Listen
by
Matthew McFarland
Erika Lott stared helplessly as the woman in front of her died. She pulled her hair out of her face and watched, trying to be dispassionate, trying to be desensitized, but still feeling a horrible, metallic sensation in her stomach. She groped around the couch for the remote control, never taking her eyes off the screen, watching in the same sick way that some people watch traffic accidents; disgusted, but needing to feel that twice-removed revulsion. She found the remote, and stopped the movie.
A classmate and confidante had recommended the movie. Erika had told her about her problem, as far as Tyler went, and she had advised Erika to rent a sexy movie to watch before Tyler arrived. This, however, had been a bad movie to choose. The sex in the movie had been fun to watch, but before she could even begin to imagine Tyler in the man's place, or herself in the woman's, the camera had cut away, and the plot had begun to inject the obligatory brutal murder.
Switching off the television, Erika made her way into the kitchen. She could, of course, tell Tyler that she didn't want sex tonight. Tyler, however, wasn't particularly good about taking "no" for an answer. He wouldn't become forceful, but he'd subtly remind her that he'd driven two hours to see her and she'd wanted to when she wrote the letter and why couldn't she just re-read the letter and be in that frame of mind and so on.
Erika sat at the kitchen table. The house was quiet, and she could hear the new furnace humming merrily along. Her parents were gone once again, her father away opening a new plant in god-knows-where. Her stepmother was with him because if she stayed with Erika, they'd eventually either end up fighting explosively or tiptoeing warily around each other like two old high-school rivals who would dearly love to believe that fighting is now beneath them.
She opened the fridge and pulled a can of diet cola from the bottom shelf. Yet another perk of her parents being away; she could drink pop and not hear about how bad it was for her. Before her stepmother had been visited upon them, her father ate what he wanted and was happy and jolly and a bit overweight. Now he ate what she said and was thinner and healthy and gazed helplessly at what he'd once loved.
Sipping her drink, Erika wandered to the front door. She stepped outside, and sat down on the porch steps. From here, she could see the gates of the cemetery. Every now and then, she would see three lights - the headlights and searchlight of the security truck - pass through the grounds. She smiled bitterly. Security at that graveyard was a joke. There was only one guard in one truck, but several acres of ground to cover. Plus, with the lights on the truck, you could see it coming a long way off. To her knowledge, only one of the many nocturnal visitors to the place had ever been caught, and that was because he'd tripped on a headstone and broken his ankle.
She took a long drink and belched loudly. That was one thing she honestly liked about Tyler; he didn't care when she acted that way. Paul had. Paul had given her some unpleasant looks when she belched, or generally acted "unladylike" in public.
Erika stood up kicked the step. "No Paul," she told herself. No Paul, no anybody, only Tyler, because Tyler was only for her. She needed a new mantra, she decided. "No Paul" wasn't working anymore. Not being able to get Paul out of her head was why she was no longer dating him, as it happened. She wanted him, wanted to be with him more than just whenever one of them could make the drive. It was probably when she'd mentioned transferring to his school that he'd gotten nervous. They'd never discussed themselves as exclusive lovers (though Paul had at least been honest when he'd had liaisons with other women), but that's where she'd thought it was going. Wrong again.
The security truck made another pass and the light in her eyes roused her from her reverie. She stood up, and discovered with some concern that she was slightly aroused, thinking about Paul. She pushed him from her mind, forced her mind onto Tyler, trying to find that shy, loving smile he loved so much. It wouldn't come. She sat down on the step and tried again, thinking of him, of his pretty eyes, his soft voice, his gentle kisses. The smile started. Then she saw the taillights of the security truck and thought of the graves, and it faded. She shook her head, stood, jumped up and down, trying to clear her head. Then she repeated her thoughts.
The smile wouldn't come. It isn't coming, she thought. Just like me. It won't come.
She went back inside and slammed the door. A framed photo of her father and stepmother fell off the wall and shattered. She had an urge to step on it as she walked over to pick up the glass.
Erika stopped. She stared down at the glass, scattered over her stepmother's face. She had seen glass, she remembered that much. She had come home from school, and gone to put her key in the door, only to find the door had been wrenched open, by a crowbar, the police said later. She had walked in, and she had never felt so loud in her life. She could hear herself breathing, and she was sure anybody could hear those breaths, those squeaking, whining breaths, from anywhere in the house. She felt a crunch of glass underneath her, and looked down and saw hundreds of her own reflections staring up. The medicine chest mirror was broken.
