Ghouljaw and Other Stories (10 page)

Discretion, or rather devoted attempts at discretion, had been part of their pact. It was implicit that no one suspect anything untoward. Once, immediately following the conclusion of class, Wayne, wanting to know a little more about this mysterious little creature who had casually imposed herself as his concubine, followed her to her car. There was no car. Rather, he watched Bridgette slide into the passenger seat of a waiting vehicle. The figure of a young man was positioned behind the wheel. And at that moment Wayne had intentionally made himself visible, confidently ambling across the parking in such a way that he would have to come within pointed proximity of the car on his way to his own.

The car slowed, allowing for Wayne to cut through its headlights. He gave a hearty smile and a wave and a split-instant glance at the black silhouette in the passenger. Of course, the next time they were alone together Bridgette provided an explanation. “I bet you’re curious about who I got in the car with the other night, huh?”

After a moment of feigning recollection, Wayne shrugged.
The curiosity, my dear, has driven me to the point of distraction
. “No, not really.”

“That was Doug. A friend of mine. My car’s at the mechanic’s and he gave me a ride.” Wayne opened his mouth as he prepared to say that it was none of his business when Bridgette, perhaps sensing one last, lingering question, cut Wayne off. “He’s gay, Wayne”—the trace of a comely smile appeared at the corners of her lips—“you have nothing to worry about.”

Bridgette was gleefully indecent, and sex with her, Wayne had convinced himself, was like therapy. (He had difficulty, though, committing himself to whether it was sex with her body or sex with her spirit that provided the anesthetic effects.) Nancy had her methods of coping with their unhappiness—her therapist . . . her cache of meds . . . her close companionship with her bohemian, Ouija-board wielding sister, who had convinced Nancy to begin reading spiritualist books about her “inner path,” stuff (Wayne had gathered) pertaining to meditation, the power of positive thinking, astral projection, and other witch-doctor nonsense. Wayne had no healthy outlet, no companionable release valve, until compromising his steadfast fidelity and acquiescing to Bridgette’s coquettishly aggressive advances.

On some of those nights in Bridgette’s bed, just before climax, Wayne, his face slacked with ecstasy, would savor Bridgette’s body: her slender torso and creamy skin grafted with the razor-slashes of shadow and orange, sodium-vapor light seeping in from the courtyard through the mini-blinds. When she was on top, the black strands of her hair, like rivulets of spilled ink, covered her shoulders and hung between and around her breasts, which rose and fell in an eager-anxious cadence with the rhythm they created.

On one strange occasion, Wayne had drifted into a post-coital drowse and had become overwhelmed with the sensation that his body was levitating, slowly floating up toward the ceiling, away from Bridgette’s bed. Wayne was aware of this unfolding as a sort of semi-lucid prelude to sincere sleep; but he was also paralyzed, unable to move his arms or open his eyes. After a time, Wayne—feeling as though he were trapped in the chapter of one of his sister-in-law’s meditative self-help books—focused on the synaptic command to simply peel open his eyelids and
look
. And so Wayne opened his eyes.

He was still floating, but his back was against the ceiling now, and he was hovering face down above Bridgette’s bed. Two female figures lay on top of the tangled sheets—each with their backs to each other, facing away from one another, each loosely curled on their sides in fetal positions. It was as if a mirror had been placed in the center of the bed, reflecting one of the frail, dark-haired women lying there.
A Rorschach test,
Wayne thought distantly.
Or the top-view of the brain’s corpus callosum
. Yet as identical as the figures appeared, he began to discern that one was older, the splayed hair wired with streaks of gray. Everything in this scene, this half-dream aberration, had been absolutely still, but now, with arresting slowness, one of the figures began to twist her head, rotating her face away from the pillow to stare at Wayne’s form floating above the bed. Of course it was the familiar visage of Nancy; but as Wayne recognized this, his body began descending, Nancy’s portentous expression contained something like devastation mingled with expectation. Her face was painted not by shadow but smudged and smeared with what looked like jaggedly applied war paint. Wayne had seen this sort of mask on the faces of Cherokee shamans. A thin layer of smoke, or perhaps tendrils of incense, appeared, creating a phantom cloud to permeate this slow-motion spectacle. And now Nancy’s body was no longer wrapped in crumpled cotton sheets, but was enveloped in a black bear pelt, the animal’s palate and upper skull capped over Nancy’s head; and as Wayne fell toward her, it was no longer his wife, her face streaked by mystic designs, but simply the open maw of a black bear. The curve-clawed arms sprang toward Wayne as he fell inexorably toward the black cavern of sharp, gleaming teeth.

