Like Life

  “What are you, hard of hearing?” asked Odette.

  “A little,” said Pinky. “In the right ear.”

  “Next we come to a stalagmite which is the only one in the cave that visitors are allowed to touch. As we pass, it will be on your right, and you may manhandle it to your heart’s content.”

  “Hmmmph,” said Pinky.

  “Really,” said Odette. She peered ahead at the front of the group, which had now gathered unexcitedly around the stalagmite, a short stumpy one with a head rubbed white with so much touching. It had all the appeal of a bar of soap in a gas station. “I think I want to go back and look at the cave coral again.”

  “Which was that?” said Pinky.

  “All that stuff that looked like cement broccoli. Also the chapel room with the church organ. I mean, I thought that looked pretty much like an organ.”

  “… And now,” the guide was saying, “we come to that part of our tour when we let you see what the cave looks like in its own natural lighting.” She moved over and flicked a switch. “You should not be able to see your hand in front of your face.”

  Odette widened her eyes and then squinted and still could not see her hand in front of her face. The darkness was thick and certain, not a shaded, waltzing dark but a paralyzing coffin jet. There was something fierce and eternal about it, something secret and unrelieved, like a thing not told to children.

  “I’m right here,” Pinky said, stepping close, “in case you need me.” He gave her far shoulder a squeeze, his arm around the back of her. She could smell the soupy breath of him, the spice of his neck near her face, and leaned, blind and hungry, into his arm. She reached past the scratch of her own sweater and felt for his hand.

  “We can see now how the cave looked when it was first unearthed, and how it had existed eons before, in the pitch dark, gradually growing larger, opening up in darkness, the life and the sea of it trapped and never seeing light, a small moist cavern a million years in the making, just slowly opening, opening, and opening inside.…”

  WHEN THEY SLEPT TOGETHER, she almost cried. He was a kisser, and he kissed and kissed. It seemed the kindest thing that had ever happened to her. He kissed and whispered and brought her a large glass of water when she asked for one.

  “When ya going back to New York?” he asked, and because it was in less than four weeks, she said, “Oh, I forget.”

  Pinky got out of bed. He was naked and unselfconscious, beautiful, in a way, the long, rounded lines of him, the stark cliff of his back. He went over to the VCR, fumbled with some cassettes in the dark, holding each up to the window, where there was a rainy, moony light from the street, like a dream; he picked up cassette after cassette until he found the one he wanted.

  It was a tape called Holocaust Survivors, and the title flashed blood red on the television screen, as if in warning that it had no place there at all. “I watch this all the time,” said Pinky, very quietly. He stared straight ahead in a trance of impassivity, but when he reached back to put an arm around Odette, he knew exactly where she was, slightly behind one of his shoulders, the sheet tight across her chest. “You shouldn’t hide your breasts,” he said, without looking. But she stayed like that, tucked close, all along the tracks to Treblinka, the gates to Auschwitz, the film lingering on weeds and wind, so unbelieving in this historical badlands, it seemed to want, in a wave of nausea and regret, to become perhaps a nature documentary. It seemed at moments confused about what it was about, a confusion brought on by knowing exactly.

  Someone was talking about the trucks. How they put people in trucks, with the exhaust pipes venting in, how they drove them around until they were blue, the people were blue, and could be shoveled out from a trapdoor. Past some barbed wire, asters were drying in a field.

  When it was over, Pinky turned to her and sighed. “Heavy stuff,” he said.

  Heavy stuff? Her breathing stopped, then sped up, then stopped again. Who on earth was entitled to such words?

  Who on earth? She felt, in every way it was possible to feel it, astonished that she had slept with him.

  SHE WENT OUT with him again, but this time she greeted him at his own door, with a stiff smile and a handshake, like a woman willing to settle out of court. “So casual,” he said, standing in the doorway. “I don’t know. You East Coast city slickers.”

  “We got hard hearts,” she said with an accent that wasn’t really any particular accent at all. She wasn’t good at accents.

