The Bear Comes Home

by Rafi Zabor

  "Here's some more," he said, snouting a bunch of fallen maple leaves aside and uncovering a fat black scrotum of morel.

  "Can we go back now?" Amy asked the grey upward air, and in fact it did look as if it might begin to rain.

  On the end of his leash, the Bear looked up and back at Iris, who wore a long Scottish cloak and was peering uphill into the trees. She couldn't have looked more beautiful and he still admired the fineness of her jaw, but he wasn't happy about the leash he was wearing.

  This was not what he had envisioned doing, this time of year.

  They made other attempts to behave like a family.

  Later in autumn, when the woods were in the most spectacular flame of their seasonal decline, they packed themselves into the orange Volvo wagon and tooled east along the curving blacktop to Lake Hill, where they took the side road that ran around the placid man-made lake: a reservoir for the locality when the rest of the area's watershed—fifteen towns and valleys flooded by edict and charter—ran away by conduit back to the insatiable cit^ south. It was one of their better days. Conversation in the car remained ciil, almost sociable, and the drive was picturesque, especially when they reached Cooper Lake's farther shore, where Iris pulled the wagon to a halt on the roadside and the four of them ambled through evenly planted spruces to the calm water of what appeared to be an eye of wide blue contemplation beneath blue unfathomable sky.

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  An inverted forest braved the ripples at the edges and pointed down to the reflected immensity above, inexactly rendered clouds passing west to east— another slash of rain approaching?—although to see real mountains you had to forsake reflection and raise your eyes: attentive, calm, gone bare where deciduous trees predominated, dark green swathes where pine held sway.

  The Bear tried to talk to the girls again—hope against experience— telling them what he knew about the woods, trying to get them to appreciate the scene set forth—see how different it is from the Southwest you've come from but just as beautiful in its way, don't you think?—before all that was left was winter's bare branches.

  Tracy turned her back on him to look at the Volvo, if at anything, and after a short perhaps confused pause Amy looked down at her feet and scuffed one shoe against the other.

  The Bear looked at Iris and she looked back at him. What can I do? he thought. What? I try my best but do you really think it's fun to have your heart so systematically rejected?

  "Can we go now?" Tracy asked her mother.

  "Not before I go in for a swim," the Bear said in what he thought might prove a clever gambit—it might prolong the trip at least—speaking to the girls even if the way they looked at him was not exactly encouraging. "This is a reservoir, see, and people can't swim in it by law, but me," he thumped his chest, "I'm wildlife, me."

  Tracy rolled her eyes to heaven, but Amy could not quite stifle a laugh.

  Iris' unblinking look, as she stood there in the brown and dun squares of her soft Scottish cloak when gladly he would have kept her warm himself, was enough to make his rolling, four-legged passage to the water feel like ignominious retreat.

  Under the circumstances he had to go in, didn't he, even though the lake was colder than he had expected, and no birds sang. He breasted the water anyhow, breathed out hard, shook, pushed on into colder flow.

  "He looks like a log," he heard Tracy say back onshore once he was well into the lake and paddling away, but he grinned back over his shoulderhump anyway and said he'd be back in about five minutes. Pathetic.

  A third of the way into the lake and really beginning to enjoy the swim, warming to the cold, he heard Iris calling from the shore, and looked back to see her waving her arm above her head.

  "What?" he yelled back, turning, but got a mouthful of water, and as he watched, expecting further discourse, he saw the three of them walk back through the spruces to the station wagon, Tracy fictitiously clutching her behind—heard the thunk of three shutting doors after space and time inter-

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  posed their delay—and before the parping of the old engine's idle came to him across the water, he saw exhaust puff out of the tailpipe in a fade from blue to grey as the car cranked into motion. He watched the orange Volvo wagon that he had paid for, mostly, roll along the shore of the lake until it disappeared among pines.

