by Lee Upton
As it turns out, Linda had picked up her check earlier that afternoon (it had been processed because we were at the end of the month). We never saw her at the agency again.
One of the women in our office, the one nursing an ulcer, informed me that Linda told her just before she left us that Paula had contracted gonorrhea. Furthermore, this was due to the fact that Linda had seduced Paula’s boyfriend after she herself contracted gonorrhea from her dentist during a checkup that turned passionate following a routine cleaning.
“But why,” I asked, “why did Linda want to hurt Paula?”
About two weeks later I was able to figure something out again thanks to the woman with the ulcer.
“Did you know that Linda used to live with Paula’s brother?” the woman asked.
I felt my breath knocked right out of me. With that information I could see that I understood everything. How better to harm Paula’s brother than to harm Paula?
“He must have dumped Linda in some spectacular way, and poor Paula was the sacrificial lamb,” I told the woman with the ulcer. “I bet he was polite about dumping Linda. He used his politeness like a weapon. That would make Linda want to kill him, at the least.”
And then my friend with the ulcer said: “Guess who else is walking funny these days?”
Of course I found out that she meant my superior.
It was all miserable—and more trouble for Linda than it should have been worth.
This all happened so long ago, but parts of it are very fresh to me. Especially the firing and the way Paula cried. And her brother. Sometimes I felt guilty about Paula and her brother although I never tried to contact either of them to apologize.
Just this past year, believe it or not, I saw Linda again, and I still recognized her after all this time. I was visiting with my cousin who asked me to stop with her at a yarn shop. This was about ten miles outside of Cincinnati at one of those little malls. I recognized Linda immediately. She was standing under rows and rows of knitting needles of all sizes, most in bright metallic colors—blues and greens and magenta. A line of hand-knitted sweaters dangled from the wall behind her. She had a kind of washed-out look. Instantly it occurred to me that if she were a sweater she would look nice until you turned her inside out and saw all the loose knots and clumped spots.
She tried to sell me some angora yarn but backed off immediately when she sensed my lack of interest. She had a superior air, and so it was likely that she owned the shop. It occurred to me too that she must have been a fabulous knitter and had successfully changed her avocation into a vocation. I tried to imagine her reputedly fast fingers clicking the needles, but of course she didn’t give me a demonstration. Her smile was much the same; one little tooth kept getting caught on her lip. At one point her hand fluttered up to hide it—even from me, an old nobody.
And then a month later—this is the way life is, some version of reality will always come to get you, let no one tell you otherwise—I was at a wedding reception when I met a woman who appeared vaguely familiar. When I told her my name she laughed and said she knew something she bet I didn’t know: “You fired my niece twenty years ago.”
This particular woman was about my age, heavy-set, sloppily drunk, and extremely talkative. She was laughing as she spoke. She looked, I could see now, a lot like Paula and her brother. And apparently she knew my name because I was a family legend of some sort.
I found out from that woman what I could about Paula’s life.
Paula—get ready for this—is a chief executive officer of a major marketing company. I felt disoriented for a moment. Who could have predicted it? Paula must fire people all the time. You can’t be in a position like that without ruining people’s lives. Paula, I learned, was also married and the mother of a teenage daughter. A powerful person. Our Paula.
But I didn’t think I would drop Paula a line of congratulations for her good fortune and hard work even if her family laughed about her first job now. I knew what it had cost her.
“Don’t feel bad about firing her,” Paula’s aunt said, looking right into my eyes. “It was nothing to her. It was amusing. Given everything she had to deal with it was nothing.”
I was sure then that Paula must have made the firing incident into a family joke. She was fired from her first job, but look at her now.
“What about your nephew—Paula’s brother?” I asked the woman. Truth be told, I had wanted to ask her about him as soon as I knew she was his aunt. I had thought of him for years really. I had even tried to imagine having someone like Paula’s brother to comfort me on the two occasions when I got fired.
