The other lived on her own in a safehold of foldaways and one-player card games with crueler and crueler rules. She had a couple of dogs that she wanted to see something of the world.
I was the middle child, but never the central one. I had gone through life as the unencircled son, unfetched.
The three of us were heeders and continuers, yes, but mostly resemblers bent on coarsening the resemblance.
I had been a suggestible kid, senseless in all I foresaw. I’d had that pair of shiftful sisters, and parents: the kind who taught you to tell time, then taught you that time would tell. High school I had liked — the hourly hallway travel, the breezy hygiene of the girls — and in college most of the profs shook your hand on your happy way out of the amphitheatre. One subject would eclipse another until there was a totter to my grades.
A diploma was at length made out to me, and I was free to apply for openings. I liked the festive attention allowed me at interviews — the questions put to me pointedly but unpersonally. My first job involved scourging printouts with proofreaders’ marks in a metropolis of sorts mocked up for regional commerce beside a thin, palling river. I prinked about the offices in baleful well-being, maybe awaiting ovations.
Or was I already taking the long view — that the world we lived in stood in the way of another world, one where you need not keep backing your way into things with your eyes wide open?
I took to taking things calmly and degenerately.
I moved to the forefront of the city, shared an apartment divided four scarcely distinct ways, now and then brought home discouraged hitchhikers or delicately shaven teenagers — wrathful, facetless kids easily regaled with things neither strange nor true. I thus got roughed up in my roommates’ regard, found “for sale” signs taped everywhere on my car. Then the first, brute months of a new year. I spaced things out in my luggage and hauled it all to the outskirts. I became one of those secretive types who want you to know everything about them except what should most catch the eye.
People, in truth, had got the wrong wrong ideas about me — that I responded well to cosmetics; that I had already come to know most of the disrobers in our town of halfway houses and rehab socials; that my teeth had been sewn tight into my gums with thick black thread.
In awful point of fact, I rewrote my rent checks until the dollar-amount and signatural hurrah was just so, and I called my parents almost any Sunday. I would force myself to talk for exactly twelve minutes, the better to counter criticisms that I could never be kept on the line for more than ten.
I would have to answer the same question every time: “Why are you always so out of breath like that?”
Shall I say that I eventually shamed myself away from men, though they had been just boys, actually — boys too much alike in the rough patter of their pulse? They were happily acrid in shorts almost too long to be shorts.
It’s not every day I let any of them come cohering back. But there was one whom I will call by some other name, Floke, and who called me both timid and vicious — tender in only an investigative way.
Or, rather, there were men I offered the luxury of witnessed private conduct, and women who set out bridge mix or pretzel twists, women with colorless good looks, women who picked fights with their bodies.
I always walked away a differently unchosen person.
My life neither wended nor entailed.
The one at whose side I worked that summer was deep-set in family heartaches, and facially inhumane, but she sometimes came out from behind all the etiquette.
Eleven was the only clock word she liked. She would insist it sounded lilting and relenting to her.
For me, though, the hour itself — the work-shift one, I mean, and not its trimmer twin in late evening — did not slope toward anything better. I never budged for lunch, and I liked to do myself in a little. I would postpone a piss until I had to brave rapids, practically. (There was a vessel I kept beneath my desk.)
This was the property-management division. We were sectored off from the rest of headquarters by little more than particleboard. The job required the luxurious useless indoor fortitude it has always been my fortune to enjoy.
Then some unsought weeks with a silkened fright of a girl with unfellowly elbows, lively fatalities in her thinking. She had a ring of relations around her — impressionable cousinry, commanding aunts with bracelets by the silverous slew — and we moved in with her parents, early retirees, who swanked away at the prospect of the two of us unpairing before the year got thinned of its holidays. Her father would stand outside our room, knock gallantly on the door, say, “We hear you in there.” Then the mother would say, “We most certainly do not.” It was her reproofs that counted.
Men of my kind kept cramming themselves into marriages, violated hindquarters and all. I mugged for a minister late one morning myself.
This was hazing July, and the day just burned away.
My wife came from a family with vaulted closets, kitchens with doors that locked. Every dress the woman wore had to have vents, slits, pinholes. She drank excitative mixed drinks of her own fixing, was swayable in her credos, drove home the sobering groceries.
Her hair had something almost auroral about it, plenty of sparkle in its upper reaches. But she wasn’t eating.
When the day came that she wanted something frothed and resolving to daub onto her face, I walked her to a makeup counter at H-- Brothers. A saleslady came over. We made it sound as if we were picking out a gift.
Was the skin about which we were barely making a peep a dry skin, or an oily one, or was it splotched, or papery, or combination? What was the one thing the woman — if the intended recipient was, indeed, a woman — wanted most to change?
“Should we be telling people?”
I might have kept going through life repeating: Consider the source!
There was, a while afterward, just one other taker, somebody else at city hall, a man who leaned on me during the last-ditch derisions of election year. (A stuffy, unbowing couch in his office, a provisioning little fridge, curtains and blinds both.) He expected to compound some things he still felt for his wife with his unriotous feelings for me, then come up with a new, totaling emotion that he could offer to the woman he wanted to clean his life out with. She was a recent hire in the prothonotary’s office, level-voiced and unshifting. Mistily immediate one minute, undivinable the next.
As for the man, there was little he still did in his role as my resister. I started bringing things home from the library — magazines mostly, the pages brightly outdated. Touching whatever someone else had touched first was going to be fellowship enough for me.
This was punctual, unbrilliant winter. My car got harder to start. The thing just scoffed, razzed. The library stayed open later and later. The one I liked behind the circulation desk had lips dulled plumly, some final drifts of girlhood at peril in her voice. A becoming boniness to the fingers, and that hardening and seaming of the face achieved, I was certain, from having seen too soon the pleading in things.
I must have been hoping for someone deep-eyed and hampered and unfancied like that, someone with consolingly different dislikes — pretty-witted antipathies I would not want to trump.
This library had a back-corner department of cassettes thick-cased into sets, series. I signed some out, drew myself into a few. I did not own a player, but I would poke the cap of a pen through one of the hubs in a cassette, jostle the tape forward a little that way. Such were my heaves, my advances, in the hours before I would pass myself back into the unmonopolizing sleep of my nerveless, earliest thirties.