“Done,” she said.
“Thank you.” He watched the skin move over her vertebrae as she got out of the tub to put the first aid things away. When she sat down again, they had nothing to say to one another, and she put her hands on his knees. He sat, un-moving, his bandaged hands elevated and tingling at his ears, and he felt a nagging sexual heat that angered and embarrassed him. But when she moved her hands down his legs, he let her, and when he came he was watching her face, placid and focused, where it lay on his knee.
* * *
He put clothes on, grabbed his jacket and keys from the dresser. “I’m going out,” he told Anita when he passed her in the kitchen. She was sitting very still in a bathrobe at the table, her hands flat on the table.
“Okay.”
He looked at her once more before he opened the door, and the look she met it with was only sad, nothing else. Any comment he might have made evaporated. He left.
Outside, it had begun to get dark. He walked to the car and stood by the door for a minute, watching the clouds turn color. Then he noticed, in the shadows at the edge of the yard, a dim angle of light coming from the reconstructed shed: Bernardo. For a little while, he had forgotten Bernardo was there; now his presence was a kind of relief. He didn’t know where he’d planned to go, and the interior of the car looked drab and cold, so he walked through the mud to the shed and knocked on the door.
“Yes, hello?”
“Bernardo?” He pulled the door open and found Bernardo sitting on a stool at the workbench, drawing. By his side, a plate of votive candles burned.
“Close the door, please. The wind.” He pointed at the flickering candles.
Paul did as he was told. He hadn’t really looked in here since they’d finished rebuilding it, and Bernardo had made tremendous use of the small space he’d been given. The tools were stacked or hung on one side of the tiny room, and the rest was taken up by the workbench and a couple of blankets that lay opposite it. Paul had to push the blankets aside slightly to keep from standing on them.
“This is nice,” he said, for lack of anything else. “I mean, you’ve fixed it up nice in here.”
“Grazie.” He looked at Paul’s bandaged fingers, but said nothing.
“What are you drawing?”
Bernardo raised his eyebrows and leaned back, revealing a series of roughly drawn seascapes: men in boats, houses on hills in the distance. “What are they doing there?” Paul asked.
“They fish.”
“For what?”
“Swordfish,” he said. He looked up at Paul and smiled at him sadly. “My grandfather catches them, a long time ago.”
Paul nodded. “I think Anita is going to leave me.”
He didn’t seem surprised. “Maybe not,” he said.
“Were you married?”
“Yes.”
“Not anymore?”
He turned back to his drawings. “No.”
“Do you regret that?”
Bernardo waited some time before saying, “She is dead now.”
But Paul had a lot of regrets, and they all came to him now, lodging in his head and chest like bullets: wasting himself and his dignity, thinking too hard about the wrong things, getting lucky with Anita and somehow blowing it. It wasn’t so easy to pretend they weren’t there. He reached for the door. “You might not want to go in there.”
“Okay.”
“You know,” Paul said, “you don’t seem like somebody who’d lose his shirt. You don’t seem like a vagrant.”
Bernardo turned again, this time scowling, and searched for the words. “No, no. Anybody fails, anybody.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“Yes.”
He walked out and shut the door behind him. He could hear Bernardo shifting inside on his stool, getting himself comfortable enough to draw. Paul didn’t feel like he’d ever feel comfortable again. His hand, which hadn’t hurt even when Anita was working on it, ached as if he’d broken every bone. And he was absurdly hungry. He walked to the car, still unsure of where he was going, only confident of the image of him behind the wheel, driving, somewhere.
12
Lars had been talking on the phone with his mother. She’d called frequently since the crash, and always, for his benefit, tried to sound cheerful, but it was clear that she was a little bit lonely and had been for some time. Lars’s father died when he was five, and since then, though she usually seemed to be happy when Lars was at home, his mother hadn’t had any lasting partner that he knew of. Stoughton, Wisconsin, was not a big town, and she was a homebody; she poured a lot of the energy she would have expended in a relationship into spontaneous and marginally useful household projects: graceless wooden furniture assembled with nails and glue, frequent rewallpapering. Lars saw these things whenever he went home to visit, and always felt a little sorry for her. Now he was wondering if maybe he ought to start a project himself.
