by Gary Lutz
I would have to answer the same question every time: “Why are you always so out of breath like that?”
Shall I say that I eventually shamed myself away from men, though they had been just boys, actually — boys too much alike in the rough patter of their pulse? They were happily acrid in shorts almost too long to be shorts.
It’s not every day I let any of them come cohering back. But there was one whom I will call by some other name, Floke, and who called me both timid and vicious — tender in only an investigative way.
Or, rather, there were men I offered the luxury of witnessed private conduct, and women who set out bridge mix or pretzel twists, women with colorless good looks, women who picked fights with their bodies.
I always walked away a differently unchosen person.
My life neither wended nor entailed.
The one at whose side I worked that summer was deep-set in family heartaches, and facially inhumane, but she sometimes came out from behind all the etiquette.
Eleven was the only clock word she liked. She would insist it sounded lilting and relenting to her.
For me, though, the hour itself — the work-shift one, I mean, and not its trimmer twin in late evening — did not slope toward anything better. I never budged for lunch, and I liked to do myself in a little. I would postpone a piss until I had to brave rapids, practically. (There was a vessel I kept beneath my desk.)
This was the property-management division. We were sectored off from the rest of headquarters by little more than particleboard. The job required the luxurious useless indoor fortitude it has always been my fortune to enjoy.
Then some unsought weeks with a silkened fright of a girl with unfellowly elbows, lively fatalities in her thinking. She had a ring of relations around her — impressionable cousinry, commanding aunts with bracelets by the silverous slew — and we moved in with her parents, early retirees, who swanked away at the prospect of the two of us unpairing before the year got thinned of its holidays. Her father would stand outside our room, knock gallantly on the door, say, “We hear you in there.” Then the mother would say, “We most certainly do not.” It was her reproofs that counted.
Men of my kind kept cramming themselves into marriages, violated hindquarters and all. I mugged for a minister late one morning myself.
This was hazing July, and the day just burned away.
My wife came from a family with vaulted closets, kitchens with doors that locked. Every dress the woman wore had to have vents, slits, pinholes. She drank excitative mixed drinks of her own fixing, was swayable in her credos, drove home the sobering groceries.
Her hair had something almost auroral about it, plenty of sparkle in its upper reaches. But she wasn’t eating.
When the day came that she wanted something frothed and resolving to daub onto her face, I walked her to a makeup counter at H-- Brothers. A saleslady came over. We made it sound as if we were picking out a gift.
Was the skin about which we were barely making a peep a dry skin, or an oily one, or was it splotched, or papery, or combination? What was the one thing the woman — if the intended recipient was, indeed, a woman — wanted most to change?
“Should we be telling people?”
I might have kept going through life repeating: Consider the source!
There was, a while afterward, just one other taker, somebody else at city hall, a man who leaned on me during the last-ditch derisions of election year. (A stuffy, unbowing couch in his office, a provisioning little fridge, curtains and blinds both.) He expected to compound some things he still felt for his wife with his unriotous feelings for me, then come up with a new, totaling emotion that he could offer to the woman he wanted to clean his life out with. She was a recent hire in the prothonotary’s office, level-voiced and unshifting. Mistily immediate one minute, undivinable the next.
As for the man, there was little he still did in his role as my resister. I started bringing things home from the library — magazines mostly, the pages brightly outdated. Touching whatever someone else had touched first was going to be fellowship enough for me.
This was punctual, unbrilliant winter. My car got harder to start. The thing just scoffed, razzed. The library stayed open later and later. The one I liked behind the circulation desk had lips dulled plumly, some final drifts of girlhood at peril in her voice. A becoming boniness to the fingers, and that hardening and seaming of the face achieved, I was certain, from having seen too soon the pleading in things.
I must have been hoping for someone deep-eyed and hampered and unfancied like that, someone with consolingly different dislikes — pretty-witted antipathies I would not want to trump.
This library had a back-corner department of cassettes thick-cased into sets, series. I signed some out, drew myself into a few. I did not own a player, but I would poke the cap of a pen through one of the hubs in a cassette, jostle the tape forward a little that way. Such were my heaves, my advances, in the hours before I would pass myself back into the unmonopolizing sleep of my nerveless, earliest thirties.
Hard to imagine anyone’s ever having had cause enough to wonder what in my life might have once been worth a count — dying adorations, maybe, or playsome enamorations going way back to nursery school, or any hands most recently mislaid on me, then on bedposts, then on banisters on the bullying way back down the stairs.
My sisters were just sturdier, vulval versions of myself. We kept in touch by tardy and typoed e-mail. Greeting cards arrived on time to clear things up again about Mom. (“Hi there guys. Sorry for the form note.”)
When I asked how things were going, the answers came out more like pledges than anecdotes.
The older of them rode the bus over one night and knocked, tunicked and flip-flopping, a bismuth-pink on her lips. She had gotten herself a flu shot some days before, and would I have a go at the Band-Aid? She whisked up her sleeve. Her bare upper arm was pale and asquish.
