Belly Read online

  If he closed his eyes, if he kept his eyes closed, yes, it wasn’t Maybelline, it was Loretta. It was Loretta, it was the first time, it was War Bar in its heyday, there was music, there was the music of murmuring and bass beat and that reassuring scent of stale beer. He had cheated before, yes, of course, many times he had stepped out on Myrna, whose breasts drooped and swung like pendulums after nursing four babies, whose stomach turned to a rippling ocean of flesh, everything fallen on her, even her spirit, a body given up on, a body gone to bed.

  All the times he’d strayed it had been easy. Easy. The first time—what was her name? A young girl, some folkie type, who’d come to the dais at the back of the bar and asked if she could play her lame Bob Dylan covers on a shiny acoustic guitar two sizes too big for her, that she barely knew how to strum. Such a sweet little thing all the way up from Half Moon in her daddy’s Chevy Celebrity. How could he resist? Yes, he did think about Myrna, for a minute, thought about her the way she used to be, the way she was in their first six months together, before the accident of Nora sealed them up. Myrna, who was too smart for him, really, too sharp, she had something he’d never even touched, what his mother called Ambition. And how she’d dulled over the years, and rounded, and grayed, so much more malleable than he ever would have guessed.

  When he met Myrna, that last year of high school, she was an innocent. That’s what he loved about her. She was shockable. His potty mouth, his chain-smoking, his binge drinking, his belt-wielding father, all of it caused her to gasp, to rub her soft hand on his thigh and say, “You poor dear.” She had barely tasted alcohol, other than the sips of wine at Communion, and the first time he plied her with beer—the old Genny Cream Ale, he remembered, the thick dark bottle with the green label—her face lit up, her cheeks with round patches of red like a baby doll, and she twirled around him, his private dancer, his Catholic virgin. He adored her, and he wanted more than anything to fuck the innocence right out of her. And he did.

  How long was it before she changed? How long before the alcohol took hold of her, so she had to fight her own hands to keep from pouring the wine or whiskey during four pregnancies? How long before her body changed from tight and thin and athletic to soft and heavy and inert? And then how could he resist, who would even want him to resist the cream puff from Half Moon with her big guitar and her small breasts? And then Nora’s little friend from summer camp, his second—he never told Nora, of course—and then that woman from the track who kept her white straw hat on so she wouldn’t mess up her hair. There were so many, and never did he think twice about it until Loretta. He thought twice about Loretta. Three times. Over and over, from the moment he saw her, he thought about Loretta, he mulled it over. Because just from looking at her he could tell that it wouldn’t be just once, not with a woman like that.

  And even though Loretta was so beautiful, so vital, so much the anti-Myrna, oozing with confidence, all painted and perfumed and well preserved, that first time, in the back room, he had to keep his eyes closed. In the self-imposed darkness he put his lips to hers, like two rows of zipper teeth meeting, metal on metal, yes, sparks, enamel on enamel, and he felt so guilty. He opened his eyes, he looked at Loretta pressed to the wall with her leg up and her shirt off and he said, “I’m in trouble now.”

  But Loretta was not here. It was Maybelline.

  It was Maybelline who held him too tight and too long. “Time to take the convict home,” he said, swinging one leg over the bed.

  “Can’t you stay here?”

  She lay back on the lacy pillows in her red bra and granny underwear. A long black treasure trail ran from her navel, all those hairs pointing down there like arrows.

  He was so bored he didn’t even want to say no.

  “I gotta go,” he said. He stood and slipped on his jeans and buttoned them, stepped into his cowboy boots.

  She tossed a teddy bear at his head and he thought, What is the bare minimum I have to do to get with this girl again, maybe just once more?

  She scooched over in her little bed to make room for him, and he curled himself around her, and he knew right then there would be nothing between them, the way her hips pressed into his thighs instead of his stomach; their bodies just did not fit. But he closed his eyes and pretended that he held someone else, anyone else, any of the women he had loved or lusted after, he held her tight to him and ran his old-man hands along the soft skin of her inner arms until she was satisfied.

