Holy Water
Page 9
Her happiness jars him. What’s the motive for that? He considers telling her that he insulted every one of “the boys,” that he vomited into said pool, destroying its briefly perfect balance, and that he’s done with Meat Night forever, but it’s too complicated. He’s afraid he’ll start babbling and tell her everything the wrong way.
“So did the doctor say anything?”
“No. This was strictly a drop-off. Splash and dash.”
“Where are you?”
“In the parking lot at the train station. I just missed two trains.”
“How is it possible to just miss two trains?”
“It’s an acquired skill, Rachel.”
“So you’re still going in?”
He thinks. What the hell. “Unless you’d like a little company.”
Nervous laughter. “I’m . . .”
What? He thinks. Swamped? Crazy? Trying to make me crazy too? Anything but interested.
“... sorry. But today’s bad, Henry.”
“Sure. Actually, it’s not looking so good on my end either.”
He clicks End and stares at the phone.
~ * ~
He thinks, I can go to the beach. I can go for a hike. I can go to the library. I can go bowling.
~ * ~
During his research he came across several stories of homosexual men who had vasectomies.
~ * ~
He calls Meredith. “What’s the good word?”
“Who is this?”
“Your soon-to-be former coworker.”
“Giffler came by. Tried to peek through the smoked glass to see where you were.”
“Did you have the Henry Tuhoe life-sized action figure placed in the hard-at-work position?”
“He didn’t buy it. Lingered for a minute, spraying just enough executive pee to let you sense he was here.”
“Did he say anything?”
“He had me put you down for an eleven o’clock with him tomorrow morning.”
“La fin du monde.”
“Only to the self-absorbed and melodramatic among us.”
“Easy for the self-absorbed and still employed to say.”
“I know too much to be fired. So are you not going to accept the transfer?”
“Not a chance. This is the best thing to happen to me, Meredith. I had a drunken epiphany last night, actually a series of them, and I’m going to do something with my life that matters.”
“The other line’s flashing. Anything else?”
“How’s Warren?”
“Still pissed at you, but very excited about India. He’s already tracked down his Bangalorian doppelgänger job.”
“You know what? I would like to take you and Warren out to lunch tomorrow. No, how about drinks after work? A sort of going-away party in my honor, given by me.”
“Wow. Drinks with two recently laid-off middle-aged men. Can’t get any better than that.”
“How about Ginger Man at five?”
“Will you be in today?”
“No. I don’t want to see Giffler yet. Plus I have a doctor’s appointment.”
He thinks he hears Meredith cluck her tongue, her audio equivalent of the skeptical eye roll. “I see,” she says.
~ * ~
Two black vans claim the last of the day laborers. The politician is long gone. No votes left to court. Off to record telemarketing messages, Henry thinks, about immigration, or the tangible evil his opponent stands for. Such as telemarketing, campaign finance reform, and mudslinging. He shuts off Lionel Ritchie and lowers the windows to better soak in the late-morning commuter rail station silence. At 10:37 a northbound train stops and more than a dozen black women in white nurse’s outfits get off. A small bus pulls in seconds later, ready to drive them to hospitals and nursing homes, the lonely residences of the affluent and infirm. Insourcing for the soon-to-be permanently outsourced.
Before his grandmother died six years ago, while she lived alone in an apartment in White Plains, he tried to convince her to let a nurse come in to visit once a day. But she wanted no part of a stranger in her house, and sometimes he felt that included him. The day before she died, he called to say he was coming by on the weekend and asked if she needed anything. She said yes. “Get me the vitamin drink where the old couple on the rowboat in the middle of the lake are laughing and drinking and saluting the feeble, no-vitamin-drinking couple languishing onshore.”
~ * ~
He thinks, I can get a Swedish massage. I can get the car washed. I can text-message every person whose text messages I’ve ignored in the last three months.
~ * ~
More buzzing in the passenger’s seat. Norman from the gym. Henry watches the screen signal that a message is being left, probably confirming tomorrow’s workout, which he most likely will have to cancel. How to break it to Norman?
Next to the message icon is a small movie camera icon. Norman has left a video message as well. He opens the file and hits Play. Soon his small screen fills with the title “Jump” in white letters on a black background. As Van Halen’s song of the same name begins to play, Henry watches a series of vignettes presumably filmed by Norman. Nursery school children jumping in a classroom. Kids on blow-up castles. Trampolines. High schoolers dancing. Sweet, sappy, happy stuff. Boring, clichéd stuff. Then it changes with the chorus. The happy kids give way to grainy long-range footage of a man standing midspan on a great American bridge—yes, it’s the Golden Gate— poised to jump. Then jumping. Before the man hits the water and presumably dies, the piece cuts to footage of another jumper on another bridge, leaping. Then another. Might as well jump. A half-dozen suicidal jumpers on a half-dozen bridges, each falling with his own morbid choreography, arms windmilling, arms spread like a bird, torso locked straight, tucked, tumbling, spinning, hands at sides, over head. All plummeting. Go ahead and jump. When the chorus ends it match dissolves from bridge jumper back to happy jumper footage—a small girl and a dog on a playground, a chubby old man on a pogo stick, a yellow lab grabbing a Frisbee—and it has a profoundly different effect on Henry.
