Oh!

by Mary Robison

  7

  Lola replaced the light bulb in the emerald-glass lamp in the piano room. She ran her feather duster over the window-sills and on the curly maple frame of an enormous mirror. She put fresh pink marble ashtrays with felt underliners on the stands at either end of the settee. She rested finally on the piano bench before the mirror and watched herself and scratched at a spider bite near her nose. She said to the mirror, “‘The river’s face is stuck with a stiff, hard mitten. A bloodstained trace to point out the place, for under the ice lies a dead corpse.’”

  “You’re putting me on,” Cleveland said, his head in the doorway.

  Lola stayed in the mirror, with Cleveland’s reflection beside her, only smaller. “See how you think this sounds.” She inhaled and began again.

  “I heard it once,” Cleveland said. “And I don’t need to know the second stanza because that’s probably got grappling hooks in it. This is about the Wilshire kid, right? Who went in the pond after his spaniel?”

  “I changed it to a river to be on the safe side,” Lola said. “There’s more room for the kid to drown in, fewer chances of anybody rescuing him.”

  “That’s screwy,” Cleveland said. “You can’t improve on the circumstances of a kid’s death.”

  “Death’s not the topic,” Lola said. She drew back her shoulders and lifted her high bust higher. “In the real day-to-day, death seldom happens. Water’s the theme. You look caked with dirt,” Lola said.

  “I’ve been digging,” Cleveland said. “I just wanted to remind you, Ginny’s on the way.”

  “She’s coming?”

  “Yep,” Cleveland said.

  “That’s still the plan, huh?” Maureen said, flapping through the doors at the other end of the room, Violet with her, walking bent over in imitation of an ape.

  “Lola, we have to tell you something,” Violet said.

  “Fire away,” Lola said.

  Cleveland said, “Notice the wet feet on both of them.”

  “Exactly why is Virginia coming over?” Maureen said.

  “She’d like to look at a room,” Cleveland said. “This room probably.”

  “What for?” Maureen said.

  Violet talked upward to Lola, who was still gazing at the mirror. “You were doing something hilarious. You don’t remember?”

  “Me hilarious?” Lola said.

  “Ginny would like to have her wedding in this room,” Cleveland said. “If we ever get married. She’s attracted to the colors in here.”

  “What was I doing?” Lola said. “Was it something bad?”

  Maureen said, “You were walking and talking in your sleep.”

  “You really were,” Violet said. “You went, ‘What’d you get me for Christmas?’”

  “So you’re seriously getting married,” Maureen said. “And you don’t care if your bride sees you blind drunk?”

  8

  A red sign was bolted to the chain fence at the end of the airport’s long glide path. The sign warned motorists about approaching aircraft. There was, however, a gravel apron off the highway, deep and wide enough for five or six cars, and to there Chris had driven and parked.

  From head on, the jet he chose to watch was a small horizontal bar in the sky over the flat tops of trees. The jet was gauzed over by distance and uncertain in the waves of heat from the highway. Before there was noise, there were the hanging engines, the black windshield, a pinkish flash of color on the undercarriage. The jet seemed to swell and at last a tearing sound split the air over the soybean fields beyond the end of the runway. The jet came faster and as it passed over the trees a quarter-mile out, its relative size became apparent. Its shadow swallowed row after row of bean plants. The roar dragged somewhere behind. The wheels extended like talons. The wings bristled. The jet closed in, nose up, coasting forward, coming lower, and then the roar began to catch up and shake the local earth.

  On the roof of his car, Chris ducked, but kept his eyes on the tremendous belly of the machine that covered the sky over him. He spun on his seat, hands mashed against his ears, scooted forward, dropped his heels down against the windshield, and watched the screaming plane shriek to the ground.

  He got into his car. With the tape deck too loud, he drove around treeless, dizzying neighborhoods of new houses. He parked in the lot of a Dairy Delight that stood adjacent to the community’s hectic acre of swimming pool. He bought and sucked a slush drink. He sat in his car, looking at the girls in bathing suits, admiring a particular girl in a wet white one-piece that she had outgrown the year before. He exhaled at her through locked teeth. The girl in white stood with her weight on one foot, her breasts pointing.

