Miracle Creek(76)
Janine tried a blow job, and that worked for a minute, but he made the mistake of opening his eyes. The fuzzy film of moonlight made visible the long curtains of Janine’s hair, swinging as her head bobbed up and down. It made him think of Mary, the way her hair had swung about her face as she pushed herself up from his body. He went soft immediately.
That had been the beginning of Matt’s impotence. Janine, bless her, kept trying, resorting to things she’d once scoffed at as denigrating to women—slitted negligees, dildos, porn—but none of that compensated for his feeling clumsy and inadequate in bed, let alone his shame about Mary, and he couldn’t make anything happen, even by himself. The one time he’d tried (in the bathroom after a failed Janine session, out of panic he’d lost it forever), his hand felt unfamiliar, the scars’ simultaneous slickness and bumpiness enhancing every rub, not at all like masturbation. Being able to see but not feel his hand holding his penis added to the trippy feel, the sensation that it was not him touching himself, but rather a stranger, and he felt that thrill of newness. But then, the thought: Was he actually turned on by the thought of a male stranger’s hand jerking him off?
A few times, he’d come close to nocturnal emissions, which Matt used to think was almost worse than none at all (with the evanescent millisecond of gratification not worth the pathetic reversion to puberty) but which he’d started praying for, if only to reassure himself that his orgasm wasn’t dead, merely dormant. The problem was, Mary always invaded his dream, and some deep-seated pedophilic/rape guilt sensor woke him up. Until tonight.
Tonight, he kept going. Took off her panties. Let her take off his pants and underwear. As he got on top and spread her legs, he held up his mutilated hands and said, “You wrecked me.” She said, “Because you wrecked me first,” then raised her hips to push him into her, tighter, wetter, and more real-feeling than he’d felt in years, maybe ever. When he came, the dream-Mary screamed and shattered into a million glass particles, the tiny beads of glass-her exploding into him in slow motion, pushing through his skin and into his body, sending tingles of warmth and pure joy out toward his limbs.
“Honey, you up?” Janine’s voice called, waking him. He clutched the blanket and turned over, pretending to still be asleep as she told him she was leaving early for the voice sample. He stayed still until she left. After he heard her car drive away, he went into the bathroom. He turned on the water and tried to scrub his underwear clean.
YOUNG
THE FIRST THING SHE NOTICED upon waking up was the sunlight. The crooked cutout that served as their window was too small to let in much light. But when the sun was in just the right position, like now—morning, when the sun climbed above the trees into the middle of their makeshift window, perfectly framed by the square hole—it surged in, the square beam of light so strong it looked almost solid for the first meter before diffusing into an ethereal brightness that flooded the whole shack and gave it a fairy-tale quality. Floating motes of dust glittered in the veil of sunlight. Birds chirped.
The thing about the backwoods was how dark it became on moonless nights like last night—the dark not just a lack of light, but its own presence with mass and shape. An inky blackness so absolute, it made no difference whether she opened or closed her eyes. For much of the night, she’d lain awake, listening to rain drumming the roof and breathing in dank air, and resisted the urge to shake Pak awake. She was a big believer in sleeping on problems before taking action. It was funny how American articles spouted the wisdom of resolving arguments at day’s end (“Never Go to Bed Mad!”), which was the opposite of common sense. Night was the worst time for fights—its gloom intensifying insecurities and heightening suspicions—whereas if you waited, you always woke up feeling better, more reasonable and charitable, the passing time and brightness of the new day cooling emotions and deflating their power.
Well, not always. For here it was, a new day—rain stopped, clouds gone, air lightened—but instead of last night’s worries seeming inconsequential, it was the opposite, as if the passage of time had cemented the reality of this changed world in which her husband was a liar and maybe even a murderer. In the surreal fuzziness of the night, there was the possibility of the new reality not being real; the morning’s clarity snatched that away.
Young got up. A note on Pak’s pillow read: I went outside for fresh air. I’ll be back by 8:30. She looked at her watch. 8:04. Too early for any of her plans to investigate Pak’s story—visit Mr. Spinum, their neighbor; call the Realtor who sent the Seoul listings; use the library computer to search for e-mails to/from Pak’s brother—except one: ask Mary exactly what she did with Pak the night of the explosion, minute by minute.
Young stomped twice outside Mary’s shower-curtained corner—their faux knock—and said, “Mary, wake up,” in Korean. It was a toss-up which would annoy Mary more, her speaking English (“No one can even understand what you’re saying!”) or Korean (“No wonder your English is so bad—you’ve got to practice more!”), but she didn’t want the handicap of using a foreign language for this talk. Switching from English to Korean doubled her IQ, gave her eloquence and control, and she’d need that to root out all the details. “Wake up,” she said louder, stomping again. Nothing.
Suddenly, she remembered: today was Mary’s birthday. In Korea, they’d made a fuss over her birthdays, decorating overnight to surprise her with signs and streamers when she awoke. Young hadn’t continued this in America—her store hours left no time for anything beyond basic necessities—but still, Mary might expect something special for her eighteenth birthday, a milestone year. “Happy birthday,” Young said. “I’m excited to see my eighteen-year-old daughter. Can I come in?”