by K M Cholewa
Linda.
Words caught in his throat.
“What’s the occasion?” she said.
Her hair was somewhat rumpled. She looked tired, but then, she always had. Paris unloaded all but one of the plates on the work space behind the counter. He extended the last one in her direction.
“My birthday,” he said. He told the truth.
Linda waved off the plate.
“Well, happy, happy,” she said. She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out several crumbled singles. “I’d like some soup,” she said, “if you’ve got it.”
Both the request and crumpled singles caught Paris off guard. She did not make eye contact, almost as though her having the money embarrassed them both.
Just then, the two retarded girls passed through the doorway and slid into a booth. An older woman with a dry drunk’s twitch tailed the girls and seated herself in the corner. Paris poured coffee for Linda — the old habit — and then picked up three slices of cheesecake and took them to the other women. They accepted it without question. Then he filled a bowl of soup for Linda and delivered it with packaged saltines. As he placed it before her, she looked down at her hands, which she took turns with, one rubbing the other. The first wave of relief upon seeing her had blinded him to what he now saw. Her facade had melted. He had known it was a facade but had believed it was sadness below and not what he now saw. Fear.
The retarded girls talked in a low murmur. Paris ladled soup for them and for the older woman and dropped it at their respective booths. Back behind the counter, he pulled plastic wrap from its roll to cover the remaining slices of cheesecake. He stole a sidelong glance at Linda. He hoped her fear was not related to his own past bad judgment. She lifted her eyes and returned his gaze. For a moment, it seemed like she had something to say, but then her face went white.
In a single movement, she was up and over the counter, banging her knee, and spilling her coffee. She bit her bottom lip and crouched low, hop-limping her way into the kitchen. Paris dropped the plastic wrap and moved swiftly toward where she had been seated. Instinctively, he dumped her soup and spoon into the bus pan and wiped away all traces of her. The retards watched with wide eyes. The older woman kept her eyes averted.
Paris turned to face the doorway. A man stood there, arms puffed slightly at his sides. Paris assessed him quickly: Sober. Clean. Wound up tight. Weak and violent, a bad combination in a man for all women, children, and small animals. The man’s eyes darted through the room, landing on each woman in succession and then to Paris, who was hanging up his rag.
Paris thought the man might turn and leave, not finding among them what he was looking for. But no such luck. He took a seat at the counter, sitting sideways on the stool. He ordered only a Coke. A bad sign. A Coke is an excuse. It’s putting money in a meter. Buying a place to park.
The retarded girls focused on their soup and did not speak. Paris sat on the stool behind the counter that Jerry used during the day. Rarely did Paris sit at work, but he did so now, a sentry in the corner. Paris felt the man sizing him up, but he kept his own eyes unfocused on the space before him. But it was to no avail. Paris had lost his invisibility.
The man bought twenty tense minutes with his Coke. Paris wanted to go back into the kitchen and check on Linda, but he didn’t want to leave the man unattended. He wondered what the man’s relationship was to Linda. Pimp? Husband? Boyfriend? Some combination? He felt certain the retarded girls knew. The threat he posed was not that of the unknown.
Finally, the man stood and dumped change from his pocket onto the check. But instead of heading for the casino and exit, he turned and approached the retarded girls’ booth. He looked back and forth between them.
“Where the fuck is she?” he said softly, but with menace.
Paris slid off the stool and came to lean with both hands on the counter. “Hey, hey, hey,” he said. His biceps peeked out from his white T-shirt sleeves.
The man turned around.
Paris pointed downward at the top of the counter. “Bring it here,” he said.
“I’m looking for my wife,” he said, his back now to the girls.
“Which of you is married to this guy?” Paris said to the retarded girls. They looked back at him with blank faces. Then they looked at each other, and the white one seemed about to speak. Paris was relieved the man spoke first.
“This isn’t your business,” he said to Paris.
Paris lifted a hand and waved him closer to the counter, away from the women. Then, he leaned forward, looked him in the eye, and spoke softly.
