Vacation (15 page)

It doesn’t matter if he knew about me. You know how is best? Just knowing he’s out there. My real dad. He is perfectly formed in my eye. Nothing has gone wrong. There have been no arguments, no misunderstandings, no doubts that he might have about me have come up. And I haven’t seen anything I don’t like either. I haven’t begun to lose him in any way at all.

I got up. The radiator ticked like a time bomb. I saw the bartender’s wallet. I took enough to get home. I took more, I took the rest. I got dressed. He raised his head and I gave it a pat. I went. I got back on the train and headed for New York.

I am weary of my adventure.

THE UNTRAINER

So this dolphin here, he comes originally from far out in the ocean off the coast of Corn Island. We tracked the trainer. I had the help of automatic weapons and men. We followed him into the hills straight to the dolphin, brought him here. I called the local authorities and they came over and threw a salaried, half-hour fit and said I had to give him back. Then I called the international authorities and they came over and threw another fit, a bigger fit, a tantrum of the leisured rich. And now, as an expression of the new national interest in the perishing paradise and hope for a swimmy future for all and for better relations with all animal bodies and especially with the international financial body, the national authorities have congratulated me and have invited everyone to witness this spectacular media event. We will all go together, all the authorities, as one happy group, to take the dolphin home. The untrainer will go one way and the dolphin another.

This is the kind of shit I put up with to see one animal free.

Hey, get away from the animal.

Chapter Fourteen

Here is the wife’s confession, which she spoke aloud but not to her husband. Myers never heard it and never knew. She confessed to a stranger, not the same one she’d followed, but a third man in a third suit, also with a briefcase, though she never saw him carry it, never saw the briefcase in the air at all. She saw it on a desk, jaws open, and she could not view its contents from where she sat, though she supposed them to be not entirely unlike the contents of the briefcases of other men she’d known, husband, strangers, and so on.

She told the third man her story, meted it out with the disimpassioned face of a dashboard, and then rode home on the train. She did this each week, the same man, same hour and day, same story, and each time she paid him the same sum of money to listen to her confession, and not to judge or scold her, but merely to murmur phrases in a detached tone or to ask a simple question softly and from behind a lifted hand so that she could not hear him even if she leaned forward and cocked her head to his voice. She confessed for twelve weeks, as her benefits allowed, and then she stopped.

Confession to follow.

The confession began: Once I ran away from my husband.

THE WIFE’S CONFESSION (PART I)

I ran away from my husband once. I was gone for so short a time that he never found out I’d gone. It was winter. We’d gotten married only a few months before. The toaster was still shiny and reflective. We were still perfecting our recycling program. I was still writing out our thank-yous on ivory paper.

How he and I met was nothing special. On my end, it had something to do with college, with being a few years out of it. I’d made it all the way through school without any big loves, just the odd boyfriend and Valentine’s date. I’d seen enough of my parents’ marriage—two corpses feigning life—to keep me off romance. My father had some kind of wire arrangement around his heart, a dark armor that clanked when he walked. He seemed most absent when present. He spoke exclusively in the imperative. Don’t touch the thermostat. Use your napkin. Tiptoe. The worst was when he added his special word on the end, his concession to the single hour of therapy my mother had insisted on. No stomping,
friend.
Shake hands with Mr. Clark,
friend
. Other than these clipped commands, he was completely silent. His smile was so phony it looked painful.

I can see now that my mother was unhappy, that she walked through my growing years bewildered and depressed, but as a child I took it as disinterest, so I returned the same. By the time I was a teenager, we all politely disliked each other with the same chilly restraint.

So I graduated, set off for the city, found a job. There I was, pretzeled into my seat on the subway, and who should come strolling over like a cowboy. I think it was the most spontaneous thing he’d ever done, the way he approached me, and therefore the most spectacular, and although there wasn’t anything spectacular about it, it seemed spectacular to me.

He sat down next to me. I am having the moment, he said, that I’ve always heard about.

Where you miss your stop and wind up in Queens? I said.

Where I meet the woman I will love.

The next year was like nothing I’d known. More than a cowboy, he was like a fireman or some other dependable community service. He was steady, able, good with his hose (ha), and my reaction was appropriate:
I was relieved. I had never been close to anyone, not really, and I wanted to try. I imagined closeness as being like the people I saw in restaurants and on TV, people with clean faces, with problems like mathematic equations, which could be solved with a pencil and a sharp mind. It was the strangest time in my life. I felt something in me healing. Yes,
I thought. It could be that simple. This nice man. I could love him. He could save me.

Save me, I thought.

I have almost no memories from that year. It’s not that I feel nothing for it, it’s just that it hurts too much to look at. I see a blur of objects—my dresses like straitjackets, the prehistoric pasta we cooked off his shelf. There was the Halloween we worked the haunted house—a swarm of children in homely Kmart costumes, plastic green pants, face masks. We made love on the floor of his office. We made love on his desk. We went exploring, found a machine junkyard and picked our way through the scraps and curled metals. I was amazed at how easy everything was when I had someone beside me saying, Good job!

Saying, Wow, you look great doing that.

Saying, Here, let me get it!

The truth is, it wasn’t the cure. I slowly became aware of this. The infection was still inside me and it had been hacked back but was once again growing.

