From Away

by Phoef Sutton

  Even in these depths, your voice, ringing so musically, so clearly enunciating its mispronunciations, could make me laugh. “I am. Totally.” And I vibrated my lips with my finger to prove it, sending you into fits of laughter. “Anne left her machine on too loud. Should I go turn it down?”

  “Sure,” you said.

  “That’s right,” Charlotte called from the background, “listen to her. She’s four.”

  “Four and a half,” you snapped. You dropped the phone, and I jumped as it clattered on the floor. “I wanna watch a movie!”

  “No, it’s bedtime.” Charlotte picked up the phone. “I have to put the little creep to bed. You want to come over?”

  A tempting thought. The warmth of Charlotte’s house. Her lumpy pull-out sofa. The homey clutter of your toys underfoot. The fragmented remains of our family.

  “No, I should sleep.”

  “And you’re not going to do anything stupid?”

  “Don’t be stupid, Unca!” you hollered.

  “I won’t be stupid.”

  “By stupid, I mean don’t break into her apartment,” Charlotte said.

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Can I tell Unca my joke?”

  “We’re going to bed.”

  “Not till I tell my joke!” You could always go from zero to furious in two seconds flat.

  Charlotte sighed and handed over the phone. She might occasionally match our mother’s firmness of tone, but Charlotte can never really stand up to you, Maggie. She values your friendship too much.

  “Unca?”

  “Hey, Maggie.”

  “Okay. Well, okay, well, here’s my joke, okay? Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Knock-knock.”

  “Who’s there?”

  “Banana. Knock-knock.”

  “Who’s there?”

  “Banana. Knock-knock.”

  “Who’s there?”

  “Banana. Knock-knock.”

  “Who’s there?”

  “Banana. Knock-knock.”

  “Who’s there?”

  A long pause. “I forget the rest.”

  I laughed.

  “That’s not the joke, Unca!” you cried out, affronted.

  “Do you want me to tell it?” Charlotte asked.

  “No! It’s my joke!”

  “Tell it tomorrow.”

  “I’ll tell you tomorrow, Unca.”

  “Night, Sam—” Charlotte started to say, but you hung up before she could finish, leaving me alone in an apartment that felt darker and emptier than before I’d called.

  The phone beeped and whined and told me that if I wanted to make a call I should hang up and dial again. I pressed the button to summon the dial tone again, dialed four digits of Anne’s number, then hung up. Was that what I was going to be reduced to? The masochism of calling her machine just so I could torture myself with the sound of her smoky voice in its cheerfully welcoming tone?

  Anne wasn’t one of those people who changed her outgoing message frequently. I redid mine once a month, with different selections from movie soundtracks playing in the background—Bernard Herrmann’s score for Vertigo seemed to fit the mood this month. Not Anne. She had the same recording on her machine that she’d had when I’d first called her last spring, when she was still just a neighbor, to tell her that I’d gotten some of her mail by mistake. (It wasn’t quite true that I’d fallen in love with her voice right then, but I’d sure as hell felt it resonate somewhere deep and low inside myself.) And that was the same message I’d gotten when I nervously called to ask her out the first time, to see Susan Werner sing at the Birchmere in Alexandria. And when we were first dating, I’d hear that greeting when I would call to leave messages of playful, erotic promise. And once that stage had passed and the messages had transformed to simple logistical plans for the weekend, that was still the greeting that welcomed me. And now, with it all over and done with, that same outgoing message still answered her calls, unaffected by any of this, as if I’d never been in her life at all.

  Her key was hanging on the hook in the kitchen where I kept all my keys. It was there in plain sight, and she could have taken it last Friday when she had responded to my marriage proposal, so she had nobody to blame but herself.

  Walk out my door, five steps to hers, key in the lock, open it, and step in. I’d done it many times, but now my heart was pounding and the familiar ground of her apartment was transformed into a foreign landscape, enemy territory.

  Well, I wasn’t doing anything bizarre there. I wasn’t going to rifle her drawers and search for evidence of an infidelity she’d assured me didn’t exist.

