John Henry Days (19 page)

The mothball’s surface is too pocked and imperfect to roll away.

Rarely in his recent memory has he been as happy as when he unpacked his clothes. In any drawer he pleased. He had saved this task (extra-special treat) for after the banquet. In the top drawer Alphonse delicately placed his underwear and socks, in the second his shirts, and in the last his pants. One, two, three. Every item of clothing level in his palm as if he were handling packages of moody nitroglycerine. In the ledge above the sink he placed his travel kit just so. Eleanor was not there to stop or move his placements and each time his hand departed one of his possessions he felt a blush of freedom. A bona fide sensation.

Putting clothes in any old drawer feels like a political act because recently in the Miggses’ household, 1244 Violet Lane, there has unfolded a cold war over spaces. It happens in every household of course, someone picks out a favorite chair or side of the couch; over time someone comes to a choice, or all at once—on the first day the new chair arrives in the house and is claimed. In Alphonse’s home the usual pattern of domestic boundary erection has attained the aspect of warfare, with the attendant gamesmanship of posturing, deployment, arcane strategy. Not to mention hurt feelings on both sides.

Alphonse and Eleanor married for all the usual reasons: fear of death, fear of being alone, the compulsion to repeat the mistakes and debacles of their parents’ marriage. It was a small ceremony; Eleanor’s six-year-old niece caught the bouquet, leading to jokes at the expense of Eleanor’s unmarried
older sister, whom everybody pretended was not a lesbian. On the honeymoon cruise they made brief love several times, with the lights on for the first time ever, as there was no one who could see them except whatever beings lived in the darkness outside the porthole. Eventually they bought a home.

The prefabricated house at 1244 Violet Lane came equipped in its natural state with nooks and cubbies. These were areas in rooms that would offend the eye if not occupied by a thing or object. That corner in the living room. That somehow frightening blank spot in the foyer. The mantel, with its unbroken plane that spoke of manifest destiny. These were areas that needed to be filled or else something else might roost there that was unwanted, a negative feeling or perception. A great flood of refugees from knickknackland set up lean-tos where appropriate, dispossessed tchotchkes earned citizenship. Artificial flowers insinuated into the small nook between the bay windows in the dining room and doilies accepted their missions with a grim certitude that belied their frilly edges. Alphonse’s second-place trophy from his senior year achievement in the hundred-yard dash posed in the foyer on a three-legged table whose radius forbid objects larger than single-flower vases or small pictures, perfect for the submajestic dimensions of the die-cast second-place trophy. Whether the architects of the house placed these nooks out of a farsighted sense of need or mere perversity is beyond telling, but Alphonse and Eleanor passed the test with flying colors and swiftly the house looked lived in. Together they chose where things went.

A routine of married life settled in. For the first couple of years Alphonse spent an inordinate amount of time looking at his hands. Lifelines and their mysteries crisscrossed and terminated in his palms. His cuticles obtained nicks and imperfections that healed over time and he observed the process. Alphonse tried to read something there, a clue or two. He took this preoccupation as a symptom of incompleteness, despite what surface appearances told him. He had a good job, for example; middle management was only a better tie away. Around him the house was in great shape, as they outgrew the wisdom of the home decorating magazines. Sometimes they entertained other married couples of their acquaintance for dinner to discuss the issues of the day. But still. Then one afternoon, in his doctor’s office as he waited for his annual physical, Alphonse discovered an article about hobbies. It caught his eye. The article elaborated about a psychological need common to most folks, a hole that needs filling. Stamp collecting, the article suggested, was a wholesome interest amenable to the beginner but equally rewarding for the seasoned collector. He showed the article to Eleanor, who nodded, and he
sent away for a starter kit from one of the philately companies recommended in the article.

The basement proved perfect for this new interest. The basement was great for storage and one day would make a fine barracks for the washer and dryer, but in the early period of their marriage served only as the home of the fuse box, oft-worshiped during hurricane season. Then the stamps arrived. He scraped a table down the stairs, untangled an extension cord to power the lamp and created a space for himself not far from the water heater. Above him spiders wove secretions into traps amid a maze of bent copper tubing. The basement became a place that was completely his, different from the communal nooks and cabinets and drawers upstairs, the spaces that testified to their shared effort to make a home together. They agreed where to put the vase, the porcelain unicorn, together they ratified the placement of the wedding picture, but the basement was his. An inequity blossomed. It was a full third of the house’s cubic space and he had claimed it. It was a place to masturbate and think about the world and mount his stamps, glory over his collection of railroad stamps.

