Certain American States_Stories Page 7

  Sean had disregarded the landscape assignment and instead painted a cartoon duck in a gray puddle. Someone sighed heavily, though when I turned to see who it was, they all appeared to have been sighing.

  Does anyone have something to say about Sean’s landscape? Yes? No?

  This silence, I thought, could choke a person.

  Okay, I’ll start. So I think you’re developing an interesting sense of line, but I’m curious, Sean, about how you came to the decision that this would count as a landscape?

  It is a landscape.

  It really just isn’t, you see—

  Actually, there is some land, right there—

  This doesn’t even matter, Megan interrupted us both, something she had the right to do as the class’s self-appointed leader. We’re going to be lawyers, not artists.

  Others nodded. Some were asleep.

  Well, when you’re lawyers you can sue me for improving your graded-wash technique, but for now you’re in my classroom and I require participation. Anyone else? Anything to say to Sean?

  I felt as if I were standing on a building ledge, a hard wind blowing in my face. Megan used a plastic stylus to make a note on some little device while cutting her eyes toward me.

  Well, if there’s anything you need to say to Sean, I guess you can say it to him at some point between now and the rest of his life.

  * * *

  When I came home from class that day, Ellen was crying, bent over her knees on the couch just sobbing and sobbing. I sat beside her and whispered, What’s wrong, what’s wrong? She kept on for some time and I thought, well, someone is probably dead and I must admit I hoped it was her mother. She’d had a long life, after all, and she was mean as hell and I never liked her, though I could stand Ellen’s father, always chuckling in a corner and offering me Scotch again and again so he could freshen his own glass. In the last year her mother had become insistent about Sunday mass and Ellen had, rather quickly if you ask me, given in, first complaining on her way out of bed, but soon coming home with a superior glint, smug about enduring multiple punishments before noon on a weekend and all of this could be over, I thought, as Ellen wept, if only her mother was dead.

  A half hour later she sat up, wiped her face, went to the kitchen, took a whole raw chicken from the fridge, and began rubbing it with dark spices. It seemed her mother would live another day. I watched her hands on the chicken, watched the spices darken its pale, dead skin, waiting for her to explain herself.

  How was class, she said, staring out a window as her hands mushed the carcass.

  After dinner we sat on the back porch and she lit a cigarette and told me she had been renting cars in the middle of the week, driving them in circles all day. North on one highway, south on another, west and east again. Her expression was guilty and defiant, as if admitting an affair she didn’t regret.

  Renting cars?

  Yes.

  And just … driving around?

  That’s right.

  I would have asked more, but she made no room for it.

  Have you ever heard, she said, then interrupted herself with a long pull from her cigarette (and when had she taken it up again?), about that culture in ancient Mesopotamia that believed a man wasn’t really a father unless a stone the size of his child’s skull was shoved up his ass as the birth was taking place?

  She knows how much I love obscure history, but this blindsided me. She blew smoke over her right shoulder.

  My God, I said into my hand.

  She crushed the stub into a potted fern, covered her face, and began to silently heave. I thought she was crying again, but when I went to her—What’s wrong?—she jolted.

  I’m kidding, she said through laughter. God, you’re so—you’re so—

  I just take you at your word, I said, remaining calm and speaking clearly.

  Relax, she said.

  I am relaxed. I was relaxed.

  You’re so uptight. She was turning the lighter over and over in one palm. Sometimes I think it’s because nothing bad has ever happened to you, so you can’t even take the thought of something bad happening to anyone.

  You know that’s not true.

  Name one traumatic thing that’s happened to you.

  This is ridiculous.

  One thing, she said. Name one traumatic event.

  For a moment I tried to take her request seriously: I paged through the years—grade school, college, adulthood—and thought of my parents—kind and wealthy and alive and well, but it didn’t seem right, it just didn’t seem like a thing I should be doing, trying to legitimize myself this way. I stopped thinking. I crossed my legs and watched her flick the lighter on, smiling, swishing her fingers through the flames. Maybe she was the traumatic thing that had happened to me, I thought but didn’t say.

