scarce adjusted in the tomb

mike karpa

Natalie’s hand squeezes mine under the desk when Daphne’s T.A. announces he is taking over Precursors of Modern American Poetry. And why. Grief counseling sessions will, of course, be available. I want to pull away, but I can see Natalie is on edge, so I squeeze back.

The T.A. flips his red hair out of his face and scratches the revised course schedule on the board. I find it hard to stay in my seat. I hate Daphne; the word had no meaning in my life till now.

The T.A. struggles through a lecture that is mostly throat clearing, ums, and one wiping of his eyes that makes me look away. He sucks in a breath, holds it for an ungodly amount of time, and dismisses us twenty minutes early. Natalie walks out to the Quad with me, takes my arm and leans on me as we walk. Natalie and I have been an item for six weeks. Item. What a stupid euphemism. Fucked. We fucked for the first time six weeks ago. Funny how that makes me angry now. Funny how long it can take to catch on to the obvious, like how relationships are only about sex, like how helping someone makes them resent you. It's late April and the cherry trees are in full bloom, giant pink dandelions whose fallen blossoms form mock shadows on yellowy grass not yet recovered from winter. I feel if I blew hard enough, all the petals would float away.

“I'm so sorry, Greg. I know you liked her class.”

“Did I? Did I in fact give a damn?”

She jerks her arm away as though scalded, pivots, and takes off down the concrete path in the other direction.

“Natalie!” I yell. “Come back.” I don’t want her to, but this is what I am supposed to do: have a girlfriend, want her to come back.

She keeps walking. I look at the sky—blue, a few stringy white clouds—and scream wordlessly at it.

She stops around the curve to Berger Hall, facing away from me. I’m supposed to run across the grass to her. It’s the last thing I want to do, but I do it; I catch up, stare at the soft stray hairs on the back of her neck and attempt to summon feelings that aren’t there. I put my hands on the back of her upper arms, half surprised it is OK for me to touch her, half resentful I’m required to.

She turns toward me, teary eyed. I wonder how she’ll play this. She always has a wounding comment ready if she needs to remind you she’s from “the fucking Bronx,” and God help you if you ever mistake that for Brooklyn, which I have done.

“Don't yell at me,” she bleats. She’s not someone who bleats. It’s her teacher who died, too, I remind myself; she wants to be comforted.

“You don’t even like me.” Her lower lip actually trembles. She’s crying now. Jesus, who is this person?

“I do, I swear. I'm sorry.” I feel like someone is writing my lines.

“Let's go over to my house,” she says. “I've got goat cheese and kalamata olives. We can have lunch.” Her hair is the same black as Daphne's but thick and assertive where Daphne’s was fine and limp, unable to resist gravity. In my mind I see Daphne’s hair slip forward as her head moves toward me.

I shudder. “No.” I gasp it; a tone of repugnance seeps out. I know I’ve blown it before the word escapes my lips.

Natalie squirms out of my grasp.

I'm choking on air, blinking, not seeing. But some part of me does notice Natalie speed past the weathered copper domes of Berger and is glad. I want to be alone.

As soon as Natalie left my room this morning for her eight A.M., I high-tailed it across town to check on Daphne. A police car was parked out front of Daphne’s house. I thought of turning back, but all I could think was, Why aren’t the lights flashing? I stared up the steps to her porch, at the gleaming dark oak and beveled glass panels of the front door, which was open a few inches. Into a crackling walkie-talkie a man said, “Yes, medium-caliber gunshot to the temple. Self-inflicted.” He was loud.

A policewoman opened the door wider and peered at me. Her relaxed hair looked stiff, styled into something altogether different from what it wanted to be. She seemed barely older than me.

“Can I help you?” She was very dark, but nonetheless ashen, as though seeing Daphne had made her re-consider her line of work.

“I wanted—was going to drop off a, a late paper.” Best to pretend I hadn’t heard the walkie-talkie.

“Yeah, hang on to that paper,” she said.

I nodded.

Someone called to her from inside, and when she turned, I took off for our now teacher-less poetry class because I thought I should be there for Natalie.

Ha.

I drop my books on a booth table in the basement snack bar of the Student Union, buy coffee and a bagel with cream cheese, and hope someone I know will show up. I guess I don’t want to be alone after all—I just don’t want to be with Natalie.

