They lasted two and a half years, existing to each other only on Tuesdays they made outings, hikes that she took in old oversized boots of Charlie’s until he brought her a new pair, mail-ordered to his office, the length of her feet guessed perfectly by how he remembered them on his dash. She told him what she was reading, what it made her think and feel, and he gave her the names of things. Cirrus, ponderosa, osprey. He was working on a paper, alternatives to parachutes, a frame not unlike a bicycle. Once she mentioned that she loved him and he nodded as one does at a child who has made an understandable mistake.
In the Angeles National Forest they ate sandwiches she’d made up high on granite ridges, or down in view of the pool of a waterfall, everything they could see coated in moss that ranged from olive to sylvan, everything they could touch changed by water. As though his vision could cut through the covering of green to the flat, dry places where he might press her down and unbutton her ill-fitting clothing, he had a strong sense of where to deviate from the trail. He had been a Boy Scout, he never let her forget, and seemed almost to wish for the minor disaster that he might cope with in a programmatic way. When she took a deep, crooked step into a sudden concavity in their path and cried out a little, he insisted on a series of tests that would diagnose any sprain or fracture. It was almost, she thought, like he wanted to see her compromised, but then she ignored it, that beginning of hatred, banished it.
There was a line from a poem she wanted to understand, and on a day her life felt possible she repeated it aloud as they passed from shade to sun. “‘Except for us the total past felt nothing when destroyed.’” “Total nonsense,” he said, laughing. “I wouldn’t buy a used bike from your friend Wallace Stevens.” Their infatuation was not with what they made together but an astonishment at their differences, how far each had to travel even to reach the other’s thinking. On the drive back he was silent except to point out a circling eagle. There was no one on the road, serpentine curves dictated by mountains, and he was already, she refused to see, halfway gone.
IN THEIR SECOND NOVEMBER SHE violated their terms, unspoken rules he’d made her suss out like the inclinations of an animal, where not to scratch or press. Fay had called him at home, and he was punishing her, and she was not going to be punished. It was remarkable how easy it was to decide. It made her whistle, songs she’d known long before him, in the shower and out riding Lloyd, bright, vicious.
Her crime had transpired in thirty seconds, less. A slow shift, few orders of liquor, no one on the piano, everything already wiped down twice. She was in a mood, or a mood was in her. It was a change other people could notice. Her sentences were faster, or they took three ways to the same point, and her usual six o’clock gin, no ice, no tonic, had no effect. There was a story she wanted to tell him, a pilot who had used the word gargoyle when he meant argyle. You wouldn’t believe her in this gargoyle sweater, he had said. It was as if the alcohol couldn’t find purchase in the channels of her body. She was more interested in mirrors than usual, the pocket of hip visible at the crook of her overalls. When her mind felt sharpest was when she most wanted it obliterated: the thoughts rendered null by his body behind her, the mouth that would speak them stuffed with a pillow.
She called him at home.
The sense she had, the sense he’d given her, was that his wife did not exist, and so she had actually not considered the possibility of her voice, her good evening. Somehow she asked for him, whether he was in. Immediately she wanted to sever the connection to that room where his wife stood—she imagined it as yellow, she imagined a wedding ring on a dish-soaped finger—and never think of it again. The babel of the bar behind her, she followed the first idea that came to her and didn’t wait for an answer. Are you happy with the overall condition of your appliances, she had said, and then she hung up.
He had not come in on her day off, no call since then, no letter taped to her window predawn that began Dear Bess Rainy or To Whom It May Concern, Pertaining to the Matter of the Hole in Your Bucket. Charlie took her shift when Fay asked, the first request of this kind, and slid the car keys down the bar. “All I require is that you don’t die,” she said. “If you die, I’ll kill you.” Fay kissed her goodbye on the mouth and slid the metal loop onto her ring finger.
She would not be punished; his absence was not that if she failed to note it. Los Angeles appeared through the windshield sooner than it should have, buildings with rounded corners of milky glass windows, neon arrows that curved, an hour and fifteen flat. She’d gone ninety most of the way, smoking her sister’s Luckies.
Under an eight-foot-wide donut mounted on a twenty-foot pole she parked, the truck at a sharp angle in the painted lines, its wheels still fixed in a turn. Nobody knows where I am, she thought, walking into the diner, and it was a sharp, chamfered kind of thrill. After two cups of coffee she switched to liquor. She was wearing one of two dresses she owned, sleeveless dark green linen with buttons down the middle and a tie belt she knotted.
He looked at her first but she returned it three times over.
His name was Raymond and he was closer to her age, not handsome or charming but clearly observant of people who were, their habits and gifts, and he came over when she smiled. A comb in his back pocket, Korea tags down his chest, dark blue felt jacket buttoned once at the neck. She could smell the starch coming off his shirt and it was a taste in her mouth alongside the rye. Removing his pocketknife was a nervous habit and he showed her all the different parts, describing the benefits of a blade’s shape, testing the point on his index finger. She had little to say, only his face to watch. He suggested his apartment, and on this point she remained noncommittal.
“I’d love to see your car,” she said.
But the quickness of her feeling, the competing voices of the coffee and whiskey, had caught up with her, and the whole time in his front seat she felt like her mouth was a loan, a borrowed thing whose limits and quirks she didn’t know yet. Even as it occurred she was forgetting it, the hairy knees, the moth-eaten military blanket, the eight-ball gearshift in her spine. She cried once but covered it with a sound that meant the opposite.
It was the first time someone put a hand on her throat, and also the last. “I thought I was paying,” he explained after. “I apologize,” she said, buttoning her dress, not knowing for what. His car was out of the lot before hers was unlocked.