In the entryway of her downtown apartment building, Joanna retrieved her mail from the metal box for the last time. Catalogs selling garish bras and underwear, flyers for nearby pizza delivery, credit card applications—all these went directly into the blue recycling bin. Underneath the layers of paper, there it was, the prize: a thin airmail envelope addressed to her in a now-familiar slanted scrawl. She placed the letter underneath a bank statement and tucked them both under her arm.
“Ready?” Nate was holding the elevator door open for her. It was one of those old-fashioned ones with a wrought iron gate that needed to click into place before jostling up to the fourth floor. Joanna tried to swat away her annoyance. It was the last time she would pick up her mail down in the lobby, and she had wanted to savor the moment.
Joanna chastised herself. She was being ridiculous. It was just mail. It was not a “moment.”
“You sure you don’t want me to stay and help?” he asked her, standing on the threshold of her apartment.
Joanna smiled at Nate and reached up to run a finger through the wave of hair across his forehead. “Nah. I work better alone.”
He kissed her lightly on the lips. “All right. We’ll celebrate tomorrow.”
When she was eight years old, her parents sold their little blue Audi Fox. She had crawled in the back seat and cried for an hour until the new owner came and drove it away. She felt the same way about leaving this apartment: sentimental beyond reason. She’d made a life for herself here. Or perhaps that wasn’t the right phase—it implied settling down, growing roots. She’d lived here for a year and a half; can you make a life in a year and a half?
The place was not all that great. A downtown studio on the top floor, with a view of the building right next to it, ten feet away. It smelled like stale bread. Old toast. Joanna walked to the back and pushed open the awning windows, letting in a cool gust of air. The windows were old, metal with chicken wire inside the glass. When it rained, cold water dripped on her face as she lay in bed. But now it was a rare sunny day in early spring, and the whole room filled with light, fading the fabric on the bedspread. Pigeons roosted outside on the ledge, flapping close to the glass, staring at her with their red eyes.
This was where she lived when she started taking classes, after her sister insisted she “do something with her life.” She signed up for a few graduate-level courses at the downtown campus and moved out of her sister’s laundry room. By winter term she was enrolled as a graduate student in rhetoric and composition. After grad school she could give teaching another shot, redeem the whole Czech fiasco. She would carve out a niche for herself in adult education. It was a solid plan. But the truth was, she didn’t want it as much as she probably should.
As a child, Joanna had wanted to be a singer despite having no talent for singing and no real desire to perform. Ditto with acting, marine biology (the career of choice for every girl in the fourth grade), fashion designer, and archeologist (inspired by film enactments of beautiful women in khaki clothes and pith helmets). She was not the type of kid to settle on a future profession. Even as an adult, she could not help but think she could apply herself equally to any number of pursuits.
Right here on this horrible twin mattress, under the faded quilt, was where she and Nate had consummated their relationship. Their first time had been awkward, a fumble of belt buckles and buttons in the dark. They weren’t overcome by passion, kissing frantically, then falling on the bed, ripping each other’s clothes off. Instead, they’d more or less agreed that they’d like to “take the next step” in their relationship. And that was that.
They had spent the next three hours in each other’s arms, talking about the failed relationships of their pasts. Nate was still suffering the emotional ramifications of his broken engagement to his high school sweetheart. They’d stayed together through their senior year and for all four years of college. In the months before his fiancée, Melissa, was supposed to enter dental school, they decided to “take the summer off” and date other people. How would they know they were meant for each other if they had such limited romantic experience? Following their agreement, they didn’t see or speak to one another for three months. Two weeks before the deadline, she called him in tears, begging him to escort her to an abortion clinic.
Nate told Joanna all this in a rush, in one breath, as if he were making a confession. Then he had fallen asleep while Joanna lay awake, spying through the windows of the next building, making up stories about other people’s lives.
Joanna stood in the middle of the apartment, her hands on her hips. The place looked deceptively empty—her bed under the window was the only piece of furniture. The folding card table she’d used as a desk, the overstuffed chair she’d found with a “free” sign on the curb outside her building, and the frayed rugs and pressboard bookshelves had already been carted off to the thrift store. A few boxes—packed and taped shut—lay stacked in the small entryway.
