Leveling (From a Notebook) — Garielle Lutz

I must have always been drawn toward people on whom life hadn’t yet crested too gaily. I grew up little by little in a family where words had no real ring to them. We had to work hard to not be of this world, but there’s only so much of yourself you can get etherealized even early on. The first of the girls I knew at school, should there be no other way to put it, was beet-red and garbled in the heart and not yet finished with some youthlessness of her own. You couldn’t count on any length or breadth of her to stay the same from even a Monday to a Tuesday. She looked fuzzily at people and soon had to be put to one side. The second girl had already done plenty by the time she’d been packed off to campus. It was a taxi that got her there. She’d had to pay the fare out of her allowance. Her parents, as described to me over drinks, were just smudges over parents of their own. The bar wasn’t even that far from the school. She had a slurred personality and a limestone complexion, and she reached into her purse for plastic bag after plastic bag full of spruce vibrant euros. She must have taken me for a traveler from afar. (I should mention that in a dress so dark and hollowing, and with my hair formatted so short, I could get away with looking a whole lot older than I was.) From the bar we walked to a restaurant and disheveled our salads and carved our initials into stumpy steaks, then exchanged plates. Dessert was a crackpot uprisal of scorched strawberries we couldn’t get the waitress to share. The headmistress and I later came to blows over some memories of the girl’s I’d found suspect (nobody’s childhood could have felt that endless; kids hear the chiming of death in just about anything anybody ever says; they are readier than the rest of us to join the filthy dead). This headmistress was a clean breather, a stoutly incapable woman of broad shoulders and novelty soaps and trick deodorants tiered from floor to ceiling in her bathroom. She had some trouble with unfussing herself from the pageantry to come, and by now her voice must have had every sort of splinter in it, but let’s dispense with the next decade or maybe three of them, and let’s allow what follows to concern, at first, just an adjunct instructor where I much later now still worked. He was another drunk (or so I at first assumed), and a cajoler, and was just that very moment through with a divorce of his own. He had the adjunctive gift of gab, a lazy nostril (the left), and episodic custody of a son of dusky temperament on his ex-wife’s side. For my part, I’d long been finding enjoyment in discovering new ways to be hard on myself. I reused Q-Tips, diluted the shampoo. I dragged leg warmers all the way up under my sleeves to give my arms some bulk. From my bed I’d watch a day strengthen until it was intelligible in all its terrors. I honestly thought that the phrase so often making the rounds in those days—“Asking for a friend”—was just a face-saving way of saying “Please be one to me, at least just this once.” 

The first night this adjunct showed up at my apartment, he was wearing an odd, cupboardy sort of coat. There were pockets all over the front of it, and I had every reason to believe they were as deep-going and as rearward-reaching as pockets could ever be sewn. He sat down on the sofa and right away got tears to drip down his cheek. His eyes, when they were open wide enough for me to see, looked marshy, indefinite. I figured this display was just about his ex-wife (recent uproars in the tropical stew of her heart, some new dumb bluster in her bloodstream, and whatever else you’d expect from a care-defying, fickle-fancied, cat-faced, tables-turning, gloating beleaguerer), but I did listen. I was struck mostly by how valuable his tears came out looking. I figured that if I were to collect them in a vase and settle some flowers in it, some new good would likely come of everything. 

I had five or six things to offer him to drink, but he said he wanted nothing more than tap water, preferably in a tumbler, and I didn’t have any tumblers. I was down to just a couple of giant-portioned plastic fast-food cups I’d been rinsing out for years. These were tall-bodied cups tapered imperilingly all the way down to the base and hard to keep standing upright when filled to the brim. All I ever drank was a thin-flavored subsistence cola I bought by the case from a van parked behind the farmers’ market proper. I poured some water for him and some cola for myself. I already felt a little stringy and untied inside—as if I might not yet be done with being tugged. 

He was on the living-room floor now, already going through my albums, tsk-tsking me for having returned records to the wrong sleeves—a greatest-hits thing, say, by that over-revered singer of tipsy, wit-worn richesse (I’d always sworn I could hear a dimple in her voice) shoved unforgivably inside the cover of the final compilation by that late-lost guitarist who’d been forever crying wolf in kinked and tangly anecdotal solos nobody could ever figure out the right way to decode. 

“It’s not always like this,” I might have said, though my voice could barely abide itself. The words seemed to dissolve themselves in drool.

I’d been this way for months now, beating about inside of myself at all hours of the day, with no use for music, or life, or mistfalls of feeling, or moon-white womanly differences in people not even women. But I was already stooped only inches from the side of this hard-favored, determined man. I was inhaling the talcum-powdered totality of him. I’d once been too easily stirred by people, ready to lap things up right away, so why did I let him move in? 

I can say this much for our first month or two together: everything felt practical. Nothing ever once felt like grounds for a saga later on. Nothing either of us ever asked of each other had to be answered with “I’d just as soon not.” 

