The Bear Comes Home

by Rafi Zabor

  I want love to win out, not just for my sake but so that the picture of this world will line up right with the picture of the other. The dissonance is a figment, it's unreal.

  The Bear tried this sentiment in his normal baritone but couldn't find the right key for his range.

  The car crested the rise, made its gradual descent, and as he reached the T junction, life, doing what it did best, presented him with a picture he had not anticipated: the house standing there okay, looking as usual a trifle dark and tall, but the Volvo nowhere to be seen in the semicircular drive beneath the guardian trees. No one home. Or the kids were home and Iris had run into town to pick up some delicacy or other. Had he passed her on the road without seeing?

  The Bear braked the Accord—Accord?—to a halt and looked both ways before dridng across.

  Worst of all, it occurred to him as his heart hit bottom, she's taken the occasion of my New York gig to split, pack up her stuff and daughters and take off, just the way she did with Herb years back.

  As he urged the car across the turnpike and then up the grinding-stones of the drive—exceeding small—he felt with heavy certainty that this worst-case scenario was the one in play. She's flown the coop. She's gone. The vocaUst stepped out of his heart's spotlight and stumbled backstage, perhaps to drink himself insensate.

  The Bear stopped the car at the foot of the steps and fumbled twice at the key before switching the ignition off. Is she gone forever?

  When he got out of the car he saw what he should have noticed from the T junction: a homely blunder of woodsmoke wooling its way out of the chimnel:op into the trees. Although he did not entirely recover his uphill hopefulness, he felt a palpable lightening of his burden as the worst-case scenario fell away, its pages crumbUng back to native dust.

  There was hope yet, or something like it.

  He turned to survey his old domain, amazed for the first time in his life he had really slept away the winter—how quaint—and his eye encountered, timid and lovely on a patch of stray grass and bare ground, the doves. Six mourning doves in fact, the rose underglow brightening the dun swell of their breasts, their delicate heads held aloft and watchful, a ring of bright aqua circling each round black eye. Of the two males he saw, one's neckside iridescent patch was magenta, the other's a luminous chartreuse. Two of the females pecked watchfully at the bare earth—a clever supplication to him, or

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  a means of conjuring food from heaven? It came to the Bear in a rush. Iris hadn't fed them! She hadn't fed the lovey-doves, the doves of love, and it really pissed him off. In fact, so blinding was the disproportionate, preposterous rush of rage that he wasn't aware of himself galloping up the steps and bursting into the house through the door left open—standing open! Fucking kids!—although he came to himself once inside and rose to his hindlegs, nostrils quivering for some niff of what might actually be going on. Faint smells: no one home, but they hadn't been gone long. No smell of Siege or some strange man. He took a few steps forward and peered around the rustic grey massif of the chimney: breakfast still on the table: two half-finished bowls of some breakfast flakes or other, cold toast and a mug of abandoned coffee. The wreck of the Marie Celeste. The Bear had come home.

  The Bear walked closer. At Iris' place, at the head, beside the mug of black coffee, on the blue plate that held the slice of wheat toast, he could see the crescent shape of his beloved's bite; in the children's places—how he hated the ungrateful look of uneaten food—blue bowls of flakes decomposing in milk amid the eyeless gazes of stranded raisins. He did some rapid calculations, emptied one bowl of cereal into the other, crumbled the toast into the mix and carried it outdoors all altruistic for the tenderhearted timid-souled doves, to feed their beauty.

  "Here you go, kids," he announced on the approach, and they took off for the trees in a panic of shrieking wings. The Bear stood there with his begging bowl, revealed again as walking wrath and a terror of the earth. He scattered the sodden flakes and toast on the ground and poured the milk into a hollow in the top of a low grey rock before retiring houseward with the bowl in his paw, tr4ng to feel virtuous but not quite making it. "I know you'll come down when you're ready," he said over his shoulder, and had the strength not to look back to see if the birds were fluttering down.

