Know Your Beholder: A Novel (8 page)

Hearing her say her daughter’s name was strangely shocking in that it revealed nothing more than if she’d uttered “clock” or “can opener.”

She said, “What exactly did he ask?”

“If I’d seen anything out of the ordinary.”

She started bobbing her head. Tiny little nods. It was almost parkinsonian, this bobbing.

I was confused, back on my heels, defensive, yet I still had this impulse to pull her close and feel her breasts press into me. Something about our mutual desperation. Or maybe it was just my hormonal loneliness, my proximity to an unwashed woman pheromonally spiking my testosterone. Despite our many respective thermal layers, I was convinced that an old-fashioned breast-to-chest hug would do us both a world of good.

After her head came to rest, she said that they hadn’t filed a missing person’s report because they didn’t even know what that was.

“Of course,” I said.

She said that when they signed the lease they told me how they were “different.” “We’re still getting used to this kind of life,” she added.

I told her I totally understood.

“Why did he give you his card?” she asked, and the space between her words had shrunk, her breath had quickened.

I said I was pretty sure it was standard procedure and that he had given it to me unsolicited.

Then she asked if she could see the card, and I told her it was up in the attic.

“What’s his name?” she asked.

I told her “Mansard” and she asked what kind of detective he was. “Just a regular detective,” I said.

Her eyes seemed to go soft-focus, and she mouthed his name a few times. Then the head bobbing started again. “Are you gonna call him?” she said.

“Should I?” I asked.

Her blue eyes seemed to surge. She regarded me with an attitude I can only describe as ultracontained vitriol, her mouth a small knot of bitterness. “We didn’t know about the Office of Missing Persons,” she said.

“There’s no need to explain anything to me, Mrs. Bunch.”

“Mary,” she said.

“I mean Mary.”

“I’m not a librarian.”

“Of course,” I capitulated yet again.

“She disappeared while we were shopping,” she said. “Someone took her right out of the fucking Target.”

Their refrigerator hummed in the kitchen. Hides of snow calved on the roof. Someone in the neighborhood was trying to start a chain saw. Plows scraped by on distant streets. These were epic sounds.

Then, to change the subject, perhaps cheaply, almost in the voice of another man, someone I’ve never heard speak before, I said, “I don’t mean to have to be a landlord right now, Mary, but you’re almost three weeks late with the rent.”

“We’ll have it to you in a few days,” she replied tersely.

Her large, unblinking eyes, their pupils enormous again. This is what grief does to your eyes, I thought. It turns them into doll’s eyes. Grief or sociopathic numbness.

“Todd’s waiting on a check,” she added.

“Don’t worry about the late fee,” I offered.

For which she didn’t thank me. Mary Bunch was about as thankless as an interstate tollbooth attendant.

“By the way,” she said, “are you planning on shoveling the front steps? Todd almost slipped and fell this morning. It’s starting to get dangerous and we can’t afford him losing any days.”

“I have someone coming by,” I lied.

She asked me why I couldn’t do it.

“Bad back,” I lied again. “But don’t worry, they’ll be shoveled and salted first thing tomorrow.”

Then, without looking at my hands, she said, “Why are you holding that?”

I hadn’t even realized it, but I’d removed their TiVo remote from the pocket of my bathrobe. I was squeezing it so hard my knuckles were pearling. I loosened my grip, handed it to her.

She gently snatched it and wedged it into her armpit. “I think you should go,” she said, her arms folded in front of her, her chin still jutting.

I found myself wondering how many times she’d fallen into the net while doing trapeze. Twelve? Two hundred? And would it have been a product of bad timing or a missed cue? Her body hurtling through the air as if thrown from the window of a high-speed train.

The remote fell from her armpit to the floor, and the cover for the batteries popped off and one AA battery rolled across the space between us and kissed my slippered left foot. We froze in recognition of a kind of mushroom-cloud moment. Neither of us would look down.

I realized I was squeezing my butt cheeks together with all my might, which I surmised was related to my acute dehydration. It somehow felt like the AA battery was now lodged in my rectum.

“I’m sorry,” I said, hoarse now. “Next time I’ll make sure someone’s home.”

She uncrossed her arms and then crossed them again.

