by Elise Levine
For her sake he tried but his parched throat wouldn’t close and some water dribbled down his chin. He handed the bottle back to her and she polished it.
Where we going tonight, again? he asked. Some other castle you’ve dug up?
She slowly screwed the cap back on.
Oh-kay, she said.
It is okay, he said quickly. No problems here. We’re good.
She snorted, drew herself taller. No, we’re not, she said and swiped clumsily at her mouth with her hand.
L’eau. Low. Bryce pronounced it silently a few times, as he’d done last night in the fancy-pants castle restaurant, getting up the nerve to ask the waiter for a refill while Serena slurped her—surprise, surprise—third glass of wine.
Maybe she was right. They weren’t good.
He chewed the inside of his bottom lip now and faced her down.
She glared back, face a dull gleam in the dim cave. Want to know something? she finally said.
He waited. He shifted his weight. At some point you’ll let me know? he said.
All we’ve ever done is get old.
This Bryce could deal with. You’re not old, he said quickly. No way. Never.
You’re not listening, she said.
Last night, cicadas had clamoured just beyond the window near their dinner table and farther off, in some thick shrubbery—a hunched shape darker than the growing dark—a bird insisted. Bon soir, a woman near the bird suddenly chirped. Ciao, a husky voice, male or female, answered. Bon soir, Bryce had repeated in his head. Ciao. Made up for the silence to which he and Serena treated each other over their stringy quail, and mushy pears for dessert. He’d headed to their room by himself while Serena took some air, as she put it. He’d scowled at himself in the bathroom mirror and pasted his own toothbrush. Air, for fuck’s sake. He thought of doing her toothbrush but left it naked and got into bed. He never heard her return, though she was next to him, lightly snoring when as usual he woke panicked at three a.m.
In the cave she crossed her arms over her chest. Her fingers twitched like spider legs. Except for getting old, it’s like we’ve never changed, she said.
Nothing wrong with that, he said, encouraged by her use of the plural.
Same old idiots, she hissed, leaning toward him, face a contorted mask.
Her venom shook him. He pressed his knees together, as if he were sensing Scottie ready to spook at an extra-rowdy crowd. Ride it out, Bryce ordered himself now. Yee fucking haw.
Not catching your drift, he offered and sucked in his cheeks to flash some dimple. That used to defuse her every time, a long time ago.
Her eyes glittered. Bryce’s gut needled and for an instant he saw himself wrinkled and unshaven, in a small gray room in the center of a jumble of hallways.
Come again? he said, dogging on anyway.
I’m always less me. You’re just more you.
Come on, Serena, he pleaded. I don’t get what you mean.
She uncoiled fast and snapped her fingers under his nose. Voilà, she said. Right you are. You don’t get it. You never will.
Merde, he muttered occasionally, practicing. At one point, choked for breath, he stopped and placed a hand over his chest. Merde, he said, as if swearing a solemn oath.
If she didn’t love her life or him in it, he would let tactical take him once more. Whatever happened between he and Serena, this was his decision. She could leave him for rejoining or stay with him and hope he died. She was a cop wife but more. Or maybe she would decide she wasn’t.
Serena? Bryce said out loud now in the cave, though no one was there. Hey you?
He couldn’t tell her in this fake cave anyway, Serena awed like in some church. He’d tell her on the plane. During the dinner service, the second movie, whenever. She’d rise from her center seat and crawl past him on the aisle. He’d clink the ice in his first scotch, why not? Sip from his third somewhere over the unseeable North Atlantic in a grey clarity his, all his. And then fuck it, down the hatch, while she took a long while in the bathroom.
He wished they were on the plane now and that he’d already told her. Seat backs and tray tables in their upright positions over Chicago at dawn, its light-grid warrens he’d sight as the aircraft swooped lower, ready to land. Or in their terminal at O’Hare already, Serena streaking ahead of him toward baggage claim, soon swallowed by the crowds.
Now he thought of her as she’d been in the first few days in Paris, this wife he nearly couldn’t recognize. He paced onward toward—he hoped—the fake-cave’s exit, picturing the Serena he’d thought he’d known. Almost there, he told himself. Nearly home free.
