ANTONYA NELSON (1961–) was born in Wichita, Kansas. She received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arizona in 1986. Her first story collection, The Expendables, won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction in 1990. She is the author of four other short story collections, including Some Fun (Scribner, 2006), and three novels (Talking in Bed, Nobody’s Girl, and Living to Tell). She shares the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston with her husband, Robert Boswell, and lives in New Mexico, Texas, and Colorado.
McBride found himself at the Pima County psychiatric hospital in the middle of the day. “Don’t visit me here,” Daisy told him. She slid her palms over her frizzy white hair as if to keep it from flying off like dandelion fluff. “It embarrasses me, these crazy people make me ashamed.”
“I thought you wanted to see me. I thought that was the point. Why else are you in Tucson?” Daisy, McBride’s girlfriend of the year before, had been discovered on the highway near the Triple T truck stop carrying a portable typewriter, trying to hitch a ride. Native New Yorker, she’d never learned to drive; maybe that was why McBride had assumed she would stay in Salt Lake City, where he’d left her. He certainly preferred to think of that chapter as a closed one, a place he had chosen against.
Daisy said, “I want to see you when I’m normal again. I just feel like you’re staring at me, at my flabby skin and everything.” She began jerking her shoulders in some simulation of crying but her eyes remained dry. McBride did not wish to touch her. She’d taken on an institutional smell and her sweatsuit hid any physical charm. Her eyes had lost whatever snappish wit they’d once held, glazed with depression and the medication used to treat it. McBride reached to hold her and felt she was made of something more inert than her former substance, dull as clay, and pale as an albino, as if she’d been dipped in bleach. In the past, she’d been burnished, tanned twice weekly in a salon coffin, hair dyed golden and frowsily restrained with combs and barrettes, a Victoria’s Secret kind of girl, pubic hair dyed to match.
Had his leaving her brought about such thorough transformation? He felt like asking her. He was sort of flattered, sort of appalled.
When she’d fallen in love with him she’d gone to his apartment and climbed into his bed and waited for him to come home. She was a free spirit with a crush, a mission, a taste for disaster. His roommate had greeted him in the kitchen that late night, wearing boxers and socks, whispering as he stepped daintily on tiptoes, “There’s a girl in your bed” with such admiration and awe that McBride seemed stripped of very many options. A naked girl between your sheets was not a thing to take lightly.
“Drunk?” he asked, pulling off his own clothes.
His roommate had given an elaborate impatient shrug and shiver: who cared? Or: of course drunk; you had to ask?
Was she desperate? No—devoted. Spontaneous. Outrageous. A girl on fire, burning so that you wanted to stand in the radiating glow, a girl on the verge, confident in not caring. The prospect of death did not deter her. She was up for whatever.
And this had led her here, McBride supposed, later and after, immolation imminent. The Arizona desert was forgiving in February, springlike by eastern standards. They sat in the building’s courtyard. A general wooden catatonia in the human population—patients and orderlies both—made the Adirondack chairs seem full of personality, resting at jaunty angles and in conversational clusters over the evergreen grass. Other visitors carried Styrofoam cups of coffee to other patients, crossing the lawn quickly, trying to be spry in the face of lethargy. McBride felt trapped by his past, and kept sneaking covert glances at his watch. His tapping foot ached for an accelerator.
What he remembered about Daisy was sex. Even when he’d stopped loving her, he’d wanted to fuck her. They’d been strangers their first night together, Daisy waiting for him drunk on that crowded single mattress. His roommate’s awe, “There’s a girl in your bed.” Like a gift, like an animal in a gunnysack, and on fire, in heat.
Was there a word for the way you winced, recalling a former affection, that place in your rib cage that briefly collapsed, your glance that no longer lingered but skimmed over her face like a skipped stone over water?
Now Daisy said, “Look,” and pointed toward the hospital entrance. “Family theater.” They watched a woman wrench herself free of the guiding hands of an older couple, her parents, McBride guessed, the three of them sharing a lankiness. Their daughter was easily in her forties, long-limbed and angry, crossing her arms defiantly and refusing to enter the front doors. McBride was sympathetic to the parents, who looked harried and doomed, as if they hadn’t slept in days. Daisy said, “Old farts just want to get rid of her.” McBride supposed that was true but he didn’t blame them.
When the woman suddenly sprinted down the walk toward the street the parents began shouting. The woman ran like a dancer, straight into the street without looking. Her mother screamed, putting her hands to her cheeks. Cars weaved around the daughter as she stood between lanes but nobody stopped driving. Nobody in Tucson ever stopped driving. The woman stood facing traffic like the oblivious prow of a ship. McBride looked to the orderlies, who’d jumped up yet made no move toward action.
“Help her,” Daisy said to him, pushing his elbow from the chair arm. He rose and started reluctantly for the street, jogging in such a way that his teeth hurt. When he reached the woman she took his arm as if she’d been waiting for him, her partner on their dance stage. She stared at him with clear unmedicated eyes, startled like a deer, pretty and skittish.
“What am I doing?” she asked.
McBride told her what he’d seen as he escorted her up the walk. They passed her parents, who simply watched as if at a wedding.
“You’d never do a thing like this,” she informed McBride as they entered the building’s foyer. She held his arm lightly, with long shaking fingers. A group had clustered at the commotion and now drifted away disappointed at the tame outcome.
“A thing like what?”
“Like impulsive behavior. It’s a feminine trait.”
McBride recalled a similar complaint Daisy had made when he refused to try sushi or inhale an illicit powder. No, he wouldn’t eat raw fish, or snort an alien drug. Nor would he bolt, barefooted, into traffic.
“Party pooper,” Daisy called him. “Wet blanket. Coward.” What was so brave about taking risks, he’d asked her. What separated it from stepping off a cliff?
“You step off holding my hand,” she’d said, popping a pill, removing a garment, switching off the headlights at high speed on a dark highway. But he’d wanted a bungee, a net, a loophole.
