“And you want me to take this rabbit.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“It isn’t mine anyway.”
“What should I do with it?”
“Give it back to Mike Schoen.”
“I don’t know him.”
“You will, you’ll find him and give him his rabbit and marry him, you two will put the rabbit on your mantel.”
“I don’t want the stupid rabbit.”
“It’s not stupid, it’s my finest accomplishment.”
“Why are you helping me rob your house?” she said in a tone that amounted to a confession that she was not robbing it, if Karl was to be trusted to decipher what tones amounted to.
“It’s burdensome to me,” he said.
“Why?”
“I own it.”
“I thought you said your mean stepfather owns it.”
“I didn’t say he was mean, what makes you think that?”
“Look at you.”
“He’s not the one who beat me up.”
“Yes, but you’re the sort of person who gets beaten up because he has a mean stepfather, which, as a grown man, you should get over.”
“Only people with happy childhoods have free will,” he said. “I own this house with him. My mother, when she was dying—”
“How old were you?”
“Sixteen. She asked me to stay with him and care for him.”
“Why?”
“He’s sick.”
“Your mother asked you to live here and look after him until he dies, in exchange for which you will own the house and any other assets in her estate.”
“How did you know that?”
“I’m intuitive. Why does it happen that the dying person extracts some untenable promise from the living person, and this always happens with the dying person lying in bed and the living person sitting in a chair, and the dying person hates the living person for living, so much that she’s going to cast a pall over the living person’s life by making him do something for a long time that he doesn’t want to do, and the living person agrees to it as if that’ll make the dying person somehow not die? This is just bad faith on both people’s parts.”
“Get out of my house!”
“Well, I wish you wouldn’t yell at me, it’s hurtful.”
Was that a tear in her eye? “I truly hate that you’re in my house and I’m drinking this tea you made me. Whatever awful thing you’re going to do to me, I wish you’d do it already because the anticipation is increasingly worrisome and unpleasant.”
TWO
THE FRONT WINDOWS OF HIS CAR were down and Sylvia Vetch stuck her feet out the passenger side. She’d rolled her jeans above her knees. Her calves and shins were beautifully unhaired, pale and shinily moisturized against the cracked beige vinyl of the old Volvo door’s inner wall. Karl Floor drove them down a road in his town near the coast, the lush scent of swamp grass in the air, dust, dunes, tiny seashells brittle and bleached, the old engine’s moribund racket, its unwholesome light gray exhaust, a poem of going to the beach. The upstairs TV wobbled in the center of the backseat. The smaller stolen items on its left and right seemed to pray to it. The cracked-open parts of Karl’s face slowly came together. His wounds were not so bad. He didn’t know how bad they were. He didn’t know how bad these last few hours were, in the small scheme of his own happiness, the very clinging to which had thus far in his life brought about its opposite, so screw caution and the knowledge that this woman was acting on behalf of a goal or person or principle to which or to whom he was probably an impediment, and that what she intended was inimical not only to his happiness but also to his material comfort and physical health. He wanted her, there, he wanted her, in so many words. He did not want her for anything—sex, children, lifelong companionship, to be shattered by. He drove nowhere with her for nothing.
Imagine, then, their arrival, after a hard hour on a gorgeous beach, at a house physically compromised by neglect, painted wood-color by beach weather. A party or something like it may have been under way. “This is Stony,” someone said. “This is Rich, John, Jen, Jan, Tom, Rob, Arv.” Karl’s head was a mass of uncooled lava held together by a soft yellow hat. Stony, someone with long hair about thirty years old—Karl liked to establish a person’s numbers in case this would make up for the not-knowing of which he seemed to possess a greater amount than most—led him by the hand from one room to the next. They were two men holding hands at a loud party in a messy house, Stony’s hand large and dry and strong, palm somehow curved away from Karl’s and representing knowledge about Stony Karl would never have. They arrived at a sturdy metal vat of beers. “Have one.”
“Can’t.”
“Why?”
“My head.”
“Mine.” Stony pointed at his: his long and thick and gently wavy chestnut hair, of which far more care had been taken than of this house, hung partway down his white long-sleeved button-down shirt, which he wore untucked, and which was more than just a normal business shirt, who knew how? To his face there was a lined handsomeness almost on a par, though it creeped him out to think of it, with the smooth loveliness of that of Vetch.
Karl drank beer from a brown bottle in a room he understood by its rotting-broccoli smell to be the kitchen, with a grimy and sticky linoleum floor that people his age with more talent for nesting—Karl had been to their homes—would have spent days pulling up to reveal the valuable old hardwood floor beneath. Tipping the bottle and his poor enormous head back, he leaned against a counter’s edge and found a horizontal line of unknown wet transferred to the back of his cotton chino pants just below the lonely belt loops. He was comforted by the rank dishevelment of the house, but not by the ugly unimaginativeness of his own clothes as he now abruptly perceived them in contrast to those of Stony, though he did enjoy his own yellow hat. Dance music to be known by the masses a few months hence came softly from another room.
“Has he tried the goulash?” That was Arv, he thought (twenty-eight), who had appeared along with Jen. Sylvia Vetch was gone.
