Gould (21 page)

She liked taking baths with him—“Gould, I'm in the tub, want to join me?” or “Want to take a bath together?” and he said “I already showered today,” and she said “So take it just to relax”—sitting on him with her back to his chest and his penis floating or sticking up between her legs. “So this is what I'd look like with one,” she said the first time. “But I'd like mine clean, I never see you really wash your cock—go on, show me how you do it,” and he said “Come on, what am I, Brons? I'm the cleanest guy around, often to the point of manic-compulsiveness,” and she said “Your hands, yes, but I'm serious about this: I want to know how clean something is that goes so deep inside me,” and he washed it with his hands and then splashed the soap off and she said “That's washing it? You didn't scrub; you missed several parts. What about all those folds there and the hole? You don't open it to wash inside?” and he said “That'd burn; what I did was enough. I've been doing it like that most of my penis's adult life and never had a rash or sore or anything like that on it and no smell or smegma ever,” and she said “Will you permit me?” and grabbed it and he thought she was going to play with it and he lay back and rested his head on the top of the tub and shut his eyes and she washed it hard with a soapy washrag—“Hey, take it easy!”—seemed to get at almost every part but the eye, and then she said “What about the balls?” and he said “Leave them alone,” and she said “Do you ever wash them? Because silky and clean as they might feel, they're just as liable to be dirty. And though they don't go in me they do often sleep against me or at least roll around on the sheet and there's hair on them and hair collects germs like nothing does,” and he said “I do wash them, but in my own way: very gently. I know just the places where if I washed them even a little less than very gently, it'd hurt like mad. So never touch them, or if you do, then very lightly, but never the balls parts—only the top of the scrotum without the balls, okay? No, best you never touch them at all; a woman could never know how sensitive they are,” and just with her hand this time she washed his penis but the way she was doing it with the soap it seemed more to get him hard and then tried putting it in her but it didn't work and the two or three other times they tried doing it in the tub like this it didn't work and she said one of those times “I wonder why men can't keep it stiff in water,” and he said “What about women, not that I've truthfully ever tried doing it in a tub with anyone else, but are you so slick and open inside?” and she said “I think so,” and raised her rear above the water and he felt her and she was. “Well then I'm sorry, it must be the warm water,” and she said “Cold would make it worse even,” and he said “Then maybe we should try something in-between,” and they let the cold water run till the tub was lukewarm and then tried doing it and it still didn't work and then let the water get cool and it didn't work and he said “I'm sure there are some men who can do it in any temperature or some who are better at hot than cool and so on, but I'm just not one.”

The tiger outfit she liked to wear and wore it till it was threadbare. It went from her neck to her ankles, one piece, long-sleeved, fastened with a couple of hooks near the neck in back, black and faded orange stripes, some material like muslin, bought for a buck at Goodwill. She never knew what to put on her feet with it—“Tiger in sneakers? Sandals, socks? Better I go barefoot,” but she only did around the yard or house. When she wore it to the local supermarket or in town people would occasionally stare and a few times she quickly mussed up her hair till it was like a mane and raised her hands into tiger's paws and growled at them and once snapped. “Listen,” he said, “people just haven't seen an outfit like this, so what are you doing that to them for? It's embarrassing, unpleasant; not like you,” and she said “It's the skin that's making me do it. Anyway, nobody really minds. A pretty girl, you once said, can get away with almost anything like that, and a pretty tiger, but a small domesticated one, well maybe even more so,” and he said “I find the scene ugly. Just don't ever bitch at me when I get stupid and rude,” and she said “Oh brother, you sure have a nice way of putting it,” and slid her nails across his cheek. She usually wore nothing underneath it, at the most a bikini brief, and she liked saying to him when they got home, if Brons was at someone else's house or sleeping in the car seat, something about how tiger and man should mate, and she continued pretending to be the tiger in bed, moving around on all fours, bounding over him, landing with her hands on his chest, scratching, hissing, snarling, rolling over playfully, ending up on her back with her arms and legs in the air and saying something like “Now's the optimum time, tiger's in extreme heat, take it any vaginal way you like, it won't bite off your head, whatever interdictions it had to the other customary positions are temporarily suspended.”

