by David Gates
She means to kill me.
I can’t walk out with her in this kind of shape.
This will never end.
I will take her throat and rip it open.
I am observing all this from a great distance.
Then you began to sob, and I took you in my arms and patted your back again and again, and smoothed and smoothed your hair, thinking: Every minute of this is a minute out of my life.
When you finally turned to the sink and began washing your face, I picked up my glasses and brought them into the living room. A Y-shaped crack in the left lens. I tried to figure out how to hide from you the evidence of what you yourself had done; all I could come up with was not putting them back on. The bathroom door closed. Now what? Were you using the toilet or swallowing handfuls of Bufferins and Sudafeds? Cutting your wrists? Not easy with a Good News razor. I could save your life by breaking down the door. But first I’d have to ask if you were all right in there, and that might enrage you—even make you suicidal. The thing to do was ask something else—Hey, Cindy? I’m going to need to use the john pretty soon—and see if you answered. But of course you’d see through it.
Finally you came out and sat on the sofa hugging yourself, your feet tucked under you. “I’m sorry,” you said. “I am completely humiliated. And I need very much not to talk at this point.”
“You’re humiliated?”
“Don’t,” she said. “Listen, would you do something? This is crazy, but do you think you could pretend with me? Please? It would just be for a while, okay? Like until tomorrow? Can we just pretend we’re all right? One more day?”
We managed it by drinking lots of wine. Or I did—I lost track of you. We called the good Chinese place for cold hacked chicken and cold sesame noodles, and I dug out my prescription sunglasses, and we lay on the bed in our underwear and watched an old Jackie Gleason variety show on cable. It seemed to be about a fat, unhappy man who dressed himself up on Saturday night to watch things happen around him. When he introduced the orchestra leader as Sammy Spear, I pounded the mattress. “God, it’s too fucking perfect. It’s like, the spear and the wound. Look at him—he’s the open wound. He’s the walking wounded.”
“You’re the walking drunk,” you said. “You’re so cute like that.”
“I’m not walking,” I said. “Lying right here. Check it out. Too goddamn smart to even think about walking.”
• • •
Sunday morning, catnapping. I opened my eyes, looked at the clock, closed them, felt your thigh against mine, opened my eyes again, saw it was ten minutes later, closed them again. Wanted to keep on and on.
Then I woke up and saw you standing at the dresser, bareback, in underpants; I imagined a steely look on your face. I said good morning and you turned around. Your large, flat nipples. You came and took your watch off the night table and strapped it on. It was the look I’d imagined.
You said, “I’m going to pack some things, and then I’m going to go, okay?”
“Go where?” I said. “Would you tell me what’s going on? I thought—”
“Please don’t be stupid,” you said. You took a T-shirt out of the drawer.
I closed my eyes before you pulled it over your head.
“Listen,” you said, “you’re going to come out of this just fine. If your platonic friend and coworker Kate won’t take you back, you can always find another platonic friend and coworker. And if that one doesn’t work out, then you go on to the next one. You know, until you find exactly the right one. So why don’t you just go back to sleep, and when you wake up—presto: wifey’s just an unpleasant memory.”
“Where are you going?” I opened my eyes and you were pulling on a pair of jeans.
“To Unpleasant Memoryland. Poof.” You raised a palm to your lips and blew.
“Cindy. Where?”
You zipped up and looked at me. “Boston,” you said. “I should give you the address.”
“Oh,” I said.
You shrugged.
“He’s a lowlife,” I said.
“He’s not so bad,” you said. “Fact is, he’s a little like you. Anyhow, he’s probably not forever.”
“And then what?”
“Not your problem.” You sat down on the bed to put on your running shoes. “Look, I promise you, this will be very easy. I don’t want money, I don’t want any of the stuff except for my grandfather’s chair, which I’ll come and get at some point. I guess I want the little rug that’s in the other room. My books. I’ll let you know when I’m coming down. And I’ll call Marie tonight, to spare you any further embarrassment. Okay?” You picked up your purse and slung it over your shoulder, and said in your Robert DeNiro voice, “Don’ worr’. I take care ev’ryt’ing.”
