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Posted on November 16, 2013 at 1:03 PM |
Dave’s wife was a lip balm
addict. She stashed it everywhere: the car, her two purses, and in each of her
coats. Cindy used all the brands she could find, without loyalty to any one.
Blistex, Chap Stick, Carmex, Vaseline Lip Therapy, what have you. She employed
an evenhanded, unscientific approach to selecting which stick to apply—closest
one to her lips wins. Flavors were many. The basic fruits like Super Cherry and
Lunar Lime. The sweets like Gum Ball Galaxy. Those named after famous people:
Shaq-a-licious Surprise and J. Lo-Co-conut. And combinations like Very Berry
Katy Perry and Jackie O-range
Diamond. Some had an SPF of 45, but that was gravy. She made Dave carry one with
him in his front pants pocket, just in case she forgot hers. It was a strange
thing to Dave—that Cindy sometimes forgot the thing she most needed. But he
found it sweet that she relied on him in this small way, especially after his
career had veered into a ditch. He needed that vote of confidence. Dave had an advanced degree in
economics. He’d been a star at school and at work. That people had once
listened to his ideas was a badge of honor he’d worn with the pride reserved
for the greatest of achievements. He could picture himself, and he often did,
in a victory lap around the inner perimeter of an open-air stadium filled to
capacity, flags of every color and design waving, adoration being foisted upon
him. This was a thing that could not be matched by any remuneration. For Dave,
it was never about the money. But then his firm had shut down under the shadow
of a billing scandal. The events had left Dave’s resume with stains he couldn’t
scrub off, and his ambition dormant. Now, a comparable job was out of the
question. Headhunters wouldn’t touch him. He finally settled for a job down at
the commercial docks gutting and cleaning the daily catch, figuring that doing
so would be incentive not to remain inert. Problem was he was starting to like
it—the repetition, and the certainty of how he measured his daily success. Cindy worked full time. At
night, she kept lip balm under her pillow like a tooth for the tooth fairy.
Dave tried it himself once, without telling her, just before they’d gone to
bed. He wanted to understand and for about a minute he thought he did. His
coated lips felt impervious to the summer heat. He believed, at least for the
short time he’d rubbed his upper and lower lips together, that he was
protected. He lay there naked on his back watching the ceiling fan overhead
until Cindy came to bed. Their lovemaking that night lasted for hours, each of
them finally falling away from the other in sweaty exhaustion. He fell asleep satisfied,
believing things were on an upswing. I feel better, he thought. But at three
a.m., when Cindy couldn’t find the lip balm under her pillow, she turned all
the lights on in the bedroom. Frantic. She shook Dave awake, demanded he help
her find it. The thing must have rolled off the nightstand, he said, where he’d
put it while they were rolling around. But they never found it, as if their
lovemaking had removed it from existence. * Cindy had a four-year business
degree and a secure job in software development. She left Dave later that same year he lost
his job. This was during a September when it rained a lot, and the rest of the
fall would be much the same. On the day he moved into his new place, his
landlord helped him with the furniture. They carried a wooden library table up
a long flight of stairs, around a sharp bend onto a landing and into his kitchen,
placing it in the corner. It was big, oak, rectangular, with one drawer filled
with something that rolled around every time he and his landlord repositioned
it. He’d found the table with Cindy years before, second hand. She said they
should buy it and refinish it. They’d be doing something together, she said,
and it made her feel good. It would be a symbol of strength and longevity in
their relationship. After Dave’s friend Richie lent them his truck to bring
home the table, Dave and Cindy spent four days sanding the thing, making sure
to rub out every bit of its previous finish. They coated it with a
reddish-brown stain, and then used three coats of glossy polyurethane to
complete the job. The new surface gleamed. He liked to rub his hand over it, to
feel its smooth surface and the newness of what they’d done together. * During that last summer Dave
and Cindy were together, they would sometimes lay in bed naked and sweating
beneath the whirring fan. When the wind was right, the fan cooled them with
fresh air off Narragansett Bay. Most days, though, the stagnant air hung over
the town, wrapped it up so tight that no matter where you were in town you
couldn’t breathe without smelling the daily catch from the docks where Dave
worked. “Hey, you,” she said, reaching
for her lip balm. As she applied it, she rolled over, her head on his chest,
and looked up at the ceiling. “Let’s play ‘Do You Think?’” She rolled over
again, her dark hair falling onto her shoulders. She was on top of him now,
smiling. She put the stick under her pillow. “Do you want to play?” “What?” “Where are you anymore?” “What do you mean?” Dave said. “I don’t know. You just aren’t
here sometimes.” She straddled him, her hair falling off her shoulders and her
breasts rubbing against his chest. She put her hands on his collar bones,
gently, slowly moving toward his exposed throat. “Do you want to play or not?”
