Talking Heads (15 page)

She kept kicking at the deck. Chop, chuff, scuff. Kit thought of his phlegm-full conversation with Corinna, that morning.
That's it?
the woman had asked.
That's all I can tell these people—you've left the city?

“I, I wanted to hear it again,” he told his wife. “Before the Cottage.”

And here it was, the look Kit had fallen for. The hamper in the haystack, the unabashed tatterdemalion. Blue, blonde, white. Whenever Bette showed him this face Kit could once more sense their first hot point of contact—she the know-it-all and him mad to find out—while at the same time he spotted glimmers of a more durable connection. Glimmers of equivalent core elements. Kit couldn't name these elements. Most words felt too broad (“curiosity”), and whenever he came across something more precise it turned out to be an impossible antique (“pluck”). Kit knew only that words were part of it, part of their shared, staged business: an instinct for words, a fussing over words. He could even see the pleasure they took in the fussing, another glimmer. Enough for a believer to go on.

*

Then after half a day steeling themselves for a depressed and cold Cottage—another Monsod, to hear Bette describe it—Kit and his wife pulled up at a very different place.

Every light was blazing. Kit recalled the downtown record stores, their radium-bright checkerboard. Now what kind of winters had these New England Brahmins expected, building their seaside houses with so many
windows?
Kit circled round the Duster to the trunk, ticking off windows as he went. Front parlor, back parlor. Dining room, sitting room. The library and Uncle Walt's study, the large and small guestrooms.

Even up in the widow's walk, an uncovered bulb was burning. A dab of yellow against the evening glower. Monsod, no way. From where Kit stood, the Cottage looked like a funhouse. Twists, turrets, crazy lighting. And now, naturally, two little heads popped up at the nearest downstairs window. Two little ticket holders.

Did Bette have the wrong weekend? Should they have tried calling a second time?

Two children banged through the Cottage's front door. Two boys, calling “Unca Kit!” Calling “Aunt Beddy!”

Hans and Rutger, sure. Bette's sister's boys.

“My guys! My tough guys!” Kit shouted.

Their huffing and puffing was flavored with hot chocolate. Within their hoods their faces nestled like eggs. And the boys had to show Kit how'd they'd learned to slap five: “Gimme some skin, Unca Kit. Gimme some skin!”

Kit took a couple of hits, murder on his cold hands. “My two ratso fave terrorist
tough
guys!”

Bette's sister was eighteen months younger, but she'd had her first child more than five years ago. She met the group at the Cottage doorway, surprised, in slippers. Cecelia, Ceci. Her bones had Bette's length and strictness, but tomatoes had grown through the fences. Lots of cheek, lots of top and thigh. Ceci framed her features with boxy suburban-Mom glasses. In tee shirt and work shirt, she might still have been breastfeeding.

“Well,” Ceci said. “We're going to have a full house.”

“Hey, Bette—can't you at least say hello?” In the front hall, in the speckled shadow of the unwashed chandelier, Cecelia filled the silence with quick bedroom arrangements. Cousin Cal and the duck hunters, she began, had longstanding reservations on the first-floor rooms. “You know,” Cecelia said, “cooks' quarters.” But Bette didn't appear to be following. Pulling off her furred hat, she blinked at the crackles of static electricity. She backed away onto the front stairway's elongated bottom step, steadying herself with a hand on the banister's final curve. Bette might have been a mannequin in a museum tableau. Days of the Empire.

“Well,” Ceci went on. “Let me move into a single room. You guys deserve a double.”

Let me move? Let me? Surely Cecelia couldn't have fallen for Bette's pose. Surely she didn't believe in the mannequin. But the mother was actually making apologies. Fingering the hems of her work shirt, she was saying, “I guess you guys won't get quite the quiet getaway you were expecting.”

Sisters, boy. “So, Ceci,” Kit asked. “What brings you down here?”

The woman touched her glasses. At Kit's waist the two boys were tugging, pleading: “Play the monster.”

“Same as you I guess,” Ceci said. “A getaway.”

The louder of the two boys was the younger. The blond foursquare Rucky-rat. “Play the monster!” he squealed. “Please!”

