Eccentric Circles

by Larry Duberstein

  “You do not.”

  “I do, I do,” he said, by now openly fleeing toward the shining street and the high chill shimmering moon. He had a sudden infusion of terror about Donna, nothing to do with legs or that, it just seemed she held the power to bring him down, like an anchor; this wondrous new equanimity somehow depended on his staying alone with the letters.

  He was fine, he was solid, afloat—solidly floating toward his car—but it was very tenuous. He did not want to see the wrong sights, or invite the wrong images in. The evening was brassy and right, full of fine autumn swirl, and the call of his own warm bed back home was sufficient, even delicious in prospect. Kate was beautiful, the world was surely beautiful—life was, dammit—and sliding under the steering wheel Doug realized he was still grinning like a fool. Hours. And right then he was hit with one huge heavy shot to the heart, a slab of iron wedged under his breastbone, that flashed an unmistakable message of distress and oblivion to all his organs, but he sat, and breathed, and let it pass.

  The engine rasped and caught, and Doug wasted no time, leaping through the carcluttered intersection like a salmon splashing up against the violent white water, loud happy music booming in his ears.

  Domestic Tranquility

  It began with a nasty screaming bout one Sunday morning when their son was at a friend’s house. Neither of them could recall anymore what had inspired it, and of course it would never have happened at all had Robert been at home.

  But the screaming had grown worse in the car—much worse—and it was there that Karen lost it altogether. Literally foaming at the mouth, she started sweeping objects off the dashboard, whipping them out the window. A tin of Band-aids, the old chipped scraper, map fragments—flinging them backhand one after another and shrieking until finally, inevitably, she pitched George’s 4-way screwdriver.

  This was the only tool he owned, really, at any rate the only one he ever used; if the screwdriver couldn’t get it done, then George couldn’t either. It had been weathering agreeably on the dash for years. When he saw it go, George stopped the car, backed up, and spent the next twenty minutes sifting through the roadside brush. The brush yielded plenty of treasure—bottles and cans and faded paper—but it did not yield up the 4-way. It was impossible to prolong the search with Robert waiting for them, and really it seemed hopeless anyhow. At least Karen had quieted down.

  It festered, however. George feigned good nature for the boy, naturally, and went about a Sunday’s business of clawing his way through the newspaper, tending the yard. They even had a drink that afternoon with the Carlsons next door and though George was far from scintillating, he was certainly pleasant. Karen herself would never have guessed how it was festering.

  It wasn’t just the loss of the 4-way, it was the stupidity and malice in her action. If George “needed” to kick a wall, he would still take care not to break his own toe, or seriously damage the plaster. Surely one could express anger, even rage, without suffering total blackout. That was for psychopaths—the ones who could appear so clean-cut and normal in court yet in a wild rage had taken six lives some icy night last February.

  Even so, George was surprised to awaken in the same dark state of mind on Monday. Again he passed, rushing off to work, but clearly there had been no real emotional resolution. Something as trivial as this spat should simply dissolve into the morass of their lives and for Karen it had—whoosh and gone for her, always, like the screwdriver—she’d left it all behind at the scene of the crime. And hers was without question the healthier response; he dared not even broach a displeasure which it was incorrect to harbor still and whose disbursement, moreover, just might start her screaming again.

  The solution came to him at his desk, a sure way to dissipate this cold unwelcome fury. An eye for an eye, someone at the office had said in some regard, a tossed-off saw of the sort no one even hears: but why not an eye? Why not rough justice? Karen had a particular wire whisk in her kitchen that was irreplaceable in the exact same way the 4-way was, namely that there were other whisks in the world but this one was hers, it pleased her out of habit and familiarity. The ones she could buy were somehow minutely different, were at the very least different whisks. Where the punishment so precisely fit the crime, could there not be justice for all? And without a lot of hubbub.

