Exclusive Excerpt: "Fugue"
A New Novel by Paul A. Toth

Chapter 7: Begin

     I had been unjustly denied, but here's the thing: What I had been denied, I didn't know. I just knew I wanted it so badly that the desire became more important than its object, and that posed a danger I wouldn't understand for a long time.
     Now a freeway sign indicated San Diego lay two hours ahead. I hadn't driven far enough the day before, delayed by breakfast, Giant Travel Plaza, Gooseberry National Bank and constant, fatiguing thoughts of Rosie, Mother and Mary. Anyway, it would have been too late to arrive that night on Mary's doorstep, but now it was early enough. With the outcome of my screwy genetics -- the semi-Asian eyes of my wanton father and milkless adoptive mother -- I feared the roll of dice and normally drove the limit. But on this occasion, I shoed the accelerator and watched the needle edge right.
     I glided through Los Angeles, where I'd met Rosie. She was standing in front of me at a concert that night. I'd gone alone. All I did was ask her to sit down, please, ma'am.
     "Motherfucker," she said, owling, "you sit down. You blocking somebody else behind you."
     "I'm standing because you're standing."
     "And I'm standing because the guy in front of me is standing, bitch. Why don't you listen to records at home if you wanna sit down? I think you like me, that's what I think. And if you like me, get me a beer."
     That was the beginning.
     Soon, Rosie took me into her home, as I had come to expect would happen. Once again, I moved from a resort with one luggage bag. Those spare, wandering years had allowed me to accumulate the wealth Rosie now controlled. Summertime was easy, the cotton high, the fish jumping...but I doubted her mama was too good looking.
     Rosie spent her days singing standard religious songs. The big L.A. churches could land recording contracts for the best singers, and Rosie believed she was a caged bird. At that time, her faith was more conventional, resting on favors she believed God would grant her. In her mind, Jesus would gladly lend a back for her to step upon, and she was more than willing to test his weight-bearing capacity.
     One day, I accompanied her to a meeting with Minister Acorn Jackson -- yes, Acorn. Acorn was the man when it came to studios, more talent scout than preacher, but I liked him. He knew most singers would return after their success, depositing big contributions in the collection basket.
     "Rosie," Minister Jackson said, "I'm not sure --"
     "You not sure what?"
     I covered my eyes. Minister Jackson was in danger of receiving the smack I knew so well.
     He swallowed hard. "I'm not even sure you should be in the choir. I mean, in it, period. I've had complaints."
     When Rosie accumulated anger in her cloud, I could feel the rise in barometric pressure. But Minister Jackson tapped the Bible on his desk, reminding Rosie of his station. "I'm sorry, but I'm an honest man. You probably possess some other gift. Everybody does. Yours ain't singing, though."
     I would have grabbed her arms, but I was still skinny and lacked the circumference to embrace her. Instead, I touched her hand, hoping to distract her.
     "Why the fuck you touching my hand? You Jesus?"
     "Come on, Rosie, let's go."
     "Naw."
     Then she sang a spiritual I guarantee Minister Jackson had never heard before.
     He covered his ears. "Please stop."
     It was the birth of her four-letter sect. However low sweet chariot swung, it had never been engaged in the hit-and-run accident Rosie proposed. Meanwhile, that preacher spoke in tongues. He squirmed about his desk and dug forefingers in his ears. I pulled the back of Rosie's sweater, trying to make her sit. Instead, she spun and caught my chin with a palm flat as her notes.
     "What the fuck, Rosie?"
     "Fuck both you motherfuckers." She ran out of the office and into the church, screaming, "You promised me, God. I don't forget no broken promise."
     That's when Jesus became for her a ghost but not a son of god. Meanwhile, Minister Jackson and I looked at each other like two orphans in a strange new house.
     He said, "You gonna be all right?"
     "Me? I'm used to it, Preacher. And we won't be coming back, but it was nice coming to your church. Even if I don't believe."
     "Lord."
     "Yes, I know."
     He rubbed his forehead. "Oh, Lord."
     "You could say a prayer for her."
     "Sweet, sweet Lord."
     "Maybe say a prayer for yourself."
     "My head hurts so bad."
     "At least you didn't get a slap."
     "Does she -- does she do that often?"
