Know Your Beholder: A Novel Read online

  Harriet Gumm boasts dyed black bangs over mischievous Coca-Cola-brown, heavily lined eyes, and she is one of those sun-phobic loners whose ears are perpetually plugged with iPhone buds. She wears mostly navy-blue or black clothes, often covered by a charcoal-gray wool pinafore, a silk headscarf, knee-high white socks, and black leather, brass-buckled children’s shoes. She seems somehow out of time, as if she could have been a troubled silent-film star, or some haunted character from an Edward Gorey fable. In a more pedestrian context, at a glance she could be mistaken for a parochial junior high school student. But then she’ll turn and cast her large brown eyes at you with such intensity it’s as if a four-hundred-year-old witch is glimpsing the damp, thin paper napkin that is your soul.

  Our exchanges have been limited to brief hellos in the basement laundry room—her voice surprisingly quiet and girlish—and minimal discourse about the rent, which she always pays in cash (invariably twenty-five twenty-dollar bills), which she wraps in scented white, patterned Kleenex and stuffs into a white business envelope with “Mr. Falbo” printed on the front. The strange thing about her penmanship is that it’s an uncanny replica of my manual Corona typewriter font. So much so that I took an eraser to it only to discover that it was composed in fine-point charcoal pencil.

  When she moved in she brought with her a duffel bag, a waxed canvas backpack, and a wooden easel. Once, when I had to fix her window, which wouldn’t close, I noticed that she had turned all of her artwork around, so that it looked like she was hanging blank pieces of sketch paper on her walls.

  Her music of choice is a multitude of African-American female classic soul singers, ranging from Etta James to Tina Turner. Her skin is so alabaster white it’s almost blue, and as far as I can tell, she doesn’t appropriate cultural “blackness” in any way. If anything, she presents herself as a prog-rock/goth chick, and I would expect her playlist to contain more Ministry or PJ Harvey than Sister Sledge.

  There is something porcelain and doll-like about her. She is slim-hipped, not quite long-legged, not quite full-lipped, and, like Dennis Church, possesses a long yet unapologetic nose. But her icy pallor dominates. For some reason I can’t quite imagine her with pubic hair. I see a small series of pyramid-shaped gemstones instead. She is attractive in the same way that certain kinds of high-end candy dishes can be.

  The man whom she is currently drawing, Keith, is an overweight, slow-moving, light-skinned perpetual smiler whose extreme positive nature could be misconstrued as Christian. He’s always beaming, or at least on the verge of it, and the grooves in his deep-guttered corduroys produce such loud swishing noises that I can hear him approaching the back porch all the way from my attic room. Keith stands a hulking six-four, with oddly thin, vermiform arms. He apparently doesn’t own a car, as I’ve witnessed him only afoot.

  As I sit here in my yellowing, decade-old thermals, while the ghostly snow (it has officially been declared a blizzard) passes through the spill of weak moonlight outside my attic window, I am seized by the certainty that I am still obsessed with a woman who no longer wants me, and has not wanted me for a good long time. This certainty I picture with a large Marfan hand, one that might be wearing a thin, black, homicidal-looking leather glove, and it hurts. It makes it ache in my Adam’s apple, this certainty. It makes me want to drink consecutive bourbons and play Minnesota-based, midnineties slowcore music, which doles out fewer beats per minute than Chopin’s brutally sad nocturnes.

  Other than the wretchedness of cancer, which I came to know vicariously through my mother’s suffering, there is perhaps no greater misery than the loss of the Love of Your Life. I know it’s hyperbolic and sentimental and whiny, but those are the truest words I can type.

  The Love of My Life. The One Great Love. Miracle Love.

  As if I were some sad-eyed, slope-shouldered, prehistoric mountain creature roaming the antediluvian earth at night, and was befriended by a lonely, nocturnal, equally prehistoric bird, say, a kind of burly, mechanical-looking but kindhearted loon of the night who saves the prehistoric mountain creature from the terror of Epic Loneliness.

  In other words, Love So Special It Might as Well Be a Children’s Fable kind of love.

