by Robert Cohen
“So I take it you’re not signing up for this Africa thing then,” Alex said.
“Sue me. I’m a nonconformist. You all go ahead. I’ll tend the home fires.”
“I don’t know,” said Carol vaguely, stubbornly. For all her mildness of manner, you could see how she could wear a man out. “There was something in her face when she got off the plane. I don’t know what to call it. She hardly knew who I was.”
Teddy looked up from his plate. “I’m trying to remember the last time I had an intense experience.”
“How about sex with your wife,” Gail suggested. “Or doesn’t that one time count?”
She was regarding him as she had in the car, from the cool, shadowed side of her lonely planet. He could hardly bear the weight of her appraisal. He thought of what he’d seen in the bathroom just now when he had stood up from the toilet—what his body was doing to itself—and a knot of bile formed in his throat. His eyes filled with tears again. Crybaby!
He drained what was left of his wine—quite a lot actually—and set down his glass, which rang unpleasantly against the plate. He glanced down to discover he’d broken the stem in two.
“Jesus,” he said. “How do you like that.”
“Oh,” Fiona said, “they were cheap glasses anyway. Now I’ve got an excuse to replace them.”
“So I’ve done you a favor then? Is that what you’re saying?” Dregs of sediment and cork were lodged in his teeth. “You’re happy I broke it?”
“You’re shouting,” Gail said quietly. “You’re now officially shouting at our dearest friends, who are trying to make allowances.”
“Allowances? Allowances for what?”
“Just stop, okay?”
“Fine. I’ll stop. Okay? I’m stopping.”
“How you like those Sox this year?” Alex piped in. “Are they something or what?”
“The thing is, though, Gail,” Teddy said, “I don’t really feel like stopping. I’m tired of stopping. Stopping is something I’m good at.”
“Not right now you’re not.”
“True, but in general. In general, all in all, I’m a pretty good stopper. Pretty controlled, pretty restrained. But here’s the thing. What if a guy gets too restrained? What if he gets so restrained, he can’t even remember what he’s restraining from? What happens then?”
Gail sighed. “You know what happens then, Pooh Bear. He says good night and goes home to bed, and then the next day he makes an appointment with a licensed therapist.”
“Take your pal Dostoyevsky,” he went on airily, and with a peculiar exaltation; if he’d had another wineglass in his hand he’d have broken that too. “Not a hell of a lot of restraint there. Of course he had his reasons, didn’t he? They say his old man was murdered by his own peasants. Strangled. Isn’t that right, Alex? Tell her. You’re the humanist.”
“Actually I think they crushed his testicles.”
“Good story,” Fiona said. “Any others you boys want to share over dessert?”
“The point is,” Teddy said, “you can’t deny your own nature. Even if your own nature is terribly flawed. Even if it’s ugly or annoying or hurtful to others.”
“How about all three?”
“In Africa they let the big cats roar. Here we cage them up in the house. No wonder they want to bite us.”
“Again with the cat?” Alex lifted his eyebrows. “I thought he didn’t even break the skin.”
“There are cuts you don’t see. By the way, Alex, you’ve got a hell of a living room in there, have I ever told you that? Nice stuff. I like nice stuff.”
“I know you do, Ted.”
“You should see my TV at home. Thirty-two inches. Flat-screen. Hi-def. Five-comb filter for clarity of image. You talk about your resolution. Six ninety-nine plus tax. I went to Best Buy.”
“Sounds like money well spent.” Alex glanced over at Gail; his expression didn’t change. “There’s no shame in treating yourself to something nice, Ted. You’ve worked hard for a long time.”
“Who’s to say?” Teddy gestured expansively toward the windows, slung with lace, and the dark trees beyond them, growing taller and wilder as the season progressed. “The bedouins have a proverb: whatever we don’t need is an encumbrance.”
“Oh boy,” Will said, “here we go again. Across the desert sands.”
“The sedentary species, they don’t hold up, do they, Alex? You’ve read the history. It’s the movers that survive. The nomads, the bush people. The skinny guys who travel light and sing their way across the desert. The fat guys who sit around waiting for the next world? They all wind up buried in sand.”