  He was lousing up. He was losing his temper. How dumb could you be? Keep cool.

  But back in the lidng room his mind acknowledged what his eye had already seen: the half-open black iron woodstove door. Even before things had gone sour between him and Iris this had been a bone of contention: she liked to load the woodstove up with oak and then, as if she had not the least knowledge of the principles of convection or any sense of the price of firewood she would—it was hard to believe it— she would leave both doors of the woodstove open. Often she would pull up a chair and sit in front of it in the morning with her mug of coffee, dragging herself back to consciousness while split oak went up like matchsticks. Okay, he understood that she woke to a difficult, fragmentar)' state of mind, but allow nature more than nature

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  needs and even beast's life don't run so cheap. Two hundred dollars a cord! and that cord dubious: a local tendency to give short weight.

  Prithee, do not make me mad.

  He shut the door of the woodstove, reuniting the halves of its bas-relief mountainscape—and turned the handle snug. Will she never understand? Good oak burning up by the ton in there. Do not make me mad.

  Then the Bear had an odd experience: he saw a chill malignant fog emerge from within his body and begin to fill the house to its last beam and leastmost corner. He recognized it as a monstrous instrumentality of control. This was what had screwed everything up between him and Iris and the kids. From his side, this.

  Free me from this delusive nonsense, he asked. Help me now. There must be some grace left over from last night. And to the monster inside himself said. Leave me, fall away, begone, fuck off, die . . . and hey presto, these things happen, it fell, shucks, husks, fell from him like the heavy inert qlipothic carapace it was.

  So that, when he went upstairs to niff around the rooms, it was without the slightest trace of wrath that he unmade Trace's and Amy's beds when he found pistachio shells, candywrap and shards of tortilla chips in the bedclothes—bugs, chipmunks, mice!—and it was in a nicely balanced, reasonable frame of mind that he returned downstairs and stood meditatively in the living room, ready for Iris and the kids to come home from wherever they were. He would greet them expansively and with love. Then he would have a private talk with Iris and explain that he understood how difficult, make that impossible, he had been, and how he felt for the situation of her daughters, understood the peril in which she felt them to be, and acknowledged the unusual, some would say unnatural, picture he made in conjunction with her; and would end with the certainty that love could find a way. No matter how long it took. He would talk about love. Not just their love, but love in itself. As it shaped and made the forms of nature and refrained from overspilling the conventional skies, exquisite consideration, only in order to preserve intact the individuated forms of its making, of which. Iris, you and I are two who have recognized the trace of that original love in each other, and . . .

  No one came home from wherever they were, however—Jones'd be up soon, he knew—and a light dusting of drowsiness fell upon the Bear. He really ought to have a nap. Had to play again that night and all.

  Without thinking about it overmuch he wandered into the master bedroom and the big brass double bed that had seen such pleasure once. If things broke right with Iris, the Bear thought sleepily, and with the royalty statements, maybe we could buy the house from Stanlynn, hire an architect to cut

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  a hole in the bedroom floor and plant a tree down in the crawlspace, let it grow up into the bedroom and flourish there like the one Mr. & Mrs. O'Dys-seus had. Yeah, if things break right and we put aside enough college money for Aim and Trace maybe,
Iris, you and I could get ma—

  I must be idiotic with lack of sleep.

  He tumbled into the bed but came alert when he encountered that much-unmitigated scent of her—Iris!—and it was several minutes before sleep began perceptibly to descend again and he started edging into dream, images of Iris blending with thoughts of music, thoughts turning into images, images turning into sound so that, when it came, the familiar rumble of the Volvo rattling up the drive blended with the mumble of his mind rolling down the slope to sleep, and the shock of waking recognition only came as the engine switched off, the handbrake ratcheted tight, and one door cranked open on its busted iron tongue.

  "No," he heard Iris' voice say, "I don't know whose car it is either."

  The Accord, she meant. He didn't know what to do, and decided in default that he was much too sleepy to arise. He heard them hesitate on the boards of the landing at the bottom of the steps.

