Year of Lesser by David Bergen

away.
    But she keeps talking. “It was Karen. She said, quite by accident, that Loraine Wallace was going to have a baby and that the baby was yours.”
    Johnny looks right at her now. He wonders how it came to be that he married this woman, as if by some accident they met so long ago and he felt sorry for her or she for him and they ended up in the same house. She took his name back then so now she’s a Fehr and it’s odd, he thinks, giving up her name like that, he’d never do it, become her name. Rempel has the ring of disorder and loss.
    He watches her. Her tongue touches her lower lip, her eyes close and open. He would like to be good to her, to hold her now and say proper things, but he can’t, because her suffering is so obvious, so needy. “That’s right,” he says. “It’s mine.”
    She wants to throw her glass. Her fingers squeeze and whiten. Herbrow is shining. Johnny knows what she would smell like if he were to slide his nose along her hair. Defeat. When she gets like this she stirs up his own desperation.
    “Come here,” he says, and surprisingly she comes. When he stands and holds her he can smell her hatred. He takes her hand and kisses the wrist. “It’s Loraine’s baby,” he says.
    Charlene bites his shoulder. She clamps down and Johnny wants to howl, but instead he grasps, through her top, the flesh at her waist and he digs with his nails, harder, until they both break each other’s skin and their eyes water. They butt foreheads. Johnny mumbles, “We’ve done things wrong.”
    “Shut up,” she says, and kisses him. And then, there in the middle of the front room, curtains open to the yard light and the few cars and trucks that flash by on the gravel road, she undresses him.
    She removes her own clothes and squats to take him in her mouth. Johnny lets her; she does this only when he has bitterly disappointed her. Johnny thinks that both of them are like those simians in the zoo, reaching out through the bars, stroking an arm, a shoulder, begging for a touch. He watches the back of her neck. The vertebrae glide beneath her skin. Her shoulders hump up and down. He poses his hands on top of her head as if praying. She licks and pauses. Looks up at him.
    There is a gap at the centre of his being. Of hers too. Johnny knows this, knows he has to keep plugging it up over and over again. This is what he’s doing now. He takes Charlene by the face and pulls her up and kisses the taste of himself from her mouth and nose and tongue. Then he lays her down on the braided rug his mother made and cups Charlene with his hands. His hairy belly slaps down on her soft round tummy and “Oh,” she says, again and again into his right ear.
    Later, she pours herself another drink but doesn’t offer Johnny one. She sits in a soft chair, crosses her legs, and pushes with a finger at her sore wet mouth. Johnny dresses. He goes into the kitchen and puts an antibiotic cream on the teeth marks. His shirt is un -buttoned, he’s still breathing with effort. He closes his eyes. There isa wetness in his underwear. He shifts his hips and buttons his shirt. Puts on a jacket and cowboy boots. He steps outside and before the door swings shut he hears Charlene’s voice. He ignores her, finds his truck beneath the yard light, climbs in, and after starting up, shudders in the glow of the dash.
    Johnny goes to the centre. It’s either here or Carol’s and tonight he doesn’t want to face Carol. There is a cot in the back room and a shaver and shampoo in a cupboard; he washes in the sink. That night he sits in a vinyl chair in the darkness of the centre and he smokes. He phones Loraine but Chris answers so he just hangs up. When he finally goes to bed it’s three in the morning but, still, he can’t sleep. He turns on the black-and-white TV he has beside the cot and there are these people, a man and a woman, talking about a frying pan.
    “Nothing stuck,” the woman says, “It’s wonderful.” Her eyes open wide and