This Angel on My Chest

by Pietrzyk, Leslie

  “Okay,” I say. “I guess you’re right.” I tend to agree with people. Doing so makes them like me. I’m lucky I don’t live under a totalitarian regime because I would be agreeing that yes, my neighbors probably are spies, now that you mention it.

  She says, “There’s a difference between honesty and truth.” She pauses until we write that down in our notebooks or type it onto our keyboards. Then she says, “That, and the tension between the two, is what we’re here to explore.”

  A young man sits directly across from me; before class starts, we drag our desks into a circle, and last week and this, he’s across from me. He’s about twenty-five or so and generally quiet, writing in a battered spiral notebook with a photo of the “Welcome Back, Kotter” cast on the cover (with Travolta), using one of those old-time Bic pens that click down four different colors. Did he find those things in his grandmother’s attic? I want to tell him that “Welcome Back, Kotter” was my favorite show in grade school, but I don’t want to come off as an official old lady, or like his grandmother. Anyway, he watches me during this exchange, half-listening to Jinx, and then he tilts his hand up off his desk and flashes me thumbs-up so fast it’s like the gesture’s not there. It’s nice. He seems like a nice boy. (If I’m worried about sounding like his grandmother, well, now I do.)

  The truth is, I liked this boy immediately when I saw him last week, across the circle from me, and I like him even more right now. I like him a lot. He looks exactly like my husband who died fifteen years ago, like my husband looked when he was the same age, which is the age when we got married. It’s my husband I’m writing about in this class, and—if I were being honest (damn Jinx), I would admit that—truthfully—I’m writing about this boy too, this new ghost of Y, my husband.

  If I were being honest, I would type out his name, wouldn’t I?

  If I were being honest, I might have not lied about his wedding ring: the man in Guatemala took it. Just a gold band, easily replaced at a mall jewelry store. Not even engraved with initials or a date. But still. The new ring never felt right. It’s funny, the things you don’t want a roomful of strangers to know, and one of them is that my dead husband was buried wearing an imposter wedding ring.

  The class is three hours long—which seems excessive for a cheap-catalog community class; exactly how much do they pay Jinx to sit with us for three hours?—so we get a break halfway through, which is when Jinx stacks up Round Two of her Triscuits. The twelve of us pile and cluster at the door like a herd of wildebeest, then funnel through and stampede down a poorly lit hallway where college posters are tacked to the walls—we meet in an alternative high school on the edge of the bad side of our suburb—and once the hallway splits, vending machines are to the left and bathrooms to the right. I let the man with the shaved head dictate my direction: whichever branch he takes, I go opposite, and so tonight I end up at the vending machines. There are other classes, also breaking, and people clot the machines, jostling to slide their dollar bills, so I stay back about twenty feet, leaning against the wall next to a confusing bank of garbage bins—paper, waste, metal, glass, plastic (someone has helpfully Magic Markered “puke here” across the waste bin). It’s just candy, I want to shout at the swarming mob.

  The young man who looks like my dead husband sidles up, standing close enough that I imagine I hear him breathe, and that our breaths catch up and match. He’s got on a long underwear shirt, which looks like something Y wore when we met in college in Chicago, and a generically plaid, untucked flannel shirt loose over it. It’s more than the same shirt as Y: it’s the same dusty-blonde hair, rumpled and lank; the same dimple in his chin, an embarrassment to Y, with girls fussing over it, and guys calling him “butt-chin,” as in, “you still dating butt-chin?” my brother asked that first year. It’s the wide-set, dark eyes, virtually without pupils, unless you look closely, unless you catch them glittering in firelight, and when you stare into them, they expand into utter blackness. It’s broad hands and short fingernails and delicate wrists and a peachy shade of skin and slashing eyebrows and eyelashes long enough to curl and a wide face shaped like the kind of pumpkin that makes a smiling jack-o’-lantern, and it’s the smile: warm and loopy, but with a slight downturn at each corner, creating a tinge of sadness, so that when Y smiled, I always wanted to hug him. It’s that smile. The young man turns it on me right then, that smile. I want to hug him, so I focus on standing perfectly still.