He was incorrigibly hirsute but not that bad about bathing, and if he wasn’t any longer the lanky kid he still pictured himself to be, there was nevertheless something taffily far-fetched about every outstretched limb of his (he seemed to thin himself out the closer he approached), and there was a preservative self-reverence about him that I was surprised not to mind all that much. He brought a lot of books home with him from the back rooms of the campus cathedral, and he would rake through the things (brittle-paged monographs, mostly) as if they were pleasantly corrected bank statements assuring him that he was a whole lot better off than he’d ever had reason to think. I sensed no insolence in how he kept rearranging the furniture (I had a lot of scrawny chairs and stump-legged end tables), and when he took over the cooking, it turned out to be cooking that never once dishonored the ingredients, no matter how humble or backdated. I’d always had a grumping stomach until I started eating any whatnot he came up with. There were always wads and wedges of albino chocolate afterward. I suddenly found myself caring for new things. I started feeling retrieved. My days now seemed to be arising straight up out of life. 

At work, people were one by one taking me aside and saying “You’re doing it!” or “Hell yes!”

Dinner conversation was mostly about his ex-wife—her breasts, which he claimed looked “pompous” from one angle and “pouting” from another; her muddying view of his scholarship (it made little sense to me, either); the way she chunked her hair so that it looked more and more like his, cut in a flat-top style whose bristles or nettles incited you to pet them as aloofly as you would pass a hand over the back of a wary-eyed reptile. Yet everybody, to his way of thinking, deserved to enjoy a few more years of ebullient jejunity before the “corrections,” though I never once thought to ask what he might be driving at.

In short, having him around must have made me feel endorsed, but his feelings for me lacked dimension and particularity, there didn’t seem to be any emotional nucleus to him at all, in the bed we shared we were chummy but chaste, his words were no longer going anywhere new, and in no time he was making off with loads of secreted money of mine (rank miserly tattered fifties) and the better of my clothes (his underwear, for one thing, was primary-colored dollar-store cheapery—boxers, they were, and what an apt name for something that so smartly cartoned off the worst parts of a man). 

The stolen money began to add up, and I kicked him out. I figured I could get him off my back by resorting to a lawyer. I had never resorted to a lawyer before. I went to see one in a two-story building on a roomy street downtown. He was fraternal enough, and cologned maturely, and his green eyes were perplexed into bloodshot significance behind thick bifocals. He listened to me for a minute or two and had his secretary come in and type a letter to be dispatched by certified mail to the man. The secretary was a fellowly young woman with mustard-yellow hair plastered flat at the sides and humored into a thinning froth up top. Her typing had a pleasingly meek and aspirational asperity to it. The lawyer charged me twenty-five dollars. It was almost an insult to owe so little. The letter had been phrased from my point of view, had to be signed by me, and gave no hint that anyone else had had any say in its veiled intimidations. I should have read the thing more carefully before I dropped it off at the post office. The lawyer called me a few days later and told me the man had been around to see him. The lawyer said, “This one talks a pretty good game. He’s got a lot on the ball. He’s going to be in your hair a long, long time.” 

In those days I made a point of buying the papers—the morning and evening papers from the close-by city and the scantling daily of the hard-shelled town in which I lived, and it was the local one that a week or so later reported the lawyer missing the day before a court date. By now my man had started the threats. I’d be on the phone, long-distance with a friend (a man who had never once in his life been leveled with; I’ll be getting to him, as well as to three or four later women), when the operator, always a woman, would cut in and say, “A gentleman now speaks of an urgency. He resolves to do something bad to his life. He places himself outside your building.” I’d tell the operator, “Oh, he’s always doing that. I’m in the middle of a conversation here.” One time the operator even helped herself to a dry sort of laugh. Then one night the conversation with my friend didn’t seem to be heading anywhere special, so I let the operator patch the man through to me. There wasn’t much reach to his voice. He wouldn’t tell me where he was calling from. I could hear faint, night-faring traffic in the background, but he might have been out on his ex-wife’s porch, which faced an unpopular highway. I wasn’t sure what to do. I paid a visit to the town police. The headquarters were in the same building as the mayor’s office and the traffic court. It was a small building of lime-washed brick, just one story. Through a little window in a brick wall inside, I tried to explain things to an officer. When I gave the man’s ex-wife’s address, the officer said, “I know this is probably going to sound a little funny, but that address is actually just a few feet outside the town limits, so there’s nothing we can do. You need to go to the state police.” I drove to the state-police barracks. I explained things again. The officer said, “Don’t come crying to me with crap like this.” I went out to my car, then drove to a pay phone. I called the state-police barracks and asked the woman who answered if she would give me the name of the officer I had spoken to. She said, “I could, but it wouldn’t do you any good.” I told her I didn’t need things to do me any good. I asked her for the name again. She spelled it out, and I wrote it down, but I never did anything with it, never reported the guy. It was a funny name, just two letters off from a ready-shapen, easily spat slang substitute for a term loosely meaning “a person, such as yourself, who goes through life untouched by human hands,” so it might have been fake. I drove back to my apartment. My stomach was cramping up. I went straight to the bathroom and sat on the toilet and felt shit coming out me in bristling smidgens. Around three in the morning, the man’s son showed up at the building and rang the buzzer. It was the first I’d ever heard his voice. It had a kind of long-distance tremulant pleading in it. I buzzed him in. I would never have recognized him. He right away sat down at one end of the sofa. The faces of some kids strike you as a fussing refinement or clarifying summation of a parent’s face, but the face on this kid offered little more than wastes, dregs, emptyings, fleetings: the front teeth were flippantly thin and cocked a trifle to the right, the eyes were tamed and unregardful, and there was the beginning of a significant trench or two above the nose. Just a slow-headed kid in a sloppy tank top and even sloppier shorts, the cargo kind, mutedly pink, his legs blunt, bald, ungraceful, his arms not exactly lank but curt—and he gave off a smell a little like bologna, though it was a passive stink; there was nothing the least bit targeting about it. Like his father, he was crying, but it turned out to be only because he had put off taking his speech-course requirement until his last semester (he was in college, the formless, yellowing, unrivaling campus on the brutal side of town), and now, at ten-thirty later this morning, he was expected to get up in front of the class and deliver what was pesteringly called a “process talk,” but he didn’t know the first thing about it, because he’d been skipping for weeks. I tried my best to walk him through it, explained how all you have to do is, first, tell your audience what you’re about to tell them (Try: “I think I might have once been doing something with my life. Then I guess I must have stopped”), then come right out and tell them (“If only I had grown up way back when the things people wore over everything else they were wearing were still called “wraps” and every place—a classroom or an office no matter how cramped—had a cloakroom, and things stayed mantled on people, and people got through a visit to the tormentative close-by city only by dashing out from under one awning or canopy to another and then keeping it up until finally making it back to their cars. I have always had to wear hats—sky-scaling hats, hats whose upreach became more and more heinous”), and finish by reminding them of what you have just now got done telling them (“Then a day or two before I turned forty, I drew up a list of things most likely to slip next through my fingers [job, apartment, teeth, parents], and the fingers themselves looked meager, scraggy; their nails were blurred with lacquer in two strengths of cinder-gray. It has often been said that I look lessened”), and then stride back to your seat. I sent the kid off.

