Babylon and Other Stories

Meeting Uncle Bob

Spike proposed to me at the bus station. It was November and we stood outside shivering and smoking cigarettes, our breath merging with the exhaust from departing buses. Spike stuck one hand in the pocket of his jeans, blew smoke, and said thoughtfully, almost to himself, “We should get married.”

“What did you say?” I said.

“On second thought, never mind,” he said. He dropped his cigarette to the ground and picked up my bag, then his.

“What do you mean, never mind?” We had never discussed marriage before. Spike smiled and put his arm around me, guiding me toward our bus. He kissed the skin below my ear.

“Maybe we should talk about it later,” he said. “After you've met Uncle Bob.”

On the bus he pulled out a book, slouched down, and began to read. I looked out the window as we wound out of the city and hit the highway. The day was dense and overcast, the sky crouched down close to the earth. We passed small towns with churches and bars strung along the road, wooden steeples, neon signs. In places the road was cleft through rock, leafless trees high on either side. The bus was cold and I leaned closer to Spike, who put his arm around me but didn't talk.

His real name was Leslie. When he was ten he wanted a tougher name, so he picked Spike, and it stuck. He'd spent every summer of his life in Vermont with his uncle and cousin, and this was our first trip there together. I was nervous. I was twenty-two, about to graduate without any real plans, and Spike was the only thing in my life I knew for sure I wanted.

We stepped off the bus into a deserted parking lot. It was dark and snowing dizzily, flakes that turned red in the taillights of the bus before dissolving on the pavement.

“It looks like Uncle Bob's late,” Spike said. “He's usually late. Are you cold?”

“Very.” He stood behind me and wrapped his arms around me, his cheek against mine. This led to kissing. When Uncle Bob pulled up he honked the horn and we jumped. Spike's teeth hit my chin.

“That's Uncle Bob,” Spike whispered.

He was a pale, round-faced man with a dollop of chin, like a piece of dough stuck under his mouth. He jumped out of the truck and shook Spike's hand, then mine, and helped me into the cab.

“Heat's broken, so you two snuggle,” he said. Everybody's breath blew whitely toward the dashboard. Spike pulled me closer, and I leaned my head against his shoulder while he talked to his uncle.

“Your mother says you're thinking of dropping out of graduate school,” Uncle Bob said.

“I am,” said Spike.

“I'm supposed to talk some sense into you.”

“Okay,” said Spike. He leaned forward and looked at Uncle Bob, and both of them laughed.

Ten minutes later we pulled onto a dirt road and the headlights played uncertainly over rocks and trees and snow. The road turned out to be the driveway leading to a small wooden house. Smoke rose from the chimney and lights glowed in the windows.

“Is someone here?” Spike said.

“Miriam is.”

“Who's Miriam?”

“She's my lady friend. You get to bring a lady friend, I get to bring a lady friend.” He smiled at me and parked the car.

“I never thought of myself as a lady friend before,” I said.

“Well, you are now.” He patted my shoulder. “Congratulations.”

Spike took the bags and Uncle Bob went around to the passenger side of the truck, holding out his hand to help me climb out.

The house had been in their family for generations and was beautiful inside, small and old with hardwood floors and a stove with a pipe running up to the ceiling. I smelled garlic and tomatoes.

“This is nice,” I said to Spike. As we took off our coats, Miriam came out of the kitchen and introduced herself. She was wearing a black turtleneck and dark red lipstick and she looked about my age. Uncle Bob kissed her on the cheek, then disappeared to make drinks. I lit a cigarette and stood next to the stove; three hours of continuing cold had left an ache in my legs and arms. When Uncle Bob returned from the kitchen and handed me a glass of red wine, I took a big, grateful sip, and felt warmer and, right after that, sleepy.

“So,” said Uncle Bob. He rubbed his hands together and laughed. There was something impish about him, gleeful and young. It was hard for me to imagine him in his professional life, being competent and busy and medical. He was supposed to be an obstetrician.

We ate spaghetti and drank red wine.

