Funny Once

by Antonya Nelson

  “Do you remember when you were running for city council?” Hil asked.

  “Which time?” Boyd said. “She’s run more than once. And lost.” He added this last quietly, somehow vindicated.

  “A real reformer is never popular!” Bergeron declared.

  “Nineteen ninety or so,” Hil said. “You guys were canvassing the street, Bergeron stumping for herself on the Democratic ticket, and you, Boyd, signing up Republicans. You got up on this very table to give your speech.” Boyd standing aside with his clipboard, as if knowing Bergeron was a perfect argument for the opposition.

  Jeremy and Janine laughed.

  “Oh, make fun,” said Bergeron. “Go ahead, Bergeron Love’s a crackpot and a nuisance.” She struggled out of the blue chair now, glass of ice in one hand, toothbrush in the other. “Nobody was ever grateful for anything I did, nobody, not you homeowners or your kids, not you, Boyd, you damn cringing mynah bird, not even my own son, Allistair, not even Allistair, everybody’s a fucking ingrate. Why run for office? Why give a shit? Why have children?” She turned to Jeremy, who blinked at the force of her fervor.

  “Well,” he said, taking a moment to put it politely, “it’s not exactly like he asked you to do it.”

  At the meeting that was mostly men, mostly professional men in the medical district, they’d laughed to hear about the naked social call, appreciating the ludicrous image, the backstory details of previous drunken escapades featuring wild card Bergeron Love, even admiring Jeremy’s visit-ending remark. That innocent teenage observation had defused poor Bergeron Love, and Boyd had then been able to rise from the matching blue chair he’d been occupying so ineffectually and guide her limpily out the front door.

  “Wow,” Janine had said. “Talk about true crime.”

  “Yeah,” Jeremy had agreed. He’d seemed to be studying the paused image on the television.

  At the front door, Hil had hugged Bergeron Love, taken into her arms that molten clammy body.

  “Don’t tell Allistair, will you?” Bergeron had said into Hil’s ear, no longer angry, no longer an incendiary force, no longer anything but very tired. “Don’t tell my boy.”

  After she’d told the medical district AA group all about it, after she’d acknowledged their applause, the mild smile still on the blind man’s face, Hil and her friend Joe went as usual to their favorite Mexican restaurant to debrief.

  Joe said, “You didn’t share the part about Bergeron Love being dead now.”

  “Yeah, that part would kind of ruin the fun. It doesn’t feel like a satisfying third act. Everybody would get all ashamed when they found out they were laughing about a dead person, right? In between the naked visit and the heart attack was only about five days.”

  “Short shelf life, for a crazy story.”

  “Exactly.” Joe didn’t care that Hil ordered a beer at Chuy’s. It was his opinion that beer didn’t actually count, as it took so much of it to provide a buzz. He hadn’t had a drink in five years, but it had only been two hours since he’d downed a few Xanax. He was checking his watch to see when he could have another.

  “You could tell the dead part next time, like it just happened. A follow-up on the first story, next installment. Chapter two.”

  “Could do. You know, if it wasn’t for you and blind Jim, I’d quit this meeting.”

  Hil had first attended because the meeting was near the medical center and coincided with happy hour. Divorced, she’d thought she might meet a doctor. Instead, she’d found Joe, a guy she’d known in high school, gay, also looking for a doctor. “But I wanted to meet doctors because my dad was a doctor, and I like the fact that these guys are just like him, and also, hello, they’re no better than me.”

  “A syllogism,” Hil had supplied. “It makes perfect sense.”

  “Sort of. Maybe you can tell me why I’ve chosen to live with a porno addict?” he’d then said.

  “Same reason I live with a morbidly obese woman? It’s good to have somebody else’s bad habits around to put your own in perspective?”

  “Agreed. Also to compare and contrast. To get a little clarity.”

  “I should have known doctors wouldn’t think of AA as a dating opportunity. In fact, the opposite.”

  “Live and learn,” Joe had said. “Or, live and don’t.”

