You Were Wrong

by Matthew Sharpe

  She wept in drawn-out moans and gasps he felt in his legs and chest. He held her hand and stroked her creamy inner forearm. After a time, she seemed to have temporarily exhausted her distress, and stared idly at the wall across from her through wet eyelashes while he stared at her staring. It occurred to him to cheer her up with an anecdote about a man she disliked that might make him more sympathetic to her.

  “So I found out something interesting about Arv and those high school boys.”

  “Did Arv tell you? I’ll kill him!”

  “Why would you kill him? And no, he didn’t tell me, he didn’t have to. Are you really so opposed to Arv that you don’t find his behavior the slightest bit charming?”

  “Oh, I’m so relieved you think it’s charming.”

  “Why relieved?”

  “I was sure you’d be really mad at me, if you found out. I hoped you’d never find out.”

  “Why would I be mad at you?”

  “Because that would be a normal reaction to finding out your friend paid to have you beaten.”

  “What friend?”

  “Me.”

  Karl dropped his friend’s hand, stood up fast, careened forward, landed on the low wooden coffee table by the couch, smashed his shin on it. Its leg snapped off and sailed across the room. Shin pain came in swift, sharp bursts.

  Movement from above. “What’s going on down there?”

  “Nothing!”

  Swollen feet lingered on the landing and, satisfied their own treacherous journey down and eventually back up the stairs could in no way ameliorate the calamity in the music room, retreated.

  “What are you?” Karl said. He tried to stand. The floor surged up toward his face. He stopped it with his hands, at some cost to them. He had lost track of where he was in relation to the room and to his body and to hers. He looked around for her, found her legs, stared at them in woe.

  “Karl, I’m so sorry, please forgive me, I need you to.”

  Outrage combined in him with a recognition of his momentary strategic advantage. “I need you not to have hired people to hurt me and then lie to me about it. Why did you do it?”

  “I was desperate. He had threatened to take the house, to take everything, to ruin my father. I blackmailed Arv.”

  “Well, fine. Who wouldn’t? But why exactly did you blackmail him to have me beaten up by two boys?”

  “I was desperate!”

  “To do what?”

  “I thought if you would get hurt—just a little bit!—and then I was there to take care of you, and then convince you Stony was behind it, I could—this won’t sound good—soften you up.”

  “For what?”

  “For something I figured out once I met you that you were totally unsuited for. But I find you help me in this totally other unexpected way.”

  “What on earth way is that?”

  “By being this innocent, adorable, melancholy weirdo who’s just himself, who isn’t machinating or striving, who wants nothing more than to carry on with his unambitious, unremarkable life—I’ve never met anyone like you.”

  “Oh please, stop, you’re overwhelming me with flattery!”

  “Though I admit it’s not been easy to adore you when being adored seems to make you so uncomfortable.”

  “Yes, you’re right, that’s true, I don’t so much like being adored when the adoration is expressed through secrecy, lying, and having the shit beaten out of me.”

  If someone who knew nothing about these two were to have wandered into this harshly lit, not-yet-assembled room of this Brooklyn house on this, the darkest night of the season, and seen the man on his knees before the strangely thin pregnant female who was seated above him and leaning down toward him, that person might have been excused for believing the man was begging for mercy from this troubled goddess of uncertain function, and that the goddess was lamenting that mercy was not hers to dispense.

  “If I had known you then, I never would have done it.”

  “How reassuring,” he said, put his hands gently on her alabaster knees, and caressed them, not in affection but in one final, small expenditure of a lust that would never be fully expressed. “And I guess it was you and not Arv who gave me the roofie at that party?”

  “No, I think you just passed out, Karl.” She looked down at his hands on her knees. “So are you still my friend then?” she asked.