  Late that night he slid the whisk into his briefcase; next day, downtown, slid it out and flipped it into a blue dumpster with a most gratifying clangor. He knew he was partaking of the selfsame foolishness and waste he deplored in her action, and he also knew some shame. Karen had been malicious in broad daylight, as it were. The daylight here was broad enough, but George was skulking nonetheless. Shouldn’t he be doing this to her face, in her face, both in fairness and for full impact?

  Well, no, this was best. The grudge he harbored was “wrong” and the point therefore was not to dramatize but rather to discharge it, to work through it without making matters any worse. And the pragmatic approach did seem to pan out: by the time he came home the air was clear, the smile he had for Karen was real, the roast she had cooked for him was delicious, and it seemed the dust of that roadside lunacy had truly settled. Their life together could resume as dull and cheerful as ever.

  George didn’t mind dull. He accepted and even liked it (as he saw it, a pleasant orderly life would have to be a little dull) and moving toward the weekend and a cookout with the Carlsons, he was positively radiant with resolution. Friday night, however, he couldn’t find Barrett’s Chess Gambits in its customary niche on the mantel and was about to hassle Robert for moving it when the truth belatedly struck home—Karen. She had figured out about the whisk and this was her return salvo. She had taken his favorite chess book and burned it, or wrapped up last night’s bluefish in its hallowed pages. The battle was joined.

  For George, guerilla warfare had its delights and its nasty surprises; on the whole it suited. He particularly liked the quiet of it, and the creative latitude it gave him to strike as he chose and when he chose. Indeed, he waited fully a week before flushing her grandmother’s moth-eaten silk hankie down the toilet. The hideous rag was worthless, of course, yet in selecting it George felt he had met all the requirements of the contest, of which (to his way of thinking) there were three. The choice must punish, clearly, and it must also be slightly—yet only slightly—malicious. And thirdly, the condition most easily met, virtually an automatic, it should entail idiotic wastefulness. Karen had set these standards and if there was to be edification for her, the standards would have to be upheld.

  And so they were. There never came an escalation; this remained a small war, a ground war fought with conventional weapons in purely guerilla fashion. No peace talks commenced because no declaration of hostilities had ever been made or even vaguely acknowledged. Neither of them once alluded to any missing item, so neither indulged a visible emotion over any loss, though each object was held dear and beyond all value. The understanding, the contract, was so complete that Robert had no sense of roaming freely in the militarized zone; the boy felt perfectly safe.

  There were aspects that began to bother George as the weeks went by. Now the battle lines were drawn, for one, wherein lay victory? Or failing victory, resolution? In the beginning, victory had not been a goal; Karen had erred and George had sought to adjudicate, or at least offset, the error. Yet from her first retaliation (Barrett’s Chess Gambits) Karen had shown a disinclination to truck with Justice. It was as though she did not agree she was wrong about the screwdriver (not even after quiet reflection!) and therefore incurred no retribution. It was this terrible, untenable position that had made the game into something more and more like war, cruel and partisan.

  This too bothered George, for at the outset there had been an agreeable lightness, a humorous edge to the proceedings, as though they were having fun, almost. It was not dull. Now the fun had gone from it and a distinct grimness had settled on them in its stead. The awful screaming, he realized, had silently lasted, for months.

 
Larger questions arose. Should it end, could it end, and if not what did it mean? Must they enlist in joint therapy? Would they need to divorce? What was this? Most women who were murdered, George read, were done in by their husbands; was this how that came about?

  One night, trailing 5–4 on the Scoreboard, he finally imagined an ending to the awful impasse. He would counter the loss of his old fraternity lavaliere by deepsixing Karen’s desk calendar sometime in the next day or two. Then, with the score knotted at 5–5, and before anything else could happen, he would open the discussion he’d had a hundred times in his mind.

  “Isn’t this getting pretty stupid?” he would say. Or: “Aren’t we both being awfully stubborn?” But say it with affection somehow, say it without a trace of vindictiveness.

