by David Gates
She hears the crunch of a corn chip all the way across the table. “Good salsa,” Van says. “Salsa without cilantro is like a day without sunshine.”
“Matthew Arnold?” Seth says.
“He will never cease to twit me about this,” Van says to Holly. “One line—a very apposite line—in your wedding toast. From ‘Dover Beach.’ Apparently this was the ne plus ultra of fuddy-duddyism. See, years ago—this character was still in grade school—I used to teach nineteenth-century. Until I realized that my true gift was for glad-handing.”
“You used to say it was for kissing ass.”
“Ah, but there’s a lady present.”
“It’s okay, she knows about these exotic practices.” Seth crunches a corn chip. “Are you having a margarita?”
Silence. Holly looks up. He’s looking at her.
“Oh.” She tries to determine whether he’d implied that she should or she shouldn’t, but the sound of his voice is back too far and getting farther. Would a margarita help bring her down or make it worse? She’s pretty sure tequila comes from the same cactus as mescaline.
“Be working on your answer,” Seth says.
“My arm is twistable,” says Van.
“Maybe if I had a half?” Holly says. God, her mouth is dry.
“A small one?” What Seth means is I’ll help you through this, but you’re being a drag.
The waitress moves toward them, her healthy face appearing to glow from inside like a Halloween pumpkin, but there’s a candle on the table to provide a reassuring explanation. All these little things will click back into place if Holly can just hang on. The waitress says her name is Andrea, and she recites the specials while looking them in the eyes. She has rings on every finger of both hands, even spoon rings on the thumbs; she’s pretty and young and fetishy, and Holly feels the threat, which is insane given what she’s been up to. In fact, Holly tried out fetishy things on Mitchell: an ankle bracelet, then a tiny silver stud piercing the web of skin between her big and second toes. Seth liked it, too.
When the waitress goes away, Seth’s father turns to Holly. “So, are you nagging this character sufficiently about his health? He asks, having brought them to a restaurant specializing in fatty food.”
This question has so much ironic spin that she gives up and says, “I don’t know.”
“Well, by my calculations, he’s about to turn forty, and depending on whose genes he got the most of … You see what I’m saying. These last few years have put the fear of God into me. I go in every six months, religiously, get ’em to check my cholesterol, EKG, the works. Prostate exam—very important.”
“Fingered for death,” Seth says. “I have to say, one of my least favorite things.”
Holly understands he has to say this in front of his father. In fact, isn’t that why he said I have to say? Clever Seth! But she knows what she knows.
“Yes, well,” says Van. “If you want to talk about least favorite things …”
“Yeah, you’re right,” says Seth. “I should be doing it.”
“I’ve also got my living will witnessed and notarized. But if I’m in any shape to prevent that situation, believe you me …”
“Well.” Seth looks over his shoulder, as if to see what’s keeping their waitress. “Let’s see how you feel if it ever gets to a point like that. I mean, how did Mom feel?”
Van shakes his head. “I wondered all the time. All the time. I used to look for any sign that—you know. Well, we don’t need to pursue this. Holly, you look like you’ve been shot.”
“I do?” She has no idea what else to say, though he clearly wants her to build on this and then they can all three be talking. She feels a leg against her knee and moves her knee away.
The waitress comes back and sets their drinks in front of them, baby drink for Baby Holly. She could swear the waitress smirked.
Van raises his glass. “As another fuddy-duddy writer once said: Only Connecticut.”
“Hear, hear.” Seth holds up his glass by the stem, prissy-pinkie. He means it ironically. He’s doing all this stoned?
“To Connecticut,” she says, trying to get in the same key. Seth and his father laugh, and she takes in an icy mouthful of salt, sour lime and poison alcohol. It scares her that this taste—which should be so familiar: a frozen margarita, no more, no less—is coming at her in components she can’t recombine. She hasn’t come down at all; in fact, she feels herself going to an even higher place. If she survives this, she will never smoke weed again.
The waitress comes back to take their dinner orders, and she and Van have quite the little flirtation. He says she looks exactly like someone he knew back when he was a graduate student. Somehow he makes it clear that he and this person slept together. “Of course this was many, many years ago.”
“Not that many,” the waitress says.
“It was a while back,” he says. “She and I were studying oceanography with Matthew Arnold.”
The waitress cocks her head. “Okay, you’re kidding. Right?”
“Would I kid you?”
“You might.” She narrows her eyes. “You’ve got that look.” She walks away, her long Mexican skirt swishing.
“Whew,” says Seth. “The air smolders.”
Van picks up his glass. “I’ve got to get the hell out of Florida.”
While they’re undressing for bed, Holly tells Seth she can’t smoke weed anymore. “I have to tell you,” he says, “I don’t think weed per se is the problem.” He balls up his shirt and brandishes it one-handed above his head like a basketball, lightly touching his wrist with the other hand. He misses the hamper.
“It’s the problem when it gets me too high to deal with anything.”
“You get yourself too high to deal with anything.”
“Okay.” She doesn’t follow. “But then wouldn’t you say the solution is not to do it?” She turns her back and unhooks her bra.
