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Endowment Arts & Letters Editorial Staff Learn about the MFA Program
at GCSU |
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Dear
By: David
Crouse |
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Those old mystery stories always begin with the
clatter of weather so I will remind you of the rain that night, tumbling down
hard on my roof and across your windshield as you headed home. You once said that I have the disposition of a
nervous housewife and although I don't deny this, you made it easy to worry,
didn't you? It was past midnight when you finally called, and the first words
out of your mouth were, “ “Slow down,” I said. “What are you talking about?” I began to wash my dinner dishes as you talked. If
that seems insensitive, then I'm sorry, but you always had a dangerous tale
to tell about something, and maybe I just needed to do something with my
fumbling, hairy hands. You told me you had been drinking at your favorite bar
in “Sure,” I said. “Right. Okay.” As I listened to the dreary tapping on my roof I
thought of you following the blurred brake lights of some ghost car off in
the middle distance. You would have raced up to its bumper, passed it on the
left, then found another beacon, honed in on it,
accelerating until you passed that one as well. That’s how you would have
found your way home. I had driven with you before, of course, the fingers of
my right hand resting on the dash. I pushed a sponge into a wine glass, twisted it
around as you said something about the dog’s head, so low to the ground, as
if it were eating something—maybe another animal that had died, some errant
squirrel, victim of another car, another troubled driver. One plate, two glasses, and a salad bowl. I set
them upside down in the dish drainer and watched water collect in small pools
beneath them. You said, “I’m having a nervous breakdown.” “Ah,” I said, because how can someone reply to
that? The image of your face came to mind, your long
roman nose, your steely eyes, and the way you clicked your tongue against the
back of your teeth when you were anxious. “I need to come over,” you continued. “I need to
get out of this house. “It’s just "Hey," you said. "I know where I've
lived." "The weather there is great," I
continued. "There are really good drugs there.” I was remembering your stories, giving them back
to you. “Yeah,” you said. “Marijuana butter.” And then you
coughed a moist cough. You sounded so wet, and it was easy to believe that
people were ninety-something percent water from the moist sounds you were
making in the back of your throat. "I'm really losing it," you
said. "We both are," I said. "We're
losing it together." Although I did not feel very bad at all. “If I wasn’t such a coward I’d put a gun to my
head and kapow kapow, you
know? Like that guy in the movie we saw last year. What was the name of that
stupid movie?” I said, “We just need to just get some sleep.” You said, “I killed a living thing today.” “It’s not your fault,” I said, not because I knew
every intricate circumstance of that night, but because nothing seemed to be
anybody’s fault. The stove clock was ticking away the time nervously. “What
kind of dog was it?” I finally said, because I couldn't think of anything
else to drop into the near-silence. “Golden Retriever,” you mumbled. “They’re one of the dumbest breeds," I
explained. "They’re practically birds. Their bones snap like twigs and
they run out into roads all the time. Statistically, they’re the number one
breed killed by cars. And not by a nose width, either, Michael. By a long margin.
A wide margin is what I mean. A wide margin. It’s like they were bred for
that kind of thing. What did you do?” You seemed to consider this. “What did I do? I
stopped and I rolled down my window and looked at it. I looked at it and then
I left.” And then you must have heard something—a click, a
secret breath—because you said, “ “It’s nobody,” I said. “ “Michael,”
I said. “There’s nobody there.” “I’m
coming over,” you said, “so we can have a private conversation. You stay
where you are. Put some tea on. I’ll be over in twenty minutes.” And this
is the strange part. It’s the part that, if you told a person, they wouldn't
believe you. Because I
turned the burner on under the tea pot and watched it steam and listened to
it whistle and then poured the water and let the water grow cold as I read
the paper and you never came—not that night, and not the next, and not in the
month of June, and not in early July, and not in late July, when Nancy needed
you most, and not in August, when I expected you to appear as if by magic. I never spoke to you again, and neither did * * * * * These words would make you laugh, but I don't
care. I only allow you here as a ghost, a mirror to throw my bad acting
against, so I can see the shape of my lips when I make the words, the
meanness in my ugly eyes. It's September now and missing you has become a
bad habit, like biting the side of my thumb while reading a novel. I still
drive up Route 121, past the horse farms, past the bordered-up Dairy Queen,
and I walk that long stretch of beautiful woods, pacing up and down like a
prisoner calling your name. But at the same time I’m free, aren’t I? I have
begun visiting the narrow little bars in this town, chatting with the person
two stools over about whatever is on the television. I make the trip to Picture me—gorilla-shouldered, chubby-cheeked
little me—standing at the edge of a small stream, hands cupped to my mouth,
shouting your name into the trees. We skied through those woods in February, you
leading the way, until we came across a long shed with a burned black roof.
