by Dan Cluchey
Jane had a calm demeanor and a curious habit—she never made eye contact when we spoke. Normally, I’d expect myself to mirror this behavior: all my life, I’ve involuntarily taken on the characteristics and idiosyncrasies of those around me. I slip slightly into the accent of whomever I am speaking with, temporarily abscond with the minor limp of the man I just passed on the street, even mimic the mood of my waitress. My body is an easy host, and yet it could not bring itself to accommodate Jane’s aversion. The more she looked away, the more intently I looked at her.
“Jesus, you’re stiff,” she said, still manipulating my hopeless limb. “I take it you’re not a runner?”
“I’m a lawyer,” I answered.
“You can be both,” she replied matter-of-factly. “Injuries like this one are easier to prevent and recover from if you regularly take the time to stretch, and, you know … exercise, from time to time.”
“I play basketball, on occasion,” I told her defensively, and technically this was true. But only technically.
“Okay,” she said. After several rounds of silence, she added, “I wasn’t saying that you’re out of shape or anything. I just meant—”
“No, I didn’t think—”
“Because I’m just talking about flexibility.”
“I get it,” I said, still trying to meet her eyes, which remained indelibly fixed on my knees. “So you don’t think I’m fat, then?”
“Of course not. You’re the dictionary definition of lanky. I just meant you could benefit a lot from increased movement. You’d heal a lot faster.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said, “for next time.”
She went on examining me, and I her, for another ten minutes. She prodded; I stared. The both of us were thorough. My preliminary diagnosis was that Jane was studious and dry—she had a level way about her that came out in crisp, unadorned movements and a relentlessly deadpan tone. She spoke calmly and with purpose. She was, as far as I could tell, a top-notch physical therapist. But she was warm in spite of what appeared to be a mostly serious demeanor.
Not warm like Fiona, who was warm like a match: i.e., not warm at all unless you were so close as to be set on fire, at which point she was as warm as one person can be to another, at which point she went out. Not even warm like Rachel, who was warm like a blanket: i.e., statically and steadily generous with herself. No, Jane was warm like alcohol: i.e., working from the inside.
She prodded; I stared, and, as I recall, this went on for a very long time.
* * *
It was 4:45 in the morning on a summer night—I can’t remember the year—when a call came in from a number I did not recognize; I was in bed, and Rafael Uribe Uribe was too.
“Hello?” I said, and was met by labored breaths, a pronounced gulp, and words whispered so softly as to render their authorship undetectable: “It’s really you.”
“Who’s calling please?” I asked, and my heart became a sudden rock, my arteries a petrified forest, my throat seized up with eremic want, my hands grew numb, and my face hot, because the moment I asked, I knew.
“It’s me, Leo,” the whisper revealed. “It’s Fiona.”
It had been a long, long time since I’d heard her voice, and in my life I would never hear it again—not off-screen, not like this. I rose, and walked in silence to the window. Rafi paced hurriedly away from the room, because dogs know. I wasn’t certain what to say. What was there even to say?
“It’s 4:45,” I enunciated blankly into the phone, sounding, I thought then, like one of those old time and temp recordings. “In the morning.” A long few seconds passed by.
“Well, it’s only 1:45 where I am,” she said, whispering weakly still. I thought that maybe she was drunk.
“In California,” I clarified. She might as well have been in outer space; it might as well have been any time at all.
“Yeah,” she sighed, “in California.” Another half minute elapsed without words.
“Why are you calling?” I asked at last, but I didn’t even know if I wanted to know the answer, if there was one. Three thousand miles away and three hours behind me, she began to cry audibly.
“I don’t know,” she heaved, keeping her heavy sobs low. “I don’t know, Leo. I just wanted—ha-pfffffffft—sorry; I blew my nose. I just wanted to hear you I thi-hi-hink.”
“I didn’t even know you were still out there,” I said calmly, but the calm came from shock and not from steely nerves.
She hiccupped, and let go of other wet sounds.
“What do you me-he-hean?”
