Wilhemina Austin
After Louis C.K.
We were in the Garden, high up. Ralston was to my right, then Ralston’s son next to him, then way down in front of us, the spread of barren stage. Louis C.K. stepped onto it, then held fast to the spot he picked as the hysteria of a greeting rose around him. Ralston’s son lifted one long, thin arm and swung it around his dad’s shoulders. The show was on. Louis C.K.’s voice was both meditative and performance-loud as he swiveled stage right, threw his chin up, head back, and shot a remark to the other side of what had been made to look like one of a traditional theater’s two wings, curtain pulled all the way back into folds, dead space.
Abortion, he said. You either think ‘why not’ about it, or you think it’s killing babies. Then, turning front and center, he said, It’s either one or the other. We had a choice, all of us, but not really. The audience was his, a polar bear club, the mass laugh coming on almost instantaneously except for the folks front and center, floor-level, where it broke faster and louder from seating I thought of as the orchestra, though at the moment the show could just as easily be a sport. The last time I’d been here, I’d lived here, Phil Jackson was a Knick, and the roar of the crowd rose the same way to seats high up and to the side.
A few weeks before the night, Ralston had warmed me up with his iPad and a snippet of a C.K. performance, not really much of a warm-up, being clean. We squinched together over the screen, my laughter breaking free and loud, Ralston’s battened down, though in general he was the guy in the room who dropped the questionable remark, the thing being sought, thought, but unsaid, so whatever the size of the group around him, he was the one to warm them up, bring them on to crack and spill out of themselves with laughter noisy as applause. “I can do this,” I said, as he shut down the screen. “I’ll like it.” And we’d gone ahead with plans for what would be a weekend in the city, and a test, a date night with his son for the performance I was sure I could handle, as I could certainly handle New York, where I’d lived for ten years after college, where I still stepped out of a subway in the right direction, no hesitation, in the old days a matter of safety, the days when I’d met Eric, my husband for eighteen years.
Was everyone else in the Garden convulsed? I could see Ralston in profile, couldn’t see his son. The rest of the crowd was faceless, twelve-thousand people with darkened shoulders fastened to heads. As Louis C.K. stepped deeper into his line of reasoning, the crowd followed, the roar wild and united. The logic: subtle, crazy, clever, no time to refute it. It was like crack-the-whip on the pond at the foot of the hill in Delaware where I grew up―a game of people on ice, in a line, hand-in-hand and spinning slowly and then faster, screaming, until the moment the last one in line was unleashed to shoot uncontrollably over the ice toward the frozen bank of the pond. Or worse, for a weak skater, toward thin ice, toward open water at the pumphouse outflow. Who cares, the audience roared, laughter breaking through into its own frozen water. As for Louis C.K., he stayed on solid ground, reason on his side as he segued to the situation of a guy who’s criticizing his girlfriend.
You have this beautiful girl, C.K. confided his argument to his audience, shape-shifting from comedian to gentlemanly, chivalrous lawyer with a case to make against the guy’s complaint that this girl―wouldn’t swallow his come. You have this beautiful girl and she’s just sucked your dick. Whatever is in her mouth is hers. Was Ralston guffawing? He must be. My furthest band of peripheral vision caught his profile, strong nose with angle to it, skin stretched tight over a cheekbone, one of his wide eyes sewn tight, his eyelashes, thick and sand-gold, doing the shutting for what had to be laughter. His blue eyes went aquamarine when intent on something, but there was no way to catch their color, or eyelash color, in the dark of the Garden’s crowd.
Why shouldn’t he laugh? I should have, too, recovered from the abortion segment. But then came the next bit: animals, a gimme-a-break shutdown of public service ads about abused dogs. Ralston would have known how I felt about this. Too bad, I reasoned with myself. I was stuck here, signed on to the laughs, forced to sit tight, every second a long second when Ralston had no gesture of solidarity to make though he was an animal-lover, a dog fanatic, for God’s sake. He wouldn’t move an eyebrow, shorten his grin, swivel his head a fraction of an inch my way. And if the moment never ended, if Louis C.K. never swept the stage clear of this particular riff, Ralston would never look over to acknowledge we might think alike. He was here with his son, after all, his bride of the night, his only child, the one who hadn’t spoken to me until this year, year eight of an eight-year relationship with his dad. The divorce was my fault.