“So how's Michael?” Spike said.

“Who the hell knows,” Uncle Bob answered glumly. He turned to me. “My son's a graduate student in East Asian languages. He's learning how to forget English. He only speaks Mandarin now.”

“I know,” I said. Michael had come to see Spike once. We took him to a Chinese restaurant, where he drank plum wine and refused to eat the food.

“I call him on the phone and he quacks like a duck,” Uncle Bob went on. “I'm supposed to learn goddamn Chinese to speak to my own son?” He kept looking at me. “I'm not an unreasonable man.”

Miriam leaned across the table and whispered loudly, “Michael has issues. Since his mother left.”

“He's sensitive,” Spike said.

“I'm sensitive, too,” said Uncle Bob. “I'm so sensitive I can hardly stand myself. As a matter of fact, everybody in this family is sensitive.”

“That's true,” Spike said.

Uncle Bob smiled broadly. “Take my wife,” he said, “please.” He laughed and I laughed, too, just to be polite. Miriam didn't. “She was so sensitive she had to move to California.” He spoke the word California in a mincing, high-pitched tone, and he put his hands up in the air, as if he were doing a little dance in celebration of the state. Miriam put her hand on his shoulder and he took it and touched it to his cheek, a sweet gesture, I thought. “Sunny California,” he said. “Going to California in my mind.”

“That's Carolina,” Spike said gently. Uncle Bob went into the kitchen and brought a large jug of wine to the table. Miriam— I assumed it was her — had made a little centerpiece of pine branches and there wasn't space for both, so Uncle Bob threw the centerpiece into the fireplace, where the needles melted and snapped, and set the jug down instead.

“Jesus Christ, Bob,” she said.

“Oh, lighten up,” he said. He poured us all more wine. “It's a wise man who buys in bulk,” he pronounced. “Ancient Chinese proverb.”

“Ancient Irish drinking,” said Miriam.

“Shut up, Miriam,” he said.

“So anyway, Miriam,” Spike said, dropping his cigarette ash into the remains of sauce on his plate, “how did you two meet?”

Miriam shrugged. “It's a small town. Everybody meets everybody else. And you? How did you and Lucy meet?”

Spike and I looked at each other. At the beginning our relationship had been a secret, and we had discovered that's how we like it, the world it made for the two of us. He had been my TA in “The Bible as Literature” the spring before. In class he said the Bible contained the greatest and most basic stories of our culture, then asked us to put our notes aside and retell stories from our reading to the class. Tell whatever you remember, he said. He walked around the room, pacing and talking, and I thought he was sweet and fierce and slightly terrifying, like a raccoon trapped in your basement. My friend Stephanie and I used to mock him outside of class. Spike? What the hell kind of name is Spike? We imagined some foolish woman having sex with him and moaning, Oh, Spike, give it to me, Spike. Then, all of a sudden, that woman was me.

“It's a small school,” I said to Miriam. “Everybody meets everybody else.”

Halfway through the semester I came upon Spike in the quad. It was early spring and the campus bloomed sedately with the first flowers. He sat under a tree with a bottle of wine in a paper bag, smoking a cigarette.

“Ruth, right?” he said when he saw me.

“Lucy,” I told him. “My name's Lucy.”

“I know.” I realized he was referring to the story I'd chosen to tell in class, Ruth and Naomi. Ruth said to Naomi, Wherever you go, I will go; wherever you live, I will live. I liked that story, the devotion in it, Ruth making that permanent promise.

“Are you allowed to do that — at school?” I said, looking down at the bottle.

“School,” Spike said. “Do you want a sip?”

“Okay,” I said. “But aren't you, you know, religious?”

Spike laughed. He passed the paper bag over to me, and I sat down next to him.

“It's just a divinity degree,” he said. “Not the seminary or anything.”

I took a swig from the bag and swished it around like mouthwash and winced. It was pretty bad wine. Spike laughed and told me I was funny. We spent all that summer together. Every night we sat on Spike's porch, drinking beer and talking in the dark. I never talked so much in my life: three o'clock in the morning, sometimes four o'clock. We'd fall asleep holding hands. More than once, after we had sex I cried, from the closeness of it.

