Amor and Psycho: Stories Part 5

Froyd's friend Palmer recommended this carpenter, a favor Froyd appreciated early and regretted immediately, as the unnecessary intimacy of the connection feeds Froyd's paranoid fantasy that the carpenter might mention something to Palmer-something compromising-about Froyd. "He seemed anxious and defensive the whole time," the carpenter might tell Palmer, or "He kept staring at me"-neither of which is true.

While keeping half an eye-a quarter!-on the progress of the doghouse, Froyd prepares a lecture for a course he teaches in the city, a course on forms. In it, Froyd attempts to prove that traditional forms are still the most radical ones. Although he works up his usual heat in arguing this position, Froyd no longer really believes it; he feels contemptuous of the new forms (the constraints and chance patterns) that have replaced the despised forms he knows. In this, Froyd identifies with the hay-bale-loving carpenter, contemptuous of traditional techniques-concrete foundation, floor joists, wall studs, eight-foot ceilings, and suspicious of new architecture. The hay-bale carpenter rages pa.s.sively against the dumb tradition that proclaims its supremacy over more interesting, more original forms simply by replicating itself again and again-house after house built facing any which way instead of south-southeast, so that a woman reading a book at eleven o'clock in the morning has to burn fossil fuels to make out the words. A similar idea-about forms generally and forms of building in particular-flits like a line of text across the screen of Froyd's mind, and he skims the line as it pa.s.ses.

Days have pa.s.sed, and the question remains: Why a doghouse? Froyd needs one, although he doesn't own a dog. He doesn't own a dog for the obvious reason that he doesn't yet have a doghouse. He explained this to the carpenter, who asked. He explained it to his daughter, who asked-repeatedly-for the dog.

When the dog does come, the perfect Plexi sheets will be scratched by the animal's urgent toenails and muddied by paws, breath and drool. Over time, the Plexi will yellow, too-but for now, at this moment, Froyd looks at what he still thinks of as "the doghouse I built for my dog," or "the doghouse I built for my kid," or "the doghouse we put up"-the jocular "we" leaving a generous s.p.a.ce around the structure, which is, after all, part of this gift to his wife and his daughter-a doghouse with a dog in it. Every time Froyd looks out the window, though, the harder it is to imagine a dog in the doghouse. Froyd steals another peek at the construction, leaning over his computer, with its cursor blinking over the words "alienated labor, power structures of late capitalism," and cranes his neck until he can see the man to whom he is paying carpenters' wages, whose broad tanned back faces Froyd as he hangs Sheetrock on the walls. What Froyd sees is not a doghouse, but a place of possibilities.

The one possibility Froyd cannot see as he stares through the windows is (frankly) a dog staring back at him, one paw raised dumbly to scratch at the invisible boundary. He considers the porous border between inside and outside, the irrepressible urge to be where one is not. He tries to conjure a dog indistinct enough to be Everydog, and yet particular enough so that Froyd can hear, precisely, the sound of its toe claws on the expensive, fragile plastic.

"WHEN ARE WE GOING to get a dog?" Froyd's daughter asks. She has crept up behind him quietly and caught him peering out at the carpenter. (He should simply have planted himself before the window, his hands behind his back in an att.i.tude of repose, and freely surveyed his creation. "Accept and use your madness," some mad Beat poet once said.) The top of his daughter's head, he realizes with a touch of horror, comes up to his elbow. Could I have shrunk so far already? he wonders.

Froyd smiles. "It's more complicated than you think."

Froyd's daughter's eyes narrow. "Why is it complicated? I've lived without a dog for nine years. You promised."

Later, she writes Froyd a note and leaves it on the keyboard of his computer, where his lecture waits, rebuking him. "For my birthday I would like a small, brown, medium-size dog. PLEASE do this one thing for me."

Froyd hates the dog already.

MRS. FROYD FINALLY GETS DOWN on all fours, an extension of the yoga she took up in pregnancy, stretching, saluting, elongating, opening. In this position, she feels more in tune with her animal nature. She insists on eating outside. The first time he sees her on the porch, crouching over a bowl, he calls sharply, "Get a spoon!" She has always been critical herself where manners are concerned.

She still dresses every day-good!-and seems cured, too, of the compulsive hand was.h.i.+ng. He feels, even, that she could wash more-hands and feet. She sleeps with him in the bed.

