Research: Journals
The Journal
Past Issues
27.2
Armand Inezian
BaerJohn Baer’s mind spun like the whorl in the middle of his thumbprint, or maybe like an astronaut in void. He was naked, on top of a woman, humping out in the woods. He was joyful and floaty, and the last time he felt like this, he was in a desert in Africa suffering from bloody teeth, singing “Attend the Tale of Sweeny Todd” at staring tourists. Crazy times. So he barely noticed when the woman froze.
“Something’s coming,” she whispered.
She was on her back and looking over his shoulder. Something was coming out of the woods. It was accompanied by grumbling noises and the cracking of dried pine twigs. Baer was still inside her. He tilted his head away from her breast and did his best to turn around. Its shadow fell over them. It had to be an animal, and yet, despite all the animal evidence—a wet doggy smell, a hunched shadow, and a growl that made his balls tighten—Baer’s first reaction was that he’d been caught by Janet, his wife. Of course it couldn’t be Janet, but that was an emergency he could imagine.
He couldn’t imagine this creature as it edged around them. It had a massive triangular head and a wad of muscle jammed between its hairy shoulder blades. For a second, he thought it was a giant, rabid St. Bernard, like in the horror novel by King. He couldn’t help it, things came to him in a weed garden of images. But it was a bear. Not a dog, but a black, shaggy bear with amber-stained fangs.
The woman clamped her eyes shut. Their groins were still locked tight and quivering. “Stop humping,” Baer hissed.
“I am!” she spat back without looking. “You’re the one doing it!”
She was right, of course, it was his body that was doing the pushing, but what she didn’t know was that Baer, terrified, was talking to himself.
The bear came close, from right up behind. Baer could feel its fur against his leg hair. He half expected to see scenes from his life, but he didn’t see anything like that; he was just scared. It was going to bite his balls off, he knew it. It was going to do something horrible. His thighs shook and he could taste stomach acid welling up his throat. The woman must have felt it too, because she started to yell, and then the bear started to make its own kind of noise. Baer still couldn’t see scenes from his life, but he could feel them, like train tracks rumbling far beneath.
~~~
He was used to moving. Baer came from an academic family; both his parents taught, and they moved almost every summer. He’d been through four grade schools and three high schools. His parents only settled after Baer went off to college, purchasing a condo in the Wilshire District. It came as no surprise then, that Baer spent his college years packing, going from one dorm room to another.
He had been moving out of dorm room 151A when he fell in love for the first, and really only, time. The walls had been lined with cardboard boxes. He was stuffing a suitcase when Carolyne Beebee walked in. She was tall and wearing cut-off jeans that exposed her slim calves. Her face was angled and authoritarian, but her eyes were friendly melting pools in the middle. She leaned against the door frame, wearing beaded moccasin style sandals.
“I’m moving in after you go,” she said. “Are there any secrets about this place you want to tell?”
Squatting near the floor, he watched her gazelle legs. “No secrets. The closets are small, though.” He watched her legs and she looked down on him. She was half-Italian and half-Irish, he found out, and she’d been studying Spanish for two years, hoping to get into translation. She came from money, a family that owned six travel lodges between LA and Las Vegas, but you could never tell. He got her phone number and she chuckled as she watched him try to shut his suitcase. It wouldn’t close. “Let me tell you one secret about this place. I once had sex in the tub,” he said.
“Well, did you now?”
On their fifth date, he went down on her and she had an orgasm, he lifted himself and half-kissed, half-nipped her. “There’s a bit of wickedness in you, my wee Irish wench,” he said in a miserable brogue.
She punched him in the lips, not hard, but enough to knock Baer into an aggravated state of lust.
After that, they were inseparable, and when she went to North Africa to study Spanish poetry, he got a credit card and followed. The tour they were on used four-wheel ATV’s instead of camels. They sprayed fine beige dust in the air, so tiny that, later, they had to floss the grit out from between their teeth. Baer’s gums bled wickedly and he wandered around the camp displaying them, singing, “Attend the tale of Sweeny Todd. He served a dark and hungry God,” at smiling tourists. He chuckled and slumped into Beebee’s two-person igloo tent. “Our tour guide looks like a goat.”
She was going through a Spanish prayer guide. She said religion sounded better in Spanish. “El corozon,” she was saying, and then she said something else he didn’t understand.
