I Thought You Were Dead

by Pete Nelson

  He hung up, banged himself on the head with the receiver, then hung up again. The damage was done.

  The best-case scenario was that she’d get the message, buy his story, skip the visit, go to Paris, and have such a terrible time that when she got back, she’d forget to ask about his car trouble. As he stood in line at McDonald’s, waiting to order something for dinner, he worked through the remaining scenarios. One was that she wouldn’t get the message in time and would drive to his house and wait there for him, which meant he couldn’t go home. She would probably check her home machine or her voice mail, get his message, and turn around, but he still couldn’t go home, on the chance that she might go to his house and wait for him anyway. He didn’t dare call to check his answering machine because Tamsen might have let herself in and might pick up the phone. Worse still, she would get his message, get in her car, drive to Boston, and then head west on the Pike to stop at every rest area to find him and rescue him. He wouldn’t put it past her.

  After he’d eaten, he went to his car, took an adjustable wrench from his tool box, and loosened the cable on his battery, so that when he tried, the car really wouldn’t start. Then he went to sleep in the backseat. If she found him, it would look as if he’d been telling the truth.

  He’d had better nights.

  When he got home the following morning, he played back a message on his answering machine from Tamsen. She said that she hoped everything was all right and that she’d call him when she got back. At least she hadn’t driven all the way to find him missing. The damage was minimal, but it was damage all the same.

  He pictured Tamsen and Stephen in Paris, laughing gaily, wearing berets and striped shirts and smoking Gitanes and agreeing that Paul was a loser and she was better off without him. He pictured them clinking their wineglasses together, toasting their future.

  À votre santé.

  Merde.

  12

  Scared

  He went to the Bay State the next night, but it did nothing to lift his spirits. D. J., Mickey, and McCoy were at the end of the bar. Brickman was in the corner, talking to a sweet-looking doe-eyed blond at least a dozen years his junior. McCoy moved down three stools and bought Paul a Guinness.

  “Who’s Bricks talking to?” Paul asked. A charming guy when he wanted to be, Bricks had flirted with countless younger women before, but somehow this girl seemed too young, too innocent. Bricks drove a Porsche. He would offer the girl a ride home, and she would see the car and say yes, and why not? She was an adult, presumably. Tonight, for some reason, Paul found it annoying.

  “Don’t know,” McCoy said. “You hear my news? I’m moving to Paris. Maybe at the end of the summer.”

  Paul was shocked. Nobody ever moved from Northampton.

  “Why is everybody going to Paris?” Paul said. “You know, that thing about the French liking American jazz players in France is just a myth. They hate jazz in France. They hate Jerry Lewis too. They hate everything.”

  Brickman and the doe-eyed blond rose from the table and left. The girl was laughing, tipsy, perhaps already thinking of the story she would have to tell her friends back at the dormitory tomorrow.

  “If he touches her,” Paul joked, “swear ta God I’ll put him in the hospital.”

  “He could get a room next to Bender,” McCoy said.

  “What’s Bender doing in the hospital?”

  “Heart attack.”

  “What?”

  “Why does everybody say that?” McCoy said. “Am I mumbling? He. Had. A. Heart. Attack.”

  “Bender can’t have a heart attack,” Paul said. “Bender spends five hours a day in the gym. If he can have a heart attack, I should be dead. How?”

  They’d found him on the bike path out by the mall after he’d cycled to Bread and Circus to buy organic produce.

  “Poor Bender,” Paul said. “What hospital is he in?”

  “I don’t know,” McCoy said. He called out, “Does anybody know what hospital Bender is in?”

  D. J. and Mickey shrugged.

  It was raining as he walked to his car. He took stock. Bender had had a heart attack. His father couldn’t speak. Stella was old. Mortality was everywhere he looked. When he got home, he lifted Stella onto the bed, where she lay with her chin on her paws. The Red Sox were playing in Oakland, the game only in the fifth inning, though it was past midnight on the East Coast. He listened to the game on the radio and to the rain drumming against the top of his window air conditioner and tried not to think about where Tamsen was or what she was doing.

