Subtraction

by Mary Robison

  Praise for Subtraction

  “There isn’t a writer working today who sees the world, or hears it, or inhabits it more fearlessly than Mary Robison. Reading Subtraction is falling in love with her—her voice, her verbs, the peculiar squinted view she has. This is the book we all wanted to write. It’s as smart as snakes. It’s a work of generosity and genius, of perfect timing and pitch, of immense sadness, and singular, driving hope. I can scarcely imagine anyone writing a novel half as stunning anytime soon.”

  —FREDERICK BARTHELME,

  author of There Must Be Some Mistake

  “Robison raises sitcom wit to the level of real emotional situations, real comedy and real art with much the same perspicacity as Henry James did a century ago in ‘The Reverberator,’ his romantic satire on American media madness and the first novel to isolate the wisecrack or one-liner as the basic unit of American courtship conversation. But where James’ use of the wisecrack satirized his innocents abroad in the 1880s, Robison makes the one-liner emblematic of her characters’ ’90s hipness at home against a background of baffled emotional and intellectual drift.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Subtraction stands out as a high-wire act of the novel form—taut in expression yet rich with humanity, expertly crafted and unfairly neglected . . . In Subtraction Mary Robison creates a poignant, forceful tale of lovers in limbo. Her writing is rich with detail, lean with implication. When the tedium, the drudgery, the ephemera are sifted out, we’re left with the intense. Each word pulls its weight. Nothing is wasted.”

  —The Millions

  ALSO BY MARY ROBISON

  An Amateur’s Guide to the Night

  Believe Them

  Days

  One D.O.A., One on the Way

  Oh!

  Tell Me

  Why Did I Ever

  SUBTRACTION

  Copyright © 1991 by Mary Robison

  First published by Alfred A Knopf, Inc. in 1991

  First Counterpoint paperback edition: 2018

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events is unintended and entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Robison, Mary, author.

  Title: Subtraction : a novel / Mary Robison.

  Description: Berkeley, California : Counterpoint, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018010548 | ISBN 9781640090859 | eISBN 9781640090866

  Classification: LCC PS3568.O317 S8 2018 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018010548

  Cover design by Jenny Carrow

  Book design by Jordan Koluch

  COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Bobbie Bristol

  and, with love,

  for Rachel and Jen

  Coco Plumoso

  OH SURE, THEY, OVER there in the city, had rain to behold. From out my third-story window I could see to Boston and over to the Fenway. There the sky was so low and black; if I had been there the rain would have torn at my hair, and ruffled my clothes, soaked me in cool lashings of rain. But over where I was, not so far west—a six-minute trolley ride!—nothing but fringe winds and hot breezes that dog-bone July day, although the four floor fans I had running were mixing up a nice brisk area on my damp back, which was wet from the ice-water shower I’d just suffered. I made myself do that every hour to cool off: five minutes of a paralyzing cold shower, but then fifty-five minutes of relief; of shivering even at first.

  A telephone bill that arrived early in July showed Raf’s tracks. It showed all the long-distance calls he had charged to our Brookline number. He’d been to D.C.; gone on to Charlottesville; then Birmingham; Oxford, Mississippi; Thibodaux, Louisiana. New Orleans was last listed, and from there Raf made three Houston calls.

  Now I had a chair in the only corner of the room not scorching with light, and I sat, wearing a towel sarong, hair streaming from my hourly shower, and dialed, and watched starlings out the window, and waited for someone in Houston to answer his phone.

  The man who said hello was named Raymond Hollander.

  He said, “Raf’s here in town, I believe, but not here here. Not with me, or with us, anymore. And where he’ll be tomorrow I wouldn’t know. Or, hell, where he’ll be tonight. I could make some guesses about him but nothing you’d wanna put a peso down on.”

  I called Herb, a former student of mine.

  “I’ll go ‘on line,’ ” Herb said. And, “Hold.”

  His voice returned. “Window seat; flight’s this evening; they can do vegetarian; a motel suite; a week’s worth of rental car, but car isn’t accurate. I splurged on that part.”

  “You should market these skills, Herb,” I said. “You go public, you could buy food.”

  “They’re not skills, they’re crimes. And not winky-dink ones either. They’re felonies. So think prison, hard time, the gulag . . .”

  Herb went on like that. I hung up and dialed again for Raymond Hollander.

  Raymond said we could meet tomorrow, after he got off work, at something he called an ice house.

  “Cab there,” he said. “ ’Cause directions is tricky and this is in a dumb place, nowhere you wanna be circlin’ lost. We’ll hook up there, then we’ll see.”

  I studied the road atlas and its blowup of Houston, picturing horses, cacti, oil derricks, astronauts.

  Once earlier after Raf vanished for a week, he mentioned an artist had put him up. I realized Raf was talking about my dad.

  “You mean Mario?”

  “In fact,” Raf said.

  “You stayed with my dad and didn’t say anything?”

  Raf shrugged his bony shoulders. His face had a stillness that seemed almost shy. I figured that over the years I’d heard plenty of stories, without his being named, of Raymond Hollander.

