Contrary Motion

by Andy Mozina

  “Happy Mother’s Day,” I say without identifying myself.

  There’s a pause. Maybe she’s deciding whether to hang up.

  “Thanks,” she says.

  “Is Steve there?”

  “He’s grilling outside.”

  “Are you having a good day?”

  “I’m sorry about losing it on the way to the hospital,” she says in a quiet, defeated voice.

  “You didn’t lose it,” I say. “Actually, you were very in touch with it. I’m still sorry. It just never occurred to me.”

  “I know,” she says. “You didn’t think of it. It’s okay.”

  “How’s Audrey? She seemed good at my place.”

  “Maybe sometime when I haven’t cried in the last ten minutes, I’ll tell you about the Mother’s Day card she made me.”

  “She’s a good kid,” I say. I’m tempted to say I helped her with the card, but even I can see it would be a sly manipulation.

  “Look, I need to tell you something,” Milena says. “Steve proposed last night. And I said yes.”

  I imagine the top bunk coming down to crush me. I roll off the bed and stand up, but what Milena has just said is still present wherever I am.

  “Oh,” I say, politeness twitching my extremities. “Congratulations.”

  There’s silence on the phone, then the sound of the air between us getting covered up by her hand. I expect to hear her hang up, but this doesn’t happen.

  “Are you still there?” she says, and I can tell she’s been crying.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “Well, I have to go now,” she says, and she hangs up.

  I click off the phone and catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. My expression is the blank but forbidding look of a zombie—not a crazed, brains-hungry, rank-and-file zombie, but one in administration.

  I put the phone back on its charger and wander to the kitchen, where Luke and Christine are putting food in the fridge. I help them clean up, until my mother comes in from the deck.

  “I hardly got to see you,” my mother says. “Just come and talk with me for a minute.”

  She leads me into the living room, where dusk is more apparent than in other parts of the house, and we sit on the beige furniture.

  “How’s your music?” she asks, with deadly earnestness. This question, which seems so supportive and empathic, is actually quite painful, because she manages to put everything into it: she’s a mother searching for her child’s happiness, for whether or not my life has been good as a whole, and that’s not a question I want to face right now.

  “Coming along,” I say. “How are you doing?”

  She nods and purses her lips. “I’m okay, can’t complain.” Then she adds, “God must have thought it was time. I shouldn’t argue with Him.”

  I grunt awkwardly. I just want to walk away, then drive far away.

  “Matthew, I don’t mean to upset you, but after what happened to your father, I know how things can happen so fast. So please make yourself right with God before it’s too late. Can you do that for me?”

  A gusher of anger spouts from my chest, filling my head. I almost shout Leave me alone! like a teenager. But I don’t. Maybe it’s the dismal memory of yelling at Audrey in the car on the way to my father’s wake that warns me against indulging this not entirely explicable upsurge of feeling. And resisting yelling gives me just enough time to realize that yelling is an unusually sad activity.

  “I’d like to,” I say.

  “All you have to do is ask Him,” she says. “He’ll take care of the rest.”

  She looks at me with damp eyes, head canted just so. This is a moment of extreme widowhood—nothing to hold against her.

  “You know, I’m curious,” I say. “When Dad wasn’t doing so well, he did some paintings, didn’t he?”

  “Who said that?”

  “Mom, please.”

  “I don’t know what to do with them,” she says miserably. “He wouldn’t let me throw them out.”

  “Can I see them?”

  “They’re down in the basement,” she says.

  “Well?” I ask. “Could I look at them?”

  She goes to her bedroom and fetches her key ring from her purse, and we head downstairs. The basement is more damp and musty than I remember. The dehumidifier is silent, with its red light on. I imagine Mom has trouble emptying it, so I go over and pull out its collection bucket, pour it down the floor drain, snap it back into place—and the fan and the compressor automatically come on.

  “Oh, thank you,” she says, paging through her keys, standing in front of a squat gray metal cabinet jammed in among boxes and cannibalized small appliances against one cinder-block wall. The cabinet is about four feet wide, with about twelve three-inch high drawers. She turns the key in the lock on the top corner of the cabinet, which pops out, releasing all the drawers. She pulls the top drawer open. It is full of canvases.

