Lola, California

by Edie Meidav

  SEVENTEENTH OF FEBRUARY, 1989 5:02 P.M.

  in one of the moment’s variations is when he parks outside their house and doesn’t know what to do. Their cat Medusa sits outside on the lawn, hunting new spoils, tail unfurling, her gaze admitting no need to her human couple. The two do what they usually do which is to enter through the front door.

  Vic rushes Mary in or does he push? He locks the door behind them. Without considering, he hurries to the stereo to press, somewhat arbitrarily, the triangle of play.

  “Stay there,” he says.

  Play! No choice really. Play! The violins speed on. Mary looks at him, confused.

  “Just wait,” he says.

  “What?” she asks. The blaring music makes her churlish. Disgust crosses her face as if the whole setup might signal some new tediously kinky turn. The dusty gun in his hand before he realizes it, Mosh’s silver gun. Violins thundering, rage in his loins. Whatever she says is not wholly addressed to him but to the invisible spectators who now people their marriage. She shouts turn it off and also what do you think you are doing?

  But she is not the only one who knows how to shout.

  With any other pretext, they might have dropped the act altogether, might have grappled only to fall over the two stumble-stairs separating entrance from living room. Yet this was no ordinary fight. The thrall of cellos, his marrow gurgling, an itch. Something else pilots him.

  Long light stretching through the plated glass by the entrance hall puts him out of time.

  Have you taken leave of your senses? asks Mary and then repeats herself, neck strained against the scarf from her sister, some scent of milkshake emanating. Seconds earlier the scarf had hung on the doorhandle, an afterthought now tight around her throat.

  In her eyes the same terror and hope he’d seen on their wedding day at city hall: will you won’t you be my savior or destroyer? The Mahler in the background, riled up, the Eighth always speaking to him, one thousand instruments required for full orchestration. First his hand is grabbing the globe and using it in a manner never intended by cartography. Next his hand fires, old duck-hunting knowledge entering, shaken into two more rounds. And then the act finds an end that will become no end after all but rather endless intermission.

  He walks. Leaves the scene, absents himself. Leaves her there. Locks the house, rushes by the intrigued cat, keeps walking. Uphill past the cypresses to their trusted neighbor Carol’s house where he lets himself in the back. On Carol’s granite counter lies a circus-themed ad for a corner pizza store. Without thinking he picks up the phone, dials the number, waits through circus music, peeks outside to see the number of Carol’s house, talks to a foreign-accented woman to request delivery of a small cheese to the house, using his neighbor’s name, asking for no trimmings. Hungry because he hadn’t touched his malted and because a hole bores through his gut. There at someone’s kitchen island he watches the clock, drumming fingers on Carrara stone while having the nonsensical thought that now he might never get to see Carrara. The pizza delivery takes exactly nineteen minutes.

  As he used to tell his daughter whenever she herself was obscenely tardy, nineteen minutes slanted toward death.

  Vic takes money from his neighbor’s ceramic kitty, tips the bucktoothed delivery boy too generously. Not wishing to be recognized, he closes the door in the boy’s face. Poor devil. He writes an IOU to Carol but forgets how to sign his own name. Sits back at the table, chews a hot slim triangle in half, disgusted by the island shape of sauce on his shirt. Closes the box. And then makes the first conscious choice: he doesn’t wash his hands before picking up the phone, dialing 911, this time no music to wait through, this time calling the police on himself.

  MARCH 1990

  In court he blames that earlier morning’s reading. He hadn’t been footnoted in a recent article in Science. Who in court could understand what plagiarism means to an end-of-career academic? No one. How to shore up your future? He floats the idea over their lowbrow heads, knowing they cannot understand how a footnote might become almost a life-or-death matter.

