The Monster's Corner Read online

  It turned out that Roberta could not take Neil over to my house on Friday night. She was the program director of an oldies radio station, and a crisis had exploded across station management with shocking urgency. The station’s popular morning DJ announced he’d received a lucrative offer from a station in Baltimore, and Roberta had to attend an emergency meeting about how to confront this offer. Pete, who telecom-muted as a software engineer for the database company he’d been with in San Diego, had the flexible schedule, and he was the one who picked up all the parenting slack. On the way to my house, Neil slouched in the front seat, playing with the satellite radio, settling on some kind of shrill dirge-like music that left Pete feeling both anxious and depressed.

  “What’s this Mason like?” Pete attempted.

  Neil shrugged and then attempted to retract his mass of curly brown hair into his chest cavity. “Okay, I guess.”

  “Yeah? What do you two like to do together?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing.”

  At a stop sign, Pete took a moment to look at his slight, pale, gaunt specter of a son. “Is he also into computer games?”

  “Who?” asked Neil with complete sincerity.

  “Who do you think?” Pete sighed with frustration. “Mason.”

  Neil didn’t respond, but his silence was not of the furtive or guilty kind, and Neil was already drifting off into the blank space he so much preferred to conversation. Pete decided to let the matter go.

  Mason’s family, which is to say my family, lived in one of those massive old Alamo Heights houses on one of those winding old streets near the dam. It was the kind of house, inhabited by the kind of people, that made Pete feel small and insignificant and destined to be an outsider in San Antonio. Here was land money, oil money, cattle money. Here were people who surrounded themselves with uniformed Mexicans and felt no discomfort in wielding their complete authority over them, comfortable giving out orders in their competent Spanish. They were the sort of people who, when they heard Pete was a software engineer, would say, “I think that’s great!” as if to announce that they were okay with Pete’s curious little career. They were accepting of his meaningless toil. They were willing to put a happy face on his inexplicable lack of riches. Mason’s family’s immodest weal made any interest in Neil even more inexplicable. Pete steadied his nerve as he pulled into our circular driveway, and Neil grabbed his bag and was out the door before Pete had unbuckled his seat belt.

  Cindy was precisely what Pete expected—pretty and faded, slim, blond, ponytailed, tennis outfit as casual attire, too much makeup, certainly some minor plastic surgery, possibly something major. He felt like he needed a translator when talking to women like this.

  “Those kids,” she said, looking toward the house, where the silhouettes of two figures were visible on the other side of the curtains. They stood there, still, bodies at odd angles, surely listening to the adults.

  After Pete shook her hand and uttered a few awkward words of introduction, Cindy pressed on with her breathless and insincere enthusiasm. “I am just so glad Mason met Neil. I know he’s been a good friend, and Mason’s had such a hard time this year. Fourteen is such an awkward age, don’t you think?”

  Pete agreed because he supposed, from talking to parents who had kids Neil’s age, that they had difficulties he and Roberta did not—drama and romance and hormones and emotions. Slammed doors and unfinished homework and asserting dominance. Pete had heard about these things. Also, agreeing seemed to be the best way to keep the conversation to a minimum, and more than anything else, Pete wanted to be in his car and driving away. After answering Cindy’s questions about what Neil liked to eat and how late was absolutely too late to stay up, Pete was soon free to retreat to his Accord and return home.

  Later, Roberta was angry with Pete for not going inside the house, getting a sense of what the family was like—they didn’t even know if Cindy was married. Pete hadn’t noticed if she wore a ring. He hadn’t figured out a way to meet Mason, to lay eyes on the first friend Neil had made in years. Roberta’s irritation bordered on genuine anger.

  Pete didn’t have the energy to defend himself. If he had, the discussion might have turned into a real argument, but as far as he could tell, he had done nothing wrong. He could hardly have forced his way into the house. He offered to call over there, but Roberta did not want to embarrass Neil in front of his only friend, so she managed to keep her curiosity under control. When Neil was safely returned home at the promised time the next morning, it was apparent there was nothing to worry about. That Neil would not describe his night as anything other than fine and okay in itself raised no red flags. That was Neil.

