Bark: Stories

PAPER LOSSES

Although Kit and Rafe had met in the peace movement, marching, organizing, making no nukes signs, now they wanted to kill each other. They had become, also, a little pro-nuke. Married for two decades of precious, precious life, she and Rafe seemed currently to be partners only in anger and dislike, their old lusty love mutated to rage. It was both the shame and the demise of them that hate like love could not live on air. And so in this, their newly successful project together, they were complicitous and synergistic. They were nurturing, homeopathic, and enabling. They spawned and raised their hate together, cardiovascularly, spiritually, organically. In tandem, as a system, as a dance team of bad feeling, they had shoved their hate center stage and shown a spotlight down for it to seize. Do your stuff, baby! Who’s the best? Who’s the man?

“Pro-nuke? You are? Really?” Kit was asked by friends, to whom she continued indiscreetly to complain.

“Well, no.” Kit sighed. “But in a way.”

“You seem like you need someone to talk to.”

Which hurt Kit’s feelings, since she’d felt she was talking to them. “I’m just concerned about the kids,” Kit said.

Rafe had changed. His smile was just a careless yawn, or was his smile just stuck carelessly on? Which was the correct lyric? She did not know. But, for sure, he had changed. In Beersboro they put things neutrally, like that. Such changes were couched. No one ever said a man was now completely screwed up. They said, The guy has changed. Rafe had started to make model rockets in the basement. He’d become a little different. He was something of a character. The brazen might suggest, He’s gotten into some weird shit. The rockets were tall, plastic, penile-shaped things to which Rafe carefully shellacked authenticating military decals. What had happened to the handsome hippie she had married? He was prickly and remote, empty with fury. A blankness had entered his blue-green eyes. They stayed wide and bright but nonfunctional — like dime-store jewelry. She wondered if this was a nervous breakdown, the genuine article. But it persisted for months and she began to suspect, instead, a brain tumor. Occasionally he catcalled and wolf-whistled across his mute alienation, his pantomime of hate momentarily collapsed. “Hey, cutie,” he would call to her from the stairs, after not having looked her in the eye for two months. It was like being snowbound with someone’s demented uncle: Should marriage be like that? She wasn’t sure.

She seldom saw him anymore when he got up in the morning and left for his office. And when he came home from work, he would disappear down the basement stairs. Nightly, in the anxious conjugal dusk that was now their only life together, after the kids went to bed, the house would fill up with fumes. When she called down to him about this he never answered. He seemed to have turned into some sort of space alien. Of course later she would understand that all this meant he was involved with another woman, but at the time, protecting her own vanity and sanity, she was working with two hypotheses only: brain tumor or space alien.

“All husbands are space aliens,” said her friend Jan.

“God help me, I had no idea,” said Kit. She began spreading peanut butter on a pretzel and eating quickly.

“In fact,” said Jan, “my sister and I call them UFOs.”

It stood for something. Kit hated to ask.

“Ungrateful fuckers,” Jan said.

Kit thought for a moment. “But what about the o?” she asked. “You said UFO.”

There was a short silence. “Ungrateful fuckeroos,” Jan added quickly. “I know that doesn’t make perfect sense.”

“He’s in such disconnect. His judgment is so bad.”

“Not on the planet he lives on. On his planet he’s a veritable Solomon. ‘Bring the stinkin’ baby to me now!’ ”

“Do you think people can be rehabilitated and forgiven?”

“Sure! Look at Ollie North.”

“Well, he lost that Senate race. He was not sufficiently forgiven.”

“But he got some votes,” Jan insisted.

“Yeah, and now what is he doing?”

“Now he’s back promoting a line of fire-retardant pajamas. It’s a life!” Jan paused. “Do you fight about it?”

“About what?” asked Kit.

“The rockets back to his homeland.”

Kit sighed. “Yes, the toxic military crafts business poisoning our living space. Do I fight? I don’t fight I just, well, OK: I ask a few questions from time to time. I ask, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I ask, ‘Are you trying to asphyxiate your entire family?’ I ask, ‘Did you hear me?’ Then I ask, ‘Did you hear me?’ again. Then I ask, ‘Are you deaf?’ I also ask, ‘What do you think a marriage is? I’m really just curious to know,’ and also, ‘Is this your idea of a well-ventilated place?’ A simple interview, really. I don’t believe in fighting. I believe in giving peace a chance. I also believe in internal bleeding.” She paused to shift the phone more comfortably against her face. “I’m also interested,” Kit said, “in those forensically undetectable dissolving plastic bullets. Have you heard of those?”

“No.”

