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“Left?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Right?”
“No, no."
“Right, so, why don’t we just phone the police and get this over with?”
“Oh, sure. That’s a grand idea. Like they wouldn’t just have us—”
“Well, what else’ll you have us do, Paul? You’re the one who’s got us into this mess, and now we’re shit behind schedule.”
“Mess—? John, it was supposed to be fun. And now that it’s not, I don’t understand why we can’t just—"
“Right, well, I’ve had a royal time. Now that you’ve gotten your way, I—what? Oh, don’t be like that. Come—Paul, quit looking at me like that.”
“Look, you always fucking do this, John. It’s always got to turn into something with you.”
“Someone’s got to turn it into something. Otherwise we’d just be flitting around turning nothing into anything all day.”
“Oh, that’s rich—”
“What, coming from me?” John folded his arms over his chest. “That’s what you were going to say, was it not? Coming from me, because I’m unemployed?” He motioned with jazz hands around the last bit for emphasis.
Paul couldn’t help but roll his eyes. “I don’t understand why you keep bringing everything back to this, it’s not me bringing it back to this. It’s not the unemployment that bothers me, John. You know that.” He paused, offering up a concessive jest. “Besides, I think it’s just called ‘retired’ at your age.”
John ignored it. “Oh, sure, and what is it, then? That’s bothering you so much about me. Let’s not be daft, here, Paul, we know it’s something.”
Paul felt a bit helpless, having repeated the sentiment in many words over the past few months. “It’s not bothering. It’s not bothering. It’s, you know, I just wish there was more ambition.” The word felt wrong leaving his lips. He had the sense to feel regret.
John scoffed, turned away. “I’ve got ambition, Paul. It’s just that yours lies in touring, and mine lies in bread. You can’t dote on your househusband to the magazines but complain when he’s doing househusbandly things in your life, you know.”
Paul winced. It had been a year, but the interview was still a sore subject between them. Paul hadn’t thought anything of it, a mastercraft of PR after nearly sixty years under the inquisitive public eye. John had considered it a slight against him, to not share the gritty details of his struggling, as though Paul had been ashamed of his grief. Paul had said, “well, you go on, then, you do the interview.” John had left for three days.
Paul could feel the tension rising between them, could feel a full-blown argument coming on. He wanted to will it away, wanted to concede and get on with things, but his tongue refused to listen to sense. He’d always had a problem with having too much and not enough to say all at once. “And when the househusbandly things are done, then what? We’re two men in our eighties. How much laundry could there be to do?”
John looked indignant. “It’s not just the laundry, Paul.”
“No, I know it’s not just the laundry. It’s not just the laundry, and it’s not just the dishes, and it’s not just the floors and the counters and the sewing and the patching and the glass and all the mirrors in the apartment and the little garden. I know it’s not only that, I’d just thought—” Paul cut himself off abruptly, clicking his jaw shut. They could get in a row all they wanted—that seemed to be about half of their conversations now, anyway—but he needed to at least keep things surface-level, at least for tonight, at least so they could get through tonight. Get back to critiquing John, call him lazy or uninspired or something of the sort, bring up another quarrel they’d had last week. Just something to keep the attack straight-on and leave the well untapped.
John turned back to him, then, his gaze skeptical, and Paul wanted to kick himself for being so… reactive. His tone was daring, venturous. “You’d thought what?”
Paul sighed then, leaning back against the prickling wall. He could pretend to be aloof, pretend that John wasn’t realizing what he’d meant in real time. It felt too late for any of those things, things he should’ve done six comments ago. He settled for: “’m sorry. Didn’t mean to bring it up.”
Paul’s tone was all too indicative. It seemed to dawn wholly then what he was referring to, and John quieted as well. John had turned away again, but over the last two years, Paul had gotten quite used to the slump in those shoulders that told him everything he needed to know. Paul was practically aghast with himself. Leave it to him to make his husband cry on a fun family outing.
It would do them no use to pretend the words hadn’t been spoken. Paul stuck his hands in his trouser pockets and began softly. He hated to be the one to mend things most times nowadays, but he knew that if he didn’t, no one would. “I’m sorry, love. I know you needed time. We both di—do. Still do. I’d just thought that, I dunno, maybe getting you back in the swing of things would… you know, help, or something, I dunno,” he repeated, losing the thread of his consolation.
“You really want to talk about this now? Here?” John inquired, a bit incredulously, still hiding his face.
Paul huffed. It would do neither of them any favors to veil the honesty now. “I don’t know, John. If we don’t talk about it now, here, will we ever? I mean, not to get morbid with you, dear, but we haven’t much time left in the grand scheme of things. Something’s got to change.”
