Tumbledown

by Robert Boswell

  “Not even close to not being a psychologist.”

  “What does that make you?”

  “I’m not not anything,” he said. “Not yet.”

  “Well then,” Alice of Neiman Marcus said cheerily. “Fuck off, why don’t you?”

  Billy nodded and stood. “I need to throw up anyway.”

  In terms of the physical movement and the specific sensations of the body that accompanied such physical movement, the sex between James Candler and Lise Ray would have fallen into that great, wide, generous category of so-so. But a participant’s evaluation of intercourse is never merely a measurement on some orgasm scale, and despite every thing that pornographic movies have taught us over the years, the corporeal whatnot is rarely first in the hierarchy of sexual pleasure, and this was definitely true this particular night for our participants. Candler loved the wicked mischief of finding a willing and attractive woman and bringing her home to his bed just a couple of weeks before his fiancée would arrive and permanently end his wandering. The whole business was just so not him and yet he had pulled it off. And Lise felt the liberation that comes from accomplishing a treasured goal of long standing. That may seem a prosaic description given how lengthily she had imagined the encounter, but rarely is it possible for any event to equal such a buildup. In the release from long-held aspiration, there is also an element of wonder, like the virgin thinking, I’m doing it, I’m doing it; which is both rousing and a distraction. She enjoyed the sex more as an event than as a passionate act, a marker on the road that proved she was making progress.

  The sex, then, had been thrillingly adequate for both.

  The lights were out, the sheets a mess, and their naked bodies were perched on the mattress like fallen figurines on a game board. He weighed more than she had imagined but she did not particularly care about his body. Her hip bones showed sharply, much like her cheekbones, and he liked this anatomical symmetry.

  She said, “Are you ready to know my name now?”

  Some rather elemental part of his personality did not want to know her name, but he could not say that. He nodded, and she told him. “Lease?”

  She spelled it.

  “What brings you to live all the way out in the county?” He was suspicious of any woman living alone in the Corners. Women out this way tended to have husbands, and while he had no intention of seeing her again, he nonetheless hoped she was not another woman hiding a relationship.

  “I wasn’t wild for San Diego,” she said. “The whole beach culture, it’s all body nazis and dimwits, or Elmer from Bumfuck, Kansas, with his wife and their three paleface blobs in swimsuits advertising Corona beer or Johnnie Walker or Microsoft.”

  “You’re hardly being fair to Bumfuck,” Candler said, “or Microsoft.”

  “Oh?” she said. “You like ’em corn-fed?”

  All at once he realized that he hated this conversation.

  “Let’s not be so entertaining,” he said. “Let’s just talk. Tell me something about yourself.”

  She pulled the sheet over them. He had no idea that she had loved him for what seemed to her a very long time. She intuited that she would have to continuously forgive him for that ignorance, or she would not be able to be with him. She liked that he had stopped the exchange, that he wanted them on a more meaningful conversational road. When they first entered the room, she had noticed the photograph of him with an attractive woman, younger than Lise and prettier, though overly cutesy in her frilly dress and skillful smile. While she was in the bathroom, he had hidden the picture and she appreciated that. (That he was cheating on someone had been evident from the start.) After sex, when it was his turn to duck into the bathroom, she opened the drawer by his nightstand, where she found a stash of mild sex magazines: Penthouse and something called Naked Volleyball, the porn of generations past. This find also pleased her. It made him seem upstanding in a retro way, without being a complete stooge. When Lise liked somebody, she accumulated evidence that supported her estimation of his character. No matter what the evidence happened to be, she managed to find it endearing. Now he wanted to know something about her. Her evidence would make him flee. She had reinvented herself, turned her life around, become a new person. That might impress him, but it required her to divulge the past, the thorny mire from which she had emerged. Those thorns were sharp.

  She leaned down and touched her lips to his chest, a quick kiss, and said, “I like men who can dance. Your turn.”

  “I like women who like men who can dance.”

  “Now who’s being entertaining?”

  “All right, let’s see. I’m a counselor at the rehab center in Onyx Springs. I’ve been there three years.”