  She put on the classic rock station as she drove him back to town. It was only 10:30 according to Maybelline’s Hello Kitty watch, but he was so tired. He wondered what it would be like to come home at night with his fingertips stained from espresso, smelling of coffee grounds instead of booze. There were things he missed about the bar business: his pockets stuffed with wads of cash, smoky memories lingering on his shirt collar, meeting the sunrise most nights. He missed the mixing-in of vermouth and bitters, the satisfaction of pouring a perfect head on a Guinness. He missed that moment when he had a specialty drink ready and waiting for a regular: Loretta’s Cuba Libre, Phillip Sr.’s god-awful Miller High Life—the Champagne of beers—Carlson’s boilermaker, and a Shirley Temple for his never-ending supply of much-older lady friends, a Black Russian for Clem the sign painter, Stoli vanilla to start for Huck and Harmony the hippie couple, who made their way by the end of the night to prune liqueur, Rob Roys for the Knippenbergs, and always a Manhattan for Mad Martha, the cleanest bum ever known to man. In the winter sometimes, the graveyard shift guys from the Ball plant would stop in for a Bass.

  He did not miss the vomit and the occasional brawl, the Skidmore students with sorry excuses for fake IDs indignant and threatening to sue when the bouncer turned them away, his wife Myrna’s constant whining at the hours he kept, the impossible task of taxes in a cash-based business, the regulars whose skin sagged perceptibly from week to week, the effects of alcohol visible as they stumbled out to empty homes every night. August was the time he hated and cherished the most: fresh blood in the bar, bets rolling in and then away, trying to keep afloat in the sea of crisp bills. Every August, he longed for September to come and save him, and as soon as September arrived, he wished the summer would return. For twenty-four days a year, back then, he owned the world.

  Maybelline dropped him off and chirped, “Call me!” before she drove away. He had the card with her phone number and the lighter and the too-sweet scent of her perfume stuck to his collar, and he thought then that he might sidestep all the unpleasantness of starting over and just move in with her out there in Ballston Spa. Get free meals at Springway Diner. Split the gas for her Hyundai. Three blow jobs a week and cheap rent. He’d be all right.

  Outside, in the tiny backyard, a girl swayed in the white rope hammock with a laptop computer on her legs. He couldn’t see her face at first, just her long legs in tight jeans hugging her behind, long hair in a wild knot. All memories of Maybelline were murdered by that body. He thought, I want to pull on that hair. He cleared his throat.

  “You Ann’s friend?”

  She turned.

  What a dog. Her face really looked like a dog, like a basset hound, every feature too long, too sad. Her smile was a teardrop of lips.

  “So you’re Belly.” She dropped a foot out of the hammock to make it swing. She wore big black boots, shit kickers almost. They made a dent in the soft ground and dry grass. “You’re awfully thin for your nickname.”

  “I lost twenty pounds in prison,” he lied.

  “The food was that bad?” she asked, her question hooking up and then falling at the end, as if she were a Brit.

  “Better than you’d think. And a state-of-the-art gym.” He tried to flex his biceps, but they seemed to have shrunk on the way home.

  The Basset Hound stared at him. He dug his foot in the dirt.

  “Thanks for letting me stay in your room.”

  “It’s not my house,” he said. Then, “No problem.” He took out a cigarette and held the pack out to her, but she shook
her head. He was down to sixteen cigarettes, and they were now more than five bucks a pack. It was miserable math.

  “I’m only here for three more days,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  “I’m at Skidmore for this journalism conference.”

  “It’s fine,” he said.

  “But I’d love to talk to you about your experience of the last four years before I leave.” She sounded so formal and faraway, like a telemarketer.

  “Sure.”

  She stared at him a minute, as if she were waiting for him to ask her a question.

  “I’m a journalist,” she said, as if that answered it.

  She sat straight up in the hammock then, and he could see she was too tall for him, all stretched out like taffy. “Do you think we could meet tomorrow for a cup of coffee? I’m buying.”

