You Were Wrong (16 page)

She removed her hand from his knee and looked at him and raised her eyebrows as if their beloved and clownish uncle had just died in his early sixties of congestive heart failure and what was there to do?

“Arv twisted his ankle on the trail and fell down with all the gear on his back. I didn’t stop to help him,” Karl said.

“Don’t waste your conscience on him.”

“The conscience is not a finite resource.”

“Yes it is.”

Karl felt Sylvia was revealing important information about herself in this remark, which, if he only knew the proper way to hear it, would yield the solution to the mystery of her. And even if, as she herself would say, a personality was not a math problem, he knew there was something crucial he had not yet understood about her—just to limit the field, for the moment, of world phenomena he had not yet understood something crucial about.

“So what,” he said, “if I were to have lent a jerk a helping hand and he’d repaid me with further jerkiness, so what?”

“To call him a jerk is to underestimate his power to do harm. Trust me.”

“Trust you. I can’t be in my room, I can’t be in my house, my yard, I can’t be on my sidewalk or in my town without feeling them as places you’ve touched—with—your skin. You’ve now married this man you claim to loathe and won’t tell me why. You
heap
on me decisions and requests I’m meant to take on faith, and now you want me to trust your dire assessment of this goofball over my own mild one without, again, offering a single reason why I should except that you are telling me to. I won’t do it. I won’t do it!”

The sun went down and she sighed. Flat, bloodred clouds lay in jagged stripes at earth’s edge.

“I have explained some things to you,” she said. “But no, you’re right. This is why I need you. You’re more decent than I am, and trusting.”

“I’m not that trusting.”

“And I’ve abused your trust not by lying to you—”

“You
have
lied to me, a number of times.”

“—but by asking too much of you. You’ve a core goodness that you somehow weirdly assert despite your passivity.”

“I know, I’m so passive, ugh!”

“I want to spend time with you. I want to be with you. You make me think about hard things. You might even one day make me nicer although that would be truly scary because niceness seems to me kind of like this baby field mouse with a broken leg just waiting out in the middle of nowhere to have its neck snapped and be devoured.”

Stony and nighttime arrived simultaneously. “That was beautiful,” the former said. “We’re all in a reflective mood now. We’re all philosophical now in this beautiful place that money can’t buy on the night of the nuptials. It smells so delicious here, I’m invigorated. Let’s forgive each other our trespasses. I forgive you both.”

“For what?” they said.

“Oh,
come
on,” Stony said in either mock disgust or disgust. Karl respected Stony’s use of tonal ambiguity as a method of intimidation.

Sylvia stood up and walked away before they could stop her. The two men were alone in the woods in the dark of night, Karl on his ass on a rock, Stony on his feet behind him. Karl stood, removed a miniature flashlight from his pocket, and turned it on.

“That was smart of you to bring that,” Stony said. “May I have it?”

“No.”

Stony took the flashlight from Karl’s hand and pressed down so violently on his shoulder that Karl sat back down on the rock.

“I dislike you. You’re demented. I love the woman you just married and she loves me and she doesn’t love you. You coerced her.”

“She doesn’t love you. You’re effectively a child, and not even a promising child with an interesting hobby like cello playing. You possess no innate talent or virtue or forcefulness.”

“She may not love me but she likes me. She doesn’t like you.”

“She may not like me but she loves me.”

“She doesn’t love you, she despises you.”

“She may despise me but she continues to fuck me.”

“You really should not say just anything that pops into your head. It’s impolite.” Karl stood, spat in Stony’s eye, ran away in the dark across the rocks, and fell on his face.

Stony was upon him. “This is different now from this afternoon in the bedroom in a number of ways. You’ve spat on me and verbally insulted me. We are alone on a beach at the edge of a forest. I have used my connections in town government to get a permit to camp here even though they never issue permits to camp here, so there’s no one around for miles. Now I’m just going to place my—uh, sorry,
your
flashlight on the pebbles here like so, pointed at your hand and, as you can see, my knife. I’ve tried different brands but I come back to the Swiss Army Knife for its elegance and utility. Let’s make a little test first.”

