The Entire Predicament (5 page)

When the rain gets going hard enough that it’s blowing through the screens, Andrea and I move inside. We sit on the floral carpet in the living room and lean our backs against her white couch. I cross my ankles. She takes off her apron, folds it, and sets it next to her on the floor. She crosses her ankles, too. We put the bottle of wine between us. Our butts are on the small space of hardwood floor exposed between the carpet and the couch. At some point I take off my glasses, lean over her, and place them on her folded apron.We keep talking for a while and then we start making out, something I haven’t actually pictured happening before but suddenly realize I’ve been
very interested in having occur. I think, vaguely, Oh, fuck, not my neighbor, that’ll be all kinds of mess . . . but I think it in a way that makes me feel happy because it comes with an image of the two of us tossing colored scarves from a ferris wheel. I also think, I wonder if she notices my teeth, because I didn’t mention you at all. Then, for quite some time I don’t think anything that I remember.

This is the good part. Making out. I have no idea how long it lasts.

It’s so beautiful. If I try hard to remember, I think it’s like sun coming out over snow, glowing, and stunningly, incongruously warm and clean.

Next, though, I remember the phone ringing and saying, “You want to get that?” and Andrea says,“Not really,” and looks at me—accusing—so I shrug. The machine does its thing, but it’s a hang up. “Joey,” she says, and takes the empty bottle, leaves the room, and every warm clean thing rolls over, revealing a stomach iced with soot, and every ferris wheel screeches to a halt, all scarves collapsing to the faraway ground.

Boy do I feel dumb. This is how dumb I feel: I feel more than dumb because the second Andrea leaves I am stunned by the sterility of the room without her and my ass is cold on the floor, and numb. I’d somehow thought I could separate this afternoon entirely from the rest of her life and mine, too. I imagine Joey in the bushes, peeking with his bulldog face and then, because he’s seen us, I see him drop back across the yard like a football player and I picture a brick coming though the window. Then I revise and picture Joey as the sniper. I might think somewhere in my mind that I’m getting carried away, but it’s so true the way I imagine it, like the sky has peeled
back in a rush and revealed what hides behind it: there’s an awful distant sound, like something enormous breaking in one compact instant, and there’s a hole in the window with tiny spidering around it. But the way I imagine it the hole is followed by no more than a plink on the floor and a rolling sound, which I follow with my eyes. It’s as if making the hole through the window deflated the entire energy of the bullet, which it turns out is actually a pea-colored marble that rolls along the molding until it reaches a corner of the room, where it stops without even bouncing once. It makes a tiny thud, like someone shot dead, but far away.

I look around her living room. There are two tin lanterns and throw pillows with a batik print of zebras on them. I know exactly which store she got these from. I think of the whole suburban acreage from here to DC to Richmond and up into Maryland spidering out into who knows how many places. The whole paved-over, guardrail, speed-bump, exit-ramp landscape is shrouded in this in-between time.Why am I not frightened? Why am I thinking about you? Once this sniper is caught or shot, or they are, however many of them, this time will evaporate. It’ll snap back like elastic once the fat man’s belly is gone. It’ll be those weeks before they catch someone, or shoot someone in a wild chase, or whatever will happen happens. Why do I know it’ll end? Why am I so sure it won’t go on and on? What’s under your gloves and what’s under your mask? You’re looking in my mouth under such bright lights. You’re looking into my head but in your mind you’re thinking about your birds. They’re out the window, they’re in their house, they’re zooming through the air faster than anything I know how to imagine, they’re
away, they’re hunting, gone for the winter; at least, either way, they’re gone.

Andrea comes back, this time with beer, with a whole six-pack. “What are you doing?” I ask.

She kneels before me on the rug. “Fuck Joey,” she says. She’s unbuttoning her shirt. It suddenly horrifies me that she’s wearing eyeliner.

“What are you trying to do?” I say.

