by Ashley Ream
I could have checked the schedule, which was posted outside. I did not do that. I had not been to confession since Aunt Trudy made both Bob and me go, back when I lived in the small bedroom and was carving my initials in the windowsill. How would you fit twenty-five years of lapse into one confession? It was like cleaning house. If you took care of it a little at a time, it was manageable, but neglect to take the trash out for a few decades and there was nothing to do but take a backhoe to the whole house and start over.
Still I sat.
A Hispanic man came in behind me dressed in long pants and a shirt with his name embroidered on the front. It looked like he did lawn work. He knelt and crossed himself and then took a seat on the opposite side of the aisle farther up. I wondered what personal crisis brought him here in the middle of the day in the middle of the week, but we were not in a bar and so I did not ask.
In my own way, I had already called for mercy, directing the wish at my own self rather than above. I had not prayed about it, and I was not praying then, not in the way I had been taught. I did not believe doing so would help. I did not believe anyone was listening, and I was not worried—at least not excessively so—that my soul would be punished for all eternity.
What I was doing sitting there on the wooden bench, polished and smoothed by decades of tormented behinds, was allowing for the possibility. I did not talk to God, because if Moses couldn’t catch a break and be let into the Holy Land, I was sure as shit doomed. So the Virgin it was, the übermother and kisser of boo-boos, the forgiver of schoolyard fights and messy bedrooms.
I talked to her. I explained myself. In case she hadn’t been keeping up, I gave her the rundown of my reasons for doing what I was doing. I explained the things I had tried and how they had failed. Therapy—all kinds, medication—all kinds, work, money, marriage, divorce, sex—all kinds, drugs, a strong affinity for Motown. I told her that I really thought this was for the best. I told her about my mother and how that had ended. I knew, I said, that she would understand how important it was that no such thing happen because of me. I explained how I had carefully made sure that no one needed me and that nothing would be messy or complicated in the aftermath. I told her I hoped I had covered my bases. And when I ran out of explanations, I just sat. I sat and waited for something to happen. That was it. That was all I had. I felt like a child sliding the permission slip across the dining room table for a signature.
“Are we good here?”
Nothing happened. No one signed. I hadn’t really expected anyone to.
“All right then, maybe later. Glad we had this time together.”
Sometime while I was sitting there taking care of my “just in case,” the gardener had left. Maybe his problems weren’t so complicated or maybe he just knew the value of brevity. I had spent longer sitting in the pew than I had intended. I walked out into the warm, late afternoon sunshine and headed through the chain-link gate to my car. I was hungry.
Usually this restaurant required reservations, but they had just opened for dinner, and most folks had not yet shown up for their tables. I was in luck. Or maybe Mary was looking out for me after all. The hostess sat me next to the window at a table dripping with white linens. I had more glasses and silverware at my disposal than any single person should need. Despite its being plenty sunny outside, a candle was lit for me. The wine list was long, dense, and beyond my ability to translate. I asked if there was a sommelier on duty. Of course there was.
He arrived at my table in dress pants and tie with his shirtsleeves rolled up, which gave him the look of a man who was putting in a vigorous and demanding day. He introduced himself and shook my hand. How could he help, madam?
Red, I told him, easy to drink. Not too heavy, not too light. A cabernet sauvignon maybe.
“Did you have a price range in mind?” he asked very politely.
“Let’s worry about that later.”
“In that case,” he said and pointed at the menu.
It was expensive but not the most expensive. I chose to believe this was a sign he wasn’t merely padding the bill. I told him I’d take it, and he was back before I’d decided on hors d’oeuvres. He opened it at the table with one of those basic, Swiss Army–type corkscrews that I can never get to work right and poured a sip into the appropriate glass. I swirled, sniffed, tasted, and just barely controlled the urge to lick the drip off the side of the bottle.
“Yes,” I told him. “Yes, that’s it exactly.”
And it was. It was the Goldilocks of red wine. Not too watered down, not so heavy it made your teeth feel they’d sprouted fur. Just right.
He smiled, nodded, and poured a proper glass.
