She Poured Out Her Heart (4 page)

She wouldn't have said she was in love with every one of them, but often enough she was, and often enough love, or keening lust, or mad impulse overwhelmed her in ways that confounded and embarrassed her and led her to all manner of bad behavior, including, but not limited to, drama, indiscretion, urgent phone calls, reckless trysts, peering through windows at night, crying fits (on sidewalks, in bars, in a hospital emergency room), outlandish couplings (including in a parked VW Beetle, but that was only the once), and breaking and entering (once or possibly twice, even if that particular time she had not meant to go inside, only heave a chunk of rock through a glass door).

These were the things that she had told Jane, or that Jane had witnessed, although there were some further incidents that Bonnie had not shared.

What was wrong with her? She was always too impatient to sit back
and wait for boys to come calling, or those who did call didn't please or interest her. She was too full of longing, she wanted what she wanted and saw no reason not to pursue it, and of course she scared the crap out of most guys. Not one of whom was a burly lumberjack who owned a shelf of Great Books. Laugh all you wanted at the old, sappy stories with their cartoon faces and cartoon hairstyles, and all the while sex like a dog under the dinner table, fed in sly handfuls. Hilarious, cornball, a triumph of repression aided by industrial-strength lingerie! But everybody wanted the dream, the fantasy, the happy ending, and in spite of it everybody wanted the dream, the fantasy, the happy ending, and that included her, no matter how much she mocked them.

Jane thought that Bonnie was too often unrealistic, that she expected too much. “You put so much energy into chasing these guys, you keep trying to turn them into something they aren't. Maybe you should just calm down some. They don't have to like, make your toes curl every time, do they?”

How funny it was that they had met on the occasion of Jane's single most transgressive act, the removal of her virginity by some drunken character she couldn't have picked out of a police lineup. Which must have scared Jane away from doing anything so bold ever again, because instead she had a series of boyfriends, each more dreary than the last, the soon-to-be discarded Jonah the latest.

Anyway, it was time to get her head out of her ass, stop thinking about boys, in comic books or out of them, and figure some way to make a living.

Bonnie moved on to the kitchen. The stove needed degreasing. The inside of the microwave looked like a miniature crime scene. She hauled the kitchen garbage out from under the sink and started a new bag. Set the morning's oatmeal bowl to soak, swept and mopped the floor. She wasn't enjoying it, exactly, but there was an energy to it that carried you along. She would have sung a work song, if she'd known any, something about hoeing cotton or hauling in fishing nets.

She took the garbage down to the outside bins, not bothering to lock the apartment door behind her, and when she came back, and was wrestling the vacuum cleaner out of the hall closet, she looked up to find a man standing in the passageway.

“Hey!” she said, more of a yelp than a word. At first glance Bonnie took him for a student, but no, he was older, rougher and shabbier, tall and thin, with his hands jammed into the pockets of his coat. The coat, she noticed, as if this were important, was the same kind as her old high school boyfriend once had, with a facing of soiled fake sheepskin. “Hey, what are you doing?”

“Terry live here?” he asked, looking not at Bonnie, but at the floor near his own feet. He had a long, hollowed-out face, and droopy blond hair.

“No, you have the wrong apartment.” She waited for him to do something, say something. “So you need to get out of here.”

“Terry back there?” he asked, nodding at the rooms behind her and taking a step toward her. He was between her and the door. Bonnie shoved the vacuum cleaner into the hallway and that checked him. He took one hand out of his pocket. He held a knife with a short, thick, sharp blade. Bonnie's brain spun like a dial. She could almost hear it making clicking sounds. She was unable to fathom the idea of the knife, of it actually doing something to her.

So out of pure and stupid reflex she said, “Would you at least get out of the way so I can vacuum?” And bumped the machine toward him.

He took a few steps back. “Go on,” Bonnie said. “Give me some space here.” She stooped down, plugged the vacuum in, turned it on, and advanced on him. It was an old machine and it made a lot of racket, vrooming and hooming.

