by Peter Orner
“I can’t.”
“Do you wallow for her? Or for yourself?”
He didn’t answer. He lay back down on the grass and looked up at the trees. One day he’d learn their names. One day he’d walk along and point out—to somebody, anybody—the names of trees.
“I’ve got to get home,” he said.
“I know you do.”
“It’s not like there’s any chance of us—”
“Of course not,” she said.
They stayed on the riverbank until it began to rain. The dog was waiting by her car.
Montreal
In the spring, he and his wife drove up to Montreal and stayed in a little pension. Their room was on the top floor; not a floor, really: the room was a glass box on top of the house and accessible only by a ladder. At the top of the ladder, you opened a hatch in the ceiling and pulled yourself up into the room. He wants to remember that the two days they spent up there were calm, that the little box on the roof, windows on all sides, was truly an oasis, that the psychosis, paranoia, mania—all the words that couldn’t begin to describe whatever it was that was so particular to her (and what made him think he was so sane, either?)—abated and they were able to simply exist up there in that strange pod of a room. All they had to do was climb the ladder and open the hatch. Hold it—You know it came and went, that it wasn’t constant, that even amid what you call the worst times, there were long stretches, weeks, even months, when things were normal or some degree of normal, because what does “normal” even mean in this context? So to say there was something especially calm about your time up in that room—
He remembers that in order to get up to Canada, they’d needed a decent car. The Honda was on its last legs. So they’d rented an old BMW sedan from a guy who worked at the local coffee shop and also rented cars. This guy had told them he’d come out to the Hudson Valley from the city intending to grow stuff—what, he wasn’t exactly sure. He said he was thinking maybe pumpkins, but mostly he just wanted to watch stuff grow out of the ground. “You know? Like the cycle of nature?” When he realized he didn’t have any idea how to make that happen—“A lot harder than it looks to grow pumpkins”—he had to do something else. He’d always had a thing for cars. So, yeah, why not an under-the-table car-rental business?
“Depending on how much time you two have, I could tell you two how I made the transition.”
“How about show us the cars?” his wife said.
The coffee-shop guy led them out to a barn. Inside were a few cars covered in bird shit.
“Take your pick.”
She pointed to a Beemer.
“Sixty for the weekend. An extra twenty-five if it’s not back by Sunday at four. We good? I just got to find the keys.”
And they drove up to Montreal and stayed in a glassed-in room on top of a house for two days, and they were happy, almost like they were floating up there—It’s just not accurate. It was no more happy or unhappy than usual, because even though the trouble came and went, it was always there, on the edge of any moment, and so, again, to say it was a happy couple of days—
Yet the room exists in his mind as a kind of mirage that he can still conjure up, the two of them climbing the ladder and opening the hatch like you might in a submarine. Besides, he’s got this need, doesn’t everybody, to put certain things in a kind of rational order, and so that time in Montreal he files under: Things were good for a little while. For two days, things were—Okay, let’s say for the sake of argument it was happy. A little bit happy, but if things were already so wrecked, if there was already no possible way out, then what could two days possibly mean?
And Montreal itself, the first time for both of them, was emerging from winter, and people were out on the streets, in the cafés, and the two of them wandered around and even laughed, tried out some high-school French, stuffed themselves with pastries, and went back to the pension and climbed the ladder. Up through the hatch and into the glass box. Over the rooftops, they had a glimpse of Mount Royal. One problem: there wasn’t any bathroom up there. To go to the bathroom, you had to climb back down the ladder, but he remembers waking up in the just after dawn and climbing out one of the windows. He took a piss off the roof into the courtyard below. And as he turned back to the room, he looked at her sleeping through the windows. She always kicked away her covers. The way her bare legs looked, scissored across each other, as though she were in midrun.
The way her bare legs—
Two uneventful days, almost like a blessing, and they’d gone to an architectural museum where they’d seen Giacometti sculptures, thin women walking. And she’d talked about how making the same thing over and over was a kind of genius. Because it’s never truly the same thing, right, by definition? So long, she said, as you create each woman from scratch, one woman walking can never be another woman walking. You see what I mean?
