Most of the Time: Chapter 2

Jason pushed the car seat forward as Halsey stuffed her camera bag in the backseat. The interview had gone pretty well. An average Sixth Street band that had worked up enough fresh material to make a CD; they’d last through summer, playing the clubs, and then fade out in the fall when another CD went out by a new band of the season. While Halsey got in on the passenger side, Jason made sure his laptop was secure in the backseat along with the camera. Once behind the wheel he said, “Shit, it’s hot and I’m hungry. Want to get a drink, something to eat?”
“What’s close?” Halsey draped the seatbelt over her shoulder.

“Kerbey Lane’s just a block over on Guadalupe.”

“Ooh,” she said, “they have yummy migas.” She made a slurping sound. “Mmmm, that sounds good baby. I’m all for the migas.”

“Excellent.”

Jason tore off a piece of warm tortilla and used the torn bit like a spoon to scoop salsa from the bowl on the table. On the TV screen above them flashed a map of Kosovo.

“What’s she saying?”

Halsey tilted her head to listen to the anchorwoman.

“Could you turn the TV up?”

A girl with a burgundy pixie cut and three gold hoops in one eyebrow nodded and stopped wiping the counter and turned and stretched up to reach the volume control at the bottom edge of the TV. Three Harriers in formation flashed across the screen.

“The Clinton administration announced today . . . .” the anchor’s voice was rigid and nasal.

Glass crashed behind the counter. On the screen a column of black smoke billowed off a gray hilltop and the small dot of some kind of fighter jet streaked over the hill and into a silvered layer of sky.

“. . . bombing would be suspended this week,” the anchor continued.

Jason’s hand covered Halsey’s, his palm warm. Her eyes seemed to shimmer like melting candle wax and she drew her thumb over his and asked if he would stay the night with her that night. “Please,” she said.

“I’m off today,” Halsey whispered into Jason’s ear when they were both awake. Otherwise the bedroom was silent, not even the air conditioner seemed to be humming, and there was no sound of either Tanner lurking on the other side of the door or of the rat dog scratching to get let out. Light from the sunroof above them sprayed over the swell of their bare, uncovered bodies, dappling the scramble of sheets and pillows around them, making shadows and foreshadowing the deeper shadows to come.

“I’ll call in,” Jason said. “Raoul ought to understand. He’ll have to. I’ve never called in before. He’ll just have to accept it.”

Jason lay in bed sipping a glass of Pepsi, an open Vanity Fair magazine balanced on his lap. He hadn’t flipped a page in ten minutes. So they were ceasing bombing, he thought. That didn’t mean the war was over. Someone had to stay and clean up afterward. The war might’ve been over but it didn’t mean Kyle was coming home. Not anytime soon. At least not for a couple months more. And what then? Halsey’s ass was hoisted in the air, her glorious orbs twitching like Jell-O as she scrambled around on the floor picking through a stack of videos, searching for a movie the whole family could watch, since Tanner was there with them. And then what happens?

Just a month ago he sent her a hot passage from Henry Miller - he forgot which, maybe about the whores Germaine and Claude - after she had e-mailed complaining about how horny she was, how she missed her husband, but would give anything then to get laid. She even thought about calling an old boyfriend, Brennan; of course she didn’t: Not another affair, not the slaughter of another marriage just to get laid, just for sex. Half jokingly, when she had read the Miller, she responded, sending Jason this one line of hers: “Why don’t you just come over hear and jump my bones?”Jason hadn’t heard the expression “jump my bones” since high school, and he took the invitation as facetious, that she had, indeed, meant it as a joke. Still, he asked her out for dinner at a barbecue joint on the north banks of the Colorado and she wore a spaghetti-strapped black tank top that fell loose over her black skirt, the skirt slinking to just below her calves, the skirt that revealed the supple bumps of her thighs when she walked. They took their beers from the bar and waited on the deck over the river, while they waited for their tables; and they watched kayakers flailing themselves upstream like hopeless salmon. And when a chill from a breeze off the river rippled over her shoulders and down her arms and spine, he touched her shoulders and drew up close to her, closer than he probably should have, close enough she felt the hardon billowing up under his jeans, craving her. She tilted her head and that made it seem as if they were caught in a magnetic field of some kind. Then her mouth was on his in a moment they seemed to both really want, one that felt as if it had been locked inside the both of them, a moment waiting to happen.

