Square Wave Page 2

  It was this qualification that complicated the gymnast’s answer. The case, and the contrast with the other endeavors, would seem simpler to make with an unjudged sport, track perhaps being the ideal. But the gymnast spoke with such casual conviction, Stagg found it difficult to disbelieve him, even if it threw into doubt exactly what case he meant to be making, and it was not quite possible to understand how what he said could be true, or even how the world would have to be arranged for it to be true.

  But wasn’t it Catherine, another Great, who’d said that victors aren’t judged? The question flitted through Stagg’s mind. He let the conversation move on. He would rather explore the thought himself, later, on his own. The gymnast, if he knew anything of this, could only muddle things from here, or coarsely domesticate whatever wayward insight he might have had. Still, Stagg was more impressed by the man then, if only complexly so, than he had ever been, before or since.

  The only thing about the gymnast that brought Stagg an unadulterated satisfaction, though not a noble one, was a disastrous day in his life. Renna had gone to see him perform in a state competition, more of a warm up for the season, in his second specialty, the rings. From a handstand, impressively taut and straight, he dipped down into the iron cross, an inverted one, his signature move. But just before he reached the position, a pectoral gave way.

  Normally the cross, inverted or not, needs to be held for two seconds for the judges to score it. But his was not a holding of the position so much as a passing through it. He descended from the handstand past the cross, his outstretched arms closing in on his sides. For an instant, with his arms angled back slightly, like wings, he seemed to her a plane flying toward the mat. Stagg found this beautiful. Sometimes he would ask Renna to tell him the story again, go over the feeling she had at just this moment. Once in a while she would indulge his morbidity.

  When the gymnast’s arms reached his sides, his hands clung tight to the rings and his body whipped around perforce, separating his shoulder and tearing a biceps as he spun to the ground. This was six months ago. But even as he was moving out, Renna remembered him not by the energy drinks crowding the fridge, or the hyperbolically proportioned upper body, or the six a.m. alarms that began even his Sundays, but by that passing, upside-down cross. For her, if not for the judges, it counted. If what the gymnast was saying at dinner were to be believed, it simply counted, for no one in particular.

  They were in her bed now, she under the covers, he over them. “You can be my roommate,” she said, caprice speaking.

  “I like my apartment.”

  “Compared to this one?” she asked, as if that were insane.

  “It’s chastening is what I mean. I have a lot to do right now, to write. It will go faster there. And anyway you don’t want my notes all over the place. They’ve got a way of taking up as much space as there is.”

  She frowned but it was mostly show.

  “The sooner I finish, the sooner we could go somewhere,” he said, taking her expression in earnest. “Maybe we’ll get a place together when our leases are up.”

  “I can edit them. They’re like short stories,” she said, passing over, or through, his words to his work.

  “More like fragments, of fact. Patchworks of fact.”

  “Bricolage.” She drew the word out in a faraway whisper, as if speaking to her own past in graduate school.

  The mattress shifted. She was on her side now, away from him, texting, and then up and out of bed.

  “Oh I thought he’d cancel. I have so little to do and I’m still doing it terribly.” She dressed twitchily, pulling on lint-ridden leggings, Chelsea boots, and a cream blouse. “And I have a dinner tonight.” She ducked into the bathroom to fix her hair, so short now it didn’t need to be fixed.

  “Weren’t we going to see Larent play tonight?”

  “I know. You go, though. He wants you to hear his new stuff, he said so.”

  Stagg’s interest was wholly dependent on hers.

  “Tell him I’m sorry,” she said. “He knows how I am. Will you go, for both of us?”

  With a sucking sound a kiss came at him from the doorway. He stared at his feet. Then she was on top of him, sprawled. “Let’s move to Africa.”

  “Who’s the writer this time?” he asked.

  “The dinner? Tim Heath. He hasn’t written much yet. But what he’s written! Have you read anything?”

  “What’s he write?”

  “Short stories mainly.”

  “Stories, no, I don’t—”

  “You just write them.”

  “That’s what you keep saying.”

  “Okay, so they aren’t stories! They don’t sound at all like essays, though. Something beyond that. Beyond even history maybe. Right?” She rubbed her face against his and her hair poked at his eyes. “I know they’ll be you—all you.”

  She pecked his lips twice and sat up on the edge of the bed, facing away from him. “Anyway, I want to get something new from Tim, before his story collection comes out. A reported piece even. He has some pitches. Could make him a regular contributor, if things go well. It would definitely help the magazine.”

  “That is your job.”

  “It’s the only interesting part of it right now. He’s very good. He’s like you.”

  She stood and turned just her face to him, over her shoulder. “Oh, do I love you,” she said, in a tone that placed this just between a statement and a question.

  He pulled her hands to him and kissed the tips of her fingers.

  “Okay, so, home late, I’ll miss you.”

  The door rattled shut and a pattering of feet faded in the hallway. He lifted the window. The draft stung his face, whipped the door closed, and vanished. There was only a plastic lighter in the blue and white cigarette pack on the sill, next to the dark bottle and the trails of ashes like crumbs. He tossed the empty box, cellophane still girdling its lower half, into the morning outside. It caught in a gust and hovered a moment before the wind pinned it to the other side of the alley, leaving it soon to tumble into the weeds of pale green and the beer bottle shards of a darker hue below.

