by John Haskell
* * *
Driving with Alex through West Virginia, inspecting the various clapboard towns for my old maroon station wagon, I was still feeling that disorientation, or something like it. My job was to find Anne, and in order to do that I needed my awareness focused on the world, and because this disorientation was clouding that focus, to cure myself I pulled off the highway somewhere in Kentucky.
I found a small road which led eventually to a parking lot for an overpriced tourist attraction, an underground cavern or cave. Instead of visiting the cave, we got out of the car, peed in the trees, and decided to walk down the hill from the parking lot. We followed a single-track trail that led through a pine tree forest that ended at a small round pond with a steep bank and frogs making noise. It was surrounded by birch trees and maple trees, and the good old maple trees reminded me of our garden. Which reminded me of Anne. Which reminded me of my disorientation—like the hand of the woman in the restaurant—attaching itself to my heart.
“Aren’t you coming in?” Alex said.
I sat on the grass slope at the edge of the pond watching him take his clothes off. I shook my head.
“Why not?” he said. “It would do you good.”
“Oh really?” I said, thinking that he didn’t know who I was, and that swimming in a slimy pond wouldn’t do anything any good.
He reminded me that he’d fixed the car. “Remember the car?” he said.
“I’m not a car,” I told him.
“Your body is a vehicle,” he said. And then he jumped. He was standing at the high point of the bank, completely naked, looking into the water, and then, feet first, arms flailing, he jumped into the water. He splashed and hooted from the middle of the pond, and although the water was obviously cold, he seemed to be enjoying it.
I stayed rooted where I was, dressed and warm, and when he climbed out of the water with a huge smile on his face I made a point of looking away. Birds may have been singing peacefully in the trees but I wasn’t listening.
“It’s not that bad,” he said.
I made some disparaging face.
“It’s only cold in comparison to out here,” he said.
“Which is where I am,” I said. “Out here.” I told him I was perfectly fine.
“If that’s what you think you need,” he said, and he walked again to the edge of the bank and again he jumped into the water. I watched him breaststroking his way across the pond.
I’d been fairly successful at protecting myself, and the reason I decided at that moment to step out of the skin of that protection was … I don’t know what it was, but I took my clothes off. I stood naked on the grassy bank. Alex yelled to me to jump, and I was trying to get ready to do that. “Jump,” he said, but there was the thought of the freezing water and the warmth I’d be giving up. That was on one side. On the other was something in me, something I needed to cleanse myself of, and I thought … or rather, for a moment I didn’t think. I just jumped.
Actually I dove. He’d said it was deep enough so I dove in, head first. And it was freezing. He said it wasn’t that bad, but it was that bad. I also started hooting. We were both kicking furiously to adjust to the cold or to counteract the cold, but I think the fact that it was freezing, the fact that the cold itself cleared away all other thoughts and sensations, made us happy. I say we were happy because both of us were smiling.
I stayed in only a few seconds, and then we were both on the bank, running in place and flapping our arms to keep warm. We were two naked hyperventilating apes, laughing at the exhilaration of pure sensation. When our thoughts, slowly, started coming back we put on our pants. I was drying myself with my T-shirt when Alex, apropos of nothing apparent, turned to me. He was shivering and he looked at me, and he waited until I looked directly at him. We stopped running in place.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
I could see the goose bumps covering his body. I nodded.
We were face-to-face in a way we hadn’t been able to be in the car, and why at that moment I don’t know, but that’s when it hit me. Anne. The fear of losing her. I don’t know if Alex saw the fear, but I know that I was feeling it. That I would never see Anne again. That my life, and everything I’d based my life on, had gone. That I’d never get it back. And at this point, something in me started welling up—and it didn’t matter about Alex. I was staring into his face but I wasn’t seeing him or thinking about him.
The thing I’d been successfully holding in me, or keeping out of me, was gathering in my chest or belly. And when I let my attention go there, when I let myself experience what it was, it came up from down in my body, through my chest, and the sobs just came, in waves, the tears flowing from the corners of my eyes, mixing with the pond water dripping down my face. And once they started coming they kept coming, and I stood there, unworried about the strange face I was probably making, feeling the peristaltic convulsions come, not making them come, just feeling the empty space from where they seemed to originate.
And when they finally subsided, when whatever spasm it was died down, I stood, staring into the pond and shivering. We both were shivering. And then, without speaking, we got dressed. Slightly damp and still shivering, we got in the car, and with the heat turned up, we drove out of the hill country and on toward Lexington.
6.
We arrived in the late afternoon. Alex navigated us to a bar, an Irish bar (or faux Irish bar) where at that moment a girls’ softball team was celebrating some local victory. I was still a little chilled, and because I didn’t know anyone, I sat at a table near the jukebox wall, removed from the locus of the festivities.
