Scissors

by Stephane Michaka

  The mattress looked heavy to me. Especially for someone whose back hurt. When Dan pulled on the side handle, the mattress tipped over onto the garage floor. The top half of the mattress was charred. The fire had apparently been extinguished before it could burn the bottom half.

  “Piece of crap,” Dan said. “Unusable.”

  “Why are you saying that? I’m sure we could sleep on it.”

  “You want to sleep on that thing? Really?”

  The fluorescent lights, which we hadn’t switched on, began to sizzle. Aunt Susie came into the garage. “Here I am, at your service!” she said.

  She strode in with her usual light step, wearing her kitchen apron. My aunt knew that Dan was fond of her shortbread cookies. The visit from her neighbors, the couple we’d seen on the beach, had distracted her from her task.

  When we’d arrived back, she’d been just seeing them off. I’d asked her if we could borrow the mattress. All she’d said was, “Go on, I’ll be there in a minute.”

  The fluorescent lights reflected on her brown hair. “I should have warned you,” she said. “It’s been damaged.”

  The lilt in her voice contrasted with Dan’s sullen demeanor. I elbowed him so he’d make an effort to smile. He gave me an uncomprehending look.

  Aunt Susie seemed to want to settle the matter as soon as possible and get back to her cookies.

  I said in a jocular tone, “Was someone playing with matches?”

  “It was Paul. Ten days ago, he started tinkering with the car engine. He caused a short circuit and something caught fire. The flames blackened the windshield, but fortunately Paul wasn’t hurt. I heard him yell and got to him in time. I took down the fire extinguisher and …”

  We were looking at the mattress.

  “It was on the roof of the car,” my aunt explained.

  The burn mark was shaped like a man’s head on an elongated torso.

  “It could have been worse.”

  I was the one who said those words, and I felt stupid.

  My aunt winked and said, “Well, we won’t be giving him the launch codes.”

  The wink was addressed to Dan. She was no doubt implying that he should make a story out of the incident. But that wasn’t his type of story. He did couples who ruin each other’s lives or people who can’t manage to stay sober or make a home. He wrote about what he knew. I would have liked it if just for once he would have told a story about Uncle Paul setting off a nuclear war.

  I smiled at my aunt to indicate that she was wasting her time, but she’d already turned toward Dan. “Take it if you want it,” she said.

  After we carried the mattress to the cabin, we went back to the house to eat cookies. It was the first time I’d had a good look at Uncle Paul since the onset of his sickness. The previous evening, I’d seen him through the doorway of his room, sitting on the bed and unbuttoning his shirt. He’d raised his eyes as if he felt himself being watched. I’d waved at him. He hadn’t recognized me.

  This evening Uncle Paul was in the living room, looking out at the ocean. Toward the horizon the sea was calm, but waves were pounding the shore. At brief intervals, trails of foam ebbed back.

  My uncle was a man of imposing size. Aunt Susie used to say he could have been a sports coach. His talent was for training other people. But patience was not his strong point. If you lingered in a restroom, he was the kind of guy who would get tired of waiting for you and drive off. Aunt Susie had once paid the price for staying too long in the ladies’ at a highway service area. Now Uncle Paul couldn’t go anywhere without her.

  When he woke up in the morning, she’d comb his hair. That simple act had become impossible for him. His face had the expression of someone waiting for the punch line of a joke. He’d look at you with his mouth slightly open. You’d feel obliged to put on the same look. Or to tell a story and defer its ending so he’d have reasons to be continually surprised.

  He was still able to talk. He’d speak his questions out loud. He’d wonder where he’d parked the car (he never mentioned the garage) or whether someone would come and get him at a given time (my aunt was the only person taking care of him) or who was going to come and when.

  Very quickly, we all had cookies in our mouths. Dan swallowed two at once.

  I turned to my uncle and said, “We found the boat this morning.”

  He screwed up his eyes.

  “It had a little bucket in it. A yellow bucket.”

  Dan asked my aunt, “Did it belong to your children?”

