How to Stop Loving Someone

by Joan Connor

  “You tired?” she asked. “You hungry?” Her questions pig-piled. “Wine?” She started heating something up on the stove before he answered. He hated that. Mother bullying.

  “Cops,” he said. “You should have seen this cop. Fucking police state, man.” He looked around furtively for an escape but kept talking.

  While he ranted, she stirred the soup. Let him run his course. It was a guy thing. Guys don’t handle authority well. This wasn’t the greeting she’d anticipated, hoped for. But still he was here. Drove eleven hours. She’d feed him, rub his shoulders. They’d sip wine, talk, recover the easy banter from the phone.

  He raved. She set the table. He waved his arms. She poured the wine. He thumped the counter. She served the dinner, smoothed his napkin.

  “Here,” she said. “Relax. Eat.”

  Ten minutes. He was here ten minutes and she was already telling him what to do. He smiled and sat down.

  They thought, We’ll just have to make the best of this.

  “Do you want to smoke some pot?” he asked.

  They were high. She thought his eyes had gotten bluer since he’d eaten. He liked her crooked smile, he decided.

  He impersonated the cop. “May I have your license and registration, urp, please. Would you, urp, while I urp this on the urp?”

  She laughed. She fed him cookies, meringue. More soup? Wine? Yes, please, no, please, three bags full, please.

  For a giddy moment, they became themselves. They thought that their laughter sounded genuine. They thought they were enjoying themselves, but, but.

  She cleaned the kitchen. As she put things away, she was watching herself put things away. Butter in the butter cubby. Napkin in the basket. He was watching her. This was all too much. She was playing into his fear of her: That women always anticipated what men feared: Their domesticity. Which was what they wanted. Feed me. Feed me.

  “Would you like to listen to this tape?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she lied. She wanted to run screaming blue murder into the blue moon of Kentucky. She wanted to slit her wrists and watch her blue blood trickle into a bottomless basin. Her nerves twanged like a bluegrass banjo. She was stoned. Neurally jangled. She wanted to talk.

  He popped in the tape. Why did women always have such lousy stereos. He wanted another meringue. Maybe he could just stroll over and puff one nonchalantly into his mouth. He wanted to study her, but every time he tried a surreptitious peep, her green too wide eyes would catch him, appraising his disappointment, judging him for it. He hated that. It was going to be a long weekend. He sat in the easy chair. The arm was loose. Right arm. He listened to her laugh at the tape. She laughed in all the wrong places.

  “I love Fireside Theater,” she said.

  “Firesign,” he corrected.

  It didn’t register. “Remember that one—Don’t Touch That Dwarf. Hand me the pliers.”

  He nodded and stared at her now downcast eyes. What was so interesting about her lap?

  She stared at her suddenly old hands. It happened like this when she smoked. She turned twelve, but her hands turned old. Old leaves. Spatulate hands turned over an old leaf.

  “Do you want to hear the other side of the tape?” he asked.

  “Do you want to go for a walk?” she asked.

  He wanted to be agreeable. “Sure.” He wasn’t.

  They stumbled into the frosty air, clopped down the tarmac through the subdivision. He felt that he had squirted like a watermelon seed from his own pinched fingers. The pink pulp of Spielberg’s suburbia, sweet watery nothing. Pretentious prefab structures loomed waiting for something ominous to happen, anything, wiggy skeletons to rise jigging from the ground, sentimental aliens to start guzzling Coke. Where was this woman leading him. What was she talking about.

  “There’s a field,” she said, “at the end of the development. An old farm. Baled hay.”

  He squinted at the pond she indicated with her right hand, but he couldn’t see a thing. She shuffled along a dirt road, the way becoming clearer as the development halogens’ eerie orange vanished like Kerouac’s vision. On the road, off the road, he chanted to himself as he kept pace with her.

  “Here,” she said. “Isn’t this lovely?”

  A thatchy field spread gray and rolling open behind a skeletal corncrib. The moon was a perfect quarter, a yellow rocker.

  “Yes,” he said.

  And it was.

  “I wanted you to see it.” Then she said no more. She turned and walked back along the road. We are talking, she thought.

