Jeff Karr
When she woke to the hot gray of a Sunday in early October, he was already up. The Carolina wren was in the tree outside their window, and from the living room came the sound of pregame. It was normal on Sunday mornings for them to read in bed and maybe fuck, but now the grating football commentary suggested there’d be no sex and he wouldn’t want to talk.
She cracked the blinds. Hello, wren. In the bathroom, she made noise washing her hands so he wouldn’t ask. Without a glance, she went and poured coffee into her Tennessee mug. The kitchen window opened onto the shared balcony and parking lot. Dead leaves from the withering live oak whirled around. She felt the live oak was still stunned from summer. She breathed into the hot mug and imagined her ancestors placing it in a kiln, felt the kiln’s heat on the skin of their faces.
When she turned to the living room, he was staring the way he had last night: eyebrows arched, mouth an oval. His feet were on the coffee table, and a cup of coffee was wedged in the crotch of his sweatpants.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
“I thought you might want some alone time.”
“I live with you because I like being around you.”
She sat beside him. Despite their age difference, she sometimes saw flashes of the little boy he’d been. Sometimes it was nice, and sometimes he seemed a prisoner to adulthood.
“I like being around you too.”
“Did you wash your hands?”
She went to the table and checked her phone.
“What’s going on with you?”
A brittle tenor was turning his every word into a plea. She felt him searching for signals as to her feelings after last night. They’d gone two-stepping, and some bachelor party fucker had gotten rowdy on the dancefloor. He had stepped in to tell him to be careful, but the fucker had lunged with his fist cocked back. He had flinched.
“You’re worrying,” she said.
“Why would I be worried?”
“I mean you’re dwelling on last night.”
“Should I have just stood there?”
“You were just ready,” she said. “We talked about this.”
“Can you leave me the fuck alone?”
She went to the kitchen for the spray. Fucker. She wouldn’t let him spoil the Sabbath. She tied a shirt over her mouth and used the spray on the shower tiles. Tonight she’d put on her mountain playlist and light candles by the bath. She’d put lavender in the bath and drink tea and magnesium. She’d go to bed with a book and wake up renewed.
“I’m sorry,” he said in the other room.
***
A security guard with a whistle and a sidearm waved her down the ramp to the subterranean parking lot. She yielded for a suburban driven by a pointy pubescent boy and went to a spot whose vacancy was indicated by a green light dangling from the ceiling. In the next spot, a man was standing on the bumper of a rapey conversion van, pumping his arm to secure a luggage rack, flashing pit hair.
“Hi,” he said.
He was tan and blotched with tattoos that bespoke a suburban upbringing.
“Hi,” she said.
She made for the escalator. He’d had big veins in his forearms, a bruised thumbnail.
The flinch had been violent. The people nearby had ended up drenched in beer. It was more of a flail than a flinch, and though the music had been loud, she was sure she’d heard him yelp. She’d told him there was no nobility in taking a punch and that he hadn’t flinched but responded on reflex. He’d been ready. Nothing wrong with being ready, she’d said, but she kept hearing the yelp, kept seeing the flung beer flash in the bar light.
The escalator brought her into the grocery chain. Men in sandals walked around with their calves tan and bulging. They smiled and sipped beer out of clear plastic cups. White yogis had their belly buttons out. She imagined fetuses in glass capsules. Next time she was home, she was going up to the fattest person she could find and kissing them on the lips. She picked up bars of soap and sniffed. She went to the produce for the stuff for the veggie bowl. Later she would eat a veggie bowl and bathe and sleep without flesh sizzling inside of her.
When she went back down, he was sitting on his bumper, smiling with pried open eyes.
“I mean I had to wait,” he said.
She opened the hatch and set the bags in the trunk.
“I guess he makes you do the shopping?”
“Who makes you do it?” she said.
He laughed and extended a business card listing social media accounts. There were references to a van. Life spelled with a Y. Yippee—she took the card and left.
***
Something about its being smoke-filled made the place seem less an apartment and more a container. She unloaded groceries and snuck glances. His eyes were red and his feet were on the table, his hands clasping the mug to where he looked like a beggar. She gleaned from snippets of commentary that this was a big game for one of the quarterbacks.
“Raped,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“The quarterback. He was just a kid, and they raped him.”
“Who’s they?”
“They never found the guy. He posted about it last week.”
She sat beside him. The quarterback was on the sideline, his hair matted and wet. He kept nodding and leaning toward his teammates, animated like someone who’d finally, after all these years, stepped into himself.
“He looks so nice,” she said.