And if it were meant to happen how possible could it be she’d give it all up when Kyle returned? Jason seemed to be drifting alone in the bed. He shifted himself so he could get a better look at her ass again, and know that she was still there on the floor searching for something to watch. Giving up the sex would be awful. Surely she wouldn’t give up the sex. Of course, what if she fucked Kyle? She wouldn’t. Their sex life was almost non existent anyway. Most of the time Halsey slept on the couch to avoid any attempts Kyle might make. Theirs was the most loveless marriage Jason had ever heard of, except perhaps for his parents’: His parents lasted a little over forty-three years before his dad took off with another woman. The old bitch.

What kind of marriage did Halsey and Kyle have? One devoid of all feeling, except perhaps for anger. How could that possibly be good for anyone involved? A child especially? Tanner didn’t have his father home half the time. And there was never any certainty Kyle would return from whatever front he had been sent to. His helicopter could malfunction and crash or he could be shot down. What would Tanner have then? What would Halsey have then? That marriage wasn’t anything like the passion she and Jason had for each other. This was passion and love beyond reason, love beyond time, love beyond all doubt. This was the sort of love you thought you shared with someone, until you wake up one morning and she tells you she doesn’t love you anymore and might never have in the first place. And then she runs off a month later and marries a seminary student because she realized all along she wanted to be a missionary and serve God and her husband in some place where she felt she was really needed.

He couldn’t imagine Halsey doing that to him. She crawled up next to him on the bed. The TV screen began to flicker, first the red-lettered F.B.I. Warning, then the green of the coming-to-video-soon preview screen, followed by trailers. Amorphous light and sound dusted him, never jelling into images or voices the whole time the movie ran. Only Halsey had form, her fingers quilted into his, her toes grazing a shin and a calf and an ankle, touch a transforming Eucharist.

She wouldn’t abandon him when Kyle came back. She was going to be gone for two weeks the first part of July, but leaving for Kentucky to see her family wasn’t like leaving for good. It wasn’t leaving him. She’d be back.

Only after Betsy let Phillip inside her apartment did she realize she didn’t want to sleep with him. And of course this had everything to do with Erica’s taking off back to Kansas after their blissful two weeks together. She knew that the moment she tasted Phillip’s beery breath mingling with hers. More like a wave of breath coming to shore over her tongue, spreading out like the tide. He only had drunk three glasses: How could it be this bad? And when he fell on top of her while they were making out on the couch and had reached under her T-shirt and groped at the cup of her bra and folded it over and mashed her breast down like a kindergartner pressing Play-Doh, she knew she didn’t want him, she just wanted somebody. So when he wriggled his hand between their bellies and struggled with the button of her jeans, she said, “I thought you were tired. That’s why I brought you over here. So you wouldn’t fall asleep driving or get pulled over.”

“I was,” he said. He kept his fingers splayed over her jeans button. “I am.”

“It doesn’t seem like it.” She nudged his forearm.

He freed his hand, letting it fall against her hip. “I am, really.”

And it must’ve been the angle, the tilt of her head, but he actually seemed to be shrinking away from her as if he were some kind of pink blobbish putty folding into itself until it disappeared. This must’ve been how Phillip’s father was, shrinking away from his wife’s balled fists, or even her open palms, recoiling from each blow. A child really, afraid to defend itself. All this time she’d sat with him all night at Shanto’s, their coffees and teas getting cold as he explained a new math theory or she explained her theory of how testosterone affected people. They could wander then from science to books to movies and she thought at some point he’d make a great father one day. He seemed gentle, or maybe that was just the sweaters he wore when it was cold, the sleeves so long they bunched at the elbows, and the necks on each one stretched out when he pulled them off. That was the image she had of him: Always wearing this awkward sensitive guy’s uniform; they were like the sweaters her father wore when she was a girl in Boston.

She could talk with Phillip about anything, until one day she asked the question she had to ask every guy, if there could ever be anything serious between them: “Do you want kids?”

They had been at the cash register picking up their coffees and he stepped away from her as if she’d struck him, slopping coffee over the rims of their mugs.

“No. No kids.” He shook his head and pointed a mug toward their table. “Not for me. Not with the shit I’ve gone through. No kid should ever have to go through that shit. I don’t even want to get married.”

