by John Brantingham
Even from the cab of his truck, Harrison can tell something’s gone wrong in his ex-wife’s house. It isn’t just that Stanley, his son, is sitting on the porch talking to one of his monkey puppets either. Stanley tends to do that in moments of stress — disappears from reality into a fantasy world populated by talking monkeys. It’s not just that. The place feels wrong, but Harrison doesn’t exactly know why.
Coming up the sidewalk, he can hear his son’s conversation with the red monkey on his hand. Stanley says, “Not every pie is made of eyeballs.”
The monkey, in a high-pitched voice, says, “You ate eyeball pie. They told you they were cherries, but they were eyeballs.”
“Stan,” Harrison says. At moments like these, when something has caused Stanley to retreat into one of his morbid little morality plays, he almost never responds, but Harrison always tries anyway.
“Eyeballs are people. I don’t eat people.”
“You do eat people,” the puppet says. “You are a heretic.”
“Stan,” Harrison says more firmly.
“You have broken the law that could not be broken.” The puppet’s voice is commanding. “You are a sinner.”
“Stanley!” This time he shouts it.
Stanley comes out of his world slowly. At first, he and the puppet merely stop conversing. Then he blinks and looks around, the puppet going limp and forgotten on his hand. When he finally snaps out of it, he sees his father and smiles. “Hi Dad,” he says.
“Hi Stanley.” Harrison sits down on the step next to his son’s chair. “How you doing, Buddy?”
Stanley clears his throat and smiles. “All right.” By the smile and the tone of his voice, Stanley looks perfectly happy, perfectly normal, but Harrison’s been through enough of the puppet shows to be drawn in by this.
“Really? Everything’s all right?”
“Sure.”
“Mom’s fine?”
“Yeah.”
“Joey’s fine?”
At the mention of the boy’s stepfather, Stanley’s eyes tear up a little, and he looks at his puppet.
Harrison nods. He wishes that his son could express himself, but at least the boy didn’t say that his stepfather was a heretic. “What’s happened?”
Stanley shakes his head, and a little wave of smug rolls over Harrison. Joey has clearly hurt the boy, just as Harrison knew that he would. He should feel anger, he knows, pity for the boy too, but he just feels warm. This was what he knew would happen. This is the result of infidelity, and making Joey the man most present in his son’s life instead of Harrison.
“Stan,” he says again in a tone that’s meant to push the boy.
“It wasn’t so bad,” he says.
“What happened?”
“He put Mommy in a closet.”
Harrison laughs. He doesn’t want to do it, but the idea of Carol stuck in a closet appeals to him. His moment of joy, however, is chased away by the flashing anger in Stanley’s eyes, and Harrison realizes that Stanley misses Joey. Why shouldn’t he, after all? Stanley doesn’t understand the politics of sex. Harrison puts on a suitably serious face that he has to fight to keep there as he imagines the ex telling him that she never should have left him for his college buddy, that he had a depth and intelligence that Joey never had, that she never should have cheated and that she should have done whatever it took to keep their marriage going.
“Were the eyeballs delicious?”
“What?” Harrison asks, but he realizes that the boy’s gone away again, and that it’s likely that Harrison pushed him into his monkey-world when he laughed. He shouldn’t have done that. He shouldn’t have felt happy that his happened to Carol either, and on further reflection, he knows that he’ll feel nothing but chagrin at his joy for her abuse, but he doesn’t feel that yet.
He puts his hand on Stanley’s head and thinks about trying to pull the boy out of his mask of concentration, but he decides just to leave his son alone. “They were delicious.”
“Were they worth the sin of heresy?” He wishes to God that he could get his hands on the person who taught the boy that word.
What good would it do to bring Stanley out into the real world? Anyway, he was able to do that once today. Let that be the victory.
Harrison goes into the house without knocking. He can’t seem to force himself to knock. It was, after all, his own house, bought and paid for, even before he met the ex. “Carol,” he yells. “Carol.”
He finds her in the kitchen doing dishes stiffly, rubbing at a plate in the sink as though she’s trying to rub out a birthmark. “A closet?” he asks.
She jumps a little and turns holding her breath. When she realizes who he is, she exhales slowly and loudly. “God, don’t sneak up.”
