Exile on Kalamazoo Street

by Michael Loyd Gray

  “I’ll help you clear the table and do dishes,” she said.

  “Don’t even think of it, Janis,” I said as I grabbed our plates. “Go enjoy the fire.”

  I cleared the table and stripped off the table cloth and took coffee to Janis; then I washed dishes and tidied up the kitchen. I opted for tea and joined her by the fire. The embers glowed orange and blue. I wasn’t sure what type of wood was burning, but the aroma was sweet and pleasant. Black Kitty had been napping in a chair, but now he was awake and seemed mesmerized by the flames.

  “He’s your sidekick now, Bryce,” she said, inclining her head toward Black Kitty.

  “He’s a good boy.”

  “He helped you through the winter, I think,” she said.

  I thought about how Elsa helped me get through the winter, too. I listened a moment for any knocking sounds, but there weren’t any.

  “It would have been awfully lonely without Black Kitty,” I said, “but you helped me through the winter, too, Janis. Obviously I couldn’t have done it without you.”

  She sipped coffee and stared back into the fire.

  “It was for a good cause,” she said finally.

  “A lost cause, at one point.”

  “Not true.” She shook her head vigorously and her long brown hair danced on her shoulders. “Only people who won’t change are lost, Bryce.”

  I nodded. It was a good line. It was true and a good line. A line for a book but an even better line for life.

  “Once I was lost, but now am found,” I said. “What’s that from?”

  “ ‘Amazing Grace.’ ” She kept staring into the fire. It gave her face a glow.

  “I knew it was some song.”

  “Mother sang that song when we were kids,” she said. “Don’t you remember?”

  Pieces of childhood came back to me.

  “Yes. Yes, I do. Sobriety is good for the memory, I guess.”

  “And soul,” she said, turning to me and smiling. The side of her face nearest the fire still glowed.

  “Ah, the soul. An elusive character.”

  “Is it?”

  “Maybe not as much as it used to be, Janis. Another benefit of sobriety.”

  She turned back to the fire.

  “Can you hear her singing, Bryce—Mother singing that song?”

  I could. It came back to me. It was far off in my mind, but distinct enough to hear.

  “Yes, I can,” I said, smiling and feeling warm inside. “She had a lovely voice, actually.”

  “Yes, she did. She sang in the church choir while you were away at college.”

  “I never knew that, Janis.”

  “She stopped after Dad died. That sucked all the wind from her sails, I guess.”

  “That would do it,” I said.

  I tried to remember the day he died, but it had been twenty-five years, and the memories were fragments, like shattered glass on a floor. Our mother was killed in a car accident just a couple years after Dad’s heart attack. That was far more tragic than Dad’s death, far more of a searing pain and loss, and yet it, too, had occurred long ago, back in the cloudy, murky past. Both experiences flooded back into me and my eyes flooded.

  “I wish they had lived long enough to see my first book,” I finally said. “Does that seem selfish?”

  She shook her head gently.

  “It’s not selfish. They would have been very proud of you. I’m very proud of you, Bryce. You’ve survived a lot.”

  “Both of us.” I extended my tea and we toasted cups.

  “To exile,” she said.

  “Does exile really make sense to you, Janis?”

  She smiled. “Now it does. More than before, anyway.”

  We listened to the fire crackle and pop, entranced by the glowing embers. Soon Black Kitty tumbled from his chair and joined us. He sat between me and the fire, gazing into it longingly, it seemed—even lovingly. I wondered what was going through his mind. In my mind I was experiencing a jumble of feelings: loss and pain and confusion and dissipation and recovery and exile—but also hope.

  I thought, as I had early in my exile, of “The Dead” and the incomparable passage about snow falling all over Ireland and Gabriel Conroy’s epiphany. I thought, too, of what Stephen Dedalus said: “We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.”

