Subtraction

by Mary Robison

  Luckily I started wiggling & could not stop as in convulsions and I donut recommend them & even the cops didn’t want me like that—shoulda seen it—so I went from the pokey into the bug house or SOMEPLACE like a toilet but with doctors. It’s been tough to get to a phone. Withal, now am OUT and back in town, but I got to go away for three days or a week but I’ll meet you out at your angel mom’s inn on the shore & real soon? Is it Wednesday 2-day. So next Monday I’ll see u??? Please? I got the gall to suggest it all because you’re the only girl for me, girl

  And I thought: You ought to know, Raf. You’ve tried most of the others.

  I felt stupid crying in front of kids on bikes and my Irish neighbor, who was passing with his drugstore copy of the Globe.

  “You-ah beck?” he asked.

  “I’m back,” I said after a mighty inhale that gave me some control.

  He touched his newspaper to his hat brim, a fine salute.

  Inside was dusty, and the bed had been undone and done. An empty Johnnie Walker Black bottle lay among the pillows.

  I had to sleep, and so flung off the used linen, flapped down new.

  Sleep didn’t come. I fetched and lugged back to bed The Concise History of the World, and read from Mesopotamia to the Missouri Compromise before my eyes lowered to a close.

  They opened after a few minutes, and my body jerked up and rolled out of the bed. I couldn’t sleep in it alone anymore.

  I did laundry, packed clean clothes, went shopping for supplies. I would live at the inn, was my thinking; a place that had been good for me. I liked being there; liked Dottie. I loved Dottie, although I never had figured out why on earth she left my dad.

  Zigzagging up from Reading International to Harvard yard, my knapsack pointy with the spines of new hardbacks, I thought: “Why did I do this to myself? Why didn’t I buy detective novels, books a person could read?

  A student with windburned cheeks recited a sonnet she’d written. Her eyes were wet. Her throat sounded constricted.

  This was my class—forms writing—but Johnny Belize had it for the two semesters I was on leave with my arts grant.

  The class, a casual seminar, ran itself. Students and Johnny were gathered in the undergraduate lounge. Johnny listened only now and then. He seemed close to dozing in a leather armchair.

  When the student finished reciting, the young man seated next to her lifted himself from his chair. He said, “Well, that was fine, Olivia.”

  “The ending has the wrong effect, though, don’t you think?” Olivia said, but with relief in her voice. “Don’t you think the final line’s cheaty? A piece of exposition? Maybe a correlative would’ve been better.”

  “One does speculate—how to say it?—about the tonal consequences of unvarying values in that last. And, as you suggested, Olivia, why so much narrative?” asked the young man.

  He went on talking that way for a while.

  Olivia put pages into her valise and nodded or tipped her head in consideration.

  I had come by to check on my student-work drop box—pleasingly empty—and more to say hello to Johnny.

  Class broke up. Students stood, gathered notebooks, parkas and gloves, tote bags, satchels.

  “War or babies,” someone muttered, moving alongside me in the hall. “Those’re all Olivia can write about.”

  I visited my vacant office. The young man who’d talked in class appeared and pantomimed knocking on the already open door.

  The office was a narrow room, with two walls traveling a slanted ceiling and two others built with bookshelves— almost emptied by borrowers.

  The file cabinets were mine, and of the desktop stuff, I owned the stapler and the crane-neck lamp.

  Johnny Belize joined us. He was forty or so. He wore his good wool suit, wingtips with leather laces, one of his good silk ties. He had height, lankiness, drowsy eyes, a kindly face.

  “How’s Raf?” he asked me.

  “Missing in action again,” I said.

  “But of course he is,” Johnny said. “Your bottle!” From the hat shelf in the little coat closet, he slid a pinch bottle of Haig & Haig that I kept for visiting parents, poets, faculty. He held the bottle delicately in his fine-boned hands, as if it were an antique.

  “You are a lovely crazy man!” the student said to him.

  “Hardly,” Johnny said. “I’m paranoid and mean. Ask anyone who knows me. Professor Deveaux? Am I not caustic? A moocher? A sot?”

  “All of those,” I said.

