Far back as Mark could remember, Joshua had been like this. He was the kind of guy who took his truth where he could find it, and because, given his line of work, factoids were the morsels that made up his communion, he was prone to flights of trivial import, his life a kind of Jeopardy! He might note, with urgency, that the blind were known for their acute sense of hearing or that elephants sometimes ran trunks over the tusks of the dead. Invariably, he would follow these nuggets up with It just goes to show you, or It really makes you think, though he could never be depended upon to say just what something went to show or was meant to make one think. His metaphors went forever unfinished, as though to turn them toward relevance might diminish their vague power. The right listener might smile, amused or awed, but Mark was not the right listener. The treatises generally left him resisting the urge to roll his eyes.
As a child, Joshua had been drawn to nature documentaries. He’d harried the family at mealtimes with the sleeping habits of lions, the diets of zebras, the migration patterns of various African birds. Traits were occasionally attributed to family members.
“You,” he told Mark over a dinner of hot dogs, “are a rhino.” He didn’t say why. Instead, he took a big bite of hot dog, mustard dropping onto his shirtfront. He set the hot dog down, and—Mark couldn’t say why he remembered this so vividly—he pulled the shirt to his mouth and, nimbly as a cat, tongued the fabric clean.
Each evening brought new animals to the table, and what Joshua didn’t know, Mark suspected he made up. He suspected this still.
On the bluff, Mark watched him. They shared the same hawk’s nose, the same narrow forehead and cleft chin. Hard features. Presidential, Lorrie had said.
They shared the same blood. This was unmistakable, right up to the moment Joshua opened his mouth, at which point Mark always wondered how they could be brothers.
“This bridge,” Joshua said. “It really makes you think.”
“It does,” Mark said, thinking how a moment can mean two things to two people.
He thought this and did not speak it. Neither did he remind the man at his side that a bridge in winter was what had killed his wife.
. . .
They drove on, following the coastline, until they came to a kind of compound. Identical concrete units rose between trees from green hills, the buildings dark-roofed and many-antennaed. They had reached the Presidio.
“Former military base,” Joshua said. “And now—”
“Housing for hippies?”
“You got it.”
The units were small, three-storied, drab but for plants in window boxes and flags hung from ledges.
“Batteries line the beach,” Joshua said. “The government was all set for the Japanese.”
They took the streets through the compound too fast, up steep hills and down steeper ones. They nosedived down one slope until Joshua jerked the wheel and ground the car’s tires into the curb.
“While you’re here, it’s important to angle your tires on inclines,” Joshua said. He appeared unconcerned that Mark had no car and, therefore, no tires to angle. It was just another fact, a thing to know. “The city’s notorious for runaway cars. This way, your brakes give out, you stay put. It’s the law.”
Mark reached into the backseat for his bag, then remembered he didn’t have one. He was still in the passenger seat, still facing the back, when Joshua said something, his voice muffled, a near whisper.
“I’m sorry?” Mark said.
“This funeral business,” Joshua repeated. “That’s behind us, right?” He put a hand on Mark’s shoulder and squeezed.
And what could he say? The funeral wasn’t behind them. The very subject was a river to be crossed, a river rising fast and one that might never be crossed with Joshua so quick to dismiss it. If he’d come for an apology, Mark saw now he’d never get it.
“Marisa feels bad,” Joshua said. “I tell her you’re fine, but she won’t believe me. She misses Lorrie. I made her promise not to bring it up.” He undid his seatbelt and stepped from the car. He knelt, face framed by the open door. Beyond him, the sky sank into the ocean. “Just know, you say anything, she’ll cry.”
The door swung shut, and Joshua was across the parking lot before Mark could bring himself to follow.
. . .
There had been a letter.
This wasn’t long after the funeral, when the weight of what was pressed so hard upon Mark that he woke once, twice a night and sobbed. His dreams were ice, tires smoking, vehicles catapulted through guardrails.
