Sally Mars: Stories

Hydrangeas

He is thinking about Hydrangeas. He’s thinking about the ones in front of the house, how they sag. He’s thinking about when he planted them and he’s thinking about when they bought the ring-things to hold them up, metal circles with a grid on stakes – the plants grow up through them, don’t droop down. But they don’t work, not really, and the plants lean down and break when it rains and you can’t even really see the flowers.

They bought the rings at a garden store, not the kind of place he frequents but she brought him along “to carry things” and walking through the rows and rows of boxed up flowers and the sour smell of certain ones and the dusty smell of others, and the sweet smells and the chemicals and his wife pushing the cart in front of him...she just looked so beautiful. He can still remember it exactly: The colors, the light. She was picking through Lilies. He walked up behind her. He put his arms around her – lightly, up above her breasts. He kissed her neck, her breasts against the heels of his hands.

She turned toward him.

There was fury in her eyes. She shoved him back, looked around. Set her jaw, turned.

Marched to the Hydrangea rings. They clanged into the cart he stood behind. Six clangs. She threw them in one at a time, her back to him.

He likes to stop the memory before that part. He’d like to stop with her bending over the Lilies.

But drooping plants remind him. It’s too late this year, but he’s thinking about a device. It has to be strong enough to hold the plants up. It has to be thin enough to disappear behind the leaves. He’s thinking about wooden stakes, or maybe rebar, with some sort of netting attached. He could get a sheet of loose netting and attach it to the stakes – maybe wooden ones would be best, he could staple the net to them. A stake every two feet, or maybe eighteen inches. He pictures himself at the hardware store, buying what he needs. He pictures himself in the garage, whittling the wooden ends so they plunge into the earth. He pictures himself putting it all together, and he pictures himself and his wife together, putting it up in the Spring.

He pictures it working.

Well

When the well would run dry he’d stop coming around. She wanted him to come around, so when the well was full or even when it only filled up a little bit, she would find him. He never asked if it was okay to take the very last drop but even if he had she would have told him she had more, even when she didn’t. Her well left her thirsty but she wanted him near. She wondered what other wells he visited, where else he drank. He took all that she had but sometimes she only had a little bit. She started to borrow, just enough to please him though of course he didn’t know. She’s pretty sure he didn’t know.

She borrowed and her credit was good and when it wasn’t anymore she worked more and worked harder and she sold some things too. But work left her rugged and he liked to have fun and the work made her thirsty but she kept on because she knew there were other wells, and she wanted him close. There were other wells and she knew that he would find them and that he’d go to them too and maybe he already had; maybe he already did and when he filled up at her place maybe he was taking what she had over to some other girl, a younger girl who still had nice things and time to play with them.

She tried to sell her blood but they said it was too thick. She tried to sell her hair but it wasn’t worth a thing what with all the hair people in third world countries were selling off cheap – long, beautiful hair. She tried to sell an organ but by now she was too sickly and she hadn’t seen him in awhile and she wondered if she told him this - that she was ill - if he’d confess to her he loved her. But she wasn’t sure where to find him and was partly scared to look. She wondered if he could feel her. The test would be the rescue. Would he come in time to save her? She cut her wrists and waited.

Some time later he stopped by the well that used to be hers but of course it wasn’t any more. He found it full. He didn’t ask the new woman there how she came to have it, only her name and the scent of perfume she had on.

Brother

I was the one who told my brother our parents had gone broke. Away at school he thought they’d been snubbing him but really there was nothing left. They lost the house and ill-prepared for change left the furniture and family pictures behind. We moved into a furnished apartment then with dirty shag carpet and a cigarette-burned sofa bed into which our mother’s new cigarette holes blended perfectly.

My brother thought the lack of forwarding address was deliberate. And it was, but not toward him. People were looking for us, creditors, maybe a bookie. Our folks were snobs and gave the air of being well-off and self-contained. Once exposed, they went into hiding.

My brother thought he’d been snubbed, related to wrecking Mom’s Skylark and asking for money for school. Work, our father told him. Then my parents disappeared, me in tow. He imagined us living in some new house nearer the sea. I imagined him in college, dashing and pre-occupied. He’s too busy for you now, our mother said.

At ten it hadn’t occurred to me I could call my brother on the phone. At thirteen it did. We were in Ohio then, no where near the ocean or even decent public schools. When I told him what had happened, he sounded nearly relieved.

My teacher brought her daughter’s old clothes to school, I said, For me.

That’s nice of her, said my brother. I told him they were all too big. I’ll come get you, he said, The semester ends in two weeks. I’ll come get you.

My brother was twenty-one years old, a student, struggling with classes and a full-time job. He did his best. He’s always done his best.

Even at thirteen I was too practical to accept his offer. That or I was more comfortable with what I knew – however miserable – than with that which was unknown, despite its potential. Maybe I’m like that still.

I call my brother and tell him how my husband gambled our money away. I tell him how the car wouldn’t start and I couldn’t fix it and we hadn’t paid the phone bill so I couldn’t even call in and I lost my job – when really I just stopped going because I’d missed work and hadn’t even called and didn’t have a car get to there anymore anyway. Leave him, my brother said, You can stay with me as long as you need to. I reminded him that I had no car. I said I was calling from a pay phone. I’ll come get you, he said.

No, I said. Just send another check.

He did his best. He’s always done his best.

Plane Trip #82

I imagine you in shirts I have washed or know the smell of walking along Melrose as I have done so many times. I imagine you in the desert likely places I have been looking at new skies yes but the exact same mountains. And mostly the same sand and stones.

