ASSISTED LIVING

Four Fictions

Gary Lutz

Future Tense Books

ASSISTED LIVING

Whether she came on to me or just came at me testily, without much sleep to her name, should make no bit of difference to anybody now. I tried to be a father to her, and she wanted to try being a daughter—that was to be the understanding, effective whenever.

Twenty-three, twenty-four, she was already sinking in a life of mild peril, of shortages sought out. She had run away from one of the middle counties to that blocked-in, secondary city, the one summoning itself clumsily upwards downstate. I was down there temporarily from the tertiary one.

She was staying in what had once been a magnificence of a building—eleven limestone storeys—with three roommates, though each had a room, and she knew people of all walks and wrongful pockets of life.

She wanted to report to me. That was my importance to her. I forget her earliest accounts, but a later one was about her youngest sister’s knack for looking at people a little older and thinking only “hostel... house... hospital...hospice.”

I never got the roster of siblings right, but they were mostly sisters dropped off at peewee colleges that each had a pond and a climbing wall with trampolines underneath. They were all majoring in medical billing. They all adored her and told her to stop fooling herself away on straw men, older men, ones who knew their place only if you walked them to a map and pointed out just how stringy and facetious their part of the world really looked in a cartographer’s dullard colors.

Another report: Her mother these days was reachable only through regular, moseying mail—fatted envelopes that came back unopened but bearing signs of purposefully rough handling, cross-room tosses.

She had larger, veinier hands, her TMJ was creakier than mine, her hair had been pruned to incoherence. (It looked sketched onto the skull, then scumbled.) She had me beat with her pirated culture and that unjust élan of the validly but modestly depressed. She wore sweeping sleeves reaching all the way to thumbnails gnawed raw. She claimed she was paid to sit with stay-at-home couples while they sent their kids out for papers, coffee, out-of-town tobacco. Her other job was at a custard shop.

There wasn’t enough testing of affections on each other. At most, one afternoon, I wound a couple of sidewalk-vendor necklaces around her wrists, which were thicker in the bone than mine, though who was I to be limbed so cleanly at fifty?

She had been portioned to just over six feet. Life had harshened on her dearly. She asked about my former wives, and why, in my describings, I’d let what they ate look like the vegetal grime it was. The second of them, I said, was just one of those overcared-for types, a belonger last seen caught awkwardly in a crosswalk.

But this one, this grown but unboosted girl, had different, sounder hurts.

Everything, I repeat, was on the level. It was so level we could set things out on it, the whole of whatever it was, with its jumpiness and discomposures, without anything of hers ever having to touch anything of mine.

We faced each other in a bed just the one time, at my hotel.
She woke me in a tremble and said, “I know what’s going to happen, but I don’t know just what.”

I soon enough had to go back to my city, where I feared for my livelihood. She was against doing anything over the phone and could write only on a severe sort of gray stationery that was harder and harder to find at a good price.

I fell into the old, retaliatory life. I saw a lot of a nervy man some years my junior at work. Everything to him had to have a sexual result. I called things off with him after a few weeks of giving myself the third degree. It was as good a time as any to just cross yourself out. I wandered one day into one of those warehouse shopping clubs. I wasn’t a member, but a man in a smock waved me through. I walked and walked until I came to an aisle where my eye was caught by a box with the taunt “24 COUNT.” It was all I could do to stop myself from breaking the thing open and counting them out one by one, whatever they fuckingly foolishly were—pouched chippings from something crackly, I gathered.

Nine, ten months later, I bumped into her at a bus terminal. Or maybe it was at a car service. She was wearing old-looking clothes that were new to me. She had a handbag—a first. She was applying to veterinary schools, she said. (We shook hands over it.) I said that at my age, you start to realize you might have loved only once, if that. This came out sounding newsy and impatient.

She said, “It’s been years.”

YOU ARE LOGGED IN AS MARIE

I was not so much the quiet kind as the kind quieted. Had a daughter in cram school, plus a son not much older, though life had mostly fizzed off the kid.

