We Live in Water (7 page)

—We gonna start playin’ catch now, too? Tommy asked.

Ken laughed.

Tommy watched the old man pass through the metal gate. The fucker.

Virgo

YOU ALL SAY
the same thing. You suits, you cops, you shrinks, you all sound alike: tell us what happened. Give us your side of the story.
My side
of the story. My side. As if truth were a box that you could flip over when you want another side, another version. Well, there are no sides, no box, maybe no truth.

You don’t really want
my side
of the story. You don’t want to understand me, know me, to crawl inside my head. You don’t want to
feel
the things I’ve felt. You just want to know that one thing: why.

Fine. Here’s why: Her. I did it all for her.

THIS ALL
began in late October. We’d had the same old fight, with the same stale grievances Tanya had been lobbing at me for three months, almost since the day I moved in:
Blah, blah, stalled relationship; blah, blah, stunted growth; blah, blah, I worry that you’re a psychopath
.

I said I’d try harder, but she was in a mood: “No, Trent. I want you out of here. Now.” So I gathered my things. Four loads of clothes, shoes, CDs, action figures, and trading cards I carried to my car. I was about to drive away when I saw . . . him. Mark Aikens, Tanya’s missing-link ex-boyfriend, was loping up Twenty-first like some kind of predator, like a fat coyote talking on a cell phone. She had moved to Portland for this loser, even though she made twice as much as he did. She requested a transfer from the Palo Alto software company where she worked and found a small condo in the Pearl District, but she wasn’t in town six months before he’d slept with someone else and she tossed him out. Mark Aikens was a cheating shit.

He swung around a light pole and skipped up the steps of our old building. She buzzed him up. Mark Aikens was a sous chef at Il Pattio, one of those jerkoffs who acts like cooking is an art. She always said he was sensitive, a good listener. Now he was up in our old condo, listening his sensitive, cheating ass off. For two hours I sat in my car down the block while this guy . . . listened. It grew dark outside. From the street, our condo glowed. I knew exactly which light was on—the upright living room lamp. She got it at Pottery Barn. Through our old third-floor corner window I could see shadows move across the ceiling from that light and I tried to imagine what was happening by the subtle changes in cast:
She’s going to the kitchen to get him a beer; he’s going to the bathroom.
How many fall nights had I snuck home early from work and looked up to see the glow from that very light? It had been my comfort.

But now that light felt unbearably cold and far away, like an astronomer’s faint discovery, a flicker from across the universe and the icy beginning of time. I might have gone crazy had I stared at that light much longer. In fact, I’d just decided to ring the buzzer and run when the unimaginable happened.

The light went out.

I sat there, breathless, waiting for Mark Aikens to come down. But he didn’t. My eyes shot to the bedroom window. Also dark. That meant she was . . . they were . . .

I tooled around the Pearl having conversations with her in my head, begging, yelling, until finally I crossed the bridge and drove toward my father’s little duplex in Northeast. I parked on the dirt strip in front and beat on his door. I could hear him clumping around inside. My dad had lost a leg to diabetes. It took him a while to get his prosthetic on.

When he finally answered, I said: “Tanya threw me out. She’s seeing her old boyfriend. She said living with me was like living with a stalker.”

“You always did make people nervous,” my father said.

Dad was a big sloppy man, awful at giving advice. Since my mother’s death, he’d been even less helpful in these father/son moments. He sniffed the air. “Have you been drinking?”

“No,” I said.

“Christ, Trent.” And he invited me inside. “Why the hell not?”

BEFORE ALL
of this, I loved my job. And I’m not talking about the job as portrayed in my five-year-old performance evaluation, the low point of which (one flimsy charge of harassment stemming from an honest misunderstanding involving the women’s restroom) the newspaper found a way to dredge up in its apology to readers. No. What I loved was the work.

