by Amity Gaige
He sat back against the radiator, smiling with quiet amazement. His head and the side of his face and the plants in the room were lit with sun. Alice nodded slowly.
She settled on the far side of the small room, leaning against a file cabinet.
“I like you very much,” she said. “But from a certain distance.”
“Well, I like you up close,” he said, looking at her.
“I like you as a friend.”
“I like you up close.”
They looked at one another. The bell clanged at the front of the store. He stood on the other side of the room, completely straight, completely unguarded, completely facing her. He faced her and watched her as if deaf. She could see his breastbone rise and fall with his breath. He was staring at her. He was perfectly created. He was facing her completely. And then, swiftly, without further comment, he came toward her. Just the two three steps it took to cross the small blue room. He reached one warm hand inside the back of her parka to her naked back. He gripped her there, by her stem.
“Don’t,” she said.
“Please,” he said. “Just once.”
He bent down and put his nose against her nose. Standing there together, she felt his breath in her mouth. And then it was like drinking. Her eyes slid closed. She was drinking muscle and silk and salt. She heard him breathe thirstily through his nose.
“Oh,” he said. “Oh God.”
She felt his hardness against her. Suddenly this filled her with a physical passion edged with rage. He was up inside her parka now, inside her nest. She clawed at the sides of his arms, his shoulders, as if looking for the switch that controlled him. In response, he pressed her nearer, reaching further in. He kicked her sneakers apart. He was fumbling now, with one hand, down her pants. She grabbed his wrist. He pushed down anyway. She could feel his cold fingers and his relentlessness slide through all the barriers of mind and body and hem and was overcome with the annihilating physical desire to accept. When he reached into her, she gasped, opening her eyes. It was as if they were both coming upon the same sweeping view. He moved his hand slowly in the silence. Her body paused, expanding. The walls fell as curtains, soundless. She waked herself.
“All right,” she whispered, turning her head away. “That’s enough.”
He exhaled, putting his mouth to her neck. His lips were warm and soft.
“OK,” she said. She put one hand gently on his chest.
Slowly, he withdrew his hand. She closed her eyes. She saw him disappearing down a tunnel of time, spinning away. It felt good to be in his arms and it felt good to see him disappear spinning down the tunnel.
Then she heard a voice: “Good God.”
Someone was standing in the doorway of the storeroom.
“Who’s there?” Alice said hoarsely.
Hal stood, large and inert, in her way. All at once she felt strangled by him and by his proximity and his power and his stupid youth and by herself also. “Move,” she shouted. He lifted his hands from her as if from something burning. He stepped aside.
Marlene took a step back from the doorway.
“Mother?” Alice said.
The stroller was between them, the engorged purple blue eyes of her children staring up at her. Their eyes moved philosophically from face to face—mother, man, mother, man. The man from before! Evelyn smiled with remembrance, thinking of Airplane. She lifted her arms.
“No,” Alice gasped.
“I—” said Marlene, shaking her head. “I didn’t—”
The older woman was withdrawing from the doorway. She was being sucked away. The infants’ fuzzy heads went backward into space. Their eyes, searching, could no longer locate their mother. By the time Alice straightened her clothes and came stumbling out of the storeroom after them, she saw Marlene making haste out the door, a tall man in a raincoat helping to lift the stroller out sideways.
He stepped into the frigid afternoon. The air was raw and cold. His lungs contracted; he bent over coughing. Then, straightening his coat, he tried to breathe normally. A siren rose up and died in the distance. He walked several paces and stopped. He turned, and walked back to where he’d been standing. He was shoved from behind by a man exiting the clinic.
“Sorry,” the man mumbled.
“No problem,” said Charlie. “My fault.”
The man, his eyes widening, stopped and looked at him. “Who wins a tie? That’s what I want to know. Who wins a tie?”
Charlie nodded. “I don’t know,” he said.
