Shaking out the Dead (13 page)

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The background bustle of the coffee shop moved to the pulse of the offbeat syncopation and upstroke strumming of Bob Marley and the Wailers, giving rise to a collective groove. The hum of voices and the hum of thought laid down tracks. Rehashings of the night before. Pointless conversations serving no purpose but to hear the sound of another's voice meeting with one's own, spinning what nonsense one could from found threads of thought. Rachael and Geneva sat in their booth making their contribution. Rachael dawdled over a list of professions while Geneva reworked the words on her yellow pad:

Geneva considered her thesis. To which group should she pledge allegiance? Looking to the past, the cause in her situation would be her own behavior. Hump your veggie husband, and you'll pay the piper. But what if her situation was not the effect but the cause, the precursor to the unforeseen? The latter, Geneva thought, had the distinctly better ring.

“You know what rationalization is?” she asked Rachael.

Rachael looked up from her page.

“It's trying to convince yourself of something,” Geneva said. “But at the same time, you kind of know it isn't true.”

“Like lying, but pretending you're not?”

Geneva laughed.

“Is there any other way to lie?”

Rachael returned to her own page while Geneva considered rationalization. Was it a lie, or simply psychological opportunism, finding the philosophy that casts one in her best light and adopting it as her own? Why not choose that which offers salvation? The religions all knew it. Salvation sells.

But then, she thought, what is a philosophy, or religion for that matter, but a frame, illuminating some data while discounting other. Turn the frame cockeyed, and one's god or theory collapses. They're all just lenses, she thought. Looking through them, you can frame your world but not create it.
That
required a different tool altogether.

Geneva thought she was onto something. She positioned her pen. But then, on the right side of her body, the surface of her skin began to tingle as something not material pressed up against her like breath. Her eyes lifted to meet the presence.

“May I?”

It was the man Geneva had made eye contact with earlier. Broad-chested and over six feet tall, he wore Carharts, no belt, and a black T-shirt. He smelled, at once, of flesh-heat and winter. His hair was gray and neatly cut. His beard, salt and pepper.

“Just for a second,” he said, sitting down sideways on the edge of the booth on Rachael's side. His body language was of a temporary sit down, no intention of intruding.

Geneva instinctively calculated his age. Fifty-eight? Seventy? Rachael sucked in her lower lip and looked at him.

“You're Belinda?” he said to Geneva. He looked like a giant beside Rachael.

“Guilty.”

He gave a brief nod as though he had confirmed something with himself. He pulled the latest
Messenger
out from under his arm.

“I like what you wrote this week,” he said, dropping it onto the table.

Geneva didn't need to refresh her memory. She hadn't considered it her best work. Not even original. Someone had written,
how does one get past envy?
She had replied:
See your good as tied up with theirs.

“You could save the world with that one,” he said.

“Ah, but who listens?” Geneva shrugged.

“You haven't spent a lot of time twiddling your thumbs, have you?”

Geneva laughed, embarrassed and flattered by the question. She spoke in her best Belinda voice.

“One person's thumb twiddling is another's search for enlightenment.”

His blue eyes sparkled, but it was the least of their charm. The sparkle was icing. The cake was experience and the source of the light.

“I like what you think about,” he said.

He placed a large, calloused hand flat on the table between them.

“Anyway,” he said. He took a sidelong glance at Rachael.

“Granddaughter?”

Geneva hesitated, realizing that he was flirting. He had found a reason not to leave.

“She's . . .” Geneva stumbled on the words. “This is a friend of mine.” She withheld Rachael's name for prudence's sake. You never know for sure who the ax murderers are. “I'm Geneva,” she said, willing to take the hit herself.

“John.”

He extended a hand across the table. Geneva met it with a single squeeze. It was rough and seemed, somehow, to need tasting to appreciate. Her mouth watered.

“What are you working on?” John asked Rachael.

Rachael was quiet for a second and Geneva thought maybe shy.

“Homework,” Geneva said, but then Rachael jumped in, as though to prove she could speak for herself.

“I have to tell my teacher what I want to be when I grow up.”

“I see,” he said. He perused her list from his side view. “Can I write down a suggestion?”

Rachael let him take her pencil and notebook. He was a lefty and wrapped his arm across the page. He finished and slid it back to her. Rachael read it and made a face. Geneva leaned over and read it upside-down. It said, “quite a character.”

“A noble goal,” Geneva said.

“Well, Belinda,” he said, getting ready to move on. “I mean, Geneva.”

Geneva sensed a “wait” fumbling around inside of her, some reason that would reel him back to the table, but there was none. She looked over her shoulder as he walked to the back of the coffee shop. He stole a look over his shoulder, too, busting her.

