Exes

by Max Winter

  “I helped you. I might’ve even saved your life,” he said, falling into the shuttered shopfront window of what couldn’t have possibly been that ratcatcher’s or the taxidermist’s. It wasn’t a movie, so it was just some shop that neither mattered nor meant anything.

  I turned my back and walked toward home.

  “We can take turns,” he shouted. “We’ll try!”

  I tried not to weave and in all likelihood failed. Eli was somewhere behind me. He didn’t look as small as I’d hoped he’d look in Paris. If anything, he looked bigger. I went down into the Metro. Stamped my ticket, walked onto the platform. Eli, meanwhile, fumbled through his many pockets, looking for his carnet, yelling at his pockets and at me. “Now see here,” he yelled. The train pulled up. There had been some kind of match, or strike, and the car was oddly full and loud for that time of night. The doors opened, and someone pulled me in. The doors closed in Eli’s red face. A transport cop grabbed his arm, and we were sucked into the tunnel, the whole car cheering.

  I spent that night and the next seven nights at a girlfriend’s in La Défense. I didn’t go to class. Eli had no idea where to look for me. His flight was in a week. When I went back to my place, there was a clean spot on the floor where he had slept outside my door and a neat little stack of bottle caps. I had missed my chance to say goodbye.

  _____________

  Georgie was out front, wiping down a car with a dirty rag. He stopped when he saw me. I pretended not to see him, but pretending not see someone doesn’t work with guys like Georgie.

  “Hey!”

  Same with pretending you haven’t heard them.

  “I just want to show you something.” He walked toward me.

  I turned back around. “You can tell me from there.”

  “I can’t tell you nothing. This is something I got to show you.”

  “What.”

  “Just come here. You gotta take a look at this.”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “Ah, c’mon.”

  “No, I’m asking you: If I look at this one thing, will you leave me alone? From now on?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said, and walked toward him. The sun was low, and we were both being loud: me on purpose, him because he couldn’t help it. I approached him, and he stepped aside, giving me a path and pointing at the car parked facing the wrong way right in front of the club. He pointed at the driver’s side-view. “That mirror. How come it don’t got that warning about things looking smaller in them. Other side’s got one.”

  “Maybe it’s a mistake.”

  “They don’t make mistakes like that at a factory. I worked in a factory, okay. There’s spics lined up around the block waiting to take your job for half what you make. That shit happens on purpose.”

  “Maybe they thought it would distract the driver. Like he should know how side-views work if he’s behind the wheel. Like he should already know from mirrors.”

  “That’s a good answer.”

  “Are we through?” I started walking backwards. “ ’Cause I need to pick up my boyfriend, he’s gonna be ho—”

  “He’s dead.”

  I stopped, thinking he meant my boyfriend, thinking that meant Eli. I felt nineteen all of a sudden. “What?”

  “They found them, he’s dead.”

  “Who’s dead?”

  “That guy.”

  “What guy?” I started walking backward again, toward something that might have been my car.

  “That guy that looks like a dinosaur.”

  “Huh.” I stopped.

  “Yeah. He washed up on the shore of that lake where he lives. Read it in the paper.”

  “The paper.” I looked over my shoulder. There were no cars. No people to see. No one to help.

  “I believe in all that shit: ghosts, dinosaurs.” The whole street was quiet. “Jesus.” He stepped closer. “I was an instrument baby.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Got caught inside my mom. They used howyoucallit—clamps—to get me out. You can see the marks.” He leaned into the security light outside the club and pointed at the dent in the left side of his forehead. “Killed my mother, though.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Not your fault.”

  “Okay. Bye.”

  “Come on, Alix, that’s not how to be a neighbor.”

  “I mean it. About my name, about everything. Leave me alone.” I put my hand out, as if I were blocking a spell. He stopped and stared at me, his mouth open.

  I got in my car and peeled out. By the time I crossed downtown, I realized that I knew where I was going all along.

