The Bear Comes Home

by Rafi Zabor

  They dropped the girlfriend—Annie—in the day's last light at a square in old Santa Fe, and the Bear saw her skipping away under mission arches in deepening twilight—he felt a mixed pang of natural concupiscence and conscious worry—as the bus pulled out. He rode standing up in the middle, kitchen section of the bus with Jones, holding onto the walls for balance. They didn't speak much, and both felt constrained to keep a distance from the wingtables farther front, where Iris was consoling and reassembling her daughters. One of them might have been hysterical: the Bear heard one voice

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  alternate weeping and laughter in unnatural succession. The one with dark blond hair, he thought. Amy? The other one seemed almost imnaturally self-contained.

  By the time the bus found the highway north it was dark out. The windows gave back reflections of the bus's occupants through which the red tail-Hghts of cars ran front to back along the tinted glass—Rondo was driving fast, passing them all.

  Twice the Bear went forward to visit Iris and her daughters. Tracy, the older one, was a beautiful child of at most fourteen with silky dark hair parted in the middle, a long serious face, and deep eyes that did not blink or look away from him as he approached. xmy, with light eyes and those freckles across her cheekbones, seemed to have inherited some of Iris' Irishness and what looked very like a sense of humor: in any case something irrepressible gleamed from her eyes and tugged at her wide mouth as she looked at the Bear not as if he were a joke but as if perhaps they shared some joke between them. Then she began to cry again.

  He tried to place a helpful paw on Iris' shoulder but she squirmed away from his touch. The second time he came forward, holding onto the booths for balance, she came to meet him halfrvay and barred the path. "Don't even think of coming up here now. They've had enough to assimilate for one night."

  The Bear was irresistibly reminded of a she-bear at the cavemouth, ready to kill him if he took so much as a glance at her cubs. He retreated back to the kitchen area and Jones. "Kids always love me. Remember how it was in the street act? What's Iris' problem?"

  Jones wouldn't say anything.

  The funny thing, the Bear had always recognized the suprapersonal justice of a she-bear's motherly ferocity even if her judgment of his intentions was way way off the mark, and he knew that despite his attempts at protest now and possibly in the future, he would submit to Iris' biological imperatives whatever they cost him, although he expected more consciousness from her than he did from the usual run of mother bear. He shook his head regardless, expecting to hear the rattle of two dried peas, wondering at the way of the world and the clumsy laws of his own construction.

  After a few minutes Iris came back to where he and Jones stood. Iris looked remarkably self-contained and despite the obvious intensity of her emotion—he saw her suppress the trembling of her hands—she spoke calmly. "I think it would be best," she told the Bear in a voice that retained much of its habitual music, "if you stayed in the back of the bus until we get to Boulder. The girls and I are flying to New York tonight if we catch the last plane in time, and I think it would be best if you and the band would take the extra

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  week of work so that the three of us have this time together before you come home."

  Iris walked back to her daughters down the aisle, her step light, her balance good.

  She had spoken with explicit correctness, and although any motherly fury in her was well hidden, the Bear was not so dim that he could not read handwriting when it appeared as if by magic on the nearest wall. He had the nearly literal experience of scales falling from his eyes, and he believed that he could see the future as the bus rocked northward through the dark. There was also the chance, of course, that he was getting it wrong, as usual. The Bear wobbled slightly where he stood and placed an ineffectual paw to his brow. "Wow," he said softly, and shook his head.

  "You mean you didn't see this coming?" Jones asked him.

  "Not even slightly," said the Bear.

  "I sort of tried to tell you."

  "You did? I don't remember."

  "You weren't listening."

  "What was I, starry-eyed and wanting to see her win the big one?"

  "A little in love with yourself too," Jones said, "and the prospects of the role."

  "Yeah," the Bear nodded. "The Rockfish Files."

  "You really didn't see it coming?"

  "Nope. Not a jottle. Not a tit. I mean ..."

