by K M Cholewa
“You’re going to disappear again,” he said.
“Don’t love me, please,” she said, reaching for her pants. “I won’t be able to take it when you don’t some day.”
“I don’t think I can not love you as a favor,” Paris said. “If you don’t want it, that’s different, and I accept it.”
“No,” she said, snapping up her shirt from the floor as she stood. “I do want it. I just can’t afford it.”
“You don’t love me.”
“Stop it,” she said, throwing her shirt at him. “That’s not fair. If anyone’s. . .”
She stopped and buried her face in her hands. Paris gathered up her shirt as a ransom.
“If anyone’s what?” he said.
Tatum sat back down.
“I can’t believe what almost came out of my mouth,” she said. She turned and looked at Paris. “I almost said, ‘If anyone’s not loved, it’s me.’”
“Turf, huh?” Paris said, sitting beside her. He ran a hand down her bony spine.
Tatum flopped backward on the mattress.
“I am so fucked up,” she said.
Paris bent over her and kissed her forehead. They made love for the fourth time.
Geneva waited in the basement with a stack of blankets and a set of flannel sheets piled in her arms as Paris and Ron maneuvered the mattress down the stairs. They tipped it onto the rug Geneva had unrolled to carve a room out from the larger space.
“I have sheets,” Paris said, seeing Geneva standing there.
“These will be better,” she said.
“Done with me?” Ron asked.
“Thanks, man,” Paris said.
They shook hands, and Ron headed up.
Geneva put the blankets to the side and tossed the pillowcases to Tatum, who had followed them down. Tatum worked Paris’s skinny pillows into them.
“Your sheets have completed their service,” Geneva said. “Let them retire. These,” she said, shaking the sheet out over the mattress, “need a life. Purpose and meaning. They’ve been sequestered too long in a cedar chest.”
She tucked in the edges while Tatum and Paris passed energy back and forth above her, a silent conversation in which she was not included.
They would make love for the fifth time shortly.
Paris and Tatum’s newfound passion was hard on Geneva. She was happy for them, but the energy between the two of them was so taut that it made her realize her separateness from it. She left them, climbing the stairs and returning to her apartment. She was heading for Parkview Home later in the day. Ralph had been put on breathing and feeding tubes, and Geneva couldn’t help but wonder if his decline was due in part to her absence. So, she had accepted the sentence: monitored visits. Ralph rebounded enough to get off the machines, but the Home had asked Geneva to sign a Do Not Resuscitate order, a DNR. Signing it, of course, was the right thing to do. But what she wanted to do was storm into Mr. Hans Mood’s office and declare with great indignation, You think signing a DNR for my husband would be advisable? Hear me well: I’ll sue if every effort is not made to ensure his well-being. I’ll get the Right to Life involved. If he’s got one cell left quivering, damn it, you help it quiver.
Such had been her petty dreams of vengeance. Instead, she had signed and been surprised by the onset of anxiety that accompanied the very real possibility that Ralph’s days were numbered.
She would leave for Parkview in the afternoon. Right now, she just wanted a bath. She went to her bedroom and kicked off her shoes in front of the dresser. She pulled off her earrings and flipped open her jewelry box. On top sat the old, blue, folded piece of legal pad paper. She lifted it between a finger and her thumb. It was the note she had received from John inviting her to dinner. Unanswered, it had taken up residency in her jewelry box. She knew it belonged in a garbage can, cast into the realm of “what if?” Wistfulness, she could allow herself, but not the suspense of indecision. Her lack of response was the decision, she thought, lying to herself. The note was just a souvenir.
Geneva did not see herself as having chosen a man, Ralph over John, per se, but instead as having chosen a path. It was a path she chose long ago. Committed love. Seeing a thing through to the end in order to know what one can only know by taking the whole road. There was knowledge at the end of it. There had to be. So she would not indulge thoughts of sacrifice or martyrdom. She would not make Ralph a burden. People aren’t high maintenance. Love is.