  On top is a three-foot-by-three-foot painting composed of a series of rectangles, different sizes and colors, nested together and bordered by black bars. Within the rectangles there are very thin horizontal striations of orange and yellow or aquamarine and yellow or pink and blue. At first it doesn’t seem as if it’s something painted with brushstrokes. The lines have mechanical precision. All of the colors glow, as if lit from within, as on the surface of a TV screen. Some colors are so strong they seem to flame out of the painting and some seem to recede into it, creating a surprising depth of field.

  “I like that,” I say, and I imagine Cynthia would, too.

  I lift it out of the drawer and place it on top of the cabinet. I look through more. A few are on the same scale. A few seem to be closer and closer views of individual sections.

  “He was losing his mind,” Mom says, looking over my shoulder.

  “Did he ever paint anything else?” I ask.

  “Never! I begged him to paint something outside—or Lake Michigan. He loved to go to the lake.”

  “I’m sorry, Mom, but I don’t know if this was so bad.”

  “He thought this was the meaning of life! He didn’t believe in God—he believed in computer chips. And apparently that was so wonderful he wanted to kill himself!”

  She’s crying now.

  I want to cry, too, but instead I hug her—I hug my mother.

  “I’m sorry, Ma.”

  “Uhhgh!” she suddenly cries out. “He made me crazy!” And now she laughs a bit as the tears subside.

  “Would it be okay if I took a few of these home with me?” I ask.

  “I knew you’d like them,” she says morosely. “You both get lost in strange things. I guess that can be good, but it’s so sad to me, Matthew. It hurts me. No beliefs, nothing to say. What about people?”

  “People like to make things,” I say.

  “Well, people go crazy, too,” she says.

  —

  I pull into the garage a little after nine-thirty, and I’m wondering if I can lose myself in the harp for an hour before listening to recordings until I sleep.

  As I walk down the brick garden path, carrying several of my father’s canvases rolled in one of his old cardboard blueprint tubes, someone calls out: “Hey there, sailor.”

  I make a high-pitched yeep sound and turn toward the voice. A safety light strapped to a telephone pole in the alley illuminates Cynthia, sitting on a wood and wrought-iron bench in a back nook of T.R.’s garden.

  “Sorry,” she says, getting up. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “Just testing my smoke alarm?” I say.

  She laughs, walking down one of T.R.’s carefully raked gravel paths. “We finished last night,” she says, “and I couldn’t resist coming back to surprise you.”

  “I’m glad,” I say, and I mean it.

  She’s wearing a light black sweater over a simple top and tight Capri pants, plus sandals. A bottle of wine in her right hand and my blueprint tube don’t stop us from embracing. I press her up against me, breathe in her perfume
, and we kiss. We kiss quite a bit.

  “Is that a flashlight in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?”

  “Just glad to see you,” I say. In fact, I am crazy-grateful that she is here, feeling every bit of love and possibility surging back.

  “And what’s in the little tube?” she asks, tapping the cardboard.

  My reply sticks in my throat. I smile unconvincingly. Eventually I’ll show her my dad’s paintings—she really might like them—but I don’t want any wrenching thoughts coming between us right now.

  Then we enter my dark apartment, where anyone with a nose would know that the garbage needs to be taken out.

  I turn on the light in the kitchen. Suddenly revealed, a mouse on the counter is flat-footed for a millisecond before he disappears down the wall behind the stove.

  “Should we open the wine now?” I say.

  “Sure,” she says, “if you want.”

  My garden erection is gone, but I’m hoping the renewal of physical contact will bring it back, and maybe she didn’t see the mouse, and maybe she’ll understand about the trash. I’m choosing confidence.

  “Wish I could’ve cleaned up for you,” I say.

  While I pour some wine, she drapes her sweater over the back of a dining room chair. We wander into the living room, where she slips out of her sandals, leaving them on the floor by a plastic Polly Pocket beach house world. She’s braless.

