Square Wave (2 page)

So it would be left to him, Carl Stagg, to subject these fragments, at a later time, to the maw of his mind, scraping away at their surfaces until a pleasing resistance was met, and what was left in his grasp was hard as stone.

“Tickets aren’t so bad, if we buy now—or soon.” Her voice, unraised, came from the living room. Immediately she appeared, her face carrying the question.

He stepped on the trash-pedal and knocked out the steaming puck of spent powder. She stopped just short of him and regarded the grocery below in the street as he rinsed the portafilter and wiped down a kitchen counter that didn’t need it.

“To England?” He liked misunderstanding her.

“No! Africa. Doesn’t that sound better? You’ve spent enough time—
I’ve
spent enough time—in England. The house is crumbling anyway.”

“It’s been renovated.”

“And I’m supposed to hang around while you’re in the attic digging up old family letters?”

“You could help me if you want.” He hung the unsoiled cloth from the oven door and wrapped an arm around her from behind, just beneath her breasts.

“You don’t touch them enough,” she said.

He turned her around and put his hands on her waist, squeezed her hips, pinched the skin with his thumbs and pointers. Her panties were a shambles. In places the cotton was reduced to just a few crosshatched fibers, and the elastic was dark with sweat and sloughed skin. He pulled it down in front with his thumb and ruffled the dark hair; but he was thinking of Portsmouth, of London, and then of the Fens, where they had both spent most of their time in England, though separately. Finally Kent came to mind. He could see if Oli might save him a trip and visit the country house in Canterbury, send him the last of Rutland’s letters.

“I like that you like it.” The hair, she meant. Her mouth twisted into a smile that became a pucker. He kissed her eyes shut, right to left, and released the elastic with the lightest of snaps, silent.

“Can we sleep here tonight?”

He nodded.

“So… tickets?”

He laughed. She left the kitchen for the living room, her arms behind her, pulling him along by the fingers in a way that turned his hands into pistols.

Renna’s apartment was larger than his, nicer. The living room was a long rectangle lined with narrow boards, maple or ash, varnished and staggered. The wood had gone matte in places: along the path from the kitchen to her bedroom, from the bedroom to the bathroom, and then near the foot of the sofa, the massive gray-green brick covered in a rich fiber.

Besides the sofa there was little else. A parched mahogany table of unknown but apparently ancient provenance served for eating and working. (For him, anyway. She preferred bed for both.) There were cigarette burns all over it. (She didn’t smoke, and though he did, the marks predated him.) The table’s edge bore semicircular scuff marks from the bottle caps popped on it in its life before Renna. Two folding chairs were wedged under it, and a pair of unstable barstools sat near the kitchen counter. That was it.

The other bedroom, only recently adapted into Stagg’s second study, had been vacated just weeks before by the gymnast, a pommel horse specialist. He left in haste to Orlando, to train at a well-regarded program where a spot had opened up owing to another man’s career-ending injury. There was some chance of making it to nationals this year, he’d said, but at twenty-three he was already considered old, and his best shot at laud, Olympic qualification, had passed him by three years earlier. He’d finished two places out on the horse.

In the nine months he occupied the second bedroom—he’d replaced a college friend Renna had rented the apartment with originally, a year before, while Stagg was still in England—the two kept things mostly polite and formal between them. Now and again, though, they would eat together.

Stagg once shared a starch-heavy dinner of gnocchi in a veal reduction with the two of them, at the battered table. They’d lifted up the leaves, unnecessarily, as nothing was placed on them. Stagg found the man more of a boy, really. He was not stupid, though his education was soft, his brain, Stagg imagined, resembling unkneaded dough.

That night, he asked him idly about the origins of the pommel horse. Something about Alexander the Great came back, martial preparation. And then, cheaply, he asked him about the
meaning
of the horse, knowing, first, that the gymnast was not practiced in the address of this sort of question, and, second, that whatever meaning might be lodged in the horse, recovering it would be pedantry at its worst, certainly not something worth sullying dinner with, and probably not even a seminar room.

