Beyond Deserving

by Sandra Scofield

  Jeff blurts out, “And there’s no way we can plan a damned thing while you still have him around your neck!”

  She doesn’t like the idea that he knows how things might go but she has to pass a test to hear about it. What does he think he is planning? She doesn’t have any plans, with or without him. She is thinking about buying a little air conditioner, to get through the hot months of July and August, and that is about it for plans and Katie Fisher. Even the divorce remains tentative; it’s not like she has a court date set, is it?

  She goes over and sits on the cushions on the floor, and Jeff pulls one close and sits down beside her, facing her. The room is pleasantly bare. A rectangle of glass sits on two wooden blocks near the cushions. There is an old director’s chair and a baby spotlight on a slim, long stand. These things came with the studio. The floors are bare shiny oak. The little kitchen has a table that clips up against the wall when not in use. She sleeps on a futon in an alcove, and keeps her clothes in baskets. It is the neatest she has been since she stopped living in June’s house. She doesn’t feel like she lives here. She feels she is visiting. She thinks about their house.

  Jeff reaches over and runs his fingers along Katie’s neck, then leans way over to kiss her. “Kate,” he calls her. He wants to go to bed, so she gets up with him. He walks behind her, a pale slim shadow. She doesn’t especially like his fairness, though she has gotten used to it. She does like the long corded muscles of his legs, and his long fingers. She likes his broad shoulders edging out over hers when he lies on her, instead of meeting her, bone to bone. She likes it that he feels so different from Fish.

  They make love on top of her pale green down comforter. Pistachio Ice, the package said. Ursula gave it to her at Christmas, as if she needed something special while Fish was away. Katie was made uneasy by the expensive gift. She blurted out once, when she and Ursula were alone in the kitchen, “I’ve got a lover.” Ursula immediately got busy slicing cheese and laying out Wheat Thins on a platter. She didn’t say anything. Later Katie thought, maybe all I really said was, I’ve got a boyfriend.

  “I thought you might go with me,” Jeff says. He is urgent after three days away. He jogs, plays racquetball, makes love. A well-rounded fitness plan. “You can carry the phrase-book.” He runs his hand along her spine. She feels disconnected, but she feels she will eventually be able to sleep, and sleep will release her from thinking. She is just about sick of thinking.

  She touches Jeff at the back, pushing her finger up against him in the way that delights and embarrasses him. “When?” she asks. She is asking about France.

  “Now,” he moans.

  “Where’s your car?” He is standing at the kitchen door, looking out onto the little lot behind the house where he is parked.

  “At Ursula’s. There’s something wrong with the starter. I had to get pushed today.”

  “We can go get it tomorrow.”

  “It’s okay.” She can see he doesn’t like it. She can’t think when he has gotten so possessive, or whatever this is. Probably since Fish got out of jail. The first time he came home with her she told him, “I don’t want to pretend I’m free when I’m not.” Hearing herself, she burst into nervous laughter. She felt like Katharine Hepburn. They made love, and he had a terrible nosebleed. They laughed some more and said you did what you could when you could, and who ever expected more than that? She threw away the pillow where he’d bled. Later he said, “I never have gone with a married woman. Of course I didn’t know you were married at first—” She said she had never had a ring. He went on. “But I thought it over and it feels okay to me. Like he isn’t around for more reasons than just where he is. Like you weren’t feeling married.” She said, “It’s okay, really. It’s okay.” He sounded like he wanted to be forgiven for spending time with her. She didn’t think he would like it if she said she didn’t think Fish would care. It wasn’t like she could be with Fish instead.

  “I’ll pick you up at five,” he says now. He likes to cook for her, likes to take charge of her days off if his are free. “Or we could have a late breakfast and spend the day together. You can keep me company while I do my bachelor things.”

  “I’ve got things to do myself.” They have never discussed it, but neither has suggested sleeping at the other’s place. Maybe that’s what could change if she got a divorce. Only she has never thought of it as something she’d like to do.

