Eddie tries to think of anything, anything, anything to say. Steven looks very terrible, but then, when she thinks of it, Adam looked terrible too, interrupted in the clearing by a man with the name of her old boyfriend, and his face too, all wrinkled as usual with false concern. She never wants to fall for that again, but what else is there? There is no one who doesn’t say something strange. Love is this story, maybe, something happens to us and we are with someone, and we abandon them when we can—we leave them way behind—or we stay, in sickness and in health, as it gets later and darker, quicker than we thought, and colder too, as it has happened one million times before. “There’s a song I know,” she says. “You don’t miss the water till the well’s run dry.”
“I’m not talking about a song,” Steven says in disgust, and coughs with pain and puts down the rock. “I mean, if you get old, I wonder. I wonder if you get old do you worry about everything you wasted.”
“You are wasted,” Eddie says.
Steven coughs roughly again, and he nods and looks at the packs on the ground. “All of us,” he says, and he puts his hand on her. He puts his hand on her knee.
“Um,” Eddie says, and let’s leave now. It is clear what is going to happen.
naturally
It was the sort of day when people walk in the park and solve problems. “We’ll simply call the taxi company, David, and request a large one, like one of those vans,” is the sort of thing you would overhear if you were overhearing in the park. Hank was. He heard that one, and “Let’s tell them six and then they’ll show up at six-thirty” and “America just needs to get the hell out of there and not look back.” Hank lay on an obscure corner of the grass, eyes closed, not moving, getting cold even in the nice day, and he overheard “Maybe we shouldn’t move in together at all” and “If taxi companies don’t take requests the company will rent you a car probably” and “The guests can gather out on the porch and then come in when dinner’s ready” and “Oh my fucking Christ! Don’t look, honey, don’t look! The man is dead, honey, that’s a dead man, oh god somebody call the police.”
It was not a mistake. It was perfectly natural, although it ruined the whole day in the park for everyone who was there. Certainly for Hank. It made all the other problems recede for a little bit, although soon they returned, which is as natural as the park itself. Grass, trees, flowers trampled by the paramedics, a few people sticking around to watch with the small wisdom which reaches us in such moments: it is all natural. Someday we will all be dead people but in the meantime we have these problems to solve.
How? Money maybe, money money money, or who knows. “Where’s my money? I’m very angry because I believe I am owed some money which you are preventing me from obtaining, I’m going to stab you, or maybe I’m crazy, it’s an odd corner of the path in the park and I’m a growling crazy person the government ought to be taking care of, nobody will see it happen.” The police asked bystanders who did not see it happen, but there weren’t any details. Only a body, what seems like the end of a story to anyone who spoke to the police. “I found him, officer, but I don’t know anything else and I must walk around the park and talk with my girlfriend about myself because after all I did not see it happen and I did not know him.”
Hank was all packed up, like a song about a man leaving a woman. A zipper closed across his dead face like he had never been there, only a duffel bag. Hank’s life was over. He kept his eyes closed, slowly figuring it out and wondering how it would go, surprised that, given that we all wonder it, a bright light or what, surprising that you would have to wait to find out like anything else.
An interval here, nearly indescribable.
It happened. Hank got up while the morgue guy was signing a piece of paper. He saw his own body lying on the thing but to tell you the truth that wasn’t what he was most interested in looking at. He had seen himself naked and so had quite a few other people, although some of them do not remember. Hank was more curious that he could walk through the rooms of the place but even this faded almost immediately. Hank moved through this time and did not know what to do with it, those first few blank days at a new job. Where do I go? What do I do? What time do we meet and where do we go for lunch and where are the people who are nicer? He sat on benches and tried to get in a spooky mood. But all the things he could see were all the things you see anyway. People having sex, sure, a couple of times. But Hank had seen movies in which people had sex and those people did not know he was in the room either. We do not want to be in a room and people not to know. Alive or dead this begins to hurt our feelings. We want to be seen. We want to haunt people, if they’ll have us, and if they won’t have us we feel as sad as we do in life.