she said, her shining lips so close to his he could smell the lip balm: Calypso
Punch. She backed away her hands, pushed down hard on his chest and then shook
him. “I just want to feel better,”
he said. “This will help,” she said,
straightening up. “Okay, okay, I give.” “You start.” “No, you start,” he said. He
couldn’t think of any questions. “Okay, then. Me first.” Cindy
thought for a moment. “Do you think we’ll have any children?” They’d met five years before
and had been together since. She told him then that they’d be with each other
always because he understood her needs and that she always admired a man who
knew interesting things—things you could talk about at dinner parties, like the
ones with Dave’s co-workers who were important enough to have catered affairs
serving food prepared by the best local chefs. Sometimes Dave’s company even
brought in a chef from Boston, like Todd English, to do the cooking. Those were
the nights, Dave thought, when he most tangibly felt his success—eating the
food of kings. It was said by several of Dave’s now-former executives that
before Dave’s time at the firm, Julia Child had served French cuisine one
evening. At the dinner party where Dave and Cindy had first heard the story,
told with the greatest of reverie, they’d passed a satisfied glance to each other.
The lovemaking that followed later in the evening had, to Dave, validated
everything he’d done to that point in his thirty years on earth. Dave looked at her mouth now as
she spoke. He thought about how her smile had attracted him to her in the
beginning. How her lips looked just after she’d rubbed her tongue over them.
Soft, silky smooth, and a shade of pinkish red. He thought about how his
current career trajectory no longer fit with Cindy’s desire for important
people and dinner parties. “Your turn.” “Right. Okay. What was yours?” She was getting pissed. “Do you
think we’ll have any children?” she said again. “Do you think we’ll live until
we’re eighty?” he said. “Do you think Elvis will be
elected President?” “Do you think Richie’s cute?” “Do you think I belong in a
nunnery?” * Dave had counted 15 places
where Cindy had stored her supply of lip balm, including one on the shower
shelf next to his razor blades. She’d
found this one at Banana Republic next to a sock display: Peach Peridot Almond.
She’d gone there to buy him socks for a job interview. He’d needed those socks
the next day when he’d been scheduled to speak with a company about selling
their business equipment and supplies. The guy on the phone practically
guaranteed Dave the job. “Just come in tomorrow,” he’d said, “and talk to Jack.
Jack will love you. I know what Jack likes and you sound like what Jack likes.” Dave’s impulse had been to say,
“Of course Jack will like me,” but he hesitated. Desperation can do that, he
thought—hide your confidence so far out of reach you wonder if you ever had it
in the first place. Maybe it was a dream.
Cindy forgot the socks but
remembered the balm. Dave’s smart new suit and shiny polished black shoes
couldn’t overcome very old socks with holes in them. On the walk over to the
interview, the pain from the backs of his heals rubbing against the insides of
his shoes pissed him off to distraction. This and the oppressive summer air
clouded his ability to form coherent thoughts. Not surprisingly, the interview
went badly. Rain fell hard later that
afternoon while he walked home, defeated, his clothes soaked through to his
skin. He looked up and squinted, as if by doing so he might see between the
raindrops and the thick cloud cover all the way into the blue sky and beyond.
He saw himself just above the clouds carried by the wind, skipping along the
tops, feeling them soft and smooth. As he floated, lighter than air, he slowly
blended in with the sky so that all the molecules of his body scattered, and as
the warming sunlight hit them just before dusk, they caused the clouds to
evaporate, radiating colors so striking they brought people to their knees,
crying with joy. He couldn’t carry the elation
all the way home, though. He found Cindy in bed, waiting, but the sex lasted
just a few minutes as the rain hitting the roof caused Dave to lose focus and
think only about it breaking through and flooding their bedroom. He imagined
them being carried out the window, down the street and into the Bay, all the
while holding on to each other tightly as they floated farther and farther
away. He rolled off her, and lay beside her, listening for the rain to ease up.
