Know Your Beholder: A Novel (27 page)

I asked her what drug they had him on.

“Thorazine,” she said, “the great affect eliminator. They theorize it’ll be good for the paranoia and delusional stuff.”

I imagined Bradley shuffling around in a hospital garment, blank-faced and drooling, with stunned koala-bear eyes, clutching an empty Dixie cup.

“I don’t know where it comes from,” she added. “Major mental illnesses don’t exactly run in our family.” She added that she’d always assumed Bradley’s problems were far subtler than delusions of grandeur.

Then she asked me about my tenants and I went down the list. The Bunches and their missing daughter. Harriet Gumm, the artist college student. Bob Blubaugh, the Most Neutral Man in the World. And Baylor Phebe, the sixty-two-year-old former-junior-high-school-teacher-turned-actor. I told her that he was a widower, that he’d been cast in the Arthur Miller play, that he had an amazingly large stomach and surprisingly light feet.

She asked about the band, where everybody was, if I’d been in contact with anyone.

“No,” I said. “Everyone’s doing other things.”

I had no interest in bringing up the recent appearance of Glose and what I’d done.

Then she asked me if I was writing any music.

“I noodle around on the guitar, but that’s about it.”

“You’re through with it?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’d like to think that I’ll get hungry for it again at some point.” I didn’t dare tell her that the simple thought of being in public almost caused a panic attack.

After we ate I put on one of our favorite records, Steely Dan’s
Aja
. Sheila Anne and I have always loved Donald Fagen’s voice, but it’s the band’s arrangements, their studio work, and their overall songwriting that have consistently blown my mind.

As soon as I showed her the album cover, a certain sweetness passed over her face.

During the bass-line intro to “Black Cow,” she laughed. Back in our marriage we’d endlessly talked about how the beginning of that track inspires an inexplicable silly feeling. It always made Sheila Anne imagine someone in a black turtleneck and handlebar mustache, carrying a banana cream pie topped off with loads of Cool Whip, mischievously sneaking around to the beat in some totally choreographed tippy-toes way, looking for a face to victimize.

The sound of her laugh alone cured me of all my woes for at least the next ten minutes. She had to know that by playing
Aja
I was pushing old sentimental buttons, but how could I not?

She said, “You know the guitar part in this is the background music on a commercial for a top-selling erectile dysfunction pill?”

“That’s amazing,” I said. “Good for Steely Dan.”

“The important things you learn on the job.” Then she told me she liked my beard, that it somehow brought out my eyes.

We were sitting on my couch now, our backs against the armrests, facing each other, the rich smell of Mexican food still lingering. I was drinking Maker’s neat out of a coffee mug. I set the mug down and put my hands on hers. We took each other in for a moment. I was convinced that we were going to make out. But then she slid her hands out from under mine and returned them safely to her lap.

“How’s the back?” she asked.

“Right now it’s fine,” I said. “This position is fairly painless.”

It was more than painless, in fact, it was perfect. This was perfection. Just how things used to be. Mexican food and three fingers of Maker’s and some classic vinyl.

“How did you hurt it?” she asked.

I told her it had locked up on me one day when I was bending down to pick up my laundry basket, that I had likely slipped a disc, but that “my spine guy” thought if I rested, the bulge would recede. I was so convinced by my own lie that I actually could see the moment clearly in my head: bending down to lift a laundry basket and then everything locking up, me crumpling to my knees, pitching onto my side, calling out for help from the laundry room floor. “All those years of lugging amps around,” I added. “It was bound to catch up to me.”

She’d slid off her sneakers and was flexing her toes to the music. She wore white athletic socks that had grayed on the bottoms.

During the title track, the epic “Aja,” I asked her if she was happy.

“In what way?” she said.

“In the only way.”

“You mean with Dennis?”

Hearing her say his name did something to my throat. It felt like my Adam’s apple had been snagged with a fishhook.

“Do I not seem happy?” she said.

“Do you guys have this?” I said.

“It’s different,” she said. “We have our own ‘this.’”

“The New This,” I said.

“Yeah, the New This,” she said.

