Thy Neighbor (2 page)

As for circumstance, I'm slipping that second trap consistently. No wife, no bullet. Simple as that, and a staunch rule in this house. No woman is ever around long enough for me to kill her. Or long enough, that is, when I'm untreated and capable of wielding anything heavier than my whiskey-softened cock.

Which brings us to substances. Ordinarily, I'd agree. That's got trouble burned into it as surely as a brand on my ass cheek that says:
RUN
! Which is why, as a matter of policy, I never drink alone. There's always a crippler in the mix. A mellower, a flattener, a tranquilizing dart blown into selfsame ass cheek by cautionary zookeeper me before I even get the barest hint of a pheromone in the vicinity. No one has seen me blood count sober since I was twenty-one. Not even Dave, though that should go without saying, since no moderately intelligent or humane human being could stand Dave's unadulterated company.

But Dad.

The question of Dad.

That's a tough one. The toughest, and the one I can't resolve.

Why did he do it? And did he pass that reason or loss of reason down to me?

Unknown.

No one heard anything that night. Not a cross word spoken, or not so as it, or they (there must have been more than one word), could be heard reverberating around the neighborhood before the gunshots unquestionably were.

I wish I had that script. I really, really do. God, what an artifact. To know what they said to each other—so civilly, it seems, as not to have been overheard—what they whispered, implied, insinuated that led up to:
Bang
.

The gun going off as a last act.

I've written it a hundred times in my head and crumpled it a hundred times in frustration, just as I, too, have crumpled to the floor in a rough-hewn ball, like the draft in the digital dustbin.

Inadequate, as usual.

I understand nothing but this. Grief is exhausting. To me, it is happening minutely, on a cellular level where I can't console or reach it, but where it reaches me more potently than any other toxin, wending through my liver and my spine and all the way to my extremities like venom that's not kind enough to kill.

Maybe there's a clue. Were they kind words they said to each other that night? A kindness spoken, a kindness done, and silence thereafter?

I can't know.

But I know that they both come to me in the night or the day, or whatever twilight I inhabit without the company of Dave or the static of substances.

Crepuscular visitations.

I wake in the dusk and I am not alone, and for that fingernail of time when I am three parts aware and not yet abusive, they appear.

I rouse to the scent of them.

That is how they come, and only how they come.

There are no apparitions. No banging in the pipes or blurs in the mirrors. Nothing so dramatic.

Just smells. Perfect, spot-on smells, which, I realize now, are the absolute essence of any person, any house, any moment in time. The residue of its uniqueness carried on the air, more intense, more real than any spectral visitation.

I have smelled, for example, the replica of a Saturday winter morning circa 1984, when I was eight and waking late for hockey Little League, lying drowsy in the fug of my down comforter, my whole consciousness focused and filled with the ecstatic prospects of the day. The game, the hot dogs after, the movies late in the afternoon, the sneaking spy game of the house to myself all evening while the babysitter did her nails in front of the TV, and, best of all, another whole day of buffer between Monday math class and me.

All of this emotion, immediate again in my nose, of all places, and so in my mind.

Frying bacon, the sharp, salty, metallic ting of the driveway being cleared, and bittersweet exhaust from the warming car in the garage, the back door opening and closing as Dad dashes in for gulps of creamy sweetened coffee, the cakey egg, vanilla bean of pancake batter, and its caramelized drabs that burn on the skillet, the melting plastic spatula, the brand-new carpet on the stairs, the oily musk of soiled pajamas in a heap on the floor, and the funk in the sleeping cat's coat.

I smell it all as if in memory, but in the present, and I feel it all again so keenly, as if a life lived and a pathway seemingly expired could bend back on itself and return, this instant folded to that instant, the past touching the present, fused in some quantum dimension.

Scent is the truest messenger. A particle and a wave. A waft.

Swift as, sylphish as thought.

As real, and at once unreal, as it ever was.

Ghosts.

I told you there were ghosts. Or was it undead? I said undead. A mausoleum to the undead. And so it is, redolent and rife with them.

They come to me most often as themselves, without context, their scent coiling around me like campfire smoke.

Just as I am coming to, they come to me.

There is the smell of my father's fresh sweat, so sweet and alkaline and inoffensive, like a tuber cracked open raw. There is the smell of his Old Spice shaving soap and the pomade he put in his hair, the loose change in his side pockets, the talc he sprayed on his feet. There is the crisp starch of his cotton dress shirts, and the sere residue of the chemicals that cleaned them, the warmed wool of his dark suits mingling these odors and sending out his signature around him like an aura you could taste.