  She hadn’t left me for someone else, she’d told me. She’d just felt that things were going too fast, that I was trying to take the relationship to a level she wasn’t ready to go to yet. So, fine, I’d said, let’s go back three steps, whatever you want. But she’d said no, love wasn’t like a board game. What the hell did that mean? If she’d just said she’d been cheating on me it would have been easier to take. Better to be left for another man than for some metaphorical bullshit I couldn’t even follow, much less argue with.

  (Have you been through all this yet, Maggie? Have you been lied to, or had to lie to someone? I’ve always prayed you’d be spared that kind of pain; now I hope to God you have the chance to feel it.)

  Well, I wasn’t here to snoop or take any petty revenge. All I was going to do was turn the volume down.

  There it was. Loudness up to ten. What sort of sadistic move was that? I set it down to zero, realized she’d notice that and turned it up to four. Over and done with. Five messages on the machine. She’d get home and listen and I wouldn’t have to hear a word of it. And I didn’t want to. Her life was her own now, and pressing playback, easy as it was, would be a clear invasion of her privacy.

  I pressed playback.

  “First new message, sent today at 8:04 a.m.” And after the computer voice, Bill’s voice came on. “I’m watching you walk out to your car and I’m just feeling, like, so incredibly sad that you’re not with me, but so happy I can feel this sad, do you know what I mean? I mean, it’s like this whole stupid house of mine was like altered while you were here. You know, like the holodeck on the Enterprise; it’s an empty room and then, voosh, you’re here, and it’s, like, Paris or Arabia or something. But now you’re gone and it’s just back to being my house again and I can’t believe I’ll be able to get up the energy to go get dressed and go to work and watch you there all day without being able to talk to you or touch you. I’m not going to make it till you come back here tonight. Bye.”

  “Second new message, sent today at 8:17 a.m. ‘I found your red scarf under the sofa. Bye again.’”

  I hit stop and the tape started to rewind itself.

  Hand on the table to support my suddenly heavy weight, I knew how wrong I’d been. This was worse, much worse, than any intellectual reasons she could come up with for dumping me. This was real. This was primal. This hit me way down in some pre-evolutionary level. You didn’t even have to be human to feel this pain. This was the pain the smaller mountain goat felt after it clashed horns with the larger one and lost and went tumbling down the hill. This was the pain the loser bull elephant felt when it had to stand aside and watch the victor mount the beautiful gray round rump of his beloved.

  As the pain passed from the primitive parts of my brain to the more civilized ones, it only got worse. Personal insult. That she should choose this one, Bill Zacharias, the computer nerd at work, a man who would use Star Trek references in love talk. How was Bill superior to me? Was Bill better looking? A better lover? Was she fucking crazy? Or were her evolutionary instincts instructing her to pick the man whose offspring would thrive best in the twenty-first century?

  I squeezed my eyes shut, not crying, but feeling the pressure of tears behind my eyes and a throb of pain in my head, because this hurt, this physically hurt. I opened them and blinked the watery distortion away.


  That’s when I saw the old woman. I hadn’t turned the lights on, so I couldn’t see too clearly, but I knew I wouldn’t have seen this image clearly even in broad daylight. She was on the sofa, her flesh a topography map of crinkled lines. She twisted on the cushions, and the cushion did not move under her, not one bit. Her bloodshot eyes stared up at the ceiling in a look of such agonized want that I felt my own pain well up again. But it was a stronger pain now; a biting, bitter, lonely agony that could only be built up after years, decades, a lifetime.

  Shut your eyes, boyo, she’s not there and you know it, I told myself. She doesn’t match her surroundings; she floats above that sofa like a bad computer special effect in a B-movie. Clench your eyelids shut until you get the light show and open them and she’ll be gone, you’ll see.

  I looked again and she was staring right at me. Watery gray eyes with pupils shaped like keyholes. Dry skin turning moist now. Wrinkles smoothing, skin being pulled taut. Thin gray hair turning red, turning gold. Eyes focusing, rounding, turning green as the ocean. Turning into beauty. The agonized loneliness was turning to yearning, to hope that flowed from her now-lovely, now-youthful eyes into mine.

