Homesick for Another World(39)

“Is this what you were hoping for?” she asked, watching his face for his reaction.

Jeb kept his eyes shut, licked his lips again. The girl could smell the stink of his breath, like a sick cat’s. She sniffed his mouth, wincing happily. Their faces were only a few inches apart. “I was hoping . . .” Jeb began to say. The load of her body against him ground at his bones. He felt himself blush, harden. He lifted his hands.

The girl just laughed and hopped off him before he could touch her. Her dress had been hiked up in the maneuver. Jeb watched her thighs tremble with the impact of each step she took across the living room floor. In the hall she laughed to herself some more, put her boots on, and whipped her raincoat off the rack.

“Let me see you to your door,” Jeb called out. But she was already gone.

An hour later, the nephew called again. “My whole damn building lost power,” he complained. “I can’t even watch TV.”

“You could have spent the night here,” Jeb chided him. “I had a fine time with the neighbor girl without you. But I don’t think you’d like her much. Sort of a dud, if you ask me. A fish in a bucket, as they say. No fun for the hunt.”

“I’ve got other girls,” the nephew said and hung up.

In the morning, pale mist filled the air like smoke. The girl’s house was obscured by the fog. Jeb awoke on the couch, got the Kenny May, and assumed his position in the basement once more. A small drop of water trickled from the crumbling concrete wall down to the floor. He drank. All he heard from the girl’s house was drawers and cabinets opening and shutting, the faucet running, and then her radio dial crackling up and down, landing finally on bright, snappy pop songs. She listened to one after another, singing merrily along as though she were completely innocent, as though nothing at all had happened.

? ? ?

Days passed. Jeb spent them sitting at his kitchen window. He watched the girl carry cans of paint into her house, smoke cigarettes on the front steps, pick up debris from the yard, drag bags of trash to the curb. Her figure appeared now and then through the wispy drapes of her bedroom when she opened or shut the window. The mail came. The sun rose and fell. Jeb neglected the dead leaves that had blown from the girl’s yard into his. He didn’t want the girl to see him out there raking. She was a tramp, a tease, nobody worth his time, he told himself. He read the Sunday paper and fried his bacon while the girl painted and cleaned and hammered at her walls. Despite his neighborly instincts, he refrained from going over to offer his help or counsel.

“She’s a plain Jane” is what he told his nephew when he came over for breakfast. “No substance, no depth. Full of herself for no good reason.”

“Maybe I’ll go over and say hello,” the nephew said, but he didn’t.

And then, a few days later, Jeb heard the thunderous squeal of a motorcycle peeling up the road. For hours, he listened at his basement window, nodding his head to the rhythmic tempo of the girl’s headboard hitting the wall, the gasps and grunts and growls. When it was over, he took off on foot down the road into town and spent the whole afternoon ambling like a stray dog under the striped storefront awnings, dodging the daylight, lest his white skin burn and blister. He licked a vanilla ice cream cone and regarded his slumped silhouette in the shop windows. He straightened his posture as best he could, but he was stooped by nature. He could still be a god on Earth, however, if only he found the right tribe. That would be something—to be worshipped and beloved. Jeb whistled through the warm evening streets, imagining this wonderful new place and all the stupid people who would gasp and fall to their knees in ecstasy every time he shuffled past.





THE BEACH BOY


The friends met for dinner, as they did the second Sunday of every month, at a small Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side. There were three couples: Marty and Barbara, Jerry and Maureen, and John and Marcia, who had recently returned from a week-long island getaway to celebrate their twenty-ninth wedding anniversary. “Were the beaches beautiful? How was the hotel? Was it safe? Was it memorable? Was it worth the money?” the friends asked.

Marcia said, “You had to see it to believe it. The ocean was like bathwater. The sunsets? Better than any painting. But the political situation, don’t get me started. All the beggars!” She put a hand over her heart and sipped her wine. “Who knows who’s in charge? It’s utter chaos. Meanwhile, the people all speak English!” The vestiges of colonialism, the poverty, the corruption—it had all depressed her. “And we were harassed,” she told the friends. “By prostitutes. Male ones. They followed us down the beach like cats. The strangest thing. But the beach was absolutely gorgeous. Right, John?”

John sat across the table, swirling his spaghetti. He glanced up at Marcia, nodded, winked.

The friends wanted to know what the prostitutes had looked like, how they’d dressed, what they’d said. They wanted details.

“They looked like normal people,” Marcia said, shrugging. “You know, just young, poor people, locals. But they were very complimentary. They kept saying, ‘Hello, nice people. Massage? Nice massage for nice people?’”

“Little did they know!” John joked, furrowing his eyebrows like a maniac. The friends laughed.

“We’d read about it in the guidebook,” Marcia said. “You’re not supposed to acknowledge them at all. You don’t even look them in the eye. If you do, they’ll never leave you alone. The beach boys. The male prostitutes, I mean. It’s sad,” she added. “Tragic. And, really, one wonders how anybody can starve in a place like that. There was food everywhere. Fruit on every tree. I just don’t understand it. And the city was rife with garbage. Rife!” she proclaimed. She put down her fork. “Wouldn’t you say, hon?”