by Anna King
I went downstairs to the bathroom, sat on the toilet, and leaned forward to cradle my head in my hands. The jealousy burned so hot that I didn’t know whether I could have Al stay the rest of the night. I actually let out a small moan. If I made him leave, he’d know why and that would be more degrading than anything else. Why had I decided to stop writing and become a bartender? Something about getting real, if I recalled correctly.
Suddenly I heard Brother Ralph’s voice. “Ask yourself a question, and then answer it as if it doesn’t matter.”
Why did you quit writing, I asked.
A beat of indifference, a beat of not caring, a beat of telling myself the answer didn’t matter.
Because I was afraid I had nothing to say.
I straightened up on the toilet, shot through with astonishment at what I’d figured out by asking a question and answering it as if it didn’t matter. I wondered if Brother Ralph had zeroed in on the secret of happiness. Or, maybe not of happiness, since I suspected a majority of people weren’t particularly comfortable with knowing certain truths. More like the secret for revealing oneself to oneself.
If I had nothing to say, then it was okay to be a bartender. And it was, therefore, okay that Al would be publishing a book while I was not publishing a book. Furthermore, I didn’t love Al and I knew I didn’t love him, so it was also okay that he meet the beautiful creature, Christine. In fact, I should wish for him happiness, both professionally and personally. He could stay the night and I would enjoy all the ways in which he brought pleasure to my bed.
Take that, Unseen Powers such as angels and the like. I’m in control of my destiny and a happy woman.
I was grateful to have resolved things so neatly in my not-so-neat psyche because I’d invited Al to join me for brunch at Jen’s apartment, which she was hosting with Tom the next day. We arrived feeling bleary but satisfied because we’d made love again after finishing the champagne, when we were puttering around the kitchen cleaning the dishes and putting everything away. I was washing the salad bowl and Al stood behind me, his body plastered against me and his arms wrapped around my waist. His lips nibbled gently at my earlobe.
“Yummy,” he said. “Fresh earlobe for dessert.”
I had no idea why that excited me, but something about the combination of the word earlobe and the sensation of his lips just sent me over the proverbial moon. I groaned and dropped my head forward. The hot water rushed out of the faucet and my hands hung limp and warm in the sudsy water filling the bowl. He lifted the hem of my bathrobe and slipped inside me. I bent further forward, my face breathing in hot gasps of wet air. It bordered on something inexplicably wonderful, which I might have called love in my younger days. I would have to find a new word for this thing.
Like.
I like you. I enjoy you. I relish you. I appreciate you. I fancy you. I delight in you.
Nothing sounded right, which, according to my figuring, was how I knew that my relationship with Al was fucked. Literally, figuratively, and all the most beautiful ways imaginable.
We’d fallen deeply asleep and hadn’t woken up until 11:15 a.m., a mere three-quarter’s of an hour before we were expected at Jen’s. Then we tried to rush the shower and dressing routine by sharing the shower. When we’d finished having a quickie in the shower, plus washing ourselves, and getting dressed, we both felt utterly exhausted and ready to go back to bed. I prevailed upon Al to do the driving, anyway.
Jen opened her apartment door and stepped smoothly backwards. If I hadn’t known, I never would have guessed that she was standing and maneuvering on two prosthetic legs.
“Mimosas?” she asked cheerily, her always beautiful face almost luminous.
I blurted out, “What’s going on with you?”
She opened her wide eyes even wider, then repeated herself. “Mimosas?”
Al levered me towards living room and said, “For sure.”
Tom emerged from the kitchen, with two tall glasses.
“This is the weekend for champagne,” I said. “We had something to celebrate last night.” I announced Al’s signing with an agent, along with the plans for an auction, and Tom immediately made two more mimosas so that we could toast Al’s success.
“What’s the title?” Tom asked.
“Tie Me To The Bedpost,” Al said with a laugh.
The apartment streamed with sunlight, but the air-conditioning was on high and a strange little shiver passed over my shoulders.
