Funny Once

by Antonya Nelson

  Hugh was torn: Pull his father from the fantasy, grab hold of reality—the kickplates, the frozen boards of the porch, the benign dying women inside—and insist? Or play along? He went with the latter. “But Dad, if they’re going to take you to the same place, if those ladies are holding Helen hostage, and you want to see her, shouldn’t you just let them take you? I mean, if Helen is already there?”

  “Let myself be abducted?” His father shook his head at Hugh’s sorry logic, then accused him of being as useless as everyone else. “I’m surrounded by idiots,” he concluded, dismissing his son with a feeble wave.

  “I’m sorry, I was just thinking out loud.”

  “Take me back inside, do you want me to catch pneumonia?”

  Hannah had already been to the home earlier that day, attempting to correct her father’s understanding, insisting on and explaining over and over again the facts of his situation, which had also failed. “Why do you indulge his delusions? I think that makes him believe them more.”

  “I subscribe to the rules of improv,” Hugh had told her. “Yes, and?” He wondered now what percentage of his father’s usual day was anywhere near lucid. In the past, these flights of fancy would come up, hang around long enough to be entertaining, then evaporate. His father would be asking for his shows, his dinner, his drink, his ordinary perfectly reasonable necessities. And would it be worse, Hugh wondered, to know that he wasn’t a person of interest to a group of kidnappers? Would it be preferable to understand the truth, that he was just waiting around to die, that some stranger would take his place, whose son or daughter or spouse out there in the greater metropolitan area was hoping his death would be sooner rather than later?

  Didn’t everyone operate under the delusion that there was something else going on besides that sad fact?

  Meanwhile Ms. Fox had sent an email to Stacy about her attendance—or lack thereof—and asked her to deliver the same message to Hugh Panik, who hadn’t provided an email address.

  “Why don’t you have email?” Stacy asked him that evening while they were skipping yet another session. They’d had every intention of going to class, but somehow ended up talking and drinking in the parking lot instead. Hugh had picked up a bottle of the same wine stolen from Stacy’s car in the beginning, a pleasant jug of Chianti. It had become their special beverage, its quality irrelevant; his sister Hannah would have been appalled.

  “Who would I email? Ms. Fox?”

  “You could email me. Except, knowing me, I’d probably forget to close the in-box window, and my husband would snoop around in there, and then he’d be furious—well, first he’d be super-surprised, he probably wouldn’t believe it, me having a man friend to write to, he thinks I’m invisible now that I’ve had kids and gotten a little chunky—and then I guess we’d get in a big GD fight, and the kids would hear, our house isn’t that big, we’re all up in each other’s business—and the nine-year-old, sheez, she would lose her crackers, she’s such a drama queen—and next thing you know the whole weekend is wasted by arguing and crying and making up, and . . .” She sighed. “I guess it’s just as well you don’t have email.”

  “Nor a cell phone, either.”

  “Yeah, I’ve noticed that, because I always want to send you a message or talk to you about something, all day long, it’s like you’re hanging around in my head with me and I’m talking to you. A cell phone would be good for that, because now I try to remember what I want to tell you but I know I forget, I should keep a list.”

  “This is the first time a cell phone has seemed at all tempting. My sister’s been trying to hook me up for years.”

  “I think it’s sweet how old-fashioned you are.”

  “She also hates my wardrobe,” Hugh said of Hannah, just so Stacy would compliment that as well.

  Stacy insisted that she did not mind that Hugh wore the same thing every day. “You remind me of Ernie,” she said. “From Ernie and Bert? They always wear the same clothes, too. It’s very comforting.” Ought he to have been insulted, being compared to a pair of Muppets? He wasn’t. She went on, “I love Bert and Ernie. They make me cry sometimes, they’re so dear.” Her eyes teared, just thinking of it. Just looking at Hugh’s khaki pants. On Sundays, he washed all six pairs and then hung them around the basement on hangers, on water pipes. There they swayed, drying from the cuffs up. Sometimes, on Sunday evening, he would wear a pair with damp pockets, slight detergent odor rising from his crotch. “Moist,” he said now to Stacy, of his pants, of her eyes. “I hate that word.”

