Watch Your Mouth (5 page)

“
Sir?
You’re making me feel old.” Dr. Glass took his handful of crumbs and dropped them into the bowl I was holding.

“Sorry. Nice going, Dr. Glass.”

“Call me Ben.” Ben leaned over to me and I saw suddenly the same curve in his lip as I saw in Cyn’s whenever she leaned in to kiss me. I found myself wondering if the curves tasted the same, father and daughter.

“Nice going, Ben.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I’m just—I want to tell you something.”

He tied an apron over his crotch and turned on the faucet. “Be- fore you start living here, with us, for three months or however long it is.”

Something about the way the bassoons were murmuring made me not want to hear it. “Do you want me to dry, or maybe I should shake the tablecloth out?”

Ben smiled sheepishly:
I don’t mean to embarrass you.
“I don’t mean to embarrass you. It’s just that—I think mothers are more protective of their children immediately. I mean right
after.
Birth. Because they came out of their
bodies,
you know? I mean, of course I had a hand in it.” He held up his hand; I pictured what
it
was. “It takes two, right?”

“Tablecloth?” I asked. “Shake it out?” Or hose you down, Ben?

“But I think the father feels more protective later, when she’s grown up. When she’s become a woman.” Ben turned off the faucet and wiped his hands so there was a damp spot in the middle of his apron. “Look, Joseph,” he said. “You seem like a very nice young man. Sheesh, now I’m making
myself
sound old. I mean you seem very nice. But I wanted to tell you—well, Cynthia is a very pretty girl. I look at her and I can see how you would look at her.” He walked over and leaned into me again. If I just stood on half-tiptoe—“I don’t mean it like that. You seem nice.” Suddenly I realized what all this was about— a fatherly talk. He was nervous but protective. All this sex blather was just his way of eventually arriving at the same old girlfriend-father point: Don’t you abuse my daughter. Many boyfriends were resentful of this kind of thing, but I understood it. I had the same feeling as I lay in bed with Cyn and felt the results of our sex evaporate, off to impregnate the air some-

where. The wetness on my leg—that had come from
me. Mine.
I could imagine how protective I’d feel if my fluid grew up, walked around, majored in something. Ben had obviously felt this way since he rolled out of Mrs. Glass’s legs flush with fa- therhood. Or maybe Mrs. Glass, like her daughter, preferred to be on top; I could picture her lowering herself onto him like a wet guillotine.

“What do you want to tell me, Ben?”

“I can see what you see: she’s attractive.”

The orchestra, in one big unison blast: BRUM! “Cyn?” I asked. “You find Cyn attractive?”

“I don’t
find
her attractive. I
know
she’s attractive. She
is
at- tractive.”

With each tense of the conjugation: BRUM! BRUM! BRUM! Obviously I was overtired. I reminded myself that Mrs. Glass had been glad Cyn was getting
paid.
Ben was probably saying
protective, objective, progressive, exhaustive.
Any of the words that rhyme, that over the sound of the faucet, wouldn’t be
at- tractive
. Over the roar of rinse-water it could have been any- thing. But the faucet was
off,
those of you who couldn’t find parking and are now guided into your seats by those pinpoint flashlights the ushers carry. The faucet was
off
. He said
attrac- tive.
The opera was really starting up.

“Are you talking about incest?” I asked, but Ben just turned and smiled at me like I hadn’t said anything.

This is the first entrance of one of the orchestral leitmotifs that will keep popping up as the plot-knot is tied tighter: The Unknown Dread. Lurking in the backing of the aria like a rapist hiding behind the fire escape, The Unknown Dread is usually sounded by some trombones: a simple, sinister tune, dark and

low like fog on a swamp. The Unknown Dread, abbreviated in music criticism journals as “T.U.D.,” will creep in and out of the orchestration whenever vague and hopefully-imagined trou- ble clouds the stage like hot water, filling pans that need to soak overnight.

“Funny you should say that,” he said. “A laugh riot,” I said.

“No, it
is.
Somebody was just talking—but they didn’t call it—what did they call it?”

