Certain American States_Stories Read online

  But in some wordless corner of us we must have also known or felt—this is the last time. So the apology kiss became urgent and more urgent, and it became more like an early-days kiss, like time had bent our love back on itself, folded it like a sheet with the end meeting the beginning. And the urgency built, became animal, and I heard his belt clang just before he pushed me over, pushed the sheets aside, pushed into me, and even though I don’t usually like it this way, face in pillow, hardly able to move, a startling angle—it seemed just then that this was all I could bear. To be done to.

  Afterward he stood there at the door, suitcase in hand, and he looked at me not like a man who was leaving but like a man who had just arrived, as if he had just come home and hadn’t expected to find me here. He smiled, uncertain, in the lamplight, said, Bye.

  I heard his band almost canceled the tour but couldn’t for some reason, just took two nights off and hired another bassist. Adrian himself had been a replacement for a replacement, so it seemed they had been ready, all along, to replace him as well.

  * * *

  In the park one day a man, a stranger, sat on the other end of my habitual bench wearing Adrian’s worn-out pale blue shirt, the one I almost kept.

  I almost kept that one, I said. I didn’t even have to turn my head to see it. My peripheral has always been strangely strong, though I’m nearsighted for everything else. Before us a half dozen tennis players darted and swung themselves across the courts. I kept my eyes on them, listening to every groan and gasp.

  The man said, Sorry? And I said, No, you’re not. And he said, What? And I said, Why would you be?

  I think you must have me confused with someone else, he said, and finally I turned to him. Very quickly I could tell that this man was in a sort of life intersection. Not a crossroads, not a time where a decision needed to be made, but something like a junction in an old, unplanned city where ten streets hit each other in a burst and there is nothing but choices and no clear answers and no clear path, just chaos, too many options. Perhaps he had spent years of his life in such a place, wandering from corner to corner, wearing shirts picked up off the street.

  No, I said after a considerable pause, I’m not confused. You’re the man wearing the shirt you’re wearing.

  I slid down the bench to be closer to him, or to the shirt, or the past—it wasn’t exactly clear. The shirt held this man more snugly than it had fit Adrian. A little gnarled and bursting, this man. He told me his name was Frank but that people called him Frankie. The hairs on Frankie’s arm were raised, alert, so I patted them down only to watch them rise again.

  It was my husband’s shirt, and now he’s not around and you’re wearing his shirt. Now it’s your shirt.

  You mean he’s …

  I answered his nonquestion in a glance. We already had a shorthand, Frankie and I. It could’ve had something to do with the shirt, maybe. I reached out to touch the sleeve. It felt the same as ever.

  And you gave away all his clothes? Frankie asked, and I said, Yes, that’s right.

  After a long silence Frankie said, That’s wild, all slow and reverent. You don’t care or nothing? You don’t want to hold on to them?

  I didn’t say anything and he took that as an answer, nodded, looked back up at the matches being won and lost.

  I’m forty-three years old, he said, and I’ve never known anyone who died. Puts me on edge, you know? Even my grandparents, all four of them, still alive. Everyone’s still alive. All my stupid friends, even though we’ve done such stupid shit—we should be dead, at least one of us, but—nope. Living.

  I didn’t see why this was a problem really but I didn’t say so. I didn’t know how it might work over there, for those still sipping pulpy juices beside a great pool of life.

  We kept silently watching the people hurl themselves around the green courts, and I considered telling Frankie the story that Corina had once told me about that long white scar on her arm. When she was a young wife, she said, there were all these temptations, and she’d never quite managed to sweat out all those years of Catholic school, so she bent one edge of a coat hanger into the shape of a snake, held it over the stove flame till it was nearly molten, and branded herself. She didn’t want to forget, she told me, how much she cared about doing right. Now there’s this smooth white snake on her arm, keeping her out of trouble, perhaps, writhing there for at least a few more years. I didn’t know you were married, I told Corina when she told me this, not knowing what else to say. I still am, she said.

  I wanted to tell Frankie this story, I guess, as a long way of saying that a person can force whatever issue they want on themselves, but the more I thought about that idea the less I was sure about it, so I kept quiet. Light was leaving, and tennis players were leaving, and eventually I was leaving too. I got up and said, So long, to Frankie, went home, not missing my door this time, knowing right where I belonged.

  A few days later Frankie met me at that park bench again. He was holding the blue shirt folded in a neat square.

  I don’t like it anymore, Frankie said. Here. I washed it.

  I don’t want it back.

  Just take it.

  I got up and began walking home and it’s not my fault that Frankie followed me. He kept saying, Just take the shirt, just take it back, and usually I wouldn’t accept a strange man following me home but when I got to my door I somehow invited him in. Wordless, he followed, and though I told him to make himself at home he just stood still and dumb by the door before lowering himself, silently, onto the couch.

  I got us two glasses of water, adding slices of lemon though I never do that, had never done that before, and haven’t done that since. We sat in the living room for a moment. He looked around. Nice place, he said, though he would have said that anywhere, Frankie, that’s the sort of man he is, I guess, finding niceness in every glance.

  I said, Frankie, put the shirt back on.