  My exile was surely about meeting myself. And lately about Elsa leaving her underwear at home. I wondered what she was doing—hoped she wasn’t entertaining Matt, the ass outlaw in training, with her 23-year-old shaved vulva. That really was none of my business, I reminded myself. Unsuccessfully.

  Through a window in the failing light, I saw snow falling and flakes battering themselves against the glass. The snow had been falling for ages, it seemed, with great purpose as well as great tragedy on some days, and without tragedy on others. Or so I imagined.

  After all, it was just snow and did not have much longer to live.

  Chapter 11: The Muddy Homestretch

  Purplish-white flowers sprouted in my backyard in the growing expanses where the snow had melted. Rain fell, sporadic at first, and then hard, washing the remaining snow away, except for thin white collars around the trunks of trees. Soon the collars evaporated, too, and the yard was soggy and brownish green as lively brown and black squirrels scavenged for what they had buried in the fall. Mourning doves appeared in pairs and sparrows lined power lines, but no longer seemed to huddle together for warmth. In the trees I saw many vibrant cardinals and husky blue jays, and on one day I spied a hawk circling lazily, high above the trees.

  Soon I had days of pleasant enough inertia and I reread The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms. I enjoyed very much the worlds of those two books and was summoned out of them only to field calls from the movie people. But I managed to convince them the script was going well when in fact not a word of it existed on my laptop screen.

  Or even in my mind.

  Maybe it existed in some form in my subconscious.

  In my conscious mind the debate raged over whether I would actually write it. It was good that I could afford to give back what money I had already accepted.

  Mavis kept after me by phone.

  “Working hard, Bryce?”

  “Hardly working.”

  “Ah, that sage Midwestern wit.”

  “Colorful, aren’t we, Mavis? Ever hear this one: piss up a rope?”

  “Now I have. And I’m sorry I did.”

  “That’s okay. Pissing up a rope is overrated and a bit messy.”

  “D’ya think?” she said. “Put it back in your pants and tell me about the screenplay.”

  “What screenplay?”

  “Cute. The screenplay you took good money for. Ring a bell?”

  “I do hear something, off in the distance. It’s a bit faint.”

  “You’ll be fainting, Bryce, when Hollywood asks for its money back. Maybe they send Tony Soprano to collect.”

  “Maybe I can get Tony Soprano into the screenplay.”

  “Why not? A wise guy Jedi would fit in just as much as anything, I suppose.”

  “I’ll get right on that.”

  “My friend, you better get right on something … anything.”

  “Let me play some more with my lightsaber. I’ll get back to you.”

  “Don’t hurt yourself, Bryce.”

  Clearly she had a percentage to protect.

  And an investment in my future, she claimed.

  Ah, the future.

  Yogi Berra was right: it ain’t what it used to be.

  Unchartered territory.

  Foreboding horizons.

  I had not allowed myself to think much about the future for quite a while.

  The future seemed like a novel yet to read.

  To write.

  Or not.

  * * *

  Elsa and I had settled into a routine that was not routine. She still lived with her
folks, but had a job as a teacher’s aide at an elementary school. And graduate school at Western Michigan University seemed on the near horizon to her. I couldn’t imagine her parents would have been anything but devastated to know she had taken up with a man old enough to be her father, but I was slowly letting go of the guilt in that area. Our routine was what it was. And our routine was based on her sneaking away from her folks’ house at night. If she stayed the night, she told her folks she had stayed with a girlfriend. She didn’t always stay the night—guilt, I suppose. She likely had plenty of guilt. Me, not so much. The older I got, the more I was willing to accept the unexpected pleasures, no matter how wicked they might seem to others.

  What she told her folks on those nights when she returned home, I didn’t know, and I didn’t ask. I cared, but not quite enough to ask about it and have to worry about it. I was the recipient of charity, of sorts, my academic gifts to Elsa finally coming back to me in a much more practical form. Maybe it was the universe and fate conspiring to pay me back for what I gave others. I was hoping I wouldn’t elevate our fling to anything more than that and begin questioning the value of the gift or the morality of it. I did the math and accepted it with little guilt: 51 goes into 23 quite nicely. And a number of times.

