Verge: Stories

STREET WALKER

First thing in the morning, when I take out the trash, I see it: syringe on the lawn. Still bloody. It spikes and chills my memory: four long years of youth sliding cold silver glint into waiting blue.

My neighborhood is turning. It’s not dramatic, it’s no more or less real than TV, than other places I have lived, all those little white-lined streets. We can posture as a nation of shock all we want. It’s still a story we know: Somebody wants something more than their own life. Somebody else is terrified by all that they want.

It’s not possible, in my neighborhood, to tell who has money enough to live on and who does not, though it’s clear that no one is wealthy. Old two- and three-story homes built in the early 1900s, with questionable roofs and overstuffed leaf gutters. Ours a sort of bohemian-looking hippie haven, both inside and out: overgrown garden, cracked eaves, front porch step rotting away. The rest of our street dotted with flat ramblers, faux-stone façades, additions tacked onto additions like berserk extra appendages. One of the houses has been graced with a concrete lion. So regal! Covered in moss and bird shit.

Nor is it possible to tell who is liberal or who is conservative or nuts or brilliant or a criminal or a good citizen. All the façades need new coats of paint, all the yards need care. Even our fences are leaning toward giving up. The spaces between houses hold their secrets: overflowing trash cans and piles of broken flowerpots, garden hoses all snarled up and molding, our efforts at beautiful landscaping creating their own ridiculous labyrinths between our homes. I’ve noticed that my neighbor Clark and I both wear sweatpants and sneakers after five and on weekends. Clark may be an alt-righter; he may be just a guy who lives in his mother’s basement. In our Nike uniforms, who can tell?

In our hearts we meant to complete all the projects, spiff up our neighborhood, improve our homes and selves. In reality we’re too fucking tired from too many jobs or kids or just the idea that nothing turned out the way we dreamed it would. Our sad little dream balloons, once swollen with hot air, deflating slowly like my aging breasts.

On the other hand, money isn’t what makes our houses homes.

For example, instead of filling my house with things that cost money, I’ve filled it with things that comfort me: Plates and bowls filled with rocks and feathers and the small bones of animals. Cups with azure beads. Seashells and talismans and trinkets. And books. More books than you can possibly imagine. Books in every room, shelved, on tables, in stacks on the floor.

Books saved me from my former self.

About the only thing of serious value to me inside my house is a vintage Royal typewriter we lugged all the way back from France, imagining that some famous expat writer might once have plunked out something brilliant on it. And a coffee table and a rug I bought when I got tenure—my first non-garage-sale “furniture.”

I teach literature in college now. I write. I’ve become… well, we don’t say “bourgeois” very much in America, although these days the students love to say “bougie.” I’ll just say middle-class.

But we all know there’s no such thing as middle-class.

IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD they have developed a yearning for the dreaded neighborhood watch. Guy down the street stops me one night as I’m headed home, lead-armed with groceries—he’s never spoken to me in his life; I’ve never even seen him poke his mole skull out of his white house—and he’s bobbing his head around like a scared rodent, his eyes darting out of their sockets, so titillated he’s sweating. Have you noticed the problem? he says. What problem? You know. He looks one way, then the other. Go ahead, I’m thinking, no cars are coming, we’re on our own street, we’re in front of our own houses. He continues: All the dope peddling. The drug deals. And that woman being paraded up and down the street, all day all night every day every night. My God, we need to stand together before it’s too late. There is a long pause while we consider this. Whose god? I wonder. I feel myself turn on him. Is my neighbor a white supremacist? A fascist? A bigot? A MAGA voter? Then I’m just me again.

Who could miss it? What moron wouldn’t notice? Not because they’re doing anything to us but because they’re doing it too near us.

The needle against the flesh threatens us with its obscenity, its mechanism of invading living skin.

I carry my groceries back to my house. Clark, my sweatpants twin, the one across the street who lives with his mother and wears undersize rock concert T-shirts and the exact same baseball cap every day of his life, a guy who inherited his money from an accident on the job, a fact that now works him over into bitter and pale and beer-bellied and pot-eyed, waves to me from the other side of the street. Then he crosses and stands on my lawn and says, They’ll never change. It’s like I always say, once a junkie, always a junkie.

I feel anger welling up in my belly. For an instant I want to hurl my knowledge at him like obscenities. Instead of saying, Shut the hell up, you ignorant asshole, I want to scream, Keats! Byron! Shelley! Van Gogh! Bacon! Eliot! Faulkner! For some reason I feel a list of M’s rise up in my throat: Mozart, Mingus, Monk, Munch, Miller, Malcolm even! I want to move on to Germans, Africans, Latin Americans, Russians, French, Swiss, periods, genres. I want to say, If we didn’t have junkies, we wouldn’t have art, but I don’t. I just stare at him until he turns away and walks silently back to his yard, his front door, and gone. Anyway, it isn’t true. Addiction doesn’t make art. Does it? What the hell am I worked up about? It’s just Clark.