Under the surface, though, the place was a disaster. The kitchen cupboards contained a mountain of recycling she’d stuffed inside for the entire time she’d lived here: crushed cans, glass bottles, cardboard and paper. She should start with that; it would probably take eight trips down to the basement to get rid of it all. First, though, Joanna walked over to the bed and straightened the covers, then smoothed the wrinkles out of the pillowcase with her hands. She placed the pale blue envelope with the striped red edge in the center of the pillow and made a bargain with herself: After taking down the recycling, then mopping, scouring, and dusting the place until it would pass the building manager’s inspection—then and only then, could she open the letter, as her reward.
She’d always thought she’d be the one sending letters from foreign countries. Now receiving mail postmarked from Kazakhstan had become the highlight of her days. She invested a little too much energy into the correspondence, scribbling out pages between letters. She had the sense not to send it all.
Her history with pen pals had left her cautious. In fifth grade her best friend moved away, and they made a solemn oath to write. Joanna and Veronica had made forts in the sagebrush, read all the same books, played with dolls together long after everyone else their age had outgrown them. They’d concocted elaborate mysteries and solved them by using calculators, studying the clouds, and recording their observations in notebooks. After Veronica left, Joanna spent most of her allowance on stationery and stamps. For months they exchanged stickers, jokes, secrets, but eventually the correspondence tapered off. For every letter or postcard Veronica sent, Joanna wrote three. Sometimes she enclosed a self-addressed stamped envelope, too.
When the lapse between letters became unbearable, Joanna had no choice but to accept the possibility that Veronica had died. Joanna would lie down on her bed, stare up at the ceiling and let the sadness press down on her. She’d try to summon tears. After mourning her friend for what seemed like hours, she’d jump up with a renewed sense of purpose, sit down at her desk, and scribble out another letter.
In high school, she had a male pen pal: Geoffrey, from Chicago. He signed his letters “Geo,” had a fake ID, went to bars to see bands they mutually adored. Their letters quickly evolved from confessing their love of British musicians to love for each other. They made plans to move to London after graduation and live together. Page after page detailed the apartment they’d rent, the graves they’d visit, the pubs they’d frequent.
He had written poetry about her, about yearning to gaze into her sloe eyes and touch her supple skin. So when Geoffrey said he had borrowed money from his older brother and bought himself an airplane ticket, she told her mother she wanted to go on a school ski trip over winter break. Geoffrey would find a romantic getaway in the mountains and take care of everything. On the day of his arrival, she packed a small suitcase, borrowed her mom’s car, and drove to the airport to pick him up, clasping the snapshot of him in her hand. She’d studied that picture so much she had memorized his face, squinted to make out details in the background: the posters on his wall, an unmade bed.
He never arrived. She waited for him for five hours, until the next flight from Chicago came in, then drove home in a daze, called his house, and talked to his mom, who said he had certainly flown to Reno that day. She locked herself in her room, confused, crying. She told her mom she wasn’t feeling up to the ski trip after all.
She heard from him a week later. Geo may have been the one person who enjoyed writing letters more than Joanna. He had three pen pals in the Reno-Tahoe area alone and had gone snowboarding with the first girl he recognized waiting outside the gate. Sorry he had missed her. He guessed he hadn’t recognized her from the photo she had sent.
Of course most of her long distance friendships didn’t end so badly. But they all ended eventually. First their letters would taper off, then they stopped coming altogether, then they were gone.
Joanna’s phone was ringing when she came in from the basement. Her hands sticky with old jam and who knows what else, she let it go to voice mail. Trudging up and down the stairs had made her hungry. She retrieved a jar of peanut butter from the fridge. The refrigerator! How could a 350-square-foot apartment contain so many hidey-holes for empty cans and bottles, half-eaten jars of pickles and mustard? Oh well. She’d empty the contents of the fridge into a box or a laundry basket and take it all over to Nate’s tomorrow. She’d deal with it then.
She couldn’t find a spoon, so she ate the peanut butter with her fingers. In the distance, a siren wailed. Shopping carts filled with bottles clanged over the sidewalks. People shouted. These noises had created the soundtrack for her letter reading and writing for a year and a half. The next time she read a letter, she’d hear—what? Lawn mowers droning, children screaming?
