How to Stop Loving Someone

by Joan Connor

  Night didn’t fall; it fucking plummeted. He stared out the window looking for Zero Mostel, the Mostel of The Producers , but he could only see himself reflected. He glared at his shlubby self, body like sausage shoveled into one of those cheap plastic boots you can buy in dismal dimestores. Dimestores? There were no dimestores. His infrastucture was collapsing. He’d lost a briar patch of hair since Linda had moved out. Linda. Bad move to start thinking about Linda, Brer Cliff. He needed to get a dog, something cute and kissy, a Yorkie maybe, a smoochy pooch. He glared at the old man reflected in the window. He raised the empty bottle. “I lift the glass to my mouth. I look at you, and I sigh.”

  The phone rang. Cliff dropped the bottle. It rolled neatly under the desk.

  “Yes? Yeats here.”

  “You died in 1939.”

  “In 1942, Zero Mostel debuted at the Café Society.”

  “You are not William Butler Yeats, Mr. Yeats.”

  “I am quite sure that I am. I looked myself up in the phone book just last week. And when I called, I answered.”

  “What was your mother’s name?”

  “Mom. Tell me what you look like?”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “Describe yourself.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I dream of a Ledean body.” Cliff sat in the desk chair and twirled it slowly around.

  “You have no scruples.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I have one scruple,” Cliff said, “maybe a couple of scruples. Scruple, scruple. Have you ever been scrupled?”

  “I am sorry, Mr. Yeats, but this is making me uncomfortable.”

  “How about your name then, just your name?”

  “Maude. Maude Gonne.”

  Click.

  The girl was doing her homework. He definitely needed to get the phone re-listed in his own name.

  Cliff glared at the monitor. He had pests covered, and was moving on to compost. Hastening Decomposition. Cheery thought. Linda had hastily decomposed and been discomposed. The oil man of all things. Of course in Vermont in the winter an oil man was a man of some stature. Slick pumper. An oil man had clout with the frozen few. Cliff could overlook the oil man. But then he found out about the snowmaker. The snowmakers were a weird breed, living in the night, encased in ice, frosted with hoar, they trod the ski areas suffering hyperthermal delusions that they were Thor, the winter sports god of thunder, protector of humanity. Cliff had had it when he found one of these snowmakers on his porch, grinning like he’d just invented wood. The oil man, the Valhallan snowman. Talk about the second coming. He started regarding Linda as if she were a bowling shoe. Something that a demographic map of people had shoved their feet into for a lace up. And when he glanced around the alley, the people were sweaty and smelly and had I.Q.’s commensurate to their shoe sizes. Linda didn’t like the bowling shoe expression on his face, so she moved on. New frame.

  Decomposition. Can one decompose a poem? Decompose love? Toss Linda on top of the coffee grounds and orange rinds and eggshells?

  Shit, I have to concentrate. Staring time. Cliff rose and peered out the window. Less wind today. The snow ghosts had danced away to fiddle on a roof somewhere. Ten a.m.. Was it too early to crack open that bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, a droll little white from New Zealand, dry but not aloof. Ten in the morning, just an eentsy bit too early.

  He really must get back to work on the herb project. I shallot be sage and attack the project. This thyme, I will Burnet up the keyboard. But first he needed to buy a dog. Cliff grabbed his bomber jacket and torpedoed out the door.

  Cliff shuffled through the snow on Maple Street to the pet store, Animal Magnetism. The clerk stood with his back toward the door before a tank of Angelfish, whispering to a wispy looking blonde in a trim black coat.

  Shit. Linda. Cliff stared. The clerk curved over her as if he were about to slurp her down through a straw like a cherry coke. Cliff felt his face go slack and secondhand, all bowling shoe.

  “The lady will have the boa constrictor,” he said in a voice that sounded like the cranked up decibels of some enthusiastic over-eager fun-fun-fun soft drink ad for depressives with Tourette’s syndrome.

  Linda startled, then turned back to the aquarium.

  “Sailing to aquarium,” Cliff yelled. Why was he doing this?

  Linda adjusted her coat collar. The clerk whispered in her ear.

  “Bowling shoe, bowling shoe, bowling shoe,” Cliff yelled. This is what happened when metaphors collapsed, forgot that they were metaphors, when metaphors thought that they were rock stars with addictive personalities and checked into McLean.

