Know Your Beholder: A Novel (16 page)

The closet was closed. Next to the closet, on the floor, a small stuffed bear, brown, faced the corner, as if put there to be shamed. With every angstrom of will that has been genetically assigned to me I had to fight the urge to enter the room and take the bear. I quietly closed the door and returned to the living room.

Mary was still on the phone. After a long silence punctuated by some sniffling, she said good-bye and came back out into the living room, wiping her face.

I asked her if Todd was on his way and she nodded. I told her that as soon as he arrived I’d get to work on replacing their door.

Mary seemed to contract within herself like a sick child. For the first time I wondered how seldom she slept. How she got through each day. How little peace she felt.

She must have smelled the empathy steaming out of my pores because she said perhaps the most improbable five words to me since I’ve known her, which were: “Can I have a hug?”

“Sure,” I heard myself say.

We took a half step toward each other and hugged. She forced her hands under my armpits and inside my bathrobe, where they interlaced between my shoulder blades. For a half second I thought she was going to perform some inverted version of the Heimlich maneuver. But it was an authentic hug and she pulled me tight, burying her head in my midchest region. Mary is a good deal shorter than I am so I rested my chin—or beard, rather—on the crown of her head, which didn’t smell anything like the dandruff shampoo from her shower cubby. It smelled more like gloom. Like the funk of pure sebaceous gloom leaking through the pores of her scalp. A peppery, oily musk.

We clung to each other desperately. The heat from her face radiated through my many layers. I realized I was sort of pulling her into me. Her breasts, which felt surprisingly fuller than they appeared in her clothes, were pressing into my rib cage.

“Thank you,” she said, still buried in my chest.

“You’re welcome,” I almost sighed.

“I’m sorry if I’ve been a bitch.”

“You’re not a bitch,” I said. “You and Todd have obviously been through a lot.”

The hug started to develop chapters. There was some shifting of weight and subtle movements of her hands, which were still interlaced between my shoulder blades. She sighed a little as well. I think our sighs occurred in roughly the same register, which means that mine were likely pretty womanish. She switched cheek positions, offered shallow breaths. A kind of laryngeal bellowing. I bellowed as well.

The hug was verging on novella length. Just when things couldn’t get more bizarre I felt an erection coming on. And I was wearing loose boxer shorts under the plaid flannel pajama bottoms—which were also loose in that semi-pleated MC Hammer genie pants sort of way—so there was no way to prevent detection. We thawed out of our hug as it was about to get visibly embarrassing, and I turned and took a few steps, walking like some wayward, bowlegged Christmas soldier.

Todd Bunch entered through the front door, his face worried and ghostly white. He was wearing full firefighter regalia: the boots, the rubber coat with neon-yellow bands, the helmet, the vulcanized gloves.

“Was there a fire?” I asked, my hands forming a severe steeple in front of my pajama bottoms.

“Simulations,” he said, and embraced Mary, who buried her head in his fireproof shoulder. She was like a dope fiend for hugs.

I stood there and awaited instruction.

Todd made severe eyes at me, but I think he was just generally freaked out. His face was incandescently alive. “I can take it from here,” he said.

“Just knock on my door if you need anything,” I said.

Todd somehow looked like a Fisher-Price fireman. A human-sized figurine with child-safety features.

As I was leaving, guarding my crotch with one hand, I reached down with the other and picked up the brick. “I’m assuming you don’t want to keep this.”

Todd shook his head.

I told them that I’d get to work finding them a new door.

When I got back upstairs, still erect, I slid the brick back into its position on the bookcase, which had been dangerously teetering.

Although at the embarrassingly young age of thirty-six, I am only infrequently visited by the Galloping Magic Cowboy of Natural Erection, once it’s fully achieved, the only way to make it go away is by ejaculating. I thought of Mary Bunch, naked on the trapeze, high in the air, her nipples erect, her body glistening under the circus lights…I thought about taking her from behind, in her circus dressing room, the roar of the crowd and the smell of elephants and clown makeup…

Then I whacked off to great relief.

Before it got too late, I used my Makita drill to screw a piece of spare plywood into the mullions framing the Bunches’ broken window panel. I said good night and repledged my promise of replacing their door.

They were grateful and exhausted.

Just as I was about to ascend the aft staircase, out of the corner of my eye, I saw another snowman. As soon as I spotted it I felt a chill pass through me. The snowman was at the base of the copper beech. The charcoal eyes. The carrot nose. The pink scarf.