  “It’s just candy,” he says.

  I agree. “Yeah.”

  I’m not good at writing dialogue, for myself or for others, and knowing that, I steer away from it in Jinx’s assignments. Nobody speaks. Ever. That’s my kind of world.

  “Though I could go for a Snickers,” he says.

  Y’s favorite.

  “Dinner,” he says. “You know, the peanuts are protein.”

  Afraid I might launch into a lecture about poor nutrition, I press my lips together. I must look like a troll. It would be better if I learned how to write dialogue. I let my body relax, just the tiniest bit. I still want to hug him. He hasn’t read his work out loud yet. For some reason, Jinx has exempted him from her rule, maybe because he looks capable of saying, “Forget it then,” before walking out, when the rest of us only nod mutely when Jinx points and says, “Go.”

  It’s like Jinx’s voice fills my head—“go”—and I do: “You look like someone I know.”

  “Yeah?”

  Now I don’t know what to say next. I parrot, “Yeah,” and maybe I sound aggressive. Or afraid. (Write about fear. This.)

  He easily fills the pause with half a laugh. “Man, that good, huh? What’d that guy do to you?” Another laugh.

  He died, I think, when he wasn’t supposed to. I say, “Nothing. Just a really long time ago.” Translation: I’m old. Translation: And weird. Translation: Better stay away.

  But he sticks out his hand and gives me his name, which is a derivation of Y’s very common, yet very specific, name.

  “You longed to read everything, to know everything. You weren’t fussy or elitist; you’d read the back of a cereal box and turn that into conversation: ‘What’s riboflavin again?’ You picked up the Weekly World News at the 7–11, laughing at articles about women giving birth to half-human, half-mole babies, quoting interviews with doctors who autopsied space aliens in Roswell. You kept file folders of newspaper clippings about dozens of pertinent topics and could locate any article you needed in minutes. You were totally and deeply in love with knowledge, and with ideas, and with me, maybe prioritized like that. Early on, I read books you insisted I read: V. S. Naipul, Graham Greene, Atlas Shrugged. I couldn’t keep up with your recommendations, your panoramic mind.

  “You were a political idealist, an intellectual; you cared passionately. Not a marcher or a protester, but a thinker, a ponderer. I’m guessing you wouldn’t be impressed by politics now, the hammering ‘I’m right, you’re wrong’ and the constant spin.

  “Back then, a year out of college, you interned at a political think tank. I visualized big-brained fish flitting through cubicles under cool fluorescent light. You read and researched, citing facts and statistics and relevant studies and quotations to prove and disprove what the Important Thinkers who were the bosses cared about; you drafted op-eds to be published in newspapers and magazines under the names of the Important Thinkers. Occasionally you were allowed to publish your own op-ed, and there was your name printed in the Christian Science Monitor or the Orange County Register, papers that may no longer exist. Sometimes you got paid. We always needed money, but it wasn’t the money for you, it was the ideas.

  “After you died, after Google was invented (imagine! you never knew Google)—after Google was invented, sometimes I Googled your name when I was lonely, and one time an article you had written popped up, your name and an impassioned plea about cultural imperialism. What was wrong with a McDonald’s in Santiago, you wrote, if people got jobs as well as the Big Macs they craved? How can the French government pass la
ws banning American gangster movies from the multiplex in Paris; will doing so bring a renaissance of French New Wave cinema? An old, forgotten worry: Mickey Mouse taking over the world.

  “On my computer were your words, young and naïve and idealistic, arranged exactly the way you had arranged them when you were alive. I remembered that while drafting this piece you needed a punchy ending, the call for action, and I was on the floor, twirling a feather for our playful young black cat to chase, and I said, ‘Let their wallets decide,’ and you gasped at my perfect suggestion, and I was impressed that you were impressed by me. All these years later, those words written in 19—glowing on my laptop: your byline, my punchy ending; your words lingering, haunting me, a ghost of you forever here; what you thought, what you said, what you imagined was important. Your words outlasting you.

  “And an author’s bio: Y is a research associate at X, a think tank based in Washington, DC. He has a master’s in international business from Z. Publications include etc. Is. Has. Present tense. On the Internet, you’re alive.

