The Dead Fish Museum Page 7

  She said, “What?”

  I hadn’t said anything. “Isn’t there anything else you like to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s raining out.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” I said. “Why is it raining?”

  The air in the room was stale and hot as a kiln, the motion baked out of it. I opened another window in the kitchen alcove. Instantly a sort of pulmonary breeze blew a green curtain into the room, expanding the space. I saw a forgotten slice of bread in the chrome slot of her toaster and a used tea bag set to rest on the edge of her sink, the stub of a cigarette going soggy inside it. When I returned to the bedroom the ballerina hadn’t moved. She’d sleep in these ashes, like some black-feathered bird. Her back was to me, and I went to her, but the burns covering her body—how would you even hold such a woman? Where exactly do you put your hands on somebody who hurts everywhere? I stopped short. I’d never seen her back before, and it was pristine. The skin was flawless, a cold hibernal blue where her blood flowed beneath. I blew on my fingers, warming them, and then laid my hand between her shoulder blades, lightly, as though to press too hard would leave a print.

  “How about cleaning up?” I said.

  “Oh,” she sniffled. “I don’t know.”

  In the bathroom I plugged the drain with a dry cracked stopper and dialed the spigots until the water running over my wrist was hot and tropical. I looked around at all the ingredients. The stuff in jars looked like penny candy, and I spilled some of that in. The beaded things were especially pretty, and I tossed a combination of yellow and green gelcaps in the tub, followed by a pill that effervesced and changed the color of the water to a pale Caribbean blue. I gave up on any idea of alchemy and just went wild. Pine Forest, Prairie Grass, Mountain Snow, Ocean Breeze. Once I got into it, I saw no reason to stop—juniper, vanilla, cranberry. A capful of almond oil, a splash of bain moussant, some pink and blue flakes from a box that turned out to be ordinary bubble bath.

  “Okay,” I said, closing the bathroom door to trap the steam.

  She hadn’t budged from her place on the bed. I hooked her arm over my shoulder. For a ballerina she had pretty much zero ballon at this point. Her feet dragged across the floor like the last two dodoes. I was afraid that when I lowered her into the tub she’d sink to the bottom. I made her sit upright. With steam curling down from above and a heady lather of bubble bath rising over the edge of the tub, the bathroom was now one massive cumulus cloud.

  “A candle,” she said.

  I snapped the chain on a bare bulb above the sink. “No more candles tonight.”

  I grabbed a soft white cloth from the shelf and sat beside the tub, in a pillow of suds.

  “My life is so simple a one-year-old could live it,” she said.

  “You’re just having one of those days,” I said. I wrung the washcloth and let the warm water dribble down her chest. “What’s up with those old people? Your grandparents?”

  “They emigrated here after my mom died.”

  “Where’d they come from?”

  “Yugoslavia,” she said. “Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Macedonia, that whole thing.”

  “You speak their language?”

  “Mala koli(breve)cina.”

  I soaped her shoulders and neck, rinsed the cloth and ran it slowly along the length of her arm, studying the scars. I was stupidly surprised when the wounds didn’t wash away. A siren passed in the street. Her startled fingers took off in flight, fluttering up from the sea of foam and sailing through the fragrant steam, darting here and there.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You must have a diagnosis. Everyone has a diagnosis.”

  “Well, just before I came to the hospital I spent three hundred dollars on Astro Turf and PVC pipe, trying to build a driving range in my dining room.”

  “It’s your dining room,” she said. “You can do what you want.”

  “I’ve never owned a golf club in my life.”

  “Oh.”

  “Travel brochures are a bad sign, too, but you know what’s the worst? Messing with the medications. Like lithium—it makes my hands shake and I can’t walk steadily. So I decide to back the lithium off a little and titrate up on something like BuSpar or Lamictal. My hands stop shaking but I can’t remember anything or I start eating like a pig. I keep trying, you know, making all these little adjustments, but it’s like— I don’t know. I don’t know what it’s like.”

  “It’s not like anything,” she said.

  “Eventually I can’t move. I’ll have the thought, Oh, I want to go out, so I put on my hat and stare at the door. Right about then I check into the hospital, they fix me up, send me back out. I kick ass for a while and then collapse.”