Other dreams, he stood before an enormous arcade game, a pinball machine. Instead of balls, the bumpers rebounded cars. The cars spun and ricocheted, and Mark jammed like mad on the buttons. But the flippers were locked, always locked, and, one by one, the cars tumbled, fell, slipped past the flippers and into the mouth of the machine, swallowed, gone.
There were dreams of the river, the car bubbling, a hole in the windshield, and Lorrie’s hair trailing, current-caught and swaying like kelp.
Another dream, the dream that gave voice to the letter, found him in the river. Water filled the car. Heels dug in the riverbed, he pulled at the handle, but the door wouldn’t give. Lorrie’s words were gurgles. The water would not stop coming. And then there was a hand on his back. And then there was Joshua. The car was lifted, heaved from the river to shore. Lorrie tumbled out in a rush of water and into Joshua’s arms.
That morning, trembling, Mark had picked up a pen. The dreams were horrors, but they were his horrors, and Joshua had no place invading them. He didn’t organize his thoughts. He wrote. Letters leaned angry into words. Words tangled into hateful sentences. There was no proofreading, no revision. His students, even the laziest, would have been appalled.
Furious, dazed, and half-asleep, he’d folded the paper, folded it again, addressed an envelope, and mailed the letter before he could change his mind.
He couldn’t say, now, what the letter had said. Certainly there had been some fucks in there, some fucks and some motherfuckers that must have stood out no matter how sloppy the penmanship. There’d been a list of grievances: a model airplane stolen and broken in boyhood, a borrowed shirt torn at the sleeve, a seatbelt slung and the faint scar it had left on Mark’s temple. The list had likely culminated with the missed funeral, but he couldn’t be sure.
What blue rage had he been in, what boiling soup, to write such things?
His fury had since cooled. Now, it was an ache—persistent, arthritic—but nothing like the fire from before. No, the real fire was his own.
Joshua, after all, had not cursed her. Joshua had not heard the unspeakable pass between his teeth. Joshua had not flung Lorrie from the bridge.
No, that had been him.
. . .
The clothes did not fit. Mark’s stomach hung over the waistline of jeans he’d barely managed to button. Even the largest of Joshua’s T-shirts clung to his chest, exposing his navel and the taut skin of his gut.
“It’s a good look for you,” Joshua said, and Marisa laughed through the hand at her face.
Like Joshua, Marisa looked healthy, fit, young. She credited the weather, the water, and her decision to move to a diet of all-natural and organic foods.
“We tried vegetarianism,” she said, “but your brother missed meat.”
Joshua lowed like cattle.
Marisa’s hair was long and straight, still blond, and Mark wondered whether Joshua knew that Marisa was—as she’d once confided in Lorrie—going gray under all that gold.
Marisa had met them at the door, and, like Joshua, she’d held him for too long.
The past nine months, he’d become a connoisseur of hugs. There were the pity hugs, the obligatory hugs, even the few that meant sympathy, genuine and unforced. Marisa’s was one of those, and it was only once she’d let go, his chest warm, that he missed how it felt, having a body in his arms, and he thought of the Mohawked woman, and he was afraid. Whatever was surfacing, pushing through, he wasn’t rea
dy.
Joshua and Marisa left the room, and he changed back into his clothes. His socks clung, sweaty, to his feet. His shirt smelled like the plane he’d flown in on.
He’d been given the spare room, which turned out to be a kind of oversized storage closet. Boxes and piles of papers had been pushed into corners. An inflated air mattress filled the floor, and an unzipped sleeping bag covered the mattress. A pair of towels and a washcloth sat stacked on a pillow. The room’s walls were white, the ceiling low and mottled with what he’d once heard a Realtor call popcorn, the bubbly sealant that hid the seams of poorly hung drywall. The ceiling dropped from the doorframe’s apex to the floor like the hypotenuse of a triangle. Already, he saw he’d have to sleep with his head at the door to keep from rising and cracking his skull in the night. He ran a hand over the ceiling, and it snowed, the sleeping bag, pillow, towels—all of it—mottled with a pebbly, white dust.
