The Map That Leads to You

by J. P. Monninger

  It’s over, I told myself. Maybe it had never been, had never actually existed in any sense that mattered. I reached down to my purse and slid my Smythson out of my bag. What I could do, what I had always done, was to stay organized. I had ignored the Smythson too long. I opened it carefully, as if calling a friend I hadn’t seen in a while, and my hands moved slowly through the pages. Appointments. Assignments. Forms. Birthdays sketched in pink ink through the year. I leafed through the pages slowly, resolutely, and I did not cry. Why cry? We had had Paris and Amsterdam and Prague and Kraków and salt mines and milk barges. That was a good summer. That was a good trip. I slipped the pen out of the tiny holster on the Smythson and darkened a square around my work start date. I darkened it until the pen tip nearly pierced the paper. The clouds floated below us, and nothing seemed solid any longer.

  When I tried to slide the Smythson back in my bag, it refused to enter. I jiggled it, angling it so it had to go in, but something continued to block it. I reached down inside the bag and pried things around. My hand fell on Jack’s grandfather’s journal. I knew its feel before I even put my eyes on it. It turned me cold. I felt my chest compress, and it made it hard to breathe.

  “Would you take this and throw it out?” I asked the flight attendant the next time she passed by. I held the journal out to her. It still possessed a perfect weight and size for my hand. I believed that if she took it, if she freed me from its touch, I would be restored.

  “Sure, honey,” she said.

  She gave me a fake smile and tossed the journal in a tiny refuse bag she had carried down the aisle. She did not examine the journal at all. She smiled brightly and continued on, the journal no more or less than a saggy weight in a bag reserved for peanut wrappers and swizzle sticks.

  She covered half the distance back to the galley before I screamed for her to stop.

  I made, in the vernacular, a scene. I was aware of making a scene even as I performed for it. Deep inside, I blamed it on the drinks. I blamed in on my emotionally overwrought condition. But self-knowledge didn’t prevent me from surging down the aisle, my balance off, tears starting to cloud my perceptions.

  Watching me advancing toward her, the flight attendant made a face that said clearly: Calm down, you little bitch. The last thing she needed was a madwoman passenger.

  “Sorry,” I said, leaning in to whisper to her. “Love letters and things from an old boyfriend.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  Only she said it this way: Oooooooooooo.

  Then she held out the bag, and we enacted a reverse trick or treat, with me digging through the trash to secure the journal. When I finally fished it out, I clutched it to my chest.

  “I’ve been there,” the flight attendant said. “Exactly there.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’ll bring that last gin and tonic, okay? But you just get some sleep after that.”

  I nodded and bobbed my way back to my seat. The rest of the world felt far, far away.

  Part Two

  New York

  39

  If you’re going on a date, a fix up, would you rather be in the bar waiting for the guy to show up, or would you prefer to make an entrance, scan the diners and drinkers, trying to pick out the friend of a friend who is supposed to be cute?

  Worst-case scenario, you don’t know if you are early or late, because your heart isn’t into it, but you have come out of some sort of prescriptive push from two friends at work, and this is what people do, this is one way they meet, so you have said yes, okay, all right, I’ll meet him, thanks.

  His name is Gary.

  That’s what you were told.

  It’s after work, 7:30, which is an early night for leaving work when all is said and done. In the month and a half since you started at Bank of America, you have earned a reputation as a grind, a work grind, so you have changed your shoes, combed your hair, put on a touch of eyeliner, a bit of blush, and unbuttoned one button to reveal the top of your laciest bra. It all feels phony, like putting peanut butter on the lever of a mousetrap as bait, but Eleanor, the girl closest to your age and experience at Bank of America, has coached you, even made you sign up for a dating site—Come on, Heather, don’t be ridiculous, you need to get out and about, it’s not a big deal, everyone is online, it doesn’t mean you are some sort of dating failure—and now you are putting into practice what you are expected to do.

