|
|
Bad MoonDavid Jordan
Nick Heath and Elliott Larsen had been high school buddies, college roommates. When an ex-girlfriend died in a car wreck a few months after she dumped Nick, Elliott hugged him while he wept. When Elliott married, he spent the night before the wedding at the Heaths' home, sharing Nick's room.
At twenty-seven, Nick found himself teaching eighth grade and feeling severely undernourished, lifewise. He still dreamed of becoming a movie star, as he had since high school. He yearned for a life of extravagance, of glitter and passion. Instead, he graded math papers and existed with his graduate-student wife, Sarah, and two preschool children in a duplex near the University campus in Corinth, Oregon.
Then Elliott quit his newspaper job and moved back from Seattle to write a novel. He and Nick had been apart five years, and their reunion seemed ecstatic. They swilled beer, they trooped to University football games, they watched Clint Eastwood movies on television and recited the dialogue to each other.
Some evenings Elliott's wife, Donna, and their four-year-old daughter joined him for dinner with the Heaths. Donna had to awaken early weekdays to arrive at her job as a bank teller by 7:30 a.m., so she usually drove home with her daughter around nine o’clock. Sarah put her son and daughter to bed, cleaned up the kitchen and went upstairs to sleep. Elliott and Nick continued to drink beer, singing along to songs on the stereo or watching TV sports if Eastwood was taking a night off. Eventually, Nick drove Elliott home.
This had been going on for almost a year when Nick made a pass at Elliott's wife.
It was a Saturday night, and the Heaths had come to the Larsens' house for a change, leaving their children with a sitter. The Larsens’ daughter had gone to visit her grandparents for the weekend, so the couples partied late. Around midnight, with the lights off and candles flickering atop wicker-covered wine jugs, Creedence Clearwater went onto the stereo and the two couples began a kind of group dance, an arms-entwined, four-person kick and shuffle, swaying and staggering and gyrating and grinding against each other. They guffawed and sweated. "Proud Mary" pounded through the speakers, and "Lodi" and "Bad Moon Rising."
Elliott had one arm around Donna and the other around Sarah. He felt the swelling, bouncing pressure of Sarah's far breast under the tip of his fingers as they danced. Donna was flat-chested. He wasn't used to breasts. Sarah's seemed large, gelatinous, alive. He marveled that he had never noticed them before.
Sarah was a sturdy former farm girl—she had once been Daniels County Dairy Princess—who was studying for a master’s degree in English so she could obtain tenure as a high school teacher. Practical and competent, the kind of woman who could milk a cow or sew a dress from a few yards of cotton and a tissue-paper pattern, she kept flaky Nick on track. With her oval face, slightly protuberant blue eyes and wide mouth, she wasn't a woman who attracted much notice. She wore her blonde hair short, in a comb-it-with-your-fingers style. Her most noticeable attribute, Elliott felt, was her left front tooth, a small corner of which had broken off when she fell out of a swing at at age nine. The jagged tooth caught Elliott’s eye in a fashion oddly endearing each time she smiled.
The dancing went on for maybe half an hour before the album ended and the Heaths gathered their things and went home. The door had barely closed when Donna said: "Well, that was interesting."
Elliott feared he was about to receive a tongue-lashing for letting his fingertips stray to the edge of Sarah's breast. "What do you mean?"
"You didn't notice?"
Elliott shook his head. He'd play dumb.
"You didn't?"
"Notice what?"
"Well, your friend Nick was only sticking his hand up my dress and propositioning me."
"What?" Elliott said.
"Nick. He was feeling me up. And saying some not very nice things."
“I didn't see anything."
"It was dark. His hand was behind me. Maybe you couldn't."
"What did he do, exactly?"
"He put his hand up my dress from behind, between my thighs. And he whispered in my ear."
"Between your thighs? How far between your thighs? I mean, was he trying to—what was he doing?"
"Well, I suppose he was trying to get his hand into my underpants, but he didn't make it. I kept my thighs pressed together. But he sure talked a lot."
"About what?"
"About what you'd think."
"Which is?"
