Poetry and Prose from the Center for Writers
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Polyester Silk
by FAE DREMOCK
It's ten in the morning and Carl is still packing. My own bag, packed last night while Carl was on the phone with his ex-wife, Ria, is sitting next to the door.
"Did you sleep with him?" he asks.
I can barely hear him, the hair dryer in my hand is so loud, but we have been having this conversation for three days—since I returned from Chicago. "Of course we'll meet with them," I say, turning off the dryer, smiling.
He turns his back to me and continues packing. Since his divorce from Ria went through, he's angry all the time. He puts the last of his books into his duffle bag and zips it shut, leaving it on his desk. He picks up the stack of bills, settles into the rocker, the wood creaking softly.
"Do you see the pillows anywhere?"
Without looking up, he points to the floor on his side of the bed. "On top of the bedspread."
The bedspread, something I once bought Malone, is an old Indian print torn along the side. Carl hates it.
"You should make a break from the past," he says as I make the bed. "New clothes, new apartment—"
"New face?" I say, and laugh because the white flannel pillowcases I am smoothing once belonged to Ria.
The creaking of the rocker stops. After a moment he is at my side, smoothing a wrinkle down the edge of the bed.
"Aren't you going to start packing?" he asks.
-
I am wearing an overlarge black skirt that puffs out at the side.
"It's all right," he says, when I ask. "Only you should wear a black belt with a black skirt." The plain brown leather displeases him.
He holds my hand as we sit in his baby blue Toyota waiting for the engine to warm up. The air is unusually chilly, and I have an old jacket wrapped around my bare legs.
"Look," he says, "It doesn't matter if you did."
I pull my hand away and wipe off the windshield. "Your defroster isn't working."
"But his was?" he asks, watching my face.
I pull a dog-eared map out of the glove compartment. Door County has been highlighted in yellow, a big red 'X' where their house was. "Which highway are we taking?" I ask.
We argue all the way to the gas station. At the other pump, there's an old pick up, the body jacked-up high over the wheels. The driver, with tattoos up to his elbows, is watching us. Carl takes the map from me and spreads it out over the hood. When he asks again about Malone, I threaten to hitchhike back to Chicago. "Do you want to be cremated or buried?" he asks, without looking up.
After the gas station, we are on the highway, on the way to Door County. The car is packed with wine and sweaters, newspapers and pastries, apples and cheese.
-
The night before while we made salad, he was trying to reason with me about Malone, the man I lived with before Carl. Malone slept around. He played jazz sax, worked weekends at a club in Chicago. Women bought him drinks, ties, hotel rooms. Still, every night he was gone Malone called at four with jokes, stories about the women.
"We were friends," I told Carl. "Good friends." I reached for the salad bowl and dumped in the cheese I'd been grating. "How was Ria?" I asked. Carl had been on the phone for over an hour, sometimes whispering, sometimes yelling.
"We're friends," he said. "Just friends. Good friends."
By supper he had forgotten about Malone and was full of plans for the weekend. We sat up until two talking about this weekend, other weekends.
Once when he was eight, he said, he and his brother had gone camping with their father in the Grand Tetons. They had lived on lizards, birds, fried beetles—whatever they could catch. On the way back, the three of them had walked the last mile barefoot. “Just don’t stop,” their father had said when they wanted to sit down, feet hurting. “Don’t stop. Don’t give up.”
“I wanted to be just like him,” Carl said. “When he was dying, I sat with him in his hospital room and listened to him talk about his life, the way things used to be when he was young. He stopped once and looked over at me. ‘You’re too much like me,’ he said. Then the nurse came in, and I left.”
Carl got up, turned off the lamp and settled down on the rug next to me. “I was proud of that for years,” he said. “Must have told that story to Ria a dozen times. She never said a word. I always thought she wasn’t listening.” He smiled, looked over at me. “While you were in Chicago, I took my brother’s kid fishing. He thought he knew everything. I couldn’t even show him how to wrap a hook. I remember thinking, Danny’s too much like his father.” Carl laughed. “For about five minutes, I decided I didn’t want to be a father. And then I started thinking about us.” We were stretched out next to each other like children, our feet and shoulders touching. Carl was quiet for what seemed like hours, and I listened to crickets, ducks, and one very loud nightingale. “You slept with him, didn’t you?” he said at last.
