I had a short-term sexual relationship with my cousin when we were both in our teens. He was my first true love. Before love could be broken down into categories, we had the real thing together, the pure thing. But he was my cousin, and we were discovered, and now he is no longer with us. I am a liberal until threatened. Sometimes I forget to eat lunch. I rarely drink alcohol alone. I go months without masturbating and then diddle myself twice a day for a week. I want to know that you are not going away. When I’m in trouble, I call my aunt, who is difficult to talk to. When I need someone to talk to, I call my friend Francine, who despite her intense competitiveness usually provides a sympathetic ear. I have no one to talk to. My mouth moves, words come out, people nod and respond, but I never really get to talk to anyone. Since childhood, I have prayed for God to take my life. I have two cats and will not get a third because I do not want to be a single woman with three cats.
It was a thrill, creating her out of thin air, setting the trap for Raven. Life was going to be different soon. I was typing away under my desk lamp, the rest of the house dark, when I heard the familiar but unexpected creak and groan of the garage door. I looked at my watch and at my calendar. Tonight was a work night. Patty was supposed to go straight to work after running her errands.
I heard her footsteps in the hall, and then she appeared in the doorway with a peculiar look on her face.
“I’m ditching work tonight,” she said.
I knew the look—the tight smile of a very responsible person doing something barely irresponsible—the shell of liberation. It was Patty’s belief that if she were to act less responsible now and then, she would find herself to be a freer, happier person. But being irresponsible seemed to strain her and the consequences of her irresponsibility always came down on her as if totally unexpected. “Why do I always have to be the responsible one?” she would ask. “Other people get by just fine.” She could never get used to the idea—she could never be convinced of it—that we irresponsible masses were constantly paying for our irresponsibility with additional heaping portions of stress, heartbreak, and bankruptcy. We did not lead the carefree lives she imagined for us.
She took in the disorder of my office.
“Jesus, Owen,” she said. “What happened?”
Did she envy my devil-may-care attitude at that moment? She tiptoed across the archipelago of open carpet and pulled my head to her stomach.
“Are you finished for the day?” she asked.
“I could ditch, if that’s what you mean.”
“And if you did, what would you want to do tonight?” she asked.
“What do you want to do?”
“You,” she said, “and Frisbee, and dinner.”
“Three things that can happen in only one order.” She looked disappointed for a moment, then went to the front closet and retrieved the Frisbee. Sex first would have meant no Frisbee, and dinner first would have meant no sex or Frisbee. Even in our limited experience we had learned this. Our sex life was a disaster. We went through great droughts punctuated with spasms of activity, based on how Patty was feeling. In the beginning, she would break down and cry during sex, claiming an overflow of emotion. CJ’s ghost standing at the end of the bed.
It was one block to the park in the cool night. I walked as naturally as I could.
“You seem distracted,” she said.
“I’m fine.” The panties were a vice. When we got there we threw the Frisbee back and forth a few times. As was inevitable, it ended up on the ground. I couldn’t bend to fetch it. I managed to flip it up with my foot, but could not get it high enough to retrieve it. I kicked it in a circle.
“Owen, what are you doing?”
I couldn’t bear to look at her. I left the Frisbee on the grass.
“I should have gone to the bathroom before we left,” I said.
“There’s one over there.”
The public restroom at the park consisted of a cute outbuilding—more handsomely appointed than the concrete hellholes down by the beach—and appeared very clean from the outside. I went in expecting the worst possible odors, graffiti-covered metal “mirrors,” pooling fluids in the corners, but it was better maintained than I thought it would be, especially considering the half dozen or so homeless men who inhabited the park with their dogs, sleeping bags, malt liquor, and weed. The only thing I would have asked for, aside from a nice floormat, was a higher stall door. The city had equipped the toilets with thigh-high stall dividers and doors, just enough to provide a modicum of decency for the average sitting citizen while also not providing enough privacy for shooters to shoot, taggers to tag, lovers to love, or me to doff my wife’s underwear in privacy.
