Inner Tube: A Novel Read Free Page B

Afterwards I hear thuds from their room and Dad being sick.
    And all night I have strange pressured dreams. I wake up sore and hot with a thickness in my head.
    And what began that night has been with me, to one degree or another, ever since: an unquashable sexual desire for my sister.
    There. Happy now? While Jim Anderson does time for embezzlement, his Princess gives head behind the bowling alley to pay for her habit. Donna Stone, well, she’s pretty dim these days behind the Woolworth’s lunch counter, not a lot to say since that drunk driver took out her whole family Christmas Eve. And Beaver? Everybody knows about the Beav; he’s torn and stinking under a betel palm as Charlie strips him of boots and wristwatch.
    Realism, it may be seen, has no more to do with reality than anything else.

6
    I WAS EIGHT YEARS old when I first saw my mother on the stage. Gordo drove us into the city for the Saturday matinee. We stopped for fried clams en route and Carla was sick all over herself the minute we rejoined traffic.
    Gordo punched the gas pedal. “I’m not taking you in that condition,” he said.
    Carla kicked and sobbed while being led into Aunt Rita’s Lexington Avenue apartment building, but I wasn’t the least sorry she was being left out. The experience would be exclusively mine. And I wouldn’t have to share the intermission candy that had been promised.
    I remember the sense of event, the rustle of overcoats and the aromas of perfume and cigarettes, far better than the name of the play or even what it was about. A comedy, yes, one of those set in Westport or Bala-Cynwyd: tennis rackets and cocktail glasses, a long white sofa with tasseled cushions, and my amazement at the living laugh-track surrounding me in darkness that reached undiluted to an impossibly high ceiling dotted with gilt extrusions. My plush seat cradled me like an outsized hand, and the program’s coated paper curled and went sticky in my small one.
    You can see my attention was not where it belonged, and so could my father, artist of laws. His hand fell threateningly on my knee; he hissed. So I fixed my eyes in the prescribed direction, took in the furniture and the cellophane fire that shed no light, passed quickly over yapping faces. I could follow words individually, but completely missed their point. Too, the voice tones were like none I’d ever heard. Considerably later, I learned of projection from the diaphragm and reaching those red EXIT bulbs at the back of the theater; but at that moment all dialogue felt alien in my ear. I lowered my gaze to the rows of heads in front of us, studying varieties of hair.
    Gordo’s elbow was sharp as my mother entered through French windows at the back of the set. Disillusion took but an instant. She had a white sweater tied round her neck by the sleeves—a style frequently affected at home—and a bundle of fat white blooms across one arm, as if she’d come in from clipping the peonies that marked the edges of our property. Where was the transformation? I knew what “playacting” meant, like any third-grader, and this wasn’t it. I felt like crying when she opened her mouth to speak and out came the teasing snob accent she used to cajole my sister and me into drab chores, or to dinners where we had to keep quiet.
    This display of her ordinary self before strangers was indecent. She was exposed, without even the small tricks of glamour a little boy could recognize. I noticed that Gordo didn’t laugh with the rest. His posture was stiff and defiant, chin jutting. Was he reading the same indecency that I did?
    The curtain couldn’t fall soon enough for me. With alarming suddenness, the slight pressure in my bladder had grown into a torment. I shut my eyes against it, afraid to move. Then I heard my mother trilling from the stage: “How do I get out of here?”
    The lights came up at last and I zigzagged my way to the men’s, praying the hot dribble inside my leg wouldn’t turn into something