You Were Wrong (2 page)

“I guess I’ll start robbing you now.”

“Do you want to know my name?”

“No.”

“It’s Karl Floor.”

“You’re giddy.”

“I got beat up.”

“I see.”

“How do you know? Maybe I was in a car accident.”

“Were you?”

“No. What will happen if I try to stop you from robbing me?”

“I’ll beat you up.”

He lightly vomited again, into the crevice. An umber waterfall inundated the land beneath the couch’s cushion that time forgot but vomit remembered.

He had been holding the tea and now put it down on the glass top of the coffee table. Sylvia Vetch sat still and watched him from her chair with eyes of an almost hostile shade of blue, her strong and elegant arms resting on the chair’s arms, her hands clutching them, tapping them, their movements betraying an agitation whose cause Karl knew was relevant to him but was too sad and dumb to figure out.

“Why are you just sitting there?” he said.

Again a wave of something like distress passed through her. “I don’t know.”

“Figuring out what you’re going to take?”

“Yes.”

“Want help?”

“Taking things?”

“Deciding.”

“Okay.”

“Well, people who are acting in a play always say, ‘What’s my character’s motivation?’”

“But I’m
not
acting.”

“What are you, stupid?”

“No!” Her face turned red; she stood up, walked toward the door, walked back with hands out as if to strangle Karl, sat down, and looked at him in supplication. This business of eyes, their meanings, their requests, their acts of aggression, their penetrations of the skin, the flesh—astonishing.

“Then why are you burglarizing my house in the middle of the day, with me in it?”

“What’s your point?”

“My point is, what’s your motivation for being here?”

“I don’t have to tell you.” She leaned forward and down in her chair as if she, too, would now be sick.

“I’m asking so I can help you figure out what to take, remember?”

“Oh. Well then. My—uh—motivation is to—God, this is so stupid, who told you people know their own motivations? Not all life is math, you know, where each question has its answer.”

“Why did you say that?”

“What?”

“That life isn’t math.”

“Because you’re a math teacher.”

“I didn’t tell you I’m a math teacher.”

Her white face went red and she stood up. “I’ve got to go.”

“Sit down!” He did not remember ever speaking to someone like this, even a student, and he felt his words go into her the way her look had gone into him more than once this afternoon.

She did not sit down, and he was no longer sitting up. He lay sideways toward the front of the couch, looking up at her as she looked down at him across the low, rectangular, glass-top table with its vintage beer-ad coasters, its stack of books of antique art. He watched the workings of her lungs move her rose T-shirt up and down. Her knees were bent, her arms were bent and tensed, a karate sort of stance she seemed to have leapt into from a sleep interrupted by a stranger’s touch.

“I want a buffer between me and, you know, nothing,” she said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Why I’m robbing you.”

“Oh, well, God, I want
no
buffer between me and nothing.”

“Only someone raised in Seacrest could say that. Have you ever wandered over the line into Centraldale, where I’m from? Not everyone lives in a beautiful two-story house with a big front lawn. Have your parents ever been unemployed?”

“They’ve been dead.”

“You just roll along through the hours, don’t you, living in this house for free, storing up your teacher’s pension against your last day, as if you could kill time without doing harm to your own life.”

“You don’t know anything about me!” Karl said, though everything this Sylvia had just said about him was true. “Fine,” he said, “if you’re going to leave, leave. Just don’t stay here and lie to me.”

She looked at him awhile, was scrutinizing him, was—if it were possible he was not mistaken—sizing him up in advance of telling him, finally, something true about herself. “There are forces in this world, my dear friend, darker than I think you’re willing to imagine could ever touch your life.”

“Oh, I can imagine. Two of the ‘forces’ touched my face about an hour ago.” Even as he said this he knew those were not the forces she meant. He sensed that the piece of information in her remark most relevant to him was
my dear friend
, which affected him as the sequel of something whose beginning he was already supposed to know. “Dark forces?” he said. “Who are you, Princess Leia?”

