Between You and Me Read online

  Joy had stepped out of the car. She stood on the pavement, staring up at the kid, rain pattering her fair hair. In the last month she’d often seemed older than her nine years. On their second outing, when they’d gone to see Herbie Goes Bananas, she’d told him he seemed tense, that maybe he needed a cocktail, and Paul, mortified, sounded like Kyle when he answered, “I just have a little headache.” But now she looked only gangly and innocent in her pink shirt and floral shorts, her head hardly coming up past the kid’s waist. How had he managed to let her out of the house without a raincoat after fighting about it with Kyle? The kid seemed to be waiting for her to speak, maybe thinking she was an imbecile, gawking at him like that with her mouth open. Paul wished she would close it. He was waiting, too, to hear what she had to say. But she only stood there, getting drenched.

  “Look,” the kid told her. “I was totally here first. You were way down at the end of the aisle.”

  What was it that fascinated him about the t-shirt? That it failed in its attempt to seem sinister? That the demon looked like a crazed Muppet, more sultry than threatening, striking a harlot’s pose on a dimly lit street beneath a beautifully striated sky?

  “Shit, man,” the kid said. “You know that spot was mine, and you come flying in and try to steal it.” He turned to Paul and called through the window, “Why don’t you get outta the car, man?”

  The girl in the Camaro stirred, tossing her cigarette out the window, her head following. Her hair was still in her eyes, and Paul couldn’t tell how she saw what was going on around her. “What’s the hold-up,” she called, voice high and abrasive, not at all what he’d expected from her lazy, languid smoking. “Get him to fucking move.”

  “I have an infection,” Kyle said quietly, hunched down on the car’s floor.

  Joy was good and soaked now, and so was the kid. They were having a battle of wills, and Joy was clearly winning. She still hadn’t said anything, hadn’t moved, just stared at the kid with her mouth gaping, until he backed off another step. This was the lesson, then, Paul thought. Teaching the children that they could do things for themselves. The key now, he knew, was to keep Cynthia from finding out about it. He hit the horn, hard, and held it for five full seconds.

  The kid threw up his hands and turned away. “Okay! Take the goddamn spot. I don’t have time for this.”

  On the back of his t-shirt was the word “Killers” in shaky red ink, as if written in blood, and for some reason this had its intended effect, making Paul shudder. Joy watched the kid until he was all the way back to the Camaro, and only when his attention was taken up by the pimpled girl, who’d lit another cigarette and was questioning him with a skeptical, exasperated expression similar to the one Paul imagined Cynthia turning on him later this afternoon, did he roll down his window and tell Joy to get back into the car. “You’re sopping wet,” he said.

  “Aren’t you supposed to thank me now?” Her shorts made a squishing sound on the leather seat. The Camaro backed out with a screech of tires, and the girl gave Paul the finger again. He smiled and waved.

  “If you catch cold, your mother won’t forgive me,” he said. “You’d better not tell her about this.”

  “I never get colds in summer,” Joy said. “And I never talk to mom about her men.”

  “Let’s go!” Kyle cried, standing on the seat.

  “Down until we’re parked.” Paul had to maneuver the car back and forth three times before he could pull into the spot, which was a tight though satisfying fit. The Camaro would have had an easier time with it. “Watch the doors,” he said, just as both Kyle and Joy slammed theirs into the cars on either side. He had to suck in his belly to squeeze out and then fought with the umbrella that stuck halfway open. Kyle started to run ahead, and Paul shouted at him to wait. Joy, to his surprise, took his hand and pressed close to him, shivering.

  “Paul?” she said. “Iron’s a metal, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  She nodded but didn’t say anything more, instead dodging a puddle that Paul saw only as he stepped in it. They hurried the rest of the way to the theater, passing the video arcade spilling out cackling teenagers—doped, he thought, and neglected by their parents—but of course they were too late. The Muppets had begun ten minutes before. Kyle muttered something about chest pains. “We might as well go home,” Joy said. Paul scanned the board and checked his watch. There were two possibilities, but one was sure to get him into trouble. A History of the World: Part I sounded innocent enough, educational, even, but it was rated R. “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” he told the girl at the ticket counter. “One adult, two children.”