For the first month after they left his parents' apartment they couldn't find any other place to live in New York but a single room in a halfway house. To pay for their room and board he did odd jobs for the woman who owned it: washed dishes, bussed tables, painted rooms, applied some sulfuric acid solution to the five flights of marble steps to take out the stains in them from about fifty years. Then they got an apartment and the woman claimed they owed her eighty dollars in back rent and he said he'd worked off the entire four weeks' room and board and she even owed him some dough for all the hours he put in at minimum wage and the woman said she'd take him to small claims court if he didn't pay and he said “Okay, I don't want any trouble or bad feelings between us, I think you're wrong but I'll come up with the money some way,” and back in the room Evangeline said “Like hell we'll pay. What do I have to do, teach you how to talk back and get what's due you? Your father, for all his ugliness to Brons and me and his cheap picayune ways, would have known what to say: ‘Eat pig meat, you bloodsucking bastard, and all the junk carts you rolled in on.' Because she's cheating you blind. You worked hard, at slave wages, scarred your fingers through the gloves on that lethal acid and maybe your lungs too, when she could have got a much safer but more expensive cleaner. She knew a jellyfish when she caught one but she's not going to bulldoze me,” and he said “Better we go along with it than risk a court case and have to pay double, is what I heard those judgments against you can be,” and she said “Horsecrap. This is what we do,” and they told the woman they'd pay the day they left, “Say around eleven or noon we should be all finished,” he said, and Evangeline asked an actor friend to drive by at six that morning, there was a blizzard going, ten or so inches already and the actor was an hour and a half late and could barely get his car down the street through the snow, the woman was shoveling a path on the sidewalk and she said “Mr. Bookbinder?” when she saw him carrying some things to the car and he said “Just loading up for the first trip, Mrs. M. I'll see you when I get back, if I can make it in this snow,” and she said “No funny business now. I've seen all kinds, you know,” and he said “Don't worry, I'm leaving my family behind as collateral,” and after the car was packed and the actor was at the wheel and the motor was running he went back to the room and said “This is terrible, and really bad for the kid to see, let's just pay her,” and Evangeline said “No, we're going. Just keep walking and I swear, if she tries stopping us I'm going to push that woman, I don't care if she slips and breaks a leg,” and he said “No pushing,” and they left the building and started down the long stoop, which Mrs. M. had just cleared but it already had what seemed like a half inch on it; she was at the second-story window and threw it open and yelled “You come back here, Bookbinders; I'll have the police after you by the time you get there,” and as they drove away he said “Let's go back; I'll write her a check. It'll be my money, not yours. She'll find us through our new phone number and we can be thrown in jail for beating out on the rent. Or I can—you, they'll say you've got to take care of your boy,” and she said “She'll never chase after us for eighty smelly bucks. And serves the greedy yid right—I wish she had come at me and broken a leg,” and he said “She isn't Jewish; what is it always with you? This is New York; you're not in the foothills. And she's Irish or something, maybe Welsh or Scottish, judging by her name. What's Macreedy?” he asked the actor and the actor said “Could be anything like you said but not Italian,” and she said “Jewish, don't tell me. Maybe not the name, but she is. Macreedy's probably her husband who ran away from her like us, and in a hateful snowstorm also, but thirty years ago. Or she took the name out of a phonebook so she wouldn't be known as Jewish. But who can't see what she is by that big flabby nose and the Shylock way she treats people, pound of your foreskin or half pound of your balls,” and he said “I don't know who I dislike more now, you or her.     I'm sorry, Brons, and I'm sorry, whatever your name is, driver, actor,” and the actor said “Go ahead, say your spiel, don't mind me. What I'm doing today's a favor I owe Ev, so what's between you's between you,” and he said “Why, what'd she do for you?” and the actor said “Another favor, friend to friend, but enough for me to stick my car's neck out in this blitz.     Gray,” and shook Gould's hand and Gould said “Gould,” and to Evangeline in back “Anyway, you're going to have to tell me you know how wrong it is what you said about Mrs. M. and that particular religious thing in general,” and she said “You don't know what you're talking about now, so why should I?” and he said “You mean you're saying you don't know what I'm talking about,” and she said “Yes, subject closed.”

