American Purgatorio

by John Haskell

  And when the plate left my hands I didn’t feel as if I was throwing it out the window. Not because it didn’t feel like throwing, but because it didn’t feel like me. Not who I thought I was, anyway. Some other me, I thought. And yet it was me. I did throw it. And the glass shattered, more than I would have expected, and the plate continued on its outbound trajectory, passing through the window and disappearing into the backyard. I could feel the cold air being sucked into the warm house, or the warm air being sucked out into the cold, either way it had a cooling effect. The cold air that used to be outside was now surrounding me, and although it was getting cold, it wasn’t me getting cold. I’d had enough of keeping the air out and the cold out and all the things I hated out, and now, like a huge inhalation, I’d taken the outside and brought it in, leaving me sitting there, looking through a broken window. I sat in my chair experiencing the transfer of air, feeling the temperature lowering against my skin, degree by degree, unable or unmotivated to do anything but notice it.

  Or maybe I didn’t notice it. Maybe I didn’t feel the cold. Maybe a kind of pride allowed me to sit there and see what I wanted to see, see myself as what I wanted to be. Sitting at the table in the cold air, looking at the baby faces strewn across the table, maybe everything seemed fine or normal. The article I was working on was an attempt to make the difficulty of a baby’s first year seem normal, to pacify and reassure and inform the readers (in that order) so as to create a world of acceptable reality and situate the reader safely in that world. A world I knew nothing about, by the way, a world of vomit and diapers that I had only talked about with Anne. And in the same way that I was manufacturing information about babies, I was manufacturing a belief for myself. Sitting at that round table I came to believe in what I thought of as a realization: the realization that Anne had been kidnapped. I imagined what had happened, and then talked myself into a belief in this version of events. Which relieved my agitation somewhat, and would have relieved it completely, except that now something had to be done.

  I called the police but of course they told me there was nothing they could do. I said I wanted to report a missing person but they told me that their hands were tied, that I should sit tight and that my wife would eventually show up. I called Anne’s mother again and again no answer, and although I didn’t quite know what it was, I knew I had to do something. So I found some duct tape, gathered together most of the shattered pieces of window, and by taping the broken glass in the approximate location it had been before, I fixed the window, making it, not good as new, but at least, as the day worked its way to its eventual end, there was action and movement, and although I was tired of being in my body, by fixing the window I was able to find a little normalcy. I wanted normalcy and so I interpreted the window breaking as a normal thing, saw the kidnapping of Anne as a normal thing, or at least a real thing. And I would deal with what had happened.

  The odd thing was, as I sat in my chair looking at the duct tape repair job, I had no recollection of throwing the dish. As if some force had acted on me. In my memory the dish just seemed to fall, not down but out, at an angle, so that in falling, instead of hitting the floor, it flew like a thing with a mind of its own, into the window, as if trying to fly through the window, like a bird, blind to the pane of glass.

  3.

  At this point the fellow who was never at a loss was at a loss. I wanted to change something bad into something else, and I attempted to do this by drinking bourbon from a bottle with a faux wax seal, or possibly a real wax seal, it didn’t matter because either way, there I was, four o’clock in the afternoon, drinking hard liquor as a way to stop what was happening. Although I normally would have listened to the public radio station, I didn’t. I closed my windows, shut my shutters, and pulled a wool watch cap over my ears to quell the sound of the cars outside, preferring instead to concentrate on what was happening inside, my heartbeat for instance. I would have liked, if possible, to excise myself from the outside world, or at least to push that world, with its radios and telephones and honking cars, as far away as possible, to do nothing but sit in the solid wooden chair (what I called my lawyer’s chair) looking out the broken window and become like a plant in the garden, my hair growing and my nails growing and that’s about it.

  Except that I had to do something.