  “I will be right with you, sir,” the clerk said.

  Cliff hated him, hated him like one hated divorce lawyers who drove sports cars (it approached magnificent indifference) hated him with his natty mustache and creased trousers. He looked like a waiter in a Van Gogh painting.

  “I want a dog,” Cliff said. Again with the big voice. The clerk hastened over, looking a little alarmed now, like he was eyeing the phone askance, keeping tabs on it, so that he could make his move, lurch, call 911 and tell them to bring a net before he jumped Cliff and pinned his jugular with a Chihuahua chew toy then hog-tied him with poodle collars till the uniforms showed up.

  The clerk pressed his palms together. “You’re in luck, sir, because we have dogs. All manner of dogs.” He nodded toward the kennels. “What breed are we interested in today?”

  “I want a big dog,” Cliff said. He suddenly did. He wanted a huge dog, a humongous dog, the world’s most enor-fucking-mous dog in the universal pound. “I want a dog big enough to swallow a snowmaker whole.”

  The clerk tittered. “That is a big dog, sir. Follow me, and we will pick out one big dog.”

  Cliff followed the dapper dogman down the aisle where the dogs crouched under glass like some canine automat. Dachshund on rye. He tramped and stamped as he walked, hoping to force Linda to glance at him, hoping that she would look up and see that he was perfectly okay without her, so okay that he was buying big dogs. Big, bigger, biggest dogs. “That’s the one,” he said in his over-amplified voice. It bounced off the turtle paradises and fish tanks and ferret cages. It reeled over the hamster wheels. Cliff pointed at a slobbery jowelly weepy-eyed dispirited looking Saint Bernard.

  “Excellent choice, sir,” the clerk said. “That is most certainly a big dog.”

  “Want to hear a shaggy dog stor y?” Jesus, he was ranting now. He couldn’t stop. “We had a dog so dumb that it used to sit on one hill every night and bark at the next hill. When the dog on the next hill barked back, he barked again. Haw. Haw. Haw. All night long the imbecile barked at himself. Echolalia. Echolalia. The little peckerhead was using echolocation to tell himself where he was. Like a bat. Did you know that bats migrate? Someone told me this once. I didn’t believe him. Where I asked? Where do they migrate? Mexico, he said. Why, I asked. For some quickie Tijuana divorce? If bats migrate, how come I’ve never seen them, you know, like birds in a chevron, heading south? My friend said, because they fly by night. Haw haw haw.”

  “Would you like a seat, sir. A glass of water.”

  Cliff heard the little cat bell tinkle on the door as Linda slipped out to the street.

  He went home wearing a restless bomber jacket with a Cairn terrier inside it. Shivering. Thank god he hadn’t picked the Saint Bernard.

  Four p.m. and already gloaming. Holding the pup at eye level, Cliff inspected the terrier who inspected him.. He set him on the coffee table. What to name the little mange-muffin? Linda? Heh heh. How about Peeve? Hi, I’d like you to meet my pet, Peeve. No, too cute. How about Fergus? “Who goes with Fergus?” Why, Cliff of course, no other. He tried it out. “Fergus,” he said. The terrier stared at him. “Fergus,” he said again, “Fergus, it is four in the afternoon and time for a libation. Maybe that California Chardonnay, vulgar and cloying, but I’d drink paint remover if it had the right vintage—any.” He was not going to fribble at the keyboard tonight
.

  Cliff popped the cork and poured a saucer for Fergus. “Is there a drinking age for dogs?” he asked. Hell, times seven, in dog years, Fergus could pass.

  Cliff tilted the bottle and stared out the window. “Fergus, there is no pun for marjoram.” The moon rose full and cut a thin wedge of paler white against the white snow. Small pines dotted the meadow. Sometimes he imagined that they were wee people in camouflage. He swore that they moved, scurrying from one spot to the next in the corner of his eye when he turned his head. Hey, wasn’t that one closer? Probably scouting for Linda who had moved into town on Ferry Street two months earlier. One plump tree bore a passing resemblance to Zero Mostel. Zero Mostel sagging with snow, Mostel as snowmaker. In Vermont the snowmaker was the rainmaker. What had Linda been intent on buying at Animal Magnetism, a hamster? A Tarantula? A hairy-legged Tarantula. Linda shaved her legs. In the bathtub. He stared at himself in the black window. Age: three hundred and fifty in dog years. He looked it. Every dogday of it.

