Watch Your Mouth (20 page)

“That book you’re carrying around wherever you go?”

“It’s
helping
me,” I said. “I’m trying to—I’m in
recovery
from all these things that happened.” I looked down at the Statement again; it was blurrier, but not, I realized, from sweat at all. I was crying all over it. “I consider myself sick. It’s difficult for me to—”

“What do you mean, everybody was sleeping together? They were all having affairs?”

I took a breath and remembered the second step: I had to believe that a power greater than me could restore me to sanity. If I wanted a Styrofoam cup of coffee, I had to throw my change in the coffee can decorated with Bindings giftwrap stickers, con- tributing to the Employee Coffee Fund. But the government was paying for Good Cop’s coffee. That was
power. Faith
. The sec- ond step. “With each
other,
” I said. My reflection wiped its nose. “With each
other.
”

I caught Good Cop mid-sip and he grimaced and swallowed, reluctantly. Mimi had done that when she stood up, retying her nightgown. “You mean—? You can’t be—?” His reflection wiped its eyes. “No.”

“It’s
true.
”

“
All of
—I can’t believe you.”

“Yes,”
I said, “
yes.
And then Mimi—that’s the mom—was so upset about it that I think she, I don’t know, dabbled in voodoo or something. Jewish voodoo—she built a—you’re not going to believe this part, but she would sneak down to the basement

and perform, I don’t really—some kind of experiment, no, some kind of
ritual
I guess. I know it’s hard to believe, but she was sneaking downstairs and—”

“She
couldn’t,
” Good Cop said darkly, “even
bend her knees.
Listen to you. The rabbi
told
me, O.K.? She was
very sick
. She wasn’t sneaking around doing whatever you think she was sneaking around doing.”

“I
saw
her,” I said. “I
saw
her bending her knees. I don’t think—look, I
know
how it sounds—”

Good Cop glared at me, his reflection, I could see, shimmer- ing in the one-way glass. “You’re not making any sense.”

“I’m not sure she’s dead.”

Not shimmering. He was trembling.

“They
all,
” I said, “slept together. I
know
this. And she made a monster and now it’s killed Stephen. Probably me next, or maybe Ben.”

“You
are
sick,” he said. “Talking about a family that way. A family with so much—the rabbi told me
all
about it, all this tragedy—and then at the
funeral,
the daughter being—and now
look at you,
telling these sick stories. Who are you? What the hell are you doing?”

“I’m
trying,
” I said, but when I looked at my reflection I saw it was useless. I heard, suddenly, what it all sounded like, all this ranting and opera and voodoo.
Nothing.
All these half- remembered details forced into a myth, like a foot in a glass slipper—these were just nothing
and
semantics. My faith was crumbling like the rim of a cheap cup and I couldn’t think of anything, anything to say. “What are you going to do with me?”
“Nothing,”
Good Cop barked. “We
can’t
do anything. Any lawyer could get you out of here in five minutes anyway, we

don’t have anything against you except you seem like you’ve lost your fucking mind.” He stood up and put his hand
firmly
on the back of my neck, the way a lover might in order to kiss you harder or to keep your tongue in
that very spot,
because you were
so close
. A fucking mind indeed. But he was just es- corting me out.

Bad Cop was sitting behind grimy glass in the lobby, giving me a manila envelope with my keys, my wallet and
Breaking the SPELL,
and a dirty look. To have been behind the mirror he would’ve had to sprint, unless there was a network of hallways I couldn’t see, a whole way of getting around that was denied me. I’d believe that, too. Anything.

“We’ll be keeping an eye on you,” Good Cop said. “Thank you,” I said.

“Don’t leave town,” Bad Cop said, a stock exit line if there ever was one.

