Savaging the Dark Page 9

  At first Connor is tremendously excited simply to see different motel rooms. He’s hardly ever stayed in a motel, he says. “Just once, when my dad took me to a baseball game in Boston. I was really little.” He’s interested in the ice machines outside, the little cakes of soap in their paper wrappers, the toilet paper folded just so on the roll, the towels, the TVs. (“Hey, Mona!”—he’s growing more comfortable with my name—“look, they have HBO!”) But soon enough (“We don’t have much time, Connor, sweetheart”), I have him choose which bed we’ll use. Each time I teach him patiently how to slow down, how to be a partner, a lover, rather than an overexcited boy. He learns quickly. He’s wonderful, wonderful beyond words. But soon, terribly soon it’s over, each time it’s over, I look at my watch and realize that if I’m going to get back in time to pick up Gracie we have to go in the next half-hour, twenty minutes, ten minutes.

  Part of me hates all this. Hates the frantic darting around, the secretiveness, the slow driving to a certain corner, nerves jumping under my skin, hoping Connor didn’t get confused about where he’s supposed to be standing—that happens once, I never find him, I’m crushed, heartbroken, wail in tear-filled frustration and beat my hands on the steering wheel while I circle, circle, circle, and all the time (I learn from him later) he’s two blocks over, lost, panicked, needing me and I’m not there. But he’s there, I wave casually, pull over, he gets in as quickly as he can, just as I’ve told him to, I pull away fast but not too fast. I don’t have him hide on the car floor or anything melodramatic like that. We’ve already got our story. I was giving him a ride, that’s all. I happened to see him and he was going to (fill in blank depending on what direction we went that day) and I stopped to give him a ride, nothing more. Ms. Straw is never not helpful to her students. Everyone knows that. We never touch each other in the car, not even to hold hands. That’s a firm rule. It’s good that Mr. Blue is so often not home, so inattentive to his son when he is. Excuses with him are easy for Connor—he was at a movie, he was at a friend’s house. His dad doesn’t care, never checks on anything. It’s terrible of me to think of myself as grateful to him, but in an ironic way I am. Connor doesn’t need his useless violent dad for anything, anyway. Connor needs me.

  Still, part of me hates this. I want to bring Connor into my life, into my family, make him proudly and beautifully part of the Mona Straw everyone sees and knows and admires. But it isn’t possible. And so it’s dirty motel rooms, grimy doorknobs, sheets that reek of bleach, and always the infernal time limit, the ticking of the clock. Usually by the time we’re in the room we have an hour, an hour and a quarter. Ninety minutes is heaven. Once there’s light traffic and the motel is one of the closer ones we’ve ever used and we have two full hours. We make love twice, watch the last few minutes of Brute Force with Burt Lancaster on TV, shower luxuriously together, and I still make it to Gracie’s day care on time. It’s one of the most wonderful days we’ve ever had.

  Often only once a week with him. Sometimes twice. Never more than that. I can’t possibly keep my other life together if we do this more than twice a week. Grocery shopping, house cleaning, making dinner, taking care of Gracie, building lesson plans and grading papers. And I know I can’t let things fall apart, that I must keep up this other life, be the exemplary wife and mother and teacher that I am. It’s vital to not let those things slip. They me sane, keep me knowing that Mona Straw still exists even if she’s taken over for hours sometimes by this frenzied stranger, this frantic hysterical madwoman who can think of nothing but making love again and again to her young boyfriend in the afternoon, touching him, pulling, sucking, our skins slapping together, shrieking with joy with him. How new everything is to him, how fresh and awe-inspiring and unimaginable. I can see it through his eyes, imagine what it’s like for him to be with me, so different from my own puzzling and disappointing first experiences with sex. His energy and enthusiasm are boundless. He’ll try anything that involves us touching each other in a new way. His excitement fuels mine. But afterwards is even better, our hair blending together on a single pillow, arms and hips and legs pushed together in the narrow bed, hands clasped, breathing, staring at the ceiling.

  Once he asks, “Have you ever done this with anyone else?”

  I glance at him. “Of course I have, sweetheart. I’m married. I have a daughter.”

  “I mean like this.”

  “In motel rooms?”

  “With a guy. Not your husband.”

  I turn to him, rest my head on my elbow, dangle my hair in his face. “No. Never.”

  “Really?”

  “Never.”

  “I mean, it’s okay. It doesn’t matter. I’m just curious.”

  “Never, sweetheart.”

  He looks away, is silent for a while. Then: “Mona, is it normal to jack off every day?”

  “Oh, I’m sure it’s normal, Connor.”

  “Twice a day?”

  I chuckle, then shrug. “I wouldn’t worry about it. You’re young and energetic.”

  “I think about you when I do it.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But it’s not like really being with you.”

  “No. There’s nothing like being with someone you love.”

  He’s silent for a moment. Then: “So you’ve never done it with one of your students before?”

  “Never.” I grin and kiss him. “You’re my first. My first and only.”

