Not Any City You Might Right Away Be Thinking Of
Life (to repeat) kept offering me nothing but the precipitate of experience, never the experience itself, time kept fluttering all about me, and then all of a sudden came the sort of day I could maybe make something of, the sort that might even get everything spelled all the way out for once, and I was following a young man (this time it was somebody unkindly and brattily attractive, twenty-two or twenty-three at the most) into the one department store left standing downtown, a limestone hulk from the 1920s. I followed this kid up two escalators to the young men’s department, and from a distance (store as dead as ever; not one salesperson around) I watched him hurriedly decide on a pair of practically knee-length shorts (the color of apricots) from one counter and then an ashy short-sleeved sweater of sorts from another, then disappear into a fitting room. He emerged a few minutes later and ditched both things (there was a wide-seated plush chair set aside to receive anything failing to please), and after I watched him make his brash way to the down escalator, I came forward to claim the shorts and the sweater, peeked at the sizes (M; I’m an ungainly, ungraced L), managed at last to find a saleslady, paid good money for these two full-priced eyesore castoffs, caught the light-rail train back to my apartment, shed my teaching costume, and slowly, deep-breathingly drew the shorts and sweater onto my pale, spurned body (the fabrics, thankfully, had give; nothing came unstitched), and felt what exactly? This is where I’m told I always either get stumped or go overboard. True, the young man had worn these things, spread himself givingly into them, exalted them, for maybe no more than a minute, but my wearing of them now brought him onto me until I could feel all of the allness of his life, the gleamed sweep and specificality of his days, way past the misrouted tendernesses and dumb-luck loves and then all the way down to scores unsettled, sore spots, potshots taken at, his forever having to be the one to say “But I’m the wrong person to ask”—and I must have gotten some of what I’d been counting on, rogue moments of feeling myself somehow futilizingly renewed, enough at least to doze off in that sweater, those shorts, and then dream of a friend I had come so close to having in eighth grade and how every time the phone would ring back then (those were still the days of rotary phones), the stuttery trilling of the ring always made me think of the wide wales of the stupid dun-drab corduroy pants this care-encumbered, sweet-breathing seraphic smudge of a kid had to wear day after day for school. In sleep, all loves are finally requited.
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As for people in the here and now, there at least was Ethan, with that blankness about him that was easy enough for my mind to color over with sloppy washes of ultramarine and streaks of pert, pepperminted pinks during that week or so we finally knew enough of each other, but sleeping with him felt like the way you feel when you’re eating something just to get rid of it. Joshua, though? I picked Josh up at the other bar on the same rough street, the bar mostly for older folks, though Josh was a bare, pallid twenty-five, and I might as well just celebrate the aptness of the phrase “picked up,” because that’s exactly what I did—hoisted that crinkly-haired beanpole high enough into a better sense of who he must have always wanted to be: somebody hailing from Overland Park, Kansas, and now weighing an enlivenedly defeatist return. Besides, people who had always ignored or slighted me in ways I found comforting have started getting around to moving or (at work) retiring, even dying, and the other day I finally had some luck persuading Larry, who calls me practically every other night, to let me be the one to hang up first when we reach the end of a call, because that way I’ll be spared having to hear that abrupt click of his departing, which does, to this day, distress me so.
And Spencer (self-vilifying grad-schooler; dry-lipped; his apartment a mucky below-street studio): all he wanted to talk about (I knew him for just those two unfragranced nights in late July) was some ex-wife, though they’d been married for not quite nine months, and how he hadn’t even wanted to spring for a decent ring and how, during the ceremony itself—little more than an exercise, the way he put it, a run-through for other humdrum stunts and overturnable milestones yet to come—he’d already felt like a stand-in or a third wheel in the distribution of this wife-woman’s affections; and with me, this somberly carnal, preeningly melancholy big baby, I hate to say it, got cold feet and had no use for me, either, and all during the act just kept standing his ground.
#
Come Monday, of course, I had classes to teach at 8:30, 9:30, 10:30. Nothing of worth was getting itself explained, nothing of worth was getting itself understood, but I must have liked it that the students (these were second-year community-college scholars in an honors catch-up program) thought so little of me. I’d ask a question about the reading assignment (just a few piddling paragraphs that, often as not, I’d chosen for their gistless impudence and lurid undertow), and I’d be met with silence, but I always liked to draw the silence out, let it dilate and widen, because the joke was surely on every one of us, and for however long we were for this world, but I didn’t mind the quiet of a couple of these kids, because their quiet hit me differently, it was a quiet that could have had anything and everything stirred into it, and whenever I could feel that big-hearted, sumptuous quiet of theirs starting to merge with some of my own, I knew it was time to dismiss the class, no matter how early. Then one afternoon one of those two kids (the loosely knit dirty blond with a face mostly clouded over, a demoralizer already, in clownishly wide pants and a rumply plum-purple pullover) stopped by during my office hour. The papers this kid kept turning in, no matter the assigned topic (global warming, the promise and perils of artificial intelligence), were always, in some way or another, about his older brother, who, he claimed, knew a little something usefully occult about everything. I give this kid credit for knowing how to smite a page with words. His papers amounted to a kind of typographical bastinado. But today the kid was saying, “Shouldn’t you be wanting to meet my brother? Wouldn’t that be the point?” So I did meet the brother that evening, at a dim, beam-ceilinged restaurant in some murky riverside warehouse district, and I did like this older brother’s way of thinking (he informed me, for instance, that you can let everything turn out to be really simple, make it just a matter of putting yourself through a sequence of steps, you don’t even have to know what you’re doing—just follow the steps, there’s nothing more you’ll ever need to do), but then he got on his high horse about some woman who had flown in from Louisville, Kentucky (she had been direct-messaging him every night for weeks) and had apparently been hanging around some hotel near the airport for two days and nights now. Wanting what? he expected me to know. He said he had never once invited her (and never would have). He insisted he had given her not one iota of encouragement. He asked me if I had ever been the type to show up anywhere uninvited. But I never know when people are pulling my leg or just waiting to play footsie. I looked across the table at this fuzzy little self-hallowing dumpling of a man in a ponytail dyed a deepened black. As some sort of experiment (I’m guessing), he began to reach for my hand. The three or four tattoos on that bony hand of his were just monotonous smoke-gray hieroglyphs. I told him I had to get going. He insisted he’d gladly pay. I later ended up at a moribund supermarket where I like the peanut-butter brownies, because of how large they are (three and a half inches by three and a half). I was waited on by a mountain of a woman I’d never seen behind the bakery counter before, who told me she was breaking in a new helper (though I saw no signs of anybody else.) She was taking an awfully long time getting my two brownies ready to be put into a bag, and the bag that this soberingly slow, overformed woman finally handed me felt suspiciously light. When I got outside, I opened the thing. Inside were two puny cuts of just one brownie; I must have felt cut down to size myself. I shoved the bag into a pocket of my jacket and walked across the highway (six lanes) to Walmart and bought (because it was high time?) some oil-defeating face powder. The woman at the checkout counter (she was somebody I should have been—in snug, sunny, bouncy, teeming middle age, blotchless, with lively plight in her eyes) said, “You look like you’re in an awfully big hurry!” Why do I always give the wrong impression? I took my time walking to the light-rail station. From the half dozen or so people waiting with me on the platform, I later took home the image of just one, the sufficing likeness of somebody at whose side I’d once temped in a public-records office, a vague-faced, gangled twist of a man, implausibly thirty-eight already by then, a man so flimsily himself yet bodied so blearily to my liking that I dropped off to sleep almost at once by letting my arms become his arms making expert short work of me.
-Garielle Lutz