  “I’m going to use it in class next week, just to torment you,” she said. “‘The moist weather made the skin of Harvey McFarvey moisten like he was covered in moisturizer.’”

  “I’m going to put ‘cacophony’ in again.”

  Stacy covered her ears and chanted “lalalalala” against her least favorite word.

  Hugh’s subject, in both the poetry and the fiction class, was drowning. A fear of it, and also just a lot of water imagery, unbreathable atmospheres, and the weird simple baffling disappearance of a boy in still black water. He’d disappeared at dusk. Setting like the sun, silently into the lake. Like an illusionist. Like a miracle in reverse.

  This better not be about Jesus, wrote Ms. Fox. Her comments in the margins were interesting to Hugh, as they seemed to reflect her personality. She was sarcastic and had a short attention span. She had been living in Wichita only four months and didn’t get it. Also, she was tired of teaching creative writing. Oh, please indicated this. When Hugh described his brother’s (his protagonist’s father’s) disappearance into a lake as “like a cheap magic trick,” Ms. Fox responded with Fresh! The exclamation mark made Hugh smile. That was good, both pleasing Ms. Fox and being able to smile about his disappearing drowner. He would write his way out of that old trouble. Then some other characters dragged the lake and didn’t find the body. Not credible, penned Ms. Fox, a sloppy circle-and-slash drawn around the paragraph. Well, OK. But it had really happened. Yet Hugh had seen how ineffectual that defense was in Advanced Creative Writing, Prose, and knew not to mention that fact. She’d be all over that.

  Hugh had been at the lake when Hamish had drowned. It had been his first (and last) camping trip with his older brother and his friends. They’d gone every year just before school started; when Hugh had started high school, he’d been invited to join them. Hamish was to head back to college within a few days. Instead, he’d walked into the lake. It was Hugh who’d driven the car home, after, in the full-blown dark of midnight. Did his brother walk in on purpose? Yes, said his arms, thrust cross-like in a T. It was the walking out—the failure of the return journey—that had always been a question mark. For hours, Ham’s friends and his little brother Hugh had waded, swum, yelled, and floundered. Fourteen years old, with no real experience behind the wheel, Hugh had insisted on driving them home. He’d been the only one who hadn’t been drinking, smoking pot, inhaling cocaine, and coming down from the same in the subsequent hours. He’d been stunned to discover that camping was, mostly, about intoxication. His sisters might have been proud of his tearful, raging, sober insistence on being the driver: back then, Hugh had been proud of it.

  Now he could hardly recall that terrible trip, the highway a series of yellow lines he’d watched without blinking, devoured by the car hood, trucks roaring past angrily, rocking the vehicle, his brother’s friends chattering and sobbing, Hugh recoiling against the fact of having left his brother behind. Betrayal: it had overwhelmed him for years, a hot sensation of shame, his failure.

  Later, he’d come to believe Hamish had killed himself; he and his mother had agreed on this point. They had also agreed not to tell Hugh’s father or sisters what they thought, absorbing the dark belief as if to prevent the spread of infection, the infection of despair. Nonetheless, the family had been altered by Ham’s death: before, they’d thought themselves lucky, and after, they’d realized they were, at best, ordinary and, at worst, cursed.

  When they sat around the se
minar table reading their work aloud, Ms. Fox placed her elbows on the surface and then rested her face in her palms. This made her expression harder to read. Everything on her face was squashed into a sort of grin (grimace?) like a leftover jack-o’-lantern. She could be thinking anything, inside that mashed face. Hugh would try to practice this at home. It could be useful to be inscrutable like that. Right out in public. A face that could be smiling, smirking, or smoldering. Rotting, he noted, of the pumpkin comparison.

  Stacy’s story was told from the point of view of a dog.

  “What, now you’re Tolstoy?” said Ms. Fox. Hugh liked hearing Bozo’s (Boris’s) take on Stacy’s (Laura’s) life. Two of the three “small humanoids” in the house treated Boris kindly, but the third, the middle little biped, the only boy, was very unkind. He often experimented on Boris’s body with pushpins or markers. He fed Boris suspicious concoctions, the ingredients of which were not all necessarily edible. For this and other reasons, Boris was brought along with his owner whenever Laura went out and about in her “quick-moving scary thing.” This was more fraught in the “time of panting.”

