three Denials
My wife denies being my older self.
“I’m not your older self,” she says.
Everything was going fine until the vows. Everything always goes fine until the vows. I find someone to love. I find someone I can find no wrong in, another self. And then comes that part in the vows, my other self.
“But we said in the vows my other self,” I say.
“It’s a metaphor,” she says.
“And you’re older than me,” I say.
She’s got six months on me. Six months less four days, leap year notwithstanding. It’s one of those April-December things—myself one of them, herself the oldster—if only April and December weren’t so far apart.
“You’re the one who insisted we write our own vows,” she says. “You wrote my other self,” she says.
“If only April and December weren’t so far apart,” I say.
“What the fuck do April and December have to do with anything?” she says.
“It’s a metaphor,” I say.
“For what?” she says.
Here comes the explaining. I hate having to explain this, having to explain myself to my older self, the possibility, the inevitability that in six months I could be so dense as to need a statement like if only April and December weren’t so far apart explained for me.
“It means you’re six months older than me,” I say.
“April and December are eight months apart,” she says. “Or four months apart,” she says.
“I said it’s a metaphor,” I say. “For how you always get there first and then you ruin things for us,” I say.
“Neither of us was born in April or December,” she says.
“You don’t understand,” I say.
Try explaining anything to my older self. Sometimes I think she’s willfully misunderstanding, though, to advocate the devil for only a moment, it could be the restricted blood flow.
“Maybe we could work this out if you’d just untie me,” she says.
“I’ve heard that one before,” I say.
And I have. There were a couple of times I even fell for it. Don’t imagine this one’s my only other, older self. Or imagine whatever you want. What are you, my judge? No seriously, are you my judge? Then maybe you can understand why I do what I do?
My neighbor denies the very shit on my shoes.
Believe me when I tell you there is shit on those shoes.
They’re sneakers, gray, with Courage on the heels just above the plastic that makes them for running, the plastic above the shit.
I meet my neighbor—not as in rendezvous—I bump into her without physical contact in the stairwell where I have my cigarettes. She’s having a cigarette with her daughter who isn’t having a cigarette.
I’m wearing sneakers when I meet my neighbor, just not the sneakers in question. The sneakers in question are outside my door, up the stairs first on the left. They’re not allowed in for the shit on them. And they aren’t in question until my neighbor says your shoes.
“Your shoes,” my neighbor says.
I look down at my shoes. They say New Balance, but I’m several exchanges ahead of ourselves.
First she says: “Hello. I am a woman who is divorced from Georgia. Don’t ask me why.”
“My wife is from Georgia,” I say.
“Actually Louisiana,” she says. “I’m also an epileptic.”
I don’t know whether she means that she’s actually from Louisiana, as though she’d forgotten for a moment where she was born and raised, or that my wife is actually from Louisiana, that she’s met my wife before and can hear through the Georgia accent to the Louisiana one smothered underneath, which I have not detected if it’s there to detect.
“Which is why I get confused.”
“Have you met my wife?” I say.
“He was definitely a man,” she says. “He was making inappropriate remarks while folding my laundry. I became flustered and couldn’t find my way through this large building to the apartment where my daughter awaited me with clean pajamas.”
It’s not such a large building. Four stories and a basement, the whole thing shaped like a horseshoe.
“These ones,” says her daughter.
Nothing special—fuzzy and blue with a zipper running from left ankle to only gullet—though there are those who get nostalgic about the footy ones.
“She’s like my older self,” I say.
“My daughter?” says my neighbor.
“My wife,” says me.
“My daughter,” says my neighbor, “was awaiting me, being patient. And her pajamas. But how could I know that she wasn’t getting frantic with my epilepsy?”
My wife is probably getting impatient, though frantic I doubt. I’d told her I was going for a cigarette and she knows how long a cigarette takes. Not this long. My cigarette is an inch of ash swerving slightly from the filter between my fingers.
“I was standing in the middle of the hallway getting more and more unrecognizable,” says my neighbor.
“To whom,” I say.
“To me they all look the same,” she says. “All except for your shoes.”
I look down at my shoes. I say: “They say New Balance.”
“They said Courageous,” she says, “and gave me the courage to find my way back.”
“I should be finding my way back to my apartment where my wife is awaiting me being patient,” I say. “Besides, there’s a doormat on the first floor embroidered with dolphins frolicking in a moonlit sea.”
I take a step toward the stairs. I didn’t notice how close she was until I took a step toward the stairs. Her arm, the one that isn’t holding a cigarette in its hand, crooked across her chest, hooked by hand on the opposite shoulder, presses into my belly.
I take a step back, and another. I rest my ass on the ass-level windowsill of the window I sometimes stare out of, when smoking and alone. I light a new cigarette, turn my head, and stare out the window. Or into the window where my neighbor’s reflection floats.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she says.
