Underworld (16 page)

“You were a sensitive boy.”

“I was scrawny and mute, barely human. You were a strapping kid who beat the crap out of kids like me.”

“We didn't have any kids like you,” I told him.

“You carried a rubber?”

“In the little slit pocket in my dungarees.”

“By the time I was sixteen they weren't doing that anymore.”

“They're doing it now,” I said.

“I don't think my brother ever used the condom in his wallet. When he got a car he put it in the car. He put it in the glove compartment. That's when I think he finally got to use it.”

A man was singing softly along, crooning the lyrics on the sound system. He moved haltingly toward us, pushing a cylinder of oxygen on wheels, a gray-haired guy, with tubes from the tank running all the way up into his nose. The tank was the size of a dachshund in a custom case. And he sang, he crooned in a rasping voice—he had the phrasing, the timing just right, the lazy line endings, some insipid lyric about a farewell letter, only altered in his gnawed voice to a life's own shape, felt in the deepest skin.

We moved out of the way to let him pass.

Behind the products and their uses we glimpsed the industry of vivid description. Dermasilk and astroglide and reservoir-tipped. There were condoms packaged as Roman coins and condoms in matchbook folders. Brian read aloud from the copy on the boxes. We had natural animal membranes and bubblegum scenting. We had condoms that glowed in the dark and foreplay condoms and condoms marked with graffiti that stretched to your erection, a letter becoming a word, a word that expands to a phrase. He did a little Churchill—
We shall wear them on the beaches
. We had lollipop condoms, we had boxer shorts printed with cartoon characters shaped like condoms standing on end, sort of floaty and nipple-headed, who spoke a language called Spermian.

A young woman stood near the door, a Ramses logo tattooed on her earlobe.

“My kid's got one of those,” Brian said. “Only it says Pepsi. Should I be grateful?”

“Which kid?”

“Which kid. What's the difference?”

Brian was wary of his family. He adopted the put-upon pose of the father complaining routinely about kids who are careless with money
and forgetful of every caution, we all have this act we perform, it amounts to a second language, the dad's easy-to-master lament, and Brian did scornful solos of high animation, but he also harbored something deeper and sadder, a sense that these were his enemies, forces loose in his own house prepared to drain him of self-worth, a stepdaughter, a daughter and a son, all in high school, and a wife, he said, who was a couple of bubbles off center.

“That's not the only thing she's got planted on her body.”

“Which kid?” I said.

“Brittany.”

“I like Brittany. Be nice to her.”

“Be nice to her. Listen to this, she wears an armband, you won't believe this—they had Apartheid Simulation Day at her school.”

“What's that?”

“What it says. They attempt to simulate the culture of apartheid. A lesson for the kids. They all wore armbands. You wore gold if you were the oppressed class and I think red if you were the military and green if you were the elite. Brittany volunteered for the oppressed class and now she won't take her armband off. The official simulation lasted one day but she's been doing this for weeks now. Nobody else is doing this but her. She restricts her access to the lunchroom, ten minutes a day. She only rides certain buses at certain times. She sits in a specified area of the classroom.”

“How do the other kids react?”

“She gets spat upon and shunned.”

He made a TV screen with his hands, thumbs horizontal, index fingers upright, and he looked out at me from inside the frame, eyes crossed, tongue lolling in his head.

We took a final turn around the room. A boy and girl in one of the murals sat in a booth with ice-cream sundaes and frosty glasses of water and long-handled spoons for the sundaes and the scene was not contrived to be charming but was close to documentary in tone and the whole place was a little museumlike, I thought, with time compressed and objects arrayed of evolutionary interest. And a woman sang a ballad about a chapel in the moonlight, vaguely familiar to me, and I turned to see if the man with the oxygen tank was still singing along.

Brian bought a package of condoms to give to his son David, a buddy-buddy thing, a token of communication and accord. We went outside and stood in the empty plaza and he opened the box and removed a single sheath in its foil wrap. He looked at it. He had a sputter-laugh he saved for certain occasions, like a semidrowned man bitter about being rescued, and he looked at the thing and laughed.

