Unraveling

by Owen Thomas

  Mae hits the freeway and slips the car into fifth, accelerating sharply. I can see her legs working the pedals. She has this thing against wearing heels and driving a stick, so her shoes are off, her left foot arching off the clutch and her right pushing in the gas. Two columns of glossy flesh emerge from the darkness beneath the steering column and disappear into the darkness of her skirt.

  Saab Turbo: We’re Simply Out of Your League.

  For a moment I am not worried about felonies or violent showers in the pen. I am temporarily transfixed by the immediacy of Mae’s erotic appeal. In spite of all my longing reminiscence, night after night after night, I had forgotten. It feels like months, even years since I have smelled her, touched her, looked at her from this distance. I want to reach over and yank the wheel, pulling the car onto the shoulder, forcing her to stop, reclining the seat. I cannot believe that I have ever been so fortunate as to be in a relationship – a romantic, sexual relationship with… with… this, and yet so incredibly stupid as to provoke its destruction. No. That’s not true. It is not destroyed. It is not. A corrective course is not destruction. We’re still building an understanding. She’s here isn’t she? In my time of need, she is here, sitting right over fucking there.

  But Detective North is still close by. I can feel him, following my thoughts even now, burrowing into my brain and twisting the prurient thoughts of an honest red-blooded man into something far more weak and pathetic. I cannot help but wonder if Mae thought he was attractive, if she and Brenda spent the first fifteen minutes of their night at Wildcats talking in mirthful whispers about what they would like to do with him.

  She asks questions as she drives. I end up telling the story all over again, relishing her attention and hating myself for it; hating that it takes the prospect of a violent felony conviction to get her attention; and hating that, in just the right light, it is all worth it. I am relieved when she is quiet and, at the same time, desperate for some sign that she is still there, connected, interested, concerned.

  We arrive at the place that used to be ours, although, truth be told, she never did give up her own place in Belleview. When she left, everything, including the wall clock, fit into one suitcase. But, just the same, I thought of it as our place.

  She cuts the engine and climbs out and, for a second, I feel the rising hope that she wants to come inside, that rote memory will pull her back in and that the surroundings will unlock memories of forgotten fondness.

  But that is not why she has climbed out. She wants to see the rapist car.

  Honda Civic: So much less than your typical Saab Story.

  “Oh, my God. David, that’s terrible. And you’ve been driving around this way?”

  “Probably just today, but who knows how long it’s been there.”

  My neighbor’s circular saw whines its way through a sheet of plywood.

  “Still at it, huh?” She says, looking behind her at the sound.

  “Every night.”

  She laughs and shakes her head, reappraising the Civic.

  “You wanna come inside, Mae? Just for awhile.”

  “Dave…”

  “Just dinner. Look, we’ll call Pink Pagoda. We can talk. It would be nice just to have… you know, someone to talk to.”

  She looks at me, motionless, unblinking, as though God has hit the pause button and I remember, painfully, these pregnant pauses in our more strained relations; pauses suggesting some silent audit of secret considerations; pauses that betoken unpredictable changes in direction. When she blinks, she looks again for a moment at the angry red epithet emblazoned across the side of my car. Her hand moves to her lips and I realize she is trying to stifle a laugh. It escapes anyway.

  “I’m sorry,” she says sweetly. “It’s not funny. It’s not. It’s just…so ridiculous.”

  “Thank you,” I say, and head for the door.

  * * *

  At first it is awful. Awful to see her so polite, so respectful of my home, in which she once roamed so freely. Awful to see her wait to be invited from the doorway into the hall, into the kitchen, into the living room, where she eventually sits and crosses her legs and drinks her wine. I know she is not nervous, or polite, or even just naturally inclined to be deferential where I am concerned. She isn’t any of these things and never has been. She is making a point; drawing a boundary. I read her loud and clear and I hate it.

