The lovers laugh
As they fall asleep.
The chimes of their bells
Ringing in each other’s mouths,
Still ringing in each other’s bodies.

Later, they dream of losing each other in fantastic ways.
One thinks of a bear attacking their camp ground,
And wonders which one would defend the other.
One dreams of an earthquake
That splits the world in two,
And spits them on opposite sides of a great hole.

They wake and look cautiously
Through the slits in their eyes.
At each other, at the room, and the changing world.
Is this the same world that they put to rest last night?
Is this the same world that their bodies together
Mourned and celebrated?

They stand and shake night off their shoulders.
(hesitating for a moment)
Is this the same world—full of disappointment
And predictable sadness?

They rise,
But some of their parts stay behind.
The shadows of their bodies on the sheets
Stay put, holding one another lightly.
While morning turns to day,
And the day broadcasts the world to them,
They remain, refusing
To acknowledge
The light in the window.
(...to the full post)

PREFATORY NOTE

For some time now I have been fond of words. However, either in denial of the avuncular logic that you ought to think things through before doing or saying them, or in allegiance to some sort of eastern principle that you ought not, I often use words incorrectly. This should not deter the typical reader. My vocabulary, at the very least, exceeds the national average. I am not proud of my errors. The idea, often used to haunt ESL students, that a language properly spoken is spoken as a native speaker would speak it, irrespective of the fact that native speakers often do not speak properly, has never made too much sense to me. Still, by most measures the tendency continues. Perhaps this owes to a lack of linguistic/ academic rigor; perhaps it has something to with the idea that the sonic worth of a given word does not always line up with the exact meaning of that word. In any event, the reader will please be cognizant of such.

It also bears mentioning that I have always appreciated stories which are able to incorporate some basis for their writing into the narrative—e.g.,…and so the mad man forced me to write my memoirs but without any compound words;…and so I decided to put it all down on paper before I ate the poisoned yams; etc. I do not intend to reveal any such basis at this time, however.

CHAPTER 1 (hereafter ‘***’—as the story’s ordering will not be exactly chronological)

“…well I knew you were going to say that. You see, I can hear the future, but only statements preceded by politeness.” Margie Melnik replied with a sort of sunken firmness that was as much imitation as her own.

“You know one day when I have the means I’m going to take you away from here and lock you in a tower;” continued Tic Verdoliak in the style that so often resulted in him being misunderstood, or outright mistrusted, by others, but which to them seemed as natural and softly certain as the seasons.

“I didn’t hear that.”

“I’ll say this one more time doing my level best to comprise my confession entirely of words reasonably calculated to admit of only the interpretation that I intend…”

“Great start.”

“I have psychic faculties. I am prescient. I know the future…” said Tic.

“Well then I shouldn’t have to continually remind you to floss, tooth decay…”

“However,” he interrupted and then paused in a way that gently showed that the interruption was not out of concern for time, “…these psychic faculties are at slight variance from those which seem to lend themselves ever more to murder mystery television.”

“Yours respect the 4th Amendment?”

“I only receive these psychic intimations a mere moment before they are actually realized.”

“…”

“…”

“Even with this limitation you should still be able to beat me at gin.”

“Well, this winning streak of yours is not explained by any amount of cunning or competence on your part as much as it is that I can’t just see what card’s next unless it is fated to be chosen…I think. From what I’ve gathered, I can’t see alternate futures—a limitation perhaps explicable by the shotgun timing of it as much or more than any sort of predetermination in the apparatus of things...maybe. You might also be palming aces.”

“…”

“…”

“How far into the future are we talking?”

“I never clocked it.”

“Do it.”

“Now?”

“As much as it seems unnecessary to give a psychic a heads up let’s say I’ll pick a number between 1 and 8.”

“That’s not how it works.”

“You can’t accept numbers?”

“No, it’s that I could only tell you what’s going to happen once there’s not enough time to even mouth the words.”

“You mean you couldn’t even guess when I’m about to raise this finger?”

“Not in time to alert you to your own design, no.”

“…If there’s no practical application to your mysticism does it really exist?” Maggie said in a way that suggested she was more and more convinced of it as the sentence went along.

“Yes…I can still…hear it” he struggled for the word in a way that might have been expressed by placing a question mark after each syllable in the sentence or by having William Shatner read it.

“Well, I didn’t ask you about a falling tree, so, I’m not sure that hearing it is all that significant.”

“Oh what that rapier wit of yours lacks in subtlety is more than made up for by its speed” he rebounded.

“It’s funny, you know, you who so often are unsure of what you did mere moments ago can see moments ahead.” She continued, “Hey! I got it; perhaps rather than any sort of heightened awareness or ESP you just sort of traded in your focus on the more distant future, present and past for an increased emphasis on the unimpressively near future.”

They both looked confused.

“Even if I did know what the hell you meant by ‘traded in’—as if the component parts of my consciousness were the result of some sort of haggling—, I wouldn’t agree and I’d likely—though certainty would be outside of powers—still pinch you.”

“Ow! Asshole.”

“…”

“…”

“Alright, raise that finger at an as yet undisclosed time.”

“…”

“Hah!!” pointing to the raised finger.

“You saw me move it.”

“I knew before I saw it.”

“Well, how do I know that?”

“Because you love me.”

“Oh, shut up.”

***

Margie Melnik was born Marguerrite Melnik in a middle-class suburb of Cleveland. Hers was not unlike the youths of so many around her apart from a few more or less notable exceptions. At some point she went from being a characteristically happy person to a person categorically concerned with, and committed to, being happy. If at first blush this seems unclear, the difference is certainly subtle. This subtlety was borne out by the fact that the shift did not produce many appreciable differences in her. She, and those to whom she explained the change, most likely thought it either a very natural maturing into consciousness, or—as the case may well have been for those with whom this metamorphosis was shared not because of any outward signs of similar transformation in the confidante but, perhaps, because of other more fleeting connections, (be they the indefinable sorority which follows from peeing together or from sometime drug experimentation)—a simple misunderstanding, and misapplication, of the lessons of womanhood. Incredulous types might have described it as the beginning of any thoughtful life or a mere impulse to put feelings into words.

That is not to say, that she paid any additional mind to the whims that from time to time claim hold of us all. Rather, (and it’s uncertain whether this was means or ends) she saw an emotive component to perception and accorded it the consideration she thought due. Few people would find this revolutionary; likely even fewer women for reasons which quite possibly owe to the unity of all women borne of that single hotline to the moon and the tides which they are forced not only to share but through the unlikeliest of places. . (Suffice it to say at the point of transformation she became aware that she wanted to be happy. Whether or not this must have followed from her having been—or having seen herself as—unhappy is unclear.)

Margie was proud to be a female and if she was more inspired by socio-political issues involving women it was only because their place was so often misunderstood. However, Margie’s concern with emotions was decidedly different than the will to catharsis so prevalent among women. Perhaps this was due to her ambitions to be a writer which she thought needed something more than mere candor if they were to be realized—the days of blanket denial long since supplanted, she reasoned, by nights of cleverly woven conundrums which operated to similar confounding effect even if they required an adroit finger to point out the labyrinthine turns which most only walked in their sleep or the comparable psychic condition that obtains when people speak of casserole dishes.

It cannot be overstated that her dream of being a writer was subsidiary to her abiding concern with happiness. True, she did not think the two that distinct but just the same made an effort to not see them conflated. She recalled a conversation with a decidedly unsuitable suitor where this came up: He was a singer in a friend’s band who was known in small circles for getting naked on what makeshift stages their gigs provided them and then collapsing, naked, into a corner after what one could only assume was an emotional crescendo for him where – the jerking of his body seemed to suggest though his head was hidden – he was reduced to tears. “How are you?” he asked Margie at a party. “Walking tall and laughing easy” she replied. “You?” “Well, if it wasn’t for bad luck I wouldn’t have no..” “Reason to get naked and cry?” she interrupted. “No luck at all.” He finished. “Come on give yourself some credit. It’s more than bad luck; it’s bad instincts.” “What’s bad instincts?” “You know: the whole self-destructive front man thing. The band stands poised for untold success thanks to the industrious rhythm guitarist but the damn singer is just wound a little too tight and keeps fucking up.” “But if it weren’t for his emotional depths the band would be nothing.” “Yeah, I suppose it’s songs like ‘the crushing darkness’ or ‘oblivion please’ that put asses in the seats.” “Do you want me to sing ‘the flower’?” “Whatever keeps your toe tapping. Are you always upset?” “Life is suffering.” “It is when you’re around. Don’t people suffer enough with their own lives?” “I stand up to the darkness and give them strength to persevere. I die so they can live.” “Jesus didn’t crucify himself—and he didn’t strip—you pretentious putz.” “He wasn’t given a chance to.” “Ok, how do you keep yourself so sullen all the time? Do you flog yourself too?” “It’s just a matter of thumbing the jagged edge of life all the time.” “Is that what you’re thumbing?” She walked away.

Margie too had a sort of middling mysticism about her: she could, with varying degrees of veracity, tell how people felt. She did not think this was unique (as many women would not); rather she thought it was a common enough quality among women to justify their having their own state (somewhere in the Balkans maybe). Her ability, however, did not always begin and end with conversations involving the word ‘vibe’ as one may have assumed. Hers was skill, and a useful skill at that as this world grows more and more veiled. At times Margie may not have realized that her receptive powers were influenced by the things she thought she’d felt, for reasons that were thereby substantiated even if not explained—a common limitation somewhere between a fait accompli and a priori (nunc pro tunc maybe?). However, Margie was decidedly different in that she believed that by receiving messages of the kind from others she could better understand her own transmissions such to take control of their content and release. Whether she was able to actually send some sort of corpo-telepathic messages or not was made somewhat irrelevant by the fact that she thought most everybody could feel what others were feeling if they’d just try. Just the same, she too thought she was somehow marked (though on certain days she might have called it a smudge instead).

