Two Stories

Human Remains


He drinks so slow I don’t know whether to feel put on or just alcoholic. He spits talking and my face is in the way so what’s the dignified response. His work has to do with spreadsheets and he dresses like he’s sorry about it. He has this pudgy perma-smile. I feel fake trying to return it, which is itself fake, which is etc. If I put this bristling aside, we could do this again and again until we find ourselves at the end of a more pleasant life together than most people will ever know, but life’s too short.

Anyone has a right to leave anyone for any reason and will even if they don’t but things were so good I’d shoot you if death weren’t a thing. When I say what I mean I always regret it. I’ll never forget you called staying with anyone foreclosing on someone better, which is true. All my attempts to deny this with love have come from somewhere dirty and mean.

Spit’s on my cheek. He’s talking about his dad. His dad Cliff was 25 years older than his mother Grace. Cliff got rich owning muscle car dealerships in the ‘60s. His first wife left him. Between alimony and gin he spent the ‘70s poor. He met Grace at a wharf bar half as bright as this one. This feels like great practice for someone I’ll like better but each new day means that’s less likely. Better people are everywhere and lonely but just try to find one. Okay, now what. Spit’s on my other cheek.

Cliff and Grace get married and have a baby, an accident, this spreadsheet man. Ending him is not in their values, plus they love him, so they need more money forever. Cliff buys a five-room houseboat with his last dollar from a nepo-hippie at the pier. They dock it there. This is back when it’s not just tourists but also fishermen and layabouts. The whole boat is mauve. They try a bed-and-breakfast. Bay tours. A floating playschool once the hippies trust them. Candles.

If you cremate someone, you need a permit to scatter them. But out in water, only the boat needs a permit. Cliff gets one from the city. They live off referrals from hippies, who always know someone grieving. Cliff sails out every afternoon. His baby is halfway through his drink. He grew up on this boat.

Some mail ashes in advance. Travel problems, or they make peace with loneliness a little early and they’re scared they’ll change their mind. Cliff has a blue convertible from his dealership days. He drives it to the post office to pick up urns, pouches, whatever, every morning. Once there’s only a little oak box he drives back to the pier and leaves on the passenger seat while he checks on Grace. She has a headache. His car gets jacked.

Cliff faces what my chin-spitter calls a moral dilemma. Does he tell the widow her husband’s gone for the second and last time? No one’s hurt if he doesn’t. The crisis passed. Here it is. He calls the cops, then the widow.

The next morning, the cops call back. They couldn’t find the car but they found, where Cliff said he parked, a pile of human remains. He calls the widow. Oh, she says. He was always trying to get away from me.

In love there’s no final anything. What if I hold out so long the better one comes late? What if he finds me on the curb, dumped by a thief? What if, being remains, I have no mouth to say fine, you. What if the wind just throws me at his shoe. What if that’s the waited-for. What if he steps on me like dogshit. There’s too much loneliness to bother with but this or else what. Love is one attempt to walk away from this but there are others.

He offers another drink. I say goodbye so maybe I’m not that alcoholic. It’s windy black outside. There’s no meaningful way to say this but I’ve never been so sad.

Petra


I have so much tenderness I’d kill for it. I did something wrong today.

I took Moxie to the vet. She wouldn’t stop licking herself. She’d lick her furry patches down to scaly brown skin, and she’d still lick. The vet called it hygienic neurosis and put a big clear cone around Moxie’s neck. I got tranquilizer pills in case the cone didn’t work.

A woman was fixed on me in the waiting room. She was turned straight at me from her chair a few chairs down. She looked at me wide-eyed. She had straight long black hair that didn’t move. She had a narrow body under thin clothes. The vet brought out Moxie howling hollow in that cone, her tail swishing crazy. I got up and took her and that woman got up and followed me out and we got in our cars. I drove home with her behind me.

She had a little green sedan with dark windows. I could see her face in my rearview through that dark. She was wide-eyed. Her forehead was wide and crinkled. It’s a few minutes home. She took every turn. I could’ve turned down more backroads but I never do anything like that and I wondered what she’d do. I’ve lived with a crazy woman named Sarah with crazy eyes and these weren’t crazy. And Moxie was already yowling in the car.

She flew out when I opened the door. She scuttled in nervy circles, neck bent, knocking that cone against the driveway, so I picked her up. I put her down in the kitchen. I have this big bright window to watch from but nothing ever happens. I watched that woman watch me, wide-eyed in her car. She had a tire smooshed on the curb.

She had no pet in there. Maybe she left it with the vet, dying maybe. Moxie was scowling trying to chew through the cone, so I fed her a spoon of tranquilizer pills in peanut butter. Then I came back to the window and saw not one thing. The next afternoon she was parked again, looking. Her face was not creased. She looked calm. She did not look like a woman who would hurt me though anyone could.

