“He didn’t,” she said.
“If he did,” my father said, “it’s okay to tell us. We won’t harm you. We’ll make sure you’re safe. You can stay here if you need to.”
She shook her head.
“You really fell down the stairs?” he said.
“No,” she said. “But Ben didn’t hit me.”
“Someone else hit you?”
“Could we talk about something else? I’m sorry, I just—”
“Hey,” my father. “Hey hey. It’s fine. We’ll talk about something else. How about… Well, the engagement. I mean, my son’s a great kid, but I’m fairly certain he put every last penny he had to his name toward buying you that obscenely lavish invisible ring you’re wearing. I mean, do you really think it’s good idea to get married before he finishes college and gets a real job?”
Tell laughed for him. She said, “Ben was just kidding about the getting married thing. He likes to exaggerate.”
“Well, look,” my dad said. “I know you’d rather not talk about it, and I’m trying not to, but I just—I’m a parent, and I feel like I have to tell you that whatever’s going on, whatever happened, Jane, you don’t deserve to get hurt.”
My mother rushed past me with a first-aid box and Tell looked up on hearing her. She spotted me sitting there. I ducked back, reflexively, like I’d been caught at something. I didn’t know exactly what.
I stayed on the stairway for a little while. My mom turned a brown bottle onto a ball of cotton and pressed the cotton to Tell’s bottom lip. My dad offered her some ice cream. Tell declined. My mom told him to get her some anyway. Tell asked her what kind of accent she had and my mom started talking about immigration.
While my dad was getting a bowl together for Tell, he said, “Where’s Ben?” and I crept outside to smoke on the driveway and figure out how to say that I loved her so it meant something better than I accept you.
By the time Tell came out front, it had been raining for at least twenty minutes and I was on my third cigarette, pacing carefully to avoid stepping on the worms that had come up onto the pavement.
“You wanted to see if he’d Rick me,” she said.
“I don’t think that’s true.”
“You know, you could have just asked me if he’d do it, instead of testing me out like a fucking lab rat. I feel like such a piece of shit now. It’s your fault this time. Feel guilty.”
“I don’t think I was testing you out,” I said.
“You don’t think you were?” she said.
“Quit it,” I said.
“Quit it and stop it and cut it out,” she said. “Smoke. Walk. Park. Tracks. Denny’s. All we do is repeat, you know that? Like an error message. Like a beeping fucking circuit board.”
I couldn’t tell if she was crying or if it was anger cracking her voice.
“Everything repeats,” I said.
“Look at these worms,” she said. “They think they’ve saved themselves from drowning in the grass.”
Anger.
I said, “Quit analyzing the imagery, Tell. It’s manipulative.”
“Listen to you!” she said. “It can’t be that manipulative if you know to call it imagery.” She slammed me on the nose. It broke. “If I was so manipulative,” she said, kicking my legs out from under me, “you’d be manipulated by now.”
Coughing, my face flat on a dead red worm, I said, “I was jealous.”
“You just figured that out?” She made for the street. “I’m moving out,” she said.
“Wait,” I said, “I’ll drive you.”
Soaked and bleeding and limping beside her, I felt romantic, like I could prove something simple.
Then we were standing next to my car.
“Take me to my mom’s,” she said. “I’ll come back for my stuff tomorrow when you’re gone.”
I got in the car and started it. I hadn’t driven in months and all the dread came on. I closed my eyes and there they were: the trucker and the tow-trucker and the sales clerk with his glasses. Manx. The therapist. A soldier. A café owner. Any number of cops and vice principals. Every man whose face I could remember but for me and my father. They waited in line to leave their impression and Tell told me it was okay, take it easy, she liked it. I opened the door and got sick in the lot.
“I’ll drive,” she said. “You sit shotgun and by the time we get there, you’ll be used to the car. You’ll be able to get yourself home.”
I kept my mouth shut. I did what she told me.
I tried escaping the panic by thinking of fucking, but every time I closed my eyes I’d see all the men lined up in front of her.