  Houston wasn’t desert and cacti. Houston was magnolia and swamp, jungle heat and jungle humid, and Raymond’s ice house was in a neighborhood of shotgun shacks.

  I had left my rental car—a low, quick, red Firecat—at my hotel and cabbed here.

  The place, called the Cielito Lindo, was a stucco garage converted to an outdoor bar.

  There was a slab of patio in front where people ordered drinks from a counter, as from a Yankee Dairy Queen, and then the idea was to stand around in the green shade of the corrugated fiberglass roof’s overhang.

  This was Raf’s type of territory—of the spirit and mind—and I was heartened on first view. But the heat ticked like a windup clock; dangerous heat. The patio section emptied.

  I moved inside and sat in the attached lounge. It was a wine-smelling cinderblock box with plywood boards banged over its windows. My glasses kept fogging and the frames slid down my wet nose.

  I was sinking from the six-hour plane ride, the heat, my second Chihuahua beer.

  I thought about the Gauguin show—240 pieces on exhibit at the National in Washington. I could’ve flown there instead, could’ve been standing in a cool quiet gallery wing right now, studying “Yellow Christ.”

  I was afraid Raymond Hollander was like Raf;
that he would mean to show, but . . .

  Mexican music blew from a radio: fast roiling music so that when I closed my eyes I saw dizzying orange skirts swirling off brown legs. When I opened my eyes I saw boxing posters and tangled strings of Christmas bulbs. I saw I was the only woman left in the dark bar and that there were ten or twelve men. None was talking. All were pounding away at drink.

  The door made its noise and shapes of light crossed the near wall. Somebody said, “Ray.”

  He was early-forties, tanned, dressed in rough clothes, their colors worked and washed out by salt, soap, sun bleach. He looked like a desert item, part mirage through my fogged lenses. He looked exactly the sort who might run with Raf.

  He came straight over and climbed into the booth seat opposite. He planted a hand on the table deck for a hello.

  “Thanks for coming,” I said. “He’s not out in your car is he?”

  Raymond said no, four times, four ways. He called me Mrs. Deveaux.

  “I’m just Paige.”

  “Well, you’re not just anything,” he said and smiled. His smile was good—white, genuine, a smile you had to repay with one of your own.

  I did, but switched instantly to staring at the tabletop. Its wood looked oily and warm and handled: oily from a century’s worth of touch in this cantina.

  Raymond said, “It’s going to be a leetle trickier than what you mighta thought.”

  Nodding, I must’ve appeared so heartsick and tired that Raymond did another smile.

  I took off the glasses. I said, “You’re either the guy who worked with Raf in Baltimore, or you were on the tramp steamer, or you could be the one with the smart dog. . . . I’m sorry, I get his friends confused.”

  “So does he,” Raymond said. “I’m smart dog—that one.”

  He shook a pack of Camels. “He was with me for almost three weeks.”

  “Prevailing on your good will,” I said, and Raymond pointed a cigarette in my direction. “No thank you. I meant Raf.”

  “Now that boy rilly prevailed,” Raymond said.

  I asked, “Could you quit smiling so much?”

  Looking me over, he said, “Umm,” as if he’d got my height, weight, and bra size.

  “You’re as tall as I thought you’d be. I never saw Raf with a woman wasn’t one of your stretch jobs.”

  “Stretch jobs,” I said, and there was a cry, as if on my behalf, from the street. I couldn’t tell if the shriek was made by a kid or a drunk or from joy or terror.

  “I’m not saying like rubber band,” Raymond said. Above him on the white plaster wall, hand-painted purple roses cavorted. They seemed friends, these flowers, as in a cartoon.

  “How many women have you seen Raf with?” I asked.

  “Umm. However many there are. You’re the only one I know of he’s married. How long’s that been?”

  “Five and something years,” I said. “So. He crashed your car, drank your liquor, ate your food.” Raymond was nodding yes, yes. “Jumped your wife? Borrowed money? Cooked your parakeet?”

  “Some of those. Yep. Yes, ma’am.”

  The Cielito Lindo’s matchpack was soggy from the tabletop or from just the day, but Raymond got his cigarette lighted and sighed smoke and appeared to relax. He ordered another Chihuahua for me, an iced tea for himself. He ordered by yelling at the boy behind the bar.

  “I’m sorry for all he did, Raymond. I wish you had him tied up out in your car, or someplace under guard. I need to find him, fast like.”

  Raymond winced and drove a hand through his hair, which was actually golden, thatchy and thick.

  “There are several likely places to look for Raf, though if he’s not in them, any of ’em, you’re fucked.”

  “Because that means he’s left town?”

  “Yeah, and ’cause, you know, he’s not too good on forwarding addresses.”

  I would say to myself that Raf kept me strung so tight I sometimes believed I felt the earth turning under my shoe soles. This is no gift that he brings, I would say, and remember how he came at me in bed—with such heat—as if each chance were our last on the very last night of the world. Every time with Raf, I would think—before he chased the thought away—“This is so scary!”

