by David Gates
But where the bloody hell was the clarinet? Not on the table where I’ve taken to dumping stuff. Not in the coat closet where I used to put it. Not among the clutter on the floor. Bedroom closet, for some reason? Then of course it hit me: You left the thing in the goddamn bar, for Christ’s sake. Fucking J. M. Barrie’s, whatever it was. Third Avenue and something. I remembered sticking the case under the table, and I must’ve just up and walked out of there without it. Not hammered, by any means, but a decent buzz. Oh, Jesus, and marijuana in there, too. My name and address on the little card hanging off the handle.
Phone book. Except what was the goddamn name? Call Jane and ask? Right. Eight-thirty in the morning anyway; place wouldn’t open up until lunchtime. Great. Well, this day was certainly shaping up. Christ, if only I’d left when Jane did instead of—well, no use. What I’d told her was, I hadn’t had any dinner and I wanted to get a burger or something before the kitchen closed. What I’d told myself was, another Jack Daniel’s wouldn’t hurt a bit. Moreover, since we were both going downtown, I would’ve had to offer to drop her, in the cab I meant her to think I’d be taking. And moreover: my staying behind put her on notice that she was in this alone.
So the thing to do now was just get in to work. Jesus, five hundred dollars right down the toilet. I put on my overcoat, patted the pockets: the right-hand pocket was soft and lumpy, the left-hand pocket hard and flat. Terrific. So I hadn’t lost either my five-dollar street gloves (What, lost your mittens? You naughty kittens!) or my Portable Blake, a gift from Jane. Back when love was young, a few months ago. I didn’t have the heart to tell her I had an old Laurel edition kicking around, with everything anybody would reasonably want to read. The heart: ha.
Out on the street it seemed even colder than last night: sky clear blue, wind stinging. My breath made steam and my face was stiff and numb before I even got to the corner. At the bottom of the subway stairs, out of the wind, I stopped and pawed back my frayed left coat sleeve with my gloved right hand: quarter to nine. The usual line at the token booth, people looking over their shoulders toward the platform, huffing out their breath (no steam down here in the human-heated air), as an old geezer at the window took his sweet time over some bullshit with the token clerk involving a senior-citizen pass or whatever the hell it was. I felt smug breezing by them with my little store—three tokens left from the ten I’d bought on Wednesday—then realized that of course the fuckers count on that, on people like me thinking they’re better than the down-and-outs who can only buy one or two at a time. They use it to divide us. Which doesn’t sound so reasonable now that I write it down.
On the platform, people were packed shoulder to shoulder, meaning either a train coming any second or trouble on the line. I pushed through the turnstile, hearing in my head, as usual, Drrrop the coin right into the slot/You gotta hear somethin’ that’s really hot. Plus I have this thing where I always have to get through without the turnstile touching my ass when it comes around. I assume my unconscious thinks the spokes are dicks. Dicks going at your ass and another dick (the clarinet) in your mouth. No wonder you have trouble with women. Though I suppose I should cut myself some slack about the clarinet, since just about every other instrument is also a dick, no? I mean, the electric guitar is a well-known dick. The real interpretive problem this morning wasn’t why I liked sticking a clarinet in my mouth, but why I had, in effect, thrown it away. Now, generally, leaving something behind someplace means either (a) you wanted to get rid of it or (b) you didn’t want to go. I’d guess (a) over (b): after Billie Holiday they’d started Ella Fitzgerald, and I was only too glad to clear out of there. Okay, so let’s agree that the clarinet is a dick: then you get something like Wants to abandon his responsibilities as a man. Like I say, what don’t I know.