  The kid in the Iron Maiden t-shirt and the pimpled girl with hair in her face were ahead of them, arms around each other’s waists. They were all going into the same theater, and Paul had an intimation of his mistake. “Killers,” he read, before walking the children into the gloom.

  “Why did God melt their faces?” Kyle asked, blanket pulled up to his chin, though it was steamy in the house now, humid after the rain.

  “God wouldn’t really do something like that,” Paul said. And he explained for the tenth time that it was just a movie, a made-up story by twisted people who somehow decided that “PG” included heads exploding on screen. He was perched at the end of Kyle’s bed, feet on the floor. He’d stood twice already, and twice Kyle had kept him there by asking about details of the movie’s plot. It was half an hour past Kyle’s bedtime and getting close to Paul’s own. Cynthia had been in the bath for as long as he’d been in here, and he imagined her skin first growing pink and angry, then puckered.

  Tacked crookedly above Kyle’s bed was a New York Yankees pennant. Paul tried not to look at it. He’d grown up within walking distance of Ebbets Field, where his father and uncles had season tickets, and the thought of someone in his house being a Yankees fan made him mildly nauseous. But he couldn’t convince Kyle to root for the Mets, one of the worst teams in baseball. The current strike was a blessing. He hoped it would last the whole season, so Kyle wouldn’t start begging again to be taken to a game. In his entire life, Paul had never once set foot in the Bronx, much less in Yankee Stadium.

  “Why did ghosts come out of the box?” Kyle asked.

  “They were supposed to be angels, I think,” Paul said. “The avenging kind.”

  “Why did angels melt their faces?”

  “Because they were Nazis,” Paul said. “That’s what always happens to Nazis.”

  “Will angels do that to me?”

  “Of course not. You’re not a Nazi, are you?” Kyle shook his head. “I didn’t think so.”

  “Why did Indy want the box?”

  “I told you already. He’s an archeologist. It’s his job to find ancient things.”

  “Can I be an archeologist?”

  “You can be anything you want to be,” Paul said, hoping not only that this was the right answer but the one that would end the conversation.

  “I don’t want to find any ghosts.”

  “Most archeologists don’t have such exciting lives as Indiana Jones, I bet. Or as dangerous.”

  “Can I be a baseball player?”

  “Well,” Paul said. He’d watched one of Kyle’s Little League games, and Kyle had hardly been able to hit the ball off the tee. “Sure you can. You’d have to practice a lot. And there’s always the question of natural ability—”

  “Can I play for the Yankees?” Kyle asked. His voice was quieter, and his eyes were beginning to close. Paul eased himself off the bed.

  “I don’t think you get to choose your team. It depends who picks you. You might get to play for the Mets, though. Wouldn’t that be great?”

  Paul was standing now. He took a step away. But then Kyle’s eyes went wide, and he sat up. “Are there ghosts in here?”

  “None. I promise.”

  As soon as he said it he heard rustling behind him, and the curtain moved, though there was no breeze. He whirled, and Kyle ducked under the blanket. But it w
as only Franklin, making his nervous rounds from one window to another, his tail flicking against the screen.

  “No ghosts,” Paul said. “No such thing.”

  “I feel pale,” Kyle said, his voice coming from where Paul expected his feet to be. “And my elbow hurts.”

  “You’ll feel better after a good night’s sleep,” Paul said, hurrying to the door and turning out the lights. “And remember, it was only a movie. None of it was real.”

  He said the same thing to Joy when he checked on her, but she only gave him that blank, open-mouthed stare that was entirely disconcerting, and he understood why the kid in the Camaro had run away. She was reading a book about cats, and her walls were covered in posters with kittens on them—one hanging from a tree, another spinning on a turntable, a third standing in the middle of a collapsed birthday cake—but never once had he seen her pay any attention to Franklin. After a moment he asked if she also wasn’t afraid of angels or ghosts who might melt her face.

