Shaking out the Dead (32 page)



Helene and Geneva returned to the highway and drove until they saw a turn-off for state forest access. Helene pulled into an empty campground, and they leaned against the hood of the car, smoking a joint. Helene thought they should climb the ridge before them, not too high, and release Ralph to the wind, although there was none.

“I know he was faithful,” Geneva said. “He never cheated on me.”

“Big deal,” Helene said, quite stoned. “Vincent's father was faithful too. He reserved all his screwed up, private, intimate, abusive bullshit for me, and me alone.”

“And you know,” Geneva said, “he never said,
I love you
. He said,
you know I love you. Hey, Gen, you know I love you —
I found that confusing, like he was messing with my head. I don't think I like being told what I know.”

“You know,” Helene said, then laughed, “or maybe you don't — but it sounds to me like you really trusted him, enough to make you doubt yourself.”

“That's exactly what happened,” Geneva said, turning her wrist to pass the joint. “I could never figure out which to trust — myself or that voice that says I love you. I just figured the problem was me. He loved me. I didn't feel it.” Geneva put her hands to the sides of her head as though trying to stifle voices inside. “I'm just tired of thinking about him,” she said. “That was our relationship: Me thinking about him. Not talking to him, oh no, that didn't work. So I wasn't tired of talking to him. I wanted to talk to him more. I wasn't sick of having sex with him. I wanted more. More of everything. I never got tired of us because there was no us. Just me and,” she jabbed her finger at her temple, “a him in my head. Maybe I didn't stop loving him, I just got tired of thinking about him. I
am
tired of thinking of him.”

“So, let's go then,” Helene said, pointing with her chin to the ridge and snubbing out the joint on the bumper.

“Yet, I have this sense of” — Geneva looked into the darkness before her — “incompletion. I don't know if I can move on without knowing I got the lesson.”

“The lesson is to let go. C'mon.”

“You're asking me to lie.”

“No, I'm not.”

“Yes, you are. You're asking me to do something symbolic, but there's no real thing for it to be a symbol of.”

“Maybe if you do it, you'll have done it, and then it won't be a lie.”

“I can't do it,” Geneva said, taking the joint from Helene's hand. She relit what was left of it and took a hit. She held in the smoke, and she said it again. “I can't do it.”

“Eva.”

“Yeah.”

“Ralph's a thought in your head you have to stop thinking.”

Geneva stared forward into the dark and the night.

“I know,” she said.



The basement of the Deluxe was not tidy like Geneva's. It required shoes at all times, not an ideal situation for Paris's feet. He had moved in after buying a new, used Impala from the want ads and a cot from the army/navy store. He joined a gym, where he showered but didn't exercise.

Despite its shortcomings, the basement of the Deluxe offered relief from the August heat and the layer of smoke choking the valley. Fire season always came on the tail of summer, but this was bigger. National news. The fires jumped highways and closed roads. In the valley, throats ached and eyes burned. Summer windows were closed.
Particulate
, it was called, and it was everywhere. Tiny floating filth. The elderly and asthmatic were warned to stay indoors.

Paris sat on his cot in the glow of a shadeless overhead bulb. He hadn't seen Tatum for nearly three months. The last time was at the diner two weeks after Ralph's funeral.

“I'm sorry,” she had said.

She said it twenty times if she said it once.

“I failed you, I know. I'm sorry.”

Paris worked as she spoke and didn't look up. He wiped the length of the counter's already clean surface.

“I told you I didn't know how to do this,” she said, following him from the other side of the counter. “I told you I make a good friend but a lousy girlfriend.”

Paris couldn't stand the sound of it. He stopped wiping and looked up.

“How's Rachael?” he said.

“Gone,” Tatum said, her eyes tearing up and then swallowing the tears back down.

Paris looked away. She was who she was. She was afraid and had doubt. He wanted her to be brave and believe.

“I can't keep chasing you,” he said, shaking his head. “I know you want me to love you, but you don't love me. You're always two steps out of reach.”

“I'm not out of reach,” Tatum said. “I'm right here. And don't tell me who I love. Maybe I'm not good at it, but that doesn't mean I don't feel it.” Her lower lip started to quiver. “I thought you knew me,” she said. “I thought it was okay. I thought maybe. . .” But it was all she had to say.

Then she was gone.

But Paris saw her everywhere. He suffered mirages and optical illusions. There were cases of mistaken identity in momentary flashes on sidewalks and in the diner's doorway.

Linda, on the other hand, he saw nowhere. He didn't ask the retards about her again. Still, he carried five hundred dollars in his pocket at work, just in case.

Work. It had been his refuge. It offered concrete tasks. Necessity and reason. But as of tonight, at 3 a.m., the Deluxe would officially close.

