Good Neighbors Read online

  ‘Not now,’ she says.

  He reaches out to stroke her other breast, thumbing her nipple. She pushes him away again, this time with more force.

  ‘Not. Now.’

  William rolls onto his back, looks at the ceiling. There’s something wrong with his guts. There’s something in his guts that won’t let him stop. There’s a need there, deep in there, and it just won’t let him stop. It’s hungry and it’s got control of him and it won’t let him stop. He has to go back. It’s Elaine’s fault. He has to go back and finish what he started. Even if it means the police get him, even if it means he goes to jail for the rest of his life – that might even be a good thing: he’d no longer have to hide what he is from his wife and children, he’d no longer be able to hurt anyone else. But he has to finish this one last thing. He has to go back.

  He sits up in bed and spins, swinging his feet off the edge.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Going out.’

  ‘Where? You just got in.’

  ‘Just out,’ he says, and stands.

  He gets dressed in the bathroom, slipping back into his pants and shoes and sweater.

  He grabs the kitchen knife from the dish drainer and walks back out into the night.

  22

  Frank makes a left and drives down a one-way street. As he drives, the row houses give way to Tudor-style single-family homes. He looks left and right as he goes, looks for a stroller that’s been knocked to its side. He drives for three blocks, seeing nothing.

  Then, as he swerves the Skylark slightly to the left to avoid a pothole, one of his headlights catches it lying on its side between two parked cars. He can only see the blue canvas back of it and the chrome handles and the wheels with black treads. What’s inside of the stroller is facing the opposite direction.

  ‘Oh, shit.’

  He simply sits with a foot on the brake pedal, his hands gripping the steering wheel, and one headlight shining on a mangled stroller. He lets go of the steering wheel with both hands and then wraps his fingers around it again. It feels grimy under his palms, grimy and hot.

  He closes his eyes and opens them again.

  All right, he thinks.

  He puts the car in reverse and backs into the curb, hitting it once, straightening out, parking, and then killing the engine.

  He steps from the car and the cold air hits him. The inside of the car was about ten degrees hotter and he’d not had the heater on. He was simply nervous and sweating and filling the car with his own body heat. As the cold air hits him, it sends a shiver up his spine, chilling the sweat that stands out on his body. He stands unmoving by his car for a moment and in that moment he considers simply getting back in and driving away, driving away and never looking back. But he doesn’t do that; he couldn’t do that, despite the fleeting thought. He could never live with himself. He could never look at himself in the mirror and see the man he believes himself to be; he’d only see a coward.

  He remembers something that his dad told him before he died. All courageous men are afraid, he told Frank – all of them: if a man isn’t afraid of something that normal men are afraid of, that doesn’t make him courageous, it makes him an idiot. A courageous man is a man who feels fear but does what he has to do anyway. If you’re not afraid, he told Frank, you’re not being brave.

  ‘You’re right, dad,’ Frank whispers into the night.

  He nods. He nods and he takes his first step toward the stroller. It is followed by a second step, and then a third.

  He stops walking once he has reached the back of the stroller. Then he puts out his foot and turns the stroller toward him with his black leather shoe, cringing in anticipation as he does, but when he sees an arm he stops.

  ‘Oh, God,’ he says.

  He leans down and turns the stroller toward him with his hands, revealing what’s on the other side. A pink leg. A baby’s lolling head.

  No.

  He blinks.

  His heart is pounding so hard he can feel it behind his ears, throbbing there, and in his temples. He realizes he’s been holding his breath and lets himself exhale. He swallows.

  And then he sees it for what it really is. A doll – a child’s doll strapped into a stroller. Flesh-colored, one glass-blue eye staring at Frank. Where the other eye should be is just a black cavity. Maybe some boy pried it out with the prongs of a fork to add to his marble collection; maybe the doll was dropped and the eye popped out, rolling to some unreachable location. Either way – gone.

  A shocked laugh croaks from Frank’s throat and surprises him so much that he actually glances around to see where it could have come from.

