All the Beautiful People We Once Knew

by Edward Carlson

  “What is that?” she asked as if holding her breath.

  “Special K,” Benjamin said. “It’s for the animals.”

  “How appropriate,” she replied. She handed him the rolled-up bill. “Happy birthday, my man.”

  Benjamin leaned over the table and snorted a birthday line. The crowd gathered around him and sang happy birthday and he sat there with a silly smile on his face as the ketamine traveled through the open capillaries of his sinuses into his bloodstream. He snorted three more lines, each progressively longer and thicker, he would snort up almost the whole gift. Now leaning back, eyes wide open, eyebrows arced.

  “Wow,” he yelled. And with that he launched into middle age.

  Within the core of the party, something had changed, its metamorphosis contingent upon my absence as I sulked and smoked outside. Only then did it have the right combination of elements and personalities to practice its magic. The girls squeezed and grabbed and stroked one another’s denim, all of them now covered with sawdust, as they lapped up the remnants of the Special K from the glass table. Outside it had started to rain and the rain was black and the girls dancing around the fire wrapped their arms around one another to keep warm and also for something extra. The cowboy beckoned them to get back inside and he led the girls to the couch by the hand and there were now four, five girls making out, struggling to unbutton and remove shirts over arms and heads. Multicolored everyday bras and unbuckled jeans and penumbras of nipples and the firm, steady breasts of women who hadn’t yet birthed children but were now the prime age to do so. Beckoning Kath to join them; their mascara water soluble, cheeks streaked with blackened water. Kath now short of breath as the cowboy led her too by the hand. Her hands now down around the hem of the dress, she too just about to, half off it comes. Until, as if commanded by their master to go forth and wreak havoc, Benjamin’s dogs snarled into the living room and leapt atop the couch.

  “Damn it, Benjamin,” the girls lamented. “You and your fucking dogs.”

  Only exciting the dogs more. Now rolling atop one another in the pile of wet women.

  “Damn this life. It was just getting good,” cursed the cowboy as the girls snapped and covered themselves.

  “Rebecca, stop always trying to fuck my sister,” Benjamin yelled.

  He was high and serious and angry and his voice filled the ceiling and the dogs stilled. Rebecca and Sam retreated into a corner as they pulled on their shirts and Kath brushed dog hair from the white dress. Benjamin ripped the stereo chord from the wall and some portal door closed and the revelers had no choice but to leave the party because the man-god Benjamin was angry. They exited the living room and kitchen through the holes in the walls and out the long, thin windows.

  I walked outside to the bonfire. The structure had collapsed onto itself and the ground was now a bed of charred joists and a blanket of glowing hexagons. I looked through the fence erected to demarcate the boundaries of Benjamin’s compound. A man, neither white nor black nor Spanish, pressed his face against the fence while smoking a blunt and blew smoke into Benjamin’s yard, watching me.

  “Stephen,” Kath said. As if she had been looking for me for an hour and I was hiding under the laundry inside the wicker hamper, all of us now back to a more innocent time.

  She stepped through the door and I could see only her silhouette in the yellow halogen security lights that ringed Benjamin’s house. I was relieved she wanted to speak with me.

  “Come on, we’re going out.”

  27

  THE KITCHEN LAY IN chaos. Tables covered with beer cans and crushed soft packs of cigarettes. A half-eaten honey-baked ham and a tray of burnt tater tots removed from a dented toaster oven. Benjamin and Kath spoke in low voices, discarding plastic plates heavy with half-consumed slices of carrot cake. Benjamin tossed a plate in the nylon bag to protest the task’s futility. I realized there was nowhere here for me to sleep and slung the swish messenger bag stuffed with a change of clothes and toiletries over my shoulder, in order to spend the night in a hotel. It was late but I would try to find one. There was nothing for me here. I needed to communicate this to Kath.

  “Leave it,” Benjamin told Kath. “We’ll clean it tomorrow.”

  He wanted to go to the bar and Kath and I followed him out the front door to the street, deserted but for the bushy-tailed Puerto Rican kid in his slackened jeans and a girl sitting between his legs on a stoop across the street. Kath fumbled with her camera phone as Benjamin deadbolted the house’s front doors and pulled on his padlock behind us.

