The Wrong Heaven

by Amy Bonnafons

  I had to admire his audacity: the real Drexel—dour, inbred-looking, personalityless—would never have dared such a thing. Also, his misspelling of “faggot” seemed oddly apt, perfectly descriptive of his father’s Francophile pretensions.

  Still, it was unsettling, and I didn’t tell Carl. This was the second reason for keeping him out of my room: who knew when someone would come alive again? And if they did, and he saw, then what would happen?

  On the one hand, I suspect that Carl would be less perturbed than a normal person if he came across a four-inch talking human: unlike anyone else I know, he believes in the inherently secret nature of everything. He believes in the dream life of penguins, in the quiet longings of plants, in the muscles and heartbeats of prehistoric fish. He eats oranges slowly, out of respect.

  On the other hand, who was to say? Perhaps he’d become terrified, and leave me; or perhaps they’d go dead in his presence, and I’d have to wonder if I’d imagined the whole thing. There were too many potential outcomes, running around my imagination like wild animals, impossible to corral. One thing was certain, though: if my creations spoke to him—if these two compartments of my life overlapped and interacted—it would complicate everything, in ways I could not apprehend. It was not a development I felt I could risk.

  The children asked if they could play. I told them yes, if they went to sleep in an hour.

  “Let’s play Pretend,” said Gretel to Otto. “You be the man and I’ll be the lady.”

  “Here,” I said. “You need costumes.” I handed Otto the bowler hat I’d made for his father, and Gretel her mother’s shawl. Gretel promptly lay down on the table and threw her arm across her face, in a pantomime of distress.

  Otto tipped his hat. “Hello, missus,” he said. “What seems to be the trouble?”

  “Well,” said Gretel, “I have terrible dreams, about black ants crawling up my nose holes.”

  “Well, I am a doctor, so I can help. Do you have a washcloth?”

  “Let me see.” She got up and looked around the worktable until she found a stray square of cloth. “Yes. So what do I do with it?”

  “You soak it in Forgetting Liquid.”

  “And then where do I put it?”

  “You don’t put it anywhere. I put it.” He lay down on the floor, and put the washcloth over his own face.

  In the morning I awoke to find that Otto and Gretel had made their way off my worktable. I followed the high-pitched sound of their voices into Carl’s room—which, fortunately, was vacant; he’d already gone out on his piano-tuning rounds.

  Otto and Gretel had climbed up onto Carl’s turntable. Gretel stood on the record, and Otto at the base of the needle. “Are you ready?” he asked. “I’m about to do it.”

  “I’m ready,” said Gretel. “Just start.”

  Otto took hold of the record with his little hands and hurled it sideways, so that it began to spin. Gretel, standing on top of the spinning record, fell down to her knees and screamed with glee. “Wheeee!” she cried. “This is the most fun I’ve had my whole life!”

  “That’s enough, young lady,” I said. I brought one finger down to halt the record midspin. The two of them looked up, terrified. I could see their tiny hummingbird heartbeats through their clothes.

  “We were just—”

  “We got lost.”

  “Because we fell off the table, and—”

  “Well, first of all,” I said, “I know you didn’t fall off. You’d be dead. I know that you shinnied down the table leg.”

  I was bluffing, but I’d caught them: they looked down at their feet, ashamed.

  “You should know,” I said, “that this room is forbidden.”

  They continued to look down at their feet. I thought I could see Gretel’s little round shoulders shaking.

  “You are going to have to think about what you’ve done,” I said.

  I took them back into my room and put them in a shoe box and shut the lid, punching a few holes for air. Then I sat down at my table and attempted to carve the clawed feet of the bathtub.

  The children stayed quiet for a long time, and then I heard them mewing softly, like kittens.

  I had decided to make them suffer until they learned a lesson—the last thing I wanted was for them to walk into Carl’s room again—and so I tried to ignore the sound of their weeping. But I felt a growing heaviness: forcing other people to suffer, even if for their own good, has got to be the loneliest feeling in the world.

  I stopped working. I sat there and sympathized with God.

  Finally, I went into the kitchen, found a wide soup bowl, and filled it with sugar. I brought it back and set it down on the worktable.

  “Here,” I told the children, plucking them out of the shoe box and dropping them into the bowl. “You can play around in this.” I quickly carved them a pair of shovels and gave them some thimbles to use as buckets.

  “I wonder what it is,” said Otto, sifting it through his fingers. “Is it manna?”

  “What?” said Gretel.

  “You know, you blockhead. The white food that fell from the sky, when the Israelites were wandering?”

  Gretel shoveled some grains directly into her mouth. Her eyes grew wide. “It’s sugar!” she cried.

  “Impossible,” said Otto. “It’s too big.”

  “Just taste it!”

  He put a grain into his mouth, and the frown on his face slowly softened. “It is sugar,” he said, incredulous.

  I pinched some between two fingers and sprinkled it down on their heads, as if dusting the top of a pie. They giggled and caught it in their palms and put it into their mouths.

  In spite of myself, I smiled.

