Hum: Stories Read online

  “Hello, ma’am.” I immediately regret calling her ma’am, since she’s no older than I am.

  The lunch box is lying on the ceiling of the Jeep within easy grasp. I pick it up and hand it to the girl. Standing there with her brown curly hair arranged quite properly and her lunch box clutched in her tiny fingers and her face a bit cross, she looks not one bit like a child who has just flown upside down in a Jeep through a tunnel and been rescued by a stranger in a stupid red baseball cap that he wears every time he teaches dialectic philosophy.

  Then it occurs to me that a) my work is not done and b) having saved the child the logical next step is to save the mother and c) the rest of the world still seems stunned into inaction. I walk quickly but not too quickly—I do not want to inspire panic in the child—to the other side of the car, where the woman is hanging upside down in front of the steering wheel. Her hair is very short. I open the door. “How is my daughter,” the woman says. She says it as a simple command, unquestionably authoritative, although her voice is a bit shaky.

  “Your daughter is standing over there. She’s all right.”

  She blinks once. “Okay,” she says. Her eyes are extraordinarily green, so green that they cannot possibly be natural. For a moment I am nearly in love with her, but the feeling quickly passes.

  “Could you please place your hands on the ceiling,” I say, “like you’re doing a hand stand. I don’t want you to fall on your head.” She does so, and I unbuckle her seat belt, being careful not to brush up against her breasts. Then I help her crawl out of the car, and she goes around to her daughter and tucks her daughter’s shirt into her bright overalls, and the two of them sit down on the sidewalk.

  Suddenly, the second hand moves forward, the minute hand clicks into place, and real time is restored. “Mrs. Fernandez,” a boy is saying. The boy is about fourteen and he is wearing an orange vest and holding one of those signs that says Slow Children Playing. “Mrs. Fernandez, it’s me, Jack, the crossing guard. Are you okay?”

  Mrs. Fernandez looks up at Jack. “Oh,” she says. “It’s you. Hon, have you seen my dog?”

  Just then a woman in a svelte black suit and smart heels walks up. She is one of those New York City women who could be anywhere between 29 and 45 years old and who would be wearing a svelte black suit at any hour on any day, one of those women who I am not the least bit surprised to see clutching a rather large black lab to her chest at 6:49 on a Monday morning. This woman’s hair is long and perfect. It shines alluringly in what passes for sunlight on this rather dismal morning. This woman’s hair is, in fact, the exact same color as the dog’s coat—and it strikes me that this is a skill that only this very particular type of New York City woman has—the ability to pick up a dog that has just been tossed violently from a moving vehicle and make it look like a well-planned accessory. She walks up to Mrs. Fernandez and says, “Is this your dog, Miss? Is this black lab the dog you are looking for?”

  “Oh yes, thank you.”

  The whole street has sprung into action now. There are suddenly a great number of pedestrians crowded around Mrs. Fernandez and her well-adjusted daughter, and they are all very concerned, and at least a dozen of them are dialing 911 on their cell phones. I walk back to my car, which is blocking an entire lane, and of course the lane is backed up and the light is green and a lot of people are honking at me. The whole thing has taken no more than three rotations of the light.

  I pull away. I go to school. I give a brilliant lecture. And then, standing there in my red baseball cap, right in the middle of my brilliant lecture, I begin to doubt dialectic philosophy. I begin to sense this gray area, in which things do not have to happen one way or the other: you do not either love someone or hate her, you do not necessarily play either the hero or the fool, you are not either a great or a terrible father. A new possibility occurs to me, the possibility that, in each case, the truth lies somewhere in between. Is it possible that the accident had nothing at all to do with a parallel universe? Is it possible that, at the moment the Jeep came hovering out of the tunnel, I did not click over into some hitherto hidden world in which I behaved in a manner exactly opposite to how I would expect myself to behave? Could it be that my heroic actions on Queens Boulevard are a true representation of the man I am, and that, until now, I simply have not been tested? I have always considered myself to be a man lacking courage and conviction, but perhaps I never before encountered the appropriate situations. Is it possible that, all these years, I have insisted upon a parallel universe as a sort of crutch, a rationale for all my own weaknesses? “Yes,” I say. “Here, today, I am like this, but in that other universe, the mirror opposite of this one, I am courageous, decisive, brilliant, witty, entertaining, compassionate, extraordinarily good-looking, and, above all, virile.”

