What Friends Talk About
Weekday mornings, after she takes the children to school, she drives to the local grocery and sits out on the covered second-floor balcony. This is where she goes to call the other man, though some days he calls her first. Below the balcony is a parking lot, car tops pulling in and out, train whistles from the rail line a half-mile beyond the row of Bartlett pears bordering the shopping center. In the spring, when the affair has ended, the trees will flare out in a lacy white bloom. Look at the bride trees, her youngest daughter will say, gazing through the backseat window.
In tiny print, on receipts and the insides of book covers, she makes lists of things she wants to ask or tell the other man while she sits at the table above the parking lot. She writes down things her children say—Does the Mississippi dump into the Atlantic or Specific? When I’m at school my stuffed animals stay home and do very quiet things. Got my braces tightened today so I can only eat Pure Aid food, ugh!—her oldest daughter’s Facebook status. She tells him about her husband’s trip to Singapore, the hand-strung black pearls he brought home for her birthday: thirty-seven pearls, each tinged an iridescent purple-blue.
The other man tells her about his wife, how she’s training for a triathlon and got a new haircut, short and spiked. How he misses it long and silky down her back.
Don’t ever cut your hair, he says.
She knows the man doesn’t like it when she talks about her husband and children. He knows she doesn’t like it when he talks about his wife. But these are the things friends talk about.
Later, when they’ve finished with talk of spouses and children and the vagaries of their daily lives, he will read poetry to her. Linda Gregg, Jack Gilbert, Sharon Olds. He’ll ask her to read certain passages aloud for him, and she’ll record them on the computer, then send them as MP3s. He will e-mail long passages from books on quantum physics and New Age spirituality; she will e-mail passages from C. S. Lewis and the Psalms. They’ll talk about these things, too. And when they’ve finished with poetry and science and God, and the pauses between their sentences grow longer, she will leave the table and walk down the stairs past the sushi bar and deli and greeting cards and potted orchids near the store’s entrance. She will get into her car.
Today it’s raining, hard. Even at top speed the wipers can’t keep up. Overnight, in Chattanooga, the rain will turn to sleet; on the mountain, where the woman lives, snow.
I’m driving home now, she says.
He draws a breath.
If our lips could touch, he says. Even once. We could be done with this. Put a period at the end of our sentence.
For me it would be an em dash, she says. Or the start of a new sentence.
We’re going to need some kind of physical closure, he says. We need to grieve together, alone.
I couldn’t be alone with you and not want everything, she says.
I’d be strong for both of us, he says. I imagine kneeling in front of you, my head in your lap. You’re sitting on the edge of the mattress, I’m holding on to your belt and just—weeping. We’d sit at opposite ends of the room, watch each other undress, then sleep in separate beds, like twins. We’d never touch.
Back up, she says. I’m still with the belt.
The man is quiet.
Sometimes, he says, when I’m home alone, I lean my forehead against the wall and say your name.
Say it now, she says, and he does, his voice cracking on the vowel.
I can’t work, he says. At night all I want is for my wife to go to bed so I can sit in my office and think about you. If someone asked me what I want right now, I would say, To go on thinking of her.
What I want, she says, is for you to make me cry, then be the one to make me stop.
Where are you right now? he asks.
Halfway up the mountain.
Pull over, he says, and she does.
Where would you want me, he says. If I could.
In my mouth, she says, and then the other. So I could walk around knowing I was carrying you in two places inside.
I don’t even know what to call this, he says. It’s a fucking overwhelming drug.
Addiction, the woman says, her hand moving beneath the elastic on her skirt.
She leans back in her seat, turns off the wipers. The passing cars blur.
Can we go into the forest? the boy asks.
He and his mother sit on one of the benches in the old amphitheater abutting the Conservatory of Music. The benches narrow down to a cement stage, behind which is a small clearing surrounded by trees—what the boy calls the forest. Sunlight does not enter the space. The trees, a dozen or so, leaf out only above the rooflines of the surrounding buildings: amphitheater in front, parking garage behind; Conservatory on the left, dormitory on the right.
