For a year or so I thought that was how it would always be, that I had achieved some plane of existence that was better than the one I’d been on previously and there was no going back, but I was wrong and there was going back and I went back, I went back and forth, and forth and back again—
I would sometimes think of my husband smiling and the thought of him smiling would make me smile but hours later I would think of my husband again and I wouldn’t smile—I’d think, Husband, what do you think you’re smiling for, there’s nothing to smile about, and I would think that wasn’t the kind of thought that I wanted to have, but I had had it, and then I couldn’t think of my husband smiling anymore because every time I thought of him he was frowning a pissed-off frown and later I would think, Husband, please smile again, and sometimes, after a while, the thought of my husband would smile again and I would think, Oh, good, we’re fine, we are human, we love each other like adults should, we are grown people. And this went on for some time and sometimes it was easier to keep the thought of my husband smiling and sometimes it was harder to keep the thought of my husband smiling. As the years went on I sometimes could have sworn that the existence of my husband and the whole complicated mess of him in my life was everything that was wrong with being alive and if I only extracted myself from him everything might go back to making sense the way it had when we had been new to each other. If he was no longer a part of my life then the fact that he was no longer a part of my life would be new and maybe the newness was what had made me make sense to myself—not him, another human, just fallible and breakable and not capable of creating redemption—because that’s the thing: people can’t really redeem people and I don’t know what redeems people, what keeps people good, what keeps people in the sense-making part of being a human instead of the senseless, the unwell, the wildebeests that everyone has—because we all have them and there is a part of every human brain that just can’t bear and be, can’t sit up straight, can’t look you in the eye, can’t sit through time ticking, can’t eat a sandwich off a plate, can’t read the newspaper, can’t put on clothes and go somewhere, can’t be married, can’t keep looking at the same person every day and being looked at by the same person every day without wanting to make him swallow a tiny bomb and set that bomb off and make him disappear, go back in time and never get near this man who is looking at you and living with you and being so happy to just love and be loved and we all sometimes want to walk away like it never happened.
Isn’t everyone on the planet or at least everyone on the planet called me stuck between the two impulses of wanting to walk away like it never happened and wanting to be a good person in love, loving, being loved, making sense, just fine? I want to be that person, part of a respectable people, but I also want nothing to do with being people, because to be people is to be breakable, to know that your breaking is coming, any day now and maybe not even any day but this day, this moment, right now a plane could fall out of the sky and crush you or the building you’re in could just crumble and kill you or kill the someone you love—and to love someone is to know that one day you’ll have to watch them break unless you do first and to love someone means you will certainly lose that love to something slow like boredom or festering hate or something fast like a car wreck or a freak accident or flesh-eating bacteria—and who knows where it came from, that flesh-eating bacteria, he was such a nice-looking fellow, it is such a shame—and your wildebeest, everyone’s wildebeest, just wants to get it over with, can’t bear the tension of walking around the world as if we’re always going to be walking around the world, because we’re not, because here comes a cancer, an illness, a voice in your head that wants to jump out a window, a person with a gun, a freak accident, a wild wad of flesh-eating bacteria that will start with your face.
But my husband before he was Husband, being around him did, for a while, make me forget about my wildebeest. We walked around the city holding hands and we did a good deal of reflexive smiling and we often kissed and it felt like drugs that are too strong to legally exist outside of a body and there was that night the professor who became my husband smiled at me in the dark and I could see the pale white glow of his teeth and I thought there would never be anything better than seeing the pale white glow of his teeth through the dark on this night after we decided to get married and for at least a few minutes it made perfect sense and I believed that he had redeemed me and in a way he had and he did—but I don’t know why the wildebeests kept coming back, throwing all their angry weight around and making all those sweet, human, cracked-open, genuine, well-adjusted feelings go away, but they did go away—why did they go away?—I would like them not to go away and I would like to go back to being or feeling redeemed by him, by the white glow of his teeth in the dark, by our skin against each other—What are you thinking? he asked me that night with his teeth, and I thought about what I was thinking about and I worried that I was slipping away from making sense, but I gripped hard on that sense and said, Oh, nothing, just how I love you, and I twisted my toes under the sheets and told myself to be a woman who lives normally, being loved and loving—and I could be her—couldn’t I? Couldn’t I?
12
After Taupo and some cars, I got to Wellington and I got all the way to the ferry station and I stared at it. I remembered what someone said once about traveling, that sometimes the body moves somewhere too quickly for the soul and the soul is taking its sweet-ass time to catch up because the soul is not on speaking terms with the body but regardless, the body is a lonely animal without the soul, so I thought, maybe it is time for me to sit very still and wait for the soul and I understood how melodramatic that was but I decided not to care because, after all, someone else had said it first and even though I couldn’t remember exactly who it seemed that they were very old or European or both—someone somehow trustworthy.
