Love Warps the Mind a Little Read online

  “So, who else were you?”

  It took her a second to see what I was driving at. “You’ll make fun of me.”

  “I won’t.” I swung my leg over the bench, sat facing her. I put my elbow on the table. “I’m all ears.”

  Judi drank some beer, sized me up. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  She said, “This was in Russia. A little village. Obruchanovo or something like that. I don’t know exactly when yet. I’m just beginning to recall. My name was Marya Dolzhikov There were many of us children. I think ten. No mother—she died giving birth to me, they say. I am the smallest. Papa’s name was Matvei. I remember him holding me by the neck, whipping me with a willow branch—my legs were full of sores from scratching. I remember playing with bits of broken pottery on a path to where the cattle grazed. I think there was a factory in the village. We ate black bread. You would have to sweep the roaches off the loaf first. We dipped the bread in water to soften it. My sister Katya was in charge of our samovar, but the tea smelled like cheese and the sugar was gray and infested with weevils. I died in a fire on my name day I remember it was dark, and I was shoved to the floor. It must have been my brothers and sisters running over me. I can remember the sting in my eyes, how my chest hurt, how I lay there waiting. I heard the crackle of flames.”

  “That’s sad.”

  “But you don’t believe all this, do you?”

  I didn’t believe she had lived before. I told her that. How could I? “But something’s going on,” I said. “How do you remember?”

  Judi shook her head. “My memories are like dreams,” she said. “They just come.”

  I left it at that. We drove home. Judi took a shower. I went outside to talk to Spot. I took him for a walk. I did send a story to Daphne Engdahl that Monday, by the way. Sent her “Change of Plans,” a story that begins with a child riding his Big Wheel up and down the walkway of the motel where he lives—the City Squire in De Ridder, Louisiana. (Later I revised it, put the family up in Monroe, got rid of the ugly business where the husband beats the wife, locks her out of the motel room, added other characters, called it “Splice of Life.”) Twice in that time I drove past the house she gave me as her address. It’s out in Barre—a two-story Victorian with a hipped roof and cross gables. White with green shutters. A blue minivan in the gravel driveway.

  11.

  My White Bear

  I GOT AN UNEXPECTED BUT MUCH APPRECIATED REPRIEVE ON THIS MOVING BUSIness. It seemed that Stoni’s beau, Richie, aka Attila the Muneyhun, would be paroled at the end of the summer, and that meant that I would not be immediately sentenced to solitary confinement in the trailer. Richie might want it. Stoni would want to offer it to him at least. Fine with me. But I was not to breathe a word of this to Arthur Bositis. Arthur’s such a high-strung fellow, Judi said.

  She told me not to worry, even if Richie took the trailer, he wasn’t likely to have it long. Why’s that? I said. Judi said the last time he got out of jail, Richie wasn’t on the streets seventy-two hours when he tried to hold up landoli’s Package Store on Grafton Street. He waved a pistol over his head, but he was so messed up on heroin he couldn’t find the trigger. The guy behind the counter had a baseball bat and broke both of Richie’s arms in several places. His kneecaps, and then his jaw and his teeth.

  Judi and I were sitting on the deck. It was dusk. We could hear Spot beneath us chomping away on his Te Amo balsa wood cigar boxes. Judi shook her head, looked at me, and smiled. Good thing I like you, she said. I like you too, Spot. Spot woofed. We were into our third or fourth gin and tonic. Judi laughed, said she was just picturing Stoni and Richie making love on the fold-out bed in that cramped trailer. She said Richie was twice Stoni’s size. I found that hard to believe.

  “You know how big Arthur Bositis is,” she said.

  “Real big,” I said. Arthur’s at least six feet three, probably 220 pounds, and solid.

  Judi said, “One time Richie hung Arthur out a third-floor window by his ankles. Dangled him over the sidewalk. Richie told him if he even so much as looked at Stoni again, he’d toss him into the blast furnace at Wyman-Gordon.”

  Judi went inside to freshen our drinks and returned with them—the glasses garnished with fresh crescents of lime—and with a snapshot of Richie and Stoni. Richie had thin, brown, straight hair that reached nearly to his waist. He wore a sleeveless black T-shirt that said, “Instant Asshole—Just Add Beer,” and large turquoise rings on every finger. Stoni sat on his shoulders with a can of Bud. She looked like a party hat.