The lights flickered, snapped off.
He halted. Knees shaking, he waited for his vision to adjust. But he must still be too far inside the cave. No external light penetrated.
No up or down, left or right. The floor twisted to the ceiling. His head whirled and he dropped a knee.
Serena’s paintings came to him, fuddled with the cave’s falling red horses. He rode tall on Scottie and Scottie, near obsolete in real life, fell, toppling Bryce. The images shifted and raced in place, paced by occasional blanks—silvered cloud banks portending cosmic rain, soaring blue that signaled all clear, Scottie full gallop. Flip flip. Bryce wielding a lance or charger—whatever those knights of old carried—that vibrated above Scottie’s arched neck confoundingly like a giant diving board over ocean.
Astonished, Bryce dipped deeper into his vision. Scottie’s nostrils like saucers and his gait like flight—Scottie, only better. Not the Scottie in his South Shore stall waiting for Bryce to return them both to duty at some boring Irish parade or outdoor Nirvana tribute band concert. Scottie not knowing it was all over. Asleep on his feet.
All We Did
Any man with a ponytail, any man twice our age—this was our thinking way back when, what passed for thinking. Any man changing the marquee after hours as we rode the streetcar past the second-run movie palace. One of us swaggered off at the next stop, dirty slush up to her ankles but so what, her baby-fat body not yet a bulb she’d blown, winter white not yet her favourite colour.
In the aisle of the theater, rows of faded red velvet seats, rank and file, observing like cattle. Forget-me-nots in the carpet.
Spring came. She tried all things. Which when we think about it now, how quaint.
Pregnant once and never again. Cramped for weeks after.
She went away. She came back. Everyone who’d stayed looked the same, terrific, inexhaustible. She left again, and when she returned everyone had vanished. She was in need but the buildings were mute. Mother dead. Father too. The sister she never had. Cinema Lumière an expensive isolation.
Slowly the flowers release themselves from our fingers.
Nostalgia one tough slog. Along the avenue the trees are still beautiful, naked with snow so pale they’re like girls’ boys, premature. With perfect recall she is falling down drunk and laughing on every corner. A moving van mesmers by, its crew anxious as suitors while on the sober cul-de-sacs, behind closed doors, a euphony of TVs make mockingbird song.
For all that, she manages to inhabit herself enough to play well with others, get and hold a job.
At the Ministry, the jingle-jangle of intergovernmental meetings fits her public-complex ambivert excesses so swell. It’s official—she is a definably valuable human resource, there is a memo that says. The way she likes her coffee, the endless upgrading of skills, the steady paycheck, the backaches, stomachaches, benefits—she is the usual dichotomous self of the acute-stage, sleep-deficit employee. Her private enterprise thrives like a hothouse weed. Stuffed away in her cubicle she is her own dream board, she has if not friends then allies, she networks like crazy. Madam Prime Mover. Wee Willie Dinkum. Among the addendums everlasting, she has her peace plan.
It is working. Is so.
Still she dreams of clean breaks, a start dat
e that says Now instead of this confusion with Then. She begins to dream her old apartments, dreams she loses the baby in a pile of old newspapers, a mausoleum of distracted words. Hopeful. Hopeless.
The returns policy. Must have the receipt somewhere. The one that says, If Opened, Item Cannot Be Returned. Some way of determining Best Before, or Best After.
Meanwhile her apnea episodes spike and spike and spike. And each time she wakes, she wakes extinct, tongue draped over her airway, uvula collapsed, the once-stately architecture of her slumber a ruined ghetto, remnants carted off, tourist trinkets hawked cheap in the grottos of penny remorse.
Nothing a long hot shower, a good dubious look in the mirror won’t cure. One, two, buckle her shoe. A tonic sick-day hike past bungalows, parkettes, the shallow heaven slung with wire conducting information loads, low-grade illuminations. She is Only the Lonely. There will always be Last Tango in Paris. Another Deception. A sky shorn of cover opens its deep blue Wi-Fi throat until, in the splendid manufacture of her hypnagogic hallucinations, light hisses off the metal-glide surfaces. Office towers, car windows, a woman’s unfettered lip gloss. Shush. There, there. Such solemn deflations. What’s left is what only the wind gathers. A bouquet of swings swinging in a playground.
