The Man Who Cancelled Himself (56 page)

“I don’t
believe
it!”

“What is she
doing
here?!”

“Omigod!”

Others began swarming around us, wondering what the commotion was. And anxious to get in on it. Quickly, I hustled Clethra out of there, two dozen or more women in hot pursuit. We had to sprint the last hundred yards to the Jag. Lulu even had to show them her teeth, a sight known to throw terror into the hearts of fanzoids the world over. Then we hopped in and I floored it out of there.

“Jesus, why can’t people just leave me the fuck alone?” Clethra cried, as we headed back toward Lyme. She seemed genuinely shaken by the frenzy she’d caused. She was used to Manhattan, where people go less ga-ga. In Manhattan, they’ve seen ’em all. “I mean, why do they even care?”

“Because your private life is public theater. They see you on TV, just like they see Heather Locklear on TV. It’s all entertainment to them.”

“Well, it’s not fair.”

“Life isn’t, Clethra. Sorry to be the one to break it to you.”

I got off the highway at Old Lyme and took the Shore Road down past the boatyards and salt marshes to Griswold Point, where the Sound and the mouth of the Connecticut River meet. The water was choppy that day, the beach deserted now that the summer folk were gone. I parked there and Lulu hopped out, the better to arf at shorebirds. We stayed in the Jag with the top down, facing the water.

“Do you love Thor?”

“Duh, yeah,” she answered mockingly. “Like, what do you think?”

“I’m trying to figure out what to think.”

She shook a Camel out of her jacket, stuck it between her teeth like a schoolyard tough and lit it, letting the smoke slowly out of her nostrils. “I’ve loved Thor for as long as I can remember,” she said, her voice soft and dreamy. “Thor is a force within me, the great and eternal male, enveloping me, inside of me, part of me,
me.
”

From the rocks nearby, Lulu started coughing violently. Me, I was just staring.

“I love him with my body and my mind and my soul,” she went on, and on. “Our love is timeless and life-affirming. By loving Thor I am loving myself.”

“I hadn’t realized you were majoring in dramatic arts,” I observed.

“I wasn’t. History.”

“My mistake. I take it you don’t feel you’ve done anything wrong.”

She shook her head. “I know I haven’t.”

“You don’t think of Thor as your father?”

“He’s
not
my father!” she insisted, flaring at me angrily. “God, why can’t people get hip to that?”

“Because he raised you, that’s why.”

“Look,” she said, with exaggerated patience, “if he was my father I wouldn’t feel this way about him. I
have
a father. I mean, that’s what people keep forgetting.
Barry
is my father. I see him all the time and I love him as my father and I would never, ever in a million years think about fucking him. Thor … He’s just a man who used to be with my mom. And now’s with me.”

“About your mom … Is this you getting back at her?”

“Getting back at her how?”

“By taking her man away from her.”

“She has shit to do with it. I love Thor. I
told
you.”

“Do you love her, too?”

Clethra shrugged her shoulders inside the jacket. “I did, I guess. Back when I was little, I mean. But these last couple of years, man, she’s just been all the time in my face, busting me, dissing me, telling me what to do.”

“She’s your mom. Moms do that.”

“Not like her, homes,” she argued. “Like, my mother happens to be the bitch of the century, okay? But I don’t have to tell you that. You know her, right?”

I nodded. Because I did know her. And because I was well aware she could be damned hard on people. Ruth Feingold was a tough, demanding woman. Her outright belligerence had ultimately led to a big falling-out with Friedan and the others. And had dealt the women’s movement a serious blow.

Clethra took a drag on her cigarette, staring out across the Sound. It was a clear day, clear enough to make out the north shore of Long Island on the other side. “I mean, nothing I ever do is good enough for her. Not my grades. Not how I look. Not who my friends are. I’m, like, she’s always running me down. Thor’s the one who kept me sane. If it weren’t for him I’d have run away when I was fourteen. I’d be a hooker on the street somewhere. But I’m cool now. I’m free of her.”

“Is it true that she has physically abused both you and your brother?”

