Love and Death in the Sunshine State

by Cutter Wood

  My attention did emerge from time to time to settle on this or that detail—her careful manner with a salad fork, or how, with a few words, she put the waitress at ease—but these details were picked out almost entirely at random, and I might as easily have found some other gesture just as darling. And the worse truth is that of the things I noticed about her, the majority were forgotten as quickly as they came, and the few that remain with me have survived not by virtue of the particular allure they held that evening but because in the time that followed I returned to dwell on them. That night they were only gestures, and their beauty lay in the fact that I hardly knew what they might mean.

  In any case, she didn’t say yes that night. In fact, I can’t recall whether she ever said yes, either because she didn’t or because I never waited to hear it. And though it was hasty, it seems it was necessarily so, since compared to the reality of cohabitation, in which one sees the shared mornings stretched out, as in a funhouse mirror, ad infinitum, everything previous appears rushed.

  Just north of Iowa City, Dodge Street left the highway, passed a cemetery and a dairy collective, made a bend at a pair of cedars, and swept downhill into town. The house we rented was behind those cedars. On the side nearer to civilization sat a stumpy building, shingled in lime-green asphalt and occupied by a hermit, who had lived there with his mother since childhood and had continued living there since her death in 1996 (he stood in the front yard narrating this as we carried our belongings up the stairs); he now spent much of his time collecting and organizing the “perfectly good” towels left behind by sorority sisters at the end of each semester. On the other side sat an electrical transformer. It gave forth a low ruminative thrum, occasionally crackling maliciously. From the parking lot across the street, the house looked much like the house in the painting American Gothic, but as one drew closer, this resemblance began to diminish. The porch had been replaced at some point with sheets of plywood, which bowed ominously under one’s weight, and when the rental agent stopped by to say hello, the front railing detached in her hand and clattered to the pavement.

  But it seemed to us on that day entirely lovely. There were two apartments, ours on the first level and another, empty, on the second, and in our unit two bright rooms with oak floors and deep bay windows took up the front of the house. In the back, a large kitchen and a bedroom looked out into a woodsy gulch. No matter that a Ford Ranger sat on blocks on the adjoining property, its cab stacked to the brim with neatly folded towels. No matter that the second floor was vacant because a writing student had hanged herself there (scorned by her professor lover, it was said). Erin and I had secured our life together. I saw my desk before one of those bay windows, and myself seated at it, my cup of coffee beside me, the typewriter clanking querulously as I banged out my opus, and I was untroubled that in this imagined scene, flooded with light, Erin was but a dim figure somewhere in the other room.

  That afternoon, as we closed the doors on the emptied moving van, it was as if we were sealing off a former portion of our lives, as if that van contained all the uncertainty that had previously animated our experiences of love. There were to be no more chance brushings of a hand across a knee, no more wondering what such incidental contact might prefigure, no more dallying at the end of a night, no more hesitation at all. And the closing of the door to her apartment, the soft clicking of the lock in its catch: these were gone, as were the three steps down to the pavement and the long blocks stretching away from her house, which I walked with her in mind, or maybe without thinking of her at all, thinking of a story I might write sometime, or only looking for the right word to describe the green of magnolia leaves at night and wondering if in five years or ten I’d remember this moment.

  Instead of that expectancy, of conjecturing what the night might hold, there was on that first evening only a vacuum. In the apartment, boxes stood in columns around the rooms, books lay across the floor, a dozen glasses sat on the counter without anywhere to go. We set to work cutting through tape and unpacking. For some reason—maybe we simply hadn’t yet acquired the habit—neither of us turned on a light when the sun set, and the rooms were already dark when we realized we had stopped making progress. We found a set of sheets in a trunk and, standing on opposite sides of the mattress, made the bed.

  “Does it feel stuffy in here?” I said.

  “I was just going to ask you that.”

  And with the window open and the sounds of the night filling the room—cicada calls, an owl, an eighteen-wheeler coasting downhill—we fell asleep.

