Homesick for Another World(37)

“I’m sorry, dear. Did I offend you?” he asked.

The girl looked straight up at him. “You’re trying to get to me, aren’t you?” she said. Jeb’s eyes cowered and darted back and forth between her crossed, luminous knees and the rumbling windowpane. “I see your game. You’ve trying to shame me for being young and pretty. You want to make me apologize for all the other girls who didn’t like you. You just can’t stand that I’m right next door reminding you of all that. That’s it, isn’t it? Pump and dump,” she scoffed. “Nothing you say can hurt me. See if you can do it. I dare you.” She chuckled and sipped her whiskey, then placed the glass on the coffee table.

“You never know with young women these days,” Jeb said. “It’s a rough, wild world out there, and girls, women”—he knew the distinction was an important one to make for the girl to feel respected—“they just give themselves away for free. It breaks my heart. Low self-esteem, they call it.” He clucked his tongue, shook his head, then brought his hand to his chest. “I’m sorry,” he said, speaking softly, as though he were about to cry. He stooped forward over the coffee table, picked up the girl’s glass, and moved it to a coaster.

“But I haven’t done anything,” the girl maintained, rolling her eyes. “There’s nothing to get upset about. Jesus. I already told you, I see your game. You’re trying to get me to cry on your shoulder, make me out to be the screwed-up one, like that’s why I don’t want to fuck you. I wasn’t born yesterday, you know.”

When Jeb was excited, his heart fluttered. “Like a pigeon in a burlap sack,” he’d told the doctor.

“And what do you mean ‘for free’?” the girl went on. “You think it’s better to sell yourself? What is with you men, you always see everything as this and that? Like everything is for sale.”

“Pardon?” Jeb said.

“Give and take. Like life is some bank account you’re trying to fill up. And like every girl’s a whore.”

“My dear, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“No kidding,” the girl said. She pursed her lips tight, wrinkling her chin. Jeb thought she looked rather ugly that way. She held her breath. She seemed somehow to be on the verge of combusting. Beneath the coffee table, her bare foot was jiggling like a bobblehead. A bolt of lightning cracked and flashed. “Is your nephew coming, you think?” she asked, her voice suddenly soft and innocent.

“No,” Jeb said.

“Oh,” she said.

But still the girl remained seated. She even adjusted her posture to make herself more comfortable, leaning forward so that her skin did not touch the rough fabric of the couch. He was quiet. He watched her lips tighten, then unfurl as she sipped her whiskey.

Jeb swallowed back some phlegm, moved stiffly to the couch, and sat down. His hand rested on the cushion between him and the girl. His pinkie finger grazed the soft fabric of her dress. If he’d wanted to, he thought, he could easily have pinched the flesh of her thigh.

“These are some photos,” he said, turning to an old cigar box on the coffee table. He flipped the lid of the box open. The girl bent over to look at the photographs inside, slid them around in the box as though she were shuffling puzzle pieces. Jeb looked again at her tanned, dewy cleavage.

“What year was this?” she asked, picking up a photo. It was a small school portrait of Jeb as a boy. His face was fat, his eyes cold and tortured, his striped tie wrung tightly around his neck.

“Age nine,” Jeb pronounced. He shook his head gruffly, as though to wake himself up. “If my age is an issue for you,” he began to say.

“Why should I care how old you are? What’s it to me?” She flipped another photo around, stuck it out so Jeb could see it. It was a photo of him as a young man, skulking beside his father, a dark, mean figure in a gray sacklike suit. In the photo Jeb had thick red hair. “Your hair’s so white now,” she said, looking at the photo again.

“They called me Red Jeb when I was young. Say that six times fast.” He laughed. “People sometimes think I’m an albino, if you can believe that.”

“Of course I can believe it,” the girl said. “I’d believe almost anything in this world.”

“And occasionally black folks think I’m an albino black, if you can believe that. I suppose it’s a compliment. It isn’t catching, my vitiligo. It’s perfectly harmless. In some cultures it’s considered a mark of the divine. If I went to those countries, people would stop and pray to me in the street, I guess. Saint Jeb.” He said, and laughed again. “Nowadays, of course, I just look old. Children can be cruel—”

“Can I use your bathroom?” the girl asked, interrupting him.

Jeb looked down at her knees. The blue tint of her veins showed through her skin. He faked a cough, composed himself, then bent over the photographs again, wetting his finger not on his tongue but on the fat, spittley lip hanging down between his frown lines. “You know where it is,” he said.

Jeb listened to her heavy step as she crossed the front hall to the bathroom beneath the stairs. In her absence, he looked at the photos and thought back to a failed romance from long ago. He’d thought he was in love, but after only one intimate rendezvous, the woman had sat on the toilet and dismissed him completely. “You’re too uptight,” she’d told him. “You have no imagination.” His heart fluttered again as he remembered how her thighs had swayed when she rose to wipe herself. Then the toilet flushed. He listened for the sink faucet to run, but it didn’t. The girl came back.