FICTION
Acts TOM REYNOLDS
We were two writers sitting around talking about women, Michael and me, men both, and Michael said, “What the world needs is more love,” like he was thinking about his ex-girlfriend and I thought, “Are you crazy?” like I was thinking about mine. The world doesn’t know what to do with the love that it has now, what’s it going to do with more love? You can be in love and still be a rotten person. Criminals can love their wives and still be criminals. Hitler loved Eva Braun, poor thing.
Now better love, then you’d have something. Build a better lover and the world will beat a path to your door. But more? More of the same? More of what we’ve had so far? I don’t think so. “They say you never forget your first love,” Michael said, and I said, “Yes, but what gets me is they say it like it’s a good thing.” The difference between what love feels like in one’s head, which is as the strongest, most essential, universal, undeniable, unstoppable force in the universe, and what it actually turns out to be like in real life, which is as a temporary, inconsistent, undependable, easily thwarted, finite thing, that distance, that enormous gap, can hardly be closed by mere increases in quantity, no matter how many people in love try to tell you it can. “What’s the point?” Michael said. I looked at him and butted out my cigarette. “Shit,” I said. On one of those popular dating shows on tv a woman explained that she was looking forward to meeting her blind date because she had heard such good things about him. When the knock came to the door she opened it and saw him. He was handsome and holding flowers. She was thinking what a good start things had got off to when she looked down at his shoes. He was wearing jazz shoes. She said that those shoes ruined the date for her. She could not go out with someone who wore that type of shoe, so she cancelled the date right then and there. All the man’s hopes of romance, of love, crushed because he had the wrong type of footwear. You never know why you’re going to be rejected. If only women used their power for good instead of evil.
Michael and I were eating Kentucky Fried Chicken on the card table in my apartment. We neither of us played cards. It was just a table. It was just food.
14
“My own son,” Michael said. Beth wasn’t letting him see his son. “She’s using him to crucify me,” he said, and threw a bone back in the bucket. He stood up. “It’s a goddamn world,” he said, “that’s for sure,” and he picked up a pornographic magazine from the couch. “I gotta go to the john,” he said, and left me. There used to be a woman named Mother Theresa who did good things for poor people in India. No one knows why. She said it was love but it wasn’t. If you love somebody you get married and have kids and grandkids and a little house and stay faithful and enjoy doing little inexpensive things like walking and watching tv and sex. You don’t feed a hundred or clothe two hundred or go out in the streets collecting people to bring in. That’s not love, that’s something else. That’s summer camp. That’s an illusion. That’s politics. Michael came back from the john and said, “What do you think?” and we both looked at the gun on the table. “It’s a cruel world,” I said. “Okay then,” he said, and picked it up.
Mike’s sister had a place out in the county where the roads that crossed the highway were gravel and the corn fields and Christmas tree farms came right up to the ditches on either side and Mike and I were walking down one of them towards a gas station. Michael and I seemed to spend a lot of time together. There didn’t seem to be many other people in the world. Two squirrels were having a stare-off in the road ahead and Michael wanted to shoot at them but I wouldn’t let him. He took a shot at a stop sign. Between us we put five holes through it. “Red like blood,” Mike said. “This too shall pass,” the book wrote. No one need stop at that sign ever again.
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