  They had a mirthless laugh together at that one.

  "It'll work out though, won't it?" the Bear asked his buddy.

  Jones shrugged.

  The bus continued north.

  of !«•• Iris' departure east with her daughters, the Bear took her suggestion and picked up the option on a second week at the Blue Note. Though it was the rhythm section's week really. His own playing had lost its glory and his mind was elsewhere. The fact that he played with an unfailing competence he

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  might have wished for in vain two months before didn't cheer him much. Oh all right, he came alive once or twice even so. In the afternoons he ran his worries off through high-altitude woods while Jones ate lunch at the Gold Hill Inn (elevation 9,500 feet) and kept a New York eye on the rent-a-van parked on the one dirt road that ran through town.

  The Bear roamed the forest higher up, giving his legs and lungs a workout. Even though it was high summer there were caps of snow on the peaks and the sky behind them was a brilliant unbroken blue to which warmth seemed alien. The Bear was stirred by the majesty of the view—even remembered it was the material emblem of the higher ranges of consciousness—but it had no power to intercede for him. He had the sickening suspicion that had he run into any hikers he would have tried to tell them all about Iris.

  For the ride back east Rondo cranked himself up with some crystal meth he'd scored outside the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, man, right there in downtown Boulder. The band, down with the road cold that had spared them until a day or two before departure, spent most of the ride in the bunkbeds all adenoidal honks and misery and where the fuck's the paper towels.

  Rondo sang at the wheel much of the way and kept Waylon Jennings on the box, with occasional remissions of Willie Nelson. When anyone tried to interfere with the program Rondo warned them not to fuck with him when he was crankin'.

  I'm gonna kill him, said Garrett.

  He's gonna kill us first, Linton told him.

  We're already dead, Hatwell said. We died in a crash forty miles back and this is a bad dream.

  The Bear's immune system permitted him to recover first. By the time Pennsylvania came around again he was up at the windshield watching the whitehne miles come at him and Rondo, paste-faced and driving with unblinking white-eyed concentration, had stopped singing.

  She loves me, thought the Bear. Too much has passed between us for everything to. Burger King. Price of gas going up.

  She's a good-hearted woman in love with a good-timin' man. Rondo remarked.

  Is that my story? the Bear wondered, and watched the city slowly assemble itself out of busted warehouses and industrial scrapyard as the bus passed through Jersey, the air thickening with humidity and smog, buildings raising up out of the earth, radio waves multiplying in air racketous with commerce and banality and dream.

  Hello walls. Rondo piped up.'

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  You keep surprising me, the Bear told him.

  Hello windows, Rondo added.

  There's that, the Bear allowed. The air's filthying up. You think it's smog, or tons of mental waste and the stupidification of the idiosphere?

  Hard to tell ain't it. Rondo said. Look there's the city.

  The band was slow debarking in Manhattan, making the most of how sick they were and how heavy everything was to lift. Rondo getting lost after dropping Garrett and his bass up in Harlem and starting to worry would he ever get out of here and Jeez, look at all the niggers. R
ondo's face started going grey on the ride up to Shady and his eyes looked fried.

  You want to come in and have some coffee, use the can? the Bear asked him. Take a nap?

  Naw, think I'm gonna get the bus back, take the engine apart and either grease it or piss on it.

  Well, bye.

  It's been a pisser. Don't forget your alto.

  Iris was cooking dinner when the Bear came indoors. She hadn't come to the front door to meet him. The girls were upstairs. We have to talk, Iris told him. I know, he said. But they didn't talk.

  Dinner was a strained affair, the four of them sitting mostly speechless over roast chicken and wild rice. Iris looking radiant and only mildly electrified, Tracy keeping her long beautiful disapproving face turned away, and Amy suppressing a giggle.

  "I see, now that you're back," Iris managed to say, "I'll have to start shopping for eight."

  "Naw, that's all right."

  "If you had phoned a bit earlier ..."

  "Sallright."