He shuts it off in the middle of the second chorus, after the third of three new jumpers, a teenage girl, appears poised at the rail. This is less than halfway through the film, still several minutes away from Norman’s printed signoff urging people to vote for his film at this address, to make it a daily favorite on his preferred aggregate video channel.
Closing his eyes, listening to another train pulling into the station—northbound or southbound, he can’t be sure—Henry decides that it’s a good idea to cancel tomorrow’s workout.
~ * ~
I can go for a jog. I can go clothes shopping. I can talk with a certified financial planner. I can take a short trip to the middle of the Tappan Zee Bridge.
~ * ~
Today’s women want a real man fucking them in the bedroom, someone had said at some point last night. But outside the bedroom it’s the other way around. They are the ones doing the fucking, the ones in charge, making us do the most emasculating things, subjecting us to the most humiliating shit. Shit that a real man would not do. Making the whole bedroom thing a sort of doomed construct.
Did Marcus say that? Did I? Do I really believe that?
~ * ~
He hears a chain saw in the distance and thinks of the months after they first moved up here. Whenever he would fire up his new chain saw, Rachel would throw a fit. She’d shout things like “Hire someone else to do that!” and “Please don’t hurt yourself, Henry.”
And then she didn’t. And he’s certain it had nothing to do with his improved cutting skills.
~ * ~
He sleeps.
For how long? How many hours? How many trains?
The phone’s vibrations bring him back, spur the Pavlovian act of clicking Talk without checking caller ID.
“Henry Tuhoe.”
“Tick, tick, tick. How goes the desperate searching of the soul?” Giffler.
“The search has been cal
led off. No survivors.”
“Where are you? We’re worried to death.”
“Who?”
“No one, actually. But I was curious. Your wife too.”
“Oh.”
“Called the casa and she said you were on your way into work, which is a big stinky lie. But I didn’t say a thing. I played along with whatever it is you’re up to. Figured you were considering the possibilities. Unless you are on your way into work at what, one o’clock?”
“I’m not on my way into work. I had a doctor’s appointment. Now I’m heading home.”
“We’re on for ten tomorrow?”
“Eleven.”
“Before we meet, and the reason I’m calling, because of our undeniable father-son-like bond, I wanted to give you some more information to run up the flagpole of your conscience. I wanted to tell you what else I’ve learned.”
“Okay, Dad. Lay it on me.”
“Where they’re sending you. It’s a tiny kingdom on the India-China border called . . . shit. Should have written it down.”
“Bhutan?”
“No. Not Bhutan. Bhutan is like the Land of Oz compared to this place. Anyway, the government there is really making a play to open its once closed gates to, if not democracy, then capitalism. You’re to be part of a historic corporate delegation that will turn their wretched history around.”
“By setting up a call center for an American bottled water company?”
“Exactly. Hugely important, because this mind-bogglingly impoverished nation, whose name still eludes my memory, is like the water industry, bottled and otherwise, on the rise. You’ll be helping their economy, albeit not their thirst. Still quite admirable, the whole mission.”
“Nepal?”
“Not Nepal. Some place considerably less developed. Less known. But I’ll have all the facts by tomorrow.”
“Don’t bother. Doesn’t matter. All that matters is what kind of termination package you can pull together for your favorite son, because I’m not going anywhere.”
“Didn’t hear that. Click.”
Click.
~ * ~
Non-motile
If the second test shows non-motile (also known as dead) sperm, then a third test will be necessary. If the follow-up test shows moving or active sperm, the patient will be declared to have had a vasectomy failure, and it should be redone.
—Snipped.com
He thinks, I can be a research consultant. I can work for the competition. I can teach. Go back to school. I can work for a not-for-profit. I can work with my hands, building houses or honestly constructed pieces of furniture. I can become a personal trainer, a webmaster for a big-boob porn star, a day trader, an online five-card-hold-’em poker legend.
I can do whatever I want.
When I tell Rachel, she will understand. The job part, at least.
Pulling into the cursed driveway, turning off the incongruous car.
