The Geometry of Love Read online

  It is a gray September day, and the rain dots the windshield as we pull out onto the blacktop. Roll up your window, she says, and I shut out the merciful cool, breathe instead the tepid interior air, listen to the moan of the wipers on the glass.

  We go into town for some groceries—milk, cereal, flour—and to browse the aisles of the fabric section in the five-and-dime, her hands idly plucking at the bolts, pestered by some thought. She wears her sunglasses in the house, like some movie star, although I know it is to hide the bruise around her eye. The other women in the store, I think, notice only how glamorous she looks, like a president’s wife. I follow her, watching which fabrics she pulls between the first two fingers on her right hand. She settles on a bolt of black cotton, crushing it for wrinkles, testing its heft, its drape. She lifts the bolt and carries it to the cutting table. Eight yards, she says, sliding the bolt to the woman on the other side of the table. The cutter slides her glasses onto her nose from the chain where they hang on her chest and copies down the price from the end of the bolt onto her beat-up receipt book. She smiles, friendly, and the bolt thumps on the cutting table as she turns it, unfurling the fabric into a dark pile.

  What are you making Miz Johnston? the woman asks, smoothing the cloth to check for flaws. I am counting off the inches on the yardstick edge, watching the flash of her scissors, like wings against the black, marking how lazily the fan moves above our heads. My mother does not answer, can only look away as if she hadn’t heard, squint against the light from the storefront window, her mouth immovable. And the woman is quiet again, counts off the yards, six-seven-eight. She holds the mark with her finger, and her sharp scissors smoothly part the fabric with a sound like the noise of something being irreparably torn.

  The afternoon has cleared, and all that is left of the rain is the damp under our tires. At home she submerges the fabric in the sink, carefully, and it bleeds color into the water, bouncing its pale echoes on the porcelain. The fabric hangs on the line all afternoon, flapping in the breeze like some airless and angular flock of black birds, seen too close. She spends the afternoon in the kitchen, flipping the pages of a magazine and watching the fabric dry, considering, I think, what sort of dress to make. And I watch her. I catch her out by the line once or twice, checking on it, testing its dryness, and she holds a loose flap of it, like a comfort, against her face. Walking among the folds of the fabric I can feel its presence in the wind; it is a counterpoint to the sun, like a picture seen in negative, but it glows, too, with the heat, and I can lose myself in it. Where the fabric flutters against my face I can see the dim world through its weave, a hard-surfaced world of light and light reflected. The fabric smells of the sunlight it has absorbed, warm and deep, the light falls against its skin and in, in.

  Come away from there, she calls, and the wind whips her skirt about her legs like a lover. Against the bright sky she is beautiful, a strand of her hair has come loose from her bun. A bunch of blackbirds scatter in the sky near the house, their fleet shadows speckle the ground. Their red wings are like wounds, flashing into sight. Come along, she says, but after I have gone into the house, I can see her through the screen taking another look from the porch, looking out over the clothesline and off to the barn where my father is shoveling feed, his back bent with the load.

  The cars around me skim at an unwavering seventy-five, eating up road, passing me in a blue swish of steel and chrome, their lights coming on two by two, showing me the crystalline white of hurried speed, an anxiety to get home before the day is entirely erased. The sun is still quite high, but it was filtered in and out through the clouds in the west. A storm is blowing up, wide and low, and it tints the distant air, so the horizon to the west looks heavy and particled like some photograph blown too big.

  The map in my head is telling me north, north, I am drawn like metal to a magnet. My road is some simple line drawn on the face of the world, and I wish for the certainty of it, for a route without relief. The other cars pass me, twitching between lanes, committed only to forward speed and motion, as if they do not know when to stop. In my head I carry the picture of both ends of this journey, like a map, an end needs a beginning, a destination is in some sense alibied by where you’ve been.

