Big Lonesome

by Joseph Scapellato

  I tried to imagine what this meant.

  “You’ve got it,” she said, and winked. Then she tapped her nose. And click-clicked her mouth.

  I bought her another drink. At her suggestion we swiveled our barstools to watch the other amateur stand-up comics. On the tiny stage they looked sweaty, clumsy, and young. Most of them she knew. She bar-whispered commentary, telling me the famous comics they were ripping off, the drugs they’d done as part of their pre-performance rituals, and one or two wildly inadvisable exploits they’d embarked on late at night after open mikes.

  “Look out, here comes Mr. Rape Joke Man,” she said.

  Mr. Rape Joke Man said, “Two rape jokes walk into a bar. One says, ‘Why the long face?’ The other says, ‘I raped a horse.’”

  “I’m out of here,” she said.

  I got up too.

  She scratched Burnham’s butt. “You can walk me out!”

  The regulars I’d come to know who saw us get up together smiled. The friends who’d come to see her stand-up didn’t. Most of them were men. She grabbed her coat from their table and gave out a round of hugs and cheek-kisses. Standing, she was shorter and squarer than she’d seemed on the barstool. She didn’t remind me of anyone.

  We walked the one block to her car over sharded ice and crunching salt. No wind, just cold. Burnham stayed close to her, pulling hard at his leash. I almost lost my balance more than once. She dance-walked, teasing Burnham.

  At her car I asked if she was okay to drive.

  “You seem really sober,” she said. “How?”

  I don’t remember what I said but it wasn’t witty, and as soon as I’d said it I felt twice as drunk in my face and in my limbs. She jerked open the back door and asked Burnham if he’d like to go for a ride. In he went. “You too,” she said, nudging me, “there’s no room up front.”

  Everything in her car smelled like cigarettes except for her. Stacks of crumpled magazines slid around as Burnham paced himself into sitting. In the front passenger seat was a cracked mannequin and a box of wigs.

  “I used to be in beauty school,” she declared. “I’m a drop-out!”

  She drove slowly on residential streets. A few salt-powdered cars circled for parking. I might have asked about her stand-up, or she might have started in on it herself. “A girl’s version of ‘guy humor.’ Instead of dick-and-fart, think vag-and-queef.” She told a few jokes that I forgot. I was trying not to think about what anything meant. She was there and saying things and I was sitting there for her to say things to. At my place she parallel-parked in front of a fire hydrant, punched on the flashers, and said she had a question she’d been meaning to ask ever since me and Burnham so nobly walked her out.

  “Can I poop out of my anus and into your toilet?”

  We took the stairs, Burnham banging on ahead. In the apartment she stepped out of her shoes and made straight for the bathroom. Burnham waited by the door for her, tongue out, tail sweep-wagging. I went to the kitchen, fired on the oven, popped in a frozen pizza, and took two giant glasses of water to the dinner table, where I sat. I couldn’t see the bathroom from there but I’d hear her when she got out, which seemed ideal. It seemed so ideal that the contemplation of it gave me satisfaction. I drank my water. I tried to use the feeling of satisfaction to bludgeon the feelings of angry shame, fearful longing, and confusion. I took off my jacket. I drank her water. I refilled her glass in the kitchen and then I went to the bathroom door with it.

  I said, “You all right in there?”

  I knocked. The door parted some—she wasn’t in there. Burnham was missing.

  In my terrified rush to check the stairway I dumped her water on myself, dousing my stomach, thighs, and crotch. I crouched to hurry on one boot. When I reached for the other I saw her salt-crusty sneakers still on the mat. That’s when I heard sounds in the bedroom.

  She sat cross-legged on my bed with Burnham, his bowl of food wedged in her lap. Burnham had never been on a bed before. Up there he looked half his size. She fed him one pellet at a time. She’d taken off her coat.

  “Sit down,” she said to me.

  I sat on the edge of the bed.

