The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards

by Robert Boswell

  “What does my bag tell you about me?”

  “You dress well. And you don’t know yourself.”

  “I forgot to check here.”

  He slips a finger inside the waist of her jeans, the gap between the denim and her pale skin. He paces a circle around her, rimming her pants with his finger. When he stands in front of her again, he lifts her shirt: small breasts, nipples upturned, fruit plucked prematurely from the vine.

  “I guess you’re clean,” he says.

  “Certain?”

  He unbuttons her jeans, tugs them down. Her panties slide along her thighs, slanting and rippled like a flag. Her pubis is shaved to a narrow strip. His hand slides between her legs. “You don’t appear to be hiding anything.”

  She grips the hand and begins rocking her pelvis.

  “I can come like this,” she says.

  A drop of sweat forms beneath her fine hair, the scalp turning pink.

  After, she says, “Watch me walk.” She shuffles with her pants down to the bathroom. “You have to do yourself,” she calls. “I’m a married woman.” Her laughter is round, complicated, lovely to hear. She reappears, buttoning the jeans. “We have rules about what I should and shouldn’t do.”

  “You should gain some weight,” Claude says.

  A veil descends. “I like myself this way.” She slams the door twice before the latch clicks.

  Claude slides the chain into its slot. He takes the paper cup from the television, the coffee still warm, still bitter and burnt, but easier to swallow.

  LACUNAE

  Paul Lann’s window on the silent world was narrow, but no one else had any view at all. The hospital sat on a sandy mesa that overlooked an irrigated valley. As a boy, Paul’s paper route had taken him through this valley, and he had always gotten lost. The view from the seventh story revealed the underlying grid, a finger pattern on either side of a curving irrigation canal. Beyond the trees, the desert resumed, blond and fierce and holding tenaciously to the sun as it receded beneath the horizon. A hazy, persistent light lingered among the rooftops, burnishing a satellite dish so that it shone like a spoon. Dusk in the desert was a reluctant phenomenon. It required encouragement, expected coddling. Case in point: it was almost 10:00 p.m.

  The waiting room, nothing more than a wide spot in the hallway, had only the one window, where Paul pressed his forehead against the slender strip of glass. Directly below, Paul’s car, a disintegrating old Mercury, suddenly rolled forward. He had set the brake when he parked it, but as soon as he shut the door the car had inched along the curb. “That’s better,” a security guard had said. He spoke as if Paul had made the car move by remote control. “This is loading and unloading only,” the guard added, as he did every time Paul parked in the gray zone. “Picking up your old man?”

  Paul had nodded and patted the Mercury’s fender. “She won’t be any trouble.” He had driven two hundred miles across the Arizona desert to take his father across town from the hospital. Now, an hour after arriving and a single floor below his destination, he stalled. He made his living designing and building furniture. He had recently quit the Tucson Morning Star to work with wood full-time, which put him at the beginning of what might be a risky artistic endeavor—or merely a tedious business venture. He wished he could ask his father for advice. To succeed financially, he needed to make dozens of identical chairs, tables, desks, and dressers. To thrive artistically, he needed to build what the wood demanded—precise, one-of-a-kind pieces. At present, he compromised, constructing high-quality examples of everyday furnishings. A few boutiques carried his work, and he eked by. The worst of both worlds, his father might have said, but what the old man would have suggested Paul didn’t know.

  The window radiated heat, and his warm forehead felt like a symptom. “Don’t come this time until they release him,” his mother had said over the phone. Her husband’s strokes had become routine for her. “I know how to sit alone in a hospital,” she’d added. “I could use you later to get him out of my hair.” Below, the Mercury slipped forward again just as a lamppost came on, light winking off the car’s tilting hood.

  Paul winked back. He was thirty-five, divorced and living alone, a reasonably intelligent man who smelled this evening of lacquer and body odor—a surprisingly inoffensive combination. He did his best work when he obeyed the wood. Something in the grain and texture guided him. He could get lost in it. He once spent eight consecutive hours on a commemorative paddle for a retiring vice principal.