“Great fucking guy,” he said. “A hero, probably”
The hotel in Vancouver had had a speakeasy in the basement: just a bar with a bookshelf for a door. She’d fallen in with a Portuguese whose laugh was a wet rasp that suggested he knew the fullness of life’s wretched beauty. She remembered his enormous face. She remembered shifting qualities of light. The booze had blown holes in what could have become memory. There was deranged laughter, a waking up to a helpless ambiguity, half-knowing, half not.
“Sometimes I wonder if I fully processed the Vancouver thing,” she said, watching the QB take the field.
He looked at her. The window light was in his dark brown eyes. He rubbed her hand, his palm soft and warm.
“That’s a motherfucker I still need to murder,” he said.
She went to the kitchen.
“Portugal is like Italy,” he continued. “Their favorite pastime is making kissing noises at underage girls.”
The impasse was a feeling in her throat. Whenever the subject welled up inside of her, worked its way out into the daylight, he used it as a tool to sharpen his sense of self.
“How are you feeling about last night?” she said.
“It’s called reflex.”
“I didn’t know if you were dwelling on it.”
“I was starting to forget,” he said. “Now here we are.”
“Why would you want to forget? It was reflex.”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“It could have been all the trips to the bathroom.”
He turned back to the game and scowled. Ten years back, he’d been in a drunk-driving accident with his little boy in the car. He’d done some time. He’d kicked his habits and left his little boy with his ex in Chicago. The best thing for everyone, he’d assured her a month into their knowing each other, and if at first she’d found it craven, it had come to make him more interesting. It had taught her about her capacity for acceptance. She’d come to learn there wasn’t a lot she couldn’t look past.
“You said I was responding on reflex,” he said. “Now you’re blaming that stuff?”
“It can’t be both?”
“I feel like you want me to feel bad.”
“You’re my boyfriend.”
“But you keep bringing it up.”
“Why would I want you to feel bad?”
He shrugged. “Maybe you’re the one who’s struggling with it.”
She went to the bedroom. The wren was on the tree trunk that had split in half in the ice-storm. It had a self-serious face and a squat little body. Honestly, beautiful.
She heard the yelp, saw the flail and the flung beer alight in red, suspended over the dancefloor. What was wrong with her?
Last night they had tried and it hadn’t worked. She’d felt his spirit drain while he lay on top. Now she pulled up the van guy’s profile: big sunglasses, tongue out, irritating hand gestures, holding fish and smiling, shirtless skydives, van at sunrise, van at sunset, etc. He was handsome, but he was a dumbass and a moron, not running from obligations so much as precluding them from forming.
She put on boots and sunscreen. She’d get a little time outdoors, come home, make the veggie bowl. She’d light some candles and bathe, use the new soap. It seemed possible to have a good meal and a little rest and a reset.
“You’re leaving?”
“Don’t you want to watch the game?”
“Are you going hiking?”
“I thought you might want more alone time.”
His eyes were wide. “Why would I be mad?”
“I didn’t say you were.”
***
They sped toward MoPac and got passed on the right by a sunburnt man in a top-down Porsche. He made no mention of Molotov cocktails. Testaments to a nascent radicalism had always made him feel better, but there’d been fewer since he’d started using again. The trees flanking the feeder road cut out at the crest of the hill, and as they descended toward the entrance ramp, they saw the stalled traffic ablaze with brutal white sunlight.
“That fucking wren woke me up at dawn.”
“I love that wren.”
“My God,” he said. “Shoot it.”
He rolled up the window and gripped the wheel with both hands. It didn’t look like there was room, but then they had merged and were taking part in the ceaseless procession.
“Have you ever even looked at it? Its mean little face?”
“I choose not to anthropomorphize.”
He tended to develop principles when the opportunity to make her feel small arose. A black Infiniti full of women, singing and laughing, passed on the left. Fucking imbeciles, retarded dykes—she waited, but the words she had anticipated from him had merely materialized in her, and here he was, silent. The realization opened her up: sunlight was on the trees and the rolling hills and the river. People on paddle boards dotted the sun-glanced green.
“Are they winning?” she said.
“Sometimes,” he said, “I have no clue what you’re talking about.”
“The nice quarterback?”
“They looked solid when we left.”
Traffic stood still. He turned up the AC, said the sun was a white hot bitch. She fought the urge to tell him that, excuse her, that would be anthropomorphizing, now wouldn’t it?
“Are you okay?”
“I’m not thinking about it at all,” she said. “You’ve got to get over it.”
“All I’m saying is it wasn’t a fucking flinch.”
“I was talking about when we got home.”