Froyd does not confide in his friend Palmer. Fear stops him. Instead, he asks, "You know how you fool yourself, thinking a situation will resolve itself? You think you're trying new strategies and they seem to be working?"

"What new strategies have you got?" asks Palmer, himself a desperate man. His wife has a life all apart from Palmer, a spirit world of witchy dust and trickster animals.

"I've got nothing really," Froyd says.

His wife has changed. She pads around barefoot, covered with dirt and mud, and collapses on the white slipcovers. The behavior continues even after he speaks to her reasonably. She just lies under the potted cactus, gnawing on a knucklebone big as her head.

"Do you know how much fat is in one of those?" he asks her. But she simply looks at him with her greeny yellow eyes and chews. Later she skulks off with the bone and comes back with dirt on her nose.

In bed, she licks his face with her tongue as he mounts and thrusts into her. It's the hottest s.e.x they've had in a long time. Afterward, she rolls against him and holds up her stomach to be stroked. Froyd looks at his wife, and his face goes cold. He sits up suddenly. "Get off the bed," he says.

"Off!" he shouts.

She looks at him-stubborn, hurt. He reaches over and pushes her firmly. She tumbles to the floor. She scratches behind one ear, bends impossibly, licks his juices from her hind parts, curls up into a fetal position and sleeps.

The next night, he offers her a cus.h.i.+on beside the bed, but she seems to prefer the doghouse in the backyard. She even uses the doggy door, comes and goes as she likes.

Froyd has spent some time imagining the kind of man he might become if he had a dog-the kind of man who is firm but fair, the kind of man who throws a ball overhand for an hour before dinner. He feels his daughter should take some responsibility; if she can't even take the food bowl to the doghouse in the morning and the evening, and change the water, then-what then?

But children forget. They resent the pet that arrives as a test.

One day, the mother bites her daughter on the hand. (The daughter stuck a pencil in her ear, but still, the behavior crosses a line.) The doctor who puts in the st.i.tches nearly convinces Froyd that she must be put down for it-there can be no excuse for biting a child. But she's rather old already, taking into account the way the years accelerate, and Froyd realizes that he can't bring himself to have his wife shot full of poison at the vet's, or shoot her himself. She is his wife. He still finds her beautiful and desirable. He cannot even condemn her. Benign neglect seems the most humane solution, the simplest thing. He'll wait a reasonable length of time, Froyd figures; then he'll buy his daughter a puppy-a real family dog.

THE ANTIHEROES.

Months after our last paycheck, we no longer felt sure we could trust Federico. If he had lied about the first check (in the mail, he'd said, a reasonable argument) and again about the second one, and if he no longer returned telephone calls or e-mails, and kept his shade drawn and his office door locked all day, this did not necessarily reflect on his character.

"Trust me," he'd said on the first day, and we had. After what he had told us about his mother's downfall, how could we not? When Federico was a boy of twelve, in Lisbon, his mother had died before his eyes. She stood at the top of the staircase, a construction of rare Brazilian canarywood, her eyes s.h.i.+ning down on him as he waited to hear her speak through the terrible cracking sound of the sky breaking open. Her look expressed embarra.s.sment and a slightly excessive formality, as if she had forgotten his name. "This is strange," she said (in Portuguese); then she died. Her eyes spun out of focus and turned blue (they had always been a dusky green before) and her body rolled headfirst down the stairs. His first instinct was to laugh, Federico said. What could be more absurd than the death of one's mother? It was an impossibility to imagine, he said in that English of his. Uma intervenco divina-relampago stopped her heart. The loss was absoluto, a hole in himself so wide that even grief could not live there, but blew through him violently and rearranged him. He became, at twelve, an empresario-a businessman-supporting his father, whose soul had become paralyzed, as well as his sister, a child of eight. The experience turned out not as a tragedia but a calling. Give him people on the edge of catastrofe, Federico a.s.sured us, and he would save them.

Given his qualifications, what could we do but embrace this savior, already hired by unseen and inaccessible forces?

