Corrections to my Memoirs

by Michael Kun

  “He moves around quite a bit, from room to room,” I heard Jane say before she started talking about the Aztecs. “He’s very transient that way.”

  I take my boots off and make the bed, then I lie on top of the bedspread with my hands flat on my chest. It’s Saturday. I’m not doing much at all, just thinking. I half-listen to what they’re saying in the kitchen, but it’s hard to make out the words. I just pick up the sensation of a conversation. Their voices carry more at night, and then I can’t sleep.

  I close my eyes. I try to figure out how much money I spent on lunches last week. There isn’t a good reason for doing this. It’s not as if I need to know for my taxes or something crazy like that, it’s just that it’s the only thing I can think of to do. I can either sit around the kitchen and listen to Jane and her new friend talk about the Aztecs, or I can figure out how much I spent on lunches last week.

  I spent $18.50 on lunches last week.

  I ate at fast-food joints all five days, even though Jane made me a sandwich to take with me on Tuesday. Bologna and Swiss cheese on toast. The toast was stone cold by the time lunchtime came around. I had to throw it out. I had a couple of Whoppers and a milk shake at the Burger King instead. Four dollars and I don’t remember exactly how much change.

  Barbara’s laughing in the kitchen. They all laugh in the kitchen, all of Jane’s new friends, and she has a lot of them. I used to be able to keep them straight, which one was Martin and which one was Walter, which one was in her archaeology class and which one was in her English class, but now I don’t even try.

  Jane started taking night classes at the college back in August. She’s got three classes: archaeology, film, and English. She brings people over all the time now, and they sit at the kitchen table and drink coffee and keep me awake. They talk about digs and zooms and other things like that, and it’s strange to hear her say these new words. It’s like she’s still breaking them in, like they were new shoes.

  This Barbara’s a new one. Denise is a regular. She comes by every Tuesday. Samantha and some thin guy are Mondays. They might be married. I don’t know. Kenneth used to drive Jane home on Thursday nights, but he doesn’t anymore. I think he tried something funny once. I have to pick her up on Thursdays now, as if I’m not tired enough as it is.

  There are more, and they come by so often that it’s gotten to where I can guess what class they’re in just by looking at them. The archaeology ones are all white, like socks. Sort of sickly looking. The one in the kitchen now is an Archaeology. I’d bet my hat on it the second she came in the front door. She had archaeology written all over her pale face. The English ones are messy and sad looking. They’re all depressed because Shakespeare’s dead, like they just got the news yesterday. They’re the ones who are teaching Jane all the fancy ways to say things she used to say just fine. The film ones are tough to call, except when they smile. When they smile, they look like they’ve got gas. They look like they’re going to explode. They all look distinct, the Archaeologies and the Englishes and the Films.

  Jane looks the same. Jane still looks like my wife.

  We were in the bedroom, just like I am now, when Jane told me that she’d signed up for classes in the night school. She’d already bought one of the books, a giant one with a picture of a gold coffin on the cover, and she had it propped up on her lap. It made her look small. Jane was wearing shorts and a tank top because it was hot out.

  “Baby,” I said, “when are you ever going to go to Egypt to hunt around for old pots and stuff? Never, that’s when. You’re never going to go, so what’s the point?”

  “They’re not old pots. They’re relics of past civilizations. They’re treasures.”

  “So, when are you going treasure hunting?”

  She shook her head side to side and pinched her lips. Jane doesn’t think the things I say are funny anymore. “You wouldn’t understand,” she said, and she started up reading again.

  “Yes I would.”

  “Benjamin, you’re too…pedestrian. I’m sorry to say that, Benjamin, but you are.”

  “C’mon. Try me.”

  She huffed. “I’m not doing it because I’m going to Egypt. None of us are going to Egypt. Well, Louis might. I met him in the bookstore, and he said he might. But I’m certainly not going. I’m doing it for the experience.”

  The experience is costing me $750. It’s $250 a class.

  Now I have something else to do. I can figure out how many weeks of lunch I can buy with $750.