And yet it was nothing like life, this thing he was living through. It was as far from life as pizza served on an airplane is from Italy, even if the plane is flying over Italy at the time. People did not see him and so he grew hungry. He did not need to eat, but who does not go into the place anyway sometimes, and order a snack something, just for something to do and because you are not a ghost? The girl at the counter stood and looked at the mouth of a honey bear. It was a clear plastic thing, shaped in the shape of a real bear, somewhat, with honey instead of blood and organs and bones. The girl at the counter was young and named Lila unless the name tag was a joke too, and she was peering into a hole in the fake bear’s head to see what the problem was. “It keeps sticking!” she called behind her. Hank overheard her call it as he stood there dimly hoping she would look up and give him a doughnut if he asked. The doughnuts sat there under a clear dome covered in icing and the sprinkles, waiting to be chosen and picked up by the pretty girl’s tongs. But Hank felt the thin weight of ignored and left the place without his snack. Woe filled him at least halfway. He had missed his funeral because no one had told him when it was, and always this feeling of what if this is heaven and I’m screwing it up? What if I’m also screwing this up?
This is a love worry, of course. It is the trouble all the time with love. You see the person and you want to cry, “Put down your honey bear and look at me, my darling I dream of! Bring me the doughnut I desire!” But all the time you know the depressing thing: she doesn’t even know you exist. Hank kicked a few things around in the street and floated through the door of a private home. A man was opening his mail, who cares. Down the block was the neighbor, an older woman who had sent the letter. There Hank found he could pick up pens, which is where they go when you can’t find them. The cat saw him do it. “Mr. Mittens, what’s that?” she said. “What do you see, Mr. Mittens, that you behave like that?” Hank gave Mr. Mittens the finger, not for the first time. He walked out holding the pens like a dozen skinny roses for no one he could think of that would see him.
But it turns out someone did. Back at the park Hank was revisiting the scene of the crime in the hopes of haunting maybe. He walked down to the stables where the girls look at the horses and the boys wonder if it’s time to go home. Hank steered fairly clear because you never know with horses. He stood on the lawn and cast a shadow over a woman eating cookies on a blanket. The cookies are a favorite of my wife’s, dull biscuits with a chocolate picture on top of a boy eating one of the cookies. The boy on the cookie sees the cookie on the cookie, so why wouldn’t the woman see Hank? And she did and said, “Hey.”
“Hey yourself,” Hank said very happy.
“You’re in the light is what I mean,” said the woman, but she was smiling. “Do you want to sit down so you’re not blocking my light?”
Hank got on the blanket and the sun shone on both of them. “Do I get a cookie?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” the woman said. “For years my husband ate more than his share of cookies. This is the first time I’m in the park without him. I told myself I’m going to eat all these cookies myself and Joe won’t have a single one.”
“You’ll get sick,” Hank said.
“That is the trouble,” the woman agreed. “When the marriage is over there’s no one to hold your head when y
ou’re sick in the toilet. But there were other reasons, you know. It wasn’t just all the cookies.”
“Of course not,” Hank said.
The woman sighed. The joking part with the cookies relented a little, and she stared out at where the horses were living in individual pens. “It was sad, actually,” she said, “and it’s sad that I’m talking to a stranger in the park about it.”
“I guess you don’t remember me,” Hank said. “I’m Hank Hayride.”
“Hank Hayride?” the woman said. “That’s your name, or are you the king of a hayride company?”
“I’m no king,” Hank said. “We went to high school together. You’re Eddie Terhune.”
“High school?” the woman said.
“Go Magpies!” Hank said. “You were in Ms. Wylie’s class.”
“Hank Hayride?” she said. Eddie looked up for a moment like Hank was still blocking her light. “Hank Hayride? That can’t be right.”
