How to Stop Loving Someone

by Joan Connor

  The woman can see the fox’s haunches tense. The high thighs, muscled for speed, twitch, but the fox only snuffles, appraising the danger.

  “I can’t believe this,” the man says, sitting next to her. “Do you think she’s sick? She drank for such a long time, and her eye—”

  “Maybe that’s it,” the woman interrupts. “She’s very thin.” She considers, rabies? But the fox lies contentedly near the water. She shakes her head, wonders at the three of them: a woman, a man, a fox. She reaches to take his hand, but it shuns her. He’s fussing with his pockets.

  “Shit. I wish I’d brought the camera,” he says.

  “Isn’t this enough?” she asks.

  And he looks at her quizzically, but he doesn’t answer.

  His restless hands disturb the fox who rises slowly but imperturbably and trots to the hole in the fence, ducks through and lies down on just the other side of it. The woman can’t help herself; she blurts a laugh. Inquisitive, the man looks up at her, but she can’t bring herself to tell him what she’s thinking: that the fox knows just how much distance to maintain between itself and the other, just how much intimacy it can bear, permit, just how much proximity to allow. The fox is wiser than they. Wild hearts keep a fence between.

  The man, still disappointed with the missed opportunity, the camera snugged under the car seat, sighs. She smiles at him and flattens her palms on his sun-warmed thighs.

  Eventually, lazily, the fox rouses, pads back to the pool, drinks long, then sprints over the dune. The man hugs her then, takes her by surprise. And something twinkles, the silica dusting his cheek, an inkling of the possible life, the alternate one, the one that might have been.

  A sharp face. Then a glimpsed tail.

  If It’s Bad It Happens to Me

  HERE’S ANOTHER THING nobody tells you; cowboys can smell women. Austry Ann is in front of me, (her name is Australia, Australia Ann. I don’t know what her parents were thinking; I guess that they were feeling colonial). She is entering the smoky beery darkness of the Continental Club on Soco, and, without even turning around, the cowboy in the lizard print hat has a bead on her. It’s in the tightening of his shoulders, the twist to his hips. He is on her like chocolate on coconut, like cupids on valentines, like salsa on a fajita. He turns his head then, cool and slow. Then he gasps, he really does, as if he’s just been sucker-punched in the gut by some Friday night roustabout. And who can blame him? Hell, even I know that Austry Ann makes seeing men blind, and talking men dumb. She’s got a shelf that you can display calacas on. Hips that were invented to be riveted to Levi’s. Tonight she’s wearing a plum top so tight that it could be inside her and it comes to a little triangle hem in front so that you can catch a glimpse of her skin either side. She’s bopping to the pumping fusion already that some local girl is blasting out of her axe. Austry Ann’s hair is flipping around, her long tangled, shock-waves of red hair, and the cowboy is asking her to dance. It isn’t always easy being her friend.

  The cowboy is two-stepping her onto the sweaty dance floor. It’s crowded. Don’t get me wrong. I love Austry Ann. How not to? But around Austry Ann you get used to being a gaping ape of a sidekick. You learn how to smile like you enjoy standing alone, enjoy getting pushed around in a jammed bar, enjoy watching your beautiful girlfriend dance. It takes practice. Patience too. Especially tonight because I am in stiletto heels. They are not dancing shoes. Hell, they are not even walking shoes. They are I-got-glam-legs-but-am-too-stupid-to-walk shoes. Austry Ann has the beauty and the dazzle. But I got height. It gives me a vantage point.

  And here’s the point. It’s late. It’s around 1:30 when the cowboy starts pitching into the drum set. Jimmy Buffet can sing until every tourist mourns his Mexican cutie through the punt of a Jose Cuervo bottle; I am here to tell you that Margaritaville is Austin, Texas. This time the cowboy doesn’t extract himself from the cymbals, so Austry Ann tells me that we are calling it a night. It was a night four hours ago. It was a night all night long, but I keep that to myself. As she leaves the Continental Club, Austry Ann is breaking hearts. One soused cowboy grabs me by the arm and says, “Hey, ladies, it ain’t even closing time.”

  “We’re just drunks going home,” I say. And we are.

