The Unknown Knowns (4 page)

“I'm sorry I said you play with models. How's that?” She poked me under the arm, a vulnerable spot. “Truce?”

I refused her extended hand and with it her offer of détente. To accept would have been a breach of my stated position, and then the whole thing would have crumbled.

“I'm sorry I said you stole my razor.”

I gave her a hurt look, trying not to move the muscles of my face, which is impossible. The hurt look requires a squinching of the eyebrows and the slight protrusion of the lower lip.

“Ha!” She poked with both hands now, index-fingering both my underarms. “You moved. Game over, Jim!”

I tried not to use my lips when I said, “It's not the razor. It's that you don't believe in me.” I felt like the most depressing ventriloquist on earth. Try saying the word
believe
without moving your mouth. “You don't believe in me anymore.” Next came the pleasant sting of tears, not from sadness but from keeping my eyes open too long. I wondered if even this tiny reflex action would count as moving.

“I do
deleeth,
” said Jean, mocking me. I held my position. She saw the tears in my eyes.

“No—come on,” she said, putting her face so close to mine that I could see the inconsistencies in her lip gloss application. “I believe in Jim.”

She put an arm around my rigid shoulders, now aching and starting to cramp. “I believe in the old Jim. I like the nerdy comics guy Jim. Bookmobile Jim. Sea Monkey Jim. But there has to be a part of your life that's not that. I'm not saying you're obsessed.
Okay, you're obsessed. But maybe that's
my
problem. Maybe you need somebody who—”

“I don't need somebody who.” My lips were still not moving, so the word
somebody
came out sounding like
sundoddy
. A tear had found its way into the trough that goes from the nostril to the corner of your mouth. Whatever that's called. I couldn't think of the name of it, but it tickled anyway. Still, I held fast to my position.

“Well,” she said, releasing my shoulders. I saw the diplomacy dry up. The window had closed. She was done. “Maybe that's my point.”

 

By nine o'clock that night I had allowed my knees to buckle. Soon I was kneeling on the linoleum, my forehead resting against cool stainless steel. I was actively revising the rules, or adding new corollaries to the old rules. I thought that allowing gravity to do its work wasn't, technically speaking, moving. Not in an active sense, not with malice aforethought and all. Out of the corner of one eye I could see the minutes ticking by on my Helvner.

Maybe,
I remember thinking,
maybe this
is
getting ridiculous. Maybe you should just leave, Jim. Go to the Hilton. Let Jean think about things while you're gone.
I was tired of playing the martyr. If she wanted me—the actual Jim, Sea Monkey Jim—she could make the next move. Why should
I
always have to make the next move?

I recall that being my reasoning at the time, which in retrospect seems kind of flawed.

When I stood up, my knees clicked. The sound was like a death sentence, a clicky death sentence. I didn't recall my knees making noises before. I was thirty-eight years old in the worst way possible.

Rep. Neil Frost:
Son, I'm sure your lawyers have briefed you on why we wanted you here.

 

Agent Les Diaz:
Yes, Congressman. I've been briefed.

 

Rep. Frost:
We just want you to answer as honestly, clearly, and completely as you can.

 

Diaz:
I make it my policy never to do otherwise.

 

Rep. Frost:
Good for you, son. You comfortable? Want some water? Get some water in here for Agent Diaz.

 

Diaz:
That won't be necessary.

I
t was 9:45 by the dashboard clock when I eased out of the condo parking lot. My shoulders still felt crampy from standing still so long. Through the windshield I took one last look at our curtains to see if Jean was watching me leave. She was not. So I honked, flashed my brights, and waited a minute. Still nothing.

My first stop was the Hot Mart, for my customary Paycheck bar. At 10:15 I reached the Hilton hotel and pulled the hand brake on the Corolla without depressing the little thumb button at the end. I didn't care if it made that ratchety noise. I felt reckless and fatalistic. Like I'd played the Lyre of Doom and was now ready to face whatever interdimensional hydra I'd summoned forth.

