Subtraction

by Mary Robison

  “Say, Paige, Pru says I should live with you and you like my one-note drunk talk.”

  “Only he doesn’t like sex, Paige, you should know. He doesn’t dislike it, but he can go weeks . . .”

  “Paige doesn’t care,” said Raymond.

  I said, “Could we change the subject, please? I mean to anything at all?”

  “One note, one note, one note,” said Pru.

  “Right after he left Princeton,” said Raymond, “I stayed with Raf in Malibu. He’s living on the beach. Tex Watson’s his landlord. And Raf’d fight with him and fight with Manson. This’s before they were into killing people, but just doing goats, drinking the blood of live chickens, I think I heard.

  “Another time, a little baby shark floats up in the tide? And this girl with Raf, she wants to keep it. Dead little silver shark. But by next day the whole entire beach’s polluted so Raf’s gotta bury the thing. Pru thinks I’m gay,” Raymond said.

  “I tend to think that about most men,” she said. She turned to me. “Except, that time at work when Raf walked in. I’d never seen him before. One look at him and I felt weak.”

  Raymond said, “I better sign myself into Ben Taub, they got a detox. ’Cause it’s getting like ‘Wonder whose place this is, sure looks familiar.’ You know? I mean, how do you steer the goddamn thing?”

  Raymond called on me after the hospital—browner, blonder, thinner; even more tightly wound than before.

  It was late October, a melancholy, thick, itchy day.

  “You wanna know what I think?” he asked. He had a duffel bag of Raf’s hooped in his arms.

  The smoke-colored car was loaded up with Raf’s stuff—his running gear, his pairs of black Levi’s, his shaving kit, his T-shirts, a carved stone jaguar, his books, swollen and broken from the way he read them. All this was packed into three labeled boxes, going back to Brookline by rail.

  Raymond bent into the car with Raf’s CD player and CD’s. The interior was an oven from the sun at the end of the drive.

  “Yes, I do,” I said. “Want to know what you think.”

  “Raf’s like me. I mean, he’s not anything but roach for leaving you behind, but otherwise he’s just wobbly and can’t trust what he thinks or sees. He’s not running from you, he’s just running.”

  Whenever Raf came to mind these days, I felt Sunday- morning stuff—queasy, hungover, sore from the bones out. Sometimes I wished he’d never happened.

  After the train station and dropping Raf’s boxes, we drove onto the Loop and off, into a city of malls, plazas, department stores, garages, all expensive-looking and pin-neat.

  “I’m about to change your life,” Raymond said, as I followed him into a place called MicroBytes.

  In here were cool gray plastic and beige Plexiglas and books that looked plump and promising but were written in math.

  “I’m buying you a computer, Paige, what they call a laptop? It’s a kind you carry around, size of a briefcase, and there’s programs that go with it that’ll teach you what to do.”

  “Raymond, I can’t let you. Thanks, but, between Pru and Luisa . . .”

  “Aw, the hell with ’em. Pru’s fine, and I been fightin’ with her all day anyway. And I left Luisa everything—the ranch, our daughter, the VCR. She’s got a new boyfriend she has to impress—our lawyer. Says she needs it all. I don’t mind. Hell, I like paring down. You know what else?”

  “What?”

  “It’s a wide old world,” Raymond said, and sighed.

  On the round dining table now were the machine, a printer, printout sheets, a half-dozen manuals, program boxes, a mouse and textured mouse pad, black-ink ribbons, a power bar and surge suppressor, unopened plastic-wrapped packets of floppy disks. All like a question I hadn’t heard myself ask.

  Pru and Raymond took me out into their night, which included dinner at the Camellia, a pink place off the Eastex Freeway; ale for me and Pru at a jazz club called Lapaz; drinks in a dance cellar.

  There Raymond hauled me onto the amber-lit floor. He pressed a hand in the small of my back and moved me around with all the strength he’d got from carrying bricks or steel or house parts around in the sun for so many years. “The best feeling,” he told my right ear, “is when you don’t give a fuck. Lately, I don’t.”

  “You’ve got Raf in there moving your mouth,” I said.

