Strange Cowboy (10 page)

And my wife, she seemed so full to me, expectant; when I saw her hair curl in the
sunlight, I was thinking
flaxen.
I almost thought that I could touch it. Her. She was plump, smoothened, tan, she
had the look to me of unfullfilled expansion. She bore no outward sign of her retreats.
No stretch marks, wrinkles, scales, no shame or wish, no worry I could see was showing
from her eyes for what she was and was becoming. She could have worn a skirt. She
seemed to me a girl in plaid-and-white I used to dream of from the private school
I never went to. I saw my wife transported to an era of her life she had survived
in pinks and blues of fabrics not dissimilar to cashmere. Angora, possibly. I suppose
I wanted then to hold and pet my wife, recall her to the time when it was she who
cheered us through our fields and tracks and diamonds, all the greening seasons of
the adolescent games our student body would anticipate by burning stacks of palettes,
putting to the flames the effigies our glee club had constructed of our rivals in
the desert. I saw her there, in the fire’s flicker, in her plaid, and pink, and was
afraid for her, and wanted to protect her, and to burn for me, as if it were for me
she cheered, for my defeats and victories she rallied us around the firering to celebrate
and suffer.

She sighed, took me by the elbow, offered me a penny for my thoughts. According to
my wife, my chin was up. I seemed to her as if I teetered on the brink of breaking
forth in something worthy. Yet I was simply unprepared; I was honest, unrevised; I
told the truth before I knew it.

I said, of our son there on the sidewalk, I said, “I don’t know, the boy just looks
so porous.”

And then my wife became herself again, the cooler, brittler woman I have seen too
often these days at the window, smiling, piningly, as if she would, but could not
join our son for fear of
ruining the balance in the moment we were watching: a boy, a dog, playing Tug of War
with beef ribs on the sidewalk. I studied her, searched for avenues by which I might
retrieve her. I saw the light divide in bars across her body where it struck her through
the parted slats. She wore a sweatshirt reminiscient of my mother’s. Nothing I could
see of her was reminiscient of angora. No cheer. She sighed again, more deeply; her
voice was mingled in the sigh, underneath her breath; I marked the falling accent
from the high note to the low note; I watched the fog of the breath the note was sounded
on, contracting on the windowpane.

I thought: Porous. I asked myself: Why porous? I thought: What if something in me
had been worthy? And what if I had broken forth in it? Why does honesty, I wondered,
so seldom coincide with preparation? I looked at her beside my chair and wondered
if I were to crawl up in her womb and pluck my seed out with my teeth, hold it in
my mouth and spit it in the river, would she find her life recalled to her, would
she luxuriate beneath a butter-colored sky? Did I correct her, insist her skies were
lemon-lime? Did I neglect her hair? Did I kindle the fire with little Lincoln’s drawings
before I learned they were to go to school with him, or after? Did he cry because
I threatened him, or did I threaten him because he cried? Or did he cry at all, and
was he rather mute? And did I really burn his artwork? Have I truly given Hope a chicken
bone? feigned the limp I have acquired since my operation? And my beauty, that handsomeness,
does it square with what I’m seeing in the mirror? Was that me, tweezing whiskers
from my shoulders? Is my cheek no longer red, as my mother has observed, but blue;
are the hairs that sprout from there forever to grow denser? Science tells us that
the ears and nose enlargen even while the spine of humankind contracts. Our gums recede.
Our teeth rot. We learn
our fingernails are curling in the coffinbox. Is it true? Who has seen it? Enough,
that is, to move from seeing to believing?

Speaking as myself, at times, my beliefs are likelier to coincide where fact elides
in me through a desire. Depending on the pitch of my ambition, it is possible for
me to sit here in my chair and see my wife in memory as if she were my wife in flesh,
and to see my wife in flesh as if she were my wife in memory. I look at her, asleep,
her head cushioned on the pillow. Her lips part, her breath quickens; I see her tongue
come to her teeth, she smiles. I think: Beauty, do I know you? Are you wearing skirts
beneath these blankets? Are you mended? Smoother? Whole? I wonder sometimes if I lift
the covers will I see the girl the boy I was did not have eyes for seeing. Blind eyes.
A kid’s eyes. I was ungrown. Unaware. I was of my time. I was the same age she was.
Still am. We match each other in successive phases of ungrowness, continue to be insufficiently
contrasted. My most vivid sight of her is elsewhere. The accomplice of the clearest
vision is regret. I must invite it, that corny, olden pang. No doubt, someday, I will
come to see her as she is today; no doubt, as my flesh grows farther from the bone,
I will be seeing hers grow closer. I am tantalized by ghosts, traces of the past in
bursts of light and odors. I want to be a girl, hold her hand, lie beneath the cottonwood
and not know what I’m doing. I must pause for her; I lie awake and watch; I sit; I
fetch; I revel.

