Лидия Юкнавич - Verge - Stories

I get up there, again, for the I-don’t-know-how-manyeth time, and she’s naked, yet again, and cool as a fucking cucumber. First thing she says to me is, What the hell are you doing here? Couldn’t they find somebody more suitable? Christ. Just for the sake of argument, I say, since we’ve been through this before, I say, What do you mean by suitable ? You want a guy in a suit? I laugh. She doesn’t. Someone more dramatic, she says, less… I don’t know, ordinary . I look down at the tar on the roof there. Old baseballs, wadded-up paper, wire, weird stuff up there. And I say, Dorothy, I think they assume we have a common history. She looks off and says, Well, they should have considered the ramifications of that. I say, Jeez, are things really that bad, that you have to keep pulling stuff like this for the rest of your life? Wasn’t it enough for us to go and break up? When I say “that bad,” I make the mistake of waving my arms around. She responds by waving her arms wildly and saying, As a matter of fact, things have never been better . Throws one leg over the edge in some kind of fit. That was the whole marriage—one leg over the edge.

I bet from the ground you saw a helpless naked woman lurching and retracting.

I then make mistake number two. I say, Well, you look great. She says, You motherfucker. She starts cursing so hard that spit flies out of her mouth and her hair rages around like crazy from a wind whipping up briefly. She says, You are the most predictable human being on the planet. You are like Tupperware. Then she makes obscene flailings with the other leg until she’s sitting on the edge. My heart is jackknifing in my lungs—old feeling. I move toward her out of instinct, take a moment of comfort in that: Anyone in their right mind would move toward a naked woman on a rooftop if she got too close to the edge. She darts a You’re dead look at me and says, Listen, don’t be such a pathetic ass. You couldn’t get me to be a wife. You can’t get me down from here. You can’t even make me put my clothes back on. You try to grab me, I’ll just divorce you in a more permanent way, know what I mean?

All I can do is stand there staring at nothing. I’m so familiar with this feeling that I can barely recognize it: Me like a jerk with my hands dangling from the ends of my know-nothing arms. Me looking at the ground, no matter where I am in my life, no matter what successes, failures, confidence, or panic I may be feeling. We freeze there like that for a long minute, until finally she calms down a bit. A light breeze joins us. You know what’s extraordinary? she says. What? I say. You can see flight from above. Yet another completely incomprehensible statement from what always appeared to be a normal, beautiful, intelligent woman. I respond—who knows why, maybe it’s inevitable—What are you talking about? I’m tired. I don’t want to listen to her nonsense anymore. I am more tired than I have been in my entire life. We’re not even together anymore, and won’t be. I could remarry, I could have a thousand different lives in a thousand different worlds, and we’d still meet here, like this, in this way. Birds, she says. From up here you see them from the top, not the belly side. See their backs, the tops of their wings. And she holds her hands and arms out like a bird. For an instant I think, My God, she is as beautiful as ever, she is so angry and interesting that she’s larger than life, and I think, This is it, this is really it, she’s changed, she’s different somehow. If the wind blows, she’ll lose her balance, and I screech, DOROTHY, DON’T! FOR CHRIST’S SAKE DON’T —

She says, Don’t be an ass. I’m not a bird.

So I’m going to sit here, and I’m going to drink this coffee, and when I’m done, I’m going to walk out of here, and I’m never going to see her again. I’m still a young man. I’ve got a life, pal. You wanna save her? Knock yourself out.

She pulls up to a stop sign like blood throb. Motherfucker. She has a flat; she can feel it like a bruised shoulder. Front left. She wheels it over to the curb. Her jaw aches. Her left eye twitches.

Jack. Spare. Tire iron. Truncated lines stack themselves in her skull as she moves. The line Ten years . The line Suffering makes us stronger . She sets up the metal that will fix her, there on the road’s shoulder. It makes a cross. She can’t not see it as a cross. The line Recovering Catholic . This makes her laugh. She thinks, Jesus Christ , then, Goddamn it .

First crank. The muscle in her right arm pops up, ready. The cords in her neck tighten. Her left arm dulls over; memory.

YEAR ONE. Her face down near the pavement. Skin , she thinks. Up close the road looks like bumpy, black, magnified skin. She remembers sitting on the pavement, laughing hysterically until the light changed and he grabbed her by the scruff and yanked her back into the car. She still had vomit smear around her mouth, but she was laughing her ass off. Seven hundred dollars, he said. You can’t just carry your money around in your pockets like that. Look at it, he said, it nearly fell out into the street there, it’s got barf on it, for crissake. She was still laughing. She couldn’t help it.

YEAR TWO. I’ll pay you two hundred fucking dollars to kiss that guy on the mouth. She waved the cash in one hand like a gray-green fan, steering with the other. Her lover and some guy they picked up on the side of the road. They’d been driving for two hours in some shit-sack place in Texas, and she was bored. Flat flat flat fuck this state, was what she always thought of Texas. Pancake flat. Hand splat on pavement flat. Where do you come up with this shit? he asked, to which she replied, Kiss that guy on the mouth with tongue. The two men looked at each other innocently. They were high, childlike. They were more beautiful than was humanly possible. She wanted it. She wanted his mouth on his mouth in her rearview. She wanted man-on-man wet like that. She pulled the car over into dirt and scrub and the lost dry heat of endless sky. She got out of the car. Her boots crunch-printed tracks on that land. She leaned against the red metal, smooth as a drive-in movie. She smoked. She waited for them. She waited for them to meet a woman with a want bigger than Texas.

And they did it. They split her money. Then they all fixed there in the shade of the open trunk, wide open as a mouth. Her eyes went wild like fire. Then closed. Her arm lax. Her mouth open. Her desire a flooded desert. Smile float teeth vertebrae melt.

YEAR THREE. They never spoke of it except to call it “the incident.” It started out around nine p.m. They had an epic fight. She slammed the door and left. She went to a bar he knew about but did not frequent much with her. The bar she haunted before she found him: club dancing and sleeping with women. She wanted something back. Or she wanted to be free to shoot around like a marble again. Or she wanted something else.

Inside the bar the smell and the dark and the red vinyl and the sticky black linoleum floor and the regulars and the deejay and her hair, hanging behind her, she could feel it on her back, it comforted her. In a flash she’s dancing hard as a boxer with a woman who is thin and muscular and jagged-haired.

Every time they fight, she wants to run or fix.

She remembers the incident. She understands the unsuturable scar it left over his heart. She can see hear smell feel the flash of memory, one scene at a time: His footsteps walking up his own driveway. The windows of the car fogged up. The car seeming to move there in the driveway. What he saw next. He opened the car door. A man was fixing her, but he was also fucking her, his dick was already sliding into her smooth as a needle into its waiting. He grabbed the guy by the hair and yanked him out of the car.