“Twenty-eight years.”
“How many of your wife’s friends have you met in town for a drink during the last twenty-eight years?”
“None. You’re the only one.”
She didn’t need to speak, as her laugh let me know how bad a liar she thought I was.
“We can go get a room when you answer my question.”
“This is absurd, Annie,” I said.
“I go by Ann now. I have gone by Ann for years. But you don’t want to accept that either, do you? You want it all to be like it was twenty-eight years ago, when we were all too young and dumb to know what we were doing to each other.”
I thought of my sons in a bar, minutes from last call, furiously chatting up the last two available girls, wondering how they’d let it get this late. All their friends had scored, were off in strange bedrooms or out in the parking lot, in steamy backseats. Jess at home fixing my dinner, listening to All Things Considered as she sipped her single glass of Chardonnay, still dressed in her workout clothes.
“You were supposed to fuck her, not marry her,” said Annie. “Wasn’t that the plan? What went wrong, Dave?”
“I love her.”
“You were a lonely little boy who needed his mommy to cook his dinner.”
“She’s right about you. You’re wretched.”
“Well, I’m happy to hear that,” said Annie. “That actually makes me like her. She deserves to think ill of me. I fully admit my faults. In fact, I’ve never tried to hide them. I prefer people to be up front about such things. I do hate a phony.”
“So what are you doing here?”
She shrugged and finished her wine. “This is the sort of thing I do.”
I called for the check.
“You’ll be going home now, I guess.”
“You’ll be giving Jess a call, I guess.”
She reached for her purse and slid out of the booth. “I guess you’re in enough trouble already.”
I sat there until the waiter brought the check. He was so overly courteous to me that I imagined he’d been spying on us from the bar, had seen the whole thing, and was commiserating as only a fellow soldier could.
“That one got away,” I said, forcing a smile.
“She was a beauty, that’s for sure,” he said, and his own smile was just as forced, but then he whistled, and it was the most grating and intolerable noise I’ve ever heard in my life, that whistle out of the waiter’s mouth.
I Will Clean Your Attic
AFTER HE LEFT HER it began to snow. The house was huge and drafty without him, its rooms silent and overly bright in the new whiteness. This was the South, and snow down south brings its own brand of frenzied incompetency. There is no budget for salt and sand; the main thoroughfares are ineptly freed of drifts but the side streets are left marooned. The schools shut down at the first sign of flakes and stay closed until grass once again dominates the soiled slush. Stores surge with overtime stock boys and delivery trucks but lose the fight to the flood of anxious customers who line up for bread and beer and candles.
To Laura it was only snow, and she knew it would not last. She found things to like about it: Children squealed and tumbled outside, and birds lingered with gratitude in the box of feed outside the breakfast nook. Music sounded alive in the firelit living room.
And yet it was intolerable, for it made all the more painful Christopher’s absence. It turned rooms hollow, the snow. As it lingered she closed the curtains and paced, entombed. The mail stopped coming. A note appeared in the slot: Unable to deliver, ice on steps. She looked forward to catalogs with the indifferent intensity she paid to cooking shows. She neither ordered merchandise nor cooked more than rice and the occasional chicken breast, but without her distractions she felt desperate. Before the snow came, three weeks after he left her, she had just been able to sleep again, four-hour stretches uninterrupted by nightmare or the angry punching of numbers on the phone. She had managed a movie, a workout in the pool; she spent a weekend preparing her tax return. But now everything was buried beneath the bright layer that made teenagers polite and distant neighbors friendly.
When Saturday arrived, she forced herself into an ancient down jacket Christopher had left behind and stuffed her sweatpants into boots and went out to the garage for the snow shovel and the rock salt and went to work on the front steps. One thing at a time. She had avoided therapists for she knew what they would say and why go to the doctor when you save yourself the money and drink the prescribed fluids and rest and take the necessary steps on your own? No one else was going to help her out of this. Cleaning the steps was not going to help her. Small mindless tasks were rumored to help and she forced herself to chip away at the ice to spite the therapists she did not allow herself to see, as if to say, See there? I did it and it did not help.
The front door had been shut tight and locked for a week now, and the lock was frozen. She struggled to open it, her boots sliding on the wood floor. There was no traction; she pulled the edge of the rug over and tried again and finally it swung free. A slip of photocopied paper, a flyer, drifted inside. Its edges had curled, its print had faded, as if it had gotten wet, then dry, then wet again. She could barely make it out. I will clean your attic. I will shovel your walk. I will I will I will—a long list of I wills, domestic and household chores. The refrain suggested the writer had been ordered by a teacher to write one thousand times on the blackboard his litany of I wills. I will not give this any more attention than thou would a pizza coupon, she vowed. But she studied it, the cold rushing in from outdoors, her limbs starting to shiver as she read it over and over. A name — B. R. Bradshaw — a phone number. She folded it in eighths and stuck it in the pocket of her husband’s abandoned jacket. Let him deal with it. Though it was never his job, she always spent more time on the yard than he did. She took care of the house and yard and he took care of himself. He needed to be taken care of and while she took care of home and him he found a woman named Sydney to take not necessarily better but a different kind of care of him, and sometimes, even though she knew it wasn’t true (for she had heard Sydney’s chirpy whispering once on the phone when she’d picked up by mistake), she found herself wishing Sydney was a man. At least if Sydney was a he, Christopher might miss the kind of intimacy that a woman could give a man. She wasn’t so much shocked by this thought as bored by it. She had had even more pathetic thoughts and now she was simply exhausted by the bathos.
