Bark: Stories (8 page)

She and Rafe had not yet, however, signed the papers. And there was the matter of her wedding ring, which was studded with little junk emeralds and which she liked a lot and hoped she could continue wearing because it didn’t look like a typical wedding ring. He had removed his ring—which did look like a typical wedding ring—a year earlier because he said it “bothered” him. She had thought at the time he’d meant it was rubbing. He had often just shed his clothes spontaneously—when they had first met he was something of a nudist. It was good to date a nudist: things moved right along. But it was not good trying to stay married to one. Soon she would be going on chaste geriatric dates with other people whose clothes would, like hers, remain glued to the body.

“What if I can’t get my ring off,” she said to him now on the plane to La Caribe, the gringo enclave Rafe had chosen. She had gained a little weight in their twenty years of marriage but really not all
that
much. She had been practically a child bride! “Send me the sawyer’s bill,” he said. Oh, the sparkle in his eye
was
gone!

“What is wrong with you?” she said. Of course, she blamed his parents, who had somehow, long ago, accidentally or on purpose, raised him as a space alien, with space alien values, space alien thoughts, and the hollow shifty character, concocted guilelessness, and sociopathic secrets of a space alien.

“What is wrong with
you
?” he snarled. This was his habit, his space alien habit, of merely repeating what she had just said to him. It had to do, no doubt, with his central nervous system, a silicon-chipped information processor incessantly encountering new linguistic combinations, which it then had to absorb and file. Repetition bought time and assisted the storage process.

More than the girls, who were just little, she was worried about Sam, their sensitive fourth grader, who now sat across the airplane aisle moodily staring out the window at the clouds. Soon, through the machinations of the extremely progressive divorce laws—a boy needs his dad!—she would no longer see him every day; he would become a boy who no longer saw his mother every day, and he would scuttle and float a little off and away like paper carried by wind. With time he would harden: he would eye her over his glasses, in the manner of a maître d’ suspecting the arrival of riffraff. But on this, their last trip as an actual family, he did fairly well at not letting on. They all slept in the same room, in separate beds, and saw other families squalling and squabbling, so that by comparison theirs—a family about to break apart forever—didn’t look so bad. She was not deceived by the equatorial sea breeze and so did not overbake herself in the colonial sun; with the resort managers she shared her moral outrage at the armed guards who kept the local children from sneaking past the fence onto this white, white beach; and she rubbed a kind of resin into her brow to freeze it there and downplay the creases—to appear younger for her departing husband, though he never once looked at her. Not that she looked that good: her suitcase had gotten lost and she was forced to wear clothes purchased from the gift shop—the words
LA CARIBE
emblazoned across every single thing.

On the beach people read books about Rwandan and Yugoslavian genocide. This was to add seriousness to a trip that lacked it. One was supposed not to notice the dark island boys on the other side of the guards and barbed wire, throwing rocks. When a cruise ship temporarily docked in the bay,
and then departed, she joined some other tourists on the beach to shout at the boat, “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass!” as if they were different and not all of them tourists, seeking to console themselves with hierarchies of tourism, to keep the stone-throwing boys from one’s thoughts.

There were ways of making things temporarily vanish. One could disappear oneself in movement and repetition. Sam liked only the trampoline and nothing else. There were dolphin rides, but Sam sensed their cruelty. “They speak a language,” he said. “We shouldn’t ride them.”

“They look happy,” said Kit.

Sam looked at her with seriousness from some sweet beyond. “They look happy so you won’t kill them.”

“You think so?”

“If dolphins tasted good,” he said, “we wouldn’t even know about their language.” That the intelligence in a thing could undermine your appetite for it. That yumminess obscured the mind of the yummy as well as the mind of the yummer. That deliciousness resulted in decapitation. That you could only understand something if you did not desire it. How did he know these things already? Usually girls realized this first. But not hers. Her girls, Beth and Dale, were tough beyond Kit’s comprehension: practical, self-indulgent, independent five-year-old twins, a system unto themselves. They had their own secret world of Montessori code words and plastic jewelry and spells of hilarity brought on mostly by the phrase “cinnamon M&M’s” repeated six times fast. They wore sparkly fairy wings wherever they went, even over cardigans, and they carried
wands. “I’m a big brother now,” Sam had said repeatedly to everyone and with uncertain pride the day the girls were born, and after that he spoke not another word on the matter. Sometimes, silently, Kit accidentally referred to Beth and Dale as Death and Bail, as they buried their several Barbies in sand, then lifted them out again with glee. Anyone near, on a towel, reading of holocausts, turned and smiled. In this fine, far compound on the sea, the contradictions of life were grotesque and uninventable. She went to the central office and signed up for a hot stone massage: “Would you like a man or a woman?” asked the receptionist.

