Funny Once

by Antonya Nelson

  Sometimes Caroline would see the girl bring home somebody from her nights out at the bars. Telluride was still and forever that same vacation destination; there was always a party to attend, people to meet and drink with, and Crystal was pretty, confident in the way of the insider, needy in the way of the lovelorn, and always familiar with someone on either side of the bar, tending and drinking. She could tell stories about the town’s history; she knew who sold coke or pot, and which cop was the most lax if you happened to get caught. She had a within-walking-distance house where a drunk boy could crash; she was desperate to fall in love. But she didn’t, or couldn’t. Drew might have forever stunted her in that capacity.

  As perhaps Caroline had been stunted, not so much by her marriage to Gerald as by his wishing to exit it, to undo it; she could not quite surmount the total surprise. He’d never surprised her before. If anything, it had been his predictability that had made her feel close to him: she’d known what he was thinking, what he wanted, what he would say. Some mornings, they’d woken having had the same dream—except that in Gerald’s dream, his cohort was Caroline, and in Caroline’s there was no cohort.

  There was no man. In middle age, she had no patience for new intimacies; the groundwork was exhausting, all the accumulated details of some other person’s life, the number of siblings, the catalog of troubles, and the high potential for some ludicrous deal-breaking belief in magic or miracles or money. Here was the consequence of having chosen to live in a tourist town, a place whose offerings had been, from the beginning, startlingly physical, if not gold and silver and lesser mining booty, then snowpack and tourist dollars, and forever a stunning beauty. Movie starlet gorgeous, and perhaps equally vacuous.

  Caroline’s sons would never mention her love life, or its lack; the idea would disgust Will and embarrass Drew. One morning, passing by Crystal Hurd’s house, Caroline ran into the man who’d spent the night. A stranger, another in a long line of people who’d come to town for a wild weekend. Behind him, in the doorway, stood Crystal. The women appraised one another, Crystal still languid and unguarded, wrapped in a quilt, and Caroline bundled for the weather, waterproof, armed with trekking sticks. Crystal’s expression said, You envy me, while Caroline worked to communicate I disapprove! Behind the girl, a dark room with a rumpled bed, the odor of sex and a stranger still pungent.

  It was dizzyingly easy to imagine.

  “I have to go to New York,” Caroline told Crystal in May. “For the wedding.” Ostensibly, she was asking the girl to take care of the two dogs for her, as she had a couple of times in the past. She fully expected to be punched.

  Instead, Crystal’s eyes filled and she dissolved into Caroline’s embrace, a warm and pliant body that shook and sobbed for a good long while. Holding her, Caroline was struck by how long it had been since she’d been so passionately and physically near another person, how sticky and paralyzing a hug seemed.

  Gerald came alone to the wedding, some concession to the truce he’d managed with his sons after the divorce. He’d grown stringy with age, and his smile seemed tentative; he’d become more vulnerable without somebody fearsome there to keep him defended. “I’m worried about Will,” he confided to Caroline at the reception, after a few glasses of champagne. Alcohol had always gone straight to his head and made him sappy. “He’s depressed.”

  “He’s chafing,” Caroline predicted. “He got married too young, to somebody too old. What was she, the first woman he ever slept with?” Will’s wife, Adora, clapped merrily at the head of a spontaneous line she’d orchestrated on the dance floor, people running in a circle, partnering, creating a bower with their hands for the others to duck under, then reclaiming the circle, cheering maniacally. The antics beneath the bower got more outlandish with each pass through, a man now wielding his wife by the ankles like a wheelbarrow. Meanwhile, the bride, Elizabeth, looked on with a tight smile; sweaty people on their hands and knees wasn’t what she’d had in mind.

  “Some people don’t have to have a raft of previous lovers,” Gerald said primly.

  “You should tell Will to have an affair,” Caroline replied, leaning into her ex-husband’s neck to make sure he could hear. “He hooked up too early, he hasn’t had enough experience. Tell him to have a secret affair, and to let it inform the rest of his marriage.”

  Gerald pulled back as if singed. “I will not tell him that.”

