by K M Cholewa
He turned from the window and wandered back to the canvas. He kicked at the edge of it, not hard, but toppling it nonetheless. His laundry, he knew, sat in a lump in the bottom of the machine. He didn’t care. He stood there until his feet snuck up on him, hot in his boots.
He left the apartment and finished his laundry. Back home, he washed his feet before matching up socks on his kitchen table, partnering them based on stain and wear. As he rolled them, he worried about how long he’d gone without physical contact. Without sex. He worried it warped him in some fundamental way. Unhandled babies fail to thrive. Films from grade school showed rhesus monkey babies, deprived of touch, despondent in their cages, clinging to cloth-covered pads for comfort.
T-shirts and underwear neatly piled on the table, Paris tried to find contentment in that each sock had found a mate. No strays or escapees. He stepped away from his laundry to check the kicked canvas for damage. It had survived. He returned it to the closet, an act of defeat. Retreating to his mattress, he flopped down, pulled off his glasses, and dropped them to the floor. He curled around a limp and deflated pillow. Thoughts he rarely permitted slipped through cracks into his consciousness. He didn’t want to be alone forever. He didn’t want to be alone now.
A tear made a break for it, slipped out the corner of his eye, surprising him.
“God, you pussy,” he whispered, wiping it away.
He rolled onto his back and covered his face with his pillow, trying to smother the want and need. Then a vision came to him. There was a half bottle of Chablis in the door of his refrigerator. He tossed the pillow aside and felt around alongside his mattress for his glasses. In the kitchen, he poured the wine into a glass with a Chicago Cubs logo on it. In his mind, he relived kissing Tatum in the park. He held the memory in his hands, hoping for a psychometry, a resurrection of feeling.
His thoughts flickered. Park lights. Shadows. The night he kissed Tatum and the angles made by the playground equipment and the hush of the summer leaves in an imperceptible breeze. He didn’t walk Tatum home that night. He never did. They split paths where it made sense, her heading into the dark hominess of neighborhoods, Paris heading toward the soft glow of downtown. Tatum’s key turned under starlight. Paris’s turned at the bottom of concrete stairs in the blue-white illumination and faint hum of an imposter moon.
Quarters and Lemonheads. He had been so rich.
Paris stared blankly at his cabinets. Cheap particleboard. Ugly plastic knobs. It was like a reflex then. No forethought. He reared back with his arm and whipped his glass at the cabinets. It shattered, splattering the cheap wood and floor.
The adrenaline receded as quickly as it had spiked. Still, he forced himself not to move to clean the mess. Instead, he imagined himself tossing the place, hitting walls with chairs and upending the table and his mattress. He imagined himself living among the rubble for days, stepping around the debris to reach the bathroom.
But that was not who Paris was.
He pushed his glasses up his nose and ran his hand through his hair. Then he bent over and grabbed the plastic garbage can from under the sink. He cleaned the floor and the cabinets thoroughly. He finished by running his hand over the surfaces, feeling for stickiness and missed shards.
Holding the garbage can in one hand, he stared at the counter where his drawings were scattered. With one arm, he swept the Einstein era into the trash. Then he roughly opened the drawer, pulled out the rest of the sketches, and jammed them into the can. When the drawer was empty, he slapped it closed with an open hand.
The metal lid of the Dumpster behind his building clanged shut. Paris stood there with his emptied can, thinking about Tatum’s phone call to him, the hunkered down sound of her voice. He thought about how sometimes when he was telling a story and she was excited to interject, she would raise her hand. Paris would stop his story and look around the room. “Tatum,” he’d then say, calling on her with a quick point of the finger.
What could love be to her, he wondered, if not that?
The sound of soft laughter fluttered down from a fire escape above the alley. He looked up. Above the buildings, clouds dusted the sky, but the stars were not intimidated.
He was going to do it, he decided. He was going to try again.
Don’t do this, a voice inside of him said.
He pretended not to hear.
