I Am No One You Know (32 page)

H
ERE IS A FACT.
That first time together in the front seat then the backseat of Mrs. Halifax’s Chevy station wagon immediately the lovers knew they’d kissed before with such eagerness and desperation. Immediately they knew they’d many times declared their love. Clutching at each other in the vehicle parked in the dark-dripping interior of Edison Township Park. “Oh Mrs. Halifax, I—I guess I l-love you,” Rickie Swann stammered, and Mrs. Halifax said, in a swoon of joy, “I love you too, Rickie. My darling!” Mrs. Halifax pressed her cheek against the boy’s head and rocked him in her arms. They were partly unclothed. Where their skins touched, they scalded. Mrs. Halifax was the one to lead. Their damp yearning mouths, hands. Alternately they were shy and emboldened with each other. Almost at once Mrs. Halifax ceased to think of herself as a married woman; she would never again think of herself as Mrs. Dwayne Halifax. Rickie in a paroxysm of need pushed his groin against Mrs. Halifax’s belly. Madness overcame her like warm lava in which she might drown. Kissing the boy, tonguing and stroking him, that beautiful lanky boy-body, the lean stubbled cheeks, hard flat flank of his thighs, and between his legs his boy-penis suddenly quivering and hard and larger in her fingers than she would have expected, and no sooner in her fingers than a violent shudder ran through the boy’s body drawn tight as a bow and he groaned and shook against her and his penis erupted in a silky liquid that made Mrs. Halifax weep, it was so exquisite. The moment so perfect. They would be lovers for the remainder of their lives.
Now there is no going back.

T
HOSE MONTHS.
In Mrs. Halifax’s station wagon. In motels on Route 1. Rarely the same motel twice.
Days Inn, Bide-a-Wee, Econo-Lodge, Sleep E Hollow, Holiday Inn
(Rahway, Metuchen),
Travellers Inn, Best Western.
Mrs. Halifax and her teenaged son (Brian/Jason/Troy/ Mark). Only Mrs. Halifax entered the motel lobbies, but her adolescent son was sometimes glimpsed in the parking lot, or in the video arcade,
or, if there was an indoor heated pool, there. Once they were safe inside their cozy locked room they luxuriated in lovemaking, Jacuzzi bathing, take-out McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Chinese and Italian food, giant Pepsis (for Rickie) and six-packs of beer (for Mrs. Halifax). In poems Mrs. Halifax would grope to express their happiness.
Our souls we surrender. There is no I, no thee. A thousand thousand years ago for all Eternity.
Though knowing it was reckless Mrs. Halifax couldn’t resist giving Rickie presents for his fifteenth birthday in January. Music videos of his favorite bands, a Hugo Boss T-shirt, Nike jogging shoes. He’d have to find some way to hide them from his mother’s sharp eyes. (Maybe tell her he’d found money somewhere? A wad of bills, on the sidewalk? He could say it was behind the Shamrock bowling alley, see how Mrs. Swann reacted.)

Sometimes their lovemaking was so profound, it was almost scary.

Other times, they tumbled together, breathless and squealing and playful as lascivious puppies.

This beautiful boy Rickie Swann who might’ve been Mrs. Halifax’s son. But he wasn’t her son and that, Mrs. Halifax knew, was the very best luck. For if he’d been her son he wouldn’t have adored her the way he did. And she couldn’t have adored him, every square centimeter of his perfect boy-body, Even pimples, skin eruptions on his back she kissed. Never did she allow Rickie to say he was ugly, never
never.
Never that he was stupid, he was
not stupid.
Both Rickie and Mrs. Halifax were in awe of Rickie’s indefatigable boy-penis, so very different from the pathetic limp skinned-looking penis of Dwayne Halifax Mrs. Halifax shrank from glimpsing by chance with the mortication of self-disgust you feel for an old discredited ridiculous and humiliating crush you’d had for somebody now glimpsed on the street and hardly recognizable, he’s so
old.

On the occasion of Rickie’s fifteenth birthday. In a top-floor suite of the Rahway Hilton. As Mrs. Halifax toweled Rickie dry after their languorous Jacuzzi and restyled his hair in what she called the
Elvis look,
slicked back from his forehead in a sexy pompadour. There in a careful voice she inquired what birthday presents had he received from Mrs. Swann, and Rickie sniggered, “Are you kidding? Not a goddamn thing.”

“You don’t mean your mother…forgot? Oh, Rickie.”

“Think I give a shit, Mrs. Halifax. I don’t.”

