Hard Mouth Read online

  I didn’t listen to the remaining voicemails, instead departing quickly and driving through summer-light traffic to the Metro station’s Park & Ride. I intended to visit the Portrait Gallery: to stare at the faces of old white men, to have some staring contests, to always lose or always win. It would give me a clean minute. A breath in which not to think. I liked being inside museum buildings. I was less invested, still, in the art.

  At the station I scanned my card and took the escalator up to the platform. It looked like rain. I sniffed the hot asphalt flux of the city. The train came quickly.

  Boarding I saw the car was packed. There must’ve been, I believe, some kind of event that had attracted tourists to the Red Line in August. Most locals—if they had any money, vacation time, or otherwise-sourced mobility—knew to leave the city’s boggy haze. Or they stayed inside, orienting sticky skin toward any source of cool. Meanwhile the interlopers emerged, coming by threes and fours and fives and twenties, on buses and airplanes, to see the nation’s capital, and to sweat.

  In this sea of raucous motley tourists in baseball caps and pleated shorts, my body ached. I searched for a place to rest. A rich- and young-looking businessman was taking up two-and-a-half seats with a rolling suitcase and garment bag. It was the solo sitting prospect. I perched beside the suitcase. “Is this your bag?” I asked him. The train began to move and in response he moved his bag only slightly. It made no spatial difference. I watched him chuckle to himself while my leg muscles propped me, bleating. On his phone he was reading from a satirical news-humor site. I scanned his hands. He did not wear a ring but rather a bracelet of Tibetan prayer beads. Paired with the suit and behavior I found this accessory an odious display of hope. The man put his phone away, then yawned and smiled to himself. My calf muscles seized as the train skittered along. His glasses were rimless, his shirt primly pressed.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “Do you think you could move your bags a bit more?” He looked at me as if smelling something. Other passengers leaned in to see what he would do. He did not move. He took out his phone and began to read the satirical news again, overplaying his chuckle.

  To match I sighed like a brat. “Excuse me. Maybe you also need space and care,” I said to him. “Maybe you are also on your way to a funeral.” I was not dressed for a funeral, was wearing shabby jeans and some T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. Like a man I gambled my umbrage would get me what I wanted. This time he looked up at me.

  Gene was sardine-packed upright on a pole two thirds of the way down the car. Even so, I could see him clenching his ham fists white. At this point everyone was paying attention but no one was doing anything. I had been loud over the tourist chatter. It began to rain, hot lashes of water whipping the train windows, tightening the scene.

  The man said something that sounded like “I do not speak English.” Though he had just been reading it. I could not tell if he cared that he was a known liar. Geney was boiling. All around the tourists made satisfied humming noises. No one knew he was a liar but me. A girl my own age offered me her seat. I said no thanks. I watched the graffiti on the buildings go by, wet colors overlapping with speed. I burned a bit. I fantasized about a retirement home for twenty-something women with antisocial tendencies. Presently I felt squashed.

  When at last we rolled into the station I deboarded in an extravagant, silent huff. A busker violinist was playing “Flight of the Bumblebee.” I recognized it from The Jack Benny Program, which Pop loved to listen to on Sunday nights, courtesy The Big Broadcast with Ed Walker. Pop loved everything old. Once, he’d liked to hold on; now he was letting it all ride. I moved out and down G Street through a blood-warm rain, up the Gallery’s broad steps, and in.

  The Portrait Gallery was not as popular as, say, the Air and Space—where once they’d had a Star Trek exhibition, and where they sold the tantalizing tooth/tongue challenge of astronaut ice cream in the extensive gift shop. Here, the galleries were inflected occasionally by bored-looking, backpack-wearing groups of two or three, who spent twenty-to-forty seconds standing near each painting. Their patterned duty of tourism put me off. Despite my previous plan I bypassed the dry-rot presidential faces. At Mr. Hackett, in the Character of Rip Van Winkle I stopped, simply because there was no one else nearby. My rain-wet skin frosted in the gallery’s cool.

