Love Warps the Mind a Little Page 3

  Her son said, “Charlie first.” He stood and looked at the receptionist, then at his mother.

  “Go ahead,” his mother said. “I’ll be right here.”

  “Right here,” he said.

  I took out my pen. I balanced my tablet on my knee and wrote as fast as I could. I described Charlie’s plaid shirt and his chino slacks, the eczema on his forehead, and his long fingernails, his mother’s navy blue shoes and white patent leather handbag. I wondered why she’d never called a nursing home. I wrote about that and about what she might do if she got sick. Did she have a plan? I mean terminally sick. Would she just refuse to die until he did?

  A hygienist opened the door to the waiting room and told Mrs. Diggins that Charlie wanted her. She stood, Mrs. Diggins did, draped her purse over her arm. She looked at me doing my job. She said, “Okay, Charlie.” I wrote that she limped when she walked. I wondered about Uncle William and that trick.

  I didn’t want to deal with Shimkoski just then, so I told the receptionist that I felt like I was coming down with the grippe, and I resceduled the appointment. She told me there was a twenty-four-hour virus going around. I smiled like it hurt. She said the tooth didn’t look all that bad. I walked out into the mall and stood outside the yogurt place. I thought I’d wait for Charlie Diggins and his mother, and then I’d follow them. See if they sat down somewhere, so I could eavesdrop. And I would have done it, too, except that I saw Judi arm-in-arm with a guy wearing a Greek sailor’s cap. I thought, She’s dating Stanley Kunitz? They had just walked out of Le Bon Pain, and when they turned to admire something in Zales’s window, I saw that the man was young, in his twenties, it looked like.

  I left the mall without buying Spot a treat at the Pet Supermarket. I figured Judi would be expecting me on my feet rather sooner than later. I wondered how the imminent upheaval was going to affect Dale and Theresa. Their weekend was over. Dale was just then standing in front of his Eco 101 class trying to remember the point he was making about supply and demand. Theresa’s in her bathroom brushing the little one’s teeth, telling him to hold still, it doesn’t hurt.

  At Mr. Natural’s, I picked up a block of feta cheese and a pint of hummus, put them on the counter, smiled with my mouth closed, and introduced myself. She said she remembered me from the other day Said her name was Pauline. She asked me how Judi was doing. I said, Fine, now that she’s got the cute boyfriend. The one with the cap? she said. Yes. I found out that Pauline had two boys in grade school, Mick and Keith, and an ex-husband who still comes around. I wanted her to whisper her entire life’s story into my ear. I steadied myself on the counter. My bones hummed her name. I wondered if she could hear it. I wondered what “comes around” meant. She told me I looked wan. She used that word. I wanted to hug her, take her away from all this nutrition. I was getting stupider, giddier, by the second. She said, It comes to $8.34 with the tax.

  7.

  She’s Married—She’s Happy—She Drives a Mercury!

  WHEN I STEPPED OUT OF THE SHOWER, I SAW HER NOTE ON MY BATH TOWEL, written on “From the Desk of Judi Dubey” stationery. “Laf, Here’s # of a really terrific marriage counselor. Name’s Terry Cundall; she’s a friend, and she’s expecting your call. Kindly scoop up dog shit in backyard—Please!!! Judi. PS: Won’t be home for supper—golf lessons.” I dripped a little water on the phone number until it was illegible.

  I set the typewriter on the kitchen table and rolled in a blank sheet of paper. I cleared away Judi’s cereal bowl and her juice glass. I sat and read the Telegram & Gazette while I made coffee. Edmund’s murder trial was finally under way, and Edmund, through his public defender, had entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. I was disappointed, wished Edmund had done the decent thing and accepted responsibility for the killing. So I reminded him. I said, You were trying to rob the house, Edmund. You did shoot a.38-caliber bullet into Lena Tremblay’s neck after Judi’s party, remember? On page three was a photo of Edmund sitting at the defense table with a trim little haircut and a baggy suit. You could even make out the Quonset-hut people behind him in the spectators’ gallery, Edmund’s dad, Noel, blowing his nose. I wondered, Is this what got Judi’s day off to a contentious start?

