Portraits of His Children Read online

  Helen’s face was red; beet red, Cantling thought, and rejected it, too old, too trite. “Oh, yes, but she’ll do them, won’t she?” Her voice was pure acid. “Cissy, your cute little Cissy. She’ll get a sexy little tattoo on her ass if you ask her to, right? She’ll do it outdoors, she’ll do it in all kinds of strange places, with people all around. She’ll wear kinky underwear, she thinks it’s fun. She’ll let you come in her mouth whenever you like. She’s always ready and she doesn’t have any stretch marks and she has eighteen-year-old tits, and she’ll always have eighteen-year-old tits, won’t she? How the hell do I compete with that, huh? How? How? HOW?”

  Richard Cantling’s own anger was a cold, controlled, sarcastic thing. He stood up in the face of her fury and smiled sweetly. “Read the book,” he said. “Take notes.”

  * * *

  He woke suddenly, in darkness, to the light touch of skin against his foot.

  Cissy was perched on top of the footboard, a red satin sheet wrapped around her, a long slim leg exploring under his blankets. She was playing footsie with him, and smiling mischievously. “Hi, Daddy,” she said.

  Cantling had been afraid of this. It had been in his mind all evening. Sleep had not come easily. He pulled his foot away and struggled to a sitting position.

  Cissy pouted. “Don’t you want to play?” she asked.

  “I,” he said, “I don’t believe this. This can’t be real.”

  “It can still be fun,” she said.

  “What the hell is Michelle doing to me? How can this be happening?”

  She shrugged. The sheet slipped a little; one perfect red-tipped eighteen-year-old breast peeked out.

  “You still have eighteen-year-old tits,” Cantling said numbly. “You’ll always have eighteen-year-old tits.”

  Cissy laughed. “Sure. You can borrow them, if you like, Daddy. I’ll bet you can think of something interesting to do with them.”

  “Stop calling me Daddy,” Cantling said.

  “Oh, but you are my daddy,” Cissy said in her little-girl voice.

  “Stop that!” Cantling said.

  “Why? You want to, Daddy, you want to play with your little girl, don’t you?” She winked. “Vice is nice but incest is best. The families that play together stay together.” She looked around. “I like four-posters. You want to tie me up, Daddy? I’d like that.”

  “No,” Cantling said. He pushed back the covers, got out of bed, found his slippers and robe. His erection throbbed against his leg. He had to get away, he had to put some distance between him and Cissy; otherwise . . . he didn’t want to think about otherwise. He busied himself making a fire.

  “I like that,” Cissy said when he got it going. “Fires are so romantic.”

  Cantling turned around to face her again. “Why you?” he asked, trying to stay calm. “Richardson was the protagonist of Black Roses, not you. And why skip to my fourth book? Why not somebody from Family Tree or Rain?”

  “Those gobblers?” Cissy said. “Nobody real there. You didn’t really want Richardson, did you? I’m a lot more fun.” She stood up and let go of the satin sheet. It puddled about her ankles, the flames reflected off its shiny folds. Her body was soft and sweet and young. She kicked free of the sheet and padded toward him.

  “Cut it out, Cissy,” Cantling barked.

  “I won’t bite,” Cissy said. She giggled. “Unless you want me to. Maybe I should tie you up, huh?” She put her arms around him, gave him a hug, turned up her face for a kiss.

  “Let go of me,” he said, weakly. Her arms felt good. She felt good as she pressed up against him. It had been a long time since Richard Cantling had held a woman in his arms; he didn’t like to think about how long. And he had never had a woman like Cissy, never, never. But he was frightened. “I can’t do this,” he said. “I can’t. I don’t want to.”

  Cissy reached through the folds of his robe, shoved her hand inside his briefs, squeezed him gently. “Liar,” she said. “You want me. You’ve always wanted me. I’ll bet you used to stop and jack off when you were writing the sex scenes.”

  “No,” Cantling said. “Never.”

  “Never?” She pouted. Her hand moved up and down. “Well, I bet you wanted to. I bet you got hard, anyway. I bet you got hard every time you described me.”

  “I,” he said. The denial would not come. “Cissy, please.”

