How to Stop Loving Someone

by Joan Connor

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “This is Greg.” The phone’s voice is deep; it sounds like bricks hitting shallow water.

  I search the file for Greg. There’s a Greg in Earth Science, but we don’t know each other. A Greg in tenth grade, but he dates a cheerleader. I don’t know what to say, so I wait.

  “I seen your name on the back of Fields.”

  My head is full of bees. So many bees buzzing that I can’t hear his voice.

  “What?” I ask.

  “I wanted to know if you’d like to meet somewhere, have a good time.”

  “No,” I say. “Yes.” My mind’s racing like it’s gaining on my heart. I don’t want to see him, but I don’t want my mother to find out. Hive. My mouth races, too. “Meet me at Kay’s Drug,” I say, “in an hour.” Then I think better of it. Kay’s is in my neighborhood. He’s already got my number; I don’t want him to figure out my address, and I do not want my mother to know. “Wait. Let’s meet at Mama Leone’s. It’s across from Fields.”

  “Okay,” he says. “Be there or be square.” He hangs up.

  I stare at the phone as if it could tell me what to do next. I change my jeans, funnel some change into my hip pocket, and bang down the stairs.

  “Where are you going?” my mother calls from the kitchen.

  “Out,” I yell.

  “Wait,” she calls back. She ambles down the hall, wiping her hands on her dishrag. She smiles at me with the same twisty smirk she wore when she delivered the Facts of Life speech. Her mouth looks like a bloated lemon peel swimming in the bottom of a highball glass. “Have a date?” she asks.

  I realize that I want to kill her. The moment passes. My throat dry, I nod.

  “Will you be back for dinner?”

  I nod again, fly out the door to avoid my mom’s cheery, “Have fun,” and I mount my three-speed like some bad movie cowboy eluding an ambush. It’s hot. I’m pedaling like a cartoon character, Quickdraw McGraw spinning up momentum. Sweat glues my poorboy jersey to my chest, my back. I’m churning hard, so I don’t have to think. But I can’t help myself. What if he’s a pervert? What if he has a knife? But maybe he’s cute. Maybe he’ll even like me.

  But he’ll want to do it. Grafitti is no love letter. He’ll knock me off the bike and drag me into the bushes and do whatever it is they do and leave me for dead or something worse and close to it and my mom will find out that I’m advertised cheaper than a Gomer Pyle Christmas album at J.M. Fields, cheaper than white frosted lipstick and shiny minidresses, cheaper than free, just a phone call away. Oh god.

  And then I’m at Mama Leone’s, skidding my bike to a halt and my heart, too, as I scan the place and no one’s around—not a dog, not a mailman, not a single pedestrian. I hide my bike behind the building, because I don’t want him to think I’m some schoolgirl although I am, of course. And I sit on the grassy median in front of the restaurant and wait, all the time practicing what I’m going to say, finally settling on the truth: my girlfriend wrote it for a joke. I’ll explain it with dignity, shake his hand as I say goodbye. He’ll want to take me to the Turkey Trot, he’ll be so impressed.

  Every time a car passes, my head jerks up. But none slows. A few bored teenaged boys whistle as they slink down the street in a Galaxie convertible, but they’re just passing time. Like me. A white-haired man in checkered pants smiles at me as he enters the restaurant. A delivery truck comes and goes. The sun teeters on the tops of the cypresses in the cemetery across the street, then dips behind them, tattering them into lace. A chill suffuses my back.

  I do not know what I am feeling. No show. Relief? Disappointment? How can I know when I don’t even know who called me? But after my panic, how do I explain to myself this following sadness? I watch the cars pass, traffic dwindle, the street lights blink on, one by one, like an illuminating marquee rousing itself to life.

  I am not the sort of girl, the sort of girl who boys like. I’d been stood up, stood up by someone who didn’t even know that I was bookish, wore my jeans cut too loose, stood up by my first date.

  I do not realize as I board my bike and pedal listlessly toward J.M. Fields, I do not realize as I call my mother and tell her that I will be late, I do not realize as I buy a can of black spray paint, as I furtively censor, with sweeping black bars, my name, my number, I do not realize what it will take me many years to realize—that he, too, perhaps was scared, that his heart, too, shook the bars of his ribcage.