Stony made a light slice perpendicular to Karl’s right pinkie finger just below its middle knuckle. He was somehow holding Karl’s hand down by the wrist. Karl felt the hard pebbles on the underside of his wrist and palm, and the sting of the slice, and saw, thanks to the flashlight, the thin red line of blood.

“I don’t know,” Stony said, “how many slices it will take to get all the way through the finger. This is reasonable recompense, I think, for what you’ve said and done, for how profoundly you’ve interfered with my happiness. You might say I’m plaintiff, judge, jury, and, as it were, executioner here. You might say it’s un-American of me not to abide by the legal division of labor that assures justice. What would the nice lady who married us today say about this punishment? ‘I’m sorry he made you unhappy, Mr. Stonington. I’m sorry he ruined the one thing in your life that could have brought you true happiness, but that still does not constitute adequate justification for cutting off his finger, here in America. Here in America, amputation is not considered a reasonable punishment for anything. You will not find precedent for it in any law book, though you’ll no doubt find that elsewhere—in the street, perhaps, or in the wild.’ And that is where we are now, Karl. And really, right now, I feel
in the wild
, don’t you?”

Karl did feel in the wild too, here where the Dutch and the English and the Indians had exacted justice from one another plentifully and with minimal interference from or recourse to the laws that had bound each but not all. And that may have been why he also felt resigned to losing this relatively unimportant appendage. “Not long from now, this will have happened,” he felt, but Stony was not cutting, he was making a noise with his mouth. His mouth was open and a shapeless sound emerged from it, a nonlanguage sound, something between coughing and singing. Weeping, Karl eventually decided.

“Damn it! It’s not even—” He wept and tried to control it and could not, all the while pressing Karl’s wrist into the pebbles of the beach with what turned out to be his knee. Karl relaxed while Stony got the cry out of his system and Karl wished he would quit trying to stop himself from crying because that just delayed the release of Karl’s wrist from Stony’s knee.

“It’s not even empathy,” Stony finally said. “I don’t think it is. And it’s not cowardice. It’s not caution. I think it’s discouragement. Don’t flatter yourself that you’ve discouraged me, Karl.
She
has.”

Stony stood up and Karl stood up. His wrist was bruised, if not broken. There were abrasions elsewhere on his body that he could not properly locate.

“I’ve behaved abominably and it’s not even been worth it. I don’t mean to say that I’ve not behaved abominably before—I have, and have been quite conscious of it, and that’s why it’s paid off, because I’ve measured it out—I’ll cause
this
much suffering in
this
circumstance for
this
outcome—and so I always got what I set out for, but not this time. Not yet, anyway. That’s a warning to you that I haven’t given up. I just need to figure out how not to be destroyed by her. That’s a real conundrum. Now that we’re having this brief cease-fire, this moment in the beautiful woods where we’re just being humans together, will you please corroborate—are you and I not now brought together here in this pastoral setting because you
can
corroborate—that she simply is able to fuck a man to pieces?”

Karl was too distraught to corroborate this or even to know he could not. He bent down and picked up the flashlight and trained it on the trail back to the makeshift campsite and walked away from Stony, who had begun to cry again on an open vowel, hands at his sides, freely and unselfconsciously, a very tall three-year-old with magnificent posture and long, luxuriant hair, a perfect being giving full expression to a pure sentiment. He caught up with Karl and took the flashlight from him and threw him to the ground and marched off ahead of him down the trail.

Arv grumblingly scoured the camping pot of frank ’n’ bean residue by the fire. How scary could a man be about whom one so readily wanted to say, “Good ol’ Arv,” even or especially in times of tribulation? Arv with his rubbery nose and tight dark curls, was he a Negress too, at this point? Nothing is but what is not, Karl vaguely recalled someone having said.

“There’s food for you on that plate,” Arv said in annoyance as Karl approached. “It’s a little encrusted but that’s wilderness camping for you.”

“Where’re Sylvia and Stony?”

“Stony didn’t eat and Sylvia did, she’s pregnant.”

“Did I ask you if they’d eaten?”

“They went to their tent.”

“Great.”

“You axed, girlfriend.”

Karl sat across the fire from Arv and tried to eat his cold franks ’n’ beans. No light came from or penetrated the marriage tent. Light, harsh whispers and swishing of fabric reached Karl’s ears.

