Love & Darts (9781937316075) (2 page)

She didn’t really invite him. And he didn’t
exactly say he’d come. But there he was at her place without the
music that probably should have been playing. Not long. The girl he
found under a night-lit skylight came back with ginger vodka
drinks, an unnecessary seduction. And so these two were socially
imperative like that for an hour before the start-gate release of
their mutual moving on. One of them giggled. The other,
respectfully, pretended it hadn’t just happened. She straddled him,
leaned forward, kissed him, kissed his neck. He lifted her up,
turned her around, pulled her back down onto his lap and pressed
his hand into everything he didn’t think was exactly perfect.

An hour and forty-five minutes ago the
bartender’s finger hovered over the button that controlled the
totalizer system. She’d accidentally—well, so what if it were
staged?—elbowed the oil rig man in the ribs. But hard enough to
force a conversation at an Irish pub when she got bored with the
practiced words of student lawyers. God. She tired of those lofty
boys’ aspirations, their talk of how it all should be—how it would
all have to be—and so she turned on their convictions, gravitated
toward this other man in jeans and an undisclosed smile.

This guy wasn’t so sure of how things should
be—would all have to be—or at least he didn’t say. He just reached
one hand out to her hip, put his fingers down into her waistband,
bent his arm so she stepped forward between his knees while he put
his other hand around her back, pulled her in even closer and said,
“Hi.” She said, “Not really.” So he didn’t ask any more questions.
He’d been practicing his story and told her he tied oil rigs to the
ocean floor with heat enough to weld what’s desired to what’s real.
She didn’t understand. It was his job to dive over oil under the
sea and join steel to steel two hundred feet down in the black.

He made promises easily like a man who never
took physics in high school. But not to her. There was no point.
She didn’t want or expect any of that. So he didn’t bother. He just
laughed for the girl he found in the bar, broad telling of his
eight weeks with the winter ocean’s twenty-five-foot swells, how
those furious, feminine seas could very likely scour him off with
their daily washing. “You get pretty knocked around. Gotta be
tethered or you’re gone.”

She pretended not to notice or care.

He showed her, demonstrated the harness that
held him and mimed the length that tied him to the rig. He told her
about being sealed skin to soul by that North Sea’s frigid wanting.
A man of faith—two hundred feet down in the black. Just a man, a
steel-making man, on the water all winter, robbing the layered sea
floor. So what? Why should she be impressed? That woman—young
woman—was not the North Sea, not the water, not anything to tether
himself to. She was the way he used to be: quiet, nostalgic, and
true. But now he’s less easily baited. He’s
heavenly-ride-the-rode-down-bluebell and Honduras blends whiskey,
too.

New Orleans, a port city, still rocks and
sways with him as he shows her the ashes of the Irish owner behind
the bar, asks about her travels, her school, her
under-the-water-pressured lubrication, asks—with final kindness—if
she’d like a beer. Laughing hard, with his hands on this small
out-of-town girl (refusing to be scoured off) she says yes. It is
the only answer. Two hundred feet of foregone conclusion wrap him
desultorily without words and yet, she drifts free—when anyone
knows oil is best suited for floating. Like you, she’s been told
that babies will wake her in the morning part of the night. Funny
how people will pay to let you borrow their children for a while.
But there is nothing to babysit underneath the sea. That man lives
in relief, opposite, pressured from all sides by our foundations:
oil, steel, the ocean floor. So she knows in the morning she will
wake up and ask him to leave. Sometimes—never when she waits—her
mind reels hapless in possibility.

But this time she will not let it.

Even under the North Sea’s mighty pressured
weight, he’ll disrespect her repression, override her compression.
He’ll steel-make and can rise up—with a flame down deep—drilling
oil for freighters to drink. So neither of the two of them takes
bars and beer for granted. They say nothing and let their eyes
work. In her mind she explores his deep sea diving welds and lets
him come up through it all covered in oil. And for him she goes
down into everything, into the sea changed, thinking of him there,
two hundred feet down in the black.

“We can walk to my place from here.” She
will never admit to being a power-monger, a tyrant, but his telling
her no is unacceptable.

They’re at her front door again—right before
she held his hand and led him down that shotgun hallway to begin
their awkward-fondling preliminary hour of what would be their
fifteen-minute forever. And they both see it on the porch:
everything that will happen in an hour. There’s no power of
attorney. A simple consent is all that’s necessary for his body,
riding an eddy current and sloshing over some forgotten bank, to be
never so golden-gilt or at all, so easy does the wick go free.

They’re inside the apartment. Her eyes flick
quickly, realizing what a mess she’s about to bring him into but he
sees nothing. She knows everything that’s not good enough. Not him.
Not the door. Not the scented amber candle on the speaker, the one
she’s about to ask if he’d like for her to light. Not the belts and
bras hanging from their hooks in her bathroom that she should have
put away. Not the dracaena growing tall in the window. Not the
catcher’s mitt on the floor. Not the rumpled clothes burying a red
rocking chair. Not the TV stand where the pepper grinder’s left
forgotten. Not the unopened stack of mail shifting, losing its
balance on the desk. Not the beach hats rarely worn or her
grandmother’s heirloom painting where a tugboat forever pulls a man
on a barge over silk-rippling waters. Her eyes flick on,
wishful-cleaning as they go.

They have to get through this hour to get to
the well of not wanting more. Neither of them is dutiful. They just
wait it out. Hoping one will go for the other as soon as possible.
His gaze is upon her and then—because she seems so nervous—he takes
it off her again and plants both eyes upon the man in the painting
who is standing on the barge with his back to the painter. He
doesn’t admit a knowledge of art but wonders what it is to feel a
ruddy perennially burning sun through that sweaty, dingy oil-canvas
t-shirt and half-dry pair of pants. What kind of forever would it
be to stand on the stillness of a moving barge that’s being towed
by a tugboat through a painting? Why paint a person backwards like
that with one arm up, untired, waving to someone else hidden in the
trees on the far side of the river? He doesn’t care and his eyes
are upon her again.

