Lit Riffs (30 page)

He promised he would.

The following Monday Dr. Cupper said he’d like to give Olive a full examination. He asked her to undress. “Lie down on your bed,” he wrote. “I’ll be up in a few minutes.”

While unhooking her dress, Olive looked to the sunset upon the western fields. It was early November and the day was ending quickly, freezing up. Soon the sky would be black, and even after all these years it startled Olive how dark the late afternoons in autumn were: as dark as midnight at five o’clock. She unhooked her dress and it fell to the floor, the cardboard belt landing softly on her foot. Olive rolled down her stockings, and soon she was wearing nothing but her slip with the scalloped hem. Lying atop the bedspread, she felt the room’s chill. Outside, soon the horizon would collapse into the blue-black of dusk; night would bury the day, again and again.

She sensed Dr. Cupper knocking at the door. She turned and found him standing in the doorframe, stethoscope round the neck. He was a handsome young man, Olive noted; he who would marry again and she hoped his wife would offer sympathy when he told her of his deficiency. Who can predict what we are capable of forgiving? Certainly not Olive, and by now she had given up.

Dr. Cupper placed the cold stethoscope upon her breast and turned away; he was looking out the window to the quick dusk. From his furrowed brow Olive sensed that he, too, was noting the injustice of time. He said something and Olive didn’t understand. He had her lie upon her hip and he raised her slip to her waist and placed the stethoscope just above her groin. His fingers were warm; she knew that she must appear to him as nothing more than a pile of moley bones. His finger traced the hoof scar that dented the flesh beneath her navel; so old the scar was, it was as if it had always been there. Except that Olive remembered the accident as if it had happened only yesterday: the kick that shot her across the field and left her bleeding and half-unconscious. The shriek of her father from the porch. He shot the bull between the eyes, and the black, shiny horns hung above the front door until the day he died. Olive had lost her hearing for a week, and then it returned, with a
pop!
like a cork pulled from a bottle.
You’re going to be fine
, her father tried to explain while she convalesced.
But you’ll never be able to have
… as if she didn’t already know.

“Relax, Olive,” Dr. Cupper wrote on the notepad at the bedside that had once been there for her songs.

“I’m going to give you something to help you sleep.”

Olive nodded, thinking that would be nice. Dr. Cupper took a syringe from his bag and held it to his eye and filliped the needle. He doused a bit of cotton with alcohol and sterilized a spot on her buttock. Soon the syringe was sinking into her, and there was a cold sensation just beneath the skin; it spread out and then passed away. Dr. Cupper returned the syringe to his bag. His hand fell to her naked hip and stayed there, stroking her just a little.

Outside, the last bit of dusk was draining from the sky. In no more than a minute, the cold night would be upon them. How permanent darkness can seem! Dr. Cupper took Olive’s hand and massaged her swollen knuckles and together they looked to the window that was already frosting over. The house was silent, the world was silent; she didn’t know if the mouse lived in the wall anymore. There was no one to listen for it in the night. Once or twice, knowing it was a silly thing to do, Olive had called out,
Oh, mousey mousey, are you there?
Once or twice she had sung,
Oh, mousey mousey, do you care?

“Do you hear anything?” she wrote in a last note to Dr. Cupper.

“Not a thing. The house is still.”

“Not even a mouse?”

Olive felt the movement of Dr. Cupper’s chuckle. She closed her eyes. He pulled her slip down across her hip and helped her lie back into the bald pillows. The quiet was the quiet of the dead, and Dr. Cupper returned his stethoscope to his bag. For a long time he stood in the dark at Olive’s side and listened to the early long night. The temperature was dropping and the wind was picking up: the nightsong heralded winter’s dust. Those with a good ear would hear the music of the world cracking and drying, the brittle shiver and creak; the folding, the closing, the burrowing into the deep. At season’s end and in night’s morn, oh, must we always regret the cold onslaught of our final sleep?

elissa schappell

F
or years Tracy chased Ray through crowded museums and poorly lit train stations—once, while in pursuit of her ex-boyfriend, she’d seen the Last Supper being played out in an airport lounge. There was Jesus, lit by the neon of a Bud Light sign with a plate of nachos at his elbow; Judas, at his side, was tucking into some atomic chicken wings. The Son of God had waved at her to join them, but she kept running. She passed up witnessing the one-of-you-will-betray speech, just because of Ray.

In the beginning when Tracy awoke from these dreams, her chest was clenched with sadness, and she felt sore, like Ray had physically forced his way through her skin, she felt invaded. Since the day he’d disappeared from her life—the phone line he’d been pirating had been disconnected, he refused to answer her letters—he continued to cheat her. He was a blur on a bicycle grazing her elbow in the East Village, not even braking; he was at the back of CBGB’s standing hunch-shouldered in the shadows, watching her until she spotted him, then he’d make a quick escape, leaving only the faintest scent of cigarettes and turpentine.