  We went together, our first outing as roommates, to a barbecue. The event took place in a backyard that was reached through a narrow passage between house and fence. Even as we moved out of this cramped darkness into the grassy lawn beyond, much overhung with oaks, the texture of the air attained that electric sizzle of long-cooped brains let loose. In the alley at the yard’s far end, two people stood beside a grill while a third sent a waggling stream of lighter fluid into it, and in the distance between, at varying degrees of discomfort from the large blue bucket of ice and beer, the writing students stood in little groups, the burble of their conversations rising and falling.

  “No,” an elfin woman was saying, looking up into the branches of the oaks. “His prose isn’t exactly static. It just suffers from a certain . . . lividity of detail.”

  “I like the dialogue,” someone murmured.

  “It may be the overuse of metaphor,” said the first.

  “Schizophrenia,” said another, though whether to the group or to herself remained unclear.

  “You know that anecdote about Dickens and Dostoyevsky,” said a man whose chest hair sprouted thickly from his shirt. “Young Dostoyevsky goes to visit Dickens, and Dickens says to him, ‘It’s like I have these two voices in my head, and they can’t agree.’ And Dostoyevsky says, ‘Only two?’ ” The man laughed so uproariously at his own joke that two more newcomers were drawn into the circle, and as he began the anecdote again, the woman closest to us, dressed head to toe in black, turned to Erin.

  “What do you write?”

  “Oh, I’m not a writer.”

  “That is so refreshing,” said the woman, and turned away.

  If we are smart, of course, we recognize the difference between a person’s popularity and their worthiness of love, but who is immune to the desire to see the things one cherishes celebrated at large. Through the eyes of others, everything that had so disarmed me about Erin was inverted. I wanted her to divulge some of her unprepossessing genius, to reveal herself as the woman who had studied Titian’s brushstrokes and yet saw wolves in Beowulf. I wanted her to show that lexicon so deeply affected by the terminology of gymnastics that she still described getting off the couch as dismounting. I wanted her to offer some rebuttal to the woman who had shown her such marked disinterest, but the conversation had moved on. A man was talking about a sailboat, a gorgeous sailboat that he was going to restore, had already basically begun to restore, a perfect little sailboat on which he would give us all rides.

  “The wind, the sun,” he said. “At night, the stars.”

  “I was on a sailboat in Alaska,” said Erin. “The nights were so still, and there were so many stars.”

  The hostess, her face encircled by ringlets, laid a hand on Erin’s arm. “Did you see the foot on the treadle of the loom?”

  “No,” said Erin. “But I saw some sharks.”

  Undoubtedly, she was coming to see me differently, as well. My ability to define uncommon words, my sardonic commentating, my infatuation with cynical frames of mind, and my covetous collection of anecdotes (later that night I would transcribe the story of Dickens and Dostoyevsky): these attributes played well in certain crowds, but seen against the uniform background of writers’ neuroses, they were drained of any individuality or interest. Now having seen the type, Erin must have begun, with some satisfaction, to tick off all the ways I fit it, and in my tennis shoes and baggy jeans, standing beside a man whose arm was sleeved
in a tattoo of Whitman, I was not even a particularly exemplary specimen.

  In the alley, they were still trying to light the grill. I began to pull Erin away, but we were intercepted by another young couple—she, dressed in a draping sweater, he, in a light green jacket. They had returned only minutes ago from an excursion to the mall.

  “Harrowing,” she said, her chin lowered to indicate seriousness. “I nearly had an attack.”

  “I looked over,” the man said, “and she was literally swaying.”

  “All those fat people, all that cheap pizza, and the candle stores.”

  “I dragged her out to the car, maxed out the AC, and pumped NPR.”

  Previously, Erin and I would have gone our own ways, and there we could have built up again, in privacy, some idea of who the other was, but now we only walked back slowly in the direction of our house.