  I get up from the bed and pull up the shade. It’s not very sunny out. It’s October still, but it feels like January. It’s cold out, probably 30° Fahrenheit. There are plenty of people out on the street, though, all wearing dark coats. They look like a flock of birds. Crows are what they look like, if you don’t look too closely. Then you see their faces and see that they’re not birds at all.

  There’s a ballpoint pen on the bureau by my wallet, and I find a notepad on Jane’s nightstand. It says, From the desk of Jane Hucknall on the top, and there’s a yellow smiley face on the bottom. I sit back down on the bed and divide $750 by $20. I divide by $20 instead of $18.50 to make things easier. There’s no sense breaking my neck over this. It’s not like I need it for my taxes.

  Thirty-seven and a half weeks of lunches. That kills me.

  I lie down on the bed again and try to think of anything else but the lunches. Thirty-seven and a half. That’s almost a year of lunches. I think about the time we were putting up that office building out by the shopping mall in Paramus. At lunchtime we went to the mall, just me and Pete, and we wanted to get some tacos. There were fast-food joints everywhere, though. McDonald’s. Arby’s. Something called Chicken George. So we went up to the girl at the information desk and asked if there was a Taco Bell anywhere in the mall, and she said, “No, but there’s a JC Penney.” That broke me up. She said it so matter-of-factly. I smile just thinking about it.

  Thirty-seven and a half weeks. I think about when Jane and I first moved into this apartment. We weren’t but twenty years old then. The very first day that we were here, when there were still boxes all over the place and her parents’ old, beat-up furniture just pushed into the corner, I was walking around the apartment eating a chocolate bar. I wasn’t really doing anything special, just sort of walking around thinking about how this was our home. Jane was eating peanut butter out of the jar with a plastic spoon, and I banged smack into her. I got chocolate on her peanut butter, and she got peanut butter on my chocolate. Jane laughed. “This is just like the commercial,” she said, and it was, except that in the commercial it doesn’t make as much of a mess. That was before we got comfortable living together. Things like that don’t happen anymore, once you get comfortable.

  “Benjamin,” Jane calls from the kitchen. “Benjamin, do you want something to eat? Brenda and I are fixing sandwiches.”

  It’s Brenda, not Barbara.

  “Sure,” I say. I tear the sheet off the top of the pad and throw it in the trash basket, and I put the pad back on the nightstand. I go to the kitchen. I don’t say anything when I get there. Jane’s at the counter, and her friend is sitting at the table. Her legs are crossed. She has skinny legs. She’s drinking coffee.

  “Ham and cheese?” Jane says. “We’re having ham and cheese.”

  “Fine,” I say. I sit across from Brenda.

  “On white bread?”

  I don’t know why she asks that. “No,” I say, “on toast, like always.”

  Brenda puts her fingers over her lips so she won’t laugh out loud. She’s trying to be ladylike. Jane’s laughing too. Her back is turned so I can’t see her face, but her shoulders are bouncing up and down.

  “Did I tell you he’d say that, or didn’t I?” she says to Brenda.

  “Yes, you did.”

  I look at the refrigerator. There’s a poem on the refrigerator door. A magnet in the shape of a slice of watermelon is holding it up. There’s usually just a Snoopy cartoon up there.

 
; “Benjamin is just so intractable about his toast. Everything has to be on toast. Who on earth ever heard of ham and cheese on toast?”

  Brenda is still being ladylike.

  Jane’s not finished. “And not just toast,” she says, “but warm toast. It has to be warm. He won’t eat it if it’s cold. He’s like a little boy. You know how little boys have to have the edges cut off their sandwiches. Well, Benjamin has to have warm toast. Isn’t that right, Benjamin? If the toast is cold, I have to throw it out and put the sandwich on fresh toast. It’s like it’s ceased to be toast once it’s gone cold. It has moved from one state of being,” she says, holding her right arm out, then moving it across her body, “to another.”

  They’re both laughing now, but it’s true. It’s not toast anymore if you let it go cold. It’s just hard bread then. Stone-cold, hard bread. What makes it toast in the first place is that it’s warm, that feeling you get when you bite into it and when you swallow it. It’s like an oven. Or maybe you’re the oven and it’s the coal. It puts the warmth inside of you. It takes the warmth from the outside, and puts it inside.

