You Were Wrong

by Matthew Sharpe

  “What is it, dear?” she asked before she’d turned around.

  “Late, unannounced, unasked for, just like at his birth,” said the man he had recently killed.

  “Monty, saying things like that will not make him less sullen.”

  “His sullenness level does not determine my remarks.”

  “Does human decency?” Karl asked.

  “He does have an endearing wit,” Monty said.

  “So you two’ve moved in together?”

  “We’ve resolved our differences,” he said.

  She said, “No we haven’t.”

  “Come on in, we’ll show you the place.”

  Jones opened a low black iron gate on a minuscule yard with a small magnolia tree whose period of flowering had long passed; it was unfragrant but healthily leaved. The couple managed the eight stone steps up to the front door singly, slowly, one on the left, one on the right, with the aid of a pair of iron handrails. In the house, cardboard boxes, some open, many not, sat among couches, chairs, the piano. The walls and floors were bare, the lights bright, the air cool and smelling of fresh paint. The owners removed their hats.

  “Come into the kitchen. You hungry? You smell bad. You look bad. What happened to you?”

  “So you’ve moved in here, the two of you, in other words?”

  “Nothing gets past you.”

  “You couldn’t have told me this?”

  “You’re rarely—what’s the word I’m looking for?—present.”

  “What about that time you told me you’d lied to me about my mother’s deathbed, um, stipulation that I had to live with you till you died in order to inherit the house, and you said that the reason you’d made up that lie was that you wanted me to keep living with you because you liked having me around?”

  “Well I don’t remember the conversation you allude to and in any case you’re twenty-six, do you expect me to continue raising you indefinitely?”

  “Raising me? More like sinking me. I don’t need or want you around, I was just trying to get to the bottom of your hypocrisy, which, like your dickness, has none. Raising me. I’m an adult, thank you very much, with a job.”

  “That’s not a job, it’s an abdication. You, with your aptitude for math, could have been a millionaire by now, but you’re not one. You know why? Because you fail to recognize that the purpose of math is not math, the purpose of math is counting, and counting is an act of aggression, and you, who are not devoid of aggression, fail to locate or understand it in yourself or in the world. Being alive is a rough business and counting knows this. When you put them to use on people and things—and why else would they exist?—the basic mathematical operations are crimes. Addition is theft, subtraction embezzlement, multiplication rape, division murder. You, a math teacher, have terrible thoughts you can’t act on because they’re all backed up in your head. So you turn them on me, the wrong person. Here’s a little equation for you to consider: you don’t kill someone because he insults you now and then, you kill someone because if you don’t, he’ll kill you.

  “You and I, we should have started making money together half a dozen years ago when you graduated from college, when your math skills were sharpest and my acumen and energy had not waned as they now have. Instead, you moped around the house, unreachable, because of I don’t know what, the death of your mother five years before? And meanwhile my powers leaked away, I lost everything, we wandered like a pair of fools into the future, and you became a math teacher and tried to kill me, but all you’ve killed is time. Grotesque!”

  “Who would like some crackers and cheese?”

  The two men sat on cushioned stools at an amoeba-shaped island in the middle of the kitchen topped with a great whorled black marble slab. Henrietta, who’d shifted the burden of her weight from her shoes to her feet, brought them their snack, which they ate. Despite the hour, she went into the next room and continued to unpack.

  “I’d rather be a math teacher than be a liar who abandons one family and gloms onto another without ever telling them the first one exists.”

  “Admittedly not my finest hour.”

  “Admittedly not your finest decade and a half. But what do you mean, you lost everything?”

  “I mean when demand for my product spiked, I borrowed from an institution that offered an interest rate lower than the belly of a pregnant ant, and I ordered three million units from a Chinese plant I had not done business with before. My Malaysian account manager had warned me against working with the Chinese manufacturer but I thought he was speaking out of soreness at me for not giving him the additional business, which he couldn’t have handled anyway. The Chinese required an unusually large deposit and a swift payment schedule. Demand for my product went soft, I paid off the Chinese with the sum from the lending institution, but couldn’t pay the lending institution back, and while their interest rate was low, their penalty was severe. They took my business and my house.”

  “They took our house?”

  “Yes.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “In the spring.”

  “So who owns the house?”

  “Well, you do.”

  “I do?”

  “You will.”

  “When?”

  “When you sign the papers.”

  “What papers?”

  “The ones my daughter hopefully at some point will give you to sign.”

  “What’s Sylvia got to do with the house?”

  “She got the lending institution to agree to deed it to you.”

  “How’d she do that?”

  “By marrying it.”

  The head of his stepfather started feeling extra-real to Karl right now. It was smaller than he remembered. Surrounding the long, wispy goatee, tiny, stiff white hairs protruded from his red-gray lower face, as if the hairs were holding their ground while the face shrank to reveal them. On the sides of the upper skull the white hair was lustrous and thick, but sparse on top, where the skin was pinkish-brown. The lobey ears, more red than pink, showed veiny signs of wear, and were as if nibbled by the sun on top. When he talked his bone-white, even teeth emitted a distant whistle; Karl attempted to contemplate the totality of dental suffering in the life of Jones and failed, not for lack of imagination but for lack of desire to come face-to-face with his own oral future. Notwithstanding the compromised state of each of its parts, the head itself was an object of uncommon beauty, a brilliant modern sculpture made of little odds and ends gathered on a junkyard excursion and signifying man’s struggle to make good use of his time.

