The Bear Comes Home

by Rafi Zabor

  "Consider that a given," the Bear suggested. "I'm not gonna play myself. I mean, do I ever?"

  "—they can do wonders with animatronics."

  "Really"

  "Hey," said Bobby Hatwell, who had come around the chimneypiece, flanked by the potentially antic figure of Linton Bostic. "Pardon me—I couldn't help overhearing—who would you want to do your voice?"

  "Lee Marvin."

  "Hate to break it to you. Bear," said Hatwell. "Mr. Marvin, he dead."

  "Okay," said the Bear. "Michelle Pfeiffer." He waited for the laugh and got it. "Lee Morgan, Lee Marvin. All those good Lees gone. It's hard to beheve."

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  "Lee Marvin outswTing Brando in The Wild One'' Harwell said.

  "Yeah, but Brando had all this mystery," Bostic maintained.

  "Fuck mystery," Hatw^ell told him. "Mystery, fuck."

  They heard Garrett yawn in the living room.

  Bobby Harwell started to sing "I Was Born Under a Wandrin' Star" in Lee Marvin's voice but he couldn't get low enough.

  "I've been sketching out a story proposal," Jones confided to the Bear. "Could be the beginning of a screenplay."

  "No kidding? How's it begin?" the Bear asked him.

  Sybil put her hands back on Jones' shoulders.

  "Do / know where hell is" sang Hatwell-Marvin. ''Hell is in hello.''

  "I thought maybe getting out of college and looking around for work ..."

  "College?" asked the Bear. "What college?"

  "You know what school I went to," Jones told him. "So there I am, not cutting the job market, doing a little acting, and then there was the time I wanted to marry that belly dancer, remember her?"

  "I see," said the Bear. "Spielberg's people got in touch with you about doing a Jones movie. First Indiana Jones, now you. They've been working up to it."

  "Jeez," said Jones, "I'm getting to you, don't worry."

  "^ wandrin', wandrin' star," Harwell and Bostic sang in rough unison, then retired to the living room before the shit hit the fan.

  "Maybe," Iris suggested, "maybe Jones feels that he could use some of his story as a sort of bridge for the audience."

  Jones snapped his fingers and pointed at Iris. "There you go. That's it. A link to common experience. Exactly. A bridge."

  "How much bridge you think?" the Bear asked him. "Half an hour?"

  "About."

  "I can see the card game now," said the Bear. "The cards oversized, shooting across the table like planes of being."

  "Too Scorsese," said Jones, frowning.

  "Naw," said the Bear. "Steve might do it. He shoots for impact too."

  "You think?"

  The Bear looked up at Sybil Bailey, who was looking back at him inscrutably but with persistence and intent. "All right," he said, retrieving his intended vocal thunder from the brink, and went on quietly: "Try this. Jones, what the fuck has happened to you? Or were you always hke this really?"

  "Like what?" Jones asked him.

  The Bear found it remarkable how Jones didn't even begin to see it. "You

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  know, a shallow, self-promoting pile of notiiing much, just waiting to break loose and rule the world. I mean, what have you done with your essential characteristics, man?"

  "I'm trying to improve on them. I'm trying to fit in. I'm trying to help your case."

  The Bear looked up at Sybil, then back and up at Iris, who was gripping his shoulders surprisingly hard. "Okay," he said. "I'll try to be kind about this," he began, and by the time he was done Jones had gone upstairs to the bathroom for shelter and Iris was pounding rhythmically on the top of the Bear's head with small hard fists. "What did I say?" he asked her. "What?"

  Sybil flopped into the chair across from him, the one Jones had vacated in such a hurry. "I need a drink," she said.

  "Did I goof?" the Bear asked her. "Or am I right and does our boy need a little flight correction? Because as far as I can tell he's heading for a crash."

  "Fuck knows," Sybil said, and slumped in her chair. "I could swear I saw a bottle of Cutty around here somewhere."