“Excuse me?” asked Kit, stalling—after all these years of marriage, which
did
she want? What did she know of
men
—or
women
? “There’s no such thing as
men
,” her friend Jan used to say, until recently. “Every man is different. The only thing they have in common is—well—a capacity for horrifying violence.”

“A man or a woman—for the massage?” Kit asked now, buying time. She thought of the slow mating of snails, an entire day, being hermaphrodites and having it all be so confusing: by the time they had it figured out who was going to be the girl and who was going to be the boy someone came along with some garlic paste and just swooped them right up.

“Oh, either one,” she said, and then she knew she’d get a man. Whom she tried not to look at but could smell in all his smoky aromas—tobacco, incense, cannabis—exhaling and swirling their way around him. A wiry old American pothead gone to grim seed, he had the Dickensian name of Daniel Handler, and he did not speak. He placed hot stones along her back and left them there in a line up her spine—did she think her belotioned flesh too private and precious to be touched by the
likes of him? Are you
crazy
? The mad joy pulsing in her face was held over the floor by the table headpiece and at his touch her eyes filled with bittersweet tears, which then dripped out her nose, which she realized then was positioned perfectly by God as a little drainpipe for crying. The sad massage hut carpet beneath her grew a spot. He left the hot stones on her until they went cold. As each one lost its heat she could no longer feel it even there on her back, and then its removal was like a discovery that it had been there all along: how strange to forget and feel it only then, at the end; though this wasn’t the same thing as the frog in the pot whose water slowly heats and boils, still it had meaning, she felt, the way metaphors of a thermal nature tended to. Then he took all the stones off and pressed the hard edges of them deep into her back, between the bones, in a way that felt mean—perhaps in embittered rage about his own life—but that more likely had no intention at all. “That was nice,” she said at the end, when she saw him putting all his stones away. He had heated them in a plastic electric Crock-Pot filled with water, she saw, and now he unplugged the thing in a tired fashion.

“Where did you get those stones?” she asked. They were smooth and dark gray—black when wet, she could see.

“They’re river stones,” he said. “I’ve been collecting them for years up in Colorado.” He replaced them in a metal fishing tackle box.

“You live in Colorado?” she asked.

“Used to,” he said, and that was that. Later that day they would see each other at the Farmacia de Jesus and look the other way.

Kit got dressed. “Someday you, like me, will have done sufficient
lab work,” Jan had said. “Soon you, like me, in your next life, like me, will want them old and rich, on their deathbed, really, and with no sudden rallyings in the hospice.”

“You’re a woman of steel and ice,” Kit had said.

“Not at all,” Jan had said. “I’m just a voice on the phone, drinking a little tea.”

On their last night of vacation Kit’s suitcase arrived like a joke. She didn’t even open it. They put out the paper doorknob flag that said
WAKE US UP FOR THE SEA TURTLES
. The doorknob flag had a preprinted request to be woken at 3:00 a.m. so that they could go to the beach and see the hatching of the baby sea turtles and their quick scuttle into the ocean, under the cover of night, to avoid predators. But though Sam had hung the flag carefully and before the midnight deadline, no staffperson awoke them. And by the time they got up and went down to the beach it was ten in the morning. Strangely, the sea turtles were still there. They had hatched in the night and then hotel personnel had hung on to them, in a baskety cage, to show them off to the tourists who’d been too lazy or deaf to have gotten up in time. “Look, come see!” said a man with a Spanish accent who usually rented out the scuba gear. Sam, Beth, Dale, Kit all ran over. (Rafe stayed behind to drink coffee and read the paper.) The squirming babies were beginning to heat up in the warming sun; the goldening Venetian vellum of their wee webbed feet was already edged in dessicating brown. “I’m going to have to let them go now,” said the man. “You are the last ones to see these little
bebés
.” He took them over to the water’s edge and let them go, hours too late,
to make their own way into the sea. And one by one a frigate bird swooped in, plucked them from the silver waves, and ate them for breakfast.

