Dance Real Slow (18 page)

Zoe is slow, removing my clothing before her own. When she undresses she stands, never taking her eyes off my naked body slumped in the tub.

“Just hold me first,” she says, lying on top.

We are still until she decides it is time to move, kissing the wiry diamond of hair lifting from the crevice between my nipples. Immediately I can feel my erection push into her stomach and I try to slide to one side or the other, but there is no room.

“It's all right.”

She reaches down and rubs the underside of my penis with the back of her hand. Then she grabs it full and begins pulling in long, gentle strokes. There are other things I try to think about: leaky basements, the cold-water spigot against the bottom of my foot, Halloween candy that will make Calvin sick. But nothing works and I come in a terrific burst, with semen shooting its way nearly to Zoe's armpit. For this I want to apologize, to explain to her it has been quite a while since I have been intimate with a woman. Instead, I close my eyes tight, snapping my head back and losing myself in the warm, tender closeness of someone else, someone who can make me feel this rush.

It does not take long for me to get hard again, and this time Zoe climbs over and places me inside her. She lays her palms flat against the tile wall above, bracing herself as she rocks in easy waves that begin and end at the hinge of her hips. We both make the same gravelly moans, starting in the parched well of our throats. It feels so good, so foreign, that after I come for the second time I beckon her to continue, guiding her with my fingertips grazing the roll of her rear end. Soon my fingers lose contact with her skin and I lie quiet, motionless, as she retreats from the tub and walks to the sink. Neither
of us speaks and after a few moments she hands me a cigarette from my coat pocket. She sits on the toilet beside me, the tinkling of her urine the only sound as we share the cigarette, alternately blowing smoke into an open crack of window.

Then Zoe reaches down and taps me on the arm, gesturing with her head to the doorway. Calvin, standing in his turned-up pajama bottoms and floppy T-shirt, rubs the sleep from his eyes. He still smells of douche bags and skunk.

“Does her tummy hurt?” he asks, and I know exactly what he means. Sometimes, when Calvin has a stomachache or is constipated, I sit with him in the bathroom and hold his hand while he is on the toilet. When he was younger, a year or so ago, I would also read to him.

“Yeah,” I say. “She isn't feeling so well. Too many sweets.”

“Oh.”

He takes out his stepladder and climbs to the sink for a glass of water. When he has finished he leaves without saying another word, without asking us why we are not dressed. Again there is silence and I close my eyes and reach for Zoe, rubbing small, perfect circles onto her knee.

Harper Blyth is leaning against the hood of my car, eating popcorn from a red-and-white striped cardboard box. His wife, Natalie, is seven months pregnant and she is standing to his side, her bloated belly pushing out from beneath the folds of a tan topcoat. When I approach, Natalie raises a mittened hand and waves.

“Sorry,” she says.

After winning its first four games, the Tarent High basketball team has lost by nearly twenty points to Creekside. In the locker room, once the game had ended, I wanted to tell the boys not to get upset about this, not to let it ruin the rest of their weekend. Instead, I complained about their lack of full-court defense, about Russell Johns's repeated refusal to pass the ball to the open man, and about overall poor shot selection—particularly by Noah. Shortly after I left them and was walking down the corridor to the parking lot, I stopped briefly, debating whether or not I should go back and apologize. But then Jess Thomas, the principal and scoreboard
operator, came over to console me and the two of us left the building together.

“This was not the game to come to, huh?” says Harper.

“No,” I say, kissing Natalie on the cheek. “It was not.”

They invite me for coffee, but I decline, saying that Zoe is babysitting Calvin and she deserves to be relieved of those duties.

“You're spending a lot of time with her,” says Harper, sarcastically wagging his eyebrows.

“Leave him be,” says Natalie. She plants an elbow in his ribs and then reaches for his hand, leading him toward their car, which is parked bumper-to-bumper with mine. Harper is a good husband, helping Natalie into the passenger seat. He spits onto his thumb and wipes the corner of her mouth. “Mustard,” he says, before easing the door closed and walking around to the other side.