  I don’t have a job yet, so in the morning we decide to play. Austry Ann works nights at a gallery, Blue Cactus. They import retablos and Katrinas from desperate Mexicans, jack up the prices, and sell them to the turquoise-studded tourists. I moved in with Austry Ann two weeks ago, but I am not sure that it’s going to work. For one thing, Austry Ann has a temper. I mean temper. When she goes off, it is so sublime that you might believe that she is holy. She’s a saint of temper, the Mother Teresa of temper.. And she does go off. And you never know when. When there’s no milk for the coffee or the lizard-figured shower curtain isn’t pulled all the way across.

  Once in New York City I saw a burned car. The dashboard was puffed up into something that looked like burned marshmallows. That’s how Austry Ann’s heat makes me feel. Toasted. Charred. It makes me quiet.

  Then she will do something so beautiful or so funny that you know it’s safe to venture out again. Last week when I told her that I liked her ankle bracelet, she just popped it off and popped it on me. And when we were out last Thursday she sauntered up to some stranger on the street with nostalgic hair. Nineteen-forties sausages of hair, lacquered into place with gravity defying techno-hairspray. Austry Ann said, “I just love your retro look.”

  The woman stared and spluttered. She’d been keeping that coif in her closet and trotting it out every day since Roosevelt went on the radio. We laughed until there was nothing funny left in the universe. Not to be mean. It was just an accident.

  “Austry Ann,” I said, “you are more fun than things that are not fun.”

  Okay, and for another thing . . . I mean besides the temper. But that’s enough right there: the temper. Maybe this living arrangement won’t work.

  This morning Austry Ann screams, “Toast. The last piece of toast.”

  I know that she means bread. I wait it out.

  “The last fucking piece of toast. What am I? The last fucking runt piglet to the tit?”

  She goes on for a while. After Austry Ann’s wildfire about my eating the last slice of cinnamon bread burns out, we’re headed to the costume store on Soco. I don’t know why. For laughs. Because we haven’t been there yet. It has a neon parrot sign and Elvis and Marilyn Monroe in the window which feels about right. Down here cars and buildings last forever.You keep feeling as if the globe were whirling backward. And when you read the news, you wish it were.

  Austry Ann says that she wants to go canoeing after that which is okay with me. Sounds soothing. Water is soothing.

  On the plane to Austin I looked down and thought that I saw water, Jimmy Buffet water, with giant sea turtles scudding through. Then I realized that it was all sky, sky in every direction, and the turtles were the tops of clouds making their leisurely way. They didn’t even need flippers. There were—it took me a while to identify them—pellets of ice falling through the sky. White landing on blue, like a swan startling in Boston Gardens, like the purity of deep ice, and I thought it was an omen, that Austin would be all right. In the sky, you forget about news, about a Texan invading Iraq which is far away, because in the sky everything is far away, even you, and nobody knows where you are, because you didn’t tell anyone, not even your old boyfriend. You are leaving him just like Austry Ann is leaving her husband. Finally. She and her husband haven’t lived together since you met her. In New York. On the street. Near the burned out car. Right after 9/11 when people were going to witness, to mourn. But that wasn’t why Austry Ann was there; she was there to serve papers on her husband. But that was where we met. On the street. She came right up to me. Austry Ann is outgoing.

  After canoeing, she needs to go to the notary public, something about her divorce papers. She pronounces it, “Noter republic.” It irritates me less than you might imagine. It’s cu
te like the scrunchi with the poodles on it that she uses to pull back her hair.

  But me? No noters, no public. I just upped and left my boyfriend. What can I say? It was the sort of affair that could have only begun on a floor. And it had. He was crashing on my girlfriend’s floor in Boston, recovering. Heroin, I think, then alcohol. Americans are recovering from everything, themselves. I was staying with my girlfriend because I didn’t know where to move to next. After Boston. Not Boston actually. Allston. But the Boston area. It seemed like a good time to leave. Boston is next, I think, the next target. Prudential Building I bet.

  My boyfriend and I used to go to Jack’s Joke Store in Boston. It wasn’t funny. A novelty act, a novelty store. I opened a box. It said, “What every girl wants.” Inside, a lei. A cheap one, no flowers, the kind that gassed people wear at suburban barbecues in July. I didn’t get it until Jack looked embarrassed. At least I think that it was Jack, think he looked embarrassed.. It wasn’t funny. Little is. My boyfriend laughed himself senseless. No observable difference there. So I left.

