David Gates - Jernigan

“This is a little crazy,” she said. “What are we doing?”

“Taking you for a walk,” I said. “Ostensibly. But I don’t see that anything beyond the ostensible would necessarily”—smoother and smoother, boy—“be so crazy. I mean, okay: we have our kids in there doing whatever they’re in there doing. Which does not mean—”

I tried to think how to say what it didn’t mean.

“But there isn’t any music,” she said.

I dislodged my arm, assuming this was her trite way of saying she was having second thoughts.

“Better get back there put some music on,” she said. “You can’t give a party and then neglect it. Any more than you neglect your own child.” She seemed much in earnest about this.

“Are you in any shape to deal with your party right now?” I said.

“Dealing with my party,” she said, “will get me in shape to deal with my party.” She took my hand and pulled. “But you have to come help.”

It was the first husbandly duty laid on me in a year. In exactly a year. To the fucking hour. Give or take. And clearly I was the first husbandly help this Martha Peretsky had had for a while too. I thought about her kneeling by that crate of records. Trying, unadvised, to come up with the song that would get things going.

5

Martha Peretsky’s bedroom was unrecognizable by morning light. It was full of all this detail, whereas the night before it had been, I don’t know, whatever. A long-legged old dresser, painted glossy black, with an oval mirror. A flower decal on each drawer, centered between the many-faceted glass knobs. On top of the dresser, jars and jewel boxes and hairbrushes. A wicker laundry basket with a pantyhose foot dangling from under the lid, as if someone were being swallowed. On the wall, in a too-ornate silver-painted frame, an old chromo of a hula girl with ukulele. Our clothes here and there on the floor. Outside, birds sang and a faraway lawnmower was going.

Martha Peretsky was asleep, or pretending to be asleep, face down. Shoulders swelling and subsiding. I got out of bed, found the jockey shorts where they’d ended up — I remembered now her taking them down and my not caring what became of them — and crept to the door. Then I remembered the girl, Clarissa, and went back and put on trousers. Glanced at stomach. Put on shirt.

In the hallway I met Danny, in just his jockey shorts, coming out of the bathroom. He gave me thumbs-up, and a grin I would never have given my father, no matter how much of an old bohemian he was. But what was the point of trying to be on your dignity when you were getting up from doing the same thing he was getting up from doing? I decided fuck it, and gave him thumbs-up back, the canny old veteran who could still come off the bench and move the runner along with a perfect bunt. Greeting the rookie who’d raise his average fifty points and still hit almost as many home runs if he’d just cut down on his swing. Then he went into what I gathered was Clarissa’s room and closed the door behind him, back to whatever moody pleasures she gave him, and I went into the bathroom. Should I really be countenancing this?

Back in the bedroom, Martha was lying pretty much as I’d left her: on her stomach, bent arms making a diamond around her head. I undressed again, got under the covers, lay against her, caressed her awake. Sleepily she rolled onto her side, facing away, and my penis slipped between her buttocks. Then she reached around behind and pulled me in tighter. So. If she was ready for refinements this early along, it meant what? Probably that it would run its course even quicker.

“Mmm,” she said. “Do you like that, is that good?”

“Listen,” she said, after another little while, “I hope this isn’t too shocking of me, but I think there’s still a little thing of Vaseline in the drawer of that night table.” Right she was. I got the cap off, hands trembling. A few seconds later she said, “Oh my God. I know you’re not supposed to do this anymore, but I just”—she inhaled sharply—“do not care.” Later we both lay staring at the ceiling. “You’re probably completely scandalized,” she said. “Rusty sort of gave me a taste for that.” She snorted. “Literally and figuratively.” We stared some more.

“I guess you probably don’t need to hear about Rusty,” she said. I reached over to pat her thigh, and my hand collided with hers reaching over for me.

When we finally got up, the kids had gone off someplace. She made coffee and brought it to me on the living room sofa, pretty good brewed coffee with cinnamon in it. I couldn’t decide whether cinnamon was a good idea or whether it was in bad taste because you should want the true flavor of the coffee. She pawed through the records again and came up with Webb Pierce, which got her some points. I mean, Webb Pierce? You would’ve thought Billy Joel or something. Or would you? Consider the woodstove and the black-and-white tv, and just the house in general. So maybe that t-shirt had been an aberration, or even a very twisty irony. Then there was the thing she’d said about her husband giving her a taste for that: had this been tactlessness or air-clearing openness? She did seem to know the difference between literally and figuratively . I was having trouble getting a handle on this Martha Peretsky.

“Have you ever heard him?” she said, lowering the needle.

I considered saying yes and said no. So whatever the first lie was going to be, it wouldn’t be that. Unless I’d told one last night at some point. I thought I remembered maybe fudging some things.

“If you end up liking it,” she said, “I’ll stick a tape in the thing.”

“Great,” I said. “Friend of mine’s been getting me into country music a little.”

“Why isn’t anything coming out?” she said. “I’ve got it turned up to five.”

“I can sort of hear it,” I said.

“OA my God,” she said. “I forgot to bring the speakers inside.”

“Your neighbors like Webb Pierce, do they?”

She jerked the needle off the record.

“Why don’t I go out and hand them in to you through the window?” I said.

“Would you? That would be great.”

Another beautiful day out. And full-grown trees around: on Heritage Circle the trees mostly weren’t big enough yet to give shade. Here I was in the backyard of some woman I’d been fucking. Whereas a year ago today — I don’t know, enough with the year ago todays. “Your yard looks kind of partied-upon,” I said, handing her the first speaker. “I’m afraid our cleanup last night was kind of superficial.”

“And whose fault was that?” She actually shook a roguish finger.

“I’ll make it up to you,” I said, queasy at having to coquette back, but wasn’t it a lover’s obligation not to break the mood? “It actually shouldn’t take that long.”

“Come in and have your coffee first,” she said, probably meaning Let’s go back to bed first. Or at any rate, that’s how it turned out.

We got to hear the Webb Pierce later.

“Yeah, I really like it,” I said. So maybe that lie was the first. “How did you end up getting a taste for this?” Phrased about as maladroitly as possible.

“Long story,” she said. “You really want to know?”

“Sure,” I said. The second.

“When we were growing up, outside of Washington, my dad had this country-western band? The Stony Davis Show.” She said this announcer-style.

“That was your dad’s name, Davis?” I said, wondering about the Peretsky.

“Yeah,” she said. “I just sort of kept my married name. So anyhow, his big thing was imitations, I mean he could do Johnny Cash and Ernest Tubb and, I don’t know, Eddy Arnold. Webb Pierce, of course. And he really had them down, and that was part of his show. And see, he looked a little bit like Webb Pierce. Kind of jowly? So about once a year he and the band would drive someplace like Pennsylvania or New Jersey where he wasn’t known, and they’d call some little nightclub and give them this story that Webb Pierce’s bus had broken down on the way to somewhere and that since he was stranded in the area he’d put on his show that night for — I forget what he’d ask, but something that would’ve been really a lot of money then. And they really used to fall for it. And he’d comb his hair the exact way Webb Pierce did and go in there with this real fancy cowboy suit on and sing, you know, ‘There Stands the Glass’ and everything.”