Bruce Wagner - I’m Losing You

“I don’t know. If I wasn’t on Zoloft, I’d probably be depressed.” He paused. “I still think about her — actively. Sexually.”

Calliope had the Give Me More look and Donny told her about the games. How Katherine would lie in back of the Land Cruiser like she was unconscious, panties off. They’d pull up to someone, anyone — a mechanic or a Mexican selling maps to stars’ homes — and the agent would ask if he knew where the hospital was because his girlfriend was sick. Shifting and showing herself while Donny got directions. On the freeway, too: Katherine in back like she was asleep. The truckers went insane.

In the last few months, they picked up people in bars. He remembered the first time they did that. The fantasy was that the guy would give her head, nothing more. Safe. They had to be in agreement on the candidate. No women — boring, that. Passé. Someone who they thought could be trusted was usually to be found, but the danger was still there. They liked the danger. When they found their mark (or Joe or Jim), they took him home and had a few drinks. Smoked some pot, Katherine fumbling at cold Thai, self-conscious laughs. This guy was cute and tried to kiss her in the kitchen but Katherine said Hey! the deal was head only. More laughs. She kissed him anyway. They “adjourned” to the bedroom and she tried chickening out, but Donny could see the chickening was only pretend and that made it hotter. Donny tied a kerchief around her eyes and the guy started licking her and she groaned “Oh God” as Donny left the room. Where are you going! she shouted, splayed like an animal on their bed, saliva-stained thighs gripped and spread by the hands of a stranger. Her neck crooked, the blindfolded eyes: Donny? I’m just getting a drink, he said. Katherine said she didn’t want him to go — already overcome. The whole time never taking the scarf off. Donny, love of her life, taking that as a sure sign of abasement and delirium. He left them there and had the drink, pulling at himself as he listened to the moans of his wife, the woman he loved to annihilation, saw them moving in the distance in the dim bedroom light. It excited him beyond belief. Donny? she called again and he thought he’d pass out he was so aroused. Donny —token bleats now, the name meant nothing in her mouth, something he’d read in a book flitted through his head, how a girl had been raped and the men let her use the bathroom before they poured Drano down her throat and how she’d padded back after doing her business, terrified, nude except for smelly socks and said, Guess I really had to go, huh? The agent circled around the house and watched from the terrace. He deliberately left the sliding glass door open when they first arrived and now the stranger’s pants were down around his ankles and Katherine no longer called for her love. The guy put her hand on his cock and the mask rode up on the ridge of her nose enough for her to see the show, to watch with a horse’s crazy eye as he sank it in, grinding, and after a minute she bellowed as the scarf came all the way undone….

It was impossible to gauge Calliope’s reaction; she was a pro. Her expression might have been the same had he spent the hour bitching about office politics. On the way out, in place of the Oscar-winning D.P., sat Phylliss Wolfe. Donny had promised to help with casting on her go-nowhere indie remake of Pasolini’s Teorema . They laughed when they saw each other.

“Ho ho. Ships in the night,” said Phylliss.

“It’s like a New Yorker cartoon,” he said.

“Only better drawn.”

The diminutive man in coveralls squinted as the day nurse led him to the living room. In the center of the space was a round marble table with a gigantine flower arrangement befitting the lobby of a small hotel. Modern paintings — little Dines and Twomblys — mixed with sculptures of antiquity and a piano so grand it seemed a parody; upon it, a thicket of family photos in the small, elaborate, variegated frames favored by the rich. Serena Ribkin sat on a Donghia sofa, on a slice of bedsore-repelling sheepskin. Simon realized what he’d smelled at the door was emanating from the frail, elegant woman with black bangles and grayish skin.

“What seems to be the problemo?”

“There is a family of raccoons on the hillside,” she began, most grandiloquent, “and I am worried one of them has died in the house.”

“Okay. Yes. That could be una problemo.”

“It’s particularly strong in the guest room and den.”

“Okay. Right. How long have you been aware of the smell?”

“Juana?” Simon thought it an odd name for the nurse, who looked Danish. “Juana, how long have we had that smell?”

“A few days.” With this, the saturnine aide took her leave.

“What makes you think it’s a raccoon?”

“I feed them at night. They come right down the hill, a mama and her two babies. But now they don’t come.”

“Right. Okay. And you think one of our friends died under the house.”

The woman looked stricken. “I hope not! If it was one of the babies, do you think the mother would — what would she do? Keep vigil by the body?”

“Right. Uh huh. Okay.”

“Would she try to bury it?”

“That’s one for Marlin Perkins. Can I go to the — den, did you say it was?”

“Please. What is your name?”

“Simon. But people know me as the Dead Animal Guy.”

“I am Serena Ribkin.”

“Beautiful home. Used to live a hop, skip and a jump from here, on Saltair. My mom still does.”

“The smell is so awful.”

“It tends to be — always part of the problemo. If our critter’s found a nice little niche to make his quantum leap to the Great Unknown, there’s not a whole heck of a lot I can do short of taking a few bites out of your wall — which I don’t think would thrill either one of us. To summarize, I’m not actually equipped to do that. I pretty much go under houses, and that’s all she wrote. To summarize, the last time I looked, I didn’t have the Jaws of Life handy. If that is the case and Fluffy has gone and wedged himself in a remote area, these things usually burn themselves out in three to seven days. I’ll still have to charge you sixty-five dollars just for saying hello. Now, if we find our Roger Raccoon or Peter Possum or what have you and it’s purely a matter of crashing a maggot party, we have no problemos. While I’m here, I’ll take a nice look at your screens. I have to tell you that I am against hiring someone to do a patch job; it’s almost part of my covenant. They will rob you blind. If you’re not all that worried about aesthetics — judging by this place, you are! — but if you’re not all that worried, you can spend a fraction of what a professional would charge, by doing it yourself. But I’ll take a nice long look. Part of the package.”

Knowing that this American Gothic, this spindly hired hand, was rooting around below was a source of immense comfort to the old woman, who closed her eyes and listened for subterranean maunderings. She hoped he would find no coons yet the satisfaction derived from knowing the thing was being faced head-on gave her a moment of peace that felt innovative, potentiating the effects of the Demerol. All her life she had taken solace from the good offices of those involved in service — the handymen of Rockwell’s America, armies of commonsense illuminati with natural born dexterous gifts, men who dismantled and trimmed, gutted and washed away, improvised and cobbled, unstopped, unplugged and unstuck; men who removed unwanted things, useless or dead. She wanted him down there forever, guard of the underworld; now and then, he could surface for a meal, sitting with her at the captain’s table of the kitchen banquette as she sipped her painkiller, telling all the Huck Finn things he’d seen from the mystic engine room as they trawled their way to the far sodalities of Raccoon Cove.