"Sex. Screwing. He kept saying, 'I want to fuck you, I want to fuck you.'"
They stood looking at each other. "He said that?" Elliott asked. "I didn't hear anything like that. When did he say that?"
"He was whispering it. In my ear. All the time we were dancing. You didn't notice him slobbering in my ear?"
"I guess not."
"Well, it was weird."
"What did you tell him?"
"I didn't tell him anything! I just kept trying to move my ear away from his mouth."
"I hope you didn't tell him yes."
"No, Elliott, I did not tell him yes. I did not tell him a thing."
They moved around the room, picking up wine glasses, emptying ash trays, straightening furniture.
"That just doesn't sound like Nick," said Elliott. "He must have been really drunk."
"He was very drunk," Donna replied.
"He's my friend."
"I know. That's why it was weird."
They went to bed. And had fierce, sweaty sex.
In the days afterward, Elliott mulled what had happened. Was Nick in love with Donna? He'd known her for years, and Elliott had never observed any romantic spark between them. Had Nick seen Elliott's fingertips at the edge of Sarah's breast and struck back by putting his hand up Donna's dress? If so, he hadn't seemed angry when he departed that evening. Was he jealous of Elliott, upset that Elliott was writing a novel in the back bedroom of his rickety little house while Nick trudged off to teach pimply eighth-graders every day, so he decided to even things out by knocking over Elliott's marital apple cart? It was, as Donna had observed, weird.
The Larsens and the Heaths didn't see each other for a few days. Then Nick called. He invited the Larsens over for dinner on Wednesday night. He had two tickets to a golf tournament Thursday, and he wanted to share them with Elliott. They would divvy up the tickets Wednesday night, then meet at the golf course Thursday morning. Nick would call the school district, report himself sick and arrange for a substitute teacher.
So the Larsens had dinner with the Heaths. No one spoke of their most recent evening together. They laughed and joked and drank beer and ate tuna casserole. At nine-fifteen, Donna prepared to go home and take her daughter with her. Sarah steered her children to bed. Nick announced he had a great idea: Elliott should spend the night at the Heaths’ house, sleeping in an extra bed, so he and Nick could leave early for the golf tournament the next morning. They needed to beat the crowd, Nick said. John Brodie, the Hall of Fame quarterback for the 49ers, would tee it up, and celebrities always attract spectators.
Donna left. Elliott and Nick drank more beer. They played music on the stereo—The Flying Burrito Brothers, Three Dog Night. Eventually they arrived at Creedence Clearwater Revival. Elliott and Nick, neither of whom could carry a tune, croaked along with John Fogerty:
I see the bad moon a-risin’
I see trouble on the way
I see earthquakes and lightnin’
I see bad times today
After Sarah finished cleaning the kitchen, she padded barefoot into the living room and sat beside Nick on the couch. She had stopped drinking an hour or more earlier, and appeared relatively sober. Nick kissed her, laid a big, wet, sloppy lipper on her. Elliott cruised out of the living room and down the hall to the bathroom at the back of the house. He took a leak. When he drank, he had to urinate frequently. Every twenty minutes, it seemed. Nick called him TWB, for Teeny Weeny Bladder.
Re-entering the living room, Elliott looked blearily to the couch and saw Nick unbuttoning Sarah's white silk blouse. Nick tugged the blouse open. Sarah wore no bra. Her breasts glowed pale in the light of the lone lamp in the room. Nick slipped a hand into the blouse. He dropped his head to the side of her neck and nuzzled with his lips. Sarah closed her eyes.
"That looks like fun," Elliott said. He sat on the other side of Sarah, extended a hand into her blouse and cupped her free breast. Cradled in his palm, it felt smooth, soft, solid, cool. Sarah opened her eyes, smiled dreamily at him. He saw the broken tooth. She closed her eyes.
This, thought Elliott, is truly, indubitably weird. Am I retaliating because Nick stuck his hand up Donna's dress? Or is this just—weirdness?
Abruptly, Nick sat up. His head wobbled on his neck. His eyes drooped shut, opened, drooped again. "S'go to bed," he said. Either he was very drunk or he was acting.
