by Maria Flook
“A nose? Oh, honey, I thought it was worse.”
Pamela looked at me. She made another double take, as if my ridiculous error in thinking had again outwitted her. My scenario appealed to her. She started to sputter. Her laughter came and went in maniacal waves.
Her laughter startled me, it seemed ghoulish. Of course—she was upset. Her reaction could be excused as hysteria. Finally, I took her shoulders and gave her a shake.
“He was forcing you, so you had to fight back? Is that it?”
“He was on me,” Pamela said, her eyebrows were lifted high, arched in drunken mirth.
“You were attacked and you bit his nose?” I said, trying to pinpoint the cause and effect while avoiding the tone of a legal technician.
Pamela went over to the counter and looked down at the knob of flesh, too casually I thought. “Shit, he was on me. He was just on me.” Her words were comfortably slurred. She held her fingers against her upper teeth and wobbled them once or twice to show me.
I said, “He wouldn’t get off of you even when you asked him to?”
“I didn’t ask anything. I already had hold of him. It hurt to bite so hard. I saw cold stars behind my eyes. He was snarling. I couldn’t let go. My jaw was locked. Then he hit me and my teeth clicked through like a stapler. He did it to himself.”
I made Pamela rinse her mouth and then I gave her a cold washrag. She held the dripping towel against her lips. “Don’t worry,” I told her. I kept touching my fingertips to my temple where I felt a peculiar stabbing. Pamela sat down in a kitchen chair. She drummed her fingers on the table. This confused me. She seemed to be waiting for me to decide something. I had to consider my niece, and yet, I wondered about the boy. I imagined him stumbling through town in a bloody stupor. I asked Pamela, “Who was it? Did you know him?”
“Yes and no.”
“Yes and no? This is important—did he know your name?”
“I’ve seen him at the bar. He was a creep. He pestered me when I came outside. It happened so fast. Please, I need to talk to Leon. Will you call Rhode Island Fish?” Her eyes were strange, bright with anticipation, almost like a child in the swell of pride that comes directly after a minor peril. She wanted Leon to know.
“Call Leon,” she said again. Her request was chilling because its urgency seemed oddly programmed.
I ignored her wish to telephone Leon and asked her more questions. “Was he a big man, a heavyset man?”
“He was just some guy. A guy is a guy, isn’t that right? Who cares which one? Maybe you can call Leon and tell him what happened to me.”
“Okay,” I told her, and I went over to the counter once more to see it. It looked suspect, this tiny leaf of tissue. It looked peculiar, too white and spongy. Like a sliver of tripe.
“We have to report this,” I wanted to tell her. I wanted to go to the telephone and call the police just to see what her reaction might be. I told her the police would come over in an instant when it was a situation of attempted rape. I imagined the police, the social workers, the rape doctors, all the troops who gather after sex crimes.
I went over to the counter and looked down. The bubbly scrap in its congealing web made me reconsider contacting the police. Something didn’t add up. I had to be firm and canny all at once. I had to be one step ahead of Pamela and one step ahead of my own first instincts. My first instincts keep me within the routine patterns of good deeds, indifferent allowances, and blank permissions that normal people live their lives by. Let the poor be poor, the murderers be jailed, the average citizens be left alone. If I wasn’t always exactly innocent, I knew which side of right and wrong I was meandering in, and I knew something more. I knew about crimes of loneliness, and this was shaping up to be one. I could not be sure if my niece was justified in what she had done, but there wasn’t any reason to call the authorities. This was a family matter.
I called the emergency desks at Rhode Island Hospital and at Miriam Hospital and asked the receptionists if anyone had come in. I asked them if a young man with a facial cut had registered to get care. Neither hospital would tell me if such a boy had arrived. One receptionist said that there were always a lot of nose injuries because of all the car wrecks. The nose was the first to strike the dashboard, it was the “pointer.” “People are lucky if it’s just the nose. A nose can be reconstructed.” It’s really just a decorative appendage, like an awning, and it could be reaffixed. I called all the hospitals. I interrogated the emergency-room receptionists for Pamela’s sake. She watched me as I talked to the switchboard operators, the nurses, the interns. She looked very peaceful, pleased I was doing everything I was expected to do. She listened as I told one hospital receptionist that my son was supposed to be there, he had a bad laceration, a dog bite, and could they tell me his condition. The receptionist told me she couldn’t give me the information I wanted, but just between her and me, there was nothing like that, no dog bites had come in for days. She asked me if we owned a pit bull terrier. The hospital had to report pit bull incidents directly to the Providence police.
