But what I really want to say is that the sight of her bony shoulders outlined in her black sweatshirt brought me back to something, which I wouldn’t exactly call reality because I was already in reality, but which I might call context. Her unsmiling gaze made me feel like I had access to some former version of myself, one not tormented by those things currently tormenting me. She was a vision. Now she smiled. She handed me the Frisbee.
“That guy was scared of you for once,” she said.
Ahh—that was the face she’d been wearing: the stored-up joke.
“What was going on in there?”
“Why? Did he say something?”
“Grumble, grumble, grumble.” She imitated him, shaking her head.
“I guess he expected the place to himself.”
I tossed her the Frisbee. We threw it back and forth a while, under the lights, in the drained concrete fish pond. The surface was smooth and even; it was like playing on a court. We did better than usual. The Frisbee made a horrible sound whenever it skidded along the concrete, so we played more cautiously than if we had been on grass. Her hair, which she’d pulled back in a ponytail, became a half-restrained mess, then a quarter-restrained mess; her limbs became limbs I wanted to wrap myself in. The wonderful thing was that I could simply look at her, watch her move. My wife.
When the Frisbee skidded to a stop somewhere between us, we both went to pick it up, and Patty said “Enough Frisbee,” and we headed for the bedroom. There, she discovered that I wasn’t wearing any underwear. Rather than asking why or commenting on it verbally, she hummed and smiled.
My underwearlessness reinforced the transgressions of her ditch day and she put her hands on the crown of my head in a not-so-subtle hint to drop to my knees. We fucked like we hadn’t fucked in a long time. This was not the comfort of Owen and Patty making love. It was the animal thrill of two people fucking. The areas of my penis that had been chafed by the panties now felt extra-sensitive, raking in a sharper sort of pleasure, and despite my wanting to make it last forever, I came quickly. Life is like a dream, with alternating zones of clarity and obscurity.
I used to want to apologize: I’m sorry I fucked you. I meant to make love. I’m sorry I was transported like that. I see the error of my ways. Because I believed that sex was all about connection, consideration, communion, and all those other C words. I
couldn’t handle the reentry from fucking to love. Eventually I figured it out. Patty helped me understand that she wanted to fuck too, sometimes, wanted even to get fucked by me sometimes. We came down together: that was our communion.
She lay her head on my chest and looked up at me. This was one of the few angles from which, physiognomically, she didn’t look sneering, snotty, or superior. She looked like an ingenuous and vulnerable young woman. I could only handle that look in small doses. Life takes ingenuous and vulnerable creatures and makes them suffer in ways they cannot understand, and then it snuffs them out.
“Let’s open a little wine,” she said.
She lit candles, too, and we ate dinner—“gourmet” mac-and-cheese, salad, Brussels sprouts—in the bathrobes my aunt and uncle had given us as wedding presents.
“This is the wrong wine for Brussels sprouts,” she said.
“All wine is the wrong wine for Brussels sprouts.” I laughed at my own joke and noticed that while she laughed, too, something was holding her back. I suspected the elation of ditch day had finally caught up with her, that her mind had begun, yet again, to reckon with consequences. I raised my glass.
“Here’s to ditch day,” I said. “A reminder to take a break from serious stuff once in a while.”
“To ditch day,” she said half-heartedly. She sipped her wine, then held up the glass again, eyes watching the guttering candle flame. “And …” She looked me in the eye now, as if steeling herself to make an admission. “… to CJ. Happy Birthday.”
“Happy Birthday,” I said.
My mind flashed to the look she’d given me in the doorway of my office, the Frisbee, the fucking: ditch day. Not a real ditch day, a true ditch day, but a ditch day with a purpose, a Stocking family holiday. I knew she had deliberated all evening about whether or not to tell me, that she had gotten caught up in my belief she was letting loose “for the hell of it,” but in the end she had to tell me why she hadn’t gone to work that night. She had to give me, the last person who wanted it, a good reason why she’d taken the night off.
