Into the Great Wide Open (14 page)

Kenny agreed.

“The trick,” she said, still looking at the seat cushion. “The trick is to not get stuck. You’re seventeen, Kenny. You’ve got a future. You don’t want to make decisions now that are going to make it harder for you. That’s all I’m trying to say.”

“I understand it, what you’re trying to say.”

“I don’t think you do,” she said, turning her eyes full on him, angry. Kenny was trapped in the headlights. “I don’t think you’ve got the slightest idea, either one of you. You don’t even know what it’s like to be alive yet, and you’re making these decisions that are going to affect every day of your lives after this. It’s hard to watch, Kenny—it’s like watching a drunk person trying to cross a busy street. All I can do is close my eyes and pray and hope for the best. Do you understand that?”

Kenny blinked, nodded. He felt his own anger rising up inside him, like he was supposed to live his life for her enjoyment.

“I don’t have anything against you,” Junie’s mother said.

“Well, thanks,” he said; but she missed the edge to his voice. He was dismissed, anyway. He had paid the tithe.

“Do you need anything?” she asked, as he retreated toward the door. “Money or anything?”

“I’m all right for now, but thanks.”

“I’m glad to see it, you and Junie,” she said. “It worries me, though. I’m just telling you that so you’ll know. I don’t have anything against you.”

“No.”

“But the two of you together, I don’t know. All the long faces, I just don’t know if Junie needs that right now. Don’t worry about it,” she said, and he was free to go.

Mixed messages, he thought, mixed feelings. Mixed drinks. That line about the glum seventeen-year-olds had been a favorite of his father’s. Kenny stood in the stone hallway of the downstairs a minute, alone. The thing about this house: all of its wood and stone and careful angles connected it to the earth, made to seem to grow out of the earth; but in the process it picked up some of the earth’s coldness, the underground darkness of stones and wet dirt. He thought of his father, the touch of his skin. Not physically cold—the heating was elaborate, efficient, hot-water pipes run through the concrete slab—but that underground sense of blind indifference, streams running out of sight. Down in the ground where the dead men go. He closed his eyes, remembered that his father might be dead, even then, was gone for something and he might not be back. Again that sense of hollow victory: the King is dead, long live the King! Kenny himself was the new King. Born again, King and Jesus of pain, O come let us adore him … His father’s face, gray on the hospital pillow. Why here in particular, he wondered, why now? But there in the half-light, in the narrow hallway lined with stone, he felt his father’s loss. His father had tried, once upon a time. Or maybe that whatever his father was, Kenny had grown around him, the way the apple tree in his grandmother’s backyard grew around the wire clothesline she had strung from it years ago. No way to get it out without injury. He suddenly felt tired, exhausted. Was this what she wanted? To strip him of his ability to pretend, to ignore. To leave him defenseless. You want the truth, he thought, we will start with you: your daughter is a beautiful wreck, your husband missing, and yourself exiled to the
land of the shades. Although you have a lovely ass.
Callipygian
, he thought; and remembered that he was here to see Junie.

Her father was alone in the kitchen, pulling a neoprene sleeve gingerly over his calf. It was a surprise to come up and find it still full daylight, an indifferent gray sky but still bright, four in the afternoon. The basement’s perpetual twilight, dim skies through branches.

“I heard about your father,” Junie’s father said. “That’s bad luck. Is he doing any better?”

“They don’t know yet.”

Mr. Williamson grimaced; out of sympathy, or out of pain—he pulled the brace all the way up over his knee at that moment—Kenny couldn’t tell. Mr. Williamson was the odd man out, fair, freckled, and bearded while the rest of his family were dark. He was a lawyer who didn’t look like one; he wore jeans to the office, big stout shirts, shoes with mountaineering soles on them. He drove a Jeep. He made a lot of money and drank too much, specialty beers and forty-dollar Scotch, and his legs were stout as baby trees, freckled and covered with an orange-blond shrubbery of leg hair. How could Junie come from this? He looked like a Celtic warrior, now in decline. Dry deltas of wrinkles converged at the corners of his eyes. “You need anything?” he asked Kenny. “Money or anything?”

“No, but thank you,” Kenny said, thinking: if I took money from everybody who asked, I could go to Europe, take Junie with me. Fleeting vision of escape, gray skies over Paris. Matisse.

