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Know Your Beholder

Page 22

by Adam Rapp


  We were sitting on my couch now, our backs against the armrests, facing each other, the rich smell of Mexican food still lingering. I was drinking Maker’s neat out of a coffee mug. I set the mug down and put my hands on hers. We took each other in for a moment. I was convinced that we were going to make out. But then she slid her hands out from under mine and returned them safely to her lap.

  “How’s the back?” she asked.

  “Right now it’s fine,” I said. “This position is fairly painless.”

  It was more than painless, in fact, it was perfect. This was perfection. Just how things used to be. Mexican food and three fingers of Maker’s and some classic vinyl.

  “How did you hurt it?” she asked.

  I told her it had locked up on me one day when I was bending down to pick up my laundry basket, that I had likely slipped a disc, but that “my spine guy” thought if I rested, the bulge would recede. I was so convinced by my own lie that I actually could see the moment clearly in my head: bending down to lift a laundry basket and then everything locking up, me crumpling to my knees, pitching onto my side, calling out for help from the laundry room floor. “All those years of lugging amps around,” I added. “It was bound to catch up to me.”

  She’d slid off her sneakers and was flexing her toes to the music. She wore white athletic socks that had grayed on the bottoms.

  During the title track, the epic “Aja,” I asked her if she was happy.

  “In what way?” she said.

  “In the only way.”

  “You mean with Dennis?”

  Hearing her say his name did something to my throat. It felt like my Adam’s apple had been snagged with a fishhook.

  “Do I not seem happy?” she said.

  “Do you guys have this?” I said.

  “It’s different,” she said. “We have our own ‘this.’”

  “The New This,” I said.

  “Yeah, the New This,” she said.

  “Good album name,” I said. “The New This.”

  She just shook her head and smiled.

  “What about ‘stuff’?” I said.

  “Stuff?” she said.

  “Issues. Please tell me you have issues.”

  “Generally speaking, our ‘stuff’ is the good kind.”

  “Do you guys order Mexican food and put your feet on the sofa and listen to classic Steely Dan on well-preserved vinyl?”

  She smiled again, impenetrably.

  “Do you have equally argued, heated but spirited American film debates about Tootsie versus, say, Fast Times at Ridgemont High?”

  “Or Blade Runner versus E.T.?” she said, playing along.

  “I still can’t believe how much you like E.T.”

  “I could never get how much you liked Cat People,” she countered.

  “Like,” I said. “Let’s keep it in the present tense. Cat People is a hidden classic. Twenty years from now Cat People will still be talked about. What would a nine-year-old boy in the middle of Illinois have done without Nastassja Kinski? You were only four then. You had no concept of how, say, A Flock of Seagulls was shaping the minds of a generation. You were busy watching Fraggle Rock.”

  “I was a pretty precocious four-year-old,” she said. “And don’t start dissing Fraggle Rock. Fraggle Rock was an allegorically complex weekly television masterpiece.”

  I drank from the coffee mug and said, “What would Dennis say if he saw us like this?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Would he be pissed? Would he want to fight me?”

  She remained silent.

  “I could still make you happy, Sheila Anne. I can change,” I heard myself say.

  She looked at me for a long moment. I had always thought she was most beautiful at the end of the night, when she was tired. Her lids would get heavy, her face would soften, the little cleft of worry between her pale peach brows would finally disappear.

  She said, “I’m pregnant, Francis.”

  It felt like a low-flying jet had just decapitated me at the precise moment my heart crawled into my mouth.

  I think an entire minute passed. I’m not sure I moved. I had the distinct feeling that I was turning to hay. Not a scarecrow, but an actual bale of useless lost hay.

  Eventually Sheila Anne said, “It’s one of the reasons I came here tonight. I wanted to tell you in person.”

  I asked her how far along she was and she said twenty-two weeks. I imagined the sonograms, the morning sickness, Dennis Church lovingly pulling her hair back for her while she vomits into the toilet.

  “No sushi,” I said. “I get it now.”

  “No sushi, no steak tartare, no raw cookie dough. No whiskey.”

