Subtraction

by Mary Robison

  “Don’t let this get to you, this last. You don’t ever have to come back here,” Raf said.

  We were into a Hispanic neighborhood. “Clinica, Albierto Todos Los Dias Del Anos,” I read from a sign.

  “Turn up there—not quite a road,” he said.

  It was more of a trail, jagged, with plates of old blacktop and asphalt that rocked the car and bounced us as we crossed. One pothole was like a Ferris wheel drop. It jerked the radio song out of a phrase or so.

  “Slow up. This whole section’s one of the worst wards,” Raf said.

  There was a gathering of little girls with thick hair braids, baggy clothes, white anklets and huaraches who shouted something in Spanish as we passed.

  “See that shack?” Raf said, turning in his seat. He meant a cinderblock hut. Its bubble-gum-pink paint was sun-faded. Kids’ bikes with banana-shaped seats were angled around the shack, lying down or leaning on their kickstands.

  “O.K., yeah, I do,” I said.

  “It’s the sniff house of choice. Bigger than it looks. Most popular,” Raf said.

  “Oh.”

  He said, “Kids can do glue or aerosols or shine in there. They come out pretty goofy.”

  “I don’t thank you for showing me this,” I said. “And probably the Chamber of Commerce is smart not to mention it in the tour catalogue.”

  “Keep going,” Raf said. “On up to that parking lot.”

  The lot stretched out behind a movie theater named The Lido Six. Abandoned trash dumpsters, filled and fenced over with kudzu, blocked the theater’s rear-exit doors.

  “You go through those doors into the theater and inside . . .”

  “I don’t go through those doors,” I said, gunning out of the lot. The tires made static noises crossing the lot. Broken glass was strewn everywhere; glass ground fine as rock salt.

  “No, but I have,” Raf said. “And inside is the Church of Sun and Flowers. There’s a room in the basement with twenty or thirty people sitting around in the dark. Some have been there for days, weeks; they never want to leave.”

  A blond bundle like a long duffel bag lay ahead in the cement road.

  “Is this a dead man?” I asked Raf. I slowed the car and closed my eyes. “I’m sure he’s dead. He looks rumbled over by trucks. We have to do something.”

  “Stop when you get to him, but keep the motor running,” Raf said.

  He kicked open his door and leaned out over the figure. “Umm, he’s not dead. He’s resting.”

  I clunked the car into gear and drove. On Dahlia, we passed a clutch of sick-looking boys in ponchos and felt hats.

  “They been to the movies,” Raf said. “Now, you wanna go to the MFA?”

  “No, I’m out of the mood. What I really want to do is get into the fetal position and suck my thumb.”

  “Yeah, I know. Especially when you figure that’s eighty percent of the fuckin’ world. The palace is surrounded,” he said. “The serfs are plenty pissed.”

  “I haven’t asked what errand took you into that theater- church place.”

  “No, and don’t,” he said, tapping out the last drink from his flask.

  We went by a boarded-up nightclub and a boarded-up cabana, both behind razor-wire fencing. “Trevino Bail Bonds” was the cabana’s business. The nightclub had a sun-whitened sign that read: “GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS!”

  “Where Pru used to work,” Raf said.

  “Something else I will never ever ask about,” I said.

  We sat on café chairs at a little table in a club called The Yellow Man. Raf had skinned off his shirt and wore only his black jeans. His tanned bare chest was damp, as the bar had a couple floor fans but no real air conditioning.

  He was watching me now, even as he tipped the iced bourbon in his grip. He laid his left boot on my lap.

  For something to do, I pretended I was a radio. I figured Raf could listen or not.

  I talked about my Grandpa Amelio, how he had converted his barn and smokehouse and the heavy-equipment garages into studios for the sculptures he and my father did: civic sculptures—statues, monuments; and park stuff—equestrian statuary, Civil War, and Lafayette. I mentioned that my grandfather, by the time he died, had done eight George Washingtons, three on horseback.

  A man interrupted me—a chubby, white, curly-haired college-aged man—to beg a dollar for a drink.

  “Let go of her shoulder, Greg. Billy!” Raf called to the bartender. “Two for Greg, but over there.”