In fact, she’ll probably be happy, because she hates my job more than I do.
Stretching, staring at the unfortunate subdivision, the malevolent house, the thing that never should have happened. The window of the room where the recent orgasms were counterfeit, the funny faces forced.
He thinks, One thing I will absolutely do, first thing tomorrow, is call the doctor. Then a travel agent to book a trip. Nothing like an exotic trip to provide the perfect. . . what? The perfect sorbet for stagnant lives.
Walking up the foreign path, past the detestable topiaries, wondering how it will feel to be unemployed and watch a landscaper trim your hedges.
Nearing the door he never wanted to open, thinking, We’ll take a trip and sort it all out. Like we did in Cabo. And Maui. And even in Block Island. She’s always wanted to go to Belize. With enough tranquilizers I would be willing to fly to Belize.
Reaching for said door but getting hit in the cheekbone by it first. Sensing blood before it flows. “You son of a bitch.”
Canceling Belize. Reaching for a possibly broken nose.
“You lying, duplicitous son of a . . . prick. We didn’t have much left, but we had the truth.”
Absorbing a two-handed push. Backtracking down the foreign path, brushing against a detestable topiary. “I just found out yesterday.”
“Yesterday? That is an absolutely unconscionable lie.”
Raising hands to block a series of roundhouse smacks.
“All you had to do was tell me. But you . . . this is deliberate, hateful, almost criminal.”
“I was going to tell you right now. Tonight. There wasn’t time last night. I just spoke to Giffler about it yesterday.”
“You told Giffler before you told me?”
“It’s his specialty. Besides, it’s not even official. I assume he broke my confidence and told you when he called today.”
“Your confidence? What? What are—”
“You’re talking about the layoff, right?” Realizing that the horrified look on her face has nothing to do with his employment situation. Watching her look for something to throw. Watching her fingers and eyes point at his crotch.
“Layoff? I’m talking about that. I’m talking about a procedure that never happened, Henry.”
“Operation, technically.”
“The shaving, the follow-up tests. The frozen fucking vegetable ice packs. What a freak you are. My God. We were having unprotected sex when I thought you were testing negative!”
He holds up his right middle and forefingers. “Twice. And that’s because you were drunk on witches’ brew. And I never orgasmed, Rachel. I faked. I made the face, but both times I faked.”
“I will not stay in a marriage built upon lies and fakes.”
“I did lie and I did fake. But it’s because I didn’t believe I was talking to the real you. I thought that you were going through a phase, that you might change your mind.”
“Well, I’m about to enter a new phase. It’s called life after the lying faker.”
“I want to work with you, Rachel. Get you some help. I mean, get us some help. I mean, what the hell happened to us up here? We were never meant to come here.”
“Get me some help? I didn’t pretend I had an operation!”
“Years of moping. Years of your refusing to get out of your own way. You stopped paying attention to me, Rachel. It was as if I never lived here.”
“That’s the first true thing you’ve said. You never did live here! And now you don’t have to physically be here either. Now go.”
“I was laid off yesterday. Take a job somewhere in Asia or be fired, was the ultimatum.”
“This isn’t about yesterday, Henry. This is about long-term dishonesty.”
“I did it for us.”
“Hah! Go, Henry. Go on unemployment, because God knows you’re too boring and afraid to do the other thing.” She raises her hands as if to hit him again, but she continues to raise them overhead, closes her eyes, and begins chanting something in a tongue not of this world.
“I don’t want to leave you the way you are. I’d be willing to—”
“What, Henry? What have you ever been truly willing to do?”
He has no answer.
“That’s right. Now get you and your lying penis out of here.”
~ * ~
Stepping away from the malevolent house, onto the cursed driveway. Reaching for the door of the incongruous car. Pulling away, thinking about sweat, and then sperm, and now water. Feeling a sharp phantom pain in the recently shaved but otherwise undisturbed scrotal area.
Leaving.
~ * ~
Motel Three
A chain of hotels for wayward men. Displaced men. Men who have been given the boot. Men who have run away. There definitely is a market for it, Henry thinks, heading south on Route 9, in search of just such a place.
~ * ~
Within an hour after she kicked him out, Rachel called to say she was giving him two hours to come back and gather his belongings. When he asked if she’d be there, she told
him no. She said she was going to her friend’s house to learn how to put a spell on his lying ass.
While lurking around the house in which he had never wanted to live, he thought about his belongings. He thought about how they were different from his stuff, his shit, his necessities, and he decided that a belonging was a thing he valued, that he’d miss and possibly even fight for. And he was surprised at how few things fell into that category, and even those could hardly be considered belongings. Clothes and music, mostly. His passport. The big bottle of Purell.