Gary Lutz - Partial List of People to Bleach

The girlfriend was the tallest of us three. She had lots of that mobile jewelry all over her. Her body seemed to crowd around her life in ways that kept her from being too social with me.

But my sister was the sackier one. There were blurts of blue in her hair.

My first full day was a workday for them. They had me using the edges of one of those disposable-razor caps to scrape away the crud from the insides of their tub. They would be wanting a bath, a long, lemon-laden, embubbled soak, they had said, after they came home and before they took on the night’s carnal charges.

They would be arriving antsily together in that nonnative sedan of theirs.

I had to shove a brood of soaps aside.

The tub’s guck came off in a powderish gray. This took hours, but what was time to someone with nothing to wait for but take-out pad thai, hoi polloi, potpie, whatever they were calling it?

The house was actually more of a cottage, with bookcases built bluntly into the walls. The books I could not exactly read (I had disorders), but I could land a hand onto a page, spread my fingers, then make out whichever words that showed in between, though these were mostly just ingredients of words:

firt leen bini

aze oli

They shut their bedroom door at night.

Mornings, I went through their drawers — but things were much too plush and tingly for me in there, all that underwear inalienably theirs, plus some shapely drugs, mostly robin’s-egg-blue and dazing.

I took another of the tabs. It was quick to get me feeling renewedly mortalized and minute.

I couldn’t log on to either of their boxy old laptops. No diaries or journals or such for me to see whatever each might have finally dared rue about the other. Those two more likely lacked even a line of wiseacre poetry to their name.

I could have written a poem for or against them right then and there, and tried to, something merrimental and penciled, but it got to be all about my own catchy life and what all had gotten caught in it — the set bedtimes and slant-tip tweezers, any old TV screen with the power off, the less-than-a-year-left stuff that dragged on and on, the chances begged for, the overnight bags that were actually technically for the next day, if you woke up and the world was still looking coy.

I needed to find something better to know like the back of my hand.

The last time I had gone looking, I’d found that woman with the tiny floes of green in her eyes. This was a woman like nothing else floral at all. She had had concussions, and blackouts, and years later was still blinky when she turned up looking ousted from everything peaceable in the species. So, yes, I loved her calamitously and however little. But she was a braggart, a cheat, and a back-stabber. I’ll keep her mostly out of this reminiscent business, though. I’m under orders to tend to just about any other hill of beans.

Regardless, I’ll venture that marriage spreads itself filmily and spherically around two people until you’re doing your best to poke your way back out.

Truth be told, I felt less joined than merely jointed to her in little fiscal fashions.

She would say, “Are we ever even talking about the same thing?”

She hoped to be a guitarist. It would have had to be one of those half-size guitars. The songs were going to be bouncy and sagacious about having a cunt with more mystique than most. For a minute there, in the stairwell, her singing voice got something trapped in it, a real shiver that brought you revealments from afar.

Making her way up the steps was a girl who must have heard. The girl looked to be about that age when instead of places to go there were only worlds to come.

They just shook hands at first, exchanged names hard-headedly, then sniveled until the two of them were kissing.

I didn’t hear from my wife for a while.

I’m not telling you anything I won’t have already one day come to have known about myself, at least the parts about life’s not being right for everyone, and how I’ve no reason to know why; but for a couple of semesters, I’d pushed myself over at the community college, the one they had set up in the older hangars. My fingers kept driving themselves into the books until every binding gave up the ghost. One of the profs, some even-minded soul, took me aside, said, “All work and no play.” I said, “I’ll play when I’m dead.” But it was a stretch, and then I took up with that man who day in and day out looked loveproof and bloated.

What — all that water and blood in him wasn’t enough to drown his sorrows either?

His story was that I was using him just to brush up against myself. But I must have looked redundant even off on my own.

Men, you must know, are behind everything, meaning only laggard, backward, passé.

But I keep coming back to my wife as if she weren’t the one coming back to me standing pat.

This was all in that make-do conurbation between the state’s two hardening and unfavored cities nobody even snooped around in anymore.

We didn’t really tell anybody about the marriage. Whom could we have told?

Her sister was dead, and her parents weren’t the type you would ever once think to describe, and as for friends, there were none left aside from me, though she might have sent notes, potshot postcards, to lorn pharmacists she had leaned on, or mentors long spurned, or pushover crisis-hot-line troubleshooters, or any other sobber who might have once bashfully asked her to piss on him as a finale to something long since finished anyway.

As for my acquaintances, I knew a man who kept daintily to himself in an enlarged house with six sinks and a tub from which the water, he claimed, would never completely run away. It had the plumbers stumped. He was hit with bills you wouldn’t believe. He was thorough-hearted and easily wowed. I called him every now and then to go over the eventualities.

“It’s all been pushed back,” he would say, then hang up, then not answer when I kept redialing, thinking: by which he had meant what — it’s been moved forward or further behind?

I had a dictionary, but it was the kind that hedged on everything.

“Bound, adj.,” or so it said, meant just the opposite of “bound, vb.”

So I tried to keep my wife to the fore and laid off sex.

We lived in the perfect timing of our passions for other people.

Some people, I now see, are idea people. The idea might be only: Eschew bloodbaths.

My mother had never done much besides lose her heart to the dial tone. It must have seemed a threnody of a kind. That was in the times of landlines only. I believe she lived mostly in silhouette.

It was my father who had taught me it would be disloyal to buy another town’s newspaper, even the one from the town just down the road, where the people liked it when the hours finally got themselves all balled up into a day that could just roll itself right off from them.

So my sister’s girlfriend, to let something be known: I did in fact try her out in their bed. It’s no debauch, though, if the other party is mutinous in even the twiddliest way against your own sis. She buttoned her lip. Everything went without brunt. Next morn, she said, “You’re a man still here. You’re a breach of peace.”

But I’ve never been very immediate in things. I’ve skipped out on myself every time.

My wife had married me in a huff. There had been somebody else, somebody before me and later to come back — a man of clean riches. Any affection from me went right through her.

I’ll say one thing for her, though:

She looked for all the world.

My sisters had turned out to be women who wore their hair speculatively, lavishing it forward into swells, or loading it again with clips, barrettes. The younger worked for a store that still had a notions department, a dry-goods department, a toilet with a coin slot on the door. Her affections raced in undaring ovals around co-workers.