  Unfortunately, he knew—knew—what she would say in reply: “You started it.” He would need a good response to that—something vague and nonpartisan, if possible something affectionate—most definitely something other than, “No, you started it.” The fact that he could imagine no conclusion to the dialogue had helped to keep it, thus far, from beginning; but they would just have to play it by ear. Christ, maybe it would even end in wonderful heedless laughter and sex, the way their fights always used to end.

  But first must come the tying heist. The desk calendar was a good choice (Karen was so totally dependent on those scribble-filled pages that he almost hated to do it) and perhaps it was the excitement that kept George awake, then vexed his threadbare sleep with dreams. He dreamt he was creeping toward her desk when the room suddenly exploded with light and there she stood, fierce and resolute in rippling bandoleros studded with bright silver bullets.

  Too shaky to act in the morning, George went to work but came home early with a touch of late summer flu. Karen brought a pot of tea and sat on the bed with him watching the news. The Red Sox lost by a run in the ninth. “Another tough loss,” he groaned, and Karen consoled him: “Maybe it should be like tennis. You know—where you have to win by two?”

  She smiled and went back downstairs and George knew he would never get a shot at the calendar. He knew in his heart she had changed the rules, was in the den right now rummaging among his topographical survey maps. It was not her turn, but he knew she was going anyway, going out of turn. Win by two.

  He didn’t even care; had no more stomach for trouble; knew for certain that defeat would be far less serious in fact than it was in prospect. It was over, or it would be, and as soon as he shook off this germ their lives could return to normal, to the status quo ante bellum. That was how it was with wars, they never changed a damn thing but they could kill you just the same.

  The Golden Gate Funeral March

  Ma might have said it as a joke, just to give us all something to laugh over and herself to relax a bit, she might have never meant a thing by it. But then again she might have, and I wasn’t taking any chances: if it was her wish to go to the Golden Gate Bridge, then that’s exactly where we would take her. It’s a long way of course, and the Boss had already come a long way (up from Bluefield last week) but we figured just do it, so we did. Got packed, set Ma up in the back seat as tender as possible under the circumstances, and simply wung it out across the Thruway to Buffalo and Points West.

  Did I say we’re starting out from Schenectady? That’s where Ma has been living, just the other side of Schenectady in Cohoes. I keep a room in Duanesburg, mainly because with both Pa and the Boss gone south, someone had to stay close by. Anyway I took Pa’s job with the turnpike when he went off, and Duanesburg’s as good as any in that respect. I wouldn’t want to be right in the city, like when we first came up. I was fourteen then and we all came up because there was supposed to be jobs in Troy and there wasn’t, but in Schenectady Pa got taken at the turnpike authority.

  Troy, Greece, Rome, Utica, Ithaca. They got all those, which I believe come from an ancient myth, and then they got the Indian ones, which I personally like, such as Cheektowaga and Irondequoit, and Seneca. Buffalo and Niagara too, I guess, though I prefer the ones you get less often—Tonawanda and Oneonta and so on. When we first got north Pa told me they were actually all reservations (with the real Indians in their wigwams drinking liquor) and I did believe it, as I was a kid. But Pa may have believed it too, as he was no special wizard and someone may have just told it to him for truth. Of course in time we saw some of those towns and saw they were like any other, with your stores and gas-ups and mainstreet lunchrooms.

  Anyhow we blew out to Buffalo like nothing that first day with Ma, did it in under five hours and kept right on going to the Points West, though it was rough and cold along that Lake Erie with no heater in the Boss’ Chevy. We were shooting for Cleveland, maybe even Chicago if we stuck to plan, but Boss was tired and we both were turning blue in the breeze, this being November.

  “You know something, Jerry?” he said. “We are right this minute closer to Bluefield than we are to Schenectady. That is right.”

  “Don’t feel right,” I said, meaning how cold it was.

  “But doesn’t this start to feel stupid?”

  “Can’t argue with Ma.”

  “No, but I can see doing it different. Why not take her home? Head south right now—or in the morning, whatever.”

  “To Bluefield instead?”

  “Sure.”