  “But I email the publication: Y is dead, I write, therefore the bio should be updated accordingly to be factual. To be correct. I press ‘send,’ and you die again. Not for the first time I regret the inescapability of being a responsible person.

  “I miss you.”

  Class Three. Jinx looks at her phone constantly, for the time or waiting for a text. She thinks we won’t notice, but we do. Three people don’t show, so we’re down in numbers, which Jinx pretends is okay—“More time for discussion!”—but I imagine she takes such things personally. She shouldn’t care: no refunds. This policy is very clear on the registration form.

  Even in our diminished circle, the young man ends up directly across from me.

  “Did the writer go far enough?” Jinx asks about my piece, which I’ve read too fast out loud.

  The class debates me and my life as if I’m not sitting there, as if I’m a baboon plucking lice off a friend’s bright red butt. Some think I go too far, comments that send Jinx’s hair flying back in fury, but most think I don’t go far enough. “I’m uncertain about that last sentence,” someone says. “But that’s the heart of it,” says the lady who is always knitting. The man with the shaved head treats us to a loony political rant while Jinx dips into her email, pretending she isn’t, before reeling him in with a curt, “We’re here to talk about the words on the page. The words on the page.” The way she recites that line makes me visualize it tattooed across someone’s shoulder. “Do the words on the page show us that the writer is honest?” Jinx asks.

  I’m in court, up on unspecified fraud charges. The class is working too hard because I could pleasantly agree that, yes, I am a fraud, that I’m not the least bit honest. But the writer being discussed isn’t allowed to speak. I’m supposed to sit there, scribbling notes like a moron. But I’m doodling.

  To be specific, I’m writing Y’s name and my name and crossing out the letters that are the same, in that way girls did back when I was a girl. Count off with the remaining letters: love, hate, friendship, marriage. Where you end—the last letter—is the relationship you’ll have with your beloved. Back then we included middle names, or initials, or even nicknames, to get what we wanted. Already I know that Y and I match “love” with my middle name and his middle initial or “marriage” with his middle name but not mine. I shouldn’t be doing this in class; I should listen to the smart comments about my at-home assignment: write about a terrible mistake.

  The young man with Y’s name flops his head down hard onto his folded arms. I don’t know what that means.

  The class is distracted momentarily because someone questions when Google was invented.

  I want to figure out my memories about Y; I want them organized in computer files: MistakeAssignment.docx and such. Pertinent topics. It’s not like I think about Y all the time. No. Not until Jinx presses me for Truth and Honesty.

  Not until I see the man who looks like Y sitting across from me. I want to hug him. Or, I want him to hug me, I want his arms to be that right sort of wiry, his grasp leaving me almost breathless. It seems possible that I may have a worse terrible mistake to write about next time Jinx teaches “Tell It Slant.”

  The young man with Y’s name lifts his head and says, “She’s on to something.”

  “The writer,” Jinx prompts. We’re supposed to refer to The Writer, separating ourselves from this personal material. “Say ‘The Writer,’ not ‘she.’”

  He repeats, “She’s on to something. She should keep at it. She should just keep going.”

  “We never say ‘should’ to The Writer,” Jinx snips.

  Oh, yes. I’m totally, completely, utterly captivated by this young man! I might be a little in love, or even a lot.

  Did I mention that I married a perfectly wonderful man two years ago? This perfectly wonderful man, this lovely man—The Writer will call him R—asked to read my assignment, and I told him the teacher made us promise not to share our work until after the class’s critique. This lovely man believed me. He even said, “That makes sense,” though it doesn’t, because what I told him was totally, completely, utterly a lie.

  He looks at me, this young man who looks like Y, looks at me straight and hard as Y used to look at me straight and hard, and I’m expecting Y’s words: “Ignore the bullshit.” This boy doesn’t say that because that would be too crazy, right, too much coincidence, so instead, he says, “Truth, it dazzles gradually, you know?”

  The man with the shaved head obnoxiously goes, “Huh?”

