Babylon and Other Stories Part 12

"I never thought of myself as a lady friend before," I said.

"Well, you are now." He patted my shoulder. "Congratulations."

Spike took the bags and Uncle Bob went around to the pa.s.senger side of the truck, holding out his hand to help me climb out.

The house had been in their family for generations and was beautiful inside, small and old with hardwood floors and a stove with a pipe running up to the ceiling. I smelled garlic and tomatoes.

"This is nice," I said to Spike. As we took off our coats, Miriam came out of the kitchen and introduced herself. She was wearing a black turtleneck and dark red lipstick and she looked about my age. Uncle Bob kissed her on the cheek, then disappeared to make drinks. I lit a cigarette and stood next to the stove; three hours of continuing cold had left an ache in my legs and arms. When Uncle Bob returned from the kitchen and handed me a gla.s.s of red wine, I took a big, grateful sip, and felt warmer and, right after that, sleepy.

"So," said Uncle Bob. He rubbed his hands together and laughed. There was something impish about him, gleeful and young. It was hard for me to imagine him in his professional life, being competent and busy and medical. He was supposed to be an obstetrician.

We ate spaghetti and drank red wine.

"So how's Michael?" Spike said.

"Who the h.e.l.l knows," Uncle Bob answered glumly. He turned to me. "My son's a graduate student in East Asian languages. He's learning how to forget English. He only speaks Mandarin now."

"I know," I said. Michael had come to see Spike once. We took him to a Chinese restaurant, where he drank plum wine and refused to eat the food.

"I call him on the phone and he quacks like a duck," Uncle Bob went on. "I'm supposed to learn G.o.dd.a.m.n Chinese to speak to my own son?" He kept looking at me. "I'm not an unreasonable man."

Miriam leaned across the table and whispered loudly, "Michael has issues. Since his mother left."

"He's sensitive," Spike said.

"I'm sensitive, too," said Uncle Bob. "I'm so sensitive I can hardly stand myself. As a matter of fact, everybody in this family is sensitive."

"That's true," Spike said.

Uncle Bob smiled broadly. "Take my wife," he said, "please." He laughed and I laughed, too, just to be polite. Miriam didn't. "She was so sensitive she had to move to California." He spoke the word California in a mincing, high-pitched tone, and he put his hands up in the air, as if he were doing a little dance in celebration of the state. Miriam put her hand on his shoulder and he took it and touched it to his cheek, a sweet gesture, I thought. "Sunny California," he said. "Going to California in my mind."

"That's Carolina," Spike said gently. Uncle Bob went into the kitchen and brought a large jug of wine to the table. Miriam- I a.s.sumed it was her-had made a little centerpiece of pine branches and there wasn't s.p.a.ce for both, so Uncle Bob threw the centerpiece into the fireplace, where the needles melted and snapped, and set the jug down instead.

"Jesus Christ, Bob," she said.

"Oh, lighten up," he said. He poured us all more wine. "It's a wise man who buys in bulk," he p.r.o.nounced. "Ancient Chinese proverb."

"Ancient Irish drinking," said Miriam.

"Shut up, Miriam," he said.

"So anyway, Miriam," Spike said, dropping his cigarette ash into the remains of sauce on his plate, "how did you two meet?"

Miriam shrugged. "It's a small town. Everybody meets everybody else. And you? How did you and Lucy meet?"

Spike and I looked at each other. At the beginning our relations.h.i.+p had been a secret, and we had discovered that's how we like it, the world it made for the two of us. He had been my TA in "The Bible as Literature" the spring before. In cla.s.s he said the Bible contained the greatest and most basic stories of our culture, then asked us to put our notes aside and retell stories from our reading to the cla.s.s. Tell whatever you remember, he said. He walked around the room, pacing and talking, and I thought he was sweet and fierce and slightly terrifying, like a racc.o.o.n trapped in your bas.e.m.e.nt. My friend Stephanie and I used to mock him outside of cla.s.s. Spike? What the h.e.l.l kind of name is Spike? We imagined some foolish woman having s.e.x with him and moaning, Oh, Spike, give it to me, Spike. Then, all of a sudden, that woman was me.

"It's a small school," I said to Miriam. "Everybody meets everybody else."

Halfway through the semester I came upon Spike in the quad. It was early spring and the campus bloomed sedately with the first flowers. He sat under a tree with a bottle of wine in a paper bag, smoking a cigarette.

"Ruth, right?" he said when he saw me.

"Lucy," I told him. "My name's Lucy."

"I know." I realized he was referring to the story I'd chosen to tell in cla.s.s, Ruth and Naomi. Ruth said to Naomi, Wherever you go, I will go; wherever you live, I will live. I liked that story, the devotion in it, Ruth making that permanent promise.

