4.

After dinner was cleared away, and Thomas was washing up the dishes, and Carolyn was herding the children into the living room for a little TV before bed, Crabbe was unsure what to do. Should he retire to his room? Try to relax a little in the living room with the family? The latter thought appalled him. He could already hear the jingly sound of a cartoon’s opening doggerel, something about a pineapple under the sea. Oh God, what a dreadful fucking age in which to be born!

“Eugene, you’re welcome to join us in the living room. The house is as much yours as it is ours now,” Carolyn said.

“No thanks. I think I’ll retire.”

Alone, Crabbe climbed the darkening stairs to his room, Mr. Edward’s room, and closed the door behind him. Mr. Edwards had left some things here, she’d said. What, besides the tacky ashtray?

Crabbe pulled open the dresser drawers into which he had not yet delivered his undergarments and socks. Nothing. He pulled open the night table drawer and found one condom, a Durex Ultimate Pleasure. The date on it indicated it had not yet expired.

He opened the screen on the window and threw it out in disgust, afraid Carolyn might think it his. Mr. Edwards had a secret life, it seemed.

Fucking the co-eds that come to you for tutoring, no doubt, you horny goat; demonstrating a bit of how the Greeks did it, perhaps, only on girls. Or did you really prefer boys? Maybe explains your interest in the children, you ass. Now get out. It’s my room, now.

His books were still in their boxes on the floor, carted dutifully upstairs by Thomas. His clothes lay on the bed in a heap. Crabbe took his iBook and plugged it into the wall and sat on the edge of the bed, the computer on the night table, and opened a blank email.

Fuck! Didn’t think to ask them if they had Internet. Spose they do. Be shocked if they didn’t. Papa John Thomas probably likes a little porn, now and then; probably likes it more and more as he gets older and the wifey loses interest in sex, hee-hee. I’ll ask tomorrow.

In the meantime, he could write his email and mail it tomorrow, perhaps from a Starbucks he had noticed, just down the street, where he envisioned himself taking his morning coffee and quietly criticizing the passersby and the bums rummaging in garbage cans. He thought of a good image of the bums he would have to use in a poem, “buggers in long coats / reaching deep down in the waste bins.” The buggers/beggars phonic similarity was nice. He’d be sure to use that. Maybe.

Then he began his email, addressed to Frederick Smudge, his agent, literary executor, and one friend.

“I don’t know what I’ve got myself into here, Smuddy,” he wrote, using his nickname for his friend. “Fucking bitch of the house is so fat from popping out her little suckling pigs, I wonder if her husband can even get on top of her for a good ride. Probably not, though they have three kids, which must mean he’s impregnating her with a turkey baster. And the kids! Ugh. I thought I didn’t like kids before; now I know I despise them. I flatly detest them. Buggers. Buggering shite-holes. Truth is, I can’t afford anything better at the moment. “You’ve got to persuade FSG to re-publish my collected poems now I’m Poet Fucking Laureate. You’d think they’d be tripping over themselves to get a new edition on the shelves. I can write a new introduction, tell them. The only thing I can’t deliver is the one thing they want, some new poems.

“I swear to fucking god, Smuddy, you’re the only one whom I can talk to. I don’t know what’s happened to me. I can’t write anymore. It’s like my own decline has coincided with all these honors suddenly accruing to me. It’s beyond ironic. I win this award, or that award, and in the meantime, my poems grow slighter and slighter. I suppose I’ll win the fucking Nobel next, then lapse into early senility and be admitted to the Home for Decrepit Poets, and some other, younger poet will take my place. Is that the way it works, then? Oh God, I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I’ve achieved everything a poet could desire, and it’s like ashes in my mouth. It’s like I am filled to the brim with bitterness…”

The email went on in this vein, paragraph after paragraph.

After awhile, he ran out of bile and self-pity, and sat on the edge of the bed, eyes sunken behind thick glasses, tired. The sounds of laughter and play downstairs gradually intruded on his consciousness. He could hear them beneath him. He looked around for something to stuff in his ears, but found nothing. His ‘water closet’ was empty. What the hell did fucking Edwards leave for me? One crusty old rubber? Couldn’t he have left some fucking cotton balls?

Crabbe went out into the hallway. He could hear the TV and sounds of talking, the children playing.

Seven o’clock. How late do children stay up?

In the family bathroom across the hall, he found cotton balls. He also made note of the toothpaste smears in the wash basin, the hair brush tangled with mats of hair on the edge of the tub.

God, people are disgusting.

He lifted up the toilet seat, just to see. The water was yellow. Someone had pissed and not flushed.