“Good album name,” I said. “
The New This
.”

She just shook her head and smiled.

“What about ‘stuff’?” I said.

“Stuff?” she said.

“Issues. Please tell me you have issues.”

“Generally speaking, our ‘stuff’ is the good kind.”

“Do you guys order Mexican food and put your feet on the sofa and listen to classic Steely Dan on well-preserved vinyl?”

She smiled again, impenetrably.

“Do you have equally argued, heated but spirited American film debates about
Tootsie
versus, say,
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
?”

“Or
Blade Runner
versus
E.T.
?” she said, playing along.

“I still can’t believe how much you like
E.T.
”

“I could never get how much you liked
Cat People
,” she countered.

“
Like
,” I said. “Let’s keep it in the present tense.
Cat People
is a hidden classic. Twenty years from now
Cat People
will still be talked about. What would a nine-year-old boy in the middle of Illinois have done without Nastassja Kinski? You were only four then. You had no concept of how, say, A Flock of Seagulls was shaping the minds of a generation. You were busy watching
Fraggle Rock
.”

“I was a pretty precocious four-year-old,” she said. “And don’t start dissing
Fraggle Rock
.
Fraggle Rock
was an allegorically complex weekly television masterpiece.”

I drank from the coffee mug and said, “What would Dennis say if he saw us like this?”

She didn’t answer.

“Would he be pissed? Would he want to fight me?”

She remained silent.

“I could still make you happy, Sheila Anne. I can change,” I heard myself say.

She looked at me for a long moment. I had always thought she was most beautiful at the end of the night, when she was tired. Her lids would get heavy, her face would soften, the little cleft of worry between her pale peach brows would finally disappear.

She said, “I’m pregnant, Francis.”

It felt like a low-flying jet had just decapitated me at the precise moment my heart crawled into my mouth.

I think an entire minute passed. I’m not sure I moved. I had the distinct feeling that I was turning to hay. Not a scarecrow, but an actual bale of useless lost hay.

Eventually Sheila Anne said, “It’s one of the reasons I came here tonight. I wanted to tell you in person.”

I asked her how far along she was and she said twenty-two weeks. I imagined the sonograms, the morning sickness, Dennis Church lovingly pulling her hair back for her while she vomits into the toilet.

“No sushi,” I said. “I get it now.”

“No sushi, no steak tartare, no raw cookie dough. No whiskey.”

Another minute passed.

Some part of Dennis Church was inside her. A little blind fetus contorted into itself, translucently pale, palsied, parasitic, its alien head too large for its body.

To my mind came the word
defenestration
, the act of throwing a person out a window. I had an impulse to run at my lone attic window, to actually run
through
it headlong and defenestrate myself.

I drank some more bourbon and said, “So you’re keeping it?”

“Yes,” she replied.

I asked her if Dennis knew.

“Of course he knows.”

I asked her if they’d been trying to get pregnant.

“Yes,” she said again.

Her yeses were like little colored discs of poison I was being forced to swallow, and yet I kept talking. “So things must be really good,” I said.

She nodded, sparing me the actual yes this time.

I told her she didn’t look pregnant.

“Well, I certainly feel pregnant,” she said.

I asked her if it was a girl or a boy.

“Boy,” she said.

“When we talked about having kids you said you wouldn’t want to know.”

Then she offered the age-old platitude: “People change.”

I’d always wanted to have a little girl, though it was something I never told Sheila Anne. We rarely talked about kids. We didn’t have enough money, so it just wasn’t practical. I wanted a little girl with Sheila Anne’s strawberry blond hair and her freckles that emerged every summer, and with my mother’s sad-sweet Polish eyes.

I told her not to take what I’d said about her not looking pregnant the wrong way. “You actually look pretty amazing,” I said.

She thanked me, and I told her she always looked amazing and then I lost it bad. I started crying, and while at first I could swallow most of it, then there was too much, like an entire feast of sadness, and it just came out, raging up my throat like something I’d actually eaten. Part of me wanted her to be disgusted by it, to be driven away by such a lame, self-pitying response, but instead she took my head in her hands and lowered it to her lap.