I had removed my pants very carefully to avoid their touching the floor or the bottom of my shoes, and I had just slung said pants over my arm in order to pull off the panties when I heard a shuffling at the door. My first thought was Patty. The ball of guilt in my chest was being whacked back and forth by the twin paddles of justification and fear of discovery, and I had to remind myself that I was doing all of this for her, that she loved me, that I loved her, that I could explain everything and make everything okay again.
I was on the verge of explaining myself to the invader when I realized it wasn’t her—it was a homeless man. We had seen him down at the corner coffee shop many times. He had a crew cut, a sharp square jaw, and his eyes were a tad too close together. He wore a military helmet from time to time and his cardboard sign usually read “please help $1 anything,” though he seemed too able-bodied to be living on the streets and begging. He looked like a cartoon soldier, thus his sobriquet: the Cartoon GI. He spent most of his time—in residence at the coffee shop—drawing multicolored diagrams (with a four-color click-pen) of various worldwide conspiracies, with arrows joining a Union Jack to a (well-drawn) rat to the Stars and Stripes, with the words FLOW OF CAPITAL written over one of the arrows and U.N. GLOBAL P.O.W. CAMP written over another. He posted these diagrams on telephone poles in the area. I used to collect them.
One evening I was dozing in the quiet cocoon of my home office when I heard yelling outside. Yelling was rare, a thing of the city. I went to the front door and poked my head out to see what was going on, and there he was, the Cartoon GI, making his way down the sidewalk with his helmet, his tightly rolled sleeping bag, his olive-drab pack. He screamed at random intervals, at the sidewalk ahead, although no one was there: “Niggers!” and “Mother fuck your nigger ass!” and so on, each phrase punctuated by the same racial epithet. Now I am sure there are white people in the world for whom the sound of that epithet means the safety and comfort of a redneck home, but for me it had the opposite effect—I understood, upon hearing the Cartoon GI screaming these words, that he was not as harmless as I thought he was. Ever since then, I had made a point of avoiding him, no longer peering over his shoulder to see what his latest diagram contained.
We locked eyes for a moment, he recognizing that I was standing in a pair of women’s underwear, me recognizing him. He turned and walked out, cursing under his breath. I slipped out of the painful thong as quickly as possible and pulled on my pants, careful not to streak the insides with whatever was on the bottom of my shoes. The secret was to roll each pant leg into a donut and get the shoe through all at once. As for the panties, I didn’t want to risk keeping them in my pocket. And I couldn’t throw them away—I couldn’t bear to imagine my wife’s panties sitting atop a landfill somewhere. (Birds pecking at them.) There was a ledge at the top of the concrete wall, just under the roof. By straddling the stall—standing on the too-low stall walls—I was able to reach up and tuck the panties there, under the eaves (but indoors) for safekeeping. I would get them in the morning. Mission accomplished, I hopped down and walked briskly—how free my parts felt!—out the door, almost bumping into the Cartoon GI, who’d been waiting outside for me to finish so he could go in.
There stood Patty, Frisbee in hand, eyes on me. I wanted to collapse at her feet. I have stolen something from
you, sweetheart. I have deceived you. Sometimes I feel that nothing human is foreign to me, but at other times, I can be unsettled by the pettiest deception. Look at her. She stood before me and, relieved of the torture in my crotch, I could see her again. Why had I deceived her like this? I had to remind myself that all deception would fall away soon enough.
But what I really want to say is that the sight of her bony shoulders outlined in her black sweatshirt brought me back to something, which I wouldn’t exactly call reality because I was already in reality, but which I might call context. Her unsmiling gaze made me feel like I had access to some former version of myself, one not tormented by those things currently tormenting me. She was a vision. Now she smiled. She handed me the Frisbee.
“That guy was scared of you for once,” she said.
Ahh—that was the face she’d been wearing: the stored-up joke.
“What was going on in there?”
“Why? Did he say something?”
“Grumble, grumble, grumble.” She imitated him, shaking her head.