  Ellen went inside, made a big show of sliding the glass door behind her to keep the air-conditioning in—something I only had to ask her to do for about three years until she could be almost reliably counted on to do it—then she mushed her face against the glass, nostrils flared, cheeks puffed, showing all her teeth. A smear of face grease and spit was left behind. You only learn who you’ve married after it’s too late, like one of those white mystery taffies you have to eat to find the flavor, and even then, it’s just a guess.

  * * *

  And maybe there are times a person just tries to hold still, like your whole dumb life is a game of hide-and-seek and the seeker has just entered the room and you’re curled under the coffee table and if you only hold your breath you’ll survive another round. I was thinking of this the afternoon one of my watercolor lawyers, Leroy, seemed to have fallen into a trance at his easel after consuming a large container of hot-and-sour soup. He’d been still for a full hour. I’d been keeping a peripheral tab on him to ensure he was blinking, breathing, but the time had come, I thought, for an intervention.

  Are you okay?

  He stayed still for just long enough that I almost began to repeat myself, but he said: I’m thinking … about what I … could … paint.

  You know, you’d really be better off at least trying.

  The whole class had stopped whatever little work they were doing to stare at us.

  Heidegger said, Leroy said, in a heavier voice, that the possible ranks higher than the actual.

  Well, I said. My heart rate increased. It’s always been unclear to me what Heidegger’s fucking problem was, but you’ll need to get to work if you expect to get a passing grade. You can’t improve unless you try.

  We’re not trying to improve, Megan interrupted. We have better things to do!

  Everyone has better things to do, I said to all of them. That’s not the point. The point is you’ll never get anywhere if you don’t accept that other people get to tell you how to behave. That’s what a law is. What kind of lawyers do you plan to be if you can’t even—

  I’m just here for the attendance credit, Megan said. A unified silence. I was nothing more than their enemy, I realized then. I stood in the way of everything they wanted. I almost cried or perhaps I did cry, though just a little. Didn’t they understand? Didn’t they feel moved at all by making something beautiful?

  Megan? I called out, transfiguring my pain into anger, clenching my jaw. Is Megan here?

  Megan snorted, folded her arms.

  Well, I guess Megan’s been absent today, I said.

  Megan frowned, then smiled, and her smile slowly widened to show teeth. It was somehow clear we were both thinking of how her tuition paid my wages, perhaps only a dollar of it, but still. She was the customer—always right—so she carrot-ed that dollar above me, or perhaps had it there in pennies, flicking them at me one by one.

  I let them go early, drew the blinds to the room, spread out facedown on the linoleum, maybe slept for a moment, maybe just licked the floor. I tried to hold still, to hold very still. It was not clear how long I would have to be here, hiding.

  And maybe it was just autumn, that back-to-school feeling, th
at cyclical reminder that everything falls apart, or perhaps it was just the loneliness I’d felt since Ellen had become something more like a mean roommate than my wife, but lying there in the dim art studio I began to think back to college, specifically of that guy Jared—a townie, some years older, a sort of suspicious person but the right kind of suspicious for the time. We did Jägermeister shots, drove drunk, set an old couch on fire—or rather, he did all these things and I warmed my palms in the heat of his wildness. We spent whole weekends smoking terrible pot and listening to worse music. He had a vast collection of bootleg Grateful Dead cassettes and approximately one emotion.

  After a few months Jared and I had a falling out and I wondered if perhaps this would have counted, to Ellen, as a traumatic event. It was spring break and we were stoned at his apartment, which I later realized was just a motel room. We had been playing video games and drinking grape soda for a few days when there was a knock at the door. Jared went to open it and another Jared was there. Jared shook Jared’s hand and the new Jared came in, sat down, took my controller, and started playing my side of Mario Kart. I was saying What the fuck? over and over, until I realized I actually hadn’t been speaking at all, was just slumped over, stunned. Both Jareds looked at me. One of them asked the other if he thought I was okay. The asked Jared shrugged at the asking Jared. Eventually I found the energy to run out of there without my shoes, ran until I realized neither Jared was chasing me, that they had both just let me go. The next day when Jared came by my dorm I pretended not to be home, stared at the door until the knocking went away.

