Dive From Clausen's Pier

by Ann Packer

  Then suddenly I woke to the sound of the front door clicking shut. Eight thirty-three, according to the red numerals of Kilroy’s bedside clock. He was on his way to work.

  I was muzzy with exhaustion, thick-limbed and trembly. I burrowed back toward sleep, but something pulled me back: the fact that he’d never before left without saying goodbye. If I happened to sleep through his shower, he always came and sat on the bed, touched my shoulder and whispered a plan for later.

  I thought of him on the futon in the middle of the night, just his head showing above the heavy wool of his coat. Then his parents again. The way they looked at each other, the way they looked at him. I kicked the blankets off but lay there for a while uncovered before I rubbed my face and sat up.

  No note in the kitchen, no coffee in the coffeemaker. Well, he’d probably overslept, too. I wandered out to the living room and pushed his coat away so I could sit on the couch. Minutes after we’d gotten into bed together the night before I’d reached to touch his side, and I’d felt him flinch slightly, then deepen his breath so I’d think he was asleep. I thought of his mother’s face, her soft, grayish blond hair. His father’s smile. I pulled the coat close and felt in the pocket, half hoping he’d removed the note, but there it was, the stiff, smooth corner waiting for my fingertips. What a terrible thing to do. I pulled it out and looked at it, now seeing that the scrawly engraving on the back flap read BFL. Barbara Something Fraser. And Paul written on the front, in girlish, back-slanted printing.

  I lifted the flap and pulled out a heavy card.

  Darling, you must be thinking of the date as much as we are. Won’t you come by and have a drink with us? It would mean so much to your father. We’ll be home today and tomorrow.

  I slid the card back into the envelope and returned the envelope to Kilroy’s coat pocket, arranging the coat haphazardly on the futon. The date on the card had been March 20th, Saturday’s date: the note had waited a full day for Kilroy to find it. I wondered what you must be thinking of the date as much as we are meant, and why, rather than mail it, she’d come all the way down to Chelsea, maybe stood around until someone came out so she could enter the building and slide it under his door.

  So he couldn’t miss it, that was why. She’d probably called first: Friday evening, Saturday morning, Saturday noon.

  I tried calling him from the brownstone after Patternmaking—at six, when he was usually home, and then at seven, and then, with mounting anxiety, at eight. No answer, and I couldn’t leave a message because he didn’t have an answering machine, of course. Was he there, letting it ring? I walked over to McClanahan’s, the night dark and wet, a light rain misting my hair. The bar was noisy, Joe the bartender busy filling glasses, but Kilroy was nowhere in sight. At his apartment building I buzzed but got no answer, and I was afraid to use my key: I could use it when he wasn’t there but not when he was, and I suspected he was. It was after nine when I returned to the brownstone, and I tried phoning one more time. By nine-thirty I was in bed, lying wide awake in the dark again. The house was quiet, and my room—my room—had a smell of old dust that was all but foreign to me.

  Standing at Kilroy’s door the next afternoon, I rapped once for good measure, then slid my key into the lock. It was before five, but I wanted to be there when he got home from work: so I wouldn’t have another evening like last night, so I wouldn’t have to find out how many days in a row he’d fail to answer my phone calls. Inside, a smell of burned toast hit me, and I was about to go into the kitchen when Kilroy appeared from the living room, looking bedraggled in sweatpants and a ragged white T-shirt. Oh, it’s you, he didn’t have to say: his expression said it for him.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t expect—” I stopped and shook my head. “Did you skip work today?”

  He lowered his head and moved it up and down without taking his eyes off the floor.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again. “I thought I’d wait here for you to get home. I was worried about you last night—are you OK?”

  He let out a whoosh of breath, then looked up at me and smiled unconvincingly. “Sure.”

  “I can tell.”

  He scowled a little, then turned and made his way back to the living room. “Come on in,” he said grudgingly, and then he flopped onto the futon, adjusting his position until his head was centered on the bed pillow I’d put there Sunday night. I wondered if he’d slept in the living room last night, too.

