by K M Cholewa
The group was too small for the tensions. Geneva tried to stay uninvolved behind her sunglasses. When it was near time to go, Rachael climbed the front porch steps to say her good-bye to Geneva.
“What a day for both of us,” Geneva said to her.
Rachael pointed out to Geneva her father on the front lawn and told her he was taking her home. Helene stood from where she sat beside Geneva and walked inside as Geneva pushed the sunglasses down her nose, just enough to look over the top of them into Rachael’s eyes. Vincent moved too, following his mother, but descending the front steps to where Tatum stood waiting for Rachael.
“Are you ready?” Geneva asked Rachael.
“I would like it if things stopped happening,” Rachael said with a painful kind of laugh.
“Good things happen too,” Geneva said, and Rachael gave her a sad “like when?” kind of smile.
Geneva pulled her in for a hug. “There’s good out there,” she said quietly into Rachael’s ear, “and it’s coming for you.”
“What’s going on?” Vincent asked Tatum, having seen from a distance the scene played out with Lee.
Tatum put on a good face.
“Rachael’s dad wants to take her home. It’s bittersweet, you know.”
She looked up at him, and he looked down at her. He seemed to be taking in her words, comparing them to how things seemed. Tatum smiled and stepped away. She joined Rachael and Geneva on the porch. Geneva pushed her sunglasses back up her nose and looked to Tatum.
“Big changes,” Geneva said.
Tatum nodded. She placed her hands on Rachael’s shoulders.
“How are you doing?” Tatum said.
Geneva closed her eyes and nodded.
“We’re right across the hall,” Tatum said. But she knew as the words came out that it would only be her there across the hall. Rachael would be gone.
Rachael left the funeral with her father. He would drop her back at the duplex later. Tatum drove home and parked the Celica out front. She turned off the engine. She rested her forehead on the steering wheel. Paris. He had split. It was time to find out why.
Tatum got out of the car and headed inside. In the foyer, she rapped gently on the basement door. She knew Paris was down there — she could sense his presence — and when he didn’t respond to the knock, she entered and went down the stairs anyway. She stepped slowly, craning her neck.
“Paris? Knock, knock.”
She reached the bottom. Paris stood beside the mattress with a box at his feet.
“Where’d you go?”
“Here,” he said, coldly.
“I’m going to try to talk Lee out of this,” Tatum said, sitting at the edge of the mattress that had no sheet.
Paris said nothing.
“Do you think it’s the right thing to do?” she asked.
“I don’t think anything,” he said, reaching for his pillow and shaking it from the case. “You know me.”
Tatum realized then that his boxes had moved, the pile shifted toward the bottom of the steps.
“What are you doing?” Tatum said, abruptly knowing.
“I’m leaving, Tatum,” he said. “Aren’t you?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Aren’t you going with Rachael back to Chicago?”
“I just wanted. . . I was just trying. . . Lee doesn’t want me there.” She tried to speak calmly. This was no big deal, a misunderstanding about to be fixed. “Didn’t you hear him? He did some song and dance about sometime up the road.”
Paris tossed the pillow onto the mattress and looked her squarely in the eye. She could see what was in there, the pain turned into anger.
“I don’t mind being second to your,” he closed his eyes and shook his head, “your sadness, or your fear.” He reopened his eyes. “But you would leave me? You would just volunteer to walk away?”
“Paris,” Tatum said, standing. “I couldn’t have Rachael feeling pawned off again. She’s a child. If she needed me . . .”
“You act like you were sacrificing yourself,” Paris said, “but you were sacrificing me.”
Tatum took a backward step.
“Is that what I was doing?” she said. “I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry.” She reached toward him but then pulled her fists to her forehead. “Paris, I’m sorry,” she said. “I told you I’m no good at this.”
“Yeah, Tatum,” Paris said, “throw yourself on a sword. That’s what I want.”
Tatum looked up from her fists. Paris’s face was stone.
“You don’t love me anymore,” she said flatly.
