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I looked out the window for my mother, my blessed mother, my blessed blessed mother. Blessed mother over and over again because I was lifted from her stomach. My grandfather had a slow voice that lay days in your blood, and he used to declare: They drew the blinds and you were the light. He said this once walking along the beach. "They drew the blinds, Manley, and you were the light!" Blessed mother. And I imagined her playing the scar like a harpsichord; a cello suite in her head. I looked out the window for the way she walks so pregnant. I like to watch a pregnant woman walk. Then she has her baby and it goes back to like it'd been. I like the way you always make sure you know what you mean when talking to the pregnant, even my little sister, the way she so gently goes: Mom.
When I stood above my dead grandfather, all I wanted was to open his eyelid to know what color he'd inherited from his mother. For a lifetime, you can elude your reflection in the faces of your relatives, then one day they get sick, they die and the lifetime of eluding puts you down to the knees. How could I be named after a man whose eyes I never noticed? I have my mother's dark brown eyes, though I wonder how we ever got such the same-looking eyes but such difference of vision. An eye of mine got crossed from watching the TV so close and so I got an operation to straighten it out. Other than this and infantile jaundice and the swelling on my arm when I get the TB shot, these are my only past medical incidents to speak of.
If my name were Luca D'Malito, I'd be getting piss-tested for my new security job at the bank, I'd be three months away from freedom from my probation officer, I'd know a thing or two about people who break your back, I'd paint frescoes as fast as I could, I'd see a gull circling its shadow in a winter sky and know it's an omen for a dry spring. Luca D'Malito, the man sitting across the waiting room—he closed Home Furnishing, put it on the coffee table, the subscription insert slid out and floated down to the braided rug. Luca lifted his heavy frame from the chair, walked to the receptionist's desk and leaned over the counter. His waist-length raincoat rode up his back, exposing a patch of hair just above his Navajo-style belt. They exchanged words. He instantly caught a whiff of the fragrance the receptionist spritzed on her neck early that morning when the drawbridge got cranked up by Chaim Levson, making way for the oil tankers. She directed his eyes to a line of information on a piece of paper, he nodded, wondered if she remembered his face from the previous physical, shifted his weight to the balls of his feet, swiped his hands east west on the counter, his body into a cross. He was slid the white plastic cup. Luca D'Malito then followed a nurse into the back.
Mine was the second name called.
"Manley Chaffeys," she said.
I said, "Here."
She said, "What're you—over in the high school over there?"
She brought my name up on the computer screen and asked me to confirm my home address, date of birth, social security. She asked if I was on any new medication and how much I liked going to the movies, how much I liked that lady Beverly D'Angelo because she had the Beverly D'Angelo look; did I like older women who were widowed mothers who'd lost their lovers in service overseas; had I ever felt a woman's tongue in the hollow at the base of my neck on a winter morning, smells of burnt rubber penetrating the storm windows, holiday carols murmuring out the clock radio, being hot under the covers.
"My mother's parking the car. She should be here any minute."
"You go on ahead in," she said. "Follow Rosie and I'll tell your mother where she can find you."
I followed the nurse down a short flight of stairs and through a corridor walled with a half-dozen photographs of mountain ranges. In the furthest room to the back, she directed me to the patient's chair just as the door across the hall opened and Luca D'Malito appeared holding the white cup steady in one hand, while his other hand clung to the blue raincoat slung over his shoulder.
"Just leave it on the tray, Mr. D'Malito," the nurse told him.
He blushed. The nurse hunched over the counter, her heels clicking against the linoleum floor as she glanced through my file. A poster depicting a Yeshiva beside a Catholic School that looked exactly like the Catholic Church behind Yancey's house hung above the nurse's head. The first time Yancey tried putting his hands on me we were high on cocaine waiting for the cross-county bus. We'd taken two girls from the YMCA Reassimilation Program out dancing at the Nine Millimeter; Yancey got spotted trying to steal margarita glasses, we got chased out, and when the girls got picked up by their housemother, we got stranded. When snow started coming down, we huddled beneath the furniture store awning to wait. Yancey lost his ability to speak clearly whenever he got high, so when he brought his face in close to mine and asked to pick some shit out of my teeth, I didn't know what it was he was talking about. Then I felt his dick pressed into my leg, I pushed him away thinking he was just fucking with me but saw his eyes drop in shame, and he turned around, walked off, and I didn't hear a word from him until the Save-the-Lake Fair at Avon Lake the following spring.