They were both silent. “Hey,” he said, finally. He
left the lights off. “What.” “Do you want to hear about today?” “How’d it go?” “Oh, I didn’t mean the
interview. That was a disaster.” He told her about his vision,
the one where he floated above the clouds. He could feel himself getting
excited as he explained it, painting her a vivid picture of what he was now
calling “his revelation.” “Can you see it?” he said, when
she wasn’t responding. “Cindy?” He turned on the light now, but
somehow she’d slipped out of the dark room as he’d been talking. There was no
lip balm under her pillow.
* Now, when they made love, he’d
feel that they were together, again, in the same bed where she hid a stick of
lip balm, and nothing more. Her lips stayed soft, and varied in taste and
smell, but nothing could change the feeling that the two of them had gone flat.
“We need to spice things up. Do
you think we could?” She said this one night after he’d finished a bowl of
cereal. He’d gotten home just a half hour before from ten hours out in the sun.
His boss said he’d seemed off that day. Like he wasn’t interested in his job
anymore. “What do you mean?” he replied
to Cindy. “It’s just that I’m getting to
a point.” “A point,” he said. “What point
is that?” “Well, you know, people are
always getting to points in their lives. I just think that we’ve gotten to one.” “So it’s both of us, is it?” “I just want us to love each
other the same way we always did, is all. Do you think that’s asking too much?” “I’m tired,” he said. “Do you
think we could talk about this another time?” * “Dave?” “What?” “Do you think that Richie would
do it with me and you together?” She was next to him in bed, her left arm
draped over his chest, her left hand clutching Ruby Red Surprise. The air in
the room contained none of the vibrancy of times before. Just a sheet covered
them both, and his feet stuck out the end so that his heels rubbed along the
footboard. He didn’t wear socks. “What did you say?” he said.
But he’d heard her. He felt his heart pound harder in his chest. He bent his
knees so that the arches of his feet could rub along the footboard. “Do you...?” “Richie’s game for anything,”
Dave said. “But I don’t think I could—you know—participate.” Cindy turned away, onto her
back. Looking disappointed, she stared at the ceiling. She licked her lips and
then, without looking back at him, said, “Would you watch?” * Heavy rain battered the
sidewalk and trees outside Dave’s new apartment. He sat at the library table,
his landlord standing next to him looking out a window. Dave couldn’t get
comfortable. There was all this oaky, grainy space in front of him. He ran his
hands over its surface: smooth, like silk, just as it always had been since he
and Cindy had worked on it. He had positioned the table in the only spot it
could fit, just below a small window, the one his landlord looked out now. He
wondered how he’d gotten himself to a point where he was alone and worked five
days a week at the docks. This was not a possibility he’d imagined when he
first bought this table with Cindy. “Got a great view of
Narragansett Bay from this window,” his landlord said. He was old enough to be
Dave’s father, but in great physical shape. He wore a dark blue T-shirt, now
with sweat stains from moving the furniture. His biceps bulged through the
sleeves. He had more hair on his arms than Dave had ever seen on anyone. The
hair was mostly black, with gray scattered throughout. “Do you know anything about
gutting fish?” Dave asked, rubbing his own almost hairless right forearm. “I know they stink something
fierce when it’s hot like it was this past summer,” his landlord said, continuing
to look out the window. He folded his arms, showing off his Schwarzenegger biceps, and nodded slowly. “I do
know that.” Dave opened the table’s drawer
and picked up a stick of Strawberry Garnet Glaze lip balm. It was one of about
a dozen little-used sticks that had been rolling around in the wooden drawer
while they moved it. “My wife,” he said, showing his
landlord the stick. “She had the softest lips.” “They all do,” the landlord
said, taking it and studying the writing on its label. He held it close to his
nose, breathed deep and closed his eyes. A faint smile came over his face and
then quickly disappeared as if it had never been there. He placed the stick on
the table and looked at his new tenant with an expression that said he
understood but didn’t want to discuss it, and moved his gaze back out the
window to the heavy rain. “What’s out here?” Dave asked.
