by Rafi Zabor
That done, and despite occasional passionate intermissions, farther removes were easily accomplished.
See, this was the demeaning thing, that their story could be spelled out so simply, and without, it seemed to the Bear, much nuance or honor. As he saw it, the decline of his romantic fortunes took place in one smooth swift motion, even if it took a month or two. What he liked least, aside from the fact of it happening at all, was how blatant and legible the process was: you could write the story with Iris' body and his own, each new word spelling out some greater gap between them. At first, the orthography could be accommodated by the white page of their double bed between its brass margins, but then the words began to get too long and the spaces between them too wide for the binding, and the text expanded to the oval bedside carpet—I'm more comfortable on the floor, she said, because the air is cooler—and later to other rooms.
It was clear to the Bear that sex had been too central to their relationship all along—his increasing clashes with her daughters were irrelevant to the process, secondary at best, whatever she said. They should have learned to talk more; all those exquisite intimate nuances should have found some other arena to spell themselves out in than bed, though their lovemaking had seemed to say everything at the time. Had they learned to talk better, thought the Bear with no great certainty, they'd be able to manage things more intelligently now. They would be able to work things out.
Well, maybe.
What amazed him was how, just when you thought you had safely reached home, the world assumed its alien aspect again. Was this something he was doing? If so, he didn't see it.
The Bear's head hurt and he was beginning to feel abnormally tired.
The Bear saw nothing. Iris thought, heard nothing, noticed less and less. Certainly he should know better than to keep crossing Tracy as if he had something to teach her or could put her in her place. Didn't he know, when
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Tracy punched the refrigerator and stomped out of the kitchen after he had won some minor argument, that this rage was nothing compared to what Tracy self-contained, stored up and wielded afterward in all directions but especially at her mother—and Tracy has longtime legitimate claims. I know the Bear's a big dumb horny one-eyed romantic but can't he see what fighting with Tracy is doing to my loyalties?
And when you try to tell him he says . . .
Tracy's mad at me even when I'm extra nice to her, so I figure as long as she's mad anyway I might as well tell her how things really are.
Bear, that's the worst thing you can try to do.
Why? I've been walking on tiptoe since I got back and I can't keep it up forever.
Who said forever. Just bear with us for a little while, and—
You're leaving} he says, all gapmouthed and sorry-eyed.
Who said anything about leaving?
You're eaving}
. . . impossible! Why, whenever she tried to tell the Bear that she and her daughters needed time to themselves so she could get them settled and perhaps eventually adjusted to the idea of him, why did he take it so personally and read it as rejection and abandonment? Iris knew that he had been early, perhaps traumatically separated from his mother, but ... do I look like his mother? Can't he see straight?
He no longer hears anything you say. Then you have to trudge to the other end of the house, where Tracy is steaming, find the valve and try to ease that pressure off. . .
He thinks I'm this kid, Trace would tell her. He thinks I'm this chump kid who has nothing better to worry about than him. And if that's his attitude it's not going to change, is it, because once you bring that energy in, it stays there.
I agree with you about the energy, Iris would tell her—although it seemed to her that Tracy was repeating something she had heard somewhere—but if you'd just give the Bear a chance . . .
Does he give me one? No, he pulls one of those tirades on me— whammo—because he thinks I breathed wrong on his stereo. Who does he think he is? What does he xhmkyoii are. Mom?
You don't know him. Iris said, watching her daughter smirk at her.
I may not know him but I've seen him. I'm sure I haven't seen as much of him 2isyou have, but—
Tra-cy. . .
Well it's true isn't it so you don't have to take offense, because it is true so how can you then?
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. . . and she stamps her foot and walks away from you, happy in her triumph of spite.
It was exhausting. Even these internal playbacks were exhausting. Iris had hoped to be able to deal with her daughters and the Bear at the same time, but the logistics were too complicated, and she would have to reconfigure. Everyone thought she was so fluid, but she knew that she went at things in fixed ways, and she would have to reset herself. This was just too hard.
Iris had to stop and pause for thought. Real thought. A long time since she'd had the luxury of any. Life had turned into event event event. She had hoped to have a triumphant feeling after her daughters' rescue, but it had turned out to be a million tiny things, endless compHcations, just more life as usual. It was like working for a living again. It was worse.
She put her fingertips to her forehead and stood by the window and tried to slow things down.
Iris was no longer guarding her own fragile light but her daughters' bright-dark souls. They had seen too much, too young. Herb's decline into a drugged amoral world, and now their mother with the Bear.
Tracy had grown judgmental and severe, perhaps above all with her mother, whether for abandoning her initially or rescuing her now it was hard to tell. Iris remembered adolescence: you were out there on your own, no one around understood what you were going through, and the quickest cheap relief lay in finding someone to blame.
Amy, doing the standard younger-daughter two-step, had learned to be charming. Iris herself remembered becoming so charming that she could hardly breathe—it was still a problem—and behind Amy's levity there was a scary disarray in which Iris could recognize something akin to her own fractured counterfeit of grace and ease—so young, so soon!