After we’d driven a couple of miles, I covered up my closed eyes with my hands, thinking irrationally—however deliberately—that it might be possible to blot out the images appearing on my eyelids by shielding them against the backlight of the streetlamps. Instead I saw Jane’s body bruising, breaking, deforming, her bloodstained hair in a flat-knuckled fist that dragged her along the shoulder of a highway, one swollen eye winking, the other turned to look placidly skyward.
The car struck a pothole. Both my hands slipped, jarred my nose at the break. What had been a redundant, dull, throbbing pain became so suddenly sharp and brutal that I didn’t care about anything else. I could only see white.
Soon enough, though, the pain died down and I knew where I was.
I wiggled the bridge of my nose with my thumbs and returned to that state of excruciating relief. When it disappeared, I wiggled my nose again, but it didn’t hurt as badly as it had the first time, and the relief wasn’t total. I proceeded to squeeze, and then to tap, and then to frantically flick at my nose until those methods became ineffective.
Through all of that, Jane Tell said nothing—either she hadn’t seen what I was doing or she’d chosen to ignore it—and she continued saying nothing till I struck my nose with the back of my fist, and she yelled at me to stop. “Just stop!” she yelled.
Blinded, I leaned against my window and bled.
When the relief wore off, I used my fist again.
And Tell again yelled out for me to stop. And again I was blind and leaning on my window. And when I could see again, I could see that Tell wasn’t looking at the road, but looking at me, and the car was about to collide with something black. It was too late to stop.
The collision was quiet, a clop without resonance. The thumping of the anti-lock brakes was louder.
We ran to the gasping animal and knelt. It lay on its side on the yellow line, trying to bark, trying to growl, coughing and squealing. “It’s breathing,” Tell said. Its spine was severed, even I could see that. “There’s an all-night vet on Willow,” she said.
I called the vet. They didn’t have an ambulance.
I called the cops. They told me an hour.
“But it’s breathing,” I told them.
They told me an hour.
“Help me,” Jane said. She was trying to lift it. It made awful, human sounds. Moaning, pleading sounds.
“Let go of it.”
“It’s a dog.”
“You’re hurting it, Jane.”
I got into the car.
“Just help me,” she said.
“Fucken move,” I told her, and turned the key. She got out of the way.
Reader, I ended it.
RSVP
The way I heard it, this guy, Donald, who was pathologically shy, wrote the world’s greatest love letter—four lines long, a mere seventy words—to a girl called Janet, with whom he’d made slightly longer than average eye contact on at least three separate occasions. (After what may have been the second, he went to the bathroom and discovered in the mirror a smear of red ink on the bridge of his nose.) Donald wrote the letter in flawless calligraphy on supple paper, then folded it into an origami duck, and at lunch the next day—Donald and Janet worked at the same office—he hung back a couple minutes till all of his fellow employees had cleared out, at which point he walked the duck across the r
oom and mistakenly stood it on the chair of Chrissy’s cubicle, which shared a partition with Janet’s.
Just a couple minutes earlier, Janet, a secret origami enthusiast who was even shyer than Donald, lonelier too, and whose feelings for Donald were entirely mutual, had noticed, on her way out the door to lunch, that Donald had not yet risen from his cubicle. Janet thought that maybe if she could dally long enough to bump into Donald with no one else around, they might finally get up the nerve to speak to each other, or, failing that, they could make some more eye contact, maybe even within the close quarters of the elevator, and maybe, were the elevator crowded enough, she could brush Donald’s arm with a shoulder. So Janet lingered by the water fountain, fake-drinking water, and saw Donald place something on her chair. She was instantly sweaty. What could it be? She ran to the ladies’ room and washed her hands twice. By the time she returned, Donald was gone. She went to her cubicle, discovered her mistake. Her chair was empty. Donald’s gift was for Chrissy. An origami duck. Janet picked it up, turned it in the light. What beautiful work! Not a crease that wasn’t straight. Not the slightest hint of an unintended shadow. Under the wings and along the bill’s edges, words inscribed in impeccable calligraphy appeared between the elegant folds: love and eyes and bashful and you and glue and us and forever. Other words appeared on the sides of the neck and the webbing of the feet, but Janet, remembering they weren’t for her, chose not to read them, and, lest she obey her terrifying impulse to crush the duck against her chest and jump out the window, plunging to her death, she set it back down on the seat of Chrissy’s chair and left the building, as if in a trance. She walked a block, not knowing to where, then walked another block, still unknowing. In the middle of the third block, she settled on the lake. She would go to the lake and look at the waves, the sight of which always gave her comfort in summer. The lake was east and east was left. She took a sharp left, into the street, where she was struck by a bus and instantly killed.