I remember as a child waiting for my parents to soften. I looked for signs, weak points in their armor to push on and break through. But my mother had given up, had sunk into herself. She fended me off from deep inside her stronghold. My father may have never felt a thing in his life, for all I know. I waited. Inside, my mind was a windswept plain, a few stalks of thistles, rocks, and it stayed that way. Now with this new man around, I was trying desperately to redecorate, drag in couches over the fields of my mind, put up some paintings with clothespins, attach them to the lines.

The truth is I was having little doubts even at the courting stage. (What did he have to be so helpful about?) (Did he have to be cheerful every
goddamn minute?) (Honestly now, what was there about me to like?)

I have no idea what my parents’ great disappointment was.

Maybe each other.

Maybe me.

We had a crazy Technicolor wedding. We moved into an apartment, took out of boxes a game show’s worth of appliances, began our marriage.

Then the real trouble began.

Myers pushed through the doors, fled the hotel management. He had one hand clenched around the grip of his briefcase, the other pinned patriotically to his chest. Outside, the streets were full. Across the street the park was full, a numberless noisy crowd, his eardrums raw and banging. He went down the steps and into the hotel garden.

THE WIFE’S CONFESSION (PART II)

I had assumed it was a birth deformity. How else does a head get that way? I didn’t mind, that’s how love is—you accept what they’re born with. Sure, I realized he wasn’t aware of it. From the mirror’s flat face, he couldn’t see the way it was misshapen, and no one had told him. I wasn’t going to be the one to break the news. I do have manners, if little else. One day I was doing some wifely arranging (
not
snooping) and I found the hospital papers in his files. One sheet described the accident. There’d been witnesses, corroborations. From the ground below, from the windows across, they had seen him. A young man stepping up into a window frame, leaping out.

You tell me: what sort of man jumps out the window?

That first night I sat up and watched him sleep, only his earlobe visible over the blankets. I don’t know what I was more upset about: that he had chosen not to tell me or that this man I had entrusted myself to, had gone so far as to marry, this man had thrown himself out the window, had nearly killed himself, had certainly tried, had a death wish or a wish to fly or some other deeply irregular desire. Why hadn’t he told me? How was I supposed to believe him now that I knew what was in his heart? How was he supposed to save me?

I am a private person but at this point I needed to talk. I went to my closest friend, Anita. I told her everything. She was unimpressed.

So? she said.

He was twelve, she said. What won’t a kid do?

Jump out a window? she said. That’s nothing. You should hear what
my
husband did before we met.

Every man has a weakness, she said. Every man has a past.

I said, Here’s what I want to know. Is it contagious?

What on earth? she said. It’s not the plague.

I don’t want to get it.

Your head’s not going to cave in, she said. Get what?

Not the dent, I said. The urge.

Myers ran through the garden, along the sun-washed, white-spilled wall of the hotel. Flowers were bunched in the way, strewn in maniac obstacle clumps. He veered around them, vaulting when he had to. He came to a gate at the end of the garden—padlocked. He could possibly squeeze through.

He drew himself up, squeezed through.

THE WIFE’S CONFESSION (PART III)

I don’t know, I don’t think it’s so weird. I can think of any number of reasons. Humans, we just hop out of things, off things. We splatter ourselves in inappropriate places. Because we have nothing to live for.

Because we want to destroy what we can.

Because we want to be something we can’t.

Because we don’t really believe we can die.

I’d been unhappy for a long time. I had been counting on him to be strong. I didn’t want to be close to someone with secrets and a fake smile, someone ready to jump. I have that already, I’ve had it.

I have had it.

The next few days I struggled. I was surprised he had it in him to pull off such a stunt and that he had the restraint to hide it. How could someone like him do it? He was more cunning than I’d imagined. Part of me thought I was being unfair. I should confront him, demand an explanation. Then it occurred to me: was I using this as an excuse not to love him? In the kitchen I watched him work the can opener. I watched him arrange the jars. What was behind that face of his? Of mine? An eeriness crept over me and hardened me. All I could do was look at him a little more stone-hearted each day and feel, inside, stone.

Myers crabwalked down the street as fast as he could, gasping and sweating, a roar in his ears, a pain in his side. He stepped over the cracks. The earth’s slick human protective covering was coming off in places now, not the whole thick thing, just the upper layer, peeling off, unsticking, to reveal whatever was pulsing and suffocating below. He stopped, craned his head around the corner and down the avenue, could see the hotel and a long line of figures stringing out of the building, fanning into the street. He couldn’t believe it. They were coming after him.

SPOKE

Why did I come to Nicaragua? Mostly to visit my grandmother.
I just came from there. I would have seen my grandfather too except he’s been dead six years, which no one bothered to tell me. How hard is it to send a note? I haven’t seen either of them in twenty years or many of my other relations either, because when I was twelve years old I was drafted into the army of the revolutionary government and I walked out of our town with all the other soldiers and I haven’t been back until now.

THE WIFE’S CONFESSION (PART IV)

Finally I left one morning. He was gone, weekend with the parents. I didn’t leave a note and I planned not to come back. I took only a few items—several sandwiches of cheese, a change of slacks. I closed the door to the apartment and walked away.