Forgiveness

by Jim Grimsley

  “I eat fruit.”

  “You can’t even name one.”

  “I eat tomatoes.”

  “That’s not a fruit.”

  “Yes it is.”

  “All right, you eat tomatoes. Did you ever once make nine hundred dollars worth of tomato juice in the juicer?”

  She bites off half of her gum and throws it in the stainless steel garbage can. “Don’t change the subject to me. You could have told me we were running out of money, you rat bastard.”

  “For twenty years I was lucky enough to earn more money than you spent. When did I once ever please even once convince you not to buy a single thing?”

  “We always had money then.”

  “You knew I was out of work. Did it never occur to you there was a bottom we were going to hit sooner or later?”

  “So it’s me. It’s all me. I wasn’t sensitive enough when you lost your job.”

  “How sensitive do you need to be to decide not to redo the kitchen for thirty thousand dollars? For the second time redo the kitchen, I mean. Forgive me. How sensitive do you need to be to decide that it’s a bad idea to redo the kitchen when your husband is out of work?”

  “We thought you were going to get another job right away.”

  “I never thought that. There were no jobs.”

  “We both wanted to redo the kitchen, we talked about it.”

  “It was a recession. There were no jobs.”

  “Your friends got jobs.”

  “Stop with this already, you said it a thousand times.”

  “You could have taken any job, anything, to bring in some money.”

  “What about you?” I ask.

  She sits there with a compact searching her face to see if it shows that she’s been crying. The light’s not good so she moves the mirror and her head this way and that.

  “Why is it me that’s supposed to get my brains blown out working on the night shift in some fucking 7-11?” I ask.

  She touches a tissue to the corner of her mouth like it’s a frigging science experiment, like she’s some kind of surgeon.

  Frank heaves to his feet. This time he uses no hands at all. “The two of you are priceless.”

  “What, Frankie? Where are you going?”

  “Out for some air.”

  “The doors by the pool are open already, sweetie,” Carmine says. “Sit in the chair right there. You’ll get a good breeze.”

  “What time is the lawyer appointment?”

  “Ten o’clock.”

  “Why did you get me over here so early, then?” Frank asks, red-faced, from the poolside door. I can see him across the eating bar.

  “Because I thought you and your father would need to go through accounts and things.”

  “I could have been in bed another hour.”

  “Don’t be upset with me, Frankie. My nerves can’t take it.”

  “Your nerves have got to go,” Frankie says. “Your fucking nerves are running me ragged.”

  “Watch your mouth.”

  “You said ‘fuck’ yourself not ten minutes ago. Didn’t she, Dad?”

  “She’s always had a foul mouth when you kids weren’t around,” I say. “I’ve put up with her abuse for years.”

  She flings the Prada bag at my head. It’s pretty light since most of the contents are strewn on the counter at the moment. I deflect it and it slides on the floor. It’s one of her old Prada bags; she must have filled it for show, knowing she’d want to hurl it at some point. She’s picking up one prescription bottle after another.

  “You seeing your divorce attorney? That who you’re seeing?”

  “No. We’re seeing somebody Frankie knows who does real estate. But don’t worry. I plan to see my divorce attorney as soon as I find one.”

  “How you going to pay for him? or her? or whatever?”

  She looks at me as if this is a completely new thought. She’s frozen, transfixed. Parts of her face are even more motionless than usual.

  “We should sell all this crap in the house,” I say. “We’ll get some cash for it. Get rid of some of our clothes.”

  “Shut up, Charley.”

  “I’m talking to myself now. I can sell my suits used. You don’t need nice Italian suits if you’re working at a convenience store.”

  “You pisser,” she says. Now that Frankie’s not in the room she gives up the teary eyes. “You lose everything we have and you act like it’s nothing.”

