Instant Love: Fiction

by Jami Attenberg

  She closed the door, smiling, flushed with emotion, then turned to the May Sarton room. Inside, the room was much darker, though not grim, just wanting, waiting for the sunset. And then there was the bed, the same beautiful bed, and the bedding, pink this time, but the patterns were the same, the pillows dripping with beads arranged almost identically, the same brass nightstand, this one with a nick on top, perhaps from a careless delivery man, the same picture frame, the same secret smile paired with a serious one, surrounding a deliriously happy and, on further inspection, potentially deluded Bill, and the exact same desk, no heirloom, no antique-store find. She opened a few of the drawers. A receipt from Pottery Barn sat in one. She rubbed her hand on top of it. It felt slick and new. It smelled like fresh paint.

  The swell inside of her dissolved like salt in water. One pinch, and then it was gone.

  THE PATH to the peak was marked with strips of yellow tape, reminding Christina of trees turned into tributes for missing soldiers. Kong had taken an early, commanding lead, so they were walking at a brisk pace, but every so often, Christina would spot a yellow flag and think of men in uniform, making stirring speeches before heading into battle. What if this were a forest of soldiers? What if I were crossing enemy lines right now?

  Kong quickened his pace, jerking her forward, as if he knew she was daydreaming. He sniffed the earth as he walked, but in a busy and self-important way, so that it appeared as nothing more than a glance at the world around him. As the trail grew steeper, his tongue dropped from his mouth, and he began to pant loudly. He didn’t slow, though, skipping all of his usual stops at the promontories. He wouldn’t rest until he reached the peak.

  Christina tumbled after him, calling his name, begging for him to slow down. She tugged on his leash, finally digging her heels in the ground, and he stopped. “Let’s just stand here for a second,” said Christina, and she breathed deeply. “Come on, you bastard. Yes. Just stand still.” She stared at the trunks of the trees, and then lifted her head to gaze at the nest of leaves suspended above her. The woods were silent, except for the sounds of her breath and that of the dog, and general forest noise: tiny bugs buzzing, the wind in the leaves, an occasional chirp of a bird.

  And then there was a crunch of leaves, footsteps perhaps, off in the bushes behind her. She heard another rustle, turned, and saw a group of birds taking off quickly in the sky, their delicate wings fluttering in fear. Her heart began to pump even faster. Kong stood, and crossed behind her. He didn’t pull on the leash, but he stood there, alert. He sniffed at the air, and then he inched forward. He looked back at Christina. There was another crash of foot to leaves, and then, slowly, another. Kong let out a bark, and then there was a mad moment, where Christina could have sworn she saw a deer, but it was just for a second. It was definitely an animal, though, off in the trees, and it had heard Kong, and it was scared. Kong pulled on his leash, but the noise drew farther away, until the footsteps became one with the other sounds of the forest, and they knew they were alone again.

  “Good boy, Kong!” she said.

  He turned his head back at her, and looked her directly in the eye. She reached her hand out tentatively, and thumped his back with her palm. Her voice skipping, she said, “Oh, OK, there you go.” She laughed a little bit, and patted him once more. “Yes, good, yes.”

  WHEN BILL RETURNED from his trip later that night, he found Christina sitting on his favorite chair in the corner of the living room, a copy of his second novel, On the Emperor’s Ridge, in her lap, and Kong at her feet. He jumped up when Bill entered the room, raced around him, then after a few pats, loped back over to Christina’s feet, and sat.

  “What’s going on over here? Did we make friends?”

  “We made friends,” she said, and recounted the incident in the woods.

  “I can’t tell you how much this pleases me,” he said.

  “I feel like everything is going to be fine now,” she said. “I think he just needed to save me.”

  “He truly is a king among dogs,” said Bill.

  “Well, I don’t know about that, but I do know that he’s a good boy,” she said, and patted Kong’s rump.

  “OVER HERE,” said Christina. “That’s where I saw the deer.” They were heading back up to the peak again, so Bill could see where the actual bonding had occurred. Bill had insisted on getting up the next morning, as soon as the sun rose. He said it was because it would be cooler earlier in the day, but she thought he seemed a little restless, and, frankly, jealous at how close Christina and the dog had become in just one day.