Baer bleated at her like a goat and when she didn’t look over, he said, “I wish I could fuck your belly button. It’s so cute standing there on the tip of your belly bubble.”
“Jesus,” she put her book down. “John, does the concept of peace and quiet mean anything to you?”
“Oh sure. Peace: a state of non-aggression. Quiet: a state—”
She shushed him and he lay back on his sleeping bag, licking the blood off his gums.
The next day, they reached a part of the desert that was tourist friendly and they were allowed to freeride. Beebee pressed to go as far as they could before lunch and Baer followed, sweating from his neck, forehead, and ass. They plowed past mounds of shining sand. They found an abandoned house, the skeleton frame of a shack. It didn’t mesh with any of the other architecture they’d seen. It was made out of wood and squarish, a failed experiment of some immigrant, maybe. It was just hunched there, behind a giant lump of sand. “Like the Sargasso Sea,” said Beebee. And it was easy to imagine that the shack had drifted over shifting dunes and sunk in, its shade supporting tiny colonies of gray-green weeds. Sandpaper winds had scoured the exposed wood. She ran her fingers over it. “Touch this. It feels like driftwood.”
Baer didn’t move. He leaned forward with his elbows propped on the handlebars. For a second, he was a cowboy, a biker maybe; all he needed was a cigar. When he was ready, he turned to the shack. “This kind of wood is great for furniture, the kind of furniture you want when you want to show the world you’ve arrived. You don’t want this kind of furniture when you make 30k in Nashville, you want it when you make 70k at Beacon Hill or Point Dume. When you settle.”
“Why would you want that kind of furniture, if you’re going to settle?”
“Man, I wish I had a cigar.”
Beebee sat sideways on her ATV, so she could face him. “You have no idea what I’m getting at, do you? You don’t want nice driftwoody furniture, because kids will eat it alive. You should go to K-Mart.”
“I dunno,” he said. “You could get one of those electric fences, the kind they use to keep dogs out.”
“Dogs? I’m talking about children. What do you think of children and furniture?”
“Is this multiple choice?”
“You fucknut!” She pounded his shoulders, laughing. But her voice took on a hoarse tone.
Baer was not a monster. He knew that he had hurt her, and he also knew he needed her. She put her face up against his dirty collar, and he held her. He said, “I don’t think I can have kids. I mean, not unless I have money. Kids need health food and HMOs, and their own computer, and then cars and college.” He did not ask her thoughts on children, nor did he ask what she thought of his ideas—not because it didn’t occur to him, but because he was stuck with her on another continent and was unreasonably scared of her answer. So he watched her thin smile, and felt exposed. It was all up in the air, like his voice had filled an aluminum balloon, and it was floating away, twinkling down on them.
That night, in their igloo tent, Beebee rode him and dug her lips in, and her tongue and hips, and fingertips too. Her body language was big; she was nasty in bed, like someone a shade past caring.
~~~
Baer saw it coming. They got back to LA and she dumped him. She said to meet at Café Insomnia, a stucco hole in the wall with ivy and creepers painted onto the walls; she said she had something important to tell him.
Baer slapped the table. He was quiet for some time, almost a minute. Then he said, “Damn, and I just bought an engagement ring.”
“This is not funny, John.”
“And I threw away the receipt. Save the receipt, they always say.”
She was speechless and looked tired.
He did his best Groucho Marx, ashed an invisible cigar. “Thanks for leaving me single sister, and by the way, is your sister still single?” He shook her hand. His neck heated to a pink burn, “Lissenlissen,” he spit the words out as he stood, “You made your decision and now you’re fucked.” He left her at the coffee stained table. Maybe Beebee would think that his outburst had been meant for her, maybe not, but Baer only meant it for himself. It was like he was torn free and splattered against things; despite this, he figured he would see Beebee again. He figured it like the pain in his throat.
~~~
After he split with Beebee, Baer, over a period of seven years, had dated six women, all of them twenty-three years old. Because of the passage of time, the effect was that each twenty-three-year-old was younger than the last. He met them at Cal State Northridge, where he got a job teaching history. He taught a course on pop culture that filled a lecture hall with a hundred fifty students. He had a one-hour lecture on the history of Mickey Mouse.
Janet was the last of the twenty-three-year-olds. She came looking for Al Finn, with whom Baer shared an office.
Baer put down some papers and said, British style, “Yaz, well old Finn, or Finky, as we’re wont to call him, won’t be in for another half hour. Perhaps I could interest you in tea?”
