The Laws of Average Page 5

  She was the center of it all.

  The door clicked behind him and the hallway opened up to reveal more click-closed doors, each marked with a doorplate embossed with thick numbers in Arial font and inset braille. He had to wait for the elevator to take him down the 60+ floors of glass and steel. He drummed his fingers against the contour of the phone in his pocket for a good three minutes before the torpedo-shaped car opened behind the brushed metal doors. He dragged his feet past the threshold and silently acknowledged the young Brazilians already in the car, blinged out and shaded up and speaking fast in a language he didn’t understand. Their thick cologne stained the air he was breathing into his lungs. None of them returned his quick nod. He was invisible to them, sealed away in his own little curve of the torpedo, silently watching the numbers on a red diode fall away, the torpedo pausing only to let more bodies fill the thinning foot-space. In the lobby he slinked through the arms and legs of the crowd, and made his way to one of the $5 craps tables, where a miniature swarm of the same crowd he’d just made his way through/behind/over was buzzing around the elliptical pond of felt and clay chips. He fished one of the hundred dollar bills out of his wallet and placed it on the table, waiting patiently for the attendant to stack him with green, red and white chips. The husband took his time transposing them into the wooden grooves below his thumbs and fingers on the padded railing. He selected a single red chip and placed it on the Pass Line; he had enough money in his wallet to play like this for a week, if he had to. He took his phone out and placed it in the drink holder that was molded into the rail. An overhead camera spun and whirred silently in its large black bubble and the husband’s face fuzzed onto a monitor in an unmarked office somewhere on the colossal property. Someone pulled a joystick and fine-focused the camera to pull in and zoom on the cell phone; Another Someone scrunched in to take a close look, over the top of Someone’s shoulder; Yet Another Someone squinted before pulling a phone handset out of its socket and speaking something to Still Another Someone, all the way on the other side of the property. The emulated ringtone kept ringing. She was the center of it all.

  The door clicked behind him and the hallway tunneled into the back of the room, where she sat upright in the bed towel draped up top, the big fiesta-patterned comforter pooled down below. He waited long enough to hear the footsteps disappear outside the door and into the elevator lobby before he cracked the door open again to loop the card’s cut-out notch around the door handle. He pulled the door tight, refastened the brass security chain and drummed his fingers on the doorjamb before turning back towards the room. He watched her for an uncomfortably long time; she never so much as exhaled in his direction. When she did move she fiddled with the towel or canted her chin towards the window, which was hidden beneath two enormous black-out curtains; the room dripped with yellow light. The lover slid back into the bathroom and slicked cologne on his neck with a rough swipe of his hands, cris-crossing the bigs of his fingers over his throat. He didn’t meet his own gaze in the mirror as he did this. When he reappeared in the little hallway she was looking in his general direction but hadn’t turned her head enough to make full eye contact. She flinched her shoulders and then didn’t move them beyond the shallow elevating action caused by her lungs, the motion so largely out of her control. Because if she could stop all of her internal organs at once, perhaps she could actually enjoy this the way the husband swore to god she would, and to this she wasn’t at all philosophically opposed. The lover slinked to the far corner of the bed, breaking her perpendicular gaze with the television. She did not meet his eyes, even when he bobbed his head around and mugged and made slapping sounds with his hands on his sides. He made a big arc between them with an outstretched arm and a fist unfurled, fingers cocked at perfect angles to one another as he scraped the air for her attention. He lowered his arm and stood there without any pretense, his eyes scanning the small bowl at hair atop her head, her thin torso, matchstick legs and unpainted toenails. He felt she could tell. Just tell. The digitally-emulated telephone tone kept ringing. She was the center of it all.

