Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events (12 page)

L
ugo drives and drives until it feels like exercise. After talking to a young woman in a booth at the mall, a woman who sold him perfume by rubbing different kinds on each wrist, asking in a woodwind voice, “So you like? They're imposters, based on designer perfumes. Can't smell the difference, right?” tilting her face close to his, and Lugo smelling something besides perfume, sweet, invigorating mall smell, after buying two bottles of perfume and telling the young woman before she handed over the receipt, “You have a great voice,” and her saying thanks, and him saying, “I mean, it's studio quality,” and her saying yes, tearing the receipt from the register, and him, “How old are you?” and her, unblinking, hardening her jaw, “Off you go now. Enjoy your perfumes,” after walking out past the playground, driving around, reenacting the exchange in his mind, remembering it away, Lugo finds himself in a bar. It's one of those places with news clippings and snapshots of patrons covering the walls.

“It's too beautiful to be outside today,” the bartender says, pouring his drink. She's the owner's wife, an older, saturnine woman whose name Lugo can never recall.

“I can only stay for one today. I have my daughter for the weekend.”

The bartender drops a cardboard coaster in front of him, sets his drink atop it. “You remember Shandra, our youngest?”

“Your daughter,” he says.

“Yep. We've been at it all week. Turns out last Tuesday she went and had both nipples pierced. You believe that? A stranger did it. She's nineteen, but goddamn. I said to her, ‘Now why would you volunteer for that?' She says, ‘A bunch of reasons.' And I say, ‘One. Give me one good reason.' And she says, ‘For increased pleasure, Mom.' For increased pleasure. Like she's reading it off a box.”

Lugo studies the ice cubes, dissolving cavities of light, floating in his drink. “My daughter's at a birthday party.”

“You could see the studs through her shirt. That's how I knew. But once they're eighteen, isn't much you can do. The cord is cut.”

“Erica's just fourteen,” he says. “I'm helping her with a project for school.”

One drink. Lugo is gifted with willpower when he needs to be, but he rarely needs to be. He sips the drink in slow time—not too slow, he doesn't want the ice to melt—and thinks about Erica. When she was a baby, around the time of her obsession with the Popeyes sign, he, too, became obsessed: with the idea that he would die or go missing before Erica was old enough to remember him. The thought was enough to make his chest palpitate, lying in bed after a half-hour fight with Irene over something he did or failed to do, and he'd often get up to check on Erica. He would lift her out of her crib and sit in the velour glider in the corner and rock himself to sleep to the sound of her sleeping. It would take years for her to begin remembering. Like walking and talking, remembering wasn't something you were born knowing how to do.

“She's nineteen,” the owner's wife says to a woman down the bar from Lugo, “but goddamn.”

He takes a final sip, stands up, and starts to transition himself, mentally, home. Not to his new old apartment, he can't go there, but to his old old house, where Erica and Irene live. He needs to go there. Leaving the bar, turning the key in the ignition, driving five miles per hour below the speed limit, he tries to project casual concern. The last time he surprised Irene at home, it did not go well. She was entertaining a big group of friends, artists, some of whom Lugo had known, and she'd reluctantly invited him in and . . . it did not go well.

“We should really talk more often,” he says to himself as he drives. It's a beautiful day. A few cloud wisps in an otherwise clear sky make the sky look clearer. “I think we can do better with Erica.” No, too imperative. “What does Erica want for Christmas?” Close. “Is there anything Erica needs?” Closer.

D
uring the winter Erica learned to walk, he brought her to the indoor playground at the mall. They went early, before the stores open, when it was just Lugo, Erica, and the mall-walkers swinging both arms in exaggerated crisscrosses to increase their heart rate.
Right behind you
, they would say, when approaching from behind. They said it in a singsong, drawing out the third syllable, to make it seem less repetitive.

This was before he met the woman who came to the playground with her nephew. The nephew was staying with her because his house was being tented and fumigated for termites. That morning she'd driven him by the house to look at the tent, she said, but the boy couldn't see it. Literally could not see it. “It's as if the tent's not there,” she said. This was when Lugo knew she was lonely.

