Everything (17 page)

He knew she was home, knew RL had flown off to Mexico that morning. Still he wasn’t going to go there.

Cars swished by on the bridge overhead, making so much more noise than they knew they were making, tires on wet pavement. Everything melting or still frozen. Lamps in windows looking yellow and warm in this first light of morning. The night so long this time of year. Night so long and the Hellgate wind so cold it blew right through his bones. He had a scrap of folk song running through his head around and around:
in the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shines …
. He felt himself like something old, with banjos. It’s a hard way to find out that trouble is real.

It’s nothing new, can be said about dirt.

All these sane and reasonable lives unfolding around him, all this predictable newspaper-reading and lunch-making and child-kissing-good-bye. Toasting and percolating. Somewhere in this city a sleepy husband and a sleepy wife were making love, half awake, slow and quiet and under the covers so as not to wake the baby. It was a love world, all around him. Edgar was moving through it cold and alone, but he wasn’t meant to be. Love shone down on all of it, and just now was like a winter night, long and cold but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t end. The sun would rise again, it always did. He was just turned sideways to it was all. The love world all around him.

Just the thought of Layla brought a small rising happiness, a warmth inside the cold shell of himself; and then the cold again, the
cold fact that he must not and would not, the thought of his daughter, the son on the way … He had made his commitments and now was the time to be a man about them. And then, to be a man, fine, a little dead inside but holding on, holding up his end, his Amy would smile at him sometimes and wasn’t that enough? It ought to be enough. It would have to be enough.

In another lifetime it would be enough. In another skin.

He knocked and held his breath, listening for footsteps, which he did not hear. She was asleep or gone. The world, which had seemed brightly colored and dangerous a moment before, now resumed its gray face. Snow rotting in the dead grass.

Then silently the door cracked open and she was there in her bathrobe, sleep all in her face. She looked surprised, worried. She didn’t open the door any further.

Can I come in? he asked.

She had to think about it.

I thought you weren’t going to come around anymore, she said. I thought we were done with this.

I was just out for a run.

I can see that, she said; and just then he turned inside out and saw himself as she must have seen him, wounded and sweaty, begging on her doorstep in a dirty sweatshirt.

I didn’t mean to bother you, he said. I’ll just, uh.

* * *

You might as well, she said, and swung the door open.

He entered unembraced or kissed and sat down at the kitchen table. She said, I’m going to make some coffee, and then started making coffee. She said, I’ve been having crazy dreams. Last night I was dancing the mambo with this guy I knew from my first year of school, my poetry TA. I don’t even know what the mambo is supposed to look like but there I was dancing it.

I love you, he said.

I know you do. That’s not exactly the issue, is it?

It’s like you’re enjoying this.

No, she said, and turned the coffeemaker on, and sat down across the table from him as it began to gurgle and hiss. No, I’m not enjoying this at all. I’m the opposite of enjoying this.

I should go.

No, you should.

Neither one of them moved. It started to rain or hail outside, a soft patter on the window glass.

RL is down in Puerto Vallarta, Edgar said.

RL has lost his mind, Layla said. There seems to be some of that going around lately, the crazy bug. I got bit with the crazy bug
last week when you didn’t call and you wouldn’t answer an e-mail or anything.

I’m sorry, he said.

I just sort of went a little crazy around the house, she said. At least I didn’t go flying off to Mexico with my ex-girlfriend from a hundred and fifty years ago.

What’s the deal with her?

I have no idea, Layla said. Not a fucking clue. You could ask my dad when he gets back, but I don’t think he has any better idea. Just restless, is my bet. Crazy bug bit him.

She gave him a tight false smile and Edgar had never seen a person so unhappy as she. And he made her so. This was his doing. He could think of nothing more to say.

He’ll get over it, Layla said. He always does.

As if nothing mattered, as if it were all illusion, the hope and pain together. A game they couldn’t stop playing but no more consequential. This bitterness. She was too young to feel this, too lovely. Edgar remembered her as he had drawn her, that lovely stillness in her eyes. She knew more than he did, she
understood
. A thing he loved about her. Now she didn’t understand anything, she just saw through things.