Something agitated her excessively.

“Tell me who you are!”

“I can’t! Not yet.”

“Why not
yet
?”

She reached out with both hands as if to gather back into her body the words she’d just said. “Forget it. There’s no
why
because there’s nothing to tell.”

“There’s a safe in the study with jewels and cash.”

“What?”

“You’re robbing me, remember?”

“Do you know the combination?”

“No. There are things in boxes in the attic.”

“What things?”

“A rabbit.”

“What kind?”

“Of clay, that I made, as a kid, or didn’t make. Another kid made it, and I made one too, but when they came out of the kiln mine was misshapen and his was beautiful. His was the shape and color—blue, various blues—I’d meant to make mine and thought I’d made mine. I refused to believe I’d made mine, I said I’d made his, and believed that, and cried. This all happened at school. The teacher insisted I take mine home, I said I wouldn’t, I said it was only fair I take his, which I thought was mine. This other kid, Mike Schoen, who was stronger than I was and handsomer and nicer and more generous and had better grades and a better rabbit, said, ‘It’s all right, I’d like him to have it,’ or some magnanimous speech like that. He ceded me his rabbit. He didn’t say, ‘This nicer rabbit really is his,’ he needed to let the teacher and me know that he was giving up his rabbit for me. The cocksucker.”

“And you want me to take this rabbit.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“It isn’t mine anyway.”

“What should I do with it?”

“Give it back to Mike Schoen.”

“I don’t know him.”

“You will, you’ll find him and give him his rabbit and marry him, you two will put the rabbit on your mantel.”

“I don’t want the stupid rabbit.”

“It’s not stupid, it’s my finest accomplishment.”

“Why are you helping me rob your house?” she said in a tone that amounted to a confession that she was not robbing it, if Karl was to be trusted to decipher what tones amounted to.

“It’s burdensome to me,” he said.

“Why?”

“I own it.”

“I thought you said your mean stepfather owns it.”

“I didn’t say he was mean, what makes you think that?”

“Look at you.”

“He’s not the one who beat me up.”

“Yes, but you’re the sort of person who gets beaten up because he has a mean stepfather, which, as a grown man, you should get over.”

“Only people with happy childhoods have free will,” he said. “I own this house with him. My mother, when she was dying—”

“How old were you?”

“Sixteen. She asked me to stay with him and care for him.”

“Why?”

“He’s sick.”

“Your mother asked you to live here and look after him until he dies, in exchange for which you will own the house and any other assets in her estate.”

“How did you know that?”

“I’m intuitive. Why does it happen that the dying person extracts some untenable promise from the living person, and this always happens with the dying person lying in bed and the living person sitting in a chair, and the dying person hates the living person for living, so much that she’s going to cast a pall over the living person’s life by making him do something for a long time that he doesn’t want to do, and the living person agrees to it as if that’ll make the dying person somehow not die? This is just bad faith on both people’s parts.”

“Get out of my house!”

“Well, I wish you wouldn’t yell at me, it’s hurtful.”

Was that a tear in her eye? “I truly hate that you’re in my house and I’m drinking this tea you made me. Whatever awful thing you’re going to do to me, I wish you’d do it already because the anticipation is increasingly worrisome and unpleasant.”

TWO

THE FRONT WINDOWS OF HIS CAR
were down and Sylvia Vetch stuck her feet out the passenger side. She’d rolled her jeans above her knees. Her calves and shins were beautifully unhaired, pale and shinily moisturized against the cracked beige vinyl of the old Volvo door’s inner wall. Karl Floor drove them down a road in his town near the coast, the lush scent of swamp grass in the air, dust, dunes, tiny seashells brittle and bleached, the old engine’s moribund racket, its unwholesome light gray exhaust, a poem of going to the beach. The upstairs TV wobbled in the center of the backseat. The smaller stolen items on its left and right seemed to pray to it. The cracked-open parts of Karl’s face slowly came together. His wounds were not so bad. He didn’t know how bad they were. He didn’t know how bad these last few hours were, in the small scheme of his own happiness, the very clinging to which had thus far in his life brought about its opposite, so screw caution and the knowledge that this woman was acting on behalf of a goal or person or principle to which or to whom he was probably an impediment, and that what she intended was inimical not only to his happiness but also to his material comfort and physical health. He wanted her, there, he wanted her, in so many words. He did not want her
for
anything—sex, children, lifelong companionship, to be shattered by. He drove nowhere with her for nothing.