The next morning a thick silver fog covered Our Little Hamlet by the Sea. Patty and I drove down to the local coffee shop. She seemed preoccupied by something, probably the hangover of ditch day, and I too was preoccupied, by the low-level but persistent fear that the Cartoon GI would emerge from behind some pillar and call me out. I couldn’t get my mind off the panties. I was going to have to retrieve them soon. I was most concerned with what I was going to do with them. My latest ploy, after dismissing the possibility of just washing them (they would be stretched out), was to make it look as though the cats had pulled them from the drawer (“they were protruding, I guess”) and stretched and damaged them in the course of their feline play, discovered by me too late to save the underwear from ruin. Far from foolproof, this plan seemed downright stupid in the light of day, thus my lingering anxiety, preventing me from being attentive to my wife.
“That was fun last night,” I said.
“Yes it was.” She spoke matter-of-factly, not disagreeing, but also not engaging me.
“Is something the matter?”
She placed her hand on mine, and I knew instantly it was nothing I had done. After a moment she spoke. “I was up really late last night. Couldn’t sleep. I probably should have gone in to work or something. I don’t know, that’s not it exactly. It’s always his birthday or a holiday or the week he died. I forget, you know, for a while, and then it all comes back the same as ever.”
“Talking about it is healthy.”
“Talking about it
is
healthy.” She nodded. “But nothing changes.”
“Nothing changes.”
I moved my hand on top of hers. We sipped at our coffees.
“I need some sleep.” She looked far away, then smiled. “Do you want me to drive you back?”
“I’ve got some errands to run down here. I think I’m going to hit the bookstore or something.”
“In this fog? What if you get lost?” Her eyes sparkled. She seemed fine now. This was a remarkable capacity of hers—she could shrug things off by sheer force of will, could take something that was bothering her and force it not to bother her any more.
She went home, leaving me in the coffee shop parking lot, and I walked toward the park in the fog. The streets were humming with commuters, some of whom gave me questioning looks—why isn’t
he
on the way to work? It’s funny. When I was working at the office every day, our neighborhood didn’t seem so full of 9-to-5ers, but once I began working more at home,
walking the streets to stimulate my mind (a block for a block), I noticed how crowded the streets got when people left for work or returned home from it.
The park was deserted, save a few moms arriving at the playground near the north end of the park, pre-K kids in tow. I felt self-conscious walking alone in that park, as if a sign were flashing above my head (with a glowing nimbus, now, in the fog):
PERVERT
. I made my way to the restrooms and went in. Empty. I found my stall, which someone had defiled in the meanwhile, climbed up the stall walls, and reached my hand up to the ledge under the roof. Nothing but cool air coming in from outside—the roof was raised above the wall. I moved my hand from side to side. I couldn’t actually see up there, but I could feel the entire thickness of the wall, to the outside edge, and the panties weren’t there. I climbed down. I had picked the right stall, yes. I scanned the floor. Nothing resembling panties. I went outside, retrieved a stick from under a dying tree, and poked through the trash can inside the restroom. I managed to scatter paper towels all over the floor but found no underwear. Standing there in an ankle-high swamp of crumpled paper, I realized the underwear might have fallen off the wall to the other side. I experienced the epiphany of having found something mentally before going to confirm its location physically. I had obviously pushed the panties too far and they had gone all the way across the top of the wall, falling from the eaves on the outside of the building. I left the restroom and walked around the building to the back, where the shrubs pressed against the wall. I made my way to the corner below the men’s room and pulled at the shrubs. Nothing up top. And, after I got on my hands and knees in the damp dirt,
nothing under the shrubbery but old candy wrappers and a wax cup. The panties were gone.
At that time, I did not see those lost panties as harbingers of everything irretrievable. I was too wrapped up in the question of the moment: How would I explain to Patty what had happened? Walking home through thinning fog, I decided to play dumb about all of it. Patty might not even notice they were missing. And if she did, why would she suspect me of taking them? She wouldn’t. This resolve gave rise to a secondary set of questions: Had someone taken the panties away? The custodians? Someone else? The Cartoon GI? And what if it was the Cartoon GI? Would he try to return them?
