Borrowed Hearts

by Rick DeMarinis

  “Go to Mel’s Pawnshop tomorrow,” Raquel, or the person Raquel was in the process of becoming, said when I came back to the bedroom. “They sell fine guns there for under one hundred dollars.”

  She’d turned out the lamp and was sitting naked next to the window, looking down on the dog. It had quit barking and was just staring, like a rejected lover, at the cold beauty of Raquel’s unforgiving silhouette.

  “It’s against the law to shoot fine guns in the city,” I said, mocking her lambent Hispanic fire and lilt. “It’s a felony.”

  “I am not interested in your putrefacto laws,” she said.

  “What do you know about Mel’s Pawnshop, anyway?” I said. I stepped behind her and put my hands on her moon-dusty shoulders. The moon was nearly full and she was incandescent with a chalky light. Given the state of our lives, 3 a.m. sex was unlikely, but this crazy moonlit woman in the window broke the spell hard times put on flesh. I slipped my hands down to her breasts like a repossessor.

  She hunched away from me. “I want to put a bullet in that dog’s throat,” she said.

  I went back to bed as the dog resumed its pointless assault on our lives. “I am not going to Mel’s,” I said.

  “Fine, St. Francis,” she said. “I’ll go.”

  But she didn’t go. She was afraid to. The pawnshop area of town was full of aimless psychotics. Now and then one of them would be picked up for a crime committed in another part of the state or country. In fact, a serial murderer had been arrested in Mel’s a year ago as he was trying to trade a necklace made of human kneecaps for a machete.

  The next night a weather front moved in and the air was stifling. The changed atmospherics improved the acoustics of the neighborhood. The dog, it seemed, was in bed with us.

  “I can’t stand it!” Raquel screamed. “You have to do something!” She pulled the pillow off my head and threw it across the bedroom.

  I got up and opened the window. “Shut up, dog!” I yelled, but I might as well have been arguing with a magpie. We were not on the same wavelength. The odd timbre of the dog’s bark gave it an almost human quality. I could nearly make myself believe I was hearing a kind of garbled English. “What what what?” or “Hot, hot, what?” But there was also a forlorn tone that was not translatable. A canine refusal to accept some wrenching loss. I went back to bed.

  “I’ve got this feeling, hon,” I said. “Like that dog is in mourning for its lost mate.” We’d called the Animal Control cop days ago and his white van toured the neighborhood, picking up strays. Maybe the big dog lost his ladylove in that sweep.

  Raquel turned on the bed lamp and studied my face for signs of mockery or perhaps derangement. “Are you crazy?" she asked. “Dogs don’t mate for life like swans. They screw any bitch in heat. Don’t try to turn that monster into a brokenhearted family man.”

  Then she said the thing that forced the issue. “Look, hon,” she mocked. “Either you get that gun or I am going to find somewhere else to sleep at night.”

  My joblessness, and now my refusal to take action in an emergency, had turned her against me. “All right,” I said. “I’ll get the gun.”

  The next day, after I had made breakfast and Raquel had gone to work, I walked through the neighborhood looking for the dog. I’d already done this several times, but now I knocked on doors and asked questions. No one would admit to owning such a dog, not on our street or on the several adjacent streets. But even more curious than this, no one admitted to having heard the dog bark. Evidently its tirades were sharply directional, like the beam from a radar antenna, hitting only the thing it aimed at.

  “Did you get it?” Raquel asked me when she got home from work.

  I stalled. “Bindle-stiff chicken tonight, darling,” I said. “Plus asparagus a la Milwaukee vinaigrette.” These were recipes I had invented. I was proud of them. They were Raquel’s favorites.

  “You didn’t get it,” she said.

  “All Mel had were big-caliber revolvers—.357s and.44s. Nothing we could use comfortably. We’d wreck the neighborhood with those cannons.”

  “You didn’t go,” she said.

  I stuttered, a dead giveaway, then faced a wall of spiting silence the rest of the evening. She didn’t touch my wonderful dinner.

  The following morning at nine-thirty I saw Dr. Selbiades, my shrink. I told him all about the dog, the gun, and Raquel’s threat. I had not called him up about this crisis, and I could tell that it miffed him a bit.

