What Could Have Been

“Let’s go up to school and shoot some baskets,” B. W. offered when he saw me moping around the house, watching a talk show about wives who had affairs with other women. Michelle was up at school helping decorate the cafeteria to look like the retro restaurant in Pulp Fiction, which she had seen seven times that previous fall and claimed had changed her life; my parents were getting in the last of their visit with Candy and Arturo before they ventured across the Texas Panhandle and into Nuevo Mexico; Lauren was in her room with headphones on, listening to Michael W. Smith, a hunky Christian singer with a perpetual five o’clock shadow and eyes that smoldered out of one of the posters over her bed in such a way that they might evoke more complex feelings in young girls than simple devotion to God.

“You sure?” I asked him. “I know you’ve got other things you’d rather do. And this is pretty interesting stuff.” It looked like two of the wives were getting ready to fight—or kiss.

“Dad, this is trash,” he said.

“Right. But interesting trash.”

“I’ve got to get out of this house,” he said in a stage whisper. “And clearly you need to too. The sooner the better.”

The gym was cold when we got there and smelled of ammonia; the cleaning staff had apparently given it a once-over the night before, the obligatory cleaning during the Christmas break. The floor, too, had been waxed, because it was both glossy and slippery.

“I can see myself in the shine,” B. W. said, dribbling out to center court. I would have thought he was too young to remember those commercials.

“You just want to shoot, or you want to play one-on-one?”

“Let’s warm up and then play a game or two.”

We dribbled to the west basket. “You doing this for fun or to humor your old dad?”

“A little of both.” He sank one from the top of the key and watched as it bounced almost straight back to him, propelled by his beautiful backspin. We shot for about ten minutes until we were warmed up, and then we played three games of one-on-one, the three games necessary because I won the first on the strength of half a dozen deep outside shots that fell before B. W. was convinced he was going to have to guard me out there. B. W. won the other two, as he should have; he’d been playing better ball than I since he was fourteen, and at first that was a hard thing to swallow, although I suppose if one has to lose something to someone, to lose to a talented son at least means you can take pride in his accomplishments.

And, I thought as we dribbled, laughing, over to the bleachers after the last game, all this could be lost—the simple pleasure of a basketball game with a dutiful son, the joy of seeing children blossom into adults with skills and talents that mark them as special, the wordless rapport possible with those who share the blood coursing through your veins.

Afterward, we thought about showers, but the locker rooms would have been as cold as the gym, since no one had been in to turn on the heat, and so we decided just to sit and cool off a little before going outside.

“Hey, Dad, how you holding up these days?” B. W. wanted to know after we’d sat for awhile, panting in silence. “Isn’t it hard not seeing Michael?”

I nodded.

“I’m sure it’ll change someday. He’s not gonna be like this forever. He’ll come back to the family. I mean, he did want to see Gram and Poppa when they got into town, and he’s been seeing Grandma and Grandpa Hooks every week or so. Grandma said sometimes he and Gloria come over for lunch on Sundays.”

“He always did love roast beef,” I said. We used to go over to the Hooks’ every Sunday after church until the kids got too old or we got too busy or something of the sort, and it became occasional instead of regular. Maybe not all traditions were bad; one could do worse than roast beef.

“I think everything’s going to be all right,” he said, and he waited for me to agree. “We’re just going through some rough times right now. As a family, I mean.”

“You may be right,” I said. “I hope so.” Then I laughed—more of a disgusted snort, really. “Your mom says that Phillip One Horse and Michael have been spending some time together. I can’t get close to either of them, but they’ve managed to find each other. Crazy.”

B. W. rose to his feet. “Should we check up on Mom before we go?”

“We’re not going to make a very good impression on the other folks there,” I said, indicating our sodden, stinking selves.

“I know,” he said. “But she said she was worried that everything might not be ready.” I don’t know how much he knew, but B. W. was a keen observer. “This dance is pretty important to her, you know.”

“Yes,” I said. “It is.” I took a deep breath, let it out slowly, tried not to think about walking into a room where my wife and my potential lover were hanging crepe paper. “Okay. Let’s go over and see how things are going.” We put on our sweats and jackets and locked up the gym before walking across to the main building and into the long and cavernous hall heading to the cafeteria.

“Sure looks different with the lights out,” B. W. said, and it did. The halls that looked laboratory sterile under fluorescent light looked downright spooky. Our footsteps echoed, and if I didn’t know the walls were lined with steel lockers, I could almost imagine we were wandering into some monster’s den.

