TED LOSES SLEEP
The same night that found Hugh Adair confessing to his second wife the fraudulence of his first marriage, his older brother Ted lay in his king-sized bed at his condo in Georgetown recalling a confession he, too, had heard earlier in the week. It was all some kind of bullshit that his Old Man had come up with when the nervous breakdown came crashing down around him, but still Ted had been losing sleep over what his father had said to him.
Outside his bedroom window a street lamp shone through dark mottled trees, and a cat yowled below; occasionally a car drove by (he counted seven by two A.M.). His ceiling was the kind made of plaster waves and raised dots, a white and frozen sea, and his mind created designs among the crests and curves until he thought he could stare at the ceiling no longer without going mad.
But it's just because pop went pop. And too much caffeine -that's right, buddy, you've been hitting the Nescafe hard, and mainlining the Classic Coke and the Pepsis until your piss is brown and fizzy. You've got the jitters and your Old Man just leaked his brains like a pigeon crapping on a park bench. You put the two together and you lose a few nights' sleep and you go to work with circles under your eyes and you keep those colas coming.
Ted had had a date earlier in the evening, a woman named Holly of all things, and Holly had had just about enough of his trembling and his guzzling beers at the American Cafe.
Oh, yeah, mix some beers with the Coke, and the fear -the goddamned fear that your pop was losing it all over the place, that you could practically SEE right under his skin the lunatic blood pumping around that fat old head -the fear made you want to slap little old Hollyhocks senseless, but I will refrain, m'dear, refrain from any act of violence because I have been brought up a gentleman, and even though you needed a good stiff one, sweetheart, I will not lay a hand on you tonight. Oh, no, tonight I could not get it up even if there were three of you sucking so hard my head caved in -maybe pop went through such a transcendent experience, maybe that's what turned his brain to slush. Ted had dropped her off at her place on Capitol Hill. On his way back home, he took a detour. He drove his Mercedes up Connecticut Avenue, around DuPont Circle, up Columbia Road, then a left, then a right, then a left and was sitting in his car, the headlights off, alongside Winthrop Park.
The street was quiet, and he looked up at the house his brother lived in.
The upper story's lights were off; there was some dim light from the lower apartment. The house was black in the lamplight, black and featureless, and Ted shivered in his car (as hot as it was) when he remembered what his father had told him. And when he saw the black woman sitting on the park bench not more than ten feet from where he was parked, he started the engine again and drove away, quickly.
She was fat and old and clothed in trash bags that glittered under the street-lamp light. She swayed back and forth on the bench, apparently reciting something.
She fit the Old Man's description of Madeleine Perreau. Ted, lying awake in bed that night, could not get the Old Man's words out of his mind:
I met her when I first bought the houses down there, down in Winthrop Park. I was twenty-one, I'd just come into my inheritance, and I had money to burn, boy, money to burn.
The war was still raging in Europe and I had no desire like so many of my foolhardy companions to go over and fight the Germans. War, boy, is the finest time to run domestic businesses, and property was dirt cheap. I knew if I bought that block on Hammer Street something would come of it.
And something did come of it, too. Something bigger than I expected. Back then, this neighborhood was a cesspool, shit, it was a cesspool clear until 1979. I hung on to it even when it was losing money because there was always something here I didn't want someone else to find. She was there, Madeleine Perreau, living in a rented room in a tenement near Draper House, and you wouldn't know it to look at her, but she had something inside her, something more than looks, something sexual, something that approached the place where fucking met death -I know that now, God, I know that now. And if I had just looked before I leaped, but I believed in nothing in those days, Ted, nothing at all, nothing but myself. I screwed her whenever I had the chance, screwed her like I was masturbating against the leg of a chair, like a dog humping whatever hole was available. But I didn't know a few things about her: one, that she was in love with me, Ted, this black whore from the tenements was telling people we were going to be married, and I thought when she said it it was a joke. I saw her maybe ten times in four years, and each time we fucked, boy, just fucked, that's all it was as far as I was concerned.
