T. Boyle - Riven Rock

“What are you—?” he began, but then she was on the bed, naked in the frigid light, the springs jostling, the mattress giving, naked and on all fours, the chill sweeping over her breasts and her navel and groin till she was all gooseflesh.

“Don’t talk,” she said, “don’t say a word,” and she found his face and his lips and she kissed him, a wet kiss, a true kiss, the heat of their bodies conjoined, she poised there atop the covers and Stanley forced back into the headboard and no place for him to go. He fought away from her mouth and came up sputtering like a diver, his nightcap knocked askew, the blue light in the window as solid and tangible as a block of ice. “I’m not,” he said, “I–I—I—”

“Shhhh,” she hushed him again, and in the next moment she was beneath the covers with him, her toes seeking his, her breasts tender against the fabric of his nightshirt, her head cradled under his arm, and she just held him for a long while, an eternity, till she felt him relax — or begin to. She kept kissing him, kissing the side of his face, his throat, his fingers, and then, after another eternity, she worked an expeditionary hand up under his nightshirt till she found what she wanted.

His penis was limp. Or not limp, exactly, but by no means was it stiff either. It was the first penis she’d ever held in her hand and she was amazed at how small it was, at how she could cradle the full length of it in her palm, but she knew enough to rub it, stimulate it, make it swell, and all the while she was kissing his throat and breathing hot endearments into the collar of his nightshirt. At first he stiffened — in every place but one — and tried to move away from her touch, but after a time (five minutes? ten?) she began to feel something, a definite movement, a twitching, a palpable thickening. Encouraged, she brought her other hand into play, rubbing furiously now, rubbing Stanley’s awakening member between both palms with all the intensity of a red Indian rubbing two sticks together to produce fire.

And she did produce fire — of a sort. He was erect now — or nearly erect; she was no expert — and she lifted his nightshirt and rolled atop him, rubbing now not with her hands but with her own groin, and the sensation was intoxicating, like nothing she’d ever known, except maybe for Lisette and her precocious forefinger, and “Stanley,” she whispered, “Stanley, I’m ready. Make a baby for me, Stanley, make a baby. ”

But he didn’t make a baby. Didn’t even try. As soon as she spoke he shrank away to nothing, less than nothing, the softest, smallest, most irritating little thing in the world, all coiled up in its nest, and when she reached for him again he pushed her away — and with more force than was necessary.

There was a shock of cold air, a great flapping of the covers, and suddenly he was standing over her in the glacial light of the room, and she could just make out his face, the lips curled in a snarl, the wild glint of his eyes. He was trembling. “You whore!” he shouted. “You dirty whore! ”

Dr. Kempf’s time began in 1926, but the need for him — for direct action, for hope, for change — had been a long time coming, as O‘Kane would have been the first to admit. And it wasn’t just that everything fell to shit and ruin under Brush and the new estate manager (a grubbing incompetent multiple-chinned little fraud of a man by the name of Hull), it was Mr. McCormick himself. Very gradually, day by day, in a way you might not even notice, he began to withdraw into himself again, as if he were slipping back into the catatonia of the early days, and O’Kane was afraid they’d have to break out the sheet restraints and the feeding tube all over again. Mr. McCormick was torpid and morose, barely articulate, and there were days at a stretch when he didn’t want to get out of his pajamas — even the prospect of a drive in the country didn’t seem to get much of a rise out of him. And of course it was always unpleasant to have to force him to undress and get into the shower bath, much less try to get him to put his feet into the legs of his trousers if he was fundamentally opposed to it.

O‘Kane was no psychiatrist (even if he did have more experience in the field than half the headshrinkers running around the country with their dabbed-on beards and Krautish theories), but he was finely attuned to Mr. McCormick’s moods and he was worried. As far as he could see — and he’d discussed it with Mart time and again — Mr. McCormick’s present decline was traceable to a series of traumatic events over the course of the past few years, the first and most devastating of which was the loss of his mother. That was in 1922 or ’23, and it was followed by his brother Harold’s divorce and remarriage and the hullaballoo the papers made over it, which to Mr. McCormick’s mind was a shame and a blot on the whole family and the Harvester Company too. Then came the news that Dr. Brush finally had to commit his wife because she was parading naked through the streets and setting trashcans afire; this seemed to disturb Mr. McCormick on all sorts of counts, from his sheer horror at the notion of aggressive female nudity to the sad contemplation and reevaluation of his own hopes for cure and release into the world of men and women. And finally, just when it seemed as if he were coming out of it, making his little jokes and eating his meals calmly and nicely, there was the earthquake that knocked down half the city of Santa Barbara and gave Riven Rock such a rattling that all the windows broke out, the piano wound up on its back in the middle of the music room and the garage fell away into a random-looking heap of stones with a dozen cars crushed like salmon tins in the middle of it. Any man would have been hard-pressed to remain cheerful and forward-looking in the midst of all that, but for a man in Mr. McCormick’s state of mind it was like putting up walls on top of walls.

Indeed, when the old lady died, O‘Kane braced himself for a major outburst at least equal to the business with Dr. Hoch and the gopher, but if Mr. McCormick was anything, he was unpredictable. He barely blinked, and officially, for Dr. Brush’s records, he said all of seven words. He was playing a game of solitaire when O’Kane broke the news to him. (Brush had thought it would be best that way, for the main and simple reason that Mr. McCormick was more comfortable around his head nurse, who had, after all, known him longer, and the news was bound to be traumatic, for the main and simple reason that Mr. McCormick was so pathologically attached to his mother, though of course he hadn’t actually seen her since nineteen-ought-seven, and he was very likely to give vent to his grief in a volatile way and to resent the bringer of the news, which for obvious reasons shouldn’t if at all possible be his attending psychiatrist for the main and simple reason of the risk of alienation.)

“Mr. McCormick, I’m afraid I have some bad news,” O‘Kane had announced, Brush concealed behind a closet door on the landing, Mart looking on as placidly as if they were discussing a change in the luncheon menu.

Mr. McCormick glanced up quizzically from his cards. “B-bad n-news?” he echoed in a kind of bray.

O‘Kane steeled himself. “I’ll come right to the point, sir: your mother’s died. Last night. Peacefully. In her sleep.” He paused. “She was eighty-eight.”

For a long while Mr. McCormick merely sat there, looking up at him out of a neutral face, the last card arrested in his hand. He cleared his throat as if he were about to say something, then turned back to the table before him and laid the card at the head of one of the four neatly aligned rows. After a while he glanced up again, and he had a sly secretive look on his face, as if he’d just gotten away with something. “I won’t be going to the funeral,” he said.