He watched the man as he strode away down the street, talking aloud. Then Charlie discovered, like some cheap souvenir, a smile frozen on his face. The same disbelieving smile he’d been wearing just now, in his office.
Charlie blinked city grit out of his eyes. A bus came grinding up the hill and pulled toward the stop on the side of the road. As if the bus itself wore the news flashing on its sign, the impact of the moment finally registered. The shock of being forced out, banished, the failure. The shock of the cold air. The freefall. The terror of it. Dead of insincerity, the smile dropped from his face. His heart went dumb. How in the world would he be able to say it out loud? He would not be able to say it out loud. He did not speak this language.
“Oh, Jesus,” he said, his own voice drowned out by the traffic. “Jesus, help me.”
Numbly, Charlie began to walk. The wind blew his coat open, but he did not move to close it.
Streetlights glowed through the curtains. The hallway light cast a path across the dark apartment floor. In this twilight, the objects in the room were shadow colored, the two sitting chairs, the bed, broad as the sum of two bodies. Alice laid her keys on the side table and shut the apartment door. Like a child coming out of her bedroom from a nightmare, open to the meagerest signs of rescue, she was gladdened to see the light on in her mother’s room down the hall, and to hear the sound of a cough, zippers.
Stepping forward into the darkness, she struck a large object with her foot. She bent down—the suitcase. She looked down the hall toward the lighted nursery.
A room with a mother in it was always a changed room. The lights a mother turned on were different lights. Brighter, further. And a mother’s smell: perfume, sherry, wax. A smell so singular it broke the heart, for there was only one mother, and you did not ever get another one or another chance. And it was never right and never enough. When she was sad, you would wilt up and die for a little while, and when she was happy and dressed up in her blue silk dress, it made you yourself feel dressed in a blue dress, and thusly in your pajamas you floated, beatific, until the electrician or the volleyball coach came to the door to pick up your mother. And when they left you just got very small and waited. Much later, credits rolling over the treacherous face of J.R., she would return, the mother. And once (it had been the final date in memory, the electrician) you pretended to be asleep because she was sobbing. Walking across the flickering room with her hands over her face. You opened your eyes a crack just to see how horrible to see. For now and always would the color blue be twinned with this weepy march of the mother across the darkened room, as would silk, electricity, pajamas, couches, doorbells, and Larry Hagman, catching in its web of associations almost everything obliquely, until the taint of sadness formed a nagging little footnote to every memory of her, and sometimes even broke free of all context and became a rogue memory, doing senseless violence to others in the middle of a day.
Alice stood in the nursery doorway. Her mother was bent over her small, leatherette bag, stuffing in socks, a book, Kleenex, a neck pillow.
“Mother,” she said. “Why are you crying?”
“Shh,” said Marlene. She pointed at the twins. “I will speak with you outside this room.”
Alice backed away from the doorway, watching her mother’s final, angry movements. Her throat burned. She rubbed it with the fat of her hand, following her mother down the hall.
As soon as they reached the living room, Marlene spun around.
“What took you s
o long? Were you with him?”
“No,” said Alice. “No, Mommy. I was walking. I was thinking.”
“I should have known. I’m disgusted. I’m disgraced.”
“Don’t leave,” said Alice. “Sit down.”
“I’m not going to sit in this place. And since when do you call me Mommy?”
Alice reached out her hand. Marlene’s face was shining with sweat and tears, her eyes wide with a crazy look.
“Mother,” she said. “Please calm down.”
“How could you? How could you?” Marlene’s arms flapped at her sides. “Have you been using me as a cover? Is that why you asked me to stay?”
“Please just listen to me. I barely know him. It was just that once.”
“I saw.”
“What you saw, that’s all there was. I swear to God.”
“He’s your lover! I heard you on the telephone.”
“He’s not. I swear to you. And it will never happen again. Ever.”
“I don’t believe you. Why should I believe you? I didn’t raise you to be—” Marlene felt the woosh of air, and she knew the word was irrevocable, and yet it brought such acute satisfaction, “—a whore.”
