Lucy kept staring at the door.
“Ho,” said Lowell. “The silent treatment. Just like when you were a baby.”
“How would you know?” said Lucy.
Lowell guffawed, very loud. His shrunken body seemed to grow with each expulsion. Laughter energized him, turning him demonic and lively and bringing color to his face.
“The opening movement of The Guilt Sonata! Don’t waste your quarter notes, lass. I’ve soloed with the best of the Sin Symphonies!”
Lucy began circling the room, moving as freely as the clutter would allow.
“Your silence,” said Lowell, “is not artillery. It’s an empty knapsack—you were a mute baby with skinny legs. No cries, no tears, not a yawp. Dead-mute as an anencephalic accident. Unlike the other one, Peter-Peter morpho-morto poison eater; he howled professionally. It was rent a studio down the block or strangle the little snot-rat.”
He closed his eyes. “You, on the other hand, kept your lips glued as if your tonsils were treasure.” The eyes opened. A bony finger shot out, accompanied by a hoarse laugh.
“You wouldn’t shit, either, har. Anus on strike, weeks at a time, quite a style, quite a style. Take all, hold in, give nothing. I thought you were abnormal. Your mother assured me you weren’t and poured mineral oil down your aphasic little gullet.”
Still walking, Lucy mustered a smile of her own. “Is that why you ran? Scared at having an abnormal baby?”
Lowell chuckled, but there was anger in it.
“Run, did I? No, no, no, no, no, I was invited to vacate the premises. Menstrually shrill banshee bye-bye from Maw-Maw and a claw at the face.”
“Mother kicked you out?” Lucy’s turn to laugh. “A big tough guy like you?”
Lowell looked at her, as if in a new light. Sucking in breath, he wiggled his thick eyebrows and stuck his finger in his mouth.
He kept it in there, probing and scraping and breathing roughly.
Pulling it out, he examined a fingernail. “Mother,” he said, “was a blindered, bujwhacked, neurally corseted, parlor-bound stumplet with the textbook vision of a suburban storm trooper. Middle-aged at twenty-three, old at twenty-four. Tapioca libido—her sheer puddingness turned me into a rebellious adolescent. She wouldn’t—couldn’t—learn how to be. She had nothing to live for but rules and rot.”
Lucy’s hands clenched as she turned. For a moment I thought she’d pounce on him; then she shook her head and put one hand in her pocket. And laughed. Her hips angled forward. A lounging pose as staged as Nova’s.
“God,” she said, “you’re pathetic. Terminally blocked, blah, blah, blah. Hiding behind all that bad Joyce.”
Lowell paled. Smiled. Lost the smile. Fished for it and finally found it. But it had lost its cruel luster and his grizzled jaw seemed to weaken.
“Joyce,” he said. “Know him well, do you, Mademoiselle Sophomore? I met the dwent. Paris, 1939. Clerk face, no lips, woman’s hips, lime-suck, lime-suck, lime-suck, bloody gud. That fucking Irish lechery for talk with no conclusion . . . but let’s get back to lovely Mother. She died a virgin and you genuflect to her daily; the truth is, you know as much about her as you do about prostate clog but you defend her because that’s your script—well, believe what you will, shutter your limited mind to your heart’s contempt.”
He wheezed and inflated his voice.
“Whether or not you know it, you’ve come here to learn. If you fail to do so, it’s your lowered expectation, not mine. The truth, Constipata: she invited me to leave because she couldn’t tolerate a bit of in flagrante delicious.”
Lucy pretended to remain aloof. But he was talking loudly, and his voice made her flinch.
He rubbed his hands together and looked at me.
“A sad, sick, salacious, succulent tale, Braintrust. Perfect for you.”
Turning quickly to Lucy. “After you stretched her womb, she lost whatever feeble interest she’d ever had in the double-backed beast. But like the old song says, her sister will—oh, did she, little Sister Kate. One of those yawning vaginas the exact color of bubblegum. So who was I to play brakeman to Fate? Her sister did, so I did her sister, oh, yes, oh, yes.” Smile. “She bucked and buckled, that one did. Scratched and caromed and screamed like a stuck sow at the moment of truce.” Pointing to his groin. “Remembering it almost convinces me something dingled, once upon a spine.”