Everyone but You

by Sandra Novack

  Ryan slapped the baseball bat into his open palm and stood at the gate.

  “What do you want?” Viktor called out. He stood up, peered out nervously. He kept the gun to his side.

  “You know what we want, old man,” Ryan said. He slapped the baseball bat again.

  “Ryan, don’t,” Trish urged him.

  “I told you to stay home if you couldn’t handle it,” he said sharply.

  “You don’t speak to her like that,” Viktor yelled. “You don’t speak to me like that, either.”

  The group moved toward him, and Viktor could barely catch his breath enough to remember to hold up the gun, to point it. They stopped. “I’m within my right,” he said, waving it. “This is my house, and you are not welcome.”

  VIKTOR AWOKE in the morning. He was out on the porch and didn’t know how many hours had passed. A dampness clung to his skin, and the sun was just rising. It had rained during the night, but nothing else had happened—he’d waved the gun, which was empty of bullets, and the girl, Trish, started pleading and crying and the boy came closer before the others said, “Let’s go,” and they all separated then, running off in different directions, calling Viktor a lunatic, all while Ryan and Trish stood there a moment longer, Trish tugging on the boy’s jacket. The boy shot him such a look of hatred—such hatred—before he threw down the bat, hard, on the ground, and he spit and wiped his mouth and told Viktor—told him—that the old man wasn’t worth his time. They walked off, and Viktor, shaking so urgently, sank back down to his chair, his heart beating so fast he thought he might die himself that night, finally make good on a promise.

  In the ensuing weeks, a few incidents persisted. Another egging. A smashed mailbox. It was more than a month later that, while tending to the garden and weeding the overgrown flower beds, Viktor noticed the faint trace of lettering across his walkway, white paint on the cement. He looked more closely—MURDERER. He wondered how long it had been there. He made out each letter, then finally the word itself, before he went into the house and returned with a bucket of soapy water. He bent with difficulty and washed what he could with a wire brush. He hosed his walkway down with water, then took to scrubbing again. He would not call the police. Let them call him a murderer. They were children. They were scared, they were as scared as he was of this life. They were children, he told himself. What did they know? And he could defend himself.

  He heard Trish’s voice before he actually noticed she was there, listening to him complain under his breath. He looked up from his work, wiped his brow, squinted. Trish was at the gate. She had a dog with her, a mangy-looking mutt much like the ones Viktor and his friends used to kick when they were younger, when the mutts came too close to trash cans, sniffing for food. This dog, too, sniffed nervously around before lifting its leg on the fence.

  “No manners,” he said, nodding. Then he went back to his work. She didn’t seem to be waiting for him to say anything. She simply watched as he struggled to remove the paint from the sidewalk. “What do you want?” he asked sharply.

  She debated, pulled the dog closer. She was about to say she was sorry when she realized there was nothing she could say to make anything better. The old man could barely hold the brush without it slipping from his hands. She tied the dog’s leash to the fencepost and opened the gate. She said, finally, “I’ll help clean it up.”

  She came over then and bent down, her bare knees scraping against the pavement. She pushed her hair behind her ears and took the brush from his shaking hand. Viktor said nothing. He sat back, exhausted, on the dry grass. One more moment, Trish thought, and he might have wept, right in front of her. His hands came up to his face, then fell suddenly back down into his lap.

  “I know you didn’t do anything wrong,” she told him. “I mean, we’re all sort of assholes sometimes.”

  Viktor wiped the sweat from his forehead. The dog sniffed at the flowers and grasses that poked through the fence and into the sidewalk. “I had a dog once,” he said. Then to Trish he said, “Where’s your friend?”

  She glanced up. “Ryan? Gone.”

  “Ah,” Viktor said. “That’s good. Whether you know it or not, he wasn’t the right boy for you.”

  “That’s what my mother said,” she told him, but when he looked at her, he could tell she was upset by his statement. He didn’t understand youths—he could admit that—why a girl with so many possibilities would want to be with a boy whose life would never go anywhere.

