Bark: Stories

  “Hey, it’s not that easy being a man, either,” said Bake. “There’s all that cash you have to spend on porn, and believe me, that’s money you never get back.”

  He then retreated, turned toward his left, toward Suzy, and leaned in. “Help me,” he whispered in her ear.

  “Are you charming the patrons?”

  “I fear some object may be thrown.”

  “You’re supposed to charm the patrons.”

  “I know, I know, I was trying to. I swear. But she’s one of those who keeps referring to Brocko as Barama.” He had violated most of Suzy’s dinner talk rules already: no politics, no religion, no portfolio tips. And unless you see the head crowning, never look at a woman’s stomach and ask if she’s pregnant. He had learned all these the hard way.

  But in a year like this one, there was no staying away from certain topics.

  “Get back there,” Suzy said. The sculptor was tapping Suzy on the arm again.

  He tried once more with Linda Santo the evil lobbyist. “Here’s the way I see it—and this I think you’ll appreciate. It would be great at long last to have a president in the White House whose last name ends with a vowel.”

  “We’ve never had a president whose last name ended with a vowel?”

  “Well, I don’t count Coolidge.”

  “You’re from what part of Chicago?”

  “Well, just outside Chicago.”

  “Where outside?”

  “Michigan.”

  “Isn’t Michigan a long way from Chicago?”

  “It is!” He could feel the cold air on the skin between his socks and his pant cuffs. When he looked at her hands they seemed frozen into claws.

  “People talk about the rock-solid sweetness of the heartland, but I have to say: Chicago seems like a city that has taken too much pride in its own criminal activity.” She smiled grimly.

  “I don’t think that’s true.” Or was it? He was trying to give her a chance. What if she was right? “Perhaps we have an unfulfilled streak of mythic hankering. Or perhaps we don’t live as fearfully as people do elsewhere,” he said. Now he was just guessing.

  “You wait, my friend, there are some diabolical people eyeing that Sears Tower as we speak.”

  Now he was silent.

  “And if you’re in it when it happens, which I hope you’re not, but if you are, if you are, if you are, if you’re eating lunch at the top or having a meeting down below or whatever it is you may be doing, you will be changed. Because I’ve been there. I know what it’s like to be bombed by terrorists—I was in the Pentagon when they crashed that plane right down into it and I’ll tell you: I was burned alive but not dead. I was burned alive. It lit me inside. Because of that I know more than ever what this country is about, my friend.”

  He saw now that her fingernails really were plastic, that the hand really was a dry frozen claw, that the face that had seemed intriguingly exotic had actually been scarred by fire and only partially repaired. He saw how she was cloaked in a courageous and intense hideosity. The hair was beautiful, but now he imagined it was probably a wig. Pity poured through him: he’d never before felt so sorry for someone. How could someone have suffered so much? How could someone have come so close to death, so unfairly, so painfully and heroically, and how could he still want to strangle them?

  “You were a lobbyist for the Pentagon?” was all he managed to say.

  “Any faux pas?” asked Suzy in the cab on the way back to the B and B, where warm cookies would await them by their door, and snore strips on their nightstand.

  “Beaucoup faux,” said Bake. He pronounced it foze. “Beaucoup verboten foze. Uttering my very name was like standing on the table and peeing in a wineglass.”

  “What? Oh, please.”

  “I’m afraid I spoke about politics. I couldn’t control myself.”

  “Brocko is going to win. His daughters will like it here. All will be well. Rest assured,” she said, as the cab sped along toward Georgetown, the street curbs rusted and rouged with the first fallen leaves.

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  He was afraid to say more.

  He did not know how much time he and Suzy might even have left together, and an endgame of geriatric speed dating—everyone deaf and looking identical: “What? I can’t hear you? What? You again? Didn’t I just see you?”—all taking place midst bankruptcy and war, might be the real circle of hell he was destined for.

  “Don’t ever leave me,” he said.

