Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events (11 page)

“Don't worry about a thing, Maxim.”

“No. No, I won't worry,” he said. How to phrase it? He had a tendency when he was nervous to retreat to the bluntest possibilities. It was a way of getting it over with quickly. He breathed, he waited for the right words to come. He said, “If you'd just be with me for a little while, I could force myself to get the old crown. I don't need the new crown. The old one's fine.”

The right side of Paula's face twitched almost imperceptibly. “Be with you how so?”

“The usual way. Or however you want. Or I don't know.”

Paula breathed deeply. “Oh. Wow. Well, gosh. Okay. Let's see. Right. That's the thing about freedom, Maxim. It can be somewhat . . . sad. Like how you just exercised your freedom to ask me to be with you? Now I have to exercise mine to say no way, but thanks. Really.”

She rebuffed him congenially, brought him to the surface in stages like a scuba diver. She continued saying his name, but with less and less resonance. He started to notice things like that her gums, when she smiled, densely glistened like boiled ham. Also her face was too skinny. And her eyes were so blue they brought to mind toilet cleaner. Her tongue, where was her tongue? Oh, there it was. Yes, her tongue was actually still quite nice. He traced his own tongue along the inside of his mouth, reenacting hers, stopping on the hewn molar.

“I know what I have to do,” he said. He thanked her. He even touched his hand to her hair, which was, as he had suspected, supernaturally soft. “It's a perfectly good crown.”

These were the words with the strongest aftertaste. If they weren't heroic, they were at least—no, they were definitely heroic. He savored them after Paula left. He let himself savor the thought, however delusional, of her savoring them.

This was how Paula said good-bye:
Bye now.

M
axim knew what he had to do, and he did it the following day. He borrowed a pair of yellow latex gloves and a sauerkraut bucket from Poland, which he toted through the park, trailed by catcalls and whistles from his fellow employees: “It's time! It's time!” In his room, he ate the recommended dose of a chocolate laxative bar, then sat on the bucket. It was as uncomfortable as he expected it would be. He tried not to envision how he would get the crown but was unable to restrain himself. In the past, when he swallowed something, it was gone, but now he involuntarily retraced the crown's journey, all the way to a permanent anchorage in his mouth. This, he considered, was why we voided solid waste from behind, so we didn't have to consider it afterward. So we could
leave
it behind.

Our bodies were explicable. They made sense when you considered them. How our faces made crude maps of what we were thinking. How our internal lives kept pushing their way to the surface.

Maxim stared at his wall, blank except for a horror movie poster left by the previous tenant. He could hear his neighbors' televisions: Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Portuguese, English. Together the televisions made a sound like the brown smear of overmixed paints. He closed his eyes and concentrated on pulling out a single language. But they were all mixed up, indecipherable.

What did he need with freedom? Having a choice only meant he was going to make the wrong choice. Like on his first birthday, when his mother held out a string, a ruble note, and a crumpled napkin, and he was supposed to select one, which would portend his future. He selected the napkin. “Ah,” he now imagined his mother saying. “This means you are going to sell bells for a living. And that you'll be a nuisance to the women you want. Oh, and also one day you'll find yourself on a sauerkraut bucket, waiting for a laxative to take effect so you can extract a crown from your own feces. Happy birthday, baby Maxim.”

Freedom was for the Paulas of the world. Lithe acrobats on invisible trapezes tumbling above a safety net. Maxims were better equipped for choke chains and limitation, following orders. Stand here, stay still, be thankful. Rarely had Maxim felt so liberated as when he told Paula that it was a perfectly good crown. And it was. The dentist probably had all sorts of exceptional disinfectants to clean it, sterilize it, return it to new—better than new. Maybe the disinfectants came in a choice of flavors, like mouthwash. He would choose . . . no, he'd let the dentist choose.

He felt a surge in his lower torso. All the hope and toil, all the choices made and unmade had led him here, to this state of perfect choicelessness.