  Trish continued her work. She scrubbed hard, intent on making the letters fade. She could have told the old man it wasn’t Ryan who did this—if Ryan had decided that the old man wasn’t worth his time, then he meant it. He wouldn’t go to that place that would, finally, make him like his father. She still believed that. No. It wasn’t Ryan but the remaining gang. They egged the house, smashed the mailbox. They stepped back after spray-painting the letters, satisfied with their own actions. They were the ones who came over to her house after leaving Viktor’s; they were the ones who called her out on the porch, wanting her to come see. But she felt years and years older. She was finished with all that business, too. They laughed, and she couldn’t help but think they were mocking her, too, in a small way. He is gone, their smiles seemed to say. We all knew that would happen. After he had thrown the baseball bat down onto the sidewalk, Ryan stopped talking to any of them. Within the week he’d run off from the foster home, and no one, not even Trish, had heard from him since.

  She scrubbed harder. Viktor sat next to her, watching. Perhaps he was thinking she deserved this, that she deserved everything bad that had happened in her life. She glanced up at him. He ran his hand through his damp hair and then pulled a small towel from his pocket to wipe away the sweat.

  She said, “I’m sorry about this.”

  “Ah,” he said again. He frowned, and she couldn’t tell if he was resolved or angry. He stared off to the roses and hedgerow. Finally, he told her, “My wife was very ill. I promised her I would help her die when the time came, and I did. That does not make me a murderer. I still have a promise to keep. It is like a great burden in my heart.”

  Trish inched down the sidewalk on her knees. “I don’t believe in promises.”

  “It is probably just as well,” Viktor said. “They are difficult things.”

  She got up and dropped the brush in the bucket. She thought of telling him about the promise she and Ryan had made, but it hardly seemed to matter anymore, and she didn’t want the old man to dispense fatherly advice. At least she didn’t think she wanted it. “I don’t care what people say anymore. It doesn’t matter much. It’s not totally gone, but it’s better. In a few months, it’ll be covered with snow anyway. That’s the thing about this place, there’s so much snow.”

  “Winter is a cruel season,” he said. “But sometimes summer is worse. I do not want another summer. I wait, eagerly, for the first snow, and then I will keep my promise to Bella.”

  “You’d be the first.” Trish brushed off her knees. Overhead the sun beamed brightly. The breezes blew but didn’t stop her from sweating. She undid the leash from the fencepost and yanked the dog toward her, but the dog pulled away, not wanting to come to her. “Stupid dog,” she said, twisting the leash. “My mom thought he’d be good for me, to learn responsibility.”

  “Ah,” Viktor said, nodding. He lifted himself up slowly, ignoring the sharp pain in his back and legs. His face twisted. He picked up the bucket. “Responsibility is also a difficult thing, but your mother is a smart woman,” he told her. “And you’re a good child. My wife always said that about you.”

  Trish wasn’t sure if she was good or bad or anything but herself. Anyway, she didn’t owe him anything else. She’d apologized, and she helped him, and that was it. “I don’t think you’ll have any more problems,” she said now, nonchalantly. Viktor nodded as she closed the gate and pulled the dog down the street, not urgently, toward home.

  RILKE

  Although I am preoccupied with words, I cann
ot say what I want. Once when traveling in a foreign country I negotiated my desire while lying naked on a bed, legs up in the air, toes gripping the flesh of a stranger’s shoulders. And when this man asked me, in between wet, jaunty kisses, what I wanted, all I could say was Je ne veux rien and not Prenez votre temps, s’il vous plaît, which is what I actually thought.

  I do not remember this man’s name. (I am not certain I ever knew his name.) But his small, dingy apartment smelled of smoke, and his body felt sinewy, racehorse lean, moist with sweat. His hair fell across my shoulders as he moved. He spoke of things I dare not say, and some of which, truthfully, I did not understand. When we finished, I grabbed my purse and buttoned up my blouse, slipped on my jeans, and stole a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. I quoted Rilke, not in French but in German, and said, We are never at home in our interpreted worlds. And the man, this stranger, lay back in bed, blew me a kiss from his cupped hand, and whispered in a smooth, soft voice, Va-t’en!

