Standing by the shower door, while she stood inside, red-eyed, he noisily pulled a length of shiny olive tape off its roll, wrapped it around her abdomen, reaching behind to pull it across her knobby spine, then circling around front, by her belly button.
"It feels tight."
"I did that on purpose. It'll stop the bleeding."
"Our dinner is ruined."
"You could call for a pizza."
She kept her hands against the duct tape across her stomach. "How are we ever going to buy a house if we keep spending all our money?" Her green eyes were wet with tiny diamonds, tip of her nose red. "Is the dutch oven broken?"
"I didn't notice. I had all my attention on you."
She wound up ordering a pizza, since she still had some money left over, miraculously, from last week's paycheck, although that would mean she'd be late paying the electricity bill again. But when the pizza came, she didn't eat more than half a slice.
Later, in bed, held by him, one hand still on her duct-taped stomach (she kept it there all night, even after she fell asleep), the other hand on his forearm across her breasts, she looked out at the gloom of their unlit bedroom, orange windows. "Promise me you'll never do anything like that, ever again."
His forearm tightened across her breasts. "I promise. Never again. That's my vow to you."
She called in sick the next day. The owner of the kennel told her not to bother coming back. Too many sick days.
She endured the humiliation of showing up at the shop in the afternoon to get her final paycheck, rather than having it mailed, because she needed the money.
They were out of drugs, she couldn't afford to buy them a new supply, so they got drunk that night instead, alternating hot coffee with Pepsi and vodka, the coffee meant to have the same effect as cocaine, keeping them more or less alert so they could get even drunker before passing out or getting sick.
At one point in the evening, while they were snorting antihistamines, just a cheap way to get the taste of something in their nostrils, backs of their mouths, he picked up the same chef's knife he used the prior evening.
She looked from the knife to him.
"I want to prove something to you," he said. He advanced towards her. She let out a high keen, small body clenching, but didn't move.
He stood in front of her with the knife. "See?" He started crying. "I could stab you again, but I'm not going to. It was a one time thing."
Touched by his crying, she put her arms around his shoulders, wincing at the pain in her stomach, which she was still a little worried about. She kept squishing the tip of her tongue against the backs of her teeth, creating bubbles, to see if she could taste blood. "Please don't ever do that again. Please don't."
At a later point in the evening, he taunted her for the way she fled from the kitchen, like a scared little rabbit, not even able to stay on her feet. He imitated her, letting out melodramatic cries, arms waving in the air, crashing into walls, getting down on his knees, knees running in place on the linoleum, looking in mock terror over his shoulder. Like a pathetic, scared little rabbit.
She drew into herself, sitting at the kitchen table, eyes glassy, nodding to herself, sipping her drink, waiting for him to get sleepy.
At a still later point, about two o'clock in the morning, he threw her out of the apartment, even though it was her apartment. She stayed in a crumpled heap on the hallway side of the apartment door, begging to be let back in, crying, nose running, talking high-pitched to herself, until the super showed up, ordered her to leave the building.
She wandered down the empty city streets in her pajamas, weeping, three o'clock in the morning, nothing out there in the night but her, dark buildings.
Tom rolled over in bed, woke.
Shut his eyes, drifted off.
The phone rang again.
He started snoring.
Rang again.
He let out a startled grunt, reached across, turned on the bedside lamp, cone of light picking up the gray in his black hair.
The digital clock read 3:45.
He raised himself on one elbow, shutting his eyes, picked up the phone.
"Dad! Dad, you have to help me!"
He rubbed his free hand over his eyes.
"Dad?"
He was trying to wake up. "Is this Claudia?"
He couldn't understand what she was saying. She was hysterical, drunk, screaming into the phone, frightened like he had never heard before.
After twenty minutes of trying to make sense of what she was saying, he told her he'd fly out to California.
He arrived at LAX from Chicago that afternoon, unshaven, tired.