  I wanted Dan to address at least a few words to my uncle, the beginnings of a conversation, but Dan didn’t understand. I frowned. He took a paper napkin from the coffee table. His knees were covered with cookie crumbs.

  Aunt Susie got up to serve the tea.

  “A yellow bucket? Someone must have forgotten it. Who takes milk?”

  I waved the milk off. Dan held out his cup. My aunt looked at him benevolently. “What are you writing at the moment?”

  “At the moment, I’m not writing anything.”

  “He’s going to a colloquium.”

  My voice had turned shrill, as if I was announcing an exploit.

  “A meeting of writers?”

  “No,” Dan said, sounding apologetic. “University professors. They study my short stories and see things in them I didn’t see when I wrote them.”

  “Impressive.”

  I glanced at my uncle. For an instant, I thought he looked the way he’d looked in former days. He was keeping his mouth closed. He seemed attentive.

  Dan put his hands on his knees. Then he spoke, a little more softly than before: “When I went to AA meetings, everyone told their story. The rest of us listened. We recognized ourselves in the other people’s stories.”

  My aunt and I exchanged glances. Dan had taken me by surprise. I’d never mentioned his drinking problem to Aunt Susie. I’d been silent about my own troubles with alcohol, too. Drinking with your husband in order to feel less alone had turned out to be a bad move.

  Then something happened. Uncle Paul sat forward on his chair. He planted his feet solidly and waggled his fingers. His tongue lolled out as he tapped hard on the empty air. Every time his index fingers struck the invisible keys, he made a moist, salivating sound. Each sound corresponded to a keystroke. Not only was this a funny sight, but his movements were also somehow graceful.

  He was imitating Dan at his typewriter: not just a drunken man but a man determined to stay the course despite the state into which drink had plunged him.

  Uncle Paul knew more about Dan than I thought.

  We sat staring, our cups suspended in midair, utterly surprised to see my uncle revive before our eyes.

  During those few seconds, it seemed to me that nothing was tragic, that with a little goodwill we could overcome everything. I took Dan’s hand and squeezed it.

  Dan stroked my hand as he’d done the night before, his fingers passing over mine, feeling for the wedding ring.

  It was still in the glove compartment, but a vision from I don’t know where rose before my eyes, and I saw my wedding ring floating in the yellow bucket and the bottom of the boat covered with sand and water, which ebbed and flowed and made the wedding ring, the bucket, the whole boat shake.

  “Dinner was delicious. Like the whole day. What a delicious day. Your aunt is a delicious person.”

  “You’re talking like Gertrude Stein.”

  Having said yes to everything my aunt had proposed to pour for me, I’d returned to the cabin fairly tipsy. Dan had drunk nothing but water.

  My remark made him smile. When we were students, one of our games consisted of repeating the same word from one sentence to the next, as Gertrude Stein did in her stories.

  Dan’s smile vanished. “I’m tired,” he said. “I feel better than I did this morning, but I’m tired. This morning I had a backache, but I wasn’t tired.”

  He fell silent. I was sitting on the edge of the bed, unbuttoning my sweater. Dan lay on the burned
mattress.

  In a hesitant voice, he said, “I hope we can love each other.”

  The only light in the cabin came from a little lamp at the foot of the bed. I couldn’t make out Dan’s features.

  Was he talking about loving each other though separated or loving each other and staying together?

  “Do you want to sleep with me?”

  He was out of the bed now, standing beside the innerspring mattress and waiting for my answer.

  I pricked up my ears for the sound of the sea.

  You would have thought it had receded altogether.

  I slept beside Dan on the innerspring. Or rather I snuggled up against him and waited for sleep to come.

  The sound of the breaking waves returned with obsessive regularity. I set myself to counting them.

  I felt Dan’s breath on my neck. Like a current of warm air filtering under the door. I forbade myself to stir, to make the slightest movement. I didn’t want to awaken him.

  The minutes, the hours went by.