I spread the cream cheese in little cresting waves that look like a frozen ocean. I knew Daphne was going to kill herself. She told me. Not in coy metaphors of kindly stopping her own carriage. She said, “I am going to kill myself.” And I told no one.

I drink the coffee and tear the cup into Styrofoam bits till it looks like I emptied a box of breath mints onto the table. A cook clacks his metal flipper on the griddle; I smell French toast. Daylight streams in from stubby ground-level windows that rim the ceiling. The room is painted yellow and well lit. It’s cheered me up many a time, but its magic has no power today.

Ginny comes in and sits at her usual table. Our usual table. I’ve known Ginny since we were freshmen. We have been platonic friends from the get-go, which Natalie says isn’t a thing. I do not understand why she thinks it’s impossible.

“I just saw her,” Ginny says, “frowning at the sidewalk.”

Her. Natalie.

The collar of Ginny's light blue sweatshirt is stretched and loose because she chews and tugs on it. She pulls her long blond hair out from her sweatshirt, where she keeps it contained.  “You two are such opposites.”

Everyone here says so. I’m always a lap behind, friendly, obliging, aimless; Natalie burns with purpose. Natalie is half Inuit, half not, and spent her early, pre-Bronx years in the Alaska bush, much as I spent mine in Asia and the Middle East. Not having to explain nostalgia for a lost home is what initially drew us together. After she graduates, she is going to her father’s town in the bush to make sure Inuit kids get good educations. Every class she takes—early childhood development, ethnomusicology, curriculum design—fits into her plan. She is studying how to become herself. Me, I just want to blend in so I can fail upwardly with the rest of the friends I’ve made here—folks who have advised me on how to present myself in class, which classes to take to get into this thing I’d never considered called “graduate school”, which unintentionally hilarious Texas turns of phrase to avoid. I admire these folks, who know which Vermeers hang in the Frick and which in the Whitney. (Trick question—the Whitney has none.) Blending in takes all day every day to pull off. It is my true major.

“You had Burton, right?” Ginny moves her collar to her teeth.

I nod. Daphne Burton. “Just came from there.”

I blow into the pile of Styrofoam bits and they fly up. A single chunk gets tangled in Ginny's hair, but she doesn't notice. I spent last fall break with Ginny and her dad—then newly un-estranged—at his apartment in Manhattan. (My parents were and are working in the Persian Gulf, which I have learned not to call “Arabian”.) She hinted I should treat her dad with the same wariness she did, in case her nascent forgiveness of an unmentionable betrayal was withdrawn, but I liked her dad a lot. She raised an eyebrow, but forgave me.

She looks at the clock on the wall. “Modern British Litrahchah at one.” She stands up, mustering proper British aplomb. “Well, glad you’re OK.”

“Wait.” I pull the chunk of Styrofoam from her hair. She pretends to bat my hand away and then leaves. I herd the scattered chunks back into a pile. She never ordered anything.

And for the record, I never said I was OK.

A couple of weeks ago I went to see Daphne at her office in the Humanities Building for almost the last time. I sat in her armless, red-leather “student” chair. Daphne squatted on the stepstool near my feet. She had locked the door. “I need you to know something, but you have to promise you’ll tell no one.” She placed her head onto my lap.

“I promise.”

She sat up and shrugged kinks from her back, moving her spine through concave and convex, concluding with a rotation of her neck. “I'm old enough to know my life won't get any better so I'm going to end it.” She said it like it was an insight gained from a careful reading of Emily Dickinson. “I’m going to kill myself.”

I tilted the chair back, my feet pushing on the carpet. “I'll tell.”

“I’ll deny everything and do it somewhere else.”

My heartbeat accelerated. She reached to the desktop for her entirely illegal pack of cigarettes, pulled two out and handed me one.

I waved my cigarette at her. “These things’ll kill you.”

She didn’t laugh.

Now I was scared. I guess it showed.

“I just don’t want you to be surprised. I promise to wait until after you graduate. I owe you that much.”

“It'll get better. You've said that yourself. Lots of people feel that way.”

“Yes, but unlike them, I’m not a coward.”

