Partial List of People to Bleach

by Gary Lutz

  FIRST WIFE

  I don’t know which is finally sicker — specifics or engulfing

  abstractions.

  She said she was just looking for someone to ride out some sadness on.

  MOTHER AND BANGED-UP SON

  Looking back over everything I might have ever said, I see that I have never come down hard enough on any of the rooms I lived inside.

  I want there to be science behind it if and when I do.

  FATHERLAND

  The state I was born in had to be abbreviated as “Pa.”

  HONOR MY WISH

  I tried drinking, but it wasn’t extinctive of the parts of me most in need of extinction. Plus, I had a good umbrella, but it got blown inside out, and I couldn’t get the thing to close. I set it down on the sidewalk and watched it blow off into the storm.

  I welcome any drowsy and senseless sincerity.

  I COULD SEE WHERE SHE WAS STUCK

  A man I knew had had car trouble for years. He got around by bus.

  He had just the one daughter, and I knew what she needed to be told.

  I could feel the words already forming into solids in my head: There’s no such thing as parents.

  When the time came for her to go off to college, she picked one in the state that was shaped far too much like the human heart.

  She arrived at the airport seven hours ahead of her flight.

  The automatic doors that led from the long-term parking lot to the terminal wouldn’t even open for her. She tried all three sets of them. The sensors, she guessed, failed to detect sufficient bodily or characterical presence.

  She should have brought luggage, school supplies, a change of underattire.

  An untroubled-looking couple turned up.

  The doors parted.

  She rushed in behind.

  SECOND WIFE

  We had to move two towns to the left, which was west, westish, in this case.

  GIRL

  I was singing over petite chords fingered on an electric guitar that wasn’t plugged in.

  It was a song of infatuation that I eventually passed along to the infatuatee. She said the chorus could use a little something more to fill it out.

  My voice was as flat as it ever gets.

  It sounded practically ventriloquized.

  I’M AFRAID I AM NOTHING SO DEAR

  The hours keep dragging things out of us or throwing us into reunion.

  I want everything elegized the instant it happens.

  MY LIFE TAKES PLACE MOSTLY ON THE FLOOR

  “Get over here!” I shouted into the phone.

  The woman came.

  She thought I had meant just her.

  THIS IS NOT WHAT I WANTED TO SAY, BUT SO WHAT?

  I wish I could inhabit my life instead of just trespassing on it.

  I LATER SUFFERED ATTRACTION TO SOMEONE A LITTLE LESS LIKE HER

  There should be a way for this to go straight into my short-term memory.

  There should be buttons to press, entire consoles of buttons.

  This should be more like science fiction and less like hate, pure and simple.

  Pulls

  It has always been my custom to go hungry for people, then make my way practically from door to door. But there was a time I had a wife and a new best friend.

  I was just doing the weary thing of being in my forties.

  My wife wanted to be known best for her parting shots, the breadth of her good-byes. I could count on her to be back within hours, though, tidily silent in her chair.

  And the best friend? He was an uncrusading man, rebuttable in everything. He looked felled, or probably at least fallen.

  I began dividing my nights between them.

  This wife and I had a rented house, two storeys of brutal roomth. The air conditioner required a bucket underneath it. Our meals were the cheapest of meats thinly veiled.

  My best friend had some uncovetable rooms above a garage. We took down hours with our talk.

  Here’s her name — Helene — though she will probably tell you different.

  For a while, I tried to get her steered toward women. We settled on a blowhard of sporty despondence, crude to the eye but newly starving for her own sex. I staked the two of them to a meal and threw in good wishes.

  She came home ebbing in all essences, looking explored and decreased.

  She wanted to know about my best friend. I told her that he and I fell onto each other more in sexual pedantry than out of affection, that our life together did not grow on us or chew away at our hearts. His body was just profuse foolery.

  Thirty-eight years of picked-over, furying age she was — brittled hair, a bulwark forehead, a voice that sounded blown through. There were hidey-holes in whatever she said.

  I felt indefinite inside of her, out of my element and unstately in my need.

  One night he wanted to know what it had been like to go through with the nuptials, the hymeneals. Not much had held up in memory. I let out that the minister had spoken of a “middle ground” between women and men or husband and wife, I forget — someplace irrigated and many-acred, maybe a plain. I had felt unchampioned that day. The minister got me alone at the reception, snapped his fingers, said, “This better not’ve been just some skit.”

  There are only two things, really, to ever say to anyone.

  Try: “I’m very happy for you.”

  Or: “This is just not done.”

  I made no more than the arcanest of passes at others. They probably never even knew they had been addressed or beset. I worked for a sloganless bail-bond concern. The people closest to me in seating were a rough-playing woman and a man about my age, drowning in the hours. The woman drank liquored sodas that brought something flowerful into her voice: words were now petally with extra syllables. The man took a restroom break whenever he saw somebody else come out. Maybe he found something engreatening about being in there so soon after anything dirtily human had been done. I pictured him taking deep, treasuring breaths, filling up on us. Home was probably just an air mattress somewhere.