The sliding glass doors of the Hilton lobby slid open and I accepted their whispered invitation. Corey gave me a what's-up signal but I was too bummed to respond in kind.

“You don't look so good,” he said. I neither denied this nor confirmed it. Corey could see in me whatever he wanted to see.

He informed me that the pool was being “serviced,” a word that aroused my suspicions. I was told to “cool it” for an hour or so. I took a seat in the lobby to wait. The sofa suite at the hotel is Colonial-style, decorated with some kind of brocade showing military life in the period reflected in the design of the furniture. It was, I always thought, like embroidering a midcentury modern love seat with a picture of the atomic bomb. My eyebrows, I realized, had been arched for some time. I returned them to their default position and settled back into the imperialist upholstery.

With my three-ring binder on my knee I began to organize my thoughts for the evening's session. This was not easy, of course, given my delicate state. Whenever I fought with Jean it didn't just make me upset, it had an impact on my sense of being. I was always surprised that I still commanded a presence at all, that I occupied space and moved through it. That in my opinion is the most creepy symptom of regret, the sense that you are dislocated from existence. It took Corey's “what's up” to remind me that I
was
. If this sounds dramatic, it's not nearly as dramatic as it felt at the time. I was attached to Jean with ontological tentacles. Jim and Jean. Jean and Jim.

I moved my eyes back and forth, and the dim museum of my brain showed me one familiar tableau after another. The hotel desk, where the poseable figure of Corey sat drawing pictures on a cocktail napkin. The pool area, where patio furniture crouched menacing and spidery in the dark around an impassive black lake. Back to Corey again, whose realistic details had shifted in the short interval like actual organic matter, flesh and breath. To the left of the desk I saw the bank of elevators. The lights above the doors
suggested the rise and fall of real passengers through actual floors. By scanning the room in this manner, seeing it as a series of discrete dioramas, I was verifying my own subjectivity in the face of the Jean situation.

It was nearly 10:45 by the time the maintenance man cleared out and Corey gave me the green light to enter the pool area. The pool is housed in an extension off one side of the hotel. And though it might be an enticement to a weary traveler on the belt-way, it's kind of a rip-off when you actually get inside. The patio furniture looks wrought-iron but it's really powder-coated aluminum. The tiled floor is of Spanish derivation, polished like they're begging for a lawsuit. But look closer and you can see the flamenco characters are SpongeBob and his starfish friend. The water laps with genuine fervor against the sides of the pool, but the air is redolent of feet and bleach.

After hours they keep the pool area dark, but the mercury-vapor lamps shine in from the parking lot to project a mirror of the pool on the glass walls. A lesser intellect might be fooled by this, might not know where the water ends and the solid world begins, but I have no trouble with illusions. I know them too well.

I stole to the edge of the water, avoiding eye contact with the surveillance camera, per Corey's instructions. Where the tiles give way to a glazed blue lip I slid in, toes pointed, until I was submerged up to my collarbone. I strapped on my scuba mask, an old-fashioned Cousteau job made of natural rubber. It's got plenty of face suction and the Plexiglas is so thick it might even be bulletproof. Though I wouldn't want to test this hypothesis.

I pinched my nose and blew out to attain a more amphibious pressure in the ear canal. Then I slipped the nozzle of the
snorkel between my lips and wetted it with my tongue. On better nights, the snorkel had the rubbery flavor of adventure, and often I hung there sucking on the nozzle and dreaming of past explorers of note—Sir Ernest Shackleton, Ponce de León, and Mungo Park. But that night the nozzle tasted like nothing but imminent failure.

The lead shot in my pockets dragged my body to the bottom, and I stood there for some time trying to enter the semiamphibious state of
ooeee,
but it was no good. I couldn't focus. When I tried the circular breathing, I could feel myself start to hyperventilate. I tried to summon up Nautika, the wondrous domed city, Queen Ô enthroned in Her grand alabaster ovum. But all I could think about was the noise. You know what I'm talking about, that weird noise in hotel pools, like if you glued a contact mike to a housefly and broadcast it over a transistor radio. It's sexy and nagging and reminds me of Jean.

