David Gates - The Wonders of the Invisible World

Here’s a short one. This is the first time Jane and I lay face-to-face. She runs a hand down my spine, then back up again to cup my shoulder blade in her palm, as if it were a breast, and says, “This is probably really a mistake. But I just really want to.”

“I know,” I say. Question remains: Why does she want to? Is it simply that being nonstandard has fucked up her self-esteem? Is it dismissive to add that her father deserted the family when she was twelve? The implication being …

“Oh, bullshit,” she says. “You don’t know the first thing. You are such a fake. Will you just please relax and make love to me?”

Did I give myself a whore’s bath before? Get hammered after? Can’t say. That other moment I wanted to put here is the same way: nothing before, nothing after. Also in bed, I guess a couple of weeks later.

She says, “I’m sorry I told you that thing.”

“Thing,” say.

“About the coke,” she says. “I shouldn’t have told you.”

“What am I going to do, have him arrested?”

“What I mean is, it’s his business,” she says. “And possibly my business. But it isn’t anything you have to know.”

“I care about you,” I say. “I want to know what your life is like.”

She rolls her head from side to side on the pillow. “Uh- uh, ” she says. “You’re not my husband. If we even lose track of that —I don’t know, forget it, it’s stupid to even talk about ethics in a situation like this.” She flops her naked body across me facedown, to stretch for her backpack on the floor (her buttocks, for all her nonstandardness, are more perfect than any I’m likely to touch again in this life), and comes back up with her hairbrush. She flicks two brisk strokes at her left temple, then flings the brush backhand against the wall. My wall. My landlord’s wall. “This is so stupid,” she says. “I don’t know what integrity I think I’m trying to keep up. Why don’t you hit me?”

“You’re doing enough of a job on yourself,” I say. I look at the wall. A tiny mark that might have been there already. “I wish we could go away,” I say. “And just not come back.”

“Please,” she says. “This is the one thing I promised myself. Not to get into discussions about how I’m going to leave Jonathan and yat-ta-dat-ta-da. If this is going to be about sitting around saying I wish this and I wish that, it’s like forget it, okay?” She gives me a quick, wide smile — the kind of facial cue an ape might use to signal submission. But there is no submission.

Now, maybe that right there is the cadence you want: But there is no submission. Over and out. God knows it’s cold enough.

But I still haven’t told how it all came out. After that we can worry about cadences. So under Loose Ends let’s put (a) the clarinet and (b) Jane’s little problem. (You want cold? Now that’s cold. ) Oddly enough, I did get the clarinet back. What happened was, I took the subway up at lunchtime, found the place, and sure enough: guy had it stashed behind the bar. He asked if I had i.d. and I thought, Well, this is where you get busted, but what was I going to do? I showed him my driver’s license, he looked at the name tag and handed me the case. I opened it up, nodded when I saw all the pieces of the clarinet in their molded recesses, lifted out the bell and looked underneath. The joint was gone. The guy behind the bar had a white apron, clean except for a brown-red stain shaped like Mississippi. His blond hair was combed straight back. “Something missing?” he said. One more confrontation I wasn’t up to.

Which brings us, by commodious vicus of recirculation — hey, the fun never stops — to (b). So here’s the thing that happened today. Monday. No need to backtrack and give a blow-by-blow of the whole weekend: it got over with. Phone didn’t ring once. Which really isn’t a complaint. It wasn’t until late this afternoon that I finally heard from Jane.

“I’m sorry to be bothering you at work,” she said.

“What are you talking about,” I said. “How are you? What’s going on?”

She said, “I just wanted to tell you that you don’t have anything to worry about if you were worried. I got my period.”

“Thank God,” I said. I fetched a sigh, too, but got my hand over the phone in time to muffle it. “That’s really good,” I said. “I was worried, to tell you the truth. That would’ve been just—”

“And,” she said, “I also wanted to tell you. I don’t think I’m going to be seeing you anymore, okay? So. It’s like, I’ll probably, we’ll probably run into each other around school and everything, but I really don’t want to talk to you, like have a conversation with you. And I don’t want you to call me. Okay?”

“Look,” I said — but as I said “Look” she said “ ’Bye” and hung up. I hung up too and said “Okay” out loud. I took a deep breath and let it out. Steady now.

I looked around and there it all was: file cabinets, books on shelves, cloth wall hanging of a vulpine Elvis in white jumpsuit, a lei around his neck. Camp fun from long ago, a gift from Laura, and what it was still doing up I couldn’t imagine. Picture of Carrie, in stand-up Plexiglas, smiling with all her hurt radiance, holding a kitten whose name I knew to be Mittens. As in What, lost your. I took another breath, let it out. Okay. See, the temptation would be to dwell on the possibility that she was lying about her period and had taken steps on her own. For all I know, she was calling from the pay phone at some clinic. And had been counting on me to see through her bullshit in the nick of time.

It was the woman doctor who finally came out and told us we could go in. She said Bonnie came through the surgery fine, as far as they could tell, and not to be shocked when we saw her. We followed the doctor into the intensive care and over to a bed with an IV bag hanging over it. Bonnie lay flat on her back, in a white gown with short sleeves; they’d taped the needle end of the tubing to the back of her hand, and they had the hand strapped to the side rail in case she tried to move. But she wasn’t moving: you had to look close to see her chest rise and fall. She had another tube up her nose, the whole top of her head was wrapped in bandages and her face was so swollen that she looked the way she had as a baby.

I picked up her other hand, stroked it and held it. The hand didn’t do anything back. I said, “Daddy’s here, honey. You’re going to be fine.” Nothing.

Dave Senior wouldn’t come near the bed. Being her husband, it must’ve been even harder on him. He turned to the doctor and said, “ This looks great. When the hell are you going to know what’s going on?”

The doctor put up a hand, like she was making to guard herself. “Not before tomorrow,” she said. “At the earliest.” She was a small woman, pretty enough, with lines at the corners of her eyes and dark circles. To me, she seemed young for a doctor — she might’ve been forty — but for her I suppose it was a different story. I know when I was forty, I felt like an old man. Sylvia had run off to Phoenix with her boss and left it up to Bonnie either to go out there or to stay with me in Clinton. A teenage girl, with her school and all her friends? What do you imagine she’s going to choose? So I had Bonnie to look after and the house to try to keep up, all the while putting in ten, fifteen hours a week overtime so I could set something aside for her college. But that’s years and years ago now. I retired, sold the house and bought my little place up in Shelburne Falls. And Bonnie finally settled down and married Dave; they live over in Madison, not ten minutes from where we lived in Clinton. Sylvia and I will talk a couple times a year by phone, and I’ll even chat with Harold if he happens to pick up. Hell, by now they’ve been married longer than we were. She claims to have cut way back on her drinking, which I think was half her problem. And I really am an old man now, though Bonnie says seventy-two’s not old anymore. I don’t feel old these days. I’m healthy (knock wood), I keep active and I’m not strapped for money. That’s my good way of looking at it.