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  He drew his knees up and crossed one leg over the other.

  “Kilroy?”

  “Do you mean ‘wuz happenin’?’ ” he said with a jive accent. “Or ‘what is wrong with you?’ ”

  “Either,” I said. “Both.”

  He didn’t answer, and I sighed. There were several stacks of books in front of the bookcase, precarious towers of ten or twelve books each. The bookcase itself was partly empty now, two free shelves plus most of a third one, so I knew what he’d been doing: When it’s too full, I weed out whatever’s lost its glitter for me. When it was too full, or when he needed something to occupy his mind.

  He reached for Contemporaneity and Consequences, the book he’d been reading since before Montauk—I had no idea what it was about. He opened it and raised it to his face.

  “I smell burned toast,” I said.

  He lowered the book and stared at me. “Any other observations?”

  I noticed his coat just then, in a heap on the floor behind the futon, and when he saw me looking at it, fear clawed at my stomach. Could he know I’d read the note? Was that what this was all about? But no, he couldn’t, there was no way.

  “Do you want me to leave?” I said.

  “Whatever.”

  I turned away and moved down the hall and into the kitchen, where three or four plates of toast crumbs were crowded onto the counter, a dish of shapeless butter nearby. In the bedroom the blinds were drawn, and the bed was a mess, sheets wrinkled and twisted, pillows hugged into awkward shapes and abandoned. There was a half-empty coffee mug on the floor, another plate of toast crumbs. I skirted the foot of the bed to sit on my side. My photograph of the Parisian rooftop leaned against the back of the kitchen chair I used as a bedside table, and I picked it up, admiring in the half-light the perfect match between the gray paint of the frame and the gray roof of the building. I remembered the night he’d given it to me, how happy we’d been.

  I heard his footsteps and turned to see him standing in the doorway, his book closed around his finger. “Want to get some dinner?” he said. “I could eat Chinese.”

  I put the picture down and buried my face in my hands—I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I could eat Chinese—as if this were a normal night in the course of our relationship.

  “What?” he said, coming around the bed to stand before me.

  I looked up at him and shook my head. “How can you act like nothing’s happened? You honestly want to go eat Chinese food?”

  He held up both palms in protest. “Whoa, whoa—Italian would be fine, too.”

  I slammed my fist into the mattress. “Are you insane? Or am I, because there’s something really wrong here and I don’t even feel like we’re on the same planet.”

  His expression darkened and he turned toward the window, slatted blinds covering the glass. I could see his face in quarter profile, his mouth working over his teeth. A smell of sweat drifted off him.

  “What are you so upset about?” I said.

  He lifted his hands away from his legs and then let them fall again. Still facing the window he said, “Nothing.”

  “Kilroy, this is me. You were upset Sunday night after we left your parents, and you still are, and I just feel completely shut out.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said dully. Then he turned to face me. “All right?” he added, his voice tightening. “I’m sorry I subjected you to it.”

  “It was fine,” I said. “They were perfectly nice—that’s not at all what I mean, and you know
it. I called you a million times last night, I came by. What’s wrong?”

  He exhaled hard and looked away. “It’s just difficult for me to see them,” he said. “I have problems with them. We just—Well, we’re very different, that’s all.”

  I shook my head. “No, it’s not.”

  He stared at me for a moment and then turned around again, back to the window. After a while he separated the blinds with his thumb and forefinger and peered out. Dust motes swarmed in the bar of weak light that shone in. Watching him there, his back to me, I had a sudden sense of how it must be for his parents to have him living nearby—so close and yet so closed off.

  “Kilroy?” I said.

  He turned around. Against the blinds he looked pinned, trapped—like someone in a lineup.

  “Why do you stay here?”

  Color rose into his cheeks, and he looked away. “Do you mean why don’t I take my obviously huge trust fund and buy a nice co-op on Central Park West?”