  Nor does he mention the students’ sex freedom, their celebration of Saint Valentine. He does make himself mention the affair that Mary had described with such viscosity, telling the blank faces on the jury that his wife had been seventeen years in love with another man, someone he had known. Worse, a colleague. Worst, someone he’d thought a shared friend. And not just an affair. His wife had known an all-consuming love, perhaps the closest to pleasure she’d ever had. When naming the culprit, she had given off a little love-tremble, as he had noted, one that plunged Vic down into all their unhappy recent years. Of course it made sense only if you believe that sense is sadistic.

  After her confession, the sole satisfaction left Vic was the apocalyptic grimness of a scientist who, the last living human, proves his sad hypothesis that an evil world-eating bacterium he had predicted had triumphed: the scientist gets the lonely conquest of aha!

  Because he had been cuckolded by someone with a sniveling laugh from a neighboring department: Gallagher!

  Gallagher who had elegant theories but who had vetoed Vic’s requests. Who had been notorious for being the administration’s darling, an officious prig in a suit with a baby’s face, beard and mustache, his blue eyes notorious for unctuous flattery of power-mad superiors, Gallagher who even after tenure actually kneeled by chairs in the faculty dining room so as to exchange civilities eye to eye, lick to lick, Gallagher which could almost rhyme with cuntlicker, who wished to be seen as important and busy, who apparently had lusted after others’ wives despite the amazing civility of his own tolerant Dutch wife, mother to two compulsively excelling children, a woman who made homemade jam at the slightest excuse. Gallagher who didn’t deserve any woman, his name rather more like sputum: Ga-lla-gher! More than an affair: it was as if Mary had guerrilla-conscripted Vic to a life of polyamory.

  In court, finishing up, Vic sees that what he has just said might work against him so he finally offers them what they expect: it was self-defense. Look, we had an argument, the heat of the moment, the usual man-woman thing, you know? all this his attempt to try to speak contemporese when their faces have already snapped shut and they will let him undo no early bravado, refusing to understand Vic and his European flair.

  Already his fame, as the judge has hinted, works against him: Vic can feel fame smothering him. And of course no notoriety ever could compensate for the cuckold’s gutburning shame, fame’s eviscerated cousin in which your skin peels and your innards spill out. Could he now write a whole new corpus on shame?

  Be indifferent to your enemies.

  On the one hand, sure, he had probed Mary for all the grimy details. Had Gallagher held her by the back of her neck, her hair spilling over? Had he loved the obtrusion of her hipbone, her long flanks? Had he called Mary at work, murmuring? Had they eased into familiarity like a married couple? Or had it always stayed new between them, seventeen years fueled by the dynamo of taboo?

  Over my dead body. Vic could understand that idea from every direction, Mary and Gallagher frolicking over his body, Vic’s entrails powering their dance, making him need to end the unwilling troika. Would Gallagher one day contact him? Unlikely when the man was a flame-haired narcissist. Had the man shed tears over the Mary now denied him? Or could he have understood any part of Vic’s act? The guy probably at that exact moment was still kneeling somewhere, licking up to someone in the faculty dining room, just like Vic on his one knee during yet another all-prison alarm.

  If Mary had been just a bit forthcoming—but Vic couldn’t blame her. Still, if Vic had known just a few more details, she would not have unmastered him: rather, Vic would have mastered this new idea of Mary as a cheater, Vic her cuckold, and his motor neurons might not have excited him in such untoward fashion. But right after the most vicious part of her confession she had chosen to stay mum, saying little. Just as if, a young immigrant in his early twenties, a new parishioner of America, someone had prevented Vic fr
om studying in the low-cost college in Los Angeles or as if every book he’d tried prying open had remained glued shut. Mary and her Gallagher were keeping him from knowledge when knowledge is experience and experience is ultimately innocence, as he used to tell his own daughter and her friend, encouraging them to steal out for one of their nighttime walks.

  During Vic’s turn in court, he tried explaining how little he had chosen his horrible act.

  “I loved her,” he said. “My instinct to save her was strong. Say a car had threatened to run over Mary, even after her truth-telling, I still would have jumped before the car, I still would have sacrificed my life to spare hers. Without hesitation. In this case, however, her idea of reality could coexist neither with my own nor with the past of our reality.