  “You told me Stony had me beaten because he knew you had a crush on me. That’s three lies in one, none of which you can even explain. How am I to believe anything you say or do now? You hug me, you kiss me, you claim to care for me, and all the while you probably are out to hurt me again, only worse this time, for reasons that are beyond the comprehension of this person who was ‘totally unsuited’ for whatever psychotic activity you ‘softened him up’ to help you with. Am I still your friend? I haven’t ever been your friend, I’ve been your puppet. I can’t tell you how much I wish I could go back to the tolerable misery of not ever having known you. Since I cannot, I will do the second-best thing, which is never to see you again.”

  “No! I won’t allow it!”

  “You just keep the fuck away from me or I’ll call the cops.”

  He was on his feet now, wobbling, trying not to look at her face, because he had in fact looked at it for an instant, and did not want to know that this face he had loved could look like this, that any face could, and so he looked at the window behind the couch and saw the shambling figure who shimmered there on the brink of dissolution. “I have done everything you asked of me,” he said. “I have granted all the favors I was capable of. Now I ask you not to seek me out, not to try to persuade me of anything or comfort me or help me or befriend me. Leave me alone, now and forever.”

  “No, Karl. You can’t do this. I love you!”

  On wavy, distant feet, he ran out of the house and into the hot air. He doubted on the short flight of stone stairs from house to stunted yard that his feet, if they could get him to his car, would endure for long enough to press the car’s pedals all the way out to the town on Long Island that was presumably his home, and so he made the choice to pass out in the soft dirt beneath the yard’s magnolia tree, and had lain down there, and closed his eyes, and was more than halfway to being beautifully unconscious when he heard that voice again—“Karl! Please!”—and rather than allow himself to be pierced by it or its owner repeatedly, unceasingly, fatally, he stood up and ran to his car and got in it and drove to Long Island with strength borrowed from reserves that were themselves borrowed.

  But it was not just a matter of driving to Long Island, not when the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway so resembled his mind. Monstrous entities, far larger than himself, roaring, surged up from the dark and would have crushed him had he not swerved to the brink of a steep drop down to his own annihilation, guarded only by a barrier his former trust in the solidity of which he now saw as deluded and pathetic. Meanwhile the road—rough, marred, exhausted—kept on beneath him, but tenuously, on the point of ceasing to be. The Kosciuszko Bridge, that promising but ultimately sad affair that delivered a man from one borough to the next, came and went. The tops of warehouses, shops, offices, industrial places of business, homes, dark and quiet—in which no one could be happy for long—rushed past him uttering low and even whispers in a language whose each sound was indistinguishable from every other sound.

  And so out of Brooklyn and Queens and onto Long Island proper on that pathway to the sea, the LIE. Here another problem beset Karl whose origin and meaning he almost understood in the same way he was almost a contented person with consistently good luck. It was the problem of the headlights, a single pair, stronger than his and higher off the ground. It happened all the time of course on this and other roads, even in the black hours of the night when so few cars were out: two souls went the same way for miles—how many ways were there? How many roads on this narrow landmass could speed a soul from west to east with minimum effort and maximum expediency? And yet one could not discount its insi
stence, sometimes twenty yards back, sometimes fifty, never more than a hundred. When he went left, it went left; when he went right, it did. He slowed down, it slowed down; he sped up, it did. It bugged him. It plagued him. Exhausted though he was and in danger of losing control of his vehicle even on this no-brainer of a road, he passed his own exit to shake it loose, and did not shake it loose, this pair of lights which, sometime around Ronkonkoma, he understood to be the mistake he had made in the spring, the one that had led inevitably to that other mistake, and that other one, and that other one, and to say that it was following him was to understate and therefore was probably not so different from saying that the ass of a man followed his dick, except when he was standing still, or backing up, or jumping down or diving down a deep dark hole.

  He pulled a U-y in one of those places you’re not supposed to pull one, a curved dirt path across the verdant meridian—an interstate’s casual nod to what preceded it—and hurried to return to the place he could no longer regard as home, and did not so long as he was on that highway look back once to find out if that thing was still with him. But he did look back when he got off of it because he knew that no amount of not looking back would make the thing not be there, and not only was it there but so was another thing, and he knew what the first thing was and he knew what the second was even if he didn’t know or didn’t want to think he knew how the second, the husband, had found the first, the wife.