***

“Is man alone in his desire to press to the beating heart of the essential strangeness of things?” asked Tic in a way that certainly seemed a joke.

“What…oh…men stand alone, but it’s not the heart that they seek in pressing towards the chest of things. It’s woman alone who is not content to wallow in the pretexts and imprecations of that essentially strange creature that is man.” replied Margie in a way that was meant to lightly mock the questioner into submission.

“Hah! Women only care about the order of things in so far as that order concerns them. It is man who can meditate on the relationship between the cat and the dog quite apart from his interests implicated therein. Can a woman ever live slightly to the side of things?”

“I was raised quite happily just over from Shaker Heights if that’s what you mean but stop talking like that.” Margie responded in a way that in the past had been punctuated with a silencing kiss.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know, like a monk.”

“Monks are silent.”

“Well, I’m sure you can make up for whatever was lost in authenticity by a little self-immolation.”

“Isn’t that why you were run out of Shaker Heights to begin with?” said Tic in a slightly exaggerated but still playful form of his previous tone.

“I wasn’t from Shaker Heights, as is clearly shown by the fact that I do not smell all briny”

“Do they smell briny? They’re landlocked.”

“Well ‘sea to shining sea’ never had a better home than Shaker Heights.”

“Love it or leave it.”

“I’m leaving you.”

***

Truth be told it was now somewhat difficult for Margie to remember how she had been before meeting Tic. She remembered herself longingly remembering past events that now could only be viewed from her present vantage point at his side; and as such, were of decidedly slight concern. Apart from figuring into present states by a connection which was, even to her, largely inexplicable if somehow invoking as yet unexpressed metaphors, she rarely thought of the past. That is, she made no attempt to seal herself off from the past. Why would she? Hers was a happy past. She just questioned Emerson’s logic that the past ought to be dragged into the “thousand-eyed present”. Wasn’t there something inherently contradictory about honoring the present by ceremonially subordinating the past? Why not leave it be? she reasoned. Instead the operating philosophy with which she now tinkered—she always had at least one—might best be explained as trying to feel nothing until something comes along. Though some might find this stupid, rest assured it never took too long for something to come along. This was a fact which Margie thought vindicated the whole enterprise though others might be apt to see it as an even more persuasive demonstration of its uselessness (sort of like thinking that the fact that you were able to resume breathing justified the practice of holding your breath).

***

“You know there aren’t too many guys who can stand on one leg for as long as I can.”

“There aren’t too many girls looking for flamingoes” she replied as surprised by her response as his statement.

“…”

“…”

“Most of the guys you’d meet out there wouldn’t even let you touch their food.”

“Is there something you want?”

“I just want you to know that it’s a topsy-turvy world.”

She smiled.

***

While Margie was by most accounts a rather unique sort it should not be suggested that her singularity was absolute. Rather there was something about her which, when properly contextualized, recalled her home town, its denizens and their manner with the sort of precision that can be attained for the fleeting moments when one tries to hang on to an emotion they’ve just felt—almost as if you could still see its reflection in her eyes. She said ‘pop’ instead of ‘soda’ and ‘gym shoes’ instead of ‘sneakers’ but it was more pervasive than just a predilection for local expression (it was even more than the contempt she felt for people who said ‘bubbler’ instead of ‘water fountain’ or ‘standing on line’ instead of ‘in line’). And if it could not be viewed at regular intervals its cause seemed reasonably clear: Margie was always very fond of her youth. If eventually she would come to stray from some of the endemic vices that suburban lifestyles are shot through with today, and began to speak differently, and began to change her diet and the recreational pursuits that she would prefer, there remained something less susceptible to change by anything short of amnesia. How, then, can this be reconciled with the previously mentioned fact that she rarely thought about the past? Because she didn’t really think of it as a ‘past’ at all. She’d once heard someone say ‘tomorrow doesn’t have to be any greater than yesterday.’ It seemed like a platitude on the order of a greeting card but she liked it. The past did not need to be tended to in order to affect you. She was who she was. And who she was couldn’t help but be shaped by what she’d been. It was thinking herself in circles like that which might have hastened her latest revelation (supra re: thinking nothing…).

Though, as stated, this phenomenon never really changed in Margie it did at times fall prey to that autonomic ordering process within us all which sometimes covers its tracks by making pain simpler than pleasure. That is to say, at times it slipped into a sort of dormancy. However, when Margie went home the collective carriers of this system pressed out towards Margie’s pores to get a look at the land of their birth. This produced in Margie a feeling which was at once as light as the ether and still leaden in the detail with which its dictates expressed themselves. This contradiction led to those very dictates often being impossible to understand or obey but no less capable of producing a churning that would swear itself perpetual by the continuing struggle between the opposing—or at least incompatible—forces. The result was, as most travelers have experienced, a mild constipation.

***

“… I … don’t know what to say.”

He bends his left elbow and allows himself to fall, slowly rolling, in that direction. He lies recumbent looking up at the ceiling or beyond. Successive expressions seem to dawn in him yet wilt before they are breathed. Several minutes pass.

“The male ego is a …” she says in a way that could have been intoned with budding anger or fatigue.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Several more minutes pass.

“It’s a strange apparatus.” He says, immediately realizing that his wit could not help.

“…”

“Are you pissed?” The emphasis was included to express his surprise. There was a rough protocol in this as in most of even the strangest things, he thought.

“Yeah, I’m not down with that … whack … shit.” She said with staccato bursts like gunfire to which were added an additional measure of shock for the fact that she had never said ‘whack’ before.

“What?”

“I don’t care about all that…but how do you think that makes me feel when you suddenly don’t want to touch me when hit with the news of your wounded pride.”

“It’s not that…”

“There are other things we could do.”

He had almost no room for the inexpressible feeling he felt at hearing her say this—as if it was written in his mind somewhere—so he continued, “OK, but it’s not like I’m sitting there mourning the suddenly wan prospects of future sexual conquest. It’s embarrassing.”

“It’s self centered.”

“Any woman should know that there is something which factors in onlookers’ presumptive opinions into self-consciousness. I’m thinking about the way you’re thinking about me and I’m embarrassed. Does that help?”

***

He knelt and hid his face. But he did not do this with the desperation that makes you think that it’ll all go away; nor was it with the thought that if there’s any justice in this world it would demand that you see your end coming. Rather he did it because he knew full well that the way people had looked at him throughout his life—somewhere in between the way you’d stare at a deformity and the way you’d stare at a star—would offer him a singularity that he’d gladly refuse today (or so he flattered himself offering testament to his enduring arrogance: he wasn’t that good looking).

It didn’t work today. The thought which typically followed from someone just missing a train—If I hadn’t checked the part in my hair again I would have made it—was usually silenced when Tic thought that he had more foresight than he should already (the fact that this assuaged regrets about the past, notwithstanding. Silly? Yes, but so marches the mind of someone who thinks they’ve a gift). Today nothing of the sort took place. Today the world did not approach him in the ways he’d thought had been agreed to. The thought occurred to him that it’s the sort of people who think they hold themselves to high standards that never apologize because they’d have to acknowledge more than just the fact that they were wrong—they’d have to acknowledge that the world was not as they’d thought.

Looking back he might have known something was going to happen. (But I suppose looking back you always might have known something was about to happen.)


***

“Are those underwear between the couch and the wall clean or dirty?”

“Sort of in between.”

“You know God loves you just the way you are but he loves you too much to let you stay like that.”

“Don’t you ever feel like the only part of this world that isn’t tragic is that sliver that’s pressed between our wet, naked bodies?”

“Why are we wet?”

“Pool.”

“…”

“Even within us, there’s just no way around it. We are being pulled apart by the horrors of this world. Sometimes it feels like a breeze. But it can’t be resisted for too long.”

“You’ve got honey in your voice tonight.”

He laid his head on her lap.

***

People started calling him Tic because he once got so high he started very lightly convulsing. Tic would seem a cruel nickname for someone given to fits but people will tell you that he sought them out—he liked being so high that he had almost no control over such things. There is an argument to be made that this was a gift from his mother who, in somewhat similar fashion, enjoyed offering reports on the progress of her indigestion to her child. He’d always assumed that one of the reasons she did this was because she liked that physical manifestations substantiated the depression in her which people stopped believing long ago. At the very least these things interested Tic: psycho-sexuality; psychosomatics; telekinesis; etc. However whatever the latent abilities and mechanics of the mind, the force with which it could turn against you—should capitulation to the demands of those around make strategic sense—was not to be underestimated.

‘Where was she’, he thought. Surely there should have been something in the immutable shape of the world which would bring her back—something like the thing that brings your bowling ball back. Then he remembered a party he had been at years earlier. He walked up to a girl and said “Don’t I know you? Weren’t we on that game show together called ‘Name that Jewish athlete’?” She played along by saying “Yes, you beat me in the lightning round by answering Moses Malone.” He approached her again later and said “Say we don’t know each other and I’ll walk out the door.” She did and he did.