“Do we have music?” he asked.

“‘Have’ in what sense?”

“In the sense of fuck you.”

“No.”

“Tell a joke or something.”

“Two idiots go camping with a pair of newlyweds. One of them says, ‘Do we have any music?’ The other says, ‘No soap radio.’”

“I’m going to bed.”

Karl ducked inside the little raincoat-material tent and semi-disrobed and slid into the borrowed sleeping bag that had a mushroomy Arv smell around which Karl hastily hammered together a rickety fence of inattention. Arv came in and seemed to settle right into juicy sleep breaths. It was not much past nine p.m. Karl lay on his back trying not to think or smell or hear or feel, trying to be as little Karl as he could and meld with the local molecules, though he melded no less tentatively than he did not meld.

For how many minutes or hours had this passive struggle gone on before he heard the first of a particular set of outdoor sounds, a grunt, of probably a creature indigenous to Suffolk County? Grunting, regular grunting, rhythmic grunting and breathing not from the county at large but from the next tent over—low, harsh whispers and rasping breaths and light smacks and a sharp high vocal noise—a yip—and soft insistent percussive sounds of cloth or skin or flesh or bone on barely cushioned earth. Love sounds. Not love sounds, sex sounds, hard sounds, mean—not rape—rough sex. Karl screamed. He thought he’d screamed but hadn’t, wanted to and didn’t. The scream was strong in him and he had to hold it back all the way down his body. He knew that a great deal was predicated on his not screaming exactly now, that this may well have been the core of the task she needed him along on the honeymoon to accomplish—to be here now, for this, and not scream.

TEN

THE EARTH MOISTENED
and steamed like a febrile sheepdog. Karl slept and ate and read a book about George Boole, a nineteenth-century Englishman who’d thought up a useful system wherein algebraic concepts could be used to make logical propositions about the world. So, for example, if the totality of the world was represented by the number one, and the letter
x
represented the adjective
horned
, then (1−
x
) would represent all nonhorned things, or the experience of at least thinking about them, a mental operation that without the aid of mathematical principles and symbols would have been impossible. Karl had long enjoyed performing this operation in his spare time—if one may speak of “spare” time—in the way that a person can be consoled by the reliability of assertions as true as they are useless. But just at the moment when he’d found a vital use for Boolean logic, its value had fallen off sharply, for let us say that
y
—and the letter was not chosen at random—equals the proper name
Sylvia
, and, to restrict the field further for precision’s sake, not Sylvia as denoting all things living or otherwise that went by that name, but specifically the one who had recently married Charles “Stony” Stonington in Krüog. Boolean logic ought to have been able to assure us that the phrase (1−
y
) could represent all non-Sylvia things, but as was adumbrated not long ago in Mashumup at dusk by Karl to
y
, his findings repeatedly showed that Boolean logic could superduper not account for the way in which so many presumably non-Sylvia things had become Sylvia things without strictly
being
Sylvia, as for example the air, or the moon, which, when he watched it diminish in size from one night to the next, made him feel he was losing her by a corresponding increment. George Boole had been born to the working classes, had devoted his life to the pursuit of truth, and had nonetheless drowned in the fluid of his own lungs at age forty-nine.

Karl sunbathed once with Arv and fished with him once. They joked. Sylvia, increasingly fat, came by twice, yelled at her father, dragged Karl by the arm into the yard and whispered things to him of great urgency that he barely made sense of and could not remember once she’d left—to do with money, he guessed, and real estate, areas of inquiry more abstract for him than the equations which during the school year were his daily bread. Once a week there was an excruciating luncheon for four at the Stonington residence.

The planet moved around the sun. Geologic time lurched ahead. Karl too.
Tick, tick, boom
, a song on the radio said; Karl knew it referred to him but not how. There came a tougher lunch than all the ones before, hours long, unleavened by Arv. Chef salad, dressing overvinegared, oily chips, bread and butter, pulpy mimosas with airy prosecco, six-figure 3-D wallpaper peeled despite the central AC, grim remarks delivered sublingually, Sylvia’s finger in the air—couldn’t bring herself to say it, hard feelings made harder. Beyond the window, Stony’s home cove might as well have been a painting of a cove, for all it breathed coastal freshness into this stultifying box. A mouse ran along the wall. Stony flung a china plate, sliced the mouse in two, stained the air and then his rug with blood. Karl, drunk and low, wandered home behind the wheel, the hour embalmed in heat and dusk.

