I meant to leave by ten. I had packed my suitcase the night before and put it in the car, save my toiletries and a thank-you card. I believed in efficient departures.
Lora rubbed at her front tooth. “I should tell you, there’s someone else here. Tom.”
“Tom?” My mind went blank.
“Not your Tom, of course. A guy named Tom. He came over after you went to sleep. Tiptoed right past you.”
Indignation caught in my throat. How could she invite a man over on my last night here?
“Don’t look so scandalized!” Lora shook her head. I noticed she was wearing earrings, birds with turquoise eyes, and they lunged against her jaw. Her lips were a shade of purple she could not wear to Kohl’s.
“Where is he now?” I looked into the kitchen and down the hall. I could not shake the feeling of conspiracy. They crowded illogically in my mind: some slack-eyed guy from a bar, Lora with her bruise-colored mouth, and poor old Tom, wasting away in the disease I’d wished upon him. I don’t know which of them harassed me most.
“He’s around. If you run into someone in the shower, that’s probably him.” Her smile was playful and mean, just short of confrontation.
I said, “Help me find my pants.”
She said, narrowing her eyes, “You already packed them.”
We didn’t speak the rest of the morning. I padded in my cotton shorts down the driveway to the car, where I changed in the backseat with my packed bag—in case Lora’s Tom came out from the bathroom or wherever he was—wiggling my thighs against the window crank and thrusting my hips to zip up the fly. Back inside, I slowed down when I passed Lora’s room, listening. I knocked fearfully on the bathroom door. This man who was Tom could have any type of face. He could be any type of man, fretful and shy, a dumbass kid with nothing on his mind. I told myself this but I feared his gaze, as if he knew exactly how I’d promised and failed to love the other man with his name.
But there was no razor by the sink, no smeared steam on the mirrored walls. When the water was running, I thought I heard voices in the hall, but with the faucet off, there was nothing.
I sat down across from Lora at the kitchen table. She was painting her nails a Coke-can red, coating and blowing on them intermittently. With the cosmetics and jewelry, she looked young, haggard still, but working to impress someone.
“Is he here now?”
“Tom? He stepped out, I think.”
“You think?”
“For coffee or something.” She squinted hard at her work.
I also studied her hand: the bony knuckles, the fine network of wrinkles. It lay lightly on the table, waiting for someone to take it up.
“Will he come back?”
“Unless he gets run over by a truck.”
I did not doubt his existence outright until later. I did not think she made him up until I was hundreds of miles down the road and the truth no longer seemed provable either way. For the moment, in the kitchen, I just watched Lora work, watched her dip the wet brush in the bottle and pluck it back out. She fretted over her nails with her usual carelessness, staining her cuticles and groaning at herself. She got three drips on the table. She coughed dramatically into the back of her hand, and a tiny red smear appeared on her face. Like a scar. Like a kiss.
When she caught my eye at last, I found my heart was pounding.
I pointed at the smudge on her face.
“What?” She looked almost shy. “What?”
The day Lora held me under water I’d been ignoring her. I’d been sitting on the dock, resentful of her ebullience in the water, self-conscious in my lumpy swimsuit. She’d been out swimming by herself all afternoon. Calling me from the ragged black center of the lake, diving under the dock from time to time, grabbing my ankles. When she unexpectedly tugged me down, a knife of water went up my nose. I remember seeing the flash of her white legs in the murk, a blaze of sun at the broken surface, and as she held me under, air bubbles moved over every surface of my skin. Swarming the backs of my arms, worming beneath my swimsuit and up my chest, fluttering in exquisite profusion up the length of my spine.
“What is it?” she asked now, again.
I took a breath, less sure.
Remembering the envelope in my hand, I leaned over and slid my prepared thank-you card across the tabletop.
Lora glanced down at it and up at me. Then, pivoting in her chair, she began drying her nails in the air. Bit by bit, as if her hands had gotten away from her, the gesture changed into a huge, sloppy, two-handed wave. She seemed to be laughing, hatefully, sorrowfully, her whole head tilting back on her neck. “Bye-bye! Bye-bye! Bye-bye!” she sang.
