Robin looked at me. "Always a little out of the loop, eh?" She smiled stiffly.
Pat was digging around in a hemp tote bag I hadn't noticed before. "Here's a little painting I made for you," she said, handing a small unframed canvas gingerly to Robin. I couldn't see what the painting was of. Robin stared at it for a very long time and then looked back up and at Pat and said, "Thank you so much." She momentarily laid the painting in her lap and I could see it was nothing but a plain white blank.
I looked longingly at the paper sack of gin.
"And I have a new dance for you!" whispered Isabel excitedly.
"You do?" I said.
Robin turned to me again. "Always the last to know, huh," she said, and then winced, as if speaking hurt. She clutched Pat's painting to her stomach.
Isabel stood and moved her chair out of the way. "This piece is dedicated to Robin Ross," she announced. And then, after a moment's stillness, she began to move, saying lines of poetry as she did. "Heap not on this mound / Roses that she loved so well; / Why bewilder her with roses, / That she cannot see or smell?" There was more, and as, reciting, she flew and turned and balanced on one leg, her single arm aloft, I thought, What the hell kind of poem is this? It seemed rude to speak of death to the dead, and I kept checking Robin's face, to see how she was taking it, but Robin remained impassive. At the end, she placed the painting back in her lap and clapped. I was about to clap as well, when car headlights from the driveway suddenly arced across the room.
"It's the cops! Get down!" said Isabel, and we all hit the floor.
"I think they're patrolling the house," whispered Robin, lying on her back on the rug. She was hugging Pat's painting to her chest. "I guess there was a call from a neighbor or something. Just lie here for a minute and they'll leave." The police car idled in the driveway for a minute, perhaps taking down the license number of Isabel's car, and then pulled away.
"It's O.K. We can get up now," said Robin.
"Whew. That was close," said Pat.
We all got back into our chairs, Robin with some difficulty, and there was then a long silence, like a Quaker wedding, which I came to understand was being directed at me.
"Well, I guess it's my turn," I said. "It's been a terrible month. First the election, and now this. You." I indicated Robin, and she nodded just slightly, then grabbed at her scarf and retied the knot. "And I don't have my violin or my piano here," I said. Isabel and Pat were staring at me hopelessly. "So—I guess I'll just sing." I stood up and cleared my throat. I knew that if you took "The Star-Spangled Banner" very slowly and mournfully it altered not just the attitude of the song but the actual punctuation, turning it into a protest and a question. I sang it slowly, not without a little twang. "O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave, O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?" Then I sat down. The three of them applauded, Isabel clapping her thigh.
"Very nice," said Robin. "You never sing enough," she added ambiguously. Her smile to me was effortful and pinched. "Now I have to go," she said, and she stood, leaving Pat's painting behind on the chair, and walked into the lit hallway, after which we heard the light switch flick off, and the whole house was plunged into darkness again.
"well, i'm glad we did that," I said on the way back home. I was sitting alone in the back, sneaking some of the gin—why bother ever again with rickey mix?—and I'd been staring out the window. Now I looked forward and noticed that Pat was driving. Pat hadn't driven in years. A pickup truck with the bumper sticker "No Hillary No Way" roared past us, and we stared at its message as if we were staring at a swastika. Where were we living?
"Redneck," Isabel muttered at the driver.
"It's a trap, isn't it," I said.
"What is?" asked Pat.
"This place!" exclaimed Isabel. "Our work! Our houses! The college!"
"It's all a trap!" I repeated.
But we did not entirely believe it. Somewhere inside us we were joyful orphans: our lives were right, we were zooming along doing what we wanted, we were sometimes doing what we loved. But we were inadequate as a pit crew, for ourselves or for anyone else. "It was good to see Robin," I continued from the back. "It was really good to see her."
"That's true," said Isabel. Pat said nothing. She was coming off her manic high and driving took all she had.
"All in all, it was a good night," I said.
"A really good night," agreed Isabel.
"good night," Robin had said the last time I'd seen her well, standing in her own doorway. She had invited me over and we were hanging out, eating her summery stir-fry, things both lonely and warm between us, when she asked about the man I was seeing, the one she had dated briefly.
