This Appointment Occurs in the Past
Sam Lipsyte
Davis
called, told me he was dying.
He said his case was—here was essence of Davis—time sensitive.
“Come visit,” he said. “Bid farewell to the ragged rider.”
“You?” I said. “The cigarette hater? That’s just wrongness.”
“Nonetheless, brother, come.”
“Who was that?” said Ondine, my ex-mother-in-law. I kissed her
cream-goldened shoulder, slid out of bed.
“A sick friend. I’ve known him twenty years, more, since college. I
might have to leave town for a while.”
“No,” said Ondine. “You’re leaving town for good. The occupation ends
today. It’s been calamity for us, for the region. Go to your friend.”
“He’s not really my friend.”
“All the more reason to go to him,” said Ondine. “Jesus would be in
Pennsylvania by now.”
Ypsilanti was easy to leave. I wasn’t from
there. I’d just landed there. The Michigan Eviscerations had begun in
Manhattan. Martha was a junior at NYU, heiress to a fuel-injection fortune. I
was the cheeky barista who kept penciling my phone number on her latte’s heat
sleeve. Cheeky and, I should add, quite hairy. Martha finally dialed the
smudged figures on the corrugated cuff, cavorted in my belly fur. The woman
never exhibited any qualms about our economic divide. After all, she’d remind
me, I was a Jew. One day I’d just quit mucking around with burlap sacks of
Guatemalan Sunrise and start brewing moolah.
“You can’t help it,” she said. “It’s a
genetic thing. You weren’t allowed to own land in the Middle Ages.”
I wasn’t allowed to own land in Michigan
either. We got married, but her folks bought the Ann Arbor house in her name.
Martha enrolled for a master’s degree at the university. She demanded I concoct
a passion she could bankroll, a “doable dream.” What would it be? Poetry journal?
Microlabel for the new jam rock? Nanobatch raki boutique? I mulled these and
other notions, but mostly focused on my favored pursuit: grilling premium
meats. I grilled grass-fed beef, saddles of rabbit, bison, organic elk. My
mulled projects moldered. I’d always pictured myself the genius in the journal, on the label, not running the damn
things. Moreover, wasn’t there bookkeeping involved, basic math? No matter what
Martha believed about my inherited numerical wizardry honed on the twisty
streets of Antwerp, or maybe Münster, I could barely count.
I grilled until the grilling season ended.
Around the time the first shipment of Danish birch arrived for my new curing
shed, Martha kicked me to what in this municipality wasn’t quite a curb. She’d
met an equally hirsute Scot from the engineering school. His name happened to
be Scott, and his people had the twisty brain, too. Besides, our sex life was a
wreck. We were down to those resentful tugs and frigs. She’d said the stench of
burnt meat put her off. I figured it was also the weight I’d put on, the
perpetual slick of cook grease on my chest beneath my loose kimono.
Ondine, an old beauty with hair the color
of metallic marmalade, was historically attuned to her daughter’s fecklessness.
She took pity, rented me a unit in a shingle-stripped Victorian she owned in
Ypsilanti, let me slide on the rent until I found a job. I never did, but she
seemed satisfied to visit a few times a week for my attentions. She called my
style of lovemaking “poignant.”
Still, even before Davis called, I could
tell she was getting bored.
“I’m getting bored,” she said.
It came to her suddenly, unbidden, the way
it might strike you that you hadn’t gone candlepin bowling, or eaten smoked
oysters, in years.
“You bore the piss out of me,” she said.
I stood, started to dress.
Ondine reached out, pinched my ass fuzz.
“Ouch.”
“Don’t be sensitive. Lots of things bore
me. Things I love. My husband. My house. My daughter. My Native American
pottery collection. It’s not an insult.”
But if not an insult, it was a signal.
Now, weeks later, I headed east in one of Ondine’s several Mazdas, a parting
gift, along with a generous cash severance and a few keepsake Polaroids of her
in aspects of the huntress.
The dashboard robot in the Mazda goaded. Beneath
its officious tones I sensed confusion, a geopositional wound. Had some caustic
robot daddy made it feel directionless? Meanwhile, the comics on the satellite
radio joked about their dainty white cocks. Such candor was supposed to prevent
the race war.
My neck ached and I bought an ice pack,
wedged it up against my headrest. My tongue was a mess. I still tasted Ondine.
Deep in Pennsylvania I ate a coq-au-vin quesadilla. It’s what Jesus would have
ordered, and it was delicious.
I had to drive fast, before I ate too much
road food.
The ragged rider, David had called
himself, but I couldn’t parse the phrase. I was naturally undetective.
Clues clenched me up.
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