I’ll give you an absolutely textbook instance of (b) that leaps to mind, the one where you don’t want to go and what you leave behind is a stand-in for yourself. This happened the time my brother Miller came to New York for MLA with that graduate student. Alix. Big hair and tight jeans, but ultra-large glasses denoting seriousness: you could see why Miller bought the package. Miller was the charismatic Lacanian of his department; I was the dead-ender who had cannily crossed over into administration to become a rising young hack. We brought them out to Pennsylvania for the weekend, and it was painful to listen to him on the phone with Felice and the kids back in Indiana. After Miller got us stoned, this Alix and I locked eyes a couple of times, which I hoped Laura didn’t notice. Which was all that happened. At any rate, when Laura and I and Carrie (she was three) came out again the following weekend, I was straightening up the spare room and found a copy of Snow White (Donald Barthelme’s, I mean) with Alix’s name inside. The old paperback with the naked girl on the cover whose buttocks had been blurred for decency, so naturally your eyes went right to the blur. On this copy, somebody had recloven the cleft in fine-point felt-tip. Ah so, I thought. But I was a faithful husband then. That copy of Snow White is on my shelf right now, next to The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, which I might as well stop kidding myself I’m ever going to read. The Snow White Laura ended up with, in the Division of the Things, had been mine.
And since we’re on the subject, there’s one other story that goes with this Alix. One of those nights when they were out at the farm, it got to be Carrie’s bedtime and Laura was holding her in the wicker armchair, about to read The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin. “Oh, Laura, could I?” said Alix. She’d plunked down on the couch between me and Miller. “That is just such a great book. It’s like—boundaries.”
“You’d have to ask Carrie,” Laura said. Which I thought was fucking brilliant. We’d had drinks before dinner and wine with. (House rule: the dope came out only after beddy-bye.)
“Carrie?” said Alix. “Would you let me read Squirrel Nutkin to you? That’s about my favorite book.”
“No, I want Daddy to,” Carrie said.
“You want me to?” I said. “Your mom’s already got you.”
“I want you to get me.”
Laura rested her cheek against the top of Carrie’s head, closed her eyes, smiled and said, “Loves her daddy.”
“Pretty mutual,” I said. I got up off the couch, knelt by the wicker chair and put my arms around the both of them, and just then old Alix could go fuck herself, her and her nice ass and her little eye games.
Alix, anyway. At some point one stopped hearing about her from Miller, and that was all she wrote for Alix. Call her a distant early warning. It was about a year later that Mickey crossed my path. Michelle, really: she’d renamed herself at age ten because the Beatles song infuriated her. One suspects that if it hadn’t been Mickey it would’ve been somebody else, but at the time being with her seemed worth—oh, boring. To cut a long story short: there my wife and daughter are, in Greenfield, Massachusetts, and here I am.
I walked to the far downtown end of the platform where the crowd thinned out some, though even here I could’ve reached out and touched: two probable secretaries, white, each pretty enough to go to bed with once; a muttering black man, my age, whose checked pants were trodden ragged at his heels; a black teenager with a Raiders cap and a Triple F.A.T. Goose down coat. To assume that such a coat must have been bought with drug money was unworthy of me, a good man. I smelled human shit, glanced around, spotted the pile in the corner where the big trash bin met the wall. A residuum of modesty? Or a reversion to wary animality, shitting in a spot where you couldn’t be blindsided? I stood in the stink and looked back up the platform at them all. Some read newspapers, others fat paperbacks. A few ventured to the edge and peered past me into the tunnel. But most of them watched others, looking away when the others saw. I took out The Portable Blake. Holding it up to read meant exposing my fraying cuffs. But I’d be straphanging any minute now, so what the fuck. And what the fuck anyway. I needed (meaning wanted) something between me and all of them. How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, I read, Is an immense world o
f delight, clos’d by your senses five? Like I could give a shit. Eventually a train came along and took us all in. Shut its doors with that phoebe sound and brought each of us to where we did what we had to do, here in New York City.
I was going to leave it at that because I liked the cadence and the way it came around again to the phoebe thing. But you can’t have all these loose ends. Did she go ahead with the abortion? Did he ever get his clarinet back? Or, I mean, you can, but. Plus, there are these two other moments I want to set down before I forget them. Or set down in hopes of forgetting them, whichever. Same principle as sticking stuff on a floppy that you don’t want cluttering up your hard drive, if that’s not too techno a model for that immense world of delight, the human mind.
Here’s a short one. This is the first time Jane and I lay face-to-face. She runs a hand down my spine, then back up again to cup my shoulder blade in her palm, as if it were a breast, and says, “This is probably really a mistake. But I just really want to.”