She refolded the note and returned it to the box. She picked up the envelope beside it and checked the contents. Inside were three joints that Vincent had brought her on his last pass through town. Several hours after Rachael put her hand through the window, Vincent had called, and Geneva met him for burgers and shakes at a greasy spoon. They had caught up quickly. Geneva noticed he didn’t ask the identity of Paris, despite that Tatum’s blouse hadn’t been buttoned quite right. Vincent shared his successes — an article had been picked up by the Utne Reader. He shared his troubles — fines, harassment. He told her of his plans. He and a friend were starting a business making simple, plain, pine coffins and marketing them to yuppies. He was studying composting human remains, though he knew the country, neither Indian country nor the U.S. of A., wasn’t quite ready for the idea.
Vincent was an interesting man. Geneva enjoyed his good looks and charm. No woman could compete with him when it came to holding his own interest. Geneva identified and thus couldn’t condemn him for arrogance. He was a good kid. A good man. He had called his mother’s old friend and made sure she had a small stash of weed. He had taken her out for lunch. He had risked running into an old girlfriend to do it.
Geneva removed one of the joints from the envelope. She frowned at it but took it with her into the bathroom. She sat down on the closed lid of the toilet. Through the heating vent, she heard sporadic sighs and throaty gulps of air. She struck a match and was about to light up when she had second thoughts. Did she need her mind any more open than it already was? Few understand the open mind. It’s not all “yeah, whatever, that’s cool” because it accommodates all the opposing arguments and the judgmental voices too. The open mind is not laid back and groovy. It stretches and stretches, works to accommodate more and more. Geneva figured her mind had stretch marks, and she really wasn’t in a mood to reconsider hard-won choices or see anything from a new perspective. She didn’t even want to acknowledge her choices as choices. They were decisions. Done deals. If God were truly benevolent, she thought, returning to her bedroom and placing the joint back in the envelope, he would have given Adam and Eve freedom, and not free will. Free will was the call to choose, but not to create.
Choices. She was fed up with them. Yes or no. This or that. Duality, it was such a bore. Free will says, sure, eat the apple, but do and you’ll pay. That didn’t sound so “free” to her. Freedom, on the other hand, says eat the apple if you must. It will lead to something different than not eating the apple, but see what you get and go forth from there. Free will had a distinct undercurrent of right and wrong, reward and punishment, that freedom was, well, free of.
She slipped out of her clothes and into her robe. Returning to the bathroom, she pushed back the shower curtain. Through the heating vent came the sound of muffled laughter. It made her think of John. She would’ve asked God for a sign — should I call? — if she hadn’t just questioned his almighty judgment.
Stop looking for answers, she told herself, turning on the water in the tub, drowning out the laughter. As the tub filled, she thought about the sayings, axioms, and pithy quotes pasted on her refrigerator and written on fragments of envelopes and napkins, tossed into drawers and kept for unknown reasons. She had more answers than questions. No wonder she wrote an advice column. The imbalance between the two, she thought, just went to demonstrate that there weren’t any answers, or rather, there were dozens, hundreds, millions. They just didn’t necessarily match up with any parti
cular questions.
She slipped out of her robe and into the tub, settling into the warm water. What could it mean, she wondered, that she was a person who had accumulated more answers than questions?
But she decided not to answer. It would only contribute to the problem.
27
Tatum’s hips balanced at the edge of the mattress. Paris knelt on the floor between her legs and kissed with a warm and open mouth. His tongue lashed out. It dragged, slick and gritty. His hand slid up Tatum’s stomach to her breast, up the curve of it until he pressed her nipple between his thumb and the knuckle of his index finger. She caught her breath. Her pelvis softly tilted, then tipped. Paris’s other hand stretched across the flat side of her chest, fingers curling inward, slowly, as though he could fold her scar into his palm.
Tatum was present as a drip on a faucet. The tension stretched her. Orgasm, when it came, was not coming down. It was a pumping, a diffusing, a spreading out like waves, creating space as it pushed outward. It served only to raise the stakes. She wanted more.