She never thought Malcolm would actually write her from Kazakhstan—especially considering what a fool she’d made out of herself before he took off—but he did. His letters were filled with strange details; she could never quite tell when he was pulling her leg and when he was giving an accurate depiction of his life over there. The first winter he was gone, he told her it was so cold that the rivers froze over. He ice-skated under the bridges. “It’s forty degrees below zero,” he wrote. “That’s the same temperature in Fahrenheit and Celsius.” He later informed her that he’d taken to wearing a huge fur hat, a floor-length fur coat, and fur boots to deal with the elements. She had assumed he added a few creative flourishes to this story, but the next letter came with a snapshot of him wearing this very ensemble. “I have nothing on underneath this,” he scribbled on the back.
On winter nights she’d walk on sidewalks wet with rain and think of Malcolm on the other side of the world. Through the crosshatch of tree branches she’d look up at the telephone wires, looming firs and cedars. The sky, always gray, so near the ground, the rain on her skin. She belonged here in a way she had never belonged at home, growing up. In the high mountain desert, the sky stretched out huge and blue, the dust-colored hills and the mountains vivid in the distance. Everything was wide open; she didn’t know it then, but she longed to feel closed in. She had missed, without realizing it, the coziness of rain, early nightfall, cups of tea, ferns and moss growing on trees.
At times she wondered if her imagination had made Malcolm into this great friend, wonderful listener, sensitive soul who took in everything she said and understood it better than she did herself. She had a hard time piecing together how she viewed him. She knew parts of him, but those parts didn’t necessarily fit together to form a picture she understood. The Malcolm from the party, the one with the hood up over his head, girls pulling at his sleeves, pulling him away from her. The Malcolm after everyone had left or gone to sleep, who lifted her shirt over her head and folded it neatly into a square and set it on top of his packed suitcase before he turned back and looked at her unclothed body—not lustfully but with a serious, almost studious expression before he kissed her.
And then the Malcolm in the letters, the vegetarian traipsing around in a fur coat and hat. Who also worried that he was in over his head, that he had nothing to teach his students who knew the rules of English grammar better than he did. Who had quit eating meat when he was twelve because of some childhood trauma involving a seagull but took the gift of the fur coat from his host brother because it would seem rude to turn it away. And because he was so cold that he curled up with two hot water bottles at night. One at his feet, the other cradled against his chest like a baby.
Through their letters they discovered that they’d been the same type of angsty teen, right down to the thick black eyeliner and dog-eared copies of The Fountainhead. They used the same brand of toothpaste. They both, by the most remarkable coincidence of all, owned the same New American Heritage dictionary published in 1963.
One time Joanna mailed him a letter that contained only a list:
Words that Didn’t Exist in 1963
air head
area code
astronaut
carjacking
disco
gentrify
glitch
junk food
pizza
sexism
supermarket
“Would we have been friends if we’d met in high school?” Joanna asked him once. Malcolm said they would have. They would recognize each other by their matching eyeliner, by their twin books. They would seek each other out. Joanna could imagine it perfectly, the two of them, skinny teenagers dressed in black clothes, hunched over their brownbag lunches on the bleachers, having those intensely sincere conversations about Camus or the Communist Manifesto that seem so exciting and relevant when you’re young.
Every once in a while they would mention the night they had spent together. “I’m freezing here in Kazakhstan,” Malcolm wrote her. “I could use a bed warmer. Someone like you, whose skin is soft and warm, like a pancake. But then I’d wake up wanting an American breakfast, and I can’t get that here.”
Malcolm mentioned other girls every so often, but their names were always changing. Once he mailed Joanna a photo of the Peace Corps volunteers in his group and he had his arm slung around a redhead’s shoulder. He didn’t say who she was, and Joanna didn’t ask. She had told him about Nate, of course. A friend from grad school introduced her to him. He had seen Joanna around campus, pursued her. February was an odd time to start a romance, with the slick black tree branches crisscrossing over their heads as they walked down the park blocks together. Their first kiss took place under an umbrella in the rain. He took her by surprise, pressed too hard against her face, immobilizing her lips. But it was too romantic a gesture to dismiss, and after that, they were together. Of course she didn’t tell Malcolm all that. She mentioned Nate casually at first—slipped his name in a sentence somewhere in the middle of a page.
