Beyond Deserving (2 page)

She remembered the way her throat pulsed while he talked, and how hot the small room was. She lay down on the floor and put her cheek against the porcelain of the toilet, and then Fisher lay down beside her and said, “Someday we'll be really old, and I'll have told you everything.” She thought,
This would be a good time to die
. She was that happy.

Someone brought a blanket for her, and took off her shoes, and set up a vaporizer. Her mother took the baby. “I've got a crib all set up,” she said. She came back in a few minutes and laid hot cloths across Katie's eyes, and then cold ones. Back and forth the cloths went. Katie felt as though she were dissolving.

3

They both had a little money when they met. She had become part of a circle of friends that had been his before he enlisted. His friends liked to spend time in the bar where she worked, where the owner said one day he was going to be mayor. They had helped Katie find a better room to live in. They had tried to talk her into staying in college when it got so hard (Ursula had old papers lying around in drawers, she said), but when she quit, saying it was pointless, she had no ambitions, they said they didn't care about that. Some of them did graduate, and went on to be social workers and post-office clerks, land-use planners and teachers. They took on houses and had children. (Later some did move to the country.) Fisher's twin brother, Michael, and his wife, Ursula, were like a planet to all their moons. If anybody knew where the others were, it was Michael and Ursula. They had a cache of stories to tell. Some, like Katie, drifted out of school. Burly Winston, everybody's confidante (he had such enthusiasm for your history), drove a school bus and went to Salt Lake for half a year to trace his lineage. Katie got a better job, in a fish and chips place with a big lunch trade, and she saved her money to go to Mexico in the winter. That was when Fisher came home. He and his brother came in for cod and beer, and waited for her to finish her shift. Fisher told her he had money left from his tour because there had been no place to spend it except on the way in and on the way out. He was living in Michael's basement. He kept coming by to pick her up after work. He was full of tales, mostly funny ones, about people he had met in the last four years. He didn't come on to her, except to watch her a lot, while she was working. One night he showed her he had two cameras and two radios. He gave her one of the cameras. She saw they were finally going to get somewhere. He sold the other camera. One of the radios had been gutted and stuffed with hash. That he sold, or most of it. Then he went downtown and got a drive-away car, a Grand Prix. It belonged to a hockey player who wanted someone to drive it to his mother. Fisher told Katie—they still had not touched one another—that he had been thinking what a good idea she had, to go to Mexico. She liked it that he assumed they would go together. She had planned to take buses all the way. Later she realized it was one of the boldest things he had ever done. He never came on to women, except in Asia, where the women were gentle and he was special, being American.

They drove like idiots down the coast of California, in someone else's car. They told each other stories about made-up people, and made up stories about themselves. He said his first fuck had been a fat lady and he hadn't been able to tell if he ever hit home. She said hers was in some bushes behind a frat house at Texas Tech. That was close to the true story, but she laughed, telling it, and hoped he at least wondered. It was understood that this was a lark. What else could she expect from a man just back from the brink of death? She didn't mind being easy. It was better than pretending you might not when you knew you would. She thought he probably wanted a lot of sex. That didn't make any difference to her, one way or the other, except that she had the idea that a man owed you a little for each time: a little conversation, a little attention. A little remembrance, after he left, or you did. Most of her memories were sorry ones. She had not known any men especially well; she had always assumed they would treat her badly.

At the border of Mexico, Fisher went into a deep funk and would not talk at all. He saw her looking at him, and he said he was going to have to get used to being
here
rather than
there
, though he thought it would help to be in a foreign country again, one that wasn't stinking with war. They were on a Mexican bus then and her curiosity was building. “I'll recover when I see the ocean,” he promised, and then didn't speak to her again for a day and a half. She forgot what she wanted to know about him. She was good at spacing out, herself. She bought them candy bars and beer at the places the bus stopped, and he took them without looking at her. She thought him exotic, his enervation a come-on. She had been anxious most of the time since puberty. She didn't know much about depression. The first night in Mazatlán, he snapped out of it. They got a room in a decent hotel and ate lobster and got very high. “Oh lady,” Fisher crooned, two fingers in and half the night to go, “your flak jacket's open, dumbshit lady.” She thought he was talking out of some dream station, and she didn't care. Communication wasn't very high on her list right then. Everybody wakes up, even from deep sleeps, she thought, thinking of dreams as events, not states. Never thinking that what you take out of a dream might work like erosion on the solid parts of waking. Knowing nothing about war underwater.

