Dance Real Slow (22 page)

“Oh, you don't know she said anything,” says Zoe, scribbling something in the margin of one of her pages.

“Yeah, I do.”

“And so what if she did. Big deal. You both know he's much too young.”

“It's just the idea …”

She puts the book down at her side, leaving her pen between the binding to mark her place.

“You know how comfortable I am with this whole situation. It's not like I'm exactly thrilled having her hangin' around, either. But really, she's not awful.”

“Fuck Kate!”

“Come on, Gordon. Stop.”

“Fuck you, too!”

“I'm not even going to respond to that.”

“Go ahead. Respond. Respond all the fuck you want.”

The anger is so fiercely hot I can feel it fluttering behind my eyes. And then, from somewhere in my chest—deep near a place I despise knowing exists—I speak out Calvin's name in a sawed-off voice, a singsongy high and low, like you might use to call a possum or raccoon before you bludgeon it with a sharpened ax handle. Hateful. Seething from low in my esophagus like before, like with Noah. “Fuck him,” I mutter. In his little room, with no worries except what color his goddam horse is gonna be. Fuck him.

“Gordon, stop.”

Only last week I found him burrowing beneath our living-room rug, crawling on all fours, with his back this movable hump, an enormous dust bunny—submerged. Again there was anger. “Maybe we're both dysfunctional,” I thought. Taking a broomstick, I slapped at his tiny body twice, three times, before I heard him whimper.

Later, it was easy to make him forget: pizza, ice cream with sauce.

I bang the sprinkling can into the base of a floor lamp. Zoe slugs me in the ankle.

“This is not what I want,” I say.

“It never is.”

From her place on the ground she reaches up to make contact with my fingers, to make contact with me.

“You think Calvin understands all this?” she says. “Kate's just as confused. You know, the other day we spoke. Briefly.” She fans out her hair against the rug. “It's more than her wanting to spend a few days with Calvin—or a few weeks even. She feels like you're dictating this little window of opportunity in which she can spend time with her son.”

“What am I missing? Didn't she leave him behind and move on?”

“Not forever,” says Zoe, stretching at the waist.

“And I suppose she gets to decide when forever is up.”

“Do you know she's looking at property in the area?”

“Property to buy?”

“Yes, to buy.”

“That's ridiculous.” I sit in a wing chair, the empty
sprinkling can balanced on one knee. “That's fuckin' ridiculous.”

“She doesn't hate
you
, Gordon.”

I do not answer.

“You know something she told me? Something she remembered?”

Still, I am silent.

“It was about the funeral parlor, after your father died. She remembers taking you—practically forcing you to go to his casket. Then she told me she watched you from beside a set of lace curtains, alone.”

This is a strange moment for Kate to recall. It was two or three days after my father died, and in the beginning I was afraid to see his corpse. Kate stayed with me in my bedroom at the house and it was she, ultimately, who convinced me to go and see the body. She had reminded me of something my father once said when I was a boy, something I repeated to her much later. He said, “Don't ever be afraid of nothin' that can't bite you.” As she held my arm, gently massaging my right temple with her free hand, she assured me there wasn't anything at the funeral parlor that was going to bite me, least of all the lifeless body of my father.

At the parlor, she stood in the doorway as I walked to the side of his open casket. I wanted to touch him, to rub away some powder that had clotted in the dent on the side of his nose. But I didn't. Instead, I dropped to a knee and sang him his favorite song, from start to finish. It was a James Taylor song one of his players, Cooper Turo, used to sing accompanied by his guitar. Now I only remember the refrain: “So close your eyes/You can
close your eyes it's all right/I don't know no love songs/And I can't sing the blues anymore/But I can sing this song/And you can sing this song/When I'm gone.”

“It was a beautiful thing for her to choose to tell me,” says Zoe. For a long moment, she seems lost in thought. “You've got to find a way to sort out your feelings.”

I place my hands against the table, face-down, and say, “I've never had to share Calvin.” Then I take a breath. “I'm not sure I know how.”

“You'll do fine,” she says, pushing her fist along the bumpy ridge of my knuckles. “And so will he.”