Then when we turned the corner we picked up light and music coming from the cafeteria and walked gratefully toward it. Although you may know rationally that mad killers are almost exclusively a creation of Hollywood screenwriters, it’s still hard not to imagine one creeping up on you in the iron dark. We stepped into the cafeteria, which was bright and frenetic—although not, it turned out, as bright and frenetic as it needed to be.

“Hey,” Michelle called from up a ladder where she and June Four Horse were hanging balloons. Across the way, doing something with the skirting of tables against the wall, was Samantha, who looked up, smiled, then turned back to her work. Caroline Osbourne and a few other ladies (and some duly-deputized husbands) hung banners, carried chairs, fiddled with the sound system, which was blazing “Dancing Machine,” the Jackson Five from back when Michael Jackson seemed cute and normal.

Michelle climbed down and crossed to give us head-averted hugs for the sweat impaired. “I’m so glad you’re here. We’ve got a problem. I need you to run to the City.”

“What for?” It seemed a little late to set off on the hour and a half one-way trip to Oklahoma City when the dance itself was only some hours away.

“The programs for the reunion aren’t in from the printer. They said they’d had a holdup because of a job in front of us that took longer—anyway, they’re just now finishing them up. They said we could pick them up this afternoon at four.”

I checked my watch. “Which means leaving right about now.”

“Why don’t you let me go after them?” Sam called over from her tables. “I’m not really doing anything important. I’m sure John has better things to do than fetch programs from the City.”

“That’d be real nice of you,” Michelle said in the tone of voice that means it’s decided, but then she pursed her lips and thought a moment. “Except this printer is sort of hard to find—it’s down in the Bricktown part of town that wasn’t anything but abandoned warehouses when you moved to Texas.” She looked at me as though she’d had a brilliant idea, and when she spoke, her voice was brilliant, although the joy didn’t reach her eyes: “John, maybe you ought to go with her, help her find her way.”

Sam, B. W., and I all turned to look at Michelle. Probably everyone else who heard did too. “Well,” Michelle said, meeting my gaze, “I can’t go. There’s still too much that has to be finished up here. And if you take Samantha’s car, B. W. won’t have to sit around up here all afternoon because he doesn’t have a ride home.”

“I don’t mind,” B. W. said. He looked back and forth between us. He knew something big was happening.

Michelle put her hand on my shoulder; someone who knew her less well might have even seen the movement as playful. “Please, John,” she said. “Help Samantha.” Her face was grave and her eyes bright.

I turned to look at Samantha, whose eyes were shining too, if not perhaps for the same reasons, and then back to Michelle. “Okay,” I said. I looked at her again.

Michelle nodded softly—she was sure, whatever her reasons—and wrote down the address for us. I gave B. W. my keys, answered his “See you at home” with another quiet “Okay,” and gave Michelle a quick hug when she came back.

“See you in a little while,” I said. She didn’t say anything.

Then I followed Sam out to her car, that big blue Buick Century, accepted the keys from her, and slid into the thick cushioned seat behind the wheel.

“She knows you don’t have to go with me,” Sam said as we clicked our seat belts shut. “I can find an address on my own. I’m a realtor. I find addresses all day every day.”

“Yup,” I said.

“But she’s sending you with me anyway.”

“Yup.” I started the car, and we glided out of the parking lot. It was so quiet inside the car that I could hear Samantha breathing.

“Do you know where we need to go?” she asked as I headed south out of Watonga toward the interstate.

“No idea,” I said. I laughed. It was crazy. “There’s absolutely no reason for me to be going.”

We sat in silence again as I drove south through Geary, around the curves and up the long hill leading up out of the Canadian River Valley on old Route 66. Sam was deep in thought, and I remembered from the distant past that when she was trying to solve a problem, she preferred quiet to chitchat. She’d hold it in her head like one of those Rubik’s cubes, turning it this way and that, trying to picture it from all the angles.

I looked at her there, next to me, the two of us driving away from everyone in my old life and in the direction of something I didn’t know yet. I had always wondered what it might feel like, and now that I was doing it, it was strangely unsettling, good and bad feelings mixed like volatile chemicals in the beaker that was my stomach.

“Do you think she knows that you and I might just keep going and never come back?” Sam asked, still turning things over in her mind.

“I think she knows.”

“And yet she put us in a car together.” She shook her head, turned the cube to another angle.