He lay in his bed. Since she left him, he’d gotten into the habit of turning the music off and giving himself a good talking to before falling asleep—not in the way that a high school guidance counselor would give someone one about the need for extracurricular activities to show breadth and initiative, more in the way that a father might attempt to get to know his son again after the son took to calling him ‘guy’. But as the morning, seeming as it did to gather around itself, was able to spare enough to light his lime green walls, being alone with his thoughts was not necessarily what he wanted. Still, he always believed—and the trite formulation belied the vindication he’d found in its results—that it was those thoughts that were only half thought—the other half consisting of drift, spectacle and, perhaps, his ideas about proper pant length (to wit, no sense in waiting for the creeks to rise before you realize that pants that are too long just don’t drape right) etc.—which were damaging. Occasionally these cathartic assignments were crowned with a sort of prancing distribution of forgiveness—a leftover from a revelation during a college course called, Poli Sci 606: justice as love and benevolence (grade: B-; student won’t stop giving hugs; pretext suspected). But today his mind could not seem to pass the psychic fog of morning. An adherent to his previously mentioned theory might have argued that as he had only just woken he did not yet have the cognitive heft to complete his rounds, rather than thinking it demonstrative of some inherent flaws in the theory and its practice. He tried a quick service of forgiveness—but there was no one to forgive. He thought of the way that the color of the room and his lifestyle were almost full realizations of a dream he had had years earlier which, reduced to its simplest terms, could be called a desire to live in the seventies—though he had long since lost the feeling which he pursued into that desire (something about the supernatural properties of earth tones and the way you can smell peace on polyester in the wind) and certainly found nothing waiting for him here at the finish line. He thought of his dream from the night before but in it he found nothing indicative of any other world such to lend the morning additional enchantment—rather, just a stale reordering of the same world (more specifically, the same world but with daily boat tours through the typically dry halls of his days). He thought of the stricken and the charmed (would someone with congenital whooping couch feel their mind halved the way he sometimes did?). He thought of the sleep which he sought as a mother tongue wrapping him in its warm folds. He thought of the ‘other things’ they could have done. He thought of the girls whom must have been lined with breeze-spread and wave-washed Newport pleasure: girls whose blue eyes lit up at the mention of perennials. He thought of a life lived through a gradual transformation as his mind narrowed and the bright waters rose. He thought of another girl from whom you’d leave to go to work and you’d think only split-hoofed devils could force such separation. He thought of another girl the facility and fluidity of separation from whom was like a wire. He thought that everything is irrevocably sheathed and that beauty—like all things—can only live within its own confines. There’s no access at the middle. To enter, you’d have to trace it back to an arguably imaginary beginning and start re-writing it. Whether that’d help him remember or forget was unclear to him.



***
(...to the full post)

She met him on the first hot day that April. She was walking back to work during her lunch break. To break up the monotony of the hours in her cube, she had taken to eating her lunch at her desk and walking the neighborhood during her lunch hour. She would walk up 68th street towards Lexington, fantasizing as she passed Hunter College that she was one of the students. She was in the habit of fantasizing about being anyone who was not her. She passed the Hispanic nannies with their white charges sitting in the park, talking on their cell phones. Some even smoked, only feet away from the pristine heads of the children they took care of. The few upper-class mothers who hadn’t farmed their kids off looked at the smokers in disgust. She would have traded places with either of the warring parties, though she certainly would have chosen to be the smoker first.

he thought about being the Mr. Swirley man. This was a nice person to think about being, because anywhere you went you were met with delight. Instead of walking into a dim felt-trimmed office and sitting down in a dim, felt-trimmed seat without arousing the notice of anyone, Mr. Swirley was met with fanfare everywhere. This was a nice way to live, it seemed.

She thought about being the crazy man who stood on the corner of York and 67th street every day. He had erected a tiny cemetery out of popsicle sticks in a bank of flowers that sat upon an office building’s retaining wall. He wore a security guard’s outfit and motioned for you to cross once the “walk” sign had appeared. At least he got to be outside.

There was something rewarding about being selfishly consumed by her hatred for her job. She had flare, the way she trudged around. She wasn’t about to be one of those depressing people who hides her depression. And so, when she got asked what she did at parties, she quickly said, “I’m a secretary.” The mixture of embarrassment and pity she got as a response was delicious. Fuck all your fellowships, and degrees, she thought. She remembered an Onion headline that read: “This receptionist’s job is just a stopgap till I die.”

She hadn’t always been like this. You might wonder what it says about Sarah’s character that her first taste of professional adversity left her rejoicing in bitterness. Don’t. It won’t profit the story at all for you to think along those lines.

She hadn’t been like this at all. She had been a freaking skipping fool. She had been a person who had sometimes been so filled with love that she had embarrassed those around her by telling them how she felt. But it isn’t quite right to say that either, because she hadn’t always been like that. The truth is, she had always been happy and then sad.


This particular day she finished her cigarette about a block before returning to the hospital’s campus. This denied her the pleasure of giving dirty looks to the people who gave her dirty looks for smoking outside a cancer hospital. She looked around guiltily, considering dropping her cigarette in the gutter before deciding against it. She chucked it on the ground, crushed it with her heel and then bent down to pick it up. Before she could grab it, though, a black lab that had been watching her movements carefully bent his head to eat it.

“Your dog is eating my cigarette,” she said before looking up.
When she did she saw a man with curly red hair looking down at her from dark glasses. She smiled. “I don’t normally chuck those on the street. I was just about to throw it out.”

He nodded. “It’s okay. He eats rocks too.”

She stood up. She had to fight the urge to dust herself off, though she hadn’t touched anything dirty. “Those are carcinogens, though.”
“That’s true. He also eats broccoli.”
“Maybe that will counter act the cancer.”
He smiled. “I was thinking so.” The light changed. They crossed the street, both looking up every once in awhile to see if the other one was looking. They were going the same way. “Do you work around here?” he asked.

“Unfortunately. Right down the street. At the hospital down on York Ave.”
He nodded. “Ahh—know it well.”

“Oh yeah?” she raised her eyebrows. “I hope not too well.” His silence told her not to pursue the topic. “I’m Sarah,” she said, turning sideways to face him and stopping in the middle of the sidewalk. She extended her hand.

The lab sat down dutifully under her hand. He laughed and reached to shake her hand. “Jake.”


Sarah ended up running into the same man, walking the same dog, the next day. The day after that was Wednesday, and every Wednesday she ate lunch at the diner with Mary and Ernestine, but on Thursday she saw him again. And they planned to meet for lunch on Friday.
(...to the full post)

Margie was a woman replete with contradictions. As is their (and so, her) nature, even these contradictions had contradictions. What contradicts a contradiction? certain aspects and appearances of coherence/cohesiveness.

One such contradiction: despite at times being dominated by some of the most demanding compulsions one could conjure, Margie could be described today, in a way that was summary but still almost wholly accurate, as lazier than a sack of potatoes.

Yet, this, as most of these contradictions, could be explained: she was not always like this and would not always remain like this.

Margie was by most measures a homebody. However, Margie did not approve of sedentary lives, and so, sought what few fleeting hints of an itinerant lifestyle could be obtained while wearing a bathrobe. One such attempt: Margie thought that having an advanced enough understanding of the world around her to allow her to take various types of drugs, inspiring in her various types of derangement, while maintaining some semblance of the equilibrium with which she lived her life would mean that she really didn’t need to leave the house—sort of having the world (with the drugged visions/moods as proxy) come to you instead. However, her theory was rarely substantiated in her life by successful experimentation with any but the most invariably pleasant drugs. The failures included numerous instances of her licking her teeth for extended periods of time, chewing on her gums or concluding that civilization was no more than a euphemism for bladder control. And so it often was that Margie often fell short of the image she had of herself.

If these descriptions seem like they do not describe all that much there is, once again, an available explanation: so deep was her contradictory nature that it was not enough to house presently contradicting principles, but, rather, there were just as many conflicts which took place over a time line. That is, Margie’s life was marked by successive changes which to the casual observer could seem equally explicable by some sort of jarring revelation about the proper path of a life as by some realization of something fatally flawed or unbearably repulsive in herself: she zigged and zagged (and in so doing defied general description). And for a long time the shifts found their respective explanations from a new theory or from some visceral rejection of an old one in about equal share.

One instance decidedly closer to the latter saw Margie decide that whisky when mixed with coffee, bananas, B12 and something apparently prescribed to amnesiacs for a brief time in the 50s would have curative properties. Some hours later she was asked to leave the cab that she had been directing to various spots in town that she suddenly thought would be inexplicably lit in the frozen, moonless night (though this garbled supposition of hers was instead taken by the cabbie as a greeting from what he thought to be a country near his home that he just couldn’t place) after it became clear that she had no money in what looked to be an all-camouflage outfit donned for reasons unclear. Fits and starts.

After a few such ill-fated instances of following ill-conceived impulses with almost nationalistic allegiance—one led her into a midnight canoe ride with a broken ore, others saw her violating municipal ordinances and customary standards of propriety by variously breaking and entering, falling asleep in foreign places, crashing cotillions, engaging in petty larceny almost for sport, and playing sports criminally (by, for example, going to golf courses after they close; she didn’t really play, as such the numerous putters she was found with were largely unnecessary), and the like—she started to become more of the homebody that she has previously been described as. This shift did not take place at the expense of her impulses but rather represented a sort of unwitting compromise: a trick she felt she had to start playing on herself. Though the procession of impulses that paraded through her typically announced themselves in the monosyllabic language of sudden certainty, that was not always the case. This was a mistake…I need to lay down…but I’m not tired…I wonder if I could climb that silo…is that a silo?…I want ice cream…You need to sleep more…an infinite expectation of the dawn…who said that?...I’m pooped…maybe just a little walk, there’s no shame in modestly regretted mistakes...there are no words

It was in the throes of one such inner compromise that she met Tic. Inexplicably he seemed to her to be in exactly the same state.