She let out an embarrassed fizz of laughter, “What kind of tea do you have?”
“Coffee. Yaz.”
“I have my own.” She reached into her pocketbook and pulled out a plastic bag filled with loose green tea. “It’s from Vietnam. I work for a company and we sell nutrient rich, niche products.” She shook the bag a little. “This is called Green Dragon.” She was pretty, with a face that was rounded and catlike. She kept her hair cut short, in a bob, and wore a nose stud. She made Baer think of the 1920s, of flappers; maybe it was her favorite era. He thought about fashion and models. He imagined seducing her, taking nude pictures, stylish black and whites.
Janet was working on her senior project, and Finn was her advisor. So Baer would sometimes run into her in the halls outside his office. He made up his mind to pursue her, but the college administration had grown wary of his young girlfriends, so he waited for her to graduate before he asked her out.
~~~
“What do you think of my face?” he asked one night, over dinner. They were seriously dating. They had been discussing modeling and makeup over Mongolian pepper chicken. The peridot stud in her nose glinted, and it matched her cat eyes. “I mean, what would you do with my face?”
“Faces depend on shape,” she said. She put her fork down and lightly touched his chin. She said his chin was rounded, so he should grow a little goatee. And if he got feather-weight bronze glasses, it would soften his complexion, and that he should grow a ponytail, too.
Baer’s hair had begun to recede in a widow’s peak. He’d thought nothing of it, but when he got home, after the Mongolian chicken, he went to the mirror. He tried on different ties and different color shirts. He imagined himself with a ponytail, or maybe a shaved head. He even tried to picture himself with tattoos. He decided to grow a ponytail. Janet liked to play with his hair. He fantasized that he would marry her: how she was quick and vibrant, and how they could drive for hours to try a new Jewish-Vietnamese restaurant, joking and laughing the whole way.
But he also thought of how Janet talked about “Seinfeld” and he held firm to “Taxi” and, sometimes, “Moonlighting.” He bored her talking about academic trends, while she would describe in great detail a new blue-algae diet. He liked to make terrible jokes that combined astrophysics and sex. She would rehearse saying the names of new Argentine wines. He could see her sometimes, mouthing them silently when she thought no one was looking, holding the bottle out in front of her. He thought it would never work.
~~~
“I’m pregnant,” she said. “I’ve been pregnant for two weeks.”
They were in bed at Baer’s small home in the suburbs, naked because it was hot out. Baer didn’t understand how it could happen; he thought maybe she was joking. There was no reasonable explanation; he couldn’t remember any torn condoms or unprotected sex. He always wore a condom, always with spermicidal lubricant. The box said they were 99.9% effective against fertility. “Are you joking?” he finally said.
“I talked to my parents. I called and talked for hours. We think there should be an abortion.”
Baer tried not to imagine a child but it was no use. It was a small astronaut, naked with a big head floating inside a wet balloon, itself floating inside Janet. It made him want to close his eyes and cover his head with the sheets. Instead, he held her hands. “An abortion.”
“I’m too young. There’s no father.”
Of course there was a father. He was right there, in the room, but he knew what she meant. She meant, who was going to stand over the baby? Who was going to watch it the first time it climbed a set of stairs? Baer thought of the movie 2001, about how the astronaut found some sort of embryo inside of the black, magic monolith. How the ship’s computer had gone crazy and couldn’t handle the stress. He tried to caress Janet’s shoulders in a comforting way. “Is that what you want?” he said, “An abortion?”
She rubbed the corners of her eyes, which were glossy pink.
Later, he sat in a fake leather chair in a swept and disinfected lobby. Pictures came to him, like what you see in your head when you think of old TV shows, a kind of flickering, pointillist image. There was a reverse astronaut, floating, headed from dark to light. Then there would be a pinprick, chemicals. The astronaut wouldn’t be dead. It was simply never born. Over the years, it would circle the earth, quietly waiting to take revenge.
After that, their relationship changed. Baer didn’t want to draw attention to himself. He was afraid of that voodoo revenge. He talked quietly and made less jokes, and he felt a terrible need to help Janet. “I want to do good by you,” he kept saying, whether she was there or not, some idiot mantra for his soul. It became a lethargy which hung over him and nothing would rid it. Not exercise, alcohol, nor music, nor pot. It stayed round like a ragged ghost, even much later when his back was being ripped open by a bear, he could feel it.