She saw, in the bathroom mirror, that her lover spoke the truth.

Though sensing that Mrs. Swann was her deadly enemy. And that, one day, well—

But Mrs. Halifax was determined not to think of that day. Not yet.

H
ERE IS A FACT.
Rickie was receiving higher grades at school. For Mrs. Halifax tutored him as they lay naked together nuzzling and tickling and kissing and doling out rewards to him for each correct answer he gave. And of course Mrs. Halifax helped him with his homework in all his courses. Sometimes taking his hand in hers and pretending to guide his pen as he wrote. And what came out in Rickie’s large looping handwriting was unexpectedly smart, made sense, and Rickie’s grades in English began to be B-, even B. Mrs. Halifax also tutored him in “deportment”—“winning friends and influencing people.” Her model was ex-President Bill Clinton who could charm the pants off, well—anyone! You smile you make eye contact you speak clearly and never mumble and never never appear sullen or slouch-shouldered. Rickie had to admit, he looked pretty cool when Mrs. Halifax groomed him. The
Elvis look
plus the Hugo Boss T-shirt and Nike shoes. Rickie had to admit he hadn’t liked himself much, in fact he’d kind of despised himself before falling in love with her. He didn’t tell Mrs. Halifax, though, of his crazy plan to murder his mother with a hammer. Not that it had been an actual plan. Now he had other, better things to think about. Lots better things. So, fuck Lenore Swann. Though that woman scared him sometimes sniffing around him like a dog including even his crotch if he was careless enough to pass by her so he’d push away—“Christ sake, Mom! That’s disgusting.” And Mrs. Swann would say, “There’s some hot high school chick getting into my kid’s pants, I just know it.” But what could Mom prove? Not a thing. She never went to PTA meetings and would never meet Mrs. Halifax.
She can’t smell Mrs. Halifax on me after the Jacuzzi so fuck her!

T
HE PLAN WAS,
they would wait until Rickie was out of school. They would wait until he graduated from high school at least. Then they would elope. He’d be eighteen, a legal age. They would move
away to the Southwest where Rickie’d never been and was dying to go. Lying in their king-sized bed in the Travellers Inn their twenty bare toes wriggling together beneath the sheet as they leafed through
U.S. Road Maps: A Scenic Guide
marveling at color photos of the Grand Canyon, Death Valley, Yosemite, Red Rock Canyon, plotting their escape from the prying suffocating world that surrounded them in East Orange, New Jersey. Drifting to sleep in each other’s arms thinking of dogs’ names—Gallant, Greywolf, Duke, Cleopatra—for the greyhounds they hoped to adopt from the dog tracks, and the palomino ponies they hoped to buy at auction to spare these beautiful doomed creatures, as Mrs. Halifax spoke vehemently of them, the slaughter-house.

God help us. God who has sanctified our love, help us now.

It was not Mrs. Halifax’s fault! As somehow in the late winter and early spring of the new year, things began to go tragically awry.

Not Mrs. Halifax’s fault that the driver of an uninsured pickup speeding above the limit at 69 mph in a 55 mph zone lost control of his vehicle and careened across two lanes of traffic on Route 1 in Metuchen to sideswipe her station wagon at dusk of a rainy weekday in March when Mrs. Halifax was driving her lover home after a snatched hour of happiness in the Metuchen Holiday Inn. Lucky for Mrs. Halifax and Rickie they hadn’t been killed in a head-on collision but not so lucky they were so abruptly
exposed.

“Ma’am, this boy is your son, you say?”

“I…didn’t say.”

“His I.D. says his last name is ‘Swann.’ What’s his relationship to you, your name’s ‘Halifax’?”

“Officer, is this…necessary? I mean, is it necessary for you to ask…?”

“Don’t get your back up, lady. Either this ‘Rickie’ is, or is not, your son. Which?”

“Rickie is my…student.”

“Student, ma’am?”

“I am his eighth-grade teacher.”

“Teacher? What’s he doing with you in your car, ma’am?”

“I was…driving him home from school, Officer.”

“After 6
P.M.
? What kind of school would that be, ma’am?”

“I was…you see, I was tutoring him. He’s behind in his studies. I was tutoring him after school, Officer.”

“Tutoring! What kind of tutoring would that be, ma’am?”

Mrs. Halifax was feeling faint. Her neck was aching from whiplash. A migraine headache had begun behind her teary eyes. Yet under duress in the presence of burly Jersey cops eyeing her with the alerted interest of fishermen who’ve netted a mermaid amid their catch of smelly wriggling fish she had lapsed into the stylized gestures of desperate female coquetry: lowered rapidly blinking eyelids, seductive/ shy gaze, soft husky suggestive voice.