Tic was given to similar cyclical shifts but what she glimpsed that first night was different: he seemed to be muttering something to himself about “sad ecstasy”. While he was capable of almost Olympian indifference, the unconcern she saw was an act of sorts. However, it led her to believe that he was caught up in himself in a similar way to what she was experiencing. To be sure it was an act that he would have performed for himself had she not been there (in his experience it might well have followed from the adage that all the world’s a stage that it was all those spotlights that caused him to sweat so even in the dead of winter), but an act just the same. The calmness that she saw in him comforted her, cold comfort, perhaps, befitting the cold night.

Let us now note that they slept in the same bed that very night. (Everything skipped will soon enough be clear or clearly irrelevant.) They slept on one pillow, their faces almost touching. Margie fell asleep first, her face inches away from his in a way that may have been taken as an invitation—and on some level may have been. Margie had a habit of sort of muttering and moving in her sleep—this night she seemed to be laughing. Tic closed the gap between their faces to about half its former size. Margie moved her head off the pillow and then let it fall back to an even lesser distance. This sequence repeated a few more times. They wound up sleeping through the night with their faces touching (Tic’s lips just below her cheek for most of the night). However, the puckering movement of the lips that is required by most definitions of kissing was never satisfied.

He could not have imagined that she would have objected had he reached over and tried to press his lips against hers—his lips, through some of the night, were already listlessly rested on the area where her chest flattened out before coming out collar, neck. But at the same time he was held back by something which was not entirely his own: something more than the fact that she seemed to be asleep. His heart beat out pounding rhythms like hooded death knocking at your door. He swore he was never closer to sleep than he was to heart attack through the night. What the hell was going on? He thought to himself. What kind of a girl just sleeps in a bed with a guy? Is she a little touched in the head? What are you a stuffy lady of affluence, why would you be questioning something like this? Blow it out your ass…

This scene played out in its entirety two more times. Both would have been happy to have enjoyed more traditional corporeal conquests with the other on any of those nights. However, both decided to not ruin what they took to be the designs of the other. The second night (weeks later) of this inexplicably replicated scheme of muted seduction he attempted to feel her through his thumping chest. Not in the sense that would have meant breaking the sensual silence of their fevered forbearance but in the way that he had come to think that women should be held in the mind of the sexual beholder. That it didn’t seem to work was not all that surprising to him since he had only recently resolved that thinking of other women during sex was just stupid and set out in search of the proper erotic ordering of a mind. But the effort ceased his other thoughts as well.

Margie would have not have been surprised to hear that those three nights of simply sleeping in Tic’s embrace without the exchange of so much as a kiss were the result of his uncertainty in her reception of anything more—they weren’t entirely. But it would have taken her a few moments of some measure of clarity—like that which followed the first trip to the bathroom in the morning (there was a reason that Margie was so open about such matters: pleasure superseded protocol; if it took a certain amount of fiber for existence and essence to line up it was worth it and no less meaningful for the efforts taken) —to realize she wasn’t surprised. Very likely she would have initially concluded that everything she had assumed of him as his chest pressed against hers through those nights was wrong. She maybe would have even resolved in haste to not see him again. But none of this came to pass as she was never given to understand that the thoughts that informed the other side of this complicity were anything different from her own but, perhaps, for the difference in the way that men and women framed their thoughts or how they read them to themselves. And whether they were or not: her thoughts were not exactly about him.

Margie slept—or at least feigned sleep—through those nights with a feeling that everything was going backwards, that she was at an end without ever noticing a beginning, that once she stopped knocking she looked up to find she was, and had always been, inside. She did not see any visions of her and Tic together 20 years hence. Instead she saw herself surrounded by something colorless stretching as far she could see and lit by something which was not in view. She rolled around and laughed to herself and felt as if she belonged there, alone. Because even though she was alone she felt as if she was surrounded by every feeling of home she had ever known. Not exactly the home that she had grown up in – though her parents did still live in the same place with the same picture of a plumed peacock in the entryway – but somewhere else. And even though all she saw nothing she felt that she was everywhere and entirely whole, completed by something which caused everything around her to move like small waves.

If it could be said about any woman, Margie never worried about what guys thought of her. True enough she had little reason to worry as most seemed hopelessly devoted to her. This led her to maintain friendships with only those men that she knew had the constitution to withstand her not liking them back. She just did not really care about men enough to entertain the compromised, pretextual logic that there is nothing (including relationships) more important than friendship, but there is no better basis for a relationship than a friendship. She did not like the way men (and, at times, women) would use this logic to cast you as a shrew if you didn’t want to be friends with someone knowing full well they were thinking (and plotting) along these distorted lines.

She saw men as essentially flawed and pitiable creatures. If—as they seemed to think—they lacked the liabilities that attended the faintest recognition of an emotional infrastructure then why shouldn’t they all live the Spartan lifestyles they sought? Their inability to recognize their true natures when presented with their inability to realize the lives that befitted the strength that they arrogated to themselves was just stupid to her mind. There is a difference between aspiration and delusion, she reasoned. That was enough but the constant declarative statements really meant to declare no more than the ability to make declarations was almost intolerable.

Still, she learned – relatively early – that for all their shortcomings men could be lots of fun, and more often than not were equipped with a capacity for abandon that would strip this “fun” of anything indicative of the past nor promissory for the future. These sorts of thoughts demonstrate that what Margie wanted from most men required something in the way of strategy but that shouldn’t be misread as any kind of deceit. She liked sex but disliked the many taboos and especially the many presumed meanings that attended it. Margie believed that there was nothing wrong with giving a stranger something that they did not even know they wanted. Ignorance was bliss, she reasoned. Try telling a beggar that a taste of sugar is worse than none at all. Margie gave them more than a taste; what she withheld she rarely felt any misgivings about. All this is to say she liked catching men off guard and then being off before they gathered themselves: like a sexual ghost.

Margie was afforded the opportunity for her sexual and sociological explorations, in some part, by the fact that she was exceptionally attractive. She had dark hair that she wore at a length just long enough for a ponytail but just short enough that these ponytails would often come apart moments after their construction. This gave her a vaguely flustered look which she would have resented had she realized; but she did not realize because she was usually flustered. The constellation made of her lips and eyebrows seemed to have a geometrical logic to it that you could not name, like a crop circle. Her eyebrows curved at precisely the same pitch throughout such that had they been joined they would seem at least 1/3 of a perfect, rueful circle. Her lips had an almost comic exaggeration about them; in fact, it might have been the fact that the center of her upper lip seemed to always smile that gave her a less threatening air than she deserved. Margie was relatively petite, though anyone who has ever known her could attest that that impression was put to rout in onlookers as soon as they spoke to her. She was cheeky almost without even knowing it. She never meant to be emasculating and she did not want to attract the sort of men who would be impervious to anything like that but still she caused in many men a feeling that they were the product of a society where gender roles were anything but clear—a feeling which many were only able to quiet by re-application of their favorite pomade or re-affirmation of their self-worth as enumerated from nose to toes with extra points coming from a look which suggested, without being, overly rugged. She did not do this by acting in a masculine way. She did it with a rhetorical style that caught almost everybody off guard. This style combined a sort of hangdog reservation and whimsy with alacrity and a rapier wit the contradiction of which usually clashed somewhere behind the recipient’s eyes. The result was something like the marriage of Archie Bunker and Diane Keaton.

Tic was not much of a lothario himself. In the back of his mind he had always suspected that there was an active conspiracy to make him think he was less attractive than he was. There was not: he was not a handsome man, not classically anyway. What success he did find with women was not because of his looks, nor, necessarily, in spite of them. He looked mysterious. This may have helped define the set of women with whom he was given occasion to convince of his worth as a lover. However, those that came to him did so first and foremost because he was an exceptional conversationalist if an abiding dilettante: at least once he had made the claim, aloud and even in company with presumptive behavior disorders, that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of early quantum physics proved that there was no God. And while he had sort of sworn to himself that he would not recycle jokes, he made no such promise about sexual overtures. Still, the line that he had repeated to the three women that he had met prior to Margie he meant in some way or another. If the wording changed some the sentiment did not: fate, as it’s been revealed in some part to me, demands that we be together. This was never said in a way that seemed too contrived, or worse, pathological. He said it as if embarrassed that he was as allegiant to the vision he’d had as he was. It was never an out and out lie. It was only after the last time that he realized that he’d meant it for reasons that were entirely superficial but no less profound. He thought, as everyone does from time to time, that he could tell something about people from their faces which exceeded shallowness; as if the magma of their interiors had finally cooled into the shape of their faces, as if everything was no more than a surface, as if (as he once heard someone say) everything was a “visible core”. Even coming from a starry-eyed sort, this ought to have strained credibility. Coming from someone who once wrote a paper that certain unspecific chords (he had no musical training) had divine resonance this ought to have been preposterous. And coming from someone who snapped at a friend for calling himself an existentialist nihilist but who himself had told people that he was nearing Nirvana it ought to have been responded to with disdain.

Tic was intelligent and his dabbling was not affectation. He had a genuine hunger for knowledge of the type that could be applied to life lived. But he never lost a winsome quality which sort of delighted in thinking thoughts like maybe he was actually a reluctant prophet or the like. Did I just break that light bulb with my mind? he had asked himself before. And it was this brand of thought which made him think that he was fated to be with certain women because of certain (arguably superficial) qualities. However, when he first met Margie he had no such thought. Instead he felt a profound sadness. Why? That he would never be with someone like her. That likely sounds like something which commonly precedes the thoughts of fate. To say something is fated is to have more than a little confidence in its potential. Certainty might creep behind this sadness like an echo but they do not tend to occupy the same space or time. He, for about 4 hours at the time, had been attempting to rid himself of any such certainty. But before any farfetched longing could mature in him, in spite of his mind, into burgeoning potential, she approached him.