I imagine you staring out the airplane window craning your neck like I do to survey the coastline; seeing further north and south as the plane lifts higher placing yourself where you've just been and considering all the life that you know is going on below you this even as California disappears.

Considering it, but not caring so much as you might if you were leaving not heading home.

Minneapolis #130

What did I do to drive away Rain? Did I taunt it, ignore it, fail to say how much I loved it when it was here? Did I love it when it was here?

I check the radar, like looking up an old lover, seeing what Rain is up to now, without me. I imagine that it misses me, that where it falls now is not as good as when it fell here and that sometimes Rain pretends that it falls on me like we used to, as it’s falling on some other girl.

I've not been left stranded, I have a garden hose that answers to my every whim, that is there when I seek it and disappears when I tire of it or am simply not in the mood. But I do not love the garden hose, and I lie in bed thinking not of it but of the sound that thunder makes, and the wildness of Rain, it's terrible and wonderful timing; it's terrible and wonderful temper. I imagine the sound that thunder makes like some whisper in my ear saying: I'm coming, I'm coming, I'm coming.

I Dreamed of You

I dreamed of you.

I pretend that you can feel this. I pretend that you dreamed of me too, that I have conjured you, that I will hear from you soon/now before I shame myself writing to you again, saying:

I dreamed of you.

Minneapolis #129

And here rain finally came like a lover with temper. It stomped its feet and cried and cried and boomed like dishes thrown against the wall, then later whispered like the sweeping of those sorry broken dishes. A temper, yes. And while not typically one for outbursts or drama I am recklessly attracted to him and found myself whispering in his ear: Come back to me.

And today it did, just enough to taunt me, saving the best of itself for some other girl; deliberate, close enough for me to see its tears and fire but passing me by, not even touching me. I feign indifference - as becomes a lady denied - but truth be told: I still want it.

Awake I dream of rain.
Asleep, I dream of drought.

The Sweet Years

These are the sweet years. These are the sweet years, bursting with juice and happiness: The ones when I love exactly what it is that I have; the ones when I love exactly who I am. And I do not fear you’ll leave me, poor health or other women. And I know that if you left me that I would still be okay.

These are the sweet years, where I realize my life has turned out better I’d imagined it; that I don’t think about what I deserved. I’m pretty enough still and only now can I look back and realize I was pretty then. And I can realize this without regret, without want to go back, not back so much as a single second: Not for younger face, or younger body, or younger ways of living. Because I was stupid then. I am still pretty enough and wise and I know that you won’t leave me and that even if you did that I would be alright.

Pink Blush

She is looking at the pink blush that never looked good on her. It looked good on the girl he was flirting with that day, their guide in Switzerland who took them on a walking tour of Zurich, which reminded her then of Madison, Wisconsin. She knew he flirted with the girl only to hurt her; she knew his type. The guide was not his type. He was handsome and rich and the girl responded, even though he was there with her, his wife. They all dined together and over lunch he focused on the girl, ignoring his wife so the guide ignored his wife too, not knowing then who was paying and that the flirtation would ultimately result in a truly miserable tip; a tip made to acknowledge that the protocol was well known, but small enough to demonstrate utter displeasure with the service.

She had seen him do this before, but in each of those incidents she had been feeling a certain confidence, which, looking back on it, she attributed to the newness of the relationship – they had married quickly and unexpectedly, to the shock of their respective families and friends – and what she perceived as her position of power relative to it: She was an heiress, and had recently come into her fortune. He was younger than she, and perhaps better looking, but she was rich and smart and felt good about herself. Now four months in her confidence was shaken. He was lazy and the particular brand of wildness he possessed – which was initially very attractive and fun – seemed, when they returned home from Las Lenas where they had met and had wed, considerably less charming. Her family didn’t say a thing, but was clearly unimpressed. He took no one up on various positions offered to him and proved an utter failure at the Instructor gig he had landed in Aspen, prompting them to move there, only to move to her parent’s condo in Laguna Beach some three weeks thereafter.

She remained quite attracted to him, and this made her sentimental. In an effort to rekindle things she took him snowboarding in St. Moritz, a destination, he had told her, he had always dreamed of.

From St. Moritz to St. John’s: They went dancing in a bar with a sand floor. They had made love just prior and there was something in her that felt so desperate in the act that, subject to rum and blaring music, ignited a fairly manic response. She danced with utter abandon. He would not dance with her but she could not stop. She felt like everyone was watching her because she was wild and beautiful. He felt like everyone was watching her because she was old and ridiculous.

He would not dance with her. Strange men would come up behind her, trying to capture her hips. She’d dance away. A girl from Norway danced up behind her and she entertained this, feeling sexy and unthreatened. She danced with the girl and when the music paused just briefly the girl told her: I think you are beautiful. She laughed and said: I am old enough to be your mother. He brought them both drinks.

They had rented a house, a three bedroom (though they needed only one) because this was the finest house – staffed, and on the beach. At the end of the night the girl asked if she could stay there. It’s late, she said, I don’t want to wake my mother. The tragic mistake: She said, Of course. She was feeling electric. She was feeling benevolent.

There the girl told her, I want to make love to you. Again she laughed and told her: I am old enough to be your mother. The girl said, My mother is nothing like you. She laughed again, feeling wise but not old. She said, I’m sorry but I am married.

I’ll sleep with both of you, the girl said, pleading now. The mania was waning. She felt instantly hung over. You are welcome to the downstairs room, she told the girl then climbed the steps, suddenly exhausted and nauseous.

