The Kingdom of Childhood Page 22

  “So you’re in the chorus with Scott,” said Russ.

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s very selective. You must have a lot of talent.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “What do you sing? Tenor?”

  “Yeah.” The man seemed perfectly friendly. He didn’t come off like a fire-breathing demon the way Judy had characterized him. Zach was becoming familiar with the differences between an adult’s public face and their private one; doing puppet shows among the five-year-olds, Judy didn’t seem like a nymphomaniac, either. But even so, holding the eye contact unnerved him deeply. He shook his bangs into his eyes and stuffed his hands down into his pockets.

  Russ smiled broadly. “That’s great,” he said. “Wish I could hear you boys sing more often. Music’s gotten away from me over the years. My wife and I used to go to rock concerts all the time when we were younger. Of course, that was back in the ’70s. Nothing that would be your speed.”

  Zach shook his head. “Not really.”

  Russ nodded and grinned again. “Good to meet you, Zach. Hope I’ll be seeing more of you once I get work under control.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Scott and his father walked off toward the outdoor games area, and Zach took off in the opposite direction. He made it as far as the trash Dumpster, then ducked behind the tattered enclosure and wrapped both arms around his stomach. It didn’t help. He leaned over into the corner, braced his hand against the wall, and puked up the contents of his stomach. One Dr Pepper and Judy’s chocolate chip cookie.

  He spat onto the concrete. The saliva dangled from his lip and refused to completely fall. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and steeled himself for another round of cramps. At the same moment he heard a quiet voice call, “Zach?”

  He knew it was Judy. He didn’t turn around when she stepped into the enclosure. She asked, “Are you all right?”

  “I just met your husband.”

  “Oh. So he actually showed up, huh? What did you think?”

  Fear of embarrassment overrode psychic distress, and his stomach settled down. He moved away from the puke and sat on the ground beside the Dumpster. The cement felt nice and cool, and he fought the impulse to lie down on it. He cradled his head in his hands and felt the sweat beading his temples. “He didn’t seem so bad.”

  She laughed ruefully. “Don’t be fooled. Normally he’s a royal pain in the ass. He’s just in a good mood because he got laid last night.”

  Zach felt his stomach lurch again. “Thanks for telling me that. Really, that’s the vision I needed to keep going just now.”

  “I’m sorry.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “I was trying to find you so I could apologize.”

  “You found me.”

  “I see. I think my husband makes you sick to your stomach. That’s okay. He has the same effect on me.”

  Zach managed a small laugh.

  She squatted down beside him. “I’m very sorry about what I said,” she told him quietly. “It was stupid of me. Are you angry?”

  “I don’t know.” He felt weary, not angry, but he knew he might feel angry again later.

  “Tell me what it will take to make it up to you.”

  He looked into her eyes, struggling for clarity, but only felt dizzy. He pulled his knees up against his stomach and wrapped his arms around them.

  “I don’t want you to be angry,” she whispered. “I care about you. I love being with you. And you can move on, but everything is at stake for me. My career, my marriage, everything. You know that.”

  She waited for him to respond. He maintained eye contact, but said nothing.

  She unbuttoned her blouse halfway and pulled it open. Her bra, black and lacy, stood out against her pale skin. Beneath her collarbones, like tattoos, lay the twin arches of bruises shaped by his fingertips. He thought back to their two trysts the previous week, the state of his mind and body: still ragged out by illness, constrained by the clock, afraid he wouldn’t finish in time—and angry. As desire bloomed in him, so rose his anger at her; he couldn’t differentiate the two, and hadn’t cared enough to try. But had he really used enough force to bruise her? The evidence bewildered him. He wondered, but dared not ask, if she had taken pictures. Sex Ed lesson number three hundred and eighty-six: it’s dangerous to sleep with people you don’t fully trust.

  “If Russ saw these,” she told him, “I would be screwed. And not by you.”

  “It was an accident.”

