Borrowed Hearts

by Rick DeMarinis

  I put on my parka and watch cap. Raquel cornered me in the hallway. “What do you think you’re doing?” she said.

  I gave her the look I felt she deserved. “He’s in love with you,” I said.

  “I know,” she said.

  “You know?" I felt dizzy as my blood pressure wobbled and peaked.

  “Of course I know!” she said, with unashamed spunk. “It’s very harmless. He’s a cute guy, Sloan is.”

  All I could do was stare at her as I zipped up the parka.

  “Love is not harmless,” I said, measuring out the words with some care.

  She slapped her forehead and rolled her eyes. “Jesus, listen to what you are saying for once,” she said. She turned away from me and walked back into the chaos of tooting horns, paper streamers, and the wet mouths of strangers. It was midnight in the eastern time zone, two hours away, but that was reason enough to toot your horn and stick your tongue down someone’s throat.

  I slammed the door behind me and started walking the seven blocks to Dr. Selbiades’s house. The planet had French-kissed itself through several time zones as it mindlessly rolled down its doomed orbit. Though bells were ringing, horns were tooting, champagne corks were popping, I skulked away from it all, hating the manic pagans and their endless whoopee.

  After I left the Selbiadeses’ party, I walked aimlessly. I wandered into the North Side, a poorly lit district of tall Victorian houses. The area was famous for night crimes. Muggings, rapes, vandalism were the nocturnes played in these shadowy streets and alleys. I half expected a mugger to put a knife to my throat, and didn’t care. Then a man waved to me from a front porch. He was a tall, heavy man in a metallic green suit. “That you, Roger?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “Why not?” I answered.

  “Then come on in, we’ve been waiting to start. Did you get lost or something?”

  “Yes and no,” I said.

  I climbed the sagging boards of the porch stairs. When I reached the big man, he threw his arms around me. “Peg Munson is nervous as hell,” he whispered into my ear, his warm spittle electrifying it. “I’m Jerry Peters,” he said, pumping my hand. “You know,” he added, seeing my blank look, “group coordinator.”

  He took my arm and steered me into the house. Inside, seated on sofas, love seats, and armchairs, were about a dozen people, men and women in their late thirties or early forties. “Here’s the missing person,” Jerry said, slapping me on the back. “Roger”—he fumbled with a piece of paper, a computer printout, squinted at it—“Roger Flexnor. Now we can get the show on the road.”

  It was easy to figure out that everyone here was a stranger to everyone else and that Roger Flexnor, whoever he was, was expected to round out the group: six males, six females. I guessed it was some kind of dating club for hopeless cases. I felt right at home.

  People on one of the sofas scooted over, making room for me. I sat between a pale, bearded man and a small, plump woman. “I’m Peg Munson,” the woman said.

  I shook her hand. “Roger Flexnor,” I said.

  “Where’s your data sheet?” she said.

  I slapped my coat pockets, dug in my pants.

  “Here’s an extra,” Peg Munson said, giving me a carefully folded computer printout. I saw her name, a paragraph giving a general (somewhat generous) physical description, and a personal statement (“Professional woman, Master’s degree, likes walks in the rain, poetry that speaks directly to the soul, good conversation over gourmet dinners; expects to share her considerable resources, both physical and spiritual, with a man of corresponding substance”).

  I refolded the data sheet and slipped it into my pocket, wondering what Roger Flexnor had to offer such a woman.

  “...tall, scientifically oriented man,” Peg read, from the data sheet of Roger Flexnor, “desires affaire d’amour with mature Christian lady with unusually small features...” She giggled self-consciously; then, splaying her fingers in her lap, revealed to me a set of miniature hands without visible knuckles. This is what Roger Flexnor desired most in a woman. I glanced down at her feet and saw that they were also miniatures. Flexnor would be seriously awash in lust by now.

  Jerry Peters, our host, said, “All right, one and all, let’s get right down to it. We’re not children, and it’s a brand-new year. At least it will be in fifteen minutes. There’s no need to stumble and bumble. I suggest we break with the past, whatever that might be, and give our Rocky Mountain Dating Service partners a big how-do-you-do Happy New Year kiss.”

  A woman, almost as big as Jerry Peters, stood up and kissed him with shocking energy. I leaned toward Peg Munson and she closed her eyes and offered me her Kewpie-doll lips.