“Right, then. Fine. Let’s talk about it here and now.” He still wouldn’t face him, the words growing accusatory and ever-more-so unsteady. “I want to know about you. Let’s not talk about me, for once in our goddamn fucking lives.” Paul braced himself for the worst of it, a crashing wave that would knock you down and leave you wondering which way was up, only you’d find yourself on your feet, anyway, choking on salt and sand. “I want to know how you can go to the studio every day, how you can have your little meetings and your little phone calls and do your little deals with your little businessmen. I want to know how you can even think about touring, Paul!” John’s voice was rising as he rambled on. “How you can play, how you can sing, how you can whistle, how you can dance.”
“Tina’s said not to do this, you know,” Paul answered plainly.
“Right, well, Tina can suck my ancient cock, that’s what I care about what Tina thinks.”
Paul sighed.
Grief was a funny thing. It did funny things to people, made them act in funny ways, but the funniest bit to Paul, he thought, was not only how ridiculously different it affected different people, but how differently it affected the same person throughout different points of their life.
After the band’s breakup all those years ago, Paul had been like John. He’d thought he’d lost John for good. He couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t write. He couldn’t wash himself, or cook for himself, which were two things that even John had going, even if he made an extra plate every night at the table just to toss it at the end and storm off to bed. He couldn’t watch the news or listen to the radio, but he couldn’t sit in silence, either. He had drunk himself to the death of his soul and quite nearly to the death of his body, too. Nothing.
After John had been shot, Paul had been everything. If he’d thought he’d nearly lost John before, there weren’t enough words in any language to describe how he’d felt after that fateful night. John had spent months in the hospital, and Paul had spent months on a bender. He’d eaten until it made him sick, slept for sixteen hours a day, wrote three triple-albums worth of songs and five poetry books to parallel it. They were all shit. He’d started painting, he’d sold the paintings for thousands, once even a million, and he’d taken the money and relapsed on cocaine. He’d cheated, he’d been arrested, and he’d spent a short stint in an institution. Everything.
Life’s a bitch and then you die, right?
But that’s the trouble, wasn’t it? Sometimes, life’s a bitch, and then you don’t die. Life’s a bitch, and then there’s still dirty dishes in the sink and a trash can full of food that should’ve been composted. There’s still a relationship that needs reconciling and a self that needs healing; still a wounded partner to nurse back to health, to teach to walk again; still a husband who’s lost his son and a daughter who’s lost her brother and grandchildren who’ve lost their uncle. At the end of it all, there is still.
Part of him had begun to wonder if such extremes in suffering had killed the bit of him that could be like that now. Perhaps he had tapped into grief much too often, and now the well inside of him was bone dry, leaving nothing left to offer him. Emotion was still there, but regulated—he could be happy, he could be sad. He could even be sad about something as trivial as a broken houseplant, or as monumental as how late fall seemed to start this year. It was just the anguish of loss that seemed depleted.
He knew that John was in that first phase now, and had been for about two years. The difficult part of it all was that Paul wasn’t in that phase now; he wasn’t in either of them. It was as though he wasn’t even in one at all. He’d been through the obligatory mourning period—it’s not that he’d been like this the entire two years—but it hadn’t lasted long. It had been only a week before Paul had gone back to work, and he didn’t make anything new, and he didn’t make anything revolutionary, and he didn’t not make anything at all. Just continued on an old track he’d been trying to figure out for a bit.
John, of course, in his nothing phase, took that to mean that Paul was simply unfazed by the untimely death of their son. Nothing could have been further from the truth, of course, and in a desperate attempt to convey that reality, Paul had hired Tina the shrink to explain the complexities of loss to his grieving husband. John, however, had believed this all to be a ploy, a ruse, hell-bent on granting Paul some sort of psychotic pass from justified emotion whilst painting John as a case.
Paul didn’t blame him, of course. He knew there was something wrong with him too. He didn’t have any trouble with the dishes. They didn’t pile up, and they weren’t thrown against the wall to shatter into a thousand tiny pieces. Not even the third, untouched plate. And here he was again, bringing it up ever-so-casually at a pumpkin patch. The most horrific tragedy either of them had ever experienced.
“I don’t know, John. I wish I could tell you. I don’t know.”
“So, what, shall we go that way, or…?”
Paul looked up in surprise. John was gesturing northeast, pointing down a row that looked harrowingly familiar. His cheeks were splotchy and a bit tear-stained, but his eyes were dry now, his face expressionless. Paul continued tentatively, a bit thrown by the change in dynamic.
“No, I think we’ve just come from that way.”
John continued, determined. “What about that way?”
“No, no, I’m certain we’ve already tried that. John, what are you—?”
“Look,” John said, finally meeting Paul’s eyes, and Paul’s heart fractured a bit more. He was certain it looked like a porcelain doll’s, breaking off bit by bit, still functional whilst missing some of its most glittering aspects. John lowered his voice as though he were speaking to Paul in front of a crowd that shouldn’t hear his plan. “I’m just—look, I’m trying, all right? I’m sorry. Everyone processes differently, and whatnot,” he continued with a mumble.
