Scissors Read online

  “No?”

  “I can always try.”

  MARIANNE

  Hello? Hello, I … I called an hour ago. Room number six. He’s still not there? And he didn’t leave his key at the desk? All right.

  I have to tell you … I was very moved when I heard your voice. I haven’t stopped thinking about it. You have my mother’s voice, if she were black. She’s sick at the moment. Of course, you’re right, I hear her voice everywhere. But yours is special. No, don’t say that, you’re not just anybody. You’re special. You have understanding.

  It’s one o’clock in the morning and he’s still not back. He hasn’t returned to his room. Should I call the police? No, of course not. They’d laugh in my face. Sometimes Raymond, I mean my husband, doesn’t come home at night. That’s no reason to call the police. Especially as he may well be in a cell, sleeping off his liquor. But that’s here. In a big city, it’s another story. Every hour he’s gone … well, you understand me. I appreciate your voice and the fact that you haven’t hung up on me. I appreciate it more than you think.

  Right, that’s what I have to tell myself. He’s with a man, the editor he went to see. If he’s not with him, he must be in a bar, and what can happen to him in a bar? Doesn’t a man alone in a big city have a right to the comfort of bars?

  But truly, if my mother were black, she’d have your voice.

  RAYMOND

  Her name’s Jeanine. I wasn’t able to start her car. Now she’s calling me “Smooth Talker.” She invited me to spend the night with her. To seek her forgiveness, she said. I could tell by her tense face that it would be best for me to accept. I didn’t have enough money left for cab fare anyway.

  She lives in the suburbs. A gabled house with tall guillotine windows.

  “Have a seat, Smooth Talker.”

  She served me one beer and then another. A little later, I found myself in her bed. The bedroom was upstairs. The wallpaper looked about a hundred years old. In front of the bed was a chest of drawers with a three-paneled mirror on top. My toes were reflected in the central panel.

  Jeanine stayed in the bathroom a long time. I heard her cursing the pipes. I said, “Plumbing problems?”

  I saw my toes moving in the mirror.

  “Goddamned pipes!”

  I sat up straight. She came out of the bathroom. A strange smell accompanied her. A scent of dried flowers, Jeanine’s smell.

  Some branches projected their shadows onto the curtain. There must have been a big garden outside. She came close to me. She put her hand on my penis and I thought, Petunias. A story came together in my head.

  I don’t know how long I slept. When I opened my eyes, she was lying on the edge of the bed with her back turned to me. I ran my eyes up the length of her spinal column. It was like a delicate mechanism nestled under the surface of her skin.

  She heard my breathing.

  “What do you know how to do, Smooth Talker?”

  I searched for a reply.

  “What can you do with your hands?”

  “Oh, a lot of things.”

  “For example?”

  “Pick a trade, any trade. You’ll see—I’ve done every sort of work.”

  “Except for auto mechanic.”

  “Except for that, I admit.”

  It seemed to me that she was smiling. I encouraged her: “Well? Pick one.”

  “Basketball player.”

  “Good guess!”

  “Professional?”

  “Semiprofessional.”

  That wasn’t entirely false. At the university, I replaced a player on the school team. I rode the bench the whole time, but I was a substitute all the same.

  “Cardiologist?”

  “No. But night watchman in a hospital.”

  She looked interested.

  “It had a cardiology department … People of any age can have a fragile heart. That’s one of the things I learned in that hospital.”

  She was smoking a cigarette, and she held it out to me.

  I kept on trotting out my employment history. When I revealed that I’d been a plumber, she sat up straight and said, “I need a plumber!”

  She grabbed my wrist and pulled me into the bathroom. A monkey wrench and some bolts were lying on the shower mat.

  I spent the rest of the night clearing the bathroom pipes of the clumps of earth that were blocking them. She had no idea how clumps of earth had gotten in there.

  I learned later that Jeanine was a flight attendant. A flight attendant who lived alone in a gabled house with a garden around it. The garden threatened to invade the house.

  I told myself I’d put that in “Petunias.”

  MARIANNE

  I thought I didn’t give a damn about that. I thought it wasn’t important. “He can sleep with whomever he wants,” I said. “I don’t care. All I have to do is sleep with someone else myself.”

  I slept with the history teacher. It did me no good. I could sleep with the principal and his assistant. By way of climbing up the social ladder.

  “There are twenty ways of climbing up the social ladder.” That’s what you told me when you refused to let me complete my education.

  The education I didn’t complete because you were getting yours.

  The education I stopped because you wanted to write.

  The education I interrupted when Leo got sick.

  The education I couldn’t finish because you were too fidgety to stay in one place.

  The education I suspended when they fired you from the warehouse.

  The education I abandoned because you were drinking. The education I envied you for getting. The education I would have been better at getting than you.

  My education.

  It took me eleven years to obtain my certificate. “Become a teacher and we’ll go from campus to campus,” you said. You were thinking only about yourself, about the writing workshops you wanted to be in. Now you’re a better, a much better writer. And me, I’m a teacher during the day and a waitress at night. For tips that don’t pay one percent of the mortgage on this house.

