by Ben Marcus
The doctor’s wife’s hands were laced loosely about his waist as they came down through a thin strand of sassafras, edging over the ridge where the ghost of a road was, a road more sensed than seen that faced into a half acre of tilting stones and fading granite tablets. Other graves marked only by their declivities in the earth, folk so far beyond the pale even the legibility of their identities had been leached away by the weathers.
Leaves drifted, huge poplar leaves veined with amber so golden they might have been coin of the realm for a finer world than this one. He cut the ignition of the four-wheeler and got off. Past the lowering trees the sky was a blue of an improbable intensity, a fierce cobalt blue shot through with dense golden light.
She slid off the rear and steadied herself a moment with a hand on his arm. Where are we? she asked. Why are we here?
The paperhanger had disengaged his arm and was strolling among the gravestones reading such inscriptions as were legible, as if he might find forebear or antecedent in this moldering earth. The doctor’s wife was retrieving her martinis from the luggage carrier of the ATV. She stood looking about uncertainly. A graven angel with broken wings crouched on a truncated marble column like a gargoyle. Its stone eyes regarded her with a blind benignity. Some of these graves have been rob, she said.
You can’t rob the dead, he said. They have nothing left to steal.
It is a sacrilege, she said. It is forbidden to disturb the dead. You have done this.
The paperhanger took a cigarette pack from his pocket and felt it, but it was empty, and he balled it up and threw it away. The line between grave robbing and archaeology has always looked a little blurry to me, he said. I was studying their culture, trying to get a fix on what their lives were like.
She was watching him with a kind of benumbed horror. Standing hip-slung and lost like a parody of her former self. Strange and anomalous in her fashionable but mismatched clothing, as if she’d put on the first garment that fell to hand. Someday, he thought, she might rise and wander out into the daylit world wearing nothing at all, the way she had come into it. With her diamond watch and the cocktail glass she carried like a used-up talisman.
You have broken the law, she told him.
I got a government grant, the paperhanger said contemptuously.
Why are we here? We are supposed to be searching for my child.
If you’re looking for a body the first place to look is the graveyard, he said. If you want a book don’t you go to the library?
I am paying you, she said. You are in my employ. I do not want to be here. I want you to do as I say or carry me to my car if you will not.
Actually, the paperhanger said, I had a story to tell you. About my wife.
He paused, as if leaving a space for her comment, but when she made none he went on. I had a wife. My childhood sweetheart. She became a nurse, went to work in one of these drug rehab places. After she was there awhile she got a faraway look in her eyes. Look at me without seeing me. She got in tight with her supervisor. They started having meetings to go to. Conferences. Sometimes just the two of them would confer, generally in a motel. The night I watched them walk into the Holiday Inn in Franklin I decided to kill her. No impetuous spur-of-the-moment thing. I thought it all out and it would be the perfect crime.
The doctor’s wife didn’t say anything. She just watched him.
A grave is the best place to dispose of a body, the paperhanger said. The grave is its normal destination anyway. I could dig up a grave and then just keep on digging. Save everything carefully. Put my body there and fill in part of the earth, and then restore everything the way it was. The coffin, if any of it was left. The bones and such. A good settling rain and the fall leaves and you’re home free. Now that’s eternity for you.
Did you kill someone, she breathed. Her voice was barely audible.
Did I or did I not, he said. You decide. You have the powers of a god. You can make me a murderer or just a heartbroke guy whose wife quit him. What do you think? Anyway, I don’t have a wife. I expect she just walked off into the abstract like that Lang guy I told you about.
I want to go, she said. I want to go where my car is.
He was sitting on a gravestone watching her out of his pale eyes. He might not have heard.
I will walk.
Just whatever suits you, the paperhanger said. Abruptly, he was standing in front of her. She had not seen him arise from the headstone or stride across the graves, but like a jerky splice in a film he was before her, a hand cupping each of her breasts, staring down into her face.
Under the merciless weight of the sun her face was stunned and vacuous. He studied it intently, missing no detail. Fine wrinkles crept from the corners of her eyes and mouth like hairline cracks in porcelain. Grime was impacted into her pores, in the crepe flesh of her throat. How surely everything had fallen from her: beauty, wealth, social position, arrogance. Humanity itself, for by now she seemed scarcely human, beleaguered so by the fates that she suffered his hands on her breasts as just one more cross to bear, one more indignity to endure.
How far you’ve come, the paperhanger said in wonder. I believe you’re about down to my level now, don’t you?
It does not matter, the doctor’s wife said. There is no longer one thing that matters.
Slowly and with enormous lassitude her body slumped toward him, and in his exultance it seemed not a motion in itself but simply the completion of one begun long ago with the fateful weight of a thigh, a motion that began in one world and completed itself in another one.
From what seemed a great distance he watched her fall toward him like an angel descending, wings spread, from an infinite height, striking the earth gently, tilting, then righting itself.
