I Thought You Were Dead

by Pete Nelson

“That’s it. She said, ‘He’s a bit of a bozo, but I can see what you see in him,’ and then she sighed and bit her lip. FYI, I think she might be in heat.”

  “All right, then,” Paul said. “You mind sleeping out here tonight?”

  “Not at all,” the dog said. “You seem nervous.”

  “Little bit,” he said.

  “Why? I just told you she loves you.”

  “It’s hard to explain,” Paul said.

  “Tub’s ready,” Tamsen called out.

  He went to her. She’d turned out the lights in the bathroom and lit candles.

  “Where’d you get bubble bath?” he asked.

  “I brought it with me. We got a giant box of free samples in the office from Bed Bath and Beyond. Oh, please — I don’t want to talk about the office anymore! If I mention work one more time, you have my permission to shush me.” She kissed him. He put his arms around her. She undid his belt and tugged at his shirt. She pulled his shirt off him and undid his shoes. She pulled down his pants and then removed his shorts.

  “Get in,” she commanded. She undressed, got in the tub with him, and started washing him. He would have closed his eyes, but if he did, he would have missed the way the candlelight played off her perfect skin. That a woman so attractive would find him appealing seemed extraordinary. He thought of the last few months that he and Karen had actually slept together, how he’d slide his foot across the mattress and touch her under the covers, foot to foot, and she’d jerk away as if he had leprosy. The feeling transcended loneliness. He felt like poison. As Tamsen washed him, he thought of how long he’d ached to be touched like this. He tried to concentrate on the feeling, though he knew he couldn’t will his penis to become erect through sheer force of concentration.

  She washed him, touched him, kissed him, trying to reach him. He closed his eyes, trying to simply enjoy it, trying to focus, the way the therapist he’d seen with Karen had tried to teach him. When he opened them again, he saw himself sitting on the toilet, watching himself in the tub.

  “Nothing yet, huh?” Paul on the Toilet said.

  “I’m not talking to you,” Paul in the Bathtub said. “Leave me alone. Don’t you see this is — ”

  “Exactly the problem,” said Paul on the Toilet, finishing the sentence. “Of course I see it — I’m the analytical one. Try relaxing. Try breathing deeply through your nose and holding it in. Count to six. Now let it out. You need to be relaxed to get an erection.”

  “Go away,” Paul in the Tub said, irritated. “You’re ruining this.”

  “I’m ruining this?” Paul on the Toilet said. “You’re the one who called for me, pal, so don’t pin this on me. Take some responsibility. I’m just trying to help.”

  “You’re not helping.”

  “Paul?” Tamsen said.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Paul told her. “I’m really tired. I guess I must have just closed my eyes for a second.”

  “You’re not getting off that easy,” she said, kissing him again. For a second, he thought she’d meant to say “easily,” a comment on his lack of responsiveness. Paul on the Toilet watched as Tamsen did everything she could to get Paul in the Tub aroused. She climbed on top of him, lifted a taut nipple to his mouth, pulled at him, bade him touch her and moaned with pleasure as he did, and held him close as she shuddered, and Paul on the Toilet admired her passion, her style, her imagination, and her determination, and he liked watching the soap bubbles run from her smooth skin as water and suds splashed about the room, but it was Paul in the Tub who needed to be present in the moment, and he was not.

  “I’m sorry,” he said when Tamsen at last desisted and simply held him, resting her head against his chest.

  “Shh,” she said. “You don’t have to say anything. It’s all part of the mystery. Sometimes I can have an orgasm like — ” She snapped her fingers. “And sometimes it’s like — ” She pretended she’d forgotten how to snap her fingers, flailing them palsied in the air. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I heard about a woman who had orgasms every time she sneezed, and when the doctor asked her if she was taking anything for it, she said — ”

  “Just pepper,” Tamsen said softly, holding him. “You told me that one. No jokes. You don’t have to entertain me to get me to like you. I just want you to feel comfortable with me. It’s going to happen, and I’m going to be here when it does.”

  “I think I drank too much,” he said. “I’ve had a lot on my mind.”

  “You have.”

