Disgraceful all around, thought Perkins. That they would treat a vet like that, that a vet would act like that. He looked out the window at small homes set in overgrown backyards: broken pieces of machinery sitting in patches of weeds, a swing set, a tied-up dog barking at the train, barbed wire snarled around chain link. A long time ago, he would've gone home and told his wife about the guy being put off the train; they would've talked about it. Now he probably wouldn't even mention it to her. They used to talk about everything. Now silence and routine were where he felt her most. He looked out on marshy land, all rumpled mud and pools of brown water with long grasses and rushes standing up. His reflection in the glass floated over it, a silent, impassive face with heavy jowls and a thin, downward mouth. And there, with his face, also floated the face of Heinrich Schmidt, PFC.
He didn't touch that lady's breast; he touched her shoulder. Maybe the train rocked or something, made his hand move down, but he was just trying to talk to her. The conductor knew that—he told him so—but they'd had to take him off the train anyway. It wasn't good, but it wasn't that bad. The police said there would be another train, sometime. But there was no lake to look at here. Where you sat down here, there were just train tracks and an old train that didn't work anymore. He would sit for a while and look at them and then he would call his foster mother. He would tell her there'd been a problem he'd had to solve, a fight to be broken up, and he couldn't get back on the train. His foster mother had strong hands; she could break up fights, using the belt when she had to. She served food; she rubbed oil into his skin; she washed his back with a warm cloth. She led a horse out of the stable, not her horse, the horse of some women down the road, the one that sometimes his sister, Cora, would ride. She was so scared to get up on it at first, but then she sat on it with her hands up in the air, not even holding on, and they took her picture.
They said Cora died of kidney failure and something that began with a p. They had the letter when he got back to the base. He read the letter and then he sat still a long time. Before he left for Iraq, she'd had her toes cut off, and she said she was going to get better. When she took him to the airport, she walked with a fancy cane that had some kind of silver bird head on it. He couldn't picture her dead. He could picture Paulie, but not Cora. When he came home, he still thought he might see her at the airport, standing there looking at him like he an idiot, but still there, with her new cane. He thought he might see her up in Syracuse, riding her horse. Even though he knew he wouldn't. He thought he might see her on her horse.
Riding her horse across a meadow with flowers in it, riding in a race and winning a prize, everybody cheering, not believing she'd really won, cheering. Then they'd have a barbecue like they used to have, when the second foster father was there, basting the meat with sauce and Jim helping out. The cats walking around, music turned up loud so they could hear it out the window, his foster singing him a dirty song to the tune of “Turkey in the Straw.” It was mostly a funny song, so it wasn't dirty and his foster always told him not to hurt anything, so it wasn't bad. Or his other foster father did—he wasn't sure. He'd tell his foster about lying on the ground and feeling it shiver in terror, watching the grass and the trees shiver. He might tell him about seeing a little boy trying to crawl away and getting shot. Because his foster father had known Jesus. But he did not know the face of God.
Or did he? Softly, Jim sang, Way down South where the trains run fast / A baboon stuck his finger up a monkey's ass. / The baboon said, Well fuck my soul / Get your fucking finger out of my asshole. A family came down the stairs, little girls running ahead of their mother. They wouldn't think his sister would win the prize, but she would; she would race on her horse ahead of everybody, her family cheering for her. Not just her foster family, but her real family, Jim's real family. Like the Iraqis had cheered when they first came into the town. Before they had shot.
Description
Joseph and his friend Kevin were driving to New Paltz for a hike. Kevin was driving with one hand, elbow out; Joseph had his whole arm out, hand on roof. They had finished their M.F.A.'s in creative writing weeks earlier and they felt great. Kevin had just published an essay in a big-deal magazine that paid. Joseph's mother had been really sick, but now she was getting well. It was a bright spring day; the car windows were down and the breeze smelled good. They were drinking sodas from cans and arguing about literary junk.
