Adverbs (19 page)

“Oh my god!” The pharmacy woman is here and now she is wearing sunglasses and three other people, one of whom is inching her hand toward a camera tucked into the waistband of her pants. “Have you told them?”

“Told us what?” Hillary says, and laughs for a minute like she’s getting ready to laugh later and wants to make sure it’s ready.

The pharmacy woman claps a hand over her mouth and her friends laugh, sure enough. They’re all comic fans, although clapping their hands over their mouths will not save them from kerosene-encouraged flames.

“Told us what?” Hillary says. “Told us what told us what told us what?”

“She’s pregnant,” the pharmacy woman says, and how could this happen? Allison never should have let her out of the closet. More and more in the news, in the country where this whole
thing takes place which is America, there are random gunmen and they shoot up whole rooms of people. But why are they never here, where we want them? Why don’t they shoot up a whole room just when Allison wants them to?

“Oh my god,” says one of the friends of the pharmacy woman. “With your husband and what he does. He writes about it and now it’s true! You must have been waiting for many years!” Everyone thinks this over and makes some joyous noises.

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Hillary says. “Oh Spouse I mean Allison this is so exciting for you.”

“You know what I hadn’t thought of?” Keith says, but the pharmacy woman and her friends have found some stools so they can get their chance to meet comic book artists in an informal setting. They decide to sit in a half-circle, like half a bunch of sharks, like there is only half a chance Allison could go someplace else. “I hadn’t thought that everyone who works on the cruise would be a fan of comic books, “Keith says. “I’m pretty sure they didn’t make that very clear on the phone with the Comics Cruise woman.”

“Yes, wasn’t she awful?” Allison says, but instead one of the comics fans is explaining they needed waitressing experience.

“Or an equivalent,” she says, and then she pulls the camera all the way out of her waistband because this is her chance. “They didn’t just take everybody.”

“This way we don’t have to pay,” the pharmacy woman says. “Plus it’s not very difficult. Have you seen that pharmacy? It’s just a tiny room. It’s about the size of a bathroom, really.”

“It’s such a big responsibility,” Hillary says.

“It’s just handing people things,” Allison says. “One of those Monkeys could do it.”

“I mean another life,” Hillary says, and then reaches across the table and puts her hand on Allison’s furious stomach, apparently so she can think about it some more. “Another life. I don’t know if I could do it.”

“I could do it,” Allison says, but she has no idea if anyone can hear her. “I need another life, actually.”

“So it’s really true,” the pharmacy woman says. “It really turned blue?”

The song ends, so even a soft-spoken woman can be heard. “I was definitely blue this morning,” she says. “But then, I’m blue most mornings.”

“Blue most mornings,” Keith says. “I really like you, Allison. I think I like you. Can I use that? I’m going to use it.”

“You won’t believe what they make us do, on the Comics Cruise,” the pharmacy woman says. “Okay, first of all we have to show up five days early, okay? And on the glass windows? By registration? There were these stupid Christmas paintings from the Christmas Cruise and guess who had to take them down? They gave us a scraper thing to do it. Scrape scrape scrape, just to meet you.”

“And your husband,” says the woman with the waistband.

“But Christmas was a long time ago,” Allison says. Everyone frowns, so they must have heard her.

“Christmas was just the time before,” says the pharmacy woman. “It was just Christmas.”

Allison thinks through the ice in her glass, the stained napkin of the Something Bar. How is she here? It was just Christmas? “Smile,” says the woman with the camera. “Smile or cheese.”

Tomas lifts his head from the bar at the flashbulb, perhaps thinking it was the end of the world. “I want another drink,” Tomas says, “but the bartender is an enormous fan. This is like some sort of anxiety dream.”

“Oh my god!” the pharmacy woman says. “I know a great game, Oh my god! It’s Dream or Real. We each say something that’s either something that happened to us or a dream and we guess it. You say, ‘Dream or Real’ when it’s over. I learned it from someone else.”

“I don’t want to play,” Allison says.

“I’m guessing that’s Real,” Keith says. “Do I score a point?”