* * *
The weight of moonlight tracking across the paperhanger’s face awoke him from where he took his rest. Filigrees of light through the gauzy curtains swept across him in stately silence like the translucent ghosts of insects. He stirred, lay still then for a moment getting his bearings, a fix on where he was.
He was in his bed, lying on his back. He could see a huge orange moon poised beyond the bedroom window, ink-sketch tree branches that raked its face like claws. He could see his feet book-ending the San Miguel bottle that his hands clasped erect on his abdomen, the amber bottle hard-edged and defined against the pale window, dark atavistic monolith reared against a harvest moon.
He could smell her. A musk compounded of stale sweat and alcohol, the rank smell of her sex. Dissolution, ruin, loss. He turned to study her where she lay asleep, her open mouth a dark cavity in her face. She was naked, legs outflung, pale breasts pooled like cooling wax. She stirred restively, groaned in her sleep. He could hear the rasp of her breathing. Her breath was fetid on his face, corrupt, a graveyard smell. He watched her in disgust, in a dull self-loathing.
He drank from the bottle, lowered it. Sometimes, he told her sleeping face, you do things you can’t undo. You break things you just can’t fix. Before you mean to, before you know you’ve done it. And you were right, there are things only a miracle can set to rights.
He sat clasping the bottle. He touched his miscut hair, the soft down of his beard. He had forgotten what he looked like, he hadn’t seen his reflection in a mirror for so long. Unbidden, Zeineb’s face swam into his memory. He remembered the look on the child’s face when the doctor’s wife had spun on her heel: spite had crossed it like a flicker of heat lightning. She stuck her tongue out at him. His hand snaked out like a serpent and closed on her throat and snapped her neck before he could call it back, sloe eyes wild and wide, pink tongue caught between tiny seed-pearl teeth like a bitten-off rosebud. Her hair swung sidewise, her head lolled onto his clasped hand. The tray of the toolbox was out before he knew it, he was stuffing her into the toolbox like a rag doll. So small, so small, hardly there at all.
He arose. Silhouetted naked against the moon-drenched window, he drained the bottle. He looked about for a place to set it, leaned and wedged
it between the heavy flesh of her upper thighs. He stood in silence, watching her. He seemed philosophical, possessed of some hard-won wisdom. The paperhanger knew so well that while few are deserving of a miracle, fewer still can make one come to pass.
He went out of the room. Doors opened, doors closed. Footsteps softly climbing a staircase, descending. She dreamed on. When he came back into the room he was cradling a plastic-wrapped bundle stiffly in his arms. He placed it gently beside the drunk woman. He folded the plastic sheeting back like a caul.
What had been a child. What the graveyard earth had spared the freezer had preserved. Ice crystals snared in the hair like windy snowflakes whirled there, in the lashes. A doll from a madhouse assembly line.
He took her arm, laid it across the child. She pulled away from the cold. He firmly brought the arm back, arranging them like mannequins, madonna and child. He studied this tableau, then went out of his house for the last time. The door closed gently behind him on its keeper spring.
The paperhanger left in the Mercedes, heading west into the open country, tracking into wide-open territories he could infect like a malignant spore. Without knowing it, he followed the selfsame route the doctor had taken some eight months earlier, and in a world of infinite possibilities where all journeys share a common end, perhaps they are together, taking the evening air on a ruined veranda among the hollyhocks and oleanders, the doctor sipping his scotch and the paperhanger his San Miguel, gentlemen of leisure discussing the vagaries of life and pondering deep into the night not just the possibility but the inevitability of miracles.
PEOPLE SHOULDN’T HAVE TO BE THE ONES TO TELL YOU
GARY LUTZ
He had a couple of grown daughters, disappointers, with regretted curiosities and the heavy venture of having once looked alive. One night it was only the older who came by. It was photos she brought: somebody she claimed was more recent. He started approvingly through the sequence. A man with capped-over hair and a face drowned out by sunlight was seen from unintimate range in decorated settings out-of-doors. The coat he wore was always a dark-blue thing of medium hang. But in one shot you could make out the ragged line of a zipper, and in another a column of buttons, and in still another the buttons were no longer the knobby kind but toggles, and in yet another they were not even buttons, just snaps. Sometimes the coat had grown a drawstring. The pockets varied by slant and flapwork. The man advanced through the stack again. His eye this time was caught in doubt by the collar. A contrastive leather in this shot, common corduroy in that one, undiversified cloth in a third. And he was expected to make believe they were all of the same man? He swallowed clumsily, jumbled through the photographs once more.
“But you’ll still have time for your sister?” he said.
Her teeth were off-colored and fitted almost mosaicwise into the entire halted smile.
A few nights later, the younger. A night class was making her interview a relation for a memory from way back and then another from only last week. He was not the best person to be in recall, but he thought assistively of a late afternoon he had sat at a table outside a gymnasium and torn tickets off a wheel one at a time instead of in twos and threes for the couples and threesomes. He had watched them file arm in arm into the creped-up place with a revived, stupid sense of how things ought to be done. A banquet? A dance? He never stayed around for things.
