Love & Darts (9781937316075) (10 page)

Canyon walls rise around the three lovers
and their raft floats on the surface of a deep down waterway. She
picks up one of the poles, stands, and pushes them further
downstream. Granite surrounds whatever questions there are and
makes the river seem defined, known, trustworthy in its place.
Trees grow on shelves up high and vines hang down from slippery
cracks so full of life the rock itself seems to chase hanging algae
down its face.

The woman, she’s twenty-six, poles over
close to one of the river walls, reaches out her hand, and cannot
quite touch the rock without affecting their raft’s balance. The
thick vines droop along the granite, around the saplings on ledges,
and she gives up reaching, choosing instead to pull clay from the
river’s edge onto the raft.

She sits again, lays the pole down, starts
rubbing wet clay on one man’s legs while he kisses the other.

Warm skin surrounds three minds that are
always left untouched like piles of sun-warmed clothes on the bank:
a pair of faded, acid-washed jeans; a paper-thin St. Patrick’s Day
t-shirt; a yellow skirt; two halves of an eight-year-old bikini; a
pair of flip-flops; some red shorts; and four forgotten running
shoes. All that stuff’s left piled together in the woods at the
landing by a too-bright yellow Corvette.

They have choices. They aren’t children.
They each, as consciously as possible, have two more lives taken,
and no more longing, no more wanting, no more reasons to wait, to
beg, to ask for mercy, to respond, to curl long strands of hair
around once-broken fingers and also move whisker-rubbed lips; no,
nothing but skin (under a most private sun) rolled respectful of
their shared precarious balance, each taken, with rising up, with
release, with shifting weight leaning on elbows, on hips, on
shoulder blades with arched breast kinds of calling.

The river moves them beyond the canyon into
a quiet stand of trees where the waters widen to a knee-deep,
nearly-stopped, unhurried serenity. Why talk? There is nothing to
say. They forget about conversational formalities, about bellies of
laughter, about
tsking
over amnesty for smokestacks, and
about who should shamefully have to drag the potted spider plant
from room to room.

Someone must.

The one man, the one with clay on his legs,
the one who reaches out to the second man with something just
beyond brotherhood when he knows that other’s gentle heart so
desperately, deeply loves him. Neither can do much about his
feelings. So one with clay on his legs pulls away from the two
strong hands that hold him close. His leaving the caress is
something they all notice. With a kind willingness if not with
plunging joy he’s off the raft and ridding himself of that clay in
the water for a minute.

Even with all the maturity of their
agreement, the man left with his feelings is not so relaxed. He
wants both lovers for himself, now if not forever, and having to
share he is angry from the neck up.

She is numb from the waist down. She doesn’t
love either of them. Not like she should. She lets her legs drag in
the cold river water. And she wants to rid herself of knowing
either of them. She stands again and pushes the raft downriver. The
man left with his feelings stands, too, and picks up the second
pole. They move downstream more quickly, more effortlessly, and
without the rise and fall that happened when only she was
pushing.

But. The man lets go of what’s real and
picks up what’s nonexistent to help propel them all. It’s hard for
the woman to understand why he keeps making such an effort. But he
does. He’s working diligently at something she doesn’t understand.
He kneads what’s in front of them with yearning, longing, love, and
his twin pangs of hope and despair, sweetness and embittered
grace.

There is an elegance as though he wants to
draw them more near to something impossible. She turns her mind
away from his work and keeps pushing her pole into the river
bottom.

The man in the water notices none of the
others’ unseen exertion and swims behind them both, holding onto
the edge of the raft, kicking out with fun frog-legs, blowing
bubbles, pushing them all downstream his way, keeping his distance,
waiting a few more minutes to get back on.

She likes that he’s pushing, helping her
make them go, because she doesn’t like that—doesn’t understand
why—the other man laid down his pole and just gave up. The
reflections she gathers up from the water exist almost, but they
aren’t real enough to distract her from the work that’s necessary:
pulling the pole up, planting it into just a reach ahead, pulling
her body closer to that place, bringing the raft along with her
feet until her body is past that pole, and then methodically
pulling it up, and dipping it again, sometimes twisting from one
side of the raft to the other to keep their heading.

The man on the raft is still angry from the
neck up. He doesn’t understand why they don’t know he’s laid down
the pole and picked up the current instead. Hand-over-hand he pulls
the nothing rope that’s frayed and twisted as if caught in the
teeth of a gar that swims through the shallows of a faraway, nearly
unimaginable delta, through brackish silt avoiding the sea. The man
left with his feelings on the raft just wants the man in the water
to love him; no, not only him, her too. So of course he lays down
his pole and pulls the invisible rope and so they move forward.
Hand-over-hand the blisters rise. He is pulling them toward an open
end where the river gives up like Sunday afternoon onto the flat
forgotten parts of the Gulf and they will be there, soon maybe, if
he keeps ever-pulling.

Hand-over-hand he is angry from the neck up.
Pushing her pole into the mud she ignores his pouting pathos and
looks back at the man in the water blowing bubbles, kicking with
fun frog-legs. She watches him and he likes it. He notices her gaze
and rolls onto his back to let go a belly of sunlight warmth. He
wears the silver river lining like a glass ornament blown full of
mercury and rises endlessly against impossibility.

She wants him, puts the pole down, starts to
climb into the water, but he comes up to her instead, pulls himself
onto the raft. With water sheeting down his body and the clay gone
he lies in the center of what they’ve lashed together. They aren’t
quite callous that the other man pulls them hand-over-hand toward
the delta with his whole mind and heart. They just make their love
like joint checking used to be.

