First Light by Charles Baxter
He likes love in showers and bathtubs, on rugs in front of electric heaters, on tables, in settees and chairs, and standing up. They have made love in a loveseat. He has taught her how to make love while dancing, the feet hardly moving, his hips swaying against hers. They have made love in front of windows, looking out at the unnatural black of the Buffalo night, and on the dining room table, which creaked and groaned. He has initiated these scenes with his hey-guess-what look and his eager hands. He has whispered the names of constellations to her while her head swung back in her orgasm and she pushed her pelvic bone forward.
“Arcturus,” he says. “Orion.”
He has asked her to let her fingernails grow, so that she can touch him on the backs of his thighs and his ribcage. “I can’t,” she says. “I work at a blackboard.” He says it doesn’t matter. He watches her hands in their gestures and brings them to his lips and teeth.
In these encounters he has played Brick and the Gentleman Caller and Stanley Kowalski and Superman and Estragon and Lord Byron and Prince Hal and Casanova and Jay Gatsby and Don Giovanni and Tarzan and Peg Leg Pete and Peer Gynt and Pinocchio. He has invented accents and gestures for the various international styles. He admits playing these characters in the bedrooms of his other lovers. Of love, he says, there’s no getting enough.
Dorsey, worn down at times by these charades, has asked him for something straight, unimaginative, with the clothes off and the bodies meeting each other simply, between the sheets. Something quick and sweaty and all-American. He would like to, but he cannot. That is, he is incapable. Without the pretending, he is bored and impotent, prudishly offended by the predictabilities. “We’re going into training here,” he says. “I’m teaching you how to act.” Look, he says: desire is a spell. You rouse it. You wake it. Watch this.
Desire brings itself to bed with talk. Unless he is kissing Dorsey, he keeps up a ceaseless whispering murmur, a concoction of praise for her body and mind and spirit. He makes offers and demands. She is free to gratify or refuse. Refusals, if they are delivered in a certain tone, are as much fun as agreements. They inspire erotic pleading, poetry, deals, and bribes. At times she initiates the play, though she has no talent for roles and usually cannot think them up. Simon can be tiring; he keeps her guessing. In his determination to play variations on the simple one-fingered tune of sex, he dreads repetition, enacting the same role twice. Simon dreads boredom. Desire dies in boredom, in the fateful repetitions of himself in her.
“What’s more exciting than my tongue on the loose?” he has asked. And the proof is that there is not a part of her exposed skin that he has not touched with his tongue. He has brought her dinner on a tray in bed and challenged her to eat it while he stroked and kissed her available skin. She made it as far as the crab martiniquais and the steamed rice but could not progress to the broccoli in béarnaise sauce or the poached plums. She daintily removed the tray from the bed, putting it on the floor. Then she gave herself to Simon, wrapping her legs around him hard, urging him in.
There will be no children from this. Because of what happened with Noah, she has had her tubes tied, and that is that.
She goes along with Simon because he takes care and does not insist on anything if she says “No” twice. Sometimes she will not and cannot play the other part in the duet. But she believes in Simon’s tenderness, and believes, as he has claimed, that bored love leads to casual cruelty, to lengthening shadows on the soul. She believes that love can make the spirit rise and walk. She believes that it is a fact, violating no laws of physics, that her soul has risen and intertwined with his at the moment that they have come together.
For all his failings, he has become her other half, their improbably twined selves as solidly linked as two knotted ropes, or Plato’s first unitary soul. Interested in love, she has reread Plato’s Symposium, where love is described as finding an abode in the softest things there are, settled in the tempers and souls of gods and men. Wherever he meets a soul hard in temper, Plato says, the god of love departs, but where it is soft, he abides.
“If I were always true and faithful,” Simon says, sitting behind her on the bed, his legs over hers, one hand rubbing her back and the other cupping one of her breasts, “I’d be someone else.”