Paris leaned back on his heels and wiped his chin on his shoulder. Still fully clothed, he stood and headed up the basement stairs. Tatum turned to her side and pressed her legs together to still the hum. The bathtub turned on above.
Dragging the sheet across her body, Tatum slid up the mattress and propped herself on an elbow. Faint light from the window wells cast a green hue across the well-swept concrete floor and the walls with boxes two and three deep. Few of the boxes were hers, yet she zeroed in on her modest stack. Just a couple of months back, she had puttered among them, nervous and anxious, as though she were stashing a body. But it wasn’t a body. It was a book. The Book of Rachaels. At the time of the stashing, there had been no plan for Paris to be moving in. The basement was still the domain of the past. A desert for personal items. Exile.
Tatum’s eyes settled on the green leather spine just visible over the box’s edge. The past loves crashing the present’s party.
“So, we meet again,” Tatum said, and then she rolled onto her back.
Upstairs, the water shut off.
Tatum heard Paris before she saw him, and she sat up. He hit the bottom of the steps and came to the end of the mattress. His feet were bare. Tatum felt tempted to kiss one, the top of it at least. Kiss the monster. He pulled his shirt over his head, and it caught on his glasses, tangling for a second. Tatum pushed away the sheet and came to the edge of the bed on her knees. She kissed at Paris’s softly muscled chest and placed a hand on the pale circle of hair surrounding his navel. Paris pushed her backward and came down, one knee at a time, between her legs.
Tatum wrapped her legs around his hips. He pressed her arms over her head and held her wrists with one hand as he braced his body with the other. Torso grazed torso. And then it was all heat and steel and velvet.
They had stolen the moment, like new lovers do. A pocket of time that is what it is. Not part of the great march toward something else, not one of seven plates to keep spinning. Stealing moments draws the attention of grace, serves as a lure, and so she too was tangled in the arms and legs and entwined fingers. They lingered on the mattress, the three of them, insulting the self-importance of time.
When duty did call at last, they dressed in a satisfied silence. Outside, Tatum sat on the stoop, watching Paris behind the wheel of her car acquainting himself with the controls. She felt turned inside out, cool air reaching long closed-up places. The iron-gray sky above was splitting open to reveal ragged, blue portals, and the trees seemed to sigh as though washed clean. They had taken a beating from the hail, but it was somehow all good, the ordeal having left them ravaged and refreshed.
“Wow,” Tatum said, wrapping herself in her own arms. Sex between her and Vincent had become so tragic in the end that she had forgotten this post-coital purged feeling. Vincent had always gotten her off, but in those last months, it seemed more something he did to assure himself of the kind of lover he was than a drive that had to do with her. She orgasmed to avoid insulting him.
Paris pulled away from the curb. Tatum watched him go, thinking about the fact that Vincent had never called like he said he would the day he had showed up at Geneva’s. In fact, Tatum had begun to wonder if Vincent had ever even said it. She didn’t want him back, she felt sure of that, but the possibility that he might want her was an attractive one. She had hoped to reject him, look him over like a table of trinkets, wrinkle her nose, and shake her head no.
She placed her hands on her knees and stood. “Do you have to bring a problem everywhere you go?” she remembered Vincent saying on more than one occasion.
Perhaps he had a point, she thought. After all, she had been happily humming along with big plans for a big day, and now she had gone and polluted it with thoughts of him.
She went inside determined to get herself back on track. The itch to return to the workforce had been growing, and she even felt up to giving her oncologist a call. She was ready to follow through with the mammograms and health care plans discussed years ago. She felt alive. She wanted to stay that way.
The first step was to dig up her address book. She knew where it was, dumped in a junk drawer under the kitchen counter. It was the bottom one, and she squatted down to open it. She pulled miscellaneous instructions and never-mailed warranties from the top of the mess. She knelt down to shuffle through the rubble. Duct tape. Napkin holders. Sunblock. String. She pushed around the debris until she spotted her old address book. But then reaching for it, she noticed a picture frame peeking out from beneath. She knew the frame and remembered what had been in it when she had tossed it into the drawer. The picture had been of Vincent. She pushed aside the address book and pulled out the frame. It was empty. She flipped it over. It was intact. Not broken. She looked back into the drawer. She pushed aside an opened pack of batteries, a Christmas ornament, and a trivet. She dug through the drawer, looking for Vincent.