  He took his car downtown and left it on the roof of a public parking garage. On the front lawn of the art gallery, a string quintet sawed away. People lounged or stood in groups on the grass and ate lunches from boxes as they listened to the music.

  He walked around to the new wing of the gallery. He breathed the cooled air inside and rode a chromed escalator to the top floor, where a patio gave a view of a cascading, terraced interior garden.

  An old man in a uniform, hair growing to his shoulders, walked over to the railing where Chris leaned. “Is it raining?” the man asked.

  “It’s dry where I’ve been,” Chris said.

  “Put out that cigarette,” the old man said.

  Chris sat on a pew of blond wood and studied a huge sheet-metal sculpture that resembled a lobster. He got up and left. He fetched his car. He drove to the university, parked in a faculty slot in the central quad. He went to the basement of Digby Hall, a brick affair with a gambrel roof and dormer windows. In the basement there was a tiny auditorium and two L-shaped classrooms. This was the school’s Drama Department.

  Chris went along a narrow passageway that led to the department’s green room. He made instant coffee from a kicked-in kettle on a hot plate.

  A young woman with a face like an antelope’s marched in and stirred up a cup of tea. She wore a man’s pajama top, complicated earrings, a miniskirt, short boots.

  “Is Howdy Cleveland somewhere around here?” Chris said.

  “Are you his lover?” the woman whispered, smiling.

  “No, are you?” Chris said.

  The woman snorted through slender nostrils.

  “I’ll start again,” Chris said.

  “Would you like to have me?” the woman said.

  “Have you what?” Chris said.

  “Would you like to do me?” the woman said. “You’d be the first, I swear.” She unbuttoned her pajama top and opened it. “You’re so gorgeous,” she said.

  Chris went back out into the hall and stopped a fellow with a big black beard. “Do you know Howdy Cleveland?” Chris said.

  “I won’t say I do and I won’t say I don’t,” the young man said.

  The hallway was filling with students. Chris threaded a path through them, asking for Howdy. A boy in blue said, “Check the lunch bar. He likes the lunch bar.”

  Chris climbed some old stairs and hurried out along a covered walkway that led to the school’s cafeteria. He saw Howdy in a circular booth, his nose bent over a tray of sandwiches and waxed paper cups of beer. A skinny girl with a bad complexion and a nest of frizzled hair was at his elbow. A man and woman, both in white T-shirts, both smoking cigarettes, were in the booth as well.

  Chris said, “Hey, Howdy.”

  Howdy pushed his fingers through his hair, making it stand straight up. “What are you doing here, Chris?”

  “I was going to eat here. I’m scouting the campus for an apartment.”

  “These are Richard and Judy Allen and this is Stephanie,” Howdy said. He hugged the small girl next to him. “My fiancée.”

  Chris nodded. The woman in the T-shirt blew a plume of smoke into the silence Chris had brought. When she spoke she sounded as if she had sinus trouble. “We are talking about bathrooms and toilet humor.” She made her eyes, which were ringed with dark makeup, very wide. Her husband picked
up a sandwich. “You’re a man,” the woman said to Chris. “How would you characterize the graffiti in a men’s room?”

  “I wouldn’t,” Chris said.

  “Try,” the woman said.

  “I really don’t know,” Chris said.

  The woman said, “Wouldn’t you say it’s normally of three types: scatology, sports stuff, and overbidding for anonymous sex of some stripe or other?”

  “You already told us that once,” Stephanie interrupted.

  “Chris wasn’t here then,” Howdy whispered to her.

  The woman ignored them. “Whereas if you ever went into a ladies’ room, you’d be very surprised.”

  “So would the ladies,” Chris said.

  “Shut up, dear, and listen,” the woman said. “You’d be very surprised to find an enormous degree of human compassion and communication in the things that are written on the walls.”

  The man had taken his sandwich apart on an open napkin. He chewed on a lettuce leaf and, looking straight ahead, muttered something.

  “What say?” the woman said coldly.

  “It’s their dearth of humor,” the man said.

  “How do you mean?” Stephanie said.

  Chris went for a bowl of chili and crackers. He bought a couple of draft beers at a table that held aluminum kegs and tall cups. He drank off one cup immediately while still standing by the table.

