And to me: “Desert what you’re wearing.”
I did as I was told. Stripped — or, rather, felt things tearing, being torn, away from me. If it’s hard to say, it’s because of my hands, the way each of them had always been contrary to the nature of the other.
“Your heart is jerking,” he said.
All I knew was that I was naked, skeptical, ill-spun, beastly, muddlesome, shame-burnt, dashed and thankless, disheveled in every sinew. (I had always preferred my body sight unseen.)
It was a plastic hanger, not one of the wire ones, he finally came at me with. He hooked the thing into my behind and pulled and pulled educatedly until he let out a peep that just as soon structured itself downward an octave or two until it was harrumph after harrumph of chronic expertise.
“You keep yourself awfully stocked,” he said.
He exchanged the hanger for a shower-curtain rod.
Ripped into me again.
Fetched out, and set down on the plane of the ironing board, the expectable barrettes, compacts, lipsticks, and atomizers, but also:
the serpentinous leathern strap of a shoulder bag (clips included);
pages wrung from a scratch pad with what must have been phone numbers scribbled over until they were gibberished into inconsultable, unconsolatory faces blurrily girly;
airline-boarding-pass envelopes, stuffed with an overkill of nervily plucked coils of bikini-line hair;
receipts for shoes of synthetic materials only, for fair-trade coffee beans, the receipts a little smeary, as if having blotted the oils from the tip of a much finer nose;
a head-shot photo, scissored from a magazine, of some sacked sit-com actress, taken to salons as a prompt for the stylist to age her just so (bangs, featherings, tints);
a ropy noose of a necklace in full, but just smashments of chokers, lockets, bangly teakwood—
“That’s it?” the man said. He stepped back, the better to hurl the curtain rod at me. “That’s the most trouble you’ve gone to?”
He called me a man of pronenesses instead of convictions, screamed things even more coring, threatened my life, walked me out to the tram to see me off, etc.
I forget if she was still with me then or not.
This isn’t all of it, obviously, just some notes I must have taken not much later, overstepping. I had never been the type of man that women reassessed. I do know that in days to come I heard that she and the man had gotten themselves thrown out of her aunt and uncle’s, or whomever’s, and were living in a bed-and-breakfast in the same ruin-heaped city, and I liked to think that they were going to have to feel it in their bones just as I had always felt it in hers — that lingering business, I figured, about fitting new people and their irritable parts to the old feelings, the feelings that only made you feel as if you were going to have to get permission to chalk any of it entirely up to her.
Life — mine, I mean — might best be left unattended.
Tic Douloureux
My brother and I were the last of the sons still living at home. It was my aunt’s job — once a month a pay envelope was propped against a step halfway up the staircase — to see to it that I was kept some distance from him. One afternoon she told me to drop what I was doing and walk with her to the room in which he was kept. I trailed her down the hall as far as the doorway, then stopped.
“No monkey business,” my aunt said.
The room was dark and windowless. This was still very early in ragweed season, and my brother was the only one of us the pollen had wanted much to do with. Handkerchiefs were balled up on his bare chest and on the floor beside the footage of yellowed foam rubber on which he was taking his slumbers. There had to be so many handkerchiefs, I was tired of being told, because a single one would have been soppy, draggled, useless, in no time.
“Go ahead,” my aunt said.
I seized each handkerchief by the corner and shook it out into a lank spookling and then passed it along to my other hand until I had a dank fraternity of at least a dozen or so of the things squirming together.
My aunt started toward the doorway.
“Go,” she said. Her eyes, I could see, were watering a trifle.
In my room, I dunked the handkerchiefs one by one into the scummed water in the wash pail and, without rinsing or wringing, distributed them across the floor to dry. At some point, I composed myself — stretched myself out atop the handkerchiefs to cool the backs of my legs. I pictured, as always, the gleaming expanse of my brother’s chest, smooth as tile. I might have fallen part of the way asleep.
Every room on our floor was a complete dwelling, with something to fall asleep upon, and a wash pail, and another pail for whatever was going to desert our bodies, and something to cover the food we never could finish.
When you are one age, my father was fond of repeating, practically anything is either a blanket or a bed, no matter what it might have started out to be. But I was no longer that age.
I one day entered a room where my aunt had got ahold of a newspaper. She was trying to find a reliable way to keep a taut double-page of it aloft, kite-like, between outstretched arms. She shoved it at me.
“Read this and tell me what you get out of it,” she said.
There was an article about the different things people ate and wore in a different part of the world. It was padded with recipes and sewing patterns, anecdotes, excitant quotes. I could see how old and rotten the thing was. I gave my aunt a chunked, inaccurate summary.
“Nothing in there about brothers?” she said. “How brothers should behave themselves around each other?”
She reclaimed the paper, tried to get it up in the air again.
“It names all the places they’re allowed at on each other,” I said. “It names everything about the places.”
“Show me where it says any such thing,” she said. “They can’t print that in a paper.”
I stabbed my finger through the page, jerked it out of her hands. I returned to the tropical stink of my room and counted the number of times my brother at the other end of the house sneezed next in succession — forty and seven.
Downstairs, it was a regular house. My parents were partners in a failing sales venture that confined them to hotels for weeks on end, but when they came back, their voices rose up through the hardwood floors, reminding us to mind our teeth or running over the details of turning points, of showdowns, with finicking clients. We were expected to make our reactions, our acknowledgments that we had heard, sufficiently audible. Sometimes I just pounded on the floor. My brother often followed this example. I could tell when he was using his elbows and not his fists, because with an elbow you do not get nearly as much thud. The sound is more pointed. A few times I heard the ball of a bare foot. Once I swear I made out what had to have been his skull. There was nothing from his direction for a long while after that, so I drummed enough for the two of us, moving about in the room and out into the hallway, but whom was I fooling?
During my parents’ absences we were permitted downstairs no more than twice a day — one at a time, my aunt first — to choose our food and to fetch our water for drinking and dousing. We emptied our pails in the powder room. The toilet had a new seat that was not screwed on properly. It would slide out from beneath you unless you knew the right way to sit. The sink had no stopper, so you had to make sure there was nothing loose on you or on your smock when you bent forward to wash. Only one burner on the stove was even hooked up. There was a wagon-wheel-like chandelier above the kitchen table, which had an extension-leaf slid into it. One afternoon I sat at the table with a dish my mother had covered with foil in the refrigerator. It held a fantastication of stringy meat overextended with cake crumbs and edged with vegetabular sliverings that didn’t quite sit right. I happened to hear my brother squishing along the floor upstairs in socks that must have still been soaking wet. That day I began to develop an appreciation for how things upstairs sounded to people underneath. From every footfall, every stride, came a creak that rippled outward until it overspread the entire ceiling of the room. The effect was one of resounding activity, of achievements far and wide.