Rebecca Coleman - The Kingdom of Childhood

She laughed ruefully. “Don’t be fooled. Normally he’s a royal pain in the ass. He’s just in a good mood because he got laid last night.”

Zach felt his stomach lurch again. “Thanks for telling me that. Really, that’s the vision I needed to keep going just now.”

“I’m sorry.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “I was trying to find you so I could apologize.”

“You found me.”

“I see. I think my husband makes you sick to your stomach. That’s okay. He has the same effect on me.”

Zach managed a small laugh.

She squatted down beside him. “I’m very sorry about what I said,” she told him quietly. “It was stupid of me. Are you angry?”

“I don’t know.” He felt weary, not angry, but he knew he might feel angry again later.

“Tell me what it will take to make it up to you.”

He looked into her eyes, struggling for clarity, but only felt dizzy. He pulled his knees up against his stomach and wrapped his arms around them.

“I don’t want you to be angry,” she whispered. “I care about you. I love being with you. And you can move on, but everything is at stake for me. My career, my marriage, everything. You know that.”

She waited for him to respond. He maintained eye contact, but said nothing.

She unbuttoned her blouse halfway and pulled it open. Her bra, black and lacy, stood out against her pale skin. Beneath her collarbones, like tattoos, lay the twin arches of bruises shaped by his fingertips. He thought back to their two trysts the previous week, the state of his mind and body: still ragged out by illness, constrained by the clock, afraid he wouldn’t finish in time—and angry. As desire bloomed in him, so rose his anger at her; he couldn’t differentiate the two, and hadn’t cared enough to try. But had he really used enough force to bruise her? The evidence bewildered him. He wondered, but dared not ask, if she had taken pictures. Sex Ed lesson number three hundred and eighty-six: it’s dangerous to sleep with people you don’t fully trust.

“If Russ saw these,” she told him, “I would be screwed. And not by you.”

“It was an accident.”

“I’m not blaming you. I’m saying, this is how much I don’t want to mess things up with you. I can live with this. You could do this to me every single day and I’d just hide it and hide it and hide it.”

He dropped his head to rest between his knees.

“Tell me what it will take to make it up to you,” she repeated.

He stared down at the gritty concrete. All he wanted to do was take a few deep breaths and Zen out and forget about all the shitty complications that kept creeping into his life. He didn’t even want to ditch Judy, because then he’d have the ditching of Judy to deal with on top of everything else. He just wanted to take a mental break from all of it—not only Judy but also school and Fairen and his homesickness for New Hampshire.

He looked up at Judy and, in the nicest possible voice, asked, “Can I have a blow job?”

She smiled. “Of course you can. Come with me. I think I left some extra cookies in my kitchen.”

“What I want the American people to know, what I want the Congress to know, is that I am profoundly sorry for all I have done wrong in words and deeds.”

The rising volume of the television caught my attention as I took a tray of cookies from the oven. I turned off the heat, then walked into the den, where Zach sat on the sofa with the remote in his hand. A white-haired and pallid-looking Bill Clinton stared back at him from the screen, speaking from the Rose Garden. It didn’t sound like a Rose Garden sort of speech.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“They impeached him.”

“What? No.”

Zach gestured to the TV. “This is from yesterday. CNN’s running it again because they just approved another item of impeachment or something.”

I frowned. “I don’t think that means he’s impeached quite yet. But it doesn’t sound good.” I listened for another minute and asked, “Did you know about this?”

“Sort of. My dad said something last night.”

“This is what I get for going out of town,” I murmured. With a subtle shift of my gaze, I peered down at Zach. He seemed to be trying to watch intently, but his eyelids drooped as though he were fighting sleep. His gray shirt was bunched onto his stomach, his belt notched tightly but his fly still undone.

The voice from the television filled the silence between us. So nothing, not piety, nor tears, nor wit, nor torment, can alter what I have done. I must make my peace with that.

I looked at Zach again and asked, “What do you think about all this?”

He rested back against the sofa with a tired half smile. “I think he should have turned down the BJ,” he replied. “Just say no to head.”

“They’re not impeaching him for the impropriety,” I explained. “They’re impeaching him for lying about it under oath.”

Zach shrugged. “He wouldn’t have had to lie about it under oath if he hadn’t gotten blown.”

“True. He knew they would hang him for it. This wouldn’t have happened in Europe. I think they’re slinging mud at him just for the sake of it.”

“Oh, I didn’t say that,” he replied. “I think it serves him right. He ought to have had the self-discipline not to take it when it was offered, even if he is a politician. ‘Without being attached to the fruits of activities, one should act as a matter of duty.’”

I stared at him in dismay. “Where did that come from?”

“The Bhagavad Gita, ” he mumbled. He chewed the side of his thumbnail. “It’s a yoga thing.”

“So you think it’s karma.”

“That’s exactly what I think it is.”

“That’s not what you used to think about this situation,” I reminded him. “Back in the fall you thought he was getting a crappy deal.”

“Yeah, I changed my mind. I think he’s getting what he deserves for lying to everybody. Cheats and liars need to be brought down.”

“You think so.” I took a few steps forward so he could see me more clearly. “And where does that leave us?”

He removed his thumbnail from his mouth just long enough to answer. “Fucked.”

Back at the school, Zach lingered in the parking lot for a few extra minutes as Judy carried the cookies inside, in a sort of halfhearted nod to her paranoia. Russ was over in a sandy section of the play area, stationed at the ring toss, shouting in a friendly way to the little kids as they set their tongues between their teeth and gave the game their best shot. Whether they did well or poorly, he congratulated each with a high-five. Zach stood at the edge of the lot with his thumbs in his pockets, watching him plainly, making no effort to be covert. He was taller than Zach by several inches, lean for a guy of his age; his face, fair-skinned and spectacled, carried a kind of arrogance that evoked in Zach feelings of both respect and scorn. Regardless of the present state of his marriage, he was Judy’s real lover—the one who found it no trouble to handle her, who was even bored of going to bed with her, who would no doubt laugh if he knew the boy watching him at the edge of the grass was also the object of her attentions, because was that the best she could do?

He ground a patch of gravel beneath his shoe and considered that he ought to admit defeat—to go to Judy and say, I’d like to be excused now, then return to his day job of currying the favor of a girl his own age. In the months since Ohio, Fairen had gradually warmed to him again. When they met with Temple to discuss their history project, she often sat beside him at the table now, rather than across. At Madrigals practice the week before, after the third run-through of a song none of them particularly liked, she had dropped her head back—he was standing just behind her, on the risers—and rested the crown of it against his chest, sighing and meeting his eye to express her aggravation. For a long time after Ohio, resentment still shadowed every interaction he had with her, and his enthusiasm for Judy left him unmotivated to set aside his anger. But now, not much older but a whole lot wiser, he felt ready to lay down his sword where Fairen was concerned. If she wasn’t holding a grudge, then neither would he, for he hated the sense of waste that welled up in him when he mused that in his greed to have her he had lost her entirely.