by Maria Flook
“I gave her my Valium,” she told me.
“How much Valium do you give to a dog?”
“I must have given her too much, because she seems real sleepy.”
I walked through the apartment to find the dog. She was lying quietly at the foot of the bed, wearing men’s underwear.
There are many ways to react to the harsh sights of our times. We can laugh at six people in wheelchairs crossing a busy intersection on an icy day, or we can feel miserable about it. I have learned to embrace the grimy little mysteries I come across, giving full rein to my sense of humor. My sense of humor has saved me on every occasion. But I felt distressed when I found the dog in the bed of a woman whom I’ve wanted for a long time, and this dog is wearing some man’s underwear. I reminded myself that it was common to put underwear on dogs in heat. The ASPCA didn’t have to learn about Lane’s bitch, in its pathetic, biannual phase of receptivity. The dog was drugged but not stuporous.
“It will be a while before the Valium wears off,” I told her, “and please, no tea for me,” I said to her. “I’m starting now.” I made no small production of pouring myself a real drink.
It was around dinnertime then, and Lane took a carton of jumbo shrimp in black bean sauce out of the fridge. How long the carton had been sitting there, I didn’t know. We ate it cold, right out of the box. I liked dipping my fork into the carton and stabbing randomly at its fleshy contents, biting a tangy pink crescent right off the fork; it mirrored my mood somehow. I started to feel better from the bourbon. I was going though my carton of cigarettes, and nicotine surges pulsed in both my wrists, dancing up one arm and down the other.
We had to be in Brookline at the house of a small-press publisher. It was a book-signing for Lane’s friend who had written a group of stories about Vietnam. Lane had written something for the sleeve, some patriotic phrases. I read the blurb and saw that Lane didn’t have any idea about that war.
She took a few extra minutes putting a line along her eyelid with a sharp, waxy pencil. She scolded me for watching her as she applied her makeup, and for a minute I was bored and edgy as I stood beside her; she treated me like her handmaiden or a younger sibling.
“The smeary look is in,” I said. “You put on your makeup like you’re working on a drafting board; that lip liner is thin as a blueprint. Why don’t you muss yourself up some?”
“I don’t tell you how to zip your pants,” she said.
“Unzip them,” I said. I stood directly behind her as she leaned into the bathroom mirror. There was a hairsbreadth between us, yet I did not fit myself against her. I just dropped my face to her hair, my lips to her shoulder. I stood behind her and faced her face in the mirror. That was all.
I never really liked these book events she took me to. The poetry readings in coffeehouses and college libraries were bad enough in the dark months of winter, but in summer they were a crime. Who wants to think of the printed word on a humid evening, when clothing feels unnecessary, when my shirt, itself, by its own accord, wants to peel away from my shoulders. My belt buckle unclasps, like the head and tail of a snake. My pant legs roll down until I can walk right out of them. Even a mosquito, its pulsing proboscis inserted somewhere along Lane’s alabaster neckline, reminds me of sex. Clouds of gnats emerge from the hedges and suburban lawns like swarms of tiny, impertinent phalluses.
I opened the refrigerator again for another look.
“Oh, no you don’t. They’re waiting for me,” she said.
She was wearing her new white shift and I made a bet with myself that she’d spill some wine on herself before the night was out. I put her in the car and we started out peacefully, but after a few miles I stopped on Massachusetts Avenue at The Plough and the Stars. I heard her saying, “Not this place again.” I was getting out of the car and leaving her where she sat. I knew she didn’t like the idea of keeping her seat warm, and she accompanied me into the bar. She pouted, lifting her chin to such a degree she looked as if she were going to apply some eyedrops.
