Nothing Is Terrible (16 page)

“Snacks.” She removed a roll of mozzarella and a jar of Spanish olives. She had on a knee-length denim jumper and a
sturdy white faded T-shirt. I wanted her to drop the glass jar on the high-gloss oaken floor or give some other sign that she loved me.

“So how do you like the new neighborhood?” I said, dancing around her while she stood and did whatever it is women do to mozzarella.

“Good.”

“Do you miss the old place?”

She shrugged. Either that or she tensed up more. I strolled around the kitchen. The one accoutrement I didn’t recognize from the old place was an antique field hockey mallet, if that’s what you call it, that hung on the wall below the clock. The mallet was decorated with bright stripes of color. “Nice mallet,” I said. I was wearing the hiking boots and tried unsuccessfully to make a scuff mark on the floor. I took off the boots and tested the slidability of the floor in my socks. It was good. I slid here and there about the kitchen while Myra shuttled from fridge to counter and back.

Skip’s voice entered the kitchen through the acoustic funnel of the hallway off the kitchen. “… difficult,” I heard her say. “This is a lovely home.”

“Isn’t it?” Tommy said.

They walked into the kitchen.

“Where’s the food, darling?” Skip said to me.

“Myra made a spread,” I said.

“Well, I don’t mean Myra’s little
spread
. I mean what I made for us to eat for the substantial meal of the day.”

I glanced at Myra, who looked like her usual lump self. I began to develop the idea of returning to New York without Skip Hartman.

Tommy and Myra and I sat down at the kitchen table of old,
which had a sad personality, for like a dog or a child, a table is susceptible to the vibrations of a home.

Skip stood with her back to us at the built-in counter unloading a three-bean salad. I thought of things around the house that a person could use to hit and sever her spinal cord, such as the ornamental field hockey mallet. The room was quiet. You could hear the mozzarella sliding down people’s throats.

“Come on already, why is it so quiet in here? Somebody say something,” Tommy said.

“Where does your water come from?” Skip said, turning to face us with the bean salad.

“Is that some kind of dirty question?” Tommy asked.

“When you turn on the tap in the kitchen sink, the water that comes out comes from where?”

“A well.”

“Where?”

“In the backyard.”

“And must each homeowner have his own well in the backyard?”

“I guess. I don’t know. Yeah.”

“Ah.”

“What do you mean, ‘ah’?”

Skip had put the salad on the table and returned to the counter to arrange the cool, damp pieces of tarragon chicken. “I mean that you do not really need a wall and a gate with a Special Forces commando in order to keep the poor people out.”

“So? Who cares? What are you talking about?”

“I am talking about the necessity, for living in Marmot, of having a well. And one must suppose that when there is a well
per man, each man must buy enough land surrounding his well such that his well is, shall we say, one hundred fifty yards from his neighbor’s well, because a preponderance of wells any greater than one per one hundred fifty yards would radically destabilize the water table.”

“I hate when you say ‘per,’ ” I said.

“In this way you keep the poor and lower-middle-income people out
sans
gate.”

“I hate when you say ‘sans.’ ”

“Myra, would you like a piece of tarragon chicken?”

“Yes please.”

“Leg or breast?”

“Either one is fine.”

“How do you keep the poor and lower-middle-income people out of your brownstone in Manhattan?” Tommy said.

“That’s not the same.”

“It seems similar.”

“The equivalent would be if I had devised a way to keep them off the island of Manhattan altogether.”

“Besides, you talk like a liberal but you live like a conservative,” Tommy said.

“How would you know such a thing?”

“I’ve been reading up on people like you.”

“Were I a liberal only insofar as I have redistributed my own wealth to you and Myra, that would surely be liberal enough.”

“Let’s play catch,” I said.

“We don’t have a ball,” Tommy said.

“I have a ball in the car,” I said.

“That’s not a good idea,” Tommy said.

“What do you mean?”

Skip said, “He means let’s not make a display of ourselves in the yard because the new neighbors might not understand the friendship of the two visitors. The friendship of a mature woman with an adolescent girl can only be a form of deviancy, from the imaginary point of view of the new neighbors.”