  Without fantasies he licked his hand and lay back on the bed. Just before he came, soundlessly, he turned on his side, toward the floorboards. He turned back and waited for the medicinal effects to take hold. Immediately things seemed simpler, mercifully abstract. Philosophical. A natural refuge.

  He rarely leaned on fantasies now. When he faltered, and a blank slate wouldn’t do, the only ones that helped were of her. But he didn’t want them. They were the wrong kind. There were times, though, when nothing else sufficed, and, helpless, he would let his mind, till then a vacuum, fill with the men who had, in her own strange and potent description, metabolized her.

  Thinking of her this way, as an instrument, satisfied something in him. He was slow to accept this, but the link between imagining her so and the stiffening of his cock had grown too strong to ignore.

  She herself spoke with something close to pride about being a notch in the right bedposts, the ones of the Casanovas and cads, the elegant rakes. Mostly she would describe these men of art through the beauty of their apartments, the ubiquity of their friends, the perfection of their seductions. There was admiration, envy, and only a little disgust in her voice when she did, and on the occasions when scorn did come to the fore, the more she poured on them, the more pleased she seemed to be to have lain in their beds.

  It gave her something, to play a part in their stories, any part, the more public the better. Though she liked gossip, she liked being its object even more. And as she seemed to measure her worth not by anything inhering in her, but by the company she kept, the surroundings she could work her way into, it was lucky she had a knack for ingratiation.

  Generally all of this nauseated him, and though he didn’t like to think about it, it must have been one of the less lofty reasons he’d dropped out of publishing so quickly: that he might not have to know these gallants of empty graces and Chesh
ire smiles.

  In fact, she too wanted to feel she was something apart from these men, that world, especially its charlatanry, which in quieter moments she allowed, in the soft, slow monotone she did her thinking in, was part of its essence, maybe even part of its allure. You were never really expected to show your hand.

  His affection for her, though, was the proof that she had a hand to show. After all, she thought, he’d done the work—not just intellectually, in books, but introspectively, in himself—that they mostly pretended to. If she could hold his attention when they could not, that must mean something: that though she spent much of her time swanning around, disappearing in the froth, there would always be a remainder. And this, the solidest bit of her, was something that he had to take seriously.

  But did she really want that, to be truly seen? Wasn’t that seriousness, the very one he was applying now while she ran off into that world, already beginning to undo them? The closer he looked, the more she squirmed, the more the remainder receded like a mirage. Even if it existed, she did nothing to honor it. And was that what drew him to her anyway? He stepped around the idea that her appeal might be grounded in bone structure. Perhaps they both needed the conceit then.

  None of these thoughts, of course, helped in bed with her. But alone, with his hand on his cock, they brought him not just nausea but pleasure. Solitude activated their sexual potential. He came hardest this way now, without her around, only a notion of her and him, and not a flattering one.

  It occurred to him then, in that swell of endorphins, that really her history with men was derivative, an effect emanating from a cause broader if not deeper than sex. She was shot through with a flutter.

  The skittering and lunging, more than her beauty, had a near unassailable force on him—near only because, like bad hearts, her attention too had a flutter in it. The order of explanation, though. Was it just that she was a perfect conduit? The impressions the world made on her, lighting the eyes, tickling the skin, was their transmission simply uncorrupted, and all her buzz and bloom merely the reflection of a chaos woven into the world itself, an irreducible manifold? Was it, then, only his own sensorium’s deficiencies that rendered the world smooth enough to still his mind? Could this distortion, the soft focus, be what provided for the possibility of sustained attention, and so of art, love, friendship, and the rest of the things the gymnast had spoken of?

  But then it might have been the other way around. Maybe the flutter dwelled in her, sent a tremor through the world. It might have been what governed the flitting that so transfixed him, if “governed” was the right word.

  What whiskey remained he tipped into last night’s snifter till the better part of the balloon was amber. He took four overlarge gulps, brimming mouthfuls that sent trickles of liquor down his chin. Sparking the flint of the lighter continuously, he sat back on the bed and returned his eyes to his feet, waiting for the soft and familiar burn of the stomach and a still airier texture to the world in his mind.

  Sometimes he wished simple condemnation were an option. But there were spasms of awareness in her as rich as any he’d known: the times, say, she could tell he’d had four drinks not three, or more preternaturally, ten drinks not eight, by the slightest variations in the clatter of his words as they left his mouth; or sense the strength of his misgivings by how their hands fit together when they walked; or weigh the gravity of his thoughts by how his head lay on her shoulder, in bed.

  There were the times too when she seemed to recall every detail of his boyhood, however quotidian, or of his sexual history, however odd, that he’d ever conveyed to her, even if only implicitly. She would seem more at home with his life than he was, more able to flip through the facts, his facts, and arrange them into significant wholes. She couldn’t do the same for herself, of course. She could be you but not her. That was her perversion.