Then I bent down, which allowed me to release my butt cheeks, engaged my unfit, atrophying hamstrings, and grabbed the remote, its small plastic battery cover, and the battery. On one knee I negotiated the battery into its correct plus-minus position, clicked the case closed, and rose to hand Mary Bunch the remote, which she accepted with cupped, rigid hands, as if being forced to inherit a piece of unwanted heirloom crystal.

Up close she had soft, perfect skin, and despite her mucoidal nostrils, her breath smelled like maple syrup and pancakes.

Later in my room I took a Viagra. Earlier I’d procured a vial of the little blue rhomboidal pellets from my pot dealer, Haggis, who, in addition to the popular erectile dysfunction pill, is now selling Vicodin, Xanax, and chocolate bars infused with psychedelic mushrooms. It seems that when it comes to matters of small-town drug dealing, expansion is more than possible, even during a recession.

Despite the blizzard, Haggis wore frayed corduroy cutoffs and hiking boots with no socks. I could smell his feet. Oddly buttery, deeply fungal. Like multiplex popcorn and the between-the-toes cheese of masculine decomposition.

Haggis lives out of his car—a venom-yellow midnineties Nissan hatchback that boasts a suspicious-looking Nevada license plate and many dings and dents. He’d recently fashioned ghetto-style valance curtains from what appears to be the felt hide of a pool table, which he uses to conceal his front and back windshields and all windows. He’s one of those post-post-post-college-aged eccentrics who spring for custom curtains but won’t fix the dents on their car.

Haggis came up to the attic, and after completing the Viagra transaction, we drank instant Folgers and listened to side A of Fleetwood Mac’s
Rumours
.

Inspired by his shorts, I offered him my corduroy reading chair. I manned my twin bed, which sort of sags in the middle.

Our hands were interlaced around kooky gift-store mugs. Mine had a snoozing Garfield the cat on it, the phrase “Anybody can exercise…but this kind of lethargy takes real discipline” splitting at the ellipse, ringing either side of the rim. Haggis’s mug featured the words
BEST WIFE IN THE LAND OF LINCOLN
in large red letters, which were superimposed over the silhouette of our great sixteenth president’s profile, the profile framed by a cookie-cutter outline of our twenty-first state. A joke gift from Sheila Anne. Given that I am the one who was technically cuckolded,
wife
now carries with it an ugly, stomach-turning connotation, yet I keep the mug around the same way people who suffer through excruciating toothaches keep extracted wisdom teeth in jam jars.

We both drank and re-interlaced our hands around our mugs. I think Haggis really appreciated the company.

“So you chose the attic,” he said. “Cozy.”

I told him that I felt better having everything going on below me.

“Like a lordship.”

“I never thought of it that way,” I said.

“You’re lording over your subjects, Fran. You’re like a fucking monarch.”

I imagined actually commanding this kind of status over my tenants. I’d have to start showering and wear jackboots or something. Jackboots and a greatcoat. I could shape my beard into a kingly Shakespearean spade and speak in declarative iambs:

“I dig the stairwell paneling,” Haggis said.

I told him that I’d been thinking about adding a workout room in the basement. “Treadmill, StairMaster, rowing machine, some dumbbells.”

“Fitness,” Haggis replied sadly, as far away from the concept of the word as a shipwrecked man from a fax machine.

I wondered if Haggis was one of those men who doesn’t die a human death, but dissolves like a piece of wood in a barn.

“Diggin’ the beard, dude,” he offered after a silence. “You’re startin’ to look downright apostolic.”

Despite his nearly forty years, Haggis hasn’t gone gray and still possesses a boyish, clean-shaven face. His jet-black hair, like my apostolic beard, is wayward and at certain angles looks like a smashed crow clinging to his head. He has the strange habit of absentmindedly stroking his left nipple, over the shirt, in a curiously circular fashion, as if perpetually haunted by a life-altering grammar school tittie twister. His teeth are dim, so dim they’re almost blue. They belie his youthful face and non-gray, unwashed hair.

Stevie Nicks’s syrupy voice began “Dreams,” the second song on side A but easily the record’s true beginning. I’ve always thought the first track, “Second Hand News,” sung by Lindsey Buckingham, to be an asinine, herky-jerky chest-wiggler better suited for the end credits to one of the Muppet movies. It’s totally beneath the rest of the album.

“So, Viagra,” Haggis said. “Gettin’ back in the game?”

“Trying to.”

“Seein’ someone?”

