I Loved You More

by Tom Spanbauer

  But most of all, more than anything, is that a part of you is well enough to know how fucked up this is. But that well-enough part is bound and gagged, and all that’s left of you, the filament flickering flickering, is really really afraid for any fucking reason you can possibly find. This morning it’s because there’s another body in the room next to you. Even though it’s Hank’s body. Fuck. How when his body moves what your body does. Donnie Darko is two years down the line. But that Darko shit is happening right there in your kitchen that morning. I mean every morning.

  So you take a deep breath. You take a bite of egg, or kale, or papaya. Whale blubber. Whatever it is. You really hate Hank for his fucking cup of fucking coffee.

  IT WILL BE three years before this gets any better. One day in 2002, maybe 2003, you’re walking down the street and it’s spring and you see a tree, a pink blossoming plum, and your charcoaled soul actually sees the tree and remarkably the tree sees you. In that moment, you bless the moment and in the blessing there is a transformation.

  Bam, just like that, you start to come back to life.

  BUT NOT YET. Not this morning with Hank.

  “Gruney, man,” Hank says. “Gruney, you all right?”

  “I’ve got yoga class at eleven,” I say. “You want to come?”

  “What kind of yoga?”

  “Hot yoga.”

  “On Christmas Day?”

  “They’re not Christian.”

  “Nah,” Hank says. “The doc says nix on that.”

  AFTER YOGA CLASS, I’m back in my body as much as I can be. I’m in the shower at Bikram’s when suddenly it becomes real that my best fucking friend Hank is at my house. I hightail it home and when I open my kitchen door I really do wonder if I haven’t scared Hank off altogether.

  Hank’s right there, though, in the living room in the big chair under the window. Sunshine. Of course it’s sunshine, Hank Christian is here and he’s writing in his leather notebook in the sunshine. The sun through his hair and Just for Men. Purple.

  When I speak, my voice is way too cheery.

  “Hey, Hank,” I say. “How about a sandwich?”

  TUNA SALAD SANDWICHES for the both of us. I’m just putting the sprouted wheat bread in the toaster, just mixing in the mayonnaise into the canned tuna, when I say:

  “Hank, I’m sorry if I weirded you out this morning.”

  Hank has that half-smile of his on, like on the back cover of his book. He’s dressed all in black again. The same clothes as far as I can tell.

  “It’s the depression,” I say. “It’s hard to explain.”

  In the daylight, Hank’s eye looks like he’s been punched. And the punch left a scratch that hasn’t quite healed. One crooked line down from the middle of his eye. Like a blood tear.

  “I’ve been a little depressed myself,” Hank says. “And I came all this way just to tell you about it.”

  The fucking silences, man, what was in them. Hank finally lays his cards down on the table.

  THE ENIGMA OF Hank Christian. He’s peeled back his top layer of black sweatshirt. Just two more layers of black and it’s Hank’s white skin. I’m on one side of the table, he’s on the other. A tuna salad sandwich on a big white plate in front of Hank, his matching white coffee mug. A tuna salad sandwich on a big white plate in front of me, my glass with red and yellow balloons filled with sparkling water. The stove’s behind me and I’m looking at Hank with the window light behind him. He’s on his second cup of coffee, maybe his third, black, no sugar. The way he starts talking, I remember what caffeine does to you. The words gather up and crowd his throat, each one trying to get out first.

  “Her name was Maria,” Hank says. “We met at Hal Taylor’s wedding. Up in Connecticut. You remember Hal, don’t you?”

  “He thought you and I were having an affair,” I say.

  “Hal’s an asshole,” Hank says. “Married him a rich Connecticut girl. What a mess that turned out to be. The Great Gatsby: The Miniseries,” Hank says. “’Course I’m not one to talk. Look how my marriage turned out.”

  “Hank!” I say. “You married this Maria?”

  “Not really.” Hank says. “I mean I did. We got married at the Justice of the Peace on Staten Island. But it wasn’t two days I found out she was still married to her first husband.”

  “What the fuck?”

