He turned on the radio and tuned it to the station the girl always listened to. Blues, even in the morning. On Monday morning the striding guitars, the lyrical pain of black and would-be-black voices, seemed exotic in this northern city of Swedes and Indians with French names. He turned the volume up, recalling her warmth. After they had made love in the first light of morning, she was full of advice. She told him he was the whitest man she knew. He wanted to know what she meant by that. “The questions you tend to ask,” she’d said. ‘“Did you get off that time, hon?’ ‘Do you ever think of me as someone else?”’ She laughed at him and said, “It’s like you’re clueless, you know? Guys like you figure there’s always something invisible they got to dig for, like their own eyes were caked over with shit. They only trust a questionnaire. Tell me something, did you have to take Robert Young lessons for this?”
She was always sharp-tongued in the morning. Her cheek was on his arm and her lips touched his chest as she spoke. She was small and dark and not very goodlooking. He pulled her tight against his chest, forcing a sigh from her. He resented her needling critiques even though they aroused him. “All right,” he said. “Here’s another one—do you think I’m a bad man?”
She kissed him and then pushed herself away, her hands careless against his face. “You wish, ” she said.
Sometimes she seemed depressingly wise to him. Other times he believed her apparent wisdom was an ornament, like the rope and wood wall-hangings in her apartment, but he never challenged her.
He turned the car into the street. The wheels rasped against the new snow, but the car continued to pick up speed. The traffic was not heavy because it was now past the rush hour. He would be late for work this morning, as he had been three mornings out of five for the last several weeks. He had been sent terse memos about this.
He drove through the snowy streets following the already glazed ruts a hundred cars had made before him. The city lurched by him on both sides. Redfaced men shoveled snow away from the doors of shops and offices. The sun was up in the south, a cold white disk stamped against a hard blue sky. There was an honest crispness in the air. The cafes were beginning to fill with early shoppers. The blue guitars and the black voices were another thing. The girl, who claimed to be part Saskatchewan Cree, a native of Moose Jaw, said, “They know where it’s at.” He doubted it. No one knew where “it” was. The world was made of dazzling, impenetrable surfaces, margined on all sides by oblivion. There was no “it.” People wore blinders from birth to death. A condition he could accept. Even so, he liked to humor her.
“Tell me about it,” he’d said, lighting a cigarette to cover his grin.
She’d looked at the ceiling, as if remembering something too exquisite to put into words. Then she raised up on her elbows and looked at him. “Yes or no,” she said, “does your manhood depend on how I answer?”
He shrugged, suddenly bored with her. “I don’t know what my manhood depends on,” he’d said.
He was on a bridge that linked the two halves of the city. White mantles of snow-covered ice from each bank did not quite meet in the center of the river. A dark blue snake of unfrozen water serpentined against the encroaching ice and snow.
An old man in a knee-length parka fished with a long cane pole. His face was wrapped in a scarf and his wool cap was pulled down low on his forehead. Only old men fished the river in winter. They fished for whitefish with maggots, standing in a single, bone-stiffening spot for hours. He knew that the old men kept the maggots between their lower lips and gums to keep them alive. He told this to the girl. She had shuddered and refused to believe it. “It’s the truth,” he’d said. “It’s the only way to keep the maggots from freezing.”
“You just can’t keep this up indefinitely,” his wife said calmly, reasonably. He nodded assent. These were easy punishments. She stayed at the sink, her back to him, doing the morning dishes. She worked righteously, her back stiff, her arms busy. She was wearing her red quilted robe, the one with the imitation Chinese ideograms on it.
“Guilty as charged,” he said, too softly for her to hear. He wondered what the ideograms might mean, or if there could be such a thing as an accidental language.
Furious images from a cartoon network collided soundlessly on the Zenith. A mechanized triceratops with bloody teeth, a bespectacled alien gutting a sleek blonde, a seductive but sexless dragon wading through gore: corporate child molestation, around-the-clock. The sound was muted now that the children had gone to school. Dishes rapped against each other telegraphically. He read what had come to be a familiar code as he watched the snow slide from his shoes.