  He followed her, slapped his forehead once. What? What am I doing?

  “You must. You must be tired,” she said.

  “No,” he contradicted, then, “actually.”

  The high was wearing off.

  “I’ll show you your room.” He followed her up the stairs. Her ass was immense. Black leather. Maybe it was just the angle. “Here. Here’s the guest room.” She indicated the door. He set down his bag. They waited.

  “You’re welcome. I mean you can. If you want you can stay with me. I mean if you want.You don’t have to.”

  He kicked his suitcase. “What do you think. I mean, I think maybe I should stay here.”

  “Okay, then. Let me get you some clean towels.”

  “Thanks.” Why do I need towels to stay in the guest bedroom.

  She flipped on a light. “Here’s the guest bathroom.”

  He peeped in. “Fine, thanks.”

  As she slipped into her nightgown, she heard water rushing, gurgling. She wasn’t used to hearing water run. Only her own. It comforted her. The toilet seat flapped. The water shushed. Water, water everywhere. She cracked her door. He was there, Conroy. He was smiling. His face looked boyish, friendly.

  He looked at her in her yellow nightgown, her face tilted up into the sifted hallway light. Her mouth looked like a forming question. She looked very small to him, her hair unpinned, her back bare. All those freckles. He could play Connect-the-Dots, maybe. He could constellate his own myths, find a quarter cradle of a moon to rock him.

  He shuffled. “Thank you for dinner.”

  “You’re welcome. A pleasure.”

  “You could come down to me. Later. If you want. It’s okay.” He walked back down the hallway.

  “Be there in a jiffy,” she called and laughed.

  He stripped and crawled into bed, laughing, too. He pulled the bedspread to his neck, upsetting a tumble of pillows. “Doesn’t this feel a little weird?” he called.

  “Yeah,” she called back. “I feel as if I’m in a pension.”

  He chuckled, letting the down nestle his head, wondering if she would come, nudge him, slip into bed, wondering if she would and if he wanted her there.

  Down the hall, she stared out the window, fiercely insomniac. She pretended to read. The Mystery of Edwin Drood. I know what he’s up to. He is making me decide. That way, he’s off the hook. He can say, She started it. She wanted to whack him one with a hacksaw, tweak his button nose with a plumber’s wrench. But did he really expect her to creep down the hall. He didn’t want her there. He was being nice. But maybe. Still, why should she. . . . And then she could picture herself not wanting to disturb the moment, the darkness, the surprise of it all, banging into the walls as she fumbled down the hall, stubbing her toe, hollering as she pitched headlong into his shins. Throbbing toe. A choked curse or two. Yeah, that’d be erotic. Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk. Curly does Dallas.

  They fell asleep.

  She woke first. Maybe it wasn’t so bad. Maybe he didn’t find her as loathsome as she thought. Maybe. The light spilled into the room, uncertain. Maybe. The morning was pink and yellow. She rose expectant. The sun shimmered between the pointed lace trimming of her curtains. Maybe. As maybe as a butterfly’s wings drying, as maybe as their iridescent color, their powdery charm.

  So she goes to him. The hall feels very long. She snuggles into bed behind his back.

  “MMM, nice,” he murmurs.

  But
it isn’t. Something feels off. It is his stomach perhaps. She isn’t used to his girth.

  He closes his eyes so he won’t see her chicken neck. He wants her to be someone else, his old girlfriend Marla who was in her twenties. While he tries to recreate Marla with his hands, she slips out of bed.

  They are in the kitchen. He is complaining about the skim milk, only drinks two percent, he says. She says that she’ll go out to get him some milk. He starts eating Halloween candy from her freezer. “Please, don’t do that,” she says.

  He glares at her and eats another peanut butter cup.

  She wonders why he is doing that. He is overweight.

  Chicken neck, he thinks. They all want to be mothers.

  She served him some popovers. He ate them.

  “I usually have bacon and eggs,” he said. She made them.

  Why am I doing this, she asked herself.Why am I waiting on this boor? She hated herself. Feed him. Feed him.

  They spend the day in book stores, CD stores. She knows what he is doing, avoiding her, avoiding talking. So many avenues for communication, but still men and women don’t talk to each other. She is growing tired of waiting as he finicks over books and CDs.

