Strange Cowboy (21 page)

Yet my wife, as I recall her, was not crying. I think that she was smiling, hovering
over the brink of a good, long, long-long laugh. Perhaps if she had looked at me she
would have laughed. Perhaps I might have steered her, moved myself to action, dropped
the clothes I carried right there on the road, taken hold of my wife, kissed her on
the mouth, dragged her off into the sage and loved her. But I think I was afraid,
I was bent on hearing more, I thought that if I kept on as I had that I would learn
what moved my wife so near to laughter, what held her shy of laughing.

Because she never laughed. Instead we passed a quiet time through which I thought
that I could hear the sky. Not a wind sound, but a crush, a sound of steady, necessary
pressure. The sky was far, I thought, and blue, and yet it seemed to me I heard it,
pressing at me, against my skin, inside my head, I thought I heard a rupturing inside
myself, as if my life, the air it breathed, all my body touched was audible as one
long rupture, if I listened, a single, muted, lifelong throb. Until I listened, I
had no idea what was going on inside myself without me. A soft crush, a yielding.
I was glad then for the sound of the wrecking ball, the motor car, a siren. I thought
I understood the drive across our kind for making poetries and song. I would have
welcomed laughter. I would have welcomed tears. We walked, and I listened at myself,
and heard myself contracted, and it seemed to me just then that the arc of the sound
beneath our lives was echoed in the histories we marveled at of grass and flowers.
Seed, root, stalk, bud, bloom; and then a sleep, and then a burn, a loamy inhumation.
This was the sound of our interval, our limit, the space through which we would be
held. I might have asked her did she hear it. I might have asked her if she felt a
little lonesome or afraid. I might have asked her, naked as she was, in the desert,
underneath the noonday sun, paired in
nakedness beside her recent husband, if she felt herself a little nearer to her bloom,
or to her wither.

She said, “Do you think it’s possible to live and not regret what you have done with
your life? And do you think regret is an emotion, or something more like of a place
a person comes to, where you could walk, you know, or sit, or lie in it, like in a
house, and go to sleep?”

She said for me to put my clothes on.

“Let’s not be ridiculous,” she said.

She held a hand beneath each breast and lifted one and then the other to a younger,
tonier dependence from her chest, perhaps intending to approximate the heights she’d
fallen from since she was roughly teenaged.

“If these made milk,” she said, “do you think that we’d have anything between us left
for drama?”

She said for me to put my shirt on and my pants, and she would wear my underpants
and T-shirt.

“Nobody will bother with that car,” she said. “You’ll see. Somebody will be along
here. It’s possible. You never know. You haven’t really lived until you’ve lived,
now have you?”

Unto death,
I think she meant. She meant,
Nothing has happened until it has happened. We could pay off,
I think she meant,
we might escape ourselves, whatever accident we seem here to have suffered, it is
possible we might recover from it, we could be coming into something larger.
She said,
You never know,
and she might have seen me, years into our future, seated, mothy, paunched, an ineffectual
reminiscer, content to have my wife become the ready confirmation of myself, seated
in a chair we chose for comfort and compatibility beside me. We did not speak; we
agreed. We addressed our television, our papers and our magazines. The little news
came
into us and we embraced it. Perhaps, then, she had foreseen the graders scrape the
brush off from our lot on O Street, seen our walls raised and our roof capped, heard
us bless the safety and the peace we could enjoy from petty crimes and natural disasters,
the advertisements for the thinner, richer, freer, cheaper, faster lives we propped
our feet up to regard and to assure each other we were glad to see were falling well
enough behind us. Perhaps she saw us shrunk down in our lives to repetitions, secondings,
not’s and no’s, a honing down in us toward a life confirming for itself an evenly
eroding scope, and she told herself, she said to me,
You never know,
meaning we might change; that house might never come to us, not that roof, not those
walls, not that shrinking confirmation.

She stretched out her arms as if awakening from a good night’s sleep, looked up at
the sky as if to know how much daylight would be left to her, scratched herself and
yawned and said, “What next?”

