Safe from the Neighbors

by Steve Yarbrough

  I knew exactly what I was going to have to tell her, and I think she must’ve known, too. I would say all the most predictable things: that I really did love her and, in a perfect world, would gladly have spent the rest of my life with her, enjoying her company and all the excitement she offered. That I’d never met anyone else like her. That I wished she could somehow forgive me if I’d caused her pain, and that I wanted to remain her friend. All of this, except the last, was true. I knew, as surely as I knew my name and date of birth, that we couldn’t possibly be friends, and what I really wanted was for her to leave and spare me and my family the misery that was sure to come if she stayed in Mississippi.

  I got her voice-mail but didn’t record a message. I called her off and on until almost eleven, each time with no luck. I could have climbed into my car and driven over to her place and knocked on the door, but I didn’t. Instead, cell phone in one hand and remote in the other, I sat there on the couch watching Ole Miss and Arkansas on ESPN, hoping for a glimpse of my daughters.

  OVERNIGHT, a cold front blew through, and when I woke up the next morning, our recent spate of warm weather was over. I turned up the heat, then flicked on my cell phone. It immediately began beeping, informing me of three text-messages and a voice-mail.

  The first text was from Trish: fooey pig boo hoo they beat us how r u? The second was from Candace: We’re at a Waffle House in Little Rock and it’s three a.m. I miss you, Daddy. I hope you’re all right. I’ll send another message when we get back to Oxford. Her last text said, We’re here, Daddy. I love you. I hope you’re okay. Maybe you could call me tonight?

  Jennifer had left the voice-mail. “Luke,” she said, “I wanted you to know we got up early and are leaving a lot sooner than we’d originally planned. I should be home before lunch. So if you’ve made a mess there—well, you still have time to clean it up.” In the background, I heard a woman laugh.

  I put on a pot of coffee, then took a look around the house to make sure no evidence remained from the other night. I didn’t see anything that didn’t belong there, so I went outside for the Memphis paper and read it while drinking my coffee.

  The previous evening, I’d decided to call Maggie first thing this morning and get it out of the way, so whatever her reaction was going to be, I could put it behind me. But now that didn’t seem very smart, or even right. I’d see her at school the next day, and we could make arrangements to talk after work. She at least deserved a chance to tell me whatever she wanted to in person, though that wasn’t an encounter I was looking forward to.

  Jennifer pulled up in the driveway at a quarter till twelve. One look at her, and I knew the conference must have gone well. She hopped out of the car, slinging her hair and smiling, and I hugged her, grabbed her overnight bag and carried it inside. In the kitchen, while I made us sandwiches, she told me that the poetry editor of the Missouri Review had heard her open-mike reading, walked up to her afterwards and said he’d like to publish her work, and that when she thanked him and explained that three of the poems had already been accepted by Tin House, his response was “What about the other two?”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I told him they hadn’t been taken—that in fact his journal had rejected them last spring. And he said, ‘Well, everybody makes mistakes. They’ve been taken now,’ and then he smiled and put out his hand. So I gave him the poems, and he’ll send me a contract next week.”

  “Jesus. You could have a book soon.”

  “You know, I never even dared to think about that. But now it doesn’t seem so far-fetched. Those are two of the best lit magazines in the country. Maybe I’m not as bad as I always assumed.”

  In that moment I understood what bound us together, beyond simply a shared history. We both thought we lacked some essential quality that might’ve made us consequential in ways that we weren’t, but the main difference was that she’d never quit trying to find it in herself. Whereas I always had tried to find it in someone else, some historical figure or local exemplar, hoping to parlay those lessons into making myself special.

  I put the plates down on the table. “I never thought your poetry was bad,” I said. “It’s just that I never really understood it, though I tried to. That’s a comment on me, not you. You want something to drink?”

  “Now that,” she said, “is a comment on you.”

  “What is?”

  “Asking me if I want something to drink before I’ve had a chance to respond.”

  She was smiling, so I said, “I’m sorry. By all means—please respond.”

  “First I want something to drink.”

  “Like what?”

  She was standing behind her usual chair, where she’d sat for years when all four of us were gathered around the kitchen table. There was her place, and my place, and Candace’s and Trish’s. We never moved around. If I’d ever walked in and found her or one of the girls in my chair, I wouldn’t have known how to react. That’s what marriage and family do to you—or what they’d done to us, anyway—and right then it seemed utterly correct. Who doesn’t want to know where he or she belongs? Who wants to have to look for a place?

  “How about some champagne?” she said. “Got any Freixenet?”

  I’d always suspected I would make a poor criminal, that I’d either fail to lie when that was called for, or that I’d just lie badly. Now I knew my suspicions were sound. “Freixenet?” I said.

  “Uh-huh. Like you drank the other night with Ellis. Except that, as you and I both know, Ellis Buchanan hates champagne. He won’t even drink it on New Year’s Eve.”

  We faced off across the table. Oddly enough, she was still smiling. It struck me then, as it does every time I remember the moment, that Jennifer can’t act. She is what she is, and everybody knows it. And that day she was anything but displeased.

  “Well?” she said.

  “I guess one of the girls mentioned it.”

