The Problem with Murmur Lee

by Connie May Fowler

“He’ll be okay. He’s probably just going down to the beach for a minute. Let’s go back inside.” What the fuck is Charlee Mudd doing, acting as if she is running this joke of a party.

  “Jesus, Lucinda, you broke his fucking nose!” Silas stares at me, his expression hard. “Goddamned.” I can’t figure if he is congratulating or scolding me.

  “No she didn’t.” Charlee lets go of Edith. “Dr. Z broke his nose.” She tosses back her hair as if she is the queen of fucking Sheba and brushes past us. The screen door bangs behind her.

  “Fuck it,” I say, “I’m going home.”

  “Oh, mais oui! Terrible! Terrible!” Edith dabs her eyes with the tail of her boa. I don’t think she is acting. She seems genuinely fucked-up.

  “Enough with the fucking bad French!” I yell as I walk down the drive. I hit the road and don’t look back. Not once. Not even when a gale smothers me with the pitiful sound of Edith sobbing.

  Me? I didn’t cry until I was in the shower and the room was so steamed up that even my cat wouldn’t have been able to detect my tears. And I discovered something: water and flour don’t mix unless you take a whisk to them. So I had to scrub the shit off of me, the blood, too. I went through five wash rags, thanks to the clinging dough I’d inadvertently created.

  Once I was clean, I just stood there, letting the water pickle me, damning myself for losing control. What the fuck had I been thinking? How could I have raised a fist to anyone, even if it was that jerk Speare? My hands were sore. I held them up to the hot water, turned them palm up, palm down, palm up, palm down.

  “Dear fucking Jesus, please forgive me,” I whispered. “Please don’t let me do that again.” Maybe it was the vodka, just the vodka. I’m not really an asshole, but the liquor altered my center. It won’t ever happen again, never, never, never.

  I stepped out of the shower and grabbed a towel. Just as I was about to run it through my hair, Lucinda Williams’s voice drifted into the thick wet air. She was accusing someone of stealing her joy, and she wanted it back. This was fucking interesting. I hadn’t stopped to turn on the stereo when I got home; I had headed straight for the bathroom. I wrapped the towel tightly around me and tiptoed down the hall and into my living room. Why was God testing me? Just because I asked for forgiveness in the fucking shower didn’t mean he immediately had to challenge the sincerity of my request by putting a freaking weirdo robber/rapist/murderer in my house so that I’d be forced to stand passively by—be the good pacifist, be the good pacifist—while the guy did who knew what to me.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  Silas stood at my bookcase, riffling through the CDs. He turned around. “Well, hello to you, too. I just came by to make sure you were okay.” Dressed in a white tee and jeans, he looked like an orderly from a fucking insane asylum.

  I secured my towel and stared at the floor. “Thanks.”

  “Let’s take a look at those hands of yours,” he said. He walked over to me. He had this funny look in his eyes. It was as if he was trying to be kind. It creeped me out.

  “That’s okay. They’re fine, really.”

  He took my small painter’s hands in his big rough ones. “No, they’re not. You need to ice them.”

  “Hey, I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself,” I said as he sauntered into my kitchen.

  “Yeah, Lucy, that’s why you lost it tonight.”

  “Fucker,” I muttered, and sat down on the couch. He came back in with two Buds and a kitchen towel full of ice. He pressed the compress on my hands and I winced.

  “Why’d you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “You know.” He cracked open a beer and handed it to me.

  “Because I fucking wanted to.” I shot him a you-are-dumb-as-shit glare.

  “You’ve got one helluva mouth on you, girlie.” He sipped his beer, really dainty like, which was ludicrous, since he was such a big fat fucking redneck.

  “I don’t like him,” I said.

  “Really. Well, you sure as hell fooled all of us.”

  I looked at Silas straight on, this time without too much attitude. I felt myself slipping into a momentary bout of earnestness. Fuck! “I mean it. I really don’t like him.”

  “Well, he ain’t my favorite candidate of all time, either. But I just ignore him. No reason to beat on him.”

  Since when did you become Mother fucking Teresa? I thought it but, to my credit, kept the insult to myself. I gritted my teeth and adjusted the compress. “Yes, there is. Yes, there fucking is.” And then things went from horrible to an all-out suck, because I started to cry. In front of him. I don’t cry in front of anyone.