Dreams,
he had told his students each semester.
Never dramatize dreams
. But this really hadn’t been a dream, had it?
Come now. No
. Some type of hybrid between hallucination and image-muddled musing.

The affair continued into the first few weeks of December, and Wayne had achieved a confident disposition in concealing his liaisons—always meeting Bridgette somewhere far from the familiar thoroughfare of faces, and only on nights after class. Nancy, typically, would already be in bed when Wayne got home, not budging as Wayne slipped into the bedroom, and appearing not to have stirred even after Wayne had showered, washing away the scents of sex.

On the night of his last lecture with Bridgette’s class Wayne, having deemed this a providential coincidence, seized the opportunity of Nancy being out of town—visiting that reclusive, incense-burning sister who lived out by that backward town Colfax—and decided he’d spend the entire night with his kinkily agreeable young lover.

So: the morning after that last class, Wayne woke in Bridgette’s bed, his head throbbing and his tongue residue-soured from some questionable brand of Bordeaux. The phone was ringing. Bridgette twitched awake and clambered for her cell phone. She picked up and made a few monosyllabic responses before clasping the mouthpiece with her hand and saying one last thing and hanging up. “Listen,” she hissed, “you have to get out of here. My friend Doug’s out front.” Wayne hadn’t risked asking too many questions when it came to the possibility of her sleeping with someone else—someone her own age. Even this Doug character. Bridgette’s expression was soberingly unapologetic. “I forgot I told him I’d go to the opening of the Pawnee exhibit up at the museum,” she said. “He’s waiting outside for me to buzz him in.”

Translation:
You are
not
to be seen;
but still he asked, “What do you want me to do?”

Bridgette slid from the bed, partially wrapping herself with the sheet in which she’d been twisted moments before. She crouched and clutched the bundle of Wayne’s clothes. “Just go through the courtyard.” Bridgette flitted her fingers toward the window. “It’ll be easier that way,” she said and flung Wayne’s slacks to him. Still distantly assuming this might be some sort of joke—
escaping through a first-floor window . . . this has to be a
—Wayne had time to slip into his pants and fasten his belt as Bridgette ushered him over to the window.

It had snowed lightly overnight, leaving a feeble layer of dusty accumulation on the trees and sidewalk in the courtyard. Clouds of various gray smudges stretched out above the apartments like a smoke-tattered shroud.

Bridgette yanked up the window and appraised “professor” Webber. Wayne was tempted to lean in for a kiss, but thought better of it; he swung a leg over the sill. He was gathering his faculties to make a joke about how ridiculous he must look, but he lost his balance and tumbled into the shrubs below the window, the wiry cluster of branches raking his bare shoulders and face. As he rolled into the snow-peppered grass Wayne thought he heard Bridgette stifle a giggle. Or maybe it was just a gasp. He got to his feet, cradling his remaining clothes to his chest. He quickly brushed snow and dead leaves from his slacks. Wayne looked up to say goodbye, maybe even taking the risk of investing the sentiment,
I love you
.

Bridgette had already shut the window and dropped the blinds behind it.

In the following days Wayne continued his business at the university—conducting end-of-the-semester meetings, arranging appointments, generally preparing for break. Initially, Wayne dismissed the less flattering aspects of his first-floor retreat and instead envisioned the scene at Bridgette’s apartment with a fair amount of levity—fleeing, he mused, from the ravaged bed of some clandestine lover like a modern-day Casanova.

Wayne spoke with Bridgette on the phone, briefly, after turning in his final grades. She had apologized for the awkward scene at her apartment. Wayne—succumbing to some pathetic possibility that she might instigate another chapter in their relationship—had all but guaranteed a perfect grade for the class.