Imagine, then, their arrival, after a hard hour on a gorgeous beach, at a house physically compromised by neglect, painted wood-color by beach weather. A party or something like it may have been under way. “This is Stony,” someone said. “This is Rich, John, Jen, Jan, Tom, Rob, Arv.” Karl’s head was a mass of uncooled lava held together by a soft yellow hat. Stony, someone with long hair about thirty years old—Karl liked to establish a person’s numbers in case this would make up for the not-knowing of which he seemed to possess a greater amount than most—led him by the hand from one room to the next. They were two men holding hands at a loud party in a messy house, Stony’s hand large and dry and strong, palm somehow curved away from Karl’s and representing knowledge about Stony Karl would never have. They arrived at a sturdy metal vat of beers. “Have one.”

“Can’t.”

“Why?”

“My head.”

“Mine.” Stony pointed at his: his long and thick and gently wavy chestnut hair, of which far more care had been taken than of this house, hung partway down his white long-sleeved button-down shirt, which he wore untucked, and which was more than just a normal business shirt, who knew how? To his face there was a lined handsomeness almost on a par, though it creeped him out to think of it, with the smooth loveliness of that of Vetch.

Karl drank beer from a brown bottle in a room he understood by its rotting-broccoli smell to be the kitchen, with a grimy and sticky linoleum floor that people his age with more talent for nesting—Karl had been to their homes—would have spent days pulling up to reveal the valuable old hardwood floor beneath. Tipping the bottle and his poor enormous head back, he leaned against a counter’s edge and found a horizontal line of unknown wet transferred to the back of his cotton chino pants just below the lonely belt loops. He was comforted by the rank dishevelment of the house, but not by the ugly unimaginativeness of his own clothes as he now abruptly perceived them in contrast to those of Stony, though he did enjoy his own yellow hat. Dance music to be known by the masses a few months hence came softly from another room.

“Has he tried the goulash?” That was Arv, he thought (twenty-eight), who had appeared along with Jen. Sylvia Vetch was gone.

“Don’t give him the goulash, give him the
dentice
,” Stony said, “which I adapted from a recipe by Nigella Mantovani, though mine is more authentic because I understand the pared-down purity of true southern Italian cooking. You have to start with excellent ingredients of an extreme freshness.”

“The
dentice
! Oh, the
dentice
!” said Arv, whose haircut and clothes, like Karl’s, were wrong for the room, and whose face was like putty with air holes, but Arv came on strong now with his impression of an Italian accent—of a whole Italian person, fingers bunched and moving rhythmically beneath his chin, loving the
dentice.
“Is-a so fresh, the fish, she is-a caught this-a morning in-a the river behind-a my grandafadda his-a house. He caught-a with-a his-a own-a hand-a. No sauce. No oil. No pan. In-a Milano they put-a the sauce is-a stupid-a sauce a rich-a man he make-a the sauce. No. My grandafadda he no shit-a on-a the
dentice
widda sauce.
Mangia.
”

Arv was sweating, his shoulders hunched. Stony had a relaxed posture and elongated neck. He didn’t do accents and didn’t need to. He stood still in composed silence and said with only the contraction of a few eye muscles that he took the mockery as a form of violence he would feel justified in responding to with his own far more severe violence, one memorable enough to dissuade Arv or anyone from mocking him ever again.

