Night of the Avenging Blowfish

by John Welter

  “I’m glad, too,” Natelle said, not looking at me, but lightly, almost barely, grasping my hand in hers for a second, then letting it go, as if she was handing me her emotion and I had to know what that meant. I wasn’t sure. I wanted to fall on top of her and stare into her eyes and kiss her until I couldn’t breathe.

  And I wondered what she was thinking, if she wanted to lie down naked on top of me with one of her breasts in my mouth, if she only wanted to put her cheek against mine, if she wanted to divorce Gabriel so she could marry me, or if she just hoped I was her friend. You never knew what someone else was thinking. Maybe we were walking in the same direction toward different places. You could only hope—only hope that, by a prolonged and astonishing accident, somebody in the world would want you. I wanted this to be Natelle. And then I sighed, because a sigh was the only thing I could think of saying to the woman I wasn’t supposed to tell anything to.

  This was how you got nervous breakdowns. Apparently successful with my first one, I was qualified for at least one more. Probably a better one.

  For lunch we bought hot dogs from a street vendor and ate them on a wooden bench near a tree where some squirrels were sitting on their hind legs eating popcorn.

  “I wonder if they prefer plain or buttered,” Natelle said.

  “I think they like it with dirt on it,” I said.

  We watched the crowd wander around the art fair, and watched some children flying a kite in the shape of a dragon or a salamander or a Polish sausage. It was just this long, indistinct shape, so if you wanted to say it was a Polish sausage, you could.

  “I’ve stopped taking the pill,” Natelle said quietly and abruptly. I didn’t know why she said it, because we’d been sitting on the bench being peaceful and happy together, and now when she said she’d stopped taking the pill, this brought to mind an image of vaginas and penises, which wasn’t an image we’d shared before. This meant we were close enough that Natelle felt she could tell me anything in her heart, or almost anything, and I was happy to be that close to her. But it also made me think of Gabriel having sex with her, and I was jealous. I wanted to have sex with her.

  “You have?” I said.

  “There’s no reason to. Gabriel and I haven’t been sleeping together for weeks,” she said.

  I was glad. I didn’t want her sleeping with her husband. Something I realized again was that Natelle and I had never even kissed, but I wanted to be with her for the rest of my life. Once more I was having urgent thoughts about the only person who needed to know them, and who I couldn’t tell.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  She made a quiet moaning sound and sighed loudly. “What isn’t wrong?” she said, looking down at her hands in her lap, right next to a part of her I was trying not to think about. “Oh, I shouldn’t talk about this. You just got over a nervous breakdown or something and you don’t need somebody else’s pain.”

  “If I have to have somebody else’s pain, I want yours.”

  “That’s sweet.”

  “I’m not trying to be sweet. You and I have to share each other’s pain. I mean, I want to. The one thing you and I share is our lives and that includes the pain. So tell me what’s wrong. The worst it’ll do is give me another nervous breakdown, and I’m getting accomplished at those. Now tell me, please.”

  She closed her eyes and smiled in a sad way, as if she were glad to be with me to help the sorrow rise up in her so we could both look at it and maybe drive it away, although I knew better than that. You don’t usually drive sorrow away. You just study it and pass some around, and then everyone has it.

  “I’m going to tell you some things,” she said, “some very difficult things, because I think I need to, or at least I want to. I want you to promise me that you won’t run away,” she said, and put her hand on mine.

  “Run away from you?” I said. “I’m more likely to run toward you.”

  I did it again. Revealed too much. I might as well have given her a Hallmark card, if they had one about nervous breakdowns and love.

  “You might change your mind,” she said. “You might think I’m terrible.”

  “I’ll never think you’re terrible.”

  Her eyes closed again and she said, “I went to confession today. This morning, before I picked you up. Gabriel was already gone. To work, I think. I have no idea. I don’t want to have any idea. I wasn’t really sure why I was going to confession. Not because I’d committed a particular sin, but I’ve been very uneasy and restless and unhappy for a very long time, and I just needed to tell someone, like I’m telling you now. Or trying to. In the confessional, I told the priest that I’m not having a very good marriage. I told him …

  “This is too hard. This is too much to remember,” she said.

