Thy Neighbor

by Norah Vincent

  I opened my mouth to do it.

  I leaned in.

  And I was going to bite him.

  I really was.

  But the art comes through on its own.

  No warning.

  It does not obey intention.

  The world is upside down and backward, Judas, said the voice in my head. So kiss.

  Soft sell.

  Soft shell.

  Cracking.

  King’s pawn to king’s pawn

  Is pawn to pawn.

  Sliding felt over lacquer.

  And clack.

  The pieces fall.

  Sliding tongue over teeth.

  Then clack.

  Teeth to teeth.

  The pieces.

  Fall.

  They fall, as master and disciple, as killer and wife, with a kiss.

  And so a conjugation.

  I kissed. He kissed. We kissed.

  I kissed thee ere I killed thee.

  But no matter.

  I left no trace.

  These acts are only ever in the mind, whatever the mess on the floor.

  Am I right, Mother?

  * * *

  How much time passes in a kiss?

  How much information?

  Who has any way of knowing from the inside, where time and information are both the same and both immeasurable? When an act is an act in the mind, the motion hardly matters and the means of calculation are all awry.

  Jeff tasted like acne. Suppurating acne and its corrective cream, like caulking and the pith of a black banana. He did. And he tasted of malt and the hops and the sugar in the beer with a bit of bleeding gums at the back, like the finish on a tannin-steeped wine or the harsh in a macerated cherry.

  They were not flavors I knew intimately.

  He was not one of my ghosts.

  Jeff stood abruptly and reached for his bag.

  I stood, too.

  “Face-to-face not your style?” I grunted, tripping slightly on the chair.

  “What?” He stopped. “No. What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about Facebook, asshole,” I shouted.

  A doubles posse of old men in sweat suits sitting by the TV turned briefly and looked in our direction, shrugged, and looked away.

  “Facebook?” Jeff said. He looked frightened.

  “Yeah, Facebook. You use it, don’t you?”

  “Everybody uses it. So what? God’s sake! What are you talking about?”

  Committed now, I thought. Just pull.

  “I know that you’ve still got that bird in your house, Jeff,” I hissed.

  A cramp of puzzlement made its way across his face, then the slackness of dumb fear.

  “How—?” He broke off, shouldered his bag abruptly, and pushed past me into the lounge. Striding fast, he kicked open the double glass doors to the parking lot and walked out of the club.

  I left my bag and followed, running.

  I caught up with him at his car. I grabbed him by the collar of his track jacket and tried to pull him down, but he was surprisingly strong. He took hold of my wrists and squeezed until I lost my grip, shoving me back against the adjacent car and leaning into me with all his weight. He butted his forehead against mine and held us together, bone on bone, his mouth tearing into the rictus of a silent scream, his eyes squeezing shut.

  He held us there, sobbing openmouthed, tendrils of drool shuddering between his lips, his hands shaking violently now, seeming to scramble to my shoulders for support, then, at last, falling to his side as he himself fell back against his car, his head canting backward onto the roof.

  He took a deep, frightened breath, his eyes searching the sky, his head loose-necked and lolling. Then he reached for the door handle behind him, and in one swift motion rolled himself into the car, slammed and locked the door, pulled out and away.

  His bag lay forgotten on the pavement.

  * * *

  When I got in tonight there was a note from Iris in my inbox. “Chat at midnight,” it said.

  So there I was at midnight waiting with my Word document open, ready to copy and paste.

  At twelve oh two a.m., a blip.

  Chat box up.

  “You there?”

  “Yep.”

  “Good.”

  A pause.

  “I’m going to help you to trust me now.”

  What the hell do you say to that?

  “OK,” I typed, then erased it. Too passive.

  “Fine,” I typed, then erased it. Too bitchy.

  Finally, I settled on his word.

  “Good.”

  Another longer pause. Then:

  “She is as in a field a silken tent.”

  “What?”

  “At midday when the sunny summer breeze has dried the dew.”

  Oh, gimme a fucking break with this shit already.

  “And all its ropes relent.”

  “I’m not doing this,” I typed.

  He went on.

  “So that in guys it gently sways at ease.”

  “I’m signing off if you keep this up.”

  “And its supporting central cedar pole,

  “That is its pinnacle to heavenward.”

  And then I recognized it.

  Of course.

  The Frost poem. He was reciting the Frost poem.

  Such a dolt.

  Furious typing.

  “I already know you’ve got that bird, asshole.”

  This shut him up for a minute.

  Then: “Ah, so that’s who you think I am. I see now.”

  “Right, so can we stop the crap already?”

  “Nick, Iris doesn’t know the whole poem.”