  “You know your diagnosis,” she said.

  “Whatever—bipolar II, Fruit Of The Loom IV, it doesn’t make a difference.”

  “We’ll never get out,” she said.

  “Au contraire—I’m getting myself discharged AMA, first thing tomorrow.”

  “But at least we have our own language.”

  “Yeah, Greek.”

  “In grade school,” she said, “I wrote a report about how a myth was a female moth. We were studying the Greeks.”

  “You have a beautiful mouth,” I said. “I’d like to crawl in it and die.”

  “I’m twenty-nine years old,” she said. “My mouth is full of dead boys.” She blew me a kiss. “Sometimes your mind gives me a feeling of great tiredness. Aren’t you exhausted?”

  “My curfew,” I said feebly.

  “The fires are going out, it’s true.” She sank down in the tub and submerged so that only her knees, her small dancer’s breasts, her big nose, her lovely mouth and blue eyes, these isolated islands of herself, rose above the darkening water. Flecks of ash floated over the surface. “Here’s my idea for your next screenplay,” she said. “Sirens are going everywhere. People are weeping. It doesn’t really matter where you are, it’s all black. You can’t open your eyes anyway.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “And there’s a donkey marooned on an island in the middle of the ocean. A volcano is erupting on the island and rivers of hot lava are flowing toward the donkey. In addition, all around the small island is a ring of fire. What would you do?”

  I considered the possibilities. “I don’t know.”

  Smiling, she said, “The donkey doesn’t know, either.”

  “That’s a good one.”

  She poked at the remaining bubbles with her finger, popping them. I checked my watch. It was midnight on the nose and all that awaited me back at the p-ward was another morning and a long walk down a putty-colored corridor and, at the end of it, a paper cup full of pills. And in a month or a year the ballerina would touch a scar on her breast and tell a rather pointless story about a screenwriter she’d met in the psych ward. Waves of dirty water lapped against the sides of the tub, and her skin, moist and gleaming, was fragrant with wild yam and almond. Then everything went briefly quiet in one of those strange becalmed moments where it’s hard to believe you’re still in Manhattan.

  Up North

  We angled our heads back and opened our mouths like fledgling birds. Smoke gave the cool air a faintly burned flavor, an aftertaste of ash. A single flake lit on my wife’s eyelash, a stellar crystal, cold and intricate. I blew a warm breath over her face, melting the snow.

  “It’s been falling since Saginaw,” I said.

  “Listen,” she said.

  The flight from New York had been rough, and my ears were still blocked, but somewhere in the distance, beyond the immediate silence of the falling snow and the thick woods, I heard the muffled echo of rifle shots.

  “Deer season,” Caroline said.

  “Your father go out?”

  “He usually goes,” she said. “He and the boys. And now you. Now you’ll be one of the boys.”

>   Caroline brushed her hair free of a few tangles and clipped it back in a ponytail that made her look a decade younger—say, twenty years old, taking her back to a time before I’d met her. Perhaps in reflex I remembered the sensation I’d had the first night we slept together, thinking how beautiful she was, how from every angle and in every light she was flawless, like some kind of figurine. Now she examined herself in the small round mirror she’d pulled from her purse, grimacing. The shallow cup of the compact looked to be holding a kind of flesh dust, a spare skin. She dabbed powder around her cheeks, the set line of her jaw. She took a thick brush and stroked a line on either side of her face, magically lifting her cheekbones. She traced her lips lightly with a subdued shade of red and suddenly she was smiling.

  “Up a ways there’s a fork,” she said. “You want to stay right.”

  Before I could start the car again, two men in orange caps crossed in front of us, rifles slung over their shoulders. They stopped in the road and waved, the ears beneath their caps like pink blossoms in the raw cold, and then they bumbled into the woods. I stared at their fresh footprints in the snow.

  “You know them?” I asked.

  “No,” she said.

