“Let’s do hear some divorce stunts,” Penny says. “Give us the down and dirty.”
“I don’t know how to respond,” Greta says. Her husband died before she could divorce him. “I wasn’t a saint. No one would accuse me of being a saint.”
“We don’t want whining,” Penny says. “Stunts. Exploits. Humiliating whatnot.”
“We were happy,” Greta says. “Ellen can testify to that.” She will not describe the way Duncan’s body quit little by little, how it became a substance, a stone. The immovable object. How it repulsed her. Every moment of her day was concerned with that weight, its comfort, its functions, its awful greed. “When Ellen moved away, well…”
Andrew and Penny speak at the same time. He raises the cast to stop her. “Sometimes we need an outside party to keep the inside steady, like…” His face tilts skyward. His head makes small jerking motions, as if he’s searching the constellations for words.
“A voyeur,” Penny suggests. “Every family needs someone staring through its windows. It’s the only thing that keeps you from seducing the mailman.”
They laugh to let Andrew off the hook, but Greta doesn’t laugh and neither does Andrew.
“She had a fling with a boy,” Ellen says, making her eyes wide. “They were upstairs while hubby was down!” They have almost reached her house. She points to it, and her voice takes on the approximations of excitement. “Our destination: Florida’s official Bacchanalia site—Elle’s Den of Iniquity!”
Greta is too bewildered to move. She never had sex with any boy or man—not while Duncan was alive.
Andrew hangs back with her. “Like a spoon,” he says at last, “in a cup of coffee, that keeps it from spilling over the rim. An outside person can do that. A spoon. That really works, you know.”
“I know,” she says. The sudden affection she feels for him is troubling. She takes his arm. “We’re falling behind. We should catch up with the others.”
AJ can’t stop trembling. The men help him from the harness. He wants to describe the look the snake gave him and how it stared at him a second time after it was cut in two. It had a cruel face and then an awful, impossible face. There is no way to tell anyone this.
They wrap him in a coarse blanket. They’re treating him as if he’s injured. Could this blood be his? He touches his ribs as he walks, a man on either side of him. He pats the bloody places, feeling for wounds. They put him in the cab of the truck. He can’t remember the boss’s name, but he’s driving, talking about bathing and fresh clothes, taking a day off. They’re not going to the hospital, which tells AJ he isn’t hurt.
It’s a long drive and no one is at his house when they arrive. His boss asks when his parents get home. AJ doesn’t know. He thinks they should be home now and wonders whether they’re in the right house. On the end table is a picture of himself as a boy standing between his mother and father. No one else would have that.
“You ought to get a shower,” his boss says. “You’ve got blood on you.” After a moment, he adds, “I never should have put you in that harness. I have experienced men. They wanted to see how much they could slough off on you.”
“It was okay,” AJ says.
“Get some clean clothes,” his boss says. “Soak in hot water. I’ll wait out here. Go on. Wash off.”
AJ understands something is required of him. He heads down the hall to turn on the bathwater. In his bedroom, he finds clothes. When he returns, his boss is by the front door, talking on a cell phone. AJ piles the fresh clothes on the toilet lid. The water is hotter than he normally likes, but he feels it’s his job to soak as his boss suggested, and isn’t he a good guy to be so concerned? All that happened was a snake… a snake in a tree… a snake he sawed in two… a snake looked at him and ruined his clothes.
The bathwater turns pink with the snake’s blood. A surgeon could sew the snake back together. Doctors can do all these things now. They could get blood from other snakes to fill its body. But there’s no way to make it alive again. Which makes AJ wonder what that means, to be alive.
He dries off and dresses, discovering that he took two pairs of pants from his room and no shirt. When he steps from the bathroom he finds his boss on a kitchen chair in the hallway, his cap in his hand. The cap is green. His name, AJ recalls, is Tom Stewart.
“You look like a new man,” Tom Stewart says almost too softly for AJ to hear. “Did you a world of good, I bet.”
It occurs to AJ that maybe he missed something in all the action. What else could have happened?