To this end, I decided not to look. I trusted in the livelong, sunny day. Even after
we had put my clothes back on, I kept an ear out for an invitation from my wife for
sex, though I might have known I could have saved us from the course our lives have
taken, should I have had the courage to invite myself. How often and how thoroughly,
I wonder, in sexual crises, have we been made a child of the subjunctive mood? How
often have I thought our teachers might have talked us out of
might
and
would
and
should,
had they given us a clearer feeling for the purple ache rewarded to engorged, hypothesizing
genitalia? No lingual rhetoric, to my mind, engages so severely as that rhetoric ascending
from the testes. There ought some day to be a way of corresponding more completely
with the testes, a drug, perhaps, a cream our teachers might apply that would direct
and satisfy our sexual persuasions, a probe an expert might insert through the urethra,
a microphone that might be
fitted to the probe to monitor the prostate, an earhorn for the labia majora. What
secrets might she shout at us, I wonder, should we lend our ear to her, what joys?
Glans penis, Grand Lamentable. Too often in my life, an anticlimax there reiterates:
I might,
it goes,
I should, I would, too late.
Surely, had we better understood each other, myself and my Lamentable, the life we
might have made up for ourselves and those most near to us must be an unimaginably
harmonious creation. Who could imagine? How many live according to a smoothly integrated
partnership of self and sex? Violence and mishap, these are the precedent creators
of our histories as humankind; in the beginning was not the word, but the rape, and
from the rape descended slaveries and holocausts and myths we tell ourselves to help
us to transcend them. Someone, somewhere, somehow ought to spare us please the myth,
give us back into our flesh, before the rape, redeliver us to that initial wash of
urge and faith we want to know is love.

Says my wife, “We should have fucked.”

This is how we talk about that day today. An oil pan cracks, the boy is bruised, and
there we find ourselves, our days done, our sleeps to come, retired to our chairs
to bicker.

“You idiot,” says my wife, “I was asking you at least to fuck me.”

Neither one of us, I think, must be to blame. We were becoming increasingly, equally
middle-classed. We believed in the same sun. We believed in the word, thought we talked,
were determined to inject some say in how our lives unfolded. We made our way out
of the desert, tried to scale ourselves back, sold the Olds, took our suppers at my
father’s suitcase. We were “getting back to basics.” On our porch we kept a box in
which we were to put those items least essential to ourselves, any garment or
appliance undemonstrative of our simple wants we might deliver to Good Will. We would
be honest. We must not be rash, but recognize ourselves from time to time by way of
reason. If we sometimes found we missed the Olds, or were soon back in the habit of
the chair and table, we told each other this was nothing hostile to our simplemost
desires, but rather was an indication of our having met with “human nature.” It was
“only natural” to sit in chairs, only natural that when my wife would hold a dress
up to herself we both agreed that she should keep it. I found within my nature reason
to retain a pair of snakeskull cufflinks, my first phonograph, a leaky innertube,
a broken compass, a bit, a wing, a wire, a map describing Union maneuvers at Antietam,
a sketch I made when I was very young once of my dearest rock. Naturally, we might
have seen in the advance of so much reason a retreat from nature. We might have doubted
our integrity, I think, when we discovered we were able in the end to give up nothing
to Good Will. Here we are, we might have said, the same old sledge and garlic press
away from finding what we ever really wanted.

I think that we had listened to a story told too young to us. The story was too big
for us, grew as we grew, moved faster as we aged and overwhelmed us. I think we told
each other, “We are naked,” and believed it. Hadn’t we said the sky was lacquered?
Hadn’t we worn our summers in the winter? Look at us, we said, we still fuck in change-rooms.
We never bought ourselves a papered Lab. No, no, not at all. Ours was a pound dog,
an anti-Lab, a squeezling of a failing Pomeranian concocted by a roguish Pug. Beverly,
we called him, in broad daylight, and nights did not discourage him from lapping us
where we were coupled. These cannot have been the teachings that our papas and our
mamas urged; the story anybody told on us must be distinguished by unprecedented style.