My mouth went dry, and there was a strange pulsing in my head. I took a few steps toward it, my nose nearly pressing against the back porch’s cold screen.

“Everything okay, Francis?”

I turned.

Baylor Phebe was standing behind me.

“You look like you just saw a ghost,” he said.

I said hello to him.

He told me he was just going to go get a few things out of his truck. “My phone charger. My Bonnie Raitt CD. Can’t fall asleep without my Bonnie Raitt.”

I said, “Baylor, can you do me a favor?”

“Sure,” he said. “What?”

“Tell me what you see when you look at the tree in the backyard.” I moved aside and he stepped toward the screen and squinted.

“I see a tree,” he said.

“Anything else?”

“Nope, just a big old tree. And a heckuva lotta snow. Why, you got coons or somethin’?”

“No,” I replied, “no coons.”

“’Cause I can certainly help you on that front. I’ve never been known to hesitate when it comes to dispatching a meddling coon.”

I thanked him and he headed out toward his truck. I turned on the floodlight over the garage. From his driver’s side door, Baylor waved appreciatively, but I wasn’t thinking of him.

He was right. At the base of the copper beech there was nothing but snow.

February 25.

It’s been a month since I picked up these pages.

Pollard is still locked in snow, though it’s lost its immaculate gloss and shimmer. The cross-country skiers have gone away and the three neighborhood yards within view of my finial window are now maligned with little carbonized monuments of dogshit. The dogs themselves bark through the night and I’m starting to think they’re trying to tell me something. Perhaps there is some encoded pattern in their leavings, a secret escape map that will lead me out of the upside-down Arctic forest that has taken over my mind.

My bad molar isn’t so much painful as it is just strange getting used to. I’m sure the tooth’s nerve has long lost its purpose and I worry about winding up with a postapocalyptic face once the decay has rotted through my jaw. I’ve called Dr. Hubie three times now to request a home visit but I can’t get past Julie Pepper, who diplomatically deflects the idea with the skill of a world-class badminton champion.

Nearly two months have passed since Bethany Bunch’s disappearance. Recently someone staked a realty sign in the front lawn, only the culprit had painted over the actual firm’s name and in large red horror-movie letters had scrawled the words
BABY KILLERS LIVE HERE
. Baylor Phebe extracted the sign and brought it up to the attic before anyone else in the house could see it.

“Those poor people,” he said of the Bunches.

His kindness verges on the ecclesiastical. I’m starting to believe he might be the Kindest Man on Earth.

Now the sign is living under my bed, ironically on top of the Bunches’ DVD player, which is still wrapped in a towel.

Three days ago Baylor invited me to go ice fishing with him. I ran into him while re-stapling insulating cellophane to the screened-in panels of the front porch.

“Up at Lake Camelot,” he said. “They got bass the size of Toyotas. Ever been ice fishing?”

“No,” I said.

“The best way to take your mind off stuff,” he said. “They got a great waffle house right near the lake.”

I told him I would think about it. The idea of being in that much open space makes me start to sweat and claw at my face.

Bradley Farnham is a UFO personified. There are occasional sightings, but these are mysterious and often from a distance. I knock on his door every few days but there is no answer.

It’s past time to start harassing Harriet Gumm for February’s rent. It’s her first delinquency. The lease gives each tenant a six-day grace period before I charge a $25 late fee. Lyman’s lawyer, Marty Moynahan, felt this was more than generous. I’ve only had to tack on a late fee once, which was to the Bunches after their fourth month in the building. (I waived it in January, the month Bethany went missing, but the Bunches insisted on paying it anyway.)

My first nude modeling session with Harriet Gumm is scheduled for four p.m., five hours from now. For the past few days I’ve completed fifty sit-ups and fifty push-ups; the sit-ups in two sets of twenty-five, the push-ups in five sets of ten. These numbers are staggeringly low for a grown man who doesn’t suffer from muscular dystrophy or some other related disorder. My chest is sore, almost depressingly so. It feels like what little pectoral muscle tissue I possess is full of crushed glass.

And then there’s this: Three nights ago I think I tried to kill myself. I took one of Haggis’s Percocets and then another. I drank a few fingers of bourbon and looked at the blob of aluminum foil containing the rest of the deal. The rest of my life represented by a blob of aluminum foil seemed somehow appropriate.

I thought about Sheila Anne. I imagined the children we would never have. Freckle-faced, with huge, wondrous eyes. The stray dogs we would never take in. The old farmhouse we would never fix up.

