by Steve Almond
Later, in bed, she made me promise. “I want Washington to be different.”
“Of course it’ll be different,” I said. “It’s a whole different city.”
“You know what I mean,” she said.
She closed her eyes and smiled a little and for a second I could see her at sixty, with a bolt of white hair and skin too tired to shine all the time.
“Who’re you going to take?” she said.
“One of the sports guys, probably.”
“What about Claudia? I haven’t heard about her for a while.”
“She’s got a new boyfriend,” I said. “A cop, I think.”
It would be fair to call the show a letdown. Loosed from the studio firmament, Axl’s voice came across as chalky and unmodulated, the bark of a hungry seagull. Slash was so drunk he kept falling over. A roadie had to scurry onstage and prop him up again. This grew disheartening.
My review was indignant. The band was taking its fans for granted, squandering a hallowed opportunity, retreating from the mandates of thus and such. I clacked away on my laptop in the empty cavern of the coliseum as, down below, the roadies broke down the lights and drum risers and mikes.
Claudia was where I’d left her, on a bench near the back exit. When I’d told her about the move to D.C., she’d only looked down and nodded. It was what she’d expected all along, I guess. But now, as I approached her, sitting there in her sad little blouse, I wanted to be able to do something for her, some terrific, unassailable thing that might restore the magic she held as a lifeguard (a guarder of lives!), quiet and secretly powerful so long ago.
“Let’s grab a drink,” I said.
“I should be getting home.”
“Nonsense.” I took her hand. “We’ll have some wine. We’ll go to my place and have some wine.” And as we moved out into the night, with its sooty breath and slender moon, I understood that Claudia was one of those people who is acted upon; that imposing her own desires invited risks she felt unprepared to take.
When I moved into her for the last time, she closed her eyes and lay back and her smell, chlorine and skin lotion, mingled with Jo’s perfume, which rose from the sheets. I was in no hurry. I had dropped Jo off at the airport six hours earlier. She would be landing in New York, combing out her hair, wrestling with the overhead compartment. I gave no thought to the weather back East. El Paso, after all, was sweltering.
Claudia’s knees began to tremble. Her toes dug at my calves and her mouth went slack. With each thrust, I could hear the faint clack of her teeth. And when her hips began to tilt up, I reached down to caress her, that her body might open and bring the miracle of water. I had a vision, even then, with all that had happened, was about to happen, that I might bow my head between her legs and be washed.
When you live with someone, you come to recognize the way they move, the pace and gravity of their gait. It’s the way of our kind: we can’t help but reveal ourselves. Jo always took the stairs two at a time, favoring her right leg from an old ballet injury, executing a little hop-skip on the landings. And now, somehow, despite the fact that she was thousands of miles away, I could hear the dangerous jig of her footsteps drawing closer. Claudia began to moan and her body opened and released the water and I felt my own body reaching ecstatically to repeat itself.
The door slammed. Our bodies slammed. Jo’s voice sounded out my name. Claudia grabbed at my face for a kiss. One red suede boot appeared in the doorway. I looked down at the glistening contortion of Claudia’s body. I still believed I might have time, that there was so much time left to me, to behave like this. And then Jo stepped into the room and looked at us and the air inside her seemed to crumple.
She began to sob, then to choke on her sobs. Her face turned a deep red. It was clear she could not breathe. Claudia’s hips gave way, fell to the sheets with a damp smack. She was facing away from the door, still lost in the innocent spell of pleasure. Then she noticed my face and her head swung around and she saw Jo and began weeping too, a soft sound like neighing. Her legs drew up and curled beneath her. Her painted toes looked like little dabs of blood. There was nothing to say. There was that room and the three bodies inside it. Claudia was hyperventilating. Jo was not breathing.
Or rather, she was attempting to breathe, to draw air into her lungs, but failing. Her body made a hundred silent hiccups; her lips were drawn over her teeth in a grimace. Her eyes were pinched shut. If we’d had a child, a little baby girl, this is how she would have looked at birth, drowning on the air of some cold white room.
