Night of the Avenging Blowfish

by John Welter

  Maybe I just wanted her to hold me, so we could feel the softness of each other’s flesh, like there really was something good in the world, and it was each other, and we’d look into each other’s eyes as if we couldn’t possibly see enough.

  And maybe she wouldn’t even be home. I didn’t call her to find out. Maybe she’d be on a date. She wouldn’t do that. Maybe she’d be out with a lawyer. Women getting divorces often saw lawyers. Maybe she’d be out with some of her girlfriends, having dinner and getting drunk and defacing their memories of men and wondering if they should become lesbians because all men were assholes, except for a few million of us you never heard about.

  I was at her door, breathing in deeply to calm myself, wishing I could tell her every affectionate thing I’d ever felt about her, every true and astonishing secret she ever gave birth to in me, wishing, if there were things I’d forgotten or been afraid to tell her that could sustain the slight and wavering magic I had that kept me in her life, that all of those things would rush to me in a single insight and I’d tell her, as if there were some torturous and cruel spiritual maze you had to pass through without error, and if you missed a step or turned wrong even once, the punishment was that no one would love you, and you’d be alone and lie awake at night like I did sometimes, realizing in a tingling panic that of all the millions of people in the world, not one of them wondered where you were, or would ever want to hold you.

  This was the maze I was in when I knocked on the door and Natelle opened it. After everything I’d just thought about, I couldn’t think of what to say to her.

  “I’m back,” I said.

  She stared at me silently, with pain and fear, looking at my crutches, looking hard into my eyes, as I looked into hers.

  “You’re so pretty,” I said, not caring anymore if I scared her, since I was scared. We might as well be scared together.

  “My God, you’re so pale. Have you got a fever?” she said, walking up to me to put her hands on my cheeks and forehead.

  “Your hands feel good,” I said.

  “You’re sweating,” she said, rubbing her finger across my forehead.

  “I feel anointed when you do that. Would you do that again … rub your finger across my forehead?”

  She leaned into me and put her arms around me and squeezed me to her with her cheek against mine. I felt the softness of her breasts on my chest, and she breathed deeply and sighed on my neck, and I felt her shudder.

  “Are you scared?” I said.

  “Please don’t get shot again. Please don’t,” she said quietly. She kissed my neck, and I tingled. Not like we were going to make love, but as if she loved me. We held each other for a while and breathed together.

  “I feel happy,” I said. “That doesn’t happen very often.”

  She pushed into me a little harder, and I pushed back. Something was going on, but I didn’t give it a name. I just gave it room.

  She stepped back from me, keeping one hand on my waist, and said, “Well, good Lord, let’s go inside.” She put her hand on my forehead again as we walked inside and said, “You’ve got a fever. Did they let you out of the hospital with a fever?”

  “I don’t know if I had a fever or not. I just left,” I said.

  “Did they give you any medicine?”

  “Pain pills. Antibiotics.”

  “Sit here,” she said, holding onto my arm as I sat on the couch and dropped the crutches to the floor. She sat beside me, looking anxious and gentle, and said, “How do you feel?”

  “I don’t know. I feel so much,” I said, smiling at her face so close to mine. “How was your retreat?”

  “The retreat?” she said. “You just got out of the hospital after being shot. I think we should talk about that.”

  “No. It’s probably a little scarier than a retreat operated by Catholic nuns. Unless the nuns had guns. Did they?”

  “Doyle, you don’t look well,” she said, leaning a little closer to me and putting her fingertips on my cheek. It was wonderful, being touched by her. I couldn’t tell her that, because maybe she didn’t want it to be wonderful. Maybe she did. I had to find out.

  “Did you figure anything out on your retreat?” I said.

  “Doyle. You’ve got a fever. You’ve been shot. I’m worried about you.”

  “Well, good. And I’m worried about you,” I said, putting my hand lightly on her shoulder.

  “We can worry about me later.”

