Читать книгу Acting Badly - Michael Scofield - Страница 8

“DEAR SANTA FE CLOUDSCAPE THAT KNOWS NOTHING OF war,” Chuck Ridley whispered to no one.

Lying in bed in a violet silk pajama top, he shifted his eyes from the sky to the lawn glittering with frost. Ice warming to mush still gripped the tips of the weeping willow that shaded the pond whose installation Chuck’s wife, Helen, had overseen last August.

Early this morning, schoolmates from Desert Prep had picked up Mark and Melodie—Chuck’s and Helen’s children—for a Saturday of skiing. Now the twins’ pet llamas lay with forelegs folded near a scattering of hay in front of the stucco three-car garage. A breeze fluttered the wool on their harlequin flanks.

Feeling his penis stir, he twisted to face his wife of twenty years. Though she was one of five sisters, Chuck—the only child of a Santa Fe gynecologist—believed that population growth had become the world’s primary sin and wanted no more children. The twins’ birth in Greenwich Village through a cesarean section that took eight months to heal helped plead his case. Helen had had her tubes tied.

He had never reconciled himself to her decision, following the tubal, to crop her waterfall of hair into two-inch spikes. But now, curled under goose down with its embroidered jack-in-the-pulpit cover, she smelled like pancakes steaming. He gazed at the brown wisps spiraling down the back of her neck and pushed his lips against her bare shoulder.

“Ummm,” she murmured. She shifted wide hips clad in the Indian-maiden loincloth which matched the fringed bra he’d bought her last summer at Indian Market.

“Guess what,” he said, rising to his elbow. “We’re alone.” He thrust his genitals against the soft leather of her loincloth and bent to peck an earlobe.

She continued to gaze at the huge color photo on the wall, framed in birch, of their summer chalet outside Montpelier that they’d bought years before moving to Santa Fe. Three canoes floated beside the dock; the pond was ringed in beech and white pine. “Don’t you have a business breakfast?”

“I do—renegade CPA, newborn investment advisor to the rich. First I’m meeting Alexis to see what figures she’s come up with. Then Manny Barnes drops by to pick up a sign for tomorrow’s march. Helen? Let’s remember our anniversary early. Where’d you put those good-old-days clothes?”

“Give me a moment.” She hoisted herself away from him, throwing her feet to the Navajo rug and pressing her eyelids. She rubbed fingertips across the washboard her forehead had become. “I want to go back full time, Charles. I don’t mean New York City, I mean to Montpelier. Us four. Not just summers. Peonies in June and mosquitoes in July, leaves in October and for Christmas a yard full of carrot-nosed snowmen. I’ve tried to make this palace here home. But we live thirty-five miles from five hundred drums of nuclear waste. We came four years ago to care for your mother and now she’s dead. My own parents are aging back in Hanover. I’d like to live less than two thousand miles away.”

“It’s a bad time for good ideas, Helen. My five stock-and-bond clients’ portfolios fell eight percent the quarter ending in December; agreed, I’m just learning. But two major tax clients have left. They don’t know what to make of my antiwar goings-on.”

His eyes swept the vast bedroom, the Kurdistan rugs soaking up heat from the neoprene loops embedded in the concrete slab, the black spirals and sawtooths of a Dan Namingha acrylic that dominated the east wall, the trumpet-vine pot fountaining ricegrass which Helen had fired in the garage last month. In the corner sat the sofa of pleated calfskin they never used. Streaked and smudged because she couldn’t find a workman with a ladder long enough for the slope outside, a picture window over the sofa showed the opera house and the piñon-green hills overlooking I-25.

“Too much violence in Santa Fe, Charles. That stabbing at Desert Prep last month felt like a final blow for me.”

“It’s no longer the town I grew up in, true. I’m also weary of this double life—” triple? he wondered, recalling how leafing though Alexis’s gay-and-lesbian newsweekly yesterday triggered a surprise erection. “Let’s talk later. Where are those new dress-ups you bought?”

“With the rest, of course.”

Flinging back the comforter, he squinted against the seven-thirty sun sparkling off the screen of his laptop on the credenza. Embedded heat warmed his bare feet as he padded to the south wall across the long crack—jagged as Namingha’s painted black lightning—that had separated the concrete slab.

The chest’s scent of cedar greeted him. He peeled off his pajama top and tossed it onto the ottoman, then bent toward the paper-doll-like kachinas chiseled in the arched lid. He fumbled with the tumblers until he could pull the lock apart.

Bleach prickled his nose as he hoisted the lid and hauled out purchases from the store Helen had found last Saturday, smoothing back the preteen extra-large frock and boy’s knickers he’d previously bought on-line that concealed more retro clothing.