Books he read and then gave her that she got more out of than him. When friends seemed to intimate to him she was pretty or beautiful but not too smart he said “She's a much better reader than I. You should see her. Books I had trouble with, sometimes had to work hard to finish, she winged through and had insights into I never approached. Her intelligence is natural; she's shortchanged herself in not going through and past high school, but you can't say she doesn't speak well.” She said she couldn't stand poetry, it wasn't that she didn't get it, though some of it no one could get; it was that most of it was useless and precious and made for fairies or textbooks and she was ashamed whenever he took a book of poems along with him when they went out, except the ones in both English and German or French or Spanish, because then people would think he was just trying to learn the language. “As for the others—keep them in your pocket, read them in the car in secret or when you're alone on the bus or just at home, but don't take them out in restaurants while we're waiting for a table or on the movie line. If you have to read anything at those places, why not history or stick with your good fiction, though to really please me I wish you'd take to books on investing money or how to repair my house.”

Brons wanted a dry cereal the New York halfway house didn't provide and Evangeline said they were out of toothpaste and dental floss and while she was at it they could also all use new toothbrushes and he said he'd go out to buy them and she said “I didn't mean you had to do it tonight,” and he said “Ah, I want to take a walk, this house is sometimes like a prison.” At the market he got the cereal and a box of animal crackers for Brons, went to the drug section and saw that except for the floss the dental stuff was expensive. He held three toothbrushes, put back the one he'd chosen for himself, dropped the floss into the basket with the cereal and crackers and then thought Screw it, do it, you just don't have the cash and Evangeline will like you got everything she needed, and after quickly looking up and down the aisle and only seeing an old lady facing the other way, slipped the brushes and toothpaste into his side coat pocket. Oy, God, what'd he do? why'd he do it? and looked up and saw the woman staring at him, hand to her mouth as if horrified at what she'd just seen, or maybe not and she was only staring that way because of how he looked: messed-up hair, rather shabby clothes, face which for a few moments must have gone pale and looked sick and frenetic—but she seemed to have seen him, he was almost sure of it—now she was turned away, facing shelves with cleaning and diaper things for babies and feminine hygiene—the look one has when catching someone in the act like that but one you'd never do yourself, but if she did see him he didn't think she'd tell anyone in the store while he was still there, she was old, frail-looking, very thin and short, she'd be afraid, for instance, she'd by chance bump into him on the street one day and he'd recognize her and knock her down, something he'd never do but maybe his appearance to her said he might. Should he put the brushes and toothpaste back? “Oh look at me,” he could say to himself aloud, hoping she'd turn around so he could say it half to her too, “I'm so absentminded, I don't know where my head is today, excuse me,” putting the brushes and toothpaste back in the racks, “I don't know if you saw them with me before but if you did I hope you didn't get the wrong idea, it was just a stupid mistake,” or say all this but first look befuddled and slap his pocket and say “Holy shit—excuse me,” and take the things out and put them in the basket and then walk around casually for a while, get one more thing—cheap bag of chips—and pay for all of it. No—something about what she was doing now, keenly interested in a row of different shampoos on the top shelf—she didn't see him and he had an idea and said “May I help you, ma'am?” and she turned to him and looked a bit startled but didn't back away, which he should take as a good sign—it was just his appearance; he also needed a shave—and he smiled and said “Sorry, didn't mean to startle you, but I was just thinking, you need any help there  .     reaching?” and she said “No thanks, I was only comparison shopping,” and he said “Prices better here? Where else do you shop? I thought this was the only large market in ten blocks,” and she said “Associated, on Ninth Avenue, two blocks west, but they're much more expensive on almost everything and the quality isn't as good,” and he said “Oh yeah? That's good to know; I'll tell my wife,” and from the way she smiled and said good-bye—neither seemed fake—he was almost sure she hadn't seen him but he'll still, just in case she did and only tells them after he leaves, not go by the front of the store for a week or in it for two or three, or he might never have to go in again, since by then he and Evangeline will have their own place uptown. He got a bag of chips, two oranges on sale and went to the shortest checkout line, one with only one person on it. Everything seemed all right, business as usual, till he noticed the checkout man eyeing him sort of suspiciously while bagging the groceries of the customer who'd just paid, and