by Pete Nelson
“You won’t,” Paul said. “The other day I dropped a piece of cheese on the floor and I almost called her to come get it. It’s hard to get used to the idea that she’s not here.”
“I know,” Tamsen said. “I miss her. I think about her a lot. I can’t walk through a doorway without expecting her to be lying outside waiting. Or I’ll be sitting in a chair and I want to turn my head because I feel like she’s just beyond my peripheral vision. It’s a presence. Or an absence.”
He nodded to tell her he knew the feeling.
“I appreciate you driving all this way,” Paul said. He wondered why she had. “You could have mailed it.”
“I could have,” she agreed. She turned on the couch to face him, tucking her legs beneath her. “Can you do something for me? I want to tell you something and I just want you to listen. Okay?”
“Okay,” he said.
“All right,” she said. “I drove up because I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. About us. I mean, when I think about Stella, I think about you. And even rereading our last online conversation, I’m not all that clear on what happened. Are you?”
“You broke up with me,” he said. “I’m pretty clear on that. You had to tell me about Stephen.”
“Yes,” she said, “but you were also pushing me away. Even before. Before Stella died.”
“I was,” he acknowledged.
“Why?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “I thought it would be better for you if I removed myself from the equation. I felt like it would be selfish to stand in the way of what was going to make you happy.”
“What about what you want?” she said. “You’re supposed to fight for what you want. Why didn’t you fight?”
“I did,” he said.
“How?”
“I was trying to be nicer.”
“Nicer than whom?”
“Nicer than Stephen. That’s how Minnesotans fight. We try to outnice our enemies.”
He remembered something Stella had said: “Sometimes you act like you don’t think you deserve to be happy. Like the universe is punishing you for something. You haven’t done anything bad. You deserve all the happiness you can find. You probably deserve more than you can find.”
“You know what I mean,” Tamsen said.
“I wanted you to pick me,” he said. “I was trying to be pickable. Maybe lovable is another word for it. Except that you did love me. You just didn’t pick me.”
“I couldn’t,” she told him. “It wasn’t safe. I mean, it was the wrong situation to get involved with.”
“I know,” he said. “For what it’s worth, I quit. Drinking.”
“I know.”
“How?”
“I called your sister. To see how you were doing.”
“She didn’t tell me you’d called.”
“I asked her not to,” Tamsen said. For a moment, he felt as if Tamsen and his sister were conspiring behind his back, but then he realized he quite liked the notion. “I was going to call you a hundred times. Just to check in.”
“But?”
“That’s not how you break up with somebody,” she said. “I learned my lesson when I got divorced. You can’t simultaneously end something and keep it alive. You can’t stay in touch. You have to go cold turkey. It’s harsher at first, but in the long run, it’s kinder. You get over it quicker. At least that’s what Caitlin told me.”
“She always was on my side,” Paul said. Tamsen smiled. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Why didn’t you ever say anything about my drinking?”
“Don’t think it didn’t occur to me,” Tamsen said. “Probably the first time we had lunch.”
“So why didn’t you?”
“Because then you’d be quitting for the wrong reasons. You had to do it for yourself. Not to please me. Or win me. I didn’t want to be the prize. I couldn’t open my mouth. Does that make sense?”
“Perfect sense.” Paul nodded. He got it. You couldn’t make other people responsible for your sobriety, any more than you could blame them for your failings. It was nobody’s problem to fix but his. It made him wonder why she’d stayed as long as she had.
“Is it hard?” she asked.
“That’s what I don’t get,” Paul told her. “It’s not. I know it’s supposed to be, but I hardly think about it. Maybe I’m missing something. The hard part was when I used to keep asking myself, ‘Yes? No? Should I have another?’ Saying no forever takes the pressure off. It seems sort of obvious, like, all right, I’m not going to drink the bleach under the sink, or the antifreeze in my car, and I’m not going to drink alcohol. It can’t hurt me unless I let it, and why would I do that?” He shrugged. “Maybe I never really made up my mind about anything before. I know a lot of people have trouble with it.”
