Notice

by Heather Lewis

  This thinking led me easily back to Ingrid. And out of something I didn’t recognize in myself, but still knew to be mine, I said, “I thought I loved her. She’d say these things to me. I knew better than that. I shouldn’t’ve …”

  “What did she say?”

  Beth’s voice coming the way it did, completely flat and protected and trailing off – was enough to stop me from where I was going. Kept me from being stupid a second time. At least for now. I stopped talking and started fidgeting, not in any evident way but inside myself.

  To look at her, she’d done the opposite. Gone so lost and still she seemed not even to notice the quiet. What we did for a long time was just sit there. She’d fixed on some point out the window. And I’d fixed on her. Not restless now, but caught in the same place she was. This brought me to a point of wanting to offer her something. But I was unable to think what that should be.

  Like last night, what she finally asked of me was to leave. I felt stung by this, by her. I got up wanting to lash back but swallowed it. And when I did, I found my throat already crowded with other things. I comforted myself with a plan of how to get back. Not at her, but at myself.

  And so that’s how I left – knowing exactly what I’d do, just not knowing when.

  Fifteen

  The next day Beth called me at work. She told me she wanted me to show up fifteen minutes later. I said, sure, that it’d be fine, thinking how this would give me time for an extra drink after work.

  She stayed on the line like she had more to say. I had customers waiting, so I said, “Was there something else?”

  She said, no, she guessed not. Then we hung up, and I went back to work with my hands shaking a little, and the rest of me limp and asleep and expectant.

  When I got to her place that evening, no one was there. No one but her and I was glad. I even imagined she’d realized my discomfort and had done this rescheduling for me. I’d had four drinks in rapid succession, standing at the bar – the corner of it by the door. And now, in her office, I found it easier to sit down. I still couldn’t manage it right off the way I suspected you were supposed to, but at least I didn’t drag it out too long.

  Already she seemed quieter than usual and when I sat down I noticed this more. I realized she hadn’t yet said a word or asked me a question and I looked up quickly to see if she was there at all. I was suddenly scared she’d gone lost already. Done this even before me. But the look on her face was so sharp it seemed nearly grim and I felt myself smiling.

  She didn’t amuse me. This smile was more of the same kind of fear, just angled different. I began chewing my tongue to try and change the look on my face. “What is it?” I said when this didn’t work either. But I guess she didn’t know how she seemed because she said, “Nothing,” and it sounded convincing.

  She didn’t ask me anything about work and I didn’t volunteer anything. I worried maybe I looked drunk or acted it. I didn’t think this possible after only four drinks – well, and those two in the afternoon. If anything, though, I felt like I could’ve used one more. Especially since once she began asking me stuff she went right back to Ingrid.

  I didn’t mean to, but I became uncooperative. I could’ve talked to her about the rest of it but not this part. I felt stupid about what I’d said the day before. That I’d let on as much as I had. And then she’d gone and left me by myself with it. Had gone off somewhere, where it bothered her, too, but in another way. Some way I needed to understand but couldn’t yet.

  I didn’t know the place safely between us and so what else could I do but stop altogether or at least try to? I hated her vacant but this sharpness was even worse. Its edges cut up all the space between us. Left it stirred around and cloudy. I would’ve gotten back on my feet but I knew what would happen when I did that and I wanted to save it.

  “Is she why you stayed?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Not exactly. It’s hard to know where he stopped and she started. What was what. I don’t remember it well.”

  This was the sort of stuff I said to her. And the last thing most of all seemed a con, though true at that moment. The rest of the time I remembered what had happened with them, with Ingrid and him. The rest of the time I couldn’t get rid of it. But sitting here with Beth reordered everything and then moved it some more until it didn’t make any sense and was hard to recall.

  That’s when the way out, the way back, seemed so necessary and all about Beth. About touching her. But then each and every time, she’d wind up where I’d been – lost and dazed – and then what brought me back was getting hot. Angry, I mean, but the other way too. That other way running underneath and governing everything between us. There all the time, but never acknowledged.

  For now at least I could still talk and she could too. She said, “What do you remember?”

  “Little things that don’t mean anything.” But this wasn’t true either, so when she asked what things these were, I found myself telling her other things, found myself saying, “She said we’d run off together. I didn’t want to because I didn’t believe her. I didn’t believe she would or that we could.

  “I saw myself as just the push anyway. I didn’t want to be around her when she realized this. We’d only wind up fighting.”

  I didn’t plan to go on, but Beth said, “Tell me what you mean.”

  “If we left, she’d find out I wasn’t who she wanted. Who she’d made me into. I mean, how long do you think it’d take?”

  Beth didn’t say anything to this and I found I kept talking maybe just to fill the space.

  “I didn’t want to end up there so I didn’t believe we were going at all. That she’d ever be able to. I didn’t believe it until I woke up alone in that house.

  “But I didn’t have to think about it much. I had to get out fast. I had to get out before he came back. I didn’t think about whether I should’ve done something different. Not until I wound up in that car with those cops, anyway. Until I saw how long his reach was, and that he would bother with me, in a way she never would.”