  How we used to love each other, though. Madly, like the couple in the film we watched yesterday. A girl and a boy meet during a traveling carnival. They get married, live it up for a while, and run through all their money. Their only remaining choice is to hold up banks. It reminded me of us. Except we’re not gangsters. And I can’t see you holding up anything, except maybe a liquor store.

  Almost five o’clock. I can’t sleep. I polished the furniture—rubbed it so hard it’s shining like the surface of a pond. I’d like to slip into that pond and go under. When you’re floating on your back and the water’s lapping at your ears, you can sense the slightest quivering.

  Everything that’s in you.

  The sound of jet engines. An airplane taking off. It’s as if there’s no more distance between us. And I take off too.

  Petunias

  When Robert returned home from his third consecutive day in town, he found his wife lying on the wall-to-wall carpet. Her legs were rigid, her arms outspread. She was staring at the ceiling.

  “Darling, did you fall down?”

  No reply. He noticed that his wife’s cheeks were sunken, as though sucked from inside.

  He reached for the telephone on the coffee table in the living room. “Do you … do you want me to call someone?”

  A doctor, a neighbor lady, or as a last resort his mother-in-law.

  “Put that receiver down, you son of a bitch!”

  The words came out as though a ventriloquist, or the devil in person, had taken possession of his wife.

  “Ah, you’re breathing,” he said with relief.

  He hung up the receiver.

  Emma got up and went into the kitchen, which was separated from the living room by a yellow ceramic bar. A long time ago, working together, the two of them had glued on the little mosaic tiles. Robert had wanted to figure a white swan on the front of the bar. Emma had thought it would be a big d
eal just to get all the tiles glued in place. In the end she’d finished the job herself, without depicting any swan.

  She busied herself at the kitchen sink. When she looked over at Robert, her eyes were furious. He thought it was because he’d come home so late.

  “I’m sorry.”

  He was the first to recognize his errors—a trait that exasperated his wife. She would have preferred a husband who was arrogant and obstinate like all other husbands but who would have had the nerve to look her in the face.

  She muttered through clenched teeth, “If you think I’m just going to let this pass …”

  She was peeling some potatoes. Considering the state she was in, Robert was afraid her fingers would slip and she’d cut herself. He dismissed his mental image of the peeler slicing his wife’s wrists to shreds.

  For some time now, Emma had been on edge. Especially since Robert, an unpublished author, had started commuting to the city more and more often under the pretext that he needed the urban atmosphere in order to write.

  They lived near a highway access road in what looked like a village. Small farms alternated with moderately priced rental houses, each with its own yard. The place gave the impression of being far from everything. Robert would jump on the morning express and return in the evening on the 5:48 (except for this time, when he’d taken the next train).

  Upon his return, when Emma would question him, he wouldn’t talk about his book. He seemed to have nothing to say about the city. Vexed by his silence, she’d ask him, “But at least you liked it, right?”

  He’d make a face before eventually saying, “I wonder if I’m not a country writer.” The situation had been going on for five months.

  She flung a utensil into the sink and began kneading her hair with her wet hands. “It’s the last straw, Robert!” she said, yelling the words. “The last straw!”

  She left the bar and went back to the living room, where she lay down again, weeping and pounding the carpet with her fists.

  Robert understood that the last straw wasn’t the fact that he’d come home sixty minutes later than usual but the mistress he’d been seeing in the city for the last five months.

  While Emma remained stretched out on the living-room floor, he opened the sideboard cabinet and poured himself a glass of whiskey.

  Had Emma been having him tailed? Followed to Jeannette’s place? Jeannette was the flight attendant he’d met in a bar. He could see her house, with its gables, its second-story window, and the warm light that shined, behind the curtain, on their frolics. The memory made him feel ashamed.

  He sipped his drink for a while and then said, “Are you trying to tell me something?” He was standing on the living-room threshold with his whiskey glass in his hand. He didn’t go any farther into the room for fear of tripping over his wife. “Say something, for God’s sake! Let’s settle this once and for all!”

  She’d covered her eyes with a mask, one of those sleep masks airlines hand out to passengers on long-haul flights. Robert thought Emma was making a veiled allusion to the flight attendant. Emma lifted the mask, stared at him, contorted her mouth, and put the mask back in place. Then she said, “I don’t want to settle anything. I just want revenge, you bastard.”

  “Why do you have that mask on?”

  “So I won’t have to see your ugly mug.”

  He turned on his heels and went up the stairs.

  He was on the last step when he heard Emma say, “My own Robert …” This was followed by a snigger, and then by sobbing.

  He heaved a sigh. In the love notes she scribbled on the backs of oblong postcards—watercolors of airport terminals—Jeannette addressed him as “My own Robert.” Why had he brought home one of those cards? Whenever the living room started running short of ashtrays and glasses, Emma would go into his study to retrieve the ones he’d left there. While gathering them up, she’d cast rapid glances at the page in his typewriter and the papers lying around.

  Robert knew how to recognize a subconsciously deliberate mistake. Leaving that postcard by his typewriter was the same as asking to be discovered; he’d wanted to introduce chaos into his household.

