by David Gates
Down the driveway, beyond the mailbox, across the road, the land dipped down to the brook, then rose again to a grassy hillside, belonging to somebody—Paul must’ve said the name a hundred times—whose black-and-white cows stood in a complicated arrangement against the green. The phrase effictio portrait came into her head. Above the pasture, the wooded hilltop, a deeper green in which she already saw flecks of red; it was crazy to pretend she didn’t. Strange and terrible powers were available to us, no matter what her shrink had said, but in most cases you could wish and wish and wish—wish people dead, wish the leaves green again, wish your husband, your real husband, back in your arms and babies beyond number issuing from between your legs—while everything just stayed silent and inert, exactly as it was.
She stood up and went back inside. Her wildflowers lay on the kitchen counter; better get them in water. She lowered her palm above the remaining pie until she felt heat, then edged it back up, feeling for the boundary where the heat left off. Then she walked over to the table and touched the shotgun, still lying on top of its fake-leather case. She touched the stock, then the barrel; why should metal feel colder than wood? She couldn’t imagine an explanation that wasn’t mystical. At least touching this thing took away some of the awe. After all, it was just an object: its presence probably wouldn’t change things much, unless you allowed it to become an emblem of something. She sat down at the table and started lifting the beer cans, found one that was nearly full, examined the edge of the hole for cigarette traces, sniffed, took a sip. It was so quiet in here that her whole body jerked when the phone rang. She jumped up to get it, then sat back down and let it ring and ring and ring, thinking: As long as I don’t pick it up, it isn’t anybody.
A WRONGED HUSBAND
Half awake, pawing at the night table for The Book of Great Conversations, I knock the bottle onto the floor. The sound hangs there: a ringing part, a shattering part, a splashing part. I smell the gin. Fine. It can stay there until I feel like getting up and dealing with it. Nobody here to be scandalized, nobody to be protected. A mouse, I suppose, might scamper across and cut its dainty foot, but that’s the mouse’s lookout, no? I remember when we first moved in here, we felt sorry for them, darting along the countertop to cower, bright-eyed, beside the toaster. So tiny, so dear: couldn’t we all just live? It took a month for you to agree that something had to be done. But no D-Con. So, like what? I said. A resettlement program? “Well, couldn’t we?” you said. “Couldn’t we try?” And finally I went out and bought the Hav-a-Heart trap. Humane, enlightened. That was only last fall. Less than a year ago. As I remember it, we were all right then.
Kid noise through the open window. Sunday morning, quarter to eleven, already hot. I lift the sheet and shake it out to make it feel cool as it floats back down to rest on my legs. The coolness doesn’t last. I prop both pillows (yours and mine) together against the headboard, sit up, put on my prescription sunglasses and turn to the Great Conversation in which Shaw loses his temper when Chesterton calls him a Puritan. Shaw says Chesterton has no real self, no firm place to stand, and Chesterton calls Shaw a Puritan for thinking that was necessary. Trying to understand these ideas is waking me up. I put the book back on the night table—carefully, though now there’s no need—get out of bed, step around the glass (I can’t wholly avoid the gin puddle), go to the window and tug the shade to make it go up. Down in the street firemen have put a sprinkler cap on the hydrant—otherwise the Dominican kids just open it up and let it gush—and pencil-thick streams of water come arching out. A little boy stands at the edge of the widening pool, undecided.
But hang on: didn’t I park the car in that first space to the right of the hydrant? What’s there now is a rusted-out station wagon, cloudy plastic duct-taped over where the passenger window used to be. So now I know: they tow after a week of tickets. Well, fine, more power to ’em. Unless of course somebody stole the thing. In which case, also fine. But isn’t it weird. You were always the one who said it was insane to keep a car in New York. I was always the one who said I wanted the feeling I could get out.