  But there I was, bawling my head off. And there was Silas—all of Silas—brushing away my tears and smoothing my hair and saying things like “Ah, come on now, things ain’t that bad.” And somehow—I don’t know what came over me—we started kissing and tugging at each other’s clothes (wasn’t difficult, as all I had on was a towel), and we were close to doing, you know, IT. I hadn’t done IT in six years. That and pork. And I really wasn’t into cocks. It was nothing personal. I just couldn’t do it.

  Oh yeah, right. I’m such an asshole. I couldn’t do it. That’s why I said, “No, this way,” and I guided his head down there, to my place—you know, down there to my business, where I don’t let any fucking person go. Jesus. And as he did his thing, my mind wandered; it just took to a truth I had been all worked up over to avoid. In my mind’s eye, in my fucked-up soul, it wasn’t Silas going down on me. But Murmur, Murmur, Murmur. Murmur was doing me.

  Yes, I know that Murmur’s door didn’t swing that way. And, hell, I don’t know if I have a door that swings at all. But I do know I always wanted to touch her. And to be swallowed by her crazy-ass laughter.

  So when I said, “Baby, slow down. Yeah, like that,” I was speaking to my friend Murmur, whom I miss so, so much.

  How fucked-up is that?

  Charleston Rowena Mudd

  Endings. Are they forms of betrayal? You know, hopes dashed by the indecipherable subtext that pumppumppumps against the gooey walls of intrepid hearts? Or are they the inevitable last gasps churned out by the failings of fallible minds?

  I had a friend in Cambridge, a fellow grad student, who didn’t breathe oxygen. She inhaled and exhaled platitudes: Endings are simply new beginnings. Endings are opportunities to begin a new chapter, a fresh page. Endings are the world reborn!

  I wanted to choke her.

  But back to my point: Let’s talk about the pain. Let’s talk about how Murmur’s end left us adrift in sorrow so thick that even walking across the room took calculated effort. Let’s talk about the color of our fear—morning, noon, and night—when we tried to go forward honorably, honestly, even though our hearts had been ripped apart by the passing of our friend. Let’s talk about endings that are so awesome, you fear that tomorrow just might happen.

  Let’s talk about Edith’s party, her little gathering, which was designed to dispel winter and grief.

  This is what we know. White. Drunk. Violent. Dr. Z busts Billy Speare’s nose. Then Lucinda beats the downed man with her bare hands. Z storms off. Billy storms off. Lucinda storms off. Silas disappears. Edith cries. The party is over. Way over. I stick around, both to try to calm Edith and to help her clean up. Piaf is back on the hi-fi; I take her perpetual spin as a sign that maybe normalcy is settling back in.

  “Edith, it’s okay. People actually had a good time,” I said as I dried a white plate.

  “Oh please!” She clawed at the snowy marabou boa that draped her neck and back. “I want this thing off!” Her face twisted and scrunched, and she wrestled the feathery drape as if it were a constrictor that had decided to squeeze. She threw it on the floor. I think her intent was to spike it, but since it was weightless, it drifted noiselessly and landed in a soft pile—resembling a sleeping cat—about her feet. She tried to march forward but became tangled and nearly fell over. I offered her my arm, which she slapped away
. She kicked at the boa, eerily mimicking how Lucinda had kicked Speare. Finally free, she collapsed into her sheet-draped wing-back chair.

  “It was a disaster!” She grabbed her wig with both hands and shimmied it right off her head like a cork. She looked bald, thanks to the flesh-colored skullcap, which matted down her real hair. “I know about violence. I know what it is to kill a man. You look in his eyes. You see his soul right before you snuff it out. When I left the Corps, that was it. No more violence!” She picked at her silk sleeve. “I hate it when my creed is broken.”

  I rubbed my fingertips over my eyelids, which were gritty with salt. She was right. This was terrible. Shit. I looked at her. For the first time in our ten-year friendship, I think I really looked at her. Not at the drag queen. Not at the sex change. Not at the profoundly weird person she was. I looked past all that. And you know what I saw? I saw the marine. I saw the tough little jaw. In her countenance—even after God only knows how many martinis and fisticuffs—I saw the steely glint of a survivor and the resigned yet stubborn humility of a loyal soldier who gets the job done. I saw a person who believes in honor but who realizes there are no absolutes—that honor and loyalty and morality are slippery slopes that must be defined and redefined hour by hour, always keeping in mind this eternal and quarrelsome question: Who gets hurt this time? And I saw in her pained eyes, the desire to be free of all that. I pulled over the piano stool and sat. I took her hand in mine.