He saw his words descend into the whirling ungaieties of her longhand.
“And one from just last week?”
Easier.
At the Laundromat, he had chosen the dryer with a spent fabric-softener sheet teased behind inside it. He brought the sheet home afterward to wonder whether it was more a mysticization of a tissue than a denigration of one. It was sparser in its weave yet harder to tear apart, ready in his hand when unthrobbing things of his life could stand to be swabbed clean.
(He watched his daughter wait a considerate, twinging minute before she set down the tumbler from which she had been sipping her faucet water.)
“Your sister’s the one with the head for memory,” he said. “You ever even once think to ask her?”
Most nights, the man’s hair released its oils into the antimacassar at the back of his chair. The deepening oval of grease could one day be worth his daughters’ touch.
He got the two of them fixed in his mind again.
The older went in for dolled-up solitude but was better at batting around the good in people. Her loves were always either six feet under or ten feet tall because of somebody else.
The younger was a rich inch more favored in height, but slower of statement. Men, women, were maybe not her type. But she was otherwise an infatuate of whatever you set before her—even the deep-nutted cledges of chocolate she picked apart for bits of skin.
They had tilted into each other early, then eased off, shied aside.
Then they were wifely toward him for a night, poising curtains at his streetward windows, hurrying the wrinkles out from his other good pants, running to the bathroom between turns at his dirt. The older holding the dustpan again, the younger the brush—a stooped, ruining twosome losing balance in his favor.
They were on the sofa afterward, each with a can of surging soda.
“Third wheel,” he said, and went into his bedroom to sit. Were there only two ways to think? One was that the day did not come to you whole. It was whiffled. Things were blowing out of it already. Or else a day was actually two half-days, each half-day divided into dozenths, each dozenth corrugated plentifully into its minutes. There was time.
He sat, stumped.
When he looked in on them again, they had already started going by their middle names—hard-pressed, standpat single syllables. Barb and Dot.
The next couple of nights he kept late hours, pulling his ex-wife piecemeal out of some surviving unmindedness. The first night it was only the lay of her shoulders.
On the next: the girlhood browniness still upheld in her hair—a jewelried uprisal of it.
The souse of the cologne she had stuck by.
Budgets of color in her eyelids.
The night it was the downtrail of veins strung in her arms, he had had enough of her to reach at least futilely for the phone.
It was the younger’s number he dialed.
It was a different, lower voice he brought the words up inside of. She had never been one to put the phone down on a pausing stranger.
“People shouldn’t have to be the ones to tell you,” he said.
One night, he went over their childhoods again. Had he done nearly enough?
Their mother had taught them that you can ask anybody anything, but it can’t always be “Do I know you?”
That you had arms to bar yourself from people.
That you had to watch what you touched after you had already gone ahead and touched some other thing first.
That the most pestering thing on a man was the thing that kept playing tricks with how long it actually was.
For his part, he had got it across that a mirror could not be counted on to give its all. If they should ever need to know what they might look like, they were to keep their eyes off each other and come right to him. He would tell them what was there. In telling it, he put flight and force into the hair, nursed purpose into the lips, worked a birthmark into the shape of a slipper.
Each had a room to roam however she saw fit in either fickleness or frailty.
Rotten spots on the flesh of a banana were just “ingrown cinnamon.”
The deep well of the vacuum cleaner accepted any runty jewelry they shed during naps.
The house met with cracks, lashings.
They walked themselves to his chair one day as separates, apprentices at the onrolling household loneliness. The older wanted to know whether it was more a help or a hindrance that things could not drop into your lap if you were sitting up straight to the table. The younger just wanted ways to stunt her growth that would not mean spending more money.
When they were older, an
d unreproduced, he figured they expected him to start taking after them at least a little. So he now and then let his eyes slave away at the backs of his fingers in the manner of the younger. He raised the older’s keynote tone of gargly sorrow up as far into his voice as it deserved when it came time again to talk about his car, any occult change in how the thing took a curve.
Some nights he saw his ex-wife’s face put to fuming good use on each of theirs. His failings? A waviness around all he felt bad about, a slovenry mid-mouth. Timid, uncivic behaviors that went uncomprehended. Before the layoffs, he’d been a subordinate with at least thorny standing among the otherwise harmable. He had left it to others to take everything the wrong way. (Tidy electrical fires, backups downstairs, wastepaper calculations off by one dim digit.)
From where they had him sitting, to see a thing through meant only to insist on the transparency within it, to regard it as done and gone.
But adultery? It was either the practice, the craft, of going about as an adult, or there had been just that once. Poles above the woman’s toilet had shot all the way up to the ceiling, hoisting shelves of pebble-grained plastic. The arc of his piss was at least a suggestion of a path that thoughts could later take. He went back to the bed and found her sitting almost straight up in her sleep. Her leg was drawn forward: a trough had formed between the line of the shinbone and some flab gathered to the side. It needed something running waterily down its course. All he had left in him now was spittle.