“Must have been fate,” Uncle Bob said now, “because you are such a beautiful couple.” He refilled the wineglasses and toasted us silently.

“I don't believe in fate,” said Spike. “Or God. That's why I'm leaving school.”

“Shit, Spike,” said his uncle. “Nobody believes in God anymore. That doesn't mean it's not interesting.”

“Some people do,” said Miriam. Her red lipstick had worn off, except at the outlines of her mouth, and the real color of her lips was pale. “I do.”

“Sure,” Spike said, putting his elbows on the table in an irritated jerk. He ran his hands through his hair. “And fanatics and terrorists and people who wage wars.”

“That's not true,” Miriam said.

“People who prevent women from having abortions. Isn't that right, Uncle Bob?”

“Not everyone here is Catholic, you know,” Miriam said. “Not everyone here has to rebel against the pope.”

“What are you, Lucy?” Uncle Bob said, turning to me. I was smoking a cigarette and trying to stay out of it.

“I wasn't raised any particular way,” I said. “I'm not anything.”

“Everybody's something,” he said, kindly.

“I for one am Jewish,” Miriam went on.

“Well, congratulations,” Spike said.

Spike and I climbed the stairs to the guest room. As I went, I steadied myself against the walls with the palms of my hands. I was drunk, a lazy, liquid kind of drunk, not a loud and talking kind. I was learning to like this about drinking, that there were so many moods to it; in this it was like sex, one physical situation that could go in a million possible directions. Spike pulled his clothes off and dropped them in a pile on the floor. I lay down on the bed and watched him.

“Are you okay?” he said. I said I was. He stood looking out the window, in only his long underwear.

“How old do you think Miriam is?” he said. “I mean, she's got to be younger than I am.”

“So?”

“So I'm worried about Uncle Bob. Ever since Aunt Mary left, he's been meeting these crazy women. He's always got these crazy women up here.”

“She didn't seem that crazy to me.”

“The last one was a Jehovah's Witness,” Spike said. “She left Uncle Bob because he wanted to celebrate Christmas, for crying out loud.”

“I don't think Miriam celebrates Christmas, either,” I said, and closed my eyes.

Spike climbed on top of me and stroked my hair and kissed my forehead. I kissed him back but then stopped. I liked to drink with Spike in general and I liked to have sex drunk, too — it made everything velvet, blurred edges, smoothed time. But I was spinning.

“Sorry,” I said. “Can't.”

“Let's get married,” he said. I looked for his eyes in the darkness, hoping they would stop the spinning, but they didn't. He touched my nose, which was very cold, and then traced my lips with his fingertip.

“I don't know,” I said.

“You love me. But?”

“I love you but I wasn't thinking about getting married. I mean, not right now.”

“I love you but,” Spike said. He put the palm of his hand on my neck, moved it to my breast. I arched my back to press against it. He stuck his fingers into my armpit, and I laughed and clamped down my arm.

“But what?”

“But nothing,” he said, his fingertips walking along on my collarbone and down my chest. “But nothing at all, not ever.”

The bed was the worst I'd ever slept on in my entire life. Lumps in the mattress competed with broken springs to torture my back. I woke an hour later in agony, and Spike was groaning in his sleep, tossing back and forth, like a fish dying on land. My head hurt and my mouth was dry. The moon shone over Spike's face. With his eyes closed, his cheek against the pillow, he looked like a child.

From the other bedroom I could hear a bed squeaking and Miriam's voice saying, “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.”

Without waking, Spike reached up and pulled me close to him, warm together against the cold air of the room.

In the morning, the house smelled of syrup and bacon. We sat up in bed and spent a while kissing. There was a holiday sort of feel to things. Downstairs, Miriam was mixing pancake batter and Uncle Bob was building a fire in the stove. He winked at us.

“You two sleep all right?” he said.