  She ponders the word bachelor a moment. It is a word you never hear anymore except on old tv reruns. Where did Jeff pick it up? She knows nothing about his family. He is from the Midwest. Maybe he has said other things, but she wasn’t listening. Such things don’t make much difference to her. She does know that people can see the world in very different ways. She would never ask him personal questions. Besides, he will probably get around to telling about his parents. So far he has told her about former girlfriends, boyhood pranks, and several college tales. She has no idea why he talks so much, except that you have to do something besides eat and make love. It is a problem that never came up with Fish. Fish has never bored her, though she has often worried about saying the wrong thing to him. All in all, being quiet seems safest with men and mothers.

  “I feel like sleeping in,” she says.

  He kisses her on the cheek.

  It occurs to her that if she is getting a divorce for Jeff she might be making a mistake. Divorce better firmly have to do with her and Fish. They are the only two she knows who will for sure have to live with it.

  32

  She bathes and heats water for chamomile tea. She is just reaching for a cup when she hears a noise at the back door. She glances at the clock. It is only eleven, though it feels later. Someone in the parking lot, she decides.

  She pours the tea and sits at the table with the cup between her hands. The night is cool and pleasant. She can smell it through the window above the sink.

  “Katie.” It is Fish at the back door. The tea she drank rises up in her throat.

  “What are you doing here?” she asks through the screen. The door isn’t locked, but he doesn’t try to open it.

  “I saw you had somebody here. I waited to be sure he wasn’t coming back, not just out for beer. I wouldn’t mess you up, Katie.”

  “Go home.” Just what she felt like saying to Jeff, though she doesn’t know why.

  “I’ve never seen the inside of your apartment.”

  “There’s nothing to see. It’s practically empty.”

  “We need to talk.”

  “It’s late.” About fifteen years.

  “Not for us. I know you. You don’t go to bed early.”

  “I have new habits. I work. I get up earlier.”

  “They got me up at five in the morning, but that doesn’t mean I have to do it now.”

  “You’ve been drinking,” she guesses. He has to have worked up his nerve. She is worried he will laugh at her herb tea, that he will say it is “dandy,” something picked up from the arty people she now knows. He should see Maureen’s apartment, with aphorisms stuck up all over the place.

  “I haven’t, Katie. Honest to God.” He leans his face against the screen. The light hits his face. “Smell,” he says.

  She opens the door and lets him in.

  “There’s not anything to say,” she tells him. They remain near the door. She thinks she should be cool, detached. If they talk she will only get emotional. He will confuse her.

  “I learned a lot in jail. There was a lot of time to think.”

  “You were in jail before. What did you learn those times? What good did jail ever do you, or anyone?”

  “Those times were before you.” He is leaving out two overnights for tickets, thirty days for DUI, forty-five days until he plea-bargained a dumb possession charge in Napa. He is only counting hard time in Miami, and Oakland, in the navy. “All I learned was to be mad and not to trust anybody. Not to be a stupid dick.”

  The first time, in Miami (he’d borrowed somebody’s car that time, too
), he was grateful to this big black guy who gave him a cigarette. As soon as he turned around with it, the dude pulled his pants down and clamped his hand around his mouth before Fish could take a drag. That story plagued Katie when Fish went to jail this time. She kept remembering the sound of Fish’s voice as he talked about it, the pain, and how she had wanted to make it up to him.

  “So what do you know now, Fish?” She feels as if a heavy fluid is being poured into her veins. She wants to go to bed.

  “I’m converting the top floor of this big old house into an apartment. A neighbor wants me to do a fancy screened-in porch. Hell, there’s work all over, Katie. Michael says I should get licensed, legit. He’s going to look into it. I like working, Katie. It feels good to have money in my pocket.”

  “I know.”

  “Should I give you money?” What a pathetic question. He really doesn’t know. But neither does she.

