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'Look!' she said, making a pirouette in front of them. 'You wanted to look, so look!' They looked, then looked away.
'Actually,' Couth said, 'we wanted to see what you were painting.' When Elsbeth laughed, they both laughed with her and stepped inside. Fred promptly bumped into a standing lamp, knocking off the shade and stepping on it when he tried to pick it up. Which made Couth hysterical. But Elsbeth tossed her shirt lightly over her shoulder and took Couth's hand and pulled him upstairs.
'Well, you must come and see the paintings, Cuthbert,' she said, and when Fred started up after them, she said, 'You wait down here, please, Fred.' Couth looked back over his shoulder, fri
ghtened and clowning and stumbling upstairs after her.
When Couth returned, Fred had completely ruined the lampshade with his reshaping efforts and was cramming it in a wastebasket under the desk.
'Here, let me fix it,' Couth said, and pawed the mangled shade out of the wastebasket. Fred stood watching him, but Couth nervously shoved him upstairs. 'Jesus, go on,' he said. 'I'll wait for you.'
So Fred climbed to the garret, unknotting the drawstring of his bathing suit as he went, critically sniffing his armpits and smelling his breath hugged into his cupped palms. But Elsbeth Malkas didn't seem to care about any of that. In a cot in her garret, she stripped his bathing suit off and told him that when she used to baby-sit for him, he would peek when she used the bathroom. Did he remember that? No.
'Well, please remember not to tell,' she said, and then laid him so fast he scarcely noticed that every canvas in her room was white, all white; that any stroke or color put upon those canvases had been painted over white. The walls were white too. And when he joined Couth down in the living-room, he noticed that the lampshade had been stuck back on the lamp all scrunched up and crushed, so that the light bulb was burning brown a part of the shade which touched it; the whole crazy lamp looked like a man whose head had been driven down between his shoulders, and in an effort to tug up the head, his glowing brain had been exposed.
Out on the blowy beach, Couth asked, 'Did she tell you the bit about peeking at her in the bathroom when she used to baby-sit for me?'
'She used to baby-sit for me,' Fred said, 'but she's wrong; I never did that.'
'Well, I did it,' Couth said. 'Boy, did I ever ...'
'Where were her parents?' Fred asked.
'Well, they weren't home,' Couth said, and they walked down to the sea and swam naked, then walked along the wet sand until they were opposite Couth's cottage.
Tiptoeing into Couth's hall, they were surprised to hear the murmurs of a lot of people in the kitchen, and Couth's mother crying. Peeking, they saw Elsbeth's parents and Fred's mother consoling Couth's weeping mother, and Dr Trumper, Fred's father, seeming to be waiting for them at the door. Their sin already discovered! She had told them, said she was raped or pregnant! She would marry them both!
But Fred's father pulled him quietly aside and whispered, 'Couth's father died, a stroke ...' Then he stepped quickly after Couth, intercepting him before he got to his mother.
Fred couldn't look Couth in the eye, for fear that Couth might see how relieved he looked.
No such relief, however, did he see in his bathroom mirror on the morning there was no hole to pee out of. At first, a little pinch would open it. Then it began opening and closing all by itself; he seemed to have no influence over it. He took aspirin and rationed his water.
But on the morning he shyly shared the bathroom with his father (turned away from his father's looming lathered presence shaving at the mirror), Fred straddled the hopper and peed what felt like razor blades, bent bobbypins and ground glass. His scream opened a messy gash on his father's chin, and before he could hide the evidence, his father shouted, 'Let me see that!'
'What?' said Fred, clutching what he was sure was only a remnant of his former part.
'What you're holding,' his father said, 'that's what.'
But Fred wouldn't let go, fearing it would fall at his feet; he knew that if he let go, they would never be able to put it back. He held on fiercely while his father raged around him.
'Stuck together, is it?' the good doctor roared. 'A little discharge now and then? Something like nails in the way of your passing water?'
Nails! So that's what he'd felt! My God!
'What have you been into lately?' his father bellowed. 'Sweet Jesus! Just fourteen and you've been into it already!'
'I'm fifteen,' Fred said; he felt more nails wanting to come out.
'Liar!' boomed his father.
Down the hall his mother called, 'Edmund? He is fifteen! What a lot of shouting over such a silly issue!'
'You don't know what he's been into!' his father shrieked at her.
'What?' she asked. They could hear her coming toward the bathroom. 'What have you been into, Fred?'
But this made his father conspiratorial. He locked the bathroom door and called to his wife, 'Nothing, dear.' Then, all pink-foamed, his shaving cut bleeding through his lather, he bent over Fred. 'What was it?' he whispered grimly, and the way he said it made Fred want to say, A sheep. But the pink-frosted face was frightening, and after all his father was a urologist; expert advice on peeing was something he couldn't afford to turn down. He thought of iron filings floating down from his bladder; he saw the stout snout of a chisel pushing its way down his urinary tract like a raft.
