Bill’s car looked like a shiny black beetle, and on our second date, I didn’t have to search for small talk. “Cool car,” I said, when he picked me up.
It had been a week since our first date, and I’d spent plenty of time thinking about him. Playing out the words we’d said, his smile, that scar on his upper lip, his dark eyes on me. I felt hopeful, and scared at how hopeful I felt.
I’d mentioned to a friend that I had a date with Bill. This friend had met him before. Her lips went in a downward direction and she crinkled her nose. “He might be kind of boring for you,” she said. She thought I liked wild men.
I’d mentioned him to another friend who had met Bill before. The lines between his eyebrows deepened. “I don’t know if he’s for you,” he said. “I think he likes to party.” He thought I liked calm men.
People putting stories on other people.
Now here Bill was picking me up at my apartment, opening the car door for me. Another proper date, dinner date, I-hope-I-have-something-interesting-to-say date. I had on a silky blouse, another slim skirt, heels. I tucked my stockinged calves, one, two, into the car and he shut the door. He walked to his side of the car, his long, lean body passing in front of me, his shoulders with that small inward curve, the angle of his cheekbones. I was not bored.
He turned the engine on, a purr and rumble.
“What kind of car is this?” In my head: What kind of man are you?
“It’s a Saab.” He pulled out onto the road, shifted up, and up again.
“I like it.” In my head: I like you.
The purry engine sound deepened as he accelerated. “Me too,” he said. About the car, not about what he couldn’t hear, the chattering inside me.
Some bubbly no-words music played on the stereo. He turned it up. A bubbly no-words warmth moved from my ears to my throat, down my chest, into my stomach.
I wanted to sway with the music, put my hand on his thigh, feel the vibration of the engine, feel his muscles move with the acceleration. Feel the possibility of him.
I looked out the window at the dark shadows of firs and cedars, the prism of streetlights. I took a breath. In my head: Slow down. Slow down.
“I bought this car in Sweden,” he said into the space of my quiet. He shifted from third to fourth, fourth to fifth. He’d picked the car up and then driven it for five weeks all over Europe, then had it shipped home. “I actually saved money that way.”
“Wow,” I said. “Five weeks in Europe?”
We were on the freeway, heading toward downtown, red taillights of other cars ahead.
“It was our honeymoon,” he said.
Record needle stop on my heart, that bubbly music not in my ears anymore. How had he said it? Honeymoon. Maybe with an achy sound. Maybe a love sound, wishing and romance. Maybe a heartbreak.
I could’ve put a check mark next to “financially stable” on my list of things I wanted in a man, been impressed with him putting together a trip to Europe with buying a car. I could’ve been happy he kept the car and not the wife.
“How long ago was that?” I said.
“Europe?” he said. “About two years ago.”
Somehow, in that talk on the couch, I’d missed these fine details.
“Have you traveled a lot?” In my head: Are you done with that marriage? And how exactly long has it been since you split up? And why did you split up, and what did she do wrong in only two years? It didn’t occur to me to wonder what he might have done wrong.
The questions bunched up in my throat. We were only on a second date. I would sound like a jealous woman, a nosy woman nosing in.
When I’d been with Stephen, the man I thought was the one, I searched for his secrets when he was away, put my hands in the pockets of empty coats, read letters tucked on shelves, opened desk drawers, fanned books for notes and secrets. Evidence to understand why I was not enough.
“I love to travel,” Bill said.
“What places have you gone to?” I asked.
Stephen had noticed. A letter moved here, a note put back on the wrong page, the worry-scent of me lingering in pockets and drawers.
Bill listed the places he’d been. “Well, all over Europe. I’ve been to Canada,” he said. “New York, New Orleans. My favorite is the desert southwest. Oh, and Mexico. My ex-wife got me traveling to Mexico. I love it there.”
How did he say that? Wife. Ex. Did he love her still? Had she broken his heart? Was he done?
My worry-chatter exhausted me. But Bill spoke of his past matter-of-factly, no love or heartbreak in sight.
“How about you?” he asked.
“Me, what?”
Stephen had confronted me. Have you been reading my letters? Looking at my things?
No, I’d lied.
“Have you traveled?” Bill asked me now. “Do you like to travel?”
At first I thought to say yes. But that wasn’t true. I didn’t want to start with hiding. “I don’t know,” I said. “I feel kind of embarrassed that I’ve hardly been anywhere. Just around Oregon and Washington. A little bit of California. And Montana.” Things I’d done with other men, and why should this be a secret? “I like the Oregon coast. That’s where my ex-husband and I went for our honeymoon.”
Here I began a new kind of searching. Catching myself hiding when there was no reason to hide other than some tangled idea that love didn’t exist without jealousy.
White tablecloths and candlelight, my grilled prawns and his red snapper. Bill leaned in toward me.
“You grew up on a ranch?”
I nodded. “I grew up in the house my great-grandfather homesteaded. My dad has lived in that same house all his life.” I never tired of telling this, the long legacy of home always with me. “I lived in the same house until I was eighteen,” I said. “Same house, same school, same town.”
In this restaurant that Bill had found when he asked a friend for a special place, the spotlight of him warmed me.
“I have no idea what that would be like,” he said. “We moved thirteen times by the time I was through high school.”
All that moving. I took a few bites. In my grade school a new crop of kids cycled through each year. They only stayed for one year and then they were gone. They lived at the airbase outside of town, children of air force parents. Those kids had been to Germany and Japan and, for show-and-tell, they brought foreign coins and coconuts made into masks and elephants carved from alabaster. I brought the stuffed dog I’d gotten at Christmas and once a three-legged salamander I’d caught in the creek. But even if those students had exotic things for show-and-tell, they kept to the sidelines at recess, got picked last for the softball games. They tried to fit in with us Condon kids, but our roots were like arms locked one to another in a birthright game of Red Rover. I couldn’t imagine moving thirteen times.
“My father left when I was one,” Bill said. “Mom didn’t have much money. We had to move a lot.” His voice, his words, didn’t sound like he felt sorry for himself. But in the telling we discovered the important differences between us.
It would take us years to understand what these differences meant. When I was a kid, for a big change Mom moved sofas and tables and rearranged the arrangements. Us kids swapped bedrooms. I took the yellow room, Leanne took the green room, Pat took over the bunkhouse, Brad got the big bedroom all to himself. Same house, new look.
The first time Bill was out of town, a year after we moved in together, I decided to rearrange the furniture. My big surprise. He came home to the sofa and bookshelves and framed pictures all in new places. He stood in the doorway. Still body. Eyes blinking. He could hardly speak. He wasn’t angry, he was lost. His mother always kept things the same, as much as she could, in each new house. Sofa in front of the picture window, bed always facing the same direction. The same ornaments on a white flocked tree, year after year. New house, same look. She would tuck Bill and his brother in at night: Here is your bed, here is your pillow, here is your blanket, here I am. Everything the same.