  When he realizes it was him, he laughs again.

  A fucking doll.

  Stroller probably spent five years in a hall closet before some little girl found it there, strapped her doll in it, and rolled it around the neighborhood till the sun started to dip below the evening horizon and her mom called her in to eat her chicken livers, peas and mashed potatoes, leaving it in the street for Erin to hit in the dark hours of the next morning while she drove home from her long night shift, half asleep, thinking about something that happened at work.

  Frank gets to his feet, feels a brief rush of dizziness that quickly passes, turns, and walks toward his car.

  ‘Oh, thank God,’ Erin says into the the telephone. ‘Come home. I want you to hold me.’

  She feels her legs go weak and she falls into a chair.

  She wants him home, looking into her eyes, smiling at her; she wants to feel his big arms wrapped around her, making her safe.

  ‘I’m on my way,’ Frank says. ‘I’ll be there soon.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘I love you.’ Erin feels as if someone has lifted a boulder off her chest. ‘I love you so much.’

  ‘I love you too,’ he says, and puts the scratched-up pay phone back in its cradle. He stands a moment smiling at the absurdity of this, at the fact that it was all over a oneeyed doll, and then he turns away from the phone and heads toward his car, which is parked across the street.

  He reaches the curb, and when he sees no headlights coming at him from either direction, he jogs across. As he crosses the street, he sees that a police cruiser is parked two cars behind his own. He sees that a police officer is sitting behind the wheel. He sees that the police officer is watching him.

  Frank tilts his head in the cop’s direction, howdy, and continues to his car, but the cop does not reciprocate. He just stares.

  Frank gets into his car, and he sits down, pulling the door closed.

  He glances in the rearview mirror; the cop is watching him.

  Frank starts his car; a moment later he hears the cop’s car start.

  He puts his left turn signal on and pulls his Skylark out into the quiet street and he heads toward home; the round yellow headlights of the cop car pull out after him.

  23

  Peter Adams paces back and forth, wearing out the rug beneath his feet. Ron and Bettie simply sit on the couch beside one another. They’re holding hands and watching him silently.

  But he just paces – paces.

  This isn’t right. This shouldn’t have happened. He doesn’t understand how this happened. It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t. He’s a good person – he tries to be. How can a good person be in this situation? It’s stupid. It’s fucking stupid and it doesn’t make sense.

  ‘You should go talk to her,’ Ron says.

  Peter stops pacing a moment and looks at Ron.

  Ron simply looks back, no readable expression on his face – as if he wasn’t the one who got Peter into this mess, as if the whole swapping thing wasn’t his idea in the first place.

  ‘I don’t want to talk to her,’ he says finally.

  ‘You’re making a mistake,’ Ron says.

  ‘Fuck you.’

  ‘I’m trying to help you.’

  ‘I don’t want to fucking talk to you,’ Peter says, and turns to Bettie. ‘How can you say that all we
shared was sex?’ He hears a childish whine in his own voice that he hates.

  ‘Because,’ Ron says, ‘all you shared was sex. That was the whole point.’

  ‘I don’t want to fucking talk to you,’ Peter says again; and then says, ‘You think you’re above it all, don’t you? You think you’re so fucking enlightened. Well, I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to Bettie.’

  ‘No, you weren’t talking to me,’ Ron says, calmly, making Peter hate him more: Peter wishes the guy would get mad, would be unreasonable – this is an unreasonable situation and calls for unreasonable behavior, goddamn it, not simple calm – ‘but you were talking to my wife, and in situations like this, I feel pretty comfortable speaking for her. Especially when I’m only echoing what she’s already said for herself.’

  ‘Situations like this?’

  ‘Bettie is my wife. Just because you two had sex does not mean you earned a right to her love. You didn’t. That’s reserved for me. The sooner you get that through your skull, the sooner you can mend things with your own wife, and the better off you’ll be.’