  “Let’s worry about you now.”

  “Maybe I should call a doctor?” she asked. “You’re pale. You’re sweating.”

  “We can call a doctor in a little while. I just need to be with you now. I’ve missed you. I worried about you. I prayed for you. I don’t care about my stupid goddamn fever. Okay … I care a little. But I mean …”

  She put her hand over my mouth and smiled at me in a sad way and said, “At least let me get you something cold to drink, for your fever. Do you want iced tea? Water? Coke?”

  “Beer.”

  “You can’t mix beer and painkillers.”

  “Coke,” I said.

  She got up and walked to the kitchen.

  “Don’t leave,” I said.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said, sniggering at me.

  I watched her get a can of Coke from the refrigerator and get a glass from the cupboard and pour the Coke in the glass, because it was wonderful to watch her do anything, to see her at all.

  “I like to look at you,” I said.

  She stared at me briefly, stared straight into my eyes, and didn’t say anything, like I’d just given her a secret and she was wondering what to do with it. She brought me the glass of cold Coke and I drank some as she sat next to me again, with her knee slightly touching mine. She sat sideways, looking at my face, being quiet and simply looking at me. I was starting to get an erection. One more thing I couldn’t tell her.

  She put her hand on my shoulder, touching my flesh through my shirt, and she said, “I guess I should tell you a little about the retreat.”

  “Yes.”

  “But I feel so stupid talking about that when you were shot.”

  “Yeah, but that’s over with. I can tell you about that later. I mean, basically someone shot me and I shot him back, or I shot someone. I didn’t get his name, and he didn’t ask mine. But the shooting’s over. What I want to hear about now is you. I want to find out how you are. So please tell me how you are.”

  “I’m better,” she said in a weary voice. “I didn’t really decide anything. I went to the mountain. I didn’t come back with any commandments or anything. No revelations. No talks with God or angels or ghosts, although sometimes I felt like a ghost, haunting myself, trying to remember where I’m supposed to be, or who I’m supposed to be. I think, you know, when part of your identity comes from another person, and you become part of that other person, and then they betray you and they’re gone, it’s like an actual part of you is gone with them. Part of you is suddenly missing, and you want it back, and it never will come back. And do you remember what I said to you in the letter about how this was like a death? I had a funeral.”

  “A funeral?”

  She nodded her head. “There was a bird, a dead bird near a tree when I was out walking on a trail by myself. It was a little bird with beautiful yellow and black feathers, just lying near a big pine tree with its wings folded up, dead. It didn’t look injured. I didn’t see any wounds. It just looked like it stopped flying, like it had flown all it could and it just couldn’t fly anymore and it died in the air, and dropped to the Earth, where I found it. I looked at the bird’s yellow and black feathers still so brilliant in the sun, and it reminded me of everything dead in me, of everything flying along in me and just instantly dying.”

  She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, and I touched her cheek while she tried not to cry.

  “And so, I had a funeral for us,” she said. “I know it’s stupid, but I did.”

  “It’s not stupid. Tell m
e about it.”

  She touched my hand on her cheek and said, “I found an old limb on the ground and used it to dig through all the rotting pine needles and the ground near the bird, and I dug out a hole, maybe six inches deep, maybe a little deeper. I cried while I was digging. It seemed like all my emotions were trying to escape from me at the same time, and they just knocked me over, and I fell forward on my face on the ground and just trembled and cried with my face in the pine needles and my hands grabbing whatever weeds or flowers or pieces of bark were there, like I had to hold something, somebody, and no one was there, just weeds and dirt and the Earth. And I held that, and I cried for a long time. I cried for the death of my marriage. I cried for everything that was ripped from me and stolen forever, like I’d just fallen from the sky right there in the dirt. And finally I couldn’t cry anymore. It just stopped. It was enough. And I wiped the dirt and twigs and pine needles from my face and remembered I was supposed to be having a funeral. I put the little bird into her grave and covered her with dirt. I put a rock on the grave. I can’t remember what I said. I prayed something. I thought I’d remember it forever, but I don’t. I think what I prayed or said was …”

  She was silent, and looked at me, thinking, and she said, “‘I fell from the sky, dead, and just had my funeral. I guess I’ll go take a shower and have dinner.’”