Standing erect, I must appear gloomy, because as Harper backs out he rolls down his window and smiles. “Things are not so bad,” he says. Then, as he pulls away, he shouts, “Eat a burrito!”

Near the end of our first year of law school, after Harper had split with his then girlfriend and was so depressed he insisted he was going to drop out and sell seashell-sculptured trinkets on the beaches of Spain, George Redwin and I took him to a Mexican restaurant at 1:30 in the morning and made him eat four burritos. We told him he would feel better afterwards. Of course, he did not. He became ill on the walk home, spraying
the steps of the student union with vomit that came in salsa-speckled splashes. It took all of George's and my powers of persuasion to convince two campus police officers that Harper was not intoxicated, only sick from heartbreak and fierce Mexican cooking. From that night on, whenever our minds became encumbered with thoughts so debilitating that we were incapable of studying, watching television, shooting pool, etc., we would escape for burritos.

At home, Calvin has fallen asleep in my bed with the radio turned low and his loose crayons scattered across the cotton sheets. His tiny breaths cause the mattress to twitch, leading some of the crayons to roll into the crack underneath the headboard.

“He was tired,” says Zoe.

She is reading a textbook in the gauzy, funnel-shaped light of a desk lamp. The pages of her book hold pink fluorescent dashes from a marker she has in her right hand.

“We lost.”

She slips the book into a leather satchel and then rises, coming to my side and kissing my neck.

“This is not such a good night for you, huh?” She removes her coat from the back of a chair. Then, without looking up, she says, “I spoke to Kate.”

“What do you mean?”

“She called here.”

“What did she say? What did
you
say?”

“Nothing much. She sounded surprised that I answered, that a woman answered.” Zoe zips her coat and
the two of us walk downstairs, into the front hallway, beside the door. “She wants to come here.”

Who the fuck is she, I wonder, to talk about such things with Zoe. Or does she have to crowbar her way into this relationship, too?

“What else?” I ask.

“She wants to come next week.”

“Next week?
Not
next week. Next week is too soon.”

“Too soon for what?”

“Just too soon.”

As she unfastens her keys from a clip inside her bag, I ask her if there was anything else. Really, what I want to know is why Zoe does not seem angrier, teeming with jealousy.

“She wanted to sing to Calvin. Something from when he was a baby.”

“Did you let her?”

She nods and then slips her arms through mine, hugging me so that her wrists tug gently against my spine. In the hanging wall mirror I watch my eyes widen. Also, I can see the elastic waistband of her coat has caught on her hip, curling beneath itself.

“What are you gonna do?” she asks.

“I need to sit with this for a while.”

“You don't have a while.”

Perched in the doorway, I watch Zoe walk to her truck. Before she climbs in, she knocks on the windshield, for no apparent reason, and says, “She seems sweet, Gordon.”

Mostly she was sweet, I think, climbing the stairs
to the house. Except for those times when she was not.

“What would you do?” I call out, peering over my shoulder.

“Hmm,” Zoe says. “I'm not the right person to ask.”

“Why?”

She sighs, loud. Brushing the bridge of her nose, she says, “Do you know Bailey Foss?”

“From down at the paper? He's an editor or something?”

“Or something.”

“And?” I turn to face Zoe, squarely. Now she is tapping at the open pickup door with the toe of her boot.

“I dated him for almost a year.”

“Really?”

“Yep.”

“Really?”

“You want him paying me social calls?”

I smile, hooking my thumbs through the belt loops on my pants. “You two got any kids?”

“None that I know of.”

“The thing is—”

“Look, it must be hard for her, too—being away from Calvin for so long, being away from you. I can appreciate that. Really, I can.” She reaches forward, lifting something from the vent in the dashboard—yarn or a twisted piece of wire, it's too dark to tell. “I just don't want to stand around and watch.”

“Watch what?”

“Whatever.”

I walk back down the steps and rest my elbow
against the roof of the truck, staring at Zoe beneath the curve of my armpit.

“We are
very
divorced,” I say.

Zoe nods and after a few minutes of silence dense like a soggy sponge, she tells me she has to get home.