  “Maybe not, but Google does.”

  Another short pause. Then from Iris:

  “You had to Google it, huh?”

  I said nothing to this. I was done. I was moving my hand to quit Facebook when one more transmission made it through.

  “Your mother would have been so disappointed.”

  17

  Trust me.

  I’m going to help you to trust me, he’d said.

  But what can that really mean?

  What helps me or anyone to trust another person?

  Knowing their secrets? Knowing who they are? Where they’ve been? What they’re capable of? What they’ve done in the past and so are likely to do now? Knowing them all your life?

  Ha.

  We trust people on these bases all the time, but they are false bases. There is nothing to them. And at some level we know this, or, perhaps if we are less lucky, we are at one time or another confronted with the shattering betrayal that forces us to know it.

  There is no knowing someone well enough to trust them. Ever.

  Because the knowledge involved is of the wrong kind. Inductive knowledge, which is really just belief. Nothing more. I believe that such and such will happen in this particular way in the future, because it has always happened that way in the past. Induction.

  That is trust for most of us, trust not just in people, but in the whole way of the world—trust, as the philosophers said, that the sun will rise tomorrow, that the ground will hold us upright, and that the green piece of paper that says ONE DOLLAR has a dollar’s worth of gold behind it in the treasury. In God we trust.

  In trust we trust.

  It’s nothing.

  You see?

  But the person who is Iris Gray knows different.

  That person knows that there is only one kind of real trust: the trust based on self-betrayal.

  This is my standard, and he shares it.
It is his standard as well.

  It goes like this.

  I know that a person is telling the truth only when it costs him something to tell it, when it goes against his interests, or his pride, or his vanity. Only when all other possible reasons—the self-interested reasons—are exhausted, and there is nothing left but the vulnerability, or the shame, or the risk of a person having disclosed something he should not have—only then can I believe that what I am hearing is the truth. Only then can I trust.

  In betrayal I trust.

  And so Iris unveils himself to me as an offering of trust, because his anonymity is the thing he values most, the thing he relinquishes, strange to say, most self-effacingly.

  Iris and I share the same inverted principles, because Iris and I had the same teacher, the teacher, as Iris said, who would have been so very disappointed that I did not know the Frost poem off by heart.

  * * *

  Twelve sixteen a.m. The chat box was still open, and my index finger, poised above the Q for so long, had pulled back, retreated with my thumb from the command key, and hunkered, like a startled crab, on the desk.

  Okay. The tests of trust. Betray yourself.

  Prove that you are who I think you are.

  A few easy ones first. The ones I did remember.

  I typed.

  “Hearts are not had as a gift . . .”

  And the reply came quickly.

  “. . . but hearts are earned. By those that are not entirely beautiful.”

  Check.

  Good.

  Now again.

  I typed.

  “I have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons . . .”

  Wait.

  And blink.

  Blink.

  Blink.

  Reply:

  “. . . I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”

  Yes!

  Check.

  Okay.

  Now the last one. The only one that only she would know.

  “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita . . .”

  Come on.

  Come on.

  Be there.

  Be her.

  Blink. Blink. Blink.

  Answer, damn it.

  Answer.

  Let this be true.

  Let it be real.

  Come on.

  Come on.

  Blink.

  You know it.

  You know it by heart.

  Blink.

  Don’t be afraid.

  Blink.

  Then scroll.

  “. . . mi ritrovai per una selva oscura.”

  My God.

  I fell back in the chair.

  My God.

  It’s her. It’s really her.

  “She’s alive.”

  I said it out loud.

  “I don’t believe it.”

  I slapped the desk with both hands.

  And again in disbelief I said aloud: “It’s really her.”

  Wait, wait.

  One more time to be sure.

  I typed.

  “And the translator was . . . ?”

  A smile emoticon appeared.

  Blink.

  :)

  Then blink again:

  “Robert Pinsky.”

  My fucking God.

  Robin Bloom.

  It really is Robin Bloom.

  * * *

  Twelve thirty-five a.m.

  “Nick? . . . You still there?”

  Pause.

  “I’m here.”

  Blink.

  “You okay?”

  Count of five with the cursor.

  Thinking.

  One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five.

  Then typing:

  “I can’t believe it’s really you.”

  “I know, I know. I told you there was a lot.”

  I smiled, typing:

  “The name and the male template were kinda stupid, though.”

  “Yeah, well, Facebook is kinda stupid, but it was the best way to reach you.”

  “You must know where I live.”

  “I wasn’t going to show up at your door.”

  “Actually, I’m glad you didn’t.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “But why not just write me as Robin Bloom?”