“I’m sorry,” he said, again too softly to be heard. I’m rotten, he thought, wishing it were true. It would make things easier. But he was not rotten. He was a nice guy; he’d been told that often enough by friends and colleagues. His wife was equally well liked. There was nothing wrong with either of them. They had a good life that had been drifting, without hint of self-congratulation, toward a dream of domestic perfection. He oftened imagined himself at sixty—respected, calm, loved, his wife gray but still nimble, sexually responsive, and good-humored. And they would die respected and comfortable after a long, responsibly lived life. What is wrong with this picture? he thought. Nothing. Only a fool would find fault with it.
She fixed him eggs and a thick slice of ham. She poured coffee, gave him silverware and a fresh napkin that was still warm from the dryer. All these gestures were normal and convincing, but she would not look at him.
“So what is it,” she said. “Delayed curiosity? Is there something you need to know? Do you need to fill in some gaps?”
“It isn’t that,” he said. But it was that. It was exactly that.
The places at the table where the children had eaten were messy with crumbs, pieces of toast, flecks of oatmeal. The paper was spread on the floor, open to the comic section. There was a gob of grape jelly on Sally Forth. His wife sponged the mess off the table. Small winds from the sponge’s thousand tiny caves sighed as the crumbs went flying.
He poured himself another cup of coffee. He drank half of it in one swallow, scalding his mouth. “I’d better get going,” he said.
She went into the bedroom. He expected her to come right out, but she didn’t. He finished his coffee, then went into the bedroom to get ready for work.
His wife was on the bed, motionless, face against the pillow, no list of accusations in her eyes. Cold light glowed deceptively warm from the window’s yellow curtains. The furnace blower came on with a chuckling gale.
“Is it because she’s younger than me?” she continued. “Is it because she’s pretty?”
He took a clean shirt from the dresser. He took off his clothes. He put on clean shorts, clean socks. Yes, he thought. No, he thought. “I don’t know,” he said.
“Come here,” she said, opening her robe. Her whiteness on the dark bed made her seem small and frail, adolescent and vulnerable.
“I have to go to work,” he said.
“No. Call in sick. We can have the whole day.”
She propped herself up on her elbows, her round breasts and dark nipples were lurid on her child-sized body. Her stomach was still flat and tight. “Make love to me,” she said. “The way it was.”
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“Come here, goddamn you. I’m still your wife.”
He went to her and she raised her legs. She was thin, and the silky hourglass joining her thighs was darkly obscene against the perilous frailty of her body. He felt suddenly repelled, almost pulled away, but she took him in hand and manipulated him until he was ready, and the possessive vise of her legs hurt his kidneys. As if in a fit of rage, she grabbed him by the hair and pulled his mouth down to hers. He lunged athletically, careless, without finesse, then pinned her arms hard against the mattress in a parody of rape, the only way he could, at this point, stay interested. He nipped blood from her neck, then watched tears slide down her face.
“You b
astard,” she said as they fell away from each other.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
He felt nothing. She heard it in his voice and her face went grim. “You don’t care about anything,” she said.
“That’s a terrible thing to say,” he said.
He drove back toward town. Sex fixed nothing, especially when it was frenzied. No help in that for the head or for the progress of the soul. It was a spike on the otherwise unremarkable flatline of life. In marriage it produced the illusion of intimacy, even when it had degenerated into habit and ritual. He knew of people who had tried to breathe new life into their marriages with kinkiness: mateswapping, picking up third parties in bars, role switching, collars and cuffs, and so on. He had suggested something along these lines to her once, but she had recoiled. And, in truth, he was no sexual adventurer himself. He just wanted...
He didn’t know what he wanted. Maybe it was just Want itself, a shapeless constant of desire that never attached itself to a specific object. He began to see Want as a demon, a parasite on the heart.
