Читать книгу Saint John of the Five Boroughs - Ed Falco - Страница 7

LINDSEY sat up in bed with a hot cup of peppermint tea and a Land’s End catalog that pictured a beautiful twenty-something model walking barefoot on a pristine beach of white sand beyond turquoise water, wearing a subtle pink top and SwimMini™ skirt and trailing a matching beach towel, her eyes downcast as if shy about being photographed. She flipped the catalog to the foot of the bed, where it landed on top of several other magazines and catalogs, and pulled a Victoria’s Secret out of the night-table drawer. Here barely dressed women were all looking directly at her. She tossed the Victoria’s Secret on top of the Land’s End, poured a shot of Bacardi into her cup, and stirred it in with the tea bag, bouncing the porous sack of herbs around on its string as if were a dancing puppet. The house was quiet except for occasional TV sounds coming from the basement, where Hank was watching a football game. Keith, her seven-year-old, was asleep at the end of the hall. This was ten o’clock on a Saturday night, and when she thought about that and about not yet being thirty years old, a little hot flash of fury ripped through her, which she calmed with a swig of rum straight from the bottle.

Lately Lindsey’s sense of humor was failing her. She considered herself someone who took the world in stride and with humor, but lately—Her younger brother, Ronnie, was in Iraq, and that weighed on her because she loved the little shit, but she was simultaneously furious at him. He had gone to Iraq because his friends were going. That was what he’d told her. What kind of reason is that? You’re going to Iraq because Willy and Jake Jr. are going? She talked at him and talked at him about the stupidity of it, and he was just, Well, Willy and Jake Jr. are going, and we all went over to the recruiter’s together, and they said—Willy and Jake Jr. and Ronnie, who were all still little boys in her mind, kids screaming on the Slip’N Slide, boys off fishing on Claytor Lake together every chance they got. Now the three of them were in Iraq and every time an IED killed some boy on the news or in the paper—which felt like it was every goddamned fifteen minutes—her heart went to ice and her blood stopped till she heard or read the names and they weren’t her boys. This war was killing her sense of humor. Mostly she put it out of her mind as best she could, but it weighed on her and that was part of it.

Then there was her father, who was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. He was fifty-five when he married her mother, who was thirty-eight at the time, her second marriage, his third. Now her mother was dead some nine years, from breast cancer, and he was pushing eighty-five and in assisted care, which, luckily, he had the resources to cover, but, still, to see him going downhill so fast, a man who had once doted on her and now sometimes had trouble remembering her name. Still, still, still. She was alive and young and she had her health and her family, her baby boy, Keith, and . . . That brought her around to Hank. She sipped her tea.

It wasn’t even September yet and already he was down in the rec room watching some college football team play some other college football team somewhere out West. And he’d been looking forward to this event all week, yet. This, for Hank, was a big Saturday night: alone in the basement of his house watching television while his twenty-nine-year-old wife, who was pretty damn good-looking, lay in bed reading catalogs. How Hank could care so much about which bunch of boys scored more points than which other bunch of boys while boys he actually knew and loved were in real danger at first baffled her and lately was getting to downright piss her off. When she was inclined to think badly of Hank, which was not a rare thing anymore, she saw him as a moron, a gape-mouthed, mindless slug stuck to his La-Z-Boy, an idiot who had traded real life for a series of games, for watching a series of games.

Still. When she wasn’t inclined to think badly of him, which was most of the time, she loved him. Just, things were getting away from her. She started to pour more rum into her teacup, thought better of it, and took another swig straight from the bottle. Eventually this would put her to sleep. For the moment, though, she was stuck on the thought that this was a Saturday night, and she was still young, and there was something very wrong with feeling so alone in a house where her husband was in the basement and her sleeping son down the hall. When she felt, suddenly, as if she might break into tears, she got out of bed and walked through her dimly lit house to the patio.

It was hot out. She was wearing white linen pajamas and carrying the bottle of rum, and within moments after she pulled open the glass patio door and walked out into the heat, a patina of sweat coated her forehead. Hank had mowed the lawn late in the evening, and the smell of cut grass was still in the air. She sat on the wood swing, pushed it once for momentum, and then pulled her feet up under her. She loved this swing and she loved her yard. Their house backed up against undeveloped land, Roanoke Mountain looming in the nearby distance, and on summer nights like this one, the dividing line between their neatly mowed lawn and untended land was marked by swarms of fireflies. She held the Bacardi bottle to her nose, inhaled the rich aroma of rum. She took a sip and placed the bottle on the concrete patio under the swing. Across the yard, the fireflies were doing their magic, scores of them slow-blinking that bright dark yellow light.