  “I work in a clothing store, a nice place. Expensive, but not the dreadful stuff you usually see in shops like that.” The boutique was called Whispers and Lies. Lise worked on commission. Her colleagues offered customers nothing but compliments, but she knew better. It’s not that you look bad in it, she would say, but the way it emphasizes your hips isn’t flattering. Women asked for her by name. She made a decent living, picked up college classes here and there, had a group of friends. How could she convey all of this, the terms of her new life, and indicate how precious it was to her? He had no idea that he had made it possible. She decided she was less curious about whether she could win him away from the cutesy dish in the photo, which seemed unlikely, than about whether in the best of circumstances she might have been able to love him. She decided this, and immediately wondered whether she believed it. “Beautiful clothing,” she went on. “I think I might like to open my own shop one day.”

  “See how easy this is?” He reached for pillows to stall. All he could think to say next was that he was engaged to be married and his fiancée was arriving in a couple of weeks to live with him, and he was a complete shit for bringing another woman to his bed. The thought crowded out all others, even though he did not feel like a shit. He should, but he didn’t. “I drive a stupid car,” he said, “a Porsche. My boss owns a Corvette and told me I ought to get a Corvette, which was out of the question and not my obsession but his, and then this opportunity for the Boxster came out of nowhere, and I went after it as if I had wanted a Corvette. I bought it used and got an amazing deal, and my car payment is nonetheless greater than my house payment.”

  “You own this place?”

  “For better or worse, yes. I guess I could have said that, too: I live in a stucco warehouse. Too big and people tell me it’s not so attractive, and I guess the front is overwhelmed by the garage. But the unincorporated parts of the county are having hard times, and I got it cheap, considering that it’s four bedrooms.”

  “It’s kind of big for one person.”

  “My friend Billy has moved in. You met him.” He hesitated and it showed. “And my sister is coming to stay with me pretty soon.” In a burst of bravery, he added, “And my girlfriend.”

  She did not let herself show any reaction, entering his honesty as another point in his favor. “I chose you because you look so square-johnish but you dance like a mad genius. It made me think there must be a couple of things to you. Typical guys are, at most, one-thingers. Some can’t quite even cut it at the level of one.” After a moment’s hesitation she added, “When does your girlfriend get here?”

  “Couple of weeks.”

  “Two weeks,” she said. “You want to be with me for two weeks?”

  “Then what?” he asked, but he slid his hand over her hip as he spoke, the tips of his fingers finding the divide in her ass.

  “Then I disappear from your life like the bubbles from a beer you leave in the sun.”

  “I’ve always wondered where those bubbles go.”

  “Ocean Beach,” she said. “One of my girlfriends is looking for a roomie. I’ll be on the opposite side of this thriving metropolis.”

  “Two weeks,” he said. “Maybe.” Then, “Can I trust you?”

>   She kissed him.

  Neither had the perspective to see that their congress would never have happened had Candler not come unglued that morning, racing on the freeway, punching a stranger, telling a mentally impaired client all about it. Likewise, Lise would not have been impressed with Candler had he not entered her life when she was falling apart. Neither had the whole story.

  To review: both parties were delighted with the tepid, drunken, utterly unexceptional sex. They followed it up with another bout—slower this time, pleasanter. And then, after another brief interlude of chatter and resettling, they slept. They were sleeping when Billy Atlas stumbled into Jimmy’s big house and quietly shut the door. He took off his shoes to tiptoe past, falling heavily against the wall while removing each shoe. Did he hesitate by the door to Jimmy’s bedroom? Did he listen for sounds of lovemaking?

  Well, did he?

  PART TWO

  Two-Week Time Machine

  You were a stranger to your sorrow;

  therefore fate has cursed you.

  —EURIPIDES

  4

  DAY 1:

  Friday morning, Mick parked as usual on Juniper Street, at the corner of Lantana Avenue, to wait for Karly. Nirvana performed on his CD player, a band he’d loved before his illness. He could understand why he used to like this music, but he couldn’t say he liked it now. It was insistent in a way that made him anxious. A part of the chorus of one song, though, stuck with him.