"I don't usually get blood-tested alone," I said. "I've got a slow heart-valve that means sometimes I get faint."
"I'll draw the blood," she said, "and afterwards you take as long as you need."
The overhead fluorescent light mixed with chalky beams of hazy daylight that cut through the half-slanted blinds on the street-level windows. The ankles and shoes of pedestrians were visible, passing quickly through the rain. The receptionist's voice came over the intercom.
"Rosie, pick up line 1."
As if she'd been expecting the call, the nurse nonchalantly excused herself. Outside, a beagle on a red leash rubbed its snout against the window, sniffed the cracks, and froze when he noticed me. I turned away.
In the poster on the wall, it appeared that the Catholic School and Yeshiva were structures composed of rays of colors cast by the sun. Both buildings, visibly supported by entire walls of stained glass, spread their colored shadows like shawls over an old Hasid with a golden rod who was charging his car with sparkplugs connected to a fisherman's pickup. The Jew resembled my dead grandfather except for the long forelocks that dangled down to his hips. I heard faint murmurs of my grandfather's Russian voice and turned my eyes away. The beagle was still staring, except now its mouth hung open and it seemed malnourished, pleading for something to drink. In the round mirror above the weight-scale I witnessed tears leaking down my cheeks though I felt no sensation of sadness. It was as though my grandfather were whispering through a loudspeaker. Then his voice abruptly faded and I heard my mother say,
"Manley, you wait with getting tested till the baby's born."
I looked back at the poster and the slow voice of my grandfather revealed itself in a chain of unfamiliar recollection.
"The boy has to know a woman's vagina hosts a man's penis and the world revolves by the chronological axis of reproduction, the orbit of her breasts above the sequence of his propulsion, the flex of his thighs beneath the heat of her arousal. The boy has to know systems go down when the converters discharge useless product, juices wax while motors rust, fuses blow while outlets synthesize the dead mass with divine psalms. The boy must know if he's HIV positive, the child in his mother's womb will greet him at the threshold of death with a bandana to keep the sweat out of his eyes and a puppet of his corpse to prolong the race between guilt and sexuality. Her features will look just like his, but the love between them will be inflicted by his guilt, and thus, love will be the valley that separates them rather than the bridge over the valley. The boy's punishment will be the vacuum that exists between aging and dying, where his betrayal is the constant temptation of the migrant poison his friend Yancey's penis released into the boy's rectum flowing into his bloodstream."
When the nurse returned, I asked if she'd seen my mother out there.
"What does she look like?"
I told her pregnant, with long brown hair.
"Didn't see her," she said.
She strapped the rubber tube around my arm and flicked my vein until it protruded.
"You go to school around here?" she asked.
"St. Ignatius."
She flicked at my vein again and once more told me to relax. Like my mother, she has wide knuckles in her slender fingers. It was that morning that my mother warmed her fingers over a pot of boiling oatmeal. As I strolled in, she asked if I wanted breakfast. Our dim chandelier lit my little sister resting her head on the tabletop. Mona shifted her ass in her chair, her shuteyes remained shut. I looked around the room at the portraits of my father, which over time had been buried by the accumulations of Mona's doodlings. But each morning, one of us habitually straightened my father's gold-framed Certificate of Appreciation signed by the Commanding General of the Army Air Forces: Sergeant Raymond Chaffeys, 47th Bombardment Group, because every night since years ago when the house began warping inwards, the letter has tilted.
"Mom," I said, taking a bowl from the dish drain, "last night I had a long talk with Yancey."
I was worried that the moment I told her, I would start crying. Instead, I was disoriented by the sensation of hearing Yancey's voice telling me again what I was now telling my mother.
| "He told me he found out he's HIV positive." "What?" "I know," I said. "Please don't tell me that now, Manley. Why are you telling me that now?" |
"I've got to tell you something," Yancey said, "but this is something you can't tell anybody." And I said, "It dies with me," and he goes,"It dies with me, too" |
My mother scraped the burnt surface off her toast. The crumbs peppered the stovetop and she wiped it down, refraining from responding. Her face had gone hollow since one of the women in her Lamaze group gave birth to a stillborn and she was getting more and more worked up over everything, especially how heavy she was still smoking Newports during the first weeks, before she'd discovered she was pregnant. When the Reverend's wife told her that a man's excessive exposure to radiation was a common cause of stillbirth, she wanted me to check into the radiation levels at the tire plant where my father had been employed before he left us again.