The wedding reception was virtually over. People were getting their coats. The roads were likely to be icy, and there was a sense of urgency in the air amid all the white and silver wedding decorations.
“What about your nephew—Paula’s brother?” I asked again.
“Oh dear,” the woman said. “You didn’t know? Paula doesn’t have a brother. You must mean Michael.” She paused and then I felt her determination—she would be swift, and she would lower her voice so we would have our privacy.
“I don’t like to speak ill of Michael, but he enjoyed fooling people. Paula didn’t like to do that, but he liked to go around pretending they were brother and sister.”
She must have registered the look on my face because she went on speaking even more quickly. “I know. I know,” she said. “It was strange. He liked to call Paula his sister. It was his strange joke—a kind of compulsion. He did it even in front of me. But I shouldn’t talk ill of the dead.”
“What?”
“I’m surprised you didn’t know. Hodgkin’s disease. He must have been fighting it when Paula worked for you. I thought everybody knew. I thought you knew. You hired his sister.”
“But Paula—.”
“Lynn was his sister’s name, I think. No, Linda. Linda was his actual sister.”
I was swimming in confusion. “The only person I ever fired in my entire life was Paula,” I said, “and I shouldn’t have.”
In my mind’s eye I saw Linda with all those knitting needles hanging over her head, and I felt what people used to call Holy Fear, the fear of a jealous God’s revenge.
Already I have had a long life, filled to the hilt with mistakes, but I’ll say this: it is a terrible perversion to harm the living just because you want to injure the dying.
It’s not that I’m bragging about, at last, knowing what I know. Or pretending in some mealy-mouthed way that I should have known more than I knew years ago. He took my breath away, I used to think of the beautiful young man who said he was Paula’s brother.
Why wouldn’t I have believed whatever he said: the man I thought was Paula’s brother? If I had known the truth I wouldn’t have said anything anyway. That’s what beauty and politeness do. When you see those two possibilities together in one person that person can lie to your face. You don’t say: Your real sister believes she’s the love of your life, not Paula. And you play your little game with Paula because your sister is right. You let Paula go, I didn’t. Would I have said that? It’s only family members who can correct one another that thoroughly and ruin each other in the process. Like anyone, even the bravest of the lot, it’s cowardice I understand.
The Live One
On the morning that Clint Pouvretz left for the retreat, Tesia’s face was half-buried in blankets in their overly air-conditioned bedroom. She struggled with her pillow and whispered what sounded like, “Be careful.” He was reasonably sure she understood he was leaving for days, which filled him with a sensation hard to bear. He loved—it was beyond love—her imitation of the superintendent of schools, her conspiracy theories about zoning boards, her dedication to the troubled children in her art classes. He couldn’t be grateful enough about having all that intelligence lying next to him almost every night and about watching her nearly every morning as she leaned over and kissed him goodbye, even those times when her satchel slid off her shoulder and she cracked him
in the skull with the holster of her glue gun.
That she had been relentlessly unfaithful to him—falling in love every few months with one man after another—was something he would never get used to. Although it was something he had—somehow—to endure. Her father had left the family when she was a kid and that explained a lot. It was hard for her to trust. So if he hung tough throughout all this—all these humiliations, not to mention the way his stomach felt like it had been scraped out, and his throat too, and lately there was this tornado in his head—if he could endure what was happening she would soon enough understand that he wasn’t like her father. He wasn’t even remotely like the kind of man who would abandon a woman. No matter what she did.
“Handshake’s a little rough for you?” The staff member wore a name tag over his black T-shirt that read “Oscar.” He tucked his chin into his neck, an effect that made his laugh sound like throat-clearing. His nostrils, rimmed with red spider veins, widened. The obvious occurred to Clint. Unsettlingly enough, Oscar was smelling him.
“When we’re finished with you,” Oscar said, “you’ll be more aware of your own strength than you are of mine.”
Already Clint knew his head must glow more than those paper lanterns that used to float on wires at spring sales promotions.