Then later, she told Malcolm things about Nate that she never told anyone else. That she was going into this relationship with her eyes open. She was not going to make a fool of herself like she did with Dustin. These confessions didn’t feel wrong because Malcolm was so far away. Things she couldn’t imagine telling the strange guy she met at the party, with his big, morose eyes and sarcastic snicker, she wrote down on paper and flung into the universe. Kazakhstan! Thousands of miles away, over an ocean, high up in the air—it didn’t even seem like a real place.
Moving out of her sister’s apartment, attending graduate school, dating Nate—all these things made her feel slightly less ridiculous for the way she’d acted when Malcolm had left. Wearing her wrinkled clothes, she had tagged along when Ted drove him to the airport. And then—oh how she wished she had just gone home, bid him farewell after slinking out of bed!—she’d cried her eyes out as she waved goodbye to him. He was kind, though. He’d wiped her tears away with the sleeves of his hoodie, bent down and kissed her nose. “It’s just two years, sweetheart,” he said. Sweetheart! Later she wondered if she had imagined that part.
Ted had given her a lift back to Laura’s apartment. Joanna went straight to the balcony. Through the panes of the French doors, she saw Ted and Laura sitting next to each other at the kitchen table, their heads bent together. They appeared to be whispering—probably about her. When her sister looked up, Joanna shut her eyes, still red and stinging from tears and exhaustion.
It had turned dark outside her downtown studio—and it was as clean as it was going to get. She owed it that much, she supposed. She took a long shower and changed into her pajamas before curling up under the covers. With the bedside lamp on, her place felt cozy rather than empty and stark. She could live like this. Maybe moving in with Nate wasn’t such a great idea after all. They had been together just over one year; cohabitating could be a huge mistake. She could back out now, start over (again!), this time with just the most essential possessions: a bed, a lamp, a teacup, a pen, some paper, a letter. She would be like that character in a novel she read once about the woman who rid herself of everything she owned, item by item. She kept paring down, paring down until all she had left could fit in her handbag. Then she walked out the door and left the house behind, too.
Settled under the covers, Joanna was about to open the letter when she remembered something she forgot, had almost left hidden in the recesses of this apartment. She threw off the quilt and ran over to the tiny cupboard door off the entryway. When she’d first moved in, this mysterious cabinet on the floor had been painted shut, but she’d pried it open with a butter knife. Nothing was inside. She wrote Malcolm about it and he’d asked her if the cabinet was accessible through a door from the hallway, too. She had never noticed it before, but every apartment had one—a tiny door next to the big one, nailed shut.
It’s a milk door, Malcolm had explained in his slanted handwriting. Milkmen would access the door in the hallway, depositing cold bottles of milk for people to retrieve in the comfort of their own apartments. She’d been keeping all of Malcolm’s letters in there ever since, in a heap. She opened the door and reached in to gather them up. To think she’d almost left them for the next tenant to find! It was a romantic notion, in a way. Letter writing took effort; it was tangible evidence of their connection—ink on paper. They never called or emailed. And sometimes she sent him more than words: a book or a tiny packet of tea or a clipping from a newspaper or a feathery Japanese maple leaf pressed flat between the pages of the dictionary.
Maybe she should leave the letters here, to be discovered. Someone would find them in the milk cupboard, read them all, and see how she and Malcolm had something special, a deep friendship that went beyond ordinary romance. Like Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir! No, not them. Too messed up.
She went in search for a string, something to bind the letters together. A red satin ribbon would do the correspondence justice, but mint-flavored dental floss would have to do. She tied the letters in a neat bundle, as thick as a brick, then buried them under some clothes in her suitcase.
Back in bed, she could hear the muffled sounds of her neighbor’s television. She studied the envelope of her unopened letter. These letters would stop coming, one day—in half a year, to be exact. Then what? Well, she didn’t need to think about it now. It was late, and she deserved a reward for the hard work she’d done. The cavities of the apartment had been scraped out, the baseboards sparkled—even the walls had a special sheen. She situated herself against her pillow and opened the envelope with a box knife.