  “So,” he said, in that loftily humble, arrogant, self-effacing way of his. “Your wife wants you to get a... gun.”

  Selbiades is not a Freudian, so this was only a joke—meant, no doubt, to get even with me for keeping secrets.

  “I’ve decided to get one this afternoon.”

  “Just like that?” he said, rocking back in his five-hundred-dollar leather-covered swivel chair.

  “Yes. A.22 automatic.”

  “It would be a mistake, my friend,” he said.

  “Probably. But I don’t see that I have a choice.”

  He stood up and flexed his hairy arms over his head and yawned. His yawn was as healthy and as uninhibited as a lion’s. He scratched his ribs vigorously, then sat down again. He was wearing a T-shirt and Levi’s and running shoes. He never wore anything else, at least in his office. “Christ, man,” he said at last, his thick neck corded, it seemed, with redundant veins and arteries. “Of course you have a choice! Unless...”

  I bit. “Unless?”

  “Unless you hate her.”

  “Hate her? I love her! What do you mean, hate?”

  “It just sounds like some classic passive-aggressive bullshit, my friend. You’re giving her enough rope to hang herself with.”

  “I am terrified of losing her,” I said, my voice ragged.

  Selbiades swiveled his chair around abruptly, so that he now faced the window behind his desk. “There is, of course, a level on which what you say is true,” he said, his tone suggesting a far too intimate knowledge of mankind. His window gave out on a view of fields, freshly scraped down to naked earth in preparation for a town-house development called Vista Buena Bonanza. He clasped his hairy hands behind his head and contemplated this field. He owned it and was a partner in the new development. I envied him: he was the happiest man I knew.

  “What about bullets?” Raquel asked that evening. I gave her the small paper bag that had four boxes of.22 ammo in it. She snatched the bag from me and inspected each box.

  “No blanks,” I said, thinking that blanks would have been fine. I was sure all she wanted to do was scare the dog off, not actually wound it.

  She looked haggard sitting at the kitchen table, holding the pistol in one hand and sorting through bullets with the other. Then she put the gun and bullets in one messy pile and shoved them to the center of the table. She stood up and hugged me. “I am so proud of you at this moment,” she said.

  But it was a soldierly embrace. French or Russian, it would have involved tight-lipped kisses on both cheeks. A distinct warpage had entered our lives.

  While I did a stir-fry, she paced around the kitchen smoking cigarettes, lost in strategy. She had been putting on weight and her heavy stride made the wok shimmy. I guessed that she’d put on twenty or thirty pounds since she’d taken the job at the courthouse. I hated to see that. In spite of our quick lip service to the contrary, physical attraction is the first thing that draws men to women, and vice versa. Time and mileage do their damage, but Raquel was too young to lose her figure. She had the long-muscled legs of a Zulu princess, along with the high-rising arch of spirited buttocks. Her torso was wide and ribby, the breasts not large but dominant and forthright. But now that rare geometry had been put in danger by the endless goodies office workers have to contend with every day. The county office in which she processed words seemed more like a giant deli than an arm of government. Often she would bring me pastries oozing lemon curd or brandied compote, or giant sandwiches on kaiser buns thick with ham or beef,
and on special occasions such as office parties, entire boxes of sour cream chocolate cookies, brownies, or Bismarcks. She wouldn’t step on the scale. When I suggested it, she snapped, “I know, I know, I’ve put on a couple of pounds. I don’t need to have it shoved in my face.”

  But it was more than her waistline that was changing. She began to embrace opinions that seemed alien to her nature. She’d sit on the sofa in front of the evening news with watchdog attentiveness. (“See how Rather works in the knee-jerk liberal point of view?” “Look at the expression on Brokaw’s face when he mentions the Contras. Looks like he wants to spit.”) In the past she had no coherent politics. She was resolutely apolitical, in fact. But now she was listing sharply to the no-nonsense Right.

  “The people are going to take law and order into their own hands if the courts keep turning loose the rapists and killers,” she once said.

  “That’s how a society destroys itself,” I suggested, fatuously, I admit.