  “He wears spurs on his boots,” Judi said.

  “And your sister goes out with this guy”

  “He carved that scar on his face himself.”

  “Do you know if he’s ever killed anyone?” I said. I figured he might have.

  Judi told me that, in fact, Richie did kill this biker one time, but it was accidental, sort of. “Accidental” reminded me of my tooth. I put my tongue over it. I’d have to call Shimkoski before he forgot who I was. Richie and this other guy—his name was Himmler—were finalists in a head-butting contest at some Labor Day picnic. Himmler collapsed and died of a brain hemorrhage after losing the match.

  The phone chirped. Judi said, Your turn. I stood, told her I just remembered that Dr. Stouder called with a date for her appointment. “I marked it on your calendar.” I went inside. I put my hand on my forehead, imagined slamming my head onto the edge of a toilet bowl, saw the skull plate crack, the porcelain drive the sharp bone into the gray matter. Jesus. “Hello.”

  It was my brother, Edgar. The last time I saw Edgar was at my wedding fourteen years ago. Edgar followed my parents to “La Florida,” as they like to call it. Edgar lives in Miramar with his wife, his two boys, Matthew Mark and Luke John. Usually, Edgar makes his annual phone call in January when it’s ten below here, and he acts like he hasn’t been watching the Weather Channel. He’ll tell me he’s sitting by the pool. Anyway, I figure this call can only mean trouble.

  “Is that you, Laf? What’s going on up there, bro? Just talked to Marsha—”

  “Martha.”

  “She tells me you’re living with some world-class bimbo. Says you quit teaching and everything. She gave me this number.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “That I quit my job.” So Martha knows the number. She’s on to me.

  “What’s this all about, Laf?” He began to speak quietly. “Why can’t you just have an affair like every other normal human being? Why do you have to make such a big hairy deal out of it? You think you’re better than everyone else? Is that it?”

  “So, what’s up, Edgar?”

  “Jesus loves the fornicator, Laf. Hates the sin, loves the sinner.”

  I should tell you that Edgar and family are Charismatic Catholics, which means, as near as I can tell, that they can speak in tongues when they are slain in the spirit and occasionally will become enraptured and collapse during Mass. Edgar’s other fascination is with professional wrestling. He and the boys go to all the matches they can. At the time of this call, Edgar was managing a NAPA Auto Parts store and was president of the Miramar Optimists Club. Now he’s bought himself a Pollo Tropical franchise and runs that. Anyway, all of this depresses me. I could hear Edgar’s wife yelling at her kids to “Get down off the g.d. washing machine.”

  “Why did you call, Edgar?”

  “Delores,” he said. “I’m trying to talk here. I’m on long-distance.” She said something I couldn’t make out. “Is that all right with you, Delores? Is it all right if I talk to my brother?” I heard a dog yip. Edgar said, “Shut up, Tin-Tin.” And then, “I called ’cause Dad’s sick.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “He needs a triple bypass.”

  “I’ll send him a card.”

  “He might not make it. You really ought to see him.”

  “I can’t do that right now.”

  “It might be your last chance.”

  “I’ll call him.”

&n
bsp; It’s not that I disliked my father, although Judi thought I had some volatile unfinished business with both parents. They pulled out of my life in 1979. I was twenty-one and a senior in college. Blaise and Eudine sold the house I grew up in and moved to Hollywood, Florida. They bought a motel on the beach, the Maravista, and they’d been running it ever since. For a while we talked on Easter, Christmas, and my birthday. Then just Christmas. They were always very much in love with each other, I thought. They seemed to resent Edgar and me. Like we had intruded on their romance. I know that doesn’t seem probable, but there, it’s what I believe. Like I said, Edgar went after them when they moved away. He says they’re terrific grandparents. They’re nice people. The world is full of nice people I don’t know

  “Are you still there, Laf?”

  “I was thinking about Dad.”

  “What about him?”

  “How he always stopped talking to Mom when I walked into the room.”

  “ ‘A foolish son is a grief to his father, and bitterness to her that bare him.’ Proverbs 17:25.”

  “Is he still at the motel?”

  “Yes. They’re not going to admit him till Thursday”

  “Anything else, Edgar?”

  “Why are you tormenting those that love you?”