turned around and saw a man behind him without a coat and holding two loaves of bread—what was the man doing coatless when it was so cold out?       snow was predicted tonight, temperatures dipping into the teens and there were already freezing winds. Maybe he worked in the café a few doors down, or the one on the next block and he didn't bother with a coat because he was so close and was buying the loaves because they'd run out of the bread they had delivered early each day—Gould had seen the tall bags of them lying up against the café doors at seven or so when he went out for the paper or a run     or else they got him, and his stomach went cold. Well, shit, Jesus, too late if they did have him, for what could he do now, take the stuff out of his pocket and drop them into the basket? But wasn't he only imagining the worst again, which he often did, for he already explained the suspicious looks: his clothes, appearance, and he wasn't a regular here—had only been in the store three times in two weeks and always for just a couple of small items, and in this city, or just this kind of poorer neighborhood, if they don't know you they don't trust you, or something like that, but nobody's going to jump him just because he might fit the profile of what they think's a potential thief. He was fine, so long as nothing dropped out of his pocket or the pocket flap didn't open and someone could see right inside, and once out of here and around the corner he'll stick the stuff into his supermarket bag and go home, maybe even run with the bag he'd be so relieved, and in the room have a glass of wine or shot of scotch, even if Evangeline complained about him drinking late at night—said it did something to his stomach, made him toss around in bed, keeping her up. “Next,” the checkout man said, and he put the things in the basket onto that rubber runway, man rang everything up, wasn't looking suspiciously at him anymore, guy behind him was looking at the clock above the front window, the old woman was now on the next checkout line, three customers away from being taken—his would have been the best line to get on: just he and the guy with his two identical loaves, and he was almost done, and one of the people in front of her had a shopping cart of maybe fifteen items. She didn't look at him when he looked her way, maybe that was why she didn't get on his line: didn't want to talk to him anymore, felt their conversation—attention he gave her in the health-and-body-care aisle—was too much or had gone far enough or else she didn't want to be on his line because of the trouble she expected on it  .   but then she wouldn't have gone on any line, right? She would have stayed away from the checkout area, wouldn't have wanted to be seen and eventually blamed by him. The checkout man said what Gould owed, he paid, his stuff was bagged and handed to him, he said “Thanks,” man said nothing and looked hard at the guy behind Gould in a way that suggested “What do we do next?” and Gould thought “Oh shit, get out of here,” and started for the door and just as he had his hand on it to push it open, someone grabbed him from behind—the coatless man—the checkout guy ran around the counter and shoved his hands down both Gould's coat pockets and Gould said “Hey, what the hell you doing?—get off me, get off,” and tried slapping the man's hand away from the pocket with the things in it but his arms were held tight, tried wriggling out of the grip and got one arm loose, checkout man yelled “Cliff     Hugo,” and two young men with store aprons on ran to help the coatless man hold him, and he started dragging them all through the front door, wanted to get outside, once on the street they couldn't touch him, or was it the other way around, they couldn't grab you inside?—but he wrenched and tugged and grunted and lunged them along with him till he was past the door, on the street, still holding the bag, he suddenly realized, and dropped it and got his other arm free and slashed his hands in the air, whirling round and round as he did till there was nobody within fifteen feet of him, then felt his pocket—wait, the guy already took the stuff, but one of the brushes was still in it—and the checkout man said “You bum, you thief, these what you looking for?” and held up a toothbrush and the toothpaste. “You're lucky we don't hold you for the cops. Don't ever come back here, you creep, and take what you paid for,” pushing the bag of groceries toward Gould with his foot, “that's the last you'll ever get from us,” and Gould kicked the bag and said “Stick it you know where,” and the coatless man said “Up our asses? Up yours, you dope. Feel good we didn't bash the bejesus out of you, which we could have—we'd the legal right to—defending ourselves against a bona fide thief. You're worse than a fucking street hooker,” and Gould said “That so? I am? Well you forgot this, mister,” and took out the other toothbrush and threw it on the ground to them and the checkout man said “Oh, bravado, or bravo—whatever they call those heroics—but just what we needed from the jerk. Forget him, we got work to do,” and picked up the brush: “Every little bit appreciated,” and laughed and they all went in, the two young men laying dirty looks on Gould before they went through the door. People on the street had