  Roberta wanted to reciprocate as quickly a possible, both to show their appreciation and so they could have the chance to meet this elusive Mason, so the following Friday evening Cindy’s Escalade pulled into their driveway, and Pete watched from the window as my mother emerged, followed by a figure with long dark hair and dressed entirely in black. The first thing Pete noticed was that I had girlish hair—a long, straight tumble of darkness with two elevated purple pigtails. Then he noticed that I was wearing leggings and a skirt. It took a few seconds for Pete to put all the pieces together and realize that his fourteen-year-old son was having a sleepover with a girl. Or was it a cross-dresser? No, it was definitely a girl.

  It was not Pete’s first encounter with Texas girls with ridiculous names, androgynous only because they were not first names at all. Nevertheless he’d assumed—of course he’d assumed—that someone named Mason would be a boy. Masonry was masculine work, after all. Now both Pete and Roberta were so paralyzed by surprise and awkwardness, they could not even begin to imagine how they ought to act. There was no precedent, no guidelines. They stood, mouths open, eyes wide, while an uninvited girl walked up their driveway followed by her blond, attractive mother, whose prettiness diminished in the wake of her daughter’s presence. Charisma radiated from Mason like radioactive waves. Pete saw at once that this was not just a girl. Mason was something special.

  So, yes, he noticed me right away. Unlike small and androgynous Neil, I was neither scrawny nor underdeveloped. I was a full head taller than Neil, broad in the shoulder, and respectably stacked for a girl my age. I wore a long black skirt, black boots, and a gauzy blouse that showed off enough cleavage to make a point, but not so much as to venture into whore territory. Despite the dyed black hair and the excessive makeup, neither of which Pete was inclined to find particularly appealing, I had his full attention.

  “I can’t thank you enough for having Mason over,” Cindy said, keys still in hand. She looked, as if with longing, at her Escalade. “Y’all are so nice.”

  “It’s the least we could do. After you had our son sleep over with your daughter,” Roberta said, emphasizing the gendered nouns in case this aspect of the situation had somehow escaped Cindy’s notice.

  “Y’all are so nice,” Cindy said again. “And I love your house!”

  “Are there any …” Roberta waved her hand in the air and then, noticing what she was doing, stopped. “Are there any special rules you want us to enforce.”

  I looked at Cindy and she looked away. “No,” said Cindy, who after a moment remembered her smile. “I trust y’all.”

  With Cindy retreating to her car, Pete and Roberta hurried into a huddle as they attempted to formulate a strategy, but things quickly devolved into Roberta berating Pete for not having discovered last weekend that Mason was a girl. Roberta wanted to find some excuse for sending the girl home, but Pete wouldn’t allow it. It would be enough for her to sleep in the guest room. He did not want the girl to sleep in Neil’s bedroom, but he certainly didn’t want her to go. For Neil’s sake, he told himself, and at that point he wasn’t even lying.

  Pete would not have thought of himself as the kind of man who would become fixated on a fourteen-year-old girl, but let’s look at the facts a little more closely. First of all, the girl in question did not look fourteen. That has to cou
nt for something. An uninterested party would think I was sixteen, maybe even eighteen. It’s not the most dignified thing in the world for a forty-five-year-old man to fall for an eighteen-year-old girl, but it is hardly pedophilia. I looked like a woman, not a girl, so while we are certainly entitled to think of Pete as a perv, we are not necessarily obligated to do so.

  Secondly, I went after him. Maybe. That is what happened, isn’t it? At times he was so sure, but other times—well, it was complicated, wasn’t it? As the more mature of the two of us, he ought to have found it within himself to be wise and dignified and refuse to enter into some kind of fucked-up relationship because the girl wanted to or seemed to want to or whatever it was that was going on. All of that is surely true, and yet I went after him, almost certainly, and he enjoyed it too much to find the will to resist.