  He got online the following morning.

  PaulGus: It’s raining here today. Is it raining there?

  HarrGus: NO

  PaulGus: Are you lonely?

  HarrGus: NO

  PaulGus: Don’t you wish you could talk to your wife?

  HarrGus: YES

  PaulGus: Karen said she felt lonely even when I was home. I knew exactly what she meant. By the end it felt like when you’re on an airplane, sitting next to a person you’d like to talk to but you can’t figure out how to break the ice. You shouldn’t have to break the ice with your own spouse.

  HarrGus: NO

  PaulGus: The strange thing is, my main memories as a kid are of being alone. I remember being sent to my room. Sitting in my room alone, waiting to get out of trouble. Climbing trees and hiding in them for as long as I could to get away from everybody. I don’t know why I wanted to get away from everybody. Don’t you think that’s odd?

  HarrGus: YES

  PaulGus: What I don’t remember were times when the whole family was together. I mean, I remember the family being together but I’m always on the outside looking in. Sometimes I wonder if it had something to do with the accident. When I was okay but everybody else was hurt.

  HarrGus: YES

  PaulGus: I used to listen to all your classical records and I remember putting Barber’s Adagio on the hi-fi and fantasizing that I was walking somewhere alone. Like I was trying to convince myself I wanted to be alone. I was bluffing.

  HarrGus: YES

  PaulGus: Mom’s worried about me, isn’t she?

  HarrGus: YES

  PaulGus: Are you?

  HarrGus: YES

  PaulGus: To tell the truth, I’m scared I’m not going to make it. Scared I’m going to always be lonely. I’m tired of giving myself little pep talks. Are you scared?

  HarrGus: NO

  PaulGus: Because of your faith?

  HarrGus: YES

  PaulGus: Have you ever been scared?

  HarrGus: YES

  PaulGus: I mean really scared?

  HarrGus: YES

  PaulGus: When? Sorry. You can’t answer that. Do you want to talk about it?

  HarrGus: NO

  PaulGus: Are you sure?

  PaulGus: Are you still there?

  PaulGus: Forget I said anything. Sorry.

  PaulGus: Sometimes I don’t know when to leave well enough alone. I’ll talk to you soon.

  13

  Pretzel Logic

  The postcard from Paris was a print of van Gogh’s painting The Night Café. On the back, she’d written, “Hey, Paul — how are you? Hope all is well. The food is fabulous here. I think I’ve gained five pounds. Love, T.”

  She hadn’t mentioned the missed rendezvous — had she forgotten or, more to the point, had she forgiven him?

  And were monkeys currently flying out of her butt?

  At the bar, the word was that Bender’s heart attack was entirely stress related. Paul found this worrisome. Running every day helped with stress, but he also needed to relax, to quiet himself inside. Tamsen had once suggested that he try yoga. He went to the Laundromat and looked on the bulletin board for a flyer for a yoga class, something not too crunchy-huggy. He found one offered by a woman named Amelia, who patiently explained to him on the phone, when he told her he’d always been interested in the martial arts, that yoga wasn’t one of them.

  Amelia was slender and serene and wore her ha
ir in a fat black braid, and she smiled slyly when he cracked wise in class. It was all he could do to bite his lip and keep quiet one night when she’d led them from a sarvangasana or “candle” pose (“lie on your back and stick your legs as high in the air as they’ll go, hands on hips”) into a halasana or “plow” pose (“bring your legs down behind you until your toes touch the floor, your knees touch your forehead, and your rear end is sticking up in the air”), which had caused the gentle young man on the mat next to Paul to fart loudly. Everyone else in the room was too centered in the moment to say anything or even snicker.

  “Do we have to pay extra for the aromatherapy?” Paul wanted to ask.

  He liked the mindful breathing part. The poses hurt like hell, but that seemed to be the idea, learning how to get bent out of shape without getting bent out of shape. Amelia gave him a very cursory introduction to transcendental meditation theory, and he found that if he practiced it on his own at home, even without true instruction, it helped him feel calm, and sometimes the daydreams he experienced were wicked good.