  “How many people did you kill back then? Tell me.”

  She breathed in. I do believe she stole my oxygen. “That is off-limits, Charlee. It is not to be spoken of. Ever.”

  “So . . . you saw their souls?”

  “I own their souls. And they mine.”

  I appreciated the present tense. Her fingers danced across the raised edge of her lips even as her jaw tensed. Edith Piaf, this Edith Piaf, the one who had so thoroughly reinvented herself, the one who had put hundreds of thousands of miles between her current self and the nineteen-year-old kid from Palatka, the kid who had hunkered down—him and his penis—in a blood-soaked Vietnamese jungle and who—for the love of God and country and duty—had sniped the souls of fellow warriors, was one hell of a woman.

  “You don’t think God blames you, do you?” I asked this selfishly, an exercise in exploring my own salvation.

  Edith pulled herself straight, like a ribbon unwinding. “I don’t think he cares. I think our lives aren’t all that important to him.”

  I felt a tear, the moisture of it, travel across the summit of my cheekbone and then meander toward my ear.

  “What about Murmur?”

  She pulled at the bobby pins that held the skullcap in place. She ate more air, filled herself up, and then said, “That’s why we need to be kind to Mr. Speare. We don’t know what happened out there on the river. But if he did have anything to do with her death, we have to forgive him.” She curled her fingers under the elastic rim. “Because, like I said”—she got a real good grip—“God doesn’t care”—she rolled the cap off of her skull and tossed the second skin—“so we have to.”

  I leaned over and hugged her. “Thank you, Edith.” I held her as tightly as I could. “Thank you.” I pulled away. In her disheveled state, she looked both insane and royal. “I’m going to go see Z now.”

  Edith nodded, as if that was all there was left to do. She stood and walked into her kitchen. I saw her—there at her sink—reach for a sponge and begin furiously to scrape away at a glob of mashed potato. “That’s good. Because he must be in pain. The poor man has lost a wife and a flame.”

  I rose to my feet. The vodka had depressed my normal tendency to talk loudly. So I said steadily, in nearly a whisper, “What do you mean, ‘a flame’?”

  Edith tossed aside the sponge and pulled off an eyelash. “I mean Zachary had a thing for Mur. It was so obvious. Everyone knew.” She tugged at the remaining lash. “Honestly, Charlee, if you had come home more often, you’d know these things. Now for God’s sake, please go see Zachary.”

  The last vision I had of Edith that night was her standing in her kitchen, tugging at the eyelash, wincing.

  I knocked on the front door, the back door, the door to the screen porch. Nothing. But I knew he was in there. I felt it tooth and bone. And I knew he was damning himself over losing control and two women. So I decided to assert my Yankee self and walk on in. The front was locked up tight, but the back was wide open. I stepped inside the dark kitchen and caught my breath. The place reeked of rotting vegetables. I felt the wall for a light switch, but to no avail. I took a step forward and something crunched beneath my feet.

  “Z? You in here?”

  I shut my eyes for a five count, then reopened them. Slowly, the darkness became penetrable, and as it did, I said, “Good God.” The place was a mess. The floor was strewn with crackers, cereal, chips. The counters and kitchen table were stacked madly with dirty dishes, beer cans, shoes, orphan socks, magazines, opened and unopened mail. Pots and pans blossoming with mold teetered in hazardous heaps. If there were a decorative style to describe Z’s approach to interior design, it would be Clutter and Crap and Chaos. I decided to try to move on, see if the living room was in any better shape, and as I did, I felt something soft implode beneath my foot. A putrid gelatinous tomato. “Damn it all to hell!” I started toward the sink in order to wash my shoe but was afraid to touch the faucets. I wandered in the shadows and ink into the bathroom. There, I flipped on the light.

