Subtraction

by Mary Robison

  “No,” Raymond said. “It’s the flip side of the same.”

  Back at the motel, Raf seemed only murkily aware of us.

  A car-wreck movie played on the jumbo color television. The movie had a wet-lipped stripper, shiny with sweat, strolling a shiny runway in a shiny saloon.

  Raf told me my legs were better than hers.

  “I think she’s a man,” Raymond said.

  Raf said, “Paige’s a man? You been hanging out in the wrong restrooms, amigo.”

  “The film person there is a man,” said Raymond.

  I agreed with him. “That’s a guy, Raf. And still his legs are better than mine.”

  “Wicked world,” Raf said.

  Raymond said, “Well, I’ll be off. But if you’re around tomorrow, Paige, and if you feel up to it, Raf, I’m driving over to see the Consul General of Mexico. Cónsul Hen-e- rail du Meh-he-co.”

  “Give him a blow job,” Raf said.

  “Might turn out that way. You know that amnesty deal for illegal aliens?”

  “Don’t trust that shit. It’s a trick to deport some and skin the others for back taxes,” Raf said.

  “Luisa’s got a brother who might qualify if there’s still time. I’m gonna find out—no names named. You all wanna come along, you’re most welcome.”

  “Tempting,” I said.

  “Afterwards, I was gonna take you to lunch,” Raymond said. “ ’Cause see the consulate’s over in the fag-museum- boutique area they call the Montrose district.”

  “Raf won’t go if there’s no horse manure for him to toss around in,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Raf said. “True. It’s not an authentic day for me unless I degrade myself in so many ways.”

  I dreamt Raf lay beside me in a cold room. I dreamt a freak snowstorm had fallen and left a snowy pudding on the floor and I was thirsty. Someone caressed me, and I liked the caress, but explained, “Wait, wait. I need water first.”

  I came to at four a.m. and heard the wenk-wenk of my wristwatch. I unbuckled the strap and flung the watch at the sliding glass doors.

  “What’d you do that for, Paige?” Raf asked me. He was awake.

  “The sound,” I said.

  “Hey, hey,” he said. “Easy. It’s just another night.”

  Later I left the bed and Raf—who sat now, still awake; slapping through my copy of Zoom—to drink all the tap water my body would hold.

  Sunrise lured me, barefoot and in my bathrobe, out onto the front balcony.

  The sky had heat lightning. Quick sequences of it strobed the grape clouds.

  A black woman in a pale linen suit came from the next suite and stood watching with me, as though I’d been expecting her.

  Over the way, we could see the Southern Cross Nursery with its banner: LINERS SHRUBS GROUND COVER & TREES. We could see a freight truck garage bleached of color by the security lights yet burning. Not much else, though, in view.

  The woman spoke with an accent. She asked if I smelled rain. I didn’t.

  She said, “I lost a friend a while ah-go.” She stroked her cheeks as if to exercise some change on herself. “So I pace, not sleeping. And ahm enticed into stupid thoughts about destiny. Cynical as we are, we could say something for it, I suppose.”

  The sky blinked with a spear of lightning, followed by a boom.

  She said, “This man I won’t bore you about, in Trinidad, he lost a testicle in surgery. Nothing could have mattered less to me. But he never came to believe me on that. And what does his affliction mattah now? Not at all.”

  The motel door stood ajar and I could see that back in the room the TV—soundless, but showing a film—made everything in there gold, now blue, now circus red.

  The woman was silent until she came up with this: “A mile or so that way is a self-serve carwash. They have vacuum hoses. You can clean the seats, do the inside, wash the exterior and dry it. Mine is the white Jetta. I think that ees what I will do, and feel better after.”

  Raymond collected me around noon.

  He drove across town, along Telephone Road, the Martin Luther King Highway, Navigation Boulevard, and into a dandified neighborhood of southwestern art deco, Miami-ish palms, stucco and glass-block condos, dappled ponds of shade. The storm had well passed and straight overhead the sun was white. Everywhere, I heard the twitch and sputter of lawn sprinklers.

  A collie dog ambled across the parkway ahead of the car.

  “Yep,” Raymond said, grinning at the dog.