One of us, Boxman, suffered a stroke and could no longer afford the medications he needed to stay alive. The faculty chipped in and bought him a bottle of absinthe. Boxman appreciated the terrible thoughtfulness of the gift. Our health insurance had been summarily canceled; the inst.i.tute could no longer provide such perks. His former carrier rebilled Boxman for his medical expenses at 800 percent of the original rate-a sum larger than his entire accrued income over a lifetime. Imagine a man's medical bills worth so much more than the man himself! Boxman said. We knew that Federico must appreciate the importance of adequate coverage; just before the cancellation of the health insurance, he'd had a line of polyps removed from his colon. The diagnosis? Not cancer but stress, induced by our situation. Naturally, we sympathized. Our stress infected Federico-contact stress!

Like any great leader, Federico excelled in his early phase, when we knew him only by introduction and projection. It shocked us later to learn that this beach ball of a man, with his pasty skin, his golf s.h.i.+rts, his bald head, his seductive Portuguese accent, was vulnerable, and we began to trust him less.

How could we forget that day, now so many months ago, when the president had brought Federico to us as a last resort? We received him at first with chill hauteur, and Federico said, "What can I do to win your hearts?" Someone said, "Never underestimate the power of an apology." Federico apologized immediately and from his heart for the injustices that had been done to us because of the inst.i.tute's financial position, which he was already on the point of correcting, well in advance of the final inspection that would decide our fate. He would not disappoint us, Federico promised. Catastrofe was his specialty. Not to say that our road would not be hard, but with our help, Federico felt confident that we could recapture the high opinion of the agencies that were about to shut us down.

So we worked harder than ever to correct the messes of the past, to find again the funds borrowed for fact-finding missions to Nicaragua, Iran, Miami and Montreal; to reprint the doc.u.ments a disgruntled employee had urinated upon; to correct discrepancies and account for unusual services-ma.s.sage therapy, shock therapy, colonics-the inst.i.tute claimed to have provided. We worked in the dark in our shadowy stalls (Federico had cut the lights to save electricity). Our mistrust of "the Man" (embodied in the abstract idea of the final inspection) united us. We believed in coalitions, organizing, empowerment, partic.i.p.ation, collaboration. Many of us had traveled hard roads before, from Montgomery to Birmingham to Selma, from Cape Town to Cairo. We also felt it important that someone listen to the complaints and threats once the administration began to hide behind locked and shuttered doors. The administration feared for its safety, it said; the students and creditors had grown unreasonable, insane. The police department sent a SWAT specialist, who offered advice on how to handle angry or armed students, and how to behave in a hostage situation: We needed to imagine the inst.i.tute as a battlefield. Every day, we should visualize and plot our escape route. Whenever we walked into a room, we needed to ask ourselves, "Where would I take cover under fire?" The SWAT specialist taught us to listen for the silence that folowed the discharge of a weapon. "That's the sound you want to hear," the SWAT specialist said.

"Why?" we asked.

"Seize that chance to a.s.sault your attacker. Never talk to your attacker, unless you're in a hostage situation. A hostage situation, that's a different story. Don't stand out, but don't be afraid to ask for something-a blanket. You want to be perceived as human."

Those of us with the capacity adapted to the situation.

Most of the students just wanted to transfer. They wanted transcripts, or letters of recommendation, or exculpatory letters for their banks. Federico explained that nothing could be put into writing. The ink on the inst.i.tute's letterhead had not settled and bled down the page, rendering void any legal communication.

A homeless man took up residence in our office. We found Neville Nevene, the security guard at the school, smoking a blunt in front of the parking lot while reading the collected poems of Arthur Rimbaud. We asked if he could help us escort the man out. Neville did this with uncustomary efficiency, because he hadn't thought of that-he could live in our office. We had a couch; we had a bathroom, a shower, a sink and a coffeepot.

"But the shower doesn't work," we said.

Neville said, "That could be okay."

The board continued to meet at unannounced times in locked rooms, whose windows it covered with a sad a.s.sortment of old towels. It did not report on its conversations, its strategies, its decisions. For its own safety (and because of the bleeding letterhead), it put nothing in writing. As weeks and months pa.s.sed, the board began to detect hostility, even desperation, among the employees at the inst.i.tute. Hostility and desperation became particulate in the air, like sugar in the atmosphere of a doughnut shop. All the stories began to sound the same, dull rounds of complaints about lost wages and benefits, stories of foreclosure, eviction, the inability to procure life-saving medications, et cetera, as if the board were not already on red alert.