"Well, I don't know," I said, a little sad. At that point I was still sitting at her table and I found myself rubbing the grain of it with one finger. "He seems now also to be seeing this other person—Daphne Kern? Do you know her? She's one of those beautician-slash-art dealers?" All the restaurants, coffee shops, and hair salons in town seemed to have suddenly gotten into hanging, showing, and selling art. This dignified, or artified, the business of serving. Did I feel I was better, more interesting, with my piano and my violin and my singing?
"I know Daphne. I took a yoga class once from her, when she was doing that."
"You did?" I could not control myself. "So what's so compelling about her?" My voice was not successfully shy of a whine. "Is she nice?"
"She's pretty, she's nice, she's intuitive," Robin said, casually ticking off the qualities. "She's actually a talented yoga instructor. She's very physical. Even when she speaks she uses her body a lot. You know, frankly? She's probably just really good in bed."
At this my heart sickened and plummeted down my left side and into my shoe. My appetite, too, shrank to a small pebble and sat in stony reserve in the place my heart had been and to which my heart would at some point return, but just not in time for dessert.
"I've made a lemon meringue pie," said Robin, getting up and clearing the dishes. She was always making pies. She would have written more plays if she had made fewer pies. "More meringue than lemon, I'm afraid."
"Oh, thank you. I'm just full," I said, looking down at my unfinished food.
"I'm sorry," Robin said, a hint of worry in her voice. "Should I not have said that thing about Daphne?"
"Oh, no," I said. "That's fine. It's nothing." But soon I felt it was time for me to go, and after a single cup of tea I stood, clearing only a few of the dishes with her. I found my purse and headed for the door.
She stood in the doorway, holding the uneaten meringue pie. "That skirt, by the way, is great," she said in the June night. "Orange is a good color on you. Orange and gold."
"Thanks," I said.
Then, without warning, she suddenly lifted up the pie and pushed it into her own face. When she pulled off the tin, meringue clung to her skin like blown snow. The foam of it covered her lashes and brows and, with her red hair, for a minute she looked like a demented Queen Elizabeth.
"What the fuck?" I said, shaking my head. I needed new friends. I would go to more conferences and meet more people.
"I've always wanted to do that," said Robin. The mask of meringue on her face looked eerie, not clownish at all, and her mouth speaking through the white foam seemed to be a separate creature entirely, a puppet or a fish. "I've always wanted to do that, and now I have."
"Hey," I said. "There's no business like show business." I was digging in my purse for my car keys.
Long hair flying over her head, bits of meringue dropping on the porch, she took a dramatic bow. "Everything," she added, from behind her mask, "everything, everything, well, almost everything about it"—she gulped a little pie that had fallen in from one corner of her mouth—"is appealing."
"Brava," I said, smiling. I had found my keys. "Now I'm out of here."
"Of course," she said, gesturing with her one pie-free hand. "Onward."
for Nietzchka Keene
(1952–2004)
/> * * *
Debarking
ira had been divorced for six months and still couldn't get his wedding ring off. His finger had swelled doughily—a combination of frustrated desire, unmitigated remorse, and misdirected ambition was how he explained it. "I'm going to have to have my entire finger surgically removed," he told his friends. The ring (supposedly gold, though now that everything he had ever received from Marilyn had been thrown into doubt, who knew?) cinched the blowsy fat of his finger, which had grown twistedly around it like a fucking happy challah. "Maybe I should cut the whole hand off and send it to her," he said on the phone to his friend Mike, with whom he worked at the State Historical Society. "She'd understand the reference." Ira had already ceremoniously set fire to his dove-gray wedding tux—hanging it on a tall stick in his backyard, scarecrow style, and igniting it with a Bic lighter. "That sucker went up really fast," he gasped apologetically to the fire marshal, after the hedge caught, too—and before he was taken overnight to the local lockdown facility. "So fast. Maybe it was, I don't know, like the residual dry-cleaning fluid."
