She Took My Arm As If She Loved Me (12 page)

Karim touched my arm in that way some men have, gentle, sharing, paying attention, and alert to how they look doing so. He shook his head heavily, mournfully, from side to side, and it came to rest with a heavy mournful smile. He pitied slavishness in a man, but he also meant to honor love. “So full of feeling,” he murmured. “Kudos, Dan, kudos. You are a man capable of a rare devotion. I offer kudos and respect.” Encouraged by my not squirming away under his fingers, he gripped my arm; he too enjoyed intimacy, hoped to learn kudos. “Now you must leave room for the woman to express a woman's devotion, woman's needs. You must listen carefully and consider, my dear friend.”

Usually so concentrated on his enjoyment, greedy for his meal, Karim today picked at his food. Yet when I looked again, his plate was clean, with a decorous few brush marks where his fork had missed something. He must have been getting what he wanted. I was sure he enjoyed our little chat.

“Listen carefully to me,” he said, “and above all listen to this unusual woman.”

*   *   *

And so I said to Priscilla, “I don't want to do business with Xavier, and I don't need Karim either.”

“It was only a thought, dear.”

“I don't want to.”

“I can dream that you'll change your mind though, can't I? Even if you love me truly, as I know you do, you can't take away a girl's right to dream.”

“You're an American.”

“You said it, I didn't … Of course, I've said it on occasion in the past. I do believe I even uttered those words to Karim and he was charmed. He just went on, totally charmed, about how much he admires your skills.”

New reasons kept coming up for Karim's persistence. It wasn't just Karim. Xavier wanted me in his employ. Priscilla wanted me in a better line of work, one that brought in more interesting amounts of cash. They all had an interest in filling my life. Flying ideas were buzzing around my head. The concept “tax free” came to me without clearing off the buzzing. “Are you in some sort of trouble?” I asked.

“You'd be the first to know.”

“In trouble with Karim?”

“Give me a little credit, lover,” she said.

Instead I gave her a little time. Sometime with a client you just wait and he speaks, he incriminates himself, he caves. Priscilla wasn't a client and she didn't cave.

Finally I spoke, and told myself it wasn't that I was caving.

“I don't think I want you to be out scouting jobs for me. If you need things to do, there must be other things.”

“Didn't you say we're partners?”

“Probably I thought it, but I didn't say it like that.”

“So there! I read your mind, dear. Oh come on, everything has to move along, doesn't it? Just look at Jeff, how he changes every day. Let Jeff be an inspiration to you, isn't that a good idea?”

I didn't want a quarrel. The last thing I wanted was a quarrel with my wife and partner. I let her say “There, there” and run her fingers down my arm in a petting motion, although there was something about the touch I didn't enjoy. The difference between being loved and being indulged.

The subject wasn't fully closed. That's marriage. That's something I would need to live with. At least Karim and Priscilla were happy, feeling they had planted a seed that might grow in the right weather.

Chapter 10

Nowadays a person seldom feels the instant sea change when a woman stops loving, closes the door. There may be a whiff of draft that the person calls “mood.” (“Hi honey, how was your day?” No answer, mumbly nonanswer; no further questions, please the court.)

She took my arm as if she loved me, her eyes washed their blue all over our lives, she made the picnic and said, “Let's have cheese and wine and other good things, because we're lovers, dear man.” Yes, let's, and forever.

The door closes silently in a house that is suddenly still. At first, no clashing of walls, shaking of foundations, just the quiet munching of dry rot, which means invisible termites. Not even a big fight over take-out-the-garbage or drinking-a-little-more-lately or shit chores with Jeff. She might draw on an afternoon joint, some old-fashioned Acapulco gold, the sort of pleasure a person finds when perturbed and alone but shouldn't find when alone and upset. She might draw on a little easing smoke and, like other people, give herself leave to repeat herself, inquiring again about Karim, just out of curiosity: Isn't it nice to be respected, lover? By a very successful business person operating out of a white linen suit he probably has dry-cleaned after one day's wearing? Hey, what about your bride having to open the garage door loaded down with an armful of groceries and Jeff? A Genie would be nice, Dan, works like magic on FM frequencies …

One day I came home and the wiring in the house was different.