I cracked open the window and yelled at her to come in for coffee. I had a pot going. I left the front door open so she wouldn’t ring and wake Moxie, who was belly-up by the sink. I met her at the door. I didn’t want to force her to talk, and she didn’t. She stared in a way that made me hate her a little for making me think I did something wrong when it was only me doing anything and nothing came of it. I put the hate away and brushed my hand over her smooth hair and smiled and felt stupid. She closed the door behind her coming in, gentle, like she was sneaking out.

The first thing she said, halfway through her coffee, was I looked like her husband. He’d even had a jumpy black cat, and a house nearby just as shabby—this is not a word I would’ve used about my house—and sparse.

I said to her: Your husband. Well, then, what shall we do about that.

I wondered if I sounded suggestive, or if that would help. I tried holding her gaze in a suggestive way but it didn’t seem to change anything. So I asked more about her husband. All she said was he left. He left, and it had been so long. She couldn’t have been thirty-five. I could’ve told her how much longer it could get. I could’ve held her hand and told her. I considered asking her out but I figured we’d be like now, staring, not saying much, only in public. When it’s been a long time, there are cheaper ways to find out how much is enough tenderness.

But I was getting nowhere even talking. I was agitated over her just staring at me like that, probably thinking of her stupid husband. And Moxie was yowling, attacking herself again, so I just went for it.

I said: Do you wish to sleep with me?

I don’t know why I said “wish.” It sounded opener than “want.” If she kept staring like that, that was not no wish. If I opened her, nothing withheld. If I didn’t and just let it all get longer.

Later, she said, and thanked me for the coffee and left.

Later. Jesus.

The next day, barely noon this time, she was on the curb again. I yelled her in for coffee, only this time I let her ring the door. The peanut butter had already fainted rabid Moxie. She’s because of Sarah. Sarah said for months, almost a year, how nice it’d be to have a fluffy cat to pad around the house, sweet, loving, independent. Then she left it with me.

Sarah’s in the city now. I called her once at the number she’d sent when she settled in, and a busy-sounding man answered. We both left people for each other so we had it coming if you believe in fate. Sarah did but I don’t. I believe what people point to and call fate is what people point to and call fate. That’s all. Another thing she pushed for was to move to the city, but I don’t want to work hard to live in a cramped room somewhere I don’t know, where everything’s expensive and it’s never quiet. I never will. But where there’s room for quiet nothing happens.

Sarah said I didn’t love her because I never opened up about my deepest need but the one time I did in three years did it for me. I said—this was right after we got Moxie—I wish we’d be more intimate, it’s been a while. She got mad thinking that meant that was all she was to me but I just don’t need much. What is there? She’s probably having the same row about it now. No, he must be more tender. But I don’t know how to be more tender with a woman than I am and not feel like a dog that’s caught the mailman and gets shot over it, guts all over the green yard.

She asked for more coffee. I emptied us the pot and realized I’d overlooked something.

I asked: What’s your name?

Petra, she said.

After a lot more staring, she followed me to bed. It’s terrific when things go your way with a woman, even if all that means is things go her way too.

I took Petra’s clammy hand and led her to bed. But walking her down the hall, I started feeling scared about pleasing her. I got scared about pleasuring this woman who stalked me just because I looked like a man who didn’t need her. I wondered to ask what he would do to her. I wondered what I could do to her to see her on the curb tomorrow, and what I could do to not, and if it was him or me or her that made her fix on me. Whatever would’ve made me love to fix on somebody like that, something’s taken it from me. But where is it? It was there. It was.

She sat on my bed. Moxie was whining in the kitchen in a soft drugged way, probably keeled over. Petra looked at me wide-eyed. I smiled at her and focused on conjuring lust. I smiled at her. I tried to conjure tenderness. Jesus. Then I tried hard not to. I couldn’t tell how I was coming off. She’d look at me like that whatever I did, which no longer made me hate her. I don’t know why I said, before, I’d done something wrong. I really don’t. It had been so long. But I remember, for a little while, doing it all the time with Sarah, and still feeling this way. Pleasure is all I care about and none of it is mine.

Petra, I said.

I was standing over her, now, over the bed. I knelt. My mouth touched her ankle. I said Petra softly, slow, not stopping. I heard, from her, then me, pleasure that didn’t want to be. I pulled my mouth even lower, to the face of her calloused little heel, and started there. I murmured into it. Petra. I worked my way up into her. I couldn’t think of anything in my life I’d rather be doing. I hate feeling like that.