  His swim had lost its savor but he persisted in it anyway. The chill wasn't bad and water, at least, was still water: he wished he could melt into it and fade away.

  On the trot home he avoided the openness of the road and followed the course of Beaver Creek downgrade beside it, going deeper into the forest halfway home to squat and have a large-size satisfying dump into leafmeal. Does the Bear shit in the woods? Yes, and it's one of his last remaining pleasures. He wiped himself with a swatch of leaves and a patch of moss that grew at the base of the greying stump of some forgotten tree.

  En route he reminded himself that Sonny Rollins probably had days like this, perhaps not in detail but on the essential plane. If not Sonny then Ornette, Monk. Shostakovich had Stalin. Bird had junk. All I have is busted love, which is par for the course, an unavoidable thing.

  But nothing eased the ache.

  When he got back to the house, Tracy was helping Iris make dinner and Amy was dancing alone to a rock record in the living room—conventional progressions, beat all insistence, no nuance: not a world she should really want to live in. If he couldn't help the girl, who would?

  The Bear waved to her and retired to the front steps and sat down.

  Two minutes later the rain. It began thoughtfully, not unlike the quaHty of mercy, but before long an angry wind piled up behind it and the air went sharply cold, about ten degrees in half as many minutes. The Bear stood up and put his face into it. Crack your cheeks, he thought, and then realized, not likely. The rain and wind blew harshly in his face but it didn't help him feel Shakespearean or even Byronic.

  Winter was not far off.

  The wind intensified and his senses went keener. The land was lit by bruised, inverted stormlight, sun dropping beneath the cloudline and peering under the heavy weather.

  Across the road on the other side of the pasture a gust of wind hit the trees and seemed to lift the whole grove of birches, but in fact it only took their last, most persistent leaves with it up into the air, and he wanted to call back into the house so that Iris and the kids could appreciate the moment's vehemence and beauty^, but it was over before he could raise his voice and they wouldn't listen anyway.

  The moment was happening to him alone.

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  When he came indoors again after shaking himself dry on the porch, Iris greeted him alone to apologize for their departure from the lake—the girls' insistence on the need for a toilet—and he sensed an opportunity for some real communication between himself and Iris hidden in the moment but could not make out its face and it passed by unspoken.

  Iris adjusted a bright silk scarf about her throat and said that dinner would be ready soon and he could join them if he Hked.

  Alone in the afternoons he went downstairs to Siege's basement room and practiced bebop in all twelve keys. He put on early Ornette Coleman records and thought, all things considered, he'd be wise to give up music entirely. I mean, how could he, how could anyone ever play anything as beautiful and unexpectable as what Ornette had done? Not to mention Charlie Parker.

  In a bout of weakness he thought of calling up Charlie Haden so Charlie could tell him how great he played. He had just enough character left to resist the impulse.

  Afternoon declined, daylight modified its expectations, and at length a sequence of footsteps would give laggard testimony to the girls' return from school. They'd make dish-noises in the kitchen, then go upstairs to listen to Prince's Black Album and giggle over a video.

  Iris would come home. When she and the Bear took their mostly silent dinners together late. Amy and Tracy would pretend to go to bed but actually, as the
Bear's directional ears told him, would hunch in the halflight at the top of the stairs Hstening, so that if he had wanted to say anything significant to Iris he was prevented from doing so.

  He might mention that he needed reeds.

  Iris favored the weather, car repairs, what to eat tomorrow.

  He had begun loving Iris knowing that in loving her he was loving all the beauty and spirit allowable in this world or any other: through her he had all of it compact, and in scenes of staggering intimacy had actually embraced it. Now he was beset by minute, purely personal considerations, each one a door closed upon the greater world and the beauty of which she had been the sign. ... He knew he was being stupid, but he couldn't get the halves of the picture to coincide, nor could he reconcile the experienced breadth of the universe and this undeniable constriction. It was probably too late to plead that he was only a joke of a talking bear and could Iris clue him in please.