“I can’t believe this,” I said.
“Look,” you said, “I have to crank it, you know? If I’m going to make my plane.”
“Can’t I at least drive you to the airport?” I said. “And we could talk on the way? I really need to understand what’s going on.”
You sighed. “If that’s your idea of a good time. But I don’t know what you need to understand. Your bad wife is leaving you. For another man. You’re a wronged husband. Now you can be happy.”
Because Kate wasn’t about to leave her husband and I wasn’t about to leave you, she and I had agreed to be responsible. No hang-up calls, no leaving the office together, no being at each other’s apartments even if it seemed perfectly safe, no overnighters anywhere, ever. But you and I had rules, too, though never codified: the gist was that neither of us was to go looking for what we didn’t want to see. You were the one who violated that rule, by following me into the subway at lunch hour, riding to West Fourth Street in the next car, walking a block behind me to Kate’s sister’s building and watching from a bus shelter as I was buzzed in. I was the one who was trying to be protective.
Basically it was no different from the lie I told you about the Hav-a-Heart trap. We thought it was so ingenious, the way the trapdoor would fall away from under the mouse and tumble him into the box for deportation. But the day we baited it, I got home before you did, opened the thing to check, and voilà: a twitching, squealing mouse, hopelessly wedged into a corner between sharp edges of metal. He’d been trying to worm himself out through a place where the box didn’t quite fit together. I watched awhile, then went looking for something. Nearest thing to hand was a screwdriver: I pressed the tip into his neck until I felt a snap. Then I hid him at the bottom of the trash, wrapped in the paper towel I’d used to wipe the inside of the box. When you came in, I told you the trap turned out to be useless.
“It’s only been a day,” you said.
“Right,” I said. “But. One of them already managed to steal the bait and get away. We’re either going to have to put up with mice or go to Plan B.”
You shook your head. Sighed. “I don’t know. I guess we can’t really put up with mice, can we?”
One of our Great Conversations, in which nobody had to come right out and say it. And if I had a whole additional thing I wasn’t telling, that was called being a good husband. Back then I loved to play the part.
I tug the shade back down, check the phone book and call the number for towaways. Busy. Eight million stories in the Naked City. I pull off paper towels, mop up the gin, pick up the pieces of broken glass—gingerly, remembering I’m in a stressful period. They go into a paper bag, which goes into an empty Tropicana carton, which goes into the trash so no one gets hurt.
A week ago today, at just about this time, I was driving you to LaGuardia. I asked you what that last weekend had been about, why you’d bothered to come back and put us both through it. You wouldn’t talk. I insisted—it seemed wrong not to—but all the while I was thinking, Why not just admit this is a relief? So much traffic: people heading for the beaches. Sun glinting off windshields and bumpers. Good I had those sunglasses. We weren’t moving fast enough to get a breeze going, and my shirt was soaked through. Shifting from low
to second and back to low, temperature gauge getting close to the red. I remember passing a black van with an orange volcano painted on its side panel, then the van passing us. Its windows were up and the driver, a blond thug, was singing away unheard, beating time on the steering wheel as his girlfriend painted her nails. When we finally got to the terminal, you let me park and carry your suitcase as far as security. I put it on the moving belt, you set your purse next to it and turned to me before stepping into the frame.
“ ’Bye,” you said.
“This is really it?”
You smiled, beckoned with your forefinger and raised your chin. I cupped my hands around your shoulders and bent to kiss you—at least your forehead. You laid a palm on my cheek, pushed my head aside and whispered, “This is what you wanted.”
SATURN
Somebody cuts the lights and Seth backs into the dining room pulling the wheelchair. He swings it around, then pushes it toward the table: Holly’s birthday cake, a single candle flaring, sits on a board laid across the armrests. Her sister and her sister’s new boyfriend are on their feet applauding. Holly gets up and starts clapping too, then feels stupid, stops and just stands there in the dark, her fingertips on the disagreeably coarse tablecloth. She’s way too high. But if she doesn’t dwell on any single thought too long, she can get through this. She hears Seth take a deep breath: he sings out the syllable Haaaaa, the others find his note and come in on ppy-birthday. She’s deciding whether to sing along when they finish and start clapping again.