  “I’m not blaming you. I’m saying, this is how much I don’t want to mess things up with you. I can live with this. You could do this to me every single day and I’d just hide it and hide it and hide it.”

  He dropped his head to rest between his knees.

  “Tell me what it will take to make it up to you,” she repeated.

  He stared down at the gritty concrete. All he wanted to do was take a few deep breaths and Zen out and forget about all the shitty complications that kept creeping into his life. He didn’t even want to ditch Judy, because then he’d have the ditching of Judy to deal with on top of everything else. He just wanted to take a mental break from all of it—not only Judy but also school and Fairen and his homesickness for New Hampshire.

  He looked up at Judy and, in the nicest possible voice, asked, “Can I have a blow job?”

  She smiled. “Of course you can. Come with me. I think I left some extra cookies in my kitchen.”

  “What I want the American people to know, what I want the Congress to know, is that I am profoundly sorry for all I have done wrong in words and deeds.”

  The rising volume of the television caught my attention as I took a tray of cookies from the oven. I turned off the heat, then walked into the den, where Zach sat on the sofa with the remote in his hand. A white-haired and pallid-looking Bill Clinton stared back at him from the screen, speaking from the Rose Garden. It didn’t sound like a Rose Garden sort of speech.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “They impeached him.”

  “What? No.”

  Zach gestured to the TV. “This is from yesterday. CNN’s running it again because they just approved another item of impeachment or something.”

  I frowned. “I don’t think that means he’s impeached quite yet. But it doesn’t sound good.” I listened for another minute and asked, “Did you know about this?”

  “Sort of. My dad said something last night.”

  “This is what I get for going out of town,” I murmured. With a subtle shift of my gaze, I peered down at Zach. He seemed to be trying to watch intently, but his eyelids drooped as though he were fighting sleep. His gray shirt was bunched onto his stomach, his belt notched tightly but his fly still undone.

  The voice from the television filled the silence between us. So nothing, not piety, nor tears, nor wit, nor torment, can alter what I have done. I must make my peace with that.

  I looked at Zach again and asked, “What do you think about all this?”

  He rested back against the sofa with a tired half smile. “I think he should have turned down the BJ,” he replied. “Just say no to head.”

  “They’re not impeaching him for the impropriety,” I explained. “They’re impeaching him for lying about it under oath.”

  Zach shrugged. “He wouldn’t have had to lie about it under oath if he hadn’t gotten blown.”

  “True. He knew they would hang him for it. This wouldn’t have happened in Europe. I think they’re slinging mud at him just for the sake of it.”

  “Oh, I didn’t say that,” he replied. “I think it serves him right. He ought to have had the self-discipline not to take it when it was offered, even if he is a politician. ‘Without being attached to the fruits of activities, one should act as a matter of duty.’”

  I stared at him in dismay. “Where did that come from?”

  “The Bhagavad Gita,” he mumbled. He chewed the side of his thumbnail. “It’s a yoga thing.”

  “So you t
hink it’s karma.”

  “That’s exactly what I think it is.”

  “That’s not what you used to think about this situation,” I reminded him. “Back in the fall you thought he was getting a crappy deal.”

  “Yeah, I changed my mind. I think he’s getting what he deserves for lying to everybody. Cheats and liars need to be brought down.”

  “You think so.” I took a few steps forward so he could see me more clearly. “And where does that leave us?”

  He removed his thumbnail from his mouth just long enough to answer. “Fucked.”

  Back at the school, Zach lingered in the parking lot for a few extra minutes as Judy carried the cookies inside, in a sort of halfhearted nod to her paranoia. Russ was over in a sandy section of the play area, stationed at the ring toss, shouting in a friendly way to the little kids as they set their tongues between their teeth and gave the game their best shot. Whether they did well or poorly, he congratulated each with a high-five. Zach stood at the edge of the lot with his thumbs in his pockets, watching him plainly, making no effort to be covert. He was taller than Zach by several inches, lean for a guy of his age; his face, fair-skinned and spectacled, carried a kind of arrogance that evoked in Zach feelings of both respect and scorn. Regardless of the present state of his marriage, he was Judy’s real lover—the one who found it no trouble to handle her, who was even bored of going to bed with her, who would no doubt laugh if he knew the boy watching him at the edge of the grass was also the object of her attentions, because was that the best she could do?