“It’s just a party game, or drinking,” the pharmacy woman says. “There’s no points. I can’t believe I’m getting to play with comic artists oh my god.”

“I’ll go first,” Tomas says, and Allison stops liking him best. She has not liked a thing about him, including his work, which she read a few pages of in Adrian’s room. Everybody was a vampire or was afraid of vampires, and they all lived in a rainy town where the sun went down every night. But he brought a bird in its own cage, with a sheet over it so no one could see the bird and the bird couldn’t see anyone and the whole thing was a secret bird. This was a customs problem, and it meant that Allison was able to skip parts of the argument in the registration room, particularly when the bird started shrieking. The customs problem ended the discovery that a Spouse was taking a free cruise to
Alaska while the famous comic book artist lurked at home with a pen and the fans did not get the chance they were working at the pharmacy to get.

Since then Tomas has not been so reliable. He talked at the panels, and everything he said was tinged with the unreliability of someone who would bring a bird on a cruise ship. “I was hiking with two friends of mine,” he says now, “deep in the woods outside of San Francisco, when one of us tripped and fell and hurt his leg very badly near a stream,” and Allison skips this part too, migrates as far away from the woods as she can with the same mystery that grips her throughout. Why are there so many moments like this, in her love story? Why is it that there are so many ways it can go? Why can’t it just be the same thing, over and over, like a John Donne poem run off at the copy store with the receipt stapled to the bag, an identical John Donne poem for everybody in the classroom to ask the exact same questions about, so that sometimes you go home and drink a bottle of chianti and shout things up to your husband like, “Dissertations aren’t the same thing at all, because I have to work really hard on them!” Allison definitely loved him then, that nice guy Adrian. She loved him when he left his stack of work on the table by the cash register and she looked at all those panels. His first comics were about the end of the world, a time when volcanoes became angry and burned everybody up in Detroit and Los Angeles and other cities where Adrian had lived.
Hell on Earth
, nine issues numbered. She loved them, one through nine. She used to sit in her bathtub and read them several times, listening to the rustle of the pages of panels in the empty tub. It was too hot to take a bath
and she loved him. Adrian scrawled two sentences on two pieces of paper and held them up for her, lines of dialogue. They were almost the same, but Adrian spent the whole day convincing her to care about them. She would waste every day with him and his shoulders, drooping under his shirt, as he would lean down and pull her out of the tub by her beltloops. Why couldn’t every moment be a copy of that? Instead, unfortunately, always, there are several ways to do everything, and this is evidently the way Allison’s story has gone, with a Comics Cruise heading north for a state she has no interest in visiting. How could it go this way, with Adrian? Look at herself, she is dancing with Keith in the emptying late bar. They are dancing to a song with lyrics.

And the chorus goes,

By the time they were married Adrian’s comics had shifted slightly, like the crust of the Earth. Now the comics were about a
young man and his wife and they had adventures, but all the adventures were about having trouble having a baby. They would rob banks, and aliens would fire lasers at them, and the woman would pull all sorts of lifesaving props out of her purse, but never never never could they have a baby, and that was always the bittersweet end of the story. Allison didn’t love these as much as the end of the world, but this was the path of the ship she was on. “What is it?” she asked him, after a fight she lost track of. Allison had thrown something up in the air. “Is it that you want a baby?”

“Baby?” Adrian said, and threw down his pen. “Maybe someday,” he said, and what was she talking about and why was she asking, and now the song is over and Allison is asking the bartender something.

“What?” the bartender asks.

“Hong Kong Cobbler,” Allison says, instead.

“Are you sure that’s good for you?” Keith asks, who is apparently standing beside her.

“It’s for you,” she says to him. “I’ve been drinking cranberry juice all night. Dream or Real? Dream or Real?”

Keith chuckles and looks over Allison’s shoulder and makes a little jiggling motion with a clasped hand, like he is running a pen through the air. “I don’t think so,” he says. “Morning will be here early. First thing in fact. I’m going to chuckle again at my own joke until the bartender brings the bill.”

