by Maria Flook
“Well, I’ll see you later,” Pam said. “I’m going downtown with Leon. Leon knows what I’m going through. He wrecked his mountain bike and skinned the meat off his elbows. It took a while to come back.”
Garland turned to me and said, “The tone of the evening has been irrevocably set. Who can think of the flesh now?”
“Suit yourself,” I said and I sat down in the firm captain’s chair that always helps me face someone squarely. I leaned back in the deep seat, aligning my spine with the rigid center dowel. I cupped my palms over the smooth knob-ends of its arms. I was ready for the edgy debate that always took us into sex.
I didn’t mind Leon coming to the house. Pamela and Leon were adults; I couldn’t baby-sit them. I soon adjusted to seeing Leon coming naked from the bathroom, strolling down the full length of the hall.
The first night we met, Leon walked towards me, backlit by the moon coming through the fanlight window. I couldn’t avert my eyes in time. In that glimpse, I couldn’t help but notice that his penis was still partially erect in its dreamy recovery from sex. He nodded to me and smiled and kept walking. He didn’t cover up. He wasn’t ashamed of his body and didn’t turn his hip to hide himself. Why should he? My alarm was overcome by something stronger, an affection. A warmth so familiar and even, a level surge that I found pleasing. I thought of my own sons moving through these halls, and although Leon wasn’t their double—he wasn’t my sons’ equivalent in any way—he looked too comfortable to be a mere guest.
I closed my bedroom door. Seeing Leon wasn’t like seeing my sons, at all. I felt the current of heat that flows upward from the pelvis to the brain in an instant recognition. I felt its flashpowder aftertaste in the back of my throat.
My nights were altered after that. The kernel of my sleep disorder had germinated with my first glimpse of Leon. His lanky gait. His long strawberry-blond hair, newly shampooed, seemed quite lion-like when it fluffed in golden tiers along his shoulders. When I saw him again the next night, he mumbled, “Hello.” He might have whispered something else. He stood still beside Pam’s door and shrugged his shoulders, as if he couldn’t decide if he should return to her bed or join me in mine. Of course, I might have imagined this. I told myself my sleep troubles arose from Leon’s part-time job. Leon drove a refrigerator truck for Rhode Island Fish Company. Leon loaded the truck with fish in the evenings, sliding four-gallon plastic trays of whole flounders, cod, bluefish, and swordfish steaks onto galvanized racks like built-in bookshelves on either side of the truck. Then he stacked bushels of shellfish, quahogs and mussels, in the forward part of the truck, making sure the bushels were squared and wouldn’t topple. The next morning, before rush hour, Leon would leave the house to deliver the fish to processors and seafood distributors, sometimes driving all the way into New York or over into Hartford. If he was going into New York City, he had to leave Pamela’s bed at 4:00 A.M. in order to keep to his schedule. If he was delivering locally, he could sleep through until the morning. The fish stayed fresh overnight in the refrigerator truck. After 11:00 P.M., because of Providence’s off-street parking ordinance, Leon had to park the truck in the drive, beneath my bedroom window. The unit on top of the cab was loud when it switched on and off, and it kept me awake.
My position lets me make my own hours, but I prefer to work mornings. I write press releases and public relations materials, myriads of simple three-page brochures for a large maternity hospital. A single pamphlet, written with sincerity, some flair, printed on good color stock, and distributed in the nick of time, can save the lives of a teenage mom and her infant. I never hold a squalling newborn, but I reach new mothers in the early stages with my pamphlets about back exercises, childbirth classes, nutrition guides, laundry instructions, crib safety, premature labor warning signals. Schedules, lists, tips, warnings.
There are occasional conflicts between the busy routines of the delivery rooms and the hospital’s heavy abortion schedule at the out-patient clinic. My pamphlets cover these opposite extremes. I try to get information across in a nutshell.