“It’s late,” Gail said. “Hey, big cat, what do you say? Let’s call it a night.”
“Fine. I’ll just use the bathroom.”
“Again?”
“Last time.”
His second trip to the bathroom that evening, though shorter than the first, proved eventful in its way. Coming out, after drying his hands on the little towels and checking his fly, he overheard Gail say, “…even Bruno keeps his distance.”
“Really?”
“I guess animals sense these things.”
“Wives too,” he heard Fiona murmur, in her insinuating purr.
“Tell me,” Gail said on the way home.
“I’m fine.”
“No you’re not.” She adjusted the vent, trying to coax out a little heat. “You skipped right over fine. You went straight from being weird and quiet to completely wigging out. Was it that business with the cat? I took it too far, didn’t I? I must have been mad at you for some reason.”
“Don’t give it a thought,” he said. “I had a perfectly good time.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
“I didn’t either.” She sighed. “I don’t know what it was. I kept going on about that stupid novel, and everyone just kept sitting there staring at me, and I kept thinking about how hard I was working to sound interesting, and how they were all probably thinking, ‘My God, look at her, she’s put on all that weight.’ And Fiona overcooked the fish, as usual. What a shame, that beautiful creature, grilled to death, and no pleasure in eating it at all.”
“You had a lot of wine,” Teddy observed mildly. “We all did. Anyway I’m the one who broke the glass.”
“You should have broken them all. It turned out to be the highlight of the evening.”
“Next time I will.”
The wine, the semen, the blood he’d glimpsed swirling darkly in the bowl—all the evening’s currents swam together in his mind. But he wouldn’t say anything to Gail. There were doers and complainers. He knew on which team a man should play.
“That wine you bought, with the red label? Did you ever get to try it?”
“No. Did you?”
She nodded. “Oh, it was wonderful. You did a wonderful, wonderful job. Sometimes, you know, Bear, I think you’re a better man than you even know. You know?”
He nodded. Gail was a cheap date; two glasses of wine and her syntax left the building. And yet he did know what she meant. He felt a luminous alertness, like the flash of a scoreboard in the late innings of a game. Somehow he had squeezed out a victory. He’d done away with that tiresome rival, her husband. Smashed him like a glass. And now they were making their escape from the wreckage, so something new could begin.
He looked out at the dark houses along the road, night’s black curtain suspended overhead. If only they could continue on this way, and not pull up into the same old driveway, get into the same old bed. He remembered that night in the parking lot with Vera Blackburn, his sense, driving home, that his neighbors were looking down at him from their illuminated windows not with rancor but approval. As if they’d been the ones making him do it. As if, after two hours in a hot auditorium, they’d all been expelled out into the darkness with the same secret disturbance of the nerves, the same need to keep the show going, the wild tropical night with its lovable rogues and gamblers, its errant missionaries
. I can never fit the cork back in the damned bottle…
“I’m on my period,” Gail said, “but I’m thinking I’d like to have a little fun when we get home. What say you to that?”
“I’d like to have a little fun too.”
“A little good clean perimenopausal fun at the Hastings establishment.”
“Sure,” he said. “We’ll go with the flow.”
She gave a low, voluptuous laugh. Like all women, she was accustomed to flux, to sudden eruptions and cessations, the pull of unseen tides. For men it was different. The sight of one’s own blood, for example, in the toilet bowl, the crimson drops unfurling like jellyfish when they hit the water—at such times a certain terror prevailed.
“Did you know Mimi’s been going out with Jeremy Dunn? They’ve been seeing each other for weeks.”
“Christ. I had no idea.”
“I just found out myself,” she said. “Fiona let it slip in the kitchen. He swore her to secrecy.”
“She’ll get bored with him. She always does.”
“Jeremy’s a little prince. They’ve spoiled him terribly. I can’t see it lasting. But it might.” Gail looked out the window. “Does your arm still hurt?”
“Not so much.”
“I shouldn’t have teased you. I know you have a low threshold.”