  I’d fixed the window. I’d stanched the flow of warm air out of the house but I still hadn’t stopped what was happening. I still had to move forward, in some direction, and because I didn’t know what that direction might be, the only thing I could think of was to take a nap. Not nap, but lie down on the bed. Doing so, I thought about Anne and how we used to lie on that same bed, warming each other, my legs over hers, or hers on mine, and the sweetness of this memory was something I could only take so long—the fact that it was only memory, that all I had was memory, was painful—and then I got up, made coffee, sat in my lawyer’s chair looking across the photos on the table to the empty chair in front of me. I imagined Anne, sitting as usual, her back straight, her feet wiggling, and it took some time before I realized that I couldn’t keep talking, in my mind, to an empty chair.

  So I walked upstairs and started looking around, first in the bedroom and then in her closet. She had a separate closet and her dresses and tops were all lined up. Stacks of shoe boxes were on the floor, and there were sweaters and scarves and nothing seemed out of the ordinary. It’s funny how we sometimes act out the old banal clichés, because as I was standing there smelling the smells of the closet I leaned in and touched my lips to one of her dresses, a silk dress that I’d bought for her and given to her, and although she always said she liked it, she’d never worn it. In a box on the top shelf was her wedding dress, folded in tissue paper.

  She had a small room in the middle of the top floor that she called her office. It had a skylight and a desk and I looked in the drawers of the desk. All her tax returns and receipts and operating manuals were filed in orderly manila folders. In the receipt file I found a yellow paid bill for a tune-up, from the Trinidadian mechanics we used. The date on the receipt was just six days earlier. She hadn’t said anything about tuning the car, or that it needed tuning, but there was the receipt.

  On the floor, in a stack of art books with the names of artists on the spines, one book didn’t have a name. It was a sketchbook and only the first dozen pages were written in. More drawn in than written, mainly with geometrical shapes, cross-hatched ovals and polygons. There was writing on the top or bottom of the page, mainly reminders, things like Call Dad, or Make stretchers. She was an abstract painter, and other bits of writing were along the line of: notice shades of green, or masks of faces on people like masks on baskets, things that meant something only to her. Mainly there were just blank white pages, which in a way symbolized our life together. Just beginning.

  There were a few papers on her desk, some unpaid bills, a folded map, and several postcard invitations to art-show openings. The map was a well-worn map of the United States and when I unfolded it there was a circle drawn with a felt tip marker around New York City. There was a line from New York to Lexington, Kentucky, which was also circled. As far as I knew she didn’t know anyone in Kentucky. Or Colorado. The thick orange line followed the main highway to Colorado, where the town of Boulder was circled. The line stopped there, except that another circle, on the West Coast, was around San Diego, California. She was from San Diego. She was born there, which made the circle seem more than merely coincidental. It was her map, it had to be, and the cities she’d circled were … I didn’t know what they were, and so I took the map to the kitchen. I’d spread it over the baby photographs on the table, trying to figure out what it meant, when the doorbell rang.

  Patty, a neighbor who ran the community garden, was standing on the front stoop with her two black dogs, talking either to the dogs or to the woman standing slightly behind her. When I opened the door (and the dogs began sniffing) she asked if I wanted to participate in the neighborhood garden tour. They were looking
for volunteer gardens to put on the list but I said I couldn’t, that I was too busy. But Patty wanted to show her friend, a sturdy, older European woman, the backyard. “He has a beautiful camellia,” she said, and without any invitation from me she stepped inside. She knew the way, and so she led her friend through the house, out the back door, and down the steps into my small plot of garden.

  It was early spring and as the two women named and commented on the various species of plants, the dogs played in the bulbs that were just coming up, trampling on and chewing slightly the hyacinths and daffodils and tulips. Thomas Jefferson said something to the effect that tending a garden makes a person grow younger, and maybe I was getting younger in some poetic way, but I wasn’t feeling any younger, and in fact I was feeling tired. I watched the dogs and heard Patty calling the dogs, telling them to stop it and to sit, but I didn’t really mind. I told her, “No problema.”

  “What?”

