Touchy Subjects: Stories Read online

  As I stood up, I had a hysterical impulse to say that if it proved to be a boy I'd name it after him. Instead, I mentioned that I was going off on an early summer holiday, but yes, of course I'd be home for the birth.

  The new regime was a manageable nuisance. On Saturdays now I went straight from karate class to a shopping centre twice as far away in the other direction. An old friend of mine, meeting me laded with bags on the bus, mocked me for being so upwardly mobile, to go that far in pursuit of walnut-and-ricotta ravioli. One Saturday in May my mother asked me to come along to the old shopping centre, to help her with a sack of peat moss, and I had to invent a sudden blinding headache.

  The dress I wore as often as the weather allowed; it seemed the least I could do. The leaf-green silk billowed round my hips as I carried my box of groceries close to the chest. There was room under there for quintuplets, or a gust of summer air. When August came and went and nothing happened, I felt lighter, flatter, relieved.

  That was five years ago, but always I keep one eye out for him, even on the streets of other cities where my newjob takes me. I have my story all ready: how I shop on Sundays now when my mother can take the children, two boys and a small girl, yes, quite a handful. He's sure to compliment me on having kept my figure. And his daughter, did she try again?

  I felt prepared, but last Friday when I thought I saw him among the grapefruit I backed out in panic. What do you say to a ghost, a visitor from another life?

  It occurs to me all of a sudden that he may be dead. Men often don't live very long after they retire. I never thought to ask how old he was.

  I find it intolerable not to know what has become of him. Is this how he felt, wondering about me? On Saturday when I woke in my cool white bed, I had to fight off the temptation to drive down to the shopping centre and park there, watching through the windscreen for him to walk by.

  The Man Who Wrote on Beaches

  As a child he'd never known what to put. He always started out along the expanse of saturated sand with a yip of excitement, but after scraping the first great arc with the edge of his sneaker, he'd stand with his leg extended like a dog trying to piss. Everything took so long on sand, you might as well be using Morse code. You'd better be sure you still meant what you were writing by the time it was done. Once he'd put HELLO, but his brothers laughed and scuffed out the o with their toes.

  Then another time on another beach, some New Year's Day when he was maybe fourteen and alone, he'd written COCKSUCKERS in letters as long as himself. It looked so terrible, printed so starkly for the clouds and every passing stranger to read, and he'd thought the first wave would wipe it out, but in his nervousness he'd dug too deep with the crescent of mussel shell, so the small frills of water only smoothed his words, glossed over a mistake he'd made on the K. The letters looked graven, as if on a headstone, the obscenity emerging from the beach itself. So after such a long while of standing with his back to the wind, he'd dragged a line through the whole word with the toe of his pointed shoe, lurching along on the other foot, but still it was legible or could be guessed at anyhow, since no other word looked like that one.

  The day he was forty-three, he accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Personal Saviour. It was quite a shock to his system.

  A few weeks before, he had been driving through downtown Tacoma on a sticky afternoon much like any other. Traffic was slow as molasses and he found himself staring at a bus shelter with a poster on it that said in large pink letters, JESUS IS THE WAY.

  He might well have seen it before, on other days when he'd been preoccupied with what to make for dinner or whether Margaret had remembered to call the IRS from the office about those tax forms, but the fact was that only on that particular day was there a chink open in his mind as he glanced at that bus shelter, a crack wide enough for those words to drop in. And for a moment he forgot a lifetime's worth of wisecracks about the Born Agains; for a moment he thought, What if it was true? What if just maybe?

  Wouldn't that explain a lot of things, like what a mess this country had gotten itself into? Wouldn't that make some sense of how his life had turned out after all the promising things his report cards had said, after all his dumb dreams of changing the world?