  “‘Time of panting’?” interrupted Ms. Fox. “Like being in heat? I thought Boris was a boy dog?”

  “Summer,” explained Stacy, blinking like an owl behind her round reading glasses. She had a strong reading-aloud voice; at one time, she’d thought she might make a fine newscaster, but somebody over in the Communications Department had disabused her of that notion.

  Ms. Fox eased her cheeks back into her hands. “Proceed.”

  The seizures confused everyone except Hugh. He thought Stacy had done a good job describing the sensation of having a seizure from the point of view of the poor frightened dog having one, including a kind of hilarious interpretation of the pill that had to be inserted in the dog’s anus so as to calm him. She was sensitive, he thought, and wasn’t that a requirement for creative writing? He told her so in the car after class in between kisses.

  Stacy had ended up in tears. This was a risk of workshop, Hugh had discovered. The class members themselves, with the exception of the two punk girls, had been very kind. It was Ms. Fox who had brought on the tears. Apparently the enthusiasm of the students—all but the high school girls had declared that they’d happily read a whole novel told from this dog’s point of view, so charmed were they by it—had been too much for her to bear. “I cannot help you with puppy lit,” she’d finally said. “I have no expertise in sentimentality or soft-focus!”

  That was why Stacy and Hugh were skipping class tonight. He’d brought Bozo a gift, one of the clay bowls he’d thrown last year during his ceramics class. He had a large collection, occupying their lumpen positions in the cupboard. Dog bowls, he saw. All last semester he’d been preparing for a dog.

  The hippies had adopted a new one recently, too, and they didn’t take very good care of it. Waffle had told him that the dog was part coyote, which certainly looked to be true. But maybe that was only an excuse for their not feeding it enough? More than anything, it looked hungry. Unhappily so. It stalked around like a cheetah, suspicious and jumpy. It had grown extra fur in anticipation of winter. The hippies didn’t believe in fences, so the dog was at large all day. Hugh had seen Animal Control prowling along the street more than once, but the animal was wily, perhaps endowed with some native ability to blend in, become camouflaged and invisible when its enemies appeared.

  “We can’t go to a bar,” Stacy said in the parking lot.

  “We can go to my house,” Hugh offered shyly. “It doesn’t smell like a bar.” What did it smell like, anyway? Old people? Since his mother’s death three years ago Hugh had rarely made his bed. When had he last changed the sheets? Would those cupboard moths bother Stacy? And what, exactly, was she just now saying?

  She was saying she would love to come to his house.

  “I’ll lead,” he said, and climbed into his truck. They had not had sex, and they were going to. He wished he’d already drunk a drink so that this information wouldn’t scare him so. It had been fine with Hugh not to have sex; he’d wanted to, but a phrase had been running through his head that stopped him short of making a request of her: another man’s wife. She was Stacy, first and foremost, with her half-moon scar and her too-tight dress clothes and her ready laugh and squinted expression as she listened to what he said, but she was also that other thing: another man’s wife. At night, when he was drifting off, happily thinking of her, the phrase would come in like an arrow through a window, an arrow with a message on its sharp tip that wanged into the wall and vibrated there, forcing his eyes to slap open and his happiness to flee: another man’s wife, the message read.

  Well, tonight he was going to sleep with another man’s wife.

  But that was not what transpired. Instead, Bozo had a massive seizure while left alone in the kitchen on the other side of the closed door (he wouldn’t stay off the bed, and there simply wasn’t room for the three of them, Bozo mistaking foreplay for roughhousing). The noise was tremendous, as if a far larger creature had fallen over, rattling the oven door. Stacy leapt naked from the bed, knowing at once what she’d heard. Again, the rifling through the purse, bouncing on her bare feet, this time locating the pills. “Hold him?” she requested of naked Hugh, who’d followed. He found himself squatting with the dog’s gnashing teeth uncomfortably near his exposed privates, while Stacy lifted Bozo’s tail to adroitly insert the pill.

  Hugh was surprised how arousing that was.

