Subtraction

by Mary Robison

  “Life’s harder up here,” he said. “I’m facing Raf, and this faculty-club place where they’ll make me eat in the basement. I’m freezing all the time. For doin’ the littlest thing I gotta wear all my clothes and never mind what I wanna wear, you know? Now we’ll most probably slide over a cliff.”

  His voice came out stuttered from his shaking. His teeth knocked.

  I drove the Point Road. The wind combing the bluffs still blew snow. There were steel-colored puddles with ice skins.

  A chain wrestled and clanged on the flagpole outside the Wasnascawa post office.

  In Hampham, kids’ crayon drawings of winter were taped to the windows of the grade school. The pictures had snowmen with carrot noses; scribbled figures swerving on skates; hooded men teetering on skis.

  People were shoveling furiously. Repair trucks worked over every wire and pole. Fallen tree branches lay on side roads. A lone salt and sand truck had most of the driving space on the main drag and ahead of him was a monster plow. It trapped rows of cars at street meters, putting them behind a snow mountain and covering some entirely.

  I drove off the peninsula, past the ROUTE 20A sign, which bled rust from its borders.

  In the rearview now I could see the shanking leg-shaped peninsula—bay side and ocean—and there were boats and towers, tiny rooftops, soft brown clouds of trees.

  “How’s it driving?” asked Raymond.

  “O.K. so far,” I said, although the road was cracked, crumbling at the shoulders, pocked with deep holes where it surfaced at all.

  “You still like me?” he asked.

  Because of the road I could spare only a glance, but he had invested a lot in the question, I could see.

  I nodded. “A lot,” I said.

  Away from the beach there was no mist and the street shone with sunlight.

  In Boston, on the BU bridge, cars were confined to one lane and being flagged slowly, singly. Emergency crews worked behind crusty metal cones. There were winking Day-Glo lights, caution signs. Still, the city was open for business.

  The desk officer shook dry the check I had inked to get my club privileges unsuspended. “I don’t know if I have the authority to decide this,” she was saying.

  She wore three sweaters—thick and thin cardigans and a pullover—and tiny glasses on a necklace chain.

  Raf had long been using my ID number and signing for drinks and food in the downstairs bar and cafeteria.

  “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a bar bill this large,” the desk officer said.

  We waited in the velvet-draperied reading room, a half- dozen dons and Raymond and I, drinking coffee from a silver pot and china cups. The profs turned newspapers, folded them, dozed.

  “I’m just here to fix the furnace,” Raymond whispered to me.

  “Relax.”

  “No, I’m just the pest exterminator, if anyone asks you. I came about roach control.”

  He followed me over to a bow window. We watched bundled-up literature students rushing in and out of Warren House; watched young women treading snow. They wore cheap white yarn gloves, metal-tipped cowboy boots, down jackets opened at the throat on their grandmothers’ pearls.

  A chime called us to dinner.

  We let ourselves be guided across the maroon carpeting to a corner table. The room had scarlet linen and miniature paintings beaming with lacquer, long windows, and a view of a forty-foot hemlock in the yard.

  “O.K., so you’ll help me with which fork and all, right?” Raymond said.

  “This place, I think they give you only one fork,” I said.

  We ate iced oysters with hot sauce. “Raf!” Raymond said.

  I shucked another oyster. “He better show up,” I said.

  Raf lifted me up out of my chair and turned me around. He folded his arms over my shoulders and kissed me. He smelled clean, of the outdoors and winter. On his hands were big gloves of wet leather, which he kept, fingers spread, away from his embrace.

  I pulled back, and saw that he looked gaunt but darkly appealing. A long chesterfield topcoat hung from his shoulders.

  “I remember you,” I said.

  He shrugged and gave me his crinkly grin.

  “Lifeboy!” he shouted at Raymond. The other diners twisted in their seats.

  “Raf, Jesus,” I muttered.

  He lunged at Raymond in a half-fall, and hugged him. “Didn’t we cut a swath down on the bayous?” Raf said.

  “Turn me loose,” said Raymond. “Let go.”