14
One more ring, Tatum thought, huddled against the pay phone. Then she turned her head to look down the boardwalk toward where Rachael stood. Rachael’s eyes were darting from the car, down the boardwalk, toward the street. Tatum could tell she was looking for her.
“Rachael,” Tatum called out to her, still holding the receiver.
Rachael’s eyes snapped in her direction. Her chest began to rise and fall quickly as if up until then she had been holding her breath. Her cheeks were red from the cold, and her eyes were stocked with tears, not falling, but beading in the rims. Tatum fumbled the phone back onto the hook.
“What’s wrong?” she said, walking down the boardwalk to Rachael.
“Where’d you go?” Rachael’s voice was full of accusation.
“I was right here,” Tatum said. “Right there.” She pointed back toward the phone. “I was trying to call someone. What’s wrong?”
“I want to go home,” Rachael said, and her tears broke the surface, spilling out.
“I know, I know,” Tatum said.
“Was that my dad? Did you tell him to come get me?”
Tatum squatted to meet Rachael at eye level. She couldn’t tell whether Rachael was afraid she was getting dumped or hopeful that the cavalry had been called.
“It wasn’t your dad,” Tatum said. “I was calling some stupid guy I used to know.”
Rachael looked distrustful.
“Honest,” Tatum told her. “He used to be my boyfriend, and I found his phone number in the phone book. I’m glad you stopped me.”
“Your boyfriend?” Rachael said.
“Yes,” Tatum said. “He dumped me.” She figured it had pleased Rachael to know she had spent a night with her face in the toilet. Perhaps her having had her heart flushed down one would make her downright giddy.
Rachael’s voice quavered.
“What did he say?” Tears clung to her lashes.
“He didn’t answer the phone.”
“I mean, what did he say when he dumped you?”
A gust of wind made the buildings creak. Tatum reached over and hiked Rachael’s coat higher up onto her shoulders.
“He said he loved me but wasn’t in love with me,” she told her. “I think it was just too hard.”
“What was too hard?”
“It was too hard to love me.”
Rachael looked away and started to shiver. The wind had quieted but was only resting. A wet freeze was descending, a hint at the nature of the coming storm. Tatum could feel the temperature dropping.
“Does anybody love you?” Rachael asked, eyes averted.
The question was frank. Rude, by adult standards. But Tatum understood where Rachael was coming from. She needed to know. If their fates were to be bound, she would need the straight story.
“I’m not sure,” Tatum told her truthfully. She thought about parents, boyfriends, Vincent. She gave her most optimistic answer. “I think there are people who must have loved me, but that maybe it was in a way that I don’t understand.”
“Like when that guy said it but then didn’t want to be with you?”
Tatum started to laugh, at herself, but swallowed it quickly when it occurred to her that Rachael wasn’t asking about her or Vincent. This was about Rachael, herself. It was about her father.
“You’re easy to love,” Tatum said.
She looked at Rachael’s profile — Margaret’s profile — staring out onto the dirt street. The wind whipped back up and whistled down the boardwalk now, carrying shards of ice. It stung, but they did
n’t move. Rachael was lost in calculations. One’s own unlovability and another’s inability to love can be so difficult to tell apart.
The wind bit hard on their ears. Tatum reached forward and pulled Rachael’s coat together in the front. She knew she loved her. She loved Rachael like she loved Margaret. From whatever proximity allowed. She loved them because she wanted to. Because she wanted to feel love.
“I’m going to hug you,” Tatum said.
Rachael looked up at her, anger in her wet eyes. Tatum pulled her close. She held her and rubbed her arms to warm her. Then she pushed back slightly and pressed her forehead to Rachael’s. Together, they hung like a tear, awaiting a blink, awaiting release.
Rachael pulled away and looked at Tatum, her eyes full of hurt now, raw, without questions or blame.
