Dance the Eagle to Sleep (3 page)

“Stevie will be getting up.”

“But not me. Not yet. We can’t go into the office together anyhow, right? So sign me in, and I’ll mosey along by the middle of the morning,”

She was nervous and hurried the kid through his cereal and milk. But she had already lost the ability to fight Shawn. Too insecure, too nice, too genuinely soft. He went back to sleep in spite of the building noises.

When he got up, there was a ticket on his car and a brand-new scratch on the street side. Two kids were climbing on it. Damned nine o’clock side-changing. She didn’t have a car.

“That’s a hell of a neighborhood for parking,” he told her in the office.

“But it’s convenient on the bus to work … Maybe you could come on the bus? Your car looks a little conspicuous.”

It was a blue Porsche, the color—as many girls had told him—of his eyes. She was still watching, holding her breath to see if he was in fact going to come again. He laughed and patted her fanny. Not that night. He had a concert. But the next. When the next night came, he took a cab.

He spent two or three nights a week with her, then three or four. His parents did not like it. Tough. Very tough. She was a lousy cook—partly because she was tired when she got home and partly because she didn’t buy good ingredients. She was always adding up bills. He was getting her in the habit of punching him in and out and covering for him, so he took to making dinner the nights he stayed. She would sign him in to a practice room at the bureau and lock the door. Jesus, if he spent one third the time practicing he was signed up for, he would have made a one-man technical revolution by now. He’d buy a steak or chops and put together a salad. And fruit, lots of fruit. Not like suppers at home, but not bad. He learned to make spaghetti.

He had never shopped for food. He had never cooked. He had never washed dishes. Food had been something that came on a plate. But this was how people lived. They kept house. It was part game and part nuisance and part voyage of discovery. Tripping into the ordinary.

Stevie was in kindergarten in the morning and a playschool in the afternoon. The woman who ran the playschool drove a VW Microbus and delivered the kids home. Stevie had his own key. He could just about reach the lock. Shawn had his own key, too, now. Stevie was glad to see him when he got home. Sometimes Shawn would wait to do the shopping until Stevie could come with him, because they both enjoyed that. Stevie really dug being asked what they should have for supper. Denise had a whole set of muddled guilts about being a bad mother because she worked. She would read some idiot in the Sunday papers about how to raise kids and go into a dither that she was doing something wrong. He could not understand how she could let the Sunday paper make her feel guilty.

She bought his records. He couldn’t stand to hear music on her diddly little phonograph. It was a pain in the ears. He bought some components and put together a decent hi-fi, working all day. Turned it on to surprise her when she got home, and in ten minutes the neighbors were pounding on the walls.

“It’s a shitty apartment, you know? Not even a bedroom.”

Roaches in the sink. She had a can of bug spray she was always using, but all it did was give him a sore throat and roughen his voice. Roaches ate it up like candy. Probably got high on it.

“It’s only a hundred and ten a month and it’s right on the bus line to the office.”

It all came down to money. Everything in her life had price tags hung on it. Cash register whirring away all the time. She got forty bucks a month
child support. Jesus, she couldn’t keep a dog on that. Stevie wanted a dog, too, by the way. Then the playschool and bus fare and utilities and the dentist and she was taking the pill now and everything went jingle, jingle on that cash register in the closet. They did not pay her enough. Yet she was frightened of losing her job. She saw it as great security and she clung to it with her nails and teeth, even though she hated every minute. She had a terrible drone of fear going on all the time that she would lose her job and Someone (the State, her exhusband) would take Stevie away. It was the best-paying job she had ever held. Shawn used to spend as much as her weekly paycheck in an evening and not think twice.

Stevie was a funny kid with a shock of brown hair, already wearing glasses that looked big on him, too. He met the world with a nervous but enthusiastic giggle. He liked school pretty well. He liked most things that a kid could be halfway expected to like. He didn’t get much. A hotbox to sleep in. A plastic Noah’s ark that floated. Magazine pictures of dogs taped on his wall.

