Amor and Psycho: Stories (14 page)

Irene rose to her full height—six foot three—and bent over O’Malley until he disappeared. In this way, sadly, we began to dispatch one another.

EVERY DAY
, a new message came from someone: “I’m sorry, I can’t stay anymore,” listing debased conditions—a litany of apologies. One could no longer afford a bus pass; another couldn’t keep up her strength without her AIDS medication; another had moved in with his mother, who insisted
that he be home every night at five-thirty. One couple, known throughout the institute as bon vivants, invited us over for a farewell dinner. They were in the process of losing everything—electricity, gas, heat, car, apartment. They still had a bidet, though. We ate Cuban beans with a ham hock and drank a few bottles of Margaux they’d saved for twenty years for a special occasion—the occasion now being the end of an era of wine and roses, collaboration and solidarity! We pitied our lost colleagues, and, yes, we feared them. After that rich evening, we never saw them again.

During the season Riva thought of as the autumn of her divorce, life became so quiet that she heard fog drip. Big spongy porcini pushed up under the orange pine needles and hissed as they grew, distracting her from the uninhibited exposé of the county school board she’d tried for weeks to write on assignment from the socialist weekly, whose primary agenda—“to fan the flames of discontent”—was broadcast on the masthead. As she worked, Riva thought about butter and shallots sizzling in the pan and the way she and Roberto used to laugh before dinner, their glasses of red wine on the scarred wooden table, some Ghanaian highlife CD playing on the stereo. She thought about the atmosphere she and Roberto made together those five years, about mushrooms and butter and wine and bare feet and West African music, as if happiness were a country where she’d once owned a house. Without Roberto, she
didn’t even bother to open a bottle of wine (she’d only drink it all), and she ate cold, hard food: apples from the tree, carrots from the garden, crackers from the general store. She drank water from the well. Brutal simplicity felt weirdly comforting. Sometimes she woke in the night, rattled by a ringing, dinning silence so profound, she might have been at the center of deep space.

What she missed most were barefoot nights, dancing on the beach around a fire, or on the floor of the movie theater when live bands came and the house manager took out the first two rows of seats. She missed tipping her dirty feet back into high heels at midnight and riding home next to Roberto in the blue Taurus. She missed his greatness of spirit, his exuberant ways, the intoxicated poetry that surrounded those moments of terror and pleasure in the car. “Uncork the night!” he’d shouted out the windows, driving fast and confidently down the coast road while she gripped the wheel. “Breast against the triumphant curve and fly down the dirt road unbuckled, casting sparks!”

In retrospect, she could see how codependent she had been.

SHE
’
D LEFT
Roberto because he hit her; it hurt to say this so simply. He’d hit her more than once—twice, or three times, jarring smashes of knuckles in her face. That she didn’t, at thirty-four, remember the apparent provocations or the number of hits worried her most of all. Forgetting,
diminishing, or rationalizing violence made
her
complicit, guilty! Roberto, too, implied that Riva shared a dynamic role in the hitting, which he called “arguing.”

“It takes two to tango,” he’d said once.

The first time he hit her instantly created a rift so deep, she knew she must leave him. Within five minutes of his first swing, they were undressed, fucking. Riva’s black eye bloomed under Roberto’s caresses. His tenderness, as he touched her, made her shiver. She put his fingers on the wound again and again, definitely the wrong message to send.

The blue-and-yellow swelling dropped down her face over the course of four days, until she looked like a gerbil. While her eye and cheek healed, Roberto picked up the mail and ran errands. Riva appreciated his kindness and discretion. She worked at home anyway, mostly. She did most of her interviews by telephone or e-mail, more than a first-rate reporter would, because even without livid marks, she was shy.

