Lola, California

by Edie Meidav

  I come from a candy cane? Am I striped?

  No, but no—Vic had laughed, Mary laughing even harder, slapping his hand to try to stop her own laugh, the moment so rich. That had been back when their Lana had been a more tractable quantity, some sixteen, seventeen years earlier. Since that time, since Lana had been about four, what had not slipped away? Some witch had come at night to steal their daughter. A rude theft, he muttered to himself, stealing someone he and Mary had brought into the world, the world exacting its penny for the miracle bounty of a child. How quickly a daughter’s essence could disappear, how subtly, and so easy not to have noticed when she’d first coughed, looking away, asking the dinnertime may I be excused? that now lasted an eternity.

  Mahler filled his decanter and peeked in again on the students. The music of his daughter’s generation: loud, sardonic quotations of his era. Who could work to that parody?

  I could tell you about real sex, he might have roared at them. Direct, no-holds-barred sex, the kind where you slam your partner down, thighs grasping, everyone entering primal abdication, moving through the senses to lose them. And afterward the tender muted apology a gentleman uses to stitch himself back to his lady. The polite thing to do after is swallow the urge to run since later you get the reward of a hilltop postcoital moment of solo reflection, calm sight: where you have been, where you are going, the lady and your romancing her a ladder up that hill and back to yourself.

  Even old tenderfoot Sinatra knew more than any aggregate of these students, too busy with ornate forms of procreative dance to listen to old Vic Mahler, too busy with importantly self-appointed tasks, the pink decoration of cookies shaped like vulvas and penises, a boy stretching rosy plastic over a friend’s face. Mahler returned to the threshold of his door to shake his head and of course no one noticed the vestigial professor.

  Why were their tasks any more important than his? Who among them wasn’t acting out the great march of neural determinism?

  And yes, he had argued, the brain had its plasticity, up to a point, but there were also biologically determined coordinates that functioned like bitumen if one were to consider the ideas of his colleague Gallagher, whose ability to create elegant, modular theories Mahler had once admired. Perhaps, had his theories been more like Gallagher’s, Mahler might be more relevant to these kids today.

  Was that plastic a new form of a condom? Flat plastic? Could that be a woman’s condom? When did these kids become so sophisticated?

  Back to the office, back to its sediment he went, slamming the door on the beat, as loudly as any first-day kid leaving his lecture. Clearly to them Victor Mahler lived mainly as a quotation, while everything he once considered the forefront of human connection—reverence, civility and gratitude, he’d told Mary at the start of their courtship some half-century ago—was up for question. No center held and how revolutionary were these kids anyway?

  How different were they from any previous generation, the ones who just wanted to knock up a girl, knock the sexual power out of her, get her caveward, barefoot and pregnant as the cliché would have it, so that she would knead bread dough and tend babies, an endless life of Kinder, Kirche, Küche?

  Was this the harbor his own daughter headed toward? A girl lost in the universe of that first year after college, barefoot and swishing through rooms, padding about, most definitely a padder and swisher. And if he couldn’t quite see the outcome of whatever she was doing, you had to have faith that a kid could work it out, steered by whatever muddled hope this generation offers as a ticket out.

  At his desk at school, this new breed of sex-positive Valentine’s loud and intruding on his consciousness, Vic had tried returning to the task at hand. What had he been working on? His daughter. Clearly, Lana, as she’d asked them to call her somewhere at the start of her high-school career, Lana had a pressing need to defer the real world. One way of putting it: she wished to delay the world of linear task-reward systems in the vocational sphere (cf. Mahler, “Work Force and Neural Imprinting,” 1969) in order to create an illusion of her own world (cf. Mahler, “Delayed Adolescence Among American Youth,” 1982).

  Spontaneous, loopy, improvisational, that was what his offspring needed to be, or rather, Lana’s neopallium demanded of the inferior archipallium the illusion that it could make territorial claims upon the future.