  I think of him after all these years with fondness, Greg, a boy with a featureless face, fumbling as he laced his sneakers, rubbed the pimples on his chin, trembled beneath his model airplanes bombing him from the ceiling as he, too, skirted his mother’s attention, swung out the door, tried to walk at a pace he hoped would make him look careless, but his carefully chosen shirt was dying itself dark with sweat, and, before he could stop himself, he found his sneakers leading him down a side path, pulling him along to the baseball diamond where he hooked up with some friends who helped him to forget his cowardice, his call, his intended destination as the balls thocked into their mitts with a safe pop and they called each other “homos” and “retards” with reassuring familiarity and affection, glad to be boys. The softballs in their mitts and all right with the world.

  Greg, forever lost to me. Greg of summer sidewalks, spraypainted in my heart. Greg, a voice like bricks in water. A missed chance. An unseen face. An unbuttoned blouse and unhooked bra. The tremble of the possible. The dream-name I fell asleep to for a year afterward. Why didn’t you call back? Was it something I said? Or how I said it? Was it the color of the paint? Now all unwritten, all unsaid. How could I know that you would be my first love?

  What It Is

  They met at a conference. It doesn’t matter what sort of conference. It was a hardware conference, say, at a Holiday Inn. They mingled among the bins of nails, keyhole saws, socket wrenches. He liked the way she hefted her hammer. She liked the way he tested the haft of his chisel against his palm. They were professionals; they knew their tools, their monkey wrenches from their vise grips, their Philips heads from their screwdrivers. The nuts and bolts of life. They introduced themselves. He did exteriors; she did interiors. They lived far apart. As two professional lonely people, they liked that about each other. They could build a bridge to span their solitariness but keep their trestles separate. He thought she looked competent. She thought he looked cute. He liked the cut of her nail apron. She thought his T-bar was cute. They exchanged business cards and half-hearted promises to meet somewhere sometime. Before he headed home, he gave her a copy of his recent manual, How To Build A Lean-To.

  She read it on the plane. The guy really knew his stuff. His plumb line dropped straight. His corners were true. She thought, hmm.

  Courtship in the computer age. A reticulating web of options, electronic avenues: e-mail, voice mail, mail, airmail, answering machines, the overnight expressways to your heart.

  She e-mailed a careful compliment: I liked your book, How To Build A Lean-To, especially the section on slanted roofs. Your paragraph on gradients and outwitting ice buildup was profound.

  He e-mailed back: Thank you.

  She e-mailed back:You’re welcome. I just re-read the section on ice jams and the life span of the twenty-year shingle. No one else has ever before explored this topic with such sensitivity yet thoroughness.

  He e-mailed back: I’m a sensitive guy. And may I say with Excruciating Politeness that I could not help but notice that you are an architectural gem?

  She e-mailed him back with the compliment that he seemed structurally sound himself.

  He e-mailed: Thank you. Let’s stay in touch.

  She e-mailed him an expurgated autobiography of her life to date.

  When he received it, he didn’t have time to read it thoroughly because he was en route to see his girlfriend, Marla, the computer programmer who was telling him to get with the program or delete. He didn’t like ultimata. While Marla sketched out her blueprint for his future, he
found himself reflecting on slanted roofs, ice jams losing their grip and sheeting to the ground in glorious January sun. It was a good section, he realized. It was in fact profound.

  She sent him a carefully selected card, a carefully etched Escher print that played with the architecture of perspective. The woman pins laundry. The man stares above the terraced hill at the sky. They are as alien to each other in the building they cohabit as Hopper figures in separate paintings: Sunday Morning. Gas. Marine plant life blooms impossibly in a gallery garden.

  He sent her a postcard, telling her that his new book, Building a Snow-fence, Slat by Slat was out.

  She sent him a note thanking him, a carefully selected box of small chocolate hammers, two tins of cookies, and a hand-braided belt. She ordered a copy of his new manual.

  He left a message on her answering machine, thanking her.

  She left a message on his, inviting him to come visit.

  He e-mailed her saying that he couldn’t visit now, because he was putting a greenhouse on his garage.

  She e-mailed that she was building a hope chest and she’d send him the plans. She sent him the plans.

  He called to thank her answering machine.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Hello,” he said. “This is Conroy Cardamom.

  “Oh my,” she said.

  “Oh yes,” he said.

  They started talking long into the night. They started talking around their short term plans. They told each other stories which featured themselves as heroes. They put on their best faces and forth their best feet. They sketched the blueprints.

  Hmm, he thought.

  Hmm, she thought.

  This guy/gal really likes me.

  Hmm, she thought.

  Hmm, he thought

  This gal/guy is really smart. This guy/gal has great taste in men/women.

  She express-mailed him pickled doves’ eggs, four leaf clovers, falling stars, mermaid songs in pale pink conch shells, and the completed hope chest.

  He sent her a signed copy of, Your Friend the Retractable Tape Measure .

  She sent him a hand carved trompe l’oeil tablecloth of ormolu. She sent him fudge, butter cookies, ladies fingers. Feed him, feed him, she thought.

  He wasn’t home to receive the package because he was off with Marla, arguing about their future. But when he got home and found the box, he thought: This has gone on long enough. He called her, “I’m coming,” he said.

  “Finally,” she said. “When?”

  “Soon.”

  Soon. Soon is a word with promise, eventuality, rhymes with swoon, spoon, June moons to croon at with a wayward loon on a dune. But that was silly. Snap out of it, her Alpha female said to her Epsilon male. But.

  She dreamed of him, alone walking somewhere across a treeless plain. She woke wondering why this man was ambling across her dreams. She woke, singing, If I were a carpenter and you were a lady, failing to notice the double conditional. She shored up her empty hours raising high the roof beam, building a bungalow built for two, putting out malt for the rat in the house that Jack built. In between, there was life, interior decoration.

  He thought of her occasionally. How not to. Why is this woman being so good to me, he wondered. It occurred to him that she was crazy. But, hey, she liked the lean-to, the passage on the longevity of asphalt. She caught on to things. She fed him. Still it might be a pretty trap. Why was she being so nice to him. He got back to work. He bricked the floor of the greenhouse. On Tuesday Marla called and crashed the hard drive. He stared at his monitor, his own impersonal computer. You have mail, it said, and raised the red flag.

  “Drive,” she said. She sent him a road map, room keys, directions.

  Maybe, he thought, possibly. We’ll see. He failed to note the red flag. (That is a metaphor.)

  As she cut cloth, scalloped it, contemplated window treatments, she sang, “The bear went over the mountain to see what he could see.” (That is a song lyric.)

  He called her. They exchanged histories, building tips, niceties, anecdotes, favorite movies. She laughed at his halting stories, sly asides. Feed him, she thought, feed him.

  “I think structure is what is important,” he said on the phone. “Integrity of building materials. Decor is cosmetics.”

  Integrity, she thought, we are talking. We are talking. Aretha wailed from the CD player, “But I ain’t got Jack.”

  “Cosmetics?” she asked. They had so much in common. Uncommon much.

  He explained his theory of cosmetics. They rang off.

  He thought, she gets my jokes. She has a heart as big as the Ritz. He ate all the fudge in a sitting and sank into a sugar low. She erected skyscrapers of meringue and sang into a sugar high, “The handyman can cause he mixes it with love and makes the world taste good.” (That is a song lyric and a metaphor.)

  She mailed him a meringue of the Empire State Building with a note: I won’t scream, King Kong.

  He called her. “I don’t even remember what you look like.”

  “Like myself ,” she, no Fay Wray, said.

  “I’m having anxiety attacks of approach avoidance,” he said.

  “Relax,” she said. “Just have fun.”

  “Fun,” he said. “Okay fun. I think if I plan ahead I could find a few days clear.”

  “I’m afraid,” she said. He was scheduling his fun.

  “Of what?” he asked.

  “Of this.” It wasn’t fun. “What is this?” she asked as women are wont to do after the fact.

  “What is this?” He growled in a gritty blues voice, “Why, darling, what it IS.”

  She laughed.WHAT it is. She stocked the house with groceries, planted peppermint petunias, aired out the attic, propped his book jacket photo on her dresser, tucked a retractable measuring tape beneath her pillow, baked cakes with flying buttresses, broke the ground, cleared the site, raised a cathedral of hope. In her dreams he was still walking across a vast treeless expanse. (She wasn’t receiving the omen.)