Janet said she didn’t feel guilty. She was pro-choice and discussed the abortion like people talk about having their wisdom teeth pulled. She was not shallow about it, but simply refused to think bad thoughts, and she refused to let Baer apologize. “It was as much my fault as yours,” she said in a soft voice. But they almost never had sex. They just lay next to each other at night, maybe with the TV on. When she walked through Baer’s house, she looked around all the time.
Three months later, they were still living together, and they got married, a throwing down of arms, and it was all guilt. He thought that Janet and he were like two people who had been wounded, one in the right leg and one in the left, and they could lean against each other to walk.
Baer’s parents drove over from Wilshire for the weekend. They were animated and spent half the time arguing about a house they could have bought in 1972. They brought photos. Many of them showed Baer as a child—mostly he was alone, smiling at the camera in a punch-drunk way. Sometimes, there was another boy in the pictures, a childhood friend named Mike Betters.
“There’s your old Mikey,” Baer’s mother said. “Remember you used to call him ‘My-Mikey?’ Whatever happened to him?”
Baer shook his head and arched his eyebrows a little, to say he didn’t know. He’d been best friends with Mike Betters until the day Baer found out he would have to leave Santa Barbara, and then Mike made him swallow a live cricket. Baer didn’t take it hard; in some way he understood that he deserved it. After, they stayed loyal friends until the day Baer moved.
“What was he really like?” Janet suddenly asked his parents. “You know, when he was little?”
“Oh, he was hyper,” Baer’s mother said. “He used to flap his arms up and down when he was watching a scary movie. And sometimes, he used to chew on his shirt collar.” They all laughed, but a warm kind of laugh.
“He would chew on it until it was sopping wet with drool,” said his father. “He would zone out. I invented a rhyme when he was five: You can have dessert, or you can have a shirt, or you can have your shirt for dessert. I used to say it to him. But after that, he put his energy into school. He was a sponge. That smart. He got straight As for years.”
“He got along better with teachers than with the other kids,” said Baer’s mother.
Baer poured another round of drinks. “The trick was to get in good with them, so they would let you smoke in the lounge.”
Janet smiled at him. He deliberately bumped his foot against hers and she rolled her eyes. Baer wasn’t sure what it meant, but noticed that his mother had caught their small interaction. His mother blushed, holding in a smile, and Baer wished he could feel the same way.
Janet’s parents came next, flying in from Chicago. “They brought the cold with them,” Baer hissed behind their backs, but they were quiet, ice-blue eyed people to begin with, and what could he say to their stares? They loved Janet deeply, and it showed in every way, easing a hand against her shoulder, maybe, or by bringing her a box of fresh fruit. But to them, he was the abortionist, the abortion maker.
Baer and Janet did the popular and right thing by not canceling out her maiden name. She became Janet Owen-Baer. She was neither here nor there and, after the honeymoon, they thought things would go back to the way they were before the marriage, but when they tried to talk, they found out they were angry. She lay on the couch, with her feet up over the armrest. He asked about her office, about nutrition programs. She let her feet hang there with one toe ring glinting at Baer. Finally, she said, “Are you making fun of me?”
“No. I only make fun of myself. I’m a one-trick pony, self deprecation is my redeeming quality.”
“You’re so tiring. You’re exhausting. I know you don’t care about soy, so why don’t you just say what you mean.”
Baer put a clamp over writhing anger. “Okay. I just want to talk about your life.”
“It seems like, the way you’re going on, you already made up your mind. You don’t need my help.” She sat higher, maybe two inches higher.
“You’re angry, aren’t you?”
“No, you’re angry, John. That’s one of your jokes I do get. Why don’t you ever just want to go out for beer and see a movie? Why don’t you ever want to talk about how you feel?”
“I do talk about how I feel. I feel fine. As for you, I already know how you feel.” It was a horrible mistake, he realized. She didn’t lash back, or cry, but she refused to open her mouth, and Baer felt like one of those Russian dolls. The people inside people dolls. He wanted to be angry at her, but found it preferable to be angry inside himself. He wanted to apologize, but found it better to apologize to himself. He felt seasick.
Only a few days later, they were awakened by a three AM phone call. “A woman,” said Janet. “She’s apologizing.”
Baer took the cordless phone and didn’t turn on the light. He squinted into the dark as though he might be able to see the caller through his phone.
“Sorry,” said a voice.
“I’m awake.”