  Here we are now, entertain us

  I feel stupid and contagious

  Because he’d taken his meds late the previous day, he’d taken only a quarter this morning, and yet he felt precisely stupid and contagious. It had to be a good song to nail that down.

  He believed if he listened enough to the things that used to please him, they might please him again. They might make him well. Something was going to make him well, and it was impossible to say exactly what it might be. Kurt Cobain could maybe do it.

  He didn’t want Mr. James Candler calling him out again, embarrassing him in front of his friends, but he didn’t want to go through life a zombie, either. He needed a balance between ragging and dragging. His therapist had twice lowered his dose, but she wouldn’t go any lower. So it was up to Mick—partial doses, skipped days, experiments.

  Earlier, before leaving the house, he had told his brother that he and Karly were engaged. “She’s pretty,” Craig said. He had met her twice but only briefly each time. “What’s wrong with her?” he asked. “I mean, why is she at the Center?”

  Mick admitted that he had no clear idea. She was friendly to everyone, and she was forgiving of people; it was hard for him to think that she might have an emotional problem. Maybe she had trouble concentrating, but he was pretty sure she didn’t take meds. Sometimes, if she didn’t want to talk about a subject, she’d act like she couldn’t understand, which was more polite than cutting somebody off. Sometimes she genuinely didn’t understand, but no one understood everything. Some would say she wasn’t bright, but even acknowledging what others might think felt like a betrayal, a denial of the woman who made his heart swell, his veins throb, his thoughts swirl. Karly was his love, and he would not indulge in the transgression of imagining that she could be better.

  Karly lived in the leafy part of town, and a lot of the sunlight was lost in the leaves, especially on the sidewalk where she would soon walk. There was something about the distance that sunlight traveled only to be stopped by leaves just a few feet before the concrete where Karly Hopper—his fiancée—would momentarily walk, that million-mile journey of the light impeded by the implausibly transient leaves, no thicker than magazine paper, with their wobbly inconstancy that randomly blocked some rays and permitted others to reach completion: it seemed so heartbreaking to Mick, that such an incredible passage could fall short of the earth just a few feet before—Karly! She appeared up the street, on the walk. She was possibly late. It was hard to tell. He was invariably early, and he never thought to look at his watch once he caught a glimpse of her. She wore a black dress with high black boots, more like a party outfit than work clothes, a space between the top of the boot and the hem of the skirt, an interval of leg, bare flesh-colored legs in locomotion. He did not look away to check the time, but watched that winking of flesh on one side and then the other. She passed through the patches of light and moving shade, oblivious to the celestial tragedy surrounding her. The passenger door flew open.

  “Hi, Mick!” she said, as if they had not seen each other for weeks. “You look so good in that jacket.”

  Mick had decided to wear a suit and tie to work. He was in a suit and she, a party dress. They were on the same page, weren’t they? He worried that he was maybe inspired by the suit Rhine wore last night to Alonso’s party, but now that she had dressed up too, he felt jubilant. He had thought a long time about how to greet her this morning, how to convey their status as engaged people without making her uncomfortable.

  “How are you, my betrothed?”

  “I have a new joke for you,” she said. “I can read it while we drive.” She showed him two sheets of lined paper. The scrawl of ink on them was enormous, and he thought her disability might have to do with muscles and motor skills. “What did the reindeer—it’s a Christmas joke. I know it isn’t Christmas time. Do you still want to hear it?”

  “Of course, my betrothed.”

  Her handwriting was large and crude, which had to reveal something. She must have a neuromuscular disorder. None of clients at the Center talked about their diagnoses, if they even knew them, but this guess made sense to Mick. Karly had some problem with her muscles or with her brain’s control over her muscles. This problem could get worse. Maybe, as an old woman, she would have to be in a wheelchair, and he would have to push her. He imagined himself carrying her from the wheelchair to their bed, pausing to feel her personal heft. Weight was a measure of a person’s attractiveness to the planet, wasn’t it? The melancholy image made him unreasonably happy. He put the car in gear and pulled into the street.