  “I should’ve known soon as I seen her,” Hank says. “Had to be something wrong with a woman that perfect. Tall, olive skin, green eyes. Crazy the way her brown hair could go from blonde to auburn with the light.”

  “She ever get the divorce?” I ask.

  “Right after I found out about her husband,” Hank says. “I met her son, Boomer.”

  Hank takes another swig of coffee, picks up his tuna salad sandwich then lays it back down. Hank looks at the sandwich, as if he’s studying it, but really he’s not looking at the sandwich.

  “I loved that kid, Gruney,” Hanks says. “You should’ve seen him. Sturdy little guy, full of piss. More than I ever loved her. You’d have loved him, too. At seven years old, he already had a heart like yours. Smart as a whip. He came to stay with us for a couple of days and never left. His father didn’t want him back.”

  Hank’s black eyes look over the table at me. The sorrow of a son whose father doesn’t want him. The way the light comes through the kitchen window, you can see Hank’s glass eye rolls a little. Not like Buster’s, but just enough to notice.

  “There’s no doubt in my mind,” Hank says, “I was that boy’s true father and he was my true son. We even look alike. We had this thing where he was Spider-Man and no matter where he went, our spiderweb was always connected. Heart to heart. The crazier his mother got, the more he needed me. Broke my fucking heart.”

  “Crazy?”

  “Cocaine,” Hank says. “Did it every chance she’d get. And other drugs, pills. All kinds of pills. Course I didn’t figure that out until our second year together in Florida.

  “Porca Miseria,” Hank says. “Of course the sex was out of this world.

  “But she kept coming up with these weird reasons why she had to fly back to New York. Most of them had to do with business, but the one that topped them all was I’m going to die if I don’t have a cappuccino.”

  Hank pushes the big white plate away from him. It smacks into his coffee cup. I hold on to my new glass, the red and yellow balloons.

  “Crappucino,” Hank says.

  “That’s all right, though,” Hank says. “Boomer and I didn’t miss her at all. Saturdays we’d head out to the beach and spend the whole day there.”

  My mouth is full of tuna salad sandwich but I can’t wait to speak.

  “But was she totally addicted?” I say. “I mean like a junkie?”

  “The drugs were just frosting,” Hank says.

  “Then I got the first cancer scare with the tumors on my dick and all,” Hank says. “And all of a sudden this weird-ass woman starts acting like a human being. I mean she was still on the drugs then. I didn’t find out about the drugs for a long time. But for some reason, when I got sick, Maria completely changed. She came home from work every night, cooked dinner, even wore different clothes and tied her hair back. Like all of a sudden she was the Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Ave Maria. Fucking crazy bitch. She was even considering becoming a Catholic.”

  “You said business?” I say. “Did Maria have a job?”

  “Maria’s a fucking lawyer, man,” Hank says. “Corporate. Found a job in Gainesville the first day she went out. Didn’t put a thing on her body that wasn’t designer.”

  “So she supported you?”

  “She supported herself,” Hanks says. “And her habits.”

  “All the while,” Hank says, “I’m trying to keep my little family together and my health together and go to school. Take good care of my boy. I’m working for the college library. Didn’t make much, couldn’t make the rent on the fucking lavish apartment Maria insisted we live in for fuck’s sake, but I bou
ght the groceries.”

  “All in all though, I’d say,” Hank says, “we stayed together a pretty good family for two years. By that time Boomer and I were blood. Then I found the rock of cocaine and her stash of pills.”

  “In one of her designer purses,” Hank says. “Gucci. A huge leather purse filled with bottles of pills, all different shapes and sizes, blue and pink and white capsules. Smiling faces on some of them. And the rock of cocaine. It’s what they call an eight ball, man.

  “When I showed her the cocaine and the bottles I’d found,” Hank says, “Maria went ballistic. She called my dean at the college and told him I was sexually abusing Boomer.”

  Hank, those sweet smiling lips, the way his lips flatten, push tight together.

  His black eyes staring straight into my eyes. Not staring, really, searching, the glass eye just off enough. The scar under it, a crooked blood tear. As if in my eyes there was a secret and Hank had to know this secret.

  “Gruney?” Hank says, “Can you fucking believe that shit?”

