World Gone Water (3 page)

“Like this,” I said, showing Janice how to put her fingers in the holes and lift the ball up onto the ramp. Janice watched the ball roll down, picking up speed, until it thumped in the lane and slowly rolled toward the pins.

Janice clapped wildly as the ball veered into the gutter, grounding past the upright pins.

“You try it,” I suggested, and she said something unintelligible.

She lifted the ball with both hands and loaded it onto the ramp. “Like this,” she said.

“Good job, Janice,” I said. Her ball guttered, and we both stood wondering what to do next.

“Watch,” I said, pushing the ramp to the side. I took up a ball and let it fly down the lane.

“Wheeeeee!” Janice screamed. Everyone looked over, and I thought for a minute I might get into trouble, but the sound of the pins crashing into one another brought cheers and applause from the others, and I just smiled blankly at everyone.

“Are you my brother?” Janice asked.

“What's that?” I asked.

“You're my brother,” she said.

I didn't know what to do, and Janice started pawing at me in a surprisingly lewd manner. I stepped back and Katherine rushed up.

“Sorry,” Katherine said. “She thinks all men are her brother.”

“Oh,” I said.

Janice ignored us and picked up another bowling ball, peering into it as if it were a mirror.

“Where is her brother?” I asked hesitantly.

“He's in jail,” Katherine said.

“Really?”

“He molested her.”

I nodded my head like I understood, because I didn't really know what else to do. The information didn't mean anything to me—I had just met Janice and I didn't know her brother and I was pretty sure her brother's molesting her hadn't made Janice handicapped. Mostly I felt like I couldn't really do anything for Janice even though I knew this about her.

I was sulking about what a crappy person I probably was when Katherine said, “She thinks all men are her brother, so she thinks it's okay for all men to do to her what her brother did.”

Janice began dropping balls right onto the lane, one after another, clapping madly at their dull thumps.

Katherine lunged to stop her.

I thought about men taking advantage of Janice.

I wondered if
I
would.

I wondered if I knew anyone who would.

I could picture several.

All the boys in high school thought my neighbor Talie was pretty, and they all tried to get dates with her. She wasn't as pretty as some of the cheerleaders, but those girls only had what you saw. With Talie, boys knew she felt things most girls didn't, and they wanted to feel them too.

Talie had natural grace. When I wanted to learn how to dance for the Christmas formal, Talie volunteered to help. We would practice in her foster parents' living room, the coffee table standing awkwardly on its end, pushed in the corner to make more space. We pretended we were at a grand ball, hooking up arm in arm in the kitchen doorway, entering the room stride for stride and turning to each other. I bowed and she curtsied.

“Not too fast,” Mrs. Chandler, her foster mother, would say, marking the time by slapping her hand against her leg.

Talie moved majestically and I tried to follow, becoming lost in the way she looked directly into my eyes before she dipped me. My head went right for the floor until I thought I would bring us both down, but her arm would catch, saving me, bringing me back up, making me look graceful too. Talie would spin me out, away from her, and I would rotate like a satellite, pulled back in by her gravity.

“Not too fast,” Talie said. “You're hurting me.”

I eased up.

“Don't stop,” she said. “Just don't go so fast.”

I remember the pain and fear I would feel when I would come while masturbating, but with Talie, things felt different. Her breath was warm and touching her was like running your fingers along clouds.

“Doesn't it feel good?” she would ask.

“I'm going to come,” I said, warning her.

“Shit,” she said, stopping suddenly. “I don't want to get pregnant.”

Talie climbed off and lay on her side, facing me. I felt her fingers on me, moving back and forth, and I did the same for her. We came out of sync, me first, then her. She cupped her hand to keep me from making a mess on the sheets. I watched her lean over the sink in the bathroom as she scrubbed her hands.

Most of the time she would just come over and ask me to. We wouldn't kiss on the mouth or anything corny like that. She would just say she wanted to, and I don't think there was ever a time when I didn't want to. I'd just ask if the coast was clear, and she would nod and lock the door.

“You're learning,” Mrs. Chandler said.

It didn't matter that no one at the formal would dance.

I was glad.

I didn't want to show anyone what Talie had shown me.

Jason wants to come in and say hi, but I tell him it's better if he drops me at the front gate. “I haven't seen JSB in forever,” he says.

“Maybe next time,” I say, and he gets it.

I wait until Jason is out of sight to punch in my gate code. I'm surprised that it still works and the heavy metal gate rolls back on its track, retracting behind the concrete walls of Arrowhead Ranch.

The red Land Cruiser that JSB is going to loan me is parked in the far corner of the driveway. If I could jump into the Land Cruiser and drive away, I would.

Heading up the back walkway, I kick through an overgrown row of birds of paradise, their orangish flowers drooping and rotting. The upright arm of the giant saguaro outside the back kitchen window has rotted too, and it rests elbow-out at the top of the walkway. Weeds sprout up through the graveled cactus beds underneath the picture windows.

I knock on the back door. Through the kitchen window I see a pizza box next to an empty plastic pitcher of iced tea on the cutting block in the middle of the kitchen. I consider going around to the front, to where the bell is, but knock again, harder, until JSB shuffles into the kitchen, sees me, and smiles.

He opens the door with considerable effort, and a stiff foulness rises to my nose when he opens his arms, a smile somewhere deep within him barely visible on his face.

“When?” he asks.

“While you were in Canada,” I say apologetically.

JSB nods. “Was there any trouble there?” he asks.