“Social studies, Officer.”

It was then that Rickie intervened. All she’d taught him of
winning friends and influencing people
came into sudden improvised practice. He told the Jersey cops in a courteous frank voice that Mrs. Halifax lived in his neighborhood and often drove him home when he stayed after school for sports so his mom wouldn’t have to pick him up.

And so they were spared. And so they were allowed to leave Metuchen. Mrs. Halifax hadn’t been the cause of the accident but her car had to be towed off the highway and she’d had to give a police report; she hoped to God the accident wasn’t significant enough to be written up in the local papers. (It wasn’t.) But she had to call a taxi to take her and Rickie Swann to East Orange, and she had to call her husband. Rickie had to call his mother. Excuses were fumblingly made. Rickie didn’t get home until 10:30
P.M.
that night, and Mrs. Halifax didn’t get home until later. As soon as she entered the house there was Dwayne Halifax waiting for her, up from his Barcalounger and limping about the kitchen with fierce eyes and a hurt, bruised mouth. “Tutoring some kid? What kid? What the fuck’s going on here? Where’ve you been all this week? Where’s my station wagon?
What the fuck’ve you done with my station wagon?
”

This was the first time Mrs. Halifax had reason to believe her husband might be deranged, and might be dangerous. For the station wagon wasn’t his, not any longer. How could it be
his?
Maybe it was registered in his name but that was just a technicality. She was the one who had a job, she was the one bringing in a paycheck she was the one who required transportation,
it was her station wagon.

“Whore! Think I can’t smell you!”

Dwayne Halifax’s fist leapt out to strike Mrs. Halifax’s already lacerated face. She uttered a short sharp cry of pain. She thought, dazed
It’s TV. It isn’t real.
But there was Dwayne Halifax’s face contorted with rage. Mrs. Halifax turned, and ran heavily upstairs. Locked herself in the bathroom. Oh, she was bleeding again: where the nurse at the medical center had put Band-Aids on her face, blood was seeping out. Yet she knew she was lucky even so. The worst had not yet happened. Rickie Swann had not been taken from her. And lucky too that Dwayne Halifax wasn’t the strapping husky youth he’d been when she had first fallen in love with him. The blow he’d given her with his atrophied right hand hadn’t broken her nose or loosened any of her teeth.

He knows. But he can’t know.

Can he?

N
OW CAME THE
time of renunciation. Now, the bittersweet time of chastity. Mrs. Halifax had long anticipated it.

Explaining to Rickie who stared at her disbelieving that they must stop seeing each other. Until he was eighteen.

Rickie protested, no! No no no.

Mrs. Halifax spoke quietly. The world was preparing to destroy them, she feared. “My husband, your mother…”

Rickie protested, no! His mom didn’t know
a fucking thing.

“But my husband, Rickie. He suspects.”

Rickie knew nothing of Dwayne Halifax. His eyes registered blank at the mention of a
husband.
The very concept seemed to elude him. Mrs. Halifax hadn’t decided whether she would tell Rickie how Dwayne had struck her already lacerated face.

“Those vulgar Jersey cops, Rickie. You heard them. If they hadn’t believed you. If they’d called your parents. Our love would be exposed, now. I would lose my job, and…” Mrs. Halifax paused. She had no wish to ponder what would be her fate, professionally and legally; though she must have known that having sexual relations with a minor constituted statutory rape, and being involved with any of her students intimately constituted grounds for immediate dismissal, yet she hadn’t thought of these matters, for it seemed to her that such sublunary
things didn’t apply to her. Gently she said, “No one can understand our love but us, Rickie. You know that, darling, don’t you?”

Rickie nodded, yes! He knew.

Rickie had come round to believing as Mrs. Halifax did, they’d been lovers a thousand years ago. In more than one lifetime they’d been lovers. He didn’t understand it completely, as Mrs. Halifax understood it, but he knew it had something to do with “incarnation”—or maybe “reincarnation”—and “transmigration of souls.” It was a fact, how their eyes had met and sort of melted into each other that afternoon in Mrs. Halifax’s classroom. And the way each time they made love Rickie felt safer in Mrs. Halifax’s arms like her white soft body was a big balloon floating in warm water and as long as he clung to the balloon he was safe, he wouldn’t drown. But at the same time—he knew this was weird, even kind of freaky—he felt stronger, too, like he was empowered to kill, to take any life, the way a god is empowered.