  Now I am here. And we, Austry Ann and I, are going to the costume shop. Then canoeing. Then the noter republic.

  The costume shop careens with color like Peewee’s Playhouse, all chairy and cheery, all color and queasy like Memphis with a hangover, like Elvis on drugs. I nod at the punctiliously pierced child with the punk tufts, magenta, behind the counter. “Nice window,” I say. “Marilyn, Elvis.”

  “Yeah, Elvis. Iraq and roll.” He leers, and he and his vacuous vampire co-worker skirl into whip-it giggles.

  What is wrong with these people? Then I pause because they are my people, too.

  It’s strange in here. Bright and cheerful, almost manic. And dirty. Say you set PeeWee Herman, masturbatory interior decorator, loose in your house. The furnishings are cartoonish, but you wouldn’t sit anywhere. The source of that stain? It may not be a comical spot. Not good clean fun. It may not be lemonade. Maybe marital aid.

  Austry Ann is ahead of me and staring at rows of masks. Rows and rows of heads—Mickey Mouse, Ronald Reagan, Jason, George Bush, Goofy, George Bush Redux—stacks and stacks of historical heads like Mme. Guillotine runs the shop. The SpongeBobs and ET’s, Margaret Thatchers and Darth Vaders.

  Vampire Girl swishes her fishnetted legs and leans her Goth coif toward Pin Cushion face, and they giggle and gossipily hiss. Then Pinhead looks at us as if we’re homeless people who have blundered into Prada or something and asks with a flip of the wrist that a sitcom fag wouldn’t risk, “Do you fillies want help?” But he’s turned back to his vamping cohort before we can answer.

  We wander into the catacombs of parti-colored cos-tumeland. Entire racks of leather lingerie and Gone with the Wind bustled gowns, parasols. I try to imagine them together, Melanie stripping off her demure gown to her patent leather Merry Widow and smacking Ashley with a riding crop. It’s troubling how easy it is to imagine that. Gone with the whinny.

  Austry Ann bumps my hip with hers.“This place scares me a little. How do you think they stay in business?”

  I wonder the same. Halloween, sure. Mardi Gras. The occasional costume ball. But it would take a lot of gay clubs to support a place like this. And I doubt that there are a lot of gay clubs in Texas. There was only one cowboy in the Village People.

  I follow Austry Ann past the feather boas and the dressing cubicles which are action-painted in primary colors, past the funhouse mirrors, and the screaming meemie murals until we reach the shoe racks, and I stop like a spring-less jack-in-the-box. There they are. Ruby slippers. And I really am ready to go home already, but I no longer know where home is—not Boston. Not here.

  It becomes fun for a while, playing dress-ups in the back alleys of the store. I click my ruby-dusted heels, and Austry Ann starts camping it up like Aunt Bea, right down to the Mayberry dither. It’s a little karaoke-hokey but fun until I hear something that doesn’t sound fun. That sounds like wailing, and it is.

  I look at Austry Ann and the bib of her Aunt Bea dress is wicking out with tears. Her Bea bun of domesticated hair is bobbing as she sobs. I mean sobs. Weeps. The sort of weeping that makes you think of willows and engravings of them, curving over a headstone with a short poem below, mourning for a child. Usually the graveyard has a stream.

  Austry Ann is streaming. Her face is a mask of itself, her body lost in the absurd Bea dress with her blue jeans underneath. And I am uncertain what to do, so I hug her. Her Bea pop-it pearls press like a chain into my chest. What links us.

  “What is it, Austry Ann? Whatever is wrong?”

  She can’t get the words out, and she’s soaking my shirt. I just keep patting her Mayberry bun and asking her what’s wrong.

  Finally she gets out, “Everything. Everything is wrong. If it’s bad, it happens to me.”

  Round and round the Mayberry bush, I keep mumbling, consoling until Austry Ann tugs the Bea dress, using the bib to wipe her nose, her eyes.

  When we leave, the slacker clerks glance up at us for an instant as if we might be borderline interesting. Austry Ann is a mess. Mascara like an oil spill. Face jalapeno red. Hair an uncoiling Monty Python of a bun. She sticks her tongue out at the clerks who resume gossiping. We’re across the border, no longer interesting.