Somehow the hour passes. Twenty minutes in,
she takes the vodka and ginger glasses to the sink and finds three
cans of beer in her crisper. She shouts a question from the
kitchen. He says not to worry about it. He’s got a condom.

Forty minutes in she’s less nervous and
notices him looking at the painting again, says, “Do you think he’s
leaving or just arrived? Waving like that?”

Fifty minutes in, he smiles to her and,
again, for the last time, it’s already happened right there before
everything. With nine minutes left he puts his hand on her thigh.
At five he takes her to the floor. He is a river between them with
that eddying-dentist’s-drill way of going on carving away the soft
easy places to rush through. And finally he falls on her, kissing
on and on without malice.

She didn’t ever ask what music he likes.
Didn’t figure she’d want to listen to it for that hour, sitting
together, quiet on a blue corduroy couch with two threadbare
cushions and a pristine third. She didn’t even bother to turn on
the TV.

For those dredged minutes of putting off
passion, she stared at all her electronics and was igneous.
Stillness left of heat and motion. Her silent mouth echoed with
gunshots and doom in that cavity fortified by a perimeter of teeth.
But they didn’t need to talk. If some hinged midnight swung open
and crashed complex over the minds of any willing listeners
begotten of forgotten mothers, could there have been a
resurrection? No. The hour goes by and the clothes get lost with
everything else that’s not good enough. They’re finally sweating
naked without having to get through undoing anything. His nature,
with one foot on the floor, two hands against the wall and his
common ground inside her own, seems all the more damned. As if
fright and courage were not twins, as if breath were not divided by
passion held, and as if bright harnessed lives did night sing.

But yes, worth everything, his shoulders rub
her harder-to-reach, harder-to-understand solid ways of loving
until they shine, polished wet and recede, giving out and arriving,
filling some flood plain, some untouched me-part of both-them, some
world so often dry, now saturated and ready for continual living.
Under that patient fury; his waterway; his easy-to-abandon God.

At eleven o’clock that morning she asked me to take
her for a drive.

I held her too tightly walking out of the restaurant
and back to the car, I remember that. So I guess I sort of knew.
But not really. Not like she did.

She knew.

I know she knew.

My Grandma Charlottie was sweet, skinny, sinewy,
white, sleeves-rolled-up, slow-walking, tobacco-spit-sprayed
pants—I don’t even know how that happened—and a kind of
full-upper-body head-turn that’s hard to believe. God damn. She was
tiny. But sometimes she’d look at you like she was about to haul
off and whack you with a remote control before she’d smile and walk
away like nothing ever happened.

I’d been thinking about whether or not to refurbish
the utility room. I don’t know who did the sheet metal work in
there but the seams are opening up. No matter how high we set the
thermostat that furnace can’t warm up any room for all the heat
that escapes.

When she asked to go for that drive she hadn’t been
in a car in eight months. My dumb ass took it as a sign of
improvement. I said, “Sure. Where you wanna go, Grandma?”

I used to pick up the prescriptions after her
radiation treatments. I remember waiting for something called Magic
Mouthwash. The girl in the pharmacy said it would take a little
longer because they have to mix it up special. I said, “What’s in
it?” The girl—she wasn’t really pretty or anything—said, “Something
to coat the ulcerations. Something else to numb the whole area. She
can use it every few hours. Whenever she feels her throat burn.” I
said, “Fine. I’ll wait.”

And I did. I was patient. Read an
issue of
Car &
Driver
. I remember that’s when I called my
friend back about the job in his garage—not that I want to put
tires on cars my whole life. But. It’s good money for a while and
he didn’t do a credit check. Anyway.

She hadn’t been in a car in eight months and then
she said, “Take me up 421. Would you, please?”

Polite and poor. That’s what the minister should
have said in her eulogy. Not that twenty-minute story about her
going to Duluth for a typing job for two months. Who gives a shit
about Duluth? That wasn’t her. That’s only two months. The rest of
the time she was here, with us.

But I’m glad we went for that drive.

Her shirt was covered with her own blood spat out
and dried up. But there was no other shirt. Mom put ‘em all away
when we thought hospice was a place she had to go. So I didn’t say
she should change. Grandma’s bare arm was thin and the skin
gathered at her elbow and again at her wrist. Weird skin. Kind of
yellow. Almost like you could see through it. I wasn’t thinking
when I grabbed for her sweater. I forgot it only had one sleeve
because my sister cut the other one off to start making an afghan.
Well. It would have been a nice afghan if she didn’t give up trying
to do a whole blanket to help keep Grandma warm, if there was more
time, more yarn.

Grandma Charlottie pretended not to notice the
cockroaches running in all directions when I picked up her
sweater.

I pretended not to notice, too. Just shook it real
good.

And I guess I was sort of pissed about there only
being one sleeve when I helped her put it on. I was mainly pissed
at myself for forgetting. But then I was pissed at my sister for
even trying to make an afghan out of her favorite sweater. Grandma
just went ahead and let me put that one-armed sweater on her, you
know, went through the motions, seemed not to notice what was
undone and missing.

We had the heat on because she was always cold. Even
that morning. Even though it was summer. Damn ducts in the bedroom
need to be repaired, too. I shifted my weight back and forth while
I helped her with the sweater. I could feel a stream of hot air
coming through a crack in the metal. I’d move my body into it so I
could feel it on my head and then move it back to get away.