I must have made a gesture toward her, because her body recoiled and she backed out of the room, bent at the waist, like a servant who has intruded unforgivably on the master’s privacy. I stood at the edge of the bed. A draft from the window moved across my absurd little penis. I felt a soft spearing in my side. Earlier, I’d laid down a towel, meaning to slip it beneath Claudia, and now I drew this around me and went after Jo. I had the idea that I still had something to do with her.
She was in the hall, staggering toward the landing. If I could see her face. I so wanted that—to see her face.
“Breathe,” I said. “You’ve got to breathe, baby.” I reached out to touch the scrolls of black hair pasted to her temples. Her throat clicked and her voice, finally catching, produced the thick vibrato of agony. Her hand raked my face.
Then she was flying down the stairs, and I charged after her, yelling wait wait, yelling, Oh God, honey. The neighbors hung from their doorknobs. On the second floor, I got my hand on her shoulder, tried to sort of tackle her, but she threw me off and I landed on my tailbone. A few seconds later the door below clanged. I struggled to my feet and raced down and bounded outside. My towel had fallen away. I was naked in the street, blood smeared on my cheek.
Someone had called the police, I guess, because a squad car was gliding to a stop in front of our building. The cop squinted at me through his tinted windshield and I ducked back, hid in the shadow of the door, watched Jo sprint into the night and disappear.
Claudia was gone, too. Poof. There was only a stain on the bed. I checked the bathroom, the closets, everywhere. And then it occurred to me what had happened: she had jumped out the bedroom window. There would be her body, on the sidewalk, and the police would want to know what it was all about.
But this was only some gaudy male fantasy. There was nobody down below but the cop, standing outside his squad car. He looked mean and confused. His hand rested absently on the butt of his gun. And somewhere farther off in the desert, a radio was playing, Axl Rose’s tiny voice reaching out, singing: Take me down to the Paradise City where the grass is green and the girls are pretty.
And now you listen to me, you people with your poise and careful judgments: These are the things I did. And I was punished for them, as we are all punished, in the end, for the degradations we inflict upon those who love us. Sorrow waits, with the patience of a psalm, for the infidel.
Though what returns to me now is how I felt afterwards, on those certain evenings, driving home toward Jo, sweet Jo, still a little drunk, bearded in the smell of Claudia, weaving the empty lanes of I-10, the warehouses sliding past, El Paso’s downtown like an isle of dinky lanterns, the Rio flowing black, and beyond, the speckled blue lights of Juárez. How full my heart was of gratitude! Thank you, I wanted to call out. Thank you! Thank you!
And if, as was often the case, a cassette were playing, the dumb blunt exuberance of the band, the howl and drub of all those fierce desires would gather in the night above me and become one desire and merge with my desire and confirm that I was doing something even noble in the eyes of youth, radical, kickass, seeking love on all fronts, transporting myself beyond the reach of loneliness and failure, into the blessed province of poontang.
It is in these moments of tender and ridiculous nostalgia that I know something inside me is still broken.
Among the Ik
Rodgers was a nervous man and now, with his wife dead, he was even worse. He had a story to
tell but kept insisting he was no good at stories. His hands flapped about like loose cardboard. His tremendous nose, which might have made another man feel powerful, bloomed red with agitation.
“This was, oh gosh, this was back in the sixties. Is it that long now? Yes. It must be. We’d just graduated from the University of Chicago and we were looking for work. I was looking for work I should say. This was before Connie and I, before we were married. I went to some conference or other and met this nice old fellow and, you know, everyone was looking for work back then. He said I should send my material along, would I do that, and a few months later he called and asked if I would like to teach at Newton College. There was none of this business of search committees, interviews. I was twenty-three years old, maybe twenty-four. A silly age.” Rodgers giggled tentatively. He was speaking to a friend of his daughter’s, a tall fellow named Ken who had arrived that afternoon in a gale of slightly forced cheer.