They took a bus to a village down the coast and rented a thatched
palapa
. They were there for weeks; she thought she was happy, for the first time ever. One morning they hiked over a hot hill to a lovely stretch of beach lying below a grove of orange trees. She sat on a towel while he waded into the surf. He had just shouted to her to come in when she saw the Mexicans at the edge of the grove. They made a line, squatting against the trees. Katie ran down to the water's edge. “Come back,” she cried. “I don't like it here.” Fisher mocked her, but she begged him to come out, pointing to the Mexicans who sat like stones. He told her she was being stupid, but he did go up the hill with her again. As they passed the point closest to the
campesinos
, there was an audible rush of sound along the line. Then the Mexicans rose and walked away. “What did they want?” Katie whispered. Fisher pushed her onto the hill. “Nothing,” he said. She asked him again when the hill was behind them. “The water had a treacherous undertow,” he said. “They were waiting for us to drown.”

She got diarrhea and couldn't get over it, so she took a plane out of Mazatlán and went to her parents in Texas. It was high season for her dad's tire store. As soon as she was well he put her to work on a phone. She called people who had bought tires from him a year to a year and a half or two ago. She let the Texan stream back into her voice, and sold a lot of tires.

Every night her mother made meat and mashed potatoes, and her father came home late. “If he gets home this time every night, it's not really late, is it?” she said to her mother one evening. June burst into tears, but she wouldn't talk about it. Then Fisher showed up in another car. Katie bought her mother a blender at the drugstore and left it on the kitchen counter with a thank-you card. They went by the tire store on the way out of town, but her father wasn't there, and they didn't want to wait. Katie never saw him again.

The next day it occurred to her that she and Fisher had no agreement. They didn't even know one another's age. He had hardly looked up to say goodbye when she left Mexico holding her gut. Now they were on their way to see some friend of his who lived maybe in Mill Valley and maybe in Sausalito. It was crazy. By then they were in Arizona, and there was nothing she could do except read the map and keep the radio tuned. In a roadside park, just past dusk, they made love on the back seat of the Oldsmobile. It made a wet spot on the dove-gray upholstery. She thought it was an awful thing to have done, a kind of trespass. Maybe nobody would know. But when you made love—or did hateful things, at the other extreme—some of you stayed behind. She didn't know how to explain it, she had never tried to put it into words. She didn't even know the word
karma
then. It was simply another of her ideas for which she had no vocabulary. She wondered if everybody who didn't watch television and didn't like to read had ideas like hers. If people filled up their minds or went around with them empty. What was important about this idea was that it helped her make moral decisions, when she remembered in time. She knew, for example, that she would never have survived a war. She would never have been able to keep it straight, them and us.

Back on the highway she kept on thinking, and she decided that if it was intensity that left your image, there must not be anything of her anywhere. She felt a kind of constant desperation, small and steady like the hum of a cat; it kept her moving, but it didn't make her interesting. She couldn't imagine what Fisher saw in her except accessibility, and though she could see that that might have appealed to him at first, she didn't think it was going to make much of a bond. What could two people have who were sure they couldn't have anything else? Yet for her, Fisher was made up of secrets, and she thought that inside him, his hum was louder. It wasn't just that he was a man, it wasn't that at all. It was that he had been somewhere that counted, somewhere she couldn't even imagine, somewhere he was making her think about when it hadn't ever before crossed her mind. When he said he didn't mind if they made love during her period, she didn't say that it seemed only fair, that sometimes she thought she could smell blood on him.

