by Peter Orner
The Apartment
After his divorce, he moved into a complex out by the 101 in San Mateo. He’d been awarded half the furniture, and, unable to choose what he wanted to keep, what he wanted to sell, and what he wanted to put in storage, he ended up stuffing it all into a one-bedroom apartment. He lived among towers of teetering cabinets, tables, lamps, crates of records, houseplants on top of couches, loveseats, recliners, bureaus, his grandfather’s old desk—years of accumulation stacked and scrunched together. He told himself, in the beginning, that he wouldn’t spend much time here. This was a temporary stop. He’d find a bigger place. He’d only sleep here, and not even that, if he could help it. This proved optimistic, and he found himself spending more and more time in the apartment. He dated a few times, but after two, three years, nothing had come of the four or five women he’d taken out. Not a revelation and yet, still, he thought a lot about the way time moves. He found he could sit down in one of the few chairs that wasn’t piled on top of other chairs, and hours could go by without him noticing. He wasn’t sleeping, he hardly slept anymore, it was something else, a kind of absence during which entire weekend afternoons could be swallowed whole. He began to see it as a talent, this ability to obliterate hours without moving.
The complex had a pool, and one Saturday he went down there with the vague notion of burning off a few calories. The pool was too small for laps. He tried anyway. Three splashes and he’d reached the other side. He kept it up. Three more splashes, end, three small splashes, end. When he’d done this thirty times (he kept count), he stepped out of the pool. He hadn’t brought a towel. She was lying long-legged in one of the lounge chairs reading a magazine. Had she been there the whole time, watching this odd display? Of what? It couldn’t have been called swimming. He stood there, dripping. But she smiled at him, over the magazine.
“Forgot my towel,” he said.
She tossed him hers. And smiled again, wider, with more teeth. A smile of second, third, even fourth chances. Only he wasn’t close to what she’d been hoping for, not that she even knew anymore; she just knew it couldn’t possibly have been him. She’d had in mind some jaded swashbuckler, a traveler, someone who’d been around awhile, maybe a long while, but was still game for one last crazy romp, the sort of guy who might say, How about Melbourne? How about we leave in two hours for Melbourne? I was there in the eighties doing a photo shoot, it’s a bit run-down, but quaint in its way—
“Pool’s as big as you,” she said. She hadn’t meant it the way it sounded. He was paunchy. He was more than paunchy.
“You should see me in a bathtub,” he said.
That night, at Moon’s, he told her about his divorce, and she told him about hers. It was like trading war stories. All divorce stories are the same. And as in war stories, it’s not about the combat, but the emptiness. She had two college-aged kids: a daughter at Santa Barbara, a son who’d recently dropped out of SF State to become a drummer.
“Good for him,” he said.
“We’ll see,” she said. “He’s got to find a new place to practice. Now he drives out to a warehouse in Fremont at three in the morning.”
He told her his wife had always wanted to wait for a time when they were in a better financial position to have children.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
He took a chance and looked directly into her eyes. She closed them. The light was no good at Moon’s, but he could see she was wearing purple mascara. Every once in a while, the fact that he wasn’t anybody’s father lurked like a dull ache, a phantom limb.
“For the best,” he said.
Convenient that they lived in the same complex. It took the pressure off somehow. His friends, his family, considered him a failure, he knew, not a spectacular failure, a mundane, run-of-the-mill failure, and yet here he was with this woman, Judy, in the passenger seat of his Mazda. The novelty of having a person next to you. Months, years, you drive around alone, and suddenly somebody’s breathing next to you.
His place, she’d said, because her daughter was up from school for the weekend.
“Shit. You weren’t kidding.”
“A lot’s going into storage.”
“Uh-huh,” she said.
He turned off the lights. The two of them squeezed their way along the narrow alleyway between the heaps toward his room.
“One thing you should know,” she said. “I have sleep apnea.”
“Sounds good.”
“It’s a disorder.”
“I’ve got flat feet, really flat. Basically, I walk on pancakes. You could pour syrup—”
She shut him up with a kiss. No, he wasn’t anybody’s definition of a catch. He didn’t have great skin. He didn’t have great teeth. So fucking what? Maybe because the problem of bodies was a little easier now? You bungle around, eventually you fit together. Or you don’t. If not tonight, another night.
Wine helped.
Something—an electric space heater? a toaster?—slid off the top of a pile and nearly hit them. It fell to the carpet with a twang. A pair of ski boots followed, one thud, another thud.
“Don’t move,” he said. “Avalanche precaution.”
She kissed him again. “You want something to happen,” she said. She was still a little woozy. “In your life, you know what I mean?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Nights are hardest. And you wait, and you wait. For what?”
“Exactly, for—”
“And then in the morning it’s morning. The light is back in the trees again. And I think, Really, another one? I’m not talking about going to work. Though there’s always work. Some days I even like it. Other days I feel like there’s not enough of it. Because I’m not tired enough for the night, you know?”
“I know, I know.”
“But it’s like your morning never met your night. Like it has no idea how dark it gets.”
“Yes, yes.”
“And maybe that’s not such a bad thing,” she said.