“Everybody talked about VD then. The clap was a term with a very decisive ring to it. The clap.”

“The siff.”

“All those terms, one worse than the other. But I couldn't detect a saving element in a condom. Maybe because it brought to mind another term.”

“Scumbag.”

“And in my little retard sort of twelve-year-old brain, maybe I sensed a secret life in this object in my brother's wallet, this scumbag—how could a thing called a scumbag be safe to use?”

“We're waste managers,” I told him. “Scumbags are things we deal with.”

“But think of the contempt we invest in this word. It's an ugly word. Full of self-loathing.”

“Never mind the words. You bought a rubber for your kid because it's important for him to use it. I hate to be sensible. I know it's thankless to be sensible in the face of someone's primitive distrust.”

“You're right.”

“People have to use these things.”

“You're right,” he said. “It's thankless.”

He unwrapped the condom and shook it out until the nipple end swung lightly in the breeze. Then he crumpled the thing in his fist and held it to his nose.

He said, “What does it smell like? Is it shower curtains? Is it car upholstery or lampshade liner? Is it those big blocky garment bags where you store the clothes you never wear?”

He was inhaling deeply, trying to absorb the odor, retain it fully so he might mark its nature. His lean head flared, red-roostered. He thought it might be the smell of the bubble wrap around your new computer when you take it out of the shipping container. Or the shipping
container itself. Or the computer itself. Or the plastic baggies that have been in your freezer too long, collecting Freon fumes. He thought it might be a hospital smell, a laboratory smell, a discharge from a chemical plant. He couldn't place it exactly. The insulation in your walls. The filter in your air conditioner.

“I thought they were odor-free. Modern condoms,” I said. “Except when flavor is added.”

“That's the new type that's odor-free. I bought him the old cheap latex that binds the sex member and reduces the sensation and smells bad. Because I want him to pay a price for being sensible.”

Marian sat in Jeff's room watching a movie on TV. I had to adjust to the sight of someone else in his room. His room was his animal den, his pelt and smell, and I thought she was committing some breach of species, sitting in there.

She wore beat-up jeans and an old tank top that drooped in front, the kind of woman who grows into her beauty, I think, who becomes beautiful over time and then one day you see it, sort of suddenly and all together—it becomes a local scandal of surprise and comment.

“When did you start smoking again?”

“Shut up,” she said.

I told her about Condomology. I stood in the doorway and talked above the noise from the movie. She was fine-skinned, assertive in a way that was all featural—slightly angular of face, straight-nosed, dark-haired, no-nonsense-looking, very near classical in an American way, a certain sort of old-fashioned way that doesn't stray drastically from plainness, like the face cut in raised relief on the old soap bar, maybe it was Camay, I'm not sure, the woman's head in profile, with marcelled hair, although Marian's was straight.

“Where's Jeff?”

“Went out. I'm watching this.”

I told her about Apartheid Simulation Day, standing in the doorway.

She said, “I'm watching this.”

“Want something? I want something.”

“Mineral water be nice,” she said.

I went to the kitchen and got all the things out of all the compartments. I poured the mineral water over ice in a tall glass and dropped a wedge of lemon in. Got the potato vodka from the freezer, smoky cold, and remembered what it was I wanted to say to her. I cut a lune of lemon skin and dropped it in a port glass.

I wanted to say something about Brian.

I'd tried drinking port for a while just to see how it would feel, how it would sound, a port glass, a fortified wine, and now I used the port glass for my vodka, pouring it syrupy cold and opal.

I heard the dialogue from the movie at the other end of the house.

Her skin was Camay-pure and her hair was dark and straight and she usually wore it short because short was easy. Her voice was shaped, it was deep and toned, sort of vowel round and erotic, particularly over the phone or in the bedroom dark, with brandy static in it or just the slightest throaty thing of night desire.