  Jane doesn’t understand. It’s not the same when it’s cold.

  It can’t take the cold out of you if it’s cold.

  Jane puts a plate down in front of her friend, then goes back to the counter to get our sandwiches.

  I look at her friend. “So, Brenda,” I say, “are you in Jane’s English class?”

  “No,” she answers. “Archaeology.”

  I knew it. I knew it before they started talking about the Aztecs. It’s the skin.

  I take a bite of my sandwich. I get that feeling. The warmth inside of me. I take another bite and another and another. If you don’t eat quickly, the feeling leaves you. Jane and her friend are watching me chew. They laugh.

  I stop to talk. “Archaeology, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Treasures and relics and stuff?”

  “Treasures and relics,” Brenda says. “Are you interested?”

  “Um, um,” I say. I have a mouthful of sandwich.

  Jane and her friend go all quiet again. They eat. I eat. They’re like monks. They talk with their eyes. They look at me. They look at my sandwich. They look at each other. They look out the window. Jane and her friends are like monks whenever I’m in the kitchen, but when I leave they start up.

  I finish the sandwich and put my plate in the sink. They’re hardly halfway through with theirs. I go back to the bedroom and fall onto the bed again. I touch my stomach with my palm. It’s gone cold already.

  Things didn’t used to be like this: me in the bedroom, Jane in the kitchen talking with her friends about important things, like we’re not even in love anymore. Things didn’t used to be like this, but they are now.

  It’s not just the classes, either. The classes are just a part of the whole, big picture. They’re what she’s doing to make things better. At least that’s what they’re supposed to do. I don’t think they are.

  “They’re an outlet,” Jane says. “They help me forget.” Sometimes I think it’s me she’s trying to forget. Sometimes I don’t think that at all. It depends. Still, it’s funny to think that one day you could come home from work and your wife would say, “Who are you? What are you doing in my apartment?” She’d hold a fork to keep you away, and her eyes would look huge and frightened. Like she’d succeeded in forgetting you so much that she could be afraid of you. Then she’d call the police.

  Nothing’s really been the same since April. That’s when it was. I was sitting in the living room watching TV, and Jane came out from the bedroom.

  “Baby,” she said, “baby, I don’t think I can fix dinner tonight. Maybe you could order out Chinese. You like Chinese.”

  She was just in her underwear and a T-shirt. She was standing at the bedroom door. There was blood all over her lap.

  I stayed home with her all that week. I called work and told them that I had a bug and couldn’t get out of bed, could they get by without me? They don’t give you sick pay when your wife has a miscarriage. You have to lie. They told me to stay home until I felt 100 percent.

  That week I sat in bed with Jane and put my arm around her shoulder. I didn’t know what else to do. I brought the TV into the bedroom and put it on the bureau so we could watch soap operas, and I kept bringing her something to eat even though she said she wasn’t hungry. Nothing fancy, since I’m not much of a cook. Just soup and a sandwich. Ham and mustard on toast, or peanut butter on toast. I thought the toast would keep her warm inside, but when she fell asleep I lifted up her shirt and pressed my hand against her stomach. It was as cold as marble. Toast is very transient.

  This is what I have to remember. Whenever I want to yell at her about the Archaeologies or the Englishes or the Films, this is what I have to remember: I have to remember how cold and empty her stomach was. Just now, with her and Brenda in the kitchen, I almost said something about the thirty-seven and a half weeks of lunches. But when I thought of how cold and empty she was, all of a sudden thirty-seven and a half weeks didn’t seem like all that big a deal. It’s not like thirty-seven and a half weeks is the rest of your life.

  I take a nap right there on the bedspread.

  When Jane wakes me up, it’s past six o’clock. Brenda’s gone. It’s just me and Jane in the bedroom.

  “Benjamin,” she says, “you ought to get up. You shouldn’t sleep so long right after you’ve eaten. It’s not very good for you digestively.”

  I sit up. She’s in front of the mirror, changing her clothes. She’s hooking her bra. Her arms are twisted behind her like a full nelson, and I get up and help her with the hook.

  She pats my arm. “Don’t forget,” she says, “we’re due at Walter’s at seven-thirty.”

