Under the Rainbow

by Silvis, Randall;

  Travis lays a hand upon his shoulder. “Sorry, Dad. But I guess it wasn’t meant to be.”

  “Travis,” Donald begins, but then stops, gives up, he has no strength for a lecture. He takes a slow deep breath, fills his lungs with carbon monoxide, then puffs out the air, deflates himself, blows the anger away.

  “Where do you want to eat?” he asks.

  “To tell you the truth, Dad, those waffles I had for breakfast are still with me.”

  “You’re not hungry?” Donald certainly is not. He has no appetite at all.

  “Let’s get a bag of soft pretzels and a Coke and go sit in the square.”

  Roebling Square is an acre of cobblestones and water fountains splat in the heart of the city, a resting place named for the man who invented wire cable, who built the Brooklyn Bridge, a park filled with pebble and concrete benches upon which it is impossible to comfortably rest.

  Donald and Travis sit side by side on one of these benches, knees touching, a bag of pretzels on Travis’s end of the bench, a pretzel in each man’s hand, mustard smears on Donald’s fingers.

  “It’s a beautiful day,” Travis says softly, hoping to soothe. “Don’t you think so?”

  “Look straight ahead and tell me what you see.”

  “I see … a couple of ladies, they’re both very pretty, and they’re eating take-out salads from.… I can’t read the bags, can you?”

  “Look behind them.”

  “Oh yeah, the way the sun glitters through the fountain spray. The colors in the mist. The gleam of the buildings.”

  “You don’t see that guy in Army fatigues, curled up on that bench over there? The guy with the Pacman beach towel over his face? A towel he probably scrounged from a trash can somewhere? You can see him through the mist too, can’t you?”

  “Yeah, well, I see him now, sure.”

  “Why is it that he’s the first thing I see when I look in that direction, but he’s the last thing you see?”

  Travis has no answer.

  Maybe James is right, Donald thinks. Even snotnoses can be right once in awhile. Maybe my work is slipping. Maybe I have stopped looking at the world the way I used to. Maybe I’ve developed tunnel vision. A cataract on my soul.

  To test himself, Donald looks to the right. Coming onto the square is a young woman in a tight yellow dress, long thin legs, high heels, a very attractive woman. She is carrying a paperback novel. She sits not far away, begins to read, legs crossed at the knee, face to the sun.

  I see her, Donald thinks; but what do I see?

  I see a beautiful womangirl who is going to lose her beauty in a very few years. Next week or next month she will meet a handsome young man who works in the same office as she. They will fall in love. They will date for a year and a half. He will give her herpes but she won’t care because she loves him and intends to marry him. Then he will get a transfer to another city and he will leave her behind. She will sink into a deep depression, start drinking too much, become promiscuous, nonorgasmic, a man-basher, radical feminist, celibate, a strident old woman.

  Or she will find a wonderful husband, have two wonderful children, live in a beautiful home in the suburbs, have a beautiful life, and wake up a week before her thirty-fourth birthday with a lump in her breast.

  A cyst on her ovary.

  Or her daughter will be molested in preschool.

  Or they will all be fantastically healthy but her husband will never get the breaks he deserves and they will live a gray and bitter life of good health together, full of silent complaint.

  But that same woman, Donald tells himself, ten years ago, maybe as recently as five, I would have seen her differently then. I would have desired her, would have indulged in the sweet pleasure of a harmless fantasy. A hotel room, the bed warm with afternoon sunlight slanting through the window, a tender hour, the slow touch of flesh, sweet soft kiss of gratitude and goodbye.

  Where did my lust go? Donald wonders. Where is my ambition, my expectation, my indulgence of hope?

  “What are you thinking about, Dad?”

  “I’m thinking,” Donald says, and he looks at the young woman and sees nothing but grief, “that I wish I had your eyes.”

  Donald’s car is on the ninth floor of the parking garage. Even the elevator ride, that jerky ascension in a scratched metal box, tires him. He steps out of the elevator and is momentarily lost, which way to the car? But Travis knows, his memory is clear, no scar tissue there. Donald follows; the lobotomized patient going home. He spots his car. It looks dirtier, smaller than he remembers.

