Onward Toward What We're Going Toward (38 page)

“Good try, Chic,” Mitch said.

“Pick up the spare now. Come on,” someone said.

Chic waited at the ball return. He watched Diane. She was talking to Leslie Soderstrom, and they were both laughing. What did they have to be laughing about? This wasn't fun. His ball came back. He picked it up. He aimed. He took three steps and rolled the ball down the lane, knocking down seven pins. An eight in the first frame.

“Get 'em next time, Chic,” someone said.

Stan Landry and his wife clinked their beer bottles together, still celebrating her strike. Chic walked up to Diane and held his beer up to her so that he could clink it against the glass of water she was drinking, but Diane looked at him like she didn't know what he wanted her to do. He sat down. Ever since Diane had told him she knew he was masturbating, he kept picturing her standing outside the locked bathroom door listening to him. Or, maybe, when she was lying in bed listening to Dr. Peale, the sounds of his masturbation wafted through the heating vents. Whatever, Chic told himself that he was just biding time until
she was ready to have sex again. Masturbation was like a warm up lap, like knee bends before a big race. It was a way to keep loose and focused. Who was he kidding? It was pathetic. And look at Diane over there, laughing and having a good time, drinking her glass of water, laughing again, slapping her knee. He needed to quit lying to himself. He needed to be honest with himself. You need to be honest with yourself, he told himself. Your life is not the life that you wanted to live. Whoa, that was direct. But it felt pretty good. He tried it again. You're mad at your father for committing suicide. You blame your mother for it. You hate her for leaving you. Your son died. You blame yourself for that. You masturbate in the bathroom every day. Your son probably knows that you masturbate in the bathroom. Your father, too. Actually, that made him feel small, imagining that dead people knew what he did. Maybe he was being too honest. This wasn't really working, come to think of it. He didn't want to be honest. He wanted to put the lid on these thoughts, he wanted to live in a cloud of smoke like all of the people here at the alley and not notice that he was living in a cloud of smoke. Next to him, a cigarette smoldered in an ashtray. He picked it up and took a drag. He coughed. Diane made a nasty face. The guy sitting next to him, Larry Stevenson, whose cigarette he'd picked up, looked at him.

“I didn't know you smoked,” Larry said.

“I don't.” Chic handed the cigarette to him and stood up.

“Hey, where are you going? You're almost up.”

“Bathroom.”

On his way to the bathroom, he stopped at the bar and bought two beers. In the bathroom stall, he guzzled them both. He thought of Diane out there laughing—all of them, Stan Landry, his wife, the people he had gone to school with, every single one of them, laughing. At the end of the night, they'd get in their cars and drive home, where they'd laugh some more. In the morning, in the afternoon, and at night when they watched television, they'd laugh some more. Weren't these people depressed and sad
and overwhelmed with their existence? Didn't they know there was a war going on? People were dying in the jungle in Southeast Asia. People were dying everywhere. Someone came into the bathroom. The person was whistling. He wanted to take that whistling and shove it right down the guy's throat. The guy burped. He unzipped his fly. He was in the stall next to Chic. The guy did his business and Chic listened to the tinkle of urine in the toilet water. This was what it had come to—sneaking beers in a bowling alley bathroom and listening to people piss. The guy in the next stall finished up and washed his hands and left the bathroom, whistling again on his way out. Chic put the bottle to his lips and finished off the beer, swishing the last drop in his mouth and letting it roll on his tongue and down his throat. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Someone else came into the bathroom. He held still.

“Chic?” It was Diane. Oh, Jesus. What was she doing in here? “I know you're in that stall, Chic. I can see your shoes. I know you're drinking beer. I saw you buy it.”

He didn't say anything.

“Quit feeling sorry for yourself,” she said, then left the bathroom. He was alone, holding two empty beer bottles. Had his wife just come into the men's bathroom to tell him to quit feeling sorry for himself? He wasn't feeling sorry for himself. He was feeling sorry for her, for them, for the bowlers, the people, all of them. He was feeling sorry for how they didn't even notice what was obviously right in front of their goddamn noses.

When he got back to the lanes, he took out his notebook and flipped to an empty page. Everyone was watching him, but he didn't notice. He tried to write a line, but his mind was a blank. He closed his eyes. He wanted to capture what he was feeling in a poem. He wanted to frame it so it could be hung on a wall, so others could look at his feelings and understand him. He wanted to hand the poem to Diane and say, “Here. This is how I'm feeling. Read this. Right here. This is me. My innermost feelings walking right into your imagination.”

“You can shatter glass with your concentration, Waldbeeser,” Mitch said.

Chic looked up. Everyone was staring at him.

“It's your turn.”

“Oh, sorry.” He smiled. He got up and bowled a seven. He sat back down. He looked at a cigarette smoldering in the ashtray next to him. He thought about Diane coming into the bathroom. He couldn't tell if that had really happened or if he just thought it had happened. He didn't really know how much he had had to drink. His head felt stretched out like a balloon with too much air. He felt a little bit different, older somehow, or actually, that wasn't quite right. He felt like he'd already finished a book that everyone else was just starting, and he knew how everything was going to end.

On the way home, he wasn't paying attention and drove past their house.

“You just passed our house,” Diane said.

Chic slammed on the brakes. He backed up and pulled into the driveway.

“You don't like bowling league, I know. I can tell, but tonight—were you drawing a horse in your notebook?”

“No.”

They both got out of the car and stood in the driveway. It was dark. The crickets chirped.

