Martin and John Read Online Free PDF Page B

moment I saw him in the V of my legs—I was coming from the shower and I had nothing on under my robe—and then I kicked my legs past him to the bed. I lay there rigidly, hands clenched in fists at my side. “John,” he finally said, after saying many other things I don’t remember, “you just don’t know what I live with every day.” But I did, I did know—or I knew at least that it had something to do with the way his hands kept pushing their way through my hair like a thick-toothed comb. “John,” he said, “I’m sorry.” But I wouldn’t listen. Three words kept batting around my head until finally I let them out: “Don’t touch me,” I hissed, and my father’s hand stopped automatically, like a machine, and then without speaking he left my room.
    After my father’s visit to my room it seemed that the only thing left was for me to visit his. I snuck in often and rifled through the papers in his night table: I wanted to find one thing, just one thing, that would at last confirm or disprove what I already knew. And so I came home one day, and hearing nothing, I wandered in. My father sat on his bed in a blue satin gown that clung to his waist and hips but sagged at the chest. A brown curly wig sat crookedly on his head, and the makeup on his face looked as though it had been applied following paint-by-numbers directions. I looked at him for a long time; he looked down at a red inch of lipstickpoking from a silver capsule. Very slowly, the crayon-like tube twisted back into its chute. “It’s not so easy to put this on,” he said. “It’s harder than it looks.” Smears of red stole the shape of his mouth. His eyelids lowered, as if weighted by the globs of mascara sticking to them. He stood up, then nearly fell as his heels tipped out from under him. He removed his feet from the stretched-out shoes and turned his back to me. After a pause, he said, “Unzip me, please.” I did it quickly, looking away when I saw the bra strap, and then I stepped far away from him. The straps fell off his shoulders loosely, and he carefully pushed the dress past his waist. “Your mother kept her figure better than I do, I guess.” He wore her underwear, and the pale fabric stretched so tightly across his buttocks that I could see the split between them as if he were naked; red indentations marked the panties’ outline after he took them off, and a few crumpled pieces of toilet paper fell to the floor when he took the bra off. There was a towel on the bed, and he wrapped it around his waist like men do before turning back to me. Catching sight of himself in the mirror, he stopped, pulled the wig off. “She had a shag once,” he said, “and long hair came back in style, so she picked this up.” He looked at it a moment then dropped it to the floor. My father the drag queen: his stage name, I suppose, would be Miss Communication. I moved farther out of his way than I had to as he passed me and went in the bathroom and closed the door behind him.
    Sometimes my mind plays a trick on me, and I rememberthat as the last time I ever saw him. But I didn’t leave home until a year later and he came out in just an hour, his lips still a little red, and he cooked dinner like he always did. Afterward he made his way to the shelf where he kept the liquor, and he poured himself a glass of whiskey which, as though it were bottomless, he never finished. If he did empty the bottle in our house he went to the pool hall, and on those nights I’d get a call at two in the morning from the bartender, asking me to come get my father. One time I found him at the bar’s old piano, slumped on the keyboard. A ceramic cowboy on a rearing horse sat atop the piano, and as the bartender and I each grabbed an arm, my father stirred himself enough to say, “I never wanted anything that she didn’t want.” In the car, a little more sober: “She once told me that there was nowhere she could go where I wouldn’t find her. She said she had