  On the map, the highway tips a little west at Waco and then unrolls straight and true, headed north, long past the limits of what I know and how long the day will last. I wish the sun were high and strong. I wish it did not waver or wave, did not paste shadows at the feet of all these things around me: squatting cars, the cacophony of tall signs, the irregular comings and going of buildings and towns. There are no curves in this landscape, the center is that clear line of uninterrupted interstate, the dotted centerline ticking off time and distance, stretching to the horizon, as if off the end of the world. This feeling pulls me along the interstate as if it were between the rails of a bridge and the water were far, far below.

  It happened in our house, of course, I have never been inside your apartment, have only glimpsed it from the outside, peered into the half-open door. When you left you did not take sheets or towels, only some clothes, inexplicably from the hamper, as if you wished to send me some message about clean vs. dirty. I remember sitting on the closed toilet in the bathroom, fingering the pink plush lid cover your mother mailed us from Kansas and watching you, wondering what you would find worth taking. As you packed a duffel, you kept up a running commentary that faded in and out like a radio signal not quite tuned in.

  It’s not that I haven’t imagined your new life. I imagine your apartment as a dank and windowless place without sheets or cutlery, where your dirty clothes have taken over the furniture like unwelcome guests lying across all the horizontal spaces and sucking up all the beer. On Sunday afternoon you watch football together on your little black and white.

  In fact, I’m sure it is a nice place, quite livable with sheets on the bed and a half-gallon of fresh milk in the fridge. You have rented furniture, I know, and have a phone number, as if this arrangement were permanent. If I call directory assistance, a stranger’s mouth will say: Frank Wilson, as if you were real. And then the computer voice hooks up to say: We’re sorry. That number is unlisted. You sometimes date, I am told, and I can imagine your arm around a woman on the rented couch, the rough weave scratchily urging you toward a kiss. In fact, a floor above you lives a woman who would have been your next wife. At night you sometimes rap on the ceiling with a broomstick, just to tell her you hear the music running on her stereo and to let her know that you’re alive.

  But this is another story, something between us, like the thing that lay on the table between us. I did not want to pick it up, but I did not want to let it go.

  When did you buy that thing.

  What thing?

  The gun.

  You know, when we split. You are lying, but why.

  Why?

  Why what?

  Why did you buy the gun.

  Don’t you get it? You make a motion like a gun at your head, and your thumb is the hammer thrown over. We uneasily shift in our chairs like schoolkids.

  Not me?

  Jesus Christ, you say. That’s your trouble, everything has to be you, you, you. You give me that open-handed gesture. The hand lies there a moment between us, your palm turns toward the gun, then you balk, pull your hand back, run it through your hair, relax, sit back. Take a breath. Let my heart beat. First you, then me.

  You had put the gun on the table between us. Here.

  My father’s shotgun had leaned like any old thing, barrel skyward, in the broom closet at home. It was as regular as the mop and sometimes hung with dust rags. But this was a surprise in our tiny universe: a gun, gunpowder, gunpoint, gunplay. I can shoot but I am gun-shy, generally hold to the gunwales of my boat so it does not tip. I looked at that gun and thought of the hiding places you might have used. The usual: nighttable drawer, between the mattress and the box springs, in the glove compartment of your car. Or maybe someplace else: in the vegetable crisper, under
the sofa, in the hanging dining room lamp (its outline, dark and heavy, projected through the bowl each time the switch is flipped.)

  I knew all along I would have to leave this house. I had packed the little pasteboard suitcase, folded my clothes into days, pants and shirts, a layer of underwear between like icing between the layers of cake. I put in it the things I wouldn’t think of in a rush, as if I were packing for a fire. I finished it up with a toothbrush and toothpaste in that shiny pocket at the side but I couldn’t make myself go through with it, couldn’t leave. I sat behind the wheel of the old Ford, willing myself to start it up, but only staring out the windshield at the white rectangled garage door. Not yet, I told myself. Later.

  Take it, you said.

  I don’t want that.

  Take it. And your hand nudged the thing toward me, the hard edge of it grating on the tabletop.

  For protection.

  From whom? You want me to shoot you?

  No, impatient, but I want to come home.

  So you’re giving me a gun?

  You’re afraid.

  Yes.

