Partial List of People to Bleach

Thus: sudden kisses in her car, smushy and considerate at first. Then into her apartment, onto her husky furniture. (Only a daybed, though, with throws instead of sheets, the toilet muttering until morn.) We would run down a day in the solid clarity of the town, hold only the most lulling of things against each other. Such a rushed and rubbishing month! (Later, of course, all that mending talk, and the perspectival protection it probably should have brought.)

It turned out to be a commodious enough marriage, though. Other people started cropping up in it. They fell asleep on us, entertained our touch, cut us in on their injuries, their every setback and deadlock.

Then went away, to a man, so much the slower of heart.

This wife and I took to styling more and more feeling into our morning farewells.

We were believers, the two of us, in giving people their dwindling due.

Just the same, you learn to live without yourself.

You go behoovedly to work in safety pants.

But it’s not you yourself who turns forty, forty-five, fifty — you get turned. Dialed forward and therefrom.

Except now I’m pushing, being pushed, sixty, with cataracts and suchlike. I listen through snow to the scrattle of a neighbor’s shovel on the sidewalk out front.

There should be limits on how much can be spelled out on people.

The facts have yet to do their job.

I Was in Kilter with Him, a Little

I once had a husband, an unsoaring, incompact man of forty, but I often felt carried away from the marriage. I was no childbearer, and he was largely a passerby, minutely berserk in his bearing. We had just moved to one of the little cities that had been set out at intervals — they formed a kind of loose oblong, I imagine — in the upper tier of our state.

He had an unconsoling side, this husband, and a mean streak, and a pain that gadded about in his mouth, his jaw, and there was a bumble of blond hair all over him, and he couldn’t count on sleep, on dreams, to get a done day butchered improvingly.

He drove a mutt of a car and was the lone typewriter mechanic left in the territory, a servicer of devastated platens, a releaser of stuck keys.

I would let him go broadly and unseen into his day.

These cities each had a few grueling boulevards that urged themselves outbound. Buses passed from one city to the next and were kept conspicuously to their schedules, and I soon took to the buses, was taken with them: I would feel polite and brittle in my seat as a city was approached, neatened itself into streets and squares, then petered out again into bare topography. It never made much difference in which city I got off. I always had some business somewhere of a vaguely gracious, vaguely metropolitan sort, if only a matter of inquiring at a bank about exchanging some uncomely ones for a five. Sometimes I resorted to department stores, touched handbags, clutches (I have always preferred the undoing of any clasp); and I liked to favor a ladies’ room with my solitude. I knew how to make an end of an afternoon, until the day lost pace and went choppy with a fineness I could refine the finality of.

It was mostly younger women on the buses — women barely clear of girlhood, dressed for functioning public loneliness in tarplike weighted cottons.

I one day sat down beside one.

My fingers were soon in the pan of her palm.

This city was a recent thing built in pious, cutback mimicry of someplace else. The streets were named after other streets.

I had been hired, probationally, as a substitute teacher, which meant I was not hated by any one student for any length of time, but I made enemies aplenty in the short haul.

I would write my name on the board, and then I would usually have one girl, a roupy-voiced thing, who would say, “Wait, I know you,” and I would say, “I don’t think so,” and she would say, “Not from here.”

Back in the practicums I had been taught to ask, “Who belongs to this paper?” Because you do run across cases where the possessory currents seem to be running more forcibly from the paper to the kid than the other way around. You’re taught to feel something for anybody caught in that kind of pull, though I never once felt it.

I had, I hope, a dry, precise smile, a good-bye smile.

My husband: he had sized his life to deprive it of most of the right things.

I had been meaning to get something in here of our incensed domestic civility, and the queered quiet of our nights, and the preenings of the weather all the following summer, a summer that never cut either of us in on its havoc and seethe, but the mind’s eye is the least reliable of the sightholes, and I might have been looking all along through only one of those.

It was availed away, our marriage.

We got tardier about every fresh start.

If I am talking them up again, these women brimming hectically now on buses, it can’t be only to keep throwing pinched perspectives over their low points, every rut in their loveliness.

It’s just that I tend to get all devotionate when I sense sore spots and unaired ires in any shrewd mess densening suddenly in my ken.

A Tuesday, for undiscouraged instance: a vexable, vapory girl.

My one hand mulling its way into a pocket of her coat.

(To join hers there at last.)

My other hand fluffing up the leg of her pants.

(The hair on her shin a chestnut-brown emphasis.)

I helped myself to their charity.

Ruthfully open arms, blind sides, always a general alcoholature to their breath — it was true a few of them might have been cautioning me all along to look out for myself, but I took that to mean what? That I was the fittest object of my own suspicions?

Women of muddled impulse, lonely beyond their means — I let my drowsy heart drowse around.

Then it was decided it was time to fix on just one of them. I was on a bus homeward from work. She was steadfast of face, and it was a situated face, or my idea of one, but her dress curtained her off so completely that the breasts were cryptic, the legs undefined.

Ideally, the way we sat, the way our forearms were set out in a line, her bracelet should have slid with ease from her wrist to mine. But the rumps of our hands were too thick to permit a crossing.

Then her apartment, a barracksy large, lone room: tenants on either side of us, and above, beneath, making overheard but unintelligible dead-set headway.

She had sweepy arms, a squall of dark hair, eyes a slubby brown. She spoke through prim, petite teeth of favors she was owed.

There was relief in how quick we could find the hardness in each other.

Then weeks, scrapes of inquisitive affection, kisses kept quiet and dry, unluminary movements not undear to me, a clean breast made here or there, every passing thought treated to a going explanation (people combine unneatly), an inaccurate accusation, a principal I had to have it out with.

They weren’t hours, these classes; they weren’t even forty-five minutes — they were “periods,” which sounded to me as if they were each at once a little era and the end you had to see decisively put to it.