by Elise Levine
It helped now too, in the cave ballroom, as he remembered the times when she was in the kitchen and he’d knelt on the couch and examined the paintings and felt sad and a little dicked with, perusing the tiny studs of white funeral-type flowers reflected in his spacey ice-cube eyes. At each inside corner, a single melt-tear.
Another loud laugh. It came from the front near where the rat-faced guide likely lurked, confirming another of Bryce’s suspicions.
He veered over the lumpy fake ground, gulping crap air.
Tall, sturdy, in truth it was her—the flesh and bone he stretched alongside night after night, bunked cold. Made it. Bryce wanted to scoop her in his arms and give her a twirl, cheesy as that might seem, before making the hell off with her.
Too cheesy. Plus she was faced away from him, otherwise absorbed. He could hear her snickering at something the guide had just said.
Bryce hip-checked her. Not hard but she startled. In the uneven light she seemed paler than ever.
Hey you, he said.
She glared at him for a second. Not even. Hey yourself, she chuffed, already again turning her back.
Before he could get out of the way her small fancy knapsack knocked his chest. She’d bought the bag on sale, after what seemed to him like hours of deliberation, in a Paris department store, calculating the exchange on her phone’s app, slipping the straps over her shoulders and mugging in profile for the mirror while he lurked behind, squinting at herself, uncertain if she liked what she saw.
Wounded, Bryce retraced his steps and wandered anew among the cement formations. They were soft gray, jagged in places and smooth in others. He studied their swirls and grooves as if he knew what he was looking at. For whose benefit? he wondered, feeling dumb as dirt.
After a moment the outgrowths seemed oddly familiar. His hand went to an itch on his brow. That was it, he realized. In Serena’s paintings, tiny knobs with curious markings—some bizarre symbology—grew from his forehead, just visible beneath his riding helmet, his dress hat. Strange he’d forgotten. He knelt and inspected one of the formations at length, top to bottom and, craning his neck, from all sides. With its ridges and lines, it bore a resemblance to carved bone. Like his painted baby horns, except all grown up.
He wondered what to make of that.
He got to his feet and brushed off his pants. He touched his sweat-oiled face. As usual, aside from the faint impressions of dimples, it felt as unremarkable as putty. Of the two of them, and despite her protests to the contrary, Serena was the striking looker.
He listened for her again. Chitchat burped around him. Nothing he could identify as his wife.
He felt his temples now, massaged his entire head. His goddamned heart seemed asleep in his rib cage.
One night, a seven-year-old Bryce realized that the vessel of his deepest desires, which he’d never seen but had taken to imagine hovering a foot above his bedroom floor, possibly pre-existed him. Maybe it had been waiting patiently for eons, for some slow-rolling irregularity in Bryce’s retina or a slipshod iris to burst awake and reveal another world. Or rashes of them, like the constellations of blisters on his legs when he’d waded into the poison oak behind his aunt’s house in Janesville when he was five. Because who knew how things connected? If they did at all. And if they did, what could he do about it? Bryce lay nearly paralyzed in his bed, his parents at it downstairs. His thoughts spun. He forwent his nightly tracing and retracing of the faint shapes of cowboys on his jammies, not knowing if he felt less or more afraid to reach for the glass of water on his bedside table, to get up to pee and forget to flush. His brain felt both very large and very small.
What couldn’t he do?
He hadn’t known then. He didn’t know now. Though for an uncanny second he almost felt the cave might have something to tell him. As if alive, it wheezed—he could feel puffs of air pushed by the creaky ventilation system, tickling the hair on his forearms like a tiny wasp might, an intelligence universes distant from his.
He froze.
And then he shook off the thought as Scottie might a fly. Shit together, Bryce ordered himself. Get real.