  The Greg man bustled away. The other half-dozen patrons of The Yellow Man were Caribbeans, men and women who knew Raf well enough to greet him by name and leave him alone.

  I went on talking family history. I told about roaming the sculpture barn when I was little, wandering among horses’ heads that were taller than I, and huge faces of presidents and statesmen.

  “I had a wood-burning kit,” Raf said.

  I said my father and grandfather worked twelve-hour shifts when they had a job, until gradually, out of the rock, a shape would appear. And it was sad, I told Raf, to see some of them go. “So we’d have a goodbye dinner; a farewell to the Allegorical Figure of Justice, or to Roger Taney, or to the Symbol of Athletic Competitive Spirit for the University of Eastern Maine.”

  “My dad worked as a salesman,” Raf said.

  “Then in the end, you know,” I said. “They’d use the statue for maybe the top of the train station in Wilmington or Iowa City. And there it’d be, up with the clouds.”

  “Mom hooked rugs,” Raf said. “There they’d be, right underfoot.”

  I went on to how Mario, my father, had stopped making monuments in the sixties when the market dried up and there were no commissions. “Nobody wanted eagles on freeway bridges anymore. But we should go to Brigham Park in Philly sometime, Raf.”

  “It tops off my dream vacation list,” he said.

  “No, listen,” I said. “When I was twelve or thirteen, Mario got his final commission and it was for a bronze water sprite for this marble fountain in Brigham Park. And he used me as his model.”

  “Aw, come on, when you were twelve, Paige? Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure, I remember it exactly. I mean, modeling nude. . . . And Mario—opera roaring away on the phonograph—in his apron and goggles. I think he was just so frustrated by failure he wanted to spit in the eye of propriety. As if to say, ‘Fine, you want jigsaw puzzles and car wrecks for your sculptures? And turn your backs on Michelangelo and the Greeks and three thousand years of figurative art? Well, here’s what you’ll be missing.’ ”

  “He sure never mentioned this to me,” Raf said. “Jesus. His own daughter.”

  “Well,” I said, “whose other kid was he going to get?”

  “I can’t judge the man,” Raf said. His voice was scratchy and low from drink now.

  Through the doorway and windows came a brown-orange light that meant sunset. And over the sweet scent of Raf’s bourbon I could smell palm, and a flinty odor from fireworks the neighborhood kids had set off.

  Dawn, and I came awake as if falling from a great height; falling from somewhere hot, white, hectic with the sounds of screaming machinery.

  My one leg was tangled up with Raf’s.

  I found nothing hot or white in the motel suite, nothing noisy going on, but pulling loose from Raf I saw the angles of his cheekbones and jaw and the line of his brow looking sharp and starved and terribly dark and beautiful against the bedding, and suddenly I had no patience for empty time, plotless hours, quiet.

  Room service brought up a carafe of coffee. While cold water streamed into the bath, I printed words in my poetry notebook:

  Live Oak Drive

  Lido Six

  saffron

  Cujaness

  rispetto

  the summer with all the falling stars

  Palo Pinto

  baby lizard—detailed, nectarine orange-yellow body, thread of vein on belly, silver
and lavender eye stains

  San Saba

  island lace

  black gum on saloon floor

  crystal wood

  pin nails

  hackberry

  rain on the convent grounds

  the Chickanut Sewing Circle

  I phoned my mother at the seaside inn she managed. Eastern time, it would’ve been about eight.

  “Oh, thank God,” Dottie said.

  I pictured her in a dressing gown, her pretty legs bare, her feet half tucked into mules, sitting on the side of the bed in the Commodore’s Suite, her hand pressed to her chest in relief. She adored Raf.

  “Your father lit a candle to—I think—Saint Anthony,” she said. “Whoever’s the patron or angel in charge of lost and found.”

  “Yes, well, Saint Anthony can’t grab all the credit. I get some.”

  “I’m sure it was an anguished search,” my mother said.

  “Wait a second, Mother. How would you know anything about Dad?”

  Dottie squirreled out of answering me.

  My parents had been divorced twenty years.

  Someone tapped on the window sill. I notched the chain and cracked the door open on Raymond.