     "Oh, every now and then. I never see them coming. Storm clouds behind a mountain, you might say."
     "That woman would be dead if she were my --"
     "Well, look at me, Preacher: I'm no match. That's probably why she picked me."
     "I was wondering why she -- why a skinny little white boy -- I wondered. I was thinking sometimes -- in the pulpit --"
     "She holds me to the fire, Preacher, and more than my feet. I guess I like her pushing me around.      Must be some kind of, I don't know, fetish or something."
     "No, please, I'd rather not know."
     "I'd better go."
     "I've got to lie down."
     "You lie down, Preacher."
     "Yes, I must lie down."
     He retreated from the office, feeling his way through the door. Rosie had scored a TKO, and I was headed for a knockout.
     In the parking lot, I spotted a shoe-wide dent in the driver's door. I opened it with one hand, shielding my face with the other. I started the car. She was crying and shaking, hugging herself.
     "God betrayed me, that no-good motherfucker."
     "That's crazy, Rosie. Don't say that."
     "What the fuck you care? You don't believe in nothing."
     "Yeah, but you never know. Just to be safe, you shouldn't say that."
     "Naw, naw, nobody cares about me. There ain't no God."
     "Jesus, Rosie, you're gonna draw attention."
     "I know Jesus still cares, but God don't. I just had an illumination."
     "Revelation."
     "Naw, I saw light."
     "The sun's in your mirror."
     "It's there for a reason. Jesus shined a light. It came from his robes. He revealed himself to me."
     "Okay, okay. Let's go home."
     "I hear his voice."
     We drove out of that parking lot, Rosie channeling Jesus all the way home and the rest of the day. We had a little apartment in West Hollywood then, and I'm sure the neighbors must have thought we were going at it, Rosie shouting, "Lord, yes. Yes, Lord!" She needed what she was imagining right then, so I stayed quiet and out of the way.
     That night in bed, it seemed the voice switched off. For the first time in hours, she spoke to me.
     "I got to educate myself. Everything I believe's a goddamn lie. My mother's a lyin' bitch."
     "I think parents mean well. Except my mother, but that's another --"
     "She the one that told me I could sing. She probably laughing now, that crazy, drunk bitch."
     "Settle down."
     "She's a bitch and Father's a back-door, sneak-around, scrazzle-headed, crotch-scratching, butt-sniffing dog. And don't tell me to settle down, else I'll wallop you."
     The Gospel According to Rosie, much of it written that day, in pencil, erasable when occasion necessitated. Was that why I now missed her one minute and imagined with such pleasure Mary Whitcomb's barely-covered bones the next?
     San Diego appeared. For some reason, that place made me edgier than the cliffs along its beaches. It's too damn clean and clear, especially the outskirts, every house and condominium so alike their owners probably walk into next-door neighbors' homes by mistake: "What's for dinner? Oops, sorry: wrong house...again."
     Mary used to live in a ground-floor apartment. According to the phone book, that's where she still lived. I remembered the way there, one of my only two homes in San Diego, counting the resort. They called it something-something Park, and the buildings faced each other like sextuplets bored with seeing the same face everywhere they looked.
     As I pulled into the parking lot, what I was about to do seemed momentous and monstrous, a dangerous beginning to what I couldn't know. Adrenaline flooded my veins, fueling and revving, making me perspire with panic-sparked sweat. It was a sensation I usually avoided. When it comes to fight or flight, I'm all flight, a boxer with good legs and no fists.
     But this time was different. I wanted change. I didn't know why, except perhaps that my jawline was permanently numb from Rosie's slaps, my back ached from her weight, and my gut showed the implications of our life together. Was our marriage ending? There was no way to know. But if there's one thing I'd learned in all my wandering, it's that the period preceding a breakup is often signaled by a strange sadness, as if I practiced missing someone in advance, getting used to doubting my decision before I'd even made it.
     I closed the car door and moved like a private toward a battlefield. Her bedroom faced the parking lot, designed, perhaps, so that traffic would dissuade ground-floor invasions.
     The window was open, the curtain billowing. Mary snored. It was noon.
     "Mary," I whispered through the window. "Mary?"
     "Huh? Mu-mu-ma?"
     "Mary, it's me, Jonathan."
     "Who?"
     "Wake up, Mary."