He tagged Serena, flocking among the Aussie dickwad, German dickwad, big-dick lady, girl dicks. Bryce found it hard to decide on the other couple, nearly old, identically handsome, quiet except to murmur between themselves and never seeming to leave each other’s side, but he ended up deciding anyway—dicks. His head hurt more as the guide led the way beneath arches and through a cave room of illuminated display cases. They contained bone tools and wood-handled brushes with dried grasses for bristles. Hollowed stones used as candle holders, the candles with wicks of juniper, the guide said, which would have burned a white smoke that didn’t damage the artwork. More passages followed this room. Purple aurochs—big-ass horns on those oxen, Bryce noted with satisfaction—and deer and horses fanned three or four deep that would have flickered into movement in the candlelight, according to historians, according to the guide. Some of the creatures upside down and some sideways, as if from the viewpoint of a spinning beholder, maybe one of the stick-figure humans who appeared quilled through the chest and limbs—every now and then the guide parked and barked these theories, arms woozing back and forth as if he hoped to conjure the original haze. Through it all Serena cleaved to him, her spiky head bobbing.
If he wanted, Bryce could theorize about that.
Good for Serena, he thought. How nice for her notebooks and sketch pads. Her vision boards—her words for them—that she tacked to the long western wall of their basement. For what? She’d never sold her work. The last time she exhibited at a gallery, a single painting among a dozen by other hopefuls, she’d priced herself to extinction. In Bryce’s view, not that he’d said. Six thousand for a canvas too large for most people to hang in their place? That was several years ago. Nowadays she attended the major dog shows, setting up a table and easel and drawing people’s prized Poms and slobbery Berners—from photos, not even the actual dogs. Cash only. She actually bragged once that she knew every ATM location in the convention center. Bryce had just grunted.
According to Mr. Expert, this cave, so-called, featured more than six hundred animals. How many pet drawings had Serena done? So good luck to her with all that. How nice for her if she found the inspiration to keep on with her work. If inspiration was what she needed.
Bryce rubbed the nape of his neck. Salt prickled his vision and he imagined smoke thickening the passages, his thoughts sharpening instead of dulling.
Serena was a cop wife. She might hate it but there it was.
The walls closed around him again. He tried to stretch, reclaim some space—but people. He accidentally brushed the German’s side. The German actually apologized.
No prob, Bryce said, pressing his finger to one nostril to siphon air in through the other, a trick his therapist showed him. He felt his chest reopen.
The problem was, he admitted now that he could think more clearly again, his mom had been a cop wife. She drank alone until his dad took early retirement after testifying against some buds. At least in those days they let you go, no questions asked. You came home permanently to fish from shore and drink with the rest of the retireds who had lacked the smarts to hustle enough on the side to buy a boat. You trolled and tippled with the near-indigents who not only caught but ate the sore-studded carp, you shot the shit with off-duty hose draggers not even casting much but probably just trying to clear their sinuses of the black char of babies lost to house fires in Englewood because their parents were too drunk or drugged to properly ash out. Anyway. Once Bryce’s dad retired, he fished and drank and in his absence Mom drank. And then Dad came home and drank and the two continued to battle.
Serena though—she was a cop wife, but more. She drank but not much. Bryce didn’t touch it period. Not since his first and short-lived attempt at shedding the fam when, in his early twenties, he booted it to Toronto and camped
at a waitress girlfriend’s for a year. Bryce an illegal, not working. Boozing like the old guy and gal and freeloading off his own gal’s shrimpy earnings. Not proud of that. But he was proud that he hadn’t seen his parents since he and Serena married. Good on he and Serena, right? Beating the odds, fingers crossed.
He continued to spy her now in the cave. The planes of her face angled to the arches and shadows. Her shoulder shrugs. The fast tilts of her head to her left side when she was pondering. So her.
Still her, Bryce noted, with relief. Hair crisped to sharp points despite the earlier precip, she looked like when he first met her in the bar on Damen she tended when he was new on the force and new to moonlighting as a bouncer. Serena. Great name, he’d thought when the manager first introduced them. Great ass but also no-nonsense with her slashed jeans and waist-looped chains and paint-spattered Docs. He’d liked her straight away. Really liked her. She seemed fearless. Puke in the toilet? She mopped no comment. After a knife fight on the floor—Bryce up the street grabbing a gyro, re-entering approximately ten minutes after it happened to a lot of blood and the club mostly cleared—nothing from her except her usual gruff last call and lightning-fast cash-out. He suffered calling that one in but had to admire the backbone. Morning classes, earning her BFA, the dishwasher told Bryce when he asked around. Her Art Institute attitude returning his initial interest with a few snotty once-overs and then ignoring him for a month. Not much got to her in those days, not even him.