  He ground a patch of gravel beneath his shoe and considered that he ought to admit defeat—to go to Judy and say, I’d like to be excused now, then return to his day job of currying the favor of a girl his own age. In the months since Ohio, Fairen had gradually warmed to him again. When they met with Temple to discuss their history project, she often sat beside him at the table now, rather than across. At Madrigals practice the week before, after the third run-through of a song none of them particularly liked, she had dropped her head back—he was standing just behind her, on the risers—and rested the crown of it against his chest, sighing and meeting his eye to express her aggravation. For a long time after Ohio, resentment still shadowed every interaction he had with her, and his enthusiasm for Judy left him unmotivated to set aside his anger. But now, not much older but a whole lot wiser, he felt ready to lay down his sword where Fairen was concerned. If she wasn’t holding a grudge, then neither would he, for he hated the sense of waste that welled up in him when he mused that in his greed to have her he had lost her entirely.

  He wandered back into the gymnasium and caught up with his friends. The whole group of them, Scott included, was now gathered at the bake-sale booth, but Judy was absent, and so Zach happily joined them. By the time the bazaar began to wind down, he was in high spirits; Fairen had flirted with him, Russ stayed out of sight, and for a precious couple of hours life felt entirely normal.

  Temple offered him and Fairen a ride home, and Zach was glad to accept. He sat in the back with her until Temple pulled up in front of her house—an odd route for him to take, given that hers was midway between his and Zach’s—then climbed into the front passenger seat for the ride back toward Sylvania. “You forget where I live?” Zach asked him as he pulled on his seat belt.

  “Nope. Just wanted to talk without Fairen here.”

  “What about?”

  “Tacitus.”

  Zach laughed and set his foot against the dash. “You picked the wrong person to talk to about that. Fairen’s the one who’s doing all the reading.”

  “This is all stuff we went over in class,” Temple said. “Remember the part about how they used to hang traitors from trees, and stake down the prostitutes in the swamps, and drag women—”

  “Through the streets naked. Yeah, I was listening for that part. What about it?”

  “She talked about how certain crimes were punished out in the open, so they could make an example of the people, and for the ones where they considered the people polluted, they had to, like, destroy them and all the evidence. I was thinking about that—”

  Zach squinted at him. “Man, that’s got nothing to do with our report. Does it? It’s supposed to be about Maryland, right? I think we can sneak in the Bunny Man thing, but not anything about them staking down hookers in Hauschen Lake.”

  “Stop interrupting me for a minute and just listen. I’ve got a point to make.” His voice had grown tighter; Zach glanced at him. “I was thinking about how what it gets at is that, anywhere you go, the tribe doesn’t want people breaking with the code. The individual threatens the group, so the group threatens the individual. You know what I’m saying? In a small, tight society, they had to be real brutal with the violators to make sure the code gets followed. People still broke it some times, even though they knew what was coming. Maybe they thought they could get away with it, who knows. Maybe they just got sidetracked by whatever they were after and it made them stupid.”

  Zach nodded absently and turned the hot-air vent to blow toward him.

  “Dude,” Temple said, and Zach looked up. Temple’s eyes looked wincing, and his voice held a hard edge of regret. “You’re sleeping with Mrs. McFarland.”

  For a brief moment nothing on him, in him, attached to him moved. His blood seemed to pause in his veins, the food balled in his stomach, the air stung his unblinking eyes. Then he swallowed against his dry tongue and asked, “What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t care that you are,” Temple hastened to add. “I guess. I mean, it’s none of my business—”

  “Man, I am not. That is so not true. Where did that come from? I thought you were talking about Tacitus and all that Germania crap.”