  His experience in yoga class was soured when a woman named Marty joined the group. He recognized her as one of his ex-wife’s co-workers. She recognized him with a smile and said she’d just been talking to Karen that morning — they were going to sign up together for Amelia’s prenatal yoga class.

  “It’s more effective than Lamaze,” Marty said perkily, “and you don’t have to drag your husband along to do it.”

  Until this point, Paul had been unaware that his ex-wife was pregnant.

  His friends at the Bay State were sympathetic when he told them, and bought him beers to help drown his sorrows or at least give them a good soaking. It was clearly unfair of Karen to have children without him. Of course, she was a free agent and had hooked up with a nice guy named Kurt (or Kirk?), and she had the right to behave however she pleased and didn’t need Paul’s consent or permission to so much as blow her nose.

  That didn’t make it fair.

  It probably meant she’d be getting married. That sucked too.

  When he got home, he opened the top drawer of his dresser and, in it, the cigar-box-size jewelry case he’d inherited from his grandfather Paul, along with some of the old man’s accessories, nothing fancy, a pair of cuff links featuring hunting dogs and flying ducks, a tie clasp in the shape of a Shriner’s scimitar. In the back of the jewelry box, Paul found a small ziplock bag containing a folded cocktail napkin upon which he and Karen had written, “Rosemary, Sam (Samuel/Samantha), Henry, Caledonia,” and, with a question mark after it, “Booker?” He considered mailing her the list they’d collaborated on, with a brief note saying, “These names you can’t use.”

  Instead, he took the napkin into the bathroom, where he lifted the lid on the toilet and, using the matches he kept nearby, lit the napkin on fire, twisting it as it burned to make sure the flames consumed it before he dropped it into the bowl. He flushed twice.

  “Chili for dinner?” Stella inquired from the doorway.

  “Would you like to go for a walk?”

  “I thought you’d never ask.”

  He carried her down the front steps. It was a fine summer evening, with a breeze rustling the leaves overhead to let the moonlight sift through. He had to slow down to let Stella catch up. He tried to remember the things he’d learned in yoga class and took a deep breath, in, hold it, out …

  “Did something happen?” Stella asked.

  “I found out Karen is pregnant. And remarrying. Probably.”

  “She’s having a litter?”

  “So to speak.”

  “And you’re not one of the fathers?”

  “Nope.”

  “I thought she didn’t want kids.”

  “Apparently she’s changed her mind.”

  He turned left at the corner, heading for the cemetery. He didn’t expect Stella to understand, and for her part, she seemed to know better than to probe, though she stayed close to him as they walked, something she’d always done when she knew he was upset about something. He wasn’t sure how she knew, but she did.

  Back at the house, he lifted the dog, climbed the front steps, and set her down. He told her to lie down, poured himself a scotch, and then rejoined her, sitting on the porch swing. The scotch tasted good. He sipped, even though alcohol had the unwanted side effect of letting the past leak back into the present. Some people said spirits damaged the memory, but he found the opposite to be true — they kept memories alive.

  He rocked. It was the same porch swing where he and Karen had discussed when she should stop taking the pill. They’d agreed on New Year’s Eve arbitrarily. They made love a few times a week after that, but as the year came to a close and the nights grew longer, they made love less and less frequently as he more often failed to sustain his erections, and he asked himself if he was afraid of the moment when she would go off the pill and the stakes would go up. Afraid of what, though? Then she’d said they needed more money first, so Paul put in extra hours at his computer at his office to get more money, until Karen said he was never there for her. He argued that he couldn’t be in two places at once, to which she’d replied that he couldn’t even be in one place at once.

  Was it Karen who’d stopped believing first, and he’d caught it from her? To have a kid, she had to believe in one of three things: herself, him, or the future. To believe in herself was on her To Do list, but when she looked inside herself for strength, she saw ferocity instead, at the end anyway, like a thunderstorm darkening the midday sky. Then one night the fights stopped, and that was worse than the conflict — that meant she’d quit. To believe in him wasn’t much easier. His heart was good, she said, not a mean bone in his body, but at the same time, there was something wrong, missing. She couldn’t be more specific. Something made him run away from her, she said, some hidden thing that made it hard for him to trust people. She’d felt kept at a distance, unimportant, unseen, and that wasn’t going to change, and she was tired of it.