I walked to a hostel and tried to pay for a room with a card and the girl behind the counter seemed embarrassed when it wouldn’t go through a third time—Oh, it’s probably my fault—so I paid for a night with one of the traveler’s checks I’d brought to give me a false sense of having my shit together. I only had a few hundred dollars in checks because a false sense of having my shit together only cost a few hundred dollars. I left my backpack in my room and walked into the city, beside a museum, past a bank, past a library with wide windows. Businesspeople strolled around, looking for business.
I stepped into a nearly empty pub where the bartender was wiping the counter, leaning into his flexed arms, a swirl of black hair on his head like a cartoon of a mechanic in some imagined past. He seemed to immensely enjoy being himself, fashionably morbid, nostalgic for an era in which he was still dead. At the end of the bar was a woman who was maybe my age or younger. From the waist up she was waifish and pale, but her legs were gigantic, muscular logs—proportionally absurd, and I imagined taking her to a park where she could lie on the ground and I could nap on her legs, thick as mattresses as they were. It is a strange thing to want, the sexless bodily comfort of a stranger, but her legs seemed to be as long as a door and one was bent to her chest and the other dangled below like all this leg was just too much for her and there was something comforting about that surplus and I was low on comfort, on anything comfortable. A man with a bloated neck stared down the girl the way a dog stares down a steak.
Up close the bartender’s face was boyish and pained, so much so I felt like his mother when I looked at him, and it was unbearable to see him so unhappy after all that I had gone through to bring him into the world. This was not a convenient feeling to have when all I wanted was to order a sandwich and beer. I took a stool facing away from the girl and pushed my bizarre feelings away for long enough to order and I got out a book to avoid looking at the bartender and as I read I half dreamed that the bartender asked me to read aloud to him, and so in my half dream, I did. At first he laughed at the right parts, he saw the quiet tragedy of Mrs. Bridge and I began to think that he had just the right measure of unhappiness and
dissatisfaction with life to be someone I could get along with. In my half dream the bartender smiled and we made occasional, comfortable eye contact as I read, but then my fantasy turned sour, and he stopped laughing at any of the funny parts, stopped reacting entirely. He looked around for someone to pour a beer for and seemed dismayed when there was no one. He exhaled visibly. He cracked his knuckles.
Oh, this chapter’s not as good out loud, I said in my half dream. I’ll read a different one.
I flipped to the scene where Mrs. Bridge is trying to learn Spanish from a record, but I mangled the pronunciation and he had to correct me.
It’s Cómo está usted.
Cómo está usted?
No. Cómo está usted.
I am a stupid American, I thought inside the fantasy inside my thought as I read Mrs. Bridge, as the imagined bartender wiped a white towel down the bar, inching away. I decided in my fantasy I would make an effort to speak in a way that was more pleasing to listen to and I would choose a passage better suited for the bartender: the part where Mrs. Bridge, sleepless, has a growing sense of unreality and despair.
She had a feeling that all was not well and she waited in deep expectancy for some further intimation, listening intently, but all she heard before falling asleep was the familiar chiming of the clock.
(The imagined bartender began wiping down the bar again, moving toward me.)
The next morning Lois Montgomery telephoned to say that Grace Barron had committed suicide.
(And he was visibly satisfied with the sudden darkness, and I knew that I’d found a way to capture his attention, though I wasn’t sure what use I had for his attention.)
In the days that followed Mrs. Bridge attempted to suppress this fact. Her reasoning was that nothing could be gained by discussing it; consequently she wrote to Ruth that there was some doubt as to what had been the cause of Mrs. Barron’s death but it was presumed she had accidentally eaten some tuna-fish salad which had been left out of the refrigerator overnight and had become contaminated, and this was what she told Douglas and Carolyn.
(The imagined bartender kept listening and I thought, as I read, inside my thought, that maybe in another dimension this bartender was my child and this was our alternate-universe bedtime story, in the middle of the day, in the middle of a bar, in the middle of my head.)
Her first thought had been of an afternoon on the Plaza when she and Grace Barron had been looking for some way to occupy themselves, and Grace had said, a little sadly, “Have you ever felt like those people in the Grimm fairy tale—the ones who were all hollowed out in the back?”
The idea of my alternate-universe bedtime story dissolved and I left money on the bar and I got up, denied myself a glance at the woman who owned those legs, and wandered away, first to the library where an email from my husband let me know he’d canceled all my credit cards and closed my bank account and that explained it, so I went back to the hostel and counted the money I had: two hundred American dollars in traveler’s checks, twenty-seven New Zealand dollars, thirty-eight New Zealand cents, and one American nickel. I thought about this, remembering that when he took over all our finances after the wedding I somehow hadn’t considered any of the ways that it might become a problem, then lay on the bunk and saw that on the underside of the mattress above mine someone had written THIS PLACE SUCKS.
