Flesh and Blood by Michael Cunningham Page A

He looked up and saw Zoe standing in the hallway, shyly, with her hands clutching her belly. “Go back to your room,” he said. He watched until she had run into her room and shut the door. Then he stepped around Mary and his son and got himself downstairs.
    “You monster,” Mary screamed. “You stupid bastard.”
    Constantine didn't answer. He didn't look back. He made himself walk slowly, with buzzing calm,, out the door and into the garage. He got into his car. Breathing steadily, he opened the garage door and backed down the drive, gunned the motor, and drove away. The needle of the speedometer touched fifty before he'd gone two blocks. He looked in the rearview mirror and saw his porch light receding, joining the welter of anonymous neighborhood lights. The sound of his heart drummed in his ears. His face burned with rage and shame. As he drove he promised to work harder. He promised to be better, kinder. He found himself driving back to his development, to watch the nocturnal life of the houses and to listen, like a penitent in church, to the murmur of the voices inside.

1968/ The golf course was vast as an ocean, cut by a pale sliver of rising moon. Constellations glittered, and a northern wind, the first of autumn, tossed pine branches among the stars. Susan lay on the faint yellow square of the blanket, holding Todd's cock in her hand with cautious solicitude. She watched his face for changes.
    “Oh,” Todd murmured. Steam rose white from his mouth and nose. “Oh. Ohhhh. Oh.”
    “Shh,” she said, although he had not been loud. During the ordinary hours of his life he lived inside his own large flesh with astonishing ease. He seemed to find it unremarkable that his fingertips could grip a soup bowl around its edges and that his feet filled shoes massive and potentially lethal as cinder blocks. He obeyed rules, shook other boys' hands and told them, with profound conviction, that he was glad of their friendship. But at night, on the golf course or in his brother's car, something too big threatened to escape from him.
    “Ahh,” he said, and she whispered again, “Shhh.”
    He groped his way along her thigh. She hoped her thigh was beautiful, alabaster under the tossing branches. She hoped she was something to adore, in skirt and panties, wearing his rough cardigan over her bare breasts and the cold circle of his class ring on a chain around her neck. He slipped his fingers under the elastic of her panties. She shifted nervously. His fingers raised a queasiness in her belly, an unsettled feeling. They probed, rubbing her dark pubic hair (why was it so thick?), and then one dipped inside, quickly, almost furtively. The finger thrust, withdrew, thrust again. She fought a rising panic. He was so insistent. His finger burrowed through her in search of something else, a mysterious perfection she was afraid she lacked. Did he joke about her with his friends? She worked his cock faster, knowing that if she made him come he'd subside and return to himself, gentle gregarious Todd. To take her mind off her own fears she focused on his cock, its veined shaft and purple, strangely innocent head. Todd's was the only cock she knew, and when she fantasized, guiltily, about other boys, she imagined their chests and legs and asses but never their crotches. She put a white, illuminated patch where their cocks would have been; she made them powerful and inspired and neuter, like horses. Only Todd's cock appeared on her geography of the body. She wondered if he understood her loyalty's depth and breadth. She wondered if this diligence, this scrupulous and clinical interest of hers, was what people meant when they spoke about love.
    “Aww,” he said, a moist, guttural sound, and she knew he was getting close. His finger pounded inside her. She might have cried out for him to stop but instead she worked the loose skin up and down his shaft, up and down, aiming the whole of her will at it until, with a strangled moan, he shot a