  The black vinyl roof of his car, sun-bleached and peeling, changed appearance under the direction of an evening breeze. A pattern emerged, an oval with irregular features. Paul could not transform the image into a face or a symbol he recognized, and yet his skin began to ring. Headlights flashed in the dim lot. Brake lights followed. Vertigo made his knees weak. The landscape, shifting with the fading light, seemed to gather itself just beyond the window, as if the glass were a divide.

  The waiting room itself held three bulky chairs and a matching couch. A television guarded one end, while immense vending machines watched over the other. One machine had made Paul’s coffee, a drink mahogany in color and with the almost satisfactory flavor of aged dung. The television entertained a family of visitors, a genetic grouping of broad bodies topped by chunk heads and orange hair. They huddled silently on the couch while a jingle recommended candlelight and cola, mechanized voices singing, “Romance is changing.” As if in response, one of the vending machines flashed a digital green message: “Exact change only.”

  Paul tossed his coffee cup into a squat barrel lined with brown hospital plastic. The liner was not entirely open. The cup landed right side up and was held aloft, as if floating, a curl of coffee lolling obscenely in its mouth. He was tired, he told himself, and likely dehydrated. His father’s condition encouraged morbid, idiotic thinking. The plastic liner in the wastebasket emitted a mild shriek as the Styrofoam cup exerted enough weight to force the bag open. The cup slid down and the dark liner closed over it.

  This was not a revelatory vision, Paul told himself. Static electricity, inertia, gravity—the usual suspects up to their usual sport. After one of the strokes, his father had tried to say “Styrofoam” and substituted “Chappaquiddick.” Yet Paul had understood. He and his father had been unusually close. Woe unto the gaps, Paul’s college roommate had said upon their parting, and Paul had never seen him again. What was that guy’s name?

  At the threshold to his father’s room, Paul could see most of his father’s body, which was still in hospital garb, lying on the bed, pale arms folded over his chest. He did not look ready to come home. West Wing played soundlessly on the ceiling mount. Paul’s mother sat across the tile floor, against the far wall, wrapped in the plaid of an institutional chair. An identical chair gaped beside her. His mother’s magazine showed images of kitchens and living rooms. Her hands flipped through the pages quickly, as if she were shuffling cards, her extravagant hair shuddering. She dyed it black but left long strands of gray. The last time Paul had come home he had dropped her off at the beauty shop and returned for her too early. Her head had been plastered with dye but banded sprouts of gray hair erupted like dandelions gone to seed. “You can’t see me like this,” she had said evenly. “It spoils the magic.”

  Paul’s father spoke. “We’ll have to bury you in that thing.” Mr. Lann was not in the bed, but standing at a window, fully dressed and looking out at the Mercury. There were two beds in the room. Paul had mistaken a stranger’s body for his father’s. “It looks worse than I do,” his father went on, his voice soft and a little sad. This was the voice that Paul had grown up with, and it pleased him to hear it.

  “The car’s twenty-five years old,” Paul said. “Cut it some slack.”

  His father was talking and making sense. He didn’t look like a man who’d had a stroke a few days earlier.

  “I’m seventy-two,” his father went on, “and I’m in better shape than it is.”

  “You’re seven
ty-seven,” Paul’s mother put in. She opened her arms to her son.

  The man in the bed looked nothing like his father. He was closer to Paul’s age. A purple scar divided the pale skin of his shaved head, traversing his skull from ear to ear, as if doctors had removed his brain.

  “The Mercury is twenty-five in human years,” Paul said as he hugged his mother. “That’s a hundred in car years.”

  His father grunted. His face clouded. “Get me out of this damn place.” He said this in his other voice. His bad voice. It had come into being after his second stroke, an urgent, expulsive vehicle, deeper in tone than any normal voice, darker in texture. “His angry voice,” Paul’s mother called it. But angrydid not seem adequate. It was coarse and lurking. An unclean voice. “A residual of the lacunar infarction,” a young neurologist had explained. “It may go away. Or at least get less creepy.” And it did go away, only to return after the third stroke. A new, even younger, neurologist tried to explain it. “Damage to gray matter produces mysterious results.” He described a patient who could not recognize parts of his body. “I came in when he was eating and he said, ‘They’re feeding me.’ He was talking about his hands.”