  “I heard it on a movie,” Karly said, “and rewinded the DVD nineteen times to get it on paper.” She paused then, studying her penmanship or something else about the lined sheet. She seemed to be counting. “Yeah, nineteen times.” She turned one of the sheets sideways. “What did—do—what do the girl reindeer do while the boy ones are out with Santa Claus?” She looked up from the paper and smiled at him.

  Her smile made it difficult to drive. Men had been blinded by less. The trip to the sheltered workshop required changing lanes, merging, signaling. Her smile was like another sun right here in his Firebird.

  “So it’s Christmas Eve, right?” Karly said. “Do you want to guess? Don’t peek at the writing on the paper.”

  “Knit?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Prance?”

  “No, silly. But that’s a good guess, pants.”

  He slowed the car, as if to help with his concentration. They were almost to the sheltered workshop already. What would be funny? The male reindeer were making deliveries, and giving birth was called a delivery, but only females could give birth and so if the males were making deliveries . . .

  “Pass out cigars?”

  Karly shook her head, delighted. “Not right.”

  If he hadn’t taken any of his meds whatsoever this morning, he would have the answer. He was sure of it. The meds would let thoughts reach the tip of his tongue, just close enough to tease his mouth. Yes! He could literally feel the answer resting on his tongue, like a tingling lozenge, but his tongue was bloated by the meds and only marginally connected to his brain.

  “All wrong answers,” she said. “Give up, Mick?”

  “I can’t think of anything.”

  She raised the papers and read the punch line. “They go to the town and blow a few bucks.” She laughed, leaning so far forward that her forehead brushed against the dash.

&nbs
p; “That’s a good one,” he said and laughed with her. Sexual jokes—her way of confirming their engagement, so much subtler than his attempt. Sometimes he worried that she was too sophisticated for him. Not that she was too smart but that she knew the ways of the world. There were lots of ways of being smart.

  “That’s so funny,” she said, “shopping on Christmas Eve.”

  He took a second and got it again, how she was turning it around to make yet another joke. He laughed harder.

  “That was the workshop street turn,” she said, “wasn’t it?”

  “I missed it,” he said, nodding, imagining all the work it would take over the years to keep up with her.

  The sheltered workshop was suddenly way different. For instance, the new supervisor worked alongside them. He wasn’t very good at it, Maura noted, but she liked that he was trying it out. He was going to completely fuck up their progress reports, as if they had all suddenly become master packers, but that meant more money. Free money. He told them to call him Billy, just Billy, and during their morning break, he shared his lunch, flattened sandwiches with greasy peanut butter windows showing through and not even any jelly, but it was nonetheless unprecedented. He was not at all like Crews. If anything he paid too much attention, smiling and nodding, with big teeth, like a horse. A big nodding horse. He was a moderate fatso and had too much action in his face, like a reasonably cool piano piece played way too quickly. Both of Maura’s sisters played the piano, and her little sister was actually good at it. Why was this portly dweeb making her think of her sister? He was trying to see what they were like, this crew that was suddenly his charge, as if it was his intention to find a way to fit in. You’re the boss, she imagined saying. We have to fit in with you.

  Unless Billy’s cheating brought it up, her work score was going to be crap. She was bugged, bummed, bushwhacked—anything but depressed. If she was depressed, she’d have to spew to Barnstone about sneaking out of the dorm and accepting a ride from perverts and missing Mick anyway—Mick who hardly had the time to say hello to her today. Except for getting through the basement window, which was trickier from the outside, she hadn’t had trouble sneaking into her room. But she slept badly. She had cried in front of Rhine and Alonso, and that fucking ride in the pickup was a stupid thing to have done. If she told Barnstone about it, Barnstone would have to narc on her, and she’d be in lockdown and totally fucked. If she told Mick about it, he’d think she was pathetic and loose and unbelievably stupid. He’d have to think it because it was true.