His eyes go from that tough slant to wide open, and he’s back behind the wheel, putting the Dodge in gear when I bounce the curb, heading right at him. He floors it, and his tires spin and catch just before I get there, and all I do is clip the back end a little, send him fishtailing out onto the road. I stop just short of the abandoned gas pumps, back up, and follow him.
He’s missing his left taillight, but he’s moving pretty good back up Rainbow Drive, the river on our left now, the mayflies. I’ve got a headlight out and there’s smoke coming from beneath the hood, but I’m gaining on him as we pass the mini-mall, pass the Hardee’s, pass the turn into Cherry Street Park, and the smoke is coming heavier now. I push the pedal to the floor, pass the café, and I’m getting closer now, pass back by Sandy’s street, where she’s brushing her teeth or her hair, or she’s in her pajamas or in bed or dreaming, and there’s more steam, and a smell like rubber burning, and we’re coming up on the turn onto the rural route where he has to slow down to make the turn and I know I’m not going to. I’m not going to slow down one bit.
When I hit the back end of Royce’s black Dodge at the bend into the rural route, the front end of his car comes flipping up past my passenger side. I swear in that instant, I look through the window, and Royce, upside down, is looking in at me, and he sees that it’s me, and the look on his face is all I need. I’m ready myself now to go flipping upside down and spinning into the river or out into Fletcher’s back forty or into the pines that line the road. I have my eyes closed now, and I’ve taken my hands off the wheel and my feet off the pedals, and I’m just waiting for the end.
But it doesn’t happen. At some point I open my eyes, and I’m going a responsible thirty miles an hour right down the center of the rural route. The front end of my car is accordioned up into itself, and the smoke coming from the engine is black and thick, but somehow the car still runs. I put my foot on the brake, and I have to push hard, but the car eventually stops, and I get out and walk back down the road. I’m completely unhurt, as far as I can tell, unless I’m in shock, but then it occurs to me that a person in shock wouldn’t know she was in shock, so I must have survived the whole thing.
Royce’s car is wedged between two pine trees and face down in some Coosa backwater that spilled over the roadway back during the spring. There’s fire glowing in the undercarriage, and both his back wheels are still spinning. This is when the car should explode, but I don’t know if that’s just in the movies.
When I get to Royce’s driver’s window, he’s pinned in there something awful. He’s bleeding heavily from his face, which is stove in against the steering wheel, and his upper body’s not going the same direction as his lower body, and I can’t see his arms at all. The car itself is bent in a V-shape, and there’s no glass left in any of the windows. Royce can’t talk, but his eyes meet mine as I lean in where he can see me.
“Looks bad for you in there, Royce,” I say. “I’m pretty sure you’re gonna die here.”
I can think in this moment, but I cannot seem to feel, so I think about what I should feel, and I don’t know. I think I should go get help. I think about the times I let Royce sleep with me, usually at his house, once in my bed while Buck slept in the living room. I think about Buck, and how we stayed together all those years even though we only got married because of Ronnie, and then how, years later, here comes little Ford, the boy I wanted, the boy we actually made love to make. I think, Royce is someone’s child too—but she’s dead. I think I know why I did this to him, and I think it’s almost a good enough reason.
I say, “If you don’t die, you’d better by God stay away from that girl.”
With that I turn and walk the other way down the rural route, away from my car and away from Royce, away from Buck and all of it, and it suddenly seems I may walk all night. The air in my lungs is good and cool, like I’ve just started to breathe again after being underwater for a very long time.
I MARRIED AN OPTIMIST
Which is a hell of a thing to just find out, admittedly, after nearly two years of marriage, not to mention that Heather and I had known each other, off and on, for the better part of ten years. Ours was no whirlwind romance, no Vegas job, no love at first sight. We spent time, much of it alone, living in this dreadful town with few friends save each other, night after night, talking and talking. We ate our meals together, we drank our drink together, we shared our beds and our minds. Both of us wary—or so I thought—we got to know each other—or so I thought. But now it appears that the facts are uncontestable, the truth as plain as rice: my wife is an optimist.