  “You’re shy,” she said, after the pecking kiss. “I am too. I guess the computer knows how to match personality types.”

  Peg Munson not only had little hands and feet, she also had tiny facial features. Lips, nose, and eyes were set close to one another to produce a smallish face. Her head was a distraction: it was nearly full-sized. “I’ve always wanted to know a Christian man who had a passion for nuclear science,” she said, breathy with growing interest.

  Then the real Roger Flexnor came in. “Sorry, everybody,” he said, stamping snow off his shin-high mukluks. “I just could not get the chains on my car. I had to have the Exxon people do it.” He was a tall, white-haired man in heavy glasses.

  “Who are you?” Jerry Peters said.

  “I’m Roger. Roger Flexnor, Ph.D. You’re expecting me. I’m here for Peg Munson.” He waved his printout as his glasses fogged over in the warm room.

  I got up and walked through the awkward silence until I was back out on the street. The street seemed the place for me that New Year’s Eve.

  Jerry Peters called to me from the porch. “Hey, it’s okay, citizen,” he said. “Next time, though, try going through Central Data. We’ve got uplinks throughout the Northwest. Check out our ad in tomorrow’s paper. There’s someone out there who loves you. Believe it.”

  I didn’t believe it. I waved to him and walked toward downtown, another two or three miles into the wind.

  The city streets were bright with holiday decorations, but empty. I went into the first bar I came to, a place I’d never been in, called The Loose Caboose, a velveteen-and-Leatherette night spot with a scandalous reputation, but I was cold, and brave with self-pity.

  The Loose Caboose was nearly empty. One drunk in a three-piece suit at the bar, two guys in designer sweats huddled in a booth. A big TV over the bar was showing us what New Year’s Eve in New York was like. I ordered a bourbon and soda, and then another. An oily, old-time band singer in a tux began his version of “I’ll Take Manhattan,” Times Square celebrants roaring behind him.

  My feet were aching with cold. The third bourbon made them feel like they were Roger Flexnor’s feet.

  “I know utter dejection when I see it,” said one of the designer sweat-suit guys. He was at the bar, ordering drinks for himself and his friend, but looking at me.

  “Good for you,” I said.

  “Say, listen,” he said. “Delvin and I are going dancing later. You want to tag along? My name is Jeffrey, Jeffrey Hazeltine.”

  Delvin came up behind me. He put his arm around my shoulders. “Do I get the first dance or not?” he said to me, his voice sharp with a habitual pout.

  “Not,” I said.

  Outside The Loose Caboose I realized that the walk back home was close to four miles and most of it was uphill. I jerked the strings of my parka hood tight and set out.

  Three blocks into my trek, a car pulled alongside me. It was the pair from The Loose Caboose. “You need a ride?” Delvin asked.

  “I need a ride home,” I said.

  “Hop in.”

  I did. I sat in the back while the two friends cuddled up front. I held no opinions about all this. Opinion holding had been one of the first causalities of my condition. Not that I didn’t have opinions, I just didn’t hold them. Everything was open to dispute, muta
tion, or outright cancellation.

  I had an opinion about everything that had happened to me that evening, but also knew that I would not defend it tomorrow even if I could remember what it was. It seemed to me that all the people I had been with were puppets to a hidden agony, and could not find simple peace until the puppet master had lost interest in them. They had been yanked down their lives with seismic disregard. They didn’t know where they were. They wanted their bearings and were willing to risk a lot to find them.

  I revised this opinion a few times before giving it up. I wished the whole stumbling lot of us a lucky New Year. Then I remembered Sloan Capoletti. I leaned into the front seat. “Drive faster, Jeffrey,” I said.

  Your Burden Is Lifted, Love Returns

  I lie on the nail-bed of my life still believing I am a good-hearted, sensitive man who would never beat his wife. You know my type: the afflicted, back-sliding liberal, self-aware to a fault—narcissistic, my shrink would say—but above all, not a man who would pound on a woman with his fists.

  I stood over my wife telling myself these things. Her lip was bleeding. She was sobbing silently into her hands, her shoulders lifting and falling in heart-breaking shudders. I looked at my still-smoking fist. It was hot and tingling with the shock of what it had done. Was it my fist? It looked alien. It was too big, too cabled with blue veins. The middle knuckle was red, the flesh dented and raw where it had scraped a tooth. It was the fist of the Brute: the blunt club-end of a Stone Age arm. I opened it and looked at the trembling fingers that had once stroked and probed the woman on the floor in the name of love and tender lust.