His answer wasn’t discouraging. It challenged her. She assumed he’d change his mind once they slept together. She’d kept a lot of boyfriends as well as girlfriends a lot longer than they wanted to stay simply because the sex was so good.

She worked for months on seducing Phillip. And there he was sitting on the couch fluffing the pillow she’d brought for him from her bedroom, getting it soft enough so his neck wouldn’t stiffen against the arm of the couch. His shoes were off by then and there were holes in the big toes of both socks, the thin sort of black knit socks old men wore to work. This wasn’t a man she could ever sleep with, much less love.

The sheet lay heaped on the carpet at the foot of the couch and the couch itself was empty except for the dented pillow at one end. Betsy picked up the sheet and tossed it on the couch. The only thing left of him, the only evidence he’d been asleep there at all, was the indentation his head had made in the pillow. He must’ve woken up early and had obviously left without saying anything to her. She was glad he was gone. Still, she could feel the apartment’s emptiness, with Phillip gone and Hamad over at Sam’s for the weekend. Somewhere her cat Miranda was stalking a frog or a roach or waiting outside the door to be let in. Only there was no scratching.”I still can’t believe she e-mailed you.” Halsey turned on her side and placed her hand on Jason’s chest. “I’m sorry. I fucked up.”

“You’re fine. It’s fine.”

“I fucked up so badly, though. She had me cornered and I blurted everything out. I can’t keep my big mouth shut. It’s my fault, I left my password up or something and Mom just found everything.”

Jason shifted in the bed to get his feet under the covers. Halsey kept trying to explain herself. He didn’t stop her, figuring she needed to vent; she felt terrible that somehow her mom was able to get into her e-mail, had discovered everything, and when confronted Halsey, in an almost breathless stream of sobs, confirmed their affair, almost every detail, because Halsey had kept every e-mail. Then her mother took it upon herself to e-mail him, one that lashed out as if she were a biblical prophet on her mountaintop scolding a lost nation.

“God baby I was so scared you’d be so pissed off with me for telling . . . you wouldn’t want to see me . . . “

A single tear coursed over her cheek. His thumb went over the smooth wet flesh, catching the tear before it slalomed down to the edge of her jawline.

“I’m here. There’s nothing to worry about. I’m here and I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

Her lips grazed the fold between his thumb and forefinger when she brought his hand to her mouth. “What did she say? Didn’t it piss you off? I know it would’ve pissed me off. I know it pissed me off when she told me she’d sent you that e-mail.”

“Something like how I must be too stupid to see you’d get bored and dump me.”

“Oh baby, you’re not stupid,” she said. “And I’ll never get bored with you. I got dumped by Brennan. I didn’t get bored with him.”

He lay flat against the mattress, his arm crimped between her shoulder and neck, a position he always arranged himself in after they had made love. ” I was pissed at first,” he said. “Not because she found out, but because it seems she’s trying to tell me what to do, as if she could make me decide to not see you any more. It’s like she thought she had a way of controlling me, like I was her boy.”

“I’m sorry, Jase,” Halsey said. She eased closer to him and could tell by the heavy way he shifted his arm that it had started to fall asleep. She apologized for this discomfort. Which he said was OK. “This is the way my mother is with me. Always wanting to control me.”

It was worse, really, than control, but Halsey wouldn’t tell him that. She had screamed at her mother that the affair was more than just her wanting to get laid. “It’s not about getting laid, Mom. I love him.”

“I heard that before,” her mother said. “‘I love Brennan, Mom, I really do.’” There was no excuse for an affair this time. “What a way for your husband to come home.”

Hearing that was like an assault, her mother’s voice relentless, her attack as intense, well, as fire from Kyle’s gunship. Halsey had seen those demonstrations of power. The obligation of an army wife to witness rusty cars and old captured Soviet tanks shredded by fiery chunks of lead spitting out from a gun barrel at six hundred and twenty-five rounds per minute. No other married woman ever needed to know the rate of fire from the machine gun on her husband’s attack helicopter. Everything about her life, seemed, in all actuality, about Kyle. And now her mother worried about how Kyle would feel. Over and over, everything was about Kyle. Nothing was about her or how she felt. She was a disappointment to her family. Cruel to her husband.