  The Mexican Consulate had the ground floor of a six- story amber-glass-and-concrete box.

  “This won’t be but ten or fifteen hours,” Raymond said. “Then I’ll take you to some rum ordinary.”

  He was in a blousy white shirt and a tie but wore his wash-faded Levi’s.

  I drifted around the immaculate lobby. It was spacious, somber, chilled. There were desert saguaros in earthen pots, and some bland abstract wall paintings I spent time on.

  I wandered out into the sunny lot, where Mexican flags flapped high overhead—green, red, and white.

  Across the street, whole families squeezed under an awning at a place advertising “Passport Photos, Immigration, Fingerprints—FOTOS de MEXICO.”

  Too near me, a bird landed on its own shadow. This was an eerie bird, white-eyed. I moved away from it to a glen of shade.

  There was a glitzy house opposite where I stood. Before the house were willows and a hand-painted sign for twenty- four-hour palm readings with “Sister Andros.”

  I walked over. Inside the bright living room a tiny woman wearing pink sneakers sat in an armchair and frowned at a tumbler of fizzing yellow seltzer she held.

  “You again,” she said.

  “Me? I’ve never been here before.”

  “Then your twin has,” the woman said.

  “I don’t have a twin. I was an only child. Are you Sister Andros?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “Never mind,” I said. “I just came over here to kill time.”

  “What I meant is we’re closed,” Sister Andros said.

  “On your sign it says open twenty-four hours.”

  The woman gently fingered her head. “It’s not you,” she said, “it’s this headache. Some other time?”

  Back in the cool lobby of the Consul General’s offices, I got cross-legged on the marble floor and stared at a great cactus posted in a clay drum.

  Raymond was the only blond in line; easy to spot. He stood at the head now, chatting with a chic woman on the business side of the desk.

  I liked watching Raymond and realized as he sauntered over to me that I felt contented in the cool and wished he’d taken longer.

  “Is that it? Everything’s settled already?” I asked.

  “Mostly, if you can trust ’em. They wanted specifics and I kept it all hypothetical, but just filing costs you.”

  I said, “Raymond, you’re friends with Luisa’s brother? You want him living with you?”

  He looked confused. “More the merrier, ain’t it?”

  Back at the motel suite, Raf, covered only by a waist-knotted towel, was pacing at a mean tempo, incensed, distressed, fearful; maybe all those. He seemed sober, but I could seldom be sure. He had plenty of talent for camouflaging drunkenness.

  “Maids want fucking in here,” he said.

  “They want fucking in here? So where’s your problem?” said Raymond.

  “Hi, Raymond,” Raf said, dropping onto a chair.

  “Oh, are we gonna be friendly?” Raymond asked.

  I rang the desk and canceled housekeeping services for the day.

  Raf said, “I need support before I do what I gotta do.”

  “Get dressed?” Raymond asked him.

  “No, a shower.”

  “Oh, the heavy work,” Raymond said.

  “I’m a hero in my book,” said Raf. “If you two hear dying noises . . .”

  A bourbon scent mixed with t
he hot cloud from Raf’s bath.

  Outside, rush hour. The motel was filling up. There were traffic noises, and the sounds of car doors and trunks being slammed, the voices of guests unloading luggage, bringing luggage up the stairs.

  Raf’s black Levi’s were half zipped. He was shirtless and barefoot, and he left damp tracks as he crossed the room to yank shut the draperies and close out the motel people, the parking lot, the elaborate shadow work of the giant palm tree.

  He had mixed a drink for himself: four parts bourbon and one part tap water.

  Now he leaned over the sinks at the dressing counter and took the drink. I saw his sinewy back arch as he fought to keep down the jolt.

  He made it to the bed, where he dropped, looking stunned.

  “So much for Doctor Jekyll,” Raymond said. “Here comes Hyde.”

  “Jekyll put in a full day,” I said.

  Raf asked, “You been having fun with my wife, Raymond?”

  “We been screwin’ our brains out,” Raymond said.

  “That’d be a short session,” said Raf.

  “All we did was drive back here, hoss. To take you to supper with us.”