"You'll remove that ring when you're ready," Mike said now. Mike's job approving historical-preservation projects on old houses left him time to take a lot of lenient-parenting courses and to read all the lenient-parenting books, though he had no children himself. He did this for project-applicant-management purposes. "Here's what you do for your depression. I'm not going to say lose yourself in charity work. I'm not going to say get some perspective by watching our country's news every night and contemplating those worse off than yourself, those, say, who are about to be blown apart by bombs. I'm going to say this: Stop drinking, stop smoking. Eliminate coffee, sugar, dairy products. Do this for three days, then start everything back up again. Bam. I guarantee you, you will be so happy."
"I'm afraid," Ira said softly, "that the only thing that would make me happy right now is snipping the brake cables on Marilyn's car."
"Spring," Mike said helplessly, though it was still only the end of winter. "It can really hang you up the most."
"Hey. You should write songs. Just not too often." Ira looked at his hands. Actually, he had once got the ring off in a hot bath, but the sight of his finger, naked as a child's, had terrified him and he had shoved the ring back on.
He could hear Mike sighing and casting about. Cupboard doors closed loudly. The refrigerator puckered open then whooshed shut. Ira knew that Mike and Kate had had their troubles—as the phrase went—but their marriage had always held. "I'd divorce Kate," Mike had once confided timidly, "but she'd kill me."
"Look," Mike suggested, "why don't you come to our house Sunday for a little Lent dinner. We're having some people by, and who knows?"
"Who knows?" Ira asked.
"Yes—who knows."
"What's a Lent dinner?"
"We made it up. For Lent. We didn't really want to do Mardi Gras. Too disrespectful, given the international situation."
"So you're doing Lent. I'm unclear on Lent. I mean, I know what the word means to those of us of the Jewish faith. But we don't usually commemorate these transactions with meals. Usually there's just a lot of sighing."
"It's like a pre-Easter Prince of Peace dinner," Mike said slowly. "You're supposed to give things up for Lent. Last year, we gave up our faith and reason. This year, we're giving up our democratic voice and our hope."
Ira had already met most of Mike's goyisheh friends. Mike himself was low-key, tolerant, self-deprecating to a fault. A self-described "ethnic Catholic," he once complained dejectedly about not having been cute enough to be molested by a priest. "They would just shake my hand very quickly," he said. Mike's friends, however, tended to be tense, intellectually earnest Protestants who drove new, metallic-hued cars and who within five minutes of light conversation could be counted on to use the phrase "strictly within the framework of."
"Kate has a divorcee friend she's inviting," Mike said. "I'm not trying to fix you up. I really hate that stuff. I'm just saying come. Eat some food. It's almost Easter season and—well, hey, we could use a Jew over here." Mike laughed heartily.
"Yeah, I'll re-enact the whole thing for you," Ira said. He looked at his swollen ring finger again. "Yessirree. I'll come over and show you all how it's done."
ira's new house—though it was in what his real-estate agent referred to as "a lovely, pedestrian neighborhood," abutting the streets named after Presidents, but boasting instead streets named after fishing flies (Caddis, Hendrickson, Gold-Ribbed Hare's Ear Road)—was full of slow drains, leaky gas burners, stopped-up sinks, and excellent dust for scrawling curse words. Marilyn blows sailors. The draftier windows Ira had duct-taped up with sheets of plastic on the inside, as instructed by Homeland Security; cold air billowed the plastic inward like sails on a ship. On a windy day it was quite something. "Your whole house could fly away," Mike said, looking around.
"Not really," Ira said lightly. "But it is spinning. It's very interesting, actually."
The yard had already grown muddy with March and the flower beds were greening with the tiniest sprigs of stinkweed and quack grass. By June, the chemical weapons of terrorism aimed at the heartland might prove effective in weeding the garden. "This may be the sort of war I could really use!" Ira said out loud to a neighbor.