  “Please,” she murmured. Her hand was busy. “Yes, please.” She tugged at his briefs and they fluttered to the floor. “Please,” she said. She untied his robe and helped him out of it. “Please.” Her hand moved along his side, played with his nipples; she stepped closer, and her breasts pressed lightly against his chest. “Please,” she said, and she looked up at him. Her tongue moved between her lips.

  Richard Cantling groaned and took her in his trembling arms.

  She was like no woman he had ever had. Her touch was fire and satin, electric, and her secret places were sweet as honey.

  * * *

  In the morning she was gone.

  Cantling woke late, too exhausted to make himself breakfast. Instead he dressed and walked into town, to a small cafe in a quaint hundred-year-old brick building at the foot of the bluffs. He tried to sort things out over coffee and blueberry pancakes.

  None of it made any sense. It could not be happening, but it was; denial accomplished nothing. Cantling forked down a mouthful of homemade blueberry pancake, but the only taste in his mouth was fear. He was afraid for his sanity. He was afraid because he did not understand, did not want to understand. And there was another, deeper, more basic fear.

  He was afraid of what would come next. Richard Cantling had published nine novels.

  He thought of Michelle. He could phone her, beg her to call it off before he went mad. She was his daughter, his flesh and blood, surely she would listen to him. She loved him. Of course she did. And he loved her too, no matter what she might think. Cantling knew his faults. He had examined himself countless times, under various guises, in the pages of his books. He was impossibly stubborn, willful, opinionated. He could be rigid and unbending. He could be cold. Still, he thought of himself as a decent man. Michelle . . . she had inherited some of his perversity, she was furious at him, hate was so very close to love, but surely she did not mean to do him serious harm.

  Yes, he could phone Michelle, ask her to stop. Would she? If he begged her forgiveness, perhaps. That day, that terrible day, she’d told him that she would never forgive him, never, but she couldn’t have meant that. She was his only child. The only child of his flesh, at any rate.

  Cantling pushed away his empty plate and sat back. His mouth was set in a hard rigid line. Beg for mercy? He did not like that. What had he done, after all? Why couldn’t they understand? Helen had never understood and Michelle was as blind as her mother. A writer must live for his work. What had he done that was so terrible? What had he done that required forgiveness? Michelle ought to be the one phoning him.

  The hell with it, Cantling thought. He refused to be cowed. He was right; she was wrong. Let Michelle call him if she wanted a rapprochement. She was not going to terrify him into submission. What was he so afraid of anyway? Let her send her portraits, all the portraits she wanted to paint. He’d hang them up on his walls, display the paintings proudly (they were really a homage to his work, after all), and if the damned things came alive at night and prowled through his house, so be it. He’d enjoy their visits. Cantling smiled. He’d certainly enjoyed Cissy, no doubt of that. Part of him hoped she’d come back. And even Dunnahoo, well, he was an insolent kid, but there was no real harm in him, he just liked to mouth off.

  Why, now that he stopped to consider it, Cantling found that the possibilities had a certain intoxicating charm. He was uniquely privileged. Scott Fitzgerald never attended one of Gatsby’s fabulous parties, Conan Doyle could never really sit down with Holmes and Watson, Nabokov never actually tumbled Lolita. What would they have said to the idea?

  The more he considered thi
ngs, the more cheerful he became. Michelle was trying to rebuke him, to frighten him, but she was really giving him a delicious experience. He could play chess with Sergei Tederenko, the cynical emigre hustler from En Passant. He could argue politics with Frank Corwin, the union organizer from his Depression novel, Times Are Hard. He might flirt with beautiful Beth McKenzie, go dancing with crazy old Miss Aggie, seduce the Danzinger twins and fulfill the one sexual fantasy that Cissy had left untouched, yes, certainly, what the hell had he been afraid of? These were his own creations, his characters, his friends and family.

  Of course, there was the new book to consider. Cantling frowned. That was a disturbing thought. But Michelle was his daughter, she loved him, surely she wouldn’t go that far. No, of course not. He put the idea firmly aside and picked up his check.

