by Sam Michel
Soon after, as an unexamined token of my want “to do what’s right,” I removed my belt and gave it to my wife, dropped my pants and grasped my ankles and instructed her to “let me have it.” And she would have, she explains, her first want was to hurt me. In retrospect, she faults our posture, something physical for having compromised her wants, she recalls my hair. Possibly, she says, beneath the kitchen light, its unfavoring flourescence, she was astonished to observe what such abundancies of bottom-hair should really look like; possibly she held off with the belt for fear of rupturing a pustule. She felt repellently embroiled, she said, felt herself to be a witness to an accident, a private mishap, as if the hirsute, pallid hash I sat on was the outgrowth of a quarrel I carried on within myself, a domestic spat my wife perhaps believed was best left unintrusively concluded. Then, too, poultry crossed her mind; my testicles, seen lolling from my backside, inducing her to visions of the turkey’s wattle, the scalded, wrinkled throatsack of the barnyard cock.
“And I really never noticed how much lower one was than the other,” says my wife. “I never thought about how you could really get them swinging.”
Naturally, they swung. I grasped my ankles, as I said, and I braced myself, and flinched, despite my wife insisting hers were nothing more than “love-strokes,” and between each stroke, when I allowed myself to look, I saw them, meat and nuts, Pauls and Peter, cock and ballocks, swinging. I felt betrayed. It seemed gay to me, this swing, incongruous, a lark, certainly unstoic. This wasn’t punishment, was not even science, not the classic physics; it was difficult for me to see in such insouciant movement a numeric ratio relievingly descriptive of our folly. I wanted cool. Objectivity. Formula. I thought I might experience at last, by virtue of my wife, the heaven-headed vision builded on the rock-hard footing of a categorical imperative.
Eventually, whether from my head’s displacement in the pulmonary loop, or from embarrassment, or both, I felt the blood collect behind my eyes; I thought my eyes might burst, my ears; I felt myself delivered not by science, not by knowing, but by feeling, but discomfort. I sought to cleave to this discomfort, and soon enough had also the discomfort of a cramp to cleave to, a stitch in my side, a crick in my neck, the sudden, peripheral awareness of my mother. As for my wife, I was not too long in understanding she had meanwhile found out for herself a system of delivering her strokes by which each stroke was paired with the announcement of each ornament my oversight had ruined for our evening. One stroke for the stockings, said my wife, one stroke for the pearls, each stroke falling with a force, I thought, commensurate with the ruin each intended to redress. The hair, for instance, stung me nearly not at all, whereas the watermelon douche provoked a tingling in my system from the sphincter to the sinus. I was happy, then, to have made a little sense. Gradually, as the strokes accrued, I thought I might have been delivered further from my folly, a little nearer up to moral vision through the parsing of a rank. Hard to say, however, how many strokes I had endured, how much was truly on its way to order, before my wife was humped along my spine, pantingly, muttering obscenities and petting my erection. Hard to say how many times my seeking after punishment has landed me in love. In my experience, a hand is raised against the naked skin—my skin—a clap sounds, a gasp, a cry, and there I see myself, despite myself, aroused to tumefaction; there I see another striving forth of foreign life.
In seeking after punishment, it may be I conceived this son, who was in turn delivered to the clap and the gasp, the cries we were relieved to hear had landed him in living. He breathes, he cries, he lives; he breathes, he cries, he lives. Life, we say, my wife and I, happy to observe his mastery of the habit, its variable expansions. Through the years, we see our son has come to be selective of his food. We see he has his joys. He plays, he hits, falls sick, gains weight, grows height, sheds shoes, soils himself and sings. He thinks, my wife informs me; he will, she says, remember. And will he, I must wonder, love? And will his love occur to him, obscurely—when it slows, unheats, congeals—as his reward for an unconscious quest for punishment? When he wakes at night, will there someday be a woman sleeping there beside him? Will he remember how she came to be there? Will he lean to her, draw nearer to regard the addled cheek, slack beneath the winter starshine; will he listen at her mouth, hear her dogged, longing blood, lay his fingertips against her forehead, find her pulse and worry: What have I done wrong? Will there have been an unrecited sin he wants to call up from his past, for which he hopes he might, following a life endured beside this woman, finally be absolved?