  Listen, is this some kind of … But he seemed unable to finish the question. Just what is it you’re after?

  Put the shirt back on.

  He drank his water, drank it deeply, finished it. He stood up and unbuttoned his shirt as if it were physically painful, as if he were removing a body part. He put on the blue shirt in a hurry then stood there all still and uncertain and my God, I thought he was going to cry, sweet Frankie.

  You must miss him, Frankie said. I can’t imagine. I just—I can’t imagine.

  He was covering his eyes. I looked at the carpet. I looked at the ceiling. I looked at the shirt and for a moment everything was perfect. Something had vanished and something had been found. I had found some sort of unfolding that was not yet done unfolding and it was golden hour and the light fell into the room like a gift for which I’d already written the thank-you note and could now just enjoy.

  I used to wake in the middle of the night and check to see if my husband was still my husband or if he was actually a sack of flour, I eventually said, hiding my hands behind me like a shy child. You know how in high school they used to give teenagers sacks of flour to make them not want to impregnate each other? It was like that except he was a whole human-size sack of flour that looked and acted like a human being but was really a sack of flour.

  Frankie said he understood me completely and I believed him. It didn’t matter if I really thought he understood, just that I believed him.

  Did you know your fears become your life?

  I told him I had read that somewhere.

  No, he said, I am saying it to you now.

  It’s true, I said. I agree with you. I see the world the way you do, at least in this one regard.

  How nice for us. Frankie picked up and finished my glass of water, fishing the lemon slice out and absently ripping it to bits.

  I used to always worry that Adrian would die in a plane crash or from some undetectable illness or that he would be mistaken for someone else and fatally knifed. Then he did die, and now I haven’t stopped wondering if I worried it into being.
r />   Well, it was going to happen one day or another, Frankie said. Not to be a downer, but you know it’s true.

  He had a point, I just didn’t like his point. I suppose I wanted to feel that I had known all along how it would end, that I contained some sort of foresight.

  How did he die? Frankie asked, hunched over the coffee table, pushing the torn lemon rind into a little pile.

  I don’t want to say. Or perhaps I didn’t know or couldn’t remember or perhaps it had never happened. I felt sure that I had never known a single thing for certain, but that couldn’t have been true. I must have known something. I knew nothing’s ever been written that can’t be erased. I knew that every idea negates another. Every page I’ve ever read shuts some doors and opens others. Everything breaks even. And maybe I said some of this to Frankie, or maybe he was the one saying it to me. It’s so hard to remember, to keep anything straight. Anytime I speak or listen to another person I feel there is a hand atop mine on a Ouija board and it’s never clear who is moving and who is being moved and I think I’m always looking for the times that the pair can be moved by a third thing, something outside us, better than us.

  Just then the door opened and Adrian was there, dragging his suitcase, looking weary from all the places he’d been. He said, You left it unlocked again.

  The room was very still and Frankie stood there like a photograph of himself.

  Is that my shirt?

  It’s joyless, I said to Adrian. You don’t need it.

  Says who?

  The window was wide open and Frankie was gone, taking the shirt with him. He must have crawled out onto the ledge and dropped onto the stoop, which was a way I had also escaped, at least once in the past and perhaps again very soon—it isn’t such a difficult thing to do. Still, I admired him for doing it, for doing something so simple as leaving.

  Adrian opened his suitcase and all the clothes I’d given away were there, dirty from the afterlife he’d returned from, and already he was laughing, already he was smiling again, fine with being undead, coming home to the same home, staying, somehow, always the same.

  I weep athletically almost every day and sometimes I cannot get down a city block without collapsing but Adrian is always upright and smiling and glad, so glad, so glad. It may be we do not live in the same world at all. Some nights I wake up and panic, thinking he’s truly gone, for real this time, and I lie there shaking, all my organs going wild in me for hours until I roll over and see he’s been beside me all along. I keep sleeping in the wrong places, I think, or maybe I’m just waking up not where I am.

  The Healing Center

  Sylvia put her hands on her belly and she put her hands on her hips and she faced the mirror and she turned sideways to the mirror and she faced it again. I lowered my hands from my chest and put them on my hips too and looked into the mirror at the opposite of Sylvia and at the opposite of me, at all the flesh and hair and shapes we were living in.

  Why do we look like this? Sylvia asked, so I asked Sylvia, Why do we look like what? and Sylvia said, Like women? Why are we women?

  I looked at Sylvia’s body in the mirror and I looked at my body in the mirror and I remembered that my skin is the color that panty-hose companies mean when they say nude and Sylvia’s skin is not that color. Sylvia is an ample woman and she is the right kind of ampleness, by which I mean she has been strategically engineered by God or whatever to cause earthshaking want in people, the kind of want that leads people to stay up all night, hostage.

  I don’t know, Sylvia said. Never mind.

  Sylvia was doing a lot of never-minding back then, so much never-minding that it became unclear if she minded anything at all anymore, or if she minded her own mind or even my mind, or anything that was mine. She’d spent the week cutting her bangs slanted and balancing grapes on her belly button and letting pots of porridge cook to soot on the stovetop.