For lunch, Donald ate some egg-salad sandwiches. He’d prepared the egg salad the night before, as soon as he’d finished folding the duck, and this morning scooped enough to make four sandwiches into a sealable plastic container. He’d carried the container, along with utensils and disposable napkins, in a thermal lunchbox he’d bought for the occasion. The first floor of the building in which he and Janet worked featured a bakery that made his favorite brioche rolls. After purchasing four, Donald brought them to the park across the street, and, sitting on the ledge of the fountain, in the sun, he sliced three in half, spread egg salad on them, and ate them with gusto. He waited until the very end of the lunch hour to make the fourth sandwich, in order to ensure that it would be as fresh as possible. He would, upon returning to the office, as long as Janet didn’t seem repulsed by his letter, give her that sandwich. His last girlfriend, Terri, had sworn his egg salad was the finest egg salad she’d ever eaten, and his friend had liked it, too. Donald, if he did say so himself, agreed that he made a mean egg salad, but he hadn’t once eaten it in over three years, not since just before Terri and his friend ran off to Connecticut together and became highly paid pharmaceutical representatives. A part of him had been worried that he might have lost his touch, but no sooner had he swallowed his first bite of sandwich than he realized he hadn’t.
He returned to the office a couple minutes late. Everyone was there but Janet.
Chrissy never realized the duck was a letter, but she thought that it might have been a gift from Janet, the dikey bookish girl she’d worked with who a bus killed—so sad—so she held on to the duck for sentimental reasons. Chrissy was lucky to be born with her genes and she knew it, too, so she was nice to everyone, including lesbians, just as long as they didn’t try anything creepy, since, first of all, lesbians were people too, and secondly she knew that no one stayed beautiful, you got old and saggy, and having a nice body was not a thing that lasted, but having friends was. Those were her values.
When she got home from work on the day Janet died, Chrissy set the duck on her knickknack tray’s edge, where it stayed till the first chilly night in fall, when the heat kicked on and the vent blew the duck all over the tray till its bill wedged between a pair of porcelain gorillas in T-shirts, hugging. Then, on the first warm night of spring (by which time Donald had long since hanged himself), Chrissy threw a party which got so fun that a dancing drunk guy fell down hard, knocking the knickknack tray to the floor. With the exception of the world’s greatest love letter, all the tray’s contents exploded on impact.
“You broke my knickknack tray,” Chrissy told the drunk guy.
“You sank my battleship,” the guy told Chrissy.
“You broke my knickknack tray,” Chrissy said.
The guy said, “Knickknack paddy wack, can’t you see that I love you?”
He worked the broom and she held the dustpan. The duck looked like garbage and they swept that up, too. They fucked all night long, fucked well for being drunk. The next night, sober, they fucked even better.
When you and I were young and in love, Tom and I would go to a twenty-four-hour diner in a basement at Western Avenue and Augusta. We’d sit at the counter there and eat fried eggs on small croissants nearly every weekday morning before work. Because we were regulars, the cook would occasionally surprise us with cheese squares melted on our sandwiches, gratis.
I still type all my letters and address the envelopes by hand. I still feel about origami the way I feel about mimes, unless you insist Harpo Marx is a mime. Harpo Marx I feel great about.
