The Underwriter
by Julia Gaunce
Summer wanders sweetly on, and you and your wife were
walking through the park. It was raining. It never rains here—you were
crying. You were crying and the boys on the baseball diamond thundered
around the bases. Love tried to end the conversation. "Go
home," she said. You’re accidentally teaching her to forget you.
She meant home: your new apartment. The radiators
knock, the tenant next door plays darts, and the woman downstairs has
dogs. You hear her call the dogs every morning. She's always reasonable,
at first, then benignly fed up. "I see you there. Come
here." You think the woman is a call girl. A call woman, really—she's
probably about forty. She says she works at a knit shop.
None of this is your fault. You came home at the
beginning of the summer from a business trip. You took your shoes off,
phoned the office to report in to Mr. Brown and to get an update on his
stormy state of mind. As soon as you hung up, your daughter phoned you
on her cell to say hello from the pup tent in the backyard. The dog
whined at the door. Your wife asked for a lift to her check-up. You
waited in the hot car, and when you saw her walking back to you, funny
look on her face, you thought about the heat. She stood there, leaning
in through the window, hand on her hip. "Did you have enough
air," you thought she said. "Yes," you said, sensibly
enough, then it dawned on you, with horror, what she had actually said,
and you were stuck with your sorry accidental story, stuck with your
stupid accidental truth. You drove home together, both of you completely
oblivious to her purse flapping on the top of the car. At the house, she
begged you to tell her, over and over. (You remained courtly, demure on
the question of the bruises, on the woman's arms, her hips, and her
ass.) Then she left you there, and you went to the den to lie down. The
dog still whined at the back door; you finally heard and let him in. You
plucked a soggy empty pregnancy test box from his mouth. You moved out.
The downstairs woman is loose-limbed, quick, almost
hinged. She has men's shoes and a handbag light as air. You would like
to touch her hair. She removes herself to another room and emerges a few
minutes later, hair feathered further. Love calls every night around
dinnertime, when it knows people are home.
You make toast, because that's what it smells like,
down there, where she lives. Toast is a long dark apartment, and it
makes you feel sleepy, because now you're feeling good, although you
don't feel very well. You feel like you felt when you sprained your
ankle, years ago, when it started to get better, when it began to be
yours again, something attached and something in trouble, something you
would have to bring along with you after all. You have to stop this
feeling, before the feeling comes true. You lie down, your face turned
toward the heating vent. The cigarette smoke from the woman's apartment
comes through the vent. You breathe into it. Your breath hangs in the
air, acrid as a shaken match.
You invite the woman to go for a drive. You and she
and her dogs are on the outskirts now, out where the houses give up to
the fields and the woods. You are taking her to a cabin you know. (When
you were a boy you wanted to live in a house made of roots.) There's a
mowing jacket there, hanging on a nail; sometimes you like to wear it.
There are four small l's chalked on the wall, with another one drawn
straight through. You saw a deer on this road, once, standing in the
fog. Its legs were so thin you thought they must break. You rest your
arm in the open car window and the hair stands up. You are picturing
yourself shaving the crook of the top of the woman's inner thigh. You
ready yourself, you fish around for her name. You could end up having a
heart attack today.
Your attention is wandering. Out of the blue, by
mistake, you ask her if she has ever had to beg for mercy. She doesn't
say it, she just looks it: she looks at you. You can't stand that look.
If she doesn't start talking, you're going to pull over, right now. And
then you are pulling over, too fast; the tires are pushing deep and
pulling hard into the soft sandy shoulder. You lean over and snap open
the passenger door. You push the woman out, and then you get yourself
out too and you walk around to her. The woman steps back into the sand
and lands on her ass, then she pops back up and cups something torn off
against the heel of her hand. She's still looking at you.
There is no one who can say you cannot do any of this.
You are capable of anything. Look at Mr. Brown: he used to be a dentist
until he got caught, and last year he pulled out all his teeth and made
his own set of plates, in his own little workshop.
It's maddening, the way the woman stands there,
looking. You want her to resist, you want her to make this impossible,
to teach you that there are some things you just cannot do. You would
like to see the devil. But she just stands there, in her figured dress,
refuses to talk her way out of this, the way you do, the way you run off
at the mouth, like when Mr. Brown gave you your last performance review,
grabbed a handful of your inner thigh in a killer grip, the way he likes
to do, his favourite test of loyalty, a test of how a person takes to
that. You drove a pen by mistake into the back of his hand. It was an
accident.
This—you and the woman standing here, almost in the
ditch, almost out of sight—this is a car accident. The facts are rude.
Mistakes are being made; they must be making themselves. You talk
yourself into circles until you start to run. You're running through the
field to the woods, and you'll get ahead. The woman's hounds sound a
million miles away. They're getting overexcited and fucked up and
they're turning on each other. They won't get dinner because of you, but
they'll be too fucked up to remember it was you, next time, to hold it
against you. They'll just come running up the way they always do,
slobber on your pants.
That is what they do, when you walk back to the
car. You drive the woman home, quietly.
So you don't get your heart attack. Instead, on Monday
morning, outside your office door, Mr. Brown turns his face to you,
sidelong and private. He is flushed, or drained. Or he is flushed and
drained at the same time—that is possible, these are only figures of
speech. "You're the goodest man I know," Mr. Brown says. And
then he wobbles down the hall, shuts his office door behind him and (as
has been reported) collapses in a terrible huff. You wonder if he
doubled over his desk at that moment, as if he had only then discovered
a mistake, a mistake buried in his own plumbing, a mistake for which he
likely fired some other poor dope months ago. You wonder if he looked
embarrassed.
At the end of the week, Mr. Brown is lowered down.
The men from work clot together at one end of the
churchyard. They are slim and beautiful. They are sharp dark suits.
Tom's necktie is loose. (They're all freedom now, out of reach of Mr.
Brown's punctual demolitions, his running down the hall at them with his
teeth out.) The men look like the difference between dust and mud. The
preacher starts the fireworks with a spade of loose earth. You stand
apart, focussing on the neighbouring farmer's field. You know that
farmer. You happen to know that last year he planted a field of corn,
just for the deer.
And then you find yourself at the foot of the hole,
eyes boring in. These are guts you don't like very much, but you find
yourself talking to Mr. Brown. "You are going to be all
right," you say—more like, it comes ripping out of your mouth.
You look around to see if anyone has heard you. The grass shimmers. You
think, Mr. Brown is going to be alone, but he shouldn't have to go
alone. This is no time to be hard. You will be the one to watch
him go, you will see him through. This is your new job. You look around
again. You wonder where the family is; you wonder if they know.
And then, looking up, at the grass and the yard and
the lie of the field, you're surprised to see there is no snow. Only you
know that snow has left, not over the course of last spring and this
summer but just now. A tongue of snow, not a tongue—it slipped across
the grass and down the banks. It joined the river then and overran. The
snow rolled back like carpet, not before your eyes but rather just
before you saw, because the snow you can no longer see was not snow but
love, and now the snow is gone.
Julia Gaunce's novel Rocket Science
was published last fall by Pedlar Press. She is working on her next
book. |
