Dirty Love Read online

  THE SUN STILL SHINES over the water and the beach shacks. Many of them are vinyl-sided and reflect whitely at Mark as he walks Lisa Schena to her car. She has parked in the driveway of a friend, and they are moving down the sidewalk through tanned bodies and sunburned bodies, fat ones and scrawny ones, tattoos abounding the way they do now, piercings too, five alone in the left ear of a girl no older than twelve, a burning cigarette between her fingers at her narrow hip. Lisa’s hand is small and fits snugly inside his own. He tells himself it is there, in his, because the sidewalk is crowded and loud with voices and laughter and the thumping of arcade machines, the roar of a motorcycle passing in the street, and it’d be rude to leave her untended in all this, but it was her hand that reached for his, a touch of skin, then a grasping that shot into his bloodstream and groin.

  They may have had two more drinks. He does not remember eating, only listening to Lisa Schena who had given up trying to get him to talk about Laura, for he would not; to bring her to that table would make that table disappear and he did not want it to disappear. He wanted to sit and drink and watch world-weary Lisa Schena talk all day, though now she is quiet, smoking a cigarette as they reach the corner, nickels of flattened gum on the concrete, a trash barrel outside a pizza shop overflowing with tomato-streaked paper plates and empty Coke cans, and she drops her butt onto the sidewalk, then steps on it and leads him into the street through slowing traffic for the other side.

  The sun is warm on the back of his neck. He can smell the rot of the ocean, seaweed and dried-out mussels on a rock, gull shit and wet sand and salty surf he only glances at as Lisa steps onto a new sidewalk and he keeps up with her. This one is largely clear of people, so there is no reason any longer to hold her hand, but she isn’t letting go and neither is he.

  Up ahead are clusters of beach houses along short sandy streets. He can feel her bare forearm brushing his, and it’s strange she’s being so quiet. He glances down at her and she smiles up at him as if, in his silence, he’s been telling a long story and she is simply listening to it. They have to step around a small mound of sand in the asphalt, then they’re off Ocean Boulevard, walking down a narrow street, one-story beach houses wedged close together on both sides behind split-rail fences or chain-link. Some have tiny square lawns, others sand or pea stone. Many of them are flying Old Glory off poles in brass holders screwed into their door casings, and it’s as if these hard-earned summer places of theirs have to have some visual justification, that a summer home is yet another gleaming possibility in this continuous American Dream and these flags, most of their stars and stripes faded by the sun and salt and wind, are semi-defiant sanctions of approval for this excess, small as they are, built as close together as they are. It’s like a cruel joke is being played on these people, though sensing this, Mark feels above no one; in fact, he feels quite at home here, the brunt of a cruel joke himself, and that’s what he feels with this Lisa Schena too, at home, when she is nothing like any home he’s ever had. She has pocked skin and bad teeth and faded blue eyes and she talks on and on about difficulty and loss, but she does it with a glint in her eye, the black humor of the condemned, like we are all in this together and who, honey, said it would ever go the way it was supposed to anyway? And how nice for him now to maybe give up a little and stop giving such a shit, so he stops there on the cracked asphalt under the sun and watches his hands pull Lisa Schena to him, her eyes startled for only an instant before they soften and he kisses her deeply, her lips pliant, her mouth opening without hesitation, her menthol tongue there like the answer to a question he does not even know he’s been asking. His erection is as immediate as when he was a boy. In the darkness of his closed eyes, things seem to tilt a bit and he knows he’s half-drunk but he doesn’t care. Her tongue darts in and out of his mouth like a nurse tending to many patients at once and there is the guttural humming of an air-conditioning unit, the needy cry of a gull overhead, the sounds of a television in an open window somewhere, baseball again, the Red Sox, and he was a good athlete in high school, fast enough to play in college though he did not for he knew he was not good enough to play beyond that so what was the point? It wasn’t practical. It wasn’t the logical thing to do, and he is so tired of logic, so tired of managing every last detail of each and every day, and how sweet to let go of the wheel and let someone else drive, to let Lisa Schena pull away first, her eyes not so washed out this close up, but thin, as if they’re blue ice and every year of her life has melted away one more layer yet she has no sadness about this because she’s tougher than he is, taking his hand now, leading him wordlessly down the street and around the corner where a small boy sits on a Big Wheel staring up at them, a dried purple ring around his mouth, his mother sunning herself on a chaise lounge just feet away on her coarse yellow lawn. Her thighs are oiled and dark, and oblivion never felt as good as it does now, Lisa Schena letting go of his hand and turning down a driveway where her Chevy sedan sits behind a motorcycle under a blue tarp weighted on the ground with bricks. She’s climbing three pressure-treated steps of a small porch. Her face turns to him, “My friend’s a cop. He’s working a double.”