  “I guess so. Candace called first and never said a word about it. I could tell something was bothering her, though. But Trish wanted to tell me how hilarious it was that you and Ellis had spent an evening sitting there sipping bubbly and discussing the dead.”

  “Didn’t you check with him?” I asked.

  “No, because I know he’d lie. He’d lie so convincingly, and with so much charm, that I might be tempted to believe him.”

  If I’d been an abject canine, this is the point at which I would’ve rolled over and exposed my belly, begging for mercy and then requesting to be finished off. “What do you want me to do?” I said. “Or say?”

  “I don’t want you to say anything. I really don’t. What I want you to do is sit down and listen while I say a few things. But before that,” she said, “I want you to go over there to the pantry. Down low, in the right-hand corner of the bottom shelf, there should be a bottle of Cook’s that I want you to take out and put in the freezer.”

  What she wanted to talk about, after my shaking hands jammed in that bottle of champagne beside our Thanksgiving turkey, was poetry. Specifically, the writing of it. She wanted to tell me what she’d heard a poet say at the conference. She said he wasn’t exactly major, so I wouldn’t know his name—not that I would’ve if he had been.

  This minor poet, whoever he was, participated in a panel discussion about workshops, and almost nothing he said made any sense. “For instance, he told us that on the first day of class, he hands out a sonnet—always Shakespeare’s ‘My love is as a fever’—and tells them to memorize it. They think they’ll be tested on it, or they’ll have to get up and recite it in front of their peers, and that makes a good many of them drop the class. Which he said is a nice by-product of this particular assignment.”

  She shook her head. “Anyway, the next time the class meets, he tells them they have forty-five minutes to write a sonnet of their own, then gives them the topic. Since he lives near Pamlico Sound in North Carolina, his favorite theme lately has been the pollution of the Noose River. Can you imagine having to w
rite a sonnet on that in forty-five minutes? Or even forty-five days? Or ever? Nearly everything he said was just about that crazy.

  “But then he said something that really got my attention. That he hates it when he hears other poets advising their students to write what they know, because they almost always take that to mean ‘write what you yourself have experienced.’ In his opinion, that’s too limiting. He always tells his students there are different modes of knowing, and that you should be free to write about whatever you can imagine.

  “And that got me thinking about what we know and how we know it. I thought about it all the way home. It was pretty clear to me from talking to Candace that absent any verifiable facts about how you spent your Friday night, she still knew something—even if she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say what it was. And it was clear to me that I knew it, too, and had for a while. And it really has nothing to do with facts and, in some sense, experience.

  “The facts, as I know them, are that Saturday morning there were two empty champagne bottles on the coffee table and that Ellis didn’t help drink them. For all I know, you drank both of them yourself. That’s a possibility I wouldn’t be able to exclude, based on the information I’ve got at this moment. Everything else belongs in the category of what I can imagine. And that’s just as real to me, maybe even more real—though I don’t know, and can’t imagine, whether you can understand what I’m saying.

  “The other thing I know is my own reaction to all of this. I’m not surprised—not even particularly disturbed. But there was a time, Luke, when I would’ve been both, and it wasn’t as long ago as you might think.”

  I believe I must have put my head in my hands by that point. I don’t know for sure, but it seems like that’s what all this would demand. I do recall trying to figure out what to say when she saved me the trouble.

  “If you want me to know things differently from how I know them now,” she said, “you can give me the facts. If you don’t want me to, just keep them to yourself. You’ve always valued them more than I do anyway, so as far as I’m concerned they’re all yours. Use them however you choose. To me, they’re worth nothing at all.”

  She waited to see if I would speak, and when I didn’t she got up and walked to the freezer, took out the bottle of champagne, stripped off the tinfoil and popped the cork.

  I PULLED INTO THE DRIVEWAY over at Maggie’s at a quarter past five. Her car was gone. I’d called her as soon as I left my house—or what had been my house until today—but she hadn’t answered.

  I climbed out and walked towards the back door. I wasn’t wearing a coat, only a threadbare pair of Levi’s and an Ole Miss sweatshirt, and it had gotten really cold. Leaves crunched beneath my tennis shoes. She hadn’t raked the yard the whole time she’d lived there.

  I looked in the kitchen window. All the lights were off, and darkness was falling, so I couldn’t see much: just a newspaper lying on the counter, a coffee cup beside it and next to that a yogurt container. Thinking maybe she’d gone shopping, I sat down on the steps to wait, hugging myself and calling her every few minutes.

  Earlier, after Jennifer and I drank that bottle of champagne, she’d reached across the table and taken my hands in hers. “Luke,” she said, “I want us to go to bed and make love. Then I’ll ask you to get up, walk out of this house and drive away. Where you go’s up to you, though I’m sure your dad could use some company. And I want you to tell the girls—whatever version of the truth you like. One story’s about as good as another.”

  So we went off to bed, and neither one of us said a word the whole time. She kept her eyes open, which was unusual for her, and at one point, I remember, she reached up and ran her fingers through my hair. Then she watched while I got dressed, and when I looked at her and started to tell her I loved her, she shook her head and turned towards the wall. I used my key to lock the front door.

