by K M Cholewa
“I want to tell you something,” Tatum said. “I feel like telling a story.”
The stoners pitched their money onto a shared check and moved, tired-eyed, toward the casino and street. The first woman to arrive, tall and acne-scarred, didn’t look at them as she passed. She sat down at the stool farthest from the phone, closest to the casino.
“One second,” Paris said to Tatum.
Paris let the phone hang from its cord as he ladled a bowl of soup. He pulled a spoon from the silverware rack beneath the counter and grabbed a fistful of crackers wrapped two to a pack. He carried it all to the woman and placed it in front of her. She didn’t look up, but the words thank you emanated from her, forming in the space around her.
“Tell me,” Paris said, returning to the phone.
“I was eleven,” Tatum said, her voice disembodied. “I wanted to play with my sister, Margaret, but she wouldn’t let me. In true kid sister form, I didn’t let up. I whined and begged and loitered in her bedroom doorway. I told her I didn’t have anything to do and she said, ‘Why don’t you kill yourself?’”
Paris watched a second woman come in, his favorite who had told him her name was Linda. Almond-eyed and with stray grays curling wiry in her dark hair, she looked half-something — Indian, Italian, maybe black, or Greek. Her pretty was faded by resignation to a thing that was or a thing that was not. Whichever thing, it either was or wasn’t for a long time. She unzipped her windbreaker and took a stool at the counter, in the middle, not in her usual seat at the end closest to the phone. She was not a prostitute of the high-heels and hot-pants sort. She looked as ordinary as her johns. She made certain rounds, kept certain hours in low life places. She was available, and those who needed to know knew. It was clear, somehow, that the money she earned was not her own. She rested her elbows on the counter and folded her hands. She aimed at more than invisibility. It was nonexistence she tried to cultivate until Paris was finished.
“So, I go to the garage,” Tatum said. “I climbed up on this tool thing and took down my father’s hunting rifle. I tried to turn the barrel toward my head. To tell you the truth,” she said, “I think I was more playing at killing myself than actually going for it. Anyway, the rifle was too long for me to manage, and while struggling with it, it goes off.”
She paused. The acne-scarred woman opened a packet of crackers slowly, almost painfully, like a burn unit victim.
“But you lived,” Paris said.
“I did. But I also took out the garage window. Anyway, in seconds, the garage door was hauled open. There was my mother and some neighbors. I was on the ground. The rifle was on the ground. My hands were burning. My ears were ringing. Everyone was talking to me. They were making gestures that said, relax, be calm. I couldn’t hear a thing. Then I saw Margaret.”
Paris knew, then, that Margaret was dead.
“She gave me this look,” Tatum said.
Paris could tell it was a good thing, the look.
“She approved?” he said.
“She was impressed,” Tatum said. “Then the paramedics came. They examined me and took me to the hospital. Blah, blah, blah. After that, Margaret let me play with her for . . . well, it must have been weeks, but it felt like forever.”
This, Paris knew, was the point of the story. The happy ending.
“She died, didn’t she?” he said.
Linda’s eyes briefly flickered in his direction.
“Yeah.”
Paris nodded though Tatum couldn’t know.
Paris wondered where Tatum was calling from, but he didn’t ask again. She would’ve answered the first time if she hadn’t needed to be only a voice, invisible like his customers. So he let her whisper into his ear without squeezing her into time or space.
“Tell me something, Paris,” Tatum said.
“Yes?”
“Tell me anything.”
Paris turned toward the phone and stared at the wall’s edge. His feet were hot in his boots like they always were. His feet. It was a story he should tell her. One he owed her for looking at the topless pictures. Stink foot. It was his secret. It was no laughing matter.
Hearing more customers, Paris looked over his shoulder. Two more of the women arrived. There were four now in total. The Women of the Deluxe. It was another story he could tell. Another secret.
“You have customers,” Tatum said, understanding his silence.
“Yes.”
“Then, I thank you for your listening. Perhaps I’ll even bid you adieu.”
“I’d like that,” Paris said.
There was silence for a moment, an implied adieu. Paris gave a barely perceptible bow. Tatum hung up first.
Paris put down the receiver and turned just slightly. He looked down the laminate surface of the counter, a white dulled and yellowed. His line of vision included only the curved edge of a bowl of soup, sleeves and hands, and salt and pepper shakers. Paris saw it in paint. As he lifted his eyes, Linda reemerged into existence. She slipped down the counter to her usual stool. A young, tough, but frightened-looking white woman and her cross-eyed Indian friend sat in a booth.
First, Paris poured a cup of coffee for Linda. Then he carried two bowls of soup to the young women in the booth. He moved like a fish through water, returning to the backside of the counter, carrying the stacked dirty plates and the check from where the stoners had been sitting. Paris hated handling money in front of the women. It was the only dimple in the velvet fabric generated in these a.m. hours, the only thing that made him self-conscious with them.
The two younger women in the booth talked in low voices, unintelligent sounding conversation about places and procedures, something vaguely retarded in the rhythms and cadence of their speech. The two stayed for nearly two hours, enduring long silences, unashamed to simply sit in peace. Of the women, only Linda ever verbalized a shy greeting.
Paris performed the side work that he did in the middle of the night. He took the lid off the sunken vat that had held clam chowder for the previous twelve hours. He dipped in the ladle and spun its contents, determining how much was left. The women knew when the soup was gone, just as a dog knows when you’ve eaten the last bite of your sandwich.
Linda never ate the soup. Her collarbone and thin wrists made Paris believe she was a woman who lived on coffee and cigarettes, though she never reeked. As usual, she was the last to leave. She didn’t do business at the Deluxe, though her first time there she did say to Paris, “I’m looking for work, if you need anything done.” The service she was offering was unmistakable. Every now and then, before she left, she might ask, “You need anything?”
Paris would smile and shake his head. It made him feel guilty and ridiculous, those nights, for his offering of soup. He knew that on those nights she hadn’t made her money elsewhere. She would slide off her stool and walk into the inky night.
The sun bided its time beneath the horizon. Paris had left a spotless kitchen and a balanced drawer for Jerry, the old Vietnam vet who worked the morning shift. Paris passed through the streets on his way to the duplex in the light of lampposts standing proud as trees. Quiet doorways blended with windows and walls in the shadows. Fire escapes crept down brick veneers into benign and potholed alleys. Paris thought about a canvas, a twelve by fourteen, he had in his closet. The artist’s task, he knew, was not to reduce the world to two dimensions, but to find the proper detail — the curved spoonful of chowder, the fragile turn of a wrist — the fractal that told the larger story and contained the rest of the dimensions.
Paris had been saving the canvas. Waiting for the perfect idea. His excuse was that canvases were expensive. Not to be wasted.
The canvas had been in his closet for a year.
He reached the library and cut through the park behind it. He passed the concrete water fountain that jutted up from the ground like a squat sentry at the playground’s edge. The swing set and slide stood, sleepy as the trees, c
aught in the half-dreams of hibernation. He wondered if Tatum, like himself, was unable to cross the park without remembering.
It was in this park that Paris had kissed her. That they had kissed.
He stepped past the flat, metal merry-go-round with its silver bars and chronic tilt. The kiss happened the night they’d gone to see a local theater group’s production of Picasso at the Lapin Agile, a fictional encounter between a young Einstein and a young Picasso. The play had launched for Paris a mild obsession with drawing Einstein. Einstein as a janitor. Einstein shooting craps. Einstein selling snow cones.
It was a summer night, the middle of July, and Paris and Tatum were walking home after the play, cutting through the park as the day’s heat dissipated in the thin mountain air. Tatum’s throat rose from the scoop of a black tank top. A small, cloth purse just big enough for folded money hung from one shoulder across to the opposite hip. Above them, the sky doled out stars. She looked straight ahead as she told Paris that Einstein tried to save the universe from his own equations. When he calculated the destiny of the world as ending in fire or ice, he did more math, she said, grasped for an equation that would say it wasn’t so.
