by Chris Adrian
“Nothing,” he said. He squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again.
“What?” she asked again.
“Nothing,” he said. “Belly trouble.” It was the first excuse that came into his head. He went and sat on the toilet, considering everything else he could have said, and remembering what he had said a few months before: that he wished he could give her brother back to her. He had told her that when she started crying one night the previous year, apparently for no reason at all as they lay cuddling in bed waiting to fall asleep. He had said it almost without thinking about it, the exact right thing, and that night, despite the fact that their brothers were dead and so much else was wrong in the world, everything had felt right between them in exactly the way that everything now suddenly felt wrong.
He went back to Mrs. Perkins as much to stay away from Carolina as for any other reason, considering that it was probably naïve to think there was only one right thing to do for her on the day her brother died, and it might be as right to leave her alone for a little while as it was to hold her while she cried. If he felt like a failure as he made his way up and down the hills on Broadway in his truck, maybe that had more to do with him alone than with him and her together, and maybe a little time spent in the company of pretentious fools was just what he needed to make him appreciate his girlfriend again. It was better, anyway, than going off to drink alone at a bar, something he felt pulled to do as well, and it even seemed better than drinking with a friend, because his friends had all been her friends first, and he was sure it would be very hard for him to explain, and harder for them to understand, how there was something wrong with her, which was actually something wrong with him.
“Follow me,” said the butler at the door. It was the first time Will had rung the front doorbell since he had come to the house; he usually let himself into the garden through a side gate. The butler loped through five different rooms—Will barely keeping himself from aping him even though he hadn’t said “Walk this way”—each of which seemed perfectly serviceable for hosting a salon. They passed through the living room and dining room and library and some sort of parlor full of cat sculptures and finally the kitchen, where the butler held open a door that Will at first thought led to the pantry. The stairs behind the door led both up and down but the butler pointed down. “Thanks,” Will said, but the butler only blinked at him.
Funny place for a salon, Will thought, though he had figured out, after only a few steps, what sort of party it was. With one foot still on the stairs he had a look at what was happening, and looked long enough to take it all in, and yet when he tried to remember what he saw it only came in pieces: a girl in a feathered Indian headdress down on her knees in front of a fat man wearing a Minnie Pearl hat, someone’s hairy butt thrusting against the sort of vaulting horse that the Mary Lou Rettons of the world were always colliding off of, and Mrs. Perkins, naked except for a pair of Groucho Marx glasses, complete with nose and mustache, seated on a wicker throne smoking from a hookah and watching over it all. He walked slowly back up the stairs. It seemed like bad manners to run, and also he didn’t want ridiculous Mrs. Perkins to think he was afraid.
He planned the conversation with Carolina in his head: You won’t believe what I just saw! Yet he never managed actually to have it with her. There was some minor degree of culpability even in having only seen that flash of thrusting buttock and Mrs. Perkins’s droopy breasts, and he felt guilty already for having gone to a party to which she was expressly not invited, even if the party he thought he was going to had turned out not actually to exist. It was a little too complicated to get into at the moment, but it was too good a story not to tell, and so he only delayed the telling, and delayed it again. At breakfast and lunch and at dinner and in bed, he failed again and again to tell her what he had seen, and he told himself that he kept thinking about the salon only so he could better describe it to her. It was vile and silly, he would say: a vile, silly scene. He didn’t admit to himself that he thought it was just plain interesting until it made an at-first unwelcome intrusion into his mind as he was masturbating. He was having a nostalgic whack on the HMS Pussywillow, someplace he didn’t return to that often, though he had been retreating to the bathroom to masturbate more and more in the past month. The Pussywillow was a little degraded from its former glory, or else he just saw it differently now: the curtains on the portholes shared a dingy quality with the petticoat chaps that Carolina wore, and he found himself noticing how dusty everything was, and how dark. It would be better, he thought, to do their fucking up top against a cannon or the ship’s wheel, yet he could not make the exertion of imagination to move them there. Instead, the room got even darker, and rocked less and less, and there was a smell, like cat litter and mothballs and cedarwood, that he recognized from the basement, and the orgy theme from Conan the Barbarian started to play. All of a sudden it was Mrs. Perkins whom he was fucking in her petticoat. He dropped his cock, and let out a little yell, and slipped on the toilet, and waited quietly for Carolina, who was sleeping outside in the bedroom, to say something, but there wasn’t a sound besides his frantic labored breathing.
