I got in touch with Mimi at a very high point in my low life: divorced and living on the couches of my contemporaries——people I just met, people who felt charmed by the first convivial stage of my alkie banter; then some who knew me when I was doing perfect: the job at The Verger and the clothes for that job and that black Volvo, and the wife who looked like a strawberry blonde Linda Blair.
A year into drowning out my divorce found me slow walking through several galleries on one of those open gallery nights with my ex editor Rhemy, the guy who hired me at The Verger and trusted me with covering grocery store openings as well as the obituaries of several locally lauded nuns. When Rhemy and I were effectively running the weekly we made an after hours/out-of-office pact to take chances; so we did: we interviewed den mothers about the politics of scouting, we did a top ten lists of shoe shine brushes and raspa stands and dollar stores least likely to catch you shoplifting. We lost advertisers and so we lost our jobs and then kind of smiled about it even; but we pooled our prides and Rhemy offered me the left side of his apartment. Each night we combed our funds for beer and cigarette money, and we hit shows for humus and almonds and glasses of gallery night wine.
Six weeks into this and I called Mimi up, inebriated and amorously aching because I had looked her up online and been so taken by a photoshopped and filtered image of the girl I knew now on Twitter. Her social media page was all links to songs she liked and poetry she had written and even recorded: her words clipped in sync with synth and electro beats punctuating each stanza, her spoken word take on candelabras and felt hats and William Castle flicks. Exact same salmagundi Mimi craved when we were kids, when we were best friends with much teenage tension and now that we were both midway through our journeys I was moved by the tenacity of her juvenile tastes. So I left a message and figured, since it had been over fifteen years with no contact, that she would not call back.
When my cell phone sounded its digital chirp I was talking to a woman about a set of acrylic and foam doll houses before us. I frowned at the distraction and then smiled as I excused myself to take the call.
“I am not what I was,” said Mimi.
“So … what are you?”
The answer came out like one of her spoken word SoundCloud poems: “Broken. Botched. And bigger. And bitter. And talking to you right now.”
“Hey that’s all of us now,” I said, though really none of those B words applied to me. I was red in the eyes maybe and I had some jail time behind me now. But at forty I sometimes still got carded at bars and was wearing the same jeans I wore when I was twenty-five, and was lucky to have found them in an old trunk in my childhood home after my wife threw out my clothes and I had to trek back to McAllen to make arrangements to get Dad into hospice, when Dad was losing several mortal battles and I, his only son, was done fighting all social ones.
We talked about seeing each other and Mimi really did not want that. That is, she did not want to come to me or even meet me halfway. She hated driving and only if I could get to her place was there even that possible and so I made my drunken swears about getting up to her one day soon and we both believed, for that night, that the plan was imminent.
Some part of me might have called her up hoping to stay on her couch for a while, but I was not desperate for a place and she did sound wounded. So I didn’t push.
A year later I was living with a woman I had known in much better days.
I used to TA for Tammy when I was twenty and she was thirty-five and we were never romantic but I always thought we could easily be. I saw her at a pub I used to frequent in a town I never thought I’d ever be in again, and we talked and hugged and shared a pitcher and then a cab ride and she invited me to come over to her home to talk more, to tell her about how all had gone so wrong, how the guy that used to get her coffee and walk it down to her as she taught her mid-morning auditorium class and set up Duchamp slides for her lecture had become some kind of desolate Dharma-less bum.
“Divorce,” I said.
After a weekend of walks and white wine strolls through the Blanton and then a Twilight Zone marathon that ended in a two person game of charades, Tammy agreed to rent the upstairs room to me, and then she agreed to let the rent slide.
It was November and I was working on a manuscript about John Cage and how loud that no noise composition could get in a room of the uninitiated. And as Mimi and I were still in email contact and she was still very much into posting her poetry to the sounds of crickets and storms and samples from Mr. Sardonicus or 13 Ghosts, I sent her the manuscript to get her to pick away at my points on the mounting dissolve regarding “The Perilous Night” and also to just show her that I was being productive.