  Donald unlocks Travis’s door, then the driver’s side, key pushed into the lock, an ingenious contraption, the cold mechanics of sex, the key as pecker, the pecker as key. Donald wishes it were so, that easy, he wishes he could slip his dick into a welcoming keyhole and thus unlock the door onto a better life, air-conditioned and softly padded, heat and music at his fingertips, a steering wheel responsive to every touch, a steerable life, sound-proofed, with lots of room for luggage.

  But alas, it is just a car key, it is just a car. A trope is but a trope. Donald sits behind the steering wheel, leans into it. No snuggery here. He had thought this excursion into the city might do him and Travis some good, spark an epiphany, an understanding, but Donald craves only sanctuary now, the dim silence of his basement, a ghostly pal.

  As for Travis, he has not yet climbed into the car. He stands against the low concrete wall, surveying the plummet, the dizzying drop. To Donald he appears to be inclining increasingly forward, the abutment across Travis’s hips as he with back held straight inches his upper body further and further beyond the edge, toward, it seems, the angle of decline, that posture whereof his center of gravity will find itself bottomless, will slide off the fulcrum, will reach for the ground.

  Donald slides out, stands up. “Don’t even think it,” he warns.

  Travis does not move, does not turn, does not speak. He is in love with the void, the sweet empty inbetween.

  Cautiously Donald approaches. He is but a desperate lunge away. Now an arm’s length. Now a handspan. He slips two fingers under Travis’s belt. Holds on for dear life.

  “Stop it,” he says, his voice quivering and thin.

  Time passes, or stands still, Donald knows not which. Finally the pressure pulling on his fingers relents, Travis’s weight returns to the concrete, the grip of his heels. When he looks at his father the expression on Travis’s face startles Donald. Donald can describe it only as the dopey flush of ecstasy. The vacuous glaze of rapture.

  “But doesn’t it intrigue you?” Travis asks, beatific Travis, St. Travis of the Marvin Avenue Garage. “Be honest now. Don’t you ever feel it calling?”

  To be honest or not to be, that is Donald’s question. He would lie if he thought he could do so effectively, if he could come up with a convincing fraud, an eloquent persuasion. But something tells him that he is made of cellophane now, Travis can see straight through him, can spot the twisted viscera of his lies.

  “When I was a boy,” Donald says, and casts a glance to the distant ground, waits to hear it plop like a pebble down a well, his fingers tightening on Travis’s belt, “when I was very young, and older, your age and beyond … I remember an urge I used to have sometimes.”

  Travis waits. He smiles. He knows.

  “Whenever I was high,” Donald says. “Elevated, I mean. At the top of the ferris wheel, for example. On the rim of the Grand Canyon. Et cetera.”

  “You had an urge.”

  “I had an urge, at times like that, to take just one more step. Over the edge.”

  Travis is nodding. “And it wasn’t because you felt sad or depressed, either. In fact, just the opposite.”

  “Niagara Falls,” Donald says, remembering. “Pike’s Peak. The World Trade Towers.”

  “It was … beautiful somehow, wasn’t it? You knew it would feel so good. The grandness of it all. The vast, unending magnificence. You wanted to enter it, to surrender to it. You wanted to mer
ge.”

  Donald feels his son’s hand slip into his. Suddenly the city is all around him. Stink of car fumes, dirty concrete, engines echoing through the oilstained labyrinthe, horns honking, briskly clacking footsteps. Donald faces the ledge again, he looks down. He sees two bodies falling hand in hand, splatsplat on the pavement, exploded skulls, guts shimmering like two dropped plates of fettucine calamari.

  Donald doubles over the edge, he loses his lunch, half a salty pretzel gone, half a lifetime lost.

  They are driving home, a few silent miles left to go. Travis, quiet now for twenty minutes, clears his throat.

  “Are you glad you and Mom had me?” he asks.

  “I love you more than anything in the world, son.”

  “But are you glad you had me?”

  “I’m not sure I understand what you mean,” Donald says, although he surely does.

  “My existence causes you pain.”

  “All love is a burden.”

  “So are you glad you had me or not? Or wouldn’t you rather be free of that burden?”

