Another Life

by Robert Haller

  April had assured him she was aware and that, believe it or not, there was a time when she hadn’t confined her alcoholic intake to a couple of glasses of wine every other Saturday night. Putting down her drink, she felt it already beginning to work its magic.

  Paul sighed. “I guess I just wasn’t planning on drinking for a while.”

  “Really? Why’s that?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not a good person when I drink. I make bad decisions.” He took a large gulp of his beer.

  It occurred to April that the reason they slept together in the first place was because Paul had been drinking, but she decided not to point this out. Instead, she said, “My ex-husband, Ray—he never drank, either. A Pepsi man all the way—Mountain Dew if he really wanted to cut loose.”

  “What does Ray do?”

  “He’s a carpenter. Builds stuff, tears stuff down.”

  “I’m guessing he wasn’t the best husband.”

  “Let’s just say I have a bias against recently converted young women named Christina.”

  “Wow. So when did you two—”

  “I actually don’t feel like talking about my ex right now.”

  “Sorry, you brought him up.”

  “Well, now I’m shooing him away. Bye, Ray!” She waved at the window beside them, as if Ray’s ghost had slipped through the glass and was now skipping down the dark street. She took another drink of her Long Island. Paul was staring at her with raised eyebrows. “What?” she asked.

  “You’ve just been acting … very different tonight.”

  April put down her drink. “And you would prefer me another way, right? You would prefer this part of me to stay behind closed doors, in the bedroom, so you can sleep with me whenever you feel like it, but otherwise act like I’m just the annoying old woman from church who makes you run errands sometimes.”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “You thought you had things set for a minute, didn’t you? You thought you had everything worked out—screwing the Bible school teacher in the morning, being a role model for the town’s angry black kid in the afternoon.”

  “April, what are you talking about?”

  She leaned forward in her seat and slowly stirred her drink. “Let me ask you this, Paul. Being completely honest, do you actually believe you’re really going to help DeShawn by giving him a few guitar lessons, or is this just a quick, easy way to give yourself a little sense of fulfillment?”

  The expression of utter confusion on Paul’s face was almost comical. “Seriously, I’m lost. I don’t know how we ended up talking about DeShawn.”

  “Well, try to keep up, then,” April said, and took another long drink.

  She felt a stab of tenderness for the boy sitting across the table. He looked so bewildered and caught off guard. This whole thing would have been so much easier if she hadn’t ended up liking him so much. If, when he left her alone in her bedroom last night, she hadn’t felt a void open inside her. If she had managed to keep him from taking over her mind these past days. If she’d been able to look forward to seeing him just for the sex and hadn’t begun to look forward to seeing his smile just as much.

  Her vision earlier in their hotel room came back to her. Even if it wasn’t likely, that version of Paul’s future seemed possible in a way that a future for the two of them just wasn’t. But there was a part of her, a very small part of her, that had meant everything she said earlier, on the street. Why couldn’t they be open about each other? Why couldn’t he move in? When she fantasized about a happy future with Paul, she didn’t see them running away together and starting another life across the country. She saw them—all of them—together in the living room, watching a scary movie: Laura in the armchair, Jason sprawled out on the floor, and her and Paul sitting together on the sofa, the way they had that first night, his arm around her, her head against his shoulder. Why couldn’t she, in the end, get what she wanted?

  “April,” Paul said as he swirled the suds around in his nearly empty glass, “do you think, if I’d been born earlier or you’d been born later, if we’d gone to high school together, or college, if we’d met somehow, do you think we’d …” He trailed off, never finishing his question, probably thinking it sounded stupid or pointless.

  April sighed and said, “Who knows? It’s possible.” Then she reached across the table and took Paul’s hands in her own and smiled. “But what would be the fun in that?”