“It’s me. It’s Carolyne Baby.”
“Baby,” he said it softly and blankly, in a way that you couldn’t figure out if it was a question or statement, which was not wrong because Baer, himself, hadn’t a clue. He’d heard about her, that she’d been married and divorced and now worked the editing circuit, but he hadn’t spoken to her since their break up, eight years before. Thanks for leaving me single, sister.
“I had a dream you were eaten by wolves,” Beebee said. “It was very real.”
“Jesus.”
“I just had to call to see if you were okay. I got your number from Al Finn. Sorry.”
“I’m okay,” he got out of bed and, even though it was dark, walked to the kitchen.
“Whooosit?” Janet whispered as he walked away.
He grunted back and waved a “never mind” gesture. When he got to the kitchen, he poured a glass of water. “What kind of wolves?”
“Gray, black, big—I don’t know.”
They talked for an hour. After, he couldn’t recall what had been said; some of it was flirtatious and regretful. They talked about new novels and even the economy. He talked about his marriage. She’d heard about it through the old grapevine and was his wife nice? Baer said that she was nice and he’d heard Beebee was divorced.
“No kids,” she said.
The kitchen was humming, that’s what he would later recall. It was like in the old cartoons where everything dances to an unseen orchestra, even the mountains and trees. He had heard that all electronics made a sound in b-flat. B-flat was rumbling up from under the fridge, the clock on the range, and from the central air somewhere below. The tiles and floorboards gave off creaks and squeaks. He thought he should just blurt it out to Beebee, that the kitchen was humming and it wasn’t an earthquake. A few years before, he would have said it. But now, what if she didn’t get it? What if she put on a fake laugh for him?
He plopped back in bed, and decided he was going to stay quiet. He peeked over at Janet. She was on her side, snoring daintily, the top of her blue nightie tucked at an awkward angle. He realized that, for the first time in months, she looked peaceful, and it was because she had had the bed to herself. He went off to the living room couch. Jamming his head into the pillow, he couldn’t think of one reason to stay with her. He could never repay his debt for the astronaut, and he doubted that she could repay hers, whatever it might be.
So, he bought her a new convertible Beamer. It was like an expensive mousetrap that he could catch her in and convince her to take extended weekend trips with her office friends.
As for Baer, he met women, but not twenty-three-year-olds, they were his age or close to it, and after sex they exuded the same type of fear he had in himself. But he found that he was comfortable around these older women; Baer let jokes slip out. “How about a Woody Allen movie?” he told a woman named Elisa during their second tryst together. “Or, ‘The Old Man and the Swimming Pool.’ An aging man spends days struggling with an inflatable raft.”
She wrinkled the corners of her mouth and changed subjects.
“Oh,” he said. “Let the old man of the sea get his fishing rod out.”
That made her laugh but couldn’t change the fact that they were lying under cheap polyester blankets at a motel called Sleepers Inn, both damp and smelling each other’s sweat. “We’re like two lost dogs,” he finally said. “Afraid to come or go.”
“Don’t be disgusting,” said Elisa.
“I didn’t mean it to be sexual,” he said. It made him unhappy that she had taken it the way she did.
In order to get out of the house more often, he took up teaching part-time—US History, at a small college in the San Bernadino Mountains. It gave him a travel stipend and an excuse to stay at hotels, motels, travel courts for at least part of the week. Then, one night, he went out into the quiet woods behind the main campus where Elisa was waiting for him with a sleeping bag. They got naked. His mind spun like the whorl in the middle of his middle finger.
~~~
After the bear was through with him, he found himself wrapped in his sleeping bag, which was warm and soggy with blood. Elisa stood over him; she wasn’t naked anymore. Her clothes were blood-stained.
“This isn’t my blood!” she yelled, answering a question he didn’t remember asking. “Can you hear me?”
It felt like Baer’s back was covered with zippers and someone was doing his damndest to open them all. He couldn’t speak. He made sounds and twitched. He tried to stand, grabbing at her legs.
She laid him back down and wrapped him in the sleeping bag again. She stroked his cheek, not like a lover, but how you comfort an animal.
“I must be in shock,” he suddenly said.
“The bear attacked you and you fainted. Then it left, and you got up and ran after it. I had to put shoes on to find you. You ran half a mile. I don’t know how you did it naked.”
He felt his body, looked for fingers and toes. “Am I a cripple?”
