At the Bottom of Everything(22)

Anyway: … yes … yes … oh my God, you’re so … Oh my God, there … yes …

There was often a point, when I was a teenager masturbating in my room, when I would think: If someone were to walk in right this second I don’t think I could stop. The orgasm gravity was such that all considerations, even ones about not masturbating in front of my mom or Frank, were out the window. At the time I’d never had occasion to find out if this was really true.

It turns out it’s never too late to stop, really. Gravity can be reversed in the time it takes to snap your fingers. Or in the time it takes to hear someone rap his knuckles against the glass in the kitchen door.

It was strange, in retrospect, how immediately I knew that the sound wasn’t made by a squirrel or a branch or by anything other than someone watching us. Peter’s face was about a quarter inch from the window (he had to hunch slightly to look in, and he held one hand like a visor to his forehead). Beside and behind him were the tops of two little brown-blond heads. Thomas used to think it was funny, when I fell asleep watching a movie, to wake me up by putting his face as close to mine as he could and waiting. This felt like that, if instead of Thomas’s face waiting when I opened my eyes I found a lion’s. Only because a chair was behind me did I not turn and race out of the room.

The panic! chemicals that were dumped into my bloodstream made everything seem fine-grained and slow. It seemed to take minutes for Anna to grab a dish towel from the faucet with which to (sort of) cover herself, minutes for her to unlock and open the door, minutes for Peter to enter and begin to shout, minutes for me to pick up the red oven mitt and settle on a way of holding it so as to minimize my exposure. My penis hung there dumb as a diving board. Luckily, if anything in this scene could be called lucky, Peter was so fixated on Anna, grabbing her by the arms and shaking her, that he seemed hardly to see me. And he’d apparently sent the boys (I could just hear the littlest bits of their voices) out to wait on the patio.

Peter and Anna were like two dogs that needed to be separated.

“You selfish bitch—”

“You motherfucker, come into my house—”

“You slut, fucking this piece-of-shit tutor—”

“Spying on me—”

“You ought to be in jail—”

“I hate you—”

“You will never see the boys again—”

“You just fucking try—”

“Oh I will—”

“You make me sick—”

At some point I realized that I was inching my way backward and that I was now practically in the kitchen doorway. Peter noticed it too. “And just what the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he said, stepping toward me.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t have any fucking idea what I’m going to—”

I didn’t know if he was going to stab me or tackle me or just keep walking toward me until he had me against the doorframe. So in one terrible butt-baring instant, I made a run for my pants and shirt (I’d have to do without my underwear) and, dressing as I fumbled with the door, bashing my shin on a bench, I escaped. I didn’t look back to see if he was behind me, or if a butcher’s knife was spinning toward me. I just wanted never to hear from or have anything to do with any of these people ever again. Close the door and change my phone number and change my name and be done.

Now I felt as if I were crazy. The street seemed so calm and springlike and ordinary as I limped down the steps that if my pants hadn’t been unbuttoned, and if I hadn’t been carrying my sneakers, I might have believed that none of it had really happened. I ducked into the coffee shop on Wisconsin where Anna and I had gone that first afternoon and hurried past the hostess to the bathroom, where I locked myself in and waited long enough—at least fifteen minutes, sitting on the toilet tank and dabbing at my face with wet paper towels—to be convinced that Peter wasn’t out looking for me with a gun.

Here’s what I learned, when I got home that night to an email from Anna:

Peter had come to drop the boys off because his mother had gone into the hospital after a dizzy spell. And he’d come to the back door because no one had answered at the front and because Anna had taken his keys. And he was planning on calling Barbara, my boss, to tell her that he was going to sue her and sue me and that every fucking parent in D.C. was going to know that her tutoring company …

And that Anna wasn’t going to see me again. It was crazy and self-destructive, what she’d been doing, she said, and she needed to focus now on rebuilding her family. Luckily the boys hadn’t seen anything, or hadn’t understood anything they had seen, but it would be crazy to count on that kind of luck again.