Orange Suitcase Read online

  The Orange Suitcase

  Joseph Riippi

  Contents

  “Something (Entirely True) About Your Grandfather”

  “Something About Birthdays”

  “Something About Perfecting A Love”

  “Something About Marriage, Part 1”

  “Something About A Nail”

  “Something About The Rest”

  “Something About L—”

  “Something About New York City”

  “Something About Borges and the Blind in Chelsea”

  “Something About Ben Jensen”

  “Something About The Unpublished and Unfinished Novels”

  “Something About A Joke”

  “Something About My Book”

  “Something About Maxine”

  “Something About A Valentine’s Day”

  “Something About The Zombies”

  “Something About A Finger”

  “Something About A Painter”

  “Something About Ipek (On A Valentine’s Day)”

  “Something About Poetry”

  “Something About Drinking In Baton Rouge”

  “Something About Rings”

  “Something About Someone Else’s Poem”

  “Something About Moby Dick”

  “Something About Marriage, Pt 2”

  “Something About A Promise”

  “Something About the Orange Suitcase”

  “Something About Swimming With Sea Turtles”

  “Something About Remembering A Couch Or A Person”

  “Something About Vegas: A Note on the Second Edition of a First Novel”

  “Something About Last Time At The Cedar Tavern”

  “Something About Marriage, Pt 3”

  “Something About My Blood And Yours”

  “An Exchange”

  for my family

  “Let’s start again.”

  A baptism. Seattle, Wa. 1983.

  “Something (Entirely True) About Your Grandfather”

  “He was carrying an orange suitcase when we met. Wearing his crisp green dress uniform and carrying this absolutely hideous suitcase. I remember it clear as day. He approached me in Point Defiance Park, rose bushes and daffodils around us, bees, a blue sky, Mt. Rainier. I was on my lunch break, and he invited me for an impromptu picnic under a white gazebo. Such a handsome man. He just appeared out of nowhere and asked if I would do him the honor of joining him for lunch—it was quite scandalous in those days, let me tell you. Anyway, I remember sitting there with him and thinking to myself, Now what kind of a lady would fall for a man like this? A man who carries a sandwich and coffee thermos around town in an orange suitcase? No kind of lady I know! But later my mother told me: You can hate the suitcase, Bernice, but still love the man who carries it. And that’s just what I did, and he carried the damn thing for the next 63 years.”

  “Something About Birthdays”

  This happens: I am sitting in the basement of the old house in Tacoma, in the leather chair my mother will make my father sell the summer we move to the valley. I am trying to make sense of the huge metal computer on the desk. I can’t find a mouse; the keyboard is a sheet of heavy metal. Childhood photographs of my sister and me are set in small faux-wood frames before the wall. Then I hear a voice behind me: You look old, it says, and I turn and there’s Ben Jensen, my best friend from grade school. He doesn’t have braces yet; his front teeth stick out like white erasers. He must be around seven years old, and I look down at myself and see that I am still 26, still the me that went to sleep in New York after too many beers. Ben is holding a bow and arrow, the kind we used to make from the springy cedar saplings in the empty lot next door. Slice a notch in either end with a Swiss army knife, his dad taught us. Bend the stick and tie a length of weed-whacker string between its notches. Arrows were straightish sticks; pop cans on railroad ties were enemies’ heads; our squealing sisters were moving bulls’ eyes. Ben reaches behind his shoulder and shows me the arrow he’s made, the tip whittled to a jagged point. He raises the weapon, pulls back on the orange weedwhacker, fingers’ tips at his cheek. Whatever happened to you? I ask, but I know he can’t reply. I remember your dad left when we were in sixth grade. I remember he abandoned your family so he could be gay, so he could live with the orchestra teacher and move to California. I remember my mother told me this when I asked her, years after we moved, Whatever happened to Ben’s dad? All she could explain was: He left Ben a note. But what did the note say? I’ve always wanted to ask you that. What did it say? And did you understand? Does he call you on your birthday?

  “Something About Perfecting A Love”

  We were sitting at the café on our third date. The waiter brought us our drinks: a cappuccino for me, loose-leaf tea for her. Monk’s Blend? I asked. Monk’s blend, she replied, and ordered it always thereafter. We fussed with the mugs and saucers for a bit, and then I coughed and looked at her, still a bit nervous in those early conversations. So, what’s the funniest joke you’ve ever heard? I asked. She didn’t say anything, just dipped her tea bag up and down in the browning hot water. She laughed to herself. I sipped my foam and was about to say something when she asked: How do you get a nun pregnant? I shrugged. Prayer? She shook her head. You fuck her, she answered. She stressed the hard consonant and squeezed the wet tea bag between her fingers; she pursed her lips to blow cool air across the surface of the drink. I remember her stare over the rim of the mug. I remember her fingers, her bracelet, music.

  “Something About Marriage, Part 1”

  When I think of our wedding I think of a blonde curly-headed child dressed all in white, pouring slow water into the ocean from a great glass pitcher. It takes both hands, and a very long time passes before all the water has passed. The sun sets and the moon rises and the sun sets again. There is warm wind; the arcing water is the only sound. I think maybe we are the water leaving the pitcher, or maybe the pitcher. Maybe we are the ocean, or the moon, or all of it. I know none of this makes sense.