  The future was easier for her to believe in, except that it was a fantasy. She wanted to be a stay-at-home mom in a big house with four kids, she’d said. He tried to make her dream come true, but every time he managed to tuck a thousand dollars away toward a down payment on a house, she wanted to buy a new couch, or take a vacation, or replace a perfectly good appliance, and the money got pissed away. Her pay, working in an art gallery, did nothing to further the cause. The farther they got from their goal, the more they argued, despaired, drifted, until he envied those mythical couples who had nothing but each other and screwed three times a day using their unpaid bills for a mattress. Each time he failed, he tried to shrug it off, but each time he shrugged, another piece of his body fell to the ground, his fingers, hands, arms, legs, internal organs, until he had nothing left to shrug with — and then finally she had to walk away, telling him, “I can’t fix this.”

  His friends told him life goes on, but what they failed to mention was that life goes on indeed, on and on and on and on and on. There was no magic anywhere to be found. The days dragged. He walked around his little town with a giant billboard sprouting from his skull that read divorced. “When does the billboard fall off?” he asked friends experienced in such matters. “It doesn’t,” they told him. “They just build a road around you.”

  He went inside to refresh his drink, feeling a bit unsteady on his feet, while the dreaming dog twitched her tail and wuffled in her sleep. In the kitchen, dust bunnies lay undisturbed in the corners. It was the same apartment where he and Karen had tried to make something bigger and better, something more than the sum of their parts. Maybe it was time to move. He saw the walls she’d painted, thinking it would brighten things up and possibly save the marriage, the first of her last-ditch efforts. He closed his eyes and heard the ghost sounds, laughter, music, fragments of dinner party conversations, flitting about the house like moths, eating holes in the fabric of time, sounds of summer barbecues, autumn rakes scraping the sidewalk, a Christmas goose cracklin
g in the oven, because everybody else cooked turkeys, so he and Karen did what they could to start their own tradition. He heard the noise of her screaming at him until the piano rang in harmonic sympathy, and he heard her sobbing softly from across the room, the kind of sorrow you can’t comfort because you’re the cause of it.

  What would the Zen masters do at a time like this? Did their hearts break like everybody else’s? Did they drive past their ex’s new house at two in the morning to see if the light was on in the bedroom window? He drew a deep, slow breath and focused on the beating of his own heart until a freight train split the night silence, blasting toward Brattleboro, making the house shake. He wondered who was driving the train and whether they were headed toward home or away from home. Did the engineer know where love goes when it dies, or how it was possible that hummingbirds can cross the ocean while words can fail to fly half a pillow’s distance? And on those cold winter nights when snow obscured the tracks, did he ever lose faith? That the rails would still be there, that the bridges would hold, that there really was a Vermont, that there really was a train, and that the clickety-clack he heard wasn’t just the sound of his own heart moving away from him in the night, growing fainter and fainter, beat by beat.

  Paul had weathered the storm and made it to spring, and then Tamsen found him, with her smile and her wet, bright eyes! The phone rang and magic reentered the world, like the day Houdini was born, nurses in fishnet stockings, doctors in top hats and tails, asking for silence as they levitated Mother Houdini, passed a brass hoop around her as she pushed and groaned, the calliope playing “Entrance of the Gladiators,” until suddenly and with great flourish the doctors pulled from between her legs a bouncing seven-pound white rabbit, and the hospital gasped, and then a baby was heard to cry from inside a padlocked cabinet in the next room. So Houdini was born, and so Tamsen was delivered to Paul, entering off to the side while he wasn’t looking. Her arrival astonished him. It had no explanation. It came after much pain and labor and crying and gnashing of teeth, unexpected and astonishing. Presto — ta-da!