The boy’s mother is talking on her cell phone. It’s what she does every week, now, while his sister takes her piano lesson. I miss you, the boy hears her say, and he feels safe. She must be talking to his father.
Can we go down there? the son asks again, pointing.
The mother looks at her watch, nods, and takes the boy’s hand, but he pulls away and hops down the benches, then runs into the clearing ahead of her.
The mother finds him standing on a protruding root at the base of a four-story-high oak, its trunk striped with tiny squares of white paper. Each square, she sees, has been driven into place with a burnished nail. The squares are aligned in spiraling rows that begin fifteen feet aboveground and twist down the trunk to its base, like a strand of DNA. The mother thinks there must be a thousand pieces of paper nailed to the trunk.
The boy thinks of a giant candy cane. He rips off one of the scraps and sees writing.
Look, he says, handing it to his mother.
She turns the scrap over. “I’m sorry” is written in blue ballpoint pen, the cursive delicate, the tail on the “y” rounding up in a scrolled flourish. She walks up to the tree, begins to lift the scraps to look at their undersides. Standing beneath her, the boy can see the same blue writing on each of them. He hears his mother say, You won’t believe what I’m looking at. He hears Some kind of installation art and I’ll call you right back. He watches as his mother backs away from the tree, holding her phone up.
The phone makes its camera sound.
The mother looks down to check the image. It’s blurred. She takes another shot and texts it to the other man. Then she holds the scrap of paper close to the lens. She wants the man to see the writing. But when she previews this photo all she sees is her own hand, which is ugly—the part of it that shows, anyhow: thumb and index finger with chewed nails, cuticles torn, fingertips raw; the skin between crinkly, webbed. For a moment she has clarity: she is middle-aged and flattered. The man on the phone is a fiction, her own desperate creation.
She hands the scrap to her son.
Do you know what this says? she asks. Can you sound it out?
The boy shakes his head, mouth open.
I want you to keep this, she tells him. Like a present from me to you, okay?
The boy nods, clutching the piece of paper.
Okay, she says. Now hold it up, like this, so I can take a picture.
The classroom window is open despite the drizzle. Sitting in the outdoor amphitheater, the mother can hear her daughter playing a Bach Invention, low octaves in the left hand blending with a flute trilling in the classroom next door. On the floor above, a baritone voice sings a single phrase, over and over. German, she thinks. Wagner. She feels the light flutter in her stomach she used to feel before her own piano recitals. She is waiting for her phone to vibrate. Tuesday, 4 P.M.—any second the other man will call.
She looks down to where her four-year-old son is hopping from bench to bench. He’s taken the hood on his raincoat off; strands of wet hair cling to his temples.
>
Careful, she says, it’s slippery. The boy stoops to run his hands over the slick wood.
The mother turns to look at the classroom window. Inside, her daughter will be sitting at one of two Steinways, which have been placed side by side so the student can observe the teacher’s hands. The teacher, Lena Ivanov, will pace behind the girl while she plays, stopping to sit down and demonstrate how strong this sforzando should be, how light that staccato. She’ll ask the girl simple questions—What does the pp mean? How many flats in the key of F?—but her accent is strong, the diphthongs rising and falling in the wrong places, and her daughter will remain silent, staring at the calendar above the piano. It’s an old calendar, from eight years ago, but Lena Ivanov still displays the months in sequence, each page depicting an important Russian landmark: the Hermitage Museum, the Volga and Neva Rivers, a statue of Pushkin.
On the way home from the Conservatory, her daughter will scowl. I don’t like piano, she’ll say. I don’t like Miss Ivanov. But by the time they’ve reached the top of Lookout Mountain, she will have stopped complaining—she’ll be cheerful, full of chatter—and the mother will convince herself, again, that the discipline is good for her, that it’s important for her to learn to adapt to different teaching styles.
