Social Blunders (11 page)

Back outside, I asked, “When did this happen?”

“Last night Rory ordered pizza and him and Lynette went to pick it up on account of my feet being swollen. They knew my feet would be swollen, they planned it all out.”

“They leave a note?”

Babs cried with one hand on her belly and the other holding the cone. Her eye makeup left a single black trail down her face. She nodded to my question. “In the refrigerator, but I knew before that they’d snuck off. Lynette’s overnight case was gone. She don’t need a toothbrush to pick up a pizza.”

When Wanda left me she didn’t sneak off at all. She announced her plans during
The Yellow Rose
, when I was in the midst of a tremendous Cybill Shepherd fantasy involving an electric piano and yards of Saran Wrap.

Wanda stepped between me and the TV and said, “You have driven away the only good thing that will ever happen in your life.”

I said, “What’s that?”

She had me carry her baggage out to the 240Z, where Manny the pool boy sat with the engine running. Knowing Wanda’s convoluted sense of honor, sneaking off would have been dishonest. Sleeping with the neighborhood was allowed, but sneaking away wasn’t.

Babs sniffled. “Me and Lynette have been best friends since second grade. If we have girls, we was going to name them Babs and Lynette, after each other.”

Even though friendship is more important than romance, there’s no depths to what friends can do to each other in the name of romantic love. “Maybe she’ll come back,” I said.

“I wouldn’t speak to her if she did. She stole my Rory.” Babs dropped the ice cream; her chest shook like she was hyperventilating. I put my arm over her shoulders and rocked her gently while she pressed her wet face against my shirt.

“What am I gonna do now?” she asked.

“Have your baby.”

“Rory took our half of the rent. The other half is Lynette’s and she’s gone too. And I was on his insurance at the plant, only now he don’t have a job. Who’ll pay the doctor?”

“Don’t worry about the money,” I said. “I’ll take care of that. You just take care of your baby.”

Most of my heroes committed suicide. That thought came to me late Monday night when I should have been asleep, but, as usual, wasn’t. I’d ridden the Exercycle 6000 twenty miles at high tension, but stopped because I couldn’t concentrate on Wanda. Gilia’s face kept getting in the way.

I lay in the bed with three pillows next to me for the arm and leg that had to be draped over someone before I felt okay enough to sleep. No help. I didn’t feel okay and I wasn’t asleep. Buttons in the mattress poked into my ribs. Why do mattresses have buttons? I got to thinking about Alan Watts and his views on sleep, which led to a local poet named Randall Jarrell, then Sylvia Plath and Marilyn Monroe, who Maurey says slept naked, and it dawned on me that these four people had two things in common: They were all my role models and they all killed themselves. And my heroes who didn’t kill themselves on purpose—Gram Parsons and Hank Williams—killed themselves accidentally. Were these people I wanted to model my life after?

Baseball heroes don’t commit suicide. Sandy Koufax, Moose Skowron, Vin Scully, I could think of a dozen admirable baseball people who hadn’t killed themselves, but let’s face it, at thirty-three, you can’t sign on as disciple to a baseball player.

The door cracked open and a form slithered into the room. My first thought was, Skip’s hired a hit man.

“Who’s there?”

“Who do you think, darlin’?”

“Oh, shit.”

“You don’t sound happy to see me. I can’t believe it, you must be covering up your true delight at my arrival so I won’t become overconfident.” She was wearing a nightgown, a filmy, flowing number with ruffles. She floated through the dim moonlight like a short ghost.

“Katrina, this isn’t a good time. I have someone with me.”

“No, you don’t.”

I sat up in bed. “How can you tell?”

“Those’re pillows. Anybody can tell the difference between pillows and women, ’cept maybe a horny man.” Katrina slid across the room. “I was lying there next to old Skippy, tingling from head to toe on account of what you did this morning.”

“You don’t have to thank me.”

She sat on the edge of the bed. Her fingertips brushed my arm. “I decided once wasn’t enough.”

“Katrina, that’s not fair. I do you a favor and now you want more. How did you get in, anyway? The door’s locked.”

“The side door isn’t.” She ran her fingernails up and down the inside of my elbow. I swear, she purred like Alice.

“We don’t have a side door.”

“Behind the weeping willow.”

“That’s the servants’ entrance. Nobody’s used that door in twenty years.”

She leaned so close her lips grazed my ear and said, “It still works.”

“Am I wrong or did you pick up a French accent since this morning?”

Her tongue flicked in and out of my ear. In my experience, women who are into tongue flicking all read Danielle Steel.