  “Just because it’s unconventional doesn’t mean it isn’t good advice.”

  Gerald squinted, sorting out the triple negatives. But then later it seemed her son had gotten the word anyway; Will made a point of keeping his distance the remainder of the weekend, not that he’d been especially enthusiastic about seeing Caroline before that. He was careful to prevent his wife and his mother from ever being in conversation together, as if he’d told Adora something scandalous or tragic that she would inquire into, given the chance. But what would it be, Caroline wondered?

  She had been assigned no duty in this marriage ceremony, no part to play larger than placeholder. “Just show up,” Drew had said. Elizabeth’s mother and sisters had done the rest. Will had been best man; Gerald had written a toast and proposed it tearfully. Before Adora had hijacked the dance floor, Drew had taken his mother for a sort of waltz, holding her by the shoulders as if she were a large box.

  “Mom,” he said, “I know you wouldn’t do anything like this, but please don’t ever ask Elizabeth about grandchildren, OK?”

  “I would never do that.”

  “I know, like I said, but she can’t have any, so it’s no good to bring it up.”

  He needn’t have worried; Elizabeth brought it up herself, the day Caroline was scheduled to leave, during the delay at Newark. Drew had driven Will and Adora and Gerald to JFK; Elizabeth was stuck with Caroline. Whatever etiquette rulebook she’d been brought up with dictated she could not leave her mother-in-law at the curb. “Just so there’s absolute clarity,” she began outside security, “I want you to know that I’m sterile.” So cold, Caroline thought, a trait she herself had occasionally been accused of. And also, as if Elizabeth assumed that her mother-in-law could only be interested in her as a vehicle toward grandchildren. Was she supposed to now offer sympathy? Suggest adoption? Pray for hypoallergenic pets? She could not tell; nothing in the girl’s face gave her a clue.

  Such a strange way to think of oneself, Caroline thought later, forehead pressed to the chilly oval window, eyes following the country passing below her. Sterile. It suited Elizabeth, that fickle aristocrat, she who’d placed a container of hand sanitizer beside the guest registry, who’d sulked when the wedding party had grown raucous, who’d disallowed children at the ceremony, who’d declined to invite Drew’s friends’ band to play in favor of a costly string quartet. Sterile, indeed; Caroline could almost prefer her other daughter-in-law, the plump postmenopausal weeping one she’d suggested her other son cheat on.

  A For Sale sign had appeared in the Hurd front yard in her brief absence, and Crystal had her stubborn face back in place. “I’m not gonna turn thirty like this,” she said to Caroline as if Caroline was arguing with her about it. “I gotta go do something.” She returned the dogs’ leashes and mentioned that the terrier had escaped and been AWOL for a day and a half. “You’re lucky the sheriff likes you,” she said to Caroline.

  “You’re lucky the sheriff likes me,” Caroline told the dog who’d strayed. Hugo.

  There’d always been a couple of dogs in the house. The family had two types, the white terrier and the beagle. This had been the pattern from the beginning, a tradition Caroline had brought with her based on her parents’ preferences. In fact, the first terrier in her life with her husband and children had been inherited from her parents when her father had died and her mother had been moved to a nursing home. The current pair were Caroline’s companions as she hiked up and down her favorite trails around the town, two dogs who inspired other hikers to remark on their fortitude, the short legs of the terrier, the plaintive, stra
ining expression of the bug-eyed beagle.

  In July, Caroline’s mother died in Denver; it was a mercy, her mind having slid far away from her long ago. Caroline’s monthly visits to the old woman had passed without recognition or notice. “Why do I come here?” Caroline had asked aloud. “What is it I hope will happen?” “Granna?” Drew would shout over the telephone, and the woman would turn a terrified face to Caroline: why was this man yelling at her? Soon after the death, Caroline retired from the high school. There’d been a change of regime; she had not been promoted to principal, and that had seemed signal enough to step aside. Her farewell party was attended by a touchingly large crowd—graduates came from as far away as Grand Junction. Caroline found herself grateful for the ritual, willing to embrace her longtime enemies and antagonists along with the more benign of her colleagues. Defused, she could be approached with generosity, or indifference. Leaving the building she swore never to step through its doors again.

