Flesh and Blood

by Michael Cunningham

When his father talked about “working ourselves to death to keep ourselves

alive,”

His father had a merciless eye that could find one bad straw in ten bales of good intentions.

When her voice dropped and her hands went idly to her hair she’d lost interest in whatever she was saying, although she could keep talking without listening to herself.

Constantine rose. The look of fear that crossed Billy’s face further tightened the constriction in his throat.

Your enemy is whoever charges you too much. That’s it. That’s what you need to know about friends and enemies.”

Billy would have traded anything to be able to keep from crying, but his sorrow and outrage were too much for him and the crying won, as it usually did. Crying pulled him down.

Billy could feel himself as a spoiled, greedy, ungrateful little boy. The louder he cried, the more firmly he became that, but the feeling of becoming it only made him cry harder.

her, she might have been a young handmaiden to a goddess of domestic exasperation.

He wanted to be happy in a solid, sustained way, hour to hour, not in turbulent little fits that gripped him at odd moments, usually when he was alone.

How could he fail to adore his son? What was lacking in him?

Todd’s strength lay in doing perfectly all that was expected of him. He was known for his expansive, cheerful cooperation.

He was fifteen now, a sophomore, and instead of growing up he seemed to be hardening into some sort of sulky, continuing childhood. He had no interests. He dressed ridiculously, in patched bell-bottoms and flowered, billowing shirts. His only friends were a handful of hippies and hoods who skulked around school like stray cats.

So, you know, lately I’ve been thinking, it’s us he wants to hurt. He knows what he’s doing. If he was really out of control, he’d have smashed that chicken a long time ago.”

“I’m all right.” “Tell me what happened.” “Just a couple of slaps. Open-handed. They were like kisses.”

“I’m going to kill him one day, and when I do, I don’t want people going around saying I lost control. Okay? When I kill him I’m not going to hurt anybody else, I’m not going to break anything. But still. I want it to be clear. I want you to say you stood out here with me one night and I told you I was going to kill him. Only him. Nobody else. Will you do that? Will you do that for me?”

“Oh, senioritis. A desperate urge to be done with school just about the time you’ve reached the top of the heap. It has medical science baffled.”

Billy felt the edge of the world, the harsh blossoming happiness that moved too fast for ordinary life. Only when you raced, only when you took the risks, could you enter this other dimension that shot through time and space at triple speed.

He knew that he loved his son—what sort of man doesn’t?—but he wanted him to be different. He wanted, right now, to stand in this kitchen with his boy and talk to him about the world’s elusive glory and its baffling, persistent disappointments. He wanted to wrestle with his son, to throw a football at him with all his strength.

He’d be old one day. He had to be careful about the past he made for himself.

Then, because he was a family man, because he had love for his son shot through with hatred, he picked it up again and draped it carefully across the back of a kitchen chair.

A garden would be something to come back to. A garden would remember her.

You’re a new man, sugar. Rise up and go forth into the world.”

Billy adored the house. He loved Charlotte for being wry and mannered and faintly masculine. He loved Inez for her willful and methodical rejection of common sense.

“It’s burdock-root tea. At first you hate it because you’ve lived on sugar all your life. Drink it, it’s good for calming all needless anxieties.”

“I mean, well, you married him, didn’t you?” “What kind of thing is that to say? I married a boy, twenty-two years ago. People change. You don’t know that yet. Not that I think Todd will change. Todd is different.”

She wanted something else, something more like what Alice must have had after she’d gone to Wonderland and then returned to the world of gardens

and schoolbooks and laundry on the line. She wanted to feel larger inside herself.

Was she setting herself free, or was she beginning the long work of killing herself? How could you be sure of the difference between emancipation and suicide?

It was a lie. He was surprised to hear himself telling it. He didn’t want to teach. Teaching was monotonous, thankless, underpaid. He wanted to study architecture. He wanted to build.

“No, you answer one for me, Dad. Where does all this hate come from? What’s the point? What does it get you?”

This, he realized, was where adults came from. They developed, suddenly, out of strange unhappy children like Zoe and himself. They would live into the next century.

She hadn’t known what to tell him, beyond the obvious: “You know, you’re the first one in my family or your father’s family to graduate from college. Ever.” “I know, Ma. I know.” Billy would be the only one. Susan was married and Zoe was Zoe. Constantine’s people were still farmers in Greece, as far as anybody knew, and Mary’s brothers’ children would all be lucky to see thirty without doing time.

have come straight from the junkyard. The apartment was, well, indescribable—it might have been the home of a lunatic, someone so lost to the fundamental principles of order and cleanliness that he’d drag any filthy piece of trash up from the street and display

it proudly.

There they sat, her son and daughter, heir and heiress to centuries of daily struggle, the recitation of prayers for luck and better weather, the husbanding of funds. There they sat in rags, hair

unkempt, slumped like the poorest of white trash on a piece of furniture that had been dowdy and threadbare even when new. Mary’s drunken father had had more pride. Her Sicilian grandmother, too poor to buy drinking glasses, had kept her jelly jars in immaculate rows. For the first time in her life, Mary knew her son as a stranger. As someone who might do anything, whose head was full of thoughts and desires she couldn’t imagine.

They were simply the daughters of wealthy families powerful enough to demand that the concept of beauty be expanded to include them.

tame her hair. “Wild is one thing,” she said. “Medusa is something else. You’re scaring men off with that jungle do. Why

In men’s clothes she looked more feminine. In dresses and wigs she looked like a man in a dress and a wig.

“A nice body. Skinny. Sort of a boy’s body, with tiny little nipples. But I liked it. I don’t need muscles.” “You straight girls are a marvel. No wonder you all get married. It’s only men who disappear up their own assholes searching for perfection, isn’t it?”

She continued looking at Mary with a victorious hatred so naked it seemed to emanate from her in waves, like heat rising from asphalt.

The Plaza calmed her a little. In the ornate golden hush of its lobby she felt, once again, like a woman who could handle herself, a woman of power and means who could do whatever must be done.

They fly too close to the sun.”

“Most gentlemen don’t like love, they just like to kick it around. Cole Porter, the sage of our century.”

It wasn’t an affair. Affair was the wrong word for what Susan was having. It was—what? A mistake she permitted. An ongoing temptation she found herself, temporarily, unable or unwilling to resist.

Affairs were premeditated; they were kept alive by a tortured system of meetings.

But. I’m not sure how to say this. I guess I’ve known for a long time that I need my own life. Your father and I raised you kids, we hung in there, and now that you’re all on your own we need to be on our own, too. Does that make any sense?”

These days, he just wanted to be loved. He wanted to be loved. What was wrong with that?

Here he stood in front of everybody with his brawny, girlish son and there in the first pew sat Zoe with the little black bastard, and beside her was Susan—perfect Susan, who barely spoke to him—and her cheerful kiss-ass husband and their son, his grandson, clear-faced, in a miniature dark blue suit. His grandson. At three, the kid could already write his name; he could throw a softball hard enough to sting your hand. He had a precocious air of gravity, a personal importance.