A Tapless Shoulder (17 page)

“
What?” I
asked when she finally had laughed.

“
Distracted
much?”

“
What do,
what do you mean?” I asked slowly, wondering why she wasn’t just
saying it already.

“
It just amazes me how you go off in different directions;
the slightest distraction redirects you and just how far off you
end up going depends on when you or I,
ahem
, catch it.”
She shook her head and laughed some more.

“
What,” I
said again.

“
Lewis,
honey, I love you very much, just come in and try to relax, okay,”
she said soothingly, maybe patronizingly, with a beckoning hand.
She smiled, “I’ll go and get the pizza you were going to
get.”

“
Ah,” I said
quietly, followed by, “BALLS,” not quietly at all, and spun
completely around on the spot. “Bouncing balls of fun,” I said and
put my hand onto Knuckle Butt’s head as he held up a train of his
for me to see, “That’s okay, I just got side tracked, I’ll be right
back,” I muttered, and wondered if the words even made it through
the seething frustration that had surely reddened my
face.

As fast as I
was
in going out the door; I
stopped to take great care in shutting it behind me as slowly as I
could. I moved like it was meant to be a secret that these things
even made sound. I wanted to slam it shut like it was to blame for
everything. I suddenly let go of the handle. What was wrong with
me?
I was being sarcastic
with an object
.

We were lying
in bed, talking about the things we’d forgotten about earlier and
wanted to get out before we’d forgotten them for good by tomorrow.
That was my excuse, anyway, for not letting her sleep. She smiled
giddily. Her love for me was always right there, right where I
could see it. I smiled at that and at her.

“
They say it’s my duty to critique my surroundings…
otherwise I become a part of them.” I felt like I wasn’t thinking;
that the thoughts were just somehow coming out of my mouth.
“Maybe
that’s
why I haven’t written for so long:
I’m a part of my surroundings. I need to see them again or
something… oh, good old something, where would I be without
something
.”

“
Why don’t you write that stuff, your witty – whatever?” she
said, as if common sense was the same as encouragement. I was
pretty sure advice lacked conviction when it ended with
whatever
.

I nodded
anyway. “That’s a good idea, if I can combine that whatever with my
something; I might actually be able to come up with… some ever or
what thing… maybe some whatever thing or, I guess, something else.
I thought I had something... I’m confused.”

“
I’ll
whatever your
something
,” she said
threateningly with a giggle, to which my eyes alone said
eek
. Steven then jumped onto the bed and curled up at the
bottom of my feet. I placed my hand on Katie’s leg and made a face
like what was to follow may hurt to say or to
hear.

“
They say writers and artists, and whoever – I don’t know –
often share the same characteristics as manic depressives and
schizophrenics. That’s what those ‘they’
I told you about say about writers.”

“
Who says
that about writers?”

“
Oh God; your parents,
they
are your
parents. Your dad called me last night, and said, ‘Hey, did you
know that you writers are fucked by design.’ And then there was a
long awkward pause where he thought something would sink in and I
tried to get something out of my eye. They say it; the
‘
they’
they always talk about.”

“
They talk
about themselves?”

“
Maybe,
when they’re
not talking about you
or no
one else is talking about them, they might.”

“
Kind of seems like a lot of wasted energy, these
tabs
they’re
keeping.”

“
That’s them for you, by them I mean they, Kate, that’s
what
they
do. They need to measure everything, practical,
impractical, you can’t hold reason to these things, you can’t even
disagree, well, you can, but you can’t be heard doing it. Well, you
can be heard disagreeing with everything, but
they
won’t
ever hear it. They don’t have to, I don’t think.”

“
God, you are
so strange,” she laughed out loud, while in my head I accepted her
apology for calling me strange.

I kept my
serious expression intact and shook my head, “That was the worst
prayer ever,” I warned. “No wonder we don’t have good things coming
out of our yin yangs.”

“
Um, excuse
me, I’m here with you, we have a roof over our heads, and, most
important of all, we have two beautiful and healthy children
sleeping in the room next to us.” Her eyes were wide. It felt like
she was always looking at me wide-eyed about something I was saying
or doing.

“
I know that, I’m talking about
shallow things
,
like nice cars and bigger houses, and more nice cars in front of
our extra houses, you know, cars with
two
windshield
wipers.”

“
What? Why,
what happened to your windshield wipers?”

“
Um, nothing,
except I was trying to pry it off the windshield, and the ice said,
‘No,’ and I said, ‘Well, some of it,’ and stuff snapped and then
the windshield said, ‘Fine, take the whole thing, but not all at
once.’ And so, yeah, I need to buy a new wiper, and ask the
neighbours if they found the old one. It’s not a big deal… have you
seriously not noticed?”

“
Um, okay,
and what do you mean, if they found the old one?”

“
Well, yeah, like two months ago; there was a lot of snow
outside because of that winter thing we get, so I was celebrating
the fact that the wiper came off right in my hand by swinging it
and I kind-of dropped it on the upswing, and so it fell up through
the air and landed over across the road somewhere.
And I was kidding
; I’m not going to ask them for it. It’s broken,
I don’t freaking need it.”

“
Okay, so your dad’s behaviour can be a tad,
shall we say, erratic, at times, uh,
do you think maybe that’s where you get it from? Hmmm,
mmmaybe
?”