“Don’t give him the goulash, give him the dentice,” Stony said, “which I adapted from a recipe by Nigella Mantovani, though mine is more authentic because I understand the pared-down purity of true southern Italian cooking. You have to start with excellent ingredients of an extreme freshness.”
“The dentice! Oh, the dentice!” said Arv, whose haircut and clothes, like Karl’s, were wrong for the room, and whose face was like putty with air holes, but Arv came on strong now with his impression of an Italian accent—of a whole Italian person, fingers bunched and moving rhythmically beneath his chin, loving the dentice. “Is-a so fresh, the fish, she is-a caught this-a morning in-a the river behind-a my grandafadda his-a house. He caught-a with-a his-a own-a hand-a. No sauce. No oil. No pan. In-a Milano they put-a the sauce is-a stupid-a sauce a rich-a man he make-a the sauce. No. My grandafadda he no shit-a on-a the dentice widda sauce. Mangia.”
Arv was sweating, his shoulders hunched. Stony had a relaxed posture and elongated neck. He didn’t do accents and didn’t need to. He stood still in composed silence and said with only the contraction of a few eye muscles that he took the mockery as a form of violence he would feel justified in responding to with his own far more severe violence, one memorable enough to dissuade Arv or anyone from mocking him ever again.
And somehow Karl ate a whole fish that was bland and contained an odd, bitter nonfish taste he knew would cause him trouble of an unusual kind.
He swooned. He didn’t know he’d swooned. “Someone had blundered,” someone said, either inside of Karl or not inside of him.
“Let’s take a tour of the house.” Arv had him by one arm and Stony painfully by the other, evidently Vetch surrogates, the former hairy, the latter smooth. Where was Vetch? She had abandoned him. His goose was cooked. “This is this room,” Stony said, back in a room Karl had passed through on his way to the beer an hour ago or more—seventy-five minutes, approximate
ly, or ninety. Three long, faded floral couches, cushions lastingly depressed, stood side by side by side against a wood-paneled wall like the wall Karl had at “home.” People Karl’s age sat on them, stood on them, bounced on them, lay on them, one’s head on another’s leg. The music was louder now. Other people, also mostly young, danced or stood on the room’s patchwork of soggy, ancient, indoor-outdoor carpeting. “And this is this room,” Arv said as they all three stepped down into a slightly sunken octagon with a parquet floor whose design they said was a secret sign. “Don’t touch the candle on the floor in the center of the star.” This room was speckled with people, sitting with drinks or laughing faceup on the floor. One of them was almost her but turned out not to be at the last second. Karl’s—“Karl’s”—TV was in there too, on a shelf on a wall at the height of his eyes. Stony, Arv, and Karl were on the TV, the backs of their heads were, as seen from above. Karl turned to see the camera above and behind him, didn’t, and turned back to see the back of his head, turning back. “Someone had blundered,” someone said again, not Stony, not Arv, and Karl looked around for Stony’s eyes. He was dizzy thanks to fish, fists, Vetch, her men—he thought of them as hers—her party, its music, its crowd and their smells, the expressionistic dilapidation of the house. Stony’s eyes found Karl’s, on the way up the two steps out of the octagonal room. The left side of Karl’s left eye still registered the dull and pulsing glow of his own TV at the moment he became aware that Stony’s eyes now held his own more forcefully than his hand had been holding Karl’s arm a moment before. His face, up close and still, was not as uniformly tan as it had seemed in motion and at a remove. He was older than Karl had thought. The creases in his face and shifts in hue seemed not to be accidental but crafted by Stony, confirming a remark Karl had heard that at a certain age a man had to take charge of his own face. Arv was funny, voluble, and loud, but Stony in his quietude shone with an aggressive personal luster, and now, without touching Karl, assaulted him. Karl was looking too, but Stony was looking more. Stony used not just his eyes but his nostrils, mouth, and pores to look into Karl. Who was Stony? How could he do this? God should not have put the face on the human body where He did; it would have been more useful, less in danger of violation if placed elsewhere, in many locations, perhaps. The face’s parts should not all have been bunched in one spot but dispersed: the mounting of so many crucial sense organs nearly on top of one another made the face the lone cosmopolis in the body’s attenuated nation of volcanoes, deserts, and small farms. The conversation of the pairs of eyes went on, but Stony’s eyes wouldn’t let Karl’s eyes talk. Stony’s filibustered, shouted their interrogation. Karl was more disheartened by what Stony’s eyes were doing to his soul than by what his students’ fists had done to his face. He knew the particular way that this vigorously not-nice man was looking at him had to be connected to the reason the man’s beautiful friend had materialized in his house that afternoon.
And then he didn’t know anything, including where he was, geographically or otherwise, nor could he calculate the angle of his body to the earth. “Someone had blundered,” and she was upon him, but not in that way. More in a health care way, mental health care, but straddling him in mental health care, riding him in emergency mental health care, concerned, rhythmic resuscitation in rose-colored T-shirt and rolled-up jeans, on a forest path perhaps, with light, soft sticks beneath and a latticework of leaves above, black against the purple sky, and others nearby, in pairs, and similar in form: one down, the other up; one sick, the other not; one extracting promises the other could not keep.