  Bergeron Love had been on the gurney, led out feet first, just as she might have predicted she’d exit that formerly lovely home, that place where she’d been born, raised, loved, and abandoned, only five days after having gone roaming naked through the street on which she’d lived forever. Her last jaunt. On an unusually clear Wednesday, less than a week after that strange nocturnal visitation, the emergency equipment had screamed into the early-morning quiet, halting at the gates of Bergeron Love’s beautiful ruin. Boyd the boyfriend had come out to undo three generations of fence: the faded white picket one that matched the house; the black iron one with its spiky tips; and the hideous yet effective chain-link with concertina wire, the enclosure of the most recent vintage. Suicide, Hil had predicted; Bergeron Love had been making a farewell tour of the neighborhood, exposing herself, putting herself at risk because she no longer cared what happened.

  Also watching the action was the man who’d been reported for abuse. What was going through his head, Hil wondered. Good riddance, racist whore.

  Hil lied at AA meetings. She led a life of sobriety, there; there, she had not had a drink for eleven months now. It was soon going to be her fictitious one-year mark. Telling the story of her neighbor was at least the truth. But was it a story? Twenty years’ worth of half-known information. She’d told it at two different meetings, starting at different places. The naked visitation. The phone call to CPS. She could tell the version that began with Bergeron campaigning for city council, using the coffee table as a soapbox, Hil and her husband horrified and amused by their new neighbor, as yet still newlyweds, their moving boxes unpacked, their son a few years in the future; or she could begin with the homeless man who’d been discovered lying beside Bergeron’s kidney-shaped swimming pool one night, the man who’d somehow breached the various deterring fences, empty bottle of isopropyl alcohol in hand, and who would have died had Bergeron not summoned the ambulance, had she not moved with surprising speed to get him aid, screaming for assistance, summoning it on the phone; or Hil could begin with the cocktail party Bergeron had once interrupted, pushing into Hil’s house wearing an ivory evening gown and trying to seduce her husband. “He’s flirting with me!” she’d gaily shrieked, laying her head on Hil’s husband’s chest. “Look out, Boyd, you’ve got competition! Careful, Hil! You’ll lose him!” Hil and her husband later laughing together in bed. As if he would be attracted to the likes of Bergeron Love! Or to anybody else, he’d then declared tenderly to Hil, holding her close and naked, romantic, affectionate, still hers.

  Not a suicide, the neighborhood learned from Boyd when the vehicles had driven away soundlessly, their lights extinguished. Heart attack, very sudden, there in bed. She’d grabbed his earlobe, he told one neighbor, illustrating by grabbing it himself, his face a shocked white, more mouse-like than ever. She couldn’t speak, said Boyd. That neighbor told the rest of them, and that was the end. Everybody went back inside.

  Bergeron’s son would come home, Hil thought. He’d have to. It would be up to him to decide what to do with the Love estate, that grand squalid monument in which he’d been raised, the mosquito-ridden pool, those many cats, the lingering boyfriend.

  Meanwhile, Hil had found a new meeting nearby, one so close to her house she could walk there. Handily, there was a pub situated on the route home. Maybe she’d tell the story of her curious neighbor by starting with the son as a teenager, Allistair, him trying to keep his mother from trouble at two or three or four in the morning, shouting at her uselessly, “Please come back inside, Mom! Please get out of the street!”

  Funny Once

  This year, on the anniversary of their first date, Phoebe had said to Ben, “You know, n
ow I’ve been with you longer than I wasn’t with you,” and he had found that wonderful, not only the fact—the twenty years with trumping the nineteen years without—but Phoebe’s having kept track. Prisoners also kept track, Phoebe did not say. Her not finding it wonderful was the problem between them: she couldn’t be happy.

  Not happy then, not happy now. She hated Houston, yet she’d also hated Boulder. “You said you wanted to see fat people,” Ben said. “You said you were sick of polarized sunglasses and tourists and . . .”

  “Kayak skirts,” Phoebe said. “I fucking loathe kayak skirts.” Before hating Boulder, she’d hated Austin, where they’d met. She’d been raised by critics, pessimists; she was genetically disposed. Ben knew by heart the long vast list of what she hated, her unhappiness at the top, and then other, more minor things, including her parents—those progenitors—her paranoia, her pessimism, herself, and her self’s inability to imagine anything but the worst-case scenario.