She got up, poured coffee, gave him his cup and sat down again. Morning light, her hand curled around the coffee cup.

* * *

I’ve been having crazy dreams myself, he said. Last night I was trying to cut this tree down with a chain saw, a big fir tree with limbs all the way down to the ground. I had to cut my way into it to even get to the trunk, and then every time I made a cut, it started to lean toward the house like it was going to fall on it and so I had to stop and start again on the other side.

Whose house?

It was my house, Edgar said, I think. But there was nobody in it. I don’t know how I knew that, but it felt like there was nobody home.

None of this was true. Edgar never remembered his dreams. But he had the feeling that if he kept talking, he could keep her in the room, keep her with him. Her hand opened from her coffee cup and rested on the table.

He said, Every time I went to the other side of the tree, though, when I started to cut, it leaned in that direction and there was the house!

Like magic, she said.

Oh, he said. Just the rules are different over on the other side. The other side of what?

Didn’t you ever think that? That whole other world over on the other side? Just as real as this one, and we’re just the dream that they’re having over on the other side. We just don’t remember it
right. They wake up over on the other side and they say to each other, I had the most amazing dream.

You were alone a lot, weren’t you? When you were little.

I was a complicated kid, Edgar said.

Were you happy?

I don’t know, he said. Happy enough. I had friends, some of them not even imaginary.

Her hand opened on the table between them. All he had to do was take it.

RL showed me some pictures of you a while back, he said. You in your little birthday crown. Big old stuffed pink pig. Bigger than you.

Pork Chop, Layla said. He’s up in my closet right now.

You were beautiful.

Layla laughed, unhappy.

Everybody’s beautiful when you’re a kid, she said. Everybody’s got that perfect skin and that beautiful hair, everybody’s slim and pretty and talking to the angels all day. People don’t get older. They just get worse.

It’s not true, you know.

* * *

What part?

Plenty of fat kids out there.

Not you.

No, he said. I was the one whose ears stuck out. My teeth were crooked and I was so skinny that I looked like a zipper. My teachers thought I was smart.

I bet you were cute, she said.

He took her hand then, and they looked at them, their hands clasped together on the tabletop, as if they were independent animals, unattached, little comfort-seeking comfort-loving animals with an instinct for each other. The tap of rain or hail against the window. Then they were standing, kissing, and Layla was just as tall as he was but soft, pretty, pliant, a hardheaded girl but soft everywhere else and a feeling of surrender, of weightlessness, that moment on the Gravitron when you’re just spinning, spinning with nothing but air below your feet, kissing, and then they were in her bedroom, surrounded by her childhood, and then they were naked on her childhood bed and he was inside her and she was weeping but she did not want him to stop. Would not let him stop. Tears and snot all on his neck and, yes, there was something hot about it, something deep, something he didn’t want to think about but did not let himself think but just gave up, let go, deep inside her.

Howard, drunk, and June, drunk
, and the record player was also drunk. He kept on trying to play an old LP of George Jones, but it always stuck at the same place and wouldn’t go any further:
the lip-print on a half-filled cup of coffee that you poured and didn’t drink, poured and didn’t drink, poured and didn’t drink …

The CD is a fraud and conspiracy, Howard said. He took the record elaborately from the turntable and sprayed it with a special spray and wiped it with a special blue cloth and set it back on the platter with the careful movements of the experienced drunk.

The music is still on there with a CD, but it’s like a curtain or something, he said. Like a veil. But with one of these, the music is just there, it’s printed on there, the music itself.

* * *

As I have said repeatedly, June said, I believe you.

Get everybody to buy the same exact music over and over again, Howard said. Next thing you know, it’ll be the microdigital whosiwhatsis with the curb feelers and the mud flaps.