  A knot of something hard forms in my stomach with her face making this expression that I hate, that I loathe, this blind denial of everything we’ve been talking about for the last hour, this twisting of the whole conversation to a summary that will make me look as bad as possible. With us a conversation is never about talking, it’s about winning. “How am I supposed to talk to you?” I ask.

  “You open your mouth and talk, just like usual.”

  “You never listen.”

  “I never listen? Here is the king of not listening telling me that I never listen.”

  “I am not the one who lost our money. We lost it. You and me together. Don’t you get that?”

  “The numbers were your job, Charley. The money was your job. It was always your job.”

  “Why is it that my job was always whatever you said it was? Why is it I never got a choice?”

  “You got a choice, Charley, you married me. After that, there was no choice.”

  “Amen to that.”

  “So you lost all our money and our house and our cars and you want to get in my face about where I’m going to live and what I’m going to do?” She’s shaking now, shoving her stuff by the handful back into the purse she threw at me. “If you needed me to change all you had to do was ask. We could have sold the house and moved to someplace smaller. We could have sold the cars and just had one apiece. There are so many things we could have done.”

  “Six months ago I asked you about selling the house. Do you remember?”

  “You weren’t serious.”

  The fact that she says this makes me boil but I contain it and take a breath. “That was the first time you brought up divorce. Do you remember?”

  She closes the bag with effort. “We weren’t serious. We were joking around.”

  “I was serious, Carmine.”

  “No, you weren’t.”

  “You see? This is what it’s like trying to talk to you. I never know what you heard till you repeat it back to me later, and it’s never what I remember. You don’t even live in the same world as I do.”

  She gives me a poison smile. “That’s right, Charley. I live in the world where men pay the mortgage on time and talk to their wives about their problems. You never heard of that world.”

  “That’s a great world for you,” I say. “It fucks me completely. But what do you care?”

  “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

  “All I want is once in your life for you to admit that you might have done something wrong. That you might have been part of the problem.”

  “Sure I did things wrong,” she says, again with that cigarette gesture. “But I was a good wife to you and a good mother to your children and I kept up my part of the bargain.”

  My head is pounding. “I can’t get through to you.”

  “Our marriage was a mistake from the start,” she says. “I never should have married a man with such a low level of passion.”

  “What are you talking about? Now it’s my passion that’s the problem?”

  “You never liked sex, Charley.”

  I’m breathless. She sees it. Her opening.

  “You never liked making love to me. I deserve better. I deserve more passion.”

  “Neither one of us was ever that passionate. Neither one of us.”

  “I always felt like I was missing something from you. But I settled for it anyway because you were so comfortable.”

  “Sex isn’t the whole fucking world, Carmine. You didn’t like it any better than I did.”r />
  She takes a complacent breath. “I might have. If I’d been with the right person.”

  The case is made in her head now. She has her facts lined up the way she wants them. Nothing I can say will ever change that.

  I’m finished talking. A knot of something hard in me. I can still do something with my life, but it won’t be pretty.

  “You should talk to that lawyer about personal bankruptcy,” I say. “Don’t waste your time about the house.”

  “That’s a good idea,” she says, and looks at me coldly. “Maybe I’ll get a referral for a good divorce lawyer, too.”

  I laugh. “Threaten me with that. Go ahead. I’m ready for the divorce now. I’m so ready I’m dancing all over the house. You’ll get nothing from me. We have nothing left to fight over.”

  “I’ll find something,” she says, her eyes as hard as glass.

  She walks into the sunroom with Frankie.

  There is a rack of knives across the kitchen, very expensive Japanese cutlery, sharpened to a turn, kept there in case some itinerant gourmet wanders through the neighborhood and offers to cook for us some night.

  The moment with Carmine is over. Out of this wreck will come the story of bad Charley and how he failed at everything, marriage, work, and manhood. From the ashes will emerge blameless Carmine thrown on the mercy of the whims of the world. That is a role Meg Ryan could have played, but it’s Joan Crawford I see across the house, standing with her arm on my son.

