And for Karl, Raskolnikov’s plight took on a new urgency. He couldn’t put the readman down, was reading faster than usual and having trouble scrolling the lines at a smooth pace. Each time the phone rang, he answered it, hoping it might be Jody, but it was instead a schoolmate of Liana’s or one of Mom’s friends or one of Uncle J’s drinking buddies. With each passing chapter he began to feel that the next phone call would be for him, that when he flipped on the screen, the image of Deborah Madison’s husband would flash on, and he’d ask Karl what, exactly, had happened to the extra campaign cards and flyers.

  Karl went jogging before dinner to try to shake off the feeling. He wished cross-country season hadn’t already ended. If there had been a meet he wouldn’t have gone on that idiot walk-and-talk.

  The couch was a refuge of soft darkness, and the warmth of their embraces, the lingering kisses that reddened and chapped their cheeks, made everything disappear. Jody’s brother, three years younger, had been sent to bed at ten. Not much later, Jody’s mother had discreetly headed upstairs to experience a video before going to sleep. Her uncle had said that he wouldn’t be home until one or two.

  It was sometime after eleven, and Karl had to be home by midnight. Their lips and faces were wet from so much kissing. Both their shirts, and Jody’s bra, were beside the couch on the floor. Jody had wrapped her legs around Karl’s, and Karl found it hard not to press into her. The remaining layers of clothes (four, to be exact) keeping them apart created a sense of exalted, sweet, unreleased pleasure. Karl felt on edge and wonderful and, at the same time, horribly uneasy about everything that could go wrong by happening too soon.

  He had tried several times to say, “Do you want to make love?” but the words had become trapped in his brain, a programmed loop that he couldn’t escape, even though they had already made love twice before, both moments horrible because he’d reached his moment so quickly (a surprise because it took forever to happen with his hand). After the first time, he’d used his library subscription number to call up some texts and find out what he should do afterward, but the next time, just when he was about to put theory into practice, Jody gave him this tight embrace and kissed him passionately like the moment had felt special (when he knew she must have been disappointed) and insisted that they dress right away before anyone came down and caught them.

  Karl repositioned his weight so he could roll onto his side, which caused his butt to hang over the edge of the couch. Jody, with alternating jerks of hips and shoulders, maneuvered her back up against the couch. They both smiled at the awkwardness of it all. Karl tried to look at her breasts as best he could in the darkness bleached gray by the streetlight filtered through the curtains. He barely made out the silver necklace her uncle had given her, a tiny crucifix resting along her breastbone just where flat skin met the beginning of curves. He wanted to stare, to touch lightly, but he felt like there was never enough time, or just too much shyness (never mind the two times) to study each other, to trace the curve and texture of skin like they did in videos, in books.

  “Hey,” Jody whispered, “my face is up here.” And she pulled him to her, placing lips against lips. He reached between, elbow sticking awkwardly out, to touch her breast, feathery fingerprint against nipple, afraid of what her reaction might be, or afraid of what really could happen. He’d learned from Hamlet, read in September during school, how frightening true passion was, how you didn’t want to change your life so thoroughly that you lost all control. His hand, as if taking a life of its own, went from touching nipple to cupping breast. Jody kissed him more intensely. Karl wanted to ask her again, but the words were still looping through his brain. His hand, programmed in some other part of his brain, slid down from breast, along belly, down to slacks, and it seemed like everything was positioned just right for him to comfortably slide his hand across descending curves. Jody’s fingers encircled his wrist, gently, as if taking his pulse, and drew his hand back up to her breast.

  The gesture frustrated him and endeared her to him all at the same time.

  “You can press against me,” she whispered. She sounded sheepish.

  He, too, felt guilty, like there was something wrong with him, some energy he couldn’t contain, but Jody could.

  Their shirts were on, Karl had just called for the electra, and they were standing by the front door, their last kiss turning into two, or three. “I wish it were next Saturday.” Jody’s voice was barely audible. The kiss had been so long, her embrace so warm, his erection placed so firmly between them, that Karl all at once let his mind glide over this week’s morality testing and land on next Saturday night when Jody might not feel a need to stop his hand and her passion. The kiss lasted so long—the sweet warmth of tongue learning tongue—that Karl almost missed the electra.

  But he made it out the front door in time, and one of the passengers had hit the hold button, so the electra didn’t take off without him. It was one of the shiny new red-and-orange six-seaters imported from Brazil. A man and a woman were sitting together, and there was a middle-aged woman keeping her finger on the hold button until Karl waved good-bye to Jody, who was standing fully clothed on the front-door step, her hand raised into the air, her body, visible in the front porch light, shivering from the late October chill. “You know,” the woman said to Karl, after she released the button and the electra jerked forward, “you should come out and wait after you make the call.”

  “Sorry,” Karl said. He found the keypad and pressed out his bank access code, the last four digits of his social security number, and his address. It turned out that he lived closer than anyone else, so the electra headed for his house first. He sat there and kept quiet, feeling like the three others were watching him, wondering what he and the girl had been up to that he ran out the door so late. The tiny dome lights were too dim for them to see his chapped cheeks, or the way his erection pressed against the fabric of his slacks, but he felt like they knew anyway.