The nurse took my pulse. Her cold fingers pressed against my wrist. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, from behind the nurse's ass.
"Why would you need to get tested?" my mother asked, and dumped a tablespoon of brown sugar into the oatmeal.
"Wouldn't you get tested if you found out your best friend got HIV?"
"No, not likely."
"For all the times we drank out of the same cup and I went to the bathroom in his house."
"Manley, you're not getting AIDS sitting on a damn toilet."
"It's how I got tuberculosis."
"That's just what Dr. Crouse said to make you feel better. What a crock of shit. And if it's true, then you and somebody else'd need to have some major open cuts down there."
The nurse began to quietly hum.
My mother turned down the flame under the oatmeal.
"Where did Yancey get it?" she asked.
After one vial was filled, the nurse deposited it in a receptacle filled with hundreds of identical vials; she drew a second round into another vial. Her humming was like a piano soft-pedaling a sustained high note, her small eyes remaining indifferently focused on her work. I watched the windows for my mother's feet. She must've stopped to pick me up some food, I thought. One of my mother's pregnant friends convinced her that eating was the best prevention of my fainting spells.
"Do you have brothers and sisters?" the nurse asked.
"Do you have a spare minute?" I said to Yancey, his upper body folding over the information table as I approached. He was drawing a salmon jumping upstream a river, the logo for the perennial initiative to clean up Avon Lake, for which we always volunteered during the Save-the-Lake Fair to fulfill our community service points.
"Magda called Monday," I told him. "And wanted to see if we ever felt like coming over."
I waited for an answer. He looked at me, which gave me a sense of permission to lean over his shoulder and admire his drawing. Yancey was always waiting for reasons to forgive. When somebody ran over his cat on Hamilton Avenue the first thing he did was race out to forgive the driver.
So it was as though nothing had ever happened between us. We stole the U-Haul the Waterlife Rehabilitation Center rented to transport an aquarium of small sharks. The girls' housemother was out of town for the weekend, so we started out the night by going to their halfway house. All we had to do was sign in as the girls' siblings and wear time-allotment badges somewhere visible so the cameras could read them. Magda and Melanie led us up to their roof where we wouldn't be under surveillance. They brought out a bottle of coconut rum they had hidden in their clothes hamper. Magda took her shirt off and mounted me, dangled her breasts above my head. Her right breast was tattooed with the Virgin Mary; the stretch marks on the underside stretched the bottom of the Virgin Mary's jaw. The cool air put bumps over her skin and, at the time, the fixated glare in her eyes made me slightly nervous, but my hands mechanically undid her pants, catching heat like air blowing from a laundry vent. She breathed loudly as my fingers moved over her pussy. She put her lips against my nipples and leisurely zigzagged them down my chest until she rolled her eyes up at mine and smiled. She began sucking my dick, her hair parted symmetrically over her craned neck like a horse's mane. My ass burnt against the course shingles.
I looked over and saw the silhouette of Yancey on top of Melanie, both of them shirtless with Yancey's jeans halfway down his legs, the hem of Melanie's skirt pulled up under her breasts, her underwear cuffing her ankles. Streams of sweat glistened in the streetlights as they descended Yancey's temples, the muscles in his skinny arms twitched as he thrust, her hands slid slowly down the side of his body and clung to his hips. He held her smallish breasts from flopping, what sounded like infant's breaths escaping his lips, his eyes settled on a plastic Pepsi bottle that was getting blown around in the eaves. Headlights of a car coming up the block momentarily illuminated us. Yancey and I made eye contact and he watched me come in Magda's mouth.
A moment of silence passed between my mother and me.
"Please tell me his mother's all right. She's had enough to deal with living with Yancey's father. And please tell me Roy doesn't know about this. I remember when he set fire to the kitchen at the J.R. Valentine's Diner after something happened in some baseball game and the whole place went up. Your father was smart enough at the time to hurry over and get Yancey and his mother out of that house because I don't remember what he said, but Raymond knew enough that night to admit Roy lost it. And then Roy went and put up a cross that night in their front yard beside where they got the basketball hoop now, and he nailed chickens to the three points and put a basket of eggs at the base. Whatever the hell that's supposed to say about yourself."