  When they slept together again, she tried not to make too much of it. Once more they watched Holocaust Survivors, a different tape, out of sequence, the camera still searching hard for something natural to gaze upon, embarrassed, like a bloodshot eye weary and afraid of people and what they do. They set fire to the bodies and to the barracks, said a voice. The pyres burned for many days.

  Waves lapped. Rain beaded on a bulrush. In the bathroom she ran the tap water so he couldn’t hear as she sat, ill, staring at her legs, her mother’s legs. When had she gotten her mother’s legs? When she crept back to his bed, he was sleeping like a boy, the way men did.

  In the morning she got up early and went to the closest thing there was to a deli and returned triumphantly with bagels and lox. Outside, the town had been museum dead, but the sky was lemony with sun, and elongations of light, ovals of brightened blue, now dappled Pinky’s covers. She laid the breakfast out in them, and he rolled over and kissed her, his face waxy with sleep. He pointed at the lox. “You like that sort of stuff?”

  “Yup.” Her mouth was already full with it, the cool, slimy pink. “Eat it all the time.”

  He sighed and sank back into his pillow. “After breakfast I’ll teach you some Yiddish words.”

  “I already know some Yiddish words. I’m from New York. Here, eat some of this.”

  “I’ll teach you tush and shmuck.” Pinky yawned, then grinned. “And shiksa.”

  “All the things a nice Jewish boy practices on before he marries a nice Jewish girl. I know those.”

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  She refused to look at him. “I don’t know.”

  “I know,” said Pinky, and he stood up on the bed, like a child about to bounce, toweringly naked, priapic. She could barely look. Oh, for a beaded bulrush. A train disappearing into a tunnel. “You’re falling in love with me!” he exclaimed, gazing merrily down. She still had her coat on, and had stopped chewing. She stared, disbelievingly, up at him. Sometimes she thought she was just trying to have fun in life, and other times she realized she must be terribly confused. She narrowed her eyes. Then she opened her mouth wide so that he could see the train wreck of chewed-up bagel and lox.

  “I like that,” said Pinky. “You’re onto something there.”

  HER POEMS, as she stated in letters to friends in New York, were not going well; she had put them on the back burner, and they had fallen behind the stove. She had met this guy. Something had happened to the two of them in a cave, she wasn’t sure what. She had to get out of here. She was giving her final reading to the library patrons and matrons in less than three weeks, and that would pretty much be it. I hope you are not wearing those new, puffy evening dresses I see in magazines. They make everyone look like sticky buns. It is cold. Love, Odette.

  LAIRD WAS CURIOUS. He kept turning his head sideways during the sit-ups. “So you and Pinky hitting it off?”

  “Who knows?” said Odette.

  “Well, I mean, everyone’s had their difficulties in life; his I’m only a little aware of. I thought you’d find him interesting.”

  “Sure, anthropologically.”

  “You think he’s a dork.”

  “Laird, we’re in our forties here. You can’t use words like dork anymore.” The sit-ups were getting harder. “He’s not a dork. He’s a doofus. Maybe. Maybe a doink.”

  “You’re a hard woman,” said Laird.

  “Oh, I’m not,” pleaded Odette, collapsing on the rubber mat. “Really I’m not.”

  AT NIGHT he b
egan to hold her in a way that stirred her deeply. He slept with one hand against the small of her back, the other capped against her head, as if to protect her from bad thoughts. Or, perhaps, thoughts at all. How quickly bodies came to love each other, promise themselves to each other always, without asking permission. From the mind! If only she could give up her mind, let her heart swell, inflamed, her brain stepping out for whole days, whole seasons, her work shrinking to limericks. She would open her mouth before the library fellowship people, and out would come: There once was a woman from … Someone would rush to a phone booth and call the police.

  But perhaps you could live only from the neck down. Perhaps you could live with the clothes you were taking off all piled on top of your head, in front of your face, not just a sweater with a too-small neck but everything caught there—pants, shoes, and socks—a crazed tangle on your shoulders, in lieu of a head, while your body, stark naked, prepared to live the rest of its life in the sticks, the boonies, the fly-over, the rain. Perhaps you could. For when she slept against him like that, all the rest of the world collapsed into a suitcase under the bed. It was the end of desire, this having. Oh, here oh here she was. He would wrap himself around her, take her head like an infant’s into his hand and breathe things to her, her throat her chest, in his beginning to sleep. Go to sleep, go to sleep with me.