  “Then she called up every person in the department with wild stories of how I was a sex addict and that I was taking drugs and assaulting her and her son. Really it was fucking nuts.”

  “So what did the dean say?” I ask.

  “Oh, everybody at the university was cool,” Hank says. “They could see what I couldn’t. One day I come home and there’s a note. She’s moved back to New York and if I ever want to see Boomer again, I’d better not come after them.”

  “She took my son, Gruney,” Hank says. “Stole Boomer and left me alone in the night without my son.”

  Hank’s fist hits the table. The salt shaker tips over, the pepper too. I gulp down the last bite of tuna salad sandwich, quick reach over, hold the water glass.

  “Three months later,” Hank says, “she’s crying to me on the phone, telling me she can’t live without me and how much Boomer misses me and she’s not doing drugs. So they came back. They gave her her old job back.”

  I pick up the salt shaker. Take a pinch of the spilled salt, throw it over my left shoulder.

  “First thing Boomer does when he sees me,” Hank says, “the Little Shit, green devil eyes just like his mom. He’s Spider-Man, see, the web between our hearts. You should have seen it. He leapt clean across the room right into my arms.”

  At my kitchen table, Hank Christian has his empty arms out and is waving his arms around his head.

  “Two weeks in the house all together,” Hank says, “shit started up again. The cocaine, the pills, the phone calls, the allegations of abuse.”

  “There was this one day,” Hank says. “It was the last day Boomer and I were together. We both knew there wasn’t much time. I took him to his favorite place, Back Yard Burgers, and I tell you, Gruney, it was just like that one time with you and me and Silvio on Columbus Circle – that boy and me sitting in the booth in a diner. I asked him right out please to not cry because if he did cry I’d start too. That’s what kind of boy he was. He didn’t cry so he could protect me.”

  “And of course that,” Hank says, “makes me start crying. Fuck. For some reason, both of us are holding onto the Heinz ketchup bottle, a grown man and a boy, crying our eyes out.”

  Under Hank’s new eye, the scar that makes a yellow and blue dent there, the crooked blood tear, a bolt of lightning.

  “The next day when I get home from work, she and Boomer are gone,” Hank says. “No note, nothing. That was just two days after they’d found the tumor behind my eye. Fucking things never looked so bad.”

  Hank snuffs up, wipes his good eye. In a moment, he pulls the hood of his sweatshirt up to his new eye, holds the fabric there. Soft, the way you’d touch something brand new, or a baby. The trembling in Hank’s big hand.

  “By Christmas, though, she was back on the phone. Crying. Telling me how much she and Boomer missed me, begging me to take them back. I was just starting radiation.”

  Hank pulls the hoodie away from his eye. That’s when Hank stops. Everything. As if before my eyes he’s turning to stone. I wonder if he’s breathing. I wonder if this is how he does it. Pulls his cards close into his vest. Shuts it all down.

  The coffee in him keeps going, though. Jet propulsion. I pull my chair across the ugly yellow linoleum with purple triangles, around the table next to him, sit down close enough that our shoulders touch. Hank’s chest is up, his shoulders down. He doesn’t move, just stays wound up like that. His shoulder and his arm muscle, man, as if I were touching stone.

  “That’s when I did it,” Hank says. “I moved to a studio apartment closer to the university, changed my phone number, and made it unlisted.”

  My tuna salad sandwich is a bunch of crumbs on my big white plate. The big white plates I bought so Hank and I could have something to eat off of. On Hank’s big white plate, his tuna sandwich looks like a hurricane had hit.

  Hank’s bottom teeth come out, bite his upper lip. Chest so full, he’s going to burst. That’s when Hank turns his head, locks his eyes into mine. One eye looking at my soul, the other eye staring into nothing.

  “The crazier his mother got, Gruney,” Hank says, “the more that boy needed me.”

  I put my arm up around Hank’s granite shoulder, lay my open palm against the back of his neck.

  “I fucking left him, Gruney,” Hank says. “Boomer.”

  “I left my son when he needed me the most.”

  “And that’s why I came here,” Hank says. “To you. I knew you’d know what to say. I’ve been so fucked up. Gruney? Do you think I did the right thing?”

