Erasure (11 page)

“You boys funny?” The skinnier and taller of the two asked.

“Funny?” one of the Frenchmen asked.

“You know, queers,” from the second long-fingernailed, backwoods, walking petri dish.

“Ah, queers,” the Frenchman said. “Oui.”

“Oui,” from bumpkin number one, who looked at his buddy and shared a laugh. “Come on outside so we can kick your ass.”

“I don’t understand,” the second Frenchman said.

Bumpkin two must have stepped or leaned closer. I registered the alarmed expression on the face of the waitress, who then called out that she didn’t want any trouble.

“Outside, faggots. You ain’t chickens, are you? It’s two against two. That’s fair.”

“Actually, it’s two against three,” I said. I put the bite that was on my fork into my mouth.

Bumpkin one stepped over to look at me, then laughed to his pal, “I think we got the nigger riled.”

I chewed my food, trying to remember all the posturing I had learned as an undersized teenager.

“You a faggot, too?” he asked.

I pointed to the fact that I was chewing. This confused him slightly and I could see for a split second his fear. “I might be,” I said.

“So, you want to fight, too.”

I didn’t want to fight, but the fact of the matter was that I was already fighting. I said, and still I am proud of it, “Okay, if we’re going to do this, let’s do it. Just remember that this is one of the more important decisions you will ever make.”

I’d overshot my mark. His fear grew and turned into rage and he hopped back and yelled for me to get up. I was afraid now that I might really have to do something I didn’t do very well, throw punches. I stood and though I wasn’t a skinny wire, I was not much larger than either of them. The second bumpkin yelled for the gay men to get up, too.

They did and I wished I’d had a camera to capture the expressions of those two provincial slugs. The Frenchmen were huge, six-eight and better, and healthy looking. The rubes stumbled over themselves backing away, then scrambled out of the diner.

I was laughing when the men asked me to join them, not at the spectacle of the rednecks running out, but at my own nerve and audacity, to presume that they needed my help.

C’est plus qu’un crime, c’est une faute.

I imagined my sister treating a patient, a little girl with a name my sister despised, looking into her ears, joking with her, asking her if purple was her favorite color because that was the color of her throat. The child laughed and my sister said something stern to the mother, wrote out a prescription for antibiotics. She walked the mother and child down the corridor to the front, where a scared teenager fidgeted in her chair on seeing my sister. The receptionist said something to my sister and handed her a chart. She took the pen from her jacket breast pocket and checked a couple of places, initialed a couple of places. Then the little girl tugged at my sister’s skirt and all sound stopped while my sister offered the child a raised-eyebrows glance. The sound came back. Broken glass, screams, the squawking of chairs against the floor. My sister’s mouth formed words that even my imagination cannot make out and then she was gone.

The police rang the bell of my mother’s house. She thought they had come to read the gas meter. They told her about my sister. The officer, a woman, said, “She was pronounced dead on the scene.”

My mother undid the clasp of her watchband, then fastened it again, then she said, “Thank you for coming to tell me. Would you mind telling Lorraine for me?” She called Lorraine into the room.

Lorraine upon seeing the police was immediately in a panic, her hands starting to shake.

“Lorraine,” Mother said, “these nice people have something to tell you. I’ll be upstairs. It’s time for my nap.”

I took a taxi from National to my mother’s house, stared down at the river as the car crossed the Fourteenth Street bridge. I had vague and unsettling memories of everything that had ever gone wrong when I was a child, times when I accidentally hurt my sister, times when I hurt her on purpose, when some boy had crushed her feelings, when her grades weren’t what she had wanted, Bill ignored her, I ignored her, Mother paid me more attention. I admired her, but hardly knew her and it was all my fault, had to be my fault, because she was not alive to blame. But that thinking was bullshit and I quickly dropped it, replacing it with consideration of my familial duties.

At the house, my brother opened the door to let me in. Our embrace served only to amplify the distance between us, though our grief was very real.

We stepped back and looked at each other.

“How’s Mother?” I asked.

“She’s asleep,” Bill said. “I gave her something. I got here a couple of hours ago. Lorraine’s the one who’s bouncing off the walls. I gave her something, too.”

“Maybe later you can give me something,” I said. “Have you figured out what happened yet?”

“Someone shot into the clinic and killed Lisa,” he said. “I talked to the police thirty minutes ago. A rifle.”

I walked into the living room and sat on the sofa. “Did they catch who did it?” I asked. It felt like a stupid question, a pointless concern. It really didn’t matter. Lisa was dead and nothing would change that. “Do they know why?”

“Some zealot, they think. One of those anti-abortionist idiots.”

“Lisa mentioned that murder in Maryland when I was here,” I said. “Good lord. I can’t believe this. I was halfway expecting Lisa to open the door when I arrived.”

“Me, too.”

“I should go up and see Mother,” I said.

“I guess. She’s pretty out of it. After that, we should go over to Lisa’s and look at her papers, see if she left any instructions.”

Mother was, as Bill had said, out of it. She looked up at me through her haze and wondered aloud if I were my father. “Is that you, Ben?” she asked. “They’ve taken away our little girl.”

“No, Mother, it’s me, Monk. You just rest, okay?” I helped her back down into her pillow. “Get some sleep.”

“My baby is dead,” she said. “My little Lisa is gone.”

Klee: What are you thinking about?

Kollwitz: Why is it that bloody-minded men are such prudes? Why are they so hostile to sexuality and images of the body?

Klee: You’re referring to mustache boy.

Kollwitz:
You
were lucky to leave when you did. I couldn’t bring myself to abandon my home. But back to the subject. That monster and those like him are as threatened by those silly nymphettes of Mueller as they are by Kirchner.

Klee:
Ferkel Kunst.

Kollwitz: Pardon?

Klee: That is what he calls what we do.

Kollwitz: I lost my son in the first war and I fear I will lose my grandson in this one. All because of a man who is afraid of his pee-pee.

Klee: And other people’s pee-pees.

Kollwitz: They’ve established a new bureau. The Commission on the Value of Confiscated Works of Degenerate Art. They’re selling our works to foreigners. They sold them for nothing and burned the rest. I want the ashes of the bonfire to mix with my paints.

Klee: That’s a lovely idea.

Kollwitz: Imagine the smell of those ashes.

Klee: Indeed.

My sister’s apartment was full of life. I never knew her tastes in anything after she became an adult. She liked pastels. She listened to R&B. She enjoyed color photographs of horses and birds. Her bed was neatly made. Her kitchen was clean. Her bathroom smelled sweet. Beside the sink was the ring box I had made for her four years earlier. There was an inlay of wood on the top. I remembered vividly making the box and hoping the while that she would like it as much I enjoyed constructing it. I lifted the lid and looked closely at the spalted maple inlay. It had darkened with age, but was still considerably lighter than the ebony box. There was one ring in the box and I guessed it had been Lisa’s wedding ring.