And I want to point out that it’s not merely a few good thoughts about the world, some half-assed, Christmas- and Easter-type optimism. We all fall victim to that sometimes, lose our bearings, briefly apostatize: when the worst possible scenario doesn’t play out; when someone belies our initial underestimation; when we—rarely—make it to the end of a day without seriously contemplating murder. We can all get a little soft now and then.
No, I’m talking a serious conversion here, or—I shudder at the implications—a difference in my wife so profound and debilitating that it must not be a conversion at all, but must be the way she’s always been. I’m talking glass half-full; I’m talking a bowl of pitted cherries; I’m talking Anne Frank here, and I don’t know what to do about it.
Because I’ve grown fond of my wife, even, yes, to love her, over the years we’ve spent living this now obvious lie. I don’t want a divorce. I do not want to simply throw up my hands, abandon her to the dark side. And yet, isn’t it optimistic of me to think I can change her? Or that I can remain unchanged?
Because looking back, I have to admit that there were signs. A year or so ago she came home with a dog, announcing her intention to train the animal. Her quest for the tomatoes of her childhood is relentless, quixotic, Diogenesianly hopeless, and yet every time she bites into one of these measly, pesti-steroided monstrosities of today, she seems surprised and hurt by it. One recent evening, while I was drinking and sulking at the only decent bar left in our suddenly swank Houston neighborhood (the war on terror has been very good for Houston), I happened to scoff at a young woman wearing a Dollywood T-shirt. Heather proffered the opinion that the well-built and well-maintained young woman was probably wearing the T-shirt ironically, stretched tight as it was above a pair of $300 blue jeans. What’s more, she proposed, the woman was wrong to mock Dollywood; Dollywood might be fun; Dolly Parton had given the wretched denizens of the previously wretched burg of Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, many opportunities for jobs and cultural exposure. I responded with my belief that Pigeon Forge is one of the major nexi of evil in this evil world and that, as chief proprietress, Dolly Parton received profit and succor from said evil, and further, that if we lived in an even remotely decent society, Dolly Parton would have never had the chance to build Dollywood, because she would have been legally put down as soon as we heard her singing “Coat of Many Colors (That My Momma Made for Me).”
“It’s nexuses,” said she.
“What’s that?” said I.
“Not nexi. Nexi is not a word. The plural of nexus is nexuses.”
About which, it turns out, she’s right. But this, I think, is hardly the point. The point is she’s wrong about Dollywood, she’s wrong to bring a dog into this house and then try to train it to do what she wants it to do, and she’s wrong to think that a store-bought tomato exists today that isn’t absolutely putrid, and the reason is that we let them—the tomato growers—feed us this shit; it’s our fault, not theirs, because why would anyone take the trouble to grow a decent tomato when we’ll still buy the crappy ones they can make more cheaply, and buy them at a higher price? I mean, you can play tennis with these tomatoes now, so tightly packed are their piths and peels. Don’t even start on organic. You buy that, you’re a bigger fool than I thought. Organic’s just a label they stick on the ugly tomatoes so they can sell them at an even higher price. Add to all of which that it should be nexi, becaus
e nexuses is too hard to say. Just try it sometime.
We met in college, the University of Houston, journalism school. Old Cougar High was a pretty standard pit, no better or worse than most of the big State U’s that blight our landscape with brick and fake ponds and one of each tree, but the J-school was top drawer, and it was here that I first learned the joys of cynicism. When in repose, my rounded, slightly oriental face has always tended toward a frown (my mother, repeatedly: Try to smile, honey; you look so gloomy all the time; people won’t like you), and I found that I could use this to my advantage. I learned the easy bliss of mockery. I developed my blossoming but theretofore latent hatred of men and this world, the way you can cloak that hatred in—for you must, for it truly is—a love of Mankind and The World. I read Mencken and Dreiser and Lewis, the Holy Trinity of the Sneer, and I preached their doctrine with Pauline fervor. I wrote my early journalism pieces for The Daily Cougar with all the subtlety of a truncheon, but by the time I was a senior, I had honed my cynicism to a filet-knife sharpness, and I moved easily through the clammy, gray skin and the feathery rib bones of university life, straight to the guts of the stinking fish, which, in my column, The Way, the Truth, and the Right, I lay bare for the campus to see and smell.