That had been four months ago.

Bridgette never called again.

Nancy is still massaging Wayne’s head, her slender fingers gently coiling and loosening, flexing sensually. With his eyes still shut and the mercury hue of the TV playing on his face, Wayne allows himself a faint smile. He hopes the tepid spell between him and Nancy is over, and that he can share and return his wife’s attempts at affection (catalyzed by medication or otherwise) as he had so many years ago. He begins to rotate his upper body toward her. Wayne opens his mouth to verbally reciprocate—
I love you too
—but again, Nancy cuts him off and whispers, “I know, darling. You don’t have to say anything—I know.” Wayne’s smile widens. He thinks about new things, about an uncertain but ultimately companionable path together.
This could be our second act
.

Nancy’s fingers, still threaded through Wayne’s hair, suddenly contract and coil—her grip tightening on the crown of his skull. In the periphery of his now bulging, searching eyes, Wayne sees a silver flash as Nancy’s free hand moves over his shoulder, under his jaw, between his ear and the pillow. And gracefully handling the pearl-handled straight razor that Wayne instantly recognizes from its place on the narrow shelf of their mirrored medicine cabinet, Nancy places the chilled, obscenely sharp steel against the strained cords of his throat, and with a single, elegant stroke, slowly slides the blade to the other side.

The nimbostratus moth wings out west

has become the undulating Rorschach test

I’ve expected for months. It’s hard to tell where it all

begins—where that exam ends. I know Fall

like dreamers know the ocean floor

peace and the aquamarine torpor

of the Kraken’s embrace—like the stray dog

seeks the burlap solace in a hollow log

after a morning of fruitless looting. The hound knows:

ear cocked with the hope of a far our howl; nose

to the ground as he crosses the dead-bladed plain

of this frost-peppered property. He returns to the remains

of his hermetic campsite hidden in a wooded nook,

and to the comfort of that aforementioned oak.

Our pup props his jaw upon his paws and joins the dreamers

—drifting off against the green-glow fire made of femurs.

Things began deteriorating after the dog got knocked up. Of course, Lewis only made this association after it was too late. Doing the gestational math—one of the only reliably rational methods that proved useful to Lewis in this particular predicament—the dog had certainly been impregnated on the night he and Maggie had gone sledding on Hatcher Hill.

That had been a Friday night, and on Fridays Lewis Brewster had a routine: finish recording his students’ grades for the week, hustle out of the high school as early as his contract stipulated, take a well-worn shortcut to a nondescript liquor store, and drink a generous portion of the purchase along the narrow backroads on his way home. It was a routine he’d established shortly before his separation from his ex-wife and which was later ratified in the midst of a tidy divorce. But then Maggie came along, and Maggie presented an entirely different sort of routine.

On this frigid Friday in February, Lewis had made it home and was sitting in his recliner, easing into inebriation, reading a book about the Johnstown flood, waiting for Maggie to call.

His cell phone rang just as the sun was declining behind the leafless tangle of tree limbs and the steep-pitched roofs of the nearby houses.

“Put on some warm clothes,” Maggie said. “I’ve got a surprise for you.”

Maggie. Full of surprises. It had been about six months earlier that they’d initiated their difficult-to-define relationship. Following the divorce, Lewis—having gained the judgment that spending too much time alone would only exacerbate his growing talent for slow-paced psychological self-destruction—had acquired the compulsion of remaining in public places, surrounded by the white noise of the vox populi. He had even taken to writing poetry at a coffee shop on the other side of town, solemnly scribbling bitter, disjointed material, the caliber of which he would have frankly criticized had it been composed by one of his own high school students.

He was a stranger in this part of town, though, and found solace in assuming the role of mysterious poet, a sort of poseur Byron—mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Yes, Lewis was mad, but he wasn’t bad, and the only person he was a danger to was himself.

It had been a genuine surprise during one of these self-obsessed writing sessions when someone had casually bopped a fist against his shoulder. Lewis turned to discover one of his former students.