He was driving forty miles an hour and he didn’t see the other car. He hit the brakes knowing it was useless. The street was solid glare ice by now, and his car went into a frictionless slide. The other car had been sounding its horn, and after he hit it the horn continued to sound. The wallop of metal on metal punctuated the morning convincingly. His forehead crystallized the windshield, and his car skated a full circle and came to rest against the curb of the opposite lane. The other car slid into a power pole. It was a black Buick, an old Roadmaster, driven by an elderly woman. There were other elderly women in the backseat, and another beside the driver. They were gray and plumpish and wore the same blue corsage, on their way to some gray function. The horn of the Roadmaster continued to alarm.
Other cars stopped. He got out slowly. His knee had rammed the dashboard. “He must’ve been doing fifty,” someone said. He didn’t see where the voice came from. Someone else said, “A morning drinker. Couldn’t wait for happy hour.” The second voice was also nondirectional. Stupidly, he looked up into the sky at the contrails of a jet. Ice crystals winked in the cobalt zenith like tiny weightless diamonds.
The old ladies did not leave their car. He looked into an unshattered window. They were seated as they had been, before the impact. They looked straight ahead as though their drive had not been interrupted. They were very pale. Chalky. They were not speaking. The Buick’s engine was racing. The driver seemed unaware of the engine noise or of the blaring horn. She held a painted hanky to her eye and her nose trickled blood. He opened the door and shut off the ignition.
He noticed a spilled purse between the two women in the front seat. Among the compacts, lipsticks, checkbooks, and other odds and ends, there was a roll of currency thick as his forearm. The outer bill was a fifty. He put his hand on it, and an excitement he would not have been able to explain raced through his body. His hair felt like copper wire in a magnetic field. He heard the irregular thudding of his heart. He had to urinate badly.
He backed away from the car and closed the door gently. “You’d better stick around, bud,” someone told him.
“I’ve got to go,” he said, and limped away from the accident scene until he found a gas station. He locked himself in the men’s room and relieved himself. Then he counted the money. Nine thousand dollars in fifties and hundreds. He counted the money again, then fattened his wallet. He stuffed the remaining bills into several pockets.
He heard the distant wail of sirens. He walked to the rear of the service station, and continued up the street and into a run-down neighborhood of narrow, clapboard homes in need of paint. He ignored the pain in his knee, which was not bad at all. There was a large bump on his forehead and he felt light-headed, but he only had a slight headache. He walked quickly, limping, the accident and the people it attracted falling away behind him.
He walked through this poorest section of town, along the river, past gray warehouses and the small, wretched houses where the unskilled unemployed lived. A slatternly woman with stringy unwashed hair looked at him through her front-room window and, without provocation, sneered. A half-naked child appeared at her side. The child waved at him and the woman slapped the child away from the window. She repeatedly mouthed some words meant for his eyes. He gradually deciphered them: Move on, trash. He smiled and returned the insult. Miss America, he mouthed.
Then he was on the highway north, heading toward the airport. He was exhausted when he reached the terminal, since the airport was uphill from the town. He went into the restaurant, a franchise called Cody’s. The decor of Cody’s was Wild West. On the walls, cowboys in silhouette rode ponies or slouched in talky groups against corral posts. A stuffed black bear stood next to the cash register, its glass-eyes fixed in an idiot stare.
He sat at an empty table. When the waitress came, he ordered coffee and a breakfast roll, though he wasn’t hungry.
“That’s some bump you have there,” the waitress said.
He shrugged. “Ran into a cupboard,” he said.
The waitress, probably only thirty but her face already creased with fatigue and disappointment, said, “Cupboard my aching rear. You been out doing your reckless buckaroo act, I can tell. My second ex used to come home mornings looking just as worked on as you, if you don’t mind my saying it.”
