Love Warps the Mind a Little

by John Dufresne

  Dale wonders what the hell went wrong. He never heard his father sing in his life. They never even had a record player in the house. Dale scratches Keynes behind his ears. Keynes lies on Dale’s chest and licks his other hand. He does remember when he was in high school himself. He was nothing like a star at all. He was closer to being a mirage. He even felt like an impostor at the graduation party out the highway and down at the pump jacks. He kind of sat on a rock by himself and watched his classmates drink Lone Star and make out. He had had a crush on Elisa Martin since eighth grade, and that night, for the first time, she talked to him. She sat down in the dirt beside him, wiggled his foot, said, Why you being an old mope, Dale Evans?

  They talked, and he even tried to drink some of her beer, and she asked him what he was going to do now that it was all over. He said, You really want to know? Yes. He told her that what he wanted to do eventually was to get involved in politics, maybe start out running for office in Lea County and then on to the statehouse, if I’m lucky, and then who knows. She said, Maybe you’ll be the President. I think you could do that. Dale blushed. She said, You’re not like the others. She looked over at the revelers. Cowboys and roustabouts, she said. He asked her if she’d sign his yearbook. She said, Sure. He ran to his truck and got it. She opened to her picture, made a face, said, I look like a dork. She wrote that Dale was too cool to be forgotten like it was an addition problem. She signed it “Elisa M.” and put a heart over the i. She kissed him on the cheek. He asked her what her plans were. She said, You haven’t noticed? What? he said. Elisa stood and pulled down the hem of her T-shirt so that the jersey clung to her body. She took his hand and placed it on her belly. She smiled. I’m going to be a mommy. She gave him back his hand, said she was moving to Las Cruces next week.

  Dale thinks how could he have been so stupid—a politician who doesn’t speak to people. He thought about Elisa Whatever-her-name-might-be-now, as he had so often over the years. The phone rang. Judi’s. Stoni told the answering machine that her Richie Honeybun was sprung from the slammer. She was just too happy. I’ll talk to you guys later, she said. Maybe we can all go for a drink.

  25.

  Dog Days.

  WHEN THE WEATHER THAT FIRST WEEK OF AUGUST TURNED SWELTRY, DAMP, AND stifling, Judi and Stoni cut themselves a deal. If Stoni would give up pharmaceuticals, then Judi would quit smoking. Judi was now down to two or three cigarettes a day. Stoni was down to just a few over-the-counter substitutes: Percogesic, Afrin, Benzedrex inhalers, NyQuil for sleeping. Judi became flamboyantly annoyed with her sacrifice. I tried to stay out of her way and warned Spot to do the same. Of course, with the oppressive heat and the grim humidity, Spot could barely manage to lie in his scooped-out bed of dirt under the deck and pant. Judi explained to me that the two best cigarettes of her day, the most tempting and delicious, were the one after a big meal and the one after sex. Therefore, until she felt more in control of her habit (“It’s not an addiction”), she would have to forego the near occasions to sin. She was also at the doctor’s office nearly every other day for one test or another, for consultation, for reassurance. Meanwhile, Mr. Lesperence seemed to have left on vacation. Newspapers littered his front stoop. I gathered them up and fed them to Spot. He did his best to nibble at them. Judi told me that Mr. Lesperence had a son, a Realtor, who lived on a lake in New Hampshire. Mr. Lesperence was likely there fishing as he does every summer.

  Trixie cleaned the trailer from stem to stern, she told me. Had it fumigated. Even hosed down the outside, flushed the sewage system, aired out the foam mattresses, and put down new contact paper on the kitchen counter. It looks so festive, she said. Richie Muneyhun had, indeed, moved into the trailer. He’d been out of jail two weeks already and hadn’t been arrested yet. Trixie called him a changed man. She reminded me how much good prison had done for Charles Colson. Buckets of good. Same thing with our Richie, she said. And you should catch Stoni now—such a lady she’s become. Like Princess What’s-her-face. I hear wedding bells, she said. I said, Planet Earth to Trixie Dubey. Come in, Trixie. She slapped my shoulder, told me to peddle my cynicism elsewhere, thank you. Hervey had a different take on Richie. He told me Richie’d been mouthing off about cleaning Arthur Bositis’s clock. What he said, actually, was he was going to adjust Arthur’s cojónes with a strap wrench, put his opened mouth on the edge of a curbstone, and kick in the back of his head.

