Indecision: A Novel Read online

  “Later I tell you of the fruit,” Bridge said, taking my hand now and scaring off the butterfly.

  Several long moments, swelling as they did so, went past and popped.

  I began writing in my to-do list as I walked along: Form a plan.

  This was to get her to kiss me.

  Think, I wrote, as she dropped behind me.

  Be brave enough to lead her—then I crossed out her and wrote you. Then I heard her say “Look,” and was writing that word down when something crumbled and clung across my face.

  TWENTY-THREE

  I did a crazy little dance or frightened tarantella as I kicked and slapped myself all over. “Bridge,” I screamed, “is there one? Is there? On me?”

  She was looking at me with such an open mouth that I felt bitten already. “Aaagh!” I screamed.

  “For a moment I thought, ‘He is mad—finally he is utterly mad.’ ” She started laughing really hard. “But—but—” She could hardly talk for laughing so hard. “But there is nothing on you to fear.”

  I was plucking spider web off my face. “Swear to honest God?”

  She was able to stop laughing for a second. “I swear to the truth. There is nothing.”

  In my terror bad visions had passed through my mind. I’d glimpsed myself playing hackysack in hell, I’d imagined Alice in a Halloween costume—black dress, bare arms and breasts, with six bouncing artificial legs trailing behind her on a black-crepe-covered cart—and I had seen dad being electrocuted in a desk chair while mom sat in the next cubicle manipulating a parrot puppet by strings. New York, New York was at the center of the universe and we all lived downtown.

  “You go first now,” I said. “You’re not so arachnophobic as me.”

  Brigid was trying to wipe the giggles off her face. “But I am—how do you say this?” She pointed confusingly at her crotch. Which looked wet. “I am incontinent!” She was laughing hysterically and wiping away tears from her eyes. “I am ashamed. But you are so funny!” Gigglingly she untied her boots then slipped off her underwear and pants. “I am very sorry.” She smiled as she handed me her clothes, and I stared at her half-nakedness.

  “Dude, this is getting weird.” But somehow like it wasn’t all that weird I removed the tomates de árbol from their ziplock bag and replaced them with Brigid’s damp things. She had already grabbed the water bottle away and was spritzing herself off between the legs.

  “I am sorry.” She was still laughing.

  “That’s cool. Who wears pants in Eden, right?”

  “Yes so now you take yours off, so that I may wear them, okay? I will let you keep your undershorts.”

  “Thanks.” I stepped out of my pants and handed them to her as she’d asked.

  “Regarde le sans-culotte!”

  The breeze infiltrated my boxers as I picked up the dropped staff and started up the path again. I was looking for any glint of spider cord and carrying my staff held out before me like some altar boy’s candle or caveman’s torch. Thus I felt in touch with ancient types of hope and dread.

  “I am sorry that I peed on myself,” Brigid said.

  “Nah, come on, it’s an icebreaker. But what was this designer fruit you were going to engineer for me?” I hoped it might be the kind of fruit to counteract any tendencies to freaking out I was feeling as I led her up the ravine.

  “Continually I am thinking today of Eden or paradise or utopia, I don’t know why. For me that is the effect of this drug. Besides that I sweat and have peed in my clothing! Continually I am thinking of whatever would be the most happy thing.”

  “Okay.”

  “And I am thinking that once everyone is admitted into paradise—”

  “I always thought of paradise as being very selective.”

  “This is my fantasy—so, for me, yes, everyone is allowed. No borders.”

  “Bad people too? Mediocrities?”

  “Yes, bad people particularly. All mediocrities. Because it must be everyone. This is my idea, to invite everyone.” She turned and looked at me straight on. “But would you be afraid to be me?”

  “Wait—to be? To be you? I mean yeah, if that’s the question—yeah, I’d be kind of afraid.” She looked sad at this news (and also beautiful, not that that was either here nor there). “Sorry, Bridge, but for me to be you—I don’t even know why we’re talking about this—but being you wouldn’t just mean being this beautiful smart cool woman, which I’m sure must have its perks. It would also mean thinking your thoughts. Which it seems like a pretty dark world . . . Anyway what happened to the fruit part?”