  Pru and I decided to walk over to the Palm. We cut through an alley behind Stonewall Elementary. Coming the other way was a man in a suit and fedora, his arm around his young son.

  As we got close, Pru nudged me. “Watch,” she said.

  She unbuttoned her top and flapped open the right side, baring her breast entirely.

  The man lowered his eyes. With a firm hand, he gripped his son’s head, forcing the aim of the boy’s face away.

  We walked on. Pru giggled as she buttoned up. The sound of her tinkling laugh sent me back to junior high, slumber parties, night whispers, the TV with the sound off, homemade cake.

  “Got weekend custody,” Raymond said, introducing me to his old dog, Connie. The dog was a pencil-faced collie with a brushed coat of butterscotch and white. She stood balanced sideways on the rear seat of Raymond’s big convertible.

  Downtown, he parked at a meter. This was a Saturday but he bought tomorrow’s paper for me from a girl in a cap.

  I followed him into a lobby with marble floors, brass door fittings, live plants. The building had a postal drop where Raymond collected a week’s worth of his mail—bundles of mail, rolled and rubber-banded.

  “Could try Galveston Beach,” he said, when we were back in the car. “Me and Raf used to go when it got too hot for him in Houston. And coeds still show up on weekends hoping to grab a last-minute tan.”

  “Sounds like Raf’s song. But what would we say if we found him?” I asked.

  “We won’t,” Raymond said.

  He had his painter’s radio, a slim black plastic beatbox, positioned on the dash. At Galveston, the radio picked up a program of garage-band hate music, and the speakers sounded with brittle crunch and din. “I’m Lisa,” the d.j. said. “Bringing you ‘Hell Comes to Your House,’ like it or not.”

  Raymond jerked the wide steering wheel with both fists, maneuvering among pedestrians and double-parked cars.

  Beautiful teenagers idled everywhere. They perched on cars and on curbs, leaned, looking glazed, against storefronts or affectionately on one another.

  We drove to a beach slum away from the main strip, where the day’s buttery light cast wet-looking reflections on rooftops and ramshackle housing.

  Raymond squinted around as we drifted along a street called Valparaiso. He let the car skid onto a gravel berm before a three-story with mud-green siding.

  He climbed easily from the car, breathed a great breath, lit a cigarette.

  I noticed this and that—a boy writing on a rock; a souped-up race car aboard a trailer behind a convenience store; a woman pedestrian wearing only a bathrobe; the sound of a car with no muffler; kids rushing from house to house, ringing doorbells, hiding in shrubs.

  Raymond walked Connie and fed her a bowl of dried dogfood. She clambered back into the convertible as he sauntered up to the door of the three-decker.

  The woman he spoke with wore rimless glasses and ragtag Army fatigues. Her hair was mostly buzz cut but here and there had stubby braids. “It doesn’t bother me,” I heard her say. “But, see, you brought someone along, and, Raymond? We would never bring someone along if we came to see you, would we? And what is she, anyway, a hitchhiker? Jesus.”

  Raymond leaned in to answer and, after a beat, the woman said, “O.K., misunderstood. Sorry. So maybe he was in and out of here, but over a month ago. Only I didn’t tell you that, right? And juiced, like he just came to argue. I mean, the man’s confused. You ought to do something about him before somebody else does, you know? ’Cause I mean the mouth on that guy . . .”

  Raymond stopped the car by a tidepool
and let Connie out for a stretch. The water was seething with snakes. Raymond threw a stick in and the water swallowed the stick.

  “That was a bust, ’cept we know he’s alive. I had my toes crossed he’d be there,” Raymond said.

  “What a scary woman,” I said.

  “Patton? Nah. Her and her satellites got a gay bar in town, and they’ll always take Raf in, he happens through. On pity, they say, but they enjoy bickerin’ with him because he’s on their level. Connie, get back in the car, girl.”

  “He fights with them about being lesbians?”

  “No, no. It’s that they’re—they want their own country—what it comes down to. And religion, he’ll get ’em on, like there’s one tryin’ to start up a ministry.”

  I nodded.

  Leaving Galveston, we saw the last light burnishing the city. In moments, the downtown was a few black buildings set before a copper sky. We didn’t talk much on the return.