The summer she was twelve and Ronnie was seven, the family spent two weeks on Smith Mountain Lake, a close-to-home vacation. Days were spent on a pontoon boat fishing and swimming, nights in the big, fancy house with a backyard on the lake. At twilight she’d chase lightning bugs with Ronnie. They’d put them in a Mason jar, punch holes in the lid, stick some grass in the jar. “How many’d you catch?” “How many’d you?” Dozens each, till it was time to let them go and they’d set up a folding chair out on the dark lawn and Lindsey’d settle in to watch and Ronnie’d place the two jars side by side, pop the lids off quick, then run back and jump into Lindsey’s lap, and sometimes, as often as not, he’d fall asleep while she held him cuddled against her watching fireflies float up into the darkness, spilling up out of the unseen Mason jars, drifting away into the night. It was almost as if, Lindsey now grown and married with children and Ronnie half a world away doing whatever a soldier does in the morning in Iraq—It was almost as if, swinging gently in her yard on a hot summer night with her son asleep and her husband in the house—It was almost as if she were that twelve-year-old girl again, she could feel the past that vividly, so sharp it was like it wasn’t past, and that might be Ronnie in the house sleeping peacefully, and Mom and Dad in the basement watching TV. Then, when a couple of things happened at almost the same time, when Lindsey missed her mother and father so powerfully it was as if Mom had just died and Dad had overnight grown old, and she could almost feel her little brother’s warm body wrapped in her girlish arms, the physical senses of that memory, the heat of Ronnie’s sleeping body, the weight of it, his little-boy’s sweet, sweaty smell, when that came back to her tangibly for the briefest of seconds and then disappeared, leaving her bereft—when those two things happened so quickly, one instantly after the other, then she cried. Her face scrunched up like a child’s and warm tears seeped out of the corners of her eyes. Once it was gone, the moment passed, she felt a little better.

A swell of dizziness hit her when she sat up so that she had to lean back and close her eyes and wait it out. She was sweating more than she should be, more from the rum than the heat. She took off her pajama top and wiped her face with it before tossing it onto the lawn because she wanted to see the white splotch against the deep green of grass in moonlight, a token of abandon, as if some wildness had just gone on here in the backyard of this quaint, two-story colonial in quiet Salem, Virginia. Then she took off the bottoms, tossed them next to the top, and laughed. Wasn’t anyone to see within a half mile in any direction, so why not? She looked up and saw a sea of stars scattered across a dark sky.

Someone cried out in the house and she was alarmed for a moment until she realized it was Hank and that he was shouting in reaction to something that had just happened in his game, a score no doubt. She spread her arms and spun around on the patio and then held the pose. She was a middle-sized woman, middle-sized everything: middle-sized height, five six, middle-sized weight, 135, middle-sized breasts, 34C, middle-sized looks, not beautiful but certainly nice-looking, certainly attractive; middle-sized ass . . . well, that she had to work at. She had to diet and exercise to keep her ass under control, otherwise it would mushroom into a monster ass, like her mom’s when Ronnie was twelve and used to sing in Lindsey’s ear, Mom’s-got-a-monster-butt, whenever he wanted to make her laugh. But for now it was a middle-sized ass, and all that middle-sizedness made her perfect for spinning, which was something else she used to do with Ronnie when she was a girl, the spin-until-you-fall-down-and-then-try-to-walk-a-straight-line game. She grinned at the memory of the game and then spun like she did when she used to play ballerina, an all-alone girl game. She spun around and let the momentum of her spinning carry her out to the grass and the yard, all the way across the lawn to the line of trees and wild grass and scrub, where she stood a while with her eyes closed as if blindly offering her middle-sized dizzy undressed self to the huge untended firefly night, and when the night refused to ravish her and the dizziness subsided, she went back into the house and down to the basement.

Hank at first didn’t notice that she was naked. His eyes were fixed on the TV and as she passed in front of him he ducked his head, not wanting to miss a second of the action. “It’s fourth and goal,” he said. “We’re on the two-yard line,” and then, as if her nakedness had indeed registered with him on some deeper level, he turned his head slowly toward her, seemingly wary about confirming that he’d just seen what he thought he’d seen. He looked at her worriedly for a moment before the play went off and his head snapped back to the TV.

Lindsey looked down at her pale body against the black leather couch. The air conditioning had raised goose bumps on her arms and legs. Her nipples had popped up. She grabbed the lightweight red throw from behind Hank, where he had placed it to support his bad back when he wasn’t leaning, as he was now, so far forward that it looked like he might leap into the action. She draped it over her and propped her legs up on the coffee table. She always felt a little like an intruder in this room, which seemed to belong in some deeply gendered way to the boys. She and Hank had fought for a week after a delivery truck showed up on a Saturday morning and two workers hauled out a monstrous sixty-inch rear-projection TV. It took Lindsey the longest time to understand that the tank-sized package was a television set. They had to take the back door off its hinges to get the damned thing into the rec room, where it loomed over the furniture like a billboard. Once the TV was installed, with its array of speakers and amplifiers, Hank camped out in the room for a month. Keith, following his daddy, brought his favorite toys down, so now the carpeting was strewn with so many Lincoln Log cabin pieces and Lego parts and Tinker Toy crap and Erector Set contraptions he and Hank built together, she thought of the room as a cave where the boys played, with a huge electronic portal into every hockey arena, football stadium, and basketball court in the universe.

