Fiction
Carom
Tuesday and gone. I woke up on the floor and walked stiff and angry to Charlie's room only to find it empty. Not only was Charlie gone, but between night and day everything in the room had disappeared. When I offered a tepid, hello, my words echoed. I made a lap of the room anyway, peeked my head in his big closet and laughed because alone on a shelf was an old tennis racket I had asked Charlie to store for me when my own closet, the small one, couldn't find the space. I walked around the room again, my sweaty feet sticking to the wood floors with each step, and as I finished my lap, I could see my steamy footprints disappear. I made a quick account of my own room and found everything in place except for the dirty black futon I had gone to sleep on the night before. I had borrowed it from Charlie.
The living room was nearly empty too, only my green telephone and its wobbly table remained. I could now see the phone from anywhere in the apartment. It was my only contribution to the living room, I realized then, and felt bad. Charlie always used a payphone down the street.
In the kitchen, the food was almost all gone. When I went to make breakfast I found only one Pop-Tart in the wispy silver sleeve where there should have been two. We had purchased them together, same with the yellow rubber gloves and soap. Appropriately, in the drawer by the sink there was only one lonely glove, left-handed and a bar of soap cut carefully in two. It was all so fair. I walked around the living room and felt the cold spaces reverberate with each step, a stillness like being behind a closet door. The phone rang.
"Hello," I said and again the words echoed throughout the empty room.
"Mr. Smith?"
It was a voice I didn't know, but it wasn't about Charlie or the missing Pop-Tart or why I woke up sleeping on the floor. The middle school on Mandy Street needed a sub. I dressed in khakis and a button-down, momentarily confused by not being able to sit on the futon to lace up my oxfords like I normally did. As I left the apartment, the sun spread over the varnished floors in a white pool. It was later that night when I noticed a picture of my family that hung by the door had gone missing. It was a picture we had taken on vacation in Florida when I was nine years old and I don't remember my family ever being as happy as we looked in that picture. A year before, Holly, my girlfriend, had rescued it from a box in the back of my closet and hung it for me while I was taking a shower. An orphan, seeing that picture near the door was like having a Christmas tree year round to her. She straightened the frame every night when she came over. The picture was definitely not Charlie's, but it was gone just the same.
The kids at the middle school ignored me during homeroom and laughed at me during algebra as I struggled to write the most basic equations in white chalk. When I caught the bus back to the Little Eden apartment complex, I worried about how I was going to the pay the rent without Charlie. As a substitute teacher without a credential, I made 75 dollars for a full day with one free meal of whatever casserole the grubby cafeteria served. Now that it was spring, the teachers who would once have called in sick with imagined illnesses showed up, solved math problems, and left looking forward to summer soap operas. I would need a job over the summer to pay the full rent if Charlie didn't return. The summer before I had won my rent playing Charlie in pool, winning game after game because Charlie played pool like he was planning an invasion. He'd sip a beer, wink, and call out some improbable combination of balls and banks, strings of them, nine to the seven to the three off the left rail, until he settled on a pocket where, if everything went right, one lone ball would gently cascade over the edge. Most of the time he'd hit every ball he'd name. He had a way with predicting collisions, but it was the last, important step where he failed and kept me living better than I should. But Charlie never seemed to mind. Mostly I think he liked keeping me around because I was not at all like the men he told stories about, men who lost paychecks and cars to Charlie when they bet on the wrong team or were on the other side of a fixed horse race. Charlie told long, devastating stories. They always ended the same way.
"I can't tell you the rest," Charlie would say, "but it's like pool, some people just aren't lucky."
I never knew if he was confusing pool for poker or if he just thought it was all luck. That he was wrong and he was wrong ever occurred to him.
After my day at the middle school, Holly came over and didn't seem at all shocked to find the apartment empty. She seemed a little happy even. Holly never liked Charlie.
"What happened to the picture?" she asked.
I was napping on a bed of laundry in my room when she came in. She had her own key, a concession I had made six months prior. Living together was next so it was no surprise when she demanded that we move in together after she found out about Charlie.
"We'll live in Charlie's room and have a baby,she said. Your room will be a nursery. We can paint the walls yellow. I'll stop taking the pill tonight, Kingsley."