  “Raymond?” I said.

  “King of the cowboys. I decided to duck work today. D’I wake you? You’re still in your bathrobe. Guess it’s only seven something.”

  I let him inside.

  “You found the loathsome one,” he said.

  The sleeves of his shirt were rolled on his brown arms. He looked sun-tinged and he seemed more inhabited than he had before.

  We stood uneasily, both staring at Raf.

  “Say what you will, that boy can surely sleep,” Raymond said. “I gotta make a smoke run. You care to ride along?”

  We took the Firecat, which Raymond wanted to drive.

  “Well, I’m glad you caught up with him. How awful was it?” he asked me.

  “I suppose it could’ve been a happier reunion, but at least he wasn’t bumping anybody at the time,” I said, and saw Raymond wince.

  “I should be more careful with my phrasing,” I said.

  “Whew,” said Raymond.

  “It was nice of you to fall by.”

  “No,” he said, “it wasn’t.”

  He drove under the Loop into West University—a leafy neighborhood of old brick homes. The yards here were mostly rust-colored soil, but where there was grass it appeared a livid green.

  “Magnolia Street,” Raymond said. “See that house with the arch?”

  He meant a tidy one-story where a shadowed front porch had, strung under its arch, an empty parakeet cage.

  “Woman lived there worked for my family for twenty years. Ida Consuela Nightingale. Half black, half Mex. She died just a year back.”

  “Nightingale?”

  “Ugly as her name was beautiful,” he said. “But her old man Harold loved her like life and breath. Harold’s probably inside there now, mourning. You know there wasn’t a day he didn’t deliver her to us. And then he’d be there to collect her. Always a little early. He didn’t want her on no bus and didn’t trust her to a cab, so he’d take time off work to chauffeur her. Forty-some years of marriage and they never were apart, except for their jobs. I kinda think that’s it, don’t you? The thing itself.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t know, Raymond.”

  “Well, I would,” he said.

  He pointed at a checkerboard place with a neon script sign: “The Panaderia.”

  “Best bakery in Houston. But back on what I was saying, what I want is like that, and nothing less. I don’t see the sense of anything less.”

  We shared the last cigarette in his pack, taking puffs and passing it to each other.

  Over a closed dry cleaner’s, on a plywood sheet, nineteen worn Michael Jackson posters were pasted. They were black and white with life-sized figures of Michael Jackson, and in splashing red “BAD” was printed nineteen times.

  Vivaldi, my father had listened to. And Scarlatti and Handel. Bach, of course. Those composers had gone right with the magnitude of Mario’s sculptures.

  Everything with him was hard and deductive and serious, but inflamed.

  We glided into the lot of a fuel station–convenience store called the T-EX.

  In its tiny yard, in the morning sun, stood a lovely girl. She was maybe fourteen, heavily pregnant. She wore a maternity frock of lime-colored cotton.

  Raymond let the engine idle and kept on the air conditioner. Turning to me, he said, “Can I ask you something real personal, Paige?”

  I nodded.

  He pushed his dark dictator glasses up the bridge of his nose. “I don’t know, am I rilly weird? Because I can have sex with strangers just fine. I acquit myself just fine. But if I get to know her, even a squinch . . .”

  “You’re not weird,” I said.

  “Well, that’s all about what?”

  “I think only a stranger can have magic. Maybe that’s why your spouse can’t hypnotize you. Or anyone in your family, or any good friend. . . . And probably another reason’s fidelity. As if you aren’t really being unfaithful with a stranger—she’s just a body, just a female.”

  “That’s a sweet view, darlin’. I bring all this up ’cause of Raf, actually.”

  “How’s that?”

  “He’s same as me. Now and then, he just reaches and takes whatever’s there,” Raymond said. “But it doesn’t mean a thing to him. ’Course you know that, or you wouldn’t stick by. I’d sure hate to see it if you weren’t sticking. The guy’d go straight down in flames. You think he’s fucked up now, well, I seen him plenty more fucked, in the old days, before you.”

  I told Raymond there was no chance of my saving Raf, but that I wouldn’t want to do without him, despite reaching and taking.