“I know,” I say. Question remains: Why does she want to? Is it simply that being nonstandard has fucked up her self-esteem? Is it dismissive to add that her father deserted the family when she was twelve? The implication being …
“Oh, bullshit,” she says. “You don’t know the first thing. You are such a fake. Will you just please relax and make love to me?”
Did I give myself a whore’s bath before? Get hammered after? Can’t say. That other moment I wanted to put here is the same way: nothing before, nothing after. Also in bed, I guess a couple of weeks later.
She says, “I’m sorry I told you that thing.”
“Thing,” say.
“About the coke,” she says. “I shouldn’t have told you.”
“What am I going to do, have him arrested?”
“What I mean is, it’s his business,” she says. “And possibly my business. But it isn’t anything you have to know.”
“I care about you,” I say. “I want to know what your life is like.”
She rolls her head from side to side on the pillow. “Uh-uh,” she says. “You’re not my husband. If we even lose track of that—I don’t know, forget it, it’s stupid to even talk about ethics in a situation like this.” She flops her naked body across me facedown, to stretch for her backpack on the floor (her buttocks, for all her nonstandardness, are more perfect than any I’m likely to touch again in this life), and comes back up with her hairbrush. She flicks two brisk strokes at her left temple, then flings the brush backhand against the wall. My wall. My landlord’s wall. “This is so stupid,” she says. “I don’t know what integrity I think I’m trying to keep up. Why don’t you hit me?”
“You’re doing enough of a job on yourself,” I say. I look at the wall. A tiny mark that might have been there already. “I wish we could go away,” I say. “And just not come back.”
“Please,” she says. “This is the one thing I promised myself. Not to get into discussions about how I’m going to leave Jonathan and yat-ta-dat-ta-da. If this is going to be about sitting around saying I wish this and I wish that, it’s like forget it, okay?” She gives me a quick, wide smile—the kind of facial cue an ape might use to signal submission. But there is no submission.
Now, maybe that right there is the cadence you want: But there is no submission. Over and out. God knows it’s cold enough.
But I still haven’t told how it all came out. After that we can worry about cadences. So under Loose Ends let’s put (a) the clarinet and (b) Jane’s little problem. (You want cold? Now that’s cold.) Oddly enough, I did get the clarinet back. What happened was, I took the subway up at lunchtime, found the place, and sure enough: guy had it stashed behind the bar. He asked if I had i.d. and I thought, Well, this is where you get busted, but what was I going to do? I showed him my driver’s license, he looked at the name tag and handed me the case. I opened it up, nodded when I saw all the pieces of the clarinet in their molded recesses, lifted out the bell and looked underneath. The joint was gone. The guy behind the bar had a white apron, clean except for a brown-red stain shaped like Mississippi. His blond hair was combed straight back. “Something missing?” he said. One more confrontation I wasn’t up to.
Which brings us, by commodious vicus of recirculation—hey, the fun never stops—to (b). So here’s the thing that happened today. Monday. No need to backtrack and give a blow-by-blow of the whole weekend: it got over with. Phone didn’t ring once. Which really isn’t a complaint. It wasn’t until late this afternoon that I finally heard from Jane.
“I’m sorry to be bothering you at work,” she said.
“What are you talking about,” I said. “How are you? What’s going on?”
She said, “I just wanted to tell you that you don’t have anything to worry about if you were worried. I got my period.”
“Thank God,” I said. I fetched a sigh, too, but got my hand over the phone in time to muffle it. “That’s really good,” I said. “I was worried, to tell you the truth. That would’ve been just—”
“And,” she said, “I also wanted to tell you. I don’t think I’m going to be seeing you anymore, okay? So. It’s like, I’ll probably, we’ll probably run into each other around school and everything, but I really don’t want to talk to you, like have a conversation with you. And I don’t want you to call me. Okay?”
“Look,” I said—but as I said “Look” she said “ ’Bye” and hung up. I hung up too and said “Okay” out loud. I took a deep breath and let it out. Steady now.
