David Wallace - Girl With Curious Hair

The Lenny who did my wife Mrs. Labov's shopping for months when God knows he had work of his own and plenty of it to do in school for his degree and doctorate, when Mrs. Labov's phlebitis got extreme and I had to be at the shop tailoring and the elevator in the building was broken and the landlord, even during Kennedy and Johnson he was trying to get us out, he took criminal time in getting to repairs, and Sandra would give Len a list.

Mrs. Tagus is telling Lenny on the phone to just hold it right there. That she has things to tell him, as a mother. There is the fortitude of the person who carries around stomach trouble every day in her voice's tone. The cold of my kitchen makes for a pain in my hands and I put them under my arms, under my lined coat, like Arnold Tagus's old coat, that I made.

LENNY

As I spoke and listened to my mother, envisioning her hand at either her stomach or her eyes, the two physical loci of any of the troubles she gathers to her person and holds like shiny prizes, Mr. Labov doubtless at his black teapot, baggy old pants accumulating at his ankles and sagging to reveal the northern climes of his bottom (god I feel pathos for people whose pants sag to reveal parts of their bottom), envisioning him clucking and casting, from a cloak of tea steam, glances at my mother, at the phone, my mother no doubt leaning for support against the lurid peeling wall of Labov's prehistoric kitchen; and as I reviewed the letter, undoubtedly couched somewhere on the person of my mother, the letter a doomed exercise in disinformation I could not even finish before sending it from me, rabid with a desire that things be somehow just known, that it be out, the waiting over and trauma-starter's gun's sharp crack — [keep]

— I found myself raw and palsied with the urge, in mid-conversation — the conversation consisted as usual chiefly of pauses, the wire's special communication of the sound of distance, electric and lonely — the urge… to explain. To explain. And as I urged my mother to come to my home, to help the edible girl and me extract Bonnie from a darkness of brooms rags and Lysol, and to hash this all out, we five, together — I found rising in my hickied throat the gorged temptation to explain, excuse, exhypothesize, extinguish in and for myself the truth, the flat unattractive and uninteresting truth that came concrete for me via nothing other than a small and shakily faint line written in quick pencil over the southernmost urinal in the men's room of my office's floor at University, the line simply[keep]

no more mr. nice guy[keep]

amid the crude tangle of genitalia that surrounded its eye-level run. .

Instead, in electromagnetic communication with my flesh, amid the sounds of Becky and Bonnie and the burble and chuckle of Carlina's bare coffee back bent before a bong hidden somewhere on the femininely held side of the Tagus bed; on the phone, instead, I found roiling out of me a torrent of misdirections, like releases of bureaucratic flatus, calculations derived from an ageless child's axioms about what his mother wishes to hear, arguments twirling off the base clause that Bonnie and I Are Just Not Right For Each Other Any More Mom, that We've Grown Apart, with Nothing But The Kids To Hold Us Together, and Is That Fair To Of All People The Kids?

Which mr. nice guy knows is manipulative, empty, and testa-mentally wicked.

Though there was an episode, too unbeveled to have been a dream, in which one wee-houred morning, last last year, Bonnie and I both half-awoke. In sync. In this bed. Half-awoke, sat up, and looked at each other's thick outlines in the green glow of the alarm's digital spears; we looked at each other, first with recognition, then a synchronized shock: looked shocked at these each others and shouted, in unison, WHAT?' and fell on our pillows and back to a puffy sleep. Compared notes at breakfast and both came away shaken.

This Mom understands, this sort of unified moment's revelation of separateness; it's marriage trouble as opposed to person trouble, troughs in the ebbing and flowing sinal flux that attends all long-term life-term emotional intercourse. She says,

'Every marriage gets its ups and its downs, or else it's not a marriage. You I need to tell about the years me and your late father?'

Yes Mom.

But, see, also no.

I could respond honestly with the kind of interior paralysis that also attends any sustained intersection of two people's everyday stuffed-together practical concerns, and how this restricts the breath of a man. The way Bonnie's conversation condenses each and every evening around issues. The cost of re-covering the love seats in the family room. The quality of market x's cut of meat y. The persistent and mysterious psoriatic rash on Josh's penis that is causing him to scratch in a way that simply cannot go on.

Vs. this partner, who is in best and worst ways still a child: either sulking, overcome, silent, screaming Yes {Si! Yes! [God!]); or offering on her Sears sofa, to a tie-loosened teacher pummeled into catatonia by the day's round with the near-Soviet bureaucracy that is this university's German Department, offering to me a cool twittered river of such irrelevant and so priceless insights as 'I hate my hair today; I hate it' (how can one hate one's hair?); or 'I notice on the television last night that the nose of Karl Maiden resemble the scrotum of a man, no?' (Yes); or 'Fahck you man is not funny I get my period in my god damn pair of white jeans at the right there checkout line at Jewel'; or 'Will Mike beat you when he finds out' (were it only that simple); or 'I never love anybody ever'; 'You want me to feel sorry for your wife who you don't love anymore' (were it only).

Yes Mrs. Tagus weary of navigation, exigency, routineschmerz, mid-life angst rendered. A unit of cinnamon milk, on fire with love for no one ever, vs. exhaustively tested loyalty, hard-headed realism, compassion, momentum, a woman the color and odor of Noxzema for all time.

Vs. vs. vs.: the reasons that center on others are easy to manipulate. All hollow things are light.

Because I just tire of being well. Of being good. Maybe I'm just tired of not knowing where in me the millenial expectations of a constellation leave off, where my own will hangs its beaver hat. I wish a little well-hung corner. I wish to be willful. I will it. It is not one bit more complicated than no more mr. n. g.

That's no more mr. l. s.

Then no more bullshit, if I can send even myself only halves.

If only Bonnie'd stop scratching at the closet door.

LABOV

"A good boy Lenny," Mrs. Tagus says truthfully to my phone. "You're a good man, and we love you, Bonnie and Mikey and I. Even Mr. Labov," she looks my way and the bravery which has held on so long in Mrs. Tagus's case gives up, and Mrs. Tagus weeps, weeping like you can imagine whole nations weeping, and I turn away, for respect. I put my aching hands with arthritis under my arms in my coat and look across the fire escape across the courtyard of my building at the window my window faces, which has a shade down which has never recently come up. The shade has been down since the Viet Nam era and I do not know who lives in the apartment. I notice how there's no more talking and Mrs. Tagus behind me has hung the wall-telephone up on the wall by the piece of wallpaper that curves. She is weeping like a nation, her eyes squeezed tightly from the pain of such stomach trouble I don't even want to imagine. I go to Mrs. Tagus.

MIKEY AND LOUIS

"Mikey, all I said is where, is all I said."

"If I get grabbed and I have to go somewhere in such a hurry I like to know where I'm goin', is all."

"You won't say where you're going, you can at least tell me why that brake light on the dash stays on all the time like that."