He crawled into bed with Carolina, who didn’t stir even as he put one arm around her belly and wriggled another awkwardly beneath her shoulder, but when he placed his fingers lightly around her bellybutton and moved them very slightly to and fro, she said, “What are you doing?”
“There’s a jellyfish on your belly,” he said.
“What are you doing?” she asked again.
“Nothing,” he said, not moving his fingers anymore but not letting her go, either.
It was a Wednesday morning and the anniversary of Sean’s death. He declined to make breakfast, but she didn’t remark on it, quietly pulling cereal from the cupboard, getting an extra bowl for him but not a spoon. He did not fetch the milk, either.
“I think I’ll take the day off,” he said.
“Not me,” she said, holding a hand up high over her head with her wrist flexed to ninety degrees. “Work up to here.”
“We could go for a bike ride. Or a museum.”
“Up to here,” she said, straining higher with her hand.
“A movie?” he said, and she only grunted, dropping her hand and raising her bowl to the lips to drink the gray dregs of milk. He went outside when she went into her studio, and sat for a while underneath the grand, weird tree, pretending to read. The orgy theme kept playing unbidden in his mind, and he found himself thinking at length about Grace Jones, even though she wasn’t in the orgy or even in that particular Conan movie. He thought about the outfit that she wore and the fierceness of her haircut and how at odds it was with the surprising, furry tail that hung down from the straps of her loincloth. “Want to take a break?” he asked Carolina inside, as he opened an uncharacteristic 2 p.m. beer.
“Sorry,” she said, cutting a giant picture of Ryan into confetti-sized pieces. “I think I’m on to something here.”
“Alrighty,” he said. “I’m going to go pedal around for a while.”
“Have fun,” she said, but none of it was really fun, not the laborious bicycle ride over the many tall hills between the Mission and Russian Hill, or the way it felt like he was pedaling his mind around and around on the same circuit of thought—that it was poor taste for her to be concentrating so devotedly on her dead brother on the deathiversary of his—or any part of the silly vile spectacle at Mrs. Perkins’s, the masked girl in the sling or the game that was like Whack-a-Mole with blow jobs or the sixteen-hand massage. He didn’t have fun, though he participated with a focus of attention that felt requisite to enjoyment, and nothing frightened him off, not the bad music or a smear of poop, blithely ignored by her, on Mrs. Perkins’s leg, or even what appeared, in the dim light of the backmost back room, which everyone called the treasure chamber (as in, “Haven’t you visited the treasure chamber yet?” or, hands hefting his cock, “Here’s one for the treasure chamber!”), to be a man (or woman) in a strap-on poodle, nuzzli
ng and shoving at the ass of a man tied to a whipping post.
When he came home, Carolina had dinner waiting for him, a meal made up entirely of foods that Sean had liked, that they could enjoy together on his behalf, the menu assembled over the past few months from questions she’d asked so subtly that he had no recollection of answering them. She handed him a note that said Surprise, because it wasn’t the sort of occasion where that should be shouted out, or to which one invited guests, and yet she had wanted to surprise him with something nice. “Well,” she said, lighting candles all down the table, “nice is probably the wrong word, but you know what I mean.” And taking his hand as she sat him down she said, “You are probably the only person who knows what I mean.” He nodded at that, though he didn’t think it was true—weren’t there countless millions of bereaved brothers and sisters out there who would know just how it was pleasant and unpleasant in exactly the right way to sit down to such a feast on the anniversary of a death, to not exactly celebrate the death and not exactly mourn the life with carrots and Pop-Tarts and mashed potatoes and Mississippi Mud Pie? But maybe he only wanted it to be untrue, because he didn’t deserve to be so distinguished, and did not deserve this gesture of something related to but much, much better than sympathy, and was not worthy of anything of hers, not her beauty or her generosity or her home or her wonderful tree or even, eventually, her woundedness, her fury, her disgust.