  Pete certainly had no way of preparing himself for what was coming. It began as nothing more than an awkward social situation that would someday turn into the kind of funny story you tell after a little too much to drink. I disappeared with Neil into his bedroom, where we did whatever it was we did—Pete certainly had no idea what was going on in there, and he didn’t want to humiliate his son by having a peek—until dinner, when we emerged looking neither entirely guilty or innocent. We sat at the table, where we were presented with Roberta’s chicken enchiladas, and Pete tried not to avoid looking at me, because that would be rude, but to avoid looking at me too much, because that would be rude, too. Mainly he kept sneaking glances, trying to remember if I was quite as striking, quite as interesting and pretty and magnetic as he recalled me being when he was looking elsewhere. And I was. You’d better believe it.

  Over dinner Pete kept staring longingly at a distant wine rack, but he and Roberta—mostly Roberta—had decided not to model drinking in front of the children. Behind the decision was an unspoken need to set clear, strict, puritanical boundaries. Uncorking a wine might just be the first step to an untamed, drunken bacchanal. Mason’s mere presence in their home that night was an assault upon the fortress of propriety, so cracks in the walls could not be tolerated. Consequently, Pete made do. Roberta, meanwhile, made a valiant and highly laudable effort to make conversation about normal things—which classes Neil and I shared, what subjects I liked best, what kind of after-school activities I enjoyed. I grant her points for her careful navigation away from questions that might have embarrassed Neil, such as which friends we had in common, what it was we liked to do together, or what, precisely, my interest might have been in a boy whose parents had come—really through no fault of their own—to regard him as something of a ghost.

  Questions directed at Neil lost momentum and died. There was no inquiry that could not be satisfied with a shrug or nod or shake of the head. Both parents tried, and both failed. When I talked, I found ways to include him that did not involve any actual response from him, and I knew he would be grateful.

  Roberta gave up on directing questions at Neil and focused on me. “So tell us, Mason, what kinds of after-school activities do you do?”

  I did not give her the kind of withering glance that any self-respecting goth girl would launch at a parent floundering this badly. Instead, I smiled broadly, waving my fork around for emphasis as I told her about my hours logged on the school literary journal. “I,” I assured her, “am a poetess.”

  Pete liked the way I talked. He liked the youthful exuberance and brazen self-confidence, all laced with the most subtle hint of self-effacing irony. As dinner went on, Pete regarded me less as a child and more as a person, less as a curious invader and more as an interesting, even welcome, intervention into his musty routine. That was what led Pete to ask more interesting questions, because he believed I could handle it, because he believed the answers would be illuminating. He wasn’t a parent passing judgment on the peculiarities of the younger generation. He wanted to know. “I’m interested in your, I guess, style, Mason.”

  “Pete!” Roberta objected.

  “I don’t think I’m being rude,” said Pete. “Mason knows that she dresses in a particular way, and she knows it is going to attract attention. It’s not offensive to ask you about it, is it?”

  “Of course not.” I smiled at both of them. “If you dress in a way that makes people stare, you should be prepared to discuss it.”

  “Is it some sort of a music thing?” Pete asked. “Are you dressing like a singer? Like, I don’t know, Marilyn Manson?”

  “Who?” I asked. “Oh, yeah. My mom used to listen to him, I think. I don’t mean that in a bad way. I like oldies, but my look isn’t about music.”

  “Is it about Twilight?” asked Pete. “Are you into vampires?”

  “I’m not a vampire, Pete,” I said.

  “I’d never suggest you were,” he said, feeling a little chastised, and feeling it was deserved. He realized he had veered into the condescending, and wished to correct course. “Of course not.”

  “Some people are,” I told him as I picked at a piece of chicken. “Some people like to pretend they are, and some people actually are. But I’m not.”

  “We know you’re not, honey,” said Roberta.

  “I’m a ghoul,” I said.

  This kind of pronouncement can bring a conversation to a halt, but I had confidence I could get things moving again. Neil chewed on obliviously. Roberta looked at Pete, as though begging for some kind of lifeline. Pete grabbed for the goblet of wine he wished were by his placemat.

  “Oh,” said Roberta at last. “That’s so interesting.”

