“Jesus,” Hamish said. He rubbed the back of his head and left my pants to fester around my ankles, the immediacy dangerously threatened once again.
I bit my lip. I writhed. “Fuck me,” I said, and hoped that no one’s God was watching.
This brought him back. He stared at me. “Wow,” he said. With a final tug, he threw my pants onto the gravel drive. I winced when he ripped off my underpants. They were not high waisted or gauzy or old like handmade paper, but his stripping me cut too closely to what I’d just done to my mother. I propelled myself up and grabbed for Hamish’s penis, which had poked above the waistband of his briefs.
As soon as I had my hand on it, I tugged him forward and down. He moaned in pleasure as I spread my legs and wrapped myself around him. “Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck!” he wailed. I lay there in disbelief. He had ejaculated on my stomach. My fingers, sticky and enraged, squeezed. “Ow,” he said, and placed a hand on my wrist. “Let go.”
He moved around, flattening one of my knees painfully with his ass, until he was sitting on the seat behind my legs with his own legs bent up in a tent above them. I smelled the fetid smells of the backseat, where the crisp scent of my greenmarket groceries mingled with the danker smell of my ancient gym bag.
“Shit, I’m sorry,” he said. “This is intense.”
I lay there. Suddenly I was beside my mother in the basement. Mrs. Leverton was coming down the stairs with After Eight mints spread out in a decorative circle on an old enamel tray. The phone was ringing in the kitchen, and Manny was upstairs dropping condoms like so much rain.
“Will you take me to Limerick?” I said, as if I were asking to be voluntarily committed to an asylum just over the hill. I would not look at him. Did not want to see his face. Instead I looked at the square-cornered tear in the back of the passenger seat and tried to recall how it had gotten there.
Hamish was kind, even if motivated by an unnecessary shame. “Do you want to wash up?”
“I’ll stay here,” I said.
I could feel him wanting to say something but resisting. “I’ll bring you a towel,” he said, and I nodded my head at him, both to say yes to the towel and to make him, for the moment, go away.
I lay in the backseat and listened to the night noises surrounding me, thought of fucking Jake in Madison in the VW Bug. Avery would come and sit for the girls, and we would go to a dark spot at the edge of the U-Mad campus and leave the AM radio playing low while we made love.
I wanted to be looking up at the sky, but instead I was looking up at the waffled roof of my Saab. The cool night air rushed in the open door at my feet, and I shivered, drawing myself up and turning over to lie in a fetal position and stare at the back of the front passenger seat, where my mother’s braid lay tucked inside my purse.
I had once read one of Sarah’s true-crime books that she’d left at the house. It was a book about a serial killer named Arthur Shawcross, and the most vivid thing in it, for me, was the portrait of a woman whom he had obviously meant to kill but who was too smart for him. She was old for a prostitute and still doing speedballs and getting high. She’d gotten high for three days straight after Shawcross tried to strangle her while raping her in his car. He was a man who picked up a prostitute, drove to a deserted spot, and killed her after he was unable to perform. She had known how to talk to him, known how to brace herself so that his hands, enclosed around her neck, could not produce the leverage needed to crush her windpipe. And she had known that her survival was connected intimately with his ability to ejaculate. It had taken hours, or so she said, and it was arduous, but he was grateful enough that he didn’t kill her and instead drove her back to the spot where he’d picked her up.
“How can you read such things?” I asked Sarah over the phone, brandishing, as if she could see me, the consumed-in-one-night book.
“It’s real,” Sarah had said. “There’s no bullshit.”
Hamish returned, smelling of Calvin Klein’s Obsession for Men, which it embarrassed me to know. He ducked in the backseat and held out a small blue hand towel. I looked at it in horror, but I did not reach for it.
“That’s okay,” I said. “I’m good.”
Again a quizzical look came across his face, but instead of asking me a question, he broke into a smile.
“You like having it on you,” he said.
“Hamish,” I said, sitting up and scrambling out of the car to find my pants and underwear, “your job is not to make me throw up.”
“Harsh,” he said.
“What I mean is that I’m still your mother’s friend, and your seduction lines are calibrated for women half my age.”
“If that,” he said.
“Touché,” I said, and zipped up my pants while slipping on my flats.
“You’ve got to admit this isn’t our usual way of relating.”
“We’ll take my car,” I said. “I’ll drive. You go around the side.”
“Sweet. Mom always makes me drive.”
I sat down behind the wheel and whisked my purse off the passenger seat, tucking it by my side. I pictured an eight-year-old Hamish running to my car with a wild smile on his face. He had been smitten with Emily from the first time they’d met when they were two. I looked out the window at the full-grown man whom I had almost just fucked and who was now walking around to the passenger door. I didn’t know who I was anymore or what I was capable of.
He swooped in and kissed me on the cheek.
“Buckle up,” I said, my spine stiff against the soft and mealy seat.
I backed out of the driveway, the gravel crunching under my tires. It was Leo’s baby carrier that had torn the hole in the back of the passenger seat. I had struggled to get it inside the car on the day my mother dropped him, trying to show Emily I could take care of it while she stood on the sidewalk, clasping Leo to her chest and shouting, “It doesn’t matter, Mother! Leave it! Leave it!” until I shoved the carrier in and slammed the door. Inside the car, I turned and saw a spot of blood seep through Leo’s blue baby bonnet. When I’d called to tell my parents I was pregnant for the second time, my mother had yawned extravagantly and said, “Aren’t you bored yet?”
“Who is Natalie out with?” I asked as I swung the car onto the road and started off.
“Shit,” Hamish said. “Don’t make me tell you.”
But I didn’t want to talk about what had happened between us. “Okay, can we talk about your father instead? Are you ever happy that he died?”
“Man, what’s with you? I’m sorry about back there, but chill out, okay? I want to make you happy.”
“Sorry, I just came from my mother’s house.”