People like that—prematurely worn, still ungrown—start a day with a cleared heart. (Pocketed intoxicants, unrolled tobacco from a night table, futile fruit-flavored incidentals.) Distinct on the streets in approximations of undress, yes, but by midafternoon they’re bashed up again, back home, underlining every preachy word they read.

These two didn’t live with me.

These two were from a bygone wife, an ex only if we let ex equal extinct. The recent wife, the deserter, was the truer to life of the two, an ex if ex, just this once, is allowably abbreviative of expeller, or excluder, or exiler—take your pick.

This marriage had had a running time of one year, three months, sixteen days, forty-two minutes.

Her name still had its run of the growlier lower vowels.

•

My ex-wife: She was to have been the woman by my side, though I had other sides, and she must have had other people, dumbfoundingly young things in cloches or berets, none of them cut out for life in its longer forms.

She delivered herself into a day with pills she crunched with unmilked cereal.

She pestered the alphabet in craggly poems of groped-for woe. I quote from “Bedclothes”:

at any given

moment there are

only half as many marriages

as there are

people

who are married.

•

It was rumored that old men stink, and I was just about sixty, but the dollar-shops obligingly stocked confectionery fragrances, bottled lollipop pitched at preteens. PINK WHIM one was called, and PINK DREAM, PINING PINK. I bought a lot of the stuff, doused myself liberatively (forearms, chest, shoulders) before setting out for a day’s errancy and dare.

But how much can you do for a sister practically fifty, except visit her five, six times a year, the two of us shivering around her kitchen table, though she ate off the TV tray by her bed?

This was in a newer town that had gone up hollow, then slowly filled in with discounters, a clinic, a competing clinic.

Her body displeased her, so she barged away from it toward sometimes even mine. That led to sweatful, recondite disquiet.

Then the day I had news to deliver of Mother.

Said this sister: “What’s she so dead about?”

•

I don’t want to be going over this again, but it keeps going over me: how there were months when the days would not stand themselves up into weeks, how there were way too many moments when we cost ourselves our lives, how there were people who were the billionth of their kind and yet had days when their place in their home and their place on earth were just one and the same.

•

She had put a premium on starting almost every other sentence with “I will have you know.”

She had a body bullied by insomnia, but another body, sometimes showing through the depilatories, the cold cream, was sometimes offered for a leak or two from my own.

She dispensed a drastic but heterodox affection to grabbed and frugally loved pets.

We were the seediest of our set, no question, invited to after-dinner groupings just because of her, because of her shoulder tattoos, each of the three a rebus. I was unpopular, unmodified, underportrayed, never meriting a full first impression.

Something else about the ex: She was forever speaking of things as last (adjective) when I, stupid-surely, tended to think last (verb).

•

I either jumped out of myself in my sleep or intruded on myself in dreams, woke up, let faucet water run all over me, then let a new day brain me with its frights.

Life wrinkled out at me on the streets. I’d follow somebody for blocks, a woman, say, looking jolly and maybe unmanning, but this was a city whose avenues ran out pretty quick.

Longtimers looked skeptically at the skyline. You’d close your eyes and hope that the thing would hold up.

•

Sentiment kept turning against the world, people in the world, the things the people wore and looked up in books. She hadn’t gone to the bother of puttering with me much anymore. A well-adjusted partner, she’d repeat, never has reason to touch the other.

•

Okay, okay: the podium is what you stood on, the lectern is what you stood at, the class is what you stood up. Because I cancelled a lot, last-minute, phoned-in, fancily sick of a sudden.

•

Hadn’t I always tried to keep my life respectfully unspecified for parents, employers, sister, wife?

They called them restrooms, but I never got any peace, any respite, in there. Pisses of a man my age were just dawdly drizzle.

They pushed me over into Human Resources, every incoming résumé looking more and more like a ghost story to me.

Every quarter-hour a fresh stanza of minutes to be oblivionized a.s.a.p.

Let me talk of it as another time in my life when I must have been described as a man who walked a lot, was often seen jogging, trotting all over town, covering lots of ground day in, day out, though not looking any fitter, and when asked what kept him on the go, said, “I know where I’m not wanted.”