There were almost half a dozen categories of hors d’oeuvres and choices in each. I ordered the French onion soup. The broth was deeply colored and almost sweet from the caramelization. I didn’t eat it all. I didn’t plan to eat all of anything tonight so as to have room for everything. My taste buds had fully emerged from their medication-induced coma, and I wanted to let them run. Next I asked for the terrine of foie gras. The liver was unctuous and cut perfectly by the layer of port jelly on top. I smeared it in decadent portions on top of my little toasts and protected it from the waiter, who offered to take the remaining bit away before my next course. What I didn’t eat, minus the wine topping, Chuckles would have.
I nibbled on a salmon tart with lemon cream and drank more wine before the main course arrived. We were going slowly. I was going slowly. An hour had passed, perhaps a little more, and the sun had sunk past the tall downtown buildings that surrounded the restaurant. The streets made narrow urban valleys that darkened early. It was both sad and romantic. It was the way old Italian movies make you feel.
I had eaten a lot of food already, but I was starting to get lightheaded from the wine. It was a happy, cozy feeling, like pulling on a sweater. The bottle was almost half-gone, and the glass I was working on half-gone, too. I topped it off and ran my finger through the butter, which was French. It was so much better than American butter. It tasted like fresh cream, like real dairy. It tasted the way butter must’ve tasted before we began pasteurizing the life out of everything. Why shouldn’t food be a little dangerous?
If the restaurant had been Japanese I would’ve asked for the puffer fish. As it was, I had duck confit, salt cured and cooked in its own fat, with cherries and a side of haricots verts. I nibbled at all of it, savored my bites, smelled everything before I took a taste. God, it was so good to be able to smell things again, to have all of my senses back. Sane, unmedicated people don’t know how good they have it.
I ordered a cheese plate with a selection of three. I asked for the chef to choose his three favorite goat cheeses, presuming he had three favorites. Goat, with its tendency to be sweet and grassy, was my favorite animal to squeeze for sustenance. The tray came with bites of dried fruit, nuts, and, best of all, a small pot of orange marmalade. I loved the gentle bitterness of the rind in the sweet jam. I loved the color of it, the translucency that caught the light and reminded me of church windows and of Miles, who had told me a clementine was a type of orange, in case I didn’t know already. I loved how it mixed with the softest of the cheeses.
The leftovers, too, although there was none of the jam, I would take to the cat. Dairy and duck and liver for him, and a case of feline diarrhea tomorrow for his new owners. I poured more wine. C’est la vie.
I was verging on the sort of full that makes you hate yourself, that’s painful and gluttonous and stupid, but I told myself I was not there yet when the waiter, a beautiful woman with dark, thick hair and dimples, brought out dessert. The chocolate pudding was dark and, like an orange rind, a mixture of sweet and bitter. Fresh whipped cream swirled on top to be taken bit by bit with each bite of the custard, and sprinkled over it all were crystals of sea salt large enough to crackle between your teeth. I sat at my table for two that was a table for one while the world went full dark, and I ate that pudding slowly and methodically until it was all gon
e.
The restaurant had gone from empty to full while I had eaten. Not one table was unoccupied, and couples and trios stood waiting at the bar and clustered around the hostess stand. The din, when I stopped and listened to it, was loud enough to keep dining companions from being able to hear each other across a table. Voices rose above the clatter of silverware and glasses. Still, it was quiet in my own head. I felt deliberate and calm. It could’ve been the wine. It most certainly was a little bit the wine, but that wasn’t all of it. Choosing death was different from death choosing you. I wasn’t a fresh-caught fish flopping on the bottom of the boat, desperate for that last rush of water and oxygen through my gills.
I lingered over my last glass of wine. A quarter of the bottle remained, but I was done. I asked my waitress with the dimples to box up those things I wanted for the cat and slipped cash into the leather folder with the check. I included just enough to cover the bill then reached into my back pocket and took out the title to my car. I asked for a pen, and she brought it, leaving it on the table for me and then going on to her other duties. I signed the title and slipped it, the key, and the valet receipt into the leather folder, got up, gathered my to-go box, drank the last dregs of the glass, and went to call a cab.