“I guess he expected the place to himself.”
I tossed her the Frisbee. We threw it back and forth a while, under the lights, in the drained concrete fish pond. The surface was smooth and even; it was like playing on a court. We did better than usual. The Frisbee made a horrible sound whenever it skidded along the concrete, so we played more cautiously than if we had been on grass. Her hair, which she’d pulled back in a ponytail, became a half-restrained mess, then a quarter-restrained mess; her limbs became limbs I wanted to wrap myself in. The wonderful thing was that I could simply look at her, watch her move. My wife.
When the Frisbee skidded to a stop somewhere between us, we both went to pick it up, and Patty said “Enough Frisbee,” and we headed for the bedroom. There, she discovered that I wasn’t wearing any underwear. Rather than asking why or commenting on it verbally, she hummed and smiled.
My underwearlessness reinforced the transgressions of her ditch day and she put her hands on the crown of my head in a not-so-subtle hint to drop to my knees. We fucked like we hadn’t fucked in a long time. This was not the comfort of Owen and Patty making love. It was the animal thrill of two people fucking. The areas of my penis that had been chafed by the panties now felt extra-sensitive, raking in a sharper sort of pleasure, and despite my wanting to make it last forever, I came quickly. Life is like a dream, with alternating zones of clarity and obscurity.
I used to want to apologize: I’m sorry I fucked you. I meant to make love. I’m sorry I was transported like that. I see the error of my ways. Because I believed that sex was all about connection, consideration, communion, and all those other C words. I couldn’t handle the reentry from fucking to love. Eventually I figured it out. Patty helped me understand that she wanted to fuck too, sometimes, wanted even to get fucked by me sometimes. We came down together: that was our communion.
She lay her head on my chest and looked up at me. This was one of the few angles from which, physiognomically, she didn’t look sneering, snotty, or superior. She looked like an ingenuous and vulnerable young woman. I could only handle that look in small doses. Life takes ingenuous and vulnerable creatures and makes them suffer in ways they cannot understand, and then it snuffs them out.
“Let’s open a little wine,” she said.
She lit candles, too, and we ate dinner—“gourmet” mac-and-cheese, salad, Brussels sprouts—in the bathrobes my aunt and uncle had given us as wedding presents.
“This is the wrong wine for Brussels sprouts,” she said.
“All wine is the wrong wine for Brussels sprouts.” I laughed at my own joke and noticed that while she laughed, too, something was holding her back. I suspected the elation of ditch day had finally caught up with her, that her mind had begun, yet again, to reckon with consequences. I raised my glass.
“Here’s to ditch day,” I said. “A reminder to take a break from serious stuff once in a while.”
“To ditch day,” she said half-heartedly. She sipped her wine, then held up the glass again, eyes watching the guttering candle flame. “And …” She looked me in the eye now, as if steeling herself to make an admission. “… to CJ. Happy Birthday.”
“Happy Birthday,” I said.
My mind flashed to the look she’d given me in the doorway of my office, the Frisbee, the fucking: ditch day. Not a real ditch day, a true ditch day, but a ditch day with a purpose, a Stocking family holiday. I knew she had deliberated all evening about whether or not to tell me, that she had gotten caught up in my belief she was letting loose “for the hell of it,” but in the end she had to tell me why she hadn’t gone to work that night. She had to give me, the last person who wanted it, a good reason why she’d taken the night off.
10
The next morning a thick silver fog covered Our Little Hamlet by the Sea. Patty and I drove down to the local coffee shop. She seemed preoccupied by something, probably the hangover of ditch day, and I too was preoccupied, by the low-level but persistent fear that the Cartoon GI would emerge from behind some pillar and call me out. I couldn’t get my mind off the panties. I was going to have to retrieve them soon. I was most concerned with what I was going to do with them. My latest ploy, after dismissing the possibility of just washing them (they would be stretched out), was to make it look as though the cats had pulled them from the drawer (“they were protruding, I guess”) and stretched and damaged them in the course of their feline play, discovered by me too late to save the underwear from ruin. Far from foolproof, this plan seemed downright stupid in the light of day, thus my lingering anxiety, preventing me from being attentive to my wife.