  ‘Go fuck yourself,’ Peter says, turning away from Ron. But only a moment later, he turns back around. ‘Would you please just let me talk to Bettie alone? Please.’ Again that childish whine in his voice. He hates himself for it but he can’t stop it. A grown man whining. A grown man with manicured fingernails and perfect hair whining. A grown man who knows more about good merlot than he’ll ever know about internal combustion engines – whining. He can’t believe how much he hates himself right now. ‘Please,’ he says again.

  ‘She’s already said she’s not interested in what you have to offer.’

  ‘Because you’re fucking sitting here! Let me talk to her alone.’

  ‘Ron,’ Bettie says.

  He looks at her.

  ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘You sure?’

  She nods.

  ‘Okay,’ Ron says, getting to his feet. ‘Fine.’

  24

  The clock on the nightstand says it’s four fifty, but neither Thomas nor Christopher is looking at it. Christopher is belly-down on the mattress, and Thomas is on top of him, covered in a gloss of sweat, holding himself up with a hand pressed down on Christopher’s back between his shoulder blades. Both men are silent during the last of it save for quick short breaths from Thomas and then it is over.

  Thomas rolls off Christopher, the guilt hitting him before he’s even on his back, and he stares up at the ceiling.

  Christopher gets to his feet.

  ‘I’m gonna clean up,’ he says. ‘I’ll be right back.’

  Thomas nods but he does not make eye contact. He can’t, not after what they’ve done.

  He simply stares at the ceiling.

  There is a yellow water stain there shaped sort of like a crescent moon drawn by a child and Thomas tries to figure out how it got there. There shouldn’t be any plumbing there. Directly overhead should just be another bedroom. Maybe it’s a child’s room and the child is a bed wetter. Maybe his upstairs neighbors have a plant there that they perpetually overwater. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t really care. It’s just another stain in a world full of stains.

  Thomas reaches to the nightstand for his cigarettes, puts one between his lips, strikes a match. He’s always liked the smell of matches. When he was small, around ten or eleven, and found boxes of them, he would burn them one after the other just so he could smell the sulfur exploding with the flame, and since his grandmother was a two-pack-a-day smoker and forgetful to boot, he found boxes of them everywhere, littered throughout the house.

  He also found bottles of gin and vermouth hidden away, which he tasted and cringed over and then put back. At the time he didn’t know it was impossible for grandma to have obtained the liquor legally but he did know she sneaked her drinks, pouring herself a mixture from the two bottles into juice cups when she thought he wasn’t around, adding olives, and sipping them while smoking and listening to her shows. He’d heard of Prohibition, of course – heard the word, anyway – but he didn’t connect it with grandma’s juice-cup drinks until much later; nor did he connect her often leaving him alone in the house and coming home smelling of fermentation only a year or two later with Roosevelt or the Cullen-Harrison Act or the sudden visibility of drinking establishments.

  He did however connect her forgetfulness with her drinking; if he asked for his allowance after she’d had three or four, he found he could usually ask for it again the very next day and often would get it.

  He inhales deeply on his cigarette, feeling depressed, lost.

  This shouldn’t have happened.

  He pushes himself off the bed and looks around for his pants, having no idea where he left them. Finally he sees a wrinkled fabric leg sticking out from under the bed. He pulls the pants out of the shadows as if they were an animal trying to escape, shakes off the dust bunnies they collected from the floor, from under the bed, and slips back into them.

  Then sits back down on the edge of the mattress and continues to smoke.

  After the first cigarette has been smoked down to the filter, he lights a new one with it, and butts it out in the glass ashtray sitting on the nightstand.

  Soon enough, too soon, Christopher walks out of the bathroom wearing a pair of underpants and nothing else. Thomas wishes he would get dressed. He should at least put some pants on. Thomas doesn’t want to see his body; it only reminds him of what happened here tonight.

  Thomas glances at his face, but briefly, and then looks away.

  ‘Maybe you should leave,’ he says.

  Christopher stops in his tracks and looks at Thomas. Thomas can feel Christopher looking at him but he refuses to look back.

  ‘What?’ Christopher says.

  ‘Maybe you should leave.’

