Assisted Living

by Gary Lutz

  •

  Hatred, in short, but not in so many words?

  •

  Thanks, though, for asking.

  •

  The story, later on, as it got itself passed from one chummily divorced couple to another, was that we’d been turned away by jeweler after jeweler the grievous week we went shopping for the rings. We showed the clerks our rubber-banded hundreds, but they said, “We doubt this very much” or “If you’re buying for somebody else, we don’t do that, because you may have noticed in your travels that fingers differ in circumference from one person to the next.”

  A manager at one place, a woman, came out from behind the counter and said, “Let’s see you even kiss this lady.”

  What I could do was drop to my knees and grind my face against her midriff. I’d been doing that for months, and it was no different there in the glare and glamour of the sales floor.

  “What about you?” they said to her, my intended. “What is it you do? Keel over?”

  “We’d like to keep this between us,” she said. It sounded little.

  “Maybe you should take your make-believe outside,” the manager said.

  But a browser, a faltery woman braceleted the entire route from elbow to wrist, trailed us out to the sidewalk and whispered that there was a man with a cart at the mall on weekends who could maybe do something suitable for us, but could we be happy with white gold?

  “White gold doesn’t even look like gold,” my copemate said.

  “But at least it won’t look white. Nothing white is supposed to look like anything.” Her voice started curving off into what could have easily gone philosophical.

  We got the rings, all right. Later, in some fullness of time or another, it was a matter of deciding where and how to dispose of mine, though I’ve still got it, the way I’ve still got this sense that sometimes there’s just news, and then sometimes there’s news to me.

  THIS IS NOT A BILL

  I was either a bad reflection on my parents or their one true likeness. But my own kids? You promise them anything their little hearts desire, but how little their hearts always are, and how unethereal

  the desire.

  The son wanted nothing so much as for everything to have been ever so long ago.

  The kid was having none of himself.

  He tried hiding behind his similarities to me—the oftenness of my earaches, the prickled miseries in every joint.

  Ideally, this should be all about him, his personalisms and all the topics his second thoughts could hold. But I can’t get him magnified any larger. This is as big as his marvels will ever get. Men kept saying, “Put it there,” and he was supposed to know they were hankering for no more than a handshake?

  As for the daughter: She was a dampered little dispatch already orderly in her dolors.

  Things she learned in school she rubbed out in her sleep, because, come morning, she thought feldspar was a plant, larkspur a bird.

  Others were soon bunching about her, the mood of a morning always slow to premiere.

  Sad about what now?

  She snapped out of her youth with a riffraff of hair on her arms and a filing cabinet that was mostly for show.

  What she took away from college was something heard in a lecture about snakes or maybe starfish, that the things could grow to refreshedly full size from just a slice of their original selves, so why couldn’t that be true of people—that from the odd hair or scab you could get, if not the undivided human being, at least the excellence of an entire arm around you?

  She never let on whom it was she had slapping about in her heart.

  Then again, not discussed nearly enough is the bodily risk of sleeping with someone—the danger, I mean, of being crushed by some dozing amoroso rolling over, though the prospect of bruises must have been what got her wooed into bed in the first place.

  So, true: She was somewhere there in the physical hooey that went with being human. The love itself she could laugh off.

  She went through with the wedding, and when they had kids, the kids were girls, the two of them: athletic and unhauntable, I would have bet.

  It was a town in which the skies usually misled you about what was coming next.

  Things later came down to a car that should have lasted her until well into her thirties but that was recalled first for this, then for that—transmission, starter, part after part repudiating its duty until loaners felt better than home to her now.

  Then mail that was mostly window envelope after window envelope bearing doctor-office statements claiming, “THIS IS NOT A BILL.”

  I have not mentioned her mother, if only because one part of her would have referred you to another part, something more secluded, then along to where you were alone with maybe just the back of her knee, then farther along until you were off her body completely and at the feet of someone or another who had let himself in and was even more wanting.

  I go into a day saying, “I won’t let myself know.”

  NOTHING CLARION CAME OF HER, EITHER

  As these things go, a woman I’ll call my wife and a woman I’ll call myself were not yet finished burning the bridges between us or even sharpening the sorrow down to something enough like a stick that a third party could at last take into her fingers and snap practically straight down the middle.

  Let me at least drag the third party into words, because all we ever did, the three of us—in pairs of her and her, of her and me, never the three of us chordal together—was leave messes of wordedness in the air for any others to have to poke their way through.

  And how we two wreaked devotion on her!

  When you stir a marriage like that, the things that keep rising to the top aren’t, mind you, the choicest stuff.

  And I know, I know, people don’t look like what they look like, thank goodness, but here is how she looked at least to me that day of name-calling over complimentary toast in the lobby of the motel: She had built such a fortress out of her unbelovedness that it was tricky to have beheld her for those months as just a plain underneath being with holes some earrings could have filled lyrically enough.

