Orange Suitcase (5 page)

Maybe a bald grandfather. Maybe a tool-belt in a garage while it's raining against the window. Dust, empty vodka bottles.

Retrieving jewelry from a sink catch. Applause from a girlfriend's weeping friend.

Hiding Christmas gifts and peeking on the 23rd. Used books with love letters and lists forgotten inside. Lockets. Broken fingers. Maybe old luggage filled with photographs. A Polaroid of newborn rabbits on a dishtowel. Receipts. Hidden cigarettes.

Definitely a couch, a foldout with slept-on sheets. A relative is visiting for a funeral and our apartment smells like a grandmother's house. Mildew, definitely, and the dead turtle my cousins found and hid beneath the couch in the basement. A frisbee in flight. A do-not-disturb. That girl with the pink t-shirt and oranges.

The alarm. Voices. Alarm. An arm.

I
've heard it compared to childbirth, and that's partially true. Because even though you don't worry about college tuition or breast-feeding or vaccinations with a story, a story can still wake you in the middle of the night seventeen years later, telling you how even though it's been on its own for seventeen years, now it's in trouble, and now your story has its own story about how it got pregnant one weekend in Vegas, and how now there's going to be a wedding and a new family and more stories and a pastry chef named Marcel is moving into your house, baking sheets and all. All you can do is listen, because that's what good parents do, and that's the only way you're going to get any sleep.

I
'm reading an airport paperback and waiting for Peach in the wooden booth we shared last time. Last time was a summer afternoon; today it's just started snowing. Last time, which was really the first time, I fell asleep when he went to piss. He returned and put a bottle of brown mustard under my nose; he sat and poured the last drops of brown beer into my glass. Kerouac pissed on an ashtray in this bar, he said. I wiped my nose and eyes. And Pollock ripped the bathroom door off its hinges, I said. We clinked our glasses and drank.

The waitress interrupted with another foamy pitcher and set it between us. I remember she was beautiful, vaguely Irish with Killian's-colored hair and something of an accent. You're talking about the old location, she told us. The bar used to be down 8th street. We moved decades ago. She took our empty and walked off. Peach refilled his glass with the new pitcher. It was our fourth. Franzen set a scene of The Corrections in this location, I said. Peach nodded. Sad there aren't any ashtrays to piss in anymore, he said. I nodded. One of us needs to write a good story about this place, one of us said. Before we leave this city.

Now Peach settles in across from me and shakes small snowflakes off his collar. I close my book and we order a pitcher of the brown stuff. In a week the bar is closing down; this is really the last time. A waiter brings our beer and we clink glasses and say, Here's to the last time. Then, together, we remember the first time: how the waitress said what she said, how we drank until we had to piss again, how we fell asleep again. We remember how Peach returned from the bathroom and woke me with a shake; how I lied and said I'd dreamed of ripping the bathroom door from its hinges. We remember how he'd stood on the toilet to piss out the window, how he'd pissed-out the Irish waitress' cigarette as she stood in the alley on her break. We remember how four years later I wrote this and sent it to him.

1

O
n our 50th anniversary she will give me an orange suitcase full of photographs. Pictures of our wedding, our first apartment, our first trip to Berlin. Thank you for the adventures, she will say, quoting from a movie we'll both have forgotten.

2

Some of the photographs we won't recognize. Who was that? she'll ask. I think that was Jensen, I'll say. It was? I think so. See the red gloves?

3

When we die, we will be buried with the suitcase between us. We were the only ones with the right idea. The only ones who knew it all. It was easy, but no one else knew it. All our passwords were our birthdays.

1

I
t's late and the freezing-rain outside rattles against the dark window. A gravelly sound—tintinnabulation, someone called it earlier. Most of the journal staff is asleep or almost passed-out at our professor's apartment in Chinatown. We've been drinking wine and bourbon; we've been playing with the ugly dog; we've been yelling about Salinger, who died today. Our editor-in-chief, the professor, hates Franny and Zooey. Now he reaches for a double-bottle of red wine and spills it across the wooden center table. It spreads like an ink blot over old copies of the journal and the advanced pressing of my novel. I wonder where the dog went; he should come over and lick the wine. Everyone still awake laughs, but it's a quiet and drunken laughter, and I watch the cheap cover of a Nine Stories wrinkle and turn purple; I watch my own book do the same. The room tilts and I close my eyes and rub my face. When I open them again the old man is rising; white hair shoots from around his red face like an exploded pillow. It's all shit! he yells. He claws the purple Nine Stories and flings it across the room. It splats against the opposite wall. He roars: A book like that should break my fucking heart! I think he might cry. I sip my porcelain mug of bourbon and laugh with everyone else.