  “My fiancé is boring,” she said. “I love that about him. I love how he wants the same things the same way every day, how he’s the same person every hour. He’s always himself. He’s a happy rock. He can’t move on his own. I used to think I wanted to marry an explosion. A series of explosions that would blow me to fucking pieces, that would blow the fucking pieces of me to pieces. Nope. Turns out I don’t want that and never did. Here I am: it took me till thirty-five.”

  “I’m boring,” I said. “My fiancée likes me that way. I don’t know. I don’t get it. I guess I don’t like that she likes me that way.”

  “You try,” she said, and she put a pellet in my hand.

  I held it out to Burnham. He started trembling.

  She put one hand under mine and one hand on Burnham’s jaw. She helped him take it from me. He ate it.

  “Don’t beat your dog,” she said.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Lie down.”

  I did, tightening up when my soaked jeans chilled me. She took off the one boot I was wearing.

  “You pissed yourself,” she said, smiling.

  I allowed her to believe this.

  Burnham sighed.

  “Oh,” she said.

  She was still feeding him, and with her other hand she was touching herself.

  She said, “Touch yourself.”

  I didn’t.

  Burnham licked the hand she fed him with. She pushed her other hand under her pants and she moaned.

  She moaned louder, in a lower voice.

  She gripped Burnham’s muzzle—he shuffled, afraid—she gripped harder and he whined.

  “No,” I said, sitting up.

  Burnham thumped off the bed and out of the room.

  “That’s it,” I said, “you’re done.”

  She kept at herself, low-moaning with her mouth closed, her back rigid, her hips thrusting.

  I watched until it was over.

  “I didn’t like it here,” said my then-fiancée. We were on the couch and not touching, her feet up on her luggage. Burnham, in the other room, had slunk off when we were shouting. We’d agreed to finish out the last month of the lease together. We were exhausted. She looked like she did when I’d get up at two or three, see that I was alone, and find her in the living room sitting on the couch, trying to think herself back to sleep. “I didn’t like the city,” she said, “I didn’t like my dorm and my classes and my professors. I didn’t like being away. You know that. But what made it worse was the guy I dated my first semester. We dated for six weeks, which isn’t much, but at the time it felt like a lot. He was thoughtful, attentive, playful, handsome. I knew the town in Wyoming he was from. We’d both cut the heads off chickens. He missed his five dogs, I missed my three. After our first week together, he said, ‘You ought to break up with me now, because you’re going to, later.’ I told him not to be so silly. But he started saying stuff like that every day. Then a bunch of times a day. Everywhere we went he made it lonely, which was the opposite of what he’d been doing before that. When I was with him I started to feel more lonely than I did when I was alone. I went from telling him he was silly to telling him he was nervous, mopey, stupid, infuriating, manipulative. But I didn’t break up with him. I got mad at him, I sure did, but I apologized, and so did he, and I tried to understand him and his anxieties. I worked at it. I thought he was working at it too. Then he took me on this big date, we went to a classy restaurant on Randolph, the place doesn’t exist anymore, I don’t even remember what it was called, we ate the kind of food I thought I’d only ever see in movies. After dessert he dumped me. And I’ll tell you what: I told myself that that was the last time I’d wait for someone to dump me.”

  She took her feet off her luggage. It wobbled.

  I wasn’t sure if she expected me to say something, so
I said I didn’t think I’d ever dumped anyone.

  “He moved to North Dakota and died,” she said.

  I thought about my other relationships.

  She stood up. “Let’s take a walk. Let’s get a drink.”

  I told her I shouldn’t.

  “It’s not asking much,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She put on her coat and boots, called the dog, and leashed him on the way out.

  At the window I stretched to see them turn the corner. They looked excited.

  “I only dumped somebody once,” I said to my friend. We were in a booth at the Boiler Room, after work, in front of shots and beer and pizza slices. My friend stopped shaking extra cheese onto his slice to look at me. “We were in college. It wasn’t that I didn’t like being with her, or didn’t love her, it was that I wasn’t as wild about her as she was about me. She wanted to be with me all day. It made me feel bad. And I thought that the right thing to do, the respectful thing to do, was to break up.”

  “Yep,” said my friend.

