The Summer That Melted Everything(45)

“What are you doing up there?” they asked.

“Fixing the steeple,” I answered.

I didn’t have my tools with me, so I had to improvise. I heard someone down below say I was mad, the way I gripped air and hammered it too. The way I sounded out the sound of steel hitting wood. I had gone temporarily around the bend. Don’t we get to at least once in our lives? To go so mad, we survive what it is we are doing. And what I was doing was jilting the woman who loved me. My God, what I must’ve done to her heart.

I heard someone from below say I had always been good for nothing. I picked up one of my invisible crowbars and flung it his way. He didn’t flinch.

I suppose someone told her I was on the roof. She came running out of the church, white dress and all. I heard her mother saying, “Mary, get back inside. He’s not supposed to see you yet.”

But Mary didn’t care. Mary only ever heard what she wanted to hear. It was her fault we got as far as we did to the church.

One day I said Mary and then I said something else, I know I did, but ended it all with a me. She thought I’d said Marry me. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that wasn’t what was said at all. She was just so excited. I thought, hell, this girl really wants to marry me. Why not give it a try? Maybe her love would be enough to paradise the hell. But then I realized, I couldn’t use her like that. Like a shield in the fray. She deserved to marry a man who loved her for all the things she was and not for all the armor she could be.

As she stared up at me that day on the roof, she knew exactly what I was doing up there. I’ll always be grateful for her, how she never asked me to come down like everyone else did. She just took off her veil and told her mother she’d like to stop by Denny’s on the way home. She was hungry, she said.

That was the last I saw of her, her white dress piling up against her body like the snow I never saved her from.

I waited for them all to leave. I cringed when I heard a woman call me a no-good son-of-a-bitch. Even the flower girl flipped me the bird. I threw an invisible hammer at her. She just dropped her chin to her chest and shook her head as she walked away, dragging her feet while the flower petals fell from her hand.

Before I climbed down, I yanked some of the shingles off the steeple, kicked it in the side, and broke the stained glass in its little window. A week later, I’d drive by the steeple and see it was still damaged.

Some people might call me lonely because all I got are pictures of steeples and towers and roofs. I do have the neighbor boy’s photograph, but he’s not mine. Like I said before in Maine, I wouldn’t have done much good with a kid if I had one. I did have a dream once that I had a son. In this dream, I went out to the woods with him and put a gun in his young hands. I woke up at the bang.

“Just a nightmare,” I muttered, reaching for the bottle by the bed. “Just a nightmare.”

Maybe I am lonely. Maybe I do hold onto the pillow at night, maybe I have twisted a bread tie around my ring finger just to see what it feels like to have a meaning there. I think of Elohim during these moments.

Him and his Helen.

Too bad he couldn’t just let go of what she had done to him. After all, it wasn’t the losing of her to the Andrea Doria he’d been destroyed by. It was the losing of her to another. It’s a gasoline betrayal when the romance of your lover becomes a separate energy from you. It lessens your significance as lover. As man.

Spark, spark, hiss, and burn.

I’ve been with many Helens. Their legs around me. My head on their husbands’ pillows.

Sometimes a husband would come home early. I’d hear his tires crunching over the gravel in the drive. She’d throw my clothes at me, tell me to get out. That the window was the best bet. I’d just lie there.

“What are you doing?” She’d try to pull me up. Fear in her whisper, “He’s gonna catch you.”

I could hear his keys in the front door.

“Honey, I’m home,” he’d call, like a sitcom. I could tell his head was down, looking over the mail he’d just brought in. “Honey?” A step creaking on his way up while she yanks on my arm, telling me he has a gun.

“Does he know how to shoot it?”

She’d shriek and look at me with fear like she could already see the blood and all the cleaning up she’d have to do. Blood is hard to wash out, I knew she was thinking, her eyes rolling like washing machines already starting the job.

Only when the doorknob turned with his hand did I grab my clothes and throw them out the window, me jumping after. I’d wait in the yard, thinking he knew. How could he not? How could he not smell me all over her? All over his sheets? His pillow? But the curtains would close and no guns would fire.

Later the bartender would say to me, you look like you could use a drink. Later after that, he’d say I’d had enough and I’d have to use my fists to say otherwise.

I dated a girl named Andrea once. I could feel her sinking under me into the downy comforter. I asked her if she ever heard of the Andrea Doria. She said no and said for me not to go so fast.

“Gentle, gentle.” She patted my back.

I said, “I’m not a damn dog,” and I came and she went disappointed and rolling off to the side, saying I shouldn’t stay over anymore and not to call again and if it wouldn’t be too much trouble to hand her some fresh sheets from out of the closet on my way out.