And so I taste it. Unmistakable. Lurking, unfriendly, the heavy dregs of him accumulate, hanging, moist at first, and then stifling like the after-stench of someone else's shit until I can't stand it any longer. I lurch from the invasion, recoiling back and across, throwing up the window to disburse him, leaning out and gasping for help, or an exorcism of air.

Less often, there is my mother.

She comes, too, in her own time, like a victim, on her knees, low to the ground. I can smell her only when I'm lying down or prostrate in the room, weeping at my most distraught, stooping for the purpose, down on my own knees and hands, dogging the room for her.

She smells of crusted breast milk and saliva. My first months of life. Baking soda and wet stones, copper, zinc, and alloys of the blood in rough congruence with suet and salt water. She rests in all the low lies of this house, as brisk as sea air and as uplifting, fragile yet persistent, clinging to the fabrics of things, and wise. Wise as every inkling and end point after the fact.

She is never here when he is. They only come alone, and separate. Always apart. Which, I presume, is where they must be now. Dead or in transit, whatever that is. And likewise in their missions to me. They move, parallel and passing. Cords of a circle that do not cross. And I am the circle that contains them. Their circle of entrapment and separation. Both. Encompassing but lost, in and of myself, without compass, trudging in a ring, trapped as they are, and trapping.

I do it all again.

And again.

I have been doing it for years.

And I find that I do not remember anything really. Nothing recent. Nothing real. That paper in my basket is mine. The pink piece of paper, a ream or single sheet of which I do not to my knowledge possess. And yet there it is. And the poem written on it is mine, too. Clearly—if a bit more sloppily put down, the letters strangely spaced and sloping, as though written in the dark or, yes, under the influence. But I have no memory of writing it. All its code is foreign to me, even as I hear the echoes of its self-important conflict here, in these lines that I am writing now.

But for whom?

To accomplish what?

To—

Damn it.

There is Dave now.

The reliable fool, ringing the doorbell like a twat, punching his thumb at it peevishly, relentlessly, as if it were one of his candy vendors on the fritz. It chimes its rinky ding-dong arrhythmically, like a spring-loaded atonal bird, or some quaintly calibrated toy being abused by a thoroughly modern brat.

Ding-dong. Ding-Dongdong-Ding-da-dingdong.

Ease off, you shitpile. I'm coming.

2

Monica sits by the bay window and looks out. She does this often after we're done. Just sits there. Staring off. Staring out. Somewhere else. Yet strangely present as well, and satisfied. Or spent. Like she's gotten it out of her system again—whatever it is, and for however long it lasts.

Unlike most women I've slept with, she doesn't want to be cooed to or cuddled after sex. She doesn't want the intimacy that fucking is supposed to have bought, and I'm relieved not to be asked. That's why we stay at it, meeting once or twice a week, impromptu, whenever the mood strikes, having at it rough and raunchy, like a couple of haters, clawing for each other's eyes and missing, or being blocked by a fist, a forearm, a set of teeth. We're both usually banged up afterward. Bites, scratches, scuffs, burns. All the marks of the weapons that were handy, or the obstacles, objects, surfaces we ground on, slid across, slammed against.

I met Monica in early March, three months ago, at the Swan, the suburbasexual hellhole that Dave and I frequent most nights when we have even the remotest intention of getting laid. It's a lounge more than a bar, which in Midwestern terms means they serve a sickly sweet assortment of champagne cocktails and mocktinis so that the leggy legal secretaries and other temporary professionals who go there looking to land their first husbands don't feel they've been had on the cheap.

Meanwhile, the razor-burned bucks in—what else?—business casual can get good and nasty on Jägermeister and Red Bull before they turn their guns on the girls.

The Swan also serves something they have the hayseed pretension to call New American tapas, which means that the iceberg lettuce may have the odd pecan or pomegranate seed drowning in the usual bog of bacon-bitted blue cheese, and the pumpkin vegetable lasagna, gamely disguised with a sprig of wilted parsley and a Zorro drizzle of salad cream, came from the “healthy options” aisle of the freezer section at Kroger.

The cuisine is septic enough that, if you have to eat something, either to soak up the swill or to keep your speech coherent for as long as it takes to get Gloria to give you what you came for, you're well advised to go veggie. I don't doubt that some poor portly middle manager has been paralyzed from the waist down by tainted meat he ate here and never heard from again.

Monica stood out in this crowd at first glance, mostly because you didn't feel you had to take her out back and hose her down to get a sense of what she really looked like. She wasn't wearing makeup, and she was beautiful, just plainly beautiful, standing there, silent and staid, animally alert, an incongruous still point in the hustling throng.

I don't remember what we said to each other that night, if anything. I only remember walking to and opening the bar's front door for us, mechanically and with complete confidence in what was to follow, as if we had been married for twenty years and were leaving a party the way couples do when the desire to go on socializing has been suddenly and powerfully outweighed by the need to be home alone.