And again climbing up the ladder, holding a bag of takeout because even the takeout in Montreal was—
And then the border post on the way home.
Why rush it? Can’t we—
It was almost nothing, a weekend trip. It’s over and you’ve got to head back south and cross a border that’s hardly even a border and—
Right, he thinks, and the border post should have been funny. How the border guard ran the plate and the car came up stolen. They were detained. Detained! It should have been funny. It was funny. They were only in Canada. They weren’t car thieves. He was a visiting professor. She was an artist. The two of them, they had graduate degrees. It was a misunderstanding; they were in Canada, not Turkey—But she wouldn’t stop screaming. “You’re arresting us?” she kept yelling. “Arresting us?” They’d had to restrain her. You forgot? The original guard and then a woman cop, and they cuffed her—and he couldn’t convince her, This is funny, we’re in Canada, don’t you see how hilarious this is? Can’t you see, please, I love you, please see
Other Nights
Other nights were so bad he didn’t even put on his shoes. He’d grab a pair on his way out and shove them on outside. A small town. There wasn’t any place to go. There were a couple of bars, but he was afraid he’d run into students or, worse, other faculty. He wandered up and down sidewalks. If it was cold and he hadn’t thought to grab a jacket, he’d go to the convenience store at the gas station to warm up a little. If he’d remembered his wallet, he’d buy something. A bag of Doritos. Once he ate one of those hot dogs that roll all day and night. Delicious, hot and salty. Standing there by the gas pumps wolfing. If he didn’t have his wallet, he’d browse the store shelves for a few minutes, as if he were looking for something they didn’t carry, and then leave before he seemed creepy, especially if there was a female clerk. He’d flash the ring on his finger but wasn’t sure if this made it worse. It was better on the sidewalks. All the small dark houses. The sleepers in their bedrooms. So easy. You said good night. You turned out the light. You fell asleep. Maybe someone was in your arms or maybe someone wasn’t. Another time, in May, he didn’t even have time to grab his shoes. She’d stood in front of the door screaming, and he’d had to knock her over in order to leave. He’d slopped across bogged grass and mud barefoot, the way he used to when he was a kid. The mud slick and cold under his feet. A couple hours later, he went back. He always went back. She never locked him out. He’d crash on the couch downstairs. In the morning, she’d be kneeling beside him. “What time do you have class? Don’t you want to get some real sleep?” And she’d apologize for what she remembered and forget what she forgot. A lot depended on what they both forgot.
The TV Room
It wasn’t visiting hours. They let him in anyway. She was on the fifth floor. He needed a special code to work the elevator. After he buzzed, he was led through two locked doors and down a corridor to the TV room. She was sitting on a bench, holding a book. He joined her and handed her a small paper bag.
“I brought you a brownie,” he said. “You’re too thin.”
“The food’s not terrib
le,” she said.
“Maybe you should eat more of it.”
“I look thin?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.”
“You’re going to be all right.”
“You know, I’ve been thinking,” she said. “Maybe it doesn’t really matter.”
“You will. Soon. It’s just going to take—”
“No pep talks, all right?”
He looked around the room. There was no TV. In one corner was a pile of tattered board games. Life, Sorry, Clue, Connect Four.
“Have some brownie,” she said.
“I brought it for you,” he said.
They used to say they lived in the country of us. Years of mornings, years of nights. He used to read her his stories. The minute he’d finish one he’d beg her to listen, and she’d sit on the couch with her feet tucked under her legs and her chin in her hands, and if a line rang wrong, she’d dip her head slightly, only slightly, but enough so he’d notice, and he’d make a mark by that sentence because he knew right there he’d blown it.
“They let us wear our own clothes, thank God,” she said. “How’s the baby?”
“Let’s not—”
“I’m asking. How’s your kid?”
