Orange Suitcase (3 page)

1

T
hey didn't look like baby rabbits. More like pink balls of unbaked dough with caper eyes.

Can I –

No.

My grandfather gathered up the five or six of them. Max, their shaky mother, wrinkled her nose again and again and again and again in the corner of the cage.

There'll be rabbits everywhere, he grumbled.

From the house, my grandmother called out my name.

2

I stood on the toilet and watched through the open window; my grandfather was at the end of the dock tossing globs of dough into the lake. Ducks stirred the water in a rush; they thought he'd thrown bread. He wiped his big hands on the side of his jacket and watched the frantic mallards dive after the sinking things. Shiny green heads popped up wet, smacking orange beaks.

3

I took some pieces of lettuce to the garage and held one into the near-empty cage. C'mere Max, I called, extended my hand further. We didn't know you were a girl, I said. Mom says we should call you Maxine. Maxine wrinkled her nose again and again and again. I remembered the time she bit my cousin and pulled my hand back. I tossed the lettuce onto the pink towel we laid down the night before for the babies. I wondered if we would throw that towel away.

I
remember a night before I got engaged: I went to Arlington to visit a friend. We drove into the district, to the bar on 14th that's not there anymore. He wanted to introduce me to the girl he was seeing, the beautiful bartender. She was older than I expected; with pink hair and enormous breasts that made her the kind of woman my friend would be with. After an hour of talking about the high-academic music quarterly we would never start, snow began to fall. My friend stumbled back from the bar; we would spend the night at the beautiful bartender's apartment, he said. She had called her roommate. I asked my friend if the roommate was beautiful too. No, he said, She's just a bitch. Does she have pink hair? Later we'd drunk plenty and decided on three new features for our quarterly. Then the beautiful bartender announced she needed to close her till. We were the last left. My friend lit a cigarette and I rose to pay what the beautiful bartender charged us. She watched as I wrote a tip on the receipt. Thanks, she said, and smiled. Thank you, I wanted to say, but I don't remember if I said anything. My friend walked over and offered cigarettes. The bartender declined, and my friend and I sat and watched her count from a giant stack of dollar bills. After she'd counted fifty-two, fifty-three, fifty-four, I felt him tap me on the shoulder. He looked like he had something important to say. He said: I am incredibly drunk. Good, I answered. He nodded, rose from his stool. I'm going to the bathroom, he announced, more to himself for encouragement than to us. He went, and him leaving is what I remember best.

B
en Jensen and I are listening to The Zombies when Meg shows up around the brick corner. She's wearing a tight white sweater and black jeans combination I love and hate. She would be beautiful, drop-dead-gorgeous if I didn't know her. You guys playing chess? she asks. She leans against the side of the building, next to a window. We don't answer. In the window a guy and a girl are framed sitting across from each other at a small round table. They type as fast as they can on their matching white computers; their screens touch like in a board game. I wonder if they are chatting with each other. Outside, Meg lights a cigarette. She blows smoke and watches Ben move his pawn. I glance and move my bishop and stare at the trees. Wind blows and some leaves fall and the air smells cold. The Zombies are singing. Ben moves another pawn and Meg says: So Elliott Smith stabbed himself. Ben looks up and so do I. Is he dead? Ben asks. Mmm, she answers. He stabbed himself in the chest twice. She looks at me: Bet you're pretty upset, she says. Should I plan on seeing you crying at the house tonight? I look back at the board. Fuck you, Meg, I say, and move a piece, doesn't matter which. Ben gets up and heads for the computer inside the coffee shop. I don't believe it, he mutters. The screen door flaps shut. You know what that sound is? Meg asks. She jabs her cigarette at the door. It's you, she says. I don't say anything. She doesn't either. Wind blows and The Zombies play “The Time of the Season.” The record is on its last track. Meg finishes her cigarette and lights another. Black cigarettes, cloves. They smell delicious like I know they smell and I hate her for smelling like that. Ben comes back to the porch. She's right, man. Fucking Elliott Smith is dead. The screen door flaps shut again. Meg shifts against the wall. She would be beautiful if she weren't such a cunt. Are you listening to The Zombies because it makes you think of Laura? she asks. She blows that smoke at me again, laughs and moves to walk away. See you tonight, she calls from her shoulder. I look back to the window and the couple typing. They've sped up; it's a race and this is the final sprint. Push, man, push, I think. I listen to the last bars of the song; I love and hate this song.

T
here was one girl who had a broken finger. Her left hand, the ring finger. Everything was perfectly normal until the last knuckle, where it bent at a hard angle across the pinkie. She said it happened when she was a little girl; she crashed her tricycle into a rock wall at the end of her driveway and it never healed right. It's like I'm always lying, she'd tell me, Because I always have my fingers crossed. We dated for a few weeks and I didn't much notice the finger. But one night she was undoing the buttons on her coat in such a way that it was like watching a monster's hand: How can I ever buy an engagement ring for this girl? I thought. Will I have to buy it extra large, so it can slide past the broken part? Will she wear the diamond on a different finger, or on the other hand? And does she ever think about this? Does she have a plan? I never asked because I didn't think it was my place—we'd only dated those few weeks. But I think I stayed interested in her longer than I would have otherwise.

