Lawrence Block - The Best American Mystery Stories 1999

“Stop,” she said. Then she let her body drift backward, pressing herself against the earth, her arms lifting toward me, open and outstretched and welcoming.

Any other man would have leapt at such an opportunity, but fear seized me and I couldn’t move.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I’m afraid.”

“Of what?”

“That I wouldn’t be able to...”

I could see that she understood me, recognized the source of my disabling panic. There seemed no point in not stating it directly. “I’m a virgin,” I told her.

She reached out and drew me down to her. “So am I,” she said.

I didn’t know how it was supposed to feel, but after a time she grew so warm and moist, my pleasure in her rising and deepening with each offer and acceptance, that I finally felt my whole body release itself to her, quaking and shivering as she gathered me more tightly into her arms. I had never known such happiness, nor ever would again, since to make love to the one you love is the greatest joy there is.

For a moment we lay together, she beneath me, breathing quietly, the side of her face pressed against mine.

“I love you,” I told her, then lifted myself from her so that I could see her face.

She was not looking at me, nor even in my direction. Instead, her eyes were fixed on the sky that hung above us, the bright coin of the moon, the scattered stars, glistening with tears as she peered upward to where I knew her thoughts had flown. Away from me. Away. Away. Toward the one she truly loved and still longed for, the boy whose beauty was equal to her own, and for whom I could serve as nothing more than a base and unworthy substitute.

And yet I loved her, married her, then watched in growing astonishment as her belly grew day by day until our son was born.

Our son. So the townspeople called him. So she called him and I called him. But I knew that he was not mine. His skin had a different shade, his hair a different texture. He was tall and narrow at the waist, I was short and stocky. There could be no doubt that he was the fruit of other loins than mine. Not my child, at all, but rather the son of that handsome young boy she’d strolled the town streets with, and whose disappearance, whether by death or desertion, had left her so bereft and downcast that I’d tried to cheer her with a carved horse, walked the streets and byways with her, soothed and consoled her, sat with her on the far hillside, even made love to her there, and later married her, and in consequence of all that now found myself the parent and support of a child who was clearly not my own.

He was born barely six months after our night of love. Born weighty and full bodied and with a great mass of black hair, so that it could not be doubted that he had lived out the full term of his nurture.

From the first moment, she adored him, coddled him, made him the apple of her eye. She read to him and sang to him, and wiped his soiled face and feet and hindquarters. He was her “dear one,” her “beloved,” her “treasure.”

But he was none of these things to me. Each time I saw him, I also saw his father, that lank and irresponsible youth who’d stolen my wife’s love at so early an age that it could never be recaptured by her or reinvested in me. He had taken the love she might have better spent elsewhere, and in doing that, he had left both of us impoverished. I hated him, and I yearned for vengeance. But he had fled to parts unknown, and so I had no throat to squeeze, no flesh to cut. In his stead, I had only his son. And thus, I took out my revenge on a boy who, as the years passed, looked more and more like his youthful father, who had the same limber gait and airy disposition, a boy who had little use for my craft, took no interest in my business, preferring to linger in the town square, talking idly to the old men who gathered there, or while away the hours by reading books on the very hillside where I’d made love to his mother, and who, even as I’d released myself to her, had slept in the warm depths of her flesh.

I often thought of that. The fact that my “son” had been inside her that night, that my own seed had labored to reach a womb already hardened against them. Sometimes, lost in such dreadful speculations I would strike out at him, using my tongue like a knife, hurling glances toward him like balls of flame.

“Why do you hate him so?” my wife asked me time after time during those early years. “He wants to love you, but you won’t let him.”

My response was always the same, an icy silence, followed by a shrug.

And so the years passed, my mood growing colder and more sullen as I continued to live as a stranger in my own household. In the evening, I would sit by the fire and watch as a wife who had deceived me and a son who was not my son played games or read together, laughed at private jokes, and discussed subjects in which I had no interest and from whose content and significance I felt purposely excluded. Everything they did served only to heighten my solitary rage. The sound of their laughter was like a blade thrust into my ear, and when they huddled in conversation at the far corner of the room, their whispers came to me like the hissing of serpents.

During this time my wife and I had terrible rows. Once, as I tried to leave the room, she grabbed my arm and whirled me back around. “You’re driving him from the house,” she said. “He’ll end up on the street if you don’t stop it. Is that what you want?”

For once, I answered with the truth. “Yes, I do. I don’t want him to live here anymore.”

She looked at me, utterly shocked not only by what I’d said, but the spitefulness with which I’d said it. “Where do you expect him to live?”

I refused to retreat. “I don’t care where he lives,” I answered. “He’s old enough to be on his own.” There was a pause before I released the words I’d managed to choke back for years. “And if he can’t take care of himself, then let his real father take care of him for awhile.”

With that, I watched as tears welled up in her eyes before she turned and fled the room.

But even after that, she didn’t leave. Nor did her son. And so, in the end, I had to stay in the same house with them, live a life of silent, inner smoldering.

A year later he turned fifteen. He was nearly a foot taller than I was by then. He’d also gained something of a reputation as a scholar, a fact that pleased his mother as much as it disgusted me. For what was the use of all his learning if the central truth of his life remained unrevealed? What good all his command of philosophy and theology if he would never know who his father was, never know where he’d gotten his curly black hair and lean physique, nor even that keenness of mind which, given the fact that he thought me his natural father, must have struck him as the most inexplicable thing of all?

But for all our vast differences of mind and appearance, he never seemed to doubt that I truly was his father. He never asked about other relatives, nor about any matter pertaining to his origins or birth. When I called him to his chores, he answered, “Yes, Father,” and when he asked my permission, it was always, “May I, Father?” do this or that. Indeed, he appeared to relish using the word. So much so, that I finally decided it was his way of mocking me, calling me “Father” at every opportunity for no other reason than to emphasize the point either that he knew I was not his father, or that he wished that I were not.

For fifteen years I had endured the insult he represented to me, my wife’s deviousness, her false claim of virginity, the fact that I’d had to maintain a charade from the moment of his birth, claiming a paternity that neither I nor any of my neighbors for one moment believed to be genuine. It had not been easy, but I had borne it all. But with his final attempt to humiliate me by means of this exaggerated show of filial obedience and devotion, this incessant repetition of “Father, this” and “Father, that,” he had finally broken the back of my self-control.