Babysitter, page 11
And now Jody saw the sketch Jenny had drawn this afternoon, with that same unmistakable scene.
Sam was back. “You all right, mother?”
“Yes,” Jody said, but her voice was ragged.
“So what did you want to tell me?” Sam said, sitting in the chair across the room.
Jody cleared her throat as Sam lit a second cigarette. “Something happened to me when I was thirteen. Something I just assumed I could forget about until now. In fact, until today I wasn’t sure that it really had happened to me. I thought that maybe my mind—”
There was silence.
Sam exhaled smoke.
Jody tensed her hands into small fists. She had never told anyone, anyone, of what she’d seen that night. She was not certain why—pride probably, afraid she’d be looked at as foolish or worse. It was just not the kind of story you told.
“The summer I was thirteen,” Jody began.
It was not an easy story to tell. Not an easy story at all.
3
You were always doing business. You could have your mouth stuffed full with beef tenderloin (he liked his pretty bloody) or setting your little white ball on the tee or peeing at a urinal . . . and you were always doing business. You had to see who was next to you and think about what kind of car he was driving these days, and figure out the best way to pitch him on a Caddy. Because the old days were over, the days of Glen Stover’s youth when everybody who was anybody in Winthrop had just automatically wanted a Caddy. They just weren’t the status symbols they’d once been, and it wasn’t just the heat they’d been taking since the fifties and the emergence of Lincolns; no, now it was a variety of foreign jobs as well, particularly the frigging Benz. These days the Mercedes was the status symbol—just take a quick glance at the parking lot—and you found yourself vaguely apologetic and even a little defensive when you pitched somebody on Caddies. You didn’t want to touch on the pathetic gas mileage, not with the price of gas being what it was—so you always talked about how Detroit, especially General Motors, and especially the Cadillac division, had been putting out one mighty fine automobile the past couple of years and how the prestige of driving an American-made Cadillac was more than compensation for the poor mileage. The Caddy was once more the car it used to be, an American car, not some frigging kraut Benz. An American car.
Thus far tonight he had hit on every major category (he tended to think of people that way; not so much as individuals but rather as representatives of various professions). He had hit on lawyers (lawyers being know-it-alls, unfortunately, and notoriously tough sells), doctors (their wealth vastly overestimated due to their legendary inability to invest their money properly and consequently giving up about seventy percent of their income to an uncle named Sam), CEOs (their problem being that while they might individually prefer a Caddy, they couldn’t afford to be perceived as driving something lesser than most of their peers), and the unemployed wealthy who spent their days playing golf and looking for ways to safely make their inheritance work for them. The unemployed wealthy were actually his best prospects because they had plenty of time to hang around the showroom and let Glen Stover give them the full benefits of his sales technique.
Thus far tonight, he’d lined up six appointments stretching over the next three weeks: two lawyers, a doctor, and three CEOs. Of the six, only two had previously owned Caddies, which was a curse if those Caddys had been manufactured between 1998 and 2003 (the worst product the division had ever put out), but a blessing if their Caddies had come from any other year, because dollar for dollar and feature for feature, Glen Stover was prepared to prove that the Caddy, screw the Krauts, was the best value on the market.
He had had six drinks. Marietta had asked him to limit himself to three. For her sake, for his sake, for the sake of the dealership, and not least for the reputation of her family, which had, after all, been among the club’s founders. And this being the beginning of the one hundredth anniversary.
He was drunk and he was bored and he hated tuxedos. He sat at a small table near the edge of the dance floor and deeply resented the fact that his life was going by him so quickly. Sometimes it seemed to him as if he were witnessing a stranger’s life, as if he had no control whatsoever over his days and nights. It would be the end in twenty or thirty years and he would not have understood a moment of it, not really. He would have been this thing trapped inside a body known as Glen Stover. A thing that had never known the happiness or the gentleness or the peace it had so long and uselessly sought
“Are you all right, dear?”
He looked at her without recognition. Booze and inner turmoil had blinded him, literally.
She patted his hand, leaning in over the candle flickering inside the red glass of the table light. “Are you all right?”
His wife.
Talking to him.
Asking if he was all right.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”
Still her face, her quite beautiful face, remained hovering there in the flattering glow of the candle, and she smiled at him and he remembered the first date they’d had, how nervous she’d made him even though he was far more experienced than she. And how for a time she’d changed him and the happiness and the gentleness and the peace he’d sought had been so near . . . so near.
“I’m going for a walk,” he said, standing up abruptly.
“Like me to go with?”
He hated that expression. It irritated him beyond reason. “Go with.” What was wrong with “Go with you?” Cutesy. God, he hated cutesy.
“Not unless you want to see the inside of a men’s room.”
There. Now her kind and concerned words about his well-being had been dashed, and their relationship was back on more familiar turf.
