Tim was across from her, finishing up her notes. That’s how Diane thought of them—her notes, not his. What wasn’t there to like about her, or at least about the woman she scrutinized in mirrors? She was forty-three but didn’t look it. When she narrowed her eyes, any man would know how sometimes the only thing for two people to do was fuck. She had read enough letters of serendipitous sex to know how to trick people, how to wear down their defenses. With what she hoped was a grin instead of a plain smile, she opened her mouth to speak.
“So how were the last few weeks?” Tim asked.
She didn’t know how to answer. Her lips were still shaped into that grin but she’d lost the look, the heat in her eyes. “Fine, I guess,” she heard herself say.
“Just fine? How’s Heather doing? You guys still fighting regularly?”
The shaky feeling was gone. She sank back into the chair and frowned. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“I guess nothing’s new. She mostly just stays in her room.”
“This happens to a lot of families. It’s usually the worst with the oldest child. There’s no model for how it’s supposed to work, so you both tend to hate what’s happening.”
Say something sexy, she commanded. Her tongue felt inadequate and she dragged it across her teeth. Now she was stuck thinking about Heather. “Are you trying to make me feel bad?”
“What? No. Not at all. I’m just trying to—I’m softening the blow, I guess.”
“What blow? What are you talking about?”
“Forget I said anything.” He took up the pen and rearranged himself in his chair. “How about the boys? Didn’t one just have a birthday?”
“Colin’s birthday was in October.”
“Yes, Colin. He’s…”
“Fourteen.” After the supermarket she willed herself to remember it. She’d wanted to buy a bigger, more expensive cake, but all they had left was a six-inch marble cake with no flowers or footballs or even swirls. She still told him, all these weeks later, how terrible she felt.
“Fourteen.” Tim made a note.
“My kids are fine.”
His eyebrow jumped. He crossed a t with a quick swipe of his hand as though he was trying to cut something. “Your kids are fine. Is something else on your mind?”
There was a purring sound coming from the ceiling vent. When she sat back in her chair a rush of air caught her in the eye. “I don’t know,” she said.
Tim was tapping the pen against the legal pad. You could tell he had no idea how horrible it was, that sound.
“I don’t know what it is lately. I keep thinking about things.” Her whole method of seduction now seemed impossible, like when you set out to draw someone’s portrait and what ends up on paper looks inhuman. “I don’t know what it is lately.” She cleared her throat and uncrossed her legs. She should’ve worn a skirt, even though it was winter. Her lips felt fused together and with a sound like an egg hatching she wet them with her tongue. How long, she wanted to know, until you regress into virginity? “I keep thinking about sex.”
Tim’s eyes fell to the notepad. He wasn’t tapping anymore. “That’s not so unusual.”
“It is for me.” She brushed her hair behind her ear. “I swear I didn’t think about it once for a year. Then bang, it’s everywhere.” Her hands felt weak and she collapsed them into fists to verify her strength. She didn’t sound sex-starved and manic, only sad. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. You can talk about whatever you need to. What you’re describing is very natural.”
“I just feel so ridiculous. And stupid, like I should be beyond this. It just feels so unhealthy.”
“Diane, it isn’t unhealthy. It’s very normal. It’s sex. Why do you think it’s unhealthy?”
Her eyebrow started twitching and she covered it with her hand as if deep in thought. “I keep thinking about people I know.” She glanced up at him, under the shield of her fingers.
A door slammed in the hallway and sent a picture frame on the far wall into convulsions. Tim was reading his notes as if he’d already forgotten the first few minutes of their session. The clock’s every tick sounded critical, like someone tsk-tsking. Hate, too, is like lust, and she wanted to overturn the table and give this man hell. Have you ever actually helped someone? Do you know what that means—help? She looked up at him, his sweater and his glasses and his faint greying stubble the purest picture of smug, arrogant, abstracted humankind. Tim was everything a lover was not. Why had she wanted this? When she imagined it, it was like the letters where people lunged at each other, where they smashed themselves together. That it was wrong made it even better, the perfect affair, and it made it easy to pretend she was still married. All through October she’d thought about what he told her—about men and their reasons. In their November session she’d watched him like an appraiser or analyst. Everything he did—smiling at her, leaning into his hand as he listened, touching his ear as he fell into thought—had become flirtation. Now it made him seem like an overgrown child.