I noticed Alex circulate among the crowd, bowing imperceptibly when he met his friends, bowing, ordering beer, and talking to a girl in a ponytail. I noticed her several times that night but never spoke to her—she never came to my table—and after a while, after the beer and the infectious celebratory mood wore off, I drove Alex to the place where he lived, a cedar-shingled house on a quiet street with lawns and large trees. Inside, because there wasn’t a lot of furniture, we sat on the hardwood floor, drinking leftover red wine, and because there was no sofa I assumed I’d be sleeping on the floor. I had it all laid out in my mind. With a few rugs stacked on top of each other I’d have a mattress, soft enough for sleep. I went to the car, brought in my sleeping bag, and as I was spreading it out on a rug beneath a painted bookcase, the girl from the Irish tavern walked into the room. Alex hadn’t mentioned it, but it turned out that she was his roommate.
She joined us, sitting cross-legged on the wood floor, a bowl of miniature carrots between us, and she was wearing an oversized T-shirt and what seemed like the bottom of a bathing suit. Although a lot of her skin was visible, I had the impression that she wasn’t showing off, that this was how she walked around, and she was determined to do the same thing, even if a strange or unknown man was camped out in her living room.
Laura was her name, and when Alex retired to his room Laura and I started talking. She said she was a cartoonist, and so we talked, not about cartoons, but about the philosophical foundation of animation. About how you start with a point, and then you have another point, and between them you have a line, and by moving the line just slightly, just imperceptibly moving the line over and over and over, over time, you begin to effect a change. You start to tell a story.
She started out asking some innocuous question about where I was from, which led to something and then to something else, and at a certain point in the conversation she commented on the solidity of the floor and the discomfort of sleeping on the hard wood surface, and not too long after that she invited me to sleep in her bed. Not with her, but in her bed. At first I told her it didn’t matter, that I’d be fine on the floor, but I realized I was saying it just to be polite, and why should I be that? Her bed, she said, was large enough, and her offer seemed sincere, an offer of kindness. So I told her, Why not? I didn’t say the words “Why not.” I just said, “Yes, I would love to sleep on a bed.”
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br /> She was wearing the same large T-shirt on the bed; the bathing suit, it turned out, was ordinary regular-sized underwear. And there we lay, on our backs, in parallel lines. I was facing the ceiling, making a point of keeping my body straight, imagining an invisible border between us. I let my eyes close, and we weren’t talking, not at first, and then she said something about her lack of success in the restaurant business. She was a waitress in a local restaurant and apparently she wasn’t getting the shifts she wanted. We talked about her boyfriend, or ex-boyfriend, and I said something about looking for my lost wife. She seemed to understand. We seemed—mutually, I think—to be getting along, and I didn’t sleep and she didn’t sleep, and as we spoke, and as I listened to the sound of the whispering human voice, I was lulled into—not a trance—but I moved closer, so that my shoulder was touching, or almost touching, her shoulder, so that only an infinitesimal gap existed between my arm and hers. Although I couldn’t see her arm, I imagined it, brown and smooth and still.
At some point, under the spell of the words that were passing between us, without my actually doing anything, Laura’s arm transformed itself—or I transformed it—into a different arm. I imagined Anne’s arm next to me. And because a person’s arm is connected to the rest of the body, gradually, in my mind, Laura herself was replaced by Anne. Not an image of Anne or a representation of Anne. The person beside me was Anne, and I was lying there, happily absorbing the old familiarity and warmth.
Because my eyes were closed it was easy enough to alter the body beside me, but because the voice wasn’t Anne’s voice, and because it wasn’t possible to shut my ears, I had a little trouble keeping the audio part of the fantasy intact. But as she spoke about her plans to move to a bigger city, and as the sound of her voice traveled from her mouth through the air to my ears and then into my brain, over time, I was able to transform that voice and mold it into what I wanted. The knowledge that the voice I was hearing was a voice I was making, I let that recede, happy to usher out of consciousness any evidence of my own volition.
I was able to overlook the knowledge that she wasn’t Anne, so that to me, she was Anne. In the back of my mind was the fear that she would say something or do something to wake me up, but because this new reality was preferable to the earlier one, I was able to maintain it. I settled into the more comfortable mode of lying with Anne, and the reality of Anne, such as it was, became more solid and stable, and when it got to the point where I was sure of its solidity, that’s when she decided to go to the bathroom.
When she sat up and crawled over me, wearing her oversized T-shirt, it was Anne in an oversized T-shirt, crawling over me as she’d crawled over me a million times. That’s the thing about a fantasy: once it gets started it takes on a life of its own, and I kept it alive by picturing Anne in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet and washing her hands and then climbing back into bed, which she did.
