III.
OR, BEFORE GOING OUT, he receives a letter. We see him returning from work, retrieving an envelope from the small, rust-colored box just outside his front door. The envelope is plain and white but asserts its presence for not being a bill—no tiny cellophane window to peek through—and for the name on the front: the man’s own. There is a return address from a Spanish-sounding name of a town in California. It is the only mail this day—the envelope thick and soft, many pages—and he takes it in the house with him, opening it alongside a bottle of beer at his small kitchen table.
The sheets of paper within have been folded into thirds. Dear James, the first page begins. A thick black ink, a decent pen. Looking back to the return address, the man wonders who knows him in California, anywhere near California. The letter instructs James to copy—either by typewriter or by hand—the letter and its accompanying pages, a text written by the letter’s previous recipients, and then to add his own paragraph at the end. He’s to do this three times and send each letter to a different person within three days. The letter’s author—in a boxy, forward-leaning handwriting, neither masculine nor feminine, neither script nor print—goes on to detail the fates of previous recipients who did not follow the instructions. A woman in Ohio was strangled by her husband of fifteen years, he having accused her of cheating. A boy, a teenager, took his dog for a walk in the forest preserve a mile from his house; the collie returned two days later without him. Car wrecks on long stretches of night highway without another vehicle for miles; allergic reactions; sudden, previously unknown medical maladies; amnesia. The man has never been a member of a team, has always been wary of groupthink and anything that involves a number of people doing the same thing at the same time: school choir, church, disco. More something his superstitious wife would be into. He flips to the next page. Above a solid block of text, in the same pen as the first page, hangs the title: An Old Story. In some versions, he keeps reading.
In the movie version, the wife is a crone, a controlling, uncaring woman whom we want to not only see left but also shamed, made to realize the ways she’s failed. If only she had been kinder, the man’s car wouldn’t have broken down. The wife’s hair is stringy and limp, her eyes the insensate gray of the drugged. She barely lifts her gaze from the boxy television as the man leaves the house, goes back to watching a made-for-TV movie, a woman with long, glossy hair found dead, bent and angular, in an alley. It makes it easier, in this same version, for the man sitting in the theater—after having sat for too long, after having given the woman too much time to walk away from the small, old theater—to finally rise, rush up the dark aisle through the lobby’s soft, buttery light, and out into the now-damp chill of evening. Easier for him to look one way down the lamplit street—always the wrong way first—then the other. To run now, to turn the corner, to see her from afar and call her name.
In most versions, there is no man. No unreliable car or woman with hair like silk, hair like curled ribbon, hair like old string. There is no short house to leave from, no dimpled couch sunken into a shrug or pieces of chicken in a cardboard bucket next to a six-pack of Schlitz in the fridge. In no version is the night warm, romantic, or mysterious. No version in which the season means anything at all. After a few years screening adult films and B movies, the single-screen theater in the small town closes and does not reopen for many years, if it ever reopens. Instead of a house, there is a blank, dry field near the interstate. There is the distant whoosh of passing traffic that sounds like fabric being ripped. Bottles and old pieces of pipe in the dead grass, crumpled paper garbage that has been tossed from above, and at the front of the lot, an orange plastic fence that arcs downward in a lazy collapse. In one version, there is a FOR SALE sign pushed into the earth and people who might do something with the space. In another version, there is no field.
HERE COMES YOUR MAN
THE MAN DRIVES A TRUCK and has a glorious beard. It’s leather brown and looks impenetrable, like the after of a Just for Men commercial. He says, You probably wouldn’t be interested in someone like me. We’re in a bar on the edge of a college town, and my friends and I look like the grad students we are. They don’t understand why I like to come here, where there will be people we don’t know.
What department are you in?
History, I say.
I would have guessed science.
Because of the glasses?
They’re dark-rimmed and thick—massive. Someone once told me I looked like Woody Allen in them. Not the exact compliment a woman wants to hear, but I don’t mind. It’s kind of true.