“Oh. Hello. Hi.”

Was that a greeting I just heard? Was it?

So I hugged Jeff and went to the bathroom and washed my face carefully in cold water and made the claim to my pink face, wet beard, that this was “mood.” Jeff and I would roll on the floor and she could just be as much a part of Daddy-comes-home-from-work as she chose to be.

The next day something similar. And the next.

“What's the matter, Priscilla?”

“Nothing.”

I pick up Jeff. He laughs. I throw him in the air. He laughs wildly.

“Someday he'll hit the ceiling,” she says.

“Never yet happened. I was a pitcher. Softball in high school.”

“I know a kid lost his teeth that way, his father showing off.”

“Not me, Priscilla. I think my dad did this to me. It's a free ride in the air. Not showing off, I promise.”

“Would you know? Define the terms.”

“Hey! At Lowell I was all-city—”

“This isn't softball. Just be careful.”

I could feel the frown gather on my forehead. This is hardball. I undo the creases with my fingers. Then I say to the other happiness in my life. “Jeffy Jeffy Jeffy, don't you like to fly?”

He says, “Daddy Daddy Daddy,” that's what I hear, the spirit of pronunciation still at an early period of dadadada
da.
Pretty good, Jeffy.

Then I turn to my great love, my miracle blessing. “Want to go out to dinner?”

“No sitter. We can't just pick up like that anymore.”

Why is she explaining that we now have a child? Don't I know?

“We can get one. The kid next door. Or we can take Jeff.”

“That's no help.”

“I'll take care of him. He'll sleep.”

“No.”

The word that launched a billion shipwrecks, the all-encompassing no, the lips no-ing white at the edges, the eyes no-ing hard in their blue clarity, the face and body finding other places to be in a small house when the husband walks toward her; the no-in-chief; the no of no-ness.

Or it might have filled the air of another day.

Or been just gradual, like leukemia, a leaking of illness into the lymph system, capillaries wriggling for cover like worms.

Dimly dumbly dying, I took notice of something I had named “mood.” It was more than mood. Emergency call to KCBS: our marriage was injured up to the point of asking to be considered dead. There was a thrill in the unmoving air of a house, something brutal, not quite fully happening yet, being prepared; like a lynching in the neighborhood, or an unannounced lightning war, an attack precise in scale but total. Priscilla was a brilliant antagonist with a pure heart, maybe the only pure heart I'll ever meet.

With such power she loved and didn't love!

We had dinner, talking to Jeff and not each other, and then put Jeff to bed. As I bathed him, watched him splash, dodged storms, Priscilla came into the bathroom; she had something to say; she chose not to say it. She opened her mouth and shut it. This was not Priscilla's way, this silent scream. I supervised the brushing of the Jeff teeth. I urged the putting away of the Jeff toys. I told the story. Again Priscilla came toward us, her lips parted, then shut, and then she bent to kiss him. Goodnight, Jeffie. Goodnight, Daddy. Goodnight, Jeffie. Goodnight, Mommy.

I thought she should have the last goodnight. Sweet dreams, Jeffie.

She shut his door carefully and listened. It was one of those evenings when he was drifting off nicely. Good.

She came out to tell me she had been wanting to mention something, and I was relieved that she would finally be mentioning whatever it was that needed to be mentioned. Again her mouth opened and shut with its barricaded scream.

“Please say it,” I asked.

She shook her head. “I'm not sure how.”

“Just whatever comes to you.”

“What comes to me,” she said with a tentativeness unlike Priscilla. Violently, with a gesture of violent head-shaking no-saying, she planted her legs in a hard straddle in front of me and shouted: “What the hell makes you think it's
my
job to clean up your friend's dog shit?”

I stared.

“Mingus!” she said. “Your goddamn friend's mess!”

Now I knew what she was talking about. “You've got a memory like an elephant.”

