The End of the World as We Know It (20 page)

My father was a handsome man. As a child in the twenties, his blond hair was cut in a kind of pageboy style, as though his mother wished she had had a girl. In photographs, he always looks fine. He has perfect posture. Somewhere in all of this, there is the pleasure of being held by my handsome father, somewhere in all of this there is the moment at which it all began, the sensuality, the desire, even the willingness to hurt myself later, years later, because it was the only sensual experience I had at hand,
because I could not bear to imagine being touched with love or affection by another human being anymore, and cutting was a kind of affection. It all began in that dark room with the moonlight, with his hands. Somewhere in the pain there is pleasure, and that is the most awful part, perhaps.

The moonlight was coming through the window. I could see the door of his closet where he hung his smart clothes, where he hung his uniforms, the raw sweat smell of the woolen cloth, the uniforms that he wore to teach, the smell that never went away, the smell that all the men and all the cadets left behind them when they left a room.

He had shoes that had belonged to his uncle who was in the legislature, fine old brown leather shoes. He had white bucks he kept immaculate with a solution that came out of a bottle. Sometimes he let me make his bucks white again, cover the grass stains and the scuff marks so they were perfectly white and unmarred in the summer sun. There was an old gun in the closet, although he didn't hunt, changed the subject to something else when the men talked about ducks or deer. Maybe the gun didn't even work. It disappeared and we never knew.

He was inside my body and the pain was enormous and the moon was coming in the room and I was wearing striped summer pajamas and I was gagging because his long thin fingers could go so far down my throat. He held me tighter to him. I could feel the fine brown hair on his chest, his thin legs between mine, forcing them open. He pulled the bottoms of my pajamas down farther so they were around my ankles, and I couldn't speak or cry out because my mouth was full of his hand and the
fun was all gone now, whatever pleasure there had been was killed, all forgotten, and I was afraid and in pain.

He was thirty-five years old. His hair turned dead white by the time he was forty, beautiful fine white hair. He was born in 1917. When he was four he looked like a girl. He was thin, not just his hands but his whole body, and there was bourbon, sick-smelling liquor on his breath and in my ear and the house was filled with people, people in every bed, people sleeping, and there was nowhere to go and my aunt was getting married the next day and so there had been a party with a lot of drinking and laughing even though my grandfather was dying upstairs and knew it and I couldn't get away. I was four. He was five-foot-eleven. I barely came as high as his thigh.

The next time you're walking down the street, look at a father walking with his tiny son. Just take a look.

I turned my head, the hot tears on my cheeks, trying to get his hands out of my throat, but my arms were pinned by his arms around me.

He told me later that he had decided as a child to be like the Spartan boy who let the fox eat out his entrails. Because his father was a drunk. Because, as a teenager, he had to drag him home from saloons, go get him when he had smashed another car. Because he had a miserable childhood, I suppose.

When I turned my head, I could see my mother, on my father's other side. She was just coming awake, murmuring in her sleep and opening her eyes, her party makeup still on, her lips black in the moonlight, her nails black, her nightdress transparent in the weak white light. I could see the curve and shape of
her body, could see the curve of her breasts as she sat up and held herself up with one arm. She looked.

She screamed my father's name, and she raised her free arm straight up to the ceiling and slapped him just once, on the shoulder. She said his name once. And she slapped him once. She slapped him hard, I could hear the smack on his bare skin.

And he stopped. His fingers stopped moving on my nipple, his fingers came out of my mouth, and I felt the soft suck of him leaving me. He got up and went into the bathroom. My mother just sat there in the moonlight. She sat there staring as I pulled the bottoms of my pajamas up from around my ankles, as I lay shivering in the hot sheets. I didn't look at her. I turned away. I didn't cry, I don't think I was crying anymore. I just turned away and pretended I wasn't there.

She didn't touch me. She turned over and slept.

My father came back into the room, his boxer shorts baggy and white in the moonlight, and lay down next to me. Between my mother and me. He was asleep immediately. Sometimes, in the night, he would move closer, and his skin would touch my skin without menace, but still I would move away, move away until I couldn't feel the touch of his skin on mine. The casual, slight, unconscious touch of a man's skin on a boy's, the thin arms, the hair on his chest, the thin cotton of his boxer shorts, his waist already going soft, nobody cared in those days, his shoulders as he turned, his hands, slightly grazing my own sweet skin, which was ruined forever.

T
ERRIBLE THINGS WILL HAPPEN
.
Things you can't talk about. Things that bring death.

No angel came, like in the dream. No angel came to carry me into my own safe bed.

M
Y FATHER TURNED OVER
.
I could feel his thin, elegant back, the bones of his ribs, his spinal column, like a bird, he was so fine. He was dead to the world. He didn't know he was touching me. Somehow, the fact that he didn't know he was touching me made his touching me worse. I have never been able to bear the casual, unknowing touch of a stranger or even a friend.

Three figures in a bed. Three figures in a white, hot landscape on a night when the party had gone on one drink too long, when all the beds were full and my grandfather was dying in striped pajamas and something was done that could not, that could not, that could not ever be undone.

My father taught young men English history. He could recite all the kings and queens of England in order. He was a failure; he had never completed his thesis and so was an object of some pity, but he was a good teacher, and the kings and queens thing was a good trick, and he could tell a funny story, drink in hand. He was never the same, either, although I didn't know it for a long time.

The next morning there was blood when I went to the bathroom. The next morning there was fear when I thought of any part of my body.

The next morning there were Bloody Marys and the hearty laughter of young men and women who have had too much to drink the night before. People in those days had drinks in the morning because they thought it was sophisticated and comical to be hungover, like Mary Astor or Katharine Hepburn in the
movies. The next morning, dresses and hats were laid out on beds, and Queen Anne's lace and magnolia leaves and autumn clematis were put in vases on the mantels after breakfast.