In the center of his room was a slatted drain, and gazing into it he could feel gravity trying to pull him toward the drain, down, down through the pipe to the center of the earth. Trying to swallow and absorb him for nutrients. First his skin then his tissue then his bones. “Meat,” he sang in time with the clamor of televisions. “Meat meat meat meat meat.”

He burrowed his hands into the yellow gloves. He sang another verse.

lugo in normal time

L
ugo unbidden, Lugo at home in a new pair of sweatpants, holding, circling, waiting for something to happen. Something often happens.

This weekend he has his daughter. He's sipping brandy and following her from room to room while she works on a project for school. A teacher has asked her to find a household item and use it to tell a story, so all morning Erica's been picking things up, studying them carefully, and putting them down. She roots through the boxes in his closet, boxes in the hallway and in the kitchen. She finds a fondue set: a pot with six blue-handled and six red-handled prongs, like equipment for opposing teams. She taps one against the sink. “How about these,” she says.

Lugo regards the derelict prong from the kitchen table. “Never used,” he says. The idea, the hopeful logistics of him and Irene making fondue together seem ridiculous now. He remembers the old lady who sold it to them repeating,
It's so lovely, it's so lovely.
“We bought it at a yard sale before you were born,” he tells Erica. “It's supposed to melt cheese.”

“And you still have it why?”

“I guess it reminds me of your mother,” he says.

Erica is fourteen years old. She has brought a to-do list with her, which she keeps taped to Lugo's refrigerator. This weekend, she must finish two pages of geometry problems, start
Member of the Wedding
, figure out feudalism, and go to a friend's birthday party. Lugo notices
Stay with Dad
written on the list, among her obligations.

Uneasy
, he says, studying the list.

Not easy
is what he means to say. His daughter's not-easiness makes him uneasy.

Earlier that day, when she dropped Erica off, Irene handed him a note. “Remember what we talked about,” it said. “Ease up on the scotch. Distract yourself (and her). Maybe take her to a movie.”

Lugo looks at the newspaper. Searching for the movie listings, he finds an article about a prison escape in Illinois. A prisoner sealed himself in a box with some packing peanuts and shipped himself to freedom. He jumped out of the mail truck and is still at large. At large, Lugo repeats, treasuring the sound of it. Sometimes an expression like this is all it takes. He closes the newspaper, forgets what he was going to do. Then he remembers: he was going to fix himself another drink.

E
rica moves in long, loping strides, scrutinizing, disregarding. This is Lugo's house, his new house. Actually it's an apartment, an old apartment with broth smells and puppy and disinfectant smells in the carpet. The odor of a dozen forfeited security deposits. Most things are still in boxes from his move eight months ago. Extension cords, Halloween appliqués, ornaments, a box of old Louis L'Amour paperbacks whose covers Erica studies, bemused. She opens one of them. “ ‘Death had come quickly and struck hard,' ” she reads, “ ‘leaving the burned wagons, the stripped and naked bodies, unnaturally white beneath the sun.' Wow. Are these yours?”

“They were when I was about your age,” he says. “I was saving them.”

“Not for me, I hope.”

“No,” Lugo says. “No, not for you.”

No, not for her. Not since three seconds ago, four seconds, five. He takes sips from the edge of his drink. It's cold and warm and cold. It is a wading pool and he's just tranquilly wetting his ankles.

In his bedroom, under the bed, she finds shoeboxes of family photographs organized by shape. “Me as a baby. Me in front of a chicken shop,” she says, dialing through them. “Me in front of another chicken shop.”

Lugo bends down and picks up a crushed blue sock, underhands it into the closet.

“You were obsessed with the Popeyes sign,” he reminds her. “Whenever we drove near it you'd chant
popeye popeye
until I pulled over and let you look at the sign. After a while, you'd say
okay
and I'd drive off.”

“I don't remember.”

She also liked street sweepers, bats, kangaroos, the sound of television static . . .

“Bring one of those photos to class with you. You could say, ‘Once upon a time I was in love with the Popeyes sign.' It'd be a great story.”