She tried to remember the last time she felt the good kind of alone, truly unobserved and free to do whatever she pleased. When had she last thought, staring at something or someone she wanted: Who gives a shit? It would have been in San Francisco, when she was young. Twenty-two or -three, out of money, out of shits to give, she could have done anything, been anyone.
Finally Tim spoke. “I’m not going to ask who.”
“Just people.” She fell back into the chair. “The usual. That guy Daniel, always.”
“You don’t have to divulge specifics if you don’t want to.”
“I mean, who else would it be? I don’t know anyone else.” Her scalp felt as though someone was pulling her hair, one strand at a time. “Don’t worry about it. Hormones, I guess. Maybe I’m getting to that age, I don’t know.” She plucked a tissue from the box. A habit, she realized. She was someone who cried after a confession, after sharing a memory. Instead she broke out in laughter, loosened from her chest like a strange phlegm. “It’s been a long year.”
“I’d imagine.” His fist was clasped around the pen, his finger poised as if to make that awful clicking. Just put down the fucking pen and listen to me, she wanted to say. Her reflection was there in the corners of his glasses, translucent and cut in half by the light. She wanted to watch it laugh again, to put her hands to her face and laugh at how funny it was to be laughing, to be so stupidly controlled by boiling, bubbling chemicals in the body.
Often I worry I am a kind of cage or straitjacket, a way of confining or mummifying other people until they’re no longer themselves. My wife has it in her to soar far above this life I’ve anchored her to, and instead I sit here and let her look out the window at the sky she’s denied herself on my behalf. If she is a bird, I am her wings kept clipped.
If she is light, Alan had written, I am the curtain. I am the shroud.
“Anyway.” She waved her hand in the air, her old magic trick. “Let’s just forget about it. It was stupid anyway.” She reached for her purse. The familiar clicks and clacks filled the room as she pushed aside those pieces of life. When she found her list she laid it on the table, pressing it flat to hide the way her hands had decided to tremble. She brushed her hair out of her eye and took on a different voice. Her mourning voice. “I keep thinking about this cologne he used to wear. I saw a bottle of it at Macy’s. I just had to smell it again.” She kept her eyes on the list. It wasn’t a lie—she had gone to Macy’s, and even brought the bottle home. She’d gently misted his clothes, leaving the closet door open so it could weaken as though it’d been worn all day. Thinking of it now was more of a pleasure than anything—her resourcefulness, the slow ritual she took in setting up an opportunity to remember, to immerse herself in something she’d loved so much. If she’d ever even loved it, or if now was the first time. Death had given her so many new things, she thought, and shook her head, there in Tim’s office. Since she’d read that passage in Alan�
�s notebooks it was hard to cleave from herself that image, light splintering outward from what was presumably her soul. There was so much, yet, to accomplish in this life that was newly her own.
“Is something wrong?”
“No.” She bit her lip. “I mean, other than the usual.” She sucked in a breath and pushed her hair back with both hands. “Life is so cruel,” she said, in a lilt that couldn’t hide her joy.
By Christmastime, Colin no longer pretended to have a reason to linger after the bell. Every day, Victor was waiting at the far edge of the lot, the defroster making its strange handprints on the windshield. Paul too got used to it, no longer rocking in the backseat until the ride was over. Colin watched his teacher’s hands glide over the steering wheel as they came around sharp bends in the side streets or passed over the icy patches along the curb. Once, they got stuck in traffic and the car grew hot enough for Victor to take off his coat, revealing the short-sleeve button-up he’d worn in class. His bicep shuddered as he shifted the car into reverse to find another route. Colin looked out the window. He thought about his promises to God.