  “Stop reading!” Ben had ordered her, exasperated. “Quit going to school! Get off the Internet! No more paranoid phone calls from your dad! Everything you do just makes it worse!” The lectures and research, the sad art and sadder science. Novels, newspapers, textbooks, her father’s conspiracy theories, all of it evidence of a dismal downward trend. She was highly credentialed in disillusion.

  That very morning, Phoebe had found her car in the drive with a flat tire, and Ben, naturally, was gone on some long salubrious run. “Fucking hell,” she had said to the vehicle. Her father had long ago told her that an impenetrable rubber had been invented but that tire companies were on purpose withholding the product. “That’s how they get you” was his mantra. Doomed to be late to her first appointment with the new therapist, Phoebe hadn’t been able to trust the tattooed man who’d suddenly appeared in the street, this large, menacing stranger in his cabinet-of-wonders panel van, suspiciously well prepared for a problem such as hers.

  “People are generally good,” Ben often instructed her. The man had changed her destroyed tire in a matter of minutes, the lug wrench a blur in his meaty hands, the spare doughnut tossed about like a toy. From the ruined rubber he’d removed the blade tip of an X-Acto knife, presenting it to her like a gemstone held between his thick, begrimed fingertips. Ben couldn’t talk Phoebe out of believing that the man had been the one to stab it there in the first place.

  “Like the arsonist who’s also the fire chief,” she said. “He had facial tattoos, those kill-somebody teardrops. I just know he was casing our place. I wrote down his license plate number so you can tell the cops when you come home someday and find me all slashed up.” She abruptly lowered the passenger seat to recline, put her feet on the dashboard. They were in his car, the one she called the Penis Mobile. She hated it, too, and thought Ben was neither young enough nor old enough to be driving it. Plus, she hated rush hour, as well as the sudden sodden spring humidity. She also hated that they were headed to dinner at his friends’, the two Louises’, which was a monthly ritual, but most of all she hated the fact that tonight she did not have her usual sport bottle of gin and tonic in the car console. The therapist had suggested she stop drinking.

  This was all she’d told Ben, so far, about her session. He’d immediately volunteered to also quit drinking. “Solidarity,” he’d said, making a fist and offering his knuckles for her to bump.

  “Big of you,” she’d said, and watched him, with satisfaction, flush red. They had been very, very high and drunk when he’d accidentally lit her hair on fire. That had been last weekend. A wake-up call, they named it, afterward, tending the blister on her scalp, trimming away the singe. There’d been other wake-up calls—a bloody spill on the sidewalk, a trip the wrong way down a one-way street—and then some ensuing forgetfulness, a sort of mutual snooze button. But the burst of heat near her eyes. The alarming pungency of charred hair. The image of her head, topped by that wavering flame, reflected in the window over the kitchen sink, just before Ben shot her with the spray nozzle.

  May was always a bad month, and this one was no exception. First, Ben’s old band, the Brutes, had finally, finally gotten their big break—nine years after Ben had quit! As usual, he and Phoebe had shown up for the release party back in January, had driven over to Austin and slept on a futon, sprung for two of the cheap domestic kegs, wandered the loft space poking gentle fun, Ben feeling sincerely pleased for—and modestly superior to—his old bandmates, and they vaguely chagrined by the low-budget look of their CD, if not also by the gray in their ponytails, their ragged concert shirts, and the faded state of their fan base. Ben’s latest replacement on drums was the hostile fifteen-year-old son of the lead guitarist. Leaving the party, Ben had drunkenly thanked Phoebe for talking him into quitting the group.

  Now everything had turned around. Instead of being a motley crew of losers who’d refused to move on, the Brutes had become the lucky performers of a high-rotation single with a replete backlog ready-made to reissue. “I can hear my influence,” Ben insisted every time he heard “Wally’s Gone AWOL,” jacking the bass to emphasize his point. And then he couldn’t help adding that Wally had been his basset hound, way back in high school, the lost dog who’d inspired the song.