Heather appeared that final year, trailing behind her a cape of rumor, why someone would change schools as a senior and then never want to talk about it, things like that. There had been a painful romance. She had slept with a professor and aborted their love child. She was wanted for some heinous crime. She was a drunk or a drug addict. She had gone insane.
Most of it was jealousy, the kind of petty sniping you always hear from someone’s inferiors, and as far as photography went (and in most other ways as well), they were all her inferiors. By late in the fall semester, having started at the bottom of the pecking order—and never once complaining about it—Heather had established herself as our star. Day after day, her art graced our covers. The night we returned from Thanksgiving break, she first graced my bed.
That’s when the talk began. Between bouts of love, we agreed on the reasons for capitalism’s failure, the horrors of American culture, and the absolute slack-jawed idiocy of golf (the little hats they put on their clubs; the clothes they wear; the way they not only spend countless hours and untold thousands of dollars playing it, they then go home, sit on the couch, and watch other people play it on television, or at least they do for a while, only later to awaken with stiff necks and body-temperature drool puddles collected in the yokes of their ridiculously broad-collared shirts). We were for an educated meritocracy, the thirty-hour work week, and stringent population control. We both swore—independently—that we’d never have children, and probably never get married, unless it just seemed more convenient, for regulatory reasons, to do so.
We talked and made love, seldom ate and never slept. We didn’t need it. We needed each other, our energy and ambition. We weren’t in love—we didn’t need, or believe in, that either. We simply loved. When graduation day came, we skipped the ceremony to spend one last day as close as possible without devouring each other like two snakes, and when she left to start her future in Baton Rouge, and I for a job in Dubuque, we both thought that was it.
Or at least I did. That our paths crossed again four years later seemed less like fate to me than it did to Heather. I’d taken a one-year teaching job here at the alma mater after The Failure. (Ahh, you’d know about The Failure, would you? Well, I got fired from Dubuque—and good fucking riddance to Iowa—from Augusta, Georgia—they take their golf very seriously there—and from Fayetteville, Arkansas—where I’d repeatedly made the mistake of assuming they wanted an insightful and incisive editorial page, rather than just a stroke job for the gurgly, benighted local weltanschauung. When you get fired from three jobs in four years, it’s time to go into teaching, at least for a while, until people forget your name.) I had no grand illusions about educating the Space City’s youth, but I did think that a little time away from the pinheads who run journalism in this country would be a good thing for me.
After the first day of classes, having properly inflicted upon my students my assessment of their dim futures in the newspaper business and of the newspaper business as a whole, I felt a bit thirsty, as I am wont to feel in this terrible heat, and made my way over to the student union where there was a bar in the basement that blared censored hip-hop and served Natural Light beer in plastic cups. Just as I recalled from my student days, there was a poet of some minor renown in the corner with a couple of his grad students. A few other students sat at a table in another corner trying to look as angry as possible while they bobbed their heads along to Kanye West. A bartender muscled a new keg into the cabinet under the bar.
I sat down and asked for a beer, which was soon sullenly provided by the sweaty bartender. The beer itself was sort of sullen and sweaty, and I would have left it and the bar if it hadn’t been for the heat outside. No one should live in Houston in late August. It’s just not worth it. I decided I’d drink my beer really fast and then leave for the day, stop at the Quick Shop for more beer, and go home and sit in front of the air conditioner and count how much money it was costing me every time the compressor kicked on. I closed my eyes to drink the beer, to pretend I was somewhere else, to dream, when I heard a voice behind me say, “Somehow, this doesn’t surprise me nearly as much as I thought it would.”