Two hours later, Clint stood at the end of a line of men on a stage, waiting for a snake to crawl to his outstretched arms. A minute ago a camp staffer had come onstage wearing the snake around his waist like the belt to a bathrobe. Now the staffer was handing the snake to the main speaker who was trying to make a point while the snake waved its head around like a self-conscious drunk.
So what, Clint told himself. A snake.
A snake. Only one.
But it was the color of creamed corn.
Out of the corner of his eye Clint watched as the retreat’s main speaker stood up from his chair, his back erect, as if braced. He was an older man, and like Oscar he appeared certain of himself in a way that made Clint sick to his stomach. The speaker held up the snake and said, “If you believe God cut off Satan’s legs to make this—if you think this creature—unique in its separateness—has nothing to teach you, you’ve defiled yourself.”
The speaker suspended the snake like pulled taffy over the first man in line. Immediately, the snake began sucking itself along the man’s arm. Its skin looked like it should snag.
Inside his left ear Clint’s heart fluttered. His skin prickled as if every hair was standing. The snake aimed for him. The head and the first inches of the snake seemed separate from the rest of the snake, like that part of the snake was on a pulley. Clint could see only one eye of the snake, a wet dark thing right near the hidden mouth. The snake swiveled against his elbow and then across his forearm and the sensation was odd, almost like a kiss, a horrible kiss.
The retreat’s main speaker addressed Clint with what sounded like hate: “If you don’t want to experience snakebite you’re going to have to relax.” The speaker turned to the audience and raised his voice. “And don’t think you’re not somebody’s snake. Because you are. Somebody’s snake. Some tongue-flicking reptile to somebody. But you know what? You don’t have to impress your enemy. He doesn’t matter to you. Because you’ve got coverage.”
A familiar voice muttered from the audience. It sounded like the voice was saying, “I can’t see.” It had to be Norman, Clint’s cabinmate. Guys like Norman used to be in TV ads: good-looking men—before advertisers found out that people were more comfortable viewing soft chinless men with obvious medical conditions. A face like Norman’s could only have a future in print ads. More voices erupted from the audience.
“I bet it feels like cool butter.”
“I can’t believe it’s not butter.”
The voices—they helped. Say more stupid things, Clint wanted to beg. Say stupid things so I don’t have to live in my own mind right now.
And then, as if mercy rained upon Clint, an attendant directed the snake with a stick, making it muscle-glide over to another man. Clint knew that the snake could wriggle toward him again, but there were men onstage who looked even more miserable than he was and thus would prove more attractive. He imagined that he heard knees knocking. Could that be possible?
“If you learn to comprehend exactly what you fear—if and only if—you’ll be able to look at anything without turning away. You will face the truth. You will triumph over life’s many tests. And then—through your example—you can be a misery to your enemies even after you’re dead. More people suffer snakebite from handling a dead snake than from handling a live one.
“Intuition. It’s not a word you’ve probably thought of in terms of yourself. It’s a word you should steal back. There was a time when great hunting parties crossed over these passes. There was a time when men such as yourselves lived off the natural world without the constant streams of communication that are meant to confuse you. You came here because you heeded a call. That instigation—whoever or whatever told you it’s your time to arrive here—that instigation was one you could have ignored or resisted. But no. You wanted to change your life.”
Clint told himself: pity the snake. Poor snake. Poor confused bitch of a snake.
After Clint galloped off the stage and collapsed on a chair, Norman said, “This was all carefully planned to be enormously cheap.” He stroked his own arm as if testing it for durability. “Everything that guy said was contradictory. Although one thing’s true: that thing he said about snakes biting after they’re dead. So you were safe up there, given that the snake was alive. It’s a reflex maybe?”
After dinner Clint and Norman weren’t ten yards from the door of their cabin when the sound of huffing began. A string of shredding noises erupted, followed by crackling. At the cabin door Clint turned but couldn’t make out anything except shadows and a flash of white.