  “I was not in love with her, Fergus, as I told her many times. She is beautiful, mind you, but intellectually we were not compatible. Linda, I told her, we are not intellectually compatible. Your interests are domestic and familial ; mine are artistic and intellectual. It would never work, long term. Then I caught the oil man with his nozzle in her fill-pipe. That is not a metaphor, mind you, Fergus. He was really just filling the pipe, but the way that he looked at her like a new Ferragamo turquoise leather loafer. . . .”

  The phone rang.

  Fergus hopped off the coffee table.

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Yeats?”

  “Yes, this is Maude Gonne. I am calling to invite you to the wedding. John, John McBride and I are tying the knot, we are.”

  “Look, Miss, Miss Aluminum Foil, this ceased to be funny a long time ago.”

  “We’re most serious, Mr.Yeats.You needn’t be raising a ruction. Perhaps you’re in a tippling way at the moment ? I could call back.”

  “No. Do not call back. Look, Miss. Miss, what is your name really? I’ve had something of a rough day, and. . . .”

  “Kathleen Ni Houlihan it is, sir.”

  “Did Linda put you up to this?” Cliff slammed down the receiver and sank into the couch. He tipped the bottle. “Too much it is, the literary life. It is all simply too much.”

  Fergus squirmed out from under the couch and watched Cliff roll the empty bottle back and forth with the arch of his argyled foot. “It is just too much, Fergie. How can we tell the caller from the call?”

  He rose and crossed to the kitchen and hefted another bottle from the rack without pausing to check the label. He raised the bottle. “Here’s to what is past, or passing, or to come.”

  The phone rang again.

  “Yes?”

  “Mr. Yeets?”

  “Yes?”

  “Mr. Yeets have you given any thought to how your loved ones will be provided for should you experience a sudden and unexpected loss of life?”

  “Do you know what the problem with the world is? Not enough poetry. People ask me what I do for a living. I say, I am a poet, and they all look at me as if I were vomiting carp onto the canapé tray. So I started telling them, Actually, I am working on a detective novel. Oh really? they ask, tilting their champagne flutes against their jaws. How interesting. Nobody reads poetry, see, and that is. . . .”

  Click.

  Cliff and the bottle settled into the sofa and brooded gloomily. Fergus scrambled back up on the coffee table and rested his muzzle on his paws, one eyebrow warily raised. Beyond them, beyond the window, the cold, the snow, the darkness settled comfortably in. Far below them blind tubers bided their time, and tiny roots still frozen in fibrillated curls waited to unfurl. It would thaw. It would always and eventually thaw. They had all the time in the world.

  Inside Cliff slurred, “I am going to give Linda a call. Who am I kidding. She’s an angel, an angelfish. That’s what I am going to do. I am going to ask her to move back in. Think she’ll come back, Fergus old boy?”

  The phone rang. Cliff lurched. The wine bottle rolled wobbily under the desk.

  “Not a chance in hell,” Fergus said.

  The Writing on the Wall

  IT’S 1968 OR 69, and I’m studying cool, Muriel’s cool, Muriel, because all the boys treat her to pizza, tease her about being a whore, make jokes about beavers. I am not the sort of girl to whom boys tell beaver jokes. I am apart. I write poetry. I get good grades. I am not the sort of girl. I am not the sort of girl who is always the sort of girl who wants to be the sort of girl to whom boys tell beaver jokes. Muriel will teach me how. Muriel licks at danger like most kids lick at frosting. Muriel’s father is a baker. He subscribes to Playboy , leaves copies around the living room even when Muriel’s home. He laughs too much. He has a way of laughing that sounds like spitting. Muriel hates him. That’s why she likes to hang out.

  We hang out at J.M. Fields in the record department, watch the tough kids shove 45’s into their pants or slide cool LP’s into Gomer Pyle Christmas sleeves, the shoplifter’s discount. We order cherry-vanilla cokes at the counter. We try on surfer shirts from the boys’ department, so they’ll be extra tight. When boys try to trip us or tease us, Muriel goes cool, so cool she could freeze a sno-cone solid. She never looks back at them, never giggles, just saunters slow toward the door, filches a can of spray paint from a shelf as she passes. Not a flinch.