  “Need I remind you, when you go to buy your turkey, stay away from factory farmed,” my mother said over the phone.

  “It can’t be Thanksgiving time,” I said.

  Dottie said, “Did they stop putting lithium in the water supply? You’re the second person I’ve talked to who doesn’t know what day it is.”

  A silver steady rain played in the leaves, brightened them and waxed their little bit of color. The rain drummed on the windows. I lay on the vinyl couch staring at the hand printing on a white postcard, which read,

  Paige,

  They ought to change the fucking symbol for infinity. Instead of an eight on its side it should be o—

  Zero (Nothing).

  Barny, the physicist, hadn’t sent this card as I had thought on first read. It was from Raf. There was no signature, but I knew Raf had sent it.

  The card had a Wasnascawa postmark, a part of Boston’s South Shore near where my mother lived at the Seahorse Inn.

  Now I had the shakes so bad my teeth locked. I ripped the card in half, squared the halves, ripped them into quarters.

  From the back door I flung the pieces at Raf’s garden.

  I fetched the pieces and began taping them together, but they were damp, limp.

  This seemed an idle rain, although another storm was tearing up from the tropics—this time, a hurricane named Hilda—the radio warned.

  A silhouette appeared at the screen door. Dark-shadowed, Raymond looked hard-carved and hungry.

  “You gonna let me in, Paige? Lemme in,” he said.

  “I don’t know. Are you alone?”

  “I’m alone,” he said. “Open it.”

  “You brought the devil with you, didn’t you? I hear him snapping at your heels.”

  I tucked Raf’s postcard away, deciding.

  “What’ll happen if I do?” I asked. “Bad, bad, bad?”

  “Wouldn’t be, unless you wanna put that construction on it.” He glanced down at his wristwatch. “We got until seven forty-five, a.m. Then I’d have to shower and get out of here and drive to work.”

  “The door isn’t locked,” I said.

  In the Cyclotron

  THE KNEES WERE BLOWN out of my Levi’s and the shoelaces missewn through the eyelets of my boots. In Baton Rouge I’d bought the boots and a cold-weather canvas anorak.

  Flooding storms had hit here and a watch for Hurricane Hilda was on.

  Lawns were ponds; highways were rivers.

  My motel stood on high ground in McComb, Mississippi. The room had a scarlet bed quilt, globe lamps, a lizard on the glass door; a Bible subtitled Revised Standard Version. The walls were like wet taffy, high-glossed an ivory white.

  On the color TV now, a hurricane expert answered viewer calls.

  People were giddy. Rules had been suspended. Maids and their children frolicked clothed in the pool.

  I lay in bed. On the night table were a bottle of Grey Riesling, and the Good Book, and my ticking timepiece.

  The flood’s noise thrashed on the roof—more wind and water.

  The TV man switched to talking about light. He said the waves reaching us had traveled all the way from galaxies in Andromeda Nebula or they’d come from Hydra, two thousand million light-years off.

  Through the one front window, I saw low violet clouds, black pines, a slip of freeway.

  I read from Ecclesiastes:

  Emptiness, emptiness . . . everything is empty. All things are wearisome, more than one can say.

  I had bought the boots, whenever that was. Now I dragged from bed and, crouching on the tufted carpeting, put a fist into each. That cheered me up for a few sweeps of the second hand. I stayed on the carpet, holding the boots and staring at them.

  I waited to phone Raymond until I thought Pru was on shift at her job. But I got that wrong. Pru answered.

  “You cunt! You fucked Raymond!” she said.

  “I know,” I said.

  “You whoring cunt. . . !”

  “Please, Pru. Just let me say something to him.”

  “No. Anyway he’s not here. I liked you!”

  “I liked you too. I’m sorry. It was all wrong . . . very, very wrong . . . completely. I hoped no one would find out.”

  “Are you kidding me? Raymond’s never acted happier. He’s talking about dividing his time between here and there, living half with me, half with you.”

  “But I’m not there, I’ve left. I’m going home. Not home but, I mean—Massachusetts.”

