You Were Wrong (15 page)

“I’m about to give my toast,” Stony said with the mock distress of a father who will enjoy his children’s unruliness only up to a point, and then will be enraged by it.

The pantry was a vestibule between the dining room and kitchen with floor-to-ceiling shelves on which wet food was stored in jars and dry food in boxes and tins. The shapes of the jars and their labels and the boxes’ graphic designs were strange to Karl, artisanal and refined, signaling ingredients grown, raised, processed, and prepared with a degree of loving attention that put the resulting food above his pay grade.

Sylvia’s face was close to his. Her body made the air vibrate. “You’re not supposed to be enjoying this, you know.”

“Oh, really? Tell me not just to show up at this abortion but exactly how to feel about it. Totally relieve me of the burden of autonomy.”

She giggled, a quiet and abbreviated expression of genuine pleasure from a woman certain her misfortune was not yet at its worst.

“What?” he said.

“I love when you get indignant.”

In the warmth of the pantry he saw that she’d removed her high heels, that they’d left red ridges on the tops of her feet, that on her wedding day her feet were not clean, that they gripped the floor as her pale, taut skin gripped the air, that her blue dress was wet, that she was a pregnant animal trapped in a pantry. Jellies, jams, chutneys, sauces, pickled things, pasta, bread, flour, coffee, tea, cereal, crackers, cookies, bags of onions and potatoes swirled around him in the tiny room.

“You know who’s interesting?” he said.

“Who?”

“Arv.”

“Arv’s horrid.”

“That may be, but he’s complex.”

“Who said he wasn’t?”

“I give most people little credit for complexity.”

“That’s because people scare you and you stay sealed up in your house to avoid them.” She cooed this criticism directly into his ear as if it were a lullaby. From his ear, the warmth traveled inward and downward.

“Arv’s barking was a soliloquy,” Karl whispered back, “about how life disappoints him, knowledge eludes him, and the strong triumph over the weak regardless of either’s virtue.”

They glanced toward the dining room, where Stony hit Arv on the snout with a rolled-up magazine and Arv whined.

“Arv is vile,” she said.

“He’s harmless.”

“He’s the one who put a mickey in your drink at the party.”

“What’s a mickey?”

“A roofie.”

“What’s a roofie?”

“Date rape drug. Don’t look like that, no one raped you. But Arv drove you to the beach in your own car while you were still unconscious and dumped you on the sand.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s vile. You can’t protect me if you’re clueless.”

“And why weren’t you protecting me the night of the party?”

“I was vomiting. My morning sickness came at night.”

“Was I supposed to stop the wedding? Is that how I was supposed to protect you?”

“No, I had to marry him.”

“So you keep insisting.”

“I need you to figure out how to protect me.”

“So, protect you by figuring out how to protect you.”

“Yes.”

Her face was inches from his. She looked at him with pleading in her eyes. He put his hand on her cheek and she held it there with her hand.

Stony, who was leaning in the doorway of the pantry, said, “The groom would like to give his toast now, lovebirds.”

What was one to think of his toast, especially if one was not really paying attention to it? One mainly heard its tone, which was tender, jovial, calm, and therefore demented and terrifying. He insisted she make one too. “Wow, marriage, glad that’s over with, cheers,” was hers, more or less. They drank. White waitstaff brought food none ate. They drank more though. “Bathroom!” Karl cried, and left. His real goal was his hat. He wandered up a wide flight of stairs. He found a room with a bed and a window and looked at the water and thought of his mother. She had married Larchmont Jones. Teen Karl went to the wedding but teen Vetch did not, or so she claimed. He must have seen her somewhere though. If he’d known himself he’d have noticed her and would remember her. Where were the sensations a person had had and not noticed? And might he not remember his mother because she too had been unformed? He thought of her photo in the college yearbook, in the days before the advent of the peasant blouse, glasses too big for her face, dark hair straightened with that era’s crude machine, a large blob of false straightness arcing down her head on either side, the clouded look in her eye of a girl who could not unite her perceptions and thoughts with the organizing principle of an integrated self. Marriage for such a one was always blackmail of a kind. He stayed in his house to stay with his out-of-it homemaker mom, and stayed dead to stay close to her via resemblance.

He felt the flesh of another human on his back and arms and neck. It hurt. Some part of him behind his head was being stretched beyond comfort.

“Hello, Karl.” That was Stony.

“What are you doing?”

“What are
you
doing?”

“Looking for my hat.”

“It’s not here. You missed Arv’s toast, and didn’t make one yourself. This hold is called a full nelson. It can be used as a neck crank where the head can be pushed into positions past its normal rotation, causing hyperextension of the spine. USA Wrestling, which is the governing body of wrestling in America, has banned it but they teach it anyway at wrestling camps from coast to coast. Wrestling coaches are a strange lot, all those muscles are the male equivalent of hysteria. You could stomp on my foot or break my knee with your heel but by the time you did I’d have dislocated both your arms or snapped your spinal cord.” Stony moved Karl to the bed and leaned forward. Karl fell facedown and Stony fell on top of him. Stony’s cheek of muscle and bone pressed against Karl’s one of loose flesh. There was wetness on Karl’s cheek as well, his forehead, nose, and mouth were mashed into the bedspread’s textured nubs, his legs pinned by Stony’s legs. “We’re in each other’s lives now, but there are some places you can’t go, and this is one of them. If you come to the second floor of my house again without being invited you’ll find yourself in this same position, only your pants will be down and I’ll be raping you.”