“I mean, I’ve seen you on television,” I replied, trying my damnedest to sound, I don’t know, aloof, or at a minimum steady. “I know that you exist still, or some version of you, I guess. I know that you’re definitely still alive. But it doesn’t really seem like you anymore—you look very staged, out there, not at all how I remember. What happened to you, Fiona? I mean, Jesus, what the hell happened? Can it really be true? Did you really become all the things you always—and so fast—what happened? Why are you calling, Fiona? I’m really asking. What is it that you want?”
And though I wasn’t trying to upset her, this made her cry openly for five whole minutes. No words were exchanged; I gave her time to even out. When she spoke again, she was nearly calm. She said:
“There is something I wanted to ask you. I know you don’t owe me anything anymore, but is it alright if I just ask you this one thing, because I feel like I really need some help right now?”
“Sure, Fiona,” I said. “What is it? Go ahead and ask.”
“Was I a good girlfriend?” is the thing she asked.
“Heh,” I ejected, reflexively. It took me a moment to: “Wait, is that a serious—no!”
“I wasn’t?”
“Fiona, are you being serious? No! Of course not.”
I felt it all rising up inside of me, all at once: every bit of that poison I’d stored away.
“Why?” she asked, her voice leveled, every trace of her tears washed clear.
“I can’t tell if you’re being serious.”
“I am.”
“That’s insane. You’re just … insane.”
“Leo!”
“You were a terrible girlfriend! You can’t … you have to know that. Right?”
“You’re being mean on purpose,” she said, and in that moment I wanted nothing from this world but the words that would make her cry forever.
“You left me for another man!” I shouted, and I knew it wasn’t what I wanted; I knew it sounded somehow insignificant in the face of all these endless things.
“I meant before that, obviously.”
“You left me for another man—that’s, like, the top thing you can’t do—”
“Leo,” she whimpered, “you’re being mean right now, and I obviously meant before that.” I took a long, deep, breath, but my temper was on the lam now and it would not be coming back.
“There is no ‘before that,’ Fiona. You’re the captain of the Titanic asking if he was a good captain! Sorry, I meant before the iceberg! No. I’m sorry, and it’s been a long time now, and things have changed, but you still should know that you were bad; you were titanically bad. If you get nothing else out of this conversation—and maybe it’s best that you don’t—you should know that you were a bad girlfriend. You … cannot … possibly think otherwise.”
Across the line, she breathed out recklessly.
“Just please—I want you to tell me I’m special,” she said, and it sounded so childish.
“How would I even … I don’t know. I have no way of knowing if you’re special or not. You used to be. I know that. Okay? That’s the best I can do for you.”
I huffed like a monster; I was agitated still.
“I’m the same,” she asserted desperately. “I’m telling you I’m still the same.”
“You aren’t. You just aren’t, Fiona. It’s fine now—it is—but you aren’t the same. Look, Fiona, if you really want to get
into it right now, let’s get into it. Let’s get real, right now, okay? I don’t want anyone to hurt anymore, but if you want to talk, we can talk. So I’ll say this. The thing I liked most about you, back then, when it was us, was that you weren’t like other people, and the deep-down truth, I think, is that being different also happened to be the thing you liked least about yourself. So, in a way, you got what you wanted now, right? You’re not different anymore. Which is fine—it’s great, I’m sure. I’m really … I’m not happy for you—I can’t lie about that—but I am, I guess, neutral for you at this point. And I’m sorry, but I think what happened is: you traded in special for normal, because special was too hard.”
“What’s normal?” she asked me in earnest.
“Normal, I think, is wanting things to be easy. It’s getting by, I guess, and being content with getting by. It’s not a bad thing. Not at all. I think I’m getting to be more normal too, in another sense. It’s being happy with just this one life, maybe, and maybe it’s accepting the idea of death, you know, just being okay with it all. Normal is fine. It’s okay. It’s … maybe it’s the way we used to talk about other people. Do you remember other people? How they weren’t like us?”
