by Gary Lutz
ASSISTED LIVING
Four Fictions
Gary Lutz
Future Tense Books
ASSISTED LIVING
Whether she came on to me or just came at me testily, without much sleep to her name, should make no bit of difference to anybody now. I tried to be a father to her, and she wanted to try being a daughter—that was to be the understanding, effective whenever.
Twenty-three, twenty-four, she was already sinking in a life of mild peril, of shortages sought out. She had run away from one of the middle counties to that blocked-in, secondary city, the one summoning itself clumsily upwards downstate. I was down there temporarily from the tertiary one.
She was staying in what had once been a magnificence of a building—eleven limestone storeys—with three roommates, though each had a room, and she knew people of all walks and wrongful pockets of life.
She wanted to report to me. That was my importance to her. I forget her earliest accounts, but a later one was about her youngest sister’s knack for looking at people a little older and thinking only “hostel... house... hospital...hospice.”
I never got the roster of siblings right, but they were mostly sisters dropped off at peewee colleges that each had a pond and a climbing wall with trampolines underneath. They were all majoring in medical billing. They all adored her and told her to stop fooling herself away on straw men, older men, ones who knew their place only if you walked them to a map and pointed out just how stringy and facetious their part of the world really looked in a cartographer’s dullard colors.
Another report: Her mother these days was reachable only through regular, moseying mail—fatted envelopes that came back unopened but bearing signs of purposefully rough handling, cross-room tosses.
She had larger, veinier hands, her TMJ was creakier than mine, her hair had been pruned to incoherence. (It looked sketched onto the skull, then scumbled.) She had me beat with her pirated culture and that unjust élan of the validly but modestly depressed. She wore sweeping sleeves reaching all the way to thumbnails gnawed raw. She claimed she was paid to sit with stay-at-home couples while they sent their kids out for papers, coffee, out-of-town tobacco. Her other job was at a custard shop.
There wasn’t enough testing of affections on each other. At most, one afternoon, I wound a couple of sidewalk-vendor necklaces around her wrists, which were thicker in the bone than mine, though who was I to be limbed so cleanly at fifty?
She had been portioned to just over six feet. Life had harshened on her dearly. She asked about my former wives, and why, in my describings, I’d let what they ate look like the vegetal grime it was. The second of them, I said, was just one of those overcared-for types, a belonger last seen caught awkwardly in a crosswalk.
But this one, this grown but unboosted girl, had different, sounder hurts.
Everything, I repeat, was on the level. It was so level we could set things out on it, the whole of whatever it was, with its jumpiness and discomposures, without anything of hers ever having to touch anything of mine.
We faced each other in a bed just the one time, at my hotel.
She woke me in a tremble and said, “I know what’s going to happen, but I don’t know just what.”
I soon enough had to go back to my city, where I feared for my livelihood. She was against doing anything over the phone and could write only on a severe sort of gray stationery that was harder and harder to find at a good price.
I fell into the old, retaliatory life. I saw a lot of a nervy man some years my junior at work. Everything to him had to have a sexual result. I called things off with him after a few weeks of giving myself the third degree. It was as good a time as any to just cross yourself out. I wandered one day into one of those warehouse shopping clubs. I wasn’t a member, but a man in a smock waved me through. I walked and walked until I came to an aisle where my eye was caught by a box with the taunt “24 COUNT.” It was all I could do to stop myself from breaking the thing open and counting them out one by one, whatever they fuckingly foolishly were—pouched chippings from something crackly, I gathered.
Nine, ten months later, I bumped into her at a bus terminal. Or maybe it was at a car service. She was wearing old-looking clothes that were new to me. She had a handbag—a first. She was applying to veterinary schools, she said. (We shook hands over it.) I said that at my age, you start to realize you might have loved only once, if that. This came out sounding newsy and impatient.
She said, “It’s been years.”
YOU ARE LOGGED IN AS MARIE
I was not so much the quiet kind as the kind quieted. Had a daughter in cram school, plus a son not much older, though life had mostly fizzed off the kid.
People like that—prematurely worn, still ungrown—start a day with a cleared heart. (Pocketed intoxicants, unrolled tobacco from a night table, futile fruit-flavored incidentals.) Distinct on the streets in approximations of undress, yes, but by midafternoon they’re bashed up again, back home, underlining every preachy word they read.
These two didn’t live with me.
These two were from a bygone wife, an ex only if we let ex equal extinct. The recent wife, the deserter, was the truer to life of the two, an ex if ex, just this once, is allowably abbreviative of expeller, or excluder, or exiler—take your pick.
This marriage had had a running time of one year, three months, sixteen days, forty-two minutes.
Her name still had its run of the growlier lower vowels.
•
My ex-wife: She was to have been the woman by my side, though I had other sides, and she must have had other people, dumbfoundingly young things in cloches or berets, none of them cut out for life in its longer forms.
