Funny Once (4 page)

“The lads are protesting,” her husband now said faintly into the phone. “I'll call you back.” Nana could hear the dogs, those fat foxy creatures, yelping gloriously. It was easy to work them into such a state. You had merely to lead them to the plate glass porch door and point out the squirrel or cat running on the railing, or the automatic pool vacuum flipping its tail in the water as it carried on, side to side, end to end, tormenting mechanical scorpion. They were brothers, two and a half years in age. Lacking children, Nana and her husband had settled for dogs; their friends no doubt pitied their misplaced affection. This was the third pair of siblings they'd owned, first black Labs, next cocker spaniels, now the corgis—each set a slightly smaller breed. “We'll die with Chihuahuas,” Nana had once told her husband.

“You'll die with Chihuahuas,” he'd corrected her. “I'll die during the dachshunds.” In the past, he had enjoyed pointing at the discrepancy in their ages, his future ghostliness that would haunt her. He didn't do that, anymore.

Nana's mother had asked about the dogs before she did her son-in-law. And how she struggled to call a man her own age her “son-in-law.” The title begged to be inflected with irony, and her mother wasn't capable of irony.

“All well?” she said now, disallowing any answer other than an affirmative. She was rooting in her purse for lipstick, preparing herself for the morning's trip to the hospital. Nana had gotten in too late to visit her father the night before.

“Whose shoes are those?” Nana asked as they headed out, noticing for the first time several pairs of children's shoes by her parents' back door.

“Didn't I tell you who moved into the Dixons' old place?”

“Remind me,” Nana said.

 

Peter Hinshaw. Nana's first boyfriend. Who now had a wife, and two children. He'd come to the open house only because he'd mistaken the address, thought it was Nana's home on the market. On a bored Sunday whim, he'd brought his wife and son and daughter, expecting to revisit the rooms where he had first had sex, first gotten drunk, first dropped acid, but instead, had found himself in the house next door, and his wife, untutored on any kind of context, had fallen in love.

Pete's wife adored her new neighbors, Nana's parents, as well. Her children had become their surrogate grandkids, running through the drive and yard that connected the properties, charging up the back steps and entering Nana's kitchen as if it were their own. They habitually removed their shoes, as was customary in their own home. They called Nana's parents by their first names, Bud and Lil. They had favorite places around the house, stations that they visited: the piano with its glass dish of meltaway mints, the base of the dining room table, where a town of blocks and thimbles was set up, a giant jar of change in the sewing room, too heavy to lift but lovely to study, and the aquarium into which they took turns dropping the minutest bits of food on the fishes' gawping mouths. Her mother's joy in these children, her father's reputed amused lenience, stung Nana. Nothing she herself could do would transport her parents in quite the same way. Indulging these two small people, ages three and five, a boy, his older sister, was as much as they could ever wish for.

After the visit to the hospital, Nana and her mother came home to find the children waiting on the back steps, pink chins in hands, two blond mops. They did not look like their father. Pete's skin had been sallow, his hair a dark, kinky, too-long mess, his eyes sunk in gloomy sockets. These drug-addict, rock-star features had attracted Nana, in high school. She was not immune to the appeal now. Pete had broken up with her to date a college girl, trading up. Nana couldn't even truly be surprised or personally wounded, although for a long while she had suffered—suffered as if kicked in the ribs by a horse, in tremendous pain but with no real hostility toward the animal itself. It might have been that college girl, all those years ago, whose allure had convinced Nana that she absolutely had to attend college herself. And a better one than the local U. She would be a coed from a school with a national reputation. She would show Pete Hinshaw.

In fact, her eventual marriage to her professor, from the next rung on her academic ladder, could very well have been the fruition of a seed sown when Pete Hinshaw had confessed to her that he was sorry, but he had met a college girl.
Say no more
, Nana had thought, sad but resigned.

