By Victor Greto
He was looking at the fleshy curve of Dorothy’s foot as it protruded from her blue bathrobe when she told him he was a lousy lover.
It hurt, sure, but it felt good at the same time.
It was two weeks since Dorothy had served Nick with divorce papers at work. Now, weeks after that – a mishmash of long and short days concentrating on everything else but the biggest thing happening in his life – the day before he was to leave the house, she told him she had never loved him, that he had wasted the best years of her life, that he had ruined her daughter.
He hated her, almost as much as he loathed the obnoxious curve of her foot, pudgy and clean as a whistle, sticking abruptly out of the robe he had bought her a lifetime ago for a Christmas present.
It was night or just about night, but he doggedly couldn’t tell, refusing to remove his eyes from her foot to the window. He just watched it bounce or sway with her words, pouring like syrup that trickled too quickly from a bottle you were sure would come out slow.
Like her words five years ago, when she had stood barefoot in white shorts with dimpled knees on the front porch of his parents’ house and told him that Nick’s father just told her he had had affairs with other women shortly after he had married Nick’s mother. Dorothy wasn’t sure how many, but there were several, she said. The old man told her this, Dorothy said to Nick, while he smoked his cigarette in the living room, sitting on the red rocker, musing about how lucky he had been all his life to have a wife like Grace.
Nick turned the news over in his mind like a lawyer handling a murder weapon in front of a jury. Even while staring at Dorothy’s unattractive legs, he imagined the twenty-something man meeting the other woman down the street, at the corner of Maddock Street and Chester Pike, Less than a lousy block from Nino’s Bar, where the old drunks could see him wait at the corner with his hands in his pockets, could see the long dark hair of the woman sitting impatiently at the driver’s side of the gently quaking vehicle, a slim hand hanging out and tapping the metal of the door, waiting for him to come up to her like a pup in heat.
It was that feeling, Nick knew, of irresistible infatuation wrapped tightly around the romance of maybe-love, of the inability to say no to a woman whom you know wanted you, when you both had the knack to block out the wife and husband and decided just to live for that moment. It was a trait he shared with his old man before he even knew he did.
The fact that he had known nothing of his old man’s infidelity, that he had to hear it from his wife, that his wife knew something like that before he did, that his mother must have known all those years – that it came from Dorothy’s mouth and without a note of sympathy in her voice – well, that was it.
Maybe, but perhaps that was just wishful thinking years after the fact, a self-inflicted revenge pressed snugly within the labyrinth of his own head – because he never did tell her how he felt – for her finally saying to him he was such a lousy lover. But, really, he had expressed his indifference toward her in a thousand small ways over the years, by ignoring her own feelings, or when he punishingly fucked another woman, trying to lose himself, working himself into a frenzy of unthinking passion.
He was lousy, he admitted to himself.
“It takes two, you know,” he said, but only because he felt he had to. Still, the choked feeling in his throat that came out like a strangled cry made him feel suddenly out of breath. She smiled at the sight. He could not tell her how he did not have it in him to touch her, even during sex, nor tell her of the loss he felt when she did not touch him, even as he laboriously pushed his way in and pulled himself out. He did not love her and could not remember ever loving her; but he knew very well he must have.
But that was long ago, and for years now he had sought the feeling he once had with her with others, the excitement of the first time, each time he approached a woman with his hands in his pockets and her body quaking. Blow jobs in the library when he attended college downtown; more recently, clandestine meetings after work and that silly, awful, giddy thrill of beer, loud music and intimate, innuendo-laced conversation.
Still, he always came back. There was something about Dorothy’s steadfastness that appealed to him, her wide-hipped determination.
“I’m so sick to death of you,” she said to him, “you and your meanness. You’re mean. You’re just plain fucking mean.” Her foot had stopped moving, pointed toward him, bunched at the toes, accusing.
He finally averted his eyes and looked out the black windows.
There had been a time when, if things went unsaid, everything remained okay. Or, if not okay, at least nothing much happened. They watched TV or a movie after ordering a pepperoni pizza or making tacos; or Nick went downstairs to the basement and wrote in his journal or read a book.
This had been easy for Nick to do. But he knew nothing of how Dorothy felt. He had grown numb, held no intuitive powers of observation, no natural lust for life; his passions were sucked into a sinkhole of self-absorption. At thirty-one, he still had a peculiar attractiveness that kept him unthinkingly lazy with others. He never had to do any of the work.
In this ultimate crisis with Dorothy and her daughter Annie, his laziness reasserted itself and he knew of nothing he could practically or naturally do but observe – glumly watch – and then wish he was outside or down the basement reading or writing in his journal. The fact that Dorothy was hurtfully accusing him of meanness, accusing him of destroying another human being’s life, did not touch him. First of all, because he didn’t think it was true; but also because he could not convince himself she was serious. She was spewing bitterness and regret over the past dozen years they had been together. How else could she act or feel? It was as though he was looking at her from the outside of a cage.
