by Paul Neilan
“YOU SMELL LIKE FOOD!” Marlene shouted when she walked in.
Thank you. Where’s the sweeper? I had managed to kick the glass into a small pile but the salt was still everywhere.
What?
B-r-o-o-m, I spelled out with my hand.
I’ll get it. What happened?
One of my saltshakers broke and Doug started crying.
What are you talking about?
I don’t know.
Why did you bring a saltshaker to a dentist appointment?
I thought we could have a picnic. I don’t know.
You’re a weirdo.
There was a broom but no dustpan so the best I could do was sweep the salt up against the walls, which was as much as I would’ve done anyway.
I have to tell you something, Marlene signed, just as I was finishing up.
What. I was demoralized from sweeping the salt and from all that I had lost.
You can’t tell anyone or I’ll get in trouble.
I don’t care about anything.
Promise you won’t tell!
Fine. I promise.
She looked over her shoulder and put her finger to her lips, even though I wasn’t talking.
I cheated on my husband again.
You always cheat on your husband.
No, but bad. Bad. I slept with—and she jerked her thumb over her shoulder.
Jesus Christ.
No, I signed.
I did!
You fucked Doug?
Yes.
I wanted to beat myself into a coma with the broomstick.
No!
I did. It’s bad.
I was bent over gagging, leaning on the broom so I wouldn’t fall down, hoping I would die soon. I could not live in a world where Doug could fuck anyone, never mind deaf Marlene.
Stop it! She thought I was kidding, that my dry heaving was just part of my usual over-exaggerated sign language pantomime. She couldn’t hear the strained hacking in my throat, the gurgle as I reached for bile, for anything.
Why? Why did you do it? I signed.
I don’t know! It was after my party when everyone went home. I was drunk!
I was shaking my head and holding my stomach.
It was a mistake. We said we wouldn’t do it again, but then we did. This morning. And her eyes shifted involuntarily towards the dentist chair. The one I had just been sitting in.
“Aaaagh!” I was coughing up internal organs. I needed to set myself on fire. I’d have to throw out these clothes and run home naked, take a scalding hot shower and scrub my skin until it bled, call my mother and tell her to fuck off, then start a heroin addiction.
I’ll tell you another secret—
No!
He likes anal sex.
No! You fucked him in the ass?
No! and she laughed.
I held up my hands in surrender. The details were too horrible to imagine. I knew then, and it was true, that I would be haunted by this conversation for the rest of my life.
Why? Why did you do it?
I told you, I was drunk!
I’m drunk all the time! I never fucked Doug!
She laughed but I was serious. Disgusted and serious.
It was good! I liked it.
And there it was. Sex with Doug was good. Doug fucked like a champ. If I tried to reconcile that fact with what I knew of him, my head would explode. The universe is based on a certain set of laws, and Doug having sex with a woman—and being good at it—invalidated them all. Dr. Douglas Weinhardt was not a sex god. He was crying in his office because a broken saltshaker had scared him. I prayed for total amnesia.
But it’s bad. My husband knows. He found the sheets.
The sheets? Oh jesus god.
He doesn’t know it’s Doug but he knows it’s someone. I told him I got sick but he didn’t believe me. I don’t know what he’s going to do. I need your help. I—
She looked up and so did I and there was the lumpy, hangdog figure of Doug in the doorway, his limp curls smashed to his forehead, his eyes red, the skin around them pummeled nearly purple. Clearly, this was a man who knew how to fuck.
Marlene waved away our conversation and scurried out of the room. Doug stayed in the doorway.
I cleared my throat, hoping it would clear my head of Doug and Marlene on the chair, the chair where I’d been reclined, resting my head on the cushion where Doug’s bare ass had been just an hour earlier, the side of my face pressed on the same funked, slippery surface. It did not work.
“I’m, uhm, sorry about the glass. I was just—”
“It’s all right Shane,” he said, his voice shaking. “I feel as if I owe you an explanation.”