Joshua and Marisa were waiting for him in the main room. The room was sparsely decorated, furniture an assemblage of pieces salvaged from sidewalks and yard sales. Here and there, cups stuffed with cigarette butts dotted the landscape.
The room’s focal point was a wide-screen TV perched on a coffee table. The TV was huge, the table too small for it. Beneath the table, three gaming systems sat piled beside jewel cases. Discs scattered the hardwood floor, a perimeter of silver puddles. Mark tallied the expense in his head. He wondered how many games a plane ticket would buy.
“We thought we’d lay low tonight,” Marisa said. “We figured you’d be tired.”
He wasn’t tired. Already, he felt trapped by the small apartment and its quiet ashtray stink. How did Marisa, a nonsmoker, stand it? He couldn’t imagine the three of them sitting there breathing the same stale air while evening turned over. But he said nothing.
He fell into the lap of a white, wide-armed chair. Across the room, Marisa and Joshua shared a couch. Above them, and through a window, the apartments of the Presidio were overtaken by trees and, beyond these, a blue, Pacific strip.
The silence in the room was approaching insurmountable.
“You have a nice home,” he said.
“We like it,” Marisa said.
“We were just happy to find a clean, safe place,” Joshua said. “You wouldn’t believe what it costs to live—” He stopped short, as though he’d said too much.
And then they were all thinking money, funerals and flights.
Mark turned to Marisa. “How’s the world of physical therapy?” he asked.
She laughed. “You make it sound so noble. It’s nothing like that. I massage the rich and the tense.”
Marisa was famous for her back rubs. During visits, Lorrie would remove her top and lie on the floor. Marisa would squat over her, working her hands between Lorrie’s shoulder blades and down her spine. Afterward, Lorrie would always slip into his arms, limp and lithe. “Nothing sexual about massages,” Lorrie would say. “They’re relaxing, that’s all,” but Mark didn’t believe her. Always, he could count on those nights to get some. Which was why, when Marisa offered, hands oiled, legs crossed on the floor, and his wife watching, Mark always said thanks, but no.
A bird flew past the window, then another.
“She’s good,” Joshua said. “Really good. Number one requested masseuse at Salon Six. Does all the San Francisco celebs. Robin Williams—”
“Okay, love,” Marisa said. She raised a hand to Joshua’s cheek. She had large, clean hands with trimmed nails. Mark could still see them kneading Lorrie’s skin like floured dough.
“Sorry, Mark,” she said. “Our client list is supposed to be confidential. We get stars, sure, but more has-beens than anything else. Reality hacks, old soap divas.”
“Alex Trebek.” Joshua laughed. “Hundred-dollar tip.” He put his arm around Marisa.
“That was one time.”
“Asked her to rub his mustache.”
“He did no such thing,” Marisa said.
But she must have gotten them on occasion, given her line of work, Mark thought—the inappropriate proposals, the special requests. He was curious but not curious enough to ask.
“You should let her give you one,” Joshua said. “I mean it. When she’s done, you won’t have a care in the world.” He turned to Marisa. “You have time tomorrow, right?”
“I have an hour,” Marisa said.
But the suggestion had rattled her. Mark could see the surprise, see her register his seeing.
“That’s all right,” Mark said. “But I appreciate the offer.”
“I insist,” Joshua said. “I’ll pay.”
After that, what could anyone say? Marisa coughed. Mark watched the window.
Later, from his bed on the floor, through the thin walls, he heard them fucking. They were trying to be quiet about it, you could tell, but there it was, the rhythm of the bed, his brother’s grunt, and, at the climax, not a moan from Marisa, but a breathy exhalation, like what comes just before the whistle—a teakettle’s exquisite, satisfied sigh.
. . .
And who could say for sure that he hadn’t killed his wife?
“Go to hell,” he’d said, and what if she had? He wasn’t a believer. Before that night, he hadn’t given much thought to heaven or to hell, to an afterlife of any kind. He’d never believed—not really—that he or anyone he loved would die. At the river, though, the cold cutting through his socks and into his shoes, he’d watched the man in the wetsuit emerge from the water and he’d known for sure that some place followed this, that Lorrie was there, and that he had been her dispatcher.