Mike and Kate's house, on the other hand, with its perfect lines and friendly fussiness, reeking, he supposed, of historical-preservation tax credits, seemed an impossible dream to him, something plucked from a magazine article about childhood memories conjured on a deathbed. Something seen through the window by the Little Match Girl! Outside, the soffits were perfectly squared. The crocuses were like bells, and the Siberian violets like grape candies scattered in the grass. Soon their prize irises would become gorgeously crested cockatoos along the side yard. Inside, the smell of warm food almost made him weep. With his coat still on, he rushed past Kate to throw his arms around Mike, kissing him on both cheeks. "All the beautiful men must be kissed!" Ira exclaimed. After he'd got his coat off and wandered into the dining room, he toasted with the champagne that he himself had brought. There were eight guests there, most of whom he knew to some degree, but really that was enough. That was enough for everyone. They raised their glasses with him. "To Lent!" Ira cried. "To the final days!" And, in case that was too grim, he added, "And to the Resurrection! May it happen a little closer to home next time! Jesus Christ!" Soon he drifted back into the kitchen and, as he felt was required of him, shrieked at the pork. Then he began milling around again, apologizing for the crucifixion. "We really didn't intend it," he murmured. "Not really, not the killing part? We just kind of got carried away? You know how spring can get a little crazy, but, believe me, we're all really, really sorry."
Kate's divorced friend was named Zora and was a pediatrician. Although no one else did, she howled with laughter, and when her face wasn't blasted apart with it or her jaw snapping mutely open and shut like a pair of scissors (in what Ira recognized as post-divorce hysteria: "How long have you been divorced?" he later asked her. "Eleven years," she replied), Ira could see that she was very beautiful: short black hair; eyes a clear, reddish hazel, like orange pekoe tea; a strong aquiline nose; thick lashes that spiked out, wrought and black as the tines of a fireplace fork. Her body was a mixture of thin and plump, her skin lined and unlined, in that rounding-the-corner-to-fifty way. Age and youth, he chanted silently, youth and age, sing their songs on the very same stage. Ira was working on a modest little volume of doggerel, its tentative title "Women from Venus, Men from—well—Penis."
Like everyone he knew, he could discern the hollowness in people's charm only when it was directed at someone other than himself.
When it was directed at him, the person just seemed so totally nice. And so Zora's laughter, in conjunction with her beauty, doomed him a little, made him grateful beyond reason.
immediately, he sent her a postcard, a photograph of newlyweds dragging empty Spam cans from the bumper of their car. He wrote: Dear Zora,
Had such fun meeting you at Mike's. And then he wrote his phone number. He kept it simple. In courtship he had a history of mistakes, beginning at sixteen with his first girlfriend, for whom he had bought at the local head shop the coolest thing he had then ever seen in his life: a beautifully carved wooden hand with its middle finger sticking up. He himself had coveted it tremulously for a year. How could she not love it? Her contempt for it, and then for him, had left him feeling baffled and betrayed. With Marilyn, he had taken the other approach and played hard to get, which had turned their relationship into a never-ending Sadie Hawkins Day, with subsequent marriage to Sadie an inevitable ruin—a humiliating and interminable Dutch date.
But this, the Spam postcard and the note, he felt contained the correct combination of offhandedness and intent. This elusive mix—the geometric halfway point between stalker and Rip van Winkle—was important to get right in the world of middle-aged dating, he suspected, though what did he really know of this world? The whole thing seemed a kind of distant civilization, a planet of the apings: graying, human flotsam with scorched internal landscapes mimicking the young, picking up where they had left off decades ago, if only they could recall where the hell that was. Ira had been a married man for fifteen years, a father for eight (poor little Bekka, now rudely transported between houses in a speedy, ritualistic manner resembling a hostage drop-off), only to find himself punished for an idle little nothing, nothing, nothing flirtation with a colleague, punished with his wife's full-blown affair and false business trips (credit-union conventions that never took place) and finally a petition for divorce mailed from a motel. Observing others go through them, he used to admire midlife crises, the courage and shamelessness and existential daring of them, but after he'd watched his own wife produce and star in a fabulous one of her own he found the sufferers of such crises not only self-indulgent but greedy and demented, and he wished them all weird unnatural deaths with various contraptions easily found in garages.