  The bartender’s voice behind them rang out last call. April glanced up at the garish plastic Budweiser clock on the wall above her. She was now forty years old. It was past midnight, but the spell wasn’t broken just yet. She would finish her drink in this bar full of bikers. She would take this boy back to the room she had paid for. They would drink the two bottles of wine Paul had brought with him. Then they would make love together drunkenly in the night, and the next morning … the next morning, she could afford to ignore until it was upon her.

  LAURA

  At Camp Lone Eagle, the only place you could get cell phone service was down at the waterfront, by the docks. I wasn’t sure why this particular spot was special—it was just as remote as the rest of the camp—but I didn’t question it. It was the only balm for what was otherwise sure to be an ugly bruise of a weekend. On Friday, the first night at camp, I had set my alarm for 5 a.m. Usually, not even an earthquake could wake me up before seven, but under the combined annoyances of a thin mattress and Marcy Clemens’ snoring, I hardly slept at all. When the alarm went off at dawn on Saturday, I shot right up, turned it off, and looked around me.

  I hadn’t woken anyone else. All nine girls and the other counselor were still sleeping in their bunks along the cabin walls. Turning onto my stomach so that my legs dangled over the side of the top bunk, I dropped as lightly as I could, my bare feet hitting the cold concrete of the cabin floor with barely a sound. I slipped into my flip-flops and grabbed my dad’s old sweatshirt from where I’d hung it up on the post last night. I used to dread these camping trips because of the lack of privacy. Before seeing anyone besides my immediate family, I wanted time to assess the damage—the frizz level of my hair, check for any new zits. Just a few weeks ago, the only reason I would have forced myself to get up this early was so I would have the showers all to myself. But things were different now. I no longer cared whether people saw how I looked after just rolling out of bed—or, more accurately, I no longer cared whether these people saw me.

  Outside, the sky was already brightening, the air already hinting at the heat to come. I heard birds singing and cicadas droning. Soon the air would be thick and heavy, and this now empty camp would be swarming with loud, wild kids. I wished I could freeze the day here and stay in perpetual early morning. I stepped outside the cabin door and looked around. To my right were two more cabins, where the rest of the girl campers were bunked. To my left, across a field of gravel, were the big rec hall and the bathrooms, and behind these, near the edge of the forest, the three boys’ cabins. Across from the rec hall, in a grove of pines just before the ground began its descent toward the lake, stood the long, low structure of the dining hall, which also doubled as our sanctuary for the evening worship rallies. Last night, the campsite had been filled with the din of the worship band and kids screaming out their love for Jesus, the noise spilling out from the open dining hall windows and into the Adirondack night, no doubt striking fear in the heart of every woodland critter within a mile radius.

  I walked toward the dining hall. The lights were on. They had already started prepping for breakfast. My mom was probably in there, too, getting a head start on her day. She was always the first one up. I could picture her sitting at a table with her notebook and a giant mug of coffee. I hurried past, not wanting to be seen. If I did run into anyone, I would merely say I was going down to the lake to check my phone before showering—which was, in fact, exactly what I was doing.

  Past
the rec hall, a dirt path led through the woods to the waterfront. I walked down it, barely noticing the birds chattering in the trees around me, or the deep, damp smells of pine and spruce, moss and mushrooms and fallen leaves. And when I got to the beach, I didn’t really stop to admire the way the early sun glinted off the silvery surface of the water, creating thousands of little diamonds, or how the lake stretched out before me for what seemed like miles, finally stopping against the deep green of the pines on the far shore. I just sat down on the sandy beach, which was still a little damp, and pulled my phone from my pocket.

  Even though I knew that it would be there waiting for me, I still felt a little tingle of excitement upon seeing I had a message from Martin on my mobile MatchUp app.

  It was short, and I read through it quickly, then reread it, as I always did.

  He asked me how things were going running the camp. He asked jokingly whether I was surviving. He asked how I was making out on The Good Soldier, a book he had recommended. He couldn’t wait to talk to me about it in person. He told me he’d been thinking about me a lot—at work, at home, when he went to bed. He was counting the days until September. He couldn’t wait to meet me. Reading these last words, I felt goose bumps rise on my arms.