As a features copy editor, I pulled national stories off the wire, proofread local copy, and wrote headlines for as many as five pages a day. My favorite, because it was Tanya’s favorite, was “Inside Living”—page two of the features section, the best-read page in the
O
—with syndicated features like the crossword puzzle, the word jumble, celebrity birthdays, and Tanya’s favorite, the daily horoscope. That’s how we’d met, in fact, four months earlier, in a coffee shop where I saw her reading her horoscope. I launched our romance with a simple statement: “I edit that page.” Within a week we were dating, and a month later, in late July, when I was asked to leave my apartment because the paranoid woman across the courtyard objected to my having a telescope, Tanya said I could move in with her until I found a place.

Now, to some, I may indeed be—as the newspaper’s one-sided apology to readers characterized me—
strangely quiet and intense, practically a nonpresence
, but to loyal readers like Tanya, I was something of an unsung hero.

Each morning during those three glorious months, she would pour herself a cup of coffee, toast a bagel, and browse the newspaper, spending mere seconds on each page, until she arrived at “Inside Living,” her newspaper home. I couldn’t wait for her to get there. She’d make a careful fold and crease, set the page down, and study it as if it contained holy secrets.

And only then would she speak to me. “Eleven down: ‘Film’s blank Peak’?”

“Dante’s.”

“Are you sure you don’t see the answers the day before?”

“I told you, no.” Of course, I did see the answers the day before. But who could blame me for a little dishonesty? I was courting.

“Hey, it’s Kirk Cameron’s birthday. Guess how old he is.”

“Twelve? Six hundred? Who’s Kirk Cameron?”

“Come on. You edited this page yesterday. Now you’re going to pretend you don’t know who Kirk Cameron is?”

“That celebrity stuff comes in over the wire. I just shovel it in without reading it. You know I hate celebrities.”

“I think you pretend not to like celebrities to make yourself appear smarter.”

This was true. I do love celebrities.

“Hey, look,” she’d say finally. “I’m having a five-star day. If I relax, the answers will all come to me.”

It’s painful now to recall those sweet mornings, the two of us bantering over our page of the newspaper, with no hint that it was about to end. And this is the strange part, the mystical part, some might say: on those days Tanya read that she was to have a five-star day . . . she actually had five-star days. Now, I don’t believe in such mumbo-jumbo; it was likely just the power of suggestion. But I did begin to notice (in the journals in which I record such things) that Tanya was more open to my amorous advances when she got five stars. In fact, after our first month together, I began to notice that the only time Tanya seemed at all interested in being intimate, the only time she wanted to . . . you know, get busy . . . was when she got five stars on her horoscope.

Then one day in early October, when we’d stopped having sex altogether, I did it. I goosed her horoscope. Virgo was supposed to have three stars, and I changed it to five.

So sue me. It didn’t even work.

OBVIOUSLY, THOUGH
, that’s where the idea came from. And yet I might have simply moved on after our breakup, and not launched my horoscope warfare, had Tanya not fired the first shot at me by filing a no-contact order a mere two weeks after throwing me out. A no-contact order! Based on what, I wanted to know.

“Well, you do drive over there every night after work and park outside her place,” my dad said as he nursed a tumbler of rum.

“Yeah, but eight hundred feet? What kind of arbitrary number is that? Shall I carry a tape measure? How do you know if you’re eight hundred feet away from someone? There’s a tapas place around the corner from her condo. Am I just supposed to stop eating tapas?”

“There’s a Taco Bell over on M.L. King.”

“Tapas, Dad. Not tacos.”

Dad poured us a drink, then turned on the TV. “Look, I don’t know what to tell you, Trent. You make people uncomfortable. When you were a kid I thought something was wrong with your eyelids, the way you never blinked. I used to ask your mom if maybe there wasn’t some surgery we could try.”

This was my father. A woman breaks my heart and his answer is to sew my eyelids shut. But I suppose he tried. I suppose we all try.

“Life just isn’t fair,” I said as the old widower hobbled away on his prosthetic leg to get another drink.

“Yeah, well,” he replied, “I hope I’m not the asshole who told you it would be.”

The very next day, November 17, Virgo got the first of thirteen straight one-star days.
“Four stars: your creativity surges. Keep an eye on the big picture,”
Virgo was supposed to read that day. I changed it to:
“One star: watch your back
.” It was glorious, imagining her reading that.

