Where You Live

by Andrew Roe

  She didn’t know why she said she liked it rough, which wasn’t true, which was just a dumbshit line that came to her, an utterance penned by someone else and that slipped out by mistake. It was something to say when you’re tipsy from too many cosmopolitans and your body is alive with the electric blood-buzz of discovering a new person (a very promising new person) and you’re walking past elaborate mansions that no doubt house elaborate lives and in the distance there’s the bay’s steadfast foghorn lament and the occasional cable car clank and you’re periodically looking at him and thinking a million different things and then only one thing.

  Afterwards he was sweet, offering her tea and control of the remote. But she didn’t stay, and she could tell the decision made it worse for him. Immediately she regretted it—“I think I should go,” which became the harshest sentence she’d ever spoken—but it was too late. And plus she really did want to go. She suddenly had the postcoital—if you could even call it that—desire to be alone.

  It wasn’t like this hadn’t ever happened before. She had a boyfriend in college who’d been that way, chronically, who’d even read up on the subject to try to increase his stamina. One tactic he tried was to masturbate while watching himself in the mirror and then stop right before he came. Which didn’t work. Neither did thinking of sports or Bea Arthur or the ghastly shrunken old woman who replenished the salad bar in the school cafeteria.

  She remembered, too, a film appreciation class she’d taken in college, and one of the films they appreciated was The French Lieutenant’s Woman. According to her professor, the sex scene in the movie represented the most realistic sex scene ever put on film. Why? Because after Jeremy Irons has endured all this unbearable pent-up passion and stinging desire for Meryl Streep, he finally gets his chance to fuck her and he comes in like five seconds and then it’s over. He didn’t say anything about it having been a while, although that was probably the case, it being Victorian England and all.

  Seconds, minutes, an hour—what did it matter really. It was all transitory, over before you knew it, she thought. There were other things to consider.

  He never saw himself as the type to videotape the birth of his children, but he’d done it for all three. In fact he became something of a delivery room auteur, jockeying around nurses and orderlies and anesthesiologists to get the best angles, making use of natural lighting, trying to create a Scorcese-inspired gritty realism and edginess. When reviewing the tapes he could see a definite progression in his work, from the first birth to the final one—and it was the final one. There’d be no more kids, they’d decided, no more home movies of blood and birth and beauty. Three was enough.

  By then, they no longer lived in The City but in a house in a city (a suburb, that is) where it was okay to say the name. They had neighbors who always waved, gym memberships that did not go unused, financial portfolios with mutual funds that were considered “moderate aggressive.” He felt lucky. He was lucky. Sometimes he’d sit in the backyard and soak in the multicolored sunset and pleasantly marvel at the simplicity, the fundamental ordinariness of his life. He’d playfully pat his ebbing stomach and not worry too much about its slow yet determined expansion. He’d see Anna inside the house, knowing that she’d eventually come outside to join him. He loved the waiting, the anticipation of that, knowing that soon he would reach out to touch her and she would touch back. His wife. They’d come a long way since that bar in the Marina. Every year they went there and had a drink to celebrate the anniversary of their first date.

  It did not look good. It did not look good at all. He stayed up after she left, unsuccessfully trying to console himself in the numbing whirl of late-night cable until his eyes stung too much and he could no longer watch.

  After he awoke later in the morning, he made coffee. While it was brewing, he walked to the café around the corner to get one of those big-ass poppyseed muffins he liked so much. It was all part of his Sunday ritual. He went back to his apartment and read the paper. Twice. Even the travel section. He listened to early R.E.M. and thought about a screenplay that he knew he’d never write. Which was also part of the ritual.

  He would see Anna the next day. They worked together. Well, not really together, but at the same company, along with about a thousand other people. They had little work-related interaction, a fact that now made him grateful. They’d struck up a conversation at the office Christmas party a week before. Hence the date. Hence the fuck that was over before it began.