We sit this way for some time, until, finally, Calvin shouts from upstairs. He has crashed his plane into the side of the television set and one of the lights has popped off. He wants me to come into the bedroom and help find it.

Standing in the hallway at work beside the open door to Harper's office, I stare dumfounded as he rests naked on the couch, his arm flopped across the bridge of his nose, shielding his eyes from the early-morning sunlight. His legs are intertwined with the unclothed body of Joyce Ives. There is an empty fifth of bourbon on the desk, its weight smashing down on two Dixie cups. Before I can say anything, Calvin leaves my side and walks into the room. He bends, carefully, and from a distance peaks at the rigid lips of Joyce's vagina.

“I'm lookin' for money,” he whispers, still a foot away.

As Joyce begins mumbling something, to herself, I yank Calvin back into the hall and tell him to wait for me in my office. This Harper hears, or thinks he hears, though for a moment he remains still, even settling deeper into the couch before, rapidly, sliding his arm away and gazing full-eyed into my face. Ever so briefly, he almost appears to smile. Then he scrambles to his
feet, knocking Joyce onto the carpet as he gropes for his boxer shorts, which are dangling, rather neatly, from a desk lamp.

“Geez, Gordo, I didn't …” His voice gets lost somewhere in his throat as he searches for the rest of his clothing.

Crossing her ankles, Joyce doesn't seem bothered much by my intrusion. She lights a cigarette and adjusts herself on the floor, reaching beneath her bare ass to remove a used condom.

“I was sitting on this,” she announces, holding it daintily above her head with two fingers.

Harper grabs the condom, along with the empty bourbon bottle and cups, and crams them into a trash can and then, after pausing to think for an instant, shoves them into his briefcase.

“This isn't what you think,” he says.

“Yes it is,” says Joyce.

“Well, it is”—shoeless, his shirt untucked and unbuttoned, he reaches down and pulls Joyce to her feet—“but it isn't.”

“Hey,” she says, as Harper holds open her jeans and tries to force one of her legs through.

“I'm going to leave you two alone,” I say. “I'll be in my office.”

“Really, you don't have to …”

Now Harper has Joyce hunched over his shoulder, still puffing a cigarette, as he fiddles with the buttons on her fly.

Calvin is perched behind my desk, so that from the entrance to the office, where I am, all I can see is his
head. He is holding the Xeroxed copy of his hands that he made a couple months ago.

“This is me,” he says.

“Yes, it is.”

He lifts the paper to the window and tries to place one of his hands over the imprint. I'm not sure if he remembers how he made it, but before I'm able to ask, Harper pats me on the shoulder.

“I'm sorry about all this,” he says.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I ask, pushing him into the hall, away from Calvin.

“I don't know. I mean, the first time—”

“First time? This wasn't the first time?”

He looks down and I don't know if it's because he is ashamed or because he wants to fasten his wrinkled necktie into a knot.

“Well?” I say, pressing him into the wall. “How long?”

“Maybe a year.”

“A year? You two were fucking when you asked me to fleece her husband? Jesus, you're an asshole.”

“We went to high school together. I've known her for years.”

“That's great, Harp. That makes everything fine.”

“I didn't say it made everything all right. I was just—”

“He was just saying sometimes these things happen,” says Joyce, who emerges from Harper's office zipping the front of her coat.

“Like they just
happened
between Rob and that waitress?” I ask.

“No one wants it to happen with her husband.”

“Get out of here, Joyce,” I say. “Just get out.”

Harper nods and she leaves through the rear entrance, milling about outside the glass door before getting into her car, Rob's car.

“Your wife is
pregnant,”
I say, spitting out the sentence. “Christ.”

“Don't you think—”

“No! Don't
you
think? Some part of you, some really fucked-up part, must have wanted this to come out—to get this discovered and over with. Why else would you have asked me to even come near her?”

As Harper is preparing to answer, Calvin wanders to my side.

“Baking bread,” I announce, tipping my head to the heavens.

Both Calvin and Harper look at me, puzzled.