  I’d heard that Eli was living on Ives Street, at the corner of Transit. There was no doorbell, so I knocked on the blinded window nearest the front door until a black-pored nose poked through the slats. Then an eye, which squinted, then widened and disappeared behind rattling blinds. Then something fell. Keys. At least a minute’s worth of quiet. It had been so long, and I had heard so many things, that I didn’t know what to expect. The deadbolt clicked and there he was: older and thinner, as gray and pitted as concrete.

  It took longer than it should have for me to realize he was also shirtless. Eli used to avoid pointless shirtlessness—hated his hairless chest, his inverted left nipple, and, depending on the light, the briefest shadow of breasts. But now his torso was simultaneously withered and sinewy, and it looked like he had grown hair at some point but that most of it had fallen out. Like a bomb had gone off in him. He’d also grown two extra nipples—one red, the other clear—and all four of them were hard.

  I realized I was staring, but he had the kind of eyes where you couldn’t tell if he was staring or not, so I don’t know if he saw me. I also realized that I hadn’t said anything yet, so I said hi and his name. He said nothing, but made a noise that might have been a word or words. Then he coughed and lit a cigarette and pinched it out and put it behind his ear.

  “Why are you come,” he said, wincing.

  I winced, too. “It’s been a while.” Which was true, but not an answer.

  “Yeah. And stuff.” He took a different half-smoked cigarette out of his back pocket and lit it.

  “Can I come in?”

  He took a deep drag and held it like it was the pot he probably would’ve rather been smoking at that exact moment. He shook his head like he didn’t know what I was talking about, but not in an evasive way—like he literally couldn’t understand the question. He kept on holding his breath and shaking his head. Smoke fell then rose from his nostrils. Behind us, a German car was turning onto Ives. My skin tightened.

  “Look, Eli. I don’t want to stand here.”

  He held the door for me in such a way that I had to duck under his arm and contort so as not to brush against his crotch. He smelled just how you’d expect a shirtless, chain-smoking yard worker on the wrong side of thirty to smell. No better, no worse. So there was that at least.

  His apartment was an efficiency and seemingly empty but for a table and two chairs, which also gave me hope, until I realized that they matched the cabinets. He sat down in one with a blanket folded over its back and gestured at the empty one with his cigarette. Then he ashed into the quahog shell now wobbling between us. The apartment smelled like his scalp. I looked around, stealing a quick glimpse into his bedroom, empty except for a straight-backed chair and something small and gray beside it.

  He noticed me noticing this. “I—uh—I’m thinking of sleeping in the kitchen,” he said.

  “Oh yeah?” It looked like he’d been doing so for some time.

  “Yeah. In my bedroom, just a chair. To sit in.” He put out his Camel and pulled out a pouch of Three Castles and rolled himself one. “I’ll look out the window, when I get home. There’s a tree the moths didn’t get.”

  “Sounds nice.” There were only gaps between what few practical items his apartment contained: a box of matches, a can of
coffee, some grain in a jar. It was tidy, but how could it not be? There was work grit in the corners and a broom leaning against the wall.

  “After work,” he said.

  “Sometimes sitting helps.”

  “And stuff.”

  “Look, Eli—” I started. Eli hugged his left arm to his side and rocked a little in his chair, which squeaked as he rocked. Smoke rose around him like fog. No, like smoke. Like the cigarette smoke it was. I uncrossed and recrossed my legs under the table, kicking something on the floor. Eli was still angled toward the bedroom, so I glanced down and saw a fingerprinty sneaker box, with an almost completely faded blue Tretorn loop. My heart did something, then did its opposite twice as fast. With the toe of my shoe I tipped open the lid, and there they were: the black-and-whites Viv had taken of us, now wrapped in milky-looking paper. As far as I could tell, the corners weren’t so much as kinked. My throat caught and my eyes filled up, but what did it matter. Eli couldn’t look at me. I replaced the lid with my foot. “Eli,” I said.

  He stopped rocking.

  “Did—I just want to . . . I mean, I want to know—” I stopped myself. And we both stayed quiet and still long enough for me to become aware of the sound of his apartment, a low, minor hum. I picked up the box and put it on the table between us. Eli looked at it, then at me, then quickly looked away.

