When Watched (8 page)

This is what it means, Peanut and Frances realized, to be the keepers of something beautiful. This is what it means to become other people. They thought about what they had been when they stood next to each other. Freaks, strutting their base interests. But now, next to the dog, they lost their queerness, if only for a moment. “We're sort of like Elvis's family,” Frances whispered. “The trash these people are willing to put up with to get to the king.” Tony shot them a long look, as if in agreement, and stepped out into an area of sunlight. He was more aware of his beauty than any creature they had ever met. Everyone crawled around him. They sat in the sun, fondling his warm velvet head. And he shined.

She sees him at the grocery store. He doesn't see her. He is with his daughter. He is putting green apples in a bag.

She grabs a pear and pretends to examine it. She puts it down. She walks over to the melons and stares abstractedly, her heart hammering. She looks up and he's smiling at her. His smile is warm. Instantly she feels weak and excited. He is walking toward her now.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hi,” he says. He's standing right in front of her. She's looking down.

He is divorced now so technically it's possible that they could date.
Or just have sex,
she thinks. She can't think about him without thinking about sex. And so she is afraid to look into his eyes, afraid he will know and be disgusted.
A man likes a woman to be ambivalent,
she articulates in her mind. And she has never been ambivalent about who she wants to fuck. She has always been sure and she thinks that certainly there is nothing uglier than this, a woman who is sure.

They both ask how the other is and both say, “Good.” Clearly both are lying.

She tries to control her face. “I don't know how to pick melons,” she says.

“You've gotta look for the pecks,” he says.

“The what?”

“The pecks,” he repeats. “Birds go for the sweeter ones.”

This makes her blush. What he said feels lewd, filthy.
But it isn't filthy,
she thinks.
It's me. I'm filthy.

She looks down at the little girl, who must be seven by now. It is a knowing face. A face that knows she is filthy. “Hi, Becky,” she says to the child, who says nothing.

“She's a little shy,” he says, patting the girl on the head. But shy is the wrong word. Becky looks suspicious.
Little girls know everything,
she thinks.

“Well,” he smiles again. “It was nice running into you.”

“Yeah.” She cannot believe their encounter is over. She hates the politeness of her life. He walks away.

She shops impatiently. She cannot bear the fact of time. How it keeps passing. How she has to wait to pay for cans of soup, to have sex.

She wants the man to know what she knows, that she wants him. And somehow she feels that he already does. She has fantasized so heavily and for so long that she feels her fantasies hold a kind of penetrative power.
It's as if my daydreams have hacked into his,
she thinks, her eyes shining. She feels certain that she has appeared in his thoughts. She has been naked in his thoughts and this same naked body has returned at particular hours of the day.
Possibly we are having the same fantasies at the same exact moments,
she thinks, which makes all the dullness between them in public seem coy and silly.

She walks to her apartment and passes a couple. All she hears the man say is “There are two types of people,” and instantly she hates him.

On her stoop there is a group of drunk teenagers smoking cigarettes. “You can't sit here,” she announces, clutching her brown bag of groceries. “You have to leave.”

One woman says “Cunt,” under her breath. Another says “Bitch,” loudly. They all leave and she puts her key in the lock.
I used to smoke cigarettes,
she thinks, moving into the building.
I used to be a teenager. Now I'm a Bitch and a Cunt.

Upstairs she gives herself an orgasm. The sun is setting. The window is open wide. Red light pours over the room. She rolls onto her side and imagines the man and his daughter eating dinner. She thinks that she would be happy just to fuck him once. She thinks that it isn't true what people say about men, how they are dying to fuck all the time. She thinks that men are in fact a little prudish, hard to get in the sack.

She reflects, though, that she wouldn't be happy to fuck him just once. She loves this man. And if they fucked she would say it. Almost against her will, she would say, “I love you.” She pictures him saying it back. “I love you. I've always loved you.” Then his face disintegrates.

She grows anxious. She thinks of all the pressures assigned to a person who is loved. She thinks that certainly if he loved her, it would be because he didn't really know her. It would be because she was hiding certain hideous qualities. And it would only be a certain amount of time before these qualities surfaced. Soon he would know that she couldn't drive. He would also know that even while walking or riding her bike, she often had no idea where she was going. He would know that she couldn't give directions to tourists.
He would make fun of me,
she thinks and cries a little.

He would also discover that she had no urge for cleanliness, that in fact she must force herself to clean her apartment. That when she does not force herself, the kitchen quickly gets filthy, with mice walking idly across the counter, like it is their home. And the truth is that she doesn't really mind it this way.
If I never had anyone over,
she thinks,
it would always be filthy
. She is amazed by people who clean compulsively. These people happily call themselves freaks and she hates them for it. Because she knows who the real freak is: the slob.