  He settled himself. Even thinking about the neopallium had rendered his own calmer, allowing him to read a book on intelligence by one of these new computer guys, Hank A. Fearnley. He tried but the words swam: too many footnotes! Instead he thought he should close up and nap on the chaise longue—once carmine, now browned—that had been his wife’s gift to him so many moons ago, on his fortieth birthday, the age he sometimes thought was still his before the usual self-inventory intruded: a man of sixty-two, arteries only semi-blocked, circulation reaching his toes, a bit of plaque on the brain but appetites still occasionally feral. At forty he’d started thinking of himself as an old man given the mystery of his own birth-father’s age at death—the closed archives of Liechtenstein obscuring his own genetic sentence—offering Vic the gift or theft of a faceless clock. How long did his genes predispose him to live?

  He could be a healthy sort (the thought usually easing him toward sleep) and yet, because students insisted on celebrating sex so loudly, no nap for Vic! He would have to go home, his mood not leaving him the whole drive back, still cranky as, once inside his front door, he cuckooed his usual Mary? No one greeted him and for this small respite he was glad, upstairs finding himself almost content to lie down on his study’s tattered green couch so that when he awoke, rested as the legendary giant, a teakettle whistling downstairs, his mood found a decent hum, perhaps because he’d had a dream that set things aright, part of the brain’s brilliance in its electrical spark or soup. Half asleep, he had the impulse, if not to make amends for whatever slight he had inflicted—was he not usually in the wrong with Mary?—at least to make an appeal. He had some tricks, some roundabout methods for achieving bonhomie, a moment of better repute in her eyes.

  And he was pleased that well-being warmed his limbs, a boon often denied him. Get closer to death and you no longer enjoy the slumber of youth; the best you get is to linger in somnolent halfness. Halfness because some dim reminder buzzes in the corner of the psyche, the deferral of some pressing appointment with mortality as bad as the awful scent of wet tweed suffusing the room, some new unclassifiable form of mold, something he’d have to talk to Mary about—but then he heard her downstairs, Mary talking with her hard-chinned assistant Sherry, continuing the mystery: what did women always have to say to each other?

  Sherry to Mary, Mary to Sherry, Sherry who had stayed around the longest of the long retinue of assistants, who’d gone through grad school and yet despite the rigors of classes, orals, defense committees had helped Mary with her research, interviews, the typing up of field notes, charts and statistics. Sherry who, like Vic and Mary, had understood the unpatented holiness of work.

  To Sherry, Mary felt she owed her success. More than once he’d heard Mary’s whispered refrain what would I do without her. From upstairs he heard some similar whisper run through the women’s speech, a clandestine train punctuated by sharp outbursts of laughter before an arrival at concord. What compels women to talk on and on, he thought again, mood slipping notches toward grumpy. Had Mary ever confided in him with such tones? In the hall downstairs Mary said goodbye to assistant Sherry, and, after one more embrace, closed the door. Sherry, ma cherie, he mouthed upstairs, capable of farce even half-asleep.

  The only other person his wife would hug with similar susurration—sincere, slow, a small purr escaping—was their friend Mosh, the one friend they’d ever truly shared, a ruddy man full of tales of mushroom-hunting, duck-trapping, cheerful moose escapades. Years ago Mosh had given the Mahlers a silver-plated gun at which they had laughed, thinking it a quaint relic of some night of syrah, vermouth, palaver. For years they had kept Mosh’s gun, dusty, locked but loaded ag
ainst intruders, heavy and unused in the upper shelf of the china hutch in the hallway, behind the teapot, away from the prying dustrags of cleaning ladies who under California law were as illegal as black-market firearms. They had kept the gun even after Sherry had told Mary that she thought the Mahlers should get rid of it—the leading cause of gun fatalities among white males is suicide. Which Vic thought a convoluted way of saying the obvious: keep a gun and naturally one day a person considers its applications.