He says, “You didn’t have to wait, Mr. Stewart.”
“I owe your parents a word or two about what happened.”
AJ doesn’t know how to phrase the question he wants to ask. “I cut up a snake,” he says. “Did something else happen?”
Tom Stewart raises the hand with the hat, pauses, and then fits it onto his head.
“No, son,” he says. “You did fine.”
“That snake was alive,” AJ says. “It makes me think how you can’t put life back into something once it’s gone.”
“That’s right,” his boss says. “That’s how it is.”
AJ wants to describe the commotion inside him. He wants to say the encounter with the snake is the most important moment of his life. But how can that be true? He was born, wasn’t he? He’s had sex with two completely different girls. He won a drawing for a color television and sold it for two hundred dollars. He went to Disney World and tried to kill himself. How could sawing up a snake compare to any of that? He realizes he himself was the one screaming. That makes the most sense. A snake, even if it isn’t sawed in half, can’t scream. That’s why his boss is here. To make sure the screaming and trembling are done. He can’t decide whether his hands are shaking. It might just be his eyes.
He says, “Why am I so…”
“There’s no telling,” Tom Stewart tells him. “What scares us, we don’t have control over that.”
“After I cut it in two,” AJ says, “it was ugly.” He wants to say more, explain that the snake had a second and horrible face, but the door opens. The sun is all but set and his father’s shadow across the carpet is gigantic.
As soon as the joint is lit, Penny decides she must get back to her party. “I don’t require an escort,” she announces, a statement that demands a volunteer.
“Grab Andrew,” Ellen whispers to Greta. “Let’s hold on to him.”
As the joint is passed to Andrew on the couch, Greta intercepts it and sits on his lap. She inhales to make the lit end glow. The one who sang “Hotel California” offers to walk Penny.
The Talking Heads sing over the speakers. A slight chronological advancement over Motown, Greta thinks, as she rises from Andrew’s lap. By the end of the album, the joint is gone and all but four have returned to Penny’s party. Besides herself, Ellen, and Andrew, there’s a dark little man she has hardly noticed. The pot is not so potent that she fails to see her duty. She kicks off her shoes and traipses over to his chair. She sits on one of the wide arms and puts her bare feet on his knees.
“Hey, sport,” she says. “I’ve forgotten your name.”
He has a serious face with intense black eyes.
“We were never introduced,” he says softly.
“I’m Greta, like the immortal Garbo.”
“Not too often I meet an immortal,” he says. “You’re only the second.”
She laughs at that. “Tell me something about yourself.”
He bends his finger. She obediently leans in. “I’m in love with your friend.” He points.
On the couch, Ellen and Andrew use a mechanical device to roll another joint.
“Which one?” Greta asks.
“Hah,” he says without any humor. “Your sister. This whole evening is for my benefit. I’m supposed to be crazy jealous.”
Andrew holds the rolling apparatus while Ellen tucks cigarette paper in its vinyl saddle. They look intimate already.
Greta says, “Sorry, but I d
on’t think so.”
“Oh?” His eyebrows rise, and the pouches beneath his eyes vanish. He looks a decade younger. “Watch this.”
He runs his hand along her leg and under her dress.
“Hey, now,” she says.
At the same moment Ellen says, “I know,” and hops up from the couch, spilling pot over Andrew’s lap. “Let’s move the furniture and dance.”
AJ pedals his bicycle to the house where the tree is coming down. He has stayed home from work two days, and it has taken most of the morning to ride from his neighborhood, which has few trees and no snakes. He watches from a distance. He doesn’t want the crew to see him. All of the branches have been removed from the tree. The top of the trunk has been lopped, but the tree is still incredibly tall—and bare now, like a single monstrous thought.
He pedals farther, to the house with the red tile roof. A station wagon fills the driveway. The house is brick—nothing any bad wolf could blow down. It would take something huge, as big as the tree, to knock it over. The sprinklers are on and a man is on his knees in the wet grass, getting soaked.