I saw her home afterward to her troves.
My younger sister threw herself into her work, battled away at largely moony evenings. For a time, our feelings ran parallel toward the same woman. A yearning for her firmed in us both.
This woman put wrong names to our faces, and there were oddened tilts and tonings to her voice as often as we approached. Her wardrobe was a rowdydow of oranges, beckoning reds.
Eyes an acorn color.
Hair she kept ruckussed upward.
A finger sometimes presuming upon a front tooth — to test the sureness of its set, its hold?
These were weeks of endangering heat. My sister and I were of like violences of mind about this unrelished, unensnared piner throwing herself aside. We plotted a past for her: meadow hockey in college, weddings called off, devotions forever obsolescing. We left a brood of brazen tulips on her doorstep. Pictured her kicky and ambitious sleep, an exercise of caution in her days, her vague but chaoticized dailiness. We started eating where she ate — ordered the same boffo salads, with just scribbles of onion, parings of radish fillipped in just right.
Still, we made no grabs, no gains, until my sister wondered, Maybe we were the couple?
What at first doesn’t sit right might eventually be made to stand at least to reason.
Then came crackdowns at work — freezes on travel, on “favors” for office affairs. I liked how things got worded on the stop orders, and I liked how a day harshened around ten o’clock and again about three; I liked personal bombshells — the miscarriages and surprisingly affordable addictions.
But I mostly liked feeling pinned down, sized up, taken for.
The new guy they paired me off with was just some kid, formerly rural, with a headful of unmastered mathematics and specialty jests.
He figured in my toilet ruminations, true, but only as someone spooked, not spooking.
The library girl had the disease in its early, bashful stage. “Watch and wait,” she said the doctors had said. But it did not come out of its shell the little while I knew her.
I
would help her off with her coat, and she would put everything she had into a practiced shakiness that could not be ignored. The money we threw around was mostly money torn most of the way down the middle.
She had a diary she decorated alertly but wrote in only here and there — tidings, updates, mostly flashily inaccurate. I know because I, too, tended to peek at life and generally save my breath.
Then a boxier month holding more than I knew what to do with. My mother died idly and lopsidedly in her sleep, and within days had begun her cindered foray into the infinite. My father threw himself truantly into grieving, claimed he could hear his mind clearing up too soon. My older sister had started courting some galled dab of a man. He kept his back to the rest of us while we whiled away the days of bereavement pay.
This was supposed to be broad-skyed autumn, don’t forget.
Slants were falling all across my life, too. A sore, a lasting blemish of some sort, had asserted a fresh residency on my chin.
Then my older sister had a change of heart, married her man’s grappling brother instead. The ceremony was swift, inventive, isolating.
A year or two of slower considerings, and then another year broke out its days. I was newly forty, and veinier, but now and then still had a crack at people.
I squibbed myself this way and that into a few more women, fled the coming fruitions.
Then Elek.
I had known him for only the hour, but he left that scathing of citrus on my lips.
In years to come, I shared a house — some plywooden, hideaway housing, really — with a much younger woman who had a daughter, a keeper, from a man who had left. This woman and I helped each other off with high-collared sweaters that verged nearly to our shins, ate take-out pizzas that had been rechristened to sound like sensible dishes. We fought like equals. When the daughter grew up a little further and started overdoing it (she had a finessed, triumphal bloom on her), the two of them got mistaken for sisters wherever they went. They took to explaining that they were just good friends with hopes of someday being something more.
People Won’t Keep
Like everyone else in that kindergarten, I was told to bring something from home to kill a couple of minutes in show-and-tell. I brought in the one toy I’d been living for — a toy drive-in theater. (Tiny cars, tiny snack bar, a tiny projector that beamed film-stripped cartoons onto a tiny screen.)
A girl in the class cried out that the thing was hers.
The teacher, a Miss Somebody Else, naturally took her part, handed the whole works over to the girl.
That quick, there was every way for me to go about not rising in the world.
And in high school? I girled myself around the boys retiring behind their guitars.
I enjoyed their entertainment of their every doubt.
Then college, and more college, then pointless turnabouts between turning points.
Wife number one was always a baby at the table.
She came from that side of humanity that fostered a fern on every stick of furniture.
She called her mother day in and day out, doing things to her voice that made her sound uprooted.
Her mother’s voice: “I want you to do something for me. I want you to stretch your right arm out as far as it will go.”
My wife’s voice: “Okay.”
Her mother: “Are you doing it? Are you up against
anything?”
My wife: “The back of a sofa.”
Her mother: “Slap it so I can hear it’s really there.”
I forget if it was an alderman or a magistrate who served me with the papers. It looked like legerdemain.