  Walter’s having a get-together tonight. Walter’s in her film class.

  “So?” I say.

  “So, go shower already.”

  I pull some clothes out of the closet and get some shorts from my underwear drawer. Then I go to the bathroom and get washed up and changed. I wash my hair with Jane’s shampoo. It smells like strawberries. I put my dirty clothes in the hamper. There’s a hamper for my clothes and another one for Jane’s, because my work clothes get all dirty with mud and grease, and Jane doesn’t think we should mix them. It makes good sense.

  When I come out of the bathroom, there’s Jane in front of the mirror. She’s putting on eye shadow. She looks beautiful. When she puts makeup on, she looks like a movie star. She looks like Natalie Wood when she was young, with that black hair of hers. She doesn’t look a thing like the Archaeologies or the Englishes or the Films.

  I come up behind Jane and put my hands on her waist. She has a very thin waist. Then I rest my chin on her shoulder. I can’t think of anything romantic to say, so we both just stand there and look at the mirror. Jane’s holding the brush to her eye shadow next to her face. She isn’t moving it. It’s the same position, like she was holding an umbrella over the two of us.

  You just can’t see the umbrella. It’s invisible.

  I think about saying, “Baby, you’re beautiful,” or “Baby, I love you,” but I don’t. I almost say, “Baby, do you need a hand with your eye shadow? I know how,” but I don’t say that, either. After a while I just let go of her. My feet are still wet. I sit on the bed and put some socks on. Jane waits a second before she starts up with the eye shadow again, keeping the little brush beside her head like she’s just holding the umbrella over herself now. She’s thinking of the baby.

  “Which one’s Walter?” I say.

  “You know exactly which one Walter is.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You just do this to bother me. Pretend all my friends are nondescript, that you can’t tell one from the next.”

  I know which one Walter is. He’s my age, with long, blond hair and thin arms. I just asked so she’d stop thinking what she was thinking. I’d rather have her upset with me than thinking about the baby. I don’t know why tha
t is. It’s just the way she looks when she’s thinking of the baby, like she’s never stopped crying inside.

  I fix myself a Scotch before we go. Jane doesn’t have anything to drink.

  We take the bus to Walter’s apartment. Jane sits next to me on the bus, holding her hands on her lap.

  Everyone on the bus is wearing a dark coat, blue or black or brown. Except for one woman who’s wearing a red one. I’m wearing a black one. Jane’s wearing navy blue. I bought it for her for her birthday two years ago. Actually, I bought her a purse, but she didn’t like it. She took it back to Gimbel’s. The coat is what she got in exchange. But technically I still gave it to her. I paid for it. It’s a very nice one with a black collar and large, black buttons.

  I don’t say anything to Jane because she’s thinking. I just look at the people on the bus and out the window. Jane’s thinking about her new words. I can tell. Effervescent. Translucent. Dolly shot. Ubiquitous. Pharoah. You can see her lips move if you pay attention. Little, little movements, but they’re doing it.

  I think Jane knows that she doesn’t sound very comfortable with her new words. Once, when she was taking a shower, I pressed my ear against the door, and through the water I could hear, “Hyperbole. Hyperbole. Hyperbole. Hyperbole.” She knows.

  The bus stops a block from Walter’s apartment. We almost miss the stop because Jane isn’t paying attention. I’ve never been to Walter’s before. I have to nudge Jane and say, “This is it, isn’t it?”

  She says, “Oh, oh, yes,” and we get off the bus.

  Walking to Walter’s apartment, I keep my hands in my coat pockets because it’s cold out, but I stick my elbow out in case Jane wants to hold on to it. She doesn’t. I knew she wouldn’t. Her hands are in the pockets of the coat I bought her.

  Sometimes I like to do things now just to be sure that she won’t do them, that it’s her that’s different and not me. Like the elbow, for instance. Or sometimes when we’re both at home I’ll say, “Jane, want to go for an ice cream?” just so she’ll say no. We used to go for ice cream all the time. Chocolate chip mint cones. The ice cream parlor’s right around the corner from our apartment. It doesn’t take but two minutes to get there.