“No, I should just go.”
“No, please. I need to say this.” He put his hand to his forehead, his palm facing out, his wrist bent and resting against his sweat-soaked hair.
“I have a condition,” he said, taking measured, deliberate breaths. “Certain sounds, gritting sounds, or sometimes shaking sounds, affect me. Whenever I hear sand or sugar being scattered or stepped on, or maracas—” His whole body convulsed. He hugged himself tightly and bowed his head.
Even in the midst of my own trauma and horror I forced myself to look at him carefully, trying to memorize every curve and line of his face so I’d be able to provide the police with an immediate and detailed sketch when he finally went fucking insane and started blowing people away. It was only a matter of time. Probably minutes.
He composed himself as best he could.
“When I hear these sounds I tense up, my body shuts down, my muscles freeze. I can’t function properly. I just need to be by myself until it passes. I’ve tried everything—ginseng, iced tea—nothing can control it. It just has to work itself through.” He sucked in his bottom lip and looked away. He was being so brave. “So that’s that. I just wanted to explain myself. So you knew.” He took another deep breath and looked at me. “I hope you’ll still allow me to be your dentist.”
I wanted to ask him if he’d been kicked in the head by a horse as a boy or cursed by a gypsy or just what had happened to make it all turn out like this. I wanted to rock him gently and whisper in his ear, tell him that sometimes suicide was noble and nothing to be ashamed of. Sometimes, it was the answer. And in spite of the retching it would lead to I wanted to ask him what kinds of noises Marlene made and if it was ever scary. But mostly I just wanted to go home and hide.
And when he nodded and turned and ran hunchbacked into his office again, that’s exactly what I did.
* * *
It was Tuesday so I knocked on the door and when Bryce answered I went into total cardiac arrest.
Whenever we saw each other around the building we had an unspoken agreement to completely ignore one another and run the other way as fast as we could without seeming obvious. That was my unspoken agreement at least. I didn’t want to talk to him about having sex with his wife and I was hoping he didn’t want to talk to me about how I’d stopped paying rent. No good could come of any conversation we could possibly have. Even a nod hello would have been unbearable. Subtext is fine in plays or cartoons but in real life it’s very uncomfortable.
But I couldn’t run this time. It would have been rude. And my legs didn’t seem to be working. I was rooted in fear and awkwardness. Bryce looked terrible. His eyes were raw and his face was pale and sunken. He’d obviously been crying or projectile vomiting. He didn’t seem especially surprised to see me. He just stared for a long time with his mouth moving slightly, his lips parting and unparting, saying nothing. It was like the time my grandfather tried to wish me a happy birthday but he couldn’t get it out because he didn’t have the mechanics for it anymore. I hugged him anyway. But Bryce wasn’t my grandfather. If I’d hugged him it might have been weird.
All I could do was wait until he gave up. I didn’t have to wait long. His head dropped and his shoulders sagged and his whole body shrunk down to half its usual size. I stepped aside and he shuffle
d past me on his weak little legs and went out the side door to cry behind the Dumpsters.
I stood in the doorway for a while.
When I went into the bedroom she was on the bed with her blue bathrobe tied around her, smoking a cigarette. She was on her back and the cigarette was straight up in the air like a chimney. She let the ash build into a column and then just as it was ready to topple she took the cigarette from her mouth and flicked it in the ashtray on her bedside table. It seemed unnecessarily risky, but it looked pretty cool.
I kept my clothes on and laid down beside her without saying anything. She finished her cigarette and crushed it out. Then, still lying down, she took a glass of water from the table and drank half of it, holding it six inches above her face and pouring the water into her mouth without the glass ever touching her lips. I’d never seen anyone do that besides me. When I drank lying down like that it hurt my stomach and gave me real bad gas. I was impressed with her performance, and afraid.
“What do you do when it’s not Tuesday?” she asked.
There was Panopticon Insurance, my girl’s bike, deaf birthday parties and all my saltshakers. I led a full, interesting, vibrant life.