It took all afternoon to clean the steps of ice. The next day at the regular time for her mail to come she read at a book in the living room, paying more attention to the sound of the postman’s approach, the rusty slot opening, the plop of newsprint and envelope on the floor, than the book in her hand. But he was late. And when she finally picked up the paper, something less demanding to read while not reading, she discovered it was Sunday, no mail.
And then it was Monday, then Wednesday, and the mail fanned out on the floor where it had landed and she found herself ignoring it. If the absence of catalogs was so painful, she was better without them. She told herself this. She told herself a lot of things, over and over, mumbling them aloud as if learning a new language in preparation for departure to a country where she knew no one.
The mail she heaped on the coffee table. For a week it grew until one day it toppled. She bent to clean the mess from the rug and discovered yet another flyer from the attic cleaner. B. R. Bradshaw. Perfect name for a workman. Didn’t they all go by their initials? She pictured his pickup in the drive, aslant from bad tires, its dashboard adrift in receipts and more of the same crudely executed flyers and empty cigarette packs. She sat in the corner of the living room studying the flyer.
She went to work at the free clinic, interviewed prospective patients, forced herself to believe that their misery was real. The flyers kept coming. She threw them away, she pulled them out of the trash and kept them in a stack. Determined to stop the flow, she dialed the number in a rage one day, her breath coming hard and hot as the di
al tone bleated. The voice on the answering machine was the generic computer-generated voice of some woman who sounded, in her electronic monotone, slightly British. Laura had owned one of these herself once, cheapest on the market, so cheap you could not personalize your message. She hung up in horror, as if she’d called back in time to leave herself a message. Don’t marry him, her message would say. He will clean your fucking attic.
One Saturday she read the long afternoon away in the living room when the doorbell rang. She shuddered at its echo, bolted up as if someone was spying on her, as if this was not her house and the owner had come home to surprise her squatting there. A year or so ago, the house had been broken into while they were out at a party; since Christopher left, she’d been nervous, especially about opening the door to strangers. She crouched on the sofa, peered through the blinds. The man on the stoop looked both suspicious and familiar. Like someone she’d interviewed at the clinic. She did not want to open her door to him until she realized that she had probably sat across from him in her office. She had never once had a patient show up at her house and was too curious to ignore the bell.
He introduced himself. B. R. Bradshaw. She knew she should cut him off before he got started on his attic-cleaning spiel, but she found herself embarrassingly eager to check him out. He was a few years younger than her, late twenties maybe.
“I run a small business. Odd jobs around the house. You should have gotten my flyer, I sent a couple your way.”
Laura realized that she’d never seen a postmark.
“Sent? You mean you mailed them?”
“Well, no ma’am. I dropped one in your box, I was working your neighborhood.”
“With a vengeance,” she said.
“What’s that?”
She was glad he did not call her ma’am again.
“I got more than one.”
“Haven’t had a whole lot of takers. Lots of people don’t want to think about spring cleaning right yet.”
“Spring cleaning,” she said. She wanted it to be a question. She wanted to consider it as an option, something she ought to have thought of herself now that the season of Christopher’s abandonment had passed and a natural division had been reached, an organic and easily observable one of weather and calendar.
“I do attics, garages. I’ll do your basement.”
“I don’t have an attic,” she said.
He cocked his head and looked at her. He backed down the walk and cocked his head again, at the house this time, looking up at each side, stroking the stubble on his chin, posing all the while as if he was being asked to improvise a mood in a drama class. Exaggerated incredulity. She studied the attic cleaner’s eyes, milky blue, stunning against the blackness of his unfashionable shaggy hair. She watched him pantomime suspicion and when he walked back to the stoop she said, “Okay, I have an attic. What is this? You go around trying to catch people in lies?”
He laughed. “I don’t imagine there’d be much profit in that.”
She wanted to laugh also, but she was a little uneasy at how heartlessly she found herself mocking this guy. B. R. Bradshaw. She heard herself on the phone to a friend, “I got a guy who can handle that for you, B. R. Bradshaw, no I’m not joking, I know, isn’t it perfect?”
“So look,” he was saying, “if you say you don’t have an attic I guess that means you don’t want it cleaned.”
“Come back later,” she said. But why? She didn’t want him to.
“Attic out of town?”
“Gone south for the winter,” she said.
“Condo in Florida I guess.”
“Actually, Mexico. A cabana.”
She wanted him to leave but she had fallen into a rhythm and she was enjoying it, and she realized that this was the first time she’d engaged in such spontaneous and meaningless chatter since Christopher left.
“I guess I’m like my neighbors,” she said. “Not quite ready for spring yet.”