  “Why on earth would I do that?”

  He paused. “I’m putting in a request not just for on earth, but for even after that.”

  “OK,” she said, and squeezed his meaty thigh. At least he had once liked to think of it as meaty.

  “I fear you will soon discover some completely obvious way to find me less than adequate.”

  “You’re adequate,” she said.

  “I’m adequate enough.”

  She kept her hand there on his leg, and on top of hers he placed his, the one with the wedding ring she had given him, identical to her own. He willed all his love into the very ends of his fingertips, and as his hand clasped hers he watched the firm, deliberate hydraulics of its knuckles and joints. But she had already turned her head away and was looking out the window, steadily, the rest of the ride back, showing him only her beautiful hair, which was gold and flashing in the passing streetlamps, as if it were something not attached to her at all.

  WINGS

  Should he find he couldn’t work it there would still be time enough.

  —Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

  The grumblings of their stomachs were intertwined and unassignable.

  “Was that you or was that me?” she would ask in bed, and Dench would say, “I’m not sure.” They lay there in the mornings, their legs moving at angles toward one another, not unlike the elms she could see through the window outside, the high branches nuzzling in the late March breeze, speaking tree to tree of the thrilling weather. Her dreams of eating meals full of meat, which caused her teeth to gnash in the night—surely a sign of spring—left the insides of her cheeks bloody and chewed, one saliva gland now swelled to the size of a raisin.

  Shouldn’t they be up and about already? Morning sun shot across the ceiling in a white stripe of paint. She and Dench were both too young and too old for this close, late-morning, bed-bound life, but their scuttled careers—the band, the two CDs, the newsletter (turned e-letter turned abandoned cyber-litter) on how to simplify your life (be broke!), the driving, the touring, the scrambling, the foraging in parks for chives and dandelions, the charging up of credit cards, the taking pictures of clothes and selling them on eBay (“Wake up!” she used to exclaim to him in the middle of the night, sitting up in bed, “wake up and listen to my ideas!”)—had led them here, to a nine-month sublet that allowed pets. Still in their thirties, but barely, they had bought themselves a little time. So what if her investments these days were in pennies, wine corks, and sheets of self-adhesive Forever stamps? These would go up in value, unlike everything else. Beneath her bed was a shoe box of dwindling cash from their last gig, where they’d gotten only a quarter of the door. She could always cut her long, almost Asian hair again, as she had two years ago, and sell it for a thousand dollars.

  Now, as she often did when contemplating wrong turns, she sometimes thought back to when it was she had first laid eyes on Dench, that Friday long ago when he had approached her at an afternoon sound check in some downtown or other, his undulating tresses not product-free, a demeanor of arrangement and premeditation that gussied up something more chaotic. Although it was winter he wore mirrored sunglasses and a thin leather jacket with the collar turned up: 150 percent jerk. Perhaps it was his strategy to improve people’s opinions of him right away, to catch an upward momentum and make it sail, so when the sunglasses came off and then the jacket, and he began to play a song he had not written himself, he was on his way. He lunged onto one knee and raced
through a bludgeoning bass solo. At the drums he pressed the stick into the cymbal and circled it, making a high-pitched celestial note, like a finger going round the edge of a wineglass. He smacked the tambourine against his head and against the snare, back and forth. When he then approached the piano, she stopped him. “Not the piano,” she said quietly. “The piano’s mine.”

  “OK,” he said. “I just wanted to show you everything I can do.” And he picked up an acoustic guitar.

  Would it be impossible not to love him? Would not wisdom intervene?

  Later, to the rest of the band, whose skepticism toward Dench was edged with polite dismay, she said, “I don’t understand why the phrase ‘like an orchestra tuning up’ is considered a criticism. I love an orchestra when it is tuning up. Especially then.”