Geneva turned back around. Her senses felt shuffled. Rachael raised her brows.

“What?” Geneva said.

But Tatum suddenly slid into the booth on Rachael's side. She put an arm around her. Rachael tolerated it.

“Got your birthday cake,” she said. “Yours, too,” she said to Geneva. She had brought with her the scent of the cold, just as John had. Geneva had never noticed before how the cold works like a perfume, mixing uniquely with each body's chemistry.

“It's getting wetter out,” Tatum said. “How's the homework going?” she said to Rachael.

Rachael leaned back, away from her notebook.

“Photographer, cook,” Tatum said, reading the list. “Helping dead people?” She looked at Rachael, then Geneva.

“We were talking about people's jobs. Yours, Paris's,” Geneva said. “We talked about Vincent's.”

“Oh,” Tatum said. “Well, don't forget Paris is an artist too. Not just a cook.” Then, she squinted at the notebook, “‘Quite a character'?” she said, pointing to the strange handwriting.

“We got some outside help,” Geneva said.

“That's what I want to be,” Tatum said.

Rachael shut her notebook.

“I think I'm just going to say I want to be a veterinarian.”

Geneva sent them on their way, refusing a ride. She was glad to see them go. She checked over her shoulder again, but John was gone. There was a back door. He must've left through the alley. She drank the last of her chocolate, cold now, and doodled on the corner of her pad the same daisy that she'd been doodling since childhood. That man, John, had perked up something in her that she hadn't had perked in a while. But now, she felt a malaise creeping back in. She recognized the malaise as a lamenting of the perklessness it had forced her to admit.

Desire. Buddha said to forsake it. But Geneva begged to differ. Desire drove the planets and all of evolution. The universe, she knew, expands for the same reason people do. Desire. The desire for more. To be more.

She gathered her things, put on her coat, and paid at the register. Wet snow fell on her as she made her way back through the downtown. As she passed the Chairman of the Board, she considered the likely verdict of the Board of Parkview Homes. They would seek a solution, not justice. She made her prediction: monitored visits. A slap on the wrist to a horny old lady. A bone thrown to the social worker who was indeed just doing her job.

But the thought slowed Geneva's steps. She had assumed she would endure the sentence and do what one must for those she loves. But if that's what her future held, she found the steps suddenly harder to take. She came to an awkward stop on the sidewalk in front of a pawnshop with a used drum kit in the front window.

Move
, she told herself but found her legs uncooperative. She knew she could insist, force one foot in front of the other, but she found herself reluctant to override their judgment. Weariness washed over her. She gazed through the pawnshop window and her heart skipped when she noticed a gray head, mistaking it, for just a moment, for John.

She forced herself forward. She continued to walk, but slowly. The rain-like snow fell on her face and lashes, unsure of what it wanted to be, resisting the choice. Geneva looked up into it, squinting as it came down upon her. She wondered which way it would tip.

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Paris scowled, something he rarely did. He was looking forward to seeing Tatum but dreading it, too. Desire had hijacked the good. The good was no longer good enough. Shadows came and went on the melting snow as he passed beneath the trees on his way to the party. Wind chimes tinged softly, barely disturbed by a movement of the air. Loosened snow slipped from branches, and gutters dripped. The afternoon was unusually warm. El Niño pushed the mercury into the fifties. Bad news for the snow pack, but good news for a winter barbecue.

As he walked, Paris recalled what Tatum had asked of him when she returned from her sister's funeral. The scene had not unfolded as he had dreamed. He had imagined her, rumpled and road-weary, showing up at his door unannounced in her khaki coat. He would know by the look in her eye. Death. Loss. Mortality. It would've burned away trivial fears and doubts born of prudence and cleared the way for a new kiss, one that, this time, would take.

But she did not show up at his door. She called and asked him to meet her at the Grounds. She introduced him to Rachael over coffee and hot chocolate. When Rachael went to the counter for napkins, Tatum leaned in with a quick explanation of a runaway father and uncertainty as to whether the situation was temporary or permanent. Her forehead wrinkled above olive-colored eyes.

“I've got a kid now,” she said. “You will still be my friend?”

That is what she had asked of him. To be her friend. Not to try to kiss her again. Not to put his hand out for more.

“Of course,” he had said.

Quietly, he kicked himself. It was his lesson to learn, over and over. Stop wishing, willing, and wanting.

It was not religion that drove his aversion to desire. Not Buddhism with its well-known indictment of desire as the root of all suffering. For Paris, the aversion was an ancient one, born in childhood. After so many years, it was no longer a decision but a pattern of the psyche and a habit of the heart. It had served a purpose once. It had helped him flee the guidance counselors and standardized tests that kept telling him to want more, to be more. It had helped him slip through the arms of his mother, single and full of frustrated dreams for him. He had run from encouragement and the debt it seemed to him to imply. He did not want to stand, back to a wall, measuring himself against some mark he was supposed to reach, wondering every day whether he was up or down.