I went about my business—drove to my regular place for lunch, later to my regular place for dinner, then passed the evening in the usual drifts of gistless fancy. Nothing much is date-stamped in my recall, but I think it was four or five days later that the mail brought me a thick envelope. Inside the thing was a many-paged billing statement, addressed to the man from the local hospital, summarizing the charges for a three-day single-room detox stay (the total came to $5,351.24), along with the envelope in which the bill had been sent to him (he’d Magic Markered “This must be for you” across the top). I set it aside and paged through a human-nature magazine. There was an article in there about a man who, for the better part of a decade, had ordered a rotisserie chicken from a supermarket for each of the three year-terminating holidays. He wore thick disposable dish-washing gloves and used a heavy-duty disposable see-through plastic knife and fork to cut the meat. He couldn’t bear to make any direct contact with what he called “the flesh.” The prospect filled him with revulsion. When he was finished slicing the chicken, there was an elaborate mental trick (the writer excused herself for not going into detail, but it must have been some prayerful rigmarole or another) to which he always resorted in order to achieve the mental and emotional state in which the flesh was now food eligible for him to eat. Then he would take the gloves off and eat the chicken with his fingers as if there were no tomorrow. I grazed through the rest of the issue, then fell into a daft sort of nap, woke up, and went settlingly to bed. Around two in the morning, the buzzer sounded. It was the man’s kid again. I let him in. He was wearing the same tank top, the same shorts. This time he smelled leafily of the even-streeted suburban outdoors (he might have been sleeping on unmown lawns; there were imprints of greenery on his shins and upper arms), and since his first visit he'd squandered his full head of thick toast-brown hair by having it chopped down to a quarter of an inch, a maneuver I took to be vaguely retaliatory. His eyes didn’t look in harmony with each other this time. But he looked as stuck to the world as I surely did. “I can crash here?” he said. I pointed to the sofa. He fell asleep within seconds. His snores came out sounding by turns sodden, insincere, captious, reviling. A little later I felt a timid tapping on my shoulder. “Can’t sleep,” he said. 

We gathered on the sofa.

“Tell me about your buddies,” I said. I wanted to tire him out. You could always count on any mention of friendship to foster some fatigue awfully fast. 

The way I remember it, he brought up some people not exactly friends, but people whose lives kept cropping out indifferently toward him—a kid in one of his classes who had a forehead so steep it looked practically raftered, and a neighborhood boy who’d once skipped out of the shower stall and was drying himself with a tea towel and smelling of balefully luxuriant soap and making moon-eyed double-natured faces, and an older girl whom he made sound scathingly beautiful and beautifully awry (her bangs were cut at a slant; her gullible brother had died downweighted in a hall closet), and there was also some sort of befrilled but haggardly bellicose dog usually tied to a mailbox post in a front yard down the street from where his mother now lived in floor-mattressed faceting with a woman whom time had taught to let a general mussiness overtake the seat of her affections. 

The kid then said, “And yourself?”

I’d heard that question too many times. It always came out like a threat. I’d tried getting close to people—I really had. I’d asked them the questions. “Don’t be silly” was the answer I got used to getting. 

“I mean just your parents,” he said. 