The woman’s parents had followed them inside and now stood deferentially behind McBride. The woman let loose of his arm, surrendering to her parents. “This way,” she said quietly, leading them toward the admissions desk.
Daisy had her eyes closed when McBride got back to their chairs. “I’m not asleep,” she told him.
McBride sat on the arm of the chair, ready to leave.
“Fix everything?” she asked acidly; this was like her, to tell him to do something, then ridicule him for doing it.
“I should go,” he said.
“You should,” she agreed, starting to not-cry again.
“I’ll come back.”
“I’ll be here.”
• • •
At home that evening McBride’s current girlfriend Martha sat on newspapers painting chairs. In her spare time she decorated secondhand furniture; her house was full of it, colorful as a toy store. Yellow snakes wound up the spindles of one chair, blue tulips drawn freehand popped along the arms of another. Sad music came from a bedroom, the mournful wailing of loons. Martha’s gray head was tilted and her tongue was lodged beneath her upper lip in concentration. There was the odor of hearty food beneath the paint fumes, that and the burnt herby smell of marijuana, which she’d smoked earlier. The ordinariness of the evening, the simple and somehow unbelievable normalness of it—the way McBride could accept a healthy woman in the house where he lived doing something so utterly charming as painting furniture and cooking food—should have made him happy. Instead, he was irritated by the tableau. He felt domesticated, as if it had happened against his will. Time with Daisy, however brief, had left something under his skin.
“How was she?” Martha asked.
“Drugged. Nuts. I ended up dragging some other woman out of the street in front of the hospital.”
“Alive?”
“More or less.” He told her about the morning while she worked her brush around in her patient, stoned method. The room grew dim and she quit, leaning back on her hands, legs splayed open lazily. She was the first woman McBride had ever known who was not at war with her body: she liked it, it liked her. She walked around in the world unself-conscious inside of it, completely casual with its shortcomings as well as its gifts. Fond, as if of a beloved pet.
“Oh, Daisy,” McBride said, trying to sound as if he could dismiss his old girlfriend, laboring to evoke that useful wince that meant he was over her, ashamed of former passion. “How was your day?”
Martha quoted some of her accident victims’ depositions to cheer him up. She worked in the police court downtown taking statements from bad drivers. This was only one of her jobs. She also interviewed rape victims for a professor at the University of Arizona, having some talent at listening. She was thirty-six, six years older than McBride, prematurely gray, and had lived with a number of men so she knew how to do it. Calmly. With a great deal of forbearance and humor. Even her name: Martha. Not Muffy, not Marti, nothing cute or hip, an old-fashioned name designating a person with both feet on the ground. She said, “ ‘Coming home I drove into the wrong house and collided with a tree I don’t have.’ ”
McBride smiled. Martha smiled, too, and rose to extract whatever she had cooked from the oven, which had the bloody odor of red meat and mushrooms. Wine. He suspected she made up depositions but she swore they were authentic. Her favorite went: “I had been driving for forty years when I fell asleep at the wheel and hit a telephone pole.” The rape victims she and McBride had agreed not to discuss.
They ate on the front porch in the breeze of an oscillating fan. Even in February, the birds went on and on, noisy as a coffee klatch. The next-door neighbor the transvestite came out, as he always did, as the sun fell, lips a red bow, bosom an emphatic bolster. His era was the fifties: floral, with forgiving hemlines.
“Imagine going through all the nonsense he must go through to look like that,” McBride had once mistakenly said. The shaving, the plucking, the makeup, the heels: torture. Martha had thrown her head back to laugh. She could really laugh. “Just imagine,” she’d said.
They waved, as usual. The pretense seemed to be that two people shared the little house next door, a man and a woman who were never seen together yet wore the same shoe size. “Whatever,” McBride muttered, also as usual. Martha liked her funky neighborhood. She liked the tree full of umbrellas as well as the lawn art on the corner, toasters and blenders and microwave ovens set out as ornaments among the plastic flowers and spinning pinwheels. She liked the car with toys glued onto its chassis. She had told McBride, when he complained of the weirdness, that as he grew older he would treasure the odd, shun the ordinary, grow easy as she with eccentricity. It would not threaten him so.
Personally, McBride thought that Martha lived among the bizarre in order not to feel so bizarre herself, normal by comparison. Plus, her neighbors’ obvious dilemmas distracted her from her own, which was that she wanted a baby. Women were on timetables, cycles, deadlines. That ticking clock, bomb or alarm, irked McBride. His gender had forever, plenitude, a wealth of progeny waiting in the wings. Babies, like the rape interviews, was a topic best avoided.
Predictably, he dreamed about Daisy that night. He was in his old house, the one he’d grown up in in Oklahoma City. In the dream Daisy lived around the corner from his parents. She rented a small sunny room. McBride visited her there and she kissed him on the cheek. He woke feeling tender toward her. It had been such a sweet kiss, so innocent and discrete, like the kiss of a child, free of history or future, and it had such melancholy force that McBride woke in a state of pure desire, which impelled his waking Martha to make love with her, his fantasy life blurred by dream. Perhaps when he came, it was into the memory of his sleeping vision of Daisy. The memory—combined, Martha and Daisy, sanity and sickness—carried him through the day, their faces next to his, his sexual past shoved against his sexual present, an interesting friction.
He visited Daisy again a week later. The tenderness of his dream had faded. Her depression made him impatient. This aspect of Daisy seemed to him an enormous weakness and he did not tolerate weakness well, trying to get a handle on his own. She wore the same sweatsuit, the same muzzy expression, the same drained pallor. Today it was cloudy but they sat in the same hopeful Adirondack chairs outside, staring at the front door as if the drama they’d witnessed last time might also replay itself, the middle-aged woman fleeing her parents, the need to run into traffic. McBride was annoyed to discover he had on the identical shirt he’d worn then, too.
Without apparent emotion, Daisy said, “I’m pregnant I think.”
McBride looked hard at her, trying to figure where the sensible part of her went when the other part came out.
“Don’t worry,” she continued, “it’s not yours.”
“It couldn’t be,” he said.