OLD HOUSE
The day I was sent home with pinkeye was the day my dad moved out. When I opened the back door, I saw him standing in the kitchen, all by himself, holding a leather suitcase with an X of frayed duct tape on one side like a mark for treasure. He was supposed to be at work. Eventually, he found something on the floor to hand me, my hockey stick probably, and said he was moving back to the “old house,” a phrase I’d never heard him use before. He didn’t ask about my bloodshot eye. I thought he must have meant the Old House in the swamp behind the school, the one with the boarded-up windows and collapsed porch. It was the only Old House that came to mind, and I was impressed and proud that my father was going there to live, envious even. I was eight, and I could not bring myself to reveal his location to anyone—even when my mom came home from work and begged me to tell her where he was. “He said something to you, Michael,” she insisted. “I know he did!” I remember her face was blotchy and damp, and it made me think of something disturbing I shouldn’t look at, like an old woman’s saggy breast or a baby’s full diaper. I hated the greasy lines on her forehead, the swollen stubble over her eyes.
“I can see by your expression that you’re lying!” she accused me.
“I’ve got pinkeye!” I yelled.
Later, when I was fourteen, I found out from my older sister that my father spent those two summer months he was away with his mistress at his parents’ house in Wisconsin. In another conversation that same year, when I suggested the Old House as a good place to get drunk, a friend of a friend told me that the place in the swamp had burned down years ago, back when we were six or seven. So my Old House was gone long before my father’s summer absence. These two facts came to me the way most of my adolescence did, as fundamentally unreal and insubstantial. I’d felt so close to my father those months he was gone, guilty and proud of myself for the secret I kept so well for him. Even after my sister’s revelation, I half believed that the mistress story was just another part of my father’s and my shared deception, a trick he’d played to keep his true location hidden. It felt like colluding with his lie when I said to my sister, “Really? He lived with Poppa and Grandma and his girlfriend? What a dick.”
But in my heart, I admit, some part of me still believed that he spent that summer in the swamp, in the Old House behind the cottonwoods. He lived there with the high-stepping egrets and mucky sewer stench and molting brown cattails. He lived there, and all that summer I could have visited him on my bike, with a flashlight and a granola bar—but didn’t, in case my mother followed me there and discovered him. I would not, would not betray him like that. I believed then, and still do I guess, that everything that came after in my adolescence, all those hours my father spent pulling me up from some lawn where I’d collapsed, all of that goddamned resigned patience he always had, he had because I had once kept his secret for him. It’s funny how the mind works. I believed he thought he owed me something. I believed I must have earned his dogged, foolhardy trust.
*
I found myself thinking of the Old House again years later, long after I’d left home, in those intense, uncertain months when I was spending all my time with Liv. I met her my senior year in college, in the big Victorian boarding house where we both lived at the time. That house was battered and sloped—painted and painted over, like some hulking wooden boa
t. It had a sunk-ship look, wrecked against poplars. It was in a place that used to be suburbs but had become something else: part woods and overgrown lots, part boarded-up dry cleaners. The students who lived there were nontrads, transfers from community colleges, loners. We were either too poor or too scared to live alone, so five of us packed into the upper-story rooms and, I presume, masturbated as quietly as possible. We shared one bathroom, one finicky claw-foot bathtub, one cloudy mirror flecked with spit.
Our landlady was a white-haired old woman who kept albino rabbits in her backyard. Saturdays in the fall, Mrs. Crubin came knocking on our doors and recruited those of us who were available—usually it was just Liv and me, we were failed recluses for different reasons—to help clean out the hutches. I sprayed the wire mesh with thumbed hose water while Liv kept track of the rabbits on the lawn. She was thirty-six, gangly still, flat-chested as a runner. The rumor was that she had two children, girls, who’d gone to live with her mother when Liv returned to school after her divorce. As I lifted the dripping hutches to shake them out, I used to watch Liv watch me through the soapy wire mesh. Sometimes, she took a yellow-white rabbit in her arms and sang to it. I was twenty-three that fall, ready for anything, I thought. Liv sat cross-legged on the grass, toenails painted a chipped black, her face freckled, wrinkled around the eyes.