Erica was a happy baby, predictable, easy. When she didn't like what was going on, she cried. When she did, she laughed. What she liked and didn't like always made sense to Lugo.

One year, he called Popeyes corporate headquarters in Atlanta and told the customer-service woman how he and his daughter had to take the long way home from preschool so they could drive past the sign. He wanted a miniature replica of it to give to her for Christmas, but the woman said they didn't make them. Instead she sent a poster of an awestruck fat man biting into a piece of thigh meat. Beneath him, it said, “Love that chicken from Popeyes!”

By Christmas, Erica no longer cared about the sign. He drove past it a half-dozen times. “It's your sign,” he would say. She wouldn't even look at it! Maybe, he thought, she was just tired of that
particular
Popeyes sign. He drove across town to a different Popeyes, stopped in front of the sign, but she remained unmoved. What was the matter with her?

“It's your
sign
,” he said. He unbuckled her from her car seat and brought her into the parking lot. “Look, there, just look at it.”

He lifted her chin a little too roughly and she began crying. He tried to console her. “It's okay,” he said. “We'll just have to find you something new to like.”

Driving home that afternoon, he felt terrible. He knew he'd meet every phase she went through—and what did he suppose her fixation on the sign was but a phase, temporary, brief, dear—with this kind of stubbornness. Better to go out of his way to avoid the sign, better to stop keeping track.

A
t the window of the studio, behind the house, Lugo watches Irene edge a thin metal rib along a piece of greenware. Her back is to him. Her hair looks shorter than it did earlier in the day and her apron is tied in a neat bow at her back, so neat that he imagines someone helped her with it, someone careful. She shapes the corners of the pot, then crouches forward to level her gaze. She'll go on shaping it for hours before glazing it and firing it in the kiln. Next to her sits a metal caddy with four unfired pots on it. They're the color of dry chocolate, box-shaped with contoured edges, large enough to accommodate the cremains of an adult human. The thought of ending up inside a piece of Irene's pottery makes Lugo's ears perspire.

He remembers Irene, four months pregnant, ruddy and self-contained, in a state of heightened appreciativeness. Cleaning the house room by room, throwing away anything, she said, that didn't make her happy. She went on long walks by herself. She came home with her pockets full of acorns, seedpods, nutshells, leaves, all sorts of tree trash, which she would arrange artfully on their bookshelves, along the mantel. When he asked why they were there, she said, “Because they're beautiful.”

He knocks on the door. She doesn't look surprised, much less pleasantly surprised, when she opens it. Her chin is streaked with slip clay. She chews on what must be a tiny piece of gum: Lugo discerns it only because he knows she can't work without it.

“Where's Erica?” she says.

He explains that he dropped her off at Adrienne's party, then went Christmas shopping at the mall where he bought a nice selection of perfume. “Do you have a minute?”

“No,” she says, standing in the doorway. “I'm working. I have thirty orders to meet in the next two weeks. Why are you here?”

“I'm here to help,” he says confidently. “With Erica.” And he thinks: Perfect. Perfect in its timing and execution. Casual yet direct. Poised, concerned.

“You look half-cocked,” she says. “You haven't shaved. You smell like a bar. You're wearing pajama bottoms.”

“These?” Lugo fights the urge to look down. He watches Irene's cheeks pucker almost imperceptibly around the tiny piece of gum. “These are sweatpants, never worn these to bed. Plus I'm not even close to drunk. I haven't had a drop of scotch at all today, so.” He looks down at his sweatpants—it's clear to him they're sweatpants. “Sweatpants,” he repeats.

“Listen.” She steps back but not away from the door. “Every time we talk about Erica, it turns into a fight. I don't want to fight anymore. Erica's fine when she's with me. I can't imagine it's all that different with you.”

“She's becoming so”—Lugo looks past her inside the studio—“serious.” He's searching for the rejects on their caddy, the pots she used to let him dispose of. “At least let me see what you've been working on.”

“No.”

How easily she dispenses that word! As if she's answering a mail-in survey about a minor appliance. Were you satisfied with our product?

The phone rings in the back of the studio. “That's the phone,” she says.

“I know what a phone sounds like,” Lugo says.