  In Van Winkle, a young actor performs as an old man who has not experienced his own life. This man stands beseeching, in a lovely primeval forest, with one arm stretched toward the heavens and the other at his chest. The painting is made in the moment of Rip’s waking. He wears a tattered shift and breeches, coma wrinkled. His features are childlike, eyes doll round, with a nimbus-y beard, bald pate, and long white hair. It is supposed to be a maybe-comic picture, or maybe a comic role wrought as a tragic picture, or maybe the other way around. The curatorial notes relayed: Rip Van Winkle went up a mountain with his dog and rifle, lay down to nap and slept for decades, woke to find his beard long and his wife dead and his son a man.

  It’s a story about time, and its passing. Of having no familiarity with a place that was once home. The idea of legacy is, in the end, impossible. Okay: I knew the painting was there. I think I wanted to feel accused, flung. I wanted to press on a personal bruise.

  “I woulda made a great Van Winkle!” Geney whispered. I rolled my eyes. “A non-actor cannot understand how it feels to encounter yourself in a role!” His whisper tickled my lobes. I went out of the museum.

  Outside the summer shower had ended. As I walked down 9th, water steamed from the grass. The stone buildings lightened as they dried. Gene trotted alongside me, making no noise on the wet gravel as we crossed the Mall. “A man out of time!” he persisted. “Who better to play him than yours truly?”

  “It’s almost like a bee is buzzing in my ear,” I said.

  I bought a Chipwich from a kiosk beside the carousel and sat on a bench, watching as kids throttled the necks of the carousel horses and screamed in delight and terror equally.

  I thought of returning Ken’s call, but he was at work until later. Also I didn’t feel like I wanted to hear anything he’d say. “Gene?” I asked the humid air.

  “Denise?” he answered, rematerializing, looking tired. “Did I ever tell you about the time?”

  “About what time?” I allowed my eyes to unfocus, so I didn’t have to see the throttling children.

  “About the time I up and left everybody?” I shook my head, though he had. He was a record skipping. I had no verve to move the needle, to get up and lift the arm. “I’ll tell you I was troubled by the Soviet attitude toward the German State from the start. It was pushy—that’s an understatement. They had nukes or almost did. They couldn’t be bossed or reasoned with.”

  “Who does that sound like to you?” I asked, a bit bored.

  “It wasn’t safe.”

  “What wasn’t?”

  “Anywhere where there were a lot of people, anywhere they could do a lot of harm.”

  I thought then of the packed train car and the lazy and/or territorial man. How he must have been desperate in a crowd to build private space. I only blamed him a little. I thought how I was becoming less invested in what a body could or couldn’t make happen. I was simply a defenseless meatbag. A stroller came by and spit a spray of gravel at my ankles. “Here’s to mud in your eye!” I said or thought.

  “You said it.” Gene continued: “So that’s when I decided to buy a large parcel of land outside Imnaha, Oregon, where the river and Big Sheep Creek come together. I began to stay at the spread for a week, then go back into town, do some flight runs, get paid, and then get back there, safe and sound.” I wanted to ask him was he an actor or a pilot. A ghost or a man.

  When Gene and I first met I’d been in the bath, wondering whether Ma would let me go on the Colonial Williamsburg field trip. I had been newly fifteen, inventorying my own body. I saw it was hard but softening, follicles spitting. I sank, letting the water enter my ear holes.

  From under the water I�
��d heard a snuffly basso.

  When I came back up, well, there was Gene, sitting on top of the closed toilet, humming a nothing tune in that voice made of simple syrup and rocks. I almost asked him to pass the conditioner, was how little strange it occurred to me then. After all, my father was dying and my body was changing and I was thinking I did not know or understand what permanence was supposed to mean. So I said: “Hello?”

  “Listen kid I gotta tongue twister for ya,” he debuted. I was dumb; he rapped on the tub. “Hello? Hello? I have a tongue twister. You interested?”

  “Fuck off,” I said. I had never said this to anyone. He made a huh of a laugh and seemed otherwise untroubled. Bathwater rolled from my scalp down the sides of my head, setting my shoulders to shiver. I saw he was wearing a broad tweed coat and pantaloons. I made my chest concave, dipping my chin back into the water.

  “Do you want to hear my tongue twister?” he asked again.