I nodded as I slowed to turn the big Century onto the ramp leading to the highway. The car accelerated like a Saturn V rocket—as slow as geological time at first, and then as the huge mass built up speed, like something you’d have to crash into a nearby planet to bring to a halt.

At last Sam shook her head and said, “I give up. It’ll come clear to me soon, I think. For now, I just want to enjoy being here.” She snaked her hand across the seat, found mine, and gave it an affectionate squeeze before I raised it to tune in something more appropriate on the stereo. Sam was listening to a country station, 101.9, which was playing Garth Brooks’s “Friends in Low Places,” and while I’d been known to listen to country when forced to, mostly when I was dancing to it, it was not my music of choice, certainly not the music Michelle and I listened to at night as we read or wrote. I found an oldies station, which seemed an acceptable compromise, especially when the Cars’ “Drive” came on three songs into a half hour of commercial-free light rock.

“The Cars. Remember our last dance?” she asked. “I’ve thought about it some nights, late, staring up at the ceiling, remembering your hand on the small of my back—”

She broke off as I swerved back up onto the highway, which I had neglected to pay attention to for the past few seconds and as a result failed to notice the slight curve. I laughed nervously and cleared my throat. It had become suddenly very warm in the car, and I tugged the collar of my sweatshirt to vent a little heat.

“Good to know I can still have an effect on you,” she said. “John, do you ever think about me that way?”

“Sometimes,” I said, although I immediately felt that I must say, “It’s not Michelle’s fault. She’s a wonderful lover. A wonderful wife.” Okay, that wasn’t at all awkward. “I just remember, that’s all.”

“I like the way you stick up for her,” she said. “I’ve never hated her. I’ve always been jealous. But I’ve never hated her.”

I smiled. “I wish I could say the same thing about Bill. I’ve hated him since the first time you went out with him.”

“Well,” she said, “you never liked him much to begin with. I remember of all the guys, you liked Oz the most. You said you thought Oz would always be your best friend.”

“Turns out I was right. Although I wish I’d treated Phillip better,” I said, passing a slow-moving pickup. “Maybe things could have turned out different for him if I’d been a better friend.”

“Some people are meant to amount to something,” she said, “and some never will.”

“What have I amounted to?” I asked.

“You’ve done the best you could with the hand dealt you,” she said. “You made one mistake.”

“Maybe Phillip just made one mistake,” I said.

She shook her head. This was not the way she saw the world, I guessed. There were good people and bad people. Bad people made their lives bad. Although bad things happened to good people occasionally, it was not because of who they were. That’s just how things were.

“I don’t want to argue,” she said. “Phillip is small potatoes.”

“Not to me,” I said, and now I was feeling a tightness in my gut that would shortly translate into anger. “That’s one of the things I’ve learned by coaching: People are all valuable. Anybody can make a contribution if they find their niche and develop their talents.”

“That sounds like a wonderful locker room speech,” she said, and I could feel her steering us to safer territory. “I know you’re a good coach. Would you like to keep coaching?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “My future’s a little uncertain just now.”

She smiled and laid her hand on my leg, our momentary rift mended. “Whatever you want to do is okay with me,” she said. “Johnny, can I come a little closer?”

“I’m stinking like a dog over here,” I warned her.

“I don’t care. Can I?”

My hormones screamed yes; my few still-functioning brain cells shouted no. “Not just yet,” I said. “I’d like to make this decision without undue influence.”

She nodded and gave me a mischievous grin. “And you think that if I slide over there next to you, it’s going to be harder to make?”

“Something like that,” I said. I could feel sweat beading on my forehead.

We reached the outskirts of the city, had to drop our speed down to fifty-five, began to hit a little congestion (of course, to someone from Watonga, a six-lane highway with more than three cars in sight means congestion), and looked for the buildings downtown that would signal our imminent exit—the First National Bank building, a trimmed-down version of the Empire State Building; the Liberty Tower, a featureless black rectangle; the Myriad Gardens, crowned by a circular glass greenhouse full of tropical plants where a cousin of Michelle’s had gotten married a few years back; and the Myriad itself, a collection of squares and mirrors that served as convention hall and concert venue and where Michelle and I had seen Springsteen in the early eighties, one of the holiest nights in my life.

We took a likely exit, made a right at the Myriad and went under the railroad line. We found the printer the next block over. After loading the box of programs in the trunk (and they looked great; Michelle had outdone herself on the arrangements for this thing), we began to think about grabbing a bite to eat, since neither of us had had lunch.