If only the Bear could be a little more inteUigent about it, but he refused to see what her daughters had been through—technically short of sexual abuse perhaps, but depravity enough. But what could you expect? The Bear was more deeply human than any of the men she'd known, but he was also several times more male. Why should he be able to see farther than his cock? Why should she be surprised if he couldn't?
A period of graceful abstinence might have given her daughters time to get used to the idea of this . . . um . . . talking . . . heai' . . . um . . . living with their mother— fucking their mother: they knew the word. Well, perhaps not. But she had done everything on hope for so long. It was all she knew, and hoping for the best she had brought her daughters safely home.
It wasn't only that he expected to be loved or that he had no notion of
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how he looked in her daughters' eyes. He seemed to have no idea what sort of Hfe they needed.
Had she misplaced her faith in him?
She had tried to tell him some of this—and this might have been her first mistake—in bed, and when talk all too predictably ran out she had tried to communicate the facts to him with her body—with the finest demonstrations she could manage of tenderness, sensitivity, compassion, tact—and he had seemed to understand her. But when she talked with him afterward she saw that no fresh cognition had taken root. She must have been addlebrained to imagine that the necessary viewpoint could be communicated by means of sex. In any case that attempt was over.
She was trying hard not to snap into automatism—what the Bear called her tendency to jacklight—and cut him out, but it wasn't easy. She was being pressured from all sides. He knows how I am. Couldn't he ease off awhile? Couldn't he stop pushing me down when I'm trying to get up and walk?
Iris sipped from her goblet of chilled Australian chardonnay
She didn't want to remember what T
racy had suggested at breakfast that day, but she couldn't help hearing it again. "Maybe after the Bear leaves," Tracy had said, her face lowered but her dark eyes brightening, "do you think you could like buy us a dog?"
Sometimes Iris wondered if the Bear was plotting something intricate and obscure. For instance, when all was pretty much lost between the Bear and her daughters, after weeks of petty argument and social fi*ost, then, then he began making pathetic attempts to win them over and be charming.
He actually—it was hard to believe it—told them the Turkish story.
The Bear descended upon the girls in the living room after their early dinner one evening. Aim and Trace were dawdling over their homework on the floor and Iris was on the sofa idling through a magazine. The old and under the circumstances obscenely hideous Turkish story had rattled through the branches of the Bear's family tree for generations, and Iris knew it all too well; it had been part of his tentative lovesong to her in the old days.
Didn't he know, the idiot, that it was precisely the wrong tale to tell Tracy and Amy? This degree of impercipience had to be some kind of put-on. What was he plotting? What was he up to really?
Iris listened acutely, ready to intervene if the Bear crossed the line when he came to the crux of the story.
"You see," said the Bear, "in the old country, the bear who may have been my great-great-great-great-great-great—"
"We get it," Aim told him, not all that unsympathetically. Iris thought.
The Bear Comes Home 401
"—grandfather," the Bear said.
Iris heard Tracy sigh heavily. Don't tell the story, Iris urged the Bear in her mind. Although she knew that he could hear her sometime, he wasn't listening now.
"In the old country, there was a family that lived at the edge of a forest, and they had a beautiful young daughter who was betrothed to the eldest son of a family of hunters who lived nearby. Now, as it happened, the bear who was my great-great-great, um, you remember, used to watch this young woman from the edge of the forest, and the morning before her wedding day, when she went out to fetch water from the well..."
Iris let him get through the bear's abduction of the young woman betrothed to the hunter's son, and allowed him to describe how, once he had carried her to his cave, he licked the bottoms of her feet with his rough tongue to make them so tender she couldn't get away—the Bear was beyond oblivion in his failure to note the tension rising in the room, the incredulous looks on her daughters' faces, and the speed with which their minds had solved the equation that ended X = Mom—although the Bear did bring a certain, if overemoted, poignancy to the story-bear's primitive attempt to build, with branches he pulled from nearby trees, something that never quite resembled the house he intended as a wedding gift. When this gesture began to win the young girl over, Iris prepared herself to stop him before the story achieved fall sexuality, but here the Bear surprised her with a certain reticence and delicacy of detail, and she was ready to let the story run to its bloody conclusion—the hunter family's final revenge, led to the cave by a path of branchless trees—but before he could get there Tracy said, "I can't believe you're telling us this horrible story," took her younger sister by the hand and swept out of the room with a look of infinite loathing.
Iris watched the Bear blunder up to her looking utterly clueless. He raised the palms of his paws like Job and intoned the story's punchline in an approximation of the peasant girl's voice: "It was only a pile of sticks but it was my house; he was only a bear but he was my husband."
"Tracy's a bit hard on you but I agree with her," Iris told him. "How could you have told them that story?"
"I wanted them to see, I wanted them to appreciate ..."
"All they see is a bear with an erect penis violating a woman in a cave."
"The longing ... the poignancy ..."
"What poignancy?" Iris asked him, but she did have to reconsider: the Bear wasn't plotting anything: he was in fact at sea. She felt for him, tried not to, felt for him again.
What had happened to him? Couldn't he see anything at all?