  “Something About A Nail”

  When I was maybe ten or eleven years old my grandfather hammered a nail into a tree with his bare hand. My cousins will tell you it didn’t happen, but we called his bluff; we didn’t believe him when he said that, as a carpenter in Tacoma after the war, he’d never used a hammer. He boasted: My hands are like the Finns. My hands are stronger than Russian tanks. And then he did it, right there in front of us. He held a three-inch nail against the cedar tree and swung his gigantic frame, no hesitation. When he pulled away that nail stayed sticking out, a monument, humongous, gray and wet, with a piece of skin as its rainy flag.

  “Something About The Rest”

  1

  I lean back from the roof and wipe rain from my face—fingers smell like wet pine and cigarettes. My grandfather used to say he built this house with his bare hands. He laid these shingles and hung this gutter. Beyond the wooden peak and weathervane the sky is a dripping scrim. Are you watching me? I pull the green string of Christmas lights and hook the final length around a bent nail and wipe my face again. He pounded this nail decades ago. He carried railroad ties on his shoulders. He crushed rocks between his fingers and threw logs for fun. Now I stand at the top of the ladder and peel white paint from the gutter. Dry flakes fall away like fake snow, revealing more original layers beneath.

  I climb down and wipe my hands on the sides of a borrowed jacket. Sniff my fingers and breathe on my palms. You look exactly like your grandfather’s older brother, my grandmother said when I put on the coat. I watch her hurry to the bookcase, watch her come back with a photograph of a great uncle. He left the farm in Finland to go and fight the Russians, she said. That was the last time your grandfather saw him, you know, when your gra
ndfather was still a little boy. She took the photograph away, left me to walk into the rain alone, not knowing how the story ended.

  I flip a switch in the metal box on the side of the house and look up. Less than half the lights work; the last reflects off a knot of electrical tape, one of the ancient splices holding the long strand together.

  2

  I walk into the kitchen where my grandmother sits with a cigarette and a yellow romance novel. She smiles when I open the door and looks back to her book. These books get dirtier and dirtier, she says, pretending surprise. I wipe my face with the sleeve of the coat that makes me look like a dead soldier. I kick my feet on the mat. The lights only work halfway again, I say. Should I drive into town for some new ones? She pretends not to hear me and flicks ash on a dinner plate. How often does she pretend? Maybe the aids are just for show. Maybe she smoked even when my grandfather was alive and this isn’t so new. Maybe she’s nothing at all like the grandmother I remember. I stand in the doorway and kick my feet some more, watch her not watching me.

  3

  She pretended not to see me take her car keys. She pretended not to notice when I took a cigarette from the pack hidden in the junk drawer. An hour later she pretended not to hear me ripping lights from the roof, replacing them with a brand new set.

  The rain fell fat and slow, like very wet snow.

  I wrap the clean white wire around the rusty nail and pretend I am setting a bomb to kill Russians; the sky is growing dark and no one sees me peel off the price tag and crumple it in my jacket pocket. No one sees me pick a scab on my thumb. No one sees me if no one is watching. No one will notice, I tell myself, not until January when my father comes to take them down, and I’ll be gone by then. I walk back inside. My shoes are soaking wet and squirt on the linoleum floor. Merry Christmas! I yell, to be sure she hears. Lights are up! She brings me a towel and a bowl of meatballs on mashed potatoes. I take off the coat; it is heavy and I feel more like myself without it. She smiles and sits next to me and pats my head, pretends not to notice the empty coat and puddle forming around it. She kisses my hair and sniffs it like a dog would a stranger.

  Grandparents. Tacoma, Wa., 1942.

  “Something About L—”

  I woke early; still black beyond the bedroom curtains. Rain dripped from the roof gutters and ricocheted across the restaurant courtyard. I rose and dressed; I listened to the rain and her breathing and tried not to wake her. In the kitchen I filled a dirty wine glass with tap water. I gathered my folders and the laptop from the table, checked the clock above the stove. I hurried back to the bedroom for my sweater and tie, watched her roll to my side of the bed, clutch the pillow. The best part of this day, I knew, would be bending to kiss her goodbye and sliding the comforter up to her chin. She would smile and murmur to have a great day, good luck with your presentation, I miss you. I would whisper back something the same. I reached for the sweater pinned beneath her shoulder. The courtyard beyond the window grew silent, and dawn outlined the roof of the restaurant white against the sky. By the time I left the apartment, rain had turned to snow.

  “Something About New York City”

  There used to be a fishing supply store on West 22nd and Tenth Avenue where the owner would demonstrate fly-fishing in the street. Whenever he was at it, the people walking past would slow or stop to watch the orange-glittering fly, alive at the end of the salesman’s line, sail in long arcs across the surface of the road. One almost expected a great stony fish to leap from the asphalt in a hard spray of gravel, only to disappear again through a pothole with the fly in its mouth. But no fish ever did, and so the store closed down.