  I consider quizzing her about the outcome of her document production, but instead I say, “Race you,” and drain my glass of wine in one huge slurp. She follows suit, laughs, and we step toward each other, go into an exploratory clench. I take her to the bedroom, trying not to notice that I’m aroused again. We make out and undress, and her body is thinner and tauter, which weirdly feels like a type of accusation, like I’ve been failing to make a woman out of her, but the fact that I’m more or less completely with her as a person is amazing, and we could come through all of this, right now, and everything could be good.

  We grope and rub and lick and kiss. Like a team of civil engineers, we get our genitals lined up. I’ve got just enough to penetrate, which I miraculously do, though the going is not totally slick and I wonder if I’ve blown the foreplay thing. There’s enough surprising pleasure for me that I just about come right away—and stop moving entirely and realize that I have either ejaculated or had a muscle spasm like ejaculation that has drained away some pent-upedness. I’m still hard enough to keep the old in and out going but wonder if I’ve already actually come, which is a recipe for fruitless humping, and after Cynthia’s sounds of enjoyment plateau and subside, I offer one final thrust, without coming, then relax as if sexual intercourse has been completed.

  It’s a moment when I wish mysterious human sexuality didn’t exist, that the handshake was the beginning and end of physical intimacy, that pregnancy occurred after drinking a special protein shake mixed in a blender.

  We lie together on the bed, neither of us willing to talk.

  Finally, I say, “Welcome back.”

  20

  I GET UP BEFORE Cynthia, take out the garbage, clean the mouse poop off the counter, and get breakfast rolling. I put out a grapefruit half and a box of Cheerios, then start cooking bacon and scrambled eggs, enough for both of us, but I’ll eat her half depending on what she’s in the mood for today. I’m focusing very hard on stirring the eggs to hold off any memories from last night, when she enters the kitchen and embraces me from behind.

  “Sleep all right?” I say, and I turn to hug her with a greasy spatula in hand.

  Fully dressed in yesterday’s clothes, she puts her head against my shoulder. “I’ve got a bad feeling about today.”

  “That’s an empty tummy talking,” I say, and I kiss the top of her head.

  But she’s hiding her face against my shoulder, an otherwise powerful person most likely scared shitless about returning to her office, where she’ll have to breathe the same air and walk the same carpets and use the same elevator bank as Whitaker.

  “You haven’t ever done anything wrong that I’ve ever heard of or seen,” I say.

  She grunts ambiguously.

  “Let’s chow,” I say. I lead her into the dining room and move aside scores, CDs, and notes to clear two places at the table.

  After I follow with the food, she says, “I’m going to talk to Whitaker in person about the Cessna settlement.”

  “Only makes sense,” I say.

  She politely eats a bit of everything except the Cheerios, but it’s not much altogether. “I gotta get going,” she says. “I have to stop home and get dressed.”

  And then she’s putting her sweater on and heading out.

  “Call me,” I say at the front door. “Let me know how it goes.”

  “Okay,” she says. She’s got bags under her dark eyes, and it occurs to me that maybe it’s not just Whitaker but also the less-than-thrilling homecoming, thanks to me.

  After doing the dishes, I drift into the living room. I take a seat on the futon couch and stare into space. Each minute that changes on Audrey’s Hello Kitty alarm clock reminds me of the audition’s inexorable approach. The disturbing notion that working toward this audition also means working on separating myself from Audrey—a thought I’d successfully tied to a sunken lead weight—comes loose and bobs to the surface. When I finally sit down to practice, dizziness curls at the edges of my consciousness.

  I didn’t exactly sleep last night, which is no doubt part of the problem, but there are fewer than three weeks until St. Louis, and the more stressed I get, the more dizzy I get, which keeps me from practicing, which makes me more stressed, which makes me more dizzy.

  I’m at the stage where I make recordings of myself, listen, and give myself notes. I actually print these memos and put them in an in-box on my desk.

  I look at one intra-office memo from two days ago:

  Date: May 12, 2007

  To: Matt

  From: Matt

  Re: Nutcracker

  Would it kill you to crescendo properly on the high A, just once in your whole fucking life? I mean, crescendo like a musician and not a monkey on a hurdy-gurdy.