“You don't know the kids in my class,” she says. “I mean, they'd
annihilate
me if I came in with something like that.” She pushes the shoebox under the bed with her bare foot. Her toenails are painted black with a rim of tan-pink newness at the cuticle. He has asked her what the black polish means and she looked at him as if he had asked what dancing, what the leaf of a tree means. He remembers a song, “I wear Black on the outside 'cause Black is how I feel on the inside.” Maybe that's what it means.

“They wouldn't actually annihilate you,” he says to her.

The note Irene handed him was on the back of a recipe card for twice-baked potatoes. He flipped the card while climbing the stairs of his apartment with Erica and he studied the recipe as he'd studied the note. Irene's messages to him lately weren't as clear as they used to be. They leaked static and forced Lugo to listen too closely to hear anything.

Why write the note on a recipe card? Was she trying to impel him to make twice-baked potatoes? He could certainly try. Erica was sitting on the couch with her bag in her lap as he read through the recipe. All the measurements and ingredients made him tired. You needed fresh dill. And the potatoes had to be baked not once but twice.

“You still haven't unpacked your things yet,” Erica said. “What are you waiting for?”

“I can't get used to this place. A few weeks ago I noticed a huge footprint on the bathroom ceiling. Right in the middle.
How'd it get there?
I think every time I'm on the toilet. It's horrible. I'm going to find a new place.”

Erica organized her homework into discrete piles on the coffee table. “Do you remember anything about feudalism?” she asked.

He nodded slowly. He looked down at the recipe again. “You know,” he said, studying the ingredients, “I'm not even sure I have potatoes.”

A
t the kitchen table, Lugo wraps a gift for Erica's friend. The box is small and light—when he picks it up, it feels like there's nothing inside. This is the only reason he opens the box, to make sure it contains a present. It does: a peso tied through with a string, a necklace.

He wraps the box in slow time. Often, when he's undertaking a task that requires particular care, he switches to slow time. He folds the paper over the box and pulls off a perfectly sized piece of tape. He centers it on the paper, runs his finger over the top of it, making it invisible. He folds down each of the sides, cutting excess paper for maximum symmetry. In slow time, each movement lasts twice as long, but each is twice as efficient, so wrapping the present doesn't take any longer than it would in normal time.

Finished, he looks around for something else to wrap. The fondue set sits on the counter. It looks so stupid. He fixes another brandy, a nod to Irene's request to ease up on the scotch, and he feels suddenly impatient for Christmas. Stringing popcorn and cranberries and mulling wine and all the other things they should have done and never did.

They, he and Irene, treated time like it didn't mean anything, that was the main problem. They forgot how the past moves aside for the present, and the present moves aside for the future, and what that leaves you with is a ceaseless series of transitions. Ceaseless, one after the other, alignment to realignment. It's hard! How do people not drink? Drinking's actually the only thing to do about it. To hem all that jagged edging and make the intolerable tolerable. Now that he and Irene aren't together, he's able to navigate all the transitions he has to.

He brings the fondue set to the table, sets the prongs atop the pewter pot, and measures out wrapping paper. There isn't enough to wrap everything, so he wraps just the prongs, sets them next to the box.

Erica walks into the kitchen holding a clear plastic bag of hair. “This?”

“That,” he says, “is a bag of hair.”

“Whose hair?”

“Your mother's, but we pretended it was yours. So.” Erica turns away, he's boring her. “It's a good story.” She walks into the hall with the hair. It's actually not a good story. “Don't you want to hear the story?”

“I can't bring a bag of hair to school, Dad,” she calls back. “I have to go get ready for Adrienne's.”

“Why can't you bring hair to school? Didn't you just ask me what it was?”

He hears nimble feet scurrying up the carpeted stairs. The door of the spare bedroom shutting lightly.

He sips his brandy, which tastes how smoke and feet smell, agreeably disagreeable. They neglected to collect the hair after Erica's first haircut, so Irene snipped some of her own hair and put it in a bag. Why in the world were they saving hair? Did they think they were Mayans? He and Irene thought memories could be safely housed within souvenirs; that was one of the other main problems.