HOROSCOPES ARE
cryptic and open-ended:
“You’ll encounter an obstacle but you are up to the task. A Capricorn may help.”
In fact, I could argue that what clearly began as a way to spoil my girlfriend’s day became a campaign to make horoscopes more useful. And I won’t pretend that I didn’t like the voice, the power that changing horoscopes gave me. In the office, I kept my own counsel, going days without speaking sometimes, but with these horoscopes I could finally say the things I’d been holding inside all those years. For our new drama critic, Sharon Gleason, I wrote,
“Libra. Three stars: those pants make you look fat.”
For the arrogant sports columnist, Mike Dunne,
“Taurus. Two stars: I hope your wife’s cheating on you.”
For the icy young records clerk, Laura:
“Cancer. Would it kill you to smile at your coworkers?”

Of course, there were complaints about the late-November horoscopes. (Thankfully, they were all routed to the “Inside Living” page editor . . . me.) In my defense, some people actually preferred the new horoscopes. Not Virgos, of course, since they were treated to day after day of stunning disappointment—“
One star: you should try to be less vindictive and disloyal . . . One star: hope your new boyfriend doesn’t mind your bad breath . . . One star: you’re not even good at sex.”

I’m the first to admit that I went a little far on November 24, the day I read in the crossword puzzle that the clue to 9-Across was a Jamaican spice, saw that the answer was
Jerk
, and changed the clue to
Mark Aikins, e.g.
Yes, it was petty, but I was being forced to wage a war without getting within eight hundred feet of my enemy.

Yet, despite my constant barrage of single-star Virgo days and crossword puzzle salvos, I got no response from either of them. Tanya knew this was my page. She had to know I was behind her run of bad horoscopes. But I heard nothing. Some days I thought she was taunting me by not responding; other days I imagined she was so deeply mired in one-star hassles (traffic snarls and Internet outages) that she was incapable of responding.

Another possibility arose on the last day of November. I had just called in another phony customer complaint to Il Pattio (“The chicken breast was woefully undercooked; it had all the symptoms of salmonella.”) and driven back to the house I now shared with my dad. That’s when I found him on the kitchen floor, slumped in a corner, his artificial leg at an odd angle, fake foot still flat on the floor.

He was in what doctors called a diabetic coma—an obvious result of his nonstop drinking. “You need to take better care of him,” the ER nurse said. But it wasn’t until I filled out the insurance paperwork that I understood exactly how I’d failed my dad. I copied his date of birth from his driver’s license: August 28, 1947. I knew his birthday, naturally, but it hadn’t occurred to me until that moment.

My father was a Virgo.

IN THEIR
glee to portray me as a bad employee, the suits failed to mention that on the very day my dad was fighting for his life in a hospital bed, I still reported to work. Of course, it was also that day, November 30, that my section editor responded to a complaint from the features syndicate, investigated, and called me into her office.

In the frenzy of meetings and recriminations that followed, I somehow got one last altered horoscope into the paper. Again, I don’t mean to portray myself as some kind of primitive, moon-worshipping kook, but the next day, Virgos across Portland read a heartfelt plea: “
Five stars: you’ll get better. I’m sorry.
”

DAD PULLED
out of his hypoglycemic coma and returned home to live dryly, me at his side. I have purged his little house of alcohol. Dad drinks a lot of tomato juice now. Since I’m not working, we play game after game of cribbage, so much that I have begun to dream of myself as one of those pegs, making my way up and down the little board. I recently shared this dream with my court-ordered therapist. She wondered aloud if the dream had to do with my father’s peg leg. So I told Dad about my dream and he said that he sometimes dreams his missing leg is living in a trailer in Livingston, Montana. I’m thinking of asking him to come to counseling with me.

And Tanya? Even after the
Oregonian
ran its “Public Apology to Our Readers,” full of righteous puffery about how I “acted maliciously and recklessly,” how I “broke the sacred trust between a newspaper and its readers,” I hoped Tanya would at least glean the depth of my feelings for her. But I never heard a word. My probation officer and therapist have insisted, rightly I suppose, that I leave Tanya alone, but this afternoon I went to the store to get more tomato juice for Dad and I found myself down the block from her building again.