“Right,” he said. “Maybe it’s—Listen, I hear voices.”
“Who doesn’t?”
“I’m the voices. I wake up and hear somebody speaking and it’s—”
They reached his room.
And it was as if they crumpled into each other as they fell together to the carpet, groping, pulling, squeezing, unfastening—
And later, weeks later, how many he couldn’t have said—time being different now—he’d remember this, how after the two of them did finally stand and make their way to his bed and stretched out on their separate sides, with only their feet touching, he listened to her, awed by the noises she was making. Every breath a death struggle, her neck muscles straining, as if just about to drown, she crashed through the surface of the water at the last possible moment.
II
Lighted
Windows
I’ll never forget how impatient I was—
I see it would be easy to go mad with love.
—Maeve Brennan, “The Springs of Affection”
The Return
In the last year of his life he got back in touch with his sister. This was in 1987. Never in person, only on the phone, and there was no anger in his voice anymore, only a kind of calm, if not joyous, evenness, though what he seemed to want most of all was to listen, to hear Janice talk about the years when not only their parents were still alive but Stevie also. At first he apologized, saying it must be hard to talk about Stevie. She said to be honest Stevie was only a flicker now. “Sure, I see his grin, I see his chipped front tooth from that bat you swung at his face. (How is it possible that you only nicked his tooth?) Stevie…Stevie…If not for the accident he’d have stuck around home just like I did. Maybe he’d have married one of those tall Hoyne sisters. Remember them? The oldest never did marry. Tina Hoyne’s still around. She’s a branch manager at the Key Bank. If not for ordinary bad luck, Stevie would be a mile away from where I’m standing right now.” She paused and let that hang there for a couple of
moments before saying flat-out what the silence had already said. “It was horrible what happened to Stevie, but it was you we were robbed of, Frank. Not Stevie, because Stevie never would have left us if given the choice.”
She waited, certain he’d hang up, but he didn’t. He was still there, and for a while she listened to him wheeze. “I’m not asking you to explain,” she said. Yet she had the feeling he was about to. His voice cracked, but he couldn’t muster any words. How to even begin? How to stuff all the years into a few words? But wasn’t this the frightening thing? You could. In two, three, four sentences you could jam fourteen years, easy. She almost asked him right then where he was, and he might even have told her, but what would it matter now? She knew this was some kind of last lap, a tying up of a single loose end in a life where so many loose ends had scattered. A few phone calls to a little sister.
She knew there were ways, without too much difficulty, to have the calls traced. Alan was always going on about this, that all they had to do was contact the phone company, or the police, who would contact the phone company. But Janice said if Frank wanted her to know where he was, he would tell her. “He’s not my brother, he’s a voice, and hardly even that. Why make more of it than it is? He wants to listen, I’ll talk.” A few memories always seemed to satisfy him. He usually called just after dinner. He seemed to always know when dinner was over. Alan said this was definitive proof he was in the eastern time zone. She told him to shut up with the Agatha Christie crap.
“We used to play tea party,” she told Frank. “You remember? One time you raised one of the little cups with your toes, and I swear you reached all the way to your mouth and pretended to drink out of it. I’d never been so amazed. I kept saying, Do it again, do it again.” She wasn’t even sure whether it mattered if anything she said had any basis in truth. The toes story might have been more recent, something Alan did with Holly or Val when they were tiny. But he seemed to like it, seemed to believe it had been him who’d been so dexterous. He almost seemed to laugh, or at least grunt with a little happiness. From then on, she told him anything that popped into her head. She could take any story she heard yesterday at work and turn it into some common memory. Like the time the couch spontaneously combusted. That was something someone read in the paper. The less related to anything that had actually happened the more he seemed to believe it, as if what he wanted above all was to hear about an alternate past life, one he could imagine without experiencing a kind of vertigo.
As a kid he’d been in trouble a few times. Nothing very serious. Busted a couple of times for pot. Another time for shoplifting. But it was his anger. Nobody could really pinpoint why it started. The night before he took off, he and their father had had a fistfight in the backyard. About what she no longer remembered, but she still retained an image of the two of them out there in the dark, not saying anything, just lunging at each other. Shirtless? Were they shirtless? Why does she remember them shirtless like two old-time boxers? Her mother said it was just a tussle. That was the word she used. A tussle. Only a tussle. Her mother blamed the drugs. The drugs, the drugs. She said he’d vanished into New York City, a bus ride away from Ohio but another continent. New York, where lost souls went to get even loster, her mother said, and there was a kind of comfort in knowing he’d had a destination, that he’d known where he was going. That maybe he had friends there. It was 1973. Her father said he probably never got farther than Akron. They’ve got drugs in Akron, don’t kid yourself. Lot of drugs in Akron.
Months into it her mother would wake up just before dawn and sit in one of the wicker chairs in the den and moan. Stevie. Now Frank.