The day following the fire, after seven hours picketing the street out front of the tire plant, I remember my father and I ducked into a payphone booth, where he took a gun from his coat and pointed it at three wild turkeys off the roadside. He made the sound of three gunshots, killing the mother turkey and her growing boys, and smiled at me. His cracked lips fiddled with a Blowpop stick.
He called Yancey's father for a ride home. Fifteen minutes later, Roy pulled up in his baby blue Skylark, ordered me to leave the sleeping dog on the seat next to me alone, and his eyes, behind a pair of semi-dark sunglasses, watched me intently in the rearview mirror.
"Manley, man, you don't look a damn thing like your father here, you know that? That's to say you're no scarface."
"He doesn't smell like a two-thousand-year-old mutt's pussy either," my father said, and cracked up.
"You ever thought about paying your dues for your country like your father and me?"
My father saw me shrug and killed an ant in the ashtray.
"Silence's Yancey's answer too. But a man need do better than that. What do ya'll spend all your time thinking and talking about anyhow? This country rides the backs of young men like you, Man. When I was sixteen, that's what my father was telling me. And I wasn't out in the damn yard counting no damn leaves on no damn clovers."
"When I was sixteen, what the hell was I doing?" my father wondered aloud.
"You ever thought about the danger that's going on, what with the biological and chemical stuff being developed? Killing women and children just like your mom and your sister, just on principal of some caveman cocksuckers. One man decides to push the button, Man, you could say goodbye to Hollywood. Say the fuck goodbye to all we worked towards, Man."
"Leila Rigola," my father interrupted. "Her brother was the one who got me my first job at the plant."
"Goddamn days go whole centuries to pain," Yancey's father continued, "and it takes the same age-old pain no more than a goddamn day to drive us back to where we were at when the first centuries started. See what I mean? We cooking the chicken, serving the cuts to the convicts, and feeding our babies the bones. The fucken quality of life this country nurtures, that we entrust our souls to, Manley—it's all going to the wrong folks."
The nurse deposited the second vial and started in on a third.
"We fill this one and call it a day, okay?"
"Roy, the boy's got this lecture a thousand times over. You need to be saying this to your own son."
"My son!" Yancey's father shouted. "What's the world got in store for my son? This is the question that's come to define my life. Not: what have you got in store for the world, Roy? But: what the fuck'is up with your son, Roy?"
He one-handed a match, which impressed me, lit hs cigarette and went on.
"Shit Manley, we got too few young men like you in the shit where we need you at, Man. Not only is this country rearing up for the historical, this country's got suckers at the helm. Gimme a frog on a lily pad, I'd gladly give you a faggot with a twelve-inch dick. See what I'm saying?"
My father laughed and stared at himself in the visor mirror.
"First and foremost," Roy went on, "you'd be protecting your family from that, the gimps we got up front, blowing their goddamn nose in no-man's-land's hankie. God bless them, Manley, but we bear too many fools and too few good-sensed young men like yourself. It ain't no time for fooling hell's hounds. The 1900s are through, man. Say 1900, you might as well be saying Grover Cleveland, Pocahontas, and the invention of electricity. Who in hell knows a damn thing about Grover Cleveland anyway? For all I know he's a faggot on a lily pad with a twelve-inch dick. See what I mean? Grover Cleveland's old news. And Madonna's tits in those goddamn cones? No older than Y2K. No older than yesterday. Yesterday equals irrelevancy, but we walk the time line like a fine line because today's an unconscious woman getting fucked by a faggot who's no better than a frog on a lily pad till she's a manikin who makes you hotter than your wife's stalactite pussy. There's a whole new way about the world that's threatening us, Manley. You know that. You ain't gotta go and be a high school grad to know that. Now I know I'm not supposed to be saying that since you and Yancey've been getting ready so hard for those tests now, but let's be civilized. You're a young man growing up who doesn't know what's the world got in store come Monday. When me and your father were growing up it was the same type of shit, but the rules are different now. It's the rules that've changed."
"Anything goes," my father consented and peered at the marks beneath the tufts of hair on his knuckles.