  Saying that one is happy is a little like saying one isn’t afraid: less convincing the more one insists upon it. And yet when I think of the rudimentary life we assembled in Iowa, I feel with some conviction, much as Bill Cumber must have felt, that we were happy. We fixed the railing, planted basil, looked up whether the violet berries on the bush out back were edible or poison. On brilliant, cool mornings, we walked the city, looking at the houses we passed, each in its turn, and discussing what we did and didn’t like—swimming pools, shade trees, screened-in porches—mentally sketching out the blueprint for some nonexistent home. And when a bank of clouds blew across the plains and the sirens went off downtown, we sat out on our front porch and watched the wind whip the trees into a frenzy. In one of the storms that summer, a tornado swept through a Scout camp during its emergency preparedness seminar. We both thought it was funny, but we never spoke about it to anyone but each other. It was one of a thousand things, a hundred thousand, that existed between us and us alone; our life, in this way, was woven of these mundane moments. If a tornado had touched down on our house and wiped us both from the earth, it would have taken with it more than our individual lives; it would have taken with it this shared existence. When I think of that house now, in fact, it is as if a tornado had destroyed it. Picking up a plate that once sat in those cupboards, I am struck at once by how unrecoverable that life is, how much more I might have appreciated it.

  In place of the uncertainty that had lent excitement to our early days, our two routines slowly took their positions. In the morning, I watched her lean against the end of the bed as she pulled on her jeans. I stood at the stove, flipping eggs, while she measured out the morning’s coffee, or she cooked the eggs while I got the toaster off the high shelf. I had loved to listen to her bathing, had been almost unable to tear myself from the sound, but now, already wrapped in a towel I waited for her to finish her shower. I looked at the mail, I got out the clothes I would wear, or I sat with a book at my desk. When she was finished, I entered the bathroom, hung my towel on its hook beside hers, and, before I began to wash myself, dragged a finger across the tiles on the wall, gathering the long brown hairs strewn across its surface into a spiderlike knot.

  In all my fantasizing, I had entirely failed to imagine this reality, this glomming together of two lives that changes both and leaves neither intact, and I was startled to realize how poorly our existences overlapped. We both woke at the same time, but she was out of bed in an instant while I preferred to loiter in the sheets and let the day come gradually. The moment she woke, she wanted to turn on all the lights in the house—she couldn’t see, she said, and it was depressing. Even on the gloomier days, I preferred the gray light that came in through the windows to the yellow glow of the bulbs. She had already been at work for hours when I at last took my post at the library, and at five o’clock, when she was pouring herself exactly half a beer, I was just beginning to write. She would have liked to spend our evenings together, to go out for dinner, to see a movie, but by then I was too engrossed in my work to be distracted. By the time I switched off the light at my desk, she was usually asleep.

  As we tried to find some pattern to the day that suited us both, the apartment seemed to take on a life of its own—dictated by neither of us but born into being by our inability to agree or our rush to find consensus, by the fickleness of our moods or our faulty beliefs of what the other might like or tolerate. We grew geraniums. We painted the walls a pale turquoise. We hung gauzy curtains in the windows. And each of these decisions helped create a space that did not belong to either of us (she had wanted begonias; I’d wanted blinds) but was hardly ours. Certain resentments built up by necessity in this process, but they were always minor, passing, forgotten almost as quickly as they occurred. When she mentioned that the geraniums seemed to be dying from some fungus, I knew that she was really lamenting the unbought begonias, just as she knew when I asked whether she had seen a certain book, that I was actually asking whether she had moved it, accusing her really, and so it was not unreasonable for her to say in response that she had no idea, hadn’t gone near my desk, hadn’t touched anything. A tone of fleeting exasperation entered our voices at these times or, because we were aware of that tone, of mock exasperation, and some of these questions, asked with enough regularity, even attained the status of something like a joke. “You’ve been hiding my books again,” I would say, but neither of us laughed.

