Affinity

by Affinity- The Friendship Issue (retail) (epub)

  This body is not the narrowness she’s accustomed to, but it is a fine thing to tower so, here in the heart of her brother’s electrified hunger.

  Her brother, her friend. He built this thing and she completed it. A horror, but it’s theirs and it’s them. Buried inside those clanking velocities, she thinks it might even be beautiful.

  Back in the clove, the girl tumbles out of the monster’s chest and onto the marshy ground. She’s covered in grease. Her brother comes to her, the third wife behind him like a shadow. He lets out a long breath and presses his forehead to hers.

  The monster lies down in the usual place, joints groaning. A moment later, it’s asleep.

  The girl’s body feels different, muscles and bones and skin working in concert. A monster’s body, full of fire. She could use it to hunt down anything, even herself.

  Sister and brother return the next day, but the monster’s hollow is empty, and the following day is the same. The boy fingers the bone in his pocket. The girl zips up her hoodie, purple and new. The third wife gave it to her. She hasn’t yet identified its powers.

  Her brother gives her a small corroded spring. It must have fallen from the monster when it tore off its own arm. She puts the spring in her pocket.

  The boy claims territory in the dining room. For his birthday, his sister gave him a new set of dice. He scatters them over the table, a hoard of bright gems. Dan is here, and Eddie, and Linda. They check their inventories and study the maps, readying characters for the new campaign.

  When the third wife comes home, she sets her hard hat on the shelf next to the father’s hard hat. The father is in the kitchen, making pizza and polishing his ammeter.

  “Looking for ghosts?” she says.

  “Only the ones looking for us,” he says.

  The sister is on the outskirts of town, perched in a tree with one hand in her pocket. She looks toward the river. The monster saunters down the power-line corridor, as it often does at dusk.

  Jackals

  Diane Josefowicz

  Isn’t that Lyndon Johnson?

  Spine arched, head thrown back, Lorraine was gesturing toward the clutch of ex-presidents who’d been figured like saints on a bank of stained-glass windows. Her bracelets glinted; the choker at her neck suggested other possibilities. Lorraine was an ostentatious fake and, as usual, Paul wanted to wallop her. But they’d been married so long he’d grown used to such urges and the mechanics of their suppression. Everyone else—they were six that evening, including himself and Lorraine—offered bland smiles. They too had resigned themselves to Lorraine.

  I’ll be damned, she continued, squinting at the windows across the bar, oblivious to Paul’s irritation, to the condescension of the group. It is Lyndon Johnson.

  Yes, someone said, in a dull, down-regulating tone. Right there next to him is Tricky Dick.

  Paul tilted his head, hoping a shift in his literal perspective would effect a similar shift on the level of metaphor, permitting him to see his wife differently. Perhaps reality was no more solid than the view through a kaleidoscope, bits of colored glass that could be rearranged with a twist of the mechanism. Twist: surely Lorraine was too old to play the dimwit. Twist: surely they’d been married too long for that. And yet, there it was: the coquettishness, which hadn’t suited her when she was younger and didn’t suit her now. But you couldn’t change the raw materials; light comes through glass in only one way. That’s what he’d been told in counseling. He’d bridled at the advice, but then he was just like that, a man who bridled at advice. Bridling didn’t make the advice less apt. It didn’t change the reality: she wasn’t part of their group. She hadn’t gone to school with them; she didn’t get their jokes. Maybe he shouldn’t have dragged her along.

  But then how long had it been since they’d gathered like this? Thirty years? Thirty-five? Paul couldn’t bring himself to do the math. Calculation taxed him more than reminiscence as he turned the far corner on middle age. They’d met as first-year psychiatric residents, anxious to shine—and they had, briefly. But time had dulled them all. Jack Stolz had developed the drinking problem they’d all foreseen; Rory Beck had lost all his hair, and much of his vitality, to chemo; and Paul winced when he noticed Kath, with whom he still shared an office, talking around nouns she kept forgetting. Even King Smalls, who had been such a dynamo, organizing double dates and tailgate parties when the rest of them could scarcely stand from exhaustion, had retired to Florida. How could aging, a natural process, produce so much that felt unnatural? Still it was good to meet, especially here, where time had stopped with Watergate: the chairs and tables were the same, as were the too-bright light fixtures that lent the place the familiar if unlovely air of a hospital cafeteria, and then there were the ex-presidents, caught forever in the glass wall of shame.

