Hell (20 page)

“Can’t we talk a bit?” Hatcher says.

Now Mary Ellen shrugs, wishing to be indifferent. That she isn’t, she takes simply to be fresh torture in the afterlife she’s living. She turns and walks off along her street. Hatcher follows.

The street narrows abruptly into an alleyway of tenements not unlike his own. The outside corridors stacked at the back of the buildings are crowded with women wandering singly up and down or coming together into small groups and then breaking apart, filling the air with cries of “After all I did for them!” and “I’m a person too!” and “This isn’t Hell, I know from Hell already!” But as Hatcher moves along behind Mary Ellen, a murmur starts up, and by the time she begins to ascend one of the circular iron staircases with Hatcher following, all the women above are nudging each other and leaning out over the railings and pointing at him. Now they are crying “He’s on TV!” and “What’s a man doing here?” and “Who’s that motherfucker?”

When Mary Ellen reaches her corridor, she steps out of the staircase but instantly pauses and waits for Hatcher to emerge. She steels herself and offers her arm for him to take. “Stay close,” she says. “They’ll tear you to pieces. They kept a lot inside in that other life.”

Hatcher looks at the gauntlet of faces before him, some once beautiful and some not but all of them leveled now by jowl and wrinkle and blotch and pallor and by the utter ingratitude of men who moved on and children who moved on. Mary Ellen guides Hatcher forward and he takes the pinches and the spit and the hissed words with “Sorry” and “I’m sorry” and “I’m very sorry” until she pulls him in at a doorway and they enter a cramped little room with its walls covered by empty snapshot picture frames. They sit down shoulder to shoulder on a tattered couch that smells, to Hatcher, like dead fish and has always smelled, to Mary Ellen, like bay rum.

“You’re chock-f of apologies down here, aren’t you,” Mary Ellen says.

“Lately,” Hatcher says. She’s right and this surprises him, but he lets it pass.

“Is that why you’ve come to me?”

“Sort of.”

“Of course. It’s a clever torture, isn’t it?”

“I don’t intend to . . .”

“In all your self-important arrogance, that’s one of the weirdest examples, right there. What do your intentions have to do with it? You think I’d assume
you’re
the one devising the tortures in Hell?”

“This isn’t going well,” Hatcher says, reflexively trying one of his little rhetorical tricks from their life together long ago. Play against her anger with understatement.

Mary Ellen knows the trick and simply snorts wearily at it.

They sit silently for a moment. She can’t let it alone. But she just feels sad now. “Not well,” she says, low. “It’s Hell, my darling.” She stops. Twice she’s called him “darling.” With irony, certainly. But also without irony. This makes her even sadder. Which is part of the torture, of course. The “darling” thing was her own similar rhetorical trick from that life together. And it tortured her in much the same way even then.

“I never was religious,” she says.

“No.”

“This doesn’t feel religious, exactly, all this.”

“No.”

“While I was drowning,” she says, “just before the last darkness, I felt peaceful. I wasn’t suicidal, really, but I was looking forward to an end to all the crap. I didn’t expect to end up
anywhere
.”

Hatcher is about to reply, “Especially not sitting on this couch with me,” but he catches himself and does not say anything.

“You’re thinking it’s about you again,” she says.

If it’s not Satan inside your head, it’s your ex-wife. He tries to mitigate his offense with her. “The crap part,” he says, and he hears how sorrowful he sounds and he knows Mary Ellen hears it too and she puffs and turns her face away from him.

“Fuck you,” she says, very low, and because she has paused briefly before saying it and because he can feel her brace herself ever so slightly, he knows who she’s actually talking to.

He reaches out and finds her hand resting on her thigh and he holds it, firmly. He wants to say, “He can’t hear you.” But he’s still not certain everyone has privacy of mind and there’s so much yet for him to do. He does say, “Don’t let it happen.”

He can feel her hand growing quickly warm and he squeezes it tighter. He’ll go up in flames with her if need be. “Stop,” he says.

She looks at him, her eyes restless again, searching his face, and he looks at her steadily, inviting her to read his mind.

Her hand is intensely hot, her whole body radiates the heat, but there are no flames yet. Her face streams perspiration. But no flames. He holds her hand and her eyes close and still there are no flames. They sit like this for a long while, and at last the heat abates and she opens her eyes.

He lets go of her hand.

“There,” he says.

“What do you mean?” she says.

“You didn’t let it happen,” he says.

“What are you talking about?”

“What you just went through. It wasn’t so bad this time.”

Mary Ellen’s mouth sags open in wonder. “Oh my darling, you are such a man. Such a stupid man. That was one of the worst.”

Hatcher doesn’t understand.

Mary Ellen says, “Whenever he doesn’t like what I think or say, he gives me a hot flash. The mother of all hot flashes.”

Hatcher should know by now that intense suffering is a personal thing, even in Hell. Especially in Hell. But his face is still a little uncomprehending.

Mary Ellen says, “The flames are inside.”

Still he’s lagging behind.

And so she says, “Remember when I was pregnant with Angie . . .”

And she stops.

It has not yet arisen that Hatcher McCord in his mortal life had two daughters, Angela Marie—Angie—and earlier, in his and Mary Ellen’s brief but intense Age of Aquarius phase, Summer Meadow. His children have not been in his mind because he has not wanted Satan to get even a faint whiff of them and because—especially with significant time clearly having passed, given the arrivals of Bush and Clinton and others—he could not let himself even begin to wonder if the girls have arrived here themselves. Hell is indifferent to torture based on concern for the welfare of others, so this effectively kept them out of his head altogether when he thought his head belonged to the Old Man. Hatcher’s children were living adults when he died. But he has heard rumors that beyond the mountains on the horizon, cut off forever from the denizens of the Great Metropolis, there is even a Great Amusement Park where all the souls that died in the bodies of children clog the roller coasters and theme rides. So what are the chances for Angie and Summer? He can’t bear to consider this possibility. They are not children anymore. He has let them go. His old method returns: he doesn’t look; he waits for that matter of things in his head to go back to normal. Which it quickly does.

