She Who Is Still Within Reach — Garielle Lutz

By now there were two of them.  I was certain that each knew about the other, but they never let on.  One was a man who ran a résumé-writing service out of his home, just a putty-faced fellable beanpole still in his twenties, a real lymphatico. The woman worked long hours—I never did find out exactly where—and had that summed-up look that some women get already in their early thirties.  She was plain, hard, and unbalanced. Her name was Donna, and I once looked her name up in a book that said it meant “she who is sent to take her time.” Either of these two people might as well have been my death made simple. For Christmas I gave the man and the woman identical silk boxer shorts and other his-and-her gifts. I lived in an apartment house and temped in offices, mostly answering phones and typing out pay envelopes.  The apartment house was a gray warship in the warehouse district.  The woman living above me was noiseless except for abrupt, hippopotamic sprints from one end of her apartment to the other.  The two men living below were pretty loud.  Most nights I could hear them watching TV homosexually.  I kept the volume of my own television low and murmurous.  

There was a girl who always called me when she was in trouble.  I’d known her since high school.  “Hear me out,” she’d say, and she’d cry and gurgle.  With every word out of her mouth, her life seemed to balloon itself upward a little bit more.  I pictured the rubber housing of her body drifting further and further above the floor of her apartment.  

I flunked out of a community college where I’d been taking some evening classes.  I had been disappointed to learn in a psychology course that fear of heights had to do with looking down, not up.  This did not accord with my experience.  As a kid, I’d been towed to parades in the downtown district of the city and would stand on the sidewalk with one hand fluttering in my father’s and the other in my mother’s, my head thrown back, and tearfully wait for the skyscraper overhead to come down on all three of us.  I grew up afraid of domes and steeples and the vaulted upper reaches of old movie palaces not yet demolished.  I learned to keep my eyes trained downward. I was interested in people begging at street level.  One of them had wrapped an empty, economy-size detergent box with packing paper, and on the front of the box he had stencilled, with dramatic enjambments, “HOME / LESS / PLEASE HELP / ME GOD / BLESS YOU.”   A block away from him stood a woman with the kind of heavy cardboard display rack designed to hold a dozen or so different stacks of tourist-attraction pamphlets in the vestibules of diners.  She had the thing suspended from some rope looped around her neck.  I wanted to be fair to people but never gave them any of my money.

Days got pasted on top of each other.

On Saturdays, I rode escalators in department stores and did whatever else I thought it would take to get me subsumed into the city.    

I would nerve my way into a long concert-ticket line that caterpillared around a block and then, finally in sight of the door, step away.  I would ride the subway and listen to words pluming out of the riders.  

Even back in grade school, when the teacher, waving her pupils toward the long tables in the cafeteria, had said, “Boy, girl, boy, girl, boy, girl, boy girl,” all I’d hear instead was “boygirl, boygirl, boygirl.” 

In the band, in high school, I chose to play the clarinet because of the appealingly jointed verticality of it. I needed something handy like that to keep my fingers atwiddle.  “Talk to me about that look you get on your face when you play,” the band director said to me one day after practice.  “Tell me what it’s a look of.”  

I had memories deep enough to bury cities in.

I once heard the band director in a conversation with another man.  The other man asked him if he had any kids.  The band director said, “Three.”  The man said, “Boys or girls?”  The band director said, “All girls.”  The man said, “What are their names?”  The band director hesitated a little too long.  The man said, “You don’t know the names of your own girls?”  The band director said, “Mrs. Kevin Bartholomew.  Mrs. Richard Fritchman.  Mrs. Frank Tolliver.”

Women were unpredictable and prone to every elasticity of mood.  I had once been married to one.  I’d had to listen to all the ground glass in all she said.  

There in the blare of our life together, anyone could  have told when a thing wasn’t satisfied with the name it had been given, but there was never a whole lot you could do about it.

I’d been nineteen when they found me going against my body in a field outside of town.  This was the one time I had brought the knife.  My blood was bloody.  Then the man had the knife out of my hands and into a hand of his own.  I watched his mouth because that was the only other part of him where there was something doing.  It was a small round mouth with the teeth skewed into it as if they didn’t want anything to do with each other.

He must have been pushing seventy.

“Honestly, I’ve been needing a decent knife like this,” he said.  Then: “We’re in that van over there.”

Downed tree branches were all over the road.

The driver named some town they were driving to.

“You’re obviously coming,” he said.