  I stopped here because this last thing put me in a place I didn’t know. I hadn’t thought this way before and so I wanted to grasp it. But stop it, too. Stop it before I said anything else like it.

  I glanced at Beth because I hadn’t been keeping an eye on her and had just now noticed it. She was looking right at me. This put me further off base because until then I thought maybe she hadn’t been paying attention. Realizing she was confused me all the more because I’d been both wanting her to and not. Or I’d been wanting her to but at the same time was afraid of it.

  I knew how I would’ve felt if she’d gone blank, but I couldn’t make out what this other thing felt like. I only knew it made me want to go somewhere else. And that’s what I did because I wound up standing, though I didn’t go anywhere far. I didn’t even go to the door, but instead to the window and then I knew I was waiting for her.

  When she came up behind me I first felt a kind of relief. But then a trembling because it was different to have her behind me and with her arms around my waist. Different enough I turned around to face her so I’d feel less bare, more in command. Or at least I thought I would except I couldn’t find any kind of force anywhere in my being. Instead I fell against her body in a way that would’ve allowed anything.

  She seemed to go toward this. I felt her hands under my shirt, on my back for a moment before she put them to a more familiar place on my neck. I was so slack, I felt all this very intently. Felt it so much there was nothing else for a while. And maybe not for her either because her breathing turned from shallow to deep and I could feel her against my chest and then felt her lower, pressing against me until it was my turn to hold her up.

  We didn’t stop this time but we didn’t go farther. It stayed the way it was – both obvious and impossible. The kind of thing I could easily keep from putting words to, could keep in someplace I’d think about later or never. This time, though, I wondered how she did it. How she th
ought about it and where in her mind she kept it.

  I got home. Or at least I’d gotten my car parked and was sitting in it. I did this for a space of time I couldn’t measure, but then started the engine again and began driving around. I ached from having nowhere to go. I don’t mean heartache but a soreness in my muscles – a tiredness that was becoming familiar to me and so, maybe to stop it, I drove past her office.

  I saw her car still there but no light on. Both wondered and knew what she might be doing, but the work of maintaining these two strands at once just tired me more.

  Sixteen

  That I found myself at the train station that night would probably surprise no one. But it did surprise me. Afterwards.

  I relegated it to the place of one-time slips and kept on as if it hadn’t happened. Spent the money from it quickly and without thought. Spent the money that same night and went back to my day job in the morning. Parked behind the store like I’d been doing ever since I took this job.

  All along I’d parked there instead of at the station. I was doing this to avoid going backwards. I knew it couldn’t last for ever. Though, by this, I don’t mean some dark character flaw on my part, or even the events of the night before, but instead something as mundane as the town parking violations bureau.

  This is the way things worked: the parking behind the store was free and for customers. It served the whole general shopping area, so you weren’t supposed to park there all day long. What you were supposed to do was park at the station, which had twelve-hour meters for commuters and workers.

  Getting caught cheating this setup was inevitable. After a while they would recognize your car. I’d already lasted longer than I’d ever expected. But that I got nailed this same morning? Well, it was hard not to take it as fate, or futility, I’m not sure which. In any case it made it hard not to make more of it than it was. And unlike the woman with the bad hip who worked in greeting cards, I certainly couldn’t explain my particular reason and then ask for an exemption. So here I was back to walking across the street after work.

  I didn’t tell Beth this, but then I had never told her of my parking scheme in the first place. I guess I thought she’d think I was dumb for trying to protect myself this way. I guess I thought I was dumb. And because I thought my solution dumb, or that I was dumb for needing it, I didn’t acknowledge that its end represented a risk.

  I got caught midweek so I had the rest of it to practice walking across the street after work and driving to Beth’s office. Then I had to contend with Saturday. I hated working Saturdays so that first week when I called in sick I didn’t need to pinpoint what specifically I was avoiding. A whole other week went by before I needed to know that.

  I expect you’ll think I’m making a lot out of nothing, but after work that next weekend I had some difficulty. Of course, the Saturday train station crowd is a little different than the Monday through Friday guys. Different enough not to be there at six, my quitting time. What I used to do was go have a drink in that same bar adjacent to the lot.

  So that’s what I did this night, too. I went in and had a drink. Not right at the bar, but at a table close by. I sat there and watched the door pretty keenly, hoping and dreading I’d see someone. Hoping, I realized pretty soon, that I’d see Ingrid’s husband and this both surprised me and didn’t at all.

  The guy who wound up joining me was named Burt. He said he thought we knew each other but I knew we didn’t. He said he was a friend of that bartender I sort of saw for a while. I had to admit that was possible – them being friends, not his having met me before.

  Burt seemed okay. Not what I usually gravitate toward, but okay. He asked did I want to go for a drive and I said why not, still not sure what he meant, or how we were talking.

  His car was big and a soft shade of red and not new, but I was too out of it to think cool or classic, I just thought old. The guy at the wheel had apparently been waiting there this whole time. Burt and I got in the back and that was that. We were off on the drive.