  "I'm sure there's nothing to worry about," Iris told her daughters in a voice disguising its worries, and then, after a very slight pause they began their way up the steps. Iris in the lead if his ears did not deceive him.

  They were at the door. He heard Iris come in alone.

  "There's no one here," she said, and then her daughters' footsteps followed her hesitantly in.

  The Bear's heart beating.

  More footsteps, one set of them lazy, dragging their way across the floorboards: Amy. Amy would come to like him first, then eventually she'd bring Trace along.

  "Hey," he heard Amy say from the dining room, "someone's been eating my breakfast."

  Once upon a time, way back, way way back, shortly after he'd broken with the family secrecy and made himself known to Jones—he'd been a little harsh about the old boy's clarinet playing, but he'd been tense—Jones, in a rather touching, unconscious parody of protective fatherhood, thinking that the Bear still needed to be taught to read, had brought home an armful of threadbare grade-school textbooks, generic tales of Dick and Jane and Spot—^you could see them run, first severally, then together—when in fact the Bear had already made his way through most of Hemingway. There had been a story, in one of these books, about a httle bearcub who had lost track of his mother and gotten stranded in the woods as night came on. That Mom would find

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  him eventually was a sentimental given of the genre, but before she did, the little cub would have to spend a night on his stony lonesome. The passage the Bear particularly objected to came when, as dusk fell, the abandoned cub curled into his own warmth at the base of a tree. First he closed one eye, the text said, then he closed the other. The Bear had found these sentences odious and objectionable. That's not how bears go to sleep! he had announced with disproportionate outrage to Jones. That's not how anyone goes to sleep! How could anyone write this crap! It took Jones awhile to joke him out of it, and after awhile they managed to defuse the moment and have a laugh at the silly shit someone thought kids were supposed to learn from. More of the same dumb hustle. Human civilization a laugh, et cetera.

  But now, as he heard Tracy join her sister at the dining table and could hear the whole freight train coming around the bend as Tracy said, "Someone's been eating my breakfast too," the Bear closed one eye.

  Whosoever diggeth a pit, he thought, shall fall in it.

  "My toast is gone but my coffee's still here," came Iris' voice, and although he was grateful for the minor variation the Bear closed the other eye.

  It took only a very basic talent for endurance to wait while the other shoes dropped. Amy and Trace running upstairs to announce something only partly audible about the state of their beds, but when Iris appeared at the bedroom door, her eyes wide, her hair as if on end and not one visible trace of irony or recognition of what she was enacting, to say, "Someone's been sleeping in my bed, and he^s still in it'' the Bear was wide and appallingly awake. In a life, in a long Hfe of tired, in a long life of tired and weary, this was the tiredest, this was the tiredest, weariest, worst. This was one to break the back, the heart, the hope, the sense of humor about this long, tired, flat, stale, weary, profitless, entirely.

  "What are you doing here?" Iris asked him in an outraged stage whisper, her face blotching red and white, and when he tilted upright and humbled himself to his hindfeet saying something about how he had played a minor blues by Trane and had to show her the car, she didn't seem to calm down much.

  "Listen," he tried to tell her, but she wasn't doing it. Trace and Aim were clumping back down the stairs. Iris was blocking the doorway with her body, and despite her petite personal radiance he could recognize without difficulty the mother bear in the cavemouth, protecting her young even though he would never do them the least harm, and keep them from the unnatural, obscene sight of him even though he had made no move toward the doorway or the room beyond. In short, the known world, with all the tedious weight

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  of its serial limitations, came crashing down again, and it was so unbearably dull, its recognitions rehearsed a thousand times, its roles played a thousand thousand times and now played out. "Aw please listen," he said, which did no visible good. "Why do you hate me?" he was finally able to ask.