  My routine with Elsa was consistent in its inconstancy. Regular in its irregularity. We were ravenous sinners, but our encounters didn’t feel sinful to me. They felt providential, serendipitous. Like striking oil or like finding hunks of gold in a stream. They were wet and slippery. There were … fun. Elsa showed up whenever she could and the impulse struck. I was, after all, a sitting target. A fish in a barrel, waiting to spawn.

  As often as not, she arrived in her long wool coat and black boots with a good amount of heel, but with nothing underneath her coat except garters and stockings and that shaved 23-year-old vulva. It was a work of art, that young and eager vulva. And finally blooming, I supposed, like it never had before. Learning just how hungry it was. I figured I was seeing a show that Matt never got to see. She would let the coat fall open when I answered the side door. It sometimes hit the floor on the way up the steps to the kitchen. Sometimes it made it as far as the dining room—never as far as the living room, though. And many times we didn’t make it upstairs to the bedroom and instead used the sofa, coffee table, and several chairs for our gymnastics, stopping only for water breaks.

  One time, Elsa made an abrupt naked dismount from astride me on the bed, and I grabbed her thigh, thinking the bell had sounded on the round too soon. Somehow we landed on the floor, elbows over assholes, with Black Kitty rushing over to investigate. Elsa laughed and leaned against the bed, drawing her knees up under her chin, that 23-year-old shaved vulva winking at me—an old friend saluting another old friend. Well, hopefully not an old friend but instead a new friend.

  I stretched out on the hardwood floor on my back like I was doing the backstroke. Sweat ran through my butt cheeks onto the floor beneath me. Black Kitty stretched out between us, against me, his tail swishing against my half-erect penis.

  “Now that’s kinky,” Elsa said, her hand over her mouth as she giggled, her eyes big.

  “I had no idea Black Kitty was gay,” I said, chuckling, though a little embarrassed, too, and then catching his tail and gingerly scooting him away a bit. He seemed not to mind at all and rolled over onto his back.

  “I bet you liked it,” she said. “Admit it.”

  I pulled myself up on an elbow.

  “I’m not admitting anything. It was incidental contact—no blood, no foul.”

  “It was foul all right,” she said.

  “And your fault. You suddenly jumped off like there was someplace you had to be.”

  “I was tired,” she said. “I just needed a break.”

  “The rest of the team needs to know when you change the play.”

  “Team? Do you need help?”

  “I feel like I’m doing my part,” I said.

  “So far.”

  “So far?” I said.

  “The second half starts soon. We’ll see how you do then.”

  “Put me in, coach.”

  She giggled and opened her legs some more, allowing the 23-year-old vulva to peek out at me. I suspected she was learning its power and how to use it. I wanted to look at it, study it, admire its symmetry, but didn’t want to seem obsessed. A tall order.

  “You’ll have to put yourself in,” she said.

  “I thought that was what I was doing … doing my part.”

  “More like doing me with your part,” she said, giggling again and letting her legs fall all the way open. I could imagine her suddenly a sexual ventriloquist, able to speak through her 23-year-old vulva. It had been speaking to me all night. I hung on its every word.

  * * *

  The house needed a good cleaning and I pitched into that for several days, Black Kitty often dogging my every step. Then I switched on the vacuum cleaner and he disappeared until that monster was slain.

  The kitchen required the most work and I steamed the tiles and wiped counters and scrubbed the sink and emptied cabinets of the jetsam and flotsam of a winter. In one of the cabinets I rediscovered that mysterious blank envelope that had seemed to appear out of nowhere in my mailbox.