"Good idea," Sarah said. She moved forward off the couch, sliding away from Nick's hand and Elliott's.
"Help me get him upstairs, would you, please?" she said, letting her blouse fall shut but not bothering to button it. She also wore white linen shorts. Elliott rose. He grabbed one of Nick's arms. Sarah grabbed the other. They hauled Nick to his feet, maneuvered themselves under his arms and walked him down the hall. With considerable struggle, they propelled him up the stairs and into the master bedroom, then spilled him onto the unmade double bed.
"You sleep there." Sarah gestured to a narrow single bed jammed against the wall beneath the room’s sole window.
Elliott nodded.
"It doesn't have box springs or anything, so it's not too comfortable. But it's more or less okay. My sister sleeps on it when she visits."
"It'll be fine."
"Help me here first, though," Sarah said. "I need to get Nicky's jeans off."
She unzipped Nick's pants, tugged them loose around the hips and grabbed one cuff. "You get the other leg," she said. Elliott did as he was told. "Now, pull!" They jerked the jeans off. Nick sprawled on his back in white jockey shorts and a tee shirt. His eyes remained closed.
"That'll do it," Sarah said. "Well, good night."
She walked to the far side of the room in the dim light rising from the foot of the stairs, shrugged off her blouse, shed her shorts and slid into bed next to her husband wearing only white underpants.
Fumble-fingered and self-conscious, Elliott removed his shoes, socks, trousers and shirt. He climbed into the small bed under the window in his boxer shorts and tee shirt. The sheets smelled musty, like mildewed canvas. He lay still, his mind racing.
After a few minutes, Sarah spoke. "You okay over there?"
"Yes." Elliott’s voice vibrated with tension.
"There's room for you in this bed, if you'd rather."
"Is there?"
"It's a big bed."
"I'm not sure Nick would appreciate that."
"He's dead to the world. He wouldn't feel it if somebody dumped him onto the floor."
"Really?"
"I know one way to tell for sure." Sheets rustled and the mattress of the other bed creaked. "Nope. Soft as a bunny."
Elliott's mind leaped to an even higher gear. He trembled, shaking all over as if coming down with the flu. He remembered the assessment a psychologist had made of him once at a newspaper-training seminar: "You're like a driver in a car with an automatic transmission stopped at a traffic light, one foot mashing the brake and the other revving the accelerator. If you aren't careful, the car may fly to pieces."
He had hated that psychologist. He slipped out of his bed and crossed the hardwood floor to the other side of the big bed, where Sarah lay on her back beneath the white sheet.
He perched on the edge of the mattress. "Hi," Sarah said.
Elliott didn't speak. He just stared at her. She smiled. Her broken front tooth winked at him. She wasn't really pretty. But beneath the sheet, her body lay nearly naked. Those breasts he had seen, even touched, when they were downstairs. The rest, too.
He watched his right hand rise and go to the top hem of the sheet. The movement looked strange, almost as if the hand weren't attached, as if he had no control over it. His fingers grasped the sheet and gently peeled it down, away from Sarah's body. Her breasts came into view. Pale, rounded globes with large, pink nipples. Donna had very small breasts. She and Elliott had a private joke about breasts. They classified them as fruit. Donna's sister Elaine had pears. Her co-worker Kathy, who was overweight, had watermelons. Donna had plums. The only breasts Elliott had ever seen, other than his mother's, were Donna's small, shriveled plums. Sarah had cantaloupes. They were neither small, nor shriveled.
Elliott watched his detached hand drop the sheet and descend slowly to Sarah's breast. The hand cupped it, hefted it, felt its weight and solidity. The flesh settled into his hand, filled it. Elliott had never seen or felt such a thing. He bent forward and kissed Sarah's nipple. She sighed, put a hand on the back of his head and held him there. Her body pressed warm and pliant against Elliott's face, against his lips and chin and nose. He shuddered.
"Are you cold?" she whispered.
Elliott sat up. "Not exactly."
"You're shivering."