“Knowing” turned out to be too strong, though that is what it felt like. The gymnast’s answer, not in so many words, was that the horse was a bounder of mastery. In most things—art, science, politics, friendship, love—success was ill defined, necessarily murky, an always evolving question. Not so, he said, on the horse. A simple mastery was possible. And curiously, he said this was so irrespective of their being anyone in a position to judge the performance, even the athlete himself. Judgment had nothing to do with it.

It was this qualification that complicated the gymnast’s answer. The case, and the contrast with the other endeavors, would seem simpler to make with an unjudged sport, track perhaps being the ideal. But the gymnast spoke with such casual conviction, Stagg found it difficult to disbelieve him, even if it threw into doubt exactly what case he meant to be making, and it was not quite possible to understand how what he said could be true, or even how the world would have to be arranged for it to be true.

But wasn’t it Catherine, another Great, who’d said that victors aren’t judged? The question flitted through Stagg’s mind. He let the conversation move on. He would rather explore the thought himself, later, on his own. The gymnast, if he knew anything of this, could only muddle things from here, or coarsely domesticate whatever wayward insight he might have had. Still, Stagg was more impressed by the man then, if only complexly so, than he had ever been, before or since.

The only thing about the gymnast that brought Stagg an unadulterated satisfaction, though not a noble one, was a disastrous day in his life. Renna had gone to see him perform in a state competition, more of a warm up for the season, in his second specialty, the rings. From a handstand, impressively taut and straight, he dipped down into the iron cross, an inverted one, his signature move. But just before he reached the position, a pectoral gave way.

Normally the cross, inverted or not, needs to be held for two seconds for the judges to score it. But his was not a holding of the position so much as a passing through it. He descended from the handstand past the cross, his outstretched arms closing in on his sides. For an instant, with his arms angled back slightly, like wings, he seemed to her a plane flying toward the mat. Stagg found this beautiful. Sometimes he would ask Renna to tell him the story again, go over the feeling she had at just this moment. Once in a while she would indulge his morbidity.

When the gymnast’s arms reached his sides, his hands clung tight to the rings and his body whipped around perforce, separating his shoulder and tearing a biceps as he spun to the ground. This was six months ago. But even as he was moving out, Renna remembered him not by the energy drinks crowding the fridge, or the hyperbolically proportioned upper body, or the six a.m. alarms that began even his Sundays, but by that passing, upside-down cross. For her, if not for the judges, it counted. If what the gymnast was saying at dinner were to be believed, it simply counted, for no one in particular.

They were in her bed now, she under the covers, he over them.
“You
can be my roommate,” she said, caprice speaking.

“I like my apartment.”

“Compared to this one?” she asked, as if that were insane.

“It’s chastening is what I mean. I have a lot to do right now, to write. It will go faster there. And anyway you don’t want my notes all over the place. They’ve got a way of taking up as much space as there is.”

She frowned but it was mostly show.

“The sooner I finish, the sooner we could go somewhere,” he said, taking her expression in earnest. “Maybe we’ll get a place together when our leases are up.”

“I can edit them. They’re like short stories,” she said, passing over, or through, his words to his work.

“More like fragments, of fact. Patchworks of fact.”

“Bricolage.” She drew the word out in a faraway whisper, as if speaking to her own past in graduate school.

The mattress shifted. She was on her side now, away from him, texting, and then up and out of bed.

“Oh I thought he’d cancel. I have so little to do and I’m still doing it terribly.” She dressed twitchily, pulling on lint-ridden leggings, Chelsea boots, and a cream blouse.
“And
I have a dinner tonight.” She ducked into the bathroom to fix her hair, so short now it didn’t need to be fixed.

“Weren’t we going to see Larent play tonight?”

“I know. You go, though. He wants you to hear his new stuff, he said so.”

Stagg’s interest was wholly dependent on hers.

“Tell him I’m sorry,” she said. “He knows how I am. Will you go, for both of us?”

With a sucking sound a kiss came at him from the doorway. He stared at his feet. Then she was on top of him, sprawled. “Let’s
move
to Africa.”

“Who’s the writer this time?” he asked.