“I’d say the solution is to look at what’s really going on.” He goes over, picks up the shirt and stuffs it into the hamper.
“Right. Well, what’s really going on is, I get too high when I smoke.”
He sighs. “Look, you know yourself best. I thought it was a fun thing for us. Sort of us against the world.”
“I know that.” She lets the “but” clause remain implied. Could he really have felt it was them against the world? Like, together?
He turns out the light and reaches over. No candle tonight.
“Listen,” he says after a while. “Would it break the mood too much if I, you know?”
She was beginning to like what they’d been doing. “Won’t it keep you up?” she says.
“Ah,” he says. “She begins to get the idea.” Holly sees his dark shape go over to the dresser. She hears the drawer slide open. “Shit, I need the light,” he says. “Hide your eyes.”
She closes her eyes, hard, and covers them with her fingers. Still, everything lights up red. What can it be but her own blood seen through her own eyelids?
She ought to be in bed, but instead she’s out behind the house for some reason, in the dead garden; this can’t be a dream because her bare feet are freezing. She wonders if Seth has noticed she’s not there beside him, so she wills herself up into the air as high as their bedroom window. It works. Now, let’s see if she can pass right through the window, as if it were a membrane. Yes! The glass stretches, gives way and reseals behind her, and she’s back under the covers with no one the wiser. Her powers are beginning to scare her, but at the same time she understands that this could be a dream after all, so she tries waking herself up. And sure enough.
She gets out of bed, creeps down to the dark kitchen and feels around by the phone for the pencil and Post-It pad. She’s got to preserve something of this; it’s like no dream she’s ever had. Primitive people thought you literally leave your body when you dream; this could be what just happened to her. She goes into the bathroom, closes the door and turns on the light. As she writes, she
feels little prickly chills on her forehead. Maybe she’s got a fever and it was just a fever dream. She could be coming down with that bird flu; it started in Hong Kong, where people got it from chickens. It’s like a pun: bird flew. And she was flying in the dream.
She takes two Advils, turns off the light and finds her way upstairs. Seth is still breathing away: sound asleep, unless he’s as good a faker as she is.
Holly’s aware of Seth getting dressed in the gray early morning; he always makes the 8:05 no matter what he was into the night before. When she wakes up for real, it’s after ten. She finds the Post-It where she left it: stuck to the back of the nightstand where Seth wouldn’t see. Dream—I am out back (in garden) and find I can fly up and pass through bedroom window. Window is like a bubble. The dream is pretty clearly about just slipping back into her marriage with no harm done. She props pillows behind her and tries to concentrate on Madame Bovary (maybe the translation’s part of the problem), but she can feel Seth’s father in the house, the way you know where the sun is on a cloudy day.
She gets up and showers. She’s not the type of person who would ever have a bathroom off the master bedroom, but here she is. South Norwalk, Connecticut. She puts on the most unalluring stuff she can find: her loosest jeans, her hooded sweatshirt with the kangaroo pocket, running shoes with no socks. Down in the kitchen she finds half a pot of still-hot coffee, and a clean mug with a note under it: Out for my constitutional. Back soon. Van. She takes her coffee into the dining room and looks out at the garden. Whatever she was supposed to do with that pile of dead vines and leaves, she’s never done it. She wants to put on Portishead, but it could make Seth’s father feel unwelcome when he gets back. So she goes upstairs and brings her book down.
It’s almost noon when he comes into the kitchen in sweatpants and windbreaker, carrying a Times and pulling a blue sweatband off his head.
“I was wondering if you’d gotten lost,” she says.
“Like an Alzheimer’s patient.”
“Exactly. Just what I was going to say,” she says. “Is it cold out?”
“My God, I can’t remember.” He drops his mouth open and claps a hand to his forehead. “Actually, it’s okay once you get moving.”
“How about some lunch?”
“I would love it.” He sits down at the kitchen table, wet hair pasted to his forehead.
“I could make you a ham sandwich—we have this great country ham.”
“Anything.” Which in fact means anything else, right? But she’s not going to stand there neurotically naming off possibilities.
“And a beer?” she says.
“That’s a thought. Yes. Yes, please.” He opens the Times.
She gets two slices of rye out of the breadbox, the ham and a jar of mustard from the refrigerator. “Were you warm enough last night?”
“It was fine. I like a room to be a little cool for sleeping.”
“If you’re cold tonight, there’s extra blankets up in the hall closet.” She remembers the damn wheelchair. “Actually, why don’t I get a couple out for you and stick them in your room.”
“If you think of it,” he says.
She pours his beer into a pilsner glass she bought at Crate & Barrel, holding the glass straight up so there’ll be enough head to leave an inch or so in the bottle. She glances over to make sure he’s not looking, then chugs it.
When she brings the beer and the sandwich over, he puts the paper down. “This is splendid, thank you.” He lifts the glass. “Better days. And colder nights.” He takes a taster’s sip. “Beck’s?”
“Sam Adams.”
“Aha. So tell me something. Are you two getting along?”
“That’s coming right to the point,” she says. Did something happen last night? She can’t begin to think back. “In answer to your question, yes. If we weren’t getting along, why would I be here?”