  Not that he was complaining. He'd been to Corsica and Bali and Scodand and the Everglades; he had a home with a view of Puget Sound and a good job and a great collection of German steins and a lot of laughs. Above all, he had Margaret, who was twice what he deserved. But it struck him sometimes that in a couple more decades he would be dead without ever having figured things out. And think of it: All these years he'd been using the word Jesus as a colourful form of ouch—if he dropped a wrench on his foot, say—when for all he knew the Born Agains were right, and Jesus just might be the way.

  He was still half joking, or at least he thought he was.

  Waiting for the lights to change, he tried it out loud. "Jesus?" so it sounded like he was calling softly over the car door to someone in the street he thought he remembered from high school who probably wouldn't know him anymore.

  But all at once he was sick to his stomach, felt so bad in fact that when the light changed he pulled right instead of left and parked in front of a fire hydrant. He laid his wet forehead on his hands where they gripped the steering wheel and said, maybe out loud or maybe in his head, he didn't know, "I'm nothing, I'm scum, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus."

  When he finally got home he watched some drag racing and waited for it to wear off, like a hangover, or heartburn. Margaret came home with antipasti from the deli; she felt his back where his T-shirt was stuck to it. He blamed the heat.

  But by the weekend he still felt the same way. So come Sunday morning he walked down the road till he came to the first building with the word Jesus on it.

  It was the Church of Jesus Our Lord. He thought he'd bolt at the end of the service, but strangers gathered round to welcome him. It turned out it wasn't them who'd paid for the sign at the bus shelter downtown, that was the Church of Christ Crucified, but still, "No objections," said the pastor. "It was Our Lord who led your feet to our door."

  He still felt sick, standing there. These people weren't his sort of people, or so he would have said a week before. Their phrases were foreign to him; there was talk of missions and calls and walks with God. When they used words like voice, or light, he was never sure if they were to be taken literally. Their clothes were funny and the pastor stood too close to him. He knew he might turn these people into a big joke at the next office party. He felt like James Dean and wished he hadn't worn his leather jacket. He felt like a sinner. And when an old lady who'd introduced herself as Mrs. Keilor said, "See you next week," part of him was so relieved he thought he might go down on his knees and cry.

  Which was exactly what he did a few weeks later, on his forty-third birthday. Pastor Tull said it took a lot of folks that way.

  For the first few weeks he hadn't said a word to Margaret about where he was going; he let her think he was stretching his legs. And when he began to mention the church it was all very cool; he tried to sound like an anthropologist on the Nature Channel.

  "Do you actually believe any of that stuff?" Margaret asked lightly in the middle of Sunday dinner, and he shrugged and took another slice of salmon.

  But on his birthday he walked home and told her he'd accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Personal Saviour. He said it all in a rush before he lost his nerve; he could hear how odd the words sounded as they left his mouth, like a very dry sort of joke.

  Margaret let out a single whoop of laughter. He didn't take offense; it was a sound she always made when an appliance broke down or she slept through the alarm and missed her car pool. After a minute she came over to give him a hug with stiff arms and say, "Whatever makes you happy." As if it was a line she'd found in a magazine.

  A couple of months on, he started bringing her to the odd church social. She seemed to come willingly enough, just as years ago she used to accompany him to occasional hockey games, be
cause that was his thing. She recognized a guy from her accounts department, and they talked about the crazy new ventilation system. She admired Pastor Tull's moustache.

  Mrs. Keilor was in charge of the salad table. She whispered a question about whether his wife was saved, too. "Not yet," he said, as if he had great hopes. He was afraid somebody would ask Margaret the same question; he kept one ear out for her sharp laugh.

  Margaret had no time for the abstract; that was something he always used to love about her. If she couldn't touch it, smell it, taste it, then it didn't matter. Her favourite exclamation was "Unreal." Whenever he started talking hypotheticals, she would reach for her sewing box, so the time wouldn't be completely wasted. Once she got around three sides of a cushion cover while he was wondering aloud about the future of democracy.

  He didn't talk about his ideas, these days. He kept his new books on his side of the bed; he left his new cassettes in the car so he could play them on the way to work. He only watched the Bible Channel on the evenings when Margaret was out at the Y. And she quietly worked around this latest and most obscure of his hobbies.