  The moods amassing in her eyes (greenish eyes adrowse, though evidently truthful), relevant moles on the left arm, hair begloomed and aptly directed sideward (then later mostly hatcheted away), knees arranged buxomly, accentual acne on expanses of her back, all of these parts carnalized only in retrospect: She was a brightly miserable and unperspirant physical therapist out of keeping with herself.

  She was nothing if not downright neither of ours, finally.

  Plus, she was a submundane twenty-eight to our fifty (woman), fifty-six (self).

  She lived with a gullible dog, a water-purifying system she could never get to work, and a sister, a slow starter whose sleep had no authority. She painted discouraging waiting-room erotica. Her saying was “Someday somebody’ll look back on us.”

  But this third party: She was the type that, when you touched her, stuck to herself.

  Me, I stickled over very little. One day it was a breadstick mossy with mold. I made it three-quarters of the way through. The core was a coaxing green.

  How I swallowed!

  •

  So enough of her.

  Let’s picture her pelted with age!

  In a marriage, the deathly custom goes, you have to choose sides—yours or your spouse’s. My side had all the wobbliness on it, the debt forgivenness, the gastrointestinal meds that came with printouts saying: “IF YOU MISS A DOSE. . . .”

  Her side had backbone in the penmanship, dollars dulling in CDs. Everything had finishes on it. Her parents came over to pamper our furniture, spoiling it rotten with pillows that foamily remembered how they’d taken every jab of my elbows.

  People usually couldn’t place me, but certain cushions always could.

  I would have
anywise settled for any old chain of events, other than morning revoking the night before, the night before revoking the day, and the day no horn of plenty, either.

  •

  Besides, someone had gone ahead and set up a business school in what had last been a buffet. My job involved elating the girls and the furiously timid, discolored-looking young men enrolled in Developmental Bookkeeping, Secretarial Philosophy, Receptionist Science. There was a body of truths for me to fatten and blotch. The PowerPoints I’d pinched online.

  The kids dirtied their worksheets and turned them in. I sometimes checked them in the restroom, the one place I could be alone. They texted in there, took their heartfelt, peremptory poops, were otherwise likely quiet, though now and then there were snipings between stalls:

  “But blood is thicker than water.”

  “But not as thick as cum.”

  The second voice I’d recognized and put the face to: some Kaelyn, a girl of garbled symptoms, of life accrued foolingly, and a saying: What wasn’t there to shave?

  I’d had her twice, two semesters of menial betterment.

  But I checked the papers. Literally. Scraped check marks, with weighted pencil, at the top of each.

  Took me minutes.

  On my way out, I had to step around a cornucopian vomitus on the floor.

  And going home wasn’t always a hoot. There weren’t always brutal acuities to sock away in some datebook.

  It was an open marriage, leaking from both ends.

  It helps to be ahead of the game in your regrets.

  •

  What else should I keep trying to have said? That when it’s a marriage between two women, there are bound to be flusterings, unsettlements—times you have to decide whether a bloodiness calls for an emergency room proper or just an emergency centerette, where the examination rooms have just shower curtains strung between them and instruments are fetched from tackle boxes?

  Plus the car (a mock subcompact) she drove so vehemently was troubled and had to be put down, and I soon had floaters and (just briefly) flashers in my field of vision, and I was never taken for granted in ways I would have liked. She could have put some thought for once into things she used against me.

  There wasn’t time to text her about every funny feeling.

  I was used to making do with the little of her warmth she forwarded to me from the handle of the fork I took from the flimsiest of fingers.

  Sleep was no joy ride.

  •

  And another development: One of our parents died. Must it even make a difference whose? We’ d left everything up to the impresario at the funeral house. He was somewhat of a man dressed with epaulets. He gave us the stock solacing face. He recommended forgoing the obits, the notices, the online guest books.

  “This of all things, you don’t want it to be topical,” he later that night claimed in an e-mail. “You don’t want a thing like this to date.”

  He had us over to meet the cremator—a brother of his. He spoke in yokelisms. Then the other brother took over.

  “Anything else you ladies might want going up in that smoke while we’re at it? We had a lady in here last week with lots of sewing machines she couldn’t find homes for.”

  I looked my wife in the mouth, at that teetery front tooth of hers.

  “There’s that fabric in the storage cage,” said said wife.

  I went along with everything—the payment plan, the vouchers, the grandeur of the carton that would do for a coffin. I’ve never minded signing things.

  Out of character? Yes, if it’s taken just this once to mean no longer having any of it.

  Anyway, who was I to be myself?

  •

  People were tedious with me or said, “This is neither the time nor the place.”

  As for work, school: I let myself in one weekend to make my mark on some papers and, after an hour or so, treated myself to a prissy piss, merely a trinkle, barely disturbing the water already there. But when I flushed, the bowl overflowed, and this wasn’t the expectable worth of a tankful of stopped-up toilet. This was outpourings galore.