  He was fully exiting the dream-zone. Listening to Sherry’s car start up outside, Vic thought he might wait an interval before he came downstairs, wishing for casualness, his limbs loose, a harmless spider hovering, caught in its own breath.

  The nagging thought returned: hadn’t things been pretty much all right? Hadn’t Mary and he evolved a pattern of being cordial when others were around? Across a room at a party he could sight Mary laughing, ducking her head, the flash of her well-preserved poitrine, a lighthouse of a woman, and fondness would return, his pride a heartburn inseparable from their histories of dispute, however rare it was that during the day around the house they engaged much because there was always work, the never-failing excuse and binding ethos simultaneously an invocation and shared god.

  Finally awake, he thought: no casualness, just go down and surprise her.

  Surprise how? Perhaps he could offer Mary something; some prick of delight might penetrate. But she’d already eaten all the birthday chocolates mailed them by their Belgian friend. What then? Like a spill seeped onto a beachhead, the fullness of the memory slammed on him: her news. What she had told him three nights ago, what he had been good at suppressing, her news which these past numb days had waited like a half-remembered appointment now rose, a phantom spiraled into rage.

  Cuckold, lost to the cockfight, he was a cuckold.

  His plan will have him make the announcement gently: Mary, I’ve decided to leave. Or just I’m leaving. He will be nothing but dignity: but I’ll leave you the house. His nobility will be the perfect punishment, given that, three nights ago, ten o’clock at night, wearing her sleeveless nightdress with the eyelets that made her look like an Indochine lady for hire, she had told him about her years-long affair with Gallagher. Maybe I always loved him?

  He would have preferred Sherry as the object of lust. Anything but Gallagher. One can’t help the ignition of rage: it is hard-wired. Unable to linger in his nap, he bolted up in bed, tramped down the worn stairs to find Mary wearing reading glasses, poring over a journal, wearing a man’s denim shirt and seated in the living room’s blue glider.

  “Sorry,” she said, a paltry attempt at reparations, “didn’t get dinner started yet.”

  “No problem,” he replied, disarmed and uncertain: he found himself holding the globe that had been left, mistakenly, on the stairs. The globe—he looked at it quizzically before assuming the cheery face of a postcard husband.

  “How about Ozzie’s?” he suggested, placing the globe down carefully. Ozzie’s was a reference to a dining moment they’d enjoyed one day after having seen a brutal matinee together, the kind of shared trauma that brings some couples closer, a movie about a Dutch woman buried and her frantic husband seeking her.

  Her eyes lifted for a second: she understood the attempt. Over her face passed the shadow of washed-away hope, a crest after a small death, the shadow of a decision she must have come to years ago when she must have started believing Vic could only spell a galaxy of disappointment.

  Nonetheless they dined, a pair of tongues and stomachs in aging bodies with greening livers, the couple led by courtesy and convention. Late afternoon at the old pharmacy at Russell and College, the one that had restored its soda fountain, senior hour at Ozzie’s. The shaggy who still stalked Vic with the greatest passion dismounted from his motorcycle outside the window and waved, smiling and holding his usual ramshackle cardboard sign on which today he had painted HOW MANY BABIES ARE YOU GOING TO PUT INTO YOUR SOUP CAN AND SELL TO TEXAS? Vic waved back as if he too could be jolly, enough to satisfy this harmless shaggy and help him move on to other important stations. The married pair without comment turned back to their meal, good American food hearkening back to imported tradition while Vic tried to locate what he wished to tell her. The diner seemed helpful, friendly, a testament to civilization with its chrome-plated stools, a malted for him, a club sandwich for her, the dainty cellophaned toothpicks festooning her plate, petite flags of surrender.

  “It’s great they’ve fixed the place up,” she said after she had finished. “The new owner’s from New York.”