  I look out at my students and sense their excitement waning, expressions of intense boredom settling across their faces. The bell rings. I am standing with chalk in hand, arm raised high, extolling a philosophy that suddenly seems flawed, when my students breathe an audible and collective sigh of relief, scramble out of their seats, and rush for the door.

  I leave school immediately after the final bell. Driving home along Queens Boulevard, I scan the scene for the next debacle—hovering Jeeps, stranded motorists, dogs lost in traffic—my next golden opportunity. But the drive is uneventful. Back home, my wife is sitting at the kitchen table, the latest scene of murder spread out before her—a young victim with haunting eyes, a silver pendant dangling primly from her bruised neck. “The Pendant Murders,” my wife says matter-of-factly, canvassing the photo with her magnifying glass. I step too close to the table and see a little more of the picture than I want to. The girl is blonde and thin, and her turtleneck has been cut open at the top, her throat slashed. A silver pendant dangles from her neck. The pendant is a tiny half-moon with a jewel at its center.

  Beside the photos is the evening edition of the Daily News. My wife prefers the Times, makes fun of the fact that I subscribe to the sensational Daily News, but I have always been comforted by its simplicity, its ability to see everything in terms of black and white. The Daily News lacks the muddle and grind of complexity, uncertainty, weighing of the facts. I also like the visual presentation. Every day there is a huge headline over an eye-catching photo. Today, the photo reveals the blurry shape of a man in jeans and a baseball cap. His back is to the camera, and he is leaning into a Jeep, which is upside down on a busy road. Beside him on the street, looking into the camera, is a small girl in crumpled overalls. In the front seat of the Jeep there is an upside-down woman, who seems to be saying something to the man. In the photo it looks as if, having saved the child, the man is having a conversation with the mother, probably telling her not to panic, not to move her head, probably asking her appropriate questions, such as ‘Can you feel your toes? Are you dizzy? Is your vision blurred?’ What I know, of course, is that the man in the baseball cap is not saying anything medically sound to the woman; he is simply retrieving the child’s Peoples of the World lunchbox. The headline reads, “Who Is the Hero of Queens Blvd.?”

  I say to my wife, “Did you see the paper?”

  “Yep. The usual stuff. Man saves mother and child from certain disaster.”

  “You’re a cynic.”

  “Actually, I admire him.” She puts down her magnifying glass and glances at the paper. “Cute girl,” she says. Then she looks at me accusingly, the way she did when she saw the father holding the infant on Life of Baby, the way she does whenever a friend of hers gets pregnant.

  “I’ll be in the bedroom,” I say.

  “It’s only 4:00.”

  “Like I said, I’ll be in the bedroom.”

  A few minutes later, she’s there, and her red summer dress is draped across the rocking chair, and she is opening the drawer of the bedside table, reaching for the condom, and I close the drawer and say, “never mind that,” and her mouth is open in a slight and endearing way, and her neck is pale and convincing, and I am P
arallel Lover, a new and much-sought-after superhero—intense and nurturing, generous and rabid, strong and gentle, impeccable.

  The sheets are askew. The room is hot. Down below, the phonograph man rattles by, music drifting from his cart. Mrs. Shevardnadze is screaming at her cat. The pigeons on the eaves are cooing. My wife’s breathing, finally, has slowed. Her eyes are closed, her hand draped lightly over my thigh. She looks more at peace than I’ve ever seen her. Soon, she is asleep and smiling slightly, unaware that I am watching. In her dreams, perhaps the dead girls are receding. For a few hours, at least, she will forget the Pendant Murders; for a few hours the world will seem like a bright, inviting place. I too am willing to believe this, am willing to believe that, at this very moment, there is a tiny flame alight in the dark recesses of her womb. There, in that place so far from reach, it has already begun: a slow and certain growth, some tiny glistening thing.