Tic’s thought followed an aesthetics class discussing Greek tragedy. There, as in most classes, he heard bits and pieces: “sensual acceptance of, and rejoicing in, the terrors of reality…his eye must be ‘sunlike’ as befits his origin…it’s only others which temper the crushing awe...natural geniuses and satyrs.” The sense he made of it was this: learn to love the fact that life is suffering. This was at odds with most of his instincts to try to be happy. However, whether misunderstood or not, it had a novelty which appealed to his sort of middling intellectual appetite. And so he tried. He tried to decouple himself from the natural charm he saw in the world. He told himself that it was only shadows that lent enchantment to emptiness. He saw the self denial that he sort of liked as a guide. He tried to reach through the slabs of his residual innocence to see himself dying alone. [This – Tic’s attempt to embrace death, you might say – would not have been such a huge departure from the typical demands made by the newest additions to his intellectual prowess. The dilettante must carry himself lightly; having too firm a grip on anything thought to be invariably true could prove a hindrance. Tic knew this and swimming through his mind you’d find very little that had sunk to the bottom – very little, in fact, which was weighty enough to not float. However, if there was one thing which Tic had not always found himself free enough to think about, it was death.

And so when he saw her she seemed to be playing an illustrative part in the pictures of his certain sadness. So it was that he did not even really consider saying anything to her because she seemed no more than a chimera of his melancholy, an avatar of his gloom (or at least something from which he could practice extricating himself); what could he say? To inspire in someone what seemed at once on the order of dread of one’s own mortality and yet without reluctance hinted in so much as an eyelid was for Margie almost a dream come true.
(...to the full post)

Jamie and Tom headed out to the field behind arts and crafts to smoke after dinner. They took a golf cart out there, which wasn’t really necessary. It wasn’t far at all, but they wanted to get high and fuck around out with the cart out there in the fields.

They pulled up behind the crudely painted brown building—nothing more than a large shack really—where they sat in the idling cart. For some reason, she felt sadder than she had in days. During Amanda’s funeral she was strangely detached, but tonight her sadness caught up with her. Tom turned the golf cart off and put his legs up. He took a bag out of his pocket and began to pack a bowl.

“You look so serious,” he said quietly. She was looking thoughtfully at the small path in between the woods and the building. It was the only way to get to the spot they were sitting by foot.

“Do you think we should go farther out? We’re pretty close to camp here. Sometimes the CIT’s come back here to make out.”

“Wink, wink” he said, laughing. There was very little that Tom took seriously, and thus there was little that scared him.

“Yeah I guess you’re right. It’s just our jobs I guess.” She smiled, and took the bowl from him. They both sat quietly. It was growing dark and she shivered. The chill brought with it the recollection of the past few days. “I have got to break up with him,” she said with finality, as if it was the conclusion to a long discussion.
He shook his head and propped the bowl in one of the golf cart’s cup holders. He had a habit of rubbing his pointer finger and thumb together when he was thoughtful. He didn’t say anything. Anyway, they both knew what his opinion was.

“I know it. I know I do.” She felt herself start to get upset. She looked at Tom seriously. “It’s just that I wanted him for so long. He was always the person I wanted to be with.”

Tom didn’t know what to say so he sighed and began to pack another bowl. He didn’t like to have this kind of earnest conversation, not even with someone he liked as much as Jamie. She always wanted to talk about serious things, which was one of the reasons why they usually smoked pot. It made her talk less, and him talk more.
Finally he said casually, “Jamie, I dunno. It’s hard for me to believe that anyone could feel that way about him.”

She gave him an angry look and then dropped her head. “Can you please not make a joke?” She was already too high and so upset about everything that she felt like crying. He started to apologize but she continued. “Seriously, Tom don’t be mean, I can’t take it right now. Jesus, I didn’t even cry at Amanda’s fucking funeral, what is this shit?” She angrily pushed her fists against the front of the cart. “Goddammit, I hate this shit.”

Seeing her so upset softened him up. He really liked Jamie, she was the one good girl friend he really had. He rested his elbows on his knees and hunched over, deep in thought. “Go on,” he said seriously.

“I dunno Tom, I know you’re right.” She was crying fully now. “You do know that I never was one of these girls? I’m not one of these tragic Lifetime girls who doesn’t know what the fuck is good for her.”

“Nobody thinks that Jamie.”

“Oh come on. I know what they think.”

“I don’t know about that Jamie,” he said slowly. “Seriously, I don’t think anyone judges you. Everyone likes you. You’re Jamie,” he said with a smile.

“The idiot.” She laughed bitterly.

He picked up the bowl, lit it, and pulled hard.

“You know he didn’t pick up his phone. After he knew Amanda died. After I had gone home. I called him and he didn’t pick up the phone. And he didn’t call me back. And then he acted like nothing had happened.”

“Maybe he didn’t know that you called.”

“I left a message. And you know the other day, the day I got back, he tried to say something to me about something that had happened last summer, about Andrew. He asked me if I had broken up with Andrew before we got together.”

“What?” Tom sat up straight.

“Seriously Tom—the day I got back from my friend’s fucking funeral. The day I got back, he basically fucking accused me of—Jesus I don’t even know what the hell he was trying to accuse me of. He’s the one who tried to get with me when I was dating someone else. Then he goes off on me wanting to make sure that I was actually single when I started seeing him.”

“Alright Jaim—you gotta’ relax. He’s a dumbass.” He put his hand on her shoulder. “You have to relax. You have to. You should dump him if that’s really how you feel.”
She paused, looking for answers. “So you think I should dump him?”

“I dunno Jaim, it’s you’re life. But if you’re that unhappy, then yeah, I guess.” He put the bowl down. It was almost totally dark now.

“I’ve had a terrible week. I’m just sad about Amanda.”

He shrugged. “He is a dick. You should dump him. But don’t stress about it tonight. You’re not going to see him till Saturday really, isn’t that what he said.” He laughed, in spite of himself. “You can dump him at Jackson’s party. It will be sweet.”

She rubbed her eyes. “I guess you’re right. I guess I’ve really made my decision.”

Her face fell. “I know it’s stupid but I just really liked the idea of being with him.”

“You do know this is Josh Synder we’re talking about, right?”
(...to the full post)

Sarah called three times in a week, and they kept missing each other. Angela had a feeling that something was terribly wrong, but when she finally got in touch Sarah excitedly told of her acceptance to UCLA. Angela was standing in front of a sushi restaurant where she was supposed to meet Paul for lunch when she got the call. She leaned against the glass window of he restaurant, searching through her purse for her cigarettes.

She was delighted to hear about Sarah’s acceptance, although it didn’t surprise her in the least. When Sarah asked her what was new on her end, she had nothing to say. She started to talk about a Harvard extension school sculpture class that she had just signed up for.

“You sound distracted. Are you driving?” Sarah asked.

“I don’t have my car out here,” she said evenly. “My purse is a black hole. I can’t find my cigarettes.”

“Maybe you should quit.”

Angela humphed. “Maybe.”

Sarah paused for a moment. “So how is the move going?”

Angela laughed. “Oh it’s good. It’s really good actually. I do wish Paul would shut up about my smoking. I think he never really realized how much I smoke before we lived together. Other than that, everything’s great with us.”

“How are your parents?” Sarah asked quietly.

“Well, my dad is not great in general. Although lately he’s been okay. Honestly I haven’t talked to him in a week, I need to focus on trying to get a job and stuff.”

“How’s your mom doing?”

“Good—seriously.”

“I feel like because this has been going on so long I forget what’s going on with them and I don’t want you to think I don’t care.”

“I know. But you know, I don’t expect people to be tuned into it. Paul is though and I think that’s what really matters. He’s looking out for me. You don’t have to worry.”

“Have you made any girl friends there?”

“No—only this professor’s wife. She’s young though, only twenty-six and she has a fucking kid. Anyway, I had a drink with just her one night at a bar.”

“That’s cool.”

“Well—it’s was the weirdest fucking thing in the universe. But yeah, she’s cool. We talked about J.Crew dresses mostly.”

Just as she was taking a particularly satisfying drag of her cigarette Paul turned the corner and ruined it.

“Hey baby,” he said loudly, not realizing she was on the phone. She pointed to her ear. Paul reached over to take the cigarette out of her mouth and she gave him a hateful look and dodged his reach. “I just wanted to kiss you hello,” he said.

“I know, I know, it is weird,” she said, responding to something Sarah was telling her. “Hey babe, I gotta run. Paul just got here and he only has a quick lunch break before going back to work.”

“Oh right, I forgot what time it was there.” Sarah said. “Okay, well give me a call soon. I miss you Ang.”

“I miss you too. Congrats so much about med school. Although I knew you would do it. But still. I will. Okay, you too. Bye bye.” She exhaled and closed her phone. “I’m sorry Paul but you shouldn’t just reach for someone’s cigarette, even if it’s me. It’s fucking rude.”

“You’re right. Honestly, I was not going to throw it out, I just wanted to kiss you hello and you didn’t have enough hands.”

She had to fight the urge to say ‘whatever’. “Okay, well I just feel that you make too big of an issue about this. At some point you’re going to have to accept that I smoke.”

“Wait a minute,” he said slowly. “I’ve just said hello to you, what are you upset about?”