Fair enough, but the next one I followed night after night to the locale’s movie house, and sat in the same fusty dark through sentimental documentaries about fatal but honest mistakes. I shopped in the shop where she bought her rosy soda. (I pictured her, to a certainty, meekening it with tap water.)
She looked even more unmingleable with people than I: night-eyed and sofa-ridden and grimed, I supposed, from stinkhole recreations and the blunts of dumbing employments — nothing new pooling in her heart, and a wayside tendency to let things just pale, and that reigning voice of hers growing more professive by the mouthful when the subjects must have gotten touchier.
Thus: sudden kisses in her car, smushy and considerate at first. Then into her apartment, onto her husky furniture. (Only a daybed, though, with throws instead of sheets, the toilet muttering until morn.) We would run down a day in the solid clarity of the town, hold only the most lulling of things against each other. Such a rushed and rubbishing month! (Later, of course, all that mending talk, and the perspectival protection it probably should have brought.)
It turned out to be a commodious enough marriage, though. Other people started cropping up in it. They fell asleep on us, entertained our touch, cut us in on their injuries, their every setback and deadlock.
Then went away, to a man, so much the slower of heart.
This wife and I took to styling more and more feeling into our morning farewells.
We were believers, the two of us, in giving people their dwindling due.
Just the same, you learn to live without yourself.
You go behoovedly to work in safety pants.
But it’s not you yourself who turns forty, forty-five, fifty — you get turned. Dialed forward and therefrom.
Except now I’m pushing, being pushed, sixty, with cataracts and suchlike. I listen through snow to the scrattle of a neighbor’s shovel on the sidewalk out front.
There should be limits on how much can be spelled out on people.
The facts have yet to do their job.
I Was in Kilter with Him, a Little
I once had a husband, an unsoaring, incompact man of forty, but I often felt carried away from the marriage. I was no childbearer, and he was largely a passerby, minutely berserk in his bearing. We had just moved to one of the little cities that had been set out at intervals — they formed a kind of loose oblong, I imagine — in the upper tier of our state.
He had an unconsoling side, this husband, and a mean streak, and a pain that gadded about in his mouth, his jaw, and there was a bumble of blond hair all over him, and he couldn’t count on sleep, on dreams, to get a done day butchered improvingly.
He drove a mutt of a car and was the lone typewriter mechanic left in the territory, a servicer of devastated platens, a releaser of stuck keys.
I would let him go broadly and unseen into his day.
These cities each had a few grueling boulevards that urged themselves outbound. Buses passed from one city to the next and were kept conspicuously to their schedules, and I soon took to the buses, was taken with them: I would feel polite and brittle in my seat as a city was approached, neatened itself into streets and squares, then petered out again into bare topography. It never made much difference in which city I got off. I always had some business somewhere of a vaguely gracious, vaguely metropolitan sort, if only a matter of inquiring at a bank about exchanging some uncomely ones for a five. Sometimes I resorted to department stores, touched handbags, clutches (I have always preferred the undoing of any clasp); and I liked to favor a ladies’ room with my solitude. I knew how to make an end of an afternoon, until the day lost pace and went choppy with a fineness I could refine the finality of.
It was mostly younger women on the buses — women barely clear of girlhood, dressed for functioning public loneliness in tarplike weighted cottons.
I one day sat down beside one.
My fingers were soon in the pan of her palm.
This city was a recent thing built in pious, cutback mimicry of someplace else. The streets were named after other streets.
I had been hired, probationally, as a substitute teacher, which meant I was not hated by any one student for any length of time, but I made enemies aplenty in the short haul.
I would write my name on the board, and then I would usually have one girl, a roupy-voiced thing, who would say, “Wai
t, I know you,” and I would say, “I don’t think so,” and she would say, “Not from here.”
Back in the practicums I had been taught to ask, “Who belongs to this paper?” Because you do run across cases where the possessory currents seem to be running more forcibly from the paper to the kid than the other way around. You’re taught to feel something for anybody caught in that kind of pull, though I never once felt it.
I had, I hope, a dry, precise smile, a good-bye smile.
My husband: he had sized his life to deprive it of most of the right things.
I had been meaning to get something in here of our incensed domestic civility, and the queered quiet of our nights, and the preenings of the weather all the following summer, a summer that never cut either of us in on its havoc and seethe, but the mind’s eye is the least reliable of the sightholes, and I might have been looking all along through only one of those.
It was availed away, our marriage.
We got tardier about every fresh start.
If I am talking them up again, these women brimming hectically now on buses, it can’t be only to keep throwing pinched perspectives over their low points, every rut in their loveliness.
It’s just that I tend to get all devotionate when I sense sore spots and unaired ires in any shrewd mess densening suddenly in my ken.
A Tuesday, for undiscouraged instance: a vexable, vapory girl.
My one hand mulling its way into a pocket of her coat.
(To join hers there at last.)
My other hand fluffing up the leg of her pants.
(The hair on her shin a chestnut-brown emphasis.)
I helped myself to their charity.