  This appeals to my sense of humor, in some way, though I guess I can see why Cynthia finds this sort of thing disconcerting. Regardless, I can’t give in to the dizziness. I have to practice, even if it makes me puke, so I spend a few less-than-totally-focused hours playing through trouble spots in a few pieces.

  During Ein Heldenleben, I start to hear the buzz in the sixth-octave C in a way that I can’t deny. Maybe I’m freaking out, but it seems to get worse as I play. This threatens flat-out vertigo, and I only make it as far as the couch, where I lie still.

  After a sleepless hour filled with bursts of panic and denial about the state of my instrument and my life, I hear T.R. and Charles outside and decide that fresh air and a chat might help—anything to get away.

  I find them on the brick path, with a woody plant that sits in a burlap bag, inside a wheelbarrow. Charles has on tight black jeans and a shiny green polyester shirt—not exactly gardening wear. T.R. looks slightly more appropriate in his usual chinos and an old green Chicago Mercantile Exchange windbreaker, his big hands hidden in tan work gloves.

  “Well, well, well,” says Charles. “What do we have here?” He picks up a long-handled shovel and positions himself protectively in front of the wheelbarrow. “Leave our shrub alone—it’s not your kind!”

  I smile like I’m squinting into sunshine. The cool wind on my face feels good.

  “Hello, Matt,” T.R. says.

  “What’s up, fellas?”

  Charles bites his tongue while T.R. goes on to describe what they’re doing in the garden: removing a monster forsythia and replacing it with another, of a more restrained variety.

  “Your playing was very nice today,” T.R. adds, with unusual sincerity.

  “He’s trying to seduce you,” Charles says. “Your cheap apartment, this garden, his attic—one big spiderweb fo
r catching boys. You’ll see.”

  “Charles is doing his best to act appropriately,” T.R. says. “He really is trying.”

  “And don’t pretend you don’t want to be caught, Mr. Harpist,” Charles adds.

  “Thanks, T.R.,” I say. “But I think there’s something wrong with my harp.”

  “So I’ve heard,” Charles says, smirking.

  I remember that he’s talked to Cynthia, but it’s such a typical Charles joke that it probably doesn’t mean anything. Still, I turn red.

  T.R. gives me a quick look and then says, “Matt, would you mind giving us a hand here?”

  I help them chop and saw apart the old shrub. T.R. has us leave about two feet of stump sticking out of the ground, and, using this stump as a lever, Charles and I rock the roots loose. It’s hard work—the roots are unbelievably strong. Our hands overlap, our heads come close together, and I can smell Charles’s cigarette breath and his sweat. T.R. jabs the sharp edge of a spade around the perimeter, breaking up the soil and cutting off root tips. Just as the whole thing is coming loose, Charles hisses, “Let go of my root, you pervert,” and he pulls the stump toward him, breaking the back-and-forth rhythm we had going. But the joke misfires, because at some point during our work a different atmosphere formed. Charles realizes it and smiles what looks like a sincere, I’m-through-messing-with-you smile.

  We drop the new shrub in a new hole and replace as much dirt as we can. I’m moved to shake hands with T.R. and then Charles, making manly eye contact. Though they seem slightly taken aback, they go along, possibly used to rolling with the curious impositions of straight men. I feel on new terms with them.

  A phone rings that sounds like it’s coming from my apartment.

  “I think I’m going to get that,” I say, and I jog toward the back door.

  “Hurry, it might be an important call!” Charles cries after me. “Your mother has an extra ticket for Cats!”

  I pick up just before the machine takes over. It’s Cynthia.

  “Matt,” she says, keyed up as hell. “It went so fucking badly.”

  It turns out that at almost the exact moment we were having poorly lubricated sex in my mouse-infested apartment last night, an apparently fuel-starved Cessna 174 made a forced landing in Monterey, California. The pilot suffered only minor injuries, but Cynthia’s plaintiffs got wind, of course, and all bets are off with the settlement.