He didn’t follow her. She waited. She was suddenly awake again, lying on top of the sheets with heightened senses. She might have heard a laugh, but she wasn’t sure. She might have heard music. She heard her heart beating and her bare feet on the marble stairs not certain if she was trying to make noise or trying not to.

They were sitting on the sofa. The girl’s dress was unzipped and hanging forward; he was sitting behind her. Aside from the beauty that is youth the girl wasn’t very pretty. Her bra was the cheap and padded kind, a child’s bra, dingy white. It was unhooked, also hanging forward. The girl’s hair was pushed forward. He was licking her back.

He was licking her back. She could hear the girl’s quiet moans under the music, or she thought that she could. She stood there for awhile. He met her eyes.

She ran out of the house and across the beach. She stood in the surf, howling. From the water she could see the lights of the house but she could not hear any music. She was waiting for him. The waves crashed and the water was warm and she stood and shook and debated whether or not to forgive him.

The slap of the door woke her in the morning. She had slept in the weeds and her head was pounding. He picked up his surfboard and drove away. She remembered that that had been the plan: He’d go surfing in the morning.

The house was empty. She packed very quickly and her overwhelming fear was that he would return before she had gone.

He did not follow her to the airport. She had to wait nearly three hours for the next flight. She flew first class and slept through both the take-off and the landing.

She was not involved in the proceedings. The marriage was annulled. She guesses he settled for a rather small sum. She does not know where he lives or what became of him.

Cleaning out a drawer she finds the pink blush. It never looked any good on her.

How did it get so empty?

Bug Trouble

It started with a plague of flies two years ago, they hatched in the cellar and took over the house. The ghosts still call out, luring flies from outside in. I am forever catching them, freeing them. Or pretending to when I just ignore them and let them die.

Next came the ants. Black ants. I’ve heard them called carpenters and I worried over what they were building, or tearing down. Invading like an army they disappeared like soldiers, suddenly invisible, faded, dead.

Last summer belonged to the flea, a special one and only one choosing me over canines or down, drawing blood from my ankle leaving fiery welts.

Winter now, I let two moths out the kitchen window and wonder where they came from. But it is some other crawly thing that torments me, six legs of infidelity and countless eyes. Nothing to spray, or smash, or let outside; wingless, dirty, jolting me awake in the middle of the night shouting But I can feel it and him assuring me: There’s nothing there.

The Screenwriter

He hustles girls on the beach, flirting his way into giving them surfing lessons for forty-five dollars an hour. But he isn’t a very good teacher. He also tends bar sometimes. He’d find those jobs rather easily because he was cute and he was charming, and he lost them rather easily too – not necessarily because he did something so wrong, but because he was the kind of guy you just wanted to find an excuse to fire. Hired initially for his charm and boyishness, his co-workers would eventually hate him for it.

He was staying with his cousin. He never offered to pay rent but he cooked dinner sometimes – with his cousin’s groceries – another skill honed for charming girls. At this he was well applied, and most of his good fortune came from this source: Girls who liked him; girls who wanted him; girls who wanted to pay him back in some way for making their vacation a special one. The good fortune came in the form of generally having enough drugs, cool clothes, meals, drinks and once even a surfboard.

Then he got a girl from Colorado pregnant. She’d flown home in the morning and phoned that evening with the news. She said she knew right away; said she felt it inside her. Home, she took the test.

There was something about her that said Money. Two weeks later he was headed West, ready for a snowboard lifestyle.

But she lived in Greeley, out on the plains, several hours from any mountains at all. Her father was a sugar beet farmer who hated him immediately. And she didn’t really have any money. But she had a good job and an apartment next to campus, and though she hated the students there he enjoyed watching them. Well, half of them.

She was twenty-one and worked in a medical office. He was thirty-seven, but could pass for twenty-four. She was very pretty, and he’d always wanted a son. She promised him it would be one.

It never crossed his mind to get his own place. It was easy for him to get a job, but hard for him to keep one. She didn’t like him tending bar, what with all the college girls and her feeling fat; she liked thinking of him at home, watching TV on her sofa, doing nothing, waiting for her. He fixed dinner. He made love to her every night.

He was working on a screenplay, a television screenplay. He was charming and you believed him when he said it: I'm working on a screenplay. He wouldn’t tell anyone what it was about. She never saw him write. He said, I'm in The Research Stage. She liked how it sounded, so she said it, a lot: My boyfriend is a screenwriter.

My husband is a screenwriter: They got married in Las Vegas – at a real chapel, not a drive-thru – and spent too much money on a room at The Hard Rock Hotel. They got trashed after the ceremony and the next morning she, seven months along, felt guilty and awful. They didn’t gamble. She felt too fat to go to the pool but he took a swim. Mostly they stayed in the room. They made love both nights.

Right on time, she delivers a son. He names his son Gordon after his father, even though he hates his father and hasn’t spoken to him in over a year. His father didn’t know he was married, and when he calls his father to announce the birth of his son his father doesn’t say much at all, but mails him a considerate check.

She chooses the middle name Matthew, for her own father from whom she is now primarily estranged. Her father sets up a small annuity in the baby’s name that can’t be touched until the boy is eighteen.

They are both in love with the baby. He calls him Matthew and she calls him Pip but he won’t call him that because, he says, it sounds like a girl’s name. She goes back to the office. He puts the screenplay on hold to be a full-time father. His favorite thing about his wife is that she gave him this little boy, the beautiful son he’d always imagined. Her favorite thing about her husband is more-or-less exactly the same. They have their love of the child in common – if not what they choose to call him.