  He seems to think about it. “Why me?”

  He looks at me. We look at each other. I don’t really know how to answer. “People fall in love, Connor, that’s all. There’s no explaining it.”

  “Are you in love with your husband?”

  His voice is soft, open, not accusing. He just wants to know, with the innocence of any young kid.

  “I used to be.” I play with his nipples. “I love him. I do. I care about Bill. Very much. But I don’t feel about him the way I feel about you.”

  “You fell in love with him and then you fell out of love with him?”

  I think. “Well, it took a long time. But something like that. Yeah.”

  “Will you fall out of love with me, Mona?”

  “Oh, Connor, no.” I press myself to him. “I’ll always love you, Connor. Always.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise. You know what’ll happen, though? You’ll fall out of love with me.”

  He shakes his head vehemently. “Nuh-uh.”

  “You will. You’ll start to notice all these pretty girls your own age and you’ll decide you don’t need some stinking old woman in your life anymore.”

  “No.” He holds me close, tight, buries his face in my breasts. “You’re not old. You’re not stinking.”

  “I will be someday, though. I’ll be old and wrinkly and fat and my boobs will sag.”

  “No. You’ll always be beautiful. Always.” He’s crying, I realize. Wetness covers my chest.

  “Sweetheart, sweetheart,” I say, taking his face in my hands, kissing his salty wet eyes, “calm down. I’m here. We’re here together, right where we want to be. Nothing else matters.”

  His voice cracks. “I don’t want things to change. Ever. Between us.”

  I stroke his hair, pressing his damp face against my chest again. “Oh, Connor,” I whisper, “oh, sweetheart, my baby, my love, my true love, neither do I. Neither do I.”

  16

  Things begin to change.

  It starts with the coming of early spring, the weather turning from cold to cool. Soon I don’t see Connor’s big coat anymore. Instead he wears a yellow sweater some days, a brown hoodie another. He begins talking more with the other boys in the class, hanging out with them at lunchtime. Once I’m on duty and hope to talk to him a little, maybe walk up to him with his book in his hand and say, “Whatcha readin’, Connor?” But instead he’s on the athletic fields playing soccer. I almost call him over. I want to stand close to him, see the sweat on his face and in his hair, breathe in his active boy-smell,
but I know not to. Instead I watch him running up the field with the ball, away from me, away from us, driving straight to the goal. He kicks and scores. His friends yell and whoop and congratulate him.

  I know he needs time with kids his age. I know he needs a chance to be a boy. Yet I feel a terrible sadness watching him. He never once asked me that day if we could spend time together, didn’t plead to be allowed to watch a movie in my classroom, didn’t try to whisper something to me after class after the other children had gone.

  Something darkens and sinks inside me. The day is bright but the light seems somehow wrong to me, glaring, accusing. Like the light on some alien planet, not meant for humans to see. Poisonous, deadly. I wonder if Connor is thinking of me at all as he runs up and down the field, if I cross his mind, if there’s some part of him that wishes he could be with me right now or if he’s forgotten all about what we are to each other. When I take him aside the next day and tell him what corner to meet me on that afternoon, he says casually—not negatively but casually, as if it’s of no importance—“Oh, okay.” When I pull up to him on the sidewalk and he sees me his face doesn’t light up, it doesn’t become suffused with that apple-glow in the way it did in our dozen or more earlier sessions. He smiles, that’s all, gets in. Doesn’t say a word. Doesn’t ask what motel we’re going to, how close it is, doesn’t ask little-boy questions about anything we’re passing by on the way there. I feel something’s changed between us but I’m afraid to ask what, afraid to even breathe a suggestion to him that his behavior around me seems different. When we get to the room (the “Kings Court Motel”), he jumps on one of the beds, grabs the TV remote and switches on the set, all but ignoring me.

  “Baby,” I say, dropping down beside him, taking the remote from his hand and switching it off, “we don’t have much time.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  Not unpleasant. Not frowning or complaining. And once we’re making love it’s just as it’s always been, wonderful, indescribable, yet even now something’s subtly altered. I straddle him and stroke his chest and dangle my hair playfully in his face and move rhythmically with him inside me and he doesn’t respond. He’s there, he thrusts himself into me, his hands are warm on my hips, he smiles when I say anything to him, but his eyes are somehow vacant. And now when we finish once he doesn’t ask to do it again, instead allowing me to hold him for a few minutes and then saying he has a lot of homework to do and we should get back.

  “Connor, sweetheart, we have time, just a few more minutes.”

  But it could be my imagination. He’s still pleasant, smiling, fun. We still talk, we still make jokes, act silly.

  “Mona?” he asks once in bed. “Do you think that Rick and Ilsa had sex in Casablanca?”

  “I’m sure they did, baby.”

  “What about John and Frances in To Catch a Thief?”

  “Cary Grant and Grace Kelly? They’d better have! I’d have sex with either one of them.”

  Connor laughs, the old laugh, the high boy-giggle I know. “You’d have sex with a lady?”

