Bereavements (14 page)

It was difficult at first, and he felt very strange, nerves raw and gnawing inside of him, chin jerking again, fingernails picking at each other or being chewed.

His heart wasn’t beating right either, so it seemed, thudding erratically, so loud he kept stealing glances at Mrs. Evans to see if she heard.

Her face was serene, and in the fading light and soft shadows, appeared much younger: muscles relaxed, lines smoothed out.

She stared at him for the longest while, right into his eyes, almost expressionless, with just the corners of her mouth turned up, though he couldn’t really tell if she was smiling or not.

And being seen, being watched so closely, was such an unbearable intimacy that his body continued to tighten, making him shift this way and that in his chair, aching to move violently, to leap up, to run, to hide.

He did none of these; instead he forced himself to return her steady gaze as best he could, eyes sliding away only briefly now and then.

Then, as he watched, he eventually saw her eyelids blink, flutter, and gently close.

Had she fallen asleep?! His body prepared itself for the sting of outrage, disappointment, of being “cheated”—though of what exactly he had no idea.

But no; she wasn’t asleep. Her fingers were slowly carressing her rings; her lips had parted. If anything, she seemed super-or ultra-awake, as if she were listening to sounds no one else could hear, or seeing things that didn’t require eyes but a sense more refined than vision.

So apparently he was doing, and doing well, the peculiar and mysterious thing she had asked be done: sharing. . . (how had she put it?) . . . sharing each
other,
each other’s
be
-ing and presence.

Yet . . . ?

Well, he
did
feel better. The tightness had left his chest; his breathing was regular if shallow, his body weak, quite tired from the strain of the afternoon, but relaxed.

Yet . . . ?

She
looked so strange!—having acquired a pallor that seemed a luminescent glow in the twilight.

And something else disturbed him. He was beginning to feel faint. And faintly suffocated. He wasn’t breathing quite the way he ought to, after all. The room was airless. Or there were too many flowers. He looked around, counting four vases.

Or maybe it was her perfume. Could it be that? There was
some
thing strong in the room: sweet and overpowering, like honey.

Book III

T
HAT FEARSOME,
most intolerable of all times—the one she had learned to dread no matter what the circumstances—had finally arrived:
goodbye,
the
small
dying, the
little
death, with a dichotomy that split Mrs. Evans exactly in two: she had to endure the paradox of profound relief that Angel was leaving (the day had been exhausting) and the equally profound desire to keep him—never, ever (if that were possible) to let him go.

The paradox was multiple, complex, for a whole hemisphere of her being told her that it hadn’t worked, wouldn’t do; the common denominator of their mutual loss (though he hadn’t really talked about his mother’s death at all) had been sufficient to bring them together, but, she was sure, would prove too weak to sustain them.
This
—while all the other continents, seas, islands of self demanded he be kept, cherished, possessed, owned, like the rarest of treasures, locked up in the safe behind Jamie’s painting along with the grimy postcard that had brought them together in the first place.

She had Cook wrap the remaining cookies (a good two dozen) in wax paper and aluminum foil. This went into a brown paper bag which then seemed hideously common, too vulgar and depressing to carry through the streets, even at night, so she had Rose hunt through the hall closet for something more suitable. The girl found a small shopping bag, which was pretty, and blue, and had originally come from Tiffany’s with something or other.

So equipped and supplied, Angel stood on the top steps by the open front door with a weak, broken-toothed smile on his slightly puzzled and wondering face—half grimace, really, trismic and fixed.

Below, Dori waited, the back door of the car open, and Angel knew that while they were driving “home”—returning to the church—he would remain in the rear seat, not wanting to move up front, and that he and the chauffeur wouldn’t speak at all.

He knew this just as he knew that Mrs. Evans was having some kind of—not unimaginable—trouble saying goodbye. Her attitude, her manner, was one of doubt, pain, delay and perplexity, as if there was something else, something very important she should remember to give him. Not only cookies, but . . .

What are the countless amenities of parting? The “good riddance” one can never quite say? “So long? Nice meeting you? See you soon? Let’s get together again?” And, most heartbreaking of all: “Why not call me?—sometime”—that death-wish, tell-all fragment of a pause separating the “me” from the “sometime.”

She had the feeling he was holding his breath as he stood there patiently if vaguely lost, confused, Tiffany-bag in hand, and the hand unconsciously held to his chest, two wide, black Spanish eyes fully on hers.

And Angel
in
side?

Had he passed the “test”? Had he fooled her good enough? Did she want him as his mother never had? Was he something of value, however small, however slight? Or was he now to be thrown away, tossed out into the street like the worthless refuse he was?

The light from the streetlamp caught the wet edge of his broken tooth, making it the blink of a star, a signal from another planet so distant in space that the sender was dead eons ago, and vast civilizations, one following another, had fallen in ruins, become featureless rubble amid drifting clouds of final, eternal dust.

She was down on her knees in the next moment, crushing him and the cookies between them in her arms, sobs welling up from a body shaking as uncontrollably as his chin when it had been seized by its shuddering tic.