Tommy said, “Ah, come on, stop it. I go a whole three hundred and sixty-five days feeling pretty good, and then you come up here with your remarks that are designed to hurt me and make me unhappy and depressed. I’m saying lay off me because I have a toothache.”

We went into the living room with the exposed beam roofing or whatever you call it and we sipped pastis, or pretended to. I excused myself to go to the bathroom. Passing the kitchen, I glanced at the clock. It was twelve-thirty in the afternoon. I removed the field hockey mallet from the wall. I crept into the hallway between the kitchen and the living room, the same hallway where Skip Hartman had been walking when she spoke the word
difficult
. I peered at them, the adults. They were sitting there: Skip Hartman on a roughly striped couch of coarse brown material, her arms spread wide over the back, one hand holding a tall, clear tumbler; Tommy with his legs crossed woman-style, thigh on thigh, a foot wagging nervously in the air; Myra balled up in another chair. I thought they were grotesque—the two people who had sold me and the one who had bought me. I went out the front door with the field hockey mallet and jogged not on the sidewalk but down in the road like Mittler toward the gate of Marmot.

I walked through the pedestrian turnstile beside the large black gate and saw the blondish-orange Marine guard getting into a beat-up small gray American car that didn’t look like
much but which he probably lay beneath on his back in his spare time when he was not practicing how to field-strip a muskrat or something.

“Hey!” I said.

“Ms. White, is it?” he said. He sat down in the driver’s seat and started the car with the door open.

“Give me a ride to the nearest train station.”

“What happened to Ms. Hartman?”

“Nothing.”

“Get in.”

I got in next to his big square body, which was covered by the dark uniform. An animal smell came from under the uniform like the smell of a freshly washed dog. Layered over that was a cologne smell. “What’s that smell?”

“Ralph Lauren Polo. Thirty dollars a bottle, but you gotta spend money on your odor because it’s connected to pheromones.”

“
That’s
interesting.”

“What is she, your aunt or something?”

“I don’t want to talk, I just want to ride.”

“Fine.”

It took ten minutes to get to the station in the neighboring town of Verdant. I looked out the front window while with peripheral vision I took in the man’s face, especially this one small triangle of muscle below and slightly in front of his right ear that kept bulging out and going back in, bulging out and going back in, like a little straining penis under the skin of his face.

He stopped the car in the Verdant station parking lot and leaned violently in front of me to open the door on my side. I got out as the train was pulling in. The sky was deep gray. It
looked as if it might rain. I backed away from his car in case he tried to shoot me. Backing steadily away with the field hockey mallet pressed along my right leg, I watched the little flexing muscle thing under the side of his face until I couldn’t see it anymore. Then I watched his whole head grow dark until it became a silhouette in the shadowed darkness of the car. Then I got on the train. Then the train left the station.

Without my knowledge, Skip Hartman and Mittler had arranged for Mittler to be cleaning the house while we were away in the country. When I arrived home in the middle of the afternoon, Mittler was in our room, lying on the bed, naked. His body was horizontal except for his dick, which was angled up away from the base of his torso toward his chin. His hands were resting at his sides. I stood in the doorway. “Mittler, what the hell are you doing?”

He was startled. He grabbed the white comforter and threw it over himself. “None of your business,” he said.

“It is my business because this is my bedroom and your penis was sticking out into the air of it.”

“That was a private moment.”

“You were thinking of me, weren’t you?”

“Go away and let me put my clothes on.”

I ran and pulled the white comforter off his body and leapt on him. He was still naked and his whole body was there for me to see plus that thing that was standing up away from his body like a small second body.

“Please don’t do this to me,” he said, holding my hand.

“What were you doing, really? Was that masturbation?”

“It was mental masturbation.”

“Were you thinking of me?”

“Not telling.”

I tried to get my clothes off while holding Mittler’s hand. I took my shirt off with both hands and then went back to holding his hand. I unlaced each hiking boot with just my left hand and pulled each boot off. I got my pants off with just my left hand, and my underwear, and then I needed both hands to remove the elastic knee brace for my stress injury, and then I went back to holding his hand. I took my bra off with one hand and with my free hand held his hand, and then I started touching his body with the other hand. His body was harder and thicker than what I was used to, with hard lumps in unexpected places.