  I could certainly use the services of one of Bradley’s visitors. I’d like to believe that, like my former brother-in-law, I have willingly devolved into my own monastic plantlike state, solitary, self-sustaining, animated only by moisture and an attic window’s worth of sun, but I can’t deny that I long for the simple creature comfort of companionship, specifically female companionship. It’s not sex that I’m talking about, although that certainly accounts for something; it’s the warmth of another. The reliability and purity of a woman’s shape moving through a shared room. The cast and cant of her shadow on a wall. The warm apples-and-smoke scent of her hair hanging faintly in the air. The perfect spiderweb smallness of bras and panties clinging to a hamper’s wicker skin. The minty effluvium of her toothpaste breath on cold winter mornings.

  In the simplest of terms, according to Sheila Anne, she left me because I lost my ambition. Because I settled—that was the word she kept throwing around.

  Settle: to decide on something; to solve; to make or become resident; to colonize place; to stop floating; to pay what is owed; to move downward; to subside; to stop moving; to make or become clear; to end a legal dispute; to make or become calm; to put details in order; to make somebody comfortable; to put something in place; to establish or become established; to compact something firmly; to assign property; to impregnate or be impregnated.

  I’m fairly certain that, with regard to me, the definition Sheila Anne was referring to was “to stop moving.”

  And why did I stop moving? Because I grew to be satisfied with our life in Pollard and the cresting of the Third Policeman and the cluttered familiarity of the basement recording studio. Perhaps the most troubling reason I stopped moving is because of love itself. Because I let love become my priority, which, I realize in retrospect, results in too much doting, a compulsive need to touch and cling, and the dissolution of any mystery that might exist between intimate companions. It is mystery, after all, that keeps a marriage interesting. Things secreted in drawers. Unknown telephone numbers on the long-distance bill. Unusual URL addresses on the web browser.

  I think I took marriage to be a kind of pre-midlife apotheosis, but instead of it inspiring me to continue to grow as Francis Falbo the Man and Francis Falbo the Rock Musician (thereby increasing my mystery quotient!), it pushed me into a strange mode of self-satisfied semiretirement. I loved getting domestic and cuddly. I practically swooned at the dependable regularity of shopping for groceries and the weekly Laundry Day and tri-weekly scheduled Magic Hour Sex and morning coffee/newspaper reading and making “team” decisions about dinner and evening entertainment and whether or not we should get a Puggle (we never did).

  Sheila Anne commuted to work ninety minutes away, where she managed the Human Resources Department at Decatur Memorial Hospital. Route 41 is not the most exciting drive in the state, and the boring commute, combined with my boring car and her boring, mostly devout Christian staff, made her tenure at Decatur Memorial pretty uneventful, if not existentially challenging. Then she would come home to a cookbook dinner, prepared by her domestically satisfied, bemused-by-a-midlife-type-lifestyle-but-actually-only-thirty-two-year-old husband, and a few glasses of twelve-dollar Merlot, and maybe a semi-interesting studio film foisting itself off as an independent dramedy about a small-town varsity wrestling coach or lawn-furniture salesperson or some such middlebrow, down-on-his-luck-despite-being-world-class-handsome hero, and then we would bed down to sleep and wake up early and she would man the espresso machine and scan the newspaper while wolfing down the granola and the antioxidant blueberries and then once again the ninety minutes in the fuel-efficient Volkswagen Jetta to clip time at a hospital where it rarely got better than talking to disgruntled nurses about when they could expect to be fully vested 401(k)-wise.

  The beig
e Midwestern hamster wheel spins and spins.

  I suspect Sheila Anne met Dennis Church at some hospital function where pharmaceutical sales reps were rubbing shoulders with pharmacists, pain management buyers, psychiatrists, and other hospital higher-ups. I imagine the scenario unfolding at a Ponderosa, Glen Campbell on the radio, Sheila Anne and Dennis Church falling in love-at-first-sight across tubs of hi-cal/low-cal dressings at the buffet-style salad bar.

  “Hey,” he says.

  “Hey,” she replies.

  “I’m Dennis. Two Ns.”

  “I’m Sheila Anne.”