Erika put her hands over her face, and started humming Beethoven. Her second therapist had told her to find a mantra, a tune, a phrase, recite the Presidents, the Commandments, anything to focus on. She chose Beethoven's Sixth. It had always appealed to and calmed her, and she hummed it until her breath came slowly. She retrieved a broom from the kitchen closet and swept up the glass, still humming. She pulled the photo out of the frame, and placed it on the kitchen table without looking at it. She hated pictures of her father and his new wife. They looked ridiculous together; her father, balding, still a little plump, and friendly-looking; Linda, short, blond, and looking just out of high school. She wasn't that young, of course, but Linda looked Erika's age. The couple always drew stares.
Throwing the frame away, Erika sat on the floor in front of the bathroom door. She wouldn't use that bathroom, even though twelve years had passed since her mother's death. Murder, she corrected herself. Death was when you had a heart attack, or got drunk and drove off a cliff, or got struck by lightning, or something. Either fate, time, or your own stupidity - that caused death. Murder was something else again. Murder was the worst kind of theft and violation imaginable, because you took someone away from not only their own life and affairs, but out of everyone else's that they knew.
Erika realized she was trembling. Her fingers were bent tight at the second knuckle, and she was beating her palms against the floor steadily. She rose unsteadily, and leaned against the wall, staring into the bathroom. She asked her father and Linda to keep the door closed, but they never remembered. Mostly she just ignored the room, and if a visiting friend asked where the bathroom was, she often directed them to the one upstairs out of habit. Once, that bathroom had been unusable for a few days because of plumbing problems, and she had barely eaten or drunk anything for that time, simply to avoid the room.
The door had been left open, however, and there was the toilet, with a green mat in front of it, and there was the mirror, no longer broken, of course. Her mother's body no longer lying crumpled on the floor, her blood-soaked hand, missing a finger where the man had been unable to remove a ring, no longer creating a growing pool under the sink. But if she tried, and often even if she didn't, Erika could still see it all.
She closed the door. That simple act was like the first time off a high dive, requiring just as much conscious effort for every move, and just as much assurance that it would soon be done and she would be walking away. And then she was, walking quickly off to her father's study to check her email.
It took several tries to log on, but Erika was used to that. The clock ticked from 11:10 to 11:18 before the computer asked for her password. She typed it in - tylernme - and found she had four messages. The first was a chain letter that promised her love and happiness if she forwarded it to ten other people within ten days. She deleted it. She was moving on to the next message - a letter from an old friend at school off in Indiana - when the phone rang.
"Oh, my God," she cried. The house had been silent for so long, the sudden noise was deafening. She picked it up and breathed, "Hello?"
"Hi, Erika?" It was Paul. She started to relax a little.
"Yeah, hi, Paul," her voice was still breathy. He's gonna think Tyler's already here, she thought.
"Are you OK?" Concern in his voice, but rushed. He apparently had something to talk about. He often rushed pleasantries when he did.
"Yeah, what's up?" She leaned back in the chair and watched the screen-saver dragon burn holes in her desktop.
"Well, I've gotta tell you something." He was edgy. Probably thinks he made a mistake in breaking it off with me, Erika guessed, and as she did, she simultaneously felt a haughty chuckle and twinge of excitement growing.
"OK," was all she said. She was twisting the phone cord tightly around her fingers, however.
"Well, it's about Tyler." So far, so good, she thought. "And before I tell you this, you've gotta know I'm only doing it because I care about you. I'm not trying to be a prick to you or Tyler or the two of you or whatever."
Now she was worried. Paul didn't usually preface things this way, typically he just said what he was thinking. And this didn't sound like him being coy, either. He was much cuter and subtler about that. "What's going on?" She was surprised how terse she sounded.
He sighed. "It's been a cracked-out day, you know?" Pause, sounded like he took a drink of something. "OK, Tyler. Well, not to mince words, he's fucking around."
