Sometimes Ondine comes over for poker or we all go out for chimichangas. Last time, after a few drinks, I asked Ondine about her daughter.
“Martha? She’ll never be happy with anybody but herself.”
“Lucky girl.”
“You lucked out, too,” said Ondine.
“I know,” I said. “But life gets really murky sometimes.”
“It’s true, honey. Like a fish tank nobody cleans. Just fish shit and dead fish. But that’s how you know it’s life.”
Debbie is a big deal over at the university, where she got a professorship as soon as I was healed enough to marry. We didn’t plan on Ypsilanti, but Michigan happened to want her. Sometimes I read her presentations for typos, but I don’t understand them. Turned out she was the brilliant one of our bunch.
I never charged Davis, and they ruled the shooting an accident. If I’d charged him, I could have taken him to civil court and gutted him, but he wasn’t lying about the disappearance of his family fortune. Last I heard, he ran some kind of permanent luau up on that Red Hook roof, and also a break-dancing camp for private school kids. Brianna, somebody told me, makes films of women giving birth alone in public spaces. I never even knew she liked that sort of thing.
I’m not sure why Debbie stays with me. Her devotion must have fixed itself to the memory of my brief, illusory splendor, or else she has some plan of revenge for the years I missed her charms. I would deserve that, if only because I know in my heart that if she were the ruined one, I would not stay.
It turns out you can live, even prosper, with that kind of truth. Until, I presume, you cannot.
I still wonder why our reenactment of that Pushkin story meant so much to Davis. My real confession is that I never even read the thing. Davis just told it to me. And the way he did so, now that I recall his manner, makes me suspect he hadn’t read it, either.
Typical, I guess. We were poseurs, but why do you think poseurs pose? Because they want to be invited to the dominion of the real, an almost magical zone of unselfed sensation, and they know their very desire for it disqualifies them. Consider that, the next time you cluck your tongue at some awful, grandiose fake.
Dude just wants to feel.
I did almost achieve that sensation, or a cheater’s version of it, but it had not much to do with Davis, or the rest.
It happened the night before I went to Red Hook, while I sat at the bar in the Hudson Lux. A woman took the next stool. She wore a silk dress with pearls, ordered one of those something-tinis. We introduced ourselves, but she had a thick accent and I couldn’t make out her name.
“You a hairy motherfucker,” she said, caressed my forearm where I’d rolled my sleeve.
“You want to see all of it?” I said.
Her room was just like my room, with more moon in the window.
We were on the bed when she asked the big New York, or at least Hudson Lux, question.
“What do you do?”
“I’m a barista by training,” I said. “Though I enjoy grilling. I’ve also been a schoolteacher and worked construction and run the night shift at a homeless shelter and interned at a men’s magazine.”
“You here on business?”
“Are you here on business?” I said.
“You mean right now?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “What do you want?”
“Well, part of me just wants to die, but the other part wants to live, to really live.”
“Okay,” she said.
I slipped my belt off slowly, slung it from a hook in the door, looped.
It all followed rather quickly after that, a surge of bliss, a great groinal shudder, a shell burst of froth and light. Then I got cold, fogged. I floated in a bitter-tasting cloud, but in that moment I also glimpsed everything that was good and sweet and fresh, and also incredibly refreshing and relaxing, and I saw how I could reach that place and remain there for a very long time. After that, I think, somebody clutched my legs, my knees, shoved me upward, and a bald man with an earpiece and a combat knife cut me down from the door.
MEN by Lydia Davis
There are also men in the world. Sometimes we forget, and think there are only women — endless hills and plains of unresisting women. We make little jokes and comfort each other and our lives pass quickly. But every now and then, it is true, a man rises unexpectedly in our midst like a pine tree, and looks savagely at us, and sends us hobbling away in great floods to hide in the caves and gullies until he is gone.
ANOTHER MANHATTAN by Donald Antrim
They had lied to each other so many times, over so many years, that deceptions between them had become commonplace, practically repertoire. Everyone knew this about them — it wasn’t news among their friends. That night, they had dinner reservations with Elliot and Susan, who were accustomed to following the shifts in attitude and tone — Kate’s theatrical sighs, for instance, in reaction to Jim’s mournful looks across the table at her — brought on by the strain of living in an atmosphere of worry and betrayal. It was winter, and dark, and the air in their little apartment was dry and nauseatingly warm; and yet what they needed, it seemed to Jim, was not to flee their home for another night of exciting conversational pauses and sly four-way flirting. They needed to sit down together, no matter how stuffy it got in the living room, no matter how loudly the radiators hissed and banged, and take turns speaking their minds. They had to talk. But first he would stop at the florist’s on his way home from the outpatient clinic. If he walked through the door carrying a bouquet, there was a chance that Kate might smile.
There was a chance also that it wouldn’t look awkward or strange when, at the end of the evening — he didn’t really believe that he and Kate would be staying in — he paired with Susan for the walk through the cold, from the restaurant to Elliot’s car. It might look, in other words, as if he were not bothered by Kate’s whispering to another man. (She had a way, with Elliot, of bowing her head and mumbling furiously through the strands of hair that fell across the side of her face, so that, in order to make out her words, Elliot was forced to stoop and lean into the fog of her breath.) Jim’s own affair, his affair with Susan, had been over for almost five months, long enough, he thought, as he approached the florist’s on the corner by his and Kate’s building, for him to begin experimenting — later that same night, if the mood was right — with innocently putting his arm around Susan’s shoulder while she and he and Kate and Elliot walked in two sets of two toward the parking garage.
Of course, he wanted to be careful not to punish Kate, or at least not to seem to punish her, for her success in adultery. Elliot made her laugh — in a sweet way. Anyone meeting them for the first time would think they were a new couple.
It was wrong to hate her.
He’d arrived at the florist’s. Inside, he went straight over to the roses in their refrigerated case. Though it was a cold day, cold and very windy, and he’d come in chilled, the short walk across the heated space warmed him, and he could feel the frigid air hit him in the face when he yanked open the glass door. He leaned in and peered at the flowers. He asked the girl, “Do you have yellow roses that haven’t already bloomed and, you know, opened?”
Yellow roses, signifying friendship more than eros, seemed right, given the complex potentials of the evening.
“We only have these.”
“They’re pretty, but they’re not going to last.”
She was pretty as well, the girl showing him roses. Had he seen her in here before and somehow not noticed? How old was she? Should he risk looking into her eyes? Was she wearing a ring? What about her ass? And what had he said to her just now? Blooming and opening meant the same thing in relation to flowers. He’d become inarticulate in her presence.