It’s a small apartment. He likes it best when she’s not there. He holds his son in arms and stands with him at the railing of the exterior hallway he calls a balcony and points out to his son all the pretty girls. One day he inadvertently points out his own wife, not recognizing her from some distance. When she walks in, they make love for the first time since the baby was born. This time he wears a condom.

Greeley is stifling him. He can’t find work, especially in The Industry. He has some friends in Los Angeles. He can earn good money teaching surfing there, and make contacts and work on the screenplay. He tells his wife that it’s for the family. She encourages him to pursue his dreams.

He is thirty-eight now, but passes easily for thirty. The friends don’t live near the beach, and being The Cute One is a taller order in Redondo or Malibu than it had been in Del Ray Beach. They want him to pay rent. He starts tending bar. He’s says it’s for the family but really he’s just scraping by himself, and there’s the extra burden now of daycare. They’re apart, and they’re behind.

But soon she makes peace with her mother, who doesn’t chide her or even comment because she loves spending time with her grandson, though the way she phrases it is: I hate seeing him going to daycare.

It’s been eight months now. He’s sent home a grand total of three hundred dollars and often complains how lonely he is, though each night when he calls her it’s always so loud on the phone.

She does not want to kill his dreams. And she does not want to live out her life as a Medical Transcriber married to a Bartender in Greeley, Colorado. He is working on a screenplay, a television screenplay. He is doing research. He is making connections. This is what she pictures: Herself in white convertible wearing oversized Gucci sunglasses. Beneath the sunglasses are her perfect Hollywood eyebrows, waxed and groomed weekly at the salon she read about in In-Style that shapes the brows of all her favorite stars. Her husband is a screenwriter – a very successful screenwriter. Their handsome young son is a gifted actor, winning the lead role in every school production from a very talented pool, the children of all her favorite stars. And while agents phone her regularly offering film roles to the boy, she and her screenwriter husband say no to every one of them, and will until the boy finishes high school. They want him to have a normal life.

Everything they do, all the hardships they endure – everything they do, they do for their son.

He is a waiter at a gourmet pizza restaurant on the mall in Santa Monica. Gourmet pizza is presently out of fashion. He has seen his son once in the past year. He lives with four roommates. He is forty years old. He could pass for thirty-five. The woman he is sleeping with isn’t very pretty but her roommate is an agent. He is hoping to be discovered.

He is not working on his screenplay.

This is what he pictures: Everything I do I do for my son.

A Christmas Tale

He is the man who lives in that house. He looks like he’d smell of cigarettes.

It’s not the first time today he’s knocked on their door and theirs isn’t the first door he’s knocked on. All day she saw him, or heard; yesterday too. But this time he knocks when her husband is home. “Just answer the door,” he tells her.

He is the man who lives in that house: “Yeah if you could just turn off those Christmas lights you know. My son, he died over there in Iraq.”

He meets her glance only briefly, his anguished eyes, puts his hat back on as he leaves, saying softly, twice: “It’s an oil war.”

White lights are spaced quite perfectly along the eave. It took the husband three hours to hang them. The ladder was aluminum, cold. He thinks about planting the spruce tree last spring; he thinks about digging the hole. He considers its white lights beneath the snow - he loves that, and the scent as he hung them. His neighbors' lights are solid blue, and multi, respectively. He thinks white is much more elegant, more elegant lining the eaves than those across the street that are draped rather generously from the roofline. He thinks they look more elegant than the blinking white lights up the block, and nearly as elegant as those that flash in sequence on the corner house – he’d like to find lights like those next year. He thinks the red and green lights on the block’s far end are really downright garish; the lighted Santa down the way is too much. He laces his boots. He pulls on his coat. He rifles around for his hat. This is his protest: Excessive bundling.

But she insisted.

The ground crunches beneath his boots. He neglected gloves, and the extension cord is buried in snow. He curses.

Only then does he notice: Theirs are the only lights on.

He unplugs them.

Hours later they are standing together outside: Coatless, hatless, gloveless, celebrating stars.

Plane Trip #81

I am leaving and I’m in the middle seat so I lean a little – not too much, so maybe I didn’t lean, maybe crane is the word – I crane toward the window and even before I can really see anything – when all I can see is a sky the color of getting darker, I think to myself, “This is my marvelous home.” I am heading west and, were it solely up to me, I would not be leaving. I am worldly, I have seen and done things others dream of and that I had dreamed about and now refer back to to remind myself how I have lived. And while home might be my favorite place of all, it is clearly not inherent that one’s place or task always be one’s favorite.

Favorites change. I’d have experiences and I’d be decoding them as they occurred, distilling the mystery of them into anecdotes in real time, describing to myself what I felt and what was happening as a rehearsal of telling the tale of it to you. I can’t say for sure if I wanted to share, or to impress. And I can’t help but wonder if that’s what I’m doing right now, this very second, breaking down my present into bits of past and future. I am flying. The man to my left – sitting in the window seat – is on chapter 46. I do not know what he is reading. The woman to my right is reading a book in a language so foreign that I can’t be sure those are letters.

There was a moment when my neck was craned and the plane was banking and I saw it in the light just before dark: My place. I saw a baseball diamond under lights and it didn’t exactly leap out of the landscape so much as become part of it, a sweet part, like a pink flower in a green garden. I saw lakes, shore. I saw a river. I couldn’t tell you which one it was, but surely it was one of mine. We were close then. Higher, I saw the lights, the artificial ones that are beautiful because they speak of people, and not just any people, but my own. I thought the view was more beautiful because it is my view. Or maybe it really is more beautiful. This is perfectly possible.