Now, seven years later, the dreams had changed, they were gifts now. She was elated when she saw Ray in dreams. In one dream she was a kid walking down a road in her neighborhood and he’d pulled up next to her in his cherry red Nova and told her to hop in. Other times he would appear outside her apartment and she’d tuck her hand inside his jacket pocket and they’d walk talking about art and music until she realized—the way one does when you spend time with the dead in dreams—that sadly, this wasn’t happening in real time. He wasn’t really back, and they weren’t reconciled, and she’d wake up. She no longer felt angry, or sad anymore, instead she felt a tenderness that faded to nostalgia for the girl she’d been in the dream, the first self she’d ever really liked.

At twenty-two she’d believed that love was two people pretending to be the person the other one needs them to be. It wasn’t hard for her, she liked cooking for Ray, black beans and rice, eggs and green peppers and onions, she liked his artsy friends hanging around drinking cheap wine and listening to old blues records by men with names like Big Daddy and Blind Lemon, she liked that she had turned into a character who was no longer supposed to sulk in silence making just a bit too much noise as she put away the dishes she’d just cleaned, but that she now had permission to yell at Ray and throw things. In fact, one night an empty gin bottle smashing against the brick wall in the apartment had the effect of turning Ray on so much he’d stalked over and dragged into the bedroom. She didn’t care when Ray couldn’t get it up; after all, as he’d told her once, Jackson Pollock was a bad lay, too. She liked the way he urged her, no,
insisted
that she read her “work” to him, bad, adolescent tales of dead pets and silent fathers. It felt like playacting to her, this was the way a couple of artists young and in love were supposed to behave, and so they did. She liked the way he’d kiss her and pull off her shirt the moment they shut the apartment door, the way he brought her things he’d bought or found on the street, perfect gifts she’d never known she’d wanted, no one from her past would ever have conceived of giving her, a red-beaded lamp, a faux fur stole, a first edition of
The Sun Also Rises
. She was taken aback by how much she needed them, how right they were for her. Suddenly everything that came before seemed ill-fitting, immature, and just wrong. Mostly though, what she missed was the way she felt with Ray, every day was an awakening, it was like they were the first people to ever think what they thought, and do what they did. No one was like them.

While Ray utilized his fine arts degree from the Art Institute of Cincinnati making “frozen moments” sculptures—the fork hovering over the plate of spaghetti, the beer pouring from the bottle foaming up in the glass—she worked in a fancy little art-book store, mostly re-alphabetizing; it seemed people who buy fancy art books thought it was beneath them to put the books away properly. Through the store she’d met a man who allowed her to write movie reviews for his esoteric little film magazine that considered the fact that it paid almost nothing a symbol of integrity, badge of honor. Life was good.

Now, seven years later she was at an advertising agency as the assistant to the head of human resources—a term that sounded sinister to her, as though she were handing heavy machinery to the person in charge of drilling the best parts out of a person, or harvesting human waste—which was what the job felt like sometimes.

“I don’t care what you say,” her mother had said when she told her about the job, “This is as it should be—finally, a real job—a job with promise. There’s no limit—”

“Mother.”

Tracy’s mother had thought it the epitome of irresponsibility the way she and Ray had just quit their jobs—Ray insisted on calling them their “day jobs”—and run off to Mexico, the two of them not even engaged. “What do you think your life is, a movie? Life is not a movie,” she’d say.

“I know, I know,” Tracy said, wanting to get off the phone.

“It’s not Hollywood,” her mother said.

“You’re right, Mother.” Tracy gave her mother the bird.

It was easier to tell her mother she was right than to listen to her tell how she’d typed up all of Tracy’s father’s papers in college and then law school, how she’d driven car pools, and hosted PTA meetings, the banality of it all crushed Tracy. She was not her mother, would not be her mother.

“I’ve got a piece coming out in the
Village Voice
,” she’d said, hoping this sounded foreign and counterculture to her mother.

“How nice,” she said. “What’s it on?”

She wished she’d thought before she answered, “Italian cheeses.”

“How is Tad?” her mother asked. This concerned Tracy; what about Tad put her mother in mind of cheese?

“I’ll send it to you,” she said.

It had been years since Tracy had seen Ray anywhere but in dreams. Occasionally when Tracy was downtown, she’d think she saw him out of the corner of her eye. A short and stocky, wild-haired man in an untucked white shirt, unbuttoned almost to the waist like a young Julian Schnabel, the cuffs stained with coffee from walking and drinking at the same time, and paint-spattered jeans, which he wore like a flag. It was embarrassing to admit but the first thought that always came into her head was
What am I wearing?
Was it what had basically become her uniform: sensible pumps, a knee-length dark skirt, and a blazer? She wished she didn’t think the word every time she put it on as it seemed to suggest a bold soul hacking through the jungle with a machete, which couldn’t be further from reality. No, she wore a jacket, a straitjacket was more like it. Would Ray even recognize her now, her black hair cut to her shoulders, her hips not as slim? Would he even look twice?

Her second thought was always
Thank God Tad isn’t with me
.

Tad had been her boss at the agency when she first started working there five years ago. It was a secret. When he came into her department, she lowered her eyes and called him
Mr. Parker
, they kissed in the supply closet, it was all so cliché. He made her laugh by sneaking up behind her in the office and doing the voices of the animals he’d written commercials for, a French bulldog frying bacon and livers, a koala bear ordering a rum and Coke on an airline. He reminded her of a koala with his gray eyes and large nose. She liked this. She also liked that he was taller than Ray, and that this would have bothered him greatly.

