Subtraction

by Mary Robison

  “Nope,” said Raf. “I guess you’re just not a very complicated cowpoke, Ray-mo.”

  “You call me Ray-mo one more time and I swear I’ll beat you to death,” Raymond said.

  “Ray-mo,” said Raf.

  Even crawling and in the sparkling pimp suit, Raymond’s anger was impressive.

  Raf said, “Ray-mo, let’s say we behave so the girls don’t lock us out.”

  “Why would they lock us out, they got a union shop? I didn’t mean that, Pru! I hope you don’t take a slander from it. Raf? Help me find my wedding ring and I’ll kill you a little later.”

  Raf ambled over and fell down. “Fair deal,” he said.

  “Ain’t gonna be a lotta help on your back,” Raymond said.

  I said, “Pru, do you see what tonight’ll be like? We might make it out of here by dawn, but they’ll have lost the car keys.”

  “Holy mother, I did leave the keys in the car! Can you believe that?” Raymond said.

  Raf was laughing and Raymond said, “Paige, you’re gonna be a widow. I can’t stop myself from killing him now.”

  “Or I’ll kill him,” I said. “Then I’ll be a murderer widow watching TV with a toddler and a dead woman from the Azores. What bothers me most is I spent time getting dressed up for this.”

  “You look wonderful,” Raymond said. “And, Pru? I’m in love with you and I should face up to it. That ain’t the bottle talking neither.”

  I told Raf to stand up. “And zip your shirt!” I said.

  “You wanna fuck?” he asked me. “I’ll do things to you nobody’s thought of.”

  “Who could refuse that offer?” I said.

  Pru asked, “What’s left that nobody’s thought of? I’m just curious.”

  “If Paige answers no, Prudence, how about you?” said Raf.

  “You married a maggot,” she told me.

  “A one-eyed dead one,” Raymond said.

  Raf said, “Let’s load up in the limo. I got dancin’ feet and a pantsload of penis.”

  “Oh, ugh,” Pru said.

  “O.K., fuck the wedding ring, fuck my marriage. Raf’s right. Let’s just get goin’,” Raymond said.

  Pru asked me if we should.

  Both men were up now, brushing each other off, trying to behave.

  “We’ll just pretend they have a disease, Paige. That’s what the AMA considers alcoholism,” Pru said.

  “True, but they also consider rabies a disease, yet I rarely go dancing with two rabid men.”

  “Pru wishes she had four rabid men, or an auditorium- ful,” Raf said. “Or an army of rabid men. Rabbit men?”

  Raymond said, “Just please don’t let no one have stolen the car.”

  The summer Raf loved someone else, I kept thinking, “That’s some other Raf.” And mostly I was thinking how to work the next curve, so hard was a single Cameroon day.

  At the Pilot, the water supply would shut off. We’d bargain for soap, carry cakes of it around in the pockets of our trousers. And then mornings we’d check to see if the sprinklers were out on the lawns of the couple-few government buildings.

  In a hard jet of the sprinkler water we could shampoo our hair, wash our clothes, rinse Mario’s painting jars and brushes, soak our sneakers through and through.

  The arches of sprinkler water and their mist would make great white shapes that looked like shrubbery from a distance. Whenever he saw the shapes appear, Mario would say, “Problem solved, Piagga,” or he’d say, “We got the luck!”

  As we were leaving Pru’s, I copped a fifth of Benedictine from her liquor cabinet.

  “Sit up straight, woman. Drink with dignity,” Raf told me, as we sped in Pru’s car through a tunnel of smeary lights, past a candelabra-like fountain.

  Raymond lounged sideways on the passenger’s seat, gaping at Pru.

  The drink finally caught fire in my stomach. “Where is she taking us?” I asked.

  “You’ll like it,” Pru said.

  Raymond said, “I can make trivial decisions. Like is it Pepsi-Cola or RC; what watt of bulb goes in this fixture. But I’ll be switched if I can decide who to love, or what God wants.”

  “Knock it off, Ray-mo,” Raf said. “You’re fast descending the ladder of my respect.”

  The downtown streets were deserted. Lights were on for no one in the high stacks of mirrory towers. But the avenues away from the business district were packed with traffic, and there were men heckling cars from curbs, night people soliciting. Neon bathed everything deep candy colors—reds, purples, oranges, greens.

