No One Belongs Here More Than You (4 page)

We were two old men. Everything seemed ordinary, even overly ordinary. There was a fly in the room and it buzzed around in a way that told us nothing amazing had ever happened in this place. I began to think about work, about the new hires in grommeting. I had to remember to tell them about the missing clamp on the heat sealer. I knew if I said something about this, if I said the word “grommeting,” then everything would be as it had been, forever, amen.

We’ll have to talk to the new hires tomorrow.

Yeah? Didn’t Albie train them on Wednesday?

Yeah, but the ones in—

I was about to say “grommeting,” the word “grommeting” was pulling up from the wet darkness under my throat; the G was coming forth with the grimace that makes the G sound. But in that instant the buzzing fly lurched toward my ear, and with animal reaction, fierce and unthinking, I swung at it and knocked over the lamp. It broke more than was fitting, crashing and shattering as if it were a lamp twelve times its size. In a final gesture, the bulb exploded in fireworks that fell quietly, extinguishing themselves. We said nothing, but the sudden return of darkness seemed to be a question, raised like eyebrows, waiting. Whatever I did next, whatever I said, would decide me. I didn’t say “grommeting,” but the G stayed in my throat, gathering voice.

I growled.

And Victor turned to me, right away, pressing his face against my neck. The new life came easily after this, a growl.

This Person

Someone is getting excited. Somebody somewhere is shaking with excitement because something tremendous is about to happen to this person. This person has dressed for the occasion. This person has hoped and dreamed and now it is really happening and this person can hardly believe it. But believing is not an issue here, the time for faith and fantasy is over, it is really really happening. It involves stepping forward and bowing. Possibly there is some kneeling, such as when one is knighted. One is almost never knighted. But this person may kneel and receive a tap on each shoulder with a sword. Or, more likely, this person will be in a car or a store or under a vinyl canopy when it happens. Or online or on the phone. It could be an e-mail re: your knighthood. Or a long, laughing, rambling phone message in which every person this person has ever known is talking on a speakerphone and they are all saying, You have passed the test, it was all just a test, we were only kidding, real life is so much better than that. This person is laughing out loud with relief and playing the message back to get the address of the place where every person this person has ever known is waiting to hug this person and bring her into the fold of life. It is really exciting, and it’s not just a dream, it’s real.

They are all waiting by a picnic table in a park this person has driven past many times before. There they are, it’s everyone. There are balloons taped to the benches, and the girl this person used to stand next to at the bus stop is waving a streamer. Everyone is smiling. For a moment this person is almost creeped out by the scene, but it would be so like this person to become depressed on the happiest day ever, and so this person bucks up and joins the crowd.

Teachers of subjects that this person wasn’t even good at are kissing this person and renouncing the very subjects they taught. Math teachers are saying that math was just a funny way of saying “I love you.” But now they are simply saying it, I love you, and the chemistry and PE teachers are also saying it and this person can tell they really mean it. It’s totally amazing. Certain jerks and idiots and assholes appear from time to time, and it is as if they have had plastic surgery, their faces are disfigured with love. The handsome assholes are plain and kind, and the ugly jerks are sweet, and they are folding this person’s sweater and putting it somewhere where it won’t get dirty. Best of all, every person this person has ever loved is there. Even the ones who got away. They hold this person’s hand and tell this person how hard it was to pretend to get mad and drive off and never come back. This person almost can’t believe it, it seemed so real, this person’s heart was broken and has healed and now this person hardly knows what to think. This person is almost mad. But everyone soothes this person. Everyone explains that it was absolutely necessary to know how strong this person was. Oh, look, there’s the doctor who prescribed the medicine that made this person temporarily blind. And the man who paid this person two thousand dollars to have sex with him three times when this person was very broke. Both of these men are in attendance, they seem to know each other. They both have little medals that they are pinning on this person; they are badges of great honor and strength. The badges sparkle in the sunlight, and everyone cheers.