Who, in Winnemucca, had preceded us? Certainly, we were the first inhabitants of O.
To get to us a person drove a dusty road through creosote and shadscale from the last
developed block at D. Ours was an outpost, a visionary overleap of E through N. We
held hands, walked the chalky lot, praised the dust, forebore the sun, ignored the
threats from family and friends that nothing green on earth could grow there. We bought
cheap. We drew up plans on grocery sacks, discussing innovative ways of making shade
from canvasses and tin, cinderblock and thatching. If it wouldn’t grow up green, we
said, then we could paint it green; if the wind would not stop blowing dust, then
we could redirect it. We submitted our desires to an architect, who submitted his
translations of our desires to the city. Then we raised our walls, shingled our roof,
installed a garden. Against all senior, native counsel, we had a go at growing ivy
on the chainlink, we strove to grow an oak. When our building days were over, we stood
at our window and gazed across the roughly virgin land through waves of heat to those
few waterslides and swingsets marking out the farthest prior reaches of our settlement
at D. We kissed, happy to perceive ourselves as pioneers.

Hooray for us,
we said,
how happy now; see how Beverly rejoices!

Yet how did we sustain ourselves? When we observed how closely subsequent translations
of desire from citizen to architect resembled ours in style, what story had convinced
us of our stylistic independence? When D Street filled its lots, and E Street, and
when ground was broken up the road on O, and we received our first few calls from
neighbors having cited Beverly harassing bitches down on J, then where were we to
find our pioneer’s perspective, what visionary distance did we trust we carried in
us which would be forever undeveloped? We all raised lawn. The north sides of our
streets would have their trash collected every Tuesday, the south sides every Friday.
We all agreed to pavement. Security lights. A neighbor was appointed “watchdog” to
investigate the distribution of the city’s tax. We all paid equally, relatively, the
man who lived in the house on the streets named after trees was no better or no worse
than those of us who lived in houses on the streets named after letters. Under the
law, by common sense and human decency and under Washington and Jefferson and God,
what single person’s life should we demean in standing next to any single other’s?
The king was dead. The Bi Rite offered each of us the same imported fruits. We breathed
the same air. We spread the same virus. We consented to be similarly ruled, stopped
at reds, went at greens and hunted autumns; we each of us, we all agreed, deserved
to have his roof put out if it was burning; K deserved to be policed as thoroughly
as Maple.

Here, here! Here, here! I said, with all the rest, yet when I left the hall where
we had gathered—its high, bright corners, scents of health and sickness, aftershave
and lanolin, intimations of a near-familial longing, its wool, its plaid, its cobbler
and its scalded coffee and innumerable plastic cups of ladled punch—when I left this
place, and I was outside, on the sidewalk, and the night drew wide and cold and darkly
starward, I was mercifully recovered. To myself. For the moment, several steps, a
block or two, I felt a rapid, upward surging forth from me and felt I had been saved.
This sky, I thought, those stars, I felt, these rushing, depth-charged cells here
in my chest must be my equal. I passed my neighbors’ leafless plantlings, trees and
one-day hedges, and I recalled myself among them and was able to believe that it was
me to whom they had aspired; I told myself that it was not my money, nor my vote they
wanted of my brief attendance in their halls, but my
idea.
I meant
what they meant to mean. I talked this way. This is how I felt. I saw myself again
as my idea of myself, as I was able to believe my neighbors must have seen me. I loaned
myself. I went seemingly. I could not be wholly touched. I was where anybody wanted
to be. Going home. I was going home. I felt able to foresee myself from any neighbor’s
window. I could hear them. They said,
If I could only look in plaid the way that Lincoln Dahl looks. If my lawn could be
that shade of green.
I wanted my neighbors to borrow tools, solicit my opinion, covet my entire wife.
They stood at their sinks, wrist deep, congealing and demeaned. They said,
How do they do it? They kiss,
they said,
they’re too old for holding hands in public.
Nor was I alone then. It was my wife, after all, who understood the charm in holding
hands. She was a modern woman, she explained, she had always guessed a ladle would
refute her; she would not have seen herself confirmed in soup.
Look at us,
we said,
look at us,
and we were able to recover for each other blessed tendrils from our early days in
rapture.
Look at us,
we said, and paid a mortgage.
Look at us,
we said, and smiled at strangers.
Look at us,
we said, and made a child. And what a child! We knew the hour of his conception,
were alert to his unparalleled development, made plans for him to share in our unprecedented
future.