  Raf snorted, full of hate for the idea. “Food’s a long way off,” he said.

  I signed us on for another week at the Park Inn.

  “What’s the story?” Raf said. “Why’d you re-up?”

  “For you. I’m waiting for you,” I said.

  “The fuck. You just don’t want to say goodbye to Raymond.”

  He slept away the day, coming awake like a vampire, at sundown.

  Night, we drove over to The Yellow Man. The club seemed safe and friendly. A step-up platform stage had been added for live entertainment—a reggae band. And for dancing, a stretch of floor was spotlighted and cleared of tables.

  Raf switched over to drinking sweetsie cocktails made with fruit syrups and cream. “See if maybe my skin’ll quit crawling,” he said.

  The sugar-liquor combo animated him, but gave him manic rage. After three drinks he left me alone at our table and sauntered over to dance with some spare woman. I heard him threaten to thrash a man who knocked into them. And I had a feeling Raf wouldn’t much mind getting thrashed.

  At six or so, I swam in the Park Inn’s lighted pool. The water was lukewarm. I pedaled on my back, stirring up a gleaming white wake, and watched dawn change the face of the sky. I saw morning birds.

  There were no calls, no messages at the desk from Raymond.

  Until noon, I lay taking sun on one of the webbed lounge chairs that crowded the patio. Noon brought the real factory heat.

  Toward dark, I was waiting alone in the Firecat on a dead street in the Third Ward. Raf had gone inside one of these houses to see a doctor—“like a doctor,” he had said, rather—about drying out.

  “I’m sick of drinking,” he had said.

  “And sick from it,” I had added.

  “Don’t help me, Paige, it hurts,” he had said.

  For something to do, I opened the glove compartment, and by its little light practiced writing quatrains. I made a kyrielle that became a pantoum because lines 2 and 4 of each stanza worked well as lines I and 3 of the next: A-B-A-B, B-C-B-C, C-D-C-D, and so on.

  Raf materialized on the dark sidewalk, the handkerchief pocket of his black suit stuffed with papers, a printed pamphlet, a prescription sheet.

  Back beside me in the car he said, “Did you go to high school, Paige?”

  “Of course I did. You have to, don’t you? It’s a law.”

  “Never heard you talk about it.”

  “Well, I went,” I said. “In Maryland and then we moved to Massachusetts. Why?”

  “Close your eyes,” he said, and his voice was soft, so I did.

  “O.K., they’re closed.”

  “I mean really tight. Squeeze them shut.”

  “There,” I said, “done.”

  “Now, pretend you’re back in high school.”

  “All right, I’m pretending. What happens next?”

  “You lift your skirt and take down your panties.”

  “Oh no, Raf, uh unh. It can’t be done. This is a compact car!”

  “You’re not pretending good, Paige.”

  “High school . . .” I said. “You’re right. Yes it can.”

  “Nine and a half medium on these,” Raf told a salesperson, and held up a pair of silver-trimmed running shoes. Collected on Raf’s lap were some scanty shorts, socks, and a couple singlets.

  We were in a sports clothes store—one in a line of shops in Rice Village.

  “I’m not complaining about how expensive all this is,” I said.

  “Has to be,” Raf said.

  I said, “I hope you’re not sobering up just to show me. I hope it’s for yourself, or for, I don’t know, not for nothing.”

  “Nothing’s something,” Raf said.

  Raymond visited the motel that weekend and guessed in an instant that Raf had started drink withdrawal.

  “ ‘Anguish in my soul,’ ” Raymond said. “ ‘How long, O Lord, how long?’ That’s Psalm six. Or it’s thirteen, maybe. . . .”

  Raf wore his running shorts. He was bent over, hands on knees, sweating still. He looked as though he’d been bucketed with water.

  “Five motherfuckin’ miles,” he said.

  “You ran five miles? Out there in that hell?”

  “Limped through four of them. Swam laps here first, though.”

  “I guess you went crazy total,” said Raymond. “It’s sad to see.”

  “It’s tragedy,” Raf said. “You’re watchin’ it blithely.”

  He straightened up, tipped the motel’s filled ice bucket to his face, and munched a mouthful of cubes. “I’m not here,” he said, “just not here.”