  Raquel scoffed. It was the first time in our eight-year marriage that she had shown outright contempt for me. It stung. The scar is still warm. “That is how a society saves itself,” she said.

  And, on another occasion, she said that the bureaucrats didn’t care a bit about the common man. “All they care about is raising taxes so they can keep their soft jobs.” She had good evidence for this, having spent the last six months working for the Department of Streets.

  That first night of the gun was electric with adrenaline. We couldn’t sleep at all. We watched TV until 2 A.M., then went up to the bedroom. We got undressed— no pajamas or nightgown, as it was another hot, humid night—and got in bed. Raquel was giddy with high excitement. I was tense, and not looking forward to the dog’s appointed hour. I wished now that my passive-aggressive bullshit had not expressed itself so classically.

  The bed got swampy with body steam. Raquel threw off the sheet and thin blanket and sat up. She took the gun off the night table and couched it on her belly. Goosebumps, triggered by the cold steel, radiated upwards to her breasts, stiffening the nipples, and downwards to her thighs, making them twitch. The moon was on the wane but still bright. A thin film of sweat made her body glow metallic. Oh rarest of metals! I thought, choking back a desperate love. The gun muzzle slipped down into the dark delta at the vertex of her thighs. Perversions of wild variety and orientation presented themselves to me.

  “Forget it,” Raquel said, sensing my state of mind. “He might start any minute now.”

  “It’s not three yet. It’s only two-thirty.”

  I was pleading. I hated myself, a beggar in my own bed.

  “Afterwards,” she said, her voice oddly abstract in the abstract light of the moon. “It will be better afterwards.”

  I couldn’t see her eyes, just the black skull-holes that held them. She was smiling.

  I snapped on the bed lamp, but didn’t look at her. I wanted to avoid her, to organize my thoughts; I wanted to hold back the clock. I picked up a Newsweek from the magazine rack under the night table and flipped it open. I read about a woman in Pennsylvania who boiled her baby and sent the parts of the cooked body to a newspaper editor who had denounced abortion. Another article suggested that eighty percent of all children under the age of twelve will one day be the victims of a violent crime. I switched to the opinion columns, but those genteel, sharp-witted souls seemed to be writing about a world in which sanity was a possibility.

  Then it was three o’clock. “How do you shoot this thing?” Raquel asked, looking at the gun as if for the first time.

  “You aim and pull the trigger. It’s easy,” I said. I heard my passive-aggressive bullshit sprocketing these words out of my lungs.

  “Isn’t there something here called the safety?” she asked. It made me happy that the enormity of the coming violence had made her a bit timid.

  “That little lever, up on the handle, I think.” Actually my knowledge of guns was not much better than hers.

  “Where!”

  “Push it up, or maybe down. I don’t know.”

  The gun, wobbling around in her hand, gradually aimed itself at her throat as she fiddled with its levers and knobs.

  “Jesus Christ!” I said, grabbing the gun away from her. It went off. It shot a Currier and Ives print off the wall. It was an original, given to me by my grandmother. Fast Trotters in Harlem Lane, N. Y. Men in silk hats driving fine teams of horses down the dirt roads of nineteenth-century Harlem.

  Raquel burst into tears. It shocked me. Not the tears but the realization that I could not remember the last time she had cried. I put my arms around her, half expecting her to shove me away. She didn’t.

  Then something else happened. Or failed to happen. It was three-fifteen and there was no dog in the street calling to us. “Listen, honey,” I said.

  But her sobs had been on hold too long to be put off. She cried for another five minutes. Then I said it again, as gently as I could. “Listen, Raquel. No dog.”

  We both went to the window. The street was empty. Whatever the big dog had wanted to get off his chest was gone. He had exorcised himself, or at least that’s what I hoped. There was the possibility that he’d taken a night off and would come back. But I didn’t have to think about that now. Thinking about that, and what I would have to do about it, could wait.

  I went downstairs and made a pot of hot chocolate. I brought two big mugs of it back to the bedroom. But Raquel was already asleep. I was too rattled to sleep. I went back down and drank hot chocolate until 5 A.M. The dog never showed up.

