Patricia Gaffney

by Mad Dash

  Dash opened the door. She’d been thinking of leaving, she told him later, because her musician boyfriend had abandoned her to get drunk in one of the bedrooms with his band mates. She had stiff, spiky short hair the color of fake mahogany and a great deal of blue makeup on her eyes. Strange clothes, boots that came up over her knees, a sort of crocheted skullcap on her head. The first thing she did was look him up and down and laugh, as if he were the one in the eccentric costume. A sweet, sunny, surprised kind of laugh, but he was about to take offense anyway when she took him by the wrist, pulled him inside, and kissed him. “Happy New Year. Friend of the bride or friend of the groom?”

  “Em…”

  It turned out the party givers were celebrating not only New Year’s Eve but also moving in together, but he didn’t know that, and Dash’s question was only the first of many mysteries that would puzzle him that night. The second was why this odd, laughing girl wanted to be with him. But she did, and as soon as he understood that, he forgot his gloomy mission and gave himself up to fate. Or rather, the unique allure of sex and chumminess Dash radiated, at least for him. Then and now.

  Awful, thumping music made it impossible to talk even in the kitchen, where she led him to get plastic glasses of someone else’s wine out of the refrigerator. The run-down apartment building had only two virtues, low rents and spacious fire-escape landings overlooking a bit of the distant Potomac River. “Get some air?” Andrew shouted. Dash looked confused until he led her through the packed, stifling living room, out an open window, and onto the fire escape.

  “Wow, this is great!” she said, turning in a circle, arms out as if she were blessing the city. “How did you know? Isn’t this fabulous?” His first experience of being made to feel as if he’d saved her. She charmed everyone that way, he knew now, an all-inclusive generosity of spirit, but that night he’d thought it was just for him.

  On the icy iron stairs under a pinkish sky, they got to know each other. “A lawyer?” she repeated, like “A cannibal?” when he told her his prospective profession. Her patent horror thrilled him. He laughed for the first time in days. Well, she said, at least he’d find a job right away, since the town was lousy with lawyers. He was aware of casting a pall over the conversation by answering, “Well, as a matter of fact. My father wants me to come into his firm. He’s expecting it.”

  One step above him, she put her chin on her fists and leaned close, eyes alight with sympathy. “Don’t you want to?”

  “Actually, I don’t want to practice law at all.” She was the first person he’d said that to straight out, no ambivalence.

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Study history. Teach it at the university level.”

  “Then that’s what you should do.”

  “Think so?”

  “Yes, of course. It’s your life. What do you care what your father thinks?”

  He might have dismissed that as naive, except that he’d been arrested from the first moment by a way she had of looking at him as if she already knew him. As if she were waiting for him to catch up, and in the meantime, being with him was exciting and sweetly amusing to her. “Have we met before?” he almost asked. And yet mixed with that was the contrary sense that she was slightly on edge with him, perhaps even on her best behavior because, in fact, she’d never met anyone like him.

  “This isn’t really me,” she said at one point, making an artless, looping gesture.

  “Who is really you?” he asked.

  She grimaced thoughtfully, tapping her front teeth together, and then laughed. “That is an excellent question.”

  She told him what she was doing with her life, which dazzled him in its directionlessness, and he told her what he hoped to do with his. “It sounds like I’m having more fun,” she deadpanned, but sympathetically. As much as he was drawn to her, his practical side, the one that could always be relied on to prophesy failure, insisted they would never work, they were too different. Temperaments, interests, outlooks—they had nothing in common, so why begin? Why raise false hopes?

  “Look, I’ve got goose bumps,” she said, showing him a bare thigh under her short skirt. “It’s freezing! Oh, but let’s not go in.” Of course he gave her his sweater, a cardigan he ripped off like Walter Raleigh’s cape and put over her lap. No, now he’d be cold, they must share, she insisted. So they squeezed together on the same step and put opposite arms through the sleeves of his sweater, stretching it tight across their fronts. She was flirting, yes, but also, she really didn’t want him to be cold. His first experience of the way she could comfort and excite, be his friend and his lover at the same time.

  Then Hood came.