  “If you would stop thinking about killing yourself, there would be a lot less burden to go around.”

  “I can’t help who I am, can I? The way I feel about the world?”

  “I don’t know,” Donald says.

  “So are you glad you had me or aren’t you?”

  Donald takes a long time to reply. He sprays the windshield with washer fluid, violently flushes and swats the sticky bug parts away.

  “I remember a time when you were little,” he says. “About three years old, I think. You were so excited, you came running down to the basement to show me a picture you had drawn. It was a picture, you said, of Dorothy and Toto. You laid it in front of me, and then, very excitedly, you started pointing. ‘Here are the Munchkins,’ you said. ‘And here’s Glinda. And here’s the wicked witch. Here’s her dead sister and the house that fell on her and here’s the ruby slippers that Dorothy gets. Here’s Emerald City and this is the Scarecrow and here’s Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion and the Wizard and the flying monkies and here’s where we live and this is Disneyworld and over here is Mickey Mouse giving Cinderella a great big kiss!’”

  “That must have been some picture,” Travis says.

  “Except for a scribble or two and a couple of crayon smears, it was blank. Which prompted me to say something like, ‘Gee, honey, it’s a really nice picture, but I’m afraid I don’t see any of those people in it.’ You flashed me a very disapproving look, and then you said, I’ll never forget, you were only three years old, and you said, ‘Daddy, you should learn how to use your imagination more.’”

  Travis considers the clouds. “And you think that’s what I’m still doing, don’t you?” he asks. “Imagining beauty where it doesn’t really exist.”

  Donald snaps on the turn signal, his foot taps the brake. “We’re home,” he says.

  Wright’s house after dinner, the picture of rosy suburban calm. A sunset wash of cinnamon light gives the white frame house a radiance, the pink of perfect health. Donald stands across the street, he stares at the silent door. He has nothing to say to the terrible darkness inside that house, no words as quick as flame, no tongue of incandescence to flap from room to room. And yet he knows he must speak, if only to admit there is nothing to say.

  Across the street then, the sidewalk. Heavy feet on wooden porch. Where has the sense of familiarity gone?

  Donald’s finger depresses the bell button. He hears the mechanical ding, it sounds like a bullet shot within a metal barn, two dull ricochets before the slug buries itself in something soft. Donald feels a pair of eyes peering out, he turns quickly to the nearest window, the curtains are drawn, blank, no glimmer of light.

  “Wright!” he calls, and jabs the button three crisp times. “Open up, man. Enough of this nonsense!”

  He rings again, he knocks, he calls, he raps his knuckles sore. And after each attempt he pauses, listens, the silence inside the house sounds even more profound for his interruption, the neighborhood a lumen less bright, as if the house is expanding imperceptibly, absorbing illumination and turning it inside out, a two-story black hole, seven rooms of gravity.

  Donald sinks to his haunches, then drops to his knees. With one finger he pushes open the mail slot, puts his eyes to the narrow slit. He sees a strip of hallway, a turn of stairs. Everything appears normal, and is all the more horrifying for that.

  Donald draws away, closes his eyes, lets the mail slot flap shut. There is no air to breathe, he feels faint. The door when he looks is still there, the mail slot no mirage.

  Again his finger pushes open the tiny hinged door, but this time he puts his mouth to the opening. He feels the same enormous tenderness and despair as when he puts his mouth to Jessica, his finger inside her too, the same need, the same confidence of blundering.

  “Wright?” he asks, softly now, his voice strange and high, muted to his ears. “Buddy? Come and let me in, okay?”

  But there are no footsteps padding toward him. No chuckle of concession.

  “Jesus, Wright. I wish I knew what to say about this. I wish … I wish I could do something.”

  It all sounds so foolish, inarticulate, inept. Only sincerity gives the words any lift at all, keeps them from plopping on the other side of the door, as silent as dirt.

  “I just want to be with you, pardner. I just want to see you again. I just want to be able to tell you … face to face … that there’s never been a better friend than you. That I’m better for having had you as a friend. And that I … you.…

  “Goddamn it, Wright, come and open this fucking door!”

  And Donald trudges home unanswered through the gray thick weight of dusk, his heart as battered as his knuckles.