  “Think about it, Nick. That’s a stupid question.”

  “What? I don’t see how.”

  “I don’t want to be found. Even digitally.”

  “I think most people presumed you were dead.”

  “Right, and that’s the way I want to keep it.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Really.”

  “But there must be other Robin Blooms on Facebook. If you used a template, who would know you?”

  “There are, but I don’t want to be one of them.”

  “You’d rather be dead?”

  “So to speak, yes.”

  I was stuck again with the full force of meeting her. I couldn’t think of what else to say. There were so many things to ask, and all of them were huge and intrusive and not my place, but I wanted to know. I wanted to know everything there was to know about why she had left, where she had been, how she had survived, and why she hadn’t come back. And then, of course, there was this whole business with the notes. What the fuck was that about? Why me? Why contact me? And why in this roundabout and—I still thought this—manipulative way?

  Still, I was overjoyed. Meeting her again was like meeting myself or my twin. The connection was so strong, the shared past, but so was the estrangement, the divergent paths we had since taken. She was the only other person in the world who knew my mother as well as I did—maybe better—and that idea both thrilled and frightened me. It made me nauseatingly jealous, too, I realized, as if Robin somehow had the power to usurp my identity, my people, the emotional things that were mine.

  I felt cruel suddenly, and angry.

  “Do you know that your grandmother keeps a light in the window for you?”

  No response.

  “She lights it every night and puts it out every morning.”

  Still nothing.

  “Don’t you think it was bad enough for her to lose Karen? Losing you, too, was like death to her. Don’t you think she has a right to know that you’re all right?”

  “Iris Gray is typing,” said the prompt.

  I waited.

  Then the scroll advanced, a chunk of text appeared.

  “Nick, you know nothing. When you know more, when you know the rest, you can give me your informed opinion. Until then, take my word for it, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Something in me softened. I knew she was right. But I also felt loyal to the old woman across the street, the woman with whom I had shared probably the most pleasant, healing evening I’d passed since my parents’ deaths.

  “I saw her recently,” I typed. “She actually looks great. She’s a strong and wise old lady.”

  “I’m glad to hear that . . . It sounds like adversity has deepened her.”

  That’s a shitty thing to say, I thought, but I wasn’t in a position to say so, or to retaliate on Mrs. B.’s behalf. I’d spent an evening with the woman once in thirteen years, an edited evening, truth be told, in which we had both been on our best behavior despite our claims to being compassionately impolite. I would defer to Robin for now about the woman who had raised her.

  “Why deepened her?” I asked. “Was she so shallow before?”

  Pause.

  “Simple,” she replied.

  Ano
ther pause. Then again:

  “She was simple. One of the cookie-bakers, your mother would have said.”

  I laughed aloud. This was Robin for sure.

  “Yeah, that’s vintage Diana all right,” I typed.

  I laughed more and typed again:

  “I can just hear her now: ‘The Philistines are upon us, Mr. Lloyd.’”

  “Laughing,” Robin typed. “I loved that book.”

  “I hated it,” I replied. “Total chick book, though, so no surprise.”

  “No way. Emma and Pride and Prejudice are chick books. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is for crones. Crones, through and through.”

  Now I was roaring. Typing with tears in my eyes.

  “True, true. Bitter old crones. And young ones, too, I guess, huh?”

  “Absolutely. I was born wizened, inside and out.”

  “And your grandmother wasn’t.”

  “Nope. Not a bit.”

  “C’mon, she’s a really nice lady,” I replied. “Don’t be so hard on her.”

  “Yes. Definitely. She was always that.”

  “So. Is that so bad?”

  “No. I suppose not. Not always.”

  “But?”

  “But nice can cover a multitude of sins.”

  I thought for a moment, remembering what Mrs. B. had said about the insult of good manners.

  “It might surprise you to know that she said something very similar to me the other day.”

  Nothing.

  “Robin?”

  Pause.

  “Look,” I added. “She really does get it, you know. She knows that she never understood you. She knows that she didn’t have what it took to nurture your intellect, or to make you really happy. But she tried. Surely not measuring up to you was not a sin?”

  “I never said it was.”

  “So what was it then?”

  Silence.

  Oh, come on. Make your point if you’re so sure of it.

  “Robin?”

  Still nothing.

  Funny how you can feel a sulk through cyberspace, the other person pouting behind her screen, empowered by your having had the last word, rather than herself. You hang there in the white, your last transmission dangling, looking, as words isolated on a page so often do, stranger and stranger and more and more meaningless the longer you stare.

  “Robin?”

  “Yes. I’m here.”