Roberto also worked from home. He had a framing business, made artisan frames from old-growth redwood and salvaged metal. Sometimes he made garden beds, a similar process: He made frames for art and frames for dirt. His frames were the real thing, everyone agreed, more artful and interesting than 99 percent of the work they enclosed. Roberto was famous for his frames, and for his raised beds, which framed the earth, and famous for the weed he grew in the woods just over their property line, his macho,
big-budded sensimilla, not organic but very strong. He sold to artists in the city, to people Riva and Roberto counted as friends, although in the end the friendships grew strained and broke. Roberto was Riva’s best friend, and because by most people’s standards Roberto’s personality veered toward the eccentric and difficult, their friendships with others had been abraded (by Roberto’s abrasiveness) and eroded. Inviting people in became awkward. The house smelled skunky: Sometimes Roberto washed money and hung it up to dry on a clothesline in the bathroom. Neither Riva nor Roberto possessed a traditional moral compass, she knew that, but toward the end she did not like to have people see the way she and Roberto lived. They might see things about Roberto and the shape of their life together that she could not see herself.

She still loved him completely; she loved most his rough, edgy side. Even after he hit her, his presence held a chemical charge.

Roberto moved out when she asked. He didn’t seem surprised. He wept; he packed his things in a Hefty bag. He backed up his flatbed to his framing studio, laid all his wood, scrap metal and tools in the back and drove away. He moved into a trailer up on the ridge, an awful situation, she imagined, a real comedown from the beautiful life the two of them had made together. Then she saw him in town at a harvest party with a very young woman who looked like a teenager, sexed and clueless. Poor Roberto, Riva thought. How sad. But Roberto didn’t look sad. He looked happy,
dancing with the teenager on the pier. Her long blond hair kept blowing into his eyes. The teenager looked happy, too. Roberto looked as beautiful as she remembered, his ravaged, tragic face bathed in light from the moon and the bonfire, his eyes lit by drink. The poor girl, Riva thought, imagining the end of the evening in Roberto’s depressing trailer. He will hit her, too, she thought. Maybe not tonight—but he will. The thought gave her a thrill of Schadenfreude, which made her immediately ashamed of herself, and proud that she had left him.

At the party, she also saw—and successfully avoided—a neighbor whose pit bull had twice attacked her dog, Spinoza, dug its teeth deep into Spinoza’s haunch, causing trauma and a big medical bill. When she called the neighbor the first time, he apologized. When she called after the second incident, he said, “You know, this never happened before, and now it’s happened twice with you. What’s your dog doing to provoke my dog? Is it a female?” Riva protested, but the neighbor just talked over her. “Sure, I could tie my dog up, but nothing’s more sorrowful than a tied-up dog. So I’m just not going to do it. If my dog attacks your dog again, take some personal responsibility—just shoot it. Put it out of your misery.”

She lived among maniacs! Of course Riva would not shoot her neighbor’s dog. Roberto used to keep a gopher rifle in the house, but Riva couldn’t stand it, and he finally gave it away. So she didn’t even own a gun.

At the harvest party, she avoided Roberto and the neighbor,
as well as the kind of mountain men—the growers, the hermits, the felons—who preyed on single women like herself. Instead, she chatted with a woman named Aisha, who had been with Riva and Spinoza in puppy-training class. Aisha had stopped going because her puppy—an enormous Great Dane—had choked to death on a treat at the beginning of the third class.

“I’m doing great,” Aisha said. “Byron and I take tango. It’s changed our life. We’re both in amazing shape, our sex life is hotter, and I see him again as a human. You should come—bring Roberto.”

“Roberto and I separated,” Riva said.

“Oh—well, then you should come find somebody.”

Riva thought of Roberto saying, “It takes two to tango” with a soupçon of bitterness, and then she didn’t think more about it. A few days later, she found a flyer in the coffeehouse. Not tango, but a swing class in a town an hour to the north where the partners—and Riva—would be new.

SHE
’
D DEMANDED
from Roberto custody of their terrier mutt, Spinoza, and he had quickly agreed, seeing all her logic. But then Spinoza died, killed by a raccoon that took to hanging about the place after Roberto left, even going so far as to sit and wait by the front door for food, as Spinoza himself had always done. After the horrific cleanup and burial of her pet, Riva felt shaken, anemic, as if she’d lost blood. She tried to call Roberto to break the news, but the phone rang
and rang; Roberto’s alienation ran so deep, he didn’t even have a machine.

After Riva went to bed, stimulated, weeping and exhausted, the raccoon came into the house—it turned the knob on the door. She ran to greet the intruder, which she mistook for Roberto, thinking he’d come back. The raccoon stood at the bowl of compost with its paws open, the pads lined like human palms (it had a fate!), its fat digits like Russian banana potatoes, its nails mandarin, tobacco-colored. The empty wine bottle lay on the floor, as if flung there in disgust, with mud prints across the label.