“Forget it,” he said. “I hardly feel a thing.”
4
Pinch Hitter
When he arrived at the hospital, Oren had to stop, roll down the window, satisfy the curiosity of the uniformed attendant, and wait for the meter to cough out its slim, time-stamped ticket before the long arm of the gate clicked and rose, permitting him entry. You’d have thought he was trying to get into some exclusive nightclub, not a dumpy sixty-five-bed hospital on the edge of a cornfield. Only a sick person would actually want to visit such a place. And Oren wasn’t sick. He was only a visitor, a man who came and went.
If he was somewhat better prepared today for the latter than the former, that was hardly his fault. He’d been ensconced in the teachers’ lounge, grading an atrocious set of pop quizzes, when Zoe Bender had cornered him. That administrators’ conference down in Hamilton; she’d mentioned it the other day, remember? Of course she knew he had far too much on his plate already. But if he could just step in for a couple of days on some odds and ends, and if he wasn’t too busy, if he could find a way to get down to the hospital later and see Don…
Oren as it happened wasn’t busy at all; his plate was so clean he could see his own reflection in it. But he liked it that way, liked being a member of the clean-plate club. He liked going home after school, sitting on the porch with a mug of coffee, listening to music and watching the birds zigzag overhead in their giddy, intricate migrations. So he hesitated. Around him bells were ringing, kids sidling down the hallways in slow, undulating globs, like the insides of a lava lamp. The jocks and their entourages. The student-government types. The math geeks, the science whizzes, the song-and-dance crowd. Girls dallied by their lockers, waging their coltish campaigns, their sly insurgencies. The younger girls, he knew, were fond of him, his teasing half-smiles, his black jeans and yanked-down ties, his blond, unruly hair. It was the older ones, the ones already as tall as their mothers, who unsettled him. He watched them in the morning out in the traffic circle, stepping free from their parents’ cars, their faces changing, blinking shut, like a membrane in a lizard’s eye. Terrifying. But that was the price you paid, consorting with the young. This exposure to their moods. This susceptibility.
His experience over the years had not so much shorn him of his innocence as revealed it to him. He wondered if he’d ever outgrow it.
“Of course I’ll step in,” he said. “Whatever you need.”
And so he’d done the necessary thing, had gathered up the flag of duty and trudged forward. How hard could it be? He’d shoot over to the hospital, drop off Don’s mail and paycheck, a couple of magazines, a bundle of get-well cards from his students, then he’d pay his respects and go. True, he did not know Don well enough to have much respect, and this was something Oren might have regretted in a general way if he hadn’t in a specific way congratulated himself for it. Because what little he did know about Don Blackburn—his loudness, his rudeness, his egotism, his closetful of frumpy vests and supersize corduroys and bizarre, sour-smelling hats, his twee Anglophilia, all those silly little songs he liked to hum in the teachers’ lounge from the Gilbert and Sullivan catalog—he didn’t like. Don was a know-it-all, a burnt-out case, a glutton who, having feasted too long on the same limited menu, fancied himself a connoisseur. He had a certain way of occupying space, of making his presence felt. He’d hold court in his own designated corner of the lounge, his teeth rutty and dark, his beard a museum of bygone snacks. Whatever detergent, if any, Don used on his clothes, and whatever deodorant, if any, Don used on his armpits, were clearly the cheapest and most astringent on the market. So there he’d sit, sipping his specially ordered Chinese teas, wolfing his specially ordered Scottish shortbread, and chortling over the letters column in his specially ordered copy of the TLS, from which he’d read aloud at tiresome length until the bell rang to signal the end of lunch. All of which would have been forgivable, in Oren’s view, had Don in any sense been welcoming or helpful to the new acting vice principal, or had even showed any sign of noticing there was a new acting vice principal. But he hadn’t.
