Like Life (2 page)

“It’s a bit bottlenecked, I admit.”

“You’ve got a ticket holders’ line so long it’s attracting mimes and jugglers.” At times this was how they spoke.

“It’s the portrait painters I’m worried about,” said One. “They’re aggressive and untalented.” A click came over the line. He had another call waiting.

“It’s so unfair,” said Mary. “Everybody wants to sit next to you on the bus.”

“I’ve got to get off the phone now,” he said, for he was afraid of how the conversation might go. It might go and go and go.

IN
THE
PARK
an eleven-year-old girl loped back and forth in front of her. Mary looked up. The girl was skinny, flat-chested, lipsticked. She wore a halter top that left her bare-backed, shoulder blades jutting like wings. She spat once, loud and fierce, and it landed by Mary’s feet. “Message from outer space,” said the girl, and then she strolled off, out of the park. Mary tried to keep reading, but it was hard after that. She grew
distracted and uneasy, and she got up and went home, stepping through the blood water and ignoring the meat men, who, when they had them on, tipped their hair-netted caps. Everything came forward and back again, in a wobbly dance, and when she went upstairs she held on to the railing.

THIS
WAS
WHY
she liked Boy Number Two: He was kind and quiet, like someone she’d known for a long time, like someone she’d sat next to at school. He looked down and told her he loved her, sweated all over her, and left his smell lingering around her room. Number One was not a sweater. He was compact and had no pores at all, the heat building up behind his skin. Nothing of him evaporated. He left no trail or scent, but when you were with him, the heat was there and you had to touch. You got close and lost your mind a little. You let it swim. Out into the middle of the sea on a raft. Nail parings and fish.

When he was over, Number Two liked to drink beer and go to bed early, whimpering into her, feet dangling over the bed. He gave her long back rubs, then collapsed on top of her in a moan. He was full of sounds. Words came few and slow. They were never what he meant, he said. He had a hard time explaining.

“I know,” said Mary. She had learned to trust his eyes, the light in them, sapphirine and uxorious, though on occasion something drove through them in a scary flash.

“Kiss me,” he would say. And she would close her eyes and kiss.

SOMETIMES
in her mind she concocted a third one, Boy Number Three. He was composed of the best features of each. It was Boy Number Three, she realized, she desired. Alone, Number One was rich and mean. Number Two was sighing, repetitive, tall, going on forever; you just wanted him to sit down. It was
inevitable that she splice and add. One plus two. Three was clever and true. He was better than everybody. Alone, Numbers One and Two were missing parts, gouged and menacing, roaming dangerously through the emerald parks of Cleveland, shaking hands with voters, or stooped moodily over a chili dog. Number Three always presented himself in her mind after a drink or two, like an escort, bearing gifts and wearing a nice suit. “Ah, Number Three,” she would say, with her eyes closed.

“I love you,” Mary said to Number One. They were being concubines together in his apartment bedroom, lit by streetlights, rescued from ordinary living.

“You’re very special,” he replied.

“You’re very special, too,” said Mary. “Though I suppose you’d be even more special if you were single.”

“That would make me more than special,” said Number One. “That would make me rare. We’re talking unicorn.”

“I love you,” she said to Number Two. She was romantic that way. Her heart was big and bursting. Though her brain was drying and subdividing like a cauliflower. She called both boys “honey,” and it shocked her a little. How many honeys could you have? Perhaps you could open your arms and have so many honeys you achieved a higher spiritual plane, like a shelf in a health food store, or a pine tree, mystically inert, life barking at the bottom like a dog.

“I love you, too,” said Two, the hot lunch of him lifting off his skin in a steam, a slight choke in the voice, collared and sputtering.

THE
POSTCARDS
from her friends said,
Mary, what are you doing!?
Or else they said,
Sounds great to me.
One of them said,
You hog
, and then there were a lot of exclamation points.