Paris searched the ceiling. He put his hands on his head like he was pulling out his hair.
“I have to leave you because I do love you,” he said. “What you do with my love makes me crazy. I mean, it’s like, aarrgg. It’s like, you’re stomping on it, and I’m like, hey, that’s my love. You’re so careless.” He turned away from her. “Loving you doesn’t feel very good, Tatum. Not knowing if at any second you’re going to vanish off the face of the earth doesn’t feel very good.”
“That’s how it is, Paris,” Tatum said, with some anger. “People vanish off the face of the earth all the time. Get used to it. In fact, it seems exactly like what you’re about to do.”
“Look,” Paris said, throwing up his hands, “forget it. It’s all my fault. You’re enough for me, but I’m not enough for you. You’re all that matters to me.” But even as the words fell from his lips, he thought of Linda, and Rachael, and the diner. He thought of his abandoned art supplies and he knew he was a liar. She wasn’t all that mattered. Too much mattered. But the lie was out there and what did it matter now, anyway. “Go away, Tatum,” he said, having nowhere to go away to himself.
Tatum stepped away from him. She bit her lower lip and then turned and climbed the stairs. She stopped halfway and looked over her shoulder but could only see Paris’s jeans and boots. She continued up and returned to her apartment. She closed the door behind her, and the devil rose up in her living room, reminding her whose soul she was dealing with. Why can’t it be different, she thought? Why not? Just one time.
She crossed the room and sunk into the orange chair. All this time, she had been getting on Geneva’s nerves. She’d been breaking Paris’s heart. All that time, Margaret had been crying. Dying.
And Rachael was leaving.
The tears inside stayed put as a familiar calm sunk in. A stillness. She was not traversing the scary turf of the new, where with each step you wondered if the ground would rise up to meet your falling foot. This landscape was predictable, flat and arid. For the first time in a long time, she knew what came next.
Helene and Geneva returned to the highway and drove until they saw a turn-off for state forest access. Helene pulled into an empty campground, and they leaned against the hood of the car, smoking a joint. Helene thought they should climb the ridge before them, not too high, and release Ralph to the wind, although there was none.
“I know he was faithful,” Geneva said. “He never cheated on me.”
“Big deal,” Helene said, quite stoned. “Vincent’s father was faithful too. He reserved all his screwed up, private, intimate, abusive bullshit for me, and me alone.”
“And you know,” Geneva said, “he never said, I love you. He said, you know I love you. Hey, Gen, you know I love you — I found that confusing, like he was messing with my head. I don’t think I like being told what I know.”
“You know,” Helene said, then laughed, “or maybe you don’t — but it sounds to me like you really trusted him, enough to make you doubt yourself.”
“That’s exactly what happened,” Geneva said, turning her wrist to pass the joint. “I could never figure out which to trust — myself or that voice that says I love you. I just figured the problem was me. He loved me. I didn’t feel it.” Geneva put her hands to the sides of her
head as though trying to stifle voices inside. “I’m just tired of thinking about him,” she said. “That was our relationship: Me thinking about him. Not talking to him, oh no, that didn’t work. So I wasn’t tired of talking to him. I wanted to talk to him more. I wasn’t sick of having sex with him. I wanted more. More of everything. I never got tired of us because there was no us. Just me and,” she jabbed her finger at her temple, “a him in my head. Maybe I didn’t stop loving him, I just got tired of thinking about him. I am tired of thinking of him.”
“So, let’s go then,” Helene said, pointing with her chin to the ridge and snubbing out the joint on the bumper.
“Yet, I have this sense of” — Geneva looked into the darkness before her — “incompletion. I don’t know if I can move on without knowing I got the lesson.”
“The lesson is to let go. C’mon.”
“You’re asking me to lie.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. You’re asking me to do something symbolic, but there’s no real thing for it to be a symbol of.”
“Maybe if you do it, you’ll have done it, and then it won’t be a lie.”