  The overhead light flared on, and another woman screamed.

  I felt my knees buckle. I pushed off from the table, out of breath, sweat soaking my body. The answering machine was beeping and clicking and finishing its rewind. Mere seconds had passed.

  “Sammy?”

  Anne was in the doorway, going from anger to relief and back to anger. I turned to face her, but I kept feeling those wanting green eyes on my back.

  “Did you let yourself in?” Anne demanded.

  I swallowed, trying to bring some saliva to my parched throat.

  “Why are you here?” Anne wasn’t beautiful when she was angry.

  “You left your machine on too loud. I turned it down.”

  Anne stared at me in disbelief. “You used my key? Do I have to take it back? Can’t I even trust you?”

  “Trust?” I tried to get indignant, but I was too drained.

  She glanced at the machine. “You listened to my messages.”

  Well, I was making this much too easy for her, wasn’t I? Now I was a creepy stalker, and she was lucky to be rid of me.

  “I’m sorry.” I wasn’t sure if I would hate myself more for trying or not trying. “I know I moved things along too fast, I know I scared you off, but I’ll give you room, I’ll give you all the room you need. I just think we should give it another chance.”

  No change in her face. She wasn’t letting herself listen. “Go home, Sam.”

  “You won’t even talk to me?”

  “You’re lucky I don’t call the police.”

  “Come on. You can’t tell me you’re afraid of me; you can’t tell me that.”

  She looked away, conceding the point. But any ground I gained I immediately lost by exclaiming, “Bill Zacharias?”

  “You don’t even know him,” she said, coldly.

  “What’s to know?”

  She sighed. “He’s smart. He’s got a future. He’s got a job. I’m thirty years old, Sam. I have to start thinking about that stuff. I’ve got to start thinking about kids and—”

  “That’s what I wanted!” I sounded as affronted as you always do, Maggie, when you’re threatened with bedtime.

  “Yes, but there’s a difference.” And the difference was me. She ticked off the high points of my life: twenty-eight years old, part-time substitute teacher, part-time clerk in a video store, a man who spent his off-hours running a fanzine website about Italian Gothic cinema. “This is not a husband. This is not the father of children,” she said. “This is a fifteen-year-old boy.”

  So, it was all about reproduction in the end. The larger mountain goat had clobbered me.

  She could have run through that descriptive list in a fond way, even an affectionate or amused way. She might at least have criticized me with hope, like my mother always had, as if she thought I might listen and improve. Instead, she said it all with cool disinterest. When she dumped me the week before, she’d said she still wanted to be friends. A friend was the last thing she was now.

  Didn’t she remember that I was the same man who’d held her when she’d awakened from nightmares, weeping? That she’d once spent nine hours straight sitting on a bed with me, doing nothing but talking—about the wine shop she wanted to open one day, about how her uncle touched her once when she was nine—pouring out secrets she swore she’d never told anyone else? We’d built up habits; we had a favorite song; we had private jokes no one got but us. No one would ever laugh at those jokes again.

  I turned and trudged to the door, muttering under my breath. “Italian horror movies are a hell of a lot better than Star Trek.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “The guy’s a Trekker, Anne. He said you were like the holodeck.”

  “What possible difference could that make?”

  Well, if she couldn’t see that, had we ever had anything in common at all?

  Out of the corner of my eye (and only out of the corner, because when looking straight on there was nothing there), I saw the woman on the sofa, old again and weeping with her face in her hands, her hope turned to ash that I could taste in my mouth.

  “I can’t just stop loving you,” I said to Anne.

  “Sure, you can,” she answered, and shut the door.

  TWO

  I didn’t sleep at all that night, but I didn’t think about the old woman, either. Call it denial, call it willful blindness, call it what you want, but those visions hadn’t been a part of my life for a long time, and I wasn’t about to admit to myself that they were starting again. Besides, I had enough pain of my own to keep me occupied without letting some spook’s sorrow add to it.