There were twelve rabbits altogether. My apostles, Mrs. Crubin called them. She had a cane of oiled rosewood, and once when we were standing in the yard she pulled the hooked end of that cane straight up, as if opening an umbrella. This revealed the bottom half of the cane as a rosewood sheath for a two-foot saber. Mrs. Crubin had a passion for such secrets. Inside she showed us a beautiful faux Bible that was really a box for jewels. She opened a tarnished cake tin and showed us her Bible. As the sun sank behind the poplars, she led Liv and me into her dark back parlor, where she pulled little balled chains under Tiffany lamps. We were handed quivery orange mounds of cobbler. After pouring herbal tea, Mrs. Crubin showed us a peculiar lace doily that folded and buttoned and fashioned, finally, into a kind of glove. “Pretty?” she asked, putting it on. She was a New Christian, she explained, which, we were to understand, meant that she had an impregnable confidence in the deceptive nature of appearances. “The more one loves God, the nearer one draws to heaven.”
I was a philosophy major, had encountered Swedenborg in lecture. “And the more you love yourself, the closer you get to hell?”
Mrs. Crubin was nod-nod-nodding. The thing that characterized those years, for me, was that I wanted an A from everybody, in all contexts.
Liv was a good student selectively. “Sounds like a rip-off of Buddhism to me.”
Mrs. Crubin squinted over at her. “That’s a pretty common misunderstanding.” She seemed to pity Liv, and at the same time, want her confidence. Want mine. Her marbled blue eyes moved back and forth. “Did I tell you that I have been divorced, too? It wasn’t a true spiritual marriage. My first husband qualified for the 1956 Olympics,” she paused. “In figure skating.”
A titter rose in my throat.
“Mmm?” Liv bit her lip, not quite sure if the joke was intentional.
But Mrs. Crubin, now, was laughing at her. “Ah. But my second husband and I will become one angel in heaven!”
“You will become—?” Liv started laughing just when Mrs. Crubin stopped.
“One angel in heaven, dear. He traded stocks before he passed. But he couldn’t sleep unless I covered up his feet with a blanket. He wouldn’t do it for himself. I had to crawl down to the foot of the bed each night and do it for him, just so.” Her eyes were shining. The little folds of skin on her throat trembled, like wet cloth. “My sweet, sweet man.”
Mrs. Crubin was barely out of the room with our plates before Liv had opened the faux Bible back up and started pawing through the tangled beaded necklaces. “She seems to love herself just fine,” Liv whispered. “Look at this all shit she has.”
I tsked. “So far away from heaven, right?”
Liv grinned. “Hell. We’re in hell, basically.”
*
For a long time, Mrs. Crubin was our private game. I think we both looked forward to Saturday nights, so Liv could egg Mrs. Crubin on and get her to tell us about her figure skater and her economist, her beau and her bull, she called them, both of whom were still very vivid to her—even though, Mrs. Crubin said, her second husband had been taken to a nursing home by his children years before he finally passed. “How did he die?” Liv would sometimes ask, to provoke her. He hadn’t died, Mrs. Crubin reminded her. The essential person, she said, is actually still alive. “Like in heaven,” Liv pressed. Mrs. Crubin smiled patiently. Yes, she said, but it’s important to remember that both heaven and hell are relative states of proximity to Love.
Sometimes Mrs. Crubin read us passages from Swedenborg’s writings to clarify the points she was making, rickety lines of prose written more than two hundred years ago in Latin. When she did this, I’d often lose the thread of the conversation, but Liv—who had a better memory, who was better than me at most things—would ask specific, discriminating, elaborate questions. Later when she saw me in the hallway, she’d quote from these passages as if they were lines from her favorite movies. Or as if they were a private language she’d mastered, along with Hindi, her major, for our mutual delectation. I tried to make her effort seem worth it.
Once outside the bathroom, for instance, she reached out her hand and stroked my newly shaved chin. Suggestively, mischievously. “Everything that is perceived and felt in the body finds its or-i-gin in its spiritual counterpart because it comes from our, um, intellect and volition.”
I paused, damp towel around my hips. Dripping on the floorboards. “Intellect and Volition, the lost, last novel of Jane Austen.”
“Ha,” she said, closing the bathroom door.
