The Afterlife (19 page)

Rentschler had been gazing so steadily at the house across the street that it took him a second to realize she meant her own. “Sure,” he said. “I’ve never been in it before. The old lady who lived here when I was a kid hated kids.” The swish of traffic was slackening on Chestnut Street, and there were no lights on at the front of his old house, just an unsteady upstairs phosphorescence indicating the presence of a television set, or perhaps an aquarium with a flickering bulb. From that lonely house he would cross Chestnut Street and come play with Wilma Anna. In her back yard there was an enchanted, luxurious plaything, a white wooden swing, two facing seats suspended in a frame upon which morning glories had been encouraged to grow. She in her starchy little dress would swing forward as he swung back, and then backward as
he swung toward her, her face in the sun-dapple utterly solemn and dimly expectant, the way girls’ faces were, her upper lip lifted to expose a wet gleam of teeth.

Georgene Mueller’s living room, as wide as her house minus the width of a set of unused stairs, contained the usual goblet of candy on an end table, next to a sullen brown plush sofa. Noticing the direction of his eyes, she said, “Have a piece. That’s what it’s there for.”

He removed the fragile glass lid, with its round red-tinted knob. The candy was not hard, in twists of cellophane, but leftover Halloween candy: three-tone corn kernels, grinning pumpkins, and conical witches’ hats, chewy but not too gummy for his bridgework. For twenty-nine dollars, he figured he could sneak three or four, while his hostess moved into the next room. “When Jake left,” she was saying, as if Rentschler knew who Jake was, “I was so mad I took the little savings account we had and blew it on the dining room; the people before us had had it as such a dull dark room and Jake always said it was good enough, we ate in the kitchen anyway.”

The room was not dull now. Spanishness was the theme, from a wrought-iron chandelier with violet candles to wall mirrors with wide baroque frames of encrusted fake silver. Artificial beams had been placed along the ceiling, descending to jutting oaken brackets as if in a California mission, above panels of three-dimensional imitation stonework; behind the mirrors a silvery wallpaper was patterned in blown-up Victorian steel engravings, like a Max Ernst collage repeated over and over. Magical caves: that was how the houses over here had always seemed to him. “Lovely,” Rentschler said, through the chewy Halloween candy. “Really striking.”

She pondered his verdict and the walls of the room, where
a few prints of staring deer, shadow-boxed in velvet, completed the effect. “It was a fancy of mine,” she said. “That’s one blessing about being alone, you can do what you want.”

Yes—you grow into the spaces the absent have left you. Rentschler had already noticed how, with the distant pressure of his mother’s existence lifted, his personality had begun to expand, distorting into a shape that half frightened him. His new talkativeness, for instance—a reaching out, where he had always taken pride in being self-reliant, going west like a tight-lipped pioneer, becoming an alien. “How long have you lived here, altogether?” he asked this other solitary. Her solid-black hair was tightly curled and her movements were brisk, even twitchy, with reserves of energy waiting to be tapped.

“Thirteen years, it’ll be. For the last seven I’ve supported myself. It’s hard,” she said, “but you make do. Your mother made do, too, I don’t doubt. I have to rent out my upstairs here, I couldn’t get by without the extra. This is my bedroom—do you mind passing through? I thought you’d like to see the back yard.”

“I would, yes. I used to play in the back yard next door.”

“She keeps it up real nice. Flowers back to the alley like her parents always had, and she just had that garden swing painted again. She cares for it like it’s a real antique.”

Rentschler was lost. “Who does?”

“Why, Wilma Anna!”

“You mean she’s still
here?
”

“Oh, sure. Still here. All alone. She never married. Though lately she has a boy friend comes calling, I never noticed one before. She goes to movies now, and shows in town. I don’t think she’s home now even, or you could go say hello.”

“Wilma Anna Emmelfoss. I can’t believe she’s still here. That was fifty years ago we used to play together.”

“Her mother went quick, but her dad, oh, he lingered something dreadful.”

“You wouldn’t believe what a pretty little girl she was, always in these dresses that seemed very fancy to everybody else. We were only children, the two of us.”