“Oh, Mittler, this is so weird for me. This is nice. I’m very excited.”

“Ah.”

“Mittler, I don’t know how to do this. Do you know how to do this? Let’s do it now. Do you know how to do this?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you sure that’s what you’re supposed to do? Ouch. That hurts. Stop it. I said OUCH! Okay, I have an idea. All right, you go over there like that. No, turn sideways like that. Okay, you put that there and I’ll put this here like this. Oh, that’s much better. Oh, that feels good, Mittler.”

“Ouch,” he said.

“That hurts you? That feels good to me. That hurts you?”

“Let’s keep doing it.”

“Do you want to keep doing it? Let’s keep doing it.”

“I like it but it hurts. Ow, it really hurts. Let’s keep going for a minute.”

“Oh. Oh nice. Oh. Oh.”

“OH! Stop! I think I ripped something. It feels like something tore in me.”

“Oh, Mittler. Oh, I guess we had to stop because something tore, right?”

“Yeah, but let me try something. You just lie back now. You lie still and I’ll go like this.”

“Yeah, but is that fun for you? That’s not fun for you.”

“It’s nice for me.”

“It’s nice for me too.”

“It’s really nice for me.”

“Me too.”

“Is it okay?”

“Yeah. Like that.”

“Like this?”

“A little more sideways. A little more—ooh.”

“Is it nice?”

“Nice.”

We were quiet for a while and then that electrical pulse-shock thing happened and Mittler sounded as if he were choking and then he started asking me questions: “Was that it? Did you—you know?”

“Wait. Shut up.” I didn’t really mean “Shut up,” I meant I needed a minute to come back into my body, but I did say “Shut up” and he heard “Shut up” and was already getting his clothes on.

“We never do this again,” he said.

“What? I didn’t even get to hold your dick.”

“See, that’s what I mean. You have no respect for me
or
my penis. I can’t be with you or see you ever again because you’re thoughtless. What do you think about anyway? Tell me even one thing you thought about today.”

“I don’t know.”

“See?”

“What?”

He left.

Now listen carefully, dear reader, because I am going to give you some very important advice: don’t ever have sex with a boy. He sticks you with that thing and it HURTS! And, what’s worse, it feels GOOD! No, but I mean it really feels good like you wouldn’t believe, which is
why
I’m saying don’t do it. I am not saying that sex with a boy brings more pleasure than sex with a girl and that you should therefore favor the milder pleasure of sex with a girl. I am especially not saying that about Skip Hartman, who works my body in a way that makes me cry out sharply. She knows how to touch me with her whole body and fasten her body to my body. She lays her perimeter down on my perimeter and we fasten ourselves to each other all along the surfaces of our bodies. And this is what is especially lovely about Skip Hartman: she knows how to unfasten, too. You have to unfasten slowly and gently. Sometimes Skip and I have been fastened so deeply that even the gentlest unfastening leaves wounds in the surface of my body, and Skip knows what to do about those, too. She fills the wounds in. She will put a kiss in each wound like a poultice. She will touch my body lightly here and there like a sculptor smoothing the last bits of rough clay into the flesh of his statue of a human figure. Mittler, on the other hand, penises you and walks out.

Hoving Harrington Hartman arrived at our door dressed as a small Nobel Prize winner. It was a Sunday morning in late October. Skip Hartman was in the kitchen making crêpes. “Skip, it’s your dad!” I yelled.

“You look fine, young man,” he said. “So tall and elegant, like my daughter.”

“I’m a girl.”

“Yes.”

“Daddy? What is going on?” Skip said. She stood in the foyer with flour on her fingertips. A thin streak of wet crêpe batter hung in her right eyebrow.

“I’ve decided to accept your invitation to brunch, my child,” he said, in the middle range of his falsetto. Today his posture was more Hartmanesque in the Skip Hartman sense of the
word. He wore a long tailored black coat. He had wire-rim spectacles and kempt hair. Someone had shaved his face.