I asked Pamela what she wanted me to do with the bit of flesh. I could wrap it in something and put it in the freezer or I could destroy it, I told her. Flush it like a goldfish with tail rot, a condom in its rumpled length.
“You decide,” she said.
“The toilet,” I said.
“Good,” Pamela said, and she stood up to hug me. She went upstairs. In a few minutes I heard her dialing the telephone on the landing. She was telling Leon about the attack. Her voice was breathless, yet perfectly modulated as it expressed her alarm, her pain, her triumph. I put my face close to the gooey lump and studied the snip. I pushed it up and down the Formica, making sure. Pamela kept talking to Leon, explaining how her teeth were loose. There was something in her tone that made me shut my eyes and throw my head back. I listened to her talk to Leon, tell him how he never should have left her on her own. He should come over. She would forgive him. I took the piece of flesh over to the sink and pushed the faucet open. I rinsed it under the stream, passing my hand back and forth until it felt clean, rubbery, then I bounced it lightly in my open palm.
Tripe. I had thought so. It was a relief, but it was a sad confirmation.
I greeted Leon at the front door. He looked truly upset and I wanted to tell him what I knew. He shouldn’t assume any responsibility for Pamela’s performance tonight. When Pamela joined my household, I had felt such rich swells of a permanent kind—one might call it loyalty or love. Now I was forced to feel caution. Forced! I watched Leon climb the stairs. I studied his narrow hips, the hollow of his broad shoulders beneath his shirt, which suggested brute strength at rest. Brute strength looks vulnerable this way. I heard Pamela lock the bedroom door after him. When I went to bed, the truck was going full swing outside my window. It had a new tic, an unmistakable gushing followed by a sizzle, then nine or ten drips slowing, until the last drip never seemed to come before the gushing started over again.
The next day I took Pamela to my dentist. The dentist bonded her front teeth together so they would stay in correct alignment as her gums healed over the jostled roots. She would not lose any teeth. She told the dentist she had had a fall playing tennis. He lifted his eyebrows, and I too wondered how she had been injured, since the rest of the story was a charade. Her teeth were indeed loose, but from what? Perhaps it was a self-inflicted injury, but I didn’t hope for that. It was more upsetting to think Pamela had created her own assailant, imitated his anger, and invented his violence against herself. It was more likely that someone had become irritated with her and slapped her hard.
Pamela was lying on the sofa eating ice cream that I had bought for her, hand-packed, at the Portuguese grocery. She had not mentioned the bloody snip, and so I asked her about it. “Where did you get tripe at that hour?”
Pamela sat up straight. She put the bowl of ice cream on the floor. “You knew it was tripe?”
“Not at first.”
“Shit. You’r
e unbelievable, you know that?” Pamela looked at the floor and moved the bowl of ice cream with her foot distractedly until it was halfway to me. “You let me go on and on like this since yesterday? You knew it was bullshit? God, what is it like to be so perfect? You go around trying on other people’s shoes? I guess you have so much insight. You’re so sweet. Sweeter than sugar—”
“Where did you get tripe in the middle of the night?” I asked her.
“Where? Star Market. It’s open twenty-four hours, remember?”
“You hurt my feelings,” I told her. I picked up a magazine and fluttered the pages, to show her that I was living with it. I wasn’t put off. When she saw this, she stormed out of the room. I must have appeared too much like one of those teachers who can’t be ruffled by a spitball, and this infuriated Pam. Maybe she was hoping I would use the techniques from my brother’s paperback book about “tough love.” If I had followed those puerile hints, she could stomp off feeling justified. She was paralyzed by my cheery intrusions, by my unfathomable maternal impulses—loving shrugs, my shoulders shifting like downy wings. My tactics were for my own survival as much as for hers. Mothering someone helps keep me in line, but I couldn’t admit that to her, could I?