Still, the board took an optimistic view and declined to prepare for the possibility of failure, of inst.i.tutional collapse. It held its power. It did not respond to questions because it had no answers, and besides, its great power lay in magisterial silence, in the way it sequestered itself in a cold fog of its own. Sometimes we heard, through some wall, the board giggle like a child hiding with its eyes squeezed tight, hysterical with excitement, imagining itself invisible.

Waiting for the board to take action was like waiting for G.o.dot, Neville said. He now lived in our office full-time, carried the collected works of Samuel Beckett under his arm and read out loud part of the famous dialogue between Vladimir and Estragon about how everything depended on G.o.dot, on waiting. He saw everything differently from the rest of us, as if we had all read the same book, but his contained different words, with different meanings. Instead of "Estragon," Neville read "Estrogen" through gla.s.ses thick as prisms, slimed with sweat and oil from wiping them on his s.h.i.+rts.

In one thrilling moment, Federico-our savior-launched a coup and seized power. But the disgraced president did not leave. He became a ghost president, wandering the corridor of power-a narrow red-carpeted stretch between his office and the executive toilet. Many of the people who had held positions of power at the inst.i.tute, even positions of very little power, remained close to the ghost president. Together, they forged a comforting narrative about the historical community of leaders.h.i.+p and the principles for which that community stood. What principles? The members of the historical community could not, for practical reasons, put them in writing, but Neville Nevene, who spent an hour a day discussing philosophy with the ghost president in the parking lot, mentioned structurelessness, the inst.i.tute's absolute refusal to tidy up its humanity to please the Man-the Man being the creditors, the final inspectors, the whole capitalist-military-industrial complex, and most of the faculty, including the activists and the union and the women of color, and the women in general, and the men of color, and the gender queers.

But, we asked (through our emissary Neville), didn't our continuing presence at the inst.i.tute prove our commitment to enlightenment, justice, a politics of meaning, a community of soul? Not really, the board shot back. The historical community functioned like a family.

Yes, we agreed. The inst.i.tute was patriarchal and arbitrary, and we loved it for the same reasons people love a family: because we felt connected to it, and believed that in some imperfect and provisional way it loved us back, tolerated us and demanded our loyalty.

WAS THAT the ghost president standing alone on the street corner, talking into a toy cell phone?

Was that the ghost president standing alone outside of the oxygen bar, playing an accordion?

FEDERICO NO LONGER looked us in the eye when we met in (or near) the corridor of power. We waited in the shadows for him to emerge from the executive toilet. We held out sc.r.a.ps of paper for him to sign, excuses and apologies we ourselves lacked the authority to make. Occasionally while we waited, we saw the accountant, a shadow of her formerly robust self, moving quickly along the wall. When she saw us, she would shout in her heavily accented English, "Let me out! Let me out! I am kept against my will!" But the longer we waited in the corridor for Federico to come out of the executive toilet, our miserable sc.r.a.ps of paper damp in our hands, the more we pretended not to notice her Mandarin oaths and mutterings. The accountant had once produced charts and budgets, and we felt, still, that we needed her.

After the authorities contacted us regarding our missing pay, Federico refused to sign our slips of paper or acknowledge us. We would, individually, be held responsible for scheduled income, the authorities promised. No use trying to evade or equivocate. No paperwork had been filed on our behalf; they had our number; we would pay as scheduled, or they would throw us in jail! So we continued to work; even Federico, who had not been paid himself, continued.

In this way, we traveled beyond the realm of the heroic, and became contemptible to one another and to ourselves. We had no wages, no benefits; some of us had even grown sick and died. We were complicit in our oppression; we knew that. The conditions felt sickeningly familiar to some of us who had survived other experiences of humiliation. Yet we continued to show up.

It became difficult to know whether our presence helped or hurt. At the first cracking sounds, the ghost president and Federico cautiously opened the door to the executive toilet, where they now hid together. Because of the narrowness of the toilet, the ghost president could not see past the beach-ball form of Federico. "e um milagre," Federico told him-a miracle-as the whole building began to rattle like dice.

The cracks widened. We mounted the beautiful walnut staircase collectively, and used simple tools-hammers, Phillips heads.