15
Henry took extended refuge in Bobby’s apartment, though they never quite officially moved in together, Henry having always maintained a separate residence even when he spent almost every night in Bobby’s bed. The closest they came was living next door to each other; they had planned to share both apartments but the breakup sundered their bachelor households before they could really be joined. Bobby’s continued closetedness and Henry’s continued terror of invisible filth made actually moving in together complicated: Bobby needed someplace that could, with the push of a button, become a straight man’s apartment should his parents come to visit, and Henry needed someplace where he could mop and scrub to his heart’s discontent in his continued losing effort to eradicate the invisible contamination still radiating from his mother and from the West.
He rented his new apartment from a pleasant muttering gentleman named Bilbo, who was shy and retiring but not short or hairy-footed. It was the first home Bilbo had owned with his wife, a seventies love nest whose chocolate brown carpet had been replaced and whose burnt orange walls had been repainted, but there was still something about the place—a three-story loft with a floating teak staircase and track lighting even in the bathroom—that always made Henry feel like he should prance around it in a caftan. It had twelve hundred square feet of moppable wood floor, some of which was quite old, and the whole apartment was kind of dingy. Henry scrubbed and mopped and bleached all day when he moved in, a complicated process because his old apartment had become contaminated by a sixth- or seventh-degree touch from his mother, so he scrubbed each object that made the five-block journey between apartments with the aqua regia of his obsession, a mixture of ammonia and water with a teaspoon of bleach (just enough to increase the disinfecting power of the solution without generating a deadly gas) and three dashes of rosemary shaken from a spice bottle. He didn’t know why the rosemary was required, though it made as much sense, or nonsense, in its way as the ammonia and the bleach, since he wasn’t concerned at all about bacterial contamination. Bobby had pointed out that he routinely left food to rot on his counter, and he ate from moldy dishes and drank spoiled milk. But if he happened to leave out the rosemary, or even failed to count how many dashes he’d shaken into the bucket, he’d have to clean everything all over again.
He started on the bottom floor, with two buckets, one for the mop and one for the sponge, wiping the walls and doors down and then mopping himself backward to the stairs. The first floor was just the foyer, a couple of closets, and the door to the basement. He had swiped here and there in the vestibule but not tried very hard to make it actually clean: he shared it with another apartment, a studio where Bilbo’s frail aged sister lived, whose spotted claws would be all over the mailbox and probably the ground outside, thence to touch the walls and mirror as she leaned and heaved, breathless after the five steps from her threshold to the stoop. She might even lean on his door or try his knob in confusion, so it was useless to try to make any of those common surfaces safe to touch; he’d have to clean them again as soon as they had come and gone from his sight. He polished his inside doorknob with the sponge until it dripped.
“Let’s get a dog,” Bobby had said, a few months before.
“That’s a terrible idea,” Henry said. When he saw how Bobby’s face fell, he added, “I mean, it’s a little soon. Maybe when I’m better. Or more better. I’m getting there.” He said something about how it would be unfair to make the dog wear shoes when it went outside, or a surgical mask to keep its sniffing nose from ever actually touching the ground.
“Maybe,” Bobby said, “the dog would make you better. Like if you loved it enough, all this stuff wouldn’t matter anymore. Because it would get a pass on the contamination, you know? Like it would have happiness on its paws instead of dirt.”