You were the person who introduced me to the Marx Brothers—you had everything on tape—but I pretended I knew their work to impress you, and dismissed it on the grounds that the Three Stooges were better. That was Tom’s opinion and I looked up to Tom. He was a couple years older than me and full of answers. One time I asked him when I’d stop hating my father. (“As soon as he stops being a cock about your friends, or you become a cock and ditch them like he wants you to.”) One time I asked him to explain, in plain language, the difference between signs and symptoms. (“You can observe others’ signs, like their swollen labia, but not others’ symptoms, like the butterflies in their stomach or their tingles or whatever.”) Another time, right after I’d sent you the one I’d written, I asked him what he thought about love letters. (“This poet called Don who my cousin used to know wrote the greatest one ever, but he gave it to the wrong girl—some dumb, heartless cunt who wasn’t even that hot—and she didn’t respond and he killed himself.”) Then one time I asked him if he thought gay men pretended their penis was someone else’s when they masturbated. He said that he didn’t know for sure, but the question was a good one, and he supposed that they probably tried to pretend at one time or another. Then he told me that that was like the Stranger.
“That book?”
“You wind a rubberband around your wrist so your hand falls asleep.”
“Oh,” I said. “Does it do the trick?”
Tom wished to God he knew, but there were never any rubberbands around when he needed one.
I’d been out with you the night before. I took you to see an action movie. You were still an athlete. You were training for U.S. swim team tryouts and I smoked a lot of cigarettes. I had parked on the roof of a four-story lot and, after the movie, you said we should race back up to the car. You thought it was funny to make me run. The race wasn’t close—you spared no effort. You were still hunched over, breathing audibly, hands on your knees, when I finally got there. Your hair was tied back with a cloth-covered rubberband the color of a robin’s egg. I pulled it off your head to announce my arrival—I could hardly breathe, much less speak—and you spun around and grabbed me, both-handed, by the ribs, and you pressed me to the wall and I pulled you to the concrete and… I’m sure you remember. But you forgot about the rubberband, never asked for it back. Probably because you had many such rubberbands. They come in packs of ten, twenty-five, and fifty, these rubberbands. They tend to have a gold or silver thread running through th
em. You know the kind I mean. The one I’d taken meant nothing to you.
It certainly meant more than nothing to me, though apparently not enough, or too much to admit. Maybe some combination. I don’t know anymore, I probably never did, but Tom was my friend, and I was young and in love, he was older and not-so, and your rubberband was wrapped around the lighter in my pocket. I handed it over.
“Stranger, here I come,” he said.
“Wait,” I said. “Actually…”
“What?” Tom said.
“Never mind,” I said. “Nothing. Let’s invent the religion.”
We’d often talked, at the diner, about inventing a religion, but we never got the chance. We’d be too hungover or wouldn’t have a pen or by the time we’d get enough coffee in us to begin we’d have to head out for work. That day was no different.
“Tomorrow,” Tom said. “We’re already running late.”
That night I met you for sushi on Division where before me was set a miso soup I hadn’t ordered. You insisted I try it, but I didn’t understand how to eat soup with chopsticks, so you showed me how to drink it straight from the bowl. A beige drop on your lip became a line on your chin and you wiped it away with the cuff of your hoodie, your thumb hooking through a tear in the seam, its chewed-looking nail and bright pink quick.
“Come on,” you said, tilting your face to my bowl.
Through the broth I saw the tofu. White cubes of paste, flaking. Mealy chunks of wet cadaver. A substance I’d managed to dodge for years. I hefted the bowl to my mouth and I drank until there was nothing left to drink.
The cubes stayed stuck to the bottom, a blessing.
I asked you if you’d gotten my love letter yet. I asked roundaboutly, weenieishly—how else would I have asked? No one ever accused me of being too direct. I said, “How was your experience at the mailbox today?”
You told me my letter had arrived, that it was typed.
I said, “Yes, but how was it?”
“Typed,” you said.
“I signed it by hand.”