I’m thinking: I was waylaid by the new neighbor. Her features are reversed in reflection, but her voice moves ever in the same direction.
“You’re thinking this would make more sense if I wasn’t so pretty,” she says.
I’m thinking: she’s an epileptic. She will have been teetering on the verge of convulsions.
“How do you think it makes me feel,” she says as she drops to her knees.
“Courageous?” says her daughter.
She’s sitting a few stairs down with her back to us, ignored and feeling ignored. I turn and look down at her, then down at her mother, her mother’s eyes about level with my lap. Her mother reaches out both-handed, takes my left foot, and brings the sole to her lips.
“Wrong ones,” I say.
She drops the left and lifts the right, brings it too to her lips as though I meant wrong one, as though I were talking about foot.
I say: “What do you think you’re doing,” but I’m thinking: Do they measure the distance between Louisiana and Georgia in dollars or years and either way, which one is inside? Which is out?
Sweet William, don’t even bother denying it.
There is a thing I should tell Sweet William which is: “Sweet William, do not do the come-hither fingers to a man’s neck, especially when he has recently shaved, leaving his skin feeling naked and vulnerable.”
“It’s Wee-yum,” says Sweet William.
“OK Sweet Wee-yum,” I say, “Where’d you get a name like that anyway.”
He’s skinny, with bad teeth and finger-waves à la Nat King Cole, but his clothes don’t fit right and he’s always on his way back from the grocery with several soft packs of the long thin cigarettes, menthol, in a little plastic bag. Kind of sweet, all in all, but you’d have to be perceptive to see it. I never notice anyone perceiving him but me.
“I didn’t,” Sweet William says, “only you call
me that.”
“Sweet Wee-yum,” I say, “are you suggesting that we have some sort of special relationship, something more intimate than just saying hi when we pass each other in the lobby and then forgetting each other completely until the next time? Do we use pet names on each other? Because don’t test a man, Sweet William.”
“Wee-yum.”
“Sweet. Wee-yum. Shit,” I say. I say: “I’ve had about enough of you. Go back to your room. Get out of my sight.”
He pops-eyes like I just demanded his first born if he’ll ever bare one, and waves his long, skinny cigarette in my face, this way, that, metronomic, whining: “But I just lit this.”
It’s almost hypnotic.
“Are you trying to hypnotize me, Sweet Wee-yum?”
I slap it from his mouth, but I don’t hit him, not even close. The cigarette tumbles down the steps of the stoop and into the grass. He gets up and scurries after it, following the smoke signals and retrieving it with a smile. It sounds pathetic, but if you saw it, it’s the kind of thing that makes him sweet, the kind of thing you’re not perceiving.
He takes a victory drag, exhales practically glowing, and says: “These things are expensive.”
Those things are nothing but poison wrapped in a combustible tube dipped in acid to make them kill faster. Strictly ghetto.
I think Sweet William’s Section 8. That’s my only problem with this building. We get spacious apartments with hardwood floors and high ceilings at a decent price, but we also get the toothless hag in fourteen who says she’s waiting on an inheritance if you can understand a word she says and the British accent’s probably fake anyway, a fat kid named Porkchop practicing his piledriver on the lawn with the neighborhood kids in case somebody from the WWF drives by, and tranny hookers brandishing salt-water balloons any time anyone comes around thinking gentrification.
I wonder what Sweet William thinks of gentrification.
“Sweet William: what do you think of tranny hookers?”
I used to imagine Sweet William hustled himself. Back then I thought of him as Sweetback, maybe even called him that a time or three before he told me his mama named him Wee-yum. Then I thought what kind of hustler name is Sweet William, and besides how are you going to hustle when no one but me talks to you.
After that it was Sweet William, the gentlest hit man in the world, appropriate for a loner like him. But you’d think a hit man worth his Ray-Bans could afford to smoke something a little better than the black death, even if he did have a three-pack-a-day habit. Anyway he’s never gone long enough to assassinate anyone of importance, even if he took the Concord, which he couldn’t. It’s been retired. Probably doesn’t even have a passport.
“I don’t have any problem with them,” says Sweet William.
“Hit men?” I say.
“The tranny hookers,” he says, lighting another.
“That’s exactly the problem with you,” I say.
That’s exactly the problem with Sweet William, but try convincing him of that. I don’t. I just knock another cigarette out of his mouth. Or try to.
“Missed me,” he says, grinning stalactite. Stalagmite. I don’t fucking know. I don’t know anything about him.
I’m thinking about going back inside when he slips another cigarette halfway out of the fresh pack with a half-slick flick of the wrist. I take it no thanks and pop it in my mouth. He offers me a light, but I’ve got my own. I pull it from my pocket and get a little buzz from the first drag.