My routine became thrown off when Leon started to park his truck outside my window. After a week of very little sleep, I couldn’t get much done at work. I decided to talk to Pamela about the fish truck. I wanted to make sure she understood that it wasn’t Leon. I liked Leon. He was agreeable, gentle, like one of those orange tomcats that seem so adaptable, eating table scraps on the stoop, then being invited into the kitchen, then finally taking full license. Garland laughed when he heard me; he reminded me that it was Leon’s name itself that had tricked me into thinking of him as a tame cat. I protested; I reminded Garland that Leon was very sweet to Pamela and he was always courteous to me. I wouldn’t say anything to Pam about Leon’s nude prowls, his silky sex talk, clearly audible and more so as it neared its conclusion. His release, which he adeptly prolonged, shimmied through several octaves. It was quite a disturbance at first, but I might have been able to sleep through that after the first few times if not for the irregular blasts of the pumping freon. The freon was the problem. Leon would have to park the truck elsewhere, down at the harbor at Rhode Island Fish, somewhere out of my hearing.
Garland noticed the dark smudges beneath my eyes and he tugged me to him on the sofa. “You just have to put your foot down,” he told me. “Leon can get the truck in the morning like anyone in his right mind, there’s no reason he has to park it here for the night. You don’t have to sleep with those fish outside.”
I laughed about that. It was a local mafia joke, wasn’t it? To “sleep with the fishes.”
“That’s Hollywood’s golden days,” Garland said. “Today’s mob is all MTV punks; their talk is streamlined because of greed. They don’t think in those lovely metaphors.”
“But how would Leon pick up the truck? I’d have to drive him. It might be easier for me to sleep over at your place,” I told Garland.
“That’s avoiding the issue. You have to set some rules here.”
“Yes,” I told him, he was squirming so much I didn’t push it further.
Then, for a week or more, there was no truck. There was no Leon. Pam sat across from me at dinner, her hands in her lap.
“Don’t pick the scab,” I told her.
“I’m not,” she barked at me. “Christ—”
“I just mean, don’t be tempted,” I said.
“For once, can we forget about it?” Pam said. “It’s all you think of. My fucking scab.”
“It’s almost healed, isn’t it?”
“What’s it to you?”
“You aren’t eating anything tonight. Aren’t you going to a concert?”
Pamela said, “I’m going to hear a band. It’s not a ‘concert.’ There’s a difference, you know.”
“You should eat something before you go out drinking.”
Pamela said she knew how to drink. We didn’t talk about Leon. It was over with Leon or maybe it was just beginning. I wanted to tell her that love took many shapes before it gelled. Did I need to tell Pamela, former member of the Fatals, anything more about life’s lessons? She liked to instruct me. Pamela told me, recently, that life was just one big pass/fail course. All these little tests were meaningless except for the distraction. “We all need our distractions,” Pamela said to me with new acidity, as Garland arrived at the house.
When Pamela went out to hear the rock-and-roll band, Garland and I took apart one of my photo albums just to remake it in basically the same fashion. I had, years before, removed any photographs that upset me, photographs of my husband sailing a Sunfish in Newport, or steering a golf cart with a tasseled surrey; yet, even without his image, some of the remaining photographs recalled the ones I had destroyed, and these ghost pictures hung before my eyes. That week, I had received phone calls from both of my sons, one right after another, and I felt comforted that they had remembered, almost simultaneously, to love me. There was no official occasion, and their unexpected greetings warmed me for days afterwards.
Durin
g one of these surprise phone calls, my son heard Leon’s voice behind me in the kitchen and my son was curious about him. I liked hearing the shy, tinny resonance of my son’s uncertainty—perhaps his ranking was being challenged in his absence. “Oh, that’s just Leon. He’s Pam’s squeeze,” I said, aware of the complex fiber-optic braid of jealousies carried back and forth across a thousand miles, at a cost, by AT&T. I told my son I just loved having Pamela in the house.
“Here’s one of Pam,” I said to Garland when I found a snapshot of my niece photographed when she was a little girl. I hunted through my photographs, ignoring my own babies, and once and again I found a photograph of my brother’s daughter. The little girl looked back at me, unexpectedly, from her place in those early years, years when I had hardly thought of her.
“She looks almost the same,” Garland said.
