Christine Schutt: A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer: Stories

Water again. He would feel a whole lot better if he could stand in a shower and think, but there’s the water again. Water is part of his problem, NO WATER WEDNESDAY — the sign has been up for days in the elevator. How could he forget except that he forgets? Explanations, probabilities. Who is it on the phone he does not answer and when he does hangs up? “Who is this?” he asks, thinking, Madeline! — but he hears only fuzz. The clock, too, is doing something.

He has known Madeline from when she was a smaller version of what she is now.

Is it five o’clock already? He cannot distinguish sounds with so much screaming around him.

Children and animals.

Somewhere in the apartment is a dog, or else the stained impress on the throw rug is a shadow. He can’t smell dog, but there are signs. The worn paint along the doorjamb from where the dog abased himself and the fact of too much dust point to dog. Dog and the city! It is noisy and dirty just as they said.

They, they, the folks back home (his mother, really), he still thinks he can call her, and he picks up the phone for the fun…and Jesus Christ! Wouldn’t you know it! Over the noise he can hear a far-off voice. He treats the phone as if he has been listening in, and he hangs up carefully. He didn’t come home to talk to anybody except, perhaps, Madeline. He would make an exception for Madeline, especially. She writes, I will write him a letter, but I can’t excuse myself. She writes that she has met another David, this time named Ralph. Silly name, really, unless it rhymes with chafe, the way the English say it. “Rafe, strafe, abrade, grate, rake,” he speaks aloud to himself, and adds scour and blister to the list. Here is okay, she writes, actually, I think here is good.

Flayed is the last word he thinks of when he reads how she hopes they can meet sometime. We should although???when?? Her visible evasions, the fence of question marks she puts around when —these gestures hurt his feelings; but after a drink, it won’t bother him at all, the unlikeliness of their meeting.

Their unlikeliness.

Love of this kind has flared before in him; he has been pursued and has, himself, pursued. Madeline, especially. Dear Madeline.

His desk is in the light he left on from this morning.

This morning he did not walk a dog although there is something doggy about his apartment; this room, hard lived here. Too much trash! And too many books he hasn’t read. Their rightful owners must come back. If he puts his ear to the floor, and he puts his ear to the floor, he can hear slippers slapping toward him. He waits. He waits on his knees. He waits until the quiet, long unnoticed, disconcerts him. What is he supposed to do?

He walks through rooms and hears a woman’s voice asking him, “What is it you want?” Most of what he knows comes from putting his face up close. The resinous dope box he sniffs at now is for how he used to smell. He doesn’t smoke anymore, but he drinks. He still drinks and he mixes with ice so the no-water Wednesday won’t affect him. There are cubes left surely. No? No.

“ No starts your every sentence,” his old girlfriend said, or else she said, “Don’t!”

Fuck her! Now that he has his drink — without ice — and the light is still on at his desk, he can start. He is looking for a way to start, and he gets up from his desk to find it.

Dear Madeline.

The word he wants is fouled.

Who would have guessed? September, the sensible yet willing month, and suddenly so hot! He looks backward to when he last saw Madeline. Not in September, August, July, but, yes, in June, with the chestnut trees in their shortlived show, deeply green and bobbing — that’s when he last saw her. That’s when he last saw his old girlfriend, too. He saw the wells beneath her eyes, dark and wet from fucking. She was almost pretty, but when she stood, it was too much skin even for him; and it seems more terrible now when he thinks of Madeline.

Now, and what time is it now? The church hasn’t bonged.

A cloud watcher, Madeline has said she is in love with light. Summer solstice is a grief she looks forward to, simultaneously loving the light and bemoaning that the light marks the beginning of days nightly shorn.

And now it is official, Madeline has written, the start of the school year, and I am twenty-one!

Nineteen ninety-five, 1996, 1997, 1998. To be all those years in Madeline’s company and yet spared her anguish— You’re never really over it, Madeline’s words. He has been spared what has happened at home and what goes on happening, or so she says. “I admit it. I am bad, and I know my poor parents suffer!” Madeline in her high, protestant voice. “I can’t help myself. I’m young.” The ongoing moodiness that has sent her on record-time drives. Philadelphia to New York to Boston, New York to Vermont, Connecticut to New York, he has only heard about the trips, those midnight visits she makes so that she might sleep away from home.

In July was it? Madeline arrived at his place in expensive shoes — just straps — and a skirt the size of a dish towel. Mostly he had seen her in uniform. Year after year, lovelier. Glasses, contacts; braces, a mouth.

Midsentence, midsummer, they went outdoors and sat in the park, and Madeline yanked back her hair while speaking, tightly tied it, although it came undone. Again and again, she pulled back her hair, and he liked how she did this suddenly, expertly, fast, exposing a swimmer’s face in its just-surfaced smoothness.

“My story is nothing special,” she said then. “He likes that I’m a girl.”

The arms she clasped around her legs are thin. She has no breasts to speak of, and the clothes she wears are throw-away thrift shop. Madeline has an orphan appeal, and her famished prettiness gives off heat.

The room is too warm. He says, “Some air in this stink box I live in will help,” when he knows of no remedy.

Another time Madeline simply called to say that she was in town for an interview with a magazine or a TV station, something glamorous that had happened to her just because she is special.

Do you think I am who I will be ? she writes with the prospect of graduation and the glamorous job. Half of him loves her and half hopes she fails.

His responses to her are always the same: Great news, Good luck, Hope I see you. He imagines her reading his letters. He imagines she yawns. He is not original, handsome, or young. Years are passing. Soon there will be snow underfoot by noon turned to slush. A wavy salt stain will abstract his shoes. Ice then, and weather soon. Her words in the park were “Mr. Gates”—laughing at him—“I will write you, Mr. Gates. I will e-mail! I will phone!”

Do you think I am who I will be? has years and years of future in it. How long has it been since he has seen her? Was it really last June, or the summer before, or even another year? There is joy to be had in what he is doing, teaching, but he has maxed out all his credit cards and lost sight of the joy and feels fucked. Glutted with the hoopla of passage and doughy skies and cold lawns — and the stupid napkins he has balled in his pocket! — toothpicks and addresses, presents and promises never to forget when he would like to forget, when he will forget and travel! Yes, he should go to Tibet for the cause. He should visit Prague fully funded. He should make more money, he should take time off, he should, he should, he should, he is thinking, shaking through the drawer for a coaster. He finds the dog collar in the same drawer, and he knows now with certainty where the smell comes from and why the cushions on the sofa are damp seeming, oily. He empties his pockets of the party and carries the collar around his room and into the kitchen again and back to his room again with a little more whiskey and a splash — there is water! — in a heavy glass. The heavy, cut-crystal glass, another clue, was left behind from when the dog lived here. He is almost certain that when the dog lived here, there was more to drinking; there was company on the couch. A lot of days felt like Saturday. It didn’t matter if it rained, and even when she stopped kissing him, he didn’t mind. He thinks of his old girlfriend demanding, “What is it you want?” Some days he knows. Today he wants whiskey, he wants to take off his party clothes, he wants to sleep on the couch. He wants no more faces — not even Madeline’s.