-
Three years ago, we had driven for the first time to Door County.
Here's the place, he had said, proud. We were far from the nearest town. The house was rundown, the window screens jagged and reddish, the gray paint peeling. I imagined what it would have been like to live there ten years ago: cutting firewood, canning tomatoes, friends from Madison helping to harvest the pumpkins, cucumbers, zucchini.
We parked my old red VW on the shoulder of the road and walked into the hills behind the house he and Ria had built. The paths were overgrown with outlaw honeysuckle, some of the big elms were dead. "They don't like living so close to people," Carl said. "In the wilderness, they're healthy, but here, they take sick and die."
When we walked back at twilight, two people were working in the yard behind the house. The woman looked up from her weeding, then stood and waved us over. Carl dropped my hand, muttered something I didn't catch, then walked to greet her. He introduced me as a friend of his and Ria's, although I was sure she had seen our hands separate.
We stood in the garden and talked about people he and Ria knew. Only once did the man splitting firewood look up at us, and then to watch a large grey cat walk the ten feet from the woodpile to the ground in front of my shoes. I squatted beside the cat, watching the slow back swing of the man's axe, the fast fall forward, in tune, almost, with the woman's voice. When the woman finally invited us in for supper, Carl refused, even though we were starving.
My tennis shoes were damp, my fingernails bluish in the October twilight. We walked back to the car several feet apart. Only after we were back inside the car did he reach across to touch me.
"The guy's a jerk," he’d said, shoving the key into the ignition. "He used to hang out at our house. He used to hang out everywhere. He was always after the women."
"Ria, too?"
He looked at me. "You can stay if you want," he’d said, shoving the gearshift into second. "I'm sure you'd like him."
"I wasn't asking if he caught her," I’d said, and found myself listening in silence to the squeak of the speedometer cable as we drove back into town.
As we drove away from the house, I turned to look back. They were watching us, the man with his back to the woodpile, and the woman leaning against him, completely encircled by his arms.
-
By noon we are on Route 12. I change the tape and slouch down into the seat, the skirt easing above my knees. His hand reaches across to adjust the skirt. “Like silk,” he says. The polyester, I think.
I open the cooler and pour some wine for both of us. As I hand him the wine, his arm under the weight of my hand and glass feels solid. In bed with him, back to back, I have measured his shoulders against mine. Even his pelvis is broader.
When we stop to go for a walk, he heads for a boulder in the middle of the field, climbs it easily. "Glacier trail," he says. "Look—" he helps me up. "Those bluffs used to be lake shores. We'd be under water here, fifty feet. Drowning." He reaches down and picks up pieces of black glass. "Obsidian." He lifts a piece to catch the light. "It would have made us rich once. We'd both be wearing silk."
I can see him dancing in his silk pajamas at the bottom of this lake, his pockets weighted down with obsidian.
One evening when he still lived with Ria, he sat in my rocking chair for hours, far away from me, angry. I washed dishes, made sandwiches he didn't eat, listened to the slow creak against the floor. When he finally left, it was four in the morning, and he hadn't said a word. A week later when he moved out of his house, he told me, “I don't want to see you. Either of you.”
Three weeks later, when I ran into him downtown, his face flushed. We went into the basement of the library to talk. He didn't understand what was happening. He was happy. He wasn't happy. He was moving back in. He was divorcing. We rented a motel room, sat in the bathtub, our shadows large and sharp on the pink ceramic tiles. In the harsh light, he looked almost prehistoric, his arms braided with veins. In the evening we checked out and went back to his apartment to sleep together. “She wants to meet you,” he said.
The next time I made love to him, there was a mark on his left shoulder. I left one on his right arm. Although he had said she wouldn't come to his apartment, I could smell her perfume on the sheets and on his towels.
The following winter, he worked in Mexico. On my birthday, he sent flowers. “No one here has freckles,” he'd written, and below in small formal letters: “Ria and I are divorcing.”