Anyway, the
ooeee
was a no-go. Eventually I gave up, surfaced, and toweled off. On the way out I gave Corey a silent valediction. He responded with the two-handed big breasts signal and pointed toward the elevator. I heard the doors slide shut without looking at what I presumed was an ample-bosomed woman riding up to her room. On an ordinary night I would have definitely looked, but this was not an ordinary night.

In the parking lot I stood for a while gazing up at the sky. Which is really something you can't gaze
at
but
into,
because it doesn't end. How far can we look when we're looking into infinity? There must be a limit to human sight. I thought I should look that up. Then it occurred to me, standing there gazing into the night sky, that gazing into the night sky was something losers did and I got even more depressed.

So it was with heavy heart that I dropped into the driver's seat of my Corolla. I switched the key to the Electrical position and the dashboard glowed like an aquarium. If there was a button on the dash that I could press and send the car through a wormhole into a parallel universe without Jims, I would have gladly pressed that button. But there is no such button. Instead I started the car. And I drove out of the parking lot into a different kind of parallel universe, one that was so sucky it hurts to describe it.

Fifteen minutes later, I was in the doorway of our town house. Almost at once I felt something, or the lack of something, emanating from within. It was, I would soon discover, the negative energy of loneliness, and it filled the vessel of my being with all the intensity of very bad sinus pressure. Every light in the apartment was burning, but I knew in an instant, I knew, my feet not even across the threshold, that my home had been drained of love. I rushed to the bedroom. The bra drawer stood bare.

I said it aloud: “That's it; she's left me.” But was I convinced of this? Not yet. I was just trying out the expression on my tongue, readying the organ of speech for the impact on the organ of misery. Then I found Jean's “good-bye note,” and I wasn't practicing anymore. It was true; she'd left me.

I call it a note, but there wasn't any note to speak of, not in the verbal sense. No tearstained condolence card or “screw you” lipsticked on the bathroom mirror. She didn't scribble anything on the back of a utility-bill envelope like “I know this will be difficult for you, Jim,” or “Someday I hope we can talk, Jim,” or “These years together, Jim, have meant so much to me, but…”

But.

On the kitchen island I found my cherished copy of
Sub-Mariner
No. 6. A paring knife pinned it to the countertop. Which must have taken excessive force because the surface is a slab of solid butcher block and our knives aren't exactly Henckels. I needed to give my hands something to do, so I rubbed them together. Then I used them to rub my face. Then I wiped my nose on the collar of my shirt. Then I scrubbed the collar with a damp paper towel.

I tossed the paper towel across the room, where it landed on the sofa. “Damn her!” I shouted, or wish I'd shouted. Why take this out on Prince Namor? (NM!; $125!; “The Sub-Mariner Fights the Periscope Peril!”) Why take our marital trouble there, to the comic-book front? Jean considered my comics rivals for her affections, but why? I guess I'll never know. True, I often ran to them for consolation and what you might call succor when my wife's arms would have done the job. But, honestly, I was never selfish with my inner life. Never. I invited her in. I opened the door to my inner life and made the sweeping gesture. Please, Jean, after you!

But instead of stepping inside to see her husband's marvelous passions up close, what did she do? She joined a book club. They met three nights a week that summer. What kind of book club meets that often? And that's where she met the cabinetmaker. I think he played rugby. When I saw the Sub-Mariner comic pinned to the countertop, I thought immediately of this guy. I didn't even know his name, had never laid eyes on him, but I could picture him all right. He was in the scrum, or whatever they call that stupid sublimated homosexual orgy. His ass in the air and his large hands callused by years gripping an auger or a jigsaw. Now they're gripping the toned hamstrings of an opponent. He's so equal to
the moment, this guy! So—I don't know—engaged with life. The buttocks tell you all you need to know. Very, very, very firm—too firm for flesh inside those mud-spattered nylon shorts. I gave this a lot of thought and nearly cried.