Paris climbed the stairs up to the kitchen for the last time. Love was no different than money or fame, he thought. Just another thing we're taught to chase and covet. Another thing the wise learn to be happy without.



Tatum spent the two weeks following Ralph's funeral fighting demons, and she thought she had won. She got up off the floor. She talked to herself. She got it all worked up in her head that everything was going to be okay. They would be okay, she and Paris. Because they loved each other. She drove to the Deluxe. She prostrated herself. She took all the blame. What more does anyone want?

She paced back and forth, following Paris on the opposite side of the counter. But he would barely look at her. Tatum reached and strained with her will and her energy trying to find a place in Paris that would receive it. Finally, she stopped in her tracks, realizing what she'd become again. A beggar. When it comes to love, it doesn't matter how nicely you ask for it, she knew. Once you're asking, you've already lost.

So what to do instead? Drink? Take pills? Punch walls?

Find Vincent?

Turns out, she didn't have to. He found her.

Tatum didn't sleep after that night at the diner, and she was out of coffee. At the Grounds the next morning, she ordered a large cup to go. Vincent tapped her on the shoulder. He had nothing but good news. He had received a six-thousand-dollar advance for a book and was in town staying at the Red Roof Inn while he worked on it. He asked how she was, and she decided to be good news too. She told him her story in happy endings — child reunited with father, she and Paris parting paths amicably. “Haven't seen much of Geneva,” she told him. “You?” If Vincent sensed a different truth, he didn't ask.

Then, Tatum offered to look at his book. When they were together, she had always edited his articles and had even suggested placements for them. When his work took off, so did he. Tatum thought that people tend to discover they don't need you and that they don't love you right around the same time.

But that's how it came to be that they kept meeting, though never again at the coffee shop. Up until then, Tatum had been going there often, hoping to bump into Paris by accident. But she didn't want him to see her with Vincent. She didn't tell Geneva either. She was avoiding her, and so she wasn't sure whether Geneva was avoiding her too. Geneva seemed to be avoiding a lot of things. She hadn't bothered with the garden this summer, and that was unlike her. The perennials came up and barely survived.

Tatum turned into the Pie House's parking lot. She was meeting Vincent for lunch. Crossing the hot asphalt, she felt like she was in a movie, playing herself. But this self didn't crawl or care.
It doesn't matter
was her new mantra. Tra-la-la-la-la-la. She played it happy and turned on what there was of her charm. You wanna be loved
,
she thought, you gotta be lovable
.
She would get what there was to get from this life. A feeling, if not a fact.

Was there really any difference?

Inside, the air conditioning shocked her skin and gave her goose pimples. Vincent wore glasses to read now, but he pulled them off as Tatum slid into the booth. It was an endearing gesture she had become familiar with. She was attracted to him, yes, but she chalked it up to biology, nothing more. They would produce a healthy offspring. That's all. Not that anything had happened. Not yet. It was all business. Platonic, friendly. The past was a non-issue. It always is to the dumper. The dumpee pretends.

Tatum dropped chapters four through seven on the table.

“Interesting stuff,” she said.

“But,” he said.

“Not ‘but,' my friend. ‘And.'”

Vincent smiled. “And what?”

Tatum told him that she thought the intro kept dragging itself forward into the text. He needed to develop ideas at this point and trust he'd set the stage adequately. He nodded and took it in. Tatum spoke with authority but was outside her body. Extreme good looks are unnerving. It's hard to see with light in your eyes. It affected her tone of voice too, making it come up from under her words and not down upon them. Vincent exerted a pull. No doubt about it. Maybe it wasn't even toward him but just a general dismantling force. Perhaps it wasn't selfish genes or biology that drew her but the pull itself. It felt half like merging, half like being torn apart. Both held an attraction.

So she played with fire.

Why not? She knew the well-known fact that the only way to drown out the hum of one man is with another. She had never wanted to drown Vincent out, but Paris had come along and under the water Vincent went. Paris she wanted to drown out. She needed to. The loss was no companion. It was unbearable.

Paris. Rachael. Geneva. Margaret. They all were gone.

It doesn't matter
, Tatum told herself.

Tra-la-la-la-la-la.

But there was something else gone too. Something Vincent didn't know about. Her breast. The time was coming, though. He wouldn't initiate sex, Tatum knew, but he wouldn't say no. The past was a non-issue. For the dumper. The dumpee pretends.

Sex with Vincent. It wouldn't be suicide. But it was the next best thing.



The Jackson 5 played on the stereo, distracting Geneva from the task at hand. Young Michael had the voice of an angel, Geneva thought, listening to him grind a note. How rare it was, she thought, to hear that kind of juice pumping out of such a little man.

The task from which she was distracted was the writing of her farewell column. She had resigned from the advice biz, and she wished to sum up her parting wisdom in a single sentence. But she was torn between two. Don't Look Back. Or, Look Forward.