Go to hell.
Fifteen years, they’d been fighting this fight. School let out at three, which left him alone for hours, bored, while Lorrie, a lawyer, worked late. He wanted her home. Was she on her way? And where had she been all evening?
But, that night, he did something he’d never done: He asked her, outright. He hadn’t believed it, not really, only wanted the slap to sting. The truth was, she was very good at what she did. She got lots of work, and she refused to half-ass a case. This meant long hours, and if he wanted to talk fidelity, they could start with the smut she’d found under the bath mat. He’d suggested he wouldn’t need magazines were she fulfilling her wifely duties, and she’d observed that such duties might be a little more palatable if he stopped calling work every ten minutes to make her feel bad. Furthermore, should he question her faithfulness again, ever, they were through—she’d file the paperwork herself.
“Go to hell,” he’d said, then hung up. His cell phone had buzzed, then dinged with the message she’d left. He’d made no move to check it.
When, hours later, the house phone rang, it wasn’t Lorrie. It was no voice he knew. He listened to the voice, heard something blossom, taloned and black, and then his understanding of the world came loose from his place in it.
That her death had saved them a divorce was no comfort, was worse than no comfort. And so what if the thing he wanted back wasn’t her, but them or, if not them, an idea of them, of what they’d been, once, long ago?
He wanted her back, if only to tell her he was sorry, that he hadn’t meant it, hadn’t meant a word.
. . .
Sunup, and Mark had to hustle to keep up. He and Joshua crossed the grounds of Victorian Park. They walked fast under the shadows of factories and canneries turned, this century, to shops and hotels. The windows of the buildings glowed, awnings striped and stretched to toothy grins.
They passed a beach. Offshore, swimmers moved in a line between buoys, all flutter kicks and swim caps, arms scissoring the bay.
The plan was for Mark to spend the morning at the Maritime Museum. He would see the ships, watch Joshua give his tourist talks, and then it was off to Salon Six for Marisa’s massage.
“You’re not naked, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Joshua said. “There’s a towel.”
Mark pulled on his shirt collar. The suitcase had not arrived. Over the phone, an attendant had reminded
him that today was the day before Thanksgiving, a very busy day, and that, in the future, Mark might consider carrying on. He’d wanted to scream. Instead, he’d returned the phone to his pocket and cut the tape on a cardboard box that Joshua had pulled from storage. The box was labeled FAT CLOTHES and was full of fashions maybe five years old. He settled on jeans and a white T-shirt with the black outline of a lion faded on the front. The clothes fit, but the odor of cigarettes was all over them, as though they’d gone into the box unwashed, which, for all Mark knew, they had.
Joshua wore his uniform, the trademark green slacks and tan, button-down shirt of the park service. His hat—perched high and unfriendly-looking on his hillock of hair—sported a brim stiff as the blade of a shovel. It was a forest uniform, one that made more sense on Smokey the Bear than it did on the beach.
They passed a trash barrel, and Joshua flicked a spent cigarette into it.
They continued up a paved embankment, across a street, and through an open gate to a small, weather-beaten building.
“Here we are,” Joshua said.
Mark had expected a museum, something grand with a winding staircase, portraits of dead sea captains on the walls. But the building looked more like a public restroom. The front was brown wood, unsanded, and the roof was tin. The real attraction was just ahead, a dozen docked ships and a pier that caterpillared into the bay.
They walked the pier. The ships varied in size and age. There were naval vessels, holes cut from their sides for the mouths of cannons, and schooners whose sails hung like pirate ships’. The ships stood in various stages of disrepair, some bright, hulls gleaming, others rusted, in need of real work.
The crown jewel, Joshua said, was the Thayer, a tall ship with wide, white sails and a prominent black bow. A red stripe marked its middle. Its anchor chain disappeared into the bay, links big as refrigerators.
“A million bucks,” Joshua said. “New hull, new deck, new mast.”
The ship towered over them, sails flapping.
The Heaven of Animals: Stories Page 18