  “I brought this up with my sponsor,” Raymond said. “Leandra. She had me read Exodus, where Moses gets the big ten. So I’m studying them and for the most they’re straight out—don’t rob, don’t kill. But you know the one God gets most het up about? ‘Keep holy the Sabbath!’ Like, you’ve had your six days to work. Go on break!”

  “You don’t sound too squashed anymore, Raymond,” Pru said.

  “My head is kinda clearing. Can I have a sip from your bottle, Paige? It won’t make anything worse. I’ve already fallen, committed the sin of sloth, I believe it is.”

  Pru took us to a gallery opening.

  We moved in a weavy procession up a gravel walkway, past security guards, into a lobby that was wide, white, icy with marble.

  “David Salle,” Raf said to a painting. “My, you smell.”

  Maybe a hundred people milled about inside the main hall. Pru swept from person to person. She kissed rouged cheeks, received hugs from the men.

  Raymond seemed blunted now and stood out of her sphere.

  Raf had located a bay of hot snacks. He and I set to work on them.

  “You’re eating all the shrimp puffs,” I said.

  “You ate all the caviar disks and there were thousands.”

  “What may I get you?” asked a bartender.

  Sculptures were on exhibit: nine-foot columns of white- enameled steel.

  Raf decided he liked the columns and that they meant a great deal. He asked me if I could see how much they meant.

  “Ah, not sure,” I said.

  “They have to do with narration,” he said.

  “Oration? Oration, yes. Possibly they do.”

  “They’re guideposts to a signified infinity,” he said. “That’s what’s important.”

  Pru introduced us to the artist, a professor of hers back when she was at Rice.

  He was short, with an angel-hair toupee, a black turtle- neck, black slacks.

  “All the shrimp puffs are gone!” he said. “These people are vultures.”

  “Come,” said Pru, and drew me away to a showy washroom.

  A black woman had been hired to sit watch in here. She seemed an installation of scorn. She wore a crisp tailored uniform and a paper hat pinned to her hair.

  “What am I supposed to do?” Pru asked.

  “About what?” I said. “Raymond?”

  “I didn’t ask him to love me. I didn’t say, ‘Leave your wife and kid.’ And I sure don’t want you mad at me, Paige. But suddenly Raf’s decided I’m home-wrecking scum. And yet, just before we came in here, Raymond grabbed me and went, ‘Let’s do it all. Fuck it. Let’s go for broke.’ ”

  “Get married he means? I don’t know, Pru. Raymond’s awfully drunk. Why don’t we just play through tonight and say it doesn’t count? Nothing that happens tonight goes on anybody’s scorecard.”

  Pru got a Raggedy Ann doll look of helplessness and hurt.

  She pulled me to her and gave me a trembling embrace. “Please don’t turn on me,” she said, her cheek warm on mine.

  I stepped back, aware of the attendant’s view of our runners-up-in-a-beauty-contest hug, and leaned my shoulders against a brilliant tile wall. I lifted and flexed both my feet, which were straining from the steep arch of the borrowed high heels.

  Pru was examining her mirror image. She smoothed the satin over her stomach; tugged the ski
rt, adjusted it on her hips.

  “A lot of these people here hate me because they invested in my daddy and he got rich on their dough and blew. They think I’m just a climber and that I should’ve left town with him. Even Lilith’s father pulled out on me.”

  “So you’re kind of like Trish Nixon still hanging around D.C. after Watergate,” I said.

  “Don’t compare me to a Republican, but yeah. I come to these festivities out of contempt. To goad the men, spook the women. You’re the last woman friend I have, Paige. And now Raymond’s jeopardizing that, and Raf’s poisoning your ears. You want Raymond, don’t you? That’s what’s really bothering you.”

  “Even if I did, Pru, that package is wrapped up and ribbon tied and your name’s on it.”

  We were in the cosmetic-repair area now, where, at a vanity counter, two older women balanced on rotating stools, their chins raised as they curved lipsticks on their O-shaped mouths.

  Pru seized me with both hands, seized my shoulders. “We can fix it with Raymond so that it’s you he wants!”