Erika didn't answer. She wasn't sure what to do. She hated surprises, and she hated bad news. She didn't know whether to drop the phone, whether to cry, whether to ask Paul to come right over to her. She was just shocked, not just at the news, but at the delivery. "Fucking around" sounded like a game. It sounded like Tyler was being a brat, not an unfaithful boyfriend. "How do you know?" She sounded terse again. She'd stressed "you" instead of "know", but she was too confused to care much.
Paul cared. "I know because I live with the fucker, OK? You don't need to be like that-"
She cut him off. "I know, I know, I'm sorry. It's just-"
He jumped back in. "I know. It sucks. Look, I talked about it with him this morning and he was just being a dick, so I tried to call you then, but nobody answered."
"Well, duh. I'm in class in the morning." She was feeling less upset now, but she imagined she was just pushing the matter from her mind.
"I know, I figured you might have a machine. Bite me." She could hear him smiling. When he smiled, his whole demeanor changed.
"Maybe later." She smiled back at him, but the smile wasn’t enough to change her demeanor. He couldn't see her smiling, anyway. "So."
"Yeah, anyway. You're taking this rather well."
She leaned forward and put her head on the desk. "Yeah, well. I guess it doesn't surprise me."
"How come?" He was trying to sound interested without sounding too interested. She started to speak, then blushed and exhaled. "I don't know."
"Sounds to me like you do." Brisk, almost businesslike, but still friendly. Paul was like that. When he was sure of himself, he was a take-charge kind of guy. When he wasn't, he asked a lot of questions until he was.
Erika felt her face burning. She didn't want to tell Paul what was wrong, why she thought that Tyler was getting laid elsewhere, because she was ashamed. She knew how much Tyler cared for her, and for all that, he couldn't get her off. And Paul always could, always had known what to do and how to kiss and what to kiss. She unbuttoned her shirt, and flapped the collar. She was hot now, hot with shame and moving toward arousal, thinking of Paul. "It hasn't been a good night," she whispered, her voice cracking a bit.
"How come?"
"I don't know, I broke a picture and now this and," she tried to think of something else, because it seemed like there had been more, but she couldn't.
"That all?" He was smiling again, but there was reassurance in it, and she wished it were his arms, not his voice, holding her. "What's up?"
"I don't know. Who's he fucking?" She was sure the question shocked Paul as much it shocked her, because he coughed suddenly.
"You don't know her," said Paul, and coughed more, trying to clear his throat. It sounded as though he'd taken a drink down the wrong pipe. "Some teacher he met. What's the difference?"
"I just thought it might be easier if it was an ex-girlfriend, or he was drunk, or something." Erika slouched into the chair. This was easy, that was the weird thing.
"Yeah, well, I used present tense, right? This has been an ongoing thing." He paused. "Shit, I feel like a prick anyway. No easy way for this, right?"
"No." She shook her head slowly, watching the dragon again. "Did you ever feel like a prick when you were screwing around on me?"
Silence, for what seemed like a long while. Then, almost a whisper, "Sorry?"
"You heard me. Did you ever -"
"Yeah, I heard you." Erika waited again. "I just don't know how to answer that."
"Tell me how you felt."
"Erika, we've been through this. There was never any talk about -"
"About being monogamous, I know." She sat up, pulled herself to the desk, and leaned on her elbow. "And you were always honest with me, and you told me anything I wanted to know, and you were always careful, blah, blah, blah. But did you ever consider that I might be hurt by you sleeping around?"
"Hey, whoa." His tone was sharper now, not angry, but she was about to get told something. "If you had wanted something exclusive with me, you should have said that at the outset."
"I didn't want anything exclusive, at the outset!"
"All right, fine, then when it was bothering you. I mean, shit, Erika, I used to tell you what I did with other women while we were having sex, and that seemed okay with you, right?"
"Right. But answer my question." She didn’t want to discuss that, because it had aroused her in some twisted way. Erika was convinced that anything Paul did would turn her on, be it talking about other women, spanking, anything outside her sexual norm. But now wasn’t the time. She was blushing. She could feel her face, red and probably crumpled. She could feel a lump in her throat, but she forced it down. "Did you ever feel bad about it?"
Nothing. Silence. The house creaked, and dragon made it's little "whooshing" noise as it burned another hole, but nothing. And then, finally, "Yeah. In a way."
"What way?"