  I lived in the lonelihold of my portents and pulls.

  Weeks kept fleeting past us.

  My wife restocked her mind daily with factual packing from TV and the papers.

  I would want a day to quit. Thinking what, though? That the one rising behind it might have a more encouraging bone structure in its hours or at least be calibered better for my regrets?

  Then one night she wanted to know how she might recognize my friend on the street.

  I spoke of the ordering of creases above his eyes, the general tempo of both his blinks and his nostril-flarings, the pitch and range of his arms, the usual drift of the rib that slid about inside him.

  But nothing eased for her or for me.

  My parents were still alive, still short on marvelry, still saying, “We’re all he has.”

  I had a sister, too, drying out again in the tedium of debt somewhere.

  She was an acher, patient but baneful in her morbid

  sweats.

  I thus sing the praises of my kind, but more often I just look for signals in the faces of grocery cashiers who are required to say “hi”—women mostly, overevident in their agony; features miseried, it must be, by hitches in the upbringing of their men.

  We tried pets, my wife and I. Bought a dog at cost, then a budget cat.

  The dog was unawed by my guidance, my sweet talk.

  The cat behaved — out of a love or regard, though, that was iotal, toiling.

  If you bought for one, you had to buy for the other. (Mostly novelties to squeeze for a spectral, unmerry squeak.)

  I wish I could remember whether they bailed on us or just died, overfed.

  Another generation had shot up behind us anyway.

  I had heard about these persons — that they were handling things differently.

  This was the generation that was discovered to have been “just reading words” and then was taught how to get through a textbook
by coloring the sentences so that a page, when the fingers had finished with it, looked beribboned, or zoned into chromatic blocks and runs. The books were handed in to the teacher, who graded mostly on pizzazz.

  Nothing went untouted about these kids.

  I went out and found one at a shopping center.

  She was aimless of face, but things had been staged in her hair — demonstrations of metal and feather in the low altitudes of stickied coralline. What she wore wasn’t so much a cover as a kind of kiting, blown about before her as she thugged away at a mood. Whims of string (from a shoe, I think) were ringed around her wrist.

  She had just been graduated from the two-year institute outside of town.

  I took her out for one of the current coffees.

  She asked whether I knew that cold water melted ice cubes faster than hot.

  I nodded learnedly.

  She mentioned “sleeping in.”

  I told her I had been well into my central twenties before it dawned on me that to “sleep with” someone didn’t simply mean to take a companion for your horizontal hours and thereby get sleep domed over you so much the higher than it would if you went home to bed alone. I had thought that was how you gave greater compass, greater volume, to your dreams.

  She sipped, and shook her head, and said sleep roamed all over her — it was tramply; it left reddening trackage on her back.

  “Not that you’ll ever get to see,” she said.

  She wanted my address anyway. I gave her the friend’s. I did get one letter later, a good-bye. It was, she wrote, a “bill adieu.”

  I am leaving out the hobbies, the odd jobs, the aplomb I had that just got harder and harder on people.

  But I will admit I went to the doctor about the ache in my face. It eventually swelled my cheeks and slit into my sleep.

  The doctor called it a “referred” pain. It had arrived, he claimed, from someplace else.

  He shunted me off to a specialist, who said the body always waits until the last minute to explain itself to you.

  And my wife? I had borne some of the brunt of her fresh starts, seen what helping hands could do with someone like that.

  Even her arm — the flesh of it looked tilled, perfected in every lurid turning away. It could withstand scrutinies more spiteful than mine.

  She fell in with a man full of biblical quips, brash intelligence about the presaging capers of his Lord. I saw her vivified and steep by his side in the business district one day. I was by myself in the house every other night. I liked the reliable isolations. I spent some time in the book she had been through. There had been obvious violence in her sessions with it. The binding was loose. It barely had a clutch on the leafage anymore. The bookmark kept sliding out.

  She came back to me with tiny growths in her groin and a new, striving vagueness of eye.

  Then I found a huge laundry room in an apartment tower near the house. For a time, I couldn’t do enough laundries there. Nobody caught on that my basket was practically empty. I would enchant every machine with dollar-store detergent, then get the things gushing and thumping through their cyclicals.

  I confined myself to one item per load. This ensured a cautious, tyrannical clean.

  Even better, there was a lost-and-found, a big cardboard box torn down a little from the top. I started bringing things to kick in — whatever clamored up toward me from the lowest of my life. The thinking must have been that I was most devoted to people I had not yet met, that I was best at laying out courtesies in advance. Thus the box filled mostly with helpings from my wardrobe: shirts gathering further shine; slacks that were negligences of hemmed fabric, down whose twinned chutes my legs had once gone their separate ways.

  My best friend and I were now living in an underhanded familiarity that, from farther off, might have been taken for an advance in attachment.

  We made it to the yard sales and brought back further caprices of the culture. Once it was just a mug whose hectic lettering said, “read a magazine tonight!”

  But nothing much was flaring in my heart.