THREE
TWENTY THOUSAND YEARS after a slab of ice the size of France had made the beach he now woke up on in sodden clothes, Karl assessed the feel of having had all but a thin crust of flesh, hair, and skin scraped out of him by Stony and whatever series of people and events—now compressed into a red, wet bolus of vague sense memory—had come after Stony in the night. The beach and Karl were alike in being relatively young yet colonized, built upon, much used, depleted, and temporary. Where was his hat? Someone had stolen his hat. An individual or group of individuals had absconded with his head covering. A man of Karl’s light skin and facial challenges would do well to have something useful on his head of a late spring day, and he had done a good job of keeping his on his on the whole trip till now—well, not till now but till a time between his last moment of knowing he had it and now, and he hoped that moment would be returned to him just as he hoped his hat would, especially as the location of the two—time and hat—likely were connected. The hat was soft and of a faded yellow that could not have been arrived at by manufacture. The brim was stiff enough to keep the sun off, but not so stiff as to jut militarily ahead of him into the world. The band had an orange tartan pattern unrelated to Karl’s people, who were from the Balkans. The whole effect was of an inoffensively monstrous and immortal daffodil. Where was his hat? Where was the house? Where was a car, a road, a tree to give him shade? Where was Karl himself? Sitting, not yet ready to stand, on a hot beach with low and mostly dead scrub brush, the horizon either distant or obscured. Dead brown sea things had been cast up everywhere on the shore, a rough night for the beach as for Karl. What was his shoe situation? Moistened and sand-filled.
“Dude!” someone said—Arv, he deduced. Till now, Karl had hoped one of the modest consolations of being a pariah would be to complete life never having been called “dude.” “I’ve got gatorade.” Arv put the jar to Karl’s lips. The substance’s sugary disgustingness flooded him, ran down his chin and onto his chest, where its bright and indelible dye made a stain on his off-white shirt. “Don’t be uptight about the shirt”: Arv. Arv’s face right now, all up in Karl’s, unknowingly explained to Karl why anyone would ever want to punch anyone’s face. And yet however it might simplify one’s life to do so, one could not discount even Arv. Did not the row of retail shops on Main Street kneel for Arv as for all humanity after two shots of tequila at The Dinghy? He now walked too fast along the beach, squat, furry, curly-haired, hunching forward into life, feet splayed at right angles when he took each step as if they had argued and would go their separate ways.
“Would you please slow down, Arv?” Arv smelled, no worse than Karl, but Arv had slept indoors. “Where are we going, Arv?”
“People like to put it at the end like that with that little free-floating sarcasm, ‘Where are we going, Arv?’ like my name itself is the punch line of a joke.” Arv in his quotation had made his face look beat up à la Karl and had done well too with Karl’s high and reedy voice. “People think I’m just a clown,” he said, and reprised last night’s dentice performance.
“Rough night?” Karl asked.
“The usual. How about you?”
“I don’t know.”
“So you always do that?”
“Do what?”
Arv smiled. “It’s all right, no one gets to stop being lonely without being violated. Breakfast?”
“I don’t see a building anywhere.”
“See that parking lot over there, and that car?”
He saw his own old golden Volvo, abandoned, door open, on a small patch of sandy black asphalt. “Did I leave that there like that?”
“No.”
“You’re driving my car now?”
“We’re pretty communal, down at the House. Maybe you’re not ready to be one of us yet but you sure acted like it last night. Do you find Volvo has a dirty ring to it?”
“‘The House’? ‘One of us’? Is this a cult?”
Arv laughed and slapped Karl’s shoulder three times. Karl felt fraternal sympathy with someone who, not sure how to be a man, hoped the use of manhood’s physical forms would help.
Arv pulled him along toward the car. “Sylvia told us about your situation. Maybe we can help you with it.”
“What situation?”
“You still look thirsty. You want some water?”
“Yes, please.”
Arv gave him a mauve and translucent plasti
c water jar whose screw top was attached to its neck by a bendable plastic armature, as children’s mittens are attached to their coat sleeves. The jar looked to be communal and of questionable cleanliness. Karl thought of pouring the water into his mouth so the jar wouldn’t touch his lips, but drank the normal way. “What situation?”
“You know, the house you live in.”
“My house?”
“Ownership is burdensome.”
“Have you ever owned anything?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not talking about a toothbrush.” As he said this, it occurred to him with horror that these people shared a toothbrush.
“I was once in danger of owning something big that my parents were going to give me,” Arv said, “but I successfully avoided it.”
“How did you avoid it?”
“By being disowned.”
“Why?”
“The usual reason middle-class parents disown their son. Have some more water.”
“I’m good.” Karl was not good. Sand was deep in the gelatinous fabric of his facial scabs. His cranium was a helmet of bone two sizes too small for his brain. His shoes chafed, his legs ached as if he’d run all night, his back was in knots, he smelled like anchovies and rotting pineapple. They arrived at his car.
You Were Wrong Page 2