"I don't know," he sighed. "I guess...shit, I don't even want to do this. I could give you a million reasons for why I slept around, and none of them would mean a damned thing, true or not. Truth is, I feel worse about it now than I did at the time. So what's that mean?"
She smiled, a soft, gentle smile. She wished he could see it. "Maybe you're growing up."
He groaned. "I don't wanna, don't make me!" They both laughed. "Look, I'm sorry about all this, I just got sick of him alternating between you two."
"Just the two of us?"
"As far as I know. What are you gonna do?"
"I don't know. Who do you think he really wants? Either of us?"
Another pause. "Her." Erika's brow furrowed. Paul sounded almost grim.
"You think so?"
"Yeah, I do. I'm sorry, that's just...". He didn't finish, but Erika figured she knew.
"Yeah. Well, maybe I'll just tell him I'm still in love with you. He'll accept that."
"But is it true?"
"What's the difference, Paul?" She was shocked at herself, horrified even, that she'd said it. She was in love with him, wasn't she? He was the one who made her happy, who was honest with her, who could make her laugh, who could even make her come. Tyler was none of those things.
But that didn't make the difference. The difference was how he felt about her, if he even cared. No, if he loved her, because he did care, he cared enough to call her and tell her this. It could have meant Tyler moving out, could have meant all manner of turbulence for Paul, and Paul liked things to stay smooth.
But by this time, she'd already heard Paul say, "You're right, I guess," and was probably on his way to "See ya later," when she spoke. She said the first thing that came to mind.
"I'm sorry."
"For what?"
"I...for what I said. I didn't mean it that way."
"You've got to stop apologizing. It's okay. You're right. It doesn't make a difference."
"If I love you?"
He swallowed something. "Right."
"Because you don't love me."
"I must love you, to some degree. I called you. But if we start seeing each other again, not only is Tyler going to get uncomfortable -"
"Who gives a fuck?", she snapped.
"But," he said, talking over her outburst, "we're back to where we were before. It makes you feel bad that I sleep around, and I'm not sure of myself in a monogamous light."
"Damn it, Paul." She brushed off a tear, and tried to think of something else to say, but everything she thought of made her want to cry. "I've gotta go." Her voice was cracking, her nose was starting to run. The lights on the screen blurred and spread into bright pinwheels.
"I'm sorry, Erika, I just-"
"I know. I'll call you later." She hung up. She tried to burst into tears, to sob, but it wasn't like that. She was caught just outside a real need to release. She felt like a child, desperately trying to summon up crocodile tears, but worse. Not just tears, she was trying to call up sadness, anger, anything that would let her work this out.
She couldn't. She wiped her eyes and got up, walked to the kitchen. She tried to pull a pop from the fridge, but instead pulled a can of beer. She opened it, and sipped. She didn't taste it, really; her nose was stuffed up now. Just as well, she thought. She briefly considered going back to continue checking her mail, but decided not to bother.
Erika walked back out onto the porch and sat down. She had taken her keys with her, though she wasn't quite sure why. She hated driving, and certainly wouldn't while drinking. She stared at the cemetery gates and decided she needed a walk.
She closed the front door and locked it, and walked across the street, down the block, along the fence to the corner. The corner of the fence had been smashed in by a reckless driver months ago, but not yet repaired. It was unsightly as hell, but it did make a good place to sneak in.
Not seeing the security truck anywhere, Erika reached through he fence and set her beer down, then climbed over. She picked up the can and quickly walked into the graveyard and away from the road, trying to lose herself in the silence.
Erika hated graves. She'd been to too many funerals too early. Her mother's, her uncle's, her first boyfriend's. Therapy bills upon therapy bills, both for her and her father. Linda had once told her father (when she thought they were alone, of course) that it was amazing Erika hadn't attempted suicide. Erika had laughed. The thought had never, not once, entered her mind. She had been around death too often to welcome it. The thought of her body splayed out on a bathroom floor, or worse, laid out in a coffin, was revolting. No, more like unacceptable. She took another drink and ran her hand over a monument. It was cold, and Erika shuddered.
The deeper into the cemetery she walked, the colder she felt. Her face, which had a moment ago felt hot to the touch, now felt hollow, as though the shame had burned away her skin and left her flesh exposed to the night air. She took a long drink, and suddenly felt herself stumbling. The ground had dipped slightly. "Shit," she murmured, trying to catch her balance and not spill her beer.