What kind of truck do you drive? My dad used to work for Peterbilt.
Oh yeah? It’s a—
How much room is there in the cab?
* * *
IT’S COZY IN THAT little bed area behind the seats. The cushion takes up the whole space except for small cubbies in the walls. One has a tiny TV/DVD player in it; another is tall and holds a rack lined with Carhartts. The trucker places our shoes in an empty recess, tucking in the laces. He’s taped up a bunch of old-fashioned postcards on the walls. Lots of pronouncements from states that don’t get enough attention. Iowa: You Make Me Smile. Missouri: Let us show you the Show Me State! I like when young people collect old things. A way to say: everything used to be just a little better before. It makes the trucker seem interested in his world but not overly clever, like he’s not going to be making any jokes I don’t get.
I came straight up from Missouri, he says. Didn’t even stop at home. I just needed to be around people. He looks at me and smiles, scratching carefully beneath the rim of his dark knit cap. I’ve suddenly grown shy, always more interested in good lines than in actually delivering on them. It’s crowded with the two of us back there, and when he finally puts his arm around me and we take off our clothes, it is as though our lovemaking is all a complicated way of saving space. You know, we’d have more room if I could just put this here and you put that there … It feels like Tetris, like packing boxes in a different kind of truck, and I think maybe I should have gone into the sciences. All that spatial reasoning, something about conservation of energy.
Afterward, we lie perfectly creased into each other’s bodies.
I say, You must be really good at folding maps.
He says, You’re beautiful.
I bite my lip.
I could get used to this, he says, and I wonder what I’ve gotten myself into.
* * *
HE JUMPS OUT of the truck then helps me down, and I have a vision of women wearing laced-up boots and full, complicated skirts, of a man pulling them from horse-drawn carriages. What kind of hat would I wear?
He wants my number. He lives here and wants to see me when he’s in town.
How often are you here?
A couple days every couple weeks.
It seems like the right amount. He hands me two scraps of paper—one with his number on it, the other blank. I’ve left my purse inside the bar. The trucker looks like a bigger version of a dirty, whiny folk singer I like. His cap is now off, his hair an unkempt overgrowth on his head and face, his lumberjack jacket zipped all the way up. I want to tell him who he reminds me of, but instead I write down my number, because he only looks like a singer-songwriter. I trust he will not whisper in infinite harmony with himself about his ex-girlfriend. He’ll just be.
As he pulls away, he looks down at me from his perch. I crank my fist up and down, and he pulls his horn. Haa-honnn.
Inside the bar my friends have quarantined themselves at a corner table, debating the Teapot Dome Scandal. They wave their arms and throw their heads around—a flock of pigeons pecking at the same piece of garbage. When I say hello, they look at me like they forgot I came with them. The virgin I’ve been seeing narrows his eyes at me and asks, Where were you?
* * *
THE NEXT MORNING I call my grandmother. It’s my grandparents’ sixty-eighth wedding anniversary, and I tell her congratulations, my voice sounding small like
a child’s, something that happens when I talk to her. I ask her if she and Grandpa did anything special today, and she laughs and says with a sigh, Ohhh, no, nothing special, just the usual. They went to church, she says, and ate lunch at the local family restaurant. It’s called Family Restaurant. I can immediately recall the limp pickle spears and sheets of iceberg that came with my burgers from Family Restaurant when I was a kid, how my dad would pull fries off my plate and replace them with sprigs of parsley. How he would order a tomato juice and shake pepper and Tabasco and A.1. into it, then below the table tip vodka in from a pocket flask. We’d cheers as though drinking champagne, tiny bubbles popping in my soda. I tell Grandma that sometimes the old places are the best ones, and she agrees and asks me if it’s snowing where I am, only a couple of hours south of where she is. There’s snow on the ground, I say, but just a little. Then we talk about how much we like snow—this is the Midwest and we like snow—and she says that she and my grandfather shovel the walks themselves, but that the high school kids still cut through the yard and muck it all up. I tell her that the mailman does the same thing. Although what I say is true, I’m partly talking for effect—I hope that she will appreciate me, someone much younger than herself, complaining about disrespectful people ruining my perfect blanket of snow. I tell her how I wait for the mail, getting really excited, and how nothing good ever comes. Bills, offers for credit cards, coupons to fast-food restaurants. On Sunday evenings I watch 60 Minutes just for Andy Rooney. I want to trim back his eyebrows the same way I want to clear the ice from the walks. Grandma says, Your father used to love to shovel the walks when he was a kid. He’d do the whole block without even being asked. She’s been doing this to me a lot since July. Laying out some little piece of something that I never knew about him and can no longer ask him about. I’m glad she tells me this stuff, but all the details—snow shoveling, his Cub Scout badges, serious, unsmiling yearbook photos—seem misplaced and wrong, like excerpts from another man’s history.