The man making love to her thinks, “You can
love her. Or you can know. But you can't love her and know. It's
too much.” So he pretends he knows. It’s enough.

But the man pulling them all toward an open
end with a nonexistent rope made of what’s felt is exhausted. It is
not quite an interruption of their union when he says, “I’m
hungry,” as he pulls and pulls and pulls. But he gets tired, bored,
lonely, sad, and ties a knot in the rope no one can see.

The other two know he is angry from the neck
up.

Agreement or not, the unforgiving middle of
a heart cannot be quieted. They do not ignore him but do not
include him either and their sweat comes together in places to
trickle down off their backs past the hairs and over the
muscles.

The other clenches his cringing repetitive
curse. “I’m hungry.”

Between kisses, between dives, twists,
caresses, and unfolded origami car commercial double magazine pages
one of the two of them acknowledges him with minimum courtesy, “We
know. God, we know.”

His bare feet are burning. He wonders about
the knot that holds them there being beaten by the sun.

I am with my husband, who has the day off. It may seem a
comfort. Melodious wind and tension left in the sky. But these are
delirious times. And electricity doesn’t mix well with
water.

We’ve come to the swimming pool after a
thunderstorm. My husband does not swim. He has his reasons. I
wouldn’t say he doesn’t want to be here. But coming to the pool
today was my idea.

Years ago someone put a lot of thought into this
apartment complex. It’s got to be older than I am. I don’t know.
Maybe it’s not. Maybe it just needs to be taken care of a little
bit better. A little gazebo full of mailboxes has a sturdy wooden
floor under which possums must congregate. But anyway the
speed-bumped drive is flanked first by flags and then by
unambitious trees that grow up any way in raised planters made of
railroad ties. Each gray-and-maroon-painted apartment building has
a foundation among hardwoods and the swimming pool sits serene
amidst them all on landscaped embankments. Crepe myrtle, boxwood,
and Bill’s Blue deodar cedar nearly strangled by the smilax that’s
been left untended for years.

The birds are quiet now, just
after midday, just after the thundering rain. But the incessant
sounds of cicadas reminds us of the surrounding heat, which makes
the pool road’s sloped asphalt seem a steam plate. It is silly to
bring a towel to lie on because the chaise lounges are pooled with
water. But habits die hard. The sky is still black with clouds.
There is the stench of Banana Boat sunscreen but that may be a film
on the water.

My girlfriends say my husband’s controlling.

We’ve been talking about it. Not what my girlfriends
say. They don’t understand him like I do. What I meant is, we’ve
been talking about my wanting to come to the pool today. I thought
it would be something fun for us to do on his day off. I didn’t
think he’d be playing poker online all morning, drinking all the
milk, and then keeping at that computer stuff while we waited two
more hours for the rain to stop.

I was watching talk shows in the living room but saw
him go and get the emergency credit card that’s taped to the wall
behind the calendar. He took it back to the back bedroom and shut
the door. I heard the lock click. What am I gonna do? Go back
there? Try to get the credit card away from him? Try to unplug the
computer, turn off the power strip, change his password, tip the
monitor over? I’ve tried all that shit before. What’s the point?
All he’s gonna do is shove me out of the room and get back on that
stupid website. No use having that lady upstairs call the cops
again. It’s not like I care. He’s the one who said we needed to
only use the credit card for emergencies and keep it taped to the
wall and hidden like that. He can do what he wants.

I thought maybe we’d go to breakfast or out to the
mall and then talk and laugh by the pool and then make dinner
together and make love all night. But once he’s on that computer
there’s nothing I can say. Plus, he didn’t want to go to breakfast
or out to the mall. Said we didn’t have the money. He said we were
going to Sonic or staying home, said he always has Sonic for dinner
on his days off, said I should know that by now. But I didn’t want
Sonic. I wanted to make dinner at home. He said, “Fine. Then make
dinner. If you don’t want to go out and spend more money I don’t
have, great. Why are we even talking about this?” I am definitely
not making love with him after he kept the volume up all the way on
his poker game when I was trying to hear my aunt on the phone. So
coming to the pool is probably our only fun thing together for his
day off, now, and he won’t even get in the water with me. He can
pretend all he wants but I know he’s not asleep over there.

I dive in and split a limpid box full of wet blue
that I wish were cooler.

For five minutes, I’ve got the pool to myself and my
husband has all of the deck chairs since it just stopped raining.
Then some obnoxious man, his kid, and his buddy show up. I didn’t
mean to be such a bitch. But. Whatever.

The man is a jerk, you can tell.
He has red hair and muttonchops that are probably meant to be
funny. His trunks are ugly forest green and five years old at
least. But his kid is worse. This child is the kind that I truly
hate. Speech impediment. Loud. Female. An awkward tween with no
discipline. Not at all cute. She’s got a fat belly, stumpy legs,
drooped broad shoulders, and must be totally attention-starved
because she stomps right and left and shrieks around her too-young
father and his pot-smoking friend. They are men with tribal armband
tattoos and budding tans.

They miss her doing a cannonball that splashes water
onto my head. I look at my husband, appalled. But. He’s not
watching. He probably really is asleep.

Safely perhaps, the child flops
around in the shallow end of the pool. I do a little breaststroke
to get further out into the middle of the pool. I can tolerate a
lot. I don’t really care what people do. But the wave action she
creates is still a problem and I’m here to have fun. I don’t want
to get too close to those guys she’s with. They are lying in the
sun at the farthest possible point away from the child. So I’m
caught between them while the girl shrieks continually, “Daddy, did
you see that?”