Russell Banks - Trailerpark

“What … what if I get pregnant?” she whispered into his ear.

“Don’t worry, man. You won’t.”

“I won’t?”

“Tantric birth control, man. It takes years to learn, but it works. You won’t get pregnant,” he promised.

She felt his semen dribbling down the inside of her thigh, and she drew her nightgown back down and stepped away.

“Just don’t forget to wash, man,” the kid said, and he asked if she wanted to use his bathroom.

She stammered no, no, she’d better get back, because her husband could be coming in any minute and he would be drunk and mean.

The kid agreed and opened the door for her. He kissed her on the nape of her neck as she passed by him and went out, but she barely felt his kiss, for she was terrified that she had been impregnated by him.

For a month after that night she felt dirty and almost evil, but when she discovered that she was not pregnant, she no longer felt dirty or almost evil. In fact, she felt downright eager to do it again. Not with Bruce Severance, however, for, even though he was a few years older than she, he was a kid to her, a long-haired pretentious kid, and what she wanted was a man, a grown man who was sure of himself and had a broad smile and could explain things to her and would be kind and tolerant and patient with her when she could not understand what he explained. That was why she made love to Leon LaRoche, who lived in number 2, two trailers down from where she lived with Buck.

Leon was in his late twenties then, and he dressed nicely, because of his job as a teller at the Catamount Savings and Loan, and he was a bachelor who smiled easily and who liked to explain things slowly, methodically, calmly, with tolerance and even affection for Doreen when she seemed not to know what he was talking about. He talked politics with her, for there was an election that fall, and though her family had always voted Republican, Doreen was thinking of registering as a Democrat for this, her first election, and Leon explained to her what she should tell her family when they found out she had registered as a Democrat, which they surely would do, since the lists of registered voters and their party affiliations were required by law to be posted in public places. He told her about Roosevelt and Jack Kennedy and civil rights, which she thought fascinating, for, even though she had heard of all three, no one had ever explained them to her slowly, carefully, and with a sure, precisely accurate knowledge of what she did not know, which meant that no one had ever told her about these things without confusing her or else condescending to her.

She touched his knees with hers — she was wearing a plaid cotton shirtwaist dress, and he wore his shirt and tie and dark brown suit pants (his jacket he had carefully hung in the closet on arriving home from the bank for lunch, which he preferred to fix for himself at home rather than spend the extra $475 a year he had calculated it would cost to eat lunch in town at the Copper Skillet). Then she reached forward between their chairs and touched his knees with the palms of her hands, running her fingertips up the insides of his legs, until she was touching his crotch. He reached out and took her by the shoulders and drew her forward and down, so that her face was laid against his tightening thigh. Then he unzipped his fly, and she drove both her hands in, working and massaging him until the red head of his penis was shoving its way past the folds of cloth toward her mouth.

Afterward, Leon hurriedly drew his crotch away from Doreen’s mouth and said something about having to fix his lunch and get back to work on time, and Doreen had left his trailer in tears and had gone back to her own place and had vomited. As with Bruce, she felt dirty for about a month, although of course this time her guilt was not compounded by a fear of being pregnant, and then one morning she woke up, Buck was gone to work, and as she looked down her long, muscular legs to her feet and wiggled them deliciously, she felt fine again. It was a cold February morning, two weeks before the presidential primary, and when she went into the bathroom to shower, she discovered that during the night the cold water line to the shower had frozen solid. Water ran smoothly through all the other pipes, so she reasoned that, as the day warmed, the shower line would thaw on its own and probably was not frozen solidly enough to burst the pipe. She knew that by noon at the latest everything would be working properly again. But she also thought of Howie Leeke, the recently divorced plumber who was awfully good-looking and had a funny, raspy way of talking and quick gray eyes, so she called the plumber.

Howie liked to please women. “I always like to leave ’em crying for more,” he said with a grin (when asked how he did it, how he managed to have so many women calling him in the morning to come and fix pipes or blocked drains or broken appliances that, when he arrived, seemed to need little or no repair at all). In Doreen’s case, however, Howie was unable to leave her crying for more. She very quickly discovered that she had too much of him, that his persistent, tireless weight was smothering her, and the longer they bounced and thrashed across her bed, onto the floor, on the coffee table in the living room, on and on and on, for what seemed to her like whole days and nights, the more she wished she had never called him, had never come to the door in her blue nightgown, had never leaned over behind him when he squatted down by the tub to try the faucets. When he finally left, which he would do only after she had moaned and cried out like an animal with its leg caught in a trap, she had shut the door on him with enormous relief and gratitude for his absence. He had said, as he stepped out the door, “I’ll be back, don’t worry,” and she had answered, “No, you can’t. I love my husband,” and he had winked and strolled across the frozen ground to his pickup truck.

But Howie was a braggart, and it wasn’t a week before Buck had got told by one of the kids who worked on his crew that Howie Leeke was making cracks about Doreen Tiede down at the Hawthorne House the other night. At first Buck couldn’t believe it, that his wife, the teen-aged angel Doreen, had let that big-mouthed, nervous, skinny, twice-divorced plumber near her perfect body, that she had listened to his line, that she had seen his sex organ! That he had seen hers! That their sex organs had actually made contact with one another! Then, of course, he couldn’t believe anything else, and he knew it was because Howie was a giant in bed, a titan, while he was a shrimp, a child, and, driving home from work, as the snow started falling, Buck began to cry, to sob, to groan, to call out her name, Doreen! Doreen! while his car slipped on the snow and skidded from side to side, drifting dangerously into long, slow slides coming down the long hill from Northwood to Catamount.

Most people can either only give love or receive it, rarely both, and there’s nothing wrong with that, so long as you attach yourself to your opposite number, that is, so long as, if you are the one who can only give love, you attach yourself to someone who can only receive it. You will be able then to make each other happy. If, by the same token, you are like Doreen Tiede and can only receive love, if you have no vision of a person’s needing you more than you need that person, then you had better not hook up with someone like Buck Tiede, or you will quickly end up as they ended up — with Buck on his knees in front of his wife, snow-covered, for he had crashed his car at the turnoff from Old Road and had walked in from the road to the trailerpark, sobbing hysterically, blindly, all the way in.

Doreen was unmoved, but she stroked his head mechanically and listened to his cries, until after a while, his cries turned to wet, begging queries as to what, exactly, she had done with Howie. In her own words, he said, he wanted to hear it from her own lips. He didn’t care how bad it was, he just wanted to hear it from her own lips. He knew, no matter how bad it was, no matter where it led, even if it led to her running off with Howie, he deserved it, for he had not been a good lover for her, he had been a weak and boyish man in bed, and she was a young woman who needed steady loving, just like all the sad songs said, so go ahead, give it to him straight, at least give him that much, so he could know the truth and wouldn’t go around the rest of his life being laughed at because everyone knew what he didn’t know.