“Um,”

“Intergenerational sex!”
he said triumphantly. Hooray. “Somebody—actually, at the hospital, you won’t believe his name. Like the book—well, it doesn’t matter. He was saying that when there’s a new member of the family—well, not of the family, no, but say a daughter’s first—well, not first, of course, you and I both know that. But when a lover enters a family, it can make bare—what’s the term? Lay bare? Lay something. Anyway, a father’s—well, let’s not speak in such general terms. My own feelings for my daughter is what I’m talking about. If you think of it as
intergenerational sex
you can think of it in its true terms—genetic interchange. What did he say? A force of nature. If I were attracted to Cynthia it would be for a reason— the continuation of the species, probably. Which makes sense if you think about it. You agreed that my genes have made some wonderful-looking children. Well, Cynthia has half of my ge- netic material. If she and I were to mate, the genetic pool for our children would be smaller. So the chances of producing more beautiful children would actually be greater. See? Inter- generational sex actually makes a lot of sense from a genetic perspective.”

In my stomach, the salmon turned like a kicking fetus. I tasted my own sour breath, and nougat. He wasn’t repeating something that somebody else had said: that was the oldest trick in the book, like calling a suicide hotline and pretending it’s vicarious:
I have a friend who is thinking of killing himself. He’s staring at a whole bottle of pills right now.
If you think something yourself, and it’s something that would shock people, you pre- tend other people said it. “Having sex with your daughter,” I said, “doesn’t make any sense at all.”

“Dad!” Steven’s tenor is heard offstage.

“Of course, of course,” he said dismissively. “Never mind. I see I’ve strayed here. You and Cyn will not sleep in the same room, is what I mean, because I have these feelings for her. They’re natural. Having sex with your daughter doesn’t make sense, of course not, not if you think of it as
having sex,
no. But even though it involves some of the same actions”—here he poked a finger—“it’s not the same thing as having sex. There’s an old saying: If I hit you on the head with a frying pan, would you call it cooking?” He picked up a frying pan and faced me.

“Dad!”

He blinked and dunked the frying pan into the sink. “I’m doing the dishes!” he called to Steven. “See what I mean, Jo- seph? But I’ve strayed. This isn’t what I wanted to tell you at all. I wanted to—I just mean, Cynthia is—well, a
dish.
And she’s as delicate as one. I mean a real one. To me. And I just want you to treat her—well, the way
I
would treat her. The way I
do
treat her. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Perfectly,” I said in sort of a growl, and then barged right on. “Because I understand what can happen to a dish—or any- thing made of ceramics. Mrs. Glass was telling me. Sometimes

all the flaws can line up in the same way, and disasters can happen.” I swallowed. “Broken legs and such.”

“DAD!”

“I’m
doing the dishes!
” he bellowed, looking fiercely at me. I looked right back at him. I was feeling pretty adhesive—
protective
—myself. The wetness on my leg wasn’t the only thing in the bedroom that was mine. There was one dish he wasn’t going to do. I looked at my hand, which was turning red from gripping Gramma’s parfait glass. I put it down. My hand throbbed.

Steven came into the kitchen wearing only shorts. “I just wanted to
talk
to you about something,” he said to his father sourly, and I watched the two of them. Steven’s chest had only a small triangle of downy hair on it, very light tan and descend- ing lazily to a point below the waist of his pants. I was a little surprised at the amount of hair, as Steven seemed so young, but I remembered my own body back in high school, remembered each eager patch of new hair, perky as crabgrass.

The Glass males began to argue over a compass of Ben’s that Steven had just broken. Sort of a corny closing symbol, but it
is
an opera and I had no idea what direction the summer was going. I watched them bicker. Steven had the same curve in his lip, and the pattern of chest hair was probably genetic, too. That meant below his shirt the doctor probably had a thicker isos- celes waiting for Cynthia to run her fingers through it. Picturing the two of them naked together made me grow trembling cold, even in the still-steaming kitchen. I felt a thin, nauseous ray of fear go through my torso, sharp and tiny like an icicle. A thorn of pain, a prick. Curtain.

