In This One I Figure Out What Gets Ratted
When I hoped to write, a crow pitched neckfirst through a phone wire. Crows are too nearly smart for suicide. A black gull, then. I’ve never seen one, but one could exist somewhere, or maybe not now. This one was (I peered out the window) squaddling down the street, squalling from the third of its throat not venting blood through ratted veins or maybe tendons. Still, the bird was walking the sidewalk calmer than you could at your calmest, so maybe, yes, it was a crow. That I could live my whole life well not knowing what would make a crow want to kill itself, or not knowing veins from tendons — if I’d always know the dispensability of words even for gore — I’d never write.
When I hope to write I hope to write a part of the most obvious thing in the world. So, now, about what was ratted, I’ve just done some research. I typed a question about what goes on inside me and I skimmed the first few sentences. Veins pump blood through muscles just to drag waste to the heart. Did you know this? Tendons let but do not make everything move. They tie muscles to bone. Some people have more bones than others, which is not pathological up to a certain number I would never, ever guess. Tendons pull a tenth of what they can in ordinary animal motions, but in this the body suffers subtle tears, and just one of these can mean — it’s the same word for anyone, anything in the world, I insist — dying. I can’t think of anything else in the world that’s fair.
Binoculars
“But you know the weirdest part about getting screwed like that,” she said.
I didn’t.
“Is the next day, when you’re in line for coffee, at the grocery store or something, and you smile at the cashier or the person in front of you and they smile when an hour ago you were naked and tied up and getting whipped all over by someone who was also naked. But I mean it can’t be that uncommon. Have you ever thought. I mean maybe the cashier, the night before. Maybe half the cafe one time or other. In the New York Times I read once that thirty six percent of American adults have tried it. I mean, my mother gets the New York Times. And then after we all go out into the day together smiling with our clothes on and Hello Thank You. Do you understand. I’m no prude. Or else would I be here. All I wonder is people. How one thing leads to the other and back.”
“Thank you,” said the facilitator.
He sat in the middle of our circle. He was supposed to make sure we all got only one minute to talk. I wondered if he got compensated for being here or if it was like AA where you were supposed to thank God there’s a better path than where you were and pay it forward. If he felt like he was paying it forward just right now.
Then a tired coarse man who was wider in the middle than his chair. The metal creaked under him when he cleared his throat, which was often and involuntary. He had a friendly face that wrinkled deep around the edges and thick curly hair that fell over his ears and looked too black for his age.
“I’m Dave and I watch too much. You know. To. That now I can’t.”
Dave was tensed. He looked over each of us, dreading disgust, probably. We all looked back and nodded softly. He settled back a bit and cleared his throat. His chair creaked loud in the bare room.
“Hello, David,” said the facilitator. “Thank you.”
“I’m Mona,” said a woman who didn’t need to. She was the only one who’d taken one of the big white stickers and a marker and written her name. All caps on her chest like an emergency. MONA.
“And I’m here because I keep cheating on my husband.”
“Hello, Mona.”
“When he was flying I wouldn’t ever have come here. I thought of it as covering my bases. Of course that’s wrong. But it wasn’t inaccurate. I’d think what could he possibly be doing on a big warm beach in Malta or Miami where no one knew him, or somewhere in the mountains with rich bored women he’d never have to see again. Calling from wherever he was, he’d tell me about his days off and get to the nights and just trail off. It was just fine. And I’d go out and meet someone. It’s not hard, you can imagine.”
She waved at her face and it was true, she was pretty with shining cheeks pulled taut over the bones and a mouth like a dropped plum. Plain blue eyes flitting from the facilitator’s lap, up to the window with the trees waving in the bright heat, down to the table with the coffee no one ever poured, down at her own neat fingers, one thrumming with a bare gold band on.
