a moment, I thought, shouldn’t I be the one who’s crying here? Until I felt bolder and brighter, like the lamp I’d been holding.
I always thought that we all have a story that we play out, in large and in miniature, through every interaction of our lives. Joan’s story was that she’d tried to rescue lost things, only to be left behind by what she thought she’d saved. Laura’s was that she’d seek out the brightest fire, only to find her own fuel swallowed up to feed the other. My story? I don’t want to sound crude, but if you talked with the highest power, I believe you’d be told that my need to touch and be touched would lead me to hurt the ones I cared about.
What a terrible thing.
That was all I knew. Where else wasn’t I stepping outside of myself, listening to how I talked, watching how I moved? Here was generosity. My skin and my soul one and the same, so I didn’t have to think about me and my terrible punishing hopes. I was shoehorned into my body, which fit like the finest leather loafer, no rubbing or space behind the heel. And how I was able to walk and walk, as if the world went onward and up, to infinity.
I led her down the hallway, by the hand.
I lay on top of her, weight resting on my elbows. When I held her face between my hands, her mouth parted, the quiet so deep that the world was struck dumb. First the baseboards with their tappings and clicks. Then the currents in the fusebox. The scrub pines, the cardinals, the bulkheads sipping water: they went silent too. Somewhere, at the bottom of the world, a young man churned inside his lover for the very first time, burning up inside the body that enclosed him. And Laura in Mama’s bed, already beyond reach.
CHAPTER 2
The new house ate up every square foot of its lot. Copper roofing, copper flashing, copper downspouts: every last detail crying out, notice me, notice me, keep up with me. Exactly the kind of house Joan would have despised, with good reason. Dozens of these were sprouting up on street after street, replacing the tidy modern ranch houses on the water. The houses were little, I know. But did anyone these days have a clue they were once sold fully furnished, all the way down to the toothbrush, from the seventh floor model home at Bamberger’s, Newark? And even the minister of French culture, invited by builder, Boris Letsky, had a thing or two to say about them: “The higher the satellite, the lower the culture.” As if that were the cleverest thing. But look, those ranch houses with their clerestories, open rooms, tongue-and-groove ceilings, and pocket doors were exactly what serious architects were aping these days, even as the dodos in our zone were tearing them down.
At least that’s what Joan had made me see.
Just between you and me, though, I had to admit that I loved the new house. Okay, not that I loved it exactly, just that seeing a house like that come together blew out all the fog in my head. All the fog that enabled me to pass through the world without looking. I looked forward to it day upon day. Here was the ugly of it: as long as things were being thrown up around me, I’d never feel stuck in myself.
At my feet, a bumblebee dragged itself across the gravel.
I picked up shards of wood, stuffed my pockets until they were fat with it. This was how I filled the hour after dinner every night except Tuesdays: I walked through the new houses just as the sky went dark. It was my time to be alone, time to be apart from Laura and Joan, who stirred up the rooms they passed through, agitating the air. So much energy between them, energy and nerves, voices stormy, legs impossibly tall and tapered. How could I stop from being lost? I loved them, don’t get me wrong. They were excitement; they were beauty to me: a big bright bank of redwoods sparking at the edge of the sky. But sometimes a man needed to know who he was again. I went from one house to the next, standing inside their privacy, their loneliness. Boards aching, smell of dust still hot from the blade. Little shifts like murmurs above my head. So this is how I’ll spend the foreseeable, said the pieces of the house. So this is the weight I will carry. And somewhere, deep inside, the memory of the woods where they came from: the dense, mossy thick, three-thousand five-hundred miles away.
“I take it you set your own rules.”
A ruddy fellow, a little soft in the belly, trudged up the ramp. I couldn’t help but think of some fuming hen, body swaying side to side, head pecking. For some reason, I thought this particularly funny, and I started to laugh before I had the chance to explain.
“What’s up?”
“I take it you’re not a reader.” He pointed to the hand-lettered sign on the fence I’d pushed through:
ACTIVE CONSTRUCTION SITE: TRESPASSERS PROSECUTED TO FULLEST EXTENT OF THE LAW.
“You think I’m up to something?”
I kept the reaction from my face, stony and plain. It was a trick I’d taught myself, years back, in the guidance counselor’s office, or in front of my moody father just before the thought of spanking me passed over his face.
He raised his chin some. “I do.”
“You’re asking to pat me down?” I half-turned, held up my arms against fresh drywall. I couldn’t get a laugh out of him, though. Instead, the air buzzed as if he were convinced that I wanted to be boned by him.
“How do I know you’re not going to come back in an hour, walk out with some pipes and fixtures?”
“You don’t.” I looked him over without reservation: the orange crew cut, the puckered white star to the right of his nose, as if someone had pushed a screwdriver into his face.
“What’s in your pockets?”
I folded my arms, pushed up my biceps with my fists. I used the grin I depended upon when a little charm was in order. “So you really are after me.”
“Fuck you.”
“What makes me think you’re going to believe what I say anyway?”
“We’ve been missing three cords of wood from this property in the last week. A good two thousand dollars’ worth in supplies. At least.”
“You want to come over to my backyard and check?”
The guy cleared his throat, part awe, part disgust. Nothing like zoning in on the thing he least wanted to hear. To serve it up to him, to force his face in it, and make him eat it on his knees. The dolt. If I truly liked guys, he’d be the last person I’d fool around with. Try losing that mushy ass, pal, I wanted to say. Then maybe someone, woman or man, would want a roll in the hay with you.
He started swinging his arms freely, a little violence in it, not aimed at any particular target. Was someone going to get hurt? I could take him down, I knew that. I could send him straight to the hospital if that was what he wanted. But the scenario was almost too easy: the thin red drip from the nose, the squint of vulnerability. No golden, molten rage. I’d have rather been blindfolded, force-fed raw chicken with a knife to the throat.
The truth was I hadn’t hit anyone since high school. Joe Batschelet, in the far back corner of the library, throwing tiny balls of wet Juicy Fruit at the back of my head. I was skinny back then, half of the weight I am now. In his thickness, Joe had decided that I was a worthy target just because I kept my head down all the time and didn’t say a word in class. The bad part wasn’t the punch; it was shocking how easily my fist fit into his face. It was as if my whole life had been leading toward that moment: his face, my fist, our marriage. What bothered me was the aftermath. Joe had lost part of his