  You pause after stepping through the door, carefully moving a little aside to let other people pass by. It’s Friday night, the start of the weekend, and the bar, Ernie’s, is awash with young energy. It’s a scene, a meet and mingle, and you suppose you fit in here, you are the correct demographic, but it doesn’t feel as festive in the bottom of your gut. A loud roar goes up at the east end of the bar; someone has done something at the center of a group of guys, and people clap and shout, and a hat of some sort goes into the air.

  A text comes in on your phone.

  Running late, Gary says. B riht there.

  So now what?

  And can he spell? Or is that text code? A typing mistake?

  The bar is jammed, but you forge ahead and look for seats, but nothing is open. This is supposed to be fun, you remember. This is why you work, so you will have money to go out and meet guys in crowded rooms. Something like that. But that is cynical thinking, and Amy and Constance have hectored you about negativity, telling you it is not right to turn into a lemony pill after being jilted by He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named. You agree, sort of, but can’t always help it. So when a pair of seats opens up off to the west end of the bar, a couple heading out, you force yourself to see it as a good omen, a propitious sign.

  Before you can save the second seat, however, another woman, your age, your look more or less, slides in, and it is everything you can do to hold on to your own seat. You swing your butt up onto the seat and hang your purse over the back, and you twist around so you can watch the door. Casually, though. You don’t want to appear too eager, a golden retriever jumping on the house door as his provider gets out of the car in the driveway, so you decide to turn back and try to catch the bartender’s eye, but he is down at the other end watching whatever it was that made everyone shout a moment before.

  You turn back to check the door, and you see Gary.

  It has to be Gary. You know it’s Gary by the look, the glance around the bar, the way he stands. You’ve been told he is into working out, and it seems true; his body is solid and tight, and he has an athlete’s bounce when he catches your eye and makes his way over to you, his finger poked to his chest, then to you, then back to his chest.

  “You must be Gary,” you say. “Eleanor’s friend, right?”

  “Heather,” he says, but before he speaks another word, his phone goes off, and he holds up a finger and smiles.

  “Okay, okay, yes,” he says into the phone, smiles at you again, then nods at something the other person has said.

  Which is okay, because it gives you a chance to examine him. He’s not bad, not precisely your type, but not bad. He’s a little suit-y, a little corporate New York, a little man on the go, man about town, man pretty in love with himself. He is blond, though his hair is thinning, has already pulled back from his forehead—He’s a fivehead, Amy would say—and he is clean shaven, with a thick chin that reminds you of an ice cream paddle. His suit is good, blue with pinstripes, and his tie is a bit too attention seeking, a boner tie, Amy would call it, bright blue and slightly iridescent. He smiles again at you, raises his eyebrows to say he is sorry, then makes a drinking motion with his hand to indicate the bartender has appeared behind you.

  “Club soda for me,” Gary says to the bartender, then returns his attention back to the phone.

  “I’ll have a white wine,” you say, then realize how pathetic and clichéd that sounds, so you switch it to a Stella Artois.

  “Sorry,” Gary says when the bartender walks away.

  He slides his phone into his jacket pocket and leans over to kiss your c
heek.

  “So you’re at Bank of America?” he asks.

  “Yes, I am. Just started this fall. And you’re an attorney?”

  “Guilty, Your Honor.”

  “Contracts?”

  “Well, for now. I’m trying to work my way into sports contracts. I’d like to be an agent.”

  “Oh, cool.”

  Your drinks arrive.

  And you are already not into this guy. And you are pretty sure he is not into you.

  Call it chemistry. Or lack of chemistry.

  “Cheers!” you say, toasting.

  “Cheers. Sorry to let you drink alone, but I’m training. Trying to avoid carbs.”

  “No worries.”

  “I’m doing an endurance thing. Do you know about them? These mega-endurance things? You run, you go through mud, go over obstacles … it’s awesome.”

  “Do you compete in teams?”

  “On this one, yeah, but not always.”

  It’s loud. Everything he says is just on the edge of too garbled to hear. You have to cock your head and keep an ear, like a small microphone, pointed in his direction.