  “You’re always going to be the leader of the pack,” she assured him. “I’m just the damsel in distress.” It amused her tremendously that this dog saw her as weak and defenseless. But she had to admit she was glad he had been there, even though it had been just a deer.

  “That’s the spot,” she said, and pointed.

  Bill and Kong stood there, both peering into the bushes, as if they could uncover some great mystery of the universe with the force of their vision. My heroes, thought Christina. She walked up the trail ahead of them, near a pair of manzanitas, and leveled her footing on a small space of flat land. Behind her she heard them traipse into the bushes, and the crisp noise of their feet on the leaves. What does he think he’s going to find in there, she thought. Deer shit?

  Christina placed her hand gently on one of the trees. Kong let out a bark, and she heard Bill hush him. She began to finger the peeling trunk, scraping off small bits along the way. As she watched the skin flutter to the ground, she felt extremely satisfied. It was as if she were tidying up the tree. Grooming it. When I am done with this tree, it will be the most perfect tree on the mountain. I can make it work. I can make it happen.

  There was a rustle, closer to her, and she looked up the trail, past a trail marker, past a mess of shrubs, till her gaze arrived at a mountain lion, the eyes in his squat head glowering at her above his slender frame, his long tail cutting calmly through the air. Christina jumped back, and fell into a tree. She felt her head collide with something, a branch maybe, and it stung deeply. She sunk to the ground. “Bill!” she yelled. “There’s a mountain lion!”

  “I can’t hear you,” she heard back.

  “Bill, there’s a goddamn mountain lion!” she screamed. She met its golden eyes. It still hadn’t moved.

  Suddenly Kong came running out of the bushes and up the path, Bill following a moment later. Kong took a moment to make eye contact with the other animal, and let out a low growl. Bill stood back away from the two animals and Christina. Kong began to bark, and then burst up the trail toward the mountain lion, who turned and ran. The dog followed him into the bushes. There was a tumble of noise, and some moans and cries of an animal, and then the rustle of leaves. Bill gingerly walked to Christina and leaned down next to her. She put her hand on the back of her head. It felt sticky. “I think I’m bleeding,” she said.

  And then Kong emerged, triumphant, from the bushes, and Bill stood.

  “Did you get him boy? Did you get him good?” He strode over to his dog. “Holy shit, did you see that, Christina? He took him. He fucking took him.” Kong gave a mighty shake of his head. “That’s why I have this dog, for exactly that reason.” He slapped Kong’s back, ruffled his head. “Yes, Kong, good dog. Yes, you are.” He pulled his hand up and examined it. It was red. “He got you a little bit, didn’t he, boy? But I bet he looks worse.”

  Christina hoisted herself up on the manzanita tree, the flakes of trunk falling under her fingertips.

  He turned back and smiled at Christina, his cheeks burned with red. “Did you see him, Christina? Did you see what my dog did?”

  AFTER SHE GOT out of the hospital (eight stitches, not that Bill would know; he spent the day at the vet’s office while Kong got a series of painful shots), she headed straight back to school. Mandy would put her up. Mandy never liked Bill. She’d be the first to listen when she talked about how he loved his dog more than her, told her how to talk and
act and walk, how he’d given her typewritten instructions on how to deal with a dog, how he’d watched her like a hawk when he wasn’t off being famous somewhere, how he was slowly closing in on her but only on his terms, only when it was convenient for him, how he almost got her, she was this close to falling for it, how all the little things she liked about him in the beginning were all the things she hated about him in the end.

  I see you, beautiful you, walk in the door, and a simple, potent pain strikes me in my chest. I would like to ask that woman to dance, I think. If I could I would. But your eyes are pointed south, like you’re not looking for any company (or trouble), just a quiet night out, you and a drink. So I decide not to intrude on you and whatever thoughts might be fighting for your attention. I know what that’s like, the fighting. Instead I drop two more quarters in the pool table, rack ’em, and start yet another imaginary game with myself. After I’ve sunk all the stripes, I order another pint. As I’m leaning on the bar, chalking up my cue, checking out my next shot, that’s when you finally notice me, that’s when you speak to me for the first time.