He wobbled away from the table, pitching himself into the crowd of people who looked too young, too pretty, too handsome, too strong, too rich, too powerful. He wanted to slap them. He wanted to slap them because they reminded him of his brother.
The club was gorgeous. Even in his condition, he could appreciate that fact. Oak and mahogany and green carpet so thick it was like walking through pastureland. And paintings. God. Beautiful Grant Woods and Marvin Cones celebrating the Midwest as it damned well should be (even if it wasn’t). He passed from one fantastic room to another, where young women with flesh he could scarcely keep his hands from sat throwing their lovely heads back in practiced laughter, and where men exuded a musky scent of lust and power, the two things often being one and the same.
He was no longer young, Glen Stover. And something like a double chin had started beneath the good Stover bones of his face. And his waistline, if not a pot, was anything but flat. And when he smiled at the young ladies now, they smiled back with a certain pity, as if he had been caught doing something foolish.
There were rooms with giant fireplaces and rooms with billiards, the clack of balls caught up in the soughing wind through the huge mullioned windows, and rooms with dry bars, and rooms with formal dining arrangements.
The Cadillac dealer acted a certain way. Or should. And so he found within himself sobriety, or something resembling it, and so for his betters there was the ingratiating and slightly toadying smile, and a formal nod to the ladies and a remark on the dazzle of their gowns or their hair.
He wandered through all three floors of the club, the vast stone innards of this domain where six generations of Stovers had dominated the politics within these walls.
Then he came, in a corner of the first floor west of the swimming pool, to the portrait of his brother Evan. Standing there, chlorine smells sobering him even faster, he stared at the portrait of the handsome twenty-five year old who had been killed while serving as a Marine pilot in Afghanistan.
When he was certain that no one was around, he leaned back enough to do it right, and he spat directly on the painting of his dead brother’s face.
Bastard.
Had he lived, Evan would have been two years older than Glen. He also, Glen was certain, would not have been content to inherit what remained of the family fortune and run the dwindling Cadillac franchise.
No, dear-bright-pretty-winning Evan would have parlayed the remnants of the family jewels into a fortune of significant count. He would have been president of the club, not merely a member, and most likely run for a house seat as a Republican from the 4th district, much as their Uncle Benjamin, now a United States senator, once had. His wife would have been twice as beautiful as Marietta (and with good ankles), his children would have been setting records both as scholars and athletes, and his company would have been sought by those powerful men who found Glen to be a lightweight.
He watched the spittle roll down his brother’s face and began recalling how dinner always went when they were boys. And what did you do today, Evan? Oh, isn’t that marvelous, dear; did you hear what Evan did today? Evan Evan Evan.
Never had there been room in his parents’ hearts for Glen, and now that he was grown he could understand why. He was passable. That was the proper word for him. Passable. Passable grades, passable looks, passable ambitions, passable accomplishments. But not the sort of boy a person, at least not a Stover, boasted about or doted on.
Passable.
He could not even join the Army. At age sixteen he had injured his knee in a baseball game, and ever since the knee had locked on him at odd times.
He could not even lay down his life for the greater glory of the Stovers
He glared up at the portrait once again. Visiting his parents these days, you would have thought Evan was still alive. Evan this, Evan that.
Still not a word for Glen.
“Maybe you’d better sit down, Glen. Really.” She always said “really” in that soft, almost whispered way when she was serious.
He pulled away from her grasp. How the hell had she found him anyway?
“I said I wanted to go for a walk,” he said. “I meant alone.”
“No room for your wife?”
He started to say no, but decided that would only be useless cruelty. “You see what I did.”
Her eyes found the silver spittle on Evan’s face. “Yes.”
“Aren’t you going to tell me I should be ashamed of myself?”
“You know you should be ashamed of yourself. I don’t have to tell you that.”
“I hated him.”
“I know.”
“Always so goddamn perfect.”
“That’s how it appeared, anyway.”
“Meaning what, exactly?”
“Meaning that he wasn’t perfect, Glen. Nobody is.”
“Try telling that to my parents.”
He smiled and slid his arm around her waist. Hers was the flesh of a forty-year-old woman. Much as he was sentimental about her at the moment, hers was not the kind of flesh he needed just now.
He thought again, for the hundredth time this evening, of the babysitter—Nikki--and of the exact moment when his hand had brushed her breast. Had he detected the slightest approval in her glance? Could she possibly have been interested in a man his age?
“Why don’t we go back in now?” she said. Now it was her turn to smile. “Maybe you can sell a few cars.”
“I’m too drunk to sell cars.”
“You sound a lot better than you did twenty minutes ago.”
“Maybe I’ll go for a drive.”
“I thought you were drunk.”
He grinned at her. “Not too drunk to drive.”
“That isn’t funny.”
He shook his head. “I’m not drunk. Here. Look.”