  IN THE MORNING she warmed her arms over the blue zinnias of the gas jets and heated water for coffee and eggs. Over the newspaper, she pretended she and Pinky were Beatrice and Benedick, or Nick and Nora Charles, which is what she always pretended in a love affair, at least for a few days, until the evidence overwhelmed her.

  “Why are you always talking with your hands?” asked Pinky. “You think you’re Jewish?”

  She glared at him. “You know, that’s what I hate about this part of the country,” she replied. “Everyone’s so repressed. If you use your body in the least way while you’re talking, people think you’re trying out for a Broadway show.”

  “Kiss me,” he said, and he closed his eyes.

  On a weekday Pinky would be off to his office, to work on another farm bankruptcy or a case of animal abuse. “My clients,” he said wearily. “You would never want to go out to eat with them. They come into my office reeking of cowshit, they lean back in the chair, set their belly out like that, then tell you about how some Humane Society bastard gave them a summons because their goat had worms.” Across his face there breathed a sigh of tragedy. “It’s a sad thing not to have clients you can go out to eat with.” He shook his head. “It’s a sad thing, a goat with worms.”

  There was something nice about Pinky, but that something was not Nick Charles. Pinky was more like a grave and serious brother of Nick’s, named Chuck. Chuck Charles. When you had parents who would give you a name like that, there was nothing funny anymore.

  “What do you write poems about?” he asked her once in the middle of the night.

  “Whores,” she said.

  “Whores,” he repeated, nodding in the dark.

  She gave him books of poetry: Wordsworth, Whitman, all the W’s. When she’d ask him how he liked them, he would say, “Fine. I’m on page …” and then he would tell her what page he was on and how many pages he’d accomplished that day. “The Wadsworth is a little too literaturey for me.”

  “Wordsworth,” she corrected. They were in his kitchen, drinking juice.

  “Wordsworth. Isn’t there a poet named Wadsworth?”

  “No. You’re probably thinking of Longfellow. That was his middle name.”

  “Longfellow. Now who’s he again?”

  “How about Leaves of Grass? What did you think of the poems in there?”

  “OK. I’m on page fifty,” he said. Then he showed her his gun, which he kept in his kitchen in a leather case, like a trombone. He kept a rifle, he said, in the basement.

  Odette frowned. “You hunt?”

  “Sure. Jews aren’t supposed to hunt, I know. But in this part of the country it’s best to have a gun.” He smiled. “Bavarians, you know. Here, try it out. Let me see how you look with a gun.”

  “I’m afraid of guns.”

  “Nothing to be afraid of. Just heft it and look down the top of the barrel and line up the sights.”

  She sighed, lifted the gun, pressed the butt hard against her right shoulder, and aimed it at the kitchen counter. “Now, see the notch in the metal sticking up in the middle of your barrel?” Pinky was saying. “You have to get the bead in the middle of the notch.”

  She closed her left eye. “I can feel the urge coming on to blow away that cutting board,” she said.

  “Gun’s not loaded. Probably not till spring. Turkey season. Though I’ve got tags for deer.”

  “You hunt turkeys?” She put the gun down. It was heavy.

  “You eat turkey, don’t you?”

  “The turkeys I eat are raised on farms. They’re different. They’ve signed on the dotted line.” She paused and sighed again. “What do you do, go into a field and fire away?”

  “Kind of. You try to catch them midflight. You know, I should take you deer hunting. It’s the last two days, this weekend, and I’ve got tags. Have you ever been?”

  “Pulease,” she said.

  IT WAS COLD in the woods. She blew breath clouds, then rings of cigarette smoke, into the dead ferns. “It’s nice out here. You don’t suppose we could just watch nature instead of shoot it.”

  “Without hunting, the deer would starve,” said Pinky.