•

People and their things that kept changing places on the face of the world; remorsing moods that halted midstream and became just present-day disfavor; the thriving story of her family and their quick-quitted keennesses (her sister sucked the sweets out of even poorer people, boys went for her brother, etc.). Then more and more poetry driven out of her, naturally, and mostly with me as the concern.

•

For a while, I tried keeping up with the news. Everything, the newswomen said, was “worse than thought,” which I took to mean “worse than thinking,” because thinking had become even worse than feeling when I thought about how I felt about her.

•

On my laptop, I’d read, “You are logged in as Marie.”

Then: “You have not provided sufficient information to reset your Account Security Question.”

Then: “Please select a new Account Security Question from the menu, or compose one of your own.”

I typed: You’d let her go sloping off after someone after someone?
“Please type the answer for your self-designed Account Security Question.”

I typed: To count for something, life kept shoving herself apart.

“Your answer exceeds the allowable maximum character count. Please try again.”

Oh, and having had that youth, having had that husband, she complained of being hemmed in by phenomena. She was the glummer of the two of us, more out of sorts with herself and the harangue of our heartbeats. We were a pair of the unpairing. Her e-mails always started: All,

“Your answer exceeds the allowable maximum character count. Please try again.”

Believe you me us.

•

“Confirm we’re not of like mind,” people were usually saying to me now. “That would put things square.”

I spent enough nights in the movie house, making faces without being faced. You try your best to outrange yourself.

Then a breastless special case, fresh from a wedlock of sorts with a woman herself worn out by greeting cards and household balladry. This one moved in with her data, her trappings—even ramekins, if you can believe that. I could see life storming around in her to no purpose, a person among other reviled people going about their puniness in apartmentry. You learn to infer a “for now” at the end of anything anybody like that might one day delay getting said. You wait your turn with everyone else to get yourself collected again in whatever was still held to be human.

•

I tipped this way and that to get out of the country and found work teaching Oral Business English, as the course was called, in some bulging empire or another in the Far East. I knew nothing about business (I was in fact “unbanked” myself) and sounded slushed and indelicate when I spoke. Most of the students were Americans with lots more youth still due them. They could afford to kill an afternoon listening to me talk about “opportunity cost” and money orders before going off to their dorms to convolute on futons.

Now and then one of them would of course have had enough of me. She would display herself malignantly in the doorway to my office. (It was a cornering nook I shared with a younger man on the faculty, an authority on prepaid cards. His teeth looked experimental. He had facefuls of glutted expressiveness.)

“You don’t motivate us,” the girl would say. “You don’t make us want to go out and start something. We feel we’re being hosed. We pay your salary.”

“I’m on stipend,” I said this time.

“Oh, God,” she said. “Please forgive? Please be well?”

We looked each other over. She wore her share of placeholder jewelry. She had a frivolity of moles on one arm. Her body, granted, had done wrong by her, but there was a kind of beauty thrashing itself out in her eyes. The dress, rumply and sleeveless, was of a rescuing water-blue.

I could feel her turning me fore and aft in her mind-set.

“See you tomorrow?” she said, and left.

I shut the door. My cock felt boggled for once.

Said my officemate: “So far so good.”

But I hadn’t been over there for more than a couple of months when word arrived that they were flying my ex over at heroic expense for an hour’s worth of jargonic charm about her new specialty—Minionship, or something like that. Allow me to forget the particulars, but it had to do with keeping your opinions to yourself, not speaking even when spoken to, letting others take credit for your work, preferring being discouraged. She had probably pilfered the whole of it, this spiffy new subdiscipline, from me.

“You don’t have to come to the dinner, if there even is one,” she wrote in an e-mail.

So I sailed back home and fell in with some flat-talking people intent on seeing things in each other just to feel hampered by what they saw.

Then it’s settled, I thought. I’ll let my life live me.

•

I will say this for myself: There was only the one of me: unflaring of mind, overthankful, entertainable with the least dregs of affection, dry-handed, living spinsterlike in a problemdom of bedless street-level rentals, privy to people when at long last they were least themselves, fittingly famished, anal to a fault, never lacking for a loss.

•

This later one came to me not quite figured out. She looked hurriedly lovely enough at first.

She was a day-shift aide at a nursing home and would return to me with dental floss of all colors threaded thoughtfully through her hair. A resident had done it, she’d say. She would not want to wash it out just yet.

“Things don’t always have to be miracles,” she’d say.

Like most of some kind, she had lived and loved spottily, with lonesome turns of mind and an unsporting heart.

I took my messes and eases with her, but she turned out to be a lot like the others, each with her pharmaceuts, her vasovagals.

Sign-offs for e-mails shifted downward from “Best” to “Take care” to “Best to take care.”

Weeks would warp themselves away from the year.

To an inquirer, I described the apartment as three sickrooms, kitchen, and bath.

•

My father? Funny I should have thought of him through all these ills. His saying was: “There’ll be other days.” And this was the afternoon of just another of them, the weather plentiful, a jilted watch of hers tight on my wrist, unticking, and still that unstoppable call and response between heart and crotch.

Other than that, it’s understood that in life looted of thrill, you’re to buy doubles of everything. Even a carton of detergent deserves to be with its own kind.

•

Things I had been mouthing to myself throughout the marriage:

Things don’t always turn out, or turn even a little to the side.

To wit: Wherever there are two people, people even anything like us, one is forever the casualty of the other.

Press further into yourself, as far as you can make yourself go.

When asked whether it’s chronic or acute, say, “Residential.”

Cultivate your disgraces.

•

My ex-spouse: Her past was so frozen now in anecdote, it couldn’t be accessed other than through quips.

Girlihood, as she’d called it? Her parents had thrown things at her to eat.

What she said did not deliver you directly to a personality. It ran you around her.

I’d been her doorstop, her kickstand—something, I mean, kickedly and meanly hers.

•

Spousality (her word). There were pacts and pledges, covenants, a contract for me alone to sign: things spelled out for me to do and not do. I could not, for instance, hide from her for more than five hours at a stretch, and there were only a couple of places I could hide, and she had the only keys to both, because one was the room where she slept and the other was the room where she made those gouaches people still begged to buy.

•

Hatred, in short, but not in so many words?

•

Thanks, though, for asking.

•

The story, later on, as it got itself passed from one chummily divorced couple to another, was that we’d been turned away by jeweler after jeweler the grievous week we went shopping for the rings. We showed the clerks our rubber-banded hundreds, but they said, “We doubt this very much” or “If you’re buying for somebody else, we don’t do that, because you may have noticed in your travels that fingers differ in circumference from one person to the next.”

A manager at one place, a woman, came out from behind the counter and said, “Let’s see you even kiss this lady.”

What I could do was drop to my knees and grind my face against her midriff. I’d been doing that for months, and it was no different there in the glare and glamour of the sales floor.

“What about you?” they said to her, my intended. “What is it you do? Keel over?”

“We’d like to keep this between us,” she said. It sounded little.

“Maybe you should take your make-believe outside,” the manager said.

But a browser, a faltery woman braceleted the entire route from elbow to wrist, trailed us out to the sidewalk and whispered that there was a man with a cart at the mall on weekends who could maybe do something suitable for us, but could we be happy with white gold?

“White gold doesn’t even look like gold,” my copemate said.

“But at least it won’t look white. Nothing white is supposed to look like anything.” Her voice started curving off into what could have easily gone philosophical.

We got the rings, all right. Later, in some fullness of time or another, it was a matter of deciding where and how to dispose of mine, though I’ve still got it, the way I’ve still got this sense that sometimes there’s just news, and then sometimes there’s news to me.

THIS IS NOT A BILL

I was either a bad reflection on my parents or their one true likeness. But my own kids? You promise them anything their little hearts desire, but how little their hearts always are, and how unethereal
the desire.

The son wanted nothing so much as for everything to have been ever so long ago.

The kid was having none of himself.

He tried hiding behind his similarities to me—the oftenness of my earaches, the prickled miseries in every joint.

Ideally, this should be all about him, his personalisms and all the topics his second thoughts could hold. But I can’t get him magnified any larger. This is as big as his marvels will ever get. Men kept saying, “Put it there,” and he was supposed to know they were hankering for no more than a handshake?

As for the daughter: She was a dampered little dispatch already orderly in her dolors.

Things she learned in school she rubbed out in her sleep, because, come morning, she thought feldspar was a plant, larkspur a bird.
Others were soon bunching about her, the mood of a morning always slow to premiere.

Sad about what now?

She snapped out of her youth with a riffraff of hair on her arms and a filing cabinet that was mostly for show.

What she took away from college was something heard in a lecture about snakes or maybe starfish, that the things could grow to refreshedly full size from just a slice of their original selves, so why couldn’t that be true of people—that from the odd hair or scab you could get, if not the undivided human being, at least the excellence of an entire arm around you?

She never let on whom it was she had slapping about in her heart.

Then again, not discussed nearly enough is the bodily risk of sleeping with someone—the danger, I mean, of being crushed by some dozing amoroso rolling over, though the prospect of bruises must have been what got her wooed into bed in the first place.

So, true: She was somewhere there in the physical hooey that went with being human. The love itself she could laugh off.

She went through with the wedding, and when they had kids, the kids were girls, the two of them: athletic and unhauntable, I would have bet.

It was a town in which the skies usually misled you about what was coming next.

Things later came down to a car that should have lasted her until well into her thirties but that was recalled first for this, then for that—transmission, starter, part after part repudiating its duty until loaners felt better than home to her now.

Then mail that was mostly window envelope after window envelope bearing doctor-office statements claiming, “THIS IS NOT A BILL.”

I have not mentioned her mother, if only because one part of her would have referred you to another part, something more secluded, then along to where you were alone with maybe just the back of her knee, then farther along until you were off her body completely and at the feet of someone or another who had let himself in and was even more wanting.

I go into a day saying, “I won’t let myself know.”

NOTHING CLARION CAME OF HER, EITHER

As these things go, a woman I’ll call my wife and a woman I’ll call myself were not yet finished burning the bridges between us or even sharpening the sorrow down to something enough like a stick that a third party could at last take into her fingers and snap practically straight down the middle.

Let me at least drag the third party into words, because all we ever did, the three of us—in pairs of her and her, of her and me, never the three of us chordal together—was leave messes of wordedness in the air for any others to have to poke their way through.

And how we two wreaked devotion on her!

When you stir a marriage like that, the things that keep rising to the top aren’t, mind you, the choicest stuff.

And I know, I know, people don’t look like what they look like, thank goodness, but here is how she looked at least to me that day of name-calling over complimentary toast in the lobby of the motel: She had built such a fortress out of her unbelovedness that it was tricky to have beheld her for those months as just a plain underneath being with holes some earrings could have filled lyrically enough.

The moods amassing in her eyes (greenish eyes adrowse, though evidently truthful), relevant moles on the left arm, hair begloomed and aptly directed sideward (then later mostly hatcheted away), knees arranged buxomly, accentual acne on expanses of her back, all of these parts carnalized only in retrospect: She was a brightly miserable and unperspirant physical therapist out of keeping with herself.

She was nothing if not downright neither of ours, finally.

Plus, she was a submundane twenty-eight to our fifty (woman), fifty-six (self).

She lived with a gullible dog, a water-purifying system she could never get to work, and a sister, a slow starter whose sleep had no authority. She painted discouraging waiting-room erotica. Her saying was “Someday somebody’ll look back on us.”

But this third party: She was the type that, when you touched her, stuck to herself.

Me, I stickled over very little. One day it was a breadstick mossy with mold. I made it three-quarters of the way through. The core was a coaxing green.

How I swallowed!

•

So enough of her.

Let’s picture her pelted with age!

In a marriage, the deathly custom goes, you have to choose sides—yours or your spouse’s. My side had all the wobbliness on it, the debt forgivenness, the gastrointestinal meds that came with printouts saying: “IF YOU MISS A DOSE. . . .”

Her side had backbone in the penmanship, dollars dulling in CDs. Everything had finishes on it. Her parents came over to pamper our furniture, spoiling it rotten with pillows that foamily remembered how they’d taken every jab of my elbows.

People usually couldn’t place me, but certain cushions always could.

I would have anywise settled for any old chain of events, other than morning revoking the night before, the night before revoking the day, and the day no horn of plenty, either.

•

Besides, someone had gone ahead and set up a business school in what had last been a buffet. My job involved elating the girls and the furiously timid, discolored-looking young men enrolled in Developmental Bookkeeping, Secretarial Philosophy, Receptionist Science. There was a body of truths for me to fatten and blotch. The PowerPoints I’d pinched online.

The kids dirtied their worksheets and turned them in. I sometimes checked them in the restroom, the one place I could be alone. They texted in there, took their heartfelt, peremptory poops, were otherwise likely quiet, though now and then there were snipings between stalls:

“But blood is thicker than water.”

“But not as thick as cum.”

The second voice I’d recognized and put the face to: some Kaelyn, a girl of garbled symptoms, of life accrued foolingly, and a saying: What wasn’t there to shave?

I’d had her twice, two semesters of menial betterment.

But I checked the papers. Literally. Scraped check marks, with weighted pencil, at the top of each.

Took me minutes.

On my way out, I had to step around a cornucopian vomitus on the floor.

And going home wasn’t always a hoot. There weren’t always brutal acuities to sock away in some datebook.

It was an open marriage, leaking from both ends.

It helps to be ahead of the game in your regrets.

•

What else should I keep trying to have said? That when it’s a marriage between two women, there are bound to be flusterings, unsettlements—times you have to decide whether a bloodiness calls for an emergency room proper or just an emergency centerette, where the examination rooms have just shower curtains strung between them and instruments are fetched from tackle boxes?

Plus the car (a mock subcompact) she drove so vehemently was troubled and had to be put down, and I soon had floaters and (just briefly) flashers in my field of vision, and I was never taken for granted in ways I would have liked. She could have put some thought for once into things she used against me.

There wasn’t time to text her about every funny feeling.

I was used to making do with the little of her warmth she forwarded to me from the handle of the fork I took from the flimsiest of fingers.

Sleep was no joy ride.

•

And another development: One of our parents died. Must it even make a difference whose? We’ d left everything up to the impresario at the funeral house. He was somewhat of a man dressed with epaulets. He gave us the stock solacing face. He recommended forgoing the obits, the notices, the online guest books.

“This of all things, you don’t want it to be topical,” he later that night claimed in an e-mail. “You don’t want a thing like this to date.”

He had us over to meet the cremator—a brother of his. He spoke in yokelisms. Then the other brother took over.

“Anything else you ladies might want going up in that smoke while we’re at it? We had a lady in here last week with lots of sewing machines she couldn’t find homes for.”

I looked my wife in the mouth, at that teetery front tooth of hers.
“There’s that fabric in the storage cage,” said said wife.

I went along with everything—the payment plan, the vouchers, the grandeur of the carton that would do for a coffin. I’ve never minded signing things.

Out of character? Yes, if it’s taken just this once to mean no longer having any of it.

Anyway, who was I to be myself?

•

People were tedious with me or said, “This is neither the time nor the place.”

As for work, school: I let myself in one weekend to make my mark on some papers and, after an hour or so, treated myself to a prissy piss, merely a trinkle, barely disturbing the water already there. But when I flushed, the bowl overflowed, and this wasn’t the expectable worth of a tankful of stopped-up toilet. This was outpourings galore.

A mischance in a pipe?

I followed the water out of the restroom. It was already way ahead of me, darkening the carpet darker and darker.

I called Security.

“That building’s closed, ma’am,” said some man. “It’s Sunday. Nobody’s there.”

“I am.”

“You’re who?”

I gave my name—which, granted, doesn’t really sound all that much like a person’s name but more like a corollary to what a person’s name might be, something running parallel to the humanly admissible. The name sounded faked, or at most only exploratory.

“Who’s this?”

I repeated. He wouldn’t hear of me.

“Let me look that up in the directory.”

I had to tell him that the ps stayed silent, that a thud had to go on the second syllable, that the hyphen was for the moment permanent.

“Someone’ll be around,” he said.

That had been a saying of my mother’s. The other had been: I get it all the time. She was another woman untuned to the human constitution.

In sum: An e-mail went out on Monday in overtaxed passive voice: Water has been found, etc. No classes for a week while the place dried up.

•

Then things took a turn for the same. We tried staying true to our sexual excruciations, but I was envious of the stretch of her friendships, the way she drew some people out and took cover in others. She could pass the time of day by literally overtaking it, skipping ahead to the unstinking parts.

No matter the fronts I put up, the gateways I drew open to myself, there was always the same talk behind my back: “What difference would end times even mean to a person like that?”

We had been to bed, in sum, and we’d come back from it unblended.

She worked as an adjunct to a couple of certified nursing aides at an assisted-living sorority out beyond the industrial park. She helped people helping people to help themselves coggle their way down hallways to the Remembrance Room or the Activity Kitchen. She enjoyed the remove the work afforded her but felt the minutes flaking off every hour, then the hour peeling itself away from the day. There were double shifts and overtime, undergarments under other undergarments, requests to tie shoes “the modern way.” The caregiven were never to be addressed directly. She was to remain an unseen hand. It should have been compensation that, coming home, she would feel exposed, overrevealed. But it was fine by me that she never once disrobed completely.

Around the house we wore wrappers around ourselves, drawstrings drawn taut.

Love was something squally and pickled among us.

Notice I didn’t say between.

It never once got that specific.

•

Then a magazine came out with another list of the eight things every woman should own. I had one of them: a raincoat you could turn inside out to get another raincoat almost exactly like it. But shouldn’t they have counted that as two?

I say this as someone who, growing up, had to abandon her growth. Life had made it known that it didn’t want me in it as anything other than a girl who scared the daylights out of herself when trusted with so much as a pair of kiddie scissors.

You phase yourself out little by little, spread your presence thinner over the immediate things of this runaway world, dim yourself by degrees. All life aspires toward the sureness of erasure, you say? At least yours does, fucking lumpen underpunished self of mine.

•

My body broached its symptoms wastefully. It was resourceful in decay.

A therapist wanted to know whether I had ever “been” with men.
My answer: On double-decked budget buses, on escalators, in ticket-counter lines when I was there not to buy but just to be moving ahead of others in a publicly observable way.

The therapist’s report: “Has no unity of self.”

•

What else? The water-towered town, the city—whatever this place was called that was at such a loss for topography? People either stayed skinny and off-limits or were filthily losing their looks in showerwater that came out in earth tones.

All roads led to the one road that wasn’t going where you wanted to go.

Except now and then people make a show of themselves, make themselves fathomable in something cap-sleeved, and jam the small talk with wherefores vast and mattery. It was thus I lapsed with one of the other instructors, a malcontent whose bitternesses were neatly layered (school/home/husband), a parfait of a woman, really, and life looked so good on her that week we picked clean.

It was just rotten luck that the things I found at the bottom of her temperament, the backfiring spites and such, were a lot like mine.
And then a month or so later, another instructor, this one wanting me to undo the mentoring of still another—all that besetting and misdivulged advice, all those fruits of freaked eureka moments, gone to waste on her.

In over her head, she said. At sixes and sevens.

Except she was a welcome tribulation of flatted hair, brows singed and blackened. A necklace that threaded itself this way and that through a course of piercings. A scrawny norm of a girl cracking her way, I guessed, out of the last of her velvet twenties. But she gained amplitude in the men’s suits she wore abbreviated to shorts and a shell from which arms would encounter you in feeble forms of capture.

She said: “If you bring out the worst in people, isn’t that a good thing? Wouldn’t that be doing everybody a favor? I mean, out with the bad, right?”

She insisted on giving me her passwords to everything, all her accounts. I never tried them out. The most I did—and this was just once, and at her place, with its screens, its dividers—was put myself in the way of the scathing hustlings of her heart.

Nothing clarion came of her, either.

•

Days skated by, I let life scribble its pending drolleries on me, but my gut told me nothing, my body was mum, I pressed myself next to my wife in restaurants and hideouts, we were a couplelike pair in stormy civilities, in burlesques of togetherness. At a store that sold a little of everything, all we ever bought was friction tape and mattress pads. But things must have shot out of her in her sleep (how else to explain, come morning, the sudden booty on the floor, once even a snow shovel that had obviously been through a lot?), and then a suspicion at first, then later a hope (that in the set of her feelings for me was a subset of gustier feelings spun off for other people), and then another death, another parent.

This one had wanted a viewing, a “visitation,” full-body burial, a tarp for the interment. An arousing wall of brothers, sisters, cousins, family men, and any last, hoarsened aunts. Rounding them up fell to me. The rebuffs I took as gloats.

Convenient that they had a boilerplate thing for the death notice. I filled it out as follows, though I’ll skip the names:

At the time of her death, her life had occurred, or was forthcoming, in New City, Old Town, Lower View, Upper Falls, Eastwood West, and Beach Canyon. She had been awarded life from a mother, ______, and a father, ________, and held a marriage license from _________. Twice a candidate for second-trimester abortion, she was the co-founder of two daughters: ______(19__) and _________ (19__). Furniture, trumpery, and dental bric-a-brac of hers were collected in seven rooms and one and a half baths. She was the motor-vehicle operator, most recently, of a 20__ ______ ______.

The morning of the service: weather digressive: a sun-shower, a cloudlet or two, then the sky seemed sealed off from us.

She didn’t look as gawky for once. Life had fallen through her completely. She had aplomb there in her bin. Packed and on a pedestal again.

In the guest book: mostly chicken-scratched You will be misseds.
The basement luncheon afterward, the tainting embraces.

•

“What does the commute do for you, other than maybe keep you at bay?”

Good question!

But must I ask it myself?

Classes were half-hours of heaving the right facts up out of the right chapters.

I was overdefinite of face, I’m afraid, and my body looked flung together from muckered, wished-away parts of others. (The brittle of my wristbones, the shoulder blades out of true.)

And others in that tournament of love interests I’d called my forties? Must we look back even just this once?

Lucerne, of the slowpoke pulse: I’d return to find her not so much asleep as nursing some oblivion within.

Aiden: fated-looking, skimming her feelings off what others had felt first, her opinions thinning themselves into whimsy.

Elara: lacking other facets, yes, but that spill of bracelets down her arm when she raised it to put another stop to her tolerance.

Emme: boisterously despondent. Infections, abscesses, things bubbling up where there oughtn’t be bubbles.

The last you heard of some of them was that speed was believed to have been a factor.

All of them lively, lovely, and tiring: the motifs in their complexions, the drift of their arms, the hallowing of their absence.

Then the one who tiptoed roughshod over and around me.

•

But, true, not everybody gets to live in the state’s fifth-largest city. Not everybody gets to be met with familial fanfare at the bus station. Not everybody gets to peak too late. Come to think of it, the landlord had a new stove brought over and parked it obstructantly in the middle of the kitchen. The thing was black and wouldn’t budge for us. It wasn’t even hooked up. (Hoses, wires, and whichnot, left on the sideboard.)

Something for us to walk around together, something to set us apart, something to come between us?

All three could have worked.

•

Make no mistake: We didn’t “break up,” my wife and I. It was just that we all of some sudden both moved out, separately, on almost the same day, and went off in different directions. But one afternoon I dropped by the assisted-living in hopes of seeing her no matter what. I had to sign the guest log like any other. Residents puddled by in wheely contraptions. They faced me with faces of febrile unconcern.

And then there she was, plain as day, that day anyway.

It was one of those days when it finally just comes to you—when to end a conversation, I mean, and when to renew an ordeal.

In memory of M. L.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the journals in which the pieces in this book originally appeared (some in different form and under different titles): BOMB, Caketrain, Lake Effect, New Flash Fiction Review, and Sleepingfish.

With gratitude to Kevin Sampsell, Gordon Lish, Derek White, Lisel Virkler, Kramer, Thomas Vasko, E.M., Vannessa Barnier, Lauren Leja, and Jane Unrue.

The entries herein are works of fiction. names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or have been used fictitiously. any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, as well as to actual events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2017 Gary Lutz & Future Tense Books

www.futuretensebooks.com

ISBN 978-1-892061-78-2

All rights reserved. The content in this book may not be reproduced in whole without written permission from the author or publisher.

Book design by Tyler Meese

Cover artwork by Genevieve Goran

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