  “Don’t look at them,” Benjamin said.

  “Why not?” Kath asked.

  “Because they’re pieces of shit.”

  “They’re just kids, Benjamin.”

  “They’re fucking criminals.”

  He started the yellow Harvester and it rumbled from its parking space like one of his pets. Like a bigger pet fed bigger chunks of meat and walked only on special occasions. He gripped the hard, plastic steering wheel with knuckles bearing those strange patterns. Celtic-Scandinavian. Runestones. We rode without music or headlights, past blocks of cyclone fencing and black men gesturing toward one another, crossed a wide, empty avenue and beneath a skywalk that echoed the heavy engine and over a stretch of railroad tracks. Benjamin spun the hard steering wheel down a boulevard and I bounced across the back seat. Gray alleyways. Yellow streetlights. Shackled storefronts and dumpsters crawling with people.

  “Stop,” Kath said. “Back up.”

  She struggled to extract her camera from her bag and now it was in her hand. Benjamin reversed the car and Kath began again with the photos. Of figures surrounding a man on the ground, kicking him in turn. Nine on one, ten on one. This wasn’t the reckless flailing of a drunken brawl, I thought. This was premeditated. An arm raised a crowbar in retribution.

  “Shouldn’t we help him?” I asked.

  “There are like twenty guys beating him, Benjamin,” Kath said. “Do something.”

  “None of my business,” Benjamin replied. He shifted the car into drive and pressed down on the gas.

  “They’re beating that guy,” I said.

  He stared at me in the rearview mirror. I let it go. Maybe he was right. Maybe it was none of his business. None of our business. Kath said something beneath the sound of the wind and the engine.

  Benjamin parked the car and you could tell it was a bar because there was a television visible through the blackened windows. A beefy Turkish bouncer shook hands with Benjamin and kissed Kath on the cheek and she introduced me as her friend. He nodded at me. I nodded back. We walked to the bar and ordered three big, cheap mugs of porter and lit our own cigarettes and leaned forward on our elbows. Like we were leaning against the inside of a dugout. The cash register locked on the bartender and he smashed it with a rubber mallet and it opened with an antique copper ring. Benjamin handed him a fifty-dollar bill and the bartender set three shot glasses on the bar before us turned upside down and then propped open a floor hatch that led to the taproom.

  “Benny, come with me,” he said and together they descended the staircase into the taproom. I moved closer to Kath, to speak with her for the first time in hours. I wasn’t ready to tell her I needed to find a hotel for the night. But I would do so once we had reconnected.

  “How are you?” I asked.

  “I’m so tired.”

  “That was quite a scene at your brother’s house.”

  “I know. I don’t know what came over me. I hope that didn’t hurt you.”

  “A little. But I’ll get over it. Besides, I don’t own you.”

  I didn’t believe a word I said. Yet I was incapable of telling her what I truly felt. If I was capable of telling her what I felt I wouldn’t be here now. I would have been back in New York hours ago. I never would have left.

  “Benjamin wants me to move back here and stay with him. He said he’d give me a floor of the house.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know
. There’s a lot of room to work and I could have my own studio. But I don’t know. It’s not New York.”

  “Did you hear from Soncha?”

  “She still doesn’t want to talk to me.”

  At least she’s honest, I wanted to say, but didn’t.

  Kath looked at her beer. I put my arm around her waist but the distance between us pushed us apart. As if we were two positive magnets. I placed my hand on her hip. The gap between us yawning. We had approached the beginning of the end, I thought. What would I do without her? How would that be? But this too passed. I would be fine. And so too would she. On the television above the bar, security ushered a fat kid from the hockey stadium. Replaying his offensive act of sticking his finger down his throat and puking on a younger fan.

  There was a row of photographs on the wall. Photographs taken inside the bar, inside another era, when Kath was in art school, a wall of mounted frames. Kath pointed at a row of half-miniature portraits.

  “See the second one from the left? That’s Robert. We had just started dating then.”