There is also the issue of her body. If he loved her it would be because he hadn't seen all of her. It would be because they had fucked in a certain dim honeyed light the first few times. Then, gradually, as they fucked more and more, he would start to notice all the small ugly things. And with each discovery he would stare in silence, weighing his love against the new offense.

She wonders if Becky said anything to her father after they walked away. She wonders if Becky said, “That woman is weird,” or simply, “I don't like her.” These visualizations produce panic. It seems to her that a lot of men care what their children say these days. It was not like this when she was a child. Her father preferred when she did not speak; and often when she did speak, he would act as if she had not, humming to himself.

I was a child so long ago,
she thinks. She thinks that it isn't true what people say about time, that it's fast. Because time has felt fat to her. Every minute has been like a steak passing slowly through space. And she is tired. Tired of wading through the lard of her lifetime, the minutes and the hours.

She thinks of the man on the street who said, “There are two types of people.” She still hates him. She hates the way people in her neighborhood seem to lecture each other on dates. But she thinks now that the man is right, there
are
two types of people.
There are the people who wake up afraid,
she thinks. And her mother is this way, puttering around nervously at seven a.m.
Then there are the people who are afraid at night. Afraid to sleep.
She is this way.

It's not her creaking ceiling that she fears or the shadows that have begun pooling on the floor. Because she is no longer in the room. She's in a canoe with a hole in it. She watches the water pour in and realizes she's dreaming. Then she wakes herself up, jerking with a snort.

This happens several more times. She wipes the drool from her mouth.
Why won't I let myself dream?
she thinks with a chill. She senses, as she has sensed before, that there is something she doesn't want to know about herself. Something that the goblins of her subconscious know.

She rolls onto her side. With one ear pressed to the pillow she can hear her heart beating. The more aware of it she becomes, the louder it gets. And time is waddling by. The minutes are chubby and endless.

She decides that she would be a whole other person if the man were there beside her. She would be serene, weak and pink with sex. The air between them would sing as they stared at each other. And when the light went out she would not lie awake. She would
sleep.

“You're going to miss that faculty dinner,” Susan said to Henry and he frowned in agreement. The van was packed, but two days later than planned. It was Thursday and they were finally pulling away from their Tribeca home and heading to Missoula, Montana, where Henry had been invited to teach poetry for the semester.

Susan looked out her window at the bright winter sky. “We packed too many books,” she said.

“That's good. We might become other people,” Henry said—already he was speeding. “And who knows what
they'll
want to read.”

Susan hummed appeasingly. She was a poet too, but she wouldn't be teaching that semester. She planned to write.

Both of them had heard such wonderful things about Missoula, how the mountains looked purple just before sundown and choirs of coyotes sang into the night. But the hell of packing had sapped much of that first excitement. The drive would take at least three days and already they were exhausted.

Henry yawned. He had just turned seventy. He had a long face, a thin, constant grin surrounded by stubble. He wore thick black rectangular specs and a plaid wool button-down with a moth hole near the collar.

Susan leaned her head on his shoulder. She did this all the time.

Henry had thin, puny shoulders and Susan's head was heavy. But he had never in all their forty-two years said so. He was just glad it was
her
head. Out of everyone in the world, Susan was the one mucking around in his life, routinely pissing him off.
It could have been a lot of other women,
he thought to himself, a few females spilling through his mind.
Nope.
It was Susan! Of course it was.

Like magic Susan lifted her head off his shoulder and stared out the window. Henry glanced at her and grinned. At sixty-six, Susan had become thinner—more frail, with bright streaks of white in her hair.
What would I do without her?
he thought, knowing full well that this sort of thinking was a two-headed beast. Just as he was quietly loving her, he was also manipulating himself into it. But he didn't mind. The love came.

Henry pulled into the first gas station he saw and a pimpled attendant in a red vest walked up. The guy stared, then tapped on the glass. Henry rolled down his window. “Yes?”

“You know we have full service,” the guy said, pointing.

Henry cut his eyes and stared. “Yes I do know that.”

“Okay.” The guy shrugged and walked away.

“Ageist little twerp,” Henry said, rolling up his window. “I can
walk
for Christ's sake.”

“People have treated me like that my whole life,” Susan huffed. “Always assuming I need
help
. Now that you're old you're getting a taste of what it's like,” she said with a wry smile, “to be female.”

“Who's old?” he said, thumbing the screen of his phone. He saw an icon of a snowflake and paused for a few seconds, not quite registering the little picture.

“If I'm old then you're old,” she said. “And I
am
old.”