* * *
I’VE ONLY BEEN OUT with the virgin three times, but he already wants to DTR—define the relationship. This, apparently, is a thing. He’s chosen the only hip restaurant in town—the dark place with red, glowing lights and little white plates—to do this. I look around at all the other tables where people wear dark, slim-fitting clothing. Surely they know what’s going on. They see his white-blond hair, khaki pants, and small, contained face, and they know.
The thing is, though, I kind of want him. I want to take him out and mess him up a little. I just can’t help it.
Our waitress comes. She looks like a model, as skinny as a Pall Mall. I don’t smoke, but will sometimes crave a cigarette harder than anything. I’ll bum one, take a few good drags, then remember why I don’t smoke. It’s not about the filling up of my lungs, but the gesture, making those movements with my hands, letting people know that I’m too cool to care about what happens to my body.
So how many little plates should we order? I smile up at the waitress. I want to somehow signal to her that the virgin and I aren’t really together, that I’d much rather buy her a fancy drink and kiss her cool, thin lips, or at least hang out, brush her long, silky hair, and talk about boys.
As many as you’d like, she says.
I look at the virgin. He’s got his nose in the menu.
I circle a block of tapas with my forefinger and she leaves, taking the menus with her. The virgin finally looks up and gives me a tender smile, but then lets it drop. It’s serious time.
So, he says.
So, I say.
So I was thinking about going down to Springfield this weekend.
Uh huh.
They’ve got the new Lincoln library. Have you ever been? I’ve heard it’s amazing.
The virgin is a Lincoln Studies Scholar. This designation exists in only one program in America, our very own university. I picture a Lincoln beard over his face, something he could put on and take off like those Groucho Marx glasses, but the image just gets me thinking of my Russian ex-boyfriend who had the most excellent thick black beard. He was always screaming at his mother over the phone in Russian: “Nyet, nyet, nyet!” I loved it when he fought with her; I loved it when he told her no. When he’d hang up the phone, I would pull him down on the bed and fuck him, thinking of how much his mother would have hated me had we ever met.
So what do you think? he says. I mean, well, what do you think about us? He looks as earnest as a Sesame Street character.
Well. I clear my throat. You’re a fine person to sit next to in a movie theater—you let me eat nearly all of the popcorn, and I never worry about you talking to me during. I trust you as a driver, even if you’re a little on the slow side. You always signal well in advance, which I appreciate.
Cassie.
You have really nice breath. Not to be underestimated. It seems like you eat an Altoid maybe fifteen minutes before we see each other—it’s not too strong, but it’s clearly there, definitely lingering.
Cassie.
The waitress brings a round of little plates. She barely fits them all on the table, their lips overlapping.
Well, this all looks really good! I beam. Each dish is delicately arranged, the foods glistening in their oils. I roll my silverware out of the napkin. I don’t know where to begin.
Cassie?
We eat quietly. I take exactly half of everything. When the food is gone, I excuse myself, go up to the bar, and ask the bartender for a smoke. I give him a one-sided smile, like I’m not trying too hard. I take it outside in the gray, slushy snow and choke the whole thing down in front of the restaurant’s big glass windows, so that the people both inside and outside can see me.