  In the upstairs bathroom, Jones found himself unable to pee. His nuts had shrunk into two hard pecans but he still had some beer in his bladder and therefore should have been able to leak something besides the remains of his human dignity. He gave his recently so triumphant member a shake and wondered how he was going to scrape by for the rest of the weekend walled up with the Bear. It was impossible. And, so the knife would not be deprived of its final twist, the Bear had insulted him in front of Sybil. Let's make sure the Jones boy doesn't get a life. Let's make sure he's deprived of everything, and that it is seen. Ah, here it comes. Sometimes, he thought, mere urination can provide as sweet a release as its second cousin the little death. He shut his eyes to savor the moment, such as it was.

  And opened them. The male stance at the upstairs toilet overlooked some greenery at the back of the house, and while he was waiting for the last drops to be coaxed up and out he twiddled the stem of the windowblind to provide an optimally downslanted view of the yard—not much of a yard, since the hill began its upslope almost at once—and, wait a minute, a slight refocussing, a slight rejigging of the image and there it was, incredible, too fucking much: the Garden.

  He was looking at the garden he had seen before final blackout in Washington Square, the green dappled wood in which he inhabited his real self outside of time in immortal self-contemplation. But this moment, now, was almost as mindblowing: not only did he exist outside of time, this present moment had in some sense preexisted, with himself in it. Ordained.

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  Intended. All its minutiae included. It was as if a veil had fallen and the real workings of the world had come clear. Teleology. Beneficence. Predestination. Good Lord.

  Odd: he had quick flash-memories of certain childhood afternoons, the view from his bedroom window—nothing like the garden—his wars between flying ballpoint pens and his father's nail clipper, the tabletop battles between the foreign coins Dad brought back from business trips abroad—British pennies, French francs, Italian tin, and a heavy brown Mexican twenty-centavo piece that blew all other coins away. He still had the coins in a storage carton somewhere, inside a galvanized iron box he'd made in high school metal shop. Should he go to the warehouse and have a look at them? A thought struck him out of sequence: I wish I'd seen beautiful things from an early age. How can you reconcile your life's transcendent outline and its stupid, negligible contents? Is there a way out of here? He looked down at the garden, identical in eternity and time.

  Jones raised his arms, palms offered up, and at least halfway expected to be taken once and for all out of time's illusion into what he really was. He breathed in, then out, raised his eyes and waited a long moment for the drama of his uplift.

  Nothing doing, however.

  Okay, so it wasn't that simple, but what he had to do, it came to him, was go back downstairs to the Bear and have some conclusive meeting with him, stand up for the real condition of things, tell him I'm not a doormat I'm a man.

  Better wash and dry your hands first.

  Which he did.

  Nice tasseled handtowels. Obviously the Iris touch.

  Checked his fly before descending. Jones was ready as he'd ever be.

  There was no one downstairs, however. He heard the rhythm section's laughter, three old buddies, outside the front of the house, backglanced into the kitchen as he passed, no one there, and settled on the sliding doors at the far end of the dining room. The Bear was out there waiting for him, and the two women. Iris and Sybil were facing in different directions, looking up into the trees; they were smoking cigarettes, blowing grey smoke into the air, threads of purer blue rising from their cigarettes' ends. The twilight, although diminished, was still doing its magic stuff, and the breeze must have stilled for the moment.

  "Let's you and me talk," said Jones, and took the Bear lightly by the arm.
There was a path winding away from the house through the maples, or whatever. Behind them they heard anxious undertones pass between the women, a

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  retracted footstep and Iris' voice saving, "Let them." From a branch somewhere up in the leaves a bird gave out with a neat rhTiimic figure followed by a sprightly two-note call. Jones doubletaked in its approximate direction. "A ait a minute," he said. "Wasn't that?"

  "Monk," the Bear said, nodding.

  "Miat have you been doing up here with your fellow woodland creatures?"

  "You wanted to talk."

  "Right."

  Hiey came upon an oval %ndening of the prospect, and at the end of the clearing, on the left just before the path resumed, sat a large grey roughly bihemispheric stone about three feet high, Uchen climbing it in a slow waveform. Star moss gleamed green about its base.

  "Mind if I sit do^Ti?" asked Jones.

