Spoiler! :
I’m thinking about her face again, but I am troubled that I cannot actually see it in my mind. Instead, I feel it, like a dream where the specifics are muddled and the letters are squirming on the page but I know what I should be seeing. If I try to construct her face, the words I scrape together to lean on each other like a house of cards are not necessarily pretty. I conceive things such as--a sort of wide face--flat cheekbones that led into her sleepy Russian eyes--a nubile, almost boyish body whose slenderness defined the bone of her elbow and acromion--soft, thin hands. Are these ragged words supposed to be beautiful?
Yes.
With all my heart, yes.
We first met three years ago, through a friend of mine, at a little bar that served absinthe. I was watching the bartender, an older woman with dark Hispanic hair and hard skin, and I was fascinated at the way she handled dripping fire in the preparation of the drink and slapped down bare palms to extinguish stray flames that would have otherwise consumed the lifeblood of the more faint-hearted. My friend, Martin, tapped me on the shoulder, and I looked over and was awestruck when I saw her.
“Jack,” Martin said, “this is Aileen. Aileen, Jack. She's my cousin. She’s been staying with me for a bit while her place in Ohio gets fumigated.”
Aileen smiled and demurely extended a hand. Her fingers were slender, stuck out straight, like a child’s handshake or a woman’s indication that she expected a gentle grip. I took her hand and shook, our fingers cupping lightly about the ridge. Please be patient with me and my examination of her hands. It was surely from the beginning that my focus on her pretty hands began its almost perverse existence.
“Termites,” she said.
“I’m sorry?” I said.
“It happens.”
It took me a moment to tiptoe back through the words and realize where our intentions and our words had intersected. By then, the moment was gone. My small cup of absinthe was waiting for me and I nearly knocked it over with a wayward elbow.
“Would you like something?” I asked her.
“I already ordered,” Aileen said.
“You did? I must have been oblivious.”
She smiled. “Like a moth to a flame.”
I picked up the delicately small glass and lifted it to my lips and caught a dusky scent. I swallowed a sip and felt licorice smoke worm up into the base of my nose and set it aflame. My eyes widened as I exhaled fire.
“Potent, no?” Martin said and sipped at his vodka.
I coughed and nodded. I gestured to the bartender to start preparing another round for me. As I was taking another mouthful of the drink, Aileen asked what I did for a living.
Martin answered for me, “He’s a writer.”
“Oh really?”
“Well, it’s what I do,” I said. “But it’s not what earns my living so much as what keeps me living.”
Aileen pursed her lips. “And now two roads diverge in a wood. Which conversation piece should we follow?”
“Neither of them,” Martin said. “Jack won’t tell you much about himself, anyway. I hardly know a damn thing about what he does and I’ve wasted more time in dead-end questions than I have hearing what he has to say about his secret life.”
“Well, that’s because you’re too brash,” Aileen said. “Who is going to talk to you about the glint of light on broken glass?” She turned and said, “So what do you write?”
“Fiction. Poetry. Events and all the things that make up our lives and the truths we never have time to acknowledge as we live it. The kind of things that come to my head when it’s already too late.”
“Just anything?”
“I use probably everything. The woman at the bar, we’ll see her again. Martin’s manly brashness, we’ll definitely see it crop up like a weed that I’ll pluck out. This stool--” I wobbled the wooden stool underneath me with four legs, one shorter than the rest, and oxblood padding “--is now part of my life. And you. I certainly hope I’ll see you again.”
“Perhaps you will,” Aileen said. The bartender finished preparing the second absinthe and slid it toward me just as I was finishing my first. Aileen’s hand slipped forward and touched the new glass with a white finger. “May I?”
When I nodded, she lifted the glass like a libation and swallowed a sip. I could almost see the smoke whorling from her lips as she exhaled.
Martin reluctantly found an excuse to leave Aileen and me alone that night, after I had cornered him in the bathroom and made awkward promises. As we left the bar, Martin said that he had to meet a girl at a bar on the other side of town and would appreciate having the apartment alone for the next few hours. He looked at Aileen and me with the insinuated question.