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Iris would have wanted to include the Bear in her current world, but it wasn't working. She could configure her inner geometry only once in a moment of crisis or decision, and the resultant crystallization included what it could and lost what it could not. Initially, she had set herself to save Tracy and Amy and include the Bear, but it was becoming increasingly apparent that she would have to make a change. Circumstances were compelling her to put the Bear on a back burner.
She knew, she knew: it was unskilled of her, but what was she supposed to do? There were so many competing individualities in her she felt more like an orchestra than a person. Poor Iris. Poor Bear. My daughters! The Bear was purely, typically intent on living as he had before, and wouldn't see how impossible that had become.
It all seemed logical enough, but it left her with a familiar feeling of panic-stricken weakness, of impotence before the brute facts of life, and therefore . . . maybe she was only repeating a familiar error. What was she supposed to do? What?
And Iris also detected a certain vengeful glee in herself at the Bear's failures of perception—a horrid involuntary grin tugged at her mouth sometimes. This smirk rendered her whole line of thought suspect and odious.
Also, what she couldn't say to her daughters and, these days, hardly even to herself: God help me I love the Bear, and the conflict between Hfe with him and life with my daughters is tearing me apart. Aim and Trace must have precedence of course, but what can I do?
Iris melodramatically wrung her hands, saw it, couldn't stop.
What was she supposed to do? What?
She would have to separate her daughters from the Bear. But how was she to do it, and for how long?
Would three months be enough? It would be simplest to move back to New York, but the last thing she wanted to expose Aim and Trace to, after what they'd been through with Herb, was the brutality of the city, not to mention the horrors of its public schools. They were enrolled here, and even though they couldn't invite anyone home they were making friends.
How was she to get ahold of some time apart? Could the Bear move down to the city for a few months? But Jones was living with Sybil, and they would make an uneasy threesome.
And besides—this was the incredible part—she didn't want him to go. She was an idiot. She still loved him.
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These small waverings in her decisiveness had their material result. One stray afternoon, when she and the Bear were wandering around the otherwise empty house at the mercy of the nonintersecting geometric lines of force that dominated the space, they exchanged a series of involuntary looks and within a minute the Bear had her up against the wall and she had raised her skirts arid wrapped her legs around him as he entered her: a quick, shuddering, full-body trembler that possessed them completely while it lasted but must have shamed them both in the aftermath: neither of them looked at the other or spoke as the day turned suddenly sordid. They saw themselves in its harsh light, stooped guiltily to pick up every scrap of torn clothing, and bumped into each other going for the bucket so they could wash the floor and the wall clean. This wasn't Eden anymore.
"I can see the dreams you're having about me," Iris told him after another
night she'd spent on the living room sofa. They hadn't touched each other
for a week.
"I'm not surprised," said the Bear. "They're pretty vivid."
The Bear volunteered that he would sleep on the sofa instead, maybe even
try a night or two outdoors, and they both pretended that would fix it.
He made his bed in the outer darkness of the living room, dutifully tended the fire in the woodstove and hefted in big armfuls of logs: autumn was coming in and heat was necessary at night, especially upstairs, where her daughters slept. Caliban has a new master.
And habitat is shrinking all the time.
Some nights he couldn'
t sleep, sat up and watched TV with the volume down. One night he saw a nature documentary about a valley in Afi-ica, desert most of the time, which burst into bloom for two weeks a year when the runoff from the neighboring region's rainy season reached it—a brief explosion of color, then back to desolation—and the Bear felt like that valley.
Once earnest autumn set in, a number of uses were found for him. Gathering deadfall from uphill and sawing it into useful portions, and then—they took instruction fi-om an article in the Woodstock Times —he learned to snuffle morels out of the underbrush so that Iris could cook up fine new things in the kitchen.
The Bear went out on early-autumn expeditions with Iris and her daughters, on the end of an improvised leash in the interest of decorum and against the possibility of unwonted discovery with the girls present. But the plain fact was that he got into it, and along a side road up Mount Tremper way he
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uncovered a positive wealth of small black \Tinkly things whose tang attacked his nostrils with fierce, irresistible insistence. He ^alffed them out from under fallen leaves clodded with moist earth and passed them back to Iris and the burlap sack she carried, Aim and Trace dawdling behind, tangle-footed, bored, conversing inaudibly with each other. Amy had a tendency to trip and bark her knee and whine about going home; Tracy would tell her not to be so iret and they'd keep on awhile longer.
W^at had happened to the trace of humor he'd seen in Amy? Tracy had her under orders and under thumb. Tracy's detestation of him was plain, though God knows he'd tried to get her to like him. She was unapproachable, even sometimes by her mother, toward whom she seemed almost to condescend. Was it conscious, the way she wielded the whip of guilt over Iris? Or just a survivor's instinctive strategy. It occurred to him once or twice that even if he were not around, Tracy might be taking it out on Iris, avenging herself for being abandoned, perhaps even for being rescued—whatever she imagined the central wounding drama of her life to be. This insight seemed inteUigent, but there was nothing he could do with it.