  Spot must have heard the clacking typewriter keys because he started to bark. I sent him a telepathic message to shut up. I typed: Dale phoned Theresa from Furr’s and asked could he swing by before work. Just because, he said. Just to say hi. Spot kept up his racket. Dale stuffed a finger into his left ear, told Theresa she’d need to speak up. “There’s a screaming baby about ten feet away from me.” And then Mr. Lesperence, next door, fired up his weed whacker and let it whine outside our opened living room window

  Usually I can write no matter what. When I taught school, not even all the wheezing, snorting, and barking by the hormone cases in the back of study hall could keep me from working on my story But on this morning, two weeks after I had left home, the real noise was not outside. It was this persistent and distracting rattle in my head. The commotion of what I had done and what I was not doing kept me from my work. And if I couldn’t even hear what Theresa was saying, how ever would Dale?

  My fingers rested on the keys. Spot quit yelping. Mr. Lesperence idled, then shut off, his weed whacker. I heard a ringing in my ears. I closed my eyes and pictured Martha at our table, eating supper by herself, chewing the pasta wearily, staring out the window I opened my eyes and saw Pauline standing at the sink, smiling at me over her coffee cup. This was a complicated business. I reminded myself that you can’t have everything, but I kept my eyes on the phantom Pauline. I thought if Martha would just let me write, not pester me about what she called “a real job,” then maybe I could live with her and be faithful. But could she live with the me I turned out to be?

  The phone chirped. I listened to the caller leave his message after the beep. It was a guy named David with a Scandinavian accent, or Baltic, or Wisconsin. Who knows? Judi’s cap boy, I figured. He apologized for spoiling (only he said “shpoilink”) last evening’s dinner at the El Morocco. He hoped she could forgive him. I erased the message and dialed Martha’s work number. I told her machine that I was calling to see how she was doing, how she was feeling. Maybe we ought to talk sometime, Martha, I said.

  First the doorbell chimed, then Spot barked, then the weed whacker droned. I answered the door. The delivery woman from Avant Gardens looked at her card. “Judi Dubey?” she said. “Jody,” I said. “They’re lovely Thank you.” I brought the dozen scarlet roses to the kitchen. I tore David’s card into six pieces and threw them in the trash. I sneezed. I put the roses in the fridge. That’s when I remembered the dog shit. I grabbed a snow shovel out of the garage and went to the backyard. Spot was so happy to see me, he grabbed a wallpaper brush in his mouth, ran from me as far as his leash would go, then made an arc around the yard. Ran into the apricot tree. He picked up the brush and shook the life out of it. Then he jumped straight up in the air. I love that dog. I waved to Mr. Lesperence. He hates me.

  Mr. Lesperence is a doll wigs hackler. I didn’t know what it meant either. One morning I watched him heave junk over the fence at Spot. Apparently, he had noticed that Spot was omnivorous. The wallpaper brush was Mr. Lesperence’s. Since that morning, I’d seen him toss dowels, magazines, shoes, a birdhouse, a picnic basket, a folding chair, and plastic flowerpots into the yard. He was cleaning out his garage. Spot ate most of the stuff. Another morning I found five baby-doll torsos lying in the grass by the deck. No heads or limbs, just the buttery little bodies. I did see a gnarled leg by Spot’s tail. Very interesting. Perhaps Mr. Lesperence hoped that Spot would choke on an arm or something.

  I asked Judi that night what exactly she knew about her neighbor. She told me that Mr. Lesperence was a widower, worked at Capital Toy, and she didn’t blame him a single bit for complaining about Spot. This has always been a quiet neighborhood, she said, and she gave me a look. Do you know his first name? I said. I called Capital Toy, told them I was David Crockett fro
m American Express, and I was calling to verify the employment of Mr. Barry Lesperence. He’s applying for our platinum card. Yes, that’s right, like the guy at the Alamo.

  He’s a what? I said. Madeline from personnel explained that Barry Lesperence pulled synthetic hair through a hackler—a cylinder kind of gizmo with teeth. It softens the hair, she said. We make the Fretty Betty doll. You’ve probably seen it in the stores. He’s been hackling for sixteen years.

  I kept my eye on Mr. Lesperence, just so he didn’t lob over any light bulbs or tin-can lids or anything. I didn’t think he would. He was not a vicious man, just an angry one. Mr. Lesperence’s jetsam actually kept Spot from gnawing at the redwood joist under the deck that he was halfway through already.