“Raccoons?” Norman asked in a half-whisper. “They can be rabid.”
Norman flopped onto his cot while Clint stood by the window to see if he could detect whatever was making the racket. Within seconds everything was quiet again. In the purple half-illuminated darkness beyond the window he could see a young birch, ill-nourished, struggling, between two elderberry bushes. Whatever had been tearing around in the camp must have disappeared.
He wondered if he should disappear too. He knew that he was in an alternate world—a place that no doubt over the years many campers had yearned to be rescued from. He wondered if every cabin held the memory of countless dank afternoons when puzzles shed crucial pieces. Of course not only children had used the camp. Religious groups? More likely hunters, roughing it with bottles of Smirnoff rolling over the floorboards.
While he was fumbling around he found an old dirty round thing in a crevice of the rickety box that served as his nightstand. He opened the lid. Inside, a plastic girl revolved in a plastic room. A tiny plastic couch was pushed up against a tiny wall. He closed the compact and read the inscription: Polly Pocket. Evidently a Girl Scout troop or some other little girl group had used the cabin. And left behind Polly Pocket, destined to turn in a circle forever. More like Pocket Neurotic. The limited view, the repetitive lifestyle, the claustrophobia. The ugly thought: no wonder Tesia wanted to leave him.
He turned off the light and lay on his cot.
In the dark Norman’s face gave off a shine like cellophane. “You were supposed to bring a pillow,” he said. “It was on the website.”
“Developing strength. The first step.”
The silence in the cabin grew thick. Norman broke it. “Do you believe in the existence of ghosts?”
“I’m kind of an agnostic about that.”
“I don’t want to believe in them—but I’ve had experiences with them. They’re clots. Clots of perception. Not clots of feeling. Places where too much was experienced. Filled-up spaces that ought to be drained. They’re clouds basically.”
“I thought they were clots.”
“Clots and clouds.”
“You see ghosts?
”
“I go somewhere, and it’s like there’s a catch in the air. Everything slows down. They want to touch me.”
Oh no. Here we go.
“The first time was in an old bed and breakfast. The hotels were all filled, and so I was stuck. Uncomfortable antique furniture. Ghosts rustling around, crashing into things. Like what we heard outside tonight. Ghosts are restless. They’re restless because they don’t have a relationship with their bodies anymore. Are you capable of understanding that? A lot of people aren’t capable of understanding that. Ghosts aren’t bodies. They’re desperate to touch another body. To inhabit a body.”
“Do you mean they’re parasites?”
“They’d like to be,” Norman said. “That’s their ambition. Their particular challenge, given their memories of their physical selves. I hope you know that what I’m talking about is the real deal. The real real deal.” For a moment Clint thought his cabinmate was referring to his own body.
Norman wasn’t finished. “You think I’m gullible. Everyone’s gullible in their own way. Their own provincial way. Have you ever contacted a psychic on-line? It’s a flatter-and-scare sandwich. She tells you that you must be brilliant, possibly you’re a psychic yourself, and that the next seventy-two days will see the transit of Saturn. I know what’s going on with fakes. I’m intrigued, but I’m not gullible.”
Norman reminded Clint of a guy he knew back in high school whose greatest desire was to be the football mascot. That guy wore a big orange bird costume that looked like a fuzzy wrecking ball. He was honored to wear that big stinking costume.
Norman was saying, “That’s why I’ve decided that overall I like this retreat. It’s not fake. It’s the genuine thing. No big promises. Not once were we told what the future holds. You don’t believe me about the ghosts.”
“I guess I don’t know enough about ghosts.”
“The thing about ghosts that you should know: they want to be recognized. People talk about a clammy feeling from ghosts. That’s cold energy the ghosts are gathering, and it’s from us. Our clamminess. They’re the ones who want to be shocked. They eat fear. Being afraid is close to being alive so they try to frighten themselves as much as us.”