“Catch.” Over his shoulder he tossed a sheer, long-sleeved beige blouse with dahlia ruffles, a blue denim miniskirt, and a floppy hat whose brim flamed nasturtiums—all from the early 1980s. He rose and turned to Helen, who wasn’t there.

“Anybody home?” he called, scratching the black stubble he’d decided to let grow—sideburns, no mustache, clipped horseshoe beard starting from the corners of his lips—better to ally himself with the City Different’s peace activists.

Helen advanced from the bathroom in lime-green slippers and white terrycloth robe.

She glanced at his dangling penis. “You think this is going to work?”

“I do.” But he wished he’d tweezed out the hairs on the shaft first; squirming at the sting often jump-started an erection. He squeezed his right eye tight—pain from last night’s two hours in the den transferring figures from clients’ tax workbooks into his laptop was assaulting his temple.

Moving to the bed, Helen plopped the felt hat onto her brown spikes of hair while he pushed his fists through the lawn-daisied sleeves of the man’s shirt.

She had draped her robe over the hamper and was trying to snap the skirt tight when, right leg thrust into mustard-colored slacks, Chuck exclaimed, “No!”

“No?”

His penis swelled. “You wear the boy’s. I’ll wear the girl’s.” Though pain clawed its way down into his tongue, imaging the change unleashed a grin.

“What are you saying?”

“No one can see us—the kids’ llamas, maybe. Get me a bra. I’ll go find breasts.” Yanking the pant leg free by its belled bottom and stripping off the shirt, he trotted across the room through the door along the heated, yard-square flagstones, down the hall past his den and Mark and Melodie’s rooms and then into the kitchen, erection waving like a bowsprit.

From the cutting-board island came the odor of mangoes ripening in a yellow bowl Helen had fired in December. Wait; yesterday she said she found beefsteak tomatoes at Whole Foods for hamburgers tonight and salsa later.

He approached the refrigerator that dominated the maple-clad wall. A thousand dollars misspent to incise on it tiled macaws and halved papayas. Each tile bulged at a different slant; two looked about to tumble down. Hauling the door open, he spotted the tomatoes in their see-through bag. He reached in and rolled out two. What the hell was he about to do?

By the time he’d returned to the bedroom, the blood slamming his right eye had retreated like the blood from his penis—though when he saw Helen, it rose again. She sat at the bottom of the comforter, straight-arming the mattress to brace herself, a white lace bra slung over one knee. A small-billed cap slanted across her forehead. Her breasts plumped the buttoned green polyester shirt; the bells of her slacks pooled against the rug. She’d left the snap undone.

“Look,” he smiled.

“Charles, those were for dinner. Do you really enjoy seeing me like this?”

“It’s strange, but I do.”

Advancing, goose bumps icing the back of his neck, he pushed the tomatoes against the black hairs on his nipples and turned. “See if they fit.” Facing her, he waited for her fingers to snake around and press the cotton against the red fruit. The stub end of one bit his flesh. Their chill made him flinch, but what had become a full erection took charge. He stroked it while his left hand squeezed his testicles. “Hook me up.”

Her fingers pulled the tomatoes tight; the catch clicked behind him.

He threw on the blouse and stepped into the miniskirt.

“How do I look?” From behind her he snatched the felt hat with its appliquéd nasturtiums, set it on his head, and adjusted its slant. “You’re sexy. Why are you staring like you just swallowed a lizard?”

“I’ve . . .” She clutched her throat where it wrinkled, just under her chin. “I’ve never seen you with an erection like that.”

He grinned, milking the shaft. A pearl of lubricant perched atop the glans. “How do you want me to go in?”

“I don’t think I do.” She faced him in the wool cap with a black button popping from its top while her left hand kept the men’s slacks from collapsing. Her tongue circled her chapped lips. “I think what I want is to get out of these clothes and make us some breakfast. Pancakes with blueberries, I think. Are you hungry, Charles?”

“I am!” He lunged for her, knocking her cap sidewise, his own floppy hat sailing into her face as she pitched backward and he toppled onto her, smashing the tomatoes. Seeds and juice squished through the bra’s lace to stain his blouse and squirted red rivulets across the comforter’s jack-in-the-pulpits. Their hearts pummeled each other while the teeth along her undone zipper rasped the skin of his erection.

She batted the hat from her face. Her breath seared his neck, making the stubble prickle. “Get off me,” she choked.

Drenched and gasping, he slithered to his knees. A gob of pulp cooled his forehead. His forearms pressed the comforter as he watched her rise.

