Subtraction

by Mary Robison

  “Do I still get the beer?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer. I heard the squeak of her bottom as she realigned herself in the tub.

  “Jewels?”

  “Just help your ole fuckin’ self,” she said.

  Facinita had probably been a bowling alley. It was a long, low unmarked building behind an acre of parking lot lighted bright as noon by security floods. A strip of stubby palms like giant pineapples lined up along the base of the façade. Shiny loud cars were patrolling.

  Jewels had come in a dress right for an afternoon bride—pastry white, crisp, lacy. Her lips and eyelids were painted purple. “Muerte—very sensual,” she told me.

  The dance crowd here was excited, extravagantly sharped up.

  Inside, little lights flashed through cellophane red gel. The music was salsa; the floor bouncing full.

  Jewels spoke quick, liquid Spanish, pretty to my ears. She knew everyone. She hooked a tall boy who wore a suit that glinted like minnows.

  When he talked, I overheard the sound “Huh-reeba”—Jewels’s sister.

  “Well, goddamn. Bingo,” Jewels shouted. “They’re here somewhere!”

  “Where are the bars?” I asked.

  She winked; nodded left.

  I saw Raf.

  He was bent over, his nose and mouth in the dark mane of a girl twenty years younger than he. Whatever he was saying made the young woman smile, shake her head no, smile again.

  His shirt collar was open by three buttons and the V of his chest was tan. He did look handsome in his way, in his loose black suit, although there was a badge-sized bruise on his left cheekbone below his glass eye, and he seemed far along in his drunk. Just moving back and forth along the bar he stumbled twice.

  His good eye finally caught me watching, and after a beat came his smile.

  I moved by slow inches through the crowd.

  “Paige . . . Buensima. Someone said you might be in town.”

  I nodded once, yes; afraid to say anything, what my voice might give away.

  “You must want a drink. This is . . . somebody,” he said, and the girl with the dark mane looked as though her arm were being bent out of socket.

  “And this is uh . . . an old friend of mine, Julio,” Raf said.

  Julio had on a cowboy hat, and he held a thin umber cigar in his fingers. He pursed his lips at me, kissed three times.

  “So, Paige,” Raf said. “A drink?”

  “Not now, thanks. Could we . . . ?”

  “I must decamp,” he told the dark-haired girl.

  “Did our tanker come in? Is this our car?” he asked me. We had walked out into Facinita’s yellow parking lot.

  “It’s just a rental,” I said. “Raf?”

  “A rental,” he said and spat on the car.

  I asked, “How bad off are you?”

  He gripped my shoulders, backed me up against the door. I had one hand full of keys, the other opened on his chest, ready to shove him.

  “Can you say how you are exactly?” I said.

  He pressed into me, kissing my throat, my collarbone.

  “I’m O.K.,” he said. “Me? I’m . . . you know.”

  I drove on shut-down streets.

  Raf liked the car’s stereo and liked stamping the control tabs for the radio. He was doing this now with the toe of his shoe as he sipped bourbon from a silver flask.

  I recognized a bridge that spanned Bray’s Bayou and pulled off into what I thought was a public park. It was a cemetery.

  “Uh oh,” Raf said.

  “Mind if we do without the radio for a minute?” I asked him.

  “Here’s where I get mine,” he said.

  “What happened to your face?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Keep falling down. You know, I read there’s a once-in-a-millennium order of the sun and moon and all the planets of our . . . um . . . solar thing going on. Which could account for my imbalances, some of ’em.”

  We were under high trees that were bearded with ashen moss. Raf lit a cigarette, shutting his good eye to the burst of flame. The hot night was talking—crickets or frogs or sighing snakes—I didn’t know.

  “You’re too thin,” he said.

  “Umm,” I said.

  His head dropped back on the car seat and he closed his eyes and smoked.

  I studied his profile.

  “Who’s Jewels?” I asked, just to keep him conscious.

  “Nobody.”

  “A friend? A toss?”

  “Neither of those. Or not so’s I committed to memory.”