  He had begun to disappear that spring just as the landscape was softening after the violence of Boston winter; just as green and gold and a little warmth were coming through the window screens. He’d be gone a week, ten days. Then he’d be back, and he’d have new scars, new stories, no excuses.

  As Raymond got his car together, the Cielito’s glimmering side wall kept me upright. I was dropping, though. I felt brain-cooked.

  My thoughts landed on: “This is just a place.”

  The year before I had spent summer break in Cameroon. My dad, Mario, took me. He was a sculptor and he wanted to see Bamileke and Zambeze art and what architecture remained. Cameroon was hotter than Houston, and wetter, but I came to regard it as just a place. Houston was just a place.

  Raymond pulled up now in his convertible, a broad old top down, the clear-green color of a frog pond. All over the sides were furry spray-painted scribbles and scrawls: “JURA!” and “LOS NINOS,” and twice in script, “LUISA.”

  “It’s a beaner-mobile,” Raymond said. “I use it to drive to work. Nobody’s gonna steal it. I work construction. Doors are broke so when I say ‘Hop in . . .’ ”

  Riding along, head lolling back, my eyes caught the rim of the sun there, visibly beaming red hydrogen light.

  We drove up Bienvenida Boulevard. There were pudgy short palm trees with fronds bowing from their tops.

  We passed a baked-clay building marked EL ESTUDIO ESCUELOS CANTOS; next a fence of three hundred hubcaps; now Southwest Texas College’s Beam Particles Laboratory, all buff and square.

  Ahead, huge cloud forms were piled up and the sky shone the same bluejay blue as the Houston squad car riding with us, driver’s side.

  “I really appreciate this!” I shouted at Raymond.

  He glanced at me, jimmied the gear stick to neutral. We idled at a railroad crossing while a Union Pacific switcher shunted some fifty tanker cars past.

  “It’s fun, riding in a convertible,” I said.

  “This day should be over, though,” Raymond said.

  My head bobbed yes, but I was a little hurt he thought that.

  Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us?

  That was Nietzsche, quoted in a kind of goodbye note that Raf left.

  “I thought of a place,” Raymond said. “We’ll be lucky or we won’t.”

  We jounced over the train tracks after the guard gate’s arm lifted. We passed a Fiesta, a food market with brass noise coming from loudspeakers over its entry doors. We went by scrap-metal yards, and a building titled O.K. CREDIT USED CARS AND TRUCKS.

  Raymond’s engine was missing bad. He fought the stick for each gear shift. His suspension was blown.

  We banged along beside a broad cement ditch—Buffalo Bayou.

  “All right, darlin’,” he said. “This is gonna be rancid.”

  “I’m ready.”

  He looked over. “Maybe,” he said.

  There was a marquee with pink and emerald bulbs and tall letters that read: THE NEW TEXAS MOTEL—WE HAVE HOURLY RATES—XXX-PLUS MOVIES!

  Raymond whipped on a pair of dictator-style dark glasses.

  He wheeled into the central court for the motel, where parking slots surrounded a circle of chicken-wire fencing. Inside the fence, a couple lean boys reclined, sunbathing on lounge chairs.

  Attached to the motel was a shack called The Anzac Club. In a box of shadows from the overhang of its tin roof three Mexican women swayed. They were all three stout women, all
rocking to the cowboy music issuing from the club. A newborn baby gestured in the arms of the stoutest.

  Raymond got out and went over to her.

  I stayed in the green car.

  He ambled back to me eventually, swinging a room key. “You wanna come with?” he asked.

  “I guess I do,” I said.

  “Be sure now. You’re not counting on anything.”

  I boosted off the mushy seat and stepped out of the convertible.

  We entered the motel room through a rusted pummeled door that looked as though it’d been wrenched from its hinges and smashed in before.

  Inside, a pinging air-conditioning unit kept the temperature icy and mixed up smells of people and disinfectant and a fruity incense.

  The walls had new wood-tone paneling.

  Mostly there was a bed—a swollen featherbed under a black velvet throw.

  “Well, no husband,” Raymond said. He turned to me. “Maybe you’re glad.”

  “But he was here? Here here?”

  “Afraid so. My Spanish is leaky but I believe she said last night, and they didn’t none of them see him leave. But he’s left,” Raymond said.

  He dropped onto the carpeting and got cross-legged. He popped on the TV.

  The screen showed nude men with a slender woman, very busy.

  “Good, the BBC,” I said.

  “Sorry. I just thought you oughta get the whole landscape.”

  “Oh,” I said, “I know the landscape.”

  The show wasn’t a movie, it was a video, and the moans and gasps that went with it sounded contained and local, as if coming from the next room.

  “Well, look at that,” I said.

  “I don’t wanna,” said Raymond.

  “She’s made different from me.”

  “You better hope she is,” he said. He put out the picture and his shoulders sagged.

  I didn’t move. My knees were crooked over the high edge of the bed and my bottom seemed to be sinking through the mattress, but I didn’t get up, didn’t let my gaze wander from the gray iridescence of the blank TV screen.

  “Well,” Raymond said. “We need us a telephone before we can go any fuh-thuh.”