We Should Have Left Well Enough Alone

by Ronald Malfi

  It was October twenty-seven.

  Years after the war, a few of the old boys got together at the local lodge in the city. It was a quiet and modest event and none of the wives were in attendance. Jonesy was there and he plucked his harmonica from his chambray work shirt and started to blow and it was just like being in Europe all over again. In fact, it was so real that the lodge grew quiet and somber and many of the men did not speak much about the war for the rest of the evening. For a long while, Jonesy looked at his harmonica and turned it over in his big hands and looked as though he did not know what it was. After ten o’clock, when most everyone had left, I looked over and saw Jonesy’s seat empty and his coat missing from the coat rack. He’d left his harmonica on the table.

  Then There is Boston

  For Deb, 2004

  Then there is Boston, and the storm comes in and makes everything white. Snow covers the city. We stay for days by the hotel fireplace, drinking pinot grigio and eating too-hot clam chowder, our bodies together and shrouded in a knitted Indian afghan. We spend early mornings in the cafés and bistros and walking the Quincy cobblestones, she beautiful in a brown jacquard cap, I beautiful because of her. The sky misted with cold, the cityscape a frozen horizon of neutral pastels in the predawn moments before sunrise, we crest Broad Street in time to see the sun break behind the buildings. She sighs and says it is something beautiful and I say yes, it is always something beautiful, and there is nothing between us and we are all open and new. I tell her I have never felt so new and she knows this and feels this, too, and holds me in that way that makes me think she will never dare let go.

  Nights and we are assembled poetry, a haiku of intermingled arms and legs, sambaed as if in dance, rhyming in all our passion. There is no greater togetherness. I am overcome by moments, some moments, and try to communicate to her the effortlessness through which I have been conquered—through which she has conquered me—yet I am powerless to get her to understand through words. I tell her this, and tell her that words are all I know, that words are how I am powerful and are what I command, so how can I not tell her what is inside? How can I bring the inside out to her? “But I know your words,” she whispers, and pulls me close. And she does. And she does. And there is the warm fall of her breath across the summit of my shoulder, and there is the ghostly tickle of her curled hair against the side of my white face, and there is the physical silhouette of her against me, the cascade of skin, and I can think of no words and I am rendered defenseless and cannot wander.

  I write in the lobby while she sleeps. I do this for us, and to keep these things down, all these things, so they will always be there to look back upon. My words come and they are free and uninhibited, but they are not perfect, and I cannot uncover, with any ounce of sincerity or personal gratification, the truest trueness behind what it is I am experiencing and in the telling of such experiences. I cannot tell it. It is there and all around me and I have slowly become infused with it, with all of it, but I cannot tell it. And I am taunted by the not telling.

  “Your wife,” says the older woman who refills the brochures at the front desk of the hotel lobby, “she is very pretty.”

  “Thank you, but she is not my wife,” I say.

  “She is still very pretty.”

  “She is,” I say.

  “She is asleep?”

  “Yes. We were up very late.”

  “She is a very beautiful young lady.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You are here to work?”

  “No. We are vacationing,” I tell the woman. “We are from Maryland.”

  “This is some storm,” says the woman. “You came just in time for some storm, the two of you.”

  “I suppose.”

  “You are in love, and very deeply. I can see it in the way you write.”

  “Can you?” I say.

  “You are pushed very far over your writing and you are hungry to get the words out, all the right words, but you do not write so fast while pushed very far over. You sit and you think, but you are still so very hungry for the words to come, and so you wait.” She says, “There is an innocent and beautiful frustration to you.”

  “I don’t know how to say it,” I confess.

  “You don’t need to say it. Write it simply and honestly and how it is. There is no need for splendor. This is not poetry; this is life. And,” she goes on, “it is good to be so young and twenty-something and in love.”

  “It is very good,” I admit, smiling.

  “You should enjoy it.”

  “I enjoy all of it,” I say. “Every second.”

  “You are a fool, then,” says the woman.

  “A fool?” I say. “For what reason?”

  “For her not being your wife,” says the woman.

  I write until I cannot write any longer. I purchase a bottle of Cavit champagne and some freshly baked sesame bagels and carry everything back up to the room. When I get there, she is coming from the shower, and there is a twist of towel about her head, and nothing else. I set my writing tablet, the champagne, and the plate of bagels on a table and watch her move across the floor and to the bed. She is smiling and whispering to me, prettily and easily very womanly, and I am suddenly and once again overcome by my love for her. She pauses in her stance, all too briefly, and remains as a dark figure suspended before the bright rectangle of window at her back. I know every part of her, and I know it from watching and holding.