  “You’re with the hospital. According to your lanyard you run the Human Resources Department. I’m with a top-three pharmaceutical conglomerate. That’s Glen Campbell on the radio. ‘Rhinestone Cowboy.’ Great tune. You know it was actually written by an Australian? Great American country-and-western pop song written by an Australian. Dingo ate my baby. Go figure.”

  “How long are you in town for?” Sheila Anne asks, warmed by his Top 40 trivia charm.

  “Only tonight. Why do you ask?”

  “Because I find you incredibly attractive, particularly your masculine, aquiline nose, and I don’t want to go home and face my mediocre husband whose recent increase in body-fat percentage is only seconded by his declining mystery quotient. Plus, our sex has become like the mechanical, shame-tinted, physiological sawing you read about in Christian reproductive books written for children, where the husband and wife look like pancake people and don’t have genitals per se, but sort of smooth, glabrous, Teflon-like surfaces.”

  “Awesome. You have beautiful, sea-foam-green fuck-me eyes.”

  “And you have an interesting, incredibly strange but undeniably sexy fuck-me nose.”

  “And without going too hyperbolically off the rails here, I have to say, glabrous—what a cock-smoking word choice.”

  “Learned that word from my husband. Good with words. Bad in bed.”

  “Dingo ate my baby.”

  “Put that heaping plate of low-cal lentils down, cowboy, I’ll follow you out.”

  But it really probably went like this:

  “I’m Dennis.”

  “I’m Sheila Anne.”

  “You looked marooned at the salad bar.”

  “Oh, I’m just being vague and noncommittal. There are too many options.”

  “The variety of croutons alone.”

  “It’s all just so complicated. And is that supposed to be blue cheese or ranch?”

  “I’d bet my baked potato that it’s ranch…I gather from your lanyard that you’re with the hospital. I’m from AstraZeneca.”

  “Is that a new addition to our solar system?”

  “It’s a pharmaceutical company. It would appear that I’ve lost my lanyard.”

  “Maybe it’s down at the other end of the salad bar, deeply recessed in that tub of cottage cheese and pineapple bits.”

  “I’m one of the reps. This is part of my new territory. Illinois, Indiana, Iowa. Do you live in Decatur?”

  “I live in Pollard. Southwest down Route Forty-one. Two-lane highway, lots of nice arable fields to take in. Corn. Cows. Silos. What about you?”

  “I live in New York.”

  “City?”

  “The Big Apple, yep.”

  “Never been.”

  “Instead of corn, cows, and silos, we have skyscrapers, pit bulls, and the smell of salmonella in August. I’m actually originally from Colorado. Little town called Yuma, about two hours northeast of Denver.”

  “What lured you east?”

  “The job.”

  “They bring you all the way out to New York City so you can work in the Midwest?”

  “They fly me out here once a month. Put me up in decent hotels, rent me quality sedans.”

  They smile. He reveals his white, nonbleached, staggeringly irresistible teeth.

  Sheila Anne’s larger upper lip dimples up adorably.

  “Mind if I join you?” he asks (finally).

  “Not at all,” she answers.

  And then they finish filling their plates with low-cal, colorful salad bar selections and sit together at an imitation oak, poorly padded, ass-cheek-hardening booth and talk about things like the Wellness Profession and the pros and cons of socialized medicine and why maybe the French and the Swedes have figured it out and the insane hours doctors put in for the good of mankind and how fluorescent hospital lighting makes one look and eventually feel bloodless as a macadamia nut, which can be generally counterintuitive to healing, and how the cafeteria fare at Decatur Memorial has actually improved quite a bit since they brought in the new eco-friendly food services company.

  And over his medium-rare porterhouse steak, in between graceful but without a doubt masculine mastication, Dennis Church, in his lightweight, well-tailored spring/summer business suit, tells the sea-foam-green-eyed beauty across from him about the loneliness of traveling and how low-down and just plain weird it is to have your only companions be your company-bought MacBook Pro and your tricked-out company-financed smartphone, and how sometimes he wishes he lived a simpler life, in a small town with like a Little League diamond and a swimming hole and a barbershop with one of those swirling red-white-and-blue barber poles and ceramic Nativity scenes erected on the lawns of churches during the holiday season and a really high-quality miniature golf course with a windmill that’s so big it almost looks real and a shopping mall with an authentic food court and a grade-A Fourth of July fireworks display at the local speedway and a lima-bean-colored water tower with the town’s name featured in black majuscule letters.

