Scissors

by Stephane Michaka

  Raymond

  JOANNE

  There are prowlers in front of our house.

  Not at night, but in broad daylight. They look like potential renters checking out the neighborhood. Yesterday a young couple, a boy and a girl holding hands, stopped by our mailbox. They took a picture of it. As if that rusty old thing was a museum piece.

  In the end I figured it out. Those weren’t prowlers, they were Raymond’s readers.

  His stories are doing surprisingly well. There are publishers who want to translate his work in Turkey, in Japan, in Korea. Countries whose existence we’re hardly aware of. Raymond doesn’t know what to think about all this, he says it won’t last, he says people must be mistaking him for someone else. He’s so accustomed to being pursued by creditors he can’t imagine things are any different now. He’s still afraid to answer the telephone.

  I feel like putting up a sign: DO NOT DISTURB. WRITERS AT WORK.

  Now that I’m reviewing his short-story collection, now that I’m penciling in corrections as he asked me to, I feel as though I’m cooperating in a common endeavor with him. As though I’m mingling my voice with his.

  I’ve never felt my existence so intensely.

  He rarely speaks of his ex-wife. Sometimes he complains about having to send her money. Money he doesn’t have but sends her all the same. As if he felt indebted to her. He also sends checks to his children. “They’re bleeding me white,” he gripes. “It’s their mission in life.” They’re both over twenty; Raymond doesn’t know when it’s going to stop.

  “Imagine,” he says. “Imagine that my collection scores a big success. Just imagine it for a moment. You know what would happen? They’d still bleed me white. Yeah, that would just give them an excuse.”

  He ponders that and settles down to writing again.

  I don’t ask him questions about his past. If I want to know more about it, I read his stories. I know they’re partly invented. I know it’s not really him and not really his ex-wife. But the feelings are genuine. They sound too true to be made up.

  There are some feelings I’d like to cut out of Ray’s stories. Traces of love I’d like to send back into the past, into the void.

  Do I have the right to do that?

  Will he authorize me to do that?

  The Mattress

  It was around the end of May. Dan telephoned to announce that he was going to stop by our house. We hadn’t spoken for months. We got news of each other from our children. They’d call up to see if we were getting back together. But from Dan there had been nothing but radio silence. I thought about him daily, and I figured I had a place in his thoughts too. In any case, I hoped so.

  I was surprised to hear him say “our house” on the telephone. He didn’t use those words when we lived together. He’d say “the honky-tonk,” because our house was the place where people drank and partied, and also where our kids’ fights would end up with one of them throwing a bedside lamp at the other one’s head. A noisy, bright, disorderly place, open to our friends and our children’s friends. Until someone got hurt and we’d dial 911.

  Our house. Those words didn’t seem to imply just Dan and me anymore.

  We’d been married for more than twenty years. On the eve of our anniversary, Dan cried out, “Twenty years! Shit! You could cram a whole life into that much time.”

  He flipped through the calendar, as if looking for the years gone by.

  “We have crammed a whole life into them,” I replied. “We’ve crammed two lives into them, in case you forgot.”

  I was talking about Vincent and Christine. Now that they’re grown up, they don’t live at home anymore. Dan was afraid of being alone in the silent honky-tonk.

  A few days later, he decided to leave. He was seeing a woman, I think. Or maybe he met her after he left. What difference did it make? He wasn’t there anymore.

  When he talked about stopping by our house, I asked him, “What do you mean, our house?”

  He launched into a confused explanation, pausing at length between sentences. I could hear him breathing. It was as though he was standing next to me.

  “I’ve been invited to a colloquium on my stories. I’ll be in the area. We could see each other,” he said. “I’d like to see you,” he added.

  Dan had become a celebrity since the publication of his short-story collection. I would have liked to be happy for him, but something stopped me. I’d sip my coffee and look at the kitchen table. That was where he used to sit down to work. The Formica tabletop still carried his typewriter’s mark, a worn rectangle paler than the rest of the surface.

  I clenched my fist on the telephone cord. There was static.

  “I’d like to see you,” he said again.

  I sighed. The sigh came back into my ear, a sound amplified by distance.

  Dan was waiting. I felt I had to respond to him. “I won’t be here. I’m going to my aunt’s.”

  “Your aunt Susie?”

  “She needs help.”

  Silence fell. I had the sensation that I was Christine, in the act of lying to her mother. My daughter’s an adult, but I’m still always on the alert for the slightest quaver in her voice.

  “I could go with you.”

  Dan was talking like he was sitting in the kitchen. I could picture him raising his eyes from his typewriter and inviting himself to my aunt’s house.

  We’d been there together three years before. Dan and Uncle Paul had stayed up late into the night, drinking and talking. We’d slept upstairs in the guest room. I could hear the sound of the sea, so close the waves seemed to be sloshing around the bed. I dreamed I was adrift on a raft.

  “If you want, I’ll go with you.”

  His voice brought me back to the present. I said, “I thought you were with … I mean I supposed there was—”

  “Nobody, Chloe. Believe me. There’s nobody around.”

  I didn’t want to hear any more of that. After all those weeks, I still hadn’t gotten used to his absence. Not for a moment. I kept hoping and praying. As hard as when I wanted him to stop drinking.