Paul was a bit shocked at the turn of events. John hadn’t much been one for apologizing lately. He nodded a quick thank you to Tina somewhere out there and her subliminal influence.
Sometimes, Paul felt like that practically telepathic connection they’d had as kids was fried now, that it had been gradually deteriorating over the course of their friendship, to their relationship, to their marriage. You wouldn’t think it would go that way, if you’d thought about it—coming up on forty years together, and knowing less about one another than before. The wires had snapped; things could only sustain so much overuse.
Other times, Paul prayed that some of it was still there. On occasion, it just nearly worked. He hoped, in that moment, that John and him understood one another. He needed them to. Paul raised his voice a bit higher, mirroring John’s showmanship. The argument was a thing under, now. “All right, well, what about—”
“I wasn’t kidding about calling the police, you know,” John said then, spinning around in a circle only to steady himself on Paul’s shoulder. “They can help old helpless fellers like us out of this.”
Paul was still hesitant. He too looked at all of their options and felt a bit defeated. “John, let’s just use the emergency exit.”
John looked at him pointedly. “I did not come all this way to—”
“Listen,” Paul tried, “Julia’s waiting. And so is Clive, and so is Elsie. They miss their Uncle Winston too, and they had a really hard time last year when he wasn’t able to come for Halloween for the first time. Julia didn’t ask us to come here, John. Elsie did. Remember?” Paul laughed abruptly then, at the memory, surprised to find that his vision was teary.
John joined in, mirroring Paul. He sniffed a bit. “She just texted a pumpkin emoji. And a question mark. I said, ‘what the hell am I supposed to do with that?’”
Paul nodded, and he felt a tear slip effortlessly down his cheek. He fought the urge to wipe it straightaway. “Right. And Julia texted back, ‘please don’t curse at my impressionable seven-year-old’, and sent a video of Elsie running around the house yelling, ‘What the hell! What the hell!’
“So, let’s—you know, just, remember what we came down here for,” Paul continued. John was eyeing the emergency exit wearily. “It’s not about us, and all of the issues that we’re working through. This isn’t some grand metaphor about our relationship. We’ve been married for almost forty years, John. It’s really, if you think about it, just two poor old blokes who can’t find their way out of a corn maze made for children.”
“That sounds worse,” John quipped. “You realize that, yeah?”
“Oh, go see a shrink about it then.” Paul was relieved that the joke passed without interception. “It’s not about us. It’s about our daughter and her children having someone here.”
John’s voice cracked, and he ran a hand through his hair, knocking his glasses slightly askew. He lifted them then to wipe at his eyes. “God, Winny was a great fuckin’ man, wasn’t he? It’s a shame more people don’t get to know that. A parent should never lose their child first, I don’t care if he was seventy.”
“I find it really encouraging that you think you’d still be around if Winny was seventy, John.” They had begun walking toward the emergency exit, a wooden door in the wall of the corn maze that led straight back out into the pumpkin patch.
“Oh, come off it, Paul. I know you think you’d still be around. You probably think you’ll be the first in the modern age to make it to two hundred. Live a whole lifetime after I’m dead and gone.”
Paul shrugged. “I’ll miss you dearly, my love.”
“You’ve got a complex about age, you know,” John said then. He poked Paul in the shoulder. “Doing headstands and all that. Me?” He pretended to hunch over and hobble, limping towards the door. “I play into it. See, that’s what you’ve got to learn, Paul. Bring a cane to the ‘pictures’ and pretend you can’t hear the attendant and you get a free popcorn because you can’t for the life of you figure out the card reader, and she’s only getting paid seven dollars an hour to pretend to care.”
“You’re exploitative, you know that?”
John waved a dismissive hand, straightening back up. Looking at him, one would never know that he had needed to learn to walk again after his incident. That he’d seen death and not only made it back, but lived to see another forty-four years and counting. Paul observed then that the two of them really were a bit impressive for their age, with their movement, hearing, and vision (more or less) intact. You wouldn’t think three excessive decades of drugs and alcohol would do that for you, but maybe you had to live a little to live a lot later down the line. Who was he to say?
“Oh, what does she care? My concessions fare isn’t going to her anyway. I ought to start dropping a twenty dollar bill on the ground as I walk away. If she’s good, she’ll give it back to me; if she’s smart, she’ll see it as a tip.”
“Ah, yes,” Paul mused as they reached the door. He opened it for his husband, who faux-slunk on through. “The two polarities. Good and smart.”
“I don’t know that we’re either,” John pondered. “Late to our grandchildren’s pumpkin-carving extravaganza because you wanted to see how quickly we could do a corn maze, and because I was too stubborn to use the exit when we couldn’t.”
“No, neither good nor smart. Oh, well. At least Elsie and Clive are both. We must’ve done something right down the line.”
Paul let the creaking door swing shut behind them.