“I am not other people. I am Fiona—”
“Fox-Renard?”
“Haeberle! Fuck you, Leo; I can be both.”
“No,” I told her, fully awake now at last. Fully calm. “You cannot be both. You only get to be one person, Fiona, and you picked Fox-Renard, the movie star. You picked that, and that’s fine. But Fiona Haeberle—she’s just the past now, and that’s fine too. That’s where she belongs: only in the past. Just memories, now. Okay? She’s finished. We’re finished. And it’s fine.”
She was quiet on the other side, but for short defiant breaths.
“You don’t have to be mean,” she told me, more gently than I’d ever heard her speak, and more wearily as well. “I know how badly it stung you when I left. I know this. I know that you don’t understand why I had to go, and I didn’t give you a very good explanation when I did. And I know—I never said I’m sorry for that. I’m so sorry, Leo. Leo, I’m so sorry.”
I let her apology hang there in the silence to ripen or to rot. But to my everlasting surprise—to my everlasting relief—it didn’t do anything at all. The moment it came, it went; I nearly gasped at how slight it all felt, how the experience seemed only to glance past me like a curious stranger on a busy street. I’d always believed that, if it came, it would meet me head on, that I’d face it down like prey and peer into its depths and wail against it so zealously that folks would speak of the spectacle I had made for generations to come. It did nothing to me, and at last, at last, I wanted to do nothing back to it. And so after a moment I spoke.
“Well … alright,” is what I said. “But I’m not sure what the point is now. You don’t get to make it better, or make it not-have-happened, in this life or in any other, no matter how badly you feel in retrospect, if you actually do feel badly.”
“I do,” she said.
“And that’s great,” I told her. “That’s really … nice … to hear. But it doesn’t change anything that happened in the past, and it won’t change anything that’s going to happen in the future. And I guess it doesn’t change the present either. And you know what? That’s okay. It is. Okay. We don’t need to change those things. Not anymore. And I’m sorry, too. I’m sorry for my parts of it too. Really. But it’s fine now.”
On the other end of the line, she emitted a long, dramatic sigh.
“I don’t want you to hate me forever,” she said.
And I said, “I don’t hate you. I’m not thrilled that I have to remember you sometimes. But I don’t hate you. I don’t care enough about you anymore for that, and I don’t mean that in a mean way—it’s just … a matter of time. That’s just what time does. It makes all of your feelings go away. Every feeling you ever have, has to eventually end up gone. And everything we went through, the good and the bad, it was all just feelings, Fiona. Strong ones, sure, of course, but those go away just like the rest of them. They go away. You shouldn’t be surprised when they go.”
“I don’t believe you,” she replied. “I don’t believe you for one second, Leo. Some feelings are forever—no matter what I did, you know that the feelings we had were different. They were the forever kind. Eternal. You know that. It was too much for me, sometimes, but … I knew that.”
We were both quiet then, and for a long while. We breathed at each other. I looked out through the window and down on the street: there were kids out there. It didn’t feel like the morning.
“I was in Delhi last month,” she said at last, and she spoke so, so carefully. “Mark’s filming a movie there. It’s really beautiful there, Leo. It’s charming. Do you remember how we used to talk about going to India? About taking it—you know,” and here she raised her pitch, “adverse possession!” and here she lowered it: “Do you remember?”
“No,” I said. I lied. I remembered.
“Yes you do,” she breathed. “You do.”
“So did you?” I asked her in spite of everything.
“Did I what?”
“Did you take it? Did you make Delhi yours?”
She sighed briefly.
“That wasn’t how it worked,” she said. “You can’t take things alone. That wasn’t how it … it isn’t how it works anymore.”
“So,” I responded, “you didn’t adversely possess Delhi.”
“No,” she said. “But I was there.”
Next came another period of silence, which lasted—it’s not possible to know. I knew this was going to be the last time we ever spoke to one another, and I couldn’t hang up quite yet.
“I think I might come to New York very soon,” she said some time later, “to do a play.”