She delivered herself into a day with pills she crunched with unmilked cereal.
She pestered the alphabet in craggly poems of groped-for woe. I quote from “Bedclothes”:
at any given
moment there are
only half as many marriages
as there are
people
who are married.
•
It was rumored that old men stink, and I was just about sixty, but the dollar-shops obligingly stocked confectionery fragrances, bottled lollipop pitched at preteens. PINK WHIM one was called, and PINK DREAM, PINING PINK. I bought a lot of the stuff, doused myself liberatively (forearms, chest, shoulders) before setting out for a day’s errancy and dare.
But how much can you do for a sister practically fifty, except visit her five, six times a year, the two of us shivering around her kitchen table, though she ate off the TV tray by her bed?
This was in a newer town that had gone up hollow, then slowly filled in with discounters, a clinic, a competing clinic.
Her body displeased her, so she barged away from it toward sometimes even mine. That led to sweatful, recondite disquiet.
Then the day I had news to deliver of Mother.
Said this sister: “What’s she so dead about?”
•
I don’t want to be going over this again, but it keeps going over me: how there were months when the days would not stand themselves up into weeks, how there were way too many moments when we cost ourselves our lives, how there were people who were the billionth of their kind and yet had days when their place in their home and their place on earth were just one and the same.
•
She had put a premium on starting almost every other sentence with “I will have you know.”
She had a body bullied by insomnia, but another body, sometimes showing through the depilatories, the cold cream, was sometimes offered fo
r a leak or two from my own.
She dispensed a drastic but heterodox affection to grabbed and frugally loved pets.
We were the seediest of our set, no question, invited to after-dinner groupings just because of her, because of her shoulder tattoos, each of the three a rebus. I was unpopular, unmodified, underportrayed, never meriting a full first impression.
Something else about the ex: She was forever speaking of things as last (adjective) when I, stupid-surely, tended to think last (verb).
•
I either jumped out of myself in my sleep or intruded on myself in dreams, woke up, let faucet water run all over me, then let a new day brain me with its frights.
Life wrinkled out at me on the streets. I’d follow somebody for blocks, a woman, say, looking jolly and maybe unmanning, but this was a city whose avenues ran out pretty quick.
Longtimers looked skeptically at the skyline. You’d close your eyes and hope that the thing would hold up.
•
Sentiment kept turning against the world, people in the world, the things the people wore and looked up in books. She hadn’t gone to the bother of puttering with me much anymore. A well-adjusted partner, she’d repeat, never has reason to touch the other.
•
Okay, okay: the podium is what you stood on, the lectern is what you stood at, the class is what you stood up. Because I cancelled a lot, last-minute, phoned-in, fancily sick of a sudden.
•
Hadn’t I always tried to keep my life respectfully unspecified for parents, employers, sister, wife?
They called them restrooms, but I never got any peace, any respite, in there. Pisses of a man my age were just dawdly drizzle.
They pushed me over into Human Resources, every incoming résumé looking more and more like a ghost story to me.
Every quarter-hour a fresh stanza of minutes to be oblivionized a.s.a.p.
Let me talk of it as another time in my life when I must have been described as a man who walked a lot, was often seen jogging, trotting all over town, covering lots of ground day in, day out, though not looking any fitter, and when asked what kept him on the go, said, “I know where I’m not wanted.”
•
People and their things that kept changing places on the face of the world; remorsing moods that halted midstream and became just present-day disfavor; the thriving story of her family and their quick-quitted keennesses (her sister sucked the sweets out of even poorer people, boys went for her brother, etc.). Then more and more poetry driven out of her, naturally, and mostly with me as the concern.
•
For a while, I tried keeping up with the news. Everything, the newswomen said, was “worse than thought,” which I took to mean “worse than thinking,” because thinking had become even worse than feeling when I thought about how I felt about her.
•
On my laptop, I’d read, “You are logged in as Marie.”
Then: “You have not provided sufficient information to reset your Account Security Question.”
Then: “Please select a new Account Security Question from the menu, or compose one of your own.”
I typed: You’d let her go sloping off after someone after someone?
“Please type the answer for your self-designed Account Security Question.”
I typed: To count for something, life kept shoving herself apart.
“Your answer exceeds the allowable maximum character count. Please try again.”
Oh, and having had that youth, having had that husband, she complained of being hemmed in by phenomena. She was the glummer of the two of us, more out of sorts with herself and the harangue of our heartbeats. We were a pair of the unpairing. Her e-mails always started: All,
“Your answer exceeds the allowable maximum character count. Please try again.”
Believe you me us.
•
“Confirm we’re not of like mind,” people were usually saying to me now. “That would put things square.”
I spent enough nights in the movie house, making faces without being faced. You try your best to outrange yourself.