In a few minutes, Pamela walked back down the stairs and straight out the front door. That night Leon showed up. He told me he didn’t intend to stay long, just long enough to tell Pamela he wasn’t interested in her games. I suspect he didn’t know the whole truth about the “nose,” but he told me he assumed it was bullshit or Pam would have opted for the extra publicity that going to the police would have brought into it. If there was an ounce of truth in it, she would have contacted the newspapers. He told me he had watched her tricks, several times, and he had had enough.
“She needs professional help,” Leon told me, and I nodded. I felt sad that we weren’t everything she needed. Why couldn’t we be everything, Leon and I? I have felt powerless before. Several times in my life I have looked at my mirror and tried to gauge my level of psychic energy, how much was left? I’ve always wondered at the tiny ration of strength we all start with and how it either intensifies or lessens. Like with watercolors, a little bit goes a long way; diluted, it makes a wash that can cover a whole lifetime with one weak color, or you might use it in a concentrated dollop here or there. I suppose the way I have lived my life, my strength has surfaced as an unremarkable sky blue, a domestic sky with neither the exuberance of dawn nor the inky ritual of night.
Leon sat down across from me for a few moments. It didn’t seem as if Pamela would be coming home soon. He said he wasn’t going to waste his time waiting to say goodbye to someone a second time. He asked me to convey the message for him.
“What should I tell her exactly?” I asked him.
“Tell her she’s immature. How about that?”
“That’s a little harsh.”
“Now, you. Why can’t she take you as a model?”
I smiled.
Leon said, “Pamela better behave herself or she’ll be losing something when you give her the heave-ho.”
I won’t give her the heave-ho, I thought to myself. Leon, of course, had already excused himself from any further involvement with Pam. He looked at me across the table. His eyes didn’t dismiss me as we stood up. He took my elbow and tugged me around to face him.
“Where’s Garland?” he said.
“Where’s Pam?” I answered, as if our exchange had been rehearsed and cued, delivered with the bold alacrity of a witty stage production.
“I mean it,” he told me. “Where are they?”
I walked ahead of him up the stairwell. I killed the hall switch and followed the moonlight’s slack bed sheet across the old planking. I was first in my bedroom and I turned around in the doorway to greet him. Given his youth, Leon’s perceptions of me had been accurate from the start, that moment when we maneuvered through the dark and were unmoored in a momentary swell which took these weeks to crest.
He untied the collar loop on my robe. The satin piping dangled, and then the robe fell. I pushed the heel of my hand up the tight trellis of his ribs, rotated my wrist at his shoulder, and coasted my fingertips down his spine. Despite a fear that Pamela would show up, our lovemaking was sweetly edgy, prolonged, and forgiving. Leon betrayed Pamela in each hesitant discovery and into the next. I sensed it was a slave’s secret worship at the eve of his freedom, and he still thought of her. After all, it was she who led us to this union and she would serve to unlink us afterwards. Perhaps I am too seasoned, but her echo didn’t spoil any of it for me. Leon endured the halting scrutiny in my touch, and, in turn, I indulged his playful, cantankerous urges, which he had not dared to introduce to her. How often would we come across these same luxuries?
In an hour, we dressed and walked out to the curb.
There was the fish truck, newly washed. Its silvery panels still looked wet beneath the street light, blue-white and iridescent as haddock skin.
“So, you’re all loaded for tomorrow?” I asked him.
“It’s all set,” Leon said.
“The usual?”
“The same. The cod’s a little ripped up tonight, weird. But, we’ve got some nice tinker mackerel, tiny as slippers.”
When I told him how much I liked tinker mackerel he went around and opened the padlock on the truck. He hopped into the mist; his shoe slipped on the wet tread but he regained his balance and he pulled me up into the narrow aisle. I stood beside him, between the tiers of fish, as he found the plastic tray of mackerel and lifted the lid off. The fish were tiny, mottled with gold and silver dapples; the flesh along their spines was deep cobalt. “They’re beautiful,” I said.
“For breakfast?” he asked me.
“I can’t wait until breakfast, maybe tonight.” I said. We both laughed at my greed for the taste of the local delicacy.