  As a postscript, he’d sent me a link to an article he was telling me about the other day, about how honeybees were disappearing, just vanishing inexplicably from hives all over the world. This might have seemed incompatible with the rest of the message, but for a while now Martin had been going on about climate change, saying young people shouldn’t have kids or worry about the future, because within the next hundred years the planet was doomed. He sent me articles backing up this theory. These things scared me, and I told him so, but of course I didn’t tell him it was because I was only fifteen and, thus, probably had more time left on this planet than he. So I said I worried about my kids.

  The mosquitoes began to hover and whine around me, so I pulled my hood up as I wrote back. After every sentence, I paused to assess and keep track of my lies.

  I told him that running the camping trip was one giant headache, as usual, and it was becoming harder and harder for me to remember why I ever agreed to do this in the first place. I was ready to stop for good. Because of camp, I hadn’t really had time to read, but soon I would start the book. (In truth, I had borrowed The Good Soldier from the library more than a week ago, when Martin first recommended it, but the book had stumped me. It just seemed so slow and meandering. I’d decided I would read up on the SparkNotes before we met in person.) I told Martin I had been thinking about him a lot, too, that it was strange how close I felt to him given that we’d never met, and that I, too, was waiting impatiently for September.

  It was strange, yes, how intimately we wrote to each other, but since about a week ago, when I told Martin I wanted to meet, things had quickly gotten heavier between us. He had given an enthusiastic yes—he was ready to meet anytime. I was the one who proposed the first of September, since that was the day the youth group would go down to Albany for the antiabortion rally.

  So what was I thinking, going down in person to meet Martin, who thought I was a forty-year-old high school math teacher named Kim Moore, divorced with two kids? What, exactly, did I expect to happen when he saw a fifteen-year-old with frizzy red hair and freckles, who didn’t even have a driver’s license? How did I expect him to respond? The short answer was, I had no idea. I understood that when he found out the person he’d been corresponding with online for the past year was under eighteen, a host of legal ramifications would arise, and his first reaction might be simply to run—flee the scene, delete his account, and deny that anything had ever happened. Certainly, it was doubtful that after we met he would want to continue talking to me online, never mind seeing me in person ever again.

  So why was I knowingly sabotaging a relationship (or whatever this was) that had become so important to me? I guess I knew I would have to at some point. It couldn’t last forever. What was I supposed to do? Keep putting off meeting him till I really was forty?

  But there was another reason, a deeper one—the one that I think had ultimately incited me to open my laptop that night and tell him we should meet. I wanted him to know me. Me, not some fake identity I had created online. I wanted to look Martin in the eyes and say, this is who you’ve been talking to all this time; this is the person you find so interesting, so incredible. But it wasn’t as if I would be shedding Kim Moore the way you take off a disguise, throwing her away. No, I wanted to make Martin see that I was Kim Moore, that really, if he could understand it, in a way, I hadn’t lied to him at all. I hadn’t created a fake identity, so much as a new one. I was both Laura and Kim, if only he could see it. And I let myself hope in the possibility that he might, if he just sat across from me long enough to try.

  Still, that was all abstract—what would actually happen when we met was something I couldn’t begin to predict, and I didn’t try. I was ready for anything.

  The night I told Martin I wanted to meet, I was drunk, still reeling after my walk back from Ian’s house. Immediately after typing the words, I had suddenly felt cold, though it was a warm night. Maybe I really was coming down with whatever my mom had. I got off my bed and went to my closet, looking for something to throw over my tank top. With a head full of bourbon, I had pulled out my dad’s old sweatshirt advertising the construction company he used to work for. He had left it years earlier when he moved out, and I kept it in the back corner of my closet, for no particular reason I could name. Honestly, when I first took it out, it was only because, in my inebriated state, I thought it looked comfortable and warm. And that is about the last thing I recall doing before I fell drunkenly down on my bed, with the laptop still open in front of me.