“
Uh, your dad
thinks pop-up ads are acts of terrorism. I’ve seen it happen; he
pulled the plug on the computer like he was stopping it from
catching fire. It was the fastest I’d seen any old person move
ever.”

“
So, your
dad’s a drunk.”

“
And your dad’s too paranoid to
get
drunk; he’d
suspect himself of being two people, one of which
would have to go
, and then things would really get
ugly.”

We were
leaning toward each other with our faces almost touching, as if to
intimidate the other. “Look, I’m on your side here,” I raised my
hands in surrender. “My point was that your dad can be just as
irrational or
whatever,
and yet he
hasn’t gone off the charts with
incomprehensible activity
.” I sighed, and sunk back against the bed. “He promised he
wouldn’t do this,” I said with less conviction than most false
statements should bear.

“
He
promised
, did he?”
she countered, knowing very well that I was not exactly being
faithful to truth. I looked into her face. I wanted to plead with
her to just go along with it, no matter how far it went. It
was
me
, and I could use the company.

“
Well, he said, you know, ‘I’ll be there all the time for
anything’ or something like that, and stuff, but the fine
print of what he was saying was, ‘I
am
not
gonna hook up with a tranny.’ Or maybe it should
have been. Yes, now that I’ve had a moment to reflect on it; he
should have taken me aside and told me he was steering clear of
transsexuals and transvestites and hookers. Like
OH MY
holy fucking hell. Who has this problem? Who is out there
saying,
jeez, dad and those
damn transvestites
? I steer
clear of the gay pride parade
because of the traffic
. I don’t
care
either way, but what now, ‘come on
kids, we’re going to see Grandpa in the big parade. Save your
questions for the end and
only ask your mother
.
Thank you.”

“
Okay, honey, I love you, but if you don’t even know what
you need to hear from your dad to help you be okay with what he is
doing, with his own life by the way, how do you expect
him
to know?” she asked innocently like she still loved me
and
wasn’t
sabotaging my industrious
rant.

I swallowed,
like the reason was there in my mouth. A tremendous fake smile
formed on my face, “I love you shut up good night.”

“
Look, I’m
just saying you know you need to talk to him, you can’t keep
standing by like this if it’s going to keep eating at you. I’ve had
a long day, I love you, but I would really like to go to
sleep.”

“
I’m trying – the talking thing, he… I’ll –” I looked down
at the bed, then back at her, “I bet a lot of marriages survive on
the fact that
a long
day
counts as
foreplay.”

“
I
will
kill you.”

“
I love
you.”

“
I love you
too. Turn out the light.”

I sat
nervously, tending to my mug with both hands like it needed to be
corralled or it would wander off. I was annoyed with myself for
being nervous. I stared at the foamy surface in my mug, trying to
remember what it was, maybe a mocha espresso from Chino or
something. What
had
I ordered? I was craning my head to
better see the menu above the counter when I realized I was really
only looking for something to distract myself,
anything
to keep me from thinking about having to have this talk
with my dad. Why couldn’t I just sit there and
not
think
of something? The drink was what I always got: whatever Katie
ordered. She had taken hers to go and gone off into the mall with
the boys. It worked best this way. She got to shop, the boys got to
walk around and point at things they
needed
, and then
break down when they didn’t get them. Win, win. We were to text the
other when one of us was ready to go, and figure things out from
there.

The Starbucks
at the mall was in the back of a bookstore. I looked at the time on
my phone, at the same time thinking my dad was probably down at the
Williams by the school saying to himself, ‘Hey, this… isn’t…’ I
would give him another five minutes before phoning. I tried to
remember if I’d told him it was
in
the bookstore. I
believed I had. But, really, what I believed was still just an
opinion, and his opinion could easily have been different, no
matter what I had actually told him. We should have done a dress
rehearsal. I could have gone and gotten him and we could have acted
the whole thing out, and
then
tried, with a
little readiness under our belts.

The setting,
with all those books, not only invoked a bit of confidence, but may
have even
made me
happy
, a statement I found I
now said after years of hearing my wife say that this or that ‘made
her happy.’ It was an adjective I didn’t like catching myself
using. ‘Yeah man, killer work on the tattoo, it makes me happy…
what? It does! Seriously, it makes me really, really happy!’ It was
an expression of an expression, like laughing and saying, ‘that is
funny.’
Really? I couldn’t
tell, I guess you were laughing too hard for me to understand your
reaction.

Of course I
liked – I more than liked, I needed – how positive she was. I had
nearly feared I would have a negative impact on her positivity, but
with time and reason and, most of all, communication, we both
coexisted quite happily. Any struggle I endured was my own doing.
Thinking too much was the problem, and she saw that in me when she
met me. The effort to be positive never dwindled on my part. The
success rate outnumbered the failures, and I was beginning to
realize that was all I should have wanted in life. Maybe I didn’t
need any medication, but maybe it’d prove helpful – I didn’t know
anything for certain anymore.

Either way, I
reasoned with myself, the lift from simply being in a bookstore,
coupled with an intake of caffeine – a thought that sent me
searching my pockets and wallet to see what money I had, and I was
relieved to find I had enough for both my dad and I to still get
whatever else we might like – I deemed this to be the perfect place
to talk calmly and clearly about what may be currently fogging the
air between us. It was neither the time nor the place to talk about
anything that may make me squeamish or hesitant, and by ‘hesitant’
I meant ‘mute,’ and by ‘mute,’ I meant ‘ready to run
away.’