  And then one day he did it. He hasn’t drunk alcohol since.

  “Come and we’ll see.”

  We agreed on a date and I hung up. Before he did, I believe.

  A few seconds later, I started feeling I’d been had. I’d always been an easy mark on the telephone. I’d give people my credit card number. I’d put myself in the red. Dan knew I yielded easily to temptation. He’d shake his head after seeing me hang up and then go back to his writing.

  I lit a cigarette and stared at the table.

  “Why did I tell you to come?”

  My aunt was delighted at the prospect of our visit. She was aware that Dan had left me. I didn’t let on that we were inviting ourselves to her house. I just said we’d be passing that way and we could stop by to see her.

  “Good idea,” she said. “Come while there’s still time. We live in the civilization of the last chance, right?”

  Aunt Susie had some favorite turns of phrase. They dated from when she’d worked as the editorial secretary of a history journal. The editor in chief was an alcoholic named Walter Sage. More than once, she’d written an editorial that he was unable to finish on account of being intoxicated. The journal wound up in bankruptcy, but Aunt Susie had seemed quite happy in the days when she was writing Walter Sage’s editorials, and she retained a marked interest in what she called “immediate history.” When she watched the TV news, she expressed opinions her husband, forced to listen to them, was the first to hear. Sunk in a chair after his day of work, he’d give his wife perplexed looks when she declared, “There’s the U.K., pulling that Trafalgar trick again,” or “Something’s rotten in the Dominican Republic.” Who could understand what she was talking about?

  She might have stayed like that for years, spending peaceful days, occasionally voicing her opinions in enigmatic form. But then life played her a dirty trick.

  For the past five or six month
s, more or less since Dan left me, Uncle Paul had lost possession of his mental faculties. The medical diagnosis had come down like a guillotine blade. In the near future, he would stop being able to recognize his wife.

  At the age of sixty, Uncle Paul, a former insurance salesman, divided his time between his classes in business school and his consulting work. Before the first signs of his disease, his mind had been lightning-quick. But in the past few weeks he’d had to quit going to class and seeing clients.

  According to my aunt, he would sit in the living room and look at the ocean. Sometimes he’d reply to his wife’s questions, which she asked in an effort to revive his memory. I don’t know if she continued to express her political opinions now that he was even less capable of understanding them.

  Every passing day blurred the external world a bit more.

  Thinking about my aunt in that big oceanfront house, imagining her with her steadily declining husband, kept me from sleeping. It’s also true that I’d been having a lot of trouble sleeping ever since Dan left.

  Sleeping pills had no effect. Once, after hours of tossing and turning in my bed, I went down to the kitchen, turned on the little TV set Dan had given me, and watched one of those programs where couples on the verge of divorce eventually come to blows. I figured most of the people on those shows must have been actors, even though I knew real couples came to blows too. I’d had an affair with someone. It had ended all at once. In short, sleep had fled from me.

  Before packing for our little trip, I called my daughter on the phone. She’d found a job on a farm. Her last postcard had included an inventory of the livestock: “Thirty cows, sixty goats, ten and a half donkeys.” The half donkey was a nine-day-old female. Christine hopes to become a veterinarian. At this point in time, she’s failed the entrance exam twice. I informed her that I was going to spend a few days at Aunt Susie’s house with Dan. She was quiet for a while. Then, in a playful tone, she said, “I’m sure you two are going to get back together.”

  She appeared to believe that more than I did. I almost told her I’d changed my mind, I wasn’t going to Aunt Susie’s, I preferred visiting her, Christine, at her farm. But that wasn’t a good idea. Nobody there would have welcomed me with open arms.

  “Kiss Daddy for me,” Christine said before hanging up.

  I packed a bag for three days, threw it on the backseat, and got on the highway, heading north.

  Dan arrived after I did. Night had just fallen. You couldn’t see the ocean, but you could hear the breaking waves. I was smoking a cigarette in front of the house. When his car turned into the driveway (I recognized the halo around the damaged headlight), I held myself back from rushing over to greet him.

  One thing at a time, I thought.

  The next day we went walking on the beach. The sky was heavy. A hard wind whipped our clothes and made them billow as though they were inflated.

  Dan grimaced.

  “What’s wrong?”

  He’d stopped walking. He bent his left arm and put it behind his back. His fingers struggled to reach his shoulder blade. All that could do was make his pain worse.

  “Did you injure yourself?”

  “That goddamn …”

  “Where does it hurt?”

  “Everywhere. It hurts there.”

  His hand fluttered behind his back. I couldn’t see the place he was pointing to. I put my hand on his shoulder blade and began to massage him. “You drove all day yesterday,” I said. “You must have been hunched over the steering wheel.”

  “It’s not that.”

  He turned around. I didn’t know where to put my hand. It hung in the air before I let it drop.

  “It’s the mattress,” he said.

  “The mattress?”

  “I couldn’t sleep. I tried, but in the end I got up.”

  I remembered that he’d been sitting in the wicker chair when I woke up.

  “You slept in the chair?”