Yet the time had passed for revel. Certainly, I thought, I was required, necessary,
beyond the scope, it seemed to me, of any party. There I sat, blinking from my chair,
smiling, possibly, blandly panicked, feeling not unlike a man who cannot name a single
soul of the seven souls he’s just been introduced to over cocktails. Worse, of course,
owing to my recent dabblings in sobriety, not to mention the disparity I must have
sensed between the wife there
on her feet, and the husband on his back, his heels propped and his shoulders swallowed
in the sculpted fluff of his recliner. See her eyes. The last time I had seen such
clarity illuminate those viscous bulbs was when we learned about my operation. Mirth
was not the word. Hilarity, perhaps, hysteria I think I saw there in my wife as our
physician held his thumb some distance from his index finger, meaning to approximate
for us the length of the incision he would make to open up my scrotum. If I liked,
he said, I might choose general anesthesia, though he himself preferred to “go with
local.” I might watch, if I liked. Mirrors could be placed.
Vas deferens, mesorchium, tunica vaginalis
: some men, said the doctor, enjoyed to see how they were plumbed for sexing. I was
not that man. It was my wife, not me, who was amused to learn why one hung lower than
the other of my testicles; my wife who asked the doctor how much four-and-a-half drachms
would weigh out in potatoes, after he had given us the skinny on the prostate. When
the doctor said that in addition to eliminating any fear of reproductive consequence
in loving, I might also save myself, down the road, from an enucleated lobe, I do
not believe that it was sympathy, not relief I saw illuminate my wife, but glee, yes,
but spite. My body was no friendlier to me than hers was. She squeezed my hand, I
won’t deny it, though the pressure she applied there was untender.

Regard her, I was thinking, see her standing at your chairside. Underneath the corduroy
and cotton there resides a smattering of bruise and scar and stubble, an exagerrated
bicep, a broadening back, a chronic ache she worries at the lumbar, a mismatched,
frayed and spotted slub of underthings, selected, I believe, perversely, antagonistically
for function. She pares her nails for function, cuts her hair for ease. She has carried
a child. In her belly, on her hip, in her heart. She was past belonging. She would
not
be anybody’s woman, no man’s, in any case; every plane, every line in her face was
drawn into her lips, it seemed, her face was hinged there on a clench, a tiny pucker,
an enormous debt, prerogative. I thought: She was duped; this woman hawked her dreamlife
for a vacuum and a rude maternal urge. I have rights, she seems to say. It isn’t fair.
I was only doing what my mother and my country and my body told me that I ought to.
I was planning on a life, can’t you see that, I am fighting for my life here.

No, I think, not tenderness. Tenderness, to my mind, collapsed entirely between us
with the demolition of the Roxy. Brick by brick the kisses we once promised we would
hold to heart forever were unhoused in us, according to the weight and the acceleration
of the ball the mayor ordered to be swung there. The force of history, this was, the
lore of balconies and velvet. This had been our theatre. My wife pressed her face
into my neck and wept and she was saying,
Lincoln, Lincoln, Lincoln.
I recall this as the only time in our familial life that she was able to forget her
character as Mother. She hushed the child, and when he did not hush, and persisted
to express his need to urinate, she told him he could “hold it,” and when he said
he could not hold it, she insisted that he could, and when he did not hold it, and
he wet himself, she got down on her knees and took him by the collar, shook him once
and asked him why on earth he didn’t go ahead and go behind the grader? All for me.
In public. For our Roxy, our love, for the last time she remembers feeling freely.
She turned her face up from my neck. Her pupils crowded out the iris. I felt her wanting
me to plunge there, through that blackened film; I felt a desperate crushing of the
distance wedged between us; she was down there somewhere; it seemed to me as if a
hand might soon emerge and grasp my throat to drag me down there with her.

“Oh, God,” she said, “I didn’t have to marry you.”