There was no answer to his knocks on the door of the most recent address he had for her.
He tried knocking on the door across the hallway.
Nothing. Probably at work.
He went back down the stairs to his rental car.
Incredibly, she was waiting beside the car, in pajamas, face red, hair a mess.
Tom felt a thump in his heart at the bedraggled way she looked. She ran into his arms. "Daddy!"
He held her, her body shaking with grief.
He got the super to open her apartment.
The place was a mess. Clothes cut up, cookware she had carefully collected over the years, discount pots and pans, bent until their black plastic handles snapped off.
In her bathroom, feces rubbed across the emerald-tiled walls. K-Mart towels, scented soaps, stuffed into the square white throat of her toilet.
Tom looked around at the long brown commas on the bathroom walls. "Was this Lou?"
"Boyd. You never met him."
He gave her a disgusted look. "Get some sleep. I'll clean this up."
"I'm sorry, Dad." She trudged off to the bedroom, with a daughter's willingness to let her Dad solve her problems.
Tom rolled up his sleeves, found disinfectant, a roll of paper towels, in the cabinet under the kitchen sink.
The next morning, during a breakfast Tom cooked, toast and eggs, that was all there was in her brightly-lit refrigerator, she put her coffee cup down, pale face crumpling, new grief coming out of her. "I thought he was the one!"
He lit a cigarette, face harsh. "Why is it you always pick the worse possible boys?"
She got defensive. "I don't do that."
"You always do that." His big fingers tapped the front ash of his cigarette against the side of his coffee cup, so the gray ash fell onto the saucer. Incredibly, for all her ruinous, self-destructive habits, she didn't smoke, so there were no ashtrays.
She shrugged, unable to answer. "I don't know, Dad." Her green eyes glanced across the kitchen table at him, with an adult's frankness.
He remembered what she had looked like, an excited girl clutching a folded sheet of white paper, starting her first day of school. "I wish your mother were here. She could talk some sense into you."
"She appears to me in my dreams."
He felt a pang. Looked down at his egg-smeared plate, whites and yellows. "She never does in mine. Or else I don't remember."
"We talk a lot."
"About what?"
She was shy. "I don't know. This and that."
He scrunched his smoldering cigarette out in the coffee saucer. "You're almost thirty. You have to get your life in order."
"I know."
"I don't mind helping you out with the rent, the utility bills, but at some point, you have to become self-sufficient." He paused, said what every parent says. "I won't be here forever."
She ducked her head. "I know."
Boyd showed up late in the afternoon, letting himself in with his own key.
Hearing the turn of the lock, Claudia stiffened, lifting a sofa pillow up to her breasts, like a teddy bear. Tom walked heavily across the living room, intercepted Boyd as he emerged from the front hallway.
Boyd acted very differently with Claudia's Dad present. He backed up, stammering. Claudia, remaining on the sofa in the living room, heard Boyd say, i
n a high, nervous voice, "It just happened."
After that, a door being shut, locked.
Her Dad dropped Boyd's key on the living room table. His voice was gruff. "We should get your lock changed. Just in case."
He pulled out the local yellow pages, Claudia thinking, from the sofa, It's so weird to have my Dad here. Tom called the locksmith with the biggest ad.
A guy showed up two hours later, long unkempt hair, uneven moustache, prison tattoos.
As the guy installed the new lock, down on his narrow knees with a screwdriver, Claudia, hair rapidly brushed in place, flirted with him.
Tom sighed to himself, thick black eyebrows.
They ordered Chinese home delivery for dinner.
She couldn't sleep.
Tom carried an easy chair into her bedroom. "I'll sleep in this chair, just like at a hospital. Get a good night's rest."
He stayed up for a while, reading the local newspaper in the easy chair, even the stuff he didn't normally read, sports and want ads, careful to be quiet as he turned the tall pages. Eventually, he heard her breathing turn regular.
He got up, looked down at his daughter's sleeping face.