She was about to lie and say that Sarah had been ragging her about smoking but she stopped herself. “Paul, I just feel like you have to accept that I smoke. You’re right this is out of the blue and I’m sorry to just go crazy on a street corner, but you have been bugging me about this since we moved in. I get that you don’t want me to die.”

“You know you have a fucking history of cancer in your family Angela. I just don’t understand how you can smoke when you see all that your family’s been through because of it.”

“I agree. I hate myself about it. But it’s not going to stop right now, so I really feel that you need not to hate me about it too. Can’t you just get over it for a little while?" A hiccup of mirthless laughter escaped from him. “I’m going to quit in the spring. I just need to get a job and deal with my life and stuff. You know moving in together is a huge deal for me.”

“I know.” He looked down. “Angela, I’m not trying to be hard on you. And this isn’t about anything else. And I won’t bother you any more after today.” He paused.

“Just say what you want to say,” she said quietly.

“But you shouldn’t just use stress as an excuse,” he said sorrowfully, as though it pained him. “You know—everything stresses you out. Not that you don’t have real reason to be in pain right now. But I don’t think smoking helps anything.”

He looked up at her. “Are you done?” She asked. She had a brusqueness at times that he found simultaneously appealing and disappointing. Things were never clear cut until she wanted them to be, and then they were.

“Yeah.”

“Okay. You’re right about everything you said Paul. I’m sorry I’ve been a huge pain in the ass lately.”

He couldn’t disagree with her. But he rubbed her back to be kind.

“It will be better when I get a job and I’m not this disaffected pseudo house-wife any more.” He knodded. “And I really appreciate you letting up about the smoking.”

“Let’s get some food.”

She reached up and put her hands on either side of his face. “Are you mad?”

“No,” he patted her lightly on the butt twice, and said, “but I gotta’ eat quick if I’m going to get back in time.”
(...to the full post)

The Monday after the funeral Jamie’s boss took her into what was called the “executive dining room” on the pretense of making lists of campers for color war teams. It was really just a screened in porch adjacent to a tool shed, with a long narrow table inside. The table nearly filled the entire room, which wasn’t more than seven feet wide, so much so that when they were building it they had to slide the table inside the skeleton of the room first and hang the screens after the fact. It commanded a view of the camp that only a select few had access to, and thus, was considered a special place. It was where the camp administrators ate, and during non-meal times, it was where special meetings were held.

From where Jamie sat she could easily see about half the camp. The wide grassy expanse behind the main office, which was burned from sun in places and sinking in other places where sprinklers had been set to provide relief from the heat, stretched all around. Behind it the woods rose, creating a little valley in which the heart of the camp sat. She looked around as if she were searching for something. A group of kids were heading to Tetherball 5, which was separated from the camp by a wall of fern trees in a little clearing on the edge of the woods. It was Josh’s group. She identified his figure receding across the softball field even before he turned around and urged the stragglers to follow. The hollow, reassuring sounds that tennis balls made were heard almost constantly, as the tennis courts were only about 20 feet away from where they sat. She saw the silhouette of the little boy who was her pet standing distractedly in the outfield of Softball 1—she had taken care of him during a thunderstorm and they bonded.

Josh turned back again. He was standing right in the round opening the trees made at the entrance of the woods. Although the sun was shining hard on his face, he was half bathed in the darkness of the woods. He put his hand above his eyes and made an annoyed herding gesture with his other arm to the slowest camper.

The man who was sitting across from Jamie was called Sack by everyone, although his real name was Jon. He saw her looking over in the direction of the woods. Josh was his nephew, and he could tell him from far away too. “What’s going on with you two?”

She looked at him with a vague expression, drawn suddenly away from her thoughts, although she had been considering the very same thing. She huffed. “I don’t know. He’s kind of—“ She stopped herself, wondering what it was okay to say to his uncle about him. Then again, she thought, Sack is my real friend—the reason I’ve been here for so long. He was the person who had taken an interest in her when she was dorky and sixteen and new here. He was the reason she was the only person her age who ate in the executive dining room.

He surprised her by saying forcefully, “He’s selfish. You know I loved busting you about it, but honestly he’s not a good guy for you Jamie.”

She sucked in her breath and drew herself up a little. “Sack,” she said slowly, “I think I figured that out this weekend.”

“He fucked up at the funeral?”

“He didn’t come.” Sack raised his eyebrows, but she stopped him. “No, it’s not like that. I didn’t want him to come. I wanted to be with my friends and I wanted to think about Amanda and not deal with him. But he just—wasn’t the way I expected him to behave. He was sort of a cold fish about the whole thing.”

Sack was the clown king of the camp, and everyone loved him. Now he shook his head, looking at the table. It was rare to catch him being serious, even for Jamie, who spent all her time with him. Today however, he looked at her contemplatively, seeming to regard her as the person she was right then, not all the different people she had been throughout the six formative years he’d known her. “You know Jamie,” he said, “you sometimes have to protect yourself in life.”

“You’re right. He’s incredibly selfish. I honestly never realized it till this weekend, but it’s all about him. Even down to the first times we went out, during the year, down to the movies we would rent. He always gets his way with me.” Sack laughed. She swatted him on the arm. “Not like that—you’re disgusting.”

He shrugged and looked down at the stack of papers before him, ready to get down to business. “You sure walked into that one.”


Later that night she was sitting out on the dock with Tom. He was standing up, skipping stones, a talent she had never acquired in all the time she’d been there. She was sitting down, her hands behind her, her feet trailing into the cool dark water. It was late in the afternoon, the time before dinner when the campers were freed from their activities and allowed to flirt or play as they pleased, and most of the counselors did the same. The sun was low in the western sky. They heard steps on the dock and both turned around. Josh finally knelt down wordlessly beside her and began to untie his sneakers. He put his feet in the water too and knitted his fingers with hers on the dock. She moved her hand away and he looked at her seriously. “How’s it going?”

She didn’t say anything. Instead, she looked in Tom’s direction, for help perhaps. He wasn’t looking at her, but almost instinctively he started talking. “How can I keep doing this? I’ve been doing this for twenty minutes. And yet it doesn’t lose its appeal to me.” He launched another stone.

She smiled in spite of herself and finally looked at Josh. “He’s a leettle bit stoned,” she said with laughter she couldn’t resist in her voice.

“Are you?”

“No,” she said, mimicking the sternness of his tone.

He looked out at the lake. “What’s up? Why are you mad at me?”

She paused. “Ja-osh.” When she wanted to make a point she said his name with two syllables. But she couldn’t bring herself to say what she wanted to say. She lied down on the dock staring up at the sky. “I’m not mad at you. I’m sorry I’m not throwing a parade every second to be back. You know my friend did just die.”

“I know,” he said quietly.
She put her hands behind her head. “When is your next night off?”

“Not till Saturday.”

“Oh good,” she said lightly. “A bunch of us are going to Jakson’s lake house that night. Tom’s coming,” she said, looking in his direction. Tom nodded wordlessly. “Too bad though.” She smiled at him. “I have tonight off.”

“Well Miss Jamie, I am on, and anyway I have to have dinner in town with my mother.” He looked down at her and patted her on the forehead. Josh’s mother was the art director there.

“Ah. Well, your loss.”

“Yes indeedy,” he said matter-of-factly. Tom laughed at him. This allowed Jamie and Josh to laugh too, which was a welcome feeling for both of them. “Okay you two, go get high in the woods, I have to go to dinner.” He leaned down and kissed Jamie quickly before hopping to his feet.

“Don’t tell your mom,” Jamie said, trailing him with her gaze.

“Bye,” Tom said vaguely without turning. Josh wasn’t yet off the dock when he heard him quietly ask Jamie if she wanted to go into town for pizza. She groaned and started laughing. The lake seemed to distill and preserve all human sounds, and Josh could hear notes of their conversation even when he was at the door of the dining room. He walked in and was overtaken by the din of conversation. A quiet person in general, he was always surprised by how quickly his own thoughts could be overtaken by the voices of children.


He was disturbed by their closeness, he allowed himself to think as he took his seat among the campers of his bunk. He made Julian, the boy who was sitting by the window, give up his seat. From here he could watch them sitting on the dock with impunity. Tom had given up throwing stones, and they were both sitting cross legged facing each other. He had difficult feelings towards Tom. They had gone to high school together and always been friendly, although Tom was always a cooler guy than he had been. They had both discovered Jamie last summer when she was dating another guy they had gone to high school with who also worked at the camp. Before last summer, although she had been a fixture at the camp for years, neither of them had ever really known her. Josh and she had bonded over their shared interest in literature; Tom had warmed to her when he realized she was a stoner. Josh remembered the first time he noticed her. She was sitting in the front office with a little boy named Jonas who was sick. They were both sitting on swivel chairs upholstered in retro orange fabric. She was playing something good and new to him on the cd player, and as he was checking his mail box he turned absently to ask her what the name of the band was. She was sitting perfectly still but making a funny face at the boy when she realized he was watching her. She smiled at him self-consciously. “He’s sick—just trying to cheer him up,” she said, poking Jonas in the belly gently with her pointer finger. He brushed her hand away grumpily and looked forlornly out the front window of the office. “Uh oh,” she said to Josh comically, “guess he doesn’t like that.” She brushed his hair out of his face. “I’m sorry Jo—do you want me to get you something?” The boy shook his head.

“Ok,” she said half to Josh, half to herself. She hadn’t meant to pick on the little boy and she felt bad.

“What cd is this?” Josh asked, rifling through his mail.

“The Actual Tigers.”

“Actual Tiger” he repeated appraisingly.

“Actual Tigers” she corrected. He nodded.