  “No,” I exclaimed. “God. I would never ask a question like that. I know I’ve said before that I figured your family had a lot of money, but what you do or don’t do with it is none of my business.”

  “I try not to use it,” he said evenly. “That’s why. I’m not that much of an asshole.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You’re not an asshole at all.”

  He smiled. “Of course I am.”

  “Kilroy.” He looked so forlorn standing there, his sloppy T-shirt and his shaky smile. “You can’t mean that.”

  “I’m not about to win any Mr. Congeniality awards,” he said bitterly.

  I got up and went to him, but when I got near he drew back, as if he were afraid I’d touch him. I stopped short, a sick, hot feeling coming over me. I wanted to touch him—I wanted him to want me to. “Mr. Congeniality would be a big, boring yawn,” I said.

  “Mike was Mr. Congeniality, wasn’t he?”

  “This has nothing to do with Mike.”

  “But he was, wasn’t he? A nice guy?” A frown pulled at the corners of his mouth. “That’s what I’ve always figured.”

  “ ‘A nice guy,’ ” I said. “That’s what you say about someone you don’t know. Mike was—Mike is a person. Sure, he’s nice—how many people do you know who aren’t nice?”

  Kilroy shook his head. “Forget it,” he said, scratching his bristly jaw. “Let’s change the subject.”

  I sighed and looked away. To what? We weren’t doing well with any of the subjects at hand. Maybe we just weren’t doing well, period. My worries from the junk shop on Long Island came rushing back. Was it true that we didn’t really work in the world, just in isolated, protected pockets of it? Mike and I had moved easily between our private and public lives: we were us at a party as much as in my apartment. Out of nowhere I remembered a beery frat blowout between the end of finals and graduation: we got separated for a while, and when I saw him again I was sitting on the steps up to the second floor talking to a girl from one of my classes. He was a little drunk, and he looked up at me and held out his arms in a way that I knew constituted an invitation to dance. He stood below us—tall, strong, hair curling in the humid party air, handsome in an impish, grown-up-boy way—and I felt a rush of pleasure at the fact that he was mine.

  “What did you mean before?” Kilroy said. “When you asked why I stay here?”

  I looked up. He was watching me curiously, and I wondered what he saw in me: a fetching small-town girl who’d been willing to break the heart of a nice guy.

  “In New York,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said, smiling a crooked smile, “that’s an easy one. I like the traffic noise.”

  I sighed heavily and moved away from him, shaking my head. I sat on the bed again. On the floor I spotted a stray green sock I’d thought I’d lost, and I bent over for it, then picked a clump of dust off it and flicked it away.

  Kilroy watched me from the window, his eyes narrowed, one forefinger laid along his jawline. He stared for so long that I started to feel nervous, wondering what would happen if he kept staring without speaking. How long would we stay like this? Apart, silent. My hands felt heavy in my lap.

  At last he shifted and cleared his throat. “You know how you just got in your car and drove, that night in September? You just locked up your apartment and took out your garbage and drove? Well, sometimes it’s just not possible to do that, or it’s not going to solve anything. I don’t see my parents much, and because of that it’s hard when I do. And, to turn it around, because it’s hard when I see them, I don’t see them much. I’m sorry about last night—I should have answered the phone. I should have, but I didn’t, and that’s where we are now, and I don’t really know what else to say about it. Either we go on or we don’t. I can’t be someone else, much as you might want me to be—much as I might want to be. So what I’d like to do is clean up and then go get something to eat.” He gave me a pleading look. “OK? Please?”

  I nodded. I was less hungry than tired, exhausted to the bone, but I understood that he couldn’t say any more and that we had to leave the apartment for a while. I made the bed while he showered, and then, heading for the front door, we walked down the hall together, our sides jostling awkwardly.

