You Were Wrong (20 page)

He was halfway to the kitchen with desiccated mouth when the doorbell rang. As proposed, Arv arrived with his young friends and the weed, the former self-evident, the latter announced. Karl saw that it was nighttime and felt through the open door that the heat, by which he’d been untouched when the door was closed, had not abated.

“I don’t mean to be rude but I’ve got to get some water,” he said over his shoulder on his way to the kitchen.

“Cotton mouth!” Paul said behind him, or Hal.

Alone by the fridge, he glanced up and caught his second, blurred self on the kitchen windowpane, against the backdrop of the black air, pressing a second, blurred glass into a recess in the second, blurred fridge door, and watched himself watch the glass fill up with water from an unseen source. These figures that came and went across a home’s nighttime panes were optical stand-ins for the second self the self always imposed between it and the obscured world.

When he reentered the living room the boys were in the midst of removing small glass pipes, presumably for weed, from the voluminous pockets on the sides of their pants legs. From one’s pocket came the beautiful green weed itself in its sealed plastic sheath. “We need to put water in these,” said Hal, or Paul, indicating the pipes, or bongs, as they were called. “Where’s your kitchen, Mr. Floor?”

“If you don’t know where my kitchen is then you’ve haven’t been making yourself as at home here as I thought.”

The guys made a certain kind of slowed-down “Huh-huh-huh” sound that meant they were giggling and also was a sign that they were a certain kind of teenage boy, a mating call if you will to other boys of their ilk—not in the
Let’s give each other blow jobs
sense of mating but in the
Let’s skateboard
or indeed the
Let’s smoke weed
sense—and a non–mating call to people not of their ilk as if to say,
This giggle is way more nuanced than you think even though it might sound dumb to you which if it does sound dumb to you then you’re not one of us
.

“Got any food?” one of them said.

“Not much. Some cream cheese. Knock yourself out.”

They went to the kitchen to fill their bongs and explore the fridge. Karl sat heavily on the upholstered comfy chair.

“I know this is going to end very badly for me,” Arv said, easing himself down onto the couch, “so you don’t even have to say it.”

“Okay, I won’t,” Karl said by rote.

“You all right, buddy?”

“I’m fine.” He was not.

“We’re here to cheer you up, man. The boys like you. They feel they owe you.”

“That’s sweet,” Karl said. He meant it, to the extent he could mean anything that was not relevant to the central and only purpose for which he now drew breath.

“Mr. Floor!” they said, reentering, arms loaded with filled bongs, cream cheese, white bread, olives, Sunny Bonghit fruit-flavored drink snack, and prune juice. “Are you constipated?”

“My stepfather is.”

“Oh yeah, that dude who we did some work in his yard.”

“That dude’s yard is my yard too.”

“Are you totally going to get high with us, Mr. Floor?”

“I doubt it.”

“Mind if we do?”

“At this point I doubt I could estimate exactly how very much I don’t give a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut what you do.”

They’d already, it turned out, loaded their bongs, and during Karl’s assertion of emphatic indifference, clinked them together in a toast, held flames to them, inhaled enormous amounts of marijuana smoke, held it in their lungs for a while, and, shortly after Karl had concluded his peroration, repeated the deadpan machine-gun laugh, now doubling as an exhalation of pot smoke. The boys looked at each other with eyes made “Chinese,” as they would have said if they could talk now, and made a sound the person of discernment will notice is slightly different from both the regular giggle and from the pot-exhalation giggle—more of a whispered, guttural “Haw-haw-haw” this time, which, if translated into words they could not say because, again, they could not talk right now, might’ve been, “We’ve toasted, and now we’re toasted.”

Arv, who sat at the end of the tan leather couch closest to Karl in his chair, nudged Hal, who sat in the middle, which in turn jostled Paul, who sat at the other end—unless it was Paul he’d nudged, and Hal who’d been jostled—and made a friendly but curt and firm head motion toward Karl, as if to say, “This is the part we rehearsed, boys, come on.”

“Okay, okay, we have a thing to say to you, Mr. Floor,” said the one whom we must now call Paul and leave it at that to conserve energy. “It’s, like, how sorry we are about punching you last spring. It was a really sucky thing to do, we didn’t want to, but we needed the money, and Mr. Pepper can be really convincing, but now he’s sorry too, and we’re sorry too.”

Karl felt Paul had called Arv “Mr. Pepper” not because he would ordinarily refer to him with that honorific but because Paul felt using it would be a sign of respect for Mr. Floor, and Karl was touched by this, a little bit.

“That was a beautiful speech and I accept your apology.”

At this news Paul and Hal enthusiastically high-fived each other and relit their bongs and redoubled their stonedness. Arv nudged Paul once more, this time to signal he’d like to be passed one of the bongs.

“You don’t mind, do you?” Arv asked Karl.

“Let’s see,” Karl said, “you’ve hired these seventeen-year-olds to beat me up, you’ve broken into my house and fellated them in my basement, they’ve just now filled the air of my living room with pot smoke, and I don’t mind any of these things, but yes, I mind
this
.”