  I counted to a hundred and then back to one without putting myself to sleep. Sentences began to form in my head. Then they crumbled away like sand castles.

  At the end of what seemed like an eternity, I turned over abruptly, determined to wake Dan up so he’d stop breathing down my neck.

  But he wasn’t snuggled against me. He was sitting in the wicker chair.

  I pushed away the hair blocking my sight. When my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I saw that Dan was staring into space, as frightened as if he’d just learned that his days were numbered.

  I stretched out my arms to him.

  “I’m here,” I said. “Don’t you see me? I’m here. My love. I’m here.”

  JOANNE

  On Saturday we take up our posts at O’Brien’s, an Irish pub a few steps from our house. We sit in a corner and set to work. Each of us has a copy of the story. I drink tea. Raymond has apple juice, which is the color of whiskey.

  “ ‘The Mattress.’ You’re sure about the title?”

  “Positive.”

  “But is the mattress at the heart of the story? Besides, what kind of mattress are we talking about?”

  At first he thinks I’m joking. Then he realizes I’m not going to let anything pass.

  “They talk about an innerspring.”

  “Then you should call it ‘Innerspring.’ ” I scratch out the original title.

  “ ‘The Innerspring,’ then,” Raymond says.

  “I think ‘Innerspring’ is very good.”

  He laughs his little laugh.

  “What’s funny?”

  His face melts me, but I’m not about to relent. I say, “Are we playing or are we working?”

  “I’m sorry, it’s just that … it’s the title Douglas would have chosen.”

  He stops laughing and concentrates on the story. I emulate him. The manuscript of Raymond’s collection, sent back by Douglas, is under my copy of “Innerspring.” Douglas’s manuscript bears no trace of his cuts. The edited text is clean, unmarked, retyped at Raymond’s expense. I’ve checked the number of pages. More than half have disappeared.

  I didn’t dare tell him. I was evasive. “His cuts aren’t all bad,” I said, trying to spare him a shock. If he saw them, he’d start drinking again.

  At the end of several minutes, he looks up at me and says, “Have you finished going through Douglas’s manuscript?”

  “Raymond. We’re correcting ‘Innerspring.’ ”

  “Sorry, I lost focus.” He turns his attention back to the story. “ ‘Innerspring,’ ” he says, his voice trailing off. “Why not?” He sips his apple juice and makes a note of the new title.

  When he puts down his glass, he notices the envelope. “Say, what’s in there?”

  “Hands off!” I say, tapping his fingers.

  “Joanne—”

  “I’ll show it to you later.”

  “How many cuts?”

  “Later, I said.”

  He wants to know. The most I can do is delay the moment a little.

  “Raymond, you say it yourself: You have to revise a story while it’s still warm.”

  I don’t like the expression on his face. His left eyebrow’s more furrowed than usual. Like he was ogling a bottle of gin.

  I’m afraid he’s going to snatch the envelope away from me, but I don’t put my hand on it. Let him decide.

  He smiles and looks toward the bar.

  I should be relieved, but I remain tense. My eyes go back to “Innerspring.” The page with the last words is sticking out from under the rest of the pages.

  “Let’s start at the end,” I say.

  “The end?”

  “The final sentences.”

  He picks up the page and begins to read slowly. “ ‘I’m here … Don’t you see me? I’m here. My l—’ ”

  “ ‘My love. I’m here,’ ” I say, finishing it for him so it won’t take two hours.

  “You don’t like the ending?”

  “I think we can get rid of the third ‘I’m here,’ don’t you?”

  “Wait,” he says, looking at the page.

  I start to lose patience. “The reader understands she’s there. No need to say it three times!”

  I pick up my pencil and strike the third “I’m here.” I press so hard the lead breaks, leaving a zigzag mark on the page.

  I look at Raymond out of the corner of my eye. He’s gazing at the envelope.

  I say, “And you know what? I almost feel like striking ‘My love,’ too.”

  “Striking it?”

  “I don’t see what it’s doing there.”

  “It’s what she feels.”