Mr. Williamson grunted and got up, evidently in some pain. “This feels worse every time,” he said.

Then why do you do it? Mr. Williamson seemed to hear the question, though Kenny didn’t ask it.

“I just think about how crappy I’d feel if I
didn’t
,” Mr. Williamson said, leaning against the counter, bending and stretching. A series of loud alarming sounds came out of his body as he did. This couldn’t be good for you. Kenny longed for a cigarette, just watching
him: the quick painful tensing of his face as he stretched his hamstrings, the wreckage in between. I’ll never be you, Kenny thought.

“Unh,” said Mr. Williamson. Snap, crackle, pop went his back.

“Is Junie around?” Kenny asked him.

It took Mr. Williamson a moment to surface, already deep in his runner’s trance of pain and self-assertion. He would not be defeated. “Upstairs, I think,” he said. “You can go up and fetch her yourself, if you want. I mean, that’s fine. I’m off to the races, now—let me know if you need anything!”

All said distractedly. He was done with Kenny but Kenny wasn’t gone yet. Mr. Williamson let himself out the kitchen door and chugged off up the empty street, breathing white vapor like a fire-truck in a children’s book, or a locomotive: The Little Engine That Could, it seemed like. Kenny puzzled over the “fetch her yourself” line until he realized it was some archaic form of courtship: the lady was to come down to the parlor to meet her gentleman friend. Or maybe some memory, fraternities and sororities … Junie’s father was barely forty, a decade younger than Kenny’s dad and even more opaque. Maybe he listened to Bob Dylan. Maybe he was in a peace march. Whatever. He didn’t know the rules of his own house, didn’t belong there.

A door opened, a door closed somewhere down the hallway and Kyle breezed through, casting a quick unfriendly glance at Kenny in the kitchen, going out without a word. He drove an Accord, too, a spotless black one. It started immediately, drove off quietly as an electric car. Kenny wondered where he was going: a gay bar; a martini party; an elegant reception; a shooting gallery. The kind of bruised good looks that suggested vampirism. Why not? He had the money. Again Kenny felt the faint suspicion on the back of his neck: what if she really was? What if they all were?

And then up the stairs, and into her bedroom without knocking. She was shuffling pictures on her desk again; tried to hide them away before he could see but it was too late.

“What?” he said.

“Well, you knock, when you come into somebody’s room. You
announce
yourself.”

“What would you be doing that you wouldn’t want me to see?” he asked. He was being rude, he knew it.

“I might be otherwise engaged,” she said.

“With whom?”

“My church choir,” she said. “A Shetland pony. You never know.”

Or Kim, he thought; and wondered where she had gone. They were inseparable, then came the hospital, now she was gone, or in some temporary exile. Which? He almost asked, though he knew he would be trespassing.

“What is that?” he asked, pointing to the half-hidden picture.

Gingerly she slid it out of the pile: it was his own face, he was suffering. His face was
troubled
in the picture. Trees in the background, a car window—it was the day on the canal, the skating trip that had ended in rain.

She said, “Kenny with blue lips.”

“I don’t remember you taking that.”

“You weren’t supposed to notice. It was when we were getting back into the car. I’d never seen you look like that, I couldn’t help it.”

“Very kind of you,” he said.

“Don’t be pissy,” Junie said. “It looks like you. And thirty seconds either way wasn’t going to kill you. We were back at the car by then.”

He sat on the bed, drew her down toward him. They lay side by side on the narrow monastic bed, jeans against jeans. Kenny kissed her lips, and then her neck. Junie said, “What did Queen Kamehameha have to say?”

“Nothing much. I need to take care of my future.”

“Jesus,” Junie said. “She’s pissed at you.”

“For what?”

“She says it’s for smoking cigarettes in here the other night. She smelled it two days later. Nose like a prize bloodhound. It’s a sex thing but she can’t admit it.”

“She doesn’t seem shy,” Kenny said, and Junie laughed.

“No, shy is not the word. Retiring. Bashful.”

“She
is
retiring,” Kenny said. “I don’t know what else you’d call the basement thing.”