And when she did I had a million questions to ask her. Mainly I wanted to know if she loved me, and if she did, how could she leave me standing in front of a convenience store.
When she lay down on the partially made bed and resumed her position beside me, I asked her, “Where did you go?”
“The bathroom,” she said.
“No, I know, but before. Where did you go?”
“Before what?” she said.
I was talking about the gas station in New Jersey, but she didn’t seem to remember that, or didn’t want to. So I asked her why she’d left.
“I had to pee.”
“Not that,” I said.
“Then what?” she said.
And we went around like this, in a circuit of mutual misunderstanding. And the words were only a symptom.
I was lying there in the darkness behind my eyelids, imagining Anne, and of course, if I had opened my eyes I would have seen that Anne wasn’t there. But I had no desire to see that. I was thinking of Anne, wondering where she’d gone. I was hurt. I thought she was going to be there. She said she was going to be there, that she was going to wait for me and she didn’t wait for me and now I didn’t know what she was doing. Or feeling. I thought we had an understanding. I certainly had an understanding, but she obviously had a different understanding because she hadn’t even contacted me. What was I supposed to do? Was I even part of it, this thing that happened so suddenly? Or did she plan it all along? Some thing she couldn’t tell me. I didn’t know. How would I know? What the fuck was she doing to me? That’s what I wanted to know. And there’s no reason to get mad at someone you love, except the way I saw it, she wasn’t being fair with me.
“I don’t even know if you’re alive,” I said.
And at that moment the person next to me sat up and tapped my chest. “I’m here,” she said. “Open your eyes.”
“Open my eyes? Okay.” And I opened my eyes.
Although the light was not that great, I sat up to tell her that what she was doing was wrong, wrong to me and wrong in general, and as I was about to tell her this I looked into her oval face, at her eyes, and the whites of her eyes, and of course I saw that the person I was talking to wasn’t Anne.
I remembered the Irish bar, and the baby carrots, and then the fantasy vanished. I don’t know what I actually said, if I even said anything, but after a while I was aware that the feeling I’d had a moment before had passed. Something had come along and taken its place. The fear was still there but the anger was gone, and I didn’t know where it went, but fine, I thought. I could hold on to the anger or not, fan the flames or not. And I chose not.
I turned to Laura, and I don’t know what I thought, but in the middle of thinking it she told me that my body was a vehicle. She said I could use it, or I didn’t have to.
Then she lay back down on top of the covers.
Here she was, with a man, with the body of a man, and she was hoping he would be a normal man, and now she was presented with someone who was talking to her in a way that made no sense. Half naked and next to her, and what is supposed to happen now? That’s what she was probably thinking.
I was propped on my elbow looking at her, trying to think of my body as a vehicle, and maybe I was aware of some galvanic skin communication in the muscles of our arms, or my arm, because it seems to me that under normal circumstances we would begin kissing. I remember thinking that I ought to be kissing this person, and I would have been kissing her except for one small thing. She wasn’t who I wanted her to be.
So we didn’t kiss.
And the lack of kissing, which I expected to wedge us apart, instead seemed to open up a kind of pathway between us. Instead of relating via the kiss, we had to relate in a different way, in a companionship way, and so we began to talk. Everyone has a story, and we had stories, and we brought our stories to this place, this bed, and we told each other as much as we wanted to be heard, or as much as we could bear.
We lay there, without speaking. And because, for a moment, I’d been with Anne, I was fairly happy. Although she wasn’t Anne anymore, she had been, and that was enough. I think we were both fairly happy, and happily we went to sleep.
She did anyway.
I just lay in the bed, waiting for the light to come in the window, and when it did I slipped out from under the covers, packed my bags, and when Alex got up I ate cereal with him before he went to work. I liked Alex, and I hoped that when I thanked him for his navigation skills, he understood I meant more than navigation.
When Laura got up we were going to make coffee, but there wasn’t any milk so we went to a coffee shop down the street. We sat in a booth and seemed to be getting along, connecting easily with each other, talking about whatever came up, just talking and talking, and we hardly noticed when we left the coffee shop. We were walking along the damp sidewalk, still talking and walking, and right about as we passed my car, which was parked on the street near her house, that’s when I stopped. I couldn’t go back with her to the house, I thought, because I had somewhere else to go. I realized that time was passing, and I couldn’
t spend whatever time there was sitting around a Lexington living room.
I had to get on the road, I told her.
She asked me why.
I tried to explain to her about Anne and what I was doing. I told her it felt as if a door was slowly closing in front of me, and that behind the door there was something I was still connected to.
“Do what you need to do,” she said, briefly opening her arms.
And as I watched her arms open and then dangle there against her hips, I thought, Why couldn’t that door also be here? Why did I have to go somewhere? Why couldn’t I somehow see in these things here, or be connected through these things, this other thing I was looking for?