Karl realized seemingly for the first time that when he’d discovered Sylvia in his house nine weeks ago, she and Stony had quite recently had sex. And you may wonder if Karl was a virgin. He was not. He had had intercourse three times in college with a girl in a dorm down the street from his; once each with two whores, not liking johndom the first time and confirming he didn’t like it the second; he’d paid seven women from three continents to stroke his penis on eight occasions in two years; and had not had nonsolitary sex of any kind in five. Three, one, one, two, seven, three, eight, two, five: he liked to do the numbers in his head and by counting know himself.

The two men lay quietly. To get what little air he could Karl had to smile or sneer with the left side of his mouth, the side away from Stony’s hard cheek. The situation taken as a whole was not as unpleasant as he’d have thought. Stony had charisma, money, intelligence, confidence, and handsomeness, that is, as he had said to Sylvia, excellence across a spectrum of attributes not including virtue. He was not a good man but good men’s goodness was often just embarrassing to Karl. This guy was not a bore to be around. Something interesting was always about to happen in his company. Capitulation—not to any man but to him—had a soothing quality that reminded Karl of home.

He preceded Stony down the stairs. “That wasn’t so bad,” the latter said.

Arv had spread the sports page on the naked tablecloth and was lost in it.

“Arv is a beautiful reader of a sports section. He do the coaches in different voices.”

“Where’s Sylvia?”

The name caused Arv to flinch as if slapped.

She appeared at the pantry door. “Mets won, pay up, chump.”

“No.” Arv slammed the paper shut.

“Arv, you welching on my wife?”

“I have no money.”

“I’ll garnish your wages.”

“You garnished them last week.”

The lunch wound down. All were in sour moods but the groom, who did not have moods. Stony told the startled help, “Have the dishes those two ate off of”—indicating Arv and Karl—“destroyed.” An overnight stay in tents in a local wood was spoken of by groom, bride, and Arv, to one another and to Karl, in a way that made clear it had been discussed in full with Karl even though he did not remember that and did not want to go. He was made to see he’d agreed to camp, which entailed a trip with Arv to Arv’s to pick up gear while bride and groom were left alone, another horrifying thought in a series.

Little must be said of the trip to Arv’s. His japes on general topics and his jibes against the bride would have been enjoyable if Karl didn’t hate them. He’d almost have rather been alone.

In the late afternoon the two passed in Karl’s car beneath the wooden entrance sign of Mashumup Nature Preserve, on which a wag had painted “Abandon all hope, you who enter here,” and another or the same wag had painted “Nature
macht frei
.” Karl let Arv haul all the stuff. They walked away from the graveled and gently shaded parking lot and past the empty, locked, nostalgic cabin that served as the nature preserve’s headquarters, on their way presumably to its hindquarters. As they entered the tunnel of trees, gravel gave way to twigs and dirt, and their sounds diminished down to the soft clump of mass-produced rubber soles on warmed summer earth. The tree world enveloped them and Karl tried not to forget to let the gentle smell and soft green tree light go deep in him, and suffered as he failed in this. When did he need tree balm more than now?

Stony was putting up the two-man tent in which he and his new wife would lie that night. His back to the arrivals, he squatted and tied a stake to a tent flap with thin rope, the muscles and veins in relief on his elegant arms. Karl was to share a tent with Arv, whose seemingly infinite mediocrity made him at once familiar and mysterious.

“Sylvia’s waiting for you down by the cove,” Stony said without turning away from his work.

“Me?” Karl said.

“You.”

Karl lingered at Stony’s back.

“You’re dismissed.”

Karl walked down the path to the beach as the sun made its final leisurely descent into the sea. The moon had risen early and now rested white-faint and indifferent in the purpling sky. Seagulls yo-yoed slowly up and down at water’s edge, dropping scallops on the rocks, retrieving them, and so on, lamenting the tedium of this limited routine with their high-pitched mews, like a flock of kittens trapped in a dark shoebox.

Sylvia sat upon a rock at the shore. Her muscular back pressed against her pale blue sweatshirt. She and Stony belonged to the corporeal aristocracy. She’d made a lot of noise about how much sorrow this union caused her, and he did not think she was lying, but her resistance to her groom was just a part of how such things were meant to go: young, fine, energetic people like her in whom nature had concentrated its gifts had to resist, had to pass neck-deep through a thick and stinking swamp, which was their own disgust with the unfairness of said gifts, before they entered the kingdom of their destiny and took their place on its throne, which in Sylvia’s case was in hand-holding range of Stony’s throne.

Karl sat beside her on the rock. She took his hand, kissed it, squeezed it to her breastbone, which hurt him. She let it go and put hers gently on his knee. They were silent. The soft sweet smell of salt and gentle vegetable decay came in from the bay while what may have been jasmine drifted down on the air from the woods. The seagulls moved off to the south; their hard complaint turned distant and sad, like a major loss vaguely recalled. A cricket chirped, then three, then ten. Low bay waves washed up in slow spondees. Evening and evening of the heart arrived at once.