Begin to Exit Here (23 page)

Janice would have liked that, unless I was never going to see her again.

J
anice was holding her gun when I walked into her apartment carrying a tree. It was the eighth day of our estrangement and an attempt at our reunion, a moment made particularly odd when I noticed, as Janice closed the door and smiled at me in a kind of tentative way, that she had the Beretta in her hand, dangling it loosely toward the floor. Holding the little potted tree in front of my chest with both hands, I said, “Hi.”

“Hi,” she said in a cheerful but subdued way, as if we both were hiding our emotions, planning on bringing them out one by one, but guarding them now.

“You have a gun,” I said.

“You have a tree,” she replied, smiling at the Norfolk
pine and then at me, where my face was visible behind the tree.

“Are you going to shoot me?”

Her smile became a little more serious now, and she shook her head from side to side. “No,” she said dreamily, as if remembering something far away. I wondered if it was me, right there but so distant I was gone. “I invited you here for dinner and to talk. I think it would be impolite to shoot you.”

“Why are you holding the gun?”

“Oh,” she said, lightly laughing at herself. “I guess it does look threatening. I'm sort of absentminded for some reason. Before you got here and I was straightening up, I put some papers in the desk drawer and saw the gun. I took it out because my father said I need to clean it sometime. And then you were here. What are you doing with that tree?”

“It's for you. I thought of getting you some flowers but
all
men bring flowers to women, and I never do what all men do. So I got you a tree. It's a Norfolk pine. I'll give you this tree if you put the gun away. Or, you could just rob me.”

“How much money do you have?”

“About twenty-five dollars.”

“That's not enough for a good robbery,” she said, walking to the desk to put the gun away. “Do I still get the tree?”

“Yes. Do you like Norfolk pines?”

“They're beautiful. And why do you want me to have a tree?” she said as she took the tree from my hands and carried it to the end of the couch, placing it on the floor there.

“I want to be nice to you. I want to stop hurting you, and I want to be forgiven, if that's possible, and I realize it might not be. I want this maddening pain to end for both of us and to be your lover and your friend again, or at least your friend, if nothing else is possible. So I got you a tree. Even if you don't keep me, you get to keep the tree.”

She was turned sideways in the room, staring down at the tree and holding her fingers to her cheeks as if thinking again of something that wasn't there. Something was gone. Me, it seemed.

“What do you mean it might not be possible to be forgiven?” she said in a puzzled and somewhat irritated voice, still staring at the tree. “Are you realizing my choices for me, in case I won't do that? I get to think up all my choices.”

“I didn't mean . . .”

“Don't tell me what you didn't mean. Tell me what you
did
mean. If I don't keep you, I still get the tree?” she said curiously, not looking at me yet.

“It was a joke.”

“Your choices are so limited. You, or a tree. Maybe I'll just keep the tree. All I have to do is water it and give it light. Maintaining you is a lot harder,” she said, walking
into the kitchen to look at something in a pan on the stove. “I have my tree. You can go, now.”

Without knowing how, we'd confused and deepened our pain. What was supposed to have been our reunion dinner resulted in my being replaced by a tree. This silliness was starting to hurt too much. I thought that whatever I'd say next would be wrong, and whatever I didn't say would also be wrong. Janice poured herself a glass of red wine and took a big drink, which I knew was meant to relax her. I didn't get to relax.

“I'd give you some wine, but you don't drink,” she said in a quiet and calm voice, still not looking at me as she held a wooden spoon and slowly stirred the sauce or something in the pan. “How are you doing?”

“Fine.”

“No. You're not. We're having a fight.”

“I know. I wish we'd have something else. I went to an AA meeting a few nights ago.”

“You did?”

“I was afraid I might go buy some beer, or I was at least thinking of it, not very seriously, so I went to the AA meeting.”

“How was it?”

“It was pretty casual. They let a bunch of alcoholics in.”