“Well, maybe I’m wrong about those. I’m probably wrong. That’s where the Mysterious Car Crash may have to come in.” In the chrome of the refrigerator she caught the reflection of her own face, part brunette Shelley Winters, part potato, the finely etched sharps and accidentals beneath her eyes a musical interlude amidst the bloat. In every movie she had seen with Shelley Winters in it, Shelley Winters was the one who died. Peanut butter was stuck high and dry on Kit’s gums. On the counter a large old watermelon had begun to sag and pull apart in the middle along the curve of seeds, like a shark’s grin, and she lopped off a wedge, rubbed its cool point around the inside of her mouth. It had been a year since Rafe had kissed her. She sort of cared and sort of didn’t. A woman had to choose her own particular unhappiness carefully. That was the only happiness in life: to choose the best unhappiness. An unwise move, good God, you could squander everything.

The summons took her by surprise. It came in the mail, addressed to her, and there it was, stapled to divorce papers. She’d been properly served. The bitch had been papered. Like a person, a marriage was unrecognizable in death, even buried in an excellent suit. Atop the papers themselves was a letter from Rafe suggesting their spring wedding anniversary as the final divorce date. Why not complete the symmetry? he wrote, which didn’t even sound like him, though its heartless efficiency was suited to this, his new life as a space alien, and in keeping generally with the principles of space alien culture. The papers referred to Kit and Rafe by their legal names, Katherine and Raphael, as if it were the more formal versions of themselves who were divorcing — their birth certificates were divorcing! — and not they themselves. Rafe was still living in the house and had not told her yet he’d bought a new one. “Honey,” she said trembling, “something very interesting came in the mail today.”

Rage had its medicinal purposes, but she was not wired to sustain it, and when it tumbled away, loneliness engulfed her, grief burning at the center in a cold blue heat. At two different funerals of elderly people she hardly knew she went in and wept in the back row of the church like a secret lover of the deceased. She felt woozy and ill and never wanted to see Rafe — or rather, Raphael — again, but they had promised the kids this Caribbean vacation, so what could they do. This at last was what all those high school drama classes had been for: acting. She once had played the queen in The Winter’s Tale and once a changeling child in a play called Love Me Right Now, written by one of the more disturbing English teachers in her high school. In both of these she learned that time was essentially a comic thing — only constraints upon it forced it to tragedy, or at least to misery. Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde — if only they’d had more time! Marriage stopped being comic when it was suddenly halted, at which point it became divorce, which time never disrupted, and so the funniness of which was never-ending.

Still, Rafe mustered up thirty seconds of utterance in order to persuade her not to join them on this vacation. “I don’t think you should go,” he announced.

“I’m going,” she said.

“We’ll be giving the children false hope.”

“Hope is never false. Or it’s always false. Whatever. It’s just hope,” she said. “Nothing wrong with that.”

“I just don’t think you should go.” Divorce, she could see, would be like marriage: a power grab, as in who would be the dog and who would be the owner of the dog?

What bimbo did he want to give her ticket to? (Only later would she find out. “As a feminist you mustn’t blame the other woman,” a neighbor told her. “As a feminist I request that you no longer speak to me,” Kit replied.)

And months later, in the courtroom, where she would discover that the county owned her marriage and that the county was now taking it back like a chicken franchise she had made a muck of, forbidding her to own another franchise for six more months, with the implication that she might want to stay clear of all poultry cuisine for a much longer time than that, when she had finally to pronounce in front of the robed, robotic judge and a winking stenographer whose winking seemed designed to keep the wives from crying, she would have to declare the marriage “irretrievably broken.” What second-rate poet had gotten hold of the divorce laws? She would find the words sticking in her throat, untrue in their conviction. Was not everything fixable? This age of disposables, was it not also an age of fantastic adhesives? Why “irretrievably broken” like a songbird’s wing? Why not “Do you find this person you were married to, and who is now sitting next to you in the courtroom, a total asshole?” That would suffice, and be more accurate. The term “irretrievably broken” sent one off into an eternity of wondering. Whereas the other did not.

She and Rafe had not yet, however, signed the papers. And there was the matter of her wedding ring, which was studded with little junk emeralds and which she liked a lot and hoped she could continue wearing because it didn’t look like a typical wedding ring. He had removed his ring — which did look like a typical wedding ring — a year earlier because he said it “bothered” him. She had thought at the time he’d meant it was rubbing. He had often just shed his clothes spontaneously — when they had first met he was something of a nudist. It was good to date a nudist: things moved right along. But it was not good trying to stay married to one. Soon she would be going on chaste geriatric dates with other people whose clothes would, like hers, remain glued to the body.