“True.” She said nothing for a while, then added, “I could have had your baby after you moved away. I could have left her in Salt Lake, given her up to the Mormons to raise. Don’t men ever wonder what happens to their sperm? I’d worry, if I were a man, but men—it’s all just hit and run.”
What occurred to McBride was that all the nasty forces of nature had female pronouns, typhoons and tornadoes and those mythic creatures, the Furies and Sirens. They were powerful, and they sent you reeling, they trapped you.
“Daisy, what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.” She shook her fluffy head. “I have to get off of these drugs if I’m pregnant, that’s for sure. But what else? You got me.” She picked at the chipped green paint on her chair arm for a few minutes in silence. Then added, “There were two men in Salt Lake. We all three lived together, very French movie. Either one could be the dad, though they’d both suck at it.”
McBride said, “You know, your life is kind of crisis-oriented, have you noticed that?”
She lifted her face to the brightest cloud, the one that hid the sun, and said, sullenly, “No,” and then wouldn’t say another word.
• • •
Two men. The image of Daisy at the fulcrum of a threesome wouldn’t leave McBride. Somehow this wrinkle intrigued him, against his will. What kind of sleeping arrangements had prevailed? Was there an alpha male, stud one, stud two? Some homosexual stuff? How did the three of them behave at breakfast, sitting together over coffee in their underwear and ruffled hair?
At home Martha attempted to cheer him. “To avoid hitting the bumper of the car in front, I struck the pedestrian.”
McBride told her, “I’m starting to believe these reports of yours.”
Martha feigned shock, sucking on a joint. “You mean you didn’t before?”
“Not before Daisy.”
“Daisy,” Martha said, looking bemused, annoyed in the unthreatened way a strong woman does in the face of a puny one.
“She lived with two men at once, she says.”
“She’s done everything, that gal, all the things I always thought I would do. It’s disappointing to realize how staid I’ve become.” But she smiled. Her complacency didn’t really trouble her—look at what surrounded her, arty furniture, queer neighbors, clacking birds.
The pregnancy part went unmentioned, but the next time he visited the hospital Martha wanted to come with him. She insisted. She drove. For someone who evaluated car accidents for a living she handled an automobile very badly, swerving arrogantly through traffic, refusing to do head checks, one palm ever ready on the horn. She had lapses but mostly Martha was reliable, grown up. Now that he’d become one it surprised McBride how few adults were grown-ups. It still seemed all seventh grade, and you had to keep on your toes.
Daisy had dressed for McBride’s visit this week. Someone—some anal-retentive obsessive-compulsive with a lot of time on her hands—had lassoed Daisy’s wild hair into tiny braids which crisscrossed her shapely skull in a flattering style. The sweatsuit had been traded for black jeans and a glossy button-down shirt, under which her breasts bobbed. She’d smeared makeup over the sores around her mouth and the dark circles beneath her eyes, and she looked like a country-western singer ready to make a comeback. Next to her, Martha seemed far too robust, big and indestructible, like a Hereford beside an impala. McBride saw that the visit was going to go wrong in a way he hadn’t anticipated.
Women intimidated Daisy; even in the sanest of moments she didn’t like them, though she pretended otherwise. Without the possibility of an encounter ending in sex, Daisy was a bit at sea. McBride sat on the grass before the willing Adirondack chairs where the women sat leaning back, faces to the sun. He thought of triangles, the two women here together only because of him; the two men in Salt Lake maybe waiting to hear from Daisy, wandering around the house wondering what they were doing together, stuck with each other and a legally binding lease. Because he could come up with nothing to say in front of Martha, McBride understood he was not innocent in his current relationship with Daisy, a fact that made him tired of himself.
Martha said, “So how are you feeling?”
Daisy took the finger she was chewing from her mouth and said, “Sad. I’m having an abortion tomorrow and that makes me really sad, even though I don’t think I’m ready for a child.”
McBride felt Martha appraising him, compiling all the data, his not telling her about the baby, his phony forgetfulness on the matter. Then she nodded at Daisy. “That’s understandable. I’m just now feeling ready for a child.”
“You have time. You’re not old.”
“I am old, but it’s nice of you to say. I’ve had three abortions and every time I think, I just saved another kid from being fucked-up. It’s one way not to feel bad.”
“Well, tomorrow I’ll save my second from being fucked-up.”
McBride was grateful he hadn’t fathered any of these fetuses. Both women looked down at him, their expressions identical: what good was he, there on the grass? He didn’t want to donate his sperm to Martha’s desire, and though he was in the position of footstool, they couldn’t even put their feet up on him.
“Coffee,” he said, hopping to. And once he’d left them together he did not want to return and so roamed the hospital halls.
The place was poorly funded, understaffed, cheaply built and maintained. It was not old enough to seem gothically romantic nor new enough to appear at least clean and modern. In all the popular spots, the carpet was worn through; the furniture was crooked, broken plastic from the seventies, and the windows were smudged with years’ worth of fingerprints, people pressing against the glass, longing to escape the big box they seemed to find themselves trapped inside. Everywhere televisions, laugh tracks and commercials fading in and out of every open doorway as McBride passed. Was there anything more representative of illness and confinement than daytime TV, anything more definitively the killing of time? This first floor was public; the upper ones required speaking with a station manager. To avoid returning to Martha and Daisy—he could see them from the second floor window near the elevator, still talking together in the sun, Daisy tilted back with her eyes closed, Martha watching her—he gave himself the challenge of lying his way past a station manager. The fourth was Daisy’s floor; the higher one went, the crazier the occupants.
But it was no challenge at all. He merely mentioned Daisy’s name and was pointed in the direction of her room. The woman at the desk didn’t even have him sign in. He opened her dresser drawers and looked in her closet. Nothing but the portable typewriter she’d been found with on the highway. Also some odd articles of clothing, obviously stuff that had been donated, discards. Plain white underpants, high-waisted and modest, nothing like what she’d worn before. A picture of Jesus over her headboard, eyes pitched upward, just as exasperated as anyone else who had to deal with Daisy.
“I didn’t know you were a patient here.”
McBride whirled, caught. At the doorway stood the woman from the street, arms crossed as if chilly. She resembled Audrey Hepburn, he thought, willowy, frail, and jittery as a stray. “I’m not,” he said, recovering. “I’m waiting for Daisy.”
“Daisy.” She said it skeptically. “Well, I’m glad you’re not a patient because I would feel bad about not struggling more if you were. Couldn’t have let another inmate be my undoing.”
McBride smiled because she seemed to be joking but she didn’t return the smile. She simply walked away, as if he’d made the wrong answer, the bones of her ribs and hips visible beneath her gray dress. From the hallway, he looked back outside. The Adirondack chairs were abandoned, big yawning laps.
• • •
Somehow Daisy wound up at McBride’s house. This was because it was officially, legally, Martha’s house, and Martha had invited her. She didn’t believe Daisy was crazy. Confused, yes. In trouble, yes. Maybe even more trouble than craziness but not crazy. The thing on the highway, with the typewriter? McBride whispered this in their bedroom after Daisy had fallen asleep on the study couch.
“She was pregnant,” Martha said. “Overwrought.”
“She still is pregnant.”
“True. But that’s only till tomorrow. Then we work on getting her off the heavy-duty meds.”
“What makes you want to do this? You don’t even know her.”
“She’s your friend,” Martha said simply. She wore a large white nightgown with ruffles and lace, matronly on her though it would have seemed sexy and Victorian on someone else, someone skinny, anorexic, or strung out like a junkie, like the woman at the hospital, like Daisy.
“She might still be in love with me,” McBride warned Martha in the dark.
Martha laughed and wouldn’t stop. It was lusty, gutsy laughter, and McBride didn’t like it.
“What’s funny? She might be.”
“Oh, you sound so serious, like you wouldn’t be able to defend yourself.” She held her hands above her head as if shielding herself from an oncoming train. “Stop, stop! Don’t love me.” She laughed again. “Gimme a break. You’re a big strong man, capable of fending off a crazy woman’s love.”
“You said she wasn’t crazy.”
“She shows all the signs of molestation.”
“Naturally. She’s a tabloid story, waiting to happen.”
“I’m pretty sure she’s been sexually abused.”
“Only with permission,” McBride said. “Only because she wanted to be.”
“You don’t believe that.” In fact he did believe it, but best to keep that to himself. Best to leave that can of worms in the cupboard. On this subject they could not have an agreeable conversation. Martha had interviewed over a hundred rape victims, her specific interest in their notions of dress and how they felt about their bodies, before and after. She and McBride lay with thoughts of rape between them, a few moments of respectful silence. She believed he was better than he was; often he did not feel like dispelling this.
Then she rolled on top of him and became heavy. She loved to start sex this way, covering him like a blanket, breathing into his neck, heat, comfort. Her bed she’d made herself, headboard a pilfered road sign from high school days. Her friends had wanted DIP or PROCEED WITH CAUTION or MEN AT WORK, but what had Martha stolen? soft shoulder.
“The act of rape and the act of love are the same gesture,” she’d told him once, explaining the messiness, the warring, scarring horror.
“Insert tab A into slot B,” McBride said, deflecting, going for the joke.
“No, I mean that something twisted and confusing like that is called a paradox.”
“A pair of ducks?” He didn’t want to be educated; he knew he’d fail the final exam. He’d had it with complexity.
“A pair of fucked ducks.”
• • •
There was something between McBride’s girlfriends and it began to grow, like a romance, as if they had secrets. Daisy had only to say a word and the two of them would be uncontrollably amused, laughing so hard they couldn’t speak. McBride vaguely remembered this about her, how she pulled you into her private chamber, made you feel that only you and she lived there, in the heady and ticklish dark. Her bratty sense of humor was surfacing, now that she’d stepped down from her meds. As well as her readiness to lie. “My brother was sexually ambivalent,” she said, when the transvestite next door walked out one evening.
“Before or after the heroin overdose?” McBride said flatly. “Or maybe that was your cousin? She’s always got a relative or ex-boyfriend to one-up with,” he explained to Martha, who blinked at him, unmoved as a lizard.
“You’re just jealous of my radar,” Daisy claimed.
“Gaydar,” Martha amended. And there they were, hysterical again.
There’d been no abortion, a decision made without McBride’s input. One of those roommates in Utah had sent some little seed out innocent in the world, trapped and growing now inside crazy Daisy.
Meanwhile McBride continued to visit the county hospital. He went to see Claire. Claire: tall, and faintly British.
“Why are you here?” she asked him.
He shook his head. She never smiled, never let loose of a somehow reassuring seriousness. She was very somber. You could say anything. She never evaded. “Why are you here?” he asked.
“I can’t keep house,” she said. “I forget to eat. I take walks and get lost. I leave the doors unlocked. My parents’ television and video camera and every single CD they owned were stolen last time they left me alone.” Her parents were on an extended vacation in Greece. When they traveled, Claire stayed at the hospital.
“You’re not sick,” McBride told her, “you’re just forgetful. If forgetfulness were an illness, the whole city would be in a straitjacket.”
“I’m pathologically forgetful,” Claire said. “I forget so I can hurt my parents.”
“But not consciously?”
“Of course not consciously. They’re retired, so this vacation they’re taking is from me. Do you understand? They are sitting on a beach, a million miles away from their troubles. Meaning me. I am their troubles.”
Then it was summer and McBride began sleeping with Claire. She put on her shoes and they signed her out and drove to a motel on the highway not far from the hospital. Coincidentally, it was across the street from the Triple T truck stop where Daisy had been found. Twenty-five dollars, no questions asked. The cash exchange without receipt or bill, no evidence, no residue. What McBride liked about the Sands Motel was its air-conditioning—no swampy evaporative cooler here—which worked beautifully. Otherwise, the rooms were typically hideous and disturbing. They would not let you forget they’d accommodated hundreds of strangers before you, some sogginess in the carpet, lingering odor of cigarette, ripped sheet where someone else’s toenail had pierced through. Claire in sex was the same as Claire in conversation: thoroughly confrontational, right there. “I’ve heard that this is the most sensitive spot on a man,” she might say, pressing the pad of her thumb against his perineum.