“She’s jealous,” Junie said; and Kenny couldn’t tell whether she was still joking, whether this was feeling or a mockery of feeling. “My mother was born middle-aged.”

“How do you know?”

“Let’s argue about something else,” she said. Something had come over her face, a little cloud. Her body was stiff under his hands, her shoulders bony and rigid. Language of touch: the way she could be all breasts and soft delights one minute, all elbows the next, all without meaning to. Kenny was learning her language; or they were inventing it together.

He took her hand in his own and brought it to his lips. She let him kiss the back of it; but when he tried to turn her hand, to open it, she pressed it against her body again. She said, “Don’t do that.”

“What?”

“It’s so stupid,” Junie said. “It makes me embarrassed.”

He didn’t know what she was talking about. “What?” he said. “I’m not teasing you.”

She closed her eyes and shook her head. Let him take her hand again, and this time let him open it, passive. He could do anything he wanted with her. He kissed the palm of her open hand and felt her stir next to him, blood answering blood; kissed the inside of her wrist, and didn’t notice anything until she went awkward again. When he looked, he saw the four parallel precise lines of scar tissue up the inside of her wrist. She saw him looking and drew away. “It’s so stupid,” she said. There was no daring now, no bragging.

A performance, Kenny thought; inspiring pity and terror. He felt an odd detachment. The scars looked deep, and serious—Kenny had learned to gauge the intentions by the scars they left: an invitation to death, a flirtation, or just a way of getting Mom’s attention—but even so this was incurably junior high. She had this way of shrinking. He wanted tragedy, trombones and kettledrums; he kept on getting bubble gum. Why must I be a teenager in love?

“You’re OK,” he said. “That was a long time ago.”

“That was last year,” she said.

They lay there next to each other, each contained in each. Junie was thinking about something, miles away. Kenny was thinking about getting out. Boy-girl, boy-girl, boy-girl. He had been laid before and he would get laid again without the high hysteria and folly of suicidal virgins, self-pity, junked-up families. He had been suckered, like coming out of a bad movie and remembering that he had wept despite himself. Your self-perpetuating tragedy, he thought. The eternal flame, the temple of your self.

And where was Junie? Gone somewhere, too. One of those moments when both partners draw back into themselves, separate planets. Second thoughts; or maybe just buyer’s remorse.

Shopping for love, Kenny thought. You made the bargain you could. Junie was first-class merchandise but damaged. He knew he was an asshole for thinking this but sometimes he felt like it was the only way he could see clear: people did what they wanted, they did what they could, and the other people around them were just counters, bodies. His father wanted a drink; the shortest distance between himself and a drink was his path, and if you were standing in the way, too bad. The rest was frosting, window dressing. The pornographic world. You are carrying around the hole I want to put my dick into. Bring me that hole over here.

The pornographic world: no other people, simply bodies, repositories. There was no proof that other persons existed at all. What you could see, what you could touch were bodies; bodies that existed,
or didn’t exist, to the extent that they could collaborate in your pleasure. Romance propaganda, religion propaganda, altruism propaganda: Mrs. Jane Dr. Williamson brings another body in and sets it down in the chair across, to perform once again the act, to gratify her own complex need to look like she was helping. After Jinx and after Kenny, she’d find another body to perform with; and there was always Junie, always handy, willing or not. Power disguised as love, power disguised as helping: the wheel kept turning, no matter what.

And in the pornographic world he was lying next to a girl, a beautiful seventeen-year-old. He raised her hand to his lips and started to kiss it again, because he knew he had to get around it; kissed the tips of her fingers, the soft mound at the base of her thumb, the lines of her palm, and finally her wrist again, feeling the blood warmth there, touching the tiny raised lines of the scar with his lips. She was frightened, then relaxed, then frightened again; and Kenny had the feeling of falling. I don’t want to hurt you, I don’t want to think about your feelings. A fair exchange, pussy for sympathy; but this wasn’t right either, he found himself kissing the scars as if they mattered, as if she mattered to him. He told her that he loved her, he remembered that he meant it, he didn’t know what to think.

And slowly she was moving with him, and nothing was decided. He moved from her wrist to her neck to her breasts, her clothes in a rumpus around them, and still he didn’t know if they were making love or he was fucking her. She stood up, when they had gone a little too far.