I am leaving, only briefly, a matter of days. Before I leave I start counting them, thinking about coming home. When I am away, I will forget once in awhile that where I am is not where I live. Or is it then?

I am thinking that I could return and never leave again, and you will never leave, and we will never be further apart than the distance I can walk, or even crawl if necessary. I am thinking I could be happy like that but I don’t know how to change things up. Travel is a habit. So is staying put, which is why no one ever visits. I’d like to have visitors, and I’d like them to climb inside of me and see exactly as I see, through this specific filter of love. Would they see something more beautiful then, or would the eyes through which they take it in be merely more tolerant, forgiving?

He said, “You are so easy to please,” and I could see it disappointed him. I
never stopped being proud of that. Were I not so easy to please I never would have been with him in the first place. And were he not disappointed, my greatest loves and joys would have never come to be. I think about it, I think about how my worst pains have always lead to my greatest delights and I think this must be how people become so fucked up; this must be the source of so much drama and wasted, sacrificed energies. But who am I to say? I mean, look what it is I am missing. Look what it is I am lusting after. Look how little it takes to please me.

Look: What I did to get this.

College Sex

My college roommate prided herself on her virginity but would give a blow job to anyone. I became familiar with the sounds the various football players made when attaining orgasm, and they in turn became familiar with what I looked like when I was pretending to be asleep.

I began self-medicating. Beer, when consumed in adequate quantities to tune out coming sounds, created the sorry side-effect of my needing to urinate too frequently. Pot served only to amplify the sounds – my ears were suddenly high-fidelity. Pills: One or two were not enough. Five worked, but I failed to wake up the next morning, and was still asleep the next night. My roommate finally sought help after midnight. Her football player had complained I was starting to stink.

I broke my leg and cast plus limp rendered me invisible. I didn’t mind this, except when bicyclists and popular cliques would nearly run me over. I got a black eye when the football players threw water balloons from out their dormitory windows - a black eye from a water balloon. I added a hunch to my limp, trying to completely disappear. It is only looking back on it years later that I realize: There was nothing personal about the attack. I just happened to be the one walking by.

I chased a gay guy for a couple of years until he finally gave into me. He broke up with me right afterwards, saying that the sex was bad.

I met Ron at a Halloween party, which is the wrong place meet a man. I fell in love with Underdog. But the next morning that I learned Ron wore loafers.

We liked camping. I liked that he couldn’t wear loafers. I liked that he had everything: Every accessory and always state of the art. Made for a lot to carry, but, I was used to sleeping under my pick-up. Ron broke up with me the last day of the semester, because, he said, he had a girlfriend.

I slept around after that. I’d do it once with a guy and then never call him back – that is, if he called. I can only remember the first one who gave me head. Not because it was enlightening, but because afterwards he took off his clothes, leaned back, and said: Now it’s my turn.

I choked him down. I didn’t return his calls and I didn’t answer the door when he came by. I didn’t read his letters and I didn’t go to parties or places I thought he might be.

It only occurs to me now that I broke his heart.

Half

His friend is your enemy but you didn’t know it then; not right away, why would you with all his comfort and reassurances? Still, there was something suspicious about the timing of his visits, always when your man is away. He asks too many questions. Prying questions.

You start testing him. You offer up fake secrets and false confessions designed to be detectable, but harmless. You say how you hate your man’s pancakes. Soon after, your man asks and tells you: How do you like your pancakes? You like them, are you sure? Because if you don’t like them, you should tell me.

You should always tell me the truth.

It’s strange he sends his friend to be his spy, another man. It’s the notion of another man that mandates the spy, and even though he doesn’t find one he still gets angry. Or maybe because. He knocks out your tooth over dirty laundry. He blacks your eye over a dent in the car. Not a dent really, a ding.

His friend who is your enemy who is posing as your friend and is very nearly believable in it, he strokes your hair. He says you still look pretty even without the tooth. He says it gives you character. He asks if you would leave him. He asks if you feel tempted. You’re not sure if this is an invitation or a test. He says: You know you can call the dentist if you want. He says: You like him, the dentist, don’t you?

You tell him your dentist isn’t a man. You giggle and call him sexist. You tell him Dr. Noonan is a woman.

He stops by to see your temporary cap. Looks better than a real tooth, he tells you. He asks: Do ever think of leaving him? He says: Come on, you must feel tempted.

You design and issue a new lie: No, you would never leave him. No, you don’t feel tempted. You confess you are fool for loving him so deeply. You confess you are a cripple, unable ever to walk away. You tell him: He is the best and only lover I’ve ever had.

It gets back to your man of course and for a day or two he is gentler. For a day or two, he puts his hands on you only as a lover should. The first orgasm is real this time. The second and third ones aren’t.

But it doesn’t last and your man turns mean again. The temporary cap is gone, the hole is back. He breaks your toe with a hammer. He says: Next time I’m cutting it off.

His friend who is your enemy, he asks about the doctor. You say: The doctor was young and handsome. Your man breaks another toe. Hammer in hand, he tells you: No doctors this time.

He comes home late and you hug his legs, weeping, pleading, kissing. Inside you are laughing, hysterical, careless of the beating to follow. Because this, this: This is beautiful. You tell him you slept with his friend.

And the beating is a brutal one but you feel exhilarated, giddy. Vindicated, knowing as he walks out that door that soon enough, at least one of those bastards will be dead.

