“I hope I didn’t hurt you,” he said. It was Bill.
But how could that be?
He was in jail again and was unable to raise the bail money. It was in the paper that morning. She remained still. She couldn’t talk, and there was no reason to piss him off by struggling against the ropes he had placed around her wrists and ankles.
“I’m sorry this is necessary at all, believe it or not. My brother would be so angry at me. I can hear him now, yelling at me, ‘Goddamn it, Buddy-boy, what the hell have you gotten yourself into?’ I hated it when he called me that. Buddy-boy. Our dad called me that. ‘Come ’er, Buddy, give your old man a hug,’ he’d say. He always wanted more than that. You knew about that, right? About me and my old man? I was pretty sure Jack must have told you about it. You knew that we were lovers, right? Jack and I were lovers. It’s okay, between brothers. My dad told me it was okay from the time I was a little boy, just learning to walk. ‘It’s okay because I said it’s okay.’ He’d say that, and then he’d make Jack and I do it, and he would watch and beat off. It was better than doing it with our dad. He was cruel, our dad was.
“Our mom knew all about it, too. Don’t kid yourself. She drank herself into a stupor each day so she didn’t have to face it. Face what her great husband was doing to his kids. Of course, he’s an icon now. She has him so far up on a pedestal that she can barely see him. ‘Your father was a great man,’ she says all the time. ‘He loved you so much.’ Or, my favorite, ‘You were blessed with a great father, and
I had a wonderful husband.’ Bernice has organic brain syndrome. Did you know that? Full-blown dementia. From alcoholism. I am not the smartest guy around, but I can read. She started showing signs of it right around the time my dad died. I figured it was stress. Her taking you in like she did, that is a clear sign that she is not right. Why in God’s name would you befriend a slut who is hell bent on ruining your family?
“That was your goal, wasn’t it, Sandra? You sure as hell didn’t have any real interest in us. Did you call us once after Jack died? Reach out? See if we needed anything? You have his business now; you could have helped me out several different ways. I didn’t even ask for money, just for the clients my brother had promised he would send my way. I was a good business man. My dad is the one who fucked everything up, not me. He stopped doing any real business years ago. My brother was to blame. My dad loved my brother. And when Jack stopped talking to him, it about killed my dad. He would come home at night and practically rape my mother. I would hear them in their room. She would be screaming, and he would be going to town. It took me a while to figure out he wasn’t beating her up. He was using her instead of Jack.
“Jack threatened my dad with exposure. Did you know that? You do, don’t you? You know that Jack was going to file a fake lawsuit, expose my dad to all that humiliation and then me and my mom. Jack didn’t care about himself. He was ready to go public. He thought it would cure him of his obsession with whores. You knew about that, right? You were in a long line of whores, the only difference being that he took you out in public. He thought
that if he went public, he’d stop. It had gotten out of hand. We had women coming to my parent’s mansion looking for Jack. His attorney did a great job covering up the lawsuits against my brother—charging him with rape, for one thing. Or women who were pregnant, just like you, who he had abandoned. He paid through the nose, over and over again. Ask around, you’ll find out I’m telling the truth.
“He was so worried his wife and kids would find out the truth about him. Don’t you think it’s strange that his kids go to school as far from Long Island as possible? One in Los Angeles and one in Oahu? And that wife of his! What a fucking dimwit. Pam was a looker in her day, and all he wanted was someone who would look good and blend in with the family. My mother had to take care of her when she was pregnant. Did you know that? Get cooks and cleaning ladies to their apartment so my brother wouldn’t starve to death or suffocate in the squalor. It was awful. I still can’t believe he stayed with her all those years.
“Ever try to have a conversation with Pam? She doesn’t have a thing to say. She’ll ask you all about yourself and then sit there like a bump with not a word to say for herself. Their kids are brilliant; they sure as hell didn’t get it from Pam. No wonder my brother strayed; she’d bore you to death!
“My brother loved me. He protected me from Dad as much as he could. He used to whisper to me, ‘Just close your eyes and pretend you are on a beach somewhere.’ Finally, when he got old enough, he told my dad he would kill him if he touched me. Kill him or expose him to the city. ‘I’ll ruin you,’ he told my dad. He saved me from my dad.” Bill started to weep.