  Paul’s father’s strokes came in almost regular intervals, like a relentless chorus to a monotonous song. Yet there were times when Edmund Lann could seem like the man he had been most of his life—gentle and ironic, a soft touch when it came to favors or money, a man who liked to laugh. More often he seemed hardly a man at all—a husk, a shell, a thing. It pained Paul to think of his father this way.

  “Let go,” his father commanded, and Paul broke his embrace with his mother. “Get me out of this…” He stuttered over a consonant, finally coming to “damp.”

  This dump, Paul translated, or possibly this damn place.

  His mother offered an expressive and vaguely theatrical sigh. “It comes and goes,” she told Paul, “like a haunting.” She had been an actress when she and Edmund met. Their romance had taken place in Chicago. Edmund, a graduate student in business school, had attended an absurdist stage production called Shelf Life, in which his future wife played a chest of drawers. Much of the humor was built on double entendres about her chest. In the playbill, she altered her name to make it distinctive, changing “Catherine” to “Caddy.” Edmund never called her anything else—until the bad voice emerged.

  Lazy bitch, the voice would say. Lardass.

  Paul knelt to place his father’s feet on the footplates of the wheelchair. He believed the bad voice had lived inside his father all along, but he had worked to contain it. Now he could contain nothing. It slipped out by means of the little gaps—the lacunae. Paul knew this word from his own work. One of his teachers had used the term to describe the tiny holes in inferior wood.

  “Have we left anything?” his mother asked. She flounced about the room gathering their possessions, her heroic tresses sweeping behind her. She insisted on taking everything for which the hospital charged them: the plastic water pitcher, razor, and toothbrush; the paper slippers and disposable dinner utensils; a translucent shower cap; slender bars of soap. “Our car is at home,” she said, stuffing the booty into a wide-mouthed bag. “Helen and Laura gave me a ride over.”

  Laura was Paul’s ex-wife, and Helen, his former mother-in-law. “They came here?” he asked.

  “And the child,” his mother said.

  “That boy looks just like you,” Edmund put in.

  Paul didn’t know whether to reply to his father’s comment, which antagonized him, or his tone of voice, which had softened and sounded like the man Paul loved. His shoes pinched his feet, and he stepped in place stupidly.

  “I guess we’ll all have to ride in the Mercury,” he said. After a moment, he added, “He’s not my son, that boy.”

  “We know that,” Caddy said.

  “Out of the pokey, at last,” his father announced happily as they wheeled him away. “That kid is the spitting mmm… mmm…” When the word finally emerged, it sounded like mirage.

  The Mercury was all that remained of Paul’s marriage. The house had slipped away—mortgage payments omitted during the drama. They’d both had affairs. Each had known and given permission. They had thought they were bored. Paul had proposed the experiment to celebrate their sophistication. He had covered local sports for the newspaper, and one of the photographers wanted to seduce him. The idea hadn’t really been avant-garde, merely opportunistic.

  It turned ugly quickly and ended one night when Laura didn’t come home. Paul packed a few things into the trunk of the Mercury and drove off. He spent a month attempting to love the photographer. He built a chair to the precise dimensions of her bottom, the contours of which he measured repeatedly with his palms.

  One night after interviewing a victorious high school football coach who said, “We literally knocked their heads off,” Paul became discouraged with his job. He ran into Laura in a bar they used to frequent together. When he joined her table, her friends one by one departed. An argument ensued. They left the place together but got no farther than the Mercury. They had sex in the backseat without ever leaving the parking lot.

  She had been living with a stockbroker and was about to move with him to Denver.

  “This was just a slip,” she said, buttoning her blouse. “A meaningless blip on the screen.”

  A year passed before Paul heard from her again. She called late one night. The telephone seemed to burn his palm and he dropped the receiver.

  “Just wanted to see how you are,” she said apologetically.

  “I’m building things again.”