“It's like what John Ruskin wrote about architecture,” Kevin was saying, “a style that allows for flaws may not be the most beautiful, but it's the most engaging because it reveals a human handprint.”
“I hate that,” said Joseph, “the whole ‘human’ thing. It's a euphemism for mediocre, and anyway, it's meaningless. Only humans build buildings; only humans write books. Those things are human by definition.”
“You're mimicking Braver,” said Kevin; he meant Professor Janice Braver.
“How? Janice never said that; I said it,” said Joseph.
“She said it. Maybe in private conversation with me, but she said it.”
“Since when were you having private conversations with her? You didn't like her. Anyway, horrible things are human—rape and murder are human.”
“Don't change the subject,” said Kevin. He took a sharp, slow curve that made the car feel unwieldy and boatlike. “To say art is human doesn't mean it's morally good; it means it engages you. It's not static, with everything in place; it's everything, including flaws and clumsiness.”
“ ‘It's everything,’” mimicked Joseph. “That's vague and grandiose.”
“Bellow and Roth write about everything.”
“That's not why they're great. They're great because—”
Kevin swerved into the park so sharply that the soda popped out of Joseph's can and splashed his face. Joseph yelped “Shit!” then wiped his chin with his shirt and said, “I said they're great because—”
But Kevin was already out of the car and rummaging in the back for water and lotion. Joseph got out, saying, “Bellow and Roth are great because—” Two girls in shorts and hiking boots came walking down the trail, cool and laughing, as if they'd just come out of a movie theater. “They're great because they're deep,” said Joseph, looking at the smaller of the girls.
Kevin straightened and the girls both turned to look at him; even at a distance, Joseph could see them spark up. Kevin was tall and athletic; he had broad shoulders and a wide mouth. Aware of them but not looking at them, he flexed his chest as he shouldered a light pack. “They write about particular things deeply,” said Joseph, and threw soda in Kevin's face. Kevin shook the bright drops off him and swiped at Joseph; Joseph swiped back. The taller girl looked back and smiled. Smiling, Kevin lunged forward, throwing air punches; Joseph danced back, feinting. The girls got in their car, talking to each other.
The boys quit playing. They rinsed away the sticky soda with bottled water and rubbed on bug lotion; Kevin put his foot up on the hood of the car to better rub his long half-naked leg. The girls pulled out of the lot, one of them smiling from the window as they went. Kevin put his leg down and gazed after them. Now he looks, thought Joseph. A family pulled up in an SUV radio blaring, two little boys in the back, one of them twirling something bright and multicolored.
They started up the trail.
Kevin and Joseph had grown up in Westchester. They became friends in junior high because both were bookish boys obsessed by horror comics in which bad things happen to girls until the hero comes. Then Kevin grew nearly two feet and began to play basketball; in high school, he made the team. Smiling girls crowded around the new hero, while Joseph looked on with dangling hands. Then Kevin's family moved to Manhattan. The boys drifted apart, but not right away; the move happened just weeks after Joseph's parents divorced, and it was somehow because of this that Joseph doggedly visited Kevin in Manhattan whenever he could. He liked being in a home with two parents. Kevin's mom, Sheila, was not pretty but her eyes were warm, and her soft, pouchy cheeks were somehow
warm, too. Sometimes they wrestled in front of her, and once they pretended to have a real fight: Joseph put pieces of white candy in his mouth, and when Kevin socked him, he roared and spat the candy out like teeth. Sheila pretended to be horrified, then burst out laughing. Afterward, they took the subway to Chinatown, where they went to a cheap place and ate an enormous meal, trying everything on the menu, until they couldn't eat any more. A waiter with tattooed hands sold them illegal beers and then they walked all the way back to the West Side.