  SO MANY THINGS happen in that moment. Portland, Oregon, Southeast Morrison, in my yellow house, in my kitchen, sitting in one of my wooden kitchen chairs. Christmas Day. All that goes away. There is only one place where I exist. Inside Hank’s eyes, the place in there he’s made for me. The eye he can see through and the eye that he can’t.

  A gaze that fucks me up because it’s looking for an answer.

  And Little Ben is an oracle without a clue.

  Big Ben is going wild on advice: sometimes when you lose things you can find them again. Sometimes you can’t. Sometimes when you find them you can fix them. Sometimes you can’t. Sometimes things are just gone and there’s no coming back no matter what you do.

  But the longer I sit in Hank’s gaze, I figure Hank didn’t fly three thousand miles for advice.

  Guys, real guys, don’t want advice. Hank came to me because he had a story he had to tell. A story he’d never told before, even to himself. A story so heavy it was getting him down. And there was no one else to tell it to.

  The place where you scribble down your prayer to God, lay it in a chink of stone, bury it in the sand, whisper it into a crook of broken tree limb, then cover it with mud. The altar where you lay your burden down.

  That’s when I really finally get it. Hank wants to know if I’ve got his back. That’s the only thing Hank wants to hear.

  From a guy who’s never understood guy things, right then I think hard about what to say and how to say it. With authority, but not like I’m trying to have authority. And then when I say it, how I should touch him. There’s got to be a touch, but it’s definitely got to be a guy touch.

  And this time I think I get it right. I make my hand into a fist, not hard, just close my fingers in, pull my thumb around. I take my not-hard clenched fist and pop Hank one, a blow of love, right in the middle of his chest. When I speak, my voice ain’t Catholic-boy high. It’s my voice, deep and clear and smooth.

  “With you and Boomer,” I say, “how solid was it? The web between your hearts?”

  The scar under Hank’s eye that makes the yellow and blue dent there. Inside Hank’s gaze, in his good eye, right then something changes. Light from down deep, and out of the black there’s color. His breath comes back. Mine too. I’m back in the chair at my kitchen table. My arm around Hank, my open palm against the back of his neck. On the table, the big white plates. On my plate, tuna crumbs. On Hank’s pla
te, a tornado tuna salad sandwich. Across the room, outside the kitchen window, it starts to snow.

  Never ceased to startle me, the way Hank and I could look at each other. So many times Hank Christian has turned his black eyes on me. But none of those times were this look. Never seen him so fragile, so close to busting open the seams. Vulnerability like that, only being close to death can make you feel. In your bones the way you fret. Hank’s good eye is looking at my question. Looking at the spiderweb that connects his heart to his son’s heart.

  Like a tree falling in the forest, there’s no sound, there’s a crash, fuck, I don’t remember. All’s I know is Hank and I are on the kitchen floor, lying on the ugly linoleum, his head in my lap, and he’s curled himself up into a ball.

  20.

  Stink eye

  RUTH HAS FINISHED THE EDITS ON THE LAST CHAPTER of my novel, so that next morning Hank and I drive to Ruth’s house.

  That’s what I told myself for a long time. That the reason I introduced Hank to Ruth was because he just happened to be there the day I picked up the final edits.

  FINAL EDITS. I know you’ve got it by now the relationship between Ruth and me was complicated. She saved my life and she was a pain in my ass and every fucking possible nuanced psychological aspect in between.

  There’s one specific part of our relationship, though, that I haven’t really stepped up to talk about.

  As a writer, your editor is the only person in the world you allow in. Where what is invisible through your breath becomes structured. Where you exist the best and are the most vulnerable. The only place that is holy. Where you tell your truth from. How the words rise up out of you, in there in between your soul and its utterance. Your ecstasy.

  Your editor. Your fucking editor, man.

  Ruth Dearden is your editor.

  THAT AFTERNOON, HANK puts his sunglasses on before we go out. The glass is so dark it’s black.

  “Never leave the house without them in the daylight,” Hank says.

  It’s two in the afternoon and it’s already getting dark.