  When I went back upstairs, the sun was flooding the bedroom with its good-hearted light. It was the same good-hearted light that fell on the heads of baby boilers and saints alike, unconditionally.

  The last thing I saw before dropping off to sleep that morning was the gun, shining on the night table like a blue wish. I had one of those half-waking dreams that give you the feeling that you’ve understood something. I understood that the barking dog had been a sponsor for the gun. The gun had sought us out, and found us, with the assistance of the dog. Go to sleep, you fool, Raquel said. But that was the dream, too, and I realized that the gun had summoned, again with the aid of the dog, real changes in Raquel.

  Morning dreams always wake me up, insisting that I register their fake significance. I got out of bed and went to the bathroom. I took a long look at my face. It had more mileage on it than my life justified. I rummaged through the stock of pills in the medicine cabinet, then went back to bed armed with Seconal against smart-ass dreams. The gun caught my eye again. It had a tight, self-satisfied sheen, like a deceptively well-groomed relative from a disgraced branch of the family who’d come to claim a permanent place in our home.

  disneyland

  Pixel. A small word, filling a few bytes of memory at most, but it sat in Albert Court’s mind like a huge bird of prey. No other words could get past pixel. He was blocked again. The brain could store millions of megabytes of information, and yet here was pixel in ten-foot-high neon letters declaring itself supreme, the only word in the world.

  Albert looked at his damaged son, trying to force the stopper out of his mind, hoping for simple fluency. “Tommy,” he said, but the obstinate pixel shoved the next word aside.

  Tommy Court regarded his sweating father. My sire, he thought, amused. Albert touched his son’s lips with a Kleenex. The sedative, tranquilizer, antidepressant, or whatever it was they’d given him caused the boy to salivate heavily. Tommy turned away, refusing his father’s attentions.

  Then, mercifully, pixel opened its wings and sailed out of Albert’s mind. Wiping his forehead with another Kleenex, he said, cheerful with relief, “Well, Tomaso, isn’t this one grade-A hell of a fix?” He laughed, jovial at the sudden release of language.

  Tommy was being kept in the hospital for psychiatric observation because of what he’d done to himself. The family physician, Dr. Bud Rossetti, thought it best. It wasn’t a private room—Albert’s Health Maintenance Organization didn’t per
mit private rooms—and the fat man in the other bed flooded the small room with the steady rasp of difficult breathing. The man was sitting up in bed, bent over a crossword puzzle. “What’s a four-letter word for ‘think tank’?” he asked.

  “Rand,” Tommy said, holding his bandaged arms over his head, like a referee’s signal for “touchdown.”

  “Come again?” the fat man said, staring dubiously at Tommy over his half-moon reading glasses.

  “Rand,” Tommy repeated. “The Rand Corporation.”

  “Oh, Christ. Of course.” The fat man leaned into his puzzle, wheezing.

  “Tommy,” Albert said, his voice hushed discreetly. “Sylvia’s a wreck. Look, you’re her only child. You know how she feels about you. What you’ve done to her... No, scratch that, Tomaso. I meant, what happened—” He stopped himself, realizing too late his blunder.

  Tommy wouldn’t let his father off the hook. “Go for it, Pops. Say it.”

  “No, son. You know that’s not what I meant to say.”

  “Sure it was. You wanted to say that what I did to myself was actually meant for puddly old Sylvia’s benefit. Every fucking thing that sends her up the walls is old Tomaso’s fault, like she had a full deck before I started screwing up my life. Right?”

  Albert glanced nervously at the fat man, but the fat man was engrossed in his puzzle, or at least was civil enough to be faking it. “Seven letters,” he murmured to himself, “meaning ‘danger for the unwary.’”

  Albert picked up the water pitcher and filled the glass on Tommy’s night table. He drank all of the water, then refilled the glass.

  Wriggle, wriggle, Tommy thought, smiling faintly.

  Words: in the best of times they were difficult for Albert. They were nearly impossible when he had to deal with crisis situations. Sometimes he believed he was dysphasic, and at other, more despairing moments, he thought he had a form of Parkinson’s disease, a radical decay of the area of the brain responsible for speech.