On the mountain, Joseph still remembered walking in Chinatown, the neon signs speaking bright-colored Chinese on each side of them, the dead fish and vegetables heaped in alleys and spilling out onto the pavement. As high school went on, they saw each other less often. After graduating, they so lost touch that neither realized they'd gotten into the same writing program until they both showed up at the orientation party Even in the same program, until today, they had not spent much time together, at least not alone. Still, Joseph looked at Kevin's back and remembered the wrestling, the laughter, the tattooed hands, the beers—
“So who do you think will be the next to publish something big?” asked Kevin, he having been the first.
“Adam,” said Joseph. “His thesis was so strong, and he's a hard charger.”
“Nah,” said Kevin. “I mean he's good, but he has a long way to go. I think it'll be Tom.” He paused, lunging slightly as the path steepened. “Or Marisa. I think it could easily be Marisa, with those last stories of hers.”
Marisa: the name was still a small, smartly struck bell. Joseph had been with her for three weeks and then she'd dumped him. He didn't think her recent work was that good, but he was afraid of what it would sound like if he said so. Instead, he said, “What about Andy? He's gotten good.”
“Are you kidding?” said Kevin. “He's weak. And he got weaker listening to Braver.”
Joseph sighed. “I don't think you understood what she was saying some of the time.”
“I didn't understand what she was saying? About how important it is to describe how characters look?”
How to tell Kevin that sometimes he was so busy being smart, he couldn't understand anything? Once in class, Janice said to him, “If you closed your mouth and opened your mind, you might actually learn something.” Kevin replied, “Maybe I would, if there was anything to learn here.” The room was quiet. Janice's face stiffened, then relaxed. “Wow,” she said. “You're a real pisser, aren't you?” People laughed. Kevin flushed. Joseph suppressed a smile.
“Why do you even care?” he said. “The semester's over.”
“I care about writing whether the semester's over or not.” Kevin's voice was mild, but feeling came off his slightly hunched back. “And what's important in writing is what's happening between the characters, what they are doing, not what they look like or what things look like.”
How Marisa looked: narrow-framed and supple, giving the appearance of coiled quickness, like a pretty weasel; small lips, short unpolished nails, blue eyes, poised, expectant posture. On the street one night, a homeless guy sitting on the sidewalk had yelled as they passed. “Hey chickie! Little chicklet! Come sit on me; you'd fit me like a glove!” She'd said, “He sounds so wistful,” her voice hitting wistful as if it were two words, one pitched high, the other low.
He wondered what kind of girl would preen at sexual praise from a homeless guy—but it was true: Marisa was supple and functional as a glove. There was no waste, nothing excessive in her words or movements, not even during sex. When she broke up with him and he tried to make her change her mind, she said, “Don't make me feel sorry for you.” And that was that.
Then he had to sit through a three-hour class with her every week. It was Janice's class. Two days after the breakup, they read a story by Chekhov in which a cruel woman scalds a girl's baby to death. Janice read aloud the part where the girl is returning home from the hospital on foot, at night, in the woods. She wanted them to notice the “soft and open quality” of the description, of the darkness and its sounds—animals, insects, the voices of men. Joseph sat across from Marisa, immersed in darkness. He was astonished that such pain could have been roused by this small alert girl who would not meet his eyes. He told himself it would pass, that he only had to ride it out. “Yours is not the worst of sorrows.” An old man in the story said that to the young girl who had lost her child; he said it to comfort her.
Janice asked them whether they could imagine such a scene written now. The suffering girl walking in the live darkness, the vast world of creatures all around. The girl and her suffering a small thing in this mysterious, still-soft, and beautiful world. Through this description of physical life, said Janice, mystery was bigger than human feeling, and yet physical life bore up human feeling as with a compassionate hand.
Joseph slowed his pace and looked at physical life: bushes, mountains, stones. The warm sun dappling the path, a tiny red rag someone had tied to the branch of a small tree. Grasses. Bugs. He could not connect any of it with Janice's talk about mystery or compassion. But at the time, her words had moved him. He had looked at Marisa and had known with certainty that his was not the worst of sorrows.
Two weeks later, his mother had called and said she had cancer.
“Am I walking too fast for you?” Kevin was turned around, walking backward.