  Then there were the times, when she was excited for a stretch, for whatever reason, that she would effortlessly absorb the tiniest things he did, chart the place and nature of every object around him. Long after he’d let go of the occasion’s minutia, she could recall just what he’d eaten, what he’d passed on, and in what order; or where the power outlets were or weren’t in a country house she’d been in just once, many months ago, in another country; or the exact page on which he’d given up on a book forever, setting it face up and open on the kitchen table, its spine broken.

  In all of these moments he felt transparent, and something like parity would reign between them. For the grain of his own attention, she admiringly granted, was unobservable, only a postulate; and it seemed always pitched that way, toward her, toward anything—except, as she’d ruefully pointed out more than once, when he made himself hopelessly drunk, and understanding was no longer an option.

  But her awareness undulated. Like a square wave of terrific amplitude, the crests would drop precipitously into troughs no less remarkable, but for the purity of their oblivion. She was made of nothing then, as was everything around her. Nothing counted, not even things that meant the world: her work, his writing.

  His own being would begin to flicker. Sometimes she would smile. It terrified him, the voided eyes. He would look into his hands and croak, “Anyway…” She would say things then they would never remember, not because the words didn’t reach their ears, but because their sense, so slight, seemed to die with their sound.

  He couldn’t help but anticipate these slackenings. They contaminated the tauter stretches, throwing them in relief, making them more acutely felt and then immediately missed, even before they had actually gone. Sex was no different—towering spikes of communion plunging down toward onanism until it was only that. She’d get herself off lying next to him, eyes closed, having only just got off on him. “I like it when you’re selfish,” she’d say. He liked it when she wasn’t.

  So things went, in an endless oscillation. She was as close to him, then as far from him, as one might be, and it was rending him. It made him wonder what exactly he was to her. Once, she’d cheerfully volunteered that he was like a stone at the bottom of a pond. He was still thinking about that. She, on the other hand, she was the lizard that walks on water, she said. Or not walks. It couldn’t do that, not without crashing through. Certainly not stands. Only runs. The surface was just firm enough for that, shattering only after she had moved on.

  You slow me down, she said. That must be how she’d arrived, falling to him, beyond the dappling light above. It was new. She liked it, seeing in the dark, without the glare. And what was she to him then? An emissary? Of that same light?

  The whiskey continued to disperse him. He considered now how the crests of the wave might be dilated, if that was the key between them. Perhaps it could be accelerated, he thought, its frequency increased, its period compressed, so that the gaping voids at the base might be elided from experience, as the black between film frames is, and her attention might appear a continuous succession of peaks.

  Perhaps, though, he would get used to the pairing of states, learn to take what he could from both. To take the flutter out of her mind, even if he could, might take it out of her body too, and he couldn’t be sure he’d want what remained. She might be an alloy, not an element. There might be no space, when it came to her, between purity and dispersion.

  ■■■

  The thin blond light turned to gleaming gold, the chill stiffened in a rising wind, but still the whiskey pulled him under. Lately his dreams were duller than his life. They embarrassed him, their triteness, their risible symbolisms. They were also countable, and this redeemed them for him, at least a little.

  There were five. Or else five acts of a single dream. In the first, standing, he eats a cold Reuben just peeled from the plastic wrap, the meat stiff, the striations of fat congealed, the rye disintegrating in a bath of Russian dressing. He throws a quarter of it out, but on its way past the swinging door of the deli trash-can, a twisted rope of plastic gets stuck in it. The man behind the counter, the one without a paper hat,
stares at him as he decides whether he’s expected to push the sandwich through. Often he would wake after this, and once he even fixed himself a sandwich.

  When he returns to sleep, invariably he’s high above half-court watching basketball. He can taste salted beef cutting through the barley of arena beer. A lanky guard on the wing sheds his defender off a high screen but runs into a forward, arms wide, legs low, waiting at the elbow. He’s forced toward the baseline, where he starts backing down the bigger man. The help comes, a passing lane opens, but the clock is at four. He picks up his dribble, holds the ball against his chest, and puts up a turnaround fade-away over the fingertips of the forward and the center. The horn sounds and the backboard is framed in pipes of red light. The ball skips across the rim. The half is done. The score stays tied. The stadium monitors replay the shot three times, each one in slower motion than the last.

  Before the close, two intervening acts: the first, at a latrine, listening to the drumming of piss on steel, and the second, in an enormous crowd molded in the shape of an avenue, on New Year’s, creeping down the Las Vegas Strip. Sometimes he can only manage to keep his feet beneath the spot where the crowd steers the rest of his body, but sometimes he feels as if, for a moment, it is his feet, his body now driven by them, that moves the crowd.

  And then the finale, which is without all sound. In the midafternoon sun he walks four blocks, through empty streets, in the city’s red light district. When he arrives at the river, he sits on the front slats of a bench, right on the edge of it, with a Parliament behind his ear. He pulls the box of cigar matches from his shirt pocket and lights one, large like the tiniest torch, with a gentle stroke. The tall teardrop of a flame fails to bear a twitch of the air. Four matches go the same way. The box has many more. But he sets it down on a slat, bites down on the filter, and hunches forward, resting his chin on his hands as his thoughts turn to nothing especially. There the curtain drops.