“Ah. Miss Feist. Mizz Feist.”
“Van, you’re not trying to pick a fight, are you?”
“No. God, no. Just trying to get up to speed. I like you, believe it or not. The last few years have raised hell with my social graces.”
“Since you bring that up,” she says, “I’ve been meaning to tell you. Seth admires you so much for the care you took of her. I don’t know if he’s said that to you.”
“Yes, well. Seth’s a romantic. Small r. Can I tell you something? And you keep it to yourself?”
“Not tell Seth.”
He turns a palm up.
She turns a palm up, too, and sits down across the table from him.
He closes his eyes, feels around for his beer, grasps it. “I hurt her,” he says.
Holly thinks how to phrase the question, then says, “In what sense?”
Van shakes his head, eyes still closed. “You know, she was, one side of her, her whole left side, it was just dead. And this one day, she was taking a nap and I just—” Shakes his head again. “I stuck a pin into her arm. Right there.” He jabs an imaginary pin into his left arm just below the shoulder. Winces.
“Accidentally, though.”
“Not accidentally. Shit.” Shakes his head. “Oh, boy. Okay, it’s out now.” Holly watches him wagging his face back and forth. She wishes he’d open his eyes. “I did it to see, you know, if she’d feel it. Because I didn’t know whether or not the nerves were still connected to the, you know, to the … Shit.” He’s still shaking his head.
“And did she feel it?”
“No. Not that I could tell. She didn’t wake up.”
“Well, then you didn’t hurt her.”
He opens his eyes and looks at her. “That’s what you think?”
Holly shakes her head. “You were under so much stress. I can’t even imagine—”
“No. Please don’t bother. I didn’t tell you this in order for you to come up with some little insight to get me off the hook.” He looks down at her breasts; good she wore her sweatshirt. “By which I don’t mean you’re not smart.” He’s still looking.
“But Van, that doesn’t negate all the, the whole—like taking care of her, taking her places, being with her …”
“Okay, you’ve said your piece. I’ve said my piece. Now what shall we talk about?”
“We could talk about where you’re looking,” she says. He goes red, looks down at his sandwich. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to embarrass you. I guess I was getting back at you for brushing me off.”
“Well, what the hell. You don’t like me much anyhow.”
“That’s not so.”
He holds up a hand to forestall further untruth. “No need. I apologize. This is one hell of a way to pay you back for the nice lunch.”
“Which you haven’t touched.”
“Which I haven’t touched.” He finishes his beer and looks around the room. “What is wrong with me?”
“Do you want to talk?”
Shakes his head. “I am talking. This is what happens when I talk. I do apologize.”
“It’s all right. Would you like another beer?”
“Which I guess isn’t the same as being sorry.”
“It’s all right,” she says. “I just wish I could help.”
“Not a thing you can do. I will take another one, thanks. Probably a bad idea, but what isn’t. And then I’ll get out of your hair. Go up and do some reading. I don’t mean to sound—whatever the word is. Byronic.”
Holly doesn’t quite catch this. “Ironic?”
“Huh,” he says. “Isn’t it.”
Holly sticks a load of clothes in the washer, then goes back to Madame Bovary. But lying on the sofa, under warm yellow lamplight, she can’t keep her eyes open; behind her red eyelids there’s an alternate story going, and she follows that for a while. She comes awake to a wet tickling on the sole of her foot. She jerks the foot away: Van’s standing at the end of the sofa with something in his hand. With the brush from a jar of rubber cement.
“Are you insane?” she says. “What are you doing?”
> “I couldn’t resist. It’s just a teensy little—here.” He whisks a Kleenex from the box on the end table; as if in a magic trick, the same Kleenex now seems to be sticking up out of the box.
She grabs her foot with both hands and twists it around to look: an inch-long streak of cloudy goo across her instep. “Aren’t you a little old to be acting like a first grader?”
“A little old? That’s charitable. Here you go.” He holds out the Kleenex; she ignores it and rubs at the goo with her fingertip. “I don’t know why I did that. Maybe it is Alzheimer’s. I actually came down to ask if I could borrow your car to run a quick errand.”
“I have to go to Westport later,” she says. “I’d be glad to pick something up for you.” Has he been drinking in his room?
“Ah. I believe I’m hearing a no. After that little performance, I can’t blame you for thinking—whatever you must think. I am sorry. It was …” He shakes his head. Could he have Alzheimer’s?
“That’s not—Van, it’s perfectly fine if you want to take the car. I just thought I’d save you the trouble.”
“This is getting baroque,” he says.
“Really, it’s fine. Take the car, by all means.”
“I’m annoying you.”
“You’re not,” she says. “I just—you know, you’re welcome to take the car, okay? Do you know your way around?”
“What a question. Huh. You remember those old postcards? Ve get too soon oldt und too late schmardt? The dirty old man with the beard and the cane, all bent over, and this gal with a tight dress is walking—”
“I don’t, actually.”
“I’m dating myself,” he says. “Just in case anybody should look at me and miss the point.”
She sighs. “Van, you’re not that old.”
“Ah,” he says. “Now, there’s a woman who knows her lines.”