1

T
here was a girl who painted on stretched thrift store t-shirts instead of canvas. Her pictures were heavy and bold, like the fingers and brushes she used to make them. She said she wanted to be a costume designer on Broadway; she read yellow-paged paperback plays but never designed anything but these unwearable shirts. One purpose replaces another, she would say, That's how everything should be. She was younger than me and very beautiful. She told me her mother used to paint, that in her mother's paintings there was never any trash or fences or rain. Sometimes there were clouds, she said, but the clouds were only for contrast, to make the sky look bluer. I love your blue eyes, I would say, and she would put down the brush and sometimes she would smile. It was easy with her.

2

This one is called Memory 1, she said. And this one is Memory 2. She held them in the dark as I directed. I propped myself against her headboard, maybe I peeled a condom wrapper from my shoulder. Creative titles, I said. She smirked and I pointed. The next was black with an orange smear through it—I recognized its shape from when the lights were on. In the dark the smear looked like a gray arrow pointing. This one's called Asshole Joseph, she said, and I heard her laugh. I could hear her smiling, too, and I told I was writing a poem called “Bitch Painter.” It didn't take long before we realized we brought out the worst in each other.

No, I don't remember her name. But what I do remember of those few minutes after my friend disappeared and left me alone in the empty bar with his beautiful bartender girlfriend is this: me trying to look anywhere but her enormous breasts. She kept counting the till money and the only noise was my breathing and her counting to herself. Like I said, this was before I met my fiancée. I wasn't dating anyone; my friend was the one who dated. Beautiful women, too, like this, always. How did he do it? I don't know. He talked to them. I guess that was the secret, because it was only when I started talking that it worked for me (I was a very quiet drunk before that.) What got me talking on this particular night was thinking how, in an hour or so, my friend would sleep with this beautiful woman. He would feel her enormous breasts pinching his nose; would scratch his beard between them; her pink hair would stick to his mouth. Why I said what I said I still can't answer, but thinking of my friend and his nose against those breasts I coughed and asked: What do you think about when you're making love? As a woman, I mean? Is it about finishing, or delaying the finish? Do you think perfect love-making between a man and woman is what happens when they meet exactly in the middle? Him holding out just so long, her getting there just so fast? Do you… And she cut me off. I think you're incredibly drunk, she said. But she said it very sexy.

A structure that will not hold water

is not,

and should never be confused with,

a waterfall.

1

The poet held a pink lighter to the end of the glass pipe at his mouth and sucked. He coughed on the exhale and lay back against the cheap headboard, tossed the pipe and lighter onto the table between his bed and mine. We were sharing a motel room near the river. It was a bit after five a.m.

No thanks, I said, and he leaned over to gather up the pipe and lighter and smoke again. I took a long drink from my beer and swung my legs off the side of my bed. You want a beer? I asked. I got up and placed the now empty bottle in a tiny trash can. I opened the small fridge for a full. He shook his head, his eyes squinting on another inhale. I don't drink, he choked out. He coughed. Remember?

He held out the pipe again.

I don't smoke, I answered. Remember?

We laughed.

2

The poet and I were introduced earlier that evening, at a party outside Baton Rouge to kick off the annual literary festival. The city's art council had paid for a few hotel rooms for festival readers traveling in from out of town, and the poet and I had to split one; we were the least important writers there—me coming from New York and he from somewhere in the Midwest, St. Louis maybe. We were the only two invitees that didn't have books, and we were only invited because the journal sponsoring the event had published us a few times. According to the editor, they wanted “some young blood.”

Our names were the last two printed on the festival poster. His had a spelling error.

3

When the party ended a designated-driving intern from the journal dropped us off at our hotel. It was a little before four in the morning, and our first readings were beginning at noon. We thanked the exhausted intern, and I crossed a highway to buy beer while the poet went in search of the room. When I found the room there was a haze of weed.

I get fucking nervous before readings, man, he said when I walked in.

I get fucking drunk before readings, I answered. I cracked a beer and threw the rest in the fridge.

We offered each other our vices and mutually declined. I told him I gave up smoking a couple years ago. I'd cheated a few times but thought it was healthier in the long run to stick to beer. The poet told me he didn't drink anymore; he had gone to LSU, gotten his MFA there. But he moved back to the Midwest six months ago. He's been in treatment and off booze since. He's been smoking a lot more.

4

The poet told me: I was drinking a lot, man. It got bad. I was having DTs in the liquor store. Like a movie or something. I almost had a stroke.

I sipped my beer quietly and promised myself I would cut back. Writers drink and smoke, we both knew that. It was part of the fun of trying to be a writer. I'd given up smoking for a few years, he'd given up drinking for a few months. We each thought the other had an amazing will power to do what he did, and we both knew the reality of the natural balance found in trying to live well—that giving up one vice means you start doing more of another. We lay on our separate beds silently, neither turning on the television. We tried to ignore how much the other was enjoying their smoke or drink. I drank more and faster; he put down the pipe and lit cigarette after cigarette. We talked about writing and journals and how hard it was to get published, how hard it was to sit down and just fucking write. We talked about how Raymond Carver said he never wrote a line worth a nickel when he was drinking, and how it was kind of funny that it was the cigarettes that got him in the end anyhow. We talked about how Richard Hugo said the only good advice he ever got from other poets was to stop drinking, and we laughed at how all our favorite poems of his were about bars.