  And it loomed before him, the pale façade of that thing he had lived in all his life and would now leave, though leaving was a country occupied by murderers and thieves. Each stair hurt the foot that touched it. The sad old faux wood paneling would have baked and crumbled to the rug in blackened shards had the rays from his eyes been as corrosive as the memories that rode out on them and touched all he saw. His bed, that sagging coffin draped in smelly cloth, accepted him, and he accepted it, for now.

  But what kind of prig would not take a beat-down from the girl he loved? And if she was coming to do him harm, or her husband was, or they both were, for reasons he couldn’t begin to understand or give a crap about, how was that worse than the life he would have if they did not? These were the questions he awoke to, posed, it seemed, by the dim predawn light. In the three hours since he’d come home, someone had plastered him to his bed. Someone had replaced the feeling in his limbs with a buzzing noise. Someone had narrowed the tube of his throat. Someone had gently laid an anvil on his face. It was himself who had done this. In short order he’d made a cohesive agglomeration of life-squandering mistakes, the first being to have met her, the last being to have shunned her. His life had been a series of slow, dull shoves through time toward the grave, which she had disrupted by existing in proximity to him, and now the sun was coming up on a post-Vetch life that was pathetic, intolerable, and that he could have prevented just by forgiving her—or even not forgiving her but living with her in unforgiveness and accepting the beating and any subsequent treacheries and lies as the modest price of loving and being loved, which was what he assumed most couples did.

  Dark blond hair greased and matted, shirt and socks ripe, skin oiled by summer neglect, eyes red, mouth a bog, he went once more to the Volvo that was as many Volvos as there were times of day, and drove off to find her, late for a happy outcome though this action no doubt was. He went to her matrimonial home, where the chain was up in the gap in the high stone wall at the bottom of the drive. He parked the car and cut across the lawn on foot, stiff pants chafing his thighs. Something here was wrong. No cars were parked in the turnaround. The garage doors were shut and locked. Shutters he’d not seen before sealed windows through which, had they not been blocked, one could have seen the windows at the back, through which one could have seen the cove far off and small. There was about the place a cold gray feel despite the hot and fuggy August air. He pressed the bell, knocked on panes, went around the back and found the Stoningtons gone, what invert life the place possessed quenched.

  He went back to the elaborate shack where she and her friends had lived, whose kitchen he’d attempted to help her clean, where his soft and beautiful yellow hat—that daffodil among head coverings—had been taken from him: a sore spot in the world, though if oneself is sore then everywhere one goes is sore.

  A look in the window revealed a single damaged chair, a broom, a mop, stray papers, bits of plastic jetsam, dust, grime. A few objects remained on the porch as well: cardboard boxes that looked full of someone’s stuff, an old gray vinyl suitcase, a gray wool blanket with a lump beneath. The lump was Arv, who stirred: “Oh, hey.”

  “What happened?”

  “Stony sold the place,” Arv said, still supine, his gluey face emerging from the top of the blanket. “We all have had to move, just as well, weirdest place I’ve ever lived, all those straight girls from the beach with no feel for hygiene, a few memorable parties though.” Arv sat up, threw the blanket off, leaned against the house’s chipped green front wall. He had the look of an old sailor now, tanned, lean, in his pleasantly worn T-shirt with horizontal red and white stripes, dark hair lightly rimed with ocean salt, putty face arranged in quiet lumps of dignified sadness. “I’m just waiting here with the last of my crap for the guys to pick me up, not expecting them for a few more hours, teenagers need a lot of sleep.”

  “Where’s Stony?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Where’s Sylvia?”

  Arv shrugged.

  “I screwed things up with her.”

  “How?”

  Karl told him.

  “Oh, yeah, sorry about that.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me she did that?”

  “I did tell you, indirectly.”

