Partial List of People to Bleach

by Gary Lutz

  “What about you?” she said. “What are the love interests? Let’s hear of their displeasing miseries one by one.”

  I said that people tended to get dislocated when I touched them too much. I stretched things too far.

  “Nonsense,” she said. “You don’t put yourself out there at all.”

  I took out my wallet and showed her a photo of a woman who had long ago taken refuge in a haven of a sweater many sizes too immense. She looked hardly even noticeable in the picture. But in point of fact she was a skin-and-bones difficulty with arrhythmic outages of affection and a butchery of blue-black hair. She had tapped me, variously, pandemoniacally, for kindliness and money, but then started offering us, as a couple, to others. In no time, people, bamboozlers themselves, had gone through us just to get through with us.

  “Who left whom,” my ex-wife said — as a reminder, though, and not as a question.

  Wine she wanted now. The afternoon had issued itself quarter-hour by quarter-hour into buggy evening, a drizzle-drozzle so soon on the windows.

  She was claiming to be pregnant in some desultory way or another. She said she had been having a devil of a time with it. She asked me to ask the waiter if he knew of any old hand at abortion. The waiter had that look of contented demolishment you often see over there. He wore a skirty apron and narrowy shoes, slippers almost, and spoke to us as if straight from his private life. He led us to the front of the place and pointed across the way to an arcade of sorts.

  We held hands in a pedal-taxi on the little passage over. I felt derisions of warmth in her palm.

  The abortioner’s office was at the back of a machine shop and was full of swatters, plumb bobs, toilet plungers. This was a staminal man with dinky eyes and fingers that kept niggling at each other as he spoke. On an ironing board behind him: a midget computer, bluey and ablip.

  “This is the wife-in-chief?” he said.

  A funny way to put it, because I figured we had always been equals in whatever was most petty or fruitless at the moment. But you had to factor in her tendencies to entice and deprive.

  “I am in want of an opinion,” she said.

  “Remove all wraps, trimmings, fixings,” he said to her.

  “No reason for you to leave,” he said to me.

  “I never left,” I said.

  “I meant now,” he said.

  She unbuttoned, unzipped. I had forgotten, I suppose, the finely hirsute earthliness of her, that vicious uneternal splendency. (The skelter of moles along the small of her back, the salmon-patch birthmark on the nape of her neck, the bubbly something near the groin — that droll, brazen sincerity of her body had always been a sticking point.)

  He reached for a whisklike thing, then something along the lines of an awl. Proddled and poked into her a little. Then, after a clinical minute or so, said to her: “Somebody has been pulling your leg. You’re not up to anything at all in there.”

  He pointed unclemently to me.

  “Maybe it’s him it’s inside,” he said. “Maybe I should be scraping around in your man there.”

  “He’s not my man,” she said.

  “How long not?”

  “Over a year now. Closer to two,” she said. “I’m with somebody else.”

  “It takes a lot longer in a man, though. It goes unclocked.”

  Then: “But just look how crammed the guy looks. Look how chockablock that gut.”

  “We were against having kids,” she said.

  “This won’t be a kid,” he said.

  And to me: “Desert what you’re wearing.”

  I did as I was told. Stripped — or, rather, felt things tearing, being torn, away from me. If it’s hard to say, it’s because of my hands, the way each of them had always been contrary to the nature of the other.

  “Your heart is jerking,” he said.

  All I knew was that I was naked, skeptical, ill-spun, beastly, muddlesome, shame-burnt, dashed and thankless, disheveled in every sinew. (I had always preferred my body sight unseen.)

  It was a plastic hanger, not one of the wire ones, he finally came at me with. He hooked the thing into my behind and pulled and pulled educatedly until he let out a peep that just as soon structured itself downward an octave or two until it was harrumph after harrumph of chronic expertise.

  “You keep yourself awfully stocked,” he said.

  He exchanged the hanger for a shower-curtain rod.