I looked around and there it all was: file cabinets, books on shelves, cloth wall hanging of a vulpine Elvis in white jumpsuit, a lei around his neck. Camp fun from long ago, a gift from Laura, and what it was still doing up I couldn’t imagine. Picture of Carrie, in stand-up Plexiglas, smiling with all her hurt radiance, holding a kitten whose name I knew to be Mittens. As in What, lost your. I took another breath, let it out. Okay. See, the temptation would be to dwell on the possibility that she was lying about her period and had taken steps on her own. For all I know, she was calling from the pay phone at some clinic. And had been counting on me to see through her bullshit in the nick of time.
VIGIL
It was the woman doctor who finally came out and told us we could go in. She said Bonnie came through the surgery fine, as far as they could tell, and not to be shocked when we saw her. We followed the doctor into the intensive care and over to a bed with an IV bag hanging over it. Bonnie lay flat on her back, in a white gown with short sleeves; they’d taped the needle end of the tubing to the back of her hand, and they had the hand strapped to the side rail in case she tried to move. But she wasn’t moving: you had to look close to see her chest rise and fall. She had another tube up her nose, the whole top of her head was wrapped in bandages and her face was so swollen that she looked the way she had as a baby.
I picked up her other hand, stroked it and held it. The hand didn’t do anything back. I said, “Daddy’s here, honey. You’re going to be fine.” Nothing.
Dave Senior wouldn’t come near the bed. Being her husband, it must’ve been even harder on him. He turned to the doctor and said, “This looks great. When the hell are you going to know what’s going on?”
The doctor put up a hand, like she was making to guard herself. “Not before tomorrow,” she said. “At the earliest.” She was a small woman, pretty enough, with lines at the corners of her eyes and dark circles. To me, she seemed young for a doctor—she might’ve been forty—but for her I suppose it was a different story. I know when I was forty, I felt like an old man. Sylvia had run off to Phoenix with her boss and left it up to Bonnie either to go out there or to stay with me in Clinton. A teenage girl, with her school and all her friends? What do you imagine she’s going to choose? So I had Bonnie to look after and the house to try to keep up, all the while putting in ten, fifteen hours a week overtime so I could set something aside for her college. But that’s years and years ago now. I retired, sold the house and bought my little place up in Shelburne Falls.
And Bonnie finally settled down and married Dave; they live over in Madison, not ten minutes from where we lived in Clinton. Sylvia and I will talk a couple times a year by phone, and I’ll even chat with Harold if he happens to pick up. Hell, by now they’ve been married longer than we were. She claims to have cut way back on her drinking, which I think was half her problem. And I really am an old man now, though Bonnie says seventy-two’s not old anymore. I don’t feel old these days. I’m healthy (knock wood), I keep active and I’m not strapped for money. That’s my good way of looking at it.
I left Dave in there with Bonnie and went back to the waiting room to use the pay phone. I’d managed to put off calling Sylvia for a whole day, just about. In the first place, Dave couldn’t even get hold of me until a couple hours after he got word of the accident. (I’d been over trying to get Scotty Williams’s ArcticCat running so he could put it in the paper; he hasn’t been well the last year or so.) Then the drive down delayed things another couple hours. I meant to make the call as soon as I got to the hospital, but I found out they still had some tests to do, and by the time they finished up it was after midnight. Only ten o’clock Sylvia’s time, but she would’ve been up the whole night worrying. I could’ve called this morning, but they started getting Bonnie ready at seven and I wasn’t about to wake Sylvia up out of a dead sleep at five a.m. Why Dave Senior left it for me to pass the word to his mother-in-law is another question.
So at least now I wouldn’t be calling with all bad news, but it scared me to think what a chance I’d been taking. Imagine having to call to say Bonnie was gone—no preparation, nothing. I waited for a colored man to get done with the phone and tried not to listen—something about a transfusion. Then he went back and sat with his wife. It being a workday, we were the only ones in the waiting room. They were a nice-appearing couple, both of them starting to get some white hairs. She would look at the floor, then up at the clock. He kept hold of her hand.
