Gould (15 page)

He liked to lie close to her in bed while she slept, or pretended to, and stare at her face if there was any moon or room light on it. Beautiful from all sides and the front and from in back too: the head shape and little perfect ears poking through the hair. Hair what he already said: long, black, bangs, different styles, etcetera. Eyes, small nose, chiseled lips, he's so bad at descripts, tiny waist, didn't mention that before but it was probably assumed and he'd wanted to say “minuscule,” slim hands, small delicate feet or delicate hands and small slim feet, flat muscled tummy, and so on     the works. “This writer also said I had the best-looking ass for a woman my size he'd ever seen, so a qualified compliment but one he still thought I should appreciate. That there'd be men there too who'd want to marry me just for it. But through him I hooked up with Brons-S and from that I got J, so something good came from the legs-and-ass man.” He loved her ass too. Turning her over in bed—no, that doesn't sound right. If she was on her back, then sort of encouraging her to get on her stomach and she'd say “Why, what do you have in mind?” and he'd say “Nothing, really  .  you know,” and massage her shoulders and neck and rub her back and legs and butt and then, or after some preliminaries with his fingers with at first a number of quick furtive forays, lift her butt up and try to get in her from behind. Hold the porno. “I'm a little small down there,” she said several times, “and I'm sorry if I can't accommodate but it hurts too much that way,” and then “What are you doing?—you know it hurts,” and finally “Jesus, you rat” or “Schmuck” and once even “Hyena,” “Will you stop that! You know I can't do it and unless something with age happens to my cunt, I never will. Try it next time and I'll tell you to get lost for good.” Only one position she liked. He on her right, both on their backs side-by-side, her right thigh raised, he in her that way. Tries picturing it and it seems right, though remembers it always took a bit of twisting and doing, he never went in easy and straight. Became frustrating, unexciting sometimes, even uncomfortable, and humdrum too—more than three years of it and, when they weren't fighting or sulking, they did it about four days out of five. He wanted the variety of positions two people living together for a long time would do and she kept saying she didn't have the anatomy for anything but the double-back one and that sometimes even then it was only a little more pleasurable than painful for her, though about once every couple of months she let him come in her a different way. One time, when he knew better, after about a half hour of pleasant foreplay, he got on top of her when she was still on her back and she said “Get off, you tub.” Another time, on an unusually hot humid night for that part of California, they didn't even own a fan, and she was naked on her back and seemingly asleep from the heat as it was around nine and they'd been reading in bed just to be on cool sheets, he said her name and she didn't answer and he repeated it and her eyes stayed closed and he slowly bent her legs up at the knees till her heels almost touched her thighs and her vagina opened, smeared his penis with saliva and positioned himself above her without touching any other part of her body and tried gliding it in and she opened her eyes, winced from pain but calmly said “I'm not going to fight you. You're halfway in and it already hurts like hell. But fighting you will end up hurting worse than allowing you to proceed, but I'm warning you I might be capable of doing a lot more to you when you're done than just ordering you out of the house and cutting up all your precious things,” and he withdrew.

