Subtraction

by Mary Robison

  I said, “Thank you, Mother. Considering I’m a poet.”

  “You all been to visit my ex?”

  “Yeah, wonderful guy,” Raymond said. “But I can see how you’d get worn out with him.”

  Dottie tilted her head left and right, the way Fredo did when some sound had him puzzled.

  “I didn’t mean nothin’ bad,” Raymond said. His drawl seemed thicker, or maybe like his sun colors, just more noticeable out of his home context.

  “Mario did not wear me out,” Dottie said.

  Raymond blinked sadly. He said, “I have not been able to say one thing I meant since I crossed over the Mason-Dixon. I believe the cold weather’s freeze-dried my brain—’specially the part that’s in charge of word choice.”

  “I’ve read about that. Happens often to Southerners,” Raf said. “They get more Southern.”

  “It’s a defense,” Raymond said.

  “The defense may rest,” Raf told him.

  “Raf’s actually named Walter,” I said. “That’s his real name, in case either of you didn’t know.”

  “Walter?” Raymond said.

  “I didn’t know,” said Dottie. “That’s awful. But never mind, you’re still Raf to us.”

  “Walter?” Raymond said again.

  “And just when I was on your side,” Raf said to me.

  In the morning, the rooms were sunny, the sky outside a cloudless blue. The four of us set to work.

  We laundered blankets and bed linens, drop cloths for the furniture.

  Raf drove me and Fredo into Hampham to replenish Dottie’s personal refrigerator and the hotel stock that the storm victims used. We bought candles, lamp oil, batteries; pounds of coffee, rice, beans, and flour. We bought baguettes and eclairs at the bakery, and fish fillets and sweet peppers at South Shore Market.

  On the ride back to Cape Head, I said, “Raf, we don’t have to get a divorce.”

  “All right. I wasn’t thinking we did, but all right.”

  “I’ll be around,” I said. “And you can visit, and stay or not. We just won’t be an act; we’re breaking up the act.”

  “All right,” he said, and blew air out his cheeks.

  “Nothing’s expected of you, so there’s nothing to run from. No reason to lie or hide what you do anymore.”

  “I know.”

  “Of course, this is both of us. You can’t expect anything from me.”

  “I’m sorry to cut in here,” Raf said. “But way out there on the bay, that spouting thing? You think that could be a whale?”

  Dottie wok-fried the fish we bought, and now the four of us gathered for supper. The group’s personality was different, though. We concentrated on eating, tearing through the meal.

  To fill air, I talked about quarks, and Barny, the physicist. I said that must have been something, finding a whole new layer, the deepest level of matter. “A thing less than a millionth of an atom in size,” I said.

  Raymond didn’t speak at all. I saw in his eyes what I sometimes saw in Raf’s, that he was already off and traveling. I’d catch him studying me, and I could see that he didn’t want to go, in some ways, but that in all ways, he needed to.

  Dottie and I shared a joint. We were in the sitting room off the lobby, with candlelight twinkling on the cherry wood and on the tall ships’ portraits and on the plasticky flanks of the big fish mounted over the mantel.

  For a frozen few moments, I thought my mom looked as though she were mourning something and that her head was lowered in sorrow. I heard crying. The moments, suspended for me and set off in brackets from time flow, ended when the crying shaped itself around a gull somewhere in the distance.

  In my sleep, I had pictures of back roads crunchy with salt, sawtooth warehouse roofs; and last of Connie, Raymond’s dog, falling seven stories, exploding in starbursts and dust where her shadow had been, leaving a steel trash can in a papery crumple.

  Raymond booked an eleven-o’clock flight out of Logan, and Raf did a gallant thing, insisting he had leg cramps from his dawn run on the beach.

  “You two go alone,” he said. “I don’t want to anyway. It’s a goddamned gruesome drive.”

  He said goodbye to Raymond in the foyer of the inn. “Hoss,” he said.

  “Hoss,” said Raymond.

  “If you happen into Pru down there . . .”

  Raymond said, “Pru and me, we’ll be all right after a while, after I get over the urge to drop her off some tower. I could marry her now, would be one way to go. Luisa and I are done with business. Her intended’s the lawyer did our divorce. Pru would rebel but deep inside it’s what she wants—marriage, quit her job, a dad for Lilith, some taste of calm.”

  “We all acted pretty stupid,” Raf said. “Next time, we’ll just talk about how stupid we were.”

  “No,” Raymond said.

  Every mile I drove toward Logan, I felt a sad panic. “There must be something of dying in this,” I told Raymond. “Maybe why people make those we’ll-call-every-day promises.”

  “Right,” he said.

  “You want to make sure the other keeps on . . .”

  “Right.”

  “It’s funny, my staying with Dottie and Raf’s gonna be at Mario’s. Like we went home to Mom and Dad,” I said.

  “That’s funny,” Raymond said.

  “Until we grow up, as you suggested.”

  Raymond put on his dictator dark glasses and lit a cigarette. He smoothed back his sunny hair. He said, “I remember I walked into that cantina and seen you last summer shaking in your booth, and I told myself, ‘Raymond, you move real slow on this one ’cause she’ll spook like a rabbit. She’ll go streaming off like a rabbit.’ ”

  “You were such a gent,” I said.

  “You know, except when you were on the road, we been together almost every day since?”

  I hadn’t realized that, but it explained why, on safari in my back thoughts, was the idea that Raymond would stay with me. I said, “I’ll pay. I’m serious, I’ll pay for the flight if you’ll come back next weekend or the one after.”