  Andrew had seen men who looked like Hood around the campus, the city, but had never met or spoken to one in person—no common ground on which to strike an acquaintance, obviously. His head was clean-shaven and shiny-bright, as if he polished it, and he had more piercings in one ear than Andrew had orifices in his whole body. He had black-painted fingernails and a wristband covered with spikes, a cigarette, or maybe a joint, dangling from his lips. He stuck one scrawny leg out the window and straddled the ledge. Holey jeans, a tank shirt, and steel-toed boots completed the outfit—and still he didn’t look tough. He had sleepy eyes, a benign, crooked-toothed smile, and when he spoke—“Hey, honey, it’s two minutes to midnight!”—he sounded more like the boy next door than a storm trooper.

  For a moment—how long? a second, two seconds, yet uncommonly momentous to Andrew—Dash didn’t move. She sat still, the left side of her body warming the right side of his, while he wondered what she would do. A tiny sigh—and then the awkward untangling, the clang of cold metal when they stood up, the clambering back through the window. Someone turned off the music. Andrew got shuffled aside as people gathered around a TV set in the living room to see what was happening in Times Square. They slung their arms around one another and swayed, counting down “Ten! Nine! Eight!” Trapped in the drunken crush, he saw shiny-headed Hood wrap his tattooed arms around Dash and give her a long, ardent kiss on the mouth. Her arms stuck out straight behind his head, her hands limp; when she closed her eyes, the blue makeup glittered with silver specks in the light from the television.

  He told himself he should stay, learn the situation, intrude, pretend it didn’t matter—but as soon as he could, he fought a path through the hot crowd and got out the door.

  In his own apartment, weirdly quiet except for the muffled racket overhead, he thought, Lucky escape, for a while, then What did you expect? He wasn’t used to losing women, who usually liked him, but he was used to not getting what he wanted. Or possibly (Dash’s theory, years later) what he was used to was being prepared not to get what he wanted—a defense mechanism, a way to save face. Either way, blighted expectations were no strangers to him, and his usual coping method was weary resignation. What else? What did you expect? He was trying and failing to console himself with that sort of shoulder-shrugging fatalism when a quick knock came at the door. Dash.

  And Hood, a few steps behind, carefully cupping a lighter to his cigarette. Or joint.

  “Hi,” Dash said.

  “Hi,” Andrew said.

  She had on a feathery, spangly half poncho for a coat, and long red gloves. And she had that look again, as if she knew him unnervingly well and were only waiting, with tender amusement, for him to catch up.

  “I wanted to use the fire escape,” she said softly. So Hood couldn’t hear? Not that he was paying any attention. One knee gave out and he lurched sideways, had to start over with his cigarette. He was drunk, but Dash wasn’t.

  “It’s so high up, though,” she said. “I got scared.”

  “The stairs are much safer,” Andrew agreed.

  “Yes. We were wondering. Do you like black-eyed peas?”

  He just smiled. He wanted to see her in daylight. Was she beautiful? Already he didn’t care.

  “I’m—we’re having a party tomorrow. I make this thing of my mother’s called hoppin’
John. It’s a southern tradition. For every black-eyed pea you eat on New Year’s Day, that’s how many dollars you’ll make that year. Actually it’s more of a superstition.”

  “Do I look that hard up?” He meant that as a joke; he was so stupid. “I’d like to come,” he said quickly. “Where do you live?”

  So it began, their confusing, undercover, thankfully short period of courtship. Hood proved to be a congenial rival, and before long Andrew and Dash were a couple. Happily ever after. She made hoppin’ John every New Year’s Day, and he pretended to like it. This was the first time in twenty-one years he hadn’t had gas all New Year’s night.

  Sunday morning dragged on. Now that it was too late, he felt guilty for not going to church. It wasn’t that he had nothing to do; he just couldn’t stand the thought of doing it.