He didn’t mind. He took it as a compliment. He liked her looks. She reminded him of a song, “Crazy Arms,” an oldie. He went to the men’s room, where he washed his face and wet his hair down. Stubble darkened his upper lip, and the bump on his forehead was blue. He still felt light-headed, but he also felt self-justified. He was suspicious of this feeling, since there was no way to account for it, but he didn’t want to pursue his doubts.
He stared at himself in the mirror and vowed never to pursue his doubts again. Maybe that’s what had been wrong with his life up to now. “Relight the wick,” he told his reflection. The man in the mirror smiled brilliantly at him, a smile open as a blank check. It took him a second glance to grasp that the uncharacteristic smile was his.
When he returned to his table, his coffee and breakfast roll were waiting for him. “Thought we lost you,” the waitress said.
“I was lost but now I’m found,” he said, quoting the hymn.
She studied his face for his meaning, then shook her head and smiled. “You’re a real card,” she said.
“I am that,” he said. “The king of trumps.”
“Is that supposed to mean something to me?”
He shrugged. “Take it any way you want,” he said.
By the time he finished his first cup of coffee, he decided that the waitress was interested in him. She wore a wedding band, but it was on the wrong finger on the wrong hand. That meant something, but he couldn’t remember what. It excited his imagination.
She was in need, he knew that. Not just money, but direction. Her life was empty and getting emptier by the year. By the time she was forty, she would have nothing, be nowhere, and the hard good looks would become just hard looks. Bitterness would bleach her blue eyes pale.
“You’ve got to seize the day,” he said to her as she refilled his cup. She looked at him for a long moment, studying him, then went to another table. He hid an urge to smile by raising his cup to his lips. She was obviously ready—as he was—for a major change.
He stood up and limped into the terminal. He found an airline that had a morning flight to San Francisco and he bought two tickets with cash from his wallet. Then he went back to the restaurant.
“Thought you ran out on me,” the waitress said.
“Far from it,” he said. He put the two ticket envelopes on the table, like a player spreading a royal flush.
He knew she’d come with him. Why wouldn’t she? She was fooling only herself now with that prim, all-business act. He could already visualize them seated next to each other as the plane accelerated down the runway. She’d be grateful for her good fortune. He could see the two of them in S
an Francisco, in a good hotel overlooking the bay. He knew how she’d make love—needfully, edgy with old hurts—and he knew what she’d say afterward, and what they’d do on the second day.
The Boys We Were, The Men We Became
1. RETURN OF THE HERO
My father came home from the Second World War empty. He didn’t look empty. He was much larger than when he went away, three years earlier. When he left us for the war, he was a lean twenty-seven-year-old, full of stories and jokes that made me and my little brother, Woodrow, laugh until we hurt. When he came home he was thick with fat and he looked forty. His arms stuck out from his sides, his legs were tight in his wool army pants, and his belly rolled out in front of him like a grievous load someone had forced him to bear. Even so, there was nothing inside him anymore, nothing for us. It was as if an overweight impostor was trying to pass himself off as our happy Dad. We won that war, but he came home glum as the losers.
I didn’t understand how war could make someone fat or how victory could make him empty. Woodrow and I thought his antics would be twice as good, now that he’d been to war and had come home safely, but we were wrong. We waited for his long, preposterous stories, his winks and chuckles, but he only sat unmoving in his easy chair, reading or dozing. Or he would go for long walks through town, refusing to let either me or Woodrow tag along. We nagged and pulled at his sleeves.We tried to remind him how generous he had once been with his time, but he acted as if we weren’t really there. He didn’t know us anymore. He had forgotten us.
It was hard to accept. I reminded him of his story about the airliner that ran out of gas and went down in the Gobi desert and how all the men passengers donated their suspenders so that the pilot could make windup motors out of them that would turn the propellers and allow the plane to fly everyone back to civilization, but he just looked mildly alarmed, as though only some kind of irresponsible idiot would tell such lies to children. We whined to mother, but she hushed us, saying, “Daddy isn’t himself yet. He’ll be all right, but we need to give him time. He saw terrible things overseas.”
Borrowed Hearts Page 42