She looked over at me curiously. It seemed like she was going to smile but decided against it, then resumed not looking at me and stirring whatever was in the pan. I kept
standing in front of the coffee table, right where I'd been when I handed her the tree, as if nothing was safe or known or proper enough for me to move, like I might have to leave suddenly because I didn't belong there anymore, or because we were so hurt, it wouldn't be right to sit down and be comfortable, but it wouldn't be right to walk into the kitchen and be near her, because it was being decided if we could have each other. She opened a cabinet and got a glass out. I watched her the way you might watch a priest or a doctor at work, as if every movement was a crucial and precise act leading to a new future controlled by them. She opened the freezer and put ice into the glass. She opened the refrigerator and took out a big bottle of Coke, then unscrewed the cap and filled the glass with Coke.

“Come get your Coke,” she said, holding the glass out to me and making me walk into the kitchen to be near her. I wouldn't look at her eyes, as if that were too private, an intimate privilege I'd lost. I took the glass from her hand, being careful not to touch her fingers. She put her other hand on my chest, just lightly resting the palm of her hand and her fingers on my chest. I was glad, but didn't know if I should say so. Everything I did was a potential error, one more being enough to hurt her again and make her decide to get rid of me. The way we were now, I was already gone. We were in the same room together, but missing. She patted my chest and turned around to study things on the stove. It was tomato sauce.

“I'll tell you what hurt me,” she said, and sipped some
red wine. “You didn't even think, when you wrote your story, that my job mattered or that you could have an effect on me. You did what you often do at work, which was to take an entire story and its relevant facts, which you got correctly, and reduce them to a form of amusement for yourself. I know that's your style, and sometimes you do it brilliantly, but sometimes things are more
important
than that and don't deserve to be just one more witty, sardonic amusement for yourself. And especially
me
, Kurt,” she said, stopping to scrape some tomato sauce from the sides of the pan with the wooden spoon. “You weren't writing about some abstract, remote meeting, or a government policy or some high-altitude bureaucrats you'd never even see so it didn't
matter
what you said about them or how you subtly or blatantly constructed a description to have fun. You were writing about
me
, Kurt. My job. My career. My concerns, and
my
goddamn emotions. But you couldn't tell it when the story came out. When I picked that paper up and read the first line, it was like I was being attacked and ridiculed by you,” she said, stirring the tomato sauce a little more violently.

“Of course you weren't de
libe
rately attacking me, but it was almost worse than that because you'd obviously written something funny and potentially damaging without even guessing I could feel this way. You de
meaned
,” she said, creating little waves of red sauce in the pan, “my work, my responsibilities and me. And to you, it was an innocent
amusement. AIDS research compared to breakfast at Shoney's?” she said contemptuously, whacking the spoon on the edge of the pan to dislodge a gob of tomato sauce. “When did a fatal epidemic become funny, Kurt? And why was my job just a goddamn occasion for you to be clever?”

There was nothing to defend. I was guilty. My impulse was to be punished as long as she felt I deserved it. She looked back angrily at me, as if my silence was a new offense.

“Aren't you going to talk?” she said.

“No. I can't defend myself because you're right. I stupidly hurt you without realizing it could happen. Your criticisms are completely correct and fair. I was a self-willed, witless son of a bitch.”

“Yes, you were,” she said, and began stirring the sauce even though it was already stirred and almost frothy. “And what should I do now? Forgive you because that would be nice? I don't feel like being nice. I feel hurt and cheated, like you didn't take me any more seriously than just a fortunate excuse for being funny. I exist too, goddamn you. All of my emotions and impulses are there just as strongly as yours, and I'm
not
some piece of material to be toyed with in a goddamn story. I don't think I want a lover who has to be reminded that I'm real.”

This scared me.

“Are you leaving me?” I said quietly.