  The next morning, I had woken to a nasty headache and Martin’s reply: Yes, we should meet. When? Where? I didn’t regret what I’d done, but I waited till that evening to respond. After nailing down the date, Martin and I had chatted online until long after midnight, our words growing more and more intimate, laced with hidden meaning and things not explicitly said. After we finally said good night and I logged off my account, I felt warm and excited. My hangover was gone, and the bad feeling from what happened with Ian the night before had been replaced with thoughts of Martin. But I wasn’t ready to sleep. I was restless. I remained on my bed, in gym shorts and hoodie, staring at my laptop screen. I opened Facebook, but all the photos and updates from the same old people seemed mind-numbingly dull, and I closed it. I checked my email, but there were no new messages. I thought about looking up some of the bands I’d seen on Ian’s wall that awful evening, but I decided that if Ian listened to them, then I didn’t want to. He was just a boy, and I was through with boys. I opened a new online search.

  In the search bar, I typed in “Porn” and clicked enter.

  I’d never searched for pornography online before. Of course I’d seen snippets of it, mostly old 1970s stuff full of sleazy saxophone music and unreasonably tan men and women. I knew that all guys watched porn online—probably even my little brother at this point—but I’d never actually looked for it, so I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect.

  My breath caught when I clicked on the first link. For a second, I thought I’d just clicked on a virus: the page was black and red, and words like “anal” and “titties” flashed across the screen. On one corner of the page, a flashing box invited me to “Meet Horny Singles in My Area,” and I saw a girl who didn’t look much older than I was, touching herself and pushing out her lips. But what really grabbed my attention was the penis. It was huge and hard and red and didn’t seem to be attached to anything, as if it were its own entity, and it seemed to be coming out of the screen. Soon, it would burst through my computer and land on my lap, flopping around like a stranded fish. I reeled back, revolted, and a second later, without even closing the page, I slammed my laptop shut.

  For a long time, I just sat on my bed, l
ooking at my closed laptop, the image of the penis engraved in my vision, like one of those floaters in the eye that move around when you blink. Then I opened my laptop again. I went quickly back to the web and tried a different site at random. Again the flashing images, the ads, a GIF of a man fucking a woman in the ass. But I tried to ignore all of it and scrolled down the page to the videos, each one displaying a man and a woman (sometimes more), in various sexual positions. Just to avoid looking at the GIF on the sidebar, I clicked on a video and let it fill up the screen, blocking out all else.

  It was filmed in the gym of what looked like someone’s house, and the storyline was that this young, hot guy was feeling out of shape (ironically), and his best friend’s shapely blond wife had come over to teach him some yoga positions. I knew people didn’t watch porn for the story, but the ridiculousness of the dialogue and the artificiality of the acting still made me giggle. I was interested, though, curious to see how their flirting and not-so-subtle physical contact as they went about their yoga session would lead to all-out sex. There was no transition to speak of. I wasn’t prepared. One moment she was showing him the downward dog, the next she had his dick in her mouth. Again with the penises! I shut my laptop.

  Over the next few days, I had watched a lot of porn. Always at night. Always after I was done chatting with Martin. But it wasn’t as if I were getting sexual pleasure out of it. No, I was watching the videos as a kind of research. I studied their faces as they did it, the way the men’s features would grow coarse and red and ugly, as if they were lifting something really heavy or pushing something into the ground, the way the women would roll their eyes back or close them, and sometimes tear up, especially if they were getting fucked from behind. When they screamed and moaned, I listened for signs of faking, and generally detected it. I especially liked to watch the people’s interactions leading up to the sex. It was strange, but in the short time it took them to take off their clothes before the fucking, they always seemed so awkward and nervous around each other, sometimes even frightened, as if looking into each other’s eyes and talking were the scariest thing about this whole experience.