Stamps like to be touched in a certain way. Soak them until they are wet to separate them from envelopes, and when they are wet enough they have to be handled just so. With tongs. It is his hobby. And so it went on for years. She never went down there. And then Eleanor retaliated. It took years but it happened.

With Eleanor lately there has been this flurry of clubs. It is almost as if he looked up one day and she’d gone through the Yellow Pages or ripped off every contact number from every flyer in every laundromat in town. Or maybe one club leads to another club, a pyramid scheme of interest and hobby. She makes one friend and the friend is a clue to another friend in another club. “It’s just something to pass the time,” she says when he asks her to explain the newest prop in her repertoire, the next alien thing she has brought into the house, bylaws or instructional literature. When she says this she is returning his stamp excuse to him and it is not lost on either party.

She is on the steering committee of two maybe three charities now. The book club. Every month there’s another discounted hardcover from the local big chain. He’s never heard of the books before he takes them into his hands and reads the dust covers. They seem to be about women overcoming, or women suffering, and then there is a little note of triumph at the end. Eleanor affects a note of irritation whenever he asks a simple question about the books. Sometimes he’ll be reading a philately magazine and will look up to
see Eleanor squinting at him over the hardcover edge as if he lives in its pages. It seems the only time she cooks nowadays is to test out the storage capabilities of her latest acquisition from her plastics club. In this club the membership requirements are that you like to get together to trade plastic food storage devices. He opens the door after a long, a too long, day at work, to a smell fit for the kitchen of a really fancy restaurant, one they might visit on a special occasion, if they still celebrated their anniversary for example. But there will be nothing on the dining room table except the honed gleam of the wood polish. In the kitchen the grand repast is already interred in her plastic containers, in flat lozenges, in sleek cylinders, in deep rectangles with rounded corners. Half a liter, liter and two liter and in between. The tops are available in many different colors, everything stacks inside everything else conveniently. The plastic is opaque and he can barely make out the contents. He’ll tilt one and watch a brown liquid collect in the bottom corner. Eleanor will be in the living room with a book while he inspects container after container. The things in the plastic containers are not leftovers in the strict sense for they have been prepared specifically for storage. She throws them out the next day in preparation for the next configuration of containers. Sometimes he’ll happen into the kitchen during the cleaning ritual. Certain orange globules of grease resist the capabilities of the soft side of the sponge and force her to turn it over to the abrasive side. Then the plastic becomes clean.

The storage devices necessitated her membership in a recipe club so she could have novel foodstuffs with which to fill her containers, which in turn required the purchase of cookbooks. Exotic recipes from foreign lands necessitated the purchase of rare herbs, ingredients that would never be used again yet required still more storage. His cereal was exiled to a not as convenient cabinet, displaced by carmine dust (for color) and lime green relishes (for tangy aftertaste). He went downstairs one day and noticed his World War II spy novels, all twenty years’ worth, in boxes on the floor of the basement; their homelands upstairs had been invaded by cookbooks. His racing trophy was on the floor next to them; it had been displaced by a group photograph of the steering committee of the Clothes for Orphans fund-raising dinner. He has no idea where things he might need are stored these days. Scissors, duct tape, the menus of establishments that deliver food, they have been replaced by Eleanor’s diverse materials and cannot be found. How could he not see it as revenge for the basement?

Perhaps they had had a decent conversation lately but about what he doesn’t know.

Perhaps he’d feel better if she had bruises on the inside of her thighs or worked late at the office or constantly returned to him thin excuses, but instead it’s these clubs. As a gesture—no, it was more than that it was an attempt at de-escalation—he said she could use his computer down in the basement, but Eleanor was adamant about getting her own. Instead she took him up on his other offer, made a decade and a half before, to use the guest room as her office, and in there she made a clubhouse for her clubs. Her new computer makes invitations and bulletins and flyers a snap. The new word processing programs make everyone into a desktop publisher. Slowly she mastered fonts. They had not used the pullout sofa in the guest room for years; she moved a desk in its place, and one of her club friends helped her move the sofa downstairs one afternoon. Now Alphonse sleeps there nights. They had long before grown bored with each other’s bodies and laid off the sex thing. Some nights he comes out only for food.

The drawers in room 12 are uncontested and his.

He can hear periodic laughter from one of the rooms down the row. Probably those journalists. They have their fun and he has his. For about an hour now he has been staring at the mothball. The small moon on the bedside table. From a few feet away it looks smooth but the more he looks at it the more the imperfections become apparent. His eyes dip between granules and go as far into the thing as they can, then clamber on to the next ridge. He has decided to make the thing into his lucky charm. Certainly there is a reason he chose that suit as his last suit, and a reason the mothball decided to come along.