  My father was recovering fairly well considering, though he did have his setbacks—fluid in his lungs, a slight stroke or two, albumin draining to his legs and feet so that they swelled up like melons. He’d spend a day or two at a time in the hospital getting medicated; X-rayed, needled, probed, and whatever else.

  While this was going on, my pal Nicky took two weeks’ vacation and rode the Amtrak out to Los Angeles so he could appear on Jeopardy! And me, whenever I could, I collapsed on the sofa near the window fan and read. When I wasn’t doing that, I was lying to people. I had come to the conclusion that lying was the best way to handle some things. Take my father, for instance. When he asked me about the old days, I told him my childhood was sensational. What would be the point of telling him anything else? I can live with the lie easier than I could live with the pain that my truth would have caused him. I lied to Martha. I apologized about the annulment questionnaire, said it just proved how serious I was about the possibility of reconciliation. I told her I had moved out of Judi’s and into a sweet little mobile home in Millbury. She said it was about time. She agreed to show up at the marriage counselor’s. I lied to Judi. I said she never looked better. Anxiety had drained the blush and the radiance from her face. She was too thin. I figured she’d get back to eating when this medical business resolved itself.

  I couldn’t wait until the weather broke. I was getting up at six these days, since I couldn’t sleep anyway, and writing until ten or when it would just get too hot in the house. And then I got news in the mail. The St. Alban’s Review said they were much impressed with my story “Married to the Married Life” and would like to publish it if I would make the few changes indicated on the manuscript. I should have been elated, I know, validation of sorts, at long last, but I was depressed. I didn’t like the story anymore. It was one of my earlier efforts and certainly the bleakest. It was almost without hope.

  The story dealt with a married couple who are both heavy drinkers. He’s an engineer at a defense plant, and she’s a graduate of Mount Holyoke who doesn’t need to work. At first, she is disconcerted by her leisure. Eventually, however, she adjusts to the long hours in the house. She fills the time with shopping trips, dusting, rearranging, preparing elaborate suppers. She thinks of herself as a gourmet cook. She’s put away Jane Austen and George Eliot for whatever paperback’s on the top of the Times best-seller list. She’s Tina; he’s Paul. They were both the youngest in their families, both brilliant and adventurous kids with luminous futures—they’d be the ones to finally get out of the neighborhood—but terrible, it turns out, disastrous, for each other. She gets fat, wears dark glasses, makes embarrassing pronouncements at family gatherings. He grows ever more condescending. In private, they abuse each other by conducting nasty and senseless affairs with neighbors, by reminding each other what they’ve given up for this marriage. Publically, they protect each other tenaciously and defend their acquisitive way of life. The story ends with Tina at forty, giving birth to their first child, a daughter they’ll name Patricia. I saw this as their chance at redemption. The editors wanted the ending cut. So I took away the couple’s child. I felt like a creep and a fraud, but I mailed the story off anyway with a groveling letter of thanks. The happy ending here is that the editors decided that they really didn’t like the story after all. And one more thing. Mr. Barry Lesperence was not on vacation. He was dead on his bathroom floor. His shift supervisor at Capital Toys had asked the police to check on Mr. Lesperence when he didn’t show for work or answer his phone.

  26.

  Tic Douloureux

  I SENSED THAT T
ERRY CUNDALL WAS STUDYING US AS WE STEPPED THROUGH THE doorway into her office, Martha first. I nodded, smiled, shook Terry’s thin, cool, limp hand. She switched on a white-noise machine by the doorway and closed the door. The drone of the machine would muffle our revelations and not disturb or intrigue anyone in the waiting room. That was the idea, I supposed. Terry was, I could tell, intent upon our entrance, though she remained impassive. Martha had a choice between the gray overstuffed chair and the matching loveseat. She seemed confused. I sat on the loveseat and sank back into the cushions. Martha complained she was cold. She put on the sweater she had carried with her. Terry sat across from me on a leather club chair. She crossed her legs. On the coffee table between us, a box of beige tissues and a small clay statue of a seated American Indian woman with nine Indian babies crawling all over her. Martha sat beside me. I sat forward as she leaned back.