  “Don’t be silly,” she said.

  “But I’m so good at it.”

  “Paul?” she called when he was at the door, and her puzzled squint sent a chill through him. Why? What could she ask that he wouldn’t be able to answer? “A maiden’s not the same as a maid, is it?”

  “No,” he said, breathing shallowly. “It isn’t.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  He waited for her to ask more, and when she didn’t, said good night and closed the door behind him.

  “It’s outrageous,” he said, pacing in front of the bed. “Faces melting? They call that PG? I’m going to write to the ratings board. You better believe it. And to the movie academy, or whatever it’s called. And to Spielberg.”

  Cynthia lay on top of the comforter, her robe open at the throat, hair wrapped in a towel. Her skin was flushed, and her neck glistened with sweat. She watched him as he paced but said nothing, giving him the same disconcerting, silent stare Joy had fixed on the kid in the parking lot. Only Cynthia’s mouth was closed, and Paul thought he could see a muscle in her jaw jump as she clenched it.

  “I mean, what’s the point of having a ratings system if it doesn’t mean anything? I would have been better off taking them to History of the Earth. They would have seen a cavewoman’s breasts, maybe, but they might have learned something, at least. They wouldn’t have nightmares until they’re twenty. I mean, I think I may have nightmares. It was really traumatic.”

  Cynthia fanned herself with her hand, and Paul stopped pacing to push on the window sash, though it was already open as far as it would go. It was hot enough to turn on the air conditioning, but Cynthia didn’t like it running all night; it dried out her eyes and made her cough all morning. She was three years younger than Paul, a small woman but solid, with thick ankles and heavy hips—peasant stock, she joked when she wasn’t feeling self-conscious about her weight, though her ancestors had been merchants, in Vilnius and then in New York. Her father was a jeweler, with a storefront on 47th Street he’d inherited from Cynthia’s grandfather and a wholesale business that supplied fittings to diamond dealers up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Cynthia had her father’s smart, scrutinizing eyes, and a smile that was always the slightest bit skeptical, as if she expected to be disappointed by whatever amused her. Paul still found her raspy voice seductive nine months after he’d heard it for the first time, and wished he could hear it now, or see that smile. She fanned herself with her other hand, pulled the robe’s hem up over her knees, uncrossed her legs.

  “I know what you’re going to say,” Paul went on, taking a seat at the end of the bed, with his back to her. The window closest to him looked out on their backyard and the intersection of Union Knoll Drive and Crescent Ridge. To the right, just across Union Knoll, the ridge dropped away abruptly, and in daylight they had a view of roofs and treetops all the way to Dover, and beyond, to the Rockaway Mall. He gestured at the mall now, though all he could see outside was a streetlamp swarmed by moths, and what he thought was a shadow crossing the lawn. Another possum, maybe, or a raccoon, or a bear cub, or a baboon—who knew what was lurking in the strip of woods between this neighborhood and the next one down the ridge? “I should have done something else with them when we were too late for the movie. But what was I supposed to do? Kyle was ready to throw a fit. It was raining. I couldn’t take them to the park. What could we have done? Walk around the mall and let Joy try on every pair of shoes in the Thom McAns? Or play games in the video arcade, with every stoned teenager in the county?”

  He paused, waiting for her to answer, though he knew she wouldn’t. When he glanced over his shoulder, her robe was open at the waist, and now she was fanning her chest. He turned away. How was he supposed to defend himself when she was mostly naked, her skin flushed and gleaming? How could he come off as anything other than irrational and bullying? “I know, I should have found out more about the movie before I took them in, but I didn’t have time, and I—I was rattled, I’ll admit. The parking lot. You wouldn’t believe what a madhouse it was,” he said, and then told her about the kid in the Camaro, only leaving out the part about Joy getting out of the car, and the part about the kid getting out of the car, too, and even the part about him honking his horn. All he did tell her, really, was that just as he was pulling into a spot another driver raced in and tried to steal it from him, but that he’d held his ground until the other driver backed away.