  “What are you doing down there, baby?” she says, and lets herself fall back onto the bed.

  “I am writing,” I say. “I am writing all of this down. I want us to have it all.”

  “We already have it all,” she says.

  “I want you to have more.”

  “What more is there?” she says. “There is no more. I would be terrified, baby, to learn that there is more.”

  “Are you happy?”

  “Always.”

  “Then I am happy, too.”

  “Then it is very simple,” she tells me, “for us to make each other happy.”

  I agree that yes, it is.

  Some indoor markets are not bothered by the snow, and so we visit and we buy boiled peanuts and eat them out of wax paper pouches. Faneuil Hall is not very busy as it is not the season for business. We watch a puppeteer perform with marionettes from one cart, and he works both puppets on his own and without assistance, and it is funny because one of the puppets—the not-so-smart one—is named after me. We laugh and it is all very funny. When the performance is over, the puppeteer tries to persuade me into buying one of his puppets. I do not buy any puppets but we give him a dollar, which I stuff into a slit in the lid of an old can of Maxwell House coffee.

  “I would like to maybe see Fenway Park ,” she says, “and maybe the Boston Public Garden.” She is reading a pamphlet.

  “I don’t think the Garden would be much to see in all this snow.”

  We stay in the hotel that night, and carry all the bedclothes and pillows to the window parapet. We curl like cats in the bedclothes on the parapet and look out on a snowy Downtown Boston. She kisses me and I smile and turn and fog the windowpane with my breath. With her index finger, she draws a heart in the blossom of fog.

  “Tell me a story,” she says.

  “I don’t know any stories.”

  “You always say that.”

  “It’s always true.”

  “It’s not,” she insists. “You write all the time. You stay up late writing in the lobby after I’m asleep. Can’t you tell me a story?”

  So I tell her a parody of the way we met, and I make it humorous but sweet and very gentle, but also somewhat rough and overdone in the parts I feel require to be somewhat rough and overdone. She laughs at some parts and frowns playfully at others but, mostly, she just listens and puts her head against my chest and, just as I finish the story, she tells me how loud my heart sounds in her ears.

  Much later, and I am writing again in the lobby, and the words are still f
inding it difficult to be born. I write and then read what I’ve written and I find that I have not captured any of it, not any of it at all, and I do not know what to do about it. I can only tell what happens and try and tell how it makes me feel, but there are no words strong enough, and I am incapable of uncovering and divulging the magic and mystery of the beauty.

  “It comes better for you tonight?” asks the woman as she refills the brochures.

  “It is difficult to find the right words,” I say.

  “Maybe you try too hard.”

  “I want to write it as it is, so we will be able to look back on what is written and remember what it was like to have lived it.”

  “Because,” the woman adds, “these are fantastic and wonderful times, correct?”

  “Yes,” I say, “fantastic and wonderful. Two adjectives.”

  “She is asleep now, your pretty young lady?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you suppose she dreams of?”

  “All of this,” I say. “At least, I hope she does.”

  “It is good,” says the woman, “to live it in the day and dream of it in the night.”

  “I can’t find the words,” I say.

  “Maybe,” says the woman, “you are just trying too hard.”

  I finish and sneak up to our room and creep into our big bed. She moves and shifts and says something that I think is sleep-talk until she speaks again.

  “We won’t let little things ruin us, will we, baby?” she says.

  “No, sweet.”

  “We will try very hard, won’t we?”

  “Yes,” I say, “but it won’t be very hard at all. Not really. Not for us.”

  “I don’t want it to be hard.”

  “Nothing will be hard,” I say.

  “Do you promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “Did you do much writing tonight?”

  “A little.”

  “Can I read any of it?”

  “Not just yet.”

  “How come?”

  “Because,” I explain, “it is for later.”

  “When?”

  “Much later.”

  “How much is much?”

  “Later,” I say, “like when we’re different people and we may want—or may need—to look back on things like Boston.”

  “That is very pretty, to think something like that, but it is also very sad.”

  “There’s nothing sad about any of it,” I say.

  “Well,” she says, “it doesn’t matter because I like how you think, and I like how you take care of us that way.”

  “It’s all I can think,” I say, “and it’s all I know how to do.”