She once lunged at him with a steak knife after he'd made what he knew when he was saying it and even a few seconds before was a cruel remark about her. He flinched, the knife whisked past the place his face would have been if he hadn't moved back, and then he jumped behind the table—it was in the dining room, they'd been clearing off the dishes after dinner—and said “What're you, crazy? You just almost killed me,” and she said “I didn't, I knew exactly when to pull back. I've got plenty of reserves; you're the one who hasn't, in anything. You're fantasizing again, thinking I'd waste my time trying to stab you and then the next twenty years of my life wasting away in prison because I did. Please, get your freaking things together and leave the house now,” and he said “Don't tell me you didn't try to stab me. You did, so of course I'm going—how could I trust you again?” and she said “Listen, you're raving, but do what you want,” and her face said she was trying to forget the incident and he wondered what to do. She put the knife and a couple of other utensils back on the table and looked at a photo on the wall of the three of them in a rowboat, Bronson and he rowing, she looking as if she was barking comical orders to them through cupped hands, and then left the room. He cleared the rest of the dishes, washed them in the sink, continued wondering what to do, leave? stay? What would he say to Brons? “Your mother and I just don't get along. We do some, but not enough. It's a pity too, because I love you, but I'll see you and we'll do things if I stay in the area, you and I, but that's the way it is, I'm sorry to say, though it's nothing you've done that's sending me away.” She came into the kitchen and he expected her to say “What are you still doing here?” but she started drying the dishes. “How do we pile up so many dishes and pots and stuff for just three people and a simple dinner?” and she said “We're extravagant,” and he said “Oh yeah, that's us.” Then he called Bronson if he wanted to carpetsweep the dining room as he did last night—“You did a great job. And it needs sweeping badly, kiddo; lots of everyone's crumbs,” and Brons said from his room “If it's okay, can I not? I'm busy playing,” and he looked at her and she smiled and said “He's playing; what a life,” and he said “So, what about that thing before?—our argument. Does it mean we're over it? Fine by me if we are, but you don't want it discussed?” and she pressed her cheek to his chest and put her arms around his waist and her hands went under his shirt till they were on his lower back and he kissed the top of her head and said “Your hands are wet, but you can keep them there,” and she said “I'd never try to hurt you like that, never. If it looked like it then that can only be because when I was pretending to wield the knife, but with no intention of coming close, I must have stumbled frontwards a bit, though I don't remember that. But I'm sorry and it's finished, the incident, all right?” and he said “I'm sorry too if I misjudged the distance of the knife from my face, if that's what I did,” and she said “It had to be, or like I said, it was all to sort of scare you a little, more like a harmless jolt, but I got too close by accident or mistake.”

He left her house for good a few times—three or four—but always came back and stayed. Phone call to her about something—Brons, important mail he's expecting and if it came, though he was probably hoping she'd ask him over—and she said “What are you doing now, want to come by? Brons is at a friend's for the night,” or he took Brons for the day, dropped him off and she said, which he was hoping she would, “Want to stay for dinner, even spend the night? Brons will love it if he sees you in the morning and I'll be honest—one of us has to—I haven't had sex for weeks and from what you've indicated about all the women you're not seeing, you've been dry for a while and could use it too,” and he said “That'd be okay if that's all it'd be, a deal?” and stuck out his hand and she looked at it and said “Oh sure, we're gonna shake.” It was Brons. Fine, for that night he wanted to get laid as he was as horny as she said—hadn't been with anyone since the last time he slept over a month or so ago—but he loved that boy and wanted to live with them again almost solely because he didn't want to just see him once a week or every other for a few hours that day. Once she called his deep feelings for Brons as bordering on the sick and he said “Why? I think of him, though I have no illusions about this, as like my son. One would think you'd be pleased he has someone who feels that way about him besides you,” and she said “Sometimes I am but other times I think it's carrying it too far. He has a father. And even if they rarely see each other now, I feel in five years or less Brons-S will grow up to the point where he'll discover what he's missing and he'll want to see him as much as J wants to see him now. And so they'll see each other a lot and if you're still around, you'll be in the way, and maybe even J will go live with his dad. That's how it often turns out, not that I'd love the idea. But you and I? Come off it, we'll never stay together and we'll be lucky, the way we hack out at each other sporadically, if we last another two months. Then when you really leave—and it might be the next time or the time after that. But when every one of your books is with you and you have a rented apartment instead of a cheap room and nothing of yours remains in this house, the boy will be clobbered the hardest by you so far. Maybe double what it was with his father, as he's older now and remembers more than he forgets and this bad shit tends to get etched into kids his age permanently, but anyway, that for the second time he's been blown off by the big man in his life. How this will affect his future relationships, male and female—you never liked my psychological speculations but here it is—don't even ask.”