“Oh, she’s a natural, isn’t she? You can see it, even then.”
Garland said, “She’s exotic, if you like that sort of thing.”
This made me feel funny. Was he saying he didn’t appreciate Pamela’s beauty or was he saying that I lacked something, something exotic? I couldn’t compare myself with a twenty-year-old girl, could I? His comment fired me up. I looked at the picture of my teenaged niece as if she were more to me than just my brother’s child—but what? I looked at my lover, wanting his face to blur the other until I pinched the cardboard sleeves of the album together.
After that, Garland and I went to bed. Later, I left Garland in the bedroom and went down the hall. I saw Pamela’s bedroom door open, so I stopped and looked inside. The lamp on her bed table burned, but she hadn’t returned from the rock club. She had left the lamp on. I liked how Pamela had made the room look different. My son’s furniture looked unfamiliar with her clothes and some of mine splashed about, her shoes paired at the foot of the dresser, and her electric hair rollers crammed on the bottom bookshelf. The bed was unmade, the floral sheets tugged high on the corners of the mattress as if ready to spring loose. She made love to Leon in these sheets, but never at the same time that I made love to Garland, so it didn’t seem like a similar phenomenon. What I did with Garland was entirely different; the difference wasn’t because of our ages or our particular status or file category in the “human condition.” It was something else. Garland and I sought privacy upon privacy, yet Pamela and Leon seemed happy to have me, and even Garland, in close eavesdropping distance of their lovemaking, as if we offered some kind of moral support. Did we sanction their raw and sensuous improvisations as we imagined them to happen? Our quiet endurance might even encourage them. Then, afterwards, if I was still awake, I might heat steaming bowls of chowder for Leon before he went off in his truck or back to Pam’s bed. I crumbled the oyster crackers over their plates, as if they were too weak to do so on their own. I couldn’t keep from imagining Leon’s phenomenal levels of expertise, which had left him looking so peaked.
Pamela never bothered to give me much support, to stick around when Garland and I were at it. Did she think I didn’t need or require her interest, her acknowledgment of my intimate life?
As I reached to switch off her lamp, I noticed some of my brochures on the bed stand. She must have brought these upstairs from my desk. There was the new one about seeking proper channels of litigation for victims of the Dalkon Shield IUD. This, of course, was of no use to Pam, who had always used a diaphragm. Then there was the booklet on Creative Visualization, not one of my fliers but one from the Home Birth Association. Then, beside the brochures, I saw a large amount of money flattened beneath a hand mirror. I picked up the mirror to look at the cash. It was more than five hundred dollars in an even fan that suddenly undulated in the breeze from the furnace grate when I lifted the mirror. The bills fluttered strangely, like something you might see ruffling underneath the water in a coral reef. I wondered where she could have obtained that kind of money. Her father paid me directly for her household expenses and gave Pam a modest allowance for school supplies and recreation. He also allowed her to use a J. C. Penney credit card and one from Sears. She didn’t often go down to the mall to shop at those stores and preferred to browse at Screamin’ Mimi’s, where everything was spandex and vinyl. Perhaps the money was Leon’s; it could have been his wages and she was going to return it to him.
Those days when the fish truck was parked outside, I sometimes thought about the fish, the fishes themselves, chilled, layered, their eyes still clear and fixed on some last, wistful look into the deep. Now that Leon was nowhere to be seen, and the truck was parked in who-knows-whose driveway, I even dreamed about them. Perhaps it was their very form—elongated pods, seed-shaped, leaf-shaped—which made an attractive vision. I found myself comforted by the image of these netted creatures. Didn’t these fish, when alive, move as a whole? Shifting in silky forward propulsion in shiny rows and layers. In Leon’s charge, they again were grouped, resting one upon the other, gill to gill. I saw how I was again thinking about mortality. I often do in the horizontal station of darkness that mimics the last phase. We expect to reach this phase; small complaints provide a window on our decline, yet we constantly work to ignore it in our daily lives.