And your suddenly having to go to D.C. (yes, well, supposedly) gave me a blame-free opportunity. Drive up to New Hampshire, get away from the heat and noise, spend some time with my brother. We hung out at the house mostly—Joey was still depressed about throwing his marriage away—though one afternoon we did get over into Vermont, to a used-book store run by a lady with cats. Joey beat her down on the price of some old compendium of myths he wanted for the engravings; to atone, I picked The Book of Great Conversations off the twenty-five-cent table and told her it came from the dollar table.
He called yesterday, speaking of Joey, to say he was doing a lot better. In case I’d been worried. I said I was doing a lot worse: that you had gone to live in Boston, that I hadn’t left the apartment for a week, hadn’t called work, didn’t know if I had a job anymore and, even if I did, couldn’t face going back and having to see Kate every day. I said I couldn’t sleep because of the car alarms and sirens. Kate, he said: refresh me. I refreshed him. Hm, he said. But the Kate thing was already over with, I said. Discussed. Worked through. Resolved. Hm, he said. Well, he said, as far as the job, they were probably just assuming I was taking two weeks instead of the one; if they were seriously upset, they would’ve called, no? He said he was sorry about your leaving, but guessed he’d seen it coming when we’d been up there at Christmas. What do you mean? I said. Why do you say that? Well, for one thing, he said, you never touched each other. He said, speaking as somebody who’d been through the same thing, that he knew I was going to come out of this stronger. Said at least in my case there were no children. Said maybe I could start seeing this Kate again. Joey. He runs off to the Outer Banks for a mad two-week interlude with his old used-to-be, she ends up going back to her husband (many tears), he comes home and Meg and the children are gone. And now he discovers there are no great new women in Peterborough, New Hampshire.
The night I arrived, in fact, he tried to talk me into getting back in the car and driving down to Boston to pick up college girls. Just as big as real women, he said, but stupider.
“Joey,” I said. “I just drove five hours.”
“So I’ll drive and you can sleep on the way down. Listen, I got a teensy thing of coke left. And we can absolutely get more once we’re in Boston. Fuck, let’s do some coke, you want to?”
But as of yesterday, he’d gotten the north side of the house painted, which badly needed it, he’d started cutting wood for the following winter—he likes it to dry for a year and a half—and he’d patched the leak in the woodshed with roofing tar. He’d probably just needed some physical exercise. Said he’d begun a new series of silkscreens, which were absolutely going to be the best things since those ducks he was doing a couple of years ago. They’re going to be—whatever the plural is of phoenix. But getting back to my thing: he’d always said that Gordon Conway was scum, and he was glad at least that now everybody would see it. Said as it turned out he guessed it was a damn good thing I’d talked him out of driving down to Boston that night. He’d planned to hit Gordon up, since Gordon generally kept enough coke around to sell, and it would’ve been an absolute mess if we’d knocked on the door and so on. Said he thought you might come back once the dust had a chance to settle. If that was what we both wanted. Said it seemed to him that despite everything there’d been a lot of love there.
Or something.
I remember speaking the vows and thinking, Maybe.
The day before the ceremony, we’d had that huge thing about whether Meg’s sister Jodie should be there. “What am I supposed to do?” I said. “Turn around at this point and disinvite her? You know, she drives down with them, thinking everything is cool, and—I mean, Cindy, this was literally years ago. She’s now a friend. Okay, what should I have done, not told you?”
“Yes,” you said. Then you said, “No.” Then you began to cry.
But then there were the times when, deferring to my choice
of a movie or a restaurant, you used to take my hand and kiss it like a courtier. What were the proportions of sweetness and irony? Not that I ever wanted to pick it apart. This gesture was still in your repertoire as late as a few weeks ago, the night you felt like going down to one of the Indian joints on Sixth Street and I felt like going someplace where we could count on air conditioning. In retrospect, this last handkiss makes me wonder whether or not you and Gordon Conway had already made your arrangements.