  I looked at myself through the one-way glass of my tricky brain: I saw a stranger in the bedroom, unshaven, drunk in his underwear, the blood draining from his face as the enormity of what he has done begins to sink in.

  He is a great fool.

  He has just put his life on a steep downgrade slope and his brakes are questionable. He feels sick to his stomach; he wants to cry.

  Raquel is sitting on the floor in her panties and bra, holding her mouth. The bedroom seems to dilate and contract in sympathy with her sobs. A line has been crossed in this marriage. Would it be possible to pull it back to the other side? The mortified assailant thinks not.

  “You hit me,” she says, rising, the nonchalant globes of her breasts swinging, the wonderful curving flex of haunch and calf reminding the fool of what has been forfeited here.

  “You hit me,” she repeats, unable to believe it herself. “You bastard son of a bitchl”

  “My God, Raquel, baby,” he says, his heart a brick of remorse in his unquiet chest.

  “Do not use my name,” she says: it is a careful instruction to the humiliated beast. The intimate syllables are no longer his to use. From this day forward, her name on his tongue will not be her name. It will ring oddly in his ear, and though he will say it over and over in tearful rages and in the half-sleep of early-morning dreams, he won’t be able to get it right.

  Even her face is the face of a stranger. This is some random woman, he thinks. A woman he might spy in Safeway fingering the eggplant. He would appreciate her fine Latina profile, how it hones itself with a shopper’s glancing hesitations. Her eyes sharp with intelligence and dark with explosive desire. This is a woman he could love if he weren’t already married to the women he loves. And she, of course, is happily married, too. She will not be picked up in the produce section of Safeway like a common aisle-walking tart. This last notion puts a wry twist on his lips and dilutes his remorse with bile.

  While he is occupied with this reverie, she kicks him. Her strong foot rises up swiftly to his crotch, the instep impacting with a rumpling thump. In his Jockey shorts, standing flatfooted before her, he has offered a choice target of opportunity. He doubles over, sick, and manages to get into the bathroom before he loses his lamb chops, rice pilaf, and ratatouille. Not to mention the three or four tumblers of Old Taylor.

  “You bastard!” she howls, following him into the bathroom. Her rage is on the upswing while his has peaked and dissipated. Do not start fights if you cannot sustain your rage, he muses. He is on his knees before the toilet, hugging the cool porcelain. Lemons of sick light float before his shut eyes.

  “I think I’m hurt bad,” he manages to say between convulsions.

  “Not bad enough,” he hears her whisper. He notices that her breath is choppy. He imagines that a dangerous wind has blown open the house, that she is teetering in it, holding on to a wall for support. He sees her hair standing out from her head, her eyes wild. Rags of rage snap in this insane wind. He sees the house lifted off its foundation, transferred by storm to a country without maps.

  Then she touches his shoulder. He almost sobs aloud with gratitude. But it is not a forgiving hand. It is her foot again. (The foot he has kissed and tickled.) This time it shoves him into the toilet tank. His head gongs off the hard surface. A thread of blood weaves itself into his philosophic eyebrows.

  By the time he has cleaned himself up and stopped the oozing blood from the hairline laceration, Raquel has dressed and packed her suitcase.

  “Don’t go,” he says. “I think I have a concussion.”

  “Fine,” she says briskly. “Perhaps in the future you will use your head more wisely.”

  “You won’t find a motel this time of night,” he informs her.

  “I’ll sleep in the car, then,” she says, snapping the locks on her suitcase.

  “Or maybe not,” he says, alluding to the subject that had put the evening’s events into suicidal fast-forward.

  “I am not going to dignify that sick remark with an answer,” she says.

  Sick remarks, he thinks, have become my specialty. He tries to reconstruct the last three hours. It seems more like days than hours. He, the responsible house husband, is out of sorts. Raquel, the breadwinner, has come home late and dinner is cold on the table. He could have kept it warm in the oven, but the cold and coagulated dinner makes a better statement. He is being spiteful. Spite: the bitter pill that spoils love’s slim chances. It hardens the soft core of stumblebums and statesmen alike. Spite: the great rotten god with baleful glance who systematically unravels the good world.

