The Future for Curious People: A Novel (2 page)

I find myself walking around the four pinched aisles of Fontana’s Super Mart and Pawn Shop twice before stopping in front of the smeary plate glass of the deli meats not far from the cash register. Mrs. Fontana is perched on a nearby stool, stuffing quarters into stiff brown paper sleeves from the bank, her fat fingers disappearing up the tubes with the resignation of a bitter proctologist. And Mr. Fontana, a narrow-headed man with blunt features, is hovering next to her, wiping his hands on his apron.

“What can I do for you?” Mr. Fontana asks. He knows my girlfriend Madge and me but has never given the impression that he likes us. I don’t have a cart. It’s a Tuesday night in January. Aside from Mr. and Mrs. Fontana and me, the place is empty, which is normal for a Tuesday night in January. The lights flicker.

“I don’t know,” I tell him. “I was really just out for a walk around the block. I got cold.” Mr. Fontana looks at my mittens, the ones Madge bought me last Christmas. I already feel idiotic in them, like a four-year-old. They’re attached by some ancient device that Madge found on an antiquities website—rusty clips connected by yarn that bite the mittens, stringing them together. Wearing them is a romantic concession. Madge presented them as a joke in front of our friends at Bart and Amy’s Christmas party.
Godfrey loses things—ha, ha, ha—like his wallet, like his girlfriends.
I guess that’s true enough. For a year now, I’ve had a hard time keeping track of wallets, and there’d been a spate of ugly breakups just before Madge that became part of my
charm.
At the Christmas party, Madge grabbed my coat off a chair and laced the mittens through my sleeves.
He won’t lose me,
she said, and she unclipped one of the mittens, attaching it to her own sleeve, and fell drunkenly onto my lap. Madge is a weighty drunk—always hefting herself around. I often wonder where all that weight goes when she’s not drinking. When sober, she’s thin and light as balsa wood. That doesn’t sound as loving as it should. Truth is, I love Madge drunk and weighty because her face goes soft, her lips are fuller, sweeter, and I love Madge sober because her mind is quick and she looks at me sometimes like she sees some great unfinished work of art, my potential, something to live up to.

“You using up my heat? That’s gotta be worth something to you. What are you going to buy?” Mr. Fontana says.

I want to tell Fontana to lay off and to confess that I’m a man on the verge of proposing! Seriously, it’s a fact that a man about to propose is cuter than a basket of kittens or a squirrel Jet Skiing in an aboveground pool. (Why am I proposing now? Does it have to do with the fact that Bart and Amy—at the aforementioned Christmas party—announced the details of their envisioning session in which they are destined to be rich boat owners? Maybe that was the start of it, a wake-up call. Their announcement’s subtext seemed to say,
Th
e future is out there—and are you and Madge going to face it together
?
)

I don’t know why I want the Fontanas to like me. It’s got to be a character flaw on my part. But I’m not confessing to the Fontanas. They’re both the type to make a sad joke, sour the whole thing. “Okay, okay,” I tell him. “I’ll get something.”

I glance down at the racks—mini-flashlight key rings, ChapStick, Life Savers, Bubblicious. Sometimes it hits me that this is what the world’s made up of—the little crap that binds the seams of the universe together. Without this stuff, surely the universe would come unglued and we’d glide off in bits and parts into dark, infinite space. That’s how fragile it all seems; maybe I think of this now because what if Madge shoots me down? Only a vulnerable man would think that Bubblicious and ChapStick keep the universe glued, right?

I pull off a mitten, letting it dangle, and put my hand in my pocket just to double-check on the velvet box. It’s still there. It’s been sitting inside a dress sock in the back of my underwear drawer, the same spot where I used to hide my weed as a teenager.

I pick up a pack of Certs, set them on the glass counter. Beneath the glass, there’s a variety of secondhand weapons and jewelry—the Pawn Shop part of Fontana’s—and it’s a little disconcerting how many hocked engagement rings there are on display.

“You sure I can’t interest you in a little something more?” he says, tapping the glass. “Other people’s desperation makes for good deals.”

“No thanks,” I say. “I’m good on weaponry and gems.” I pull my mitten back on.

Mr. Fontana rings up my stuff and shoves the mints at me—no bag—rips the receipt from the register, and slides it across the counter with two double-jointed fingers.

“Maybe you’re a winner,” Mrs. Fontana pipes up.

