Assisted Living by Gary Lutz

Author:Gary Lutz [Lutz, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Future Tense Books
Published: 2017-06-27T04:00:00+00:00

NOTHING CLARION CAME OF HER, EITHER

As these things go, a woman I’ll call my wife and a woman I’ll call myself were not yet finished burning the bridges between us or even sharpening the sorrow down to something enough like a stick that a third party could at last take into her fingers and snap practically straight down the middle.

Let me at least drag the third party into words, because all we ever did, the three of us—in pairs of her and her, of her and me, never the three of us chordal together—was leave messes of wordedness in the air for any others to have to poke their way through.

And how we two wreaked devotion on her!

When you stir a marriage like that, the things that keep rising to the top aren’t, mind you, the choicest stuff.

And I know, I know, people don’t look like what they look like, thank goodness, but here is how she looked at least to me that day of name-calling over complimentary toast in the lobby of the motel: She had built such a fortress out of her unbelovedness that it was tricky to have beheld her for those months as just a plain underneath being with holes some earrings could have filled lyrically enough.

The moods amassing in her eyes (greenish eyes adrowse, though evidently truthful), relevant moles on the left arm, hair begloomed and aptly directed sideward (then later mostly hatcheted away), knees arranged buxomly, accentual acne on expanses of her back, all of these parts carnalized only in retrospect: She was a brightly miserable and unperspirant physical therapist out of keeping with herself.

She was nothing if not downright neither of ours, finally.

Plus, she was a submundane twenty-eight to our fifty (woman), fifty-six (self).

She lived with a gullible dog, a water-purifying system she could never get to work, and a sister, a slow starter whose sleep had no authority. She painted discouraging waiting-room erotica. Her saying was “Someday somebody’ll look back on us.”

But this third party: She was the type that, when you touched her, stuck to herself.

Me, I stickled over very little. One day it was a breadstick mossy with mold. I made it three-quarters of the way through. The core was a coaxing green.

How I swallowed!

•

So enough of her.

Let’s picture her pelted with age!

In a marriage, the deathly custom goes, you have to choose sides—yours or your spouse’s. My side had all the wobbliness on it, the debt forgivenness, the gastrointestinal meds that came with printouts saying: “IF YOU MISS A DOSE. . . .”

Her side had backbone in the penmanship, dollars dulling in CDs. Everything had finishes on it. Her parents came over to pamper our furniture, spoiling it rotten with pillows that foamily remembered how they’d taken every jab of my elbows.

People usually couldn’t place me, but certain cushions always could.

I would have anywise settled for any old chain of events, other than morning revoking the night before, the night before revoking the day, and the day no horn of plenty, either.

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