  He wandered into the downstairs office he and Dash shared, then forgot what he’d come in for. It used to be a pantry off the kitchen. With no window, it was a dark, gloomy room, and so, about ten years ago, Dash squeezed up against the house behind the shrubbery and shot a wide-angle photograph of the backyard. She blew it up and hung it on the office wall inside a window-shaped frame she made, complete with curtains. It fooled people for a few seconds—they thought it was a real window. But only in summer; in wintertime, the sunny greens and pastels gave it away. They were depressing, too, unless you were in a hopeful frame of mind and the thought of springs past and to come cheered you up. Andrew wasn’t in a hopeful frame of mind.

  He’d liked Dash’s faux period, though. She would take close-ups of light switches around the house, enlarge them to their exact dimensions, mount them on thick cardboard, and glue them on the walls in unexpected places. Same with the thermostat and the heat registers, the doorbell. People halted at the sight of them for a minute, then laughed. But after a while, she’d tired of her domestic reproductions and taken them all down. All but the window.

  Nostalgia washed over him. He felt heavy, homesick. If he could find them, would it be even more depressing to hang up a few fake light switches now, or would it make him smile? He knew where they were, in a drawer in the oak file cabinet. She kept some of her early work there, pre-Chloe, back when she’d done all her own developing and printing in a tiny darkroom in the bathroom of her apartment.

  She kept other photos in that file cabinet, too. They were in a brown envelope at the back of the bottom drawer, the made-up name “Municipal Boro Council” scrawled on top in her spiky printing—“in case Chloe ever looks in here.” He went to the cabinet and pulled out the envelope, carried it to the desk, turned on the lamp. They used to look at these pictures together, but not in a long while. He couldn’t remember the last time.

  The good ones were in the middle, between batches of dull cityscapes and parking lot scenes for camouflage. They were in black and white—she’d have had to send color film to a lab. In the first few, they were kissing. “We never get to see ourselves when we kiss,” she’d said. “Don’t you want to see how we look?”

  They looked like lovers. In this one she was perched on his lap, in the kitchen at his place, he in his boxer shorts, Dash in nothing. He’d felt self-conscious; she hadn’t. She looked like a sleek, smooth fish, her skin glowing pearl white. In another photo she had her tongue in his ear for a joke, but the joke was the expression on his face, mirth battling consternation. Even then, his dignity was not to be trifled with.

  The next ones were in her apartment, in the old iron bed she’d found somewhere and painted red. Horrible bed; the springs squeaked, the mattress had a trough in the middle that forced them to sleep jammed against each other because of gravity as much as desire. The first pose was artily tasteful, Andrew on his back, Dash pressed against him with her bent knee covering his groin, her elbow coyly hiding the tip of her breast. They had their eyes closed, pretending to sleep, but their secret smiles gave them away.

  They got bolder in the next shot: full frontal nudity flat on the bed, holding hands and grinning into the camera. Dash’s blinding smile took up her whole face, squeezing her eyes to slits. Her pale nipples, her innocent knees, the shadows of her rib cage, the triangle of hair between her legs…His chest felt clogged. He stood up and sat down again.

  Their intimacy had been so thrilling to him, and at the same time so natural. Dash never felt any shame, but she was never immodest or coarse. Just free. And so kind to him. Before he knew her, he could never have thought of himself as the sort of man he looked like in these photographs, sleepy-eyed from sex, shaggy-haired, lax, his body stretching and languorous. A sensualist. She’d taught him to be who she wanted him to be, and that was what he’d been hoping for, one of the reasons he’d fallen in love with her—so she could make him feel truer to himself. Not such a stranger.

  He picked up the phone and dialed her number at the cabin.

  The machine came on. Disappointment made his mouth taste sour. He didn’t leave a message.

  God, her apartment. He remembered that lamp on the bedside table: seashells filled the clear glass base, and the shade revolved when you switched on the bulb, illuminating a beach scene with rocking waves. She’d throw a gauzy scarf over the lamp when they made love, and they’d lie on their backs afterward, talking, talking, following the colored lights around the ceiling until they hypnotized themselves to sleep.

  I don’t belong here, he would think at times, staring at the crumbling plaster walls or smashing a roach in the bathroom or trying to endure the music on her cheap stereo. But the very things that made him recoil also drew him in, as if his neat, scrupulously planned life needed the relative squalor of Dash’s for balance. It wasn’t that he’d felt superior—merely out of place, a Young Republican at the Socialists’ convention. A small-town private whose first leave is in Paris.