  * * *

  He expected it. He was almost looking forward to it. And when he returned from his evening constitutional, his cheeks red from the wind, his heart beating just a little faster in anticipation, it was there waiting for him, the familiar rectangle wrapped in plain brown paper. Richard Cantling carried it inside carefully. He made himself a cup of coffee before he unwrapped it, deliberately prolonging the suspense to savor the moment, delighting in the thought of how deftly he’d turned Michelle’s cruel little plan on its head.

  He drank his coffee, poured a refill, drank that. The package stood a few feet away. Cantling played a little game with himself, trying to guess whose portrait might be within. Cissy had said something about none of the characters from Family Tree or Rain being real enough. Cantling mentally reviewed his life’s work, trying to decide which characters seemed most real. It was a pleasant speculation, but he could reach no firm conclusions. Finally he shoved his coffee cup aside and moved to undo the wrappings. And there it was.

  Barry Leighton.

  Again, the painting itself was superb. Leighton was seated in a newspaper city room, his elbow resting on the gray metal case of an old manual typewriter. He wore a rumpled brown suit and his white shirt was open at the collar and plastered to his body by perspiration. His nose had been broken more than once, and was spread all across his wide, homely, somehow comfortable face. His eyes were sleepy. Leighton was overweight and jowly and rapidly losing his hair. He’d given up smoking but not cigarettes; an unlit Camel dangled from one corner of his mouth. “As long as you don’t light the damned things, you’re safe,” he’d said more than once in Cantling’s novel Byeline.

  The book hadn’t done very well. It was a depressing book, all about the last week of a grand old newspaper that had fallen on bad times. It was more than that, though. Cantling was interested in people, not newspapers; he had used the failing paper as a metaphor for failing lives. His editor had wanted to work in some kind of strong, sensational subplot, have Leighton and the others on the trail of some huge story that offered the promise of redemption, but Cantling had rejected that idea. He wanted to tell a story about small people being ground down inexorably by time and age, about the inevitability of loneliness and defeat. He produced a novel as gray and brittle as newsprint. He was very proud of it.

  No one read it.

  Cantling lifted the portrait and carried it upstairs, to hang beside those of Dunnahoo and Cissy. Tonight should be interesting, he thought. Barry Leighton was no kid, like the others; he was a man of Cantling’s own years. Very intelligent, mature. There was a bitterness in Leighton, Cantling knew very well, a disappointment that life had, after all, yielded so little, that all his bylines and big stories were forgotten the day after they ran. But the reporter kept his sense of humor through all of it, kept off the demons with nothing but a mordant wit and an unlit Camel. Cantling admired him, would enjoy talking to him. Tonight, he decided, he wouldn’t bother going to bed. He’d make a big pot of strong black coffee, lay in some Seagram’s 7, and wait.

  * * *

  It was past midnight and Cantling was rereading the leatherbound copy of Byeline when he heard ice cubes clinking together in the kitchen. “Help yourself, Barry,” he called out.

  Leighton came through the swinging door, tumbler in hand. “I did,” he said. He looked at Cantling through heavily lidded eyes, and gave a little snort. “You look old enough to be my father,” he said. “I didn’t think anybody could look that old.”

  Cantling closed the book and set it aside. “Sit down,” he said. “As I recall, your feet hurt.”

  “My feet always hurt,” Leighton said. He settled himself into an armchair and swallowed a mouthful of whiskey. “Ah,” he said, “that’s better.”

  Cantling tapped the novel with a fingertip. “My eighth book,” he said. “Michelle skipped right over three novels. A pity. I would have liked to meet some of those people.”

  “Maybe she wants to get to the point,” Leighton suggested.

  “And what is the point?”

  Leighton shrugged. “Damned if I know. I’m only a newspaperman. Five Ws and an H. You’re the novelist. You tell me the point.”

  “My ninth novel,” Cantling suggested. “The new one.”

  “The last one?” said Leighton.

  “Of course not. Only the most recent. I’m working on something new right now.”

  Leighton smiled. “That’s not what my sources tell me.”

  “Oh? What do your sources say?”

  “That you’re an old man waiting to die,” Leighton said. “And that you’re going to die alone.”

  “I’m fifty-two,” Cantling said crisply. “Hardly old.”