  Tie Goes to the Runner

  In the bottom of the eighth in Orange Slices vs. Juice Boxes, Kenny’s perfectly-timed relay met Grady at first base, a no-arc dart that hit him square on the tip of his nose. Grady’s mom, who had been prepping the next two batters by straightening their hats and tucking in their shirts—the small boys wobbling around with their aluminum wands mostly parallel to their legs, the oblong chalk circle surrounding them like an enchantment or glyph or landing pad for a futuristic teleport apparatus or something—instantly dropped her clipboard and ran full stride, cottage-cheese asscheeks at full ripple in her workout pants, pushing past the pitcher’s mound (Casey parked on it again, naturally) and arrived at 1st base a good two seconds before the bad news of pain had even registered in her son’s skull.

  It wasn’t so much that he felt it, either, because he was already injured via two external stimuli: 1) Kenny’s mitt umbrellaing over the purple canvas of his Juice Boxes cap, perpendicular to his bare hand extended full-fingered over his gaping mouth; 2) The overpowering stench of his mother’s chamomile body lotion wafting over him, a dense suspension-fog of dirt and perfume.

  Grady had been through this before and knew to fall the ground. His mother always preferred him to begin wailing before this action, but his timing had been thrown off by the simple fact that he had actually made contact with the ball. His temporary disbelief at blooping the ball (just through Casey’s feet again, naturally) to where Kenny was standing, scratching his black Reebok cleats in the dirt while knocking two knuckles against the hard plastic cup strapped against him underneath his tighty-whiteys, had given Kenny just enough time to drop his free hand from his groin and pick up the spongy synthetic leather ball between his outstretched middle and index fingers, cock his shoulder (“LIKE A GUN!!” —Coach Noah), step forward, and hurl the orb towards Grady, who had just arrived on the base to claim his stand-up single. Twenty years later, during his first flirtations with Eastern philosophy at a third-tier state university, he would write it all up as karma, but for this moment he knew to do just like his mother said.

  Coach Noah was planted in the outfield wearing his matching Juice Boxes cap and Juice Boxes sweatshirt, amongst his Juice Boxes players. He stretched his arms above the mostly crabgrassed field and spread his fingers wide. Out here, where the Juice Boxes outfielders couldn’t see the drama playing out beyond the pale dirt boundary between them and the base paths, Coach Noah’s players took this motion as his signal for them to lock their ankles into their shoes right where they stood.

  “READY, COACH!!!” The little voices dogpiled on top of another to form one big booming voice in this, his one measurable achievement after many many weeks of Saturday morning practices where, after usually showing up 20 minutes late (and, occasionally, more than a little hung over), Coach Noah drilled them to take their defensive positions and exclaim the prescribed exclamation. A brief, unfamiliar wash of shame overcame him.

  “No, no. I just mean stay here.”

  Coach Noah trotted towards 1st base, where by this time Grady’s mother had already forklifted her son out of the chalk-dirt sift and up into her arms, the lip of her workout pants straining to hide the fact that she was (still) wearing the fuschia thong her Secret Someone had given to her earlier in the week with the implicit instructions not to launder them until such time as they saw each other again later in the week. Grady’s crying deepened in pitch when his mother slung him into her chest. She adjusted his weight by jerking his body between her biceps and forearms.

  “Is he okay?” Coach Noah acted legitimately concerned. “Is he hurt?” (Coach Noah only ever saw Grady on game days and had no idea the kid couldn’t register pain because he was always asleep by the time Coach Noach drifted through his parents’ house like a thin breeze, Grady’s father slouched into his overstuffed leather recliner in the basement, TiVO shifting gears between Law and Order Criminal Intent, House
M.D. and Law and Order Special Victims Unit). Grady’s mother shot Coach Noah a quick glance as he stood in front of her, trying to come across as Genuinely For Real Concerned.

  He repeated himself. She repeated her glance and then looked past him towards the chalk circle where the on-deckers were still spinny-dizzy, oblivious at first to all the Grady Drama, but before too long the bouncing orange mass with way too many arms and legs hanging off it at grotesque angles came clearer and clearer into focus, trundling directly at the ondeckers with enough speed and inertia that they couldn’t have gotten out of its path even had they been paying attention from the first fat plop of the ball against Grady’s nose. The clashing sound the chain-links made against their own fence posts sounded far more like the great smashing of a giant sheet of glass as the orange mass piled through, arms, legs, hats, cleats, aluminum and underwear all gnarled into the most twisted twist of metal, flesh and polyester that rivaled some of the worst waking images among the thin contingency of war vets sprinkled among the onlooking audience.