  His house was a pretty long way away, though I still knew the area, was still on fairly familiar ground. He was having a party I guess because there were people on the lawn and more in the house. One guy headed for us as soon as we came in. He handed Burt a drink and they whispered and then he was gone again.

  “Anything you need,” Burt said to me, “Jeremy’ll get it.”

  “Which one?” I asked and he pointed his glass after the same guy, though he was no longer in sight. I guess I should say right up front that I found Jeremy more than attractive. I found myself scanning the crowd for him. And when Burt had business in the bedroom, Jeremy sat me down on a couch. Told the guy who’d driven the car to bring me a drink.

  Before I’d had even a taste of it I was thinking too much about Jeremy and in the wrong ways. He, meanwhile, seemed anxious for me to understand that he and Burt were partners. That he held a much different position than the other guys running around.

  Sitting with him and talking was okay. But I assumed sex was why I was here, and so when that part kept not happening I got edgy. I think that’s why I wound up staying so long. And besides I didn’t have my own car or enough cash for a taxi. Picking up some extra cash had been most of the point, and now Jeremy mixed in with this too.

  It had gotten late by the time Burt called me into the bedroom. The traffic in and out of there had been pretty steady and obvious. He offered the coke and I did it. It wasn’t the best stuff but he had a lot of it. I figured there were other things he could get.

  These reasons were enough for me to go with them to another house, which was somewhere even further away. And while I make it sound like I had all this in hand, I didn’t. Not really. I’d become nervous about getting home. And more nervous about the sex that still wasn’t happening because if that wasn’t the point of me being with them, then what the hell was?

  At this house, Burt stayed in one bedroom on the phone, leaving Jeremy and me alone in another. The same driver was stuck outside again, waiting. Anyway, the two of us sprawled on the bed, curled up with a full-length mirror Jeremy had taken off the wall. We just did coke and did coke, and every so often I’d traipse across the hall and check in on Burt.

  The first couple of times, I got on the bed with him. I sort of crawled up toward him, trying to figure out what he wanted. I got nowhere with this. Finally I took to just peering in from the hall, did it just to have a break from the other room where the only thing going on was the coke.

  By the time it turned daylight I had trouble making it across the hall. I would have to sit down and rest. I would sort of fall down and stay there. This was a day I was supposed to go to that job. A day I was supposed to see Beth. I didn’t see how either of those things would be happening.

  Jeremy said he’d call in for me. I knew this would look worse than me calling myself. But I couldn’t imagine doing it so instead of seeing it as crazy, I was grateful. He told them I’d gotten sick while spending the weekend at his house. He told me not to worry. That they’d sounded concerned. Of course, his perceptions by then were probably on par with mine, meaning off.

  Not too long after this, when we’d gone back to what we’d been doing for hours, Jeremy said, “So, my guess is your bill’s up to about a thousand dollars.”

  I froze when he said this, becoming cold and unable to speak. He said, “You didn’t think all this was free, did you?”

  He smiled that smile he had on his face almost all night. It reminded me how handsome he was, and also how large, physically. Reminded me he took up more than his share of the bed and that I didn’t have a way home.

  I hadn’t heard Burt but he stood at the doorway. His voice was what pulled my eyes there. “He’s kidding,” Burt said.

  And while I regained some of my faculties I still wasn’t at all sure I believed him. And if they weren’t after sex, then what? Because it just couldn’t be as simple as money.

  I never quite got myself calmed down. Jeremy made that same joke
a couple of more times. And then there was all the coke. I was jagged from that. And still nobody’d laid a hand on me. There’d been talk about the three of us together. But even the talk didn’t go far. No one could focus long enough. Then they’d dropped me at home.

  Once in my apartment I started searching in coat pockets and drawers. I told myself I was only wanting equilibrium, wanting to even myself out. Not wanting to get off and go away from things. I did finally find a scrap of foil so small I had to put it on a pin to try and smoke it. I had to hold the pin with needlenose pliers. I lit the thing over and over. Sucked at it even when there wasn’t any hint of smoke coming off it.

  I wanted sleep, long sleep. And I wanted some chocolate milk. I used to always have some in the fridge. It used to help lull me. But now I didn’t buy it anymore, not on a regular basis. I’d meant to quit this time. I’d also meant to call Beth. Reminded myself of this right before I finally dozed off.

  Seventeen

  It wound up that Beth called me. I was in that place of half-coked and dazed. That place where you memorize the ceiling but aren’t quite conscious.

  She said, “Where are you?”

  It seemed such a silly question that I said, “What?”

  “You’re supposed to be here,” she said.

  And even though I got it by now, I said, “Where?”

  She didn’t say anything, and I didn’t want her to think I was jerking her, so I said, “Sorry. Look, I’ll come over now.”

  I hung up the phone and pulled on some clothes. And while I knew I looked bad, I still figured I’d pass. I was glad I lived within walking distance of her office because I didn’t think I could drive.

  On my way down the stairs, I considered taking my car anyway – it’d get me there that much quicker. But I realized I didn’t exactly know where I’d left it. Then I remembered the train station. I figured it’d have a ticket lounging on the windshield. That people at work might notice, if any of them had noticed me at all.