Hob Broun - Inner Tube

“There was something about the sight of blood,” she later told us. “It filled me with a sense of peace.”

They wrapped on the twenty-first take and my mother passed out on the limo ride home, dreamed of Sonia selling shares in a Viennese blood bank.

The Dewbeads commercial aired for the first time on a network telecast of Charade with Audrey Hepburn, and we all circled the set to applaud.

“I’ve never seen you look so beautiful,” Carla breathed, plucking her lip, smelling of bath talc.

“Convincing,” judged Gordo, and filled his mouth with cashews.

I said: “Mom, this is what you need to get restarted.”

“Mmm-hmm.” She looked wistfully at the screen, where George Kennedy was swinging the shiny metal hook he had in place of a hand. “I even have new pictures to send out.”

I no longer believe, as I did then, that she allowed herself any real expectations. And, in fact, nothing ever came of it, beyond a personal appearance at a shopping plaza in Valley Stream. Dewbeads, widely reported to cause skin rash, was eventually removed from the market by the Food and Drug Administration. Sonia Brooks went to live on a Moravian farm near Wilmington. The glossy eight-by-tens remained in a bedroom drawer, unsent.

I watch it over and over again. The tidy rows of zinnias and marigolds, boxwood and hemlock in topiary geometries, sun glinting on the fountain’s distant spray. In white, lovely as a stranger…

I am bound to her by chemical strands impossible to sever, by an overwhelming, overriding instinct: avoidance of pain. Damn our reticence. I’ve thought of her countless times in the long years since her dive into the tube and never once missed her, never once wanted to pull her back out. She is where she belongs, and so am I. On opposite sides, each one, blinking reflexively.

“Dewbeads,” my mother says. “Because we deserve it.”

OVERTRIMMED WHITE HOUSES WITH circular driveways. Lawns clipped and edged, alike as burial plots. Two girls in pleated skirts and kneesocks who rush excitedly toward an open convertible where lettermen slouch in wait.

The marine amoebae Formanifera exist inside calcite shells and send out branched filaments in search of food. One million fibers make up the human optic nerve and mine are hard at work, assembling this picture of an unlisted street, an invented town.

That kind of day at the facility: imagining relationships that aren’t there, looking over my shoulder. Too much time underground and I suspect myself. Now here’s Eduardo with the mail cart and a smile that slides all over his face.

“Something personal.”

He dangles the envelope and I see a jaggedly halved lipstick heart on the flap. Violet, only Violet. A collector of the gestures of romance.

“Going to read it out loud?”

“Not to you.”

He tugs at his left ear, mangled by a highway patrol bullet. “You shouldn’t be so stingy with Eduardo. Don’t you know he’s culturally deprived?”

The envelope is thick, addressed in the angular, pressured handwriting.

Darling—

This took courage to send, but I had some saved up, there being little call for it out here. The Virginia position I phoned about has evaporated…funding cuts as well as “personality differences.” A juicy tale here, which you can only have in person. It’s a round-trip ticket, as you can see. No traps. Last night I cried just from looking at a cake pan. I remember small things with you, and the smaller, the more trivial, the sharper the twinge. Please say you’ll come. I’ll bake unforgettable cakes.

Vee

Sharply pointed Vee, expert scene designer, quick-change artist, greatest fuck of my life. I never could keep up with your generous provocations, or the empty difficulties that came up just as fast. But when you had a grip on yourself, which, as I discovered, was just barely most of the time…

No traps, you say? Don’t feed me that angel food. I can match you recall for recall: winding, with a tight focus anticipating the classroom, your German alarm clock sans numerals; that pertinent walk when you weren’t really going anywhere, arms swinging close as if you were polishing yourself; exuberant eyes as your machine emerged from the car wash slick and glistening like a newborn; a low, two-syllable hum while I excavated by suction those rich salt deposits below the rim of your instep.

So on and on. Uninterrupted, uninterpreted. Letting images spill is the easy part, no distinctions made. But to look away, to say no when temptation is hard and sharp against your stomach like a spear, is connivance at its best. Anyway, something close to it.

There is no more call for courage where I am than where you are, but the air is light and easily penetrated. I see things: my narrowness, blundering capacity for harm, suspended appetite for the activities that make up a “life.” Dear angular, deeply clefted Vee, I am useless to you, a hard, rebuking vacancy like the silence after a thousand cake pans clatter.

Skirts and letter sweaters swirl in the flimsy-looking malt shoppe, below the sign that says NO DANCING. Youthful high spirits, Mr. Mayor. They’re celebrating the big win over South Central State. Lindyhopping fringe bit actors whose animating thoughts are of doing Bus Stop in an amphitheater, or an unannounced, show-stopping Cohan medley at a benefit for crippled children; who celebrate raw delusion with every swirl.

So I look away, into the sure alignments of this airline ticket. Depart. Arrive. Carrier assumes no responsibility for…

For ex-wives who, to be sure of anything, require regular distress. And not enough the subterfuges of students or some incident on the freeway. Violet needs the intimate, twisting jabs of someone close. But her mother is too old and soft to peck as she once did, her twist-expert sisters gone with their ambitious husbands to Bahrain and Fort Worth, her usual friends too feckless or too repressed. Why can’t I comfort her? Make the awful quiet go away? Because the speed and the stamina are all gone. As James Brown used to croon, I’m tired but I’m clean.

Here. I’m here, Violet, and that’s all. I’m all packaged up here, in my viewing booth, in my car, in an air-conditioned unit that Heidi keeps straight for me. Yes, Violet, and it’s so easy to be with her in that cool, dark room. She’s tense and bony as a child. She’s fitful and clammy and disorganized. And when the mucus pours from between her legs, mouth around her own frantic fingers, Heidi doesn’t know who I am — or care. Nothing asked or surrendered. Two creatures following the dictates of their chromosomes.

That’s right, sure. Smoke is just particulate matter in suspension. And the television picture is only a description of light — light hitting a surface.

MRS. O. MUST BE feeling stronger. For the second Saturday in a row she’s in among the flowerbeds with clippers and weeding claw. The sun is high and she wears a maroon-and-white baseball cap advertising electrolyte salts for livestock. Strap-on rubber pads protect her knees.

I’m here with my feet propped on the air conditioner, watching her through the window. A slow news day. My pet scorpion slumbers under pine bark, water drips from the showerhead, and all I see when I close my eyes is a plate of shredded lettuce floating in space. The old lady shames me. Come on, slick, get those corpuscles moving.

Into the heat, across the empty parking lot. I squat down slowly and dabble my fingers in the dirt, ask Mrs. O. if she could use some help.

“My biorhythms are very favorable today.” She grins, a display of shoepeg teeth. “I like to get nice and dirty when I can.”