  He missed his band in Austin. He missed the mountains in Colorado. The jagged Houston skyline made of high-rises did not compare, nor did air-conditioning seem refreshing; the flow of traffic did not make him think of rivers; the cynical ways of grackles, the stupidity of pigeons, the skittery paranoia of squirrels and certain knowledge of rats did not wildlife constitute. They’d come here because it was their hometown, they had family here; they’d moved back because Ben’s old college roommate Louise could get him a job. He’d shaved off his beard and put away his hiking boots, making the best of it. Now he wrote grants, and received a percentage. “You’re good at begging,” Phoebe told him.

  “I’m a professional idealist,” he would claim.

  “Don’t do it,” she warned, as Ben reached for the car radio. “That’s just what we don’t need, right now.”

  “You’re right, you’re right,” he said, sighing; it was the Brutes’ success that had led to the long night with the pipe, to the fire on her head. “I freaking named that band.”

  “I know. And the dog. Ask me what the therapist asked me.”

  “What’d she ask you?”

  “He. He asked me if my husband demanded rough sex.”

  “What?”

  “I know. Right after ‘What brings you here today?’ and me going, ‘I’m terminally unhappy,’ he asks about rough sex.” A strange opening gambit; Phoebe hadn’t mentioned marriage, husband, sex, or violence; she’d thought “terminal unhappiness” might sound sufficiently suicidal. She’d looked down, frowning, at her clothing, to see if something about it had led to his strange question, then thought perhaps he’d mistaken her for another patient, that scrawny young girl in the waiting room, for example, the one cleaning her teeth with a business card. “Maybe because of the scarf. You think?”

  “Like I tie you to the bed with it? Gag you?”

  Mentioning the scarf made her head suddenly itch. She used both hands and scrubbed the whole apparatus angrily. In public, she’d taken to using the stems of her glasses to poke beneath and scratch. Undone paper clips. Plastic forks. The good news was that her hair appeared to be all growing back, the prickly stubble of uniform coverage, no permanent reminder of what had gone wrong. After they’d extinguished the flame, Ben had marveled at its swift uptake. “I’ve had a few mishaps,” he’d said, “mostly just eyebrows or knuckle hairs, but wow, that was extreme.”

  “Product,” Phoebe had informed him. “I think my mousse is made of napalm.” But maybe she was simply more volatile than he. Laid-back, people labeled him.

  “He’s not my husband,” she’d finally replied to the ­therapist, which wasn’t even the beginning of a coherent answer.

  “How do you self-medicate?” came next. So he did know a thing or two about her, after all. She recit
ed in daily chronological order: caffeine, Prozac, nicotine, white wine, Adderall, red wine, vodka, nicotine, Xanax, Valium.

  “Occasionally coke,” she added. “If it’s a gift.” He was writing on his yellow tablet. “And pot. Under duress.” He did not seem shocked, but then again, he’d asked about rough sex. There were toys scattered on his desk, inviting, mismatched objects, probably toxic with children’s germs. Children who sat here, and told him awful things with these toys.

  “Let’s start with the alcohol,” her new therapist said.

  “The only good part about dinner with the Louises is the drinking,” Phoebe complained as Ben whipped the Penis Mobile into their drive and engaged the hand brake. She hated how he set the brake, some piece of smug punctuation. Through the large plate glass window she saw their hostesses—Ouisie and LL, they were called, nicknames they’d adopted when they’d hooked up—awaiting them, the matronly elder, Ouisie, wearing a condescending smile and her apron, and LL, the ingenue, with her chin lifted, hands on her hips, tongue stuck out. “This is the last time I’m going in that house.”

  “You always say that,” Ben said cheerfully, collecting the flowers they’d brought tonight instead of the usual wine.

  Phoebe turned the car’s rearview mirror to check her scarf. “Yeah, but this time I mean it.”

  In her relationship with Ben, Phoebe had been the ingenue, once upon a time: young, winsome, on display. She understood the rules. Couples bent this way: The one who not only tolerated but adored the outrageousness of the other. And the one who would fall headlong into a chasm if the other weren’t there to hang on.