He did not believe so. He was a simple boy, a literal man, he lived a simple want. Initially, he liked this woman’s walk. He liked the reedy swing to her arm, the way she carried her shoulders one up higher than the other. Her dresses cost a dime. She drank honeyed milk sometimes at night and sometimes read the menu to him if they ate out nights for dinner. She coddled eggs for him. She taught him Hot Corn, Cold Corn; they sang Vine Covered Cabin. He found a note inside his pocket, once, a promise of a kiss she’d written on a circus cookie boxtop, a clue to lead him to another clue to where he could—in a bath, in a bed, in an April garden grown of daffodils and tulips—find her. What life had he kept from her? What greater love? Who was she to him, that he must hold her? And who is he, I ask myself, to me? How is it that I hold them? A lover and a wife, a spectre of a mother, maybe, and a son: no avenue, I think, to absolution. Lately I have watched him draw, seen him mooning over tubers, have been compellingly perplexed to witness his devotedness to Hope. My son continues in his life as foreign to my mind as tumefaction; as strange to me as those rebukes I carry, sacked and corded in my pants, from which he is, in part, descended. And my wife, no less strange to me, her love, what has it fetched her? She will not call it punishment. She calls love love.
“I have loved,” she says. “I know how to punish.”
I did not doubt her; I believed, saw she wore a body muscled by the heavy repetitions of her loving. Her bones warped purposeward. She stepped sexlessly, was ponderously doggish, moved as if she were unaudienced, as if motion had reduced itself, for her, to the provisioning of sustenance and shelter. She meant what she meant. A husband could not shake her. There was no flight to her. No abandon. Every feather of her heart had turned to lead; her heart was pumping lead; her veins conducted lead; lead lay grayly in her eyes, fell grayly anywhere she looked and found her future. She shook a highly moral fist. She wagged a bladed finger. Had she struck me, I do not believe I should have been allowed the breath to air myself in speaking. Not that we spoke. Not then. Not today. We were both of us unaired. Shut up. Densening. Clearly, I would not remember. We understood, I think, that I’d forgot. Her purpose. Why she stood. What she said. I remembered rather what she interrupted. My thought, its thrust, the relative importance of a breath.
Because it was a breath I had been thinking of, breathing, my father’s breathing, on my birthday, early, early on, the first thing of the day I can remember. Breathe, I thought, and felt as if my wife, her breathing, our need of breath, of speech, had landed me where I had been before she interrupted. Speak. Speak, speak, speak, and breathing, I was thinking, Papa’s breath. I was returned there. My wife returned me, with a difference, past beyond accordions and bagpipes to a blondeness and a gleam, an original necessity, a narrow bed where I had pulled the sheets up to my chin and watched the stars shine out and fell to sleep and waked up being five.
I was saturated, then, built again of widenesses and suddeness and leap. I wore a bowtie. Suspenders. I said and then a lot, remember? And then, I was sleeping, and then I waked up, and then it was dark and I could smell my daddy’s breath. Cigarettes, I could have said. Coffee, last night’s supper, middling bourbon, my father’s want to wake, and to sleep, to wake and not want to be sleeping. I was five. I knew what I meant. I knew more than I could say; I believed that what I said was everything I knew. He was a shape there, in the dark; he felt stiff to me and whiskery; I felt him breathing. And I could smell his breath, and the
smell of him that was not his breath; I likely might have pulled Amelia Dangberg’s hem and said: He smelled like Losivya. Which was true. He smelled, as I recall him, like the inside of his pickup. Which was also true. Diesel fuel, dog and cow, days of sun, unpaid bills, bent nails and a cracked dash and a prayer for coolness and a little rain. It was true he waked up in the dark, true he drove out in his pickup to his fields and checked his heifers, true he drove back to the barn and milked. He might have pulled a calf. He might have lost a calf. He wanted me to call him Pop. I felt the size of his desires. He did not need to tell me when he lost a calf that he would rather not have lost it. He might have lost a sheep. His mare, perhaps, could break her leg, stepping through the cattle guard. Hail could fall, drought persist, hoppers swarm, markets plummet, the meanest southward breeze could scratch him from the winner’s board in futures. He came in to me. He knelt beside my bed. He laid his hand against my back so I could feel it through the covers. He was the freeze to me. He was the cat that sat beside the milkpail while he milked, the leppy calf that waked up bawling for its mother. He breathed straw and seed. This was new, my father waking me, he never waked me up before, and still I knew him. He was river-gleam; the sun beat through his palms; a dry wind sifted through his ribs and smelled to me like leaves and hides, like dust, like lung, like Pop.