  The young man helped himself to the Scotch. He plugged his mouth with the bottle, gulped twice, lowered it, and gasped. He swabbed his lower lip. He said in a rusty, charred voice, “Water, water, water!”

  Almost immediately, Johnny was drunk and throwing the paper trash that had remained in my wastebasket out the office window.

  He said, “I’ve finally reached a saturation point with women. But for you, Paige. I know it’s momentary, but, lordy, look at your leg!”

  “And I have another one,” I said.

  “I know! But I don’t know what to do. Eat them or take pictures or something!”

  “Too bad age will soon ravage you,” the young man said and followed with a sigh.

  When Johnny had thrown out all my trash, he went away and came back toting a filled plastic sack of his own.

  “You can’t!” the young man said.

  “Cambridge is a hole. I’m getting even by filling it,” Johnny said.

  “How else are you getting even?” asked the young man.

  “Look, who are you?” I asked him.

  Johnny unloaded his trash sack by holding it out the window, upside down. A newsletter flew. I heard the thunk of a half-eaten apple.

  “Surely no one could blame Raf for fleeing,” Johnny said as he brushed bits of paper from the sleeves of his suitcoat. “Anywhere but here.”

  That evening I ate in a restaurant in Boston Harbor, aboard a ferry that parked there year round.

  There was moonlight. There were thrashing winds batting newspapers and whipping boat-ride ticket bits into squalls.

  The sea washing up had a rainbow skin and floated wobbly stripes of reflection from the ferry’s lights, the table candles, the moon.

  I smashed a tab of butter onto a hot tear of bread in my cupped palm.

  The ferry, the drive from Houston, sleeplessness, Raymond, Raf, his letter . . . I was swaying.

  The old South Shore hotel where my mom was manager- caretaker was forty minutes from Boston in the least traffic, with another twenty needed to navigate the lanes that wound through Hampham and then the town of Wasnascawa. The roads got skimpier for the world’s end village of Cape Head, where stood the Seahorse Inn.

  Houses crowded the bayside artery and blocked the rainy wind on the way out of Hampham.

  At the tip of Wasnascawa I crossed over to the peninsula’s ocean side and went toward the headlands. Here were two miles of naked beach, tidal marsh, acres of boat-parking space.

  The surf crested high and white and toppled with a roar that was everywhere in the air.

  At the inn, I went up a slate walk to a red door with a brass knocker.

  “My girl’s come a-calling,” Dottie said, and we hugged and patted each other. She held me away for study.

  Her eyes reddened, so I said, “Your cats are escaping.”

  “Otto and Spotto,” she said. She had given my behind a pretty good pinch.

  She pulled me into the lobby area, where a lacquered fish arced over the mantel and most of the furniture was shrouded with drop cloths or sheets.

  My mom had kept the same look since the forties— mules, sweater sets, long hair rolled back off her forehead.

  “She’s pinup stuff,” Raf had said and sighed after their first meeting.

  Spotto scooted across a braided rug into the big kitchen area with Dottie and me casually following.

  Making coffee, Dottie used complicated German equipment—bean grin
ders, valves, tubes, and spigots. “Where is he?” she asked, meaning Raf.

  “Seventh or eighth circle of hell,” I said.

  “Poor guy,” said Dottie. She was uncritically crazy about him.

  Winter-storm thunder rolled around outside. The cats followed its noise from room to room, window to window.

  “Something’s boiling out there,” she said.

  I said, “That goddamn storm has been on my back all the way from Houston. It hates me!”

  Dottie tasted her coffee and smiled. “You must have some of this.”

  “I’m already shaking without it, Mom.”

  “Then here’s what we should do. Go for a ride, smoke some reefer, and I’ll tell you some giant news.”

  Besides being caretaker for the Seahorse, Dottie wrote a column for the Cape Head weekly, The Pulse. Hers was a consumer-activist column that’d been picked up by a few other coastal-area papers. “Conscience Shopping,” it was called.