Simon’s infidelities have been Simon’s life. Because of them, she has shouted and delivered ultimatums and threats. She could not once stand to imagine his body—a beautiful one, she thinks, from all the grooming and tending he gives it—encircled by someone else’s flesh, sucked by another mouth. One time, and one time only, she picked up a urinary infection from him, which led to more hard words, absences, and promises of precautionary measures. Simon has openly claimed his obvious inability to accept the terms of ordinary life. “I subvert,” he says. “I burn all the contracts.” To have Simon means having most of Simon; the rest he gives away.
“It’s my only gift,” he says, running his fingers through her hair, caressing her scalp with the tips. “The bedroom and the stage. The only two places where I thrive. That’s it. You know I love you. But I need to prowl around sometimes.”
Simon’s erotic adventures, she has finally decided, are spontaneous and undeceitful. They are occasioned by his promiscuous tenderness, and he can’t help himself any more than Santa Claus can. Because she has no doubts about his love for her and for Noah, and because she cannot imagine any man being better with Noah than Simon is, she gets up in the morning, looks in the mirror, sees herself, and nods. The light of her self-respect has stayed on; she is not ashamed of herself for remaining in Simon’s company.
• • •
In other ways he is a child, an adult-impersonator. He is at his worst with home repair. Their landlord, an octogenarian housepainter, lives in Brockport and is slow to fix anything himself. Get it done and I’ll pay for it, he says. As a result, ever since they moved to Buffalo, Simon has had the idea that he could become a handyman. Dorsey, who knows how things work and can, in fact, fix most things in the house, has come home to find Simon in the bathroom, trying to repair a faucet, washers and seals and stems and O-rings scattered around in a gritty wet mess on the tile floor, Noah building with his Legos in the hallway outside, keeping Simon company while Simon plays plumber.
Simon has done worse. He has pretended to be an electrician. With Dorsey out of the house, he has turned off the basement circuits and tried to replace a faulty overhead light fixture. When Dorsey came home and found him on his ladder, the Reader’s Digest Do-It-Yourself Manual open to the section on wiring, she also saw that he had misconnected the leads and that he would blow a fuse as soon as he turned the power back on. She pushed and kicked him off the ladder and in five minutes rewired the fixture herself. He has promised not to fix anything else but she knows the handyman instinct in him is overpowering.
He has threatened to change the oil filter in the car; he has even offered to tune the engine. The last time he interfered with the car’s motor, it had to be towed to a certified mechanic, who smiled shrewdly and wiped his hands in a predatory manner when the hapless car was pulled into his garage. Dorsey has warned Simon that if he ever lays his hands—those hands expert in love and nothing else—on the car’s engine again, she will take a hammer to his fingers and reduce the bones to pebbles. This threat of violence amused him, but he has, nevertheless, raised no more hoods.
He has made a mess of the screens, hanging them backwards, and has built for Dorsey a bookcase that will not stand on its own. It must be supported on one side with a strong table and on the other side with a desk. The bookcase is decorative and holds only lightweight knicknacks, no books. Now, down in the basement, Simon is building a chair. Dorsey worries about the chair and wonders what will happen if Simon finishes this thing and anyone sits in it. She especially worries about a lawsuit, the result of flying wood splinters and breakaway doweled joints. She has confidence, however, that the chair will not be completed. Simon’s drawings for it make it look like an uncomfortable American primitive, but
The last time she went down there to check on his progress, she found him trying to teach Noah how to juggle three tangerines. The pieces of the proto-chair had been pushed off into the corner, and Simon was tossing the tangerines up rhythmically in small circles. Noah’s mouth was open in wonder as he sat on the basement floor. Dorsey watched Simon, unobserved herself. The tangerines, which she had bought the previous day at the A&P and had planned to eat, went up, down, up, down, in Simon’s smooth hands, and as she watched him she felt heat behind her eyes. Her heart skipped. She went back upstairs and sat down, wiping her face with her sleeves. By the time Simon and Noah came upstairs, she was reading the paper, a pleasant look on her face.
To whom can she talk about Simon? Most of the time she doesn’t want to talk about him at all, and when she has the impulse to say anything, it is not to her brother, Hugh, who telephones every other week. She reports to him on her health and good fortune and good feelings; she thinks of him as her parole officer and has said so. These calls, and the letters that cross between them, have from her side one message: “I’m okay. Don’t worry.” She can’t talk to her colleagues or her girlfriends about Simon. That leaves her neighbor, Mrs. Dlugoszewski.