  One night I told him that our lives differed in unbeautifying ways. I told him our bodies could never really be in league.

  I pointed at his hand. It had just left mine and was started on its way elsewards.

  His fingers always looked as if they were squabbling among themselves, undecided about what might next be deserving of touch.

  My wife was walking a fine line, wearing herself away from me.

  Months broadened in their burden.

  Then the advent of her scandal: sprigs of intimate hair trapped, specimenized, in the clear sealing tape all over the holiday packages that went out one noon to “influentials.” Her defense? Anything hailing from a body had to be worthy of at least flitting reverence on your way to the sink.

  But cracks had started forming in her words. Things ever after were fissured in her speech.

  Then the girl wanted to see me after all. Told me to meet her in the new wing of the closest mall. There was a swinge of ambition in her step as she saw me drawing near.

  She hated all her friends now, she said — preeners mostly, demanding dripling sorrows of every instant in her shadow. And what about me? she wondered. Did people my age have friends?

  I mentioned a couple of people who lifted emotions without giving credit yet expected originality in any affections coming from me.

  “Tell me your wife’s side,” she said.

  One evening, I caught sight of a man who had assumed himself anew in my slacks, my shirt, my jacket and shoes.

  He was startleproof in some sort of painless hurry, apparently.

  The look he gave me was not a grateful one, or even salutatious, but I felt at large.

  One night the three of us were in our right minds around the same table. There might have been a birthday. I remember that something consolatory had been ciphered into the icing of a store-baked cake.

  I grabbed her hand.

  Released its fingers — or set them out, rather, in severalizing meander — onto his arm.

  I must have thought I was getting something exalted on one or the other.

  The fingers, I could see, were stuck.

  I got up, feeling scanted and surpassed.

  My life now dates from that day.

  You’re Welcome

  Worse, I had been the husband, most recently, of a sweetly unpoised, impersonal woman, and in the months following the divorce (it would not have been worth the bother of an annulment, she had said; annulments were reserved for circumstances even more gloriously unfornicatory than ours), I had been getting sicker and sicker of living in conclusion in the little riverless city to which I had always returned after any kind of body blow or setback to my likelihood. But the divorce somehow didn’t feel finished to me, I didn’t feel riddled with it, or partitioned any farther from her; and having learned, from some florid passersby, that she was living in lower Europe with an aunt or an uncle with small sprouts of money, or sponging off somebody at least welcomingly kindred, I crossed the ocean to see what else there could be that might extinguish what I felt persisted between the two of us. There had to be a surer way to consummate the end of things already ended.

  I was a stare-about on the nightlong flight, pacing the aisles, pushing aside every meal and snack, hogging the lavatory for half-hours at a time, thinking that my thinking was, “You don’t want to go over it again, how you go from being a part to being apart.” And how true, for marriage had given us the chance to cultivate our mussed lonelinesses shoulder to shoulder, my lunatic of a penis uncoaxable into even the simplest of bedstead sex.

  People were plugged up enough as it was.

  We—I—landed at length in some city not even worth my putting the stony name to it here, because I wouldn’t want anyone feeling envious that I, of all tossed-aside American males, had made such a crossing, especially since from the instant I put myself out onto via this and rue that, I paid the place no mind, took in none of the sights
, ate only in the hamburger hideouts of tourists afraid of their own shadow. The hotel was a questionable piece of work, nothing like my apartment, that seventh heaven of meds and stink bugs, where my dreams either sneaked from sore point to sore point or beat me to a pulp.

  It was a couple of days until I met up with her in some plaza or other. There was a man with her almost terribly.

  “Maybe you should go take in the town for just a bit,” she said to him. He dropped back, the way people commonly did around her.

  Her bare arms swung boldenly as we walked to some kind of bistro. A utopian diet had limited her to rigorisms of tofu, but I ate a smattering of bacon and toast. I could tell she was stirring words inside of herself, and then she and I talked over each other about what we had coming to us, every tit for tat of it, reparations conceivably computable. Her gut had always told me everything: that there are many kinds of love, but ours had never been one of them. Need I have reminded myself, then, of the times I had moved around on her, drudged from an underarm to the rear of a knee, but always stopped short of anything that would put me across as someone connubially constituted for a woman so beautied to the point where you had to wonder whether she had ever been beautiful at all? The marriage had been no time to start.

  Her face, scarcely tended to with a scamble of blush, had assimilated some heavily haphazard eyeglasses. (The frames, new to me, looked as if hewn from rock.) But she struck me as not uncomely, if a trifle overhauled, her hair supplemented now, her dress an affluence of daylight-blue tugged over breasts looking newly punched up.

  My own body — dare I drag the thing in here? — had been exacted baggily over an inner nature unrooted-for and undelighting. I couldn’t break free from any of this body’s leakages or procedures.

  But her eyes, as ever, went vagrant when she talked. Her life was better now, she said. People went easier on her. Even the ones who had it in for her had to hand it to her that she was good at what she was doing, even (I gathered) if all she was doing was gauding about coolly in falsehoods extraordinaire.