“The dinner? Tim Heath. He hasn’t written much yet. But what he’s written! Have you read anything?”

“What’s he write?”

“Short stories mainly.”

“Stories, no, I don’t—”

“You just
write
them.”

“That’s what you keep saying.”

“Okay, so they aren’t stories! They don’t sound at all like essays, though. Something beyond that. Beyond even history maybe. Right?” She rubbed her face against his and her hair poked at his eyes. “I know they’ll be you—all you.”

She pecked his lips twice and sat up on the edge of the bed, facing away from him. “Anyway, I want to get something new from Tim, before his story collection comes out. A reported piece even. He has some pitches. Could make him a regular contributor, if things go well. It would definitely help the magazine.”

“That
is
your job.”

“It’s the only interesting part of it right now. He’s very good. He’s like you.”

She stood and turned just her face to him, over her shoulder. “Oh, do I love you,” she said, in a tone that placed this just between a statement and a question.

He pulled her hands to him and kissed the tips of her fingers.

“Okay, so, home late, I’ll miss you.”

The door rattled shut and a pattering of feet faded in the hallway. He lifted the window. The draft stung his face, whipped the door closed, and vanished. There was only a plastic lighter in the blue and white cigarette pack on the sill, next to the dark bottle and the trails of ashes like crumbs. He tossed the empty box, cellophane still girdling its lower half, into the morning outside. It caught in a gust and hovered a moment before the wind pinned it to the other side of the alley, leaving it soon to tumble into the weeds of pale green and the beer bottle shards of a darker hue below.

Without fantasies he licked his hand and lay back on the bed. Just before he came, soundlessly, he turned on his side, toward the floorboards. He turned back and waited for the medicinal effects to take hold. Immediately things seemed simpler, mercifully abstract. Philosophical. A natural refuge.

He rarely leaned on fantasies now. When he faltered, and a blank slate wouldn’t do, the only ones that helped were of her. But he didn’t want them. They were the wrong kind. There were times, though, when nothing else sufficed, and, helpless, he would let his mind, till then a vacuum, fill with the men who had, in her own strange and potent description, metabolized her.

Thinking of her this way, as an instrument, satisfied something in him. He was slow to accept this, but the link between imagining her so and the stiffening of his cock had grown too strong to ignore.

She herself spoke with something close to pride about being a notch in the right bedposts, the ones of the Casanovas and cads, the elegant rakes. Mostly she would describe these men of art through the beauty of their apartments, the ubiquity of their friends, the perfection of their seductions. There was admiration, envy, and only a little disgust in her voice when she did, and on the occasions when scorn did come to the fore, the more she poured on them, the more pleased she seemed to be to have lain in their beds.

It gave her something, to play a part in their stories, any part, the more public the better. Though she liked gossip, she liked being its object even more. And as she seemed to measure her worth not by anything inhering in her, but by the company she kept, the surroundings she could work her way into, it was lucky she had a knack for ingratiation.

Generally all of this nauseated him, and though he didn’t like to think about it, it must have been one of the less lofty reasons he’d dropped out of publishing so quickly: that he might not have to know these gallants of empty graces and Cheshire smiles.

In fact, she too wanted to feel she was something apart from these men, that world, especially its charlatanry, which in quieter moments she allowed, in the soft, slow monotone she did her thinking in, was part of its essence, maybe even part of its allure. You were never really expected to show your hand.

His affection for her, though, was the proof that she had a hand to show. After all, she thought, he’d done the work—not just intellectually, in books, but introspectively, in himself—that they mostly pretended to. If she could hold his attention when they could not, that must mean something: that though she spent much of her time swanning around, disappearing in the froth, there would always be a remainder. And this, the solidest bit of her, was something that he had to take seriously.

But did she really want that, to be truly seen? Wasn’t that seriousness, the very one he was applying now while she ran off into that world, already beginning to undo them? The closer he looked, the more she squirmed, the more the remainder receded like a mirage. Even if it existed, she did nothing to honor it. And was that what drew him to her anyway? He stepped around the idea that her appeal might be grounded in bone structure. Perhaps they both needed the conceit then.