Alice pressed her chest with her hand. “A what?”
“A whore! What you did was what a whore does. I should have seen this cheapness in you and this—” Marlene clawed the air for the word.
“Me?” Alice took a step toward her mother. “Me, a whore?”
“Don’t. Don’t you shirk this.”
Alice stepped closer, whispering now. “I was conceived in a hotel.”
“You were not conceived in a hotel!”
“No, that’s right. A boardinghouse. A boardinghouse.”
With a sharp cry, Marlene turned, raised her hands to the ceiling. Then she collapsed into a chair, unable to speak. Alice went to the window and looked out to the damp blue street, a damp blue tongue licking the city. She spoke quietly.
“I don’t want to offend you, Mother. I don’t even blame you for calling me a whore because maybe I am. And that’s my own fault. My—shame. But Mother, you’ve never loved anyone, so how can you pretend to know what it’s like?”
Marlene’s eyes flashed. “I did too love people!”
“Who? My father? You loved him so much you forgot to tell him he was the father of a child?”
“He left, Alice. He was gone.”
“But you never even told him about me. Maybe he would have stayed! If he knew about me!”
Alice’s voice broke. Marlene looked away, through the wall and backward, to where the broad back still dented the side of the bed.
“I didn’t have enough time to love him. If I did, it was for such a little while.”
“Exactly. There are people you love for just a moment.” Alice started to cry. “And then there are people, people you love too much. People who break your heart when they leave the room, you—love them so desperately.”
Marlene looked up. “Charlie,” she said.
“Love like that kills you. You hang by a thread from it. You wouldn’t know!”
“I do know.”
“How do you know?” cried Alice. “Tell me how you know. You spent your whole life warning me against people. I thought I was disrespecting you if I cared for anyone! It still feels shameful. What did you want me to do?”
“This is unendurable,” said Marlene, standing. “What does all this have to do with anything? I’m the one who should be upset. I was the one hanging around cleaning bottles while you were off with—”
“He’s not my lover!”
“You can’t control what I think, Alice.” Marlene grabbed the doorknob, and flung open the front door. “I’ll believe whatever I want. That’s my right.”
She pulled the suitcase out onto the landing.
Still crying, Alice tried to help, but Marlene swatted her away.
The suitcase sat on the landing. It filled up the doorway and the space between them. For several moments, breathing hard, they both stood, staring at it.
Marlene sighed. “You have to tell Charlie.”
Alice wiped her face with her sleeve. She stared at the suitcase.
“Tell Charlie. He would want you to. If what you’re saying is true, he’ll get over it.”
Outside, the horn of a taxi sounded.
“You’re really leaving?” said Alice. “You actually called a cab?” Her voice was suddenly shrill. “Please don’t leave Mother. I need—I need—help. I need you.”
Marlene stepped over the suitcase and faced her daughter. She brushed Alice’s hair back over her shoulders and smoothed it. Through her tears, Alice smiled gratefully at this tenderness. But then, just as quickly, Marlene withdrew her hand and stepped out into the lighted hallway, her purse over her shoulder.
“Perhaps you’re right, Alice,” she said. “Perhaps I never loved a man. Not even for a little while. I was never half the woman you are. But I know the pain of love you’re talking about.” Trembling, Marlene drew her wrist under her nose. “Because I love you.”
Then, as she had a thousand times, Marlene Bussard straightened, drawing herself up to full height. She grabbed the suitcase handle and lowered it down in front of her, stair by stair, and was gone.
The schoolteacher threw his coat on a chair and collapsed into it. He rested his big, curly head against his hand, lacking the strength to remove his shoes. Under his feet, the patterns in the shabby Persian carpet seemed to have faded even more since yesterday. Such was the exhaustion of Fridays. Such was the way he saw things on Fridays, after a week of teaching the youth of this country. But why’s it called Portrait of a Young Artist? one of them had crowed that afternoon. I mean, I don’t get it. The guy doesn’t make any art.