“Nonsense,” he said and gave her a hard little peck on the cheek. “You're my spring chicken. My honey bunny.”

Back on the road Susan pointed to some graffiti on a billboard. Huge, cloud-like letters spelled something, though she didn't know what. It may as well have been in another language. “God,” she marveled. “I can't believe someone actually stood up there and wrote that. It's so
high
.”

“That's why I'm not worried about someone cleaning our windows,” Henry said. “It's probably the same people.”

Susan opened a bag of black licorice and reached in. She eyed the speedometer. “Slow down, will you
please
? You're making me sick.”

“Al
right
,” he said as if she had already asked him many times. He relaxed his foot on the gas pedal, bringing the needle down only slightly.

“I wish we could take a train there,” Susan said, chewing the candy. “Trains put me right to sleep.”

Henry glanced at his wife. “In Russia you can't sleep on trains,” he said.

“Why not?”

“You wake up without organs.”

“Henry.”

“Either your kidney or your liver.
Gone.
I think the demand for livers is higher than—”

“Henry, please.”

“The future has been here for a long time,” he said in a kind of trance. “We're not even people anymore.”

“That's
enough
,” Susan said firmly. But it was too late. Her mind already contained a sloshing cooler of organs. She set the bag of licorice down in the drink holder, feeling nauseous. “You know what I find really disgusting?” she said. “Harvesting.”

“Oh I
know
,” Henry said, nodding adamantly.

“Just the thought of someone's organs kept alive . . . without them.”

Henry made an empathizing hum.

Susan tilted her seat back and arranged her scarf over her face.

 • • • 

When she woke, Henry was outside pumping gas. It was dark and a light snow had begun. The grass looked slick.

“We should stop,” she said when he got back in the car.

“It's not so bad,” he said. “I have another hour in me at least.”

But when Henry got back on the road, they quickly had the sensation of gliding over water.

“Henry,” Susan said in a clipped tone. “We have to stop.” Snow was falling heavier by the second.

“I know.”

“Take this exit.”

“I
know
,” he said, turning off the road. The car swerved slightly and he braced the wheel, struggling to complete the turn.

“Henry!”

“Shut up for a second.”

“You're going too fast!”

A bright Holiday Inn sign appeared at the roadside, behind it a beige castle nestled in darkness.

“Thank God,” Susan said but the tawny offering whipped by. “For Christ's sake! Why didn't you
stop
?”

“It looked expensive,” Henry said quickly, though in fact he
was afraid to make the turn. “There's another one coming up I think.”

Now they were driving down a thin road flanked by the tall darkness of trees, giant snowflakes falling in droves.

“Henry!” Susan cried, pleaded, her eyes shifting wildly from him to the road.

He relaxed his hands on the wheel, oddly mesmerized by the snow. Ding ding ding went the bells in his mind. He smiled absurdly.

Susan sat quietly, her eyes bugged. She guessed she was about to die.

A moment later the car seemed to be flying. It swerved off the road—Susan screamed—and it thudded to a stop in a shallow ditch. Instantly their hands flew to each other.

“Are you alright?” Henry said.

Susan burst into tears. They unbuckled their seat belts and hugged.

“Are you hurt?” he said.

“No,” she gagged and brought her hands up to her face, making a bowl to shudder into.

Henry patted her with one hand and felt around for his phone with the other. Susan took her hands from her face and sat hiccuping for a while. Then she switched on the car light and stared at her husband.

Nervously, with shame, he stared back. Henry could see the fear fading in her eyes and the accusation rising. “What is
wrong
with you?” she said.

“Alright, save it. Let's just get out of this goddamn hole.”

 • • • 

A few hours later they were in bed at the Holiday Inn, fully clothed, bickering, with rolled towels under their necks. They had been
pulled out of the ditch by a huge, ham-colored man in a tow truck who demanded two hundred dollars in cash, which of course they didn't have on hand. So he drove them right to an ATM.

“It was like being
robbed
,” Susan fumed.

“You're shouting,” Henry said.

“You should've refused.”

“We had no choice. That guy was clearly in cahoots with the cops. This is what they
do
.”

“My
neck
,” Susan moaned.

“You have whiplash. You're going to be fine.”

“We should go to the hospital.”

“So we can sit there for hours until some moron says we have
whiplash
? I won't do it.”

“What if we hit our heads?”

“We didn't hit our heads,” Henry said and sat up. “I'm turning off the light.”

“Sometimes people hit their heads and they don't remember,” Susan said, her eyes pleading.

“We didn't hit our goddamn heads. The windshield would've broken.” He sighed. “I'm turning off the light.”

“Leave one on,” Susan said. “Please. This place gives me the creeps.”