She stares at the candle flame as it strains in a current of air. It’s so nakedly obvious that matter’s changing to energy before her eyes that it seems strange people ever thought Einstein was strange. If anything is strange, it’s her husband’s refusing to get rid of his dead mother’s wheelchair. Also strange that there’s just the one candle. This is Holly’s thirty-second birthday; so this lone candle must stand for celebration in the abstract. They’re all looking at her. Right: this is a ceremony. She’s in a ceremony inside a celebration.
She closes her eyes and makes a wish: for her and Seth to stop smoking weed, or at least for her to. Because she’s been having these anxiety things (which is what this is) since around the time Seth started talking about leaving New York and buying a house here in Connecticut. Which just so happened to be right around the time she found herself beginning to ease into having a stupid affair; the only surprise is that she failed to see the connection when she first rested fingertips on Mitchell’s forearm. Well, so now she’s stopped having the affair, and maybe if she stops smoking weed too she’ll eventually get back to normal. She opens her eyes and there’s the candle. Okay, that’s her wish. And it’s possible that wishes actually work—like visualization, which has been shown to work. More clapping as she blows out the candle, then lights come on and the dining room springs back into place.
“So what did you wish for?” says Seth.
“She’s not supposed to tell,” Tenley says.
“We never had that. That’s fucked up—you just wish to yourself?”
“Come on, everybody had that. I mean, I’m not making this up—God, am I? Whew. Speaking of fucked up, this stuff of yours, Jesus.” It doesn’t escape Holly that her husband and her sister have just said fuck to each other.
“That is amazing shit,” says Tenley’s new boyfriend.
“Actually, I have a wish that’s not secret,” Holly says. “I wish Seth would get rid of that wheelchair before his father gets here.”
“Shazam,” Seth says, and bows from the waist. “Or what’s that thing? Not ‘abracadabra.’ Anyhow. Okay, tomorrow, boom, out she goes. Salvation Army. Hup, hup.” He turns to Tenley. “So there goes your don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy.”
The boyfriend takes a loud breath as if he’s about to say something, then shakes his head.
“Um, why are we all standing up?” says Tenley.
“I think it’s because we’re stoned as pigs,” Seth says. “What the hell does a genie say? This is driving me out of my mind.”
“Well, I’m sitting down,” says Tenley.
“ ‘Your wish is my command,’ ” says the boyfriend.
“Carl, what the fuck are you talking about?” says Tenley. “Oh, right.” She looks at Seth. “Is that the thing?”
Seth cocks his head. “Say again?”
Tenley shakes her head. “Too complicated. Why am I not sitting down?” She sits. Seth and the boyfriend sit. Holly sits, and somebody puts a knife in her hand. She can’t help but picture slicing right across her wrist, but technically it isn’t a thought about suicide: just a thought about something so extreme it would have the power to put a stop to this.
“So you going to cut the cake or what?” says Seth. “You look like you’re ready to go postal over there.” He opens his mouth in a silent scream, raises his fist with an invisible knife. “Okay, who am I? Famous movie.”
“Oh-oh-oh,” says the boyfriend, as if he’s about to come. “Texas Chainsaw.”
Tenley looks at him. “You’ve just canceled yourself out.” She turns back to Seth. “Listen, say hi to your dad for me. Not that I know him or anything. But he was great at the wedding. When he was dancing with Holly? Amazing dancer.”
Holly slices down into the cake.
“Yeah. He’s the last of a dying breed.” Seth looks over at Holly. “Smaller piece. Okay, who says that? What movie?”
“ ‘Last of a dying breed’?” says Tenley.
“No, ‘smaller piece.’ ”
“I heard you,” Holly says.
“I’ll give you a hint,” says Seth. “The movie was both a sequel and a prequel, and the actor who—”
“Wait, so what was the other movie?” the boyfriend says.