  The electra stopped in front of his house, and he said good-bye before stepping off. He was five minutes past his curfew, but no one would care. He found the front-hall light on. Liana, his mother, his uncle, were all in bed, the doors to their rooms shut.

  It took forever for Karl to fall asleep. The current of unfulfilled need still ran through him. His balls felt like they were imploding.

  ~

  The next day came upon him with a Sunday kind of listlessness. He went to church reluctantly, Uncle J ushering him and his sister out the door, only once reminding Karl of the importance of a good attendance record. After the services, he considered seeing the youth minister to tell the man how he had wanted to make love and hadn’t, and how he had felt the insistent pressure afterward and hadn’t masturbated to relieve it. But each statement, while making Karl look good, seemed a lie: neither refusal to his desire had made Karl feel very good about himself. He wondered if Jody, a Catholic, would confess her desires to someone. He wondered, because he’d never really thought to ask until now, if the Catholic Church allowed its university-bound members to accumulate morality points for proper behavior. He knew some of the Baptist churches did not: God expects you to follow the right path throughout life, not just the path that takes you to the university.

  Besides, his ten-year-old sister was waiting for him, and she would tell Mom and Uncle J that he had seen the youth minister, and both of them would have wanted to know why.

  His mother called him from his room while he was reading. Marmeladov, that drunk, that gambler, who lost so much money that his daughter Sonia must earn her family’s living as a prostitute, has been run over by an elegant carriage and is now on a bed dying. Sonia, small and thin with wondrous blue eyes, has arrived. Out of breath, surrounded by a whispering crowd in the lobby, she stares at her father, her face frightened, mouth open, her gaze terrified. This was the first time Raskolnikov had seen her, and Karl didn’t want to leave his room.

  Every time his mother wanted him, she had an ulterior motive. At the end of August, just before school, when he and Jody were running preseason cross-country and going out with each other almost every night, his mother had him help replace some corroding pipes so she could ask, “Jody’s Catholic, isn’t she? Does her mom live with Jody’s father or her uncle?” “Her uncle,” Karl had said, knowing the discussion had been meant to go further, but couldn’t. His mother didn’t like to make waves, not at work, not with her children, rarely with her brother. If things went bad, she picked up her readman, went to her bedroom, and closed the door. So a week later he was helping her slice vegetables for a stew that would feed them for a week, when she said, “It’s funny about Jody’s mom. Most Catholics I knew in school got married.” Karl got her talking about Catholicism, which in her opinion wasn’t real Christianity, so it wasn’t until they were cleaning out the garage, where she stored her gardening tools, that she found the chance to say, “You know, with a younger brother, she’s going to have to wait awhile until she can have kids. Are you sure she’s not the type who’ll be looking to get married instead?” Karl assured his mother that Jody was intent on being a medical researcher (if she made it to university, she’d start studying hard, is what Jody had told Karl, who knew better than to pass on such information to his mother). So his mother never got to the heart of the matter. At least not with Karl. Several nights later, she had a heated discussion in the kitchen with Uncle J, and he must have had too much Scotch that night, because both Liana and Karl in their separate bedrooms could hear him say, “He’s too young for that,” and Mom, not to be outdone by her brother, said even louder, maybe loud on purpose so Karl would hear the message this time: “Yes, he is too young, Jonathan, but he has a younger sister, and she’ll have kids, and I want to make sure he’s around to support them.” Uncle J stormed off and slammed his door; Mom always left him alone when his door was shut. For the next week, Liana asked Karl what he was too young for, and though he suspected the truth, he was still dismayed when Uncle J took him to the doctor, who did the tests and wrote out a prescription for the pill so no Catholic girl could trap him: “She wouldn’t do it on purpose,” his uncle assured him, “but accidents do happen.”

  The whole thing had made Karl feel ashamed. He didn’t even tell Kevin and James that he’d gone on the pill. They’d think things had gone hot and heavy with Jody, and James would probably tell enough people that Jody would find out. And if Jody thought he was after that and only that, then the whole thing would be over. Cross-country was going well. September was like a mild summer, charmed, and everything seemed to be going right for Karl and Jody. He secretly hoped that things would get that hot and heavy, but he never believed there would be the kind of moment that made the pill a necessity.

  A week after they first made love, Jody, turning bright red, got up the nerve to ask if he had been, well, safe when they had, you know. She wasn’t using anything, hadn’t ever thought anything would happen until… well, she didn’t know when, but not while she was still in high school.

  So when his mother called him down from his room, he knew there would be a chore and some questions. He turned off the readman and went to find his jacket. Whatever she wanted to talk about, he knew it wouldn’t be good. It was probably the dreamchair testing, how little he’d been studying. Or maybe Deborah Madison’s husband had called about the campaign cards Karl had tossed. The asshole with the executive perm had called the campaign phone number. Or Deborah Madison’s husband had done a follow-up in the neighborhood—calling various names listed on the palm-reader, or actually visiting some homes on the last two streets—and discovered that Karl had never been there, and yes, they’d been home all Saturday afternoon.