“Those girls,” Paris said, “they don’t know anything.”
“They know plenty.”
“What’s she look like?” Paris said. “If she shows up here, I’ll tell her you’re looking for her.”
Paris forced himself to hold the man’s eyes. Still, he could sense the woman in the corner booth trembling. This was not what she was told to expect. The man’s eyes couldn’t quite hold Paris’s and made small movements back and forth as ideas and strategies unfolded and crashed against the wall of possibilities. There was no getting past Paris, he must have decided, because he backed away from the counter and pointed at him.
“Fuck you,” he said.
Paris placed his hands on his apron-clad hips.
“Fuck me,” he said, as though in total agreement.
The man pursed his lips and bobbed his head in three short, tight nods. Blair met him when he reached the casino and escorted him to the front door.
Paris came out from behind the counter and watched him go. Then he turned to the retarded girls. The cross-eyed Indian one said, “He’s bad.”
“He’s gone,” Paris said. Then he went back behind the counter and wiped him away with a rag. He pocketed the eight-cent tip. The dining room exhaled, and Paris went to the kitchen to look for Linda.
His eyes panned the room, the floors and the counters and sinks. He stepped toward the janitor’s closet and crooked his neck, looking inside. Nothing. He moved toward the rear of the kitchen and checked the cooler. She was not inside, wrapped in her own arms, shivering. Paris then pushed on the metal bar, opening the heavy back door that led to the Dumpsters. A motion detector light ticked on above him. The alley cut through the purple night like a river, the cracked brick buildings rising up on each side like carved out canyon walls. Paris looked both ways. Angled light reached the Dumpsters, potholes, and fire escapes. But Paris saw her nowhere. The motion light ticked back off, detecting nothing either. Linda was gone. Paris hoped her small fistful of singles wasn’t all the money she had.
The image of Linda clutching her dollars made Paris’s hands tingle. He curled his fingers to his palms as though he, too, could feel the soft, kneaded texture of the bills. He stepped back inside the kitchen, pulling the door closed behind him.
But Linda didn’t need to be drawn. She needed money.
Paris looked at the carton from the cheesecake, still on the work counter. He was going to give Linda his five-hundred-dollar bonus, he decided, to help her get to somewhere where she didn’t need to hide. He had the money in savings from his last paycheck. He would give her that and cover the loss with the bonus. He would right past wrongs. He would be a man. If he were going to remember his birthday this year, this would be his birthday present. To himself.
He returned to the dining room just as the women were emerging from their booths to walk back into the dark.
“Tell her to come back,” he said to the retarded girls, and they stopped and turned. The Indian one said, “Okay,” and they continued out through the casino.
Paris cleaned up after them all. He loaded the dishwasher and then lined up doughnuts like neatly fallen dominoes on an orange Rubbermaid tray. He did what he knew how to do. He worked.
Light pressed against the dark sky. Blossoms that had survived the hail glowed. The first birds chirped, waking the others. Paris walked the
cracked sidewalks until he reached the duplex. He crept downstairs and sat on the edge of his mattress with his work boots still on, contemplating the logistics of his feet. He liked to wash them first thing after work, but he didn’t want to wake Tatum and Rachael. If he set his feet free, without washing them, the basement would be contaminated, and if Tatum came down later, she would be exposed. He realized he no longer had a deep corner closet where he could stash his offending footwear. He scanned the room for nooks and crannies. He stood to take a tour. He pushed through his own boxes and thought of the box he had left behind, the one with his paints and charcoals. He thought of Linda, and again, there was the tingling in his hands. He continued shuffling through the rummage that surrounded the rug Geneva had unrolled for him. He made his way to Tatum’s cluster, the place where he had surprised her earlier. He reached down and picked up a green leather book from the top of a box. It looked old. Expensive. Permanent, like a Bible.
