Homesick for Another World(20)
I’d gotten lucky the night before, but after I smoked another joint that morning and saw my fire burning, heart still banging with fury about the impenetrable wine, Cindy’s brown legs hanging off the bed, I knew I was in trouble. My thoughts turned to the primitive longings of early man, and I searched in my heart for some remnant of primal wantonness, and because I was looking, I found it. I rolled another joint and smoked it and removed my shirt and fed the fire apprehensively and sat on the bare floor of the cabin and growled and rocked like a baby and crawled around on my hands and knees. But the floor of the cabin was filthy. I found a broom and swept. Whoever was going up there and doing the dildoing had no regard for cleanliness, I thought to myself. I cleaned until I was hungry and fed the fire again and put one of the Whoppers on the iron stove. The special sauce melted and the bun burned on the bottom, but when I bit into it, it was all just chewy and lukewarm and reminded me of my elementary-school cafeteria and that low-quality food that I’d so desperately wanted to comfort me but hadn’t.
The cabin hardly looked any cleaner after all that sweeping. In fact, I probably stirred up more dust than I swept out the door. I sneezed and drank a few beers and relieved myself again and used more hand-sanitizing gel and sat in the armchair. I smoked another joint. That last one was a mistake, because after just a few minutes I was picturing my unborn son crying over my grave fifty years into the future, and I felt the gravity of his woe and resentment toward me, and I despised him. Then I imagined everything bad he’d say about me to his own children after my death. I imagined my grandchildren’s bitchy faces. I hated them for not worshipping me. Had they no idea of my sacrifice? There I was, perfectly wonderful, and nobody would see that. I looked up and saw a bat hanging from the rafters. I went to a very dark place. The oceanic emptiness in my gut churned. I pictured my old body rotting in my coffin. I pictured my skin wrinkling and turning black and falling off my bones. I pictured my rotting genitals. I pictured my pubic hair filling with larvae. And after all that, there was infinite darkness. There was nothing.
Just as I considered hanging myself with my belt, there was a knock on the door of the cabin, and a girl’s voice called out, “MJ?”
The only girlfriend of MJ’s I’d ever met had the odd name of Carrie Mary. I always thought Carrie Mary must have been slightly retarded because she had that kind of fat double chin and weak smile and the sort of waddle that some retarded people have, and she wore her hair in small pigtails all over her head, fixed with childish bows. I think my parents were too polite to question the relationship, but when MJ brought her home one Thanksgiving, I confronted him. “Are you taking advantage of Carrie Mary because she’s mentally disabled?” My brother did not answer me. He simply took the log of goat cheese I was spreading on melba toast and threw it at the floor and stepped in it with his dirty tennis shoe. He tracked that goat cheese all around the house, and later that night I heard my brother fucking Carrie Mary. He sounded like a growling bear when he fucked her. I’d never heard anyone grunt like that before. It was so authentic. It scared me. I couldn’t look him in the eye for days.
But the woman at the door was not Carrie Mary. I composed myself and received her in a manner I thought was perfectly casual. “How do you do? I’m Charles.” I was very high. Shirtless, I folded my arms across my belly like a straitjacket.
“He here?” she asked, seeming to notice neither my greatness nor my awkwardness. She was a local—long, dyed, purplish hair, big gray sweatshirt, tight jeans, dark lipstick, no coat on. She looked like the kind of girl who works at a Store 24 or some pizza parlor or bowling alley, takes a lot of flak from the patrons, eleventh-grade education. “Is MJ around?” she asked, sniffling from the cold. A chilling perfume, like vodka and honey, cut through the air. I thought I’d die.
“No,” I said. It seemed imperative that I come off casual. “Haven’t seen him.”
She bit her lips in disappointment, rubbed her hands together. I could see she was wearing a full face of makeup. Chalky powder caked over her cheeks, rouge, blue eye shadow. She looked young, twenty maybe. I tried to ask for her name.
“And to whom do I have the pleasure?” is what I said, and immediately I heard my voice echo through the trees like some nervous pervert or dweeb, like someone who’s never had a conversation before.
“Is he coming back soon?” she asked. “MJ?”
“Yes, MJ,” I said before I could even understand her question.
“Cool if I wait for him? My brother can’t pick me up till four.”
I nodded. She stepped closer to me, and for a moment I thought she wanted me to embrace her, so I lifted my arms awkwardly, then put them down. She was generous not to stare at my gut, my nipples.
“Can I come inside?” she asked.
“Sorry,” I said and turned to give her room to walk through the doorway. I don’t know why I kept up the lie about MJ. I certainly wasn’t in the mood to entertain this young woman, whose name I soon learned was Michelle, but spelled somehow with an x because, as she put it, her family was European. Perhaps somewhere in me I felt that keeping her company would be a further affront to my wife, which was the entire point of my trip, after all. I admit I was grateful to have something come in and disturb the journey of my thinking. The first thing she did was light a cigarette and pace around and point to the dildo and blow a ring of smoke and say to me, as though she were asking me the time of day, “You a fag?”