"I guess."
She lifted up the sheet and held it. "Get in," she said.
He lay down next to her, placed his head on her pillow. For a long moment, they stared at each other in the dim light. Then he placed his lips gently against hers, their eyes eased shut and they kissed. After a while, he shifted his face away and placed his lips against her neck. "That was nice," she whispered.
They lay for a long time, his face against her neck, not touching anywhere else, scant inches of space separating their bodies. Then his hands began to rove, to explore. She lay still.
Her soft skin intrigued him. Donna's skin tended to be dry, a bit flaky. In sunshine, she freckled instead of tanned, and he always assumed the freckling and the dryness were related. Sarah's skin was pale and very, very soft. It felt almost like touching water.
She had a prominent backbone. Each vertebra protruded distinctly. He traced the line of bones with his fingertips, thought fleetingly he could count them if he wanted.
Her shoulders were muscled, sloping. Donna's were bony and sharp. When he hugged Donna, it sometimes felt as if she'd forgotten to take the hanger out of her blouse before putting it on.
Sarah's hips flared abruptly at the bottom of her midsection, and her buttocks pushed firm—almost hard—against the flimsy fabric of her underpants. All that farm work as a kid, Elliott guessed. Donna's hips were wide but jiggly to the touch.
His exploration ended with Sarah's thighs, ample but taut. Thighs for horseback riding. Not like Donna's, which stretched long and slender, like the rest of her legs. Donna's body was, in fact, a bit ungainly, narrow at the top and bottom but wide in the middle. Sarah's was of a piece. Solid, substantial. Yet soft, because of her velvety skin.
Elliott kissed Sarah again, sat slowly up and drew the sheet all the way past her feet. He grasped the elastic waistband of her white underpants with both hands and peeled it down. She lifted her hips and let the underpants slide free, down her thighs, over her knees, past her feet, to the floor. Elliott examined her. A puff of golden pubic hair glistened in the light from the hall. He could hardly breathe. His left hand caressed the hair. It felt like cornsilk. Sarah's hips rose from the bed again. She drew a ragged breath. He slid a finger into her. She trembled.
"Excuse me," said Elliott. "I have to go to the bathroom."
Sarah's eyes fluttered open. Elliott gave her a sickly smile, stood and scurried out of the room, down the stairs and into the bathroom.
Damn! Damn! Damn! Damn! Teeny Weeny Bladder! Of all the times! His groin surged with pain from the pressure of trapped urine. He envisioned his bladder shimmying in there, distended, red, about to burst like a water balloon too long left on the faucet. He closed the bathroom door, scooted to the toilet and almost had to stand on his head to pee. His penis had hardened into an unyielding, banana-shaped rod, tip pointed to the ceiling, and it refused to dip toward the toilet bowl. He had to lean over the tank, brace himself against the wall with one hand, and arch his abdomen backwards while pushing downward painfully on his penis with the fingers of his free hand to get the tip pointed down. Then the urine refused to come out. Something was being pinched in there, some channel blocked. Elliott groaned. God-DAMN! His erection began to melt. As the angry banana wilted, urine began to flow. Thank god! It dribbled at first, then gushed and stopped, then surged freely. At last, he finished. He flushed the toilet, stood staring at the bathroom wall.
What now? Go back upstairs and assume activities will resume as if uninterrupted? What is Sarah thinking, waiting naked next to her husband? But then, what had she been thinking from the start?
Thumps and clumps sounded from the stairs beyond the bathroom door. Elliott tugged it open. Nick lurched toward him, head down, arms flailing the stairwell walls, feet stumbling from step to step. Sarah followed, her hands grasping his shoulders.
"Nicky's sick," she said. "He needs the bathroom."