  “No problem,” I said, and began asking the two women questions I’d had about tending a garden, and especially how to prune. I was in the mood for pruning, and it’s possible that I heard what I wanted to hear because basically their lesson, as I heard it, was prune with abandon. They told me that plants enjoy being cut, that it’s beneficial to their health, that it spurs their growth, and I probably wanted some control over something, and one way to have control is to cut things off. So that’s what I did.

  I waited until Patty had gone and then I kneeled alone in the dappled afternoon shade of the maple tree, examining the various botanical structures that were starting to appear in the garden around me. I looked at my rhododendron, standing against the fence, its buds preparing to flower. Despite the dogs, the daffodils and tulips were breaking through the porous earth. Green tips were sprouting on a pair of blueberry bushes. And because I loved the garden, and because the solace it brought was, in my mind, contrasted to the non-solace in my body, I held the pruning clippers in my hand, not like a surgeon, but I felt like a surgeon, examining a patient for signs of morbidity, looking to cure all forms of disease and death.

  This is what I’m calling pride. I believed, along with a million other things, that I could control what the world was doing, and in my garden the world was beginning to grow. And it wasn’t that I didn’t want growth, I did, I wanted it, I wanted my garden to live and prosper, and that’s why I held the clippers. To save something. To be rid of pain and fear, which was my pain and my fear, and although I anthropomorphized the dumb green garden, it was my own dull gnawing that was gnawing me. That was what I wanted to cut. But since I couldn’t cut that, I turned to my plants, first the obviously dead branches, the ones that snapped because the life was gone, and then the partially dead, and then the ones that were alive now but that, at some point later, would be dead. And since everything, at some point later, would be dead, I had my work cut out.

  And I’m calling it pride because I believed, not only that the eradication of the bad could happen, but that I could make it happen. That I could fit the world into my particular need, which, at the moment, was a need to cleanse some thing in me, some emotion in me, and yes, I was willing to adjust to the world, but I also wanted the world to adjust to me. I wanted the reality of that moment to leave my body, to float away like a breeze-blown vapor.

  That’s when I started cutting. And in this effort to soothe myself and rid myself of what I thought I needed to be rid of, I got carried away. The garden was my world, and to save it I began cutting, and the cutting led to more cutting, and I got lost in the cutting, bud after bud, leaf and twig and blossom falling—not like seeds, because they were dead now—but falling on the ground as I moved from rose to hydrangea to lilac, mindlessly and frantically cutting, so completely involved in the act of cutting, so absorbed in the belief in the beneficence of cutting, that I pruned to death every plant I ever cared about.

  I was oddly methodical as I strode from plant to plant, from peony to camellia to forsythia, so numbed by the frenzy that was whirling around inside of me that I didn’t notice what I was doing. Until afterward. That’s when I saw that my carefully nurtured garden had been reduced in a matter of minutes to unliving stalks. That’s when, exhausted and sweating, I sat on a step leading down from the deck and rolled for myself a thin tobacco cigarette. Because I wasn’t a smoker, after about the second puff I got lightheaded, and was just rubbing the butt in the dirt when the telephone rang. I’d been letting the phone ring since Anne had gone, but this time—something about the combination of dizziness and exhaustion and surprise—I forgot to let it keep ringing. I ran into the house to answer, and the next thing I knew I was holding the phone. Mike See, an old hockey buddy who’d apparently called before, was calling now, telling me about this car that was for sale.

  4.

  I didn’t need a car. I already had a car, and I told Mike I had a car, a maroon car, but he kept going on about what a deal this car was and how cheap it was, and as he kept talking I began to realize that in fact, at the moment, I didn’t have a car. I didn’t think I wanted a car but I asked him, as a courtesy, what the price was. He evaded the question of money, and emphasized instead the motivation of the seller, that the car just needed a little attention, and that he and I hadn’t seen each other in a million years. In the course of the conversation I went from uninterested in owning another car to curious about this particular car, and when he said he’d get me a good deal, for friendship’s sake, I told him I might be interested. And so we agreed to meet.