As a boy I had never been afraid to weep. Mother told me that only men and the emotionally paralyzed can't cry, so I tried to show her that her little boy was neither. I bawled my eyes out as often as possible. I wept at every stubbed toe and every imagined slight. And whenever I cried Mom took me to the Kress for a candy bar. (Yes, the Paycheck—sweet, chocolaty nexus of emotion!) Which may explain my rapid weight gain in elementary school, the tearful calls home from the principal's office, and the names they called me. In playground terminology I was a textbook “crybaby” and also a “fatty.” Or, when facing the most ruthless foes, a “fatty crybaby fatty-fatty.” Later, I was just a “fag.”

But when I grew up, I stopped crying. I lost weight. It's not that I wasn't sad. It was like the tear machine rusted up. Maybe something had jammed in my lacrimal ducts. Maybe I was becoming the thing my mother feared most for me, either an emotional paralytic or a man.

So there I was standing at the kitchen island, rocking the paring knife back and forth to save poor Prince Namor (even though I knew this issue would never be Near Mint again, knowing it was Good at best and would command no more than $45 from only the most pitying or nearsighted collector). And there I was trying to cry, but the crying wouldn't come. I was a maudlin, tearless knife extractor. I wanted so bad to punish Jean with my hot tears. But I couldn't cry and she'd never be there to see it if I did. Besides, what kind of a dicky move was that, punishing her with hot tears? I was such a dick.

Left with little recourse, I went to a bar. And it was there that the real trouble started, the trouble you know about, the trouble that made the news and landed me here with an ankle bracelet. It was on that very night that I first laid eyes on the Nautikon. My life's only pursuit and my life's final disappointment. He was drinking alone at a corner booth in a hotel bar. But now I'm getting way ahead of myself.

 

When I walked into the lobby, Corey looked up stiffly. His head popped out of his neck brace, turtlelike, and he regarded me with a kind of glazed-over alarm. His eyes were bagged but his hands were awake. They scuttled across the desk at the sound of the sliding glass doors. I could see that he was covering something up with a brochure, and when I got closer I understood why. He'd passed his shift making dozens of drawings of Red Sonja in all kinds of demeaning positions.

“What are you doing back, Mega-Brow?” he said. It was a nickname.

I winced but tried to shape-shift the expression into a smile. “
Sub-Mariner
No. 6,” I said.

“The one with MacArthur?”

“No, the issue after, Chor-Boy.” This was another nickname, spoken here with malice.

“Dude, you have that?”

“
Had
. She destroyed it.” This wasn't entirely true. I'd finished the job, feeding it into a shredder and then strewing the remains across our marital bed. It was an act.

“Man, you have
got
to leave that wench,” said Corey, my friend.

“Yeah.”

The hotel bar is just past the front desk, through a pair of high green doors that never seem to close. The place is called Rambles! (The exclamation point is not my own; it's actually on the sign.) Rambles! remains crowded until well after midnight principally because they offer complimentary popcorn. You can order one beer and enjoy a bottomless basket. The decor is some kind of bizarre Manifest Destiny motif. Murals of the Northwest Passage adorn two walls. And the banquettes are made out of barrel staves and wagon wheels, if you can picture something so homespun and moronic. I picked an empty one close to the door, ordered a beer for the sake of the popcorn, and sat there examining my own escalating sense of doom.

At the bar sat three unattached women, a vacant stool beside each one for spacing purposes. The bartender was an ex-Marine whose nose I had always suspected of being false. He'd worked as an explosives expert in Gulf I, which probably explains a lot. It was difficult in the dim light of Rambles! to work out the man's true age, but he always nursed a miniature can of cranberry juice, a sure sign of urinary-tract trouble.