You Were Wrong

by Matthew Sharpe

  EIGHT

  EMPTY HOUSE, WHITE CEREAL BOWL, banana flown in from southern parts, late spring sunshine on the breakfast nook, vague sounds in the street beyond the front wall: Monday morning, halting the weekender’s free fall through time.

  Karl was tired. Walking to school on the tan, granular sidewalk laid down by his municipality, he greeted the sight of the two blond boys coming toward him once again with an inchoate bring-it-on—not the I’d-adore-the-chance-to-kick-your-ass bring-it-on of his nation’s current stepdad, but more in the vein of the more the merrier, his little eagle heart preparing him for death, or even life. They met abreast of the grave of his town’s famous martyred tree, a stone elegy for a European plant that couldn’t tough it out for the long haul in the New World.

  “Good morning, Mr. Floor,” they said.

  Many a seventeen-year-old boy on Long Island in the era of our story had taken pains to limit the number of his facial expressions to five, lest his face assume a shape that corresponded to an un-preapproved feeling that would threaten the coherency of the young man he strove to believe he was. Karl admired the asceticism of making one’s face assume only five shapes, like that of an artist who painted only seascapes, and only in beige, but the formal restriction not only did not help him decipher the content, it further obfuscated it for him, and so he muddled down the street unknowing.

  They flanked him. All three walked toward school. “You don’t have to talk to us if you don’t want to, Mr. Floor,” one of them said. They seemed mild now, and he wondered if their mildness would culminate in a second beat-down. His face could take the punching but his soul abhorred the waiting. The strength not to ask them if they’d hurt him must have come from the black bird heart in his breast; he hoped that it would last him all his days, and wondered how the bird would fare with his.

  So he drifted down the sidewalk in a gauze of uncompleted thoughts, and through the hours and days of work and rest and all the movements of the self through time and space that were neither work nor rest. Larchmont Jones returned home by train. Weeks passed; no Vetch; why not? Vetch, for one, no doubt, and, for two, Karl. He could have found the house whose kitchen he’d been helping her to clean until he’d run from it and her and then run back to both to have the awful moment of the hat; but there were only so many roads Karl could make his thoughts travel on, and he could not make them go down the one called look for her. Weeks passed; no Vetch; but, at a certain point, Stony Stonington.

  “Hi Karl.”

  “You took my hat.”

  “Yes.”

  “Give it back.”

  “I will.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Oh, well, so much, don’t you?”

  Karl did, but didn’t want to have that in common with Stony because Stony was dreadful. And since today was the last day of school, and when Stony found him just now Karl had been walking out the glass-and-steel door of that venerable brick building that he wouldn’t return to for at least two months, and had been acutely dreading the summer that awaited him beyond the door, a terrible transposition happened where for a second or more Stony was summer, and Karl suspected he wasn’t the first person to mistake this man for a season.

  He’d cleared the building and was out in the open now on the concrete by the flagpole, no safe objects in sight. Stony was in front of him and saying something he couldn’t make sense of. The surgery-sharp ambiguity of the behavior at the back of trig of the boys who had punched him once so long ago, as sources of dread go, was as a thimbleful compared with this man and the impending season he stood in for or was.

  “May I give you a lift?” Karl finally understood him to be saying.

  “No thanks, I prefer to walk on such a beautiful day.”

  Like the day he’d been punched, today really was an objectively beautiful day, though its beauty was quite different in kind from that of the other one. That one had featured light-tan-spring-weight-shell weather whereas today fairly demanded the pale blue checked short-sleeve button-down shirt. The air was hotter, the leaves—hardly leaves back then—now moist and verdant, the flowers mashed up in big messes of vivid color, the trees aching with sap. That Stony would stonify all this Karl’s heart rebelled against but was also largely paralyzed by.

  “Mind if I walk with you then?”

  “Yes.”

  “But it’s a free country, right?”

  “Maybe for you.”

  “Have I done something to displease you?”

  “You took my hat and mocked me.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Probably.”

  “I mock everyone.”

  “Great.”

  “We got off on the wrong foot with the hat.”

  “So give it back.”

  “I keep forgetting to bring it.”

  “I know what else.”

  “What?”

  “You ruined summer.”

  “How?”

  “By becoming it.”

  “Maybe, but I’d like to get to know you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re someone new and significant in Sylvia’s life and I’ve known her a long time and care about her.”

  “Haven’t you known Larchmont Jones a long time too?”

  “Yes, but I don’t care about him. Just kidding,” he said, and laughed to prove it.

  With difficulty, Karl looked while walking, listening, and responding. The tailor who had made Stony’s light blue shirt must have worked in collaboration with the deity who had made his long neck, chest, back, arms, face, and wavy chestnut hair. As for Stony’s being summer, an assertion that, Karl noted, he did not contradict, the one who had made him may also have made the sun, air, and trees. By contrast, a weary and alienated Chinese teen had let herself be subsumed by an unfeeling shirt machine in the making of Karl’s blue shirt—and to say blue for both men’s shirts was to suggest that the sky and the surface of an oily puddle that reflected the sky were the same color. And Karl himself had been made not by Stony’s exalted god but by one who had misbehaved and whose punishment was to be required to use second-rate materials and formulas whose result, also factoring in the disgruntlement of the maker, was Karl and people of his ilk, because he’d long ago figured out that the explanation for humanity was not a single all-knowing, all-powerful god but a cadre of man-making gods of different ranks and abilities, and that this business of all men being created equal was, while a noble sentiment, the equivalent in mathematics of saying that all the numbers from one to a billion were equal, i.e., bullshit.