“It’s right all right,” Hank said. “I had a crush on you the whole time.”
“In Wylie?” Eddie said. “It was her with the chivalry, right? And old poems about love?”
“You didn’t even know I existed,” Hank said.
“That much is clear,” Eddie said. “What was I doing in that class while you were crushing on me?”
Hank looked over at the horses too, and watched a bird land on the fence and then drop to the ground, dead or clumsy. “Fiddling with your hair,” he said. “You would take this pen you had which was red with the gold type of a company across one side. The cap was a strange shape like the edge of a pier. I could draw it for you now from the memory of it. You would chew on this thing like a bone and then reed it through your hair, and your hair would curl over it in sort of a waterfall way and you never even noticed.”
“Tell me,” Eddie said. “Tell me you haven’t loved me ever since and followed me here or something scary.”
“No no no,” Hank said. “I used to look at you and think of that song where it says it’s not the way that you smile or the way you do your hair, even though it was probably both those things.”
“You’re not putting me at ease,” Eddie said, “in terms of are you in creepy love with me since high school?”
“The answer is no,” Hank said, “because the point is, I don’t like that song anymore. It’s stupid, the song, and anyway I graduated high school, you know.”
“And?” Eddie said.
“And,” Hank said, “I’ve been in other kinds of love. My life has been hard, though, I guess you’d say. But I didn’t come to the park to find you. I haven’t been here in a while because I got beat up here real bad, like with a knife.”
“Oh my god,” Eddie said, “but you look fine. You look okay. I guess you didn’t die.”
Now was not the time to tell her. It never is, right when you meet someone, slap them with a big secret when they’re trying to enjoy themselves. It is natural to let the worst parts of ourselves hide in the shade, while the sun shines down on our features like shimmering hair. “I guess not,” Hank said. “I guess you brought me back to life.”
There is an interval here too, and it is also nearly impossible to write about. A short version would be, Eddie Terhune gave him a cookie. But this is not the description I mean. Something closer is, my wife and I once were in an automobile. We were not married but had moved to New York and were driving someplace where inexpensive furniture might live. We were very quiet in the car, for no reason, and the land outside the car window bobbed by us, flat, unnoticed except for the landmarks which told us where to turn. We were quiet, quiet, quiet, just the engine humming us toward a sofa we might afford, or lamps, and in the quiet my wife spoke up and said something suddenly.
“Cookies,” she said.
Why did she say this? We did not care. We laughed the rest of the way, because the point of this story is, it is not the cookies. It is the love. My wife could eat all the cookies and it would not change the love, and if she ate all those cookies I would hold her head while she threw them up, and this too is part of the love. It does not matter if Eddie gave Hank a cookie or not. The cookies do not matter. It is not the cookies that matter, or the doughnuts suffering under the dome, or the horses in the pasture or the honey in the bear or the duffel bag that will close around us when our day in the park is over. There is only the laughing across the land as the car moves you along, on your way someplace with love in the car. It is not the things; it is the way the things are done, and Eddie and Hank fell in love in the way it is done. Naturally they went to restaurants and naturally they went to bed, and they were comfortable in the bed at the end of the evening. Eddie even stood up from the bed without a sheet around her body to get a glass of water. She was thirsty, but what mattered was her body, not shy, in the doorway of the bathroom as they looked each other over again.
“You have a handsome face,” she said, “and you haven’t let yourself go in the ass department, Hank Hayride.”
“No,” Hank said. “You’re thinking of another guy. Remember Keith, from the swim team? He even had a handsome name.”
“Your name is handsome enough,” said Eddie. “Are you hungry? Do you want to go out someplace? It’s past lunchtime now, or an early dinner. Around the same corner I live on is a magic Chinese restaurant. The Lantern something. Something Lantern. I haven’t been there since Joe, when we had a fight. It was a big fat fight, but I feel like I lost that weight, so we could go and have the fried dumplings.”