  He waited for her to ask, but she didn't. He would have welcomed her questions; he still had a bunch of his own. But Margaret was content not to understand. He couldn't figure that out. How she could bear not to know what was going on in his head. In his heart. In what he was learning, with some embarrassment, to call his soul.

  He was dreaming about Jesus these days; that was something he wouldn't have told Margaret even if she'd asked. In the dreams he was generally walking up a mountain behind Jesus, who only looked about twenty-two, thin but surprisingly solid. You could lean your head on his bony shoulder. Jesus could speak without moving his lips.

  He never had difficulty getting up these mornings; he just asked Jesus to get him out of bed and next thing his feet were on the rug. And work got done just like that. The things he had expected to be hardest were almost easy. He had thrown away his Zippo the day after his birthday and hadn't had a single drag since. Every time he got the craving he said, "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus," in his head till it went away. The same with beer. After Josh Miles at the church, who used to be an alcoholic, took him aside for a word, he saw he was better off without the stuff. Now he didn't miss it, didn't need it. He still dusted his stein collection, but he was thinking of donating it to a charity raffle. After a couple of weeks, Margaret got the hint and stopped asking would he like a cold one from the refrigerator. She teased him a little about what a clean-living guy he'd become—but not in front of friends.

  Another thing, he wasn't sure their friends were his friends anymore. They were the same people; it was him who'd changed. For the first year ever he put down every cent he'd made on his tax return. He could only talk about things like that to his church friends, those people in cheap shoes he'd have bust a gut laughing at a couple of months back.

  What he couldn't tell them, though, was that Margaret wasn't his wife.

  At a church picnic he watched her blowing bubbles with a four-year-old. Mrs. Oberdorf had her eye on him. "You and your wife been blessed with any children?" she asked in her cracked voice.

  "Not yet."

  She nodded, her mouth twisted with sympathy.

  He hoped she'd think it wasn't their fault. He hoped she wouldn't use the word husband in front of Margaret.

  One evening when she was pinning up new drapes he said it. "We should get married one of these days." But it didn't sound romantic enough. It sounded like clearing out the garage.

  Margaret took the pins out of her mouth. "You think so?" She had this way of letting words hover like smoke.

  "I know we used to say we didn't need it, but recently I've been reconsidering."

  She pinned up another fold of fabric.

  "It might feel good. It might be the thing to do," he added, as if he were kidding around. He hoped she wouldn't hear the guilt behind his voice.

  "OK. What the hell," said Margaret. He winced, but not so she'd notice. "We've both done it before and it didn't kill us."

  Then she laughed until he laughed, too, and she came over and kissed him on the ear.

  But as he was signing his name in the register—his ballpoint pressing the paper a little too hard—he knew that this time wasn't going to be like those other times. Neither he nor his first wife in DC nor Margaret nor her first husband in LA had had the slightest idea what they were really doing. This time would be the real thing, because now he knew what a promise was. Now he knew what the words meant.

  To show she wasn't taking the whole thing too seriously, Margaret was wearing red. He didn't care; it looked good on her. "You can bring your God buddies if you like," she'd told him, but he said that was all right, he'd rather keep it small, just the two of them and a pastor (not Pastor Tull,just some Unitarian) and a few friends who drove down from Seattle and Vancouver.

  After the ceremony he was high like he hadn't been since that time he tried cocaine at the prom. He was a bank robber who'd made it to Acapulco.

  The next Sunday after church he said the word. "My wife and I are taking a vacation," he mentioned to Mrs. Keilor, and relief stabbed him through the ribs.

  For their honeymoon—about ten years too late, according to his mother in San Francisco, but she sent them a check anyhow—he and Margaret were going to drive right down the West Coast. That first night in a motel in Mount Saint Helens he lay under the weight of his wife and moved and shut his eyes. It felt like he was running down the right road at last. But later when he was letting the condom slither off him, he wanted to cry.