At the office the next day and the next she continues to be continued, neither here nor there. Weeks pile on like tinder. Hang-fire months. Eventually somebody notices and it goes straight to the top. There is The Conversation. Lunch-room plots abound, subplots, repetitions. She gets her well-deserved time off—no really, the Ministry insists.
Problem is, boredom afflicts like flies. Her leisure hours a fistful of loose change, like words of pity instead of coins pressed into the leathered palms of the homeless. Words like Forever, Forever. Each one subtly distinctive, though they boomerang back, knock her flat on her moribund keister. From the chaise under the smoke bush in the yard, days a certain violet shape, gravid. Nothing leaps or cries out to be saved. There is only the innocent spite of the hydrangeas, the way with callous indifference their frivolous heads ornament the empty morning.
Pins of sunlight needle down.
At bedtime her continuous air pressure machine—her better half—keeps her going, her airway forced open. For this she wears a mask. Boo. Let loose upon the world, all she does is turn in, early.
Still we do what we can, we keep the faith, and every spring irises return, dwarf reticulate among the vestigial snow. We keep it coming, remember her in summer, a white dress shawled with rain, a celluloid flicker. Amaranth, belladonna. We dream a place she left, forever notwithstanding.
She dreams we little fuckers ignite.
She has her own ways of being true.
Her wraparound shades won’t save her, nor the love she ever made or waged. What she sees, we see blind. Peas in a pod, everything we look at looks the same. Our love like our fury binds and abides.
Maybe if we did the math. Acknowledged the strapping teenaged daughter. Husband. Mother-in-law. Snug as bugs in some enchanted-in-the-usual-way abode not far from where she and we were once one together. Throw in nice neighbours. Just try. Fatloads of good. Stones in a stony field. What any of them do all day we have no idea. We know no one who knows her. We refuse to. We simply, simply refuse.
The Association
Where are you? Martin’s mother says when he calls. She sounds groggy, not her usual self.
Martin is in Virginia Beach with his dad. Or not quite with his dad, who is here to check out—Martin’s dad’s words—a certain bass player at one of the bars near the boardwalk, while Martin keeps his own counsel in the motel room. His own counsel is a new phrase of Martin’s, gleaned from one of his TV shows. Martin is eleven. His dad is in a band. After a thirteen-hour drive, he and his dad arrived straight from Chicago around dinner time and now it is well past. Martin is supposed to be in Rehoboth with his dad. His dad is supposed to take him for crab cakes and fries and hot pie with caramel sauce. He is supposed to buy Martin a boogie-board, though it’s June and the water will be cold. In the morning his dad is supposed to take him the short drive from Rehoboth to Gran’s in Perth Amboy.
In the weeks before his dad picked him up at five a.m. this morning, Martin and his mother agreed he would only call in case of emergency. He peers at the low stuccoed ceiling of the motel room and swipes the sweaty hair from his eyes. He crinkles the plastic bag lying next to him on the mattress cover. The labouring air conditioner barely flutters the closed curtain. The window looks out, Martin knows, onto the parking lot. The motel is near the highway and not within walking distance of the beach. None of this, Martin knows, is an emergency.
Put your father on, Martin’s mother says when he doesn’t respond. She sounds more alert now.
Martin pops a hard candy in his mouth. Sour cherry. He clicks his teeth against it. Next he will try the banana taffy his dad bought at the last service plaza at which they stopped.
Where is your father? Martin’s mother says. Martin?
I have to go the bathroom, he tells her.
Don’t hang up, she says, enunciating with the cool precision she might use with one of her patients. Put your phone down on the desk, she says. I’ll be waiting for you.
There’s no desk, Martin says.
All right, she says evenly. On the nightstand. Is there a nightstand?
Martin, she says in her clear, unflappable voice when he returns and picks up again.
Yo, he grunts.
I’m here, she says after a few seconds.