"Are you allowed to do that-at school?" I said, looking down at the bottle.

"School," Spike said. "Do you want a sip?"

"Okay," I said. "But aren't you, you know, religious?"

Spike laughed. He pa.s.sed the paper bag over to me, and I sat down next to him.

"It's just a divinity degree," he said. "Not the seminary or anything."

I took a swig from the bag and swished it around like mouthwash and winced. It was pretty bad wine. Spike laughed and told me I was funny. We spent all that summer together. Every night we sat on Spike's porch, drinking beer and talking in the dark. I never talked so much in my life: three o'clock in the morning, sometimes four o'clock. We'd fall asleep holding hands. More than once, after we had s.e.x I cried, from the closeness of it.

"Must have been fate," Uncle Bob said now, "because you are such a beautiful couple." He refilled the winegla.s.ses and toasted us silently.

"I don't believe in fate," said Spike. "Or G.o.d. That's why I'm leaving school."

"s.h.i.+t, Spike," said his uncle. "n.o.body believes in G.o.d anymore. That doesn't mean it's not interesting."

"Some people do," said Miriam. Her red lipstick had worn off, except at the outlines of her mouth, and the real color of her lips was pale. "I do."

"Sure," Spike said, putting his elbows on the table in an irritated jerk. He ran his hands through his hair. "And fanatics and terrorists and people who wage wars."

"That's not true," Miriam said.

"People who prevent women from having abortions. Isn't that right, Uncle Bob?"

"Not everyone here is Catholic, you know," Miriam said. "Not everyone here has to rebel against the pope."

"What are you, Lucy?" Uncle Bob said, turning to me. I was smoking a cigarette and trying to stay out of it.

"I wasn't raised any particular way," I said. "I'm not anything."

"Everybody's something," he said, kindly.

"I for one am Jewish," Miriam went on.

"Well, congratulations," Spike said.

Spike and I climbed the stairs to the guest room. As I went, I steadied myself against the walls with the palms of my hands. I was drunk, a lazy, liquid kind of drunk, not a loud and talking kind. I was learning to like this about drinking, that there were so many moods to it; in this it was like s.e.x, one physical situation that could go in a million possible directions. Spike pulled his clothes off and dropped them in a pile on the floor. I lay down on the bed and watched him.

"Are you okay?" he said. I said I was. He stood looking out the window, in only his long underwear.

"How old do you think Miriam is?" he said. "I mean, she's got to be younger than I am."

"So?"

"So I'm worried about Uncle Bob. Ever since Aunt Mary left, he's been meeting these crazy women. He's always got these crazy women up here."

"She didn't seem that crazy to me."

"The last one was a Jehovah's Witness," Spike said. "She left Uncle Bob because he wanted to celebrate Christmas, for crying out loud."

"I don't think Miriam celebrates Christmas, either," I said, and closed my eyes.

Spike climbed on top of me and stroked my hair and kissed my forehead. I kissed him back but then stopped. I liked to drink with Spike in general and I liked to have s.e.x drunk, too-it made everything velvet, blurred edges, smoothed time. But I was spinning.

"Sorry," I said. "Can't."

"Let's get married," he said. I looked for his eyes in the darkness, hoping they would stop the spinning, but they didn't. He touched my nose, which was very cold, and then traced my lips with his fingertip.

"I don't know," I said.

"You love me. But?"

"I love you but I wasn't thinking about getting married. I mean, not right now."

"I love you but," Spike said. He put the palm of his hand on my neck, moved it to my breast. I arched my back to press against it. He stuck his fingers into my armpit, and I laughed and clamped down my arm.

"But what?"

"But nothing," he said, his fingertips walking along on my collarbone and down my chest. "But nothing at all, not ever."

The bed was the worst I'd ever slept on in my entire life. Lumps in the mattress competed with broken springs to torture my back. I woke an hour later in agony, and Spike was groaning in his sleep, tossing back and forth, like a fish dying on land. My head hurt and my mouth was dry. The moon shone over Spike's face. With his eyes closed, his cheek against the pillow, he looked like a child.

From the other bedroom I could hear a bed squeaking and Miriam's voice saying, "Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes."

Without waking, Spike reached up and pulled me close to him, warm together against the cold air of the room.

In the morning, the house smelled of syrup and bacon. We sat up in bed and spent a while kissing. There was a holiday sort of feel to things. Downstairs, Miriam was mixing pancake batter and Uncle Bob was building a fire in the stove. He winked at us.

"You two sleep all right?" he said.

"Well, okay," I said.