I told him I was neither of my parents reconstituted, though I could now and then feel my mother murking about inside me still, when it had once been the other way around. No matter what I’d ever done—made the honor roll, made my mark on a girl—she’d say, “Well, that might not be the side of you I prefer.” Her life pictured itself differently on her from day to day, but no matter how many times we’d had to move, the windows in her bedroom drew the sickliest of light from the sun. And I had long ago worked myself absent from my father. He’d been a lifelong dwindler of himself. He'd minced himself into next to nothing. He was the one who had got it drummed into my head early on that there never has been and never will be a quiet way to tear off a strip of package-sealing tape from the side of a package. It will make a loud, violative, scritching sound no matter what you do, he would preach. I’d wanted to grow up and prove him wrong. People were still sending me things well into my late thirties. Once, inside a nastily wrapped box, a thing taped as punitively and as far-reachingly shut as anything I’d ever endured before, I found (1) a hand-wrought scarf in flushes of differently livid blue and (2) a mutedly prophetical note written in narrow capital letters and wound around a pocket-sized bottle of antibacterial soap. I’d had to take it as a hard-natured good-bye. (Grievous beauty doesn’t last on people.)

I’d also had a brother, younger, looser in all resemblance, industriously unlike the rest of us.

The kid said, “What exactly were you doing with my dad?”

How dare you need to get it explained to somebody, let alone somebody barely started off in his twenties (and a lumberer, to boot, already) that this father of his and I hadn’t been just the best of friends, because any two people could make a claim of that sort these days, it was no skin off anybody’s nose anymore, but this father of his and I had been best friends, emphasis on the superlative adjective, a heavyweight stress on it in fact, meaning we had better only be best, it was best that we be only friends, but you can get away with saying something like that only if you can expect the listener to say, “Exact same thing happened to me, something like it, almost, maybe not quite in that order, at least not up till now,” but all the kid said was “You ever even have a friend?” 

I brought up the friend who had picked his wives—there had already been three of them—so that each had a merry birthmark, an identical and unclarifiable dun-drab splurt or scabble or smear, somewhere on either the neck or a cheek, and this friend had also wanted these women to have scrimpy arms and, ideally, the right eye oilier than the left, though he expected each of these wives to be otherwise unclearly but shortcomingly not unlike a sister he still held dearest. 

That sister had put a crimp in each of the marriages. It was a crease that kept widening until it engorged. 

The simplest fact about a marriage is, of course, that things have to happen in it almost hourly, but this man’s marriages apparently lacked any daily matter, any granulated dailiness of whatever sort, the marriages seemed to sweep into his view only once every few months or so, sometimes after even longer and longer spells, and then only when a wife would appear before him, gowned columnarly in bone-white duchess satin, her hair cast up as far as it could be coaxed, a premium of jewels at her throat, unmenaced sexual unrest evident even in how she managed to keep herself so perfectly still, and he’d say “I’ve been wondering about you,” and her cheeks would color, but his wonderings always concerned things he should have long known by now—her favored toppings on boil-in-bag long-grain rice, her age at this steepened stage of things, her preferred way of being told to leave him alone.

As far as I could tell, the man’s sister had been strolling back and forth over his heart for decades. His feelings for her had agglomerated into a courtly, homespun distaste for anyone else. The sister was said to be living in the realms and tenors of a sickness second to none. It was a waning she had to plug away at in a penthouse clinic in a hospital whose stone towers and madder-crimson smokestacks were visible from three towns over. Between visiting hours, the friend sat around thinking about her until he could imagine blood-splattered little ribbons of unmeetable timid devotion reeling toward him from some outlasted stickiness in her heart.

Even worse (to hear him talk) was that most days were hinged so flimsily to one another that you could see straight through to where the panels kept sliding back and forth between uttermost afternoon and a night having none of itself.

And I was expected to change any of that? 

This friend was fatigued, fat, clay-faced, with unclenched blackening teeth in gums obviously suffering. He always wore zippery denim jumpsuits, and expected nothing from me except unfractioned attention; I got out barely more than a word the few times he waved a finger at me in expectation of some answering oomph or some to-the-point oratory of my own. I was never exactly sure what he did for money; I must have assumed the wives had each brought a homely but sufficingly allowanced inheritance along. I later found out that a couple of times a week he would fish for discarded lottery tickets in a bin at the town’s recycling center, then run a handful of them through the reader on the counter of a QuikShop or a Speedmart. There were almost always a few unclaimed wins on the tickets—enough for a dollar-store run for sandalwood soap and the indelicate undercreamed cupcakes he now and again had to rely on.

His body was always railing against itself in measly disease. He’d gone through gout, through hikes and jinxes in his blood pressure, and dizzy spells, and cramps out of phase with whatever he last ate. He spoke of cryptic poppling motifs in the latest peelings from his rear end. He’d lost all molars above and below, and he talked about there not being an afterlife as if he’d been slighted, as if that were just one more deprivation for him to have to put up with.

I was soon talking to him in my head all the time. 

