They drove home in their usual silence made newly entire; they drove in the tame light of dusk and the aseptic chill. John Henry tried not to think of anything, but watched the thrifty sky as it diminished into evening, a sky like middle age, without eagerness or gladness, without the bright light and heat of youth. His wife shifted on the seat beside him. The motion caught his eye, and he looked at her as he pulled the sedan up the drive. She was looking at the house he had given her — she came from a family that had more name than money — in wonder or regret or some other unjustifiable female emotion. When she made a tiny mouselike motion to open the door for herself as if he would not do it for her, as if she had forgotten in her time away that it was the husband’s place to open the door for his wife, as if in her absence their marriage had ended, this was too much, and he suddenly reached over and placed one hand firmly against the back of her head. Without explanation, he pressed her head forward toward the dashboard, feeling her resist only for a moment, her left hand darting up once the way her heartbeat would flutter lightly when they made love, then he took up her pocketbook and landed three hard blows against her head, high enough on the back of the skull so the bruise would not show and where there was no danger of breaking her neck. She made no noise but a grunting exhalation with each blow, her shoulders shrinking up around her ears. Then he flung the pocketbook onto her lap and used both hands to turn her now, so that she could see his lips as he said, “Your son is sick. Go tend to him.”
And that would have been it. Except that she cried. They had already come into the house, John Henry following after her with her suitcase and pointing her upstairs, as though she were a child. She had walked up the stairs gripping the walnut banister, but then stumbled awkwardly on the last one, looking back down at him with fear wrinkling up her face, and he saw tears on her cheek. Despite her actions, her guilt, what she had done to him, despite the fact that her wet little tongue had no doubt licked the rotten fruit before she had taken it in her mouth and swallowed it, here she stood, crying, and the naïve innocence of her look, which was at best a lie and at worst cuckoldry, made a mockery of his strict dignity, his family, of his manhood. The high heat of rage flooded him instantaneously. He rushed the stairs like a bull, and for a moment Lavinia could only stare in alarm, never having seen him wholly uncontained, before she turned and fled down the hallway, and he realized she planned to escape him by rushing into their son’s room — his son’s room! He overcame her as she was reaching for the door, twisting her under him, his hands like manacles on her wrists. He dragged her to their room and kicked the door shut, beyond caring about the clatter they made or their heavy breathing. Her strained grunting and struggling only aroused him, and he unleashed himself. He forced her face-first onto the bed with her arms folded against her chest and struck her with his open hand against the back of her head with increasing force until she mewled into the bedspread. Forcing her tweed skirt above her hips, he was stymied by a hard white girdle and belts and straps and stockings so tight around her — like a chastity belt — that his fingernails scratched her as he ripped them down from her hips. He didn’t say anything, there was no need, she understood absolutely nothing of him anyway even after all these years, so this was both his farewell address and a reconfiguration of his vows. He dropped his trousers and shorts and, hard with the potency of his anger, he forced himself into her dry, the rude, fleshy slap of his hips beating against her flanks. He breathed like a gladiator as he stared down at the back of her deceitful head. But when she shifted under him once in pain, he shuddered with pleasure, and, against his will, he remembered suddenly their youthful coming together with a vibrancy like lightning, and he paused midthrust, panting, blinded by the memory of it — the plangency of old delight, of her lost charms, how her eyes had once admired him. But she had changed and turned away and made a fool of him, and he had wasted the energy of his adult life on her luster; it was not so much that he hated her now, but that he respected himself. And with that thought, he was moving again, stabbing into her, fast and with no feeling now, not even anger, in a strict charade of lovemaking again and again in the old, rote motions again and again until she cried out, but not in pleasure.
* * *
My darling boy — sleeping there just as you did as an infant — I don’t expect you to understand. You are so young, and we have no shared language between us, not really. I held you in my body for nine long months, and I gave birth to you, but you don’t know me at all. I’m not just your mother; I’m a woman. I’m telling you something now that I can barely stand to see myself, that I have until very recently been a little girl. Married, pregnant three times and now thirty-eight years old, but still a little girl. No matter what anyone tells you, a person is not fully mature until they can love another human being. I love you, of course, but loving a child you gave birth to is not what I’m talking about. That’s effortless. What I’m talking about is the love that occurs between equals, love being something that can only occur between equals. I know you don’t think of that man as my equal. The truth is I didn’t either — he’s black and he drinks too much. I can’t hear the way he talks, but I can just imagine how rough and rude it is. But what you may never understand, because you are not a woman, is that the first time he kissed me, he didn’t kiss me just with his mouth; he kissed me with his eyes. He looked into me. No one had ever done that before. Then I was completely and totally ashamed, but not because of the sex, which is the natural course of things. I was ashamed of the glaring inequality that existed between us. He knew something of which I was completely ignorant, and from that moment on, against every impediment, I strove to become worthy of him, to become his equal.
* * *
In blistering dreams, he ascends a ladder out of the brilliant sunlit present into dark, roiling cumulus clouds where the troubled faces of his mother and father recede from countenance to anachronism to chiaroscuro to nothing. There in crumbling, sooty clouds, where the rotten-flesh dead cease their prattling and rutting long enough to point upward, saying, That way, Mister Henry; up, up, step after step into the future. Now over the rumbling of heaven’s rusty gears, he detects a tolling deeper than blood: the bells of ambition and desire. Up, up to the very top of the ladder. With feverish effort, he hauls up the ladder and turns it onto its side and makes it a proscenium. So, here they come, advancing along its length, a procession of horses from time immemorial through the Age of Man, only the finest specimens: the dish-faced Arabian, the mighty Clydesdale, the wild Mustang, the cutting Quarter, the stalwart Morgan, and last but not least the royal Thoroughbred, that perfect marriage of speed and strength, of cold and hot blood, of high temper and astonishing speed! This alone is the culmination of the species, of this long, long line as old as the gods, standing behind you always watching you, Henry. Always.
Henry struggled in his sheets, but he couldn’t wake. Demeter has returned with gentle hands and nothing to say, touching him here and there and everywhere, hands on his face and at the crux of her legs, and when he says, I’ve seen something amazing, she points up at the mistletoe above her head, smiling sweetly. But when she removes her painted mask, she’s nothing but that bitch Aphrodite.
Father asks, Is the good the pleasurable?
Son: Mother thinks so!