“What do you think?” she says. She squints at me. She’s trying to see where I’m coming from. I think I hear the phone ringing again, but it’s not ringing. I think about how my tongue was recently inside her skull, and this she must see, she must see me thinking this, and she must be witnessing my repulsion, because she lets her hands drop to her sides. She sits back on her heels and lays her hands on her thighs, limp, with the palms up in a way that makes me think of lettuce leaves rocking on a countertop on their backs. Over her shoulder I can see out onto her porch. Even without my glasses her plants look lined up to be shot. When I look back at her face she’s looking down at her hands, watching them shake. “What do you want?” I say. “What do you want me to do?”

It hurts. In the break in time when we’re one-upping each other, hurt for hurt, I picture the prostitute like this: I picture her in a small room with a low mattress. She’s rigged a set of sheets like curtains around the bed and she’s lying on her side, half under the cheap covers. She’s looking at me and her face is maskless. I think I like her face. I lie near her on the bed. I can feel bits of sand. Then she puts her gloves on. She snaps them on her wrists, and I expect to see a puff of powder, poof, like magic, but there’s just the sound. She winks, which
terrifies me, which she sees because she’s a professional. Like magic she has a scarf and she ties it behind her head so all I can see are her eyes. I know I should think
harem,
but I don’t; I think
bandit
, which is fine because it calms me. I am so relieved. She puts her fingers in my mouth. I concentrate. The glove is instantly slick, and I’m astounded that such a transformation can take place. I relax. I can hear a variety of noises. I begin to participate.

It could end here, with Andrea caught in the moment before china crumbles, covered in hairline cracks. She isn’t moving, but she’s collapsing, soundless. It could end here.We could both throw up our hands: I surrender, we say. You could throw up your hands, too, in the light, your face cupped in cotton, your hands encased in heat-conducting super-easy-to-feel-through rubber, wielding your shiny pointed scraping tool.You are my favorite dentist because you’re satisfied with my teeth.You are what I think I want to be. I could go home, my head bent low as I cross the driveway and duck into my house. Andrea and I could make up for making out. Cooperatively, we could shake on it and swap chrysanthemums.

Instead, I leave the room. I leave her on the floral carpet, go into her bathroom with its enormous orange butterflies, stand in front of her pedestal sink, and look in her mirror. I bare my teeth at myself for a second and then I open the medicine-cabinet door, as if I’m looking for something. A plastic container of allergy pills bounces into the sink. Inside the cabinet is an eight-pack of toothbrushes, seven heads visible through a cellophane window in the box. I close the cabinet door. There’s my head, in the mirror. Butterflies are spilling out of the frame all over the place. I go back to baring my teeth. Am
I frightened? I almost growl. Why am I not frightened?

I’m thinking of you. I’m baring my skull. I’m trying to look inside. Way far up there is my brain.

You say, “Look at this. Anything new?”

I’m noticing all the chrome in the room. Her soap dish and her lotion dispenser are silver. The towel racks, the paper holder, the faucets in the sink and bathtub, too. I’m seeing your scrapers, your pokers, and your wheeled stool. I’m enumerating reasons to be hospitalized. I’m surrounding myself with orange butterflies, feeling wings surrounding my eyes and my ears. A shining bullet is easing through the air with speed, and clearly it’s moving from cleaning to cleaning. My teeth are so much yellower than they felt like they were, all day.They are so much more irregular, these misshapen nubs. My tongue is soft, and like my brain it wants to believe what it wants to believe. In dreams of death teeth crumble, or fall like soldiers, or they tumble into my mouth and down my tongue backward like a herd of miniature animals off a cliff. I can smell myself, and there’s an ancient tribal stink to my smell.

I picture the prostitute again. Her scarf hangs around her neck. I’m nowhere around. Who knows, maybe I went into her bathroom. I’ll tell you this, though: I can see her face, and the look on it makes me think of the glossy magazine that comes with my retirement plan. The magazine is called
Participant
. There’s always a glossy face on it. Every time it arrives in my mailbox I throw it into the garbage with a fury that astounds me. The fury comes, I realize—looking at this prostitute surrounded by curtains, looking at her face, which is far, far from glossy—from feeling dehumanized.This woman’s face is exhausted, fully human, and full of fear.