  It was the untanglement of all the above that resulted in the net 65% loss in Grady’s vision (over the coming weeks) and 100% unraveling of Coach Noah’s years-on-thin-ice marriage (even faster, remarkably) to someone named Becky, Beth, Jen, Karen, or some other name dominated by a soft-E vowel. No one in attendance would ever understand why Grady’s mother blamed the Grady Drama on Coach Noah at all, let alone so immediate and loud. Not even Grady’s mother understood this.

  But Coach Noah understood. He’d felt the same fever in the palms of his hands and tips of his fingers that now burned on the peak of her nose and on the hills of her cheeks, the grip and contraction of her from the inside, the build and release and spill that was no more. Yeah, he understood it perfectly: her machine-gun texting, the nightstand still in tremble for hours after he’d holstered his phone on his hip and left for work; her swimming the parking lot in a constant, slow, awful circle; her gerunding her way into his daytime and his defiant resistance extending permanently now into her nighttime. It hadn’t always been this way, of course, and Coach Noah was okay with it. Grady’s mother, though? Not okay. Largely unfamiliar with okay. Pretty much never touched okay, and on the rare occasions she had, she totally pushed it away. The surge of drama a rollercoaster inside her, up and up and down and down. All the okay boys bored the hell out of her, never did even as much as smell her. And Coach Noah was so beyond the threshold of okay—his stature, his goatee, his construction-ravaged jeans—well, the spin of him left her wrung totally dry.

  So when they called the game right then and there, and all the people slid-stepped back to their cars, and the fruit snacks and granola bars and rack of weird little bulbous water bottles remained absolutely still in the back of Coach Noah’s pickup truck, not a single Juice Box scaled the big tires to hop over the side. Not a one. No one had to instruct them otherwise. Some things, they learned that day, are absolutely clear and require no sound.

  Home

  And then, one afternoon, they sat on a squat set of metal bleachers and figured it all out. Everything that had gone wrong and why, every disappointment and hurt feeling tallied, every argument and curt exchange in the entire history of their relationship scored and settled like an accountant’s balance sheet or itemized list of charges on the monthly phone bill. All disputes settled, all whys and whatnots aired and retired. They looked one last time and breathed. The aluminum underneath them absolutely quiet as neither shifted weight even the slightest fraction.

  “I hope it was worth it to you.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “So what happens next?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Next. Where are you going after this?”

  “Home.”

  Her eyes widened but she said nothing. She just stared.

  “Home.”

  “And where is that now?”

  “Nowhere. That’s gone.”

  “No it’s not.”

  She turned her wrist and unlatched her elbow from her side, so she could move both at the same time.

  “Stop it.”

  The aluminum groaned one last time before his tinny footsteps pittered away.

  Plausible Deniability: A Parable

  (with Wendy Peterson)

  He sat one spring afternoon munching on his lunch. He had to run an errand to Boise and he thought he’d stop by Del Taco and grab himself a Chicken Macho Combo, mostly because it was the only drive-thru burrito to use the word “macho.” He looked at the bible on his dash and chuckled. The book was always within easy reach on his dashboard to pass time during the push-pull of his commute or for quick reference when the kid or the girlfriend or the other girlfriend were acting up. Except that day. That day required some explanation.