  Another minute passed.

  Some part of Dennis Church was inside her. A little blind fetus contorted into itself, translucently pale, palsied, parasitic, its alien head too large for its body.

  To my mind came the word defenestration, the act of throwing a person out a window. I had an impulse to run at my lone attic window, to actually run through it headlong and defenestrate myself.

  I drank some more bourbon and said, “So you’re keeping it?”

  “Yes,” she replied.

  I asked her if Dennis knew.

  “Of course he knows.”

  I asked her if they’d been trying to get pregnant.

  “Yes,” she said again.

  Her yeses were like little colored discs of poison I was being forced to swallow, and yet I kept talking. “So things must be really good,” I said.

  She nodded, sparing me the actual yes this time.

  I told her she didn’t look pregnant.

  “Well, I certainly feel pregnant,” she said.

  I asked her if it was a girl or a boy.

  “Boy,” she said.

  “When we talked about having kids you said you wouldn’t want to know.”

  Then she offered the age-old platitude: “People change.”

  I’d always wanted to have a little girl, though it was something I never told Sheila Anne. We rarely talked about kids. We didn’t have enough money, so it just wasn’t practical. I wanted a little girl with Sheila Anne’s strawberry blond hair and her freckles that emerged every summer, and with my mother’s sad-sweet Polish eyes.

  I told her not to take what I’d said about her not looking pregnant the wrong way. “You actually look pretty amazing,” I said.

  She thanked me, and I told her she always looked amazing and then I lost it bad. I started crying, and while at first I could swallow most of it, then there was too much, like an entire feast of sadness, and it just came out, raging up my throat like something I’d actually eaten. Part of me wanted her to be disgusted by it, to be driven away by such a lame, self-pitying response, but instead she took my head in her hands and lowered it to her lap.

  She and Dennis Church were having a boy.

  He would probably be beautiful. He would chase urban butterflies and frolic in concrete playgrounds. By the age of three he would learn to hail a taxi. They would take him to the opera at four. By five he would begin conjugating French verbs. He would be exceptional, perfectly appointed, a wunderkind. They would name him something like Hudson or Dane.

  “Deacon Blues” started, the final track of side one, a seven-and-a-half-minute masterpiece that should be played while driving along some oceanside vista in a ’65 Mustang convertible with the top down.

  This is the day of the expanding man…

  I imagined their little boy as a toddler with long Raphaelite hair (our little girl is trapped in this boy after all), then as a preschooler, then as a first grader with Popsicle-stained lips and mosquito-bitten arms (tough, urban mosquitoes), Sheila Anne walking hand in hand with him, dropping him off at some elite private school in New York City, wiping his face with a eucalyptus-scented Wet-Nap before kissing him good-bye.

  After I stopped crying, when the song had finally ended and there had been a good minute of needle-in-the-gutter silence, with
out lifting my head from her lap, I looked up and told Sheila Anne that this small part of me keeps hoping against hope that she’ll come to her senses and return to me, that eventually, inevitably, we’ll find our way back to each other.

  She nodded, clearly not in agreement, but to display a kind of dull, tragic acknowledgment.

  “Do you ever think about that?” I asked.

  Again, no answer. “You have every right to make me a monster,” she said.

  I told her that I wished there was a way I could hate her, that it would probably be easier that way, but that I couldn’t succeed even at demonizing her. All the cheating and the secrecy at the end simply didn’t have enough poison in them to blot out my deepest feelings. I admitted that I had drawn naked pictures of her in the margins of this manuscript, that the slippers I was wearing were in fact impostors that Haggis had brought by earlier, and that in truth I wore her ergonomic Norwegian wool ones every day, almost dutifully, and that I’d stowed them under my bed in an old pillowcase so she wouldn’t have the satisfaction of seeing them.

  We sat that way, with my head in her lap, for a long time. She even started to stroke my temples, in little counterclockwise circular motions, a tenderness that made me feel so vulnerable I had the sensation that I was turning to powder.

  The bliss of that soft lap. Her delicate fingers. I felt like I had returned to some soporific velveteen womb world.