  Jinx nods. “Not quite Emily Dickinson, but close enough and so the last word,” and she calls for break, lunging for her phone as we herd through the door and down the hallway. I end up in the direction of the bathrooms but keep heading down the hall, to a door propped open with a cinder block that leads to a metal fire escape, the old-fashioned, slightly dangerous, clangy kind. I step out onto it. It’s early spring, and clocks sprung forward on Sunday, and there’s novelty to this light and airiness. Out past the parking lot, a skinny, flowering tree is about to burst, as if it’s been waiting all winter, doubting through that freakish February blizzard that the world would turn to spring again, and now that it has, now that it has.

  Well. I silently root for the little white tree alone on the edge of the parking lot.

  “Nice night.” It’s the young man with Y’s name in the doorway behind me, framed and silhouetted, as he scrunches both sleeves of his long underwear shirt up to his elbows. I move two steps, an unspoken invitation, my feet noisy and awkward—as if I’m someone who might fall—and he slips out onto the fire escape and stands next to me. He grasps both hands onto the iron railing, flexes his body backward as if pulling at an oar. This is the first time I’ve seen his bare forearms.

  “You didn’t read,” I say.

  He shakes his head. “Not this time. Next week.”

  “It’s such a personal class,” I say. “I don’t know why I didn’t expect that.”

  “My dad says writing is nothing but cheap therapy.”

  “He sounds like a jerk,” I say, which I shouldn’t have, but he laughs. His laugh is expressive, like a saxophone late at night.

  “You’re right about that.”

  “Three hundred fifty dollars for the class,” I say. “That’s only like two or three therapy sessions. Depending on if you’re seeing a city therapist or one in the suburbs.”

  His saxophone laugh. “You’re funny,” he says.

  “Do you want to be a writer for real?” I ask.

  “I guess,” he says, all casual in a dead-serious way.

  “I admire that,” I say. “I think writing’s hard.”

  “Someone said that writing is hard, but that for some people not writing is what’s harder.”

  “You’re the some people,” I say.

  “So are you,” he says.

  I shake my head and watch his hands, wrapped around the iron rail. I wish I could touch one, just once, just brush
my fingertip along his knuckles. I fold my arms around myself quickly, hoping I won’t be stupid.

  “You are,” he insists. “You have a story. You’re not like those other bozos. That guy with the shaved head.”

  My turn to laugh. My laugh sounds like an ailing foghorn, but it’s a little late to revise a new laugh for myself.

  He says, “What a great laugh. It’s bold.”

  “Bold” is a nice word to hear. Maybe I’ll use it in my next assignment. Maybe I’ll use it now:

  “I’d love to read your work,” I say, boldly. “For critique, or just so I can tell you that you’re a genius.”

  “I’m no genius,” he says. “That’s for sure.”

  “Life is so hard if there isn’t that one person who thinks you’re a genius,” I say, which is what Y used to say, which is who Y was to me, which is who I was to Y. “I could be that person. I mean, since it doesn’t sound like your dad is doing that for you. That’s all I mean, that’s all.”

  There’s a silence that might be awkward or that might be meaningful; it’s hard to tell. Fifty-fifty.

  I take it as the latter.

  His hands are so close. I just want to. As if you’re still here; as if we’re still twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five. I listen to my heart beating.

  I peer over the rail. Broken glass, a scattering of dry leaves. “Long way down.”

  He straightens and leans over, way farther than I have, and flings forward both arms. “Romeo, Romeo,” he falsettos.

  We laugh, then shamble back to class.

  It was the former. The former. I knew that all along.

  “A September afternoon. I took the metro to your group house on Capitol Hill. I had lived in Washington for a year, and in August, I went to my first Bruce Springsteen concert—the Born in the U.S.A. Tour—invited by a male friend who wanted to be more than a friend but knew he never would be. He had camped out in line overnight to get tickets in the second row. The Cap Centre. Watching Bruce explode into ‘Born to Run,’ pointing directly at me when he sang, ‘tramps like us,’ told me in a single moment that I wanted passion in my life. I needed to be bold. I was twenty-three and I might as well have been fifty-three, saving old bread wrappers and shuffling outside in my slippers and robe every morning to bring in the Washington Post.