Hal said, “Mr. Floor, that’s how come your trig class was so fun, ’cause you crack these weird hostile jokes like you hate everyone even though we can tell you really love everyone but you’re just really lonely and sad.”

Hal’s stoned acuity and tenderness consoled Karl in the modest way one can be consoled who is inconsolable.

“Looks like we have to repeat senior year,” Paul said. “Hey, maybe we can take trig with you again.”

“And we brought you a mixtape,” Hal said, and pulled a CD from the leg of his cargo pants that had the imaginative title
Mixtape for Mr. Floor
.

Karl pointed languidly to the home entertainment center Jones must have left behind not out of respect for Karl’s desire to be entertained but because Henrietta had a better one.

A reggae song came loudly from the speakers and its beat made time lurch awkwardly forward, which reinforced the experience of time Karl was already having, and enlarged his susceptibility—scant though it was in this difficult period—to the music’s beauty.

Hal, having started the machine, danced jerkily to the middle of the room, not at all in time to the song. His indifference to the song’s time was his youthful body’s way of asserting its indifference to time itself. For his little hayloft of blond hair, for his stoned red eyes and smooth skin, his dirty T-shirt and unfatted torso, his too-low pants with ragged cuffs, his dirty sneakers slapping randomly against the rug, how could Karl not have envied him? How could Karl’s sense of loss, of the irreversible departure of vital energies, of the finality of the past, and of the future, not have sharpened?

Hal’s two friends were on their feet now too. A song played that went, “If you come from Brooklyn, and if you come from Queens, and if you come from Centraldale you’re an African…’Cause if you come from Seacrest, and if you come from Levittown, and if you come from Ronkonkoma you’re an African.”

Karl, on the chair, asked Arv, hopping on the rug, “Why are you scared of her? Seems to me Stony’s the scary one.”

“He’s scary too, but at least with him you know what you’re getting up front.”

“You think she’s out to harm me?”

“Yes!”

“Why?”

“Karl, do I look like a guy who understands women?”

The three friends danced in a slow and tightening circle, holding hands, laughing, making googly eyes at one another, sports-worn sneakers rising and falling higgledy-piggledy. They mewed, purred, nuzzled, the circle tightened, their hands went to each other’s arms and necks. When the circle stopped spinning, and they went from dancing to swaying, and their three faces touched and did not seem to be about to separate, Karl climbed the stairs and went to bed, his default response for twenty-six years.

The noises awakened him. He could not locate their source. He looked at his slick brown walls, his art and music posters, his chair and desk, his closet door, the plastic pull-down window shades of a color adjectivized by the saleswoman at the five-and-dime as
aubergine
. The noises, made in part by human voices, he thought, increased in volume and speed. He took a long look at all the things that would not be the same or would not exist once the noises stopped. There was the light itself, too, the main and first one, pink-hued, hardly detectable suburban predawn light to look at and to say good-bye to at least his current understanding of, and then the unintelligible sounds again, which he thought included shouting. He was up out of bed, always clothed these days, indifferent to the wash of hours, and he was at his window, drawing up its shade, and looking out upon his moist and near-dark lawn, up which two tall, thin, shadowed figures, male and female, advanced toward the house. Was one behind the other? They merged and came apart and merged again, and whispered or grunted. They disappeared under the eave beneath him. He’d left the window open for a little unconditioned air to sleep by, and now he slammed it shut so he wouldn’t have to hear the sounds that came from the figures below. He went to the little bed he’d outgrown and got into it one last time. He pulled the thinned, drab, Karlesque sheet above his head in a last vestigial attempt not to know. But he was already on the stairs when the banging on the door began. The door was hit at least ten times. He opened it—why try to avoid something that might as well already have happened?

“There’s this thing, it’s called a doorbell, maybe you’ve heard of it.”

“I haven’t.”

She was wet and breathing hard, her breasts and belly enormous in her pink stretch skirt and black T-shirt with the party till he’s cute epigram. There was some other oddness about her too, and her husband was not in sight.

He felt the foyer wall with his palm, behind his back, the grainy consistency of the matte white paint and the plaster beneath it impressing themselves on his skin, which interested him greatly.
So this, in the end, is the foyer wall.

“Let’s get away from the door,” she said.

He wanted to jump, but made himself walk calmly to the living room and stand in its center, on its soft Persian rug. She joined him there. The door remained open.

He saw movement at the door, but she had already said, “Karl, look at me.”

He did. She was holding out his yellow hat. He took it from her hand, saw that she was holding something else, retreated several paces toward the couch, inspected his hat: still beautifully faded, yellow, soft, versatile. He raised it to his face to smell, and saw the stain.

“What is
this
?”

“You know what it is.”

“I can’t believe you got me back my hat.”

“Hat and house.”

“I don’t want the house. You have the house. You earned it. I love you, even if—”

“Look at me, Karl.”

He looked at her, at the thing in her hand, at the fresh stains in her hair and on her face and neck and shirt and arm. He said, “Come here close to me now.” She did. “I’ll take care of that,” he said.