Want Not

by Jonathan Miles

  Perhaps this was his oblique way of apologizing or explaining, she didn’t know. Or even care, she realized. She watched him in skeptical, predatory silence.

  “Fred says they might try to smash us with fines, make an example out of us,” he said.

  “Serves you right,” she hissed, and with the satisfaction of a withering last word she turned from the table and walked out of the kitchen, the clicks of her heels on the polished terrazzo floor throwing spiteful echoes against the walls. In the living room she slipped off those shoes and flung them to the carpet. She stood there for a while, thinking how she wanted a cigarette right now even though she’d never smoked, except briefly onstage for a role, and how preposterous that would be, to smoke one now, to blow dragon plumes of smoke into her goddamn living room which the decorator had said would evoke 1920s Manhattan but with its eighty-two-inch flat-screen and Dave-inspired Italianate kitsch instead just evoked twenty-first-century New Jersey. She dropped onto the couch, abruptly exhausted and longing for her wine but not nearly enough to go fetch it with Dave in the kitchen. So Alexis had a boyfriend, and Sara’s ignorance of this fact was grounds for—what? Dave had delivered that revelation as a power ploy, had brandished it against her like a club. Because everything was power to him. As in the collections racket (“the acquisitions business,” she could hear him protest), information was the ultimate weapon; you lorded it over people, you battered them with it, you twisted their own facts and histories against them, their families too if it would help your extraction, and if lying was further ammunition (Mandy), you did that too. Because everything was power to him, she repeated to herself. Sex included: the extraction of her body, the settlement of his pig-grunt finish. After a while Dave passed through the living room muttering goodnight; Sara turned her head. She listened to his footsteps up the stairs, disgusted that he would or could sleep right now, then differently disgusted when she heard the chiming startup of the computer in his upstairs office. She knew what he did in there some nights. Unless he had a chronic sinus condition triggered only by his office’s atmosphere, the wadded Kleenex in the trash bin confided all she needed to know.

  Only after she’d turned on the TV did her tidal surge of anger begin to recede, exposing scoured stretches of sadness. Drifting through the cable channels, she was stung by the sense that something had ended tonight, or rather had begun to end—not her marriage, though that seemed possible, and also not her shaky grasp on motherhood, though for a moment, before she’d figured out (months too late, because of Dave’s strategic information-hoarding) that Alexis’s problem was run-of-the-mill heartbreak, she had thought that imperiled. No, it was something blurrier, more shapeless, and now, she supposed, less fixed: her sense of self. Who she was, and who she’d thought she was supposed to be—or play. The role of Sara Tetwick Tooney Masoli: question mark. Even the television seemed to affirm this uncertainty as she went scrolling through the channels, yearning for anything that might speak to her, distract her, entertain her, fulfill her for even half an hour, from channel 100 through channel 1195 and then back through again, through wedding disasters and shark attacks and old movies (there went Casablanca) and political partisans wagging fingers at the screen and faith healers setting hands and bombs strewing body parts across Middle East markets and other kinds of markets tracking up or tracking down and batters hitting baseballs and the arctic ice shelf melting violently into the sea and on and on and on. How obscene and astonishing it was, she thought, that amidst all this digital plenty, there could still be nothing.

  4

  THE FIRST SATURDAY after schools let out for the summer, in New Jersey, is yard sale day. This designation is unofficial but adhered to just the same. The hand-lettered posters start sprouting on tree trunks and signposts at least a week before, and by that Friday they’re clogging every corner, thick as campaign signs. Then, on Saturday morning, the earlybirds having already cased the block in their low poky sedans, out onto driveways, lawns, and curbs comes the stuff: the unjacketed books and the high-density polyethylene yard-toys and the outmoded VCRs and boomboxes and printers and floppy disks and the crib mattresses and the souvenir shotglasses and the rued leather pants and the puckered deflated basketballs along with the power tools, waterbed components, Bundt pans, stationary bikes, encyclopedias, telescopes, toaster ovens, silk flowers, fishing reels, vacuums, puzzles, folding chairs, Ping-Pong tables, and often out back the mildew-speckled trampoline, free for the taking, buddy, if you’ve got a way to haul it.