The laughter settles and the professor stays standing. He rears up like a statue of Balzac. He looks around the room, slow, and settles on me. I think, He is ready to kill. We stare and stare and he doesn't say anything. After a long while he collapses back into his chair, deflated, his own mug empty. He breathes. The ugly dog appears from nowhere and starts licking. I look around and think, This is being a writer, this is getting at the heart of it all. Then the old man's voice: Look at fucking Riippi there, so happy with himself, so smug with that book and that shit-eating grin. He gestures to the splattered wall, to my own bloody book before me; there's more drunken laughter, the slurp of the dog's tongue on the floor. The freezing-rain tintinnabulates the window. Then in one fast move he reaches and hurls my own book. The hard-glue spine slaps my mug against my chest; red wine and bourbon mixes on my shirt, and I can't tell if I am bleeding or if it's the wine. Something stings in my eyes. Bloodless shit! the old man howls, and I close my eyes against the sting.

2

I must have passed out. In my dream I write:

“I don't know the drunk priest. Didn't even know he was a priest when I got to the bar and he was already at the end stool facing a pint. But then McHugh introduces him as a priest. He calls him Paddy, not Father, and says he's the priest up at the Church of St. Thomas on 121st. Good-to-meet-you-Father, I call over, wiping hot rain from my face with the front of my shirt. The summer thunderstorm outside booms and I rise fast to shake the slouching divinity's empty hand. An image of my mother and her approving smile flashes through my head. I see her standing at the top of the church steps after Sunday Mass twenty years ago in Seattle. I am six years old and just want to go home, but she is speaking with Deacon Mike, talking about next week's Sunday school curriculum and the Monsignor's sermon. Yes, Joey is enjoying First Communion classes very much, she tells the deacon. I fidget and fuss at the bottom of the stairs; I watch her with the fat white-haired Deacon Mike. I pick at the pant legs of my too-big suit and imagine the clouds turning to war planes and dragons, the characters in the video games I'll play when I get home—but I wait for her. I obey. I am a good son and I know my role. When the Monsignor walks out the church's double doors in a bright green robe, I watch him meet the group of smiling and chatting mothers and I watch him take his place at the top of the stairs next to fat Deacon Mike. I watch my mother smile and wave at me to join her. I don't want to but I am there immediately. I promised to be good. Good afternoon, Monsignor, I say, and I shake the Monsignor's hand hard, just as I should, a six year old in a suit.”

Now it's today and I am wondering how my mother is getting on, where she is right now, if she's asleep back home or awake watching the news. It's winter again and the middle of the night. My fiancée is sneezing in the other room; the coffee mug before the keyboard is full of last night's wine. I should call my mom, I think, should try again to explain. A cop car passes on 22nd street. Someone upstairs is pacing. Someone outside is smoking pot. I want a cigarette. I yawn and write:

“Outside the bar sirens flash and pass as I walk away from the priest and back to my coffee and notebook. I think for a moment, write: He was 18 when he decided to become a priest—but then nothing comes and I put my pen down and sip the coffee. I listen to the rain and watch the sad priest keep on with his drinking. McHugh keeps on with his channel surfing on the muted, closed-captioned TV. The priest doesn't look like a priest. I write: The boy who would become a priest didn't look like a priest. I start flipping through a wrinkled Post someone left, a newspaper game halfway empty. I write in two numbers. I stare out the window. The orange flame of sky caught between two high-rises some blocks away looks like a Rothko painting. What does it take to drive a priest out into the rain for a half dozen pints? I ask myself. No, ask it a different way. What does a priest dream about during a thunderstorm? Yes, he never wanted his life this way. No one wants their life this way. The world seems wrong to the priest; the world seems wrong to everyone. But we can't question how the world is. Angels appear, Caravaggian figures. Among divine oily shadows we are presented with our callings. Like priests. When he was 18, his mother predicted he would become a priest. I spin my pen around my thumb; I feel my throat tighten; I see my mother's smile; I sense that I am smiling. And so I write: When I was 18, my mother…”

I wait to feel my heart breaking.

1

Y
ou love each other?

Yes.

Do you ever feel as if you are the only ones in the world who love like you do?

Yes.

Do you feel cheated knowing that can't possibly be true?

Other people fall in and out of love, don't they?

Yes, certainly.

Do you ever write about your love?

No.

Why not?

Because writing is for the mind and love is for the heart. Someone said that.

But don't you love writing?

Yes.

So…

Not in the way you're using the word. I love writing in the word sense, the love that can be italicized.

What's the difference?

2

You said this: Writing is for the mind, love is for the heart.

I did?

Yes.

Okay.

So you don't believe writing can touch the heart?

Writing absolutely can touch the heart. The best writing does.

Isn't that a contradiction?

Art is defined by its contradictions.

Art is defined by its contradictions?

No.

Joseph Riippi's writing has appeared in BOMB's Word Choice, The Brooklyn Rail, PANK, Everyday Genius, elimae, Bitter Oleander, Ep;phany, Salamander, and many others.

His first novel, D
O
S
OMETHING
! D
o
S
OMETHING
! D
o
S
OMETHING
!, was published in 2009 by Ampersand Books.

T
REESISTERS
, a 24-part poem, will appear as a limited edition chapbook from Greying Ghost Press in winter 2011/2012.

He lives with his wife in New York City.

WWW.JOSEPHRIIPPI.COM

T
HANKS EVERYONE WHO HELPED
.