  “No, no,” I said.

  “You don’t want Raymond then?” She shook me by the shoulders and woggled me on the high-heel sticks.

  “No,” I said, and the word came out in three wavy syllables.

  “I’m sorry. Jeez-oh, I jiggled off one of your fake eyelashes,” Pru said.

  “Raymond’s married, and I’m married,” I said. “And besides, he and Raf are best friends.”

  “Since when?” Pru said. She hitched up the skirt of her satin mini and straightened her garter-belt straps.

  “Since when which?”

  “Any of it,” Pru said, rehooking her nylons.

  On my cheek a black mothlike thing batted with each blink—the fake lash.

  I found Raf explaining the sculptor’s work to the sculptor.

  The artist’s hairpiece seemed askew, as if Raf’s tirade had blown the thing sideways.

  “How’re we doing?” I asked Raf.

  “I must go,” the sculptor said. He touched Raf’s wrist. “Keep thinking.”

  We nudged through the clusters of art patrons, who were sun-darkened and perfumed and whose gleaming jewelry struck sparks.

  We caught up with Raymond. He and a man in a fringed suede coat were talking outdoor lore.

  “I’m in a fifteen-foot boat out on Alligator Bayou with Ole Mossy. Dusk,” Raymond said. “He tells me we’re steering by the cypress shapes—they’re just these black formations but Mossy’s got ’em all memorized. It smells like snake and all we can make out is egrets.”

  “You see ’em even if there’s no moon,” said the man in the suede coat.

  “Aren’t they white? And I’m saying, ‘Mossy, maybe we could hang it up at this point?’ ”

  “Mossy never wants to go home, though.”

  “No, and the bugs are having a smorgasbord,” Raymond said.

  “They don’t bite him,” said the man in suede.

  “That’s right, they never bite him. Hello, Paige,” Raymond said. “We’re just trading stories about Ole Mossy.”

  Raf said, “I lost all my money on him once in the Preak-ness. He sprained a fetlock or something and had to be put down.”

  “This is Paige Deveaux,” Raymond said. “And the funny one’s Raf, her husband.”

  “He looks funny,” said the man in suede.

  “Call me Deadeye,” Raf said.

  “I’m Danny Hail and that’s my son. He don’t talk.” The man in suede thumbed toward a fellow with sorrowful eyes, a tight smile. “That’s Paul, but he don’t talk.”

  “Pleasure to meet you both,” I said.

  Raymond said, “Ole Mossy’s a Cajun, got a hunting lease on some land over in Louisiana? The hunting lease, just about. He’s perfect for a guide but once he’s started he won’t stop.”

  “He’ll say to you something like ‘Thought you wanted to hunt,’ ” said the man in suede.

  “Yeah, that Ole Mossy,” Raf said. “He mows down some wildlife and strayed domestic pets and eats a mess of crayfish and drinks from his radiator and finally ambles on back to his lean-to and curls up for the night with his pappy or his ma.”

  “You know all about him,” the man in suede said.

  Raymond said, “Raf’s from the enlightened North. Everything all right with Prudence?” he asked me.

  It was midnight. The Ole Mossy stuff I heard Raf saying was the last I heard from him before he fell off the earth.

  Tunnel of Air

  ALONE AT THE HOUSE with things Raf had gathered—bookshelves, two braided rugs, a cracked bust of Eurydice, other oddments—I huddled in a chair, my eyes fixed on the corner, a globe there.

  For dawn there had been angry clouds, startling winds, a tropical storm coming from Corpus. A frog quacked. The cicadas made a constant sound—it didn’t go anywhere or do anything; it did not beat like a heart. More than being hot and tired and scared about Raf, the sound made me miss my parents, miss boredom, miss TV.

  “I hate him,” I told the globe, but that felt a lot like hating myself.

  I counted to a thousand, counted back, thousands of times.

  I kept picturing Raf on top of some twenty-year-old.

  Around noon, I called Brookline hoping his drunkenness had put him on a plane and taken him home. In my ear was the tiny rattling of that phone’s ring. I hung up and redialed, hung up, redialed. I ate a pretzel, dialed again.

  I called my mother—not answering—and now my father, in Providence. I told him that Raf had vanished.

  “Big deal,” Mario said.