So she was brave. I was the coward. Of course I should have told.

I'm half asleep. Cold air sucks up under the covers. I press against the wall, heart pounding. The beat-up old house I live in is infested with rodents, but the force of the intruding blast tells me it’s no mouse. It’s Natalie. One of my housemates has let her in, and she's managed to get in my room and shed all her clothing without waking me.

She snuggles against my back, warm and comforting. She’s forgiven me and I can't remember for what.

It's getting light outside. Green leaves scratch the bedside windows of my second-floor room.

“That wasn’t about kalamata olives yesterday,” she says.

“No, it wasn’t,” I mumble into the pillow.

“So what was it about?”                                                  

I squeeze my eyes shut. I killed my friend. That’s what it’s about. I shake my head, no. That’s wrong. I had a bit part in Daphne’s drama. She killed herself. She did that. I open my eyes and stare at the wall. I could have delayed her, but I don’t know that I could have stopped her. Shit, maybe all I had to do was delay her. But it was her decision to make, wasn’t it? I can’t believe I won’t see her again. She shouldn’t be dead.

“Talk to me,” Natalie says.

Natalie will despise me if I tell her about Daphne, and rightly so.

“Is it Ginny?”

“Is what Ginny?”

“Never mind,” she says. “That was stupid.”

I’m not sure if I’m breathing. I should say something; anything, almost, would do.

“I know how you get,” she says.

I’m not sure what she means, though I know it’s why she gets angry. I often feel like I almost understand what’s wrong with me but can’t catch up with the thought. Perhaps it’s that I don’t give her what she wants. Perhaps it’s that I don’t know what she wants. This is a question for which my wise friends have no answer.

She snuggles closer. I should want to be here. We’ve had a loss. I turn toward her and put my hand over her shoulder. She tries to put hers around my rib cage but our elbows knock hard.  She jerks away, but now my arm is on her long hair so she can't move her head, though she tries anyway.

“Ouch.”

“Sorry.”

I pull my hand away. She snuggles to my hairless, skeletal chest. I’m not much to look at, but I have a cock so I guess I will do. She places a hand over my nipple. I feel shocked to be touched, feel a stab in my gut as she lays her hand upon my belly. She’s kissing me; it’s seven in the morning, and my single bed is writhing with skin. I do my duty. In spite of all our elbows and knees, sex happens.

“I couldn't get to sleep,” Natalie says, after.

I tie the end of the condom in a little knot, a recent skill.

She squirms. “I thought you would never speak to me again.” Her words pop with vocal fry.

She's between me and the wastebasket so I tuck the condom under the bed. “I need to be better,” I say. I’ve learned so much more from my peers than my teachers—I’m in awe of them—but I have so far to go. What comes naturally to them does not to me. I don’t think this is a matter of perspective; I think it’s the God’s honest truth. “I need to be better.”

“You don’t. Just don’t make me do Natalie’s so strong. I need someone to know who I am.”

She grabs my other arm and pulls up against me. Her breathing deepens. She appears to fall asleep, hands locked on my upper arm. I wonder if she was up all night. It happens. I'm lying flat on my back and have to pee. I can see right up her nostrils. I've never seen her fall asleep before. I’ve certainly never looked up her nose. Or anyone’s. Are they all the same? Her nostril hairs spiraling inward weave a cone that should gross me out, but doesn’t. I don’t want to wake her now that she’s reached precious sleep, but I really have to go. I begin to push her fingers off my arm but she stirs. I lie back, wedged between her and the wall. I can hang on a while longer, I decide.

Professor Burton, as I called her then, sat at her desk, back to the tall window, the first time I came to her office. From the student chair I scanned the floor-to-ceiling bookcase on the far wall of the narrow room. Sunlight reflected off the snow outside, blinding me. Two white pillars partially obscured the view, part of an ornamental concrete grillwork that creates a second skin over the Humanities Building, a cage over a box. We are safe, here, in our small college. Daphne rocked in her chair, a blot in the sunshine. I couldn't focus on her or the bright concrete bars for more than a few seconds at a time.

“I liked your comments on Dickinson today.”

“I thought so.”

Her eyes widened. I must have sounded like a little snot.

