Funny Once (2 page)

“His place,” Richard said aloud and abruptly turned around, convinced suddenly that the boys had gone to Isaac’s. Just the week before, Danny had said, out of the blue, “It’s weird I’ve never seen inside their apartment.” Plenty of times he’d come along when Richard dropped off or picked up Bonita and Isaac. But the pair were always waiting in the murky ground-floor vestibule or rushing through it, on their way to their two-bedroom unit on the third floor, which was far too small for their large family. One of Isaac’s chief complaints was that he never knew who would be asleep beside him when he woke in the morning: brother, sister, nephew, niece.

“Jessss,” Bonita agreed, nodding thoughtfully, drawing out the word, when Richard found her and asked if it was possible the boys had needed something of Isaac’s to complete their game. As usual, Bonita failed to buckle her seat belt, and Richard didn’t correct her. The pinging alarm would soon silence itself. This vehicle was a replacement for the one that had been totaled three years earlier; his wife had not been buckled in either. “
Lo siento
,” Bonita said for the hundredth time, shaking her head in self-chastisement.

“It’s OK,” Richard assured her. “They know better.
Está bien
.” Sitting close to each other in the car made them both nervous, Richard supposed; they hadn’t ridden together minus the children before. Her distinct smell, the fact of her vanities—the orange-tinted streaks in her hair, the powdery makeup, the bra strap cutting into her shoulder, her impractical high-heeled shoes—strikingly present. Female and male, close to the same age, arranged together in their traditional spots. Other drivers on the freeway could have plausibly assumed that Richard and his passenger were a couple. When Richard exited near Bonita’s neighborhood, he felt the observations of others would be less benign. These were people on foot, lounging on porches, leaning against poles, gathering at curbs, and then sauntering slowly into the street, forcing cars to give way, throwing Richard direct and challenging glares. It felt a bit like crossing the border, the convenience stores and groceries and taco trucks all offering their wares in Spanish, the smell in the air of Mexican food, a wariness in both the visitor and the visited. Bonita had come to Texas long ago; Richard had no idea whether her status was legal, knew only that her children had all been born here.

At her building, she was out of the car before he’d turned off the engine, running awkwardly, her purse forgotten on the seat. Anyone watching might reasonably have guessed that Richard had done something terrible to her, that she was fleeing. His habit in the past had been to wait until the light came on in her apartment upstairs, until Bonita showed herself on the balcony and waved to him. How foolish he felt now, following her, carrying her large pink leopard-spotted purse. On the walkway was a trail of trash—a diaper, a Frenchy’s bag, a smear of food that someone had walked through. The pack of dogs that usually lay panting in the vacant lot next door were howling in the distance.

The building’s door was open, for which Richard was grateful—the men and the dogs outside made him uneasy. Up the stained stairs he climbed to the third floor. Like much of Houston, this habitat had had its brief heyday, maybe fifty years before; it had been a fashionable singles’ complex, built well enough to survive only its first set of tenants intact. Now it was a shoddy ruin, a place with broken balcony railings, pocked with a hundred ugly satellite dishes, a dry swimming pool filled with forsaken furniture and fenced off with concertina wire. Bonita’s apartment was both too high for the rickety balcony to seem safe and too low to keep out a persistent climber. A breeding ground of anxiety and temptation.

A silver-haired man in coveralls stood on a step stool in the hall, repairing or disabling the sprinkler head on the ceiling.

“Excuse me,” Richard said to him, “do you know which is Gutierrez?”

“
Cómo?
” asked the man, stepping down with difficulty, in his hand a tool Richard thought belonged in the garden or perhaps the kitchen, a small rake-like thing. Eye to eye, he realized that the guy was close to his own age, that his white hair was premature, and that the man was as confused by what Richard held as Richard was by the little rake.

