Boys of Life

by Paul Russell

  I guess if I’d never met Carlos, I’d probably’ve been duped like everybody else. Monica could sit for hours and watch anything—it was one of those things that made me realize she’d never be able to understand anything about me, really, if she was somebody who could sit and watch TV like that. It was her upbringing, I guess. Her parents liked nothing more than for the two of us to come over for an evening of TV watching—Thursday night was the best night for that, they claimed. All the good shows were on then. I’d take one look at what was on, and go in some other room like it was something I was allergic to. I’d work on fixing the leaky faucets around the house, or wiring a new telephone jack—any kind of tinkering to keep my hands busy and my brain out of the reach of the TV set. One look and I could tell the big secret: TV was just another kind of drinking, and there’re lots worse kinds of drinking than booze.

  During a commercial one Saturday night, Monica turned to me and said, “I think you and me should take the old plunger.” I’ve told you how Monica had her own words for things.

  “What’s the old plunger?” I asked her. I thought maybe she was referring to some clogged drain I hadn’t gotten around to yet.

  She looked at me with this sort of smirk. “Get married, stupid.” She was sipping beer through a straw—which always drove me crazy to see, but she liked to do that sometimes.

  I was a little surprised. “Oh,” I said. “Says who?”

  She shrugged like it’d been my idea instead of hers. “We’re not getting any younger,” she said. She was three years older than me.

  “What’s that got to do with it?” I asked.

  “Well, it’s true. It’s a fact of life.”

  “Yeah? So? Are you trying to drive me crazy?”

  She flicked her straw at me. “What’s wrong with us getting married? It wouldn’t change anything.”

  “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it,” I said.

  “That’s as dumb as me saying ‘We’re not getting any younger,’” she pointed out.

  Which was true. I liked it when she wouldn’t let me get away with things.

  “It wouldn’t have to be for a while,” she said. “We could think about it.”

  “Like how long a while?” We’d been living in Memphis about two years by then.

  “Like May a while,” she said. “It’d be fun. The parents want to pay for everything—they like you a lot, they say we deserve some big splash we’ll never forget. We’ll have a great honeymoon. Think about it. We could go to Mexico. Acapulco.”

  “I don’t want to go to Mexico,” I told her. “What’s in Mexico except a bunch of desert?”

  “We can go anywhere,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be Mexico. Plus,” she added, like it was some afterthought, “they’ll give us some money to buy a house.”

  “They really said that?” I couldn’t believe they’d do something like that.

  She only nodded. She was playing with that straw in her beer bottle.

  “You mean, a house to own?” I could still hear Carlos’s voice saying, “baggage.” At the same time, it was like some door opening up, a door I’d always thought would be shut. I’d never in my life lived in a regular house, except that thing that leaked before we got the house trailer in Owen. The idea of a house—lots of rooms, a yard to mow, maybe space in a garage where I could build things in my spare time. Some woods in back where I could go be alone and think.

  “No kids,” I told her. I’d seen too much happen to want kids.

  “That’s not something we have to talk about right now,” she said. I remember she put her hand on my knee. “So what do you say?”

  I still wonder whether she knew that a house was the one button she could punch with me. Probably she did—Monica’s always been smart that way.

  I remember I was a little pissed she’d been talking to her parents about it, and they had everything planned out, but the idea of a house totally did me in.

  I took a deep breath. “Okay,” I said. “We’ll do it.”

  “So do you love me?” she asked. In general, she wasn’t too pushy on things like that. What she didn’t know, I think she always figured, wouldn’t hurt her.

  I took the straw out of her beer bottle and flicked it at her. She jumped when the little drop of beer spattered on her face.

  I knew even when I said it that I didn’t really mean it. If I’d thought I did, that would be one thing. But I didn’t think it for one instant, even at the time. “I love you,” I said.