A Variance In Priorities

He is the kind of person who cares more about where he is than who he is with. He is typical in this way, perhaps a bit more handsome. She didn’t know this as she trotted him around the globe, St. Moritz, Vienna, Havana, Bariloche. She didn’t realize she was the kind of thing he would just add to his social resume, impressing some other girl with where in the world he’d been.

She was the kind of person who didn’t care where she was at all. She was the kind of person who cared only about the company. She wanted to be with him.

She will never again go to St. Moritz or Vienna, Havana or Bariloche. She will find new places to go because those places, for her, are now haunted.

He will look for someone to take him back there.

How to Love the Past

Funny how our saddest stories can become our sweetest ones, so long as the sad story’s end seems, eventually, a happy one. They are the finest things that have ever happened to us: We forgive our own sad stories. We excuse the pain as if the relief of pain is sweeter than having never had any pain at all.

He very nearly died but his survival is the best thing that ever happened to me. Months of disease: Can’t take that away.

Can only change my memory of it.

Best Friends

She was so broken up about it that even after all his cheating and his telling her about it; she was so broken up that even after all that she still wanted to be his friend.

He had nothing to lose in that proposition; she was generous and easy. She wrote him long letters. He wrote back short ones with much less frequency and never in direct response to what she’d said or asked.

In hard times with other lovers they’d each imagine getting back together. She’d imagine he finally came to his senses. He’d imagine she was bisexual and wanted to invite other women into bed.

Eventually she did get over it. She wasn’t really sure if she was (finally) angry about his cheating and his telling her about it or the fact that he never answered a question directly, or her doubts that he actually even read her letters at all. So she stopped writing to him.

Then, she stopped writing back.

She had a new love lost. And he: He lost his closest friend.

Handle It

It’s the way you say I can handle it as if I couldn’t or as if I doubted that you could. I buy your company. You call me when you’re lonely so I hear from you from time to time. I’m trying to be frugal so I stop returning calls but I know that you can handle it.

I never doubted that you could.

Wish I Were Her

The first time you called me her name I cried and cried. My crying hurt you. It’s just a slip, you said, I’m stoned, it’s nothing.

In fact it was a relief in the way that something one suspects being proven always is. It was being diagnosed after hearing for years There is nothing physically wrong. I was crying with peace.

I want to ask you how she did it and how it was better than how I do it. I want to learn everything about her. Maybe I can look more like her. Maybe I can fuck like her. I want to ask but I know you’d feel ashamed. Even though you shouldn’t cause truth is: We both wish I were her.

Some Cancer

I am grieving my own younger body. I feel grief for that which I never properly loved. I feel resentment toward my belly. I feel loathing for the space that runs from below my armpit down to the top of my breast.

I have been told that a catastrophic illness cures vanity; that one gains affection or even passion for a body that merely survives, or works at all.

But it doesn’t work, and I won’t survive, and my preoccupation is with how awful I will look inside my coffin.

Optimism

Generosity brings out the worst in people.

After a break-up I always wanted to take my shit back. I felt like a fool for doling it out so easily. With Marc I rolled up a hook rug I’d given him lest the new girl Starla’s feet be warmed. It was as big as room and barely fit inside my car. With James it was a camera, and some music. I snuck in through the sliding glass door I knew he didn’t lock. No report was ever filed.

The David recovery mission took place at three in the morning. My heart was racing. With a pocket knife I peeled the state park admission sticker from the bumper of his AMC Javelin. I couldn’t bear the thought of his taking the new girl there on my dime, and probably the next one after her. A fifty dollar parking pass: It was a lot of money to me back then.

That was twenty five years ago. I try to look David up sometimes but to date I haven’t found him.

Sometimes when I feeling especially optimistic I think this may be because he is dead.

Project

I thought you were my friend but really you were my project. I loved you like a project. I invested in you like that. I pretended that my joy in you was about your specifics but really I was lonely. You could have been anyone who needed attention or money. Your specifics are my result: A man who is a failure and expects too many things for free.

It’s hard to love a man like that.

C-

Numbers

Numbers spoke to him. He saw them everywhere, numbers, and in them patterns, rhythms, even songs. They spoke out loud but always in code or otherwise some foreign language he didn’t understand. He tried to decipher them. 19, 19, 19: He’d see it everywhere for a little while. Then the sports scores: 9 to 1, 9 to 1. He should have bet on it. Sometimes he did.

But just because numbers spoke to him doesn’t mean they didn’t lie to him.

He’d see it in the car, a series of 3’s, then on the clock 3:33, and before it 1:11 which added up to 3. Numbers spoke to him. He bet the number 3 horse in the third race to show. It was worthwhile, long odds, 33:1. He was sure of it. He brought $300, then went to the machine to take out $40 more. He knew he couldn’t cover it but he also knew he’d win. He hands the money to the cashier who doesn’t blink or flinch when he asks for 7 dollars back. She hands him one ticket. He wonders if he should have broken the bet into thirds, but that would have messed everything up.

He didn’t win, didn’t show, didn’t even come close. Now he’s busted, and he’ll be 40 overdrawn come Monday.
On the way home he sees another number: 666. Driving down the highway at 66 miles per hour he reaches over reflexively and locks his doors.

He’s overwrought when he gets home some time past 6. He won’t check the clock, he’s sick of all these numbers and the shit they have to say. It’s like some other fucking language. They speak in code and they won’t shut up or tell you what they really mean. How’s he going to get out of this? He’s got 7 bucks in his pocket. He could go buy some scratch tickets but he’s not feeling lucky - the 6’s left him out of sorts. 7 bucks for lottery tickets. Or 7 bucks for everything else until payday.

He’s got 7 bucks in his pocket. He owes the bank another 33 more, plus 26 for the overdraft.