  Raf did. He swirled out my chair and I got resettled.

  His own seat he jammed between Raymond and me. He crossed his legs knee on knee, flapped open his napkin, and dropped it over his lap. He removed neither his coat, muffler, nor gloves.

  “June, how are your boys?” he asked our waitress.

  “Oh no, you,” she said to Raf. She was a woman about Dottie’s age, in a simple woolen dress with a corsage.

  “ ’S all right, I’m sober. Bring us seared beef tips and glazed carrots. You’ll love those, Ray. And that lawn-mower-bottom spinach.”

  “My youngest got accepted at Notre Dame,” June told Raf.

  “Eureka!” he shouted.

  While we waited for our food, Raf talked to us or to himself aloud. He talked about signs and signifiers, reflexive texts, Italian cinema, public sculpture, and private interests.

  “Sir, don’t touch the plate. It’s very hot,” June said, as she delivered Raymond’s platter of crackling meat and vegetables. She positioned the plate with an oven mitten.

  Raymond moved the platter, getting it lined up in front of him. “Yow!” he yelled.

  “She warned you,” said Raf.

  “Yeah, Raymond, that’s why Raf kept his gloves on for the meal,” I said.

  Raymond dunked his hand in his ice-water glass. He said, “You’re bein’ real cute, Raf, but there’s something we all should be saying.”

  Raf got busy cutting his food—all of it—down to morsels. He didn’t eat, but carpentered his food with fork and knife, sawing and dividing.

  As he worked, I said, “Well, Raymond’s right, of course.”

  “You’re this way now, Raf, but you keep buggin’ out on her.”

  “Raymond, I better do this,” I said.

  Raf was slicing his baby carrots into paper-thin slivers.

  “It’s agony being your wife,” I said.

  A waiter interrupted to ask if we needed more coffee. Raf tinked his coffee saucer with his knife, nodded yes.

  “Acting on impulse,” I said, “and with no sense of responsibility . . . it’s fun for a while. But it’s not too practical, or considerate, and it gets to be . . .”

  “When the years start adding up and the wisdom doesn’t,” Raymond said.

  “Well, there I disagree,” I said. “The years have nothing to do with it.”

  “I didn’t mean you’re old, Paige. I meant our health is going.”

  “I’m in great health!” I said.

  “I didn’t mean your health. I meant Raf’s.”

  I said, “But that’s Raf’s concern. That’s not what I’m arguing. Not like, grow up and get healthy.”

  “No, never that!” Raymond said. “Like to see the day either one of you grows up and acts your goddamn age.”

  “Look, Raf can act any way he wants, do whatever he wants. But he can’t expect me to hang around in the margins of his life ready with aspirin and checkbook,” I said.

  “He’s gonna die of it,” Raymond said. “If you cared about him like I do, you’d want him to knock it off.”

  “That’s his decision to make,” I said.

  “You expect him to make a decision. Look at him!”

  We looked at Raf. He had a plate of confetti food and a knife in his left glove, a fork in his right. He blinked back at us, as if he hadn’t been paying much attention.

  “Raf,” I said. “When you next go wildcatting or on some chas
e, hold it in mind that I won’t be around when it’s over. I’ll be off doing what I need to do.”

  “But you already did,” Raf said. “You fucked Raymond.”

  “None of your business,” I said, and Raymond growled in exasperation.

  “I think I’ll get June and send this meat back,” Raf said. “It’s too tiny.”

  “Why don’t I want to kill him and blind his other eye?” Raymond asked me. “The whole long drive in, all I dreamed about was killing him, blinding him, and tearing off his goddamned ears.”

  “It’s because deep down we’re still flower children,” Raf said.

  “Why don’t you tear off just one ear,” I said to Raymond.

  Raf said, “Let’s get out of here and go eat. Raymond, you’ve never seen our Brookline place, have you?”

  We walked among a pack of grad students who were wearing buckled rubber boots and flight jackets: folks who’d come from the film labs at Sever or down from the architecture library in Gund.