“Not too much,” I said.
“Outside interests are important,” she said.
Why is the worst question anyone can ask. With the things you really want to know there’s never an easy answer, and they’re hard enough as it is. It’s stupid to make them more complicated by trying to explain them, trying to reason out what never made sense in the first place and probably wasn’t supposed to. But I couldn’t help it.
“What about Bryce,” I said.
She took her glass of water from the table again and drank until it was empty, gulping it down. Her throat rolled like the ocean. After she put the glass down she said, “Bryce is never happier than when he’s bowling. He’s always been that way.”
“So it’s always been like it is now?” I said.
“No. Not like now.”
Good. I wanted to be brave.
“What’s different?” I said.
Really I wanted her to be brave first.
“He used to take his bowling ball with him.”
“Huh?”
“It’s still in the closet. He hasn’t touched it in months.”
I looked at her and she turned her head to look at me. I could not read her face. Then she untied her robe and let it fall around her.
I didn’t really want to know anyway.
So we had some sex, but slower than usual, on her open blue robe. And it was all right.
“I want to go skydiving by the time I’m thirty, and I need to learn how to play golf. I want to be through leasing by then too. From a financial standpoint it just doesn’t make sense not to own.”
Gwen had been talking about her life checklist and how it was important to set goals. She kept stressing the words important and goals, repeating the same goddamn thing over and over again. The way she was talking I knew that it wasn’t so much about her checklist as it was the absence of mine. I nodded and listened and never once acknowledged the obvious direction of the conversation, and this made her try even harder to subtly bring it up. It was like watching a hamster in a wheel, all that tireless futility.
So far, things had pretty much gone according to schedule for her. She went to Europe for a month after college with two friends and met a ton of interesting people and took lots of pictures. She passed the real estate licensing exam even though she had no intention of ever becoming a real estate agent. She taught herself to speak passable Italian, and learned the fundamentals of the stock market and retirement planning. I knew without asking that she’d lost her virginity the night of her senior prom. Good for her. She had a plan and she was sticking to it. Where I fit in though, I was not sure.
Sometimes I thought she was trying to change me, save me, rehabilitate or recycle me, whatever word people use when they want to make someone else into something that other person doesn’t really want to be. Maybe I was her good deed or her test case, or maybe she just wanted control. I never understand what motivates people to take such an active interest in someone else.
Sometimes I thought I was a number and a story, some background filler so that when she met her professional and romantic soul mate she could say she’d “done the dating scene” and settle down without any of the reservations she never had to begin with.
Sometimes I thought she might honestly like me, which was so ridiculous it almost could have been true. Empirically speaking, she really couldn’t: we hardly talked, she knew almost nothing about me besides my first name, and I was drunk every time she saw me. But you can never tell with these things. People get stupid and delusional, sometimes on purpose. They want to make obvious mistakes. It’s an easy way to turn a casual nothing of a relationship into some tragic half-assed epic, an excuse to use words like love and loss and get melodramatic about the life you wish you were leading. It’s the poor man’s English Patient starring somebody you never really cared about anyway.
Whatever it was I didn’t want to know. If I didn’t know I couldn’t be blamed when it ended. And it would be ending soon.
“I know it’s been hard lately with both of us working, you trying to go perm, me taking that automotive repair class at the community college, but I think it’s important that we make time for each other. That should be one of our goals.”
“Yeah,” I said.
We were in one of those restaurant/bars where people I don’t like go after work to unwind. The guys had their ties loosened and some had their sleeves rolled up and the girls were using their weak drinks as an excuse to act flirty. Everyone was too loud and there was always someone, somewhere, laughing. The top shelf bottles behind the bar were lit up with a depressingly ethereal blue neon light that looked like some douche bag’s idea of deep sea diving or heaven, and the dude at the door who checked my ID was wearing a tight black T-shirt and called me “Chiefy.”