“Bonita,” Richard explained, gesturing at the purse. “Isaac and Bonita
y mi hermano
. No,
mi
hijo.
Aquí?
” He indicated a door that might match the balcony he knew was hers. The man was frowning at Bonita’s belongings. “
Soy Richard
,” Richard added lamely. “
Trabajo?
” he said, hoping the word would inspire some kind of sensible cognition. Richard’s wife had spoken Spanish, so she had done all the talking. She and Bonita had often had lengthy conversations that left Richard with only the scantest broad understanding, through the few words he recognized, all subtleties lost. Had he pointed this out, his wife would have told him that it was a fair representation of men’s general understanding of the world: they grasped its fundamentals but not its tricky minutiae. “Gross motor skills,” she would have said. “As opposed to fine.”

The man in the coveralls put himself between Richard and the door to apartment 3C, rapping briskly on it, the clawed tool in his other hand. Richard was glad that the building had a handyman who wished to protect its tenants; Bonita and Isaac occasionally spent nights alone here, when the older brothers were not around. From Richard’s wife, Bonita had learned how to have the locks changed so that her husband could not reenter the place. Richard’s wife had also helped Bonita get divorced, and had insisted on restraining orders when neither a locked door nor a legal document convinced the ex-husband that he wasn’t wanted.

“And sometimes?” Richard’s wife was forced to concede. “Bonita actually
does
want him.” That was the tricky part the law couldn’t touch.

“
Gracias
,” Richard said to the man in the coveralls, who nodded, still skeptical of the hapless Anglo with the woman’s handbag. “Isaac?” Richard called out. “Bonita? Danny? Open up, guys.”

When Isaac finally cracked the door, the handyman stepped inside. Just before the door closed in Richard’s face, he saw the raw panic in Isaac’s eyes and understood that this character in the hall was Bonita’s ex-husband.

“Fuck!” Richard banged on the door now himself. “I’m calling the police,” he threatened. A door down the hall opened and a head leaned out, then popped back in like a turtle’s. “I’m calling right now unless you open this fucking door! Danny!” he yelled. “Danny, Bonita! Open the door!” He was ransacking Bonita’s purse in search of her phone, tissue and candies and a tiny Bible spilling onto the floor. Just as he found it, the door flew open.

“Dad,” said Danny, pressing into his father’s ribcage. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s OK. Where’s Isaac?”

“He locked himself in his room.”

“You go get in there with him, OK?”

From the kitchen came an animated exchange of Spanish. Not angry, Richard thought, but opinionated, people in passionate relation to each other, Bonita’s voice the more strident, the ex-husband’s explanatory, if not apologetic, pleading. Richard listened for some sign that he should intervene, follow through on the threat of phoning the authorities. He stepped around a plastic-covered dining table to wait outside the kitchen doorway. The buffet against the wall was stacked with canned goods, which reminded him of Bonita’s first day working for his family, a decade or so ago. She had retrieved from their trash the unopened yet expired boxes and cans of food that his wife had thrown away in preparation for a housekeeper. An embarrassing moment, not unlike this one, in which Richard had not known how to properly explain why Bonita shouldn’t consume the outdated food, or shouldn’t accede to her criminal ex-husband’s wishes. Above the buffet hung pictures of Isaac’s siblings and nieces and nephews and sisters- and brothers-in-law, each and every one a school or studio portrait, groups in matched attire grinning at the photographer. A few included the father, who, on occasion, made his way into the annual photo, as he made his way into his ex-wife’s home and maybe sometimes into her bed. Perhaps that would be today’s story, Bonita being a naturally forgiving woman, weak in the face of some lingering, nostalgic bad habit of love. Love for that man in coveralls, that figure who came to Isaac in nightmares and made him scream, who might or might not have been responsible for knocking out Isaac’s front tooth—a story Richard’s wife would have gotten to the bottom of.