  I told them at the club that we had been wrestling, and you blacked my eye with your elbow, accidentally. Jake took me aside that evening and asked if I needed anything done. I was fetching some onions from the back, cradling them in the skirt of my apron, and I found I could look him in the face. No, I said. What could possibly be done? and I knew you shouldn’t come around for a while, because of their kidding. You should see the other guy, I told them.

  I went on wearing my ratty apron, making lunch and change, sliding the racks of balls across the counter, and making excuses for you. I liked the job, and that paycheck was a lucky thing at the time. I had been idling at the front by the counter while you tried to pick up a game at the back. We were living out of the truck, and it was hot already although it was only May. I was sitting at the counter drinking a Coke and after a while Jake got curious, as if he didn’t know this story. He started asking me questions, mostly friendly. I was watching you, and you were tapping the business end of the cue on the floor, tipping it over one leg in that nervous habit that meant you were losing.

  I was wearing my cutoffs and a halter top, and Jake asked if I could cook. He idly wiped the counter with his gray cloth, leaving behind it an arc of grease.

  A little. He shoved a cheeseburger basket toward me.

  Oil’s not hot enough, I told him. They’ll crisp quicker and won’t take so much grease. Even so, I ate it. Later I was behind the counter, scraping the griddle and taking orders. I let Jake tie an apron on me, his arms reaching around my bare middle to cross the strings around to the front, I could feel his body up against my back, a flash of strange coastline, his round belly, the failed muscles of his arms. I could smell the morning at the grill on him, and already beer, but his hands were steady, and his blue eyes were clear. He reached a hand up to loose my ponytail from the string with a caress. He looked me in the face, up close, but then he tilted his old eyes away, backed up, cleared his throat. Still he was harmless, and at the back I could see you in a sweat. I need this job, I told Jake, and I watched you take our money out of your pocket and count twenty dollars onto the green felt of the table. That left thirty-four dollars.

  Four-fifty an hour, 11 A.M. to close. As an afterthought Jake added, Meals too, if you can find time.

  It’s good sometimes to know what comes next, to know where you have to be at 11 A.M., even if it is a dusty pool hall down on Bandera and past the barbecue place with the backwards Texas outlined in neon. It was in the mostly new part of town, Leon Valley, the storefront a leftover from the days when Bandera zoomed off into the country, and this was somewhere lonesome. It was an old stone building with a counter at the front and tables in the back. The floor was linoleum, a little dusty around the edges, and the walls smudged in places with pastel fingers of chalk and here and there a scuff from a cue, like the scars of fights. The customers were mostly men, and I divided them into two categories, friendly and indifferent.

  In the quiet of the afternoon, after the sizzle of late lunch had passed, the rhythm line was only the muted clicking of the balls and the low talk of men too bored to finish the workday. They carried beer in plastic cups from the barbecue place next door and left wet rings on the rims of the tables. The light lay in pools across the felt, pouring in yellow cones out of the overheads, as if to spotlight the games. The men moved their faces in and out of the light, their bodies rimmed by darkness and smoke, nonchalantly knocking the balls into place and acting as if nothing were happening.

  In the afternoon I could work back there, pretending to dust or carrying the broom and watch the men moving as if underwater; they moved carefully, coolly, never touching, their muscles scarcely working. It seemed that some internal gravity only kept them together, and they angled their cigarettes on the edge of the tables, the ash dropping onto the floor while they shot.

  It was cool back there and undisturbed by the sounds of traffic on the road out front. We turned the radio to something soft and kept it low so it barely showed above the spare murmur of conversation. Sometimes a man came in by himself and racked up some balls for his own pleasure, but mostly they came in twos and threes, killing time between jobs or playing hooky from the jobs they had. Ryan was one of those occasional players, I’d push a rack of balls across the counter to him, and he’d touch his hand to his cap, a brief pinch of bill, gentlemanly, in thanks.

  His lean fingers worked the triangle of balls without time for thought. The break was a quick, sharp, crack, heard all over the room, and he’d work his way around the table, fast, efficient, the balls falling into place with each shot.