  And for a few months, Caroline and the two dogs went through their days easily enough; she felt a kind of lightness that came from having no obligation, no to-do list, no reason to change out of her pajamas. No people in need of her. In September she traveled to Turkey and Greece with her friend the town librarian. They drank too much and made fun of the other tourists on the trip, elderly and frightened, overloud and incurious. Caroline revived the notorious Colosseum couple, and thereafter either she or the librarian would shout out, at each iconic landmark, “Where are we?” and the other would screech back, “I don’t fucking know!”

  Upon her return home, she discovered she could no longer summon up the password to her computer, as if a journey to the ancient world could have effectively supplanted the present one. She tried everything she could imagine—ihategerald!; Hugo8it; loveandsqualor—but none of her familiar whims would work. This forgetfulness, the swirling patch of miasma in her brain, frightened her. She could not move around it, nor could she ignore it; in the night, she woke with the sensation of having been sucked inside it, a personal black hole. She could have access to the computer restored, but to herself?

  “If I get like Granna,” she’d told her sons after a disastrous visit to the home, “somebody shoot me.” Their grandmother had accused the boys of robbing and raping her; she’d butted at them with her skull, then raised her walker like a lion tamer; the home had learned never to send male personnel to tend to her.

  “Everybody says that,” Will informed her sniffily. “Everybody says, ‘If I get like that, just shoot me,’ like it would be easy for us to shoot you.”

  “Like we would have a gun,” Drew added.

  “Why don’t you shoot Granna?” Will demanded. “Don’t you think she’d have said that, back when?”

  “I’d probably use a pillow,” Caroline told her sons calmly.

  “You’re so cold,” Will said, shaking his head. And Drew had begun to cry.

  “He’s the only guy I ever slept with when I wasn’t drunk,” Crystal confided to Caroline over margaritas. “I don’t even feel like kissing anybody till I’ve had a few drinks. Except Drew. I always feel like kissing Drew.” Present tense.

  “You need to move on,” Caroline said. She wouldn’t have offered such pedestrian advice sober.

  “Easy for you to say,” said Crystal. She was supposed to be waiting tables; her boss, Steve-o, kept shouting out at her to look lively. It was off-season again; only locals. “I’m thinking of having a baby.”

  “By yourself?”

  “Yes, that’s actually possible, you know. Spendy, but possible.”

  “Why expensive?”

  “Sperm donor. I’ve been online, you should see the sites. Fucking hell, it’s something. Very different from dating sites, I might add. Night and day.”

  “I wish you could get Drew to make you pregnant,” said Caroline, because she was tipsy, and because it was true. She wanted another chance at loving somebody. She wanted to be someone’s beloved. Nana, she practiced.

  “Really?” Crystal reached across the table and took Caroline’s hand, because she was tipsy, too, and as in her relations with men other than Drew, this was when she could be tender with this woman, this difficult woman who’d known her for so long and in so many different ways: neighbor, teacher, nagger, savior. And Crystal’s history with Drew made their sleeping together again something so habitual and native to them that it might as well be named another thing. It wouldn’t be like the typical infidelity, would it? Not like cheating, exactly. When Caroline considered it, there seemed nothing more pure, yet also nothing more vaguely incestuous, these people who’d grown up together, sharing bath time, punching and screaming and spending the night, exhausted children sweating and sprawled at day’s end, heads on one another’s chest, sex not unlike any other game they’d played together as competitors, opponents. Or? As allies, teammates. “Make him come home,” Crystal pleaded. “Let’s make him come back here and knock me up!”

  “It’s so highly unethical,” Caroline said, beginning to laugh, liking the idea precisely because her ex-husband would have been appalled. Utterly appalled. From the back came Steve-o’s imploring bored voice reminding Crystal that, hello, she was at work, earning a paycheck, fucking up her tips. “I have to admit that I really like the idea.”