  I’m waiting for his tongue to slip, I’m waiting for him to tell me, “It’s what Marianne feels.”

  “As far as I’m concerned, she’s not in love anymore. Yes, she wants to save her marriage. She’s hanging on to that. But there can’t be any more talk of love. If the story ends with that word—”

  “It ends with ‘I’m here.’ ”

  “She’s there, but her love for him, that’s gone. It’s run away, it’s flown off!” I say, flinging my hands in the air. “That’s what the story’s about, isn’t it?”

  He rubs the back of his neck. “It’s more complicated than that,” he says. “As far as I’m concerned, there’s some ambiguity.”

  “That’s the whole question.”

  He looks up at me. I raise my teacup and hide behind it.

  Raymond turns a few pages. “Show me the places where the ambiguity poses a problem.”

  I sit back in my chair and start to go over the story again. But I can’t concentrate. Or rather, I focus on details. I search for proof that this story is truer than the others.

  Is he still in love with her?

  I look at him.

  He’s not paging through the story anymore. He’s filched the envelope Douglas sent.

  “Raymond!”

  He winks at me, holds up the envelope, and slips out the manuscript.

  I heave a sigh. I’m afraid for him, for us.

  He mutters, “I can’t let him do this,” and turns over the cover page.

  RAYMOND

  “July 8, 7 a.m.”

  Should I put the time or not? What’ll he think if I do? He’ll think I’m a wreck. Ah well, let him think that, since it’s the case.

  “Dearest Douglas, You have to get me out of … I have to get out of this. I’m going to explain and you’ll understand. Things have never seemed so clear to me.”

  May as well lay it all out.

  “Even though I didn’t sleep last night. I’ve been rereading the manuscript and looking at your changes, your amputations, your …”

  He calls them cuts. Better just write “your cuts” so as not to antagonize him.

  “I’ve read over all the stories and examined every sentence, I’ve consulted the original texts and compared the two versions, yours and mine.”

  Watch out here. Kid gloves.
<
br />   “Yours is often better than mine.”

  Tell him that so he’ll listen to the rest.

  “Douglas, listen to me, I’ve reread the manuscript until the letters jumped off the page and started vibrating in front of my face. Not an hour ago, I was still shooing them away like flies. If Joanne had woken up, she would have called the emergency number and I would have wound up in the same medical center as I did two years ago. The one that used to be a hospital for the criminally insane. You could see their names carved into the linoleum with knives, and their obscene drawings …”

  What’s got into me, telling him that? Besides, it’s not true. The medical center was built only recently. I’m writing a short story.

  “But now I can see clearly. I don’t want my stories to be published in their present form. (Did you edit ‘Mine’? It looks as though you didn’t—I counted the same number of words as in my version.) Put simply, they’re no longer my stories. I recognize something very dark in them that resembles my past life, but I don’t see myself in them as I am today. I’ve come through all that. I sure came close to not making it, but if there’s one thing this collection—in my version—shows, it’s that I’ve come through. I didn’t write twenty-two short stories as hard-edged as despair. I don’t know where that despair comes from, Douglas. Is it yours?”

  Christ. I tell him that and I’m dead. He’ll scrap my stories. I have to win him over, soften him up with compliments.

  “Cutting the last five pages of ‘Think Twice’ (which you’ve renamed ‘Fill It with Super’) so that it ends just when the guy finds himself alone in the middle of the desert—you ought to get a medal for that, the Astutest Editor Award. But that’s just it, it’s not mine. It’s too brilliant to be mine.”

  Precisely, he’ll reply. Precisely.

  “I know you’re going to think I’m an ingrate. I’m not forgetting that you’ve spent long hours, maybe even entire nights, revising these stories to make them better. They’ve cost you time and money. I want you to know that I’ve just placed the check, the generous advance you procured for me, in an envelope, and I’m prepared to return it to you.”

  That makes me think … The check I mailed him to cover his typing expenses is sure to bounce. Let’s wait until he asks me for the money. Don’t make a move until he asks for it.