  I walked over to the wall and stared at the portrait. Here was Fleeger as I had never seen him before. Young and handsome. Idle but almost furious. Kath stood behind me and we stood before the portrait and she belted her arms around my waist and stood on her toes to rest her chin on my shoulder. Why hadn’t she done this hours ago? Her lightest touch reinforced my decision to be with her. I would stay with her tonight. Even if it meant sleeping on Benjamin’s floor.

  The bartender popped his head from the taproom. With her touch, levity returned to my thighs and I felt air again in my lungs as the invisible monolith rolled across smooth, sandy ground, unsealing the tomb in which I had locked myself the moment I entered Benjamin’s house.

  “I still don’t know how I managed to convince Robert to pose for that photo,” she said. “But he has such a face. His face is like art.”

  Small red votive candles flickered on the bar tables, along the walls. Like those lit in the alcoves of cathedrals for prostration before Ave Maria. Candlelight blessings in consideration for change. For Fleeger as art. Kath said she needed some fresh air. That she would be back in five minutes. I let her go. I was good like that, I told myself. I could always give a woman her space. Benjamin and the bartender ascended the subterranean ladder, the bartender smacking Benjamin’s steel-toed foot as they climbed the rungs, trying to trip him. Both of them marked with small Führer mustaches of ketamine or coke or both. Benjamin blew his nose in a red cocktail napkin, bunched it in his hand, and left it on the bar. I thanked him for inviting me to the party, for his hospitality, to try and backfill his unspoken enmity toward me. He drank from his mug of black beer and I faulted myself for sharing the honest sentiment.

  “Hey, I want to ask you a question,” he said. He rested one foot on the shelf beneath the bar. I told him go ahead.

  “Why are you here?”

  “Kath asked me to come.”

  “Yeah. But why? What do you expect will happen?”

  “I think we’re just seeing where it goes.”

  His jaw clenched, pinching the Camel Light between his teeth. I placed both feet on the ground and stood before him and he stood up straight and did the same above me. I had no more words. I was blank. I felt nothing. Had nothing to say. Anything I said would lack the velocity of an honest response and without that honesty he would swat it away. All I could do was stand my ground. He curled and gripped his strange hands around an invisible ball and shook it.

  “She doesn’t need you, man. You have nothing to offer her. You think because you got a good job, up in your office, smooth sailing, that you can do this to her?”

  This was the ketamine talking. There was a freshly minted nickel on the bar. In the red and yellow lights hanging from the ceiling Thomas Jefferson looked like an ape. Benjamin stood there, waiting for my response. I wanted to say more. That Kath told me she needed me. That she told me she loved me. That I loved her too. Benjamin watched me trying to ignore him. I fidgeted. He wouldn’t budge. I was an obstacle between him and what he needed to know and what he needed to know was inside me and he would come right through me for it if he had to. The bartender again struck open the cash register with a rubber mallet and he smiled at Benny with long, pointed teeth.

  “You work for Robert. She tells me tomorrow you’re going to have dinner with my parents. When she and Robert aren’t even divorced. You follow her here. What are we supposed to think? That you guys are going to build a life together? While still working with Robert?”

  “She asked me to come.”

  Something in his system refused to be assuaged by this.

  “But don’t you see? That doesn’t make a difference. Right is right. And that doesn’t depend on what she says or asks you to do. She’s vulnerable right now. She’s got no stability in New York, no husband, no job, it sounds like she may be kicked out of her apartment, she’s borrowing money from our parents to pay her rent, and now she has this crew of artists she hangs out with and the next thing you know she’s obsessed with Hinduism and taking pictures of homeless kids. She’s completely lost. And then you come around, and all it does is add a whole other layer of complication for her. You seem like a smart guy. I don’t understand how you don’t know this.”

  He leaned backward against the bar with his elbows.

  “Just don’t deny it, man,” he said over his shoulder.

  “Deny what?”

  “That you’re fucking up my sister.”

  “What?”