  “I was hoping to do better,” he said.

  “Paul, stop — I don’t care. I just like being with you. I think you’re cool.”

  “You think I’m cool?”

  “I think you’re way cool.”

  “No one’s said they thought I was cool since seventh grade.”

  “Who said it in seventh grade?”

  “Mary Schwandt,” Paul said. “She passed me a note. It said, ‘Dear Paul, I think you’re really cool. A bunch of us are going down to the park tonight to beat up Randy Bubniak, and I was wondering if you want to come with us. Love, Mary.’ ”

  “Who was Randy Bubniak?”

  “Just this kid I’d known since kindergarten. I guess he was somewhat on the effeminate side. I told him he probably didn’t want to go down to the park for a while because some kids were going to be waiting for him.”

  “See? That’s exactly what I mean. Nine out of ten seventh-grade boys wouldn’t have said anything. That’s one of the many things I love about you. Sometimes I think you don’t see it, and that kills me. You only see the negatives.”

  “What are the other things you love about me?” His hidden question was, “What do you mean when you say that, and is it the same thing you mean when you say it to Stephen? Do you love him too?” This wasn’t the time or place to bring up Stephen.

  “Why?” she said. “Do you have to have a reason to love somebody? It’s what you feel — it’s not a conclusion you reach through logical deduction.”

  “I don’t have to have a reason, but I try to understand it when it happens,” he said. He remembered how frightening the idea of romantic love had been to him when he’d first encountered it, when he understood it only as some overwhelming and mysterious force that comes over you, beyond your control, out of the blue. He’d worried, lying in bed in seventh grade, that he might fall in love with somebody he didn’t want to fall in love with — what would he do then? He wanted to have some say in who he did or didn’t fall in love with. Tamsen was right. He did need a reason. He’d always needed a reason.

  “Let’s get in bed,” she said. “I feel like I want to sleep with you for three days.”

  “I could go for that,” Paul said.

  “Paul,” she said when they were in bed. “Just don’t brood. We’ve been brought together by something larger than sex. There’s no clock running on it. Okay? I just want to know you. I want you to know me.”

  “Okay,” he said. He would try not to brood. “Tell me something nobody else knows, then. Tell me a secret. Something you want. Something nobody else knows about.”

  She paused. “You have to promise not to repeat this to anybody. I’ve been taking singing lessons.”

  “You have?” he said. “Who from?”

  “From a woman named Sheila Clark. She’s got a trio in Providence. Stephen and I saw her one night, and when she was on break I told her I’d always wanted to sing, and she said she was starting a class and I should sign up, so I did. Sort of on an impulse.”

  “Does Stephen know?” Paul asked.

  She shook her head. “He was in the bathroom,” she said. “It’s so embarrassing. Sheila’s been trying to help me figure out why it’s so hard for me. I can speak in front of a thousand people at a tech convention, but the idea of opening my mouth and singing in front of people terrifies me. I think it’s because in my fantasies, I’m just like the singers I listen to on CD, but when I hear myself in reality — Sheila tapes us — I want to cringe.” />
  He was thrilled to know something about her that Stephen didn’t know.

  “Sing something for me,” he said. She demurred. “Please.”

  After a pause, she sang, softly, barely above a whisper, “ ‘Am I blue?’ Not with you … ’ ” She stopped. “I can’t.”

  “You have a beautiful voice,” he said. “I’ll bet if you sang full out, you’d be great.”

  “Ugh,” she said. “That’s not going to happen. Your turn.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I write poetry. Just once in a while. I can quit anytime I want.”

  “Can you tell me a poem?”

  “There was a young man from Japan, / Whose poetry just wouldn’t scan. / When asked, ‘Why’s it so?’ / He replied, ‘I don’t know, / Unless it’s that I always try to fit as many words into the last line as I possibly can.’ ”

  “Seriously.”

  “Seriously, I don’t have anything serious memorized,” he said. “I could e-mail you something if you want.”

  “I want.”

  He held her close and closed his eyes and listened to her breathing until sleep came over him. When he woke up two hours later, he was fully aroused, like a teenager looking at his first Playboy. He considered waking Tamsen up but knew the feeling would probably fade before he could do anything about it.