  Back at the booth, Howdy was talking. The woman was smoking seriously and listening to Howdy. The man and Stephanie were paying no attention.

  “Say, Howdy,” Chris said, cutting into the discourse.

  “Yes?” Howdy said.

  “I need a friend out at your house.”

  “What for?” Stephanie said.

  Chris pinched his packet of saltines and then bit off the cellophane. “Who are you?” he asked her.

  “A woman,” the woman in the T-shirt said.

  “She’s my fiancée,” Howdy said. “I told you.”

  Stephanie said, “I saw a funny thing in a bathroom once.”

  “That’s good,” the man said. He had torn his sandwich to pieces and thrown some of the pieces on the floor. He rolled a corner of sliced ham into a cone.

  “You don’t have any friends at Dad’s right now,” Howdy said.

  “You think that’s fair? I mean, seriously, Howdy, is it?” Chris said. “What did I do?”

  “What did you do?” Howdy said.

  “Nothing,” Chris said. “I’ve done nothing. Your sister is just so goddamned spooked all the time, she imagines I’ve done something wrong. She assumes it.” He shook his cracker crumbs into his bowl and ate.

  “I think Maureen’s cute,” Stephanie said. The woman was using the tip of her cigarette to burn holes in the man’s disassembled lunch. “Hey, I’m eating,” Chris said.

  9

  Howdy took Chris and Stephanie to his studio, which was in a corner of the drawing laboratory on the second floor of the Fine Arts Building. The studio was large and had a skylight and a concrete floor and whitewashed walls. From a giant rack made of two-by-fours, Howdy tugged out canvases.

  “These are my latest oils,” he said. He leaned a picture against his knees. A heavy umber outline had been scratchily drawn around a frank depiction of a nude girl. Within the figure’s borders, patches of pink paint served for shading. Resting on the polelike neck was an accurate likeness of Stephanie.

  “Isn’t he awful?” Stephanie said.

  “Do you think so?” Chris said. “I think it’s pretty well rendered.”

  “I mean, to show me naked.”

  “I tell her over and over it doesn’t matter. This is art,” Howdy said.

  “Besides, it’s not me anyhow,” Stephanie said. “Not really.”

  Chris sat on a sawhorse. “Then it’s your twin.”

  “The body is our life model,” Howdy explained. “I paint in the body part at life-drawing class, and then I put Steph’s head on at home.”

  “That’s pretty sharp,” Chris said.

  “Which you can tell if you study the body closely,” Howdy said. “Steph’s is not so voluptuous and saggy.”

  “I ain’t got boobs that big,” Stephanie said.

  “Let me see the other pictures,” Chris said.

  Howdy got out more oil paintings, all pink nudes. Chris walked around them. “Here’s a side of you I haven’t seen, Steph,” Chris said.

  “That is my ass. Can you tell? How could you tell? That one I posed for.”

  Howdy groaned, straining on his toes to slide a canvas the size of a small wall from an upper slot of the deep wooden racks. One end of the painting dropped. Chris picked up the end, and Howdy moved the picture out, walking backward. His feet tangled and he fell on his rear.

  Chris went to the far side of the room and had a cigarette. Howdy and Stephanie struggled awhile, turning the painting to get it right.

  “My masterwork. My farewell to the plastic arts,” Howdy said.

  Chris made a low whistle at the canvas, which showed life-sized portraits of Cleveland, Maureen, Violet, Lola, and—Chris guessed—Howdy’s mother. The figures stood in a row, hands joined, like a chain of paper dolls. Real clothing had been glued to the surface of the canvas. Chris recognized the tattersall shirt on Maureen’s figure. The faces had been varnished with many overlays of color and had the tactile shine of real flesh. Their eyes glistened where bits of glass had been pushed into the paint.

  “You see his mom?” Stephanie said.

  Howdy had used fluorescent green to represent a nimbus of light around his mother. Her face was white as a mime’s, her lips black. An orange Halloween wig had been pasted on for her hair.

  “It’s far from finished,” Howdy said.

  “I’ve got to tell you, Howdy, this is an eerie thing you’ve done,” Chris said. “This is an odd, voodoo thing.”