  Ripped into me again.

  Fetched out, and set down on the plane of the ironing board, the expectable barrettes, compacts, lipsticks, and atomizers, but also:

  the serpentinous leathern strap of a shoulder bag (clips included);

  pages wrung from a scratch pad with what must have been phone numbers scribbled over until they were gibberished into inconsultable, unconsolatory faces blurrily girly;

  airline-boarding-pass envelopes, stuffed with an overkill of nervily plucked coils of bikini-line hair;

  receipts for shoes of synthetic materials only, for fair-trade coffee beans, the receipts a little smeary, as if having blotted the oils from the tip of a much finer nose;

  a head-shot photo, scissored from a magazine, of some sacked sit-com actress, taken to salons as a prompt for the stylist to age her just so (bangs, featherings, tints);

  a ropy noose of a necklace in full, but just smashments of chokers, lockets, bangly teakwood—

  “That’s it?” the man said. He stepped back, the better to hurl the curtain rod at me. “That’s the most trouble you’ve gone to?”

  He called me a man of pronenesses instead of convictions, screamed things even more coring, threatened my life, walked me out to the tram to see me off, etc.

  I forget if she was still with me then or not.

  This isn’t all of it, obviously, just some notes I must have taken not much later, overstepping. I had never been the type of man that women reassessed. I do know that in days to come I heard that she and the man had gotten themselves thrown out of her aunt and uncle’s, or whomever’s, and were living in a bed-and-breakfast in the same ruin-heaped city, and I liked to think that they were going to have to feel it in their bones just as I had always felt it in hers — that lingering business, I figured, about fitting new people and their irritable parts to the old feelings, the feelings that only made you feel as if you were going to have to get permission to chalk any of it entirely up to her.

  Life — mine, I mean — might best be left unattended.

  Tic Douloureux

  My brother and I were the last of the sons still living at home. It was my aunt’s job — once a month a pay envelope was propped against a step halfway up the staircase — to see to it that I was kept some distance from him. One afternoon she told me to drop what I was doing and walk with her to the room in which he was kept. I trailed her down the hall as far as the doorway, then stopped.

  “No monkey business,” my aunt said.

  The room was dark and windowless. This was still very early in ragweed season, and my brother was the only one of us the pollen had wanted much to do with. Handkerchiefs were balled up on his bare chest and on the floor beside the footage of yellowed foam rubber on which he was taking his slumbers. There had to be so many handkerchiefs, I was tired of being told, because a single one would have been soppy, draggled, useless, in no time.

  “Go ahead,” my aunt said.

  I seized each handkerchief by the corner and shook it out into a lank spookling and then passed it along to my other hand until I had a dank fraternity of at least a dozen or so of the things squirming together.

  My aunt started toward the doorway.

  “Go,” she said. Her eyes, I could see, were watering a trifle.

  In my room, I dunked the handkerchiefs one by one into the scummed water in the wash pail and, without rinsing or wringing, distributed them across the floor to dry. At some point, I composed myself — stretched myself out atop the handkerchiefs to cool the backs of my legs. I pictured, as always, the gleaming expanse of
my brother’s chest, smooth as tile. I might have fallen part of the way asleep.

  Every room on our floor was a complete dwelling, with something to fall asleep upon, and a wash pail, and another pail for whatever was going to desert our bodies, and something to cover the food we never could finish.

  When you are one age, my father was fond of repeating, practically anything is either a blanket or a bed, no matter what it might have started out to be. But I was no longer that age.

  I one day entered a room where my aunt had got ahold of a newspaper. She was trying to find a reliable way to keep a taut double-page of it aloft, kite-like, between outstretched arms. She shoved it at me.

  “Read this and tell me what you get out of it,” she said.

  There was an article about the different things people ate and wore in a different part of the world. It was padded with recipes and sewing patterns, anecdotes, excitant quotes. I could see how old and rotten the thing was. I gave my aunt a chunked, inaccurate summary.