  I resisted the temptation to lash back at Anne in some childish way. Instead, I put on a bootlegged video of Lo Spettro (Panda Films, Italy, 1963; four and a half stars on the Kehoe Scale, docked half a point for being a sequel). I drifted off to sleep just before my favorite part, where Barbara Steele’s murderously insane husband accidentally drinks the poison she’d intended for herself.

  My eyelids had just fallen shut when all at once it was broad daylight and the gothic black and white romanticism on the TV had been replaced by smeary color and a man screaming about an amazing new car wax polymer. I dug through the covers for the remote and started to channel surf. With my illegal cable hookup (do those words even mean anything to you, in your distant future?) I had the proverbial “fifty-seven channels and nothin’ on” to choose from, and I could spend hours flipping through them, never landing on any show for more than a second, always hopeful that something wonderful was about to turn up. You know, the same way I lived my life.

  On mornings like that, getting out of bed feels impossible. I can picture doing it, but I can picture flying, too—that doesn’t mean I know how to get started. I could have spent the whole day stretched out on that bed, flipping channels, eating Krispy Kreme donuts. These lethargic moods don’t hit me too often, but when they do, they make all the sense in the world. “Just stay in bed,” they say. “You have everything you want here. You don’t need the rest of the world; it sure as hell doesn’t need you. Just watch the glimpses of the sportscasters and TV chefs and news pundits and old dead sitcom stars as they flash by like passengers on a train speeding past you. Let them hurry, the idiots. You have four pillows and a dozen donuts. Do they have anything better to offer?”

  Your mother hates it when I get that way. She starts calling me the Krispy Kreme Donut Man and worrying that I’ll turn into one of those agoraphobic types who are afraid to leave their house. Shows how much she knows. It’s the people who go out all the time who are the scared ones—you can see it on their faces as they flip by on the TV. They’re afraid to be alone with themselves, afraid to be still. They keep in motion to hold the fear at bay. At times like this, I think about those freaks you hear about on the news now and then—you know, the four
-hundred-pound men who have to be taken to the hospital on a forklift and buried in a piano case—and they seem to me like the bravest people on Earth. They have taken the time to face their demons. And eat them.

  Okay, I know that sounds crazy to you. But when the Krispy Kreme Donut Man mood is on me, it makes perfect sense. That’s the dangerous thing about moods. They convert you to their cause at the same time they attack you.

  The phone rang. I had just taken a bite of a glazed, and I cursed the gods of timing as I muted the volume on the TV and answered.

  “Hello?”

  “Is this Samuel Kehoe?”

  I only had to think for a second. “Yeah.”

  “This is Cara Brendel at Willoughby Preschool.” Willoughby was your preschool in those days.

  “Is Maggie okay?” I sat up, all alert. Nothing banished the Donut Man like danger to my Maggie.

  “We’ve been trying to reach her mother—”

  “She’s working. Is Maggie okay?”

  “Perhaps Maggie should tell you herself.”

  You came on the line, your voice very small and solemn and grown-up. “Unca, I have bad news.”

  “We take physical displays very seriously here at Willoughby.”

  The chair I was struggling to sit in had been built to support kindergartners, so I looked at Cara Brendel framed between my bony knees—a difficult position from which to maintain dignity. “Physical displays of what?” I asked.

  The principal looked disappointed at my lack of familiarity with the current jargon. “Of anger,” she said. “Of violence.”

  “Just tell me what happened, Cara.” Everyone called each other by first names at Willoughby Preschool.

  “I’ll get to that. I’m trying to put the incident into the proper context. You can’t just look at these events in a vacuum.”

  I glanced over my left knee to you, sitting across the room amidst a pile of neglected building blocks, looking tiny and forlorn, your chocolate eyes staring out from your wild, dark ringlets. A papier-mâché whale hung from the ceiling above your head like the sword of judgment. Outside the window, a gaggle of kids played and screamed in the crisp winter air.