Do Not Deny Me

by Jean Thompson

  He ducked his head, a little self-deprecating movement. What to make of him? She wasn’t sure. There was that laugh. The unfortunate shirt, the fake smiling. A cloud was forming over his head and the cloud said, Loser. Lynn said, “For now, let’s just say there was plenty of blame to go around.” She didn’t really believe that. Jay was a slime devil.

  “Takes two to tango, huh.” He worked a couple bites of his sandwich and swallowed them down. He was watching her with some private amusement, as if she had food stuck in her teeth. He was on the creepy side of awkward, Lynn decided. If he was a pilot, she wouldn’t want to be on his plane.

  Fifteen minutes. Twenty, tops. Then she could say how nice it was to meet him and scuttle back to her burrow. She would ask him about his interesting hobbies. No doubt he had some. She was formulating a remark when he said, “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  Her insides curdled. She stared at him. His face meant nothing to her. “No,” she said, waiting to be ambushed.

  “Scott Hallberg.” Lynn shook her head. “We were in French III and IV at NIU. You used to read the books in English first so you wouldn’t have to translate everything. The Red and the Black. The Charterhouse of Parma. Madame Bovary.”

  She didn’t remember reading them in either language. She didn’t remember anybody who might have turned into this guy. She said, “I’m sorry, were we, what, study pals?”

  “No, we just like, knew each other from class.” Lynn could tell that he had counted on her remembering him. His smirking edge was gone. “I saw your picture and right away I figured out it was you.”

  Lynn murmured that it really was a long time ago. Now she was trying to recollect some scrap of French, which also seemed to have fled her brain. Ou est la biblioteque? Je me demande.

  “I was just wondering if you married your boyfriend from back then. You know, the hockey player.”

  “Richard?” Him she did remember. He had been a famous alcoholic. “No, it was somebody I met later.” At least it wasn’t Richard sitting across from her and claiming acquaintance. That thought made her more cheerful. “Were you a French major? You weren’t a pilot or anything in school, were you?”

  “God, I was so crazy about you. I mean nuts.”

  Some kind of nervous, unlovely giggle made her throat spasm. “Huh huh,” she said.

  “You never even had a clue. I mean, why would you, who was I? Some jerk in French class.”

  “I honestly don’t remember—”

  “No, of course you don’t. Girls like you don’t have to pay attention to anybody you don’t want to.”

  “What do you mean, girls like me?” She was getting over some of her first creeped-out shock, and she didn’t much like his tone, whiny and aggrieved, as if he’d been carrying a grudge against her all this time, and what exactly was it she’d done to deserve him turning up now, the blind date from hell? “French class? Who remembers stuff like that?”

  “Okay, okay, sorry.” Now he was backpedaling, less sure of himself. “But hey, don’t you think it’s weird, that we both end up in the same place?”

  “Yes, weird.” Her memory was spotty, vague, like a movie seen underwater. He might have been the kid with the beard. It had been a scrawny, reddish beard that looked like he should have been wearing underpants over his face.

  “I don’t just mean, the same location. I mean the same place in life, single and starting over. Sort of, a level playing field.”

  “There isn’t any playing field.” Lynn shifted in her seat. Around them, people cruised for tables, cut sandwiches into child-sized portions, chatted about normal things. She could write help on a paper napkin, show it to the roving bus boy. Some hideous fascination kept her from getting up and leaving.

  Scott pulled something out of his back pocket. “Here. Go ahead, read them.”

  A rectangle of folded papers, flattened and curling. Lynn shook her head. “What is it?”

  “Poems I wrote you.” He uncreased the paper and smoothed the creases. The typeface was dark blue, furred with age. She read:

  MY CRUCIFIXION

  She smiles and the nails of lust pierce my hands and feet.

  In both her words and her silence, I am forsaken

  Here is my bleeding testament, my soul sucked dry

  The quick sharp rush of holy sperm

  There was more. She pushed it aside. “I can’t handle this.”

  “Some of them are in French, but I can’t read them anymore. Look, here’s one of your quizzes. You left it in class and I picked it up and saved it.”

  “That’s a little pathetic, don’t you think?”

