You Were Wrong (18 page)

The blanket came into his arms as a delicious sort of gooey softness and lemony flavor and interconnected cluster of red and black squares. Henrietta’s soft, brown, meaningful face drifted off to the side of his view and then around back of it where it wasn’t properly a view anymore but a set of sounds, a smell, a feeling in his back and mind. And so he did not see but felt and heard the older couple laboriously ascend the stairs, while he looked at and through the two glass doors that were the double entrance to the house, the vestibule between them a decompression chamber between the deep sea of the world and the submarine of the home. He saw himself doubled and suspended in these two bright square diving bells, one inside the other, above the dark, blurred Brooklyn floor. Up into this double Karl of light rose a bioluminescent thing, thin, furred in phosphor, enlarging as it rose, with skinny legs and swollen lower thorax.

“Now everyone’s here,” Jones said. “We’re already halfway up, you let her in,” he directed his stepson from above.

Karl came flooding back to Karl. She wore a short white cotton dress that her thin taut legs went all the way up into and her massive belly pressed against. She kissed his cheek and whispered his name in his ear, reassembling him inside himself.

“Mom, Pops, how are you?”

“We’re splendid, dear,” her mother said.

“I’ve reached the age when I’m reduced to complicated pleasures,” her father said.

There was a long hiatus in movement and sound in which each of them looked at the others and seemed to wonder who would move or speak, and hoped it would not be themselves. Old impatience—it, too, had entered through the vestibule—settled into all.

“Come on, my darling,” Jones said to his child, “your mother’s feet are a pair of meatloafs. I know you’ve got a heavy load but mount these few stairs so we don’t have to go down and back up again.”

She did as told with a haughty and forlorn sigh. On the fifth stair she kissed her father’s elaborately sculptural head. On the seventh, she leaned out over her own belly, put her arms around her mother’s upper back, and pressed her cheek to hers.

“How are you, dear?” the mother said.

“My back aches and I shit five times a day.”

There was a stiffness of bodies as they pulled away caused neither by the daughter’s advanced gestation of the grandchild nor by the grandma’s swollen feet and fatigue at midnight of moving day. Everyone waited again for someone to act, the family of three-and-a-half of blood on the stairs and the one by a thread at the foot of them. “The blankets are in a box in the dining room as the young man can tell you, please understand,” Henrietta finally said. Sylvia navigated around her parents’ forms and back down the stairs with the sullenness that expressed itself so fully in the lowered and turned-in shoulders of thin girls, even pregnant ones.

She faced Karl and put her hands on her hips and raised one side of her mouth in a kind of facial tic Karl interpreted as
Well, family, you know?
“You want to show me the box with the blankets?” she said.

He put the soft wool one Henrietta had handed him around her goosebumped shoulders and arms and burnished it onto her skin with the palms of his hands and held it in place with them.

“Good night, kids,” said the tired mother, and crept up one more stair, and one more. “Let’s have a big breakfast tomorrow, I’ll make it for us after we all sleep well,” she said, covering the next ten hours with the warm blanket of a happy wish, and the older folks went up, and the younger ones wondered at each other in the lit-up downstairs.

“Is it because of her pride?” Karl asked.

“What?”

“Or is it that you didn’t invite her to your wedding? Or had the wedding to begin with?”

“I’ve just had a long drive, preceded by a horrible day.”

“Oh yeah, that brunch.”

“
After
the brunch.”

“What happened after the brunch?”

“He…Picture an hour alone with that man, as his wife.”

“I’d rather not.”

“What do you mean, pride?”

“That she loves the house you gave her but isn’t the kind of person who can just accept a free house from her daughter without feeling her dignity has been compromised.”

“Remember when you met me and thought I was a burglar?”

“You mean because you told me you were one?”

“The relationship between me being a burglar and what I actually was is about the same as the relationship between what you perceive is going on between my mother and me right now and what is actually going on between her and me.”

“So what actually were you?”

“For real, Karl.”

“Oh, for real? Hey now don’t get me wrong, I’m crazy about you even if you don’t turn out to actually like me, which I still can’t tell if you even really do, but ‘for real’ is exactly what you were not on the day we met, and haven’t been since.”

Her eyes grew moist and she trembled. Her flesh, generally taut and athletic and gripping the air, now was passive and slack. “Well I still don’t even believe people do things for the reasons they announce they’re doing them for but I’m mad at my mother, Karl, for taking back that white asshole who threw his nigger family in the garbage and bought himself a brand-new white one with his new money he got on the backs of some other dollar-a-day niggers in Asia. And I’m mad at
him
because, well, that. Imagine for just one second what happens to a teenage girl who looks like me when she has to move from Centraldale to the Hart Crane Projects.”