  “I need to get with my crew and work. And I ran through most of my savings. Gotta replace my car,” Raymond said.

  “But what’s important, finally?” I asked.

  “Important? Walking upright. Havin’ a daughter. I got all your dad’s signals. Not so stupid as Raf thinks.”

  “I can’t stand this,” I said.

  “I lied about your poetry,” Raymond said. “I don’t like it. You aren’t in it, or maybe you’d say there’s some coded version, but fuck that. My tastes, whatever thing you make is you, no mistaking it.”

  I winced but set a little smile.

  “You should’ve been different with me, Paige. You got a nice inn to go to, and a sit-down horseshit job, and Raf’s got your dad backin’ him up, but what I do sort of counts.”

  “Like leaving Luisa and moving in with Pru?” I said.

  Raymond huffed and cranked his window and fired away his cigarette.

  “That’s for me to live with and for you it’s that you could’ve been different. I hope it eats at you. I hope you wake up crying for me. Because you won’t ever see me again. And you can’t rectify anything and Raf can’t be my friend ’cause you can’t edit or change what’s over.”

  He wouldn’t let me walk in with him at Logan, or even park the car. He yanked his bag—a canvas carpenter’s tote—from the back seat and swung into daylight. He said nothing. I watched him join the hectic current of traffic at the passenger drop-off. I saw that his clothes were too frail for even this milder northern day, that the back of his unlined jacket still had a powdering of construction dust. His Levi’s puckered where his knee poked through, and there was red Texas mud frozen to his boot heel. The wind roughed his hair and it flared for a second before he was gone through the terminal doors.

  The last step in my setting up a work space at the inn was plugging in Raymond’s gift comp
uter. Its small screen flushed amber as the machine powered up.

  “If you’re going to stay long, you should sublease your Boston place,” Dottie said.

  I slotted in a disk, as I’d learned to do, and popped some keys.

  “That’s cute,” Dottie said.

  “Well, it works. Would you like it? You may have it,” I said.

  “The inn has its own, for reservations and all. I keep it stored away off season,” Dottie said. She puttered off to get the mail.

  “I could never work on this one,” I said.

  I retrieved, read, and deleted the long poem I had written on the road. There was nothing in there of Raymond or Mississippi or Raf or the storm that had seemed to follow me; nothing of driving or dreaming or hoping or falling down or phone calls or missing anybody.

  Around six, Mario came with a double armload of fresh flowers for Dottie. He was dressed in a black suit, starched shirt, and a massive scarf looped around his throat three times.

  “Isn’t he striking?” Dottie said. She wore a fake fur over her winter-white sweater dress.

  “He’s gorgeous,” I said.

  “I’m think of poor Zerlina in Don Giovanni,” Mario said. “ ‘You may yet be making fun of me.’ ”

  “Never. We wouldn’t,” Dottie said.

  “So then, we go,” he said.

  “Get her home by twelve,” I said. “And don’t try to hand me the flat tire on the freeway routine.”

  “She should no try to be funny, because it’s not,” Mario said.

  “Listen to your father, Paige,” said Dottie.

  I met Raf in Cambridge. We walked and did some bookstore browsing, walked on cobblestone streets of brick townhouses and row houses, many with wreaths on their doors; past rambling mansions and their snowy expanses of lawn; stands of pine, willow, and birch trees.

  In Wordsmith, I watched as Raf wandered an aisle. He shambled spent, like a person who had been doing heavy lifting. He stretched, rubbed his arms in their coat sleeves. In his athletic periods I often saw him working kinks from his joints this way. I wondered if Raf understood what his last event had been.

  “What’re we doin’ after this?” he asked me. He flumped an armload of paperbacks onto the cash-register desk.

  I couldn’t decide what was next. The speakers in the place were sounding Beethoven, the Archduke Trio. I got lost listening, and thinking of an old Godard movie: of a man and woman in bed, in smoky sunlight, a couple with something enormous to lose.

  Raf said, “You want to go for coffee or just quit? You seem kind of runover.”

  “I want to go for a three-week drive.”

  “I always want to do that,” Raf said.

  “You pilot if you want,” I told him.

  “I want,” he said.

  He swung the smoke-colored car away from the Cambridge garage. He drove with a kind of weary aggression—kicking at the clutch, slugging the gear stick.

  I talked about the streets in Cameroon, how some days they were full of sand, almost impassable from sand. People would sweep but more sand would come, covering and ruining everything.

  We got on and off the Mass. Turnpike.

  Raf plunged in the clutch pedal, let the car slow and roll onto the shoulder of the road. He braked. The headlights showed over lapping layers of mist slicking the twisting lane ahead. The windshield wipers slithered left and right. Their motor hummed.

  He reached under his seat and tugged out a road atlas.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, reading a map. He said “worry” with a tone of puzzlement for anyone who might.

  I studied him. Below his black hair the fine bones of his skull were modeled by the white cabin light. His good eye was a pool of shadow. I thought: generic man, perfect man. I thought how even when Raf was dead-still, he had an intensity out of which someone could interpret a world.

  MARY ROBISON was born in Washington, D.C. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, an O. Henry Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and the 2018 Arts and Letters Award in Literature. She is the author of four novels—Oh!, Subtraction, Why Did I Ever, and One D.O.A., One On the Way—and four story collections—Tell Me, Days, An Amateur’s Guide to the Night, and Believe Them. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.