  “No, not what. Why? Why are you doing it? And more importantly, why are you lying about it? Because you’re not really that into her? Because you know she’s not really as great as you tell yourself she is? Because you don’t want Robert to know? Because you don’t want to lose your job? Because you don’t know how Robert will react? I’ll tell you how Robert will react. He’ll fucking crucify you. Do you even know why they separated?”

  I was done with him. The bartender called me an asshole as I picked up my bag and exited the bar at the same moment he cracked open a roll of quarters on the drawer of the brass register. Outside, Kath stood on the sidewalk chewing on a finger. She tore off a hangnail. I put my hand on her waist. Removed my hand from her waist and realized this was all a mistake. It was a mistake for me to come. It was a mistake for me to be here.

  “Lucky cigarette,” she said, removing the upside-down fag from the orange hard pack.

  “Harker.”

  I heard someone yell my name and I heard it again.

  “Harker.”

  I looked around and there across the street stood Fleeger. Heat and vinegar bloomed through the nerves and arteries that ran the length of my neck and down my back. He paced the sidewalk, waiting for traffic to pass, back and forth, now down the curb and across 15th Street, wearing bulky cargo pants and beyond all fathomability those orange Vibram FiveFingers. Slapping the ground with ten gloved finger toes as he crossed the asphalt, vengeful in the high-watt glow of the electric marquis for Buca di Beppo, Italian American bistro.

  He said my name again. Babbling so this was it. This was why. Now it all made sense. Between each accusation an electric sizzle. Buca. About taking his wife. Buca. Because mine left me. Buca. That I didn’t make enough money to support her. Buca. Something inside me fell three stories and landed on a cool, dry floor. Bounced a bit. My intestines stiffened. I was ready for him.

  “Oh dear, we need to perform open-heart surgery on you too, Robert,” Kath said. “You’re like an open wound.”

  Kath looked tired. Exhausted by the evening so far and this drama on alcohol now a further cause of yet more exhaustion. She didn’t fear Fleeger in general and she didn’t fear Fleeger now and she didn’t fear Fleeger for me. Her teeth tore off another hangnail.

  I couldn’t see Fleeger’s face, failed to discern the whole. There were the hard eyes. The rampart chin. The jackfruit lips. But the pieces didn’t connect. The sharp edges blurred the closer he approached. Hi
s face now almost a cloud as he huffed up the curb, fingertoes smacking the concrete sidewalk. Now he was upon me. I can take him. With outstretched arms, he grabbed me with his hairy hands and shook me.

  “Please, Robert,” Kath said. “Don’t be so gauche.”

  “What are you doing with her?” he asked me. “Are you insane?”

  I pressed my hands against Robert’s broad chest as he huffed his way through my defenses.

  He released me. I brushed off something that wasn’t there.

  “Please, Robert,” Kath said.

  He turned on her.

  “And you? You said he was pitiful?”

  “Robert I was weak. I needed someone.”

  “You hate him.”

  “I don’t hate him, Robert.”

  “Hey,” I said. “Easy.”

  Robert shoved me.

  “Easy?”

  I shoved him back. He moved less than I did when he shoved me.

  He shoved me again.

  “Robert,” Kath said. “Don’t be ridiculous. Besides, it’s not like we’re still married. Well, technically we are, but we’re separated. We’re not even friends. If I’m with Stephen then you just go ahead and consider yourself the winner.”

  “Hey,” I protested.

  He shoved me again. He was angry, but I could calm him down. He shoved me again. Now up against the bar’s black windows, he tripped up my hands and gripped my arms. I remembered something from the one martial arts class I took in college. I landed the tip of my shoe beneath the curve of his left patella, triggering a deep-tendon reflex. Fleeger buckled and punched me in the gut, knocking the wind out of me.

  “Man, you are fucking my wife.”

  I struggled to breathe. It was almost like drowning. I needed to lie down. I lay on the ground. I was dying. My lungs lacked the oxygen to speak.

  “Robert,” Kath said. Still insufficiently concerned for my well-being. “Look, you hurt him. Go easy. He’s much smaller than you. And besides, we’re separated. Remember? Please. You’re scaring him.”

  They sounded like they were playing a game with me.