The town was actually a city. I was dropped off on a street corner.  I ended up going to college right there downtown.  I always had trouble with the reading assignments.  I would get lost in the sheen of a chapter, the trunks and shanks of the capital letters.  I would take in the typography and let the meaning go uncollected.  On the afternoons my roommate went out for classes, I went through everything he had. Everything of his got tried on and put back. The college counselor told me that the contagion I had been regarding (he might have said “treating”) as love might well have been something else, but he wouldn’t say what. The unending finishing off of another friendship!  To better clear my face for what was yet to come, I started to abstract the hairs from my chin with a slant-tipped tweezers.  Little black lengths of it fell onto my the front of my shirt and the double page of a magazine kept open receptively.   But everybody can surely understand a face’s urge to black itself out, its every desire for a dark ensuance.  I dropped out and went to work in an office with people so fat they looked practically spherical.  They had us sitting in front of glary video screens and writing down long, busily hyphenated numbers onto perforated lengths of accordioned computer paper. Every long sheet had to be spot-checked by a blunt-fingered, droopy-lipped man with a voice that kept coming out like mud.  I took my breaks in a lunchroom where co-workers stacked saltines. It might have been only in a dream (I might have been adoze on the clock again, and the clock was a wall unit with a retardative second hand) that I once managed to spend the greater part of a workday on the floor, my pants down around my ankles, my chin between my knees, the smell of which struck me as stale and incomplete.   

Then again, people don’t change, but the way they look at you can.  I once went home to my parents for the holidays.  I let them spend some emotions on me.  I slept retributively in my old bed.  What I heard in the middle of the night might have been only the awful sound of my mother thinking about me in somebody’s arms, making myself industrious in love.  Parts of me are forever dipping out of sight.

I drew the morning out by telling everybody at the table how okay everything actually was.  My father wanted to talk about my niece and nephew.  The nephew always clung sleepily to a sagging toy dog.  The niece talked perfectly paltrily into a toy telephone. Both ate shallow unmilked cereal out of the same bowl. 

It was a convertible I’d borrowed to make the drive. On my way back, a bird came out of the sky.  It was a plumed minutial filthiness that kept jittering within reach, on the other side of the dashboard.  Inside of a month, I’d found someone to live with in shows of servility and simulated opinion.  The side-pieces of this one’s new eyeglass frames were firmer-than-ever girderlets braced over her ears. The prescription was strong enough to have brought the world back into line.  The house was an indecency of cinder block and budget sidings. There was no one mainspring to anything she did. There was always a measure of something practically cranberry in her breath. Her face with all that makeup on it was a vignette of proportioned despair. She kept an eye on my moods and babooneries, the obscurata in my stool.  I diddled a knob off the table radio so that the volume was set everlastingly at a level I could not stand.  One night a sister of hers called to say that her kid had just gotten itself born, a galling bounty of fresh, uninflected flesh.  The sister expected us to drop everything right that very minute and come over and have a look at the thing before it could even see.

I got to know this sister a little better after the baby died.  The world guided her to what still needed to be touched, but mostly she just pored over herself.  She knew how to work herself around time, to put herself at the end of an hour before the rest of us could get there. She would read a little something, maybe no more than a word, then lay a thumb across it, sometimes an entire hand.

Both of these sisters kept squaring and resquaring their glasses on their faces.  In no time they had had it with each other and the home-truth spiel of their blood.

I moved out, pulled over at a bus stop where some woman was looking a little too long wintered and unwooed. I moved my things—I still had some sortings, some pilings--into the building where she lived, into her fifth-floor apartment.  This woman kept lists of whoever she was.  She had a genius for wearing her body as if it were somebody else’s and easily soiled. She said, “The little gully I have where others have bellies is where most people end up putting their heads.”  She’d wake me out of a sound sleep to say, “People are barely even people” or “There’s too much in the mirror again.” Eating, for her, and then later even for me, had become whichever sequence of steps by which food could be evaded for the time being.  We kept going busybodily out of our way to keep falling prey to the jumbled recumbency of our life together.  The rueful vehemence of the neighbor ladies I overtook on the stairwell, the pushing looks of love I must have given them: this was my better life?  The woman turned out to be married, though, and one day the husband came home, but he turned out to be nice about everything (he included me in some conversation he struck up with her about a restaurant all three of us remembered fondly but each a little differently, and then about this ridiculous need—we all had it—to keep knowing what we already knew, about how everybody has had at least one bashful adultery, etc.), so I left.    

This was right before a spell of unseasonable “tornado activity.”   Days kept coming up at me with a Sundayish cast, that limitedness you always feel at the end of one week but even more so at the start of the next.

I would try to keep my eyes in place on one sentence in a book.  

I learned that a room can get awfully careless about its contents.  Its clutch on everything can keep getting looser and looser.

Nothing I owned had withstood my touch and my gaze and my oils.

I became somebody who liked being talked about behind my back, but up close just enough for me to hear.  E.g., “He wouldn’t give up until he had me talking about my husband but steering clear of the facts.”  

Everything else about my life you can find a grudging synopsis of in the way I one night drank something out of a measuring cup with two others, two women, one of whose face all of a sudden looked smoothed down to just a geometric solid of itself.  The other?  Getting dollar bills from my hand to hers was obviously going to be work. There were all those sudden palsies of hers.  She referred to her naps as her “travels.”  People and things of the day always got ill-used in her dreams.  The three of us kept in touch for months afterward.  One day I said something horrible to the first one, then went to the second one to cry about it.  Everything later went down on paper and into envelopes, but it’s not as if the envelopes went anywhere.  They are still within reach.  

***

Garielle Lutz’s books include Worsted (Short Flight, Long Drive Books) and The Complete Gary Lutz (Tyrant Books).