They were at the kitchen table, regarding one another over the leavings of dinner: crumpled napkins, bits of risotto stiffening on flatware, a shank bone whose joint shone faintly blue under the track lighting. The table itself was yellow pine, a stern piece of furniture Rodgers had once hoped to extend with leaves and move into the dining room. As he spoke with Ken, he envisioned running his hand across its surface, though the wood had dried and gone splintery in the last few years. That was the problem with yellow pine.
Rodgers’s three children were in the living room, sitting around the fire, peeling tangerines and playing with his baby granddaughter. They had descended upon him for the holiday, an intended gesture of support that filled his house with ruckus.
Connie’s death had not been sudden. But Rodgers had somehow experienced it as sudden, not quite believing until belief was no longer a choice but a condition. He found, in her absence, that his children frightened him. He drifted about their busy conversations, offering an observation or pun, enough to keep himself from drawing the suspicion of despair.
Ken was a Ph.D. student who knew enough anthropology to pretend at understanding, and they spent dinner chattering about Malraux and Veblen and Dube. Rodgers had emptied his wineglass twice. He said too much when he was drunk, or uneasy, and now he was both.
“You took the job?”
“Oh yes. Of course. I packed my books and papers and drove to Newton and taught two classes a week. A hundred and ninety-five dollars I was paid, plus faculty privileges.”
“One ninety-five?”
“Plus faculty privileges. That was the royal business in those days. They had a faculty commissary and an indoor swimming pool. It was all very exciting. Someone had hired me on. That first job, you know. You’re just happy to be there. You take nothing for granted. You haven’t learned that yet.” Rodgers reached for his wine. He couldn’t figure out whether the young man was compelled or merely indulging him. He had never been good on reactions. Those he had left to Connie.
“Newton was wild back then. Everything ran by consensus. The students were always protesting something, running around naked. Anyway, one night, about two months after I got there, the phone rang. It was late Saturday and I’d been to a party and, actually, I was stoned. Stoned out of my mind, actually.” Rodgers lowered a make-believe sledgehammer onto his head. “That was another thing about Newton. There was some very good grass around. It just seemed to be around. I figured it was Connie calling. But the voice on the line was one I’d never heard before, this deep, official voice. ‘Hello, Alex,’ he said. ‘This is Joseph Van Buskirk. I’m terribly sorry to be calling you so late.’ I thought to myself: Who is Joseph Van Buskirk? The name sounded so familiar. ‘As I say, Alex,’ this Van Buskirk said to me, ‘I hate to disturb you at home.’ ‘It’s okay,’ I told him. My mind was racing: Van Buskirk, Van Buskirk. Then it hit me: the president of the university! President Van Buskirk! This real Wall Street type. ‘I’m afraid I’m going to need your help, Alex, in an extremely unpleasant task. One of your students, Mary Martin, has been in a car accident. There’s really no choice in this.’ ‘No choice in what?’ I said, and he said, ‘We need you to identify the body.’
“My God. I mean, this was some strong grass I had smoked. Very strong. I could have handled a discussion with Connie. I maybe wanted to talk to her. But this was crazy. The president said, ‘The problem is that we can’t notify the next of kin, Alex, without someone to identify the body. We didn’t want to ask one of her friends, you see. These situations can be very rough emotionally. There was no one else to call, really. She’s just a first-year. You’re her adviser. She’s even in one of your classes.’
“‘The morning class,’ I said.
“He jumped right on that. ‘You know her, then? You’d be able to identify her?’
“‘I know what she looks like.’
“‘Good,’ the president said. ‘I’ll be by in fifteen minutes.’
“Jesus. What does that mean? He’ll be by? Does he have her in the trunk? No, that means he’s going to have to drive me somewhere. I’m going to have to get into the car with him and we’re going to have to drive somewhere. To a funeral parlor. I’m going to have to drive to a funeral parlor with him. To identify the body. I mean, this is how my mind is operating. All very scrambled. I’m trying to figure out whether I’m going to be able to keep it together, actually. Because if I can’t, you know, if I somehow lose my cool in front of him or he picks up on my being stoned … I mean, that’s it. No more job. My career ruined. You know how the mind can get under the influence of grass, that paranoia.”