“Hey,” he said, “wake up. Wake up,” he said, “it’s me, your Pop.”
Perhaps he had foreseen me, was afraid he saw a boy whose life would pass him by unready. I was that boy. I am this man.
“Nothing has to be so perfect,” says my wife. “He’s your son. He’s five. He wasn’t there. It’s a story, why don’t you just make it up?”
So I addressed my son at the kitchen table over mugs of chocolate. I shouted from across the yard. I came upon him chipping paint from off the mailbox, stripping paper from the walls, watched him chop the blooms off from his mother’s amaryllis. He carved; he scrawled; I asked him what he thought he must be thinking. He looks up at me, somewhere close these past few days beyond me; when he speaks, I have the sense these days his speech is not delivered from his mouth, but from the place where he is looking.
“Dreams come from my sheets,” he says. “At day they wait, and then at night they come out of my sheets until they wake me up so I can see them.”
He says, “I’m really happy I like water.”
He pulls the petals from the blooms he chops, touches out his tongue against a leaky gouge.
“For me,” I say, “I remember I was cold. I forgot it even was my birthday, but when my papa said it was, then I remember I got warmer.”
I told the boy I wore pajamas.
“We said PJ’s,” I explained to him. “We never called them jammies. What I thought about the leaves was that the trees had gone to sleep and accidently dropped them.”
My son looks down from me. He names a rock. He looks up past beyond me, asks me when the lizards will come back, and will the desert ever be a forest.
He says, “Hopey sweats in her mouth.”
And, “Yellow moons are hotter than a white moon, did you know it?”
So far, understandably, his interest in my story is remote. I do not believe my offerings to him have caused him any interruption from himself; I often think there is no self to him which might be interrupted. I think I make no difference. I go and I come to him as the tide goes, as the wave comes, as the fish is washed upon a shore and turns its eye up at the sun and is devolved to gape and bone and scatter. I bear him nothing new. Profoundly. He knows the wind can feel because it’s it that moves it. His feet are hooved. He barks. He spins a web out from his body, hangs suspended in the canopies and catches gnats. His young are very old.
He says, “Baby needs a nap.” He says, “Baby’s sad.” And, “Baby’s sleeping.”
“You’re not listening to me,” she says. She says, “Look. I said Hans is sweet on me. I said he gets up from his chair, at least. The thing is that he looks at me, he moves, he listens.”
So listen: She was seventeen. She said she was eleven, thirty-one, said that she was twenty. She wore pointed shoes with pilgrim’s buckles. She sang aloud, at noon, alone on crowded sidewalks. Summertimes, she walked into the river naked, sat neck-deep in the flood and watched out through the reeds while boys passed by on tubes and boats and fished and smoked and lied and laughed and swam against the current. Suns set. Birds hatched. No scent or shade escaped her. She was open to a song. A lyric moved her to resolve. Nights, in the desert, the fires burned as high as churches. She sought there by the fire’s light the most aggresive eye, prayed she might live out her years beside a man who caused in her the wanting always to be seen. She said she felt herself to be exaltingly decided. Where was the Nile, she said, the Euphrates? What was the sound she craved—a heel, at dawn, in flight from love, and to it, a stroke on mossy stones, heard through a broken pane, a dream of herself her lover wakes up missing, a scent and a sound of herself, passing, passing, promised by a word and by a kiss will someday be returning. She was young. She was long. She tapered. Men must wait on her. A man must wait at table; a man must watch the clock; another, darker man must stand his hours in the sun, whistling at the sky from down upon the blistered tarmac. There must be many, many men, a long, empurpled wait. Rome, she said, was all she really ever truly cared for of my mother.