“You were hollering, the whole time. That’s the only reason I found you. You were fucking hollering. Stay here now, please. I’m going to call the 911 people.”
“Tell the truth, how bad is it?”
She told him to stay still, and then hiked off at a rapid clip. Her legs wobbled with exhaustion.
~~~
They strapped him to a stretcher and walked him to the back of an ambulance where two men hovered over him. One was a black man, all dressed in white, an EMT. He had a soft face and a big, fat jaw. The other guy was white with a narrow face centered on an eagle-nose. This guy was a park ranger. He wore the traditional park ranger sage, had a gun, and was wearing Ray-bans, even though it was dark out.
“What happened?” the ranger asked.
Baer tried to explain as best he could, but left out the adultery part. The Ranger asked more specific questions. Had he seen the bear? How big was it? Did it have cubs?
Baer felt light-headed and wasn’t too sure if he was answering the questions in the right order. Finally, the fat-jawed EMT said, “Leave him be. He’s hurt bad.”
The Ray-ban ranger gave a pissed-off sigh and leaned against the inside wall of the van.
Thank God, Baer thought. He began to drift off. They must have put some sedative in him.
But then the ranger was back up again, talking to the EMT. “This is a safety issue,” Baer heard him say. “I want to know what they were doing out there at night.”
“Maybe they were just walking,” said the EMT.
“Walking naked?” said the ranger. “I think they were screwing around.”
“We don’t judge ‘em,” said the EMT. “We just fix em up, mister. The guy’s suffered already.”
Baer kept his eyes shut.
There had been a silly headline in the local paper, “Baer Attacked by Bear.” There had been the coming and going of medical ordeals, and at Christmas, Beebee sent a red bulb with the word “Joy” stenciled in glitter. Elisa kept her mouth shut about their tryst and Janet became a semi-celebrity in her office circle: the woman with a wounded husband. Baer wasn’t sure why, but for some reason people seemed to buy the story that he’d only been out on a walk with Elisa. In the end, he could only think that the glaring spotlight of the bear attack had somehow blinded everyone to the tryst.
At first, when they didn’t know the extent of his injuries, Janet doted on him, and he wasn’t ready for that. She came to the hospital with candy, even flowers, and gently touched his arm. It seemed as though it had been years since he’d really looked at her; had she suddenly grown more mature? He saw new lines around her eyes, and her hair was longer. She was wearing less in the way of shiny jewelry. He felt like falling in love with her.
After they found out that he was going to pull through, Janet’s visits took on a withdrawn tone. Baer found himself having to carry the conversation. “How are you feeling?” he said. “You look beautiful.”
“I’m glad you’re better. You should try to take it easy. You should,” she said. It was like she wasn’t quite listening to him. There was something changed, and it hit him as though God had slapped him on the head, she was pregnant. Again. She had to be.
He took a deep breath. “Sweetheart, I’ve been in here a while now. I feel like something’s different. Is there something you want to tell?”
“No,” she said. “The only thing that’s changed was that you were nearly killed, because you were out in the fucking woods with a fucking tramp!” She hissed the last few words, but it was still too loud and the other patients in the room turned to look.
“You’re pregnant,” he whispered back.
“Yes, and it’s yours. This baby is going to be born, John, whether you want it or not. And you’re going to pay for it, whether you want it or not.” She waited and then said, “Well?” She punched his shoulder for emphasis.
“Would you keep it down?” he gasped.
“Are you going to be a father or not?”
He hesitated. He was waiting for lightning to strike him.
“Okay, while you’re thinking so hard, I have work to do. But don’t bother coming home, unless you decide you can be a dad.”
“I paid for that house,” he told her, his face flushing with embarrassment and anger.
After that, she did not come back. Sometimes, they would give Baer strong pain killers and he would wax poetic, his voice subtly edging toward high drama. “There’s no place like home,” he said to one of his snoring neighbors. “I hope you appreciate the irony of that statement, and don’t snore so loud. No place like it. I don’t know how I’ll figure my way into that place again. I don’t know how I’ll look her in the eye again.” He spoke in a way that suggested he was pretending to be sad. He did this to hide the fact that he was sad. She was pregnant. He had been attacked by a bear. There was going to be some child that he would be related to. Doing the math, he figured he should have been struck by lightning.
Finally, the surgical assistants came to take the dressing off his scars. They held up mirrors for him to see. They were long and raised above his skin, a silvery-violet color. “Will I ever play the violin again?” Baer asked.
“We should have sewn your mouth shut, too,” said one of the assistants.
Then Baer walked down to the parking lot. He took a cab home. It was daytime, so Janet wasn’t there and he took some clothes and the Beamer. He wasn’t sure where to go. He bought a tank full of gas and drove. He drifted north. “Pregnant,” he kept saying. It was unfathomable. They’d had intercourse twice in the last year. Was she taking fertility pills? Had she cut a hole in his condom? It got dark and he followed the yellow lines of the highway that burst out in front, under the headlights, and just as quickly vanished beneath his car. It was the curse of the astronaut, he decided. He finally got to Silver Lake where Beebee lived, but realized he had no idea where her house was, so he pulled over and checked a phone book. She was listed.
“Well, the prodigal son,” she said. “People have been calling about you.” Beebee hadn’t changed much. Her face was softer and she’d let her hair go straight. Her legs were still lanky and long. “I’m glad you came. I’ve been feeling guilty about that dream I had, the one with the wolves.”
“I got your Christmas ornament,” he said, “I hung it on the bulletin board over my bed.”
She smiled and let him in. She owned a two-level townhouse and there were lots of plants, brass, and some bamboo. She had one of those shake sticks, filled with seeds that rattle when you flip it over, and she let Baer play with it as they sat in the living room.
“Well, I hope you didn’t come here to do something stupid,” she said.
Baer shook his head. “I need time to think.” He watched the side of her face and did not look directly into her eyes. “I need a place to think. A place. I won’t be any trouble. You won’t even know I’m here.”
“Well, that’s creepy,” she said. She raised her eyebrows to let him know it was a joke.
~~~
She let him stay in a converted den and he was quiet. They hardly spoke. Baer remembered what it felt like to be a schoolboy, stuck in summer. He could stretch on the futon, rolling this way and that, doing nothing for hours. He stretched his calves, thighs, rib cage, his upper arms, and back, where his scars sometimes felt tight. He liked the idea of being hidden, even though he was pretty sure everyone knew where he was. He tried not to think of babies, but that was unavoidable. Their heads, he decided, were just like honey dew melons. Everyone wanted to touch a baby’s head; everyone wanted to smell a baby’s head.
He kept the curtains closed most of the time, so it was dim. He stayed for a week and then knew he was running out of time. On the seventh night, he tried to think hard about what to do, but wound up drifting to sleep instead. The next morning, he woke famished, almost dizzy. He opened the fridge and ate all of Beebee’s fruit and low fat yogurt.
Beebee didn’t notice. She went to work and checked her e-mail. She cooked sometimes and even had people over. She introduced them to Baer and said that Baer was her second cousin, come over to stay a while. She had a couple of men over—potential boyfriends, Baer thought. They were both in their forties, very warm, and funny. Baer took an immediate dislike to them. “I gotta get out of here,” he mumbled to himself. “I should shave, too.”
He went for a late walk—maybe he would see Silver Lake, which was actually a tree lined concrete reservoir. It was chilly out, and he held onto the elbows of his windbreaker. He found the lake, but there was a tall fence around it. He couldn’t even see the water. When he got back, he was surprised to find Beebee snoozing on the couch, with the lights on. He tried to pass her quietly, but she woke.
“I thought maybe you’d gone back to your wife.”
“Just a walk.”
She twisted to watch him climb the stairs. “She called.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Baer glared at her.
“I just did. I told her I didn’t know where you were. I’d thought maybe you’d gone back.”
“No, my situation is more like that book, You Can’t Go Home Again.”
“But he did go home, didn’t he?” she said.
“Just to settle his accounts. I actually did a lecture on that.” Baer stirred. Suddenly, he wanted to talk.
But Beebee just stared, finally saying, “John, you’re an idiot if you think you’re going to find some clever way out of this.” Then, she made a little frowny face and yawned, “I’m going to bed.”
After she left, Baer said, “I’m never going to go back to her.” And he meant it.
He kept waiting for Beebee to ask questions, to grill him on his situation, and it irritated him to no end that he wasn’t being given that chance. He had his arguments cued and ready to go. But what happened, instead, is that he would go downstairs where she’d be watching some old movie on cable, and he’d sit across from her and they’d make occasional comments about the actors. Baer would shuffle his stocking feet on the wood floor.
~~~
On the tenth day, Baer was awakened by a knock on his door. It was early, before eight. Beebee poked her head in. “There’s someone here to see you. A ranger, I think.”