“Joey put you in a closet?”
She frowns and cocks her head for a moment. “How did you get Stanley to talk?”
“I just pushed him a little bit.”
“That’s good, I guess. He hasn’t talked in two days now.”
“What happened?”
What happened, she tells Harrison, was that Joey had been in his office with Carol and Stanley when he got a call that someone was coming up. “It was a partner for a law firm where he applied.”
“He applied for a private practice job?” Harrison’s known Joey for years. At one point, Harrison knows, all the man wanted out of life was to work for the D.A.’s office to be the one good man he knew fighting evil — that’s how Joey would put it.
“Well, we discussed it, and we agreed that private practice made more sense. I mean in practical terms.”
“Ah,” Harrison says. He’s been in enough of Carol’s discussions to know exactly what it means when someone agrees with her. Harrison once agreed to sell his classic Mustang. He once agreed that he should get a second job so she didn’t have to work. He agreed not to have a second child. He hasn’t felt pity for the man who took his wife and child before this moment, but he does now.
Stanley, Carol tells him, had been having an episode. Something had happened at school, and no one knows what it was even yet, and in Joey’s office, Stanley’d gone catatonic, but only after having taken off his pants. He was standing naked below the waist while the partner was coming up.
“Look,” Joey had said, “I can’t do this alone. If you can’t get him to put his clothes on, stick him in the God damn closet.”
Carol had been so shocked that she didn’t know how to react, so she’d done exactly what he’d told her to do except she’d gotten in the closet with her son. The two of them stood in there quietly as her husband discussed some of the small details of his employment.
“And you haven’t talked to him since, right?”
She stares at Harrison for a moment with a look that is supposed to be withering. “Of course not.”
“And this is the end.”
“I haven’t really had the patience to talk to him yet, but, yeah. Of course it is.” Outside, Stanley’s puppet voice rises in anger or accusation, and the two of them listen to it for a moment. Harrison’s never heard Stanley’s puppet so angry before, not even when he and Carol split up. “I swear to God,” she says, “it makes me wish that I could just go back.”
Harrison stares at her mutely for a second. It was just moments before that he was daydreaming about this happening, what he thinks she’s suggesting, but he’s not getting the kind of satisfaction that he thought he would out of it. “You mean because I never stuck you in the closet?”
She shrugs. Her mouth has formed into that thin line that she gets when she feels betrayed. “Yeah,” she says.
“Does he still keep that fucking bull fighting poster he got in college hanging up in his closet?”
She nods.
“That poster,” Harrison says as he shakes his head. Something about that poster sums up Joey so well, defines all of his faults so clearly, but Harrison’s not exactly sure how. “Listen, I never stuck you in a closet with a bullfighting poster, but I never quit a job that I liked for one that I didn’t like either. Is there any way that he would have gotten that job if the partner had come in and seen Stan’s penis hanging out?”
Carol’s mouth is a firm line of contention for a moment, but she doesn’t argue. “No,” she says.
“And he never really wanted that job in the first place, did he?”
“Yeah, he did,” she says, but he can hear her doubting herself. She’s not a stupid person, and she must have known what Joey was giving up.
Outside, Stanley is saying “Monkeys have rights, damn it. Damn it, damn it, damn it. Monkeys have souls and feeling, and we have rights. You can’t eat our eyeballs.”
“If it were me,” Harrison says, “I’d give the guy a break. I might even apologize.” In all of their years of marriage, Harrison never saw Carol cry, not even once, but she’s crying now. He takes the dishtowel out of her hands and puts on the counter and holds her for a little while.
“Listen,” Harrison says, “you know that I love you.”
“I know,” she says. “I love you too.”
In a moment, he lets her go and grabs his son’s suitcase, the one that she packed. Tonight, he’ll spend some time trying to pull his son back into the real world. Tonight, he figures, Carol will call Joey to try to patch things up. He hopes they do too, and that his son has a live-in father finally. He hopes they have every kind of happiness, that they have joy, hell that they get married, and he even fantasizes about giving Carol away at the wedding.
Originally published in Rind Literary Magazine — Issue 1 (August 2012).
Vox Inaudica 