  We were by a grove of banyans, yucca, drooping St. Agnes bushes.

  Cozying up to the cemetery was a business line of gravestones with mirrory marble surfaces.

  Raf pointed the glowing end of his cigarette at them. “Soon,” he said. “My face and numbers, going right there.”

  “No. You’ve been having one long party, is all,” I said.

  “I missed you,” he said. “Genuinely did. You know, someplace, not too many cities back . . . Somewhere I was at a zoo.”

  I said, “Then what happened? They let you out?”

  “Just listen. I’m serious. They had a . . . Not a cage, but a glass room . . . tiny. For this cheetah. She was sleeping in there with this rawhide bone—great big, femur-sized. Laid out, sleeping on the cement floor with her paws up under her chin. Finest thing I’ve ever seen. I can’t stop thinking about it. My mind just goes there and stays.”

  I took a swallow from Raf’s silver flask and got hot straight bourbon, an eye crosser.

  “You wanted to get inside the room and play with the cat?”

  “No, no, just watching her sleep. She was twitching, her eyes moving, like she was having a dream. Feet flexing. Dreaming of hunting probably. You should’ve seen it.”

  “How do you like Houston, Raf?”

  He backhanded his jaw, making a brushing sound on his rough cheek. He took a second to think. He said, “Well, Paige, I don’t like Houston.”

  “Because I have to go,” I said. “Have to leave day after tomorrow. I was hoping you’d go back with me.”

  He pounded his clenched fist a couple times on the dash. “Well, probably should, but . . . you know me, how it goes with me. I’ll get back up, be better ’n ever.”

  “I know,” I said. “But I have to go. This’s the last train out, I’m saying.”

  Now he bashed his palm on the dash. “I can’t fuckin’ think,” he said.

  A bandy-legged Asian groundskeeper was doing night work of some kind, laboring over by the roses near the main gates. He wore a platterlike hat. I watched him instead of looking at Raf, who was saying, “I am too old for the constant fuckin’. . . . One uncomplicated dream is all I ask. How could I think about going back with you? That seems so blessedly long ago I lived in the motherfucking East.”

  “So, no?”

  He sighed. “Gimme a little time. Christ fuck, Paige, give me a night before I decide.”

  I thought of the Countess in The Marriage of Figaro, when she sings, “I am kinder: I will say yes,” and lets her husband off for so much everything that the chorus blasts, “Then let us all be happy!”

  “I’ve got a motel room,” I told Raf. “Olympic pool, room service, all that shit.”

  As we were merging into traffic on the Loop, Raf said, “You probably don’t wanna go back and gather up some of my friends. I’m just axin’.”

  I said I wouldn’t mind going to fetch Raymond Hollander.

  “Oh, you met Raymond, huh?”

  “I’ll say I did.”

  “There’s a bad story there. I’ll tell it to you sometime. I’m not the hero of the piece.”

  We were into the stream of cars now.

  “Such a surprise,” I said.

  In blackness, the instant the room door clicked shut, I heard Raf open his zipper.

  “What do I know, but you seem too messed up.” I snappe
d on a lamp with a pleated shade.

  “Yeah, I’m wrecked,” he said. “And yet, it’s funny. I look down and I’ve got this potato pointing at you. If that’s not funny, well then, I’ve been reading all the wrong philosophers.”

  He collapsed against the wall in a corner of the room and was sliding. When he reached the sculpted floor carpeting, he said, “Aw, hell.”

  “We should get some solid food for you, Raf. And I have B vitamins that you ought to take, so you can think.”

  “You got it all wrong. I can’t fuckin’ stop thinking. The horror show runs all the time now.”

  “I know. That’s what I mean. So you can think well and clear again.”

  “I got clear thoughts on you,” he said.

  “Aw, thanks,” I said. “You can show me sometime when you’re really here. When it’s really Raf I’m talking to.”

  He stopped me with a look, fierce and sudden and serious, his glass eye sending furious points of light. “You’re talking to me, Paige.”

  “And who might you be these days?”

  “Another dying animal,” he said with a shrug.

