Anagrams (12 page)

“But what was his name?” she whimpers. Sleep is pulling on her face.

I pause for a long time. “George. It was George,” I say.

“George Carpenter? Like me?”

“Yes,” I say, and it makes me sad, though I can see her smile
a little, seeming to find something nice in this news, this new news. The sing-song of an ambulance on the street hollers and fades. I sit there and say nothing. I watch George. I watch George’s eyes close.

I make a special kind of macaroni and cheese. It has three kinds of cheese and doesn’t turn out quite right, but Gerard doesn’t seem to mind, although he doesn’t want seconds. I give him some more anyway. He is talking about amateur competitions at the Met; applications to voice programs; the voice teacher he has now, a guy named Gil who has one arm; trying to sing Loggins and Messina at the Holiday Inn while the football game on the TV over the bar drowns him out. I try to listen fairly. I don’t want necessarily to discourage him. He says he has always loved Verdi and Puccini, Buff had tempted him astray, he needs to be in touch with serious music. “At least what you’re doing,” he says, “has something to do with what you’re serious about, something to do with poetry.”

My mouth is full of macaroni. I try not to choke. “What I’m doing,” I say between swallows, “has very little to do with poetry.” And the remark, the truth of it, sits there in front of me, shivering, like a funny old Italian man with no clothes, like a tepid macaroni from my lips.

“Gerard and I have decided to go out dancing for an hour or so,” I whisper to Georgianne. I have brought her juice and a small cup of pasta and placed them on the night table without turning on the light. She is mumbling something in her sleep. She turns toward me, eyes closed, and puts her face against my hand. I brush her dark hair off her forehead. She is not as feverish as before. “Mrs. Kimball is downstairs if you need anything. I’ll give you more aspirin when I get back.” Mrs. Kimball does crossword puzzles, eats Kraft caramels, and wears tangelo-colored pantsuits.
She has a constant crinkle about her, perhaps from the Dacron or the caramel wrappers. She has a terrific red mouth, a huge crocket of a nose, and one very serious strawberry mole. She loves my daughter. She adores her.

Moths hang on the screen like bats. George has begun snoring, a small rattly whistle in one nostril. I kiss her and get up quietly, like someone leaving church.

I first met Gerard three years ago at the movies, a bad science-fiction thing about an electric guitar that takes over the universe. I was there with my friend Verrie, who viewed the whole thing as a Hitler metaphor, and has since gone to Palo Alto to teach. Gerard was there with his friend Maple. They sat in front of us. Verrie and Maple knew each other from dance class. Verrie was stunning—tall, blonde, Plantagenet-looking—and so was Maple, though he was male and fond of earrings and Verrie was neither. Apparently they both had the same color leotard in class, some weird sort of crimson, and often they stood next to one another at the barre, cracking jokes and knees. They looked illegal together. Gerard and I were necessarily darker and scruffier than they, and had a certain small but immediate understanding of each other which came simply from that fact.

After the movie ended, while we were standing to go and Maple and Verrie were oh-helloing it, Gerard and I introduced ourselves. “Can you believe how much alike these two look alike?” asked Gerard, under his breath.

I’ve always been drawn to people who misspeak. I consider it a sign of hidden depths, like pregnancy or alcoholism.

“Maybe we shouldn’t talk about it,” I said. Gerard kept looking at Verrie. I think he was attracted to her. He leaned against the back of a theater seat and for a long moment, while I was talking about when the electric guitar had taken over the army, he regarded her legs. I decided he was a jerk.

Afterward we all went for drinks. We sipped whiskeys in a booth made from two church pews, in a smokey fern bar called The Smokey Fern. The place was noisy and had too few waitresses. I don’t know precisely how we got on to it—I guess we were talking about the necessity for gun-control legislation—but suddenly Gerard was wildly insisting on government tanks in the streets of New York, automatic searches and arrests of anyone and everyone in order to enforce, effectively, gun-control and curfew regulations.

“Curfews?” I hooted. “What do you want? A city-sized version of Annette Funicello’s dormitory?”

He ignored me. He was inexorable, generally advocating the transformation of the entire metropolitan area into a police state. Anyone with a gun should be shot on sight.