“Hey,” Riva cried. “Hey, hey,
hey, hey!
”

The raccoon turned, still chewing, twenty pounds of greed and insolence, and faced her.

“You,” Riva screamed. “You, you, you, you, you!” She switched on the lights. The raccoon kept its eyes on her and backed toward the door, three-legged, its spine arched. Riva growled out a threat and rushed forward suddenly. The animal picked up an apple from the floor, then stood up to its full height and threw it at Riva. She ducked; the apple knocked her elbow and rolled harmlessly away, and as the raccoon backed outside, it gave her a knowing look. She cried in bed later, loud wailing sobs the raccoon could probably hear.

NOW STORMS ROLLED IN
off the Pacific like wet gray walls closing in. Water poured from the milky sky and turned
the fields and ferns a lusher green. The calla lilies near the front door grew as big as oil funnels and the bark on the redwoods took on a more lively form, like the hide of an animal. Riva found an old grass bag in the back of her closet, its surface covered in a mold that looked exactly like rabbit fur. She burned it in the woodstove. The woodpile outside swelled with damp under its blue tarp and she burned anything expendable. The indoor air turned heavy and smoky, though with a bright tang of pine.

She worked on a story for the socialist weekly about a logger who’d come up from Jalisco, Mexico, to labor as a choker setter. A mountain of talus spilled down on top of him during a job—the timber company had tagged some old-growth trees on a steep slope above the river—and killed him. Environmentalists argued that those trees were protected by previous agreements, that the choker setter didn’t even speak English, that the timber company had not properly apprised the worker of the danger. Riva’s job: to get the real scoop, make the family and the loggers talk, get the foreman to talk, take the usual disorganization of points of view and tell a story that didn’t want to be told. A story emerged like a landscape; it didn’t exist until somebody put a frame around something and said,
Look here
.

Meanwhile, the foreman who filed the accident report (which became the death report), said, no story here, only an act of God. The environmentalists talked, but they demanded that the story conform to certain moral truths that the story did not exactly conform to. The choker setter’s
family talked a little, in Spanish, and revealed nothing. They’d been paid off—“In dollars?” Riva asked in her debased high school Spanish—in exchange for their silence. They also feared exposure of their relatives, one of whom, Riva learned, came across at Juárez in the bed of a truck loaded with carrots. The mainstream newspaper tried to redirect the conversation, and ran a two-page spread in the newspaper about the honorable history of logging across generations, emphasizing the life-and-death nature of the work, the shrewd and solitary nature of the logger. Never mind that the choker setter had been an untrained illegal twenty-three-year-old immigrant working for minimum wage who understood so imperfectly the danger of his occupation that he’d hidden behind a tree when the mountainside gave way. Riva had to clear away enough of the words so people could understand what kept happening. “Just get the moral truth,” the editor told her. “Those bastards—they’re all bastards. That’s the story.”

Both sides told the story the same way, with the choker setter as a victim. One side called him a victim of corporate greed; the other side called him a victim of nature, or of an act of God. The choker setter, an invisible man named Jesus Cruz, didn’t have a side. There didn’t seem to be a way for his story to extend beyond the frame already nailed down around it. The story took place around Jesus, outside of his story. The story itself depended on who told it. Riva suddenly felt filled with energy, inspiration and insight—a form of rage. The victim must become the subject of his
own story; he must be seen. Riva let them all have it—the timber company, the environmentalists, the newspapers that covered the story as one about courage or honor or corporate greed. They were all bastards, just as the editor had said, but she felt that she had finally come to this conclusion on her own evidence, honestly. She wrote for twelve hours, and when she finished, she felt tired, clean and conscious of a ravenous hunger, a gnawing so vivid, it was less like lust and more like a bacterial infection. She found a steak in the freezer, seared it on the stove and ate it, still frozen in the middle, while drinking a whole bottle of red wine. This was the meal that Edward Abbey ate to steel himself in the wilderness to greet a bear. As she ate, Riva steeled herself, and dug out the telephone number she’d written down for the swing class.