Subtraction

by Mary Robison

  We could hear Raf, skimming around inside Davey’s dim parlor.

  The sky was pink this evening and fuzzy with lights from the stadium. Gleaming cars, as if sweating in the sheen of dusk, filed off from an Astros game.

  Raf appeared at last, dragging a square unpadded chair. He wrestled it out onto the porch stoop. “You despise comfort,” he said to Davey.

  “You bratty bastard. You’ve always had it too easy,” said Davey.

  “That’s not true,” I said, and I stuck up for Raf. I said he’d got into Princeton all on his own. That most of his high school classmates were truckers now or they worked for the local factory farm. That getting a Rhodes wasn’t on just luck. “And since then, for nearly twenty years,” I said, “he’s taken the hardest jobs for the meanest pay. He could’ve chosen any of the twelve things he has a talent for, laid into that, and stacked up dough. Plenty of bosses’ daughters have suggested the alternative. Sit still for money until Daddy dies; live in the Connecticut house they got as a wedding present; produce a couple kids; wear the suit; go golfing. And that’s not even mentioning how now the divorcees are coming at him. . . .”

  “You’re no good for anything either,” Davey said.

  Raf said, “Of the many passers-by this hot evening, many have smiled at Paige. They enjoy seeing a pretty woman drinking beer on a Friday night.”

  I said, “One afternoon, a man phoned from New York. You know what he thinks I’m good for?”

  “Worm dirt,” Davey said.

  “Nope, no. He said I’m good for twenty-five thousand tax-free dollars. An arts grant from a reputable foundation.”

  Davey’s shirt had no sleeves and as he punched chords on a portable keyboard veiny striations rose on his arms.

  “Is this fact?” he asked.

  “Twenty-five thousand. No strings,” Raf said. “She don’t even have to shred documents.”

  “That pisses me off,” Davey said, resting the keyboard. “That makes me feel like vermin. With a fraction of that I could live well. I could buy an a.c., go to restaurants. Pay my rent and the light bill. I could put some down on a Yamaha synth or a four-track reel to reel. But I’m happy for you, Paige. I’m genuinely proud and happy. No I’m not.”

  “For no money, I could take a skillet to your skinny head,” I told him.

  Raf had the keyboard. He plunked around with it on his lap and now and then eased into intense musical scores.

  “I never knew you could play,” I said.

  “Choir,” Davey said dismissively.

  “You are the mystery man,” I said to Raf.

  “I had a job bein’ a mystery man for a while,” he told us. “I was in this comic strip—remember Brenda Starr?”

  Raf’s vita—what a notion. He’d had all types of tough-guy jobs, the kind they build beer and shaving-razor ads around. He’d been a foundry worker. He was still a member of the steelworkers’ union. And a waterman. He fished for lobster out of Seaforth, Mass., for a season. He’d been a smoke jumper in California, and a bouncer at the Las Vegas Sands. He had cut and hung sheet rock for a Baltimore apartment complex.

  There was only one condition Raf put on accepting a job. He would sign on to any crew doing anything, provided he could get away with drinking while he worked. Risk or pay ran a faraway second place in his calculations.

  He used to report home from the Baymoth Brass Foundry all slickered with sweat and a coat of filth—total blackface—and reeking even more of bourbon than of the roasted-metal foundry smell.

  The fishing job was his worst. He had met the captain, a twenty-year-old father of three, in a Wasnascawa saloon. That was deep New England winter, and the next morning Raf had gone out on a ship called the Tiger’s Ass.

  Raf told me they hadn’t been five minutes clear of the harbor, had just sighted Boston Light, when the kid captain said, “Bad wethah due, time to rock ’n’ roll.” Which meant break out the Irish.

  Raf said there were no more woozy death-cheating days in his life than those he spent on the tilting frozen deck of the Tiger’s Ass, trying to get the iced nets untangled with iced fingers.

  “What nobody realizes,” he said, “is those guys are sick all the fuckin’ time. Puke sick all day, all night. Like when the bed’s circling. That was everyday life, only if I fell off the whirling bed it was, you know, the watery-grave deal.