“That’ll show them,” I said. Who was this guy? He was so crudely fascistic, I didn’t know whether we were to take him seriously. Perhaps it was the movie. Surely he was being ironic. Verrie looked at me and shrugged. I was speechless, though I tried to speak anyway and it came out in vehement splutters and thought bubbles as in comic books: loaded with the upper register of a typewriter’s top row. How could he presume the incorruptibility of such a state? What liberties did we enjoy that totalitarianism would subsume? He didn’t care, he said (though I saw Maple wink at me); the government was for the protection of citizens and their property and if it didn’t perform that function it didn’t do anything at all. I was aghast. What sort of property did he own?

Maple leaned forward, smiled, put his hand on mine. “Gerard likes to try out extreme positions on people he’s just met, just to see how the words sound.”

Verrie was quiet. She was watching me.

Gerard shook his head. “No, I mean this. I’ve had a gun at my ass and at my head, and that should never happen in this
country, no matter what has to be done to ensure it. It should never happen.”

Maple chewed on his bottom lip and there was a morguish lull, a murderous wave arching back getting ready to break and strike, and then Gerard was quickly up, saying, “Who would like another round?” waiting for the nods, and “I would’s,” and then bounding across the room toward the bar.

“You’ll have to excuse Gerard,” Maple said to me and Verrie, though mostly to me. He knew I was tense, inarticulate with rage. “Do you remember last winter reading about a restaurant on Fifty-ninth Street getting held up by some stockinged men with sawed-off rifles?”

“Vaguely,” I said.

“I remember,” said Verrie.

“Gerard was there. Two people had their heads blown off. Gerard was forced to strip and have sex with the woman he was with. He had a gun butt up his ass the whole time.” Maple paused. I suddenly felt sick. I looked up at the bar and could see the back of Gerard, the sweater, the patched corduroys, waiting for drinks. “The worst thing, in Gerard’s mind, was that she was the first woman he’d gone out with in years who really interested him, and afterward they couldn’t speak to each other, they were too reminded of the incident. He called her a few times, but they finally never saw one another again.”

“Holy shit,” said Verrie. I pressed a hand over my mouth and kept it there.

Far away Gerard was joking with the bartender about something, putting away his wallet. A tiny waitress, all spritely flirtatiousness, came up and placed a hand on the small of Gerard’s back, up and down the sweater, and asked him something. Gerard smiled and nodded and picked up the four whiskeys and began making his way slowly back to the table.

Maple continued quickly. “He’s all Hobbesian hobbledy-hoy
one day and the next it’s something else. Gerard is really one of the most wonderful and one of the most unlucky people I know.”

Gerard arrived and expertly placed four glasses down on the table. We all reached for our wallets. A hundred years had gone by.

“No, this is all on me,” said Gerard. He pulled out the largest glass in the quartet and placed it in front of me. “And this is for you. Old freedom-at-any-price.” It was a double. He slid Maple and Verrie theirs and sat down across from me.

“Thank you,” I murmured. I looked down at the drink.

“You’re welcome,” he murmured back.

Gerard and I never really became lovers, though we almost did. A few weeks after the night at The Smokey Fern we ran into each other at the Fitchville public library, standing in line to have our library cards cybernetically transmutated. The library was switching over to a computer system which involved a final Fitchville disbanding of Dewey Decimals. It made me sad. As a kid I had loved simply the sound of the name: Dewey Decimals. It sounded like cartoons. It wasn’t Library of Congress, slick and federal.

“It’s the end of an era,” I said to Gerard.

“You’ve had an earache?” he asked. “Me, too.”

After we got our new computerized library cards, we walked out the door together, then stood on the granite steps, exchanging perfunctory information about how our lives were going. It was cold and we were shivering.

“Do you have time to have coffee?” he asked.

That was our first coffee together at Hank’s. We exchanged phone numbers, and later in the week he called and asked me out to dinner and I said yes, although it wasn’t without some apprehension: This was a man unlucky in restaurants. We went, however, to a small Greek one, ate souvlaki in peace and drank house wine. We smoked too many cigarettes. “The liter and the pack,”
quipped Gerard, and I laughed loudly because I had drunk a lot and because, despite everything, I liked him much. He leaned over the table, touched my hair, and kissed me. Life is sad, I thought. Here is someone.