  From the beginning, however, she could not see how Dench had ever earned a living. He knew two Ryan Adams songs and played guitar fairly well. But he had never done so professionally. Or done anything professionally that she could discern. Early on he claimed to be waiting for money, and she wasn’t sure, when he smiled, whether this was a joke. “From whom? Your mother?” and he only smiled. Which made her think, Yes indeed, his mother.

  But no. His mother had died when he was a teenager. His father had disappeared years before that and thereafter for Dench there was much moving with his sisters: from Ohio to Indiana to California and back. First with his mom, then with an aunt. There was apparently in his life a lot of dropping in and out of college and unexplained years. There had been a foreshortened stint in the Peace Corps. In Swaziland. “I’d just be waiting at a village bus stop, reading a book, and women would pretend to want to borrow it to read but in truth they just wanted a few pages for toilet paper. Or the guys they had me working with? They would stick their hands in the Port-a-Potties, as soon as we got them off the trucks: they wanted the fragrant blue palms. I had to get out of there, man, I didn’t really understand the commitment I had made, and so my uncle got a congressman to pull some strings.” How did Dench pay his bills?

  “It’s one big magic trick,” he said. He liked to get high before dinner and seemed never without a joint in his wallet or in a drawer. He ate his chicken—the wings and the drumsticks, the arms and the legs—clean down to the purple bones.

  And so, though she could not tell an avocado plant from flax (he had both), and though she had never seen any grow lights or seeds or a framed license to grow medical marijuana from the state of Michigan, KC began to fear Dench made his living by selling pot. It seemed to be the thing he was musing about and not saying. As she had continued to see him, she suspected it more deeply. He played her more songs. Then as something caught fire between them, and love secured its footing inside her, when she awoke next to him with damp knots in the back of her hair like she’d never experienced before, the room full of the previous night’s candles and the whiff of weed, his skin beside her a silky calico of cool and warm, and as they both needed to eat and eat some more together, she began to feel OK that he sold drugs. If he did. What the hell? At least there was that. At least he did something. His sleepy smiles and the occasional flash of a euro or a hundred-dollar bill in his pocket seemed to confirm it, but then his intermittent lack of cash altogether perpetuated the mystery, as did his checks, which read D. ENCHER, and she started to fear he might not sell drugs after all. When she asked him straight out, he said only, “You’re funny!” And after she had paid for too many of his drinks and meals, since he said he was strapped that week and then the week after that, she began to wish, a little sheepishly, that he did sell drugs. She began to hope deeply that he did. Once she even prayed for him to do so. And soon she was close to begging. Just a little skunk, darling. Just a little pocket rocket, some sparky bark or kick stick, just a bit of wake and bake …

  Instead he joined her band.

  It had been called Villa and in the end it had not worked out: tours they paid for themselves with small business loans; audiences who did not like KC’s own songs (too singer-songwriter, with rhymes (calories and galleries!) that she was foolishly proud of (dead and wed!)), including one tune she refused to part with, since it had briefly been positioned to be a minor indie hit, a song about a chef in New Jersey named Jim Barber whom she’d once been in love with.

  Here I am your unshaved fennel

  Here I am your unshaved cheese

  All I want to know? is when I’ll—

  feel your blade against my knees.

  Its terribleness eluded her. Her lyrics weren’t sly or hip or smoky and tough but the demure and simple hopes of a mouse. She’d spent a decade barking up the wrong tree—as a mouse! Audiences booed—the boys in their red-framed spectacles, the girls in their crooked little dresses. Despised especially were her hip-hop renditions of Billy Joel and Neil Young (she was once asked to please sing down by the river, and she’d thought they’d meant the song. She told this sad joke over and over). Throughout the band tours she would wake up weeping at the edge of some bed or other, not knowing where she was or what she was supposed to do that day or once or twice even who she was, since all her endeavor seemed separate from herself, a suit to slip into. Tears, she had once been told, were designed to eliminate toxins, and they poured down her face and slimed her neck and gathered in the recesses of her collarbones and she had to be careful never to lie back and let them get into her ears, which might cause the toxins to return and start over. Of course, the rumor of toxins turned out not to be true. Tears were quite pure. And so the reason for them, it seemed to her later, when she thought about it, was to identify the weak, so that the world could assure its strong future by beating the weak to death.