Crabbe went back to his bedroom, took a sheet of paper and a pen, and in his perfect writer’s autograph hand scribbled quickly, “Please flush the toilet after every use. This is very important to me.”

He took the paper back across the hall to the bathroom and placed it on the toilet seat, laying a stick of deodorant on top of it to keep it from blowing off.

As he was going back to his room, he met Thomas coming up the stairs with the two older children.

“We’re just getting ready for bed,” Thomas said, smiling. “School tomorrow, you know.”

Thomas directed the two children into the bathroom and they proceeded to brush their teeth. Thomas followed, excusing himself to get around Crabbe. Crabbe waited for Thomas to find the note. This would be a telling moment. In the meantime, he contented himself with thinking evil thoughts of the children.

Look at them drooling their idiot’s slobber in the sink, can’t even brush their fucking rotting teeth, no doubt, without making a fucking mess…

When Thomas came out, he was perfectly agreeable.

“Sorry about that,” he said. “Didn’t you ever hear that expression in college, ‘If it’s yellow / Let it mellow…’?”

“No. I didn’t,” Crabbe replied, “But I thank you for providing me with a rhyme I might use.”

“Oh sure,” Thomas said. “OK, you two, wipe your mouths and get in bed. Timmy, you get first choice of a book tonight.”

“What will you choose, Timmy?” Crabbe asked, feigning interest.

“Probably…Blueberries for Sal,” Timmy said.

“What a good choice!” Crabbe said, though in reality he had never heard of the book.

“Why don’t we have Mr. Crabbe read the book to us?” Thomas said. “Wouldn’t you kids like to hear the greatest poet of our time read a bedtime book to you?”

Crabbe blanched.

“Oh, I don’t know…”

“Mr. Edwards used to read to us,” Timmy said, looking up at Crabbe.

“Well, if Mr. Edwards read to you, certainly I must do the same,” Crabbe said through clenched teeth.

Blueberries for Sal turned out to be an absolutely ridiculous story about a little girl who, one day while picking blueberries with her mother, mistakes a grizzly bear for her own parent. And vice versa, the mother bear’s cub mistakes Sal’s mother for its own mother. Crabbe kept waiting for the little girl to be eaten by the mother bear, and then for the mother bear to go on a rampage and maul little Sal’s mother to death, but the longed-for denouement never took place. Sal found her mother; the bear cub found its mother; and Sal and her mother went home to can blueberries.

Insipid tripe, a wonder children ever speak a word longer than one syllable, being read such vapid hokum…

When he had finished reading the book the first time, Sarah insisted he read it again, and so twice he had to experience the disappointing adventures of Sal before he could break away. Additionally, Sarah kept moving too close to him, in direct proportion as he moved away from her. He would have preferred reading the book from across the room, but apparently children insist on close human contact during such readings.

Finally, Crabbe could take it no more, and he pinched the girl with the rather too-long nails of his thumb and forefinger. Sarah squealed and then cried. Thomas woke from his half-doze in the chair where he sat at the children’s little desk.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Crabbe said. “My belt buckle must have pinched her. Don’t sit so close, Dear.”

After finishing the book a second time, there were no more calls for another reading, and Thomas said it was time for light’s out.

Outside the kid’s door, Thomas said, “Well, I guess this is good night. Thank you for reading to the kids; I think they really enjoyed it. Psychologists say children’s brains experience greater activity when being read to by a man. Did you know that?”

“I suspect it’s because women have so little imagination for doing voices and such,” Crabbe replied.

“No, I don’t think that’s it,” Thomas said. “Well, good night.”

“Good night,” Crabbe said.

Later, lying in his fusty bed in the dark, Crabbe looked between the parted curtains and was surprised by the full, bright moon above the rooftops. Fast-moving clouds scudded over its shining face. He would have written a poem about that once, he thought.

At half-past three, he was awakened by a moan which he mistook for an expression of pain. He lay in the dark, the moon gone, his heart beating rapidly. Then that moan again.

Fuck their bedroom is beside mine. Shit and piss, I thought married people were all done with fucking. Wonder if she has to get on her hands and knees for him to enter her, fat bitch. Porker.

Perhaps twelve minutes it lasted before he heard the final strains of love’s music play out; then the house fell silent again. Silent. Twelve minutes. Not very long, by Crabbe’s reckoning, and he smiled.

At three-thirty, still sleepless, he threw off the covers and slipped down his pajama bottoms. He jerked himself off in about a minute, thinking of Carolyn on her knees and her husband fucking her. Sleep took him quickly, after.

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