“If you’re sad, feel sad,” Tatum said. “If you’re empty, feel empty. Whatever it is, Rachael, just feel it. Feeling full of love and happiness isn’t so different from feeling full of anything else. Even full of nothing. Full is full.”
A gust of wind whacked them. They steadied themselves against one another. Tatum could feel Rachael calming, comforted, and numbed by the cold.
February
15
Geneva sat, elbows to knees, head in hands. She had awakened to a dread and a pit in her stomach. She lifted the pillow beside her on the sofa and placed it in her lap. She smoothed the face of it. There, embroidered, was the Serenity Prayer.
God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and the wisdom to know the difference.
The Serenity Prayer, she thought, flipping the pillow over. So smug. What did it know of life?
The pillow had been a gift from Ralph, given for no occasion, decades ago. She had pushed away the wrappings, and her heart had sunk. Ralph was asking her not to struggle. She could see that. He was asking her to be other than she was.
Perhaps, she considered, she’d have been wise to heed his wishes. Become someone else. For indeed, what had she made of herself? Was she no better than a frat boy on a drunken sorority girl? Had she lost her antennae for right and wrong? Would not an alarm have gone off in her heart, in her gut, if her actions had caused Ralph distress? What could she say to a judge in her own defense? Your Honor, he had a boner. A boner! Do you have any idea how long it had been . . . ?
Geneva recalled getting the evil eye from the social worker. It hadn’t crossed her mind to deny the escapade when the nursing home called, and now she had been asked to refrain from visiting until the board could discuss the matter. Apparently, she had been determined a danger by the new staff social worker who had found in Geneva her first victim. Or rather, her first perpetrator. She had put certain phrases delicately, but threateningly, to Geneva. “Elder abuse.” “Spousal rape.”
Geneva lifted the pillow to her forehead as though she could block the view of the scene unfolding in her mind. Heads of thinning hair and pasty complexions. A room with a history of committees, agendas, and strategic planning. Bland coffee and supermarket baked goods. Budgets would be discussed. Personnel, too. Then, a cleared throat and a nervous shuffling as they turned their attention to geriatric sex.
Geneva moaned into the pillow. I’m a monster, she thought. But the fact, itself, was less distressing to her than the idea of a room full of others coming to the same conclusion. After all, self-scrutiny had always been her forte. Both subject and object. But now, she was what the world had been to her. She was a resident of the petri dish. She was smeared on a slide. She tapped the pillow against her forehead several times. On the last tap, she held it there, eyes squeezed closed behind it.
This feeling has got to go, she thought. Her internal needle was stuck, she knew, covering the same ground, over and over. She tossed the pillow to the side and stood. She approached her wall of albums, knowing it was in there somewhere. The song, songs, or side of an album that could meet her as an emotional equal, a force, that she hoped on this day would prevail. She gravitated to a worn, blue sleeve and pulled it from its tight spot on the shelf. It’s A Beautiful Day. It was the name of the album and the band. The vinyl was old school, thick and heavy. Its claim to fame was the song, “White Bird,” but like the pillow, Geneva preferred it B-side up. She knew that Tatum and Rachael were not home, and so she cranked the volume high.
The music was meaty. A trip classic from the ’60s, rock and roll crossed with snake charmers and hookahs. It stood on its own, drugs or no. Geneva liked to think of it as the music on a comet’s Walkman as it hurtled through the vastness of space. She paced to the front windows and held back a drape. The sun was invisible, having risen behind a bank of thick, gray clouds. Maybe, she thought, her anxiety wasn’t about the board. It was simply due to being unable to visit Ralph. Maybe he anchored her more than she knew.
She tested the idea, but it didn’t ring true.
Stray flakes drifted past the window. Geneva’s mind hummed, trying to calculate the distance between how she felt and how she wanted to feel. But there is no distance, she thought, because there’s no such thing as space. Then, she remembered it was time, not space, that was the collective illusion. But the error had come in handy. It reminded her that worrying was also the symptom of an illusion, the mistaken notion that one’s distress had utilitarian purpose, that it might mitigate the impact of a potential incoming blow. The problem was not the problem. The worrying about it was. She had no problem to solve, she told herself, no action to take regarding Ralph. Not on this morning, anyway, and not in this instant.