“My grandmama was French. It comes out whenever I’m crazed with lust.” She lifted the sheet and slipped under. I slipped right out the other side—stood there feeling foolish in plaid boxer shorts.

“Sam.” Katrina blinked seductively. “If you reject me there will be repercussions.”

Veiled threats are a sure sign that a relationship is fixing to wash down the tubes.

“I’m not rejecting you, Katrina. I just can’t have sex in my own home. What if my daughter hears us?”

Katrina giggled. “Does your daughter sleep three doors that way?”

I nodded, not liking the giggle.

“She should be worried about you hearing them, not the other way around.”

“Them?”

Katrina made her face into a pout and talked baby talk. “Uh-ho, Sammy’s wittle baby is making diddle-widdle wight under Sammy’s nose.”

I hate women who talk baby talk. It’s all I can do to sleep with them.

“Don’t go away,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

“Honey, I wouldn’t think of leaving.”

***

I’m a spy in my own home. I stood outside Shannon’s door, barefoot in boxer shorts, listening to the sounds of passion. The bed rocked a steady rhythm,
chunka chunka chunk
. I bought that bed for Shannon at the High Point furniture mart. She chose it because she liked the ironwork design on the headboard. In my mind, I could see her hands intertwined in the iron design while Eugene’s sweat dribbled into her pores. You try to be both mother and father, you try to set a good example, you want to lock them up so they’ll never be hurt, but the books and magazines all say “Set her free, let her go.” And look what happens. A balding male who can’t even talk right charms his sleazy way into her body. God, I hate men.

What to do? Call the police? Ignore the atrocity? In the olden days a man would have smashed down the door with a shotgun and forced Eugene to marry her, but times have changed. Marriage is the last thing I want for a daughter of mine.

Shannon made a low gasp followed by a series of
peeps
. I’d heard those
peeps
before. In the throes of sex, each woman emits a unique sound. I’ve been with screamers, cursers, huff-and-puffers, and women silent as stone until that sudden shriek. One woman actually shouted “Bingo!” The tones, rhythms, even the words are like snowflakes, similar from afar but up close no two are the same.

Yet Shannon was pretty darn close to someone I’d heard before. My mind raced back through the years and bodies until it suddenly struck me—Maurey. Her mother. At thirteen Maurey had sung the
gasp
,
gasp
, then five
peeps
in a row. The peeps had been like a two-minute warning.

Sickened yet fascinated, I listened to Shannon build toward climax. I was amazed. The sound of passion is genetic. A woman echoing her mother couldn’t be learned behavior, has to be heredity. Maybe it goes clear back to the moment of conception, in which case impregnation must be accompanied by orgasm or the song is not passed on.

I watched Mom have sex in our living room once and her sounds were completely different from Shannon’s and Maurey’s, which means the gene isn’t passed through the male side. Lydia sounded like a kid having an asthma attack. That night I saw her doing it, the guy came and quit before she got off—an immoral act, if you ask me—so I didn’t hear my mother’s orgasm. Probably for the best.

The emotions you feel watching your mother get laid don’t even compare to how you feel when it’s your daughter. That was my baby in there with a penis crammed inside her. The little girl I raised through kindergarten, birthday parties, mumps, first bike, driving lessons, first zit. I wanted to throw up. What if Eugene was a pervert? A bondage freak with a French tickler.

What if he toyed with her heartstrings and left? Wam, bam, thank you, Sam. Even worse, what if he stayed? They might fall in love and become life mates, and I would have to be gracious. I refuse to be gracious to anyone noodling my daughter.

I doubled up my fist and rapped on the door. The sounds suddenly stopped.

Shannon shouted: “What?”

“Are you practicing proper birth control?”

Short silence, then: “Daddy, go away!”

***

Back in my own bedroom, Katrina had tossed her nightgown aside. She sat naked on the bed, rubbing Wanda’s vitamin E oil into her thighs under the sheets.

She looked up at me and said, “I chap easy.”

I leaned back against the closed door. “My baby is having sex.”

“Good for her.”

“I shall never have an erection again. The penis is a blind and cruel animal without conscience or mercy.”

“You talk like there’s one big schlong out there that ravages little girls.”

“There is. All schlongs are one schlong and the one schlong is soiling Shannon.”

Katrina stared at my boxers. “You really can’t get a stiffie?”

“I’m limp with outrage.”

She threw back the sheets, revealing her tight little body. “You’ve still got a tongue.”