Not a particularly pretty face, except to the extent all young women's faces are pretty. The face itself was too long, giving it an elfin aspect, nose too long, a slope rather than a snub. Blonde hair past her shoulders, the shoulders being the benchmark, in Tom's opinion, between one type of woman and another. Teeth not perfect, canines too prominent.
Her eyes were moving under her eyelids.
He wondered what she was dreaming. Better not be the locksmith. Maybe something peaceful, hills and rivers.
She actually dreamed about losing her virginity when she was fourteen, to Manny, who was eighteen. She was so happy, that someone so much older would agree to make love to her, someone who could legally drink, vote, drive, smiling nervously underneath his broad shoulders as he forced his buckling cock past her tightness, she trying not to scrunch her face at the pain, green eyes widening as the length of his cock suddenly popped up past the tightness, smoothly sliding up into her, part of his body actually inside her body, such a weird feeling, but nice, something she thought about, years later, years and years later as she lay in the starched white hospital bed, big belly, face sweaty, her parents, who flew down from Chicago, leaning over the metal side rails of the bed, and as they leaned over, she shut her sweaty eyelids, remembered how it was afterwards, after he had suddenly, violently slapped up inside her, ejaculating, then fell asleep on top of her, like a warrior, heavy, breathing, and she had reached up, a child, stroking his cheeks, feeling, beneath her thin hands, the short stubble, such a nice thing to feel, the way the pads of her fingers could rub across the hundreds of stiff hairs, bending them, over and over.
But in the hospital in Santa Barbara, lying in the hospital bed, surrounded by her parents leaning over the metal side rails, pregnant by either Charles or Andy or Chico or Kimlya or some other guy whose name she didn't quite catch, it was noisy, she lost her baby.
Her father was angry. "Do you realize that would have been our first grandchild?"
The nurse rested her hand on Claudia's wet forearm. "We have to wheel you into the surgical theater to remove the mass inside you."
Claudia heard the word "mass", and, born Catholic, thought of a high mass. They'd have to remove all the men's and women's choir voices singing inside her. Which they did. They had a big, oval tin bucket on the floor beside the operating table. She leaned over the red-soaked, white-sheeted edge of the table, drunk on anesthesia, saw her baby, knees curled up against his or her chest, at the oval bottom of the bucket, big alien eyes flat and still as a dead fish.
Tom fell asleep, eventually, in his easy chair.
Most of his dreams, at this point in his life, were connected to each other.
They took place in the same large town, one he'd never been to in real life.
He thought of it as a large town, because it had a business district, sidestreets off that main avenue with houses and street corner shops, and an outlying area of homes and, farther out, farms. But he thought the population was probably under 50,000.
He didn't know the name of the town, he never did, it never occurred to him, in one of his dreams, to ask himself, What town am I in?
The longer he dreamed about this town, the easier it was for him to navigate his way around, simply because like any new resident he'd become more familiar with its layout.
It was a nice town. The people were friendly, sidewalks clean, there didn't appear to be much crime.
It felt like a real town, rather than a dream town, because each month he had to sit at a kitchen table, pay imaginary bills for rent (he was renting a small cottage), utilities, satellite TV, etc., and periodically he had to go through the refrigerator and throw out, for example, iceberg lettuce that had gone brown around the cut edges.
There was a continuity to these dreams, because events that started in one dream carried over into subsequent dreams, often months apart (in waking life).
For example, he had a dream a few months ago where he walked down a street parallel to the main avenue, to a library located on a corner. He went inside, asked for the latest copy of the town's daily newspaper (it was the middle of a sunny, blue-skyed afternoon, he wanted to unwind, read in the hush of a library like he did as a kid.)
The librarian, polite and professional, everything you could possibly want in a librarian, told him the town's newspapers, both current editions and archives, were stored in the library across the street.
He went back outside, down the wide white stone steps into the pleasant, sunlit intersection, and lo and behold, there was in fact another library right across the street.