I sat on a sofa in my grandmother's dining room. It was small and upholstered in beige linen covered with large cabbage roses. Everything in the house was fresh, so fresh and clean for my aunt's wedding. People were bustling around, people I didn't know. It was different in those days in the country. You got married in a church and had a reception at the house, with Mrs. Cake Agnor, that's what she was called, making the cake, and country girls to pass the sandwiches, and black men in white coats to pour the champagne.

In those days it was simple. It was sweet, and it was a simple and sweetly happy occasion. Just cucumber sandwiches and ladies in hats and short white gloves and a bride who glowed with pride and joy.

I sat on the linen sofa while the women moved around my house, my grandmother's house, fixing sandwiches, laying out the tablecloths, and I told her what had happened. I told her everything, the night, the bloody morning, everything. She must have been so distracted. Her husband dying upstairs, her daughter being married and so much to be done, and a four-year-old boy with a distasteful story to tell.

My mother used to say that when I began to talk I talked so much she turned to me one day when I was four and said, “Do you have any idea how much you bore me?” She used to tell that story all the time.

But I told my grandmother, and she listened, and then she said, “Don't ever tell this story to anybody else. If you tell this
story to anybody else, something terrible will happen. Something terrible will happen to our family.” And then she had a lot to do.

M
Y FATHER DROVE
my aunt to the church. He walked her down the aisle in a white jacket and gave her away. He gave her away because her own father was dying. My mother stood beside her sister in a rose dress and hat and looked serene.

I'm told that, on the way to the church, my father stopped the car and got out and threw up on the side of the road. My mother always said he had a hangover.

The rest is just a life, just the story of a life deformed. The rest is just a life in which nothing else, no other moment, really matters.

I don't know if it ever happened again. I think it did. I don't know if it ever happened to my brother or sister, but I don't think so.

I think it was just an accident. I think it was just bad luck. But afterward, my mother and father and my grandmother and I were locked forever in a secret, each knowing, each silent. I don't know how they felt. I don't know how something couldn't have been broken that was whole, how something that was lovely could ever have been lovely again.

It happened to me on a September night when my parents were drunk, and I never forget it. Every time I looked at my father, I could feel his hands on my nipples and his fingers down my throat.

I went on. I pretended to be a child. I knew I was pretending to be who I was; I was constructing a good-humored fiction so
that I might appear to be the way other children seemed to be: polite, winsome, and funny. I didn't feel like I was any of these things. I felt I was copying the smiling face, that I was an imitation. I was a faker, and a fake.

She knew. She had seen it. He knew. He had done it. My grandmother knew. It had been a full stop in the music of a happy day. And I knew and I could talk and I could tell. And so they were afraid of me, and took their revenge later in extraordinary scenes of hatred. I don't think they ever knew that I had told my grandmother, on the day of my aunt's wedding.

How did we go on?

I know I wanted my parents to like me. I wanted them not to be afraid of me. I know I wanted us all to be safe, and we all knew we weren't. We knew we were lying all the time.

I am told my father screamed at me in public. I am told he called me a pig. I am told he screamed that I ruined everything nice. I am told that their friends begged them to buy me a bicycle like my brother's, even offered to lend them the money. My brother had one. My sister had one. I don't remember any of these things.

I knew, I always knew, that one day I would find somebody I loved enough to tell this story to, and years later I did, one cold morning, lying in bed naked in Philadelphia while his wife was away at work, I knew I had found somebody I loved with all my heart, and I told him the story. I told every detail.

In the telling, I thought, would be the expiation; but it didn't make one bit of difference. It didn't make one goddamned bit of difference.

When I was twenty-two, when I was in love with my first
real girlfriend, I made an appointment with a doctor I'd never been to. I told him I was convinced I had a sexually transmitted disease, that I might have given it to others. He asked me what symptoms I had, and I said none. He looked at me oddly, he looked at my penis, he held it in his hand and looked at it, and I was afraid for him, touching it, I was sure he would see it, that there would be visible proof of some raging infection, but he said nothing. He gave me a blood test, a Wasserman, and called two days later to tell me that all the results were normal. I was perfectly healthy. Of course. He must have thought I was insane.

And it didn't make one bit of difference, not one goddamned bit of difference.

A drunken bed in the white-hot dark of a September night with my grandfather after whom I was called dying three doors away. My father, my mother, and me. My father fucking me in the night. My mother watching. It's a sad story for everybody.

I live alone now. I have lived alone for twenty-five years. No one touches me, there are no lips to kiss. Once a doctor asked me if I snored and I had to say I didn't know. I was at that moment humiliated by the whole history of my life.

E
VERYTHING IS DARK NOW
.
Something terrible will happen.

My mother was beautiful, my father handsome. He had such charming hands, my father.

Such charming hands.

It wasn't even what happened. That was bad enough. It was what happened after. That was worse.

My mother was sitting with her friend Sunshine, who wasn't a nurse or anything but who worked in a hospital, and I was still very young, in kindergarten probably, at my little private school run by the woman whose son was a lunatic, at least only half a day of school, and I was home and they were sitting there having coffee or maybe early drinks, while Sunshine complained about her husband the drunk, and I came into the room and said, “There's blood when I go to the bathroom.”

My mother made me take down my pants and show Sunshine. My mother said, “She works in a hospital. It's probably just something you ate.” With my pants down around my ankles, showing Sunshine my rear end, Sunshine pulling my cheeks apart for a closer look, my little hole, bloody. Something I ate.

I started first grade and after a few weeks my mother asked me if there were any girls I liked in my class. We were standing in the kitchen. I said sure, and named a few. Then I said there were some boys I liked, too, and I named a couple.