“I can’t do it,” Geneva said, taking the joint from Helene’s hand. She relit what was left of it and took a hit. She held in the smoke, and she said it again. “I can’t do it.”
“Eva.”
“Yeah.”
“Ralph’s a thought in your head you have to stop thinking.”
Geneva stared forward into the dark and the night.
“I know,” she said.
August
38
The basement of the Deluxe was not tidy like Geneva’s. It required shoes at all times, not an ideal situation for Paris’s feet. He had moved in after buying a new, used Impala from the want ads and a cot from the army/navy store. He joined a gym, where he showered but didn’t exercise.
Despite its shortcomings, the basement of the Deluxe offered relief from the August heat and the layer of smoke choking the valley. Fire season always came on the tail of summer, but this was bigger. National news. The fires jumped highways and closed roads. In the valley, throats ached and eyes burned. Summer windows were closed. Particulate, it was called, and it was everywhere. Tiny floating filth. The elderly and asthmatic were warned to stay indoors.
Paris sat on his cot in the glow of a shadeless overhead bulb. He hadn’t seen Tatum for nearly three months. The last time was at the diner two weeks after Ralph’s funeral.
“I’m sorry,” she had said.
She said it twenty times if she said it once.
“I failed you, I know. I’m sorry.”
Paris worked as she spoke and didn’t look up. He wiped the length of the counter’s already clean surface.
“I told you I didn’t know how to do this,” she said, following him from the other side of the counter. “I told you I make a good friend but a lousy girlfriend.”
Paris couldn’t stand the sound of it. He stopped wiping and looked up.
“How’s Rachael?” he said.
“Gone,” Tatum said, her eyes tearing up and then swallowing the tears back down.
Paris looked away. She was who she was. She was afraid and had doubt. He wanted her to be brave and believe.
“I can’t keep chasing you,” he said, shaking his head. “I know you want me to love you, but you don’t love me. You’re always two steps out of reach.”
“I’m not out of reach,” Tatum said. “I’m right here. And don’t tell me who I love. Maybe I’m not good at it, but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel it.” Her lower lip started to quiver. “I thought you knew me,” she said. “I thought it was okay. I thought maybe. . .” But it was all she had to say.
Then she was gone.
But Paris saw her everywhere. He suffered mirages and optical illusions. There were cases of mistaken identity in momentary flashes on sidewalks and in the diner’s doorway.
Linda, on the other hand, he saw nowhere. He didn’t ask the retards about her again. Still, he carried five hundred dollars in his pocket at work, just in case.
Work. It had been his refuge. It offered concrete tasks. Necessity and reason. But as of tonight, at 3 a.m., the Deluxe would officially close.
Paris climbed the stairs up to the kitchen for the last time. Love was no different than money or fame, he thought. Just another thing we’re taught to chase and covet. Another thing the wise learn to be happy without.
Tatum spent the two weeks following Ralph’s funeral fighting demons, and she thought she had won. She got up off the floor. She talked to herself. She got it all worked up in her head that everything was going to be okay. They would be okay, she and Paris. Because they loved each other. She drove to the Deluxe. She prostrated herself. She took all the blame. What more does anyone want?
She paced back and forth, following Paris on the opposite side of the counter. But he would barely look at her. Tatum reached and strained with her will and her energy trying to find a place in Paris that would receive it. Finally, she stopped in her tracks, realizing what she’d become again. A beggar. When it comes to love, it doesn’t matter how nicely you ask for it, she knew. Once you’re asking, you’ve already lost.
So what to do instead? Drink? Take pills? Punch walls?
Find Vincent?
Turns out, she didn’t have to. He found her.
Tatum didn’t sleep after that night at the diner, and she was out of coffee. At the Grounds the next morning, she ordered a large cup to go. Vincent tapped her on the shoulder. He had nothing but good news. He had received a six-thousand-dollar advance for a book and was in town staying at the Red Roof Inn while he worked on it. He asked how she was, and she decided to be good news too. She told him her story in happy endings — child reunited with father, she and Paris parting paths amicably. “Haven’t seen much of Geneva,” she told him. “You?” If Vincent sensed a different truth, he didn’t ask.