She used to sing in a church choir in her Big Ten town, she liked to call it, but quit over some belittlement, some perceived slight—how she would hate to hear me say perceived.

I handed her the mineral water and she said something about Brian. I thought she might be trying to preempt my own Brian remark. She'd felt it coming in the routine reading of signals in the marriage sensurround.

“Did he recommend another movie where everybody ends up in a storm sewer shooting each other?”

“This is how Brian relieves the pressure of being Brian.”

I remembered a party where she stuck herself in a corner of the room with a man we both knew slightly, a university poet with long raked hair and stained teeth, laughing—he talked, she laughed, innocent enough, you say, or not innocent at all but completely acceptable, a party's a party, and if the huddle went on far too long, who is to notice but the husband? And I said to her later. This was a long time ago when the kids were small and Marian drove a car without a pencil in her hand. I said to her later, self-importantly because this was the point, to speak with exaggerated dignity, to speak to the depths of my being and make fun of myself at the same time because this is what we do at parties.

I said, I suffer from a rare condition that afflicts Mediterranean men. It's called self-respect.

I stood in the doorway watching the movie with her.

“Will Jeff be living with us forever, do you think?”

“Could happen.”

“The job at the diet ranch. Fell through?”

“I guess.”

“He didn't say?”

“I'm watching this,” she said.

“Did you do the newspapers?”

“I did the bottles. Tomorrow's bottle day. Let me watch this,” she said.

“We'll both watch it.”

“You don't know what's going on. I've been watching for an hour and a quarter.”

“I'll catch up.”

“I don't want to sit here and explain.”

“You don't have to say a word.”

“The movie's not worth explaining,” she said.

“I'll catch up by watching.”

“But you're interfering,” she said.

“I'll be quiet and I'll watch.”

“You're interfering by watching,” she said.

The remark pleased her, it had a tinge of insight, and she stretched smiling in a sort of coiled yawn, hips and legs steady, upper body bent away. I guess I knew what she meant, that another's presence screws up the steady balance, the integrated company of the box. She wanted to be alone with a bad movie and I was standing judgment.

“You work too hard,” I told her.

“I love my job. Shut up.”

“Now that I've stopped working too hard, you work too hard.”

“I'm watching this.”

“You work unnecessarily hard.”

“If he tries to kill her, I'm going to be very upset.”

“Maybe he'll kill her off camera.”

“Off camera, fine. He can use a chain saw. As long as I don't have to see it.”

I watched until my glass was empty. I went back to the kitchen and turned off the light. Then I went into the living room and looked at the peach sienna sofa. It was a new piece, a thing to look at and absorb, a thing the room would incorporate over time. It took the curse off the piano. We had a piano no one played, one of Marian's Big Ten heirlooms, an object like a mounted bearskin, oppressing all of us with its former life.

I turned off the light in the living room but first I looked at the books on the shelves. I stood in the room looking at the peach sienna sofa and the Rajasthani wall hanging and the books on the shelves. Then I turned off the light. Then I checked the other light, the light in the back hall, to make sure it was still on in case my mother had to get up during the night.

I stood in the doorway again. Marian watched TV, body and soul. She lit another cigarette and I went into the bedroom.

I stood looking at the books on the shelves. Then I got undressed and went to bed. She came in about fifteen minutes later. I waited for her to start undressing.

“What do I detect?”

“What do you mean?” she said.

“Between you and Brian.”

“What do you mean?” she said.

“What do I detect? That's what I mean.”

“He makes me laugh,” she said finally.

“He makes his wife laugh too. But I don't detect anything between them.”

She thought about ways to reply to this. It was an amusing remark perhaps, not what I'd intended. She looked at me and walked out of the room. I heard the shower running across the hall and I realized I'd done it all wrong. I should have brought up the subject standing in the doorway while she was watching TV. Then I could have been the one who walks out of the room.