As far as I know, you hadn’t met him before this spring, when you went up to Boston for Lynnette’s show. The three of you having lunch at some health food place. Which seemed fine: a friend of your friend Lynnette’s. I remembered him, of course, from when he’d been at Pratt with Joey, and I decided not to be gratuitously unpleasant by saying he’d always struck me as a poseur, and therefore just the kind of person who’d fasten onto Lynnette. Or vice versa. This must have been in April. (It was the weekend Kate and I broke our rule about each other’s apartments. She came here; we rented Syberberg’s Parsifal, ordered in from the good Chinese place, marveled at how Armin Jordan, playing Amfortas, had lip-synched so undetectably in close-up.) Now, at that point, I assume, you were telling me everything, or why would you have told me as much as you did? Well, maybe to preclude my hearing it from somebody else. Or maybe just to get some relief—I know, I’ve been there. I used to make a point of telling you what I hoped sounded like everything: how Kate and I, say, had spent half an hour on hands and knees wrenching misfed paper from increasingly deep places in the innards of that chronically misbehaving copier. Such truths, told forthrightly, kept the rest of the truth away; while telling them, I could almost believe that Kate was just the funny woman who worked two offices down. With the husband who sounded so interesting.
Now, the next thing I heard about your new friend Gordon was the following week: he and Lynnette were both bringing work to show to some dealers in SoHo, and could we all have dinner? This was the point, I decided, at which to get myself on record. “As you know,” I said, “Lynnette is not one of my favorite people. And I truly dislike Gordon Conway.”
“He speaks well of you,” you said.
“He’s a ferret,” I said. “Are he and Lynnette an item?”
You said nothing.
“So where are you dining?” I said. “Elaine’s?”
You put your glass down. “Oh, fuck you.”
“Or, hey, there’s always Greenwich Village,” I said. “Where the real artists hang out. Now, me, there’s nothing I like better than real artists, you know? Getting together and being real. Should I bring a rose and eat it petal by petal?”
“I thought you weren’t going.”
“Are you?” I said.
“Yes.”
“Well,” I said, “have a marvelous time.”
“Thank you.” You picked up your glass. “I intend to.”
And then nothing (meaning nothing I was told about) until two weeks ago, when the phone rang on Sunday morning. Me at the kitchen table, drinking coffee.
“I’ve got it,” you called. After a while you came out of the bedroom. I asked if you’d turned the fan off in there. You said you had to go to D.C.
“Why?” I said. “What’s up?”
“Marie,” you said. “She was in a car wreck. She died this morning.”
“What?” I said.
“Look, I have to pack. Would you please call and see what’s the first shuttle I could get?”
“Jesus, no. Oh my God, Cindy. I can’t believe—listen, I don’t know if they even have the shuttle on weekends. Maybe we should just drive? By the time—”
“You’re not coming.”
“Say again?”
“Would you just call, please?”
“Cindy.”
“Okay, fine. I will call.” You hauled down the Yellow Pages.
“What the hell’s going on?” I said. “Of course I’m coming with you.”
“You see my family once a year,” you said. “At Thanksgiving. That’s a grand total of five times. And once at the wedding.”
“This is completely batshit. I’m your husband.”
You rolled your eyes.
“Listen,” I said, “if absolutely nothing else, it would freak your mother out if I wasn’t with you.”
“Helen knows everything is fucked,” you said. “She’s not expecting you. You’re so concerned with the proprieties, write her a note. Truly. I’ll hand-deliver it, how’s that?” You went back into the bedroom and closed the door. I followed you in, wondering if at a time like this I should be asking what this everything-is-fucked business was about. Or were you entitled to slip stuff in and not be called on it because your sister was dead?
I ended up agreeing to everything: not to come, not to call, to let you deal with this in your own way, to let you breathe. Not to upset your mother by sending flowers. If I’d given you more of an argument, would you have broken down and confessed? Such a bizarre lie: you must have wanted me to bust you on it. So: one more time I failed you. On the other hand, you went to such lengths to make it convincing. So: one more time you arranged for me to fail you. While you packed, I wrote a draft of the note for your mother, then copied it cleanly on a sheet of your good notepaper. Quite a collector’s item. What did you end up doing with it?