“Did he find one?” Paris asked, stopping at the swing set, partitioned off from the lawn on an island of woodchips.
Tatum pursed her lips and shook her head no.
“Then, we’re doomed?”
She nodded, soberly. Then she reached out and fingered a chain link that led down to a leather strap seat. She eyed the swing up and down, considering taking it for a spin. Paris watched her ringless hand, a hand older than her face. When their eyes met, she smiled, as though at an inside joke that had passed between them. Paris felt the kiss pressing at the seams of the moment, a gift apart from them, bigger than they, but theirs to deliver into the world. Paris reached to the side of her face. He leaned in, and their lips touched for only a second, but it was a second that included a Mississippi.
When they pulled gently apart, Tatum dropped her head, staring down at the seat of the swing. Paris could look only at her, his heart banging in his chest, the word ‘yes’ understood by him for the first time. ‘Yes’ not as an answer, but as a fact. Yes. It surrounded them, suffused them. But he could already see Tatum backing away from it, pretending it was make-believe, a game the wise don’t play.
But she had it inside-out. He was certain.
When she spoke, it was with caution. Each word selected carefully.
“Paris,” she said, “we’re friends. You like me as a friend. That’s why you kissed me. But if we were to keep on kissing, tonight and then tomorrow, it would become different. I’d become your girlfriend. All the reasons you wanted to kiss me would go away. People want different things from friends than from girlfriends.”
A small pendant earring caught a ray of park light and sparkled. Her eyes were green as a forest.
“I know,” she went on, sounding more nervous, “that you’re thinking we could be more than friends. But for me, there is no such thing. There is no ‘more than’. This is as good as I get. As your girlfriend, I would seem like less, not more. I like that you like me. I don’t want to disappoint you. Love doesn’t cure us of who we are.”
Paris trusted her, so how could he call her wrong?
Her truth swam past him as he stood there in his own. His truth was different from the one she had spoken. His truth was yes, but his mind couldn’t shuffle the feeling into anything solid or articulate. He only knew the summer cool air and the intimate space of the swing. He followed the kiss and not her words, not his own thoughts. His lips and skin had not served as a barrier. The kiss was sinking into his waters, floating heavily down into the quietest and darkest place, lodging itself in his sands.
Tatum turned away, looking toward the dark lawn and the distant sidewalk. She opened her mouth about to say more but was interrupted. A sudden loud ticking surrounded them. The sprinkler system kicking in. They didn’t run. Arcs of spray shot up from the grass surrounding them, spigots jerking in circles and whipping sheets of water across the clean-cut lawn. Paris and Tatum ducked but were safe, out of reach on the woodchips.
Tatum stepped toward Paris but turned profile, grabbing the swing’s chains. She sat down on the leather seat and backed it up until she was positioned to push off. She smiled at him weakly. It was a request. Paris thought she was requesting his love but not the risk of losing it.
“I know other stuff about Einstein, too,” she said.
“Tell me.”
Paris passed through both the park and the memory. He walked toward the duplex in the autumn chill through the northside neighborhoods of the aspiring working class and the liberal professionals. The houses weren’t grand, but they were beloved. Matted, raked leaves sat like black puddles on the dark lawns. These leaves were the last round, the round that might not make it into the Dumpsters and compost piles but would sit quiet under the snow until raked up in the spring with ice still clinging to their soggy brownness. The grass beneath would rise greener than the rest.
He walked the blocks, allowing himself the hope that Tatum would be sitting on the front stoop of the duplex. He pretended that she had called him at work from home, choosing to ease back into his company, first just a voice, materializing slowly.
But the stoop was empty.