“What’s that you’re reading?”

“Oh,” she smiled at her book thoughtfully. “It’s actually this book my friend’s dad wrote. It’s about this American guy who moves in with his long lost family in Greece. It’s good.” She looked cautiously from him to Jonas, as if she were checking on the child’s condition. She looked back at Josh. “I’m Jamie, I guess we’ve never really been introduced.” She stuck out her hand.

“I know who you are,” he said, good-naturedly shaking her hand. “You’re dating Ben.” Then, by way of explanation, he said quickly “I know him—we went to high school together. Go way back.”

She was happy to have been called Ben’s girlfriend by one of his friends. That meant he had told them about her. “He told me. I’m a little intimidated by the old boys’ club thing you guys have going on.”

He laughed. “We don’t bite.” She smiled. He looked around. Neither of them had anything to say. She turned back to her book and he, ostensibly, to his mail. His eyes lingered on her white shoulders. He had heard some other counselors talking about her the other day appraisingly, but joking about how pale she was. True, she was the one counselor who had not developed even a hint of tan by now, half way through the summer. She had walked by right when they were talking about her, just off the water trampoline with a troupe of little girls. “Hey, Jamie,” a guy named Justin called out in a sing-song voice.

“What is it now,” she turned sassily, already sensing the joke in his voice.

“We thought there was a ghost out there on the trampoline before. All we could see was your bikini going up and down.”

She smiled broadly, hands on her hips. “Hah-Hah.” She turned away, heading back to her group. “Gotta run, some of us have work to do here.”

Josh had been on the outskirts of the conversation already, and hadn’t been drawn in. Now he noticed that she was just the kind of girl that Ben always dated. He was always getting someone who was a little too charming or pretty for him. All his girlfriends were sharp girls and it never failed to mystify Josh who secretly considered Ben to be a little moldy. “I guess I better be getting back,” he said.

“Okay,” she said, “well I guess I’ll see you tonight at Ben’s thing.”

“Oh, oh yeah right. Well, I’m not really supposed to be off tonight, but my mom cut me a deal that I could go after my bunk goes to bed, so I’ll be driving up with some people later on. You’ll probably all be off your faces by the time I get there.” He wondered as he was speaking why he was telling her all this.

She smiled. “Let’s hope.”

“Okay, see you,” he said, patting the doorway as he exited.

“Nice to meet you,” she called after him out the screened in window.
(...to the full post)

She thought of how he would react when he read it, if he ever did. “You killed me!” he would say with mock annoyance. This was partly why she had written it—because Sam would know that it was about him and it would wound him. She had been in Boston three weeks and had not seen him yet.

In that time she had bought and assembled their wardrobe on her own and their bed and couch with Paul’s help. She had cooked dinner six times, eaten out six times and couldn’t remember what they had done the other days. She had had sex twelve times. She had carried furniture on what seemed like half the streets of Cambridge. She had spoken to her mother every day except for the two days her friend Shannon came to visit them while she went on Med School interviews in Boston. She had gone on two job interviews, accepted both positions, and reneged on both. She had written two stories about sex, one about running into Paul unexpectedly on the street and feeling strange, one about the funeral she had lately spoken at, and one in which Sam had died suddenly in a freak accident—pure fantasy. She was trying to decide how she would survive if something actually did happen to him, having recently realized that she was still pinning a lot of her happiness on him. It was a psychological experiment, then, and a lesson she thought she should have learned long ago.

So when she finally did see she him it was after she had written three drafts of a story in which he died two different ways, one where she mourned him like a widow in a melodrama and another where she hadn’t known him at all, but happened to be standing on the street watching as he was hit by the M66 bus. The girl in the brown hat. Paul was t.a.ing his first class, she was idle truly for the first time since she had moved in with him. Now that school was starting, she guessed she’d have to find something to do with herself in general—but today, she had finally consented to seeing Sam. After all, he was her only friend in Boston.

The irony wasn’t lost on her—the two men who she had loved in the last four years were both joining the same PhD program. They were going to be colleagues. Sometimes she thought about her future—maybe she would stay with Paul and they would run into Sam at some Professor’s cocktail party. And they would all be friends, and her old love for him would simply be part of the tapestry of her life; she would finally find a way to integrate him into her life without letting him obliterate everything. Or, she thought as she turned the corner and saw Sam flirting over the counter at Starbucks with the girl who was making his coffee, maybe not.
She stopped outside and watched him for a moment, wishing she were able to walk without kicking mud up on the back of her legs. He was standing with his arms resting on the glass pastry tray, leaning over the counter. The tray was high and it should have been awkward for him to lean on, but it seemed natural. He had just made a joke and they were both laughing. She disliked her own desire to disrupt the scene as quickly as possible, but she couldn’t control it.

“Hi,” she said casually, placing her hand on his back and appearing next to him, not even looking up, scanning the dessert tray as if she were trying to make a decision.

“Here she is!” he said in a showman’s voice. He leaned down to kiss her on the cheek, right on the curve of her cheekbone, underneath her eye.

She looked up at him. His sandy hair was longer than it had been when she’d seen him last, when she had cut it for him for the last time. They were standing close together—it almost seemed like they were going to kiss, but when he reached to brush a piece of hair away from her face she pulled away and made a face. The girl behind the counter was casting Angela a sidelong glance, trying to ascertain the situation. Sam, as if suddenly aware that he had left her hanging, looked at her, nodded heartily and said “she’ll have a venti cappuccino—lots of foam.” To Angela’s amazement, he actually winked at the girl, expertly communicating both his intimacy with Angela and his interest in the barista.

“You’re unbelievable,” she said, walking over to a table by the window. When he finally joined her she was looking through a crumpled edition of the Harvard Crimson that had been left on the table.

“Paul’s going to start working for them.” She said absentmindedly, tapping the paper with her forefinger.
“Oh yeah? I went on a date last night with the Arts Editor.”

“Oh yeah?” She raised her eyebrows.

He mimicked her expression, “Yes, Angela.”

When it was difficult for her to accept an idea, she had a habit of pursing her lips and nodding to herself—as if just one vigorous shake of her head would get that tough to swallow thing down. “So how’d it go?”

He looked down and smiled to himself. “Good—she’s real cool.”

“Cool.”

He smiled at her intently and leaned across the table. “So—“ he said with flare, “how’s life with the professor?”

She scoffed. “Can you not call him that?”

“I don’t know...he seems old to me.” He leaned back in his chair and smiled, “always has.”

“He’s the same age as you. And everyone seems old to you.” She narrowed her eyes at him, but couldn’t help smiling.

“That’s true,” he shrugged. “I guess I just can’t wrap my mind around you living with somebody. You’re the second most immature person I know.”

“Next to you.”

“Naturally.”

She laughed. “You’re right.” Her expression darkened slightly. His chest tightened a little—he could sense that she was going to talk about something serious. True to form, she glanced up at him with intention. He was well acquainted with the subtle changes in her face when she wanted to unburden herself. In their first few months of dating, he had loved the responsibility of being her confidant. In time, however, he had come to see that she traded secrets when she was scared that she had no other hold on him. “I’m way too immature to be living with him,” she said slowly.

“So move out.” He looked into his coffee cup, almost guiltily.

“I just got here.” She hit him lightly on the arm for emphasis. “Plus, I don’t want to move out.” She wanted to say, ‘I love him,’ but she could never bring herself to tell the absolute truth about things to Sam. He already knew too much, she thought, about everything.

“Are you guys gonna’ get married?”

“No, no. How can you even ask that?”

“I don’t know.” He shook his head. “It just seems like why would you live together if you’re not going to get married.”

“That’s not the point Sam—“

“Then what is?”

She raised her eyebrows. “There is no point—It’s hard to describe.” She said slowly. “I mean, I’m not with him because it means anything about 50 years from now or even next week. That’s not why you’re with somebody.”

“That’s definitely not why I’m with somebody.”

She laughed. “You know what I mean. I would never be with someone because I thought they were promising me something.” She smiled at him, “In fact, if they tried to promise me something I’d probably be out the door.”

“See that’s how Paul has you figured out.”

He paused. “Go on,” she said.

“Well see, Paul’s a huge hippie, and he’s had a totally crazy life. And you see that, and you think, here’s a guy who’s just sort of rolling along and doesn’t have it all figured out. And that’s what makes you feel comfortable.” She started to protest, but he said, “Come on Ang, I know you way too well. I actually remember when we all first met I could tell that you were so impressed by all the shit that’s happened to him.”
She looked at him seriously. “You’re right. You are right about that. He’s been through a lot.”

“You just can’t see him from the outside because you’re with him. I saw him with other girls before we ever met you and he’s totally hopeless. I promise you that he wants to get married.” He hit the table for emphasis.

“He just knows that you’ll flip out if you realize that. And he totally gets that you love that he’s unpredictable—he’s got you all figured out. I mean, what do you think, the guy’s practically a genius.”

She smiled and shook her head. “You’re unbelievable. I love how easy it is for you to dissect my life.”
“Who better to do it? I know you better than almost anyone.”

“I guess.” She looked around, almost guiltily. They had been there for a long time and the tables were filled by different people than they had been when they arrived. It looked like it had stopped raining. “So are you and Paul going to play nicely together this year?”

“I’m always nice.” Her hand was resting palm up on the low table, and as he started to stand up he tapped his forefinger lightly on her wrist, right on the large vein that was visible through her light skin. He shook his head in the direction of the door. “I have to go.”

That night she and Paul had dinner with the Professor he was working for, and his wife. They were young and cool, but the strangeness of being out with a married couple (Jake and Lynn) was profound. She thought she could feel the man’s wife wondering what her story was. Telling it was difficult, and she demurred to Paul who noticed this and kept trying to make her talk.