I turn back toward my own house. Then it hits me: We are alike in our silences.

INSIDE, MY HUSBAND is in his ad hoc studio, painting. Just a half room in our old falling-apart house, much like my writing room, carved out of the small space that would ordinarily be a kid’s room. We don’t make enough to rent him studio space, so we do what we all do: invent ways to live what we cannot have. I set the groceries down with relief—not because I’m tired but because I know he is responsible for dinner, because never again will I have to be responsible for dinner. This is part of my love for him. You’ll never know the relief that a junkie or a woman can feel when the pressure of the giant script of Woman or Wife begins to lift.

And he loves me, too, because I can kiss the jagged scars on his wrist like it bleeds a sweet white sugar. And he can butterfly-kiss the collapsed veins on my left arm under all the long-sleeved shirts I wear to work. We are still learning to live in these houses, these lives. We are loving over our outcast and beaten hearts. For the longest time, neither of us could afford therapy, insurance, or any other route to wellness. Today we probably could afford some kind of medical cure for maybe one of us, but neither of us has that much investment in attending to the hard-core addictions anymore, which is just as well. Easier to just keep drinking wine, downing prescription medications, moving potward down the road of our lives. The easy, low-key addictions of homeowners.

Cherise, the neighbor on the other side of us, waddles out to feed her cats. A great lumbering woman who is all heart, as if her body had puffed out from it. Our dog ate one of her cats—well, killed it anyway. We don’t know exactly how many more she has over there. We expect our dog will find out. Cherise understands. She goes inside. She will come out at exactly 6:30 a.m., start the Subaru, and go to work. She will come home at exactly 5:20 p.m., park the car, and go inside. On Friday morning, half an hour before the garbage truck comes, she will put her trash in the can. One time, out of the blue, she asks us if we want some poppies. She says she has some bulbs from somewhere in Asia, then lowers her voice: You know, the funny kind. I instantly want to fill a bed in my front yard.

I’M SITTING ON THE COUCH, looking out the window, when I see a flash of woman emerge from a space across the street, the alley between a house going to shit and a house being flipped. Right behind her a flash of man. He is skinny with desperation, and she is skinny with fatigue. Both have the ashen flesh of heroin. I’ve seen them before; I can’t help feeling like I know them, in the dumbest way. They are always swearing, usually loud enough to be heard. She is always following him. Up the street, down, up again. I think of the word “cadaverous.” I used to think the closer to death you get, that’s where the life is. Now I watch from inside my house through a plate-glass window. I hear my husband pissing in the toilet, an ordinary sound, and all I can think is, Thank you, thank you, thank you.

A minute later I see a second guy come out after them, buttoning his fly. No subtlety, no attempt to hide, just buttoning his fucking fly and heading down the road. How is it that America can say anything with a straight face? I watch the man and the woman turn one way, walking like sticks out of sight. The second man heads off in the other direction.

Withdrawing the needle, the skin slides closed, leaving only a tiny red hole.

Later I’m inside, the living room window just plain glass against the night. Phyllis, across the street, is at it again. She waters her flowers and yard at about eleven-thirty every night. She’s bent and rounded in the back from age, but she still looks feisty. She’s got her white hair in a sassy little bun on top of her head. Once I saw her march over to the couple yelling at each other on the corner and tell the guy he was just an arrogant loudmouth. He took a step toward her, and she didn’t budge, just stood there, all five-foot-nothing of her, with the eyes of a roach: You ain’t never gonna get rid of me, buster. I’m gonna live to be a hundred and ninety years old.

Next time I see them, I’m alone in the house, on the living room couch reading student journals. I tell my community college students to write about what scares them. The things they write about are deportation fears and meth-headed relatives and jail and rehab and being a parent too young. My heart is wadding up like paper when I hear the shouting. I look up. There they are. Just like punctuation. Her face cadaverous. Something in my chest lurching.

I fly out the door, waving at them.

They stop. What the hell does she want? they think. She’s not a man.

How much? I say.

What?

How much for her? How much for an hour?

Let’s get the fuck outta here, I hear her say.

Look. I’ve got a hundred dollars. I want an hour. A hundred bucks is a hundred bucks, isn’t it?

He looks down the street. He looks at her. She’s got Gimme a fucking break on her face. She doesn’t make eye contact with me once. He peers back down the street, thinks he sees someone, then doesn’t. Finally he turns back to me and waves toward her. She doesn’t move.

He yells something at her. She’s got Fuck you on her face. I’m back in my past, inside habits and mistakes, inside things that made me run into fire, but she doesn’t know it. Like a transplanted heart, I live on this street, in this life, always in fear of the body rejecting me.