  “Back on the death thing, huh?” I said, but his eyes dropped.

  And there he was in the corner, his dark figure stretched out, his face stilled, sleeping.

  The bureau lamp’s pleated shade made harsh darting light shapes so I angled it to shine on an empty niche, and switched on the soft track lights bordering the wall high above the bed.

  I padded around barefoot, in and out of the shower, emerging at last with a skimpy motel towel safety-pinned like a mini sarong.

  All I wanted was Raf conscious, but I didn’t try waking him. I thought about lying beside him on the floor.

  Instead I flumped onto the jumbo bed and pulled magazines from my rope tote bag—Granta, an American Poetry Review, an issue of Zoom.

  “Don’t ask me about Raymond Hollander,” Raf said from the corner.

  “No, I wasn’t going to. I left you for dead over there, old son.”

  “I Lazarused. That’s been happening lately, just when I’m really enjoying being dead.”

  “Oh, stay on the fucking floor,” I said.

  “Too late,” Raf said.

  I glanced around my magazine.

  He was having great difficulty scaling the bed. He was hauling himself by his arms and hands, as if climbing from a diving pool.

  He lost hold and fell out of sight.

  “Come on, up and over,” I said. “You can do it.”

  He stripped off his jacket and T-shirt, and lunged onto the mattress, landing beside my legs.

  “Well, that was almost,” I said.

  Raf said, “This is the moment all those grueling months of training were for.”

  “That’s right.”

  “The hours on the practice mattress . . . The work on technique . . . All that is over. Right now, right here, it’s just a question of pride and character; a question of will.”

  It was one of Raf’s better nights. He was ambitious and strong, which surprised me, and it surprised me that he could carry through.

  The Church of Sun and Flowers

  AT DAWN I PULLED on a swimsuit and crept down to the pool court.

  The gulf air was warm and there were breakfast smells from the restaurant, and the chlorine-clean odor of the blue-green water, and there were tree and leaf smells as well.

  The surface of the lighted pool wobbled and glistened.

  I dozed on a lounge chair and dreamt in bolts and bursts of neon color. I awoke excited by the escalating heat.

  Maybe it was ten.

  Trundling past me on this side was a maid with a loaded utility cart.

  On my other side was Raf, a morning cup of bourbon balanced on his open hand. He held the cup forward, offering me a taste.

  Beside him was a shrub with leaves like bayonets.

  I said, “Houston, right? The world, third planet from the sun? Not just that I read too much Beckett?”

  “Paints up your dreams,” Raf said.

  “Intensely. How did you know that?”

  He sipped his bourbon, shrugged. “Your dreams are same as mine, Paige.”

  “No, hardly. Well, O.K., yeah, sure. Some, maybe.”

  Raf said, “A house with a well-kept yard, two boys . . .”

  “Lyle and Vartimin,” I said for him. “Lyle has a red wagon, a paper route. Vartimin has a complexion problem and also a weight problem—he needs to reduce—but he’s an awfully nice fellow. These were really vibrant shades in my dream. I didn’t know my mind could duplicate such color.”

  “Umm,” said Raf. “That’s Houston.”

  I reminded him I’d once gone very far away, where everything was different, every rule changed.

  “Africa, yeah, but you’d had your shots.”

  “Where’s the farthest you’ve been?” I asked.

  He looked at me, thinking. “South Pole.”

  “Oh, of course, the South Pole.” I shook my head. “And I’ll never know if that’s true. No way to know.”

  For lunch, Raf chose a Mexican restaurant with rough plank benches. On the walls hung acrylic paintings and straw dolls. There were potted cacti.

  He dug some Pacifico beers from a bin of cubed ice and gulped those while I ate hot flour tortillas, scoops of gua- camole and sour cream.

  When he’d finished his beers, Raf managed a few bites of chicken in chocolate sauce, two spoonfuls of black bean soup.

  “Now what happens?” I said.

  “You mean we’re all done fucking around, Paige?” he said.

  There was music from overhead: a plinking guitar and swaying fiddles.

  “Why did you leave me, Raf?”