  Against the house, a dead potted plant sits on the railing and she pulls from it a single key and unlocks the door. She pushes the key back into the dirt, then they’re both inside. The kitchen is small and neat, the floor linoleum. She is at the open fridge pulling out two cans of beer and handing him one. Busch. Beaded and cold. She is smiling, taking his hand again. “He has a deck up top. C’mon.”

  Her hips in black denim, her ugly hair, her hand in his, small and warm. They pass through the living room of a man—a mismatched couch and recliner, a massive flat-screen television, a glass-topped coffee table littered with newspapers and DVD cases and two Xbox controls beside a full ashtray. The house smells like cigarette smoke and window cleaner and just as Mark takes the carpeted steps behind Lisa, her hand letting go, he sees a framed photograph of a man with a crew cut and trimmed mustache, his arms around three little kids.

  “Is he divorced?” The question comes out of him, though he does not want that word in the air, and his fingers reach up and touch Lisa Schena’s moving knee. She laughs and says something about his ex-wife being a bitch.

  The cop’s room is cold, an air-conditioning unit humming in the window beside the slider. Lisa Schena stands there but does not open it. Nor has she opened her beer, nor has he.

  “Decent view, huh?”

  Beyond a small deck are the roofs of houses, the street ending at a grassy dune and there, on the other side of it, the ocean, just a square of it, but it is blue-green with no horizon, the pale sky rising above it, Lisa Schena turning to him, the unopened beer in her hand.

  “What’re we doing, Mark Welch?”

  “I don’t know.” His finger touches her small pink scar. “I don’t care either.”

  “That makes two of us.” She takes his can of beer and places it and hers on a cane chair against the wall. She straightens and pulls her white top up over her head. She reaches behind her for her bra strap, her eyes—alert and reckless—on his. It’s an act he’s watched no one else but his wife perform for over two decades, and when Lisa Schena pulls her bra free he does not look at her breasts for he is afraid he will stop if he does and he does not want to stop. She begins to unbutton his shirt but he steps back and does it himself, quickly, then he’s kissing her again, unzipping her black denim skirt, pulling them down her hips as he nudges off his sandals and steps out of his shorts and underwear and stands there naked and erect before a woman he has known less than one full day, a thought he does not think but feels as she glances down at what he has to offer, stepping out of her underwear, her eyes intent and deliberate now, as if this is something she will do whether it is a good thing or not, and as she grasps his hand and leads him to the bed, he takes in her straight back and what it leads to, its beauty a dark surprise to him, and he pictures her holding down a strong, young retriever on a steel table, its futile whining an
d struggling, the needle nearby, about to be shoved in.

  THAT FIRST MORNING after the night he’d made Laura watch the detective’s DVD, Mark woke curled on the couch in the living room. Outside it was snowing, light flakes that melted as soon as they hit the ground and street. A car drove by wetly on the asphalt. It was near seven, the Welch house quiet and calm, though it was as if the smell of dried blood was in the air and great devastation of some kind had happened near by.

  Then he was standing in his garage watching his mother drive off to her volunteer job as a receptionist at the hospital. He had just carried the last of the broken chairs out there, his mother’s headlights coming on as she backed away. There was her old profile, her wool cap on her head, her gloved hands on the wheel, then she was gone and to see his and Laura’s cars parked side by side was a whip across his eyes.