  Elwin’s intention was to obey this tradition, in order to rid himself of what he’d come to see as his glut of postmarital excess, but he quite literally couldn’t get his shit together. Formal blame went to a late-May meeting of the Waste Isolation Project Markers panel, where he’d been appointed co-author (with Sharon) of the Warning Message text, as well as to the increasing demands of his father’s decreasing condition, but these were wan excuses and he knew it: the pablum of procrastination. On more than one night—more than a dozen, actually—he’d stared down all the boxes and bric-a-brac marked for disposal, with their demand to be sorted, assessed, adjudicated, and priced, and shook his head no or rather shook his head later, which he understood to be the same sentiment dolled up with lipstick. Yet he had to do it; this much was clear to him. The surplus alone wasn’t the problem, although Christopher’s remark that Elwin didn’t qualify as a bona fide hoarder because “you can still walk through the house” suggested, at the very least, an underlying issue. No, the problem, as Elwin diagnosed it, was that he was living in another man’s house: the man he’d been before Maura had marked him for disposal. If he truly was done, as he’d concluded that awful morning when he’d slammed Big Jerry against his porch post and inadvertently adopted one of Jerry’s sons, then he felt he had no choice but to reboot—to remake himself in a new and frankly alien image. The first step, he figured, was ecological: remaking his own environment by purging from it all these mementoes of failure and indulgence and failed indulgence. The upright piano he’d bought Maura for her fortieth birthday, for instance, after she’d been citing her lack of hobbies as a source of malaise in conjunction with a remembered decree from a piano teacher, from when she was twelve, that hers was an “extraordinary talent”: This wasn’t merely a five-hundred-pound oddment, sucking space from the living room. It was an emotional bloodstain, a big red reminder of who he’d been or had failed to be. For him to become someone else, it had to go.

  And so, forgoing the traditional yard-sale option, onto Craigslist he went, with a barrage of digital advertisements.

  First he checked in with Maura about some of the stuff—the shared-custody debris, like the piano, that’d once been theirs but now seemed to be his. He felt he needed Maura’s blessing, which she gave—but reluctantly, and only after she’d asked him to itemize the inventory for her. This reluctance both pleased and displeased Elwin: pleased, because her wavering (about a shabby-chic vanity table, circa 1995, she’d said nostalgically, “Oh God, do you remember buying that?”—which he did, but differently than Maura did; what she remembered was the black teenaged warehouse worker who after cracking the vanity mirror while loading their car begged them, with genuine tears in his eyes, not to tell the store manager, while what Elwin remembered was the surprise sex they’d had later that afternoon, after hauling the damaged table into their bedroom, the way Maura had tugged him down onto the bed by his belt, as if high on the opium fumes of commerce and minor-league charity) seemed to show some remnant of emotional attachment to their former life, and thereby him; but displeased, too, for the very same reason, because if that attachment remained—even partly, barely—then why had it come to all this? What the hell had he done—the old self-pitying question, on a permanent orbit ’round his mind—to deserve all this?

  All this, indeed: Elwin clicking off the phone and setting down his clipboard and then setting down himself in a room piled high with his own spurned history, his brain struggling to uncouple the familiar comfor
t of Maura’s voice from the still-novel sting of it. He sat there, oblivious to the NPR newscast drifting from the kitchen radio, to all the complicated traumas and vital global dramas floating across the airwaves, and then the traffic report, the buildup at the Bayonne Bridge, the three-car accident on the Goethals Bridge, the car fire on the Garden State, the disabled linguist at the Morristown house. How much easier it would be, he thought, if people were merely good or bad, as in comic books and television dramas, instead of suspended in the hoary in-between, goodbad creatures swerving from acts of valiant decency to craven negligence in the very same day/hour/minute. How much easier it would be, that is, for him to hate Maura. To regret their years together as a bitter miscalculation, a foul wrong turn. To chuck all the physical residue of their marriage into a rented dumpster upon which he could climb late one night in order to piss on everything, her ghost-memory included, his dick in one hand and a half-drained bottle of something macho in the other. To be able to deem her a “bitch,” as Christopher did. Yet that wasn’t Elwin. And that wasn’t Maura, despite everything she’d done or hadn’t done. “Free to good home,” he began many of his advertisements, because a good home was what all this stuff had been meant for—himself, perhaps, included.