This is the part that I’ve come to hate. Fontana has recently started up a Lucky Receipt promotional. One out of every ten receipts has “You’re a winner” printed on the bottom, giving you a 20 percent discount on your next food purchase—but the other nine have “You’re a loser” printed on the bottom, which has always been included with my purchases.

I pinch the receipt through the mittens and read the faded print:
You’re a loser.
I look up at Fontana.

“Well?” Mr. Fontana asks.

“You know,” I say, still pinching the receipt, “this might not be good for business. You might want to word the loser sentiment a little more gently. Maybe something like ‘This receipt is not a winner.’ ”

Mr. Fontana rubs his nose, a little angry gesture. “Hey, the cash register calls ’em as it sees ’em.”

I want to reach over the counter and shove Fontana in his chest or at least make him give me a shopping bag for my package of Certs. Instead, I let it go, give him a smile, and think,
Poor fucking Fontana, penned up in that shop all day with his pruned wife.
But honestly it’s not comforting to pity that dickwad even though I’ve been taught that that’s the right thing to do.

I ball up the receipt and put it in my pocket with the Certs. I walk out of the store, bell jangling, and slowly head up the sidewalk. Walking by the storefronts I catch glimpses of myself in the windows. My pants, my jacket—they already appear rumpled. I’m not sure why I rumple so quickly. My mother and father both often look rumpled. Since retirement, my father has always worn wrinkled button-downs. My mother wears wrinkly silky puffed sleeve shirts, and her mascara always daubs off with each blink, leaving little smudges around her eyes. By the end of the day, she always looks like a fatigued musketeer. They’re an exhausted rumpled pair. Maybe it’s a permanent condition: the Burkes family curse, rumpling.

And then for no reason I think of the weekend just last summer when they met Madge for the first time. They were wearing terry-cloth bathrobes, drinking cocktails by the pool. I was doing laps when my father said, “There’s a golf game on the mini-TV. Come watch.” But I said, “No, thank you,” and dipped down underwater. Madge was sitting on the pool’s edge. I could see her thick ankles, blurred by chlorinated pool water, kicking back and forth. I hate these little memories. Why do certain ones pop back up?

And now I feel a little wheeze inside of my chest cavity—the inching in of a cold, pneumonia, something tubercular? Can the heart wheeze? I remind myself, as I’m slowing down, that I also have great memories of Madge—like how we met. It was in this little coffee shop. I was waiting for a blind date,
drawing pastries in the margins of my notebook. Madge walked past me then doubled back and stopped in front of me. She said, “Vaginas?” and pointed to my pastries.

“No.
Th
ey’re pastries.”

“Really, Freud? So you’re telling me that this little bit here is like a cherry? Look again.”

Some did have cherries—and they were all clearly vaginas.

“Vaginas in the margins,” Madge said. “I guess that would be vaginalia.”

“Nope, they’re pastries,” I said, trying to stick it out. “
Th
is is obviously pastrianalia.”

“You’re Godfrey,” she said then.

“If I’m Godfrey, then you’re Madge.” And that was that.

She tilted her head and sighed at me as if seeing a current failure of some kind but one with promise. And, in that moment, my pencil mid-clitoris, I don’t know if I fell in love with her, but I know I wanted her to take me on. I wanted to fulfill that promise. I loved the tilt of her head and her sigh and the fact that she called me on my bullshit. I needed Madge and that was the start of love. I think that’s how it sometimes goes.

Home now. In front of the fourth floor walk-up I’ve been sharing with Madge for nearly six months. I raise my arms over my head. Coach used to suggest this for cramps. I bend over, stick my head between my knees. I try to count slowly to twenty-five, but I keep losing my place around twelve. I look up, directly at our fourth-floor window, but I only see blinds, blips of light peeking through. Why isn’t Madge looking for me? Is anyone thinking about me right now? If not, do I exist just a little less?

A woman walks by pushing a stroller. She’s staring at my hands as if looking for what I might be holding.
Just bulky mittens with mitten clips that are more appropriate for a four-year-old in the 1950s!
I want to tell her. I nod politely, look into the stroller. The baby is so packed in that I can barely make out a face squinched up in the puffy drawstring hood. All babies are just pudge until they’re not. It’s a disturbed little face, so red and puffed it could be choking, but then the face twists and begins to wail. I flinch. My heart stutters.
Th
is is just the kind of thing that happens to all men before they propose,
I tell myself. But then, for a moment, I’m sure I’m dying. This is it, I know, squeezing my eyes shut.