  “Something About Borges and the Blind in Chelsea”

  1

  Sometimes I pass them with their tapping white sticks on the sidewalk and I’ll think of Borges. Yesterday I watched a man in black sunglasses at the Starbucks on Eighth Avenue reading Braille. He seemed to be staring out the window at the butcher’s shop, petting a cat. Does he write, too? Maybe with one of those complicated typewriters. I watched him run his old fingers back and forth across the pages for a long time. It made me a little jealous—I would like to know what a Borges story feels like. I’d like to know what the word goosebumps feels like. This morning I thought of him when I passed five men tapping their sticks together, almost in unison, moving past the art supply store on 23rd. They weren’t speaking, which seemed odd. I remember a cousin once gave me a book for my birthday called The Book of Questions. One of the questions was, Would you rather be blind or deaf? Another question was, Would you rather be burned alive or drowned?

  2

  I had a dream in which an army of blind men and women tried to beat me to death with their sticks outside the Chelsea Hotel. Tap! Tap! Tap! I didn’t see if Borges was among them before I ran inside and hid. I don’t know why I needed to hide. I woke and decided I would rather be blind than deaf; people could read to me while I learned Braille. I would write stories that felt like the sidewalk or a rash or a basketball. I would write a novel called Acne; my memoir would be called Listening.

  3

  In Borges’ “The South,” a man gets in a knife fight with his country. The story ends with us not knowing who wins. I suppose his country wins; just by the act of fighting I suppose he is beaten. In the sixth grade my next-door neighbor Ben punched me in the face when I teased him for liking the neighbor girl. The three of us were walking home from the bus stop and I told the girl: Ben wants to suck your pussy. I didn’t know what the words meant but I knew they were powerful and would make the kids at school laugh. Ben punched me in the face and the girl ran home when she saw all the blood. We were never friends again; that was the last day we walked home together. Sometimes, not often, I wonder where he lives. If one day we meet on the street, in New York or Seattle, maybe I’ll ask him to get a drink. Will we shake hands? Hug? Maybe he will pull a knife; maybe he will lead an army of the blind and they will beat me to death. I suppose I deserve not knowing—it was me who ruined everything. I was the one who took him for granted; I was the one who moved away.

  “Something About Ben Jensen”

  So he isn’t dead. That’s what I thought when I saw Ben Jensen today. It happened on the bus, the 14D. I was sitting with my feet against the back wheel-well and trying to read someone else’s poems. I kept getting distracted—there was a paper sac on the floor next to me, of beer and the frozen turbot filets I would make for dinner later. I kept picturing the bottom of the bag getting wet. We would brake to a stop and I would stand and lift the bag by its brown paper handles, not thinking to lift from the bottom. The fish and beer would spill out across the floor, fizzing and spitting, ruining everything while everyone stared.

  Even now, having just eaten, drinking this beer, the thought gets my eyes pinching.

  Jensen got on at Fifth Avenue. I recognized him by his height and knit fingerless gloves. I’d remembered his gloves being red, but these were blue. He made his way toward me and he looked like he’d lost weight. I couldn’t be sure, and I don’t think he saw me. I hope he didn’t see me. I wondered if I looked different, too.

  I thought of calling out, but there were too many strangers between us, and I didn’t want to move until my stop. Almost everyone would be off the bus by then and if my bag spilled fewer people would stare. I watched him over my book. I peered. I remember thinking that word, peered. I remember my foot fell asleep against the wheel well. I remember wanting to say, I’ve missed you.

  Jensen was reading advertisements for skin cream and cable channels; he held the metal pole and rocked back and forth with everyone else. I wanted to ask him where he’d been the last three years, if that last story he’d told me was true, about the guys beating the shit out of him in Washington Heights.

  He got off at Seventh Avenue. I didn’t chase. I didn’t even put down my book.

  The bus pushed forward with the rest. Only then did I get the courage to look back. I thought I might get a glimpse of him, entering a coffee sh
op or electronics store, a church or synagogue—something that might give a clue as to what he’s been doing. There have been no new poems. No cryptic emails from Europe or the Bosporus or the Caspian Sea. No sightings in the usual bars, restaurants, bookstores, parks, streets, readings, grocery stores, avenues, benches.

  We kept moving forward and I didn’t have a choice; I accepted he’d disappeared again.

  Three years ago was the last time. I got an email he’d been attacked by four men in hoods. Somewhere up by City College.

  The sun wasn’t even down yet, he’d written. Somebody should make a rule.

  I tried to picture a person being mugged at 136th and Amsterdam in the middle of the day. There would be so many people. I pictured the old Dominican man selling sneakers and underwear in front of the bodega, the women sitting in neon lawn chairs by the ball field. The long accordion-bellied buses, pigeons fleeing barking dogs, children running from landing pigeons. And then Jensen, a guy just like me, just exactly like me, being attacked right there in the heart of it all. Jensen wrote that he’d been able to roll away and outrun them, even after getting punched in the back of the head, even after getting kicked in the corners of his ribs. Even then, they still hadn’t gotten his phone or wallet. I remember reading his email right here, at this same kitchen table.