He forgot his feet and took the book back to his mattress and sat with it on his lap. He opened the cover and turned the pages slowly. He knew Tatum’s Rachael story, but he’d never seen the book. The old pictures were interesting, but the narratives beside them did not impress him much. A pen marked the page where Tatum belonged, and there was a blank space where her picture should have been. He touched the space with his fingers. He picked up the pen that was tucked into the seam of the book. Where Tatum’s picture should have been, he started to sketch. It was an irresistible impulse, and he didn’t pause to question it.
He sketched out her torso. He drew the scar. A place cut open. A place sealed closed. He drew a breast, a simple curve of specificity. Paris stayed with the moment. Then he hogged the space beyond that allotted to Tatum, his drawing reaching down, claiming much of Rachael’s space below it and encompassing her baby picture. At first, the motion of his hands, the focus, and the appearance of lines, curves, and shading served to ease a tension that stretched across his shoulders and neck. It was an overdue exhale, moving out measuredly. But as the birds outside above the window wells worked themselves into a frenzy, an anxiety beset him, causing him to adjust and readjust his shoulders as he worked, as though he couldn’t get them to sit quite right on his body. He felt pressure as he worked on Tatum’s eyes. A pressure to act. To escape. His feet steamed.
The arrival of the day cast a green glow throughout the basement. Paris closed the book’s cover. He flopped backward on his mattress, fully clothed. He had done it again. Violated her space. Yet, as he lay there, he seemed to grow lighter, as though he were not guilty at all and was, in fact, absolved.
Facts are products of evidence, and evidence exists only in the past. So facts are products of the past. Making decisions based on them, and using them to predict the future, is to look into an old-news crystal ball. When a choice is made based on the facts, and then made again and again, a layered reality is created. Fact stacked on fact. Past stacked on past.
There is fact, and there is hope. Choices are rooted in one or the other. Tatum knew this. She’d chosen different paths at different times. She’d hung in there out of hope. She’d split, knowing the facts. Sometimes, she just four-wheeled it, left both paths, and tossed pills down her throat. Maybe it didn’t really matter which path she chose? So far, they had all led to the same place.
Outside her kitchen window, a black-capped chickadee sang its two-note song. Tatum lifted her head in the direction of the sound. She hadn’t slept. Hadn’t even been to bed. She paced the kitchen in her stocking feet, carrying the slip of paper with Lee’s phone number on it. She needed to call him to get insurance information for the hospital. But for Rachael’s sake, she knew she needed to ask for more. The world to which she had brought Rachael could crumble beneath her. Paris might not be there next time to stop the blood and tears. And Tatum knew that her own shame, if not Geneva’s exasperation, would dig an ever-widening gulf between the two doors across the hall from each other. Rachael could well end up collateral damage. She needed insurance in more ways than one.
Tatum fingered the piece of paper. The phone number was for Lee’s answering service. He was in New Jersey currently, setting up a satellite office for his company. Something to do with pharmaceuticals. He was two hours ahead, and she thought she might catch him before he went to work. She would get nowhere with a lecture, she knew, or anything with even a whiff of criticism. He had to be seduced, flattered. She fanned herself with the phone number, considering what to say. She looked into her living room and noted the wilting plants, signs of her neglect, reminding her of the to-do list that never got done. Track down old work contacts. Schedule a mammogram. Why did uphill tend to be a battle while downhill tended to snowball? Momentum and the laws of physics had a way of taking sides.
She picked up the phone and dialed Lee’s number. She left her message.
“There’s been a little accident. Everything is fine. Two little stitches is all. I just need some insurance information for the hospital.” Tatum hesitated. “Lee,” she said, “try to see yourself through Rachael’s eyes. You’re important to her. Why don’t you give her a call and check up on her? I think it would help. Okay. Thanks.”
It was the best, and least, she could do. A sorry commentary that the two were one and the same.