  Outside the air-conditioned doors, the air flops down like a sponge. The sun is tedious, the trees around the parking lot, listless. I am boring Muriel. She’s restless for action which comes through the electric eye—slick hair, bad skin, heading for an overwaxed car. She gives me the tag-along look, and I pretend to be busy staring down some gum on the sole of my sandal. They whisper and laugh and must have reached an agreement, because he takes off. His car is large and loud and slick-black like his hair.

  Muriel takes pity on me. “You’ll never get a date.”

  That seems to be a condition of the universe; like day becoming night, it could go unremarked. But Muriel’s feeling helpful, aggressively so. She says, “Wait here,” ducks back inside, lifts some Yardley cosmetics and a shiny minidress off Mr. Fields, the spray paint can stretching her canary yellow jeans even tighter, the jeans she has to lie down to zip shut, the legs pegged as taut as her skin. Minidress shoved in one pocket, can in the other, and no one even notes her because Muriel moves as smooth as an ice cube melting.

  In the parking lot, Muriel draws eyebrows on my eyebrows for me, outlines my lids so I look like a coloring book, and slicks my lips as white as a death-wish kiss, as white and pearly as her own, but I’m still breathing.

  “Put this on,” she says, snapping the minidress at me.

  It’s shiny, splashed with lime-green daisies. It feels like car oil in my hands.

  “I can’t put it on here.”

  Muriel whips the matching bloomers at me, tugs me by the arm, “Come on,” until we’re behind J.M. Fields in an alley overgrown with vines, stacked with old tires, wooden skids, cardboard boxes, and heaps of beer bottles, broken glass.

  “Here,” Muriel says and she unzips my jeans and tugs them down, shakes her head at my day-of-the-week underwear. It’s Saturday but I’m wearing the Sunday whites. I suck in my stomach as she slides my jeans off, slips the bloomers on. Then she starts unbuttoning my shirt, makes a dig at my training bra, slides the dress over my head, and squints at me critically, right arm akimbo, palm planted on her hip. She whistles low. “Girl, you look cool.”

  Then she wads up my old clothes, slamdunks them into a rusted oil drum, turns and starts rattling the paint can, shaking it with a shimmy like it’s a maraca. While her back is turned, I retrieve my clothes from the can, fold them flat and pin them under my arm. My mom would kill me if I came home dressed like this. I turn. The back wall of J.M. Fields has more messages than a bulletin board, more literature than our school library: Cathy sucks cock. Larry and Donna TLF. I love Craig Foss. Mo
na Gordon is a whore. For a lay, call Shelli, 484-3008. Curt has a big one.

  Muriel is warming up, twirling her arm, looping big spirals of dayglo orange onto the cement block. She points the can like she’s holding a loaded gun. She grins at me from the sheepdog shock of blonde bangs awning her eyes, as she writes in a plump cursive, “For a good time.”

  “No,” I say, but I don’t even sound convincing to myself. I’m laughing too hard. Muriel is giggling slyly. “Going to get you a date she says,” then finishes with a flourish, my first name, my phone number there in iridescent tangerine for all the world to see. She punctuates the sentence with an exclamation point, a little orange heart for the dot. The letters are as tall as my younger brother. It’s funny, but I’m shaking, too. If my mom ever saw this. I feel dizzy with laughter like we’ve been sucking helium.

  Muriel gives my shoulder a shove. “Don’t sweat the small stuff, sister. Nobody ever calls.”

  For a week, I have trouble falling asleep, think of my mother strolling through the alley, discovering her daughter is a slut. After a week, the worry fades, becomes less specific, just nags me on the brink of sleep like something unfinished, a term paper, an unreturned overdue library book. Then I forget about it; it peels off like flaking paint. I don’t think about it until my mom comes into my room on a Friday afternoon, says, “You’ve got a call.” I roll off the bed to take it—probably Muriel—then notice my mother’s simpering, knowing expression. “From a boy,” she adds in a voice that makes me want to punch her in the stomach.

  A boy? I don’t get calls from boys. My heart’s wandered off, is lost and pounding somewhere in the back of my throat which makes it difficult to say, “Hello.” The receiver trembles in my hand.

  “This Rachel?” the phone asks.