  “I didn’t sleep. I just sat there.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Nothing. I was watching you.”

  “You watched me sleep?”

  He started walking again. I stayed where I was, imagining the scene. Dan sitting up beside me, like when Christine had a fever. I let him get farther away. Then I followed him, stepping in the footprints he’d just left.

  We hadn’t spent the previous night in my aunt’s house. Uncle Paul slept in the guest room now, while Aunt Susie stayed in their old bedroom. My uncle’s sickness didn’t allow them to sleep together anymore. Doing so was “risky”—that’s the word she’d used. An idiotic vision crossed my mind: Uncle Paul brandishing a knife over the body of his sleeping wife.

  Aunt Susie had opened the little house for us, a cottage situated close to the sea. Uncle Paul called it “the cabin.” They used to store a small boat and some beach accessories there. The boat was gone, but folding chairs, wooden rackets, and a net rolled into a ball were still piled up in a corner. My aunt’s children live far away. They don’t come home for holidays. They have small children of their own, and the old folks’ house isn’t a very attractive destination. In those parts even the summers have something wintry about them.

  It was cold in the cabin, especially at night. The evening before, after Dan arrived, I’d loaned him a sweater (I was sure he’d forget to bring one) before lying down on the bed. I was expecting that we’d have a conversation. Not a lengthy thrashing-out, but a brief exchange with the breaking waves in the background. He lay beside me and took my hand. He stroked the finger where I used to wear my wedding band. It wasn’t there anymore. I’d taken it off and stuck it in the glove compartment. At the moment, I regretted doing that.

  When I opened my eyes again, it was morning. I’d slept with my clothes on. I turned over and saw Dan sitting in the wicker chair. He was smoking (the smell of tobacco had awakened me), and I could barely make out his face. The venetian blinds behind him were parallel, horizontal lines. Dan didn’t say a word. I had the impression he didn’t see me.

  “Did I tell you Christine sends you a kiss?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “I spoke to her yesterday.”

  He exhaled smoke. After a moment he said, “I wrote her before I left. I was answering one of her letters. I wish she wouldn’t get her feelings hurt so easily …” (He leaned forward. The wicker creaked softly.) “ ‘Shit, Christine,’ I told her, ‘when you write a letter, pay attention to your sentences. Use commas, put periods, and I don’t know what else. But don’t write these twenty-page screeds!’ She’s twenty years old, for Pete’s sake.”

  “She’s not a writer. She’s not you.”

  “It’s not a question of writing. It’s a question of using short sentences.”

  Dan stopped talking. I’d turned over on my back. The agreeable sensation that filled me upon waking was gone. I heard the sound of the waves, and I remembered the chaos of our family life. The times when Christine had run away, the way Vincent would look at us when we got drunk in front of him, the parties that never ended and kept him from sleeping. We’d forget to get up and take them to school. One morning, while Dan was speeding along, driving Christine to her singing class, he crashed into a police car. He was sitting in the driver’s seat in his underpants. Afterward, he mimicked the expressions on the cops’ faces. How we laughed that day. Even Christine, who’d missed her class.

  Then everything got worse. It seems crazy that we remained husband and wife. We stayed together for the children, I suppose. Not so we could protect them but so we could protect ourselves. Maintain the illusion that they needed their parents.

  My shoes were full of sand. It was more crumbly in Dan’s footprints, which were where I was putting my feet. I ended up walking on solid ground.

  I didn’t want our weekend of patching things up to be ruined. I said, “We can change the mattress.”

  He looked at me.

  “There’s another mattress in the garage, leaning against the wall.”


  A couple of senior citizens passed us on the beach. They had their arms around each other’s waists, and the wind was puffing up their clothes just as it was ours. The woman smiled at us. The man flicked his fingers against the visor of his cap. I smiled at them. Dan was looking at the sand.

  “Is it an innerspring?”

  “What?”

  “The mattress in the garage. Is it an innerspring?”

  “How should I know?”

  “That’s what I need. It’s not a luxury item,” he added, seeing my expression. “Most mattresses are innerspring.”

  “I find it hard to believe—”

  “I’m telling you.”

  “I find it hard to believe we’re talking about mattresses.”

  I turned around. The senior citizens, no longer strolling along the beach, were walking up to Aunt Susie’s house.

  “I’m sorry,” Dan said.

  It seemed to me he wasn’t talking about the mattress, he was making a general apology. For having left. For the twenty years that were in the act of slipping through our fingers.

  “Chloe—”

  “Look.”

  I’d just noticed the boat that used to be stored in the cabin. It was stranded on the beach a few yards from the waterline.

  We exchanged glances. There was a light in Dan’s eyes. I could already see us far from the shore, celebrating our reunion with a little excursion in that boat.

  We went over to it and looked inside. The boat’s bottom was worm-eaten. Long strips of sand showed through the cracks. In a corner of the boat was a small yellow plastic bucket full of seawater.

  “Let’s go get the mattress,” I said.

  We had the whole day in front of us. An entire day to carry the mattress from the garage to the cabin.

  The label contained the word “innerspring.”

  Dan nodded and said, “I told you.”

  “You think the two of us can carry it?”

  “I can carry it by myself.”