  It was very easy then, always in vanishingly small increments, to place a little more blame on the other for the disappointments and frustrations that had formerly been ours as individuals. It was easy to think, for instance, that the misplaced book was crucial to my work, absolutely necessary in fact, and as I rummaged the shelves, I found myself formulating an unspoken argument, not so much against her as against our situation. It was plainly impossible to work like this, so my thinking ran, with these interruptions and disturbances, with her looking over my shoulder or clanging pans in the kitchen, or asking whether I wanted to go for a walk. Untenable was a word I often thought. This situation is untenable. Then when the missing book was discovered, the whole thing ceased to matter. Everything was back to the way it had been before, but the word untenable remained.

  It didn’t help that my work was going poorly. My original vision had evaporated, leaving me to sift my notes in hopes of finding some clue that would lead me back in the direction of Sabine Musil-Buehler. And yet, refusing to acknowledge this fact, I pushed ever backward into the history of fire. I’d begun at that time to describe the conflagrations of prehistory, the burnings of those early human settlements with their mud-brick homes and clay idols, and I’d gone back yet deeper into the past, to fires tearing untamed across the savannas that only Homo erectus might have seen. I was at that time elaborating upon a certain Amazonian tribe whose creation story held that all humankind had been created in the collision of the planet with a giant flaming lump of sloth dung, and I knew even as I was writing the words giant flaming lump of sloth dung that I had gone irretrievably afield.

  Around that time, I also began to collect stories from the newspapers in Manatee County, ostensibly to keep in mind some sense of the place. In reality, I was losing faith in the whole premise of human relationships, and each of these stories was part of the evidence:

  By triangulating data from a number of cell phone towers, detectives had been led to a drainage pond behind a Publix supermarket, where, in a number of black plastic garbage bags stuffed into a pipe, wetsuited divers discovered the dismembered remains of Susan Fast, whose stepson was arrested later that day at the gym . . .

  Hearing a commotion in the hall, Crystal Johnson stepped out of her bedroom into a “hail of bullets,” which were being exchanged by her boyfriend and three men who had entered the wrong apartment . . .

  William Howery, standing in a parking lot, holding his child, was stabbed by a man he’d never met . . .

  After the first football game of the season, a group of girls took their friend Jasmine Thompson home, only discovering upon arriving at her house that she had been hit by a bullet during the drive and had died without a word
in the back seat . . .

  The sheriff’s office released the confession of 17-year-old Clifford Davis, 303 pages in which he described the murder of his mother and grandfather, the chronologically-organized display of his childhood photographs around their bodies, the perturbation he felt that afternoon because his grandfather’s pacemaker continued to fire long after the man had died, and his desire to be remembered, like Ben Franklin, Thomas Edison or Napoleon . . .

  “He molested his mother’s corpse,” I said to Erin. “Then he went to the mall to buy some shoes.”

  “You don’t need to tell me everything,” she said.

  I began to dream of Sabine. During many of those nights, I swam with her, far out into the Gulf, where the water below was lightless and frigid, and where suddenly her hand would lock around my arm or her hair would wrap around my ankle, and I would be pulled down. Some nights, I simply shoveled sand for hours on end, and some, I fled Florida with the sound of sirens in my ears. Most often, though, I found myself in medias res in an awkward and horrifying sitcomesque situation. One night, I was hosting a cocktail party. The room was light and cheerful, and the guests had all arrived. They leaned on the kitchen counter; they milled around the dining room admiring the view. I made some witty remark in passing and crossed into the living room, only then realizing that I was using Sabine’s coffin for a coffee table. How I could have overlooked it, I couldn’t say. I had to do something before someone noticed, but at that moment, the coffin began to rise slowly off the floor, causing the drinks on its lid to wobble and spill. Now I darted across the room and began to lean on it, pressing it back down onto the carpet, trying all the while to make conversation, to smile, to be well liked and worthy of love and admiration.