  He got himself worked up telling it and was soon off the bed again, pacing. He wanted the kids to learn something, he said. He wanted them to understand that pushiness shouldn’t be rewarded, that some principles are worth standing up for. He felt a swell of indignation, and also of pride, though when he saw that Cynthia had her robe all the way open now, her hand flapping over her perfect triangle of pubic hair—had she just trimmed it?—he was quickly deflated. “I’m going to write to the mall people, too,” he said. “If they don’t open up more parking, and keep those kids from pouring out of the video arcade into the theater lobby, they’re going to lose some customers.” He went to the window once more and watched the moths careening stupidly again and again into the streetlamp’s glass cover. A car came speeding down Union Knoll, taking the turn onto Crescent Ridge too fast, fishtailing, kicking up loose gravel, and then screeched past the house. Another teenager, Paul thought, let loose by negligent parents to terrorize the neighborhood. Everywhere he turned, wild animals and drug-addled kids. His one obligation, he knew, was to keep the children from harm, but in a place like this, how was it possible? He felt his shoulders sinking. He was resigned now. “It was a mistake,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Paul,” Cynthia said, that rasp making him turn and take in the full sight of her, the robe covering only her arms now, her towel gone, hair loose and damp to her shoulders. “You have exactly thirty seconds to get your clothes off, turn out the lights, and get on top of me, or I’m not talking to you for the rest of the week.”

  He had everything off but his socks when there was a scratching at the door. Avenging angels came to mind, and ghosts, and the cat, but it wasn’t any of those. It was Kyle, whimpering. Paul pulled on his shorts and opened the door. By then Cynthia had the robe wrapped around her again. “Your face isn’t going to melt,” she said, as Kyle clambered onto the bed, blubbering, and snuggled against her. Paul was left without much space to lie down, but he managed to settle himself on the edge of the mattress. He was nearly asleep when Kyle said, “Paul? Why was that man yelling at you in the parking lot?”

  “He was a Nazi,” Paul said.

  “Is his face going to melt?”

  “One can only hope.”

  “No one’s face is going to melt,” Cynthia said.

  In the morning, only Joy and Franklin were awake before Paul left for work. It was a relief to have made it to Monday, to know that soon he’d be on a train heading toward the safety of Manhattan, and it relaxed him to think about facing the busy week ahead. He fed the cat and offered to pour Joy some cereal, but she
was already toasting herself a frozen waffle. She studied him as he ate, hair sticking up in back, face still puffy and sleep-dazed, mouth hanging open. He tried to guess whether she, too, had had a nightmare, or had thrashed around all night, as Kyle had, but her grogginess seemed to be of a calm, peaceful sort. Paul’s own nightmare wasn’t of avenging angels or melting Nazis or even of menacing teenagers with possum faces, but oddly, of leaning out the window of his old West Side apartment so far that he went tumbling out, twelve stories down onto 79th Street.

  “Sleep okay?” he asked.

  She nodded and took a bite of waffle. Then nodded again and said, “I think this is going to work out just fine.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “We’ve got some fine-tuning to do,” she said. “But that takes time.”

  “You weren’t sure before?”

  “It’s a big adjustment.”

  “That’s true. But now you think we’ll manage?”

  “Well enough.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  Franklin jumped onto the counter, walked across the stove, and hopped onto the windowsill above the sink. The first time he’d done it in Cynthia’s presence, she’d hollered at him and tossed him down and then asked Paul if he’d ever tried to train him. “You can’t let an animal walk around where you make your food,” she’d said. Since then she kept a spray bottle full of water on the counter and gave Franklin a squirt whenever he thought about jumping up. She told Paul the cat was more likely to respond if he did it as well, but as yet he hadn’t been able to bring himself to pick the bottle up.