  “I dumped her. It was awful for a long time. Afterwards, I thought about it a lot: it seemed it would’ve just been better to wait it out. To let it go wrong for both of us.”

  “Nope,” he said.

  We drank our shots. We were almost drunk.

  “What?” he said.

  I couldn’t remember what I was in the middle of saying, or what I was going to say next.

  My friend touched my arm. He said, “You’ll think of something else.”

  Life Story

  A man lives with a woman he loves enough to live with, but not enough to marry and not enough for kids. He knows he could love others enough to marry, enough for kids, but he’s not the kind of man to find those women when he’s with this woman.

  Sometimes “love” doesn’t fit what he feels. It’s too pocket-sized. Or maybe too monumental.

  Sometimes “enough” fits. He says to himself, “I don’t enough her enough.”

  “I won’t enough her enough.”

  The woman loves the man enough to live with, enough to marry, enough for kids, but loves him too much to make him into what he won’t be. She knows she could find others who love her enough to marry, enough for kids. So what.

  Sometimes “love” is too blunt. “Timing” is more textured. “He doesn’t timing me yet.”

  “He won’t timing me.”

  The man is skinny with a robust beard and when he goes for morning walks around the block he keeps his eyes fixed straight ahead. The woman is full-bodied with a bouncy gait and when she’s alone she sings opera songs. The two of them aren’t traditional in the way their parents are but they’re Midwestern enough to want marriage and kids, they can’t help it, that’s what’s in the lives that they imagine.

  He stays, and stays, and stays. She knows.

  They love living with each other. They get a dog, they play cards, they cook and bake and slap each other’s butts. They share friends, some who marry, some who move away. They both have okay jobs that get better.

  They continue loving living with each other except for when they think or talk about marrying and having kids. When they talk about it there is only the restating of statements. They enter their thirties, a banquet hall with no tables or chairs or carpeting.

  Years stack up before the both of them. It isn’t easy to look away.

  The woman thinks, Maybe I won’t timing him, and when she sings her best songs she feels like biting her wrists, or hugging their dog, or resolving to accept that “love” won’t be the word for it when someday soon they’ll turn out to have been together forever.

  The man thinks, Maybe she doesn’t enough me enough, and that’s because I don’t enough her enough, and that’s because I don’t know why. We don’t know why. And somewhere in the middle of his morning walks he closes his eyes, needing to see how many steps he can take until they both scare open on their own.

  Company

  Brother, yesterday I said to you that there were folks to talk to. That these folks, Mom and me, if talked to, would respond with what we sensed you needed—agreement or advice or humor, say, or silence—and in doing so, offer you what no one can deny needing, the water we pour on our grown-lonely insides: company.

  “Company!” our Uncle Nunzo used to shout, the goofball, when we were kids and Mom would take us nearly to the end of the Red Line to see him, when we raced to be the first to punch his buzzer. He’d skip around in cartoony circles, screaming “Help help help, company!” like he’d opened the front door to flames.

  “You know that,” I said to you, tapping the table, not knowing if you knew it. “You can. You can talk to us.”

  You said you knew it. I watched you watch your hands scratch the label off your pop bottle. It fluttered in shreds to the floor. I’d guilted you, as you let me do just once a month, to a lonely Mexican joint in the Loop. Mariachi music plugged on around us, going places proudly. If I scooted my chair I smelled bleach and black mold.

  You knew it, you said, but you couldn’t.

  I said, “It’s that you won’t.”

  You made the face you make when you’re trying not to feel what’s obvious to everyone.

  I made the face I make when I’m trying to stop myself from screaming, You don’t understand what’s obvious to everyone.

  Understand isn’t the same as agree with, said your face.

  My face had nothing to say to that.

  When the bill came it came with two candies. I cracked mine in the back of my mouth. You knew I was thinking, If I let you pay, will you feel like you’ve participated?

  You picked up your napkin. I picked up the bill, half of which was my three beers. I hoped for the hundredth time that you’d someday have a drink with us.

  “For the holidays,” I said, tilting my head this way, that way, “if you come for the holidays, I hope you do, you don’t have to talk. Even though you know it’s hurt Mom. That you haven’t. Talked.”