“I’m really happy for you,” she said. “You seem different.”
“I do?” he said.
“You seem happier,” she said. “Calmer.”
He found this curious, in that he felt much the same, and no one else had noticed anything or said anything, but then nobody (this included Karen) had ever really seen him the way Tamsen saw him. He wondered what she saw now, and why she was looking at him the way she did.
“I’m not going to California,” she announced.
“You guys are staying here?” Paul asked.
“I’m staying,” she said. “Stephen is going.”
“Oh,” Paul said. “That’s going to be a bit of a commute.”
She sipped her cocoa, eyeing him over the rim of her mug. He didn’t know what the look on her face meant until she squinted quizzically at his apparent density. When it dawned on him, it dawned, as his mother might have said, like a ton of bricks.
“You’re not marrying Stephen?”
Tamsen opened her eyes wide and slowly shook her head, her lips tightly pursed and drawn to one side as if to say, “Oops.”
“Why not?”
“I have absolutely nothing bad to say about Stephen. But I don’t love him,” she said. “He’s not my soul mate.” She paused. “You are. I don’t know if you even believe in soul mates, but I was sort of hoping you’d be open to the idea. I had this whole speech figured out and now I’ve forgotten it. I did the wrong thing, and now I want to take it back. I’m really in love with you. I just am. And I’m not in love with Stephen. And I think that you and I should be together. If you still want me.”
He thought of a number of things to say, including clutching his skull with both hands and screaming, “Are you kidding me?” After briefly running down a mental list of options, he decided (though decided was not the right word) that a kiss was his best response — rather, that a kiss was inevitable, the impulse un-stoppable. They fell together and kissed.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Tamsen said, once the kiss concluded.
“Can I just say,” Paul told her, holding her close, taking it in, “that if this is your idea of going cold turkey, you’re not very good at it.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head and laughing.
They kissed a second time.
“Just so I understand,” he said, pulling back to catch his breath, “you’re picking me, right?”
“I’m not picking you,” Tamsen said. “That implies I have some sort of choice.”
“So in other words, it worked,” he said.
“What worked?”
“Being lovable.”
“No,” she said. “I mean, yes. I suppose it did.”
They kissed a third time. This time, she needed to say something, pulling back and tucking her hair behind her ears with her fingers.
“So here’s what I propose,” she said. “I remembered my speech. We start over. Completely fresh, from scratch. A whole new beginning.”
“No more Worcester Compact,” Paul said.
“Null and void. Total monogamy and full commitment,” she agreed. “And nothing is off the table. I mean, Paul, we can take
it slow or fast or whatever you want, but the future is open ended.”
“This is really huge, then,” he said. He felt like those people who reported near-death experiences, where suddenly a white light beckons at the end of a tunnel, except that in this case it wasn’t the hereafter waiting beyond the portal — it was the here and now.
“This is really huge,” she replied. “Big as it gets.”
“So this is like a first date?”
“Sure.”
“Do you sleep with people on a first date?”
“Not usually,” she said, “but I’m willing to make an exception. Can I just say that it really meant a lot to me to know you came to my gig.”
“How’d you know?”
“Stephen recognized you. He’d seen pictures of us,” she said. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I was afraid. I’m a little surprised he told you.”
“As I said,” Tamsen said, “he’s a good guy. If you don’t mind, I’d rather not talk about him anymore.”
“I don’t mind,” Paul said.
“Didn’t think you would,” she said, kissing him again. It was both familiar and strange. He felt them growing closer with each passing moment, drawn back by some sort of emotional bungee cord that absorbed and returned all the energy he’d put into distancing himself from her. He recalled something he’d come across, researching Nature for Morons. “Love is a single soul inhabiting two bodies,” Aristotle said. Funny how you never heard much about Mrs. Aristotle. Paul had never felt that way before, but he felt that way now. He was lost in Tamsen, and not in a way that he needed to be found.