How impossible can behavior become? Dori had to come up the steps and in a pretended offhand way, separate them—or rather, contrive somehow to ease his hand between them, ostensibly to rescue the cookies from being crushed, but really to push Mrs. Evans away that she might regain sufficient control to let the boy go.

This, she managed finally to do, but only after their next tryst had been arranged, fixed, certain: the day, the hour, the very minute when again they would meet.

Seeing the pretty, blue Tiffany bag, Aurelio asked his son what the fuck was in it.

“Nothing,” of course.

But his father’s eyes were wickedly blood-shot, and Angel stared past him to the floor where the man, evidently bored with TV, had made a somewhat misshapen medieval “castle” with at least forty or more empty beer cans, most of them crushed flat or into various angles.

Following his son’s gaze, Aurelio, with mixed pride and shame, told him: “this here’s the moat, see?”—running his hand around a circle of enclosed space. “And this here drops down, like so, f’t’make th’bridge.”

Not only no praise, no comment.

“Y’don’
like
it?!” Hurt, wide-eyed surprise.

“It’s okay.” And because Angel quickly realized “okay” was insufficient—”it’s nice”—nice, of course, for a retarded six-year-old, not a big, hulking, bleary-eyed, beer-soaked, handsome, hairy ape of a man.

“I gotta piss,” the ape said, a broad hand flat on his lower, too-full belly. “I gotta piss me a whole river”—stumbling out of sight. “You wanna watch?”

Watch?!
Angel could hear the blows of the hammer—or was it his heart—that nailed both feet to the floor.

Aurelio’s aim, because he loved the sound, was always dead center, and from the open-doored bathroom, Angel heard a stereophonic hiss, splatter, drive: a deep, tumbling niagara. It was endless beer-piss, of course, ten million gallons of it, enough to float a ship or put out a three-alarm fire.

Then: gurgle, gurgle—the broken-seated, paint-peeled toilet flushing all that prized, golden beauty away; Aurelio’s grunting pleasure of relief; snap!—the sound of the tight elastic band of the jockey underwear as it came up into place.

And, from the excitement of it all—all that exuberant, healthy, good-bodied pissing—half a hardon, or at least a quarter, the man’s crotch swollen as he came back into the room.

Angel could not more than glance at him, his heart already crowding his throat. He held up the Tiffany bag.

“What it is,” he said, deciding to explain after all, “is some cookies. Chocolate chip. Really good.” He opened the aluminum foil and wax paper on the floor, revealing a mound of large brown fragments.

“You want some?”

“That shit!” Nevertheless, the man reached down for a handful, stuffed it into his mouth. “I din’ eat no supper. There ain’t a fuckin’ thing in the house worth eatin’. Nothin’ t’eat . . . Only Angel.” With a half-smirked, crooked, crumb-smeared grin: “One a’ these days I’m goin’ t’eat
him.”
And with the usual fake leer—”teach him how it’s done—in case he ever wants t’eat me.” Pause. “Jeeze!”—the delectable, butter-rich texture and flavor of the cookies turning the famished man on. “Where’d y’get ‘em?”

“Oh . . . a friend.”

“Some guy’s mother?”

“Well . . . ” He did have his perverse, taunting side, wanting always, so often to shake up his father. “No. Just . . . a lady I know.”

“A lady! What the fuck lady you know! You don’t know no lady!” But maybe he did. “Your teacher?—that Miss, Miss what’s-a-name?—Evans! Is that where you been?” Seizing him now, seizing the boy, which was exactly what the subliminal Angel was after, despite his believed and believable, raging, outraged, “Leggo!”

“Cookies!” the man said. “More like ass, a piece of fancy, high-talkin’ ass! Am I right? You foolin’ aroun’ your age? Got y’finger into somthin’ nice?”

But all this with more pleasure than anger or even interest, desiring only to taunt the boy as much as Angel did him. “Lemme see! Lemme smell that fuckin’ finger t’see where it’s been!”

And now he had the boy’s arm in his, so twisted and anchored in an eveloping armor of hardened muscle that to move at all was to break it, while, laughing, and Angel too, though with pretended, exaggerated pain, the man literally sniffed at, half-nuzzled Angel’s hand.

“I can’t tell,” he concluded, wet mouth searching. “Chocolate sure as shit, maybe perfume! Gotta taste!” and to Angel’s swooning horror and joy, the man was licking and sucking on his fingers, a joke like no other in the world, for fingers would never do. The man’s wild, irresistible mouth suddenly covered the boy’s, moved quickly to neck, shoulders—the clothes shredded from his body.

A wet smothered heat against each small nipple, a tongue’s width of spit sliding down to the navel, then the crotch where, spewing already, Angel felt himself disappear, exploding under the pressure of an immense cavernous seizure.

Rose appeared, quite suddenly, and without a sound, all but tiptoeing.

Mrs. Evans glanced up from her vanity and, seeing the girl’s white face, supposed she must have been helping Cook with the baking—bread no doubt, which is sometimes messy, dusting herself with an accident of flour. Then she perceived that the color, or lack of it, was natural, or rather unnatural.