  Rory had extracted a passel of school photographs from his wallet and the pictures were making the rounds. The grandkids were endearing, with cowlicks and gap-toothed smiles, their attention seemingly caught by something exciting happening just over the viewer’s right shoulder. Perhaps it was the prospect of adulthood. It always looked so compelling at that age, Paul remembered. He smiled wider with each photo, aware of making an effort. The others also seemed uncomfortable, their praise coughed up, obligatory. Paul’s face ached from all the politesse.

  I can’t believe, Kath was saying, how much this place has changed. The milk stout isn’t even on the menu anymore.

  Behind her, a large-screen television was tuned to some athletic contest. Paul could see green fields, and men running across them, and, now and then, a flicker as the signal weakened.

  There’s a lot that’s not on the menu anymore, King was saying. Eggs, steak, butter.

  Rory lamented: ice cream! They all winced and then simultaneously burst out laughing. Togetherness had its pleasures. It felt good to share a concern, even if it was only about cholesterol.

  Even we aren’t on the menu anymore, Kath said.

  Her remark brought the usual silence thumping down. Why always this modesty around the topic of sex? Lorraine sniffed, and Paul braced himself against another wave of irritation. He would have to try not to find some trivial pretext on which to berate her afterward, in the hotel room.

  Kath excused herself with a wave of her clutch.

  Speaking of sex, Stolz began, shifting into the chair that Kath had vacated.

  Or not speaking, Lorraine murmured.

  Everyone ignored her—freely, since, with Kath gone, there was less need to keep up appearances with the opposite sex. Paul felt marginally better: their sexism, at least, remained lively. Though they’d finished school during a period of expanding egalitarianism, he considered them all men of the college in the old style—well, except for Kath, who was not a man at all, of course. She’d been part of the first coed housing experiment, when the boys made a point of pissing against her door. The egalitarian movement had assimilated everything, even the pools of piss, and look what had happened: the college didn’t produce men anymore, just wave after wave of undifferentiated graduates. You had to be an imbecile not to feel the loss.

  Paul’s thoughts had only grown less shareable, that was another problem with aging.

  Have I got a story for you, Stolz said.

  Over Stolz’s shoulder, a penalty flag unfurled against the green.

  You know what the dementia did to Stanley, Stolz said. His wife had to put him in a home.

  Stanley was their teacher, the one they’d all sucked up to, elbowing one another aside in their compulsion to impress. Stolz leaned forward, warming to his story. What a putz. Resentment surged through Paul.

  I went to see him, Stolz said. He greeted me same as ever. He was wearing his smoking jacket, looked like he was just on his way to the office. Can you imagine. He sits me down. He looks me in the eye. He says, The women here.

  The women! exclaimed King.

  Always the women, Rory echoed.

  All crazy! Stolz was shouting. Crazy!

&nb
sp; Paul said, Yeah?

  I mean, Stolz emended, that’s what he says to me. He says, There’s this woman, this—

  Old lady?

  Lorraine touched the tip of her nose, their secret signal: shut up.

  I didn’t want to actually use those words, Stolz backtracked.

  Quietly King asked, Where’s Kath?

  I mean, she’s an old widow—

  Gesticulating, Stolz knocked his glass to the floor.

  A flurry of napkins descended, and a round-cheeked girl whom Paul thought too pretty for her nerd glasses swept the shards into a dustpan, the crack of her ass just visible above her belt.

  That is him, isn’t it, Lorraine asked, plucking his sleeve. Isn’t that LBJ?

  Paul didn’t respond. It was important to let reality hit people. Stolz, for one, needed a wake-up call. He was obviously impaired.