Before the show, the three of us―Ralston, Ralston’s son, me, Carolyn―were to meet for dinner at some place on the West side. It turned out to be lively, crowded, young, noisy. It pushed out bare, slick surfaces at you everywhere, floor, walls, tabletops, so that everything worked toward making the noise sit up straighter. A good choice, such a place, a good way to be swallowed up, by boisterousness. “So are you up for Louis C.K.?” Ralston’s son asked me across the table, when it was time for him to ask me something. I’d met him before, briefly, a tall string bean of a person with his dad’s face rearranged, as with a knife-sharpener, with orange hair instead of his dad’s once-upon-a-time blond, and with no hint of the broad shoulders and stockiness. And the eyes, not much of a connection, either―blue, but a very light blue I didn’t like, a flag for how he would always stay on-message. Short of warmth. “Absolutely,” I said. His dad had introduced me, I said. I was screaming with laughter, I said, or some such thing.
Then I noticed his son’s thirty-something face battened down for how I was going to be out of order. For how I was going to pull out the inappropriate, a Louis C.K. dick reference right here at the table in front of him, the son, an injured party, even as I had pulled it out to get what I wanted with his dad, marriage-wrecker that I was. Everyone knew how that went. But I was ready, having had a passing thought about such a conversation. “What I loved was the Louis C.K. airport rental car return,” I said back to him, the bit I’d watched with Ralston about how unbearable the time pressure was to do the return, get your flight. How there was only one way to solve it, which would be the next time, when he would just leave the car in neutral and get out as it was moving – C.K.’s hand had planed the air gently for the audience, and I did the same – and then let the rental car people know about it as it drifted to the airport drop-off curb and he could run straight for the gate.” Gotcha, you little shit, my mental note went to Ralston’s son. The videoed audience had gone crazy in approval, even as the son’s smile in present time stayed in neutral.
***
The Garden audience was flying, the way Louis C.K. steered it, everyone focused now on a marijuana-use anecdote designed to work toward a jeez-we-almost-got-caught punchline, deeply uninteresting to a non-smoker. But Louis C.K. was building up the bitter-sweetness of how to fail a kid, shouting himself into self-immolation at the story’s end when his child, whom he told when she woke up that the smell was roasting chestnuts―can I have one, no, he only did one of them―has grown up. He imagines the two of them crossing Washington Square together where the smell, not chestnuts roasting, hangs thick, and he’s done for, screwed, as he conjures her up screaming at him, you lied, you lied, you shit, and the commotion around me plus the feel of my face means I’m finally dissolving into laughter.
Don’t swear around your kids,he segues. Or limit your swearing to those stressful situations where it just has to break out, lunch, dinner. When you serve your child some soup,he specifies. Here’s your fucking soup. And I laugh, have to laugh, but where this is going is into a chillier undercurrent where he reminds his audience that whatever delicate poison is leaking from adult to child, it can’t be as bad as what flows between grown-up and grown-up. Whatever relationship you’re in. He pauses. It’s going to end in shit.
There must be some people in the Garden who feel their laughter shoaling with this remark, but who laugh on, confident they’re exempt from the shit ending. As I hope to be, hard as I’m trying with Ralston, repairing the carelessness I was guilty of with my husband. “What’s the matter?” is what I make a point of asking these days, set on plumbing the heart of the killer silences, Ralston’s specialty. “Nothing,” he’ll say, and I’m back at the bottom of the tin mine he’d wanted to tour in Cornwall, and sinking as I walk downward, walls closing in on me. “Speak up if you’re having trouble with this,” the guide had said. This seemed a test, presented with false pleasantness, and everyone else passed, only one other couple on the tour, forty-ish, plain and fancy in varying degrees, brownish and blondish hair distributed between the two, and eyes popped a little on both; their two children eight and ten, and all four of them expressionless, attentive, not knowing if the breath was being squeezed out of them as it was from me. And not knowing whether the tour was a general informative area-sweep for them, or whether the veins around them of tin, hidden, hard, spoke to their own blood spun out of this place as it was Ralston’s, a land gale-washed, deceptive in its palm trees, in its inhabitants who took what tore up in or over its waters and killed it if still alive, whether sailors in foundered ships or the migrating birds the villagers pummeled to death after the birds landed, exhausted, on Cornish sands. The guide had been a miner here, or was it his father, then grandfather before him, all speaking together with the restraint of sarcasm through this one voice, the last one with personal knowledge to leak condemnation the way the walls around us leaked water more loudly with more depth.