  "I don't hate you," Iris said. "How could I ever hate you?" A plaintive look took possession of her face for a moment, and for a moment a major cadence popped its head above the clashing chords that after all might be his own hallucination to say. If you reach me we can make peace right here. But something happened, and the resolution sank beneath the waves of working dissonance as the composition advanced barline after barline piecing one moment from another, and he and Iris remained similarly apart, across what might as well have been an infinity of wooden floorboards, Iris in the doorframe and the Bear on the edge of the bed, springs and mattress sagging cat-astrophically beneath his weight, while he was saying, or trying to say, "Wait a minute, can't we slow this down?" But once again, despite the overwhelming waves of unconditioned being he'd seen last night, he and Iris had reached the shore on which ignorant bozos clash by night.

  "Go upstairs for a minute," Iris told her daughters over her shoulder, and as they audibly obeyed her it occurred to the Bear that this provided at least the possibility of another opening.

  "Can't we just be ourselves awhile?" he asked her. "If it doesn't work we can go back on automatic after."

  "I don't know what you mean," Iris said, but she seemed to go slightly softer.

  "Look," he tried to say. "Look," but got no farther. He was tired. And had no words. All these years, he should have learned to speak.

  "At what?" Iris wanted to know.

  At me. At the monstrous face love wears in this world. At what might work out yet. At the unacceptable face that hfe perhaps for good reason is intent on showing. At the inconvenience and insult of it all. At who we really are. "At me," was all he managed to say, the room already heavy with failure.

  ''You get all the breaks," Iris told him. "Everyone has to make allowances for j/oz/.What about me?"

  "I'm sorry," the Bear admitted. "I love you. I feel like I'm dying here. I died last night. I'm tired."

  "Well, you shouldn't sleep it off here." Iris thrust her chin indicatively at the bed, then flicked her eyes upstairs to her daughters. "I wasn't expecting you."

  "Iris, my heart is breaking."

  "Oh that," she said. "You still notice things like that?"

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  "Iris."

  "Bear."

  "If there's something new I'm supposed to put on the plate, I don't know what it is," he said. "Tell me what you want from me. Give me a hint. Offer a clue."

  "You don't have children. You wouldn't understand."

  "No," he told her, "I wouldn't understand. How would I understand a single thing you're going through?" He waved his arms in exasperated semaphore. "I'm just a puppet you can find lovable when occasion suits and toss out after."

  "That's not how I think of you. Is that how you think I
think of you?"

  "I don't know what else to think." Whenever he got in an argument with anyone he was automatically unjust, and with Iris invariably also wrong. "You know, I might have a cub or two out there," he told Iris anyway, "but their mommies treated me about the way you're treating me now. Hands off, fuck your clumsy impersonation of love, you're here to eat my kids. Iris, I'd love your daughters if they'd let me. That I love you, albeit in my dumb fatal way, hardly needs repeating. I understand the imperatives of your motherhood. I would help you if I could or if you'd let me. I think I've been good for you. I could be good for them. Let me in. Give me a cognitive kiss. Here I am. Tell me what you want. You think this isn't love?"

  "You're impossible," was all Iris found to say, but she fretted her hands and looked desperate. "I wasn't expecting you today."

  "Of course I'm impossible. But from you I'd hoped for recognition." He saw a moment's helplessness in her face, a hint that she felt caught in the web of her own reactions and might welcome release, if only he could find the lever and pry back the jaws of the trap. "Iris," he said. "Get real with me. Remember who we are."

  "Give me a minute." Her hands flustered into the air. "Why couldn't you have spent the week in the city as we agreed? I'd counted on that week. I know I've had my months with the girls but I needed that week."

  "For what? You were going to leave?"

  "Why do you keep saying that? We have a lot to talk about, if you'd only Hsten."

  "Really?" He stepped closer to her and he felt himself enter a palpable aura of confusion and pain extending at least three feet from her body, poor kid, a sort of whirring blurring of the air.

  "But not this minute. I wasn't ready. Not just now."

  "When?"

  "I don't know," Iris said. Did she look helpless or just exhausted?

  "Do I. . . Iris, do you mean there's actually some hope?"