Henry said nothing. But he had to agree that the room was awful and somewhat like a cage, with its low ceiling and unopenable windows looking out onto the parking lot. Giant flakes of snow were still rushing through the air, quietly accumulating on the three cars in the lot. It looked so soft, Henry thought. The thing that almost killed them. He closed the slatted metallic shades and undressed, then walked back to the bed in his boxers and undershirt. Henry had pale, bony legs and the paunch of a genetically thin man who has overeaten for decades. “Let's get
under the covers,” he said to Susan but she said nothing, her mouth angrily pursed. He walked to the other side of the bed and peeled the tan blanket back, then climbed in despite Susan, who remained sternly in position, blinking at the ceiling.

When she finally did take off her clothes and get under the sheets, the same angry, fearful energy kept her eyes bugged. “I can't sleep,” she said.

Henry muttered something, then slid right back out of consciousness.

“I keep thinking about the guy at the front desk,” Susan said loudly. “Didn't he have kind of a
strange
reaction when we said we were in an accident? He looked like he thought it was funny.”

“He
was
odd,” Henry said, rousing with interest. “He looked a little like the guy that killed the dancer.”

“What?”

“Remember the woman in the East Village who had the terrible roommate who killed her?”

“No,” Susan said, as icily as she could manage.

“Was it the eighties?” He squinted. “She was a dancer, I remember that. And the guy cut her up and put her in a stew and fed it to the homeless in the park.”

“God
damn
it, Henry.”

“I remember reading about it in the
Voice
. It was this bald guy that did it.”

Unable to move her neck, Susan went on staring, with great urgency, at the ceiling. “That's such a terrible thing to do to the homeless,” she said.

Henry laughed. “It was a terrible thing to do to that little dancer!”

Susan's mouth squirmed as she animated the crime in her mind, eyes shining. “How did they find out?”

“I think there was a finger in the soup.”

She groaned.

“And later on they found other parts of her in the apartment,” Henry continued. “
Feet
perhaps,” he said and Susan could hear the strange look of glee on his face. “And I think the homeless were blamed,” he said. “As if they were somehow complicit by eating the soup.”

Now engrossed in visualizing the stew, red-brown and bobbing with human meat, Susan had stopped blinking altogether. Henry still experienced her as a void. It actually relaxed him. “There are people who can be served anything,” he said. “Because they'll
eat
anything.”

Susan was quiet a second. “I would never come back from that,” she said, a frost of revulsion in her eyes. “From eating someone I mean.”

“Maybe you have,” he said and yawned.

“Oh for God's
sake
.”

“Well there's really no way of knowing,” he said casually, sleepiness dulling his features once more. “And it's good that we don't know all the things we've consumed. It's the
knowing
that drives people nuts.”

They were quiet for a while. Henry had his eyes closed. Susan stared brightly at the ceiling, her eyes drilling through it. “Henry,” she said, “I don't think I'm going to be able to sleep.” But he was already gone.

 • • • 

In the morning their necks hurt even more. Susan could barely sit up. After much complaining, they went downstairs and ate the complimentary scrambled eggs.

“Ugh. This was made in the microwave,” Susan said, chewing. “I can tell.”

They each drank two cups of the weak, tawny coffee, then put their coats on and walked out into the parking lot.

The roads had been plowed. The van looked
okay
, they agreed, brushing snow away, except for a deep scratch on one side. Susan ran her finger over it. “I'm driving,” she said with a hostile glance and Henry said nothing. It was his way of agreeing.

They packed their things and drank more of the pale coffee, then bid farewell to the bald man at the front desk, who in daylight looked more pitiful than creepy. He seemed to be the only one working there.

On the way out of town they learned they were in La Porte, Indiana, a town that seemed to have embraced its own depression, with nothing but fast-food chains and car dealerships.

“It's so cheery and failed,” Henry remarked.

Susan laughed. “What do you think people do here?” she asked.

“I don't know. Wait for their parents to die so they can buy a car?”

The following towns were much the same, one little museum of loss after another. “Americans are living badly,” Susan said.

“And
proudly
,” Henry smirked. “That's the problem.”

He joked in the same sneering way all day, which relaxed Susan. But whenever it was quiet, her anxiety came lurching back, punching the landscape full of death traps. She drove slowly—too slowly—often holding her breath. And when the sun sank low in the sky, burning the horizon, it didn't matter how slowly she drove. Susan felt powerless the way people in movies were, people tied to railroad tracks, people with big luminous knives to their throats.
So many ways to die,
she thought, her eyes traveling to the wide gap of shadows beyond the road's edge. Susan pictured the two of them down there,
dead or dying, the car on its side. “I'm a little bit afraid,” she admitted.