  By this time Christopher had been living with him for almost two months. Their agreement, such as it was, was for Christopher to stay until he’d landed a new job and with it the funds for deposits on an apartment, etc. The job search, however, was conspicuously lagging. Though Elwin had noticed a blank AutoZone application on the kitchen table, its fate remained unknown. Not that it was easy for Christopher to look for jobs from inside Elwin’s garage, where he spent most of his time making further upgrades to the Jeep that by now were stretching way beyond the functional. Way way beyond: A recent afternoon found Elwin banging his horn while stuck in downtown Newark traffic. What came trumpeting from beneath the hood—to his immediate, Diet Coke–spitting horror—was the riff from the song “Tequila” at a hundred-plus decibels. “Oh Christ,” Elwin croaked. When it looked to be going on forever—other drivers were craning their necks out their windows to see who’d just blasted that, pedestrians halting mid-stride—Elwin hit the horn button again, hoping that might squelch it, but instead he started the riff all over again: duh DUH duh duh da da DUH DUH. A man peddling roses from the median paused to do the cabbage-patch dance. Kids hooted from a school bus. A tanktopped guy in the car beside Elwin awarded him a vigorous fist-pump and shouted “Tequila!” as Elwin pressed his forehead to the Diet Coke–sticky steering wheel, cursing his Charlie Brown life.

  But Christopher—whose response to that incident was to exclaim, “Is that the coolest fucking horn ever or what?”—wouldn’t be stopped, even after Elwin threatened to close down the AutoZone account, even after Elwin pleaded with him to “soup up” his own truck instead. It somehow wasn’t enough for Christopher to merely resuscitate the dubiously totaled Jeep, to return it to its shaggy former state as Elwin’s mobile depository for paperwork and junk mail and empty Diet Coke cans and Altoids tins, his comfortably anonymous ride. No, Christopher was determined to make the Jeep perform tricks it had never been designed to perform: to strut, intimidate, peacock, crack jokes, dance. This meant a double-tube chrome front bumper and Bushwacker fender flares. A shift-light tachometer gauge above the dashboard, first alarming and then annoying Elwin every time that red bulb flashed. A cold-air intake that made the Jeep sound like a vacuum cleaner when Elwin gassed it, along with an American Thunder performance exhaust system that set off nearby car alarms in the A&P parking lot. “A chrome gas cap?” Elwin asked one typical evening. “You’re going to tell me that was necessary, too?”

  “Oh yeah, it matches the new bumper. Hey, you see the radiator scoops? Stick your head under the hood. Fuckin pain in the ass to install. Had to drill the shroud to be able—”

  “What the hell are those?” Elwin pointed to a jumbo pair of wheels stacked beside the Jeep, their tires corduroyed with deep wavy treads, like a moon buggy might have.

  “Those?”

  “Yeah. Those.”

  “Sand paddles, duh. For driving on the shore.”

  Elwin let out an exasperated, end-of-his-rope chuckle. “Wow.” Here he was, attempting to de-hoard his life, and there was Christopher, sneaking crap back in—and not just crap, but moon-buggy crap. Sand paddles? “It’s never even occurred to me to drive on a beach,” he said. “I wouldn’t even think it was legal.”

  “That’s because until now you couldn’t.”

  “No, you’re not getting it. The actual desire has never occurred to me.”

  “Yeah, right. Because you can’t desire what’s freakin impossible.”

  “Of course you can. That’s all I ever do. That’s all anyone does.”

  “You just wait, Doc.” Christopher paused to glug down what looked to be an entire can of Keystone Light. “This thing’s gonna be the shit, man. When I’m done with it, this Jeep’s gonna get you laid.”

  “Howzabout it just gets me to work instead . . . ?”

  “Laid,” came the reply, as Christopher tossed the beer can to the garage floor and dug an arm down into the engine to carburet Elwin’s future sex life.