Mrs. Dlugoszewski is only eight years older than Dorsey but looks fully committed to middle-age. Her skin is grayish-white from a lifetime of eating candy bars, and her head nods intermittently, a tic, which gives the impression that she agrees with herself and everyone else she talks to. Her husband, Ben, died of a prematurely bad heart the year before Simon and Dorsey came to Buffalo. No children, though there had been plans. Now Mrs. Dlugoszewski works part-time in the women’s-wear department of Kleinhans’, and when she sits in her living room, decorated with faded red wallpaper and pictures of Mary, Jesus, and Ben Dlugoszewski, she eyes Dorsey greedily. She cannot believe Dorsey’s life. It is beyond imagination.
It is a Saturday morning. Simon has gone out, so Dorsey has decided to take a walk down the street with Noah. They have ended up at Mrs. Dlugoszewski’s. Noah sits at Mrs. Dlugoszewski’s player piano, watching the keys hammer themselves down, to no effect. The roll, with its bug-sized rectangular holes, unwinds before his smiling-puzzled face. Meanwhile, Mrs. Dlugoszewski and Dorsey sit in the kitchen, coffee and cookies out in front of them.
“Honey,” Mrs. Dlugoszewski says, “what’s that Simon of yours been up to?” She bites into a cookie, raises her eyebrows, and nods. “Don’t tell me anything you don’t want to tell me.” She waits. “But of course it’s good to get things off your chest. Don’t forget that.”
Dorsey nods. She looks at Mrs. Dlugoszewski’s hair, fenced down this morning with a yellow scarf. She’s been cleaning the oven. Below the scarf are the cold, blue eyes of a woman who has not been fooled by men, by their casual fictions and incessant self-promotion. Her face, with its high Slavic cheekbones, has a permanently skeptical expression, a secret-police look.
Dorsey shrugs, nibbling a cookie. The player piano continues its Chopin. “He’s been getting home late. He rehearses.”
“What play is this?” She has seen Simon once on stage in a Sam Shepard play; she left at the intermission.
“Something called American Buffalo. He’s doing a Tennessee Williams play later this spring.”
“American Buffalo? Not about this city, I hope.”
“No. Not about Buffalo.”
“Good.” Mrs. Dlugoszewski waits, examining the ceiling. “I never liked it when Ben went out at night. No. Even when I knew where he was going, I didn’t like it. A man on the loose is trouble.”
“Simon’s an actor,” Dorsey reminds her.
“Sometimes I don’t know how you stand it,” Mrs. Dlugoszewski says, referring to the late hours and Simon’s habit of sleeping around, which Mrs. Dlugoszewski has picked up on, a shivery, exciting scandal. “You have a tough heart. Me? I’m more … I don’t know”—she waves her hand in the air—“more sensitive.” She opens her eyes, apparently realizing that her choice of words is unhappy. “I’d get more upset than you do, Dorsey. Around men I have a bad temper. There was this boy in high school I hit in the face. With my fingers closed, like this.” She holds up her fist for Dorsey’s inspection. “He didn’t hit back. He didn’t dare. I was stronger than I am now, believe me.” She gazes at the stove, dreamily. “I was the captain of the girls’ field hockey team.” She nods and looks at her nails.
“I couldn’t do that,” Dorsey says. “I wouldn’t want to.”
“You could take care of Simon when he gets out of line,” Mrs. Dlugoszewski says. “He’s not so big.”
The piano roll comes to its end. Mrs. Dlugoszewski gets to her feet with a double pump of her arms on the table and puts on another roll, a Jerome Kern medley. She comes back to the kitchen and picks up another cookie, gesturing with it. “He had it coming,” she says.
“The boy you hit?”
She nods. “He said something about me. He was spreading it around. A woman has to protect her reputation.”
“What? What did he say?”