“Half brother.” She hesitated a moment before she nodded, swallowing. “All the time. With the back of her hand, with her fist. She’s just so mad at the world. But, like, why does she have to take it out on us? Poor little Arvy, she’d smack him and scream at him until he’d just go running from the dinner table. And I’m, like, he shakes when she comes in the room. He’s such a sweet, sensitive boy. I’m scared for him. What she’ll
do
to him. Thor has to get him away from her. Has to.” She tensed in her seat next to me. Savagely, she added, “I’d like to see her crash and burn. I’d like to see her dead.”

“She will be soon enough.”

Clethra frowned. “She will?”

“We all will.”

She flicked her cigarette out onto the parking lot and stuck her chin out at me. “All the more reason to do what you want, right?”

“Is that your philosophy of life? Do what you want?”

She peered at me coldly. “Why are you dogging me again?”

“I’m not. I’m trying to help you formulate your voice for your book. Were you under seventeen when you and Thor started having sex?”

She shrank from me in horror. “Duh, what?!”

“I need to know this, Clethra. I have to know this. Because if you were, then we’re talking about statutory rape.”

“I was seventeen,” she said earnestly. “And that’s the truth. Not that I hadn’t, y’know, been wanting him bad for a while.”

“How long a while? When did you start to think of him that way?”

“I guess I was twelve or thirteen maybe. Like, I always had this crush on him, y’know? Sometimes when I was in bed I could hear the two of them playing Dick at Nite. Mom’s this really intense moaner. Just like I am.” She shot me a coy little glance. “And I’d think …”

“You’d think what?”

“That I could make him happier than she could. But I didn’t. We didn’t. I mean, I didn’t even know he felt that way about me, too. Not until that night she was, like, down in Virginia making one of her speeches. It was late and Arvy was in his room asleep. I was in my room studying …” Her eyes shined at me now. Her voice was nearly a whisper. “Thor came in and he just stood there staring at me for the longest time, not saying a word. Finally, I said, like, ‘What is it?’ And he said, like, ‘I can’t stand this anymore. My every fiber wants and needs you. I must have you this instant or I shall explode.’ So … So we kissed. With, y’know, tongues.” She ran hers over her plump lower lip. “And then he undressed me and I undressed him and we fucked our brains out all night long. It was
so
unbelievable. I mean, to know that I could give someone else pleasure—without inhibitions, without regrets, without
her
there telling me what a lazy cow I was. And to get pleasure back from him in return. I just felt sooo alive. And fulfilled, y’know? Maybe for the first time in my whole entire life.”

“All seventeen years of it.”

“It wasn’t my first time, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

“It’s not.”

“I mean, I’d done it all with Tyler, my ex-boyfriend. He was my first. But it all felt dirty somehow. Like he was, y’know, using me. Plus I never got off with him. With Thor …” She paused, searching for the words, a rosy, born-again glow on her face. “With Thor I felt
cleansed
.”

“Did the two of you ever get
cleansed
in front of Arvin?”

“That’s tabloid bullshit!” she cried, outraged. “We’d never do that. That’s, like, sick.”

“Is it possible Arvin saw you two without you knowing about it?”

“I guess,” she conceded. “But he never said anything to me about it.”

“Would he?”

“Shit, yes. Arvy’s my best friend. We’re everything to each other. God, I miss him …” She eyed me suspiciously, her mouth tightening. “Thor wanted me and I wanted him. I make him feel good in bed. Raisin Tits can’t. She’s too old and dried up.”

“She’s fifty-six. That’s not so old.”

“Oh, yeah? Who would you rather fuck if you had a choice—her or me? That’s cold, homes, I know. But who would you?”

I didn’t touch that one. I didn’t like what my answer would be. I especially didn’t like that she
knew
what my answer would be.

She was eying me playfully now, the way she’d eyed Dwayne. “Y’know, you’re kind of cute, in a dissipated, weary, older man kind of way.”

Lulu immediately reappeared, a low, threatening growl coming from her throat. She’s exceedingly territorial when it comes to other women. I let her back into the Jag so she could guard me as well as get as much wet sand as possible all over the floor.

“People will want the dirty details, Clethra,” I warned her. “That’s why the publisher is paying you this much money. Are you prepared to give them what they want?”

“Sure, I don’t care,” she said lightly. “I’m not, like, ashamed to talk about it. I just don’t understand why people keep wanting to make it out to be something sleazy.”

“We’re a sleazy people. Something to do with our Puritan heritage, near as I can figure.”

