Partial List of People to Bleach

by Gary Lutz

  Ruthfully open arms, blind sides, always a general alcoholature to their breath — it was true a few of them might have been cautioning me all along to look out for myself, but I took that to mean what? That I was the fittest object of my own suspicions?

  Women of muddled impulse, lonely beyond their means — I let my drowsy heart drowse around.

  Then it was decided it was time to fix on just one of them. I was on a bus homeward from work. She was steadfast of face, and it was a situated face, or my idea of one, but her dress curtained her off so completely that the breasts were cryptic, the legs undefined.

  Ideally, the way we sat, the way our forearms were set out in a line, her bracelet should have slid with ease from her wrist to mine. But the rumps of our hands were too thick to permit a crossing.

  Then her apartment, a barracksy large, lone room: tenants on either side of us, and above, beneath, making overheard but unintelligible dead-set headway.

  She had sweepy arms, a squall of dark hair, eyes a slubby brown. She spoke through prim, petite teeth of favors she was owed.

  There was relief in how quick we could find the hardness in each other.

  Then weeks, scrapes of inquisitive affection, kisses kept quiet and dry, unluminary movements not undear to me, a clean breast made here or there, every passing thought treated to a going explanation (people combine unneatly), an inaccurate accusation, a principal I had to have it out with.

  They weren’t hours, these classes; they weren’t even forty-five minutes — they were “periods,” which sounded to me as if they were each at once a little era and the end you had to see decisively put to it.

  I would be summoned from school to school, grade to grade, and I would advance through a class, a subject, a unit, by picking on yet another nobody undergoing youth, and I would peer into her worried homeliness, let a trait or feature advocate itself for half an hour’s discrediting endearment.

  Eyes, maybe; eyes of a sticky green that looked fuddled with the world and its ongoing insistence that things, people, remain detailed and unalike.

  Or an unblunt arm unsleeved in late autumn and within esteeming reach, though I had come to believe miserably in seeing arms not as the pathway to a person but as the route the body took to get as far afield of itself as it could.

  Evidence pointed directly to other evidence, never directly to me. What influence did I have? I spoke from notes.

  When you are no good at what you do, it does you no good to triumph at whatever you might come home to, either. My husband was in fact my second one. I should be making a case for the first, for the avenues of feeling I must have taken with him, though he mostly just roved from room to room between charley horses, was studious in his insults, twidged a slowpoke finger into where I still trickled against my will.

  Let me remember him, at least, for being the one to teach me that there was only one polite way left to say “yes,” and that was “I’m afraid so.”

  I am admittedly leaving out a kid I left eventually with an aunt, my one uncornering aunt, but I imagine I did later write a letter to be given to the kid when the kid finally aged overnight.

  I wrote it in emotional accelerations of my pen on hotel stationery on an evening when the fitness of the word evening struck me for once, for isn’t it the business of that first reach of the night to even out any remaining serrations of the day?

  I was a woman heaping all alone into her thirties.

  Things allowed me mostly lowered me.

  My young woman, then: she was technically out of the nest, but there was a parent she reported to, and I must have known there were other goads.

  In the nightlight, I could see where she had been C-sectioned. A weak grief usually strutted her up. She sometimes thumbed an hour aside with habits, practices; brought an abruptly feared finger down onto the pricket of a candleholder, maybe, to gloat over dribbleting blood. But the nail of the finger had been cheered an opera pink, or a mallow purple, and there was nothing uncourtly in her intonations.

  I was thus kept milling in her feelings still.

  For a living, she banged about tables in a downstairs restaurant scaled back now to only breakfast and a rushed late lunch. She would settle her stomach with formally forked portions of what had unsettled it in the first place.

  But how best to be usefully afraid for her? I could never get a sense of where others might be perched in her affections.

  Her name — I dare not draw it out here — was a huddle of scrunty consonants and a solitary vowel, short. I should have done a better job of learning how to say the thing without its getting sogged somehow.

  A family? That was where you got crooked out of childhood.

  I had been sixteen when I grew into my mother’s size — an already tight and terrible ten. Our wardrobes overlapped for a while, then no longer got sorted at all. We would pick a day’s dark attire out of the dryer, and had to go from there.

  Or you could go back even further, to when you are barely untucked from childhood and finally get the full run of your body, and feel secure in all its workings, then learn that everything on it will now have to be put to dirtier purpose.

  But my brother? I was in kilter with him, a little.

  I turned on him, then turned back.

  There was already wide plight to my tapering life.

  One night, though, I had to use her bathroom. It was mostly men’s things in there — shaving utilities, drab soaps, an uncapped deodorant stick with a military stink to it.

  When I came out, the phone rang.

  “Let it sleep,” she said.

  (The handset had, after all, a “cradle.”)

  Then later, someone slapping away at the door.

  The slaps were all accumulating at one altitude at first, but then traveled unmightily down the door panel to the knob.

  Then sudden, fretful turnings of the knob.

  We listened, hands united, until the commotion at the door was a gone-by sound, followed by the gone-by sounds of feet in the hallway, then of a car entered, roused, driven expressively away.