  I do not believe that French is the language of desire.

  I am unsure about German, though I confess that, like Rilke, I believe that if I cried out no one would hear, that I would be reminded of my own divisions.

  ENGLISH IS NO BETTER. Always I must approximate. Back home in the States, I once dated a man who was forty-three, twenty-two years older than I was then. This man never said I love you, though it’s true he did have a cat and a mother, so he may have been lying. Perhaps he simply did not say everything there was to say.

  I gave him pet names, Peanut Butter and Honey Pie and Bear, because everything about him was thick. But most of the time I just called him Bash, a shortening of his Lebanese name, Bashir.

  I called his cat Kitty because that was the cat’s name.

  I never met his mother, and so did not know her name.

  Bash usually called late at night, not because he wanted to talk dirty but because he wanted to discuss philosophy. After midnight he became extremely lucid and could speak in the most straightforward manner about Husserl and Hegel. He could breathe the body politic, phenomenology. He quoted Buber’s Ich und Du, which he struggled to read in poor, broken German until finally he gave up to read in English instead. When he read, his voice put me to sleep because he spoke in whispers.

  I do not think Buber has been translated to Arabic.

  Bash called me Cutie and took me out for ice cream and walks late at night, under the moon. When he and I kissed, our glasses knocked together, and I shook beneath his hands as if everything within me were imploding. I nibbled him and he sucked in his belly. The black hairs on his body felt full, furry under my fingertips.

  Take the advice of the Marquis de Sade, he once said while we lay in bed, arms folded around each other, sheets twisted between our legs. Don’t ever have children. He told me that at twenty-one I was already very frightening. He asked me if, like Sade’s female philosopher-monsters, I preferred an alternative kind of sex.

  What a pickup line, I told him.

  Afterward, he said it would probably be better if I remained single.

  I never quoted from Rilke because Bash thought all poets possessed feeble minds. I told him that of all the poets, Rilke was the hardest to pin down, born in Prague, raised in a German-speaking neighborhood, offended to be called a German and an Austrian, both in equal parts. I spoke of his soldier-father, the destruction of his homeland in war, his time in Paris with Rodin. Rilke, I said, never felt himself a native anywhere; he was his own country—body, mind, and heart. In his Duino Elegies, I said, Rilke spoke intimately with his readers, as if in a whispery confession, and tried to overcome distance.

  Bash asked me why anyone would ever do that.

  I wrote him a poem but never sent it.

  Once after we’d taken a shower Bash wrapped his arms around my waist and asked what I wanted from life, but there was too much, then, to say. We stood in front of a foggy mirror, his chest hairs wet against my back, steam everywhere. He bit my neck. With my pinkie, I penned on the mirror what I wanted (not sex but love), and when he pulled away from me, I told him I was only joking. I tried to laugh but felt unearthly and foolish.

  Sometimes when I see the moon and it’s low and full of itself in quiet ways, I still think of him.

  SPEAKING OF THE MOON, a word here about our alien natures. It is a widely regarded belief that mathematics, and not words, is the universal language. Do you know what desire translates to, in math? Would Rilke know?

  When I married my husband, he plotted our spending habits on charts, month by month, line by line, until a grid became full. He said he wanted to see what we were worth. When I laughed, he didn’t understand what I thought was funny.

  I’m not exactly telling you the truth about him because my husband was not technically a mathematician. Actually, he counted time lines on five-hundred-million-year-old fossils—Olenellus—in Cambrian rock. He entered all these numbers in a database and performed statistical calculations about extinction rates.

  When I first met him in a library and he told me all this, it made me horny. I said I didn’t believe anything could last that long and asked him to bed. We had sex among fossils because he worked in the Collections and had a key.

  My husband wore boxers with symbols of πr2 on them that glowed in the dark. He bought the boxers from The Gap. The Gap has a sense of humor about things.