Love is a demotion. The lover ranks lower than the friend. This is how Paris remembered what Tatum had told him that night in the park. He had decided that, for Tatum, such rankings must have to do with permanence. Those we can keep as opposed to those we can’t. Lovers were, undeniably, more slippery, more likely to come and go than were friends. Paris tried to understand her thinking rather than argue against it. He didn’t want to frame an argument on love’s behalf and risk it being a compelling one that wins her over but, in the end, isn’t true. She could be right. He might not hold up under love’s mighty scrutiny. When the hope for love outshines its reality, the beloved becomes a disappointment.
And a person can’t measure up to an idea, Paris knew. It was apples and oranges.
8
Geneva dozed while the cold hands of November pressed against her window. The black sky outside spread its arms, holding back the dawn. Voodoo curved in the soft angle of her knees and hummed, a pleasure engine. The sheets were clean, softly warmed with the heat of but one night’s sleep. Geneva had changed them before she left for Amsterdam so they’d be here when she got back, cool and fresh for her first night home.
She hiked the sheet farther up her shoulder and nestled deeper into the pillow. How good it all is, she thought, as the cat stood, stretched, and stepped over her hip to settle again against her belly. Geneva lifted a hand to pet him, a mere flutter of movement, and her mind changed direction like birds in the sky, a moment of love toppled by the fear of loss. A tragic equation of cause and effect.
Her mind flipped through tragic possibilities. Voodoo meeting his end by lethal injection at the vet, a mercy killing, the only recourse to an unrelenting suffering. Or she might find him, little body twisted at the curb, victim of a hit and run. Bad thoughts. Bad. Ill-advised and dangerous. Geneva had heard the warnings. The theories that our thoughts move into the physical world, twisting and shaping outcomes just like in the quantum physics experiments. Balance the bad thoughts with good ones, the gurus counseled, something to even out the bottom line. Voodoo may live another seven years, she told herself, have nine lives.
“Jeez,” she said aloud, propping herself to an elbow. How exhausting it is to be happy for just an instant.
Too many ideas camped out in Geneva’s noggin. Bad citizens, all of them, they left their litter behind, and they shook down newcomers, forcing all experience to run a gauntlet of comparison, reference, and cross-reference. Life arrived exhausted.
Geneva was well aware that she could crash and burn ecstasy on the rocks of overanalysis. But she didn’t believe analysis, itself, was t
he problem. In fact, she thought it essential to the well-lived life. Just knowing when to stop — that was the rub.
But her thoughts were interrupted. Her ears pricked up to attention. She heard a distinct click, a key in a lock. Her own front door opened and closed. The floor creaked beneath footsteps, and the hinges on a cupboard squeaked. There was no stealth, here. Whoever it was thought himself alone.
Then, a voice.
“Breakfast time.”
Voodoo sprang off the bed and trotted out of the bedroom.
Paris. Talking to Voodoo. Geneva’s heart resumed beating, and her adrenalin slumped off, slightly embarrassed. False alarm.
She got out of bed and put her thin, flannel robe on over her thinner cotton nightshirt. She made her way down the short hall. Quietly.
“Paris?” she said from the kitchen entry.
“Uh-jeez,” he said, turning fast and jumping back, holding a bag of cat food. Voodoo startled and made a break for it, leaping across the counter to the living room chair where he arched his back and raised his tail.
Paris held the cat food across his chest with one hand while pushing his glasses up his nose with his other.
“You scared me,” he said.
“I’m home.”
“I see that,” he said. “Tatum asked me . . .”
“I know, I know,” she said, waving him off. She looked at the clock above the sink. Five twenty. Voodoo jumped back onto the counter. Geneva picked him up and stroked him.
“Coffee?” she asked.
“That’s okay,” Paris said. “I’m sorry I woke you. It was still Thursday to me.”
“I wasn’t sleeping,” she said. “I was listening to the ridiculous nonsense in my head. Even when I thought you were a burglar, I was glad for the interruption. So, c’mon, interrupt some more.”