ACT I, SCENE TWO

Later that night. A cymbal crash lingers over lush strings as the curtain rises to reveal the sweltering attic of the Glass home. Joseph has agreed to sleep there for the duration of the summer, one floor above the rest of the family in a small triangular guest room. It seems to Joseph that when heat rises in the Glass home, it rises into this room. It feels like a kiln. There’s a double bed that dips down like a saggy diaper or a parenthesis. A small scuffed desk has been cleared for writing Joseph’s paper, waiting for books travelling in a box which will never arrive, though of course I didn’t know that yet. A small white bureau filled with empty drawers, a closet with the door half-open and wire hang- ers jingling from the lethargic breeze of the ceiling fan. Some- time tomorrow Joseph will unpack. Right now his duffels of clothing are on the floor, unzipped but unmolested. Which is more than we can say for the characters on the stage: Cyn and Joseph, naked on top of the bedsheets. The orchestra’s pastoral strings are soft enough that the audience can hear our sweaty skin sticking and slapping as we go at it.

That night was an erotic milestone for me, one of those nights my mind would creep back to, years later and past curfew. It would play in the cramped porn theater in my mind at the slightest cue: when eating something that would run down my chin, when turbulence would make my airplane seat shake compulsively beneath my buttocks. I’d imagine it years later, alone in a dingy apartment, my days weighted by a lengthy recovery program. I’d imagine it months later, while Cyn and I were having sex that wasn’t as good. I’d imagine it days later when one of my campers, having not reached the age of total

self-consciousness, reached up the leg of her denim shorts, the better to scratch a tiny bleeding bug bite where my knuckles were resting now.

We were far away from one another, with our arms extended so that three of my fingers were inside her while her hand stretched to encircle me in a motion I always found breathtaking in its languid laziness. But not now—she was much shorter than me, so she could only grab my knee. The room was so hot that we were attempting maximum pleasure with minimum contact. Her inflamed sex was spread before me like one of those im- ported fruits you have to chop open to reach the edible part. Her fingers joined mine inside her, her chubby ring finger en- twined with my index like sumo wrestlers. As her breathing got shorter and shorter her fingers contracted into a grappling hook; I faintly heard the crack of the skin on my knee breaking. I slipped on the sheets and fell face-first into her. We pulled our fingers out and I wrapped my hands around her like I was drink- ing soup. Once I open my mouth there’s no stopping me. Her hands flailed to reach me and her moans turned to shrieks; to the audience I’m sure it looks for a minute like I’m killing her. Then she pushed herself away from me and sat up. I looked at her and she put two fingers in my mouth; one tasted like her sex and on the other one I could feel the thick, unwieldy taste of my own blood. It was running down my leg. It smeared a patch of burgundy on Cyn’s dark skin when she pushed me to her and I opened the bedstand drawer for the required erotic catching mitt. After a brief and painful misthrust I was inside her. I was grateful to the family for taking me in this summer. Neither of us wanted to be underneath another body in this overheated attic so we stayed sitting up, Cyn’s breasts swinging

against mine like damp balloons every time we moved. Our mouths were hot, so kissing was uncomfortable, but we kept our mouths open and close to one another until our breathing found a sharp rhythm. She moved her hands from behind her back—I saw three of her fingernails had specks of blood be- neath them from my knee—and around me, urging me on, and in. All the prepositions were in use: on, in, out, along, around, amongst, and as one of her fingers dipped lower and lower down the center of my back, through. Her finger was just barely inside me, like she was pushing a button. Which she might as well have been: we both lost complete control, pushing so fast it was more like shuddering, shuddering so completely it was more like a seizure, seizuring so hard that the orchestra has to extend its budget and hire some additional percussionists just for these ten measures or so.

My ears were still ringing when I finally wilted and the juice of our efforts flooded beneath us in a sudden wet stain. To- morrow we’d feel the same thing in broad daylight during the Welcoming Water Balloon Fight at Camp Shalom. Just then we slithered apart, leaning against opposite bedposts like prizefighters mid-round. My whole crotch was waterlogged, as was Cyn’s, although my blood had apparently evaporated dur- ing the excursion, or maybe just rubbed in, lotion-like. My knee stung. The sheets were a liquid mess. “Next time we have to do this in your room,” I said. “I can’t believe I have to sleep on all this.”

“It’ll feel good,” Cyn said. Her leg was stretched out into the air making a faint giraffe-shadow on the wall. I watched it chew as she wiggled. “Plus, we can’t do it in my bedroom. It’s between my parents’ and Steven’s. They can hear everything.
You’ll
be