  But I am in control of myself now. I am, incredibly, relaxed and casual and, for all appearances, unconcerned with whatever boundary she wishes to draw. We spend some more time talking about Brittany Kline and my suspension and what we think will happen next which is, we resolve, a lot of waiting around for Brittany to resurface and for everyone to realize they have been jumping to foolish conclusions. Until that happens, Mae’s advice is the same as Shepp’s: keep my mind off of the situation, try not to sweat what I cannot control, catch up on reading, start working out again. Paid time off.

  I confess to her that I am slightly intimidated by Glenda Laveau and she thinks this is funny, partly, I assume, because I am so charmingly self-deprecating about it. She tells me that Glenda is single and has had notorious affairs with two different associates in the office. I tell her that I am not intimidated sexually so much as physically, by the fear that she will one day be unable to resist beating the crap out of me. Mae laughs harder, saying that each of Glenda’s playthings eventually told stories of bruises and pulled muscles and battered egos. We conclude that, sex or no sex, I am destined to have the shit kicked out of me by Glenda Laveau.

  At full volume, Mae’s laugh has a honking, nasal quality that I have never much liked. It is too jarring and liltless for my taste; too at odds with the sleek lines of her form. I don’t care. Mae is laughing in my living room. I can feel the evening begin to soften.

  By the time food arrives the wine has begun to put an end to the mutual awkwardness and we are both more authentic and comfortable in each other’s company. Once she ventures to the refrigerator and helps herself to a bottle of soy sauce and a handful of grapes. She does not ask, she just does it and this makes me feel good, like I have reintroduced an endangered species back into its native habitat and it is showing all the signs of successful re-adaptation – as though she is Willy the Orca, back in the ocean and chasing fish on her own. Only with better legs.

  She tells me that Chaney, Baker, Smith & Lyons is considering opening an office in Cleveland and that Rob Lyons, son of the late-great Parker Lyons, is pushing for it mostly because of issues he is having with several of the other partners.

  “It’s a profit distribution thing,” she explains without explaining. “Rob really wants me to come with him to open the Cleveland office, but I really like it where I am.” She speaks freely, as though Rob’s name, and what Rob wants from her, and what she thinks about Rob, and why Rob requires so much after-hours attention, has never spoiled conversation over dinner. As though my reaction to the vague and undefined threat of Rob was not the very particular straw that broke the camel’s back. She is testing me and I pass with flying colors, encouraging her to look at the bigger picture.

  “You could always give Cleveland a try. You’d probably be lead paralegal out there. Probably more money. If you hate it, then it’s back to Columbus.”

  “Rob said he’d make it worth my while, but…I don’t know. I’m still thinking about it. He can be kind of an overbearing jerk sometimes.”

  My how the mighty hath fallen. Rob – faultless, flawless, well meaning, misunderstood, get off his back you jealous prick – Rob, is now kind of an overbearing jerk. But I make no effort to actually collect any of these points.

  “Maybe the answer is in the fortune cookie,” I say, holding one cookie in each hand behind my back. “Left or right?” It is a game we used to play and now I am testing her. She leans across the couch, kissing me softly on the right cheek, brushing my left with the tips of her fingers. I blush and present her choice.

  “Hard decisions make for good opportunities.”
She reads, then laughing, wide eyed, as though I have managed some flawless parlor conjuring. “Well isn’t that right on the money. Does that mean I go to Cleveland?”

  “Maybe. If you’re foolish enough to organize your life by fortune cookie.”

  “Hey!” She swats me in the arm. “It was your idea. Open yours. Let’s see it.” She divvies the rest of the wine and drinks deeply as I break the thing open.

  “Identity is but the mask of the soul, worn in the prison of the self.” We both look into emptiness for a moment.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” she asks.

  “Beats me, but I object to the word prison in any and every context at the moment. I can’t eat this now. I’m sure it’s bad luck.”

  “Oh, come on you big baby. Here, I’ll eat it.”