“Sounds good to me,” Hank said, “and maybe a sesame something. Chicken.”
“Did you really go to high school with me?” Eddie said. “Because I still don’t remember you from then and I could check around.”
Hank stared at the ceiling and sang the song:
We’re the Monteverdi Magpies,
And we’re here to win the game,
From coast to coast we win the most,
And you’ll go down the same.
Ev’ry team is beaten,
And ev’ry player dies,
You stupid geeks will feel the beaks
Of the power-ful Magpies!
By now Eddie had joined in and flopped down on top of Hank in his sheet. “It’s a terrible verse,” she said to his cotton stomach. “That second verse with every player dies. I can’t believe they allowed it like that yet we all sang it with glee. I was even in the glee club.”
Hank remembered her in the sweater they made you wear. Back then her lips were all with the singing, and now they were kissing him like a miracle. The miracle was, she could see him, Hank, after all this time. “I know,” he said.
“I guess death was nothing then,” she said quietly. “When I married Joe it was, you know, until we part. But we parted in a Chinese restaurant.”
“I’m not sure we should go there,” Hank said.
Eddie lifted up the sheet and let it fall parachuted over her like a ghost costume. “Sorry,” she said. “Here I am trying with you like a fresh start, and I keep bringing in the ghost of Joe. It’s a good restaurant. I won’t mope when I’m there.”
“It’s okay,” Hank said, and he knew this was maybe the time to tell her about himself and that day in the park. But he did not want to, which was natural. He could picture the heartbroken scene if he admitted what was known only by Mr. Mittens. Why do this? Why behave this way? There are so many of these ghostly scenes already, the trails of things that did not happen quite. I was in the building days before it collapsed, I walked across that street hours before the accident. I almost married him and now look. I dumped her and look what happened. I’d be rich now, dead, married, happy, run over, covered in lava. I have a dream of what would have happened if what happened instead hadn’t. Hank looked at Eddie and dreamt up what would happen if she learned how he was, that instead of blood inside his heart he was only a ghost, slain on the lawn like a dead bird. She would think less of him once she knew there was less of him. Instead he suggested a diner, but Eddie was asleep, her
face thick with a nap of dreams. He floated away from her and looked through her stuff. It is natural to do this and natural to stop yourself so the person will not be angry when they awake. Hank did not stop himself.
Dear Joe, the letter said.
The window rattles without you, you bastard. The trees are the cause, rattling in the wind, you jerk, the wind scraping those leaves and twigs against my window. They’ll keep doing this, you terrible husband, and slowly wear away our entire apartment building. I know all these facts about you and there is no longer any use for them. What will I do with your license plate number, and where you hid the key outside so we’d never get locked out of this shaky building? What good does it do me, your pants size and the blue cheese preference for dressing? Who opens the door in the morning now, and takes the newspaper out of the plastic bag when it rains? I’ll never get back all the hours I was nice to your parents. I nudge my cherry tomatoes to the side of the plate, bastard, but no one is waiting there with a fork to eat them. I miss you and love you, bastard bastard bastard, come and clean the onion skins out of the crisper and trim back the tree so I can sleep at night.
I met a man, Joe, but he is a ghost of a boyfriend compared with you. He will not treat me well, you bastard, and he is already made of lies. He says he went to my high school. He says he’s Hank Hayride when I say I could check. But I don’t need to check, Joe. I know Hank Hayride died like they say in the paper, like I know how to mix that drink you like, with the gin and brandy and lime and sugar and bitters and you fill it with ginger ale and you slice a cucumber if you have one in the crisper. It’s a Suffering Bastard, you bastard. I must have made up my new boyfriend so I wouldn’t be alone in this room. I must be desperate sad, all without you. Come back to me, you prick. You took all the pens except this one and you left me all the cookies and none of it matters without my Joe. God I hope I never send this letter. I’m going to go to bed now and lose a lot of sleep over you.
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