At the word baby I froze, but I don't think Holly noticed. She was smiling as I stared at her from the floor where I pondered the impossibility of maintaining the status quo in an apartment without furniture. When I was silent for too long, she grabbed a pillow I had under my feet and walked out of my room and into Charlie's with a defiant throw of brown hair. I heard the door slam.
The baby thing wasn't new. It came from the part of her that wanted a family picture on the wall. When I met her a year ago, in the nurses' office of an elementary school, she had told me all about her search for her real parents as she put a bandage on a knee I scraped chasing a kindergartner on the playground. Later, after we had been together for a year, she got two first names and a phone number from a detective she hired but had yet to abandon whatever reserve kept her from phoning Herb and Judy, the parents who had given her up.
That night Holly slept on the floor in Charlie's room as I slept in mine. She must have had them, too: the acerbic dreams of the hardwood-floor sleeper ran through my head and I never knew if I was awake or asleep. I dreamt of empty picture frames, algorithms, and a small boy who smiled at me until the phone rang.
I maneuvered through empty space in my boxers and felt awkward, something like naked, as I stood in the middle of the empty floor and made arrangements to teach at the school I had avoided for four years. They wanted me to teach third grade. I panicked for a moment, put the chatty secretary on hold while I walked around the empty apartment, picked the phone back up and took the job. I needed the money. I touched the empty hole where the nail had held the picture of my stupid, smiling family as I left. Holly was still in Charlie's room. I didn't say goodbye.
* * * * *
On my way to Tobey's school I sat between men in dark suits, men who had finished their degrees and were headed downtown in order to work at a bank or an advertising firm, men whose cologne smelled too expensive for me to be breathing. I wished I had worn a tie as my shoes squeaked against the buffed floor on my way to the third grade classroom. There were little faces with big eyes looking at me as I entered, but I couldn't turn to face them. It wasn't until I read the roster that I saw the name of the boy who might be my son.
"Tobey, uh, Smith," I said.
The boy who raised his hand I recognized from his last picture, a scrawny kid with cheap eyes who looked even more like his mother in person. I could not find myself in his freckles and plywood blond hair, but the longer I stared the more his face resembled mine at his age until it was like looking at my face in the picture by the door. I tried to catch his eyes after I wrote Mr. Smith on the chalkboard. Tobey only yawned and fiddled with his pencil at his desk in the back row. Like all Smiths, he had already learned not to think much of encountering the name, and probably no longer wondered if there was some part of him in the eyes of the others he encountered. He probably never bothered to look for Smiths in the phonebook like someone named Wigdahl might. There would always be Smiths, even several other T. Smiths, and they would have nothing to share with each other.
I felt bad for him then. It was a lonely last name. Everyone who ever said it seemed to be speaking to someone else.
The name was not even his, or rather it might have been, but in a roundabout way, like one of Charlie's pool shots, the name caroming around until it found him waiting and vulnerable. Crystal, his mother, had left me a decade ago in an explosion of emotion that I mostly watched rather than participated in until she closed the door and never returned. Maybe she knew about Tobey already. Nine months later her Christmas card came during a blizzard and the envelope was soaked through when I pulled it from my leaky mailbox so that it nearly fell apart in my hands. A picture of Crystal smiling with a baby in her arms dropped into a bank of snow before I got it inside and I shook ot from the cold's I picked it up.
Every Christmas a card came in the same red envelope that made me hold my breath when I saw it in a stack of bills. The impersonal, oblivious Christmas cards were unbearably cruel. When I moved in with Charlie, I didn't register the new address and thought the cards might stop until the third week in December when I opened the box to see the red envelope. It was the only piece of mail that day. When the letter four years back mentioned Tobey's elementary school I stopped subbing in the school. This most recent card said James and Crystal Smith on the return address, and the letter inside informed me of their marriage the previous June. They would be taking James' name, the letter said, and Tobey took on the name that was perhaps inevitable.
The morning went fast. Tobey took no special interest in me even though I stared at him during most of lunch as I ran the numbers through my head again. The date Crystal left, Tobey's birthday, the last time Crystal had led me back to our bedroom. It was about thirty-five weeks give or take, almost a sure thing. But maybe not, too.