  I feed her the broken shell in bits and crumbs, each bite requiring that the flesh of her lips encase the tips of my fingers. At the last of it she is sucking gently and using her tongue to pry them open. It is a game, but a game rapidly losing its humor. I can feel that rising sense of urgency and the seriousness I associate with high-stakes endeavors and things that I want just a little too much to be either healthy or realistic. She smells like soy sauce and spicy oil and pikake and her breath is on my face like a wet cloud. She kisses me and my hands find her clumsily, our torsos cruelly twisted to face each other on my sagging couch, our legs splayed beneath an array of Pink Pagoda boxes scattered across the long, low antique table my mother could no longer stand in her living room.

  The moment is so charged, so beyond what I had expected out of this day that I do not close my eyes, which wander around the room behind her as if lost or confused; seeing but not seeing. It is a kind of shock, I think. An unwillingness to believe in what might still somehow be open to interpretation. Mae rolls my lower lip between her teeth and I fumble vainly at her buttons.

  “I have missed you a little, you know,” she says to me in a low groan.

  Whatever I am about to say – surely something banal about absence making hearts fonder – whatever it was, never makes it out. The playful lip-nibbling mushrooms into a full out mashing of flesh that prevents intelligible speech.

  The rest of my body responds as expected, but my eyes remain open, meandering like insomniacs as the world dreams. I am staring across the silken, curtained plain of Mae’s hair at the dark glass eye of the television. The eye stares back at the rapidly developing situation on my couch. Mae is a distant, undulating whitish blur in its pupil. It asks, silently, judgmentally, if this moment is really all I had hoped it would be; if my life is really so empty as to be utterly transformed by this … this … whatever this was, a quickie? Reconciliation? Nostalgia? Sympathy? Wine? The television has all the answers, but it ain’t talkin’.

  Above the television is the framed poster of Nelson Mandela. It consists of two large photos, one stacked atop the other. In the top photo he is wearing a white shirt buttoned to the neck, looking contemplatively out the bars of a jail cell across an over-exposed landscape. In the bottom photo he is older, standing behind a dirty green jeep, laughing uproariously as he holds a young white girl in his arms, pointing at a pride of lions lounging lazily in the shade of a distant acacia. Separating the two photos are Mandela’s words: There is no easy walk to freedom, anywhere.

  The poster had been left in the closet by the guy from whom I – and by I, I mean, my father – purchased the condo. Mae had retrieved it one day, insisting that it replace my Bob Marley poster, which had been on the wall when she moved in and which she strangely hated. I have since come to believe that her distaste was due more to her antipathy for reggae in general than the psychedelic tie-dye motif of the poster. It is also possible that she associates Bob Marley with marijuana and with all of the cultural and political identity that, along with the weed itself, she takes a certain pride in rejecting.

  Not that I have ever scored enough pot as an adult to really present her with much of an opportunity. At Tulane, long before Mae, we all but packed our pillows with the stuff, smoking brazenly at Friday night toke parties (the tokes, we called them); our chance to thumb our noses at convention and to rebel against The Man. Except that The Man at the time was William Jefferson Clinton and true rebellion would have meant low-carb health food and faith-based monogamy; which is asking a little too much of college kids just looking for a way to dress up a cheap loss of coherence. We marveled at how easy it must have been to take Nancy Reagan for granted until she was no longer around to give simple reefer-madness some real political gravitas.

  Out of college, my fond relationship with cannabis hit the skids. I knew how to smoke it, but I never knew how to find it – the good stuff, or, for that matter, how to pay for it. On the rare occasions that I have had any to offer, I have tried mightily to expand Mae’s horizons. But, invariably, her perfect conservative little nose wrinkles in opposition; as though I have asked whether she would consider growing out her pit-hair, or conserving wetlands, or trying a three-way with Noam Chomsky and Ted Kennedy.

  We have learned from painful experience not to even discuss the issue of medical marijuana. In the last round on that subject, Mae found something unfairly accusatory about my tone, and about my totally irrelevant “stoned-is-stoned” observations concerning her weekly craving for tumblers of neon-colored grain alcohol. In any case, there was never really any doubt about the Marley poster coming off the wall.