  Now as we drove away from the inn and into the strange afternoon, she said, “What I’ve finally learned and have been doing lately is taking a truth, like that some appliance makers have nuclear weapons contracts, air-and-space-weapons contracts. Or parent companies in South Africa, yet! Or most recently I’ve been writing about toiletries—mouthwash, shampoo, and what-all—emphasizing the importance of who’s getting the money and for what. All in a thousand words, until I can think, ‘There, I’ve done my damage.’ ”

  Shopping with her would be hell.

  I said, “In fact, he may be on his way here.”

  “Who?”

  “Raf. I’m sorry. I got a letter. . . . He’ll probably never show, but he might come, soon. Monday, maybe. It’s hard for me to think about too much else.”

  “And me yapping and yapping,” Dottie said.

  Above the bluffs at land’s end was the dying village of Cape Head, balanced on hilly high ground over cliffs that were getting washed away, that fell to the rocky beach. Every time I had looked the cliffs were steeper, closer to the village. One lofty old hotel was already going over in a spill of stones and timber and pieces of plaster walls.

  A match scraped. I looked over and saw Dottie bent into the serious business of lighting a marijuana cigarette. The comic novelty of Dottie’s getting buzzed had worn off long ago.

  She exhaled in a gasp.

  The view from the climbing road was of toy boats rocking on the churned-up bay, two winking lighthouses. Wasnascawa, far below us, was a smudge like an ashes and oil-chalk sketch.

  “We’re on shaky ground,” my mom said, holding her breath, her voice strained hoarse.

  “So don’t hog it, Mom,” I said, and Dottie took my remark dead level. She passed me the cigarette.

  I steered up a spiraling Cape Head street, coughing myself red from the smoke.

  Built into the hillside were an abandoned filling station, the one-room post office; the gambrel-roofed house that was the library; a Catholic church called Our Lady of the Angels; and on top of the land mass where the road dead-ended, a stone watchtower.

  I parked there and we looked at the sea and distant sky where there was a flock of snow clouds. A gust of freezing rain splattered away the view.

  We drove out of Cape Head village and down between lines of leaf-stripped trees onto the Point Road and out the spur of land where the inn perched.

  “I’ve seen Mario,” Dottie said.

  “Oh, really? How is he these days?”

  “Fine,” she said. “He comes up on the train from Providence and we eat somewhere or he just visits with me.”

  “Wait, stop. Dad Mario? I just heard you. You’re telling me you’ve been dating Dad?”

  “Seeing him, yes,” she said.

  Dottie seemed to focus on the cawing gull that paced along beside the car.

  I turned up a dirt driveway and went through a gate in the trestle fencing, under the carved sign—THE SEAHORSE INN—swinging wildly from a post.

  Ahead, the main house looked both simple and vast, with its steep, low-hipped roof and three chimneys. Annexes and new additions sprawled. Well away stood the Dutch barn that Dottie used for a garage.

  “Are you taking him back?” I asked her, but she was gaping lovingly at the inn.

  She said, “Privacy.”

  The dirt drive had potholes and puddles. I charged instead up the sodded hay-blond lawn, past the weather- blackened monumental anchor stuck there. The yard was frozen mineral hard.

  We went into the inn through a delivery entrance, into the taproom, where the floor was uneven, a pegged wood. There were ash ceiling beams, and a walk-in fireplace, its mantel blackened from smoke.

  It was Friday afternoon, so I faced three days of waiting for Raf, but the Seahorse made the best site for a waiting ordeal.

  “Tote in your luggage. I’ll fix us drinks,” my mother said.

  “This is all of it,” I said, meaning the long duffel strapped over my shoulder.

  On the mantel lay a gathering of seashells—sundials, jewel-box shells, great lilac volutes. Beside them was a talking radio.

  From the radio, a woman broadcaster predicted gale-force winds and snow tomorrow, with a disaster snow blizzard on Sunday; possibly a foot of snow.

  “Let it come!” Dottie said.

  We ducked under a blockhouse door and crossed the front lobby, where Dottie bopped the bell on the registry desk. The chime brought Fredo, the freckled dog, writhing and leaping in greeting.

  “Say hello but be a nice chap,” Mom told him. “We’re baked.”

  We came to the saloon. She stepped behind the bar and toe-tapped a floor switch that ignited yellow lights—spots trained on a shimmering assembly of liquor bottles in back of her.