It seemed strange for such a soft silly woman to be part of the apparatus of the state for controlling its restless members. In some ways she saw the apparatus clearly enough. “Well, you see, this way there’s a pool of labor available for all manner of social service, and it tends to stabilize the kids,”

“Social service: like policing. Like municipal strikebreaking”

She shrugged. “It’s supposed to stabilize the rest of society too. I mean, it seems to be working. Since they rounded up the militants and the agitators and started this, everything’s been quiet. So they must be right.”

She did not want to talk about the Nineteenth Year of Service. More than anything else, she was afraid they would find out about Shawn and she would lose her job. She could not manage to save anything, and whenever she thought of the future, she shut her eyes and turned her face and shivered. Money had been an ambience to him. But to her it came in little miserly clumps—never enough, never enough. It was finite and each dollar could be spent only once and for one thing, and always there were other needs and bills. It gave money a totally different character. It made money skinny and shrill and always butting in.

The first time Shawn took a bus to her apartment he couldn’t believe the trip. People crammed against each other, poking into each other, sweating and heaving and blowing and pushing like they’d all have heart attacks on the spot. All taking it.

“That’s just rush hour. That’s the way it is.”

“Every day? But it’s insane. Why don’t they run more buses?”

She shrugged. “It’s rush hour. I don’t know. I guess it would cost too much.”

The daily cattle drive. He learned to avoid those hours, but he could call up the physical sensations at will. He puzzled about that endurance. Somehow she was trained to endure. Maybe it started very early, with school. In the schools most kids went to, they learned to shut down, shut up, sit still.

Lots of old people lived in the neighborhood. When the sun shone at all, they would bring out folding chairs or kitchen chairs and sit by their stoops staring at nothing, hoping to talk. Yet when he came by, they sniffed and gave him the cold eye of fear. People were afraid here. Denise was scared silly when she had to come home late and alone. She had been followed on the street several times. Once, her purse had been snatched. When she had to walk on the streets at night, she scuttled along thinking about being raped or beaten or hit on the head or cut up with a knife.

The city smelled bad. Kids screamed all evening in the street, because they had no yards. Stevie played awkward catch with him in the living room until they broke a lamp. He got an air conditioner, and that helped sleeping. But the fuses blew once a week. Fucking archaic wiring. Whole place could go up like a kerosene-soaked rag. When he took Stevie to F. A. O. Schwarz and picked up a train that hooted, there was hardly room for it to make a good circuit on the living room floor.

It all came down to the damned apartment. The city pressed in on it and sweated on the walls. The street was shabby, the paint peeled in the hall under the wee myopic bulbs, the doors did not shut right, nothing was light-proof or impermeable to sound. Everything leaked and creaked and sagged and shifted uneasily. Even the newer pieces of furniture were already seedy.

The water made him gag. It was the ordinary city water, but he had never had to drink it before. It tasted like a rat had died in the pipes. Half the time the water wasn’t hot enough to shave with. He liked to shave. He shaved slowly, grinning with clenched teeth into the mirror, using a straightedge razor. It was his major affectation. He liked to strop the razor. One of the few things Denise ever insisted upon was that he keep the razor on top of the bathroom cabinet, out of Stevie’s reach. The bathroom opened on an airshaft, and as he sat on the toilet he could hear a dozen other people flushing and running showers and yelling at each other.

“Well, this is just how people live!” Denise said waspishly, and then got apologetic. They climbed into bed. Soft against him, bouncy under plush. “You’re so big,” she would say and suck on his prick till he moaned. “You’re so beautiful.” She would run her hands over his long body again and again.
She would fondle him with that soft avidity and stare and stare into his face. Then she would get on top and start almost at once, Ooooh ooooh oooh, and squeeze it out of him. It was nice, it was nice and easy, and it went on.

But the bed was something else. Not a proper bed at all. A couch lumpy and bumpy with a canyon in the middle between the two halves. He liked to sleep all wound around her, but there was that canyon gaping. The bed had metal sides he barked his shins on. He hated bruises. Like mushy spots on fruit.