His father’s name was Ivar Cowgill. He had taught fourth-grade science at a public school in Madison. Lars could remember sitting at the kitchen table with him in the evening while he made marks in his grade book. The list of unfamiliar names upset him: who were all these other, older kids his dad knew and spent time with, who got to see a side of him that he, Lars, never could? Soon after, when his father was in the hospital with his cancer, Lars was consumed with jealousy at the neat rows of construction-paper get-well cards his students had made for him. He asked his mother, “Can’t we move them?” He claimed the cards obstructed his father’s view out the window. When his father told him that it was fine, that he should leave the cards there where he could see them, Lars went out into the hall and cried.
His death a few weeks later was a complete shock. Nobody had told Lars to expect this, and later he would learn that nobody had expected it. But at the time, he blamed the fourth grade. He vowed never to speak to a fourth grader and to skip the grade altogether when he got to it, though by the time he did he was twice as old and had only vague memories of his father.
Though his mother’s eccentricities made a little more sense now, he was not comforted by the fact that, fifteen years later, she still had them. Their conversations, like the ones he had with Christine, were full of long silences that quickly stopped seeming odd; Lars often listened to his mother breathing in perfectly measured rhythms, like a weightlifter, while they thought of something to say. Usually they ended up talking about politics: Wisconsin’s Republican governor, surrounded in the capitol building by the most liberal neighborhoods in the state; Montana’s local militiamen and water rights and Canadian grain protests along the Hi-line. This last time, though, Lars’s mother mentioned that she’d gone out. “I went bowling, by myself,” she said. “In Madison. I wore tight jeans and drank a couple of whiskey sours.”
“Jesus, Mom.”
“And I got picked up!” she whispered.
“What!”
“Well, almost,” she corrected. “I could have been, if I’d wanted. The opportunity was there.” She spoke with a dreamy wistfulness, as if, in her imagination, the evening had turned out quite differently. It was unlike her, and it seemed to Lars that she was beginning, finally, to snap out of it. He wondered if she was doing it for his benefit, if he was expected to follow suit. He hoped not.
* * *
He had come to Safeway to get orange juice and noticed someone he recognized standing in front of him in line. It took a minute to place him: Paul, the detective. He looked bad, staring at his sandwich rolling down the conveyor as if it were the only life preserver on a sinking ship. Lars almost reached out and touched him, but changed his mind, afraid to frighten him.
The juice was for Christine, who was waiting for him in the trailer. They’d gotten to be fairly close, if touchy, friends in the past weeks, spending a lot of time on the phone and occasionally, when she felt up to it, hanging around together. Her mother didn’t like her to go far; if a kidney suddenly became available for her, Christine would need to get to the hospi
tal fast. So if they spent any time together it was usually in the trailer.
Megan’s loss was changing him. Things reminded him of her frequently, approximately once every ten minutes—some music, somebody’s sunglasses, a kind of food or a place in town—and at these times he felt himself going blank, his mind caught in a logic loop that he wouldn’t come out of for several seconds. The result was a general spaciness he hadn’t suffered before, and he was concerned that it might be permanent. It was akin to suddenly losing a sense: you switch on the stereo and remember that you can no longer hear. You have to learn how to live around the problem. And compounding this was the nagging feeling that it all might have been preventable.
The good thing about Christine was that she was used to this herself. She’d been through it—not being able to eat certain things, do certain things; not being able to leave the general vicinity of the hospital. She told him he’d get over it. He wasn’t so sure.