The thought was a breadcrumb. She tried to follow it. A gray quiet built within her, reflecting the sky outside. It was not joy, but it was calm. She took the moment, and when an even better thought graced her, she was determined to seize upon it with tiger paws.
She turned from the window, less paralyzed than she had been upon waking. She went to her bedroom to dress, choosing pink cashmere — acknowledging winter while invoking spring — and the black cords that she liked for their incongruency with her age. It was a miracle, she mentally informed the universe, shuffling her hair into place, that through the disease and the drugs Ralph’s pecker was able to break through for a howdy-do. She would not let the board rewrite her history. The moment had been hers, not theirs, and the moment had been Ralph’s, for whatever it might have been to him.
“Take that,” she said to the mirror, in defiance of some judgment she sensed in the great Out There. She insisted on happiness. It was an insult to suffering, she knew, but she was making the choice. Happiness isn’t found. It is won.
At 10 a.m., she left the duplex, stepping out into snow that tumbled from the sky like confetti. From beneath cashmere and wool, Geneva found the soft cold easy to absorb. There was no reason to brace. She walked, listening to the quiet carried down from the sky. She watched flakes snag on pine needles and wink out on the pavement. It was Saturday, and as she emerged from the residential neighborhood and headed downtown, the streets grew more energized, but not with the determined pace of necessity that governed the week. Next, next, next softened ever so slightly, giving way to now, now, now, just a breath here and a moment there.
Geneva stepped past the storefronts, the copy shop, Hoagieville. She smiled at the sign for the Chairman of the Board, an extreme sports shop. Not all boards were out to get her. She passed the doorway and the two young men who stood in it.
“It’s gonna puke,” one of them said excitedly.
“No, man,” the other said, more reserved. “It’s gonna rain.”
Geneva stole a sidelong glance at the young men. She liked the way this new crop were dressing, drooping pants and flat ski caps that came down to their eyebrows. They were shepherds of evolution, bringing the surfboard in from the sea and taking it to the snow-covered mountains. She secretly blessed them as she passed and their efforts to
keep the groove alive.
To them, however, she was invisible, she knew. A middle-aged woman, at best. An old lady, at worst. Irrelevant, certainly. But still, the fact of them brought her pleasure, memories of crops of yesteryears, the greasers, hippies, and punks. She felt a smile make a break for it. She liked the way it looked on her reflection in the window of the Made in Montana store. She remembered, as a young woman, that she had never doubted her wiles. She had not been a beauty. It was just that of all the things in the world to do, attracting a man never seemed to be one of the more difficult.
Up ahead, she noticed Tatum’s car pulling to the curb. Their timing was perfect. The plan was to rendezvous outside the Grounds. From there, Tatum was off to run errands. She would be picking up the birthday cake for tomorrow’s celebration. Geneva’s birthday was two days ago. Rachael’s was tomorrow. Rachael and Geneva would wait in the coffee shop, doing their homework. Rachael had a school assignment. Geneva had a column due.
Rachael got out from the passenger’s side and looked up the sidewalk. She didn’t wave but did continue to look as Geneva approached. It was a greeting of sorts.
Geneva wasn’t sure what she thought of Rachael. A shell-shocked little creature, she had seemed at first, arriving late in the night some three months back. Tatum told her the story. The dead mother. The father not up to the task. Geneva could never admit it outside of the privacy of her own mind, but at first, she was not thrilled with the arrival of a child into her world. She had already navigated the world of mothers as a childless woman while in her twenties and thirties. She remembered it as a world of women who either imagined her life as joyless or resented her freedom. They all seemed to believe there was a depth of love of which Geneva was incapable as it was a skill acquired exclusively through breeding.