  Dinner would end without a significant word being said by either of them.

  Sometimes the simplest communications would . . . how was it possible? He could offer to make a pot of coffee and she would ask him, Do you intend the

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  whole pot of coffee for yourself or can I have some, and if I can have some does it mean that I must have some because you're making some and you want me to join in, or do I have a choice?

  His own answer would turn unintelligible in his mouth, his attempts to untangle it only further confuse the issue.

  His eye was perturbed by something he had never seen, or thought to see: she's become afraid of me. Why?

  Do you mind if I turn off the light in the room? he might ask.

  Does this mean, she might answer, that control of the lightswitches in the house now belongs to you and I have to ask your permission if I want to turn one off myself? And by turning off the light do you really mean something else much more serious?

  Clearly, the woman was getting hysterical. What could he have done to provoke this? True, lately he couldn't help walking around the house, sometimes, with an unconsolable erection that even his raincoat was unable to disguise. He knew it made the rest of him look like a walking rationalization for the pole in his pants, but Iris was supposed to know him better than that and that his love for her was deep and true.

  Was it absurd to protest the depth and sincerity of his love when what he most wanted at the moment was to sup upon the impeccable curvature of her breasts as they lifted to his delectation the perishable imperishable buds at their tips?

  Probably it was.

  No: what amazed him was that they were both caught in some unknowable geometry, some overmastering rectilinear design. Neither of them knew how to bend anymore, all the sweet curving subtlety of their loving world gone.

  All he had to do was open his mouth for the wrong words to leap from it into the air. All he had to do was attempt a physical gesture to feel himself constrained by some behavioral straitjacket: his body rigid with it, hers rigid in its own bonds. They couldn't move or talk, and her daughters, who ought to have responded to a warm and sympathetic talking bear with a sense of liberation from the narrowness of the quotidian .. . with laughter and a sense of high adventure . . . well, let's not even talk about it.

  His brain felt mazed and inextricable. He wandered room to room, blim-dered through bare trees in the bereft, forsaken forest, and only when he found himself for the third time in the crawlspace underneath the house, scumbling around on all fours with no clear aim in the damp spidery semi-dark, did it occur to him that he was looking for a place to go to sleep for awhile and he noticed that it was the beginning of winter.

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  No, he thought. It's not possible. It's undignified and atavistic, not to mention overreactive and silly. But how come I feel this tired?

  He slept outdoors a few nights, or tried to, but it was not sufficient. He found himself underneath the house again with no clear memory of having gone there, the scent of earth heavy as a drug in his nostrils.

  No no no, he thought. I won't.

  "What about I went to sleep in Siege's room downstairs," he wondered aloud to Iris finally. His grammar was slipping. "Yeah and how come I never see him anymore."

  "He seems to know when you're here," Iris told him. "He turns up sometimes when you've gone up into the hills on one of your romps."

  "He knows when I've left?" the Bear asked her.

  "I don't think he knows when you've gone out. He just seems to . . ." Iris laughed. "You know? He's started trying to talk me into a mother-daughter scene. He brought it up once or twice."

  It took the Bear a number of questions and answers for him to understand that what Iris meant was that Siege wanted to go to bed with Iris and one and if possible both of her daughters at the same time. "I'll kill him," the Bear said seriously. "I'll claw the son of a bitch open and feed his liver to the crows."

  "Don't be ridiculous," Iris said. "I know how to handle the Sieges of this world. Do you know how he pronounces my name? In front of the girls and even alone now that I've rebuffed him, he's taken to calling me something like Mrs. Termaroo. I wouldn't worry about Siege if I were you."

  "Let me get this straight," the Bear asked her incredulously, and began pacing the living room. "Siege wanting to get into bed with you and your daughters rates a polite little laugh, but I'm too shocking and obscene for anyone to live with?"

  The Bear repeated this question in a number of forms and in diminishing volume until he gave it up. Or actually, until Iris began harping on a single point.