Here, he thinks, and pictures the old apartment before remembering they’ve moved. He brings the taffy close to his phone, scrunching it between his ear and shoulder, and unwraps the candy so she can hear him do it. He chews loudly.
Why don’t you describe the room for me, Martin? she says cheerily.
Not much to describe, he thinks. But he will leave it to her to decide what is important and what is not. There’s two beds, he mumbles.
Good, she says. Thank you. Any sounds?
Martin pulls his ear away from the phone. The mini fridge buzzes. A few sad clanks for attention from the AC unit. Surf, he tells his mother, struggling to get his tongue around the sugary plug in his mouth. Big-ass waves, he lies.
Martin, his mother says, then coughs to cover her sternness at his language. See? she says, in reset mode. Pretty neat, huh? Tell me, what colour are the walls?
He has no idea—the walls are walls. He wrinkles his nose and swallows. The room smells bad, flobby, a made-up word he’ll tell her if she asks. He fixes on an unevenly painted square above the TV, which is not working. There are uneven squares everywhere, he realizes, spying another above the closet, others in spots near the ceiling. Drab, he thinks, the walls are drab, though he knows that is not a colour.
He considers that yellow might please her. He recalls the Post-its tabbed on the doorframes and banisters of the new townhouse he and his mother relocated to on the South Side this past winter, the neighbourhood occasioning sneers from his aunt and uncle—his mother’s older sister and younger brother, North Siders. His mother’s flags bear handwritten instructions—NO NOT HERE! and FIX THIS CROOKED!—for the workmen who still arrive every week to finish what the builder should have completed before Martin and his mother took possession, as his mother refers to it. Martin thinks the townhouse will never be fixed. He mostly ignores his mother’s written directives, which are not addressed to him and which, in his view, serve as poor replacements for the framed prints and family photographs that once hung in the sprawling, floor-crooked Rogers Park one-bedroom he and his mother shared with Martin’s dad—mementos now stored in the townhouse garage. As such, Martin thinks—liking the sound of the phrase, sometimes used by an evil lawyer type on Martin’s favourite rerun series—as such the notes are also like the mutterings of the adult world, like the continuing arguments between his divorced parents that do not concern Martin. Over hi
s head, out of sight. Nothing he can or needs to do about them. His mother will deal. As such, the notes make him feel safe.
Martin?
He picks a jawbreaker from the bag and contemplates it. Yellow, he tells her.
She gasps happily. Yellow, she says. That’s exactly what I was thinking.
He wakes cold out of the covers. There is a kerfuffle—his mother’s word, he realizes despite his haziness—outside the motel-room door. He hears a woman’s voice. A man’s. Martin’s dad, Martin realizes after a moment. The woman squeaks a few words Martin can’t make out. Bullshit, his dad says, laughing. Martin drags his heavy legs under the covers and snuggles down. Bullshit. As such, the rest is blank.
Martin is the boy who eats all the candy and he knows it. He is a Lab Rat. This means he is smart, very. He can do what he wants, to a degree. On this July evening three weeks after the botched beach trip with his dad, Martin grabs a fistful of Gummi bears from the fancy bowl on the granite counter in the neighbouring unit, everyone cooing at the kitchen upgrades although they’re here to attend a townhouse association meeting. Martin’s bravado—another newly acquired word—causes the rest of the neighbours to glance meaningfully at each other and shake their heads. Martin’s mother gives him The Look, reserved for moments like these when they are around other people, and which he disregards.
Moments later he hulks on the end seat of the white sectional in front of the French doors leading to the Juliet balcony—terms bandied by the milling adults—and ignores the bullshit. For example, the bullshit that is his mother’s hopes that the neighbours whose unit this is will take a shine to Martin. They are a childless couple who both wear chunky sandals and stiff cargo shorts and pink short-sleeved shirts and hold doctorates in neurobiology. Jewish too—like Martin’s mother’s side, she has lately become fond of pointing out. She smiles like she has a secret each time the couple acknowledge Martin’s existence, like right now, the man stumping toward Martin offering a glass of bullshit tap water and a napkin to wipe his sticky mouth, pointing to it with the napkin and making a wiping motion. As if Martin doesn’t know his mouth is sticky.