  “Are we perhaps unlovable?” she asked Dench.

  “It’s because we’re not named, like, Birth Hearse for Dog-Face.”

  “Why aren’t we named that?”

  “Because we have standards.”

  “Is that it?” she said.

  “Yeah! And not just ‘Body and Soul’ as an encore, though we do that well. I mean we maintain a kind of integrity.”

  “Integrity! Really!” After too many stolen meals from minibars, the Pringles can carefully emptied and the foil top resealed, the container replaced as if untouched back atop the wood tray, hotel towels along with the gear all packed up in the rental truck whose rear fender bore one large bumper sticker, with Donald Rumsfeld’s visage, under which read DOES THIS ASS MAKE MY TRUCK LOOK BIG?, after all that she continually found herself thinking, If only Dench sold drugs! On hot summer days she would find a high-end supermarket and not only eat the free samples in their tiny white cups but stand before the produce section and wait for the vegetable misters to come on, holding her arms beneath the water in relief. She was showering with the lettuces.

  She and Dench had not developed their talents sufficiently nor cared for them properly—or so a booking agent told them.

  Dench took offense. “You forget about the prize perplexity, the award angle—they are often looking for people like us: we could win something!” he exclaimed, with Pringles in his teeth.

  The gardenia in KC’s throat, the flower that was her singing voice—its brown wilt would have to be painstakingly slowed through the years—had already begun its rapid degeneration into simple crocus, then scraggly weed. She’d been given something perfect—youth!—and done imperfect things with it. The moon shone whole then partial in the sky, having its life without her. Sometimes she just chased roughly after a melody—like someone kicking a can down a road. She had not hemmed in her speaking voice, kept it tame and tended so that her singing one could fly. Her speaking voice was the same as her singing one, a roller coaster of various registers, the Myrna Loy–Billie Burke timbre of the Edwardian grandmother who had raised her, a woman who had trained at conservatory but had never had a singing career and practically sang every sentence she uttered: Katherine? It’s time for dinner went up and down the scale. Only her dying words—Marry well—had been flat, the drone of chagrin, a practical w
arning: life-preserving but with a glimpse of a dark little bunker in a war not yet declared. Marry well had been uttered after she begged KC to get a teaching certificate. Teaching makes interesting people boring, sure, she had said. But it also makes boring people interesting. So there’s an upside. There always is an upside if you look up.

  Dench’s own poor mother wasn’t able to leave him—or his sisters—a dime, though he had always done what she said, even that one year they lived in motels and he obligingly wore the identical nightgown as his sisters so that they might better be mistaken for a single child, to avoid an extra room charge, in case the maid walked in. His young mother had died with breathing tubes hooked right to her wallet, he said, just sucking it all up. Dench made a big comedic whooshing sound when he told this part. His father’s disappearance, which had come long before, had devastated and haunted her: when they were out for dinner one night his father announced that he had to see a man about a horse, and he excused himself, went to the men’s room, and climbed out the window never to return. Dench made a whooshing sound for this part of the story as well.

  “I can’t decide whether that is cowardice or a weird kind of courage,” Dench said.

  “It’s neither,” KC replied. “It has nothing to do with either of those things.”

  Motherless children would always find each other. She had once heard that. They had the misery that wasn’t misery but presumed to be so to others. They had the misery that liked company and was company. Only sometimes they felt the facts of their motherless lives. They were a long, long way from home. They had theme songs hatched in a spiritual tradition. There was no fondling of the gold coins of memory. The world was their orphanage.

  But when they moved in together he hesitated.

  “What about my belongings?” he asked.