  You married? he asked one day. I was sweeping back around the tables, bored of waiting for something to happen and wanting to talk. You were staying someplace else then, I didn’t know where, and the house was empty all day, anxious Sam waiting out back for someone to come home. The house was hard to fill at night; it echoed that emptiness with only me and Sam, as if we were not loud enough or perhaps just insufficiently solid.

  Off and on, I said.

  Oh, he said. And that was all. Later I watched him walk his slow walk to the door, as if he had nothing but this moment.

  I remember walking with my father down by the creek. We skirted the cottonwoods, now and then getting a look at the sluggish blue-gray creek as it sleepily snuggled the bank. It was an autumn afternoon, chill and golden, the trees like a fire against the watercolor sky. The air was fresh with the smell of the fallen leaves, dampness and smoke from someone’s brush pile. We kicked up a racket in the bluestem, the stalks crisp under our boots. Sam trotted on ahead, pausing sometimes to sniff the breeze, his face tipped into the wind, then dropping back, panting happily. He pauses, tongue lolling, looks over one shoulder at us, and my father says, OK, boy. A few quick steps more, and Sam scares up a covey of quail, five or six brown bundles, and they start like a handful of stones pitched into the sky, each a sleek flutter of wings desperate for speed and skimming the tips of the tall grass. My father raises the 410 to his shoulder, angles his face to the sight, I see the intent in his mouth. He fires before they can drop back into the brush, the gun booms out something like words if only I could understand the words, one, he pumps it, two. He fires, and two birds fall into the long grass ahead, plunging as if flight were some impossible thing. The others streak away across the creek, and I smell the bitter smell of the gunpowder, the flash of fire. When he drops the shotgun from his shoulder, I run ahead to find the birds.

  My father isn’t through. As I look for them, he is idling behind me. I can hear him playing around, pointing the thing at Sam then me, says boom, boom, mimicking the kick against his shoulder. I find one bird, limp and dead, in the brown grass, its feathers are soft and warm in my hand, its head lolls loose over my fingers. Sam stands watching the second, it was wounded and thrashing, wet with blood, desperate. I crouch beside the dog, and my father comes up and takes the first bird from my hand
to slip into his pocket. We pause a moment, hypnotized by the movement of the second bird fluttering aimlessly in the weeds, until it stops for breath, and he closes his hand over its body, pinning its wings and closing a circle of fingers around its neck. He brings it close to his face a moment, seems almost to speak to it, rubs between its eyes with one finger as it were a pet, and then with one quick twist, wrings its neck. The blood, sticky and strange, wets his fingers, and he slips the bundle into his pocket. The blood he wipes onto the leg of his trousers.

  I took your pistol in my hand, a test, laid its smooth handle across my palm, hefted it, and your eyes flickered blue at me, both of us acting as if nothing were happening, a test, a claim, a dare. It was worn smooth, as if to fit my hand, the contours of the grip hugging my hand, my fingers falling into line, one finger easy on the trigger.

  See how simple, you said, and I laid it back on the table between us, carefully replacing it as if it had never been disturbed.

  What happened to Sam, I said.

  Oh, Sam’s staying with some friends of mine. Out in the country.

  You don’t know anybody in the country, I said, confirming it in the line you made of your mouth.

  It was just a flash of your leg, thigh really, where a gunfighter wears his weapon in a western. I saw it in the side mirror, I caught the look as you handed me into my car. You lean in the window as if to kiss me, but that was from some other time. You are framed briefly in the open window, the restaurant behind your head, your hands folded over the edge of the door, and say only, See you at home.

  In the rearview mirror, I watch you circle back to your truck, a few spaces away, in a breathless skip. You climb in, folding your legs under the wheel, levering your body into place with a hand on the wheel. The hinge complains when the door swings to. You wave, seem to smile, and I watch you through the twin frame of your car window and mine, and it seems to me you are controlled, tamed by the space, the conventions of a sunny afternoon. As we pull out of the lot, it seems safe enough to visit, for once, the apartment where you live.