  “And given what I used to believe about what happened after death—namely, nothing—would I have chosen nullity for either of us? No.

  “And though I’m not proud of sadism, I still would have preferred her to live through the torturous screw of realization so she would at least feel what I did. So that at the depth of her womb she would know the nastiness of her deceit, the grim fact of all she undid by cuckolding me.

  “Especially when one of the best parts of being a father was the romance of laying a seed in my own velvet, the womb like a marriage ring, despite creation always being vaster than its players. You could say we found a higher redemption in my daughter.

  “And my daughter, past the baby stage but before self-consciousness came at night to murder the child I used to hold dear—somewhere around age eight, I think—my child showed me that thing we could call the sparkle of creation, the way she held duty and independence, whimsy and intelligence at a perfect fulcrum. Some of you must be parents. Tell me there’s anything better than that?”

  After he spoke, the jury looked hung in space, even more unconvinced.

  “Mister Mahler, do you feel regret?” the assistant prosecutor had asked.

  “Well, regret kills,” he had answered, honestly.

  The lead prosecutor had then tried to make it seem as if, in right mind, Vic had chosen to murder Mary.

  What did they want from him? For him to say outright that he was a bad person? Would it put their own demons to rest? He actually asked them this: what do you want? Knowing they would turn a deaf ear. Of course Vic, whose shaggies had shown him how much people needed to believe in chimeras, understood why they needed to call him evil.

  “I tried,” he said, before his last-ditch attempt when he chose to single out his daughter’s friend Rose, asking her to stand and speak for him. He could have been gobbling and hooting since whatever he said mattered little to any of them. “Just like all of you. I did the best I could.”

  TWENTY-SECOND OF DECEMBER, 2008 10:04 A.M.

  Lana stands in the corridor plugging her ears against the fire alarm, watching the guard named Javier speak energetically with the prisoner said to be her father though she cannot recognize Vic in this bag of flesh-encased bones. This bag cannot rise by himself from his bed: his shins are blue-mottled sticks, his hips a child’s, his torso bends forward.

  “Try again?” says the guard.

  A moving, dancing, gesticulating skeleton. She sees Vic’s back; he doesn’t see her.

  The guard lays a hand on the skeleton’s shoulder and then bursts from the cell, locking it behind and pulling the door shut. The fire alarm has stopped, at least for now.

  Lana asks: “Is this a fire drill or some real threat?”

  “Look, if this were just a drill, you couldn’t be standing in here.” When he sees Lana’s confusion, he explains. “They were about to turn you away. We had an emergency? Basically I abandoned protocol to let you in. He scratched you off the list. Now we got to get you out. They’ll call it a security threat. Or I’m not sure what, but no one’s answering the radio and Mahler wasn’t on Cell Block A’s count.”

  “Okay,” she says, unconvinced.

  “It means officers will come looking. I let you in not knowing the full scope. I thought I’d get you in and out. Not exactly the best time for a family meeting. He has to get to the courtyard.”

  “Okay.”

  “Because say it’s a real threat and the wind picks up—I’ll need to call for a gurney. One of his legs doesn’t work well. Anyway he’s not in his best mind right now.”

  “I can help.”

  “I’m sorry, too much to explain. Please come with me now.”

  “You can’t break protocol? Just once?” she asks, looking into this guard’s pretty face and understanding his gentleness has been a boon to her father. The sirens have been replaced by a series of low warning beeps. “You’ve been working with my father how long?”

  “Six months? Four?” The guard cracks a smile for the first time. He is too pretty for her taste, inspiring admiration more than seduction. “We know each other some.” He waits. “Guy’s been living to see you. Why I let you in. But my mistake. They’ll write me up. You should probably exit now.”

  She wants to cry at this man’s gentleness. “Just for a second?”

  He signals with his shoulder the camera behind them in the corridor.

  “No, I see.” She tries for patience as bulwark against the beeps. “But if there’s a fire, who’s looking? Unusual circumstances, right?”