“I don’t remember. The kind of trash boys say to other boys. It doesn’t matter. You can’t allow men to do that. Once they get started, they won’t stop. They just keep grinding and grinding away, making you cheap, so you have to give yourself away.” Mrs. Dlugoszewski smiles. “I didn’t want to hit him. He had the face of an angel. One of those angels you see painted on the ceilings in Europe. With eyes like this!” Mrs. Dlugoszewski does an angel-gaze, smiling raptly, tilting her head back and gazing toward the spice shelf.
“I see your point,” Dorsey says.
“Have another cookie,” Mrs. Dlugoszewski says, pushing the plate in Dorsey’s direction. “You’re looking great, though a little thin. You work too hard, honey. You need more exercise.”
“I don’t sleep too well,” Dorsey says. “I never have.”
“Does Simon keep you up?” Mrs. Dlugoszewski has lowered her voice.
“Yeah.” Dorsey smiles and looks in toward the living room. “He’s very inventive. And then, when I can’t sleep, he does category games with me. He doesn’t mind not sleeping.”
“Category games?” She looks puzzled but does not ask for an explanation. “He’s not my sort of man,” Mrs. Dlugoszewski says, shaking her head. “I like them with more sense, less make-believe.”
“He loves love,” Dorsey says. “He does love me.”
The angel expression momentarily returns to Mrs. Dlugoszewski’s face. “You’re sure this is true?”
Dorsey nods. “We dance in the bedroom,” she says. Selfishly she waits for this sentence to have its effect on Mrs. Dlugoszewski’s face, and it does. “He calls me ‘darling.’ ” She smiles and bites her lower lip.
Mrs. Dlugoszewski leans back and puts her hand on the flesh over her heart. “Not many men like that in Buffalo,” she says. “In this city, they don’t …” She searches for the word, then finds it. “They don’t linger. Not with a woman.”
“Simon lingers. He takes his time.”
Mrs. Dlugoszewski’s hand drops onto the kitchen table, a gesture that is like a judge’s mallet falling on wood: case closed. “I’ll say this,” Mrs. Dlugoszewski tells Dorsey in a half-whisper, leaning toward her, as the player piano does a lugubrious version of “Ol’ Man River.” “You look a hundred times better than you did when you arrived in the neighborhood. I remember when you got here, pulling that trailer of furniture, just you and Simon and Noah, a baby then, I remember.”
Dorsey nods.
“I remember you two unloading your furniture, with almost no help. You both looked so young. You still do. There was another man here, I remember, carrying things. A solid-looking man, more my type. Yes.”
“Hugh,” Dorsey says. “My brother.”
“Yes. Hugh. You didn’t talk much, the three of you, unless the l
Dorsey sits quietly, remembering.
“I thought you’d come from some terrible place.”
“We had.”
“Things are better now, aren’t they?”
“They certainly are.”
“Well, if it’s Simon you have to thank, with all of his faults even, then take care of him.” Mrs. Dlugoszewski spreads her arms wide.
The Jerome Kern medley ends with two low repeated chords, and Mrs. Dlugoszewski looks in toward the living room, where Noah sits, pressing one of the piano keys repeatedly, louder and louder. As it increases in volume, he hits the key faster, until the note is almost like a siren, and Mrs. Dlugoszewski squirms, smiles, and covers her ears.
7
To record the passage of time through his life, Hugh alters his house room by room. He surrounds himself with the work of his hands. Weekend visitors, such as Laurie’s many cousins, are often escorted to the back porch, enclosed and winterized by Hugh himself. Without prompting, Hugh explains how he put in fiberglass batting insulation just above the knotty-pine ceiling and inside the wallboard. He points and gestures like a contractor. He describes how he reduced the window space by replacing the screens with double-paned casement windows. Below the windows he installed glass radiant heaters. “Look at this,” he says, touching the floor with the toe of his shoe. “Wool carpet, and high-density urethane foam underneath. For warmth,” he adds, unnecessarily.
If anyone is still listening, he points out how he attached floodlights to the outside wall so that the whole family could sit on the porch in winter, warmed by the radiant heaters, and watch the snow fall in the backyard, covering the grass and the swings.