“Then we got a big house across town to make space for children. And he did private flying on the side to make up the money. Seaplanes and traffic helicopters, like that. Not billionaires. Though once he did a helicopter tour of Seattle for a big football player visiting. Even though it was raining sheets. Just because he wanted it. Because the football player said if that was the real Seattle, he wanted to see it. Up in a weather plane three years ago he crashed in the woods up north. Just lost control of life at the worst moment, he told me after. There was a summer storm. We got money but not a lot because the lawyers got it looked over and both sides said there was nothing wrong with the rotor, that’s the big wheeling blade, or the wings or anything else. And that first week he could barely twitch his thumb back and forth. I thought I’d be wiping his ass forever, you know, like Christopher Reeve in Rear Window, not that I wouldn’t because I love him.”
“Jimmy Stewart,” Dave said.
“Oh I love that one, with the binoculars,” the S&M addict said. “Where he says, ‘Right now I’d welcome trouble.’”
“So he has a motor chair now and he can do everything himself. Nearly.”
Dave creaked.
“So can you imagine. Me being who I. Needing what I need. And he knew that when he married me. How important it was for me. And him. He loved that. He said he’d never met a woman like that who was always ready who wasn’t paid to be or had serious psychological issues. He loved it.”
Her hands tented on her lap.
“And you know what the worst part is.”
I didn’t.
“He still does. Not that. Well. I mean he’s still a man for chrissake. But he understands. No one spends four hours at the bank. Goes to the little park the next town over because it’s so peaceful every single three o’clock on Thursday. I used to try, you know. I had a friend in town. I’d check the movie schedules. But he understands. That’s my problem. A weakness. Who hasn’t once or twice. Or hasn’t imagined it. But coming home. Asking about his day over dinner. How he can stand up for a long time now without grabbing onto anything. Yes, honey, my day was nothing special. Kissing goodnight and brushing over him to turn the light off. He understands. Can you imagine.”
“Thank you, Mona,” said the facilitator.
“Because I was so miserable that first year, and of course he was stoic but for both our sakes he wanted to be dead. And I took perfect care of him. He told me. I still do, even better, even though I don’t really have to now. Now we laugh again when we wake up and at night with the TV. Do you see how making trouble could be so much worse than just. If he really is that comfortable for once. And what do you do with that.”
“You know what I think,” said the S&M addict.
I didn’t.
She sobered her face.
“You’re not comfortable. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here,” she said, slowly, with great weight.
That’s all she said.
But I was starting to think how she was wrong, wrong, wrong. How it was late June outside, the longest day of the year. How the sun wouldn’t set until nearly nine. And it wasn’t even seven yet. Or maybe it had passed without our noticing, and it was the day after the longest day. How we’d all get up soon and put the chairs away and enter that day smiling and Hello Thank You, catching the last full light.
Human Remains
He drinks so slow I don’t know whether to feel put on or just alcoholic. He spits talking and my face is in the way so what’s the dignified response. His work has to do with spreadsheets and he dresses like he’s sorry about it. He has this pudgy perma-smile. I feel fake trying to return it, which is itself fake, which is etc. If I put this bristling aside, we could do this again and again until we find ourselves at the end of a more pleasant life together than most people will ever know, but life’s too short.
Anyone has a right to leave anyone for any reason and will even if they don’t but things were so good I’d shoot you if death weren’t a thing. When I say what I mean I always regret it. I’ll never forget you called staying with anyone foreclosing on someone better, which is true. All my attempts to deny this with love have come from somewhere dirty and mean.
Spit’s on my cheek. He’s talking about his dad. His dad Cliff was 25 years older than his mother Grace. Cliff got rich owning muscle car dealerships in the ’60s. His first wife left him. Between alimony and gin he spent the ’70s poor. He met Grace at a wharf bar half as bright as this one. This feels like great practice for someone I’ll like better but each new day means that’s less likely. Better people are everywhere and lonely but just try to find one. Okay, now what. Spit’s on my other cheek.
Cliff and Grace get married and have a baby, an accident, this spreadsheet man. Ending him is not in their values, plus they love him, so they need more money forever. Cliff buys a five-room houseboat with his last dollar from a nepo-hippie at the pier. They dock it there. This is back when it’s not just tourists but also fishermen and layabouts. The whole boat is mauve. They try a bed-and-breakfast. Bay tours. A floating playschool once the hippies trust them. Candles.
