Where the God of Love Hangs Out - Amy Bloom [64]
Jewelle and her children go into the house and upstairs like one person. Robert offers Patsine his arm and the two of them stand in the front hall, until Robert says that perhaps he ought to go home and Patsine agrees.
When Buster and Lionel arrive, pulling their bags out of the trunk, Jewelle and Patsine run out to meet them on the driveway and the two men back away, a little, before their wives even speak. Lionel drops to his knees on the lawn and Buster kneels beside him and the two women sit down beside them, all of them on the damp, crisp grass as the driver pulls away. The four of them unload Jewelle’s van and Lionel and Buster go from room to room, kissing the children good night. In the morning, they find Ari in his grandmother’s bed.
“Is anyone going to the store?” Lionel yells up the stairs, and no one answers. Jewelle is walking on the beach. Patsine is napping. Jordan lies on one of the twin beds in the attic room, looking at a few old copies of Playboy his father or his uncle must have left behind. Corinne has taken over the living room, her dirty sneakers and sweaters trailing over the sofa and a gold-framed photograph of her latest hero, Damien de Veuster, dead leper priest, on the coffee table. It’s Jordan who has the right disposition for yoga, Lionel thinks; the boy’s a limpid pool of goodness in a family of undertow, and Lionel doesn’t know where he gets it. (Julia would have said that Jordan was very like Lionel’s father’s father, Alfred Sampson, who even as a black man in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1963, and even among white people hoping the world would never change, was revered throughout the town, and when he died, Irish cops sent flowers.) But Jordan is in the attic with his door locked and here instead is Corinne, a big-busted, wild-haired girl, her bodhichitta tank top rising over her round, tan belly, her green stretch pants dipping very close to her ass crack, racing toward enlightenment and altruism like the Cannonball Express.
“You wanna take the bike to the grocery, Corinne?” Lionel asks.
Corinne puts a finger to her lips, as if her uncle Lionel is disturbing not her, which wouldn’t matter in the least, but the tranquillity of her spiritual guides. She exhales deeply and squeezes her eyes closed.
“Christ almighty.” Lionel yells upstairs. “Is anyone going to the goddamned store before it closes?”
Lionel can’t go; he doesn’t have a license. France—his home for some thirty years and a nation exceptionally tolerant of drinking and driving—lowered the blood-alcohol level to something like a glass of water with a splash of Pernod and now he can’t drive anywhere, not legally. He doesn’t try. Not driving is his penance, like not drinking, which is itself so preoccupying and gives him such a novel and peculiar and fraught perspective on every activity, he could almost say he doesn’t mind, although he has thought a lot about Balvenie Scotch in a heavy crystal glass for the last two days. Ari jumps down the stairs in two huge steps, punches his stepfather in the arm, and hangs in the doorway to watch Corinne breathe. He breathes with her for a moment. Late last summer, Corinne put her hand on his cock by accident when he spilled his juice and she went to help him mop it up and then she felt him and she dropped the roll of paper towels in his lap and went back to her seat, but that moment is what Ari has come back for.
Late last summer, when everyone had come to Julia’s for Labor Day, Julia took them all into town for Italian ices. The eight of them sat on the wrought-iron benches in front of Vincenzo’s, sucking on paper cups of lemon and tangerine. Julia stood up. She threw her paper cup to the ground and cupped her hands around her mouth. She yelled,