  You tore the tiny corners off your napkin.

  I gave up: I said, “Thanks for answering my call.”

  You put down your napkin and said you’re welcome but come the new year you’d stop paying for the phone plan you never used.

  I didn’t know what to make of that—everything inside me sunk.

  You folded the napkin and put it in your pocket.

  That you intended to no longer have a phone through which we could continue to try to reach you felt even further out than all the other acts of isolation—your acts, my acts, Mom’s acts—and made me remember, not for the first time, that for longer than we liked to admit we’d been misunderstanding who we were on purpose.

  On the street we shook hands limply, like kids, you wearing your gigantic gloves. Our eyes flicked away just before they met. The meanest wind we’d had all month ripped in from the lake, herding trash, bending everyone who hustled down the block. You walked off wearing the coat I gave you last Christmas—the last Christmas you said you’d ever go to, which was the last thing you said to Mom in person.

  “Waitaminute,” Mom had said that day, stepping away from the sink, making your exit certain, “scusi, stronzo—per favore, wait wait wait!” but you were in that coat and out the door, shutting it so hard the silver bells suicided off. At the window Mom slashed the air with her hands and scourged herself with curses—the first steps of the smashy-dance—as if doing so would get you to look back, to look up as you crossed the courtyard. I crushed her with a hug in case she moved to bust the glass, which she hasn’t done since Dad. Together we watched you stiff-walk through old hard snow.

  Yesterday I watched you stiff-walk through the Loop’s lunch hour foot traffic, between the businessmen and -women, the work-jacketed blue collars, the street-cool students, the poky tourists—tourists even in December, even under all their layers.

  “You’re a tourist,” you said to me years ago, on the first of the lousy Christmases. I’d come home from half a year of liv
ing in a different neighborhood, eager to club you with my hipness. That you churned with a bitterness more awful than what I’d expected was in every sentence you didn’t say. You were even more alone, and it was and wasn’t on me. We moped in the kitchen, not doing dishes, as Mom readied presents in the parlor. I’d been drinking a can of beer because I was old enough. I took manly swigs. I wanted you to want some, to ask for it. You wouldn’t. You turned to the sink. I waggled the can in your face, I pressed it to the back of your neck, and that’s when you called me a tourist.

  Do I need to say what I did next, or why I’m sorry?

  I hit you in the head with the can until the can was crushed and foaming.

  I’m sorry—I can’t stop plunging my head into the past, even though it’s hard to breathe in. You know I plunge the most when I’ve seen you. You know I know you’re not actually okay with leaving everything where it is, Mom alone, old wine in old bottles.

  “How do you like that,” Uncle Nunzo used to say, mock-serious as he sniffed a popped cork. “New wine in a new bottle.”

  What I’m telling you, brother, is yesterday you walked and I followed, I followed because what you said about your phone plan made it hard for me to get out of my chair. You walked your stiff-walk, which was cocky if not nerdy, your arms looking like they were strapped to your sides, and you whacked shoulders with anyone who didn’t give—a many-scarfed grandmother, a jock of a businessman whose bulk nearly knocked you over, who stopped to turn and glare. I waited until you neared the corner, then I hoofed it to catch up, to keep a bead on you. My lungs crackled with lake air. I leaned on a parking meter and burped pukey backwash into my hand.

  You puked into Uncle Nunzo’s rubber workboots. When we were kids, playing in the mudroom on the plastic rug. Me and Mom thought you’d been faking, acting sick at every Red Line stop to dodge the visit, even though we knew you loved Uncle Nunzo. I didn’t want you to turn us around. Watching your miserable face on the train, I’d thought: I can let myself be angry, or not. This knowledge made me feel enormous. After you’d lurched over the toys to yak into both workboots, you wiped your mouth and looked at me that same way—I saw you deciding to be or not be angry. I could have laughed. If I had, you’d have joined me, and before long we’d have slapped the floor and flopped for breath, in cozy hysterics together. Instead I saw my look in your look. I stood up, above you. I grabbed and raised the dripping boots.