I was pleased to be in the Plough again; I loved its smoke and clatter and the smell of beer-splashed concrete. It was home to me, like someone’s worn-down basement rec room. The glasses were large and open-mouthed like vases or the bases of lamps. Everyone held his beer level with his breast pocket, always at the ready to greet a friend getting off work. Anyone uncomfortable in his own rank or social standing would dislike the place, thinking it too dim and plain. I liked the clientele here; all had the rich background of daily work and the earned pleasure of time off. The men greeted the weekend oasis at the conclusion of their forty-hour routine, which would start again in just a couple more revolutions of our planet, but for now, it seemed as if an eternity separated us all from a huge collective Monday. A girl like Lane, uppity in her new freedom from her coal-town upbringing, fancied to think the place a dive. She preferred a fern bar or a lounge with a white piano. I was feeling my first orneriness of the night. I could make it a lot worse for her if I wanted to. She wouldn’t drink a beer with me. She took a ginger ale and complained that its fizz was gone. “Nobody drinks Shirley Temples in here,” I told her. I hadn’t laid a finger on her yet, but I wanted to do one thing, a first thing. I wanted to release the full heavy twist of her hair from its red plastic clasp, yet I didn’t touch a strand.
Thirst is a funny thing. If it’s for a certain taste, and that taste is not on the shelf, not in this bar or the next bar, you keep trying all the bars until closing time. This has happened to me a lot. What I wanted was standing next to me, undrinkable like a stone bottle, solid fossil from a precious excavation site, like an item placed on a pedestal within a circle of electronic sensors at the Museum of Fine Arts. Something both vulgar and beautiful, suspended in time, petrified, like a tiny spider or a tree frog frozen in amber.
Being with Lane gave me the sensation of standing at the lip of a public swimming pool after hours. The lane demarcations are perfectly straight, the surface of the water is tight and quiet, like a sheet of polyethylene. I can see every speck on the bottom, the circular trowel marks left on the smoothed blue concrete. I’m looking for a tiny object, a hairpin lying on the submerged stairs, an earring where the floor slopes down, a red barrette where it’s twelve feet deep.
The next best thing is the bitterness of ale, and I had a couple before we left there. By this time she was getting mad because we were late for the book bash in Brookline. She was wearing her white child-bride chemise, and I couldn’t help noticing how it fit. It was making me feel unsteady and so I teased her and said she looked like “a flower girl for Phyllis Diller,” but she didn’t think it was funny. Some people have said Lane’s hips are too wide, disproportionate to the rest of her. This is probably true. She’s small-waisted, like a wasp, and this makes her back end twice as apparent. I like it. It’s a simple matter of taste. A man has to walk through every door of a house and decide for himself how to arrive at home.
I put her back in the car. “I’m raring to go,” I told her, but I drove off in the wrong direction.
She looked back over her shoulder at the opposite traffic heading on towards Brookline. “What are you doing! I’m already late,” she was yelling.
“There’s a band I want to hear.”
“You have to hear music?”
“My ears are ringing. I need to unclog them with some rock-’n’-roll.”
“Turn around! Turn, turn—” she screamed at me.
“Actually, the song goes, ‘To everything, turn, turn, turn, There is a season, turn, turn, turn—’ Pete Seeger pinched that off the Bible, did you know that?”
“Shit. Will you just slow down? This is a hospital zone—” She was reading the street signs for the same reason Hansel had dropped his crumbs.
I said, “It’s just a mental hospital.”
“How can you tell?”
“Those galvanized screens on the windows. They’re not for the mosquitoes. This is where you can get your lobotomy, double coupons.”
&
nbsp; She laughed. I was driving over a row of potholes, and it had a sudden, wonderful affect on her. If only I had known the advantages of these neglected streets, I would have mapped out a more arousing route. I went around the block and took the potholes once again at a greater speed. The leaky shocks squawked, the bad suspension rolled the chassis seconds afterwards, the reverberations bouncing through the bucket seats. I remembered an erotic story about a woman riding a buckboard wagon in the Old West days.
I started to tell her.
“You’ll blow a tire,” she told me.
“I will for you, baby. Yee-hah—” I joked, but I meant it, and I wanted to.
A few years ago when she was out in California, I cashed in my only stock, Texaco—the man who wears the star—and it was just enough to fly out there. She had promised to pay half my fare, but it never materialized. In fact, she ended up using my traveler’s checks like play money—“They don’t look real,” she said, as we moved up and down the San Francisco streets, eating Chinese pastries and buying loud kites and paper dragons with which she decorated her bedroom.