“Can you help me?” the man says. He is trying to turn off the sprinklers.
AJ gives the spiked knob a twist. It’s not really that tight.
The man is effusive. He drips on AJ’s shoes. “Are you handy?” he asks. His name is Duncan, and he offers work. “A few hours a week.”
AJ starts immediately, hauling trash to the curb, mowing the back lawn, raking leaves in the wet grass. He is not quite finished with the leaves when Duncan tells him that’s enough.
“My wife and kids will be back soon. I don’t want them to see you.”
AJ doesn’t know how to take this.
“They don’t know how weak I am,” Duncan explains. “I don’t want them to know. Not until they have to. The children…” He loses his voice. His face changes shape. He searches the grass, as if his voice has fallen there. AJ imagines what the voice might look like. In the raked pile, a jagged red leaf turns away from his gaze. Finally Duncan says, “Once they know their father is dying, their childhood’s over, you see?”
These words don’t just strike AJ’s ears but take to the sky, which pales and wobbles. He swallows an uncomfortable gulp of air.
Duncan pats him on the back. “How are you at carpentry?” He describes ramps for a wheelchair. “I want to have them ready when I need them.”
In the weeks that follow, Duncan gives him a set of keys to the station wagon. They shop together for plywood and two-by-fours, which they take to a neighbor’s garage. Duncan is a patient teacher. He brings AJ iced tea and makes him wear protective goggles. He doesn’t mind when AJ confuses measurements or makes a cut so ugly it has to be redone. AJ learns to maneuver a circular saw. He hammers nails, drives screws. He builds two ramps. They go together in sections. He paints them a brick color to match the house. When he shakes Duncan’s hand, it does not feel like a hand but a soft bag holding something lighter than bones—pretzels or Pixy Stix.
He thinks he will finally see Greta when he installs the ramps, but Duncan is taking his family out of town.
“Are you good with this?” he asks. “Should I hire someone to help you?”
AJ declines the offer. The sections fit together like the plastic connecting blocks he played with as a boy. He has retrieved these blocks from his closet and built a house much like Duncan’s, adding plastic ramps to the steps.
“Keep track of your time,” Duncan tells him.
AJ spends the morning loading the sections into the back of the station wagon and unloading them down the street. The sections are heavy and difficult to maneuver. One set is for the front, another for the back. He has visited this house to clean the gutters, shovel snow, put up storm windows. He has never seen any of the family but Duncan, yet he feels connected to the place—the shape of the lawn, the rumpled roots of the sycamore in the backyard, the handprints in the sidewalk out front. These shapes and sites put him at ease, but the sections of the ramp fail to align. AJ drives to a pay phone to call his father. When he gets no answer, he calls Tom Stewart.
“I’m not much of a carpenter,” he warns.
It takes them an hour to figure out the problem. AJ confused a section meant for the back with one meant for the front. A simple problem, but he has nailed the sections together. It becomes a complicated setback. They do not finish until after dark and admire their work by flashlight.
“These are well built,” Tom Stewart says, kneeling to knock on the lumber.
“The guy they’re for designed them,” AJ explains. “I just followed directions, and I messed up a lot even then.”
“That’s all right,” Tom Stewart says. “These are good ramps and you built them.”
“I guess I did build them,” AJ says, surprised somehow by this information.
Headlights appear on the street and pull up to the driveway.
“They’re not supposed to see me,” AJ says.
They climb into Tom Stewart’s truck and drive away.
Greta and Andrew Holzman are stationed at the front door. He offers her a tired smile. “Why don’t you give me your number?”
“I’m staying here,” she says. “But I only have the weekend, and I want to spend it with Ellen. Then I’ll be in cold, cold Illinois, while you’ll be in warm, warm Florida.”
The door is open, which lets in the smell of the outside world: grass and trees and the soft, soporific southern air. The night is fully dark now, and she is tired.
He says, “Hot and cold don’t mix?”
“They become something terribly bland,” she says, “or a tornado.”