  “Me and two wino Portuguese and the Irish kid, going out under hurricane warnings. The kid thought the Atlantic was like a freeway—chancy, but, what the fuck, let’s go.

  “We didn’t know what we were doing. With the deck all greasy from the oil spraying outa the air compressor and engines. And everything with the stench of oil; whatever lunch you could force down or what you drank tasted of diesel. And every surface was already slippery from ice and seawater and drek and then add oil.

  “It’s not easy, getting good jobs where you can drink,” said Raf. “It’s gotta be so dangerous nobody normal would do it, or a job protected by some ferocious union, or so upper tier that nobody’d dare confront you. Like working in the White House, you could guzzle until your guts ignite. Or transportation. Sign onto a train crew, and goodbye sobriety. Smokin’ shit and snorting. It’s a marvel to me any train goes anywhere considering whose hand is on the switch and on the throttle. All aboard, you know?”

  Raf’s America.

  I drove over to Pru’s place almost every day, and she never exhausted her rantings. She had more than she could ever spend, really.

  Lilith and I would get comfy on the cube chairs and listen to Pru’s monologues and watch her perform her large startling life.

  “Food!” she was saying now. “I mean, Americans are raised with a two-taste palate—sweet and salty. The only goddamn tastes they’ll abide. No wonder I’m bulimic. Is it all right to tell you that? So what, I urp up after every meal. It’s practically an act of conscience on my behalf. Cheeseburgers, for instance. They’re sweet and salty. Because no one would eat the vile meat unless it was hidden under candied pickles and put on cakelike rolls.”

  “Cheeseburger,” Lilith said to me.

  “It’s a political duty to vomit that meat. You know fast- food beef’s all imported from rainforests that they’ve clear-cut for grazing land. And U.S. companies send the Third World all the pesticides that’re too evil for use here. And that’s legal. Then after everything’s poisoned—rivers, top- soil, plants—whatever animals are left lying around dying, their flesh gets shipped back and made into cancer patties. I’d sooner drink a bucket of lead.”

  As she talked, Pru did dance moves and stretches, grasping and hanging from the rail bar in the studio section of her apartment.

  “This machine, my body,” she told us, “is my only means for getting the hell out of this country.”

  Her telephone rang twenty and thirty times a day.

  She spoke into the receiver with a shy accommodating voice, and could work real-sounding giggles into her replies.

  Twice, after phone calls, she asked me to watch Lilith. “Just while I dart out to see this guy,” she said.

  “I can’t, I don’t know how,” I told Pru. “She could fall over, crack her head. She could die.”

  “No she’d never, Paige. You wouldn’t hurt Lilith. She never needs anything. She’s housebroken and all.”

  “I’ll try it,” I said.

  Now Pru stood behind an ironing board pressing a black linen jumpsuit, starching it lightly from a pump-spray bottle.

  I lay across two cube chairs and lit a cigarette. “Never ever smoke,” I said to Lilith.

  “Radon’ll do her in first. Or the hole in the ozone layer and the drought and famine it’ll bring,” Pru said. “The greenhouse effect’s already happening. She might as well smoke.”

  Pru backed up from the ironing board, pointed one of her legs up behind her and brought her foot to her shoulder blade.

  She said, “Something I’d love to do is be a Dallas Cow-boy
cheerleader. I mean, just for a single game. I’d drop my panties, do a hundred-and-eighty-degree bend-over, moon the whole fuckin’ city of Dallas. And I’d wait for a nationally televised game—a Monday nighter—to do it.”

  Brahms played on Pru’s radio now—solemn music that swirled like steam.

  The phone sounded. Lilith stayed a statue. I fidgeted for four rings, preparing to answer.

  “Pru there?” a fellow said.

  “No, she isn’t. May I tell her who called?”

  “Buddy. I’ll try again later,” the man said. “Or just tell her Buddy, and it’s room two-oh-seven.”

  I pictured Buddy, hopeful, his heart thudding, his throat dry; scrubbed and brushed and waiting in a Houston hotel.

  I wanted to phone him back and tell him, don’t wait; that I knew Pru and that he shouldn’t bother.