She hung up the phone. There was still an hour, maybe two, before Rachael woke. Tatum went to her own bedroom and lay down on top of the bedspread. She closed her eyes. Hope and fact. She felt she was stuck between the two. But she was not stuck. Nothing stands still. She just couldn’t detect her own deeper currents, her trajectory, toward hope. She was advancing toward it, but she was walking backward, mistaking what was before her eyes for the ground beneath the backward stepping heel, choosing the lift and press of her step based on terrains already traversed.
Exhaustion pressed her to the mattress. Her body seemed to sink. As she drifted off, she became aware of a presence. Not one newly arrived but one just noticed. Margaret. Not a ghost, Tatum knew, but a phantom. A phantom limb. Not really there and yet part of her.
Tatum rolled to her side and opened her eyes. A slip of something on the other pillow caught her attention. She reached out and picked it up. She rolled to her back and squinted. Right there in her hand, it was Vincent.
35
Lee couldn’t tell you his story because he couldn’t see it. That is why he moved from face to face looking for it. The approval. The need. He required both. The need was necessary because he knew the approval was based on an illusion. But all this occurred beneath the veil of the subconscious. Unaware that he was so afflicted, Lee existed at the whim of physics.
The physicists say that reality takes shape at the pleasure of perception. Look into a teeming field of particles and they organize within the parameters of the stencils the one looking projects. There it is, one thinks, for it is obvious and solid. But the looker turns, and it shimmers away. Attention, alone, sustains it. Sustained him. Outside eyes turned upon him and he’d freeze frame, lit up in accordance to their hopes and fears. Was what they saw him, in part, at the least? Or was it merely bits and pieces parsed out from a grand whole, broken mirror images of other people’s minds?
Alive, Margaret had an omnipresent eye on Lee. An eye in him, thinking him into being. When Lee didn’t like what the eye saw, he found Corrina. Then he made the eye look at what Corrina saw. But when Margaret died, the eye closed. The notion of her ghost, though disembodied as the eye, offered no comfort. Ghosts don’t tell stories. Ghosts are stories. Then, Corrina left. There had been no breakup. No big talk. Lee remembered something Corrina had told him early in their affair. “Single men take up too much energy,” she had said. “I prefer to carry the light side of the load.”
He had been comforted by it at the time.
Now, Lee listened to the low roll of the Atlantic and mistakenly drowned the wrong thoughts in alcohol. The part of his mind he dulled with Bloody Marys was the
one that had it all figured out. The dulled part could’ve told you – had it not been dulled — that if you want to save your marriage, you must first save yourself . Had it not been for Corrina, he knew, it might’ve been him instead of Margaret. Dead. In order to save himself, he had lied to Margaret. True. But Lee found that most women didn’t want to deal with the truth. They wanted to deal with their feelings. They wanted you to deal with their feelings too. It didn’t matter what messed-up, imaginary nonsense their feelings were based on, they wanted you to acknowledge them.
Acknowledge them. Hell, Lee felt he was drowning in them. If Corrina hadn’t sat down on the stool beside him in a bar on Rush Street, Margaret’s feelings would’ve filled his ears and nostrils and lungs and dragged him down to rot at the bottom of a dark sea.
But Corrina did take that barstool, her hips wrapped in leather, her hair in long sheets of braids. The group she entered with simmered and sparkled. They dressed hipper. They laughed louder. They were a cluster of electricity at the end of the bar with Corrina sitting on the only available barstool, the one next to Lee’s. She pushed several strands of braids behind her shoulder and twisted on her stool toward her empty glass. Lee was looking at her. So she looked back.
She gave her brows the slightest of lifts.
“Let me guess,” she said, her voice the flavor of honey and cynicism, “your marriage sucks.” A sneaky half-smile crept across her face.
Lee shape-shifted where he sat in the light of her flashing eyes and the sneaky half-smile. The colossal failure that was his marriage was a wry joke, an urbane fact over which witticisms were exchanged. When the bartender refilled Corrina’s snifter with brandy, Lee caught his eye and tapped his stack of bills. They postponed introductions for the thrill of mystery and were clever with each other, throwing down truths like gauntlets.