OUR OLD COLLEAGUE O'Malley had always sung variations on one note: He represented an oppressed and colonized minority. O'Malley had worked as a Teamster, a merchant seaman. Colcannon and ale ran in his blood; he fought in and stewarded some union that did not apply to us. His face looked like fire and brimstone and he loved nothing more than the clarity of an enemy.

He fixed on Irene because, as part of the historical community, O'Malley still defended the ghost president. Besides, he said, Irene was bourgeois-all the activists were bourgeois, not fighting for real things, such as living conditions, wages, and so on, but, rather, for luxuries, such as s.e.xual freedom. But Irene had been in a union, too, up in Canada. She'd seen how s.e.xist it was, how dominated by men, like everything in Canada was dominated by men-by bluenecks and blockheads and by the oppressive cold and by old f.u.c.ked paradigms. O'Malley took exception to Irene's characterizing the union as s.e.xist and accusing him of being an old f.u.c.ked paradigm, turning him into a stereotype because of his working-cla.s.s accent. He knew this game, he said. He held his fists balled in his lap, as if he were trying to keep himself from leaping up and clocking Irene. "I won't have my people slandered and reduced to cheap stereotypes," O'Malley shouted, "the great working cla.s.s who invented the lively language of slang, on whose backs this nation was built, by a bunch of old d.y.k.e Canucks."

Irene rose to her full height-six foot three-and bent over O'Malley until he disappeared. In this way, sadly, we began to dispatch one another.

EVERY DAY, a new message came from someone: "I'm sorry, I can't stay anymore," listing debased conditions-a litany of apologies. One could no longer afford a bus pa.s.s; another couldn't keep up her strength without her AIDS medication; another had moved in with his mother, who insisted that he be home every night at five-thirty. One couple, known throughout the inst.i.tute as bon vivants, invited us over for a farewell dinner. They were in the process of losing everything-electricity, gas, heat, car, apartment. They still had a bidet, though. We ate Cuban beans with a ham hock and drank a few bottles of Margaux they'd saved for twenty years for a special occasion-the occasion now being the end of an era of wine and roses, collaboration and solidarity! We pitied our lost colleagues, and, yes, we feared them. After that rich evening, we never saw them again.

SWING.

During the season Riva thought of as the autumn of her divorce, life became so quiet that she heard fog drip. Big spongy porcini pushed up under the orange pine needles and hissed as they grew, distracting her from the uninhibited expose of the county school board she'd tried for weeks to write on a.s.signment from the socialist weekly, whose primary agenda-"to fan the flames of discontent"-was broadcast on the masthead. As she worked, Riva thought about b.u.t.ter and shallots sizzling in the pan and the way she and Roberto used to laugh before dinner, their gla.s.ses of red wine on the scarred wooden table, some Ghanaian highlife CD playing on the stereo. She thought about the atmosphere she and Roberto made together those five years, about mushrooms and b.u.t.ter and wine and bare feet and West African music, as if happiness were a country where she'd once owned a house. Without Roberto, she didn't even bother to open a bottle of wine (she'd only drink it all), and she ate cold, hard food: apples from the tree, carrots from the garden, crackers from the general store. She drank water from the well. Brutal simplicity felt weirdly comforting. Sometimes she woke in the night, rattled by a ringing, dinning silence so profound, she might have been at the center of deep s.p.a.ce.

What she missed most were barefoot nights, dancing on the beach around a fire, or on the floor of the movie theater when live bands came and the house manager took out the first two rows of seats. She missed tipping her dirty feet back into high heels at midnight and riding home next to Roberto in the blue Taurus. She missed his greatness of spirit, his exuberant ways, the intoxicated poetry that surrounded those moments of terror and pleasure in the car. "Uncork the night!" he'd shouted out the windows, driving fast and confidently down the coast road while she gripped the wheel. "Breast against the triumphant curve and fly down the dirt road unbuckled, casting sparks!"

In retrospect, she could see how codependent she had been.

SHE'D LEFT Roberto because he hit her; it hurt to say this so simply. He'd hit her more than once-twice, or three times, jarring smashes of knuckles in her face. That she didn't, at thirty-four, remember the apparent provocations or the number of hits worried her most of all. Forgetting, diminis.h.i.+ng, or rationalizing violence made her complicit, guilty! Roberto, too, implied that Riva shared a dynamic role in the hitting, which he called "arguing."