“She’s fine. Not sleeping much, but that’s how it—”
“Right. That’s how it goes. You forget I basically raised two little brothers?”
“I didn’t forget.”
“Eat some brownie,” she said.
“Where’s the TV?” he asked.
“They roll it in.”
He reached over and took the brownie from her hand. His fingers grazed hers.
A half hour later, the man who’d let him in, a kind, shriveled man with a vaguely Eastern European accent—Polish? Czech?—came and told him that he was sorry but that it was time to leave. Mandatory rest period. The TV room would be locked. She stayed on the bench and looked at her hands. The old Pole or Czech walked him out to the corridor, unlocked the two more doors, and let him out.
Evergreen Garden,
San Francisco, 2012
There were times when she was alone and confused, at times delusional, at times not (other times it was almost impossible, for her, anyway, to tell the difference), and she’d go to Evergreen Garden, a Vietnamese place on Eighteenth and Harrison. At a corner table in the back she’d wait out whatever there was to wait out, it was different every time, but it always had to do with thoughts, rampant thoughts that wouldn’t let up. Eating out sometimes helped a little. It was as if being in public kicked in a kind of muscle memory. She’d study the menu like a customer was supposed to, even though she always knew what she wanted. At the Evergreen Garden, the price of each dish was crossed through meticulously with a pen. Next to the old price was the handwritten new price, fifty cents more for each dish. She appreciated the thrift. Why make new menus? It was also a lesson in inflation. She’d stare at the brown and white floor tiles, at the peculiar modish chandelier that looked like it belonged in a different restaurant, at the old man behind the counter sleeping on his feet. When anybody spoke to him, his son or his son’s wife, he’d open his eyes slowly. Then he’d answer whatever was asked and go back to sleep.
There was also, in the center of the dining room, a cylindrical fish tank, crowded with goldfish, surprised looks on their faces, fleeing round and round. She often wondered why they didn’t get dizzy, or maybe if you were dizzy all the time you had no idea what not being dizzy felt like. Made her think of the pills. When the pills didn’t seem to work. Or when she forgot to take them. Or when she’d run out of them and it was after seven on Sunday and Walgreens was open, and you could buy a refrigerator’s worth of food, socks, a clock radio, a beach ball, but the pharmacy was closed—
The waiter, the son, approached her table. He never recognized her, though of course he did. But acknowledging her might have caused trouble with his wife, since everything else under the sun seemed to. She ordered a beef noodle soup (now $7.75) and a beer and sat there without a book, wondering how she could have forgotten one again, and waited not for calm, which would have been too much to ask, but only that her body allow her to breathe without feeling like she was panting. Though she wasn’t panting, at least not out loud. The thing about being delusional, or at least her version of delusional, since everybody’s had to be different, was that even while it was going on, she could always see past it. She knew that whatever she happened to believe at the moment was fantastical, or at least partly fantastical. There was always half the delusion that was true—as black-and-white true as the prices of these dishes crossed out and rewritten in pen. Didn’t Jean Rhys say if you’re paranoid, you’ve got a reason to be?
So she had this ability, this talent, for being able to half watch herself as if from a distance, believing whatever it was she was believing—today that her landlady had it in for her, was blaming her alone for all the plumbing trouble in the whole building, saying it was her hair and her coffee grounds causing it all, and she was going to start eviction proceedings soon, that was for fucking certain—and at the same time not believing it (the landlady wasn’t singling her out, the woman was a fucking bitch to everybody, who wasn’t she a fucking bitch to?), and this not believing made her feel at least a little—what?—removed during the very worst of it. No matter how much anarchy in her thoughts, or in the things she’d say, or when she’d sometimes flail around on her bed and scream out the apartment window, or even those few times out on the street when the cops came and said, We’re here to give you a hand (at the same time radioing: We’ve got a 5150, female in her thirties, corner of Twenty-Ninth and—), there was always this island in her brain that held something back, and even when it didn’t hold anything back, even when she let the panic take over completely—or couldn’t stop it—still, even then, she knew the island was there and she’d be able to swim to it later, and in this she knew she was lucky; she’d met more than enough people on the ward who had no islands at all.