In a brief alarm, I forgot our agreement and almost asked if he could stay a little longer or delay the appointment or cancel it completely. Panic seized my butterfly heart and drowned it in my gut and dissolved my resolve. My desperation must have shown because he gave me a quizzical look.
“Sure,” Aileen said. Then she glanced at me, and I went into a fit of nervous coughing. Perhaps a look was shared between them; as soon as I recovered, she took me by the elbow and led me down the nighttime street. Her slender fingers curved about my forearm and gave me a squeeze. “This is all right, no?” she asked.
“This is all right,” I said, clearing my throat.
“So now that you’ve had time to acknowledge it, what was the truth of our first meeting?” Aileen asks hypothetically.
The question takes me aback. Immediate shame for the sentimental lines I had used rushes to my cheeks. Just knowing I had said such contrived words haunts me. Whenever my mind peruses our past, that conversation rears its narcissus head and I stare into its likeness, utterly entranced by that image, until I tumble in and drown.
“That you caught me on a good day,” I answer.
“What are you like on a bad day?”
“A ghost.”
“Like me?”
“No, you’re just a figment. Words and phrases planted by me on the imagined likeness of you. You’re not actually saying these things.”
“I see. Well, what I meant was: you caught me on a good day, too.”
If she truly thought herself a ghost, then perhaps I would revise her words, soften the consonants, and call her ethereal.
My older sister, Janine, first met her after I had whispered matrimonial hints in accidental flutters of cluttered words and reddening cheeks over the phone. At the first mention of it, Janine drove the eight hours into the city and demanded to meet this woman.
Aileen still lived in Ohio, and we would frequently visit each other when our mundane obligations allowed. As Janine and I waited in the restaurant for Aileen to navigate traffic, we looked out the window into a blue-gray harbor. I do not recall what small talk we made in the meantime while she sipped water and I drank a scotch. Small talk was always a difficult thing for me. The exercises of little pleasantries and asking bites of disinterested questions and offering morsels of flavorless answers wore me out to no end. Thankfully, Janine knew this and kept her silence.
But this memory was not constructed for Janine’s sake. This little diorama in my mind has been preserved for that moment when I, before recognition, saw Aileen weaving through the crowd, leaving a wake of air and lightness. That moment of breath when I saw without knowing and felt without thinking and wondered if Aileen would be offended by my eyes following the motions of an unknown woman who passed like an evening star.
Janine laughed at me and said, “I assume that’s her?” Then added, “I hope that’s her.”
She saw me through the window, tucked a thread of hair behind her ear, and waved at me. Her fingers grasped the air as she called me back to her from miles above the earth. She trotted up and through the doors and came to stand next to me. She said to Janine, “Nice to finally meet you. I’m Aileen.”
Janine shook her hand and gave me an overt wink.
Aileen went for a walk one night.
Before she left, she turned off the air conditioner and made certain all the lights and faucets were off. She drew the curtains and fastened the gaps so no one could peer into her home when it was empty. Then she locked the door and slipped her keys into the usual pocket and walked away forever.
A neighbor reported that he saw her walking down the street towards the lake, whistling a catchy little tune that glissaded through unseeable fields.
The night Aileen and I first met and walked the town must have been similar to the night of her last walk. I like to believe that, alone on the dusk roads of Ohio, she bent her arm and stuck out her elbow, as if she were arm-in-arm with me, and her other hand--the lithe fingers pale in the winter air and the fingernails as glossy as porcelain--was placed on the opposite’s forearm with mortal tenderness.
That is a rough pantomime of how we walked together that first night, having known each other for a scant two hours, with her forearm looped into my elbow and fingers laid across my sleeve.