And somehow Karl ate a whole fish that was bland and contained an odd, bitter nonfish taste he knew would cause him trouble of an unusual kind.

He swooned. He didn’t know he’d swooned. “Someone had blundered,” someone said, either inside of Karl or not inside of him.

“Let’s take a tour of the house.” Arv had him by one arm and Stony painfully by the other, evidently Vetch surrogates, the former hairy, the latter smooth. Where was Vetch? She had abandoned him. His goose was cooked. “This is this room,” Stony said, back in a room Karl had passed through on his way to the beer an hour ago or more—seventy-five minutes, approximately, or ninety. Three long, faded floral couches, cushions lastingly depressed, stood side by side by side against a wood-paneled wall like the wall Karl had at “home.” People Karl’s age sat on them, stood on them, bounced on them, lay on them, one’s head on another’s leg. The music was louder now. Other people, also mostly young, danced or stood on the room’s patchwork of soggy, ancient, indoor-outdoor carpeting. “And this is
this
room,” Arv said as they all three stepped down into a slightly sunken octagon with a parquet floor whose design they said was a secret sign. “Don’t touch the candle on the floor in the center of the star.” This room was speckled with people, sitting with drinks or laughing faceup on the floor. One of them was almost her but turned out not to be at the last second. Karl’s—“Karl’s”—TV was in there too, on a shelf on a wall at the height of his eyes. Stony, Arv, and Karl were on the TV, the backs of their heads were, as seen from above. Karl turned to see the camera above and behind him, didn’t, and turned back to see the back of his head, turning back. “Someone had blundered,” someone said again, not Stony, not Arv, and Karl looked around for Stony’s eyes. He was dizzy thanks to fish, fists, Vetch, her men—he thought of them as hers—her party, its music, its crowd and their smells, the expressionistic dilapidation of the house. Stony’s eyes found Karl’s, on the way up the two steps out of the octagonal room. The left side of Karl’s left eye still registered the dull and pulsing glow of his own TV at the moment he became aware that Stony’s eyes now held his own more forcefully than his hand had been holding Karl’s arm a moment before. His face, up close and still, was not as uniformly tan as it had seemed in motion and at a remove. He was older than Karl had thought. The creases in his face and shifts in hue seemed not to be accidental but crafted by Stony, confirming a remark Karl had heard that at a certain age a man had to take charge of his own face. Arv was funny, voluble, and loud, but Stony in his quietude shone with an aggressive personal luster, and now, without touching Karl, assaulted him. Karl was looking too, but Stony was looking more. Stony used not just his eyes but his nostrils, mouth, and pores to look into Karl. Who was Stony? How could he do this? God should not have put the face on the human body where He did; it would have been more useful, less in danger of violation if placed elsewhere, in many locations, perhaps. The face’s parts should not all have been bunched in one spot but dispersed: the mounting of so many crucial sense organs nearly on top of one another made the face the lone cosmopolis in the body’s attenuated nation of volcanoes, deserts, and small farms. The conversation of the pairs of eyes went on, but Stony’s eyes wouldn’t let Karl’s eyes talk. Stony’s filibustered, shouted their interrogation. Karl was more disheartened by what Stony’s eyes were doing to his soul than by what his students’ fists had done to his face. He knew the particular way that this vigorously not-nice man was looking at him had to be connected to the reason the man’s beautiful friend had materialized in his house that afternoon.

And then he didn’t know anything, including where he was, geographically or otherwise, nor could he calculate the angle of his body to the earth. “Someone had blundered,” and she was upon him, but not in
that
way. More in a health care way, mental health care, but straddling him in mental health care, riding him in emergency mental health care, concerned, rhythmic resuscitation in rose-colored T-shirt and rolled-up jeans, on a forest path perhaps, with light, soft sticks beneath and a latticework of leaves above, black against the purple sky, and others nearby, in pairs, and similar in form: one down, the other up; one sick, the other not; one extracting promises the other could not keep.