  “I am imagining a paradise in which there is no lack of time. I would like for everyone to have so plentifully much time, and everyone such an excellent memory, that eventually, over time, everyone will have been everyone else. Do you see? In the length of history everyone will have been all the other people in the world. And then for once finally we will treat each other well. You and I will treat each other perfectly.”

  “That would take a long time.”

  “Forever, I admit. But don’t you think that at last the people would—if one at a time they had been all of us, at one time—?”

  “I’m sure it would help.”

  “No!” She punched me on the shoulder. “React to me! Think, or feel—don’t guess at it! If you ever had been me, you would react to me, not always guess.”

  Our discussion fell away as the ravine or path or arroyo constricted to allow only single-file traffic. Bridge led the way without any stick, thinking about paradise but putting herself in what seemed like harm’s way. Maybe it would have been better to have taken the drug in some environment less hostile than nature, where not to mention spiders there is nowhere to sit down, and you have no stereo to listen to. Nevertheless as I walked stooped over behind Brigid through the narrowing tunnel of leaves I allowed myself to contemplate her soul-cycle of a paradise. I was wondering what all the other citizens of paradise would make of having once been me, Dwight B. Wilmerding. Would they feel that I/we kept trying out women, drugs, and philosophies because I/we loved to begin things but hated to proceed? And then, recognizing that the flavor of stale beginnings threatened to overtake my/our entire life, would they, when they were temporarily being Brigid instead of me—Brigid who was crouching right before me, with her ideal ass strangely concealed by my own pants—wouldn’t they then turn around to address a saving gesture towards me, doing just the exact thing I needed done? I didn’t know what this was, and hoped Brigid would perform the gesture on her own. Then if I were ever her, and in a similar position vis-à-vis a me-like person, I would do him or her the same good turn.

  Brigid revolved around on her heel. “I can’t go any farther. Look. You are unfortunately right, there is a very big spider before us.”

  Over her lowered shoulder I saw the obscenely spread-legged spider, heavy-looking in the sac, posted at the center of its glistening web. A blind or ignorant butterfly, with Tiffany glass wings, flitted past, and had, as I watched, an extremely close call.

  I sighed, and with a sensation of giving up like when I’d learned Natasha was gone and realized I’d come to this country for no reason, I said, “Time to go home.”

  “Oui, c’est juste, mais . . .”

  “Mais what, Bridge? That’s a serious spider there.”

  “Can’t you see through the leaves? You see that beyond a few meters there is grass there and then it becomes more open, more . . . Truly open really.”

  “Hmn. I guess maybe we could just walk through the trees and circumvent the . . . I mean somebody, in addition to the rain, must have cleared this path we’re on. Not without effort but . . .”

  “No. Not without machete.”

  It was true that the growth looked pretty impenetrable. “Fuck spiders,” I said. “We ought to kill them all.” But this seemed to be thinking like a spider and I didn’t want to descend to their level. Instead with a sudden scheme I opened the backpack and ripped out of my notebook an ancient to-do lis
t. I read this particular page—

  11⁄2 cups canned tomatoes

  1⁄2 cup green beans

  1 red pepper

  pine nuts

  basil

  couscous [apparently I’d been planning a meal for Dan]

  health coverage?

  VT options?

  toilet paper

  contact:

  Vaneetha

  mom

  dad?

  —then hocked a fat loogie into the paper to give it a moister semblance of life.

  Now with the crumpled spitwad in my hand gravely I looked at Brigid: “You see what I’m thinking?”

  Gravely she nodded yes.

  “When I run screaming up the path, you follow suit. Got it?” Apparently I was on the brink of a brave deed. Thank God for Abulinix! And San Pedro too! (Unless they were about to get me killed.)

  Brigid said, “Yet first . . .”