"It takes two to tango," he'd said once.

The first time he hit her instantly created a rift so deep, she knew she must leave him. Within five minutes of his first swing, they were undressed, f.u.c.king. Riva's black eye bloomed under Roberto's caresses. His tenderness, as he touched her, made her s.h.i.+ver. She put his fingers on the wound again and again, definitely the wrong message to send.

The blue-and-yellow swelling dropped down her face over the course of four days, until she looked like a gerbil. While her eye and cheek healed, Roberto picked up the mail and ran errands. Riva appreciated his kindness and discretion. She worked at home anyway, mostly. She did most of her interviews by telephone or e-mail, more than a first-rate reporter would, because even without livid marks, she was shy.

Roberto also worked from home. He had a framing business, made artisan frames from old-growth redwood and salvaged metal. Sometimes he made garden beds, a similar process: He made frames for art and frames for dirt. His frames were the real thing, everyone agreed, more artful and interesting than 99 percent of the work they enclosed. Roberto was famous for his frames, and for his raised beds, which framed the earth, and famous for the weed he grew in the woods just over their property line, his macho, big-budded sensimilla, not organic but very strong. He sold to artists in the city, to people Riva and Roberto counted as friends, although in the end the friends.h.i.+ps grew strained and broke. Roberto was Riva's best friend, and because by most people's standards Roberto's personality veered toward the eccentric and difficult, their friends.h.i.+ps with others had been abraded (by Roberto's abrasiveness) and eroded. Inviting people in became awkward. The house smelled skunky: Sometimes Roberto washed money and hung it up to dry on a clothesline in the bathroom. Neither Riva nor Roberto possessed a traditional moral compa.s.s, she knew that, but toward the end she did not like to have people see the way she and Roberto lived. They might see things about Roberto and the shape of their life together that she could not see herself.

She still loved him completely; she loved most his rough, edgy side. Even after he hit her, his presence held a chemical charge.

Roberto moved out when she asked. He didn't seem surprised. He wept; he packed his things in a Hefty bag. He backed up his flatbed to his framing studio, laid all his wood, sc.r.a.p metal and tools in the back and drove away. He moved into a trailer up on the ridge, an awful situation, she imagined, a real comedown from the beautiful life the two of them had made together. Then she saw him in town at a harvest party with a very young woman who looked like a teenager, s.e.xed and clueless. Poor Roberto, Riva thought. How sad. But Roberto didn't look sad. He looked happy, dancing with the teenager on the pier. Her long blond hair kept blowing into his eyes. The teenager looked happy, too. Roberto looked as beautiful as she remembered, his ravaged, tragic face bathed in light from the moon and the bonfire, his eyes lit by drink. The poor girl, Riva thought, imagining the end of the evening in Roberto's depressing trailer. He will hit her, too, she thought. Maybe not tonight-but he will. The thought gave her a thrill of Schadenfreude, which made her immediately ashamed of herself, and proud that she had left him.

At the party, she also saw-and successfully avoided-a neighbor whose pit bull had twice attacked her dog, Spinoza, dug its teeth deep into Spinoza's haunch, causing trauma and a big medical bill. When she called the neighbor the first time, he apologized. When she called after the second incident, he said, "You know, this never happened before, and now it's happened twice with you. What's your dog doing to provoke my dog? Is it a female?" Riva protested, but the neighbor just talked over her. "Sure, I could tie my dog up, but nothing's more sorrowful than a tied-up dog. So I'm just not going to do it. If my dog attacks your dog again, take some personal responsibility-just shoot it. Put it out of your misery."

She lived among maniacs! Of course Riva would not shoot her neighbor's dog. Roberto used to keep a gopher rifle in the house, but Riva couldn't stand it, and he finally gave it away. So she didn't even own a gun.

At the harvest party, she avoided Roberto and the neighbor, as well as the kind of mountain men-the growers, the hermits, the felons-who preyed on single women like herself. Instead, she chatted with a woman named Aisha, who had been with Riva and Spinoza in puppy-training cla.s.s. Aisha had stopped going because her puppy-an enormous Great Dane-had choked to death on a treat at the beginning of the third cla.s.s.