This person suddenly feels the need to check her post office box. It is an old habit, and even if everything is going to be terrific from now on, this person still wants mail. This person says she will be right back and everyone this person has ever known says, Fine, take your time. This person gets in her car and drives to the post office and opens the box and there is nothing. Even though it is a Tuesday, which is famously a good day for mail. This person is so disappointed, this person gets back in the car and, having completely forgotten about the picnic, drives home and checks the voice mail and there are no new messages, just the old one about “passing the test” and “life being better.” There are no e-mails, either, probably because everyone is at the picnic. This person can’t seem to go back to the picnic. This person realizes that staying home means blowing off everyone this person has ever known. But the desire to stay in is very strong. This person wants to run a bath and then read in bed.

In the bathtub this person pushes the bubbles around and listens to the sound of millions of them popping at once. It almost makes one smooth sound instead of many tiny sounds. This person’s breasts barely jut out of the water. This person pushes the bubbles onto the breasts and makes weird shapes with the foam. By now everyone must have realized that this person is not coming back to the picnic. Everyone was wrong; this person is not who they thought this person was. This person plunges underwater and moves her hair around like a sea anemone. This person can stay underwater for an impressively long time but only in a bathtub. This person wonders if there will ever be an Olympic contest for holding your breath under bathwater. If there were such a contest, this person would surely win it. An Olympic medal might redeem this person in the eyes of everyone this person has ever known. But no such contest exists, so there will be no redeeming. This person mourns the fact that she has ruined her one chance to be loved by everyone; as this person climbs into bed, the weight of this tragedy seems to bear down upon this person’s chest. And it is a comforting weight, almost human in heft. This person sighs. This person’s eyes begin to close, this person sleeps.

It Was Romance

This is how we are different from other animals
, she said.
But keep your eyes open so you can see the cloth
. We all had white cloth napkins over our faces, and the light glowed through them. It seemed brighter under there, as if the cloth actually filtered out the darkness that was in the rest of the room—the dark rays that come off things and people. The instructor walked around as she talked so that she was everywhere at once. Her face and permed hair were forgotten; there was just the voice and the white light, and these two things combined felt like the truth.

You will never be a part of the world
. She was standing quite near.

Humans make their own worlds in the small area in front of
their face
. Now she was across the room.

Why do you think we are the only animal that kisses?
She was near again.

Because the area in front of our faces is our most intimate zone
. She drew a breath.
This is why humans are the only romantic
animal!

We were quiet and wondering under our napkins. How did she know this? What about dogs? Don’t dogs feel everything we do times one hundred? But we couldn’t see to form a chain of doubt between each other’s eyes. And her voice had a vibrant certainty that made believing her feel liberating and obvious. Why pull your finger back when you can just let it be part of the hand? It is the hand! Of course! Fingers and hands are all one thing, these distinctions are like shackles. I see the light; it is coming through the napkin.

The tiny world in front of your face is an illusion, and romance
itself is an illusion!

We gasped. But it was a delayed gasp, we were a slow group. Even the distribution of the napkins had been hard to organize. We had finally settled on take one and pass the rest down.

Romance isn’t real, and neither is your world under the cloth.
But because you are human, you can never lift the cloth. So you
might as well learn how to be the most romantic woman you can be.
This is what humans can do: romance. You may now remove the
cloth
.

We felt we might not be able to, because we were human, but it slid right off, and the auditorium seemed darker than before. I had hoped we would now be another type of animal, one that could be part of the world. But the cloth was just a metaphor, and we were forty women gathered on a Saturday morning to become more romantic. One woman still had the napkin on her head, possibly asleep.

We worked hard because we wanted results. We mirrored each other, and we breathed in no and breathed out yes. We wrapped our hands around our ankles and pretended they were someone else’s, and then we tried to run and pretended that someone else was trying to run, someone we loved, was trying to run away. We held them by the ankles and we breathed in no and breathed out yes and released the ankles and ran, all around the auditorium, forty women. Then we came back to the circle and talked about pheromones and other kinds of mists.