Then a breastless special case, fresh from a wedlock of sorts with a woman herself worn out by greeting cards and household balladry. This one moved in with her data, her trappings—even ramekins, if you can believe that. I could see life storming around in her to no purpose, a person among other reviled people going about their puniness in apartmentry. You learn to infer a “for now” at the end of anything anybody like that might one day delay getting said. You wait your turn with everyone else to get yourself collected again in whatever was still held to be human.
•
I tipped this way and that to get out of the country and found work teaching Oral Business English, as the course was called, in some bulging empire or another in the Far East. I knew nothing about business (I was in fact “unbanked” myself) and sounded slushed and indelicate when I spoke. Most of the students were Americans with lots more youth still due them. They could afford to kill an afternoon listening to me talk about “opportunity cost” and money orders before going off to their dorms to convolute on futons.
Now and then one of them would of course have had enough of me. She would display herself malignantly in the doorway to my office. (It was a cornering nook I shared with a younger man on the faculty, an authority on prepaid cards. His teeth looked experimental. He had facefuls of glutted expressiveness.)
“You don’t motivate us,” the girl would say. “You don’t make us want to go out and start something. We feel we’re being hosed. We pay your salary.”
“I’m on stipend,” I said this time.
“Oh, God,” she said. “Please forgive? Please be well?”
We looked each other over. She wore her share of placeholder jewelry. She had a frivolity of moles on one arm. Her body, granted, had done wrong by her, but there was a kind of beauty thrashing itself out in her eyes. The dress, rumply and sleeveless, was of a rescuing water-blue.
I could feel her turning me fore and aft in her mind-set.
“See you tomorrow?” she said, and left.
I shut the door. My cock felt boggled for once.
Said my officemate: “So far so good.”
But I hadn’t been over there for more than a couple of months when word arrived that they were flying my ex over at heroic expense for an hour’s worth of jargonic charm about her new specialty—Minionship, or something like that. Allow me to forget the particulars, but it had to do with keeping your opinions to yourself, not speaking even when spoken to, letting others take credit for your work, preferring being discouraged. She had probably pilfered the whole of it, this spiffy new subdiscipline, from me.
“You don’t have to come to the dinner, if there even is one,” she wrote in an e-mail.
So I sailed back home and fell in with some flat-talking people intent on seeing things in each other just to feel hampered by what they saw.
Then it’s settled, I thought. I’ll let my life live me.
•
I will say this for myself: There was only the one of me: unflaring of mind, overthankful, entertainable with the least dregs of affection, dry-handed, living spinsterlike in a problemdom of bedless street-level rentals, privy to people when at long last they were least themselves, fittingly famished, anal to a fault, never lacking for a loss.
•
This later one came to me not quite figured out. She looked hurriedly lovely enough at first.
She was a day-shift aide at a nursing home and would return to me with dental floss of all colors threaded thoughtfully through her hair. A resident had done it, she’d say. She would not want to wash it out just yet.
“Things don’t always have to be miracles,” she’d say.
Like most of some kind, she had lived and loved spottily, with
lonesome turns of mind and an unsporting heart.
I took my messes and eases with her, but she turned out to be a lot like the others, each with her pharmaceuts, her vasovagals.
Sign-offs for e-mails shifted downward from “Best” to “Take care” to “Best to take care.”
Weeks would warp themselves away from the year.
To an inquirer, I described the apartment as three sickrooms, kitchen, and bath.
•
My father? Funny I should have thought of him through all these ills. His saying was: “There’ll be other days.” And this was the afternoon of just another of them, the weather plentiful, a jilted watch of hers tight on my wrist, unticking, and still that unstoppable call and response between heart and crotch.
Other than that, it’s understood that in life looted of thrill, you’re to buy doubles of everything. Even a carton of detergent deserves to be with its own kind.
•
Things I had been mouthing to myself throughout the marriage:
Things don’t always turn out, or turn even a little to the side.
To wit: Wherever there are two people, people even anything like us, one is forever the casualty of the other.
Press further into yourself, as far as you can make yourself go.
When asked whether it’s chronic or acute, say, “Residential.”
Cultivate your disgraces.
•
My ex-spouse: Her past was so frozen now in anecdote, it couldn’t be accessed other than through quips.
Girlihood, as she’d called it? Her parents had thrown things at her to eat.
What she said did not deliver you directly to a personality. It ran you around her.
I’d been her doorstop, her kickstand—something, I mean, kickedly and meanly hers.
•
Spousality (her word). There were pacts and pledges, covenants, a contract for me alone to sign: things spelled out for me to do and not do. I could not, for instance, hide from her for more than five hours at a stretch, and there were only a couple of places I could hide, and she had the only keys to both, because one was the room where she slept and the other was the room where she made those gouaches people still begged to buy.