As I was getting ready for bed my phone rang with the tone I had placed for Mimi: a subdued drip sound like a faucet left on during a frost night to keep pipes from cracking. Mimi was in town. I had typed Tammy’s address on the top right corner of my Cage article and Mimi had Google-mapped her way to me. She was in the motel across the street in fact, passed the overpass where homeless huddled, passed the Applebee’s where I would order noon beers and pretend to read Kundera. I put on a black corduroy jacket which matched my black corduroy pants and speed-strolled over like I was going to miss a train in a Hitchcock movie.
Mimi was sitting in a rented car before the Days Inn. I knew it was her from the black curls of hair and the way she would hang her head down like she was thinking hard about how wrong everything always was; I used to find this a very lovely look. As she raised her head to my approach I almost doubted it was her until I saw her smile.
I walked over to the car and got in the passenger seat. “So we meet in the car?” I said to no response. In the dark of the car I could see what she meant by “bigger” but not “bitter” or “botched.” We hugged. I kissed her on the forehead. She opened the car door and I got out and helped her out of the rental and got her bags.
After that and in the motel room it was just like when we were kids. Only now I drank. So I drank and she ate and we did not discuss our addictions or our pasts. And I started to kiss her and she started to tense up, and after we fucked she revealed that she had not had sex with anyone in seven years, not since her last two boyfriends two years after her split from her second ex-husband. I touched her hair and we slept and I heard her start to snore before I let myself begin to.
Mimi and I made plans that I would visit her next, and visit her soon.
I became cold with Tammy, mean even. If I had money for her upstairs room I didn’t tell her about it. I drank to criminal excess in front of her and spoke unforgivable cruelty about how a woman her age regardless of how fit or tenured should not wear such short skirts, and so when I told her I would be taking a trip to see a friend she asked for the keys to her house back and I was happy to give them.
I won’t describe too much the condition of Mimi’s house, because——well clutter and mold don’t really sum it up: dim, not dark, sunken couch and Mimi was sunk in that couch wearing a beige robe every night. The way she lived: she wanted to order every meal and stay in every night, but I said I would cook and she said she would let me do that if I went across the street to buy the grub so she handed me her card and I came back with Brussels sprouts and endives and avocados and limes and two bottles of wine and then whatever she put on the list.
It was pleasant. We talked about our good qualities on a strictly physical level. She told me several times how much she liked my nose, which is large and hawklike and I told her how I loved her hazel eyes and her shell-like ears and the very way she feels now because I never felt her when we were younger and now is how I have come to know her. We made love twice the week I spent there. I washed her dishes, which were all in a cardboard box and crusted, and dusted, with a few dead rolly pollies to flick off. And eventually we went for a walk to a park near the library and the food I made had a glowing effect on her.
When I came into her room unannounced she was trying on a pair of jeans which were tight. I smiled because it turned me on.
Mimi sighed and smiled and I asked if they were new. “No. They are old. I wore them when they were loose and then I wore them when they fit fine and then for a while I tried to wear them when they didn’t fit at all, but the jeans I wore today when we were walking, they kept falling off, so…I need to see what else I have that will fit a little better.”
We sat on the bed together and I leaned over to kiss her ear, which I love and l loved better that day because of how defined her jawline looked to me but before the intended kiss I placed my hand around her neck to touch her chin and she scratched me on my neck and ran out of the room.
In odd rage I leapt from the bed and touched the blood and cried out in surprise and fury, “What the fuck was that?” I looked around for her and she was darting back and forth the living room space, eyes wild and then crying.
I left the next morning on a bus that took me to my old house where all my papers were and where I had all my clothes and where all my father’s ties and belts and blazers and pocket knives were incrementally finding their way to a Goodwill. I went on a drunken tear, disappearing for a few days before finally getting to a computer once I got out of the drunk tank.
Mimi had emailed wanting to know if I was alive and wanting to explain herself.