"I'm doing great," Aisha said. "Byron and I take tango. It's changed our life. We're both in amazing shape, our s.e.x life is hotter, and I see him again as a human. You should come-bring Roberto."

"Roberto and I separated," Riva said.

"Oh-well, then you should come find somebody."

Riva thought of Roberto saying, "It takes two to tango" with a soupcon of bitterness, and then she didn't think more about it. A few days later, she found a flyer in the coffeehouse. Not tango, but a swing cla.s.s in a town an hour to the north where the partners-and Riva-would be new.

SHE'D DEMANDED from Roberto custody of their terrier mutt, Spinoza, and he had quickly agreed, seeing all her logic. But then Spinoza died, killed by a racc.o.o.n that took to hanging about the place after Roberto left, even going so far as to sit and wait by the front door for food, as Spinoza himself had always done. After the horrific cleanup and burial of her pet, Riva felt shaken, anemic, as if she'd lost blood. She tried to call Roberto to break the news, but the phone rang and rang; Roberto's alienation ran so deep, he didn't even have a machine.

After Riva went to bed, stimulated, weeping and exhausted, the racc.o.o.n came into the house-it turned the k.n.o.b on the door. She ran to greet the intruder, which she mistook for Roberto, thinking he'd come back. The racc.o.o.n stood at the bowl of compost with its paws open, the pads lined like human palms (it had a fate!), its fat digits like Russian banana potatoes, its nails mandarin, tobacco-colored. The empty wine bottle lay on the floor, as if flung there in disgust, with mud prints across the label.

"Hey," Riva cried. "Hey, hey, hey, hey!"

The racc.o.o.n turned, still chewing, twenty pounds of greed and insolence, and faced her.

"You," Riva screamed. "You, you, you, you, you!" She switched on the lights. The racc.o.o.n kept its eyes on her and backed toward the door, three-legged, its spine arched. Riva growled out a threat and rushed forward suddenly. The animal picked up an apple from the floor, then stood up to its full height and threw it at Riva. She ducked; the apple knocked her elbow and rolled harmlessly away, and as the racc.o.o.n backed outside, it gave her a knowing look. She cried in bed later, loud wailing sobs the racc.o.o.n could probably hear.

NOW STORMS ROLLED IN off the Pacific like wet gray walls closing in. Water poured from the milky sky and turned the fields and ferns a lusher green. The calla lilies near the front door grew as big as oil funnels and the bark on the redwoods took on a more lively form, like the hide of an animal. Riva found an old gra.s.s bag in the back of her closet, its surface covered in a mold that looked exactly like rabbit fur. She burned it in the woodstove. The woodpile outside swelled with damp under its blue tarp and she burned anything expendable. The indoor air turned heavy and smoky, though with a bright tang of pine.

She worked on a story for the socialist weekly about a logger who'd come up from Jalisco, Mexico, to labor as a choker setter. A mountain of talus spilled down on top of him during a job-the timber company had tagged some old-growth trees on a steep slope above the river-and killed him. Environmentalists argued that those trees were protected by previous agreements, that the choker setter didn't even speak English, that the timber company had not properly apprised the worker of the danger. Riva's job: to get the real scoop, make the family and the loggers talk, get the foreman to talk, take the usual disorganization of points of view and tell a story that didn't want to be told. A story emerged like a landscape; it didn't exist until somebody put a frame around something and said, Look here.

Meanwhile, the foreman who filed the accident report (which became the death report), said, no story here, only an act of G.o.d. The environmentalists talked, but they demanded that the story conform to certain moral truths that the story did not exactly conform to. The choker setter's family talked a little, in Spanish, and revealed nothing. They'd been paid off-"In dollars?" Riva asked in her debased high school Spanish-in exchange for their silence. They also feared exposure of their relatives, one of whom, Riva learned, came across at Juarez in the bed of a truck loaded with carrots. The mainstream newspaper tried to redirect the conversation, and ran a two-page spread in the newspaper about the honorable history of logging across generations, emphasizing the life-and-death nature of the work, the shrewd and solitary nature of the logger. Never mind that the choker setter had been an untrained illegal twenty-three-year-old immigrant working for minimum wage who understood so imperfectly the danger of his occupation that he'd hidden behind a tree when the mountainside gave way. Riva had to clear away enough of the words so people could understand what kept happening. "Just get the moral truth," the editor told her. "Those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds-they're all b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. That's the story."