  Eventually I fell asleep.

  When I woke up she was in the bathroom, talking on her cell phone. She had powered down the turntable and re-sleeved the Steely Dan record, just as she would have when we were together. I wondered if she was enjoying revisiting these old simple rituals, or if they sickened her, if she was executing them only for my sake, as some gesture of forced kindness. By the time she came out of the bathroom, I was sitting up on the sofa.

  “Dennis?” I said.

  She simply looked at me.

  I asked her if everything was okay.

  “It’s late,” she said. “I should go.” Another disc of poison, this one white. The colorless, tasteless killer.

  “Stay,” I pleaded. “Just this one night.”

  She said she couldn’t. She had a hotel room in Decatur, and she needed to be up early for an important meeting about Bradley with the Decatur Manor head psychiatrist.

  She came over and sat next to me on the sofa.

  I wanted her to tell me that she still listened to my music. I wanted her to take my face in her hands and not put it in her lap but kiss my eyes instead. I would close them just before her lips met my lids, like a child getting tucked in. But neither of those things happened. What happened was she put her head on my shoulder and then I leaned my face on her head. I regretted the decision to not shave my beard, because if I had, then I would have felt her head with my actual face, which would have offered enough pleasure to last me another six months.

  At her rental car we said good-bye and hugged and I held on a little too long. She indulged me and I’m sure it made her sick to be enveloped by all my neediness but she indulged me.

  It was after three a.m. when Sheila Anne pulled off down Oneida Street. I found myself walking in the same direction, following her taillights, ambling mindlessly past the Schefflers’ lesser Victorian; past Darrell and Carol Stroh’s modern solar-paneled block-shaped monstrosity; past the Gordons’ and the Neugabauers’ and then the Lindholms’ tall, thin Tudor; past a little powder-blue clapboard ranch house with pink shutters and barren flower boxes inhabited by an old widow with some imponderable number of cats.

  I turned left on Geneseo Street and another left on Waverly Lane and I found myself heading toward an open field covered with snow. The field is long and contains a platoon of 500-kilovolt power lines that issue a drifty, somnambulant buzzing not unlike early-summer cicadas. This was where, as young boys, Kent and a few other neighborhood kids and I would play baseball and Smear the Queer and rough-touch football. In later years it became a favorite place to smoke cigarettes and roaches stolen from Kent’s older brother, Harry, and where we’d drink twelvers of Old Style and pints of peach schnapps and Mad Dog 20/20 in addition to whatever we could smuggle out of our parents’ liquor cabinets. The “Radio Trees,” as we called them, seemed blessed with some miraculous Holy Hand of Youth, as the cops never made an appearance.

  There is a stand of woods along one side, and I sat there in the snow and stared up at the blue-black sky, which was hung with a smattering of stars and a weak smudge of moon. I was still wearing only the cardigan and plaid flannel shirt. Haggis’s gift slippers weren’t suitable for this kind of adventure, but the cold felt good. The seat of my corduroys was getting soaked. The crisp, aqueous air was almost drinkable and I felt more at ease under the buzz of those power lines than I had in months.

  For the briefest moment I thought I might be asleep, perhaps experiencing some sort of lucid dream. I leaned back on my elbows and let my shoulders meet the cold ground. The snow was bracing. My breath plumed above me.

  Sheila Anne was well on her way to Decatur by now, and though it wasn’t even a hundred miles away, I had the sense that she was traveling a much greater distance, some epic expanse you read about in frontier novels. I imagined her rental car as a hovering egg, slowly receding into the night until it was merely a speck, then nothing. A fleeting feeling of peace, unaided by drugs, descended upon me, perhaps helped along by the Maker’s Mark, but there nonetheless.

  I’m not sure how long I lay there. It might have been twenty minutes, but it also could have been hours. The power lines buzzed hypnotically. A distant dog barked. The breeze periodically rattled the naked trees. I ate a handful of snow. It tasted salty, dirty, earthen.