She finally got up her nerve to ask him, “What was the worst thing that happened in the war?” He said it was in an Oakland bar, right before he got out. Some drunk navy kid tried to get a guy to fuck him, right there in the bar, and before Fisher had finished his beer, there were cops and MPs both, beating the shit out of this wimpy kid. “Jesus, Fish, what could you have done?” she asked. She had waited a long time to get up the nerve to ask him, and she didn't like being put off. “What about the damned
war
?” She hated ellipses, metaphors, any lies that weren't up-front fantasies. And here she was, Miss Walking Ambiguity.

“I just watched,” Fisher said.

4

Katie nursed Rhea toward morning. Someone laid the crying child in her arms and nudged her: Katie, Katie, the baby's hungry. Katie was in bed. She couldn't remember moving, or changing. She put her hand down on her hip. She was wearing a flannel gown, probably one of Christine's. Her mother wore pajamas. The baby was noisy. For a fraction of a moment Katie felt bothered to have her attaching herself so greedily. Then the gargled sucking shifted into an intense, rhythmic tug that Katie felt in her breast and neck and groin. Fisher had watched her nurse, but he had never commented.

As the baby grew less hungry, she stroked Katie's breast, and Katie spread her free hand over the baby's fuzzy soft head. Though the urge was gentle, Katie felt the fine hint of hostility in her hand. The possibilities. She shuddered and drew her hand away. Her mother saw, and whisked the baby away. Katie slept again, not thinking, for once, about the territories of the bed. She slept beneath her dreams. When she awoke, she felt better, but she didn't want to get out of bed. To be a child again herself, the baby instead of the mother—how foolishly she craved that. Refuge, succor, regression: these were desirable things. When her mother suggested moving the crib into the living room, Katie agreed with relief.

Her mother came in and said there was a phone call. “It's Fish,” she said, looking as if she were holding one. Fish spoke in a nearly inaudible monotone. He didn't have anything to say. Katie knew the call was as close to an apology as she would get, but it wasn't enough to acknowledge. And she would never assume the initiative. He had called. “How's your mother?” he asked, a silly question. “See me shrug,” she answered. Her mother was across the room cutting mushrooms at the counter. “She's there?” he asked. The momentary focus on the third party—one Katie had betrayed in dozens of stories of minor malice—brought Katie and Fisher momentarily closer. “They're crazy for the baby,” she said, relenting a little. She couldn't think of anything else to say. “Do you know how long you'll stay?” he asked next. This took some courage on his part. At the airport, she had refused to let him touch her. She told him that, after all this time, she finally admitted it was hopeless. He was a drunk and a beast. He stood docile as a lap dog while she hissed at him. She wanted him to do something vile, to fuel her journey, but he was too tired or too indifferent to her baiting. He stood with his shoulders slumped like a fruit picker at day's end. She was unmoved. She had every intention of leaving him. Maybe she had left him already. The trip was coincidence.

“We haven't talked much,” she told him. “I don't know how much I'll have to take.” The last words slipped out. Her mother looked up from her dicing curiously. Katie didn't know what she and Fish were talking about. Oh why did they always talk in riddles? “I'll write,” she said weakly.

The next day her mother went back to her regular schedule. She owned a small dress shop. She went there around nine and came home around four. She said while Katie was home she would come home for lunch, too. Christine took care of the house and shopping, Uncle Dayton, and now the baby. Katie stayed in bed. She read old magazines and did her nails. She kept thinking she would go back over her marriage, her years with Fisher, and try to make sense of them, but then it would be time for lunch or a cup of tea with Christine, time for a nap or to feed the baby, and she never got started. She only got as far as that long ride down the length of California in someone else's car. She couldn't imagine what references Fisher had given, to make them trust him with a rich athlete's car. They had laughed a lot. She had put her head down in his lap while he was driving, to see if she could shock him.