It was two or three o’ clock on a Saturday night. The city was still pulsing, but we navigated away from the lights and found a strip of sidewalk near a string of residences. The sewer grates spat upwards smoky pillars that reached for us with wispy fingers as we passed. The occasional lights of first floor windows bathed us and we peeked in out of curiosity to see warm, little dogs scurrying across golden floorboards and pictures on mantles reflecting upon the room with etched smiles. Aileen pointed out an intimate couple in the darkness and snickered and tried to get me to look, but I averted my eyes and hurried on.
She would stop at some windows and seem mesmerized at times. I waited patiently and held my tongue until her mind happened to return. It was after she broke such spells and moved onward that she pointedly asked me about my writing to know about the twiddly parts that knocked together in my mind.
“Tell me more about what you said,” she said, “about the way bits and details of your life come back.”
“Everything’s part of a theme,” I told her. “The most essential job one can do in establishing your past is the identification of themes and patterns. To link it all together with a thread is the only way you can stay sane and put each blink of life in its place. So then when I am writing and I need to enter the bedrooms and sitting rooms and gardens of my memory, I know what is where so I can take it. Each thing I have known became something I owned and put into its place in my past. And each thing I wrote was something I gave away. As much as I want to own a precious bit of nostalgia for myself, it is impossible to be entirely selfish in the process of writing. And it’s only at the end that I am terrified to realize just how much will never belong to me again.” I paused. “I’m sorry, I’m just rambling now.”
She shook her head. “It’s all very beautiful when you say it. You’re so earnest. I’m not used to having earnest conversations.” We walked onward for a bit before she said, “At first, I thought that hearing you talk this way should be scary. That it’s weird in an unacceptable way. But it’s not. It’s refreshing. Like breaking the ice with a sledgehammer.”
“Maybe it’s just because I’ve got so few friends. You think I would ever say anything like this to Martin?”
She laughed. “He’s nice, but a little hard to be around sometimes.”
“Nice, but difficult. That’s appropriate.”
At that moment, she became distracted and gazed into an empty flat, lit by a single floorlamp. The walls were bare and unpainted and the entire thing devoid of life.
“The rooms in your mind must be a crowded affair,” Aileen said, stepping forward to look into the room. “Voices, thoughts, a clutter of things--even if you’re always losing pieces little by little.” Her frosty breath danced upward along the edge of the glass. “Where will you keep me?” Aileen asked, without turning.
“Everywhere. You will walk with me through my memories just like tonight.”
She looked at me and asked, “Will you give me away?”
“I won’t want to. But I know you’ll leave me someday.”
Was that really what I said? No, I could not have been that forward that soon. Perhaps I am confusing it with another night we spent together. Let me straighten my notes, stake out landmarks in time as surely as a charted river, and revisit this night at a later time.
When Dad destroyed all of Mom’s photos, my sister was more distraught than I was. I didn’t really know what to feel. Janine was crying, on her knees, unintelligible words spilling from her mouth. At one moment, she was running her fingers through the scraps of color that littered Dad’s coffee table. At the next, she had her hands on Dad’s knees, clutching at his pant legs and twisting them, as if trying to wring an answer from him.
“Why?” she sobbed. “You had no right.”
Dad remained as we found him after we had let ourselves in--seated in his easy chair, with a stack of photo albums on the floor beside him. The tips of his wrinkled fingers were red from tearing every last photograph of Mom into shreds. He was perfectly composed, though. The torn photos had been piled neatly on the coffee table until Janine lost control and wept over them and pushed the scraps around as if she could reassemble the images through willpower. But it was too late. Mom’s 45-year-old nose was eclipsed by a disproportionately large 58-year-old eye and matched up poorly with a background of Niagara Falls, where she hadn’t been since her honeymoon at 26, when she was young and gushing with tumultuous love.
“Answer me!” Janine said.
Dad turned his head and looked at her. “This is the only way I can remember her now,” he said. “The photographs just get in the way of the memories.”
Janine stared at him for a moment. Her fingers balled into fists, and she slammed them down on the carpet. I knelt beside her and put an arm over her shoulders. She looked at me. “He’s crazy, Jack. He’s finally snapped and he’s gone crazy.”