  Through the smoked glass of memory, he watches his fist floating toward her. It seems, at first, that it only wants to deliver a semi-playful chuck under the chin. But he is grossly self-deceived. (Because of self-deception and spite he sees little hope for the human race.) The first has energy and hidden purpose. It is not as playful as he thought it was. Her lip cracked. A tooth stung his knuckle. She sat down.

  Earlier he received her explanation with an indifference he almost believed. But it was spite again, masking itself with reason, mocking reason’s coolness with sub-zero rage.

  “Oh, no, honey,” she said. “Look, it’s past eight. I didn’t realize... I’m really sorry, but—”

  He turned his back on her then and mixed himself a drink. Bourbon, because he knew she detested the smell.

  “Doug Thurston called a supervisory meeting because of the pothole crisis in the South End,” she said. “I had to take the notes.”

  “Until eight?” he said mildly, speaking into his glass.

  “Well, no, not until eight. We finished at six-thirty. But Doug—”

  “Doug?”

  “Mr. Thurston. He wanted to buy me... us, I mean... a drink. You know, for being good sports. The secretaries.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “The Yucatan Room, at the Sheraton. Lowell Black was there, and Mary and Charlene. They want me to play racquetball with them. Mary Tyson had to drop out because of shinsplints. So their foursome is shot.”

  “I’m sorry...?” he said, setting his glass down carefully, his brow creased with the mock-sincere but game effort to understand her.

  “But I told them I’m not the racquetball type.”

  “What type did you tell them you were?”

  Raquel searched his face for the possible joke, but his face was
neutral. His intentions were hidden, even from himself.

  “You could have called me,” he said, still without rancor.

  “I know, I know, hon,” she said indulgently. “I should have called. I just lost track, you know? And Doug—”

  “Doug?”

  “Mr. Thurston, the boss. Doug Thurston. He wanted to make it up to us.” She gave him a small pecking kiss on the ear, notable for its motherliness and parceled heat. He clenched his jaw against it, and against the thing that was trying to surface in his mind.

  He smelled, then, the tequila sunrises, the barroom smoke, the cologne of self-important bureaucrats. He felt rocked back by those essences. “God damn it,” he said, convinced of the awful thing that had been skirting his thoughts the past few hours. For this was not the first time Raquel had come home late from her job at the Department of Streets. Once last week, twice the week before, and several times the previous month.

  She looked at him, her head cocked inquisitively, like an alerted robin sensing the stalking cat. She heard the octave difference in his shaky voice as events began their sickening climb toward the blooded summit. “What’s wrong, honey?” she said.

  He finished his drink in a single corrosive gulp and set the glass down with a slam that startled both of them. “Wrong?” he said. “Nothing’s wrong. What makes you think something’s wrong?” Yet all this insistent innocence was betrayed by the tremors in his voice.

  "I—"

  He cut her off: “Let’s eat this slop before it walks off the table.”

  He picked up the plates and put them into the microwave, hers first, then his. The food came out gummy but warm, and they sat down to their evening meal. Since he had been out of work, he’d become a passable if somewhat paranoid cook. If praise wasn’t forthcoming after the first or second bite, he was thrown into a grievous sulk.

  After dinner he went back to the Old Taylor. Bourbon pacified him, oddly. He became more civil as the evening progressed. She went on about racquet-ball, about how great Mary and Sally were (he was not clear who these women were—secretaries, apparently, but Raquel seemed to be flattered to find herself in their company), what a great boss Doug Thurston was, how he had promised to consider her for the next opening at the Administrative Assistant level, and so on. He began to feel, gradually, like a ball of string being unwound at the hand of an idiot child, even though the bourbon helped him maintain the illusion of solidity. While Raquel spoke, he touched himself surreptitiously a few times to see if he was still there. Yes, yes, his body seemed to say, we are still here, all of us: meat, bone, gristle, blood, marrow, the beating, secreting, and pumping organs, the wiring and plumbing, all present and accounted for. As it was in the beginning, so is it now, and so shall it be at the end of time. The false alpha and omega wisdom of bourbon, storming through his tender corpus, led these wacky musings. But there were always the tricyclic antidepressants to help him through the day-after black-hole blues.