  He went into the bathroom, struggling at first. A warm shiver swept over him from head to toe as he peed. He shuddered.

  “We’ll get her next time,” he told his penis.

  “We’ll get who?” Stella said from the fuzzy bath mat where she’d been lying.

  “I wasn’t talking to you. Go back to sleep.”

  “Yes, master,” she said sleepily. “Are you all right? You seem bummed.”

  “Minor setback,” he said.

  7

  The Secret Life of Jimmy Carter

  The next day, after Tamsen left (giving him a sweet kiss to assure him all was well between them), he went to Kmart and bought a pair of sweatpants, a sweatshirt, and a pair of running shoes. He was stretching on the kitchen floor in his bathrobe when Stella walked in and saw him.

  “What in the world are you doing?” she asked him. “Did you hurt yourself?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “I’m stretching. I’m going to start jogging.”

  “You?” Stella said, suppressing a chuckle.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “I think that’s great,” she said. “I’m sure you’ll have a terrific time. Why now?”

  “I’m going to change my life,” he told her. “I made a vow after I saw my father.”

  “So you’re going jogging?”

  “Dieting too. I’m serious. I realized I’ve let myself slide since the divorce.”

  “Just since the divorce.”

  “You’re no one to sit there telling me I’m out of shape. When’s the last time you got any exercise?”

  “While you were gone. Chester and I ran several miles through the snow, chasing away a couple of ferocious deer. Twelve miles, I believe it was. Maybe you should check with your doctor. When’s the last time you had a physical?”

  “They’re just going to point to the body mass index chart on the wall and tell me I’m too short for my weight. How am I supposed to get taller at my age?”

  “Does this have anything to do with your penis?” she asked.

  “This has nothing to do with that,” he said. “Though it couldn’t hurt. I decided this when I was in Minnesota. Care to join me?”

  “Sounds like fun, but I’ll pass,” Stella said. “I’d only slow you down.”

  “I doubt that very much,” Paul said. He looked out the window. The snow in the streets had melted to slush. He could think of plenty of reasons to wait until conditions improved. Then he pictured his father again, trapped in his hospital bed.

  He changed to go running. He’d decided things were going to be different hundreds of times before, but this time he really meant it. He laid the sweatshirt and his new sweatpants on the bed, as well as a baby-seal-orange stocking cap (for safety), but before he dressed, he regarded himself naked in the mirror, to get a good mental “before” picture.

  He looked doughy. Unimposing. A pushover. He’d smoked until he was thirty — that hadn’t helped anything. He was five foot eleven, with decent posture, standing up, but with a tendency to slouch when he was sitting down, particularly in movie theaters, where he was usually quite uncomfortable, mostly owing to his not having an ass. He wished he could say he’d worked it off, better yet that he’d laughed it off, or lost it in Vegas, but the sad fact was that he’d been born without one, part of his heritage. For centuries, his Viking ancestors had rowed boats across the wine-dark seas of the North Atlantic seated on hard wooden planks — no doubt it was a question of erosion more than of genetics or evolution.

  In compensation for his hereditary asslessness, he had decent-looking legs, though a bit bowed. His feet were well shaped but his little toes turned in and tended to grow calluses and to blister if his socks were too thin. Structurally, his left leg was sound but his right knee was shot, the anterior cruciate ligament snapped and the lateral meniscus cartilage all but gone after a softball accident years earlier. His orthopedic surgeon told him afterward that he was no longer allowed to participate in any sports because of the further damage he might do and the risk of developing arthritis later in life. Paul looked at his legs. Arthritis wasn’t as bad as a stroke, and that was what he was worried about.

  He was going jogging.

  Nothing was going to stop him.

  “From this day forward,” he silently resolved, “every other beer will be a light beer. And every two out of three if I’m also eating Klondike bars.”