  “Sylvia bought you this house,” Karl said.

  “You’re not as stupid as I thought.”

  “She married Stony to save her mother and father from financial ruin.”

  “How should I know why she married him? She didn’t even tell me about it till after.”

  “So she’ll divorce him now.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “She loves him.”

  “No she doesn’t.”

  “Yes she does.”

  “Why won’t she divorce him?”

  “It is technically he who owns the houses, yours and mine.”

  “So?”

  “So if she divorces him he’ll sell them.”

  “So tell her to divorce him.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because she’s miserably unhappy that she married him.”

  “You mean you are.”

  “Tell her to divorce him. Put your daughter’s happiness before your own.”

  “She’s twenty-nine years old, it’s not my place to tell her who to divorce.”

  “She’s twenty-nine?”

  “How old did you think she was?”

  “Twenty-four.”

  “You were wrong.”

  “You need to release her from the belief that only she can save you. Also, she needs guidance, and you’re her father.”

  “She’s always been independent, I
raised her with a free hand.”

  “Look how well that turned out.”

  “It turned out extremely well. My daughter is a peach.”

  “Gentlemen.” The men looked up. Henrietta stood in the doorway between the kitchen and dining room in a bright floral dress and socked feet with a shadeless table lamp in her hands. “This is our first night in our beautiful home. No yelling, please. Monty, come and play us something on the piano.”

  “You say no yelling but asking him to play something on the piano is the same as taking his side in the argument.”

  She angled her face slightly downward toward the parquet floor in order to look at him through her brow in a way he’d seen certain black women look at children and white people that said, “My patience is at an end and you’ll be unable to endure the result of further resistance.”

  “Piano’s out of tune. A truck ride is hard on an instrument of such delicacy,” regardless of which Jones sat and played “Murder, He Says” while Karl rambled the emergent living room in search of objects his home had been denuded of, as if looking for the trail of crumbs leading back in time to the blight from which the whole of his life had derived. Jones played jauntily. Despite the loss of his business and the decline of his body, this was a happy moment for him. He’d reunited with his first wife, escaped the poorhouse, moved into a beautiful home. In so doing, he’d also blotted out the existence of Karl’s mother. He was a pretty good piano player and Karl wondered why the assholes of the world played piano and succeeded in love and had good luck, or were tall, handsome, and strong, or received grateful oral sex from an eager older person.

  “Will bring on nobody’s murder but his own,” Jones concluded, singing—shouting, really—only the last line of the song he’d played as was his custom. “Lyrics composed by Frank Loesser, an unhappy and productive man who chain-smoked, wrote seven hundred songs, married at age forty-nine, and was dead of lung cancer ten years after that. Did I mention I’ll be teaching a finance course in the fall at the MetroTech Center just on the other side of Flatbush Avenue?”

  “All right well bedtime,” Henrietta said.

  She had gone toward the end of the song into a room of the house beyond Karl’s sight and thoughts, and appeared now framed by the doorless threshold between the foyer and the so-called music room where Karl sat on a deep, soft couch. She held a checkered blanket out to him. “You can sleep where you’re sitting but you’ll have to come and take the blanket from my hands because the moment in the evening has come when my feet have simply got to save themselves for the hike up the mountain to the bedroom. Next time you come we’ll have a bed upstairs for you as well but you caught us unprepared this time.”

  Toward the end of the song, somewhere in the soft, deep couch, perhaps caused by fatigue, or by an intimation in the song, Karl ceased to be able to herd his thoughts and sensations into a fenced-in Karl type of area. Attributes and qualities—of the music, the piano, the player, the bare lightbulbs, the chairs, the boxes, the windows, the air, the hour—shook loose of the objects with which he had learned to associate them and circulated freely in the room, which is to say, in Karl. Henrietta’s invitation to take the blanket from her outstretched arms therefore required an additional “Karl!” which reinstated, in a jolt, enough Karl for him to get up and walk across the room and take the blanket from her hands.

  The blanket came into his arms as a delicious sort of gooey softness and lemony flavor and interconnected cluster of red and black squares. Henrietta’s soft, brown, meaningful face drifted off to the side of his view and then around back of it where it wasn’t properly a view anymore but a set of sounds, a smell, a feeling in his back and mind. And so he did not see but felt and heard the older couple laboriously ascend the stairs, while he looked at and through the two glass doors that were the double entrance to the house, the vestibule between them a decompression chamber between the deep sea of the world and the submarine of the home. He saw himself doubled and suspended in these two bright square diving bells, one inside the other, above the dark, blurred Brooklyn floor. Up into this double Karl of light rose a bioluminescent thing, thin, furred in phosphor, enlarging as it rose, with skinny legs and swollen lower thorax.

