9.
George loved to buy drinks for Beth, he loved
to be around her when she drank, because when she drank, she became so relaxed
and so much kinder, and she almost never lost control by becoming too drunk, at
least not for the first several years.
She just became happy, when normally she was guarded and dour.
It was a dark and stormy night. There was something they'd been talking about
that George couldn't stop turning over in his mind as he sat in his car in the
bar's parking lot, watching the neon light of the sign catch on the rain drops
and turn them red on his windshield, while he waited for the car's engine to
warm up. He'd told Beth about driving Molly to Josie's house, not worrying
about betraying Molly's whereabouts on a school night, because it never
occurred to Beth to worry about her daughter.
"Josie's probably having more problems
with this man she used to see. I
overheard the two of them talking about it," -- and Beth explained that an
older man who'd been involved with Josie was following her around now, or so it
seemed.
Things should matter more. Bad guys should be brought to justice. Men who say disturbing things to women who
don't want to speak with them should be humiliated, the woman should scream at
the top of her lungs, or cry, instead of holding it in, until everyone turns
around to look at them and then sees, knows that the man has been doing
something wrong. Normal people, who
don't like novels and cats, who are outwardly aggressive, deserved to be made
to feel embarrassed in turn when they embarrassed a weird person by responding
to a question in an exasperated tone, or feigning superiority in any way. Human frailties should be protected, not
teased out and diminished through crass, unrelenting humor. These things George believed. Sometimes it was truly unbelievable to him, the
way things didn't seem to matter enough to other people, and he was
unsure whether this was bravery or desensitization on the part of these
people. For instance, when Beth had been
telling him about the man who was after Josie (and by proxy, Molly), she was
speaking of a grown man taking advantage of a young woman, but the words she
used were so vague, she could have been talking about anything as benign as the
girls being in trouble for shoplifting, and George had to remind himself: this man had fucked the child Josie and now
wouldn't leave her alone -- this act was evil.
Now, as he backed out of the parking lot,
lamenting Beth's parental negligence, he decided it was necessary to check up
on Molly, or else something awful might happen, some new cruel or perverse
incident that wouldn't register as unacceptable to anyone but himself. So he drove to Josie's family's house,
mentally replaying the best parts of the evening he'd just spent with Beth,
surprised when, pulling up to the house, he saw a man dressed in a bulky black
parka and black pants standing with his back to the street, the binoculars he
held to his eyes trained on the house.
The man turned to face George as George got out of the car, slamming the
door behind him. So this evil man really
did exist.
"Hey old man, what do you want?"
The best George could compose himself was to
reply, “This isn’t your house. What are
you doing here?”
"How do you know I don't live here? I know you
don’t live here.” The man was obviously
enjoying the confrontation. “My wife is
inside fucking our neighbor right now, old man.
I'm just spying on her, just wracking up evidence for the divorce."
"That’s a lie. I know the people who live here."
“So do I.”
The man didn't smell like alcohol or weed, but
there was something definitely wrong with him.
He smelled like sweat. Pugnacious
a moment ago, he became almost shy now.
“Are you Josie’s grandpa?”
George answered, “Yes, I’m Josie’s
grandfather. What are you doing here? It’s not proper to be standing outside like
this, no one knowing you’re out here.” But
at the moment, he could not recall even what Josie looked like, he was thinking
only of Molly, his smart, funny little friend, who he'd driven over here to
save, because she’d intended, somehow, to protect Josie from this disgusting
man who stood before him. George had a
stooped posture and a slow gait caused by deformed toes on both his feet, and a
lazy eye. He looked vulnerable and years
older than he was, but goddammit, he thought to himself, goddammit, he was
still a man, and his anger drove his basically fragile hand to Calvin's Adam's
Apple, hard. Quickly, he punched the man
next in the balls, and before the man could get more than one punch in, the
punch that broke George's nose so that from now on his face would look
different than it had the first 48 years of his life, George grabbed the man's
ponytail and used it to pull him down to the mud. "I'll kill you," Calvin said,
doubled over and rocking on the trash-speckled, muddy gravel that filled in the
walkway in front of the gate. “No you
won’t,” George said. He remembered what Josie
looked like, all of sudden; she was like a foal walking unsteadily on legs that
were too long, and when she spoke, it was so painfully evident that she was
afraid the things she was saying were incorrect. And Molly, Molly meanwhile was a feminist;
she prided herself on having hairy legs and hairy armpits, and arguing with
grown men in a loud quivering voice whenever she spotted an injustice. But, just like Josie, she was a child. They needed protecting. Molly would live forever, George would make
it so that Molly lived forever.