Jason was sympathetic, she knew, because of his dealings with his own mother. A couple of times he had given up their Sunday afternoons together so he could visit his mom. She had lived alone in an apartment since his father left them for another woman four years ago. Since then, once he was able to get her to move out of their house and into the apartment, his mother had been able to get visits by squeezing out guilt, making him feel responsible for her being alone.

Halsey draped her leg over his torso.

The abrupt screech of the phone woke him. His head popped up from his pillow; he nudged Halsey’s shoulder to get her awake. By the clock it was half past three in the morning. Only one person would be calling then - Kyle.

Jason lay still, trying not to breathe. Maybe her mother had relayed the info about the affair and now Kyle was calling to threaten to shoot them both. That was the old-fashioned way of ending an affair, the soap opera way, right? Burst in on the lovers in bed, empty the chamber of the revolver into both, three bullets each. Of course, those things didn’t happen. And Halsey wouldn’t toss herself under a train or poison herself. These days it was more likely there would be a divorce and a bitter custody battle, and that would be the end of it. But, Jason preferred to think Kyle might get depressed and fly his helicopter into a Bosnian mountainside.

He had lain still for what seemed like a long time. By the clock half an hour had passed and Halsey had kept talking to this guy. At one point her voice got nasally, like it did when she was about to cry, or when she was scolding Tanner and he wouldn’t listen to her, and then she whined into the phone, “Stop it Brennan. Just stop it. I won’t say that or tell you anything like that.”

Jason glared at her.

She frowned. “Brennan, stop.”

With his head closer to her, Jason could hear this guy over the phone telling her how swollen his cock was, how purple its head was and how much he hoped she was getting wet.

“Brennan, just shut up. Please just shut up.”

They kept talking. The clock turned over an hour.

“I’m hanging up Brennan,” she said. “I’m hanging up now,” and there was a barely perceptible click when the phone was set back down on the receiver.

“What the fuck was that?” Jason asked.

“Oh, Jase, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said. “Nothing was meant by it.”

“Whatever,” he said. He sat up and bent over and reached down to fumble around on the floor for his boxers.

“What are you doing?”

“Getting dressed.”

On the bed, kneeling behind him, brushing her breasts over his back, she tried to elicit. . . to manipulate all his hormones, the testosterone and whatever else it was that sizzled through his brain, his bloodstream, his testicles to create a hard-on. Moreover, it wasn’t just molding an erection so big that she could see it through his jeans that she wanted; it was to work the magic of desire in him, a spell that always seemed to erase the memory of earlier misgivings. Only he blocked whatever she cast.

By then he stood bedside and had tugged up his jeans, had zipped and buttoned them. Son of a bitch I can’t believe this is happening, he thought. Not like this. Getting some guy off over the phone. Not some guy. The one she wrecked her first marriage with. Jesus, at least Sara hid the Preacher Man from me. Christ! He shook his head. Maybe what her mom had written was true: ‘Don’t be stupid. Drop her now before she drops you. Don’t believe a word she says about being in love with you. She’ll love you as long as it’s convenient. Then she’ll get bored and leave whenever it suits her.’ So, was this it? Was she already tired of him? Seemed that way. Certainly didn’t bother her to get off her old boyfriend when he calls. Jesus, who’s next?

Halsey’s mouth fell against his, her tongue trying to force its way through his teeth. But he wouldn’t let it.

He backed away, distractedly buttoning his shirt. He stopped halfway up, before sitting on the mattress again. He bent to reach for his shoes. Her palm came to rest on his outstretched forearm. He jerked his forearm and her hand fell away, and he lashed his eyes across her face. She backed away from him, huddling against the headboard, kicking the sheet into his thigh, and began to sob breathlessly.

Sometime around nine that morning his phone rang. He had been asleep. He picked the phone up, said hello.

“I’m sorry, Jase, I’m sorry.”

He imagined her tears dampening his chest hairs. The phone was cordless so he lay down again and let her apologize.

“I didn’t know how to get rid of him,” she said.

She imagined him cradling his phone against his shoulder, as he sometimes did at work, half-listening to the person on the line, while typing notes on the computer. In his voice was the veil, the scrim he had thrown up to block whatever she had to say. Not even the light of desire could penetrate its fabric.