If you cremate someone, you need a permit to scatter them. But out in water, only the boat needs a permit. Cliff gets one from the city. They live off referrals from hippies, who always know someone grieving. Cliff sails out every afternoon. His baby is halfway through his drink. He grew up on this boat.
Some mourners mail ashes in advance. Travel problems, or they make peace with loneliness a little early and they’re scared they’ll change their mind. Cliff has a blue convertible from his dealership days. He drives it to the post office to pick up urns, pouches, whatever, every morning. Once, there’s only a little oak box he drives back to the pier and leaves on the passenger seat while he checks on Grace. She has a headache. His car gets jacked.
Cliff faces what my chin-spitter calls a moral dilemma. Does he tell the widow her husband’s gone for the second and last time? No one’s hurt if he doesn’t. The crisis passes. Here it is. He calls the cops, then the widow.
The next morning, the cops call back. They couldn’t find the car but they found, where Cliff said he parked, a pile of human remains. He calls the widow. Oh, she says. He was always trying to get away from me.
In love there’s no final anything. What if I hold out so long the better one comes late. What if he finds me on the curb, dumped by a thief. What if, being remains, I have no mouth to say fine, you. What if the wind just throws me at his shoe. What if that’s the waited-for. What if he steps on me like dogshit. There’s too much loneliness to bother with but this or else what.
He offers another drink. I say goodbye so maybe I’m not that alcoholic. It’s windy black outside. There’s no meaningful way to say this but I’ve never been so sad. Love is one attempt to walk away from this but there are others.
Petra
I have so much tenderness I’d kill for it. I did something wrong today.
I took Marje to the vet. She wouldn’t stop licking herself. She’d lick her furry patches down to scaly brown skin, and she’d still lick. The vet called it hygienic neurosis and put a big clear cone around Marje’s neck. I got tranquilizer pills in case the cone didn’t work.
A woman was fixed on me in the waiting room. She was turned straight at me from her chair a few chairs down. She looked at me wide-eyed. She had straight long black hair that didn’t move. She had a narrow body under thin clothes. The vet brought out Marje howling hollow in that cone, her tail swishing crazy. I got up and took her and that woman got up and followed me out and we got in our cars. I drove home with her behind me.
She had a little green sedan with dark windows. I could see her face in my rearview through that dark. She was wide-eyed. Her forehead was wide and crinkled. It’s a few minutes home. She took every turn. I could’ve turned more backroads but I never do anything like that and I wondered what she’d do. I’ve lived with a crazy woman named Sarah with crazy eyes and these weren’t crazy. And Marje was already yowling in the car.
She flew out when I opened the door. She scuttled in nervy circles, neck bent, knocking that cone against the driveway, so I picked her up. I put her down in the kitchen. I have this big bright window to watch from but nothing ever happens. I watched that woman watch me, wide-eyed in her car. She had a tire smooshed on the curb.
She had no pet in there. Maybe she left it with the vet, dying maybe. Marje was scowling trying to chew through the cone, so I fed her a spoon of tranquilizer pills in peanut butter. Then I came back to the window and saw not one thing. The next afternoon she was parked again, looking. Her face was not creased. She looked calm. She did not look like a woman who would hurt me though anyone could.
I cracked open the window and yelled at her to come in for coffee. I had a pot going. I left the front door open so she wouldn’t ring and wake Marje, who was belly-up by the sink. I met her at the door. I didn’t want to force her to talk, and she didn’t. She stared in a way that made me hate her a little for making me think I did something wrong when it was only me doing anything and nothing came of it. I put the hate away and brushed my hand over her smooth hair and smiled and felt stupid. She closed the door behind her coming in, gentle, like she was sneaking out.
The first thing she said, halfway through her coffee, was I looked like her husband. He’d even had a jumpy black cat, and a house nearby just as shabby — this is not a word I would’ve used about my house — and sparse.