“Hey, Pete,” she greeted him at her mother's house, when he slouched in to retrieve his children. She wished he had lost hair and gained weight; instead, he looked as she remembered him, which was to say that she felt herself attuned to him, to everything about him, once more. She knew what those lips felt like, that coiled hair; she remembered the odor around his face of breath mint, smoke, beer. Still indulging and hiding his vices. The badly shaved rough neck.

“Ba-nana,” he said drolly. He didn't disguise his lazy leering scan, dragged from foot to head like a reckless blade, like the amplified snarl of a guitar riff. From the hallway came the commotion of his children, the little boy and girl running headlong into the room then and suddenly silenced—brought up short, as if with reins—by his presence.

It was as if he beat them. Except he wouldn't beat them. He would embarrass them. He would make them self-conscious. He would not laugh at what wasn't amusing, nor praise indiscriminately, just from politeness. He was finicky, and frank, and relentless. “Intense,” everyone had agreed uneasily, in high school; it had been a coup to be his girlfriend, to pass his peculiar muster.

“What are you no-necks up to?” he asked the girl, turning in her direction without releasing Nana from his glance.

“Playing,” she said shyly, edging behind Nana's mother's knees.

“Playing,” her brother echoed, a plea. In his hand he held an unraveling cardboard tube from wrapping paper; they'd been sword fighting, charging around the house's bottom floor.

“Peter,” said Lil, flushed ecstatic as hostess, mother, ersatz grandmother. Queen of the castle, bestower of cardboard swords. “Sit down. Say hello to Nana, she's come to help.” Her mother had no idea what had happened in her house, all those years ago. The blowouts in the basement, the escapades in Nana's bedroom, the hidden niches where the bottles and pills and baggies had been stashed—her own little stations, Nana thought. Her parents had been notoriously oblivious; it was her house that everybody had named as the location where they'd be spending the night.

The woman's innocence, compounded by the children's, had returned them to high school, Pete and Nana staring at each other beneath the whir of sweetness that ensued: bright pink juice being drunk and spilled, cookies offered and crumbled, sugar suffusing the atmosphere like pollen or perfume, while across the table, across years and other partners, a snaking heat coalesced between them, something engineered out of naughtiness and nostalgia, the knowledge of a shared naked history, wavering there like a faint layer of pollution.

Which would be thoroughly whisked away by the arrival of the wife. She wasn't the cool coed from back when. He'd married a physical therapist, an upbeat, wide-faced young woman, a leader of cheers. She, like her children, entered Nana's old home as if its inhabitants were her close relations, a confidence having to do with good intentions, purity. “Honey, I'm so sorry about Bud” were her first words to Nana's mother. “I took him a can of cashews and a puzzle book. Peter, you know you have messages on the machine?”

“Unemployed,” Pete explained to Nana. “Downsized.”

“Taking stock, sweetheart,” scolded the wife. “Weighing some other options.”

“That's right,” Nana's mother concurred.

Pete's wife held out her hand to shake Nana's. “I would recognize you anywhere! All those pictures in the albums.” Her smile made her eyes wrinkle up atop her apple round cheeks. She seemed so unlikely, Nana thought, though maybe Pete needed such a girl to keep him in line. To provide cover, to make small talk and utter pleasantries. A person person, as opposed to a misanthrope. To her every address she appended a term of endearment:
sweetness, monkey, pie-pie
. Her children scooted onto chairs beside her when she sat at the table, each leaning close to her radiant goodwill.

But what did he offer her? Martyrdom?

“Come see my tree house?” Pete said to Nana.

“It was our tree house,” the little girl said, “but Daddy took it.”

“Our tree house,” the boy repeated sadly.

Pete stood, patting the shirt pocket over his heart, where a hard-pack of Camels showed itself now. “I'll check the messages,” he told his wife. “Bye Lil. Coming?” he asked Nana.

 

Dr. Shock wanted to hear all about her ex-boyfriend.

