Di, or she on him. There had been other fights, accusations, betrayals, the obvious incompatibilities, but now he had crossed a line. He had stepped between Di and her child.
“I wish there was a place we could go. Someplace safe where she won’t find me.” Eliza was sitting up now, leaning over her belly, her face in her hands. “We can’t stay at Johnny’s! He doesn’t even have AC!”
Les picked up the phone and dialed the number that, the dozen or so times he’d dialed it in the last seven years, he was always surprised to remember.
“What are you doing?”
He listened to the dial tone, fanning himself with the flyswatter now, fanning himself as though putting out a fire. He had a wild idea as he waited: that his ex-wife was pregnant with his child, that this child would be the one he wouldn’t screw up, that he could have his old family and his new one under one roof. Honey, he’d say, I’m coming home.
“Is Jude okay?” Harriet asked when they’d said their hellos. She sounded impatient, or maybe just anxious, out of breath, the way she had when he’d admitted to her that yes, he’d told Jude about the kids who’d broken into her studio. She had just run inside from the garden, or upstairs from the basement, where she was doing a load of laundry. She was not a woman longing for her husband to come home. Their children were the players in a business arrangement, and what had happened in their marriage bed was an olfactory fluke. What did you do to him now? said her voice, which might as well have been the voice of the woman he’d just hung up on, the other woman he’d deceived and failed, whose faith he’d neglected to earn.
“He’s fine,” Les said. “More than fine. He’s clean, he’s cured. His rehabilitation is complete.”
What was he saying, Harriet wanted to know.
A dark shape spun in the corner of Les’s eye, and he slammed the flyswatter on the counter. When he lifted it, the fly was stamped to the back, its papery wing still fluttering. He had done it without a thought, and now it seemed a horrible accident. It broke his heart.
“Remember,” he said, “when you asked me for a favor?”
Three and a half blocks east, in the building Jude was passing on his skateboard, Johnny was eating a green apple in Rooster’s apartment. The previous phase of the eight-headed dragon had not had time to heal; Johnny had not brought his equipment with him. From the pillow where his head lay, he could see the edge of the dark, drawn curtains, into the bright morning. This sheltered calm reminded him of the motels he’d frequented during his nomadic childhood, moving from city to city with his brother and his mother, all their possessions in the hatch of their sun-roasted car. He remembered playing Marco Polo in a motel pool, a scrape on his cheek from grazing the fiberglass floor. He remembered jumping on the motel beds with Teddy. He remembered Teddy, when he was still a baby, sleeping in an open suitcase Queen Bea had lined with a towel on the floor, and now Johnny imagined carrying Teddy around in that suitcase, safe inside in the dark. He felt its handle in his palm. Now Teddy really could fit in that suitcase again. He was a few pounds of ashes in a kitchen canister he kept on his closet floor.
He did not share these things with Rooster. Rooster, unlike the rest of New York, knew Teddy had existed, and knew he was the one who had knocked up the girl Johnny would marry on Sunday. But today Johnny didn’t feel like talking about the past. “You ever been to California?” He took a crisp bite of his apple.
“I wish,” Rooster said.
“You think it’s a good place to raise a kid?”
“You ain’t movin’ to California. Not without me.”
Johnny didn’t say anything.
“I see. That’s why you gotta leave. Because I tempt you to the dark side.”
“I told you. I can’t do it anymore.”
Rooster raised his head from his pillow. His jaw, still bruised a mealy blue from a rough day in the pit, tightened. “This ain’t Vermont, baby. This is New York. Fags don’t jump off tall buildings here. They don’t have to meet in dark rooms. Here we have parades.”
Johnny chewed the tart meat of his apple. Of course they still met in dark rooms. Down in the park, a