Of course to be fair, Don Blackburn had been teaching in the North Wing of the middle school since the Carter administration; he’d seen more than his share of intent young vice principals come and go. His sheer longevity, saying the same things about the same books to children forever arrested at the same freakish, bifurcated stage of development, was, Oren reflected, both admirable and sad. Apparently as a young man he’d published a couple of stories in a literary magazine; there was talk of an unfinished novel. Maybe that was the root of Don’s problem. Writer’s block. To know the words were inside you but not be able to access them—that would be a drag, all right.
Did you have to be a writer to suffer writer’s block? Lately Oren thought he might be coming down with a case of it himself.
Now he put the car in reverse and began to back his way into a parking space. It was a habit of his, backing in; you could read something into that, he supposed, as Sabine had, something that reflected badly upon his character; but the truth was his father had taught him this method of parking, and he’d loved his father and admired his driving, as he’d admired a lot of things about him—his mordant, affectionate wit, his skill with power tools, his crisp way of folding the Times—though of course he’d never told him so, had he? Not even at the end, when he’d intended to tell him everything. But he hadn’t. He’d been living in Prague when he got the call. In the time it took to change planes at Heathrow and land at JFK and take a cab up the Van Wyck, onto the FDR, and across Ninety-sixth Street to Mount Sinai, he’d lost his chance. When he arrived at the room, he found the bed inhabited by another man, attended by another man’s son. Another question elided by the operations of nature. They were beginning to really pile up.
Now, to console himself for being an orphan and a bad son and a mediocre schoolteacher and a lot of other things he wasn’t too proud of, Oren reached into the glove compartment for one of the joints he’d confiscated at the October school dance and held in reserve for a time he recognized to have now arrived. He lit up and took a couple of quick, furtive hits. The smoke trickled through his lungs, creamy and cool, seeking its own merry little pathways to his head. Though as a rule, in keeping with his policy of disciplined repudiation, Oren said no to recreational drug use these days, he tried not to be dogmatic about it; every so often, as if to demonstrate to some dim, censorious inner bureaucrat that he was above any foolish consistency in these matters, he’d say yes. Was the opposite of foolish consistency foolish inconsistency, or was it a wiser, more discriminating consistency? As he pondered the matter in the driver’s seat, the smoke weaving a fine blue sca
rf around his neck, the answer escaped him. For that matter so did the question.
How long had he been sitting here, anyway? According to his watch his visit to see Don at the hospital was already one-third over, and he hadn’t even got out of the car yet. What had he been so worried about? The world was a placid, benevolent place, and everything that attached to it was splendid. The sky was clear. Sunlight bounced harmlessly against the windshield and shattered into brilliant sparkly bits. Soon of course it would be time to go do something else, like getting out of the car, for instance, and carrying on with his visit, or else maybe taking a nap. But no, he’d reserve napping for later. Because that was the whole point of visiting the hospital: to put his own needs aside and perform an act of charitable good works for others. Which so far as he understood these things entailed doing more or less the opposite of whatever one really wanted to do instead. If he could just remember what that was…
He dreamed, as he often did when stoned, of popcorn, then opened his eyes to find acorns bouncing off the hood of the car. Or was that a dream too? His mouth was dry. A fine constellation of ashes had settled over his coat sleeves, like fallout from some unseen eruption.
A siren keened around the corner, ululating madly. He wondered where the fire was.
Time to get going, he thought.
He eased himself out of the car, slammed the door behind him, and made his way across the parking lot, shielding the sun from his eyes with the flat of his hand. The afternoon sunlight was blinding; it skittered across the hospital windows in dazzling coronas. Next time he’d be sure to bring shades.
There was no way, nor should there have been, to look upon Don Blackburn in his present state and not be moved. His face was blotched, bulbous, weirdly scrambled; his lips were purple and swollen, bunched up like grapes; his tongue lolled thickly from one side of his mouth. Beached against the pillows, clutching the blanket to his chest with clawed hands, he stared up at the ceiling through his one good eye with something like absolute comprehension of its function. His eyes in arrest looked as vacant as they were haunted, his skin as flushed as it was pale, his belly as bloated as it was emaciated. Hard to believe this shrunken wreck was the great and powerful Don, who strode honking down the corridors like an SUV.