  I get a bottle of bourbon from the bar, pour a long shot in a glass, swallow most of it, pour more and take another gulp. Warmth spreads through me. I’m sill alive.

  I stand at the rack of knives.

  Frankie will be too slow to save her.

  I’ll have to kill him, too. I’ve thought about it. I should probably do him first. But now, when it comes right down to it, can I?

  It’s These Geese Again

  I DREAM I’M IN BED WITH Tom Cruise and Vanessa Redgrave. The other Redgrave whose name I can never remember is in the bathroom and won’t come out. She is passing a lot of gas in the bathroom. Vanessa and Tom are talking about where to go for breakfast. I’m feeling sweaty and wet. I’m looking at a book of pictures. It looks like a Dr. Seuss book about two gay boys and a cat. I can read the Dr. Seuss rhymes and hear them very clearly in my head and the writing sounds exactly like him. Two gay boys have a cat, a green cheese, and a purple onion. There is no good rhyme for onion, maybe bunion, which is not necessarily a good word for a poem, so it can’t be an onion. This is passing through my mind at the time and the story therefore changes while I’m reading it. I never see Tom and Vanessa doing anything, I only see them lying together in their robes. They have the same luminous skin tone. “There go those geese again,” she says at one point, and Tom looks where she indicates, and they nod.

  Someone models a pair of jeans for me, a bony teenager with dark eye makeup, walking hands on hips, new jeans that look like they’ve been pounded on a rock for days by a jean-pounding machine. Hugging her hips low, the pants are always crawling lower, and she pulls them up and tugs at the hem of her blouse. She is cool as ice except when she’s tugging her shirt down or her pants up.

  I think for the first time that I am probably dreaming but the thought passes and Tom hands me a cup of something. Coffee, but I can’t smell it. A supplement to aid my aging memory is in the cup, Vanessa says. “You’ll remember everything now,” she says.

  “All the time?”

  “Yes. I think so.”

  Wouldn’t that be pleasant! I sip it and it has a sticky creamy taste, like medicine.

  “It’s not coffee.”

  “It’s better than coffee.” Tom smiles. “I promise.”

  “It’s sticky.”

  “So it will be good for your eyes,” Tom says.

  We are in a car and Tom is driving and I am in the back seat wrapped in the blankets. They understand that I was still dreaming before and therefore still sleeping and that I probably need to do more of that, so I lie down. We are driving through Wyoming headed toward the mountains. Outside the SUV is very cold. Tom left the road long ago and we’re crossing rough country.

  “It’s those geese again,” Vanessa says, and points.

  “There they go,” Tom says.

  I look for the geese and the blanket falls away from my shoulder and I’m cold.

  The SUV gets stuck in a rock. No one thinks it’s accidental for a car to get stuck in a boulder like that, and no one, including Tom, knows how it happened. He says he was driving like always. Then Vanessa said look out for the rock. Vanessa agrees that she said that. She does not remember seeing a rock, but she remembers saying look out for one. After that everybody gets out of the SUV and looks at the boulder with the car stuck in it. About half of the front is gone, vanished inside the rock. Vanessa says she doesn’t think it’s even possible. Tom says he only looked away for a second and bam! We’re going to have to camp out here until someone comes, Vanessa says.

  “I’ll sleep in the back seat,” I say. “My blanket’s already there, and it’s not stuck in the rock.”

  They agree. They make a pile of things on the ground.

  I want to open my eyes but I can’t. The lids are so heavy. I feel like I’m lying on a couch. It feels more like a couch than it does the back seat of an SUV.

  “Did he kill his wife?” Vanessa asks.

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  We’ve already lost the house, I think. The court has already sold it. That’s why I’m sleeping in a car.

  Vanessa says, “I really didn’t think he would. Not murder.”

  “He might have, except that his son was there.”

  “I don’t think he’d have done it anyway.”

  “You’re wrong, he definitely would have. He doesn’t feel anything for his wife. A big lump of nothing is what he feels.”