stopped and were looking at him but keeping their distance and he said to a group of them “It was for my kids    . I didn't hardly have the money for everything,” in an Irish brogue and what he thought were the words and the way the Irish would use them, though why he went into it he didn't know. “The big store's gotta make its extortionate profit, that it? So what's a poor father to do? And three kids, not two, and I wanted them to have clean teeth after they finished their overpriced store cereal, they'd have to be sharing a single toothbrush between them anyway, but have you seen what even the cheapest toothbrush and toothpaste cost today? An arm and a leg it is, an arm and a leg.” By now everyone but what looked like a bum had walked away, some shaking their heads at him and giving him that expression and he yelled “Where you going? Why you running? It's the godawful truth that I've been telling ya, but what am I wasting my breath on you for?” and started down the street to the house—maybe so they'd have more trouble pointing him out some day later: “No, couldn't be the shoplifter; that one was dressed like a beggar and was loony as they come and had this thick Irish accent”—a few large flat snowflakes were now slowly falling and he thought “Perfect, just what the scene called for,” and slapped at the flakes and said “Fuck it, I don't care if any of the store people are there, what's mine's mine and like they said I paid good money for,” and ran back for the bag. The bum was standing over it and Gould said “That's mine, sorry,” and picked it up. It was wet and torn, an orange had rolled out of it to the curb and he stuck it into his side coat pocket, put the other orange into the other pocket, folded up the bag best he could with the rest of the things he bought, had to hold it from the bottom so it wouldn't split apart. When he got back to the room Brons was asleep in his cot, Evangeline was sitting up in bed drinking tea and reading, he wasn't going to say anything about what happened but she said “My goodness, look at you, you're a mess,” and he said “It's beginning to snow, flakes falling so lazily, but sort of a cross between snow and rain—more like a floating slush, if that's possible—so I suppose my hair got a little wet,” and she said “It's not that. The collar of your coat's torn, you have a scratch on your forehead that's still bleeding, you look roughed up—what did you do, get mugged, fall?” and he said “No,” patting his forehead with a tissue, “but do I have those?” and looked at the tissue and said “Ah, it's more slush than blood. I didn't even know. Though I actually got close to being mugged, but didn't want to say anything,” and told her what happened, didn't embellish or hold back, right down to the Irish brogue: “Don't ask me why; maybe to get them off my trail and so they wouldn't think the thief was Jewish,” and she said “Oh stop. And the whole thing's horrible. Why'd you ever do it?” and he said “I could make up a lot of excuses but I just didn't think I could afford all the things you wanted or that I'd get caught, even if I knew how dumb it was,” and she said “Was it ever. Suppose they had reported you or held you for the cops? You'd have gone to jail. It would have disrupted our lives so much that I'm sure I would have had to quit school for a few weeks. And we would have been thrown out of here, since the landlady has this rule about that kind of behavior—it's written right up there on the common dining room wall—and then where would we have lived till we get our place? I couldn't have slunked back to your parents; and also think what it would have done to them and to Brons,” and put her finger over her lips. “If we needed toothpaste that bad,” she whispered, “we could have borrowed someone's here, though we still have enough in the tube to roll it up and get a couple more brushings from it. And I only said we needed new toothbrushes, not that we were out of them,” and he said “This will sound stupid too, and I'm not saying it to elicit any sympathy, but I thought you'd like that I brought everything back that you asked for,” and she said “I would have if you had paid for it. And a brogue. You're not an actor. You can't even tell a story in two different voices. Let me hear it,” and he whispered in what he thought was close to the same brogue “For my poor kids I
did it, my three little dear ones and their sweet mother, whose teeth are rotting to the quick because they've no toothpaste to use and I can't afford a proper dentist,” and she said “It stinks. You were probably as bad at fooling them with it as you were at taking their goods. Please, I beg of you, for Brons and me and yourself too, and because shoplifting's wrong, all wrong, no matter how bad the situation gets—don't ever do it again,” and he said “I hate this life—here, this freaking craphole and so little money. But you're right; I'm a flop at everything I do—I know, you didn't say that—and I never want to be forgiven for it. And whatever you do don't tell Brons till he's all grown up, and only if you have to, for some reason,” and Brons said from the cot “I already know, Gould. That was real dumb what you did. It's the only good store around here. Now I won't be let in because of you,” and he said “Yes you will. I'll just have to stay outside.”