After helping you down with your stuff and finding you a reputable-looking livery cab I came back upstairs, made more coffee and decided to call in to work the next morning, take the week off and drive up to Joey’s. I’d like to think I meant to spend some of the time thinking about Us. But really it was just a holiday: boozing, moping, bullshitting, listening to Miles Davis, wishing for women, drugs and money. Your sister had laid down her life (as I thought) so I could have a week off from you.
I got back from Joey’s on Thursday night. You called on Friday, around noon: you were taking the shuttle, arriving seven o’clock.
“Want me to come get you?” I said.
“If you feel like it.”
“Are you okay?” I said. “How’s your mom holding up?”
“Look, I’ll see you at seven,” you said.
At ten after seven I watched stranger after stranger after stranger come down the carpeted passageway. You touched my arm.
“Hey,” I said. “Where’d you come from?”
You shrugged. “I’ve been here a couple hours. I think.”
“You’re kidding,” I said. “How come you didn’t call?” Then I smelled your breath. “Well, I see you’ve used the time to advantage.”
“The American Advantage,” you said. “Now I have the advantage.” You let your suitcase drop, and it fell on its side.
I picked it up and said, “Shall we?” You followed like a little girl who’d been bad. When we got to the escalator I turned around. “Have you eaten anything? Do you want to stop someplace?”
“Want to go home,” you said, head down.
“So be it,” I said. “I don’t know what there is, but there’s probably something.”
“You don’t want to talk to me,” you said.
It was the second-to-last of our silent car rides: me thinking of ways to open a conversation and imagining how you’d parry each one. I thought what a drag it was that you chose to get drunk. And then I thought how unfair it was to think that after you’d just lost your sister. (As I believed.) You were looking good, despite the shape you were in: your cheeks pale, your lips fat. It was the first sexual thing I’d felt for you since our confrontation over Kate, but I decided to stay angry. You showed better sense: when we got up the stairs and I put down your suitcase to unlock the door, you reached for my belt. To my credit, I was gracious.
The next afternoon, Saturday, you’d gone up to the Cloisters—you said—when the phone rang. “Hi, it’s Marie,” said the voice. “Is Cindy around? Listen, when are you guys ever going to come to Washington?”
“Who is this?” I said. “Goddamn it, who the fuck is this?”
When you came in,
I said, “Your sister called.”
“Oh,” you said. “Well.” You shook your head, sniffled. “Actually I’m surprised it took this long. But …” You shrugged. “It must’ve been weird for you. What did you end up saying?”
“Why?” I said. “Why would you be so stupid? I mean, beyond stupid.”
“Sometimes you feel like being stupid, what can I say? Didn’t you ever want to just be stupid? I have to blow my nose.” You went into the bathroom and shut the door.
I shoved it open again. “So where were you?” I said. “Obviously you were with somebody. Who was the lucky guy?”
You tore toilet paper off the roll and wiped your nose. “Why do you assume it was only one?” You turned to face me, and struck a pose, palm out, the back of your hand to your forehead. “Oh, Rick, I can’t go on living a lie.” You gazed ceiling-ward. “The truth is, it was all of your friends. Every last one. It was Stefan and Andrew and Alex—oh, and Gregory. Now, did I leave anybody out?”
“Okay, forget it,” I said. “I mean, I’m through anyway. I truly am.”
You buried your face in your hands. “Rick, I need your compassion at this terrible moment. The truth is, it was a woman. In fact, it was your dear friend and platonic coworker Kate. We just found that we had so much in common that we decided to have gay women’s sex. Can you ever, ever forgive me?” You gripped my arms, then began to giggle.
“You’re stoned,” I said.
“Oh, yes, Rick, I am stoned. You’re so perspicacious, always. And I’m just—shit under your feet.” You dug your fingernails into my arms, then lifted your head and kissed my cheek so hard I felt teeth. Then you let go, stepped back and slapped me, and my glasses went flying. We looked at each other. You were red-faced, breathing hard. I was thinking:
