Mike Hanging

“YOU SHOULDN’T BE HERE,” Carlotta said.

“I haven’t any other damn place to go,” Mike answered. “Do you know he’s in the loony bin?”

“Who?”

“Joseph, and he does have a wife and kids, only they’re not his kids; he adopted them. I’ve just been there, to his house.”

“Come in,” Carlotta said.

Mike followed her up the stairs. He never got over being amazed at her thinness. She didn’t have more width than a two-by-four. It should have made her unattractive. Perhaps it was simply the contrast with Alma, who looked the kind of woman who should have been hot brine and was instead as dry as a rag. “It’s the ones who smell of tuna fish … they’re the ones …”—old schoolyard advice. Carlotta smelled of paint and the expensive perfume Alma gave her every year for Christmas, like peppery lilies and Greek wine. Her body didn’t excite him so much as make him curious, and the distance she always kept from him made him suspect she was curious about him, too. Then he wondered what Alma might have said, what lies she might have told. “Girls don’t talk about sex. They’re more interested in your wallet than your cock.”

“I’ve got nothing but tea,” Carlotta said.

“Tea’s fine.”

The space of this room surprised him. He had not been in it often and tended to think of it as the pitiable place it seemed to Alma, who romanticized both Carlotta’s poverty and her singularity. Now that he was sleeping in his own studio, cooking makeshift meals on a hot plate, this room seemed remarkably civilized.

“It’s not for rent, so don’t try it on for size,” Carlotta said.

“I know, but it is a good setup … for one person. It sure beats an eighth of a warehouse. I’ve got to go next door to shit.”

She turned her back on him for practical reasons, but he felt the rebuke. Why did women have to pretend only babies had bowels? Or was she, who had never really sided with the snobbish prudery in Alma when they were together, feeling she had to take on Alma’s role now?

“Carlotta, we’re friends, aren’t we?”

She shrugged.

“Look, I’m not going to play the injured party. I don’t even want to talk about her.”

“Then let’s not. I don’t live alone to be a wailing wall … for anybody.”

“Joseph used to …”

“He was my wailing wall.”

“Yeah. I guess it was something like that for me, too.”

“I told him he’d go crazy.”

“Why did you say a thing like that?”

“Oh, I didn’t put it into his head,” Carlotta said impatiently. “I just wanted him to know I knew.”

“Knew what?”

“That he was crazy. But I didn’t know why. What did she say?”

“His wife? That he’s on drug therapy and, if that doesn’t work after a month or so, he’ll get shock treatments.”

“Christ!”

“Maybe he can have visitors in another couple of weeks.”

“What did he do?”

“I don’t know exactly … went manic. She said he’s done it before, but not so bad as this time. I asked her what set it off, and she didn’t say anything very clear, just shook her head and said, ‘Death … life …’ Her first husband died of cancer. He was a friend of Joseph’s.”

“How long have they been married?”

“A couple of years.”

“Why didn’t he ever say?”

“I don’t knows,” Mike said. “She’s … Ann’s her name … really a nice person, very straight, but not … oh, she seems sympathetic.”

In trying to describe her, Mike realized she was the kind of woman he never really noticed until he had noticed her. So maybe there were a lot of them around whom you didn’t see unless for some reason you had to look. When you did, you saw something in them.

“She wears glasses. She’s sort of plump. I want to say she’s ordinary, but I don’t think I know enough ordinary people to be sure.”

Carlotta smiled, and that encouraged him.

“I told her I’d like to do anything I could. I didn’t want to go on about what good friends we were when I’d never met her before, and I didn’t want to ask a lot of questions. I told her he dropped around occasionally. She said he had to walk; it was part of his therapy.”

Mike stood up and walked over to the window. What he wanted to ask Carlotta was why Joseph, with a job he apparently liked, with a kind wife and a couple of sweet girl children, went around the bend, while he, Mike, with a bitch of a wife, two kids he couldn’t keep in shoes, and the burden of a talent he couldn’t seem to carry or put down, was still walking around loose. But that would mean mentioning Alma, and he was here on too frail a permission to risk that.

“The things you don’t know about people … even people you think you know,” he said instead, turning back to her. “For all I know, you’ve got a husband and five kids.”

“I’ve got nothing but my bones,” Carlotta answered, “and I’m busy exposing them.”

“Why don’t you ever paint anyone else?”

“I have to work from life, and I don’t think I could stand anyone else around for as long as that would take. Funny … I did think I might try Joseph.”

“Not much to look at,” Mike said. “You know, he’s hard to remember?”

“Maybe that’s why I wanted to do it. I might have been able to stand two of him in the room at the same time.”

“Why don’t you do me?” Mike suggested, and, when she laughed, pressed on. “No, I mean I’d model … free.”

“My own private life class? Mike, that’s a woman’s ploy.”

“Look at me! What’s the matter with me?”

“You’re a man.”

“What’s the matter with that?”

“I could never use Alma’s castoffs. They’re not my size.”

“All right,” Mike said with a sense of angry satisfaction, “you mentioned her. I didn’t. For your information, I wasn’t ‘cast off.’ I left.”

“After hanging yourself in the shed. I know. I heard all about it.”

“Not all because I haven’t told you about it.”

“I don’t want to hear.”

“Why not? Why not?” Mike shouted.

“I don’t want your pain or hers either.”

“You women are so hard, and you tell us we don’t have any feelings. Why, Joseph has more feeling in his little finger than you or Alma …”

“Joseph is crazy.”

No hard fist in the gut ever hurt the way these female truths did, taking away not your breath but your point, the whole point. Mike took a deep, shuddering breath around the fist of tears in his throat.

“I wish I were.”

“It’s kind people who go crazy.”

“I am not unkind!” Mike shouted, and slapped her.

Carlotta didn’t move, not even to touch her cheek. She looked at him with cold calm.

“You hurt me,” he said, hating the guilty petulance in his voice. “And I am a little crazy.”

“No, you’re not. You’ve just been a bouncer too long. Throw yourself out, will you?”

“Look, I didn’t mean to do that. But don’t you understand? A man can take just so much taunting.”

“You don’t have to take any more of mine. Get out.”

“Come to dinner with me. Let’s go over to the Orestes and have a decent meal.”

He didn’t expect her to accept. He didn’t even want to take her, but he didn’t want to leave without saying something conciliatory. When she walked over to the closet and got her coat, he wasn’t sure that she didn’t intend simply to walk out. He followed her down the stairs, and only when she went to his truck and opened the passenger door did he realize he was actually going to pay the price of a meal. Was she that hungry? Or was it a punishment she was exacting, knowing how little he liked to spend money?

When he got into the driver’s seat, he saw that she was crying. Alma never cried. He didn’t know what to do.

“I’m sorry. I really am.”

She shook her head and then said, “I can’t stand to think about Joseph.”

“Let’s not. Come on. Let’s just go and eat. We’ll both feel better.”

The first several times they went out, Mike was mildly embarrassed by Carlotta, as if someone might hold him accountable for starving her to that thinness, and her table manners, probably from living alone, were irritating. He wanted and needed to talk about Alma, his obsessive bitterness in the way of his work and his sleep; yet, because Carlotta refused her as a subject, Mike was free, only when he was with Carlotta, to think about something else, and she did listen, agreeing with him often enough to surprise him but not to make him suspicious that she flattered him. Unlike Joseph or Alma in the early days when she still listened, Carlotta actually understood what he said. They were, after all, fellow artists, and, though her sort of painting was too subjective, at least she hadn’t any silly pretensions about it. Mike decided that she was, in her own peculiar way, elegant, a woman who attracted men rather than boys.

For a few moments each time he left her, he puzzled over his reticence with her. Now that Alma wasn’t there to be offended by his sexual remarks, he didn’t make them. He even forgot that one reason for seeking Carlotta out had been a fantasy of sexual revenge. Once she refused an invitation to his studio, but he’d offered it very tentatively. He knew she wouldn’t smoke dope, and he was not at all sure that he could discover enough appetite for a first attempt without it. Her independence daunted him, yet he liked the brief moments of independence she made him feel himself. Whenever they encountered her friends or she was recognized as Carlotta, the painter, as she occasionally was, she introduced him as “Trasco, the sculptor.” She sometimes now called him Trasco, which made him feel momentarily more himself and less the severed head of a family.

He heard himself say, “I’ve always liked you, Carlotta,” and he meant it simply.

Mike’s schedule was too antisocial for him to see Carlotta as often as he would have liked. He had only one night off a week. Since he’d always made it a rule not to make friends among the people he worked with, he knew no one who could help him get through the worst hours between two and ten in the morning. Occasionally, when he felt he wouldn’t sleep anyway, he’d take Carlotta to lunch.

“I’ve got so used to crazy hours, I’d almost forgotten they were crazy.”

“There’s not all that much to recommend the land of the living,” Carlotta said. “And you’ve got a social life.”

“Social life? They’re a bunch of young punks and nubiles. It’s what you might call adult babysitting. Its only virtue is that it pays. If I have to knock a guy down to take his keys away and send him home in a cab, he thanks me with a twenty the next time he’s in.”

Mike had never talked about his job with Alma, and he had never wanted anyone he knew to see him at work, standing there at the door with his hands over his privates, flexing his muscles, smiling, smiling, calling all the male customers by name. If they were relatively well behaved and generous in their spending, it was his job to be obsequious. With the mean ones he was to be ugly which had the virtue of being the way he really felt. It was a shit of a job, but at least it paid fifteen hundred dollars a month, which was a damned sight better than teaching, particularly since a lot of it was outside taxes. Saying that to Carlotta didn’t embarrass him. She’d done her own time as a cocktail waitress, not in the kind of brain-splitting music and bawdy brawling he lived with night after night but in a good hotel bar. Still, she’d known what it was to be meat, and there wasn’t all that difference between being tits and ass and being a muscle stud. She’d still be at it if she’d had responsibility for anyone but herself. She wasn’t exactly making it, beyond rent and not enough to eat.

Christ, how he wished Alma had, just for a few months, the taste of what his life, or Carlotta’s life, was really like. Alma didn’t even know there was any similarity. She thought her father’s money stood as much between Mike and the world as it did between her and the world. How could he really have explained it without sounding like some kind of mean bastard, trying to deprive his wife and children of a half-decent life simply because he couldn’t or wouldn’t make that kind of money? At least, even if he did take a minimum of what he needed for his own work, he tried not to be a pigheaded son-in-law. Alma and the kids could have anything they wanted as long as it didn’t involve him. Alma thought that was pigheaded. He should have given his own effigy a snout.

Mike had not known, until after he had hanged himself, that he intended to move out. Preoccupied with the actual making of the object, he spent his anger in the work and did not really think what it would mean, swinging there in the old shed he no longer used, until it did swing there and he walked out. His message had probably been clearer to Alma than to himself, and even now, two months later, he had not defined the ultimatum of his departure and his silence. Aside from sending Alma the money she needed to run the house, he had not contacted her. He did not know what he wanted to say. Oh, he had a hundred accusations to shout, and that noise went on in his head most of the time. But none of them was new, and none was anything either of them intended to do anything about. He had shouted at Alma more often than he wanted to before he left. Sometimes he had contemplated beating her into submission, but he always finally admitted that would mean beating her to death. Though Alma dead would have been a deep relief to his anger, her body, which never had belonged to him, did belong to her sons. Mike had struck her seldom and carefully since her first pregnancy. That was why it was increasingly easy for her to refuse him, knowing she was in no real danger.

All that women’s liberation crap about women insisting on the rights over their own bodies! They’d always had the ultimate power not only over their own but over men’s bodies, over life itself. What a stupidly negative, stupidly destructive way to prove it they turned to: flushing unfinished life down the toilet and fucking each other, all the while claiming men are too insensitive, too violent to be part of the human race! Mike had wanted a daughter, a child for all the tenderness he couldn’t spend on sons, who would be his only as they grew into men themselves, comforts of his old age when a daughter would be gone from him.

“No more,” Alma said. “Absolutely no more.” Mike would not have tried to conceive a child in anger. Rape is pollution. He was, therefore, helpless, at her mercy, and she had none. He couldn’t stand it. He left her. Out with Carlotta he was “Trasco, the sculptor,” but in his head he was husband and father of the family he’d walked out on. He could not think past that, nor could he think toward it.

Joseph, sitting in the visitors’ room, staring out the window with eyes that reflected rather than saw the October brightness of the day, was no help. When Mike was able to get his attention, it was like a lake after a long drought, a dry bowl you could only remember swimming in. Mike wanted to cry, as much for himself as for Joseph.

“Don’t say anything to aggravate him,” Mike had been advised.

Mike tried to talk about anything that wasn’t important. He was in short supply of such subjects. He asked questions, inane questions: “How’s the food? Do you have everything you need?”

Joseph’s tongue seemed to have swollen to the size of his mouth, words occasionally struggling off it, hard to understand and understood not worth the effort. The face Mike found hard to remember was blurred even as he looked at it. He couldn’t tell whether it was a puffy swelling or a deflation of flesh that made Joseph so out of focus.

Only when Mike was about to leave did Joseph give him any sense that the visit had been important. Joseph took his hand and held it for so long Mike felt it was a gift he’d have to leave there.

“Listen, Joseph, I’ll come back soon, all right?” Mike nearly shouted. “And after a while you’ll get out of here, all right?”

What Mike couldn’t say to Joseph, he couldn’t discuss with Ann either; a woman already deserted twice by death and madness would not be a good listener, or anyway would reflect his petulance, the pettiness of his griefs, and he needed them to be their rightful size if he was going to deal with them.

How he envied Joseph this woman, these girl children, the quietness of them. What business had he going crazy?

Trying to keep the critical irritation out of his voice, Mike asked Ann, “What do the doctors say? How soon will he start to get better?”

“They start shock treatments next week.”

Ann seemed calm, or at least resigned. Having watched one man shed his flesh and lose his hair with promised cures, watching another cry and shake and be unable to remember might not be as frightening. The skepticism Mike felt about the treatment he kept to himself. They must have improved it a lot since they jolted an aunt of his to blank silence years ago when he was just a kid. It wouldn’t still be primitive like that, or they wouldn’t be using it.

“If he were my husband,” Carlotta said, “I’d get him out of there.”

“What would she do with him? He’s a vegetable.”

“He’s on drugs, that’s all.”

“But off them, he’s violent.”

Carlotta looked at Mike long and soberly. “So can you be. Nobody’s locked you up.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Mike demanded. “Listen, my biggest problem is that I’m not crazy. Have I killed Alma? Have I raped you?”

“Is that what you’d like to do?” Carlotta asked, a coolness in her voice that irritated him.

“At least there would be some dignity in it!”

“Not for me,” Carlotta said.

“And your dignity is all that matters.”

“No. It doesn’t have to be either/or surely. You make it sound as if you’re simply waiting for me to be willing to participate in my own humiliation. It won’t happen.”

“I told you I’m not crazy.”

“Trasco, I’ve decided to do your portrait. Will you sit for me?”

“What kind of portrait?” Mike asked, and felt himself blush.

“Something you’ll like. I want to redeem social realism from usefulness. I want to do it as if it were the cover of Time magazine or a Mao poster. It may even say, ‘Trasco, the sculptor, page twenty-three,’ or something like that.”

“Far out,” Mike said.

“Wearing what you have on right now.”

Mike looked down at his red and black shirt, his jeans, and his boots, already tired of them before they were to be immortalized.

“With one of your pieces behind you. We’ll work in your studio.”

“The light’s not very good, and it’s going to get colder than hell.”

“I like the cold,” Carlotta said.

Joseph was the only friend who had become familiar with Mike’s sculpture, and Mike missed him sharply the moment Carlotta walked in and stood, looking. Joseph had never pretended to understand Mike’s work, but he was an interested, often comfortable presence, a soft bundle of attention in contrast with this measuring rod of a woman who knew what Mike was trying to do and would judge him.

“You can hardly see them,” he began, shouting at her.

“Don’t talk at me,” she said, and stepped away from him.

He had to talk. He couldn’t stand to see her there, measuring the work that was intended to measure her or any other human figure in its presence.

“You look like a woman in a department store buying a piece of furniture!”

She ignored him. He shouldn’t have brought her here like this at the beginning of her day, when she was fresh and cool, at the irritable end of his, when he had stood, literally, all he could. They should have been together first, if not smoking dope, at least having a drink or two, giving him time to explain, to prepare her for what he wanted her to see and think. Independent of him as she was, she was his doubt materialized, and he saw what he always fought seeing: the possibility that these huge frail structures were pretentious nonsense, the manifestation of his year of delusion. His eyes blurred in defensive fatigue.

“Say something!”

“I hadn’t expected so much elegance,” she replied, a tone of genuine surprise in her voice.

Shapes came back into focus. Mike was free both to see and to remember the hard skill of making imagined architecture into fact. The point, the whole point, was, of course, to call up that quality of surprise, which was his own when he was able to see what he had done. Carlotta had given him back his ability to see. He wanted to tell her how each piece had happened, why it happened, the balance and the hope. But he didn’t have to begin at once. She’d be here working several days a week. He could tell her slowly, asking, “Do you know what is useful? Of course, you do: all that leaks or catches fire from toilet to furnace. All that’s useful is potentially catastrophic. Art, great art, is beyond catastrophe. There is no point in making things that kill themselves. That’s too didactic, too obvious. It could be done by hooking up a tap and letting it drip. Art doesn’t function, malfunction, die.”

He would tell her how it was that he knew all this, not from the books, the critics, but from life, his own, his father’s, the prison of opposites which couldn’t be transcended except through art which must be, yes, elegantly beyond hunger and dying.

“I want to tell you about the rats and the smell of vanilla, this neighborhood when I was a kid, why I work here, make this here. I want to tell you …”

Carlotta was smiling at him. Desire, and with it dread, overcame him. She didn’t wait for him to make the first gesture, and her terrible thinness at that moment became a beautiful fragility inside the protection of his sure strength which he would fill her with, but carefully, gently. The cot he slept on would never have held him and his wife. He did not want to think about Alma, to remember the fullness of her breasts, withheld from him since the birth of his first son, the broad hips and strong thighs, the abundance of blond pubic hair, the whole lie of her magnificent body. Carlotta was a Giacometti woman, cool and hard as metal. He had never been able to imagine her naked. Feeling her hand now under his shirt, fingering through the hair on his chest, teasing his surprised nipples, he realized that she must have imagined him naked. He smiled down into her fine, peppery hair, then held her back from him, unable to release her for fear she’d not stand by herself, so fragile she seemed to him now.

He was shocked by his need to please her because it made him know how long he had been deprived of anything but trying to assert himself, his tongue in his wife’s mouth an aggressive warning, his cock a weapon against her. Carlotta’s mouth was all sucking promise. Her nipples, large fruit of her small breasts, hardened at his touch. He felt as clumsy as a child, pulling at her clothes, at his own, but her laugh was fond, full of pleasure, and her own fingers, accurate and intimate, made him laugh in return, nearly alarmed by how sure she was of his pleasure, those long, thin fingers down across his buttocks as she freed him for her mouth. He was lying on his back on his cot inside one of his angry sexual fantasies in which he had forced Alma to suck the life out of him, drink his seed until she choked. But now he was afraid that he could choke the woman so hungry at him, yet afraid, too, that lifting her up and rocking himself into her might hurt her more. He was dangerous, helpless, baffled, tears trickling into his sideburns, until she rose up and mounted him and he felt his palms slip on her wet thighs, his thumbs open, a cunt full of juices he had only imagined. For a second he thought he might be sick or faint with disgust, need, gratitude. He bucked into her with a violence which might have thrown her off, but she rode him as fiercely until the struggle was all he wanted, the marvelous grunting hard work of screwing a woman who wanted it so that he now held her, a thumb against her sexual pulse until it was his own, and she came only a second before him, and finally lay all those light bones on top of him in the briny swamp of sweat and come, their exhausted breathing as mutual a rhythm as their fucking had been.

The moment of peace was brief, his hands gradually recognizing the nearly skeletal body of a woman foreign to him, one he had not even really wanted, who had shown him briefly and absolutely what Alma had deprived him of. The anger was in his hands, and he trembled against the desire to break those bones that had betrayed him into such knowledge. Intuitive in sex, she misread him now, for she was stroking his hair, her tongue teasing at his ear. Alma could always sense his anger, as if it had a smell, and grew armor he couldn’t penetrate short of murder. This fragile-boned whore had no idea that the hand on the back of her neck could snap all that slippery, steaming life out of her in a second, that the arm across her rib cage trembled with crushing strength to resist a desire so much more compelling, because singular, to destroy the evidence of his betrayal. She mistook it for tenderness, and suddenly it was tenderness for a woman who was his friend and desired him and gave him nearly murderously costly pleasure and didn’t know.

Penitent, protective of her, he turned her into the shelter of his arm and willed himself to gentleness, kissing her nipples, stroking her belly and thighs, and then he touched her as Alma had taught him to in the early days of their lovemaking when they still hoped to please each other. Carlotta watched his hand, then cupped hers over his and stopped him.

“I don’t think I could bear that … yet.”

“In ten minutes?”

She laughed.

Then she looked at him seriously and asked, “How am I ever going to get any work done?”

But several nights later she began. She had borrowed klieg lights from Allen, strong enough not only to illuminate but to give an illusion of warmth. Mike, posed before the structure of carefully broken forms, was embarrassed and absurdly pleased.

“You should have your head under a black cloth, telling me to look at the birdie.”

Carlotta might not have heard him, her attention was so fixed on him. Mike had never been aware of being in the presence of someone else working as he worked. If he had not been the object of her concentration, he might have resented it. Instead, understanding her simply as he had never understood anyone before, he gave his will to her work, obediently still until he reached a state of near trance.

“Are you tired?”

As he heard her, he knew she had asked the question twice.

“No,” he said. “I thought it would be hard work.”

“After a night on your feet.”

“It isn’t,” he said. “I stop thinking of anything.”

Then he was aware that he was, in spite of the lights, stiff and cold.

“I’ll make coffee,” he offered. “Are you cold?”

“I have to be to work.”

When he brought her a mug, he looked at her canvas, which was nothing yet but blocked spaces.

“I work very slowly,” she said. “I warned you.”

“That’s all right.”

“Is that piece named?”

“Nicknamed. Joseph calls it ‘School Days.’ I don’t name any of them. Naming is a poet’s work.”

“I went to see him yesterday.”

“Who?”

“Joseph. He doesn’t remember anything that’s happened for the last six months. He doesn’t know you’ve been to see him, even that his wife has. But he does know he can’t remember.”

“Isn’t that temporary now?” Mike asked.

“So they say.”

“But they must know what they’re doing,” Mike said, wanting to be reassured.

“He’ll be easier to deal with, I suppose,” Carlotta answered, clearly indicating the obscenity that was for her. “He’s interested in amnesia anyway, treats it like a peculiar holiday.”

“Is that what we’re all having?” Mike asked.

“Are you?” Carlotta asked. “Is that what this is?”

“I’m a married man.”

“There are remedies for that.”

“Do you mean I ought to leave her?”

“You have left her.”

He had and he hadn’t. Surely Carlotta understood that.

“I saw Alma yesterday, too.”

“What did you tell her?” Mike demanded.

“Not what you wish I would.”

“What’s that?”

“That you’re the greatest fuck in town and she ought to get you back, on your terms, as soon as possible.”

“Why not? Why not tell her that?”

“When anything gets told Alma, you’ll do the telling, Trasco. You really want her back, don’t you?”

“She’s my wife!”

Carlotta sighed and turned away.

“Listen,” Mike said, taking her arm and turning her back to him.

“To what? Your delusions of ownership?”

“What’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with wanting to fuck for life’s sake? I wanted a daughter. Is that a crime?”

“Alma’s not a piece of raw material to be made into sons and daughters. She’s a human being.”

“What is inhuman about being pregnant?”

“Try it,” Carlotta suggested, “and see.”

“Have you?”

“No,” she said. “I’m like you. I’d rather paint. Unlike you, because I’m a woman, I know the difference.”

“What’s the point then?” he asked.

“Does there have to be one?”

He covered his face and wept. If her arms hadn’t circled his chest, his grief might have broken his ribs. He did not understand what was happening to him, to his life. He could not believe what he, in fact, believed: that Alma wanted no more to do with him. She was so far from his that he was, as Carlotta had put it, Alma’s cast-off property, and now Carlotta was trying him on for size.

“Get out of here!” he wanted to shout, but his throat felt swollen shut.

Her fingers were at the back of his neck, kneading the pain at the base of his skull. They moved under his shirt over the straining muscles of his back. Again her arms were around him, holding his shuddering. He was baffled and shamed by his need of that comfort, his passivity as she finally cradled him like an infant, giving him her breast. He fell asleep, his face buried in her cunt, and had horrified dreams of being born between skeletal thighs, a thing of forlorn and wasted flesh.

When he woke alone, it was a full moment before the trance of sleep was broken and he remembered where and how he was.

It was three months since Mike had seen his children. Though he knew she had not, he felt barred from them as if Alma had actually refused him access. He even found it difficult to think about them. Tony, so inaccurately named for Mike’s dead father, already wore glasses and used a book as Mike had used fists for self-defense. More than once Mike had had to take a book by force and order the kid out into the street to play, yet Mike wasn’t afraid, as Alma had accused him of being, of Tony’s brains. Once he grew into them and became whatever he chose to become, a lawyer, scholar, whatever, Mike would be as proud of him as Alma was, but Mike had to see that he also became a man who could fill his physical space in the world, something the brawny little Victor was already teaching himself, untroubled by Alma’s scolding or spoiling, because he knew the tests he had to pass on the playground whether she understood them or not. Mike had more trouble disciplining Vic because he wouldn’t be afraid. One day he’d be as silly as Mike had been with his father, too impatient to wait until the battle would be equal, and after that they’d be friends. Mike was less sure how friendship would occur between him and his older son, whose defense was like his mother’s, withdrawal into silent superiority, but the kid could draw. In that he was Mike’s. Sometimes, not exactly missing them so much as simply wanting to lay eyes on them, take a physical and emotional inventory, Mike was tempted to drive by and pick them up on their way to school, but it was a plan too clandestine, too much an admission of the loss of status he felt. To see them, he must be able to walk into the house and assert his right to be there.

To do that, Mike would have to know what he wanted to do with the boys. Sometimes he imagined driving them down to his mother in Arizona, but she already had her hands full with his brother’s kids, and there was the complication of the border. One morning, visiting with Ann, he had a fantasy of moving the boys in there, giving them sisters to teach them the lessons about female nature mothers instinctively withheld from sons. But that was even more a fantasy than getting them across the border and had more to do with Mike’s own wish that he’d had a sister, that he’d one day have a daughter, like Susan or Rachel.

He could, of course, simply throw Alma out and occupy the house himself, but there was no way he could take care of the boys, go on earning them a living, and work. Carlotta had no motherly interest in them.

The real reason his plans came to nothing was that he would not ever take his sons from their mother. However much Mike disagreed with her, it was not because he thought her inadequate as a parent. Her job was to nurture and protect, his to discipline and challenge. For him the conflicts were a natural part of the job of marriage, as sex was their obvious resolution. Alma apparently thought both conflict and sex were a proletarian plot against her class and person.

What had he hoped to achieve, walking out like that? He certainly hadn’t expected to have to carry on with the separation for weeks, now months. Once he had made it clear that he couldn’t stand what was going on any longer, he had expected Alma to give in, not simply to avoid the humiliation of being deserted, her cover blown for that silly nonsense with Roxanne, but because she was, after all, his wife, and it was her place to come to him and apologize.

Was it because of Carlotta that Alma refused to make any gesture toward him? He’d waited weeks for Carlotta, but Alma had no way of knowing he hadn’t walked out of the house and gone straight to her. Certainly he’d made no effort to hide the fact that he was seeing her, even spending money on her. But shouldn’t jealousy or fear of really losing him force Alma to do something?

To hang onto the last shreds of the fantasy that Alma was capable of jealousy, fear, love, Mike did not go to her. He could not bear to know what he did know, that she was relieved to be rid of him.

Without Carlotta he would have hanged himself in earnest. Instead, he posed for his portrait, and the slow work of it became a reason to go on waiting, as if Carlotta were gradually making him whole and life-sized again so that he could claim what was his.

Joseph was better. Ann talked about bringing him home for Christmas. He might even be able to go back to work in the new year. This news, which Mike had waited for so hopefully, made him apprehensive not just for Joseph but for himself. He had not only worried about Joseph but envied him there in that protective environment where other people made the decisions, and sometimes the dreaded shock treatment lured Mike as a violent solution for himself if it could blank out, even temporarily, the last six months. But now even Joseph was being asked to come back, to go on. For the first time since Joseph had been hospitalized, Mike’s sympathy for him was clarified of odd jealousies not only for Joseph’s wife and children but for the illness itself.

Joseph was easier to be with now, though he was certainly not yet his old self. He talked a good deal more, always a slight agitation in his voice, and, though he could still listen, there was a new watchfulness in his attention as if he expected pitfalls dangerous to himself in what other people said. Mike could tell him about fixing the swing for Susan and Rachel, replacing a pane of glass a newsboy had broken. He could praise Ann’s efficiency and calm. But when he mentioned Carlotta’s portrait of himself, Joseph drew back in his chair and braced himself for an accident in which he would be involved, so the only thing Mike didn’t say was that he had left Alma. Joseph could bear it no more than Mike could. Instead, Mike had to brace himself for Joseph’s revelations.

“The one important thing I forgot is that Ann is pregnant,” Joseph admitted, and then laughed the note Mike hadn’t heard in months.

“Well, that’s great!” Mike said. “A kid of your own.”

“I didn’t think it was necessary.”

“Maybe I’m a dinosaur,” Mike admitted. “Maybe I’m the only one left in the world who thinks kids are necessary—yes, kids of your own. It’s great you’ve adopted the girls, but it can’t be quite the same.”

“If it were, it would be okay. I feel responsible, but not exactly. I mean, I’m sorry for them that I went crazy, but then I think they know I’m only adopted, not ‘real,’ nothing in their blood or anything serious like that. Don’t you feel with kids of your own you haven’t any right to be who you are?”

“Hell, no!” Mike said. “You give them life. They’re the only people in the world you do have the right to be yourself with, and they have to put up with it—until they’re grown. Your own are your own.”

Mike believed what he said until he heard himself say it, refusing to admit aloud that he hadn’t even felt the right to call on his own sons for months.

“Was your father like that?”

“Sure was. Beat the shit out of me when I was fifteen and so cocky I thought I could take over the house.”

“My father was a refugee. When I got my first bloody nose, he wept and said I was the blood on his hands, and could I ever forgive him.”

“He hit you that hard?”

“No, no, he hadn’t hit me. He never laid a hand on me. He just didn’t think I should have been born. He was such a sad man I used to pick him flowers. Susan and Rachel brought me flowers the last time they came, five Christmas roses.”

“Listen, Joseph, this place has done you a lot of good. I don’t want to knock it, but these guys can make you get introspective about farting if they feel like it. There are things that are just natural, and having kids is one of them. It’s not as if a kid would change your life all that much—or Ann’s either with the girls as old as they are, and being girls.”

“Ann will change, won’t she?”

“Christ! Women are always changing. Nothing you can do about that. She wants the kid, doesn’t she?”

“Yes, but mostly because it’s something to give me.”

“Well, it is, man. That’s how it’s supposed to be!”

Mike left the hospital, confused by impatience and concern, back to the ambivalence he had felt through the months of Joseph’s illness. Joseph didn’t deserve a woman who wanted his child, but then Mike thought of Joseph at the age of his own Victor, picking flowers for his sad father. It seemed so like the man who had been Mike’s friend. Losing that friend to this new, needy candor must turn Mike into a friend of a sort he had not been before, concerned with Joseph’s moods and frailties, involved in his once-hidden domestic life. At least being with Ann and the children gave Mike some sense of a normal world around him. Carlotta might have saved his life, but Ann preserved his sanity, what there was of it.

“Sometimes I wonder if for some people being normal drives them crazy,” he said to Ann, having accepted a cup of coffee. “Like Joseph and my wife.”

“Has your wife had a breakdown?” Ann asked.

“Sort of,” Mike said. “But I don’t want to burden you with my troubles.”

“Why not? I burden you with mine all the time. Surely you think of me as a friend?”

“Oh, I do,” Mike said. “I realize you’re about the only ordinary person I know—except for myself.”

“But you’re an artist.”

“Well, yes,” he admitted.

“And so you have a way to be yourself most people don’t. Joseph has the temperament without the gift.”

“Did Joseph want to be an artist?” Mike asked, surprised.

“Oh, no. In fact, he says he feels spared.”

“He’s very lucky to have you, Ann. A lot of people wouldn’t have the patience for this sort of thing. Sometimes even I … well, I wonder what he’s got to go crazy about.”

Ann’s eyes were kind, but something in their expression checked Mike. He did not want to seem to her disloyal.

“It’s one of the ironies, I guess.”

“And your wife? I don’t even know her name.”

“Alma.” He sighed. “I’ve left her.”

“Should you have done that … if she isn’t well?”

“Part of the sickness is that she doesn’t want me around. Actually, she can’t stand the sight of me.”

“How hard,” Ann said, laying a hand on his arm. “How terribly hard.”

“Yeah, it is, and I’ve got the two sons, and I haven’t seen them in months.”

“But surely, Mike, you mustn’t let her stop you seeing the children. They must need you.”

“She’s a lot better with them if I’m not around,” Mike said, discovering an excuse he suspected of being true.

“Is she getting any help?”

“Not professional help. She’s got a friend she’s close to.”

“It seems to me the only comfort in trouble is when you can do something to help.”

Among women as tender as this one, as passionate as Carlotta, he had chosen Alma, who had no sympathy in her. Once it had seemed to him a supreme confidence which came out of the security of her childhood. He had admired what was, in fact, coldness and indifference. She had learned to count the cost and found everything human far too expensive, except for her children, and she put a limit there, too.

“I don’t know, Ann. We marry too young or too quickly before we know enough. My father tried to tell me. He said, ‘You think life’s too short, and what you’re going to find out is it’s too long.’ He was already sick then. I thought it was his sickness speaking.”

“Maybe it was,” Ann said. “People can grow past trouble.”

“Where do you get the faith?”

“With John at the last … oh, people say it’s the drugs that produce a state of euphoria, but even if it was a sort of hallucination, he did see … something. He said, ‘I see,’ and then he said, ‘It’s all all right.’ I believe life has a shape we can’t see except maybe for a moment at the end.”

“A shape?”

“Yes,” Ann said, obviously not willing to go beyond that.

Mike looked down at her and realized that she was one of those pious little girls in the eighth grade who wore crosses on gold chains, who flunked math and history and never were first in anything but neat penmanship. Even then he’d been chasing the ones who could spell almost as well as he could, who could run almost as fast, who flaunted their tits as much as he did his biceps. He had no intention of building a wren’s nest. He’d mated with a mockingbird. He could hear Alma even now, saying with exaggerated piety, “I believe life has a shape.”

Well, Christ, it had to, didn’t it? And what some people called hallucinations other people called visions. He certainly knew that sense of supreme balance he felt smoking pot was real. Or he could make it real, build it into his work. Maybe for some people, simple, sincere people like Ann, just hearing about it from someone else was enough. “It’s all all right.”

“Thank you for telling me that,” he said. It was the sort of thing Alma sometimes said to Tony to encourage him to confide in her, and it had irked Mike to see his son so manipulated. But he wasn’t trying to manipulate Ann. He did want to thank her.

“Would you like to be with us for Christmas, Mike? If Joseph’s home, I know he’d like that.”

“Why, thanks,” Mike said. “I hadn’t really thought that far.”

“It’s only two weeks away.”

Certainly he wouldn’t go home for Christmas to play disenfranchised Santa Claus to Alma’s father. They had tried not to dislike each other and were modestly successful except on holidays, when each inadvertently showed up the other, Mike a stingy inadequate provider, his father-in-law a buyer of affection who felt no more certain of his daughter’s admiration than Mike did. The very first Christmas, before there were children, Mike was simply amazed at the accumulation of things not only for Alma and her sisters but for himself. Christmas in his own home had been primarily a daylong drunk and a feast at which lesser men than his father often passed out. No one ever gave anyone else more than one gift, and in bad years it might be a dollar from his father, socks she had knitted from his mother. Was it that when you couldn’t give much, you learned to dislike giving? Mike’s brother was as tight with money as he was. They hadn’t given anything to each other for years. Alma had taken over sending presents to Mike’s mother and his niece and nephew. Since she did not ask him for extra money, she probably spent her own. He never asked her what money she had. It was none of his business. Over the years he had fought with her about every taste and value money could buy, but money itself was never mentioned. Mike wore the expensive clothes his in-laws gave him when he was less and less frequently invited to their house to dinner, and he had a closetful of golf clubs, tennis rackets, skis, and equipment for other middle-class games he had never learned to play. When one of Alma’s sisters asked him his favorite sport, he had answered, “Fighting.” She gave him boxing gloves for his birthday. The only present Mike had ever objected to was a life insurance policy.

“Jesus, Alma, he might as well have a contract out on me. Is he a secret member of the Mafia, or what?”

Alma told him it was just like having a suit of clothes or a martini pitcher, and anyway, it wasn’t for him; it was for the children.

Gradually Mike understood that Alma’s parents had not objected to him as a son-in-law because they felt perfectly confident that, propped up by their money, he could at least look and, therefore, finally become the part. When he did not, they tried to overlook what offended them most, the house he rented and his job, by calling him not an artist but artistic, which made it sound something like asthmatic.

God knows, it could seem as much an illness to him, quarantined down there in his warehouse like an untouchable, a leper, unless Carlotta was with him in a cold trance of work, which, because it was hers, only she could break with the aggressive sexual appetite that studying him seemed to give her. Once he had insisted on having her when she first arrived, not so much because he wanted her urgently but because he didn’t like the idea of being the object of her appetite. She was only superficially reluctant, but afterwards she couldn’t work, and she didn’t return to the portrait for more than a week. Alone in its unfinished company, Mike realized he wouldn’t work again until Carlotta had completed him and relinquished his space. If then.

Mike had not gone out of his way to avoid meeting his wife. It was simply that unless he sought her out, they had always lived in different territories of the city. She left their house in Kitsilano for visiting her parents in West Point Grey or a sister in West Vancouver. Though shops in their neighborhood were rich with a variety of foods for Greek, Italian, and Oriental tastes, she preferred the Safeway near her parents’ house, the shop that carried only French and English cheeses. Mike lived in his old neighborhood and went east to Commercial to shop. He crossed False Creek only to visit Carlotta or Ann.

It was outside Carlotta’s he finally did see Alma a couple of days before Christmas. She was getting into her car and didn’t see him parked across the street in his truck. He was shocked to realize what a large woman she was, almost gross.

“Cow!” he whispered harshly. “Bloody great cow!”

Moments later, in Carlotta’s company, he was sullen with his own betrayed taste, her unnatural thinness as repugnant to him as his bovine wife.

“Why sulk?” Carlotta asked. “Surely you don’t expect me not to see her?”

“I don’t give a fuck who you see.”

“Truth to tell she’s not my favorite caller these days. She was bringing me a Christmas present, that’s all.”

Mike saw the familiar shape of the box Carlotta’s perfume came in. He picked it up and looked at the card, which had always read “From Alma and Mike.” This one read “From Alma and Roxanne.” He smashed the box down and felt the glass break. The concentrated scent exploded into the room like gas.

He turned and ran down the stairs, slammed into his truck, and drove the brief blocks to his house. Alma had not come back. He sat, staring at the house, wondering if the children were with their grandparents. He knew they were not. They were in his house with Roxanne, who slept in his bed, sucked his wife’s cunt, and appeared in his place on Christmas cards. And he had let this go on for four months!

“Come to pay a Christmas call?”

He turned to find Alma standing in the street right by his door.

“Where are the kids?” he demanded.

“With Mother and Dad.”

“Why?”

“Because I had a hunch you’d turn up before Christmas, and, if there was going to be a scene, I’d just as soon they missed it.”

“Scene? You know you’re bloody lucky to be alive?”

“Yes, I am.”

“If it weren’t for the kids …”

“What have you done to your hand?”

He looked down and saw that he was bleeding. “I was practicing.”

“Mike, if you want to talk, that’s fine. It’s long past time we did. But if you’ve come back on some macho trip just to knock me around, forget it.”

“Trasco, the wife beater,” he said scornfully. “That’s what I should have been.”

“It would have ended sooner,” she said, almost as if she were agreeing with him. “Do you want to come in? You ought to fix that hand.”

He was suddenly aware that he smelled strongly of Carlotta’s perfume, and Alma would certainly notice it if she hadn’t already.

“I’ve just smashed our yearly Christmas present to Carlotta,” he tried to announce rather than confess. His hand and her concern about it made him feel more like a misbehaving child than a properly outraged husband.

“Whatever for?”

“Because you put her damned name on it, that’s why!” he shouted, near ridiculous tears.

She didn’t laugh. The distress in her face frightened him.

“Come in,” she said. “Please. She’s not here.”

Alma took him directly to the bathroom, where she washed the dozen cuts, examining them for bits of glass.

“The perfume’s antiseptic, but just in case …”

She reached for the iodine. Before she took out the stopper, she smoothed a long strand of her blond hair behind her ear, a gesture so familiar to him he was jealous of it in any other woman. In her face intent on her job he saw unconscious tenderness, and he wanted to tilt that face to his to receive what his hand received, but the weather in her eyes changed whenever she looked up at him.

“You’re never careful enough of your hands,” she said as she finished.

She did not understand in him what she didn’t understand in Victor, the natural conflict of uses, the making and breaking a man must do with his hands. She would have him carry them in his pockets, tools as precious as his cock, to be as protected. He half expected her to kiss the hand she had just tended, but instead she turned abruptly away to escape the close quarters they had been in.

“Coffee?”

She was naturally wifely, like Ann. With Carlotta it was Mike who made the coffee. He sat down at the dining-room table to be served, the habit of a table too deep in him for Alma to break. She had finally acquired it herself, and it had pleased him, even though this table was a bright emblem of the middle class, who could afford the waste space of a dining room, that it had become a center of the house instead, a place to work or rest as well as eat. As she put the cup before him, along with a plate of Christmas cookies the boys had probably helped her bake, Mike felt at home.

“You’ve lost weight,” she observed.

“I’m not much of a cook.”

They both fell silent. Having lost his first angry initiative, Mike didn’t know how or where to begin. He had never rehearsed this scene in his head because the script he wrote and rewrote was Alma’s coming to him and asking him to come home. That was always followed by a long list of his grievances, after each of which she apologized and promised reform. Alma wasn’t a woman who apologized. In real life their reconciliations were his doing, rarely with words, usually with a gesture, fixing a porch step or taking the kids for a ride, and it could never be done as a bid for sex. Neither did Alma bargain.

“This has gone on long enough,” he finally said.

“Well, it’s given us both time, and I certainly needed it. Thanks, by the way, for sending the money.”

He shrugged. Being thanked for what was his to do was a habit he’d never broken her of, but he hadn’t given in to it himself. To thank for duty was to suggest a choice where there was none.

“You’ve always been more honest than I am about big things. We were horribly unhappy, and you did something about it.”

“Don’t flatter me. It was a bad joke. This whole four months has been a bad joke. It’s over. We don’t have to talk about it.”

“I have to, Mike, because it isn’t over. Or it’s over for me with you. Please—try not to get angry. It’s not your fault. I just am really no good at being your wife, and, once I gave up trying, I should have quit.”

“Quit? You don’t quit! This isn’t a game we’re playing.”

“Oh, Mike, you’re so … old-fashioned. Who do you know who’s managed to stay married as long as we have?”

“I am your husband, not a skirt you wear one day to your ankles, the next day to your crotch, and send to the Salvation Army next week. You are married to me.”

“But I’m getting a divorce …”

“As a Christmas present from Daddy?”

“I don’t want it to be ugly. We’re not ugly people. You’ve been as unhappy as I have.”

“Don’t tell me what I’ve been.”

“But haven’t you?”

“That’s beside the point. All this is beside the point. We don’t have to talk about it. I’m home,” he said, and to prove his point he started to take off his jacket.

“All right,” she said, and she stood up. “We don’t have to talk. We never have been able to. Why should we at this point? The house is all yours.”

She got as far as the front door before he caught up with her. If the face she turned to him had been scornful, he might have been able to hit her, but he saw in it such terrible distress he could not even put out a restraining hand.

“Then talk,” he said desperately. “Talk.”

“You can’t listen. It’s nothing you want to hear.”

“Look. I shouldn’t have done it. It was stupid. I’m sorry.”

For a moment he thought he was actually going to see his wife cry. Then she turned away, walked down the steps and over to her car, leaving him alone with an apology he’d had no intention of making.

Ten years. Mike remembered listening to a man talk who had served only seven and simply did not know what to do with himself. After several months he’d stolen a car and smashed it into a tree. Neither the nostalgia for prison nor the gesture was comprehensible to Mike then. Now he felt as if he had done the same thing; only it hadn’t worked. He’d managed to get back into the jail, but with no one to judge or keep him, that accomplished nothing. Had he been horribly unhappy? He couldn’t remember. He was in touch only with the pointless misery of the last free months, which he had tolerated passively, simply waiting for the time to come to an end, for Alma to end it. Now she had. He was free, and he could feel nothing but blankness.

He wandered around the house to discover how few traces of his own occupancy were left except behind closed closet and cupboard doors. He had been much more effectively put away than Joseph, whose domestic litter was evident everywhere in his house so that, on his return, he’d be immediately at home. Even in the bathroom Mike had to rummage in the storage cupboard beneath the sink to find a box with his razor, toothbrush, shaving lotion, comb.

Among the womanly and childish clutter, he could not distinguish any particular signs of Roxanne. The small pair of trousers in their bedroom could as easily have belonged to Tony. It didn’t matter.

Tony’s room had changed more than any other in the house. On the shelves where his collection of miniature cars had been, there were books, dozens of them, and there was a music stand, though no sign of an instrument. Whatever it was, he probably had it with him. Mike wondered if his son’s face would be as hard to recognize as his room after only four months.

He found in Victor’s room what he had missed in Tony’s. Victor had obviously inherited the childhood Tony was leaving behind, but all in heaps and overflowing boxes. No amount of nagging from Alma, threatening from Mike would ever make Victor orderly as Tony naturally was.

Mike did not feel real. He was as much a ghost as if he’d actually killed himself on that ridiculous thirtieth birthday. In four months children so young would already be accustomed to his absence. Had he really missed them? He missed the idea of them. What he was really losing was the right to their friendship in the future, the bond that only contending for the same domestic space could make. He saw himself a stranger, a derelict, in a concert hall, football stadium, church, old as his father had been suddenly old, but without the right to the attention and care of the strong young men his sons would be.

Mike could not stay in this house, tomb of a failed kingdom he had never ruled as a man should. Why? Was Carlotta right? Was he, like her, only really able to be alone? What was his art worth to him if it lost him the world? What had it ever been worth anyway? If he had given it up, if he had taken a real job, by now at thirty he’d have something to show for his life: a real house on a real street with a real wife and children in it, rather than these people who had been on nothing but a long-term loan from a patient father-in-law, who had finally decided time had run out and written him off as a bad debt. Alma was his daughter; the boys were his grandsons. Nothing here had ever belonged to Mike.

In the basement he found the monogrammed luggage given to him for trips he had refused to take. Into it he piled some of his clothes, including the newest two of his suits. He also took the set of golf clubs and tennis racket, not knowing why, with some vague sense that not to would be petty.

Finally he went out into the shed to see if there were any tools or materials he should load into the truck. There he found a pile of his old clothes, on top of which was an elaborately ornamented sign.

TRASCO’S DECREES

Soft Sculpture Is a Pile of Crap…

Mike stopped reading. That pile of clothes was his effigy. He lifted it up and found the hidden head and hands. The screwdriver had been removed. So had the wedding ring. He looked back at the sign, obviously left those months ago by Joseph. It lacked the statement Mike had neglected to share with his friend: “Don’t make anything that can kill itself.” He carried the dummy out to the trash can and dumped it in. He hesitated with the sign. He knew it was meant as a friendly joke, but the pretentious vulgarity of those statements embarrassed him. He felt a thousand years older than the brash, hopeful fake he had been, so kindly listened to by a little fellow Mike hadn’t forgiven for going crazy, deserting Mike in his own craziness which he had claimed to be sanity itself. Joseph at least could come home. Self-pity, as sudden and debilitating as a nosebleed, tasted in Mike’s mouth and stained his vision. Why hadn’t he really killed himself when he had had at least enough self-respect to be able to do such a thing? Now he could break nothing but a stupid bottle of perfume. He crumpled Joseph’s sign, slammed down the lid of the trash can, and turned away. He had to get out of there.

After Mike unloaded the truck at the warehouse, he dressed in one of his rarely worn suits and went down to the club where he worked.

“Jesus, man,” his boss exclaimed. “Who died?”

“I’ve got to quit,” Mike said, “right now, without notice.”

He was willing to forfeit his last two weeks of pay, but his boss was a man of generous gestures and insisted he take an extra two weeks’ money instead.

“And anytime, you know, you want to come back, you need anything, you know where I am.”

For a moment Mike doubted what he was doing. Here, where he claimed he had made no friends, where he was nothing but a pair of fists, he was being treated with generosity and kindness. But the irony was too apparent. At thirty to be successful at nothing but being a bouncer at a third-rate nightclub was colder comfort than he could stand.

From the club he walked along Georgia until he came to The Bay. It had been years since he’d been in a department store. First he went to the perfume counter. He did not know the name of Carlotta’s perfume, but he recognized the bottle.

“Sixty-three fifty,” the clerk informed him.

He did not believe it as he counted out the money. Every year Alma calmly shelled out this kind of money for the smell of a friend. The cuts on his hand must be worn like expensive jewelry.

He wanted to buy presents for his children. He never had. You don’t feel empty-handed going home to children you live with. It was different to contemplate calling on them at their grandparents’. He found his way to the board where all the departments were listed, stood being bumped and crowded by people trying to get on the escalator. It was like being at work on a Saturday night with the sound turned off. In all the TV ads of happy shoppers, the man buying a suit or a car, the woman in her new bra with her different brand of instant coffee, there were never other people. The gray, anxious hordes were invisible. Nobody could really like spending money like this. Faintly now he could hear music, “Joy to the world, the Lord has come.” Was there anyplace he could stand to be? He got through the crowd like the bouncer he was.

Carlotta opened the door to him reluctantly. He offered her the bottle of perfume, still in its bag with the sales slip.

“You still smell of it,” she said. “I’ve been airing this place out for hours. I don’t know that I can ever wear it again.”

“You damn well better,” Mike said. “It costs four dollars and two cents a drop.”

“I’m touched.”

“I’m no good at presents. You know that.”

“Well, at least now it really is from you.”

“I saw Alma.”

“I know.”

“I mean after I left here.”

“I know.”

“For someone who’s not your favorite caller, she stops around on the hour.”

“Can you imagine I enjoy it?”

“No,” Mike admitted.

“She said you looked terrible, and she was afraid you might do something desperate.”

“She flatters herself.”

“That’s what I told her.”

“How much longer do you need to finish the portrait?”

Carlotta looked at him intently. “An hour, a year.”

“Seriously.”

“I don’t want to burden you with more bad news. It’s finished at your convenience.”

“I’m no good at riddles either.”

“People as good—looking as you never are.”

“It’s looked finished to me for a couple of weeks. You overwork it you could ruin it.”

“Then it’s finished.”

“I want to take off is all. I need to get of here for a while.”

“Go,” she said.

“I don’t mean this minute. I want to see the kids. I promised Ann I’d have Christmas dinner there and welcome Joseph home.”

“I mean this minute.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. I’m finished.”

“With me?”

“Put it that way.”

“Why?”

“Because you are and because, like any woman, I want the little vanity of choosing the moment.”

Mike had no more considered ending his relationship with Carlotta than he had considered divorce except in moments of angry fantasy.

“Look, Carlotta, I couldn’t have made it through these last months without you. “You know that. “You’ve been … great. It’s just that I’ve got to get away from all this, figure out what to do with my life.”

“Go. Figure. What do you need, a scene?”

“No,” he said. “What do you want me to do with the portrait?”

“Shove it up your ass! Fuck it! Burn it!” she shouted, hurling herself at him.

If he hadn’t been professional in subduing hysterical women, she would have done him real damage. He had only one bleeding scratch on his cheek close to his eye before he had her pinned and helpless. It had always been the unexpected violence of her appetite that excited his own, the dissolving heat of so thin a covering of flesh. He could feel her tense, waiting for a chance to break free.

“I’m going to shove it up your ass,” he said.

He was not afraid of her as he had been of Alma. He was not really angry with her. He needed to take her against her will in order to reach the deep compliance there was in her. Before he succeeded, she had torn the pocket off his jacket and bitten him through the cloth of his shirt, and he had, he was sure, broken the little finger of her left hand. Her cunt was hot, frothy, and he rode her until both their backs might break, and she came to him clinging, weeping, a moment before he gave in himself.

He picked her up and carried her to her bed. They both looked like victims of an explosion. He covered her with a blanket and then sat for a moment on the floor by her. He was faint, lost consciousness for a second, came to.

“Why did you need that?” he asked.

She turned her head to look at him, her face thin, very pale, austere.

“I didn’t. You did.”

He nodded. Then he must have fainted or slept. When he came to again, she was gone. He looked around for a note. There was none. She had changed out of her torn clothes, taken a shower, even had half a cup of tea. He drank what was left, washed his abused face, straightened himself as he could, and wore the damage as he always had from the time he was a small boy, learning how to take his physical space in the world, as if it didn’t matter.

Carlotta had been to the studio before him. Not only the portrait but all the small domestic signs of her were gone. Mike was glad because what had suited his vanity, Carlotta’s intense concentration on him, had threatened his pride, the role reversal between artist and model. The portrait itself had become too familiar from his searching it for clues and reassurances. It had finally been able to tell him not much more than that he looked like a man whose picture should be on the cover of Time, and that was a wearying irony.

Detached from the clock with no job to go to and no further appointments with Carlotta, Mike could not remember what meal to eat, when to sleep. He thought again of presents for his children and had to concentrate to remember whether shops were closed at four in the morning or four in the afternoon. Suddenly he was afraid he’d missed Christmas altogether and had to ask someone on the street. He still had eleven hours of Christmas Eve.

He went into an art supply shop to buy himself new sketching pads, and there he decided to buy for his sons what he had always guarded fiercely for himself: the drafting tools and papers they had never been allowed to touch. In the pleasure of starting again, he chose generously, buying two of everything so that there would be no cause for envy or argument, each one to be equipped for the solitary activity that had given Mike so many hours of concentrated peace. He could stay alive in their hands and dreaming shapes. The clerk gave him two large boxes he’d later tie elaborately with string, a macramé Santa Claus for Victor, a cross for Tony. On the way out of the shop, Mike paused to look at a large, handsomely bound notebook with its blank pages of fine paper. Always a grumbler about cost, Mike had never given in to his own coveting of such objects. He worked with good materials, but elegance was in the extravagance of his imagination, in the poise of line, not in such things as this. On an impulse he bought it, not for himself but for his wife, though he had no idea what use she could put it to.

After he had phoned and asked her when he might drop by to see the boys, he felt as uncertain as a man courting. Would she, would they all see these gifts as just another indication of his self-absorption instead of the hopeful offering of what mattered to him most to share with them?

Several weeks ago Ann had said she’d put off buying the girls shoes because Joseph liked to take them shopping for those and always turned it into a special occasion. She obviously thought it both funny and endearing since, aside from his teeth, Joseph most begrudged spending money on his own shoes. Mike had always thought of fatherly chores as starting his sons out in skills and pleasures, not in things, but part of his pride had been a defense against his father-in-law’s obsessive generosity. Might Mike have discovered the innocent pleasure in things if he’d chosen Tony’s first pencil box, Victor’s first lunch pail, the very things he had scorned because he’d envied them himself when he started school without the stub of a pencil or anything to eat?

The boys were out playing on their grandparents’ expansive front lawn when Mike arrived. Victor was the first to spot his truck, shouted out, “Hey, Dad!” and came at a run. Standing on the parking strip, watching the chunky power of his younger boy’s body, Mike wanted to reach out his arms not to some vision of a lost future but to this child, whom he’d tended and taught, rebuked and encouraged, loving him simply as he could never love Tony because Tony had always stayed aloof, as he did now, watching his younger brother greet his father. Mike didn’t catch Victor up in his arms, hug him, weep into his tender child’s neck, tell him how bitterly Mike had missed him. Victor was a son, not a daughter. And Victor, so like his father in his own requirements, jammed to a stop only a couple of feet from Mike, nearly falling down, and said in a soft, breathless voice with a shy, tough toss of his head, “Hi.”

Mike put a hand on his shoulder and a playful fist into his jaw. Victor returned the greeting with a fist into Mike’s thigh hard enough to make him wonder if he’d have to limp into the house.

“What are you doing? Practicing for a knockout?”

Victor buried his face against the flesh he had struck, his arms around Mike’s leg, as if he might anchor Mike there forever, half wrestler’s hold, half hug. Mike tousled his hair, already darkening as Tony’s was not, and looked across the lawn at his fair-haired boy, who had not moved.

“Hey, Tony,” Mike called. “Get a leg on. I need help with parcels.”

It worked. The boy was released into his own running. He was much more graceful than Victor and was already a good skater, one of the many such accomplishments Mike didn’t have.

“How’ve you been?” Mike asked.

“Okay, I guess,” Tony answered. “You been in a fight?”

Mike touched the scratch on his face and saw the cuts on his hand. “Would you believe I had an argument with a perfume bottle?”

Tony had his mother’s reluctant smile, which made it a pleasure to win it from him.

“Can we open them right away, while you’re here?” Victor asked the moment he saw the presents. “Hey, that’s funny!” he said, pointing to the knotted Santa.

“How did you do that?” Tony asked, looking at his knotted cross.

Mike wished he’d thought to include balls of string.

“I’ll show you,” he said.

“Are you coming in?” Tony asked, a note of uncertainty in his voice.

“I’m not going to stand out here and freeze.”

“Aunt Margaret’s in there,” Tony said, “and Uncle Peter.”

“They just came,” Victor added.

Mike felt the anger in him begin to rise. Did Alma think she needed protection? If so, she should have found someone other than that prick of a brother-in-law who couldn’t have protected his prize camellia from his wife’s Pekinese.

They were all there, his in-laws, and the term seemed to Mike aggressively legal as he shook hands first with Alma’s father, then with Peter. The women had not come to the door. Alma and Margaret sat on the couch in front of the brightly burning fire. Alma’s mother stood fiddling with the Christmas tree, which was as formal and expensive as everything else in this house. Alma did rise to greet him, a coffee table between them. He was glad he had a box to offer her and saw that she was surprised by it.

“Can we open ours now while Dad’s here?”

“I don’t see why not,” Alma said.

“What’ll you have, Mike?”

“Whatever’s going,” Mike said.

Alma’s mother was offering him a plate of fruitcake, stuffed dates, and some of the same cookies Alma had served him … was it only yesterday?

“Eggnog?”

Normally Mike would have remarked that eggnog tasted to him like milk pissed in by a diabetic. This afternoon he said, “Fine.”

Victor was struggling to pull off the macramé Santa Claus to get at his present. Tony held his up to his father.

“Can I get it open without undoing the cross?”

Mike took a knife out of his pocket and cut the string to keep the cross intact. He did the same for Victor, wishing he had also bought them knives, wanting them to have everything he did that gave him pleasure.

“You always do such clever things with your hands, Mike,” Margaret commented pleasantly. She was the sister who had given him boxing gloves.

He picked up the extra string and quickly tied her two intricate knots.

“Where did you learn how?”

“On the docks when I was a kid … from the sailors.”

“A compass, hey, funny!” Victor exclaimed.

Tony did not say anything as he looked at graph paper, sketching pad, a numbered range of pencils, pen and ink, ruler, but the pleasure in his touching with hands so like his father’s was obvious.

“Everything’s just the same,” Victor discovered, looking into his brother’s box. “I’ve got everything he’s got.”

The adults laughed, knowing that fact would give status to a bottle of vitamin pills.

“Can I draw something right now?” Victor asked.

“Sure,” Mike said. “Why don’t we just go in to the dining-room table?”

“I’m sorry,” Alma’s mother said. “It’s set for dinner …”

“Use the table in my den,” Alma’s father suggested.

Mike wondered if he had all the money in the world whether he’d ever be comfortable in the wasted showplaces of a house like this. Alma’s father probably sat at that desk once a month to do domestic paperwork. His office was downtown. The only real use for the den was the shelter it offered sons-in-law to watch football games and grandchildren at moments like this. The boys sat down at the library table. Tony decided to block out a town on graph paper. Victor began to draw a plane to bomb it.

Alma came to the door and stood watching. Mike walked over to join her.

“They’re wonderful presents.”

“Alma, I’m leaving town for awhile, maybe a month or two. I’ve taken what I need out of the house. You can do whatever you want about it.”

“What about your job?”

“I quit, but don’t worry about that. I’ve got money set aside. I’ll send you the usual.”

“You don’t really have to do that, Mike.”

“Those are my kids.”

“Sure, but if you’re not working … Without us, I thought you might be able to get on with your own work, really concentrate, without the burden …”

“A family isn’t a burden.”

“Mike, you should know I’m going ahead with the divorce, and I don’t want alimony or anything.”

“Are you going to go out and work?”

“I thought maybe, part time.”

“I don’t want that. I want you at home with the boys. I’ll send the money.”

Alma began to protest again and then shrugged. She rarely argued to get her way.

“When are you leaving?”

“In a day or two.”

“Take care of yourself, won’t you?”

“I’ve got no choice,” Mike answered.

The scene was too strange, the boys peacefully working at the library table, Mike having a civil conversation with Alma about the uncivil and unholy thing she had decided to do. Mike could hear the nervous joviality of the conversation in the living room with its silent gaps while they listened for an angry raising of voices or a slap and a scream. Mike had a momentary image of himself, the superstud, beating the shit out of Alma’s father and Peter while the women stood by in terror and admiration, but he had already won the princess’s hand and lived happily ever after. His father was right. Life was much too long, and Mike was deathly tired of it.

“Thank your father for this sweet piss,” he said, handing Alma his empty glass.

Without saying goodbye to his sons or the rest of the assembled guard, he left the house. He stood for a moment on the front steps to acknowledge the admirable and serene view of Howe Sound, the water sapphire blue today, the great mountains white with unviolated snow. From here the city might not have existed, people piled on top of each other thirty stories high in the lonely close quarters of their lives, the long drunk of Christmas just beginning, the taste already cloying.

That duty done, Mike regretted having agreed to be with Ann and Joseph the next day. He wanted to get into the truck and begin driving—south out of this cold country. But he also needed to eat and to sleep. He wondered about treating himself to a meal in a restaurant, but his extravagance had spent itself. Instead, he stopped at a supermarket to buy hamburger, a can of corn, a bag of apples.

In the lineup Mike caught sight of Pierre, three cash registers away, wearing a kerchief over his long dark curls, carrying a woman’s handbag. He seemed to be alone. Mike despised Allen, who chose not to be a man, not to be an artist, degraded himself with that embarrassing and pathetic mistake of a boy, with work about which he was entirely cynical, fawning over Alma, condescending to Mike. Pierre was simply pitiful, trying to pass as a little French housewife; he needed a shave. At that moment Pierre caught sight of Mike and gave him a radiant smile. Mike nodded.

Pierre was checked out first and came to stand with Mike while the clerk rang up his few purchases.

“Is that your dinner?” Pierre asked, peering over his own large bag of groceries.

“Just a snack,” Mike answered defensively, not able to abide sympathy from Pierre.

“You’re not eating properly,” Pierre said, a surprising sternness in his voice. “Carlotta’s no sort of cook. You can tell that by looking at her.”

“My friends aren’t feeding me,” Mike said haughtily.

“I can see that,” Pierre agreed. “I wish … well, the trouble is at Christmas we go gay with a vengeance, and, though you’d be very welcome, of course, I don’t think …”

“Thanks,” Mike said. “I’m having Christmas with Ann and Joseph.”

“I did know that. Joseph told me last week. I’m so glad he’s getting out of there. Every time I went out to see him I was sick to my stomach for hours afterwards. I told Allen, when I go crazy, he can just put me in a cage in the backyard …”

Mike accepted change with one hand, picked up his groceries with the other, refusing to meet the amused eyes of the clerk. “Merry Christmas,” he said curtly to either of them, and walked away from their rejoinders.

It was after nine o’clock, the stores all shut, when Mike thought he should also have bought gifts at least for Rachel and Susan. Could he make them something? He looked around his crowded studio space. There wasn’t time to make anything elaborate like a doll’s house. Chairs? He didn’t have the right sorts of scraps, and they’d anyway outgrow them too quickly. He was staring at the piece Joseph called “School Days,” the one he had the most trouble keeping Victor from climbing on the several times he had the boys with him here. “It’s not a fucking jungle gym. It’s a piece of sculpture, a work of art, you little barbarian!” Tony had never had to be told, though he could put on his mother’s expression of skepticism at such statements, which angered Mike far more than Victor’s innocent energy. Climbing in it did no harm. It was sturdily enough built for a dozen kids to play on. Mike himself climbed about on them all, “like an angry ape,” Joseph said.

Well, why not? It came apart in pieces he could easily load into the truck by himself. It wouldn’t take half an hour to put the structure together again in Joseph’s backyard. That problem solved, Mike finally slept and dreamed of apes and children playing in the wreckage of his art.

Joseph, in trousers now too large for him, an old man’s cardigan, and carpet slippers, looked more diminished than he had even in the hospital. Beside him Ann, now clearly pregnant, looked a member of another species. Not for the first time Mike wondered why a woman so calm and fruitful had twice been bound to men so obviously mortal. Though he knew it could not have been conscious choice, she seemed to him the female counterpart of those men who chose dangerous occupations, the constant threat of death giving them a rare radiance.

“Can we let him do this?” Ann was asking Joseph as they stood by the truck, watching him unload the pieces of sculpture.

“What is it?” both the children were asking.

“A special sort of jungle gym for the backyard. Your dad calls it ‘School Days.’”

Together they chose a place next to the sandbox Joseph had built them. The day was too cold for standing about. Mike insisted Joseph and Ann go back indoors, but the girls, in bright new ski jackets, stayed with him.

“Are you a daddy, Mike?” Rachel asked.

“Of course, he is,” Susan said.

“How do you know?” Rachel asked.

“Because he acts like a daddy.”

“Not like ours.”

“Ours is sick.”

“Our other daddy got sick and died,” Rachel informed Mike matter-of-factly. “But Daddy won’t. Mother says he’ll get well after a while.”

“Of course, he will,” Mike said.

“Where are your children?” Rachel asked.

“With their mother.”

“How old are they?”

“Six and nearly nine.”

“We’re older,” Susan said. “I’m nearly ten.”

“I’m eight.”

“Don’t stand on that until I’ve got it fixed,” Mike said, tempted to suggest that both of them go in to help their mother.

Before when he had been there, they had been very quiet. Now they seemed much more like his own nuisancy kids. You did something for children, and they thought it gave them new rights with you instead of obligations. When did that change? With women it didn’t. Maybe that was why you could go ahead and spoil daughters since it was their nature to live their lives getting what they didn’t earn as the right of their sex.

“Are you cross?” Rachel asked.

“No,” Mike said, lifting her up and putting her down on the bare branch of an apple tree, “just busy. I’ll be finished in a minute if you’ll stay there.”

“Look how high I am!”

“You, too?” Mike asked Susan.

She was more like Tony, he realized. Did first children have to be more watchful and testing?

“Okay,” she said, and held out her arms to be lifted.

She hadn’t the weight of his six-year-old. Once established in the tree, she began to giggle, a pitch low for a girl child and surprisingly sensual. When she stopped, Rachel started up an imitation. For a few minutes they played catch with their laughter, then struck up a silly duet until they seemed nearly demented.

“I’m going to wet my pants,” Rachel said.

That set off an hysteria that shook the tree. Mike tightened the last bolt and climbed up on the structure of carefully broken forms to test its stability. The sight of him standing higher than they were sent them into new convulsions, and his threatened irritation, as he looked down at those tiny-boned, curly-headed children, weak with silliness, hugging the trunk of the apple tree, vanished. Christmas morning, with their frail and subdued father, must have been tense with doubt as well as excitement, all being spent now in this paroxysm of laughter. His boys would have been having an only half-playful fistfight. Maybe at this moment they were, except without him there to permit it, understanding the necessity of spending pent-up anxious excitement, their mother would stop them. Little girls giggled.

“Come on,” he said, jumping down. “Now you can try it.”

He lifted one, then the other down from the tree. They staggered about a moment, unsure of their balance, then made a game of the staggering, until Susan with a quick grace swung herself up onto the first stage of the structure, and Rachel followed.

“Hey this is fun!”

“Come up here. Come to this part!”

“Mike, look at me, look at me.”

What he saw was not the success of his present to two small girls, though they did not interfere with his pleasure. It had been years since he’d actually been able to see what he had made in a space of its own without other structures competing for attention, in bright daylight. It was elegant.

He turned to pick up his tools and saw Joseph at the window. Mike waved and decided to join him to see what it looked like from there.

Joseph moved aside to let Mike have the view.

“Well, what do you think of that? A Trasco in your own backyard!”

Ann came to look. “Why, Mike, it’s so clever!”

Joseph nodded and then asked, “Did you ever find the sign I made you?”

“Oh, yeah, I did,” Mike said, “yeah,” trying not to remember either what it said or what he had done with it.

“I just remembered that,” Joseph said.

Through dinner, which Ann served, Joseph spoke rarely, and always when he did, it was to ask a question of Mike and to add that now-familiar refrain “I just remembered that.” His hands shook when he tried to pass the cranberry or the gravy. The little girls sat gravely wearing the paper hats that came out of their Christmas crackers, saying no more than “please” or “thank you.” Mike worked hard to fulfill the double obligation of eating enough to honor the feast and talking enough to make the occasion the double celebration it was intended to be. He was enormously relieved when he felt he had stayed as long as he was expected to. He carried off with him matching woolen cap and muffler of the same ridiculous sort Joseph wore, touched that Ann had knitted them for him but not able to wear them out of the house.

On the way back to the warehouse, he turned on the radio and heard, “But if somehow you could / Pack up your sorrows and / Give them all to me / You would lose them, I know how to use them / Give them all to me.” The weight of Joseph’s illness as heavy in him as the dinner he had just eaten, Mike had a momentary glimmer of what might have driven Joseph as far as he’d gone. Other people’s griefs could send you mad. Mike no more wanted to shoulder Joseph’s calamities than he did his own. It would take a thousand-mile shrug to get them off his back.

Mike had no clear destination. If there had been a town called Away, he would have headed for that. With the camper top secured on his Datsun, a mattress, sleeping bag, and camp stove stowed in the back, along, at the last minute, with golf clubs and tennis racket, which made him feel he could take a holiday even from the self he had been, he could be independent. If he discovered that the excuse he’d always given Alma for refusing to spend money on a vacation, which was simply that he couldn’t stand idle time, turned out to be true, he could always go visit his mother and brother, but he wanted to feel under no obligation to anyone. He hadn’t dealt this hand, but he could choose to play it.

Mike realized almost at once that he did not want to drive a thousand miles with only the radio for distraction. The songs only salted his thoughts with a bitterness he had to escape. He needed a companion. He thought of and rejected Carlotta because she hadn’t the money to take real time off. He thought of borrowing one of his children and knew Alma would never hear of it. He had no taste for the melodrama of kidnapping. The simple and obvious solution was to pick up a hitchhiker. Mike minimized the danger of being mugged by stowing a heavy wrench on the shelf behind the seat under a blanket out of sight but in easy reach. The mistake a lot of men made with Mike was assuming his size would make him slow.

Driving out of Vancouver early on Boxing Day, Mike was surprised to find no hitchhikers on the road, but at the border, where an American immigration officer asked a lot of unnecessary questions not only about where he was going, for how long, and why but about his job, his bank account, his marital status, he was relieved to suffer being obsequious alone. He knew very well how to do it since his job for the last eight years had allowed him only two choices, knocking a man down the stairs or kissing his ass.

He fanned his credit cards without saying he didn’t have American Express because he didn’t like the fucking name. He said he was a designer of jungle gyms on a visit to his mother in Arizona. He gave Alma’s parents’ address as his own. Then he waited with a show of patience, under which should have been written “simulated,” while he was checked in the big black book of particular undesirables. Probably a guy like Allen Dent, a real rip-off artist who could cross the border on his own wings, was asked to show nothing but his expensively straightened teeth.

Mike found his first hitchhiker in Blaine just across the border, a kid who was going to Seattle to marry a girl who was apparently the only virgin he had ever met. There was no point in giving him advice. The ones who so willingly let you into their pants before the blessed occasion could just as easily lock the chastity belt and throw the key away the day after the deed was done. Still, if this kid had a taste for deflowering virgins, he’d be safer and happier molesting girls on the playground at a junior high than marrying one. Such thoughts so depressed Mike that he asked the kid about his job, but he didn’t have one. His girl clerked in a department store and thought maybe she could get him in there in the stockroom. Then he was back to talking about getting married.

“Married guys are always telling you not to do it, not to tie yourself down. They forget what getting it anytime you like it is worth, you know? You married?”

Mike nodded.

“Everybody is after all,” the kid concluded.

Mike heard Alma say, “How many people do you know who’ve stayed married as long as we have?” When you’re twenty, everybody else in the world is married. When you’re thirty, everybody else is divorced.

He let the kid off, glad to be rid of him, and drove some miles alone with the worse company of Alma. He tried to think, instead, of Carlotta, but nothing of her friendliness or eager appetite came back to him. The only image he could call up was her lying on her bed, pale as a corpse, just before he passed out. It hadn’t even occurred to him to phone to see how she was. He didn’t want to know.

Unable to stand his own company, he stopped for a young couple, dressed in jeans, ponchos, boots, and beads. He should have known by their costume that they would be his age, veteran dropouts, on their way to yet another commune, where they’d find again nobody ever got round to planting anything but grass or making anything but each other’s women. They hadn’t been in the truck ten minutes before the conversation made it clear that for a steak dinner for both of them—at least they weren’t vegetarians—she’d fuck. Mike offered each of them an apple and dropped them in Portland. As she got out of the car, she handed Mike a couple of joints. He was sorry then that he’d let them go. What would have been the matter with buying them a meal, smoking some dope with them, then, if he felt like it, having a friendly screw? She wasn’t bad-looking.

Mike hadn’t done anything like that since he was in high school, when he had to do it, when fucking a girl with a bunch of your friends was as much an initiation rite as being able to knock any one of them down. A couple of the girls they knew were always willing for a buck a piece, but the greater conquest was cruising around until you found a girl or two you didn’t know. None of his father’s dire warnings about venereal disease and prison terms discouraged Mike. Such dangers were part of the point. Fear was never an excuse. The only way anyone got out of that Saturday night car was to have some place he was getting it free all for himself. Those Saturday nights, once the novelty wore off, simply bored and depressed Mike.

Sex with Alma would have bored him if he’d had it often enough. How many times could you get up enthusiasm for screwing a dead whale? The cruelty of that image amused him. Yet he had not, until Carlotta, ever cheated on Alma, and he’d had plenty of opportunity. Was it just another sign of his parsimony that he wouldn’t pay double for anything? It was more than that. Even bad sex with Alma had the wonder of possibility in it, the discovering of a child in her woman’s flesh, as you might discover shape in wood or stone. When she had stopped wanting children, Alma had ceased to be his wife. He had stayed with her as long as he had because she was the mother of his children. Carlotta? She hardly seemed to Mike a woman at all. She was his good friend, whom he had finally beaten at her own game, and he regretted it in the same way he had regretted defeating a male friend, though he understood the necessity. It wouldn’t have to happen again.

It was getting dark. There was no point in trying to make it to Grants Pass that night. He’d go off the freeway at Roseburg and find some place quiet after he’d had something to eat. He stepped inside a café and was confronted with the loud music he had had to tolerate at work, a cluster of nervously joking and punching teenaged boys by the jukebox, booths of girls who looked no more than fifteen or sixteen with babies in laps, in high chairs, making bloody swamps of french fries and catsup while their mothers gossiped.

“She told me that he swore he wouldn’t hit her again, and she said it was her fault most of the time anyway because she nagged him. They’ve gone to Reno for a second honeymoon. Her mom kept the baby.”

“Wouldn’t mind Charlie slugging me if I could get a trip to Reno out of it.”

“Only trip I’d get to Reno is alone.”

A two-year-old in a high chair overturned a glass of milk; a baby began to howl. Mike had forgotten how much even his own children had irritated him at that age. He knew he couldn’t eat a meal here without fighting the impulse to silence every child in the place. He walked out, found a grocery store, bought himself more ground meat, half a dozen eggs, and a can of tomato juice.

After he’d eaten his frugal supper, sitting in his camper door, he took out one of the joints he had been given, smoked, and watched the winter stars. The signs he had been watching all day long to read the names of realities that lay out of sight near the surreal highway began to be shapes in his mind to be reclaimed, to hang high in space, making no claim to reality at all. The huge transport trucks which had passed him in both directions all day long began to come apart as easily as pieces of Lego, not in fantasies of frightening wreckage, but in redeemable shapes. Mike remembered his brother working over an old car, determined to make it run, while Mike, five years younger, understanding nothing about engines, played among the parts as if they were building blocks.

“That’s not the way it goes,” his brother had shouted at him. “Don’t mess with that.”

Jud had thought Mike was retarded because he never built anything the way it said to, tried to make something that looked like a boat out of an airplane kit, engineered a stool that would stand only on its seat.

“I want to make it look like it wants to get up, like a bug on its back.”

Mike hadn’t the language then to talk about movement that didn’t exist, illusion, art.

“Art is putting the wrong things together. Picasso knew that.”

After a while he’d go see Jud, explain to him the difference between usefulness and meaning.

The next morning there was snow on the ground at Grants Pass, but the sun was shining, and the roads were clear. Mike wished someone else had been driving as he came down the long, winding road into California and approached Shasta. Several times he pulled off and stopped in order simply to look at the views. It was impossible to believe that just a few hours to the south oranges and grapefruit ripened in hot sun. The golf clubs and tennis racket seemed more absurd than ever. There was a grand peaceful familiarity about this landscape, all substance and clarity. Carlotta said she had to work in the cold. Certainly there was nothing in the miniature brilliance of spring for Mike. Flowers got in the way of his stride like dog shit when he wanted to be looking up, as he did now, at the classic shape of a mountain. He would have liked to stay here awhile, but he still had too much need to be gone since there was nothing else to do. Driving became an occupation.

Once he was in the flat, mild Central Valley, he mourned the mountains, nothing here but acres of dusty olive groves. Mike suffered a boredom intense enough to cancel his anger. Late in the afternoon he gave up the struggle against sleep, pulling into a rest area, and did not even bother to get into the back of the truck but lay cramped on the seat. When he woke, it was after dark, and he was back inside a private time which made him feel less and less in touch with time in the human world. But he soon discovered it didn’t matter in California. Nothing ever seemed to close down. It was as easy to get a six-pack of beer at four in the morning as it was at four in the afternoon. There were all-night gas stations, drugstores, movies, and there seemed to be a great many more people, not just runaways and derelicts, who inhabited what were unused portions of night and morning in Vancouver. Mike did not feel the outlaw or outcast he often did in his own city. Neither, however, did he feel at home, wandering in Sacramento, San Francisco, Los Angeles, as far south as San Diego.

Mike did not know how to find and make new friends. Oh, he could strike up an easy enough conversation with working stiffs in any city but he felt lonelier with them than he did by himself. In selling galleries and museums, he always felt awkward and was therefore abrupt with anyone who tried to approach him. Once, years ago, in the Vancouver Art Gallery, one of the staff had mistaken him for the plumber they were waiting for. He had never set foot in the building again, mocked the shows he only read about as the kind of tenth-rate garbage always foisted off on hick towns like Vancouver. When he was in Los Angeles, he put on his suit and went to galleries which handled the really big names, passing himself off as a prospective buyer. The combination of his father-in-law’s taste in clothes and his own knowledge was persuasive, and for several hours Mike tried to enjoy the flattering attention not of simple clerks but of gallery owners called to attend him once he had started asking intelligent questions. But it was such an empty trick—masquerading in the trappings of power didn’t give him any—and such a cowardly substitute for what he should have risked that he ended his tour full of self-loathing.

What else could he really do? He had no adequate photographs of his work, and he hadn’t any Canadian shows to his credit. His work had not been on public display since the student group exhibit when he was graduated. Anyway, these people weren’t in it to discover anybody. They were in it for the big money of the big names. He did ask for the names of galleries where lesser-known and local artists showed their work, but he did not visit them at all, even as a rich buyer. He hadn’t come down here to be humiliated as a Canadian nobody. He wasn’t out to prove anything at all.

Yet the simplest circumstances seemed to turn into tests. He got into more punch-outs than he had at work, and he discovered it was one thing to deal with out-of-shape drunks, another to deal with the young punks from muscle beach. Mike had lost twenty-five pounds in the last six months, and he was eating and sleeping more like a stray dog than a man.

“Why don’t you learn to play golf?” asked one peaceable kid who refused to take Mike’s aggressiveness seriously. “It’s more fun and better for you at your age.”

If Mike’s clubs had been handy, he’d have beaten the kid to death for his good advice.

Well, what the hell was he doing? He was letting the ten percent of his earnings he had religiously saved ever since he was a kid with a paper route leak away like pus out of the last of Job’s boils as if that were the painful cure for his pain. Stupid. He was being entirely stupid.

It was nearly the first of February. He wrote a check for Alma and sent her a note to say he would be in Arizona for a while at his brother’s. Then he picked out postcards to send to his sons, a picture of dolphins for Vic, named illustrations of desert cacti for Tony. At the same time he scribbled wish-you-were-here messages to Ann and Joseph, to Carlotta.

Mike hadn’t seen Jud for five years, not since their father’s funeral. They hadn’t talked much then, but Jud had told him he was getting rid of his wife, who’d turned out to be nothing but a tramp, and he was taking their mother south with him to look after the kids. It would give her a home and something to do. Mike had been too grateful to be relieved of the financial and emotional responsibility of his mother to think much about what getting rid of a wife had been for Jud. Mike had met his sister-in-law at the wedding when he went down to Phoenix to be best man, and Jud had brought her home to Vancouver a couple of times, but after there were two children, the grandparents had gone south to visit. Mike remembered her as a pretty woman who hadn’t much to say for herself. Alma hadn’t taken to her, so they’d seen no more of her than duty seemed to require. Jud had his own friends in Vancouver. They were the sort of brothers who never did much together.

Now Mike wondered how inadequate a brother he might have been to Jud at that time. If he’d undergone even a small measure of the pain Mike was experiencing, he must have needed someone to talk to. Maybe he’d been able to talk to their mother. Mike doubted it, remembering his mother in black, mourning with the stoic formality of a peasant a man whose moods she had accepted like the weather, whose pronouncements she had neither believed nor corrected, a man who had loved her clumsily, provided for her at best uncertainly, his only legacy to her two sons he had taught responsibility and frugality by bad example. The only comfort she could have been to Jud was in not questioning his decision to get rid of his wife, in taking over his household and children and making his life more familiar to and comfortable for him than it had been since he left home. When she said goodbye to Mike, she made her simple explanation: “Jud’s the one who needs me.”