  The Bear filled up on bread and had a bottle of Cotes du Rhone almost completely to himself, with Iris sitting not precisely beside him in the wilderness, and he could see it coming.

  But in bed that night Iris surprised him. She curled herself into him with a slightly suspect ease of movement—sure of her effects, knowing where to press her breast, where to lay the leg—and only adjured him to keep it quiet. Lying there afterward with Iris sleeping under a single sheet—easeful cool of summer night—the Bear thought for the first time that things might just go back to normal.

  Still, he could not but be aware that there was a new experiential alphabet for him to learn.

  The next morning he woke to the sounds of Iris and the kids at breakfast.

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  Feeling uncomfortably like a stranger in his own home he stayed in bed until Aim and Tracy headed into town to hang—well, after all those miles he probably would've stayed in bed anyhow—drifted back to sleep, and when he woke Iris had gone out too. There was a note saying she'd be back by evening, so the Bear spent the day blundering upslope through the shrubbery and, telling himself the long evening twiHght was too good to miss but also calculating uncomfortably that the kids might have dinner early, he came back down to the house around nine. Iris had saved him some dinner, and her daughters were already upstairs. Of course he knew he was acting like an idiot, but if there was catastrophe in the offing, he was forestalling it, wasn't he?

  The house had filled with an unfamiliar geometry by which the Bear felt himself intimately constricted. He tried to abide by its parameters and succeeded for days, trying to make friends with Tracy—impossible—or get inside Amy's sharp little smile—a more difficult operation than he'd thought—and show Iris that he was doing everything not to rock the boat or strike the keel or whatever the fuck, but one sit-around evening he heard Amy tell Tracy something had been "so fun" and he criticized the locution, explained his critique in detail, then defended himself from an all-round accusation of pedantry by saying that language was particularly precious to him because of his, well, unique situation, and usage therefore important. Then, before he was aware of it, he found himself mentioning the dirt the girls had tracked into the house, and they could listen to his CDs but not his LPs until they learned to treat them right, or at least put them away, and he knew they'd taken his saxophone out and fiddled with it and put things back wrong and would it be better if he locked the case, and by the way your rooms upstairs are a mess and I think you should have more consideration for your mother and keep the place shipshape . . . This speech seemed to pour out of his mouth unbidden, and somewhere in the middle of it he looked across at Iris for confirmation or approval and saw her startled, jacklighted eyes, and swore he could hear the gears and wheels of decision turning—no, it couldn't be, could it? he thought, then heard a clairaudible snap and saw something change in his beloved's eyes.

  But after the girls had gone up to bed, the rate of vibration went back to nearly normal and everything seemed okay.

  Iris was placidly unavailable in front of the television with a glass of chilled white wine. A few minutes after he sat beside her on the sofa, she confessed that she was tired, and before heading off to the bedroom she handed him the remote. The Bear listened as she showered with what he knew to be cool water, wanted to taste that water on her body, and stared blindly at a sitcom for two commercial breaks before his own hesitant approach to bed.

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  She was awake, reading by the bedside lamp. He sHd beneath the sheet and lay beside her.

  "Iris," he said, with a sigh behind it, wanting to talk, moved toward her, and even though he did so with no explicit hardcore sexual intent she rose onto one elbow to hold him at arm's length—her thin arm's length, held not very rigid, sufficient.

  "You know," she told him, "the situation has changed and what's needed here is not a lover."

  "Huh?" he was able to remark.

  "Please don't say Huh. I know you're not stupid. Sex is just not that important right now."

  "That's not what I would have thought," the Bear said, "from the way we go at it. Not to mention the meaning sex takes on between us. Okay, most of the time," he said, qualifying this hopefril statement when she gave him an Oh really look. Even so, he did not detect in her any listening ear.

  "Sex is not that important," Iris resumed. "Context is everything, and everything has changed. What's wanted here is not a lover anymore. I am not primarily a lover. I'm the mother."