Admittedly, that struck him as weird. Why have two libraries on the same block, across from each other?
The buildings weren't identical. Each had its own distinctive architectural style.
The other library did have all issues of the town's papers.
Here's where the continuity came in. He remembered reading in the town paper around October of last year (waking life) of a new movie that had just been released theatrically. From the review, it sounded pretty good, something he in his widowerhood would like to see. This past week, in the library across the street, he read a second review of the same movie, for its release on video.
Was he causing the continuity?
Did he decide to put two libraries on opposite corners, or did a committee in town hall vote on that, years before he arrived?
The next morning, he went through the small print of the want ads with her, him sitting upright, she leaning sideways, supporting her chin with a palm, his big fingers circling jobs she might be qualified for, mostly waitress jobs.
Claudia wanted to wait a while before job-hunting, spend some time with her Dad, opening the front door each evening to home delivery food, cash register receipt stapled to the folded top of the bag, a different cute, black-haired delivery guy each opening; the joy of a family, even a truncated family, laughing around the kitchen table, putting down plates, lifting out food and aromatic steam, but she didn't say anything. She dreaded having to do job interviews again.
He dialed the first number, using her old-fashioned phone, rotary rather than touch tone, the quick, rhythmic sound of the rotary revolving again and again through the ten numbers like a knife blade sharpened against a steel.
He drove her out to the interview in his rental, Claudia punching on the radio, hitting tabs to get to a rock and roll station. She twirled the volume knob to the right. He understood she was nervous, so didn't ask her to turn down the music. "You really like rock and roll, huh?"
She nodded. "It makes me feel bigger."
He parallel parked on the block where the restaurant was located.
There was a line of young girls outside, waiting to be interviewed. She got at the end of the line, two girls immediately getting into the queue behind her, while he walked back to th
e car.
Watching through the windshield, he saw all the other girls were talking to each other, socializing, but there was poor, dear Claudia, locked in her own world, not looking left or right, cheeks red, in weird clothes, a man's camel hair jacket over a blue-flowered dress that fell below her knees, completely out of fashion.
She didn't get the job. Someone younger did.
She was quiet as Tom drove them back to her place.
He pulled out the yellow pages. "You have to apply yourself. Nobody owes you a living."
"I know that."
"It's not enough to know it. You have to act on it."
He folded the pages open to the restaurants section. "Long as I'm here, we might as well order Mexican."
She shrugged out of her camel hair men's jacket, trying to be happy. "That sounds good!"
"Here's this place. Mercado Mia. We can get a couple of traditional meals, enchiladas, refried beans, rice, guacamole and chips."
She gave him a puzzled look, bedraggled blonde hair, green eyes like her mother's. "What did you say? At the end?"
He raised his head from the yellow pages, finger on the phone number, looking at her over the top rims of his reading glasses. "Guacamole and chips."
"Oh! I thought you said guacamole and chimps."
"No, I…"
"Because that'd be no good, guacamole and chimps, chimps getting loose in here, grabbing the remote, clicking non-stop through the TV channels, tossing our plates around, smearing guacamole over their hairy butts to make themselves more sexually attractive."
She gave him an eager look, showing off.
He realized what she was doing, smiled. "It's fine to joke about things, but joking around isn't a substitute for a job. You can't get anywhere in life if you don't have a job."
On the third day she found a job, waitress at a Vietnamese place.
Since the situation appeared to be stabilized, he flew back to Chicago. He gave Claudia a handful of twenties. Told her to buy spaghetti noodles and tomato sauce. It was a cheap dinner. That's what he had done in college.
It was raining when the cab took him from O'Hare to his home. He'd unpack tomorrow. He changed into his pajamas, opened the second story window of his townhouse high enough to hear the rain, got in bed, and masturbated. He was still young enough to need to masturbate several times a week, just to clear himself out, so he didn't get a lower back ache. He thought about his dead wife, just her head.
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