“He’s not crazy,” I said. “Come on, sit down.” I helped her stand.
Janine pushed my hands away. “I need a drink,” she said, strutting to the kitchen. She disappeared around the corner and we could hear her noisily opening and closing cabinets.
I eased myself into a chair as if it would crumble under too much weight. My hands folded around each other and I looked at the table. The scraps of photographs stared back at me. A disembodied Cheshire smile sat on top.
“Dad.”
“Jack.”
“Why’d you do it?”
“I already said. I want to remember her. As she was. As she is. In my memories.”
“What does that mean?”
“Where’s the goddamn rum?” Janine cried. Her tone suggested she didn’t want an answer, just a release. A cupboard slammed shut.
A silence followed and I wasn’t sure if Dad was going to answer my question. He had sunk into thought and it seemed like he had forgotten I was there. I cautiously stood and walked into the kitchen to find Janine on her knees, rummaging through a cabinet.
“It’s over here,” I said, grabbing a bottle of rum from next to the microwave.
“Ugh, thank God,” she said and stood and reached into another cabinet for a glass.
“Get me one, too.”
Janine came over and set down two glasses and I poured.
“We’ve got to do something about him, Jack,” my sister whispered. Her eyes cast a furtive glance at the next room. “He’s becoming weirder and weirder. He loved Mom, Jack. He loved her and wouldn’t have done that terrible thing to her if he were sane.”
“He didn’t do it to her, he did it to some pictures.” I capped the bottle and took a drink.
“Which was all we had left of her,” Janine nearly screeched. “Us. What about us?”
“I’m sure he’s got a perfectly good reason.”
“What? That the voices told him to do it? We should put him in a home. Where they can watch him. Where he won’t be alone. What if he hurts himself?”
“He won’t do that. He’s fine. He’s just confused.”
“Then you talk some sense into him.”
“We’ll talk some sense into him.”
“No. No. I can’t go back in there when he’s like that. It’s just so sad. That man used to be so strong and alive. He barely goes out anymore, except to buy groceries. You go talk to him. I can’t even look at him. I’m gonna go have a smoke.” Janine pushed open the backdoor and lit a cigarette. I stayed there a moment longer, watching her through the gauzy fabric over the window as she stood with a glass of rum in one hand and a cigarette in another on the back stoop of this dingy little house. I looked around the kitchen. It was a mess in here, and I knew it wasn’t just because of Janine’s rummaging. The sink was stacked deep with dishes and a pool of acrid water sat in the bottom of the basin and strange flecks of color spotted the floor and a disarray of pots littered the stove. I was certain the fridge was nearly empty. A portrait of men without women.
I looked toward the other room. I topped off my drink and ventured back in. Dad was still sitting where I had left him, and he watched me circle his chair and sit down again. There was a long silence. I avoided his gaze and sipped my drink.
“Jack,” he said. “Do you remember your first car?”
I nodded. “A Toyota Camry.”
“It was a good car, right?”
“Yeah. It was Grandpa’s first. Then yours. Then mine. Two hundred thousand miles on it.”
Dad smiled. “Can’t find another car like it, nowadays, right?” When I nodded, he added, “It was a piece of shit.” Dad handed a photograph to me. It was of a much younger version of me standing next to the Toyota. The black paint was a foggy gray, the fender was mismatched after a series of mishaps, and the seats were hideous, tawny blobs. Something reminiscent of racing stripes ran along the sides.
I chuckled. “I guess so. But I was so proud of it.”
Dad leaned forward and jabbed the photo with his finger. “That car in the photo is not the car in your memory. It’s not the car you kissed blushing girls in. It’s not the car you picked up your prom date in. What was her name?”
“Jessica.”
“It’s not the car that Jessica saw.”
I glanced up at Dad. The lines on his face were accentuated in the dusty light. He watched me--waiting.
I asked him, “What’s Mom like in your memory?”
He closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. “Infinite.”
My heart thudded and my skin tingled. I looked down at the picture of the gangly teen in my hands. After a few tries of my tumbling fingers, I tore the picture in two.