From somewhere nearby, she heard, "Ssssh!" She felt her knees weaken, and her heart began pumping faster. She dropped her beer, and the can hit the ground with a crash and hiss that she was sure anyone could hear. She crouched low to the ground, close to the monument, her breath coming in high, whining squeaks. She heard a rustling, then a bass rumble, not music, but like a man's voice, unintelligible, but still audible in the silence.
She found herself crawling toward it. She tried to get up and run, but she wanted to see who was here, who else had snuck in tonight. After all, she had probably scared him at least as much as he'd scared her.
Unless he's here for me, she thought. She pushed the thought aside and continued. That was stupid. This wasn't a movie. Her mother's killer was not here.
Who said anything about him? she thought, and stopped dead. Where did that come from? Of course he isn't here. He was just some punk, some burglar who got carried away. And if he was a thrill-killer, her most recent therapist had said, he certainly wouldn't come back after twelve years.
She was trying to decide what to do - hell, trying to find the strength to do anything - when she heard another sound. It sounded to her like something metal being pulled from a sheath, and she saw movement from behind a tree. Nothing emerged, but something had definitely moved.
Now what? she thought. She kept moving, quietly, breathing as softly as she could, still sure that the man could already hear her, but needing to see. She tried to find a way to stop it, but it was the same as before, when she'd tried to find the remote. Her eyes were glued to the screen. She tried to think of Paul, to get him to pull her back, but he couldn't, because he didn't care. And then she was there, behind a monument not ten feet from where she'd seen the movement.
She saw the man. Her angle was bad, but she saw him, seated at the base of the tree, his legs out in front of him. She leaned out a bit more, and saw his head, leaned back on the tree, his mouth open. There was a woman - not more than sixteen, but neither was he, Erika guessed - lying with her head on his lap. As Erika watched, her head began to bob slowly. The boy reached up and stroked her hair, she shifted and the bobbing sped up.
Erika stood up, quietly, and backed away. She didn't really want to watch this. And isn't that sick, she thought, as her pace increased? I was so hot to see something scary, and here it's just a kid getting a blowjob. She was halfway back to the fence when she realized the noise she'd heard was probably his zipper.
She walked around the graveyard a while longer, calming down. She never saw the truck - or the two kids, for that matter - but she didn't think she'd care too much if she did. She wasn't sure exactly what she cared about now, and she thought of Paul, but it only brought a momentary flush and sadness, that was all. Tyler brought less than that.
She looked at gravestones, tried to guess the religions and social class of their owners. Her mother's stone was simple and cheap; her father hadn't made much money back then. Her uncle didn't have a monument; his ashes had been thrown into the sea. His lover had died the year after he did, and no one in Erika's family liked to talk about any of it. Her boyfriend had big, expensive monument, but it was in a different cemetery. She hadn't been there in several years. Putting flowers on graves was a reassurance to the living, not the dead, and she had said all she wanted to say while he was alive. He hadn't heard her any better then. She had told him to stay with her, her father wouldn't mind, stay on the couch, don't try to drive in this weather. He didn't listen. Then he died.
Men just don't listen, she thought. They hear, but they don’t listen. True, she had never asked that Paul be monogamous, but she had communicated it. She wouldn’t have minded having sex with Tyler when he arrived, originally, but she wasn’t really in the mood. It seemed that men needed to get burned before they’d believe there was a fire, they couldn’t take anything on say-so or read between the lines. She wondered if the girl she saw in the graveyard enjoyed giving head, or if she'd just gotten sick of his requests.
Were women any different, she wondered? Am I being unfair? If men are dense and unobservant, are we vague and inscrutable? Erika didn’t really know.
She jumped the fence and started walking back home. She was tired, it was late, and she had felt and heard too much tonight. She was suddenly very glad that she was alone, and then realized that Tyler would probably be there soon. Well, fuck him, she thought. He's not sleeping here.
When she walked back into her house, the wall clock said 1:34. Tyler should have been here by now, she mused. She checked the machine; sure enough, it was blinking. Either he's late, or he's not coming, she thought. And I really don't care which. Why should I be the one to listen?
She deleted the message, and went upstairs to bed.
© 2000 Matthew McFarland
No reproduction is allowed without the author’s express permission.