Anyway, she had a kid, and the kid’s questions kept tripping me up — e.g., if you let people walk all over you, do you become a place?
Seven, seven and a half, and there were tiny whelms of hair already all over the guy.
I was flushy, heavy-faced, bluntly forty.
The morning they moved out (this was winter; flurries quibbled at the window), I made a sinking study of the lease. I had never given much thought to its terms before, the deductional verve of “lessor,” “lessee.” I was worded into the thing just once as an accountable, but the woman’s name was right and left, gothicked in fountain-pen flaunts.
In short, I left the apartment the way I had found it — evacuated, fakedly intact, incapacitated for any glorying course of residential circumstance.
This was the demising district’s lone block of limestone heights.
I had lived there wreckingly in pairs, and in notional associations of greater than two. I had painted many a rosy picture. My eyes, it had usually been claimed, were bigger than my asshole.
So I stored some things, some becalming ensembles, in my car of the decade, a four-door sobriety. Set out for a pay phone, called some people to ask after people even sparser. But after a while it was just their biles vying with mine.
Night was a portal to the morning, maybe, but morning was no gateway.
At the office campus: a couple of new hires on my level, a woman and a man. The man was in his meridian twenties, not a quick one to color. It was all I could do to show him the quickest way to disable a paper clip so it could no longer get a purchase on the pages; how to refuse food from people who came in one day with new teeth shingled over the old.
There were spatter-dash cookies all week the week he started.
We had, this new one and I, some jaunty pleasance in the john. We carried on without bywords or backwash, got to the bottom of our camaraderie pronto. He was inconclusively beautiful, a crude breather through it all, and I was easy to glut, even easier to usher out.
The other new one, the woman, gleamed in her attendance. She was one of those life-leading types newly mired. Her hair looked created just for the day.
A daughter of hers came in one morning, came over to my desk, uncautioned. She was jeweled meanly and sloping well out of her twenties, and said, “I do sense a life boarded up inside you.”
She let a hand deaden decently on my knee.
I made an appointment to meet her at the close of the week outside some vocational library beyond the county.
The day came (and so soon!) with a new droop to the sky. I drove out to the place, parked, welcomed a wait. She showed, though with a readied but refraining woman of her own. Just a girl with blacked-up, secluding hair, attractively uncertain in a man’s raincoat, a fraternal-looking thing.
I went off with the second.
Her apartment, a duplex — lawn chairs everywhere inside, an unheightened futon local to the dining room, track lamps watted lowly. It was a vague body she had, the breasts just glib, simple growths. The mossy hair on her wrists — lichen, rather, it looked like — took a weak but exact tack down her back, too. I was grateful for the broadway of bone that ran the wan length of it.
The usual skewing of selves, and then a brother upstairs if I felt I needed a look.
I did later make it up the steps. Found him adrowse undrunkenly in the tub. (The water hued, perfumed, kept bubblish with pumps. Wind chimes strung from the showerhead and set chinkling by an electric fan.)
Above the waterline: the snuggery of his underarms, an unhardihood to the shoulder blades — the healing neck, the face sharp-featured and finagledly beardless.
He talked; said he hoped to be seen as a behaving presence thereafter. Said he wanted to look traveled and dressy from a distance. Saw himself as an original in strickenness, long uncopied.
I took a seat on the toilet.
Did I agree, in maybe theory, that there were the taken, and the takers, and, between them, the kinds catastrophizing quietly?
A hand came suffering upward from the suds.
Tell the truth, he said: didn’t I now feel teamed?
I sat some more, then felt fickle, went back downstairs to sit a while longer with the sister. But the arms I put around people always met up again with each other.
It was fitting to call our sessions at our desks “shifts,” because shift I did — I mean, I fended, scraped along, moved from one point to a point just beyond. There was a lunchroom where I referred crackers backhandedly into my mouth, and a lobby with a guard who stood with hirsute goodwill behind a counter, and a restroom off the lobby. Above the urinals: a “please flush” sign, with a clip-art elephant and “Don’t Forget!” scripted down its trunk. But I wanted my piss pooling, maturing, in the bowl with everyone else’s.
The day widened as you tired of it.
This still was Thursday. Then Friday finally underfoot. Then a three-day weekend, a second-string holiday thought necessary to observe.
I knew enough to go home. The route was more formal now, with toll-takers trained to thank. Then an oncoming car not far from the turnoff, and I slipped up — got the windshield wipers going by mistake.
I was afraid the swipes might be taken for communication or, worse yet, a wave.
Then a pyloned bridge, the spotless boulevards, thinning streets of close-set addresses.
My folks! They had each overshot their marriage but otherwise went about ungulfed by life. They welcomed me back to their shams. Nothing was amiss or cosmic in my old, dormered room upstairs. A promising first gush of sleep, and then I awoke to the usual voices pluming upward through the baseboards.
I had not got a whole lot out of my heritage except a hoarseness like his, a poked heart on the order of her own.
They were savvier in their lamentations now.
Forty I was, and then fortier, fluking through my annual reviews, carrying my deskside trash home at the end of a day rather than running any risk of its being examined.
Just an inkling of skyline to this city. Nobody had thought to get lyrical about it yet. I was living on the brink of downtown but not, so to speak, alone.
There was an injuring party in his tindery fifties, and another, only lately unbunched from a family, querying out of some hole.
Then one who may have gone on to ape something
wonderful.
And yet another, much younger: wronged early on, then doctored, restarted, struck by blows again. She had eyes of a deep, speaking green, but it was a green that spoke differently in a day’s time.
I could roll off the names, the work numbers, of them all.
I could let a little thing or two ruin every other thing.
Things true of me should be even truer of you.
Sometimes people are too close to call.
The Sentence Is a Lonely Place
I came to language only late and only peculiarly. I grew up in a household where the only books were the telephone book and some coloring books. Magazines, though, were called books, but only one magazine ever came into the house: a now-long-gone photographic general-interest weekly commandingly named Look. Words in this household were not often brought into play. There were no discussions that I can remember, no occasions when language was called for at length or in bulk. Words seemed to be intruders, blown into the rooms from otherwhere through the speakers of the television set or the radio, and were easily ignorable as something alien, something not germane to the forlornities of life within the house, and readily shut off or shut out. Under our roof, there was more divulgence and expressiveness to be made out in the closing or opening of doors, in footfalls, in coughs and stomach growlings and other bodily ballyhoo, than in statements exchanged in occasional conversation. Words seemed to be a last resort: you had recourse to speech only if everything else failed. From early on, it seemed to me that the forming and the release of words were the least significant of the mouth’s activities. When words did come hazarding out of a mouth, they did not lastingly change anything about the mouth they were coming out of or the face that hosted the mouth. They often seemed to have been put in there by some force exterior to the person speaking, and they died out in the air. They were not something I could possess or store up. Words certainly weren’t inside me.