1 Day
Meow.
I had emptied and washed Chuckles’s food dish and packed it up in a paper grocery sack along with his half-empty bag of dry food, the leftover cans of wet, and his treats.
Meow.
The moving of his things was making him nervous. He’d rubbed his body around my ankles as I washed and packed, and when I sat down on the floor, he put his face very close to mine, almost to where his whiskers could touch my cheek, and sniffed, his pink smooshed nose twitching. “Explain yourself,” he demanded.
I petted him. I’d already given him a good brushing, and his thick coat was shiny and soft. I petted him all over, running my hands down his whole body and the length of his fluffy tail. He rubbed his face against my hand, marking me with his scent. “Mine,” he said. “Mine, mine.”
“I am yours,” I told him. “I promise. You’re going to hate me, but I swear it’s for your own good. You’re going to be so happy with your new people.”
Huge tears rolled down my cheeks as hot as bathwater. They rolled down my neck and dripped off my chin.
Meow. Meow.
Chuckles put his two front paws on my leg.
Meow.
None of this made any sense to him. He didn’t know what was happening or why. This whole month had been confusing for him. And things, as far as he could see, were going from bad to worse. That was the worst of it. He wouldn’t understand why he was in a new house, where I had gone, and why I hadn’t come back for him.
I picked him up and buried my face in his fur, and for once, he let me. I breathed him in, loose fur and all. He smelled like cat, like my cat, and when I pulled my face away, he reached out a paw and pushed it into my cheek. “Weirdo,” he said.
I laughed, and it made him jump down. Then there was a knock on the door. Once again, someone had left the street entrance propped open. I rubbed my face dry with the back of my hand and went to look through the peephole.
It was them. I knew it would be.
I opened the door.
They looked like such nice people. That’s why I’d picked them. They were in their early thirties. The wife worked part-time at a children’s museum, and the husband was a city engineer. He wore a lot of golf shirts.
My face was red and blotchy, and the wife reached out and squeezed my wrist. “Oh, I know you’re sad, but it’s going to be okay.”
It was the voice I imagined she used with small children who had been separated from their teacher on field trips, and it made me sob all over again.
The husband didn’t know what to do with his hands, and Chuckles was hanging out in the kitchen, unsure of this new development but not quite ready to hide.
“We’ll have to put him in the carrier,” I said. “He’ll meow a lot on the way home. He doesn’t like it, but don’t worry. He’s not like that all the time.”
“It’s okay,” she said, patting my back and rubbing it in little circles. “We know.”
She was a foot shorter than I was, and it seemed so silly to see her there taking care of me like I was in grade school, but my shoulders were shaking, and tears were splashing on the front of my T-shirt. My mouth was gummy. I had a hard rubber ball deep in my throat that made it hard to talk, but I kept pushing the words out because there were so many things they needed to know.
“He gets lonely, and he really likes the wet food so give it to him sometimes, okay? And the catnip, but not too much because he’ll eat the whole thing if you let him. And his fur gets dirty and you have to brush him a lot or he’ll get tangles. He likes to watch you in the shower sometimes, and he eats bugs. Sometimes they make him sick, so be careful. I wrote down the name of his vet. It’s in the bag.” I took a ragged, wet breath. “And just love him, okay? Love him very much, and tell him he’s a really good cat because I don’t want him to think he did anything wrong.”
“We are going to love him so much,” she said. “I promise.”
The husband held Chuckles while I buried my face in his neck one more time, then helped me put him in his carrier. “I love you,” I told Chuckles. “You’re a very good kitty, okay? A really good boy.”
Meow.
And then they hugged me, and Chuckles wailed, and I cried harder. And then they were gone. I looked down at the white fur all over my black T-shirt, and I left it there and wondered if I had made a horrible mistake.
I went to the worktable and pulled out the folded bits of leather I’d bought at a craft and sewing supply store on Pico Boulevard. I had light browns and medium browns and red browns and browns that were so dark they looked black. I laid the pieces out next to each other and moved them around and around looking for just the right composition, the whole process like a shell game on a New York City street. Where’s the ball? Where’s the ball? Where it stops, nobody knows.