  “Yeah?” I’d husbanded my courage and didn’t want it running out on me. But before you knew it we were kneeling in the dirt, holding each other’s faces and kissing full on the mouth. The lips and two tongues involved felt nimble, thick, and rude, and who was doing what to whom quickly became moot, and wet. Unless I was wrong this was the best kissing I’d done, with that one time in Fourth Form, in the Old Chapel, with Stephanie Pettigrew, a close—or actually a very fast receding—second.

  “Wow.” I was gasping. “The French must have learned that shit from the Belgians.”

  “This adventure would never happen in Belgium!”

  We kissed again, and it did seem like we had the chemistry going.

  Finally I stood up as much as the tropically bosky growth allowed and steeled my nerves for an assault on the web. “If I die you’ll tell everyone in the whole justice movement that they’ve lost a brave soldier in the cause, right?”

  “Yes, everyone, I will set up a memorial website.”

  “Don’t say web. Please don’t use that word.”

  “Never again.”

  “Can you tell how serious we’re being here Bridge?”

  “No.” Tears filmed her eyes as she smiled a tight smile. “I cannot tell.”

  “All right then.” I counted to three, and then for good measure to four, before throwing the big spitwad to one corner of the spider’s web and watching as the idiot monster scrambled after the thing. “Aaagh!” I cried and ran screaming through the web and up the narrow path until I had crashed with swimming arms through many sets of branches and at least one more web and in this violent process been able to think, with terror-sped logic, that I feared spiders not only as hairy, parasitic, stealthy, patient, easily deceived, and genuinely, actually, unmetaphorically poisonous, but also because they were hairy like the crotches of human beings and hairy like I myself had so recently been and, moreover, they had eight limbs like coupling pairs of humans have, so that when I emerged—shouting and karate-chopping with my hands—into the empty space and grassy zone which Brigid had predicted and foreseen, I stopped, sighed, and knelt down on the grass, kissing the soft earth as if I’d braved some warp-speed course of psychoanalysis and might now become sane: luxuriously, triumphantly, ultimately sane.

  Brigid collapsed into my scratched-up hairless arms. “Oh but please say there is nothing on me either. J’ai peur!” I began to pat and inspect her all over just as she did me. Soon it seemed like she was making particularly certain my groin region was all right. Meanwhile I checked and rechecked her breasts as if suspecting spiders to be fully as tit-crazed as the worst of lechers.

  Someone started laughing—it may have been me. Either way I joined in, and we began rolling around on the tasseled purple grass of the very accommodating hillside. I loved kissing Brigid; it felt like a better use of my mouth than even to say the wisest things. “Mnhm, nhm, nhm,” I said, kissing, until she’d pushed me onto my back and was looming over me: “How is it that you wait until now? You are such a bad prude. I wondered even if I am not good-looking to you.”

  “You know it’s not the looks. You’re so hot that for a while I was afraid it might influence my opinion of you.”

  “I don’t have very large breasts,” she said philosophically.

  “No, but you’ve got the ass. And the face. It’s pretty much the face that’s really the thing. And the brains. Behind the face. But the ass is a factor. But mostly it’s something else about you, I’m not sure we have a word for it anymore. Or yet.”

  “Why do I like you? I like you so much. I want to speak English more colloquially like you. But also I would like to make more sense than you.” She was looking down at me and shaking her head. “So why until now did you never bust a move?”

  “You gotta understand, Bridge. It’s not so easy to go from having abulia to deciding—to deciding—I can hardly even say it, see?”

  “For once be clear.” She yanked me up and pulled off my shirt. “What can’t you say? Of what are you afraid?” She scampered her hands spiderishly across my all-but-hairless chest.

  “No . . . no . . .” With an enormous effort of will I said, “It’s just that I’m afraid of becoming—becoming a—a—”

  “Mais qu’est-ce que tu veux dire enfin?” She was laughing. “Ça va, d’accord? N’importe quoi que tu dis, ça va. Avec moi.”

  It seemed to me that for many years to come I would feel the light of this particular day like a clean sword going through me. “I’m afraid of being a—I’m terrified of becoming a socialist!”

  Brigid looked at me and I watched her blinking. “Really you should only fear to be so strange.”