  People started dying. Parents, uncles, aunts, coworkers. Even neighbors. Mr. Tillman, for instance, who only a year ago was running in 10Ks and doing Tai Chi at the nearby park (he once showed Aaron a few of the moves, the names of which still stuck with him: “Cloud Hands,” “Grasp Swallow’s Tail,” “Parting Horse’s Mane,” “Sleeves Dancing Like Plumb Blossoms”). Cancer, of course. You could see how utterly devastated Mrs. Tillman was. Then she died, too. And plus there were the more random middle-aged you-can’t-fucking-believe-it deaths: Terry Finkel, car accident; Jenny Blackstock, also cancer, breast; Dave Gingrass, some kind of ski lift accident in Austria. And even kids, teenagers, which was the worst. Through it all, they held each other closer, tighter. They didn’t sleep as well as they used to (had they ever slept well?), especially when they knew their two daughters and one son, all full-fledged teenagers now, one about to leave for college and seriously considering becoming a vegetarian, were out, away, doing things they didn’t want to know about—but of course they did want to know, and that was part of it, too, the wanting to know and the not wanting to know. It could happen no matter how good you were, no matter how you lived your life. No big revelation here, they admitted, but still, it made you think. How terminally fragile life was, is. It was true: Being a parent changes everything. Your children—they become everything. You make them but then they remake you. And then they leave.

  That afternoon she canceled her plans to catch a movie with a friend. Instead she stayed in, writing letters, doing laundry, enjoying the lonely hum of Sunday. The weather was shitty anyway, and what else was new, the fog pouring in as if propelled from a hidden machine. She saw it from her apartment window, pulsing with what seemed to be a secret purpose, the wind bowing back the trees and swirling garbage and dust. (Anna lived three blocks from the ocean, in the Sunset District, where the sun could disappear for weeks on end. Fogville, she called it, which, sure, got to you psychologically, but she’d been desperate to find a place and had unfortunately signed a yearlong lease.) Repeatedly, she tortured herself by playing the night back in her mind. Fuck. She shouldn’t have left. Why did she leave? She should have stayed. Everything would have been better if she had stayed. Now there would be this awkwardness, because of that and because of Aaron’s, well, brevity. Fuck. Would it have killed her to stay, to lay in his arms and wake up together and then maybe even go out to breakfast and talk about how they’ve both always wanted a house with a porch and isn’t Cormac McCarthy amazing?

  The last few men she’d dated were fond of wearing black (and nothing but black) and hanging postcards of obscure Latin American poets on their bedroom walls. So Aaron seemed like such a breath of fresh air. She was just beginning to think she only attracted a certain kind of guy: angst-ridden, distant, unable to accept their anonymity in the world. They usually played in bands or were trying to start bands. Aaron did not play an instrument and he did not quote Rilke. He was from Ohio.

  One of her coworkers, Candice from Product Development, had pointed him out to her. “Hottie alert,” Candice had said as Aaron approached and then passed them on his way to the kitchen.

  Anna usually didn’t pay much attention to what Candice said. She was one of those women who Anna had decided to tune out—the kind who were always criticizing other women as too fat, too thin, too slutty, too librarian. But she was right about Aaron. He made her tingle in all the right places.

  When she saw him at the Christmas party she hesitated about going over to talk to him. She felt that high school dor
kiness that had never left her completely, especially when it came to situations such as this. Just do it. After all, this could be your husband, was the whimsical thought that whispered its way into her head, one of those out-of-the-blue aberrations that you think of every now and then because at some point in your life it’s going to be true, it will be your husband. Think of something dazzling to say so you’ll have a good story to tell your kids. Then she laughed to herself. But she didn’t have to do anything: He was the one who came over to her. She told herself to remember what song was playing as he made his way toward her, but she got so involved in the conversation, and so taken by his smile (genuine, sexy, a little shy), that she forgot.

  There are mysteries, though. He had to admit that. No matter how close you think you are, no matter how truly double-helixed your lives seem to be, you can’t know everything. Secrets exist, uncertainties linger. Inevitably there are those things that get lost along the years, that happen and somehow are never picked up again. Like what she said the night of their first date: how she liked it rough. What was that all about? They’d never discussed it, not once in all these years and decades together (there were grandchildren now, the mortgage paid off, a second home in Lake Tahoe, etc.). It had passed. It had simply passed. Although somehow it had haunted them, too. At least it had haunted him. He wondered periodically over the years, whenever there was an especially long silence or when they felt out of sync and foreign to each other, if she was thinking of that, how they’d never talked about it, how she’d liked it rough and she’d never had it rough all these years.

  She hadn’t wanted to die in a hospital. So they brought her home. They gathered around the bed—their bed—and took turns gently pressing ice cubes to her mouth to moisten the perpetual dryness. “Dad,” his children said. “Don’t stay up too late. Get some rest, K?” Then he was alone with her. Somehow, he knew. He sat and smelled her smell and remembered as much as he could and watched the final breath of air escape from her lips. Then he kissed them one last time.