The schoolteacher kicked at the fringe of the carpet.
“Hey, fuck you, kid,” he said aloud, pointing.
He heard a crunching outside the apartment building. Weakly, he raised his disheveled head. Through the streetlit curtains, he saw a figure pass his window in the growing darkness. The figure came around the front where the schoolteacher left the curtains open a crack.
It was the husband from upstairs. He was walking slowly, almost morosely, thought the schoolteacher, like a boy bringing bad marks home from school. The schoolteacher watched him. He heard the key scratch in the front door. Then the husband made his way, moroser still, up the old creaking staircase to his wife. He imagined her up there, at the sink. For he could hear the couple’s plumbing whenever they used it. The water scooting up and down the ancient pipes. In fact, he could hear everything about them, if not most constantly their footsteps. Such heavy footsteps for such average-sized people. Up and down all night, to the keening of babies. The sounds of the couple upstairs had become such a part of the schoolteacher’s life that they interfered with his dreams. He used to dream grand dreams: Rimbaud once visited him and sat on the bed reciting a recipe for bouillabaisse. And once he’d met Papa himself—old Hemingway—whittling on a stump, and Papa had said to the schoolteacher, “All this time, I was trying to look with my eyes. But my leg hurt. And then I couldn’t see anymore, and I realized I should have been looking with my leg.”
Now he dreamt only of water and toilets and jewelry box music.
He heard the husband’s key scratch in the upstairs door. What would it be like, wondered the schoolteacher, to come home to the arms of somebody like her? She appealed to some Muse-seeking thing inside him. She looked somehow French. He would have liked to see her in a corset. He had watched them both, many times, through the peephole, through the window, even on the street, walking on the opposite side.
Sure, he himself had once had a serious girlfriend. It was the worst thing in the world. She was a short, button-nosed girl from Philadelphia. A virgin and a graduate student of advanced mathematics. A wonderful girl with clear dark eyes, intelligent counting eyes. They were supposed to get married. But then he’d seen this girl cry. She had bought an ice cream on the boar
dwalk and it had fallen off the cone, and she had looked at it for a moment, and began to cry. Just like a child! When the schoolteacher remembered the series of events, he sometimes forgot which had come first—her crying or his realizing that he couldn’t marry her. A grown woman, crying over ice cream. He didn’t think he could stand a lifetime of that.
So he had told her that he didn’t love her anymore, or that he never had, in the deepest sense. Not true love, as was necessary. He loved parts of her and surely she loved parts of him. He loved her little nose that took on a shine in the heat, and surely she loved things about him—his poetry perhaps—but there was something missing between them. Think of mathematics, he’d offered. True love was like a prime number—rare, indivisible. They were not indivisible.
The girl from Philadelphia stared at the ice cream in the puddle. So that’s that? she had said. Then she began to cry harder. Like a child! It had made him feel a million miles away from her. It was the worst thing in the world.
And now, overhead, he heard the couple upstairs stomping, fighting. The schoolteacher sat upright. What on God’s earth could you count on? Shocked and offended, he stared up at the ceiling. A piece of plaster drifted down onto his arm. A shout. Crying. How could he stand it, the husband? How could he stand it, whether it was his fault or not?
He himself had been grateful that he’d cut it off with the mathematician. He decided it wasn’t practical to be married to a temperamental woman. That night, after she dropped her ice cream and was gone forever, he stayed awake in bed for a long time. When he finally slept, it was a very, very deep sleep. He slept as a man sleeps moving into a new lifetime after death. In the morning, he awoke with a terrible realization: he was no longer a poet. What sort of poet breaks up with a woman because she shows emotion? All of a sudden he understood that he had always been a terrible poet and always would be. He wrote poems of sanity. And as Sophocles had said, all the poetry of sanity would be brought to naught by the poetry of madness, and behold, at the end of time, the sane poets would not matter.