“Yes,” he would breathe, lifted as if upon a salty sea wave. “You heard right.”
She had a thespian’s voice, or a smoker’s, and she hummed when she was up against McBride, melancholy and rousing as a distant train whistle. She alone called him by his first name, murmuring it. “Your name is like a kiss,” she claimed, illustrating by placing it in the hollow of his throat; “Peter,” she said, humming lungs, mouth releasing warm air. After sex she lay quietly on his chest and slept, a small smile on her lips. He nestled his palm against her scalp. She had a dainty head. Everywhere her bones were close to the surface, where her fair skin showed tiny blue veins, a network of hairline cracks, porcelain. When he pulled his hand away, her fine black hair shivered with static electricity. In sleep, she looked like what she must have looked like as a child, that smile like a dim memory, as if she were happy.
As he stroked her hair and the painfully knobby knuckles of her spinal column, he wondered why it was he had begun fucking older women. He thought he’d matured, but maybe younger women just didn’t like him anymore. Was he more complicated, or more desperate? “We love each other’s damage,” Martha had once said, to explain their relationship. Apparently, Martha loved his, whatever it was. But only now did McBride actually follow her meaning. He couldn’t have said that he loved Claire, but he felt ready to go to the mat for her. To protect this brief easy sleep. To defend her against her parents, for example, if need be, against her own self-loathing.
“You don’t have to worry about suicide,” she told him one day as he dropped her off after.
McBride had not, until that moment, given it a thought but from then on, of course, he thought of it frequently.
• • •
“She hates me,” McBride told Martha, referring to Daisy. What he meant was that he hated her.
He and Martha had met for lunch downtown near the courthouse where McBride was laying brick. The summer had become so hot that the workday began at 5 A.M., ending by 1:00. Martha chewed her taco before answering. “She thinks you take me for granted.”
“I take you for granted? The total stranger who’s not even helping with bills, let alone housekeeping, thinks I’m taking you for granted?” He was outraged; then he remembered his affair with Claire and calmed down. The checks and balances of intimacy.
Martha smiled. “I have a feeling she’s got a kind of crush on me, frankly. I think she thinks I saved her. She’s had enough of men, for a while.”
He didn’t say that he didn’t believe Daisy could capture a man, these days, so changed was her body, skin, appeal. She had an aura of illness, contagion, that only a maternal impulse could love. “How do I take you for granted?”
“I didn’t say you did; Daisy said it.”
“But why does she think so?”
Martha leaned forward over the paper wrappings of their lunch, looked at him with her healthy hazel eyes. “She says you used to be much more physical with her than you are with me.”
“You listen to this stuff?” His voice was louder than he intended; the lawyers at the next table shifted. Daisy was right, and it made him want to go kill her.
Martha leaned back. “I’m not worried about us. I like you, I think you like me. We laugh enough, even though we don’t fuck as often as we used to.” She tilted her head, squinted; she could wait. “You asked me what Daisy thought and I told you, but it doesn’t bother me. So don’t fret.”
McBride found Daisy in Martha’s sewing room, asleep on the Hide-a-Bed. When he sat beside her she woke without alarm; nothing in human nature would surprise her.
She propped herself sleepily on an elbow, letting the sheet drop to reveal she wore a soiled spaghetti strap T-shirt, nipples large and brown through the sheer material, abdomen like a cantaloupe. “I was thinking you might come to me someday, Mac,” she said, placing a warm hand on his thigh.
McBride stood abruptly. “I’m not seducing you,” he told her. “I want you out of here, in fact. If you’re well enough to think I’d sleep with you, you’re well enough to get the fuck out.”
“I know you’re sleeping with someone else,” Daisy said, her eyes leveraging the threat. She would tell. She would ruin his life. There was no correct response so he simply stared at her, hating her. Then she began crying, and it was all McBride could do to keep from throwing a tantrum himself. Her face before him—quivering chapped lips, fair eyebrows full of acne—seemed to want to be struck. What did she expect from him? It enraged him to see her sobbing; he felt like grabbing her by the shoulders and flinging her back against the couch. How dare she know his secret? She looked up from under her hair and suddenly smiled through her tears, as if she’d caught on to a trick. She was a slutty, easy girl, and McBride could not deny the appeal. He remembered her in bed: her pleasure came only in extremity, at the very moment that might mark pain. She liked to bite and be bitten, hair clutched and yanked. Now she reached a hand for his kneecap and spread her fingers slowly, as if she might insinuate herself just this way throughout his system. Infuriated, McBride lurched away, stumbled onto the floor. She followed, into his lap, and they were wrestling, Daisy sinking her teeth first into his arm and next his neck, hard enough for his nerves to trill. He put a knee between her legs and forced her arms apart. Below him, crucified, she breathed deeply, a strand of saliva across her cheek. The fact that her T-shirt and underwear did not cover her made McBride aware of her odor, which was powerful, unwashed and sexual. Rank, with a need to be hurt, and him not so far from obliging.
“Go away,” he told her desperately. “Please. Go. Away.” He felt his swelling erection as a betrayal—but of whom? What?
She rolled out from under him and curled toward the dark cavern beneath the bed like an animal. From the back she looked just like she always had, sinuous, nocturnal.
In the bathroom McBride tilted his head and checked the spot she’d bitten on his neck in the mirror. There were tiny broken capillaries but they looked enough like razor burn to reassure him his struggle with Daisy would go undiscovered. His heart, he noted, was beating so hard he could see it in his chest, in his reflection, pulsing there like a mouse in his pocket.
• • •
“If you want to make love with me, you can’t do it with anyone else,” Claire told him the next day as she ran her fingers over the bite marks on his arm. Leave it to the woman he didn’t live with to sniff out his deception. “I know you live with Martha, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you make love with her.”
“We have sex,” McBride told her, wondering why he found it necessary to convince her of this fact while obscuring others.