After lunch, the kids in the classroom looked no less tragic, no less competent or afraid or willing than Tobey did. I wondered if the story of his life, like the story of Holly's has any more confused than the other children whose names had been with them from the womb, as if having developed like just another lame appendage. Then there were other names. Herb and Judy. Kingsley Smith. An endless line of failure names, names without faces or fresh memories, and as I looked at Tobey I realized I was as much his phantom as he was mine.
The kids in Tobey's class ignored me until a girl with pigtails raised her hand during math.
"Mr. Smith, why do the multiplication tables stop at twelve?"
In the textbook I taught from the tables did indeed stop at twelve.
"They don't ever stop," I said and I kept glancing at Tobey who looked bored. I too had always disliked math. "They go on forever and ever but eventually the numbers get so big you can't hold them all in your head."
"What's nineteen X nineteen then?" the girl asked, saying the letter instead of times."
I didn't know and instead of trying to pretend, I admitted as much. The kids looked disappointed and took out their calculators, ending the day by typing in ever larger strings of numbers until the bell rang. During the bus ride back to the apartment I thought about looking so pathetic in front of Tobey, but didn? know how to feel about it.
Holly was still inside Charlie's room, and it never occurred to me that something changed in her until I tried to talk her into sleeping in my room. I would even have mentioned that maybe, if Charlie and his stuff didn't show back up in a week, we could work something out with the other room, but I never got a chance because as she lay there on the floor she looked straight up at the ceiling and only acknowledged my presence when she turned away from me and started to sniffle. I left her there, her small body with only my pillow to protect her from the cold wood floors. There was nothing I could say to her, and even though I thought the sadness was real I could not overcome the thought that sleeping in separate rooms would at least leave the nursery unavailable for a little longer.
* * * * *
The hardwood floors wouldn't let me sleep. I woke up before the sun rose and stood outside Holly's room. The moonlight made the floors glow. An empty apartment is a worrisome place at night, and I wanted badly to be able to see someone, but Holly had the door locked and Charlie was gone. He had gotten himself into trouble, maybe fixed the wrong race, maybe just lost an important game of pool. I took a shower and washed myself with the half-bar of soap before grabbing my keys and heading for the door. I was walking to the bus stop in the ambivalent temperature of a spring morning when Holly ran up behind me and confessed everything.
She had called Herb and Judy the night before from the telephone in the middle of the apartment. When I think of it now, I see her in the middle of the floor sitting cross-legged and crying as she dials. I imagine it was one of the loneliest calls that has ever been made.
"Why'd they do it?" I asked her.
"Give me up? They said something about money. About how they weren't sure if they would be together that long. I tried not to pay attention to the parts about how they didn't want me."
"There's more, Kingsley," Holly said. She glanced around to make sure no one she knew was close. The shame had started already. "Herb and Judy's last name is Smith."
My bus came before I could reply, and I was glad because I didn't have the words.
"I only called because if we had a baby," she said as the bus pulled up, "a baby needs grandparents, but now I don't know. It's the Smith thing, that's all."
The bus driver honked. I went to kiss her but she turned her cheek to me and so I kissed that before getting on the bus, leaving her in the same clothes she had been wearing since she had taken up squatting in Charlie's room. Her hair was a mess and as we drove away, I saw her stretch her back because sleeping on the floor will do that to a person.
The thing with the parents, her own set of Smiths, would never mean much to Tobey or me because we knew the futility of looking for familiar faces in a crowd of strangers. It is what Tobey had seen when he looked at me as he read the name on the chalkboard. We understood but Holly didn't. If I had had the words, I would have told her how it was just a name, a name you could not count on when you needed to. A name that could be anyone's. A name that could be felled by love.
On that second day, my last day in his class, Tobey was silent until the teaching plan had me teaching the children about biology using the class' pet gerbil Phoebe who had unexpectedly, and somewhat awkwardly for me, given birth overnight.
He spoke without raising his hand and asked, "Mr. Smith, why did Phoebe have babies?"
The class turned to me, but I spoke only to Tobey. I told him all about love and how Phoebe had a husband somewhere and how gerbils, like his own parents, were capable of loving each other so much that they wanted to start a family together. These children of abandonment, these kids of divorce, understood in someplace deep inside themselves how it was Phoebe ended up as she did.