George Jones sang,
There goes my reason for living
. A gloom of alcoholic regret hung in the semidarkness, or maybe it was too early for regret, maybe it was pre-regret, drinking and smoking and knowing that none of this would seem like a good idea in the morning. June poured herself another little glass of wine and Howard puffed at his big cigar. None of it mattered anyway. This amber melancholy. It fit her like an old sweater, like something she had worn everyday once but couldn’t bear to throw out, though the whiskey-colored wool was frayed and tattered.

The inside of Howard’s house, she thought, was like the inside of Howard’s brain, dark and cluttered with Western memorabilia, an elk’s head over the fireplace, a pony-skin rug tossed over the back of the sofa, much evidence of killing. The room itself was cheaply made of modern materials and the fireplace ran unflickering on gas. The room did not end in the corners but just trailed off into indefinite darkness. Pictures of horses, paintings of buffalo against a winter backdrop, hooves breaking through the snow to find the meager grass beneath. As if, she thought. Put either one of us out in that and we’d freeze solid in an afternoon.

I wish, she said.

I want to go back out to Seattle one of these days, he said. I’m getting too old for the winters.

* * *

I thought you hated Seattle.

I do, he said. Don’t get me wrong. That city is a first-class shit-hole, pardon my French.

Then why do you want to go there?

Who said I wanted to go there?

You did.

I’m just tired of the winters is all. Maybe we should head down to Tucson after Christmas. San Diego, someplace.

I have to work, remember?

No, you don’t. I’m the one that has to work. You’re the one with all the money in the world. Plus there’s the horses to take care of. Who’s going to feed the horses if we’re off on a golf course somewhere?

I don’t golf, she said. But she said it just to have something to do with her mouth, to help her to breathe, keep breathing because she had seen that he was angry with her. Something black and bitter and real was alight in him. And June had done him no wrong.

Through the fog of alcohol she saw that she had done him no wrong and he was angry with her.

What’s the matter? Howard said.

* * *

Oh, June said, trying to breathe, nothing. I think I left my phone in the other house.

What do you need a phone for?

Alcohol is making a fool of you, she thought, but she did not say so. Instead, she launched herself out of the depths of his leather chair and up and into her coat in one motion and through the kitchen and out the back door where little starving deer stopped moving at the sight of her. They stood absolutely still at the edge of the yard light where they gathered every night. They were scared of June. The storm door shut behind her with a sigh and she was all the way outside, maybe ten degrees and clear, all the way to Mars.

The cold air sobered her up in an instant. The boozy layer of warmth and goo was gone and she stood naked to herself. Fool that I am, she thought.

Because there were only a few reasons to be angry with somebody, in her experience. Either she had given Howard offense, which she had not, or he was jealous of her, which he had no reason to be—Howard with the home, now, the power, the say. Which left one possibility, which was that he was angry because he had done her wrong.

Another human paradox, she thought. Built crossways and deranged. You hurt somebody and then you’ve just got to get mad at them because you can’t let things be right between you because they aren’t right because you hurt them. What on earth had Howard done to her?

Something.

The hungry deer stared at her from the edge of the light, too nervous to graze, too hungry to run. She thought with a sudden longing of Dorris MacKintyre and his oxygen tank, just an ordinary buzzard without a plan for anyone. Suffering had made him holy, she thought. Maybe it would work for her. He had not started as a perfect man—you could see it in his daughter’s face sometimes, that flash of fear, that final tiny unwillingness to trust completely after all these years. And yet the Dorris she knew was better than anybody, light and clean and willing to be happy on the smallest excuse. Suffering had polished him bright.

Not me, she thought. The mess and muck, the yard sale inside her, drunk, sober, sad, angry, loving and loveless, lonely. Fuck Howard, she thought, fuck him completely. And the rest of them, too, everybody but Layla. She laughed at herself, a small and stupid person, homeless. All these big plans for herself and now what? There was no way she could go back inside, not back into Howard’s brain. And there was nowhere else to go but the little apartment over the garage that was, in theory, hers, but felt like a public place, a waiting room.