What a relief. What a surprising joy. Not to have to eke out the usual pleasantries to a pair of vacant Girl Scout's eyes batting their lashes at you as furiously as they can through the resinous crud that's been applied to them. How refreshingly cool to be just as angry as the other person, and just as loath to varnish the introductions.

I'm almost certain she didn't say a fucking thing, or even indicate. Not as I walked to the door, not as I opened it and looked across the room at her with all that blunt assumption that had no basis in anything but instinct. Not as I waited for her, not as she slid by me, not as I passed behind her into the parking lot, walking five paces behind, watching all her perfect lonely details expose themselves unawares.

She would have felt my eyes on her, unsure, lingering on her scapulae, marking them in tempo, sawing back and forth beneath the skin, pushing out, announcing themselves again and again, a fair warning as she walked, arms swinging freely, hands clenching and unclenching slowly into fists.

Her hair was boyishly short, a cap cropped close enough to show the cowlicks in back, where the soft pelt conformed to a swirl and, under the light, revealed the glints of red in it. The hairline ended in a playful point just left of her spine and a delta of pale down that spread, paler and finer down the nape, and disappeared.

I felt nothing sexual. Except rage. That old thing, boiling up in me and breaking into a rank ammoniac sweat, reeking up to meet her own rage, which itself had been evident from the start, and smelled strongly sour, too, of cat's piss and onions. I would have laughed at this last bit then, or even laughed at it now, but I have too little perspective to wholly scorn the inelegance of our—our what?—our little feral union, call it? Our less than poetic coming together?

Whatever.

The act and the emotion are both trite, even by allusion, and were then. I can't correct that. We reeked and we fucked. What else?

I didn't feel desire, except the desire to do violence to myself by dint of her. I suffocated myself in her, gratifying with another what I had only half accomplished alone, in secret and with self-pity, which was not welcome to me or to her.

For her it wasn't even in the repertoire.

That was Monica. And there was I, being led, because I had no idea what to do with her or anyone like her, going as I had for so long, by gravity of impulse, down; the vertigo gaining in the turns, the spiral closing, faster and farther, heavy to the core with a collapse that never quite occurs.

But almost.

You say it with that reaching inclination in your voice.

Almost
.

And you get the torque of it close enough.

On that first night, she sat by the window afterward, nude, and we finally squeaked out a few words, the first of which were just a bad joke.

“What's your name?” I said and laughed.

It was what I wanted to know, and all I could really think to ask at first, maybe because it seemed I knew so much else already without asking. That was an illusion, of course, as it always is—the thinking I knew—but partly true as well, as it also always is. I knew the mood and the implications, but none of the details.

The reverse of what usually happens.

But I also had my hand inside her back, and my thumb and pinky in her sleeves, doing the mirror puppetry of all such encounters, making her up out of cloth, animating in accordance with my need.

She made this easier by saying nothing, giving away nothing but the vague auguries of a confidence trickster.

Belief does all the work.

She could have been anyone. She was anyone, and then became the someone I had scripted for her. The empty actor, filled by an imaginary role, makes it real. But the role is only as real as our categories, like taking a sky full of stars and seeing shapes in them, and then traits, and charts of personality and influence. It was all use and projection, but that is all it ever is, until the gun goes off or the blade goes in, intimate and clean.

Her voice was high and thin when she said her name, as if the sound was coming through a reed from a long way away.

“My name is Monica,” she said, still looking out, her face a sketch of shadows turned away. “And yours is Nick Walsh.”

There was no bait in the way she said this, but I wouldn't have taken it anyway. I was arrogant enough to presume that everyone at the Swan knew me, if not by name, then by sight and sordid reputation. She could have asked just about anyone and gotten the worst about me by rote.

“Yes,” I said. “I'm Nick.”

She wasn't coy in pursuing it. She didn't ask me if I wanted to know how she knew me. It didn't matter to either of us, and neither of us was pretending that it did. We didn't say superfluous things. That much had been established already, and it was the best part. No parries. No feints. Only sharp points coming straight on.

Just ask what you want to know and get an answer. Say what's on your mind and take the same back, harsh as it would come. How many people can you do that with? I can't think of one. Even Dave has to be humored with topical avoidance and kept in his sustaining myths like a pot roast trussed with string.

But Monica was just bullish in her quietude, like a T-shirt that says,
GO FUCK YOURSELF IF YOU CAN'T TAKE IT
, except that she was much too confident to swear or need signage. The announcement made itself in slow moves and few words, and in her dancer's posture, which, to be honest, was just a bit too this side of Mia Farrow unhinged for my taste, but not enough to tear me from the pull of her. There was something creepy there, no doubt, as if she had a plan and was taking her time, or like she knew she could have you killed with a nod, so why hurry? Why even raise your voice? It was weird, but good cult movie weird, and I liked it.

