Into the Great Wide Open (10 page)

“Get that thing away from me!” she shrieked. “Jesus, that’s cold. Get out of there!”

“Sorry.”

“No, I …” Now it was Junie’s turn to apologize, Junie’s turn to wreck things. They were OK unless one of them started keeping score. “It’s just so cold,” she said.

“I know, sorry,” Kenny said. He fished his plastic envelope of Dutch tobacco out of the pocket of his overcoat and rolled a cigarette, hands heavy with blood, swollen and clumsy. It was unfair that these hands should feel cold to Junie. No fair, no fair. The cold world was waiting for them, waiting for their little house of warmth to dissipate. Junie was looking off at the river.

He saw that the cold world would get them back. They were
temporary
. A trembling up the back of his neck, a certainty. They had not yet made love to each other then, he had barely touched her breasts. What do I do now? he thought. He felt like he was moving underwater, under a huge weight of water, the blue underwater light. But it wasn’t even a question: it was too late to stop.

“Junie,” he said.

“What?” Her eyes still on the river.

“Where are you going to be next year? What are you going to do?”

She took a minute to answer; he lit the cigarette he had rolled and watched the blue smoke trail off in the still air, a pleasant sense of violation. Not all Currier & Ives.

“I’m barely here right now,” she said.

“What?”

“I didn’t tell you,” Junie said. “I was going to.”

She stopped and Kenny, not sure he wanted to hear, waited for her. It was crazy that so much could be riding on a few words; that
inside-out feeling that Kenny had sometimes, where everything was the wrong size. Small was big and big was small. He reminded himself to breathe.

“I was in the hospital, right before I met you,” Junie said. “I don’t know if you heard that or not.”

“Where would I hear that?”

“I don’t know,” she said, and looked at him. She said, “I never know what parts of my life are public property. It was just for three nights, the hospital.”

“What did you go there for?” he asked. “If you want to talk about it.”

“I cut myself,” she said.

“How did you do that?”

“No, I did it on purpose,” she said; eyes away, her glasses still on, though. He saw her in the bed next to his mother and then realized that yes, that was the kind of hospital she meant, that was the kind of ward: the smell of piss, the burnt, electrical smell that the schizophrenics seemed to give off. Maybe he was making this up. A weight of sorrow, self-pity dropped onto him. Whatever else, she was supposed to be a way out.

“Where?” he asked.

“What?”

“Where did you cut yourself? Where on your body?”

“On my leg, my calf,” she said, reaching down to touch a place on the outside of her left leg, the thickest part of the muscle. “Here.”

“Let me see,” he said. “I don’t want to.”

“Let me see.”

A momentary standoff; then, her face full of misgiving, she reached under her skirt and pulled the black tights down, bare skin on the cold wood of the bench, down over her thighs and knees until they lay in a loose puddle over her white skates. He saw the scar
immediately, wondered how he had missed it before—a straight clean line, two or two and a half inches long, still red and slightly swollen along the edges. Lips, he thought. The lips of the wound.

“Why there?” he asked.

Of course she wouldn’t look at him; he didn’t expect her to.

“Because I’m left-handed,” Junie said. “I don’t know. If I could tell you why
anything
I’d probably be better off.”

“You seem all right.”

“I’m all right,” she said. “Are you done?”

“What?”

“Can I pull my pants up?”

Kenny reached his hand down and touched the wound with his finger, ran the tip of his finger along the line of the cut. “Does that hurt?” he asked.

“No.”

He let his hand stray up along the outside of her leg, felt her flinch when his hand touched the warmth of her thigh under the protection of her skirt. She flinched but she didn’t move away. Good girl, he thought. She was no coward. He drew her closer, his head in her lap, and she folded her body over him. Skin buried deep inside, her animal heat trapped by layers and layers of cloth. Kenny closed his eyes. He rested there, wrapped in her, their two bodies together.

Then heard a ticking sound, off in the woods. Another and then another. He startled out of her embrace.

“Shit,” said Junie. “Shit, shit, shit.”

She clambered to her feet, wobbling on her skates, pulling her tights up around her waist again.

“What?” Kenny asked, still not understanding.