“What if I can’t get my ring off,” she said to him now on the plane to La Caribe, the gringo enclave Rafe had chosen. She had gained a little weight in their twenty years of marriage but really not all that much. She had been practically a child bride! “Send me the sawyer’s bill,” he said. Oh, the sparkle in his eye was gone!

“What is wrong with you?” she said. Of course, she blamed his parents, who had somehow, long ago, accidentally or on purpose, raised him as a space alien, with space alien values, space alien thoughts, and the hollow shifty character, concocted guilelessness, and sociopathic secrets of a space alien.

“What is wrong with you?” he snarled. This was his habit, his space alien habit, of merely repeating what she had just said to him. It had to do, no doubt, with his central nervous system, a silicon-chipped information processor incessantly encountering new linguistic combinations, which it then had to absorb and file. Repetition bought time and assisted the storage process.

More than the girls, who were just little, she was worried about Sam, their sensitive fourth grader, who now sat across the airplane aisle moodily staring out the window at the clouds. Soon, through the machinations of the extremely progressive divorce laws — a boy needs his dad! — she would no longer see him every day; he would become a boy who no longer saw his mother every day, and he would scuttle and float a little off and away like paper carried by wind. With time he would harden: he would eye her over his glasses, in the manner of a maître d’ suspecting the arrival of riffraff. But on this, their last trip as an actual family, he did fairly well at not letting on. They all slept in the same room, in separate beds, and saw other families squalling and squabbling, so that by comparison theirs — a family about to break apart forever — didn’t look so bad. She was not deceived by the equatorial sea breeze and so did not overbake herself in the colonial sun; with the resort managers she shared her moral outrage at the armed guards who kept the local children from sneaking past the fence onto this white, white beach; and she rubbed a kind of resin into her brow to freeze it there and downplay the creases — to appear younger for her departing husband, though he never once looked at her. Not that she looked that good: her suitcase had gotten lost and she was forced to wear clothes purchased from the gift shop — the words LA CARIBE emblazoned across every single thing.

On the beach people read books about Rwandan and Yugoslavian genocide. This was to add seriousness to a trip that lacked it. One was supposed not to notice the dark island boys on the other side of the guards and barbed wire, throwing rocks. When a cruise ship temporarily docked in the bay, and then departed, she joined some other tourists on the beach to shout at the boat, “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass!” as if they were different and not all of them tourists, seeking to console themselves with hierarchies of tourism, to keep the stone-throwing boys from one’s thoughts.

There were ways of making things temporarily vanish. One could disappear oneself in movement and repetition. Sam liked only the trampoline and nothing else. There were dolphin rides, but Sam sensed their cruelty. “They speak a language,” he said. “We shouldn’t ride them.”

“They look happy,” said Kit.

Sam looked at her with seriousness from some sweet beyond. “They look happy so you won’t kill them.”

“You think so?”

“If dolphins tasted good,” he said, “we wouldn’t even know about their language.” That the intelligence in a thing could undermine your appetite for it. That yumminess obscured the mind of the yummy as well as the mind of the yummer. That deliciousness resulted in decapitation. That you could only understand something if you did not desire it. How did he know these things already? Usually girls realized this first. But not hers. Her girls, Beth and Dale, were tough beyond Kit’s comprehension: practical, self-indulgent, independent five-year-old twins, a system unto themselves. They had their own secret world of Montessori code words and plastic jewelry and spells of hilarity brought on mostly by the phrase “cinnamon M&M’s” repeated six times fast. They wore sparkly fairy wings wherever they went, even over cardigans, and they carried wands. “I’m a big brother now,” Sam had said repeatedly to everyone and with uncertain pride the day the girls were born, and after that he spoke not another word on the matter. Sometimes, silently, Kit accidentally referred to Beth and Dale as Death and Bail, as they buried their several Barbies in sand, then lifted them out again with glee. Anyone near, on a towel, reading of holocausts, turned and smiled. In this fine, far compound on the sea, the contradictions of life were grotesque and uninventable. She went to the central office and signed up for a hot stone massage: “Would you like a man or a woman?” asked the receptionist.

“Excuse me?” asked Kit, stalling — after all these years of marriage, which did she want? What did she know of men—or women? “There’s no such thing as men,” her friend Jan used to say, until recently. “Every man is different. The only thing they have in common is — well — a capacity for horrifying violence.”

“A man or a woman — for the massage?” Kit asked now, buying time. She thought of the slow mating of snails, an entire day, being hermaphrodites and having it all be so confusing: by the time they had it figured out who was going to be the girl and who was going to be the boy someone came along with some garlic paste and just swooped them right up.

