She looked at him. Even after twenty-six years his first instinct on being close to his mother was to run.
She took his wrists and pulled him down so he could kiss her. He did. He could smell the breath from her never-closed mouth: a red American mouthwash she used by the gallon.
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“I was ashamed.”
“They are the ones who should be ashamed.”
“They’re not ashamed of anything. That’s why I’ve become so important to them. What could you have done?”
“Done? I could have helped the only blood I have left on earth. Why, the television, it says you have no job, and no place to live in just a few weeks. And still, you don’t call or write me?”
Colesceau stepped back a little and sighed. “Thanks for coming.”
“How do you live with that noise outside?”
“It stops at nine.”
“They would crucify you if they had the courage.”
“And the hammers.”
“Make me some tea. I’m going to sit here where it’s cool and think about this situation. There must be a way we can overcome it.”
Colesceau made the tea. He brought it out to her.
Helena was watching “Rape Watch: Irvine.”
“Are you on the TV all day?”
“They broadcast live when I go outside for any reason. Or when someone visits. Yesterday, law enforcement. Now you.”
“What are they saying about the children?”
“They’re demanding a safe neighborhood for them.”
“But you love children.”
“True.”
“And if you had ever shown interest in a Romanian girl, she would have given children to you, like I gave you to your father.”
References to his mother in childbirth disgusted him. His father was weak, womanly and traitorous. Matamoros was ashamed to be sired by him. Which was why he had taken his mother’s maiden name when he came to the states. He tried to think of something pleasant, always difficult in the presence of Helena. “You’ve told me that a thousand times, Mother.”
“Instead of the French or Italian girls in Bucharest. Instead of the German girls in the magazines. Instead of the American girls in California.”
“I know your opinions.” Certainly, he did. She’d been opining about his prospective mate for twenty years or so. Her words had always made him sad and edgy and angry. At first it was because he didn’t really understand them. Later, because he knew she was right.
“You will never attract an American woman like you desire.”
“This isn’t the time to discuss it.”
“It’s the reason for all that’s happened. Your own type, Moros. Your own level. What is similar and harmonious. A hummingbird for a hummingbird. A sow for a hog. Beautiful and educated American women for beautiful and educated American men. For you, a simple Romanian peasant girl. Someone like me.”
“You horrify me, Mother,” he said softly. “I love you, but you always have.”
When she forced him to sleep in her bed after the death of his father, Colesceau had begun to truly understand why his mother so adamantly choked his desires for other women. He began to understand this while he lay in her bed the very night his father was shot to death by the state police, lay still and silent and in considerable pain as she sobbed and worked the cooling herbal poultice over the stitched fang holes that the attack dogs had left all over his body. Her desire was easy for him to feel. It entered him through her fingers, arcing down into him like electricity in slow motion. It never left. He could never really make it leave.
Now, years later, he considered killing her just to stop her damning words, but there was the money she gave him, the rent she paid, the vehicles she financed for him, the savings and checking accounts she helped him maintain, the lawyers and doctors she hired and fired like maids.
“I believe I have a solution for our immediate problems, Moros. You will move in with me. We can transport you in a private way, and no one will know you are with me.”
He just looked at her, the brown and broken teeth rising from her gums.
“What do you think of that, Moros?”
“No.”
“Do you have a better solution?”
“I’ll be all right here, Mother. I’ll finish out my lease here, that’s twenty-five days. Then I’ll find another place to live. It’s not impossible. It’s a free country.”
“Not for sexual perverts, it isn’t.”
“I’m not a sexual pervert. And I’m not moving in with you. I’m not going anywhere. This is my home.”
“Then I’ll move in here. And I will hear no argument about that, if you expect to continue your allowances. No arguments from you, Moros. But, more tea. And turn up the TV.”
He picked up the remote and pressed the button. As the “Volume” bar rose up one side of the screen, hatred rose up in his heart. It was like water jumping to a boil. But it was a soft, compromised hatred, not one that would ever spur him to action. It frustrated him so much that he couldn’t just shut her up and get it all over with. Then start to rebuild his life from the ground up, clean slate, American Dream and all that: no Depo-Provera, no shrill neighbors, no Helena to tell him he should aspire only to women as ugly as her.
“Who is this woman on the screen, Moros?”
He looked. “I don’t know.”
His mother turned her white round face toward him and Colesceau knew she was studying him through her sunglasses.
“Yet she is a neighbor?”
“You see her there, staring at my front door — what else could she be?”
“You desire her.”
“No, not really.”
“They say her name is Trudy Powers. You know her, don’t you?”
“She’s lived here longer than I have.”
Colesceau took Helena’s cup back to the kitchen, poured some fresh tea. What he hated most about her was the way she knew what he was thinking when it came to women. She always knew the ones he’d like, ever since he was just a boy. He looked out to the living room at her, his black-shrouded harridan of a mother with the dictator’s sunglasses, the babushka and brown, broken teeth. His heart was pounding heavy and hard, like an idling Harley. But his muscles felt loose and strong, better than they’d felt in years.
Over one week without a hormone injection, he i thought. After three years of it you don’t need any more. And if you do, one more’s not going to do you any good at all.
Here I am, he thought, caught in another drastic moment. But it felt like he was getting stronger every minute.
Then the doorbell rang. He looked to the TV screen to identify his new torment. He could feel the soft hatred still inside, the swirl of it through his blood and nerves. But instead of more cops, or reporters or something wretched like his mother, there was something wonderful now standing on his porch, asking that her ring be answered. She had her purse slung over her shoulder and something flat and heavy in one hand.
Trudy rang the doorbell again and Colesceau smiled, turning toward the entryway.
But Helena was already there, swinging open the door. Colesceau looked past the black-shawled shoulder of his mother to see the look of genuine fright on Trudy’s face as she smiled at Helena. Tried to smile, was more like it.
“May I come in for just a moment?”
“Only for just a moment.”
“You must be Mrs. Colesceau. I absolutely love the eggs you decorate.”
Helena turned to look back at him, and Colesceau knew she was trying to understand how Trudy Powers knew about her eggs. Colesceau knew that behind the black plastic of her sunglasses her little pig eyes were narrow, suspicious and uncertain.
She turned away from him and back to Trudy Powers. “It is an art I have practiced for many years. I’ve never felt worthy of its tradition.”