There is always terror. I know there is terror every day, and I know because sometimes I can actually feel it. In the small moments when I am actually able to look, I can see it in any face, a low rumble under every voice and any skin. In my office at work I sometimes feel so afraid that I spend hours cruising online. I look at people’s high school photos and I can see it. I look at mug shots of people and see it.Their faces, their heads. I can see it when I take the long walk to the water fountain and pass all these people at their desks.They’re generic, they’re encased, but I can see fear glowing through like a bulb from behind a wide white plate. I imagine I forget these times, that they contain themselves within the building where I work, within the hours I spend there, that they wad themselves into a pellet I could pocket, but it’s not true. Sometimes they reopen, they unfold, they bloom, and fill any space I’m in. Andrea is kneeling in the living room, and so far inside my mouth she’s in my mind. It’s where she’s moved since I left her in our standoff. Her face trembles.The distance between one moment and the next is shaking. I am forgetting nothing. You are my favorite dentist because I want to feel shiny and automatic. I’m not moving. I’m not moving. It won’t end.

Midgets often marry each other, like celebrities. Simpletons often marry each other. There were these simpletons who married each other, and they had a baby girl named Peanut who wasn’t simple at all. As a bright girl, by the time Peanut was four she was tricking her parents into leaving the house and then locking them out. They’d wander around the yard holding hands and Peanut would tear up the house like a lonely dog.

No-neck people tend to marry each other. There’s a birth defect, a missing gene or something, sometimes associated with mountain people, and it causes them to live without necks. Usually it’s the nonskinny mountain people; not the kind with rat eyes, pinched faces, and enormous Adam’s apples, but the bug-eyed ones who’ve moved to town and eat lots of potatoes, potato chips, and deep-fried potatoes from the grocer’s freezer. These are people whose bodies are sort of spheres and sort of
cubes.You could fit a finger, maybe, between the shoulder and the jawbone, but that’s it, and good luck if it’s one of the especially fatter people with no neck. These people marry each other, and their kids have no necks either. They are called no-neck people, and sometimes you see a family of them walking around and it can make you feel like there’s something wrong with you for having so much neck.

Tennis people marry tennis people, but what else would they do? When you marry people, you have to meet them at school, at work.You have to meet them at church.You have to meet them at the bar, or you have to meet them at the park or the Alcoholics Anonymous.

Sometimes a celebrity marries an ugly celebrity, and there are other exceptions as well. Still, mostly people don’t want to have to carry a mirror around to look at themselves.

A child psychologist from the local university enrolled Peanut in a study. Peanut was really good at the test where you predict where pool balls will go. The one where you say whether the item is dead or alive, she had trouble with clay. She wasn’t sure. It sort of moved, and it sort of changed, but it sort of didn’t. She had trouble determining agency.

People who both like to cook shouldn’t marry each other. For example, the two of them like cooking, so they start cooking constantly. One gets into one country’s kind of cooking and takes pleasure placing special orders and pronouncing them correctly. The other calls pies: I do pies, she says. She builds a marble counter, and learns all about carpentry.They’re trying to be variations on a theme. Pie girl can’t win. Pies are in the other’s country along with lots of other dishes, and she feels like a minor cooker, doing pies. She quits cooking,
nauseated, and takes up collecting exotic plants. Cooking is like the baby in the chalk circle, and they pull and pull, but when, finally, one gives up, it’s not for love, it’s for exotic plants. Then budgets are stretched, because they both need so many accessories, cooking, plants, cooking, plants, and it starts to feel like there’s an elastic cord between them. They’re forty-five degrees to the ground like plow horses, pulling in opposite directions. Sometimes they get exhausted and smack into each other, sometimes face-to-face but mostly rump first. Birds flying backward into windows.