  “Sure, yeah,” I said. I worked my mouth open and closed to distract myself from my embarrassment. Each time my jaw moved it made a little eddy. “Lay it on me.”

  “Okay, okay, okay, okay, here ya go.” He put his hands up as if pushing against a pane of glass. “You ready?”

  I nodded.

  “Who eats floating fish but flies?”

  “I don’t get it,” I said, sitting up and splashing the surface with one forefinger. I discovered that his presence did not make me feel shy. Mostly this was because he was a figment. Also: bodies are bodies. Everyone’s got one, till they don’t. “What do you mean?”

  “Girlie, there’s nothing to get. Who eats floating fish but flies? Say it five times fast.”

  “Who eats floating flish but flies,” I said, on the first try-out.

  He laughed at me. “See? I told ya. Wait for a bona fide performer to try it out.” He made a little show of clearing his throat and then began: “Who eats floating fish but flies. Who eats floating fish but flies. Who eats floating fish but flies. Who eats floating fish but flies. Who eats floating fish but flies.” He said it like he was walking across a tightrope that was also a country lane. “Stick with me, kid, and you’ll see.”

  I sank my head back under the water and blew bubbles, up. The bath was warm as urine. Underneath it was all slangy shadow and rippling light. Surfacing I thought maybe I should ask him to further elaborate, but he was already gone. But I needn’t have worried or wondered. He’d come back, again and again.

  Now on the Mall Gene was still prattling about his fortress-cum-Shangri-La. “I had lettuces and beefsteak tomatoes, snap beans and a little row of corn at the edge of the land where the cattle couldn’t get at it.”

  “I will at some point,” I interrupted, “want to know what this has got to do with me.” I felt irritable all over again. This feeling was a generic distraction.

  “O but what hasn’t it got to do with you!” Gene cracked his meaty, sweaty knuckles and seesawed on the bench. “Every story has a lesson! Every riddle has an answer! Every joke can get a laugh!”

  I said that I had never been good at punchlines.

  “You’re wasting my time, if that’s what you think,” he said. I agreed. I recalled then Hill’s finger pet. I recalled my body, touched, and shuddered in this until diverted by a runny mush in my hands. It was the Chipwich, which I had neglected unto its melting. I threw it out and washed my hands in a water fountain whose drain was clotted with snot.

  My head felt full and sloshing. I decided to ford the crowds, and descended into the subterranean. There the station was mostly empty; a suited man on the opposite platform also waited. I thought: Is that the man who would not cede his seat for me, a declared funeral-goer in need of space and care? He was standing, erect and free of his bags, twenty feet across and five feet over, beyond my track and the next. It was or was not him. We stood in the barrel-vaulted concrete volume, our bodies minor beneath its curve. As I opened my mouth I understood I was heading in a new direction and had been for some time. I submitted to this and hollered across the tracks.

  “Where are your prayer beads?”

  “What?” he hollered back.

  “Where—is—your—bracelet?” The question echoed dully in the big space.

  He looked confused and it was not quickly or slowly but instantly that I acknowledged to myself that this was a different man. He was similar only in stature and posture, in whiteness and maleness. I wished for either train to arrive, to carry one of us out of this scene. One did not for quite some time.

  Meanwhile we pretended that I hadn’t said anything. More people congregated around us. The train came. I got on it. I was hungry, and wished I’d remembered to eat my ice cream. This time I found a seat, and soon closed my eyes all the way to my stop.

  On through the station, onto the parking garage, and there to my hot car, in which I sat, blank. Still I did not want to talk to anyone I knew. I had no job. My father was finally dying; my mother was fixated. I longed for crowds or to become anonymous, even to myself. Why not, in this condition, meet a stranger for a coffee date?

  Monica answered quickly. She named a location near the research campus, a day—the next so-called work day, a Monday—and a time—lunch o’clock. All the rest of the day and night I did nothing but sleep, waking occasionally to look at the squirrel out on the back grass, which was either the squirrel from the morning or a different one, or perhaps it wasn’t there at all.