She had been messed with before, she said. She was suspicious of everyone these days and of me now and could get angry and she had driven her last husband, Sonny, away by throwing hard objects at him when he said he wanted to skip out on her grandmother’s funeral. She had thrown framed paintings and rocks from a childhood rock collection, and a lava lamp until he was out the door and sending divorce papers through the mail and cutting off contact forever. Her first husband, Ruben, she had tried to hit with a car——to be very fair about her reactiveness, her first husband had tried to strangle-choke her once when jealous of her visits to a palm reading group. Mimi had several lovers after Sonny left and one fellow she was very fond of, a guy who she said she first noticed because she saw vast similarities between he and I, even though the guy was maybe a decade younger. Derek and I shared a very similar nose and we talked about the same movies and even laughed alike, she insisted. The others——the not-Dereks——were for companionship and car rides only. After her last husband left she put on five pounds a year. That was ten years back.
She was very sorry, she wrote, but we should not see each other again.
Rubbing whiskey over the scratch on my neck, I agreed.
But two months later we were talking again. Platonic as we could be, we still flirted. Mimi emailed me when congested and sore one day and I encouraged her to go to a clinic and she did and said she had been given a B12 shot and a note for work and was happy to say that she was 178 lbs.
She sent me a picture in pants she thought I would like to see her in. And I did. But I really liked her smile while wearing them more, more than the fit of the snug magenta slacks.
I was swinging through town to see about a music writer gig in San Antonio and thought that I could maybe stop by for a weekend visit. A scary clown movie by a director we both adored had opened and we had planned a whole year back to see it together as chums and nothing more.
We held hands in the theater.
And I left that week with cuts around my eye from a glass jar she had smashed into my face while I waited for the rain to let up before walking to the bus station.
A month later we talked about our next visit. We both had been trying to become healthy people. We knew we were sick. I had cut back on drinking and even skipped booze for one serene week. Mimi was walking every night and had ordered a size 10 leotard so she could exercise indoors since she still hated going out, still did not like being around people, and would sometimes find herself breathing down a panic attack while sitting in her car during her lunch break.
As we were texting our plans for meeting on her birthday she told me there was a man outside her house.
It was late, too late for anyone who did not really know her to come by.
I grew nervous for her and then grew more nervous when she stopped responding, but managed to go to sleep without getting plastered.
In the morning I found out that the guy outside was Derek. He had not seen her in seven years. He came across her Twitter page, just as I had, and was back in town. He expected nothing but wanted to see her, he said. She told me she apologized to him for being so old and out of shape but that he had remained silent and kept smiling and that they talked until five in the morning but that she had informed him that she was seeing someone and that they could not talk or be the way they had been before.
I was not reassured. I went nuts. I didn’t know I would. I went on a bender that had me going in and out of flower shops and comic book shops and drinking in grocery store bathrooms and in jail again and then out on bail with a court date even and then on a bus to see Mimi, who was absolutely shaken by Derek’s visit, and happy to see me for three days but on the fourth day she wanted me gone. So I left on the sixth, but not without receiving a hard knock on that nose she said she loved as I tried to talk out our future plans.
I had a previous fracture on the bridge, so my nose swelled and bled crazily and kept me up at night with worry and the emergency room doctor informed me that I needed to see a surgeon, and that I should go soon. But I did not. I had no cash for it and since my divorce I had no insurance.
Back at my childhood home, I paced and cleaned and drank for days until I resolved to again skip days and then weeks and then I was sober. And then it was seven months of being sober.
I had not gone to any AA meetings, had not gone on any dates. I distracted myself by adding water to an old set of dried out acrylic paints I had purchased when I thought I was an artist. I applied a single daub of newly mixed color to a plywood plank that served as my calendar, marking each drink-free day. It was New Year’s eve and I felt like saying hello to people. I called up Rhemy and spilled much of my story and he told me I could always stay with him, but staying with him would have been booze runs and art house grifting and that was not where I needed to be right then. Next day I tried to reach out to Tammy but found that I was blocked from her phone and both her email addresses, and a week later, when I called the university where she instructed sophomores on Satie and Cezanne I hung up once the campus operator sent me to her voicemail.
I reasoned that even with the dent and new bump on my nose I still looked like myself from the left side at least.
And when I checked the mail to see if I had received my last check for a 90-word review of celebrity quiche recipes, I found a white envelope with gold calligraphy spelling out my name and inviting me to attend a very special day.