  Pete sucked in his breath, came to terms with the lack of wine, and chose to valiantly march into the battle. “Is there a difference?” He met my gaze for the first time, holding on to it, and he smiled. I smiled in return, and he knew he was having fun now. He wasn’t teasing me. He wasn’t interested in humiliating me or showing me up. He told himself he was treating me like any guest. In fact, he was flirting with me. “Isn’t ghoul just a kind of generic term, and maybe vampire is, I don’t know, a subset of ghoul? All vampires are ghouls but only some ghouls are vampires. Like squares and rectangles.”

  “It’s a common mistake,” I told him, careful to sound amused as well. I was also flirting. “Really, there’s no reason to be embarrassed. But no vampires are ghouls. Different things. Vampires suck the blood of the living. Ghouls survive off the flesh of the dead. And, to a lesser extent, disillusionment.”

  “Is this appropriate dinner conversation?” Roberta asked.

  “Don’t we all eat the flesh of the dead?’ asked Pete, holding up a piece of chicken on his fork.

  Across the table, Neil sawed a piece of enchilada in half with his knife and fork.

  I met Pete’s gaze, firm and steady, and showed him my best, full-toothed, red-lipped smile. “Indeed we do. But,” I added, “a ghoul prefers to eat uncooked human flesh.”

  “I really don’t think we should be talking about this,” said Roberta, “but what a wonderful imagination you have.”

  They made up the guest room for me. “We’re not comfortable with the two of you sharing a room together,” Roberta said. “You understand, don’t you, Neil?”

  He shrugged. “I guess. Whatever.”

  Pete stared at his son in undisguised disappointment. A charming, sexy, unconventional girl was sleeping over at his house. Surely this was the time to rouse himself from his torpor. Surely this was something worth fighting for, but Neil glanced at his cuticles and jabbed at the carpet with the tip of his sneaker.

  They let us stay up playing video games until eleven, and then it was lights out. The guest room had its own bathroom, so I disappeared inside but did not get undressed. I turned out my light, and by midnight the rest of the house was dark. I waited, not certain what Pete would do, but I knew a thing or two about desire and longing, and I’d placed my bets. A little after one in the morning, I saw a light go on in the kitchen. I heard the shuffle of feet, the low murmur of the TV, and the distinctive popping of a cork. Pete decided he would have that wine
after all. I waited until I thought he’d have had time for a glass and then went out, still fully dressed, still fully made up, looking fresh, rested, impossibly unrumpled. He was sitting at the kitchen table, wearing a white T-shirt and cotton shorts, watching a black-and-white movie on the TV, with a bottle of wine and a glass in front of him. And he was glad to see me. Maybe even relieved. He didn’t know himself.

  “Where do you keep the wineglasses?” I asked.

  He paused for a moment, and somewhere in his reptile brain a thousand possibilities played out, a thousand choices presented themselves, but there were really only two, and he chose between them without taking a moment to seriously consider the alternative. He looked at my lips, red as blood and glistening from a fresh application of lipstick, and gestured toward one of the cabinets. I took a glass, sat down across from him, and poured. I swirled my glass, took a sip, and then looked at the label.

  “So, what?” he asked. “You’re some kind of bad girl?”

  “I like wine,” I said. “I prefer old-world reds. You know, big Italian wines, especially anything from Piedmont, but this is pretty good for a California cab.” I took another sip and met his gaze, enjoying astonishment and pleasure, enjoying the distant thrum of gears turning in his mind. “Define ‘bad girl.’ ”

  “Come on,” he said. “What are you doing with Neil? You are a beautiful young girl and Neil is … You know.”

  I leaned forward, letting my top sag just enough to improve his view. “Tell me.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with him,” Pete said, staring into my face because he dared not look down my top. “He’s just a loner. He doesn’t have a lot of friends. You must know that. Before you, he didn’t seem to have any friends, and he didn’t seem to mind. As near as I can tell, the other kids don’t pick on him. They hardly even notice him. When we have conferences at school, his teachers need a minute to go through his file, as if they’re trying to remember who he is. Christ, sometimes I come home and see him and remember that I have a son.”