“But Thor and me aren’t sleazy. Our love is timeless and life—”

“Life-affirming. I know, I know. Do you have anything you want to tell the young women out there who’ll be buying your book?”

She pondered this a long moment, frowning. “Like what?”

“Something you’ve learned from this experience, possibly.”

“Okay, sure,” she said eagerly. “Here it is: Just because your mama says it’s so don’t mean it is. Like, if you love somebody, you love him, okay? I mean, you have control over your own body and your own life. And so what if she says it’s wrong? I mean, Romeo and Juliet’s families thought what they were doing was totally wrong, didn’t they? And it
wasn’t.
It was totally excellent. Because they were in
love.
Girls just get so fucked up about what our moms or our friends think about the guy we’re seeing. Y’know, like if he’s too ‘old’ or too ‘different’ or—”

“Or your stepfather?”

“Well, yeah,” she agreed readily.

I tugged at my ear. “So you see you and Thor as a Romeo and Juliet kind of thing?”

“Well, yeah. A little.” She peered at me searchingly. “I mean, don’t you?”

“And what about the women’s movement?”

She made a face like I’d just asked her to eat raw liver. “Mom’s thing? What about it?”

“Any thoughts?”

“Not really. Whatever you want to say is fine. Thor said you’re real liberated and shit.”

“Thor said that?”

“Uh-huh. Can we go now? He’ll be wondering where I am.”

“He misses you that much?”

“Well, sure. Plus he always likes to get him some in the afternoon.” Her eyes flashed at me wickedly. “If you know what I mean.”

“Yes, I’m afraid I do,” I said, starting up the Jag. Lulu, she just covered her head with her paws and moaned.

We left for Crescent Moon Pond before dusk, backpacking deep into the woods to get there. We came upon old stone walls erected before the Civil War by the hardscrabble Yankees who had tried to farm this stony soil before fleeing to the gentler pastures west of the Ohio. We climbed over huge trees downed by the great hurricane of ’38 that still lay there, rotting on the forest floor, newer trees growing right up out of them. It was nearly dark when we finally arrived, and so quiet we could hear the fluttering of bat wings overhead. Lulu stayed very close to me.

Crescent Moon Pond wasn’t much. Maybe a half mile across, with a severe crook in the middle and a few rickety shacks, deserted now that summer was gone. The place has powerful memories for me. One of those shacks belonged to Cam Noyes. I helped him write a book. Maybe you read it. Or about it.

I made a fire and got dinner started. We’d brought a quart of Merilee’s chili and a loaf of sourdough. I started the chili heating and put water on for coffee. Thor, he was more interested in the pond.

“Just how cold is that water?” he wondered, rubbing his hands together with anticipation.

“Plenty cold. Forties, I imagine.”

“Good!” he exclaimed.

“Good?”

He tore off his clothes and went running in, naked, roaring lustily. He dove for the bottom. And he didn’t come back up. By that I mean, like, never. The man was down there so long I was getting ready to go in after him. Until suddenly he shot to the surface way out in the middle, sputtering and gasping. He treaded water there for a moment, catching his breath, and then he started back, his stroke strong and steady.

“I’m getting there!” he cried triumphantly when he’d reached shallow water.

“Getting where, Thor?”

He shook himself like a bear, toweling himself with his socks. “I’m in training, boy,” he informed me, hanging them over the fire to dry. “Got to improve my stamina. I’m sailing solo around the world soon as spring hits. Journal should make for one helluva book.”

I handed him the bottle of Laphroaig I’d brought along. It’s a rather peaty single malt. Not to everyone’s liking. “And what will Clethra do?”

He took a gulp, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Whatever she wants. I don’t own her. Although it’s my hope she’ll resume her education.”

I watched him climb back into his clothes, thinking how so utterly typical this was of him. He was always stirring things up and then taking off, leaving nothing but roiling upheaval in his wake. Turmoil was the man’s oxygen. Sure, this was vintage Thor Gibbs, all right. So I wasn’t surprised. I just wondered if little Clethra knew the slightest damned thing about it.

He made himself comfortable next to the fire, grinning at me with boyish mischief. “Want to drop some acid?”

“Why, did you bring some?”

“Hell, no. Makes me too sane.” He scratched his beard, studying me. “Just trying to figure out where your head’s at.”

“On top of my neck, last time I looked.”