  They hiked up a volcano the next day, cinders crunching like cornflakes under their feet. Later they squatted over tide pools and saw anemones blossom like green doughnuts and purple sea urchins as big as their hands. Margaret tilted her face up to the sun while he took pictures and figured out the distances between towns.

  In Eugene, Oregon, he woke up in the middle of the night and had to shake her awake. "Honey," he said urgently. Then, apologetically, "Honey, I just realized, we're meant to have children."

  The words shocked his ears.

  At first Margaret didn't answer, and he thought she was still asleep, till he saw the line of her jaw. Then she said, "For god's sake."

  Exactly, he was tempted to say, but didn't.

  In the morning he woke up to find her packing.

  He stared at her knotted hands, ramming two pairs of his socks into a corner. "Who was it," Margaret asked, "just remind me who was it who talked me out of it all those other times?"

  "You were never sure—," he began.

  "That's right, I wasn't sure, but you sure were." A little bead of spit on her lip caught the sunlight. She plucked up another pair of socks but didn't put them in the bag. "Who was it always told me it would be madness to go off the Pill? Who was it said we'd lose all our freedom, tie ourselves down?"

  His throat felt like it was full of wadding. He cleared it. "Guess everybody gets tied down one way or another."

  Margaret's hands were jammed into the pockets of her silky dressing gown; her nails were stretching the seams. "Who was it kept saying he wasn't ready?"

  "I don't know," he said, nearly whispering. "I don't know who that guy was." There was a silence so complete he could hear the chambermaid vacuuming at the other end of the motel. "But I'm different now."

  "You can say that again." She stared at him; her eyes were hard as hazelnuts. "You're on another planet."

  "I'm finally ready," he pleaded.

  "Oh yeah?" Her voice was bigger than the room. "Well I'm forty-two, so you and your friend Jesus can go to hell."

  It took them two days to drive home. Awhile before they stopped for a burger on the first day he thought Margaret was crying, but she was looking out the window so he couldn't be sure. At the motel he called his mother and told her there'd been an emergency at work and he'd been called back. She'd always been able to tell when he was lying, but she didn't say so.

  When they pulled int
o their driveway at the end of the second day, Margaret laid her hand on his thigh and said, "OK."

  He wasn't sure what it meant. Pax? Or, this marriage is over?

  "OK," she said, "let's give it a shot."

  She got pregnant twice before the end of the year, which he took as a good sign. The first one made it to two months, the second to five. That one was a boy. He made the nurse give him the little body, for burial. Quite a few people from the Church of Jesus Our Lord turned up, though Margaret didn't come back with them for the chicken supper afterwards, which everybody said was understandable.

  The strange thing was that he had known the boy wouldn't make it to term. At the funeral it was like there was cotton wool round his heart, keeping the pain at bay. He and Margaret were going to have a girl; he just knew it.

  He didn't mind waiting a little while longer so Margaret could build her strength up before trying again. It felt strange to be buying rubbers—in a drugstore in the next town, so no one from the church would see him—but he thought Jesus probably wouldn't have a word to say about it, under the circumstances.

  On Christmas Eve he asked Margaret to come to church with him, just for once. On the way home she said, "One last shot, OK?" as if she were talking about pinball.

  That night as he came his legs shook like bowstrings. His mind swam inside her. He could almost see the egg, glowing at the end of the dark tube; he registered the shock when the single chosen sperm, blindly butting, felt the membrane give way and seal him in.

  The next day he started making a list of girls' names. He kept the list in the glove compartment so as not to annoy Margaret, who didn't believe in counting chickens.

  Nothing happened till March, when Margaret started throwing up her Cheerios and smiling at strangers. "Third time lucky," he told her on the way home from the ultrasound. His head was so full of a single image—the tiny curled chipmunk that was going to be their daughter—that he could hardly see the road. The nurse said you couldn't be sure so early, but yes, it did look kind of like a girl.