from “Windower”

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Of the two detectives, one has the creepy gentleness of an old cat, and may have been one, but I don’t remember him, I only remember the other, who has green neck tattoos, and who sits at our table, which Noelle built, in one of our chairs, which she built also, and asks me questions while my father holds my hand. Her body is upstairs. The people who remove a body arrive separately. Who is this lizard at our table?

That night, my mother sits with me on the couch and asks if there’s anything else, anything else, anything else. I spare her no detail. But I don’t want to be inside. I sleep in a tent in my parents’ yard, my green ancestral land. I don’t go home to Philadelphia, not to the table or the chairs, not to any of it, for a long time.  

The day after, I drag a chair to the fence of the neighbor’s horse pasture. Santiago the dog is under my feet, which are propped on the lowest rung. My brain is on fire—the sheet lightning of sudden loss. I’m hearing every word I know all at once, like a horn the devil is blowing, a nonsense dirge from which I have to spare others by clamping my mouth shut. The horse walks over to gnaw prehistorically on the wood at my feet. It’s been ten hours. The funk of an incoming summer rain upturns the leaves. I’m still wearing the clothes I had on when I held her. When I cradled her head. Noelle is dead she’s dead her body turned to garbage, the horn blares. I keep my mouth shut.  

Three days after, I’m sitting in the front yard of my parents’ house, a hilly square of grass looking onto a one-lane road. I’m with two friends, one of whom is famous among the three of us for having recently planted himself a small orchard. My mother, ever respectful of an expert, asks him what kind of trees she might plant in front of her house. “How long do you expect to live?” he asks.

Four days after, I walk up and down my parents’ driveway to keep from wondering how it would feel to remove my skin with a gardening fork. I turn off all the lights in the basement and sleep like an animal on top of her clothes, which I’d pulled from their garbage bags (the dead have no luggage), all of it unfolding exactly as in the movies. 

*

I make a new friend, Chuck, and because he charms me, I lie about liking metal music. I represent as my own an idea I remember from an article, which is that there is no coherent aesthetic criticism of metal or country music, only classist ones. 

When I tell him about Noelle, he lowers his head instinctively, like the conversation is a crawl space. “I know it doesn’t matter what I say,” he says, which was exactly what I wished people would say. He’s a psychologist, so he knows to say it. I am so smitten by his sentence that my heart decides it would say yes to anything he would ever suggest. And that’s how I start going to metal concerts.  

I stand in their evil blanket of sound and feel, at last, like a whisker. Afterwards, I buy a patch bearing the band’s name in a so-serious-it-can’t-be-serious font. The patch is always black, the font white or silver, the name is always impossible to make out, and I often don’t bother to learn the name of the band. Two months after, we see a band I think is called Armed Ghost, but it turns out they don’t even have a name. My favorite part is the middle, by which point I don’t know what I am. 

Three months after, we push up to the front, to the bow of the ship, but I forget about the initial violent surge. It gets dark, and I can tell Chuck is shouting the words “Death Comes Ripping,” which is the song this feedback predicts, and I’m hit from behind, and my head, like a shoe, breaks my forward fall. Like a meat shoe, like a fruit. 

The concussion takes time to become itself. I’m trying to watch football the next day, but all I can do is roll over to face the back of the couch, which Noelle and I bought eleven years before. I use my tongue to fondle the inside of my upper lip, which, to use the lingo, is split. I feel a teenager’s private gleeful pride about my injuries. Glenn Danzig is sixty-seven. The song is one minute and fifty-three seconds—a cloud of razors.

“Rip your back out,” he sings, “and death comes ripping out.” The concussion doesn’t teach me anything. I eat a bag of grapes. 

*

When Noelle died (when she decided to die), she made it so I could only have thoughts about her inside the bland compartment of the past tense. She also made it so I can only say things about her, not to her. Is grief what happens when a preposition flips? It’s like if a car got inside you and stayed. Like everything else, its challenges are grammatical: the car, having not been in me once, is in me now. 

When we moved to Philadelphia, she started working on a massive sculpture of a half dozen life-sized horses lowering themselves to drink and sinking into water the audience couldn’t see. The armatures were pink Styrofoam, the plaster white as a cartoon heaven, each horse was bent differently at the knees, higher or lower, and some were barely visible at all, just the crown of a head and a buoyant mane. She worked in silence I loved hearing. She’d come upstairs to shower off the plaster and we would joke about her Dead and Dying Horses because everything was funny and we would laugh our way through the awful world. 

Her talent was outlandish, a strange joke—like she had a virus that rendered her incapable of a wrong or boring idea.

Her prior boyfriends were also artists—the one who nailed a hamburger to the wall, the one who filmed himself washing the professor’s car with a bucket of his own piss—and her friends in Philly were, too. At parties, I was a square curiosity. “Can I suck his dick?” her friend asked her, looking at me. 