Why a certain woman’s tenderness should fail to rouse her beauty, where her spite
succeeds, must be a question certain husbands have been asking since the day that
God contracted Adam with a wife, and with that wife, contracted him with child. To
me, my wife is rarely lovelier than when she seizes up an opportunity to foist the
boy in my administration. I cannot resist her. I have tried to please her. But is
she pleased? Who has pleased her? A father? A mother? A doctor or a teacher? A lover,
husband, Hans? Perhaps, I thought, she’d got the butcher up her sleeve. Perhaps her
loveliness did not depend for him on her unhappiness. Who was this Hans, and was it
true, as my wife suggested, that she had given him “ideas”? A real man, she calls
him, composed of flesh and blood and bone and gristle, a useful man, the sort of man
who did not place himself above the plumbing of the family toilet. Well, I thought,
okay, well, yes, then, she must be taunting me with Hans, my history. Old Hansel.
German, Old World, Nature’s European. Futile, I was thinking, to try and argue her
away from those few corporal truths embodied by Herr Schmeltzer. I thought: Who would
butcher? Who plumb? What sort of retrovert would bark his knuckles changing spark
plugs to establish his capacity for bleeding? I was, I know, once again beside the
point. Not the proof, according to my wife, but the act; not the actor, but the witness.
The character of men, apparently, is incidental; virtue is the showershow of sparks
erupting from the nose pressed to the grindstone.

Says my wife, “Hans is not a showoff.”

She stood. Silent. Not
silent
silent, but speechless silent. She buzzed, machinelike, like a distant industry,
antiquated, relegated, poorly tended, yet up, up and running, a wife, the original
design.
I heard her body talk as if through thicknesses of padded wall, heard her pumps at
work in there, valvings and gurgles, acidic transformations, grinding teeth, brainwaves,
psychic mutterings, a cyclic monologue she narrows and repeats, sharpens and enlargens,
a colossal, stabby racket she conceives of as her refuge, a psalm she sings of clarity
and purpose.
It isn’t fair, you cheated, I never really loved you, you are not the man I married.

I changed. I cheated. How? If I look, inspect those years from five to roughly forty,
what they held for me and what they promise, I find I am an agent, a private-eye,
a green detective in my own life’s history without a common law to guide me. Had I
only learned, perhaps, when I was young, and hungered for a dogma, the strictures
of my mother’s church. Sadly, says my mother, I was a maverick catechumen, unable
to abide through any lingering coincidence of memory and hunger. True, she rapped
my knuckles, smartly, with the ruler, in recognition of my absence; true, I was brought
back, by her interventions, to myself. Where had I been? she wondered; where on earth
could I be going? I confessed I could not say. What would I have said? Out the window?
In the barn? Pillaging my mother’s bedroom? Even from the easy chair, hovered over
by my wife, her wants, her need, our son, I can still recall myself with mother, at
our catechism, remembering her bedroom. I liked the smell of Mother’s bed. I liked
her creams and lotions, her drawer, the clingy, silken pretties I discovered there.
I tried some on. I was sitting at my catechism, feeling I was in my mother’s underpants,
before my mother’s mirror, remembering how it felt to see myself as I might see my
imminent beloved. She was gauze and sheen. She was a slip, and stockings, the shrouded
furze, I thought, much prettier than I was. I tried a pout on her. I crossed her legs.
This girl had known herself. She kept her teeth to herself,
a thin regard, a shadowy circumference. Her hair sang; her scalp paled; she was rockbound
and wavestruck; it seemed to me that her head was the head my mother taught me from
Corinthians, upon which all of the ends of the world had come, and having come there
once, were to come and come again there, relentlessly regathered. I think that every
boy who steps into his mother’s silks must draw a mustache on the Mona Lisa.

Where had I been, my mother wondered, and I may have said, “I was remembering Losivya,
ma’am.” Or, depending on her question, where we were in any given lesson, I said,
“Peter’s keys?” Or, “The lamb of God?” And, “Eve?”

Daunted, maybe, accused, perhaps, convicted, even, by the presence of the interrogative
in my declaratives, I recall I spread my hands out next across the knotty pine, eager
to receive the ruler. In the end, my mother must have wearied beating me. Had she
persisted, I would tell my wife, I might have been, in faith, a more securely grounded
husband, a truer star as Father. Fill my shoes with rocks, better bind me shirtless
in a horsehair jacket. Reprimands, a caution, tips, hints, suggestions, orders and
reminders, the Ought, the No, the Pretty Pleases in my life are lost from me as soon
as they have ceased resounding on the eardrum. According to my wife, I am the sort
who makes of Yes a Maybe. Tell me that a straight line is the shortest way between
two points, she says, and I will argue for the scenic route from Happy Hour to Homestead.
I go in for milk and come out with a grapefruit and an avocado. I call a pigeontoe
a clubfoot, a gift a curse, a smile a grimace, a memory a nightmare.