  “There’s a reading at the Grolier,” one of them said to me. It was Herb, the computer-whiz who’d booked my Houston flight. He went along with us as far as Mass. Ave.

  “A poetry reading? Are you going, Herb?” I asked.

  “Hell no, you kidding?” he said.

  “We haven’t met,” Raf said. “I’m Paige’s husband Raf, and this is her husband Raymond, and you’re her husband . . . Herb, is it?”

  Raf curbed the car illegally in front of our Brookline place, a three-story house on a street of tall houses that crowded each other and were crowded by towering trees. Ours was painted lemon with ivy-colored trim. There were sun porches and overhangs, today dripping ice.

  “I didn’t expect it to look like this,” Raymond said. “Homey.”

  Inside, he prowled the rooms. He paused at a wall of built- in bookshelves. “You read all these poetry books?”

  “They’re written by friends, mostly,” I said.

  “Ha! If they were really your friends, they wouldn’t commit poetry,” Raf said.

  We climbed to the top floor, where the rooms had views of downtown Boston.

  Raymond and Raf strolled into my study—a long white- walled rectangle where I kept my typewriter, reference books, filing cabinets, class schedules, ledgers, appointment calendars.

  “It’s nice,” Raymond said.

  “It is nice and she keeps it tidy. But notice everything’s all dusty?” Raf said. “Neat and nice but dusty.”

  Raymond tapped his index finger on an oil-chalk drawing, framed and mounted on one white plaster wall. “You did this, right?” he asked Raf.

  “She did it,” Raf said.

  “Shut up,” I said.

  “Is it art?” asked Raymond.

  “History will have to answer that question,” said Raf. “I think it’s her drawing of, I think, a kid pulling a wagon. I think.”

  Raymond leaned back and squinted with his left eye, now with his right. “I sort of see the wagon part,” he said.

  We ordered Indian food and sat in the living room waiting for the delivery. The day darkened, but no one turned on a light.

  “Don’t you all have a television?”

  Raf said there was a black-and-white in a closet upstairs. He said it was a deleterious appliance, in his opinion. “This television,” he said, “won’t do anything but show television shows.”

  Raymond looked around. His fingers clawed the cloth on his knee. “I never pictured this,” he said. “I thought you two would travel lighter, is all. You got an existence here.”

  I slept on the couch, wearing a sturdy bra, a T-shirt, underpants, tights, socks, a sweat suit, and a bundling of quilts and blankets, although the steam radiator was pounding out heat. I knotted the pillow case in my fist and squeezed shut my eyes.

  Raymond closed himself in the spare bedroom for the night, and Raf, the last I noticed, was stalking around under the headphones of a cassette player, smoking a cigarette, drinking from a stein of coffee.

  “Animals not human, they stand like this, see?” Mario said. He got down on all fours. He let his head hang. “A dog, a horse, a mule. Lookata where my face sees. Sees down, right?”

  “Dad, get up,” I said.

  “But a human,” Mario said, “gotta sightline right on da horizon.”

  Mario pulled up to a standing posture.

  “When you work with mass and big big weight, see, and balance, you wonder, my God, how come you have something weighs two hundred pounds and can stand and move around on two small pads!” He walked around his kitchen, demonstrating the miracle of locomotion.

  “Move around, walk around, get the salt, move around,” he continued. “And not fall over?”

  “You couldn’t weigh two hundred pounds,” Raymond said.

  “No, I talk about Paige,” Mario said. He grabbed me from behind, hooped me at the waist and bear-hugged me.

  “Look at this animal,” Mario said. “She’s no good, but sheeza fun to squeeze.”

  Raf exchanged a dry look with Raymond.

  Mario picked up my hands, as if I were a dummy. He raised a hand and spoke for me but in his own voice. “I’m named Paige,” Mario said, waving my hand, hello, at Raf and Raymond. “Sometimes, my pretty mother moves me around and other times my genius father. But when they go off busy I live in a closet and think up my own stupid songs.”

  “Huh,” Raf said, interested.