  All right: He told himself not to dwell on it on the bus ride to work, but of course he did. His only distraction was the woman standing next to him. She was stunning. Occasionally the sway of the crowded bus caused their shoulders to haphazardly rub, which every time it happened caused a pinching little ache to bloom in Aaron’s chest. Was she thinking the same thing he was, which was this: What if they started talking? What if he made some comment about the book she was reading (a thick doorstop of a novel, something called Underworld) and then that spurred a conversation and it went so well that they exchanged email addresses (safer, better than phone numbers) and that led to a date and another date and isn’t it funny how love can strike where you least expect it, like for example a rush-hour bus that smelled of old bread and had no empty seats, and because of this, the lack of seating, they happened to be standing next to each other on a certain day at a certain time…but he didn’t say anything and neither did she. And his would-be wife/lover/soul mate/mother of his children got off at the stop before his and he watched her disappear into the downtown crowd, lost forever, his life completely altering in a space of five seconds and then returning back to the way it was. He often had these inwardly dramatic commutes. And Mondays were particularly fertile for such imaginings and longings.

  First thing at work, he got settled in for the week, checking his email, returning phone calls, planning out his calendar. He wasn’t ready to do any real work yet. He was easing into the day, pacing himself. And all the while Anna hovered in the back of his mind like a bad movie he’d seen a few days ago but couldn’t stop thinking of. How would he approach her? What would he say? How would she react? Where was the best place to talk to her?

  She worked on the other side of the floor. Her cube had an actual view. You could make out part of the Bay Bridge, the stream of cars and invisible commuters constant, never-ending. People driving no matter what. He still wasn’t clear on her job and what she did exactly. Some kind of market research, he thought uncertainly. When time for lunch rolled around he hadn’t walked over. He decided to let it go a little while longer, to see how the afternoon developed.

  But not long after, he was proofreading a report on the ability of young children to recognize company mascots and logos and then there she was, standing at his cube.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Have you had lunch yet?”

  “No. I was just starting to think about it, though.”

  There was something in her eyes, her entire face even—a look. A definite look that said yes, maybe something could happen here, it wasn’t too late. He told himself not to stare, to continue to use language and stand up and grab his jacket and ask where she wanted to go, what she felt like eating. But the look paralyzed him. He just sat there, happy. At least now there seemed to be, if nothing else, the possibility of the possible. It gave him hope.

  Acknowledgments

  These stories originally appeared in various print and online literary magazines during the past thirteen years. So foremost thanks to the editors who championed them and helped bring them into the world for the first time: Roxane Gay; Brock Clarke; Hannah Tinti and Maribeth Batcha; Rob Spillman and Jon Raymond; Linda Swanson-Davies and Susan Burmeister-Brown; Rae Bryant; Adrian Todd Zuniga; Victoria Barrett and Andrew Scott; Ryan Bradley; Celia Johnson and Maria Gagliano; David Cotrone; Matthew Salesses; Steven J. McDermott; Thom Didato; Stephanie Fiorelli, Adam Koehler, and Andrew Palmer; David Lynn; and Meg Pokrass.

  Thanks to my agent, the inimitable Michelle Brower, for her unwavering, continuing, and much-needed support and guidance.

  Thanks again to Victoria Barrett, a force of nature, superstar editor and publisher, for saying yes and giving this collection a home. Your passion and talent and what you’ve accomplished with Engine Books—it’s all truly inspiring.

  Profound gratitude also goes to both the Tin House Writers’ Workshop and Squaw Valley Community of Writers.

  Lastly, thanks to my family: my mother and my late father; my wife, Maria; and my children, Ethan, Celia, and Henry. Your love and support are behind every word.

  And a final tip of the hat to the following folks for encouragement, sympathy, commiseration, and more: Carol Keeley, Amy Wallen, Heather Fowler, Bonnie ZoBell, Alicia Gifford, Roy Parvin, Peter Rock, Andra Miller, Aline Ohanesian, Richard Lange, Jim Ruland, Justin Hudnall (and the entire So Say We All crew), Gina Frangello, Joshua Mohr, J. Ryan Stradal, Stacy Dyson, Sally Shore, and my friends and coworkers at Intuit.

  About the Author

  Andrew Roe is the author of The Miracle Girl (Algonquin Books), which was a Los Angeles Times Book Award Finalist. His fiction has been published in Tin House, One Story, The Sun, Glimmer Train, Slice, The Cincinnati Review, and other publications, as well as the anthologies 24 Bar Blues (Press 53) and Where Love Is Found (Washington Square Press). His nonfiction has been published in the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Salon.com, and elsewhere. He lives in Oceanside, California, with his wife and three children.