And then suddenly, it seemed in memory, they were shacked together in his apartment off Irving Park with a kitten called Stoli—poor Stoli, dead of cat AIDS before the age of two. Until then Bryce had never known such a thing existed, just like how until he met Serena he’d never seen such undying love for Henry Rollins and weirdo Russian art from hundreds of years ago featuring thin sorry saints. Or Bryce’s own stunned love for her when she set up a workbench in his living room with paint tins and brushes and knives and sketchbooks on the floor. Twice daily she pasted first his and then her toothbrush, an act he learned to return in kind sometimes and when he washed the pots and pans after dinner—when they did eat dinner together, depending on what shift he worked—she’d grip his waist with her strong hands and dry hump him from behind and whinny like a fiend.
She stunned him. They married. He took extra shifts and she graduated and quit the bar so she could paint full time. She was alone a lot. Over time—which Bryce imagined now in flickering layers like the cave horses—things did get to her. He got to her. She got to him. He told her to stop texting him so much when he was at work. She got a budgie, Marcel the purple budgie—Bryce noticed that much, didn’t he? He cared. So what did Marcel do but fold up his little wings one day and die. Serena tucked him in a small gift box with tissue paper and headed out the apartment door that night carrying a large metal serving spoon. She returned minus the box and spoon and with mud on her boots. Bryce noticed all that too. Did she for a second think he didn’t?
He’d listened to her crying over the years, her pleas each time a cop fell. Thanks to her he joined mounted, rode around like a grinning ape for a fraction of his former pay. But he did manage to float under the radar of the latest cop inquisition, though he was pretty sure Luis might have to squeak soon, that or jail. And Bryce couldn’t thank Serena, he knew, for the thankless fact that someone seriously tried to kill him—with a dog, of all things, and Luis had to go and have Bryce’s fucking hind-side. To be saved is to owe. So that was pressure too. He didn’t need her crying to remind him.
Worse, recently Serena declared she wanted a dog. A big dog. For company, she claimed. For security.
He couldn’t seem to explain the deal to her. For fuck’s sake, he had a horse. Think about it. Okay? Enough with the animals. He had. A fucking. Horse. His job. Get it? His extra shifts. Unless she could start making a bundle with her animal portraits, charge way more than thirty cash per at her dog shows, cat shows, monkey shows for all Bryce knew. If she could do that, he’d quit. She could get herself a dog then, get it?
She got it. Did she ever, she told him. She got all of it all right, every day of every year they’d been together and one day sooner or later she’d have enough of getting it. His killjoy fear poisoned everything she did, everything she tried to make, coloured how she saw things. What about him? Didn’t he ever get anything? Couldn’t he try? For once. To get it. Would it kill him?
Here in the cave, the old words boomed in Bryce’s brain. His fear?
He couldn’t keep track. The fuck was there to get? Remind him. He loved her. Didn’t she still love him?
He saw the problem. A cop wife like his mom, Serena was lonely. He tried to picture her solo at home on the couch, waiting for him, worrying. Getting off her sleek butt and out the door to jitter past the taquerias and dollar stores of their Chicago hood.
But what he imagined best was Serena here in the cave by herself, getting fired up, no help from some guide. Not alone, but with Bryce himself by her side. A Bryce who knew for once what to do.
The group herded into a new passageway. The guide droned on. Bryce managed to sidle up to Serena again. He reached for her hand. Got it. It felt cool and rough and his mind went white.
He put his mouth to her temple. I’m glad we’re here, he whispered.
She reared her head and squinted at him.
Bryce felt his face flush. He hoped that in the dark she wouldn’t notice. No, I mean it, he said, too loudly, sweating cheese, helplessly aware of his suddenly cheery booming voice. I do, he went on. I really do. Thanks for dragging my arse these thousands of miles.
