by Odie Lindsey
Part of me wants to make up a tale about being cheated on, or a dead lover or something. Instead, I just try to keep smiling. “No. Not really.”
I couldn’t do much at the service, save mutter a few words about Dad being a cross between Mike Brady and the Great Santini. Nobody listened. At the national military cemetery north of town, the lawn and gravestones are so precise, so wonderfully green and white. We were surrounded by soldiers and guns. A flag was folded like a paper football and passed our way. (Who ended up with it? Betsy?) As I spoke, looking out at the teethlike rows of Union and Confederate and Other, the 4,131 Unknowns, Danny fingered his BlackBerry. Janine slunk away for a cig.
Throughout the service I pictured soap-opera funerals. How the distraught launch themselves about the grave, beating their fists on the coffin, their tears streaking its glassy, lacquered wood. At one point I even looked for the controversial former lover, in sunglasses on the fringe of the cemetery, ducking behind weathered stone arches at the gate. But none of that happened, which was disappointing. In fact, the absence of my own tears made me feel so guilty I considered seeking out another funeral altogether—until “Ashes to ashes.” At that point I was hit with loss. Indeed, a sense of loss, for a moment, as those lines spilled over Dad and into the cool earth below.
IT took a while to really get it down pat. You don’t just start off perfectly fucking a television. You start off, of course, masturbating in front of it. Everyone does. And it’s good. Really good. And then things progress, and you get the idea. You get up off the couch, walk over, grapple the sides of the console and start humping at the unit, which is of course silly. (Surely, you look like a happy dumb dog forcing its instinctual hips into nothing.) Only, it’s not as good as it should be. So you practice and prod, and grumble and bumble, and then buy a bigger television; surround sound; recordable, full-throttle digital satellite; movie subscriptions, On Demand, etc. Then you purchase a hypo-allergenic latex “Pocket Snatch”—which sort of works, as you squeeze into it with one hand, the other caressing the console of the boob tube, the remote in immediate vicinity.
But really, that sort of doesn’t work either. It’s too mechanical. What works completely, you discover, after years of disappointment, is when you plant the head of a life-sized, gel-enhanced sex goddess (kind of like an X-rated CPR dummy with the most realistic pubic hair you ever dreamed of, plus a surprisingly tight synthetic anus) under a smaller television set which has been leaned back against the wall at a forty-five-degree angle—and then mount the protruding body while gazing into the eyes of the screen.
This works because you can then watch a skin flick, or celebrity game show, or nightly news or family drama or awards ceremony or women’s tennis match or soap opera or beer commercial or reality show, or whatever . . . a rerun, a premiere . . . and you can literally take it into your arms and fuck the guts out of it. Or make love. Or cuddle. Or caress. Or confess, or cry. Whichever you prefer.
What’s transcendent is that it fucks you, confesses to you, accepts you, admires you, fantasizes with you, evolves with you, shares with you, adjusts with you, understands you. Loves you back. Unconditionally, unconditionally, unconditionally.
Until they come up with a woman who has a console for a head, I fear that’s the best I can do to give love.
WHEN Janine goes outside to smoke, Danny starts confessing. “I can’t stop multitasking, Bobby. I can’t control, and it’s getting worse and worse and . . . I’m worried that Beth is going to leave me.”
His liquor-laced whispers convey such helplessness; it’s as if he doesn’t understand himself. He notes that, as I’ve seen, he must replace his urine with fluid intake the instant he evacuates—as if he never over-internalized Dad’s demands to dominate both offense and defense, “both sides of the goddamn ball.” Danny says that for whatever reason, he can’t make a bowel movement without brushing his teeth—as if Dad never criticized his ROTC and Reserve commitment, or, hell, even his war, as being “not nearly tight enough.” He swallows hard, says, “Bobby? For chrissakes, Bobby, I can’t even make love to Beth unless I’ve got one eye on the Wall Street Journal”—as if Dad didn’t call him a faggot after he was promoted to regional vice president with B of A.
This is so one-segment-of-Dr.-Phil recognizable. I’m about to suggest that he try cheating with a flat-screen, when Janine staggers back in, her silhouette breaking up the bar-door sunlight.
