The Wonders of the Invisible World

by David Gates

  Acclaim for DAVID GATES’s

  THE WONDERS OF THE INVISIBLE WORLD

  “Gates can be very funny … but mostly he is concerned with creating characters you haven’t met in fiction before, getting just right the words they use to disengagedly engage their women and their friends and even their inner selves.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Reminiscent of Kundera.… Reading these stories is, by way of a compliment, like working out in preparation for a crisis.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Gates is onto a way of making fiction that matters.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “The Wonders of the Invisible World collects marvelously true-to-life tales of characters undone.”

  —Vanity Fair

  “As one reads these painful, mesmerizing stories, one observes an intelligent and sensitive author.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Gates is like John Updike without God.”

  —Newsday

  “Gates writes with savage wit and a deep sense of the human urge to survive.”

  —The Hartford Courant

  “Gates’s talents are undeniable: His sentences zing, his details are well chosen, and his characters are disturbingly true to life.”

  —The Washington Times

  “Gates packs his stories with lively details and nimbly inhabits a wide range of voices.”

  —Time Out New York

  DAVID GATES

  THE WONDERS OF THE INVISIBLE WORLD

  A staff writer for Newsweek, David Gates lives in Manhattan and in Granville, New York. These stories have been published in Esquire, GQ, Grand Street, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories.

  Also by DAVID GATES

  Jernigan

  Preston Falls

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, APRIL 2000

  Copyright © 1999 by David Gates

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1999.

  Some of these stories first appeared, in slightly different form, in the following publications: “The Bad Thing” in Esquire; “Beating” and “The Wonders of the Invisible World” in GQ; “The Mail Lady” in Grand Street; “A Wronged Husband” in Ploughshares; “The Intruder” in TriQuarterly. A portion of the story “The Vigil” first appeared in the on-line magazine Atlantic Unbound.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows: Gates, David, [date]

  The wonders of the invisible world : stories / by David Gates. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. United States—Social life and customs—20th century—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PS3557.A87W6 1999

  813’54—dc21 99-18497

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76590-1

  Author photograph © Marion Ettlinger

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  My thanks to Gary Fisketjon, for his care, energy, taste and judgment.

  Also to Will Blythe, Candy Gianetti, Reg Gibbons, Rob Grover, Sloan Harris, Jeff Jackson, Elizabeth Kaye, Tom Mallon, Helen Rogan, Michele Scarff and Denise Shannon.

  To Amanda Urban.

  To Cathleen McGuigan and my other editors at Newsweek.

  To the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for its generous support.

  And to Susan and Kate.

  For he said unto him,

  Come out of the man, thou unclean spirit.

  And he asked him, What is thy name?

  And he answered, saying,

  My name is Legion: for we are many.

  —Mark 5:8–9

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  The Bad Thing

  Star Baby

  The Wonders of the Invisible World

  Vigil

  Beating

  The Intruder

  The Crazy Thought

  A Wronged Husband

  Saturn

  The Mail Lady

  THE BAD THING

  He has never hit me, and only once or twice in our two years has he raised his voice in anger. Even in bed Steven is gentle. To a fault. Why, then, am I wary of him? Obvious. Well, so if you’re wary of him, what are you doing here? Also obvious. For one thing, I have his baby inside me.

  Ye gods, his baby. I think of it that way because he and Marilyn never had children, and what other chance is he going to get? But it’s not his baby, of course, nor mine. The baby is its own baby. I think of it as a girl, because the idea of a tiny man inside me is, is, is what? Repulsive, I was going to say, though sometimes I think, A little man, yes, squeezed out into the world to do my will. But at other times I pray, Dear God, if You’ve made it a boy, go back, in Your time-scrunching omnipotence, and re-do the instant of its conception. Not forgetting to add, If it be Thy will. You know, the kind of thing God does all the time, going back and changing what His will is.

  So I’m trying to take it as it comes; even that seems wildly ambitious. Two days ago, after Steven had finished working and I’d come to a stopping place, we climbed the hill up behind Carl’s house until we reached the power line. Steven put on his skis, I put on the snowshoes he bought me. I’m not to ski anymore, until after. Another thing I’m not to do is address Carl Porter as Carl; Steven sees it as a class thing. Slipping along by my side, he praised my walking in the snowshoes. “Big deal,” I said. “You put one foot in front of the other.” “Ah, but that,” he said, raising his index finger, “is ofttimes the hardest lesson of all.” Big joke with Steven is to intone fake profundities, raising his index finger to make sure you see he’s kidding. I thought, Right, I’m learning that. Being married to you.

  Oh, I know, bad. You should be reaching out to him.

  Been tried, honey.

  Like our first night in this house. We’d both learned—not from each other; we’ve both been around the block—that the big moments you plan never work, so we decided against the French restaurant two towns over with the forty-dollar prix fixe dinner, and went to the diner on 28. We took a booth, ordered pancakes and sausage and sat waiting for the modest magic by which the everyday becomes precious. Steven flipped page after page of jukebox selections, fingering the little metal tabs at the bottom. The country songs in green. Then he flipped back through in the other direction.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Zip. Unless you want to hear fucking Randy Travis.”