I shake my head no. “They were fine,” I say.

“I told them to call me if there was—”

“There wasn't,” I say.

We sit at the rattan kitchen table, and JSB reaches for an invisible glass, looks back toward the refrigerator and then at me, leaning comfortably in his chair.

“Did Talie tell you?” he asks.

“That you fired your landscapers?” I ask, smiling.

JSB glances out the window and snorts. “Buckley Cosmetics is going to file for bankruptcy,” he tells me.

I lean back in my chair, stunned. I know so little about the world that I didn't know it was possible for a company to file for bankruptcy twice in its corporate life. The trauma of the previous bankruptcy, when I first came to work for JSB and Buckley, was easily summoned.

“We're so far in the red we need the protection,” he says matter-of-factly. “We were hoping the new line of cosmetics would save us, but the development has been delayed by at least six months and the banks won't cooperate anymore.”

“Can't you take a personal loan?” I ask. I can't remember when I'd last offered advice to anyone. For the first time in a long time I feel like I am really helping someone.

“My credit lines are overextended,” he says, shrugging.

I'm turning it over, trying to come up with the solution, when there's laughter on the walkway. I look out the window, but JSB sits
still in his chair, not turning when the door opens and a woman—a girl, really—who looks like Victoria, JSB's girlfriend when I left for Boca Raton, blond and honey-kissed, but who is not Victoria, saunters in with an embarrassed dark-haired kid no more than eighteen in tow. “Hi,” she says, kissing JSB lightly on his graying hair.

JSB smiles and fingers the pepper shaker on the table.

“We want to use the pool,” the girl says. “Is that all right?”

“Sure,” JSB says. “Help yourself.”

The two disappear as quickly as they arrived, and JSB gets up, motioning for me to follow.

“Thanks for loaning me the vehicle,” I say.

We're in front of the smoked-glass picture window overlooking the pool. JSB drags over a couple of chairs and we sit.

“What's her name?” I ask.

“Erin,” JSB answers.

“How long have you been seeing her?”

“Six months,” he says, sighing.

If a woman in JSB's life lasts six months, it's like ten years in a regular relationship. The six-month anniversary at Arrowhead Ranch usually calls for a locksmith and a reprogramming of the front gate.

“Where is Talie?” I ask, looking toward the end of the house, in the direction of her bedroom.

“I haven't seen her,” JSB says, not taking his eyes off the pool, where Erin and Erin's friend are pushing a volleyball back and forth across the water's surface. “I've been thinking of making Erin … permanent.”

“Really?” I'm as surprised as I was when JSB called from Atlanta when I was seventeen, freshly emancipated, working for JSB as a corporate runner for Buckley Cosmetics—a job Talie helped me get—and told me he was engaged to his high school
sweetheart, whom he'd met up with again. By the time his plane landed in Phoenix a week later, there was no mention of the high school sweetheart, and the whole episode remains an aberrant dream among the very real personalities of the women he's been with before and since.

“The secret is to let them think they're going to get a piece of everything,” JSB used to tell me. “By the time they figure it out, you're ready for the next one.” This advice resurfaced in my mind now and again because it was an unusually calculated thing to say, especially coming from a man who so passionately believed in romance. This advice was repeated with a frequency that suggested it was a joke, something he'd picked up from someone who'd said it, or half said it, or was making a joke too.

Erin and her friend are sitting on the steps in the shallow end, leaning back on their elbows. They collapse in laughter and Erin puts her head on the boy's chest. The boy buries his nose in Erin's wet hair and JSB puts his hand up to the glass window.

“I should probably go,” I say, wondering where Talie is.

JSB awakens from his trance. “The keys are on the counter,” he says. He pats my knee and smiles.

I nod and he turns his gaze back toward the pool, not able to look away from what shines in front of him.

This is an ideal day sometime in the near future:

I meet someone who can appreciate me for what I can offer and we spend a lot of time together. But we don't get trapped by love. We just like being together and we realize that it isn't forever, that eventually we'll move on, but that we'll always remember what we had with each other.

And after that relationship is over, I meet someone else who can appreciate me for what I can offer, etc.

Tuesdays, Jane volunteers at the crisis nursery, and Tuesdays put Jane in a good mood. We both always look forward to Tuesday nights, and this Tuesday night seems especially good because afterward, our backs against the crumpled sheets, we solidify the Utopian Love Code:

“If a man makes promises to a woman and does not keep his promises, another man shall fulfill the obligation,” I start. “If a man has stolen another man's woman, and if that woman was unhappy, that woman shall remain with the man; however, if the woman is said to have been happy, she shall be returned to the man from whom she was stolen.”

This makes Jane giggle and she adds: “If a man has put a spell upon a woman, and has not justified himself, the man shall plunge into the holy river, and if the holy river overcomes him, his intentions are bad; but if the holy river bears him out and shows him innocent, his intentions are good and he may proceed with his sorcery.”

“If a fire breaks out in a woman's heart and a man extinguishes the fire, he shall be set fire himself.”

“If a man has married a wife and has not made her feelings and her property part of a whole, she is no wife.”

“If a woman's reputation is besmirched by another male without just cause, he shall throw himself into the holy river for the sake of the purity of Utopia.”

Jane props herself up on her elbow and adds: “A woman's feelings cannot be hurt, taken for granted, abused, or ridiculed.”

I frown at this and tell her that the rule about besmirched reputations covers this, and she just stares at me and then rolls away, and I guess we've pretty much covered the basic tenets, but I review them silently for oversights.