“We met at Oxford, I was at Christ Church and Angela was going to Teddy Hall. We actually met through a mutual friend.” He looked at her.

“What were you studying there Angela?” Jake asked.

“English Literature.” She smiled. She didn’t want to disappoint. “I was working on this project on Lewis Carroll, and so I was doing all this research at Christ Church. But that actually wasn’t how we met, although I had seen him around. But, like Paul said we met through a friend, we were both at this thing—they have these drinking societies that put on these parties. For like ten pounds you go and it’s black tie—it’s just an excuse to drink and dress up. Anyway, that’s where we met.”

“I didn’t know you knew who I was,” he said with pleasure.

She smiled and he reached for her hand under the table. She looked at the people across the table from them. “I knew who he was because I noticed that he was an American. There’s not that many Americans at Christ Church, so I had noticed the lack of accent.”


She had trudged home from meeting Sam earlier that day and found Paul in the shower. She cracked the door and a surge of dampness descended into the cold air of their living room.

“I’m home.”

He poked his head out of the side of the shower curtain and smiled broadly. “Hey hey.” She slid through the small opening between the door and the wall, careful not to open the door too wide and release all the steam, and sat down on the toilet. He bent down to kiss her lightly on the lips. “Sorry to get you wet.”

“It’s okay,” she smiled. “How did it go today?”

“Oh—it was great.” He shook his head vigorously. He closed the curtain and went back to showering. “It was really great Angela, I really liked it.”

“That’s great baby. I’m so happy for you.”

“I know, I know.”

She felt glad. Paul was generally sort of evenly happy—it wasn’t often that he got genuinely, outwardly excited about something. “You sound so excited.”

He pulled back the curtain and nodded, “I am.”

“So do you want to go out and celebrate tonight?”

“Actually, the guy I’m teaching with wants to take us to dinner.”

“Really? That’s awesome. Well hurry up because I have to take a shower too.”

“Just come in here.”

She pulled back the curtain a little bit and kissed his wet head. “I have to shower Paul, like actually cleanse my body, without getting fondled”

“You showered this morning.”

“I know but I saw Sam today so now I have wash the stink off me.”

He was a little affronted, having not realized that they were even really in contact. He scrunched up his nose a little. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I’m telling you now.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Okay,” he said slowly. He understood the need to hang on to former loves—just that day he had gotten an email from the woman he dated before Angela, who had broken things off with him when her mother died unexpectedly. He genuinely thought that new loves and old loves could coexist in a well-ordered mind, and he understood that it was complicated. It was Sam that bothered him. He knew too well that Angela had a soft spot for him that defied logic. It was this knowledge that made him decide not to push the issue. “Well, like I said, get in here.”

“Paul—“ she looked at him. “Okay,” she said, pulling her shirt over her head. She paused and pointed a finger at him. “But don’t distract me.”

He put his hand above his head and smiled. “I wouldn’t touch you if my life depended on it.”
(...to the full post)

She couldn’t remember her father ever looking at her before in the same way he had when she told him. And she thought, this is the way we live now, this is being an adult child. You can’t just always spill your guts when you want relief.

But it was too late—the words had already dropped into the world. It hadn’t sounded so bad, she thought, when she said it to herself.

“I know daddy, I’ve done a horrible thing to him.”

Her father shook his head and stood up to leave the room, turning back only to say, “you’ve done a horrible thing to yourself.”


She had been living in his extremely comfortable apartment on the Upper West Side for nearly three weeks now. She hadn’t even seen her apartment since he’d picked up in his Jeep on a Saturday afternoon in November when he roommates had gone to meet their friends to watch the Lehigh/Lafayette football game. She left them a note.

She had been happy with him, rejoicing in being worshipped and well fed. It was only when he met her at the Port Authority on her way back from visiting her folks that her feelings about their situation began to change. Even when her father was looking at her like she’d stabbed him in the front, she was still feeling indignant about the whole thing. When Dan greeted her, taking her duffel bag from her instantly, she indulged the delusion that the people in the terminal thought he was a father whose beloved daughter had come home from college for the weekend. And then he kissed her forcefully and she had to swallow hard to defend herself from the muted expression of revulsion of a woman standing nearby. She suddenly noticed that this was becoming a familiar experience: actually seeing people change their minds about her. That was the moment—the first time she ever resented Dan, the first time a woman in nylon pants and a start jacket pitied her.


I am not some lost girl, she reminded herself as they walked toward the subway. And Dan is not that man. Dan was not indelicate. But she was twenty-two! There was nothing even wrong with them being together. Nevertheless, Dan was not distinguished from her other lovers only by his age. He didn’t need the things that they needed, he didn’t expect the things that she believed all men expect. Maybe it was because he had been married, but he certainly didn’t expect sex all the time. This she wanted to run back through the terminal and scream in the face of the nylon woman, but instead, later that night, she simply rolled over when he crawled toward her in bed.


Her head was extremely heavy when she woke up and she called in sick to work. He stayed around and made her breakfast, which was pretty standard. His heart, she knew, was chained to a sadness so expansive that he would do almost anything to keep her around and save him from being alone with it. He would kiss her or not kiss her, depending on her mood, he would feed her (dining in or out), he would make love to her the way he must have wanted to do to his dying wife. The last of these attempts to please was satisfying or heartbreaking, depending on factors as unsympathetic as the weather or the direction of the wind. When it was rainy, she took some vindictive pleasure in how close to the skin his feelings were during sex. When it was nighttime, she wasn’t responsible to reality, he wasn’t a man who’d lost his wife to cancer, who she’d met when she was working for his wife’s doctor. At night she would crawl on top of him and lovingly draw letters on his chest, trying to make him guess them in the dark, a game she had played with others before him almost as a rule. The rule in this quiet household was the indulgence of all things that interested or amused her, and that she rewarded easily at night. When his windowed bedroom was full of afternoon light, however, she couldn’t bare to touch him and would take a bath while he busied himself by changing the sheets.

He brought eggs and the paper in to her, and leaned down to kiss her on the head before leaving, a gesture which felt sickening akin to something her own father would have done, if he didn’t hate because she was fucking a forty-year-old.

“Dan,” she drew a deep breath. “I’m beginning to feel disgusting.” He sat down on the bed next to her. She was lying flat on her back on the dark blue sheets, staring straight up at the ceiling. “You know—half your neighbors think I’m your niece and half of them think I’m a hooker.” She saw his mouth tighten. She was beginning to hate his endless tolerance of her, how he didn’t just stand up and scream like a normal person, “I’m not that fucking old.” He could have said a million things, could have drawn a flow chart about they were both adults, how they were lucky to have met each other after a tragedy, how she had been the one who said her favorite movie was “Harold and Maude.” How she had said she wasn’t beholden to other people’s standards. Instead he looked at her with earnest, even interested tolerance, like he felt sure the tantrum would pass.

So she kept talking. “I feel like, so…sad.” Suddenly she was overcome by a wave of emotion and was over on her stomach, crying into the pillow. Anger surprised her—how much had she missed since they’d been together? She felt that she had robbed herself of an unforgettable afternoon of watching football with people her age, and going to bars where she didn’t know anyone and waiting to see if anyone talked to her, and sleeping in her bed, her very own bed, and totally alone. She wanted her parents back, wanted to be able to cry to them about this mistake. All this time, she had been hiding their relationship because she thought of how insensitive they were being to the memory of Rita, who had been her patient and her friend too. But it wasn’t that at all that made her hate to see him crawling over her while warm light from the window danced upon their every move and sway. It was her—she hated to see herself in bright light at that moment, giving herself to man whom she didn’t love.

It hadn’t always been like that. She had been tricked. When they first started to talk, while Rita was in with the doctor, their friendship had been sincere and uncomplicated. One day, the doctor had asked her to tell Dan how long Rita had to live. She called him, and haltingly read from her doctor’s note the devastating prognosis. Rita was living on borrowed time as it was, they all knew, but saying so was quite a different thing. “I just didn’t think this day would come,” he said quietly. It was a gift, she had begun to see, to give a little bit of yourself to someone like that, without hope of returned affection.


But she had gone and ruined that. The realization of her own immaturity invaded her now. She had needed to be loved back if she was going to give anything at all, it seemed. At the time, she had thought it was just talking on the phone. She knew he needed a distraction, needed to pretend for five minutes that his life wasn’t collapsing into hell. And so she thought, there was nothing wrong with flirting a little, because she cared for him and she knew—or indulged the idea that he needed it. It had been easy to feel righteous, but that was over now.


How she got from there to being made breakfast on the upper west side she did not care to fully examine. Regardless, now that she had figured it out, she knew she needed to be gone fast. It broke her heart a little bit, and as she climbed on top of him for the first time since the first time they had made love during the day, she regretted the chasm between them honestly, not because someone was judging her for it. The day that they had cried together on the phone, she had really felt what she could only describe as an affinity. She had actually been jealous of a woman with cancer that day, because she got to be loved by him. But it wasn’t that, she saw now, and as his expression of pain dissolved—was submerged by an expression of pleasure, she knew that she no longer wanted to give herself up to lead a life that had already been decided. She resisted the thought, but it came crawling back to her, sinking into her like her dread at afternoon sex with him had been. She defended herself from it by relinquishing her conscious mind to the act of fucking him one last time, one for the road and to make up for potentially ruining his life more. But as she rolled over, warm and tired, the old man came creeping back to her; and that, she knew, was what she had done to herself.
(...to the full post)