I just did.

It fit into the part of me that no one sees and that the foulmouthed clown in the polo shirt strenuously conceals. With her, I was coming as close as I ever have or can to being myself. Whoever that is.

And ain't that love?

By definition?

Or something like that?

Maybe. But I couldn't have said so.

She had been through way too much already in her young life, or so it seemed, to tolerate romance. Hadn't I? She had a soured view at twenty-something. Long before that, probably.

I didn't ask her how old she was. That was damning frivolous speech, or so her poise implied. If you can't deduce even the obvious, buster, don't advertise your ignorance.

But I did deduce enough. She had those wisps of golden hair all over her belly and her inner thighs and forearms, the ones that line with tiny bubbles in the bath, and turn coarse and black or break off on a girl's thirtieth birthday, so I knew she was well south of that mark.

She also had that soft, forgiving roundness in all her limbs, all the way down to her knuckles, which were plump and barely creased and which, if this weren't worldly Monica we were talking about, you could still almost see clutching a purple pen and writing, “Dear diary.”

But that innocence was long gone, or time-lapsed in the past-life portion of her brain, inaccessible to the adult.

So what do you say to someone like that? Seeing the scar tissue and the baby fat both at once, or thinking you do?

You say something tired, of course, but something you actually mean, so it's not a total disaster.

“Are you okay?” I said to her figure in the window, knowing full well that, where it counted most, she wasn't.

She didn't answer.

“Monica?”

“Yes, yes,” she said, annoyed. “I'm fine.”

“Did I hurt you?”

“Of course not.”

There was a long pause, and then, more softly, with kindness in her voice, she said, “I'm glad we met. I'm glad we did this. It's good.”

And then she eased herself away from the window and began putting on her clothes. I watched her. Every motion, every choice of garment, and in which order.

She put her socks on first, which I'd never seen anyone do, especially after sex with a stranger, and she sat to do it, very deliberately, raising one foot at a time to the seat of the chair, resting her chin on the bent knee, exposing the cleave of her vulva without modesty or guile. She gathered each sock with her thumbs and forefingers into concertinaed rolls around the toe, then unfurled them gingerly, hunch by hunch, over the arch, around the curve of the heel, and up the bend of the ankle, straightening her leg for the last pull, like a ballerina at the barre.

I loved it that she wore socks, plain black socks that she'd probably bought at a street fair in packs of six. And I loved it that her bra had no underwire or clasp. She slipped it on over her head and slid the stretch cotton over her breasts, untwined the slender straps across her shoulders, and wrestled abruptly into her shirt, a tank, formfitting, flattering, but in no way crude like the hooker halters the sluts wore at the Swan.

Her underwear was as sensible as the rest. Hipsters, white. Probably also bought in packs. Her jeans were loose and worn, hanging low and boyish on her narrow hips and ripped around the hem where they'd dragged on the ground. Her sneakers were black and plain, canvas slip-ons with a white rubber sole.

All simple easy wear. No advertisement for any kind of cool or attitude or need to be seen. Still she was beautiful, and she made you look. The kind of person who could wear a sack and have allure, because the signal was coming from her mind and beaming right to your mind, if you had one, or bouncing off and bewildering the vacuum it found there instead.

It was the same every time we met. The sex that somehow retained the anonymity of the first attempt, but also gained familiarity over time, and then the sitting mostly in silence—we did this, as I did almost everything else, in my study—she at the window, I on the couch watching her or half dozing. And then she would get dressed and go, stopping to put her hand on my shoulder on her way out the door.

She did this each time. Stopped, placed her palm on me, let it rest there for a beat, consolingly, as if she knew I was grieving and wanted me to know that she knew, even if she didn't know what for.

That came to be my favorite part, the part I waited for and needed the most. It meant a thousand times more than anything she could have said, or anything anyone ever had said, about my parents or about me. There was so much care and camaraderie in it, like a curative laying on of hands between the sick and dying.

I never moved when she touched me. I never looked up at her in recognition. I just stared at the place where she had been near the window, or at the weak reflection of her in the window, framed by the doorway and backlit by the light in the hall: her figure, my darker mass below, her arm between us.

We looked like we belonged in this house with the other partial residents. Ghosts at the window between worlds, passing across panes of glass as plays of light and shadow that would shatter with a carelessly tossed stone. I looked at our reflections, and in my head I always said something to her, as if I half believed she could read my thoughts, or receive them through her arm in the flesh.