  “So maybe we could just cook for them.” They had brought along a bottle of Jim Beam, and she twisted it open and took a swig. “Have you ever been married?”

  “Once,” said Pinky. “God, what, twenty years ago.” He quickly shouldered his rifle, thinking he heard something, but no.

  “Oh,” she said. “I wasn’t going to ask, but then you never said anything about it, so I thought I’d ask.”

  “How about you?”

  “Not me,” said Odette. She had a poem about marriage. It began, Marriage is the death you want to die, and in front of audiences she never read it with much conviction. Usually she swung her foot back and forth through the whole thing.

  She looked down at her chest. “I don’t think orange is anyone’s most flattering color,” she said. They were wearing blaze-orange hats and vests. “I think we look like things placed in the middle of the road to make the cars go around.”

  “Shhhh,” said Pinky.

  She took another swig of Jim Beam. She had worn the wrong kind of boots—gray, suede, over the knees, with three-inch heels—and now she studied them with interest. One of the heels was loose, and mud was drying on the toes. “Tell me again,” she whispered to Pinky, “what makes us think a deer will cross our path?”

  “There’s a doe bed not far from here,” whispered Pinky. “It attracts bucks.”

  “Bucks, doe—thank God everything boils down to money, I always say.”

  “During mating season the doe constructs a bed for herself, and then she urinates all around the outside of it. That’s how she gets her mate.”

  “So that’s it,” murmured Odette. “I was always peeing in the bed.”

  Pinky’s gun suddenly fired into the trees, and the noise filled the woods like a war, spilling to the ground the yellowing needles of a larch.

  “Ahhhhhh!” Odette screamed. “What is going on?” Guns, she was reminded then, were not for girls. They were for boys. They were invented by boys. They were invented by boys who had never gotten over their disappointment that accompanying their own orgasm there wasn’t a big boom sound. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Damn!” shouted Pinky. “I missed!” He stood up and went crashing through the underbrush.

  “Oh, my God!” cried Odette, and she stumbled after him, snapping the same twigs underfoot, ducking the same barbed wire. “Where are we going?”

  “I’ve only wounded the deer,” Pinky called over his shoulder. “I’ve got to kill it.”

  ?
??Do you have to?”

  “Keep your voice down,” said Pinky.

  “Fuck you,” said Odette. “I’ll wait for you back where we were,” but there was a sudden darting from a bush behind her, and the bleeding deer leaped out, in a mournful gallop, its hip a crimson gash. Pinky raised his gun and fired, catching the deer in the neck. The air shimmered in the echo, and the leaves fell from a horse chestnut. The deer’s legs buckled, and when it tipped over, dead in some berry bushes, its eyes never blinked but stayed lidless and deep, black as outer space.

  “I’ll leave the entrails for the hawks,” Pinky said to Odette, but she was not there.

  • • •

  Oh, the ladies come down from the Pepsi Hotel

  Their home has no other name

  than the sign that was placed

  like a big cola bell: Pepsi-Cola Have a Pepsi Hotel.

  Only a few of Odette’s poems about whores rhymed—the ones she’d written recently—but perhaps the library crowd would like those best, the anticipation of it, knowing what the next word would be like though not what it would be; stanza after stanza, it would be a combination of comfort and surprise an audience might appreciate.

  The local library association had set up a lectern near the windows of the reference room and had arranged chairs in rows for about eighty people. The room was chilly and alarmingly full. When Odette read she tried to look out past the faces, toward the atlases and the biographical dictionaries. She tugged on the cowl of her sweater and pulled it up over her chin between poems. She tried to pretend people’s heads were all little ears of corn, something a dance instructor had once told her ballet class to do when she was seven and they had had to dance before the parents.

  They come down to the truckers

  or the truckers go up

  to the rooms with the curtains pell-mell.

  They truck down for the fuckers

  or else they fuck up

  in the Pepsi Have a Pepsi Hotel.

  There was silence. A door creaked open then shut. Odette looked up and saw Pinky in the back, tiptoeing over to a chair to sit. She had not seen or spoken to him in a week. Two elderly women in the front turned around to stare.