Both sides told the story the same way, with the choker setter as a victim. One side called him a victim of corporate greed; the other side called him a victim of nature, or of an act of G.o.d. The choker setter, an invisible man named Jesus Cruz, didn't have a side. There didn't seem to be a way for his story to extend beyond the frame already nailed down around it. The story took place around Jesus, outside of his story. The story itself depended on who told it. Riva suddenly felt filled with energy, inspiration and insight-a form of rage. The victim must become the subject of his own story; he must be seen. Riva let them all have it-the timber company, the environmentalists, the newspapers that covered the story as one about courage or honor or corporate greed. They were all b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, just as the editor had said, but she felt that she had finally come to this conclusion on her own evidence, honestly. She wrote for twelve hours, and when she finished, she felt tired, clean and conscious of a ravenous hunger, a gnawing so vivid, it was less like l.u.s.t and more like a bacterial infection. She found a steak in the freezer, seared it on the stove and ate it, still frozen in the middle, while drinking a whole bottle of red wine. This was the meal that Edward Abbey ate to steel himself in the wilderness to greet a bear. As she ate, Riva steeled herself, and dug out the telephone number she'd written down for the swing cla.s.s.

The dances took place on Friday nights in the beautifully named town of Madrigal, at the Community House. You could drink artisan gin from a still in the Anderson Valley; you could drink organic hard cider from a farm. Riva had to drive home after, and she didn't want to take a chance on being pulled over. The police would take her an hour and a half to the county seat, she'd have to spend the night in jail, and then they'd have her license. She didn't even know how she'd get home if that happened. Her name would appear in the police blotter. Plenty of nights she and Roberto had stepped out for the evening, gone to bars or parties, and he drove home. (Once, she'd reached over from the pa.s.senger side and actually steered the car for a few minutes while he pressed the gas and sang "Spirit in the Dark" exactly as Aretha sang it.) What a pliant idiot she had been! She'd always taken care to drink very little when out with Roberto, so that if a deputy pulled him over and hauled him to jail, she could post bail and drive them home. She'd always kept a check in the glove compartment of the Taurus, just in case.

THE SWING CLa.s.s DREW more women than men. Riva got the last one, a tall, well-built person named Norman who lived in the woods outside of Madrigal and looked as fit as if he climbed trees all day-which he did, as it turned out. He'd had a girlfriend, but she couldn't take the winter and the rain, he said. She'd moved back to the city; he liked it here.

The instructors demonstrated a few steps and let the cla.s.s loose. Norman danced terrifically, sensually, philosophically. They traded partners, then always came back to each other. Riva loved the homey feel of the Community House, which smelled of sweat and venison, and the slippery lyrics that spilled from the speakers: "Satin Doll," "A String of Pearls," "I Can't Give You Anything but Love."

"Dancing is a conversation, an improvisation," Norman told her. "You take in a bit of me and give back a bit of you. Nothing you say in words touches the truth of what you say through the ends of your fingers." He touched the ends of her fingers to his, and she instantly saw what he meant. She could follow him perfectly. Then he pulled his fingers away and communicated through vibrations in the air between them. He did it simply by looking into her eyes.

Soon Riva was swinging across the floor, her body graceful and knowing. She drank a little of the artisan gin, and felt suddenly that the center of her story lay in the standpoint of the blue pumps she wore. She kicked them off and they leaned into each other like a blue couple watching from the sidelines.

During the break, Riva sat with Norman on a couch in back. He asked her serious questions and they fooled around under a gray blanket. She had never talked to a stranger this way before. "I wish I had a formal, spiritual life," she told him, "somebody else's structure. Sometimes I fast for Yom Kippur, but I never feel much except hungry."

Whatever Riva had felt so intensely in the vibrations in the air between them intensified under the blanket, where their parts touched in several places. "The spiritual condition of hunger works as well as any religion," said Norman, his eyes and fingers twinkling. "It might even be the point of fasting."

"You're still a beautiful woman. You have a hot body," Norman said. Riva felt a wet object penetrate her ear: his tongue, which functioned exactly like a knife through her heart.