  “He’s been refusing his meds,” he tells her. “He doesn’t want to eat. Yesterday he got an infection from his catheter but won’t take his antibiotics. The infection puts him in another world. I think he’s saying his goodbyes.”

  “You’ve been good to him,” says Lana, surprised to find some tears coming out of her eyes. For years she hasn’t cried. Now she loses some control and can’t help it: she shifts, awkward on the saucer device in her boot. It upsets her that Vic, with whom she hasn’t talked for years, refuses medicine. Finally she manages: “Sorry. He was lucky. I mean to get you.”

  The guard considers. “Okay,” he says. “We’ll call it emergency procedures. Don’t know what the hell’s going on.”

  She taps the gate closed behind her, hearing the click of the lock. The face Vic turns on her is deep-set and scary, purple bruises around eye sockets. His fingers fly to his cheek in salute, bloated violet stubs with yellowed rot ripping away from the tips. She tries to smile. He looks into her and then says: “Nice to see you.”

  “You too.”

  “Here in this library our parents gave us.”

  “Oh.” She had not counted on the possibility of his mind being so hazy. Or is he tricking her? Does he really think she is some long-lost sister?

  But he looks sincere. “That nice fellow outside helps service the library. Come, sit near me. Soon I have to get dressed for the wedding.”

  “Whose is that?”

  “They didn’t tell you I’m marrying the daughter of the priest? I thought you came to help. Or who’d you come to see?”

  “We don’t have a lot of time. I basically came for—” For what? For pardon as much as for anything. She sits in the chair by his bed, deep in the oyster waft of old male urine, there with her tentmate, jailmate, cradlemate. As if scratching herself, she reaches down inside her boot, under her heel. Together they are building a stone idol out of this moment, one that cannot be taken down, though she is not yet sure the proportions of the idol’s face. “How could I help?”

  “Don’t lift a finger in my direction.” He surveys this effect. “Or tell me what kind of grandparent I have been to you.”

  His optic—or trick—has shifted, though the gaze stays aquarelle, too watery for guile.

  “You know, I wasn’t sure you would recognize me,” she says, unready to take up any gambit while still sorting her own. “Right away, I mean.”

  “Of course I do. Come closer.” He squints as if to better render the portrait. “You’re the good nurse. You haven’t done anything bad. Today’s the day of the ceremony, isn’t it?”

  She pushes the chair just a few inches closer, obedient. He could not be joking,
not now. Or could this be some last frictionless duplicity? You mock life enough, you gain eternal life, he said once, back when he had been a wholly other person, living a wholly different truth. He used to shift quickly and was known for being a trickster but never like this: old Vic never went so abruptly from being present to being so crazily specific. She cannot help but cough from the smoke now threading near the hall ceiling, a grisaille in which float calipers and a league of tiny heads, the guard outside urgent in his beckoning, waving at her with one of her crutches.

  “What ceremony?” asks Lana.

  “The one in the great temple. Kick against the pricks, as the good book says. Today’s not the day? Help me. You look intelligent. We can figure this out. You know, this is the day when they convert goats to cows. Something about the mother cow.”

  “Vic. Papa. Are you confused?”

  “No,” he says, patient. The old scientist comes to the fore, under a skin rubbery and stretched, through eyes watery caverns. “You really don’t know about the ceremony?”

  They are in tune, just this second. “I came to talk to you about your daughter,” she says.

  “I do have one. Is she coming?” He waits. A light in his eye, confessing. “You know sometimes I escape from here?”

  Lana’s head shakes, a congenial tremor with no real mandate.

  “I go with colleagues. Quite friendly. We go to a hospital to talk among ourselves as if we’re back in the medieval era.” His chest puffs. “My colleagues and I are working out the names of god.”

  She tries smiling.

  “The work’s going well. Terrific. Quite pleasant.”

  “That’s great.”

  “You know my daughter’s not a bad person. She’s an angel. But she never visited.”

  “Never?”

  “Maybe. Were you there?” He peers up from that deep-set brow with suspicion.