“They were baking bread, Cal,” I tell him, because it's the only thing I can think to say. “And Harper, silly, crazy Harper, spilled flour all over their clothes and while they were waiting for the clothes to dry, well, the two of them fell asleep.”

Calvin purses his lips, stepping back. He is too young, and he will believe whatever he's told.

“Bread,” he repeats, retrieving a pen from the floor and walking again into my office, where, only yesterday, things were warm and safe. People remained fully dressed. Everything still made sense.

Harper stumbles, laying his forearm against the wall as he slips on his loafers. Now his life is truly without grace. Perhaps, in this moment, all things gentle and
easy will end for Harper and Natalie; he will wait until she gives birth to tell her about Joyce. She will not understand, of course. For, really, there is nothing he can say to make their world right again. And she will recognize this, spitefully, and move the child away from Harper, away from troubled Kansas—to Pittsburgh or Berkeley or somewhere south.

Or maybe she will be able to forgive. And their relationship will gain a mysterious strength, heal over tightly like the lightning-shaped fracture along a bone. They will hold each other in bed at night, soft bodies fitted together, and never talk about Joyce Ives again. But always the indiscretion will remain this unspeakable part of their marriage, ugly as a birthmark, immune to surgery or even amputation. Reach for it with a blade and lose all.

“We need to leave,” I say.

“But … I …”

There is nothing else. Not now. By the time Harper figures out what he is trying to say, Calvin and I are in the parking lot, backing out, with Harper in the doorway and Calvin making handprints against the frosted window on his side of the car.

This afternoon Kate has taken Calvin to Lawrence to shop for clothing, just a few new outfits, she says. Sitting on the top row of bleachers, I watch the basketball team scrimmage against itself. Noah walks along the far baseline, out of bounds, dripping wet from rain. He sinks Indian-style against the wall and starts his homework.

The demise of every man begins with a single pellet
of rain, my father once said, standing beside a basketball-team bus that had slid into a mud-filled ditch during a rainstorm in central Ohio. And so, too, did his own tragic undoing begin with an early-spring thunderstorm some years later.

At the time, I was still in high school and remember lying in the darkness, long after midnight, listening to the thunder and watching the flashes turn my room white. I must have drifted off, briefly, but when I awoke I heard my father in the kitchen speaking to my mother in a loud, distraught tone that made him sound like an outboard motor against the oak floorboards beneath my bed. Later, she came upstairs and called me to her bedroom. My father left the house again, in the rain, and she told me there had been an accident. It seemed Cooper Turo, who then was serving as an assistant coach, had been sent out to buy some beer. All the basketball coaches were working late, studying film in the offices at school. This was hardly uncommon the night before a game. Turo had gone to a convenience store not far from campus and, when he got to the cash register, found himself caught in the middle of a holdup.

At the trial some ten months later, the store owner testified that Turo had listened to everything the stickup man had told him to do. But as the man began to leave, Turo reached for his empty wallet on the floor and apparently his swaying reflection in the plate-glass window startled the man. There was only one blast, from a twelve-gauge shotgun that had been sawed down nine inches, and it removed the right side of Cooper Turo's head. And this was the hardest part: he lived for a full
eight minutes after he was shot, coughing thick, syrupy oysters of blood that blocked his trachea, not only blood seeping from the inside but also the blood that was running down his face and into his mouth from his half-peeled skull. He couldn't breathe, the doctors told my father, and, in all likelihood, didn't even know it.

Turo had grown up in nearby Shaker Heights, which, like Lakeshire, is a suburb of Cleveland. The local press put a lot of pressure on my father to resign his post, speculating that it was at his insistence Turo went to purchase the beer; Turo should never have been at the convenience store in the first place. But the school stood by my father, and he remained Eastern Ohio University's head basketball coach for seven more years, until one cloudless July afternoon when my mother found him dead in our basement of heart failure. She told me several days afterwards, when I had returned home with Kate, that she just sat down there staring at him for the longest time. It was almost quiet, she said, except for the click, click, click of a spooled game film tapping against the warm projector.