  “Nothing in there about brothers?” she said. “How brothers should behave themselves around each other?”

  She reclaimed the paper, tried to get it up in the air again.

  “It names all the places they’re allowed at on each other,” I said. “It names everything about the places.”

  “Show me where it says any such thing,” she said. “They can’t print that in a paper.”

  I stabbed my finger through the page, jerked it out of her hands. I returned to the tropical stink of my room and counted the number of times my brother at the other end of the house sneezed next in succession — forty and seven.

  Downstairs, it was a regular house. My parents were partners in a failing sales venture that confined them to hotels for weeks on end, but when they came back, their voices rose up through the hardwood floors, reminding us to mind our teeth or running over the details of turning points, of showdowns, with finicking clients. We were expected to make our reactions, our acknowledgments that we had heard, sufficiently audible. Sometimes I just pounded on the floor. My brother often followed this example. I could tell when he was using his elbows and not his fists, because with an elbow you do not get nearly as much thud. The sound is more pointed. A few times I heard the ball of a bare foot. Once I swear I made out what had to have been his skull. There was nothing from his direction for a long while after that, so I drummed enough for the two of us, moving about in the room and out into the hallway, but whom was I fooling?

  During my parents’ absences we were permitted downstairs no more than twice a day — one at a time, my aunt first — to choose our food and to fetch our water for drinking and dousing. We emptied our pails in the powder room. The toilet had a new seat that was not screwed on properly. It would slide out from beneath you unless you knew the right way to sit. The sink had no stopper, so you had to make sure there was nothing loose on you or on your smock when you bent forward to wash. Only one burner on the stove was even hooked up. There was a wagon-wheel-like chandelier above the kitchen table, which had an extension-leaf slid into it. One afternoon I sat at the table with a dish my mother had covered with foil in the refrigerator. It held a fantastication of stringy meat overextended with cake crumbs and edged with vegetabular sliverings that didn’t quite sit right. I happened to hear my brother squishing along the floor upstairs in socks that must have still been soaking wet. That day I began to develop an appreciation for how things upstairs sounded to people underneath. From every footfall, every stride, came a creak that rippled outward until it overspread the entire ceiling of the room. The effect was one of resounding activity, of achievements far and wide.

  “If it’ll get your mind off it,” my aunt said.

  She had disposed herself beneath me, her eyes already shut, her hair a leaden bulk, an infrequent twinkle in her fingernails.

  I filled her body with some pulse of my trouble. From the window I could make out the low-roofed town, untrafficable in the haze. One of the housetops close by was handsomely slated and slick. I slid my mind onto it for a clammy duration.

  This is what days were now like in the morning if I hoped to see my brother come afternoon.

  My heyday was the week or so my brother and I were finally boyfriend and girlfriend. We would arrive together for lunch in whichever room my aunt was keeping the food heated. Handkerchiefs would swag from the waistband of my brother’s pants, to be plucked, besopped, then set free. I watched them sail toward the floor, each with a fresh fortune of phlegm.

  “He always claimed his wife hated him for the wrong reasons,” my aunt said. (I am afraid I paraphrase.) “Her despisal, he felt, was wide of the mark. The marriage was far from finished, but there was less to make it stick. The bed they shared was amiss. The mattress was too big for the frame, for one thing. There was quite the overhang on his side of it. He got better at shifting his weight onto other people, or tacking somebody onto himself for purposes of symmetry alone. I was much the same way — younger. But did I run? We were too much alike in our bloodbeat. We’d gone out to eat, finally, and he told me what he had told her exactly as he had put it to her: ‘You, you, you.’ Everywhere you look — why didn’t I know it then? — people are repeating to other people what they had said to third parties, and the ones caught in the middle are afraid everyone within earshot will think that they, the middle people, are the ones being spoken to with such a tongue. So they keep interrupting. They say things like, ‘You actually said that to so-and-so?’ Emphasis on the so-and-so. But I hadn’t been around long enough to know.