WE all shifted when Pickle died. Little Pickle-face, not quite three years old. She was the baby, and was Dad’s chance at redemptive fatherhood. The nearly navy-blue eyes that meant to serve as peacemakers, as liaisons, between Dad and Danny and Janine and me, and which would at last make us a real live, functional family.
Eighteen months my younger sister, her life defined by the Monroe Carell Children’s Hospital at Vandy. She never had a chance to contemplate heaven or hell or the Easter Bunny. Yet somehow, as I look around at all of us, maybe it’s not so bad after all: little Pickle’s death.
Shhh.
Maybe, as I think about Janine—thirteen and already destroying her body—I did get off easy. Maybe, when I think about Frank’s incessant degradation of Danny, I got lucky as hell.
Yeah, maybe, just like Janine (but for different reasons), I’m glad Pickle died. Maybe the black circles under her eyelids and her hairless little head, the paper ducks taped to the ward wall, were worth it—just to again become the baby of the household. To escape my father, who after Pickle’s death just gave up on all of it: his wives, his children, his military career. Who turned me over to a brightly pixelated babysitter.
Maybe, just maybe, I was lucky to be parented by the screen. To sit for hours alone, to always look for Pickle, always always always, and to find shards of her on Sesame Street and The Cosby Show and Growing Pains and Laff-A-Lympics and . . . To find him there as well: Good Ole Dad. Or, rather, Good New Dads. Flawless and nonthreatening, a thousand different men who taught me how to live. Loving me, forgiving my faults. Providing the practical wrap-ups that Janine and Danny never knew.
Janine walks back in from her smoke and plops down on the barstool.
“Sorry, Bobby,” she says. “It’s just a weird, awful day and all.”
“No,” I say. “I’m the one who’s sorry, sis.” I picture the deepest hug I’ve ever watched, and try my best to give her one that eclipses it.
Because yeah, maybe.
Wall
SO,
it used to be that night after night I’d lie dead awake, staring at the street-lit silhouette of lace drape on bedroom wall. Hours of halogen, the silence broken only by the report of low-caliber gunshot on the streets, or by the smashing of bottles in the alley below. Used to be heart arrhythmic, in the gut of anxiety, aphasia, dysthymia, and back-of-throat-scrape reflux. I was home. Honorably discharged. I had transitioned from CHU barracks to a series of moves, south then north, and to this matchbox apartment in the city. A chair and plank of desk. To cracked, cream and cornflower linoleum of kitchenette adjoined to shower-stall bathroom. To gilt-frame picture from before the war. Pens with clotted ink. Fatty rinds trimmed from markdown cutlets graying in the drain-catch. Dress greens with combat ribbons in back of closet, moth cakes in pocket. To tight on sour bourbon, hand-sweeping crumbs and dust from the corners while bent down to recover some dropped object. A bottle top. Fork.
To the questions: Wasn’t there another way? Couldn’t I have chosen not to—? But Father, can’t you understand that—? Chaplain, can you—? Could you—?
No, nobody could. The facts were only fork and bottle top; were a glass and a glass, and dips of shallow sleep, propped up on folded foam pillows to curb the climbing flux. Glances at the red digits of the alarm clock. At the wall stamped with silhouette of lace drape. Streetlight halogen. Ever awake.
SO,
used to be nights and nights, liminal, unending, until one night I heard something new, through the wall. I shot awake. What was that? Heart pound. A knock? Who’s there? Hello
? I reached for my weapon and . . .
No, it’s nothing, I thought. Just the snag of apnea. It was nothing. Now settle in. Settle down.
I de-cocked the MK, and forced myself back to nourishing thoughts of Supposed-To-Be. (This time, I imagined that instead of enlisting, I’d gone into medical sales, achieving both base salary and commission.) Back to balmy summer, Birmingham, Alabama, and to her premature crow’s-feet and gold-flecked hazel eyes; to a Toyota Tacoma, graphite-black, certified pre-owned; to wood-fenced yard to mow on Sunday; to thinking of getting pregnant, and fifteen-year fixed rate; periodic nightlife of old fraternity buddy in town, and let’s try the new Japanese restaurant near the mall; to grocery store valentine for her, with love, true love, never left you love, fill me up love, spaniel puppy at Christmas, better than yesterday love; in-laws and the bottles of twist-off Merlot they offer; to she and I drive down to the Gulf for the three-day weekend, or maybe San Fran on Southwest for four; my turn to sweep the pubes off of the potpourri scent-filled, one-out-of-two-and-a-half-bathroom tile floors; to the shouts and the fights, and to the hours curled up watching sitcoms; to joke emails at work, and work emails at home, and . . .