A second later, I’m not dead. Fifteen seconds later, still not dead. My heart still beats. My lips still inch open to let air in. The moment passes. Another moment passes.

“Why are you standing out in the cold?” It’s Madge’s loud voice, which carries like a soccer coach. She’s overhead. Her hair is blowing around her beautiful face; her whole upper body is sticking out the window. Some women’s breasts can remind you of the singular term
bosom
but not Madge’s. She has great breasts, ample and buoyant, and independent of each other.

I’ve been expecting her, wishing for her, but I didn’t realize how not ready I was for the reality of her. This is going to be my wife. Wife! It’s disorienting.

I look away at the gargoyles perched on the corners. One is stuck in an indiscreet position—is he scratching his balls or protecting them? You can never be too sure. The sky is a gusty gray. It snowed earlier and might snow again.

“Godfrey!” Madge yells again.

I’m stuck on the idea of proposing outside. It strikes me that I might pick Madge up and spin her around—if she says yes—that I might actually yawp. I look up and down the street, shout back, “I’m not sure why I’m out here still! Are you ready?”

“I’ll be down!” She sighs. It’s a gusty sigh, the kind you give a child, and slams the window shut. Standing there in my mittens, I shift my weight from one foot to the other, feeling tall and galumphing. I’m on the tall side; nice Little League coaches told my parents that one day I’d grow into my body and become suddenly coordinated. That never happened.

I shouldn’t have worn the mittens. I should feel more manly right now.

But here’s something I love about Madge: she’s quick to get angry but also quick to get over it. When she appears on the stoop in her red coat, she’s over being annoyed with me, and she looks fantastic. She’s wearing frosty lipstick, as if she’s just kissed a cake. Madge is good to me. She really is. She once made homemade matzo ball soup for me when I was sick and she’s not even Jewish. She looked it up online.

I want to yell out,
Madge! I! Love! You!
I am happy. There’s so much blood in my head, I’m top heavy. She walks up and kisses me on the mouth. Right there, full mouth. Her lips are warm. Her lips are a heater, and when I hug her, perfume gusts up from her coat. This has been my problem since I’ve started growing hair where there never used to be hair: I love women. I should stand in the middle of a group of men sitting in chairs shaped in a circle:
My name is Godfrey and I love women.
I’m completely susceptible to them. It’s a difficult way to go through life, constantly falling in love. I don’t wear love very well. And, because of my weaknesses, I’m dangerous. I have to keep myself in check, always. Madge helps keep me in check mainly because she’s enough. Madge is so full of life, so vigorously alive, that I’m rapt every time she walks into a room—or out of a building to meet me.

“Why were you lurking?” Madge asks jokingly. “You shouldn’t lurk. People will think you’re a serial killer. Are we going to the sushi place? It’s my turn, you know.”

And that’s how quickly it changes. Taking turns. This is my future. Life doled out simply: Madge’s turn. Then: my turn. Everything in this moment seems suddenly permanent. Everything in this moment
is
permanent.

Fact: I hate sushi. Rolls too big for your mouth, but you don’t dare cut them with a fork. I don’t trust raw fish. Normally I might say, “I only eat sushi that’s well done.” Or I might say, “I’m not feeling suicidal enough for sushi today.” But this would encourage Madge to give me a speech on living life to the fullest, and I’m never in the mood for that, much less now, on the brink of such emotional risk. My hands feel too hot for the mittens, and now I’m thinking of the wallets I’ve lost and the girlfriends I’ve lost, too—Tina Whooten, Liz Chase, the Ellis twins. I look up at the buildings around us, hundreds of windows. How many women are in there? How many could I fall in love with? How many would let me fall in love with them? Am I choosing the right one? Does it mean something to even be thinking this?

“Why are you just standing there, Godfrey?” I stop and look at Madge. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

Jesus, I’m just standing here, looking at her like that. To be honest, I’m not really sure what
that
is. “I’m sorry,” I say, glancing at my shoes. How is it possible that my
shoes
look rumpled? If I were holding an ironing board, that would probably look rumpled, too. “You know,” I tell Madge, “if we ever had kids, they’d have a fifty percent chance of rumpledness.” I look back at Madge.