  Behind the fiddle sounds, the guitar was doing something like high math.

  “I wasn’t leaving you,” he said. “I had to see Raymond’s why I ended up here. He’s helped me before; scraped me off a couple other walls.”

  “How? Who is he?”

  “Old friend. We were schoolmates.”

  “Oh, uh huh. Was that at Princeton or when you were reading at Oxford? Don’t even tell me, I don’t want to hear.”

  “Cute girl behind the counter,” Raf said eventually.

  She had been cute when we pushed through the entrance door and she was cute now. She had a nice back and her stupid dress showed all of it.

  “Everything a boy could want,” I said and sighed.

  Raf let smoke trail from his mouth.

  Because of his glass eye, his gaze could go off in two directions and someone confronting him who wasn’t used to this had to guess.

  But I knew where Raf was focused. His quiet smile was aimed at me while his working eye worked over the bared back of the counter girl.

  We drove out an eight-lane highway—the Old Spanish Trail, it was called—toward the Astrodome. I saw L.A.–type blight: Wal-Marts, a thousand fast fooderies, convenience stores.

  A bank sign eighty feet aloft flashed us the temperature in computer digitals: 103° F.

  “Turn up here,” Raf told me.

  Now we were passing grand homes with deep shade and broad lawns of jewel-green Bermuda grass.

  “Next block, go right, on through the iron gates,” he said.

  We rode a meandering drive on the grounds of a Catholic convent. Shadows splattered everywhere over the yards and banks of flowers. There were white statues, luminous on their pedestals.

  The radio’s weather announcer said hurricane winds were hammering the Grenadines, that a thunderstorm was drenching the Panhandle.

  Where we were, though—before the brick convent building—curtains of bright rain fell. The sun was out, but the rain came down as if thrown from lawn sprinklers.

  Raf said, “Let me just light this cigarette.”

  An Archangel Michael, twice life-sized, stood guardian before the convent’s door. I watched a nun in a blue dress and hood as she wen
t running for him.

  And I saw a tiny orange-and-yellow lizard flicker up a cottonwood tree.

  Raf inhaled and said, “Now. I swear to you, before God here and all his angels and virgins and shit, that I mean to clean up, dry out . . .”

  “Before or after you go back with me?” I asked.

  “Uh, go back with you. Before. It’d have to be before. But, so, that’s my plan, those are they, so help me. Loyola.”

  “How long will all this take?”

  “Don’t ask me that, Paige.”

  From the elementary school next to the Catholic convent came sixty Mexican girls—in box-pleated skirts and white uniform blouses—who moved, holding hands, in a two-by-two line.

  Raf took more bangs of bourbon from his silver flask; offered it to me. His glass eye was closed while the other feasted on the summer schoolers.

  “You don’t know quit,” I said to him.

  “I was just trying to imagine you decked out like that.”

  “Twelve idiot years of my life.”

  “With the ribbon-in-the-hair deal?”

  “Sure, the ribbon.”

  “Turn at the corner. There’s something you gotta see,” Raf said.

  “Is it a museum, Raffles? Or a gallery? I know Houston has like the Menil Collection and the Rothko Chapel. And fine-arts museums with couches and guides and gift shops.”

  He was punishing the radio again, shoving in its buttons with a knuckle, twisting its dials. He tuned in a Caribbean station, a show featuring the Rastafarian Brigadier Gerry the General, and kept ahead of Gerry singing “Hafta Get a Beatin’.”

  I nibbled a red licorice stick from a bag that had ridden on the car’s back seat since being plucked from a wire carousel at Hobby Airport.

  Now Raf was directing me along avenues of shanties and weed lots, up Jessamine, Delphine, El Camino.

  We paused at the railway crossing for seven passing blue-and-yellow Santa Fe switch engines. I said, “Don’t laugh, but I sort of like watching trains. I and every other American.”

  “I don’t think being normal’s your worry,” Raf said.

  My window was down. The air felt sticky, as before a hard rain. The sky had purpled up in the rearview, readying for a storm burst.