The Shipping News (4 page)

Petal Bear was crosshatched with longings, but not, after they were married, for Quoyle. Desire reversed to detestation like a rubber glove turned inside out. In another time, another sex, she would have been a Genghis Khan. When she needed burning cities, the stumbling babble of captives, horses exhausted from tracing the reeling borders of her territories, she had only petty triumphs of sexual encounter. Way it goes, she said to herself. In your face, she said.

By day she sold burglar alarms at Northern Security, at night, became a woman who could not be held back from strangers' rooms, who would have sexual conjunction whether in stinking rest rooms or mop cupboards. She went anywhere with unknown men. Flew to nightclubs in distant cities. Made a pornographic video while
wearing a mask cut from a potato chip bag. Sharpened her eyeliner pencil with the paring knife, let Quoyle wonder why his sandwich cheese was streaked with green.

It was not Quoyle's chin she hated, but his cringing hesitancy, as though he waited for her anger, expected her to make him suffer. She could not bear his hot back, the bulk of him in the bed. The part of Quoyle that was wonderful was, unfortunately, attached to the rest of him. A walrus panting on the near pillow. While she remained a curious equation that attracted many mathematicians.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, his hairy leg grazing her thigh. In the darkness his pleading fingers crept up her arm. She shuddered, shook his hand away.

“Don't
do
that!”

She did not say “Lardass,” but he heard it. There was nothing about him she could stand. She wished him in the pit. Could not help it any more than he could help his witless love.

Quoyle stiff-mouthed, feeling cables tighten around him as though drawn up by a ratchet. What had he expected when he married? Not his parents' discount-store life, but something like Partridge's backyard—friends, grill smoke, affection and its unspoken language. But this didn't happen. It was as though he were a tree and she a thorny branch grafted onto his side that flexed in every wind, flailing the wounded bark.

What he had was what he pretended.

Four days after Bunny was born the baby-sitter came to loll in front of the television set—Mrs. Moosup with arms too fat for sleeves—and Petal hauled a dress that wouldn't easily show stains over her slack belly and leaking breasts and went out to see what she could find. Setting a certain tone. And through her pregnancy with Sunshine the next year, fumed until the alien left her body.

Turmoil bubbled Quoyle's dull waters. For it was he who drove the babies around, sometimes brought them to meetings, Sunshine in a pouch that strapped on his back, Bunny sucking her thumb
and hanging on his trouser leg. The car littered with newspapers, tiny mittens, torn envelopes, teething rings. On the backseat a crust of toothpaste from a trodden tube. Soft-drink cans rolled and rolled.

Quoyle came into his rented house in the evenings. Some few times Petal was there; most often it was Mrs. Moosup doing overtime in a trance of electronic color and simulated life, smoking cigarettes and not wondering. The floor around her strewn with hairless dolls. Dishes tilted in the sink, for Mrs. Moosup said she was not a housemaid, nor ever would be.

Into the bathroom through a tangle of towels and electric cords, into the children's room where he pulled down shades against the streetlight, pulled up covers against the night. Two cribs jammed close like bird cages. Yawning, Quoyle would swipe through some of the dishes to fall, finally, into the grey sheets and sleep. But did housework secretly, because Petal flared up if she caught him mopping and wiping as if he had accused her of something. Or other.

Once she telephoned Quoyle from Montgomery, Alabama.

“I'm down here in Alabama and nobody, including the bartender, knows how to make an Alabama Slammer.” Quoyle heard the babble and laughter of a barroom. “So listen, go in the kitchen and look on top of the fridge where I keep the Mr.
Boston.
They only got an old copy down here. Look up Alabama Slammer for me. I'll wait.”

“Why don't you come home?” he pleaded in the wretched voice. “I'll make one for you.” She said nothing. The silence stretched out until he got the book and read the recipe, the memory of the brief month of love when she had leaned in his arms, the hot silk of her slip, flying through his mind like a harried bird.

“Thanks,” she said and hung up the phone.

There were bloody little episodes. Sometimes she pretended not to recognize the children.

“What's that kid doing in the bathroom? I just went in to take a shower and some kid is sitting on the pot! Who the hell is she, anyway?” The television rattled with laughter.

“That's Bunny,” said Quoyle. “That's our daughter Bunny.”
He wrenched out a smile to show he knew it was a joke. He could smile at a joke. He could.

“My God, I didn't recognize her.” She yelled in the direction of the bathroom. “Bunny, is that really you?”

“Yes.” A belligerent voice.

“There's another one, too, isn't there? Well, I'm out of here. Don't look for me until Monday or whatever.”

She was sorry he loved her so desperately, but there it was.

“Look, it's no good,” she said. “Find yourself a girlfriend—there's plenty of women around.”

“I only want you,” said Quoyle. Miserably. Pleading. Licking his cuff.

“Only thing that's going to work here is a divorce,” said Petal. He was pulling her under. She was pushing him over.

“No,” groaned Quoyle. “No divorce.”

“It's your funeral,” said Petal. Irises silvery in Sunday light. The green cloth of her coat like ivy.