To your toothy, stuttered laugh so lovely. Let’s please just grow old.
To can’t sleep. So very old. Was that a knock?
Indeed. A knock. And that’s when I began to hear her, through the wall.
I listened to the rip of the packing tape from her boxes, and to the stacking of plates in the cubbies over the sink. I heard her pause to consider her trinkets. Heard her reprimand herself when she dropped something sentimental.
(By accent she is British. Lilting. But broken.)
Side-by-side in our crumbling walk-ups, I knew that the streetlight hit her bedroom wall. Understood the curl of her linoleum. I listened and heard a thousand lovers, a million, hourly wage jobs. City to town, spiraling farther away from home.
She did a lot of late-night, pan-crash cooking. Sang Mozart libretti. I believe there were quick raps on the wall when I snored too loud, or got too drunk. When she was trying to read, or just wondering how she’d gone wrong back in soggy old England. At times, I made out hints of her phone calls: —ther, I can’t believe you’d say that when you know very well he never cared for me, or I don’t have it right now, and I listened to her halfhearted prayers. I fell mad for her vocal tone, which tingled my neck muscles, tickled my cochlea. After hearing her leave, I’d sneak into the hallway and inhale her traces.
AND,
over the weeks, we grew. As if on orders, I made things proper for her. I bought bottled water and lilac-scented candles; some British cookies, called McVitie’s, and double bergamot tea. Marmalade. At the library, I studied: map room to Internet kiosk, Mirror and Sun to BBC News. Così fan tutte in the A/V extension. I found out my Birmingham was named after hers.
I also worried about inadequacies. My god, I must try to stop drowsing into terror, must try to stop drinking, try to smile—well, maybe not smile, but just not frown, not scowl, nor curse so loud . . . nor do anything vulgar in the bedroom or she’ll hear me and She’s All I’ve Got type of thoughts, defined and redefined themselves.
Once in a while she’d fall silent for hours, as if she’d moved on. I still don’t know why. I don’t know. To provoke a response I would pace around talking loudly to myself, clanking glasses and dropping things. Would pore over a Tupperware full of photographs and letters from all those stations left behind. Places raped by battle. People or actions that will never let me be. Choices that never forgive.
I blurted the old rants, cursed the old beliefs, felt so stupidly old. Put on my moth-eaten dress greens, got into bed and stared at my wall and lace drape, a whiskey glass on my belly, and . . .
Wait. What was that?
Somehow, always, she’d be there after all, a hummingbird’s worth of flutter through the partition. Listening!
THEN,
there was a visitor. A man.
As he cleared his tar-thick throat I realized he’d been there before—perhaps all along. To counter his grunts, I cleaned the shower with steel wool and bleach, the scalding water burning me, blistering my hands and forearms. It was not enough. Desperate to camouflage his moans, I started to experiment with distraction, with delusion or pain. Ultimately, I found that adding a spoonful of Ajax to my whiskey provided hours of constriction, my body writhing as the sweat and saliva worked to evacuate the poison.
Nothing can overpower that.
He insulted her cooking—though he never cooked. So I began to prepare meals, as a partner should. Pasta carbonara, with fresh Reggiano, ground pepper, finely chopped pancetta, two farm eggs—a dish I perfected while home-nursing an elderly Lazian whose children had milked his pension until he passed. (I hated my complicity in their avarice, but such was the murky economy outside of Camp Darby, Livorno. Or outside of any American military base.) On Sunday mornings I whipped up two plates of Rednecks Benedict, poached eggs with brown gravy and bacon in lieu of Canadian ham and hollandaise; a heart-clogging spread I invented post-military, while working a family grill outside of Batesville, Mississippi. I thought maybe she’d get a kick out of that. (Or, hell, maybe she’d refuse but still appreciate a copy of the Herald Tribune, bought from the specialty market all the way downtown.) I bought wine instead of whiskey and allowed that I can cook veggie burgers and veggie-veggies—whatever she prefers. “We can go out, if you want,” I offered the air. “Down to Brump’s, to a booth of smoking or non-, no problem.” To play billiards and flirt like candlelight, and bicker and laugh at the young, the brazen. Be young and brazen. We could, I thought, we could we could . . .