  That’s okay, I told her as the apartment filled with the smoke, people become forgetful when they are happy or worried or thinking about the airplanes of soon and all you need to do is tell me which one you’re doing.

  I already knew the answer, but back then I was the kind of person who sometimes asked people to say aloud what I already knew—it was obvious that Sylvia was thinking about the airplanes of soon and which one she’d be on and where it would go and what she might do when she got there.

  I knew she’d do this from the first day she moved in, so it is true that I let myself break myself or maybe, rather, I let herself let myself break my self and by self I mean heart except I take issue with using that word that way, because I don’t think we have any reason to pile such a responsibility on that organ, the word of that organ. Everyone knows a heart is just responsible for filling a thing with blood, except it never fills love with blood because no one can do that because love comes when it wants and it leaves when it wants and it gets on an airplane and goes wherever it wants and no one can ever ask love not to do that, because that is part of the risk of love, the worthwhile risk of it, that it will leave if it feels like leaving and that is the cost of it and it is worth it, worth it, worth it. This is the mantra of Sylvia and this is the way she is.

  * * *

  Sylvia found me at my own never-mind moment, back when the acupuncturist was the only person who would listen to me anymore. Doctors one, two, three, all said I was bluffing; doctor four said nothing, left me cold-toed in my paper gown. The acupuncturist wanted me to talk about my mother. How did I feel about her? Did she sing to me when I was a child?

  Sylvia was the receptionist for the acupuncturist, but all she did was point to a sheet of paper that said Sign Me, and I would come in and she wouldn’t look at me at all until one day she did look at me and when she looked at me, I also looked at me and I also looked at her and she also looked at herself and we both found we liked what we were looking at.

  And so we found ourselves months later waking up in the same place all the time, going to sleep in the same place all the time, walking link-armed to the acupuncturist, the healing center.

  But one day in my living room Sylvia stirred her teacup but there wasn’t anything in it, so it just went clank clank, and then I knew, for some reason, we weren’t going anywhere link-armed anymore.

  Do you ever get the feeling, Sylvia asked, that you’re a lab rat?

  That I’m a lab rat? That I’m a lab rat or that you’re a lab rat? Which of us?

  Sylvia didn’t say anything for a minute, kept stirring no tea in her teacup.

  Who is the lab rat?

  Who indeed, she said, and I said, Fuck you, Sylvia, this isn’t a fairy tale, Sylvia, you can’t just say stupid things like that to real people.

  I’ll say it.

  You won’t, I said, but she said, I will, just watch me.

  Learning

  It’s hard to know which of us began to wear our shoes in the apartment, but one of us did—one of us, then the other. First it was just in the kitchen, but soon there were tracks in the bedroom, bathroom, living room, everywhere. Old receipts and leaves crept in. The floor grew filthy. We got out-of-season colds. Ellen let clumps of her hair tumbleweed around, clogging the carpet, the drains, and I was no longer careful with the dishes, dropping plates and glasses so often we learned not to flinch at the smash, and though we still recycled, we did so poorly, never rinsing, never sorting, curbing them on the wrong night. We both knew the baking soda had been in the freezer a very long time, many years, a lifetime, but neither of us made a move to dispose of or replace it.

  Perhaps, I thought, we had both given up together, both given up being good at exactly the same moment.

  Around this time the commissions stopped coming and I decided to take a job I was grateful to have but hated to do: teaching (I use this word loosely) a watercolor elective at a law school downtown. Half the students came to class stoned or loudly eating take-out noodles from a Chinese restaurant across the street. The rest openly disparaged the idea of making something so useless as art
, insisted this wasn’t a real class, that it was just meant to be stress relief.

  Like adult coloring books, one of them said, none of this really matters.

  And isn’t that great, I said, isn’t it just so great that nothing matters?

  They stared at me and blinked at the floor, or maybe it was the other way around. One yawned, making the one next to him yawn, then the one next to her, and the yawning spread like that, like a wave through sports fans.

  Early in the semester, as I was demonstrating a technique for creating a nuanced palette, I noticed an inky bruise on my white shirt (we’d stopped sorting the laundry, letting the darks bleed on the lights), which would have been fine except it soiled my strategy of overdressing for class in order to be taken seriously. Friday afternoons already felt like the crumbling end of something, and it didn’t help that I was just a mangy little adjunct in stained clothes with the perpetual look of having just been slapped. They blended their pigments into muddy grays and browns and fondled their telephones. They all had telephones and spent most of their time gazing at them. Some of them had two telephones; one of them carried, it seemed, three telephones.

  How could I even call this teaching? All I did was speak to a roomful of people who made no reply. No discussion. No inquiries. Nothing even remotely Socratic. They were pointedly silent during the critiques. Once I tried to rally them with something like a motivational speech about how watercolor, unlike other water media, requires the artist to anticipate and influence the movements of liquid instead of trying to fight them.

  It’s a lot like being a lawyer, I said, shifting my weight from one leg to the other. Or it might be like that. You know, leveraging a situation … The uncertainty and improvisation you might need … in …

  I returned my attention to the painting tacked unevenly to the corkboard.

  Okay, so who’d like to start the critique?