  The next day I rode my bicycle to the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, down near the water, to an address I’d written on a piece of envelope. It was a moderately well maintained brick row house and in front of the house a faded red sports car, or quasi-sports car, a Honda or Nissan, was parked on the street. Mike appeared from under the stoop looking as he had years ago—a little heavier and a little slower—jangling the keys. “Let’s go for a cruise,” he said, throwing me the keys. I got in, adjusted the seat and the mirror, and began driving around the warehouse streets, and all the time I was driving Mike was talking, not about the car, but about the girl who was selling the car. She was a nurse, he said, and very friendly. “I’ve told her all about you,” he said. “She wants to meet you,” he said. And I assumed she wanted to meet because she wanted to sell her car, but the way he said it, or the way he kept saying it, made me wonder. We drove around in the cold sunlight and it was pleasant to be driving, and the car itself seemed a fine enough car, nothing exceptional, until Mike mentioned the owner’s breast augmentation.

  The expression “breast augmentation” sounded artificial coming from Mike, but even with its note of false sophistication the idea piqued my interest. I’d never knowingly met a person who’d changed herself in such an obvious and prominent way, and who, because of that change, was probably feeling optimistic about the future. I thought at the very least I should talk with her, about the car, and I wanted to talk with her. But when we got back from our drive she wasn’t home, and so it was in my imagination that I envisioned her in her nurse’s uniform. But because I had never seen this girl, the images in my mind were images of Anne. The breasts I imagined, naturally enough, were Anne’s breasts. And as I rode my bike up Union Street, thinking about Anne and the car, if it hadn’t already, the idea of Anne and the idea of the car became conflated. A desire was created for the thing that was Anne-and-the-car. And not only was the idea of Anne conjoined to the idea of car, but they both were connected in my mind to the general idea of breast augmentation. Although I was only dimly aware of the intricate psychological machinations it took to make that connection, it didn’t matter. She’d left me the map because she wanted me to find her. She wasn’t kidnapped. She was safe and alive, and there’d been some miscommunication or misunderstanding, something we could talk about. I needed to talk with her. If I could just talk with her, I thought, then maybe this whole thing didn’t need to be happening.

  From that point on I was a man on a mission, and like a man on a mission
I put my life in order. I shaved and showered and brushed my teeth. Like a man on a possible suicide mission I went to the bank and took out all my money. Whatever the car cost—Mike guessed about seven hundred dollars—I was prepared to pay, in cash, and the next day I took a bus to her house. When I arrived, Mike, waiting on her front step, informed me that his friend was in the shower, that she had to work at the hospital, and that I should give the money to him. “She wants me to be her agent,” he said. And as I signed the various transfers of title, I tried to postpone the moment of payment as long as possible, talking with Mike about his thirty-two-year-old 1970 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, waiting for her to emerge from the house, not bikini-clad, but somehow revealing her transformation. But she didn’t emerge. And yes, I was slightly disappointed, but only slightly. I realized that it didn’t matter anymore about the person who had owned the car. It was my car now, and with it I had the ability to move forward.

  I paid Mike and agreed to let him get the car, a Nissan Pulsar, “ready for the road.” I would soon be taking a trip in which I would find Anne and bring her back, and for all I knew, it would be a long trip and I wanted the car in good condition. As I followed Mike to his garage I imagined Anne sitting in the front seat next to me. Like an amputee with a lost limb, I felt her and wanted her reconnected. And because desire breeds hope, I was optimistic. Anne was my object and my direction (my future) and I would use the car to find her. She was the woman who’d been separated from me, the woman I loved. And I say thank god for pride because pride was the soil out of which my belief was growing. Not only did I want to find her, but I would find her. Somewhere along the way the seed had been planted that this was the car in which what I wanted to happen (my belief) would become reality.