I told him I was pretty much just watching Internet porn and whacking off, which was a lazy half-truth. I’ve actually been thinking about my ex-wife and whacking off.

“I could use a laptop,” Haggis lamented. “When it comes to lovin’ Old Lefty, I have to rely on my faulty memory.”

“You’re left-handed?”

“No, but I like changin’ it up. Makes me feel like I’m gettin’ away with somethin’.”

It gave me hope that a lost man living in his car could still be blessed with wit and ingenuity.

After Haggis finished his cup of coffee we said nothing for a while and listened to the rest of side A. “Never Going Back Again” into “Don’t Stop” into “Go Your Own Way” into “Songbird.” I have always loved Stevie Nicks’s voice the most, but lately Christine McVie has been winning me over. Her voice is less bewitching and not as haunted with the troubles of the world, but clearer, stronger. You’re not as fooled by it.

When side A was over, the wind whistled through the cracks of my attic’s finial window, which made everything suddenly forlorn and remote, like Haggis and I were the only two people left in some shack in the Arctic. In a semi-arthritic three-part move, Haggis wrested himself from my corduroy chair and buttoned his capacious loden coat. His calves peeked out from underneath, pale and bald as freezer-aisle chicken breasts.

“Hey,” I said, “you know anyone looking for extra work?” I figured one of his clients would be desperate to make a quick buck.

“Not really,” he replied. “Why?”

I told him I needed someone to come by every few days and shovel the sidewalk and porch steps. “Salt them down afterward. Just a few times a week. Someone sort of dependable.”

“I could do that,” Haggis offered, his voice suddenly hopeful, childlike even. “Shoveling’s my thing.”

I was surprised. He was obviously making good money dealing drugs—enough to finance homemade valance curtains at least—and I presumed he had very little if any overhead since he was living in his dinged-up car.

“I’d pay you twenty bucks a go,” I offered.

“Oh, keep your money, bro. God knows my flat ass could use the exercise.”

“I’d do it,” I said, “but I tweaked my back the other day.”

“Say no more,” he said.

I asked him if he could get it done by tomorrow, explaining how one of my tenants had been complaining.

“I’ll do it tonight,” he said. “I just have to run a few more errands. I’ll be back later.”

I told him he was the best.

After he left, I placed his mug in the sink and turned
Rumours
over to side B.

The whistling again. The blizzard passing diagonally across the attic window. That snowplow was back, scraping by on the street below.

When “You Make Loving Fun” started, I lay on the floor, pressed my ear to the central air duct, and listened, hoping to somehow bypass the second floor and hear into the Bunches’ apartment. I imagined Todd and Mary Bunch not talking, but passing notes to each other across their kitchen table, their daughter’s small half-rotted body interred in some frozen field on the outskirts of Pollard, her ice-blue cyanotic face arrested in an attitude of calm certainty, as if she glimpsed something beautiful just before Mommy and Daddy forced her to drink from her sippy cup of strychnine-laced cranberry juice.

After the Viagra finally kicked in, I powered down the turntable, manned my desk, opened this manuscript to
here,
where I had sketched a fairly decent likeness of my wife’s naked body, her eyes staring back at me, irises larger than her real ones, the pupils dreamy and crepuscular, her rabbitlike mouth filled with yearning. Her breasts small yet full, nipples erect. Her perfect hips, shaded with faint cross-hatching.

I masturbated with the intensity of a thief pillaging a dark room. Crazy images bloomed in my mind: Sheila Anne on all fours; Sheila Anne morphing into Mary Bunch with stelliform eyes, fellating me on my bearskin while clutching her TiVo remote. Even Kent’s ex, Caitlin, made an appearance, her feminist thatch absurdly large and dark, simian-like. She rode me while I clutched her bush. But it was Sheila Anne who returned and brought me to the promised land, in a classic missionary formation. Though I aimed for the nest of paper towels I had fashioned in my lap, I accidentally orgasmed copiously onto the reverb and volume knobs of my Marshall kick amp.

Later I was awakened by strange, guttural huffing noises coming from the front of the house. From my attic window I could see Haggis, down on his hands and knees, using the back of a hammer to chip away at one of the four ice-encased steps leading to the porch. He had already cleared the walkway from the street, and there was a big bag of melting salt on the lowest step, against which leaned a snow shovel.