  They don’t give June money for Rhea. It is part of the agreement. June has Rhea. She has the say, and the costs. Katie and Fish have their freedom. Katie can’t help wondering, lately, if she would be happier if she had her daughter instead.

  “I get an okay salary.”

  “Sewing, right?”

  Tears are working their way up from a well deep in her chest, into her nose. “Jesus, Fish, I’m not going to stand here in the middle of the night and tell you about buttons and zippers and basting threads!”

  She walks into the main room. The glass table top is splotchy with fingerprints and smears. She has a strong urge to find something to clean it.

  “Don’t do it, Katie. Not yet. Give me some time.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Because if you do, you might not?”

  “Or because I’ve made up my mind.”

  She sits on the cushions, not looking at him.

  He moves quickly. He kneels and puts his hands along her hips. He has always been a good lover. If he ever shut her out, he shut her out that way too. He hasn’t used her.

  “Oh God don’t leave me Katie baby.” The words come out in a fierce gush. “What have I got without you? How will I get through the years?”

  The blood of her flesh rushes to the places where his hands lie. He said something once to her, long ago, about growing old together, and she was thrilled by it.

  She has only gone to bed with him once since his release, in Michael’s basement. He reeked of cigarettes and wine and sweat, and the smells made her sick. She put him off, saying she was working overtime, saying she needed time to read-just.

  “Just tonight,” he whispers. He has showered again and put on a clean shirt, a faded yellow plaid. She bought that shirt at a flea market in Astoria.

  She jumps up, startling him. “You’ve got to go home. I want you to go home.” She doesn’t know how else to accomplish this, except to put a distance between them. She should go to Texas, and find out what her daughter’s favorite color is. “I just went to bed with another man, goddamn you, Fish. Go home.”

  He has moved onto a cushion. His legs are apart, his elbows resting on his raised knees, his head hanging. “Shit,” he mumbles. “Aw shit.”

  “Listen, listen to me.” She stands a few feet away, uncomfortable lording it over him, but not daring to come down to his level. He is contrite and sad and pleading. He would come to her tenderly, he would make her cry out. “I don’t hate you or anything. I’m not mad. It’s not a stunt.” That’s all he would know about, stunts. He does not know about resolution. “I’ve made up my mind, that’s all. I’ve—turned a corner.”

  “It’s that guy. Somebody you met while I was in jail. Somebody you fucked while I was locked up with nothing but squirrels to diddle.” While he talks, he stares at the floor.

  Maybe he is right. Maybe it is Jeff who gave her courage. Maybe she is using what she can find for strength.

  “It’s like, I ran out of gas. All the energy all those years. When you got busted this time, it used up all I had left. I cried. Then I got sick of sitting around Ursula’s watching daytime tv, and I got this job, and my own place, and that gave me new energy, but for something new.”

  He looks up. “What the fuck have you been reading?”

  She smiles tightly. It is aggravating of him to put his finger on it like that. She is starting to sound like Maureen’s books. But if you are going to stop rejecting the whole world, you need something to hold onto, you need a bridge. And books are better than a lot of things, better than nothing. They give you a vocabulary. They give you ideas to mouth when you can not come up with something on your own. And sometimes they are bound to be right.

  “I haven’t had a drop to drink all day,” Fish says.

  “I don’t care!”

  “I could stop drinking. Like you always wanted. I have stopped. What if I stopped drinking altogether? And I worked steady? What if that?”

  “I guess things would be better for you.”

  “Isn’t that why you want a divorce? To make me be good? You think I’m a fucking alcoholic, but I tell you, Katie, I am not. You didn’t see me shaking and moaning in jail with nothing to drink, cause it didn’t matter.”

  She doesn’t look at him.

  “How long does it take for the divorce to happen?” he asks.

  “Ninety days.”

  “What if I’m sober the whole three months? What if I leave you alone but I’m a fucking saint? Would that make any difference? Would it convince you?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He finally gets up. “Cunt,” he says.

  She goes out the front door, slamming it behind her, and knocks on Maureen’s door across the hall.