  I’d never said anything like that to Carlos. I never said it to anybody in my life, and I’m sorry I said it to Monica. Monica, I’m sorry. There’re lots of things I’m sorry about, but I’m sorriest about that, Monica. You won’t believe me when I say that—and I wouldn’t either if I was you—but I really am sorry. It’s the most despicable thing I ever did.

  Looking back on everything, I’m a little surprised her parents were so set on her marrying me—they must’ve seen what a scruffy, sullen sort of guy I was. But then who knows what they were thinking? Monica always told me her mother thought I was charming—which is a hoot if there ever was one. At least I managed to get through the wedding without upsetting anybody too much, except myself. All I kept thinking was—the last time I was in a church, it was in the South Bronx, and it wasn’t exactly a wedding. I kept thinking about the cool damp smell in that church, and the pools of rainwater where the floor had sunk and the pigeons flapping in the rafters.

  At the little reception at the Nolans’ house, I didn’t even get drunk. In fact, I didn’t have a single drink. They were serving champagne, and I guess it was some kind of luck that the only time I ever drank champagne before, I got the worst hangover of my life, so this time I wasn’t even tempted. Plus I must’ve known if I had anything to drink, I’d probably have kept on drinking till who knows what I might’ve done?

  I smiled and shook a lot of hands of Monica’s relatives. You could divide them into the ones with high cheekbones like Monica and her mother, and the round-faced ones like Don. Everybody in America does this, I told myself. At some time in their life, everybody has to do this.

  The only time I nearly lost it was driving away from the reception toward the airport: our honeymoon turned out to be a week at Disney World, which was okay with me—definitely better than Mexico. Along both sides of the highway, Don’s company had put up these huge billboards. I was looking at those signs, thinking how ugly they were—but also how it was the money from them that was paying for my new house and everything—when the next one I saw said, in big script letters, BEST WISHES TO MONICA AND TONY! In the background there was this pastel picture of wedding bells and a church steeple. I nearly had a heart attack. At the same time Monica was saying, “Dad’s totally crazy. He’s got to be totally crazy. Is that not the sweetest thing?” And I guess maybe it was—but I’ve never been a sweet person in my life, so I’ll never understand those things.

  “Be sure and mention it to him when we get back,” she was telling me. “He’ll love it that we saw it.”

  I remember thinking, Yeah, he’ll have it papered over in an hour with some other ad he can make money off of.

  All I can say is—I was wrong. We flew back from Disney World a week later and that stupid sign was still up, and it stayed up for the next six months. I’d see it whenever I drove by there to deliver stuff down to South Memphis for the lumberyard. Don was always trying to figure out ways to tell Monica he loved her—which I guess is all anybody can ever do, even if it’s billboards.

  I GUESS YOU COULD SAY WE HAD A PRETTY GOOD marriage. Once she’d gotten everything official, I think Monica had what she wanted, and so she was willing not to badger me for anything more and risk spoiling everything. It’s hard to describe, but she sort of became a different person after the wedding. She backed off from things a little. She settled in.

  She liked to cook—which is something I never cared about, but I pretended this sudden interest. She bought cookbooks—French, Italian, Californ
ian. Even Indian, though I had to be honest and mention how everything she cooked out of that one gave me the runs. But as for the rest, she was pretty good at gourmet food. It was something she and Lisa gabbed about all the time—cooking shows on TV, and recipes, and where to buy what weird vegetables you never heard of before. I was a little sorry the days of shoplifting cans of Spam and packages of Oreos were over—though it’s also true you could get pretty tired of eating those kinds of things all the time.

  What was fun about being married to Monica was the ways I could make her happy. I mean, happy the way ordinary people are happy. With Carlos there was never anything like that I could do, unless it was crazy stuff in front of Seth’s camera like fist-fucking a kid I’d never met before inside some run-down warehouse. With Monica, I could do it just by coming home with a bouquet of flowers—which may sound dumb, but after a while in your life it’s a relief to know that something simple like buying flowers is going to solve some things for you. She wouldn’t ever have bought flowers just for herself, but it made her so happy that there was somebody out there to buy them for her. Plus I always thought flowers made the house look nice. I’d go in a florist’s and wish I could buy a pickup truckload of flowers to put everywhere through the house so you wouldn’t even be able to tell it was a house anymore—you’d think it was the outdoors, only it’d still be indoors.