He shrugged. Bony shoulders rising beneath the too-large Lehigh sweatshirt.
“It’ll come. Before you know it, it’ll be summer.”
She shrugged herself. A shrug seemed the only appropriate response to the passing of seasons she did not have the strength to heed.
“But you aren’t like your neighbors,” she heard him say.
She braced herself for a cheesy come-on. She sort of hoped he would, so she would not feel guilty for not wanting to open the door to him. Then she could tell all her friends, the ones who’d lost patience with her moping, the ones she knew were tired of listening to how much she loved Christopher still and hated him, how badly she wanted to forget about him and how easily she’d take him back this minute, now, no questions asked, about this creepy guy, and get extended credit in the sympathy department.
“Your neighbors don’t even answer the door.”
“Maybe they didn’t care to be blanketed by flyers.”
“Blanket? That bad?”
“You hit pretty hard.”
“I want work bad enough to be persistent I guess.”
“Come back next Saturday.” When he was gone she realized this was exactly the way she dealt with Christopher, too. Oh, so you found someone else, okay, go away and come back when you feel like it. Next Saturday maybe? She went back to the sofa and her book but found herself instead of reading dreading the Saturdays to come in this life.
But one came, a week later. She thought of disappearing, going out of town, but she knew he would turn up again. He was a blanketer, persistent, he wanted work.
“What’ll it be?” he said.
She looked out in the drive. “Don’t you have a car?”
“I’m on foot today,” he said, “but if you need something hauled off I can run get the truck.”
She stared at him long enough to let him see her skepticism.
“I didn’t know what you wanted me to do for you today.”
“Clean my attic, I guess.”
“Okay if I put the stuff out in the garage, come by and pick it up later?”
“How did you know I have a garage?” It wasn’t visible from the front of the house at all — it was not really a garage, but a listing shed in the far right corner of the yard.
“When you didn’t answer the front door I figured you used the back,” he said. “I tried the back door once, back when we had that big snow.”
She didn’t like the thought of him sneaking around, disliked even more his boot prints in the snow she tried so hard to keep virgin. It had become a game during the days before the snow melted, seeing how little she could disturb the whiteness with footprints, making sure only her own tracks led in and out of the house that was hers alone now.
“Let’s get going,” she said.
He followed her in. The phone rang when they were halfway up the stairs. She told him to wait, but he kept climbing. “No problem,” he said. “I’ll find it, it has to be at the top of the house.”
“No, wait here,” she said. Alerted by her tone, he froze on the steps while she raced to the kitchen, her face tight at the thought of him sneaking around upstairs, checking out her bedroom.
“You sound tired,” said Christopher.
She was sick of people telling her she looked tired, or sad, or thin.
“I can’t talk now,” she said. “What do you want?”
“Can you talk or can’t you?”
“Fuck off,” she said, and hung up.
She took the phone with her, sure that he would call back. Usually she wanted him to, usually she told him to fuck off so he would call back, but halfway to the stairs she returned to the kitchen and cradled the phone and switched the machine on. Since he left she’d not used it; she hated to come home and hear the glee in his voice when he’d called knowing she was out and thus avoided talking to her.
“All set?” said B. R. Something in his voice suggested he’d overheard her phone conversation. She passed him on the landing and led him into the guest room closet from which a staircase led
to the attic. They stood among the piles of boxes and suitcases, the framed diplomas and the guitar cases.
“For someone who doesn’t have an attic, yours is in bad need of cleaning.”
“You know, you might want to think about branching out.” She felt she still held the phone in her hand, her every nerve poised for its shrill trembling.
He looked blankly her way.
“You’re kind of overly specialized, don’t you think?”
“You trying to tell me attics don’t need cleaning?”
“Seems like the kind of thing most people would want to do for themselves.”
“Kind of personal, hey?”
She looked around at the junk. Mostly Christopher’s. She didn’t like B. R. Bradshaw’s tone, which suggested he knew more than he let on.
“Hey, look, doesn’t matter to me what it is. I’m not cataloging, I’m toting.”
She laughed. The word tote always made her laugh. “So tote that barge lift that bail,” she said.
“Tell me which one to lift and which to tote and I’m there.”
She pointed to a set of free weights, told him to take them down to the garage. It was a three-trip job, and while he was gone she went about organizing piles of Christopher’s belongings she wanted out of the house. Almost all of it was his, and though he’d taken his clothes, he’d left most of his stuff here and she wanted him to, for it meant that once he tired of the girl named Sydney he would be back. I’m not leaving you for her, he’d told her time and again, and every time she’d asked him why he was with her, he’d said, I’m not with her. I see her sometimes, but it’s not like you think. Nothing’s like I think, she thought. The world is not what I think, it’s what you think and always has been, your reality was the one we moved around in and now you have a new one and it’s not some place I’m dying to visit. He’d wanted to see her, to have dinner a couple times a week and go to movies and even take an occasional trip together, springing for separate rooms but holding hands in the car, on walks at the beach. The only thing that has changed is that I just can’t be with you right now. I need to be by myself. I love you as much as I ever have, baby, I just can’t be with you right now.
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