  “So what did Eleanor say about me?” he asks.

  “She said you were a nice guy.”

  “Nice isn’t very exciting.”

  You take a second sip of beer. You don’t mind letting him stew on the possibility that he is not exciting. In tiny pulses, you realize you don’t particularly like him. At all. Then his phone goes off, and he plucks it out of his jacket again, holding up his finger to promise he will be only a moment.

  As he talks on the phone, obviously setting things up for later with someone cooler, more attractive, more interesting, you compare him to He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named, and it doesn’t work. It’s no comparison. Jack was bigger, for one thing, and more at ease, worldlier, more natural, much cuter. No, not cuter, you think, just much handsomer. This guy, this Gary, is like an ersatz Jack, a faux Jack, and you take a pull on your beer and wonder how you can get out of here politely. You need to be on a train out to New Jersey for the long weekend, the Columbus Day weekend, but if things had gone well, really well, you suppose you could have postponed that a day.

  But Gary solves the situation for you.

  “So I don’t beat around the bush,” he says when he finishes on the phone. “You’re not digging me, are you?”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “It’s not working on this end, anyway,” he says, smiling. “I don’t get that we’re into the same things.”

  “Should we be into the same things?” You can’t help yourself from asking.

  Suddenly, absurdly, Gary has become a project. You love projects. You cannot resist a project, and though you don’t want Gary, you don’t want him to not want you, so you try to flirt a little. His phone rings a third time, and as he picks it out of his pocket, you understand you don’t need to do this, so you make a little bye-bye sign with your right hand, then spin around and take a good, long drink of your beer. Gary reaches beside you, puts his half-empty drink on the bar, smiles wanly—oh, you love a wan smile—and then pats your back in farewell as he walks away, his phone still attached to his head.

  You think of the Esche, the mighty Esche, growing in the Jardin du Luxembourg.

  You think of the riding academy and the moment in front of the Vermeer painting, and you can’t help it, won’t help it, you think of afternoons in Berlin when your bodies collided and stopped against each other like sticks searching for sparks inside themselves, and He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named slowly takes over all your thoughts, your vision, your memory, and you drink the rest of the beer with your eyes on the mirror behind the bar. Single girl, Manhattan, Friday night.

  40

  On the train to New Jersey, to home, you text Eleanor at work:

  Nice guy. Glad we met. No magic. But thanks.

  Downy face emoticon.

  You text to Constance and Amy:

  Nice guy. Glad we met. No magic.

  Dad met me at the station.

  “Hey there, sweetie pie,” he said when I climbed in beside him. “You’re riding the rails late.”

  He smelled like butter and popcorn. I threw my overnight bag in the backseat, then leaned over and kissed his cheek. He wore a white shirt from work, but it was one of his older ones, relegated to his casual wear. Over the white shirt, he wore a Carhartt vest, his favorite weekend Dad-fix-it-manly-man wear. He looked tired, but calm, as if perhaps he had been dozing before picking me up at the train station. His hands, heavy and useful, hung from the two and ten positions on the steering wheel. He was a good-looking man, I decided, but not flashy. His hair, grayer now, had thinned a little on top, and I knew, from my mom’s reports, that it was a source of injured vanity for him. He possessed strong cheekbones, well defined, that lent strength to all his other features. He was fifty-two years old, a man in his prime, a calm, steady force in all our lives. I found him very dear in that instant, my dad, and it felt good—no, more than good—to be sitting with him in our car, the lazy weekend ahead of us, the refrigerator, I knew, stocked with my favorite treats, the TV couch in the den comfortable, my mom doubtless being the Mom-a-saurus.

  Then, out of left field, I put my head on his shoulder and started to sob.

  “Hey, hey, hey, what’s this all about?” he asked, his voice consoling, his voice the one that picked me up off my fallen bicycle when I was seven, after a failed tryout for the lead in South Pacific in high school. “Hey, hey, sweetheart, take it easy. Are you okay? Did something happen?”