Together they rounded the corner and Bonnie ran the vacuum energetically over the nubby carpet. The man watched her. The hand with the knife hung at his side. Bonnie was aware of some bodily process happening to her from the skin out, a coldness, a quivering, traveling inward in rapid waves, until her heart was squeezing through some painful cold.

The vacuum went quiet. He had pulled the plug.

Bonnie wheeled behind her, retreating into the kitchen portion of the main room, and opened the refrigerator. “Hey, you want a beer?” As long as she kept moving, talking, she felt, nothing bad would happen. “Bud Light OK?” She took out two cans of beer and set one on the counter closest to him. “Come on, man, have a drink with me.”

He looked at the beer can, then down at the knife in his hand, as if asking its opinion. His long, oddball face and long hair made him look as if he'd been stretched out, like kids' clay. Bonnie sat down at the kitchen table and opened her own beer. “Make yourself at home,” she said, idiotically.

He picked up the beer with his free hand, then laid the knife down on the counter to open it. The kitchen was small, and he stood maybe ten feet away from her. Only the dinky table was between them. Bonnie raised her beer and sloshed some into her mouth, swallowed. She watched him drink, then he set the can down again, next to the knife. He wasn't looking at her, he still hadn't looked directly at her. His face had a blank, unseeing quality, or else he was seeing something nobody else did, submerged beneath layers of murky impulse. “So who's Terry?” Bonnie asked, trying to nudge him toward the surface. “Do I know Terry?” Man or woman Terry? Did it matter? Her heart hurt. It was bruised from all the work of beating. The advice of a million dopey magazines, generations of true romance, slipped into a groove in her dumb brain: Show an interest in what he says! Be an active listener! But why was it always the girl who had to make all the effort at conversation? She said, “I'm really thinking you need to check the address again.”

He took another drink. It made him cough and sputter, as if it had gone down the wrong way, and he leaned on the counter, trying to recover. “Whoa,” Bonnie said. “Easy there.”

His jaw worked as he tried to set himself to rights. “Goddamn,” he said, still coughing.

“Sometimes it helps if you hold your breath.” She demonstrated, puffing her cheeks out.

“Goddamn sheriff took my dogs away and the county had them put down.”

And what did the moron magazines tell you to say to that? Like dating advice or makeup ads were enough to keep you from getting raped and murdered in your own kitchen. Bonnie felt her face attempting a number of false emotions all at once: sympathy, interest, indignation on his behalf. See, nice person! Friend! Not that he was paying any real attention to her. There was something wrong with his mouth, something loose, like a baby's.

Bonnie started to say she liked dogs, and that's when the man said, “Stupid bitch.” Spitting the words out like seeds.

Who did he mean? Her, Bonnie? The sheriff? Somebody else, maybe even an actual female dog? And because there was no way of knowing, and what difference would it make anyway, Bonnie said, “She shouldn't have done those things she did.”

“Goddamn,” he said again, and this time it sounded like agreement. He lifted the beer can once more and drank it down. Bonnie got up and fetched another from the refrigerator. She put this one a little farther away on the counter, so that he'd have to take a step away from the front door. A part of her mind was working furiously, wondering if she might be able to get to the door, or scream, and would anyone hear, and when was Jane due home, and how would that even help, since Jane would just stand there pie-eyed, a born victim.

But another part of her was curious in spite of or because of everything: who was he and what made him crazy and dangerous and had he always been that way. She said, “I guess she made you real mad. Hey, what's your name? I'm Bonnie. Are you hungry? How about I fix you a sandwich? Turkey and Swiss OK?”

Rattling on. He didn't answer, just opened the new beer and drank
from it. He watched as Bonnie moved around the kitchen, yanking bread, plates, the rest that she needed. She made up the sandwich with plenty of everything, mayo, lunchmeat, cheese. Cut it nicely on the diagonal and emptied a bag of potato chips into a bowl. “Here you go,” she said, setting it all down on the table and moving out of the way, just a bit closer to the door. “Oh, wait. Napkin.”

Now he was looking at her, which might or might not turn out to be a good thing. He picked up the knife and the beer and sat down in front of the sandwich, stared at it. “Whadja put on this?”