Spike collapsed on the couch. I walked through the kitchen and stepped out onto the back porch, squinting as the sun glinted against the snow. The air smelled clear and fresh, and there were no other houses in sight. The land sloped down to a rocky valley and up to a clearing on the other side. The wind rattled pine needles over the snow, and maple trees stretched their naked branches to the sky. I was only a little hungover. After a minute I went back inside and offered to help Miriam with breakfast, but she said she was all right. She hummed to herself as she stirred the batter. I poured coffee for me and Spike and went back into the living room. Uncle Bob was lighting the stove.

"So, Lucy, you didn't sleep all right?"

"I slept okay. It's just, well, to be honest, the mattress isn't very comfortable."

"It's not? Why isn't it?"

"It's lumpy, Uncle Bob," Spike said from the couch. I sat down next to him, and he rubbed my back.

"Well, G.o.d, Spike, you should have said something. G.o.d, you kids, I'm so sorry. I'm really sorry." He stretched out his hands, looking dismayed.

"It's not a big deal," I said. "We'll survive."

"Absolutely not," said Uncle Bob. "I mean, if a person comes to my home, I'd like that person to do more than survive. I'd like that person to have a good night's sleep. That's the very least I can do, isn't it? As a host? Well, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to buy a new bed."

"You don't have to do that," I said.

"Yes, I certainly do. I can't have you kids coming to my home and not sleeping. You should be able to relax in your Uncle Bob's house. I just can't have it any other way. I'm buying a new bed."

He wouldn't talk about anything else over breakfast. As soon as we were done eating, he and Miriam drove to a furniture store in Rutland. Spike and I did the breakfast dishes. Then we went back to the old, uncomfortable bed and had s.e.x.

They got back at around two in the afternoon. We were reading next to the stove, Spike engrossed in a paperback thriller he'd found in the guest room, and me battling Middlemarch. I had to write a paper on it, but kept falling asleep in the middle of chapters.

"Spike!" cried Uncle Bob as he came into the room. Cold air blew in behind him. "Come help me with this G.o.dd.a.m.n bed."

Miriam sat down next to me. She looked tired.

"Good book?" she said, and I made a face.

With great difficulty, Uncle Bob and Spike dragged the old mattress down the stairs and across the living room. It was a feathertick mattress, lumpy and huge and mottled white. It looked like a dead animal, say a polar bear-something they'd hunted and killed but that continued, even after its death, to overwhelm them. I stood in the kitchen as they dragged it in there.

Uncle Bob let his end drop. "I need a break," he panted. His face was red. He looked at me and Spike. "I bought this bed with my ex-wife. Let that be a lesson to you," he said, and shook his head.

Finally they managed to get the mattress outside and they left it in the snow behind the house. Then they carried the new one up the stairs. The whole thing took hours. Miriam stood at the base of the stairs, saying, "To your left, Spike," and "No, you have to lift and angle it," until Spike lost his temper and told her to leave them alone. She went away muttering. I stayed in the living room.

Finally, Uncle Bob came downstairs and sat down next to me. "Lucy," he said. "I think Uncle Bob needs a drink."

"Thanks for the bed," I told him. "You really didn't have to do that."

"But I did, didn't I?" He smiled widely, that impish look again. "You know, you're the first girl Spike's ever brought here."

He and Spike started drinking whiskey to celebrate the new bed. It was already dark when Uncle Bob got the idea to burn the old one instead of taking it to the landfill. He got some kerosene out of the garage and told Spike to help him drag the mattress down to the valley. Spike seemed to like the idea. Miriam came out of the house, scowling.

"What are you doing, Bob?"

"Burning this old mattress."

"Where? Under all that tree cover? Are you crazy?"

Uncle Bob looked at Spike and me and shook his head, as if appealing to our common sense. "You know," he said, "when a middle-aged man takes up with a younger woman, it's supposed to be so he can have fun. It's not supposed to be that the younger woman just looks like a younger woman but is really a middle-aged woman inside."

Miriam turned sharply around and went into the house. I looked at Spike but he didn't say anything. It didn't seem right for n.o.body to follow her, so I did. I didn't know what to do. I went to our room and sat down on the bed. I could hear her sobbing. After a while she used the bathroom and then walked back to her bedroom. I went out to the hallway and knocked on the open door.

"Are you okay?" I said.

She just looked at me. "Bob," she said, and shook her head. "f.u.c.king Bob." She pulled out a compact and put on her red lipstick, pressing hard against her lips, and seemed to get calmer and angrier. "f.u.c.king Bob, he drives me crazy," she said, and smacked her lips together. She stared at the floor as if Bob, or a picture of him, were sitting there. "I have to stay with him, though. I owe him my life."