Everyone but You (21 page)

But not with pills, he decided. He feared he’d awaken in a hospital room with Bella gone and life ahead of him. He rummaged around on the top shelf in their bedroom closet until he felt the metal box tucked in the back. He unlocked it and removed the gun and box of bullets. He went to the kitchen and sat at the table. He loaded each bullet, one by one, finally bringing the cold metal to his mouth, his hands shaking so violently that it would have been possible for the trigger to be pulled without his consciously willing it. He didn’t know what finally stopped him. Sometimes he told himself it was Bella he felt
coursing through his veins. Perhaps, though, it was only life, the quickness of his heart, the air drawn into his nasal passages, his lungs, which expanded, then contracted again. He put the gun down on the table in front of him. He knew even then that he would fail to do what he’d promised Bella. He once considered himself a fearless man. He once believed he could do anything if necessity called for it. But he was only a coward. He poured himself a drink to settle his nerves—another promise to Bella broken, after so many years of not drinking at all. He chastised himself. But what he knew was simple: He didn’t want his own life to end sooner than it might have. He was grateful, if not happy, for what life there was.

Now he heard laughter down the street, saw the slinking shapes of teenagers gathering outside on the road in front of the Powell house, the tall shapes of boys, the smaller movement of the girls as they talked anxiously among themselves. They moved closer. They walked slowly. Surely they saw him there after a time, even in the dark. There were five of them—Trish, her arms wrapped tightly around herself, as if she were cold; the boy Ryan, who held a bat; two other boys with sweatshirts on, hoods drawn tight around their faces so that he couldn’t see who they were at all, or if he knew them; and another girl with braids throughout her hair, someone he’d never seen before, talking now, louder, saying, “That fucker’s up waiting for us.”

Ryan slapped the baseball bat into his open palm and stood at the gate.

“What do you want?” Viktor called out. He stood up, peered out nervously. He kept the gun to his side.

“You know what we want, old man,” Ryan said. He slapped the baseball bat again.

“Ryan,
don’t
,” Trish urged him.

“I told you to stay home if you couldn’t handle it,” he said sharply.

“You don’t speak to her like that,” Viktor yelled. “You don’t speak to
me
like that, either.”

The group moved toward him, and Viktor could barely catch his breath enough to remember to hold up the gun, to point it. They stopped. “I’m within my right,” he said, waving it. “This is my house, and you are not welcome.”

V
IKTOR AWOKE
in the morning. He was out on the porch and didn’t know how many hours had passed. A dampness clung to his skin, and the sun was just rising. It had rained during the night, but nothing else had happened—he’d waved the gun, which was empty of bullets, and the girl, Trish, started pleading and crying and the boy came closer before the others said, “Let’s go,” and they all separated then, running off in different directions, calling Viktor a lunatic, all while Ryan and Trish stood there a moment longer, Trish tugging on the boy’s jacket. The boy shot him such a look of hatred—such hatred—before he threw down the bat, hard, on the ground, and he spit and wiped his mouth and told Viktor—told him—that the old man wasn’t worth his time. They walked off, and Viktor, shaking so urgently, sank back down to his chair, his heart beating so fast he thought he might die himself that night, finally make good on a promise.

In the ensuing weeks, a few incidents persisted. Another egging. A smashed mailbox. It was more than a month later that, while tending to the garden and weeding the overgrown flower beds, Viktor noticed the faint trace of lettering across his walkway, white paint on the cement. He looked more closely—
MURDERER
.
He wondered how long it had been there. He made out each letter, then finally the word itself, before he went into the house and returned with a bucket of soapy water. He bent with difficulty and washed what he could with a wire brush. He hosed his walkway down with water, then took to scrubbing again. He would not call the police. Let them call him a murderer. They were children. They were scared, they were as scared as he was of this life. They were children, he told himself. What did they know? And he could defend himself.

He heard Trish’s voice before he actually noticed she was there, listening to him complain under his breath. He looked up from his work, wiped his brow, squinted. Trish was at the gate. She had a dog with her, a mangy-looking mutt much like the ones Viktor and his friends used to kick when they were younger, when the mutts came too close to trash cans, sniffing for food. This dog, too, sniffed nervously around before lifting its leg on the fence.

“No manners,” he said, nodding. Then he went back to his work. She didn’t seem to be waiting for him to say anything. She simply watched as he struggled to remove the paint from the sidewalk. “What do you want?” he asked sharply.

She debated, pulled the dog closer. She was about to say she was sorry when she realized there was nothing she could say to make anything better. The old man could barely hold the brush without it slipping from his hands. She tied the dog’s leash to the fencepost and opened the gate. She said, finally, “I’ll help clean it up.”

She came over then and bent down, her bare knees scraping against the pavement. She pushed her hair behind her ears and took the brush from his shaking hand. Viktor said nothing. He sat back, exhausted, on the dry grass. One more moment, Trish
thought, and he might have wept, right in front of her. His hands came up to his face, then fell suddenly back down into his lap.

“I know you didn’t do anything wrong,” she told him. “I mean, we’re all sort of assholes sometimes.”

Viktor wiped the sweat from his forehead. The dog sniffed at the flowers and grasses that poked through the fence and into the sidewalk. “I had a dog once,” he said. Then to Trish he said, “Where’s your friend?”

She glanced up. “Ryan? Gone.”

“Ah,” Viktor said. “That’s good. Whether you know it or not, he wasn’t the right boy for you.”

“That’s what my mother said,” she told him, but when he looked at her, he could tell she was upset by his statement. He didn’t understand youths—he could admit that—why a girl with so many possibilities would want to be with a boy whose life would never go anywhere.