Tom practically shouted, “Fantastic title!”
“It refers to an alcoholic drink, called a Tie Me To The Bedpost, and a neighborhood bar by the same name, where a murder takes place on a busy Saturday night.”
“Very cool,” Tom said.
Without my noticing, Jen had gone into the kitchen. Now she called through the opening to Tom, asking for his help with dishing out the food. “You guys make yourselves comfortable at the table. We’ll just be a minute.”
At the table, I felt my eyes begin to close and open, in that preliminary dance that could easily lead to a nap. Perhaps my sleepiness could explain why, when they served our plates and sat down themselves, I said I had something important to tell them.
Jen said, “Sounds exciting.”
“More weird than exciting.”
I ate a bite of the egg and cheese soufflé, discovering the layer of cheese, onions and bacon at the bottom. “This is yummy.”
Tom nodded. “Old family recipe.”
“Come on,” Jen said.
So I told them about Ralph, my angel. Even Al, who’d known that something unusual had happened the previous weekend, hadn’t heard about my further sightings, or the trip to Isaac’s monastery.
I avoided looking directly at Jen as I rushed through as many of the pertinent descriptions as I could.
With a worried crease between his eyes, Tom said, “Have you talked to a professional about this?”
“I met with my shrink twice this week.”
“Dr. Patel?” Jen said.
I still didn’t look at her. Instead, I scooped up more of the eggs. “Yeah, good ’ole Patel.”
“What did he say?” Al asked.
“That I wasn’t crazy.”
“How could that be?” Jen’s voice had become hard, a tone I recognized and had always disliked.
I invariably became argumentative when I heard her like that because it made me feel like she only valued her point of view, her theory, her truth. To hell with mine. To hell with who I might be or want to be.
I glared at her. “Do you think I’m crazy?”
“If you truly believe you’ve seen some scruffy vision you’ve named Ralph, after the archangel Raphael, then yeah, I think there’s something seriously wrong, and I am very worried about you.”
“What if you’re wrong, Jen? Just like you were wrong not to get prosthetics all these years, maybe you’re wrong about this. Who’s to say, after all? Do you actually believe that you’re the great arbitrator of truth and reality?”
Tom said, “Okay, Rose, calm down.”
“Why don’t you tell her to calm down and not just me?”
“Because she is calm. You aren’t. You’re acting defensive as all get-out.”
I took a deep breath. Al’s right leg drifted and knocked against my left leg, under the table. Then he said, “I was with Rose when she saw the angel for the first time. I can vouch for the fact that she was completely surprised by it, and she was in her right mind. Nothing wifty about her.”
“Schizophrenics are always convinced that their visions are real. That’s one of the disturbing hallmarks of the disease.” Jen was firm.
“I saw Dr. Patel twice!” I yelled. “He doesn’t think I’m mentally ill.”
“Then you need a second opinion. Maybe he has a screw loose.”
I shoved my chair away from the table, picked up the empty champagne glass, and threw it on the floor. It’s explosion into fine fragments, scattering and twinkling across the wood, satisfied me.
“I’ll get a paper towel. I’m very good at cleaning up broken glass,” Al said.
“At least this time you didn’t throw it at someone’s face,” Jen muttered. Her gaze settled, stern, on me.
“You think I deliberately threw that glass at Al?”
“Something is very off,” she said.
Al returned with a roll of paper towels. “It was an accident, Jen.”
“There are all kinds of accidents.”
“I’m out of here.” I walked through the dining room and grabbed my purse by the door. Are you coming, Al?”
When I turned around, he was standing next to me. “Don’t go,” he said. “You need to keep talking this out.”
“This isn’t talking.”
I could hear Jen and Tom murmuring together. I whirled around. “Tom, may I speak to you?”
His chair made a shrieking noise as he pushed away from the table. I knew that Jen couldn’t follow as quickly, and for once, I was in no mood to make an exception to her disability.
Tom put a hand on my arm, tight.
I said, “Look me in the eyes.”
To his credit, he did.