  I put my hand on the soft part of her shoulder. “Tell me whatever you need to.”

  “I told him that Gabriel, as a practicing psychologist, has been having women at the apartment. He calls them his patients, but sometimes his patients have sex with him. I’m sure he does this during the day, when I’m not home. Twice I’ve found panties in the bedroom that aren’t mine. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know when love starts failing, why it happens secretly in someone and they don’t even care to tell you. Gabriel and I haven’t been really close for a long time. I think it first happened without me knowing it. I think he loved me in a shallow way, and at some point it stopped being convenient for him. And instead of just giving me up, like he should have, he decided to keep me, the way you keep a pet.

  “About a month ago, I found the second pair of panties in the bedroom. I was too hurt, too sad and frightened, to ask Gabriel what the hell was going on, to have to ask my own husband why we were losing our marriage and he didn’t even want to tell me about it, as if he thought, “Well, the marriage is over, but there’s no reason to tell my wife.’ And what I did was mean and stupid, but I didn’t care, I wanted to be mean, I wanted him to feel some of my pain. What I did was take the panties and fold them up neatly and put them on the dinner table under Gabriel’s fork, like a napkin. I served him his dinner that way. He didn’t say anything. He put the panties on his lap and ate dinner. And we never talked about it.

  “I think I started to hate him then. It was like, as if, it didn’t matter that I loved him. Like it had suddenly become an old and distant fact that I loved him, and this was now buried in me, and useless, as if it became a new part of me I didn’t understand, that I was loving this stranger who sat across the table from me with a woman’s panties on his lap and said nothing. Like he thought that was what I deserved. Nothing. One day, the reasons we got married had vanished, and he hadn’t even told me. And I thought about killing him. Last weekend he came home drunk and with the fragrance of perfume on him. He went to bed with his clothes on and passed out in bed beside me, where I could smell the perfume, smell that he’d been rubbing up against a woman who wasn’t me. He had absolutely no interest in how he was destroying me, and I thought of stabbing him in the throat with a pair of scissors. I thought the world wouldn’t be better if he died, but I would. I stood in the doorway of the bedroom, looking at him, the way you stare at a wild animal. I didn’t honestly want to kill him, but it was like I was dreaming and having thoughts that weren’t really mine, and I had a simple vision of stabbing him in the throat, as if that was one possibility. And I didn’t feel any remorse or sadness or compassion for him, as if long ago he stopped being human, and now he was just this animal with bones and flesh who remained in my life every day to hurt me. And he doesn’t even want to hurt me. He doesn’t plan it or hope for it. To him, it’s merely an uninteresting result of how he lives.

  “I told this to the priest, thinking that I’d committed a sin by imagining stabbing Gabriel in the throat. He said that maybe it was a sin, but it was certainly an understandable one. He asked me if I’d seen a counselor. I said ‘My husband is a counselor.’ He had nothing to say then. He said, ‘Oh.’

  “And now I d
on’t know how to tell you the rest of this, or if I even should. It’s probably stupid, like everything else I’ve been doing for my entire adult life. But I’ve thought about this for days or weeks. I can’t remember. And I told this to the priest. Maybe I shouldn’t tell it to you, but for the sake of understanding, for the sake of not having this in me alone, I just want to tell you, and you’ll see why. After I knew that Gabriel was seeing other women, when I began to feel thoroughly alone and betrayed so much that sometimes I got sick to my stomach, I needed to be close to someone. I needed desperately to be safe with someone, to have someone hold me, and then I had fantasies of my own infidelity. I’ve never cheated on Gabriel, or anyone in my life. But even then, to think of cheating on Gabriel—and I told this to the priest—if there wasn’t really a marriage left, what was there to cheat on? You can’t be faithful to someone who’s left you. Why should I feel guilty for needing someone when I’ve been betrayed?