  SCALES

  Before we met, he had passed a decade of bachelorhood in a small house in Fairhope just steps from Mobile Bay, with the aid of a trusted assistant who did his shopping, ran his errands, and occasionally shared his meals.

  And then he found me. Or, it should be said, I found him. On the Fairhope Pier, on a typically moonlit night. He appeared to me first as a statuesque figure at the end of the pier, dressed in a long-sleeved shirt and linen pants. I was having a difficult time of it, having recently lost, within the span of a few weeks, a decent job and a beloved pet, not to mention a boyfriend, when I saw him standing there, so still and silent he did not seem real. I stepped off the warm sand onto the pier. When the boards creaked beneath me he turned, and only then did I understand that this splendid creature was alive.

  For several moments I hesitated. Someone standing in such a way, at such a place, on such a night, surely does not want to be interrupted. Then the moonlight hit his face, and a flash of multicolored light shot off the tip of his elegant nose, and I found myself walking toward him, as the old pier wobbled and groaned.

  “Stop,” he called out.

  It was a slightly scratchy voice, halting, as if it was out of practice.

  “Why?” I called back.

  “Because,” was his reply.

  “It’s a public pier,” I said.

  To this, he had no answer. He turned back toward the water and took a step. For a moment I thought he might jump. But he didn’t. When I reached him, he kept his back to me and muttered, “I came out here to be alone.”

  “Me, too. I won’t bother you.” Then I moved to stand beside him, and he lifted a gloved hand to shield his face.

  “Please,” he said.

  But by then, I had already seen.

  We stood for a minute or two in silence before I said the only thing I could think of to say, which was, “You’re beautiful.”

  “I’m ghastly,” he replied.

  “Not to me.”

  He produced a small paper bag, and when he opened it I could smell hot spice and salt and the sea. It was a strong, wonderful odor particular to the Gulf Coast, and immediately I was happy to be home again, after a long time away.

  “Crawfish,” he said.

  “I know.”

  I reached into the bag, took one of the hard little shells, and twisted until the tail came clean from the head. I sucked the head, something I hadn’t done in years. But the juice was delicious, even more so than I remembered, tangy and sweet. The shimmering man followed suit, and it occurred to me that the boyfriend who had just kicked me out of his stylish apartment in the stylish city that had never really felt like home would never have done such a thing. I squeezed the tail end of the shell until the tender pink meat came out and popped it into my mouth. Only after I had swallowed did I have the good grace to thank him.

  “No, thank you,” he said. “One should never eat crawfish alone. I’ve been doing it far too long.” The combination of the words and the way he looked at me, as if we were complicit in some dream of love, seemed to cast forward into a future when we would do this together frequently, would, in fact, do many things together. It would not be an exaggeration to say that, at that moment, I understood that the thing we were going to share would be nothing short of a life.

  We sat down on the end of the pier, removed our shoes, our feet dangling in the water, and ate. He produced a couple of warm beers, which seemed to materialize from thin air. We drank them in silence. When the crawfish and the beers were gone, he began to talk. He was three years old when the scales began to appear, he explained—on his upper legs, at first. Tiny, half-moon shaped bits, hard and thin, the edges paper-sharp. Eventually the scales began to thicken and to stretch up his body—to his groin, his stomach, his arms, shoulders, neck, and, at last, his face. “The doctors could do nothing,” he said.

  Once he started talking, it was as if he couldn’t stop. And I, who had driven away my last boyfriend with the sheer volume and excess of my words, sat and listened. For the first time in my life, I found listening to be effortless. Every now and then I’d feel a school of tiny fish moving past like a gentle wind, the mouths nibbling at my ankles.

  “No one has ever loved me before,” he admitted, by which I understood him to mean that no one had ever made love to him.

  When he was finished, I said, “I have something to tell you.”