  "Pull up a coffin," the Bear suggested.

  Once Jones got his bouom settled on the rock he told the Bear ever--thing. finishing wixh how, nth a hole punched in his belly crawling exhausted to the rim of temporal existence while looking for his buddy, he had stumbled into the cool etemit' of the garden—which now turned out, ha ha, cosmic sense of humor, to be the -iew out the Bear's upstairs toilet ^-in-dow. "But was the garden real?"

  "It's a pretty well-kno\-n estabHshment." the Bear told him. "And what you experienced yourself to be. what the folklore calls your immortal soul, that's real.''

  "I don't need you to tell me that. My life doMi here is some kind of weird malfimctioning dream by comparison. But wh}" was it the same as the 'iew ft-om upstairs?"

  "Jones." the Bear said, "if you're gonna tn- to work out some concordance betveen that garden and the iew from my bathroom window, you're going to get confused. Take it as given, unless you know specifically better. 'Tiat's real is real."

  "Are all gardens the Garden and we don't see it?" asked Jones. He couldn't help it, he expected some kind of ultimate significance to emerge from the moment. He'd say something, or the Bear would, the puzzle would snap into focus and the}^'d be whisked out of time into truth or at least working fiiend-ship. WTiy wasn't it happening? "We're there now and we don't see it?" he prompted.

  "Sure," the Bear said. "But tr' not to get hung up on the particulars. That's where I think you might be making your mistake."

  "Oh yeah?" said Jones, and the Bear could hear him tensing up.

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  "You saw your real individuation outside time, but even that's only a flickering picture, understand?"

  "How could that be?"

  The Bear considered using the G-word and decided against it. Even the First Intellect and the Objects of its Self-Knowledge might tense Jones up and start him projecting. "In my experience," said the Bear, qualifying things bv his limitations but also feeling that he was bypassing the essential point, "you have to go beyond that selfhood too, or you'll just generate more illusion, get nowhere ultimately real."

  "Oh yeah?" Jones said again. The Bear could hear him rising to a purely phantasmal challenge to his right to be.

  "Aw Jones, stop trying to be someone so hard. Why are you so ... It doesn't suit you, it's in such bad taste."

  "Miereas you're impeccable."

  "Obiously not," the Bear admitted.

  "So where do you get off still trying to pull some kind of existential rank on me? Look, you may be too big for this world, but I need more of a self than I have so I can be out there and do the do—hold a job down, deal with the dealies, keep the woman happy, have a home."

  "But you're pushing in the wrong direction. Listen," I'll try it, he thought, "there's really only one being in existence—"

  "Yeah, and he's a talking bear who plays alto."

  "That's not what I meant at all."

  "That's wh^tyou think."

  It went on awhile longer, but Jones got more and more defensive, and as far as the Bear was concerned the rest of their talk was pointiess.

  Well after dark and dinner the Bear lay abed, and when he had finished wondering whether Iris would tiptoe down again or not, he thought about how pained his talk with Jones had left him. It would be so nice, he thought, to be free of self-regard. But he hadn't managed it yet, had he? No, he had not.

  But you reach a point where it's obvious that the self is nothing. You may still be stuck with the thing, but you can't revive it. You may have your pleasures—they may even, thank God and Iris, increase—but it's beyond your power to revive the self that has them. Jones has his points. The truth is I didn't behave like such a monster of egoism until my ego gave out. I'm probably fooling myself again.

  Iris was back in the doorway. "Hello, sailor," she said.

  He lifted the topsheet for her and she slid in but kept her cotton nightie on.

  "So," Iris asked, "are you happy with the band?"

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  "They'll do. They're great. I have to impress them with some of my best playing tomorrow, Harwell says."

  "Can I hsten?"

  "Who could be more welcome?" He gave her a little kiss, and her lips responded lightly. "Actually, I miss Charlie and Billy sometimes. They have such depth. With these kids I have to do a lot of the heavy Hfting."

  "You're supposed to be the leader," Iris said.

  "I'm not used to it. Maybe once we're on the road this summer, after a week or two . . . We'll see."

