“For better or worse.”
We turn down a tree-lined street, houses with porches on either side. “She’s been good, through all this,” I tell him. “It’s changed her. She was in the hospital with me every day when I had the stroke. She leased out our studio in New York, she’s kept our bills paid. She really came through.”
We turn a corner and Mel and the boys are there, cigarettes dangling from their lips, playing Kick the Can in front of a rambling Victorian. “Here we are,” Teddy says, and takes us all up a side set of stairs.
Teddy’s apartment is old: dark wood, low yellow lighting. As we enter, he touches an oil lamp on the kitchen table and the place glows. A cast-iron skillet glistens on the stovetop. Books are stacked beside the door: a threadbare copy of Ulysses, a couple of Larry McMurtrys, a Harry Crews.
Mel spots the ancient record player console. She touches the doors and they swing open, little copper handles twinkling. The Root Down EP is already on the turntable. Mel mutters, impressed. She leans in, pulls something from the shelf, holds it up. The Oak Ridge Boys.
“Jesus,” I say.
“No. Elvira.” Teddy opens a cupboard and draws out peach schnapps, bourbon, blue carnival glasses. Ryan and Tatum busy themselves with pruning through a Ziploc of weed at the table, placing seeds and stems in a crystal ashtray. “I’m inclined to make yours light,” Teddy tells me. “I don’t want to get the patient hammered.”
Mel draws a record from its sleeve. Reagan Youth. “Dude, how do you even have this?”
Teddy looks over his shoulder, shrugs. “I dunno,” he says, and grins. It is this surface note, sheepish and uncalculated, the opposite of cool, that hammers in the final nail. I decide that I really, really like Ted Caudill. A lot.
Sweet little drinks are produced, the bong fired upward. Talk resumes. Tatum brings out a VHS tape of cartoons pulled from New York public access in the early eighties, real basic pen-to-pad stuff, the kind of thing I used to hunt for in the city when I was at Ballister. When I ask Teddy, “Holy hell, do you really own that?” he says, “Of course,” shrugs like it’s nothing, like time isn’t collapsing and universal circles aren’t completing themselves and this isn’t something that’s been a foregone conclusion for years. We smoke, collectively reach a phase of fuzziness in which the room is one warm smear, a friendly blur.
Teddy and I end up sitting together on the couch, leaning into each other. “I love these old shorts,” I say to him. “The old DIY ones. We used to watch these for hours, Mel and me.”
“Me too,” he says. “They reminded me of watching TV with you.”
I feel his voice reverberating in my body. I can feel my head pleasantly unhinging itself as I sink into the couch. Whisper to him, “They’re full of ghosts.”
“You’re full of ghosts.” He starts poking the soft part of my thigh, making fart noises. When I laugh, it’s a honk. I squirm into the tickling instead of away. Things are getting very stupid very quickly. My body’s all surface, oil swirls on a bubble.
I moo, “Quit.” Fold myself over, nose to knee.
He ruffles my hair. “Sharon, Sharon. Should I worry about you?” His Adam’s apple jounces once, twice. I can almost breathe on it from here. I see Mel and the boys rolling their eyes at each other.
“Your accent comes back when you’re drunk, Jim Bob.”
“Naw.”
“Yes.”
“You charmer.” He twiddles his fingers into my belly and it starts up again. “That’s how you moved up in the world. You just flattered the shit out of big nerdy dudes like me.”
“Quit quit quit.”
“Superstar comes home ticklish. Oh no.” He goes to my sides and it’s a big, laughy, teeth-shining blur. I’m on top of him, he’s on top of me. I feel my diaphragm go loose.
And that’s when it happens. I pee. Just a little, but the valves release only a second before it happens. It shocks me into rolling back on my side of the couch.
I stand. “Hold up. I’ll be right back.”
Teddy sprawls, glasses askew. “You okay?”
“Yep. Where’s your bathroom?”
I close the door and sit on the toilet, hand clapped over my mouth.
Peeing on a man you like is a deal breaker. I sneak a look down at myself, bony knees up, loose skin around my middle, the deflated slope of my breasts. For the first time tonight, I’m afraid of what might happen if I end up in bed with Teddy. Sex, since the stroke, has been a slow-moving, solitary preoccupation. I’ve had precious few orgasms in the past three months—some halfhearted attempts in the Florida rental house’s grimy tub, an eventual, partial climax that was such a sad shadow of its former self that I wondered if I would ever get it all back: the joy, the envy, the pure, animal pleasure of arousal. Anything but this middling, vanilla nonfeeling. Can I even climb on top of someone without my inner-ear imbalance throwing me off?