Come inside, I say across the gap between us.

She climbs our wooden stairs and stands in the doorframe, bony arms in a knot across her chest. She has long stringy hair, permed maybe a year ago. Dark circles cupping worn-out gray eyes. Some sweater from 1992. Bell-bottom jeans. Denim jacket tied around her waist. You don’t want to look her in the eye, and you can’t help looking her in the eye. She looks back outside over her shoulder. I wonder briefly if she sees two lives, two bodies, like I did, like I maybe still do. She comes in, and I shut the door. I catch a glimpse of the man walking away like an ordinary person.

No names—we both understand this.

Sit down.

I don’t want to, she says. What the fuck do you want with me?

Sit down.

She sits down.

This is what I, a woman who teaches English all day, think looking at her, a woman who sucks dicks every night but right now is sitting on my couch. This is what I, an ex-addict reformed by something like love and given something to believe in because of books, think looking at her. This is what I, who could not stand to be alone in a room with just me, think: She looks like Mary. This is what Mary must have looked like after Jesus. No way for the body to bear the miracle, the burden, the unbelievable history of nothing, myth. When I see an image of Christ, I picture a Mary so drawn and gaunt and tired and angry and spent to the point of emaciation that she can barely wear her own face.

The Mary on my couch lights a shaky cigarette. What do I think I’m going to do, teach her?

Then she does something that disperses all my idiotic projections. She puts her cigarette out directly on my coffee table, spits on my throw rug. The Restoration Hardware coffee table I bought when I got tenure. The throw rug supposedly from Tibet, though I have my doubts.

I’ve got this woman in the house. I have one hour. Sometimes all the hours of our life rip open for an instant, then suture back up as if nothing ever entered.

Something in common: You can’t stare down a sex worker or a junkie. Either they look away, making you think you’re invisible, or they stare through your skull and out the other side, leaving a hole where your psyche used to be, and you’re left some hollowed-out moron afraid of crazy people, afraid of ghosts, afraid of your own relentless shadow.

Finally she says, Look, man, what’s this all about? You want something? Crack? Horse? Weed? You want me to do something? She takes another drag and quivers like an angel. No, not like an angel. Like an ordinary woman being eaten alive by her own heart, her own veins, her own cunt.

I say, Look, and I step toward her and put my hand near her neck and shoulder as gently as I can, and she says, I don’t fucking lick pussy. I’m not into that shit. But I’ll play with your tits if you want. I’ll finger you.

I look at her for a long minute, feeling stupider than I’ve ever felt. I drop my hand to its ignorance. How does one respond to words like that? Finally I tell her, I just wanted to give you a break for an hour. Rest. Eat. Sleep. Drink. Smoke. Do whatever you want. She looks at me like I’m out of my fucking mind. Her eye glances toward the door. I guess you can leave, too, I tell her, if that’s really what you want. It could be that’s really what she wants. It could be she’s hoping this is a way out or up. She stays.

I leave the room.

FOR EXACTLY ONE HOUR, nothing happens. Nothing. And aren’t you just a little disappointed? Weren’t we all hoping for something else?

Here is what I do: go to my computer and start to write. I don’t think I feel benevolent, but I’m afraid I might. I think of things I want to do for her, all of them filtered through my graduate school mind, and I write them down: play her Schubert, wash her hair, give her a foot rub, cook her a real French dinner with six courses, give her my vintage silk dress, watch European lesbian movies with her, read her stories by Colette, paint her fingernails, dunk her in a bubble bath, give her all the money in my savings account, buy her a plane ticket, take photos of her, hold her.

Then I cross every single thing off the list—stupid stupid stupid—shift my point of view like a writer should, and do a rewrite: play her classic rock, shave half her head and dye the other side blue, break into the neighbors’ house and drink all their whiskey and steal their prescription meds, get high and watch “Lemonade” on flat-screen on repeat, then take baseball bats to all the car windows lining my idiotic street, then run and keep running, tits to the wind.

There is a schism in us all. It shows up differently in every woman, or it dissolves into layers of skin and fat and homeownership, tidy haircuts and well-applied makeup.

I’m really rolling in there. Alone at my screen.

An hour later I come back, fevered with compassion, pumped up from my writing. I’ve got a character shooting out of me, a story emerging, perspiration lining my upper lip, and she’s standing there plain and unimpressed.

S’that it? she wants to know.

Yeah, I say, that’s it, trying to breathe like a normal person. And then she’s flinging open the door, she’s gone, he’s waiting down the street with another guy. They walk off, growing smaller and smaller in the window, as if they’re walking back to childhood.

