The Jeffrey Eugenides Three-Book Collection by Jeffrey Eugenides

Author:Jeffrey Eugenides [Jeffrey Eugenides]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2014-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

The next day we didn’t mention it. When I got up, the Object was already out of bed. She was in the kitchen, observing her father’s preparation of scrapple. Making scrapple was Mr. Object’s Sunday morning ritual. He presided over the bubbling fat and grease while the Object periodically looked into the frying pan and said, “That is so disgusting.” Soon she was working on a plate of it, and made me have one, too. “I’m going to have the worst heartburn,” she said.

I understood the unspoken message immediately. The Object wanted no dramatics, no guilt. No show of romance, either. She was going on about the scrapple to separate night from day, to make it clear that what happened at night, what we did at night, had nothing to do with daylight hours. She was a good actress, too, and at times I wondered if maybe she really had been sleeping through the whole thing. Or maybe I had only been dreaming it.

She gave only two signs during the day that anything had changed between us. In the afternoon Jerome’s film crew arrived. This consisted of two friends of his, carrying boxes and cables and a long, fuzzy microphone like a dirty, rolled-up bathmat. Jerome was by this time pointedly not speaking to me. They set up in a small equipment shed on the property. The Object and I decided to see what they were doing. Jerome had told us to stay away, so we couldn’t resist. We crept up, moving from tree to tree. We had to stop often to fight off laugh attacks, slapping at each other, avoiding each other’s eyes until we could control ourselves. At the back window of the equipment shed we peeked in. Not much was happening. One of Jerome’s friends was taping a light to the wall. It was hard for us both to see through the small window at once, so the Object got in front of me. She placed my hands on her belly and held my wrists. Still, her attention was officially given over to what was going on inside the shed.

Jerome appeared, dressed as the preppy vampire. Inside the traditional Dracula waistcoat, he wore a pink Lacoste shirt. Instead of a bow tie he had an ascot. His black hair was slicked back, his face whitened with a cosmetic, and he carried a cocktail shaker. One of his friends held a broomstick dangling a rubber bat. Another operated the camera. “Action,” said Jerome. He lifted the cocktail shaker. He shook it with both hands. Meanwhile the bat swooped and fluttered above his head. Jerome removed the lid and poured the blood into the martini glasses. He held one up for his friend the bat, who promptly plopped into it. Jerome sipped his blood cocktail. “Just how you like it, Muffie,” he said to the bat. “Very dry.”

Under my hands the Object’s stomach jiggled as she laughed. She leaned back into me and her flesh captured in my arms shook and yielded.

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