“So this is the same nigger—”

“Careful!”

“—and white asshole you just bought a house for by marrying a second white asshole who took the first asshole’s house away from him?”

“Don’t let anyone say I’m not a loyal daughter.”

He guided her by the blanket he was still touching her through over to the couch in the music room and tried to push her down gently onto it. She tensed up. He kissed her cheek. She groaned and sat down on the couch.

“Let’s talk for a minute and then go to sleep,” he said. “I can be on the floor here next to you. I’d like to wake up and see you first thing, that would be amazing. Before we have the breakfast here your mother wants to make, let’s sneak out and have a cup of tea, the two of us, in a little diner, it would be nice just to sit with you somewhere.”

He watched a strange convulsing of this body that had become dear to him, a wrinkling, reddening, moistening, swelling, and opening up of the beautiful face.

“Please tell me what’s wrong,” he said.

“It’s intolerable. You can’t imagine.”

“I was made to imagine.”

“No, no, no, you don’t know, you’re too innocent, you can’t know, it’s horrible, it’s horrible, I can’t stand it much longer!”

She wept in drawn-out moans and gasps he felt in his legs and chest. He held her hand and stroked her creamy inner forearm. After a time, she seemed to have temporarily exhausted her distress, and stared idly at the wall across from her through wet eyelashes while he stared at her staring. It occurred to him to cheer her up with an anecdote about a man she disliked that might make him more sympathetic to her.

“So I found out something interesting about Arv and those high school boys.”

“Did Arv tell you? I’ll kill him!”

“Why would you kill him? And no, he didn’t tell me, he didn’t have to. Are you really so opposed to Arv that you don’t find his behavior the slightest bit charming?”

“Oh, I’m so relieved you think it’s charming.”

“Why relieved?”

“I was sure you’d be really mad at me, if you found out. I hoped you’d never find out.”

“Why would I be mad at
you
?”

“Because that would be a normal reaction to finding out your friend paid to have you beaten.”

“What friend?”

“Me.”

Karl dropped his friend’s hand, stood up fast, careened forward, landed on the low wooden coffee table by the couch, smashed his shin on it. Its leg snapped off and sailed across the room. Shin pain came in swift, sharp bursts.

Movement from above. “What’s going on down there?”

“Nothing!”

Swollen feet lingered on the landing and, satisfied their own treacherous journey down and eventually back up the stairs could in no way ameliorate the calamity in the music room, retreated.

“What
are
you?” Karl said. He tried to stand. The floor surged up toward his face. He stopped it with his hands, at some cost to them. He had lost track of where he was in relation to the room and to his body and to hers. He looked around for her, found her legs, stared at them in woe.

“Karl, I’m so sorry, please forgive me, I need you to.”

Outrage combined in him with a recognition of his momentary strategic advantage. “I need you not to have hired people to hurt me and then lie to me about it. Why did you do it?”

“I was desperate. He had threatened to take the house, to take everything, to ruin my father. I blackmailed Arv.”

“Well, fine. Who wouldn’t? But why exactly did you blackmail him to have me beaten up by two boys?”

“I was desperate!”

“To do what?”

“I thought if you would get hurt—just a little bit!—and then I was there to take care of you, and then convince you Stony was behind it, I could—this won’t sound good—soften you up.”

“For
what
?”

“For something I figured out once I met you that you were totally unsuited for. But I find you help me in this totally other unexpected way.”

“What on earth way is that?”

“By being this innocent, adorable, melancholy weirdo who’s just himself, who isn’t machinating or striving, who wants nothing more than to carry on with his unambitious, unremarkable life—I’ve never met anyone like you.”

“Oh please, stop, you’re overwhelming me with flattery!”

“Though I admit it’s not been easy to adore you when being adored seems to make you so uncomfortable.”

“Yes, you’re right, that’s true, I don’t so much like being adored when the adoration is expressed through secrecy, lying, and having the shit beaten out of me.”

If someone who knew nothing about these two were to have wandered into this harshly lit, not-yet-assembled room of this Brooklyn house on this, the darkest night of the season, and seen the man on his knees before the strangely thin pregnant female who was seated above him and leaning down toward him, that person might have been excused for believing the man was begging for mercy from this troubled goddess of uncertain function, and that the goddess was lamenting that mercy was not hers to dispense.

“If I had known you then, I never would have done it.”

“How reassuring,” he said, put his hands gently on her alabaster knees, and caressed them, not in affection but in one final, small expenditure of a lust that would never be fully expressed. “And I guess it was you and not Arv who gave me the roofie at that party?”

“No, I think you just passed out, Karl.” She looked down at his hands on her knees. “So are you still my friend then?” she asked.