I kept my hands busy, moving as fast as they could. My heart began to beat too hard and too fast, and I refused my mind permission to roam. This and only this, I told myself.
When I had it, I started to cut. Using patterns I’d traced from the painting onto thin, transparent paper, I made the same shapes out of the leather. The pieces that made the body of the centaur looked like a butcher’s map of the cuts of meat. And when I’d done that, I took out my tackle box of tools. It was the same tackle box with my name written on the outside in Sharpie marker that I’d bought my freshman year of art school. I’d dropped out as a junior, but I kept the box. I’d been adding to it for twenty years.
I found the wooden-handled awl and a small hammer. Not worrying about the worktable underneath, I lined up the awl on the strip of cut leather and whacked it with the hammer. The pointed tip went through and lodged into the table. I wiggled it free and punched the next hole. I kept punching, keeping the holes equidistant from each other and lining them up with the holes on the neighboring scrap. I went all around the edges like I was tin-punching a pie safe. Whack-whack-whack.
The line I’d bought to stitch with was something between twine and yarn, dark red and far too thick to go through the eye of any needle I might have. I found the lighter in a drawer and held the end of the string in the flame. The fibers burned and melted, and the tip cooled quickly into a hard nub that I pushed through the holes with my fingers, whipstitching the quilted body together.
When the pieces were assembled, I took a pot of rubber cement off the shelf and tried to open it. The lid was glued shut, and for a moment, I panicked. What if I couldn’t get it open? What if the glue was bad? I didn’t have a car, and I had to finish this before Carla’s funeral that night. My heart picked up speed again and my fingers got clumsy. I set the jar down on the table, pulled a screwdriver out of the toolbox, and whacked the edge of the jar with the heavy plastic handle.
Th
e lid came loose. I unscrewed it and pulled it open. The attached brush was dripping with good wet cement that looked like burnt honey and smelled strong enough to strip chrome off a bumper. I took it to the canvas and started to paint it on, working fast so it wouldn’t dry before I was ready. When the canvas was good and coated, I picked up my cowhide of many leathers and, starting at one end, gently pushed and pressed and smoothed it into place.
And then, just like that, I was done. I looked for something else to do, some detail to fix or to add. I stood there with the minutes ticking by loud in my ear. Nothing was ever done. There was always something, a change, an edit. It could be better. It could always be better. But right then, it was done. It was as done as any piece ever was. I could mix more paint, add more cutouts, but I would only make it worse.
I knew this time would come, this time of lasts. The last time I’d wake up. The last time I’d see Richard. The last time I’d use the bathroom or wash my hair. Some of the lasts I saw coming, and some I hadn’t. But each time it was there. “This is the last time I’ll do this. This is the last time I’ll do that.”
I reached out and ran my palm over the tips of my brushes sticking up out of the cup. They tickled my skin like pussy willows. Just one of a hundred little gestures to say good-bye to all the things there were to say good-bye to.
Then I had to turn away and take a shower.
I had arranged all my papers on the kitchen counter in neat stacks. I had already checked them twice, but I checked them again. Will. Yes. Deed to the studio. Yes. Banking information, investments, funeral plans, cemetery plot, copies of last month’s bills. Yes, yes, yes. I had written out the names and numbers of people the police would need to notify: Richard, Jenny, the Taylor Gallery, Aunt Trudy and Bob, my lawyer, and my accountant. Jenny could tell Jerry and his wife if she wanted. I was sure she would, but I was leaving it up to her. His name was not on the list.
I had finished my suicide note days ago. Before I could think too much about it or read it again and decide it wasn’t right at all, I folded it up, shoved it in a plain white envelope, and wrote Richard’s name on the front. I laid it in front of the row of papers on the counter, next to my will. I had decided to leave Jenny half the paintings and Richard the other half. It was the fairest thing I could think of. Jenny got a little something of my investments, too, along with Aunt Trudy. I noted that I had given my car away and left copies of all my keys, in a straight line on top of the will, along with my passport. The cops already had my driver’s license.