“Just mayonnaise.”

“Mayonnaise's all right I guess,” he said, and bent over the plate, using both hands to get as much food as he could into his mouth.

Bonnie said, “Do I know you from someplace? You go to the bars or anything?”

He didn't answer, still working on the sandwich. You saw guys like him on campus often enough, panhandlers or criminals or both, homeless or close to it, hanging around because students were stupid and careless and easy pickings, well she sure was, why hadn't she locked the damned door behind her and taken her keys? She tried again. “You from around here?”

He was eating the chips now, crunching them by the handful. She was running out of things to feed him, inane questions to ask him. She ducked around the table, keeping it between them, and ran water in the sink. “Mind if I clean up some?”

He didn't answer. He was sucking bits of food from the inside of his mouth. Bonnie opened the cupboard under the sink and put on Jane's big green rubber gloves. It was comforting, putting this extra, protective layer over her skin. “Yeah, it's my turn to, you know, shovel the place out.” He wasn't paying her any particular attention; why should he? She was just some random body, currently making noise. Beneath the sink were the usual scrubbers and sponges and soaps, when what she really
needed was a baseball bat, or the sort of things they made weapons out of on television, batteries and matchsticks and chewing gum. All she could find was a spray bottle of some vile mildew remover Jane had bought for the bathroom. It had a reassuring trigger grip and she set it out on the counter with one green-gloved hand. “Not that most of the mess isn't mine. Not all of it. Most.”

The man shifted around in his chair and the plates on the table jumped. “You sure run your mouth a lot.”

“I do. Nervous habit.” Was he angry? She guessed she should shut up now but she couldn't stop, because they might be the last words she ever said, aside from those things he might soon make her say. “I really think men and women speak different languages. I bet if you did a scientific study you could prove it. Because men aren't socialized to talk about emotions, relationships, I get that, but see, women can't leave that stuff alone, we want men to pay attention to us. The right kind of attention.” Not the breaking and entering and assault kind. “I mean”—Bonnie's breath ran out; she stopped her babbling to pry her lungs open—“did you and her have some kind of fight? What happened?”

“Her and her big deal friends.”

“Ah,” Bonnie said, nodding.

“They was always against me.”

Right, because what could any fair-minded person object to? “They ganged up on you,” Bonnie suggested.

“The law took her side too. Like a man doesn't have a right to live under his own roof.”

His hand on the table was a fist now. Behind her back, Bonnie made a green rubber fist with one hand. She said, “But there must have been things you liked about her; it wasn't all bad, was it?”

He didn't answer right away, but gave her another glance that had some seeing in it. Like, what was Bonnie doing here in the middle of his righteous grievances? Bonnie said, “I mean, maybe the two of you could
make up.” Unless he had already murdered her. “A fresh start. Sort of like cleaning house.” She picked up the bottle of cleanser and waved it around. “Everybody cops to their share of the dirt, you know?”

He said, “How is it a woman always thinks she can talk her way out of anything.”

She was quiet then. He tipped the can up to empty it. A little of the beer dribbled past the loose corner of his mouth. He wiped at it with the back of his hand and pushed his chair away and patted at the pockets of his coat, looking for something. Not the horrible knife, it was right there in front of him on the table. Cigarettes? Her high school boyfriend, the one who'd had the same kind of coat, had smoked, and they used to argue about it because Bonnie said the smell got into her hair and clothes. They'd gone round and round about it. Of course the cigarettes were just an excuse to argue about everything they couldn't put into words, how their bodies bewildered them, now impossibly close, now separating into two contrary creatures, so that there was always longing and always the confusion of feeling. They had been so young! His name was Eddie. Where was he now, she didn't know; he'd moved away and she'd lost track. She would have liked to find him again and tell him, what, what, what had she learned in all this time? She burst into sudden, noisy tears.

“Now quit that,” the man said, annoyed. “It's not needed.”

“It doesn't have anything to do with you.” Bonnie reached for a paper towel and blew her nose.

“Oh, hah.”