“Sex with someone you live with is more like masturbation,” she said. “Just some warm object to rub on until you come. Do-it-yourself sex.”
“I’m a do-it-your-selfer from way back,” McBride said, wanting the punch line, wanting to stay out of the deep well, out of the tricky web. Women were so prone to abstraction, to pitching you into outer space. They were not afraid of the dark, the absence of gravity.
“Fucking her isn’t necessarily making love,” Claire said. “We make love.” Then she fell into her postcoital nap, a little gift her body gave her, exhausted childish sleep.
He took home Claire’s theory and tried it on the next time he and Martha had sex. In the living room, Daisy watched television, a habit she’d adopted at the psychiatric hospital and had not given up. She sat around the house indulging an adolescent appetite, Cheetos and Skittles, Count Chocula.
“Where are you?” Martha whispered in his face, holding it in her plump fingers, peering inside him, nose to nose. She was stoned, a state that made her want orgasm and honesty. McBride thought of Claire’s words and Daisy’s pregnant breasts while he worked his penis inside Martha. Where was he, indeed?
“You can go,” she breathed into his ear, his mature girlfriend with her solid legs around his hips, feet locked behind him, “but you have to come back.”
• • •
The next time he visited the hospital, Claire had been moved to a new ward. They were doing what an aide called a suicide watch. Claire had been caught sawing at her wrists, using a plastic knife, but still. “Those things have serrated edges, man,” the aide said. “Serrated,” he repeated.
McBride found her tranquilized, staring apathetically at a New York Review of Books tabloid. “I can’t read this,” she said. “The words are floating around like boats.” Her wrists were wrapped with gauze, bright clean bracelets. “I feel poisoned,” she declared, sailing the book review across the room like a Frisbee. “They’re trying to kill me.” Considering her behavior, McBride couldn’t hold it against the hospital.
“Why?” he asked, hoping simplicity would be his strong suit.
“Why not, you big asshole? That’s the real question.” She drew a soppy breath, her fine features blue, as if she weren’t getting enough oxygen. She cried in the slow, drugged way of hopeless sedation. Asshole was not really part of her vocabulary. That was the drugs talking.
“Baby,” he said, embracing her, careful of her bandages.
“That’s what I need,” she said, “a term of endearment. Muffin. Kitten.”
“Maybe you should eat? You look kind of . . .”
“I hate fat,” Claire said flatly. “I work hard to be thin. I don’t eat, in order to be thin.”
“That’s kind of sick.”
She simply stared at him, waiting for something she didn’t know to emerge from his mouth. “Your girlfriend is fat,” she added. It wasn’t a good moment. McBride liked her better when she wasn’t catty. Also, he was too tempted to respond in kind, to be catty with her. They could get nasty together, it turned out, eat each other’s spleen. “She’s got a big tush, that girlfriend of yours.”
“Where are mom and dad?”
“Flying home, wringing their . . .” She held out her own hands, illustrating by twisting her palms, wrists stiff in their wrapping. “They don’t have a notion what to do.”
“What should I do?” he asked.
“Save me,” she said, collapsing against him. She wanted to take him with her, he thought. She was drowning, and if he did not escape this clutch, he would wind up washed ashore somewhere, bloated and cold.
“You can’t save her,” he told Martha that very night, referring to Daisy, hoping he was right. Daisy, seven months pregnant, had disappeared into south Tucson. The three of them had been eating Mexican food across from the greyhound track; they’d made money betting on those strange creatures, then celebrated with burritos and beer, Daisy on her best behavior, sipping a soda, consuming protein and calcium, like a good mother. But after the bathroom run, she was gone.
Their waiter gave an elaborate shrug, his mustache a wriggling caterpillar on his upper lip.
“Fucking Daisy,” McBride said, vindicated. She could not be saved, see? “I guess we have to call the police.” He got ahead of himself, saw himself standing around with a cop describing his lunatic ex-girlfriend, driving through dangerous south Tucson looking for a fuzzy-headed pregnant woman . . . but Martha was giving him such a glance full of disappointment and impatience that he returned to the present moment, Corona bottles, coagulated quesadilla.
“It scares me how much you hate her. You used to love her.”
“Come on, Martha, she’s manipulative and dishonest and so totally fucked-up . . .” Wasn’t the evidence capable of speaking for itself? Furthermore, he refused to believe he’d ever loved Daisy. No one could prove it.
“We have to find her,” Martha said, rising from their booth. “You pay, I’ll be out on Fourth Ave., walking.”
“You can’t walk on Fourth—” But she was through the door, and the waiter was handing McBride the ticket, shrugging again, apologetic.
• • •
They fought while they searched for Daisy. McBride considered how efficient the situation was—usually a fight required so much energy, such a commitment of time, the yelling part, the pulling-the-phone-out-of-the-wall part, the walk-around-the-block part, the silent thoughtful part, the making up part, the crying and fucking, headache and hangover, raked-over-the-coals, run-through-the-wringer, launched-into-space, deep-in-the-hole part. Hours could go by; a person could lose a day. So it was good, in his opinion, to be occupied with the quest for Daisy while they had their squabble. The problem was that Martha had more experience fighting, a more logical mind-set, and made points like a lawyer. Like a public defender, the type doing pro bono business, the righteous path of the Good Samaritan. She took the moral high road—Daisy in trouble, loyalty, humanity—which left McBride with the inevitable role of bastard. Add to this the affair with suicidal Claire, and you had the picture of a man in a futile argument, perhaps about to be dumped by a nice woman in whose nice house he was living, driving badly in a bad neighborhood, to boot.
He found himself hoping they would see Daisy out there in the dark.
But Daisy was gone for five days, and the fight with Martha wasn’t resolved even after all that time. Somehow the stages had gotten messed up; they couldn’t progress past sullen silence with each other. Martha was disappointed in him. He couldn’t make himself fix it. She had every right to be disappointed in him. As much as he’d once lusted after Daisy, he now reviled her; that was what troubled Martha, the degree to which love could flip to hate. “Paradox,” he wanted to tell her savagely. “That old saw.”