“Wait a second,” Ken said. “Didn’t she have any ID on her? Why did they need you?”
Rodgers shrugged. “I don’t know, exactly. I never asked about that. It must have been a law, that someone who knew the victim had to inspect the body in person. All I knew was that the president wanted me there. It must have been some state law.” Rodgers sipped his wine. “I lived in this little carriage house out in the country that I rented for sixty dollars a month, utilities included. If you can imagine. A quiet place. Peaceful. About five minutes later, I heard this car pull up on the gravel. It was much too soon. You know, when someone says fifteen minutes they usually mean half an hour. That’s understood, isn’t it? I felt ambushed, really. You don’t tell someone fifteen minutes and then drive up five minutes later. I might not have been any more ready in fifteen minutes or half an hour, but at least I would have had the chance to adjust to the idea. Wash my face, brush my teeth. Maybe it was fifteen minutes. But it didn’t feel like it.
“Then I see these colored lights spinning outside my window. This car that’s pulled up is a cop car. Now I know for sure that I’m fired. The president’s going to pull up in his Rolls-Royce as I’m being led away by the cops, right? There’s a knock on the door and I freeze. Just freeze. It’s like one of those movies where you can hear the clock on the wall ticking. Tick tick tick. Except that I didn’t have a clock. Maybe a minute goes by and there’s another knock. This one louder. What choice do I have? I get up and open the door and there’s President Van Buskirk, this big fat man in a black coat. He has this very concerned look on his face, very Walter Cronkite, and he’s holding something in his hand. I swear to God for a second I thought it was a scythe. But it was just an umbrella. The cop car is behind him and it’s raining and he looks at me and I look at him. I thought he might have smelled the grass. That was my concern. For a second neither one of us moves. He’s sort of leaning in with his big Republican face, looking me over, and I’m figuring how I’m going to explain this to Connie, to my folks.
“‘You’ll need something more than that,’ he says finally. ‘It’s a cold one.’
“So I get myself a coat and put that on and we walk out together and get into this car with three cops already in it. State troopers. With those shiny black knee boots. All three of them sitting there, not saying a word. I get in the backseat, between a trooper and the president, and there’s two more in the front seat and I’m stoned out of my tree and w
e’re going to identify Mary Martin’s body. I mean, shit.”
Ken said, “Why all the cops?”
“I don’t know. I wondered about that later. Wouldn’t one have been enough? Why all three? But there they were. Not one of them said hello. The driver started the car and we drove. I was still stoned. You couldn’t have devised a worse place to put me. The troopers were looking at my clothes, jeans and some kind of leather fringe coat, and my hair. They knew what I’d been up to, I was sure of it. ‘I hope I didn’t wake you up,’ the president said. ‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘I was grading some papers.’ ‘On a Saturday night?’ the president said. He whistled and the cop sitting next to me let out a chuckle. There was an awkward moment there, but the president smoothed right over it. ‘I need to apologize again for this inconvenience, Alex. We’re going to need to head to the morgue and get this over with. We should have you home in less than an hour.’ I said, ‘Sure.’ ‘I appreciate your being available.’ ‘Of course, I’m just sorry it’s necessary,’ I said.
“The driver, he must have been the commanding officer, he said, ‘Goddamn shame is what it is. These kids. The risks they take.’ He looked at me in the rearview mirror. ‘They don’t believe it can happen to them.’
“I said, ‘What happened?’
“‘Single-car accident. Out along 41. Driver drinking. Lost control of vehicle. Into a ravine. Passenger, this Martin girl, through the windshield. Into a tree. Broken neck. Dead on impact.’
“‘What about the driver?’ I said.
“‘Oh, him,’ the trooper said. ‘He’s fine.’
“‘What a mess,’ said the trooper next to me.
“‘A real mess,’ said the third trooper. ‘A real mess job.’”
Rodgers paused and reached for his wine, then thought better of it. He could hear his son cooing at the baby from the other room: “What kind of girl does that? What kind of a silly girl?”