  “Make him come home,” Crystal pleaded, this time with her wild eyes, with her scrawny starved body. She had not been well, since the wedding. She had what anyone in Telluride had as the weather closed in, as the social season faded, as the mountains’ majesty occasionally appeared more menacing than beautiful, cruelly indifferent. It was a kind of personal off-season.

  Sober, the women never mentioned their notion again.

  Not long after, on a frozen January morning, a highway patrolman’s car showed up in Crystal’s gravel drive. Had the girl done what she’d always threatened to do? And how had Caroline not been roused, through her thin walls, her light sleep, her long-standing nearness to Crystal’s life? She didn’t bother to dress, found herself down the block and at the Hurd front door minus even socks or slippers, banging with her fist to accompany the banging of her heart.

  Crystal answered, in her hastily drawn bathrobe, and Caroline saw her mistake. The highway patrolman was simply another in that line of men brought home on a drunken Friday night. “Are you OK?” Crystal asked, scowling, yawning widely. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” Caroline said, turning angrily and taking herself home, one of her feet bleeding from a piece of broken glass in the street.

  Thereafter, whenever Caroline saw the new man himself, a thick-necked figure bursting from his uniform, he never failed to touch his hat, a gesture of respect; or it was supposed to be, but Caroline was skeptical. She thought perhaps she was a fond mean joke between Crystal and the cop, the crazy neighbor who ran around in her pajamas. He wasn’t from Telluride, he commuted from Montrose, he’d never been her student or a friend of her sons. Soon, she imagined, Crystal would be pregnant. The child would sleep in the room Crystal had grown up occupying. From some sentimental urge would come the idea of another pet skunk, that odd scurrying figure from the past. Caroline could not forget Crystal’s confessing that she’d never had a first kiss with anybody except Drew when she was sober. “Not sex, either, except Drew. That’s why I can’t get anywhere,” she’d said angrily, “that’s how fucked up I am. If you want to know.” She and the highway patrolman got drunk together, now. On occasion, Caroline could hear them. Their music. Sometimes something that rattled the house, its walls as thin as her own, its mining-times origins clearer with the overlarge presence of the patrolman contained therein. He roared up at odd hours; he slammed his official car door and puffed out his chest. He was coarse, crude, loud, proud; he was as different from her son Drew as a man could be. How had Crystal fallen for him?

  When Drew phoned her for her birthday, Caroline mentioned Crystal’s new beau. “That’s good,” he said. “She really, really needed somebody. I wondered why the drunk dialing went awa
y.”

  “He’s awful! He seems smug,” Caroline told him. “And maybe not that bright?”

  “Mom, you know sometimes you’re a little hard on people.”

  “He’s no you,” she said. “That’s all. I’d rather be alone than be with someone so inferior.”

  “Well, Dad always says you’re the only person he knows who doesn’t actually need other people.” Drew was laughing, as if this were good news. Was it good news? It was news, anyway, news to Caroline.

  “I wish I could clone you,” she said to him, a compliment she’d paid him since he was young.

  At the Mexican restaurant on a night when ski season was at full throttle—spring break, fresh powder, at capacity—Caroline found herself at the bar with the highway patrolman eating chips and sharing a pitcher of margaritas. On the house, Crystal’s insistence. Crystal had put on some weight in recent months, was vaguely radiant, bustling among the tourists being sexy, stopping to check in on her new boyfriend and old neighbor now and then. “Hey, I have a question for you,” Caroline said over the happy public ruckus to the cop. She was brave and buffered by the alcohol and high spirits.

  “Shoot,” he yelled back.

  “What’s your opinion on the subject of the perfect crime? I mean, how would somebody get away with murder? In your opinion?”

  He looked at her glassy-eyed, the man who’d taken her son’s place in Crystal’s life. How she longed for Drew, looking into those impassive eyes, and how she missed Crystal’s longing for him. This man was no replacement, not even close. “I tell you what,” he said, leaning in, speaking into her ear so as to be heard. “I know for a fact you don’t like me and think I’m a dumbass. I could care less, I don’t give a shit. But what you’re asking? Well, here’s what I think: I think the way to get away with murder is to make them do it to themself.” He leaned back and nodded at her. “If you see what I mean.”