The wedding would be at her home, same dim hoarder’s den with the trash bags of clothes that did not fit and the dishes in wet cardboard and photos of shells and the dust bunnies and moths living large, the place where I had been scratched and scraped and sucker punched.
I was early.
The grass was trim, the reception tables out in white and lavender and pearl. The woman who said she didn’t want to talk to anyone or even want to go outside had at least seventy people gathered for an outdoor wedding ceremony.
I knew the house so I went right to the bathroom to check my face. The plumb-colored scar over the bridge of my nose matched the maroon tie I had chosen to wear but also the choice of votive candles Mimi had burning in her very clean bathroom.
As I walked out to make my way to the backyard were the wedding would take place I saw a framed photo of Mimi on a playground swing: not as a kid, not as a teen pretending to be a kid, but Mimi right now, this year, smiling, her left leg up, left foot pointed as in dance, pushed by a happy man and wearing snug black jeans, one foot sandled the other bare, light enough for a child’s swing, eyes wide and both mouths in the shot agape with laughter.
Once outside I saw the bridegroom: the man Mimi had first noticed or claimed to have noticed because he resembled me. And he did. Maybe ten years younger than me so ten years younger than Mimi and two inches taller than me and ten pounds lighter than me and hair dyed as black as mine had been just three years back. A nose very similar to what mine had looked like before the shift in bridge and color. I made my way to Derek and he seemed to know who I was, from pictures perhaps or from Mimi’s description.
I extended my hand and introduced myself and congratulated him on his lovely bride. Derek shook my hand then shook his head and said “Oh no, thank you. You were the guy that stood before me——I am convinced now more than ever now that I see you——the guy who came so close to keeping her from me, I know it brother….If I had waited just a few more days, stalled for fear or nerves or vanity, all this dream,” he said waving his arms to the impending wedding, “all this dream would just be a dream in this dreamer’s happy head.”
I nodded and let him talk about fate and his musical aspirations and how Mimi and he were going to Corpus Christi for their honeymoon, but had actually planned several honeymoons all year and she only knew about two others, the one in Marfa and the one in South Padre Island, the fall trip to see his family’s home in Vermont was a secret he said and put his finger to his lips to mime a shushhh. I started to stand back to ready myself for the ceremony and he said: “Wait, man, you know I am not nearly drunk enough to just say ‘I do,’ and I am as nervous as a nervous boy gets. Have any advice for the happy groom?”
I placed my left hand over my eyes like, my thumb and forefinger rubbing a slow massage over my scar and the dent and bump beneath. I took a deep breath and said: “Yes, I do. I have known Mimi longer than anyone. I have kissed her before…well before you ever kissed her for sure and then after you and then right before you again. One thing that she really loves is, when you come in for the smooch, if you gently place your hand around her neck. Drives her wild.”
Derek nodded and exhaled and said: “Thanks, man,” then started to grin and nod faster, “Thank you.”
He now looked ready for union and so I bowed out and stepped back when the music that signaled the bride’s walk commenced. I kept edging away from the seated company so that I could only see Mimi’s lithe body in her white clinging gown walking towards her man.
I made my way back to the porch that led to the sliding glass kitchen doors where the caterers had already put out glasses of white wine that matched Mimi’s vanilla dress and glasses of red wine that matched my tie and socks and my scar and suspenders.
And with the words “You may kiss the bride” I raised a glass of Malbec to my lips in time with the slap sound and the cursing coming from a just married man who had just been scratched on the face or neck or chest by his bride, and swallowed my sip with the sound of plastic chairs falling over lawn and feet rushing on grass as a priest tried to pull man and wife apart before any more harm could be done.
Roberto Ontiveros is a fiction writer, artist, and journalist. Some of his work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Santa Monica Review, The Baffler, and The Believer. His debut collection, The Fight for Space, was published by Stephen F. Austin State University Press, and his second book, Assisted Living, was published by Corona Samizdat Press. His (retired) villainous name is “Roger Easter” and his favorite revenge film is Nocturnal Animals.