She painted her room a resonant white. Hope White, it was called, like the heroine of a nurse novel. She began collecting white furniture, small things, for juveniles, only they were for
her. She sat in them and at them and felt the edge of a childhood she’d never quite had or couldn’t quite remember float back to her, cleansing and restoring. She bathed in Lysol, capfuls under the running tap. She moved her other furniture—the large red, black, and brown pieces—out onto the sidewalk and watched the city haul them away on Mondays, until her room was spare and milky as a bone.

“You’ve redecorated,” said Number One.

“Do you really love me?” said Number Two. He never looked around. He stepped toward her, slowly, wanting to know only this.

IN
THE
PARK
, after a Lysol bath, she sat on the paint-flaked slats of a bench and read.
Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord?… He who has clean hands
 … There was much casting of lots for raiment. In the other book there was a shark that kept circling.

The same eleven-year-old girl, lips waxed a greenish peach, came by to spit on her.

“What?”
said Mary, aghast.

“Nothin’,” said the girl. “I’m not going to hurt you,” she mocked, and her shoulders moved around as children’s do when they play dress-up, a bad imitation of a movie star. She had a cheap shoulder bag with a long strap, and she hoisted it up over her head and arranged it in a diagonal across her chest.

Mary stood and walked away with what might have been indignation in someone else but in her was a horrified scurry. They could see! Everyone could see what she was, what she was doing! She wasn’t fooling a soul. What she needed was plans. At a time like this, plans could save a person. They could organize time and space for a while, like little sculptures. At home Mary made soup and ate it, staring at the radiator. She would plan a trip! She would travel to some place far away, some place unlittered and pure.

She bought guidebooks about Canada: Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island. She stayed in her room, away from spitters, alternately flipped and perused the pages of her books, her head filling like a suitcase with the names of hotels and local monuments and exchange rates and historical episodes, a fearful excitement building in her to an exhaustion, travel moving up through her like a blood, until she felt she had already been to Canada, already been traveling there for months, and now had to fall back, alone, on her bed and rest.

MARY
WENT
to Number One’s office to return some of the fliers and to tell him she was going away. It smelled of cigarettes and cigars, a public place, like a train. He closed the door.

“I’m worried about you. You seem distant. And you’re always dressed in white. What’s going on?”

“I’m saving myself for marriage,” she said. “Not yours.”

Number One looked at her. He had been about to say “Mine?” but there wasn’t enough room for both of them there, like two men on a base. They were arriving at punch lines together these days. They had begun to do imitations of each other, that most violent and satisfying end to love.

“I’m sorry I haven’t been in to work,” said Mary. “But I’ve decided I have to go away for a while. I’m going to Canada. You’ll be able to return to your other life.”

“What other life? The one where I walk the streets at two in the morning dressed as Himmler? That one?” On his desk was a news clipping about a representative from Nebraska who’d been having affairs far away from home. The headline read:
RUNNING
FOR
PUBLIC
ORIFICE
:
WHO
SHOULD
CAST
THE
FIRST
STONE
? The dark at the edge of Mary’s vision grew inward, then back out again. She grabbed the arm of a chair and sat down.

“My life is very strange,” said Mary.

One looked at her steadily. She looked tired and lost. “You know,” he said, “you’re not the only woman who has ever been involved with a married—a man with marital entanglements.” He usually called their romance a
situation.
Or sometimes, to entertain,
grownuppery.
All the words caused Mary to feel faint.

“Not the only woman?” said Mary. “And here I thought I was blazing new paths.” When she was little her mother had said, “Would you jump off a cliff just because everybody else did?”

“Yes,” Mary had said.

“
Would
you?” said her mother.

Mary had tried again. “No,” she said. There were only two answers. Which could it be?

“Let me take you out to dinner,” said Number One.

Mary was staring past him out the window. There were women who leaped through such glass. Just got a running start and did it.

“I have to go to Canada for a while,” she murmured.

“Canada.” One smiled. “You’ve always been such an adventuress. Did you get your shots?” This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.