The advantage of Don't Look Back, she thought, was that it at least gave a person some reference points to work with, somewhere concrete not to look. Look Forward had no such coordinates. Navigation was blind, taking place by feel alone. Don't Look Back took effort. Look Forward did not, and yet it was the more difficult of the two.

Geneva leaned on her kitchen counter hovering over her legal pad. She read the two statements again. Then she looked to Ralph sitting to her right in his black lacquer box.

“I like Look Forward,” she told the dead man and then laughed at the irony.

The album ended. The needle lifted. The new silence of the duplex asserted itself at once. Rachael was long gone. Geneva had said good-bye to her in her living room with Lee and Tatum looking on.

“When you think of me,” she had told Rachael, “think
I wonder when we'll see each other,
and I'll think the same.”

And think of Rachael, Geneva did. Unlike with thoughts of Tatum, there was no accompanying tug or pull. Thoughts of Rachael would just appear like magic. A memory. A moment. Like she wasn't even really gone. It wasn't a haunting because it was pleasant. As promised, when it happened, Geneva would say the words.
I wonder when we'll see each other.

She refused the word
again
.

There would be no more
agains
. History doesn't repeat itself, she thought. We repeat history. We re-create it at a loss for new ideas and take the raw material of the infinite and impose the same tired frames upon it.

Tilt the frame, Geneva thought, climbing up on her inner soapbox. Better yet, break it. Go a step further and change the person looking through it. And change, she was coming to suspect, always had to do with letting go.

She looked at the black lacquer box.

Helene hadn't believed that there was such a thing as a right moment. When it came to letting go, it was the doing it, she had said, that made the moment right. Maybe so. But even if there was no right moment, Geneva knew there was a right feeling. She was willing to wait for it.

And speaking of waiting. . . Her eyes slipped toward the clock. Ten minutes to go.

She had a rule: no thinking about John until she was on her way out the door to see him. She permitted herself to think about him for up to two hours after parting company too. She had two reasons for her mindfulness. First, she didn't want to transfer her preoccupation with Ralph to John, though it was tempting to live and relive a touch, a look, a word. Second, she also didn't want to turn John into an idea with which she had a complex relationship that he, the man, only dropped in on from time to time. She was having sex with John twice a week or so, but Geneva never slept over. Not yet.

Six more minutes.

Geneva abandoned her legal pad and went to spruce up.

In the bathroom, she washed her hands. She applied expensive moisturizer to her face, neck, and up her arms. In the bedroom, she dressed, choosing a black, gauze peasant blouse.
Don't
think of John, she thought.
Don't
Look Back. The
don'ts
don't work. They kept one in a holding pattern, caught in the gravitational field of the unwanted.

She looked at the clock.

Time.

Geneva grabbed her keys. She grabbed Ralph, too, as she liked to keep him on hand available to the convergence of the right time and right place.

It was early evening when she turned down the gravel road. The smoke from the fires was socked in like rain clouds, shrouding the mountaintops and sealing off the sky. But Geneva felt anything but claustrophobic. She was heading for the shack, and the anticipation was sweet.

Geneva reached John's driveway and pulled in beside his truck. She had been leaving Ralph in the car at John's, but today, she picked him up and carried him to John's door. Do different and different happens, right? John's door opened as she approached.

“Trying to keep the smoke out,” he said, pulling the door closed behind her. Inside it was shadowy, the curtains and windows both closed. Fans were blowing from two sides of the room, circulating the stuffiness.

First, Geneva kissed him. Then she placed the box on his table. She stepped back, and they looked at it together.

“Let go, let go,” she said. “Common advice, but no one ever lays out the mechanics of it.”

“Open your hand?” John offered.

“You'd think,” Geneva said, sitting down at his table. “But it's obviously more complicated. Do you think you have to know what you're hanging on to in order to let it go?”

John lowered his body into one of the plastic chairs. He put his hand before him in a fist, palm facing down. He opened it.

“Let go,” he said. “Seems to me that whatever's in your hand is going to fall.”

“I don't know,” she said, shaking her head, unconvinced. “Just thinking ‘let go' puts your attention on the fact you're hanging on. That alone might be the obstacle. Like just thinking about it, even letting it go, creates the gravitational pull that keeps it there.”

John crossed his legs. The fans buzzed, chopping away at the air. She tapped her fingers on the table and then looked at John. A slow smile spread across his face. He had all the time she needed.

“Speaking of gravitational pulls,” Geneva said.

She leaned in. He leaned in too. She placed a hand on the back of his head as they kissed.

“One sec,” Geneva said, gently pushing him away. She picked up Ralph and carried him to just outside the door. She placed him on the ground beside the shack.

“One sec,” she said again, this time to the box, and she slipped back inside.