  “That’s a far cry from hacking her up. From what I hear, he never even cut up a chicken.”

  Tom laughs. “He’s not cutting her up, he’s killing her and leaving her there.”

  “Still.”

  “If a man is angry enough.”

  “What if a woman is angry? What can she do?”

  “I don’t even need to know that,” Tom says, shaking his head.

  “A woman can’t do anything.”

  “I think he would have picked up that knife in another second or so,” Tom said. “If the phone hadn’t rung.”

  Geese are crying, a wing of them flying across the sky, I see it from upside down in the van. I want to tell the others, but I don’t know how.

  It still feels like I’m lying on a couch. We’re all outside and it’s cold now. We should go back to the van. I think I’m naked. They’ll notice in a minute. I have the blankets in the van, why didn’t I bring them out? The light’s so bright out here. Where is the couch, anyway? The light is getting brighter. I’m sure I’m naked now, and everybody is going to look at me, and they do, and see, and then my eyes are open and I’m awake.

  I’M LYING ON THE COUCH in the family room, some kind of blanket wrapped around me. I’m cold. I’ve been cold for a while.

  The house is quiet.

  I sit up. I am drunk again, buzzing, still queasy. My arm hurts near the shoulder, there are fresh scabs there. My head throbs from where I fell in the bathroom.

  I’m naked under the blanket. How did I get on the couch?

  Carmine and Frank are gone, no voices from the kitchen. They must have left for the attorney’s office. Maybe one of them walked me to the couch.

  The room is peaceful. Morning light falls through the shutters, bright bars on the window, in the air, on the floor. In this room Carmine’s choice of objects is at its best; the sectional couch is long and comfortable, easy to burrow into, without an excess of pillows; the tables and chairs are simple modern stuff from Sweden, clean lines made of glowing wood; the entertainment center is silent at the moment, the wide dark screen inviting, as if I could climb into th
e murk and stay. Thick white carpet and scattered rugs in some kind of abstract art design. An indoor palm and a huge philodendron sit in handmade pots by the wide windows.

  There’s a sweet smell in the air, not like anything I remember.

  On the floor in the doorway to the kitchen lies someone’s hand. Carmine’s hand sprawls open on the linoleum with her wedding ring and engagement ring showing. Red tracery twines over the fingers and back of the hand and disappears out of sight along the wrist; I can’t see any more because of the door, until I lurch up from the couch.

  She is lying in the kitchen on her back. There’s a phone handset a few feet away, nearer to her feet. She’s stabbed in the face, in the neck, in the back, from the torso up. A terrible wound splits her throat and a pool of dark blood cools on the floor. A slash across the face peeled off part of her cheek. She smells like a toilet; her dress is soiled.

  On the kitchen counter sits a bottle of bourbon with a glass beside it, a couple of fingers of bourbon in the glass, only a little more than that in the bottle.

  Beyond, in the sunroom beside the doors to the pool, lies Frank, chair overturned on its back and him still sitting in it, one leg slid off the seat to the side, leaning against the glass of the window. His shirt is covered with blood. His throat is cut, and a large dark puddle has spread around him. His mouth is open and a fly is crawling on it.

  I get sick looking at him and heave on the carpet, breaking into a sweat. Somewhere inside me there should be a deep pain from this, because he looks like my little boy again. His face is angelically pale and clear. There are no wounds on it. His eyes are open. He appears to be staring into a movie playing just above his head in the air. At moments I think I can see him breathing.

  Did I kill her mother, too, did I kill Carmine’s mother?

  She’s in her room on the other side of the house, sleeping peacefully, face mask over her eyes. If she took her usual snort and a sleeping pill, she could be out for a while.

  My robe is next to Carmine on the kitchen floor, soaked with blood. It’s torn. Should I take it?

  There’s a knife next to the sink, washed clean. The blade is keen, a long blade, what my mother would have called a butcher knife.