She tugged at the straps on her knapsack, then looked away and coughed. Her breath stank like something dead. The guide frowned in their direction. She slicked her lips shut.
Only once did Serena take him to meet her mother.
Judith of Blue Island, Serena called her. Our Judith of the School of Hard Knocks.
But Judith was okay, he’d thought, permitting him during that visit—a year into Bryce and Serena’s being a couple—to light smoke after smoke for her in the cramped kitchen of her Blue Island bungalow over refills of diet ginger ale, no ice. Hurts the chompers, she told him, tapping a crooked incisor then tightening the belt on her flowered robe, though it was past four in the afternoon. He got it, agreed, hurts. He’d had to pull all the strings his rookie brain could to score a Sunday off—the only day Judith received, because Penney’s six a week was hard work and only on the seventh was she rested enough to greet some rookie hump. But he dealt, because Serena. And so for a couple of hours he and Judith smoked and drank their sodas and griped about the weather, a winter Sunday just a few months before he and Serena would marry at city hall, already dark outside with filthy sleet. Judith asked him to fix the leaky washer in her sink, which he did. He changed the burnt bulb in her oven and offered to return in a few weeks to clear her gutters of dead leaves.
At which Serena—on her feet the whole visit, stomping between the tiny kitchen and living room and bathroom—hustled on her leather jacket. She bumped his arm on her way to the back door and flung it open. Last call, she snarled.
In his bewilderment, Serena’s over-bold lipstick—she’d gone full makeup like a mask for the visit—permitted him to register the words as not really hers. He hunkered in his chair, head hanging, waiting for what else.
Judith, though, rose like a queen. Head high, spine erect, her robe billowing in the freezing draft, she laughed bitterly and offered him her hand to shake. Look after Rebecca, would you, Judith rasped. Not a question but a command.
Rebecca? Befuddled, bemused, Bryce stumbled to his feet and laughed as colour flooded his wife-to-be’s face.
Then he felt guilty. He turned on Judith, laid on the indignation—Hey, I’m not stealing her, is that what you think?—and she unwrapped a sad smile.
Serena recovered fast. Mom, she sneered.
It sounded like an accusatio
n. Severe of Serena, Bryce thought, shrugging on his pea coat. At least she had a mom. A mom wanting or at least willing to pretend. One not shut up with her booze in a dark closet of a living room.
But Serena was all about the straight no-bull mode. Which is what Bryce had bought into. So when he never did see Judith again—her no-show at city hall the last straw, Serena declared—he let it drop. He figured Serena’s silence on the subject let him off the hook of future family complications. He’d guessed that Judith was still kicking, since there’d never been a funeral to attend. And as for Serena’s dad, he’d been even less of one than Bryce’s. She claimed to have never met the guy. So Bryce shrugged that off too, figured better no dad than bad dad goading bad mom.
With Serena ahead of him again now in the cave, Bryce leaned against a wall and faced the way he’d just come, wondering what good his looking back was doing him, or Serena. The remaining stragglers clomped by. The German passed, venting a small ha that struck Bryce like a pat on the noggin. Ha, yourself, Bryce muttered after the guy, who turned briefly, the smirk on him grown smirkier.
Bryce told himself he’d be outside soon. He’d fill his lungs. The drizzle would have cleared. The day would look like another better day. He’d throw an arm around Serena’s broad straight shoulders and she’d grow limp against him. Hungry? he’d ask, as if that might help restore her.
He was sure hungry. Thirsty too. It was as if the place had drained all the liquid from him, wrung him dry despite the dampness. Soon dust would be all that was left of him. Not even an outline.
Bryce?
He wheeled. Serena stood on the narrow wooden platform, showing a lot of teeth. She shook a clear plastic bottle at him and the water rattled.
Thanks, he said, leveling his chin and trying to match her smile. I’m good.
She unscrewed the cap and swished. Then she drank, throat squeezing. When she was done, she swirled the remaining inch of liquid. You don’t want some? she said.