“What the hell are you doing?” Janine said, standing in the doorway.
As I stared, dumbfounded, in the corner of my eye I noticed Dad wink at me.
Jessica was a strange specimen. Nervous and insecure and always throwing herself into new foolish endeavors as if to make up for it. And I never loved her more than when she fell into herself and thrashed on the shores of her consciousness like a fledgling too far from the nest and unable to turn back but too afraid to carry on. She sought her answers in the words of the immortals and talked of Goethe and Mozart and Hemingway. She confused herself with logic and condemned herself her thoughts at the same time that she praised humanity’s chaos. She gazed into the abyss and it gazed back at her.
It was then that I kissed her in the car for the last time. A kiss that was immortal and perhaps gave her permission to pursue another endeavor. Our relationship concluded soon afterward. I protested, I tried to woo her, I made uninvited calls and visits. My phone calls became increasingly pathetic. I began to prepare bland notecards and contrived scripts. The last message I left her was just a grocery list. Cucumbers. Bread. Eggs.
When she left town for good, I saw the conviction in her eyes, and I knew what a pitiable daydream I had become. It was all I could do to not turn and flee in disgrace. Our last goodbye was civil and--I always tell myself--mutual.
I still have the mementos from that relationship--in a shoebox or a basket somewhere. Scribbled notes and inconsequential bits that I can’t help but imagine being manipulated in her hands. Palms smoothing out the paper. Fingers tying a ribbon. She gives herself a paper cut and recoils and sticks the injured knuckle between her lips to staunch the blood. Her pencil rolls away, and its squat shadow, cast by a desk lamp, lengthens and then is swallowed at the edge of the light like a memory dissipated.
“I can’t believe you’re provoking Dad,” Janine said at a coffee shop later.
“I’m not provoking him,” I said, folding my hands around the warm cup. It was late October, a little brisk, but we were sitting outside so Janine could smoke. She tapped her cigarette into the ash tray and tilted her head back to exhale upwards, but the obstinate wind carried it into my face anyway.
“Then what the hell was that all about?”
“I just--you wouldn’t understand.”
“What, is this some kind of guy thing?”
“He’s just going through some things,” I said vaguely.
“Are you going crazy, too?”
“He’s not crazy, Janine.”
“Are you?” she demanded.
I sipped my coffee and stared into the swirling pool. The rising steam hurt my eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice softening. “This isn’t a good time for anyone.”
“What? No, I’m fine.”
“You still haven’t talked about it.”
“About what?”
Janine paused for a second, and I could see that she was debating answering. Finally, she said, “Aile--”
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
“Okay.”
We stayed there a while longer. When I finished my drink, a familiar pair of hands with tanned, hard skin lining ropey tendons reached down and took my cup away.
Aileen was found in the winter lake six days after her disappearance.
I didn’t want to read the details but my morbid eyes were inexplicably drawn to line after line. Surely, this wasn’t what she had expected--to be found by some squealing children and be hauled onto shore, all blue and pallid, by several strange hands. Her suicide couldn’t have been premeditated. I refused to believe that she was considering her death when we kissed.
“Was it an accident?” I ask her.
Aileen doesn’t reply. Of course.
“What were you doing out there?”
Still no answer. I will her to tell me.
“Across the water on a still winter day,” she begins, “the slightest sound carries so far. I wanted to see the things that I knew were out there. Out there in the dark. A dog barking. Some people laughing. Crickets. Cars. Stars. Darkness. It was all so far away that it hurt to be so removed. I couldn’t stand to be on the outside looking in anymore. I couldn’t wait any longer.”
“What are you talking about?”
No reply.
I’ve lost all ability to bring Aileen’s face to sharp focus because I destroyed the pictures of her earlier this year. I was sitting calmly at the counter, sipping a whiskey and flipping endlessly through a stack of newspapers when it was decided. Slipping from the stool, I went to the other room and came back minutes later with a stack of papers and photos and odds and ends as if they were documents I had just remembered needed attending.