  At the cabin, we ate a late lunch without the men, who were out on a mission that was, it seemed, top secret. Caroline’s mother, Lucy, had been kept in the dark, and so had Sandy Rababy, whose husband, Steve, was a partner in the accounting firm founded by Caroline’s father. We ate tuna sandwiches and potato chips on paper plates that had been gnawed by mice. Lucy set out a plastic tray of carrots and celery sticks and black olives. We drank mulled wine in Dixie cups, from which I nervously nibbled the wax coating.

  “They took their guns and vests and packed peanut-butter sandwiches and a half gallon of Scotch,” Sandy said. “Now, where do you think they’re going?”

  “We heard guns on the drive in,” I said.

  “Isn’t it awful?” Lucy said.

  “What’s worse,” Sandy said, “the toilet’s busted.”

  “It froze,” Lucy said, “and the bowl cracked. Or the pipes broke or something. We’re using the outhouse.”

  She pointed, and through the window I saw a rickety leaning structure, and a dirty trough of footprints in the snow where people had traipsed back and forth.

  “You need to wear a fluorescent hat out there,” Sandy said, “so you don’t get shot trying to relieve yourself.”

  The cabin was open and cozy, a single large room with a high ceiling, and although I’d never been there before, it struck me as familiar. It was rustic and unpretentious, with that haphazardly curatorial décor that accumulates in old family haunts. At one end was a large fireplace constructed of smooth stones hauled up from the lakeshore, and at the other end were the log bunks where we’d all sleep. Everything that had ever happened here was, in a way, still happening: the smell of wet woollens steaming by the stove, of dry leather gathering dust, of iodine and burned logs and Coppertone—all of it lingered in the air. Two persistent grayling, long extinct in Michigan, surfaced in the wash of light above the back windows, and even the mounted deer and elk heads flanking the fireplace suggested souvenirs from some gone, legendary time. It was exactly the kind of abiding paradise people create for their kids just so that, long after the last summer, the past will live on.

  “Caroline, you’re quiet,” Lucy said to her daughter, my wife, who sat with her legs crossed at the head of the table. The minute we arrived, Caroline had gone directly to an old gouged dresser and, from the bottom drawer, pulled out a man’s bulky sweater, which she wore now—it was green and moth-eaten and voluminous, belonging to her father, whose girth was still a ghostly, orotund presence in the stiff wool. As soon as she sank into the sweater, it was as if she were officially home, and no longer had to explain herself. She took a bite of her sandwich, and her silver earrings shivered against her neck, catching the light. They were a gift, I imagined, from SJ, the man whose initials now coded her journal and date book. She bunched a sleeve of the sweater above her elbow and said, “Tell me the news.”

  “You know Lindstrom’s wife passed away?” Lucy said.

  Caroline said, “Poor Lindy.”

  “He’s very depressed, especially coming up here,” Sandy said. “This is the first Thanksgiving without her.”

  I’d met Lindy and his wife, Beth Ann, on several occasions when the whole group had come to New York for a weekend of theater. They, like Sandy and Steve Rababy, were lifelong friends of the Jansens. They’d all met in college, when the men were brothers at the Phi Delt fraternity in Ann Arbor, and now, years later, the group remained intact and inseparable except for this death.

  “Hey, Daly, what about these lips?” Sandy said, sliding the torn page of a magazine toward me. She’d had cheek implants and was currently in the market for new lips. I was meant to offer a proxy opinion for all men. The woman in the magazine was pouting sadly or seductively, it was hard to tell, and she was looking confused or far off into the distance, also hard to tell.

  “Those are Caroline’s lips,” I said. Sandy held the page to her nose, and then looked at Caroline, who modeled a little moue.

  “You’re right, they are,” Sandy said. “I want your lips.”

  “They’re spoken for,” my wife said, touching my knee under the table, quaintly.

  Caroline heard the men come up the tote road around nine o’clock. I went outside and watched as her father horsed the truck over a hillock of snow, rocking it back and forth and stubbornly and finally into the yard.

  “Where’s my little girl?” Robert Jansen said as soon as he saw me. His voice boomed, a deep bass that echoed away, bounding into the woods. He looked past me toward the lighted door of the cabin, where Caroline stood, her long blue shadow thrown on the snow.

  “Hi, Daddy,” she said.

  “How’d it go?” Sandy shouted from the kitchen.