He proceeded to perform, there on the carpeting before the spittle-dripping portrait of his brother, there before the genuine George III mahogany and satinwood sideboard that sat beneath the portrait—he proceeded to perform a reasonable facsimile of the test a police officer would put him through to judge his sobriety.
“Pretty good, huh?” he said, touching his fingertip to his nose and walking a rigidly straight line.
“A lot better than I would have thought,” she said behind him.
He stopped, turned around. “Now may I go for a ride?”
“I’m really not up for a ride.”
“I didn’t mean you, anyway.”
“Thanks.”
“I need to be alone. I’m sorry if that hurts your feelings, but it’s the truth.”
She said, “It’s a woman, isn’t it?”
“No.”
“Is there somebody new at the dealership? A secretary I haven’t met? That Cuban receptionist back for the second time through.”
“Some marriage we have.”
“Then you weren’t unfaithful all those times.”
“People change, you know.”
“Some do. Sometimes.”
“It’s just a ride. Really.” He made sure to say “really” the way she always did. He kissed the side of her mouth. The longer they were together, the more he found himself addressing her as he would a combination wife-mother-jailer. A certain whine. A certain pleading. He had noticed this in other men, too, how they ended their days as children, with their wives playing the role of mothers.
“I don’t know why I put up with it,” she said. She was tall enough, on tiptoes, to stand up and daub a clean white handkerchief on the portrait. She picked up the spittle and then dropped the handkerchief into an ashtray.
Whether she knew it or not, he noted, she had just picked up after him. As a mother would.
“I’ll be back in an hour or so. Honest.”
“I’d appreciate it if you’d keep your word, Glen. I’d hate to have to bum a ride with somebody. That would be pretty shabby for both of us.”
“An hour.”
He went to kiss her again. She put a firm hand against his chest, stopping him.
“You don’t want to kiss me,” she told him.
He didn’t bother to disagree.
He had a convertible tonight. A white one. The air was fresh and the moon seemed almost spectral.
At a downtown stoplight two punks in a modified Chevrolet pulled up next to him. One of them started to say something, but then, curiously, stopped.
Glen Stover had managed to put in his expression exactly what he was feeling. That receding hairline or no, that spreading middle or no, he would take this dirtball’s head off, if the dirtball so much as breathed a single syllable in Glen’s direction.
A single syllable.
When the light changed, the Chevrolet peeled out and the punks naturally shouted something back at him, something lost in the squeal of rubber and roar of engine.
But he knew who had won the confrontation, and so did they.
Damn, maybe that little babysitter was going to be happy about his surprise visit after all.
4
She had a cigarette, a Chesterfield King, one nabbed from a stout man in a handsome red silk dinner jacket. The last time she had had a cigarette was on the night her father had died. She had never smoked before in her life. But somehow it seemed the right thing to do, to ask her brother for a smoke.
And now, sitting at the bar, the din of the band and the drunken conversations furious as war, it was for the second time in her life the right thing to do.
Tonight, she even managed to inhale without coughing, taking the blue smoke deep within her lungs, and blowing it back out in an almost pretty stream.
She sat there with her drink (Scotch on the rocks) and her cigarette and nobody bothered her. She wasn’t the type. Perhaps, she thought, with a curious kind of self-mischief, perhaps it’s my ankles. And then she had to smile. How long she’d hated her ankles; how many years.
She realized quite abruptly that she was drunk. She was now guilty of two things she’d done only twice in her life—smoking and drinking to excess.
She began, despite herself; to watch couples on the floor, dancing slow now that the band was doing saxophone ballads, couples silhouetted romantically in the soft white light of the bandstand.
Couples . . .
She wondered where he was going tonight. A quickie, no doubt. She wondered with whom. She had not been jealous of him in years, and she surprised herself with the ferocity of her feeling.
But quickly as it had come, it was gone, that feeling, and she was left at the bar noticing for the first time how the stray gaze would travel to her and then quickly look away.
They knew, those watching her, knew and felt sorry for her. And that being the last thing she wanted, she eased herself from the barstool, stubbing out her cigarette as she did so, and went off with a certain urgency in the direction of the phone.
She had decided to call home and see how the babysitter, Nikki, was doing with the girls. She wasn’t sure why, but suddenly she sensed something wrong with her daughters. Perhaps it was nothing more than the effects of the alcohol.
5
Jenny had no idea how long she had been in the basement. When the woman had pushed her down there, all Jenny had been able to see was darkness. All she had been able to feel was the grave-like coldness of the damp clay walls.
After a time, Jenny had come to feel as though she was not alone.
In the far corner of the basement, something pulsed and glowed deeply every half minute or so, offering no real light, just a dull glow.
Twice Jenny had said, “Would you please tell me who you are?”
There had been no direct answer, but the buzzing grew louder in her ears.
Just now, something in the corner moved. There was a rustling of fabric and a sound of something solid striking the floor. Jenny peered through the blackness, trying to see. The glow intensified.