I suppose it was during that visit that I started to crumble. By this time, my desire for Lane had gone through its gawky stage, it had matured and had all its whiskers; it was none too pretty. I felt it when that 747 shuddered into motion and ascended through the first powder-puff cloud. The itchy titillation I’d been coping with for months had waned, and in its place was the constant whine of a revving engine, a huge McDonnell-Douglas without a wing span or any method of lifting off. When she met me at the airport, I was encouraged by her gypsy-like attire, a cheap leather jacket and her hair held off her neck by a ribbon that looked stolen from a caravan. Also working against me were the everyday tourist attractions: the throbbing climb of the cable car we rode with sightseers. Its gears meshing with the pinion dog teeth made an audible straining; its brakes screaked as it crested the hills, a momentary caution before its plunge downward. The trolley ride matched the rise and fall of my panic reactions.
It was difficult to stand beside Lane in the way she wanted me to, as an old college chum, a neutral alliance and witness to her gaiety and brief intellectual sprints of mind. She wanted me almost in the same way that gay men desire female confidantes with whom to share their most cherished secrets about their conquests and worries. She told me I was more beautiful than I was handsome. Once, sitting at her cluttered vanity, she painted my lips with a small sable brush, which she kept wetting on her tongue to taper it.
What kind of man would allow this?
I sat still as a post as she outlined my mouth, following the curve of my lips. I tried to concentrate on circus clowns, Indian braves, mime artists, greased wrestlers, any of several masculine performers. But these minstrels and vaudevillians would not excuse my passivity during her ritual. At last Lane stopped teasing my lips with the tiny brush. She said, “I knew it. You’d almost pass. You really almost would.”
“As a woman?” I asked.
“As me,” she said with increasing awe, and she seemed overcome by the idea of it.
That year, she had rented a little cottage north of San Francisco while she taught composition at an agricultural college outside Arcata. Her house faced the water, where we could watch sea lions bumping up and down in the surf and fighting for purchase on a single large stone. The house was one of those small Craftsman bungalows, extremely run-down but charming in its airy resemblance to a house of cards. It was January and chilly at night. We kept the wood stove going, using wood she had stolen from her next-door neighbor. At first I found this acceptable, one or two logs wouldn’t be a crime. Soon, I saw that she had her thieving down to a routine. Waiting until night, when the other cabin’s lights were out, she would edge across the wet lawn in her fluffy slippers and take the newly split logs. “Those are green,” I told her, but she said that her neighbor counted his seasoned wood and it was better to take the green. Every night she would take enough wood for the evening and the following morning. I didn’t think about it until I saw a teenaged kid out there swinging a maul and stacking the split wood under his father’s directions. I saw the boy working hard. The maul hit a tough knot and bounced up, just missing his teeth.
Watching that kid, I thought of my own father. Once, my father had me dismantle a stone wall on the east side of our property and move it over to the west side of the house. It took a week to move all the elliptical stones to the other side of our lot, and then it was impossible to figure out how to rebuild the wall. It wasn’t as easy as piling stone upon stone; I had to choose the rocks individually for correct balance and extension. There must have been some kind of mathematical pattern to follow and I didn’t have the knack for it. I even stopped in the middle of the job to go the library to find an architectural text about building stone walls. I read a passage that claimed that because of “the whims of the glaciers,” every Yankee landholder owned acres of melon-sized stones, too small to use as lookouts or landmarks, too large to ignore. As a result, there are crooked stone walls everywhere in New England, even in the heart of Boston. I couldn’t get the hang of it. My wall kept lurching to the left or right and when I had a few feet of it, the whole thing toppled. My father kept swearing at me. When I saw the boy outside Lane’s cottage, splitting and stacking the new wood, I told her not to add so many logs to the stove. The place was sweltering.