  I shoveled the dog shit and dumped it behind the laurel bushes up against the foundation of the house. I took the mighty Spot for a stroll around the neighborhood. Checked the mail. Nothing for me. I walked to the library, sat in the periodicals room, browsed through old Life magazines looking for Dale and Theresa. I found Theresa’s face in an automobile ad from 1954. The woman in the ad is smiling up a storm in the upholstered front seat of her Mercury, Her scruffy, adorable Little Leaguer sits beside her, and you can tell he’s just scored his team’s winning run. Mom is thrilled with the gas mileage, the ad tells us, and with the ample space in the glove compartment. I stared at her face. Pert blue eyes, thin lips, mahogany hair. I heard Theresa tell Dale, “Sure, come over. I’m getting the kids dressed for preschool, but stop in for a cup of coffee.” I wrote that down in my notebook. Her kids are that young. I quietly tore the ad from the magazine, folded it, and put it in my shirt pocket.

  That night when Judi got home, I gave her the flowers. She looked stunned, perplexed. I said it was my way of thanking her for her gracious hospitality, that’s all. The least I could do. I told her I knew I was intruding, was in the way. She didn’t deny it. I sneezed. “So I’ll be looking for another place ASAP,” I said.

  “Laf, this is so sweet,” she said. She looked at the roses. “I want to trim these, put them in a vase,” she said. “Why don’t you make us a couple of martinis.”

  8.

  Having Been Gertrude of Helfta

  THIS IS HOW I FOUND MYSELF IN BED WITH A THIRTEENTH-CENTURY SAXON MYStic, an unsettling business that began with the roses. The roses bought me time. Judi backed off her passively aggressive insistence that I leave the house. Young David the cap boy was now, evidently, on her shit list. She invited me and not him to an upcoming psychotherapists’ party I had continued to erase David’s several daily phone messages asking “Chewdi” why she would not return his calls. I left classified rental ads by the phone along with a business card from Jack Bell Leasing. I jotted notes on the “While You Were Out” memo pad, like “no pets,” “call back at six,” and “one-year lease required.” Judi and I were back to spirited lovemaking. I was writing eleven hours a day And I was, of course, delaying the inevitable.

  Who was going to take me in? Not Martha. I was kaput with her, at least for now. Not my best friend, Francis X., who, though he did have a spare room over his garage, also had six kids, two Siamese cats, and a wife, Sandy, who despised me with a vengeance. Not any landlord of any decent apartment, not with Spot the Destroyer by my side. I could buy a tent at Spag’s and pitch camp at Rutland State Park. I could live there till the fall, at least.

  Nicky Kargeopoulos said Spot and I could stay with him as long as we wanted. He understood about women, he said. Nicky’s my pal from the fish-and-chips store. A sweet, funny, and generous man. But here’s the thing. Nicky lives kind of like Balzac in a room on Harding Street over a Vietnamese restaurant. I told him, Thanks, Nicky, that’s nice of you, but I don’t think so. It’s not just that Nicky’s is one especially cluttered room and not even that it reeks of nuoc cham sauce. It’s the televisions. He’s got three of them in that tiny room, and at least one of them is always on. By the bathroom door, he’s got a black and white Philco console with a round screen. There’s a Sony portable attached to a VCR and a cable box on the table and a four-inch bonsai TV that he sleeps with.

  I admire the intensity of Nicky’s obsession with television. It’s breathtaking, really. He has tapes of all fifty-eight episodes of Boston Blackie. He can recite entire segments of The Prisoner. He knows the name of every Ernest Flatt Dancer on The Carol Burnett Show. What kind of writing could I get done in that room? I said, I’d love to, Nicky, but Spot would have your Philco for lunch.

  Judi rubbed my leg with her foot. She laid her book on her chest, rubbed her eyes, and yawned. “I’m getting tired,” she said. I told her I wanted to finish reading the draft-so-far of the Dale and Theresa story. Then I’d put out the light.

  She said, “Why don’t you quit this fantasy?”

  I looked at her. What did she mean?

  “This writing business,” she said. “You gave it a try. So it didn’t work out for you. You’ve got nothing to regret.”

  I didn’t say anything. Dale and Theresa and I just stared at this woman beside us in the bed.

  She scratched her nose, looked up at the mirror. I read her the scene where Dale comes by Theresa’s for coffee. Peter, the little one, won’t come out from behind his mother’s leg. Dale thinks there’s something about the boy that’s different. Before he can put his finger on what it is, the girl, who’s four (for now her name is Caroline), tells Dale he has yellow teeth. Theresa says enough of that now and scoots the kids into the back hall to put on their shoes and watch for the Kinder-Kare van. Dale looks around Theresa’s kitchen, at the yellow dish towel folded over the handle on the oven door, the cast iron skillet on the stove, the white plastic crucifix with the gold Jesus over the pantry door.