  The last photograph made him hiss in his breath. She’d destroyed all their “porn” shots eventually, the ones in which they were actually having sex, but she’d kept this one. At his request. It still aroused him, dirty-movie pose and all. There was nothing in it of him except his hairy legs and his testicles. Dash sat with her back to the camera, spine arched back like a wand, her streaky hair splashing her shoulders. Her heart-shaped bottom was so beautiful, so…beautiful. He grabbed the phone and called her again.

  “I’m coming down,” he blurted into the machine. He took a long, deep breath. “Emmm…nice day, think I’ll take a drive down your way, see how things are. I’ve been meaning to.” It wasn’t a nice day at all. He paused. He had things to say, but they were too jumbled and raw; he needed to organize his thoughts first. “Are you out for a walk? How are you? Em, well, then, see you in a bit.” He waited a beat before hanging up, hoping that would make the farewell click sound more careless.

  eight

  Nothing looked familiar to him here in winter, the fields and trees bare and stark, dreary brown instead of vivid green and overgrown. They didn’t have a mailbox; he almost missed the turn, which was unmarked except for the corner of the rotting fence of the Speichers, their nearest neighbors, behind which a few cows grazed in summer. The ruts were deeper than the last time he’d driven up the long dirt lane, which would be treacherous in snow or ice. Why did Dash like it here so much? A place in the country was her dream, not his. Rock Creek Park had all the nature he needed, and then some.

  But the sight of their red-roofed, clapboard-sided cabin emerging from the last thicket of laurel and pine gave him an undeniable stab of pleasure. And there was Dash’s little white car, so dearly familiar, a piece of home in this wintry no-man’s-land. He pulled in slowly, parked beside it gently.

  The crunch of gravel under his tires made a racket, though—she must’ve heard, was probably looking out the window now to see who it was. He climbed out of his car with smooth movements, slammed the door athletically. He surveyed the murky tangle of trees surrounding the front of the cabin, featureless to him, beautiful to her, with an interested, approving expression, hands on his hips. Then he turned and walked up to the cabin
with confident, unhurried strides.

  Blue canvas covers draped the porch furniture, pushed to the side farthest from the weather. Nothing but dirt and dead stalks filled the dozen or so flowerpots she’d planted last year. She’d made a winter wreath for the door, he saw, tangled vines twisted in a circle and studded with dried flowers and purplish berries. It took up the whole top half of the door; he had to knock at belt height. He straightened his shoulders, made his face casual. She was going to like this. Spur of the moment. One of her complaints about him was that he wasn’t spontaneous enough—a completely bum wrap. This would show her.

  He knocked again after a minute, louder. He put his face in the middle of the wreath and tried to look in through the window. A twig poked him in the eye, under his glasses; he jerked back, blinking, watery-eyed. He tried the doorknob. Locked. Odd; she loved to brag that she never locked the door.

  Out in the yard, he looked up at the chimney but could see no smoke, only gray, unmoving sky above the red roofline. The flat stones they’d set two summers ago in a mossy, curving path to the back of the cabin were slippery even when it wasn’t raining; he almost fell before he got to the steps up to the deck. His footsteps rang out on the wooden stairs. He tramped to the glass sliding doors, also locked, and peered into the living room, making a visor with his hands to block the glare.

  The empty room looked cold, as if the woodstove had gone out a long time ago. He could make out sections of the Sunday paper strewn over the floor and the coffee table. That was his job, driving into the little town of Dolley for the Post on Sunday mornings; he couldn’t help hoping she found it inconvenient, having to go get it herself. An empty plate and glass sat on the hearth beside the ratty old shawl her mother had made her. He could see her glasses on top of an open book. He put his hands on the cold glass and stared in until his breath fogged the view.

  She was probably down at the pond. Her favorite place. She would sit on the pier and stare out at the water until she lost track of time. He’d have to go get her, tell her it was time for lunch, time to go home. She’d turn to him with a glazed, erased look, her eyes the color of the water.