  Her questions kept pulling on him. He took a long drag of his cigarette, blew a line of smoke straight toward her midriff, toward her big silver belt buckle engraved with a hammer and sickle. “That depends,” and he gave her his famous half-turned smile. “Will sex be involved?”

  She didn’t laugh.

  “So tomorrow,” she said, and she stood up, the whole giraffe of her with the basset hound head, and leaned in to shake his hand. “Okay, then,” she said, and she shook his hand hard, like a man.

  “You smell good,” he said. “You smell like vegetable soup.”

  The Basset Hound went in and up to her room, and he looked at the three-story Queen Anne Victorian with the sloping side porch and the attic lit up like a fiery heaven and he knew he’d never make it to the top.

  Even before he left they were working on this ailing, aging house, tearing out the saggy oak slabs and setting down new pine floorboards. They’d once painted it in what Nora termed “historically accurate colors,” a jarring pink with darker-pink shutters, off-white windows, and teal trim, but now all the paint had faded, and the house craved cover for the patches of joint compound and scarred-up siding. It looked like a candy house after a thunderstorm, what Hansel and Gretel found deep in the woods. Tacked to the front, along the street, was a long front porch that nobody used anymore, not since he and Phillip Sr. had occupied it two decades before. Their two chairs sat lonely next to the railing, waiting for ghosts to roost.

  He climbed up the little side porch and pushed open the screen door.

  “You missed dinner,” Nora said as he came into the kitchen. “Jesus, you reek. I can smell you from here. Go wash your mouth out.”

  “I love beer,” he said. “I love it.” Nora sat at the table with the baby asleep against her chest, leafing through a gardening catalog.

  “Drink all you want now, but you better be sober on Sunday.”

  He opened the fridge and took out the last Piels. “No problem,” he said. “Anybody call?”

  “Not for you.”

  “Where is everybody?”

  “Asleep, Belly, it’s eleven o’clock.”

  “Jesus, you know, this is about the latest I’ve been up in years. We had lights out at ten.”

  Nora said, “I’m sorry.” She squeezed his hand.

  “Where’s the husband?”

  “The restaurant.”

  “He ever show up here?”

  “He lives here.”

  “I’m just saying, when is he home?”

  Nora turned the pages of the catalog. “He gets home between three and four, sleeps till noon, and does it all over again the next day. He works his ass off for us.”

  “I see.”

  “What? What do you see?”

  “I just see, is all.”

  “Oh, Jesus, Belly.” She slammed the catalog shut, and the baby made a low moan. She lowered her voice to say, “He keeps the same hours you did. The restaurant business, remember? Remember what it’s like to work for a living?”

  “I remember I stayed out much later than I had to,” Belly said, watching Nora’s tough face thaw just a little, a tiny tremor at the corner of her mouth. He smiled at her.

  “Good night, darling Nora,” he said.

  She said, “Brush your goddamned teeth.”

  The house was quiet. He grabbed his duffel bag and crept through the kitchen to the TV room, through the TV room to the dining room, and up the stairs where the boys’ rooms were, and Nora’s bedroom, and the dark room where the Basset Hound was now undressing, then up another creaky flight of stairs to the attic. The whole Schuylkill FCI was one floor, and he hadn’t climbed steps in four years. His hips, legs, lower back all ached from the long bus ride, from walking, from fucking, from mounting these crooked steps.

  From the attic rose the old summer camp scent of mildew and musk. A twin bed was squeezed into the corner, under the rafters and next to the eyebrow windows. How could he sleep here, he’d never be able to sleep here, it was too much like a cell. He inspected all the items hiding in the tiny alcoves of the attic, the caves: an old spinning wheel, property of his great-grandmother who once owned a sheep farm in Ireland; ugly pressed-wood furniture that must be left over from Phil’s bachelor days; a broken lava lamp; a pile of canvases pressed against the wall. He leafed through them, big blobs of institutional green-gray with little specks of red, his youngest daughter Eliza’s initials at the bottom. There were a few more realistic paintings, and he recognized some from her high school career. Nude figures, which he lingered over for a moment, a portrait of his wife, Myrna, in her younger days, against a black and glittering sky. He stopped at the last one. He recognized the face, the eyes, her mother’s eyes, the wavy blond hair, Eliza’s sister, his lost daughter, no date. He turned it back to face the wall.