Sandra was taken aback, thinking there was a woman with him, because it sounded like the whimpering of a young girl.
“Jack! Goddamn it! Why’d you have to go and die on me? I need you, Buddy! I need you! Why didn’t you tell your bitches to take care of me? Why, Jack? I thought we loved each other!” The sobbing was horrible, loud and choking.
Sandra was afraid he would have a heart attack and she would die by starvation, tied up in her basement. Finally, after what seemed like an hour, he stopped. She could hear him go into the bathroom and pull toilet paper off the roll, yards and yards of it, and he blew his nose. She heard the toilet seat be thrown up with a slam and the stream of his urine hitting the water. He didn’t flush the toilet.
What a pig
, she thought.
What did I expect?
And he continued whining after he peed. She could smell his urine coming from the bathroom, and her gorge rose. She would choke if she puked with this wad of mushy paper in her mouth.
“My mother is in denial. I know Jack confronted her last year after Dad died; he told me he was going to. ‘I’m not going to my grave letting the old lady get away with it,’ he said. ‘She’s going to apologize for letting that fucker abuse us, or I am never speaking to her again.’ I guess she refused to say she was sorry, because he never did. He never saw her or spoke to his own mother again. She is heartbroken about it. You know that, right? She won’t mention it, but it’s clear to me. She’s got you up on a pedestal now, too. You, Jack, my dad. You’re all up there being worshiped.
“She can’t stand Pam. Ask my mother about Pam sometime; she can’t win, that girl. She’ll give my mother a huge check, and the next words out Bernice’s mouth will be, ‘She is a real dummy, that one.’ When Jack told my parents he was marrying Pam, my mother took to her bed for a week. I don’t know what she expected of Jack, if she thought he would come back home someday or stay single and keep doting on her. He did that, you know. Every week, I don’t care if he was overwhelmed at work and had things going on with Pam and the kids, he would come uptown and take my mother out for lunch. He would purposely run into her at the store or in the park if she was out for a stroll. He’d call the house, and Mildred would tell him where she was, and he would seek her out. When I got home from school, I could always tell if Mother had been with Jack. She was kinder to me then, more motherly, if that makes any sense. He brought the best out in people, Jack did. No one could make my mother laugh like Jack did. It was almost embarrassing the way she worshiped him.
“I don’t know, to this day, what his breaking point was, why he had to confront Bernice, why he stopped helping me out. Something happened right before my dad died. And then, after he died, Jack began his downward spiral. He got a young girl pregnant. I bet you didn’t know that, did you? She came to the mansion, hysterical, demanding to see Bernice. She was sure that once she confronted her, Bernice would convince Jack to allow the girl to keep the baby, even marry her. She was a college student, an art major. When Pam told me about you, I thought she was referring to this young girl. We had paid her off. I denied to
Pam that Jack would ever be unfaithful. And then I found out that he had given the business to you, and I knew then that he had someone else. You are the first ‘normal’ woman I can remember him being with. You know what Pam said about you? She said you were ‘a lovely woman, a professional business woman.’ What kind of weak-spined person would refer to her husband’s mistress that way? She never did have any pride. When she was pregnant with Lisa, she told my mother that she didn’t know if she could take care of two children. Imagine being pregnant, purposely getting pregnant, and admitting that to someone? My mother was appalled. She said she was going to watch Pam like a hawk, and if she did one thing inappropriate, she would have those kids taken away from Pam. Even then, even when I was in the worst denial, I thought, ‘Jesus Christ, if any kids should have been taken away, it should have been my mother’s kids.’