  It was obvious as the men stood warming their hands at the fire that part of what had been top secret about their day involved a bar. Their cheeks flushed red and their eyes sparked wetly and none of them was able to stand perfectly still—they looked like a trio of overweight crooners, swaying boozily in the soft light for a last song.

  Lucy rattled a plastic jar of aspirin and set it out on the table with a pitcher of ice water.

  “So?” she said.

  Lindy lifted a log into the fire, raking the bed of coals with an iron, and wiped his hands.

  “No luck,” Steve said.

  “But you found the bar all right,” Lucy said.

  “Huh—yeah,” Sandy said. “The bar wasn’t running through the woods.”

  “Tomorrow,” Mr. Jansen offered. He was a large man, so large he always struck me as unfinished, the rough framing of a man who would never fully occupy the space he’d annexed. He had a flat owlish face and arched gray eyebrows and a pounding, theatrical voice. It was he, more than anyone else, who had encouraged my wife in her acting career. “And Daly’ll come along.”

  I knew better than to object, although I’d fired a gun only twice in my life, and both times I’d missed the can. There was no romance for me in weapons, and I found it effortful to be around men who liked to shoot. I always had, beginning with my father, who was an avid gun collector and fancied himself a marksman. In an act of adolescent defiance, I’d become an equally avid birder, a member of the local Audubon, and a preachy vegetarian, turning the table into a pulpit while my father, ignoring me, packed it away, head bent over his plate. Now I stared at the men, looking them in the eye, one by one—I had rehearsed this moment for weeks—but learned nothing when, to my surprise, each of them averted his eyes.

  “How about fixing the damn toilet instead?” Sandy said.

  “What’s wrong with the outhouse?” her husband countered.

  “The forest is full of drunks with guns,” Sandy said. “Girls don’t like that.”

  When I thought I was the only one awake, I reached for Caroline’s thigh, sliding my hand ins
ide her nightgown. In the cold cabin, she was like the discovery of buried warmth, of hibernating life. I heard the fire pop and hiss, the crumbling sound as the pile of logs collapsed and settled. Stirred by the noise, Lindy rose and stoked the fire, adding a few logs and some split-cedar shakes. Steve snored loudly, and Sandy whispered something to him, and I heard them both grunt and turn over in bed. With the fire rekindled, a cobweb fluttered in the waves of rising heat, and the thin gray filament threw a shadow that wound and unwound, snaking along the far wall. I moved my hand up Caroline’s thigh until I felt the rough edge of pubic hair curling out from beneath the elastic band of her G-string. I slipped a finger under the band, and then I reached for myself. Caroline rose up, startled, and said, “What, what,” but I don’t think she ever fully woke. She stared around herself, still safely in her dream, and then she lay back down, balling up beneath the comforter with her back to me.

  My wife was raped the summer she turned eighteen. She told me this after we’d been together for a year, on a night when I’d once again caught her crying for no apparent reason. I felt instantly that I’d known all along. An entire history and sensibility suddenly pulled into focus, and there was Caroline, my wife, the blur of herself resolved into something sharp and clear. Our whole time together, I sensed that I had been tracing the contours of that moment, describing and defining its shape. This was, I thought, the elusive thing I’d been trying to put my hands on.

  For months afterward, I found myself drifting away from conversations as I rehearsed the scenario in my mind. What I imagined was horrible for me—the rain and the bushes, a black man, a knife. I saw things. I saw the underpants she’d have to pull on again when he was done, I saw her walk home in a world suddenly gone strange, I saw the mud she’d have to wash off the backs of her thighs and the way the stream of gray would circle the drain, I saw pebbles embedded in her knees, I saw her days later, alone and crying, dropping the knife the first time she cut into a tomato, I saw the halved red fruit on the white cutting board the next morning, the spilled seeds now dried to the plastic. I saw these things, I imagined them. Our life together took on a second intention, and a sock on the floor would stop me cold. My eyes would lose focus and I’d daydream, trying to capture the moment and make it less strange, trying to inhabit the past, intervening. I wanted to be there, and, failing, I developed instead a tendency to ascribe every dip and depression to the rape, organizing our shared life around it, carrying it forward into our future like a germ.