“Is he wearing Ray-bans?” Baer rolled out of bed.
“Yeah.”
The Ray-ban ranger had a pistol strapped around his waist.
“Do you carry that everywhere?” Baer asked.
The man’s face narrowed. “Why aren’t you at home, Mr. Baer?” He looked around, registering the unmade bed. “But maybe that’s not my business. Like a friend of mine once said, ‘We just fix ‘em, mister.’”
Baer sat on the couch, dressed in khakis and a pajama top, trying to see through the man’s stupid sunglasses. They were the angular kind that had been popular with volleyball players in the late eighties, and Baer was fantasizing that the key to the ranger’s powers were his hidden eyes, and that if you could just see them, he would fade away.
“I’m just here to get answers,” the ranger said. “It would wrap things up.” As he had done in the ambulance, he asked questions about the attacker bear. He wanted to know how big it was, and its shape and color. He sounded like a police detective on TV. Baer had a certain image of nature-loving rangers, but maybe this was a different type, one who was used to looking for drug dealers and illegal immigrants. The ranger flipped a page on his notebook. “Did the animal have cubs? Did you witness the existence of cubs?”
Baer knew why he was asking. He knew that when bears attacked people, there had to be a posse to go kill it. But there was a new law he’d read about in the papers, that they couldn’t kill a wild animal if it was defending its cubs. He hadn’t seen any cubs, yet it occurred to him that there might have been some, maybe, hidden in a grotto or behind a bush. “Yes, there were cubs,” he said.
The ranger jabbed his pen at his notepad. “Are you positive? The woman you were with does not corroborate.”
“I don’t know about Elisa, maybe she didn’t see.”
“Why didn’t you mention this before?”
“Nobody asked.”
The ranger glared. “There is no evidence to suggest cubs, no spoor, no tracks except the big one that attacked you. It’s a known fact that once an animal has attacked people, it will tend to attack again. That bear’s a menace to hikers and campers. I don’t want to bring any more hurt people out of my forest.”
“I saw them. They were little things.” Baer got up, “Can I get you a drink? A soda or something?”
“No.” Off came the shades. The whites of the ranger’s eyes were striking, pale like snow. “I don’t know why you’re lying, Mr. Baer. You could be dead right now.”
It was true, he could be dead. There were three long stripes down his back to remind him. But they were more than reminders, they were like a signature at the bottom of a contract, Baer decided. He could be dead, but he wasn’t and the scars were his proof. There they were and nothing would ever take them away. “I’m sorry,” he finally said, “I’m so sorry, but there were cubs. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to get a drink, my throat is all scratchy.”
The Ray-ban ranger cursed softly, folded his pen into his notebook, put his glasses back on, checked the safety on his pistol, and left.
Watching him go, Baer rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet. He stroked his chin. He didn’t know why he had defended the bear, exactly. All he knew was that he was experiencing some sort of melting in himself, as if something that had been inside, very hard, was suddenly gone. It hadn’t left violently, it had simply slipped away.
She was eating breakfast, an English muffin with butter and half an avocado, when he walked into the kitchen. “I’m going,” he said. He thanked her.
“You’re going to see her.”
“No,” he said, but he was being obstinate. They both knew that he would go back. “Maybe I will,” he admitted. Baer didn’t know what to expect—he would have to be realistic if not skeptical. Maybe there would already be another man, a new boyfriend, right there in the home he still legally owned. Maybe they would talk, and settle an amount he could give to her. Probably only bad things would come of it, he tried to assure himself. Maybe he would stare at her shiny eyes and big belly and try to imagine what his child would look like. Finally he said, “Sorry I ate all your fruit and low fat yogurt.”
She waved her hand, as if to say, oh-please.
“I’ll be glad to pay you for them.”
She took an avocado and cut into it. “You don’t have to, John. I’m not mad at you, but if you keep standing there with that shit-eating look on your face, I think I’m going to slap you upside the head.” She continued to cut quietly, exposing the thick green meat.
~~~
He drove past the trees and shrubs around Silver Lake, and the bear cubs stayed with him. They were all around, just out of view, grubbing through the thorny undergrowth. Scampering into concrete sewage channels. Figuring their way into new places. He leaned back against the seat. The windows were open a crack and a breeze whistled against his ears and eyes. The scars on his back felt numb, but he knew they were vivid in color.