  Prescription oblivials gave her an assist with her moods, veered her toward a slow-spoken sociability sometimes, sometimes made her meaner.

  We would sit down dearly to a dinner of whiskery import vegetables, close-cropped meat gone meek in the sauce, everything on side plates, everything a lurid obscurer of itself.

  But why lie when the truth is that the truth jumps out at you anyway?

  Before me, so she claimed, it had been a narrow-faced shopmaiden with a muggy bosom and a catastrophal slant to her mind.

  To hear her tell it, there were girl friends (two words), there were girlfriends (one word), there were friend girls, and there were women. Women were never your friend.

  Baby talk like that must have put the lacquer back onto my life for a while.

  I stood up quite handsomely now to my husband’s entire, perspirant heights.

  One morning I thumbed out most of the teeth from a comb of his, stuck them upright in rough tufts of our carpet — whatever it then took to get a barefoot person hurt revolutionarily.

  But the days arched over us and kept us typical to our era. It was an era of untidying succors, follied overhauls.

  Her manager gave her more hours.

  Her feelings came down to me now in just dwindlements of the original.

  She started showing up in the snap judgments of a glass-blowing uncle, and was an aunt herself to two nieces already girthed and contrarious.

  We had them over, those two, to her place, our table. They had been lured through youth with holiday slugs of liquor, had put themselves through phases but always stopped short of complete metamorphosis.

  The younger was the more bridelike. Skewy eyes, a dump of dulled hair. A sparge of moles on the neck, the shoulder.

  The older’s shoe kept knocking against my own.

  She picked a hole in her biscuit, didn’t seem to have any tides dragging at her.

  They each la
ter took me aside to tell me what they had had the nerve to collect, study, and forsake. Thick books read to detriment; tiny, frittery animals — need I say?

  Afterward, the woman and I alone, the night gone quickly uninfinite: I kept seizing things — household motes and the like — out of the broad, midbody bosh of her hair.

  But if I say I felt something for her, would that make it sound as if I felt things in her stead, bypassing her completely?

  Because that might too be true.

  When you’re a renter, a tenant, an apartment-house impermanent, you make do without cellarways, attics, crawl spaces: there’s little volume your life can fill.

  So you take it outside to the open air — into thin air, you’ve already corrected yourself.

  The eye doctor started calling my husband a “glaucoma suspect.” There were drops and a dropper on the nightstand, pamphlets of attenuated portent.

  I got better at tugging away the context from around every least thing. Something as unchaotical, I mean, as the compact she had suddenly stopped caring for. It no longer made the daily dainty descent into her purse.

  I got alone with it, unclamped the clamshell casing.

  Spoofed much too much of its powder onto my nose, my cheeks.

  Waited.

  Waited even longer.

  No alarms to report then and there, of course, but I must have, ever after, felt eaten away a little more around the clock.

  My weeks with this bare woman dipped deficiently toward winter. She either worried herself back into my attentions, or a day got minced into minutes we just wished away. Her love for me, in short, was a lopsided compliment, longer in the rebuke than in the glorifying.

  (The freshest snow on the streets already grooved and slutted by traffic.)

  Another night of roundabout apologizing, and she reached for a shoulder bag, not one of her regular daytime totes. She tipped it all out, fingered everything preservingly where it fell.

  The whole business was already looking a little too votive to me.

  First the smoot, the flaked razures and other collects, that she had abstracted from the gutter between blades of an overemployed disposable shaver. (It had taken, she said, the corner edge of an index card to reclaim this richesse.)

  Then, in a mouth-rinse bottle, a few fluidal ounces of sea-blue slosh from a compress that had been used whenever there were immaculate agonies behind a knee.

  And a smutched inch or so of adhesive tape from a homemade bandage, into which pores had confided their oily fluences. All stickage had long gone out of the thing. (She draped it inexactly across her wrist.)

  It had all been her sister’s, she said, if a sister is who it had been.

  I am always in doubt of whoever can’t die right away.

  She was gone some nights, too. Things happen when you are younger and have it in you to pinpoint your satisfactions.

  I would take the bus to look in on my husband. In my absence, life had scarcely scratched at the man. He never bothered going through my pockets or sought secrets in my miscellaneals. His point of view was exactly that — a speck, something too tiny to even flick away. We were in the bathroom; he was razoring the daily durations of hair from his cheeks, his chin. I was sitting shiftily along the brim of the tub. There was the hankering hang of his thing. I let it fool itself out to me.

  Days were not so much finished as effaced. You caught sight of new, unroomy hours looming through the old. Then months more: months of fudging forward unfamished. Then a Sunday night, a worldly evening, finally.

  We got off the bus, the woman and I, at the first town we came to. It was a paltry locality with a planetarium, a post office, a plaza. The plaza had a restaurant. We went in, ordered, raked through each other’s romaine, thinned out the conversation, set off for the restroom together. Somebody had taped to the mirror a reminder that hands should be washed for thirty seconds — the exact length, the sign went on to say, of a chorus of “Happy Birthday.” We thus sang as we soaped the other’s dickering fingers, but when we came within syllables of the end of the third line, where you have to put in the name of the “dear” celebratee, we broke things off.