  “What is it?”

  But when I opened my mouth to say it, the words would not come out. Why mar this perfect evening with my confession? I would be for him, that night, the ideal companion. I would let him think that I was the kind of woman a man might be lucky to have. You’d be a real prize, my ex had said, sliding his hands over my breasts, my hips, my thighs, if you had your mouth surgically wired shut.

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “Never mind.”

  He shook the last bits of crawfish shell into the water and put the empty bottles into the paper bag. “My house is just down the beach,” he said. “Do you want to come home with me?”

  “Yes.”

  In hindsight, I understand that when he removed his glove and took my hand in his, it was meant as a silent warning. Though he held my hand as gently as he could, I could feel the scales cutting into my palm and fingers. I wondered, but did not ask, whether the affliction covered his entire body. Later that night, pressing my face into a pillow to squelch my screams, I understood that it did.

  ***

  That first time, I was covered with lacerations. Tiny red marks all over the front of my body, like thousands of paper cuts, and also on my back where his arms had embraced me. All through the night I kept waking in pain, the fresh wounds damp with blood, my body sticking to the soft flannel sheets. Beside me, he slept soundly, his scales wet-seeming in the moonlight, his face the picture of peace. I couldn’t help but feel, somehow, that I had saved him, although it would occur to me later that it was the other way around. In any event, that first morning-after, when I woke to the sound of his scaled feet clicking softly against the tile floor, I knew that I would stay with him. That I would make a home there in that house by the bay. Maybe it was the disfiguring effect of our first attempt at love—after all, I had never been loved so dramatically. More likely, it was the fact of his having accomplished something no other man had ever been able to do: with him, I had fallen easily, happily, willingly into silence.

  I can say without reservation that the weeks that followed were the best weeks of my life. Days, I went out looking for a new job while he concealed himself in the house, making notes for a memoir he planned to write. He was very secretive about the book, would not let me see so much as a single page, kept the steadily growing manuscript locked away in a file cabinet. It was a house of secrets to which I was not privy, but I had my secrets too. I did not mention to him the flaw that had brought all my previous relationships, romantic and otherwise, to an abrupt and tearful end. I did not tell him that I had laid cruel waste to a long cadre of therapists, professionals who, though trained to listen, could not bear to listen to me. Or that my second-to-last boyf
riend had been so put off by my incessant talking that, following our break-up, he’d taken up with a woman who rarely spoke, who made her living as a mime on the streets of New York City. I did not tell him that my own mother would not take my calls.

  He had fallen in love with a certain girl, the one he met that night at the end of the pier, the one who sat silently and listened to his stories. In order to keep him, I would remain that girl. It was easier than I could have imagined: he held my rapt attention, and I, miracle of miracles, held my fevered tongue.

  ***

  Following that first night, we went an entire month without making love, during which time my body slowly healed. Mornings and evenings, he dressed the wounds with salve. Of course, he had to wear gloves, but even so, I felt that I had never been touched so gently. Some nights, while he was sleeping, I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, peeled back the bandages, and examined my shorn skin. It was a source of fascination for me, this pain that made me feel, at the same time, horribly wounded and deeply desired.

  Then, at the beginning of our second month together, I came home from work—by then I had landed a gig as a docent at the maritime museum—to find him dressed head-to-toe in a suit of clean white felt.

  “Feel,” he said, holding an arm out for me to touch. “It’s impenetrable. I had it custom-made. The felt is the best one can buy, hand-beaten by Tuvan women in the village of Tsengal in Mongolia.”

  I stroked his moon-white arm. “So soft,” I said. “It’s beautiful.”

  But what I was thinking was that I missed his scales, the way they captured and reflected light, the way, when he moved across a room, he looked like a human chandelier.

  Have I mentioned that his scales twinkled? Have I mentioned that, after bathing, while he stood in the middle of the tiled kitchen floor, dripping dry to avoid shredding the towels, he was like a fountain of light?

  “There is a necessary flaw in the suit’s design,” he said, leading me to the bedroom.