We ended up in my bed together, sort of, spastic and looped, doomed for failure, like two senile inventors in an upstairs room, lonely as spoons. The whole business finally seemed less an expression of mutual attraction than a soft, noodly act of existentialism.

After a long parade of kisses and other things, Gerard rolled over, blitzed with wine, and collapsed. “Impudence is very common,” I said to him in the dark, hoping he would smile. I didn’t want to pat his hand and say, “It’s okay,” the way they do in television movies. “Sorry,” he murmured into the ribbony edge of the blanket, and we kept on drinking—cheap cream ale in cans. We talked about childhood, and he told me how when he was little he thought he had Superman hearing, how he thought he could hear for miles. Then he got up and went home.

Miraculously, we became the best of friends, moving on to other romantic flailings, but having regular breakfasts at Hank’s, comparing sordid life-notes, having dinner, going disco-dancing for the exercise. (Although Gerard usually tries to meet women, his recent success rate hasn’t been wonderful and he has taken to greeting attractive disco women with the opener “Why have I never seen you before, and why will I never see you again?”) Often I go hear him play at one of the local cocktail places. I love Gerard, even if he is a lounge act.

The walls of The Grounded Star, the only disco in Fitchville, beat like a migraine. It is packed, even on a Thursday night. The music hurts my
eyes
for some reason, and I wonder if I’m getting old, somebody’s great-aunt at a disco. Perhaps soon I’ll have dyed hair and cheap black underwear you can see the shadow of through tight, peach-tone pants. I saw a woman like that yesterday. George
was with me. “If you ever notice me starting to wear things like that,” I told her, “you have permission to send me away forever on a bus.” I am getting the thunder thighs of my Aunt Ivy. The lumpy oatmeal buttocks. When Georgianne is fourteen she will be embarrassed to be seen with me in public places like hosiery aisles and church. She will stand in the doorway of the bathroom, while I’m getting ready to go out, and will cluck her tongue and groan, “Oh, god,
Mother
” and then show me how to wear make-up, hauling out her own slick tubes, unrecognizable gels, sneering at my dusty compacts, my fuddy-duddy wands.

The strobe-light show over the dance floor looks like something that could bring on epilepsy.

“Hey. Exercise. Good for you,” I grunt at the door, Tonto to Gerard’s masked stranger: He has put on silvery New Wave sunglasses. “You’re very cool,” I reassure him.

“You either have it, Benna, or you don’t,” he says.

We pay the five-dollar cover, take our two wooden nickels over to the bar and get two “free,” fancy German beers, which we glug theatrically from their bottles, our heads back, hands jammed into ass pockets, like juvenile delinquents. Before we are quite finished, Gerard puts his beer down on the bar, and for no reason but comedy, says “Excuse me” to the bewildered person next to him, grabs my arm and together we poke and strut our way out to the dance floor, which we locate mostly by noticing where the carpet underfoot gives way to wood. It is that crowded. We dance with our knees and elbows, all angles from the joints. We are warm and spinning in place, imitating each other’s movements: fake boxing, fake karate, fake roller derby. I look at Gerard: We are in charge; we are the best people here, whether we really are or not.

I accidentally step on someone’s foot and she turns around shrieking, “A cripple, you’ve made me into a cripple!”

“Sorry,” I call over the music.

The next song is a slow, hug-your-honey number. “I’ve got to go to the bathroom,” I shout at Gerard. He nods.

In the bathroom someone has written
I WANT TO BE FUCKED
.

Beneath it someone else has added, in a red, searing scrawl,
YOU
ARE
FUCKED
.

At the bar with Gerard, I glug more beer, warm, unfizzled, sweet. The room is pounding and airless. “You could die of White Shoulders poisoning in here,” says Gerard, absently gazing at a group of women by the dance floor, all pretty, all young. I look off in some other direction, but think I see someone I know smiling at me. I look away; it’s probably a student—I dread seeing students. I look back and someone else, a handsome black man in a white silk shirt, is standing next to me. It is Darrel, sans army greens.

“Darrel,” I say. “Hi.”

“Dr. Carpenter,” he says. Why do students do that? Add the oppressive and unprophetic
Dr
.

“Benna. Please. It’s Benna. Call me Benna. This is my friend Gerard. Gerard-Darrel, Darrel-Gerard.”