Brock Clarke - The Happiest People in the World

“Please just go away,” Locs said. Matty seemed to want to protest. He opened his mouth. But then he closed it, opened the door, said good-bye, I’m sorry, etc., and shut the door. Locs watched him walk away in the rearview. The idiot was walking pretty much in the middle of the road again. A car appeared in the snow and almost hit him. It drove past where Locs was parked, slowed down enough for Locs to see that the car was, like her rental car, a blue Chevy Cruze. The car turned around, drove very slowly past Locs again, and then suddenly sped up. Too suddenly: it fishtailed, spun, ended up stuck bumper-first in a snowbank. Matty didn’t seem to notice: he kept walking, head down, while the car spun its wheels and spun its wheels, trying and failing to get out of the snowbank. Please hit him, Locs thought. And also: Please don’t. Those mixed feelings were the worst. Love, love: it was never as pure as you needed it to be. That was the good thing about hate. If you hated someone, really hated him, then you could wish him dead and never once worry that you would change your mind about it.

What? Ellen was in his bed. No. That was just a dream. Henry knew it was a dream, because his pants were off, and in reality he’d fallen asleep with his pants on. And in the dream Henry knew his pants were off, not because he’d taken them off in the dream, but because he could feel Ellen’s bare legs rubbing against his.

“You took off my pants,” he said in his dream.

“I took off mine first,” she said, not in his dream.

Henry sat up, opened his eyes wide. His dried contact lenses made the room looked crinkly and bleached out, even in the dark. He’d neglected to close the window shades before falling asleep, and could see that it wasn’t snowing anymore. “What time is it?”

“A woman without pants is in your bed and you want to know what time it is?” Ellen said, and Henry lay back down again. Ellen smelled like cigarettes and dish soap and something else that Henry couldn’t identify. Her right leg was touching his left; he could tell that he still had his underwear on, and he wondered whether she had hers on, too. What else? Henry was suddenly desperate to know what he should do with his hands. He placed them on his stomach, but he’d seen corpses in coffins do that. He then tried to reach back and clasp them behind his head, but in doing so, he almost hit Ellen in the head with his left elbow. Finally, Henry did what he’d been wanting to do the whole time anyway: he placed his left hand on Ellen’s right thigh, and Ellen put her hand over his and left it there. Henry thought he could feel her thigh vibrating, humming.

“Anyway, it’s not even midnight,” Ellen said.

“You’re in my bed,” Henry said.

“I decided to close the bar early.”

“I can’t believe you are in my bed.”

“Two hours early,” she said. “Do you know what drunk people hate?”

“What?”

“When you close their bar two hours early.”

Henry didn’t know what to say to that. He guessed “I’m sorry” wasn’t the right thing, especially since he wasn’t. I am so happy right now, is what he wanted to say, but he worried that maybe that wasn’t the right thing, either. “I’m not a drunk person,” is what he ended up saying, even though that sounded much lamer than either of the other two things.

“I want to have sex with you in a minute,” she said.

“I am so happy right now!” he said, and they both laughed. But then Ellen abruptly stopped laughing.

“Listen,” she said. “I am married to Matty, and after you and I have sex I’ll still be married to him. I might still be married to him for a long time; then again, I might not. But either way, I also still might want to have sex with you again.”

Henry didn’t say anything to that. He had the sense that Ellen was talking to herself more than to him. So he did what she’d taught him to do. He didn’t say anything; he just lay there, frowning, touching Ellen’s hand and thigh in the dark.

“I’m just telling you the truth,” Ellen said.

“OK.”

“Don’t ever lie to me.”

“I promise,” he said.

“Are you married?”

“I used to be,” Henry said immediately. He did not want Ellen to think he was lying. Besides, was he? Was he still married? What was your marital status if you’ve been declared dead and your wife knows you’ve been declared dead and has agreed to act like you’re dead, even though she knows you’re not? At the very least, he was divorced in spirit—“in spirit” being the small lie people tell themselves in order to get to do the thing they really want to do before getting in big trouble for it later on.

“Please get over here,” Ellen said.

Henry thought he was already over here. “I thought I was already over here,” he said.

“Well, you’re not,” she said, and then she rolled over onto his chest and kissed him. Ice skating. That was her smell. The smell of someone who’s been out ice-skating — cold air and dried sweat and wool.

“HEY,” ELLEN SAID. THEY were back to lying side by side in Henry’s bed. Ellen hated it when she asked someone a direct question and that person answered, “Well, yes and no.” But had Henry asked her the direct question, Are you happy? her honest answer would have been, Well, yes and no. But he wasn’t asking her anything. Maybe he was thinking yes and no, too. “These were on your floor when I came in.”

“When you broke in,” Henry said.

“It’s not breaking in if you use a key,” she said. “Besides, I did knock first.” She reached over to the end table, picked up and handed Henry two pieces of paper. On one was his drawing of himself being watched while at Doc’s; on the other was KØKKENBORD = COUNTER. Someone had scratched a big black X through Henry in the drawing; the other paper was untouched. Neither page was attached to the notebook.

“Did you draw that?” Ellen asked, and Henry said that he did. “It’s pretty good,” she said. “Although apparently you didn’t think so.” Henry realized that she thought he hadn’t liked the cartoon and had drawn the X himself, and he let her think that. “Is that the word you taught Kurt?”

“What’s that?”

“I heard Kurt talking to his uncle Lawrence at the baseball game. Something about not remembering a foreign word for ‘counter.’ I figured it had something to do with you.”

Kurt. Either Henry had dropped the notebook and Kurt had picked it up, or Kurt had stolen it from him. Either way, it must have been Kurt who had ripped out the pages, Kurt who’d defaced the cartoon with that big black X, Kurt who’d slipped the pages under his door. But why? What was Kurt trying to tell him? What had he ever done to Kurt? Besides have sex with his mother, that is. But the X had been made before that. Anyway, he would have to keep his eye on Kurt.

“Is that word Swedish?” Ellen asked.

Don’t lie to me, Ellen had told him, and he had promised not to. But then again, he had no idea what the Swedish word for “counter” was. Besides, the languages were pretty similar; everyone always said so. If the Swedish word for “counter” wasn’t køkkenbord, it was probably something very close. “Yes,” Henry said. “That is Swedish.”

“I probably have to go,” Ellen said.

“Please don’t,” Henry said. He meant it. But he knew that Ellen really did have to go, and once she did, he would destroy those pieces of paper. It had probably been very stupid of him to draw that cartoon, and write those words, in the first place. It was exactly the kind of thing Locs had warned him not to do.