28
The hailstorm had left a kind of afterglow in its wake. Small splotches of sky peeked through the cloud coverage, and the grass seemed to illuminate itself from within. Paris thought of Tatum’s eyes as he drove, a green so different than the grass, which was both pale and bright at once. Tatum’s eyes were green like a swamp, a green pulled under water to stand in muddy bottoms.
Paris drove to his old apartment and parked out front. As he came around the car, a passing woman lifted her eyes to him and smiled. She was no girl. She was a woman, with tiny laugh lines at the corner of the eye that looked out from beneath her beret. Her loose black pants billowed slightly, rustling the Chinese symbols that climbed the outside seams. He smiled back and watched her pass. Her satchel strap cut her back in half along the diagonal. She was happy. Paris could feel it because he felt it as well. Like a million bucks. Maybe two.
The woman on the street was just the latest of many. Not just women but people. People had been noticing him. The women in the diner squinted softly and stole sidelong glances. Blair did double takes. It was a foreign experience for Paris, drawing attention. But even strangers on the street found their eyes drifting in his direction, choosing him from the littered world, from the people, storefronts, and traffic, choosing him above even their own thoughts. Perhaps, he was their thoughts. The thing they’d been looking for. Not him. It. The it he now had. The it everybody wants.
He bounded down his steps and opened the door he had left unlocked. His apartment was nearly empty now. Other than the contents of his closet, only a dank smell and a beat-up industrial ambiance remained. Paris crossed the room, wondering what its future was. Mailroom? Storage room? He imagined it filled with rows of metal shelving, office supplies, stacked and organized. Bodies would move in and out of the space. But would anyone ever see how at night the streetlight cut through the railing above and spilled across the tiled floor? It was no different than moonlight on water. It lifted one from the press of sc
hedule and duty and made you remember, this is your life, and you feel the joy, the melancholy, or the sadness that comes from the recognition. It doesn’t really matter what you feel. It’s just good to feel it. It’s good to know.
It had been the invisibility of the apartment that had endeared it to Paris. The way it blended unobtrusively into the world, it may as well not be at all. And now, they were finished with each other. Eventually, everything becomes the past. A fact that is a comfort when your life is in the sewer. Less so, when you’re walking on air. Recognizing the impermanence of things set off a cautious voice in Paris’s mind. With or without her, you will be fine, it said. One’s happiness is not dependent on anything outside oneself.
Paris gently kicked an empty box toward his closet, smirking at the voice. It spoke from some well-laundered world where business cards were exchanged. It spoke from black words on a white page, books concerned with love’s health, bearing white-coated advice. Paris knew what the clinician did not: his life would be damaged without Tatum. Ruined, even. Simple as that. He didn’t need to believe otherwise for the comfort of knowing he could go on should he lose her. More than wanting to feel safe, he wanted to feel this.
At his closet, he went down, one knee at a time. He reached into its deep corner and pulled out his canvas. He leaned it in the door jam and found himself wanting to stare into it. But he forced his attention to the task at hand. He pulled the empty box he had kicked over toward him. He tossed into it boots and tennis shoes. He hadn’t packed them earlier because he didn’t want them in the car with Tatum and Ron. Even if he had duct-taped the box closed, he hadn’t been certain that the stink wouldn’t seep through before they reached the duplex. Footwear packed, he opened a shoebox of bank statements and bills and other official documents. As he tossed the contents between two piles, one to keep and one to trash, the canvas kept drawing his attention. Like the dead hounds a psychic, spirits called to Paris out from grainy, white surfaces. Incoherent murmurs reached him, a thing existing, awaiting invocation. When he finished his sorting, he turned his attention to the final corner of the closet. One last box. His paints, brushes, and charcoal.