Just now it was the juice he was holding. The cool condensation that had gathered on the carton, the gentle swell of its sides—this reminded him of running to the store in the mornings sometimes for juice or milk while Megan stayed behind in bed. It reminded him of breakfast together by the window, of weekends alone with her. His brain went haywire making the connections; synapses fired indiscriminately. He heard, dimly, the checker asking him to put down the juice, but it didn’t occur to him to do so.
“Hey! Hey!” It was the guy who had been so brusque with him before, the chubby one. Claude. His glasses, thick lenses fitted into wire frames, looked a little like goggles.
“Sorry.”
“Oh, just I gotta keep you moving.”
Lars turned but saw nobody behind him except a woman at a nearby cigarette display, choosing a pack. Claude rang him up and Lars paid. When he stepped out onto the sidewalk, there was Paul, his mouth full of half a turkey sub, shredded iceberg lettuce sprinkled around him on the cement.
“Paul?”
Paul frowned. His eyes were red and deeply sunken, like the hidden wells of flowers. They glinted warily in their sockets. His hands were covered with clean white bandages.
“It’s Lars. You spied on me, remember?”
“Mmm!” He nodded with what looked like false enthusiasm and swallowed his bite of sandwich. “Howyadoin?”
“A little better. You?”
“Eh,” he said, wiggling a free hand. “Actually bad. Actually my wife is sleeping with somebody.”
“Geez, sorry, man.”
“I’ve been driving around, you know? In the car?” He blinked several times, rapidly. “It’s like I just stepped into somebody else’s life. Hello? Does this belong to you?”
“I wish it did.”
Paul frowned, then turned a little red. “Oh, right. Oh, God, I’m really sorry.”
“That’s okay.”
“No, really.”
“Look,” Lars said. “Why don’t you come along to my friend’s? That’s where I’m going.”
“I don’t know.” Paul said, but Lars could see his eyes starring to creep out from their pits.
“Come on.” He started walking, and after a second, Paul followed, clutching his half-sandwich. They stopped at the trailer door.
“Your friend lives here?”
“Yeah.” He knocked and opened. “Christine?”
“Juice!” She sprung into the doorway and her eyes narrowed. “Who’s that?”
“Christine, Paul. Paul, Christine.” The two shook hands gingerly, eyeing one another with suspicion. There was something creepily competitive about misery. People could sense it on each other, as if it were a smell or a way of walking. Since it had roosted on him Lars had seen it everywhere: in his apartment building, in line at the bank, on the sidewalk. If, for some reason, he had to talk to one of these people, their voices sounded different. They had an echo, as if the words had to travel a longer distance to reach their destination, and generally they did—the personal space expanded with misery. Misery buzzed around people like a repellent force-field. Paul and Christine crackled.
“How do you do?” she said, sarcastically.
“Oh, great.”
And that kicked off their evening. The three stared at each other for a few seconds, then they all went inside to drink the orange juice.
* * *
Lars’s relationship with Christine was, for all its downtrodden chumminess, a little uncomfortable. Part of the problem was that since Megan died women had taken on a tragic, painful cast to him. This was through no fault of theirs, he understood, but other women reminded him of her, and there was nothing he could do about it. He also knew this was a lousy reason to feel uncomfortable around somebody, so he pretended not to feel it. It was like trying to hide a pregnancy. They both knew, and there was little avoiding the mildly resentful silences that hung over them at times.
And Christine was a physical wreck a good portion of the time. Before her dialysis in particular, she complained of weakness and insomnia, dry skin, bleeding gums. She had problems digesting food and ran to the bathroom frequently. She gave off a foul odor: her breath was rotten, her body medicinal and rank. She became disoriented and irritable and took it out on him.
But they were respectful and open with one another. Her problems didn’t embarrass her or disgust him, and he could speak his mind about Megan without irritating her. This understanding made them close, even as their indulgences kept them at arm’s length, and they rotated around one another like a double star, throwing heat back and forth with little effect.