  When she asks him if he’d like to pick out a movie for that evening, he picks out three. Three. She knows what he is doing; he is finding more ways to avoid her, to keep from talking to her.

  She buys sandwiches for a picnic. He is throwing a hissy fit because he can’t find ice. Milk, bacon and eggs, ice. She knows two year olds who are more adaptive than this. But she grins. Her face feels tight.

  They drive out to the park and sit by the lake. It is a beautiful day, late October Indian summer, drowsy sunshiny day. He wants to climb a trail.

  “Okay,” she agrees and she follows. Men lead. Women follow. He gets them lost, all the while pontificating about how to keep one’s bearings in the woods. She pretends to joke along, but she’s had it. He’s apparently had it, too. She can feel his strain. She is getting on his nerves. They are lost in the woods, Hansel and Gretel, on a beautiful afternoon, and she feels like a witch. The path dwindles to nothing. He’s playing scout, pretending to orient them. She’s overdressed. Her sweater sticks to the small of her back.

  Jack and Jill went up the hill. The quickest way out is down. “The lake is there.” She points. “I’m going down.” And she removes her shoes and skis down the steep hill of pine needles.

  He follows, laughing, but she knows that he is pissed.

  “Impulsive aren’t you?” he asks.

  “Maybe but I ain’t lost.”

  His eyes hate her. They are full of the dirty tricks he’d like to play on her, saw her chairleg three-quarters through, scatter nails on her garage floor. But she doesn’t care; she is skidding down the hill, holding her shoes to her chest and laughing. And Jill came tumbling after. Kit Carson here, can go right to hell. I’m going back to the car. She puts on her shoes at the base of the hill, finds the lakeside trail and starts walking.

  He is brooding. It is in the hump of his shoulders. He is sulking. He is not having fun. His mood is her responsibility.

  She offers to take him out to dinner. She hates herself for offering. She hates herself for opening herself to be humiliated, to give and give with no expectation of returning affection. But YES, he says, and she buys him dinner. The boy has an appetite. He eats his way through the menu. Afterwards, he says, “Thank you.”

  It is not, she realizes, sufficient. She pays the bill.

  They are lying on the living room floor. She is touching him. He is channel-surfing and trying to annoy her. He is successful. “Would you stop it,” she says. “You’re driving me crazy.”

  “No,” he says and, “You are driving yourself crazy.”

  “No, that is driving me crazy. Can’t you find a program and stick with it.”

  He tunes in Tom Hanks in BIG. He goes to the freezer and pops a few more peanut butter cups.

  “That’s what all men really want. A room full of toys, a girl to screw. No responsibility. What a hoot.”

  He is using the movie to tell her that he doesn’t want her. He squirms under her touch, gets up, returns with his vest.

  “Would you mend this for me?” he asks. “I popped a button.”

  And she knows then that she’s damned. If she refuses, she is all the bad girlfriends he’s ever had. If she obliges, she’s his mother. She obliges, cursing. She jabs the needle in and out of the vest with angry little stabs. Damn him, damn him. He brought me his mending. This is over the top. This is the date from hell, but still she sews. She bites the thread off. “Here,” she says. He takes the vest. She can’t bear it. She pokes him in his jelly belly and says, “Say thank you.”

  “Thank you,” he says and pokes her back.

  She pushes him, thinking this is it, the nadir, the pits. Courtship as low comedy. Slapstick love. Pigtails in inkwells. Pinkies in the eye. They look at each other, embarrassed.

  “I don’t know why I act the way I do sometimes,” he says.

  She smiles insincerely and he sticks in a video tape, Bergman’s Howl of the Wolf. They watch it, pretending that they are not watching themselves on the screen. It is not a good date movie. At last, at long last, it ends.

  “I’m tired,” she says. There are two more tapes. “I’m going to bed.”

  He doesn’t shift. He stares at the television.

  Okeydoke. She goes to bed. She wakes up at one.The moon is sifting into the room, shifty light. The hall light is on. She feels the emptiness of the bed. He didn’t join her. She rises in her pajamas to turn off the light. The satin makes a shoosh sound as she walks. She hurts; her heart is full of ashes and orange rinds. She wants to cup her hands and find them full. But she comes up empty. In the sudden darkness she leans against the wall.