She and Dennis Church were having a boy.

He would probably be beautiful. He would chase urban butterflies and frolic in concrete playgrounds. By the age of three he would learn to hail a taxi. They would take him to the opera at four. By five he would begin conjugating French verbs. He would be exceptional, perfectly appointed, a wunderkind. They would name him something like Hudson or Dane.

“Deacon Blues” started, the final track of side one, a seven-and-a-half-minute masterpiece that should be played while driving along some oceanside vista in a ’65 Mustang convertible with the top down.

I imagined their little boy as a toddler with long Raphaelite hair (our little girl is trapped in this boy after all), then as a preschooler, then as a first grader with Popsicle-stained lips and mosquito-bitten arms (tough, urban mosquitoes), Sheila Anne walking hand in hand with him, dropping him off at some elite private school in New York City, wiping his face with a eucalyptus-scented Wet-Nap before kissing him good-bye.

After I stopped crying, when the song had finally ended and there had been a good minute of needle-in-the-gutter silence, without lifting my head from her lap, I looked up and told Sheila Anne that this small part of me keeps hoping against hope that she’ll come to her senses and return to me, that eventually, inevitably, we’ll find our way back to each other.

She nodded, clearly not in agreement, but to display a kind of dull, tragic acknowledgment.

“Do you ever think about that?” I asked.

Again, no answer. “You have every right to make me a monster,” she said.

I told her that I wished there was a way I could hate her, that it would probably be easier that way, but that I couldn’t succeed even at demonizing her. All the cheating and the secrecy at the end simply didn’t have enough poison in them to blot out my deepest feelings. I admitted that I had drawn naked pictures of her in the margins of this manuscript, that the slippers I was wearing were in fact impostors that Haggis had brought by earlier, and that in truth I wore her ergonomic Norwegian wool ones every day, almost dutifully, and that I’d stowed them under my bed in an old pillowcase so she wouldn’t have the satisfaction of seeing them.

We sat that way, with my head in her lap, for a long time. She even started to stroke my temples, in little counterclockwise circular motions, a tenderness that made me feel so vulnerable I had the sensation that I was turning to powder.

The bliss of that soft lap. Her delicate fingers. I felt like I had returned to some soporific velveteen womb world.

Eventually I fell asleep.

When I woke up she was in the bathroom, talking on her cell phone. She had powered down the turntable and re-sleeved the Steely Dan record, just as she would have when we were together. I wondered if she was enjoying revisiting these old simple rituals, or if they sickened her, if she was executing them only for my sake, as some gesture of forced kindness. By the time she came out of the bathroom, I was sitting up on the sofa.

“Dennis?” I said.

She simply looked at me.

I asked her if everything was okay.

“It’s late,” she said. “I should go.” Another disc of poison, this one white. The colorless, tasteless killer.

“Stay,” I pleaded. “Just this one night.”

She said she couldn’t. She had a hotel room in Decatur, and she needed to be up early for an important meeting about Bradley with the Decatur Manor head psychiatrist.

She came over and sat next to me on the sofa.

I wanted her to tell me that she still listened to my music. I wanted her to take my face in her hands and
not
put it in her lap but kiss my eyes instead. I would close them just before her lips met my lids, like a child getting tucked in. But neither of those things happened. What happened was she put her head on my shoulder and then I leaned my face on her head. I regretted the decision to not shave my beard, because if I had, then I would have felt her head with my actual face, which would have offered enough pleasure to last me another six months.

At her rental car we said good-bye and hugged and I held on a little too long. She indulged me and I’m sure it made her sick to be enveloped by all my neediness but she indulged me.

It was after three a.m. when Sheila Anne pulled off down Oneida Street. I found myself walking in the same direction, following her taillights, ambling mindlessly past the Schefflers’ lesser Victorian; past Darrell and Carol Stroh’s modern solar-paneled block-shaped monstrosity; past the Gordons’ and the Neugabauers’ and then the Lindholms’ tall, thin Tudor; past a little powder-blue clapboard ranch house with pink shutters and barren flower boxes inhabited by an old widow with some imponderable number of cats.