  “Good night, Edgar.”

  “I’ll pray for you, Laf. We all will.”

  When I was around seven or eight, my father came into my room to tell me to turn out the light, bedtime. I was reading First Down Showdown. He snapped off the light. He said, “Try not to think of a white bear.” And, of course, I thought of a white bear. I said, “Why did you say that, Dad?” He closed the door. First it was the cute bear on the Polar soda bottle, then it was a lumbering hunter on an Arctic snowfield. He’d stop, sniff the air. This was the first of my obsessive images, but not the last and not the worst. For the first time in my life I realized my brain has a mind of its own, and there was very little I could do to control it. Soon, I found I could no longer read my Chip Hilton high school football hero books because whenever I thought of a football, it changed shape—the ends became tubes, and soon the football would look like a broomstick with a lump in the middle. And so for nearly thirty years I have been unable to imagine a football as a football.

  Another time Dad woke me up early. I thought maybe I had to serve Mass or maybe we were going fishing. He shook my knee. He asked me was I awake. I nodded. He said, I’m going to sing a song and you’re not going to be able to get it out of your head for the rest of the day. And then he sang “I Fall to Pieces” in a nasally whine. Of course, I found myself humming the song everywhere I was for several days. I asked him, Do you do this to Edgar, too? He smiled. “Do what, darling?”

  And so now every night that I’ve been here at Judi’s, just before I fall asleep, when I can’t read one more word or keep my eyes open, I see Martha at our table at home, and she’s got a thread of spaghetti in her mouth that reaches to the dish. She’s sucking on it absentmindedly, The thread never shortens. Then I can’t sleep. So I watch her to see what she’ll do next. Just the way I might watch Theresa in her living room. Theresa would say something, do something, and then I might write that down. See what she does next. But Martha never moves, not even to look at her watch.

  12.

  Communicants

  I WENT TO SEVEN O‘CLOCK MASS SUNDAY MORNING AT ST. STEPHEN‘S. I SAT IN the back of the church on the right beneath the stained-glass window of St. Anthony, one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, the hammer of heretics. This St. Anthony was a pasty-looking young man with a tonsured head and a brown robe. He held a lily in one arm and the child Jesus in the other. I sat here, away from the faithful, because what I dislike most about the service is the handshake of peace, or whatever they call it. It has long seemed to me that the Church took a wrong turn on the liturgical highway sometime in my childhood. Martha and I argued about this often. She accused me of being ritually conservative, hopelessly medieval. She said, What about community? I said, What‘s the neighborhood have to do with my soul, if I‘ve got one? Fellowship, she said. Fellowship of the workplace, I said.

  My idea of the religious experience is that it should be private, first of all. It should not be the social event it has become for Catholics: let‘s respond in unison like we‘re reciting the times tables; let‘s all warble a tuneless song; let‘s shake our neighbors‘ hands, wish them eternal peace and Godspeed; let‘s get together Thursday night for bingo. I used to tell her religion‘s become a substitute for living a spiritual life. That drove her crazy

  The religious experience should be private and it should aspire to ecstasy Worship should not restrain you, keep you standing/kneeling/sitting in your pew, should not secure you to earth. It ought to take you out of yourself, the way reading Tolstoy does. At least that. It ought to lift you, set your feet on higher ground. And it should disturb you, bewilder you, confront you with the reality of your condition. I was beginning to understand why Dale may have gone Baptist. They have to have better music, for one thing.

  The mystery had once meant something to me, the incense, the hypnotic cadence of Latin, the tangerine and wine-dark light pouring through the clerestory windows, the entrancing hymns, the priest, his back to me mumbling the incantation that would transubstantiate the bread to flesh. Now the Mass is all so clear, so forthright, so shared, so rote, and all the mystery is gone.

  I had come to Mass to see Martha, and perhaps, though I wasn‘t yet certain, to speak with her. A young priest I didn‘t recognize—it‘s been a while—introduced himself as Father Bob and began his homily on the subject of “The Word of God Across the Ages.” I drifted away. I wondered who the patron saint of writers was. I figured since I was here, it couldn‘t hurt to put in a prayer for some editorial intervention.