“Let’s go up to Twenty-third,” I suggested, and we drove up Classen Boulevard, turned left onto Twenty-third Street across from what used to be the Soul Boutique back in the seventies, and pulled through an Arby’s drive-through a few blocks west.

I ordered two beef and cheddars, two orders of potato cakes, and a mocha shake; she got a regular roast beef and a water, no ice. Then I got back onto Twenty-third headed west.

“We’re going to need some gas,” I said.

“That’s not all we’re going to need,” she said. “We need to decide what we’re going to do.” She tore little bites off her sandwich, and she licked her fingers after each one, catlike.

“There’s a Texaco,” I said, and pulled into it. “What does this thing take?”

“Gas,” she said, handing me two twenties, and I could read her frustration with me, with us, with the whole situation. I pumped what seemed like a thousand gallons into the Century and also paid for the discount car wash you get with a fill-up.

“I thought your car could use a wash,” I said. The dark blue did show road dirt. I pulled around to the wash, punched in the code, and idled forward into the wash bay until the little red stoplight signal came on. Water began to dribble, then to pound against the roof and doors and hood and windows, and then the rotating brush swooped down with a rumble, closer and closer. My body picked up the trembling, and Sam felt it too, for I looked across at her and each of us was holding our breath, and the look on our faces was mingled fear and fascination, and then she leaned toward me and put her hand on my right leg, just above the knee, and we were in each other’s arms as the world itself rumbled around us. Her fingers were in my hair and mine were slipping to her back and pulling her closer, closer. My lips found hers, and I kissed her greedily, hungrily, as though she could feed me what I lacked, as though I could ingest the years I had lost, and the water pattered against the car like it had on spring nights in my old Chevy truck back in 1975, and I could almost feel the way it could have been between us all those years.

I saw us going off to college together, myself in law school, in a practice with that mahogany desk and a corner office, saw our family at the dinner table, and of course they wouldn’t look like the kids we had now, they’d be some other kids.

I saw us in bed together, those lips on mine, as they were right now, for real, in the present.

I saw the life we never had, all the way to our twentieth high school reunion, where Michelle was decorating the cafeteria for a dance.

And then the water stopped and the dryer howled, high and mournful, and I pushed myself away from her.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I pushed her mouth away from my neck, where it had returned, and she withdrew slowly to her side of the car with a sad smile.

“Don’t be sorry,” she purred. “That was wonderful.”

I shook my head. “Yes, it was. And yes, I do. Have to be sorry, I mean. I can’t be anything but sorry. For you. For me. For the past.” I let out a breath, my hope of a different future whooshing out of my body, and then shifted out of park and eased the car forward into the flow of air howling from the dryer. The water on the windshield streaked and smeared like the brushstrokes of an Impressionist painting, like a world that could only exist on canvas.

“You’re not going to leave her,” she said, and it was clear by her tone that she could not quite believe it.

“Leave them,” I said. “But no. I’m not.”

Her hand was on my arm for a moment, then gone. “Why? Can you tell me why? I could make you happy, Johnny. We could have a good life together.”

And maybe she could, we could. For so long, I wished I could have had her, wanted a life with her. But now I just murmured, “What could have been is the greatest enemy of what is,” and when Samantha gave me a quizzical look, I said it in another way: “Twenty years is plenty long enough to mope over what might have been.”

“It could still be,” she insisted. And now there were tears in her eyes, but I suddenly saw—just as the windshield suddenly cleared with a flick of the wiper switch—that you could want something your whole life but realize in the moment of achieving your desire that it couldn’t save you the way you always thought it could, that it could in fact change you irrevocably into someone you didn’t know and would not want to be.

“I just can’t do it,” I said, the world growing clearer to me with each word spoken. “There are too many people who stand to get hurt, people who love us, people who deserve better.”

“What about what we deserve?” she asked, and I could barely understand her for the tears.

“You know,” I said gently, “I’m starting to think that I’ve gotten what I deserve. Better than I deserve. And that I should start learning to be thankful for it.”

I pulled completely out of the wash bay and up to Twenty-third Street, waiting for a break in traffic.

“She knew you wouldn’t leave her,” Sam said, realization dawning as I accelerated into the road. The cube had fallen into place. “She knew that when it was staring you flat in the face you couldn’t do it.” She turned to look at me. “That’s why she sent you.”

“Then she knew more than I did,” I said, thinking, not for the first time, about how often that was true. “Part of me wanted to take you and head for the distant horizon.” I sighed. “Part of me still does.”