  “The thoughts you have to think!” I said. “The things you have to know!”

  “But even I am not a socialist exactly.”

  “Come on, have the balls to say so, you are too, I can tell! Alice—my sister—she’s one, so I can tell. I’m actually much smarter about this kind of thing than we’ll ever know. So—”

  “Okay.” She put a hand to her plump-lipped mischievous mouth. “There is something I must tell you at the last. You will be angry that I waited. But please think of the other things you have also waited for.”

  “What? You’re not”—I rose up on my elbows to kiss her—“you’re not a Communist are you?” Kiss. “Because I can deal with socialism maybe, but . . .” Kiss. “Or you aren’t an anarchist, I hope, because”—kiss—“I don’t know, I mean I have some black clothes, but they’re not”—kiss—“torn and dirty. And I have some dirty and torn clothes, but they’re not black, so—” I wanted to kiss her all I could before learning that she wished to smash the State. “Don’t you think the State will always have a role to play?”

  Bridge had gone looking for something in her wallet and I feared she was on the verge of taking out a twenty and explaining to me the hidden meaning of money. But then I saw she was displaying between her thumb and index finger one of those passport-sized photos taken by a coin-operated booth; and in it you could see—if you could believe it—Alice and me! This was back somewhere in the eighties, maybe at the Millerton Mall, and Alice, grinning in the mouth, looked sad in the eyes, while I was sporting that strange expectant dog’s look I’d seen on dad’s wall some eight completely unbelievable days before.

  Brigid was holding the picture in front of her heart and smiling. I was sure I hadn’t brought my own lost copy for her to filch; I didn’t see how she could have downloaded it, much less printed it, off of my mind, or even off the world wide web; and meanwhile in my bewilderment I suspected that at the ten-year reunion people were going to have to be told by the nurse accompanying me that I was our Form’s designated drug casualty.

  “Do you see the plot?” Brigid asked.

  “No.” I put my hands over my eyes and closed my eyes behind my hands. “Bonne nuit.” I took leave of even pretending to be compos mentis. I would have to retire gibbering and broken to my teenage bedroom in the Lakeville house, the ward of my dad. Someone would come to feed me with a spoon. “Mom!”

  Bridge’s lips were su
ddenly on mine with eloquent kisses—a nice surprise. Usually sane people can’t relate very well to society’s more broken-minded individuals and therefore refuse to kiss them.

  “I am sorry, but Alice has only tricked you for your good. Already she thought we were complementary to each other, she said to me, Brigid, he is just what—what you require.”

  I chalked up my incomprehension to insanity and just let her talk.

  “For a while if you can believe it Alice was—ridiculous to say, but she was acting as my psychoanalyst. I don’t know, I want so much to be believed, this is something we learned together—”

  “I’ll believe anything,” I said.

  “This is what Alice says, he will believe you. Dwight will. You,” she said to me.

  “How are you like channeling Alice?” Was everyone psychic but me?

  “Of course there are some men who think more or less the same as I do. But in spite of their claims really they don’t like for a woman to be like me. I am disagreeable, severe, maybe strong-headed. Or else these men are no fun. Mais—ouvre tes yeux.”

  I consented to these few words I could parse, and looked up into her wide eyes almost eclipsed by the pupils. Brigid straddled me with her knees to either side of my chest and, taking my right hand, she placed it below her ribs, near the valvey heart. I felt they should send in fleets of such women to all the asylums.

  “Or simply I don’t like these other men. And many men who are leftists, really they are not quite good-looking, I don’t know why this is, an anthropologist should study it. But you—you are almost like Alice would say.” She looked truly happy about whatever this meant. “Ever since the moment in the airport I have the sensation that you take me, you accept me. So it was very unusual that you didn’t touch me. Usually only after sex does the question come of whether to accept one another. Which—finally—no, I never have. And yet to you—it seems to me . . .”

  “Yeah?” I asked.

  Slowly she said, “It seems to me that it seems to you that I am like a piece of nature. Simply you take me like a bush or a snake or a bird—”