Ben Greenman - What He's Poised to Do - Stories

Sophie does not worry about Joe leaving her. Joe is not the kind of guy who leaves. He has told her that repeatedly. The night before, at dinner, after his third glass of wine, he bumped his knees against the table and said it again. “Once I was the kind of man who would leave,” he said, “but you cured me.” She put her hand out on the table, and he rolled his hand on top of it. “I feel full,” he said. “Like this bottle.” He tapped the wine bottle, which wasn’t near full anymore. He was too drunk to drive, so she slid into the driver’s seat and piloted his truck home. “We have to fix that rattling in your car,” Joe said, “but the last time that mechanic jobbed me for twenty percent more than it should have cost. Is there such a thing as an honest body shop? It’s good those guys aren’t doctors. You could be spread out on the hospital bed, just laid out, and the last thing you’d see was the dollar signs in their eyes.” He was still talking when they went to bed — this time, about an idea he had for a special kind of mail-box that would separate bills from the rest of the mail. They had sex, which stopped him talking. He buried his face in the pillow next to her head when he came. And then he was asleep, just like that.

When Sophie first came to America, she was twelve. Her father stayed in France with his new wife, who had been his girlfriend throughout the marriage to her mother. She was a black woman, American, everything her mother was not, and because of that her mother endured the infidelity, even the fact that when Sophie was four, her father had gotten the other woman pregnant. “He’s a musician,” her mother said, as if that explained everything. But then the other woman leaned on Sophie’s father for a wedding, and that was too much for her mother, and they came to America. Her mother worked two jobs, at a coffee shop and a copy shop. Given her accent, it was hard to tell the difference. Add to that the fact that they were one right next to the other, in a little strip mall. That was comedy. That’s where they lived, in an apartment building on the Near North Side of Chicago. Everything was within walking distance: her mother’s jobs, her school. Sophie slept in a narrow little room without a window. In the evenings and mornings her mother used to stand in the doorway and announce the time. “I am the sun and the moon,” she said. Eventually the sun and the moon took a job as a secretary in the art department at a local university. This proved to be a brilliant stroke, as it ensured that Sophie had a substantial tuition credit for her own studies. All she needed to do was drop by twice a week and take her mother to lunch. She did not mind. She loved her mother even if it bothered her that her mother refused to eat anything more than a small salad and a side of buttered bread. “These aren’t wartime conditions,” Sophie said. “And yet we are not at peace,” her mother said, with the mixture of twinkling irony and dead seriousness that Sophie recognized as a sign of pain processed in such a way that it did not become poisonous — or, as she preferred to call it, of intelligence.

Sophie did well in college, applied herself to studies rather than to boys or to art, though she was talented in those areas as well. She got work as a paralegal and was soon the head paralegal at a large firm. She always meant to go back to law school, but she had to take care of her mother, who was getting older and was sometimes in poor health. It seemed like the wrong time. Also, something tugged at her. She didn’t want to rise too far above her station, which was exactly 2.8 notches above her mother’s station. If her mother had been a lawyer, she would have been a more successful lawyer. If her mother had been a failure, that would have given her freedom. In her mind she marks off the distance from her mother. In her mind she marks off the distance from everyone. It’s what her mind is for.

Her mother knows this, though Sophie has never explained it. Her mother hates it. The week before, she had gone to sit with her mother. “I do not want you to calculate on me,” her mother said. “You are a strange child. You do so much for me that changes your own life, but when you sit here with me, you are cold like a decaying porgy.” It was something her mother had read and she clearly did not understand it, but she spoke with conviction. Peter had not liked her mother. “She is always so sure of herself,” he said. “Should a woman be that sure of herself?”

“What are some of the other choices?” Sophie said.

Peter did not quite laugh at her joke. Men were forever not quite laughing at her jokes. The night before, when Joe had told her that he felt like a full bottle, she had made another joke. Joe was asleep, or nearly asleep. “You’re the bottle,” she said to his motionless form. “Right? Well, sometimes I feel like the cork that goes down with the rest of the bottle when it’s tossed in the water.” He didn’t disagree, but he didn’t laugh either.

Joe was definitely asleep. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t laughed. She gave him the benefit of the doubt. Joe slept so soundly that he liked to call himself the decedent. He laughed at his own joke whenever he said that. Sophie could not sleep. She had a job that required her to lay awake for long hours retracing her steps, and nothing seemed to help. Sex did not put her to sleep but rather put her in a state of heightened awareness. While she was having sex with Joe, she found herself looking up into his face as he chugged along and wondering how it had come to this. His was the face of a child, shot through with a tragic lack of understanding of its own mortality. It was not the face of a man. Not really. She reached up and brushed his cheek and he mistook her touch for tenderness.

With Joe asleep, she found herself thinking of sex. What was it, exactly? What was pleasure? Had she felt it? Something had seemed to widen in the space behind her nose, to enlarge her, but was that pleasure? How would she know, exactly? Joe had put a finger inside her. What was he pointing at? What was that rivulet of fluid growing cold on her thigh? Was it her blood? And what was the point of Joe’s weight on her, exactly? Was he making a point about his bulk? Was he trying to remind her of his physical power? It was unlikely. He was not aggressive. Sex kept her up, thinking.

Her bed, too, kept her up. It was not comfortable. Something in the sheets gave her cause to itch. A bed should not be like that. If it was not a place of peace, then where was peace? She listened to the blood beat in her ears. Who else was awake? Her mother, probably. Her mother had never slept easily either. She was too often lonely, or afraid, or angry. Maybe sleep, or the lack of sleep, passed like knowledge or sadness from mother to daughter. Maybe all of this was her mother’s fault. She watched the time on the clock creep along and cursed her mother, her bed, her life. She cursed Joe. She cursed sex. She looked out the window and cursed the night sky. “If I never see you again,” she said to the moon, “it’ll be too soon.” She closed her eyes and thought of ways of changing things for the better. She must have fallen asleep eventually, because she remembered dreaming, though she did not remember any details of the dream. She called her mother in the morning to arrange a visit. “I love you,” she said to her mother.

“Will you bring Joe?” her mother said.

“Yes,” Sophie said.

“Well, it’s up to you,” her mother said. No one’s tone was convincing.

JOE LOVED HER MOTHER. He had an easy way with her. He told her jokes and she laughed. He got her drinks and she said thank you. Sophie resented this, not because she wanted there to be tension between them but because she knew that Joe was not touching her mother’s core. That core was a hot thing — hot and cold both, to be precise — and when it was touched in any way the result was discomfort for everyone. Joe kept her mother comfortable and he was comfortable in return. He smiled at everything she said, even when what she said was sharp or uneasy. He ate whatever she put in front of him, even though Sophie knew that later on in bed he would turn from his back to his side and sigh in a way that let her know he was worrying about his weight. If asked, he would say nothing bad about her mother. “I like going over there,” he’d say. “It’s a nice place.” And just like that, she was left to stay awake in the bed, where the corners of the mattress rose up slightly, where the equatorial bar bruised her back and shoulders.