  Out the window, I saw the railroad tracks, the abandoned Union Station, the library, and, beyond that, up the hill, St. Casimir’s Church and St. Vincent’s Hospital. Terry said it was natural for couples to be ill-at-ease on the first visit. Martha was already launched into her reconstruction of our marital collapse. She reached for a tissue. I looked at the framed child’s painting on the wall behind Terry. Mostly green and yellow with what could be trees or bombs, and something alive, a bear maybe, a crab, a virus. Martha blew her nose. She told Terry she had no idea why I took up with another woman, why I quit my job, why I abandoned her. I’m sure I rolled my eyes or clenched my fist or sat up straight or something. Terry said, Laf, let’s hear Martha out. She had no idea, huh? Where had she been living? When she was finished, and it was, I guessed, my turn to share feelings, Martha started to cry. As I began to speak, I heard her sob. I looked at her. She said, I can’t help this, you bastard, I’m in pain. I sat back and looked at the ceiling.

  I remembered Spot, how that morning he had sat in the backyard, staring at Mr. Lesperence’s fence, howling, cocking his head, listening. Judi was at Dr. Stouder’s, getting, I hoped, encouraging news. I wondered what they were doing for a doll wigs hackler over at Capital Toys. How was Nicky doing at the taping out in California?

  When Martha stopped crying, I said, I’d like a chance to revise my wife’s story. I began with the prenuptial agreement—where Martha gets her degree and I eventually become a writer. Martha made an audible gasp of, I guessed, exasperation. I looked at Terry. I said, Isn’t this where you tell Martha to hear me out? Terry said that I seemed angry and did I want to go with that. I said, You bet your ass I do. No, this is a ploy where women get the man irate so they can dismiss whatever he says. I took a breath and apologized for that last vulgarity. I said, I’m okay now. Terry said, Are you stuffing those uncomfortable feelings? She said, I want you to be in touch with the moment. She was getting on my nerves. I didn’t care how cute she was.

  All right, I said, I’ll be here-and-now for you. I considered my mind and my body. In the here and now, I said, I’m numb and confused. But I was seldom ever concerned with the present. It is the least interesting of the places we can be.

  I noticed that Terry had this thing she did. She put her left index finger on her lips when she was thinking and about to speak. Her eyes got wide, her mouth tight. She said, Why don’t we begin by talking about your expectations of marriage counseling. I didn’t wait for Martha. I said, I’d like to be able to have a conversation with Martha in which she did not break down into weeping. I’ve been listening to her cry for fourteen years, and I’m tired of it.

  Terry said, Martha, are you all right? Martha was choking, she was crying so hard. I walked to the window. I thought I’d scream or smash the Indian statue if I didn’t. I saw my buddy Alvin, the reference librarian, parking his car, checking his pockets. I wanted to signal Alvin, say, I’m being held captive, come rescue me. I’ll buy us drinks over at the Valhalla. We’ll talk about Buddhism or the Moody Blues all afternoon. Whatever you want, Alvin. Martha was quiet now. She sniffled. I heard the sigh of leather as Terry sat back in her chair.

  I used to have an illness called tic douloureux, where something goes wrong with the trigeminal nerve in the brain, and no one knows why this happens or how. The pain, which came like an excruciating shock to the left side of my face, was so profound and agonizing that I wanted to kill myself. Pain may not be worse than death, but it is more tyrannical. Pain, more than anything, even more than love, traps you in the present, narrows your life to a second. The relief I felt whenever the pain stopped was paradise, but I spent it dreading the next wave of misery. Anything could set off a spasm—a gust of wind against my cheek, a smile, the taste of mint, chewing, the aroma of a flower. Same as in my marriage. Any movement, any word, a look, even, might set off Martha’s next convulsion of tears. Better, I thought, not to do anything. Better to watch the shadow of that cloud pass over the face of the hospital.

  Terry said, Would you join us, Laf? I sat in the chair this time. I looked at Martha with my jaw set. Martha said, I want our life to be what it was, the two of us on the sofa, nestled under an afghan, sipping coffee, reading the Sunday Times. That happened only once that I could recall, down the Cape. At home Martha didn’t want the Times anywhere near the furniture because of the ink. I said I wasn’t so hopeful.

  Martha cried. I could see that she was trying to stifle the tears, and I appreciated that. But she couldn’t. I looked at Terry. Martha said she felt set up. She felt like the whole reason for this session was so that I could pummel her again. What was I, some kind of rabid animal?