I was being haunted not only by the loss of the panties, but by the potential for that loss to reverse itself, like those dreams Patty and I had talked about, in which the dead come back to you as alive as they had ever been. The only thing I could do to distract myself from all of this was to write a completely new letter to Henry Raven. In that letter, I saw nascent glimmers of a woman on the page. As I recreate the letter now I find it hard to believe that these words—her words!—came into being as my fingers moved across the typewriter.
Dear Mr. Raven,
Thank you for the new picture—aren’t you handsome in front of that red truck! As I mentioned, I had seen your picture before, on the D.O.C. website, so I knew you were handsome, in that noble warrior way
of yours. But even though I had mentally “cleaned you up” dozens of times—you do look sleepy in that mug shot—I still had to take a second to catch my breath when I saw you in front of your truck, all newly-shaven and fresh-looking, and I knew I had made the right decision about following my intuition and writing to you in the first place.
I believe—and don’t think I’m trying to convert you, because I am not a religious woman—that the universe communicates with us via signs and that we have to remain open to them at all times, or ignore them at our own peril. Fate, with a sign or two along the way, has led me to this moment, to me writing this letter, to YOU. I believe that, and I wonder what else fate has in store …
The other day, while I was still awaiting your letter, I sat drinking coffee on the landing of my apartment building. (It’s more like a walkway for all the second story units, but there’s enough room for a chair, and on a very clear day you can see a sliver of shimmering ocean on the horizon.) Some things had not been going my way at the school where I work—I’m a teacher’s aide—and some people I thought I could trust turned out to be talking behind my back to the administration. People don’t realize how political teachers can be. I don’t want to bore you with the details, but I was in a miserable mood, and I thought some fresh air and coffee might help to boost my spirits. It didn’t work. I sat out there and began thinking of all the bad things
that could happen. It was like I couldn’t stop my imagination from “going there.” And one of the things I thought of was you. I confess I had begun to give up hope that you would write.
I tried to clear my mind and think about what I was going to cook myself for dinner (pork chops with applesauce, it turned out), and I found myself absent-mindedly staring at the big maple tree beside my building. The wind was rippling the leaves and it was kind of pretty, so I kept my eyes on it for a second or two. Nothing I hadn’t seen before, really, but it was like something said to me: “Stop, wait. Appreciate the moment.” And so I watched the tree longer than I would have and you know what happened? A single leaf dropped. Just one. No leaves on the ground, mind you, and no others falling. I waited. No others fell. And I knew it was a sign, reminding me to appreciate my life. Just because one leaf falls, doesn’t mean the whole tree does, too.
From that moment on, I didn’t worry. I knew you were going to write back to me. And I knew that no matter what happened “out here” or “in there,” we had already created a third place.
What if that red sun (it is almost down past the horizon now) was your red pick-up, coming to pick-ME-up?
Please write back as soon as possible.
Sincerely Yours,
Lily Hazelton
I waited four days to post Lily’s letter. If writing it was like building a bomb, dropping it into the mailbox was like lighting the fuse. I waited for the explosion. With waiting came worry. How do people fall in love? I was pleased with the way she was coming out, as I learned to incorporate more of “the stuff of life” into what had been a generic woman. Still, I worried. Would Raven fall for my Lily, heart and soul? If he did not, if my plan fell flat here, Patty might drown in her sea of sorrow, or drift away from me forever …
I assuaged my worry the only way I knew how: research.
I went back to the GBS Books store near my house. I admit I was seized, upon entering the place, by an anxiety of influence. If I were to seek (and follow) outside advice in my seduction, would Lily seem less organic, more like a phony seductress out of some book? I have long known that the difference between good art and bad art is attention to detail. My Lily would have to be as complicated as any real woman, which was very complicated indeed. I would have to be vigilant, lest my research overwhelm me and turn Lily into nothing more than a paper doll. I ended up finding and buying three books—for under $20 total—in that moldy-smelling palace of words:
Literary Love Letters
, Horace Johnson, ed., a collection of love letters from various famous literary figures to their lovers;
The Greatest Love Poems of All Time
, no editor stated, with a gold-leaf cover and built-in pink satin bookmark; and
Seductress 101: How to Get and Keep a Man Using Your Inner Bitch
, by Susan Natches, MFCC, MSW, LCSW.