“There’s so much I want to tell you,” he said. “I had an interesting conversation with my parents …”
She put a finger to his lips and shushed him.
“I know. Your sister filled me in.”
“Bed?” he suggested.
“Way ahead of you,” she whispered.
AN HOUR LATER, with Tamsen sound asleep and snoring softly beside him, Paul rose from the bed, threw on a robe, and went to the bathroom to pee. He brushed his teeth, then regarded himself in the mirror, stepping back and opening his robe. He turned sideways. His gut was nearly gone. He’d lost almost thirty pounds since he’d started running. He considered adding sit-ups to his exercise regimen, then closed his robe, thinking, “who am I kidding?”
He turned off the light, and only then, seeing his darkened image in the mirror, did he remember his alter ego, Paul on the Ceiling. He was gone, apparently. He would not be missed.
He was about to go back to bed when he noticed a soft yellowish glow coming from the living room and realized he’d forgotten to turn off the porch light. He tiptoed to the living room and was about to do so when his gaze fell on the red bandanna on the coffee table, still tied in a circle. He picked the bandanna up, ran his thumb across the fabric, then untied the knot and folded it into a square, smoothed the creases, and set it on the bookcase, next to the baseball his brother had sent. He pulled aside the window shade to check on Tamsen’s car, not so much because he wanted to see if it was okay but because he needed proof that it was really there. He’d always considered himself a skeptic, putting stock in the saying that if something seemed too good to be true, it probably wasn’t true. Key word: probably.
But sometimes, possibly, it was true.
He turned the thermostat up two degrees — usually he turned it down at night, but he didn’t want Tamsen to be cold in the morning — and went to shut off the porch light. Before doing so, he cinched his bathrobe tighter and opened the front door to see how much snow he would have to shovel in the morning. The cold night air was clarifying. He inhaled through his nose and breathed deeply, closing his eyes and filling his lungs, exhaling in a cloud of steam.
His hand was on the light switch when he looked down to the dusting of snow on the porch deck and saw something that momentarily startled him: a set of footprints or, rather, paw prints belonging to a medium-size dog.
One explanation, the one William of Ockham might have preferred, was that a neighborhood stray had wandered onto the porch to look for food or to investigate an inviting scent, maybe even an Eastern coyote. Coyotes were known to travel the banks of the Connecticut River and wander into town upon occasion, though from where he stood, Paul could not see any tracks leading up or down the steps, where the snow was deeper. A second, more mystical explanation occurred to Paul, one he might have, under ordinary circumstances, rejected as implausible, though tonight, a number of implausible, extraordinary things had happened.
Why not?
“Good night, Stella,” he said, then closed the door.
Acknowledgments
I HAD AN ENORMOUS amount of help editing this book down from its original form (or lack thereof) to where it is now. That includes readings, partial or complete, single and repeated, by loved ones and friends and by the writing group I was a part of, as well as by agents and editors. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to all the wise readers who told me what was working and what was not, or what they liked and what they didn’t. Thanks to Dean Alberelli and Sarah London, Chuck Martin and Sarah Metcalf, David Hamilton and David Stern, and to my wife, Jennifer Gates, for helping me with the first round of changes. Thanks to Jennifer Gates, Cammie McGovern, Tony Maroullis, Karen Osborn, and particularly Bluie Diehl and Jeannie Birdsall for helping me with the second. It kept getting harder, so extra thanks to my agents at Lane Zachary and to Rachel Sussman, and again to my wife, Jennifer Gates, for their patience as much as for their critical insights, leading me through the closing revisions. The final edit and inspiration came from Chuck Adams at Algonquin, who saw what needed to be done and had faith that I could do it, so thanks to Chuck and to all the other people I’ve worked with at Algonquin, who are so good at what they do.