“I'm just not in a hurry,” said Joseph, picking up his pace.
Kevin slowed to wait for him; the path was now wide enough for them to walk abreast.
“I'm thinking about what I'm going to do,” said Joseph, “like for a job.”
“Yeah,” said Kevin, “I know. I am, too. People think it's going to be easy for me because of the essay. But I doubt it.”
Easier for you than for some, thought Joseph. He looked up at the tree line on a ridge above them, at the branches moving gently against the sky.
“What is it?” asked Kevin.
“When my mom was sick, I would sometimes come out of the apartment at night and watch the trees move against the sky. It made me feel better. I don't know why.”
“I understand that,” said Kevin. And his back gave off a different kind of feeling.
Joseph's mother and father had been divorced for eight years. His younger brother, Caleb, was in Ohio studying theater. His mother lived alone in Westchester, where she ran an upscale women's clothing store that made money. She did not have a lover, but she had a lot of friends. She told her friends about the tumor in her breast before she told anyone in her family When she told him, she'd known for nearly a week.
“Why?” he asked, astonished. “Why did you wait?”
“I was afraid you might cry,” she said. “I didn't want to make my sons cry.”
God, how ridiculous was that? Ridiculous and theatrical. He hadn't cried since he was about ten. He felt guilt for being annoyed with her, then sick-making pity.
She said that the prognosis was good, that they were doing the mastectomy just to be sure. She was going to have a reconstruction done at the same time; they would use tissue from her stomach. “I hope you don't think that's grotesque,” she said. “But fifty is the new forty and forty-three is too young to be disfigured like that.” She laughed. He said he would come to be with her. She said he didn't have to do that, that she didn't want him to miss school. “Don't be silly!” he snapped. “I'm going to come.”
“I think of Max when I hear certain songs on the radio,” said Kevin. “Songs I know he really likes.”
Kevin's brother, Max, was a marine; he'd been in Iraq almost a year. “How's he doing?” asked Joseph.
“Okay, I guess.” Kevin paused. “I'm not sure. He calls. But I'm not sure he tells us what's really going on.”
When Joseph called his brother to talk about their mom, Caleb said, “This could not have come at a worse time. I guess stuff like this always does.”
“Are you coming to New York?” asked Joseph. “No,” said Caleb. “She said she didn't want me to.” “She says that, but she
doesn't mean it; it's obvious.” “Joseph, I can't. I'm playing Ricky Roma in Glengarry Glen Ross. I'm rehearsing nonstop. She's going to be all right; she said the doctor said that. It's awful, but breast cancer is so common now, it's practically normal for a woman her age.”
He had to call his father several times before he got him on his cell. He was driving in his car, going somewhere with his wife, who was almost twenty years younger than Joseph's mother. When Joseph told him, he was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “Well, I never would've wished that on her. She was so vain about her body, it's going to be bad for her.” Joseph rolled his eyes, but it was true: His mother was vain. She had reason to be. Just five years ago, his friends had said, “Dude, your mom is hot,” and they were only half-joking.
“Call me anytime,” said his father. “I don't want you to be alone through it.”
“Can you call Caleb?” asked Joseph. “Can you tell him to come? Mom told him it was okay if he didn't, but I know she wants him to. And if something happens to her, he's going to feel horrible.”
His father sighed. “I know how you feel, Joe. But I don't think you can tell someone to do something like that.”
“You ought to be able to,” said Joseph. “If you're his father.” And he hung up.
The path narrowed, but they continued to walk abreast, so close that their shoulders rubbed together. “Ruskin's ideas are pretty ironic,” said Joseph, “considering the way he treated his wife.”
“What do you mean?”
“He refused to have sex with his wife. After courting her for years, starting when she was something like twelve. He'd written these passionate love letters to her when she was a child. Then she got old enough to marry and—forget it. Wouldn't touch her. It went on for years. Finally, when she was nearly thirty she said, Enough. It was the most notorious divorce trial of the time.”
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