Out in the parking lot I realized blankly that the Cops had driven me there, leaving my car outside my apartment. I was only a few squares away but I didn’t know how I’d get there. I believed that a power greater than me could restore me to sanity, still, but I wasn’t sure it would get me a ride. Until I saw Lauren in the parking lot. Leaning against her car, shielding her eyes with those angular sunglasses only Gentiles can pull off. With- out a word, her face unreadable behind the UV protection, she opened the passenger door and left it gaping as she strolled around to drive me home. We hadn’t been going out very long, hadn’t met her family yet even though they were just a couple of towns over. Lauren was Assistant Manager, which meant she didn’t have to sign in and out when she took breaks. Her change

stayed in the tidy pocket of her wallet because she was welcome to have a cup from the Manager’s espresso machine in his office. She was, it occurred to me as I buckled up, a power greater than me. I let her drive me home any route she wanted, having reached the third step:
I made a decision to turn my will and life over to a higher power
.

“I don’t,” she said, breaking the silence, “like lying to the police,” and I knew I had to answer her.

Step 4

My bed wasn’t made and I was pretty sure that wouldn’t turn out to be an opportunity to lie in it. Lauren put down her purse on the same little prefab table where she always put her purse down; behind it a subscription card from some magazine I’d swiped from Bindings leaned up against the wall like a white picket fence.

“Everyone at work is talking about it,” she said, sitting down in one of the chairs still in tableau from Step 1.

“Am I going to get fired?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I covered for you, but every- body knows about”—she gestured at the unmade bed—“us. Even the cops know.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t be there today,” I said.

“It’s O.K. Slow day. Those new
Charlotte’s Web Syndrome
s came in, but the world can wait until tomorrow for that.”

“Right,” I said. I sat down on the bed but it sagged beneath me, untrustworthy and loose, and I moved to the floor, drop- ping the manila envelope beside me. Lauren’s eyes followed me like I was curtsying to her.

“What is going on?” she said, finally.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Well, I—I guess I
do
know. Sort of, anyway.”

“The police asked where you were last night,” she said. “I told them you were doing inventory at the store, because that’s where you were
supposed
to be. I
wish
you would stop doing that, by the way. George—well,
everybody
thinks I let you get away with it because you’re my—whatever-you-are.”

“
Boyfriend.
What?”

“A
boyfriend,
” she said carefully, as if learning a new word, “wouldn’t keep blowing off work when he knows that his
girl- friend
won’t fire him. What do you
do,
when you disappear like that? Where do you go?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, wherever you go, now you’re in trouble with the po- lice. And
I
am, because I lied.
Shit!
How’d you even—what in the world—some
murder,
is that right? At the Morrison Lab?”

“My”—can’t say
girlfriend
—“brother.”

She blinked, softened like a crumbling cake. “Your brother? Your brother has been killed?
Jesus,
Joseph!” She said it again. “
Jesus,
Joseph.” All that was missing was Mary. “I didn’t even know you
had
a brother.”

I sighed. “He’s not
my
brother,” I said. “He’s someone else’s.

He’s the brother of—”

The cake reiced. “Joseph,” she said, “what are you talking about?”

I felt myself sink in, drawing weight. “You matter,”
Breaking

the SPELL
said in what I now would hear as Ben’s voice. I
was
matter. I felt my whole weight and volume sink into the rug, all angst and Archimedes’s Principle. “It’s a long story,” I said.

“I took the day off.” Behind her, the pale sun filtered through the screen and Santa’s head, bending the light all wrong and mangled, the wrong way. The day was off, all right.

“I met Cyn Glass,” I said, “in the fall of several years ago.”

I met Lauren the day I got my job, and she was the one who recommended the converted motel to me when I mentioned I needed a place to live. She tried to draw a map on the back of a promotional flyer for a lowfat cookbook with recipes in it she actually cooked for me later, in her identical apartment eight doors down. The map came out all wrong and she decided to show me instead, giving me the job and letting me follow her down the highway past the cheap restaurants we’d later treat each other to. She parked gently and accurately, shrugging her car neatly between the lines so I could glide right in next to her, and I knew then, like the other girls in the other towns in the part I skipped over, that she’d let me into her body with the same tidy consideration. After two of the restaurants and three of the twelve screens at the multiplex down the way it was true. She had golden hair, long and dry like the hills of the drought, eyes so simple and clear they might have been biological models and breasts I would caress underneath her nametag when we’d take a break together. It shocked her. She was so noncommittal I couldn’t tell if she was struck dumb by my voraciousness or if there was just nothing else to do in the suburbs. She said she loved me and bought me a sweater which I removed, telling her I loved her, in order to bring her to quiet orgasm with my tongue while the stir-fry overcooked. She placed her hand on the back of my neck, like a police escort, to keep me in the right place. I hoped she always would. She was a healthy choice, like the reduced-fat yogurt instead of the full creamy richness at Get