I didn’t answer for a while, and then I said, “I bet Mark will be thrilled.”
“Why do you say that?” she asked.
“Uh, because he told me on numerous occasions, back when he was not your husband but rather the super-dumb guy we made fun of together, that he couldn’t wait to get out of New York.”
“Please don’t call him dumb, Leo” she said. “It makes you sound so petty.”
“I’m joking around, Fiona. Shouldn’t we at least be able to do that? To joke around? Actually, if you want to get technical, I’m not literally joking around: he told me that New York was ‘a real mindfield.’ I remember that specifically: he said it was ‘a real mindfield,’ because it was fraught with all of these obstacles for working actors, and I said, ‘are you saying mindfield?’ and he said that he was, and when I asked him where that expression came from, he said—and I will never forget this—he said that it was a very popular term, and he was surprised I’d never heard of it, and that it was ‘a metaphor, ahem, for when something is so dangerous that it’s, like, a threat to the whole entire field of your mind.’ Mindfield. Your husband told me that.”
“Oh come on,” she said, lightening, “he’s not that dumb.”
“Are you positive?” I asked, and she yielded one small giggle.
It was light out now, and I was beginning to notice how tired I’d been feeling. I could hear Fiona shifting around on the other end of the connection, growing serious once more.
“You’re never going to forgive me, are you?” she asked, sighing.
“I’d rather just forget,” I answered honestly, right away. “It’s not about forgiveness, okay? It’s about just putting it away where it belongs: in the past. That’s where I’ve put you, and it’s where you ought to put me, too. We can do at least that for each other, can’t we? I swear to God, it’s just as good as forgiving. It’s better. It’s the cleanest way out. I’d like you to forget me.”
“I can’t,” she countered, “In spite of everything, I just … I don’t regret leaving, Leo. I’m sorry for how I went away, but I’m not sorry that I did. I’m sorry, just, that I had to. Maybe it was wrong, and maybe we would have had something r
eally special together for a long time—infinite Earths, remember?”
“I remember that,” I said.
“I’m sorry I called,” she said, “but sometimes I get sad, and I thought that maybe it would help … help both of us to talk for a minute.”
“And did it?” I asked her.
“Not really,” she said. “You?”
“Heh,” I replied, “no, not really.”
“Goodbye now, Leo,” she said at last. “I’ll catch you next time.”
She hung up the phone, and I slipped away from the window, away from the buzz of the floodlights and the boys down below drawing lazy figure eights on the pavement with their bicycles. I drifted into the living room, where Lita and Rafi were awake on the rocking chair.
“Hola,” said Lita, smiling, as I entered. She could probably hear the whole thing—not that she could understand the words.
“Hola,” I said back, smiling too.
“Dónde está Jane?” she asked.
“Jane está fuera de la cíudad en una conferencia,” I answered.
“Eso es bueno. Y tú? Cómo estás?” she asked deliberately, rocking and grinning and stroking the fur under Rafi’s loose collar.
“Tres bueno,” I answered, confusing my Spanish and French again.
Lita smiled down at Rafi, who smiled up at Lita, who chuckled softly to herself and corrected me: “Muy bien.”
“Sí,” I said, “bueno y sano.”
“Sí, bueno y sano,” she murmured back.
* * *
A few weeks after I sprained my knee, one of Aunt Luz’s sisters called to ask me if I wouldn’t mind babysitting her four-year-old daughter that night. Boots was out of town on a case, but I wrangled Emily and Sona to come revel in the apartment, appease the dog, and help me to entertain little Elise. At twenty-seven, I’d never been asked to take care of a young person before, and I explained to my friends that assembling a broader network of sitters was likely in everyone’s best interest. Emily estimated that she’d logged upwards of a thousand billable childcare hours over the course of her life, and eagerly signed on; Sona claimed that all children hated her, but wasn’t about to pass up an opportunity to shower in Luz’s palatial master bathroom, which made her own look like “a fucking rat trap.”