For some sake of appearances, we let a cordial enmity develop between us over the phone and by dilatory mail; we learned how to store things up to rub in later on, in person. We met up only once in every four or five months, in a town equidistant from the towns where we lived. I would always be the first to find a parking space. He was always late; I always figured he would back out. We would walk in make-believe immodest disappointment through gift shops and record stores, eat without so much to a word to each other in one Chinese restaurant, then exchange oblique whispered confidences over a duplicate meal a couple of hours later in another Chinese restaurant just a few blocks down the street, then fuss away at unshared foursquare desserts in an ice-cream concern of local renown. Afterward, on the sidewalks and slate-strewn garden paths of the town, he’d tear into me about the way I walked, take me to task for the way my left foot spread itself apart from the other at a right angle, the way I lifted both feet too high off the sidewalk (to this day I still wear prescription-strength weighted shoes), then finally have enough and snap, “I won’t have you marching by my side like that.” So he’d insist I sit with him in his car until it came time for him to leave. (He’d be suddenly solicitous about the wife left sitting alone at home; the engine would already be thrumming.) There was usually at least one cassette for him to fast-forward through to one or two spurts of sorrowed electric guitar he expected me to think the world of right that very instant, and then he’d soon be telling me things about myself, getting things quickly settled about my life the way he wanted them to be. It was important, for instance, that he still be under the impression that for five nights a week I slaved away for tips in a drop-ceilinged side-street restaurant he ridiculed as the “Wrinkle Room.” It was important for him to picture me waiting on rock-faced diapered tightwad Methuselahs, sliding plates of moot, undignified leavings of beef and pockmarked potatoes onto their place mats, tending to otherworldly changes in the levels of ice water in their glasses, then later totting up my tips, the little there was of them, and driving back to my apartment. He needed to picture me in a bed (no boxspring, no mattress pad) that gave out on vistas of brainsickness, death-dewed lonesomeness, tormentry and traumata, though none of it ever seemed to run deep enough to keep his mind off his sister.

I always drove home from those meetings with butterflies in my stomach, happy to have been done no honors. . . 

By now, the kid before me on the sofa looked freehearted in sleep, though it’s said that some people keep taking everything in no matter what. Anyway, I’d already done more than my fair share of staring at people dead to the world, their eyebrows like captions for what the mouth wrinkled in sleep wasn’t about to get said, and, truth to tell, I ended up seeing the kid through the rest of his semester, and commencement, and an après-commencement meal whose meat had something spooked into it that neither of us could quite place, and within a month he had a leisurely first job and a thick-shadowed apartment to his name. I was already with a woman still tinkering with what little she felt for someone who wanted to keep being the wan source of whatever she still felt about men, and soon enough another woman who never let you forget she was friends with a magistrate, and then a tired-faced one-time spokesperson from whom the noise kept getting louder and louder (nothing that had been engineered for the curves and quadrants of her mouth, no matter how sleekly belaid with clasps and ceramics, was said to have helped; whatever the specialists came up with kept looking like something knocked together to trap something else), and later a housecleaner I couldn’t hide from: she had a face in which everything seemed to be foregrounded; there didn’t seem to be any behind to her head at all (by then I’d of course lost my job [rumors, half truths, though with brunt-bearing, full-frontal repercussive facts skewed toward me online], but I was already working out of some good side of me with a laptop nice and lukewarm on my thighs), and then I ended up with a woman who laughed through her nose alone. The laughter came out of her in petite puffs of air. There was something wreathen about this one’s face. (It was an effect a man would have had to grow an ambitiously fancy beard to even begin to approximate.) Her capstone emotion was a soul-galled crisscross of sorrow and slaphappiness. I could sense when the old loves were acting up in her or when she was letting time just limp away; and when she talked about her father, she made him sound large enough and asleep enough to have kept everybody else in the family guessing about everything for years on end. There wasn’t much else to be wrung out of her past other than the time her mother’s boyfriend woke up from a nap and felt such a different siftage in things that his voice never again made a clean enough break from wherever it had all along been coming from. 

Of the two of us, this woman was the one who could go about any domestic business while keeping up her end of a telephone conversation, even if what I heard her saying was never more than “There you have it” or “No such luck” or (just once) "I'd give it back to him, but it's basically no longer his." She dreamt oracularly and could be suspiciously convivial or look heartfallen in a sundress out of season. Her hair was a tender bracken brown, but it looked not so much as if it was issuing from beneath her scalp than as if it had been tricked into suspension, levitation, an eighth of an inch or so above it. We weren’t all that talkative, but her jaw would keep crackling all day long, and in her sleep one night she said, “Wear out all your clothes, wear out all your shoes, especially the shoes, because shoes fall apart if you don’t wear them—the soles will completely detach.” We had been hoping for only a clean experience of things. Her signature went deep into some paperwork we soon enough had to sign. Her name came out looking like a disgruntlement of a good third of the alphabet. Everything had to be photocopied five times, and the photocopies were expected to be suitably extra-dark—tenebrous. That involved crossing a street I never liked to cross. It was just a two-lane street, but the traffic near the copying center looked overpacked and all out of proportion to the ebbing population of the town. It was a place seamed by streets that could start to lose their way after only four or five rubbly blocks. Any sunlight that dropped on those blocks usually looked sloppy and diluted. 