I admit I felt lucky to have Mrs. Crubin at first, to have such a convenient way to bridge awkward moments like this with Liv, who could be intimidating. We thought of Mrs. Crubin as essentially harmless, decorous to the point of absurdity. She was impressive in her ability to transport another century into the house, to treat the guy who mowed her lawn and the woman who brought her meals like live-in servants. So when was it that I started to feel differently? Probably it wasn’t until after Mrs. Crubin’s second or third stroke, because the effects of the first ones in October and November were hardly noticeable. She was a little slower in her speech, a little more slumped when she sat in her scrolled armchair in the parlor, as if her organs had slid to one side of her body. I started noticing a uriney stench when I got too close, and sometimes her mouth would go slack as a mask and leak lines of white drool. But that was later on. In the beginning, she was our toy.
*
After Mrs. Crubin fed us cobbler those early September nights, after she showed us her faux Bible and went to bed, we had the house to ourselves. The other students in the house all had weekend jobs or dates or drunk parties at the lake where the fraternities owned boathouses. I remember sitting with Liv among those horned antiques in Mrs. Crubin’s parlor, lingering over the last gelatinous, sweet bites of cobbler. The setting was ridiculous, like something out of Oscar Wilde, but on the third or fourth Saturday, Liv just stepped over the mahogany coffee table and plopped down next to me on the loveseat.
There was never any fuss about her. “You’re staring at me,” she said.
I suppose I must have seemed very young to her then, but I’d felt older than everyone else my age for so long that I believed we had something in common. That night Liv told me stories about India, where she wanted to live, and anecdotes about the little Iron Range town, Eveleth, where she grew up. “They called it the Taconite Capital of the World,” she told me. “What, Mumbai?” I said. She flicked my arm with a finger. She leaned in and kissed my mouth. She was sticky with cobbler, both her lips and her fingers, and she held her long staticky hair away from our faces with one hand.
“Hold this a sec,” she said—meaning her ha
ir—so I did, while she dug in her pocket for an elastic. She retrieved her hair from me, ponytailed it back. Then she unbuckled my pants and we clumsily fucked. Silk sofa pillows slid one by one to the floor. Liv’s hands clamped my T-shirted chest.
“You okay?” she asked when we were done. Ponytail swinging.
I remember trying to keep Mrs. Crubin’s loveseat as clean as possible, standing up in an awkward, armless way that required me to arch my back while clutching my pants.
“Yup,” I assured her. Then, and every time after that, she’d have a grin ready for me, one I believed, incorrectly perhaps, I’d earned by being tractable, nonchalant, and grateful.
*
Surely there were nights that fall when I lay alone on my mattress in the dark, feeling sorry for myself and impatient with Liv for being gone so much, for spending so many late nights in the library. And surely there were other students in Mrs. Crubin’s house who had faces, names, and complications themselves. When I ran into them, no doubt, I resented them their radio alarms, their stubbed-out cigarettes in the bathroom sink. I’m sure I resented their presence in that house that, increasingly, started to seem like Liv’s and mine alone. We were inhabitants, protagonists. They were intruders.
But most of those details are gone to me now. What I remember clearly is that by the end of fall semester I’d abandoned my second-floor room and shoved my mattress up the stairs to Liv’s third-floor turret. I lined up my single mattress next to hers and covered the whole thing with a wool blanket. My desk fit perfectly in the octagonal corner, and that’s where I sat in the short winter afternoons watching the backyard trees drop clumps of snow into the drifts below. A volunteer from the Humane Society came by on a blustery afternoon before Christmas and collected all twelve apostles from the backyard, shoving them one by one into cardboard boxes. I watched anxiously through the leaded glass window. I was surprised at how roughly that woman in her long puffy coat handled them, as if she were packing up laundry or something—as if gentleness with animals didn’t count unless someone else was watching. I had the impulse to climb down the stairs, let her know she’d been seen. Then she drove off in a cloud of exhaust and I was relieved. Though I had gotten part-time work at a pizzeria over break, it was a job that required almost nothing from me—and I remember feeling pleasantly adrift in those early winter weeks, increasingly unnecessary to anyone but Liv, who called me her Victim.
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