Mary Ellen too has been fighting off thoughts of her daughters, though she hasn’t yet quite gotten around to the impression that everyone is in Hell. The pain of the empty picture frames is sufficient unto the day. She cut herself off in invoking her second pregnancy because the man she called “darling” then with no irony whatsoever sits beside her in Hell on a couch that stinks of the aftershave of his youth and because she is looking even more drawn and haggard and wattled and creased for him than she did for herself on that last morning in the bathroom mirror in her cabin on the cruise ship.

The silence of the unfinished sentence about her pregnancy with Angie yammers away in each of them, and to stop it, Mary Ellen says, “You wouldn’t understand.”

Hatcher does not dispute this, even to say he wants to understand, because he knows she will not understand. And so they sit for a long while saying nothing, not looking at each other. And that was the wrong thing to do as well, it seems to him, for she finally breaks the silence by saying, “You know, I don’t even think it’s about the public adulation with you. You would be perfectly happy if you were the only person in the world.”

Hatcher realizes this is the moment to declare his past feelings for Mary Ellen, and not just because the declaration would surprise the shit out of her and thus undercut her anger, another of his recognized rhetorical tricks. He would actually like to recover that moment by recalling it. He would like to start fixing whatever was so broken in him before. He would like to have a shot at getting out of Hell. So he turns his face to her profile and says, “You may not remember this, you may not believe it now, but I did . . .”

He cannot fill in the appropriate word. But like a fatally wounded animal who lies on the ground still moving its legs, trying to run, he starts again, “Really, Mary Ellen, I did . . .”

She turns to look at him now. Surprisingly, her face has not gone hard at his hesitation. She might be expected easily to fill in the missing word in her own head, the one she would assume Hatcher cannot bring himself to say because he’s trying another of his old tricks and is so miserably and arrogantly insincere that he can’t even make himself shape the sound in his mouth. But the truth is, she doesn’t know what the word is he’s looking for. She realizes she should know, but she doesn’t. She realizes this is a crucial word, so crucial that she might even find herself inclined to try to give the man she once married a little help, if it’s such a crucial fucking word, but she can’t think what it is.

Meanwhile, Hatcher says, “Mary Ellen, I . . .” And here he tries just to run directly up on it. Push that sucker out. He can’t. In spite of his mind being his own private thing even in Hell, it still is Hell he’s in. There are limits. And in Hell the four-letter word he’s looking for is not spoken, is not thought. Mary Ellen, I did fuck you. Not a problem. Mary Ellen, I did Roto-Rooter your bodacious cunt. Go for it. But not the thing Hatcher wants to say. It is dangerous even for it to be written here. Let’s call it the ‘L-word’. And when the L-word is truly called for, not even lesser, permitted words of affection can come to mind.

So Hatcher and Mary Ellen sit shoulder to shoulder, eye to eye, and they each easily recognize the other and they each wonder
Who is this stranger before me?
And then he thinks
What was I trying to say?
and she thinks
What was it I was trying to think of?
And then Hatcher says, “I have to go,” and he understands this is so only as he says it. And at that moment their bodies tremble and the couch trembles and the room trembles and the building trembles and the whole of the Great Metropolis trembles and all of Hell trembles as from the horizon comes the grand solar boom of sunset, and the room goes black.

On the slow trip back to Hatcher’s apartment, the rear seat of the Duesenberg is dark and the car shudders from the jostling of the night crowd. He struggles to learn something about himself from his visit to Mary Ellen. What. He was arrogant. He was arrogant and self-absorbed. So what was the deal with her marrying him? He must have changed along the way. Arrogant and self-absorbed and stupid. Stupid like a man. But taking these things out of their conversation doesn’t do jack shit for him. These are just abstractions. He lived his life with her—made his mistakes—in a body, in the moment, and he doesn’t know which moments were the telling ones, and there were so many of them that he can’t even recall, and they are all gone, anyway, and there are no more to be had with her. And no one is listening. He would be happy if he was alone in the world, she says. The street is stuffed with bodies, the windows all around him are filled with an ever-changing mosaic of faces. He doesn’t see them. He closes his eyes. Half a dozen moon-white geisha faces smear past and are gone, and a Chattanooga Baptist Youth bowling team, and a cornrowed Snoop Dogg trying to mark the Dizzle’s rear whizzle but howling from the sizzle of his pizzle. Fo shizzle.

At last Hatcher steps from the car, his camcorder in hand. He hurries into the dark of his alley and along beneath the tenements and he climbs the circular staircase and emerges into his corridor. He certainly does not want to be the only person in the world tonight. He certainly longs to absorb himself in Anne. He will try not to be stupid with her. He even has Henry’s address to offer. Can that possibly be self-absorbed? He passes the Hoppers’ apartment, and their door is closed. He’s happy about that. But that doesn’t mean it’s all about him or that he wants the doors to be closed on everyone so he can be alone. He puts his hand to his own door and turns the knob.

“Darling, I’m home,” he cries even before the door is fully open.

And now it is.

Anne sits, in jeans and halter top, at one side of the kitchen table. Lulu, in nothing but her skin and furry wings, sits at the other. Hatcher thinks there might be something quite appealing about this only-person-in-the-world stuff after all.

He’s ready to back out of the door, but he understands that’s not possible now. He pretty much knows what’s on Lulu’s mind, so he focuses on Anne to try to read what has transpired and what her attitude is about it.