  CHAPTER 30

  During the next few weeks Kilroy was mostly his funny, sardonic self, but his overall demeanor had darkened, and the darkness was just under the surface. He complained about things he’d read in the newspaper, or ranted about something he’d seen on the street—two women, say, who stood blocking the sidewalk, shopping bags at their feet, never a thought for the people who had to step around them. Spring arrived with a cold, clear wind that whipped the sky blue and left behind it air that was softer and warmer than it had been in months. I was itching to go out walking, but Kilroy declined, instead spending whole weekend afternoons inside reading, the newly empty shelves of his bookcase gradually filling with thick histories and multivolume biographies. It grew hard to get his attention: he was on the couch one evening, reading a book about Gothic architecture, and I called his name four separate times without his hearing me. Finally I sat down and ran a finger up the bottom of his foot, and he startled so dramatically that he dropped the book and lifted his arms and legs in fright.

  “Carrie, Jesus. What?”

  “I said your name four times.”

  “Well, sorry—I was absorbed in my book.”

  It sounds as if he were snippy, but he wasn’t, not really: he was remote, vague, but only for the exact amount of time that I could stand it. Just as I’d be on the verge of true frustration, he’d pull out of it, come stand behind me and rub my shoulders, suggest dinner, a movie, a game of pool at McClanahan’s. It was uncanny how he knew my limits, as if I emitted something he could smell or faintly hear. We slept closer than ever, our legs entangled, our hands tucked around each other, but waking in the morning he was careful to reclaim himself, pull his arms away and roll onto his back before speaking to me or touching me again.

  One early morning—very early, barely dawn—I got up to use the bathroom, and when I came back he was facing my side of the bed, eyes open. He reached for me, and I moved close and felt how hard he was against my leg, then between my thighs. He pulled me on top of him and onto him in something close to one fluid motion, and while we moved I pressed the side of my face against his, first seeking the abrasion of his stubble and then something more. I pushed my face hard against his and he pushed back, and we kept on like that until we were done and my face actually hurt.

  Much later I woke to feel the sheets cool beside me. I rolled over, expecting an empty bed, but there he was, lying so far away that I had to reach to touch him. He was on his back, just staring up into space, and when he felt my hand on his arm he jumped a little, then reached up and tucked his hands behind his head, his elbows pointing at the wall behind us.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi.”

  I touched him again, on the side, but he didn’t react—didn’t look at me, roll
over to face me, anything.

  “What were you dreaming at five o’clock this morning?” I said.

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing, you don’t remember? Or nothing, you’re not going to say?”

  He shrugged. “Nothing, I don’t remember—I never remember my dreams.”

  “Never?”

  “Only the most boring, banal ones. I had this recurring dream for about six years where I’d be walking along a road, walking and walking, and finally I’d arrive at this little store where I’d buy a pad of paper and a pen. After paying I’d walk to the door, then I’d suddenly turn around because I needed something else, and that’s when I’d wake up.” He looked over and smiled at me. “See, you’re so bored you’re not even paying attention.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “No, you were definitely thinking of something else.”

  It was true: my mind had drifted off, but only to the way we’d been earlier and how he’d erased it. It was as if we’d sent emissaries to have sex, the two of them urgent and unacquainted—and one of them unwilling to report back. It made me think of my first time with him, the hesitation and the ecstatic falling into it. Then I found myself thinking of Mike, of our first time, at Picnic Point—the trees tall around us and the smell of the earth, the way the beach towel rucked up beneath me. Afterward he told me it had been very different from what he’d expected, but he couldn’t say how. Having done it once, though, the state of not having done it yet dissolved—he said it didn’t even feel the same to be aroused. Remembering that, I wondered: Did Mike ever have sexual dreams about me now? Was it possible to have a sexual dream if you couldn’t have a sexual feeling? We hadn’t talked in three months, but his ring was still on my finger. I thought of how he must look in bed, sleeping or not, in what used to be the den, his paralyzed body arrayed before him, and my mind made its reluctant way back to the first night in Montauk with Kilroy, when I’d lain motionless on the bed and let him make love to me as if I were unable to move a muscle. As if I’d become Mike.