Once recently, when I was bathing in the clawfoot tub, I heard the hall phone jangle. Pamela went out to the landing and picked it up. The caller asked for me. I heard Pamela say in a slur, “Oh, she’s decomposed, she’ll have to call you back.” Of course Pamela must have said, “She’s indisposed.” The error, hers or my own, alarmed me. It summoned a picture of rot that I couldn’t shake until I had rinsed, stood up, and dried off.
So there we were, on any given night, the fish and I, lying there on our chilly pallets. The fish were out of their element, that element which scientists assume was most likely everyone’s first element and comfort, the sea. I was making a parallel, or contrast, I couldn’t decide which—the fish with those flat dime-store eyes wide open, and I in stiff waves of bed linen. But, thinking of Leon’s fish, I couldn’t daydream with any reasonable purity.
Garland left me to go back to his apartment. It was trash day and he needed to discard the refuse he had forgotten the previous week. “I have to get home in time for the trash,” he said every Wednesday night.
His various methods of escape, his ferocious plunge from me each night was impressive and I was wary. I never demanded he stay to eat breakfast just to prove something. After all, we weren’t babies. I saw him off at a late hour. I touched the back of my hand to my lips, tapping back a rich yawn. I was still downstairs when Pamela came home. She crashed against the front door until it swung open. Immediately, I saw that something was wrong. Her coat was wrenched off her shoulders and trailing. Her face looked glazed and contorted. She might have been weeping, or retching.
“What’s wrong,” I said, taking her wrists to keep her squared before me. She twisted in my grasp, not wanting to meet my eyes. Then she leaned against me and shuddered. She felt like a bean-bag doll when I gripped her arms. I had seen something like this at the hospital, but, I walked away from the sight. I wasn’t a physician. I was a writer of brochures. I didn’t often feel ashamed of my profession until I watched others taking hold of a situation, what some people called “taking action.”
With this in mind, I shook her and asked, “What’s happened?”
Nothing.
I asked her again. I lifted her face to see her mouth was bloody, her lower lip swollen like a wide slice of plum.
“Are you hurt?” I asked.
“Look at this. Look what I have—” Pamela said. She stood up straight to plead with me eye to eye. “Look at this!”
“What is it?” I said. I didn’t see anything.
Pamela stepped back from me and opened her fist. “I can’t believe this is happening,” Pamela said.
I looked into her hand. There was something in her palm, but it was so reddened with blood I couldn’t tell what it was. Without thinking, I picked it up with my thumb and forefinger and immediately set it down on the kitchen counter. My kn
ees locked, and I weaved slightly from the trunk. “My goodness,” I told her.
“It’s the tip,” she whispered, then she exploded into sobs.
This surprised me. I had imagined something else. “What do you mean, ‘the tip’?” I asked her. “This didn’t come from you? I thought you might have passed it, you know—”
Pamela said, “God. You thought I passed it? Like I was pregnant or something? Are you kidding?” She looked intrigued, as if she might have liked to adopt the idea.
I was relieved that the reddened scrap wasn’t the result of an unauthorized abortion. After all, if Pamela tried to remove a tattoo with a razor, what else might she try? Then it occurred to me that something equally bizarre was unfolding, and I tried to follow her explanation.
“It’s the tip,” she insisted. “He was on me, and I bit it,” she said.
I sank down to the floor, my back against the refrigerator. I thought of the chapters of psychology I had read in college. Men feared one thing more than any other. I had always thought their fear outlandish. Then I considered Pamela, she must have been very threatened to do such a thing. I pulled myself up from the floor. “Are you all right? Did he hurt you?”
“My teeth are loose. I think one is falling out, I can push it back and forth. It hurts.” Pamela showed me how she could wobble her front teeth.
I was having some trouble getting her to explain what had happened. “What is that?” I said to her. “What is that—on the counter?” I spoke with more depth and volume than I expected. I shouted. My confusion had loosed a basso profundo, to make up for my coming up blank. I still didn’t understand what had happened.
“I told you. It’s somebody’s nose, just the tip. You aren’t going to tell anybody. I mean, it’s awful. Someone could take it the wrong way.”