“Don't you notice?” he said.

“Notice what?”

“The bowling alley. The smoke. There's this cloud of smoke that hangs over everything.”

“What do you expect? It's a bowling alley. People are smoking.”

“It's hard to breathe.”

“What are you talking about Chic?”

“The bowling alley.”

“No you're not. You're talking about something else.”

He sighed. “I can't go on like this. I can't. I won't. It's not natural.”

“Maybe you shouldn't come to the bowling league anymore.”

“I'm in this hole. This big deep hole that I can't get out of.”

“You need to stop feeling sorry for yourself.”

“Why? Why do I need to stop feeling sorry for myself? Why is that so bad? Everyone feels sorry for themselves.”

“Keep your voice down. We have neighbors.”

“Why do you think I'm masturbating in the bathroom?” he whispered.

She shrugged. “Desiring other women?”

“Other women? No.”

“Not this again. Please. A baby isn't going to change anything.”

“Let's just have sex for the sake of having sex. For fun. People do that, you know.”

She stormed off into the house. He followed after her. She was going towards her old bunker, the bathroom, and he headed her off. She did an about-face and went up the stairs and into the nursery and slammed the door. Chic pushed it open.

“Do you know how long it's been since we've had sex?”

“July 1, 1964. It was morning. Independence Day. You had the day off work.”

“You remember the date?”

She left the nursery and crossed the hall to their bedroom. Chic followed. “A good man is hard to find,” he said. “I'm a good man, Diane, but you know what? A good woman is even harder to find. Think about that, will you.”

She turned to him. “Chic, sometimes, you know . . . I'm hurting too. Just like you. Do you think I like bowling? I don't. But what else are we going to do? We're stuck, and I'm tired of feeling sorry for myself. I'm tired of it.”

Chic kicked off his shoes. “Get undressed.” He pulled his shirt over his head.

“No.”

“Go with it. Go with the moment.”

“I'm not going to have sex with you.”

“Remember Florida. How I seduced you. How I kissed your entire body. Your feet. Your legs, and how I sucked on your toes and licked your earlobes and how you giggled. Remember how I nuzzled into your neck. How we batted our eyelashes together. How I smelled your stomach. How I whispered ‘I love you' into your ear. Remember. That bed. That room. We had seafood for dinner and we were one. One. We were connected. It was beautiful.”

“That's not what happened.”

“Oh, it's what happened. We made Lomax that night. I think about it every single day.”

“Chic, I took advantage of you in Florida.”

“You did not. We connected in Florida.”

“I whipped you with your belt. I made you shut off the lights.”

Chic thought about this. The haze of his memory began to lift. He recalled what had really happened that night. It was buried down deep, back in the hollows of his memory where the floor was concrete and cold. He put two fingers to his neck and felt the blood thumping through his veins. He closed his eyes, then opened them. It all flooded in on him. She was mad at him because of Lijy, and locked herself in the bathroom. There wasn't any cuddling. There weren't any nuzzle kisses or pecks on the cheek. It was quick and he had no idea what he was doing and afterward she pushed him off of her and picked her panties off the floor and went into the bathroom. He'd sandbagged the real memory, changed it, tried to erase it by building a new memory on top of it, a false one, a lie. He was about to cry. His bottom lip started to quiver.

Chic sat on the couch in the dark living room, his mind replaying
and looping. His entire relationship, his entire marriage, his “love” for Diane, was built on lies and false memories. His fingers tracked the throbbing in his neck. He couldn't sleep. At some point, very late, around two in the morning, Diane came to the top of the stairs and whispered for him to come to bed. He didn't say anything, then listened as she padded back down the hallway to the bedroom and shut the door. The sun began to blue up the sky a few hours later. It was Thursday. He called work and said he wouldn't be coming in. Diane came downstairs and made coffee. She asked if he wanted any. He did not. She went back upstairs, and he heard Peale's voice on the radio. What was the big deal about this guy? He put on his beret and corduroy jacket. He should go see his brother. He was the only person he knew who had pieced together his life after a major setback.

He parked in front of Middleville Community Bank, directly across the street from the health food store. He dug out binoculars from under the seat. Inside the store, Buddy was wearing a maroon toga robe. He looked ridiculous. A lady took a container of yogurt from the cooler and paid for it. She left. Russ came out from behind the beaded curtain. He had a bowl haircut and was wearing striped athletic socks pulled up to his knees. He sat down on the floor to examine a potted parsley plant. Chic remembered that Buddy still thought that he was Russ's father. Another lie. Chic lowered the binoculars and remembered the afternoon of his father's suicide, sitting in his room, on his bed, staring at his brother's shut door, waiting for it to open, waiting for his brother to come for him, to sit next to him on the bed, to put his hand on his leg, to put his arm around him, to hug him, to make him feel better—to do anything. But when his brother's bedroom door opened, he only made it worse. He told him their mother was having an affair with Tom McNeeley.

Inside the health food store, Russ plucked a sprig of parsley and ate it. Buddy laughed and came around the counter. Russ started laughing, too. Then Lijy came through the beaded curtain.
She walked slowly, haltingly, her stomach swollen. It was obvious she was several months pregnant. She started laughing as well. Chic threw the binoculars down on the passenger seat. He suddenly felt very cold, even though it was the middle of summer. The inside of the car began to spin. He took a deep breath. He closed his eyes. He had a choice—to keep living the lie, or start living the truth. An idea came to him. It was perfect. All he needed was an hour. One hour. All of this would be behind him in an hour.