  Watching them scamper through the sugar, I thought about Mrs. Perlman’s family. “My grandmother never recovered from Otto’s death,” she’d told me. “She kept thinking she saw him. Always eight years old. Even when she was in her eighties, when her own kids had grandkids. She’d go up to random children on the street and slap them in the face and yell at them in German for how worried they’d made her.”

  Otto and Gretel had such hard lives ahead of them, I thought; perhaps all three of us did. I felt with sudden force that I wanted to keep them, and keep them happy.

  “I invented a new dance!” Gretel called out. She hurled herself down into the sugar and proceeded to do something that can only be described as humping.

  “That’s disgusting,” I said, plucking them out of the sugar, trying to stifle a smile.

  “Can you show us something else?” asked Otto, brushing the grains of sugar off his trousers. “Something fantastic?”

  “All right,” I said. I hunted around my desk and found a dried-up orange leaf. Carl liked to bring them home from the park when they were particularly vivid, little gifts for me from the outside world. I held it up for the children to see.

  “That has got to be from the time of the dinosaurs,” said Otto.

  Carl and I met in the park. I was new to the city, and I still didn’t know anything to do with my free time besides painting in my room and going to the park to sit and stare at things. So I was sitting and staring one day, and I noticed him. He sat on the ground, playing his banjo and singing softly. He wore a blue button-down shirt and a long red beard.

  I came back at the same time the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that. He was always there. I felt free to stare, because he never looked up from the banjo—not once. But on the fifth day, he suddenly stood up, walked over, and sat down next to me.

  “I’ve been watching you,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You have very nice hands.”

  I looked down, as if to verify his statement. No one had ever told me this before. “But how—”

  “I’m good at noticing things,” he said, “when I don’t seem to be noticing them. What’s your name?”

  “Irene.”

  He lifted the banjo into his lap and played “Goodnight, Irene,” very softly
.

  Sometimes I live in the country, sometimes I live in town

  Sometimes I have a great notion to jump in the river and drown

  Then he got up and resumed his spot, on the grass across from me, and continued to play without looking up.

  I came back every day, and sat on the same bench. Each day, exactly once, Carl would take a break from his playing and come over next to me. Neither of us would say anything; he would just sit, and play a song.

  Then, one day, he packed up his banjo and slung it onto his back. He came and stood in front of me and said, “Let’s go somewhere, Irene.”

  We went to the Museum of Fabulous Entomology, Carl’s favorite place in the city aside from the park. He took me through the insects one by one, explaining why each was a marvel of creation. “This is the merifluvian Java beetle,” he’d say. “It changes color upon the approach of rain, and has six distinct emotions.”

  When I went home, I carved and painted replicas of his favorite insects. I strung them together so that they hung, heads down, like beads on a necklace. I presented the string to him the next time we met. He stared down at it and blinked. “This is the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me,” he said.

  I took it from his hand and tied the string around his neck. I felt as if I were performing some tribal mate-choosing ritual. I stepped back and viewed him, the string of insects gleaming around his neck in the sun. My heart beat wildly.

  We were married, officially, six weeks later.

  By the afternoon, I was so caught up with the children that I forgot to listen for Carl. We were playing a game I’d devised to tire them out. It was called Run, Scream, and Fall Down.

  Gretel had introduced her own modification: rather than just screaming an open vowel sound, like “ahhh,” you had to scream the name of an imaginary person. Gretel screamed “Hermann Klass,” “Linus Hoffenpepper,” and “Frau Umbrella.” Otto, clearly more cosmopolitan, screamed “Lord Kensington,” “Hoopa Loopa,” and “Samurai.”

  They were screaming “Uncle Moses” and “Hitachi Electronics” (which Otto saw on my radio and mistook for a person’s name) when I heard Carl’s footsteps, loud and sudden, in the hallway. He was home early.

  “Shhh!” I cried, scooping the children into my lap. “Be quiet!” I placed one finger over each of their mouths.

  “Irene?” Carl called.

  “Yes, I’m here.”

  “Who are you talking to?”

  “Um—that was just the radio.”

  “The radio?”

  “Yes. It’s a new program that transmits the sound of street noises from all over the world.”

  It was unclear to me whether Carl had heard the children or just me, but I needed to assume the worst. Through a series of gestures, I conveyed to the children that they needed to stay very quiet or something terrible would happen. I gave them a piece of paper and a pencil as high as their bodies. Working together silently, they pushed the pencil across the paper and drew a series of triangles. Each triangle was more competent than the last, and at number seventeen—a perfect isosceles—they stopped. Exhausted, they lay down on the desk and slept.

  To throw Carl off the trail, I was very accommodating at dinner, practically solicitous. I found this surprisingly easy: the adrenaline of the narrow escape, and the thrill of having such a robust and vibrant secret, made me feel reckless with things I’d previously confused for my dignity.

  So when Carl said, “Have you considered my question,” like a statement (perhaps because he expected a disappointing answer, and did not want to signal false hope by a rising inflection), I said, “Just give me some time to think about it. All I need is some time.” I was basically lying, but at the softness in my voice, I sensed him relaxing.

  As we washed the dishes, our elbows touched, and I felt a new sexual charge between us. I had never thought of the elbow as an erogenous zone before, but now it made perfect sense: it’s so exposed, so sensitive, so easily bruised.