  By this I understood that I was not to want to hear Randy Travis.

  I put a hand on his. “Something’s worrying you,” I said.

  “Don’t,” he said, pulling his hand out from under. I saw tears come up and fill his eyes.

  “What?” I said. “Talk to me.”

  He shook his head. “You’ve heard the same shit forty-eight times,” he said. “Maybe the pills will help.”

  Forty-eight was one of his numbers I hadn’t heard before. Usually they were round and overwhelming, like fifty thousand (I’ve done fifty thousand of these fucking children’s books) or ten million (Ten million fucking fax machines at fucking J&R, and I get the one that craps out). Afterward
I thought about it. Forty-eight was how old he’d be in June. When his first child would be born. Oh, but Steven was such a complex man; could it possibly be that simple? One thing that might help: to get my contempt under control. Since he doesn’t seem to be doing much about his. Now that would be a mood drug I could get behind.

  We moved up here for the beauty and the quiet, and so we’d each have a workroom. It’s all so postindustrial: no need anymore to be bodily on Lexington Avenue from ten to six. Up here I’d be able to take my job lightly and my work seriously—as seriously as Steven takes his. But needless to say.

  Yesterday we had to go to Oneonta for groceries. It had started snowing in the morning; when we got back, it was still coming down and we couldn’t get up the driveway. He insisted on trying to shovel—after making three trips all the way up to the house with the stuff, which he wouldn’t let me help with. I told him forget it, come inside, we’ll drink tea and get snowed in. Thinking, actually, of some Rémy in the tea—what he’s taking is one of the new anything-goes antidepressants—and stretching out by the pellet stove, our feet together under the shiny maroon comforter. And so on. We’ll get Carl to plow us out in the morning, I said. He said I treated the locals like old family retainers. Which was so uncalled-for when for once I was trying to take some care of him. He was already pale and sweating, and his chest was heaving. I went into the bathroom and cried, then washed my face. When he came in, looking even worse, he found me sipping tea (with Rémy) and reading Mirabella. Or, rather, staring at the pages and feeling put-upon because now that I’d cut myself out of the loop, I would never design anything but monthly newsletters and annual reports. Bitch, I’m sure he thought, and clomped upstairs.

  When it got dark, I opened a can of soup. Then I stopped bothering with the tea and drank myself pretty nearly to sleep. Just managed to get up the stairs. Then woke up, of course, at two in the morning, mouth dry, head killing me. I went to the bathroom to pee and get a drink of water and some aspirin, and heard the music still going in Steven’s workroom—his damn Louis Armstrong—and saw a line of golden light along the bottom of his door. Inside was the Kingdom of Art, from which I’d been exiled. I crept back to bed like a dirty animal.

  Sneaking around a dark house at night: just like old times.

  When I was twenty-two, my boyfriend and I shared a big old farmhouse in Rhode Island with his best friend and the best friend’s girlfriend, and once a week or so I would leave Dalton in bed and make my way down the creaky stairs to find Tod waiting on the sofa. He would be drunk, having got Kathleen drunk enough to put her to sleep, and not gentle with me; I would have put Dalton to sleep by fucking him as sweetly as I knew how. More sweetly than I know how anymore. But saving my orgasm for Tod. Knowing it was of no value to him, except as proof that he could make me do it when Dalton couldn’t. Though of course Dalton could. And I didn’t always save it.

  It started in the summer, one morning when Tod and I were alone in the house. He asked if I wanted coffee, then ran his index finger down my bare arm (me in that blue sundress with the yellow flowers, him in blue jeans and a T-shirt I couldn’t imagine how he kept so white) and said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if we put the horns on Dalton?” The horns. What more did I need to know? And yet. I heard two voices in my head, talking at me as I stood there in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room: my own voice saying This is bad for you and a man’s voice saying Do what I say. I narrowed my eyes, trying to hear which was right, and I could picture myself as Tod saw me, looking intense and tempted. This is a beautiful boy, said another voice, a voice that wished me ill, who knows how to touch you.

  Did I simply have bad character, or was I a strong young woman going after what she wanted and willing to pay the price? Though how strong were you really if you couldn’t, finally, get it? One thing I promised myself, I would never again let myself in for this kind of humiliation. When Tod finally dumped me, I did the one bit of bitchy damage I could: I said I’d always known the real romance was between him and Dalton. I hope he still hears me saying that in his head.

  It was a mistake to have shown Tod’s picture to Steven. At the time, I thought I was doing it to leave nothing unshared. But actually it must’ve been to put him on notice: that once I had been desired by a beautiful blond boy. Tod’s beauty was a means of convincing Steven that I was beautiful. (How fucked up is that?) I’m sure Steven thought it was more evidence of my bad taste, to have been attracted to the merely beautiful. As if it had never happened to him. Now, there’s another thing we were never going to do: marry a man who wasn’t on speaking terms with his own desires.