  Which is something Verbena might’ve done for a movie set. I have to admit that every once in a while I’d think back to those movies we made, and I’d just have to shake my head. I wondered what had ever happened to them—if Verbena was still designing sets, and Seth still poking around with his movie camera, and if Carlos was out there somewhere making it all up for them as he went along.

  Whenever I’d get to thinking about that kind of stuff, I’d go out to my workshop in back. Working at Mad Joe’s, I could pick up tools for a discount, so I had a bunch. Plus scrap-ends of lumber that otherwise were just going to get tossed out. Only trouble was, I never knew what to build. I’d start things—a coffee table, a cabinet for the kitchen, even a canoe—but then I’d lose interest. Most nights I’d find myself sitting out there with my pocketknife and some stick of wood, whittling away at it, not sure what it was I was making. Sometimes what I ended up with looked like a little stick figure of a person, or a face, but most times it was just curves and corners and things that’d keep changing their shape the more I’d whittle them down. Because I never knew where to stop. I’d just keep seeing how the wood kept changing under my knife blade, and before I knew it, I’d whittle the stick down to nothing.

  I think I mentioned that I used to jerk off out there a lot, too.

  Monica would joke with Lisa about how I spent all my time in that workshop but I never seemed to get anything done.

  “I’m a slow worker,” I told her. But I think she somehow must’ve understood something, because even though she wanted that coffee table and that kitchen cabinet, she never got on my case about them, and, for the record, I give her credit for that. I wasn’t the easiest person to live with. I never hit it off with her parents, or her friends like Lisa, and I never had any friends of my own. I wasn’t there for her the way a regular husband is supposed to be. You could say I didn’t care enough about our marriage, but that’s not true. Monica saved me from something, or at least she almost did, and I never stopped being grateful to her. We never talked about things like that. It wasn’t the way we were with each other, not even in the beginning, and the longer time passed, the less we were like that. But I think she guessed more than she ever said, and so we didn’t need to talk.

  Since I’ve been at the Eddy, I’ve gotten one letter from her—which, to tell the truth, is more than I expected and more than I deserve. I sort of wish I still had that letter, but I don’t. When I got it, I let it lie around about a week at least before I finally worked myself up to open it. And then I read it really quickly, just skimming down the pages, afraid to look at it too carefully. It made me think about when I was little and the few times I ever went to see a movie; if it was a horror flick, in the scary parts I’d sort of squint my eyes so I could just barely see what was going on, and if something happened that I didn’t want to see—like somebody opening a closet door and there was the zombie—I could shut my eyes in no time. That’s the way it was with Monica’s letter. I read it in kind of a squint, so I could hurry and pass over the parts I didn’t want to see.

  I have to say she let me off easy. She told me she supported me totally, and I had all her prayers. She told me she thought she knew me, but now she knew she never did, and that hurt her a lot, but she guessed I had my reasons and finally they probably hurt me more than they hurt her. She said she thought I’d understand if she told me she had to pick up the pieces and get on with her life. The counselor she’d been going to had given her this book about the seven stages of grief, and it was doing her good to read it.

  I understood all that. I remember I tore the letter up into these little squares—not emotional or anything, just feeling like it was what I had to do. Then I flushed it down the toilet.

  Actually, I think I was afraid if I left that letter lying around I’d wake up in the middle of the night to find it glowing with some blue light, or the pages rustling around the room like a whirlwind had taken them up. You know the kind of dreams I have—I wasn’t about to keep that letter in there with me. Besides, even though I’d squinted, I knew everything it said. I didn’t have to ever read that letter ever again.