  “This is mine,” I said.

  He shut his eyes and cocked his head to the right. “There was stuff I wanted to tell you,” he said, his eyes still closed. “But my head hurts.”

  And I thinned my lips together and nodded at him. We sat there silently, Eli sneaking awkward red-eyed peeks at me and at the box until the apartment hum changed keys.

  I pushed out my chair and picked up the box, but a long, invisible pin pierced my wrist and I dropped it. The sound made my ears ring. Black-and-whites were scattered across the linoleum floor as if they’d been arranged by someone who wanted to re-create an accident in a film or in a museum. I saw a knee—my knee. My hair. My navel.

  Quickly gathered up, they looked like pictures of someone else. Eli got down on the floor with me, his belly flesh folded into deckles, and picked the photos up by the edges, one by one, with his fingertips. Together we returned them all to the box, to the crinkly white paper. He folded the paper over. I closed the lid. Using my forearms more than my hands, I put the box back under the table.

  “Goodbye, Eli,” I said, and meant it—really really did. I thought the word itself might help, which isn’t like me, and of course it didn’t. But maybe it didn’t hurt, either? I have to believe it didn’t. Good luck, I only thought, and saw myself out.

  It was an hour before family meal. If I could find a pay phone, I could maybe still get someone to cover my shift.

  (. . . . . .)

  I: Alix and I met the day we—me and my sister—buried Eli, meaning put his ashes in a box and sent them home with Libby. I made sure to focus on the space between Alix’s eyes while we talked, a trick an otherwise useless alienist had taught me. She excused herself pretty abruptly. Either Eli had warned her—a convenient little bit of self-flattery that would’ve been like him back then; I can just hear him blackening my name—or else she could see right through me on her own. But before she hugged Libby—who didn’t blame her for all of this—and left, she did tell me that Eli wrote a note. He mailed it to her along with that shoebox and all its contents:

  Can’t see myself working tomorrow.

  That’s it.

  Back-to-back Expository classes: According to the URI English Department website, Alix’s two Intro Expository sections are now being covered by a visiting professor of Fan Fiction.

  Eviction: On the morning of October 14, 1999, at seven sharp, the twenty-seven inhabitants of the third and fourth floors of One Eagle Square were forcibly removed from their commercially zoned domiciles by the Providence fire and police departments, the property having been, just the week prior, purchased by Sanderson & Sons, who planned on turning the entire complex into a luxury mixed-use condominium.*

  *The Baltimore-based company’s lawyer immediately procured a Historical Society–approved tax credit for this development, and his clients would pay only a tenth of the assessed taxes for the next ten years. Given the area’s superficial similarity to industrial Brooklyn, Sanderson & Sons had sold the city on a build-to-suit Olneyville built just for suits. But the question of where exactly these new residents—childless academics? gay internists? Korean architecture students?—would earn their above-market rents went unasked, and even well before the Big Fire* the project was considered a misstep akin to the city’s puzzling mid-’60s decision to pave over the confluence of the Moshassuck and Woonasquatucket Rivers with what few people realized wasn’t any old rotary, but, in fact, the world’s widest bridge. Locals called it Suicide Circle. It was our best joke.

  *On May 11, 2001, the newly renovated and still-unoccupied Eagle Mills was burned to the ground by an as-yet unidentified arsonist. Whispers persist that its main investors were already looking for an out. Rhode Islanders, as you might imagine, tend to suspect kike lightning whenever old buildings go up in smoke. But despite my self-loathing and my oft-circuitous methods of graphing history’s enfoldments, I firmly believe that horses and zebras alike will take the shortest, straightest route between two points, unless of course they are being shot at from multiple angles.* In the end, the reader must reach her own conclusions.