  I read from my notebook something I’d got from Barny, the physicist. “What keeps quarks together are gluons, a kind of quanta, that’re not real particles.”

  When the Palm was open, I walked there and sat; sat watching a stain on the boards of the dance floor.

  I remembered that before Cameroon, Raf had said, “Don’t make pictures in your head, Paige. You can’t guess how I am with her. You’d be wrong.”

  Walking home, the brown clouds took on animal shapes and started marching. Female voices sounded a chantlike hymn from the Desglaises church. The air burned to breathe. I’d been awake for so long I was logy, drunklike.

  There were lashes of wind suddenly, and trees plunging, crooked lines of rain. I slugged along, bent, the wind cutting down on me; light-headed from sleeplessness and the heat, and from the rain, stinging.

  Life would go like this, I knew—days, weeks, a month, two.

  “Swallowed my chew gum,” Raymond said. “You know, it was a compliment, Raf choosin’ me for a friend. I brought him here from Baton Rouge that summer with all the falling stars? Can’t remember what we were doin’ then, but it musta been disgusting.” Raymond staggered and caught a door jamb with his free hand. He stood there, propped, wagging his head. “No worse than this recent. Prudence tell you she found me trying to roll up under the car last night to sleep? A drunk runs off and hides ’cause he knows he’s caught in it. Ashamed of being that depressed, like it’s got its own stench. He sees people doing the day-to-day, walking around. . . . ’S like everyone else moves by in some trance.”

  A terrarium night with steam at rooftop level. The black sky was low. I could make out, from the porch, the St. Francis birdbath and could smell the sticky fruit droppings from the tree in the clinic’s yard.

  In my notebook I wrote,

  old red air

  fine needles for a tattoo

  whump and oom-pah

  of the rained-on corner band.

  Raymond’s white shirt was all the way unbuttoned. He went to urinate in the side yard.

  “How’d you meet Raf?” he called back to me.

  I hesitated before answering. “He was this guy Nick’s friend,” I said.

  “Nick?”

  “I lived with him before Raf.”

  “Huh,” Raymond said, as he returned. “Nick a good friend of Raf’s?”

/>   “Real good friend,” I said.

  “So, how’d he act when you shifted over?”

  “Relieved,” I said.

  “That ain’t true,” Raymond said, smiling.

  Now the night was gone. The headlights on a passing city bus blinked off. Sunrise took the sky through grays, reds, oranges, up to a cyan blue.

  I walked Raymond inside. I fixed a breakfast of bread, and coffee, a bowl of carrot salad with coconut and carob shavings.

  The linoleum in the kitchen was silty. The soles of our shoes scratched and whispered.

  Raymond didn’t eat, didn’t sit. He stood with his back to the screen door.

  Behind him, in the yard out there, were Raf’s plantings: a flower garden of begonia, periwinkle, and some yarn-ball blossoms called “Sparkle verbena.”

  “Am I in your notebooks?” Raymond asked.

  “You?” I said. “Oh, sure, you. You’re at the heart of it all.”

  He pulled me to him, sighed into my hair. I felt him harden against my thigh. He said, “Raf’ll be back and this time he’ll find you.”

  “Yeah. Probably that’s the idea.”

  Raymond said, “My idea I’m havin’ right now is— though not new—right now it seems a real good, borderline-genius idea.”

  “Don’t,” I said. “Not yet.”

  Pru wore a sleeve of pink fabric, like a playsuit of Lilith’s; no underwear. Her short hair was twisted into thorns.

  She was working with a piece of pine board and woodcut tools. She pried loose a jagged line of wood, across the grain, cracked the gouge handle with a hammer.

  She said to Raymond, “You hate my doing this.”

  “Hadn’t noticed,” he said.

  “But if you had, you’d hate it.”

  “Depends,” said Raymond.

  “No,” Pru said. “You would. For some reason, any goddamned reason.”

  Raymond said, “Paige wasn’t noticing you either. She’s focused someplace else. She’s just too polite to say.”

  “Then go live with her!” said Pru. “See how long she can stand you.”

  “Say, Paige. Pru says I should go live with you.”

  “She doesn’t even mind your drunk talk. The same fuckin’ note, over and over.”