  “What are you wearing?” she asked. “Describe your haircut.”

  She was moving once more, abandoning Colorado and the stockbroker for their hometown in the desert.

  “I’ll live with my mother at first,” she said. “How often do you get back to see your folks?”

  They picked a rendezvous date.

  That she was pregnant, she did not mention. Eight months along, her belly a mountain where there had once been a plain. She let the plan slip to her mother, who told Caddy the pair might reconcile. Joy mangled his mother’s voice on the telephone, and it occurred to Paul that she probably was never a very subtle actress. She hadn’t known to keep the weighty secret. She thought so much of him for not letting the mountain get in the way.

  Paul canceled the trip without a call. His machine took Laura’s inquiries, her apologies and explanations, her bitter dismissal. Paul did not return home until his father’s first stroke. During his visits, he drove his father all around town—one of the few activities Edmund still enjoyed—but Paul never encountered his ex-wife on these excursions. He never dropped in on her. Eight strokes had followed the first, and still Paul had not seen Laura or her child.

  He heard about them, though. His mother provided updates by telephone about Edmund’s health and Laura’s son. “He’s walking now,” she would say, and Paul would have to guess whether she meant his recovering father or his ex-wife’s toddler. The boy could not possibly be his. The final time he made love to Laura—the Mercury’s suspension groaning along with them—was more than a year before the birth.

  Which meant Paul had nothing left from his marriage but the Mercury. If it had been in perfect shape, it still wouldn’t have been a collector’s item. A product of the late seventies, the Mercury was the automotive equivalent of clingy polyester shirts with giant lapels. A big sandbox of a car. Everyone complained about it. But it had been good to him, almost no trouble as long as he was willing to put up with its moods and mild deformities—the occasional sputter at intersections, the unsteady acceleration and tremulous lights, the threadbare interior and snarling hood, the front seat’s tendency to come unmoored, the windows that would not close, the doors that would not open, and the loose front bumper, which rocked up and down at intersections as if muttering.

  “You should really get rid of this thing,” his mother suggested on the drive home from the hospital. She rode in the backs
eat, which was grimy with sawdust. “Don’t you need a truck for your business?”

  “Lardass doesn’t like anything old,” his father put in.

  “Call her Caddy, please,” Paul replied. He found his mother in the rearview. “The trunk’s enormous. All of creation would fit in that thing.”

  He had no intention of selling the Mercury. Always in friends, there were little traits one had to excuse.

  Paul’s only job was to take Edmund on afternoon drives. Caddy needed an hour of uninterrupted silence, which didn’t seem like much to ask, but an hour had never seemed so long. Thinking his mother’s Corolla was at fault, he switched to the Mercury, which his father came to prefer because Paul let him smoke in it.

  Edmund Lann tapped the car window with his wedding ring. “This damn thing will die,” he said. The gold ring caught the sun. It didn’t blind Paul, but he couldn’t see past it and braked. “Right there,” the bad voice insisted. The ring struck the window again. Beyond the sidewalk, in a lush yard, water flowed from the end of an elevated garden hose, soaking a leafy plant. There had to be a person holding the hose, but all Paul could see was a canvas glove gripping the nozzle.

  “Remember this street,” his father said. “Can you manage that?”

  “It’s Calgary Street,” Paul said.

  “Unless you’re an idiot, you don’t water leaves in this kind of heat,” his father said. “It sucks the life out of them.” As if to underscore the words, the air conditioner belt squealed. The rush of air through its vents became audible, a strained quality to the sound, as if the car could not catch its breath.

  “I don’t see how water can make a plant dry up,” Paul replied.

  Edmund waved his hand at the window, which meant they should move on. Paul pressed the accelerator. The engine revved but the car resisted for a moment before heaving forward.

  “Where to?” Paul asked.

  Edmund gripped the exposed foam of the armrest. “Anywhere, dope.”

  The bad voice was never deeply submerged. It lurked below conversations, ready to show its scaly head. In the past, it had disappeared after a few days. But Paul had been in town a week, and the voice still dominated his father.