     "Goddamn it, what time is it?"
     "Let me in."
     "Why should I?"
     The curtains peeled. She appeared, head shorn of the 1920s. She was blond now. She wasn't the same woman, the old haircut a mask. She looked harder, colder, all tar, no menthol. She wasn't happy. My journey had come to its end. Not much of a mystery.
     "What in the living fuck are you doing here?"
     Someone jingled behind me. I turned and saw a toolbelt. I looked up.
     The semi-familiar maintenance man wasn't happy, either. "Problem?"
     "No," Mary said. "It's okay, Dennis."
     He studied me a moment and left. Had he recognized me?
     "How'd you know I'm alone?" she said. "All right, asshole, come in, but only long enough to explain why you're here. Then go."
     I went to the door and waited for the buzzer. Strange the way I remembered that noise, which left more of an impression than I'd made on Dennis the Menace. He used to come to our apartment puffing out his ring of tools as if he wore a world wrestling championship belt.
     "Mary here?" he'd say.
     "Air conditioning's out. So's Mary."
     "Hmm. At work, I suppose. Like most hardworking, simple folk."
     "I paid my debt to society, Dennis...in a factory."
     This time, she didn't unlock the door and leave it open for me, as she had done when I first started visiting her years before. Instead, she made a big show of rattling the chain and jiggling the knob. By the sound of it, there were ten Mary's inside, each with one hand on the door. Maybe she was Kali now, with multiple arms and blue skin, born of anger, drinker of blood.
     "This is not a movie," I whispered to myself.
     The door opened not upon that painting I hated nor the pile of stuffed animals, for a lot more than Mary's haircut had changed. There was a calendar on the wall, notebooks and planners on the bed, stacks of files in the corner, books about turtles next to a computer monitor.
     Now that I could see her more clearly, I realized how well I had been deceived. Without that cute little flapper cut, her true face revealed itself. If she once was bittersweet, she was only bitter now, and her past was pulled tight behind her head in a bun, nearly amputated from her skull. Meanwhile, she wore the unsexiest bathrobe ever stitched, defrizzing pink fuzz that slunk around her frame as if embarrassed to be there. I noticed in the open hall closet a line of business suits. Beside the boom box, the only object I recalled, stood not some obscure punk rock disk but one of those environmental recordings, the cover depicting a beach.
     "What?" she said.
     "You've cleaned house."
     "You stink. Living in a car now? Can't take a shower? This is my office. I'm a secretary. Executive secretary."
     "Never mind that," I said. "What about this?"
     I handed her the envelope. As she reached for it, I realized she could have torn it into pieces and let the evidence drizzle on the carpet. But she didn't. She read and gave it back.
     "I don't have a typewriter."
     "You could borrow one."
     "From who, Hemingway? Anybody could have sent this. It wasn't me."
     She waited. I wasn't sure what to say.
     "You mean --" She interrupted herself, laughing. "You mean to say you think I obsess about you? That I'm stalking you? Actually, you know what: You're right. I've been missing you so much all these years. Thank God you've come home, Bill Bailey. 'Mashed potatoes.' Are you kidding me? You know what I think? I think you wrote this. You're the manual typewriter type."
     "Well, somebody sent it, unless you think I put a U.S. Postal Service uniform on and delivered it to myself. So sit down. Let's think about this."
     Besides the bed, the only furniture was the computer desk and two director-style chairs. I could see the tiny room in back, supposedly meant for a bed and where she had once stored her more valuable stuffed animals. Obviously, she had outgrown her friends. I wondered who or what had replaced them.
     "You've really changed, Mary."
     "You're fat."
     "Rosie feeds me well."
     "Rosie? Who's Rosie? And where'd you meet her? No, let me guess."
     "Los Angeles. She was next after you, next and last. We're married."
     "Why should marriage rule her out? If you ask me, that makes her the prime suspect."
     "And why lure me into a trap when I already live in one? Besides, she loves me in her way. " I pictured Rosie plopping on top of me. "We have our ups and downs."
     "Relationships take work, right? Give me a break. Are you sitting around crying again 'cause you're too bored to stay and too scared to leave? Oh, well, cross her off the list, then. Who else could it be? What about the one before me, Anal?"
     "Azal. A-Z-A-L."

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