There was something easy in going straight home from school. He liked the way Victor talked about the heart and its blood, the blood and its cells. There’s nothing in the body more important. Colin pictured his own heart—its panic at the sight of a road that led to a hidden park. The things he wished for, what he asked from another kind of god—one who understood him and would forgive his failures—made him think Victor could see right through his clothes. So far, just like any other prayer, nothing and nobody had answered.
He looked at Victor now. His eyes were on the road and Colin felt embarrassed not to be looked at. They passed by that same park and Colin imagined the turn, the bumpy ride to the clearing. There would be bluffs of snow all around them, pushed off into the parking lot’s corners by the plows. Victor would hold Colin down, even if he begged him not to—especially if he begged him not to. After that, Victor would steal him. He’d smuggle him across the country, his purity a little more undone in each motel as they made their way west, east, back west. You’re sick, he thought. Stop being a perv.
“It’s oxygen that turns blood red,” Victor was saying. “I’m sure you remember that from class. I just find it fascinating, when you look at your veins. How blue they are.”
Colin nodded and smoothed a wrinkle out of his jeans.
“I don’t know why you ride home with me every day. I probably bore you to tears.”
“No.” He looked up at Victor. “It’s—it’s interesting.”
“You know in Minnesota ‘interesting’ means you don’t like it, right?”
“What?” Colin laughed. “No, I didn’t. Fine. It’s…neat.”
“A way with words.” Victor tapped two fingers on the wheel. “Still, it’s always me telling you things you already know. You learned all this stuff in my class. At least I hope you did. I’m not worth anything if you didn’t. I just feel like one of those forest ranger mannequins they used to have at parks. Are you too young for those? The ones where you’d press a button and they’d start talking about the forest?” He swerved to avoid a squirrel. “What about you?”
“Huh?”
“Tell me about yourself. Talk to the park ranger mannequin. It wants to take a break.”
He looked outside. A woman was shoveling snow, her lips moving as if someone were there arguing with her. “I don’t know. There’s not much. I get up and go to school and go home.”
“I’m sure there’s more than that. What do you like to do? Who do you spend time with?” Victor glanced over at him. “Do you have a girlfriend?”
How he said it—dragging out the word girlfriend—made Colin feel like he was back in the fourth grade. He rolled his eyes to show how little he cared. “No.”
“I see you with that one girl all the time. I don’t know her name. She’s in Jeanie’s class—Mrs. Morowitz.”
“Chelsea?” He scrunched up his face and looked down at the floor mat. “She’s just a friend.”
“Come on, Colin. Don’t fool yourself.”
“What? She’s just a friend.” For a second he expected that fourth-grade joke: Is she a girl? Is she your friend? Then she’s your girlfriend!
Instead Victor shook his head. “Frankly, I’m surprised. You probably have girls falling all over you. Maybe Chelsea scares them away. Just be careful.” He peered at him, out of the corner of his eye. “Judging by the look of you, you could easily get yourself into trouble.”
“Trouble?”
“You could get her pregnant.”
Colin’s next breath was too sharp and he coughed as it caught in his throat.
“You remembered what we studied. You are old enough, aren’t you?”
There was an itch in his throat, maybe where the air had stabbed him. He swallowed and looked at his knees. He didn’t want to ask but he felt like he had to. “For what?”
“Are you ejaculating?”
Colin wrapped his hand around the door handle and watched the houses creep by. The car had slowed with only a few blocks to go. Paul was rocking in the backseat.
“It’s perfectly natural to do it. You don’t have to be embarrassed. All boys have to do it or they’ll do it in their sleep.” He laughed. “You probably spend a lot of time alone in your room thinking about girls. Or the bathroom. The shower. All those places.”
Colin’s leg was twitching. He pressed it into the floor to keep it still.
“I’ll take your silence as an admission. Girls probably drive you crazy.”
The car came around a curve and Colin caught the eye of a man reaching into his mailbox. The man waved and Colin felt his skin go red.
“Maybe you don’t like girls.”