There was a chasm inside himself, he knew, but all of this, Dorothy and twelve years of his life with her and Annie, his experiences at college and at work, with his friends, both true and dubious – none of them had anything to do with the chasm. He just couldn’t take any of them seriously, at least in the important ways he could only seriously take himself.
But was there anything to it? His meanness? Was he, really, so fucking mean?
Look at it this way: those bunched toes. The last time he had seen toes bunched that way and pointing at him had been on a Maryland beach when he was fifteen. The girl’s foot whose toes pointed at him giggled as he flicked cool sand on top of them.
You see, Nick was telling her, they had buried him alive up to his neck, right at the place where they knew the ocean would eventually come and cover him up at night. And every time the tide came in – I mean, before it really came in – as it was creeping in, he held his breath until it went back out again. Nick held his breath – even though he didn’t mean to – when he finished, then breathed out frantically, before making eyes at an imaginary tide coming in again.
She kept giggling, even as she said, How scary! Nick looked at her perfect face, the way her long black hair eclipsed the sun over her left shoulder, where he could see the light powder blue of the sky and the green-blue of the ocean. The white bathing suit with small flowers was snug against her dark skin. The sand, even lighter and brighter because of her hair, glittered down the length of her toes and foot as she poked it out. He couldn’t help himself – How I envied the waves/ Those rushing tides in tumult tumbling – he leaned over and kissed her big toe.
Hey! she said, pulling her foot behind her.
Hey yourself, Nick said. It was Bluebeard or Blackbeard, one of those pirates, he told her. That’s how the movie ended. Before he finally drowned.
There was nothing else to say. It must have been okay, because she kept smiling at him. So he said nothing. Nor did she. She brought her foot back out and dug it into the sand, again allowing the glitter to tumble down its length. She looked at it and then at Nick, daring him, and giggled. He smiled.
When he met Angie early one morning in the lobby of the hotel where he and his friend Carl and Carl’s mother were staying, he had ignored her, embarrassed when she tapped him on the shoulder as he was going out to the beach. But later, as the first couple of days went by, they purposely began to meet just after sunrise and go out to the beach together. Now, a Thursday morning, they were talking to kill time before it got to be warm enough to go into the water. She wanted to know what movies he had seen, and he remembered the pirate movie because he had been staring out at the water coming in and going out and coming in, and he bunched his forehead, and she asked, What? and he told her.
Nothing happened, though. The only time he ever kissed her that week was on her big toe. They held hands a lot, and even in the evenings, they walked the beach and the boardwalk holding hands. Here’s the thing: It was only later, after the week ended and he had been driven back home, that the girl transformed herself in his mind. Angie – who had been as giddy and flighty as any fourteen-year-old girl could be at the beach when meeting a guy and having a fun time with him for three or four days – became the well into which he poured everything that was loving within him.
During the following year, as he continued writing three letters to her one, as he waited patiently on the front porch each morning swinging on the glider until the mail arrived, or, later, in the fall, coming home from school and rooting through the mail – he looked for any word about how special he was. With each disappointment, he wrote even more deeply about his love. He leaned over into that well and saw only himself pleading with her to love him.
That may have been when he fell in love with his own words, or at least the idea that his own words held some sort of power. They sounded so good, declarations of love interspersed with bits of poems he wrote, songs others wrote, thoughts about the world, poses he thought might impress her, a glassy image of the perfect lover, a love letter to himself. He was convinced, of course, that he was writing to Angie – the girl who had held his hand and squeezed it once when he laughed, a squeeze he could not forget because, he knew, it had been unconsciously given, approving the tenor of his life.
That approval remained buried inside him. For a long time, he refused any feeling that he would need approval again. Those feelings – those sinking feelings that he needed emotional approval from others – became signs of weakness. If Angie gave him anything for the next decade, it was an inner certitude that became indulgently profound. Anyone who tried to say something approving to Nick found him to be modest to the point of caricature. There was nothing anyone could say to boost his own feeling about himself. Not even Angie, months later, could penetrate the shell she unwittingly helped create. Dorothy barely grazed it; Annie felt its coldness, brushed her lips against it, but pulled back.
Lonely, sure. But it was better than being crazy, or losing oneself, or, worse yet, just accepting things as they were. That was home. When, at sixteen, he came back from that week at the shore, his father was there, his hair newly colored black (stark white when he let it go, when he was sick), his chubby cheerfulness a taunt at normalcy, a calm before the storm of madness. Like a leaky faucet, the illness invariably began, unnoticeable, a drop of sweat on the lip of a spigot that grew longer and more oblong with each passing day, until it plopped into chaos. The well-tuned ear could hear it coming.
Nick’s mother, Grace, could. But the rest were amateurs, and they had to wait until the drips became steady and strong. Although she knew, Grace said nothing, incapable of saying much of anything about cyclical events she had long ago consigned to fate. Marco had escaped west five years earlier. Vincent, nineteen, had just graduated from high school and planned to enter a trade school; he stayed away as much as possible, looking both querulous and distant whenever Nick or Anthony told him about what their old man had done.