I didn’t open my eyes. I knew that when I did, I would see her in the mirror behind the bar, and that when I turned, we’d embrace, and I just wanted to sit there for a moment more and hope before I turned and had her introduce me to her boyfriend, the poet-in-training, before I turned and saw she’d been horribly disfigured in a darkroom explosion, before I turned and saw she’d gone to fat.
I won’t bore you with the reunion, the reminiscences, the reuniting. Suffice it to say she had not become fat, been disfigured, or, perhaps most horrible of all, attached herself in any way to the creative writing program. She was there with her advertising firm, taking pictures of the campus for a new promotion designed to convince its target audience that the University of Houston is actually an institution of higher learning and not just the four-year dullard-storage facility the community at-large believed it to be.
We immediately fell back in as before, and within a month, we were engaged, and within three years, blissfully wed by the justice of the peace in the courthouse downtown before two witnesses who were awaiting trial for some knuckle-dragging offense. We honeymooned in Philadelphia and snickered at the Liberty Bell.
But as I said, lately this inexplicable pall of kindness has fallen over our marriage. I can’t even curse at other drivers without Heather telling me how it’s useless and just gets my blood pressure up and doesn’t exactly make for very good driving on my own part. This, she says, to a man who is one of the finest automobile drivers on the American landmass.
We don’t even enjoy my work anymore. I’ve been the Chronicle’s letters editor for a couple of years now, and I used to bring some of my correspondence home to giggle over the grammar, spelling, and opinions expressed therein. We’d drink a bottle of hock and craft responses to some of the better ones. Dear Mrs. Jones, It is with a heavy heart that we write to inform you that your letter of October 17 was so insightful and brilliant that the entire editorial department was instantaneously struck blind by the briefest glimpse at your opinions and prose. As we cannot, in good conscience, subject our typesetting staff, let alone our readership, to such a fate, we are, to our regret, etc. That sort of thing, just for yuks. But lately she’s turned up her nose at the game, preferring instead to lecture me on what she calls “the world’s misery quotient,” or some such, and how I’m adding to it every day. I’ve advised her that one doesn’t really add to a quotient, that a quotient is a product of division, and that in order to increase a quotient, one must actually lessen the divisor or increase the dividend.
“Okay,” she said one night. “So which are you doing?”
“I don’t even know the terms,” I said. “How does one figure a misery quotient?”
“First you take all of your misery, then you stick it up your ass.”
“Heather, this is ridiculous—”
“No,” she said. “You want to know what’s ridiculous? Ridiculous is living with someone who sucks dry every drop of pleasure in my life, who replaces it with this . . . this hate. Why do you care what people write to the paper? Be glad they’re reading it. How can you go around all the time so miserable? Doesn’t it wear you out, having to find something to hate about everything and every minute and every day of your life?”
“I don’t hate—”
“You do too hate,” she said, moving now from the couch and into the kitchen, where she pulled a bottle of wine from the fridge and a glass from the rack above the sink. “You hate everything but yourself, and whatever ideas you have and whatever you think is awful, which is everything, and so how can you exclude yourself? You hate even yourself. But it’s not as simple as that, is it? You must hate me, too.”
“I do not hate you.”
“Who cares?” she said, then she looked at the empty glass, replaced it in the rack, put the wine back in the fridge. “Who cares what you hate? Did you ever ask yourself that? Why do you think everyone wants to hear your nasty opinions about every single thing? Why do you think they shut you in that room to read letters all day at work? They were sick of having to listen to you complain—they know you have some talent, and they don’t want to just kick you to the curb like everyone else has, but they’re sick of you. They hoped you’d get sick of it, too, if you had to read it all day long, but no, you just eat it up, like you’re some kind of black hole of hatred, and you need more and more and more of it all the time in order to keep your black and hateful engine running. I’m sick of it.”
Inappropriate Behavior: Stories Page 10