There’s also the matter of the phone calls from the man, the hour of near-privacy the lessons afford. Yes, the mother will tell herself. There’s that, too.
Today she’d planned to tell the man a story, something a cardiologist said about heart ablation being a search-and-destroy mission. But when the phone vibrates in the pocket of her raincoat and she hears the man’s voice saying her name, she finds she’s biting her lip to keep from crying.
It’s like this great darkening has taken place, she hears herself say. Like I’ve sucked the light out of the world and into myself, and only you can access it.
It’s what happens, when it’s love, the man says.
I’m a sieve, she tells the man. I need more and more contact with you just to feel normal.
She looks down to where her son is pulling at weeds growing up between cracks in the concrete.
Two more months, the man says, and we’ll have our meeting.
The mother watches her son toss a handful of shiny wet weeds into the air above his head. He looks up at her.
Watch this, he says, climbing the benches.
Too high, she calls to her son.
The boy doesn’t look at her. He’s crouching, about to leap down to the concrete stage from seven benches up.
Hold on, she says to the man.
Jonathan, she says, making her voice slow. I need your eyes.
The boy turns and, briefly, looks. She watches his body soften, the subtle, reluctant quieting of his limbs. He will not jump.
Sorry about that, she says into the phone.
The man groans.
I need your eyes, he says.
Somehow it works better than Look at me, she says.
The way you parent, he says. It tells me everything.
1.7 to Tennessee
Eva Bock made her way along the shoulder of Lula Lake Road. She was eighty-nine—tall, bent forward from the waist. Her white pants hung from her hips so the hemlines of the legs pooled onto the tops of her tennis shoes. Her narrow lips were painted orange-red, and her steel-gray hair, tied up in a bun, smelled faintly of lemon. Loose strands hung about her cheeks and trailed down her spine. She wore a pair of headphones that created a furrow across the center pile of her hair. The cord fed into a chunky cassette deck/FM radio hooked onto the waistband of her pants. She was listening to NPR.
In her pocket was a letter, addressed: Pres. George W. Bush, Penn. Ave., Wash. D.C. Seven envelopes she had thrown away before she felt her handwriting passed for that of an adult. The letter itself she dictated to Quentin Jenkins, one of the McCallie boys who went down the mountain for her groceries. Quentin wrote in cursive on a college-ruled sheet of paper. She preferred he type it, and considered offering to pay him an extra dollar to do so, but when she finished her dictation and Quentin read the letter back to her, she grew excited and snatched the paper from him, folding and stuffing it into an envelope. Then she realized she hadn’t signed the letter, so she had to open the envelope and borrow the boy’s pen. Quentin offered to mail it for her but she had made up her mind to deliver it to the post office herself. She took great pride in the fact that she, an eighty-nine-year-old woman, still had things to say to the President of the United States. It was a formal letter, protesting the war. She felt it her duty to place it, personally, into the hands of the government.
A yellow Penske truck approached, honking. Eva set her feet a little ways apart and froze, looking straight ahead. She swayed from side to side, as if holding her balance on a log. In her freckled hand she carried a furled green umbrella, the tip of which she planted into the pavement to steady herself against the truck’s tailwind.
When it passed she continued on, watching her feet take turns appearing and vanishing beneath her. One of her shoelaces was untied. The Lookout Mountain residents never honked. She had been walking this route, mornings, for as long as she could remember. Most locals slowed and made half-circles around her so she wouldn’t feel obliged to step off the pavement. The tourists would run her off the road if she did not stand her ground to remind them this was a residential suburb, where folks lived and worked and took morning walks.