  “It is great.” He stared into the bill, gloom enveloping him. Now would be the time to pounce, to tell her if he could, but his plan had turned sour in his mouth, here in a place made up of prefab nostalgia. Did he think he could fool anyone? As the prospect of leaving her neared, it seemed impossible that Vic could separate from a lady with whom he had shared so much. He would not be able to leave either of them happy; the revenge would not be sweet. It was all as impossible as if someone had said all of individualistic, rebellious, quarrelsome Berkeley could be sold into the hands of a single greedstruck developer who could glass-plate everyone’s mind. Impossible.

  “What are you thinking about, Vic?” she’d said, this woman who’d been the receptacle for all of it since almost the beginning.

  “How—beautiful you are,” he lied.

  She looked through him unconvinced, pulling off her knit cap only to put it on again, all rather uncharacteristic, he noted, dully. When he hadn’t been looking, she’d been busy accruing new habits. What was that reddish mark on her neck?

  Then it was that she struck her blow.

  He was just about to say something magnanimous—he was working up to it—when she chose to issue her own pronouncement. “You know, I’ve been thinking, it would be best if you left.”

  “Left here?”

  And then—his fate!—he understood how readily the wronging party meant to unauthor his idea, undo him. She would be the ejecting agent. She had cuckolded him and now she would doubly cuckold him, telling him to leave her and their Spruce Street abode, a home that had seen the beginning and middle of their marriage, a house that had contained them, the silent inviolable witness to the birth and death of Vic and Mary. Unthinkable. They’d been there so long; they’d moved there when Berkeley had first offered him a job as a lecturer. They’d raised a daughter in the house. His house. His money. His hard work.

  In the beginning of their courtship he used to want to devour her limbs, push his head inside her long confusing hybrid body, but now the rage that filled was its pure twinned absolute, an ice poison.

  As they’d driven home in the most brittle silence of their lives together, in the vintage leather-seated Porsche, south to north in their idyllic college town, he’d almost had an accident. Not hard to do, given all the narrow one-way roads and shortcuts winding between overgrown rosebushes and oaks, the hairpin turns that meant one car suddenly faced down another: so many decisions a person had to make to avoid mutual destruction.

  In retrospect, he might have bypassed the act. The least original thought will often be exactly the one that seems to you inevitable and necessary! he used to tell his student researchers. Never believe you’ve arrived at confirmation before you’re willing to utterly abandon the hypothesis!

  But what originality could have refuted the imperfection of her choice in ejecting him? When does one mark the onset of brutality? And who put the music on the stereo? As if to make one more sally in a decades-long argument they had continued, over the worth of music over pure quiet, Mahler’s Eighth had entered the room.

  The act happened on stairs where their Lana had first learned to walk as a toddler but their hug might have erased it all, a pleat of desperation, a death-grasp as in coupling’s early days.

  The unwelcome scene tended to visit him whenever he most needed sleep. In the language of the courts, he must have premeditated, the spontaneous act foretold by the tranquility of
choice. For had he not used both globe and gun, items not exactly borrowed from anyone else’s universe? Random chance, of course chance had played a part: chance had swayed his hand, chance whose doctrine he used to preach to adherents, chance as well as a few improvised elements, most of them products of the hindbrain with its knack for hellbent inspiration.

  At a crucial moment, when things could have stalled, if not gone backward, she’d asked what he thought of as the haunter, the question almost enough to have spun him out of forward momentum (and what awaited, the future of regret stored in the forebrain, the future when he would try to put Mary’s face into a sealed-off carton).

  Have you taken leave of your senses?

  Later her last question would seem most apt. He had taken leave. His volitional mechanism had exited the sensory apparatus, which really could be another way to define marriage, right? Not union but rather exit. Your will exits your senses or maybe the opposite: your senses exit your will. If he could just stick with the facts, she had denied him the leavetaking he’d wished for, which made him in turn leave the contours of his usual self. That day, he found himself murdering more than one thing, piercing that flimsy bubble of Vic Mahler who would choose to be a rational being and it was unfortunate that his second and third shots then proved brutal premeditation.