“If I told you that, I’d be telling you—”
“No, he means the other movie, Seth,” says Holly.
“Yeah, I know, but if—”
“Forget it,” Holly says. “Does anybody want this?”
“I’m lost,” says Tenley.
“Me too,” Seth says. “God, I love the shit out of it.”
After they get Tenley and her boyfriend settled in the guest room—one of the guest rooms—Seth talks her into having one more hit apiece; by now she’s come down enough to think she might not freak out this time. Not only do they still have sex after moving to Connecticut, but it seems to her that Seth actually goes after her more, as if in compensation. She gets into bed; he lights a candle and puts the metal flask of massage oil from the Gap on the nightstand. But when he reaches over, she’s right back in that thing. Shit. He brushes the back of his hand along her left breast, nails scraping the nipple. She can’t get her mind to stop. How weird that she’s been doing this with somebody else. But she’s not anymore, so shouldn’t this now be okay? Seth takes the nipple in his mouth. Holly begins to play with his balls, as she should, but they seem like some primitive carryover the human race could well do without. She senses the wheelchair’s evil presence still down there in the darkened dining room. “You’re going to get rid of the wheelchair, right?” she whispers. “Or put it somewhere?”
Seth stops; her nipple feels cold. “Put it somewhere? Mmm. Be glad to, ah, put it somewhere. Where might she have in mind?” One of Seth’s endearments is speaking to her in the third person. She still hasn’t figured that one out. Yes, she has.
“They can hear you.”
“How?” he says, just as loud. “They’re down the other end of the hall.” True: she forgets how big this house is. “Anyhow, they might learn something.”
“But you’re going to get rid of it, right?”
“Aw. Old Man Wheelchair’s bumming her out.”
“I hate it.”
“Somehow I don’t think this is about the wheelchair,” he says. “Could you keep doing that?” She resumes. “Yes. But listen, you’re right, he doesn’t need to see it. I’ll bring it up and stick it in the hall closet.”
“I thought you were taking it to the Salvation
Army.”
“Tomorrow’s Sunday. I don’t think they’re open.”
“But he’s coming tomorrow.”
“Right, which is why I’m putting it in the closet. You’re not following what I’m saying.” He takes her wrist and moves her hand to the place he likes her to go but won’t ask for. “Listen, do you feel like, maybe, not putting your thing in tonight?”
She pulls her hand away. “I don’t think that would be too smart.”
“I think it might be really smart.”
She rolls away from him onto her back, each hand gripping the opposite shoulder, elbows bent so she must resemble one of those big paperclips. She closes her eyes but has to open them when she starts seeing stuff like screen savers. “I’m too stoned to deal with this now,” she says.
“Would you ever want to talk about it?”
“Not now,” she says.
The wheelchair is called an Everest & Jennings. Holly understands the Everest part—Towering above all other wheelchairs—but why Jennings? It must just be a name. But since she can’t seem to let anything be anymore, she’s made up her mind that Jennings makes her think of journeying. So it would be Forever rest from journeying: her own little formulation. Except the whole idea of a wheelchair is to keep you journeying. As this one kept Seth’s mother journeying her last years on earth. Her husband put her in it and wheeled her places. Even aboard an airplane, to move her to Florida—the state whose very name had once been a snobby joke with them—so he could wheel her out into warm ocean air every day of the year. He’d been a dean at Yale; she’d taught life drawing. After her stroke, he’d had to bathe her and help her when she went to the bathroom. Help meaning “wipe.” Holly saw her only once: three years ago, at the wedding. Seth’s father had wheeled her up the ramp into the church and all the way down front to the end of the first pew; when Holly did her walk down the aisle, she had to step around the wheelchair, and her big stiff skirt brushed against the woman’s motionless arm. Seth’s mother was like a big doll: couldn’t walk, couldn’t talk, couldn’t feed herself. Well, could cry. A continuous whine punctuated by sobs and gasps: when the organ stopped, it filled the silence.