Hank cursed and turned off the television, which said good-bye with a four-note melody of electronic beeps. “They can’t get two damn yards,” he said and then leaned back into the couch. Lindsey felt as though she could actually see the various molecules and particles of his essential self recomposing as they transitioned back into the real world, where they suddenly found themselves sitting on a black leather couch in a dimly lit basement alongside a naked woman draped in a red throw. How strange that must be. Gone, the screaming crowd. Gone, the intense game. Here, dark, quiet room with a woman draped in red.

“Why,” Hank said, the annoyance in his voice obvious if restrained, “are you naked?”

“You’re upset?” she said. “I come to you naked late at night with Keith asleep—and that’s a problem?”

Hank locked his fingers behind his neck and looked at the opposite wall. “Lindsey,” he said, as if he had something significant to say and was prefacing it with her name to signal its importance.

“Yes?”

He sighed and closed his eyes. To Lindsey he looked, for a moment, almost beatific. His blond hair, bleached by the sun, was curly and thick as a boy’s, though he was coming up on his forty-first birthday. His face, big and squarish, was largely uninteresting except for those striking pale blue eyes, which every woman who ever saw him noticed first thing.

Lindsey moved closer to Hank and laid her head on his shoulder. His gut may have grown out over his belt buckle, but his arms and shoulders were still thickly muscled. She put her hand on his thigh and stroked gently upward.

Hank shoved her hand aside.

“What?” She pulled away from him. “What the hell is that?”

“You’ve been drinking,” he said. “I smelled it as soon as you came in the room.”

“So? I can’t drink now?” She kicked his calf with her ankle. “Could you look at me?” she said. He was staring straight ahead. “If you’re going to criticize me, could you at least look at me?”

“At what point—” he said, and he pulled his feet up under him as he shifted his position, turning his body toward Lindsey, “at what point does your drinking become a problem?”

“Beats me.” She clutched the throw at her neck. “Why would my drinking be a problem? Do I sound drunk to you?”

“No,” he said. He folded his arms over his chest, as he always did when he was getting ready to settle into an argument. “You never sound drunk, not at all. But you are. You are drunk. We both know, regardless of how you sound, that you’re drunk right now. Aren’t you, Lindsey?”

“I don’t know,” she said. She shrugged and offered Hank a little smile. “Define drunk.”

Hank was a smart guy whose job was mostly about lifting heavy things and arranging them. His father had started a landscaping and construction business half a century ago, and now everyone in their huge family, including Hank, was part of it. Lindsey watched with intense interest as his eyes narrowed and his lips opened. She was often impressed at the sheer bulk of him, the six foot—plus frame, the thick chest and broad shoulders and wide, muscular thighs. There was something purely animal and thoughtless in her attraction to all that mass of body, and when he screwed himself up and concentrated it was almost as if he were doing something against nature, like the beast speaks or something. Though they had met in college, at VCU. Though she had always known he was smart. “When you’re drunk,” he said finally, “it’s like you’re not really here. I’ll talk to you and you’ll talk back to me, but on some level—which I can always sense—you’re gone. It’s like having a conversation with someone who’s not here. Not really.”

“I’m here,” she said. “What could that possibly mean, like I’m not really here? You ask me a question, I respond. I’m engaged. Perhaps,” she said, “this is more about you than me. Have you considered that possibility? Maybe you just don’t think it’s appropriate for women to drink because the women in your family are all churchgoing teetotalers. Maybe you just want me to be more like your mother,” she said. “Could that be it?”

The color in Hank’s broad face, tanned almost to a shade of brown, deepened. His breathing turned shallower and more labored. “You’re not here,” he repeated, “and the person who turns up in your place is sarcastic and dismissive, and sometimes, like now, she’s mean.”

“What was mean about that? Just because I suggested you might sometimes act like you want me to be your mother as much as your wife?”

Hank looked away from her to the opposite side of the room. His eyes fell on a half-finished Erector Set cement truck. He turned back toward Lindsey and stood up in the same motion. “When you’re drunk,” he said, “like this, like you are now, I feel like you despise me.” When a second or two passed without any response, he left the room.