  He was so sweet when he smiled I knew I would devour him like chocolate, bite by bite.

  My husband’s naked body did not look like rock and did not look old. His cheekbones stood in high relief, his flesh contoured like a cherub’s. Most of his skin was smooth and white, though he had fine brown hair all over his chest that I would not have expected. I called him My Angel. I wanted to carry his skin on mine as a soldier carries a flag, announcing himself to others.

  Once during a rainy night he said he would give me anything I wanted, but at that time I couldn’t think of a thing I could actually keep.

  He said, Let’s stay together until we die.

  I quoted to him and said, Every angel is terrifying. I read him all of Rilke’s Elegies in bed, before we slept at night. I said, Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.

  He said, Poetry sounds beautiful, but I just don’t understand it.

  I told him I didn’t understand how to calculate time and the earth’s history on a one-dimensional line, from beginning to end.

  We washed dishes together, cooked meals. With him I became so full I gained weight. He read articles while I graded papers on Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal. We turned off the lights at the same time each and every night.

  After ten years things became so quiet I developed a predilection for the future. When we gazed at rocks and mountains, I could hear the smallest cracking and knew that neither the mountain nor I could do anything about this fact.

  I didn’t know how to describe the sound of erosion in a way that my husband believed, but I still marveled over fossils. For a long time, that was all we could talk about. Finally, I said, Are we any less subject to time than rock?

  He said he didn’t understand the question. People aren’t mountains, he said.

  When I left, my husband said that he was better at loving, though when he said this, it didn’t sound childish; it only sounded like a statement of fact.

  Last I heard, he had married an actuary. She computes insurance risks and premiums. I can only hope they are happy. Sometimes I wonder what she thinks when she sees his boxers from The Gap. I am sure he hasn’t gotten rid of them. He never gets rids of anything, even things that are old.

  THIS IS GETTING OLD, you say now. We are in bed together, and I can’t tell if you are angry or joking, though I have seen you naked and felt you pressing between my legs, so I feel as though I should know. If you’re going to talk like this every time I ask you what you want, you say, I may have to reconsider sleeping with you again. Then you add, I was really just asking you what you wanted to eat. I always get hungry after sex.

  Yo
u are a good lover with strong, nimble fingers, and it’s true, I suppose, that you are still hungry. You rub your belly, lie back, adjust the pillow. You stare at the ceiling fan, which swirls above us. Rain hits the window. I have seen the sky tonight, a shattered, pearl gray.

  I want to say you are a sweet man even though you are hard, emotionally balled-up like a fist. I want to say you have the most lovely milky-brown eyes, and your skin is warm and heavy.

  I sit up, lean over and kiss your stomach instead. It’s true, I tell you. I said too much. Should we fix a snack?

  Not now, you say. Now you’ve ruined it. Now I’m only tired.

  It is tiring, I agree, all this history and desire.

  I could die while listening to you, you say. I’ve aged twenty years since you’ve started. I’m really glad you didn’t start from the beginning, or go on about all the men you’ve slept with.

  That’s true, I say. There’s a lot I left out.

  I want to tell you that, as with the foreign man, we are still strangers, and, as with my Lebanese man, I have no way to know if I reach you, and unlike my ex-husband’s charts, there is no good way to measure the distance between us. Instead I ask, Why did you let me talk for so long?

  I dozed off, you confess. I remember the French guy, and war, and also something about the Marquis de Sade.

  Oh, good, I say, leaning back on my pillow. Those were all the best parts.

  Maybe I can listen when you can say what you want in one sentence or less, you tell me. Really, you need to make things simpler.

  I pull up the blanket and turn to face you. I cover your leg with my leg. Truthfully, my wants are so large that I can’t fit the words around them. I want to tell you I feel lonely. I want to ask if, on rainy nights, you are ever moved to speak the language of the poets. But mostly, I want to feel proximity of body, mind, and heart. I want, like Rilke, to cover the terrible nakedness in you and in me, to cast the emptiness out of us and into the open spaces.