The characters in this book are all purely and impurely fictitious, some composited from elements borrowed from people in my life or from the streets of Northampton, though I’ve generally kept the true good parts of people I know and love and then added fictitious character flaws and/or personality disorders for dramatic purposes. I’ve also recycled a handful of lines and images cadged from individuals who should be credited: Buddy Rubbish (“recluse driving,” page 8), Mark Patinkin (“waffle belly,” page 15), John Gorka (butts, page 82), Bill Morrissey (“purse,” page 98), and Cliff Eberhardt (“tone of voice,” page 113).
Thanks to Jen one more time for her wisdom and her ongoing faith in me, and to Jack for making me strive every day to be a better man. Eternal thanks to my family in Minnesota for all their love and support, and to the town of Northampton and all the cool strange people who populate it. Thanks to the makers of Rolling Rock, Guinness Stout, and Lagavulin scotch whiskey and to Bill Wilson. Closing thanks to Keith Dempster for giving me a puppy named Stella, the best dog in the whole world, and to Alice, who was also the best dog in the whole world, and to Lucy, who is trying really hard to become the best dog in the whole world.
I Thought You Were Dead
The Real Stella: A Note from the Author
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Questions for Discussion
The Real Stella
A Note from the Author
WHILE, LIKE MOST WRITERS, I use elements from my own life to create a sense of reality in my fiction, most of the characters and events in I Thought You Were Dead were created out of whole cloth. There was, however, a real Stella, and she was not so different from the Stella in the book, half yellow Labrador and half German shepherd.
I’d gone to graduate school at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and worked at a bar whose owner, also the president of the BMW Motorcycle Owners of America club, lived on a farm he’d converted into a campground for bikers making cross-country journeys. On the campground, he had an outdoor volleyball court with lights. On hot, humid Iowa summer nights, some of us would go there to play volleyball, and often we men would take off our shirts. Stella was one of a loose pack of nameless farm hounds who lived
in the weeds beyond the lights, and often as not, one of them would sneak in and steal a sweaty T-shirt, and then they would all rip it to shreds. Stella was always the friendliest pup of the bunch and the first to come forward to say hello. When it was time for me to leave Iowa, I wanted a companion, and so, with the owner’s permission, I drove out to the farm, picked her up, threw her into the cab of my pickup truck, and off we went, headed west. I eventually stopped in Portland, Oregon. Stella was so disconsolate, having left her littermates behind, that she pouted all the way to Montana and barely lifted her head from her paws.
I named the dog Stella at the recommendation of a friend who said, “That way, when you call her, you can pretend you’re Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire.” The friend’s name was Olivia Wendell Holmes, so I figured she knew a thing or two about names.
One of the reasons I left Iowa was a romantic breakup. Stella helped me recover from the heartache, sleeping on the bed with me, keeping me company, and forcing me to exercise when I walked her every night. I read a book on dog training called The Koehler Method and made myself something of an expert on the subject, to the point where I could walk Stella off leash and maintain vocal control over her, which was easy because all she wanted was to get along with everybody. “Never met a man she didn’t lick,” I used to joke.
I moved from Portland, Oregon, to Providence, Rhode Island, where I roomed with a friend who had two dogs, and I dated a woman named Rosemary who had a miniature poodle named Tumbler. Sometimes I’d walk all four dogs to a nearby high school field to run. I never had to put leashes on any of them. My practice was to walk them around the corner, make them wait until I checked the street for traffic, and if it was safe to cross, I’d say, “Okay — go!” and all four dogs would run at full speed across the street and through a V-shaped opening in the cyclone fence surrounding the field. One night, around dusk, I walked the dogs, made them wait, then gave the command, “Okay — go!” but I failed to notice in the darkness that some time during the day, the city had fixed the hole in the fence. All four dogs ran at full speed, face-first, smack, into the fence, then looked at me as if I’d intentionally played a cruel joke on them. They were all fine, but it was a while before they trusted me again. They also may have been mad at me for laughing at them, but it was, frankly, hilarious.