  Judi said, “You’re never going to make a living at this, you know that.”

  “Because people like you would rather read trash like this.” I picked up the paperback she had been reading, Finding Yourselves: A Practical Guide to Past Life Regressions.

  She said, “Don’t lose my place.”

  I said, “Do you really believe in this crap?”

  “Don’t dismiss what you can’t understand, Laf. It’s childish.”

  I read the jacket. “By the author of Color Me love and the best-selling Self-actualization Through Hypnosis.”

  She said, All right, I’ll prove it to you. Judi sat up, leaned back against her pillow, shut her eyes. I guessed she was toying with the ball of mercury A minute later she told me that in one of her past lives she had been a woman named Gertrude who was born in 1256 at Helfta. At five years old, she was entrusted to the nuns at a local convent. She never saw her mother or father again. A woman named Mechtilde cared for her.

  She told me that as Gertrude she began having visions when she was twelve years old. “I saw myself covered with ashes, and I was on my knees before our Lord, Jesus Christ. His loins were girded with Justice, and blood bubbled from His brow and ran like oily pellets down His face. And then my ashes were gone, and I was shining, and then Jesus touched my breasts with the wounds in His hands, and I burned, and I melted and liquefied into Him. And I was like a dish of beaten gold. And I heard His voice say, “Thank you, sister, for your service. You will live a hundred lives in me.” Judi smiled and opened her eyes.

  All I could do was look at her.

  “How could I know all that stuff,” she said, “if it didn’t happen to me?”

  “What did Justice look like?” I said.

  She closed her eyes. “It’s like this . . . this . . . I don’t know, this drapey kind of garment, but it’s not.” She looked at me. “It’s ineffable. You need other eyes to see it.”

  “I didn’t realize you had such a vivid imagination.”

  She shook her head. “Memory,” she said. She yawned. “I’m exhausted.”

  I said, “Well, you’ve been awake for seven hundred years.”

  She put her book on the night table. “Very funny,” she said.

  I remembered my future, bleak and u
ndefined. Wifelessness, joblessness, a cloud of unknowing, love uncreated, an unbridled wound. I remembered everything—my unwanted stories, my beguiled wife, my homelessness, my manic dog. I realized I could end up like one of my characters—smoking clinched cigarettes on the front porch of a halfway house, talking back to the radio.

  “I wrote a book, too,” she said.

  “What?”

  “When I was Gertrude. The Herald of God’s Loving Kindness. You should read it.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “And I meant to tell you. Now that Edmund’s going to prison in Walpole, Noel’s moving to be closer to him. You can have the trailer for one hundred dollars a month, my mother says.”

  I’d have to do something fast. Call the florist or something. And then I had a brainstorm. I’ll ask Pauline if she knows of any apartments in her neighborhood. I put out the light. And then I imagined she’d say, Well, I don’t, but I do have a spare bedroom in my apartment you could have for like fifteen dollars a week. Is that fair? I could use the money. Really, you’d be doing me a favor. And the kids would adore a pet. Yes, I tell her. Yes, yes! Christ, I don’t know what gets into me sometimes.

  9.

  Married to My Conscience

  A. “CLINGING TO THE WRECKAGE”

  In my dream, Martha and I sat in a small boat, a twelve-foot tender. Martha wore a yellow slicker and a sou’wester. First we sat side by side on the rowing thwart, the way I like it, then face-to-face, the way Martha likes it. She told me that it did not depend on logic, reason, or material evidence. It’s ineffable, she said, a belief, not a thought. It is willed, not anticipated. I thought she was talking about faith. Not faith, she said. Love. Now our little boat lifted in the swelling sea, and I could make out the silhouette of shore, and then I couldn’t; now a glimpse of dense forest, and then not. We were without oars or life jackets. Not smart of us. I gripped the gunwales. Martha said, It’s a public admission of abject failure, an absolute loss of hope, a profound disgrace, a deadly shame. I thought she was talking about divorce. Not divorce, she said. Suicide. Our cradle rocked in the waves. Martha said, But at least with suicide you don’t have to live through it. And then our tender swamped and battered against a reef. When the bow broke, Martha tumbled to the ocean and vanished. I gripped the floating transom. I thought, If you cling to the wreckage, you might be saved; you might not drown.