Kit sank down in a large chair next to Rafe. He was tanning himself, she could see, for someone else’s lust. “I think I need a drink,” she said. The kids were swimming.

“Don’t expect me to buy you a drink,” he said.

Had she even asked? Did she now call him the bitterest name she could think of? Did she stand and turn and slap him across the face in front of several passersby? Who told you
that
?

When they left La Caribe, its crab claws of land extending into the blue bay, she was glad. Staying there she had begun to hate the world. In the airports and on the planes home, she did not even try to act natural: natural was a felony. She spoke to her children calmly, from a script, with dialogue and stage directions of utter neutrality. Back home in Beersboro she unpacked the condoms and candles, her little love sack, completely unused, and threw it all in the trash. What had she been thinking? Later, when she had learned to tell this story differently, as a story, she would construct a final lovemaking scene of sentimental vengeance that would contain the inviolable center of their love, the sweet animal safety of night after night, the still-beating tender heart of marriage. But for now she would become like her unruinable daughters, and even her son, who as he aged stoically and carried on regardless would come scarcely to recall—was it past even imagining?—that she and Rafe had ever been together at all.

Bake McKurty was no stranger to the parasitic mixings of art and commerce, literature and the rich. “Hedge funds and haiku!” he’d exclaimed to his wife, Suzy—and yet such mixings seemed never to lose their swift, stark capacity to appall. The hustle for money met the hustle for virtue and everyone washed their hands in one another. It was a common enough thing, though was there ever enough soap to cut the grease? “That’s what your lemon is for,” Suzy would say, pointing at the twist in the martini he was not supposed to drink. Still, now and again, looking up between the crabmeat cocktail and the palate-cleansing sorbet sprinkled with fennel pollen dust, he felt shocked by the whole thing.

“It’s symbiosis,” said Suzy as they were getting dressed to go. “Think of it being like the krill that grooms and sees for the rock shrimp. Or that bird who picks out the bugs from the rhino hide.”

“So we’re the Seeing Eye krill,” he said.

“Yes!”

“We’re the oxpeckers.”

“Well, I wasn’t going to say that,” she said.

“A lot in this world has to do with bugs,” said Bake.

“Food,” she said. “A lot has to do with grooming and food. Are you wearing that?”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Lose the— What are those?”

“Suspenders.”

“They’re red.”

“OK, OK. But you know, I never do that to you.”

“I’m the sighted krill,” she said. She smoothed his hair, which had recently become a weird pom-pom of silver and maize.

“And I’m the blind boy?”

“Well, I wasn’t going to say that either.”

“You look good. Whatever it is your wearing. See? I say nice things to
you
!”

“It’s a sarong.” She tugged it up a little.

He ripped off the suspenders. “Well, here. You may need these.”

They were staying at a Georgetown B and B to save a little money, a town house where the owner-couple left warm cookies at everyone’s door at night to compensate for their loud toddler, who by 6:00 a.m. was barking orders and pointing at her mother to fetch this toy or that. After a day of sightseeing—all those museums prepaid with income taxes; it was like being philanthropists come to investigate the look of their own money—Suzy and Bake were already tired. They hailed a cab and recited the address of the event to the cabbie, who nodded and said ominously, “Oh, yes.”

Never mind good taste, here at this gala even the usual diaphanous veneer of seemliness had been tossed to the trade winds: the fund-raiser for
Lunar Lines Literary Journal
—
3
LJ
as it was known to its readers and contributors; “the magazine” as it was known to its staff, as if there were no others—was
being held in a bank. Or at least a former bank, one which had recently gone under, and which now sold squid-ink orecchiette beneath its vaulted ceilings, and martinis and grenache from its former teller stations. Wood and marble were preserved and buffed, glass barriers removed. In the evening light the place was golden. It was cute! So what if subtle boundaries of occasion and transaction had been given up on? So what if this were a mausoleum of greed now danced in by all? He and Suzy had been invited. The passive voice could always be used to obscure blame.