Irene leaves the door open while she answers it, so Lugo steps inside. “Yes,” he hears her say. By her tone, instantly, unguardedly solicitous, he knows she's talking to Erica. “That's because he's standing right here.” Next to the worktable are stacked four sturdy-looking green cardboard boxes with typed labels: last name comma first name. When the pots are finished, she'll pour in the contents of the boxes, seal the pots, and send them off. “Of course you're not in trouble,” Irene says. Next to the green boxes is the caddy that holds the pots to be discarded, alongside the hammer with the antler handle. What's wrong with them? He lifts one of the pots from it, turns it over to see his last name, which Irene kept after they divorced—she'd already, in her words,
established herself
with it—etched on the bottom. He loves seeing it there. “I'll come do it myself,” she says to Erica.

Lugo is studying a serrated scraper when she returns. “If we enjoy her childhood more,” he says, “she will, too. We can't forget that.”

Irene unties her apron and balls it up. “Erica's been trying to reach you for a half hour. I'm picking her up and bringing her home.”

“No,” Lugo says. “No, I'm going. She's mine this weekend.”

“Just so you know.” Irene tosses her apron onto the counter. “Erica didn't want to stay with you this weekend. She says your apartment's filthy. That you drink too much and say random things and don't take care of yourself. I made her go.”

“You made her go to my house,” he says. “For her own good.”

“The thing
you
shouldn't forget is that it won't be long until I can't make her go anymore.”

“All I know,” he says, hesitating, steadying himself on the caddy, knocking one of the taller pots onto its side. It doesn't break, or if it does, it isn't audible. “Is that I'm doing everything I can.”

This is not what Lugo wanted to say. It isn't true or germane, and now Irene is looking at him with undisguised pity. Sort of a smile stuck through with wires. He hates it when she employs his rhetorical patterns, uses them against him. All I know, he wanted to say, followed by some singular insight, something that only he could know.

“I'm going,” she says. “Get home. We'll hash things out later in the week.”

She slopes around Lugo. He wants to switch to slow time but it's impossible with Irene. She has already started the car. She's backing out, she's miles away, she's gone. It has always been impossible.

He looks around the studio at all the artful disorder. In the back, over the slip machine, like a tub with an outboard motor, she has glued shards of old pots to the wall. He wants to pick up the pot to which she was so attentive before, so carefully shaping, and let it drop to the ground. No, this is exactly what she wants him to do. It's why she left him alone in the studio. She wants him fully unhinged. Which is probably why she told him what Erica said. She wants him hopeless.

He won't break the pot she was working on, but he can at least push the dolly into the backyard and break up the reject pots. There are three of them. Identically shaped but finished with different glazes—brown, violet, green. The special hammer is right next to them, which is how he knows they're the rejects. He pushes the dolly carefully between rows of bamboo he planted years ago, along the footpath he cut, into a clearing he made . . .

The first pot he lifts and drops. It falls with a
crunk
, breaks into four or five large pieces. Unsatisfying. The next pot he decides to break by tapping the ball peen against the side, softly, then harder, a little harder, like cracking an egg. He does this to two sides before the pot collapses into shards.

The last pot is heavier and glazed violet with a coral bead attached to the top. He lowers it to the ground and looks at it. He remembers the man in Illinois who mailed himself to freedom. If he told Erica about it on the way to the party, she would've probably thought
random random random
, but it wasn't random. It was . . . what was it?

It was integral.

This pot he wants to break with a single righteous blow of the hammer. He sets it on the ground, lifts the hammer, and strikes it once, hard. The force collapses the pot and produces a cloud of what looks like smoke, but which Lugo can see, after the cloud thins, is ash. Ash and tiny fragments of bone, which spill out onto the grass. He looks at the mess and at the hammer. He can't breathe for a long time. His first impulse is to run away, his second is to cry, but he can't do either. He can only stare at the pile for a little longer and then gather the cremains with his hands and try to sift them back into the smashed pot. Fruitless, of course, yet he tries anyway. The ashes are filled with sharp, spur-like pieces, shards of pot, shards of bone. They nip at his fingers as he drags them back and forth along the grass.