For a few days life reached a pattern of some sort. Breakfast pancakes with Gilia, oral perversions with Katrina, miles and miles on the Exercycle 6000. At night I telephoned Mike Newberry to fill him in on the day’s activities: dry cleaners, the Magic Cart office, a drive over to Winston-Salem to see if Rainbow News and Novels still stocked
Jump Shot to Glory
, egg sandwich for supper. Mike accused me of holding out the juicy stuff, but there wasn’t any juicy stuff, outside of Katrina’s taco, so I made some up.

A novelist can’t stand to tell a boring story. I invented a Chinese brothel in Siler City where I wiled away the afternoon. I told him I lost ten thousand dollars betting on cockfights.

Tuesday noon I had a remarkably close call at Katrina’s health club. Turned out to be the same health club where Gilia swam. I ended up hiding in the women’s shower, then escaping down a laundry chute and out a fire exit. After that I insisted Katrina meet me at the Ramada Inn. She took out a room with a weekly rate.

At breakfast Wednesday, Gilia was indignant about the invasion of Grenada.

“Seven thousand crack marines against two hundred Cuban construction workers,” she said, “and Reagan’s behaving like we whipped the Kaiser.”

“Are Grenadians black?”

Gilia’s hair was in a ponytail, which excited me for some reason. She looked clean and wholesome, like untracked snow. I guess no boy can resist putting tracks in untracked snow.

“Spanish, I think,” she said, “but maybe black. Jamaicans are black and Grenada is somewhere near Jamaica.”

“My garbage disposal predicted a war against black people.”

“That’s interesting.”

“Actually, my housekeeper, Gus, predicted the war against black people, but she heard it from the garbage disposal.”

“Seven thousand marines against construction workers could hardly be called a war.”

I went on to explain Gus, which is no easy trick. She’s six feet two inches tall, and twenty-five years ago she played basketball for North Carolina A & T, back when girls’ teams had six on the floor instead of five the way they do now. Gus reads the
New York Times
every day and dabbles in the stock exchange, but she believes there’s a sign that migrates around the body, putting hexes on various organs. She won’t eat cranberries or tuna and she once punched out a UPS driver who called her Aunt Jemima. She’s saving her money for a personal home computer.

“We had a black maid but Mama accused her of wasting toilet paper. Now she won’t hire anyone but Quakers,” Gilia said.

“I saw a black woman at Skip’s. She wouldn’t speak to me even though I asked politely if anyone was home.”

Gilia slid the check to her side of the table. “That’s Phadron. Skip hires illegal aliens who don’t speak English. Ryan says Skip threatens them with deportation if they don’t sleep with him and Katrina can’t do anything to stop it.”

“Sounds like a sad situation.” I made a grab for the check but she snatched it away. A traditional Southern woman would have protested delicately, but still let me win.

She said, “I suspect Katrina does her share to balance Skippy’s sins. She’s been awfully chipper the last few days.”

“Chipper?”

“Mama suspects the tennis pro.”

***

That afternoon a thin man in an extremely cheap suit showed up on my doorstep. I’ll wear a sports jacket now and then, but I stopped wearing suits after Lydia told me the neck tie is a phallic symbol. I’m not ashamed of having a phallus, but I sure as heck don’t brag about it.

The man called me Mr. Callahan.

“My name is Sam. I don’t like being called mister; it’s too male.”

“Here, Sam.” He handed me some official papers.

“This is a legal document,” I said.

“You think fast,” the thin man said.

The papers were from Wanda by way of a lawyer and signed by a judge.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Vernon Scharp.”

“Do you enjoy process serving?”

He looked at me to see if I was condescending or interested.

He must have decided I was interested. “I could tell you stories that would straighten your hair,” he said.

“I imagine you run into a lot of shoot-the-messenger mentality.”

“Shoot, knife, and beat with a baseball bat.”

“I’m asking because I own a golf cart manufacturing company, and I’m certain we could find a job for you at the plant.” I gave him the address and told him to speak to Gaylene. “Work for us and you won’t have to wear that suit.”

“What’s wrong with my suit?”

The papers said I was not to dispose of any assets; piddly amounts were okay, but big ticket items were out of the question. I read the papers carefully, then filed them in a jack-o’-lantern.

***

Thursday, I did lunch with Billy Gaines. We met at Tijuana Fats where he asked if I had any plans for the future and was I seeing anybody—Dad kind of stuff. I was touched that at least he tried. He even wrote my birth date and shirt size in his pocket calendar.