“You okay with this?” I ask.

She shrugs.

“Come on. Be okay with it. For me.”

“Why can't I not be okay with it? For me.”

I reach through the parted window and her skin feels cold as sheet metal.

“Think about what you want from me, Gordon. What you want from us.”

“It's just that this is a hard time.”

She adjusts a knob beside the steering wheel. “It will always be a hard time, for one reason or another.”

“Not always. Not if Kate doesn't come.”

“Go to bed,” she says, starting her truck.

She pulls away swiftly and in the evening air I kick pebbles until they ring against the copper pipes below the porch.

Calvin likes to count rocket ships on long car trips. He presses his face flat against the window and scans the vast, fretless prairie for silos, which he calls rockets. “There are twins,” he will announce after seeing two bound together by brass piping. Because he often loses track of the numbers when he gets past twenty, it is really my responsibility to keep count. Today, from the right side of the car, he has spied thirty-one from Tarent to Lawrence.

“There musta been more than that,” he says when I sound the total.

“No,” I answer, patting him on the thigh. “Not unless you missed a few.”

In the long, fragile months after Kate left, I used to take Calvin to the parking lot of the building she lived in when the two of us first met, and lay him across my stomach and lap. There I would rock him gently to sleep while Brahms played on the cassette deck of the car. He did not know where we were, of course, but I would stare up at her old window and watch as someone else, someone other than Kate, passed behind the illuminated glass.

Because her time with Calvin was so brief, so frighteningly nondescript, I always find it difficult knowing the best way to refer to her. Sometimes I call her Mom, other times simply Kate. Today I call her both.

“Last night Mom sang to you?”

He nods, his eyes busy trying to focus on the rapid-passing scenery of downtown Lawrence.

“What did Kate sing? Do you remember?”

First he says no, he does not remember. But I press him.

“It was the sun song. Somethin' about the sun.”

For some reason, shortly after Calvin turned one, the only song he allowed Kate and me to play on the stereo or sing to him was the Beatles' “Here Comes the Sun.”

“You like that song,” I tell him.

He shrugs and then says, “Her voice isn't so good.”

We both smile.

In the library at the University of Kansas, Calvin leafs through a book filled with large, glossy photographs of wild animals. He points at pictures and then softly, to himself, tries to mimic the noises the various animals make. After he lets out a snorting sound, I look up and ask him what it was.

“This.” He is tapping a flamingo.

“You think that's how it sounds?”

“Maybe,” he says and turns the page.

We take a break after an hour or so, sitting on a wooden bench in the front corridor of the library, drinking apple juice. Calvin does not eat any crackers, he only wants to hold the plastic mug that screws on the top of the thermos.

“Careful,” I say, placing both his hands around the cup.

He leans over and begins lapping at the juice like a dog or a cat.

“There's something I want to talk to you about,” I say. He is not listening, busy instead making gurgling noises.

“It was the
sun
song,” he says, sounding slightly perturbed. “I already told you.”

“Yeah, I know.” I take the cup from him and pour the remaining finger of juice into a sand-filled ashtray. The juice pools briefly before it is absorbed. “It's not about that. It's about something else.”

Now he reaches for a sliced pear I have wrapped in a sandwich bag.

“Wait a minute,” I say, turning him so that we are facing each other. “We're going to talk first, okay?”

When he is still for a moment, I start. “This is about Kate, your mom, coming to visit us here.”

“In Kansas,” he states, confidently.

“Right. In Kansas.” I screw the cup back onto the thermos and ease my hands into a clasp, above my belt. “She wants to see us—I mean, you. Mostly you. It's been awhile, almost two years, and I wanted to know how you felt about her coming here, to our home.”

“Is she gonna bring me anything?”

This is what matters to a small boy; his needs are immediate. Motherless, half orphaned, he knows of no other way of life. Really, what he wants most is not a mother but a bulldozer with a crane attached to its rear, the kind of crane that has a dangling, braided chain that allows a boy to yank open and closed the toothy shovel at its end.