  Usually, after dish washing, Carl and I retired to our separate rooms to practice our respective arts. But tonight, without a word, I followed Carl into his room. He looked surprised when he turned around to face me, but not displeased. He reached out and initiated sex the way that he always did, the way that I usually liked: by lightly playing his fingers over my ear, until I nodded, giving him permission to move the wandering fingertips down to my breast. But tonight, things seemed more urgent; I took hold of his hand and moved it down to step two.

  Carl smiled, and before I knew it we’d skipped three and four entirely and we were on five. We did five and then we did it again. Five, five, five.

  I awoke the next morning to the sound of the children’s voices.

  “No, they live in caves,” Gretel was saying.

  “Everyone knows,” said Otto, “that in China, dragons are pets. So they live in stables, like horses.”

  Leaving them to their discussion, I performed my midweek cleaning ritual, happily humming along with the vacuum. But the noise terrified Otto and Gretel. They huddled in the empty drawing room, curled into each other, hands covering each other’s ears.

  To console them, I uncovered the only dollhouse I’d ever made for myself: a replica of our apartment. Kitchen with tiny dining/living room area, bedroom, back room (which became Carl’s; I made everything—the snowshoes, the turntable, the banjo). There was a Carl doll, of course (red beard, blue shirt, bare feet), and an Irene (pale skin, thin dark hair, round glasses). Under the Irene doll’s worktable sat a dollhouse, an exact replica, and in the bedroom of that dollhouse was another dollhouse, and inside that one, another.

  I let them walk around inside. Otto and Gretel fit right in, as if the house had been designed specifically for them. But still it was uncanny to watch them: the house had never contained anything living before.

  The children dragged the Irene and Carl dolls—larger than them, but light and hollow, like scarabs—into the kitchen, and sat them down at the table. Then Gretel climbed into the Irene doll’s lap, and Otto into the Carl doll’s. It made an odd picture: Irene and Carl stared straight ahead, their wooden faces composed and unmoving, while Otto and Gretel squirmed in their laps.

  “Nothing’s happening,” said Otto, after a while.

  “What were you expecting?” I asked.

  “Just some kind of special feeling,” he said.

  “We always wanted to do this with our parents,” said Gretel, “but they never let us.”

  They continued to sit there, though, shifting positions every few seconds as if that might change things. Finally Otto sighed and said, “Let’s go play.”

  They sat down in Irene’s room, in front of the dollhouse-in-the-dollhouse.

  Otto picked up the Carl and Irene dolls. “I want to make love to you,” he said, twitching the Carl doll’s body around.

  “Otto!” I cried. “Do you even know what that means?”

  “Yes,” he said. “It’s a way of praying. You rub your bodies together and say ‘Oh God, oh God.’” He demonstrated with the dolls.

  “We tried it once,” said Gretel, “but we didn’t feel anything.”

  “That’s because brothers and sisters can’t do it,” I explained. “Also, children don’t like it very much. Wait until you’re older.”

  “When will we get older?” asked Otto.

  “Well.” I thought about this. “I guess I don’t know if you ever will.” The thought made me suddenly, profoundly sad.

  “Will you?”

  “I’m already older.”

  “So do you make love?”

  “Yes. But not like that.”

  “Like how, then?”

  There was a real answer to this question, but I couldn’t imagine giving it. “Well,” I began. “For one thing, I don’t say ‘God.’”

  Otto nodded with understanding. “Taking the name of the Lord in vain.”

  They went back to playing, apparently satisfied.

  That night, I pulled Carl t
oward me before we’d even had dinner. We were in the hallway that connected our two rooms when we started touching; after a few minutes, he murmured, “Can we do it in your room this time?”

  I hesitated. We were in a rosebud-gathering, hay-making mood, and I didn’t want to ruin it. And, though we’d rarely had sex in my room before, it wasn’t the same as sharing a bed for the whole night. It was a step I felt able to take.

  Then again, there was the matter of the children, napping in the shoe box on my worktable. But they usually napped for several hours, and they’d just gone down, so we were probably all right. And the tiny element of danger actually made me feel excited. Maybe part of me wanted Carl to discover Otto and Gretel.

  “All right,” I whispered.

  Carl and I did several things differently this time. We switched the order of seven and five, and we did number eight backwards.

  And it was wonderful. It was so wonderful, in fact, that I completely forgot to notice how we were positioned, not just relative to each other, but relative to other objects in the room. We were midway through a particularly vigorous number nine when Carl’s foot swung out sideways from the bed and knocked off the shoe box. It landed on the floor upside down, with a heavy thud.

  I leapt off the bed and started to scream. “You idiot!” I cried. “You big clumsy idiot. Get out, get out, get out!”

  “But—”

  “Get out!”

  Carl dashed out of the room, naked, with an air of great shame.

  I slammed the door behind him and locked it. Then I opened the shoe box.

  Otto and Gretel were all right. They were sleepy and confused, rubbing their eyes, reaching out for each other, murmuring questions: “Was that a dragon? Was that an ogre? Was that a giant?”