She stopped stirring the tomato sauce and sighed.
“I'm not leaving you. I'm fixing
dinner.
If I were leaving you, I wouldn't feed you, you idiot. Do you think I'm such a nice woman that I'd give you an I'm-Leaving-You dinner? Good God. And quit standing behind me so quietly like a prisoner about to be killed. If I wanted to kill you, I would've shot you at the door. At least tell me you're sorry.”

I walked behind her and leaned my face against her head. “I'm sorry.”

Reaching behind her, she put her arm around my neck as if to hug me, then increased the pressure enough to begin lightly choking me against her shoulder.

“You really hurt me,” she said quietly as she choked me.

“I didn't mean to. I can't be forgiven if you choke me to death.”

“I'm not squeezing that hard yet,” she said, holding me to her affectionately enough to make unconsciousness seem imminent.

C
hristopher met me at the Same Place bar in Hampton to warn me that the qualities that made me valuable were also the ones that would make me fail. But first he decided to ridicule me for not drinking bourbon, like him, because I ordered a cup of coffee from the bartender.

“I'm embarrassed to be seen with you. It's un-American to drink coffee in a bar,” he said, playfully chiding me, without having any idea that I'd lived in a disabling panic for two days when I quit drinking.

“I'm not an American. I was born in Texas,” I said.

He sighed and scowled at me and my coffee, saying, “What are you, a born-again, charismatic, viper-fondling Christian?”

“I don't join clubs.”

He nodded his head approvingly, then lit a Pall Mall from the butt of the Pall Mall he hadn't finished smoking. Swallowing his double bourbon in two gulps, he ordered another one by holding up his index finger toward the bartender. Once he had his new drink and took a sizable sip, reminding me of the pleasure of alcohol rapidly poisoning your brain so that whatever hurt you seemed absent, when, really, it was just some of your consciousness going away, I said, “So is this a meeting or what?”

“Sort of,” he said. “I just called you here to warn you about yourself. You're doing a good enough job as a reporter it could fling you entirely out of this profession.”

“What's that mean?”

“It means a lot. I think when I hired you, I remember saying something like there's something wrong with you. It might be valuable.”

“Yes, and why are you warning me about myself?”

“Well, it's not something you don't already know about, Kurt. Practically everything that makes you valuable as a reporter is precisely what most editors loathe, particularly Perrault. Most newspaper editors think of the readers as dull mammals with a single impulse to acquire facts, and a fact is any knowledge generally robbed of its complexity and undecorated with any emotion or irony or humanness. A true journalist, which you're incapable of
being, always tries to write a story as if simple factuality is all that matters. You're not a true journalist. I don't know
what
you are.”

“A vertebrate.”

Christopher sniffed his bourbon audibly, like a dog or a cat exploring for food, then took a big sip and stared off at three young women together at a table.

“Perrault despises you,” he said.

“Despises? He doesn't know me well enough for that much emotion,” I said.

“He doesn't need to know you at all, and wishes you were gone,” Christopher said in his normal voice, without urgency or much emotion.

“Why does it matter that he despises me?”

“Yesterday when he was pissed off at virtually every story you've done in the last two months, like the Nicklai Indian episode, he called me into his office and asked why I hired you.”

“What'd you tell him?”

He took another big sip of bourbon. “I told him you had substantial reporting experience, nothing excellent, but sound experience. And I told him you were a genuine writer, someone who knows why we even bother to put a single sentence on a page.”

I nodded my head. “The reason we put a single sentence on a page is because most readers think
two
sentences is too much to read.”

“And Perrault said he thinks you're a self-willed, arrogant butthead,” Christopher said.

We were both quiet, wondering about that description.

“What do I do that he hates the most?” I said.

“Work on his paper,” Christopher said.

“And why should I care? Can he comfortably despise me for months and months, growing accustomed to my intolerable existence?”

“No. He won't change, and you won't change. Or will you? To please Perrault, all you have to do is make every story as mundane as possible, showing no trace of yourself and a subservient adherence to that popular distortion of reality known as traditional journalism.”