but really, at age thirty-two, he is more boyishly appealing. This ingenuous physicality encourages connection. Children, especially, are drawn to him not because he is overtly affectionate but because he has a soft, highish voice. He inspires engagement and he exploits that.
He switches on the coffeemaker, which he has prepared the night before and decides to make scrambled eggs, which he does methodically, carefully cracking three eggs in a bowl so as not to get any shell. While the eggs are slowly cooking (he likes them soft), he butters whole wheat toast and then sits down at the wooden table with the carved legs and eats.
He thinks of Lizbett Warne. He knew of her, the way others did because of her role in Annie, but he never aspired to her. However, when she appeared at his mask camp, he was delighted. What unexpected serendipity. What fortuitous availability. All little girls appeal to Melvyn, but he aims for the ones who shine. That’s why Lizbett fascinates him. Her intelligent sparkle, her sweet-natured vivacity set her apart. Her luscious girlishness is magnetic. She is generous with herself, standing out because she wants to, though not in a pushy way. She seems to ease naturally and comfortably into showmanship and other kids look up to her. He wouldn’t say she is the brightest or the most insightful, but she is the most assertive. Where her fellow maskers seem reluctant to offer their ideas, Lizbett is full of them. He has worked on developing a rapport with her.
We have a relationship, he thinks, with a surge of confidence.
He cleans up the kitchen, meticulously drying each dish, utensil, and pot and putting them away in their proper places. He gives the floor a quick sweep and waters several pots of ivy on the windowsill. He goes into the bedroom and makes his bed, careful to smooth away all the wrinkles on the lavender coverlet.
Melvyn is not as preoccupied with his person as he is with his house. His clothes, mostly chinos and madras plaid shirts, short and long-sleeved, are clean and pressed because he takes them to the laundry, but he wears them longer than he should.
He does shave, closely. With a razor and a cake of shaving soap in a wooden bowl. He looks smooth-cheeked, but he actually has a blond beard which, if grown out, would be quite full. He dislikes his whiskers, sees them as detriments to his purpose (of appearing boyish), so every day he scrapes away the stiff hairs until his face is pink and shiny. His father, a captain who flew Lancasters during the Second World War, used to say, “a soldier always shaves, especially before a battle.” Melvyn wonders if he is a soldier, if what lies before today him is actually a kind of battle; an assertion of desire and of supremacy not over an enemy, because Lizbett is anything but an enemy, but over the unsuspecting, smug society that claims her.
Melvyn doesn’t shower. Once someone mentioned his body odour to him. Melvyn doesn’t shower because he doesn’t have one, but he does have an old-fashioned claw-footed bathtub. However, he hates to bathe even more.
This morning is one of those mornings when he feels he should have a bath. He tries to talk himself out of it, reminding himself he had bathed last week — was it Wednesday or Thursday? — but something pushes him and he runs the water until the tub is quite full, slips off his pajama bottoms, steps in, and slides back, immersing himself completely. In the hot surroundings he begins to remember, but it’s when he washes himself that the images flood back. He washes his genitals and backside quickly, perfunctorily, as if it were painful there. This is where his stepmother began. At bathtime. In his earliest recall, he is three or four, an intense little boy with a cap of white curls and an angelic face. His wide, round blue eyes are filled with tentative curiosity. Stacey soaps and massages his genitals, pulling and stroking the little penis continuously. And then she inserts one or two soapy fingers over and over, deep into his rectum. Or something big and hard. He squeezes his eyes tight so he won’t cry. “Good boy,” she coos. “Good, sweet boy.” He doesn’t know if he’s good or bad. He only knows that he doesn’t like what she is doing; that it makes him sore. She gives him hugs, but he is afraid of her.
As he gets older and begins to bathe on his own, she comes into his bed late at night when his father has passed out from Scotch. At first she just fondles him. But when he begins to experience erections she starts to put her mouth on him. Eventually, he is entering her. And then it stops, when he is in high school. She no longer comes into his room because she becomes pregnant. And everything in his life changes. Stacey calls the new baby Alice after her favourite book.
He never wonders how his stepmother could have done what she did. She may not know. Or then, again, she might. Her father, Marvin, was a dentist, the youngest of six children, with five older sisters who wandered in front of him naked, mothered and bullied him, teased and used him as a little houseboy. When he was little, they flicked at his penis. And his mother either dressed him in girl’s clothes or neglected him.
Marvin had three sons, and then Stacey, and though he doted on his little girl, as she got older he saw in her a personification of his sisters and that’s when his violations began, in a kind of erotic rage. She was the one whimpering and sore then. It continued until she left home in her late teens. If Stacey’s mother had any idea of her husband’s mistreatment of her daughter, she never let on. She had enough trouble dealing with his erratic meanness.
Sometimes Stacey’s mother would go to her sister’s with Stacey and it was there that Stacey discovered little bodies when she slept with her much younger cousins. They would cuddle up close to her in the bed. One night, three-year-old Cal woke up crying, and, to calm him, she caressed his genitals. She thought he seemed to like it.
In fact, Stacey had grown up believing sex was something males did to females, but because Melvyn was there and so passive, and perhaps thinking of little Cal, or in some kind of unconscious retaliation, she acted out against her stepson. Others tempted her, the little ones at the nursery school where she worked, for example. Sometimes when she took a boy to the bathroom, she would fondle his penis.
Melvyn’s thoughts of Stacey recede when he is out of the bath. She lives in another city. Alice ran away when she was fifteen. His father died of pancreatitis, aggravated by his alcoholism, just before Melvyn moved here. He thinks of himself as being without family.
Melvyn steps out of the tub, reaches for a towel, and dries himself. He reaches for the deodorant in the medicine cabinet. Then he goes into the bedroom and puts on clean chinos and a pink-and-green madras short-sleeved shirt. In the drawer where he keeps his shirts there are several little girls’ T-shirts, and on top, a pink sundress embellished with a cartoonish, sequined cat and words that say, “I’m A Pretty Kitty.” He looks at them and wonders what Lizbett is wearing that day. A dress, he hopes. A dress makes things much easier. Besides, dresses make little girls more appealing. He can imagine their sweet legs all the way up to their panties.
Melvyn Searle’s father, Ralph Searle, was a mid-level banker. He was a surly man and never sober once he got home from the bank at six. Melvyn tried to avoid him by staying in his room, but there was the dinner table where his father always seemed to find a reason to hurl insults at him or cuff him over the head. Once he dislocated Melvyn’s arm when he pulled at it. “Straighten up!” he’d yell. “Or speak up!” “Don’t chew like that!” “Clean your plate!” “You’re a freakish little twerp fuckhead, you know that?” “Get up and help Stacey, you lazy chicken’s asshole!”
Melvyn seems to think his father wasn’t always like this. He imagines that when his mother was with them, his father was nicer. But his mother left them when he was only two. He can picture being on her lap, nestling into her soft chest, but her face is a blank. And there are no photographs.
His father’s mother took over. She was like her son: never sober and always mean. His father brought Stacey home quite quickly and Melvyn’s grandmother left. At first, Stacey seemed nicer than his grandmother. She did everything to gain his trust, especially reading him all the stories she did. He couldn’t get enough of books. He loved the alternate worlds they offered him. Stacey was a wonderful, expressive reader, pulling Melvyn close in beside her, enveloping him with one arm. He felt so cozy and safe.
Being around children was the only time Stacey felt in control. When she was with them the insecurities, the shame, she felt around adults disappeared. And when she read to them, clustered all around her, her voice bringing