Toth, on the other hand, didn’t get it. He’d heard Lars’s side of several of their conversations and thought they sounded like an old married couple. He was convinced Lars was falling in love with her, a sick kind of love based on wallowing in unhappiness. A few days before, Toth had been complaining about this over pizza they’d ordered. They were in Toth’s house, the rock band exerting themselves beneath them. “It just isn’t right,” he said, “you carrying on like this with her.”
“I’m not ‘carrying on.’ We’re just friends.”
“You talk to her every night, man.”
“So?”
“So you never talked to me every night,” he said, staring at his hands, and Lars suddenly understood how jealous he was and had been. “We’re friends, aren’t we?”
“Toth…
“Or maybe we’re not. Maybe we just aren’t the friends I thought we were.” And with this he lowered his head to his hands and stayed hunched like that over his plate of pizza crusts. Lars was certain he was crying, but when he lifted his head his eyes were dry.
“You’re my best friend,” Lars said, almost meaning it. Without Megan he had no best friend.
“Ditto, man,” Toth said, and it was obvious from his grimace that he felt the same way.
* * *
Now, though, he was beginning to wonder if Toth might be right: not that he was in love, but that he had become a little obsessed. The plasticky, close odor of the trailer triggered a rush of adrenaline that made his palms sweaty, and he was glad to have Paul here, even if he heightened the gloom. The trailer looked bigger on the inside than out, with bunk beds at the far end, and a television at the other, next to a stack of cardboard boxes whose contents weren’t clear. The three of them sat in the middle, on swivel chairs bolted to the floor before a square table that folded down out of the wall. It was the dining area of a small kitchenette.
“So,” Lars said. “How are you feeling?”
“Like dancing,” she said.
“Really?”
“Hell, no!” She shifted in her seat. “I feel a little better than usual, though. I slept all afternoon.”
Paul looked at one of them, then the other. “You’re sick?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“She’s got bad kidneys,” Lars told him. “She’s waiting for a transplant. That’s why she’s near the hospital.”
Paul’s eyes widened. “Jesus. That must suck.” At hearing himself say
this, he reddened. “Sorry.”
“No need,” Christine said. “It sucks, for sure.” She stared at the back of her hand. “So what’s your beef, Paul? You look victimized. Been feeding the lions?”
Paul told her. She shrugged. “Sorry, buddy.”
“Oh, you know, it’s nothing…” he said, and his face began to melt.
“We should go out,” Lars said quickly.
Christine raised her eyebrows. ‘“Out?”’
“Yeah, like out somewhere. I don’t know. A movie?”
“Oooh. Exciting.” She rolled her eyes.
Lars thought of his mother, bent over her scorecard, the ice melting into her whiskey sour. “Bowling,” he said. “Let’s go bowling.”
Paul said, almost to himself, “I haven’t bowled in years. I’ve never bowled in Montana.”
“There you go.”
Christine frowned. “Gimme a break, Cowgill. My mom would have my hide.”
“She’ll never know. She won’t be back for a while, right?”
“She’s at a quilting class, for Chrissake. Besides,” she said, rolling up her sleeve, “how can I bowl with this?” A couple of tubes stuck out of her forearm, held fast to the skin with surgical tape. The flesh around where the tubes went in was bright red and crusted with something yellow. Lars had only seen this in passing, but now she held it out before them like a freakish creature she’d found. Paul started.
Lars said, “Uh…can you bowl with the other hand?”
She pulled the sleeve down, stood up, and swung her left arm in the air. She opened and closed the fingers. “Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. I’ve never bowled. My brothers bowled, not me.”
“You have brothers?” Lars asked her.
She looked at him as if this was not something she needed to tell anyone, as if people should just know. “I have four brothers.”
“Oh.”
“And their kidneys.” Paul said suddenly, as if nobody had thought of this yet.
“No,” she said, looking out the small window at the street. “There’s my dad, though, if anyone wants to try and find him.” They were all quiet for a moment.
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