“It’s starting to rain,” she said. Exactly as she said it, a thin needle of cold landed on his scalp—not even wet, not at first, but absolute cold. He didn’t have a hat. He tossed his cigarette into the snow next to the bench and followed her down to the frozen canal,
hearing the ticking accelerate as the rain came down, individual drops and then closer together and then a steady soft hissing.

“Shit,” she said again. “I’m sorry I got you all the way out here.”

“Apologizing for the weather,” he said. “Not bad. That’s extra credit. But I don’t mind.”

“You will in a minute. Let’s go. We don’t want to be out here in the rain.”

Why not? he thought, but he didn’t ask it. She started back, a different stroke from before; reading her thoughts in the movements her body made, heavier now, nothing playful. Now we’re married, Kenny thought; now I’ve touched you, remembering the raised flesh of the wound under his fingertip.
Proud
flesh, he remembered. He didn’t know what she wanted from him but he knew it was something. The rain fell across his face, it soaked the stubble of his hair and dripped down the collar of his overcoat. A faint bitter aftertaste: he was needed, an actor in her own internal drama. He could be anyone:
fungible
. Inside he was all right, he was warm and mostly dry; but this time it was Kenny with his head bare to the wind and the rain. It took forever to get to the car.

Back in Junie’s house, safe and warm. He was wearing her clothes: a flannel shirt and a pair of blue jeans, no underwear. They fit him fine, the jeans were even slightly too big for him, his hips loose inside the memory of hers. He wore a towel around his neck, wet hair. His own clothes rattled in the dryer downstairs. Her mother had appeared just long enough to make cocoa, then gone again; back to her cave, as Kenny thought of the sewing room downstairs. Her strength was rooted in the rock.

“Are you OK?” Junie asked him.

They sat in the booth in the corner of the kitchen, under the
light. The rest of the house was dark around them: the living room just suggested by a reflection, a streetlight two blocks away shining through the branches. A dimmed-down light shone in the hallway but nobody was expected: her brother had called from a friend’s house, her father from the country club. The rain had turned to black ice, all over the city, and the police were asking everybody to stay off the roads. Junie had nearly wrecked twice on the way back from the canal. Kenny tried to call his father twice, no answer, it didn’t matter. He was staying anyway.

“I’m fine,” he said. “I just got cold, I guess.”

“I guess,” she said. “When we got to the car, your lips were blue, actually blue. I’ve never seen that before.”

“I’m glad to be educational.”

“Educational, recreational,” she said. “Emotional. Do you want anything to eat?”

He wouldn’t have guessed that he was hungry, but he discovered that he was starving. Emotional: he filed the word away. “What have you got?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said doubtfully. “I can make something, I guess.”

“Do you cook?”

“I can if I have to. I like to bake things, more than I like to cook, I don’t know why.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

A look, one eyebrow raised:
what did you expect?

“I’ll make you something,” Kenny said. He opened the wide refrigerator door, and found everything: smoked salmon, capers, special sausages, a chicken, a drawer full of different cheeses, vegetables he didn’t know the names of—endive? kale? He stood bewildered in the refrigerator light, the reflection of this food in his eyes.
Cornucopia
, he thought.
Panoply
. There was Bass Ale, chardonnay. Too much of everything, too hard to decide. His own cooking was strictly on a Boy Scout/survivalist plane, a few basics, a couple of tricks.

“Omelettes,” he said to Junie. “Does that sound good?”

“I don’t eat meat,” she said.

“What does that mean?”

“Omelettes are fine, but no bacon.”

“I don’t see any bacon anyway.”

“It’s in there somewhere,” Junie said. “My father likes his pig meat now and then.”

Well, so do I, Kenny thought; but didn’t say it. Junie was off somewhere again. She shut off the light over the kitchen table and stared out the window, which was worth looking at: the telephone wires, the limbs of the bushes outlined in ice, chandeliers. The black ice was still falling. He could see it in the street lamp, hear it rattling against the driveway, like it was raining BB shot. Clear in the air, the ice turned dark and rough when it landed, like pebbled bathroom-window glass. The shapes and colors of the cars were changed, smeared. Nobody drove by.