Used to imagine her with normal-size breasts or just ordinary small breasts but not completely flat. Sometimes he'd suck one up by the nipple, close his other eye so as not to see the second breast and look at the distended part and think is it really possible that if she had breasts like this one he'd feel much better toward her, might even want to try sticking it out with her for life? He wanted a few times to get her pregnant just to see her breasts enlarge, also to have a kid. She'd said she loved—wait a minute. What he means by that “also” remark is that even though he knew they'd never marry, or chances were slight, and that he'd probably end up living apart from her and their child—or maybe they would marry now that they'd had that kid and it could even be that their relationship would get infinitely better because of it—he was thirty, a little past, and felt he should be a father by now. Not the attitude he'd take today, almost thirty years later, if he still didn't have a child, though who knows. And she'd said she loved being pregnant with little Brons because not only was her marriage then as close to being euphoric as it ever was (“Nobody believes this, but between periods of contractions we made love right up to the moment we drove to the hospital to have the baby”) but because for a few months, till she went dry a few weeks after the delivery, she had breasts, she said, that could fill a small-cup bra and even gave her cleavage when she wore an evening dress once and a man could hold on to, and so on. Brons-S took lots of photos of her breasts then with and without clothes and might still have some, and if Gould wants he should write him for a few; she's sure he would appreciate the craziness of the request and part with them gladly or make dupes if he still has the negatives and send those. But most times he'd tell himself “What's the difference? Big breasts, no breasts, middling breasts, if there's anything there it's just fat and flesh, and she has a cunt, small too, she says, but most times sexually okay and adept in the limited way she's set for it, and the sweetest little horizontal hairline right above it but no other hair around (she swore she didn't shave the area and it never felt that she did), and one that never smells of anything—urine, sweat, soap, deodorant, perfume (no chance of contraceptive jelly since she was on the pill)—or that's how she prepares it before she comes to bed: maybe just water and a washrag, and a beautiful ass and great legs and all the other things, and she does have normal nipples and aureoles and he does what he can with these, more than he thinks he would to a woman with more heft to her breasts. “I should wear a shirt to bed, I'm so ashamed of my top,” she said in different ways a number of times, her hands covering her chest, and he said “No, your nipples are gorgeous, the red circles around them exciting, I love when they're erect, sucking on them and the rest,” and she said “You're just compensating,” and he said “So what, but my feeling is you get what you get, both of us, me with that, you with my hairy shoulders and back, so make the most of it, though I don't know what you could do with my furriness.”

Night before he's to come to her house he rides his bike into a pole on a bicycle path. The pole's there to keep cars off the path. It once had reflectors but someone had smashed them, or what? When he went back with her a few days later to photograph the pole for insurance purposes, the reflector frames were still nailed to the pole but the reflectors were gone. So he doesn't see the pole in the middle of the path—he's biking by flashlight, sky's dark and moon's not up and path runs through a grove of eucalyptus trees—the smells, he remembers, well, not then, but other times and perhaps especially at night—and bike's front wheel hits it, he flies over it and breaks his shoulder and cracks his head. Drags the mangled bike about a half-mile to his house and then, when he realizes how hurt he is, calls a friend to take him to a hospital's emergency room and next day calls her and says he broke his shoulder and has a concussion and he's sorry but it's obvious he won't be able to do any two-handed heavy manual labor or garden work for a while—he doesn't even see how he can help his friend drive to New York in two weeks—so he guesses their arrangement's off, and she says “Deal's a deal. You can still get on your knees and pull up weeds, can't you? And instruct me with repair work around the house, if you know how, and look after my son while I'm out, and so forth. I can't be paying for your food now, though—your labor won't cover it. We can go fifty-fifty, or forty for you, sixty for me, since I have the little boy, but all depending on your appetite. If it's enormous—you're not the biggest guy but you might have a high metabolism—it's back to fifty and maybe even you're the sixty. Actually, maybe you should be, since I bet I weigh a little more than half what you do and I'm not much of an eater. As for your room, it's here and costs me naught to keep up. But maybe you can also go in on the laundry detergent, just to be absolutely fair, and help me hang the more delicate wash on the umbrella clothesline outside, something I was also going to have you dig a deeper hole for and reinstall.”