13
In the morning I checked out of the hostel and walked slowly down the street. Three Japanese girls were posing in front of a mailbox; one pretended to kiss it while a fourth took a picture with her phone. I walked into a bookstore, half-intending to buy a book so I didn’t have to read Mrs. Bridge again, but I noticed a flyer by the door:
What Do You Need? A Home? A Job? Advice?
In smaller letters it asked:
Do You Need To Know Something? Do You Need To Know Someone? Are You Wandering? What If You Had A Place To Stay? Are You Out Here Reading A Flyer And Saying Yes, That Is Me? Some People Are In Need Of Giving; Do You Know Any People Like That? Would You Like To?
There was a name, Dillon, and a number. I wondered for a while why he had capitalized every word on his flyer, then I memorized the number, left the bookstore, found a phone booth, and called.
This is Dillon; may I help? he said after one ring.
I saw your flyer.
And what would you like to tell me?
I’m traveling and need to make some money.
Did you know that no one ever calls from that flyer?
No, I didn’t know that.
Has it ever occurred to you that no one wants to ask for help?
Well, I said, wondering if that was what I was doing—asking for help. That was supposedly the first step in something, in making progress, in becoming a better person with fewer problems. Or wait—was it admitting you have a problem? But doesn’t everyone have problems? Isn’t waking up or drinking water or eating lunch admitting you have a problem? There was a long silence going on. I realized I had stopped talking in the center of a sentence.
Do you have a pen? Can you take down this address?
I was happy he let me stay in my other world where sentences didn’t have endings.
The neighborhood I walked through on the way to Dillon’s seemed like nice families lived inside all the houses, like there was always a woman cooking something inside them all and these nice houses reminded me of a story I’d heard about a woman who’d had enough of her children: One morning after her husband had driven off she dressed the children, a small boy and two very small twin girls, and she put them in the minivan and she drove the minivan to a police station and she took the children out of the minivan and she told them to hold each other’s hands and not to speak, that whatever happened, they should just say nothing, and she led the children into the police station and she told an old man at the front desk, These children—I found these children. I do not know who they belong to or where they should go, and she turned and walked out and got into her minivan and drove home and took a nap and that evening when her husband came home and said, Dear, where are the children?, she said, What children? The husband said he could see in her eyes that she had gotten up and left herself and isn’t that the worst kind of leaving? No one is okay when someone leaves like that and I knew I never wanted to leave that way. I can’t quite remember the end of the story but I thought it somehow involved the husband going to the police station to retrieve his children and finding that they hadn’t said a word all day.
Dillon’s house was slumping into itself on the edge of a hill.
Welcome! someone shouted as I stood in the street and stared.
I couldn’t see who had shouted. I looked to see if maybe they were behind me.
Over here! the same voice said.
I looked at what I thought was over there, then I looked at another there, but I didn’t see anyone.
Hello?
Come on up, someone said, and I couldn’t quite tell if it was the same voice or a different one. A tree rustled and a man jumped out of it, in a kind-of-like-falling way, and he landed on a wooden balcony on the second floor of the house. He opened the door to the balcony and went in, then came out the other side, the door at the top of the stairs I was climbing.
Are you my flyer reader? he asked.
Yes, I said, regretting it with every part of myself. He had three or four dreadlocks tailing the back of his head but the rest of his hair was cut short, shoe-polish black. A silver ring hung on one nostril and his body was put together in a way that suggested it would be easy for him to move a large piece of furniture by himself.
Are you our traveler in need?
I guess?
You guess! Ha! You’re great. You’re a great one. All right, up you come—make haste, young rabbit! Make haste!
Looking back I realize I should have pretended to be at the wrong house, to be the wrong traveler, but for some reason, I made haste. In the living room a girl in a hemp dress and an Indian boy were talking about the sadness of a certain
class of arachnids, the ones that carry poisons they don’t have the ability to use. The boy was short and narrow, seemed barely fifteen. He wore a long, tan tunic trimmed with yellow embroidery. He was nodding his head and smiling and speaking lowly, intently, as if he was an incarnation of some god or saint. There were others there—Sia, the Italian girl who spoke in a voice so tiny it seemed whispered from her belly button, and Gian, who never said a word, and Marco, who said too many, and the British woman, who always kept her backpack locked shut in the corner, even while she showered or made dinner or spoke to someone about how safe she felt in New Zealand, not like the other places she had been and all the awful things that had happened.
* * *
That night I looked at the only picture I had of my husband. In it he is a baby in his mother’s arms, a crumpled, fatty lump of who he eventually became, his little mouth hanging open, his mother looking distraught, caught between a hard place and another hard place—the rest of the family stands behind them, repetitive noses, eyes, skins, hairs, like wallpaper. And as I looked at the baby version of my husband, I decided not to call the present version of my husband anymore. I had called earlier that day from a pay phone near Dillon’s house, but when he picked up it was only to thank me for calling and to ask me to not call again.
Nobody Is Ever Missing Page 5