Irene is a potter. It took her nearly ten years to establish herself, and it happened by accident when a gallery owner asked if she'd be insulted if she, the gallery owner, marketed Irene's box-shaped pots as funeral urns. Soon people from all over the world were mailing her the cremains of their loved ones. She would fire and burnish the pot with leaf patterns, then pour in the cremains and seal it with wire and beads.

She used to let Lugo destroy the pots she wasn't happy with. He'd put on an apron, load the pots onto a dolly, push them into the backyard, and use a hammer with an antler handle to crack them. Few things before or since have been as satisfying. The terra-cotta shattered with a
plink
and Lugo would be left with shards to study before he threw them into a garbage bag. What was wrong with these pots? he wondered. They always looked fine to him. He never asked.

Lugo gargles mouthwash until he can no longer stand it. He waits in fast time for Erica to come downstairs.

D
riving to the party, he searches for something interesting to say. Last night he dreamed he was hiding in a barn from a tornado. Today he read about a man who mailed himself to freedom. He could ask a question, but his questions are too general (How's school? Life? Your mother?) or too needling (What are you thinking about? Why are you so quiet? Do you know you didn't used to be so quiet?). In front of them is a van with a license plate that says
I BREW
, which he points out to Erica. She nods without looking at it.

“I used to brew, you know,” Lugo says. “Back then. When I brewed. You wouldn't remember.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Just testing you. Making sure you're paying attention. You pass.”

Erica opens the glove compartment and closes it. She wears a short dress with a cacophony of letters along the midriff. Her hair is tied into twin braids and pulled back. She looks pretty, older. Stopped at a red light, he asks, “What do you want for Christmas? I think I'll do some shopping while you're at the party.”

“I haven't really thought about it.”

“Well, think about it. I want to get you what you want.”

“Dad, it's March. I have like a billion things to do before Christmas.” She opens the glove compartment again, closes it. “Light's green.”

He drives slowly, stalling for time. He turns on the radio, cycles through the preprogrammed stations. All the songs are love songs. He turns it off.

“I'm gonna go through my things when I get home,” he says. “I'll find something for your class.”

“There's stuff at Mom's I can use. It's no big deal. I was just teasing you about the hair. Don't worry.”

He laughs. He feels strange, as if caught in that brief gap between glimpsing himself in a mirror and recognizing the reflection. “I'm not worried,” he says. “I've got my daughter for the weekend.”

Erica's friend lives on the river in a big Victorian with a widow's walk on the third story. The garage door is open: Lugo can see a tool bench, pegboard walls with neatly arrayed tools. Only some kind of asshole, he thinks, would keep tools so neatly arrayed. He leans over and kisses Erica on the cheek.

“I'll call in a few hours,” she says, unlatching her seat belt. “You'll be home, right?”

“Finding something for your class.”

He watches her walk toward the house, up the stairs. A woman steps out onto the porch and waves to Lugo and Lugo waves back.

W
hat is it about the sight of a woman waving? Lugo can't go home. He can't even think about it. He drives along the riverfront, past houses he, Irene, and Erica used to point out and claim as theirs. On Saturdays they would wake up early and drive this way, looking for yard sales. The riverfront houses had the best yard sales. “How much for all of it?” Lugo would ask, and the homeowners would smile or not smile while he appraised them, waiting longer and longer each time to say he was kidding.

He barely remembers the other woman. He met her at the playground inside the mall where he used to bring Erica on the weekend. The woman was with her nephew. She and Lugo sat on a bench and watched Erica and the boy pretend to be monsters. The woman was an elementary school teacher, lonely, he could tell the minute she started talking. The sort of person who checks out books ten at a time from the library. Her plates at home were plastic, laminated over colorful drawings by her students, “Thanks for the great year, Ms. Something!” Her last name wasn't actually
Something
. Lugo can't remember her last name.

How much for all of it, he'd ask. And when he bought something, he'd ask the person selling it, “What's its story?” Just like Erica this morning. Even if it was just a belt, or an unopened picture frame. He wasn't looking for a story. He wanted them to acknowledge what they were getting rid of, to see it for the last time and perhaps feel a little regret while he handed them seventy-five cents . . .