  But that’s all in the future. During the three years we were married, we had an ordinary kind of life. She’d taken to calling me Tone after we got married. It sort of drove me crazy, especially when I’d hear her talking to Lisa about Tone this and Tone that. But what could I do? That’s my wife talking about me, I used to say to myself, and it sounded so strange that I had to stop saying it or it’d pitch me into a mood I couldn’t get out of for days. My wife. Monica’s husband, Tony. Tone. I never thought about the way I used to live—all those guys I was out on the streets every night looking for like my life depended on it. It was like all that never existed.

  Except for this one time. There was a Halloween party we went to at Lisa’s house. I hadn’t wanted to go, but Monica pointed out how we never went much of anywhere, so I said okay. It was another way of buying her flowers. I wasn’t too keen on getting dressed up. From making all those movies with Carlos, I’d ended up in enough different costumes to last me my whole life. But Monica really got into it. We went around to the Salvation Army, where she found herself this fur coat some moths had had a field day with and a pillbox hat with peacock feathers on it. “I wouldn’t even think about putting those things on my body,” I told her. “You’ll get worms or something.” But she was slipping into that coat like no tomorrow.

  “They dry clean them, silly,” she said. “Before they hang them on the rack.”

  “I’m not getting into any of this stuff,” I told her, and I folded my arms to show her I was firm about it. Which of course never worked for a second with Monica. She grabbed me by the elbow and took me over to the men’s rack where all these suits were hanging. Hideous stuff—one of those suits was made out of this bright green cloth that was shiny like some insect wing. A bunch of them were sky blue or lemon yellow. There was one the color of mustard that’s been in the refrigerator too long, and that was the one Monica took a liking to. “Yecch,” I told her. There was a jacket, and pants, and a vest, all the same mustard color.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “No,” I told her flat out. “Do you want me to go around looking like some Chelsea Avenue pimp or what?”

  “It’s dress-up. Nobody’s supposed to know who you are.”

  I didn’t like it, but the whole suit only cost eight dollars, and Monica’d made her mind up. “And a hat,” she said, taking one off the shelf and squeezing it down on my head. She looked at it, and sort of squinted, and screwed up her nose. “Nope,” she said, lifting it off by the brim and sticking an
other one on there, and then another, till finally she found the one she liked.

  “You look so cute in hats, Tone. You should wear them all the time.”

  “Very funny,” I said.

  We looked like two total tramps in all that get-up. “I just hope we don’t get picked up by the cops,” I told her when we were driving over to Lisa’s. “It’ll be the slammer for sure.”

  “It’s Halloween,” she said. “Everybody’s wearing a costume tonight. Just look at the drivers of all the other cars.”

  I did, but so far as I could see, they all looked completely normal. But I didn’t say that to Monica.

  At the party, some people were in costume, but lots weren’t. It sort of annoyed me that I’d had to come in one when other people weren’t going to. Lisa was dolled up to look like a whore, though when I mentioned that to Monica she told me, no, Lisa was supposed to be Sleeping Beauty. I wanted to say I’d seen a lot of drag queens do a better Sleeping Beauty, and with no sleep either. But I didn’t.

  There were a couple of witches in the room, and somebody with a sheet over his head was trying to be a ghost. One guy had a Lone Ranger costume on, complete with two six-shooters. Somebody else was decked out in a tabby-cat mask with big whiskers and a silver spandex body suit that fit him like a glove. His body had great definition—you had to give him that. He definitely worked out in a gym somewhere.

  The doorbell rang, and some jerk outfitted to look like a computer walked in. He’d fixed a cardboard box around his waist to look like a disk drive, and another one over his head, which was supposed to be the screen, and he was holding a keyboard in one hand. Everybody seemed to think it was the greatest costume they’d ever seen.

  “Tony and me, we’re Bohemians,” Monica was explaining to a bunch of people. “Bohos is what they call them in New York. That’s where Tony and I met. New York City, and I can tell you there were Bohos everywhere you turned.”