I didn’t tell him about the two death threats I’d received in the mail. They were written in purple ink on the title pages of
L’Idiot de la Famille
by Jean-Paul Sartre and
Cancer Ward
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. If I had Clark for a son, I would probably take my supposititious heir to lunch myself.

***

Supposititious
is my new word of the month. Say it slowly—
supposititious
. It means a person you’ve never seen before who shows up out of nowhere, claiming to be your child. Imagine: a special word for people in my situation.
Supposititious
comes from the same word as
suppository
. Don’t ask me why.

***

Bastard
is another special word for people in my situation. Fatherless. Born of an unwed mother.

The disgrace of being a bastard never bothered me much, growing up. For a long time, I didn’t know it meant anything specific. Bastard was simply another insult, like squirrel or douche bag, that children yelled at each other. Dothan Talbot was the one who taunted me with
bastard
most. He was the one who explained in detail exactly what the term meant and exactly why I was one. I didn’t care. I had impregnated Dothan Talbot’s girlfriend and everyone knew calling me names was nothing but lame sour grapes.

The single practical skill Lydia taught me as a boy was not to give a hoot what anyone thought of us. That’s a rare attribute in junior high, but with the town character for a mother and a daughter by the eighth grade, I’d have been in big trouble without it.

***

I telephoned Lydia to see how the poison chew toy saga came out.

“Wire me five thousand dollars,” she said. “I need it today, tomorrow may be too late.”

“For bail or lawyers?”

“The
Politics of Pudenda
is the most important treatise written in this country since
Female Eunuch
. It will change the very foundation of society.”

“I’m more interested in whether you murdered the President’s dog.”

She made the exhaled sound of impatience. “Hank did one of his chants and buried an antelope liver next to the warm springs. FedEx lost the package.”

“Is this cause and effect?”

“Sam. Listen when I talk. We’re in a bidding war with Simon and Schuster, I must have five thousand dollars today. This afternoon.”

“Oothoon Press is in a bidding war with Simon and Schuster?”

“Are you so pussy-whipped by the harlot you can no longer fathom the English language?”

“Are radical feminists allowed to say
pussy-whipped
?”

“In
Politics of Pudenda
Muriel Blackwell has a plan to end all wars and injustice. She calls for an international ban on the male gender owning private property. Once the greed motive is removed from men, women can stabilize society.”

“Her theory sounds fascinating, Lydia, but I can’t send any cash right now.”

“Sam.”
Her voice was loud, on the edge of frantic. “Oothoon can’t change society without that money.”

Oothoon Press got its name from a poem by William Blake. Blake’s Oothoon is raped—“Bromion rent her with his thunders”—then her husband accuses her of asking for it; says she enjoyed being raped. So he seals her in a cave. Lydia calls this the Every-Woman story.

“Don’t most publishers make a profit on books and use that to buy more books?”

“Spoken like a true anal-aggressive. Where would the world be if Virginia Woolf’s publisher thought about profits?”

“My life wouldn’t be any different.”

There was a moment of silence. “Wire the money, Sam.”

“Wanda slapped a temporary restraining order on my assets.”

“So?”

“So if I give you five thousand dollars they might put me in jail.”

“I am not giving up
Politics of Pudenda
for that cow. You can just go to jail for your mama; my work is more important than yours anyway.”

Interesting leap of logic. I decided to change the subject. “How’s Maurey?”

“Here’s an idea. Transfer all the family funds into my name. That way Wanda can’t rob you blind and I’ll send out whatever you need to get by, just like you do for me.”

I didn’t say anything. The only way to handle a conversation with Lydia is to shut up and frustrate her. Hank Elkrunner learned that long ago, but I never quite caught on.

Lydia said, “Pete drug in this week. Hank says there’s something wrong with him.”

“There’s always been something wrong with Pete.”

“I can’t believe I raised a homophobe.”

“What’s wrong with Pete has nothing to do with him being gay. He was a weird kid years before he turned to men for comfort.”

“Pete brought his lover home with him. Chet is a polite boy who supports my campaign to re-educate America.”

“Shannon moved a man into her room.”

“Good for Shannon.”

“They pant and grunt all night and he sits in Caspar’s rocker.”

“You should have burned that chair when the old goat died.”

“Things aren’t going well here, Lydia. I could use some motherly compassion.”

“For five grand I’ll ship you all the compassion I’ve got to spare.”

***

I looked
pudenda
up in my
Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary
. It’s the plural of pudendum—the external sexual organs of a woman, which is roughly what I had figured.
Pudenda
is Latin for
something to be ashamed of.
Chew on that fact awhile.