Receipts, greeting cards, photographs, and other mementos dropped on the counter and Aileen’s face smiled up at me from those fractioned seconds. I flipped through them to make sure all was in order and then dropped the entire stack in the trash. The plastic bag slumped under the weight and then exhaled to a stop.
As I went to mount the stool to resume my absent drinking and absent newspaper, it rocked on its uneven legs and I slipped. My hand darted out to catch myself, but I knocked my glass from the counter. It tipped forward and spilled onto the stool and shattered on the ground. I looked down at the liquid absorbing into the red padding of the stool, darkening it to oxblood. What thoughts transpired? How had the last ten minutes been registered in my brain? Barely at all, I think. Numbly, at best. I walked across the bits of glass to retrieve a broom and dustpan.
Did this happen before or after Dad eradicated Mom from photographic history? Who was following whom?
I used to have such a sharp mind for the accumulation of things and memories, but lately it’s gone all to pieces like the photographs themselves. My notecards are a jumble of fiction and non-fiction, fantasy and memory, and I continue to rearrange them, admire them, then reorder them because keeping a bookshelf in alphabetical order is impossible work and almost never aesthetically or tactilely pleasing. The most profound arrangement, I have found, is that of looping, arabesque, Ouroboros memories. The self-chasing, self-devouring pursuit that leaps from place to place and time to time on the heels of a common theme. The kind of linked, twisting caverns and abysses evoked by a simple memento.
My penchant for collection began at an early age. In my childhood, I obsessed over facts of nature. The Portuguese Man-of-War is a siphonophore, like a totem pole of children in a trench coat, and may reach up to fifty meters in length. The pitcher plant ensnares the greediest members of the animal kingdom--from peasant insects to royal birds. Humans are the most dangerous animal.
I collected rocks, as well, though I knew little about them. My clacking collection drawer consisted of white, rugged granite that looked like snow leopards, with little flecks that shined like obsidian. Or smooth triangles of shale that scraped underfoot with sounds of the beach. Or silly pieces of broken glass that had been roughened by the elements and I added them to my rock drawer, too, thinking them to be chips of emeralds and sapphires.
But most of all, I collected mementos.
My first crush, Elisa, wore a butterfly hair clip when we met in grade school. It was this little pink plastic thing with a maw of teeth that clamped her thick, brown hair when she kissed my cheek underneath the desks one day during a drawing activity. We were to choose a partner and draw his or her portrait, and Elisa and I were matched up. She was thrilled because, for some reason, I was known as an artist in the class, but really all I knew was the inverted-pear-shape of the head, the relative placement of the facial necessities, and how to hold my tools in a steady hand.
At one point, when I couldn’t find my pink crayon, I paused and went searching for it on the floor, scuffling around on hands and knees on the dusty laminate. Elisa joined the search and there we were, two children scrambling under the desks and tables, amongst a jungle of steel bamboo, catching each other’s glances with fingers brushing fingers and shoulders bumping shoulders.
When we failed to find it, she assured me it was okay and that I could use a different color. But I insisted and detailed her subtle complexion and delicate lips and her favorite pink hair clip that all required discreet shades of pink. I reached up and touched the butterfly on the side of her head. She blushed (another use for the pink crayon), and told me I was sweet. A slant of sunlight flashed across her face as she leaned in and kissed my cheek then looked away, blushing madly, and tried to hide her embarrassment behind a leg of a desk. Elisa and I continued our portrait drawing underneath another table, and I used what were later called abstract lines and sensitive shadows to complete her image.
The pink crayon was never found; it disappeared into the ether, having fulfilled its purpose. When she moved away the next year, I made plans to run away with her and sell my drawings to pay our way and she only laughed and put her hand on mine. At our last meeting, Elisa gave me that butterfly clip, and it is still in my possession to this day, though the portrait and the girl are long gone--vanished like some beautiful creature into the wild green.