My heart like a fist in my chest. What did I just pay for? Was I trying to give her something, or did I just take something, like a fucking john? I eat four Advil and put on my running gear and sit down on my own couch.

TWO HOURS LATER my husband returns. By then my sweat is just sticky dumb odor. Do I tell him? Once a junkie, always a junkie. Turns out a sex worker and a recovering addict and a literature teacher each carry around the same question in their bodies: Does it hurt more to keep the secrets or to tell them?

I pour us each a glass of Pinot, and he starts on dinner. I like to watch his shoulders while he chops vegetables and sears meat. I like the way the back of his head looks, his long dark hair fastened in a braid or a ponytail like a woman’s. I love the spread of his shoulders, the onion and garlic aromatizing the entire house, the sizzling sound of food being put to hot oil. Most of all I love that it’s him, not me, in the kitchen cooking.

The nod, the rush, the flood of sensations overtaking a body, the my-god of it, the want of wanting it forever.

I let each sip of wine linger in my mouth before I swallow.

I close my eyes with the swallowing.

I’m holding. I haven’t felt this way in years and years.

I still don’t know what I’ll say or do.

We’re deep into dinner when it finally comes.

I paid the woman from the street today, I begin, watching his chewing slow, his eyes adjust to the sentence. It takes him zero time to figure out what I mean. We’ve seen them out our front window so many times. Watched them like HBO.

You gave them money?

Yes. I paid for an hour of her time.

Like, cash?

Yes.

He considers this. He swallows his food. He puts his fork and knife down. It almost feels like one of us is confessing an affair. I mean, not at all, but kind of. Something dark and fast and filled with tension shooting up between us.

I pick up my wineglass and drink. I don’t know if my cheeks are flushed, but they feel like they might be. My eyes feel alive.

In the house, I say.

Wait, what? They were in the house?

I feel his anger rising like quicksilver.

She was.

What the fuck? What the FUCK? What the hell did you think you were doing? The questions hang in the air.

Did I think about what I was doing? All I remember is doing it. But I must have. I had the money ready, for one thing. Had I been thinking about it when I got the cash out of the ATM after a grocery store run? But then the drama of an ordinary couple swoops down on us, and he’s all, Jesus fucking Christ, do you realize you could have been killed or robbed or hurt—

But I wasn’t, is what comes out, and I watch my own arms and hands refill my wineglass, then his, with complete calm. Like I’m taking my chances.

Well, what the hell happened? Now he’s standing.

Nothing. I went upstairs and wrote, I came down an hour later, and she left.

He sits back down, almost as if someone has let the air out of him. You’re telling me this hooker was in the house today, alone, and nothing happened? His cheeks are definitely flushed.

Well, not nothing. Exactly. Come here. I move toward him, grab his hand, and walk him like a pet over to the coffee table. I point to the cigarette scar, and that’s when I see it. She’s carved something else into the coffee table: CUNT.

My mouth twitches.

Jesus! he says.

But underneath his voice, I can hear desire rising. Danger does that to people whose lives have become normal. It ignites something you thought wasn’t important anymore, now that you have a roof over your head and another mammal in the bed every night and enough to eat and wine and a coffee table.

Fear. Fear comes back into us for a moment.

I’m still holding his hand.

Fear + anger + desire = life.

Safely tucked into your house and home and life and marriage can feel dead.

Go down on me, I say.

He starts to grab my hand and head upstairs.

No, here. Right here.

We are on my side of the living room window. The curtains are open to the night.

I AM in the living room drinking Pinot. My husband is in his pretend studio, painting. She’s been gone a week. I am watching TV, trying to recognize something.

Then, through the window, I hear the murmur of low voices just out of range: the neighborhood watch. I turn from the images on the TV to the image of the walkers. They’ve all purchased some kind of DayGlo vests, matching orange caps, Nikes that glow like lowly beacons with every step. Their flashlights swing back and forth with exaggerated purpose. Women with children are packed into the middle of the group, men on the outside. They do not look afraid. They are perfect in their movements, synchronized, brutal. They will cover maybe five blocks north and south and five east and west. Manifest destiny.

I can feel wine bile rising up my throat. I’m about to go get my husband so we can watch them together, so I can puff up and judge them from inside my house and my life—Look at these idiot zombies, what they need is more fear in their lives, not less—and then it happens: As they pass directly in front of our house, one of the women in the pack—my god, is it Cherise?—spits with all her might onto our overgrown lawn.

Anger radiates from my face.

Who am I?

User.

Later that night, before bed, I return to the window. There is no one suspicious on the corner now. There is no one dangerous in the alley. The streets are still and empty, a few quiet souls lingering on their porches, no children on the sidewalks. It is the hour of safe and sound. The streets are clean and cured and uncultured—no, that’s not what I meant. Uncluttered, I meant uncluttered.