  He wished he’d never read one word between FrankJH and LauraMW.

  You deserve real love, Laura. You know that, don’t you? I can give it to you. All I want to do is give it to you.

  You do, sweetheart. Oh Frank, you do.

  Sweetheart. It was a word she’d never used for Mark, and there were pages of this, and it was very little of what he’d expected; he had hard evidence of a sexual affair, but of all he’d read the night before, there was just one hint of this and it was from his wife:

  No one’s ever made me feel that before.

  Reading their private conversations, Mark had expected to feel more justified in his outrage, more fully equipped to develop a response to the very real threat that was Frank Harrison Jr. But what Mark felt instead was small. Inadequate. An insensitive and domineering brute. A lousy lover. That’s the picture his dear Laura had painted of him. That’s the shadow-man this Harrison knew. Mark was almost disappointed he’d found little of the lewd, for this was far worse: keeping it unspoken, even between themselves, revealed that they were lovers, that they truly loved one another.

  He had not expected this.

  That’s when he saw the four-foot length of steel pipe. It was leaning against insulation in a stud bay beside the door. It had probably been there since he’d built his mother’s apartment, since his plumber had installed the second oil burner, and Mark’s eyes had to have passed over it for years as he walked into the laundry room from the garage. But that morning was the first time he’d grasped it and lifted it and felt its heft. He wiped a cobweb off it. He looked at how his hand was now smudged gray. He slapped his palm on his pants and carried the pipe into the laundry room and rested it against the wall.

  From the kitchen he heard silent Laura open and close a cabinet door. There was the tap of a ceramic mug on the counter, the pouring of coffee. He could smell it. Before the mad mornings when both kids were small and woke very early needing to be cleaned and clothed and fed, Mark and Laura would have coffee together. Whoever got up first would make it, then carry it up, and they would sit against their pillows and headboard and sip and talk quietly, their room filling slowly with light. Sometimes they would talk about the mundane, about duties and tasks ahead of them that day. But usually they didn’t. Usually they told one another their dreams or fragments of them from the night before. One morning, snow falling outside, Laura had told him she’d dreamt she was a little girl and she lived in the side pocket of one of his suit coats. A few times a day he would lift her out and hold her in his palm and feed her bits of bread or tiny shredded pieces of meat. He would try to kiss her, but his massive lips scared her so he’d slide her back inside his pocket. Mark had told her the dream meant she knew he was her protector. Laura had smiled but said nothing. She nodded her head and sipped her coffee. He had felt like his wife’s friend then, her true companion, and he’d disciplined himself not to ruin it by reaching for her hip or breast.

  Letting go of the pipe in the laundry room, he could feel in his throat so many sentences from the night’s reading of emails, and he needed to shout them at her now as she poured her coffee in the kitchen, its smell always such a comfort to him, but not then; that morning it was like the sweet fragrance of lilacs just before you see the corpse upon which they lie.

  He stepped into the kitchen. Laura stood at the peninsula. Above her, the light fixture still hung sideways from its wires, and she was looking at her husband as if she were trying to remember his name.

  Mark’s eyes ached. His mouth tasted like iron. He pushed the upside-down table and slid it over the floor into the corner. When it touched the baseboards he felt immensely fatigued.

  Oh, you do, sweetheart. Oh Frank, you do.

  She was pouring him a cup now. He hadn’t heard her pull it from the cabinet. He hadn’t heard the tap of it as he’d heard hers. He wanted to walk her into the living room and sit her on the couch and read her some of her own words about him. He wanted to—what? Humiliate himself? Break down like a boy in front of her again?

  No, this was the time for a cooler head. For there are always three major constraints: scope, cost, and time. Enlarge the scope and you will increase the cost and lengthen the time. Tell Laura all he’s discovered and the scope would become very large indeed.

  He lifted his cup. He sipped. “Thank you.”

  “I called in sick.”