She ran a palm across her eyes and stared at the red goo that smeared it. Gripping the waistband of the slacks, she grabbed her robe and hobbled along the blue, now crimson Zuni carpet into the bathroom.

When he heard the shower’s splash, he pried off the miniskirt and lowered his buttocks onto the heap of clothes, leaning against the footboard, stenciled with the outlines of Toggenburg goats and shipped from Vermont with the headboard. He took his tumid penis and, setting his jaw, began to pump, squashed tomatoes bouncing against his chest. After a dozen strokes he groaned, arching his back to the onrush of semen that spurted into the green ruffles scalloping his wrist.

He waited for the tingle in his thighs to subside as the sounds of shower water stopped. With his forefinger he swiped a dollop of semen off his knee and licked the sweet pungency, blinking at the concrete slab’s crack. He began to figure the cost of having it repaired. Three thousand dollars easy—the edges were crumbling. Three thousand? More like ten to jackhammer the concrete into chunks and replace the tubing. Plus a call to his lawyer to initiate a lawsuit.

He was reaching to undo the bra when Helen marched from the bathroom in her robe. Hair sleeked back and glistening, she stared at him but said nothing until she turned away.

“Twenty minutes if you want to eat.”

“I’ll catch something near the office.” He wondered if she heard. All he wanted was to wander the lawn with the llamas, bask with them under the drifting clouds, whistle off flies.

Palms cupping the bra’s soaked cotton, he blew out air and trudged to the bathroom where he dropped bra and the tomatoes into the sink.

Five minutes down from upper Camino de Cruz Blanca, natty in a mohair turtleneck and hip-hugger black denims, Chuck mouthed the last of a poppy-seed bagel. He aimed for the driveway skirting his office at Palace and Otero, a renovated adobe perched on a mound garnished with hollyhocks to honor his mother. She had died three years before, following a head-on collision at Cerrillos and St. Michael’s with a young woman high on heroin.

In the rear parking area Chuck spotted Alexis’s mountain bike, handlebars spread like steer horns and leaning against the flaking trunk of a salt cedar.

Leaving his blue blazer folded over the passenger headrest, he shut the door of his Saab and hurried across the gravel with his laptop. Even at nine, the air smelled like a just-opened refrigerator. Cold chafed his ankles. The neighborhood’s feral black-and-white cat, its ribcage prominent, slinked into the waving heads of sowthistle. On the back steps he wiped dust from his loafers with a handkerchief, plucked a spiderweb from the black grille that protected the door’s window, and scratched his cheek.

“Good morning,” he called, unlocking the door. Past Alexis’s broad back he watched the just-leased Bloomberg Financial News System—by satellite from New York—run price/earnings ratios across one of its twin screens.

To bury his rage over how his mother had ended, two and a half years before he’d decided to update his CPA license, earned in New York City at Deloitte & Touche, and expand from calculating his and Helen’s taxes to offering advice to others from an office near the Plaza. Soon he was also counseling investors.

Exploding a pink bubble of gum, his stocky assistant swiveled to face him. “Sorry,” she smiled, chewing. “Oh my god.” She jammed her knuckles to the braided skirt band above her pelvis.

Plopping the laptop on his desk, he stared with her at the mustard-colored, black-banded creature creeping from a hole below the copier. Last year a workman, laying planks for a new floor, had cut a board too short. The dozens of legs they saw scrabbling resembled the tentacles of sea anemones his son Mark had described in his seventh-grade midterm. Its head pincers opened and shut as it wound along the base of the replastered wall.

“Isn’t it gorgeous?” Alexis pinched a bunch of brown hair behind her ear. “The thing’s as long as my forearm.”

“How do we get rid of it?”

“Hey, boss, you aren’t scared? Look, it’s squirming up toward the latillas.” She popped another pink bubble as the centipede wriggled into the darkness between two debarked tree limbs.

“C’mon, toss that gum while we’re talking.”

“Sure.” The wad pinged the metal bottom of the wastebasket. “Confer at the mogul’s table?” She grabbed a sheaf of printouts from her desk.

He strode past, inhaling the scent that always moved him—of the sheets and pillowcases his mother hung out when he was growing up. Under her shaggy sweaters and calf-length skirts, did Alexis wear bras and panties soaked in sunshine?

He wondered what it was like biking into Santa Fe’s quiet frenzy from Arroyo Hondo. Alexis lived with a woman named Baby who was even stockier than her who raised churro sheep and called Alexis “Sweetheart.” Baby thought Alexis’s stories works of genius, “which they aren’t,” she’d insisted the day before, as she and Chuck staple-gunned Compassion for Iraqis and Stop the War Machine to laths for tomorrow’s march.