Besides, it seemed to him that love and desire could never share the same moment. Though often mistaken for each other, they were, in fact, mutually exclusive. To want and to have were separate experiences.

He turned up the walk of the duplex carrying the pan of cornbread he had made the night before at work. He opened the front door and entered the foyer. Cautiously, he rapped his knuckles on Tatum's door as he pushed it open.

Tatum poked her head out of the kitchen.

“Hey,” she said. “I'm just cutting up a few vegetables. Everyone's out back.”

She wore a cream-colored cable sweater and a long, lavender skirt made of a rough and heavy cotton. She turned and headed back into the kitchen. Paris followed, watching the silhouette of her hips. He slid into one of the chairs at the tiny kitchen table and pushed aside Tatum's black gloves and hat to make room for the cornbread. Tatum's back was to him. She stood at the sink over a colander of portabellas.

“Tatum,” he said.

“Yes?”

He wished she had answered, “Paris” like she used to. Sometimes, it had been all they said, the entirety of an exchange. “Tatum.” “Paris.” They would remark on the fact of each other, and it was enough. But Tatum had pulled back from him. Maybe it was Rachael. Maybe it was that she could sense he wanted more. He wasn't sure.

“I've been thinking about something,” he said.

“What's that?” She turned off the faucet.

He had been thinking of Tatum while serving his 2 a.m. patrons, the women. He'd been wondering why Linda, who to him always looked hungry, would never accept his soup. The question formulated in the night. He had decided to bring it to Tatum, lay it before her, and see if they could talk like they used to.

He cleared his throat.

“If a person was told hunger was love,” he said, “do you think she would choose not to eat, or not to love?”

Tatum's head came up. She wiped her hands on a towel that hung on the oven handle. She spoke each word carefully. “If a person was told hunger equals love,” she repeated.

“Would she choose not to eat?” Paris said.

“So she'd feel love.”

“Or would she choose not to love?”

“So she wouldn't feel hungry.” Tatum leaned with her back to the sink. “What you're asking,” she said, “is that if you learn that love hurts, will you avoid love? I think the answer is yes.”

“Yeah,” Paris said. “But I think there's another side to it. Would it also be that if you learned love hurts, will something not feel like love unless it hurts?”

Paris sensed a bristling in her, an ever so slight backing away from the moment.

“Talk about a lose-lose,” she said. She pulled a cutting board down from its nail.

Paris swallowed the silence that followed. In the past, he would've let the question sit with her, trusting gaps in the conversation to be contemplation. But silences that once were full now felt strained, like something was missing.

The kiss was missing.

“I brought cornbread,” he said to fill the hole.

Tatum looked over her shoulder and smiled.

The urge pressed on him, as it had more often of late, to tell Tatum he saw the topless picture. Betrayal requires intimacy, and its fact might close the distance, if even for a moment.

“How's Rachael?” he said instead.

Tatum patted down the mushrooms with a paper towel.

“‘How's Rachael?'” she said, repeating the question to herself. “Let's put it this way, given the choice, I'd hope she would choose not to love.”

Paris noticed her freeze. She then shook her head, as though disappointed with herself.

“I don't mean that,” she said. “It's just that Lee hasn't called yet. I hope he remembers to call today.”

Paris pressed his lips together and nodded.

“What did you get her for her birthday?” he asked.

“Film, some picture frames, a set of maracas.”

“Maracas?”

“Not good?”

“No. It's good. I think it's fine.”

Tatum drew a knife from the block and placed it on the cutting board. Paris reached for her again with words.

“How's all the mother-stuff coming along?” he asked.

Tatum dumped the mushrooms onto the cutting board.

“I'm not a mother,” she said. “No one, certainly not Rachael, is under the impression that I am. But it's good.” She paused, holding the knife. “Weird, too.”

“Weird how?”

“Well,” she said, proceeding to slice, “it's like I'm responsible for my moods now. I need to be something other than I am for someone else, which feels . . . dishonest? And yet, the right thing to do.” She put down the knife and dumped the mushrooms into a bowl. “Sometimes, I think I should just be myself and hope that's the best example. But shouldn't I be trying to make things better? At the same time, though, I have no illusions that I have the power to fix the thing that's been broken.” She laughed. “How's that for an answer?”

The front door creaked open, and Geneva's cat, Voodoo, pushed through, tail in the air and walking high on his toes. He made his way to the kitchen, confident of a warm reception. He leapt onto Paris's lap.