  Moments like this one were frequent enough to tempt him to offer Christopher on Craigslist, too. “Free to good home,” went the imaginary ad. “21-Year-old central N.J. refugee. Leaves towels on bathroom floor, flushes toilet approximately 10% of time, skilled in the use of all machinery except for ‘too fucking complicated’ laundry machines. Will force you to watch allegedly hilarious YouTube videos in which young men light farts or animals hump inanimate objects. Excellent way of ensuring beerless fridge & ridiculously tricked-out car. No phone inquiries, please.” But this grumpiness tended to pass as quickly as it came; Christopher always seemed to be able to grin his way back into Elwin’s sympathies. And truth be told, Elwin half- or three-quarters-enjoyed Christopher’s company in the evenings, even if he didn’t quite get why footage of a turtle mounting a plastic sandal was funny enough to demand repeat viewings. At the hard bottom of loneliness, he’d found, there is just a single letter, one bereft of curves and ornament, a short straight line that’s capped on both ends as though to stifle growth or blossoming: I. Merely shifting that to We—two letters, one reaching upward and the other sliding sideways—felt sometimes like enough: just the regular presence of another human, not to cure the pain but to blunt it, the way an Excedrin dulls a migraine down to tolerable levels without vanquishing it completely. An analgesic for the menacing stillness. He also couldn’t deny the self-satisfaction he derived from helping the kid out—the dim halo of benevolence he felt hovering above his scalp. Christopher was a callow wreck, yes; but if he could leave Elwin’s care even a smidgen less wrecked—a few degrees wiser, more sure-footed and self-aware—then Elwin might have accomplished something. Twenty-four years of lecture-hall enervation, he realized, had not entirely driven the pedagogical impulse out of him.

  Only once had he encountered Big Jerry, partly because Elwin surveyed the shared driveway before leaving for work in the mornings, to confirm a Jerry-free route to the garage, and also because he’d also shifted his outdoor time to the other side of the house, by the fire escape, where a small gravel patio sat beneath the shade of a maple tree. Yet there was Big Jerry, one pink-sky evening, unloading his pickup in the driveway when Elwin returned home from Newark. Elwin stared straight ahead as he piloted the Jeep into the garage, for the first and likely last time grateful for the pimped-out tinting with which Christopher had darkened the Jeep’s windows. For an awkward while he sat inside the Jeep, monitoring Big Jerry via the rearview mirror, but soon enough it occurred to Elwin that what he was doing was hiding, curling himself up like a potato bug, and that Big Jerry would arrive at the same realization soon enough too, if he hadn’t already. So Elwin pulled himself from the Jeep and exhaled a big what-the-hell gust of breath and went trudging out of the garage down the driveway toward the porch steps. Alon
g the way he gave Jerry a single glance and a solemn cowboy nod, but Jerry, who’d paused to watch Elwin pass, offered no expression in return, as though Elwin were precisely as invisible as he longed to be.

  Halfway up the steps, however, he heard Jerry call from behind him: “He doon alright?”

  Elwin stopped, then turned around slowly. Before answering, he searched Jerry’s face and replayed the question in his mind for any clues as to how Jerry had meant it (earnestly, angrily, regretfully, sarcastically). But there was nothing. The question just hung there—unshaded, textureless, impenetrable. When Elwin finally spoke—“Yeah,” he said, with a whole palette of shadings—Jerry had already turned his attention back to the truck bed, as if the asking were all, the answer gratuitous. Saying no, Elwin realized, might’ve yielded the same non-response; as on Craigslist, a firm no-returns policy seemed to be in effect. Elwin added gratuitously, “He’s doing fine.” Once inside, however, he found Christopher asleep in his boxers, still in bed at 6 P.M., a video-game joystick propped loosely in his inert hand. In the kitchen, scouring the back reaches of the refrigerator for a nonexistent beer, Elwin found himself mulling the semantic ambiguity of the word fine.

  Incorporating Christopher into his Craigslist campaign, then, struck him as a sound and possibly even fine idea. This would supply Christopher something else with which to occupy himself—besides hot-rodding Elwin’s poor, dignity-stripped Jeep—while granting Elwin some scant mental remove from the dispersal of Maura’s abandoned estate. Since money was never an object, he offered Christopher a fifty percent commission on everything he helped sell. This arrangement seemed promising, at first. Elwin wrote the ad copy while Christopher took the digital photos and posted the online ads. The inquiries went to Elwin’s email address, and he forwarded them to Christopher for response. As he explained it to Christopher, “You’re the salesman, and I’m the sales manager.” With more than fifty items for sale, the inquiries numbered more than a hundred—Elwin was startled by the hunger for secondhand stuff out there, especially the way people leapt on the freebies—which gave him faith that they’d be done with this unsavory business in a week’s time tops. But night after night he’d come home to find the greater bulk of the stuff still there, stacked in the unused and now unusable dining room, while the inquiries continued to swarm in: Is the item still available? Will you take $10 for the shoe rack?