He avoided Claire. He abandoned her by telling himself he was being true to Martha.
Daisy managed to phone them up from Phoenix, where a truck driver had left her after buying her a new wardrobe and giving her a stack of Watchtowers to contemplate. His name was Buck, and Daisy entered the house referring to his kindness constantly.
Martha hugged her wayward stray, patting Daisy’s back maternally; McBride resisted the urge to punch her in the face.
“You’re not a burden,” Martha insisted when Daisy tried to explain her running away. “I want you to stay with me, even after the baby. I love babies.” Embracing, the two women looked decidedly freakish, in McBride’s opinion. “You’re just bored,” Martha insisted. “You need some meaningful activity during these last weeks. Maybe I could teach you how to drive?”
They settled on shopping. Neither of them was a mall type, which made the trip that much more thrilling. Daisy came home wearing her old perfume again, an expensive scent, describable in the way of fine wine: the amber plushness of pears, velvet, oak, wealth. McBride remembered it with equal parts revulsion and nostalgia.
“Hostalgia,” he thought: sick desire.
That night, when he couldn’t get into the spirit of a fashion show featuring maternity clothes and hair clips, Martha accused him of impersonating an adult. Abruptly she threw him a curve, direct from her stoned keenness. “Are you in love with someone else?”
“What?”
She waited.
“No,” he croaked, wanting to ask if Daisy had told her something, knowing that would backfire. “No,” he repeated, unconvincingly. Just a week ago it would have been a lie, but how could he explain now? The timing made him want to laugh like a madman.
“I’m sleeping in the sewing room tonight,” Martha said, taking her pillow.
“Maybe you should fuck Daisy!” he blurted.
“Maybe I should,” she agreed, calmly, leveling an unashamed glance in his direction.
Where did women get it, that composure, that open-minded fluid sense that not only might anything happen, but that it might be amazing? McBride could all too easily envision Daisy and Martha naked together, tongue to nape of neck, breast to breast, quivering haunch to ropy one, the homecoming embrace pushed to a climax. It was pretty, candlelit, its sound track full of saxophone.
Men with men: who could look upon it with anything but perplexity? Erections bobbing between them like those annoying trick snakes, coiled in a peanut can, unsealed and sent sproinging in your face. Ha ha. Meanwhile in the background, sound track a circus organ grinder, perhaps a kazoo.
He lay awake alone beneath the SOFT SHOULDER sign thinking of Martha. Was she trying to make him her little boy? Punish him? Improve him? “You know what your problem is?” she’d once told him, laughing yet serious. “You have gag reflex.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, you can’t deal.” She did not suffer from this impediment. Why had she attached herself to him? Only lately had he wondered—was he a project, not unlike flaky Daisy, someone shell-shocked and deemed for whatever reason worthy of Martha’s concern? He didn’t want to be her project. He preferred to think of himself as her willing plaything, the party boy, the one who could choose to leave the party. He paid rent, he stocked beer and toilet paper, he had volition.
“You’re a coward,” Martha told him in the morning. Overnight, she seemed to have chosen against him. She didn’t even seem concerned enough to be hurt. Just that disappointed. “You won’t commit to anything. The hard parts embarrass you. You feel like everything’s a scene instead of just another opportunity to get close to someone. That’s what is unforgivable. You’re terrible in a crisis. You just want the easy parts, none of the work.”
He could not not think of Claire, but what he said was, “Is this about having a baby?”
“This is about you,” Martha said. “A topic with which you should be fairly familiar. This is about a woman you not only left behind like some dog on the highway, but about whom you won’t say one kind word.” McBride had to marvel: even angry she wouldn’t leave her prepositions dangling. “Not one,” said Martha. “I can’t get over what a jerk you seem to be. Actually, what I can’t get over is that I’m in love with a jerk. I should know better.”
“I love you, too,” he said quickly.
Martha sighed. “That is so not the point.”
• • •
Meanwhile, Claire’s parents sprang her from the psych hospital, which meant that McBride had to sit in their living room drinking iced tea making small talk with them before taking Claire to the motel across from the Triple T. He was conducting an experiment, testing his maturity, trying to recapture what seemed to have scurried off. Were his intentions honorable? her parents’ faces asked, forlorn, unsure how to behave if the answer were no. The scars on Claire’s wrists were disconcerting, raised welts with tiny suture holes on either side.
“Will those go away?” he asked at the motel, putting his lips on her scars, working at not being disgusted.
“How should I know?” Claire was naked now, but what she’d removed were seafoam green scrubs, as if qualified to dress like a doctor, having hung around them for a while.
“Why so testy?” McBride asked, checking his watch. The iced tea and chat had seriously cut into their time. When Claire smacked him, he didn’t know if it was for the question or the looking at the watch. She was one unpredictable girl. They made love then, and following, went through the requisite small sleep.
Leaving McBride to think. Who did he love? Could he ask his women to put in bids for him, sell himself to the one who turned in the most impressive vita? Was he looking for a particular kind of woman and had to have these three to provide one whole? He considered the virtues of each—Martha’s good humor and stability, Claire’s startling honesty and tragic openness, Daisy’s wild sexuality and obsessiveness—and understood their individual appeal as well as their limitations. But perhaps it was having three of them that really excited him. His affection was maybe like a dropped watermelon, three rocking wet seedy parts. Or like a trident. He pictured his penis, three-pronged instead of one.
Or maybe he needed the compounded guilt each relationship made him feel, especially as it related to the other two. High drama had its own charm, like living on a fault plane.
Claire’s parents sat right where they’d been left, on plush Barcaloungers before the television. Their iced tea glasses still full of tea, diluted, sweating puddles. The strange stasis that had apparently prevailed here while McBride had been off in a rutting fever, ravishing their middle-aged daughter in a cheesy motel gave him pause. This gave him pause—her father looking sad, her mother looking sadder—not the preceding insanity.
He would not be back. His last look at Claire was like his first: she with her parents, sullen, struggling.