Once, she said—“let me tell you”—she received a postcard from a boy who went to France. A museum card. A bowl of fruits, a knife, a rind, a bottle. He was coming well with French. The women dressed in dresses. He himself was unafraid to wear a hat; he mentioned his fondness for a supple glove. At the bottom of the card he wrote: I embrace you. She received the card by her mother’s hand. She was young then, hard to think, she could blush to take the postcard from her mother and determine that the first word written on behalf of her affections was Cheri. She read the card where she received it, several times, entire, and then again, quickly, pausingly, its opening and closing salutations: Cheri, I embrace you; Cheri I embrace you. She did not mind her mother, said my wife, until she saw a smudge of something kitcheny encroaching on the margins of the card and understood she had been read. Her mother loitered in the doorway, goofily omniscient, “spooney,” said my wife, for my wife’s sake, for the sake of her mother, her mother standing in the doorway with her arms crossed underneath her breasts, her breasts appearing to my wife to be the insupportable expressions of a life consumed by folded sheets and meekness, a boney mob of thwarted want a daughter hoped was not for her years to inherit.
“Letter?” said her mother. “What’s he say?”
“After that, when I grew up, I swore that I would never share a mailbox,” says my wife. “I would have to have my own box, my own name, with a number, and a lock and key.”
I hear her. I knew what garden. I have seen her river. She may stand before me, corduroys and sweatshirt, and up from her I hear a velvet rush, her blouse, her hurry, the sound come through the broken pane of her desire to escape me, and to return to me, the inmate, tender traveler, me, Lincoln Dahl, husband, father, lover. Eventually, she must mean to me what she meant, despite my reflex to defend against us.
Meantime, a husband lapses in his habit. He names his hours. Call this hour food. This is the hour of work, to drink, of sleep. He looks beyond himself—a boy, a young man, never to repeat his father—to his father. He lapses, relapses; he becomes a man. Then one day he is seated. He is fogged. Nothing comes to him. Then a thought will come where he is glad to follow, to his head, inside his head, gone, his body gone, over there, in that chair, without him, his body a respondent to a wife, a mother and a son, a mouth, a tongue, rote and droney: Peas, it says, turnip, nothing much, 9:05, units-in, units-out, X, and X, and X and X and X, a snow, it says, and no, and yes, and I will meet you there, in the sun, where the calf is born, and the jonquil meets the bluebird. Kiss her, touch her, listen. Too late? Too late? She is here, I told myself, beside me, there she is. I hear her, hear myself, at a distance,
a distance nears, a word is uttered, a time recalled, I feel where I am most required. My child, mine, my wife’s child, ours, a child, a son, our boy, a son, our oldest, simple story. Courage, I must tell myself: How would you be read? Truly? Thoroughly? With humor, appreciation of an irony, compassion?
“Call me Pop,” my father said. He said, “When you get yourself in love, all the desert is a present.”
Skulls, he meant. Bleached bones. A feather. He meant a tooth he carried in his pocket to my mother from the splintered jaw he turned up on the refuge of a cougar.
Said my papa, “This one time—you won’t believe this was your pop, see—but this one time I rode out with nothing on my head except for picking flowers.”
When I think of him, see us in the orchard, or his pickup, feeding winters with his heifers, when I recall him in my room, come early, first thing in the morning to me, I think I sensed his happiness did not derive from me. Not first. I think I understood my father meant to tell me that his best days must predate me. I think he did not know what he meant. I did not know what I understood. He came into my room, and somewhere in the air he breathed I must have felt among the things he might have lost and did not lose the absence of my mother. She was everywhere not there. Should I begin the story rightly, and tell my son a truth, I should say it felt to me as if my mother had been purposely excluded. My father meant to beat her to me. I meant an end to him. He did not know what he meant, and I could not have said what I had understood, yet I must have felt that I had somehow come between them, my mother and my father; I rivaled, unculpably; my ascent was won at my conception; he conceived me, conceded my ascent; we were unrivaling rivals; he came into my room and I believe we neither of us felt that he was in his place; when he knelt beside my bed, laid his hand against my back and waked me up and told me that today would be my birthday, I think we understood that he was in the best place given him to come to. He was happy. Happyish. He knew that I would sit his horse. I was not too long surprised to see my father had it in his mind for me to watch the sun rise from his shoulders. I do not recall his saying what I was to watch. He said little. He said, Hey, partner, wake up, it’s me, your pop, it’s your birthday. He said, Give me your foot. Hands, he said, syrup? butter?