  This is a bad idea, he told himself. Structurally flawed. Collapsing keystone. Bad foundation work. He jerry-rigged a Tom Swift rocket to the moon.

  She e-mailed him: Despite all my kidding around, I really do like you. And I have no expectations.

  We’ll see: he e-mailed.

  We’ll see: she e-mailed.

  They saw.

  He drove, stoned, the tunes cranked, eating up the road, lost his way, recovered, the trip growing longer by the second, the road stretching endless, seven hours. Damn. Lost an hour. She’d be worried sick. Why did they do that, worry? Now what? Cruising, Joan Osborn crooning about God on a bus. Like one of us. Like one of us. The first six hours urgent, then fatigue settling in, numbing his shoulders, the highway elation wearing off. How far away did this damn woman live. Impossible distances to span. What had she said on the phone? Courtship by interstice. Overseas acquaintance by satellite. Make up for lost time. Rolled on the right through the intersection. Uh-oh. Blue light special. Easy now. Pot in the car. He rolled down the window. “Yes, officer?”

  She took a bath. She put fresh water in the flower vases. She curled her hair. She changed her clothes three times. She wanted to look nice but not too nice. Lace shirt, too obvious: Come hither. Button-down too prim: Head for the hills. She trimmed the hedges, vacuumed the floors, then paced them. This wouldn’t do. This simply would not do. They were both in their forties. This was silly. She took a deep breath. She stared into the mirror. Gadzooks. She looked like Yoda’s grandmother. Six o’clock. Seven o’clock. She set out the cheese. Where was he? She rewrapped the cheese. Why didn’t he call? They never called. He might be dead somewhere and how would she know. They never called. Anticipation become anxiety become anger become anxiety again. A woman’s assonant declension. Then irony: Great, now she’d never get laid again before menopause.

  An hour on the side of the road, an hour while the cop ran the registration. Fucking cops, man. Everyone was doing it, rolling through the inte
rsection on the right. Okay, he broke the law, but everyone was breaking the law. Why should he be singled out for breaking the law. Give a guy a uniform, a big gun, and he’s the biggest cock of the walk all right. Officer Dickhead. Gonna get myself a uniform, man, Officer Dickhead meet Officer Anarchy. Blow justice right back into the power-hungry Hitler’s beady little eyes. Ka-poom. Ka-poom. “Thank you, Officer,” he said, accepting back his license and registration. “Thanks very much.”

  Gonna cost a freaking fortune. All to see some chick who’s a tool groupie. Got to find a phone. Ten o’clock. Cops. Give a guy a uniform and he thinks he pisses testosterone. Cops.

  “Thank you officer.” Where was the fucking JUSTICE?

  He rolled up to a phone booth and dialed in the blue light.

  “Hello,” she said. “Hi. Thank God. I thought. Yes. How far? Poor thing.” She unwrapped the cheese, put a bottle of wine on ice.What room should she be sitting in. Living room, a book, perhaps? No, no. the family room. His manual. Just a half hour now. Eleven o’clock. When she paces in the hall, her reflection startles her. He’s here. No, that’s me. Where is he? She doesn’t hear him arrive. She’s in the bathroom, chobbling down antacids.

  A knock. And then he was there in the full light of her hall. And she knew the instant that she hugged him that she had failed. He had built her from absence, raised a pre-mortem Taj Mahal from e-mail, letters, doves’ eggs. She had failed. And the walls came a-tumbling down.

  “Conroy,” she tried on his name. Croy, it stuck in her throat. Offer him something, she reprimanded herself. Feed him, feed him.

  Wo, he thought. This was not the Trojan Helen he’d erected in his imagination over one, two months, two and a half. No, this was what the horse rolled in. He looked the gift horse in the eye. “Hi.”

  She smiled, pretending not to see the flinch. “Hi. What can I get you? Something to drink? Wine?”

  “Fine,” he said. He didn’t drink wine. No sandpaper would abrade those wrinkles away. No sir. No draw plane either. This girl looked every inch of her long days. Wrinkles, chicken neck. Be polite. The girl has chicken neck. Be polite. He followed her into the kitchen. Prefab mock oak. Lino tile. Trapped, he thought. Trapped like a rat in Kerouac’s suburban nightmare of the dream house lit by TV light. Blue beams. Blue light. Thin blue line.