But Chuck had read one of Alexis’s stories about a lesbian woman’s fury at her father, the president of a Masonic Lodge, for keeping an adulterous tryst with a gay man in drag. He thought Baby right.

“Bring us some water, will you?” he called over his shoulder.

In the big room that opened onto a kitchen, Chuck glanced through the window at the still-blossomless hollyhocks. Sitting, he stared at the abstract by a former client looming on a windowless wall. Its pink and azure contortions told Chuck, This chaos is you, buddy, big time—half an hour ago you turned androgynous.

“Mrs. Morgan’s gonna be there?” Alexis’s contralto brought his gaze to her printouts as she set water on the table’s mahogany planks.

“She is,” he said, gulping. The cold water calmed him.

“She’s a loose cannon.”

“Can be.”

“And the mortgage guy she uses?”

“There, too.”

“They’ll probably want Mr. Wilkes to buy residential, right?” Alexis asked.

“Good idea, you think?”

“The morning news says Bush is jetting to the Azores to meet Blair and Spain’s prime minister. It’s not a last-ditch brain-racking to find peace. It’s a war council, all about oil and establishing a permanent military base, you and I know that.”

“We do.”

“Bloomberg shows personal bankruptcies up twenty percent in the same number of years, boss. A long-term treasury bond is paying under five percent, the lowest since the nineteen sixties.”

“You know you already understand the blue-screened monster better than I do? After April fifteenth I’m going to start training you on our Lacerte Tax program, in case I get laid up.”

“Sure, boss. Anyhow, you say to expect a crash if the war lengthens past a couple of months or we dictate democracy and the Iraqis balk.”

“ ‘Balk’ meaning they turn Iraq into a second Vietnam.”

“That’s a loud sigh.”

He stared at her. “So what do I advise Bret Wilkes?”

“His portfolio looks like sixty percent blue chips, thirty percent municipals, and the rest liquid in Schwab’s Value Added. His portfolio is down seventeen percent from this time last year—current value nearly a million bucks. But the prelim tax return you gave me shows an excess of business income. He needs a deduction.”

He sighed again. “I better tell him to cash out three hundred thousand dollars and have Maxine find him income property that generates a net loss.”

Watching him, Alexis took a fistful of hair and began chewing its ends. “Mr. Baca called yesterday. He’s leaving his tax work here but moving his and his wife’s portfolios to Murch Investments.”

Chuck finished his water. Standing, he drifted to the picture window and stared at the dark-bellied clouds advancing above St. Francis Cathedral on the other side of the street. “Tell me, what’s it like being gay?”

“Oh my god, awful until I met Baby. Okay now.” She jumped from the black leather armchair and hurried to him, soft-soled boots soundless. The wool at one of her cuffs brushed his earlobe as she gave him a hug.

“Thanks, kiddo,” Chuck whispered, closing his eyes.

“You look so sad.” She let her arms dangle. “Do you . . . ?”

“Do I what?”

“Think you might be gay?”

“I don’t know what I am. I do know I can’t put up with corporation CEOs like Ken Lay of Enron who lie with the same gusto as Bush. Maybe I’ve been lying, too.”

Slouching in an armchair, he threw his hands toward Alexis’s research. “Who can believe this stuff when anything that promotes war passes as truth? I’m ashamed to be an American. Right now I’m ashamed to be me. Whoever that is.”

“An honest man,” she said, holding his eyes as she reseated herself.

“Aaahhh. Helen wants us to withdraw to Vermont.”

“What? No, don’t!” She pressed her breasts, then slid fingers garnished with silver rings below the table’s edge. “Baby lived near Burlington. Except for the winters and the litter, she loved it.”

“I’m staying put, don’t worry. Driving down here, I got an idea you may like. You may not.”

“Of course I’ll like it. What is it?”

“No time now.” Scratching his chin, he swept up her papers and pushed back his chair. “Go ahead and unwrap some more gum.”

Through the computer room came a single knock at the rear door, then four. The braided silver ring high in Alexis’s left ear jiggled as she frowned and turned her head.

“Manny Barnes,” Chuck said. “He wants a placard.”

“His girlfriend’s my best friend.”

“He’s told me. Stay there, I’ll let him in.”

Swaddled in his gray sheepskin coat and red stocking cap, Manny stood stamping hiking boots on the stoop. “Late for a breakfast, can’t talk,” Chuck said, pulling the door wide. He gestured Manny inside, touching with his fingertips the sheepskin’s ripped sleeve.

Manny unhooked the coat’s loops and stuffed the cap in a pocket. He was wondering what Alexis would be wearing this morning, when she appeared around the bookcase blowing a pink bubble at him.