  Jessica wants to make love.

  Donald is reluctant because he knows the futility of it, the unavailing promise. What after all does this nonprocreative sex accomplish? It frenzies the hormones into hope, pumps deceitful endorphins into the brain, tucks the warm cozy of wellbeing around tingling flesh only to draw it away, leave you naked and sad.

  Donald would rather brood than make love, he would rather hug his pessimism. But he loves his wife and knows how easily she bruises. She will interpret his lack of desire for her as a lack of desire for her, and that is not the case at all, he desires her with all his heart, he wants, if the truth be known, to make tender healing love to every woman in the world, to grasp the hand of every fellowman, tousle every child’s hair, scratch the belly of every dog, feed crackers to every squirrel. And because he can not do it all, what good is a token gesture?

  Even so, Jessica’s hand is warm. She pulls lovingly on his cock, introduces it to the soft cheek of her moist inner thigh. Oh yes it does feel good, there is no denying the appeal of this simmering slippery rhythm, her breasts flattened against his hollow chest, her teeth grazing his ticklish neck.

  And for awhile her ardency thaws him, the familiar grip of familiar flesh, the soothing slurp of repetition. Everything will be okay, he thinks. Everything will work out fine. Even the growing urgency revivifies. He works harder now, gaining energy rather than expending it. He knows the pattern of her breath and the language of her muscles and he attunes all movement to Jessica’s pleasure, her pleasure is his joy, oh my wife, my cherished one, oh my soul forgive such black neglect, sweet god erase my sins, why don’t we do this more often?

  The afterglow is warm. But heat rises, evanescing. This crucible does not obtain. A scent of ash fills his nostrils, he smells himself, tastes dessication. His only hope now, remote, is to avoid this crematory stench in sleep.

  Jessica wants to talk. “So tell me,” she says. “Anything interesting happen between you and Travis today?”

  A lunar bleakness descends upon him, a dusty craterlike sorrow. “We had a fine time together,” he says. “It was a nice afternoon.”

  “Did you talk about … you know.”

  “Indirectly,” he says.

  “And?”


  “I think he’s coming around.”

  “Really?” says Jessica, and hugs him tightly, the fraud. “Thank god.”

  “Pleasant dreams,” he tells her, and begins to turn, but she holds fast to his arm, her head glued to his chest.

  “How’d things go with the magazine?”

  A moment’s thought. Surrender. “I lost the assignment.”

  This she had not expected, she never expects him to fail. A delicate kiss upon the sweaty cleavage of his arm. “I’m sorry, sweetie.”

  “I’m the one who’s sorry,” says he, and basks in the momentary heat of self-pity, its sputtering flame.

  “Don’t worry. There’ll be lots of other assignments. Lots of other jobs.”

  “Right,” he says. “There’s a fortune to be made in kill fees.”

  And he pulls away, disconnecting as tenderly as selfish despair will allow. He stares at the wall, black, because it is prettier than what dances on the back of his eyelids, that rainbow of fears, that Hieronymus Bosch landscape of inexpressible words, unattainable acts, meaningless gestures and infertile thoughts.

  Jessica caresses a shoulder, she kisses his spine. Then, “Oh, I forgot. When you were out walking tonight, after dinner, your phone rang down in the basement.”

  “Okay,” he says. He sucks in a dusty draft of air, his body pneumatic, his joints needing pressure to work. Tired legs fall over the side of the bed.

  “It can wait until morning, can’t it?” Jessica asks.

  “I’m sure it can,” he says, but continues forward, an object in motion. In the darkness he pulls on only his undershorts, no robe could keep him warm.

  “Big news, Don.”

  Wright’s voice is tremulous and hushed, a teenager’s voice breathless with secret.

  “I had a wet dream just now. I just now woke up from it, my pants are still wet. Can you believe it?

  “I mean Christ, I haven’t been able to get a hard-on for close to a year now. And just ten minutes ago I came in my pants!”

  Donald is short of breath suddenly, gasping as he leans over the answering machine, hands gripping the cold stiff knobs of his knees. His toes feel as if they are soaking in a pan of ice water, a heavy lump of frozen lead shivers in his chest, his hair stands taut with a ferocious itch.