She’s waiting for him like she always is. She’s waiting, calm as always. He puts his head in her lap and she strokes his hair, cooing like he’s a baby, telling him gentle things. But just because she speaks to him doesn’t mean she doesn’t lie. She tells him: Everything’s going to be alright.

T.O.Y.

I stopped thinking about you. I stopped thinking about you when I wake up and when I check the mail. I stopped thinking about you when the phone rings. I stopped thinking about you when I go to sleep and I stopped thinking about you when I day dream.

I grew tired of pining over you and the cure is to stop thinking of you.

I stopped thinking of you when I see the colors red or blue or when it snows light or hard or when I think of mountains or the sea. I stopped thinking of you when I hear certain songs that you and I heard together, or that remind me of you, or songs that I am tempted to read you into. I threw away all my pictures of you without thinking about you – I was just tidying up.

I stopped thinking about you when I finger the shells we plucked from the sand on Sanibel Island. I wasn’t thinking about you when I threw them away – I was just tidying up. I stopped thinking of you when I touch myself, in fact I think of someone else. And I stopped thinking of you when I hurt myself like cutting myself on my body where no one can see because I don’t do it for attention.

I stopped naming you in my equivalent of prayer. I stopped naming you in the hypothetical Will that I write in my head several times a week at least.

I’m not thinking of you when I write the note that will see me suddenly appreciated and missed. They’ll all say now how deep I was – how deep and ingenious – and everyone there will blame all this on you. Even though my brilliant note will say several times, and clearly: I’m not thinking of him. I’m not thinking of him. I’m not thinking of him.

The Agency

She’d get these terrible headaches. She’d curl up on the floor in pain, writhing; curled up in a little ball, shaking. Terrible headaches, she’d puke sometimes and she couldn’t stand the light. She’d be hot, or she’d be cold, and the bed was too soft. She’d brace herself, lying in the corner on the floor. They didn’t happen all the time. They only happened once in awhile. Most of the time she was fine. She was great.

They worked together at the agency. She was the star. They started as interns together. They were the two prettiest ones, so pairing off was natural. It was encouraged.

She was a star. That’s what they told her when they gave her a raise and promoted her from Rep to Manager. She became his boss. He didn’t mind. He knew he was lazy. She was the boss and there was something very hot about that; her having the power, and his ability to make her weak. It was sexy.

He didn’t do much at work and he liked it like that. He didn’t do much at work at she let him get away with it. She wasn’t necessarily a good manager. They called her a star.
When they first moved in together they both claimed it was to save on rent. But really she had wanted to take the next the step, and really he had wanted to take some ownership of her. It was clearly known that he was the best looking man in the office, and he was frequently described as “really nice”, in part because the more accurate “really charming” was an old-fashioned phrase, and thus didn’t come to mind. He was the most handsome and she was the superstar. He felt that moving in with her would back other guys away. He liked what he had going and didn’t want it screwed up.

But couples are not defined by splitting rent, or by driving to work together. Couples are defined by doing things together, by being together. They did everything together, nearly always in groups of four or six or ten. That’s the way it was there. The agency was your family, or really more like your fraternity, or sorority house – an allegiance based on your very acceptance there, your acceptance among a privileged few at the exclusion of many others. He liked that a lot. He didn’t need his name on the door. The name on the door already was one everyone recognized; mention it and brows raise, eyes widen. It meant something, working there.

There was a pool table in the employee lounge. He liked it and spent time there. He was the handsomest and also really nice, and he and none other was living with their superstar.

She worked harder than he did. She worked longer hours and needed to start early. They’d head to the office together and he’d go work out for an hour or two. And when she worked late, he’d play pool. He became very good at it. And also very fit. He was handsome. And nice.

Spend enough time there and soon enough you’ll learn: There are always new interns. There is always someone younger, and hungrier. The word “superstar”, one comes to learn, is somewhat bandied about – there’s one or even two in every new crop – usually a female; they work harder, and longer, and often for less.

He is still the Handsome One. He is very fit, and really nice, and very good at pool. His Superstar makes it to Account Supervisor a full six months before he is even promoted to Manager. Upon her promotion, she is switched to a different account. It is a smaller account than the one they had worked on together, but also there are fewer supervisors, so the title bears more weight. They are no longer working together. They are no longer on the same account and she is no longer his boss. She cut her long hair short and he doesn’t really like it. He gets a new boss, and he worries about this, worries that it won’t be as much fun and that he’ll have to work harder. He tells himself he’s ready; that he wants a challenge; that he’s ready to be applied.

But really it’s not like that at all. His new boss is, if anything, more lenient than his girlfriend was, or maybe he’s just more relaxed. But the new guy is great. They run together twice a week and he teaches his boss how to play pool – really well. It is his new boss that eventually refers him for the promotion which, based on such glowing reviews, he receives fairly readily.

It’s like they are leading two different lives. He is not interested in the account that she works on, and he hates it when she complains about the managers. He is a manager. It offends him. They still move in groups of four or six or ten, always people from the agency. They entertain. They go out to dinner. There are functions and parties and events. She worries about a glass ceiling but she does not voice this, to him or to anyone. He manages several young interns. One is the latest superstar. She is very eager and he wields power over her. He finds this very sexy. She comes on to him. It could be his looks, or his position, but he likes to think it’s both.

She gets terrible headaches. The bed is too soft. She lies in the corner on the floor. She rocks and she cries. There is nothing to be done.