“Um, I mean, well, you did seem—you seemed so interested. You leaned forward. I'm not saying this right.” I shivered.

She laughed, a single dry ha. “Emily is someone my husband and I shared back when I was young, if you can believe I was ever young.”

Based on her diplomas, I put her a couple years shy of forty. Young enough.

She leaned back in her chair. I leaned back in mine. I couldn't remember an adult ever confiding in me and was flattered.

She swiveled so the sun shone on her profile. Her nose was short and her skin pale, making her fine straight hair look even darker. She stared out the window. I heard nothing from the corridor outside.

“I heard a Fly buzz — when I died — / The Stillness in the Room,” I quoted.

She laughed, this time a raucous cackle. She smiled, a nice smile, her canines a bit forward from the other teeth. “Sorry, my mind wanders. Do you like it here?”

“Oh, yeah.”

I loved it, in fact. I’d never been in one place so long. Here, I hadn’t been the new kid; instead, we’d all started together. Now, nearly three years later, I had friends.

I caught her eyes and we stared at each other. I didn't turn away. Neither did she.

“I'm happy,” I said.

She laughed again, this time her voice lowered to a pleasant burr. “I'm sure you are.”

Natalie turns over. It’s strange to sleep next to another person. Sometimes her breathing keeps me awake—I worry there’s not enough air—while other times it’s comforting, and I fall asleep holding her, feeling safe, as though the pulse of her heart helps mine pump too.

The urge to pee physically hurts. I scooch up against the headboard. My chest is cold. My knees knock together, even though they're under the covers. I can stand it no longer.

Natalie opens her eyes. “You getting up?”

I put on t-shirt and boxers. “Be right back.”

I sit in the front room waiting for an unknown housemate to finish up in the bathroom—probably Mesut, an early riser and art history major—and hear Daphne breathing in my ear. They should arrest me. But there's no law against being cruel and stupid and scared.

Finally, sweet baby Jesus, Mesut emerges. Droplets cling to his bare, athletic torso as he brushes past me. I pee, shave, and wash my hair, which feels like it has bugs crawling through it, each one a little Natalie Natalie Natalie eating into my brain. Shampoo trickles into my eyes and I wince, but the sting fails to distract me. I think of Daphne, swiveling back and forth in her chair, months ago, as she listened to an interpretation of a poem I was trying out for a paper.

“Do you have a girlfriend?” Daphne asked.

Natalie had invited me over for dinner several times, but I’d made excuses. She’d finally asked me if I was gay. I’d laughed, deflecting, but was going to have to say something eventually.

“No,” I told Daphne, “I do not have a girlfriend.” I’d never had a girlfriend.

Daphne smiled. She looked good, dressed in a white turtleneck with a short, smart haircut. She could look meek if she didn’t pay attention; instead, she looked intellectual. Her breasts were too large for her frame. Not the breasts of an English professor, I thought. I felt like she, too, was about to ask me over for dinner. But that was ludicrous.

She lit a cigarette, despite the ban. “I hate it here. I’m turning into someone who talks too much, and I don’t even care.”

“I like it when you talk.”

“There might be something you can help me with. Do you smoke?” she asked.

I nodded. It was a longstanding vice I tried to hide, feeling it played into everyone’s view of me as gregarious hick—I pretend to be from my Mom’s home state of Texas to simplify my story—but I took the cigarette she offered. I waited to hear what it was I could help her with. She puffed, and in the silence I wondered what she had against our manageable little town.

“Is it too isolated for you? Here, I mean.” We are out in the cornfields, and the only way into town for those without cars is the once-a-day airport shuttle at the Lodge, our one hotel.

“No,” she said. “Too many people.”

Natalie is asleep when I step back into the bedroom. I tried to break up with her last week, but she said our communication was improving so much she refused to give up. Well, alrighty then. I dress quietly and slink off to the snack bar.

Ginny waves at me from our usual table as I push through the double swinging doors. Thank God Natalie isn’t here to see this.

“Where's your love object?”

“At my house,” I say coolly, as though quite accustomed to leaving a woman sleeping naked in my room. “I’m afraid of her.”

A backpack slams onto the floor at the end of the table and I jump.

“Natalie!” Coffee spills over the table toward Ginny. It's been ten minutes since I left the house. Natalie had to have run after me.

