He half expected Teo to bring it up, to ask their mother about it, and he purposely lingered, wanting to hear what was said, but Teo kept it to herself, and he and his mother left the room at the same time.
“Now go to bed,” she told him sternly. “You have school tomorrow.”
He nodded, went upstairs.
Teo was obviously very upset. Normally, it was impossible for her to keep her mouth shut, especially when something was bothering her, and the fact that she was not willing to ask their mom about this indicated that its magnitude was off the scale.
He was pretty shaken up himself, and he wished he hadn’t been so stupid, wished he’d listened in on more of the conversation, but he told himself that they were probably talking about something else anyway and the subject of his father’s first wife had come up only in passing.
His father’s first wife.
It was an idea he still could not seem to get his mind around.
He did not even check to see if Sasha’s door was unlocked but went immediately into his own room, slamming the door behind him and plopping onto the bed. He tossed the Walkman and the comics on the floor.
His father had been married before.
It devalued everything, he thought. Mom was not his first choice for a wife. They were not his first choice for a family. They were the runners-up, the ones he’d had to settle for.
It occurred to him for the first time that Babunya knew all about this. She’d been someone else’s mother-in-law before his mom’s. She could have been someone else’s grandmother.
Was she someone else’s grandmother?
No, they would have known about that, they would have heard of it before.
But which wife did she like better? he wondered. Had she liked the first wife more? Had she wanted his dad to stay married to her?
He felt betrayed by Babunya too, although the feeling wasn’t quite as strong.
What if his mother had been married before?
He stared up at the ceiling, ashamed of his next thought: what if Sasha was her daughter from the first marriage and was not really his full sister? It wouldn’t exactly be incest, then.
He shouldn’t even be thinking about that. He’d just found out that his mother was not his father’s first wife, and he was horned out over his sister? What kind of sicko loser was he?
But what if she wasn’t his sister?
He reached under the bed and pulled out Sasha’s panties. He knew it was wrong, knew it was especially inappropriate now, but just thinking about Sasha had turned him on, and without any preamble, he did what he always did: unbuttoned, unzipped, and pulled down his pants, stretching out.
He grasped his penis firmly and began stroking it.
He closed his eyes. His door was unlocked, and in his fantasy Sasha came home early and walked in on him just as he was reaching his climax.
That moment was already getting close, and he used his left hand to pick up her panties. At the last second, he wrapped them around his erection, poking the head of his penis against the cotton panel where he knew her vagina had been.
He looked down and watched the explosion of white wetness burst against the confines of the cotton crotch as he came.
Afterward, he lay there for a few moments, breathing heavily, before tossing the panties back under the bed.
He pulled up his pants, went over and locked the door, lay back down on the bed, and began to cry.
2
There was nothing for him to do.
Gregory awoke late, the sun shining through slatted slits in the window shades, and realized that he had nowhere to go.
Oh, he could putter around the house, do yard work, fix up the storage shed, but those things weren’t necessary. And the truth was that things at the café were running themselves. He wasn’t needed. Shows were booked through the end of the month, there was no problem with any of the equipment, procedures were in place and working smoothly, and everything ran like clockwork. He didn’t have to be there.
In fact, he hadn’t been there for a while. He’d hung out, helped Paul and Odd with a few menial tasks, but he hadn’t been to a performance in over two weeks, and he hadn’t even bothered to check with the café’s other employees to find out how the shows had gone. He assumed that if there was a problem, someone would tell him. And since no one had told him, that must mean everything was fine.
Gregory sat up in bed. His work was done and he had nothing to take its place.
He didn’t know how to react, how to use this unstructured, unrestricted free time. He supposed he could try to think of other projects, but the truth was that his short burst of ambition and drive seemed to have fled, leaving in its place a disconcerting lethargy. He recalled, years ago, reading an interview with Pete Townsend, one of his idols. It had been a long interview, wide-ranging, and Pete had responded thoughtfully to all of the questions, but there was nothing he seemed excited about, nothing he seemed interested in, nothing he wanted to do. He and his wife had just had a baby, and he didn’t even seem interested in that. It was as if he’d seen everything, done everything, and there was nothing new. He was just putting in his time, waiting to die.
At the time, the interview had depressed the hell out of him, and he had not been able to understand how someone so rich, so famous, so talented, with so many things going for him, could have such an attitude. But he thought he understood now, because he felt the same way. He’d won the lottery. He no longer had to work, he could do whatever he wanted to do—and there was nothing he wanted to do.
He’d thought moving to McGuane would change his life, and it had. But not for the better. Things were not working out well here. He was not happy. He was not satisfied. He was not content. He was just… lost. And he didn’t know what to do about it.
He found himself wondering what his life would have been like had he remained with Andrea. She was completely different from Julia: flamboyant where Julia was subdued, spontaneous where Julia was thoughtful. He had loved her, he supposed—even though she was an outsider, as his mother had never ceased reminding him—and it had hurt him to break up with her, but it was the aftereffects of the breakup that had been hardest to deal with: having to explain to the family what had happened, having to adjust to seeing friends without her by his side, having to meet people by himself instead of on equal footing, as part of a couple. He was not meant to be alone, was not the kind of guy who did well by himself. He wasn’t clingy, but he needed a woman, and socially he worked better if he was part of a team.
It was why he’d gotten married again so quickly.
He had never thought of it that way before, had never even considered that the life he had now, the family he had now, had not sprung from a foundation of love and romance but had resulted from his unwillingness to be alone and his need to be married.
Did he love Julia?
He’d always thought he did, but now he wasn’t sure. They seemed to be drifting apart, and he didn’t think it was simply a temporary downturn on the graph that measured their relationship. They had moved to a small town in another state, basically cutting themselves off from their friends and their previous life. It was a sink-or-swim scenario, and they were sinking. They were not drawing closer together in this pressure-cooker situation—the test of true love in his book—but were coming apart. It pained him to think that the only reason their marriage had survived for so long on such a relatively even keel was because he had a life, she had a life, and they saw each other only on nights and weekends. Now that they were together so often, now that they had more of a life together, things were not working out.