“Well, okay,” I said.

Spike collapsed on the couch. I walked through the kitchen and stepped out onto the back porch, squinting as the sun glinted against the snow. The air smelled clear and fresh, and there were no other houses in sight. The land sloped down to a rocky valley and up to a clearing on the other side. The wind rattled pine needles over the snow, and maple trees stretched their naked branches to the sky. I was only a little hungover. After a minute I went back inside and offered to help Miriam with breakfast, but she said she was all right. She hummed to herself as she stirred the batter. I poured coffee for me and Spike and went back into the living room. Uncle Bob was lighting the stove.

“So, Lucy, you didn't sleep all right?”

“I slept okay. It's just, well, to be honest, the mattress isn't very comfortable.”

“It's not? Why isn't it?”

“It's lumpy, Uncle Bob,” Spike said from the couch. I sat down next to him, and he rubbed my back.

“Well, God, Spike, you should have said something. God, you kids, I'm so sorry. I'm really sorry.” He stretched out his hands, looking dismayed.

“It's not a big deal,” I said. “We'll survive.”

“Absolutely not,” said Uncle Bob. “I mean, if a person comes to my home, I'd like that person to do more than survive. I'd like that person to have a good night's sleep. That's the very least I can do, isn't it? As a host? Well, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to buy a new bed.”

“You don't have to do that,” I said.

“Yes, I certainly do. I can't have you kids coming to my home and not sleeping. You should be able to relax in your Uncle Bob's house. I just can't have it any other way. I'm buying a new bed.”

He wouldn't talk about anything else over breakfast. As soon as we were done eating, he and Miriam drove to a furniture store in Rutland. Spike and I did the breakfast dishes. Then we went back to the old, uncomfortable bed and had sex.

They got back at around two in the afternoon. We were reading next to the stove, Spike engrossed in a paperback thriller he'd found in the guest room, and me battling Middlemarch. I had to write a paper on it, but kept falling asleep in the middle of chapters.

“Spike!” cried Uncle Bob as he came into the room. Cold air blew in behind him. “Come help me with this goddamn bed.”

Miriam sat down next to me. She looked tired.

“Good book?” she said, and I made a face.

With great difficulty, Uncle Bob and Spike dragged the old mattress down the stairs and across the living room. It was a feathertick mattress, lumpy and huge and mottled white. It looked like a dead animal, say a polar bear — something they'd hunted and killed but that continued, even after its death, to overwhelm them. I stood in the kitchen as they dragged it in there.

Uncle Bob let his end drop. “I need a break,” he panted. His face was red. He looked at me and Spike. “I bought this bed with my ex-wife. Let that be a lesson to you,” he said, and shook his head.

Finally they managed to get the mattress outside and they left it in the snow behind the house. Then they carried the new one up the stairs. The whole thing took hours. Miriam stood at the base of the stairs, saying, “To your left, Spike,” and “No, you have to lift and angle it,” until Spike lost his temper and told her to leave them alone. She went away muttering. I stayed in the living room.

Finally, Uncle Bob came downstairs and sat down next to me. “Lucy,” he said. “I think Uncle Bob needs a drink.”

“Thanks for the bed,” I told him. “You really didn't have to do that.”

“But I did, didn't I?” He smiled widely, that impish look again. “You know, you're the first girl Spike's ever brought here.”

He and Spike started drinking whiskey to celebrate the new bed. It was already dark when Uncle Bob got the idea to burn the old one instead of taking it to the landfill. He got some kerosene out of the garage and told Spike to help him drag the mattress down to the valley. Spike seemed to like the idea. Miriam came out of the house, scowling.

“What are you doing, Bob?”

“Burning this old mattress.”

“Where? Under all that tree cover? Are you crazy?”

Uncle Bob looked at Spike and me and shook his head, as if appealing to our common sense. “You know,” he said, “when a middle-aged man takes up with a younger woman, it's supposed to be so he can have fun. It's not supposed to be that the younger woman just looks like a younger woman but is really a middle-aged woman inside.”