Remember, you don’t have to make the whole world romantic, or
even the whole bedroom. Just the small space in front of your face. A
very manageable territory, even the working women will agree. Because
when he looks at you (or she—romance has no biases!), he has to look
through the air in front of your face. Is that space polluted? Is it rosy?
Is it misty? Think about these questions during the lunch break
.

We ate our sandwiches and looked at each other through the air in front of our faces. It looked clear, but maybe it wasn’t. We thought hard about this while we drank the provided soda. This could change everything.

I got up and stood alone in the hallway and pressed my face to the wall. It was wood-paneled and smelled like pee, as so many things do. Romance. My apartment. Romance. My Honda. Romance. My skin condition. Romance. My job.

I turned my head and pressed my other cheek against the wall.

The bell was calling us back together for the wrap-up session. Romance. My utter lack of friends who shared my interests. Romance. The Soul. Romance. Life on other planets. Romance. I stared down the hall. Someone was down there. It was Theresa whom I’d partnered with during breath-mirroring. We had synchronized our breaths and then syncopated them, and then we had talked about how that felt and which was more romantic. Syncopated was the right answer.

I walked down the hall and saw that Theresa was sitting on the floor next to a chair. This is always a bad sign. It’s a slippery slope, and it’s best to just sit in chairs, to eat when hungry, to sleep and rise and work. But we have all been there. Chairs are for people, and you’re not sure if you are one. I knelt beside her. I rubbed her back, and then I stopped because I thought it might be too familiar, but that felt cold, so I patted her shoulder, which meant I was only touching her a third of the time. The other two thirds, my hand was either traveling toward her or away from her. The longer I patted, the harder it became; I was too aware of the intervals between the pats and couldn’t find a natural rhythm. I felt like I was hitting a conga drum, and then as soon as I thought of this, I had to beat out a little cha-cha-cha, and Theresa began to cry. I stopped with the patting and hugged her, and she hugged me back. I had made everything just horrible enough to bring Theresa’s sadness down to the next level, and I joined her there. It was a place of overflowing collaborative misery, and we cried together. We could smell each other’s shampoo and the laundry detergents we had chosen, and I smelled that she didn’t smoke but someone she loved did, and she could feel that I was large but not genetically, not permanently, just until I found my way again. The snaps on our jeans pressed into each other and our breasts exchanged their tired histories, tales of being over-and underutilized, floods and famines and never mind, just go. We wetted each other’s blouses and pushed our crying ahead of us like a lantern, searching out new and forgotten sadnesses, ones that had died politely years ago but in fact had not died, and came to life with a little water. We had loved people we really shouldn’t have loved and then married other people in order to forget our impossible loves, or we had once called out hello into the cauldron of the world and then run away before anyone could respond.

Always running and always wanting to go back but always being farther and farther away until, finally, it was just a scene in a movie where a girl says hello into the cauldron of the world and you are just a woman watching the movie with her husband on the couch and his legs are across your lap and you have to go to the bathroom. There were things of this general scale to cry about. But the biggest reason to cry was to drench the air in front of our faces. It was romance. Not the falling-in-love kind but the sharing of air between our shoulders and chests and thighs. There was so much air to share. Gradually, we slowed, then stopped, and after a long, still pause—goodbye—we broke apart. Then the euphoria came, warm winds from Hawaii, drying our tears and clearing the path back to the material world. It was joy to be there, beside the chair. We held each other’s hands and laughed with feigned embarrassment that gradually took hold and became real.

Theresa wiped off her backside briskly, as if she had taken a fall. I pulled down the cuffs of my cardigan. We walked down the hall and entered the auditorium just in time to help stack the chairs. There was no system for stacking, so we accidentally made many substacks that were too heavy to lift and join together. The stacks of various heights stood alone. We gathered our purses and walked to our cars.