  I shook my head.

  He kissed the top of my head and slowly pushed back my hair from my face.

  “What’s going on, cupcake?” he asked and reached forward with his other hand to turn down a college football game on the radio.

  I felt absurd, but I couldn’t stop crying. The car idled. It was cool outside, and he had the window down, and the air smelled of leaves and October and fire. He reached over quickly to his glove box and pulled down the door, rummaged inside for a second, then produced a handful of Dunkin’ Donuts napkins. He handed me a few. I put one against my eyes and blew my nose in another one.

  “You okay? What is it, sweetheart? What’s going on?”

  I lifted my head from his shoulder. I shook my head. What was worth saying that hadn’t already been said? I missed Jack. I missed what we had and what we might have been. That was established family legend. For all intents and purposes, I had been left at the altar.

  “Just the blues, Daddy,” I said, covering. “Just a long day.”

  “Work okay?”

  I nodded.

  “But on the social front?”

  I shrugged. I couldn’t risk speaking.

  “But you’re liking your apartment.”

  Which was a safe conversation point. He knew I liked it. I nodded.

  “It’s small, but I like it. It’s miniscule, really. You’ve seen it.”

  “Well, New York living. That’s what it is. I heard the other day about some condos over in Jersey City just coming online. Newark is coming back, too.”

  “Hmmmm,” I said.

  I dabbed at my eyes.

  “Mom’s got all your favorites in the fridge.”

  “Oh, good.”

  “And I am going to make my Magic Chicken Dinner on the grill. The one and only.”

  “Then all is right in the world.”

  I expected him to move the car. Cry over. But he didn’t push it into drive. I squared my shoulders and blew my nose again.

  “Listen, Heather, I’m afraid I have some bad news. I hate to add it to your unhappiness right now, but Mr. Periwinkle died yesterday.”

  I felt, incredibly, the same stillness I had felt in the Paris airport. In Charles de Gaulle. Something so horrible, so irrevocably painful, had happened, and it took the air from my lungs and the blood from my heart.

  “What?” I asked, tears returning. “How?”

  My voice went up on the last word, and I cou
ld barely contain a sob. My father took a breath and patted my knee.

  “He didn’t come inside. Your mom hadn’t seen him. He was out in the garage in that place he liked to go. In the morning sun. He was just dead, honey. Old age.”

  “Not Mr. Periwinkle.”

  Dad put his arm around me. Mr. Periwinkle, cat of cats, my childhood friend, my tear pillow, my comfort, my kitty, was gone. And nothing I could do, or say, or hope, would change that one iota.

  * * *

  Appropriately, it rained as we buried Mr. Periwinkle the next morning.

  I dug the tiny hole for him. Down in the basement, I had scrounged up an old hatbox—at least it looked as though it had once been a hatbox, with a six-sided top and a pale blue cover—and had found a discarded pile of raffia my mother had used for some sort of crafty project years before. I made a raffia-lined coffin for my kitten, for my old friend, and I put him carefully into the box and taped it shut, content that I had done what I could. I left the box in the garage while I dug the hole.

  It was early, just past eight, and the leaves stuck to the earth in wet patches of muted colors. When I had the hole three feet deep, the turned soil on a piece of cardboard box stationed next to the hole, I stopped and regarded the work. It felt good to have my hands on something solid, a shovel handle, not more numbers on a computer.

  “Deep enough?” Dad asked, coming out with two coffees. He handed me one.

  “I think so, don’t you?”

  He nodded and said, “He was a good cat.”

  Dad wore an Irish tweed hat he had bought on a trip to Limerick years ago. I liked seeing him that way.

  “Tell me something you remember about Mr. Periwinkle,” he said. “What was your best memory of him?”

  I thought a moment and sipped my coffee.

  “I used to think he was wishing.”

  “When?”

  “When he stayed on my chest or sat on a couch, he put his paws together and closed his eyes, and I used to think he was wishing for things.”