  And in between his words, Sheila Anne imagines her life in New York. The faster metabolism it would educe and the taxicabs and the inconceivable volume of humanity teeming on actual boulevard-sized streets and wide cement sidewalks and sluicing bike messengers and the unspoken rules of engagement on subway cars and the new urban way of walking and the learned skill of avoiding insane encephalitic homeless people with swollen carbuncular faces and leaky eyes and Pilates at dawn and bartenders who can knock your socks off reciting Shakespearean soliloquies while shaking the daylights out of a martini and high-speed elevators and crammed espresso bars and the yeasty sweet smell of Broadway theater lobbies.

  And every other sentence or so Sheila Anne starts to imagine this New York life with him, this incredibly magnetic Dennis Church, who has undone the top button of his oxford now and loosened his tie so his impressive, well-shaven Adam’s apple can be free to dance a bit. And although at this point it is an absurd, premature notion because she is very much married and supposedly in love with and spiritually and legally committed to a man she lost her mind over some four years earlier, she lets her imagination run like a wild horse galloping along the cliffs of the Costa Brava, and all she can see is Dennis’s presumably fit, low-fat, highly conditioned body poised over hers, the two of them composed missionary-style in some cheap roadside motel room off Route 41, with great classic soul music like Larry Graham’s “One in a Million You” playing at a volume so perfect that they can inhale the music with the pores of their conjoined bodies and yet also hear each other’s animal pleasure—the wordless mewls and whimpers—releasing into and infusing with Larry Graham’s velveteen baritone and by the end of their meal, which she can’t even remember eating, let alone choosing, Sheila Anne Falbo has decided to give herself permission to fall under the spell of this extremely thoughtful, surprisingly charming, endlessly interesting gentleman with the aquiline nose who is sitting across from her.

  Earlier I keyed into the Bunches’ unit. The grief over their missing daughter tinges the air like a spoiled egg. Their apartment is surprisingly neat, with furniture that is as beige as it is simple. I assume their plain living is due more to ignorance than some minimalistic aesthetic choice. They were itinerant circus travelers after all, most likely living out of secondhand Winnebagos and camper-trailers, enduring and adapting to gypsylike caravanning. Perhaps they have yet to experience the challenges
of domestic stability and therefore know nothing of the concept of classic American household clutter.

  I was surprised by the lack of toys. Aside from a stuffed corduroy cat that was more of a throw pillow than a child’s companion, there was little if any evidence of toddler life. Regarding Bethany, I thought I might find a series of circus-themed photos of her arranged around the living room walls, the sequined trapeze-artist parents thrusting her joyously into the air as celestial big-top lights glint overhead…a clown riding a miniature tricycle over a sawdust floor, little Bethany perched on the handlebars…an elephant standing in the center of a ring of paper lanterns with Bethany cradled safely in its trunk. But save for what appeared to be a wool Navajo blanket hanging above the sofa, their walls were blank.

  In their entertainment console, an archaic TiVo’s red light was engaged. I imagined them recording The Oprah Winfrey Show, an episode dedicated to the epidemic of Missing Children in the Heartland. The Bunches would view it encamped on their itchy calico sofa, their legs extended on their unremarkable coffee table, as they ate microwaved Stouffer’s.

  Mary Bunch keyed in while I was clutching their remote control. I have no idea why I was suddenly holding it, and I was forced to hide it in the pocket of my bathrobe.

  “What are you doing?” she asked. Her voice was high and faint and trapped in her nose.

  I told her that I’d heard a strange noise in her apartment as I was walking up the stairs. She asked me what kind of noise, and I said, “A sort of scrabbling. There were coons in the attic last night,” I lied.

  “Coons?” she said.

  “Yep,” I replied. “Scrabbling raccoons.”

  She said she was under the impression that raccoons were in hibernation mode.

  And I told her that, yes, the majority of raccoons were indeed engaged in deep hibernation mode, but that sometimes it was necessary for a few of them—a brave select few—to venture out for the purpose of foraging for food. I could hear my voice sliding into its higher bullshit register.