Howie liked to please women. “I always like to leave ’em crying for more,” he said with a grin (when asked how he did it, how he managed to have so many women calling him in the morning to come and fix pipes or blocked drains or broken appliances that, when he arrived, seemed to need little or no repair at all). In Doreen’s case, however, Howie was unable to leave her crying for more. She very quickly discovered that she had too much of him, that his persistent, tireless weight was smothering her, and the longer they bounced and thrashed across her bed, onto the floor, on the coffee table in the living room, on and on and on, for what seemed to her like whole days and nights, the more she wished she had never called him, had never come to the door in her blue nightgown, had never leaned over behind him when he squatted down by the tub to try the faucets. When he finally left, which he would do only after she had moaned and cried out like an animal with its leg caught in a trap, she had shut the door on him with enormous relief and gratitude for his absence. He had said, as he stepped out the door, “I’ll be back, don’t worry,” and she had answered, “No, you can’t. I love my husband,” and he had winked and strolled across the frozen ground to his pickup truck.
But Howie was a braggart, and it wasn’t a week before Buck had got told by one of the kids who worked on his crew that Howie Leeke was making cracks about Doreen Tiede down at the Hawthorne House the other night. At first Buck couldn’t believe it, that his wife, the teen-aged angel Doreen, had let that big-mouthed, nervous, skinny, twice-divorced plumber near her perfect body, that she had listened to his line, that she had seen his sex organ! That he had seen hers! That their sex organs had actually made contact with one another! Then, of course, he couldn’t believe anything else, and he knew it was because Howie was a giant in bed, a titan, while he was a shrimp, a child, and, driving home from work, as the snow started falling, Buck began to cry, to sob, to groan, to call out her name, Doreen! Doreen! while his car slipped on the snow and skidded from side to side, drifting dangerously into long, slow slides coming down the long hill from Northwood to Catamount.
Most people can either only give love or receive it, rarely both, and there’s nothing wrong with that, so long as you attach yourself to your opposite number, that is, so long as, if you are the one who can only give love, you attach yourself to someone who can only receive it. You will be able then to make each other happy. If, by the same token, you are like Doreen Tiede and can only receive love, if you have no vision of a person’s needing you more than you need that person, then you had better not hook up with someone like Buck Tiede, or you will quickly end up as they ended up — with Buck on his knees in front of his wife, snow-covered, for he had crashed his car at the turnoff from Old Road and had walked in from the road to the trailerpark, sobbing hysterically, blindly, all the way in.
Doreen was unmoved, but she stroked his head mechanically and listened to his cries, until after a while, his cries turned to wet, begging queries as to what, exactly, she had done with Howie. In her own words, he said, he wanted to hear it from her own lips. He didn’t care how bad it was, he just wanted to hear it from her own lips. He knew, no matter how bad it was, no matter where it led, even if it led to her running off with Howie, he deserved it, for he had not been a good lover for her, he had been a weak and boyish man in bed, and she was a young woman who needed steady loving, just like all the sad songs said, so go ahead, give it to him straight, at least give him that much, so he could know the truth and wouldn’t go around the rest of his life being laughed at because everyone knew what he didn’t know.
“The rice is burning,” she said, and she pushed his head off her lap and got up. In a few seconds she came back from the stove and sat down again, and he put his head back on her lap, and she told him that she hadn’t slept with Howie, she had only let him kiss her, once, and then she had felt awful and she had sent him away.
“Kissed you? That’s all?”
“Yes.”
He didn’t believe her, of course, and his despair turned suddenly to anger, for she was lying to him, lying so she could go out tomorrow as soon as he had gone to work and do all kinds of disgusting things with her and Howie Leeke’s bodies. He saw them sweating against each other, naked and twined around each other, heads where genitals are supposed to be, genitals where heads are supposed to be, arms and hands where legs and feet should be, stomachs against backs, backs against stomachs, everything backward and upside-down, and the two of them laughing deliriously as they swallowed each other whole. “You whore, I’m going to shoot you dead,” he declared, and he got to his feet and stomped down the narrow hallway to their bedroom, returning a minute later, just as she lit a cigarette, with his.20 gauge shotgun. “You lying bitch, you deserve to die! You first, and then I’m going to shoot that sonofabitch Howie Leeke, and then I’m going to shoot myself!” He drew the gun up and aimed at her chest, which had begun to heave.
“Good,” she said. “I want you to shoot me. But don’t shoot Howie, and please, Buck, don’t shoot yourself. You’re a good man, and it’s not Howie’s fault that he kissed me, it’s mine. I’m everything you say I am, I deserve to be shot by a jealous husband, even if all I did was let another man kiss me, but you don’t deserve to die. You’re a good man, Buck, and someday you’ll make something of yourself, someday you’ll be running your own well-drilling business and you’ll be just like Daddy and Grandpa, happy and with children and a good wife and all that a good man can wish for. But I’m a rotten wife, I haven’t been good to you, I’ve let another man kiss me…” She got up from the chair and crossed the room slowly, evenly, until she drew near the barrel of the shotgun. “I let another man’s lips touch mine.” She placed her chest lightly against the mouth of the gun barrel. “A strange man’s lips were placed and pressed against mine, and I permitted it. I invited it.” Buck pulled the trigger.
They say that time stops, or goes away, and your body and the world’s body cross into one another. You have no thoughts, for once, no memories and no plans for the future, they say it’s like being born, though of course you have no memory of that and cannot know if the comparison is apt, and they say that it’s like dying, but you have not quite done that either and so cannot know if they are right, and people who have died cannot come back and tell you what it was like to die, so you will just have to imagine what Doreen felt for that instant when Buck pulled the trigger and the hammer fell, and the only noise was a gasp from Doreen as she clamped her hands onto the barrel of the gun and pressed it as tightly as she could against the exact center of her chest and then collapsed into a pile on the floor, the shotgun clattering to the floor beside her, as Buck came forward toward her, his trousers already to his knees, his hands yanking at her clothing, drawing it away from her body, until he had her naked from the waist down, her legs spread wide on either side of him, and he was moving swiftly, sweetly, smoothly into her, the two of them crooning sly obscenities and gross compliments into each other’s ears.
Doreen got pregnant that night, and both she and Buck knew it the instant it happened, or at least they claimed to know it afterward. But they did not live happily ever after. Their second year of marriage was worse than the first, and when the baby was born, a girl they named Maureen, Doreen stopped sleeping with Buck altogether, and he took to staying out late almost every night, usually at the Hawthorne House, where he would drink himself into a sullen stupor that often led him to beat his wife when he arrived home and found her sleeping peacefully alone. Doreen had three or four lengthy affairs over the next few years, none of them satisfactory to her, all of them resulting in an increased distance from her husband Buck. They were divorced in the fifth year of their marriage, when their little girl was four and right after Buck had been fired by Doreen’s father and grandfather because she had been forced to call the police one night to stop him from beating her. Doreen and Buck never forgot that snowy night and the shotgun, however, and in later years, alone, they would wish they could speak of it to each other, but they never did speak of it to each other, not even the night that it happened.