But it comes, soon enough, and he signs it with a pen it turns out he had with him all this time. “Hummus platter,” he says. “I forgot we had hummus and we ate it.”

“I’m an enormous fan,” says the bartender. “And of your husband’s too, ma’am. Congratulations by the way. With his work I thought maybe you guys wouldn’t. I mean, how would that come about, you know?”

“It’s a common story,” Allison says, hoping she is still as soft-spoken as she thinks of herself. “My husband ejaculated inside my vagina.”

“I think it’s time for you to go to bed,” Keith says. “I’ll take you.” Surprisingly, he is right. The dance music is now playing a song from many years ago, when Keith was surely some handsome boy in high school. The song is “Come and Get My Heart” by The L Club, from their first album
Introducing The L Club
on L Club Records. “Yes yes yes,” Keith hums, “oh baby yes,” and Allison thinks for maybe the first time about this baby. Her stomach feels the same, even after Hillary put her hand on it, so it is easier to think about the baby living in her purse, the lint like placenta and an umblical cord that can keep your glasses hanging around your neck if you’ve become that sort of person. But the baby must be careful. It should not play with the gun or the kerosene-soaked rags or the little vial of ashes Adrian gave her. This was back when people were always mailing Adrian little vials of ashes because of the volcano stories. Now it’s fertility workbooks, and she and Adrian sell them back to the bookstore on grumpy cardboard mornings, the books in a box in the back of the car they bought together, 60–40 because Adrian made more money at the time. And now. Allison gets to her cabin and when she sees that Adrian is still not there she feels sick to her stupid, raging stomach.

“I’m going to throw up,” she tells Keith, and lurches past the porthole to the bathroom, which is scarcely bigger than a closet. The toilet was designed by Norwegians who have a theory about how easy it is to use, but Allison thinks to hell with it, and leans across the empty bathtub and her own vomit buckets out of her.

“Oh,” Keith says.

Allison turns on the Norwegian faucet so some of it will run down the drain, and takes off her shirt which is stained. Where is Adrian? The first time she threw up with him he held her hair like no one ever had, the gentle hands of someone who draws the apocalypse happening. It was Christmas, and her bad clams were like something buried in the center of the Earth. And now? Allison throws her purse to the floor.

“Are you okay?” Keith says.

“I just threw up,” Allison says, “or didn’t you hear me? I’m fine. I’m married to one of the most respected comic artists in this Volcanic Age. The trouble is, it never occurs to me that people are anything but nice when I meet them.”

“That doesn’t strike me,” Keith says but is getting her a glass of water.

“But then, they only have to say one thing and it all goes down the drain.” Allison feels the cool porcelain of Norway and leans down further into the tiny tub, as if the thing she’s going to say next is what is really bothering her. But it’s not what is bothering her. She just threw up, is what is bothering her, and alone in the middle of the ocean. “One day,” she says, “Adrian was listening to me speak sharply about something, and he didn’t even put down his pen. You know, I have several poems by John Donne committed to memory, so it upsets me.”

“Ssh,” Keith says, and she sips the water down. “You’re talking very loudly, Allison.”

“I do too!” Allison says. “Where, like a pillow on a bed, a pregnant bank swelled up to rest the Violet’s reclining head, sat we two, one another’s best. He’s my best, Adrian.”

“Are you really pregnant?” Keith asks. “Are you really pregnant and do you really love that husband?”

“I’m writing my dissertation,” she says, “and the center of it is this theory that it’s none of your fucking business. Often I do. Yes. Often I love him and he is always my husband.”

But Keith is taking her glass away. Allison looks back up and realizes with a sort of giddy horror that he has also taken off his shirt. His careless chest looked nothing like Adrian’s, with hair trailing down like smoke from someone’s mouth. How early are the handsome taught such things, to lumber into a room where a woman is already having a bad time, to let the party drinks convince you it’s a party? What reasons can dissuade such wrong wrong things?

“I just
threw up
,” Allison tries. With two people in the closet it feels like the pharmacy again. And, is she pregnant? But Keith is running his hand on Allison’s shoulder in a way very strongly suggesting that she actually pay crucial attention to this very moment.