The old man at the counter stood with his eyes closed, his face crunched together like a fist. Was it comfortable there in his cocoon? His son and his son’s wife were squabbling again in the kitchen. She’d had a husband once, too. He’d been her TA in college. He was gone now. Not far away, but gone. There’d been a time they were never out of each other’s sight. Maybe the little old man was sleeping, maybe he wasn’t. She watched the fish in their cylindrical tank. Around and around they fled. Her soup was cold, her beer warm. But here she could sit for hours.
Strand
He found a strand of her hair in a book. A long dark brown piece of her hair that made a curlicue on the page. The book was Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Why he happened to take it off the shelf that morning, he wasn’t sure. He’d never had any interest in theory. And a theory of fiction? A theory that explains waking up in the dark of a familiar room and forgetting where you are and how you got there? Some books sit on the shelf for so long they become part of the landscape. One day, a spine catches your eye, and you slide a book from between two others, open it, read a little.
On the page where he’d found her hair, she’d underlined a sentence: “In the Bible the world is made out of nothing.” In the margin, she’d written, Nothing? What about silence??? He spent the rest of the afternoon reading, careful that the strand didn’t drop out. He fell asleep reading, woke up to someone, nobody, calling his name.
VI
Walt
Kaplan
Is
Broke:
A Novella
The bed’s oak
and clumsy, pitching
with its crew,
a man and a wife—
—Rita Dove, Thomas and Beulah
Perhaps it was worth being poor for a long time
to be so rich for just a little while.
—John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash of 1929
1
Truesdale Hospital:
Fal
l River, Massachusetts,
July 21, 1977
The first time Walt Kaplan died, Irv Pincus was at his bedside crying crocodile tears and murmuring in pidgin Hebrew. Walt opened his eyes and thought, Heaven or hell, I’ll take either, just get me the hell away from Irv Pincus. Only Walt wasn’t dead, and only Irv’s Hebrew was fake. The crocodile tears were the genuine article. Irv’s wife, Dottie, had finally cajoled Sarah, her sister, into going home and getting some sleep. Irv had been assigned the night watch. Ah, the graveyard shift, Irv had said, and Dottie told him to can the comedy. Just sit there, don’t sleep. And if he wakes up, for Christ’s sake don’t tell him anything. Call a doctor, call the nurse. Just don’t open your trap. And so there was Irv weeping and praying and gripping Walt’s arm in the half dark, and if Walt had had the strength to scream bloody murder, he would have.
“Irv?”
“Easy, Walt. You’ve had a helluva.”
“What are you doing in my bedroom?”
“You’re at Truesdale, old buddy. Good news is that you’ve got a view of the Narragansett.”
The room is dim but for the hallway light leaking in through the slightly open door. Truesdale? Even when he’s not smiling, Irv Pincus is smiling. That puny bush of a mustache, looks like he cut off the tail end of a cat’s tail and stuck it under his nose. Alf Dolinsky calls it a pussy tickler. His wet, beady eyes in the darkness, unnerving. Must be his secret. That smile like he knows your number. Nothing’s free, even what you think you’ve already got. Irv could sell you your own shoes on layaway.
With a long, slow, theatrical swipe of his forearm across his face, Irv wipes away tears. “Hate to be the one to break it to you, old soul. Your heart stopped. Sidewalk. Up the hill on President Avenue. If not for some nosy out on her porch, you’d be a doornail. Ambulance came in a few minutes. Lucky they weren’t on a slowdown. Damn the unions. Pumped you so full of drugs you could open a pharmacy. They thought you might need a bypass. Turned out, no. You’re some kind of medical miracle. They’re saying your heart righted itself. Still, Sarah’s half out of her wits. Dottie took her home a couple hours ago. Where were you walking?”