  Christopher continues to stand there motionless for a long time. He doesn’t say anything and he doesn’t move. He certainly doesn’t leave.

  Then finally he says, ‘May I have a cigarette?’

  Thomas nods but doesn’t make any motion to give him one.

  Christopher walks to the nightstand, retrieves a cigarette from the pack himself, and lights it with a match. The smell of sulfur fills the air. Then he just stands there, watching the match burn in his fingers, and once the flame reaches his fingertips, he grabs the head of the match, which is no longer aflame but seems like it must still be hot, and lets the flame burn the rest of the small stick. Once the entire match is burned, the fuel spent, the flame goes out on its own and Christopher drops it into the ashtray amongst a litter of ash and butts and fingernail clippings.

  Thomas notices that there is a lot of dust on the baseboards. A lot of dust.

  He wonders who first called them baseboards.

  ‘I’ve never done that before,’ he says.

  Christopher takes a drag from his cigarette and sits down beside him.

  ‘Are you upset with me?’

  Thomas shakes his head.

  ‘I’m disgusted with myself for this,’ he says. ‘This was a mistake and I’m disgusted with myself.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why was it a mistake?’

  Thomas shrugs.

  ‘I don’t know. It was wrong.’

  Then he glances over at Christopher, making his first attempt at eye contact since Christopher re-entered the bedroom; it’s a fleeting thing, and he almost immediately looks away, back to the baseboards. It’s strange that he’s never noticed how much dust they collect.

  ‘I’ve spent my entire life,’ he says, ‘trying to be normal. Telling myself . . . I don’t know . . . telling myself that I’ve simply never found the right woman. Telling myself . . .’ He shakes his head. ‘I’m gonna have to quit the bowling team.’

  He shouldn’t even be alive right now. If he’d killed himself when he’d planned to this never would have happened. He should have pulled the trigger as soon as he heard the knock on the door. He should have just pulled
the fucking trigger. Christopher might have kicked the door in and found him but this never would happened and that’d be something at least. It would be better than this, better than what he’s feeling right now.

  ‘We didn’t do anything wrong,’ Christopher says.

  Thomas takes a drag from his cigarette, then waves it over the ashtray, flicking his thumb against the filter as he does, dropping the spent bit into it. His lungs feel hot. He looks at the pile of ashes and butts and fingernail clippings in the tray.

  Someone should invent a baseboard duster, something on a long stick so people wouldn’t have to bend down. Maybe someone already has. He’ll have to look into it.

  ‘Thomas,’ Christopher says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘We didn’t do anything wrong.’

  Thomas scrapes a bit of dead skin off his lower lip with his teeth, gets it on the end of his tongue, and spits, as if it were a seed husk. He doesn’t see where it goes.

  ‘Would you tell anyone what we did?’ he says. Christopher doesn’t respond for a moment. Then: ‘No.’ ‘Why not?’

  ‘It would end friendships,’ Christopher says. ‘It would . . .’ and he trails off.

  Thomas nods.

  ‘It’s shameful,’ he says. ‘How can something be shameful but not be wrong?’ And then answers his own question. ‘It can’t,’ he says.

  He takes another drag at his cigarette and looks at the wall.

  ‘It’s shameful,’ Christopher says, ‘because we’re told to be ashamed of it.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘How can something that hurts nobody be wrong?’

  ‘I don’t feel good about it,’ Thomas says. ‘I feel like I made a mistake. I feel like I’ve done something wrong.’

  ‘Because you’ve been told it’s wrong all your life,’ Christopher says. ‘So you feel bad about it, and since you feel bad, you think it must be wrong. But we didn’t steal anything. We didn’t hurt anyone. We simply . . .’ He coughs into his hand and looks away. ‘You know,’ he says, ‘right now we’re sending kids to Vietnam to kill people over ideas. We’re sending boys right out of high school over there to kill people who never threatened any violence against us simply because we’ve decided they think the wrong things.’ He laughs. ‘And yet it’s what you and I did here tonight that’s supposed to be shameful.’