-
At a wayside, I scratch around in the overturned leaves for a fall orchid. When he joins me, he tells me there is no such thing, and squatting in the ankle deep leaves, we start to argue. He tells me I am trying to take control, that I always have to be right. I agree with him on principle, but insist that this time I am right. He waves his index finger in the air. “Number one, he says. You always have to be number one.” When he lays a hand on my shoulder, I shrug it off, get up and move toward the stream.
He is reading the paper when I get back into the car. I pull a maple leaf from his jacket and lay it across the steering wheel. He lets it fall. I cross my legs and adjust my skirt so that my calves show. “Let's make love,” I say, even though he is not looking at me. He agrees suddenly, as if I'd repaired a short. Under a maple tree, I pull him toward me, wrap my legs around him, but something grounds us and we stop. On the earth, both of us covered with leaves, I comb the hair from his face with my fingers. When he opens his eyes, he says I am withdrawing from him, that I have been ever since he divorced Ria.
I start to get up, but he pushes me back down on the ground and tells me nose to nose that I don't give myself up to him in bed. The weight of his torso forces my shoulders into the leaves. When he kisses me, I respond, but he pulls away suddenly. “Where are you?” he asks. “Where? With Malone?”
Even though he is now sitting on the dirt beside me, his hands resting at his sides, I still feel the soil hard and damp against my shoulders. “Hit me,” he says, as he pins one arm down, “hit me as hard as you can.”
I clench the other fist, but I cannot raise my shoulder. “Yes,” I say, “I slept with him.”
He lets go of my arm and leans back in the leaves.
“I slept with Malone,” I say.
-
In the dark as we drive, we listen to country western music and the farm reports. Because it is off-season, he has made no reservation in town. “The inn is full,” he says the third time he returns to the car, “but Herod said we could stay in the stable”—the Stable Door Motel. “Eighty-two dollars,” he adds. We had expected less.
The motel has been converted. The ceiling in the room is low; there is wood paneling everywhere, three beds lined up against the wall, each with reading lamps clamped onto the headboards. The bedspreads are off-white velour, and the overhead light is old fluorescent. Carl turns on the color TV hanging from the wall. I am noticing how small my black shoes look against the white shag carpet when he pulls me to one of the beds.
He asks me if I am thinking about Malone. "No," I say, "About Ria." He rolls away from me onto his back, his eyes closed.
"The damn bedspread, right?" He laughs. "It's only for one night," he says. He helps me off the bed, rolls back the spread, uncovering a yellow blanket also like the one on his and Ria's bed. "Coincidence," he says.
Because it is too late to eat out, we set out a picnic on the bed: crullers and cheese, French bread and wine.
"Don't you miss keeping it a secret?" he asks.
I remember sitting home with the TV on just to hear the voices, going to parties alone and trying to avoid the drunks, running into him and Ria at bars, watching them dance.
"Your house was such a joyous place to hide," he says.
We had made love and talked, made love and drank wine, made love and read the paper, never getting out of bed the week his wife visited her sister. "We still do keep it a secret," I say. "I don't know your friends; you don't know mine."
He blushes. "I want to protect her," he says. He runs his fingers along the inside of my arm. His hands on my body feel like silk.
At midnight, we watch an old Spencer Tracy movie. "We should have brought your rocking chair," he mumbles when Spencer is not on the screen.
"The rocking chair?"
"I want to marry you," he says. "I don't want you to leave."
He slips farther down into the sheets, and we continue watching the movie, his head resting on my chest. Before the film ends, he is sleeping. I settle him down still farther in the bed and, with the remote control, turn the volume down.
I dream I am standing by the side of the highway, my thumb out, my fingernails blue. He is behind the wheel of every car that stops.
When I wake in the middle of the night, the television screen is full of static, his hand is resting on my breast, and he is awake. I lay my hand on his head, but he shifts his body to look at my face. "Ria has fallen in love again," he says.
"So has Malone," I say.
In our sleep, we cling together like children, afraid of velour bedspreads and yellow blankets. At breakfast, for the first time, we have nothing to say.
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