He arrived home to find Daisy entertaining the transvestite. They sat in the chairs that McBride and Martha had used to sit in, in the breeze from the oscillating fan. The transvestite had left lipstick prints on a hand-thrown coffee mug. In his large palms, the cup was dwarfed, silly. His nails, unpainted, were smooth, on the verge of being long, and his knuckles, McBride took a moment to notice, were shaved. Unbelievable. The man stayed seated as he extended one of these hands for a shake, like a lady.
“Alberta,” he announced. “Your neighbor.”
“We’ve seen you around,” McBride said, gripping a little too firmly, a little too masculinely.
“I love the furniture! Your wife is amazing with a paintbrush!”
“Not his wife,” Daisy was quick to say. “How was your day, Mackle?” she asked coquettishly, grinning up at him, employing a long-ago pet name, reminding him of others: Prozac, because he’d pulled her out of a depression, way back when. Moon Pie, he’d called her. And meant it.
“I gotta pee,” McBride said, exiting. Entering. Well, here was his house but where was his confidence about belonging in it? On the porch sat the man, the woman, the soon-to-be baby, a fundamental threesome unrelated and weird. “You’re not strong enough to accept the limitations of others,” insightful Martha had informed him. He wished she would quit knowing him so well, stop being so smart. Why did she love a jerk like him? Was that the weakness he would have to object to? He felt like a rung bell, jangling in a lonesome tower, village idiot down below yanking his chain.
• • •
“Did you know it was going to be black?” McBride asked Martha.
“I knew it was a fifty-fifty chance.” Martha was flushed, wearing a set of green scrubs like the ones Claire owned. Six women had attended Daisy’s labor and delivery, Daisy screaming like a tortured crow, the rest of them murmuring and assuring, room of pigeons. The baby, a perfectly healthy girl, was purple as a Nigerian. McBride could only gawk. No one else was fazed; their role was to adore, congratulate, rally. Martha cradled the baby in such a manner that McBride finally understood he would have to leave her. Already that baby meant more to her than he did, or could. Never had a decision been clearer. It made him feel oddly selfless, to see his responsibility.
“Isn’t she amazing?” Martha positively glowed, face ruddy with effort, good work, the species’ only real priority. She could have been the mother herself, with her wide hips and open heart.
“Unbelievable,” McBride said. He looked at the tiny bundle in her arms, dark and constricted. Hard to believe she’d grow up to wear cheap jewelry and eat junk food. Let boys put their hands between her thighs. “Reminds me of an eggplant,” he told Martha.
She looked at him as if through the retracting lens of a spyglass: good-bye. “You’re so cold,” she said, turning back to the room of women.
• • •
The deal is, it always goes from bad to worse. The living trajectory, birth to death, going up means coming down. Like that.
McBride told himself these things as he drove to the hospital emergency room a week after Donatella’s birth. Claire had jumped from one of Tucson’s few overpasses into the traffic below. Everything was broken, head to toe; she would die. She lay now unconscious while a team of experts tried to put her back together. McBride was not innocent in this, as he had not seen her for more than a month, pretending he was tired, pretending he felt guilty about deceiving Martha, pretending he had problems as profound as hers. How was it that affection turned, tiny tender gears no longer meshing, gone suddenly, overnight, eroded with pity? Sour with scorn? When her mother called, three in the morning, Martha had handed him the phone with a single scathing word, that one that had been like a kiss: Peter. They’d just failed to have sex, McBride pumping furiously, stiff as a stick of dynamite, unable to explode.
Now he screamed into the ER parking lot, horrified. One more portion of his life, another member in his tribe of female troubles, gone haywire. You build complication like a house of cards, geometrical, tricky, fragile. And like a child, you then like to step aside and stamp your feet, watch as it folds up on itself, flat one-dimensional deck. Dead.
Oh, those parents. Once again, sitting unmoving, identical drinks before them, same condensation. On the television: television. His intentions hadn’t been honorable, apparently, after all. Had she wanted to die for love, or its lack? She lay in the highly technical, highly temporary ICU, wrapped, strapped, tracheotomy tube in her neck, metal bolt in her skull, suction hose in her mouth, monitors around her like a recording studio, flashing numbers, graphs. Crust of rusty blood here and there, and her beautiful eyelashes, like folded fragile spider legs, wilted on those pale cheeks. Did this sleep replicate the one she fell into after sex? McBride swooned. Fainting wasn’t what he had imagined. He was aware of himself crashing, vital fluids rushing from head, hands, feet to pool and churn in his stomach. His thought was that he would vomit, and be left empty as a pocket. And there was the nurse, the woman who, like a mother, materialized beside him at just the proper moment to smooth his brow, bring him ’round.
• • •
He held Claire’s letter to him, unopened, missive from the grave, given over by the parents. Her heart, in his hands. On his porch sat four females, lover, ex-girlfriend, her black infant, and the neighbor who counted himself among the girls. Where did McBride fit? He could not be what they required. Nothing to do but squeeze out, he had already been squeezed out.
And he was glad, he told himself. Glad for his simple body, its fixtures out in the open, the expression on his face projecting exactly what was behind it in his head. What was it with women and all this hidden equipment? They dressed up, made up, faked orgasms, cried when happy, laughed when bitter, stirred up protoplasmic stews of life and then pulled aces from sleeves, wreaked havoc all the wide world over, forever refusing to come clean.
That was how he wanted to feel, driving his car with his worldly possessions: clean. Free. Was that the same as being cold? Cowardly? He’d left Salt Lake City and he could leave Tucson; the West was full of cities where his slate would be blank, his plate would be empty. There was a girl out there, he could almost see her, radiant, blonde, a healthy hiker a few years younger than he, straight teeth, muscular calves, sentimental taste in music. He would find her . . . but how did that accident claim go, the one that had amused him not so long ago? “I saw a slow moving, sad-faced old gentleman as he bounded off the roof of my car . . .” Nothing to do but plunge on. Set the cruise control, lower the windows, raise the radio, stay between the broken yellow lines, and don’t look back. No no no.