Ginny tweezes napkins from the table-top dispenser, and we push them in circles over the table.

I scoot over and Natalie sits down beside me. “Hi,” she says, to us both.

Ginny’s lips twitch a smile in response as she heaps soggy brown napkins at the table’s center. Natalie doesn't seem mad. She must not have heard what I said. In my mind, tendrils of smoke curl around Daphne’s face.

“Why did she do it?” I say this out loud.

“It must have been something organic, because she's atypical,” Natalie says without missing a beat. Natalie's a psych major. “Most successful suicides her age are men.”

“The gun was a shock,” Ginny says. “She didn’t seem depressed. At all.”

Natalie shakes her head slowly. “Didn’t see it coming,” she says, as though three years of abnormal psych classes should have enabled her to predict it.

Then nothing. Neither says anything. No flies buzz.

The stillness in the room.

I start to imagine Daphne doing it, sitting on her brown couch. Click, click, bang.

“She liked you,” Natalie says. “I mean, she liked everyone, but you were her favorite.”

The world closes in on me. The lights grow dim; Natalie and Ginny recede. My hold on consciousness feels weak. After this morning’s seminar, I have no more classes, no appointments, and no papers—just endless reading, eight hours of daylight, and the specter of comforting teary Natalie while really thinking, What the fuck do you have to cry over?

Ginny presses her hand down on her jeans and brings it back, palm up, to show us. It's wet.

“You're soaked! I'll get you some paper towels.” Natalie heads to the bathroom.

When Natalie's out of sight I stand up. “Tell Natalie I'm coming right back.”

“But you're not, are you?”

“I am. I might. I don't know. I do have seminar. Can you tell her something to make her happy?”

Ginny makes the face of Munch’s Scream.

It was still winter, barely. Yellow light from Daphne's living-room lamps sparkled back to us from her icy eaves. We'd been sitting on her couch for hours talking. She’d asked me to help her organize sources for a monograph a publisher was hounding her to write. She’d been putting off the groundwork for months. It went so quickly once we got started I felt sad when I thought of her avoiding it for so long.

She made us a very late dinner. She asked me about myself. I told her my real story: We’d lived on one construction site after another, punctuated by trips to South Texas. Daphne latched onto this as me being from Texas—because people have to be from somewhere, right?—and I realized we were bonding. She told me about growing up in Atlanta, her profound culture shock at Smith College, training away her accent, meeting her husband Bill in grad school. She told me so much about Bill I was surprised first to learn that they were divorced, then later that they had divorced eight years ago. She confided she took rejections hard and kissed me, full on the lips. Oh, fuck, I thought.

I closed my eyes and felt her lips soft on mine. Her hand moved over my thigh. My muscles seized, sharp with pain, but I was able to hide it. I did not want to lose her friendship. Her hand moved onto my crotch. I took a deep, deep breath and let my mind go blank. She seemed to take this as arousal and began to moan. I went elsewhere, let some other part of me respond. She unzipped my pants and pulled out an incipient erection through the fly of my underwear. I opened my eyes and stared at it. It looked like part of someone else. She wrapped her hand around it.

She groaned and released me. She shook her head rapidly, almost a tremor. “I can't do this.” She lit a cigarette and held it toward me, an offering. “Lordy.”

I looked at the burning cigarette, then at her. Her eyes had returned to my crotch. I willed my erection to go down, but now that I was exposed it performed without me. She rolled her eyes at me, as though I was trying to get her to do something. I tried to zip up, but the tangle of underwear and jeans conspired against me. This was all happening to someone else, but I was tied to him and couldn’t get away. She puffed on the offered cigarette in my stead, making it glow. I took the cigarette and sucked in a drag. My lungs burned like the insides of a car engine, and my problem subsided enough for me to tuck myself back in my boxers and zip my pants.

She patted my hand. “It's the meds. They warned me to watch out for hypersexual behavior.”

I picked at the flowered cushions littering her couch, alert for clues about what I should do next, how not to be wrong.

“I didn't mean that the way it sounds,” she said. “You're very sweet, really sweet. But I shouldn't be doing this. These drugs make me feel I can do anything. Bill would have loved this. He would have loved you. You look like him, you know.”