This night he saved a man’s life. He was the first to recognize the symptoms of choking, drilled into him by years of staring at the walls of restaurants as he ate by himself, with his paper already read and still half a plate of his greasy meal left on the plate. At such moments there is little to read except choking prevention signs and the wretched faces of his fellow diners. Alphonse was the first to notice that the black man was choking. Two years earlier he saved the life of a woman at The Chew Shack when she indulged too enthusiastically in a plate of all-you-can-eat shrimp. He knew what to do. But he found himself staring at the black man. It seemed as if every feature of the man’s face, as it was manipulated and contorted by suffocation, became discrete and separate from the rest. His bowed left eyebrow one object, his twitching right nostril part of something else. Each of these things could be collected and put in a separate mount on its own page in one of his stamp volumes. A special edition series. In its special place on a basement shelf. It was
only when he realized his indifference to whether the man lived or died that Alphonse jumped up to help. The man didn’t say thanks, but given the excitement, Alphonse didn’t blame him.

He props himself on his elbows, peering down the soft, foreign slope of his body, fixating on his knees and the slack skin congealed into those ugly lumps. Then he finally removes his shoes. The heels of his blue-toed socks are stiff with blood. He bought new shoes for the occasion and they break him in as much as he breaks them in. His heels are raw and torn and tarred with dried blood. He hasn’t felt the pain because all he’s felt since he arrived in Talcott is this feeling of inevitability.

J
lies on his bed in room 27 of the Talcott Motor Lodge, weary and hurting, the whitecaps of the untamed mattress cresting and dropping below his body, and he tries to get his shit together. He has a few more minutes to go before he tests his throat again. So far so good. Did he almost die? And with a piece due, even. He figures he’ll write the piece in the airport on Sunday and email it to the editor at the website. A bloodless edit will follow, emails lob back and forth, and one day an electronic burp with his byline will float up into the web morass, a little bubble of content he will never see. Fart in a bathtub. The new innovation of the internet, its expansion of the already deep abstraction of his job, appeals to him. He files and a check arrives. He mails in receipts paperclipped to an expense form and a reimbursement arrives. It’s always tricky with a startup. They might hold his expense form up to the light and question every line or be totally scattered and push his paper through without a glance. J. always leans to the side of discretion and doesn’t pad too much on his first assignment for a venue; best to earn trust and abuse it later.

He gets assignments. He is a successful freelancer.

His thoughts touch on his proposal, he prowls his tideline and nudges that dried jellyfish thing with his toe. A book agent called him up last year, after a big article of his ran in one of the music magazines, a gonzoish account of a weekend spent in Compton with a troupe of notorious gangsta rappers. No journalist wanted to talk to them after an incident where they sent a writer to the hospital for nibbling without permission at some of the band’s chicken in their dressing room. The magazine called J. up and he said sure, he’d spend a weekend with them if someone was picking up the tab. Knowing that there was always someone picking up the tab. The weekend was uneventful—the rappers had a new album coming out, and older and more practical, and understanding the brief half-life of a pop act, they needed their friends in the media—but gussied up with teen slang, a little reefer scent dabbed here and there and a nice set piece where a hanger-on gave J. a tour
of his gun collection, the piece pimprolled with street cred. It made the editors hard and went over big with the well-bred suburban white boys who made up the magazine’s readership and bought the group’s records, J.’s authentic details providing material for their performances before the bathroom mirror, and a book agent who had staked out hip turf called him to ask if he had any book ideas. J. thought for a moment and mentioned one or two things that he’d been mulling over, and the agent said, that’s all well and good, but how about something about rap music? J. circled around the idea. He admitted that he had wanted to write a social history of hip-hop at one point, when he was younger. The agent offered some words of encouragement, pray elucidate. They spoke for a few more minutes and J. agreed to put some of it down on paper. The music of his teenage years. Interview Kool Herc, visit the old Bronx basketball courts where the DJ pioneer threw his jams in the late seventies, armed with his famous monster sound system, his cobbled-together and gaffer’s-taped sound system; J.’d lean on the chain-link fence and wonder what it would have been like to be at ground zero. The majesty of a playground or ball court seen through a chain-link fence, a world cut by diamond wire. The start of something. This had been his idea when he was younger. The agent called a few months later to check his progress and asked, what about gangsta culture, he wanted something more of what J. had put in that article he had seen. The violent subculture of men who lived like outlaws. J. said he’d write a proposal; maybe he could work it out. He made notes, or notes to himself to make notes. He was gestating, he told himself. He gestated for months before he understood that he is too old now. Both he and the music are too jaded. They grew up together and are too old to pretend that there is anything but publicity.