“Three points. Good night, little man,” Huddie says.
“Good night.”
“You can call me Huddie.”
“Huddie. You can call me Max.”
“Good night, Max.”
“Good night, Huddie. Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite, ducky!” This last is yelled like a football cheer.
Huddie turns out the lights, smiling, and wonders who the father is, who’s been fucking her for the last fifteen years. Apparently, the wish to possess that hit him when he saw the undersides of her white thighs long and harshly flattened out against the oak bleachers has not gone. For the last fifteen years he’s believed he was not a jealous man and it turns out he just didn’t remember.
Max’s sound sleep makes us nervous. We shift around on the couch until we are far enough apart to look directly at one another. Huddie’s stomach presses over his belt in a powerful, endearing slope, and his arms are as big around as small barrels, filling his shirtsleeves. If I cut him, he will open brown, red, pink, down to white bone, small petals of blood rising on his skin. But he puts his arm on the back of the couch, and now I want his fingers to brush against me so much I walk to the foot of the stairs and pretend to listen for Max, who has slept through the night since he was three months old.
“How are your folks?”
“My father’s all right, re-remarried. My mother died nine years ago,” I say. I have considered myself an old orphan, not a heartwarming one, but an orphan nonetheless, ever since.
“I’m sorry. Did it get better between you?”
It got enormously better, as we both saw her death zooming up like the next and necessary exit. We entered her terminal phase like lovers in the shoddiest dime romance: reckless, breathless, selfless, you name it, we threw it out the window. We styled what was left of her blonde hair, and when that was pointless, I spent six hundred dollars I didn’t have on a platinum bob and an ash-blonde pixie cut and found myself defending the Gabor sisters against their bad press. We created the River Styx Beauty salon (my mother named it) and made up a gruesome menu of services sought by the decomposing but still-fashionable clients of our high camp owner—“That’s M’sieu Styx to you,” she’d snap at the other customers, waiting on our side of the bank.
“It got much better.” And then I got pregnant and had to miss her all over again, just as if she had been the best mother in the world. “And Gus?”
“Oh, baby. They’ll have to drive a stake through his heart.”
“That seems fair, for all the heartache he caused us,” I say, and then see that I shouldn’t have. No matter how old, no matter how bad, we are the only people who can genuinely and expansively bad-mouth our parents. Huddie shakes his head slowly, and I think that I have, with one careless, sincere remark, revealed all my enduring shortcomings.
“You still talk about fair. You’ve been in this world for forty years and talk about fair. I love that,” he says, as if I’ve shown him my childhood bear collection.
“I like the idea of fair. A little rough justice every now and then is appealing. Unlikely, but appealing.”
He tips his head, saluting my idea and me, and I sigh like an old, old woman, because the only choice is kissing or crying over what is behind us and I want to leap ahead without even knowing who he really is or how or if he’s leaving June or whether he will really love Max and do we now have to have real holidays instead of my casual improvisations?
I sigh and feel our first time, catching me in the chest. It is still my old stubbly couch and only that beneath my fingertips, but the dark plum silk of his cock unwrinkles in my hand, his flesh hardens, rising up, blindly seeking me. The sweet plump point of his nipple bites my palm. We had no words for our genitals then; we said “this” and “that” and “you” and “me,” and when I touched him just the way he wanted, all parts going the right way, his sweat spattering my face, he cried out, “Oh, yes, we’re in the zone now.” And we laughed so hard we had to stop for a few minutes, but that is where we were, and I began to say that too, and kept saying it, with other men, even though it was never as true and saying it brought me closer only to the past and never to the man right next to me. And with no vocabulary at all we had done everything we wanted to do, everything I want to do right now, although in my mind I airbrush us, pulling those young bodies out from our folding fleshy shells, even as I want to see him now, kiss the tender, pitiful changes time has left on that beautiful boy, that handsome young man.
“You could have us both.” I think I can say that. “Don’t give up what you have.” Life will be tolerable (it would have been even better than that if you’d never showed up with those ridiculous flowers and that gigantic car), and once a month it will be all-white gardens drenched in silver moonlight, sweet whole mouthfuls of revelation, a feeling of rightness in the passing essential bits of everyday. And the rest of the time, I will still have the pleasure of being a good mother, even the unmentionable pleasure of being the only parent, the court of first and last resort, the highway, the dead end, and the only gas station for forty miles. And I count on that and Max counts on me, and you are the joker in the deck, my man.
“What are you thinking, Horace?”
“Nothing.”
“You lying jellybean.”
“You’re right. I won’t tell you what I’m thinking.” And he can’t. Pictures of June, tenderly and efficiently pressing her weight on his unbendable leg two hundred times a day until he regained use of his knee; in labor with Larry, her wet face, stunned and determined; Larry as a small boy, tearing through spangled wrapping at Christmas, glitter sticking to his curls; June’s appendectomy and most of the choir crowding into her room afterwards, Rosa Grant’s flowered straw hat perched on the IV, pink silk ribbons fluttering in front of the vent; six thousand fans, standing for that last basket; June walking the floor with colicky Larry, milk plastering her red chiffon don’t-forget-your-husband nightgown to her breasts; flashes of white and black women’s bare behinds bouncing in front of him in various motel rooms, their cheeks knotting and opening, the tiny soft arrowhead of hair beneath them; women flipping over in his hands like fresh fish, their breasts swinging and sliding in silky blue-white sacks up to their shoulders, or three shades of brown in sweet handfuls coming to rest on either side of a narrow chest, cocoa pools around purple nipples and stretch marks like the veins of fall leaves, every shape beautiful, calling for his mouth, all of them gone forever.
He smiles. “I’m here. Right here.”
“No matter what?”
“Well. That’s a lot of ground. Yes, no matter what. No one’s going to die from this. And I won’t have to shuffle off this mortal coil knowing I lived the wrong life.”
He takes my hand. “And what’re you thinking? Elizabeth?”
“Nothing.”
“You lying hound.”
“Yup. And I won’t tell you.” And I cant: pictures of him trembling over me a million years ago; of Max’s face — the first Max — peevish and remorseful in the face of death; the faint, nameless image of my Max’s father, blond and tall, foolish but not unkind and not unattractive in his uniform, in bed for twenty-four hours straight until he shipped out, as I hoped he would, and now I watch my son for signs of stupidity and wanderlust; Margaret and Sol reading silently after I’d gone to bed and come out again to see what grown-ups did—“Nothing,” my mother said, “we do nothing”; my easy cloistered evenings, doing laundry, making lunch, cutting coupons, playing with Maxie and his Claudette Colbert paper dolls, of which Huddie will surely disapprove, and they will fight and Max will weep and Huddie will turn to dark unreadable stone, and long for the sensible ease of June and the pleasant routine of childless, healthy middle age. And I surely cannot tell him that I’m no more good for me or for him than I ever was, that I will disappoint and confuse him, that I’ve been alone my whole life, and that it may really be too hard and too late, not even desirable, after such long, familiar cold, to be known, and heard, and seen.