  *As a college sophomore, I enrolled myself in Kermit Barker’s popular Quantum Uncertainty—referred to around campus as Physics for Sickos. Dr. Barker was beloved and pitied for having suffered a protracted nervous breakdown first spurred on by mid-twentieth-century breakthroughs in the field to which he had already dedicated more than half his life. Like so many Depression-born and -prone physicists, he suddenly discovered that damn near everything he had been taught and had thought up until then was not “true.” At least not observably. Not dependably. Not scientifically. He made it his life’s work to pass this awesome disillusionment on to his students in a manner that managed to be both theatrical and sincere: “We don’t know what happens to it,” he’d say in response to just about any question regarding ostensibly observable subatomic phenomena. “We don’t know! All we know is that watching it changes things. It could turn into a rhinoceros! Two pickles! A lady—or her hat! We can’t know . . .” He would then burst into very real, very observable tears and flee the auditorium. At least once a semester he broke down and gave everyone either A’s or F’s, and, one year, elephants.

  My baby brother’s going to prison: A public show of support for Kit’s brother from former governor Jordan Falleman* helped little: “Fud is one of us,” he wrote in an open letter. “He is a brother, a friend, and a sailor.”

  *The same Falleman who would nip my public notary business in the bud a mere six weeks in. But I knew it was coming. After setting up my cot and a hot plate in the office’s backroom and scrubbing the WC sink clean with a toothbrush and a can of Clabber Girl, I discovered that, according to Section 11 of Standards of Conduct for Notaries Public in the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, an NP may, at any time and for any reason, “be removed . . . by the Governor, in his or her discretion.” Two years earlier, you see, I had caught His Honor, half in the bag by six, hectoring a supermarket cashier over the price of herring snacks, so I told him to give the poor kid a break, he didn’t write the circular, and, when that didn’t work, to go fuck himself, at which point he knocked the hat from my head. A stock boy jumped between us, but not before I had shoved my calling card* into the breast pocket of the governor’s topcoat. “I demand satisfaction,” I yelled as the stock boy dragged me out of the store. Over everybody’s head, the cashier shot me two quick thumbs-ups. Later I returned to collect my Bactine and my hat, still sitting there, on the checkout aisle floor beneath the gum.

  *It read, simply:

  CLAY BLACKALL

  Knowledgeable in Some Mattersr />
  Tampon incident: My knowledge of exactly what transpired that Indian-summery afternoon remains limited. (Events now known within an increasingly less tight but ever smaller circle as the other “other 9/11.”) So I will leave the reenvisioning of these events to Vivian Goddard (see her “Neoteny”).

  . . . abandoned tenements that dead-ended near the foot of the Prospect Park wall: My grandpa Ike’s properties.* I know it’s hard now to imagine so forlorn a block on College Hill, but in some respects Providence has changed. On the surface, at least. The three triple-deckers sat side by each, shaded by the statue of the state founder, Roger Williams,** patting with his (own) foot-size hand the head of an invisible indigenous boy long since removed thanks to increased public sensitivity to scale and/or race. By this point, the houses had been sitting unoccupied for at least a decade. After some twenty-odd years of renting to students, Ike had decided enough was enough. “You should see these places in June! They’re worse than drug addicts, these college kids! Let that painted baboon Gorman clean up after ’em. I’m done.” While waiting for a fire or another RISD expansion, Ike focused instead on Mount Hope and Smith Hill, where he knew what to expect and what to look for.

  *Shortly after Grandma Tillie’s death, Grandpa Ike sold his remaining tenements to his longtime property manager, Frank Luongo (see “Side by Each”), and moved to West Boca. “Look, I’m a Jew,” Ike told me. “What do I need from old houses and snow? We got the past in our guts and cold in our joints.” I didn’t respond, so he said, “I don’t have another funeral in me,” and that was the end of that.

  **It marks what little remains of the great man’s remains. In preparation for the big reburial, Williams’s coffin was exhumed from the basement of his home and discovered to hold nothing but some dirt and the taproot of an apple tree. After much hand-wringing, these contents were moved, placed in a granite tomb, and buried beneath the above-mentioned statue. What became of the corpse no one can say, but many theories of varying plausibility abound, most of which cast aspersions on Anne Hutchinson, banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for antinomian heresy and now all too often referred to as Roger Williams’s “witch girlfriend.”*