  “I’ll bet you’d have sex with her if she let you.”

  “Well, yeah,” he says, running his finger from my nipples to my navel, “but I’d think about you when I was doing it.”

  We laugh, we roll around the bed, everything is as before. But such moments seem to happen with decreasing frequency. Connor grows ever more quiet, even now, at times, moody. I try not to become hysterical about this, try to keep from thinking that he’s losing interest, that I’m losing him. There’s no evidence of it, after all. He’s a boy. He’s supposed to be moody sometimes. It just means he’s grown more comfortable with me, that’s all, he feels he can express more of his real self around me, be more natural and easy with me. At times after we finish I hold him, run my hand over his hair as I did that first time, the first time I knew there was something unexplored and magical between us, and ask him how he’s doing, how his life is—“Are you happy, Connor? With me? With everything?” And we have beautiful heart-to-heart talks, just the two of us, about his fears, his joys, his sadnesses.

  One rain-filled afternoon he tells me how much he misses his mother. “Even though I never knew her. Isn’t that weird, to miss somebody you never knew?”

  “It’s not weird, sweetheart.” I stroke his hair. “She died when you were…?”

  “Two.”

  “Two.”

  “I don’t remember her. I’ve tried. It’s like sometimes I think I can almost hear her voice or, like, see her or something like that. But it always goes away.”

  “I’m sorry, sweetie. I wish I could make it better.”

  We sit listening to the rain outside the dirty motel room and I wait for him to say something like You always make everything better, Mona, but he doesn’t. He remains wordless, motionless, accepting my touch but not reciprocating. After a while when it’s nearly time to leave he gets up and goes to the bathroom, turns on the shower without me, doesn’t invite me in. I shower alone after he’s done and we drive back to the city in silence.

  Another time there’s a bruise on his left bicep, a purple and yellow stain.

  “Connor,” I say carefully, touching it softly around the edges with my finger, “does your dad hit you?”

  He looks away.

  “You can tell me, Connor.”

  After a long time he says, “I guess. I mean, sort of.”

  “Sort of?”

  He shrugs. “He pushes me sometimes. When he’s drunk.”

  “Oh, Connor.” I nuzzle him. It crosses my mind that I would call child protective services, but then it crosses my mind that of course I can’t do any such thing. I hate Connor’s father even more now. “Connor, I’m so sorry.”

  I become aware of a new element only gradually, and at first I’m unable to believe it. It begins at the afternoon dance we have in March, to celebrate the coming of spring. The eleven- and twelve-year-olds are herded into the school’s gym one afternoon. We on the staff have decorated it with streamers and balloons and Dave Tisdale, the science teacher, serves as DJ. There’s punch and cookies in the back of the hall. The lights are turned low—slightly low, at least. It’s a socialization exercise, we do it twice a year at Cutts. It’s always cute to watch the young boys nervously approach the girls, the girls hiding in packs so as not to be invited out to the dance floor—for a while, anyway. After a few songs their courage grows stronger and they largely separate, make themselves available, and soon the floor is covered with clumsy middle-schoolers dancing to rock music.

  Connor stays in the back, playing checkers with the other boys too shy to become part of the social swim. I watch him, wish I could walk over to him, take his hand, walk out to the dance floor and embrace him in a slow dance no matter what music is playing. I wish I could stroke him, kiss him, announce to everyone there what we are, how we have something between us that they can never understand, that we love each other. But no. Instead I sit there with several other teachers blandly chaperoning, never actually doing anything except once when I stand and wander the perimeter for a few minutes, saying hi to kids, letting them know I’m here.

  But when I turn to go back to my spot I’m confronted with an astonishing sight.

  Connor, Connor Blue, my love, my lover, is walking nervously out onto the dance floor just in front of my quiet little book-reading student Kylie McCloud.

  A fast song has started and they gyrate as best they can. I’m surprised to see Connor dancing but I’m flabbergasted to see Kylie, backward shy Kylie, out there. Neither of them can dance at all but of course that makes no difference, it’s not the point. Kylie’s short mousy hair bounces, her glasses slip down her nose as they always do, she watches her dance partner with her head slightly uptilted and her mouth open a little. I wonder if she needs her asthma inhaler. At this moment I couldn’t be prouder of Connor, taking the little girl no one likes and making her a part of things.

  When the dance is over Kylie returns to her seat and picks up her
book as always, buries her nose in it as always. But that’s all right. She can go home and tell her mom that she danced at the dance, that a boy asked her and she got up and did it. I’m happy for her, so happy. But I’m even more surprised when Connor, having wandered around the back of the hall with the other boys for a few songs, steps up to Kylie again. This time I see him ask her. Looking down her nose at him she’s obviously surprised, possibly having suspected that the earlier dance had been from pity, that he’d felt sorry for her. I actually see her point at her own chest: Me? Connor nods, God bless him, and they have another go on the dance floor. All the teachers are remarking on it: Oh my God, look at that, that’s so cute!