  “Now everyone’s here,” Jones said. “We’re already halfway up, you let her in,” he directed his stepson from above.

  Karl came flooding back to Karl. She wore a short white cotton dress that her thin taut legs went all the way up into and her massive belly pressed against. She kissed his cheek and whispered his name in his ear, reassembling him inside himself.

  “Mom, Pops, how are you?”

  “We’re splendid, dear,” her mother said.

  “I’ve reached the age when I’m reduced to complicated pleasures,” her father said.

  There was a long hiatus in movement and sound in which each of them looked at the others and seemed to wonder who would move or speak, and hoped it would not be themselves. Old impatience—it, too, had entered through the vestibule—settled into all.

  “Come on, my darling,” Jones said to his child, “your mother’s feet are a pair of meatloafs. I know you’ve got a heavy load but mount these few stairs so we don’t have to go down and back up again.”

  She did as told with a haughty and forlorn sigh. On the fifth stair she kissed her father’s elaborately sculptural head. On the seventh, she leaned out over her own belly, put her arms around her mother’s upper back, and pressed her cheek to hers.

  “How are you, dear?” the mother said.

  “My back aches and I shit five times a day.”

  There was a stiffness of bodies as they pulled away caused neither by the daughter’s advanced gestation of the grandchild nor by the grandma’s swollen feet and fatigue at midnight of moving day. Everyone waited again for someone to act, the family of three-and-a-half of blood on the stairs and the one by a thread at the foot of them. “The blankets are in a box in the dining room as the young man can tell you, please understand,” Henrietta finally said. Sylvia navigated around her parents’ forms and back down the stairs with the sullenness that expressed itself so fully in the lowered and turned-in shoulders of thin girls, even pregnant ones.

  She faced Karl and put her hands on her hips and raised one side of her mouth in a kind of facial tic Karl interpreted as Well, family, you know? “You want to show me the box with the blankets?” she said.

  He put the soft wool one Henrietta had handed him around her goosebumped shoulders and arms and burnished it onto her skin with the palms of his hands and held it in place with them.

  “Good night, kids,” said the tired mother, and crept up one more stair, and one more. “Let’s have a big breakfast tomorrow, I’ll make it for us after we all sleep well,” she said, covering the next ten hours with the warm blanket of a happy wish, and the older folks went up, and the younger ones wondered at each other in the lit-up downstairs.

  “Is it because of her pride?” Karl asked.

  “What?”

  “Or is it that you didn’t invite her to your wedding? Or had the wedding to begin with?”

  “I’ve just had a long drive, preceded by a horrible day.”

  “Oh yeah, that brunch.”

  “After the brunch.”

  “What happened after the brunch?”

  “He…Picture an hour alone with that man, as his wife.”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “What do you mean, pride?”

  “That she loves the house you gave her but isn’t the kind of person who can just accept a free house from her daughter without feeling her dignity has been compromised.”

  “Remember when you met me and thought I was a burglar?”

  “You mean because you told me you were one?”

  “The relationship between me being a burglar and what I actually was is about the same as the relationship between what you perceive is going on between my mother and me right now and what is actually going on between her and me.”

  “
So what actually were you?”

  “For real, Karl.”

  “Oh, for real? Hey now don’t get me wrong, I’m crazy about you even if you don’t turn out to actually like me, which I still can’t tell if you even really do, but ‘for real’ is exactly what you were not on the day we met, and haven’t been since.”

  Her eyes grew moist and she trembled. Her flesh, generally taut and athletic and gripping the air, now was passive and slack. “Well I still don’t even believe people do things for the reasons they announce they’re doing them for but I’m mad at my mother, Karl, for taking back that white asshole who threw his nigger family in the garbage and bought himself a brand-new white one with his new money he got on the backs of some other dollar-a-day niggers in Asia. And I’m mad at him because, well, that. Imagine for just one second what happens to a teenage girl who looks like me when she has to move from Centraldale to the Hart Crane Projects.”

  “So this is the same nigger—”

  “Careful!”

  “—and white asshole you just bought a house for by marrying a second white asshole who took the first asshole’s house away from him?”

  “Don’t let anyone say I’m not a loyal daughter.”

  He guided her by the blanket he was still touching her through over to the couch in the music room and tried to push her down gently onto it. She tensed up. He kissed her cheek. She groaned and sat down on the couch.

  “Let’s talk for a minute and then go to sleep,” he said. “I can be on the floor here next to you. I’d like to wake up and see you first thing, that would be amazing. Before we have the breakfast here your mother wants to make, let’s sneak out and have a cup of tea, the two of us, in a little diner, it would be nice just to sit with you somewhere.”

  He watched a strange convulsing of this body that had become dear to him, a wrinkling, reddening, moistening, swelling, and opening up of the beautiful face.

  “Please tell me what’s wrong,” he said.

  “It’s intolerable. You can’t imagine.”

  “I was made to imagine.”

  “No, no, no, you don’t know, you’re too innocent, you can’t know, it’s horrible, it’s horrible, I can’t stand it much longer!”