And one day she got pregnant and she said it was mine and I told her to get rid of it, and she threatened a lot of things, and that's when I found him, boy, the man with the magic coat hanger, the man who was making a name for himself with his seven-minute kerosene and coat-hanger jobbies. You give the girl a drink, she starts to convulse, the fetus drops a little and you twist an old wire hanger up inside her and jab that little life out. And he lived right in my own fucking building. He lived in Draper House. He ran his little outfit out of that house. He had a room all outfitted as if he were a real doctor, not just some back-alley abortionist. He was a French coon from Haiti, boy, a man who had some kind of power over the women on that block, and he and his housekeeper took care of the pregnant whores who needed to get back on the streets. It was too good to be true. And the beauty of it, Ted, my boy, was sometimes the girls died. But there was another side, and that was: sometimes the babies lived, sometimes the abortion didn't work and what you got instead was a pregnant old whore with a cooze that looked like a sloppy enchilada, and a mulatto baby being born nine fucking months to the day after you last put it to her. So this Perreau woman has her little baby girl and names her Nadine Adair, after the father who is at this point shelling out cold cash to keep the old bitch away from his legitimate family. And one day I get so mad, so angry at that bitch when she asks for more money, more money for her little girl, that when we go for a walk down by Rock Creek, I decide I am going to kill the mother. I am going to kill her, but I get a hard-on, boy, a man's downfall is always his dick, the stiff prick with no conscience, so I decide I'm going to fuck her to death, boy, skewer her shishkabob style. And so we get worked up down on the muddy bank of the creek. And while I am screwing that black whore, she calls up the demons of Hell to bite me, wasps just like the ones she sent to me last week, but back then she called them out of her fucking cooze. Ted rolled onto his stomach on the bed, clutching the pillow against his face, trying to fall asleep. She's what they call a mambo, boy, only like I said, I didn't believe in anything, and when you believe in nothing, that's when the piano drops out of the sky on you, that's when something makes a grab for you in the dark from under your bed. But the man, he tells me he can keep that bitch out of my life for good. He's something of a voodoo expert, a priest who calls himself a bokor, and he tells me that he can make sure she never bothers me again. Man, I promise that guy, my favorite abortionist, ANYTHING just to get that whore out of my life, and he does just that, and in a way that's so ingenious that I still haven't fucking figured it out. He makes her forget who I am, boy. He makes her go mad.
I even saw her after that, and she didn't recognize me, and I'd just laugh at her, laugh at her and her raggedy little coffee-colored girl, now a teenager, and beautiful because she got the Adair blue eyes, but she's filthy and stupid like her mother. That’s when the man, the abortionist, quotes me his price.
You know the story about the Pied Piper, boy? How he gets the rats out of this town, and then the town won't pay him what he asked for, so you know what he does? He takes their children, Ted, he takes their children.
But the Pied Piper at least waited until the children were born. But this guy, my favorite abortionist, his name was Gil DuRaz, but I've done some looking into that, too, and the name was about as legitimate as the way he went about his work. Gil DuRaz was a joke name, something I guess this man knew would be found out, and let me tell you what the joke is: Gilles DuRais was a famous guy in his own way. He was also French, but we're talking France, and we're talking Joan of Arc right-hand man who went crazy when the war was over and started poking little boys and slicing their entrails out and filling huge caldrons full of their blood before he was caught and brought to trial. And one more thing about the guy he stole his name from: he used the kids for his black-magic rituals, and he bought most of the kids from their parents.
That’s part of the joke, see, because he bought an unborn child from me, actually, he bought a baby before I'd even screwed the girl. And the girl was named Nadine Adair.
My own flesh and blood. I did it because I owed him one. And I enjoyed it, boy, I enjoyed every fucking minute of it. Gil DuRaz had a ritual, and he needed that teenaged girl, my daughter by that crazy black whore. he needed her and her baby, and I stood by in a room in that house, while the riots were going on, boy, while people were shooting out windows and setting fire to entire blocks, and I stood next to Nadine's mother and she didn't recognize me. I stood there and I watched Gil DuRaz, abortionist of gutter rats, bring his face down to where that baby's heart beat inside a teenager and I saw him devour her like a hungry animal.
But, boy, that's not the best part, nosireebob, the best fucking part is yet to come. The fat lady was about to warble her chunky heart out, because they all sat down there, all except her mother, Madeleine, who was going into hysterics, but the kind where you just beat the walls, nothing to interfere with Gil's feeding frenzy -and he saved the baby, yes, he did.
He didn't swallow that half formed child, he held it up like it was the savior, and then they sat there and they drank that little girl's blood. They drank her blood because it was like a communion, boy. And I thought I was going to be killed if I didn't, so I took a great big sip myself, boy.
And son, she tasted good.
Ted Adair lay in bed awake all night wondering what you do when your father has finally lost it with no hope of getting it back. When he went to sleep, with the morning light flooding through the window, he had a dream in which he sat at the head of a great table. Before him on the tablecloth were a napkin, a knife and fork, and a plate. He was alone at the table and someone was about to come through a doorway from the kitchen, someone with a platter, someone who was going to offer him a feast.
Ted awoke before noon, screaming.