  Raymond said, “You’ll come back gradually. A part at a time, as I recall.”

  “I wish the part of me that sleeps’d come back. I bought a prescription from that quack Googie,” Raf said. He showed Raymond a clear vial of white capsules.

  “I hate that lizard Googie but it’d be dangerous going with nothin’. This is O.K. It’s what they give you in the hospital,” Raymond said.

  “Fuck hospitals,” said Raf.

  “How ’bout vitamins? Are you eating?” Raymond asked.

  “Some,” Raf said. He lowered into a chair and peeled off a blood-streaked running sock. “Fruit juices. I’m working myself up for solid foods.”

  “Listen, you two,” Raf said, hitching into a baggy pair of cargo jeans I’d brought along. He’d just finished showering.

  Raymond took off his dark glasses as if to hear better. He crossed his arms, leaned a shoulder against the wall.

  “I know what’s going on between you. I could get it from looking at Paige when you’re around, Raymond. And I also know how bad I messed up with Luisa. I’m sorry. But listen to me now. I’m going on a long stroll. You’d both be doing me a favor if you’d just get the fuck on with it.”

  “Wait, wait, Raf, please. Not one of your long strolls,” I said.

  “I’ll be back,” he said. “Before morning.”

  “You think you mean this,” said Raymond. “You’re coming out of a fog. There’s self-recrimination . . .”

  “Raymond, just do it or don’t. Look, you know how I am, and it’s gotta be the same for Paige. You can’t tell me you don’t want this, either of you, so have it,” Raf said. And in seconds he yanked the door open on the fiery day and fled.

  “Hope he meant that,” Raymond said, unbuttoning his workshirt.

  “Well, thank you, but . . .” I said.

  “Sure sounded like he did,” Raymond said. He kicked out of his boots. “Want me to undress you, peach?”

  “Raymond, of course, I’d like to . . .” I said. “The idea’s been with me since the night we met. In fact, minus the idea, life’ll be less something—a lot less.”

  He took my hand and we circled togethe
r and slow-danced.

  I said, “And ordinarily I don’t have such thoughts. My whole time with Raf I haven’t, not about one other person.”

  “So what’s in the way? My religion? What’s to stop you?”

  “You two,” I said.

  Raymond thought a moment and sighed. “Another day at the turkey facility,” he said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Don’t know, but it sums up how I feel.”

  Fists knotted, Raf paced a path in the motel carpeting— back and forth, back and forth. He ran. He whapped out laps in the pool. A couple or even three times a day he’d get me into bed for a full workout; or he climbed into the shower with me. Once he tackled me on an isolated little patch of lawn down around the vending machines.

  We were on twenty-four-hour time: banking at a cash machine at 3 a.m.; buying fruit and groceries at sunup in Jacinto’s.

  He read anything. I brought him magazines, Antaeus, the TLS. At the Brazos Bookstore on Bissonnet I bought for him a slender novel from Brazil, the diary of a dead painter, a new play by an Irishwoman.

  He wanted noise—the radio on. He listened to the jazz station, or the student broadcasts from Rice. He watched two-star movies on the TV’s cable channels, watched whatever came on.

  One night he left the news channel blaring on TV, and the newscasters’ voices mingled with my dreams. As we rolled out of bed in the morning, I said, “Anything you want to know about Sissy Wallcock, the little liver baby, just ask me. I know what Sissy ate yesterday on her birthday. I know what presents she got, besides the new liver.”

  “Aw, I heard all that. I was awake,” Raf said. “But then I harkened and changed over to Route 66.”

  “You did? Which episode?” I asked.

  “Todd poses as an American Nazi and to prove his loyalty to the group he has to beat up Buz.”

  “That’s a good one,” I said.

  He slept now as I gazed through the motel window at all the car metal glimmering in the lot below, in the beam of a full moon.

  I drifted down to the Firecat and crawled inside. I pretended my parents, Mario and Dottie, were young again, still married, riding on either side of me. I pretended they were la-la-la-ing along with the radio as it played Scarlatti—quick-music/slow-music/quick-music; an Italian overture, the origin of symphony.