I lay on my stomach and stared at our wedding Polaroid magnetized to the bottom of my minifridge. I couldn’t stop thinking about those first weeks when we fell in love. How we laughed together at our clumsy sex. How while following the band around on the road she’d run out of underwear and had to start wearing my boxers, which made her legs look thin and coltish and beautifully pubescent. How we couldn’t stop listening to Silver Apples, of all things. That never-ending feeling—which, for her, had ended so resolutely. I contemplated my general ineptitude and sexual inconsistency.

I thought about being found dead in the attic of my family home. One of my tenants knocking, the smell of my decomposed body fouling the uppermost story, Todd Bunch, Pollard’s newest fireman, breaking down my door with an official firehouse axe to discover the worms boring into my flesh. My body voided of all waste and humors. Ants feasting on the jellies of my eyes.

About twenty minutes into all of this gloom and doom I started to get really really really high and put on an early Flaming Lips record and wound up having one of the best times in recent memory, just sort of drifting around the attic like a helium balloon being batted about by a declawed kitten. I swayed and giggled. I pushed off the walls and swooned. I rolled onto my back and bicycled my legs. I fell asleep on Haggis’s promised flotilla. It was a flotilla of Venetian gondolas drifting down a warm, loving Italian river. Thanks to the beauty of Percocet and the Flaming Lips, I made it through my darkest hour.

But back to that delinquent rent. Onwards!

I will first pose for Harriet Gumm and do the hard-core landlording afterward.

About posing nude:

I worry about my average penis. Will it relax and hang naturally? Or will it retreat, assuming the form of a young acorn facing its first brutal winter? Yes, I worry about size. I worry about length. I worry about girth and general penile attractiveness.

I also worry about farting, or somehow stamping the stool. Yes, potential stamping worries me too. I long for deliverance of that sanitary doily.

Despite these fears, which I accept as normal asinine frailties of the human condition, I have to admit that I’m looking forward to sitting for Harriet Gumm. It’ll be like entering an unknown cornfield without an exit strategy. Or like the first day of Intro to Spanish.

Earlier, as I was retrieving the newspaper from the front porch mailboxes, I ran into La-Trez tear-assing it down the stairs from the second floor.

I said, “La-Trez with a hyphen.”

She stopped halfway down the staircase. Per our previous encounter, she was wearing her corduroy coat and backpack.

“Hey, Francis,” she said.

“Another delivery?” I said.

She didn’t answer.

I asked if Bradley was home and she replied, “Naw.”

Then I asked her how she kept getting into the house.

“Front door’s mad open,” she said.

I tested the door. It opened with ease. Someone had used silver duct tape to cover the latch plate so the latch wouldn’t catch the strike. I removed the tape and placed it in the pocket of my bathrobe for future reference. I assumed Bradley was the culprit, since he was the only one with a mysterious visitor.

La-Trez descended the rest of the stairs, but I stood in her way, my arms folded before me. I said, “Whatever you’re up to—”

“Excuse me,” she said, squeezing by and scooting out of the house, the smell of sesame flowering briefly in her wake.

The door latched cleanly behind her.

I went up to the second floor, where another large canvas sack had been set beside Bradley’s unit. I opened it. String again. As before, I dug my hands in deep. Nothing but string.

It’s late again. Just after three a.m.

The house sleeps below me. Only the low-end hum of my minifridge and the gentle hiss of my humidifier. I’m beginning to believe the humidifier knows my thoughts. Perhaps household appliances attain a human intelligence after logging enough hours with you. My humidifier knows my thoughts and my microwave may be out to get me. But at least I know where they are. If this gets any worse I suppose I can just start unplugging things.

I am now writing longhand, using a cheap ballpoint pen and an old spiral notebook. That’s how it’s going to be for a while, for reasons I’ll get to. I’ll have to transcribe these pages with the Corona later, in fits and starts.

Disrobing for Harriet Gumm was easier than I’d thought. While engaged in this task, I realized I was actually disrobing a robe, which made for a clever syntactical distraction. Perhaps not dissimilar to undoing a hairdo. Or dismembering a member.

It was late afternoon but felt like early evening. When she opened the door, she actually said, “Welcome,” as if she were the madam of some eighteenth-century brothel. She had taken down all the art.

She closed the door and I stood there. The overhead light was faint. Like really, really faint.

I pointed up to the fixture and asked if her lights were on a dimmer.