  Pain is pain. Despair is despair. These are not tautologies.

  Then she hears her name, and she enters his room, sits down next to him on the bed, brushes the hair back from his forehead. She takes a deep breath to steady herself, because she must say what he will not. “It’s okay,” she says. “I’m just not your type. I told you that I didn’t have any expectations, and that’s fine.”

  “I didn’t know,” he says. “I didn’t know until I came up to bed tonight and I realized that I wanted to sleep alone.”

  “I knew,” she says. “But sometimes it’s better just to say it, to get it out there.”

  “I didn’t want to hurt you.”

  “Sometimes there is less hurt in truth. Chalk it up to lack of chemistry. Too little contact. Too much anticipation. It’s fine.”

  “I feel very close to you now,” he said. “Would you hold me?”

  She cradles him. Her hands and heart are full. The moon spills into the room. Hansel and Gretel have lost their way. They are two scared children. There’s a wolf in the woods and every way, they lose the path. They are hunted by their loneliness. Terror is everywhere. He. She. They, the motherless children.

  She kisses his forehead. It is cool. “I’m tired now,” she says. “I’m going to bed.” She pads down the dark corridor to her room, slips sleeplessly into her bed, and then he is there in her door frame.

  “Are you going to sleep here?” he asks.

  “That’s the general idea.”

  “May I stay with you? I don’t want to sleep alone.”

  Why, she wonders, why do they only come to us when we leave them. But, yes, she says, her heart is large, her bed, commodious. She suffers from a surfeit of affection for the world and all its sad and lost inhabitants. Come to bed then, child.

  And together they lie hand in hand, staving off the night, the wolf beneath the bed, the squalor of loneliness, ulteriority of hope. He. She. We, two. Hansel and Gretel following a path of bird-pecked bread crumbs through the woods. We lose ourselves. We find ourselves again. We build cabins with small thatch. We raise homes in our hearts. We give each other places to abide.You’re safe now baby. You’re home. For a while.


  What is this?

  What it is, baby. What it is.

  Aground

  “COME IN,” SHE SAYS without raising her eyes, as if she’d been expecting him. “Hang your oilskins on the peg inside the door.”

  “Thank you.” He peers into the dim room. The cabin smells slick, oily with fish and kerosene. Did she watch him run the trawler aground, he wonders. Did she watch him row ashore? He cannot see the woman’s face. She leans over the counter, hidden by a curtain of hair, her arm working a cleaver—chop, chop, chop—across the damage board.

  “Leave your boots,” she says and points at the bench by the door.

  As she turns her head, she parts the drapes of gray hair, pulls them back over her shoulders and twists them together in a single hank, kinking it into a loose knot at the nape of her neck. Even in this sulky light, she looks old. Age has bunched her features. Pouches of skin droop from her lower eyelids. Her nose clumps into a ball. Her lips corrugate. He tries to picture her face when it was young, but the task vexes him. Even in his imagination, he cannot iron out all the wrinkles. She coughs, and he realizes he has stared at her too long.

  He glances out the doorway, checks the breeze, his dinghy pulled high, secure on the rocks.

  “Behind you. The bench,” she says and bends back over the counter.

  “Oh, yes.” He sits and tries to pry off his right boot with the toe of his left, but it just slides off the heel, well-greased with clam flat muck. He leans over to peel his boots off noting a row beneath him, neatly paired, running the length of the bench. Men’s boots, the rubber surfaces crackled from disuse.

  Chop, chop, chop. The cleaver hacks across the board. “You fish?” she asks.

  “Yes. Just starting out.” His right boot yields with a squoosh.

  “All men fish sooner or later. My husband, too,” she says, chopping, then adds. “I knew you’d go aground there. That sand bar extends further out at mid-tide than people guess. Chart’s wrong on two counts. The length of the bar and the name of the island. Chart says, ‘Mystic.’ But it’s ‘Missed It,’ missed the sand bar. But strange boats rarely do.You’ll be all right. It’s a coming tide. No ledge out there. Just sand. Soft sand.”