  Maureen is in her robe, but her lights are on. “Come in,” she says. “Quick, honey.” Katie thinks she will start bawling, but she doesn’t. She takes a deep breath and she says, “Fish is at my place. Saying he’ll straighten up.”

  “Let’s go to bed, you look beat.” Maureen turns off the lights. Katie follows her to bed and crawls in without saying anything more. Maureen snuggles close and wipes Katie’s hair off her forehead. She smells of sesame oil.

  “Jeff is going to France,” Katie says wearily. “He thinks I should go.”

  “Oh to hell with Jeff,” Maureen says.

  Towards dawn Katie wakes up. She thinks about going home, but she is lying on the inside of Maureen’s bed, near the wall, and she doesn’t want to wake her.

  “Worrying?” Maureen asks.

  “I woke you.”

  “I’m a light sleeper.”

  “I was thinking about selling my car. I can’t stand having it to worry about. I was trying to think of all the times I’ve driven it in the past month. I could do without it.”

  “Is it going to be expensive to fix?”

  “I don’t think so. It’s only the starter. I’m silly.”

  “Look at me.” Maureen doesn’t own a car.

  “This is the first time I ever had a car on my own. I never drove until I met Fish.”

  “I thought all Texans were car nuts.”

  “Myth. I took driver’s ed in high school but my father always had the car. My mother said I couldn’t bother him with it.”

  “Want to hear how I started driving?”

  “Sure.”

  Through Maureen’s filmy curtains Katie can see daylight.

  “I started driving when I was twelve.”

  “You didn’t!”

  “We lived in Prineville, you know where that is?”

  “Sort of. Eastern part of the state.”

  “Right. We’d need things in Redmond. There was my mother and me, and two littler kids. She had a boyfriend for a while. He teased me, said I was big for my age. Now I think he probably had something in mind, but he never made the move. He didn’t stick around long enough. He said I ought to learn to drive, the way my mother was. The way my mother was, was some mornings she couldn’t get out of bed. Some of the time she worked at a cafe. Some of the time we were on welfare. Anyway, he taught me to d
rive. Good thing, too. Once I took one of my sisters to the hospital by myself. She broke her arm on a swing.”

  “Where are they now? Your sisters?”

  “I’ll tell you another time.”

  “I should go home.”

  “Give me half an hour and come back for coffee.”

  “You do too much.”

  “Come back. I hate Sunday morning.” Now that Katie looks at her, Maureen does look teary-eyed.

  Katie reaches for her friend’s hand. “Did I upset you? About your sisters? Are they okay?”

  Maureen shakes her head. Which question she is answering, she doesn’t say. No, she says and puts her finger to her lips. “Another time,” she adds.

  When Katie comes back, dressed in loose old khaki pants, Maureen has put blueberry muffins in the oven, and made coffee. Katie reads a pink card on her refrigerator. It says, “My past is finished and I am free of it.”

  “You know,” Katie says as they wait for the muffins, drinking the first cup of coffee, “you don’t seem like a girl with a hard-luck background. You seem like, well, like anybody.”

  “I was trash.”

  “I wasn’t much, either.”

  “How old were you, you know, the first time?”

  “My senior year. Seventeen. It was dumb, nothing awful.”

  “I was fourteen. I was mad at my mother because she said I was acting slutty. I wore makeup and went around with older kids, but it was all put on. Then she made me mad. I brought a boy home, maybe nine o’clock one night. She was out cold on the couch. We went into my room. The next day I told her, before she was all the way awake. She acted like she didn’t understand. ‘Now, Maureen, when you bring a boy home, you introduce him to me. Wake me up if I’m napping, now.’ Napping!” She takes out the muffins. “Okay without butter?”

  “Who needs butter?” They break apart the muffins, releasing the sweet smell and steam.

  “What I hate,” Maureen says, “is that my little sisters were there too, in the living room watching tv, while I was in my room screwing. Like, I was doing to them what my mother was doing to me.”