  Pru said, “You mean you fucked Raymond and moved away? No goodbye, or nothing? This must have Raf in it. Is he there with you?”

  “No, no, I’m alone. Listen, I won’t bother calling again. If you’d just please tell Raymond . . .”

  “It’s all right, I’m not mad anymore. You should call back. You should turn around and come back, the way you sound, Paige, which is scary.”

  Stepping out into the Mississippi dawn, the fog was warm and pearl-gray around me. It seemed so palpable I thought I could just part it, make an aisle for myself from the motel door to the car.

  Marshes spread with algae wallowed on either side of the asphalt road. This was Winona, halfway between Jackson and Memphis. Beyond the marshes and going on forever was swamp, bitter black swamp, speared with a thousand headless trees; jaggedy stumps, as though their tops had been ripped away. A sign nailed to one said: PAPAW’S CATFISH! Another read: PREPARE TO MEET GOD.

  In my dreams, I stepped out a window and fell down a tunnel of air. I plummeted stiff, straight arms and legs, so that a woman watching said at first she thought I was a store mannequin falling. I landed on a Caterpillar diesel generator involved with street repair. Nothing looked broken, the woman told me. But at the hospital I found out everything was broken—my teeth. “That was one hell of a fall,” the doctor said. “From a great, great height.”

  The hard, white, straight road shot over the Forked Deer and Big Sandy rivers. Shadow patches drove among the traffic.

  As though escorting me, a highway patrolman in dark glasses rode same speed to my left. His cruiser was cream colored; its top, marine blue.

  Now it rained and I snapped on the windshield wipers. With their first thwack they made a snarl. They had a load of mud and wet debris to haul.

  The cop tooped his horn at me and zoomed out of sight.

  The storm changed the sky, left it whirling and wild, left an eerie warmth and the air current electrified. Insects worked a steady zipper sound. The horizon looked Dutch, demented as a Ruisdael.

  “Hot Thing” and “Parachute Woman” bammed on the radio.

  For something to think, I pretended I was an East Berlin reporter, here in the States to report. “So the file I send back will run in three aligned columns, each beginning with the same sentence fragment—some flexible line with a lot of application—and then the line will echo in each column’s final phrase or maybe only in the last word.”

  The car tires’ chant on the pavement was all vowel sounds, tonal now and close below.


  “This is a good project,” I told myself. I said, “Or at least it kills the miles.”

  I noticed a fence around a satellite dish when I dashed open the rubber draperies of my motel room in Memphis.

  A movie floated around out there and I meant to snag it and let it roll on the TV if it wasn’t an Elvis. I thought I could probably look at almost anything else.

  Although not a film about infidelity, or one with cops committing back-country killings. I didn’t want to see a movie with a swamp in it. Or one with evangelist characters. Not a western. Nothing with Charlton Heston, nor a hurricane; nor a movie about a flood.

  Raf had installed the car with surround-sound stereo. As I drove the tunnel and bridge sequence across the Ohio, I listened to a Chinese violinist playing Debussy.

  It was dawn. Barges rode the river. Above them, gulls made geyser shapes.

  I imagined Mario, my father, riding with me; having a good time, chiding Debussy for political colorlessness.

  I cleared the city and got a view of the flat foresty distance ahead. The landscape had left in it some of the burn of late autumn.

  The car’s suspension seemed brilliant. The speed bumps I rumbled over in the lot for a hardware store were no more than muffled ripples.

  I bought gardeners’ gloves at the hardware, and from their vending machines I got a cinnamon doughnut and a cardboard cup of coffee. I ate the doughnut, took whispering sips from the cup, which I held in the floppy fingers of the gigantic gloves.

  The sky went hectic with snow as I untangled from the turnpike loop in Pennsylvania. The snow was carried on gusts of wind that pushed and pressed on the car.

  Under my anorak’s sleeves, four cuffs ringed my wrists as I had layered on two more shirts in the washroom of an Octron station.

  I crossed over a quiet black river and drove along a ridge of hills with endless pelts of blue spruce, birches, and jack pines.

  It was dusk in the iced and glassed Allegheny Range and lights were up in the farmhouses here, but now and then out of the rockface a tree signaled in orange or red.