  It was a winter day, if he remembered right, the first time all that torridness happened out in the hangar, out in that slutty little town just north of Bliss; his hometown; someone else’s secretary. It was in the pickup, the big red Dodge, the one on permanent loan from his dead father, with the extended cab and short bed, where the seats lay back just enough to get a woman to arch her back in just the right position. He kept the book at the ready to pull out when he needed that extra special verse that he just couldn’t quite think of to remind the ex-wife, the kid, the girlfriend, the other girlfriend, the new girlfriend, about how knowledgeable he was in the whole God and eternity thing. It never left the dash except to open and close, his fingers like fleshy butterflies, cradling the delicate cocoon of belief inside its shell. It never asked to go inside his little apartment and spend the night on the water-stained nightstand next to his bed, the one ringed and ringed by the same stubby glass over and over again, roaming and shifting on the buckling and peeling paint. Things that happened next to the nightstand in that broken down old bed were not acceptable for it to be witness to. It would no doubt erupt in protest just stepping up to the threshold of his apartment, unable to comprehend all the things that it might see or overhear while marking the path of the sun on the nightstand. This bible, after all, started out as an innocent boy’s way to fit in all those years ago, given to him by his grandfather before his death. The boy had asked specifically if he could have it, remembering seeing it every week tucked under the rigid old man’s arm as he walked into the church, the one without the cross on the steeple.

  But there is another book in this story. The one he borrowed from his ex-wife, the one she thought she still had in her grandmother’s bible bag that was in her hope chest but wasn’t because he had it. And make no mistake: he had to have it, as a totemic piece of her. So there it was, hidden, stowed in the center console of his pickup, that little piece of her that he carried with him everywhere he drove. He knew he wasn’t supposed to have it but he couldn’t help himself. Temptation took over. It was the bible given to her in high school by one of her friends who was trying to convert her. It really wasn’t a bible per se; it was a rendition from the church she had attended as a young girl. The church that he had grown up in, and was, as he routinely professed to her before/during/after their marriage, “valedictorian” of.

  And just as the one bible on the dash didn’t go in the house to lay on the nightstand, the other bible didn’t go into the center console; they were kept separate. The one wasn’t allowed to see what the other was allowed to see, and neither were allowed to see what the nightstand was allowed to see. All of these things were kept separate from each other. Just as he had kept separate the wife and kid from the girlfriend, the girlfriend from the other girlfriend, the work from all of the above.

  Later that night of the one day, he swore he had made sure to cover the dashboard bible up as he always did with whatever happened to be in the truck that day, usually work orders for the sleepy little lumber company he worked for. When all the heavy breathing and moaning had stopped, though, he noticed the bible peeking out of the papers.

  After it was all said by someone else’s secretary to his then-wife, that one day cost him his
marriage, cost him his family, cost him his home. And the bible watched it all and never saved any of it, and he wondered why. And it was the very fact he could still wonder at all which led him to realize that that one day had not cost him his faith. It was a for-real revelation. The new girlfriend, the one he allowed everyone to see and find out about but not ever give up, she was the one the bible didn’t get covered up for.

  Rephrase: she was the one the bible wanted to see.

  Maybe the dashboard bible knew in hindsight that it couldn’t save either one of the people that were in the truck on that one day. Which was something the console bible almost certainly also knew. And maybe since neither bible saved him, his marriage, his family, maybe it was their fault. After all, this was what his grandfather taught him about faith, in the stilted phrases the old man used: “pray on this,” “sincere heart,” “clear intent,” and “truth of all things.”

  Fuck you, bible, he thought to himself, making sure not to say it out loud, where it would be harder—but not at all impossible—to deny he had said it in the first place. Maybe the bibles had been talking after all, he thought, and he instantly felt the satisfying warmth of conspiracy rush through his head, ways that maybe he could convince someone else it wasn’t his fault. Maybe that would work, like it had so many times before. I mean, valedictorian of seminary had to be an important title, and you don’t get called something like that for nothing.

  When You’re Dead You Can Do Whatever You Want

  Have as many or as little children as you like now. There is no more worry about financial, social or ethical responsibility any more. You are dead. Your dead children were born dead and will remain dead for their rest of their dead lives. This isn’t anything to be sad about in the ways that living parents and living children are sad, or are supposed to be sad, or whatever. Fuck them. They are living. And all living people really ever want to do is fuck anyway, you know, so let ‘em have that, and let ‘em deal with the consequences of all their fucking.