  “Why not directly?”

  “Because I’d’ve been scared to death of the consequences.”

  “Which would’ve been what?”

  “How dense exactly are you?”

  “Pretty dense.”

  “Still, I regret doing that.”

  “Don’t worry, it doesn’t matter.”

  “That’s a start.”

  “A start to what?”

  “To all the things I wish I hadn’t done not mattering.”

  “So you don’t know where Sylvia is?”

  “Still don’t.”

  “Where would you look?”

  “I wouldn’t look anywhere. I would leave town and never come back. That is one terrifying chick. She hates men, especially white men. Can’t you see she’s playing you and Stony off each other? She’ll do anything. Hey, I found a sweet little apartment above the hardware store, free screws. You should come over when I have it fixed up.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Or we’ll come by your place one night with weed, cheer you up.”

  Though he knew it would be closed, Karl tried the bar he’d danced in with her, and drank in with her, and told her he’d killed her father before he’d known that was her father and before he’d known he hadn’t killed him, to which she’d reacted—corroborating what Arv had just said about her—with insufficient chagrin. The bar was closed.

  He went to the gas-station-and-café where something or other had happened, he no longer knew what, and saw Jen, that uncharted territory, manning the register as it seemed she always did, a whole life he hoped never to see into. He went home and ate cold cereal. He shot pool, lay on the couch, lay on his bed, bathed, lay on his bed, boiled eggs, ate them, spread low-fat cream cheese on a square slice of bread from a loaf he’d brought home in a plastic bag from the store. He went to the picture window at the front of his husk and he saw a car that he thought was her come down the street. It was not her. He saw a hedge that he thought was her move in a light breeze that he thought was her. A cloud that he thought was her covered the sun that he thought was her.

  A woman appeared in his thoughts whom he believed to be his mother. He lay on the tan leather couch in the living room on which he’d lain while Sylvia had sat tensely drinking tea in a chair across from him on the day they met. T
here the two women were, one dead, the other likely not, blurred phantoms in the fictive room of his thoughts. He stood up, walked out his front door, and found not the even green yard and staid gray street but the wilderness in which he’d joined his sweetheart on her honeymoon, only more wild, with a less clear pathway through it and more brambles to be stung by. He came to a stand of light small trees and peered into their midst. His mother was enfenced by them, wrapped by vines, partially obscured from sight by them, stuck. The trees, he discovered, as he drew closer, did not prevent her from moving, a set of antlers did—it was they that had stuck her. They were attached to a thing, a living thing, a stag, he guessed—though he was from the suburbs and did not know the names of horned woodland things—covered in thick and luxuriant black fur. Its eyes were of a pale and eerie blue, an inhuman frequency of light that represented capacities and impulses beyond the control of a civilized cortex. This thing that could not be reasoned with lay on the forest floor with his mother and embraced her, inside an impenetrable fence of trees. The red embroidery in the white peasant blouse, he’d half known all along, was not embroidery but blood. One of the stag’s dark antlers was piercing his mother’s chest. The muscular animal jerked violently and drove its antler deeper into her flesh. She looked at her son calmly and said, “Well, I guess you had to know sometime.”

  He was halfway to the kitchen with desiccated mouth when the doorbell rang. As proposed, Arv arrived with his young friends and the weed, the former self-evident, the latter announced. Karl saw that it was nighttime and felt through the open door that the heat, by which he’d been untouched when the door was closed, had not abated.

  “I don’t mean to be rude but I’ve got to get some water,” he said over his shoulder on his way to the kitchen.

  “Cotton mouth!” Paul said behind him, or Hal.

  Alone by the fridge, he glanced up and caught his second, blurred self on the kitchen windowpane, against the backdrop of the black air, pressing a second, blurred glass into a recess in the second, blurred fridge door, and watched himself watch the glass fill up with water from an unseen source. These figures that came and went across a home’s nighttime panes were optical stand-ins for the second self the self always imposed between it and the obscured world.