She handed him his fliers. He put them in a pile near a rhinoceros paperweight, and he slid his hand down his face like a boy with a squeegee. She stood and kissed his ear, which was a delicate thing, a sea creature with the wind of her kiss trapped inside.

TO
BOY
NUMBER
TWO
she said, “I must take a trip.”

He held her around the waist, afraid and tight. “Marry me,” he said, “or else.”

“Else,” she said. She always wanted the thing not proposed. The other thing.

“Maybe in two years,” she mumbled, trying to step back.
They might buy a car, a house at the edge of the Heights. They would grow overweight and rear sullen and lazy children. Two boys.

And a girl.

Number One would send her postcards with jokes on the back.
You hog.

She touched Number Two’s arm. He was sweet to her, in his way, though his hair split into greasy V’s and the strange, occasional panic in him poured worrisomely through the veins of his arms.

“I need a break,” said Mary. “I’m going to go to Canada.”

He let go of her and went to the window, his knuckles hard little men on the sill.

SHE
WENT
to Ottawa for two weeks. It was British and empty and there were no sidewalk cafés as it was already October and who knew when the canals might freeze. She went to the National Gallery and stood before the Paul Peels and Tom Thompsons, their Mother Goose names, their naked children and fiery leaves. She took a tour of Parliament, which was richly wooden and crimson velvet and just that month scandalized by the personal lives of several of its members. “So to speak”—the guide winked, and the jaws in the group went slack.

Mary went to a restaurant that had once been a mill, and she smiled at the waiters and stared at the stone walls. At night, alone in her hotel room, she imagined the cool bridal bleach of the sheets healing her, holding her like a shroud, working their white temporarily through her skin and into the thinking blood of her. Every morning at seven someone phoned her from the desk downstairs to wake her up.

“What is there to do today?” Mary inquired.

“You want Montreal, miss. This is Ottawa.”

French. She hadn’t wanted anything French.

“Breakfast until ten in the Union Jack Room, miss.”

She sent postcards to Boy Number One and to Boy Number Two. She wrote on them,
I will be home next Tuesday on the two o’clock bus.
She put Number One’s in an envelope and mailed it to his post office box. She took another tour of Parliament, then went to a church and tried to pray for a very long time. “O father who is the father,” she began, “who is the father of us all …” As a child she had liked to pray and had always improvised. She had closed her eyes tight as stitches and in the midst of all the colors, she was sure she saw God swimming toward her with messages and advice, a large fortune cookie in a beard and a robe, flowing, flowing. Now the chant of it made her dizzy. She opened her eyes. The church was hushed and modern, lit like a library, and full of women on their knees, as if they might never get up.

She slept fitfully on the way home, the bus rumbling beneath her, urging her to dreams and occasionally to wonder, half in and half out of them, whether anyone would be there at the station to greet her. Boy Number Two would probably not be. He was poor and carless and feeling unappreciated. Perhaps One, in a dash from the office, in a characteristically rash gesture, would take a break from campaign considerations and be waiting with flowers. It wasn’t entirely a long shot.

Mary struggled off the bus with her bag. She was still groggy from sleep, and this aspect of life, getting on and off things, had always seemed difficult. Someone spoke her name. She looked to one side and heard it again. “Mary.” She looked up and up, and there he was: Boy Number Two in a holey sweater and his hair in V’s.

“An announcement,” called the PA system. “An announcement for all passengers on …”

“Hi!” said Mary. The peculiar mix of gratitude and disappointment she always felt with Two settled in her joints like the beginnings of flu. They kissed on the cheek and then on the mouth, at which point he insisted on taking her bag.

They passed through the crowd uneasily, trying to talk but then not trying. The bus station was a piazza of homelessness and danger, everywhere the heartspin of greetings and departures: humid, ambivalent. Someone waved to them: a barelegged woman with green ooze and flies buzzing close. An old man with something white curled in the curl of his ear approached and asked them for a dollar. “For food!” he assured them. “Not drink! Not drink! For food!”