[Originally Posted on the old Fluid Imagination site]
The neighborhood: a funk of sadness around it at all times, as if we had a cancerous young boy in our midst; a sadness that we refuse to recognize, refuse to acknowledge; we play with the dying boy, take him for cotton candy, tell him stories about pirates, and some even shave their heads to make him feel more at home; a bitterly ignored sadness.
One man, Charles, is a downhearted man, though he tries to hide it. His wife, Irene, is having an affair with his neighbor and best friend, and he knows it. His best friend, a bald little man, full of confusions, lives next door. His name is - and he looks like a - Hubert. I don’t know what Irene sees in him; regardless, she obviously loves him, and just as obviously, Hubert does not love her in return.
Charles and Irene have two children, Paul and Rosemarie. The daughter is older, somewhere in her mid-twenties. She doesn’t come around any more, unless it is to drop off her dog. The son left for Europe about a month ago. I think the son may be adopted, but something about the way the parents talk about him make me imagine something different, as if they kidnapped him when he was an infant.
A girl who is about the son’s age used to come around quite often. She would walk the street like a British policewoman. I don’t know her name, so I call her Bobby. I sometimes picture her swinging a chain whistle, handcuffs hanging down, and a nightstick dangling, banging against her right thigh. Instead, she carries a small wicker basket filled with hyacinths.
She comes around only at night now, now that the son has gone to Europe. Charles always leaves her a sandwich, the crust cut off and a toothpick holding it together. She usually eats it in Hubert’s back yard, sitting on an old pear-tree that is nothing but a lifeless log. Another girl cut the pear tree down about three years ago. I haven’t composed a theory for why Charles leaves the sandwich.
Hubert had a son, Eric, a boy I never saw smile. At night, over the phone, I talk to my ex-wife and we discuss why the boy might have been unhappy. My ex-wife thinks he was in love with Charles’ daughter. When she dropped the dog off, the boy would come running out of the house and try to chat with her. She barely acknowledged him, as if she were a bee and he, a plastic flower. My ex-wife says the girl is a lesbian. I disagree; I see the way she looks at her brother, her eyes covetous and her thoughts lusty; this is another reason why I suspect he is not related by blood.
Paul, the brother, is quite handsome. Everyone thinks so: “Such a handsome young boy,” my ex-wife used to say, “Like Jimmy Stewart.” The boy does not look like his father, who is more James Dean handsome. Paul has a girlfriend, the young somber lady who cut down the pear tree. She is beautiful, absolutely stunning, like a glass bottle of Coca-Cola. When Paul and his girlfriend kiss, they look around to see if anyone is watching.
It sounds strange, but I think Charles has a thing for his son’s girlfriend. He has the same eyes as his daughter, and when he covets a woman, it is as if his eyes are nymphs and the woman is Dionysus. They danced and trembled when Paul brought his girlfriend around the neighborhood. I would watch as Irene, his wife, would chat up the young woman, talking of this and that and who knows what; the entire time, however, her husband’s eyes would devour the girl, beginning at the painted toenails sticking out of her little teenaged sandals, nibbling on her tennis-toned teenaged thighs, licking the tautness of her belly-ringed teenaged belly, consuming her perfectly rounded teenaged breasts, tasting her long, tanned teenaged neck, and finally finishing with a dessert of rouged, full teenaged lips. The young girl knew exactly what she was doing. She has strange designs. I haven’t seen her since Paul went to Europe. My ex-wife suspects the two traveled across the Atlantic together. The girl is beautiful, so I think my ex-wife is correct; I know I wouldn’t have left her for a season in Europe.
My ex-wife thinks Hubert and Irene have a house together somewhere. She says that when she had her affair with the owner of my restaurant, they always slept in our bed. My ex-wife says that they would be very careful, trying to hide everything from me. She says they never used a condom because they didn’t want me to find the wrapper. She says that if we had more money, they would have rented a house together. My ex-wife says Hubert and Irene are able to do things the right way because Charles makes so much money. Whenever we talk, she finds some way to remind me that I’m just a bus boy and that she likes to have sex with white-collared workers; she always finds some way to remind me, even if it means scandalizing our neighbors.
I’m going to talk to the hyacinth girl next time she stops for a sandwich. I’m going to talk to her about my wife, spread gossip. Hopefully the young girl’s heart will pity me, and she will take me as her lover, cater to my sexual needs and wants, marry me, bear me a child, a daughter, who I can walk down the aisle and cry for when her first boyfriend cheats on her with some slut who gussies herself up and wears high heels to homeroom. My hyacinth wife will make hyacinth dresses for our daughter, and one day in May, our daughter will wear her hyacinth dress during a discus competition at her school. My daughter will look beautiful and she will be beautiful, the beloved of the discus-team captain, and one tragic day, the team captain will hurl a discus, and it will slip out of his hands and hit my beautiful daughter in the head, and he will run to her, hold her in his arms, where she will die weeping. Hopefully.