  It didn’t seem possible that she could be so serious and then so silly.

  “Did you really say that?” I asked.

  “No. That’s just what I thought of now,” she said. “But I did think that. Everything was so serious and sad, and I thought of how dirty I must’ve been from lying on my face on the ground, and so I thought that, no matter how awful everything was, and even if I didn’t know what to do about it, I still needed a shower. Plus I was hungry.”

  “So you prayed: ‘I fell from the sky, dead, and just had my funeral. I guess I’ll go take a shower and have dinner’?” I asked.

  She smiled at me. “I’m trying to make it sound better than it really was. But I’m fine, mostly. I think I’m just going to have to be depressed for a few weeks or months. I don’t think you solve sadness. I think you just feel it, and it goes away when it wants to. So I didn’t make any big or startling decisions on the retreat. I decided I get to hurt for a long time.”

  “I’ll help you,” I said.

  “You’ll help me hurt?”

  “Well, no. I think you know how to do that.”

  She smiled and leaned against me and kissed my cheek. She put her arms across my chest and my back and held me. I felt warm and light, like her affection was radiating into me. I had an erection, a separate being in my pants with no sense of reason or timing, and I was grateful to have Natelle’s flesh against mine, which I didn’t think I should tell her. I always couldn’t tell her what I needed most to say. I was going to, though.

  “I love you,” I said, waiting for her to rise up and pull away, to ask me to stop it, to tell me I was mistaken, to persuade me forever of the idiocy of my heart. But she didn’t move, except to breathe, one of her breasts softly pushed against me. And she didn’t say anything, a silence in which I imagined she was wondering how to keep me. Or if. Long ago in a secret moment that even I didn’t know about, I gave myself to her, and waited to be taken in, or told why I never could be. It was like waiting for the world to begin, or to be told again that it would not.

  Her face was against my neck and my chest, and she breathed on my skin. I wondered which sentence that was.

  “I love you,” she said quietly, and my stomach tingled, like she moved into me. “Don’t think that’s an offer,” she said. “It’s only a truth.”

  “What does that mean?” I said.

  “You don’t know?” she said.

  “I don’t know anything, until you tell me.”

  “It means no one can have me, now. But still I love you,” she said, and lightly rubbed the flesh between my neck and shoulder.

  “‘Now,’ as in forever?” I asked.

  “Now, as in now,” she said. “On the retreat, I was afraid of you. I was afraid you were in love with me.”

  “I am.”

  “You’re not supposed to be,” she said.

  “I didn’t choose to be. It just happened. It’s like being born. One day, there you are.”

  It was strange that we were that close, holding each other like lovers, and wondering how far apart we were supposed to be.

  “I could leave you alone,” I said experimentally.

  “No, you couldn’t,” she said. “I think you wanted me almost the first time you saw me.”

  “That’s true. But how would you know?”

  “I didn’t. I just tricked you into confessing it. But, also, I could tell by the way you looked at me. Whenever we talked, you always looked at me a second or two longer than was necessary, like you were wondering what to do about me.”

  “I still wonder that.”

  “Sometimes you stared into my eyes a little harder than necessary, almost like you were hoping to enter me through my eyes. I didn’t like it at first. I thought you were lascivious. But you always looked sadly away and moved on, like you were lost and belonged to no one, and you just went away. Not to any particular place. Just away. Sometimes you broke my heart when I looked at you. It wasn’t that I felt sorry for you. I felt something far stronger than that, almost like I wasn’t supposed to let you walk away. It scared me, that maybe I wanted you to look at me again, to see if I could enter you through your eyes. This was infidelity. Adultery of the heart. People make fun of that, but it’s true. No matter who you’re with, a lover or a husband, you can always be attracted to someone else. You can always find another person you want to spend the rest of your life with, until your life is a series of selections and betrayals. Maybe they should have that in the marriage vows—‘To have and to hold until either of you finds someone better, which could be this afternoon.’ So I resisted that, and Gabriel didn’t. And then you die in your heart, still conscious, and watch your own death.”