  When Mae left, I frequently considered replacing Mandela with Marley, reestablishing dominion over my own home. But I could never take the Mandela poster down. On good days, there is something so inspiring – so … optimistic – about the photographic juxtaposition – the man confined and the man unbroken – that I cannot bring myself to put him in the closet. On bad days, days when the little cannibals have devoured me to a nub and I seriously question my ability to teach anybody anything, there is something irresistibly dark and satisfying – something comically vengeful – at the idea that Nelson Mandela is about to swing this blonde kid by the ankles into a heap of bored and hungry lions. Nelson laughs. I laugh. The poster stays.

  Mae stands, unfastening as she rises what I cannot seem to unfasten. She stands over me and I look up, obeisant, my face now at the level of her waist. I run my fingers along the backs of her legs, up into the belfry of her skirt, slipping beneath elastic. She drops her blouse in my lap, turns and heads for the hallway and the bedroom beyond, unfastening and unclipping and unzipping as she moves out of sight. I am alone on the couch, listening to her bare footsteps and to the groaning springs of my bed.

  Jagged metal teeth rip through another sheet of plywood. Something large splinters and falls to concrete. I find myself wondering if my neighbor is exercising some sexual or emotional frustration. He can’t be happy, I think. He can’t be satisfied. Every night with the saw. He can’t be.

  I stand, unbuttoning my shirt feeling a surge of pent-up sexual desire, the power of which is matched only by an undeniable ambivalence for what is about to happen. I cannot reconcile these feelings and so I block them out, both of them, because they are inseparably intertwined, the desire and the ambivalence, and I do not have a saw.

  It is very much the same as it always was. The smell of her skin is the same. The feel of her fingers. We work through the same tight routine of acts from a pornographic circus. Roughly the same order and duration. There is a low voltage current that sews them all together like a tough strand of electric thread. I know this is simply the work of abstinence; a neural reunion of lost sensations, but I don’t care. If there is any benefit to deprivation then this has to be it and I gladly put the electricity to good use.

  Not everything, however, is the same. Her exclamations have changed. What once was usually a simple, ‘Yes, Yes, Oh God, David, right there. Yes.’ or simply ‘Oh, God. Oh, God.’ had now become less personal. Less theistic. More aggressive. ‘Fuck me, Dave! Give it to me. Harder! Give me your cock, Dave. Oh, fuck yeah. Harder!’

  It is theater. Bad t
heater. Exciting because it is different. Disturbing because it is different. I cannot help but think that this small and ridiculous change is a learned accommodation to another’s preference. Rob Lyons? Is this what Rob likes? I am renewing my skepticism that their relationship is, or ever was, strictly business.

  Old jealousies threaten my erection. I shake them loose and do as she commands. ‘Fuck me harder, Dave! Fuckin’ fuck me harder, Dave! Give it to me raw you filthy fuck.’

  I realize that she has evolved… devolved… changed and that she has been changing continuously since she moved out and that she has always been changing since before I met her. I have simply intersected this arc of change at specific points in her life and cannot help but compare snapshots along the traverse.

  I try to imagine the topography of my own developmental arc and can conjure only a flat line. To her I must be exactly the same as always. Static. This bothers me beyond all reason. I am fighting a rising tide of inadequacy. And anger. At her, at myself. At the buzz saw next door that will not stop. I am overcome with the need to be different and unpredictable and someone who, if you were not paying rapt attention every second, might change into someone entirely different, leaving you behind in the dust with your old useless expectations. Each roll with me might be different than the last.

  I reach around her as her hips are thrusting violently into my groin and slap her on the ass. Hard. “Ow! What the fuck…” Then again, on the opposite cheek, this time licking the tips of my fingers first for a little sting.

  “David! OW!” Her face is flushed and angry and confused and hanging down only inches from my own, so close she is almost out of focus. She sits upright, panting.