  I woke up again at seven and came down and fixed myself a tray with coffee and a bowl of Count Chocula. Steven loves the Grand Union in Oneonta—when we lived in the city he refused to shop in supermarkets—and every week he selects another brand of sugared-out kiddie cereal. “I was raised on fucking puffed rice,” he said the first time he placed a box of Cap’n Crunch in the cart. “This is a quiet man’s rebellion.” I don’t generally eat this stuff, but I had to get something in my stomach immediately. I brought the tray up to my workroom and turned on the computer. Out the window, I saw a white cloud issuing from the tailpipe of Carl Porter’s empty truck, so I picked up the phone. “You didn’t need to ask, Mrs. Sturdivant,” he said. “I meant to do you first thing.” Lovely man.

  Listening to his truck humming and rumbling as he plowed the driveway, I ate the cereal and looked over the pages I’d laid out yesterday, telling myself that one bowl of Count Chocula wasn’t so irresponsible; they probably spray the stuff with vitamins. And only then did it hit me what I’d done last night: got stinking drunk while four months pregnant. Four months: what did that mean in terms of how major a birth defect might be? Wouldn’t it be more major the earlier you did the bad thing? I pictured a bullet, fired at conception: deflect that bullet almost at the target and it would miss by only a little, but deflect it early on and it would veer off wide. Four months. That was less than halfway there. I slid from my chair to my knees and prayed, Dear God, since I did it without thinking, please don’t let it count. Just the kind of prayer God likes to hear. Oh, right, If it be Thy will. I listened down into my body to try to discern any damage, any change from yesterday. Nothing. Oh, God. Well, we just wouldn’t think about this. But what if Steven looked at the bottle? I remembered him saying, I want to make a baby with you. I know you must think I’ve said everything before to somebody else, but this is a first. A first. He actually said that.

  The thing to do was to hop in the car and go buy a pint of Rémy to get the level back up—put anything else in there and Steven would instantly taste something wrong—then hide the empty. But it was twenty miles to Oneonta, the nearest liquor store classy enough to stock the stuff. And it was seven-thirty in the morning.

  At nine-thirty I started down to make more coffee. Still another thing I wasn’t to do, drink more than a half cup a day, but I absolutely had to finish the last six pages this afternoon without fail, and I had nodded out staring at the screen. I was looking at this one page, trying to care whether or not the vertical picture should be moved to the right and the pullquote brought down to compensate, and then I seemed to be at a performance of Hamlet, I think it was—and I suppose it’s a rule with dreams that if you think it was, it was—and my dress was too tight on me and I wanted to go to the ladies’ room and let out the waist. All pretty obvious. But before going down the stairs I stopped and eased open the bedroom door with my fingertips. Steven, in pajamas, was clutching my pillow, his mouth gaping. His hair looked damp; he must’ve taken a shower before coming to bed. It made me sad that I’d never known him when his hair was all black. I tried to think what his life must be like—a first?—but I really couldn’t see that anything was so terrible. I’d never been able to take seriously enough the Central Tragedy, which was that he’d never become, I don’t know, Jackson Pollock or whoever he’d wanted to be when he was eighteen.

  Back in my wo
rkroom, I drank the fresh coffee and stared at that page. This was a simple decision. Which I still couldn’t make. I got up again and went down the hall to Steven’s workroom. So cold when I opened the door: the window wide open. He’d finished another illustration. How could I have thought one of my little moods would slow the march of his work? Last night’s production was a peasant family standing by a cottage. The cover from The Forest Is Crying was sandwiched in my cookbook stand, and he’d spattered paint on the Plexiglas. So that was where he’d gotten the woman peasant’s colorful costume; the man peasant and the little boy he’d put in brown shirts and trousers and clumpy boots. There was something familiar about the landscape, too. Then I spotted the Edward Hopper book on the floor. Aha: the thatched-roof cottage was that Mobil station, and the peasant family stood in place of the round-headed gas pumps. He’d done it well, what else was new. I’d said my piece about this new phase when he showed me the first one, for which he’d used a Currier & Ives print of a man knife-fighting a rearing grizzly. “Oh, please,” he said. “This is an hommage.” Learn a new word, Paula. Then, probably because he realized he was being a pompous ass, he went into one of his pompous-ass parodies. “Think of this bear,” he said, “not as a bear, but as Old Man Depression. The gallant mountain man? Yours truly.” He inclined his head. “And behind the tree here”—he pointed to a second man, who was aiming a gun at the bear—“Dr. Seibert and his magic bullet.” He’d only been taking the pills for a couple of days at this point. He gave his snorting laugh, the one that means I hate myself.

  Even with this fresh cold air, I smelled cigarette smoke. In the wastebasket, under a crumpled page of a sketch pad, I found butts, ashes and burned-out matches. I counted the butts. Sixteen. So he was back at it with a vengeance. How had I not picked up the smell off him? Ah: wet hair.