  "Bear," she said, her face brightening as he had not seen it brighten in months: a big smile at the prospect of his disappearance. "Do you mean you want to go to sleep down there for a long time? As in months? Bear! That would be perfect! I feel like I'm about to break apart, as if my head's about to fly off! A few months would be perfect!"

  The Bear was aghast. "You mean you're that eager to get rid of me?" he asked her, tears welling up his eyes.

  "Bear, don't you understand anything? Three months would be perfect! Four better still." She seized his arm. "At last, a use for bears!"

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  "My God. You really want to get rid of me."

  "Oh stop being so melodramatic."

  "You want to get rid of me."

  "What's the use of talking to you? You're deaf as a post. Trust me. Oh do stop looking miserable. You know, you can sleep down there for as long as you want," Iris said thoughtfully. "Siege can take his photo things out. I don't think Stanlynn would mind if I asked him to leave. Do you think she would raise our rent? How much money do we have in the bank, do you remember?"

  But the Bear was still trying to grope his way along the contours of the old point: "Siege wanting to fuck you and your daughters is okay and I'm this shocking illegal banished entity when all I want is for us to love each other in a healthy, loving, fundamentally nonperverted way? Allowing, of course," he admitted, "for the slight unconventionality of the interspecies aspect of the thing. And now you're thrilled that the one piece missing from my full suit of mockery has arrived and I'm going to hibernate? Iris, it's total loss! It'll be hke dying! It'll be worse!"

  "Oh lighten up and stop being such a drama queen. You know, if you're going to sleep for a few months," she said, in what sounded like her capacity as a biologist, "you might think about putting on some weight. Can I bring you anything special from town? I could work up a list of supplements."

  "Iris," he said, feeling that he was about to go drastically wrong but unable to stop himself. "Is this all I get of heaven? There has been nothing like me in the whole history of the world! I'm unprecedented, I love you in a way few bears have ever loved a woman, and I wouldn't harm one hair of your daughters' heads. Is this my reward?" Yes, he was going wrong but there was no stopping it.

  "I was under the impression," Iris told him in her usual tone, with a bit of laughter in it—now that he was vanishing from her life she was blithe and untroubled
again—"that there were at least twenty generations of talking bear before you came along, and the lore and skills were passed down in each generation—at least so you've told me—and that—"

  "There has never been anything like me!" He tromped up and down the living room, waving his arms in the air in what even he knew was uncivilized fashion. He had the useless intuition that he was about to make the ugliest speech of his career. "My forebears were primitives! They spoke with accents! Their taste in music ran to circus marches or at best some tawdry tearjerking Gypsy violin! Their view of the world was simple! They were innocent of literature! Some of them were rudimentary animal Marxists! Their mysticism was rudimentary! They never developed a sense of irony adequate to the nuances of their situation! None of them was remotely capable

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  of either the music I play on my horn or the greater music of my love for you, which is now, I grant you, only a stunted little tune!" Yes, all things considered it was one of the ugliest speeches he had ever made. "Twenty, forty, fifty generations of talking bear striving across the genes and generations have produced nothing even remotely approaching me!"

  "Oh Bear, what are you going on about?" Iris asked him, with not the least audible strain in her voice. "Whether twenty generations or fifteen thousand: you didn't produce yourself. You were produced. What's your problem?"

  The Bear's mouth clacked open and shut. Iris was not only unanswerable, she was just.

  "That being so," she said, driving the nail farther in with no apparent effort, "I don't see how you can claim credit for being who you are, or, more to the point, demand a reward."

  The Bear let his jaw fall open and didn't clack it shut again. When you're immade, you're unmade. Give up.

  "In that respect," Iris pressed on, "you're exactly like the rest of us. The most that can be said of you is that you're here. Beyond that, you have no special edge or any special right to blow your horn. I'm speaking figuratively of course. Play the saxophone all you like."