  Weeks later I found him lurking outside the science building after my chemistry class. He had my shoes in a plastic grocery bag, said he owed me an apology. Turns out he had a twin, had planned this whole thing as a prank.

  You freaked out pretty bad, dude. I guess that bud’s pretty strong or something, I remember him saying, kicking at the ground, and another thing, he said, he had to come clean about—come clean, those were his actual words—was that he wasn’t twenty-five, he was nineteen and a half with a good fake ID, and he hadn’t really been homeless for a year, that really he just had a lying problem, though he was working on it.

  How did one actually work on such a problem? And what do you even do with someone who tells you they have a lying problem? Could they be lying about their lying problem? And what was the difference, other than rhetoric, between a liar and a person with a lying problem? I imagined his lying problem as a calculus equation so large he would have no choice but to give up on it and live in that motel room forever.

  But I swear I’ll pay you back, for the grand, I mean, and the plane ticket.

  It doesn’t matter, I said, because it didn’t. My grandfather, who had died when I was a baby, had set up a trust fund so large and swelling it frightened me, so I’d just been giving away. Months before, when Jared asked me for a thousand dollars and a round-trip ticket to Milwaukee, I didn’t even ask him why. I’d nearly forgotten about it.

  It matters to me, dude, Jared said. It matters to me. I’ve been working on getting my shit together, on, like, growing up and shit.

  It’s really okay. I walked back to my dorm and Jared biked his little stunt bike in the other direction and I never saw him again. I had decided just then that Jared’s aesthetic didn’t suit me anymore and I was going to steer my life in some other, better way. I was going to start tucking my shirt in. I was going to cut my hair.

  But there on the art-studio floor, defeated, I felt oddly sentimental about Jared, how he wore shorts and Tevas year-round, how he seemed to feel nothing. Before Ellen became my mean roommate, long before she was even my wife, back when our talking was 50 percent backstory and no percent groceries, she would often tell me of the litany of horrible things that had happened to her, each time telling me the lesson she’d learned from the trauma, so maybe Jared had taught me that if someone tells you his whole family was killed in a house fire and he’d been surviving on his own since he was sixteen and that person is also selling drugs you’ve never even heard of, and if he’s also living in a motel room and says everything in the exact same tone of voice—maybe that is just too many things and you should avoid that person. Still, I wondered what had become of him, his lying problem, his obscure drug business. Had he gone to jail? Had he ever gotten his shit together? And how could you even tell if a person has effectively gathered their shit?

  I must admit, I find it both convenient and upsetting how easy it is to find a person now, how you can just type a name into a telephone and more often, it seems, than not, you can find a trace of them—a job, college, odd photograph, wedding announcement, mug shot, obituary as survivor or subject. It seems anyone can seem to know where almost anyone else seems to be.

  Though I felt that Jared should be unfindable, a figment, he appeared immediately. He was running a highly trafficked blog called The Grateful Dad. He’d cut off his dreadlocks, become Christian, gained some weight, married, and created three small children with an extremely pale woman. I found a picture of her on a post titled “The Grateful Mom”—a low-angle shot, her pale hair and skin nearly disappearing into a pale sky. I scrolled through the many pages of the blog, went months and years back, scrolled through infinite comment threads, read paid product placements, the parent-of-the-week series, the tips and hacks and softly religious prayerlike paragraphs Jared posted each Monday.

  I was still holding the phone close to my face when the door to the art studio opened. It was Sean, backlit by the hall light. I was lying flat on my stomach, head on its side, facing him.