  A sedan slid up next to us. Its driver wore a sleeveless black T-shirt and had a sprayed and set haircut with a wave cresting off his forehead. Around his rearview mirror he’d strung a pair of red nylon panties.

  “What did you and Raf fight about?” I asked. “He didn’t—not Luisa.”

  Raymond said, “I try to convince myself it wasn’t Raf. Didn’t do anything but he was brimming over with suggestions.”

  “I am awfully sorry to hear that.”

  “It’s O.K. Other night at the motel room with you . . . and I don’t have the excuse of bein’ drunk and despondent.”

  “But what?” I said. “I’m not a complete stranger, so you didn’t try anything?”

  “I didn’t,” Raymond said, unwhapping his seat belt and moving on the seat to face me, “only because you were so strung out about Raf. You should know that, and maybe he should, in case he ever sobers up and starts thinking too poorly of himself.”

  Climbing out, the young man with the fancy haircut binged our car door with his own.

  “Hey, Pablo, watch it there,” Raymond said.

  A wind from nowhere leaned on the odd trees around the T-EX, combed the grass in the tiny yard, flattened stands of sun-crisped wild flowers.

  I zipped down my window. This wind felt hot. The north sky was plum. Overhead, the sky had gone cobalt and there were brushstroke clouds, furry clouds.

  I said hi to the pregnant girl in lime green. Her arms were folded above her big stomach and she was walking, aimlessly it seemed, up and down the yard.

  Raymond swung out of the store now, clutching an un-bagged carton of True Blues and a webbed six-pack of diet sodas. There was a snap to his hips as he walked. He had no more waist than I and he carried a lot of shoulder. The sun shone on his blond, metal-bright hair. I hadn’t seen anything quite so good on the hoof since the diving pool lifeguard when I was sixteen.

  I considered the next car—the guy’s red underpants trophy; and the pregnant child roaming the T-EX yard there. I decided the rank steam heat of this city must knock its people sideways.

  Riding back, Raymond said, “That was exa
ggeration about Harold and Ida Nightingale. You believe everything, don’t you?”

  “Down here I do. You mean that wasn’t true?”

  “Four-eighths true.” He bit the sealing strip of cellophane from a fresh cigarette pack. “I was makin’ a point,” he said.

  He said, “You know what Raf was doing when I first met him?”

  “Uh, guessing could take a while.”

  “It was weird. Weirdest. We were both on the freshman squad there at Princeton. . . .”

  “You really were at Princeton? I mean, Raf told me that. . . .”

  “But you didn’t believe it. Football,” Raymond said. “They didn’t give athletic scholarships in the Ivy, but they could make things plenty easy for a good linebacker and I was that. ’Course then my pa was an alum, and there’s recruitment quotas—like they gotta have a certain number from the Southwest and so forth.”

  “Still,” I said. “You must’ve been a pretty sharp tack.”

  Raymond said, “And I was only there two years ’fore they booted my butt out. But so here’s Raf and me and we’re the stars of the freshman team, so we buddied up.”

  Raindrops appeared on the windshield and wriggled down in zigzag patterns. Raymond got the wipers clicking.

  “So our teammates there had money to throw away, some of them. And what Raf’d do was draw pictures for ’em, for pay.”

  “I’ve heard about this,” I said.

  “Guy would say, ‘Draw me a chick,’ and Raf would do it, real as any photograph. And the guy’d say, ‘Longer legs,’ so Raf would just erase and make changes. And then the guy would say, ‘Now draw another chick on top of her.’ And Raf would tell him, ‘That’ll cost an extra five, you know?’ ”

  “A commercial artist,” I said.

  “Or like a cop sketch artist, only for the perverted. Guy would say, ‘Make her ass wider and put in a dog.’ And Raf would look real worried and he’d say, ‘A dog. That’ll be twenty more. They’re hard!’ ”

  We drove. Raymond wagged his head and smiled. He said, “Raf could draw anything you wanted.”

  “I’m so proud of him,” I said.

  At a stoplight we heard a siren throbbing and Raymond pushed his hand between my legs.

  “This is a different record you’re playing,” I said.