  Come morning, the snow has started to melt. We take pictures standing beside the enormous stone columns of Quincy Market. We drive and lunch at a small riverside café, where we drink mimosas and share a large bowl of cream of crab soup. By late afternoon, the streets are clear enough for horse carriages to appear, and we watch the carriages campaign up the steep incline of road along the river while the day warms up around us. Later in the evening, we go to a small restaurant for dinner, and there is a band and we dance primarily to the slower songs. I am a poor dancer and I slip my fingers into the belt-loops of her slacks in an effort to keep rhythm. She laughs and she has been drinking too much wine and she dives in and pecks at my cheek whenever she finds our positioning favorable enough to execute such a maneuver. It reminds me of us from so long ago. I think it but do not bother saying it because I can tell she is already thinking it, and that she already knows I am thinking it, too. We are good that way. So we dance and she pecks and, just once, I stop her from dancing and just press her hard up against me and hold her that way, unrelenting, and her face is suddenly very close to mine and very open to mine, and there is nothing else in the world that I can see.

  “Say something,” she tells me from nowhere, and she says it very quickly and breathlessly.

  “You make me want to stay like this and not move,” I tell her. “Ever.”

  She smiles, and it is in that way that makes me aware that I have touched something important and vulnerable and secret deep inside her, and that makes me feel good, and it is always good to know that her vulnerabilities are always right there for me to touch and that she so truly trusts me to touch them and never, ever hurt them.

  “You say the right things,” she says, still smiling.

  “Rhubarb,” I say, also smiling.

  And when it grows too late we are back in the hotel room, and she is coaxing a small fire from the hearth near the foot of the bed.

  “This is my favorite trip,” she tells me.

  “Mine, too,” I say. “But I don’t go on many trips.”

  “You always have to ruin it.”

  “I’m joking. No,” I say, “this is as good as it gets.”

  She says, “It’s as good as anyone is allowed to have without it being criminal.”

  “I think sometimes it’s criminal.”

  “Is it?”

  “Just sometimes,” I say.

  “And why is that?”

  “Because you can be very, very dirty.”

  “Shhh,” she says. “Don’t tell.”

  So then we are very, very dirty together and, afterwards, I am back down at a table in the lobby with my writing tablet open before me. The lobby is very quiet and it is late and there, too, is a fire in the large fireplace across the lobby floor.

  “This writing is like insomnia,” says the woman refilling the brochures. “It is like the midnight disease.”

  “I feel very anxious to get it all down.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s important. It’s important and I would never want to lose any of it.”

  “Why would you lose it?”

  “I just want to have it down,” I say. “It would be something good to have.”

  “Perhaps,” says the woman. “But,” she goes on, “there are more important things, I would think.”

  “Like what?”

  She does not leave the counter, and says, “What are you writing?”

  I look down and then look up and then look down again. “I am writing about today and about tonight. I am writing all the things we have done and how it all makes me feel.”

  “It is difficult?”

  “Of course. I am trying to make it as beautiful on paper as it is in reality.”

  “Because,” the woman says, “it is so much more beautiful in reality.”

  I say, “Yes.”

  The woman says, “Then why are you sitting here now?”

  I look at the woman for a very long time.

  Finally, she says, “I think maybe you are trying too hard.”

  Back upstairs, I am quiet upon entering the room. The fire is dead and the room is cold. I can see a slight, curled shape in the bed beneath the tumble of blankets.

  “Hello, sweet,” I say, climbing beside her and moving up and over and against her.

  “It’s you,” she says.

  “Who else would it be?”

  “I missed you.”

  “I am back.”

  “Did you get good writing done?”

  “Yes,” I say, “I did.”

  “Have you finished?”

  “Yes.”

  “And I have to wait until forever before I can read any of it, right?”

  “No,” I say, and hand over my writing tablet. “It is for you and it is for us. You can do whatever you like.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes.”

  “I want to read it all,” she says, leaning over and switching on the tiny lamp on the nightstand. The room falls to a pale yellow. “But first I want to read the thing from a long time ago. Remember? It is the thing you said I could read sometime later. I want to read it first.”

  “It’s there,” I say. “It’s right in there. You can read it all. But,” I say, “I do not know if any of it is any good. I tried very hard to make it g
ood,” I say, “but I do not know if any of it turned out that way.”

  “You try too hard,” she says, opening the writing tablet.

  “It just may not be very good,” I continue to warn her. “I have not captured everything perfect, as I’d wanted to.”

  “Let me read,” she says.

  I say, “It is not perfect.”

  “Let me read.”

  I say, “It is not as beautiful as I’d wanted.”

  “Let me read.”

  I say, “It is not poetry.”

  And she looks at me, almost injured, and says, “But it is to me.”

  Ronald Malfi is the award-winning author of several horror novels, mysteries, and thrillers. He is the recipient of two Independent Publisher Book Awards, the Beverly Hills Book Award, the Vincent Preis Horror Award, the Benjamin Franklin Award for Popular Fiction, and he is a Bram Stoker Award nominee. He lives with his wife and two daughters along the Chesapeake Bay, where he is currently at work on his next book.