He decided to move her out of that open sore, into a place with a yard and thick walls and a bedroom with a door and water that was hot and wiring you could plug things into without everything going black. It’s true that what fascinated him was the ordinariness, the sense that he had penetrated into The Way People Live, but there was no point overdoing it. It had been very interesting, rush hour and fuses that blew and roaches, but enough was enough. She argued with him, scared. He took off her clothes and shut her up. Then she argued more. He sulked for a week. Laid other girls and waited. When he came back, she wept and clutched him. Through the filmy layers of argument, he read her fear. He would buy something outright. See? She’d own it for a change. No sweat, right? For the kid. It was easy to be crafty with his plump goose.

An agent found them a duplex, the left half of a house with an upstairs and a downstairs and a slot of yard, real rooms and doors that shut. It was a fine toy. Everything was somehow miniatured, but after those stinking three rooms, why, they’d have a room just to stand and yell in. $22,500. Cash, he said. Then the gears stopped meshing and the machine ground to a halt on his hand. Because he had only just turned twenty, and the money had come in and gone out to make more and always it had been managed, and now he found how little he controlled—all that invisible money he had raised strutting and shouting for hot squealing audiences. Somebody had it. Lawyers, his parents, trusts. But not Shawn.

His parents thought he was in the clutches of an aging adventuress. They said the affair was squalid and that he had lost his mind. “I want to help her and the kid,” he said. He talked about the street where old people sat looking at blank walls like television, and the buses where people were into each other without joyful groping—just meat on the hoof. He talked, and they shut off. Bang. Slam. They refused to empathize.

Jesus, it was simple enough. He wasn’t even in love with her. He just liked her. He liked the kid. He liked her climbing on his prick and burbling her funny noises and milking the come out of him. He liked her praising of
him. Why not? He turned her and the kid on, and they would go along with Stevie’s always damp hand gripping his, and his skinny legs pumping away and his face under the shock of slicked-back brown hair turned up like a sunflower in a silly grin. It was another world. It was through the looking glass into Everybody. But just from the old personal-comfort point of view, he wanted to drive over to see her and park on a street where kids wouldn’t cut designs on his car, and listen to music so he could feel it in his head and body, and climb into a real bed in a room with a door that shut. If he was an average schmuck taking care of his woman, nobody would make a fuss.

But they blew up a giant shitstorm, and then Denise was not in the office. They got her fired, man, like that. And she disappeared. Gone, his weeping plush goose and the kid, gone. Well, if they could pull a disappearing act and disappear his woman, he could put on a little magic show, too. He felt stripped and sore, sore in his body and mind, sore through. He went with what was on his back and in his pocket. Took the bus to New York—he was practically acclimated to buses—and headed for the Lower East Side. AWOL. Eat shit. There were always kids down there hiding out. Runaways and AWOLs and kids dodging the eighteen months of slavery. He was on the street for a day and a night, and then he landed in a crash pad. Four rooms, railroad flat, with ten kids bedded down wherever they could.

There was a redheaded kid with a sleeping bag—sixteen? seventeen? She said eighteen. He didn’t believe it. Didn’t care. “Shawn?” she said. “I’m Joanna.” She had a funny voice, metal that caught in her throat. Lots of kinky red hair, mounds of it falling on her back and shoulders. A skinny kid wearing a striped tank top with no bra and dirty denim bellbottoms and sandals on dirty scarred feet. “You want to ball? Take off your clothes and let’s get in the bag.”

Little feather points stuck through the cloth. It was hot and stuffy, and they sweated like pigs. She was bony after Denise, sharp hipbones that poked him, low breasts that flattened against his chest. She bit her lip and held him firmly by the buttocks with her nails digging in. She frowned with concentration and worked, worked, worked him into her tight cunt. Came with a muffled sigh and a grimace. Let him finish while staring at the ceiling and thinking about something else.

“I boosted some meat this afternoon, but I’m hungry again. The stew’s all gone. You got any cash at all?”

They struggled out of the sleeping bag, and she dressed without wiping herself. Rank salty smell. A fat boy was rolling joints, and they smoked for a while, and then she fell asleep on top of the sleeping bag, kitten curled with
her mouth slightly open. He nudged her over, spread out the unzipped bag, and lay beside her back to back, bone to bone. Spines in hard tangent. She mumbled in sleep. He fell under and drowned into nightmares of flight and confrontation.