“She was a horrible mother. How Jack could have forgiven her like he did, being gentle and kind to her year after year, is a mystery. My mother never took care of us; Mildred did. She started drinking before I was born, Jack told me. He remembered the first time he noticed there was something not right with our mother. He came home from school, and she was nowhere to be found. He went up to take a shower before my dad got home and happened to notice her bedroom door open. He went and peeked in; she was face down, sprawled across the bed snoring. He went in to see if she was okay, and he could smell the booze on her. He tried waking her up, but it was futile. She was out cold. Later that night, during dinner, she came down, apologetic for not being there when he got home
from school. Jack said my dad hollered at her and called her a lush. Jack looked the word up in the dictionary and said that was how he knew the old lady had given in to the bottle. I often wondered if I didn’t have fetal alcohol syndrome. She drank during the time she was pregnant with me. I have trouble reading and ‘impulse control,’ they call it. In other words, I am a fuck up. My dad used to yell at me when he coached my little league games and tell me it wasn’t my fault I was uncoordinated. ‘It’s from too much booze in the womb.’ I laughed every time he said for twenty years, but now I wonder if he wasn’t correct. My mother is a smart woman; she graduated magna cum laude from Barnard. Did you know that? She was a philosophy major.” Bill started laughing when he said that, screaming laughter. “Oh Jesus, what a waste of money.”
The phone started ringing. Sandra prayed that if it was Tom, that he wouldn’t say anything incriminating. The answering machine picked up, and he simply said, “Hi, call me when you can.” He gave no name. She could hear the faint bell of her cell phone in her purse and then the beep that told a message had been left. She felt her bladder getting full.
Is he planning on keeping me tied up all night?
“I guess your friends are looking for you. Humph. Not good for me. I’m not even sure why I came here. I don’t think I can kill you.”
She could hear him moving toward her, and she flinched when he picked up her T-shirt. He placed his hand over her stomach. “You’re not very big yet, are you?”
She shook her head no. Then, as if on cue, the baby started to move, rolling moves that surely showed through her skin.
He laughed and added a little pressure to his hand. “Oh God! How cool! I had forgotten how cool it is to feel a baby moving. My two boys aren’t that old. I haven’t seen them since June. Anne wouldn’t let them near me when I was home last. Now my fat-ass sister-in-law has them. Did you know about Anne’s family? I met her at school. She was there on a full scholarship. Anne is a better athlete than student. Don’t kid yourself, it was no academic scholarship. She wouldn’t have been interested in me if it had been. The only reason I even got into school was because my dad was an alumni and Jack went there, too. He got his master’s in business there. My dad made him work for it. He had to pay his own way. Did you know that? I probably got more handed to me than Jack did. Jack was always a worker. He said he knew early on that his one way out of the mess we were in was to be independent of my dad. He said, ‘Don’t worry, Buddy-boy, I’ll take care of you.’ And for years, he did. He paid for my apartment when I finally got the nerve to leave home. You knew we both had to go to school in the city and had to commute. We weren’t allowed to stray too far from Columbus Circle. My dad had huge appetites, too.” Bill cried out then, scaring Sandra, who jumped slightly in her chair. “Why! Why did he do that to us? It was torture, I tell you, not just the pain, but the constant drama! He was so mean to us. Jack said that he got beaten once because he hid me from my dad when he got home from work. I was a toddler, and Jack hid me to protect me. Jack started screaming so the help could
hear him, and Mildred came running. I thought my father would explode he was so pissed off. ‘Don’t you EVER yell like that in this house again, do you understand me?’ Then Jack took his own life in his hands because he said, ‘Leave Billy alone until he gets older. Do it or I’m telling.’ He said my dad laughed in his face, but evidently, he did leave me alone for a year or so more.”
Sandra could hear Bill sit down on the daybed down there. He blew his nose. Then the phone rang again a second and a third time, but there was no message left. Sandra’s feet were starting to hurt, so she tried to move ever so slightly. There was no sound coming from the daybed, then very soft snoring. He had worked himself up into a nap.
What the hell am I going to do?
She couldn’t push the foot of the chair down without making a racket. She didn’t want him to wake.
She didn’t know how much time had passed when she heard a very slight rattling of the door that lead to the outdoors. And then, in seconds, there was a ruckus, and she was rescued. She felt hands on her face pulling the wadding out of her mouth and the blindfold off her eyes, and there was Tom. Uniformed officers had Bill on the floor; he was bellowing for all he was worth.