He places his hands on her hips. She leans in and lets him kiss her. It carries a tiny charge. She glances at Ellen, who is slow dancing with the dark little man.
“Did you know about those two?” she asks.
Andrew nods. “Elle tells me everything.”
Greta’s understanding of the night is shifting. She can almost feel the movement. She doesn’t know what to think, except she doesn’t want to be alone with Ellen and her strange partner. She initiates a second kiss and lets Andrew press his body against hers.
“I could be persuaded to stay.” He wags the hand with the cast. “This doesn’t prevent me from doing anything.”
“What do you know that I don’t?” she asks. “You can start with that guy’s name.”
“It’s Stan. He’s in the process of leaving his wife. She was at the party. Maybe tonight was it, you know, the parting.”
“That girl who was the bartender—”
“Stan’s daughter.”
“Jesus,” Greta says. “I thought Ellen was after you.”
“Me?” Andrew makes a face. “Didn’t you wonder why Penny left her own party to come here? The wife is her best friend.”
This talk makes her dizzy. She clings to him while she works to fit the pieces together. Penny hired Stan’s daughter to tend the bar, which was meant to stop him from attending to his mistress. Greta understands that she misjudged Penny. She left the party to stop Stan from seeing Ellen, to shame him. The night makes sense, just not the kind of sense she expected. It’s Penny and the little man’s wife who are friends, not she and Ellen.
“I’m trying like hell to get your attention,” Andrew says. “What do I need to do?”
“Love me,” she answers. “Give up Florida and move to Chicago. Buy snow boots and earmuffs. Live for me and me alone.”
“Hmm,” he says.
“You asked.”
“What the hell. Let’s do it.”
She expects him to laugh but he doesn’t. “You’re almost serious.”
“I turn fifty next month.” He looks at his watch as if it keeps track of his age. “I was married once, but that was done with years ago. And you look like…”
“I’m the wild friend from out of town.”
“When I jumped out the window, it was at my daughter’s house,” he says. “She has a drug problem. I ha
d to let her know what she was doing to all of us.”
“A stunt,” Greta says, and it sounds like self-accusation. She realizes why Ellen said she was no stranger to stunts. All those things she invented to prolong their friendship. She mentioned a boy—one of the tree men—who began appearing on her street, staring from his bicycle at their house. She had the vanity to think he was there to catch a glimpse of her, but she discovered a canceled check to A.Jack written in Duncan’s nearly illegible hand. Duncan was using him to do the chores he could no longer do himself. The kid had built the ramps she had yet to remove.
Then Greta used the boy, too. She’d only told Ellen that she kissed him, but that was bad enough. There was the real stunt, telling such a lie.
“I left my husband when he was dying,” she tells Andrew. “I left him because he had chosen not to die, and I couldn’t face it. When there seemed no end to it, I couldn’t continue.”
Andrew nods without comment. He has no interest in judging her. He behaves as if the person she’s describing no longer exists, as if by admitting her bad behavior she erases it. She knows this is not true. All of the people she has been do not merely trail her like a wedding train but envelop her like the layers of an elaborate gown she can never entirely shed.
The player changes discs. Motown is back. Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell have tracked her down. “Ain’t no mountain high enough,” they claim, “ain’t no valley low…”
“I’m so weary of this music. Why can’t we take the pledge and move on?”
“Hey girl, I’m with you.” It’s Ellen. She and Stan join them at the door. They’re holding hands. He wipes at his nose with his sleeve. “I’ll take the pledge,” Ellen says as she marches to the stereo. The music dies. “Open the door,” she calls, but it’s already open.
They step aside and she flings the CD, Frisbee style, into the yard. The silver disc catches the moonlight as it flies across the short stretch of grass, gleaming as it strikes a parked car. The door to the car opens. The dome light illuminates the girl with the ponytail who tended bar. Beside her sits another woman.
“I have to go,” Stan says.
“Close it,” Greta says as soon as Stan passes through. “Don’t watch.”
The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards Page 3