  Forgot my hat. He crossed the room, picked up a red baseball cap, and hurried away.

  * * *

  That afternoon, I found Ellen in a fine mood. She was blasting a Motown record and swaying around the living room with the vacuum cleaner. The smell of cookies baking.

  I stood at the door and smiled at her. I was returning home, but it felt more like she was returning from something, like she had been hiding in a body that looked just like her body but wasn’t her body and now she’d come free of that other body and she was herself again, uncomplicated, but when she saw me, the real Ellen vanished again.

  Home early, she said.

  Isn’t that nice?

  No response. She coiled up the vacuum cord like a roadie running late.

  I sent my terrible students away early, and I don’t like to complain, but they are really just terrible.

  I told her about the Heidegger thing, and Megan, and their many telephones, and though I’d just said I didn’t like to complain I realized then that I really did like to complain, a little. A little vitriol could make you feel human, give you the sense that you may be the kind of person who could break something on purpose, throw a plate at a wall just like that, just to prove a little human point. I made sure to leave gaps in my tirade for Ellen to interject, to affirm me, to say, Yeah, yeah, fuck them and their laws, but she remained silent, had turned the record off, sat still in the kitchen looking at her folded hands.

  And how was your day? I asked.

  She’d never been hesitant to tell me about her work, scientific research for a book she was writing on a topic that, to be honest, I never really understood. Something about tropical bat populations, or bat populations of the tropics (there was some difference in the terminology that I never correctly remembered, a forgetting that she believed indicated a disregard for her career—her career: she spoke of it as if it were a person dangling from a cliff’s edge—so I learned to ask general questions). Regardless, she stayed quiet for a long time until she finally addressed her clasped hands: I just think it’s absurd that you think it’s fine to complain to me about your job when you know you don’t have to do it.

  But I do have to do something with my time, I—

  You could live on that trust the rest of your life—

  Well, so could you.

  She scoffed. You’re going to go there? Really? You’re really going to go there?

  Wel
l, no. I certainly did not want to go there, and I had no intention of going there, but she, it seemed, was already there, so it was too late—

  It’s not mine and I don’t want it, you can keep your fucking money! she screamed. I’ve said this a thousand fucking times—it’s poison. I’ve said this a million times—it’s a complete sabotage to having an original thought to be that coddled—I don’t want you to even mention the fucking trust fund—

  You were actually the one that brought it up.

  Her face went slack. The smell of cookies burning.

  When the front door slammed, a few hair wads and dust clumps were kicked up in the gust. I ran out to the stoop to see her driving away in a gray car I didn’t recognize. She drove slowly, coming to a complete stop at the end of the block, signaling, turning left.

  * * *

  As night fell, I sat in the living room looking at that dent in the wall from years ago, where she had thrown a volume of The Oxford English Dictionary after I told her, a week after our courthouse wedding, about the fund, how much was in it, how I didn’t really know what to do with it, how I didn’t take anything out anymore unless I had a bad month or a client was late to pay.

  So you do those cartoon things because you—what? You just like doing it?

  I wanted to say—but didn’t say—but severely wanted to say that it wasn’t kind of her to reduce my hand-painted children’s room murals to mere cartoon things. Instead I said nothing, though I could have said that early and consistent exposure to dynamic and well-crafted imagery tailored for a child helps to develop their understanding of space, color, and composition and is essential to their later ability to solve problems creatively. Or I could have told her that children who grew up sleeping by a hand-painted mural were 80 percent more likely than the average child to earn college scholarships and 40 percent less likely to behave violently or self-destructively as an adolescent, but I had told her all this before and could vaguely remember her disputing the statistics as not purely causal, but I suppose I expected, perhaps wrongly, for her to remember that at least I believed that my work had a measurably positive effect. Regardless, she was the one with the moral currency to spend, since she’d just learned of this kept secret and that I actually owned our apartment, had bought it in cash years ago, and there was no landlord named Alvin.