One day he realizes: He doesn’t care at all. He doesn’t feel her pain, or even necessarily believe it. When she is like this she asks him to turn out the lights. It occurs to him that this request is because she knows how ugly she looks when she is like that. Crying and shaking in her short hair – he only feels annoyed.

And curious, wondering if his superstar intern suffers from headaches at all.

Four weeks later she is all moved out. Something happened at a company party; something humiliating, something public. Something like that undermines one’s authority, possibly forever. She pictures a glass ceiling and sees herself banging her head. She pictures a glass floor and imagines everyone there looking up her skirt. Did everyone know before she did?

She should not have allowed to leave so easily. She should have been begged to stay.

Her new title is Group Director. A title like that justifies the change, even if the name on the door is considerably less prestigious. A title like that has authority in it. She has her authority back, and a great deal of cache, given the agency she came from.

She allows ambition to numb her broken heart.

Plane Trip #80

He was wearing a shirt that said GROOM across the chest. It was a baseball-style shirt, ill-fitting with a straight hem – a style of shirt he’d never wear. He’d already said no to this – it was a wedding planner’s idea. But on his first morning of marriage his wife, fully dressed already in a shirt that said BRIDE, coerced him with a series of whines, reprimands and denials. She cried. He surrendered.

GROOM: The cheap shirt is stiff. He tugs at the hem. In his face you can see the whole rest of his life.

Thanksgiving 2007

Cars that catch the light notice best: All the storefronts are dark, except the laundromat.

He picks out two washing machines, one for lights, one for darks.

He puts money in the dryer and starts it up even though it’s empty.

He waits for the window to fog over.

Comfort/Discomfort

There are those who would put themselves in an uncomfortable position to accommodate another, and there are those who would never consider this. The latter group, contemplating the premise, would say things along the lines of, “Why would I want to do that?” or “Why should I be uncomfortable for another?” or “Why would anyone want me to be uncomfortable for them?” In response these queries, you might describe a situation where, for example, one’s lover is sleeping so contentedly against {said respondent} that one might not want to move, even when one might find themselves cramping up. Here, {said respondent} offers, in context: “Why would I want to do that?” or “Why should I be uncomfortable for another” or “Why would anyone want me to be uncomfortable for them?”

When the question is posed in a financial context, say, giving someone your last twenty dollars, or even borrowing fifty dollars on another’s behalf, members of our noted group again reply: “Why would I want to do that?” or “Why should I be uncomfortable for another” or “Why would anyone want me to be uncomfortable for them?”

When notified that you have in fact laid in terrible positions with respect to their comfort, and that you have in fact borrowed from your own friends when you had nothing yourself just so {said respondent} could have a little something in his pocket - as he’d asked to - {said respondent} might call you foolish, or romantic, or might protest to some extent that such actions on your part were not requested, or that your execution of same was not fully or adequately disclosed. Or, perhaps grasping the concept of being uncomfortable so that another might be less so, or perhaps finally grasping the notion of maintaining some degree of discomfort personally so that another might, in fact, be comforted (even to some small extent), {said respondent} instead withholds any judgment of you, and sweetly whispers in your ear, “Oh you shouldn’t have,” an act of some mercy on their behalf which, like staying still so as not to disturb one’s sleeping lover, is intended to maintain the status quo.

Strength

It takes all of my strength just to let him sleep; not to stroke and thereby wake him and not to hold him too tight. It takes all of my strength just to lie still, my body bent awkwardly to accommodate his position. I lie awake watching. All of my strength: Not to breathe; not to move fingers; not to breathe too deeply. All of my strength: To resist tiny kisses up the length of him. Since I don’t mean to shift and a kiss is never silent, it takes all of my strength to resist and hold still; to resist and be quiet; to take shallow breaths lest the expansion of my chest somehow serve to disturb him; to keep silent my shallow breaths lest the noise make him stir. It takes all of my strength. But he makes me strong

He Had Perfect Timing

You were not the best lover I ever had but you were the one I was most compatible with. I liked the crudeness of your actions. I liked giving and you liked to take.

Eventually I wanted something back and we ended there, the balance tipped and me no longer satisfied. Oh but when I hated myself: You were perfect

Something/Anything

She didn’t know herself then. She has no memories of herself then except for the series of men she was rejected by. Boys, they were boys. She has no memories except of how she was hurt. She has fantasies of how she was vindicated.

She suddenly feels old. She didn’t feel old last year. She didn’t fret the quality of her skin except once in awhile for attention. But now she worries that she scares little children in the manner of an old woman dressing like a young girl. She’s heavier but she justifies this. She can’t remember being young and she can imagine being old. She wonders when, when will she know:

Something/anything.

No Peace for Anyone

After seven years she sees him again. He’d broken her heart and she wants to punish him. So she asks if he knew how cruel he was and she asks if he knew how he awful he’d been and he tells her yes, he knew. He says: Can’t you please get over it.

She stands, and she leaves.

Alone at the table, he squeezes his dirty napkin. He bites the inside of his cheek. He makes it to the bathroom before he cries.

What he meant was: That was the worst thing I’ve done. Losing you.

The Continental Hotel

She’d like to burn down The Continental Hotel where he gave her something she didn’t want and he gave it to her over and over again despite the fact that she was sick and she was crying. She’d like to burn down The Continental Hotel where something precious became a weapon and something good was very bad and was never good again. She’d like to burn down The Continental Hotel where, in the lobby, he showed her the ugliest thing she’d ever seen. She couldn’t get it out of her head after that. Nothing that wasn’t terrible ever happened to her there.

I’d like to burn down The Continental Hotel. I mean, she would. She would