  “Boss, come on. We been pushing it too hard, that’s all. Let’s find some coffee and some food. This one’s my treat.”

  “I’m for that.”

  That didn’t mean he changed his mind. He’d be for it no matter, just as a pit stop. But I know Boss, he wouldn’t change his mind. All the way west he’d be convinced we were doing this wrong, all the way west he’d talk about turning back. That was just how he had sized it up. Yet by the same token he would never act on it, he’d keep on all the way to Golden Gate cause that was the plan and that was what we had to do.

  We came into one of those HoJo’s where they sell you a two-dollar hot dog and they did have you because you’d go five for the hot dog and another two for coffee at that point. Boss headed straight inside while I hung a moment not knowing what to do with Ma. Leave her in the back seat seemed easiest, yet it felt bad to me. I did it that way, though, reasoning if we brought her inside all kinds of accidents could happen. She was safest, at least, in the back seat.

  Boss was settled in there, sprawled like a drunken lord in fact, burning up a Lucky and already sipping hot coffee. Coming at him across the room I saw him almost as a stranger, especially with his big new moustaches. But definitely he had aged. I hadn’t lived with him like a brother in nearly twenty years yet here was the first moment in all that time I felt apart from him. First time I took stock it was twenty years, for God’s sake. When the years was so like one another (not to mention the days and the hours), time could gain on you far too easy. And this all led by the time I sat down to a snap idea—quit the turnpike authority and get something new going.

  I meditated on this as we ate, the hot dogs and beans with brown bread they have, and except for how nice and warm it was (and how good food could taste, etcetera) we hadn’t a lot to say to each other until it was time to put off from port. Boss was picking at his teeth with a jackknife, which is a nasty habit he’s got, though not half so nasty as when he goes one better. If he comes up against a tough one, like say corn, or steak, you know, he will just take the teeth out and work on them right there on his placemat, casual as a factory girl. So this with the jackknife was not so bad. I think he believed it was a part of his well-being, cause at one time he informed me all the rich men picked their teeth at dinner. I didn’t and don’t know what to make of that and though I did once ask him why it was the case, the Boss answered it was merely an observation, such as the one that dogs will chase cats. He couldn’t tell you why dogs will chase cats, and yet he had seen it often enough to know it for a fact.

  I don’t see that much of Boss these days. He went back to Bluefield after the Army and except for coming up to help with Ma he only co
mes north once a year, at Christmas. Likewise I go down once a year. I always take my vacation in the middle of March and I see him there. Always loved the look of it that time of year, never forgot any of it. I might have gone back myself if not for Ma and my spot at the authority.

  “So will you stay west?” I asked him, opening up a subject partly just to dodge the cold. But I also was thinking, as I mentioned, about quitting my job.

  “I doubt.”

  “Me neither. But where?”

  “What do you mean? Where’s easy. Right back home. This is just an automobile ride to me, Jerry—I wasn’t thinking about the west coast before Ma insisted and I’m not thinking about it now. Just taking her where she wants to be.”

  “You really like it so much still?”

  “I know all the shortcuts.”

  “There’s that. But with Ma gone, we’ll have to think of something, won’t we? I mean, hell, Boss, you’re forty-one.”

  “Don’t remind me.” He grinned when he said that and picked between the front teeth.

  “Well it is true.”

  “All the more reason.”

  “I’ve been thinking of marriage,” I said, maybe surprising myself more than I surprised the Boss.

  “Oh yes? Congratulations, boy. Is the lucky individual anyone I know?”

  “She isn’t even anyone I know, yet. I’m talking about as a thing to do, something I would like to try.”

  “More power,” said Boss. He could get to me with his complacent ideas about life. To him it was all the same.

  “I mean without mentioning your age at all, I’ll turn thirty-five myself next month. And don’t say happy birthday either, you dull son of a bitch.”

  “What the hell is eating at you, boy?”

  “Nothing is. It’s just you never mean anything, you never think a thing through. You ignore it all, and I don’t want to be that kind of ignorant.”