Perhaps walking with Aileen on our first night reminded me of that day in grade school. We were lost and searching and in a world of our own, among the high-rise jungle and blind windows, and our shoulders were touching and our hands were shy and our eyes danced with each other, sometimes coming together and sometimes counterpoint. I’d like to believe that we were both looking for the same thing--the same lost pink crayon that we were shuffling around like moles to find.
We came upon an art installment: a tree composed of molded plates of aluminum with long, impossibly spindly branches and leaves that were flattened, shimmering strips of aluminum dangling from fishing wire. This was the kind of thing that changed seasonally on landmark street corners and the fenced-in patches of grass that passed for parks.
Aileen laughed and pushed her way into the middle of it with the metal tic-tac-scratching against each other as she moved. The glow of streetlights and neon signs shimmered and crackled around her like firecracker dust.
“So what do you do?” I asked.
“Bleed to death slowly,” she answered. “I’m a telemarketer. That damned stranger who knows your first and last name and your phone number and calls during dinner, during sex, during movies.” Aileen ran a hand down the tree trunk, tracing a path through the thin frost that had gathered there. “‘Hello, may I speak with Mr. Alex Oya--Oha...yashi?’” She chuckled to herself. “Sometimes I can hear other people laughing in the background. Kids giggling. The sounds of chatter, especially around the holidays. They hate me for bothering them. They just missed a joke that they’ll have to go back and ask the others to explain and it won’t be the same the second time.”
“Telemarketer. I’m sorry.” I gave her a wry smile.
“We all do what we have to do.”
“So I’ve always wondered. Do you prefer when they play along with you or when they cut you off politely? Because it's not as if you actually enjoy peddling these things, I imagine.”
“When they play along. Because then, I can pretend that I’m just his friend, excited about something and spreading the news. Like ‘there’s a clearance sale down at the bookstore’ and ‘you could save so much on insurance if you get the same coverage as me.’” Aileen laughed. “I sound like a commercial, but I guess that’s all I am. Usually they change the channel on me, but that’s fine. But the longer I’m on the phone with someone who plays along is less time I’ll be getting yelled at by some guy who told Mr. X from Company Y to put him on the no-call list.”
I smiled. “Looks like I’ll have to give my next annoying telemarketer the time of day.”
“That’s right. You never know.” She winked at me. “It could be me checking up on you.”
“A blind voice distorted over a phone line--that’s no job for someone like you.”
“That’s no job for anybody with a soul, but it pays the bills. The termites were a blessing, really, letting me get out of town for a week.”
“When do you go back home?”
“Tomorrow.”
“So you’ve been in New York all week and I never met you?” I parted the aluminum leaves and walked towards her.
“I guess so. What would you have done if we had met earlier?”
“Get to know you. Make you laugh. Show you what I’m writing.” Impetuousness took the momentum and tumbled recklessly forward. “Maybe fall in love with you.”
My answer caused her to freeze and then blush madly and look away. “Well, aren’t you the romantic. Good thing we didn’t meet earlier, because I can’t do love right now.”
“Why not?”
Aileen hid her face on the other side of the tree’s trunk. “I don’t know. But I know that I can’t manage it. I just don’t have the energy to be a good person. And now it’s back to work on Monday and my carefree days are over.” She wrapped a hand--a delicate hand--around the tree trunk and swung around it like she were Gene Kelly. “Ah!” she cried out and let go so quickly that she stumbled and fell into my arms. For a breathless moment we stayed like that and she looked up at me and our faces were inches apart. “Oh,” was all she said. Her raised hand caught my eye and I saw a jagged gash blossoming red blood through the arcs of her palm where an unfinished metallic edge must have raked her skin. She looked down at her hand and, with more severity, repeated, “Oh.”
“I live a few blocks that way,” I said, gesturing. Then, realizing I still held onto her, I let go and stepped back. “We should probably clean that up before you catch every disease in the city.”
Aileen nodded and stared at her wound. “Yeah. I--thanks.” She numbly took small steps in my direction, and we walked together toward my home.
It's like there's life behind his words.
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