One night he worked a crossword puzzle in bed, heard Petal come in, heard the gutter of voices. Freezer door opened and closed, clink of the vodka bottle, sound of the television and, after a while, squeaking, squeaking, squeaking of the hide-a-bed in the living room and a stranger's shout. The armor of indifference in which he protected his marriage was frail. Even after he heard the door close behind the man and a car drive away he did not get up but lay on his back, the newspaper rustling with each heave of his chest, tears running down into his ears. How could something done in another room by other people pain him so savagely? Man Dies of Broken Heart. His hand went to the can of peanuts on the floor beside the bed.

In the morning she glared at him, but he said nothing, stumbled around the kitchen with the juice pitcher. He sat at the table, the cup shook in his hand. Corners of his mouth white with peanut salt. Her chair scraped. He smelled her damp hair. Again the tears came. Wallowing in misery, she thought. Look at his eyes.

“Oh for God's sake grow up,” said Petal. Left her coffee cup on the table. The door slammed.

Quoyle believed in silent suffering, did not see that it goaded.
He struggled to deaden his feelings, to behave well. A test of love. The sharper the pain, the greater the proof. If he could endure now, if he could take it, in the end it would be all right. It would certainly be all right.

But the circumstances enclosed him like the six sides of a metal case.

3

Strangle Knot

“The strangle knot will hold a coil well. . . . It is first tied loosely and then worked snug.”

THE ASHLEY BOOK OF KNOTS

A YEAR came when this life was brought up sharply. Voices over the wire, the crump of folding steel, flame.

It began with his parents. First the father, diagnosed with liver cancer, a blush of wild cells diffusing. A month later a tumor fastened in the mother's brain like a burr, crowding her thoughts to one side. The father blamed the power station. Two hundred yards from their house sizzling wires, thick as eels, came down from northern towers.

They wheedled barbiturate prescriptions from winking doctors, stockpiled the capsules. When there were enough, the father dictated, the mother typed a suicide farewell, proclamation of individual choice and self-deliverance—sentences copied from the
newsletters of The Dignified Exit Society. Named incineration and strewing as choice of disposal.

It was spring. Sodden ground, smell of earth. The wind beat through twigs, gave off a greenish odor like struck flints. Coltsfoot in the ditches; furious dabs of tulips stuttering in gardens. Slanting rain. Clock hands leapt to pellucid evenings. The sky riffled like cards in a chalk-white hand.

Father turned off the water heater. Mother watered the houseplants. They swallowed their variegated capsules with Silent Nite herbal tea.

With his last drowsy energy the father phoned the paper and left a message on Quoyle's answering machine. “This is your father. Calling you. Dicky don't have a phone at that place. Well. It's time for your mother and I to go. We made the decision to go. Statement, instructions about the undertaker and the cremation, everything else, on the dining room table. You'll have to make your own way. I had to make my own way in a tough world ever since I came to this country. Nobody ever gave me nothing. Other men would of given up and turned into bums, but I didn't. I sweated and worked, wheeled barrows of sand for the stonemason, went without so you and your brother could have advantages, not that you've done much with your chances. Hasn't been much of a life for me. Get ahold of Dicky and my sister Agnis Hamm, and tell them about this. Agnis's address is on the dining room table. I don't know where the rest of them are. They weren't—” A beep sounded. The message space was filled.

But the brother, a spiritual sublieutenant in the Church of Personal Magnetism, did have a phone and Quoyle had his number. Felt his gut contract when the hated voice came through the receiver. Clogged nasals, adenoidal snorts. The brother said he could not come to rites for outsiders.

“I don't believe in those asshole superstitions,” he said. “Funerals. At CPM we have a cocktail party. Besides, where did you find a minister to say a word for suicides?”

“Reverend Stain is part of their Dignified Exit meeting group. You ought to come. At least help me clean out the basement.
Father left something like four tons of old magazines down there. Look, I had to see our parents being carried out of the house.” Almost sobbed.

“Hey, Lardass, did they leave us anything?”

Quoyle knew what he meant.

“No. Big mortgage on the house. They spent their savings. I think that's a major reason why they did this. I mean, I know they believed in dignified death, but they'd spent everything. The grocery chain went bankrupt and his pension stopped. If they'd kept on living they'd have had to go out and get jobs, clerking in the 7-Eleven or something. I thought Mother might have a pension too, but she didn't.”

“Are you kidding? You've got to be dumber than I thought. Hey, Barfbag, if there's anything send my share to me. You got my address.” He hung up.

Quoyle put his hand over his chin.

Nor did Agnis Hamm, his father's sister, come to the ceremony. Sent Quoyle a note on blue paper, her name and address in raised letters, pressed with a mail-order device.

Can't make the service. But I'm coming through next month, around the 12th. Will pick up your father's ashes, as per instructions, meet you and your family. We'll talk then. Your loving aunt, Agnis Hamm.

But by the time the aunt arrived, orphaned Quoyle was again recast by circumstance, this time as an abandoned and cuckolded husband, a widower.