George kneeled on the gravel and watched the
man writhing. He punched him again in
the balls. "Goddamn it, she should
have just called the cops on you,” he said out loud to himself through
half-hysterical, soundless tears. “Stay
away from them.”
The main thing that plagued him as he drove, first
scared of himself, then exhilarated, sensing a rare clarity of action, to his
apartment, was the fear that he'd somehow accidentally attacked the wrong man,
that the lurker had not been Calvin. He
would consider his soul irreparably doomed to hell if he'd made such a mistake.
So he called Molly, though he felt guilty calling
so late.
"He's a kind of big guy with
long brown hair and big eyebrows. I
think he has a moustache sometimes. He's
totally ugly and scary-looking, like with Charles Manson eyes, like, this
gross, creepy stare," she told him.
"Why, George? Did you see
him?"
"Oh thank goodness, thank
goodness," George said, never having felt more relieved in his life -- he'd
done something right. "Molly,
please don't get upset. I just beat him
up. I drove by because I got really
worried after your mom told me about Josie's problems with him. I really lost control when I drove by and saw
standing outside the house. It's okay
now though, he’ll leave you girls alone.
But I, you know, I pulverized him, I think; I’m not very strong,
but I played dirty. I – you know I don't
believe in violence, but -- what do you make of all this, Molly? Are you mad at me? Maybe you should call the cops and say
there’s a strange man knocked out in front of your friends’ house, and they’ll
take him away. I didn’t stay to see if he
was going to try to stand up…” George trailed off, and then he began another
string of worried non-sequiturs. She
knew she should interrupt him, and she grasped for some sentence to say out
loud that would make sense of what he’d done, but she couldn’t think of what to
say; she felt so full of gratitude it made her dizzy, like a wave of fever.
The next morning, she’d go to school, though
the night before, she'd been planning on playing hooky with Josie. She called Josie as soon as she got home, and
when she asked how Josie’s day had been, Josie responded, “Really amazing
actually, but I did something that might upset you.”
“What did you do?”
“Well, I – you know how I have caller ID, and
how Calvin calls sometimes and I don’t pick up when I see his telephone number
on the caller ID screen.”
“Of course.
You don’t want to talk to him.”
“Right.
But this morning the phone rang, and I saw that it was him calling, and
I was planning on answering and just screaming at him to leave me alone,
telling him I was going to call the police or that I have a stun gun I’m going
to use on him if I ever see him again or something, but before I could say any
of this, he begged me just to listen to him before I hang up. He
told me he only spies on me because he knows how vulnerable I am, and he wants
to protect me. When I brought up some of
the gross things he did to me when we were dating, like by way of saying ‘How
can you wanna protect me when you’ve done bad things to me yourself?,’ he
started to cry, he begged me to forgive him, and promised he’d never bother me
again. He confessed to being outside the
window last night, like we knew he was, and he said that he got beaten up
really bad and mugged in front of the house.
I actually feel bad for him, his voice sounded awful, like all raggedy
and weak, like he’d been choked. I told
him I forgive him, Molly, and I don’t think he’s going to stalk me anymore, I
think he meant what he said. But I feel
bad, because I know I have you all riled up to hate him on my behalf, and I
really don’t hate him anymore. Are you
mad at me?”
She would never tell her so, but Molly was mad
at Josie; it seemed unforgivably wishy-washy of Josie to forgive Calvin, and
she also felt foolish for having gotten so swept up in a melodrama that she’d
thought had been a matter of life or death.
Now, why would Josie want to forgive
Calvin? This, Molly couldn’t
understand. She’d been molested by a
babysitter’s teenaged son when she was three, and now she believed in there
being bad guys, bad guys like in movies, like the irredeemably evil Lex Luther,
like the Joker in Batman. She didn’t
respect people who could maintain a position of ambivalence. Ambivalence was borne of an acceptance of
most people’s moral ambiguity.
Not that Molly was ever very normal,
but she became that much more uncommon the day after the rainy night on which
George beat up a bad guy for her benefit.
Vomit rising to her throat from a visceral sickness caused by what felt
like Josie's betrayal, Josie who at different times had loved her maternally,
sisterly and romantically, Molly ached to sink back into the comfort of her
adults, her George and her Richard.
“Uh, I don’t really know what to say
right now, Josie. I feel like you’re
letting him trick you, you know? Or, I feel,
like, bummed. I don’t know. Can I call you back later?” She never did.