"Your silence is suicidal, son," Roy said. "Ain't no mice where the cats loom, Manley, but the cat's gotta get up off the damn couch and relearn mother nature's beast else you got Disney World in your goddamn living room. Here where I'm at? I could give a rat's ass over a biscuit, Manley."
My father turned around again, took my hand, and, for some reason, he patted the back of it like I'd just lost a fight.
The intercom buzzed again and the receptionist announced that the nurse had another phone call, but the nurse told me she'd get it later.
My mother scooped a bowl of oatmeal, handed it to me, and sat down on the step stool.
"I'm sure Yancey hasn't told him yet."
"When he finds out," my mother said, "there's not a doubt in my mind Roy'll pull something. At least he's got that bad knee now."
She pulled up her shirt and dragged a finger up her vitamin line, crossing my birth scar.
"So what do you think?" she asked, "Hannah or Laura?"
"Hannah."
My mother stamped a kiss to three fingertips, pressed them against her belly and whispered Hannah.
"Manley, you wait with getting tested till the baby's born. What's the point? Why worry about something that could get put off, right? What if something were to happen, right? We haven't seen your father since I got pregnant and God knows he's not coming back when I need him. Everything's falling on me. Everything, I'm the one who deals with everything. You don't straighten up shit; you don't do the dishes for shit unless I give you something for it; you don't take Mona to school; never shop; not the one who's pregnant; not turning down the heat; not paying rent, and your father certainly isn't. Last time he had a buck to contribute he laid it on the lotto and walked off with a winning number in a new car. Which was guess what numbers? My birthday. He's certainly not the one who fixes what's broken. If I don't do it, it stays broken. And plus, did I tell you that Jean from my Lamaze group gave birth to a stillborn? Can you imagine anything worse? Jesus, it was terrible and now she and her boyfriend have this afghan? Hanging above their bed that was what the baby got wrapped in because it was an afghan crocheted by some lady who crochets afghans specifically to wrap stillborns in and then hang up for remembrance?"
She rubbed the coffee ring on the counter.
"I don't know why in the world they'd do that, but the Reverend's wife—she told me she'd tell anybody who gave birth to a stillborn to not look at it because chances are it might send you into some kind of psychological trauma that's real subconscious and you don't realize the trauma's there but it is, it affects everything you do. I can't stop thinking about that. Of course I'd look at my child. It's gotta be worse if you never see their face but are always thinking about it."
"I already made an appointment for this afternoon."
"I'm asking you," she said, "to please not get tested yet."
The nurse pulled the needle from my vein, gave me a cotton swab and told me to hold it over the prick.
"We'll fax the results to your doctor by the end of the week, alright?"
She secured a band-aid over the cotton swab. Her slender fingers smoothed it down and slid over my skin, clenching my forearm, guiding my hand to her wide hip, which I grabbed and pulled in tight to my face; I could smell her, and she smelt like the woods.
"Listen carefully," she said, fitting her hands down the collar of my shirt, her plastic gloves moving down my back; she lifted and folded her knees on my lap, setting her chest in my face close like the mask they put you in at the eye doctor's.
"A flower and a bee fall in love in the real world, right, and they spend day after day together, the bee pollinating for it, the flower lending the bee sugar, whatever whatever, and then the flower gets clipped and the bee stings the gardener who clips it and so of course the little bee dies, too. But here's the good part. Now their souls are united, but not like united in the way people remember associations, like if I was to say I remember that bee and that flower in the backyard so therefore they are forever one, but truly united by the undressing of the soul. Because of the presence of the body, just about every soul of just about everything in the whole world is prevented from uniting, except for a lucky few."
The nurse deposited the materials she'd used into a sterile bag.
"The end of the week then?" I asked.
"Right. It should take three to four days. How's your heart feeling?"
She put her hand on my shoulder to detain me.
"You're not driving anywhere," Yancey said, as I put the key in the ignition.
I half-ignited the engine and switched on the heat, which was blowing though nothing was coming out. We climbed in the back and shared what remained of the coconut rum. Melanie'd left teeth-marks all over Yancey's neck and shoulders. The thick air of silence that sifted between us gradually lost oxygen, the slightest sounds amplified by the vacuum space. Either he was going to sit there staring at me and I would look at the hypnotic shark tank until one of us dozed off or he was going to make a move. Yancey backhanded a run of snot. Finally, he took off his boots and crawled over to me.