Then a sister of hers some years younger and said to have always been sporty around people was in town only long enough to offer condolences to somebody whose brother had drowned in some snow. We persuaded her to stay for a week after the funeral (she had an opaquely clement disposition, her face was fully lunar, there was fingerly splendor in the way she picked up her fork, you couldn’t instantly see much evidence that life had been gnawing at her at all), then another week (by now there was something practically regaling about the quiet she kept up between her sister and me on the sofa after dinner), then a week in which I tried to give her credit for trying so hard not to look puppety, not to sound so emotionally scarce around us, then almost a month in which she started writing to me (in impressively unforgotten study-abroad Spanish, because her sister knew nothing but unpliable, cowering English) with a dull-pointed but otherwise still sleek miniature-golf score-keeping pencil on sheets of paper taped to the tiled wall of the bathroom while she soaked truantly in the tub (things were soon penciled as well on an expanse of plaster opposite the sink), and her messages (translations mine) were just different ways of getting it said to the effect that she hadn’t been prepared for the way life would never refresh the past, her adolescence had been more of a set piece, a tableau, than a passageway to anywhere beyond it, and her twenties had been little more than (a) days holding themselves to their hollows and (b) a failure to direct her attentions and affections far enough off to the other side of the gender divide (she could make out nothing but boastful languor in the narrow-mouthed chorale of local men, and the women were damp-worn, out of spirits, each with an ill-fitting essence and all of them still living behind blossom-bordered blocked views of everybody else), and for just shy of five years she’d worked in an office for a man whose features (a hefty nose, that slattern of a mouth, the doused yet violent eyes) looked more like they were barged against the face rather than piling out of it, and then came the first of the downturns, with marriers now after her, and today at thirty-two, tempestuously unemployable but not exactly looking damned (even in light that looked scrutinous, verdictive), it frustrated her that in the little contingent city where she still lived she couldn’t always definitively assign a source to every sound her neighbor was making on the other side of the wall, she slept on the floor and often woke up a good two or three feet closer to that very wall than she was when she’d dozed off, her eyedrops usually dribbled down onto her cheeks and sometimes into her mouth, there was something fraught and even occult about the burning out of a light bulb and you had to wonder what it was that a turning point like that was expected to mean, and on the floor outside the door of the neighbor on the other side of the hallway was the longest baking sheet she’d ever seen, the thing just went on and on, reaching practically all the way to the stairwell, and this neighbor’s dog was a tattler, always squealing, and she took to picturing it as something as tiny and as portable as a toddler cat, and then some nights your past gushes through you a lot slower than it does on others, you remember yourself as a pale-souled, dollish, self-shunning girl waiting to be put to good second use, any one part of your body was always slandering at least any other one part of it, you make another list of things that once stuck to you in the heat (half-off coupons for killjoy cosmetics, shreds of cling wrap from a dreamtime plaything you were instantly ashamed of, pieces of freckled rice paper dressed with scrimy coils of minutial penmanship [e.g., “No one will admit this, but the areaway between any two people at any one time anywhere at all fills up instantly with a score-settling immutual mortual stink that comes from neither one of them but arises potently from a third party yet to arrive and lay some further waste”]), and you keep pressing one emotion against another until what comes out is so off-base and degrading you want to shriek, and out on the streets the neighborhoods are already starting to pull apart and unpiece, you find it helpful to remind yourself that you are simply a human shape often in the way of other human shapes, you ride buses all morning and afternoon as a way of getting even with life, a day could tauten around the least little thing, then leave it set in stone. . . 

Then one evening after a stately-paced dinner, the two sisters had it out with each other (not over me), the visiting sister left, and for days afterward there was a wasteful makeshift animation to the original woman as she went about making her way into and out of the rooms, looking for whatever there might not be. I sensed fresh enterprise in her unease. She ate unhungrily at the foot of the bed. These were sandwiches with tinned meats from many exporting principalities crammed in. The carrot-colored ice cream looked slumpy in the footed dish and had infuriant pretzel sticks fixed deep into it. She smacked her lips to hear herself eat. Night after night, the apartment filled with fumes that smelled like high-dose ammonia. We listened to rodomontade on local talk radio. We got used to shadowy fadings on the walls where things had earlier looked secure. 

For almost a month afterward there was ice beneath snow on the sidewalks. We threw ourselves apart. We bundled up for our sunsetting walks. She always packed herself tightly into a long tube of a coat that reached all the way down to her shins. It looked like a puffy coat somebody had let all the air out of. It looked completely flat on her. Her shins often met mine in unsportsmanlike ways. She kept insisting she wasn’t trying to trip me.

Days started feeling like fodder for infinity, or else the little left of an afternoon would feel clipped from something not even all that much bigger. 

Then one day I felt set upon myself directly.

The world can go in and out of you in an instant.

I walked out on her and her smoked-glass windows; the shrinal corners of her sewing room; her arm, in sleep, furled over the flight bag still bearing her father’s shorty pajamas and that bunching of towels her mother had kept bloodying in the powder room. 

I’ll leave out what I myself was wearing, because none of this was ever meant to be me in my element, but I was already listening for a new tone in things. Everything outside now looked spatialized differently. I could feel the streets before me practically courting me forward. 

The sky looked taut, packed—the clouds looked arranged for once, not strewn. Soon it was dark, with the regular spiel of stars.