  A mischance in a pipe?

  I followed the water out of the restroom. It was already way ahead of me, darkening the carpet darker and darker.

  I called Security.

  “That building’s closed, ma’am,” said some man. “It’s Sunday. Nobody’s there.”

  “I am.”

  “You’re who?”

  I gave my name—which, granted, doesn’t really sound all that much like a person’s name but more like a corollary to what a person’s name might be, something running parallel to the humanly admissible. The name sounded faked, or at most only exploratory.

  “Who’s this?”

  I repeated. He wouldn’t hear of me.

  “Let me look that up in the directory.”

  I had to tell him that the ps stayed silent, that a thud had to go on the second syllable, that the hyphen was for the moment permanent.

  “Someone’ll be around,” he said.

  That had been a saying of my mother’s. The other had been: I get it all the time. She was another woman untuned to the human constitution.

  In sum: An e-mail went out on Monday in overtaxed passive voice: Water has been found, etc. No classes for a week while the place dried up.

  •

  Then things took a turn for the same. We tried staying true to our sexual excruciations, but I was envious of the stretch of her friendships, the way she drew some people out and took cover in others. She could pass the time of day by literally overtaking it, skipping ahead to the unstinking parts.

  No matter the fronts I put up, the gateways I drew open to myself, there was always the same talk behind my back: “What difference would end times even mean to a person like that?”

  We had been to bed, in sum, and we’d come back from it unblended.

  She worked as an adjunct to a couple of certified nursing aides at an assisted-living sorority out beyond the industrial park. She helped people helping people to help themselves coggle their way down hallways to the Remembrance Room or the Activity Kitchen. She enjoyed the remove the work afforded her but felt the minutes flaking off every hour, then the hour peeling itself away from the day. There were double shifts and overtime, undergarments under other undergarments, requests to tie shoes “the modern way.” The caregiven were never to be addressed directly. She was to remain an unseen hand. It should have been compensation that, coming home, she would feel exposed, overrevealed. But it was fine by me that she never once disrobed completely.

  Around the house we wore wrappers around ourselves, drawstrings drawn taut.

  Love was something squally and pickled among us.

  Notice I didn’t say between.

  It never once got that specific.

  •

  Then a magazine came out with another list of the eight things every woman should own. I had one of them: a raincoat you could turn inside out to get another raincoat almost exactly like it. But shouldn’t they have counted that as two?

  I say this as someone who, growing up, had to abandon her growth. Life had made it known that it didn’t want me in it as anything other than a girl who scared the daylights out of herself when trusted with so much as a pair of kiddie scissors.

  You phase yourself out little by little, spread your presence thinner over the immediate things of this runaway world, dim yourself by degrees. All life aspires toward the sureness of erasure, you say? At least yours does, fucking lumpen underpunished self of mine.

  •

  My body broached its symptoms wastefully. It was resourceful in decay.

  A therapist wanted to know whether I had ever “been” with men.

  My answer: On double-decked budget buses, on escalators, in ticket-counter lines when I was there not to buy b
ut just to be moving ahead of others in a publicly observable way.

  The therapist’s report: “Has no unity of self.”

  •

  What else? The water-towered town, the city—whatever this place was called that was at such a loss for topography? People either stayed skinny and off-limits or were filthily losing their looks in showerwater that came out in earth tones.

  All roads led to the one road that wasn’t going where you wanted to go.

  Except now and then people make a show of themselves, make themselves fathomable in something cap-sleeved, and jam the small talk with wherefores vast and mattery. It was thus I lapsed with one of the other instructors, a malcontent whose bitternesses were neatly layered (school/home/husband), a parfait of a woman, really, and life looked so good on her that week we picked clean.

  It was just rotten luck that the things I found at the bottom of her temperament, the backfiring spites and such, were a lot like mine.

  And then a month or so later, another instructor, this one wanting me to undo the mentoring of still another—all that besetting and misdivulged advice, all those fruits of freaked eureka moments, gone to waste on her.

  In over her head, she said. At sixes and sevens.

  Except she was a welcome tribulation of flatted hair, brows singed and blackened. A necklace that threaded itself this way and that through a course of piercings. A scrawny norm of a girl cracking her way, I guessed, out of the last of her velvet twenties. But she gained amplitude in the men’s suits she wore abbreviated to shorts and a shell from which arms would encounter you in feeble forms of capture.

  She said: “If you bring out the worst in people, isn’t that a good thing? Wouldn’t that be doing everybody a favor? I mean, out with the bad, right?”

  She insisted on giving me her passwords to everything, all her accounts. I never tried them out. The most I did—and this was just once, and at her place, with its screens, its dividers—was put myself in the way of the scathing hustlings of her heart.