  He nodded.

  “I’m going to write that letter now.”

  “Good.” This came out sounding more sullen than he’d meant it to, but why shouldn’t it?

  Because she was beautiful. Because she stood there in their kitchen, the gray light of the morning coming through the window onto her hair and shoulders and throat and sternum, her small hands cupping her coffee like some secret he would never get to. His eyes began to burn: perhaps because she and Harrison had written nothing of their sex together, it’s all he saw. He kept seeing his wife’s lovely mouth around the erect penis of a man he’d never met. He kept seeing her fucking him, straddling Harrison and reaching back to fondle his balls, these new playthings he seemed to have introduced her to, this bald banker thrusting himself into Mark’s wife before she eventually collapsed onto him. Mark imagined their sweaty murmurings, though he could not hear them; all he heard was his own heart tapping in his head like a hammer.

  Laura was looking at him as if she were willing herself to; but no words came from her, and she turned with her coffee and walked down through the dining room and back up the stairs.

  Mark stood there. He put down his cup. He began to follow her but then stopped. He moved into the living room as tentatively as if he were returning to the scene of a crime. What he needed to do was this: he needed to take that pipe and swing it down onto her laptop, smashing its silver cover and glass screen and plastic keyboard until he got to every adulterous gigabyte leaking out one by one. Then he’d move to the television that had always brought Laura such nightly distraction. He’d bust a cavern into its large staring eye. Next would come the glass knickknacks on the fireplace mantel Mark had never liked but had belonged to Laura’s mother, a warm woman who’d birthed a cold and deceitful daughter, and once they were nothing but colored bits of glass on the carpet, he’d aim for their small table of framed wedding photos, their shrine to that joyous August afternoon.

  Because they’d met and lived in Salem, they married in a small Catholic church there not far from the water. Mark’s mother stood in the front pew in a hopeful yellow dress, a white rose pinned to its lapel, a folded tissue in her hand. Next to her were Claire and her husband Thomas and their three kids who’d come up from Connecticut where Tom worked as an industrial engineer and Claire ran a day care center, his tired-looking but happily married older sister smiling brightly at him. There were Laura’s mother and father, still alive, still married after forty-three years, her father handsome and ruddy-faced and looking like a New Hampshire farmer and not the high school principal he’d been for decades and would be until his death six years later. There were aunts and uncles and cousins with polite but distant wives and husbands. There was Laura’s maid of honor, her pale, heavy, and kind sister Julie. And t
here was Mark’s best man, Danny O’Neil, who’d flown in from San Francisco where he managed an apartment complex for an absentee owner from Brazil.

  He and Mark had played baseball together all through high school, Danny first baseman to Mark’s shortstop, a kid who had a vacuum cleaner for a glove and always made Mark look good, as he did then on that August afternoon in the incense- and oak-smelling church, Danny handsome and charming and single, probably gay, though he and Mark had never talked about that because they had never talked about much.

  The truth is it was strange that he’d called Danny’s mother to get his phone number out west; it’d been years since Mark had seen or spoken to him or even thought much about him. But Mark had no brothers, and the only men he saw regularly were those at work, most of them his underlings, or else the husbands and boyfriends of Laura’s friends from the realtor’s office, men he drank with and blathered nonsense with back and forth. There were buddies from college, a group of them he’d fallen in with his sophomore year, young men who’d also been high school athletes and now had vague desires to earn a lot of money. But except for his roommate Carlos Munoz from Brooklyn, he’d had no contact with any of them since their commencement under a misty rain, the leaves of the campus trees bursting with life. Those first years of working at bottom-floor company jobs, Carlos had written Mark a few postcards from wherever he was living—Omaha, Dallas, Miami—but Mark had never taken the time to write back: to do so was to let the current pull you backwards when his goal was only to forge ahead, to find his momentum, to begin earning and earning and never falling behind. Some nights, usually just before he was up for a quarterly review, he’d lie awake and hear, as clearly as his own beating heart, his father’s name: Welchy.