Writers & Lovers(34)

‘And that’s why you said yes to mini golf, because of them?’

‘Them, and your note. With all the cross outs.’

‘That guy was standing over my shoulder, reading every word. I couldn’t think.’ He wipes his nose again.

‘You’re a bit rusty.’

‘I know.’ He tries to reach out to me with both arms but Bob resists. He lets go of the leash and the dog stops and sits on his haunches, watching us. Oscar rests his forearms on my shoulders as if he’s done it many times before. ‘You heard the part about not making my skin crawl, right?’

‘I’ve only dated other writers.’ I hook my fingers around his upper arms. He’s strong, compact. Our hips are aligned. ‘It’s never worked out.’

‘So I’m just the next in line.’

‘A long line.’

Some kind of hawk drops from the top of a tree toward us and Oscar flinches. The hawk glides up to another high branch.

‘You are twitchy around trees.’

‘Can I please kiss you before they all attack?’

I nod.

He kisses me, pulls back, and kisses me again. No tongue. ‘I’ve never asked a waitress out before.’ Another chaste kiss. ‘That’s not how I operate.’ His lips are softer than they look.

‘How do you operate?’

‘I was married for eleven years. All my skills are obsolete.’

He picks up Bob’s leash, and we start walking again. We turn up the Conifer Path, a narrow, empty lane. I ask how she died. He says cancer and tells me that afterward he was angry for three years. He says there was nothing else. No love, no sadness. Just the anger like a big red alarm going off all day for three years. I tell him my mother died in February. I try to think of how to describe it to him, but nothing comes out. He apologizes for not knowing how that feels, to lose a mother. He says that one of the hardest things has been his boys at ages two and five having to go through something he hasn’t. ‘When my mother dies, they’ll be comforting me,’ he says.

We go up a hill and down another path and loop back around to the lilacs.

Oscar stops. ‘Here is where we had our first fight.’ He marks an X with his shoe. He backs up several yards. ‘And here’—he marks another X—‘is where we made up.’ He walks back to me and takes my hand. ‘In the spring when all these lilacs bloom it is magnificent. We’ll come back then.’





On my machine:

‘Hey, Casey. How are you? I just got back into town. Just a few minutes ago. Uh. I didn’t really plan out a message. I was just hoping to talk to you. And see you. Go on that date. I’m at the same place, 867-8021. I hope things are good with you. I, well. Catch you later.’



I play it again. The rumbling and the little laugh like a hiccough in the middle of saying he didn’t plan out the message. I play it once more and hit Erase.





I go in the next week for the cauterization. The doctor and nurse show me a drawing of a cervix on a poster on the wall. It looks like a pink cigarette. The lower end is the opening where a baby would come out. They’re planning to light that part on fire.

You have no nerve endings on your cervix, they explain, so you don’t need to use a local anesthetic. But there is an awful snapping sound, and soon the room is filled with a smell you want to unsmell immediately and can’t. This is their job, I think, smelling burnt cervix.

I meet Muriel at Bartley’s after.

‘It sounded like a bug zapper. And it stank. Like they were burning hair and leather shoes and salmon roe all together.’

Muriel looks down at her burger. ‘You have to stop.’

‘I did remember to tell him about my periods and the pain and he said I might be a “candidate” for endometriosis. It affects fertility he said. No treatment, no cure. Which means now I can be terrified equally of getting pregnant and not ever getting pregnant.’ I eat a fry. I can’t eat my burger. ‘How’s the writing?’

She shook her head. ‘I can’t get that damn war to end. Every day I sit down and try to end it and I can’t.’

‘It’s a big war. Two fronts. Not a small task.’

‘I think I’m nervous about that scene.’

‘You mean the lake scene?’

‘Yeah.’ Muriel got the idea for the lake scene before anything else. All the other ideas grew around it. ‘I’m getting all wobbly about it.’

‘You just need to write it out and get it over with.’

‘I don’t know why I feel this way. It’s like performance anxiety or something. What if I can’t get it up?’

‘Your readers will just spoon you and tell you it doesn’t matter in the least and that it happens to everyone.’

‘It’s the whole reason for the book, this scene.’

‘No, it’s not. Maybe it once was, but it’s not anymore. You have to let that go. It isn’t a short story with its one perfect culmination. It’s messy.’

‘Yeah, I know. A novel is a long story with something wrong with it,’ she quotes. It’s a line that gets passed around and attributed to a variety of writers.

‘Just get them down to the lake, and they’ll do what they need to do.’