“Guys,” Kit said, “give your Mom a chance.” Anyway he didn't think he was up to the game, your basic Search-&-Destroy. Kit would go after the boys with his head tucked inside his sweater collar, a hunchback effect.

Ceci said, “I just woke up this morning feeling, well. Like I had to flee.”

“I hear you.”

Kit glanced at Bette. He for one felt himself coming into a fresh energy that had its roots in the talk on the ferry. A weekend in a funhouse sounded a lot better than what he'd been expecting. But Bette was looking elsewhere, across the hall. Uh-oh. Framed in the double-wide opening to the dining room, Cousin Cal stood cradling an open shotgun. The brass butts of two fresh shells glittered in the chamber.

“The monster!” Rutger shouted.

A mean piece of machinery, a .10-gauge, Cal's gun was really too powerful for duck. The uncle toted it up high, two-handed, an unnatural position which kept his shoulders back and chest out. Ten-
hut
, soldier.

Cecelia addressed him mildly. “More guests for the weekend, Cousin Cal.”

Cal kept glaring. The shell butts gleamed between his chapped hunter's hands.

“And I told you before,” Ceci went on, “I don't want the guns around the boys.”

Cal's face had Marlboro-Man dimples, and his eyes the mercury glint of hard liquor.

“I told you, Cal,” the sister said. “You keep all that stuff in the kitchen. I don't want to see it.”

The .10-gauge dropped to waist level, and for a moment Kit couldn't see the shell butts. But then the brass casings gleamed again, harmless in the open housing. Cousin Cal exhaled loudly—you might've heard him up on the widow's walk—but he turned away, gun down, head down. Overgrown Cousin Cal, shrinking fast.

Kit looked at Ceci, eyebrows raised.

“Oh, that old fruitcake,” the sister said. She laughed, touching her glasses. “Cousin Cal, I swear. You can almost hear the fantasies he's got going.”

Bette, at bottom of the stairs, appeared more regal than ever. As if she'd been positive that the old man would start blasting away, and she'd wanted to look her bravest.

“You can almost hear him,” Ceci said, shaking her head. “
Here I am, the world's toughest cowboy
. I mean, fantasies.”

“The monn-sster,” one of the boys whined.

“But you, Kit,” Cecelia went on. “Looks like you ran into real trouble.”

Kit was getting tugged at again. He discovered he'd herded Hans and Rutger behind him, he'd kept them out of harm's way. He'd been expecting bloody murder every bit as much as Bette.

*

Their room seemed to do their talking for them. The radiator whispered, the bed frame cackled. And Bette too might be coming into a new energy, she just might. At the windows overlooking the shoreline, she went up on tiptoe in a full-body stretch and then with a sudden burst of humming shook her hips. His seaside Sheba. His island witch: She cast a spell with her kiss, leaving him powerless and tongue-tied against the cold wall after Cecelia called upstairs. “Drinks!” the sister called. “Hot drinks!” Down in the parlor he refortified, taking mint wafers and brandied tea, while Ceci complained genially about her life on Beacon Hill. The neighbors were all gay these days. They were very nice guys, granted, community-minded guys. But still, the sister said, they weren't people she could look at for hints about herself. Hints about what
she
was going through. She needed at least a few people around like that, Ceci explained, people she could use to suss out something about herself. Bette surprised Kit by mentioning his uncle, the rancher who liked men. She said Kit had found the uncle a decent enough role model, even though he was gay and still in the closet to boot. Bette didn't sound malicious, and the subject was by no means off bounds, but with that Kit gave in to the boys' pleading, he played the Monster. An old cracked mackinaw off the coatrack served as his Monster-Net. He tore around the downstairs, roaring till his bruises throbbed. By the time Cecelia called a halt—the boys got revved up fast, their faces red as Christmas—Bette was standing at another seaside window. She was saying it might be nice to take a walk while there was still light. Together, Kit and his wife went out. Below the sea wall they took each other's hands. Without a word they crunched over winter sand till Kit found himself once more up against it: the channel's bracing chaos, the mulchy seething whatever. The foam at his feet looked like more of the same, bubbles and scribbles shifting and multiplying. Brainless, directionless. He was once more up against it, the last winy pulp that had swilled out of Junior's mouth, the seepage under which the man's face had disappeared. Okay, editor: What's the issue now? You've shaken off your temporary insanity about
Sea Level
, Nos. 2 & 3. You've escaped the phone memos and you've gotten past a scary little loup-garou made of rags. You've put all that paper behind you. What now? Kit thought of the courtroom phrase, “the whole truth,” and wondered if he'd ever get anywhere near a truth like that again.