This made me queasy.

“I could never explain anything to him. A Ph.D. in English and I can't say how I feel.”

I gave a flick of the eyebrows. Finally, something I actually knew about.

“You know the last thing I said to him?” She put a cushion behind her back. “I cannot live with you,” she recited. “It would be life, / And life is over there / Behind the shelf.”

Wow, I thought. How can she remember something perfect for the moment off the top of her head? She was so smart.

“Can you believe what an idiot I am?” She rasped it out, the words seeming to gouge her throat.

I shook my head dumbly. The yellow knot of yarn I had been tugging at snapped back into place.

“I can't stand to even think about it.” She pulled a rust-colored throw to her chin. Only her head was showing. “I'm going off my medication,” she said, “for your sake. This should never have happened. Some people are meant to be depressed.”

My mouth opened and closed. Before college, I’d probably have said You’ll be OK, or It’s OK. But it wasn’t OK, not hardly, no how. The next day I called Natalie, went to her house, and accepted her invitation to dinner and her room and spent my first night in a woman’s bed, beginning the relationship I was supposed to be in—my ticket to that lifetime of upward fails.

It's night and college is over for me, that’s clear. I board the airport van at the Lodge and in ten minutes we're driving the Interstate. The driver stops at the passenger-unloading zone outside the terminal. Of course, I have hardly any money. I'm twenty-one and broke and don't know what I'm doing at the airport. My parents have another eight months to go on their contract—double-wide living in the Saudi desert—so there’s no home to go to. It occurs to me the airport is home. I call Ginny.

“Ginny, I'm at the airport. I'm taking off.”

“What?” She sounds dead, like I’ve woken her up from a deep, deep sleep.

“Look, can I stay with your father in New York?”

“OK,” she croaks.

I write a check I can’t cover for an exorbitant ticket. “Cute,” the woman at the counter says as she hands it back. She stares at me till I move away. I hit myself in the forehead with the base of my hand until she stares again from across the lobby. I step outside to the sidewalk. I have two cigarettes in my jacket pocket. Without someone to smoke them with, they’re just clutter—or so I tell myself, but when I discover I have three, not two, my joy is inordinate. I have become an addict without noticing. I light one.

I wake in the middle of the night, asleep on a bench, back inside the airport. I am the only one here. Barely warmed air blowing through ventilation is the only sound.

The last time I saw Daphne was in her office. She squinted, crow’s feet deep, even though I was the one facing the sun. “I don't blame you if you're angry about that night. I'm angry too. But the worst of it is, part of me wishes I hadn’t stopped.”

I turned my face to the door. “I won't tell.” I wasn’t sure if I meant about that night or about her threat of suicide.

“I feel empty inside, Greg, and it’s not stillness.”

“Go back on medication.”

“I’ve tried them all.”

“Maybe you don't want me to come see you anymore,” I said.

“No, I do. You have no idea. But you can’t. For your sake, not mine.” She leaned back in her chair and faced the sunshine. “But, most, like Chaos — Stopless — cool — / Without a Chance, or Spar — / Or even a Report of Land — / To Justify Despair.”

“I can be your report of land.”

She banged her fist on the desk, rattling the illicit crystal ashtray. “To justify despair?” She looked at me, maybe angry, maybe contemptuous, I couldn’t tell. Maybe she couldn’t either.

“You could stop reading Emily.”

She whispered, “Go.”

I writhe on the cushioned airport bench. I look at my phone: three A.M. I imagine the buzz of Natalie’s phone. I could tell her everything, whine that I’m bad for her as she pleads that I can improve. Everyone needs a home, she’ll say, the implication being of course that she, that this college, this world, is that home.

She isn’t. It isn’t.

I don’t want to be taught, I don’t want to be touched, I don’t want to belong. I see now failing upward was never in the cards, no matter how much I pretended, and I’ve already left that manageable town to its admirable people and their useless wisdom.

The ventilation heaves its unending mechanical sigh. Everyone there, and all their fucking New York boroughs, I hate them. Daphne pretended, she made it, and they killed her, they took her, everyone there. But me, they’ve given something. For now I know: I am not, will not, cannot, ever be one of them, and this, this fleeing, is my graduation.