That was the week we slept together in the same bed. I kept far over to one side of the mattress and tried to imagine lying between railroad tracks like I did when I was a kid. We lived a half-mile east of the B&O, and my friends and I knew the schedules pretty well. We counted the whistle blasts to determine if the train was coming fast or slow, if the boxcars were empty or carrying a load. If it was a heavy load, the engineer would lay on the horn extra time, a few shorts and then the long. If the string was too long to try to stop, they gave good warning, repeating the long phrases. We would lie there between the rails as if stretched out on our own living room sofas. As the train approached we could feel the vibration; we watched the grit on the tracks start to dance, but we were always seen in plenty of time. That was the whole point. To get the train to brake and come to a full stop. As the train slowed, the diesel chugged haltingly, as if remarking on the nuisance we created. The brakemen would shoot down after us, but we would be gone. Once, we had the idea to lie in the shade of a highway overpass where the trainmen couldn’t see us in the darkness and we were further obscured because of the bend. This was the way we dared one another for weeks, and finally I took my turn. I didn’t stay put between the rails, but I leapt to my feet so near the last, fatal instant, I could feel the breath of heat panting off the engine. It was one of those stupid moments of childhood, but I knew I would think of it often in my later years. Here I am again, using it as a metaphor for a greater stupidity—lying here, playing dead beside Lane.
We were in the double bed, surrounded by the new paper dragon and kites I had tacked to the ceiling. I hadn’t done a very good job, and the room had an anticlimactic feel, like a ballroom at the end of the night when the crepe-paper decorations begin to uncoil from the rafters. I felt lonelier than ever with her so near, inches away. She stretched beneath the sheet and sighed; she turned over with a luxurious rotation of her hips. She faced me and smiled. “You don’t really mind, do you?” she asked. “That we don’t do it?”
“No problem,” I said, something beaten. Shouldn’t these small, sour moments be questioned, rebuked? I was fully awake, as if a snowball rested on my forehead. No matter how I tried to separate my impulses from my actions, it was impossible to ignore my own needs. I recalled an iron lung I’d seen on display at a medical library and I tried to imagine I was encased in its rigid shell.
“You’re full of shit,” I told her, at last, and I got up, dressed, and went outside. I can fake many things—greetings, farewells, I can chuckle on cue, but I can’t fake a good night’s sleep. I went out, walked around the hem of the sea and up and down the one road I knew.
<
br /> When I came back inside, she was at the door. She kneeled down and untied the wet laces of my shoes. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry.” I lifted my feet, one after the other, so she could peel off my drenched socks. I pulled her wrist until she stood up. I steered her down the hallway. She tripped and fell to her knees. I yanked her to her feet again. She was limp, insubstantial as a scarecrow. I hooked my elbow around her neck, tightening my hold. I dug my other forearm into her shoulder blades to guide her. In the back room I shoved her onto the bed. I snapped her bikini underpants off her legs and tossed them. She started stuttering elementary words, fearful words, which sounded so clean and genuine, I was impressed. Her honesty aroused me. I fucked her the way I wanted. I can only describe it this way: I fucked her keenly. Then I started over. She sniffled at penetration, during, and in between. If it was rape, Lane never said so, but I guess it was. She cried out throughout our soulless endeavor. “Oh, God,” she said, then she just said, “God,” without any recognizable inflection, without faith or blame or surprise.
I pulled the car into the crowded parking lot of a small rock-and-roll club that looked like an old Esso station with the garage bays cemented up.
“I’m not going in there,” she said. “I’m late for a party. They sent invitations.”
“I’ll engrave you one now,” I said. I took my knife out of the glove box, a small blade I used for gutting and scaling fish. I saw it impressed her somehow. She didn’t know the difference between a weapon and a utensil. I put it in my pocket beside the exiled king, the unknown soldier. I told her she would like the band, the Swimming Pool Cues. “Now that’s a band with a sense of humor,” I said.
“Only for a while. Then you promise we’ll go straight to the party,” she said.
Lane knew that the party depended on her presence. She was happy to be a little tardy. She would enjoy their notice upon her arrival, their relief and excitement at seeing her. The pages don’t turn without her.