He tugged his wife's hand. His eyes began to water, and at first he thought it was the wind, but then he realized it was the words. He told her everything.

*

Make love to me
. Of all the unlikely responses… and with all the sisterly obligations due up in the next hour or so, with dinner and the boys' bedtime due up… . Yet as soon as she and Kit got back in the house, her face pinched tight and his spongy as a baby's, Bette lead the way to their room. Once they were up by the salted windows again she hooked him into a hug, close enough to have him retasting the low tide in the smell of their woolens. Then:
Make love to me
. Please Kit, now. The asking alone sounded a bit off—she almost never asked, in so many words. Kit glanced around the room, at once noting three or four good reasons why they shouldn't, the unlocked door and the men grumbling downstairs and the still-unmade bed. The mattress was horsehair, at least half a century old.

She had her coat off, her jeans open, one hand at his belt while the other drew his fingers up under her sweater. Her nipple was warm but stiff, and hands and flesh and eyes she had him. The Monster-Net.

The room's key had been lost long ago, but with a quick jostle Kit heaved the bureau against the door. The mahogany piece thumped into place, elephantine, gashing the doorjamb's multiple paint jobs. Christ, were they going to knock the place apart? Still Bette had him netted. She had him hooked by a belt loop, a zipper pull, the mushrooming head of his cock. It was a game and not a game at all, a mess of psychology you got free of by diving in still deeper. Bette folded up, making herself an easier reach in undone clothes. Kneeling on the edge of the bed, she started to suck on Kit while his feet were still on the floor. The springs and bed frame screeched and jangled while she hunkered down into a mouth-first bundle. Knock the place apart.

“I don't have Trojans,” he gasped. “I didn't think—”

“I don't care,” she said. “I don't care.”

Her sucking, his diving was all they needed of foreplay. His unrubbered cock was too serious for that, his confession too recent.

They couldn't lose their awareness of the Cottage, the mattress, the cackling wood, and in Kit this triggered images from the ranch where he'd been raised. He flashed on freshly dug potatoes in burlap sacks, on the Jello-and-hay odor of a foaling. Bette moaned, he whispered—
darling, the best
—yet these guttural breathings seemed to belong with Kit's memories, as if she'd been back in Minnesota with him. The notion played just perceptibly through his windings against her cunt, through the throb in his injured temple. Because why couldn't she have been there, at his uncles' ranch? The time a husband and wife spent at sex stretched way past the norms, didn't it? Packed with a thousand adjustments, replayed both out loud and in dreams, the time a husband and wife spent at sex expanded out and away according to rules all its own. And he and Bette had put in a
lot
of time, by now. A whole childhood and adolescence of foreplay and afterwards. Marriage, as Kit knew it, could include the cackling of this seaside manse, the old money showing off, while at the same time it shared his memory of feeling his way up into a mare's birth canal in order to yank out a stuck foal. Why not? He and Bette were doing it even now, cackling and reaching. Upright on their knees, they clung hip to hip.

Kit rocked with long tremors, kiss to cock. Bette's look was all tatterdemalion. Here were handfuls of buttock, there a dissolving down-the-throat moan.

They went through spasms for a while, jamming after the best angle. Such a shape they made, upright, the lovers' capital Y. Y for Yes, Yeah,
You
. She'd been right to insist.

Afterwards Kit lay fingering his stitches with one hand, the other on the thigh she'd thrown across him. The stretch-fabric of their life as a couple felt as if it were drifting down over them, a vast parachute material, tangible in a thousand gentle rumples. He began making sentences, fumbling, not quite thinking. The talk came out as the marriage-feeling was reeled back in, a compensatory mechanism. Occasionally his sweeter nothings made Bette fish tenderly along his hip, her crotch nudging his bone line.

“Second time,” he found himself saying. “No Trojan, no precautions. The second time.”

She raised her eyes, but it was dark by now.