  It was the same driver for the trip back — not a nice man.

  This being my history, I snapped out of my marriage, pieced myself back into the population, prodded and faulted, saw red, then wed anew in wee ways.

  This husband and I soon set a waning example of even our own business.

  I later fell in with a girl who kept a cat on her head to stay warm.

  I was mostly of a mood to pollute, and she was frank in her dreams, which she logged, but a liar in all other opportunities.

  Then years had their say.

  Heartscald

  HOME

  When I got back from the mall, everything in my room had been rotated almost a whole eighth of an inch to the right.

  I am taping it all back into place.

  FEMALE VOICE ON PHONE: “NO MORE CONTACT”

  I can’t speak for myself, but a job does things to a person, deducts a person pretty brutally from life.

  Desks are terrible places, no matter how many wheels a chair might have.

  You can’t do much about how drawers fill up.

  WHAT TO DO WITH THE OHIO RIVER

  Drain it, obviously.

  Hire me to walk its length and gloat.

  PLACE-NAMES

  I once thought Ave Maria was one.

  NEIGHBORS

  He slips a note under my door, says he has forgotten how to talk, so is there something that can be done?

  I meet him in the lobby. I bring my instruments in a wastebasket.

  “It’s my first time,” I warn.

  I go to work on him.

  His first words: “I’ve got something in my eye. A kingdom or something.”

  ERRAND

  The girl behind the counter rang up my package of paper towels and said, “Will that be all?”

  “No,” I said. “I want to suck out all of your memories.”

  THE TROUBLE BETWEEN PEOPLE USUALLY GETS ITS START

  The pastor kept saying, “Thy will be done,” and all I could think was, “Thy what will be done?”

  I USED TO LOVE LPs

  I used to love carrying them home from the store, the big, goofy flatness of the things.

  I thought the numbers parenthesized after the song titles were letting you in on the time of day when the songs had been taped.

  I thought the peak time for singers, bands, orchestras, was between 2:30 and 3:30.

  LIKE THE LADY IN THE PLAY,

  I have always depended on the strangeness of my kind.

  SHE WAS CARDIACALLY ALL OVER THE PLACE

  What they told me is that when the doctors opened him up, they found lots of accordion files, jars full of wheat pennies, a glockenspiel, a couple of storm windows, and told him there was nothing they could do.

  RECORD PLAYER

  I used to play my records with the volume turned all the way down.

  I would lower my ear to the needle to hear the tiniest, trebliest versions of the songs.

  I AM AWFULLY FOND OF THE INTERNET

  Trouble is, I hang on its every word. I have old-fashioned, home-style dial-up that entitles me to seven screen names. I’ve finally curbed my online activity by using the “parental controls,” which I exercise by means of intricate settings from my primary screen name. The controls allow me to set restrictions on the nature and duration of the Internet activity conductable under each of the other six names. So for each of them I’ve permitted myself exactly one hour of activity each day, but it’s a different hour each day for each screen name, and unless I log on during that one hour, I’m out of luck. There’s no way, of course, that I can remember the allowable hour for each name for every day of the week, and I naturally never bothered to write any of it down. The result is that most of the time I can’t get onto the Internet at all, and it would be much too much trouble to go back and undo all the settings.
So you might say, “Well, then, do all your business — whatever that might be, and it can’t be all that ennobling if you’ve gone and placed so many obstructions in your path — from your primary screen name.” Yes, yes, very good point, but somehow the Internet access from my primary screen name seems clogged, or something.

  WORK

  My humanity would have been misemployed no matter what direction I might have taken in life, but, no question, I have walked away cravenly from blocked-up photocopiers, paper jams of any kind.

  A lot of toner has gone into all I have done.

  THERE WERE WIDER AND WIDER SLITS IN A DAY

  She had a three-legged table.

  I always felt bad about that.

  THE WHOLE DAY WAS TOSSING AHEAD OF HIM

  As is generally the case, the father’s love for his daughter was sporadic and awful.

  The town’s founders could have done a better job of laying things out so everything wouldn’t be within a stone’s throw.

  I have to go around her to get anywhere.

  GIRL

  She wanted me to believe her best feature was her shadow.

  PEOPLE KEPT OPENING WIDE

  I keep seeing the phrase “a women” everywhere I look.

  Trouble is, it can’t be just a typo anymore.

  SECOND WIFE

  The human body is far too hot.

  It cooks things right out of your heart.

  CESAREAN

  I was hired to pack the old kind of computer disks into boxes for mailing, or maybe they weren’t even computer disks, because this might have been longer ago than that.

  The supervisor said, “Just make sure you ball up some newspaper into every box to pad it.” He pointed to stacks and stacks of old papers banked against a wall.

  Later, he checked in on me. Most of the papers were gone.

  He picked up a box, then another, and another.

  “Why the hell are these so heavy?”