  “Nice night, isn’t it?” you say, and I say nothing.

  You’ve heard of pauses, right? People use them for dramatic effect in speech a good percentage of the time, and then there’s that small sect of people like me, where we’re pausing because we’re thinking of what to say next. And in that time, a million thoughts zing through our heads, until we are ready to pick through them all to find the exact right thing to say. Sometimes even more than a million.

  “It sure is,” I say. “We got lucky this year. Indian summers are pretty rare.”

  “It’s my first fall out here. Out west. I was afraid it was going to be raining the whole time.” Your head is down when you begin to speak, and then your neck rolls to the side, slowly, brushing against your shoulder, like you are stirring from an afternoon nap; and the words roll with you, with your neck and head, your hair brushing your bare freckled shoulders, until finally I can see your face, that your eyes are still sleepy, that the freckles on your shoulders match the freckles on your cheeks; and then at last, when your eyes are wide awake and meet mine, it’s as if you’ve just taken my hand and held it. “But it’s been lovely,” you say.

  Most people I meet don’t know how to wait for the next sentence. They think I’m ignoring them, or judging them. Or that I’m shy. Or that I’m slow, which I am, but not in the way that you’re thinking. They’ll turn their head after the first ten seconds, start talking to someone else, or look over their shoulder to see if there’s something distracting me. It unnerves people. I know it.

  “New in town?”

  I motion to the stool next to you, raise my eyebrows. You nod. “Please,” you say. I settle in, balance the cue against the bar, drop the chalk next to my idling pint glass.

  “New, yes,” you say. “Everything is. New, I mean. New job. New apartment. New life.”

  My mother (unofficially) clocked my longest pause at a full six minutes in 1986, after she asked me if I had taken out the trash. I had, in fact, done it, but I just couldn’t remember, and then this song came on in my head, and I was off. I think it was something off of Rush’s 2112—I had been making my way through a stack of albums my older brother had left behind when he went off to college—and all those songs were long as hell. During those six minutes my mother grounded me twice, and almost slapped me. This was when I had just started pausing. My parents thought I was stoned throughout most of my freshman year of high school because of it.

  I pick up the glass, examine the rich red jewel color of the beer. Then I take a studious sip, a long one, like I’m trying to get drunk, which I’m not. I hope I don’t give you the wrong impression. “Where you coming from?” I say.

  “Back east. New York. Westchester.”

  My parents took me to all kinds of doctors in Portland after I started pausing: speech therapists, pediatricians, psychologists, psychiatrists (I can never remember the difference between the two, only that I needed to see both), and even a neurologist. The CAT scan scared me, and the psychiatrist (or was it the psychologist?) put me on so many meds I used to cry at night, when I wasn’t so numb I was staring into space. I begged my parents to let me be.

  “I’ll talk faster,” I said. “I’ll try.”

  Finally we went back to where we started, our family doctor. “Maybe,” he said, “he’s just thoughtful.” And for some reason, that seemed to satisfy everyone. In a way, I was the opposite of dumb, although I wouldn’t necessarily call me smart, either.

  “So how’d you end up out here? Most people you meet in this bar either grew up here or go to the art school in the next town. Tell me you’re not a first-year sculpture student.”

  You laugh. Oh, you have a charming laugh. It’s thick and hearty. Your laugh is blowing my mind.

  “That’s sweet of you to say. My undergraduate years have long since passed. Want to see my ID?”

  I laugh back at you. That I can do, no problem. Laughing is easy, though I don’t find much funny. I’m picky, I suppose. I hold my hands up, palms toward you. I give, you win. You’re no college girl.

  “I got divorced.”

  You drop your eyes to your hands, an imaginary ring still lingers on your finger. There is a delicate white line still wrapped around it, a final reminder you’ll have for a while. And in the center, the perfect center, is one perfect freckle.