  The waitress returned with a refill.

  On the house, she said, handing it to Stolz.

  What’s this, a sippy cup?

  That might actually be appropriate, Paul said.

  The waitress made excuses: it had been such a busy night they’d run out of pint glasses and had to switch to Solos. She eyed Stolz and he stared back mildly—Paul recognized the trick—until she looked away.

  Lorraine prompted: You were saying, Jack? About the widow?

  Lorraine would grease the rails of his own oblivion with the same competent charm—for which, it occurred to Paul, he might well be grateful.

  Wet lipped, Stolz was winding up to his punch line: So she’d come into the room, the widow. She was talking a blue streak, the way they do. Stanley listened for a while. And guess what he said?

  Just back from the bathroom and trailing perfume, Kath asked: What?

  We have to stop.

  A shrink’s line. Their laughter was polite, indulgent. The curmudgeon would never change, that was the point. They liked to believe that they were similarly faithful to themselves. That their lives expressed an essence that, whatever it might have been, was unquestionably theirs.

  Stolz, meanwhile, was staring into his beer. A qualified victory had never been enough for him. Paul remembered a lesson from Stanley: people are like stuck compasses, they don’t shift more than five degrees to either side. It was important to keep expectations realistic.

  The waitress dropped the check, which was fine by Paul, who had already resigned himself to an early night. Even in residency, their outings often did end this way, with one dumb move that scattered the group. After a scramble for coats, they tumbled onto the street. Yahtzee! Lorraine murmured behind her raised hand. The darkness pitched around them and they slipped the mooring their assembly had provided, bidding each other good night.

  On Monday, Kath found Paul’s door open by a finger’s width and the whole office charged with a strange atmosphere. Fraught. Some days, her patients told her, it’s better to stay in bed, and she saw the rightness of that view even as she tried to convince them otherwise. Depression had a pedagogy. For one thing, it taught self-preservation. Nothing bad could happen to you if you didn’t leave your bed. That self-preservation was more necessary in some contexts than others—well, teaching that was her bailiwick.

  Most days she felt up to it. Not today. She slipped off her clogs—she preferred to work in socks—and padded to the kitchen, where she located her mug, its interior glaze addled with cracks from the stream of hot drinks that lubricated her day. She ran hot water from the dispenser into her cup, dunked a tea bag, and, having girded herself with this ritual, went to look in on Paul.

  He didn’t answer her knock. She considered calling out but then retreated to the kitchen, trying not to feel slighted by his lack of response. A tiny practice like theirs depended on the willingness of each partner to understand the other, to provide quick bursts of support. All she’d done was the professional thing, making sure to check in with him when he seemed to be having a rough time. She didn’t deserve the cold shoulder, but then, if Paul was difficult, well, he was just being Paul. She opened a cabinet and became so absorbed in rummaging for a snack that she didn’t hear Paul enter the kitchen.

  There was a thing, he said, causing her to jump. Sorry.

  That’s all right.

  Like a child taught to watch his step, he’d learned the trick of moving noiselessly. She found a bag of pretzels and slid it toward him, the rigid plastic bag crackling. She wanted him to know she wasn’t mad about him creeping up on her, pouncing.

  So there was a thing?

  The other night at the bar. When you left to use the bathroom.

  Oh?

  He told her what Stolz had said about Stanley and the older woman who’d accosted him at the home and, in doing so, brought Stanley back to himself, to Stolz, to the world.

  That’s how Paul made it sound: like the old woman had accosted Stanley.

  Oh, that Stanley, she mused, trying to buy time. It was hard to square Paul’s sour narrative with what she remembered of that night, its density of shared experience, especially toward the end. Her next words bolted from her: The grand old man can’t also be a dirty one, can he?

  Who said anything about that?