Last night on the drive home, they had decided it wasn’t a flinch but a sign he was ready to defend himself. He’d picked her up and thrown her over his shoulder, carried her thus into the bedroom. He’d come on bullish, pressing her into the mattress, but when it was over and it hadn’t worked, lying beneath him, she’d felt guilty, like she’d eavesdropped on an argument he was having with himself.
“I bet the coke was part of the problem.”
“So you do think it was a flinch?”
“You were clean for so long. I was so proud.”
“I’m an adult,” he said. “If you’re blaming that shit, you’re saying I flinched.”
Traffic opened and he took the exit. A blue Tesla cut across the solid white.
“Imagine flinging a Molotov cocktail onto that fucker,” he said.
Most of the feeder road traffic peeled off at the mall, and as they slowed toward the intersection, his phone rang and the dash displayed his little boy’s name: BILL. The first time she’d heard them talk was a month after they’d met, a week after he’d told her about Bill, back when he had a clear head and could make the tiniest things—a trip to pick up Ben & Jerry’s, the mud dauber nest on his bedroom window—seem sources of unspeakable delight. Bill had sounded sped up. She had wondered if he was mimicking his father or if the ability to feel awe at the world’s mundanities ran in the blood. He’d told them the 8th grade locker room had flooded. He’d told them the gym teacher—great fucking guy, she’d been assured—had taken a picture of himself in a canoe next to the submerged lockers. It was an enormous event. Bill had been so thrilled to relay it.
“Let it ring.”
“You’re serious?”
“Not when I’m like this. It’ll make me hate myself.”
She felt the blood in her face thicken.
“What’s this about anyway?”
The business card had been in the cup holder. He was holding it up to the sunlight for some reason.
“Van life?” he said, as if it were the name of a new venereal disease.
“Some guy with a van gave it to me.”
“Was it rapey?”
He hadn’t been listening. The fact that the same word had occurred to her made no difference: it was cutting when you said it like that.
“Did you check his profile?”
“Yes.”
“Were there fish?”
“That’s funny.”
“Lots of sunsets? A guy like that? Just a dumbass and a moron.”
A sudden expansiveness in her chest made her feel small and unreal. Breath was passing through her without her participation. The car was a machine that generated reality.
“I’m surprised,” she said, easing back into herself. “I’m shocked you didn’t pick up for Bill.”
They were at a red light. His Adam’s apple went up, down. He stared at her: eyebrows arched, mouth an oval.
She was stuck in the car with a dangerous child.
They ascended the hill that led to the trailhead, massive houses professing to believe in SCIENCE! lining the street. Parked cars were bumper-to-bumper up to where the road curved and led back down. He brake-checked for an open spot. Too tight. She was relieved when he kept going: she sensed he was trying to find a way to blame her for the parking.
“You keep asking if I’m okay,” he said.
“It’s called being in a relationship.”
“Clearly you’re the one who’s embarrassed. About the flinch.”
He turned right and looped back down the hill.
“Well?”
“You didn’t flinch last night,” she said. “That was reflex.”
They were heading up the hill again. He stopped next to the spot he’d passed.
“Not enough space,” she said.
Nostrils flaring, he cranked the wheel all the way right. He twisted and put his arm across her backrest. She heard the air rushing out of his nostrils. A varsity football yard sign was framed by the back window in the reflection in his sunglasses. His Adam’s apple was truly large. She had joked about it with friends when they’d started dating. He eased the car back. She thought they were about to bump the curb but he cranked the wheel all the way left and turned to watch their front end. A fucking California plate grew larger in the rearview camera where Bill’s name had been. They were moving back inch by inch. He watched their front end like it might explode, and then, millimeters to spare, it cleared the Jeep’s back bumper. He shifted into park and pulled the handbrake. He turned off the engine and looked at her.
“Oh my fucking God,” he whispered.
He shot out with his arms up like a prizefighter. He used to laugh like this. For a moment, it was nice.
Stepping out, she looked down the road toward the highway. Two sprawling live oaks writhed and stretched over the street like living archways to a wider world, their leaves dazzling with shadow and light. Traffic zipped toward MoPac. The wind funneled east, toward home. She looked up the road. A bank of stunted evergreens on someone’s property threw long shadows. Everything was pinched and shrinking toward the point where the trail began.
“Tell your friends about me!” he shouted.
He took photos: they were bumper-to-bumper, not an inch to spare, front or back. She had no clue how they were getting out.
#
Jeff Karr lives in Austin Texas and teaches at Texas State University. His fiction has appeared in X-R-A-Y.