"What?" he asked, as I stared him down.
"Nothing."
"What?"
"Nothing."
"Why're you looking at me like that?"
I didn't say a word. As he unlaced my boots, I felt like Yancey had suddenly become an eight-year-old child.
"You need your mother to get you some new socks, Manley."
My face was blank and his eyes dropped like a servant's. He took off my other boot and massaged my feet, raised my toes to his lips but I lightly kicked him in the face and told him what he was doing was disgusting.
"So what the hell do you want?"
I pulled down my jeans and my dick was still soft from Magda. Yancey crawled up and started kissing my thighs. I played with the wisps of hair on the back of his neck as my dick grew hard. His scent wafted into my nose. I knew his smell like a brother's. Every so often his clogged nose whistled for air. He picked his head up and his face was pale.
"Fuck you," he said.
"Why?"
"What the fuck is this?"
"What do you mean what the fuck is this?"
Yancey yanked my pants down to my ankles and I let him flip me over. His metal belt buckle clanked when it dropped on the floor and the sound resonated around the truck's walls. It was that sound that metronomed—the belt buckle clank throbbed in my temples and my nose smushed against the moist metallic floor. Yancey's grunts seemed like they were coming out the center of his chest. Between each thrust, the image of his eight year-old face popped up in my head and then the force of the following thrust would annihilate it, then his face would resurrect again and then it became Magda's face then it became Rita then Lila then Courtney then Chitra then Gracie than Ariyele and the face kept changing among those of women I'd been with. I felt the skin of his waist grip against my goose-pimpled ass as he trembled.
I stood up and walked across the room with my hands outstretched, prepared to catch myself should my heart suddenly start to work too slow.
"Have you seen my mother?" I asked the receptionist.
"Nobody's buzzed since you've been in," she said.
I walked out of the office. Luca D'Malito was sitting on the bus-stop bench, smoking a cigarette. The rain had dropped briefly, slicking the asphalt, leaving the humid air reeking of manure. I looked up and down the block for my mother. I became near hypnotized by the image across the street: outside the Key Food, some blond kid in a Browns jersey stood on the rubber pad in front of the automatic entrance door so the door couldn't close. This is about when I started feeling faint. I thought to get to Luca's bench, where I could sit and ask him to buy me a donut. I believed, at that moment, Luca D'Malito would be my friend.
My mother was calling for a doctor and Luca was observing her with a vexed nothingness. He must've been the first one to notice I'd awakened, because suddenly he was smiling in my direction—the way he smiled brought to my attention the fetal alcohol defect afflicting his upper lip. My mother squatted over me and I had an urge to palm the underside of her belly; all I wanted was to know if she was sure it'd be a girl. Or if it was possible it'd be a boy. Little brother or little sister?
"You were rushing, Manley," she whispered. "Couldn't you've waited a sec so I could've come and got you?"
"Where were you?"
"I was parking."
"Why're you angry?"
"I'm not angry."
"It took so long I didn't know where you were."
"I had to circle the block a hundred times before I found a spot. And you banged your head," she said. She gently lifted my skull off the pavement and held it up until Mona graciously slid her sneaker underneath for cushion.
"Mom," I asked, "are you sure you're having a girl?"
"Why? What do you want?"
I pictured myself holding a baby boy. Then I pictured myself holding a baby girl. Then I pictured myself holding both at once. They lay on my bare chest and I lay in the sand at Avon Beach listening to the water lap against the cement embankment at the base of the tire plant where there were always hundreds of seagulls.
"I'd like a little sister," said Mona, blushing, "mom."
This is when I looked up and saw that Mona had developed the very beginnings of breasts. Someday in the not too distant future her lovers will suck those breasts. Then her babies will suck those breasts. Then those breasts will droop as those babies age. And then those breasts will shrivel as the breasts on her children suckle new babies. I thought that the way Yancey ravaged my dick was not the way I'd suck a woman's breasts because I never wanted to be a woman whose breasts were ever at the mercy of her lover. I don't like people who are aggressive with the breast. You want to tell them to take it easy, because one need be gentle with the breasts of a woman. If the woman asks for something a little less gentle, then okay. But in general, I believe you must be courteous.
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