  “Thank you,” Howdy said.

  “You can tell he likes the people,” Stephanie said.

  “I know,” Chris said. “You can see he loves them.”

  “Thank you,” Howdy said. “And wait’ll I put Steph in.”

  10

  The main quadrangle was a large lawn with plenty of shade. The brick walkways that divided the quadrangle converged on a round wooden kiosk pasted over with activity announcements. One of them bore a woodcut with the date, time, and place of Howdy’s play.

  Chris and Howdy and Stephanie were on the grass not far from the kiosk. Stephanie lay on her front, her thin legs kicking idly up in the air. Howdy had run down the zipper of his jump suit and bared his chest and some of his stomach.

  Chris walked an oval around them. “I’m frustrated and I’m mad,” he said. “And I have a lot of longing bothering me. You have feelings about Steph. I don’t want to embarrass you, Howdy, but my feelings are the way yours are, only sort of desperate. And everything’s complicated by Violet. I’d like to be able to see her for six minutes without someone showing me the door.”

  “Well, it’s none of my business, but I think you’re being too persistent,” Howdy said.

  “Don’t say that,” Chris said.

  “You should stay away a week or so and let Maureen settle down.”

  “Hell, I’ve been away,” Chris said. “I’ve been out of her life for nearly two years.” He dropped onto his knees and put a hand on Howdy’s shoulder. He squeezed the shoulder as he talked. “Maureen wants to see me and have me around. I’m sure of it, Howdy. I’m positive.”

  “For example, right now,” Howdy said, wincing. “How can I listen to you when you’re breaking my clavicle?”

  Chris straightened his knees, walked off, and then came back. “Do me a favor and talk to them? Just sit them down and say, ‘Maureen, Chris is outside. He just wants to chat with you for half an hour. He has important things to say and it would be to everyone’s benefit if you listened. When he’s done, if you want him to go away forever, he will. But you should hear him out.’”

  “You’ll go away forever?”
Stephanie said.

  Howdy sighed. “I’ll do it,” he said. “You follow my MG out to the house and wait at the end of the drive while I make your pitch for you. But what are you going to say to Maureen to convince her and make her change?”

  “I don’t know,” Chris said. “I don’t have any idea.”

  “The bugs are all excited,” Stephanie said.

  “What are you saying, sweetheart?” Howdy said.

  “I hate ‘sweetheart,’ Howdy. It looks like the bugs and birds are all jittery. The crickets are singing in the middle of daylight.”

  “Might be a storm,” Chris said.

  Stephanie said, “But it’s clear in the sky, though. There’s not even a breeze.”

  “Settle down, I believe you,” Howdy said.

  11

  Cleveland draped his work clothes on the hamper. He stepped into the shower stall. He weaved a bit, letting the spray pound his back. When he could move again, he got out and used a towel to buff a face-sized patch in the mirror. A glass of vodka, made pale yellow by a little orange juice, stood next to his nickel-plated safety razor. Without bothering to lather his jaws or to consult the mirror very often, he tied the towel around his neck and shaved. He drank too much of the vodka, coughed, shivered, and took the glass into his bedroom.

  Brigitte Bardot, pouty-lipped at twenty and with loosely piled hair, was on the screen of his red portable television set. Holding his towel over his hips with a fist, Cleveland struggled for balance and watched.

  Maureen came into the bedroom after rapping on the open door. She looked at her father, looked away, and walked out.

  “It’s nearly one o’clock, for Christ’s sake!” Cleveland shouted at her. “Get out of that G-string and into some clothes!”

  “Never mind!” Maureen called back from down the hall.

  Cleveland dressed in featherweight slacks and an electric yellow shirt trimmed with a green collar. He put on a leather slipper, his watch, and a gold neckchain. He buttoned the throat of his shirt. He searched the corners of the carpet for his second slipper. He filled up his baggy trouser pockets with a folding wallet, keys on a ring, a Swiss Army knife, and—after using it to mop his wet, browned face—a linen hanky. Without meaning to, he moved suddenly backward. His legs banged against the bed and he sat down. Rushes of alcohol-generated heat ascended from his stomach to his chest.