Miriam turned sharply around and went into the house. I looked at Spike but he didn't say anything. It didn't seem right for nobody to follow her, so I did. I didn't know what to do. I went to our room and sat down on the bed. I could hear her sobbing. After a while she used the bathroom and then walked back to her bedroom. I went out to the hallway and knocked on the open door.

“Are you okay?” I said.

She just looked at me. “Bob,” she said, and shook her head. “Fucking Bob.” She pulled out a compact and put on her red lipstick, pressing hard against her lips, and seemed to get calmer and angrier. “Fucking Bob, he drives me crazy,” she said, and smacked her lips together. She stared at the floor as if Bob, or a picture of him, were sitting there. “I have to stay with him, though. I owe him my life.”

“What do you mean? You can't stay with him if you aren't happy together,” I said, and I believed this to be simple and true.

She looked at me with pity. “When I met him I had no life. I was pregnant, I had no money. He helped me. So you see?”

I didn't. “I still think you have a choice.”

“If I ever left Bob I'd be in trouble again in a second. I just know it. In a second. He knows it, too. That's the thing about me and Bob, he's crazier than I am. It keeps me steady, you know what I mean?”

I looked out the window. Snow was falling thickly, but a fire burned tall and strong in the valley, and I could see two shadowy figures around it — a weird scene, magical and sinister, like a page from a fairy tale.

“I guess I'll fix dinner,” Miriam said. She didn't seem upset anymore.

I walked downstairs and went out the back. Snow piled on my hair and my shoulders. I found Spike and Uncle Bob each with a bottle in hand. On top of the mattress they'd piled boxes, broken chairs, some twisted pieces of metal I couldn't identify. Wind whipped the flames around loudly.

“Housecleaning!” yelled Uncle Bob when he saw me. “I decided to get rid of some things. I know the traditional time for this is spring, but you know what Spike says.”

“What does Spike say?” I said, looking at Spike.

“Spike says Uncle Bob is not a traditional man,” said Uncle Bob.

“Want some whiskey?” Spike asked me. “Is everything okay? Are you okay?”

I nodded. It was blazing hot next to the fire and freezing a couple of steps away. The two of them seemed not to notice, standing so close to it, their faces flushed. Outside the rim of fire the world danced into darkness. Miriam emerged from that darkness, her red lips even redder in the firelight. When Bob saw her he dropped to his knees. She laughed.

“Forgive me, forgive me,” he said. He stood up and put his arms around her, and they kissed. He looked at Spike and me, triumphantly, and said, “The love of a good woman. That's all I need.”

Spike gestured for me to come close to him. I shook my head and he gave me a questioning look. He walked toward me and stumbled as he took a step. When he reached for my arm I moved away and walked past the fire, picking my steps over rocks, going as quickly as I could. The hill was steep and tangled with roots I could feel even under the snow, until I reached the clearing.

It was peaceful there. The smell of the fire carried, though neither the sound nor the shadows of the flames. An early star had come out and the sky was a dark, smoky blue. I kept walking fast through the snow. I could hear Spike following me, his steps crashing messily. Hurry to me. I wanted him to have to run, possibly trip, fall, bruise himself somewhere: anything to get to me. He was closer, was almost upon me, and then he stopped. I heard him retching. I turned around and saw him bent over, vomiting into the snow.

“Jesus, Spike.”

“I'm sorry.”

When he finished he took my elbow and steered me away from the steaming snow. He walked me over to a pine tree at the far edge of the clearing. With his back to me he washed his mouth out with snow. I leaned against the trunk of the tree and looked back down the hillside, toward the fire, my heart beating fast in my chest.

“Marry me,” he said.

His cheeks were shiny with melted snow and his eyes were bright. I felt like no one would ever see straight through to the heart of me like he did. Years passed, we divorced, I got myself sober, strong, everything a normal person is supposed to be, yet some nights I still feel this. I remember — the world was cold and white all around me and, like a bride, I lifted my face to his.