Then, Tatum offered to look at his book. When they were together, she had always edited his articles and had even suggested placements for them. When his work took off, so did he. Tatum thought that people tend to discover they don’t need you and that they don’t love you right around the same time.
But that’s how it came to be that they kept meeting, though never again at the coffee shop. Up until then, Tatum had been going there often, hoping to bump into Paris by accident. But she didn’t want him to see her with Vincent. She didn’t tell Geneva either. She was avoiding her, and so she wasn’t sure whether Geneva was avoiding her too. Geneva seemed to be avoiding a lot of things. She hadn’t bothered with the garden this summer, and that was unlike her. The perennials came up and barely survived.
Tatum turned into the Pie House’s parking lot. She was meeting Vincent for lunch. Crossing the hot asphalt, she felt like she was in a movie, playing herself. But this self didn’t crawl or care. It doesn’t matter was her new mantra. Tra-la-la-la-la-la. She played it happy and turned on what there was of her charm. You wanna be loved, she thought, you gotta be lovable. She would get what there was to get from this life. A feeling, if not a fact.
Was there really any difference?
Inside, the air conditioning shocked her skin and gave her goose pimples. Vincent wore glasses to read now, but he pulled them off as Tatum slid into the booth. It was an endearing gesture she had become familiar with. She was attracted to him, yes, but she chalked it up to biology, nothing more. They would produce a healthy offspring. That’s all. Not that anything had happened. Not yet. It was all business. Platonic, friendly. The past was a non-issue. It always is to the dumper. The dumpee pretends.
Tatum dropped chapters four through seven on the table.
“Interesting stuff,” she said.
“But,” he said.
“Not ‘but,’ my friend. ‘And.’”
Vincent smiled. “And what?”
Tatum told him
that she thought the intro kept dragging itself forward into the text. He needed to develop ideas at this point and trust he’d set the stage adequately. He nodded and took it in. Tatum spoke with authority but was outside her body. Extreme good looks are unnerving. It’s hard to see with light in your eyes. It affected her tone of voice too, making it come up from under her words and not down upon them. Vincent exerted a pull. No doubt about it. Maybe it wasn’t even toward him but just a general dismantling force. Perhaps it wasn’t selfish genes or biology that drew her but the pull itself. It felt half like merging, half like being torn apart. Both held an attraction.
So she played with fire.
Why not? She knew the well-known fact that the only way to drown out the hum of one man is with another. She had never wanted to drown Vincent out, but Paris had come along and under the water Vincent went. Paris she wanted to drown out. She needed to. The loss was no companion. It was unbearable.
Paris. Rachael. Geneva. Margaret. They all were gone.
It doesn’t matter, Tatum told herself.
Tra-la-la-la-la-la.
But there was something else gone too. Something Vincent didn’t know about. Her breast. The time was coming, though. He wouldn’t initiate sex, Tatum knew, but he wouldn’t say no. The past was a non-issue. For the dumper. The dumpee pretends.
Sex with Vincent. It wouldn’t be suicide. But it was the next best thing.
39
The Jackson 5 played on the stereo, distracting Geneva from the task at hand. Young Michael had the voice of an angel, Geneva thought, listening to him grind a note. How rare it was, she thought, to hear that kind of juice pumping out of such a little man.
The task from which she was distracted was the writing of her farewell column. She had resigned from the advice biz, and she wished to sum up her parting wisdom in a single sentence. But she was torn between two. Don’t Look Back. Or, Look Forward.
The advantage of Don’t Look Back, she thought, was that it at least gave a person some reference points to work with, somewhere concrete not to look. Look Forward had no such coordinates. Navigation was blind, taking place by feel alone. Don’t Look Back took effort. Look Forward did not, and yet it was the more difficult of the two.