  “When your birthday cake has got more candles than you can blow out, you’re old,” said Leighton dryly. “Helen was younger than you, and she died five years ago. It’s in the mind, Cantling. I’ve seen young octogenarians and old adolescents. And you, you had liver spots on your brain before you had hair on your balls.”

  “That’s unfair,” Cantling protested.

  Leighton drank his Seagram’s. “Fair?” he said. “You’re too old to believe in fair, Cantling. Young people live life. Old people sit and watch it. You were born old. You’re a watcher, not a liver.” He frowned. “Not a liver, jeez, what a figure of speech. Better a liver than a gall bladder, I guess. You were never a gall bladder either. You’ve been full of piss for years, but you don’t have any gall at all. Maybe you’re a kidney.”

  “You’re reaching, Barry,” Cantling said. “I’m a writer. I’ve always been a writer. That’s my life. Writers observe life, they report on life. It’s in the job description. You ought to know.”

  “I do know,” Leighton said. “I’m a reporter, remember? I’ve spent a lot of long gray years writing up other people’s stories. I’ve got no story of my own. You know that, Cantling. Look what you did to me in Byeline. The Courier croaks and I decide to write my memoirs and what happens?”

  Cantling remembered. “You blocked. You rewrote your old stories, twenty-year-old stories, thirty-year-old stories. You had that incredible memory. You could recall all the people you’d ever reported on, the dates, the details, the quotes. You could recite the first story you’d had bylined word for word, but you couldn’t remember the name of the first girl you’d been to bed with, couldn’t remember your ex-wife’s phone number, you couldn’t . . . you couldn’t.” His voice failed.

  “I couldn’t remember my daughter’s birthday,” Leighton said. “Where do you get those crazy ideas, Cantling?”

  Cantling was silent.

  “From life, maybe?” Leighton said gently. “I was a good reporter. That was about all you could say about me. You, well, maybe you’re a good novelist. That’s for the critics to judge, and I’m just a sweaty newspaperman whose feet hurt. But even if you are a good novelist, even if you’re one of the great ones, you were a lousy husband, and a miserable father.”

  “No,” Cantling said. It was a weak protest.

  Leighton swirled his tumbler; the ice cubes clinked and clattered. “When did Helen leave you?” he asked.

  “I don’t . . . ten years ago, something like
that. I was in the middle of the final draft of En Passant.”

  “When was the divorce final?”

  “Oh, a year later. We tried reconciliation, but it didn’t take. Michelle was in school, I remember. I was writing Times Are Hard.”

  “You remember her third-grade play?”

  “Was that the one I missed?”

  “The one you missed? You sound like Nixon saying, ‘Was that the time I lied?’ That was the one Michelle had the lead in, Cantling.”

  “I couldn’t help that,” Cantling said. “I wanted to come. They were giving me an award. You don’t skip the National Literary League dinner. You can’t.”

  “Of course not,” said Leighton. “When was it that Helen died?”

  “I was writing Byeline,” Cantling said.

  “Interesting system of dating you’ve got there. You ought to put out a calendar.” He swallowed some whiskey.

  “All right,” Cantling said. “I’m not going to deny that my work is important to me. Maybe too important, I don’t know. Yes, the writing has been the biggest part of my life. But I’m a decent man, Leighton, and I’ve always done my best. It hasn’t all been like you’re implying. Helen and I had good years. We loved each other once. And Michelle . . . I loved Michelle. When she was a little girl, I used to write stories just for her. Funny animals, space pirates, silly poems. I’d write them up in my spare time and read them to her at bedtime. They were something I did just for Michelle, for love.”

  “Yeah,” Leighton said cynically. “You never even thought about getting them published?”

  Cantling grimaced. “That . . . you’re implying . . . that’s a distortion. Michelle loved the stories so much, I thought maybe other kids might like them too. It was just an idea. I never did anything about it.”

  “Never?”

  Cantling hesitated. “Look, Bert was my friend as well as my agent. He had a little girl of his own. I showed him the stories once. Once!”

  “I can’t be pregnant,” Leighton said. “I only let him fuck me once. Once!”

  “He didn’t even like them,” Cantling said.