The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [14]
I knew that Mrs. Castle would be back in the morning. I knew it as surely as her whispers had caught at my ankles like ropes.
It was obvious that I needed help. I got up slowly and stepped over my mother’s body to the phone. I breathed in and closed my eyes. I could see, projected, a reel of film in which the sped-up figures of neighbors and police all clambered into the house. There would be so many of them that they would get stuck in the doors and windows, their limbs jutting out in bent, awkward poses like a group of Martha Graham dancers, only squished together by doorjamb and window sash, and dressed in uniforms or perma-creased tweeds.
I have never liked the phone. Ten years ago, during a misguided fit of self-improvement, I pasted smiley-face stickers on the phone in my bedroom and on the one in the kitchen. Then I typed out two labels and taped them to the handsets. “It’s an opportunity, not an attack,” they read.
The last address I had for Jake was at a college in Bern, Switzerland, but that had been a temporary teaching post at least three years ago. The easiest way to find Jake was to follow his former students, his acolytes, his day laborers, his worshippers. I knew it might take hours, but I also knew Jake was my only hope. A body changed rapidly even in the span of a cool October evening, and I could not dispose of my mother by myself.
I hovered near the phone for what seemed like thirty minutes before I picked it up. Knightlys never called for help, and Corbins, my mother’s blood, would rather use forks to stab out their throats. We dealt with things in private. We cut off our fingers and feet—our hands, our legs, and our lives—but we did not, no matter what, ask for help. Need was like a weed, a virus, a mold. Once you admitted to it, it spread and ruled.
As I lifted the receiver, I could feel myself as a little girl again, walking into the snow and disappearing, lying down in a giant snowdrift and listening to my mother and father calling for me—liking the sensation as I began to freeze.
FOUR
I was eighteen and in my freshman year of college when I met Jake. He was twenty-seven and the teacher of my art history class.
He could pinpoint the moment, he said, when his heart started helplessly charting a course to my groin.
He had been lecturing on Caravaggio and the idea of lost work when he turned from the board and saw me fumbling with my new glasses. I handled their gold-wire rims like I might a praying mantis, they seemed so strange and delicate to me.
“That night, I dreamed about you. I came into my bedroom, and you were sitting up, reading, with your gold-wire glasses on and all that long black hair. When I reached out for you in the dream, you disappeared.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, squeezed tightly beside him in the twin bed of my dorm room.
“Then this dog, whom I named Tank and whom my parents wouldn’t let me keep, replaced you.”
“Woof!” I said.
But I did not know about his dreams until after I’d first posed for him.
I remember the pink wool dress I wore and how soft the mohair felt against my skin. I had dressed up in my best outfit only to go to a room in the art building that smelled of burning coils from an old space heater, and take it off again. Eventually, my camisole and half-slip ended up in Jake’s hands as he helped me dress so we could return to my dorm and undress yet again. His fingers, wide like spatulas, were capable of incredible delicacy, but when he held out the satin camisole and slip, they seemed strangely alien to me—the chewed ends of his fingernails, blackened with charcoal and paint, looked harsh against the lace trim I had coveted in Marshall Field’s. This was the image I often connected with the loss of my virginity.
When it was time to paint Emily’s first bedroom, Jake remembered the donkey that his grandfather had painted on the wall of his own childhood room. Riding on the donkey was a swarthy-looking man with crude features, and strapped over the animal’s back was a large