Her friends dressed in old clothes and were usually on drugs, a pack of six young Rod Stewarts I called in my head the Labradors. They were beautiful. They floated and spoke all at once and drank interchangeably from whichever beer was closest and from time to time they fucked one another. One night, smoking outside a diner that was also a bar, a Labrador in gold Nike high tops vomited in the moonlight and then led me by the hand to the bathroom where he showed me how to take cocaine. I liked it, but not as much as he did.

They DJed at the neighborhood bar: psychedelic rock and gospel, all of it old. Their favorite band was Spiritualized, who play droning psychedelic gospel music about taking heroin, led by a singer who calls himself Spaceman and plays from a bench, stage left, wearing shimmering silver pants, and requires a music stand from which he reads his lyrics. 

Walking toward the kitchen at a party one night, I overheard Noelle bragging to one of the Labradors that I just published a poem. She repeated the name of the magazine, casting a spell. It was one of the few that sounded impressive to the general public. She was proud of me. I came around the corner and saw her sitting against the refrigerator, her friend leaning on the counter. Everyone in the house but me looked like they were in the Byrds. “Tell her it’s true,” Noelle said, and I raised my eyebrows to confirm it. Her friend looked at me like she were appraising an owl. 

On pay-as-you-can Sundays at the museum Noelle and I used to sit on the Rocky steps with coffee and then pay $1 to sit in the Duchamp room. With Hidden Noise was the one she liked best, a ball of twine held between two brass plates by long screws, in the center of which Duchamp had a friend place an object—no one knows what it is. “I don’t know if it’s a diamond,” Duchamp said, “or a coin.” 

She liked wearing brown boots that came up to her knee and she liked them to be Frye. She liked to tuck her jeans into those boots. She liked having bangs. She liked having blue eyes. She liked sitting on the Rocky steps and she liked sitting on the bench in the Duchamp room and she liked asking me what I thought was inside that ball of twine. The knuckle of a mouse, I would say. Tiny ice cube in a tiny freezer, I would say. Then she would tilt her head onto my shoulder, which she liked doing. 

*

Late wife is pretentious, suitable for older, more formal widowers (same problem), and I can’t even think it without my personality shifting by ten degrees. Ex-wife is a lie of omission. Dead wife is true but only a lunatic would say that. My wife, who has died, or even my ex-wife, who is dead are factually correct but awkward. One day, in a conversation that requires me to tell a story involving Noelle, I improvise a sentence in the tone of a lecture: I was married once, the sentence begins, and I like the soft conceit of this harmless, improvised lecture-sentence, so for months I rely on it, but with time I revise it to In a previous life I was married, and then Life is very long and strange, sometimes. Eventually, I avoid going anywhere except places where everyone already knows Noelle’s story and places where no one will ask for it. Around the second group, I lie about my life. Around the first, I say nothing, unless it seems something is expected of me, and then I say I’m sorry.

*

“She’s been gone for a while,” the EMT said blankly to me or to his colleague. I was surprised they hadn’t run in. Cool as cucumbers up the stairs and then back down. And then two regular cops, and then two detectives. Then Joe, who was closest. Then Suzanne, who would have been closest but was at a party. Then my family: mother father sister, in that order. “I can’t believe she had the guts,” someone said to me years later. I was taken outside while they brought her body down and out the door. I remember the body bag coming down the stairs, its precariousness, but I know that’s not possible because I wasn’t there. I was outside when they brought her down. I was outside, my back to the fence and my knees to my chest, because my family thought that was best. But somehow I see the body bag clearest of all. Later, my father collected the rose petals and grills from the bathroom, and bagged them too, and these bags I was permitted to see coming down the stairs. By then they had brought me back into the house, maybe because it was hot and humid out. Maybe those bags are the ones I remember. Where was Santiago the dog, who saw her go upstairs but not come down? Then we all left. I guess someone went around turning off lights. My sister drove me in my car toward the green ancestral land and I never went back to that house. Kurt called and said “I love you, Michael,” which sounded strange to me. Brian was there when we arrived, on the land where my family once grew their soybeans. Others were on their way. It got dark and it was raining. My father and Brian put on raincoats and walked down the long driveway holding lanterns—I didn’t know my family to own lanterns—to help others find the house. I was in a spare bedroom with Suzanne, side by side on the edge of the bed. “This is going to get worse,” she said. It had been six hours. Others arrived, on and off for months. “I’m fucked,” I said, and my mother said “No you aren’t,” which response lived in my body for many years, waiting. 

*

Seven months after, I fly to Los Angeles after thirteen Januaries with Noelle to learn how to spend one without her. I have hangovers that keep me in bed for two and three days. One night after the next, Mikal picks me up and we eat pizza from the roof of his car. The sun, I hope, will eat my pain, like a tapeworm. I sit on the steps, open my mouth, let it in. 

I’m trying to pick up Lorazepam. I’m having trouble. I’m in a plastic lawn chair in the plastic lawn chair aisle of a CVS, sunlight pressing obscenely against the long windows behind the cashier. MJ flies out to pull me from the lawn chair, and that’s when we fall in love. 