This time – the weeks just after he met Angie – the pipe broke without warning. The old man’s cheerfulness was actually a manic episode that peaked when he drove recklessly through a major intersection near the mall and caused a five-car accident. From what Nick learned from the cops, his old man had left the car unharmed and, without talking to anyone, started walking down the highway. No one had been injured. A cop tried to stop him, but he thought his old man was drunk or high and arrested him. That’s when Nick heard about it, after the cops called the house. Once they found out his condition, the cops helped Nick and his mother, whom he took with him to the police station, to get him into the hospital. There was no pussyfooting around this time; no waiting for the old man to check himself in; no pleading; no pretending to think that perhaps the medicine would kick in and help; no last pleas to Dr. Ryan to commit him without the forever days of wait-and-see.
The room where they brought him was small. It had a bathroom and a desk and a chair and a window to look out at the rest of the hospital complex. Nick thought that he wouldn’t have minded spending several months here, reading and looking out that window, writing to Angie on his blue and white Smith-Corona, with no one to bother him. He ran his fingers across the desk, a cheaply varnished particle board table with an even cheaper chair.
When he told Vincent about what had happened, that weekend after he returned home from the trade school, he cocked his head, said, Wow, really? and shook it wearily, his piles of hair – soft, thick wisps – moving in sympathy.
Vincent is someone I should talk about here, at least a little, if only because Nick learned to sculpt his feelings the way Vincent did his expression. Vincent’s patented look of concern – a fine-tuned seriousness that contained both the universal and the particular in one gaze – was a strange but thrilling thing to watch: a look that pointedly rejected both the person speaking and what was said. But there was nothing in his gaze Nick could put his finger on. He crouched in awe of that Vincent-gaze, and thought him caring but curiously unable to do anything tangible to help.
Nick fled into Angie, who became an anticipated joy, both Thanksgiving dinner and a Fourth of July picnic. He gorged himself on her words, no matter how calorie-free, ambivalent, beside the point. The evening before he had left the shore, they had gone into a photo booth and gotten four pictures taken, all in various attitudes. He had kept two. For hours at a time he stared at the pictures, amazed. They made him ache: her sunburned face, straight white teeth, rich black hair, sharp nose and full cheeks, shining eyes and bowed lips. Her face fit into a towering fantasy that turned him like a pinwheel on her faintest breath. It turned him around until the whites of her eyes, looking bleached next to her own dark skin, seemed to hold within them everything he imagined life could be. She was his lover, forever out of reach. Within each lump in his throat she congealed, tightening and clarifying his senses. At times, he could not stand what he was feeling. He shook, then stopped, ashamed of his own shaking.
So when Vincent and his metal gaze found the pictures of him and Angie in the photo booth on his bureau one weekend, Nick felt as though he had been violated. Even Vincent’s left hand, as it held the two connected pictures, soiled them; his gaze, dramatically puzzled with a furrow, his voice, high with false surprise.
What’s this, man? he said, keeping his puzzled face frozen. He looked at Nick with concern, then darted back to the picture. Who’s this?
This was the globe held in the baby Jesus’ hand, cradled by his scarlet-bloused and blue-skirted mother; the football nestled in his old man’s arm as he ran for a touchdown; the thing he looked at when he vaguely stared off into space and thought about nothing and everything.
A girl I met at the shore, he said, his throat scratchy and dry as sand, saltwater, as lumpy and pliable as taffy.
Yeah? When, that last time you were there?
The questions thumped like rubber bullets, stupid questions the answers to which Vincent already knew, but, after more silence, repeated with more italicized question marks that hung beet-red in the air.
Decades later, Vincent became a cheerful married father of four, whose yearly vacations at the shore, pristine children and dutiful wife he cherished. It was all there, in his gaze at the pictures and then at Nick, an insipid expression of dramatized triviality.
The last time I was there, Nick echoed sullenly, not looking at Vincent but at his curiously thin, small hand. Nick could see the back of the pictures, a blue mark stamped haphazardly, and then the faint dividing line between the two.
Was she cool? Vincent asked, and smiled for the first time, not unkindly, but knowingly. Did you do her?
Nick looked over at him to see if he was serious, but Vincent had resumed his puzzled expression, eyes wide and waiting for an answer.
If I did, I’m not going to tell you, Nick said, his voice choking.
Nick’s brother’s puzzled expression dissolved into an ether of contempt. Vincent shook his head and held the pictures out for a couple of seconds, as if to give them to Nick, but then placed them back on the bureau.
Back to the black outside the windows, above Dorothy’s tilted head, her foot, bunched at the toes, accusing. Nick closed his eyes to the darkness outside and saw her body, all fleshy curves and tangled, permed curly hair; thin white-channeled stretch marks and musty, pubic smells; short, chubby feet and cheeks, plump calves and breasts; rounded ass and turned-up nose; almond eyes, angled, tea-stained teeth and pliant, soft hands; humid, prickly-pimpled skin after a long, nightly bath.
Twelve years of being with this woman and it unspooling impossibly.
“I hate you, you mean bastard,” she said. “I hate you.”
© 2023 Victor Greto