  I sat on the steps at Maggie’s until I was almost frozen. Then I went back to the car, started the engine, turned on the heater and sat there a little while longer, calling her a couple more times, with no answer still. Finally, I put the car in gear and drove out to the big new Wal-Mart on the highway but didn’t see her car in the lot. It wasn’t parked at Sunflower Food Store or at Piggly Wiggly. There was no Mercedes at the school, either, just an old VW that belonged to one of our janitors and the football coach’s pickup.

  I ran by her house again, but the driveway was still empty. I thought about going to see Ellis, but it occurred to me that Jennifer might’ve hit on the same idea and I wouldn’t know it until he opened the door. Unless I called first, and I didn’t have that in me.

  It was after six o’clock, and then I remembered promising my father that I’d drop by. I dreaded the conversation we’d need to have, though I already understood it would come as no surprise. For all I knew, the whole town was already talking, and while it was hard to imagine anybody calling to say his son was screwing around, he’d certainly found out somehow.

  I backed out of Maggie’s driveway and headed for town. At Loring Avenue I almost took a left, to go to my house and beg Jennifer to forgive me and let me try to start over. But that argument, if I was going to make it, wasn’t likely to succeed tonight. And my sense of things was that the time to start over had come in August, when our daughters left home. Instead of doing it with her, I’d done it with someone else.

  All the lights at my parents’ place were off. It seemed unlikely they’d gone to bed this early, so I called and the phone rang ten times before I gave up. So I got out of the car, walked over to the house and rang the bell. When nothing happened, I pounded on the door for a minute or two, again with no result. By that point I was concerned. Absurdly, I whipped out my cell phone and started to call Jennifer, to ask what she thought I should do, though I managed to press the red button and stop the call before the phone rang on her end. I know it didn’t go through because she told me so the next morning.

  I fumbled with my key ring until I found the one for their front door and unlocked it, only to discover that the chain was still on. So I backed up about three feet and threw my shoulder against it, which accomplished nothing except giving me a stinger. When the pain eased off a little, I reared up again and this time performed my best approximation of a karate kick, and the door splintered and smashed into the Sheetrock.

  “Dad?” I hollered. “Hey, Dad?”

  But he never answered, and down the dark hallway I heard my mother groan.

  THERE WAS A GUY who used to hang around the history department when I was at Ole Miss, a tall, slope-shouldered man with thin silver hair who always wore a maroon Harvard Windbreaker, no matter what the weather. You’d see him sitting on a couch near the elevators in Bishop Hall, his legs crossed above a few inches of hairy ankles, since he never seemed to wear socks. He’d be reading something rarefied like the New York Review of Books or the Times Literary Supplement, often reaching down to break a piece off the gigantic Hershey bar invariably lying in his lap.

  At first we thought he must be a latter-day grad student, a guy who’d retired from his job and come back to pursue some degree he’d probably never use. But then a professor told one of my friends the real story.

  This gentleman didn’t need a graduate degree because he already had one, a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in Eastern European history, and he’d written two books I soon found in the library. The first dealt with an event called the “Miracle on the Vistula,” when the Polish army, commanded by Field Marshal Pilsudski, repulsed the Russians in the Polish-Soviet War of 1919–1920, and the second examined the liquidation of a Czech village after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. One day in 1972 he’d been summoned from his classroom and informed that his son had been murdered after exiting a subway station in Queens. A couple months later, his wife, an economist, told him she’d fallen in love with a woman and was going to leave him. His response was to drink a bottle of Scotch and try to hack off his arm with a butcher knife. He’d been in and out of instit
utions ever since, and was at Ole Miss only because his best friend, the chairman of our department, had actually given him a room in his house.

  I couldn’t understand why he’d done any of this. After all, it wasn’t as if he’d caused his son’s death. As for his wife, well, she’d figured out her sexual nature was different from what she’d thought. Sometimes, I reasoned, things just happen, and as long as you’re not at fault, why blame yourself? At the age of twenty, I failed to grasp the difference between guilt, which can almost always be atoned for, and grief, which can only be borne.

  On the day my father was buried, I stood at the edge of the grave, flanked by my daughters and my wife. Ellis was there, too, as were quite a few of my colleagues and several students from my honors class. Selina and Ramsey came, my boss doing his best to conceal his displeasure. I didn’t yet know it, but Maggie had e-mailed him from North Carolina the day before, saying that teaching wasn’t for her and she’d decided to go back home. That must’ve confirmed the rumors he’d been hearing for several weeks, that she and I had become more than friends. He hadn’t said anything to me about it, given the circumstances, but earlier, at the memorial service, I’d noticed him studying me and my family, shaking his head as if he couldn’t fathom why an otherwise intelligent man would do something so stupid. I didn’t understand it myself.

  We’d invited a few people over to our house for a lunch catered by our faux French café—leek tarts, duck with cranberry mustard, that sort of stuff—but I couldn’t eat a thing. Jennifer had told me that once everybody left, she wanted me to talk to Candace and Trish and let them know, before they went back to school, that I’d be moving out. I had the distinct impression she was eager to get on with her life.