The first time Tad had come to her apartment, he’d said, “I like the art.”

She’d thought, at first, that he was making a bad joke. She’d taken down all of Ray’s paintings after a year of his absence—when it was clear he was gone. It was too hard to look at them, one was an apology, one a thank one, one a sketch of her outside a gas station he’d made when they’d driven cross-country on their third date. All that remained now were the faint outlines on the wall, ghosts of the paintings: a car on fire on a dock at sunset, a man standing in the dark with a woman pointing a gun at a tin can. Tad had walked around the room, tracing with his finger the blank spaces on the wallpaper, as though the blocks of light were some kind of abstract art, and that it was genius of her to own them. He wanted to take care of her.

One day a booklet ended up on her desk explaining that the company was now going to offer to pay part of the tuition for any sort of advance degrees that might enhance their employees’ performance. As a lark, she’d applied to the creative writing program at the local college, and to her surprise was accepted.

“My mother was right, schools do look at what clubs you joined,” she said to Tad. “Glee club, Small Animal Lovers, golf team … it all paid off.”

“Don’t be silly,” Tad said. He didn’t like it when she made fun of herself.

“Maybe it’s like the SATs: if you spell your name right, you get two hundred points off the bat. Maybe they have low standards, or maybe they are mistaken in thinking I am handicapped, or some obscure ethnicity—does my name sound Burmese?”

“I’m not surprised,” Tad said, pushing her hair back from her face in a way that seemed both annoyingly paternal and terribly loving. “Just don’t write about me,” he joked.

She didn’t. She wrote about Mexico and Ray, typing with tears in her eyes, then trotted into class dumb and eager to please as a dog bringing his master his slippers and the newspaper. Always it was the same thing.

“I just don’t like these people,” a guy in a blue suit said, as he pulled off his necktie and stuffed into his briefcase. “And why Mexico, why not Cuba? Cuba is a happening place now. Or Nigeria, then you’d have something.”

Tracy wrote down
Cuba
.

The guy smelled of cigarettes. He always smoked during the break, handing out cigarettes to all his classmates like the rich kid buying friends with candy. He insisted he couldn’t write unless he was smoking.

A young red-haired man in horn rims and a wispy beard nodded. He vacillated between picking at his beard and stroking it with the sort of affection usually reserved for mammals such a guinea pigs and rabbits. “Hmmm.” He always began his criticism this way, like he was tuning his voice. “I myself am more drawn to the world of Sierra Leone, I am intrigued by those death squads—do you follow me? Those children armed with AK-47s. Perhaps the story would be better suited with that sort of frame.”

Tracy wrote down
Gun
.

The girl across the table in a Pro-Choice Is Pro-Death button flipped her glossy blond hair over her shoulder and shook her head. “I’m sorry, but I just don’t believe any woman would be this stupid,” she said, “I mean, hello, it’s the year 2002, right?”

She looked at the teacher for validation.

Tracy wrote down
Stupid
.

The teacher, an experimental, or perhaps it was truer to say underpublished, poet turned fiction writer sighed, as though bored, and took his feet down from the table. He was always putting his feet up on the table in an attempt, Tracy supposed, to seem laid-back and cool. “So,” he said, “what am I hearing? Do we have consensus?”

The consensus was she was stupid, and she should buy a gun, join an army of militant boys, and move to Cuba. Hadn’t she tried a variation on this before?

Thankfully Tad, despite his polite inquiries into her writing, seemed to have no genuine interest in reading her work (unlike Ray), so he didn’t know how bad it was. He seemed content to console her.

“I can’t do it …,” she’d wail to him. “I don’t know how it ends, and you have to know how it ends, and I don’t. …” At this he’d pull her into his arms like she was a child and pat her hair and kiss her hands, until she was embarrassed at how much he cared for her.

Finally, to put everyone out of their misery, she stopped working on her novel about Ray and Mexico. She stuffed into a box and slid it into the closet, stillborn.

The fifth of October was the sort of fall day that makes New Yorkers feel superior to everyone else on the planet. Tracy had been out buying coffee and thinking about marrying Tad. They’d had another
discussion
that morning. They never fought. Tad rarely even raised his voice, unless he was watching the Knicks blow a ten-point lead. No, the two of them, they discussed things. He was talking marriage, he was older than her, he was tired of snogging in supply closets, playing footsie, and sneaking around, he wanted everyone to know the truth. That she belonged to him.

He seduced her with talk of buying a place in the country with a barn and converting it into a studio for her. This was more appealing than she wanted to admit. After all, as he told her, they had been together for two years now (a year less than she and Ray had been together) and neither of them was getting any younger.

She’d been contemplating buying herself some sunflowers. She liked their strong fibrous stalks, the thick yellow petals and back centers, there was something so sentient about the way they turned their faces to the sun, something so beneficent in the way they died, drying up, and dropping their seeds to feed the birds. They had a purpose.