And this has been days and months, as measured by replications of red alarm clock digits, by the hum of streetlamp, and by listening. By at last fearing nothing: No man, No god, No fucking bomb, No death, No failure.
At last, with her, I am not a failure.
YESTERDAY,
I woke to her side of a phone argument. I got out of bed and bent close to our wall, caressing it until I could best hear her. The shouts made plain that she was fighting her second-tier, bullshit lover. He was no good for her, she said. She said that he was addicted to breaking her, to mending her, and then to breaking her again—but that there was someone else who understands.
Someone who will take me home, she said.
She moved so close as she stated this. I heard her breathe between phrases, maybe even smelled the tint of her salt. She told him that he is unable to trust or give, and that he’s a slob, and that she’s not some random fantasy. She explained that she loved hibiscus tea—did he know? Did he know that she is scared to death of the forest?
But that’s not the point, she said. She told him that for once, for once in her goddamned life she wants someone who’s not out to crucify, resurrect, or alienate her pain. Or her joy.
My god, I thought. You’re talking to me, aren’t you?
Yes. She was talking to me. Because we have been here so many, many times before. Battle to battle, slaughtering, staggering on.
But perhaps, I thought. Perhaps we can finally just go home.
Last night, I poured my whiskey into the sink, arranged my pillows on the floor, and then slept like a lamb against our wall. In the instant before drowsing, I heard her make her pallet there as well.
TODAY,
her door buzzer rang and rang. I’d slept through the night—slept late, in fact—and so I knew that she was already at work. I tried to ignore the interruption, but the caller held the button for a minute or more. After a brief pause, my own door buzzer rasped, and then a knock rattled my windowpanes.
Her lover, I thought. I unholstered the MK and placed it on the kitchen counter, ready to be done with him at last. Stared at the door, inhaled, and opened.
It was only the postman, sighing and rushed, holding a brown-papered parcel for her, from abroad. I signed for it and stepped into the hallway, and watched him stomp away.
Should I leave her a note
? I wondered, my chin resting on the package. Show up in person when I hear her return? Hand her the package and . . . Anyway, this is it, this is it!
I paced the hallway like a nervous teen. Laughed at myself as I ducked back inside my apartment, and placed the package on my desk. Settle in, shh. Maybe I’ll just leave a card with my—
I sat and stared at the parcel, my bare feet tapping the floor, my left hand trembling. Took in the scrawled handwriting of the address, and the sender’s alien zip code of letters and numbers. I wondered who on earth still used twine to seal a box (and suspected it was her mother). Maybe there’s a photo inside, a fact. Perhaps I could peer. Could finally, finally see her.
No. I stood up, and began to cook our meal, chopping fresh vegetables and peeling citrus and . . . and I turned on the radio, twisting station to station to find the opera, and . . . My god, how am I to do this? A note? Perhaps a funny note or sketch on the brown paper? Yes. A smiling face in a doorframe, my name printed underneath. Or maybe nothing funny—just an invite to dinner. Or perhaps I could . . .
No. I stopped, slid down onto the floor, my back against the cabinet and my legs straight out. Ordered myself to ignore things until my thoughts became clear. We had come so far for this. But not too far? Just has to be right, that’s all. Just right. Yes. Let’s say we open a restaurant, I thought. The Bottle Top. A tiny place, nothing fancy. Four or five tables, in one of those dusty storefronts down the block. Come to think of it, one of those spaces has been for lease since I moved here, so maybe we can work a good deal from the landlord. You and I will labor together, and gripe over the disjointed menu. Hibiscus tea. I’ll clean, mostly, to keep you happy. We can use the mismatched plates of our apartment—it’ll be quaint, you know? Carbonara. I can make this when you need nights off. Success will be difficult, I know, but how about we set a time frame? Yes. Set a one-year time frame where we both live in one tiny unit; tough it out in order to free up funds, to make this thing happen. I can already imagine the number of times we’ll have to remind each other: Remember, it’s only for a year! Ten months left, love. Hang in there, babe. Bottle of wine, here’s to six more months. We can do it. Ninety days. We can, and we will, and
