You Were Wrong (4 page)

“How about if I touch your shoulders with my hands?”

“That would be worse.”

“Why?”

“Then you would look at me.”

“So?”

“I’m ugly.”

She hugged him fast and tight, careful to avoid his face. He stood trembling with his arms at his sides.

“Now hug me back.”

“I’m scared.”

“Please.”

He put his hands on her back. She trembled too. Her cool and salty shirt, her strong and nervous muscles underneath: two humans touching at the bottom of the forest, glued together by the shadows of the trees.

He did not know how long his eyes had been closed, nor why he opened them then. It appeared first as a white speck, emerging from the green gloom as a vengeful beast might rise up from the bottom of the sea to break apart the most concentrated act of solace he had known to date. “You’ve tensed up again,” she said, and pressed a place inside his shoulder blade that caused him therapeutic pain. The speck became a shirt and pants and shoes, all white. No face yet but the angry and ill-meaning one he gave it, this thing that came toward them with no real body but temporary plasma materializing inside the white clothes with the malevolent seductiveness of visual beauty. “Help me, please,” he thought he heard her say, and the thing that came toward them on the forest floor was Stony, loping up with a breakfast made for Karl himself inside an oblong white styrofoam takeout box that dangled from the crook of this man’s first two fingers in a thin white plastic sack. Thus ended the hug. What could ever be the meaning of Stony for Karl? It worried him. Our friend was on the side of humanity that would always take things hard, and knew that this new lady in his life, though she might keep him for a time, would grow weary of this burden of how he took things. He did not see, or saw but did not know, that she was his kindred and not just in this.

The three of them walked on. He sensed Stony imagined himself the rearward of two aristocrats carrying a peasant to breakfast on a platform and therefore being given only the peasant’s back to contemplate, enjoying the novelty of voluntary servitude and not enjoying the servitude.

Emerging from the woods, Karl saw the house in the light for the first time, from the back. It was dug into a steep hill whose lower end the three of them were leaning into. There was a short ascending meadow of weeds between the woods and house. An open back porch with pale gray dirty concrete floor greeted them. Grass grew in its cracks. Bicycles, balls, garden tools, croquet mallets and stakes and hoops were strewn on it. There was a wheelbarrow and a green hose, and there were dead plants in small black plastic pots on the windowsills. Gray round poles rose up from the concrete floor and supported the back of the house. The second-story window frames had once been given a coat of green paint of which only fragments now were left.

“What’s with all the green?”

“That’s our color,” she said.

“Whose?”

“Ugh, you’re so literal.”

Karl tried to imagine a perfect world in which one would always only be hugged by Sylvia Vetch, or in which all experience would have the tenor of a Vetch hug. Could “Ugh, you’re so literal” have been a verbal hug of the painful kind that liberated toxins from deep within him toward the ultimate goal of free energy flow through the body and extended pain-free living? Perhaps, if someone had not blundered.

“Karl’s coming, everyone!” someone said from the screened-in deck above the back porch. He wasn’t sure this was the same house as last night. “Don’t look!” he was instructed as he went in through the screen door of the back porch and was led up a dark stair, but how could one not look? A pizza stain on the wall and a tube sock, once white, pasted to the banister with mold, were but two ocular sensations. And if one had somehow been able not to look, one would still have felt and heard underfoot the squishy nubs of basement carpet that denoted an undealt-with flood, and one would still have smelled—well, it was complicated, grim, and didn’t have a name he knew.

“Don’t go in the kitchen!”

He saw a shoe, a leg, heard a bracelet jangle in a hall. They scurried away from him like talking cartoon mice. And this was also the dream of a certain kind of person, that the meaning which animated the world was in constant flight just ahead of his arrival, leaving behind the mute and inchoate objects it had vacated, like the ones that covered the dining room table on which a grimy place had evidently been cleared for him. On both chair and light tan tabletop dust adhered to spots where syrup or other sticky gunk had not been fully wiped up. Nothing anywhere in this house had been fully wiped up. And here was that seemingly random cluster of objects on the table and adjacent chairs, the puzzle adequate time would not be given him to solve: newspapers and magazines and books, plastic trays of dried fruits, antacids, laxatives, and analgesics, a combination lock, pliers, water bottles, SPF 30, keys, a watch, a phone and its unsnapped holster, scissors, CDs, pens, a flashlight, half-full coffee cups topped with hieroglyphs of milk, someone’s calendar and checkbook, a canister of compressed air promising to “quickly blow harmful dust & dirt from delicate or hard-to-reach surfaces.” A hand placed the sealed styrofoam takeout tray before him, opened it, and retreated. There were his cold and solid scrambled eggs, there a cooled-down, hardened slice of toast. He looked up. No one was about and yet he felt peered at, a bad actor on a meticulously trashed stage set, performing a scene in which a confused solitary man eats takeout eggs, which had been and would be performed all morning and for days to come by men throughout the length and breadth of the landmass. The relation between the morning meal and the house it happened in, between house and land, land and meal, could be expressed in a formula consisting of numbers, letters, symbols, and a single equal sign; the lifespan of one man might simply not have been sufficient time to derive the formula. Perhaps he’d know it at ninety, were he unlucky enough to live to that age, though surely it would not matter to him then. Truths harder to bear than the ones he could conceive of now would dominate his thoughts at that time, should that time come. Life presented a set of intractable problems that rose up and fell away in an unrelenting series, or maybe it was the same problem in different forms, or in the same form but seen differently as the organism first grew and then decayed. Sometime in the last twenty-four hours Karl had crested, and now joined those trudging down the slope into the valley of the dead.

