The Removed(6)

I set my fork down and watched Rae rinse dishes in the kitchen.

“Put on Ornette Coleman,” she called out to me. “The record we were listening to last night.”

I downed my cup of wine and went over to the turntable to put on the album. I put the needle on the record and, as the music played, picked up the album cover and looked at it. Rae once said Ornette Coleman was the spitting image of her dad, who had been a jazz drummer himself. Maybe that was why she wanted to listen to it. Her dad had introduced her to free jazz in New Orleans, where Rae spent summers growing up. He died when she was a teenager. When we first met, we had bonded over our experience losing a family member. Death brought us together, that’s what we always joked.

I sat on the couch and listened to the frantic shrill of the trumpet, the wild cymbals and drums. Listening to jazz revved me. I could drum my hands on my lap for entire songs, long periods of time, which was something I did almost every time we listened to music. I could imitate Charlie Watts, Stewart Copeland. That drummer from Cheap Trick with the cigarette hanging from his mouth. Rae hated when I did this. She stepped out onto the back porch to smoke and talk on the phone. I never knew who she was talking to. I wanted to care more than I did, but our relationship had become so routine and dull that I never felt the desire to ask. When she came back into the house, she told me my mom had called her.

“What did she want?”

“I’m tired of making excuses for you,” she said. “Call her yourself. The anniversary is coming up.”

“I plan on going,” I said, but I didn’t know if I wanted to go home or not. I knew Rae was pulling away from me. I wondered whether she was cheating on me, although she had never actually given me any reason to be suspicious. All she wanted, I think, was some sort of physical tenderness from me, or maybe a sign of empathy, which I never gave her. I knew deep down it was my fault she was pulling away, but I almost wanted her to for some reason. I couldn’t understand why I would want to punish myself.

I looked up and saw that she was standing with her hand on her hip, giving me a look like she couldn’t understand anything I was saying.

“I don’t know,” I said.

She stopped herself from speaking, looking annoyed, then turned and went back into the kitchen, which made me want a hit from the pipe. I did not feel guilty or ashamed of this, of course, because the way I saw it, getting high could make me feel better the same way antidepressants helped people, even though it wasn’t doing anything anymore except making me feel worse. I understood, too, that I needed to get better so I could be a better boyfriend to Rae. I’d worked on a ranch with my friend Eddie for a while, which was good for me, but at the end of summer the work ran out and I had to get a job I hated at a hardware store. They let me go after missing too many days. Now I couldn’t get motivated to find more work. Rae worked at an art gallery and was able to handle the bills, and I felt guilty about not being more interested in helping out.

While Rae was in the kitchen I stepped into the bedroom, quickly pulled off my T-shirt, and got the pipe from my dresser. A hit or two from the pipe always revived me. When Rae came into the bedroom, I was already smoking.

“What the fuck are you doing?” she said.

I was hunched over my pipe, taking another hit.

“What the fuck, Edgar?”

I finished one more hit, and when I turned to her, she was already gone. I set the pipe down carefully on my dresser, then went to the screen door and saw her pulling out of the drive in her Mazda, talking on her phone. She was always talking on her cell phone. I didn’t have a cell phone anymore. Or maybe I did and never used it. At the screen door, just then, I suddenly felt the urge to go after her.

Here’s what I did: I rushed out of the house into the cold air, shirtless. Across the street, a teenage girl was kicking a soccer ball in the yard, and she stopped to look at me. Rae glanced at me and sped away. I stood in the middle of the street and scratched at my arm. The girl turned away when I looked at her. Then she picked up the soccer ball and went into her house. My arm was itching terribly. I saw that it was bleeding from where I had scratched so hard. When I walked back into the house, Ornette’s trumpet was blowing like wild laughter.

I went into my room and put on a hoodie and sat on the edge of the bed. I thought of Rae and me in the beginning, when we stayed in bed all day. We spent many days like that, too lazy to get out of bed, which was one of the reasons we felt so attached to each other: we saw it as connecting spiritually, emotionally. I fed her soup, carried the dishes to the kitchen. I brushed her hair, then hugged her waist in bed and fell asleep with my head in her lap. We smoked weed and listened to music. Those were good days, and I knew it would never be like that again.

Now, sitting in the house alone, I was fidgety and agitated. How many nights had I sat there in the past, waiting for her to return? I pulled my hood over my head and walked back out the front door. I figured I would go meet my friend Jessie, who often sold jewelry in the park nearby, and maybe hang out with him so that I wouldn’t sit around the house being depressed or angry about Rae. I walked quickly down our street, hurrying past the corner gas station with the green roof, past the small Assembly of God church with its motto JESUS IS HERE on the sign out front. Then I broke into a run down the street, crossing over to the park. My heart was racing when I arrived, and I felt immeasurably sad.

It was near sunset, and the park was mostly empty. There was no sign of Jessie. I walked to a bench and sat. I felt like a goddamn loser, wanting to get high. Someone would show up, this was what I thought, but nobody showed and I couldn’t sit around.