We smoke our cigarettes in silence. It’s past dusk now, but not quite night, the sky like the cover of a romance novel, except it’s blocked half-out by the factory up the hill that I never found out what it turned out because it hasn’t turned anything out as long as I’ve lived here, and the moon is beaming on a Malibu with only one hubcap instead of some shirtless shepherd and his maiden if that’s what this romance was supposed to be about.
Sweet Jesus, the romance of Sweet William.
I finish first because I’m fast without trying. I flick my butt to the curb and wait button-lipped to see if I can get anything else. Sweet William catches me looking at him, but it takes him a while to catch the meaning. He kind of rolls his eyes, which is the exact thing that you don’t want to do to me, and if you don’t believe me ask anyone who’s ever done it, or worse for you try it yourself. So when Sweet William does the wrist flick again and three cigarettes fly out because the pack’s starting to loosen up, and I snatch them one two three before they ever hit the ground, he’s getting off easy.
This time I say thank you: “Thanks,” because I figure it’ll piss him off.
“Why don’t you just ask?” he says.
I wave all three of them in his face like I’m trying to hypnotize him and say: “Because these things are expensive,” like you’re getting very sleepy, and I go inside because three should be enough.
But then I want another one right away to keep the buzz going, so I pull out my lighter and it flicks a spark but doesn’t burn anything and I try it again and nothing so I go in the bedroom to borrow my wife’s but she’s tied up making false claims and you know how that goes: no use trying.
I have no alternative but to use the stove which is dangerous but desperate times are calling “just don’t singe your see-through eyebrows.” I turn the knob all the way right until it clicks and a great ball of fire flies from the right front burner, then back left to a delicate but deadly blue halo, and squat with my knees pressed to the oven, leaning in until I’m lit, trauma-free.
The buzz returns but the cigarette’s practically finished by the time I’m finished standing up with the stove safely off and cooling, and I haven’t even had time to lean back in my chair and savor it. They put something in Sweet William’s brand to make them burn faster so you smoke more. Excelsior, I think, from the planks of a plague-infested ship.
I take the second cigarette from behind my left ear and light it off the first because I’m not going through the whole ordeal again. I throw what’s left of the first into a pot soaking in the sink and flop into my armchair like that.
But it’s hard getting comfortable. There’s the awareness that I haven’t got much time, so I have to choose between shifting around and savoring. I choose savor. I drag deep and release like I’m relaxed, but I’m not because there’s something poking at my back from the crack between the cushion and the chair’s right arm, and my wife is making a racket howling: “If you untie me I’ll tell you the truth of how the balance between inside and out equals blessed assurance,” which almost makes me want to change the subject until the only good thing comes to an end which is cigarette number two.
I barely have time to get number three from behind ear number right and lit off two before two goes ash but I do. I get it lit. Then I’m grinding the butt beneath my heel on the carpet because I’m so mad and unrelaxed, and going out saying: “It’s too late you had your chance” before the door slams behind me.
Sweet William’s not on the stoop anymore, but I want three more cigarettes because the last three were hardly my fault, so I wait there in case he decides to come back out. It’s not like I can’t afford my own. I can. I’m not Section 8, but it’s dark now and I don’t go out after dark because of the Killer Bee.
He didn’t get a name like that from me. I’ve got way more imagination than to call a guy with nasty blond dreadlocks striped with the gutter’s own filth something he could pass for, though really more of a killed bee if you don’t tell him I said it and I didn’t.
Instead I said: “Okay,” when he said don’t follow me even though I wasn’t following him, I was just behind him and staying that way. I was on my way into Annie’s breakfast place to smoke the cigarettes that I did have then, and drink her coffee but not her greasy water because my wife was getting me down.
He had this stagger that was way worse than drunk, more like four feet in the grave and trying to grow a couple more and I told myself this man will be wanting to smoke so stay back until he
’s past the door.
When I say told myself I mean in my head where he couldn’t hear it, but even so he turned around and said what I told you he said and I responded as reported like let that be that and the world keep turning which wasn’t good enough for him and it never is.
He said: “Killer Bee’s got eyes in the back of his head,” and I said okay again—instead of asking him where he got a name like that, which is a dumb name and less surprising than, say, Our Lady of East Genesee Street—despite all evidence to the contrary, the extra set of eyes, not my okay which is not debatable, plus my perception which told me he’d seen me in Annie’s window by virtue of his sideways gaze. Even if he did have eyes in the back of his head they’d be watering all the time and probably stinging from the fumes of his pelt.
Still not enough.
“And all he does is kill and kill and kill,” he said, which would not be enough to keep me from going out for smokes, no. It was the way his liver was leaking into his eyes. They were the same color as his hair. There are certain eye colors that I have no problem swatting, but there is no winning against yellow even if you win, no none.
The Awful Possibilities Page 2