The first time he called, he’d had to introduce himself. And there was something uncertain about the way he said “Frank” that made her think he didn’t go by the name anymore. That he was only “Frank” for the purpose of this call to his sister. Her mother moaning in the predawn light and she remembers part of her, a lot of her, wanting to leave so her mother would moan over her, too. Nobody seemed to appreciate that she was still in the house. That every morning Janice went down to the kitchen to make the coffee that she didn’t even drink. The years piled up as years do, and they adjusted to his nonpresence, to his being somewhere out of their sight. Somewhere concrete, not abstract, eating, sleeping, waking up—
High school. College. Work. Alan, the kids. The kids growing. Work. Mom and Dad passing away. First Mom, then Dad, seven weeks later. And Alan says there’s no such thing as dying of grief. Alan, you oaf. We all die of grief. And then, a few years later, the calls after dinner. The voice out of the darkness wanting to listen. Not to talk, not to explain.
“You know you have two nieces.”
“Of course I do.”
Not asking names.
“Val has your nose.”
That almost-laugh, but less like a grunt now, less a sound trapped in his throat.
“Hope not, for her sake, hope she doesn’t.”
And she could almost see it, him opening his mouth to almost laugh again, him alone in a room. He would have to be alone in a room because she never heard another voice or any other sounds at all. This ruled out prison, Alan said. He must live in some after-prison place, a halfway house—
Shut up, Alan.
Only his labored breathing, only his occasional words.
And then the calling, which even at its peak was only maybe twice a month, stopped for good. And all she could think about for months was whether the room he’d been calling from, the room where he must have slept, was heated.
Two Lawyers
A couple of lawyers talking, Chicago, 1982. It’s February. They’re sharing a small table at a crowded deli across the street from the circuit court at Twenty-Sixth and California. Dave Pfeiffer and Arthur Blau. “And so maybe ten minutes before the sentencing,” Arthur says, “the guy turns to me and says, ‘I’m going to run over to the deli to grab a turkey sandwich.’”
“Right,” Dave says. “Must have been pretty hungry. What was he looking at?”
“Worst case,” Arthur says, “five to seven. Possession with intent, plus a twink of a weapons charge. There was a penknife on his key chain.”
“You knew?” Dave says.
“Yes and no,” Arthur says.
“Right,” Dave says. “How could you know for absolute certain what’s in another man’s mind. Even a client, especially a—”
“Exactly,” Arthur says.
“How long’s it been?” Dave says.
“Four months,” Arthur says.
“Hear anything?” Dave says.
“Not a peep,” Arthur says.
“Who’s the judge?”
“Antonia.”
“What’d she say?”
“Threw a fit. ‘Absconded? Your client absconded?’ Like he was the first fugitive in the history of Illinois.”
“Married?” Dave says.
“Indeed,” Arthur says.
“And?”
“Wife says last time she saw him was the morning of the hearing.”
“Believe her?”
“She’s more pissed than the judge,” Arthur says.
Both men laugh, slurp their coffee. As usual the place is jammed with attorneys, clerks, cops. The sandwich guys are roaring. I got a BLT up! Turkey club, no lettuce! A lone judge, Collier, sits in a corner munching a bagel, the Sun-Times open before him like the Holy Word. But his eyes are closed as he chews, as if he’s listening to music only he can hear. Judges are isolated figures, planets around which lawyers revolve.
“Who’s the bondsman?” Dave says.
“Nelson Junior,” Arthur says.
“Nelson can’t find his ass with both hands. You think he’ll make it?”
“Don’t know. Maybe. Quiet guy, never said much. When he did talk, he whispered. Polite to me, to the judge, to everybody. Seemed like he was taking the whole deal on the chin. I could have gotten him a year and a half with probation. Fucking penknife.”
“Tricky,” Dave
says.
“Right,” Arthur says.
“Whole new life.”
“Possibly.”
Dave and Arthur. Old friends for years, but the kind of friends who knew each other only through work. Weeks might go by without their running into each other. Yet when they did, they’d always fall right into talking. And their talk amounted to one long conversation about the peculiar nature of practicing law in a world with so little sense of order. The phrase “practicing law” itself was comical. Like it was violin or piano. Aside from the court calendar, chaos knows few boundaries. Not that either of them especially craved order. It was inside the cracks in the havoc that they honed their craft. Neither Dave nor Arthur could ever remember the other’s wife’s name or the names of the kids they each knew, vaguely, the other had. They weren’t that kind of friends, and maybe this is why it was such a relief when they saw each other. No outside chitchat required. No unnecessary entanglements. No shared sorrows. They were a couple of soldiers in suits, reconnoitering during a pause in the action.
“You hear Kowalski’s not on the take anymore?” Dave says.
“He got religion?” Arthur says.
“Word is he’s so rich now he can’t be bought.”
“Maybe that’s how you get religion.”
Old friends, loyal friends, criminal defense attorneys of the solo practitioner breed. They’d never been part of a firm. They were like similarly overweight leopards hunting alone—the image doesn’t quite work, but the point is they were solitary predators—and yet, when one of them couldn’t make a pretrial hearing, the other filled in. If Dave was heading to the jail and Arthur had a client there, too, Dave would deliver Arthur’s message. Attorney Blau says sit tight, he’s coming to see you Thursday. In the meantime, don’t tell your life story to your cellmates because any one of them might have grown state’s ears, okay?