“She still dresses nice. For her work, you know. She sells advertising for the paper in town. There, you can see her swing through the kitchen window.”

Leaning over an aluminum sink, Rentschler could barely make out a patch of white in the darkness, and a blurred white framework around it: the arbor that had sheltered them as children, swinging back and forth, back and forth, a sulky quizzical look on Wilma Anna’s careful face, with its wide forehead and pointed chin, flickering through shadows and sun quicker than the eye could sort out. “Yes, I see it,” he said politely.

“And here’s my pride and joy,” said his hostess. “My little piece of heaven.” She led him out the back door, and they stared up the rise of her trim back yard, with a center walk of cement arrowing back to the alley. Rentschler’s heart seemed to swell again, pumping too hard. These secret yards, straight and narrow, had been the essence of the happiness on this side of the street: lush flower beds along the walk, a patch of lawn with some lawn furniture, a shed containing hoses and rakes, an apple tree or two to represent an orchard, low fences of picket or playground wire, each quarter-acre in strict parallel with one’s neighbors’, and the far end holding a garage and opening onto the freedom of the alley. Rentschler inhaled Hayesville happiness; he saw his entire life, past and to come, as an errant encircling of this forgotten center. His childhood back yard—the bloody stump, the frightened stupid chickens, the vegetable rows that always needed weeding—had been
comparatively sad and disorderly. His family had not quite had the Hayesville secret. It was right that they had been forced to move.

He inhaled the moist darkness again and listened dimly to Georgene Mueller’s detailing of the flowers she cultivated, the quince tree whose fruit she made jelly of, the storage shed and stone bench she had ordered from a supply house—her single life stubbornly exerting its pressure back against the pressure of the world.

Returning to the gaudy kitchen, with plaid Formica on all the counters, Rentschler looked once more at Wilma Anna’s white embowering swing, and tried to imagine her life here, all those static years: it was unimaginable, like the life of a tree. For his mother’s solitude, Rentschler felt largely responsible, and amid the undercurrents of this encounter he was acquiring a hallucinatory responsibility for this woman’s—at least, a touch of guilt at the tug of her tight dyed curls, her undischarged energy. But in regard to Wilma Anna’s majestically rooted life he felt nothing but wonder.

On the way out, he was going to avoid the tempting candy, but the notary public said, “Take some. It’ll just go stale otherwise. The children don’t come around like they used to. A lot of the parents don’t let them out, what with the maniacs you read about who put poison and things in the treats.” She had suddenly become querulous, and tired. They moved in silence together through the darkened sun porch; the slight fever of their intimacy, which had peaked in the back yard, had subsided. Rentschler felt dismissed. Stepping into the glittery November chill, he was dazzled to see the house on the other side of the street ablaze; the porch light and front-room lamps were lit up as if to welcome a visitor, a visitor, it seemed clear to him, long expected and much beloved.

The outward appearances of these women told him almost nothing: some of the prettiest and daintiest turned out to have cold fingers and a merciless touch, whereas some of the plainest, with doughy humorless faces and rimless glasses, enveloped him in velvet sensations. Today’s (a total stranger, as was always the case; the turnover was terrific, suggesting an overheated profession susceptible to stress, pregnancy, and tempting offers from rival establishments) led her customer with a nunnish severity to her little, heavily equipped room and offered him, as she settled him onto his back, only the most grudging small talk. Yet as soon as she touched his mouth he knew that he was home, that she was a rare one, one he could trust not to hurt him more than necessary. The threat of pain was the mystical spice to these liaisons, the Heaven-sent menace that on both sides of the relationship concentrated the attention.