She’s here with me, here in the CVS. She looked it up, she called the Uber. She’s who shovels me into the back seat and then pets the webby flesh between my left index finger and thumb as we ride under the palms, Muppet heads on spikes. 

I remember how she rocks backwards to pull on her boots, the chill of the sand on the beach, I remember On the Beach, I don’t remember how we get there or when we leave, only how she tilts backwards onto her tailbone, straightening one leg up into the air to slide on the boot. 

“I’m not using one of you with him,” she said to a condom I took out. 

*

Ten months after, a hurricane floods the basement of my parents’ house. I’m in boots, water to my knees, when Noelle’s small library of gardening books floats by. My father hands me a Ziploc baggie with the jewelry she was wearing when I found her. My phone’s algorithm compiles an album it calls FUN MEMORIES and pushes a thousand pictures of Noelle to my home screen while I’m teaching Aeschylus. I recognize the apron as hers. I recognize the shirt Suzanne’s daughter is wearing. I recognize her butt in jeans downtown. I move through the days gingerly. I learn to soften my eyes.

A colleague whose husband died corners me in the hall and says, “if I believed in heaven, I would commit suicide.” 

A year after, I tell the couple who buys the house to keep anything they like that is still there, including the bookshelves, which they do in fact like. Now I keep my books in the basement of a new house, in boxes stacked at the foot of the stairs. It’s difficult to find any particular book because my rummaging over time has randomized the contents of every box: each has three columns of books, and in the remaining four-inch space, another six or seven books can be crammed in haphazardly. But I like the college library feel of it, going downstairs in socks with a book in mind I know I won’t find, spending a few hours emptying out boxes and refilling them differently, putting in a load of laundry. Once I found a receipt from 1998 inside The Tennis Court Oath—that experience would have been weakened by sunlight, I’m sure of it. Upstairs, one must ask oneself how the past got there, but in the basement, the past is tactile, like a tire swing.

*

Reading these memories, I feel like I did in Italy, where I struggled to order even a cappuccino, MJ behind me, laughing. When I couldn’t remember the word for eggs in the market, I improvised frutti del pollo. This was Sicily. The map they gave us showed the neighborhood was laid out in the shape of a dick. Who are the world’s great map critics?

It was thrilling to watch her order and ascertain Italian things. Erotic in the sense that she had something I didn’t. “Show me how you make the wine appear,” I said again and again. 

We stood in the Greek theater of Syracuse on a cold morning, beset by limestone. Mostly I was bored, thinking of sex. I took pictures of the different parts of the theater, taking care to get the very blue sky in each shot. “I’ll show my students,” I said, but I never did.

One night she sat down at a piano in an empty room of a type of place called a baglio, and thinking she was alone there, played a version of “Can’t Help Falling in Love” so delicate and tender that I, lurking behind one of the building’s many stone walls, began to weep as though something evil were forcing itself out of my body, and I thought, this is why older people fall out of love, this is why my parents have no friends, because as you age it all becomes too much, love itself if you get lucky and are permitted to face it squarely has a light you cannot bear, if you see your love singing like this and know she is singing about you it will be terrible and you will beg for it to stop.

*

“Lots of the houses here have ponds,” someone says to me, gesturing to a pond. The landscape is a mixture of agriculture and agricultural kitsch: a manicured yard with a large, decorative windmill looking out onto an actual cornfield. Actual birds, is my guess. But for all I know, the decorative windmill powers the whole town. So much turns out that way. It’s always the last thing you think. 

I’m new here. And worse than being new, I’m a widower—a widower courting a granddaughter. I’ve come all the way to Ohio, birthplace of David Allen Coe, to meet MJ’s grandparents. The best David Allen Coe lyric is when he sings, “I sound a lot like David Allen Coe.” Anything true is good to say. Air in the trees, air in the air. Widower by the pond, sharpening.  

I’m worried my style of courtship will ring false, and worse, I’m worried the fear of falseness will inspire an overcorrection and I’ll appear not only unsuited but also crazy. I’m also worried I’ll curse, so in my head I repeat the word “fork” as a palliative treatment. “Who is this widower by the pond,” I imagine the grandparents, with their many years of shared mind, thinking in unison, “with the sad eyes, mouthing the word ‘fork’ and overeating chips?” The grandfather asks me to spell my last name, which he writes down with care.

Here by the pond, one bird is aggrieved by others in the cattails. What is fear is really shame, is what it is. I have done all this before, is what the shame is. No one can help me remember the Lorrie Moore story about this conundrum, in which one divorcee fucks another in the style of fucking to which she became accustomed during her long marriage. Another Lorrie Moore story I would like to remember is the one where a tree grows through the floor inside an old house, which is a metaphor for not worrying too much.  

I look into the cattails, eating chips in the style to which I’ve become accustomed, and wonder about the birds. “How simple it could be in a story,” I thought to myself, “to become a windower instead.” The story wants to be original but if it works, it won’t have been. It fails, so it succeeds.