  “But I did feel guilty. There was a particular man, someone I’ve known for a long time, someone I feel safe with …”

  Suddenly I was dizzy and starting to feel sick with sadness that Natelle was telling me about some man she needed and it wasn’t me. Without ever having had her, I seemed to have lost her again.

  Natelle kept talking about this man I never wanted to meet or know anything about.

  “Sometimes I’d just have simple fantasies that he’d hold me, as if possibly we’d make love, but not then. Not yet,” she said.

  “Well, don’t do it. You’ll make me jealous,” I said.

  This seemed to startle Natelle. She blinked at me.

  “You don’t even know who it is,” she said.

  “And don’t tell me. I don’t want to know his name.”

  “You already know his name,” she said gently, as if I could possibly like the son of a bitch.

  “I do? Well, I’ll try to forget it, whatever it is. And don’t tell me.”

  “I don’t think you should be jealous of him. You get along with him. He’s someone you see every day.”

  “Don’t tell me that. I don’t want to guess his name. Damn it, Natelle, haven’t you ever guessed that maybe I like you enough to be jealous over you? I know I’m not supposed to feel this way, but, damn, I’ve even been jealous of Gabriel, and I don’t feel like politely hiding this right now. When you told me you and Gabriel haven’t been sleeping together, I thought, ‘Good. I don’t want you to.’ So now you know that. And now you’re trying to tell me about some goddamn man you’ve had a few fantasies about? Please don’t. You’ll just hurt my feelings.”

  “I don’t think so, Doyle.”

  “Take my word for it. I have too many feelings.”

  “Well, I’m going to tell you anyway.”

  “I won’t listen. I’ll put my fingers in my ears and hum,” I said, and then I put my fingers in my ears and started humming.

  Natelle grabbed my left hand and pulled my fingers from my ear.

  “Stop humming.”

  I hummed louder, and then gave up.

  “Please don’t tell me his name.”

  She looked at me and said, “It’s you.”

  I was dizzy again, and my stomach tingled.

  “It’s me?”

  “Yes. You’re the goddamn man you don’t want to hear about.”

  A stunning rush of elation flashed through me like a drug, like my heart taking a disabling dose of happiness, and all I could do was weakly stare into her eyes, to see if she was joking, to see if there was real affection there, aimed at me only. It looked like there was. She still held onto my hand and said, “This doesn’t mean I’m in love with you, although I’m not sure what it does mean. I know this has to be very upsetting to you.”

  “Upset me. I like it.”

  “Maybe it was stupid to tell you this.”

  “Sometimes being stupid is the right thing to do.”

  “I don’t want you to think this means we’re going to become lovers,” she said, as if I were the one having the sexual fantasy and not her.

  “I have no idea what this means,” I promised.

  “I’m telling you this because I wanted to be honest—as dangerous as that is—and because I needed to talk with you. And, Doyle, there really were some horribly sad times in the last few weeks, when all of this was crashing down on me, and it just happened, it just happened to be true, that sometimes I sort of automatically or intuitively thought of you, not like we were going to be lovers, although maybe like that. Like I could be safe with you. And mainly,” she said, sighing and looking down at our hands together, “mainly I don’t know. That’s the one thing that hasn’t been damaged in the last few weeks. My ignorance. Are you mad that I told you this?”

  Although I wanted to kiss her, I just put my hands on her cheeks so we were staring at each other, and I said, “I don’t know which emotion I’m having, but it’s one I don’t want to stop.”

  Her eyes were bright and glistening, as if she’d started to cry, as if at last she’d let me know she loved me but there was no way we could proceed, no touch that would work. We just looked at each other awhile, staring hard into each other’s eyes, touching each other that way. It made my stomach warm, the way I’d felt before when I’d been in love.

  “My stomach’s warm,” I said.

  “It’s probably the hot dog,” she said.