  I moved my hands along her back, to try to soothe her, and just to feel her.

  “I’m not even sure why people try to be monogamous,” she said. “It sounds like a medical condition anyway. You have monogamy. Here … rub this cream on it.”

  I had to laugh. As sad as she was, she was suddenly being funny, the same way I did it, as an anesthetic against the world.

  “The other choice is polygamy,” she said, “which sounds like a geometric shape, like a polygon. So if you’re a poly-game-ist … what’s that word?”

  “Poltergeist?” I said.

  She started laughing and shook against me.

  “So those are the three categories of marital love,” she said. “Monogamy, which requires an ointment; polygamy, which means you have three or more sides; and poltergeists, for which you need an exorcist. Maybe that’s what I should tell the church. I don’t want a divorce. I want an exorcism. But I don’t know if the church considers marriage a form of demonic possession. Oh well,” she said, and sighed on my neck and chest, which made me tingle and want to make love with her. But practically anything she did made me tingle and want to make love with her.

  She rested her face on me again, and moved her arm away from me to scratch her leg, and when she moved her arm back to me again, the palm of her hand accidentally brushed across my erection. Now she knew. I wondered what she was thinking, as if it might be an offense for me to have an erection.

  “Uh-oh. One of those,” she said in a slightly amused and embarrassed voice. “Does this mean you’re not thinking Platonic thoughts about me?”

  “Well, I’m sure Plato had erections, too,” I said. “He just didn’t write a book about them.”

  She laughed, but that didn’t mean we were safe from the taboo subject of sexual love that was always submerged between us; and not submerged anymore. I wondered if Natelle was aroused, if there was any fragrant wetness between her legs that, in a way, she wanted me to
know about, and in a way, she didn’t. For a few seconds, we didn’t say anything, but just held each other in our intimate secrecy. And maybe it was love, but you couldn’t just dumbly say so, like a child or a teenager blurting out every impulse and passion like an emotional music box. And if we did have it, it moved impatiently through us like souls we kept hidden, wondering first if they were real, wondering then if we should release them.

  She released hers not long ago and was crushed.

  Or you could crush yourself, like I did. You could conceal so many emotions so densely within yourself that one day they all fly out in a horrifying swirl. Then you go see a psychiatrist.

  I didn’t know what to say to Natelle. The last thing we’d spoken about was my penis. Plato’s, actually.

  “What’re you thinking about?” Natelle said.

  “Plato’s penis,” I said.

  She made a quiet, sniggering sound against my chest, sort of like a repressed snort.

  “You sound like a pig,” I said.

  She snorted again. “Like that? she asked gleefully.

  “I get excited by women who snort,” I said.

  “Do you mean by women in general, or just by me?”

  “Just by you.”

  She snorted. “Doyle?” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “I like to hold you.”

  “Then keep holding me,” I said, touching my fingertips to her cheek.

  “Do you want to make love with me?” she asked in a quiet and curious tone, not as if she were offering that or requesting it, but as if she just wanted to know.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Almost nothing was secret now. It seemed like whoever said anything next would take us forward, or apart. I waited, staring at one of her eyelashes blinking near my fingers.

  “The truth is, I’m wet,” she said.

  A tiny flash of joy or gratitude or something I couldn’t name flashed through me. It was odd how she could say that to me so cryptically, and I knew she was announcing the symptoms of love. I felt lighter and warmer than ever. It could have been bacteria, but I had to assume it was love.