I made my way toward a woman who might as well have been waiting all along for someone already unjointed from so many others. She turned out to be a “pharmacy tech” (her words), and we took to each other acceleratedly, unfavoringly, in a sullen and unfleshly way. She wanted me to hold down the fort while she was at work. The fort was just a kitchen, a bathroom, and a bedroom, and these were rooms that kept to themselves; nothing in them—a slatty chair that had no real stake in keeping a person seated, a rabble of self-on-self-crime paperbacks spread out on serving trays, a feeble point-blank TV—did all that much to represent her. But I liked her drafty manner, the queerly cheerfulizing tonkle of her burner phone’s ring tone, the aplomb of her bowels despite a diet of grease-fired sliders and chicken chunklets, and her twist-and-twirl way of seeming to fall back on whatever she was least sure of at any moment. She had a flat-packed face, the features looking planed or dabbed on; her hair had been snipped and shaped into little more than a flame-red valance to hang above the brows; and her voice had a sinning, volatile prowl to it, with damped-down curlings and spirals when she tested leftover endearments on me (I was her “buttermilk pudding,” her “petals-shedding chrysanthemum,” her “muddy plow,” her “dry hole,” her “bottle washer,” her “anatomy refresher,” etc.) or when she finally got on the subject of her job, or the one before it (light-industrial in a harbor-fronted space-thick warehouse) or the ice-green intimacies and stale-furor departures of the person before me (femme, phlegmy-voiced, windy, stealthful, unsated, self-disowning, unalignable, with an unbroken rotation of creped skirts and thick-wrought, cumbering vermilionette tops, the point being to pressure you into conceding that she had every care in the world, that her sleep had been exhausted of all dreams). 

Mostly, though, this “pharmacy tech” just lowered herself into her body and expected me to meet her there and keep squirming. But there was never enough in me for her to sink into (we weren’t reciprocals, were hardly even partisans of each other’s leadenheartedness), and one Sunday night, a little more than halfway through our routine outing to a gas station four or five blocks away for the bar of starkest hard-barked chocolate to content her until bed, she handed me off to a man waving from a car. The car was in the guileless idiom of full-grown, boxy sedans (taupe). The wave didn’t seem all that much like the greeterly kind, but the man stopped. I got in. Face the color of pencil shavings; something gutted about the eyes; kielbasa and sauerkraut on his breath—he was honed and horrible in apparel square-cut and underinformative. Some people seem subtracted from all other people on earth, culled from even themselves, until they’re nothing more than the little this man was to me: a backdrop on which a leer could keep itself battened. 

He set the car forward into slackened traffic, turned to me, and said, “Overstayed?”

The last person to speak to me in the emergency department was a young discharge nurse who wasn’t so much a woman as a woman-sized volume of a sweet-smelling medicinal soap. I had never inhaled anything like her before. Hers was a fragrance so totalizing that I felt as if there were nothing else left in the world. She smelled at once of the cleanest of things ever and of the very thing that was intended to keep those things smelling so clean. I kept looking at the woman and wondering how it was that she didn’t look slick or submerged. I can no longer remember anything else about her other than that right before I was discharged, she said, “Try to be a little more careful next time you’re working on cars.” I said, “I wasn’t working on a car. I was trying to get out of one.”

The discharge papers warned me that I’d need a long course of physical therapy, and the therapist I chose was an unfolksy, hasteless, square-browed woman with an office on the fourth floor of a marble-pillared building in a district no longer so grand. She was quiet and courteous, and from the first few seconds I was left with a rogue notion that she had let life sit all wrong on her. Her last name was a real doorstopper of a thing, with two girdering hyphens and every vowel put to work at least twice. Her office was not exactly a gym and not an examination room, either—just a color-blocked place with a long table for me to lie on, a few idled rope-tugging contraptions obviously for athletes, and a homely radio that pulled in some softened pop. She poked me through moseying exercises that felt like pantomimes of a workout. She was small-framed and short-fingered and seemed to live beyond her body in hurls of nervy uncertainty intended to go unregistered. The meat on her bones (she was sleeveless most of the time) was sunspotted and mottled with café-au-lait markings and other violet-black spoilures and allurements, barely muscled at all. Her first name was a flattened, toneless syllable I seemed to puncture further the few times I pronounced it. I showed up three times a week for hour-long sessions (she insisted on calling them meetings, not appointments), but I wasn’t getting any better. Not that I had expected to improve, but after the first couple of weeks, the exercises, airy and abstractive as they were, started to feel like devotionals. Then one day the radio was giving off a lovely fog, and her eyes, usually so glazen, were suddenly pool-blue scrutables. Toward the end of the hour, she told me her next meeting had been canceled, and she asked whether I’d care to join her outside for a smoke. I watched her lock up her office and followed her down the steps and around the building and out to an alley. We stood at arm’s length from each other under an overhang. Almost everything she said started with “As of my life.” She said people, friends of hers, never patients, would tell her things over the phone, and she would try to make parallel claims. She doubted she’d ever had much of a free hand in anything. She had a husband and some laggard hamsters, and often, by choice, she looked the wrong way at a road-atlas map of her fraction of the tri-state environs, wishing that covering distances meant spreading parts of herself over them, blocking them out. Her cigarette was already falling apart from all of her twiddly handling of it unlit. In the light outdoors, her purplish-blue gym trunks, baggy things, looked frayed and a little soily, and she seemed to be speaking far and near from the fettering upkeep of some hope. By now there were antsy swoops in her voice. She said she kept track of what she told to which people, because she was resolved to never tell anything to the same person twice. To strangers, she would give an entire, exact, dumbfounding answer to whatever they asked. She often biked to the local library after work, just to put off going home to her husband and the hamsters. She browsed about the shelves until she found two or three books that looked particularly well-visited, well-thumbed, grubbed away at, soiled unrestorably. She could be sure that these were books that had been around, books that had gotten somewhere. She would tear the tiniest piece from a corner of a page, return the book to the shelf, then tuck the tearing behind a window in her wallet and then later put that wallet with whatever else she lugged home in her buckety fabric bag. It was either that or try to imagine her husband again as an emotional getaway, or a gateway—it was hard to tell the one thing from the other. Sometimes when she thought about him on her way home, she fixed a deeper green into his eyes, got his hair to peak differently, perked up his bare shoulders with sun-brown freckles, threw the plain pale weight around in him with what she took as a newly misgiven authority. She kept working on him in her mind, ameliorating him, until he ended up looking just as planet-stricken in the rush hour as she must have now looked to me. 