Working by the light under the cabinets—a little spotlight, theatrical but handy—he cut green onions, sliced a little smoked salmon into slivers, broke three eggs into a cup and beat them foamy. He knew there would be an omelette pan somewhere and he was right; just as he had known there would be sour cream in the refrigerator somewhere, and a good sharp knife in the drawer. His mother had been a good cook once, a sixties gourmet, and Kenny would watch her. A prayer for you, he thought, cutting a slug of butter into the pan. Get well.

(No one thought that Kenny’s mother would get well, though, not ever again. Things had happened. The chemistry inside her brain was different, that’s what the doctors thought. One chemical poured through and she was happy, another made her sad, another chemical made her angry with strangers in public places. My chemicals, Kenny thought. My chemicals are telling me to eat lightly, be careful, things are moving. He stole a glance at Junie and his dick stirred in his pants.)

He set a plate in front of her with the crescent of eggs on one side, three circles of red tomato on the other, a sprig of parsley, mystery shrub. Brought her a napkin, a fork, a glass of white wine. She looked up at him, suspicious. She said, “What are you trying to do?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Seduce you.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“I heard you,” she said. Reached behind her, on the ledge along the window, and brought out a pair of small earthy-looking oil lamps; lit them with a paper match, small brave flames, and then she blew the match out and held it. Small things mattered, details. The butter spattering in the pan.

“Eat that,” he said. “It’ll get cold if you wait, and it will be disgusting. Please?”

She shrugged, pale face in the lamplight, and took the first small bite. Kenny poured the eggs into the pan, adjusted the flame, waited.

“This is good,” Junie said.

“I’m glad you like it,” Kenny said. A vision, then: the two of them married, in a house like this, a future. Wouldn’t it be nice? Then realized that he was quoting from, reliving, a Beach Boys song. How much of this life belonged to him? Still it was a pleasant fantasy. More than that: a strange kind of certainty, as long as he didn’t think about it.

Took his plate, identical to hers, and sat across from her in the booth. Glass on three sides, the rain ticking down outside. “Would you like my parsley?” she asked. “I don’t think I can finish it.”

“There is an example,” Kenny said.

“Of what?”

“I’ve always wondered about parsley. I mean, it comes on your plate, you never eat it, they take it back to the kitchen and throw it away.”

“Or put it on somebody else’s plate.”

“Well, yeah, of course. That one-head-of-parsley-per-restaurant-per-week theory. But even if they use
new
parsley for every diner, you know, it still doesn’t make any sense to me. What’s it there for? It’s there to
not eat
.”

“It’s a garnish,” Junie said; like the word itself was enough to make it make sense.
Garnish
.

“And now I am trying to impress you, by cooking you dinner.”

“And succeeding.”

“Thank you. And in order to impress you I put this
garnish
on the side of your plate, even though this has never made any sense to me, in fact seems like pretty much of a waste, you know? I mean there are farms in California where they don’t grow anything but parsley, I bet.”

“And children are starving in India.”

“Well, they are.”

“I know they are,” she said. “All kinds of hellish things are going on in the world. People are getting shot, starving, they’re burning the rain forest down in Brazil. I know it’s not exactly news but that doesn’t mean it stopped happening.” She took a sip of the white wine, like she was testing it, examining. Looked at her glass. “While we sit here, smothered in comfort,” she said. “Getting high, getting drunk, watching TV, picking fights with each other over nothing.”

Kenny was nearly done. The food was good, rich, extravagant; he took a final bite, tasting the salt sharpness of the salmon, the rich sour cream, butter, and eggs. Top of the world, Ma; top of the food chain, anyway. I like it here on top of the food chain.

“Smothered in comfort,” Kenny said. He didn’t feel that way exactly. These moments of comfort, moments of quiet, did not come often for him; they were like rest stops, a place to catch a breather before he headed back into the pointless noise of his life. He didn’t want this one to go away. “What are we supposed to do?” he asked. “You live the life you’re given.”

“My father would say, the life you make,” she said. “I don’t
know, I don’t mean to be a drag. It just doesn’t seem like enough to me, to live your life for pleasure. Everything’s a pleasure, right? Food and sex and movies. Everybody’s happy, and when you stop being happy you move on, you get divorced, find a better restaurant.”