“That was fun last night,” I said.
“Yes it was.” She spoke matter-of-factly, not disagreeing, but also not engaging me.
“Is something the matter?”
She placed her hand on mine, and I knew instantly it was nothing I had done. After a moment she spoke. “I was up really late last night. Couldn’t sleep. I probably should have gone in to work or something. I don’t know, that’s not it exactly. It’s always his birthday or a holiday or the week he died. I forget, you know, for a while, and then it all comes back the same as ever.”
“Talking about it is healthy.”
“Talking about it is healthy.” She nodded. “But nothing changes.”
“Nothing changes.”
I moved my hand on top of hers. We sipped at our coffees.
“I need some sleep.” She looked far away, then smiled. “Do you want me to drive you back?”
“I’ve got some errands to run down here. I think I’m going to hit the bookstore or something.”
“In this fog? What if you get lost?” Her eyes sparkled. She seemed fine now. This was a remarkable capacity of hers—she could shrug things off by sheer force of will, could take something that was bothering her and force it not to bother her any more.
She went home, leaving me in the coffee shop parking lot, and I walked toward the park in the fog. The streets were humming with commuters, some of whom gave me questioning looks—why isn’t he on the way to work? It’s funny. When I was working at the office every day, our neighborhood didn’t seem so full of 9-to-5ers, but once I began working more at home, walking the streets to stimulate my mind (a block for a block), I noticed how crowded the streets got when people left for work or returned home from it.
The park was deserted, save a few moms arriving at the playground near the north end of the park, pre-K kids in tow. I felt self-conscious walking alone in that park, as if a sign were flashing above my head (with a glowing nimbus, now, in the fog): PERVERT. I made my way to the restrooms and went in. Empty. I found my stall, which someone had defiled in the meanwhile, climbed up the stall walls, and reached my hand up to the ledge under the roof. Nothing but cool air coming in from outside—the roof was raised above the wall. I moved my hand from side to side. I couldn’t actually see up there, but I could feel the entire thickness of the wall, to the outside edge, and th
e panties weren’t there. I climbed down. I had picked the right stall, yes. I scanned the floor. Nothing resembling panties. I went outside, retrieved a stick from under a dying tree, and poked through the trash can inside the restroom. I managed to scatter paper towels all over the floor but found no underwear. Standing there in an ankle-high swamp of crumpled paper, I realized the underwear might have fallen off the wall to the other side. I experienced the epiphany of having found something mentally before going to confirm its location physically. I had obviously pushed the panties too far and they had gone all the way across the top of the wall, falling from the eaves on the outside of the building. I left the restroom and walked around the building to the back, where the shrubs pressed against the wall. I made my way to the corner below the men’s room and pulled at the shrubs. Nothing up top. And, after I got on my hands and knees in the damp dirt, nothing under the shrubbery but old candy wrappers and a wax cup. The panties were gone.
At that time, I did not see those lost panties as harbingers of everything irretrievable. I was too wrapped up in the question of the moment: How would I explain to Patty what had happened? Walking home through thinning fog, I decided to play dumb about all of it. Patty might not even notice they were missing. And if she did, why would she suspect me of taking them? She wouldn’t. This resolve gave rise to a secondary set of questions: Had someone taken the panties away? The custodians? Someone else? The Cartoon GI? And what if it was the Cartoon GI? Would he try to return them?
I was being haunted not only by the loss of the panties, but by the potential for that loss to reverse itself, like those dreams Patty and I had talked about, in which the dead come back to you as alive as they had ever been. The only thing I could do to distract myself from all of this was to write a completely new letter to Henry Raven. In that letter, I saw nascent glimmers of a woman on the page. As I recreate the letter now I find it hard to believe that these words—her words!—came into being as my fingers moved across the typewriter.
The Interloper Page 6