  "Well I guess I know what that makes t;/^," the Bear said, always quick to pounce upon a straight-hne, and whoops, saw it was the wrong thing.

  Iris gave him the darkest look that could issue from so luminous a creature, and a disappointed curl of mouth. "Nothing doing," she said.

  Before turning over and going to sleep, "Make an effort to understand," she advised him.

  Well, wasn't that what he did all the time, in all situations?

  The next morning he woke before she did, an unusual occurrence.

  There was sunlight in the room, the beginnings of day spilling through the bedroom windows, beams of it all fair promise and illimitable light. Iris and the Bear lay facing each other, he on his left side and she sleeping on her right, their heads cushioned on opposing pillows. She slept as beautifrilly as she ever had. The Bear blinked himself more nearly awake without moving so that she would not wake. After a few minutes he couldn't help it: telling himself, falsely, that he only wanted ftirther warmth against the last of the morning cool, he withdrew his head beneath the white double sheet that lay upon them both, and for good measure pulled her edge of it up so that he'd see her face under there too.

  He knew at once that he would never forget this sight, perhaps his last? of his fondest paradise. Lost? In the unconsciousness of sleep Iris had crossed her arms across her breasts against him, their incurves visible but the nipples covered by her forearms, although it could hardly be comfortable to sleep

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  placing so much weight atop that angularity of arm and elbow. In any case he had never seen her sleep in that position before.

  He raised the edge of sheet on her side so that he could see her face better. Sunlight shaped the view and softened it through white cotton, her body blushed with warmth in its shelter. He admired it, the lovely face, graceful throat, square delicate shoulders and the momentarily concealed tenderness of her chest, but was compelled to recognize that below, all the interflowing concavity of divided belly, from arch of ribs to folded triangular groin, which received the descent of the body's converging lines in the merest curls of hair, had been designed in the interests of procreation, and that it was precisely this beautiful irrefutable logic, to which the whole of his soul succumbed, that excluded him now—what legitimate issue could there ever be from a monstrous talking bear? Her daughters slept upstairs, had been sleeping there for weeks already, and everything he might want to say was contradicted past any possibility
of argument by her eloquent sleeping flesh and the blunt fact of his own mass of breathing fur. His brute unsubtlety compared to her delicacy and finesse: a not very good or useful joke. Of course it had to end. The surprising thing was that their love had happened at all. It had happened. Hadn't it?

  Iris sighed, not very dramatically, in her sleep.

  A fat bear in prison Hes.

  It was clear to him that had he ever actually made love to her he would have corrupted this beauty with his own freakishness and nuUity. So all that lovemaking, he concluded, had been fiction, written by the unnatural author who wore his form. He was a talking bear, he was illegitimacy and collapse. He wished to be without blame but there was no way he could manage it.

  Did he love her or did she just make his dick sing? Impossible to tell at the moment. He would have sworn his heart had precedence, but to judge by the visible evidence, there it goes . . . Iris, let's not lose this.

  My God we fucked each other beautifully.

  Didn't we?

  Maybe he should face it: all his attempted romantic poignancy was frustrated appetite and nothing more. But was that so bad? That kind of love, especially the way he and Iris made it, had long seemed innocent enough. And now it wasn't anymore? He lay there, stunned by her beauty, now unreachable, all his Hfe summed intolerably up. It was hard to know how his body could contain this much erotic sorrow.

  "Really, Bear. How can I deal with that much emotion?"

  "What?"

  "I can't," she said, awake, and when he had gaped at her long enough she

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  added, "Oh come here you idiot." She smiled, took his tongue imo her mouth and raised a Hmb to wrap him.

  Title of his next album: Angel Takes Amazing Mercy on Melodramatic Fool.

  But the next night Iris placed her pillow at the foot of the bed and, giving him a measured look and saying something about just for tonight, laid her head upon it, and they slept head to toe for the better part of a week. No intercurlings intervened.