Jud had sent her back to Vancouver several times on short holidays. Though she and Alma always seemed to get along all right, his mother’s presence increased tension between him and Alma, who seemed to be unnecessarily always trying to impress her mother-in-law. “You don’t have to feed my mother all this fancy garbage. She’s just a peasant, you know, like me.” Alma even wanted to give a luncheon, inviting friends of his mother’s. “Christ, Alma, she didn’t have any friends. She wasn’t a member of the Junior League.” Alma didn’t argue with him. Her mother gave a luncheon, and Mike didn’t ask who had been invited. Once Alma accused him of being ashamed of his mother, as if he couldn’t see for himself what a handsome and intelligent woman she was, perfectly “presentable.” Ashamed of her? He would have married such a woman if there had been anyone remotely like her anywhere in his experience.

His mother had, in fact, liked Alma, but Mike knew his mother would no more find fault with him than she did with Jud. Her loyalties were simple and absolute. Yet he had not been able to go to her, as Jud had, with so practical a request. Even if Jud hadn’t been five years ahead of him in this, as in everything else, Mike hadn’t established himself confidently enough to provide such a solution. And he doubted that he could live with it, if it had been an option.

He was driving east to Las Vegas, on his way to Phoenix, feeling in a hurry and in doubt by turns. The speeches he had composed for his brother seemed less and less likely every mile he drove. And his mother’s uncritical approval tasted like nothing more than borsch and perogi. Since Alma had mastered both, he might find himself more horribly homesick for her than ever. But where else could he go?

He looked toward the next road sign, growing larger and larger as he approached. Death Valley. It felt more like laughing at a bad joke than making a decision as he took the exit several miles farther down the road.

What Mike expected to find were the skulls of old cars and cattle in an enormous dried-up mud hole, the only glamor in such facts that the valley was below sea level and had taken a number of lives, some recently, of people who had tried to cross it unprepared in the height of summer when temperatures rose to the 120s. Death Valley and the Arabian desert were confused in Mike’s imagination; Peter O’Toole could have appeared in either, swapping robes for chaps and boots.

Crossing over the mountains to get there, Mike was chilly enough to turn on the heater, but as he dropped down into the valley in the early afternoon, it might have been a summer day in the north, the fresh clarity of air Mike had nearly forgotten in the smog-ridden city. He had thought of barren land always in negative terms, a lack of vegetation, an absence of green. He did not know, until he saw it, that color bloomed in rock, great strokes of ocher, ridges of red, cliffsides of aquamarine. Unlike the northern mountains, clothed in trees, this naked rock exposed the violence of its coming, layers of geological time heaved up to benign light.

Signs, which nearly everywhere in the south had interested Mike more than any view from the freeway, hardly caught his notice here, although they could have fed his schoolboy fantasies, warning of flash floods, of roads patrolled only once a day by helicopter, of the necessity of carrying water, staying with your car if it broke down, under it if the sun was hot. He was watching the mountains, a man driving at the bottom of a vanished sea through sand dunes onto salt flats where crystals had grown up off the surface like the arms of a thousand drowning men, occasionally an oasis of trees, kept alive by hot springs, where there were cabins to rent. Mike stopped at one of these for a local map and information.

Like so many other places along this coast where the Indians had chosen to live, white men had passed through, unable to tolerate what couldn’t be cultivated, irrigated, built on. Here the earth’s surface was so fragile that half an inch of rain could wash out a road.

At the lowest point in the valley, Mike got out of his truck and looked up to a sign high above him on the cliff face, Sea Level. Here Indians had lived in a tide governed by seasons rather than the moon, on the valley floor in winter, rising to the mountains for the summer, following whatever paths the winter rains or wind had made, leaving no more signs of their presence than a few arrowheads and bones, fossilizing with the bones and shells of other living things, preserved in these monumental pallets of rock.

A death wish as innocent as breath left Mike empty of everything that had tormented him, reconciled with stone, which did not need to be redeemed of anything.

He traveled up out of the valley, free of guilt or desire, free of memory until he was shocked back into himself by the enormous, almost unbelievable vulgarity of Las Vegas and recognized in it his own answer to the desert: the vulgarity or elegance didn’t matter so much as filling the space.

By the time Mike reached Phoenix he was running a fever, and it was some days before he was more than momentarily aware of his mother’s face or his brother’s fading in and out of his dreams, in which he was nearly always dead but not in the serene place of death, images taken from there and transposed so that he was a grotesquely growing tree of salt crystals at his own dining-room table, a flash flood invading his own house, a natural catastrophe rather than a man, whom his wife and children fled from down a road marked by enormous warnings he could not read.

When the fever finally broke and he woke, he was on a couch in a small living room, crowded with old furniture he dimly recognized. There, for instance, was his father’s armchair, maroon vinyl cracking, beside it the high square table with the ashtray that had held his father’s cigars. It was an L-shaped room, and in the L was the large old kitchen table, over which was a plastic chandelier with bulbs shaped like flames. Though Mike had always fiercely defended the furnishings of his childhood against Alma’s, waking to them here was like trying to recognize his father’s face in the last stages of illness. He wondered why Jud had let his mother haul this pathetic junk from British Columbia to Arizona. “Was he sentimental about it as Mike had thought he was himself? Then he was aware of the sound of quiet breathing just behind him. He turned his head and saw his mother asleep in a chair. His movement woke her.

She rose slowly, looked at him, put a hand on his forehead, smiled, and said, very quietly, “I’ll get you some tea.”

They had a quiet hour together in what Mike realized had been dawn light, before Jud woke, and then the children, who were no longer children, young David with a voice as deep as his father’s, several inches taller, a shadow of young beard, Judy with breasts and eye makeup. The room was terribly crowded with them all in it until they settled to the table under that awful chandelier for the breakfast his mother was cooking for them.

Mike had assumed his brother was modestly successful. He owned a mobile home dealership and had business all around the state. Was he overcapitalized that he kept this large-bodied family in this cracker box of a house? They all could not have sat together in the living room while Mike lay on the couch. He moved to sit up and was too weak to manage it. He was glad no one had noticed, all of them eating in silent concentration. Was that habit, or was it a silence for his benefit? Mike felt like a corpse in the parlor.

When the other three had gone to work and to school, Mike protested to his mother that they should have sent him to the hospital.

“Not here in this country,” she said. “It costs the earth. You pay even for the bedpan and the aspirin.”

“Is this where you usually sleep?”

“No, no. I have a bed in Judy’s room.”

“It seems awfully crowded.”

“Jud says how could he sell them if he was too good to live in one.”

“This is what he sells?”

His mother nodded. “All over the state. Every one has two bathrooms.”

When Mike was strong enough to move around a little, his mother put a deck chair out in the driveway for him. There was no yard except for a patch of stones barricaded by ornamental cacti. It was not so much a neighborhood as a kind of permanent camp, as if pioneers crossing this desert had been suddenly petrified. The houses, like wagons, were more places of storage than spaces to live in. The screened porch which ran the length of Jud’s house was the only pleasant place to sit.

The only person who did sit for periods of time was his mother, always with knitting or mending in her lap. The others gathered only when they were waiting for a meal, and then they watched television. In the evening the kids took off to the library, the bowling alley, the movies, and Jud, if he’d come home, went back to his office. He traveled so much he was always behind with his paperwork.

Jud apologized to Mike about being there so seldom. Though he had a secretary, a part-time accountant, as well as two salesmen, he wanted to delegate as little authority as he could in order to keep in touch with every aspect of his business. Jud suggested that, once Mike was feeling up to it, Jud would not only show him the layout but take him on one of his trips, if only just out into the suburbs of Phoenix.

It was not his certainly returning strength so much as his restlessness which made Mike accept any excuse to get away from the cramped space of not only the house but the camp, which covered remarkably few acres for the number of dwellings. There was really no place to walk; roads were designed as a series of small half-moons with an occasional straight spur that dead-ended in desert. Though the houses were different colors and the small patches of ground expressive of different tastes, air force insignia in colored stones here, stone mushrooms and tin roadrunners there, they all were essentially the same.

He would go back to try to talk with his mother.

“People like it the same,” she explained to him. “There’s room for competition, but not much.”

It wasn’t her own idea. She was speaking for Jud. Mike didn’t remember her speaking for his father in that way, but his father had had defenses rather than real ideas or explanations. Mike would have liked to lodge some of his own notions in her mind, but when he tried to talk with her about art, she didn’t even try to hide the fact that it was beyond not only her understanding but her interest. For any other subject—marriage, money, child rearing—Mike had excuses rather than conversation. He was superior to his father only in that he knew it, but Mike had been jarred into that insight as his father never had. Mike could not talk to his mother. He was reduced to watching the quiz shows she liked when he needed to be companionable. She was visibly pleased with him when he began oiling door hinges and trying to figure out how to stop the kitchen floor from squeaking right by the sink.

“You’ve learned to fix things.”

“I probably should have been a plumber or a carpenter.”

She nodded to the logic of that.

Mike had been there two weeks when he asked Jud to show him his office, which was, Mike discovered, just down the road at the edge of the camp. Jud corrected him twice, calling it a development. The office, too, was one of the same structures, the larger bedroom Jud’s office, the smaller one full of office machines. The secretary, a woman in her fifties with blue hair and a great deal of Indian jewelry, had a desk in the dining L where she could greet customers and salesmen, for whom there were comfortable couches and chairs. All the furniture was blandly modern and expensive. The kitchen was well enough stocked to make it clear that Jud, even when he was in the neighborhood, lived here rather than with his mother and children.

For a couple of days he let Mike hang around to listen and ask questions, to get some idea of the scope of the business.

“You’re not just a supplier then. You’re getting into development.”

“You bet,” Jud said. “This is the retirement center of the country, aside from Florida, and we’re getting ready for the baby boom of the forties. It’s the last big wave of population that’s coming through, and the service people are already arriving. It’s going to last just long enough to see me through.”

“What then?”

“Who knows? Who cares?”

Mike drove with Jud to development after development, almost all of them planned around a central clubhouse with swimming pool and tennis courts, often a golf course, a great green serpentine to distract and rest the eyes from the miles of open, flat desert. Nearly none of these places accepted children, and visiting grandchildren under eighteen had to stay pretty well out of sight. As far as Mike could judge, about three-quarters of the population were impressive health freaks, out on the golf links and tennis courts early in the morning, at the pool after a dietetic lunch, in bed mildly sedated by bourbon at nine o’clock. The other twenty-five percent were helped in and out of the hot therapy pool and played cribbage in the shade. Their stroke-distorted speech, arthritic backs, heart coughs did not seem to depress so much as inspire the others to make full use of their own healthy bodies. Nowhere did Mike see anyone reading, not even a newspaper.

“They don’t want to know,” Jud said. “This is the one I’ll move into as soon as Judy’s eighteen. I’ve already got two houses here, renting at seven hundred dollars a month for the season. All the land west to the mountains is going to be developed as soon as some details are sorted out with the Indians and the government.”

“Maybe I should come down and open a crematorium.”

“Seriously, in about a year I’m going to have to expand. I want to do one of these places myself, and I need a partner.”

“Oh, hell, Jud, I don’t have any money, maybe five thousand, and I don’t know a damned thing about the business.”

“I don’t need money so much as someone I can trust. You could learn the business in a month. And with your talent you could mount an advertising campaign to leave these other jokers way behind. Mike, I want a chunk of this, and if you’d come in with me, we could have a fair-sized chunk. The money makes itself.”

“What do you do with it once you have it?”

“Anything you want,” Jud said. “Just anything you want.”

“What do you want?”

“Nothing but the kinds of worries I’ve got now.”

“I’m an artist, Jud, not a businessman.”

Jud squinted at his brother. “What’s to stop you being both? You have to earn a living now.”

“Yeah, but I don’t have to think about it.”

“Don’t you think it’s time you did?”

“I’ve got a lot of other things on my mind.”

“Like what? Killing yourself?”

Mike looked at his brother, startled, and then laughed. “I’ve got no immediate plans.”

“Good,” Jud said. “Come on. I want to show you the piece of nothing we could make into a gold mine. I’ll show you some convincing figures when we get back to the office, but imagination is all you need. Imagine, say, one of your sculptures and some sort of fountain at the entrance, which would right away make the place distinctive.”

His brother wanted to save his life. Mike, who felt he should have been insulted, was absurdly touched.

The next morning, alone at the old kitchen table while his mother did the breakfast dishes, Mike opened the divorce papers being served to him. At first, the only thing he was able to read was his name, after which was typed: “of no fixed address.”