A sign of trouble at the Floor-Jones home: the door to the basement steps on the side of the house had been left up, one of that species of prefab wedge-shaped umber metal American basement entrances that looks like a short ramp up which you’d roll at top speed and hit your house’s outer wall and die. Karl moved with stealth down his steep and narrow outside basement stairs with a mimosa’d sense of himself as a young man on meaningful stairs on a Saturday of his life in this world. The coolness of the stair environment felt charged with relevance; the concrete basement moss and leafmeal rot, the level of the lawn rising up along his eyes, his hot ears and lips, the fullness of his slack face-flesh all led in with purpose to the rustle and the scrape, the light high groan and shadowed motion in the far dim corner of the underground room. He saw at the edge of the halo of light from the bare ceiling bulb a figure on its knees, face away from Karl and toward the wall. It looked, based on that quick work of the eyes that assesses the meaning of movements and forms, to be engaged in a task requiring effort, focus, and skill. Woodwork came to mind. This person, too—a male, he saw now, with short dark curls—was not the only living creature in that corner of the room. Two pairs of light-haired legs, knees toward the room, stood between the wall and the thing now known to him to be a kneeling boy or man. Light shirts came down to the waists of the standing forms, also male, no pants or underpants in sight. Karl came in quiet and a little to the side, not yet noticed by the three, whom he had now identified, two by face and hair, one by hair and movement style. The ones up top were Paul and Hal, the blond-haired boys from trig who’d savaged him last spring, their comic sneers of scorn eroded as he watched by waves of physical bliss. The one below, of course, a sweet and gentle ton of bricks—all the jokes, the social self nearly overridden with a manner that had seemed to exceed its purpose till now—was Arv, suckling one, milking the other by hand; and switching off; and switching off.

Who was working harder at his job of absorption, Arv or Karl? So many new sensations for the latter to take in: this configuration of bodies, Karl not having seen or done man-man sex to date; a new wrinkle as it were in the amalgam of phenomena that coalesced in Karl under the heading
Arv
; a melancholy tenderness for a man who enjoyed hiding in basements with boys, abasement to boys, and was so eager for a double jolt of underage semen, one in mouth, one in hand, that he’d wreck his knees for this luxury on the rough concrete floor of the excavated room beneath the house of a semiantagonist (unless knee ruin was primary, the two cums ancillary); which softened the additional thought, regarded almost with amusement now by Karl, that it must have been Arv who’d subcontracted out last spring’s hit on him by these boys, the order having come from the top of the four-man chain of command.

Hal or Paul—it hardly mattered which—tapped the top of Arv’s head. Arv looked up at him. He pointed at their secret observer. Arv craned his neck around, said, “Oh, hi, Karl,” and went back to work. The boys from trig gazed languidly at Karl, at each other, shrugged without shrugging, and each returned to the dreamy inspection of his own eyebrows. Feeling it rude to stay till the end, Karl tiptoed back up the outer stairs with the unformed presentiment of having seen something important down there to do with the room or the objects in it quite apart from any penis, hand, or mouth.

In the main body of the house, too, which went by in a quick and still-drunk blur, he vaguely sensed a new quality, an increased spaciousness or dustiness perhaps, whose meaning he did not try to work out before dropping to his side on his bed and letting sleep absolve him of further consideration.

He woke in the dark with an ache in his head and sand in his neck. He went to the bathroom, hosed analgesics and fluids. A lot of physical pain this year and more to come. It was hot in the house. Why would a guy turn off the AC when he knew his stepson would be home later?

He thought of the sights that had whipped by his head on the trip that he took on drunken feet two hours ago across the foyer, up the stairs, down the fateful upstairs hall, and into bed. What had he seen? What had he
not
seen, more like? Well-known objects, some bigger than him. What would two young thugs do after being fellated in the basement of the math teacher they probably knew to be taking a drunken nap? They’d come up the stairs and burgle his stuff. Burgled again, less lovingly this time. The widget on the wall was gone, the one in lucite Jones had made that had paid for the house and for college for Karl. Thanks, widget, bye, fuck you, widget. And the piano, now that Karl was downstairs, was a big thing that was gone. How could two postorgasmic teens and their adult lover carry a baby grand? Could the plan have really been sex in the basement, then up the stairs to void the house while Karl slept?