Richard left his listening post and joined the boys in Isaac’s room. It was protected by a dead bolt. This despite the fact that the walls and door themselves would have easily shattered or splintered at the mildest use of force. The room, like the rest of the apartment, was very tidy and held a few familiar touches: a cast-off desk and chair from Richard’s home, gifts the two boys had gotten in common—a lighted globe, a poster of SpongeBob. “We just needed this guy,” Danny was explaining, in his palm a drunk-looking Duplo clown, while Isaac sat trembling on the bed with his hands over his ears. “We were making an amusement park in the town, and this is literally the only guy who fits in the cannon. Nobody else has the right feet.” Richard sat beside Isaac and gently took the boy’s hands into his own, explaining the problem with what the boys had done, the worry they’d caused, riding the buses alone, the risk of accident and mishap, the menace of malign strangers, adding that he and Bonita hadn’t been angry so much as scared. Isaac burst into tears, and Danny just looked perplexed.

“If it’s so dangerous, how come we let Bonita and Isaac do it?” he asked. “They do it every day, twice. And also, I think, statistically buses crash a lot less often than cars.” Danny would be a lawyer, Richard thought, not for the first time. He was logical, and passionate about fairness, fearless in an interesting way. Right after Danny had spoken, however, he seemed to realize precisely what he’d said, and then he too was sniffling, burrowing into Richard from the other side. A time would come, Richard thought, when he and his children wouldn’t think of that terrible car crash and death every day, when they would no longer be ambushed by missing her.

Through the thin walls, they could hear the voices carrying on in the kitchen, his and hers, cajoling, laughing, then the embarrassing noise of nothing. Intimacy. And then the sound of his being sent away, a quiet, reluctant goodbye.

“
Is OK
,” Bonita eventually called at the locked door. “Is OK,
se fue
. Isaac?” Simultaneously, the boys pulled away from Richard, wiped their eyes, put on their game faces. Richard unlocked the door. “Is OK now,” Bonita told him, her eyes also tearful. “He go.” It was hard to say who initiated their embrace, only the second in their long association. It seemed a mutual impulse, sadness, need—the same feelings they’d shared at the funeral, three years ago. Bonita’s shoulders heaved. Tears: they did not require translation. How convenient it would be, Richard thought, Bonita’s wiry hair against his neck, her face on his shoulder, how terribly
useful
if they could simply wed, he minus a wife, she with her problematic ex-husband, and regroup together like in a sitcom scenario in the fortified comfort of Richard’s house across town, an arrangement that would be possible if they could just ignore that troubling enigma of love.

“Oh no,” she cried, smiling, when they separated, wiping at the mascara on his shirt. “How you say?” she said to the boys, wiggling her fingers.

“Spiders,” they replied together.

“Dad?” Danny said from the backseat. Richard checked the rearview; his son’s tone was hesitant. “Dad, inside your head, do you hear conversations?”

“Like memories? Like of disagreements?”

“No, like . . .” He tipped his chin to look skyward. “Like instructions,” he finally settled on.

Richard considered this. “Not exactly,” he said. “I mean, I think in words, and the words are about making decisions, sometimes, although sometimes I also just—”

“No, not like that,” his son interrupted. “Like some other voice not your own.”

“Sure. I hear people I know, or knew, when they said impor—”

“No, no, no. Nobody you know, not you or a friend or a relative.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Isaac said not to tell anyone this.”

“But you’re worried.”

“Don’t tell Bonita.”

Richard checked his blind spot and merged onto the 59. Rush hour was just about to kick in; the exchange from downtown was already filling, an army of headlights in the oncoming dusk. “Whatever you tell me, son, nobody will ever know I got it from you. OK?”

“OK. So Isaac says that inside his head people are talking.”

“He hears voices?”

“I guess so.”

“And what do they say?”

“How would I know?”

Fair enough, Richard thought. Was eleven the right age for schizophrenia to set in? His wife, master of all matters psychological, could have confirmed this. And more immediately relevant: was eleven the right age to scare his son with the idea of his best friend being schizophrenic? The problem with telling somebody something was that he wouldn’t later be able to unhear it.

“Bonita and I will take Isaac to the doctor,” Richard promised. His wife had done this in the past, when the mysterious nervous stomach had first flared up; it was she who’d insisted to Bonita that the condition was serious. In Isaac, she had, perhaps, seen some of her own anxiousness, an insidious presence that Bonita did not recognize.