  “He’s gonna go down pretty fast,” she warned, standing to wash her hands, gazing with stricken eyes at Hugh and her monstrous pet. Hugh held the dog’s shuddering shoulders at arm’s length, registering the uncontrollable spasms rocking Bozo. “Just watch. Poor ting.” Sure enough, the beast fell, splayed flat like a bear rug, his mouth agape, tongue sideways out of it, shuddering still but no longer rigid.

  “I like this linoleum,” Stacy noted, joining Hugh on the floor. “Ooh, it’s a little chilly on the botto, huh?”

  “Original,” Hugh told her. “There’s probably nice wood underneath.”

  “Good colors.”

  “I used to race my Matchbox cars along here. This yellow line was the lane divider. My poor mom, trying to cook with me underfoot.” Hugh stared at Stacy’s freckled breasts while stroking Bozo’s head, their hands running over one another’s, grabbing for a moment, letting go, back in the dog’s fur. Maybe it was because she had children that Stacy was so playful. Although that hadn’t turned his sisters playful, anything but, actually. Hugh toyed with the passed-out dog’s tongue, putting it through the front teeth so that the animal had the aspect of intelligence, alert as Lassie, pondering a point. When he moved it, to hang out the side of the jaw, the dog looked dumb, goofy and drunk as a cartoon. All from the position of the tongue. Stacy laughed, then cried. “Please God, don’t let this one die,” she begged. “They’re always dying on me! I have terrible luck. I have to tell you a secret, Hugh.”

  He prepared to hear that she did not, in fact, wish to make love with him. That she had somehow engineered this seizure to interrupt them. He bowed his head. “Go.”

  “This isn’t the original Bozo,” she whispered, as if the dog himself might not know the fact. “The original Bozo got run over at an intersection when I opened the door to pull in my coattail.”

  “That sounds terrible.”

  “It was! He just jumped right out and got hit by a van, right in front of me, it was awful! And the van driver was so mean to me, just yelling and yelling about how irresponsible I was, who needs that? Anyhow, I couldn’t stand to tell my kids, so I just went and got a new Bozo. I mean, that’s the kind of thing you do with pets, right? I mean, before it was only gerbils or goldfish. But why not dogs? And the breeder still had his brother, thank the Lord, but to be honest I think this second Bozo was kind of a reject, maybe he’s a little retarded? It took my husband a week to figure out what was different.”

  “You’re doing the best you can, Stacy. Don’t beat yo
urself up.” These phrases, which in general disappointed Hugh, seemed to be de rigueur at this moment, terribly useful. “Do you think faux Bozo would mind sharing his Valium?”

  “Oh no, he’s got plenty, take two.” Stacy shook out two of the yellow tablets. “Maybe I’ll have one? For my nerves?” They swallowed their pills. “Bozo has this one great trick,” she said. “Next time, let’s go to McDonald’s and I’ll show you, he can take a hamburger into his mouth, the whole thing, and chew, chew, chew, and then send out the lettuce, untouched. Touched.” She corrected herself. “But intact. Like a wrinkled dollar rejected from a Coke machine. Bozo.” She sighed, running a finger along his gums. “Ah, for the love of monkeys, what am I gonna do?”

  Next time, Hugh thought dreamily.

  In his sleep, the dog suddenly threw his head up and sneezed, a sodden mess on their bare laps, his tongue now gripped between his teeth.

  “Bless you,” Hugh said automatically. Stacy clutched at his arm, her large pale breasts squashed against him, her hair on his shoulder.

  “I love you, Hugh,” she said, miserable. “I truly do.”

  Hugh mumbled his line into her forehead; it seemed a rule, was certainly a reflex, and, most important, in this instance it was true: he loved Stacy. A hole opened in Hugh’s chest when he said those words, a place like a wound he’d decided to inflict upon himself, as if he’d suddenly drawn a target on his breastbone and invited the arrows to fly.

  He loaded the sedated dog into her car, then stood at the driver’s door unwilling to let her climb in and go away. That man she lived with suddenly enraged him. He wasn’t used to being enraged. Its heat distracted him, foreign, novel, a companion to the vulnerability that had arrived with his declaration of love. He felt nearly proud of his rage, as if he might need to demonstrate it. How would that happen? How had love led him to rage? How had the dog led to love? The equation was mysterious. The sick dog equaled a clenched fist. A rock plunged through a window. That, too.