Eva felt short of breath, a bit light-headed. She’d been unable to finish her toast that morning, so eager she’d been to set off upon her errand. Three houses before the elementary school she stopped to tie her shoe. Sitting on the stone retaining wall beside the Sutherlands’ driveway, she crossed her left foot over her right knee. The angle was awkward; the laces draped against her inside arch. She rested, looking up Lula Lake Road, visualizing her route. Just past the school’s pillared entrance were a small pond and wooden gazebo; beyond the gazebo she could see the spire of the Methodist church, and beyond that were the bakery, City Hall, gas station, and convenience mart. Next came the Mountain Market and Bed and Breakfast. A brief stretch of houses. And then—with difficulty, Eva pictured herself reaching it—the four-way stop where Lookout Mountain, Georgia, became Lookout Mountain, Tennessee.
It was here, at the border, that Eva usually turned around, so that by the time she came home to the Adirondack rocker on her front patio, she had covered just over a mile of ground. Today would be different. The post office was on the Tennessee side, 1.7 miles from her front door. She’d had Quentin look it up on his laptop computer. Round trip: 3.4. She had not walked this far in twenty years.
She stood and, clutching the handle of her umbrella, again began her slow, measured steps. With her free hand she brushed off the backs of her pant legs and adjusted her top. She was wearing a threadbare sweater with an orange “P” knitted into the black fabric. It had been a gift from her son Thomas, who, after one semester at Princeton, joined the Army and was killed in a village in the Batangan Penninsula when he went into the jungle to relieve himself and stepped onto a booby-trapped 105 round. One arm was found hanging by its sleeve from a branch twenty feet above the ground. At least this was the story she heard coming out of her mouth when people asked about the sweater. Sometimes she forgot and said she didn’t know where the sweater came from, and when she said this, it was as true as when she told the story about the dead son. She wasn’t always sure if the thing had actually happened or if it was just something she read in a book. When she told the story, she felt she had not even known the boy in the jungle; she told it without emotion, as if describing a scene from a stage play, the boy who stepped onto the booby trap just an actor who was now carrying on another life somewhere.
When she finished telling the story she would berate herself. “His own mother,” she would think. What kind of mother stops feeling grief for her son? What kind of mother must I hav
e been? She could not remember. And there was no one left whom she could ask.
But no one talked to her about the sweater anymore. If anyone spoke to her at all, it was, “Miss Eva, why must you take your walk along this busy road? You know when the fog sets in we can’t see you coming or going. Miss Eva, you’re going to get yourself run over.” But most people in town could not imagine what it would be like to drive along Lula Lake without watching for Miss Eva. Single-handedly, between 7:30 and 8:45 A.M., Eva Bock kept the speed limit in check.
The truth was she could no longer remember why she walked this road. “It’s the way I know,” she said when people asked. When she’d formed the habit, Lula Lake was not paved. Where the gas station and pharmacy stood had once been a grove of peach trees. But these were details that, most of the time, she could not recall. This morning, for example, she could think back only as far as yesterday’s walk, when Phyllis Driver came out of the convenience mart and offered her a cup of Barnies coffee. She turned it down. The cup was brown with a picture of a man wearing glasses drawn in yellow lines. Phyllis was wearing a watch for people with vision trouble, large black numbers on an oversized white face. It read 8:10. Eva could remember these things—the time, watch, cup, “Barnies.” She could not remember her own son.
Sometimes she did remember things, usually when the season was in a time of change, but they were memories from her childhood. When one of these memories broke over her she would laugh and clap her hands against her thighs. One October morning, she stepped into the Mountain Market, flushed and shaking. Lorna Ellis, the cashier, put out her cigarette. “Gambling!” Eva shouted. “At the college!” Except for smears of red in the corners, her lips were colorless and wet with saliva. The skin on her face was like a delicate system of roots. Miss Eva beckoned and Lorna followed her out onto the stoop. With her umbrella, Eva pointed to the ridge above the Methodist church, where the trees around the Westminster campus shone red and yellow. “That’s where Granddaddy showed me how to play blackjack. Held me on his knee and taught me to add up cards.”
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