Your Licks. Lauren was promoted to assistant manager when I was promoted to the floor. Aside from the store we rarely saw each other more than twice a week, maintaining an equal fiction of busy lives even though I just moped at home with
Breaking the SPELL
and my own dirty mind, and she just printed mass mailings from her computer with all her high-school essays still saved on it. She was hoping to become a professional organizer. I was hoping to be professionally organized.

“That’s,” she said, “crazy. That’s
crazy.
” If she smoked there would have been a pile of butts in something she’d use as an ashtray. “That’s a crazy story.”

“I know.”

“Crazy.”

“I
kno—
”

“No,”
she said, standing up, sitting down. “You
don’t
know, Joseph. If you knew how crazy it was you wouldn’t be here. If you knew how crazy it was you wouldn’t have followed what’s- his-name, Simon—”

“Stephen. I didn’t follow him.”

“—
here.
If you knew how crazy it was you wouldn’t even be
telling
—I can’t believe I told—I
lied
to the police, and you’re— it’s
crazy,
Joseph.
Crazy.
”

“I know.”

“You
can’t possibly—
”

I broke the seal on the manilla envelope and held up Ben’s book. “Look, I
do
know, O.K.? I
know
it’s crazy. I’m trying to get myself out of this. There aren’t organized twelve-step pro- grams for absolutely everything, but the twelve steps are blue- prints—”

“You’ve
lost the blueprint,
Joseph. You—you need
help.
”

“I’m learning to help myself.”

“You don’t need help from a
book
by the
father
of the
girl- friend
you—
Jesus,
Joseph,
listen
to yourself. What is going through your head?”

“Everything,”
I said tiredly, “is going through my head. I’m trying to do some rerouting.”

Outside on the highway somebody honked their horn. I smiled; I couldn’t help it. Lauren looked at me sternly for a second, and then joined me, in the smile and on the floor. It was the horn that did it, the perfect sound effect here in the suburbs:
As you can see, the universe is perfect. Don’t lie about it.
“I can’t lie to you,” I said, probably lying. “I just don’t know

what’s going on. I’m scared, Lauren. I’m—”

She put a palm on my forehead, some gesture of benediction. My tears came like she flicked a switch. I tried to finish my sentence, a good little prisoner, but the walls came down and I sobbed in her arms. It was a good thing, to live out here in a land perfectly devised with a girl who’d take the day off to lie for you. But I couldn’t do it. Something was tearing this life apart, bending it the wrong way, something made of clay which rose from the rivers of my mind only to sink back into them when I tried to catch up. I had to look for something submerged, like Archimedes, sitting in his bath and figuring out how every- thing worked. Lauren, however, didn’t need help; she’d found something submerged as she held me, my groin firing up. Her other hand cupped me between my legs, peaking the khakis as my crying subsided.

“Ssh,” she said, rubbing.
“Ssh.”
We fell together. I undressed

her, the snaps and buckles and elastic all biting my hands which

were shaking with the impatience of waiting in line for some- thing. Her skin was sweaty and I could see, kissing her neck, where her makeup left off and the real thing began. Her sex rubbed up against my lips like a raccoon, like I was the trash she wanted to get into, but I didn’t scare it away. Her mouth skipped that part, no matter how brazenly I hinted: brushing my erection against her chin, her cheek, holding her head in my hands like a globe and moving it toward my country of choice. But Lauren’s mouth would not go south. In the prickle of the rug, with her hands moving like she was shaking a bottle of salad dressing, my tongue dreamt of another place.