This might have been a drunken dream—even in sleep he didn’t get out of the house much. He hovered in the brief nonarea between the rec room and the living room. More had happened here than one might think. Fierce, prolonged battles for air temperature were waged on the five-inch field of the knob on the wall, which Karl now moved to cool the rooms. His mother, Belinda Floor née Weeks, had stood in this place on five thousand nights and, Scheherazade of brown ’n’ serve, called “Dinner” in her soft voice to the nightly succession of Karls who’d played in the rec room or read a book or stared at nothing and thought nothing of consequence. He went to the kitchen, as all men must do, to forage for food: salami, cheese, mustard, bread, olives: mom’s milk. A folded piece of paper on the table said, “To my stepson.” He read the note in Jones’s shaky hand:

My Dear Man:

How unreachable you have been this summer and always. I wish you or Sylvia—my children—had told me about the wedding. She has made up for this. You have not. No matter. I love you, there, did you know that little detail about me? And it is with love that I say how could you stand by and let Charles Stonington castrate your testicles off? They do grow back in rare cases, maybe you’ll get lucky.

With Henrietta Jones, my former wife, I have bought a brownstone in the Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn, address below, and moved there, leaving you, as you can see, with enough furnishings so as not to make you feel denuded. Good luck with the house and all else.

Yours fondly, etc.

That bastard had turned the AC off with malice aforethought. Karl drove to Brooklyn in sweaty brunch clothes with a headache no pill could cure. These long summer nights on the Long Island Expressway were really spooky. A darkness so desolating and profound he felt could not have been native to this land but must have been brought by those who settled it, laid down as an undercoat to this miraculous society predicated on endless combustion, which in turn was predicated on that dark, which even a typical insensible citizen like the one in the Volvo must sometimes feel in those rare, lonely moments on his way from one lit place to the next. Prehuman island life loomed up and pressed in on the lone driver. He rolled down the windows. Air pummeled his face and roared in his ears. Time and more time barreled into the car from the west, was sloughed off, and rolled out to the choppy waters of the Sound. Karl dreamed of his mother again, a little poodly gal this time, a little prissy in her immaculately ironed and bleached white peasant blouse, all things just so, “Dinner” uttered crisply, no one late in my house, finish your broccoli, your handwriting is abominable, it can’t have been I who taught you that. She married up and cowed the wealthy man and died. Whoever said the dead are not dead but live in the memories of those who survive them never had a dead mother. The dead die and die again.

He was in Brooklyn now. He did not know the hour, a hot Saturday night. Black people—African-Americans—moved along the sidewalks of Myrtle Avenue in fine summer clothes, limbs and faces double-browned in the luminate marmalade composed of streetlamp glow and incomplete urban nighttime dark. A few pink folks mixed in among the brown, reflecting in colorized miniature, Karl thought, as he rolled down the windows of his russet Volvo, the race mix of the land on which we’d all lived in bodily proximity for centuries. Were not the fierce and jagged rhymes tumbling over steel-reinforced bass and drums on these shop stoops and corners the same ones listened to by clusters of theoretically white high school boys on Saturday nights at the mall in Karl’s hometown?
Yo, shorty, how y’all fill tonight?
—who said that, white man or black man? Who said,
Why you hatin’?
Who said,
You see, maybe you’s got to be po’ a long time fust, en so you might git discourage’ en kill yo’self ’f you didn’ know by de sign dat you gwyne to be rich bymeby
? Who said,
I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas
? Who said,
Now all they got to do is make the robot that can walk and talk and kick your motherfuckin’ ass
?

He turned right onto the street in question, and seemed to have crossed into another town. The retail jangle and upbeat party vibe of the avenue was gone. Quietude suffused this block of somber homes shielded from the street by wide walks and shallow gated yards. A wide brown church in whose façade bloomed a monstrous rose of stained glass hugged the walk and lent its stretch of street in muffled form the old-time R&B that played inside its doors.