  I held the envelope up to light, as I had when it had materialized seemingly out of nowhere, but as before there was nothing to see. The mystery of it came back to me and ignited curiosity again, and I placed it on the coffee table and tried not to look at it. I would occupy myself with other things to avoid the sight of it, but always my eyes drifted back. I truly wondered why I put so much time into not opening it. But time was a commodity I had in abundance. Exile had taught me to pace myself in everything. Time in exile was not time in the world. Two different places. Different time zones. Separate planes of existence. And yet separated only by a side door of wood and glass. Hardly a real barrier at all. The cold leaked through it, slipped through cracks. But somehow most of the outside reality did not penetrate. A curious thing. As curious a thing as the unopened envelope.

  The afternoon of that day lengthened and light lost its vibrancy slowly as the sun descended into the west. I could no longer resist and picked up the envelope, knowing as darkness fell that for some reason I did not want to open it and learn whatever secret it contained.

  It was a secret that required light, even waning light.

  Black Kitty appeared and jumped onto the coffee table as I held the envelope in a hand like a high school love note I wanted to open but feared opening. He rubbed his face against the envelope and then jumped onto the sofa and settled in next to me.

  I opened the envelope and saw a slip of paper inside. A message? From who? Why? But the slip of paper was blank. I looked at both sides as if somehow I had missed something. I even held it up to the light. A blank piece of paper. In a blank envelope. Where had it come from? Who took the time to place it in the mailbox? Why? When had they done it—the middle of night? Early morning? Did that even matter?

  And my mind turned again to contemplating fate: what if whoever had placed it in my mailbox had been mistaken and the envelope was intended for another mailbox—a simple error regarding an address—and so the mystery handed to me was meant for another? And what was the mystery? Did the envelope and blank paper solve a mystery at all? Were they clues? Solutions? Random irrelevancy?

  I put the slip of paper back into the envelope—closing Pandora’s box?—and flipped the envelope onto the coffee table. Black Kitty jumped onto the table, batted the envelope several times with a paw, and then lost interest and jumped down, meandered into the kitchen, and ate from his bowl.

  On her next visit, unannounced as usual, Elsa sported a new black crotchless body stocking beneath her coat. She slipped out of her coat, handed it to me, and stood in the cold driveway. She pulled one breast free and let it hang, tweaking the nipple until it was firm and pink.

  “If any of the neighbors is looking out a window, I’ll have to move,” I said.
“Which will be tough since I can’t actually leave my house.”

  “Then no treats for you,” she said, slipping the breast back into hiding.

  “Do you want your coat back?” I said.

  “Warm me up with your body.”

  Some of the things she said seemed to come straight out of a secret and rather juvenile manual for how to seduce older men. Or from a reality TV show. Then I would look at her 23-year-old shaved vulva and lose my train of thought, thank God.

  “And what if I just keep the coat and leave you standing there?” I said.

  “Then there’ll be no more cookies in the jar for you.”

  The argument was flawless.

  Just like the 23-year-old vulva.

  * * *

  The mysterious blank envelope and slip of paper remained on the coffee table. Black Kitty grasped it once between his paws and chewed off a corner and licked the adhesive. He made a sour face and licked a paw—to neutralize the taste, I supposed. He shook his head several times and sneezed. I wished he could talk. Maybe he did, too.

  Mavis called again to offer … encouragement?

  “Bryce, are you actually writing, or just playing with your lightsaber?”

  “That’s good, Mavis. That could be a line in the screenplay, if I was writing a screenplay.”

  “Well, you’re certainly being paid to write one,” she said. “Eventually—call me crazy—but eventually, they just might suspect you aren’t writing a screenplay.”

  “You think they’ll notice?” I said.

  “They’re morons, Bryce, but not stupid morons.”

  “That doesn’t really make sense. A moron who isn’t stupid can’t be a moron.”

  “Well, you get my drift.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Are you going to write the damn thing, Bryce?”

  “Should I?”

  “Well, are you doing anything else with your life, for example, besides exile with a black cat?”

  “I don’t really think of it as exile anymore.”

  “What are you calling it now?” she said. “Jedi House Arrest?”

  “Maybe that should that be the title of the film.”

  “I thought you weren’t writing one, Bryce?”