  It’s the SxSW festival in Austin, and the streets are lousy with musicians and roadies and film people and news-people and tourists.

  There’s some retro punk scene exploding here, so carpenters are pounding away, constructing stages behind the restaurants high enough to vault the moshers.

  Retro punk. Like the Goth Punk costumers, deliberate stereotype retro-actors. Retro punk. Stupid. America’s been a punk since Elvis and Marilyn went under glass. And I miss them. Their glamour. The sureness in life that all you needed was a full tank of gas, tunes on the dial, an accommodating backseat, and long highways everywhere leading to neon lit promises.

  Austry Ann and I are canoeing, and I’m glad. Water is nature’s valium; Austry Ann’s calmed down. She’s paddling happily and chatting as we slip past trees, green and fungal in the water, turtles on top like conchos on a belt.

  Austry Ann is trying to talk me into going to some opening at the Gallery Lombardi, The Rawk Show, art by all girl punk rockers. It sounds either too specialized or too complicated, I don’t know which. But I don’t want to spoil the canoe bliss with a fire-breathing scene or a sob-a-thon, so I say, “Why don’t we talk about it after we finish up at the notary public?”

  I like it here on the river. Time slips by with the ducks and geese. Fish jump. Families laugh. Couples argue. The paddles make a shush shush sound. No motor boats. Beyond, the city looms. High-rises, skyscrapers. Skyscapes have changed forever. I used to think of them as aspiration, ambition, or towers of greed. Now I think of them as targets. It feels odd to be paddling in the shadow of the city. This pace and that pace side by side.

  Austry Ann is talking about everything bad that happens to her, and it’s easier to listen with the fluid sounds of the river, Austry Ann’s voice and the river’s deliquescing.

  She doesn’t like her job. She wants a shot at a film career. And her husband was a creep. And other people just don’t know how hard. Splish. Slup. Ripple. Shlup. Burble.

  It’s okay here on the river. Austry Ann’s hair is a fiery corona in the sun. She could be the goddess of Austin. Or Huck Finn’s female double. I know who that makes me.

  The stop at the notary public doesn’t go well. Austry Ann goes in, then comes right back out, sticks her head in my side of the jeep.

  “Something about this doesn’t feel right,” she says.

  “What?”

  “Something. Would you come in with me?”

  “Jeez, Austry Ann, they stamp your paper. You sign your name.” But I go in anyway.

  It’s a little clapboard shotgun with a big vanity sign of the notary public out front, her photo and signature, like she thinks that she’s famous or should be. Who puts her name on her own billboard?

  I go in
, and right away I know that Austry Ann is right. The scene is askew like the floors in that costume shop. No desk, just this fuzzy pit furniture. The whole room is a couch upholstered in some animal print. Cheetah ? Leopard? Like a weird modular interplanetary cubic cat-thing has landed and is taking up residence wall to wall. The woman on the couch looks up at me. I recognize her from her billboard. But her face glazes, like a doughnut. She’s got that keen-blurry look of a weed-eater. Stoned. She’s wearing pinto printed jeans and a midriff ripped Kiss T-shirt.

  Austry Ann picks up a clipboard. Clipboard?

  Then I see him. He’s sprawling on another pit hassock, grinning. Everything about him tweaks me: trouble. He’s got a face like a snapped off hood ornament, shiny, petty criminal, misplaced, smile like a game show host. Red mesh T-shirt. Jeans that must require an inhaler for an accessory. When I read him, I get the cue: BAD ACTOR.

  Austry Ann is puzzling over the clipboard, and the pothead is leaning forward now and massaging her shoulder.

  Clipboard?

  Austry Ann says, “I really don’t see why I have to answer all these questions. It’s just a financial disclosure. I just need it stamped.” But she keeps scribbling.

  I am still standing. “Let me see that.”

  Austry Ann hands it to me.

  I read out loud, “How often a week do you and your partner have sex? Do you enjoy oral sex? Do you and your partner incorporate play?” I think I know how the costume shop stays in business.

  “Austry Ann, stand up, “ I say, and she does. The weed woman’s hand falls away, lands thunkily like it doesn’t know it has dropped.

  “Give me your papers,” I tell Austry Ann, and she does. I give them to the notary and say, “Stamp these now, and sign it.”