But Louis C.K. could ignore any silent protest from his audience, we’re doing fine. We could keep any self-deluding conviction of virtue to ourselves. Relationship failure: he broke it down, did the smooth flushing sound that follows the terse exchange via texting: you shit, you dick. Then the upward whistle of the sent email along with a woman’s voice, fretful and prissy, I think the exchange of last June doesn’t get across certain of the issues as they relate to me.
I’m laughing hard, a little short of breath, breath-squeezing working pretty much the same way, whatever the circumstances. In the tin mine it came from the unmanageable trap of the walls, and the horror at all the past human endurance under the earth’s crust as that deceptive soft and slanted Cornish light lit the land and water over your head, back up at the top of the ladder, if you got back up. “I’ve had enough,” I said to the guide as we stood at the lowest level, and as he talked of the children in the mines, a good fit in the tunnels if they weren’t waiting at the top to shift and rinse the tin in its slurry. “Sorry,” I said, and wondered whom the apology was for.
But in the Garden, C.K had moved on to the delicate matter of motels, to enduring the cheapest ones, the ones he had to patronize in his early days of work-travel. The ones with the heavy swish of traffic so close to the room’s door – the sweep of his arm past his knees was steady and had practiced timing to it – that the traffic barely cleared it on the door’s swing open. Then there was the soap with the papery wrapping. Arm raised straight up, he showed where it would leave a track of skin disease where it passed. And there were always two beds, he said, speaking with resignation, until he caught fire. One bed with a river of come on it―a river, because there are channels in it.
It was everyone’s high point, the laughter out of control, though the monologue continued to roll to its wrap-up, when people jumped to their feet to start shouting at each other, quoting lines. We stalled trying to move out of our aisle. The lights lit up a millennial crowd, genial, hopped up on the performance, happy to wait to push in a mass down the fire escape stairs, our guides.
***
“He speaks the truth,” Ralston said, out in the eleven degrees of Manhattan cold. It was his highest compliment, intoned like a minister’s. “You know me,” he said, out of the hearing of his son, who jostled his way ahead of them. “Anything to do with that river is right up my alley.” In the cold, the city sky had cleared itself. There had to be some display of stars, the moon at quarter-fullness, were it visible, but it was safer to watch where you were going in the street, the crowd not at stampede, but not ready to accommodate sky-watching. As for the moon, it might have the innocence of those two points to its incurve, the lower one tilting up, children’s-book style, to hang the evening’s success on. Those silvery points, C.K. sharp, were so far above us there was a lot of sky to fall from should the rest of the evening not go well.
We walked, Ralston’s son heading off to his subway line, raising arm and hand in false benediction. Walk on turned out to be Ralston’s silent decree for us. We passed one subway entrance, more. Were we going to walk the whole way? No answer. When I suggested a cab, he stayed silent, and the choice became a game, my loss if I rebelled. I wrapped my scarf tighter, higher up my face. I could walk forever, more or less, but needed stillness for what was next. Baffled, resentful, I could always admire the harsh symmetry of this cheekbones when I glanced over at him. And his nose, strong, these features speaking his determination, though not as loudly as his skin, the way it flared crimson with cold, wind, laughter, temper.
The streets gave way under us, long cross-town ones more slowly, then the street numbers on Lex. These rose to where they needed to be, before we took a left for the last half-block. Ralston was going to be hotter than usual with the show under his belt. As we let our room’s door swing shut behind us, his eyes traveled to locate a spot for more exposure than shoulders and sheets. The upholstered wing chair between window and bed would be the venue. Clothes needed to come off fast. The catch was feeling invested in this vision so quickly, Ralston’s hot-shot vision of himself that traveled with him through marriage and outside it, with other women, for the twenty-five years of its existence. At the moment what mattered was that I was too tall for what he had in mind, and too cold after block upon block of cold. He always had the patience and touch that worked, but not yet, and when it did, he wanted to keep me on hold as though through a long monologue, punchline delayed. Just beyond the wing chair―he was committed to the wing chair―the room’s windows, old and cold, provide a steady stream of air where wood had pulled away from itself with age. My skin against his was honey-colored, though not where my lifetime of swimming lightened it up from the grip of one-piece swimsuits.