If I was ever going to be assassinated this was where it would go down. One of these young professionals in a French blue button-down from the fucking Men’s Wearhouse would lurch out of the crowd and shout “Oswald!” for no apparent reason and plug me in the gut. Everyone would gasp and scatter, but no one would cradle me in their arms as I died.
“You know, for all the time we’ve known each other I still haven’t figured you out.”
“Huh?”
“I don’t think you’re shy, but you can be really quiet sometimes. It’s hard to tell what you’re thinking.”
“Yeah,” I said.
Or I’d be sitting in a wooden booth over by the window and a sniper’s bullet would shatter the glass and simultaneously blow out the back of my head as I waited for my appetizers.
“Would you say you’re introspective?”
“I’d say I’m self-absorbed.”
“Hah hah, hmmm, then how are you such a good listener?”
I’ve been accused of that all my life. It’s like someone who prays every night saying God’s a good listener. Just because you’re talking to us doesn’t mean we’re listening. With me and God, you never really know.
I held up my hand and showed her my two fingers crossed, like I was making a promise I knew that I would break.
“What’s that?”
“That’s me and God,” I said.
She was dumbfounded. I was getting pretty drunk.
“Half the time I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I bet you think that’s pretty mysterious.”
“Sure.”
“And I suppose you think that’s pretty sexy.” She stepped closer to me like we were going to dance.
“Yeah.”
“David Copperfield’s mysterious. I wouldn’t say he’s sexy.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Sexy and ‘I got my name from a Dickens novel’ don’t really go together. I mean, there aren’t any underwear m
odels named Oliver Twist. No pun intended! Hah hah hah, hmmm.”
She’d given up on me ever playing witty sitcom couple with her, so she’d started taking on both parts herself, feeding herself lines and then driving them home for canned laughs. Watching someone banter with themselves is fucking creepy. I felt like Howdy Doody.
“Even if you were a Dickens character, I’d still think you were sexy,” she said, and batted her eyelashes like she was epileptic.
That kind of inane horseshit line was usually the preface to her ripping my shirt at the collar and pulling it down into a tube top, exposing my delicate, milky shoulders and pinning my arms at my sides. Then she’d rape and fuck me until I was a limp body ready to be flung into a mass grave.
But we were in public, surrounded by people in business clothes. I figured I was safe. But then she was biting her bottom lip and squinting her eyes like she was considering it, like maybe she’d yank me into the bathroom and brutalize me in a filthy stall. Oh jesus no.
“Gwendolyn? Omigod! How are you!”
There was a girl with shoulder-length brown hair and lipstick the color of weak coffee standing beside us. She had a pinched nose and her face was too big for her head.
“Julie! I haven’t seen you since Shari’s birthday! How have you been?”
“Busy enough for three people. I need to go schizo just to lead my life, hah hah, hmmm.”
“Some things never change!” Gwen said.
“What about you? Are you still at Panopticon?”
“Five days a week! Hah hah hah, hmmm.”
“Hah hah, hmmm—Oh, have you met Chad? Chad, this is Gwendolyn. We played rugby together in college.”
“Please, call me Gwen. Only my grandmother calls me Gwendolyn.”
Chad was tall. His hair was parted on the side. He’d recently had a haircut. He had broad shoulders and cuff links. He probably played lacrosse at school. Everyone in this bar was a college athlete except me.
“This is Shane,” Gwen said, and I had to shake hands with these strangers and listen to Gwen tell them that I worked at Panopticon too and then not correct Julie when she assumed that was where we met. Then the two of them talked about people I didn’t know and would hopefully never meet. Chad kept looking at me like he wanted to have a guy talk about sports or the market. I wanted to interrupt and say, “I’m just a temp at Panopticon you know,” or “I’m a good alphabetizer.” I wanted to ask Chad if he’d loan me $300 and help me carry home all the saltshakers I planned to steal from this place tonight. But I didn’t. I wanted to call him Chip by mistake, but I didn’t do that either.