Trish continued her work. She scrubbed hard, intent on making the letters fade. She could have told the old man it wasn’t Ryan who did this—if Ryan had decided that the old man wasn’t worth his time, then he meant it. He wouldn’t go to that place that would, finally, make him like his father. She still believed that. No. It wasn’t Ryan but the remaining gang. They egged the house, smashed the mailbox. They stepped back after spray-painting the letters, satisfied with their own actions. They were the ones who came over to her house after leaving Viktor’s; they were the ones who called her out on the porch, wanting her to come see. But she felt years and years older. She was finished with all that business, too. They laughed, and she couldn’t help but think they were mocking her, too, in a small way.
He is gone
, their smiles seemed to say.
We all knew that would happen
. After
he had thrown the baseball bat down onto the sidewalk, Ryan stopped talking to any of them. Within the week he’d run off from the foster home, and no one, not even Trish, had heard from him since.

She scrubbed harder. Viktor sat next to her, watching. Perhaps he was thinking she deserved this, that she deserved everything bad that had happened in her life. She glanced up at him. He ran his hand through his damp hair and then pulled a small towel from his pocket to wipe away the sweat.

She said, “I’m sorry about this.”

“Ah,” he said again. He frowned, and she couldn’t tell if he was resolved or angry. He stared off to the roses and hedgerow. Finally, he told her, “My wife was very ill. I promised her I would help her die when the time came, and I did. That does not make me a murderer. I still have a promise to keep. It is like a great burden in my heart.”

Trish inched down the sidewalk on her knees. “I don’t believe in promises.”

“It is probably just as well,” Viktor said. “They are difficult things.”

She got up and dropped the brush in the bucket. She thought of telling him about the promise she and Ryan had made, but it hardly seemed to matter anymore, and she didn’t want the old man to dispense fatherly advice. At least she didn’t think she wanted it. “I don’t care what people say anymore. It doesn’t matter much. It’s not totally gone, but it’s better. In a few months, it’ll be covered with snow anyway. That’s the thing about this place, there’s so much snow.”

“Winter is a cruel season,” he said. “But sometimes summer is worse. I do not want another summer. I wait, eagerly, for the first snow, and then I will keep my promise to Bella.”

“You’d be the first.” Trish brushed off her knees. Overhead the sun beamed brightly. The breezes blew but didn’t stop her from sweating. She undid the leash from the fencepost and yanked the dog toward her, but the dog pulled away, not wanting to come to her. “Stupid dog,” she said, twisting the leash. “My mom thought he’d be good for me, to learn responsibility.”

“Ah,” Viktor said, nodding. He lifted himself up slowly, ignoring the sharp pain in his back and legs. His face twisted. He picked up the bucket. “Responsibility is also a difficult thing, but your mother is a smart woman,” he told her. “And you’re a good child. My wife always said that about you.”

Trish wasn’t sure if she was good or bad or anything but herself. Anyway, she didn’t owe him anything else. She’d apologized, and she helped him, and that was it. “I don’t think you’ll have any more problems,” she said now, nonchalantly. Viktor nodded as she closed the gate and pulled the dog down the street, not urgently, toward home.

A
lthough I am preoccupied with words, I cannot say what I want. Once when traveling in a foreign country I negotiated my desire while lying naked on a bed, legs up in the air, toes gripping the flesh of a stranger’s shoulders. And when this man asked me, in between wet, jaunty kisses, what I
wanted
, all I could say was
Je ne veux rien
and not
Prenez votre temps, s’il vous plaît
, which is what I actually thought.

I do not remember this man’s name. (I am not certain I ever knew his name.) But his small, dingy apartment smelled of smoke, and his body felt sinewy, racehorse lean, moist with sweat. His hair fell across my shoulders as he moved. He spoke of things I dare not say, and some of which, truthfully, I did not understand. When we finished, I grabbed my purse and buttoned up my blouse, slipped on my jeans, and stole a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. I quoted Rilke, not in French
but in German, and said,
We are never at home in our interpreted worlds
. And the man, this stranger, lay back in bed, blew me a kiss from his cupped hand, and whispered in a smooth, soft voice,
Va-t’en!

I do not believe that French is the language of desire.

I am unsure about German, though I confess that, like Rilke, I believe that if I cried out no one would hear, that I would be reminded of my own divisions.

E
NGLISH IS NO BETTER
. Always I must approximate. Back home in the States, I once dated a man who was forty-three, twenty-two years older than I was then. This man never said I love you, though it’s true he did have a cat and a mother, so he may have been lying. Perhaps he simply did not say everything there was to say.

I gave him pet names, Peanut Butter and Honey Pie and Bear, because everything about him was thick. But most of the time I just called him Bash, a shortening of his Lebanese name, Bashir.

I called his cat Kitty because that was the cat’s name.

I never met his mother, and so did not know her name.

Bash usually called late at night, not because he wanted to talk dirty but because he wanted to discuss philosophy. After midnight he became extremely lucid and could speak in the most straightforward manner about Husserl and Hegel. He could breathe the body politic, phenomenology. He quoted Buber’s
Ich und Du
, which he struggled to read in poor, broken German until finally he gave up to read in English instead. When he read, his voice put me to sleep because he spoke in whispers.

I do not think Buber has been translated to Arabic.

Bash called me Cutie and took me out for ice cream and walks late at night, under the moon. When he and I kissed, our glasses knocked together, and I shook beneath his hands as if everything within me were imploding. I nibbled him and he sucked in his belly. The black hairs on his body felt full, furry under my fingertips.

Take the advice of the Marquis de Sade, he once said while we lay in bed, arms folded around each other, sheets twisted between our legs. Don’t ever have children. He told me that at twenty-one I was already very frightening. He asked me if, like Sade’s female philosopher-monsters, I preferred an alternative kind of sex.