  He had good shoulders, broad and square, and nice hands, or so he’d been told. His chest was smooth and hairless. The hair on his head was sandy brown and thinning, but only noticeably so if he stood directly beneath an overhead light, a reason to avoid motel bathrooms. He examined his face. He hated the way he looked in photographs but liked the way he looked in mirrors, except when the mirror was lying flat on a tabletop and he could only glimpse himself by bending over, and then gravity pulled at the loose skin on his face and neck and made him look jowly and ancient. A friend had warned him, “Once you turn forty and you’re in bed with a younger woman, never be on top unless the room is pitch black, because she could open her eyes and suddenly think she’s in bed with Jimmy Carter.”

  He had “quiet good looks,” in Tamsen’s words. He did not have bags under his eyes or wrinkles or frown lines, and his lips were not as thin as those of most Scandinavian men, not the down-turned narrow slits evident on his ancestors’ faces in old family photographs, immigrants in their New Land finery, men and women who never smiled, because their lives were hard and their memories pained them, and because the shutter speeds were so slow back then that you had to assume a pose and freeze for at least five seconds. No Norwegian man had ever been able to hold a smile for more than three.

  “Make an appointment with a dentist,” he told himself.

  “Find a dentist.”

  “Or get a job with dental coverage. And a physical. Yeah, right.”

  “Stop being so passive.”

  His new jogging shoes were lighter than air and soft underfoot. He felt as if he was walking on somebody’s sofa. He’d loved sports as a kid, fantasizing, as boys did, that one day he might turn pro. Horsing around and wrestling and playing kickball and catch with Carl made him aggressive and competitive. Before he broke his arm in a preseason football game in ninth grade, he’d been a four-season jock: baseball in the summer, football in the fall, basketball in the winter, and track in the spring. After the accident, he’d sat out games and practices for over a month, during which time he discovered all kinds of things: girls, tobacco, alcohol, drugs, girls. After that, he never really gave a damn anymore about sports, satisfied to ride the pine and muse without ever coming close to matching Carl’s athletic accomplishments o
r his own prior expectations.

  “I was an athlete once. I can be one again.”

  Seeing his father lying in the hospital had given him a sense of mortality that he hadn’t had before. He’d waited long enough. It was time to get healthy.

  He tightened his laces, stood up, took a deep breath, and touched his toes, making a loud grunting sound. “Stretching is overrated,” he said to himself. His belly bulged slightly over the drawstring of his sweatpants. He wore an oversize sweatshirt more because he needed something bulky to cover his gut. He took one last look in the mirror and thought, “It’s a miracle that Tamsen is attracted to me. If the psychic hadn’t told her I was the one for her, where would I be?”

  The fact that she’d chosen him was impossibly flattering and good for his ego. She told him he didn’t look anything like Jimmy Carter, but then, what else was she going to say?

  “Maybe some day I’ll run in a marathon with Carl. I’ll get in great shape and kick his ass,” he thought.

  “First things first. Just start running.”

  “Maybe I will run with you. I’ve changed my mind,” Stella said. “How far are we going?” Even as out of shape as he was, he knew Stella was too old to keep up with him, try as she might.

  “Uh … I’m going to need you to stay here and guard the house while I’m gone,” he told her.

  “Fabulous,” she muttered, turning and circling once before lying on her bed. “We wouldn’t want anyone breaking in and stealing the boxer shorts you left under the bed, would we?”

  HE STEPPED OUTSIDE. The air was cold and dry, the sky a cloudless blue, the sun bright. He briefly considered waiting to begin his new regimen until some day when it was warmer, but he recognized the lame excuse for what it was. There was no way to start but to simply start, one foot in front of the other. He began walking to the corner and told himself as soon as he reached the fire hydrant, he would pick up the pace.

  At the hydrant, he ran, turning right on Parsons and right again on Bridge, past the post office, where the employees were ominously cheerful and pleasant. He ran past Historic Northampton, a very old house across the street from the post office that was no doubt filled with very old things. Nobody he knew had ever been there, and nobody he knew knew anybody who’d ever been there, or anybody who had any plans or intentions to go there, though the building was open to the public six days a week, preserving history by more or less keeping it to themselves. At first he was surprised at how easy it was to run after years of inactivity and sloth. Then he was surprised at how briefly that feeling lasted and how tired he soon became.