Leon looked around the truck for a container, but there wasn’t anything. I pulled out the hem of my jersey and we laughed as he stretched the fabric around a half-dozen fish. He was begging off, leaving just these fish as keepsakes. I forgave him. He got behind the wheel of the truck and rested his elbow out the window, showing his luxurious ease, which I still admired. He seemed to know it impressed me and he smiled. I waved to him with my free hand as I steadied the icy hammock of fish at my waist.
Pamela came home at midnight. I broiled the fish with mustard and vinegar and set it down in front of her. She was touching her nose with a wadded Kleenex. Her tears were real. “I’m not on drugs,” she said.
“Of course you aren’t,” I said.
“It’s usually what people think,” she told me, “but it’s worse than drugs. I get crazed for a while, then it passes. Can you forget it?”
“Sure I will. Don’t worry,” I said.
“I don’t know why I do these things,” she said.
“Your arm is almost completely healed,” I told her. I lifted her wrist and stretched her arm out towards me. She tugged against my pull, but she relaxed as I cradled her elbow in my palm. The raw patch had calmed and a new field of pink had surfaced, hairless and glossy. I wanted to mention the ancient statuary in Greece. I had seen marble limbs discolored, worn concave at the wrist and fingertips, marred by centuries of human touch. Unchecked, these habits of adoration can wear away their subject. To tell her this might sound too much like a tour guide’s expert monologue, and already Pamela had pinned her napkin beneath her plate and was standing up from the table. How would I say, “Sit down, let me describe these treasures”?
LANE
It was the end of summer. I was living in a seaside town where the rent was cut to nothing during the off-season. I had a good part-time job delivering propane tanks. The tanks were heavy and I enjoyed the physical work. The truck was old and had character; I grew to expect its misfirings and to enjoy the low warble of its engine. I liked the people I saw on my job. They were busy hanging wash or shaving with cold water since their gas had run out, and they were always pleased to see me
. I had much time to think about my life. Mostly, I thought about a woman. I saw how the end of an affair is an end to the suspension of disbelief, a lot like the close of a circus act when we see the sword swallower collect his array of knives. The lights go up and we see the nets and wires which we had not noticed before. The tent is dismantled, fluttering down, like the huge dusty petals of an inverted flower.
For the past few years I had been studying medicine, but I was dependent on financial aid, which had become increasingly difficult to arrange, and I decided on a year away from the university. It wasn’t that I didn’t fare well or didn’t have the stomach for it. After working with cadavers, and having numbered and labeled their remnants, I was at ease with the great stillness they presented to me. Nothing upset me, really. Blood, with its broad spectrum of reds, from Campbell’s soup to valentine satin, had become an ordinary sight. The abscessed sacs and tumors and the wild geometries of accidental lacerations could not unnerve me. Surgical instruments steamed and wrapped in sterile towels had once excited me, but they started to look like silverware wrapped in linen napkins at a place where I used to work as a waiter. Only once, when I was required to dissect a single hand, did I find myself skittish, unable to concentrate.
There is nothing that represents the soul more than the hand. To find the digital arteries and nerves I had to peel back thin, elastic ribbons of muscle from each finger: the “flexor profundus”; the “flexor sublimis”; the “flexor ossis metacarpi”; and so on. These strips of muscle, snipped and flayed open, gave the hand the appearance of a party-popper.
I felt uneasy, even in the glaring light. These shredded bands of muscle had once represented the human touch. But I didn’t leave my studies over something like that. I thought that maybe I wasn’t entirely interested in a medical career, and I needed some time to think about it.
Lane had invited me to spend another weekend with her. Our relationship remained undefined, and these weekends were nerve-racking to me because I never knew what to expect. Although on the surface it was casual, even comfortable in a disappointing way, I was edgy. It was like registering for the draft; I was pretty sure I wasn’t going anywhere but there was always an outside possibility of something urgent occurring that would require my participation. It’s funny how one word means more than one thing. In war, seeing some action was a bad thing, but it was different from getting some action. The latter phrase is something you might hear when you’re standing five deep at the bar rail in the safety of your neighborhood tap. I have always disliked the swells and shivers of anticipation. Despite its great symptoms, it is a passive emotion. One can only endure it, drive faster, run up the stairs, move closer. It’s a waiting game.