* * *
THE TRUCKER’S NAME is Roger. When he calls, I ask him how old he is, because the only person I’ve ever known named Roger was my father’s best friend. My father’s Roger was a carpenter, skinny as a rail, and had a har-har-har style of laughing. I think of how My Father’s Roger sounds like a pretty good name for an alt-country band.
I’m thirty-two, he says.
Oh.
How old are you?
Twenty-four.
Ah.
So doesn’t your name get a little funny over the CB radio?
Yeah, people have some fun with it.
Yeah, like in Airplane!
What’s that?
You’ve never seen Airplane!? I think of how my dad used to say, And don’t call me Shirley, at least once a day, it seemed.
Sometimes they just call me Rog.
Rog, really?
Yeah.
Huh.
* * *
THE VIRGIN AND I drive down to Springfield. I’ve decided to see where this might go. He’s seemingly forgotten about the other night, now too geeked over all things Lincoln to worry about relationship definitions.
It’s twice the size of any other presidential library, he says.
Twice the size, huh?
And this is the only house that Lincoln ever owned.
Lincoln’s bedroom is on the second floor of the house. There’s a dark wooden rocking chair and matching four-poster bed. A tiny bedside table. We stand just outside the room with the other visitors behind a looped rope. Mary had a separate room, the tour guide tells us before leading the group downstairs to the sitting room. The virgin moves to follow, but I tug his hand.
Hey, I say.
He smiles.
I let go of him and step over the rope.
Cassie! he whispers.
Tiptoeing across the room, I wave my hands just above the surface of a dresser, as though an invisible force field protected it. I open an imaginary drawer, take out a hat, place it on my head, and admire myself in the mirror on the wall. I walk back to the doorway.
Don’t you want to get a little closer?
Well, he sighs. He’s not even looking at me.
Lincoln slept in this room.
He’s leaning in at his waist, peeking around the corner, getting in a
s far as he can without actually entering.
The lady said the carpets aren’t original. It doesn’t matter if you get them dirty.
Whoa-kay, he breathes. He steps over the rope as carefully as if the Great Emancipator were still there sleeping. With the pace and reverence of the grieving, he silently walks the room, finally stopping next to me beside the bed.
Is it everything you imagined? I ask.
It looks a little different up close, he says.
I take his hand and gingerly guide it over the white quilt. He sucks in his breath like he’s been shot.
I turn and sit down.
Cassie.
You can’t tell me you haven’t thought of this. He finally laughs, his face loosening, his eyes traveling to a place just beyond us—beyond this room and house, beyond school and work, beyond the Land of Lincoln and into the Land of Yes.
Mr. President! I exclaim and pull him down on top of me. I bury my head in his neck and put my arms around his skinny waist, but he wriggles, slides off me, falls to the carpet, then gets up quickly.
Jesus Christ, Cassie!
He’s out, stepping over the rope, creaking on the floor to join the rest of the history buffs downstairs. I fall back and let my head drop to the bed, wondering whether Lincoln traveled to Mary’s room at night or she came to his.
* * *
I GO TO THE MUSEUM. Sit on a bench in the great hall next to the life-sized replicas of the Lincoln family. Abe, Mary, the kids. I’m feeling a little Mary Todd–ish. A little buttoned-up and restricted, as though, like that famous first lady, I too have a head injury beneath my bonnet. In college, I dated a Lincoln reenactor. Now, I’m not a tall person. Only a little over five feet. We got some jokes, no doubt, but you couldn’t blame them. That boy was a lot of limb. I think of the trucker and traversing the trunk of his body like a hardened landscape, like tundra. I spot the virgin at the other end of the museum. He’s walking down one of the branching hallways, getting smaller and smaller. The Lincoln reenactor had an amazing beard. It was dark and real. It had to be; they were serious about that shit. He played the Civil War Lincoln, memorized the Gettysburg Address, but even so, I would sneak up behind him when I caught him sitting, would push my finger to the back of his head.
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