  Iris pulled herself away for a moment to look at him.

  "What?"

  "That look on your face. Your eyes. This is how you are. All you really care about is the music."

  "I care about you."

  "Everything is fodder for your art. Me included."

  "Aw, you just say that because you've got a fodder fixation."

  Iris blinked at him as if he'd said something serious. "Is that what you think I'm doing here? Is that why you think I'm in this bed with you?"

  "Wait a minute wait a minute. You're misreading things. That was pure wordplay." But was it? The Bear had thought so, but now, once questioned, he remembered a moment one night the week before, when he and Iris were riding the train of their passion a little more impatiently than usual to the wellknown destination, whereas usually the destination hardly mattered and the ride was all; he was going up and down into her, it was all so quick and easy, then he felt her hands fanning his back, and "Oooh, daddy," she had said. Daddy? the Bear wondered, and paused a moment at the top of his arc. Maybe he lacked a grasp of the vernacular, but it seemed to him, pace Freud, that the bed had gotten rather crowded. "It was just a joke, honey. Purest mindspin. Spume and foam. Seadrift. Froth. Fodder fixation. The merest pun." It seemed crucial to pull this off.

  Iris seemed to relax. "How did you leave things with Jones?" she asked.

  "We had a talk. We're okay."

  "What did you talk about?"

  "Horticulture. Really, we're cool."

  "You do know that you were horrible to him again."

  "We aired the subject between us. Eye. Really, it's all freshened up."

  "You called him an unrequited narcissist."

  "I said that?" The Bear rolled aside laughing, and the bed shook with it. "I said that? It's almost worth being horrible once or twice if you can say shit like that."

  "It's still shit," Iris said.

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  "Aw c'mon, sweets. I had a chat with Sybil and she's worried about him too. He's getting a dangerously swelled head."

  "I just had the image of his head expanding Hke a balloon and his feet leaving the ground."

  "That's about the size of it. An airhead making the change to helium and getting into trouble on the transition. He wants to be someone so bad it's painful."

  "I want to be someone too, remember? I want a self."

  "I told you you can have mine. The main thing is he's offensive on the subject and you're not."

  "You mean I sleep with you," Iris said.
/>
  "I've never wanted to sleep with Jones since I was a cub and the house was cold and I missed my mother. How can you even make the comparison?"

  "You also asked him what he had done with his essential characteristics."

  "Yeah, I remember that part."

  "VVTiat have you done with yours, Bear? When really you're so tender ..."

  "Ssshh." He rolled to her. "Don't tell anyone."

  "And, being tender, how can you talk like that to Jones or to anyone?"

  "Jones is family. It's allowed."

  "Am I family yet? Have I put in enough time yet? Will you be awful to me when I finally make the Hst?"

  "Iris, what are you worried about? I love you so much."

  "I know all that. Love love love. It isn't everything, you know."

  "It's not?"

  "It's what it is." She rose up to kiss him casually, but the moment changed and her mouth opened.

  "VVTiat about the people in the house hearing us?" the Bear asked, once things started to develop.

  Iris reached down, pulled her nightie up from its hem, masked her face in it momentarily, then tossed it out into the room. "Just don't get on top," she said.

  "Whyever not?"

  "Have you heard this bed when you're going up and down in it?"

  "Never noticed."

  Iris laughed, an uncharacteristic snort, thought the Bear.

  "That I never noticed the noise is a tribute to you," he said. "It's loud?"

  "It's catastrophic. This bed is going to fall to pieces one night. You don't know your own ..."

  "Strength?"

  "Weight, I was going to say."

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  "But you know it."

  "To my shame, I do," she said. "Tonight let me take the lead."

  "Batter my heart, three-personed toots," he said, and rolled back laughing. "I'm yours."

  She pushed him back onto the mattress and he let her take the initiative and lay back dropping heavy and easy into bliss.

  Afterward he lay on his back watching her sailing off to sleep, and heard her voice even though her lips were as sealed as her eyes, and thought, here we go: their clairaudience act had been one-sided for too long, and she was beginning to come in clear.