  Trees, cars, street signs, other people’s heads rose up and fell away as he kept pace with Stony down the sidewalk toward his home. If this was Karl’s walk, how had Stony come to set the pace for it?

  “…and so just as she was violating the sacrament of her marriage to my father, she started taking me to services at Francis Xavier in Seacrest, since that’s where her new beau was to be found. And that’s where I first laid eyes on Sylvia, who I know I don’t have to tell you was just an electric thirteen-year-old in her white confirmation dress, I mean that girl was wired for sound and light, and though as a seventeen-year-old I should have been concentrating on older women with more flesh on their bones in terms of whom to find alone in a doorway somewhere, I just couldn’t stop looking at Sylvia. So insolent, so trivial, so capricious, so mercenary, so careless, so hard to touch, so hard to turn—and yet so pretty!”

  They’d come abreast of the little flat stone that always told the same story, the one about the elm tree whose place in the earth it had taken, a heroic tree by the stone’s account, that fought valiantly and alone long after, it must have known, its kind had a future in the land. Had his unwanted companion on this final walk home from school of the year let him stop and contemplate the valiant and vanquished tree in silence as the little stone urged passersby to do, he might have isolated the single thought in his crowded mind that was making him so sad, but instead they walked on down t
he last stretch of sidewalk to his house, the thought lying in the grass somewhere near the stone.

  “…being loved back by her was quite simply the most profound and wonderful experience of my life. If I’d known that doing a little bit of business with her father once I got my M.B.A. would drive her away from me I’d never have done it. So when she came back to me four months ago and told me she loved me, who was I to say I didn’t really sense that same passion from her as before? Anyway, as you can see, this has been a long time coming, and I’d like you to be there to witness it, because you’re in the mix now, for reasons some of which are obvious to me. The dancing in the bar I wasn’t initially too keen on, but let’s face it, you’re not much of a threat.”

  “What dancing?”

  “In the bar.”

  “What bar?”

  “My bar, in Centraldale, in April, the day after the party in the house I rent to her and her friends, where we met.”

  “That was you in that bar?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought that was Clem.”

  “Who’s Clem?”

  “The guy in that bar that day.”

  “That was me.”

  “You own it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And her house?”

  “Yes.”

  They’d arrived at the row of flagstones that led to Karl’s house and bisected its lawn. And perhaps because they had just been speaking of houses, and ownership, they looked at the house and did not speak. Karl’s latest sadness went out now to the house, attached itself to the black shutters, sash windows, gray vinyl siding, and found embedded there many previous of his sadnesses, and some belonging to Larchmont Jones, among all of which his own sadness felt, of course, at home.

  “This is your stop,” Stony said, and Karl turned himself from the house to Stony’s face, where Stony’s eyes had been waiting for him, floodlights blazing through the unprotected windows, exposing the clutter of the rooms. “So can I count on you?”

  “For what?”

  “To be there.”

  “Where?”

  “Krüog Town Hall. I wanted it to be Francis Xavier but Sylvia insisted on a civil ceremony, ironically.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “What I’ve been talking about for the last fifteen minutes.”

  “Which is?”

  “Wow, some witness you’ll make.”

  “Of what?”

  “Our wedding!”

  His afternoon’s brief cohort retreated from him while the blight of that man’s news did not.

  Now that it was too late, he went in search of her. He drove by feel, as Helen Keller had done for years in jokes. He found, miraculously, the gas station he’d once been driven to in this very Volvo by Arv. Luckily, he needed gas. The price of it was high for him, as was the price of everything. He got out of the car and thought he saw, through the glass, at the cash register, the one called Jen, who was in that group that probably knew more about his having wigged out at the party than he himself did, a group he imagined carrying his blacked-out self to the beach on their shoulders in the dark of night because Stony, successfully disguising his malevolence as youthful mischief, had told them to, “And I’ll take his hat!” Not that Karl was a reliable arbiter of morality, but it worried him how, in groups like this and far larger than this, the logic of charisma—the sheer Stoniness of an individual, if you will—could be a substitute for reasoned ethical standards of behavior. He dipped his credit card in the gas pump’s card-dipping area. It read his card and knew things about him even Jen didn’t know. He pumped and was a vortex of products from afar: gas from Saudi Arabia, car from Sweden, shirt from China, card from Cardonia. He did not go to Jen for she would have confused him. He got in his car and circumnavigated the woods through which he’d once taken a shortcut from the gas station to Sylvia’s house and there been hugged by her. The memory of the hug sent a shiver through his beleaguered body from north to south.