“Oh, either one,” she said, and then she knew she’d get a man. Whom she tried not to look at but could smell in all his smoky aromas — tobacco, incense, cannabis — exhaling and swirling their way around him. A wiry old American pothead gone to grim seed, he had the Dickensian name of Daniel Handler, and he did not speak. He placed hot stones along her back and left them there in a line up her spine — did she think her belotioned flesh too private and precious to be touched by the likes of him? Are you crazy? The mad joy pulsing in her face was held over the floor by the table headpiece and at his touch her eyes filled with bittersweet tears, which then dripped out her nose, which she realized then was positioned perfectly by God as a little drainpipe for crying. The sad massage hut carpet beneath her grew a spot. He left the hot stones on her until they went cold. As each one lost its heat she could no longer feel it even there on her back, and then its removal was like a discovery that it had been there all along: how strange to forget and feel it only then, at the end; though this wasn’t the same thing as the frog in the pot whose water slowly heats and boils, still it had meaning, she felt, the way metaphors of a thermal nature tended to. Then he took all the stones off and pressed the hard edges of them deep into her back, between the bones, in a way that felt mean — perhaps in embittered rage about his own life — but that more likely had no intention at all. “That was nice,” she said at the end, when she saw him putting all his stones away. He had heated them in a plastic electric Crock-Pot filled with water, she saw, and now he unplugged the thing in a tired fashion.

“Where did you get those stones?” she asked. They were smooth and dark gray — black when wet, she could see.

“They’re river stones,” he said. “I’ve been collecting them for years up in Colorado.” He replaced them in a metal fishing tackle box.

“You live in Colorado?” she asked.

“Used to,” he said, and that was that. Later that day they would see each other at the Farmacia de Jesus and look the other way.

Kit got dressed. “Someday you, like me, will have done sufficient lab work,” Jan had said. “Soon you, like me, in your next life, like me, will want them old and rich, on their deathbed, really, and with no sudden rallyings in the hospice.”

“You’re a woman of steel and ice,” Kit had said.

“Not at all,” Jan had said. “I’m just a voice on the phone, drinking a little tea.”

On their last night of vacation Kit’s suitcase arrived like a joke. She didn’t even open it. They put out the paper doorknob flag that said WAKE US UP FOR THE SEA TURTLES. The doorknob flag had a preprinted request to be woken at 3:00 a.m. so that they could go to the beach and see the hatching of the baby sea turtles and their quick scuttle into the ocean, under the cover of night, to avoid predators. But though Sam had hung the flag carefully and before the midnight deadline, no staffperson awoke them. And by the time they got up and went down to the beach it was ten in the morning. Strangely, the sea turtles were still there. They had hatched in the night and then hotel personnel had hung on to them, in a baskety cage, to show them off to the tourists who’d been too lazy or deaf to have gotten up in time. “Look, come see!” said a man with a Spanish accent who usually rented out the scuba gear. Sam, Beth, Dale, Kit all ran over. (Rafe stayed behind to drink coffee and read the paper.) The squirming babies were beginning to heat up in the warming sun; the goldening Venetian vellum of their wee webbed feet was already edged in dessicating brown. “I’m going to have to let them go now,” said the man. “You are the last ones to see these little bebés.” He took them over to the water’s edge and let them go, hours too late, to make their own way into the sea. And one by one a frigate bird swooped in, plucked them from the silver waves, and ate them for breakfast.

Kit sank down in a large chair next to Rafe. He was tanning himself, she could see, for someone else’s lust. “I think I need a drink,” she said. The kids were swimming.

“Don’t expect me to buy you a drink,” he said.

Had she even asked? Did she now call him the bitterest name she could think of? Did she stand and turn and slap him across the face in front of several passersby? Who told you that?

When they left La Caribe, its crab claws of land extending into the blue bay, she was glad. Staying there she had begun to hate the world. In the airports and on the planes home, she did not even try to act natural: natural was a felony. She spoke to her children calmly, from a script, with dialogue and stage directions of utter neutrality. Back home in Beersboro she unpacked the condoms and candles, her little love sack, completely unused, and threw it all in the trash. What had she been thinking? Later, when she had learned to tell this story differently, as a story, she would construct a final lovemaking scene of sentimental vengeance that would contain the inviolable center of their love, the sweet animal safety of night after night, the still-beating tender heart of marriage. But for now she would become like her unruinable daughters, and even her son, who as he aged stoically and carried on regardless would come scarcely to recall — was it past even imagining? — that she and Rafe had ever been together at all.