Lindsey considered calling after him but instead only listened to his heavy footsteps on the stairs and along the hall to their bedroom. She knew he was angry and she knew she should be concerned—but she wasn’t. If he wanted to run away, fine. Had he stayed, she might have gotten around to explaining that a woman doesn’t like to be left alone on a Saturday night while her husband watches a football game. But he hadn’t, so the hell with him. Let him be all hurt. Like she’s not really here. Well, who would want to be, with him plastered to the television set watching some idiot game like it mattered? Meanwhile she had to worry that Ronnie was going to get himself killed being where there was no reason in the world he should be. Like she’s not really here. Because it sure as hell felt like she was here. It felt like she was right smack-dab here in the middle of Salem, Virginia, U.S.A.

Still. It would have been nicer had he comforted her and held her in his arms. Which was what she really needed.

She pushed herself up off the couch and draped the throw over one shoulder like a toga. She heard Hank’s footsteps again as he crossed the bedroom floor to the bathroom, where he would brush his teeth and take his Prilosec before curling up on his side of the bed the way he did, like a little boy, folding his hands between his knees, which struck her alternately as cute and ridiculous for such a big guy.

Lindsey clicked off the lamp by the La-Z-Boy after a bug flew into its halogen bulb and the acrid smell of its bit of existence burning up began to saturate the room. She waited in the stinking dark while she listened to Hank push the medicine cabinet closed a little too hard and swing open the bathroom door with a little too much force before crossing the hall with long, angry strides, closing the bedroom door behind him, and getting under the covers, the metal bed frame creaking under his weight. Through the rec room’s single porthole window, only an inch or so above ground level, a tributary of moonlight trickled down the wall and along the carpet. For several minutes Lindsey waited in silence, hoping that Hank, given some time to get over being angry, might come back and they might pick up the argument where it had left off and then eventually get around to the part where he comforted her and the good stuff started up. Part of her expected it. It was like Hank to get angry and walk away, but it was also like him to come back when he calmed down and was ready once again to talk. Part of her thought, Not tonight, not likely. For months now she had ignored the looks, the expressions of dismay, as he let her know he was not happy about how much she was drinking. At what point does your drinking become a problem? How about maybe drinking isn’t the problem? How about maybe the problem’s something else and drinking at least takes the damn edge off? That might be a place to start talking. That might actually do some good, Hank, trying to talk about that. Because what is the problem, really? Ronnie. Dad. You. Me. Lindsey. Is Lindsey the problem?

Who was Lindsey in this dark, in this little trickle of light? Who would Lindsey be when the lights went out at last altogether in her father’s mind? Who did Lindsey become once she was no longer any living man’s daughter? Who would she be without her brother?

Lindsey said aloud, to the dark, “Why shouldn’t I drink?” She locked the back door and then went through the house turning off lights on the way to the patio, where she considered taking one last drink and then thought better of it and left the Bacardi in the moonlight under the wood swing. She turned off the last of the lights and felt her way along the hall to her bedroom door and then hesitated. She almost knocked. The idea amused her sufficiently that she held it in serious consideration long enough to actually make a fist and lift her arm before dropping the notion when it suddenly no longer seemed like a funny thing to do. She touched her forehead silently to the door and leaned into it with her eyes closed, the darkness slowly revolving around her as if she were the nucleus of some really really slow-spinning atom. A delicious tiredness descended on her. She might crumble at the door and sleep in the hall, a dog snuggling up as close as possible to its master. No. No. Nor would she crawl into bed beside him, where they might sleep back to back like a couple of stones. Or put her arm around him—because she didn’t want to put her arm around Hank.

The knot at her neck came loose and the red throw dropped to the floor, and at the same moment she heard a small cry from Keith’s room, a nighttime sound, nothing unusual, but it pulled Lindsey out of her drowsy, drink-stunned world and she opened the bedroom door and walked through the room without so much as a glance at Hank. She found a cotton nightgown in her dresser and went back down the hall to Keith’s room, where he was sleeping, just like his daddy, with his hands pressed together between his legs. He had kicked his blanket off and his tiny moonlit body was dark and wiry, a shadow on the white sheets—except for the brightly colored Superman briefs that covered his little butt. Lindsey reached across Keith for the blanket and pulled it over both of them as she lay down beside him. She wrapped her arms around him and held him tightly to her breast and he didn’t so much as stir. Outside, where Keith played all day, it was still summer and hot, and the dank musty odor of things growing wild seemed to have seeped into his blood so that she could smell it now in his hair, in his sweat. She laid her head down on his bright yellow pillow cover, the top of his head pressed into her neck, her chin touching his forehead, their bodies fitted together like puzzle pieces. For a while she watched the trees through his window. A breeze had come up and leaves were fluttering like birds’ wings, like a forest of birds, going where? All the small dark birds flying in the moonlight nowhere.