  “MARK SAID YOU had a nice body,” Monica said. “At least you eat croissants.” We were in a chain cafe in a strip mall. Monica saluted my pastry. To this I grunted low. She gave me a funny look. The confidential dearness of the other night was entirely gone and in its place, this—this womanly collegial air. There was a summer afternoon melee of readers and klatschers and sticky young families, two messy ginger-headed children sitting under a corner table, their mother fussing with her phone. It wasn’t the kind of place I liked to be.

  “Oh,” I said finally, realizing she was expecting an answer. “I like them. So I do.”

  “That’s perfectly logical, I guess, but anyway.” She swallowed a bit of coffee. “Anyway. Mark would like to see you again, I think. He hasn’t said anything directly, but I can tell. I saw him yesterday night. He usually doesn’t bother to mention girls, you know, after the fact.”

  “I’m not looking for anything, I think.”

  “Oh, well.” Her blunt bangs reorganized themselves as she wrinkled her brow. “Well. We liked you.” And after a moment: “It’s nice anyway, then,” she said, “to be spending time with another woman of science for once.”

  “It’s not that I don’t want female friends,” I said carefully. “It’s just that I don’t have them.”

  “Well, in science—” she swallowed, “whatever you do, there still aren’t an embarrassment of ladies.”

  “An embarrassment of ladies,” I repeated.

  “Yes. It isn’t a nail salon, for god sakes.” Monica seemed to notice I wasn’t saying anything of my own. I wondered if she cared what I thought of her. “It can just be a bit of, well, a boys’ club.” Is it possible to be both warm and awful? Witness this specimen, doing the best she can.

  “I guess,” I responded. “I haven’t really noticed.” I felt she was probably wrong, that there were many female scientists, not a majority, but definitely, like, a squadron’s worth, and that perhaps the ones she knew were simply too challenging or mouthy for her taste. There had been plenty in my own former lab, not that I had spoken to any of them. Now all these years later I imagine it’s different—better, even, perhaps. Not that time and progress are always companions.

  “Perhaps you wouldn’t,” she said.

  “It seems to be an even split around where I work, especially with all the young kids, in from school.”

  “Yes, but well, that happens later.” She swept her hand upward and back in a wave-like motion. “I saw a lot of female colleagues go into, I don’t know, social work, administration, their degrees just sitting there.
Or just having those.” She tipped her head toward the mother with the ginger kids, the little one cleaned up now and the older one set upon the frosting part of a cupcake.

  “Oh,” I said once more, and filled my mouth with air.

  “Well, you just—in the sciences you have to want it. In anything really.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I see,” I said. Even strangers were overrated.

  “Lots of people can be better than you—smarter, better looking, more inventive,” Monica said. “But you can still want something the most, and that can be your edge. Well—” she said, angling her head like an overselling actor. “What’s your edge?”

  “I don’t really know.”

  “You’ve got to have one.”

  “I’m not sure I do.”

  “I can tell you do, though.”

  “I feel edgeless,” I said. My honesty shocked me. But I went on. “Or right now I do. I have some family things going on, and I’ve just left my job.” I could not stop from saying it. Likely it was my fatigue and the strange man on the train and all the sleeping and possibly the croissant. Already I was imagining that its butter was getting handsy with my insides, laminating me. “Something to do with hours and funding not going through and some line on the budget,” I added. My body calmed.

  “I hadn’t realized.” She looked caught. I thought maybe she wasn’t so happy to find herself having coffee with an unemployed person.

  “My last day was the one I met you all,” I continued.

  “Well that explains it!” She smiled.

  “Explains what?”

  “Oh, how sloshed you got.” I felt the hot red of a blush start at my jaw. She pretended not to see. “What do you think you’ll do next?”

  “Next?” It was a reasonable question I supposed. Just not one I had thought of.

  “For a job or whatever.”

  “I thought I’d take some time—” I started.

  “Oh totally!” she interrupted. “I took some time before my postdoc. Went to Cyprus and ate a lot of fish and drank grappa with the locals. Or it wasn’t called grappa, but it basically was grappa, something with a z, anyway. I didn’t know a soul there.” With a prideful commercial smile she gulped some coffee and kept going. I affected a pose of care by tipping my head to one side. “I think it was really brave of me to, you know, just go there. My mother was so worried. But it was just fine. Really very freeing.”