Writers & Lovers(15)

‘And where do you fall on that spectrum?’

‘To be him. Definitely.’

‘Do people sleep with him?’

‘No. He wrote this essay for Granta last winter about his dead wife and how he can’t think about other women and it got some people all hot and bothered.’

We hug goodbye outside her apartment building, talk for another half hour, and hug goodbye again.

The streets are quiet on the way home, the river flat and glossy. The sky is the darkest blue it gets just before turning black. I’m halfway across the BU Bridge before I realize I’m finishing that scene in my head. They’re talking and I can hear them and they’re finally going down the stairs.





Last fall Muriel’s boyfriend told her he needed to be alone in a room with books. They’d been together nearly three years. He said that if they stayed together they’d just get married and reproduce, and he needed to write. So do I, Muriel told him. She didn’t give a fuck about marriage and kids. But he didn’t know anything, he said, though he had two graduate degrees. He needed to be alone in a room with books. He went to live on the third floor of his brother’s house in Maine. That was ten months ago. They hadn’t had contact since.

A week after the book party, Muriel goes to her niece’s bat mitzvah and meets a guy.

‘I liked him,’ she says. ‘Christian.’

‘Christian?’

‘My dad said, “Leave it to Muriel to find a man named Christian at a bat mitzvah.” ’

She’s a little giddy.

The next day David, the old boyfriend, calls her. They say women have intuition, but men can smell a competitor across state lines.

‘He wants to see me,’ she says. ‘He wants to go on a walk.’

‘Is he still in his room with books?’

‘I don’t know.’ She’s half laughing, half crying. ‘Christian was such a good guy. We were supposed to go out Thursday night. Oh, holy crap, I nearly forgot. That guy Silas asked me for your number.’

He calls me the next morning. I can’t remember what he looks like. Or I can’t match what I remember with the voice. It’s low and ragged, like a half-broken engine. An old-man voice. I’m not convinced it’s him.

He asks if I’d like to go to the Museum of Fine Arts on Friday night. ‘They stay open late. And we could get a bite to eat after.’

Bite to eat. It was something my mother would say. ‘Sure.’ I feel like laughing. I’m not exactly sure why, but I don’t want him to hear it.

‘You’re laughing.’

‘No, I’m not.’ I was. ‘I’m sorry. It’s my dog. He’s doing this thing with his ears.’

‘What’s his name?’

I don’t know the name of Adam’s dog, and he isn’t in the potting shed with me. Do I really not know the name of that dog? ‘Adam’s dog.’

‘Adam’s Dog is the name of your dog?’

‘It’s not really my dog. It’s Adam’s. My landlord. I take care of him sometimes. I don’t know his real name.’

Silence.

I should never answer the phone in the morning. ‘I mean, I’m sure I knew it. I’m sure he told me. But I’ve forgotten it. I have to walk him every morning right in the middle of my writing time and I resent him so much I don’t even want to know his name and I only do it for the fifty bucks off my rent.’

‘And he’s not why you were laughing, either.’

‘No, I really don’t know why I was laughing.’

Silence.

‘It’s just that I can’t quite match your voice to your body right now.’ I wince at the word ‘body.’ Why was I talking about his body? ‘And the expression ‘bite to eat’ reminds me of my mother.’ Do not tell him your mother is dead. He has called to ask you out on a date. Do not mention a dead mother.

‘Huh.’ It sounds like he was getting into a different position, reclining, smooshing a pillow under his head maybe. ‘Do you get along with her?’

‘Yes. Completely. Very simpatico.’ But I don’t want to pretend she is somewhere that she isn’t, like I did with the dog. ‘She died though, FYI.’ FYI?

‘Oh shit. I’m so sorry. When?’

‘Recently.’

He gets the whole thing out of me, all the bits I know about her trip to Chile. It still burns a bit, coming out. He listens. He breathes into the phone. I can tell he lost someone close somehow. You can feel that in people, an openness, or maybe it’s an opening that you’re talking into. With other people, people who haven’t been through something like that, you feel the solid wall. Your words go scattershot off of it.

I ask him, and he says his sister died, eight years ago.

‘I usually say it was a hiking accident,’ he says. ‘That she fell. But she was struck by lightning. People can get very caught up in that. The symbolism. Or the physical details. Either one. It bugs me.’

‘Where were you when you found out?’ I don’t know why, but I need to picture him at that moment. It’s such an awful moment. I heard over the phone at five in the morning in a tiny kitchen in Spain.

‘I was home, at my parents’ house. I was supposed to be on that trip but I’d gotten mono. That day was the first day I felt okay. I went to the mall to get a pair of sneakers, and when I came back my father told me to sit down. I said I didn’t want to sit down. I heard it all in his voice. I already knew. For so long I was so mad he made me sit down. Something like that rips you out of your life and you feel for a long time like you’re just hovering above it watching people scurry around and none of it makes sense and you’re just holding this box of sneakers—’ I hear a voice in the background, a woman. ‘Oh shit, Casey, I have to go. My class started twelve minutes ago.’