He removed the cap from the lip balm and held it close to his nose. “Everything. Town’s going to
float away,” his landlord said. “Where is she now?” “You can probably see her if
you look hard enough, floating away with everything else.” “Yeah,” the landlord said,
still looking out the window. “Sounds about right. They do that too, don’t
they?” After the landlord left, Dave
removed all the lip balm from the drawer and lined them up on the table, as if
they were standing at attention. He counted 14 in all. He would start with the
Strawberry Garnet Glaze. One by one, he uncapped a stick, turned it so the balm
poked out, and then applied it to his lips. First the upper and then the lower.
He rubbed his lips together to spread it around more fully, making sure to coat
the entire surface. “More,” he said out loud to the
empty room. He grabbed a random stick and turned it to expose more of the balm
and rubbed some into his forearms, onto his nose, his cheeks and his ears. When
he ran out of a stick, he moved to the next one. He closed his eyes and used it
on the lids, and then on his forehead. When he’d applied some on all the
exposed areas, he took off his shirt and rubbed balm into his chest and his
stomach. Then he went to a mirror in his bathroom and contorted himself into a
pretzel as he applied the last of the balm onto his back. He placed the empty
tubes into the drawer where he’d found them and slid the drawer shut, deriving
comfort from the sound they made as they rolled around—hollow, empty. “Good,”
he said. Shirtless and barefoot, he went
outside to watch the rain. Water flowed down his street, pushing its way easily
toward the bay off in the distance. He put his feet in the warm current as it
carried leaves and twigs and trash from the gutters, passed overflowing
drainage grates as if they didn’t exist, forcing its way along a predetermined
path away from here. The rain pelted his shoulders and chest, but he was
impervious to its attack. Nothing could get through the balm’s protection. The
nights with Cindy—the panicked moments when the balm could not be found—suddenly
made sense to him. How he could not have understood then what was so apparent
now was laughable, unimaginable. He laughed out loud at the skies pouring down
on him, drilling at him in vain, water bouncing off him and into the gutter.
Nothing, he thought, could penetrate this protection, this impermeable coating. Then he had a thought so lucid he
felt scared by his own self-assurance. It was as if the coating of the balm had
had a completely unexpected effect. His brain had been cleared of all residual
input, and what was left was one thing, a singular idea of such simple beauty
tears began to fall down his cheeks. He hadn’t felt this way for a long time,
since the days he was the superstar for his clients, when he’d speak and they
seemed to agree with everything he said. And the thought was this: Let it in. He peeled off the rest of his
clothes, tossed them aside and looked up into the sky, naked, with arms
reaching up. The rain fell too hard for him to see between the drops, as he’d
tried to on the day of the failed job interview. As it fell even harder, he
brought both hands to his face, and with his fingernails scraped the balm off
his forehead and cheeks. He felt the drops begin to work their
way through the first layer of his skin on his head. For a brief moment he felt
an irrational fear, and began to move toward the shelter of his front door. But
when it didn’t hurt, he stopped. Soon the raindrops penetrated all the
way through so that his skin began to wash away, exposing his skull. Tissue began
to mix with blood, all of it dissolving into a rapid torrent of himself washing
down his body and into the gutter. He scraped off more and more balm from his
shoulders and chest, his forearms and back. When all his skin had gone—and
slowly, painlessly, all of his bones—his veins and all his organs liquefied
completely into the rushing torrent. This wasn’t what he’d expected, this
ending, far from skirting atop the clouds and flawless sunsets with people on
their knees crying at the beauty they’d beheld—this was better. As he rushed
with the water toward Narragansett Bay, he remained aware of himself spreading
rapidly, freely with the current. Before he knew it, he stretched a hundred
yards, now two hundred, gliding in the warm flow. He entered a storm drain—the bay
would be next, where he’d be dispersed into the cloudy, cold water. Look at me now, Cindy, he thought. I’m everything. END Author's Note - this is a gently edited version of the story that appears in Chagrin River Review |
Categories: Published Works
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