  The first hints of dawn were washing out the moon and I took this as my cue to make my way home. When I got to my feet the back of my sweater was soaked, as was the seat of my corduroys and the back of my head. I walked away from the field, still feeling dreamy, half-expecting to encounter a talking animal, some Pollardian black bear, briefly emerging from hibernation to remark upon the shape of my soul or advise me about the direction of my life.

  I turned right onto Waverly, and then another right onto Geneseo. I found myself walking down the middle of the street, passing trees and yards and cars and snow-heaped gables. Telephone poles and ceramic lawn creatures that seemed to follow me with their eyes as I passed them: a deer, a rabbit, a knowing red fox, a stone owl perched on a mailbox. The months-old remains of a Nativity scene, all the characters gone, but the manger, the firewood-quality lean-to, and the scattered hay still there.

  There were lights left on in kitchens, garages with initials stenciled on their faces.

  Moonlight glowed softly on the windows. My hometown asleep, breathing in unison. I had the sensation that they were dreaming me, that I was a mere figment of their collective slumber. My feet seemed to be moving on their own, slightly ahead of my thoughts.

  As I turned onto Oneida Street, I could see my house wedged between the Schefflers’ lesser Victorian and the Coynes’ Tudor, my boyhood home small in the distance, fablelike, a place for dolls and miniature lamps and intricate toy furniture, too tiny to be any man’s entire world, too insubstantial to be stuffed with misery and secrets and lost, rarefied air. I walked toward it, delicately drunk with the predawn air of this long, cold night, treading lightly through the rags of snow still plaguing the pavement, my feet surprisingly warm and dry in my new slippers. Eventually I made my way up to the attic, where I fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  By the end of the first full week in April the snow had thawed and temperatures were consistently staying in the midforties. One day it reached fifty-two degrees and the Coyne children took their bikes out and zoomed up and down the street. The sound of birds broke with the dawn.

  At night the stars were out, incredible in their arrangements, along with the soft blue pulsing of a distant planet.

  With the warmth I’ve returned to wearing normal clothes. T-shirts and old sweats mo
stly. Jeans and cords. And Sheila Anne’s slippers.

  Two days ago, at long last, the key arrived via FedEx with a note from Lyman:

  Son,

  I found that key. Enjoy the shelter. Hopefully you’ll never have to make use of it.

  Love,

  Dad

  The lock was a little stiff, so I sprayed some WD-40 into the slot. The door wasn’t as heavy as I’d anticipated. Beneath it, a cement stairwell led to a short cement hallway. With a flashlight I found a light switch and flipped it on. A fluorescent overhead flickered. The small gray hallway, smoothly paved, gave way to a four-hundred-square-foot room covered with gray industrial carpeting. There were three bunks housed in the wall—basically human-sized shelves with mattresses. They were neatly made with bottom and top sheets, generic wool blankets, and pillows. The whole shelter had the feel of a military barracks.

  There was an old Sylvania SuperSet on a small stand and, underneath the TV stand, a series of board games from the midseventies: Monopoly, Yahtzee, Parcheesi, Operation. I thought it odd that a VCR was rigged up to the TV, since Lyman said the shelter had been built in the early seventies. In front of the TV stand a coffee table held magazines: National Geographic, Sports Illustrated, Golf, Mademoiselle. A small bookcase along one wall contained many of my mother’s favorite paperbacks: John Irving’s The World According to Garp, Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, Salinger’s Nine Stories, Updike’s Rabbit, Run, Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist, among others.

  Also on the coffee table, which was set in front of a convertible oatmeal-colored sofa, was an electric daisy wheel typewriter, plugged into an outlet but powered off. There was no paper in it. Beside the sofa was a floor lamp, which contained an old fifty-watt bulb. I turned on the lamp and miraculously it worked.

  The room smelled surprisingly fresh. I’d expected dust and mold. The ceiling joists were visible. The raw, unstained lumber looked freshly cut. The ceiling itself was perhaps seven feet high. It made you want to sit on the floor. The shelter had obviously been made well, airtight. Uncle Corbit and his crew didn’t cut any corners.

 

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