“Are you asleep?” I’d asked him, beside him in bed the night before this. Last night was the first of these two nights in the city. “I don’t know,” he said. Then I asked, “Do you want to go to sleep?” Again, I don’t know, but reduced to a larynx noise with the lilt of indifference. Did he want a back rub? This was code, or used to be. He could have met it with sure, or shore,as he carried the word from the South of his past. The rest of his past, his first career as an archeologist, he’d flung forward in time so that his detail-collation skills could keep track of when I failed to second-guess him. Last night there must have been new code, one he hadn’t wanted broken so easily. But if I’d given up, turned away, what I’d get in the morning would be the silent treatment, the punishing non-response to the question I’d ask through the day in varying ways, is anything wrong?
On some future night he might not want me, wouldn’t be faking. But not on this night, the upholstered chair night, the chair itself having looked old-school frumpy when it stood empty. It was a chair from my childhood and friends’ childhoods, dragged forward even then from a past when furniture’s double function was to barricade against drafts, and a wing chair’s specific purpose was to keep a man’s back and shoulders so no domestic surprise could take him unawares from pipe and newspaper. With Ralston, I was performing against its design, able to read him, unable to be read by him.
The night before this, I’d run a finger from his shoulder down his arm, nothing too aggressive, his back a warm wall, still full his second-career landscaping muscles. I could have pretended the touch meant nothing, if nothing was what was wanted, or something. It was anyone’s choice to pretend lack of comprehension. Last night was the night we had walked and taken subways to Lincoln Center for the Messiah, a night cold as this one. We found the glassed-in lobby packed with a crowd older and younger, too, as in the girl who walked through the glass away from the frigid wind in the plaza and headed toward the coatroom, coatless. Unless what was wrapped and belted around her, short as her skirt, was a kind of pass at being a coat. How many men there would have exchanged the older model of the woman at their side for this one? How about Ralston versus Eric? Ralston still had an unknown amount of time to compete. Under the duress of six-inch heels, the girl’s gait warped to the slow and deliberate lilt of another species, an elegant giraffe. I had worn heels that high once, and to a lecture at this men’s club, once Eric’s, where Ralston and I were staying. A man I would have called elderly had looked over as Eric and I got up to leave. “They must be six inches high,” he condemned my heels, as if heels, shoes, me as well, should be banned from lectures as well as the library and the East room.
***
The club membership had passed to me, a widow, along with the right to stay in any of its rooms, each identified by a letter. Each had a door doubled by a louvered wooden outer door from back in the day when lack of air conditioning in summer forced you to forget the solid door, use the outer one to try for a breath of air between your open window and tomb-like stone floor in the hall. If sleepless, you might have been rewarded while prowling for reading material in the hall’s bookshelves by someone’s unprivate, gagging snore or dolorous rattle of a fart through the louvers. If you had tried: it was a question, more a demand, and I threw it to Eric outside the room’s window, sash rattling with the wind. Eric was the one who thought I hadn’t tried. What did it mean, that we’d gone on sleeping together, somewhere in that satisfying connection all the anger of all the world’s couples plus his own, hot as fury, cold as the wind through the glass, over the world’s not recognizing him faster and with more money. I’d been to blame somehow. Though I’d never pulled his face out of thin air to look at me with anger, never made him demand of me, Why do you get to be alive? What I imagined now was his height, straight and tall at six-four in death as well as life, and that smile of his, a sardonic awareness, Jesus, couldn’t you do better than this?
But I was warming up under bedcovers now on this last night here, free of the chair, whether this was Ralston relenting or choosing, I had no idea. He would get me where I wanted to go, and in that release, in the death of flattened nerves, with muscles so undone they were useless, I might stave off the message I wanted to send to Eric through the chilled pane of the window, free me, from everything, all of this, along with the apology, I’m sorry for this, this happiness.
Mina Austin writes from an old farm in southeastern Pennsylvania. She’s in the process there of restoring cattle-run land, a use dating from an earlier decade. She’s been published in Cimarron Review and Thema many years ago, twice in the Antioch Review more recently. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence in 2019, many decades after being an undergraduate there.
Malasaña | Hudson, NY| Cargo Collective | Portland, ME | 2021