“Do I seem crazy?”
We stared. I noticed how the pupils of his eyes had expanded so that their blackness were rimmed only delicately by the brown, like a strange sun.
“No,” Tom said. “You don’t.”
Jen appeared next to Tom at that moment. She said, “I’m simply being reasonable by suggesting that you get a second opinion from a health professional—if you were confident of yourself, you wouldn’t mind.”
“I am confident that the preponderance of overeducated assholes can’t allow that there may be more to this world than what we see and hear and touch. For some reason, we seem capable of acknowledging that a microscope reveals things invisible to the human eye, and physicists use mathematical models to prove strange, unwelcome truths, but that doesn’t matter to you.” My voice rose to a shout. “You can’t accept that I may know something you don’t!”
“You mean that you don’t know,” Jen said.
“I know that I don’t know, and I’m not so arrogant that I can’t accept I might have things to learn.”
She swayed a bit on her legs. To my amazement, I felt zero sympathy. Tom’s arm went around her waist and she leaned into him.
It suddenly hit me that I hated her. I hated her legless legs and her gorgeous face. I hated who I’d always been to her, and who she’d been to me. But, most of all, I hated that she didn’t trust me. How could I have been her friend for all these years when it must have been obvious?
She hated me because I had legs and she didn’t.
The flash came like lightning. The expression of disdain on her face when, freshman year at Oberlin, I’d boasted of a one-night stand with a guy named Joe, who played first French horn in the college orchestra. She’d asked, disingenuous, whether I expected to grow out of my pleasure in animalistic sex. That’s the word she’d used, animalistic. I guess it was to my credit, maybe, that I still hadn’t stopped enjoying animalistic sex (witness my relationship with Al). Alternatively, it seemed uncomfortably possible that I’d continued with animalistic sex simply because I sensed Jen’s disapproval and had to be defiant. Either way, not a good scenario.
I remember Dr. Patel asked me once, “What’s the most important thing to you?”
I’d been confused. He rarely even asked me questions at all, much less one so symbolic and suggestive. I felt sure there was probably some right answer, but I didn’t have a clue, and, actually, didn’t much care. Instead, I simply answered him immediately, without any additional thought.
“Movement,” I’d said.
He’d nodded, and I then thought about what I’d said.
Movement: the thing my father didn’t have. Movement: the thing my best friend didn’t have.
Later that afternoon, after I’d rushed from Jen’s apartment and gotten home, then kicked Al out with little ceremony, I lay across my unmade bed and considered the idea of my angel, Ralph. I wondered whether my seeing an angel had anything to do with movement, that thing I professed was of utmost importance to me.
Alice falls down the rabbit hole and her dress poufs up like a parachute.
The sheets smelled sour and like sex. Flecks of lettuce and parmesan cheese loomed large from the angle of my wide-open eyes where my cheek pressed into the mattress. I saw the classic illustration of Alice falling down the rabbit hole, her skirt all round about like she was wearing a hoop underneath. Did Mr. Rabbitfish fit with the angel and this idea of movement?
My fingers inched across the dirty sheet and picked up a piece of lettuce, pinching it tightly. I could see the sworls of impressions on the tips of my fingers, my unique print. I brought the lettuce to my mouth and placed it on my tongue. Then I rolled over on my back and stared at the ceiling.
I’d been moved ever since seeing Rabbitfish at the Au Bon Pain outdoor cafe. I’d changed my career, I’d ended two years of celibacy, I’d become a bartender, I’d taken a lover, I’d seen an angel. But not only me: Alex was engaged to be married, Isaac was training to be a Buddhist monk, Jen had gotten legs and a boyfriend, Al had signed with an agent. I scrambled up and began tearing the sheets off the bed. Soon the washing machine was thrumming, and I’d put another set of crisp clean sheets on the bed. I folded the lightweight comforter at the end of the bed because it was too hot to imagine using it. I ambled about the house, tidying and organizing, by carrying things about and putting them away. At seven o’clock in the evening, the silence in the house joined with the heat so that, combined, I felt equal parts oppressed and liberated. When I sat outside on the front steps of the house, the heat was even stronger, but there was also a slight breeze. I waited for the mosquitoes, but they didn’t come.