  But I could never be certain about anyone—what she or he would do next.

  I was babysitting Lilith, but she didn’t want to go anywhere or do anything, or even chat.

  We napped together on Pru’s futon, and I had a dream of somewhere with goldenrods swaying and the wind smelling of burnt-orange autumn. The dream place was like those in my father’s paintings, one of his depictions of heaven.

  When I awoke, I asked Lilith if I had said anything in my sleep. She remembered I had said, “Thanksgiving,” and now I remembered that I’d forgiven her, but I never could think what for.

  “Pru is a billboard,” Raf said. “A screaming ad for herself.”

  “I like her, though.”

  He said, “I warn you, if you haven’t already sensed this, that she’s a person who wants things. She’ll flatter you, and flirt with you, but that woman’s got a program.”

  “Couldn’t want anything from me.”

  “Oh, the hell. Maybe she wants to go back to school and thinks you can get her into Harvard. Or that you can get her poetry published. Maybe you’re the ideal babysitter. Or—this is the most likely—once you’re convinced that she’s your friend, she’ll try to grab me away from you, which she’s dead sure she can do anytime she halfway feels like it.”

  We were in the dining room. Opened on the round-top table was Cioran’s The Trouble with Being Born. I noticed where Raf had marked his place and when he loped off for a glass of water I read: “We should have abided by our larval condition, dispensed with evolution, remained incomplete, delighting in the elemental siesta and calmly consuming ourselves in an embryonic ecstasy.”

  When he returned, I said, “I am so glad I’m not you!”

  “I can tell you Pru sent an MX missile into Raymond’s life a couple years ago.”

  “She told me.”

  “Her version,” Raf said, flapping shut the Cioran book.

  Often he read with his blind eye closed, squinting as if focusing a camera. Whenever I saw this, I thought he was more serious than other readers, more engaged, and more exacting.

  “It was simple hit and run, according to her,” I said. “Only they both ran, because Raymond didn’t cotton to Pru’s politics and she isn’t liable to change. That was that.”

  “Well, interesting,” Raf said. “Raymond took it all a little more to heart. He was torn into a billion fuckin’ pieces, in fact. He filed for divorce. Only right then Luisa announced that she was pregnant. Raymond nearly ate from a gun over the whole deal, and he is still in shreds over Pru.”

  “Huh,” I said.

  “You know that night he and I picked her up from work? I was red-eyed total but even dumped I could tell she was scary. She was all over me like a fuckin’ nightshirt. And not because she wanted me but because that’s what she does. And. Also. Because it ripped Raymond up to see her acting like that. She enjoys ripping people up, for all her save-the-whales talk.”

  I said, “She’s confused, I think. You’d have to be confused to work in one of those stripper places.”

  “She’s a fuckin’ rapist!” Raf said.

  From Pru’s studio I saw sunset clouds tinted copper. Down in the courtyard the water in the frog pond looked like iodine.

  Pru and I were going on a double date.

  She wore a white satin mini dress, satin mules. Her shampooed hair smelled of coconut.

  Now she was mixing up her own cologne. I saw vanilla extract go in, and rose water, a tiny piece of orange peel. “Whales die for perfume,” she said. “The oil. And makeup, you know they drip that shit into bunnies’ eyes until they see how much’ll blind them.”

  “On this you should talk to my mom,” I said. “She once arm-cleared a shelf and pitched all my makeup because of it.”

  “Atta girl. Excellent woman,” said Pru.

  “And last Christmas she gave me the full line of Paul Penders, because they don’t animal-test at all. Good old Dottie. She can outdrink Raf and still seem her normal self. Of course, her normal self isn’t normal.”

  Pru said, “You’d think I’d end up smelling like fruitcake with these ingredients. But no, the scent makes men hungry. They’re always getting their appetites confused. One guy I know—are you listening?”

  “Hard,” I said.

  “He’s worth jillions and never worked a minute of his gross sinful life, but the only way he can do it is if there’s chocolate food messed in. Like Hershey’s syrup? Sex, I mean.”

  “Huh,” I said. “Let’s change the channel.”

  “Symbolic as all hell to me, Paige.”