  I noticed Francis X. up front with his scary wife and the six little Harveys. Eight redheads, all in a row. I was reminded of teaching and of how a job is incompatible with writing. So are a marriage, kids, religion, a bowling team. Probably everything is. And why is it called writing when the words are only a part of it? How do you explain to someone that your eyes are drifting up and to the left because you‘re trying to watch this actual person you made up cross the room and close the blinds, and that this is your job?

  I looked to the wall at the eighth Station of the Cross, where Jesus tells the woman of Jerusalem not to weep for him. He‘s fallen twice. He‘ll fall again. This is the culmination of his father‘s work. I hear the Sanctus bell, and I kneel like everyone else. I realize that coming up are the last two weeks in July, when Martha and I have always taken our vacation in Wellfleet. For the last dozen years we‘ve rented the same cabin from Edith and Ray Fortin above the beach at Lecount‘s Hollow. Maybe that‘s why this Sunday, some internal alarm went off, but I hadn‘t told myself I‘d heard it.

  There was Martha. She was wearing a calf-length black and tan print dress and running shoes. Her hair was clipped short. I thought she looked like a nun. She was a Eucharistic minister this morning. She stood beside Father Bob, handing out communion. I walked to the center aisle, got in Martha‘s communion line, winked at Francis X. when I shuffled by. The guy in front of me smelled like yeast. It looked like I had a choice. I could take the host in my hands or on my tongue. And I was supposed to say something, but I didn‘t know what. They used to do this differently, simply, quietly. I decided on the hands. What I said was, “Thank you, Martha.” Her glance fell to the chalice.

  After Mass, I waited at the bottom of the steps. Homer Donais was there selling the Sunday papers like he‘d been doing since I was a child. Homer had large teeth and kept his jaw slack. His glasses were thick and opaque. My father used to tease him, I remember. He‘d say, Homer, I gave you a five. Francis X. said something to Sandy. She pointed her chin at me and turned. She corralled the children ahead of her. Francis X. gave me a hug, called me a stuck-up son of a bitch. He looked around. He said, Where the hell have you been? I told him. He said, Jesus Christ,
then it‘s true. He told me he had to run—taking the kids swimming at Howe Pond. Little cookout, you know. We made a date for Wednesday night at Moynihan‘s.

  I waited for Martha to come out. Figured she might be telling Father Bob what a swell job he did with the sermon, how he certainly could hold a congregation‘s attention. Pretty soon it was just me and Homer out there on the sidewalk. She must have ducked out a side door or something. It looked like rain. The little Harveys would end up crying in the station wagon. I told Homer hi and bought a Herald. He told me his name‘s not Homer. “I changed it.”

  “When?”

  “Twice,” he said. He straightened out his piles of Globes, Telegrams, Heralds, Times. “I was Virgil for six years.”

  “Now you‘re Dante?”

  “Azad Chaparian. Went all the way this time. I like the sound.” He looked at his watch. “Next Mass at ten-fifteen.”

  I said, “Do you know me? Remember me?”

  He looked at my face. “I seen you around.”

  I smiled. “So, Azad, how have you been?”

  “Loosey-goosey,” he said.

  13.

  Lemonade and Paris Buns

  IF I HAD ONLY LISTENED TO PAULINE, TAKEN THE FOOD SUPPLEMENTS SHE’D SOLD me, eaten the flounder and buckwheat pâté she’d made, maybe I would not have been sitting there on the divan in the dark with a palmful of crumbled teeth and old fillings. Pauline had said she could tell from my fingernails (powdery gray) and my hair (limp, lusterless) that I was desperately deficient in calcium and selenium. She was right about that but wrong about how the symptoms would manifest themselves. It was not gradual like she said, but all at once.

  I had been chewing on my pen when I cracked a tooth on the upper right side of my mouth. The crack opened a fault line, and one tooth after another fissured and splintered at the poke of my tongue. And then the gum bone shattered, and the gum itself went slushy. The teeth lost purchase, slipped away from the cementum. I had to spit them out before I swallowed them. My first thought was, I can’t afford this—the surgery, the upper plate, the whatever else. I felt no pain, but how would I be able to eat? How would I talk? I ran to the bathroom mirror. Not only was my mouth a dark and bloody pulp (save the reinforced, bleach-white crown, front and center), but my cheeks were sunken, and my jaw had assumed a novel and unflattering configuration. I looked like my great-uncle Telesphore just before he died.