Heaven here was a ceiling of acoustical tiles, perforated irregularly in order to entertain trapped eyes like his. The angelic music was from an “easy listening” station—every third tune, it seemed to him, that nonsensical croon about Key Largo, Bogie and Bacall, here’s looking at you, kid, have it all.…

“Turn your head toward me, please.” Occasionally, one of her bare forearms brushed his ear or nose, stirring up in a small, pollenlike cloud the scent of spanking clean female flesh. Because of AIDS, they wore surgical masks now, and disposable plastic gloves. Death has always been the possible price of contact, but as contacts have multiplied, so have possibilities, forming a continuous moist membrane for viral self-advancement. She worked along his lower gum line, pausing periodically to wipe one of her oblique, needle-sharp instruments on a napkin folded on the plastic tray beside her, next to his head. Some women he had had in the past used his chest as a table, resting their tools on his paper bib—making a small, unprofessional joke, he felt, of their bodily intimacy. This one would never so trespass. Though his open mouth, with its rim of teeth, and the round plastic tray, with its serrated edges, might closely alternate in the field of her attention, she would never imply that they were interchangeable. The tray was merely a thing, whereas the mouth was connected to nerves and a soul—to an ego inside a thing. A sensitive, self-solicitous thing. Her touch, as it methodically travelled along, magnified his tiny dental surfaces, transforming the bumps and crevices of enamel and its porcelain counterfeit into a continuous plane of now dim, now vivid nervous apprehension. Her voice descended: “A little sore tissue under these bridges. Don’t be afraid to get up in there with the floss.”

Silently, in prayer’s shouting inner voice, he assured her that he henceforth would not be afraid, would
not
. He did not speak for fear of dislodging the muttering saliva ejector, which was shaped like a question mark. Sometimes his roving eyes flicked into her own, then leaped away, overwhelmed by their glory, their—as the deconstructionists say—
presence
. His
glance didn’t dare linger even long enough to register the color of these eyes; he gathered only the spiritual, starlike afterimage of their living gel, simultaneously crystalline and watery, behind the double barrier of her glasses and safety goggles, above the shield-shaped paper mask hiding her mouth, her chin, her nostrils. So much of her was enwrapped, protected. Only her essentials were allowed to emerge, like a barnacle’s feathery appendages—her touch and her steadfast, humorless gaze.

“Now, away from me a little. Not quite so much. Perfect.”

Perfect
. Would that he were. She more than anyone knew how imperfect he was. How rotten, in a word. Sinking beyond the reach of shame, he relaxed into her exploration and scarification of his lower molars, corrupt wrecks just barely salvaged from the ruin of his years of heedless, sugar-oriented consumption. Doughnuts, candied peanuts, Snickers bars, licorice sticks, chocolate-coated raisins
… Mea culpa, domina
.

Her attentions, pricking and probing on the ticklish edge of pain, formed as it were a cradle of interwoven curves, from the plump meat of the ball of her thumb tangent upon his upper lip to the arc of her masked face bent an inch or two above his nose. Woven of long soft strands of tactful touch and unstated, clinical thought, she was a kind of basket inverted above him, a woven hut, a yurt; her staring black pupils were the size of the perforations in the acoustic ceiling. She was seeing, and forgiving even as she saw, a side of himself he had never had to face—a microbe-ridden, much-repaired underside. She had an angle on him that he was spared. Other people in general possess this, this instant purchase on the specifics of an exterior self mercifully vague in its self-perception. But their case, his and hers, seemed extreme, like something from a supermarket tabloid or a Harlequin romance.
Serenely she presided above his supine abasement. Done with the lowers, she told him to sit up and “have a good rinse.” He spit. Blood, his blood, appeared in the ecru bowl animated by centripetal water. His blood was stringy and spitty and dark. He was even more loathsome than in his humblest moments he had dreamed.

And still she returned to the bout, tackling his uppers, commanding him to open wider. At her faintly more aggressive tone, a sense of counter-striving invaded his body; he seemed to arch upward in the chair, fitting himself with a distinct push into her ministrations. Her flesh, as it touched his, had a resilience slightly greater than that of a cigarette pack, a warmth a bit less than that of a flashlight face, a humidity even more subtle than that of laundry removed five minutes too soon from the dryer. She was made for him, of the same imperilled and fallible substance, yet also woven of Heaven, unpossessable, timeless, inviolate, though focused in her every atom upon him, indeed nonexistent but for him, like air made blue by our own vision, and burned into life by our lungs.