“Why didn't you answer, before?” Nana asked. She imagined him ignoring the ringing phone, humming right beside the machine, bored, as she left her messages. It was nearly midnight, and she was up on the roof of the porch at her parents' home, there beneath the tree limbs, looking down at the Dixons' old house. Pete's house. Faint pink night-lights lit the upstairs hall; in the basement, where Mr. Dixon used to hole up with his nasty habits, another light was on, this of the bare-bulb variety. Nana guessed Pete would be under that bulb, playing the phantom of Mr. Dixon. Either there or in his tree house, designed for the children, co-opted by him. He'd led her up its metal circular-stairway treads, into its boys' club confines. First he'd gotten her stoned (hookah: who'd seen its Ganesha self, its burbling trunks, since high school?), then he'd leaned over to put his lips on hers.

The night had turned brisk, as it always did just before Halloween, a wind had whipped up, and what few leaves were left in the trees slapped against the porch roof, switched at Nana's legs. Her mother would have been horrified to find her here, this same place Nana came in the old days, imperiling herself on the roof. Would she never cease scaring that poor woman?

Meanwhile, Nana's husband was drinking. “The old soldier's joy,” he informed her jauntily. He would be snug in his reading chair in their Houston study, paging through weighty art books. He couldn't concentrate on words, in this state, but enjoyed falling into the massive color plates of these expensive texts. His Rauschenbergs, his de Koonings, his Twomblys, and, saddest of all, his Rothkos. In this abstract mood (“This is when I relish visions of suicide,” he'd told her once), he tonight discerned something about her commentary concerning Kansas, peeled back her father's (stable) condition, her mother's (chatty) busyness, to inquire into the neighbor, the former boyfriend, the surprise, the narrative aside. Underpainting, Nana thought, the hidden figures beneath the public subject. He could perceive it everywhere. At the hospital a nurse had frowned at Nana's swollen purple hand, diagnosing sprain in the index finger and wrist, swaddling her in a bright white bandage right there over her father's body in bed. The nurse had used her teeth to tear the tape, tidy as a beaver. Nana had been only dimly aware of an ache, the aftereffects of her fall in Houston, pain she'd been able to neglect during her tranced 600-mile drive. In the tree house with Pete, loopy on hashish, she had tucked in her pinky and ring finger, raised the expertly made package to his face near hers as if pointing a gun.

“Tell me about the reunion with the boyfriend,” said her husband. “Spare no detail. A hug?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Peck on the cheek? Kiss? Lingering glance?”

Nana heard his longing to have her say that they had fooled around. He wanted to be titillated by the situation, turned on by the scenario, have a little phone sex intermission before returning to his heavy art books. He liked it when men flirted with Nana, when they stood too close or stared overlong, tucked in her dress tag or brushed against her. And in the past, Nana had exaggerated, especially while making love with her husband, so that he could feel like the winner, so that she could feel like the prize. He made use of it as foreplay, stimulation; also, he seemed to think that it would excuse his own lecherous tendencies. But now that his inquiry might lead to something true, Nana found it difficult to remember how she usually played the game. “You sound like you want me to sleep with him,” she eventually said.

“Do I?”

“You do.”

“Maybe I do. If you did, would you tell me about it?”

“I don't want to sleep with him,” she lied. “We already did that, a long time ago.”

“Therefore, if you slept with him again, your overall stats wouldn't change.” This number was known to Dr. Shock. A mere handful. Nana had been timid. His number of partners was much higher, higher even than might be expected given his twenty-plus-year head start. He couldn't remember all their names, those many women with whom he'd had sex.

“The stats would change.” She had never been unfaithful; she had never wanted to be unfaithful. The stats had already changed.

“Nana,” he laughed. He was so confident, she thought, so sure that she still felt herself the lucky object of the professor's esteemed attention. In her mind, she opened the drawer of his night table, just to be appalled by the number of pill bottles there, the dirty secret of his decline. At that moment, the side door at the Dixons' clattered open, the familiar metal racket from long ago, of Mr. Dixon's angry predawn departures to the newspaper stand—the boy on the bike couldn't get to their block early enough for Mr. Dixon. Except now it was Pete emerging, and he didn't let the storm door rattle shut but held it on its wheezing hydraulic arm, then simply knelt on his side steps and lit a cigarette. Nana watched him from her perch.