  Terry looked at me, asked, Did you hear what Martha said? I said, Yes, Terry, I heard. I said, You may want to die with a tidy sum of money in a bank account downtown, Martha. You might covet that letter from the Pope when you retire. You might want all the talk at your wake to be about how antiseptically clean you kept the apartment. I don’t want any of that. I want to work just enough not to worry. I want to work so I can write, and if I die owing Sears and MasterCard a bundle, so what? She looked surprised. I sat back and waited. The thing is, I knew that Judi didn’t think much of my philosophy, if you can call it that, either.

  This time Terry kept her finger on her lips as she talked. In her opinion, we had made remarkable progress. We had both been able to articulate some difficult and emotionally charged concerns. Change is not comfortable, she reminded us. She smiled. We agreed to meet same time next week. Terry gave us homework. We were to each think about and write down ten things that we liked or appreciated about the other.

  I walked out of the office and through the waiting room with Martha. The midget couple sitting there did not look up from their magazines. He and she had identical slick, black hairdos. I had decided that I would walk Martha to her car, make a joke on the way like, Can you believe we even have to pay for this? or something. I didn’t. Martha told me she needed to freshen up in the ladies’ room. She was going back to work. I said, Would you like to get some lunch? She said she wouldn’t. She said, I’m not obsessed with housework, you know.

  27.

  Staging

  I GOT HOME BEFORE JUDI. NO MAIL FOR ME. TWO MESSAGES ON THE MACHINE Stoni asked if we’d be home tonight so she and Richie could stop by. Judi said she was back at her office and would be home at sevenish. I tried to read the diagnosis in her tone. I thought maybe she was just tired. I made a pitcher of martinis, changed into my shorts and T-shirt. I took the phone book and my pen and writing tablet out to the deck. I was going to do my homework and find someone who’d deliver our supper. I kissed Spot, hugged him, tossed him the olives from my drink. I asked him what was going on over at Mr. Lesperence’s house. He woofed. Someone had set up scaffolding in the back of the house.

  I called Forbidden City and ordered Hunan beef, lotus prawns, and Happy Family to be delivered at seven. Ten things I like about Martha. One: Her feet aren’t webbed. Two: She can braid palm fronds into a crucifix, like the one she’s got pinned to the visor of the car. Three: She lets me eat the lima beans out of her succotash. Well, I coul
d see I wasn’t taking this homework seriously. I was just so ragged from the session, I couldn’t think. I needed a laugh, even at Martha’s expense. I went in and refilled the glass. Two more olives for Spot. Okay, get serious, Laf. I tore off the facetious page from the tablet, crunched it into a ball, and tossed it to Spot. Sorry, Terry, the dog ate my homework. Okay, get serious.

  Martha had told me things about the sun that I didn't know. She told me about the green ray and about the gegenschein. When the sun is setting over the water, she said, just before it slips below the surface, at the last possible moment before it vanishes, you can see the green flash of light—if you’re lucky. She saw it only once in her life—on a ferry to Nova Scotia with her aunt Racine. The gegenschein, on the other hand, is a faint, sort of elliptical, glow of light that you can see—and I did when Martha pointed it out to me—in the twilight sky, just opposite the sun.

  I remembered the night we saw that counterglow. We were in Chatham, near Monomoy, watching the sunset over a salt marsh, and she took my head in her hands and aimed me at it. And then she told me that what I’d seen wasn’t really there. For some reason, we went into town and bought some toys at a children’s store, drove back to Wellfleet, and played with them in the cottage. A top, I remember, with a suction cup at the bottom, Chinese checkers, pickup sticks, jacks. They’re all still in a box, I think, in our bedroom closet at home.

  Okay, then, start over. Martha, my dear, you are: 1. kind; 2. generous; 3. loving; 4. intelligent; 5. honest; 6. sensitive; 7. compassionate; 8. (I got stuck there at eight for a few seconds) beautiful; 9. enthusiastic; 10. hard-working. There. I had finished my assignment. I’d have the whole week to goof off.

  Judi stood at the sliding screen door to the deck. I told her where the drinks were, asked her about the doctor’s visit. Let me change, she said. I got Judi’s drink, brought it out to the deck. The doorbell rang. The man from Forbidden City was here. When I carried the boxes of food outside, Spot perked right up. He loves the chicken in Happy Family. He likes the boxes. Judi said, How was the session? I told her I got homework on the first day. She didn’t smile. She sipped her drink. I told her how explosive things had been. She said if I was serious about counseling, I probably shouldn’t be living here. I didn’t say anything. I asked Judi if she’d listened to Stoni’s message. She nodded. She said, I’m not going to toss you out. I guess I’ve gotten used to you.