I said to her: Your husband. Well, then, what shall we do about that.
I wondered if I sounded suggestive, or if that would help. I tried holding her gaze in a suggestive way but it didn’t seem to change anything. So I asked more about her husband. All she said was he left. He left, and it had been so long. She couldn’t have been thirty-five. I could’ve told her how much longer it could get. I could’ve held her hand and told her. I considered asking her out but I figured we’d be like now, staring, not saying much, only in public. When it’s been a long time, there are cheaper ways to find out how much is enough tenderness.
But I was getting nowhere even talking. I was agitated over her just staring at me like that, probably thinking of her stupid husband. And Marje was yowling, attacking herself again, so I just went for it.
I said: Do you wish to sleep with me?
I don’t know why I said “wish.” It sounded opener than “want.” If she kept staring like that, it wasn’t no wish. If I opened her, nothing withheld. If I didn’t and just let it all get longer.
Later, she said, and thanked me for the coffee and left.
Later. Jesus.
The next day, barely noon this time, she was on the curb again. I yelled her in for coffee, only this time I let her ring the door. The peanut butter had already fainted rabid Marje. She’s because of Sarah. Sarah said for months, almost a year, how nice it’d be to have a fluffy cat to pad around the house, sweet, loving, independent. Then she left it with me.
Sarah’s in the city now. I called her once at the number she’d sent once she settled in, and a busy-sounding man answered. We both left people for each other so we had it coming if you believe in fate. Sarah did but I don’t. I believe what people point to and call fate is what people point to and call fate. That’s all. Another thing she pushed for was to move to the city, but I don’t want to work hard to live in a cramped room somewhere I don’t know where everything is expensive and it’s never quiet. I never will. But where there’s room for quiet nothing happens.
Sarah said I didn’t love her because I never opened up about my deepest need but the one time I did in three years just did me in. I said — this was right after we got Marje — I wish we’d be more intimate, it’s been a while. She got mad thinking that meant that was all she was to me but I just don’t need much. What is there? She’s probably having the same row about it now. No, he must be more tender. But I don’t know how to be more tender with a woman than I am and not feel like a dog that’s caught the mailman and gets shot over it, guts all over the green yard.
She asked for more coffee. I emptied us the pot and realized I’d overlooked something.
I asked: What’s your name?
Petra, she said.
After a lot more staring, she followed me to bed. It’s terrific when things go your way with a woman, even if all that means is things go her way too.
I took Petra’s clammy hand and led her to bed. But walking her down the hall, I started feeling scared about pleasing her. I got scared about pleasuring this woman who stalked me just because I looked like a man who didn’t need her. I wondered to ask what he would do to her. I wondered what I could do to her to see her on the curb tomorrow, and what I could do to not, and if it was him or me or her that made her fix on me. Whatever would’ve made me love to fix on somebody like that, something’s taken it from me. But where is it? It was there. It was.
She sat on my bed. Marje was whining in the kitchen in a soft drugged way, probably keeled over. Petra looked at me wide-eyed. I smiled at her and focused on conjuring lust. I smiled at her. I tried to conjure tenderness. Jesus. Then I tried hard not to. I couldn’t tell how I was coming off. She’d look at me like that whatever I did, which no longer made me hate her. I don’t know why I said, before, I’d done something wrong. I really don’t. It had been so long. But I remember, for a little while, doing it all the time with Sarah, and still feeling this way.
Petra, I said.
I was standing over her, now, over the bed. I knelt. My mouth touched her ankle. I said Petra softly, slow, not stopping. I heard, from her, then me, pleasure that didn’t want to be. I pulled my mouth even lower, to the face of her calloused little heel, and started there. I murmured into it. Petra. I worked my way up into her. I couldn’t think of anything in my life I’d rather be doing. I hate feeling like that. What I know of stone is that it cleaves, melts, or never changes ever. Pleasure is all I care about and none of it is mine. ~