Elliott sidestepped. Nick careened past, piloted from behind by Sarah, and sprawled onto the linoleum floor. He seized the toilet bowl with both arms, pulled himself up and vomited. Sarah patted his back. She wore a blindingly white terrycloth robe. Its whiteness was so intense it hurt Elliott's eyes. Her pale, strong calves and bare feet showed beneath it. Nick slumped back to the floor. Sarah hovered over him, murmuring and massaging his shoulders. He muttered, stirred, struggled to his knees, grabbed the sink with one hand and pulled himself more or less upright. He lunged out of the bathroom, bounced off a wall and angled into the stairwell. "S'okay," he said. "M'allright." He climbed, slowly and laboriously but steadily, out of sight.
Sarah flushed the toilet and joined Elliott in the hall. She smiled perkily. "Too much to drink, I guess."
"You might say that," Elliott agreed.
Sarah leaned against the wall and placed her hands in the waist pockets of the white robe. A matching belt tied it shut. She and Elliott gazed at each other.
"Shall we go back up?" she asked.
"We could. Or we could go into the living room." Elliott cut a sideways glance toward the darkened front of the duplex, where the couch sat.
"That's true, we could." Sarah peered toward the living room.
Elliott's hand moved, disembodied once again. It tugged loose the knot in the white terrycloth belt. Sarah's robe fell open. Slanting light from the bathroom illuminated her pale, soft, sturdy body. Pubic hair, golden and silky and straight, glistened at the base of her sloping belly. Donna had kinky, coarse pubic hair. Tan. Elliott slid his hands into the robe, rested them on the curved upper edges of Sarah's hips.
"You think we should?" she whispered.
Elliott realized the breaking point had arrived, the point where he should answer with an emphatic "Yes!" or, better yet, say nothing, take her hands and lead her, yielding, to the dark couch. He had sabotaged things once with his toilet break, broken a natural rhythm that might have carried the two of them into sex before either had a chance to sort it out. Now he had another chance. But he thought of Nick, upstairs, probably asleep. Would this wound him? Would it ruin their friendship? Nick had made a pass at Donna, yes, but—what did that mean? And how would Donna react if she discovered he’d had sex with Sarah? Would she be jealous? Would she leave him? And Sarah herself—what would she expect of him afterwards? Was this the beginning of an affair? Would they sneak around to see each other? Was he in love with her? Was she in love with him? He didn't even know her very well. Would she leave Nick and he leave Donna so they could be together? Would they bring their kids, trigger custody fights and mass confusion? Oh, shit! Oh, shit! Don't be rational, man. That's the key. You think everything to death, including sex. And love. Every damn thing.
"I guess we should go back up," Sarah said. She slipped away from Elliott and clasped her robe shut with one hand, reached out to him with the other. She smiled. "Okay?"
No, he thought. No, no, no. That's not what I want. I want to go in the goddam living room and screw you until your eyes roll like a slot machine. But what he said was: "Okay." The moment had passed. Twice, actually. And he didn't have the energy to lawyer her into submission. Not a good idea, anyway. He valued Nick's friendship too much. And his marriage. And his daughter's stable life. And—and—oh, hell.
They climbed the stairs together, slid into bed next to Nick. Sarah, still in her robe, pecked Elliott on the lips, rolled to her husband and placed an arm around his middle. She snuggled there and went to sleep. Elliott lay awake a long time, staring at the ceiling. But even he fell asleep eventually.
When Nick and Elliott woke the next morning, Sarah had already gone, driving one kid to preschool and the other to a sitter on her way to campus. The men forced a few feeble hangover jokes, ate some Cheerios with nonfat milk, drove to the golf course in the Heaths' second car, a rusted-out Volvo. They followed the golfers around until early afternoon, then Nick took Elliott home. They didn't say much. Elliott wondered what Nick remembered of the night before.
Nick didn't call Elliott after that. Elliott didn't call Nick, either. Six months passed. Chatting with a mutual acquaintance during his lunch hour, Elliott learned the Heaths had moved to southern California. Nick was playing Oscar Madison in an Oxnard Community Theatre production of “The Odd Couple.” Sarah taught tenth-grade English. Elliott would tell Donna when he arrived home that evening from the computer company that had hired him to write advertising copy after he stuffed the fifty-seven typed pages of his novel into a shoe box and buried it under a pile of sweatshirts in the bedroom closet.
|
|
|