  “I am,” said Temple. “I’m talking about how you’re being an example of the sort of shit that really pisses off the tribe. It’s obvious, and it’s not cool, my friend. If I were you I’d get straight with that before Scott figures it out, if he hasn’t already. Because he will, and when he does, he’ll spread it all over the school.”

  “Name an example,” Zach challenged. His voice quivered but rose. “I want to know where you came up with an idea as fucked-up as that one. Because you’ve got some serious nerve to accuse me of that shit.”

  Temple didn’t shift his gaze from the road, but his eyebrows rose, and his face took on a smug assurance that filled Zach with fearful rage. “Three hours ago. You went home with her.”

  “She left stuff at her house. I had service hours. Nice try.”

  Temple’s laugh was musical with sarcasm. “Hell of a way to earn them. It’s not just one day or one thing, man. It’s a lot of stuff all the time. You vanish with her every time she snaps her fingers. You guys look at each other all wrong. When she gives people rides home, she always drops you off last. Just now you noticed I dropped Fairen off first even though that didn’t make any sense. How do you think it looks to the rest of us when she does it?”

  “So that means I must be sleeping with her,” Zach retorted. “Because it’s not like I have any other reason to be around her, like my mother arm-twisting me into volunteering for this damn bazaar. No, it’s gotta be for sex, right? It’s gotta be for sex with Scott’s mom.” He had worked himself into an indignation so profound, he almost believed it himself.

  Temple shook his head again. “Dude, I’m being a friend to you.”

  “The hell you are,” Zach half-shouted. “Telling me Scott’s going to come after me for some crap you all are inventing. What do I care what Scott says? Everybody knows he’s an ass. Nobody would believe something that stupid out of him.”

  “They will if they think there’s a kernel of truth to it,” warned Temple. “You know, far be it for me to tell you who you can lay. But dude, that’s some nasty, dirty gossip. I don’t know if you think it’s cool or if she’s sexing you up so good you can’t think straight, but if that gets out, nobody’s going to see it in whatever way you do. And you better believe Scott won�
�t. He’ll fucking humiliate you. You’d be better off getting caught in the bathroom with a guy.”

  Zach snorted a sigh and slumped in his seat. “I don’t even know what to say to something that retarded.”

  “I won’t tell Scott. You’ve got my word,” he promised. “I’ve got no idea why you’d do something like this, but I think it’s dangerous as hell. Scott’s dumb, but he’s not half as dumb as the way you two are handling it. Have some goddamn discretion.”

  Zach cast a gloomy gaze out the window, at the trees rushing by at the side of the road, the endless loop of the telephone wires. He stared at the scrubby grass and felt the hollow burden of all he was carrying, all he needed to keep secret, all that stood to go awry if he confided in anyone at all.

  “Why would you do that, Zach?” asked Temple, and although the fatigue in his voice made the question rhetorical, Zach knew his friend would welcome an answer. For a moment Zach’s silence hung between them. And then, as if all the possible reasons proved too inexplicable or too ugly to consider, Temple sighed, “I don’t know,” and fell silent as well.

  23

  He lay awake on Sunday night, staring at his ceiling, his mind racing over all the things Temple had said. He worried certain phrases like a palm full of stones, but they grew no smoother for the handling. Nasty, dirty gossip. He’ll fucking humiliate you. It’s not cool, my friend. He had hoped to wear away the sting of the words, but instead only rubbed his conscience raw.

  At one in the morning he lifted the receiver of his bedroom phone and listened to its monotonous hum, wrestling inwardly over whether to call Temple. The urge to confess, to simply purge himself of every dirty secret, was almost physical. Temple would keep his confidence; of that he was sure. But as long as Zach denied it, maintained the pretense that his friend accused him wrongly, he could resist seeing himself through Temple’s eyes. As long as the two of them agreed the very idea was wrong and repugnant, they could still be friends in spite of the lie.