The houses had become familiar. They trudged by like doomed soldiers. “I like girls,” he whispered. He could feel Victor looking at him as they crept around another corner. His house was only a block away.
“Are you sure?”
“You can drop us off here,” he said, his voice cracking on the final word. “I’ll walk. Me and Paul can walk from here.”
Victor bit his lip. “Nonsense.” The car returned to its normal speed—too fast for a residential street, Colin’s father would’ve said. “I’ll drop you off at home.”
Before he could leave, Victor wrapped his hand around his forearm. “Colin,” he said. “I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable.”
Colin stared at his hand. He was shocked that it could encompass his entire arm. Was he still a child, then? Had he grown at all? “It’s okay.”
“I’m just concerned for you. You always seem like such a loner.”
“I’m fine.”
“I know about your dad. I know what happened.”
All those times he prayed for those hands to take him, and now Colin only wanted to listen to his sister complain, his brother groan. He wanted to light his mother’s first cigarette of the evening, right when she walked through the door.
Victor’s fingers, pale from winter, were wearing veins just behind the knuckles. It was fascinating, how blood was so brilliantly blue. “I have to go, Mr. Miller.”
“Oh. Of course.” He let go and leaned back to his side of the car. “I’ll see you at school then. I hope you’re still comfortable riding home with your science teacher. I’ve grown to like…it’s really nice not listening to the same boring news on the radio every day.” He flashed once more that smile, that kindness. You couldn’t get away from it.
Fistulae of the Circulatory System: Cerebral Arteriovenous (in which an artery feeding the brain wears through its lining and joins a nearby vein, ferrying blood back to the heart); Coronary Arteriovenous (in which the carotid, brachiocephalic, or abdominal arteries fuse to one or more veins, overworking the heart until it wears out like a dry pump); Pulmonary Arteriovenous (in which an artery joins with a vein of the lungs, interrupting the blood’s intake of oxygen). Cerebral fistulae will burst and hemorrhage until the brain is blan
keted in blood. In pulmonary fistulae, the patient can go weeks without symptoms, unaware of why he can never catch his breath. In more severe cases, he begins to cough up blood, and is at risk of cyanosis—a bluing of the skin. None of this Colin learned from Victor. They were words he’d memorized, repeating them out loud as his father’s notebook lay flat in front of him. As Victor’s car receded from the driveway he asked himself what veins in his chest had come loose, what bleeding was inside him as he stood there barely able to breathe.
Heather was stretched out on her bed, bag of chips in reach, magazine between her elbows. Colin leaned against her door frame. The jewelry box was still there. The pile of dog-eared magazines. Colin’s breathing was still labored, as if he’d run right from the school. “I had a weird ride home,” he said.
“The fuck are you doing in here?” She waved her hand at him. “Go bother someone else.”
“I just had a weird story. I can tell it fast.”
“I don’t give even one shit.” She picked up the magazine and drew her arm back over her shoulder. “If I have to throw this, I’m getting revenge.”
“It’s about my teacher. My science teacher.”
“So go tell your math teacher. Just get out. You have three seconds. One.”
“Whatever. I’m going. You don’t have to be such a bitch.” He put his hands back in his pockets and wanted her to love him. Remember when you used to dress me up as your cat?
“Two.”
Colin shook his head and left the room. He heard the pages crinkle as she straightened them out in front of her. “Hey, shithead. Can you close my door?”
“Fuck you.”
Colin didn’t know why he expected a response, but when he heard only another page as she folded its corner he let out a sigh and slammed Heather’s door. After a muffled bang and a shout there was nothing to hear. He stepped into his room and closed the door behind him.
Paul was on the edge of his bed, staring out the window. The sun left a bright spot on the far wall with a Paul-shaped lump in the middle. “Our sister’s a bitch,” Colin said, as though Paul might have some wise counterpoint. Colin had always wanted a different brother, a wise older brother who’d been there, who’d seen it all. “I don’t know if you knew that, but she’s a total bitch. Like Bitch of the Year or something.”
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