  But his mother just wanted him to dig holes so she could plant bulbs for the coming spring. It had rained last week, so the dirt was moist, and the old battered trowel sliced into it with ease. Every now and then Karl looked over at his mother, who was laying the bulbs into the holes he’d dug and tenderly spreading the loose soil over them, her jacket open and hanging over her back like a canvas tent. He was embarrassed by his mothers size, by the way she’d get up and go inside for a snack, then go back in fifteen, twenty minutes later for another. At some point, she’d get so big that she’d waddle rather than walk. Her friends had told Karl that in her younger days she’d been this energetic paralegal. She knew the software, she learned the law, and she saved people, especially some poor people in the suburbs, the kind of money it took to get a lawyer or rent legal software. She gave that up to do home-work, her friends said, so she could be with her children. His uncle must have been doing extremely well then: more time at work, less time with his buddies or a bottle of Scotch. Or maybe that kind of energy just gets used up, like those disposable batteries that you read about, the ones leaking in the dumps and poisoning the groundwater.

  In a way he wished his mother still had that kind of energy. He remembered all the things she had done with him: the games, the songs, the trips, the stern, red anger when everything got said. Out here, now, stabbing the ground with a trowel, cutting the roots of a network of weeds, Karl found that he did want her to say something, ask some sort of probing question so he could tell her everything that was bothering him. If she just asked the right question, talking would be so easy.

  When Liana had been a baby, Mom would nurse her in the living room while Karl told her about school, and she’d answer all his questions, sometimes telling him more than he ever wanted to know. Back then, Uncle J had been involved with a woman who was expecting their son, and he came home only on Saturdays to play with Karl and on Tuesday nights to go through the budget software with Mom.

  But now she just complained about how tired she was. She ate more, read more, and she talked less. Jody said maybe moms got that way when uncles were around the house a lot, a statement that had made Karl sort of angry, because her uncle was always out sleeping around.

  Jody called later that afternoon. She looked lovely on the vidscreen. “Did you have a good time last night?” she asked him.

  He was never sure how to answer that question. They’d spent most of the night standing around while he had tried to talk her into going out to the suburbs and try out one of the dives that would serve them beer, but she didn’t want to do that the weekend before testing—What if someone found out?—so they ended up on the couch, kissing. Calling it a good time made it sound like fun: fun like dancing, or going to the arena, or sneaking out to the suburbs, but not like the touching of lips, and the building of energy, and something happening, or something not happening. “Yeah,” he said. “I did.”

  “I’m sorry we didn’t… well, you know.”

  “That’s okay. We were controlling our baser desires.”

  She giggled. “I think they’re rather nice desires.”

  If they were so nice, he wanted to ask, why did you pull my hand away? Instead, he asked her other things, and they talked for more than an hour. Years later he wouldn’t remember one thing they might have talked about that would take up an entire hour.

  Jody’s call had reminded him to take his pill. It reminded him of other things, too. The way the arrow of desire had such urgency and no target made him feel unclean afterward: his socks damp with sweat, the patches of stickiness where tissues had wiped but not cleaned, the point of wetness that had soaked into his underwear while he tried to ignore all his imaginings. He wanted to take a shower or wash up, but he didn’t know what Liana or his mother might think if they heard the water running longer than it took to wash your hands.

  He sat down in front of the terminal to work on some of the simulations, but he didn’t even bother to put on the gloves. He went over the software he had to prepare for the testing, the positive and negative ideals. He had done the comparisons of the ideal uncle and his uncle, the ideal mother and his mother; the ideal siblings and his sibling, the ideal woman, ideal man, ideal friend. He had been honest with the comparisons. When he drew his ideal mother, he tried to get the software to make her look like holoes of his mother when she’d been younger. He liked the way this got him to think, and at times he was glad he would turn this in, then his family wouldn’t be a secret that the family kept to itself. But he also felt like he was betraying them. If his mother read his description, if she knew that she wasn’t the ideal mother in his mind (even though they both knew the ideal mother never existed), she would be horrified. She would hide in her room for days. She wouldn’t talk to him at all.

  But it wasn’t his fault that he was doing this. Once his mother had recognized that. His freshman year, Mr. St. August had given a talk about the joys of marriage, and Karl had come home to ask why his mother and uncle hadn’t married someone, didn’t they miss the day-to-day of being with someone they loved. His uncle was flabbergasted. His mother got angry, the same way when he’d been a kid, a deliciously scary anger, her cheeks all red with emotion. She had called up St. August, “the unmarried bastard,” and told him that she did spend the whole day, every day with people she loved, and she didn’t want her son’s mind polluted with the idea that you could find joy only in marriage. Too many of her friends who had gotten married were alone now. And he’d better learn to be sensitive to people who lived their lives differently.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11