“I don’t think that’s how it works,” Henry said, though of course that ended up being exactly how it worked. “I do love dogs.” That was true: he loved them as a category but was scared of them specifically, mostly because their adorable paws were always on ground that was trod by postman’s shoes that were contaminated by dropped letters and the elixir of filth that had dripped from his old mailbox when a letter from his mother had stewed for days in rainwater. His Cambridge mailman had become his archenemy. Henry tried to avoid him, but every now and then he got caught on the street and scolded for never emptying his mailbox of circulars and flyers and the occasional bill that slipped through. “No, thank you,” Henry said, as if to decline the mailman’s anger, or as if the mailman were the manifestation of whatever agency sought to connect him back to his mother and the whole great contaminated state of California. Just before Henry had moved to Bilbo’s, the mailman had accused him of hiding his mail cart, because it disappeared just as Henry was walking down the little garden path (surrounded by reaching hedges that he had become skilled at dodging), trying to avoid being noticed and talked to because there had already been an exchange that week and an ultimatum given, which hinted at dangerous depths of postal rage. There was a dog, a friendly and dumb-looking black Lab, sitting where the cart had been, as if someone had exchanged them one for the other. Henry worked himself into a tizzy of worry that the mailman might touch him, a finger to his chest or a shove against his head, or that the dog, watching and wagging his tail, would come over and put his paws on him. But as the mailman closed on him, actually shouting now, the dog growled and leaped for him, not bothering Henry. He chased the mailman down the street, not seeming to mind at all the backward puffs of mace that came like toxic blinding farts from the vicinity of the mailman’s ass. Henry hurried away and moved soon after out of that delivery zone.
“It’s too soon, I think,” Henry said to Bobby, standing with him next to a bench that neither of them was allowed to sit on, in a park full of frolicking dogs. “But maybe not much longer. I’m getting better, right?”
“Right,” Bobby said, though he wasn’t, really, or at least he was getting better in such infinitesimal increments that he appeared to be standing more or less frozen on the road to recovery. He made the occasional visit to his psychiatrist, separated sometimes by weeks or months, and all they had really worked out in a year and a half was that Henry had a complicated relationship with his mother, and the unmemory of his lost childhood was ruining his life in exactly the way she foretold that it would. They never got to the part where they decided what to do about it; Henry’s truancy generated a lot of false starts, though it felt to him that just showing up was brave effort, and talking repeatedly about things he already knew was progress.
He wen
t up the stairs, sloshing the mop back and forth as he vacated each step, and washing the banisters as he went. When he got to the second floor he pushed the bucket in steps with his feet to the windows, where he paused to sponge the glass and the sills, picking up real filth now in addition to the imaginary kind, watching children at play in the playground across the street. It was late in July, and a series of holes in the ground spewed water into the air in rhythmic intervals, the noise of the water and the delighted screaming of the children sounding like a conversation. It was cheery work, for all that he was laboring in the service of his miserable obsession; cleaning made him happy and having someplace that could be made clean made him happy. He thought he understood how Snow White could have gone so cheerfully about her work, though her situation, when you gave it any amount of thought, was terribly grim.
“Let’s have a party,” Bobby said, and Henry said, assuming it would be a party of two, “That’s a great idea. What are we celebrating?”
“Nothing,” Bobby said. “Our friends.”
“Maybe we should wait for an occasion,” Henry said, thinking of all the people crowding into Bobby’s small apartment, the hands everywhere that might have been touching the ground or the mail. And their friends were all Bobby’s friends; it might make more sense for him to celebrate them by himself, someplace else, one of their houses or perhaps even in a rented hall. “My birthday,” Henry said, “is only a few months away.” At which time he could, if he wanted, ask for a cancellation as a present.
“That’s a terrible idea,” Bobby said.
“No, it’s not,” Henry said. “People have been having birthday parties forever.”
“I mean the waiting,” Bobby said. Henry shrugged, and they continued to negotiate, but a few weeks later they had a dinner party. It was just a few people, and Henry won the right to ask them all to take off their shoes and leave them in the hall when they arrived, a precaution that turned out not to be enough, since some of them trod on the porch in their socks and then walked inside, and anyhow who knew what they did in their socks at home? Henry did a bad job with the minuscule portion of hosting that was allotted to him, and he was sullen though he didn’t mean to be sullen. But there was such a high pitch of anxiety abuzz in his brain that it was hard to listen to what people were saying, and hard to care if they had recently become engaged or gone to Morocco or treated a sassy child for diabetes or found a lovely purse at a garage sale. He only had attention for their feet.