  “My heart back then was more of a catch basin than it is now.

  “When he was a child, mind you, he slept so soundly, he had to be taught everything all over again in the mornings — how to sit up to the table, what forks were for. His sisters were Brenna, Linette, and Naomi. They jumped for joy over whatever a foul little mouth could reach. He never wanted me to know their names and their interests. ‘Disaggregate,’ he’d say if he were here. He’d be throwing up his arms all over again.

  “He would doff his shoes the instant he entered the house. ‘You’ve no idea what I’ve been stepping in all day,’ he’d say. He’d say farewell before shutting the door for his bath. I once found the poor man trying to read his way around a business card some thoughtless cuss had left as a bookmark midway down the page in a library book. I could see the struggle in him. The thing was slotted right into the spine, like a tiny extra page. It stuck out an angle. It was obvious he did not want to have to touch it. From where I stood, I could see the parallelogrammatic shadow it was throwing onto the left-hand page. I reached over and snatched it away. I was always the one to turn on the lamp and make sure the light fell over his left shoulder. I’d say, ‘You’ll ruin your eyes.’ And he’d say, ‘The only way to ruin your eyes is to keep looking at people.’

  “So don’t think I don’t know what you two think you have,” my aunt said. “Don’t pretend you’re the first.”

  I had my foot around my brother’s ankle. One of his hands was in mine; the other grasped an undrabbled handkerchief.

  “He knocked you up?” I said.

  “It was during one of the later years upstairs,” my aunt said. “The doctors told us it was a termless pregnancy, that the child might not ever come out, that it wasn’t going anywhere, that you see these sorts of impactions every once in a very great while, that this wasn’t the end of the world, there were ways to get around things, arrangements could be made for its tutoring, its recreations, inside of me, and for a while we kept at it, the drills, the columns of words, the recommended rhymes. But we started hearing less and less in return. ‘Pipe up!’ I would shout. It got harder to tell its baby talk, as muffled as it was, from everything else that might have been going on in my hellhole of a body proper. I think sooner or later it must have just got drowned out. I know I started shedding pounds.”

  “Do you ever talk to him?” I said.

  “Your father?” my aunt said.

  A couple of nigh
ts later, I heard heavy luggage landing on the linoleum below. We were all three of us on the floor. My head was in my brother’s lap. I thought I was the only one awake.

  “Who got the decorations out?” my father shouted from downstairs. “Who gave anyone permission to hang crepe paper?”

  We lay still. I could see my aunt’s eyes unclosing themselves.

  “What did I miss?” my father shouted. “Something big? Somebody thinks they had another wedding behind my back? That’s what this is about?”

  I heard drawers being opened heatedly.

  “What else could have happened?” my father shouted. “Look at this place.”

  I heard the oven door slam.

  “Which one of you?” my father shouted.

  I saw my aunt raise an arm from the elbow, then start to bring it down. I kicked out my leg and caught the arm before the fist could reach the wide, booming floor.

  Six Stories

  SIMPLE

  This is the simplest story. Why am I always the one to tell it?

  When I was nine, an older kid said, “Hold out your hand.” Then tossed a crumpled candy-bar wrapper into my obediently cupped palm.

  Walked away, laughing.

  I decided to let the wrapper stay put.

  Out of spite, or what?

  I grew up, rented a room, worked, rode escalators, figured out where and where not to insert myself.

  People kept looking at the wrapper in my hand and saying, “Here, let me take care of that for you,” or “Are you looking for something?”

  I kept waiting for somebody to say something in a language that wasn’t shot.

  CONCENTRATION

  There was eventually a little something wrong with the son, too, though nothing so bad as with the daughter. The parents ordered corrective shoes and sat up late one night, writing and recopying and then laminating a note to be passed among all of his teachers.