Her voice turned cold and quiet. “No I don't. I only remember what I need to remember. We'll see if you like it better that way.”

I didn't yet understand; it was too simple and pure. She was looking at me in a way that made me think she was staring at someone hidden by my body. I turned to see. No one there. She didn't laugh. But now that the ice was broken, she felt easier in herself, she was on a roll, she spoke with her usual calm and almost amused control, finding exactly the words she needed in order to make her point. Some kind of logic had been distilled and purified by her long silence.

“I didn't think I'd grow up to cook dinner for a black cop and a Jewish private snoop, no disrespect intended, dear—”

“Of course not. The surprises life brings.”

“—and wiping up after their pet doggy.”

I couldn't answer. I had no answer. I wondered if I was supposed to have an answer. “Is that how you saw it?”

She looked genuinely pained. “Dear, I don't remember how I saw it then. Probably not like that. But that's how I see it now.”

She was moving backward; there must have been a reason for my graceful wife's bumping against a framed double photograph of the two of us on a table, knocking it so that it fell like a shot bird, wings flapping; she looked frightened and puzzled. I stopped advancing on her—I realized I had started violently forward. I ran into the bathroom. I turned on the cold water and splashed my face with it. No disrespect intended. No disrespect intended. I didn't want her to hear me so I let the faucet run.

She was in bed when I came out. I picked up the double-framed photograph and unfolded its wings. The glass wasn't cracked. That was a good sign; it would have been too much. I reinserted the Polaroid of Jeff where it had been stuck between the glass and the frame. I stood the hinged frames back in place next to the lamp on the table and wondered if she would leave it there. I spent the night in the normal place of a husband in a whole lot of trouble. On the couch, no disrespect intended.

And the next night she was breaking a hairbrush over my upraised arm when I refused to believe she had decided to separate our lives. “I just want to live apart, I need you to move out, I don't want to be married just now.”

“Just now?”

And the hairbrush was cracking on my arm because I refused to understand.

“Just now,” she said.

*   *   *

The routines of sudden departure, in my case, did not send me to an all-night movie or a hotel. I spent the night in Alfonso's high-rise in the Western Addition. Then I found a room. Then I started looking for a place to live. Sometime soon I would learn to sleep alone. So far I was just learning to sweat and turn alone, stare into the unfamiliar black ceiling above me, hurtle toward nonsleep in a place where unfamiliar house creaks and appliance noises seeped through unfamiliar walls. I shuffled toward dawn. It didn't help when Alfonso advised me that all this was normal, a stage. I had difficulty understanding the drill.

The drill would be an uncharted path except that so many have walked along it, worn down the territory, that only the tops of heads are visible.

A week later Priscilla surprised me with a telephone call, nothing on her mind really, just a suggestion: “Want a cup of tea?”

“It's late.”

“I know.” She waited. “Everyone's asleep.”

Well, maybe herbal tea, a mouth-refreshing Mint Medley, would be a good idea. So I spent an hour in her bed, which used to be our bed, and then got up because I didn't know how Jeff would understand it if first I was gone and then I was there, first I was moved out and then I was waking him for breakfast. He could pronounce Daddy perfectly now. “Daddy? Daddy?”

As I got up to dress in the dark, she was saying sleepily, “You going?” I wondered if she would add “Stay.” She didn't.

Here was the table, here was the chair, here was the things in our bedroom. This was the bed where Jeff's brother or sister might have been created; this was the bed Jeff used to climb into for a hug when he had a bad dream. I moved clumsily, still sticky, as silent as a burglar in my former house.

I was lacing my shoes. Priscilla sat up and she was whispering to me in the dark. “I can't imagine,” she said.

“I can't hear you.”

“I can't imagine not ending our lives together.”

My hands shook on the laces. I wanted to hurt her. I pulled a knot. I'd have to cut the lace later. I said, “That's only the movies.”

“What?”

“Where people separate, get divorced, and then after many years, when they are elegant and old, no else is in their lives, time has stopped, they are beautiful, the same as before because they're stars, not people, only there's a little gray in their hair … That's only the goddamn movies!”