“I use low wattage for first-timers,” she explained. “We’ll raise the lights with increased comfort level.”

The stool, which, in fact, did
not
have a protective doily on it, was perfectly centered in the room. There were four easels positioned around it.

Harriet wore blue jeans and a navy cardigan over a white blouse with a lacy collar. She was barefoot. Her toenails were polished red. Her eyes were made-up. She was less goth and more preppy and I wondered if she created a character for each new subject. She smelled like peppermint soap.

“So let’s get started,” Harriet said.

There was suddenly something overly calm and medical-assistanty about her.

I asked if I should disrobe right there, in the living room, or if there was some other, more appropriate place, perhaps a folded screen to change behind.

“I’ve turned the heat up,” she replied.

When I asked her why the heat was relevant she said that the living room, which she actually called “the modeling room,” should be a comfortable “nudity temperature.” The word
nudity
hit me square between the eyes like a Ping-Pong ball.

“But by all means,” she continued, “feel free to use the facilities.”

I crossed to her bathroom like a man forced to walk toward a large sleeping bear. I closed and locked the door, turned the light on. Taped to the medicine chest, as if Harriet had known I’d opt for the john, was a note:

I hung my bathrobe on the hook in the door. I peeled my double-layered thermals off, folded them neatly, and placed them on the toilet seat, after which I removed my slippers and merino Ingenius socks, inserting the socks into the slippers, and then gently placed the slippers on top of the thermals. I’d never undressed this carefully in my life. There was a geriatric, ritualistic quality to my movements. It felt like I was about to receive my first colonoscopy.

I was naked.

I took the note off the mirror and stepped back a ways to do a quick survey. The recent sit-ups and push-ups didn’t seem to have made much of a difference, and the large brown mole in my navel looked like it always does: sort of sadly forced there, a cruel anatomical joke.

I will admit that, before the session, I performed some subtle pubic topiary. I used the edging feature on my now retired electric razor. In Harriet Gumm’s medicine chest mirror my penis looked acceptably average. It was the genital equivalent of Hall and Oates’s “Method of Modern Love.” But I was grateful, if only for aesthetic purposes, that Cornelia and Lyman had chosen to have me circumcised. I tugged on it once or twice and headed out.

Harriet was standing beside one of the four easels, upon which a large sketch pad had been placed. She looked big-eyed and wise and a little savage. “Is it warm enough?” she said.

I nodded and mustered all my will to resist planting a fist in front of my dick. I kept waiting for her eyes to drop and check out the goods, but she calmly kept staring straight into my eyes.

“To the stool?” I asked. My voice had been cut in half, which used to happen a lot in the early days of fronting rock bands. The first thing to betray a front man’s false poise is his voice.

“To the stool,” Harriet replied.

I cupped my balls, sat on the stool, and then released them so they dangled comfortably. Were my balls too fuzzy? Should I have trimmed those as well?

The stool was much warmer than I’d anticipated, but the aforementioned lack of a sanitary doily was dismaying.

Harriet must have sensed my unease. “Don’t worry,” she said, “I always disinfect the stool.”

She was witchy, this girl. A witchy little preppy goth.

I nodded and simply sat there, the arches of my feet forming tensely around the stool’s little dowel support. My palms were on my knees, my head lifted high off my neck. My posture was probably too good. I think I might have been trying to elongate skeletally as well as genitally. For some reason I was aware that my nipples felt like they were more alive than usual. Like they both had individual brains. Or like they might form mouths and start meowing. And I decided to share this with Harriet.

I said, “I feel like my nipples might form little mouths and start meowing.”

“Kitty titties,” she said. It was the cleverest thing anyone had said in weeks.

Harriet continued to stand beside the easel, about five feet from me, taking me in. At this point she’d ceased committing her gaze to only my eyes and by now had surely assessed other parts, zones, limbs, joints, rogue hairs, skin tabs, and lumps.

Harriet proposed that we do a trust exercise. She told me to close my eyes. She would walk circles around me and while she did this would meditate on really seeing me, meaning beyond my physical being to my essence and my goodness and the primordial flickering of my soul, etc., etc. In a soft, pleasing voice not unlike a voice you hear on a commercial for feminine protection, she told me I should focus on relaxing, that I should simply surrender to the nonthreatening circumstances and “breathe into the experience,” a phrase that immediately made me imagine I was kneeling over one of those CPR dummies with the bald brainwashed eyes that never close and whose bodies cease existing after the lower torso.