No movement.
And I knew. I figured it out. Everything had moved, and now, with this blowup between Jen and me, everything had stopped moving. I had this weird feeling that it was my turn. I looked into my little garden, at the still bright spots beneath the trees and bushes where, soon, there would be evening shadows. I decided to go for a long run and then have a deep cool bath.
As I approached the cemetery, I almost didn’t go in. There were so many stone angels all over the place, some of them massive, with outspread wings. I didn’t think I needed any more angels in my life, though I also really loved the twisty paths through the quiet, usually empty cemetery. The light hadn’t faded, and it felt as hot as at any point in the afternoon, so I certainly didn’t feel any nervousness about seeing other real angels, or even a ghost or two or three.
I’d forgotten all about Mr. Rabbitfish.
Deep inside the cemetery, I rounded the corner of a large mausoleum and practically landed on a man who was standing stock still in the center of the path. I jumped sideways with a small yelp, or what I hoped was a small yelp rather than a full-throttled yell. He turned around and smiled. He wasn’t bald, and he didn’t have long brown curls. Despite that, I felt he was Mr. Rabbitfish because, though the hair was blond and bristled across his head, his mouth and nose and eyes were as I’d imagined and seen them on the face of the man in the bar who’d ordered a Tie Me To The Bedpost, and, so briefly, hidden in the folds of a monk’s hood. He stepped aside, off the path completely, and made a gesture with his sweeping arm, as if to say, Please, go ahead.
So I kept running, with an argument unfurling in my head about whether I should immediately turn around and confront him. I knew I should. I knew I had to. I ran for a minute. When I finally stopped and made the turn back, he was standing there, watching me.
“Mr. Rabbitfish?” I said.
He cupped his hand around his ear, as if he hadn’t been able to hear me.
I repeated the question.
He came several quick steps forward. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“I thought you were—I’m sorry—I must have been—,” I stammered.
I turned back around an
d began to run as fast as I could, hoping he wouldn’t decide to try and catch up with me. I’d had a vague sense of danger and it felt possible that he might chase me, tackle me to the ground, and rape me here among the angels and tombstones.
Panic made my feet dash over the uneven ground and my heart pound. It wasn’t until I had left the cemetery, heading back down Mt. Auburn Street toward my little house, that I realized he hadn’t said he wasn’t Mr. Rabbitfish. I slowed to a fast walk. That had been Mr. Rabbitfish, I thought. His hair was exactly the right length of bristle to have grown out from a bald head, and he’d simply dyed it blond.
I came to a complete stop, and then whirled.
I think I know you.
I began to trot back in the direction I’d come, quickly building to a run. I zipped around the paths, circling and winding every which way. Sweat ran down my face and into my eyes, making them sting. I yanked up my t-shirt and swiped at them. I couldn’t find him anywhere. Finally, I collapsed on some stone steps leading to a particularly opulent gravestone and dropped my head into my hands.
Not only was the guy reading my e-mail, he was also following me. I needed to know what the hell he thought he was doing. I was tired of being a pushover and a passive participant in this game. Next time, I would tackle him to the ground. The problem was that I didn’t want to have to wait until, at his choice, he suddenly decided to appear because, no matter what, that would mean I wasn’t as prepared as he. He’d have the advantage. I had to figure out a way to turn the tables, lure him out of his rabbit hole, and be ready with a net to grab the sucker.
I sat there a long time, until the sweat entirely dried and the setting sun threw long shadowy tendrils among the graves and paths. I looked around and saw the carved angels winging around me.
“Ralph, are you here?” I said out loud.
Everything remained still. No Ralph, apparently. I wondered about that, though. I had a sense that an angel was supposed to always be with you. So, I spoke more firmly. “I’d appreciate a little help here. Please show yourself.”