  “You and Mario?” I said.

  For now, the storm sounded far away, a reminder of storm.

  Mid July, right before Houston, I had driven to Providence to visit my dad. He was out in his garden, tying up tomato plants.

  “So thin,” I thought.

  Mario held a Tootsie Pop in his mouth. I could smell the orange candy.

  His face was tanned but his flowing hair had gone foam white. He seemed a few inches shorter. His cheeks had collapsed inward and his eyebrows were bushy.

  He cracked the lollipop and finished it, poked the white cardboard stick into the ground of his garden.

  Monteverdi blew from the kitchen. So did the odors of rosemary and wine.

  A cool twilight was settling down the ribbed hill from Mario’s, and the city in the light glowed lavender.

  After kissing me, my dad said, “See da garden? It’s not for me, it’s for the groundhogs, the rabbits. This is the thing I’m supposed to mind. I plow, plant, weed, spread manure, bone marrow. The food comes up. It’s good food. The animals is hungry, they eat it. They’re hungry so they do. I’m supposed to mind and blow out their brains or poison them? Oh, listen!”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Lee-la-da-deeee!” Mario sang. “Let them eat, I think. I’m not going to get them for it. Who am I, Elmer Fudd guarding carrots? No-lo-ta-deee! You have good legs, woman.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “But, so, Dad? Why have a garden?”

  “Endeavor! Exercise! I buy my carrots and da vegetables in a grocery store same as you. But now, as to the tomatoes. I care deeply about these tomatoes. So I drive a bargain. Eat the fucking cucumbers, radishes, zucchini. Stuff yourselves and God go with you. But leave the tomatoes for Mario. And they do. They’re honorable.”

  He wore a workshirt and a flower-printed tie, corduroys with deep cuffs.

  Patting my bare arm, his hand was callused, hard as a ram’s horn.

  Under a Dutch elm, the tire swing threw an O shadow on the velvety grass.

  “Listen,” he said. “It’s fine if you come by and my heart is full. Equally fine if you don’t. What for? I’m not lonely. How is Raf?”

  “Gone,” I said. “In Houston, I thin
k. I’m going to try there, anyway. I must be stupid.”

  “No, don’t insult me, Piagga, with you are stupid!”

  “All right, all right.”

  “You know what my dad used to say? At dinnertime? Your Grandfather Amelio?”

  “What did he say?”

  “He would look up at me and he would say, he would sigh and say, ‘Let’s eat.’ ”

  Setting my overnight things in Mario’s guest room, I had noticed a new mural on the left wall.

  In my bedroom in our house in Maryland, Mario had painted “Apollo’s Victory Over the Python” opposite my bed. I was eight or nine. I hadn’t wanted ballerinas or circus ponies. Struggle, muscles, and violence were what I asked for.

  Mario had shrugged, nodded; primed the plaster wall surface. Later he pencil-sketched a twisting dragon and a descending god, and overnight painted the scene in with thin brushfalls of sienna, brown, and dark brown.

  Over dinner that July evening, Mario said, “I’ll tell you what about Monteverdi. Opera’s turning around, time for a changing point. Monteverdi doesn’t get shaked up. Already he did the plays, the madrigal, also ballet. Most of all, he knows music. For Orfeo, he has every instrument played by the greatest musicians alive!”

  For Mario, opera was history—what people believed and when, their angers and passions.

  “Are you working at all?” I asked him.

  “Sketches.”

  “May I see them?”

  “No,” Mario said, “they’re weak.”

  “I bet they’re not weak.”

  “Not weak,” he had said. “They’re just not strong.”

  I sprawled in the inn’s fancy sitting room, where sofas upholstered in silk crowded a marble fireplace. An afternoon fire there snapped logs on a tiered piece of ironwork. Persian rugs were squared around. Two floor lamps with parchment shades lighted a magazine in my lap.

  “I’m so trashed,” Dottie said.

  “Me too. In a sense.”

  “Innocence?” she said.

  I had pushed off my shoes, hitched up my cargo jeans so I could warm my socks before the log fire.

  “Yes, fried and famished and going for food down on the boardwalk,” I said.