  If he knew anything, he knew you were not supposed to have favorites, or if you did, you weren’t supposed to admit it. But there were so many reasons to love the third one best. Nora was born with a glare, all her early words five letters with w’s—scowl and frown and growl. And after her came Ann, with those gray eyes, huge gray woman eyes in a four-and-a-half-year-old blond head, gazing at her father with total indifference. And Eliza, the baby, a colicky baby at that, up and crying all the time, eyes and nose and ears and mouth all running with waterfalls of want. They came into the world with their personalities already formed—the angry one, the apathetic one, the sad one, and the one who seemed to feel nothing but joy. His perfect little angel.

  The third girl was born with her mother’s green eyes, open and sallow as a sickened sea. But she was all his, even as a baby, a toddler, a little and then bigger kid, as a seven-year-old trailing six inches behind him at the track, twenty-four days in August made just for the two of them, her begging him to bet only on the gray horses, him explaining to her day after day how the odds worked, the higher the odds, the more the bet would pay. And he lost her like that, like a bet on the high odds, his beautiful sixteen-year-old girl in her thrift-store dresses and the shabby pink grandma cardigan around her shoulders. He shook his head and breathed through his mouth, fluttering his lips like a horse to expunge thoughts of her from his memory.

  He pressed back behind the piles of junk, and there lay hidden the contents of his old above-the-bar apartment. His favorite brown recliner. His neon Piels sign. The wall-sized poster of a white sandy beach with a palm tree. He had never owned much. Even after his third daughter was gone and then Myrna left him and he and Ann and Eliza all crammed into the cramped two-bedroom apartment, they had not collected stuff. Nora surely made up for it now, overflowing her house with toys and books and videos and those ridiculous little porcelain figurines that sat in his mother’s old hutch in the dining room.

  He unpacked his duffel bag and placed the contents into his grandfather’s old scuffed dresser. Humidity had seeped into the wood, expanding it, and the drawers resisted as he pulled them out. One by one he unloaded his clothes, jeans and jeans and jeans and white button-down shirts that he hung in the makeshift closet Nora had fixed—a metal bar wedged between two rafters. His thick white socks and his collection of plaid boxer shorts. Alway
s the same clothes, every day. His two good pairs of trousers he put on a hanger, vowing never to wear them. He had honed his fashion style back when Loretta told him how sorry he looked in dress pants, how they hung off him and made him look old. He thought of his style as vaguely rock star—the jeans and cowboy boots and white shirts—but a fogey rock star, Rick Springfield maybe. Jackson Browne. Somebody over the hill, but somebody who looked good over there, on his way down. He finished unpacking, and as he pressed the drawers shut, they squeaked, and the sound echoed off the wooden beams and made him feel too small and too alone in this high, dark cave of a space.

  He could not sleep here. The rain when it came would seep in through the cracking rafters, and he could not stand that feeling of water on his skin. His mother used to joke he must have had a traumatic baptism.

  He crept back down all forty-eight steps, grabbed a blanket from the living room, and laid himself down on the TV room couch, waiting for morning to save him.

  CHAPTER 2

  HE WAS dreaming of his wife and his truck, the beloved Bronco. He was dreaming of the brilliance of chrome rims and the fillings glinting from the back of Myrna’s mouth, of choosing between them, and he loved the truck, he had always loved the truck, and he never knew if he loved his wife or not. He opened his eyes.

  Every time Belly woke, the thought, the fact, that he had four daughters appeared to him like a preview before the real movie of his life recommenced. Nora, his eldest, and Ann, the lesbian, and Eliza, the baby, with the look of a newborn panda, some skeevy little mammal whose skull you could crush in the palm of one hand. Those three, plus the other one. The third one. Before he could call up her name, those little sleep bugs would wander off his stubble and dried saliva, and he would remember all over again that the third one was gone, there were still four, but one was a hole and the other three were just hills to be traversed.