  “No.”

  “Was it something I said?”

  “I think I’m mesmerized. I like your eyes.”

  “I like yours.”

  “I’ll let you have them.”

  “Then how would you see me?”

  “I guess I’d better keep them.”

  “You’d better.”

  “In your fantasies, was I a gentleman?”

  She smiled and said, “What do you mean?”

  “Did I open the door for you?”

  “That’s not what you mean.”

  “No,” I said. “In your fantasies, what did we do?”

  “I didn’t even tell the priest that.”

  “Well, it’s none of his business what we do in your fantasies.”

  “And why do you want to know?” she said teasingly.

  “Because I was there.”

  “You don’t remember much about it, do you?”

  “I guess, in your fantasies, you didn’t give me a memory.”

  “Have you ever had any fantasies about me?”

  “I’m having one right now.”

  “And what are we doing in your fantasy?”

  “We’re sitting on a bench, looking at each other.”

  “That’s not a fantasy.”

  “Thank God.”

  She smiled at me, still staring deeply into me, and said, “I can’t make love with you. I’m a Catholic.”

  “I’ll be a Catholic.”

  “Do you realize what we’re talking about?”

  “Yes. I think we’re talking about all the wondrous things we’re not going to do.”

  “Why do you think it would be wondrous?”

  “I refuse to imagine anything less than that.”

  “I haven’t even told you what my fantasies were. Why do you assume we made love in my fantasies?”

  “Because it’s the only place we could do it and not get in trouble.”

  Looking away from me, she exhaled wistfully or forlornly and said, “Well, we did.”

  “We got in trouble?”

  “No. We made love.”

  With this confession, she became quiet and sad, as if she was guilty of the incomplete crime of having me. I wanted to hold her, but thought that might scare her, and I was starting to cry. I put my little finger around hers, like we could at least touch in the smallest way, and she squeezed my finger, as if our fingers were sentences and we were just learning to talk that way. I didn’t want to leave her, and everything was simultaneously better and worse, because now we almost had each other, but we realized that we weren’t supposed to. The one good thing in the wor
ld was bad.

  After I couldn’t stand being quiet anymore, I said, “Thank you.”

  “For what?” she said.

  “For looking for me,” I said. This was supposed to make her feel better, but it didn’t seem to, as if she was depressed about having told me a secret that, just a few seconds earlier, had drawn us together. Now I couldn’t tell if we were sitting together or sitting apart. I wanted to say the one thing that would soothe her and draw her toward me, but had no idea what that was.

  “What’s wrong?” I said, desperately wanting to hear her talk.

  “Nothing. Just my whole life.”

  “Are you upset because you told me about your fantasies?”

  “Yes. Don’t you think that’s the same thing as adultery?”

  “Maybe. But if I committed adultery with you and I wasn’t even there, I’m going to feel cheated.”

  She smiled with her eyes closed, lightly squeezing my finger.

  “That’s what I said to the priest,” she said. “I said ‘Do you think I committed adultery in my heart?’ He only said that seemed possible. And, for some reason, I was in a cranky mood, like I wanted the church to help me but I didn’t want the church to criticize me, and I said something like ‘Well, if adultery is a sin committed by two people, and only one of them does it, then that’s not adultery at all. It must be an entirely new sin.’ And instead of getting mad at me, the priest said there are no new sins. They’re all repeats. Of course, this didn’t settle anything, and I don’t know why the hell I expected a priest to settle anything having to do with sexuality, since priests aren’t supposed to have sexuality or know very much about it. And then he changed his mind. After I told him about Gabriel, about his abandonment of me and his various infidelities and his refusal to even acknowledge it, he said he couldn’t remember what my confession was. I go to confession and the priest forgets my confession. But I couldn’t remember it, either. I said I thought my confession might have been that I committed adultery in my heart. The priest said it’s amazing that I still have a heart. I said, ‘So I haven’t committed anything?’ He said, ‘If you have, I don’t recognize it.’