  I’ll bet you had a big old rock. I bet you made him treat you right. You seem a little fancy. Your hair is cut nicely around your chin, your skin glows like the moon on a clear night after a good rain. You look like you’ve been taking care of yourself, like you’ve had the time to take care of yourself. Most women I’ve met around here don’t even know they’re supposed to take care of themselves like that. Or maybe they’ve just got better things to do with their time. I’m not judging you, though. You’re just different is all.

  “And then I had to work again. So I got my old job back, but they could only place me out here. Just for a few years, they said. But I’m glad. It’s good to be working again. No, I really am. I forgot what it was like. To work.”

  I scratch behind my ear, I look down at my beer, I shift on my stool. Then, finally, grudgingly—it feels just like that, like my brain and my mouth are wrestling like brothers, and when I speak my mouth is saying “uncle”—I release some words: “I believe you.”

  “Plus it’s quiet out here,” you say suddenly. “I like it. I like it a lot. People seem to just talk all the time out east. Talking, talking, talking.”

  You put your hand in profile in front of your face, then bend your thumb against your other fingers like a pair of flapping lips. I notice the large diamond studs piercing your shapely, milky ears. There they are. There’s what’s left. It stings my eyes to look at them.

  “It’s like, enough already,” you say. “Just be quiet.”

  You’d think it’d be hard for me to get by in high school and even college, and I’ll admit my teachers stopped calling on me after a while, especially since the other kids loved me, saw my silence as a subversive act designed to throw the teachers off their perfectly timed lesson plans. I aced every test I took, though. As for making friends, well, I grew up with everyone I went to high school with, so they were accustomed to my pauses. Just as Ricky—now he’s Rick, I know, but old habits die hard—Waterman added five inches and forty pounds his sophomore year of high school, and another two inches a year till he graduated, I added ten seconds, then twenty, then thirty, to my pauses. Now I average a minute, minute and a half most days.

  The pauses are different lengths for different people. Like Ricky, I see him once a month, I go over to the house, hang out with him and Cindy and the kids, and I might not pause more than ten, fifteen seconds when we’re sitting out back, drinking beer. We always talk about the same things, listen to the same songs on his boom box, and he always looks the same, give or take a couple of pounds, so there’s nothing new to distract me. But when I m
eet someone new, someone like you, and you’ve got a new story, and such a different way of talking than most people around here—don’t get me wrong, I like it, I like it a lot—it takes me a while to get to my next point. Right now, I feel like I’ve been pausing forever.

  “I’m being coy,” you say. “Sorry.” You name the large software corporation close to Portland. Strategic thinking. Quarterly reports, 401(k). An office. A small one. But there’s a door you can close, and that seems important to you. You say “three weeks vacation” like it’s a mantra, then shyly admit “after the first year.”

  I drop a coaster, bend over and pick it up, wipe it off. “You landed south,” I say. “Most folks just move to the city when they work there. Looking at you, I would have called city.”

  “I’m hiding out,” you say, and you look over both shoulders like someone’s going to come up behind you, eyes huge, eyebrows raised, long sweet neck extended, and it’s exaggerated to make me laugh; you’re kidding, is what you’re telling me, only I know that you’re not.

  I pick up the chalk, fit the groove onto the tip of the cue. I check it twice, blow once. I act like it needs to be perfect, but really I’m used to all kinds of flaws. Everyone’s got their thing that makes them stand out. A buddy of mine—I’m not going to say who, but if you live here long enough, you’ll figure it out—he’s on the meds now. His wife left him for some guy from Chico who came into town for a few months to teach at the art school. They’d only been married for a year, so I guess if there’s any time to show your cheating colors, she picked the right one. Might as well get it all out in the open in the beginning. Anyway, the split really threw him for a loop, so I guess his dosage is pretty high, and it’s been wreaking havoc with his digestive system. You’ll be out on a Friday night, here, or at one of the restaurants downtown, and then all of a sudden he’ll clear the room, it’ll smell so bad. But do we stop being friends with him? No.