  He thought back to their wedding day. To avoid expense, they’d been married in a public park. Emma and Robert were broke, but they had all kinds of ambitions. Ambitions that had never flourished. Two children born too soon and a grueling series of menial jobs, not to mention his chronic alcoholism—all that had darkened their horizon and invaded their home like weeds.

  Robert loved watching his children grow up. Cathy looked like her father, and Victor had his mother’s features. Robert found this gender inversion charming, like a stylistic device. But beneath his pride in being a dad, anxiety was bubbling. The incessant attention the children required—Emma could take care of them only in the evening, after she came home from work—hadn’t that constricted his talent?

  One night, after he’d finished knocking back a bottle of gin, Robert thought he heard strange sounds coming from Cathy and Victor’s room. The sole illumination in the hall was a night-light. The red halo it cast on the floor glowed like a burning ember. He groped his way down the hall. The children’s names, scrawled in chalk, danced on a little blackboard hung on their door. He went in.

  After his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he still couldn’t make out the bodies under the covers, but he noticed the slow movements of creepers and branches. They made sucking noises as they expanded, meandered, coiled around the curtain rods. His children had changed shapes. They’d become those knotty branches, powerful, loaded with sap, growing from second to second in a greenhouse room too cramped to contain them.

  Robert’s heart started pounding in his chest. He heard the snap of the wall switch, and the room was flooded with light. Cathy and Victor were sound asleep. There was nothing unusual in the room. He turned around and saw his wife, who was sternly looking him up and down.

  “Never come in here when you’ve been drinking, you hear me?”

  She pushed him out into the hall and closed the door in his face, remaining alone with the children in their room, in the greenhouse where they were mysteriously growing.

  Years had passed, Cathy and Victor were in their early teens, and measles and chicken pox had given way to other worries: Cathy would stay out all night without permission, and Victor never went out at all.

  As for Robert, his penchant for drink remained undiminished, and he was away from home more and more frequently. The flight attendant was only the most recent of his infidelities.

  Now that he’d approached the point of no return, he was obliged to “choose between the city and the country,” as Emma put it. He decided to suspend work on his novel.

  With spring in the air, he would turn to gardening.

  He verified the state of his continually overdrawn account, withdrew a little money, and bought himself a pair of rubber boots. Blue denim overalls completed his outfit. There was a shed in the back of the yard, and he remembered seeing some gardening tools on the workbench in there. He took stock of them.

  The state the tools were in, their age and wear, revealed that the yard had a history. The rake looked like a museum piece. The hoe could fall apart on him at any moment. Robert set about learning how to handle those blunt, rough instruments.

  Previously he’d looked upon his yard as a piece of waste ground. He’d go back there to smoke, keeping his eyes on the sky so he wouldn’t have to see the brush at his feet. It had grown anarchically in recent months. Robert wrote in his journal that he detected enmity in the yard—the italics, which he had a tendency to overuse in his short stories, were justified in this case by the way the weeds advanced, proliferated, encroached upon the family home.

  He tackled the most urgent task first: weeding the flower beds. The hoe didn’t fall apart on him. There was a lot of rain in early April that year. Rain, Robert discovered, made uprooting things easier, but he didn’t find that method fast enough. He sought out information about weed killers and
saw that one was praised above all others. He bought a supply of it.

  There was a hydrangea growing in the back of the yard. The plant dated from the period when Emma had yielded to a transient gardening impulse. Robert noticed that the hydrangea was being smothered by brambles. The ease with which he removed them, thus giving the flower its first taste of freedom, surprised him. A man who refused to make cuts in his writing, a man prepared to keep weak sentences despite the detriment they did to the whole, was discovering the nonnegotiable laws of nature. Either you eradicated the weeds, or the flower died altogether.

  Robert realized that gardening could make him a better writer. But he wasn’t writing anymore. He spent his days in the yard.

  At dinner, while Emma was serving Cathy and Victor portions of steak, Robert was neither melancholy nor sullen. He felt a need to communicate his intuitions. Presuming that his son and daughter were old enough to be interested in all things, he expounded his idea to them: “A weed is a plant that’s not in its proper place. It would be proper in a meadow, but it’s improper in a garden. You have to have the courage to pull it up. By the roots. A yard, and especially a garden, must not be abandoned to nature. If you let it go, it will soon be nothing but brush land.”

  Cathy and Victor counted the minutes until they’d be allowed to leave the dinner table. Emma didn’t say a word. But when her husband picked up his fork, she exclaimed, “Robert, your hands are all muddy!”

  The teens burst out laughing. Robert had to go and wash his hands, as if he’d regressed to the time of his childhood.

  He next devoted himself to composting. There were two kinds of compost; the kind you buy in stores and nurseries, and the kind you made yourself. This discovery delighted Robert. Cut brush, peelings, tea leaves, coffee grounds—they all mingled together behind the toolshed, decomposed into humus, and were returned to the earth. Less waste, less stuff inexorably headed for the dump.

  The more he planted and spaded and planted again, the more stones rose up from the depths of the soil.