“So, you're wondering if you should pretend everything's okay for Rachael's sake,” Paris said.

“Right.”

“Maybe everything is okay.”

“Now you sound like Geneva.”

Paris stroked Voodoo's back. Tatum poured salad dressing over the mushrooms and tossed them.

“You know,” she said, “Vincent once said something like, it's dangerous to want to affect someone's life. It gives that person too much power.”

Paris furrowed his brow.

“
Dangerous
,” he said, as though this were the key word. “Dangerous for whom?”

“For the person trying to do the affecting,” she said. “Anyway, if my job is to try to help her feel better, which means different than she does, I'm completely inadequate for the job. I've never tried to change my own feelings. How would I know how to change someone else's?”

Paris pursed his lips.

“So you just let her be sad?” he said.

“Sometimes,” she said. “Probably most of the time. Is that bad?”

“I don't know if there's a right and a wrong.”

“But there's better and worse.”

Paris considered Rachael. She had exactly what he wanted: Tatum. And Tatum was concerned that she wasn't enough.

Voodoo leapt from his lap. Tatum looked over her shoulder and saw Paris's inward focus.

“What is it?” she said.

Paris hesitated. He drew himself up in the chair and took a deep breath.

“I threw away all my drawings,” he said.

Tatum stopped her work at the sink. She turned to face him. She crossed her arms over her chest.

Paris put up a hand as if to say it's not important. Not the point.

“It was months ago,” he said. “The point is, sometimes I find my attention on the drawer. I've even opened it and looked inside. I haven't started using it for something else. I don't know,” he said. “What I think I'm trying to say is, for some reason, things that aren't there are sometimes treated as more important than things that are.”

Tatum continued to look at him with concern.

“Like Rachael's parents, for her,” he said. He poked with one finger the foil that covered the cornbread. “Maybe, for you, like Vincent.”

The comment hit some brake, brought the room to a standstill. Paris knew he had been obtuse, but he hadn't done it on purpose. He had been trying to say too many things at once. He wanted her to know of his own difficulty appreciating what they had together instead of wishing for more. But it was also true that he wanted her to know: Vincent was gone, but he was right here.

The moment could tip either way. The distinction between hope and fear is a fine one. If you fall to the side of hope, you keep falling. That's the attraction of fear. With fear, you get to land.

“You think I spend more time thinking about Vincent than paying attention to Rachael?” Tatum said, landing squarely. “I don't.”

Paris was surprised at the meaning she took from it. Apparently, him in that role, Vincent's role, could not even occur to her.

“That's not what I meant,” he said. “I don't think that.”

Tatum turned her back to him and busied herself with cleaning up.

“I don't think that,” Paris repeated.

He picked up his cornbread and headed down the hall for the back door. His heart banged in his chest.
You idiot, you idiot,
he repeated in his head. At the back door, he paused with his hand on the knob. His mind scrambled for a buoy, something solid to take hold of. Simple things. His job. His apartment. The women that crept to his counter as if out from parallel universes. The world belonged to itself. Not to him.
Let it be.

But he turned to go back to the kitchen not knowing why. He took two steps and ran smack into Tatum coming around the corner.

“I'm freaking,” she said.

“Me, too.”

“Are we good?” Tatum asked. “I need us to be good.”

“We're good.”

There had been the one kiss in the park, but no others. Though they were friends, they had not been the sort that hugged in their comings and goings. Each other's presence, not body, had been each other's comfort. They looked at each other, relieved, but still frightened. It was not clear what arrived where first, but Paris's free arm wrapped around Tatum while he held the cornbread in the other. Tatum's forehead rested on his shoulder. Then they stepped apart, weak smiles all around.

“I'll be right out,” Tatum said, looking at the ground. She turned and returned to the kitchen.

Let it be
, Paris counseled himself to keep from following her back up the hall.
Let it be good
.

He stepped through the back door, and eyes turned to meet him in greeting. Geneva was starting up the gas grill. Her neighbor, Ron, the old librarian, was just breaking through the hedge, wearing a yellow fleece pullover and carrying a ceramic tray. Rachael stomped on a thin sheet of ice, freeing the water beneath. Paris placed the cornbread on the card table and took a seat on the steps he had just come down, a twin to the steps that led to the patio from Geneva's back door.

Rachael hadn't raised her head, but even so, Paris could see the shard cut deep in Rachael's eyes. She was not like him. She was at home in her hunger. She wanted and knew she deserved what she wanted. That she didn't have it was an error of cosmic proportion.

“Happy Birthdays,” Paris said to Rachael and Geneva. “How's nine compared to eight?” he asked Rachael.

Rachael didn't look up from the puddle.

“I don't know,” she said. “It's my first day.”