  Sorry, she said, meaning it. How could she have failed to corral that thought? He didn’t reply, and she felt even worse. She watched him leave. She knew this aspect of Paul well enough. Beneath the posturing was a core orientation, a way of being in the world that was as much his own as his fingerprints, yet she knew that this quickness to take offense was more obvious to others than it would ever be to himself. To himself he was just right. She’d puzzled over it many times: who was Paul in that self-righteous moment and who did she, Kath, become for him? But even after all the cogitating she had to admit that she had no idea. At bottom lurked an energy she associated with sex. They listened for a living. But for him it was different, Kath thought. For him listening felt like a shock to the body’s integrity, like diving into the ocean, enduring that assault on all the senses, one’s perception suddenly reduced to green, cold, salt, wet—oh, and the smell, that faintly menstrual rot. He had to stand firm against that, perhaps.

  Or else what she felt must be wrong, an echo of her own damage, nothing to do with him at all.

  Maybe he was just blurting.

  She had an adolescent patient whose eyes were like her husband’s. On bad days, she sat with this young woman and failed to listen, distracted by private wonderings: what other children might her husband have? What lies secured her happiness?

  She caught Paul in the corridor on his way to lunch. The downstairs door slammed: her next patient was arriving.

  What did your wife say about Stolz’s story?

  Paul shrugged, avoiding her eyes.

  You didn’t ask?

  What does it matter? She’s not like us.

  In her office, Kath checked her teeth in the small compact she kept in the pocket of her work coat. Pressing her tongue against her lower incisors, she felt for the gunk where she knew it built up. She’d have to see the dentist soon.

  Not like us, she thought. What a thing to say.

  But then again, what couldn’t you say after thirty years of marriage?

  Kath knew she was too wound up to drive. The trip was a mistake, the day too bright, the business ahead—just grocery shopping, which shouldn’t have bothered her—overwhelming. Behind her eyes a pressure had built, the tension of psychic material badly repressed. All she wanted was to sit in a darkened room and hold her head. Still the groceries had to be collected. Besides, she pep-talked herself, wasn’t she used to doing things on her own, through any sort of madness?

  She drove carefully, avoiding potholes.

  It was only after she’d parked that she discovered she’d forgotten her list. She donned sunglasses and fussed with her wallet, arranging bills and receipts, waiting for a solution to occur to her. None did. She’d have to work from memory. The pressure behind her eyes intensified.

  The store was crowded. She kept her sunglasse
s on, knowing she looked crazy. So what. She hefted bunches of bananas, heavy yellow-fingered hands. She wished she was wearing headphones.

  It was useful to divide problems into types. There were abstract problems, like trying to draw a line between one country and another, and concrete ones, like ordering a milk stout. Similarly, there were thinking problems and feeling problems. Today’s problem felt like a thinking problem, which made it something of a conundrum. She couldn’t stop thinking about Paul’s story and this inability felt bad. Unless it was the story itself that was the cause of the bad feeling, and her rumination was just a symptom. A story could infect you like a virus. Perhaps Stolz’s story had made Paul sick in just that way, and Paul needed to relieve himself of whatever the story had produced in him, some unbearable state of mind. She knew from her long association with Paul that the compulsion to tell these stories was partly competitive: Paul had heard the story during those minutes she’d spent in the bathroom. He needed to remind her that he’d been on the scene when she’d been elsewhere. No doubt Paul had once suffered from a parent who tantalized, who kept the door open on scenes better left unspied upon. Perhaps—though she resisted this thought—he had excitedly imagined her in the bathroom, primping; in fact, she had spent some minutes staring into the mirror and wondering how she could get through the evening without slapping someone. Lorraine’s cackle had set her off, Kath remembered. But she couldn’t reconstruct the details. All she recalled was that Lorraine had made an unfunny joke, something about the dead presidents at the back of the bar.

  Kath turned, too quickly, and in her haste jostled a woman nearby who was wearing a lot of makeup over her tan. Apologizing, Kath darted away, down the vitamin aisle. It was getting hard to breathe. Maybe she was losing her mind, misplacing it the way she might her keys or her phone. She had to contain Stolz’s story, even as it congealed inside her like hot jam in a jar.

  The aisle wasn’t quite deserted: a girl sitting at a card table was carefully filling plastic cups with bright yellow juice.