  “Sometimes,” Mario said, “is a crazy guy, sick awhen he was just a boy, got only one eye drags me outa the closet. We walk around, move around, get the salt, get the pepper, move a left foot, move a right, eat some good food.” Mario made my hand jerk up and address my face, as if I were shoveling in mouthfuls of food.

  “This explains a lot,” Raymond said.

  “Then, all done, I go to sleep,” Mario said. He reached around and gently shut my eyelids with the tips of his callused fingers. “And I’m asleep and sleep and dream of when I was a fish, who is how I start out my life as. A fish, same as everybody.”

  “You’re damn straight,” Raf said.

  We moved into Mario’s living room, which was huge and not empty, but seemed empty. The blond-wood floors had a high gloss and were unmarked. There was a step-ladder my father had painted red. On a long shelf sat the pieces of his complicated stereo system. In a corner, in a ceramic tub, posed a lemon tree. Lined up side by side against a blank wall were five old white leather armchairs.

  The three of us took seats in three of these. Mario perched on the stepladder. “You gotta lot of power here,” he said to me. “In this room, Paige, you got power.”

  “That’s news to me,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “It isn’t. Who wants music? Who wants I make some stew?”

  “Who wants you talk like an American?” I snapped.

  My father said, “Some kittens, you think, why didn’t I drowned it when I had da chance? Hey, Raymond, you gotta little daughter, yes?”

  “You gotta meet her mom and dad before you get a fix on Paige,” Raf said.

  “I got my own fix already,” said Raymond.

  We were out in Mario’s yard, looking west over a downhill forest of pines to a country road. East were the four ribbons of Route 95.

  “You ever read her poetry?” Raf asked.

  “Sure. It was good. Wasn’t very forthcoming. Nothin’ in it about herself, but I liked it,” Raymond said. He turned to me. “Do you like it?”

  “My own poetry? I couldn’t say. It’s just mine, like the family dog.”

  Mario fed us a stew flavored deeply with wine, onions, dark tastes.

  Afterward, he hummed while serving bowls of his spicy, black, blistering-hot coffee.

  “You saw Mom last month,” I said.

  “No.”

  “She told me about it. In Boston. You two went out.”

  “I couldn’t see her,” Mario said, and he looked sad. “She was so dressed up.”
r />   On the drive from Mario’s, Raf told about a spot in Mexico where the surfing was good but the beach was crowded by pigs eating litter. He said he came back over the border at El Paso, and went on north across the Great Plains with a seventy-year-old woman who rinsed her mouth with Scotch and drove a used, repainted, resold police car.

  “There’s a ride I’m just as glad I missed,” Raymond said.

  Raf said he got a New York train in Chicago, a Boston train in New York, but had to get off, sick, in Providence.

  “So naturally I called Mario. And he tells me, ‘Raffo! But sure. We fix you like a hole.’ ”

  “Whole, as in complete and entire?” I asked.

  “No, he meant like a hole in the ground,” Raf said.

  “That’s how I always think of you,” Raymond said.

  Raf said, “Turns out, he meant literally—as literal as he gets. This was October when the ground was still workable and he had me dig a pond for him. More like a lake. With a shovel and wheelbarrow and pickaxe. And then he had me fill it back up. I got plenty sober, I promise,” Raf said.

  “But, Raf, you forgot to stay down in the hole when you covered it,” said Raymond.

  Matter

  DOTTIE GREETED US AT the service delivery door around midnight. She wore a little makeup, her satin robe and slippers. I had phoned from Mario’s to say we were coming.

  “Raf! Wow!” she said, embracing him. “You had us so scared.”

  “I’m fine,” he said, “You been smoking stuff, Dottie?”

  “Naw,” she said, and hugged Raymond.

  “Hey, Pretty,” Raymond said.

  “Don’t chew your hair,” Dottie told me.

  Raymond said, “We figured we could help you straighten up some after the storm crowd.”

  “You can, you can. Great. God yes.”

  We had agreed to sit here in Dottie’s suite, away from the saloon and the taproom.

  “And it’s too long since you and I shot the bull,” said Raf.

  “You are the one with words,” Dottie said. “You always were.”