  He recognized the blades of swamp grass on the road near the house, though they were older now, or were the children of the blades he’d seen two months ago. He eased the Volvo up the pebbled drive beneath the undescended drawbridge of thick summer tree branches. There was that one gray tree that was still leaning and dying. Sorry, tree. Here came Arv on foot with the forward-leaning Arv gait that made him an inadvertent figure of fun. Sorry, Arv. Arv signaled Karl to roll down his window though it was already down. He wondered if Arv would at some point turn vicious as comedic men sometimes do.

  “She’s a nasty piece of business and strong, too—bites, literally. Save yourself and leave her to Stony, he’s the only one who can handle her,” Arv said, leaning in toward Karl in his car. A plume of ancient halitosis issued from his mouth and enveloped Karl’s head, physically connecting the two men. Arv told Karl he had to go, and went, and Karl drove on. Arv’s remark and the sound each pebble made grinding against its brothers beneath the Volvo wheels and all the trees that lined the drive and everything that had happened in his life till now formed a prelude to the impending encounter.

  She stood as if awaiting him, arms crossed, on the wide modernist front porch with no rails. The summer sun made her black hair shine, and made her pale face and pale, thin, strong arms glow. He had to remind himself she was black. He hadn’t seen her since he’d heard the news, or, of course, that other news. Her ankles were thicker than before. Maybe she was turning into Henrietta Jones as daughters are said to do and would soon be fully black, completing a transformation she’d already begun in his head.

  They did not speak, she did not unfold her arms. They walked toward each other and met in the transitional space that was neither lawn nor driveway but contained elements of both. They did not touch. He stared at her in sorrow and amazement and tried to figure out what she was staring at him in—not happiness, not relaxation. She turned and walked down the hill at the side of the house and into the backyard. He followed her. She went briskly, arms folded, through the backyard and into the woods behind it, eyes front all the while. If the movements of her body had been a form of communication they’d have been a business memo calling for an emergency meeting. Staff must arrive together but have the feeling of being alone. Agenda: urgent yet uncertain. She stopped at more or less the spot she’d hugged him on, a power spot for her, he guessed. She turned and looked at him again. Her arms were crossed in the manner of a clamp on her restless middle. He wanted her to hug him now but knew it was hopeless. They were two people facing one another in a small wooded area with an insurmountable distance between them. Her eyes yelled.

  “Say it,” she said.

  “Don’t talk so loud, I’m right next to you.”

  “Say it.”

  “You’re marrying him.”

  “Now ask your questions.”

  “Why are you marrying him?”

  “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Do you want to?”

  “Of course!”

  “No you don’t.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Really? We’re at the shut up stage?”

  “We done been at the shut up stage.”

  “Oh, right, you’re black now too.”

  “Since you like math: I’m a quarter African, a quarter Indian, a quarter French, a quarter Jew, a quarter Basque.”

  “Wish you’d told me any of this.”

  “Hi, my name is Sylvia and I’m in the upstairs hallway of your house and I’m black and will marry a man you don’t know and won’t like when you do, and your stepfather whom you will try to kill is my father, pleased to make your acquaintance.”

  “Do you love him?”

  “You disappear for two months and ask me that?”

  Karl had always assumed it was other people who disappeared.

  “Why are you marrying him?”

  She abruptly stepped toward Karl, startling him, and thrust her arms to her sides as if to throw the reason she’d agreed to marry Stony down and break it o
n the forest floor. She stepped back, crossed her arms again, gripped her elbows tight.

  “Don’t tell my father.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t tell my mother, if you see her.”

  “Why are you marrying him?”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  He looked down at his body as if to find the hole the news had made in it. He looked back up at her.

  “Put your arms down,” he said.

  Two seconds later, when it occurred to her to protest, she had already obeyed him. She was wearing just a plain old white T-shirt now, but, like anything she wore, it was imbued with Sylvianess. This happened not just with things that were on her but also with things that were near her, like the trees that were behind her, and, from Karl’s vantage, visually touched her.

  “May I touch it?”

  “‘It’?”

  “The pregnancy—the baby—the fetus—your belly.”

  Her answer was to stand still and look away. He slowly brought his palm to rest on the newly swelled place between her sternum and navel. It was softer and warmer than he expected any part of her to be. He was gelatinous, and trembled. He removed his hand, stepped back, and tried to gather himself into himself. He looked in the general vicinity of his feet, which also included Sylvia’s cutoff jeans, her luminous and muscular calves, her dirt-edged toes, green flip-flops, mulch, twigs, dirt.

  “You’re marrying him because you’re pregnant? What is this, 1950?”

  “No, if this were 1950 he’d set me up in a little slum apartment far away from him and send me monthly checks through a third party. Or he’d have me killed. Anyway, I didn’t say I’m marrying him because I’m pregnant. That’s only part of it.”

  “What’s the other part?”

  “Even if I told you all the ostensible reasons, that wouldn’t fully explain it.”

  “How stupid!” Karl looked desperately up at the sky, which the thick green canopy of leaves prevented him from seeing except in isolated shards. “Do you even like me?”