“What’s the biggest mistake you can make about a person?” she said.

I must have been mum for once.

She excused herself to get herself ready for her next appointment. (I was later to learn she changed outfits between meetings.) I took a bus home. Things between us were different after that. She developed a ghoulish prudence, a clenched hesitation whenever she had to put a hand on me. I had no business thinking around the clock about somebody so little flush with herself. Most days she looked scarcely mustered into personhood. Daily life did its trampling on me, too.

It was toward the end of the third or fourth week that I decided on bringing her a present, something left over from a wedding or two back. It was a pair of stately candleholders, awfully heavy, sculptured out of thick crystal. (They were said to have been bought canalside in Vienna.) She accepted them with a sideswiped smile that swerved into laborious reserve, then set them down on the floor. Her every touch for the next quarter-hour (she was working first on my shoulder that day) was a slap that bounced right back toward her. At one point she got up and dialed the radio to some raucous syndicated sports talk, maybe just to have something to nod along with or sigh to excludingly. Two days later, I returned for a meeting and saw she had gamely stuck some rainbow-tinted candles into the candleholders and set them out on the marble shelf above a bricked-up fireplace in the waiting room. That day her earlobes and throat and wrists had all of a sudden acquired a crush of silver-chimed, proprietarizing jewelry. The hour went by with barely a word from her other than “Lie on your gut” or “Now try it the other way around.” A week and a half later, the candleholders disappeared from the waiting room. By this point, her hair had got itself pruned and ledged anew (it looked practically flaxen), and her voice had lost the last of its meander, its soft-spreading, saturant undertones once local to the room. (From this point onward, I was commanded to do all the exercise counts myself.) The next time I came in, I somehow expected to see the candleholders again, maybe having been deep-cleaned for renewed sparkle. There was no sign of the things. That day she was sheathed in a meanly abbreviated dress of velvet-green, and I could swear that her breath no longer smelled like hers alone. “You know the drill,” she said, and sat for most of the hour while I put myself through trivializing motions of my arms and legs. Everything about her seemed to be beaconing itself beyond the room, to some man or some mallow-lipped woman no doubt immemorial already. A week or so later, I showed up a few minutes earlier than usual for the meeting and explored the waiting room a little more personally than before. I found that around a corner was a little recessed area where coats could be hung. (I’d always worn my coat into the therapy room and draped it over the back of what was really just a simple dining-room chair.) Above the rod and hangers for hanging up your coat was a little shelf. On the shelf, lying on their side, were the two candleholders, the two candles. 

(Things are never enough tit-for-tat in this life.) 

On my way out after the meeting, I tried to make my retreating footsteps loud, countable, lethally in need of being heeded that very instant. The sky looked scummed. I never went back. Within a week, I became sort of friends with a man who claimed to be stuck with a couple of straightforwardly troubling daughters still living at home. Both were in their midmost twenties, he explained, and were ruthlessly imprecise about what they ought to do next in life (they’d found loopholes in whatever influence he still had over them), and birthday money never once brought out the best in them, and the younger daughter was only a year and a half younger, so in truth she wasn’t even young at all, and the older one kept talking about somebody she knew “in the clergy,” but she made it sound as if it were a place somewhere. At bedtime, he said, these two girls banged their heads against headboards against a shared wall. He figured there must be a code to it, and maybe I could help? He said that at mealtime, with TV trays on their laps, the two of them were always accenting the simplest of words incorrectly (“table” was “tay-BUL”; “supper” was “suh-PER”; “chicken” was “Chic-KEN”). Why was it they were so intent on getting all speech to be renatured as rebuke? Was any of this just average, or was all of it some sort of revenge? This man had a face full of gayest rosacea. It looked like his cheeks were having a festival. He had known me for barely half an hour, but he already wanted me to be his guest at a restaurant, and he drove me to a highway chophouse where he kept asking to be shown to a better booth, one near a window, then one near a better window, then one not so distant from the kitchen. When we finally got settled and had been handed our menus, I heard a woman’s voice from the booth behind us say, “Those are two different questions.” It was a voice with the whole of some other earth in it.

***

“Leveling (From a Notebook)” is drawn from Backwardness: Excerpts from Letters and Notebooks, 1973-2023, forthcoming from Short Flight/Long Drive Books. Lutz’s books include The Complete Gary Lutz and Worsted.