  “It is, but a well-traveled road. Where oh where is your babysitter?”

  I answered the door for the sitter, who stepped inside but said nothing. The woman had stripped her hair of all color, and her complexion, by lack of contrast, looked doughy, drowning-victim white.

  “Portuguese,” Pru whispered to me.

  “One of the undead. Drawn by Brueghel. On return from hell,” I said.

  Pru had worked me into a cocktail dress of hers. I’d brought no evening clothes to Houston.

  “Looks better on you, you should keep it,” she kept saying.

  I thought for wearing in public this silk dress needed more substance. It seemed an underslip, not a dress. And the sheer black nylons and garter belt—also Pru’s—went with my notion of whore.

  “Hell, it’s all from New York,” she said, as she stuck brass hoop earrings and a brass cuff on me. “Classy, classy. What size are your feet?”

  Her size, so now I teetered on six-inch heels: shoes that were open-toed, sequin-sprinkled, covered with an iridescent fabric.

  “You oughta dress that way all the time. You know, I love putting clothes on other women. I mean, love it. Do you think that means I’m a latent gay?”

  “Big furious no,” I said.

  “Especially if they’re pretty. Then I like to watch them in action and see the effects of the clothes. And I have fantasies . . .” Pru said.

  “All woman do, probably.”

  “And I’ve watched movies of other women in bed.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Your fantasies were better.”

  “Yeah, but what does that prove? Fantasies always are.”

  “You’d know it by now if you were gay.”

  “Raf told me that you are,” Pru said.

  “He what?”

  “Bisexual. He said you’re bisexual. He said the three of us should go to bed together sometime, is all. Don’t get mad at him, Paige. If you’re mad, it’ll spoil tonight.”

  Raf and Raymond were our dates. They were already late.

  Pru’s pride in my appearance made her as loopy as a mom who’d wrestled her daughter away from a swim meet and into Easter whites. “Look at you!” she said. “Raf sees you, he’s gonna pop his cork.”

  Pru opened the door on a lopsided Raf. His elbow on the side wall was all that kept him standing.

  He wore a new suit with a fish-scale sheen. The shirt underneath was peacock blue, and where buttons belonged it had a zipper, unzipped.

  “Two beautiful girls wi
thout mercy,” he said. “ ‘. . . Her foot light, her eyes wild.’ ”

  “That’s beautiful, Raf,” Pru said.

  I said Keats had thought so.

  Pru said, “Raf, you look like a low rider!”

  “Low as you go. Another great thing about Houston is that the humidity glazes everything with STP.”

  “We’re first worst for air, third worst for ozone damage,” Pru said. “Where’s Raymond?”

  I said, “He probably refused to be seen with a guy in Raf’s clothes.”

  “Thank you, Paige. I wanted something in a snakeskin pattern . . .”

  “To match your soul.”

  “Thank you again. But all they had left was this sardine fabric. Now, did you wanna ask me a question, Paige? The answer’s yes.”

  “Yes, you had a little slip?”

  “The way you two look I could eat both your little slips,” Raf said. “Raymond’ll be here in a second. He’s crawling along. Yes, we hurt ourselves with the malt that wounds.”

  “Not Raymond! Not after three years!” I said.

  “We’ll both pay tomorrow, but let’s nobody ruin tonight.”

  Pru stepped past Raf and into the hall. “Bleeding Jesus, Raf wasn’t kidding!” she said.

  I leaned to see. Raymond was on hands and knees, crawling along the hallway in a suit that was the twin of Raf’s.

  “This is too much. What do you suppose is on TV?” I said.

  “Come on, give the boys a chance,” Pru begged.

  “Yeah, give us that,” said Raf.

  I said, “No. I and a Portuguese voodoo woman are going to babysit Lilith and watch television together. We’re going to watch Divorce Court. These guys—one of them can’t stand, and the other can just barely! Besides that, they’re both dressed in oven wrap!”

  “I can so stand. It’s that I lost somethin’ valuable and I’m searching for it,” Raymond yelled.

  “And what did you lose, Raymond? Your wedding ring?” I asked.

  “How’d you find that out? Raf, did you tell her?”