The suck of the sticky wooden floor on the bottoms of Sylvia’s flip-flops announced her arrival. She presented herself, hands on hips. The bare skin of her arms, neck, and face, sensing Karl’s gaze upon them, changed hue. The skin, he felt, after the clitoris, is the most sensitive organ of a woman’s body.

“We’ve been given the kitchen,” she said.

“In what sense?”

“To clean.”

“Why now, after all these years?”

Her answer was to reverse the direction of the looking, so that now he felt his skin warm beneath the heat of her eyes.

“You and me, hon, cleaning the kitchen.”

“I’d like to nap first.”

“You’ll nap when you’re dead.”

“Maybe not.”

They stood in the kitchen and assessed their task. The pathways of the blue linoleum floor most traveled by were least begrimed, but not by much. Papers, bread crumbs, scuff marks, and well-worn plant pulp had insinuated themselves into the lowest tier of the kitchen landscape. No surface, horizontal, vertical, or otherwise, was without its trace of hard and absentminded use. They looked at the sink and adjacent countertops and decided that the teetering mountain range of dishes, pots, and pans—coated with food and with what happens to food when let to sit in warm moist air for a month or more—would be their first task. They cleared away an area of floor, covered it with newspaper, moved things from the sink and placed them there. They hosed and scrubbed the sink and countertops. The muscles of his arms, neck, and back ached. She gave him aspirin and water of questionable provenance. They scoured and hosed, soaped and rinsed. Without speaking of it, they divided the tasks and agreed upon a high standard of cleanliness, nothing less than which would justify the difficulty and grossness of what they were doing. The pile diminished slowly therefore. They had created a wide swath of countertop on which things could be dried by the air, but they hadn’t yet cleared a place for them to be stored, and a quick opening and closing of cabinet doors had revealed that this, too, would be a task requiring considerable time, energy, and thought. The orderly distribution of objects in a home had long troubled Karl; it had been done wrong in all the homes he’d visited, not to speak of the highly problematic one he lived in. He himself had never been in charge of this unavoidable feature of domestic life, and the possibility of undertaking it with Sylvia Vetch exhilarated him. In inventing a new design for object positioning, and therefore also for the way bodies move through homes, they would remake the very concept of
home
, and remake the possibilities for boy-girl contact and connection. It was possible, it was possible to become someone new in this way, not just new to oneself but new to the world, to bring into the human sphere feelings that had not existed before, made from scratch with care by two gentle souls who admired each other and had similar values, though not, of course, identical values, because it was in the happy friction of values that the serious pleasure of relationship was felt and new things were created.

As they journeyed deeper into work, sweat soaked his skin, hair, and clothes. His fragrance, fluid added, ripened and intensified. His pains had eased off and were now joined in his body by the spirit of work. Sylvia did not in any way that he could detect express her dislike of his smell, if she felt one. And if she herself was the source of any smells they were masked by Karl’s own and by the pungent lime and ammonia of household detergents. Even in smell she remained closed to him.

“So who owns this house?” he asked.

“Who owns your house?”

“I already told you.”

“Well, but think about it. The thing you said, it don’t make sense.”

“What did I say?”

“About your mother.”

“Remind me.”

“On her deathbed.”

“Oh, right, the death of my mother, which you mocked.”

They stood side by side at the sink. Each scrubbed a pot. She reddened, tensed, and paused. “I didn’t mock it, you misunderstood me.”

He turned to her, startled. “Just at the moment when a little sensitivity is required, like when the subject is the death of a man’s mother, you start throwing punches.”

“And when life throws a punch at you, you cower, saying, ‘Don’t hit me, my mother died.’”

They faced each other, mouths open. “You don’t know me well enough to say that.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that.”

He scrutinized her face for something unequivocally true.

“You’re right though,” she said. “I wasn’t, uh—”

“I know. Shut up.”

She giggled, first giggle of heretofore mirthless Vetch; a wave of joy in sad and sweaty Karl.

“But,” she said, “you said your mother said you had to stay in your house and take care of your stepfather until he died and then you would inherit the house and fortune.”

“Something like that.”

“What kind of mother says that to her son?”

“You already asked me that.”

“What was your answer?”

“Shut up.”

“That’s what you should have said to your mother.”

“She did shut up, without my having to tell her to.”

“Is there a legally binding document, to ratify her request?”

Karl remembered his mother at, for some reason, the dining room table of the house he lived in and would own if he could stand to do what she’d stipulated, if indeed she’d stipulated it. And was not this Vetch correct in pointing out how unmotherly Belinda Floor’s stipulation was? Could she really have made it, or was it the product of the derangement that followed the death of the person whom Karl—let’s not choose words that veil the truth, however translucently—loved more than any other in the world? Mother Floor sat at the dining room table in the beautiful white peasant blouse with red embroidering. Also present, Karl Floor and Larchmont Jones; this memory was evidently of a time post–Karl’s dead actual dad; post–the mother-son dinner dyad that Karl had found heavenly and Belinda lonely; post–the transient man-friends, some tolerable, some less so. Karl, then, was twelve or thirteen or fourteen or fifteen, the era of the white peasant blouse in question, a time when the boy was subject to rolling fun-house fits of rage, elation, and despair, the first and last not caused, perhaps, but intensified by the dark trinity of the newly composed family dinner table. And why must the man sit at the head? What was that about? Why was a table that did not previously have a head made to have one by this new older male, who’d arrived into a perfectly acceptable two-person dinner ritual seemingly inseparable from his cravats, colognes, goatee, and monologues?