“I wanted you to,” she said. “I guess part of me will always feel that way.”

“I hope not,” I said, looking across at her, slumped in the seat. “You have a family that loves you. And a husband who wants you more than he can possibly express.”

She knit her brows. “I thought you hated Bill.”

“Well,” I said. It was true that I was hard-pressed to think of a single thing I liked about him, but at last, one occurred to me: He loved this woman, and her loss had broken him in the same way I had once been broken. Finally I shook my head. “Not anymore. I’ve hated Bill Cobb for too long to no good purpose.”

She shook her head and sat silently. As we pulled up to the light at MacArthur Boulevard, I heard her repeat, “What could have been is the greatest enemy of what is.”

I nodded slowly. “Something somebody told me once.”

“Good advice.” She sighed. “If you can live up to it.”

The light turned green, and the enormous weight of the Century began to move forward. “We can,” I said. “We will.”

When we finally reached the high school after a drive full of reflective silence, Michelle’s little car sat forlorn and alone in the parking lot.

“I’ll take the programs in,” I said, popping the trunk. “Why don’t you go on home and get dressed.”

She slid across to take over the seat I’d just vacated, and I walked back to the trunk and lifted out the box of programs.

“Johnny,” she called out the window as I closed the trunk and turned for the school.

I stopped momentarily in my tracks. “Yeah,” I said.

“Michelle’s a lucky woman.”

I shook my head and found tears burning the corners of my eyes. “No,” I told her. “I’m a lucky man.”

The Century eased out of the parking lot, and I walked briskly through the silent hallways, my footsteps echoing, to the cafeteria, where Michelle sat, alone, head down, on the edge of the stage. Her shoulders were shaking, and I could see that she was crying so hard that she hadn’t heard my approach.

“Hey,” I said, and the look that spread across her face when she saw me is the look I hope to see on the face of Jesus at the moment of my death. I set the box down and headed for her like she was a finish line.

Which, of course, she was.

“I’m sorry,” I said as we stood looking at each other. “So sorry for all the pain I’ve brought on you. I can never make it up to you. Never. But I’m ready to try.”

“Oh, J. J.,” she said, taking me by the arms, feeling me as if to make sure I was really standing there. “You just have.”

And then she was in my arms, and I was swinging her through the air, light and free, and the world had never ever looked so good.

“Why did you come back?” she asked when I finally set her back down on terra firma.

I looked at her and winked. “We better run home and throw on our fancy dancin’ duds,” I said. “I don’t want to miss a minute of this dance of yours.”

She nodded and took my arm and led me out to the car, and she stared at me all the way home with a look of bliss on her face that I returned every few seconds.

I can’t remember much else about that evening except that I danced every dance with Michelle, waltzes and two-steps, twists and disco, until my feet were tender in my boots and I feared blisters.

“We don’t want to ruin you for your game,” Michelle said, leading me over to the punch bowl with her arm around my waist.

“I could care less about that stupid game,” I said, and I discovered to my surprise and instant relief that I actually meant it. We sat down in a corner far from the dance floor and observed our classmates, graying and balding, rail-thin or losing the battle against obesity, faces lined with years of life’s pain and laughter, as they danced to songs we had known when we were children—for that’s what it seemed to me we had been, children, at least in our understanding of life and how it was all supposed to work.

“Look at that,” Michelle said, pointing discreetly, and I followed her finger to see Bill Cobb cross the room to Samantha, bow, and ask her to dance, to see her blink rapidly, bite her lip, and accept, to see them walk onto the floor and begin to turn, both of them rigid as posts, although his arm was on her waist, and her hand sat upon his shoulder.

“Look at that,” I said.

“Things could work out after all,” she said, and she spoke as an authority on the subject. I leaned across the table, kissed her long and hard, and stood to my blistered feet.

“Let’s go home,” I said.

“What?” she said. “And leave all our friends? Do you know how long it’s been since we’ve seen some of these people?”

I pulled her close and whispered into her ear. “Do you know how long it’s been since I made love to the only woman in the world I desire?”

She looked up at me. “I don’t know that I’ve ever been the only woman you desire, if that’s what you mean.”

“Well, there you go,” I said, and when I whispered a suggestion that we ought to go make sure the coach’s office was locked up safe and secure, she giggled like a teenager.

“You know, John,” she said, “I’ve always thought we’d be together someday.”

“And you were right,” I said. “Absolutely one hundred percent right.” I took her hand, pulled her up from the table, and led her across the dance floor, out of our past and into our future.