  Oh my. Evidently, Z wasn’t in the habit of washing his underwear or even tossing it in a hamper. And don’t even remove the hair from a drain, I thought. No, no, no! Just let it pile up until you have a lovely little pube nest. Gross! But the crowning glory of the bathroom was the mushroom forest. Believe it. A colony of ’shrooms circled around the base of his toilet. The tomato goo, I decided, was the least of my worries. I backed away from the toilet, thinking, Dear Jesus, I have entered hell, a place named Depression Made Visible.

  “Dr. Z, where are you?” I yelled as I exited the bathroom. To my surprise, he answered.

  “I’m back here. Charlee, is that you?”

  “Where is ‘back here’?” I tried to follow his voice, which seemed to emanate from some faraway combustible garbage heap.

  “In the study! Just follow the bread crumbs. Ha!”

  Actually, there was a trail. A twisty, hug-the-right-wall trail of chips, popcorn, dirty clothes, baseball caps, more unopened mail, abandoned bottles of water and colas, and balled-up stinky socks led me to a closed door, which I pushed open. “Ah, there you are.”

  Curled on a small couch, he was lying under a blanket, watching Rambo. The study, oddly enough, was fairly clean. The minimal clutter, mainly munchies, were concentrated in a pile on a glass-topped coffee table.

  “Hey!” he said, “What brings you over here?” He threw off the blanket. Dressed in a South Park T-shirt and baggy running shorts, he looked like the Z I remembered from high school.

  He stood and hugged me. Even though he was simply being polite, the intimacy zapped me. “I just thought I ought to check on you. That was pretty wild back there.”

  “Ah, that was nothing. Here, sit, sit.” He whipped the blanket off the couch, and a magazine went flying. He scurried to get it before I could see what it was. I moved toward the couch, and as I did, I spied the rabbit suit. It was splayed out on the floor by the French doors—pretty as you please—just as if it were a giant pelt.

  “Well, you did break a man’s nose.”

  “No, I broke one particular man’s nose. Nothing could make me happier. Want something to drink? Beer? Wine? Water? Hey, I’ve got a great bottle of Chianti one of my patients gave me. Isn’t this a great movie? Have you ever seen it? Of course you’ve seen it. Everybody has seen it.” Z bobbed around as he spoke, making contact with nearly every piece of furniture in the room and refreshing his computer screen twice. I wished I had some Adderall—he needed to be medicated. I wished he’d sit down and confess his sins. I w
ished I knew why I was here. No, that’s not true. I knew exactly what had brought me over. I sat on the couch, reached for a pillow, and hugged it close. Yo-Yo Man made another pass wall to wall.

  “I want to talk about Murmur.”

  He stopped bouncing. He pegged his gaze to his desk. “I don’t.”

  “Please come over here. Sit down and talk to me. Please.”

  He dropped his head back, that black shock of hair shuddered, and he stumbled over as if he’d been shot. “Oh God, Charlee. It’s been a very long day.” He flopped down beside me.

  “I want to know why you hate Billy Speare.”

  “Why do you want to know that?”

  “Because it means something.”

  “Yeah? Like what?” He reached for the remote control and pressed mute. He watched as Rambo kicked down the door to a hut belonging to some poor, frightened Vietnamese peasants.

  “I don’t know. If I knew, I wouldn’t be sitting here grilling you.”

  “Charlee”—he touched the tip of my nose—“that makes absolutely no sense.”

  “You were in love with Murmur, weren’t you?”

  Heavy sigh. He rubbed his face. He wanted to disappear. I just knew it.

  “Z?”

  “What do you want me to say? Yes. No. Maybe. All of the above. I mean, she took care of Katrina during the bad time. She took care of her when I couldn’t, and I’m a doctor. And her husband. A piss-poor one.”

  “You’re not answering my question.”

  He dug under the couch, and I swear to God, the man pulled out that bottle of Chianti. He studied the label. “Maybe because your question isn’t fair, Charlee. Maybe it doesn’t deserve a response.” He placed the bottle on the coffee table, very carefully, as if he thought it were made of fragile glass. “Maybe it’s like asking Clinton if he had an affair. The question is more outrageous than what it seeks to know.”

  My, my. I despise it when I’m wrong and end up so thoroughly and clearly called on it. I picked at a hair on the pillow. It was coarse and red. I thought, Dog. But I knew Z didn’t have a dog. And then I thought, Celibate. “So have you gone out or anything? Dated anyone since Katrina passed?”