  He shrugged. His slumping posture made one of his shoulders seemed higher, crooked. “I did some other stuff too.”

  “What stuff?”

  “Oh . . .” He hesitated, then plunged in. “I used to call your place and pretend I was a wrong number, or I was doing a survey. I stole some of your mail once, but I put it back. It was just bills, honest.”

  “Go on.”

  “I hired a guy to take pictures of you. Remember, he said he was doing a calendar, College Co-eds? On the auditorium steps? You were going to be Miss July? I got a dog, a beagle, because once in class you told somebody you liked beagles. I was going to invite you over to see him, that was my big plan, you’d come over to see the dog and the magic would happen. But the damned dog ate a chicken bone and got an intestinal obstruction and cost me three hundred dollars for emergency surgery. Then he ran away. Oh, I keyed your boyfriend’s car. I really, really didn’t like that guy. I’m so glad you didn’t marry him.”

  She felt a kind of vertigo, as if the chair beneath her had disappeared and she was suspended in air. “So you’re saying, you were my stalker?”

  “They didn’t call it that back then.”

  “Why are you telling me all this?”

  “That Christmas package you never got from your Aunt June? The sweater? That was a mistake on my part and I apologize. I unwrapped it and couldn’t figure out how to put it back together. But I don’t think you would have liked it anyway, it was kind of ugly. I guess I went a little crazy. It’s nothing I’m proud of. I just wanted you to know how far I’ve come from those days. Like I said, learning from the errors of the past. So that we can have a fresh start.”

  He was smiling a happy smile. “Jesus Christ,” Lynn said.

  “I’ve done a lot of work on myself since then. I’m a practicing Buddhist now. I’ve had several of my poems published. I’m very hopeful about the applications I have in at a couple of the commuter airlines. It’s true I had a sort of a breakdown after I lost my job, but that turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because it forced me to reexamine a lot of my assumptions. I’ve always led a lonely life. Even when I was married, boy, let’s not get into that story, but I’m convinced she was the reincarnation of some very ancient and evil soul. Anyway, I realized that flying, my love of flying, was a metaphor for my spiritual aspirations, my desire to rise above my lower nature. I’ve freed myself from all the old conflicts, the debased, primitive need to pick sides, compete, assign blame. People should be kind to each other and joyful in their beings. I honestly feel I have a lot to offer you.”

  Half of Lynn’s sandwich remained on her plate. She wrapped it carefully in a paper napkin and stood up. “Scott? Thanks for lunch. I think the good news for you here is that after today, I will never forget you.”

  A week later Lynn picked up Christine and they drove to the park with the running track. Christine said, “I can’t believe I was such a moron. I can’t believe I let him get away with it.” Tony had called again, and Christine had invited him over for dinner. He’d spent the night, then the next morning told her he didn’t think the two of them had the right chemistry anymore. “Do I have to tell you how much food I cooked? I poached a whole salmon. Asparagus, duchess potatoes, pear cake with chocolate sauce.”

  “You forgot the Drano espresso.”

  “Prick.”

  “At
least he didn’t move back in, then tell you the same thing three months later.”

  “Once I get some weight off, I decided I’m going to take up pistol shooting. Do trick shots, hit targets from horseback, like Annie Oakley.”

  They parked and stood to the side of the track, stretching. Christine wore a pink sweatsuit with dream girl spelled out in sequins across the front of the shirt. “I can’t touch my toes. I can’t even see my stupid toes.”

  “My god. No toes.”

  The trees were leafing out and the track was spattered with cool shade. They took off at an easy jog. Lynn said, “I think it’s possible to get bored with being unhappy. Some kind of natural defense mechanism kicks in, like antibodies.”

  “How can you . . . huh . . . talk.”

  “Just do a couple laps, then walk, okay?”

  Lynn went on ahead. Joyful in our beings! She ran and ran, waiting for her second wind.

  New from Jean Thompson in Fall 2018!

  From the author of National Book Award finalist The Year We Left Home comes a new stunning tale of three generations of Midwestern women humanity as they confront heartbreak, setbacks, triumphs, and seek to carve out a place in the world.

  A Cloud in the Shape of a Girl

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