It had been painted bright yellow recently, and there was a combination
padlock on the door. "What's this?" you said, as you padded around
it, but I knew you had discovered it before, had orchestrated the whole trip
to have us arrive at that spot. You were always doing things like that. Your favorite color was yellow. The tumblers of the lock fell into place, the
padlock slipped off the door, and we scrambled inside. You lit a fire in the
woodstove as I tugged loose my ski straps. "Those bearded has-beens in
my department are trying to force me out," you said. "I have more
articles published than any three of them combined and I'm not even
forty-five yet. It's jealousy, plain and simple." You knew how I felt about those bearded old men in
their large offices. Sometimes when working late grading a stack of
composition papers I pushed out my chair, exited my narrow office, and took a
walk. Always I found myself at that ivy-covered building, the large one
across from the Humanities House, and wandered up and down the wide hall. In
the early evening before heading home to Cambridge and Newton these old men
with beards left their waste paper baskets outside their locked doors for the
janitor to empty, and occasionally I plucked crumpled notes from these gray
receptacles—even the trash cans had a kind of battered, aged authority, and I
was careful not to upset them too much with my prying hands. I smoothed the
notes out against the wall, stole their thoughts with my eyes, although the
numbers and scribbles did not make much sense to me. Some of that trash, I must admit, was yours. The
best of it. "They resent your suave charm," I said. "Yes," you said with a smirk. "My
suave charm." We both knew why we were there in that cabin. The
floor was covered with squat candles, which you lit with a wand of rolled
newspaper. Then you produced a bottle of cheap Merlot from somewhere and
corkscrewed off the top. I pulled my shirt off over my head and you fell back
into a nest of blankets and pillows. It looked warm there, in the dusty glow
from a cracked skylight, but I put up my usual token resistance, said
something about the threat of snow. You were lying on your back, kicking off
your pants. We could see our breath. "What's "She's probably out taking pictures of dead
trees," you said, and you put the bottle to your mouth again, corked it,
and moved to kiss me. It was the first time I had heard you talk about her
work that way—usually you were so reverential about her photography—but it
wasn't the last. I guess I felt that your honesty—that jewel-like glint of snideness—was a gift to me, and I kissed you back. Your mouth tasted like the wine, of course. You
always tasted like liquor—good wines, vanilla vodka, brandy, sometimes cheap
beer, depending on your mood. I grew to like that taste—it was like I was
sharing just a little bit of your topsy-turvy, self-destructive charisma. "It'll warm you up," you said, so I took
a drink. "We can't help being thirsty moving toward
the voice of water," I said, quoting Rumi. "Poetry," you said. You smirked like you
had just seen an amusing oddity—a child with an obscenely bad haircut, an
obese man showing his butt crack. "Beautiful," you said. "But
what does it mean? It means nothing." And you twirled yourself around me
and then over me. I wanted to explain, but we had moved onto other
things. Sometimes I would come to the clearing and stand
there, listening to my own labored breath and the birds clattering in the
trees. The more I looked at that shed with the burned black roof, the more I
became convinced that you were buried behind it. At the same time, I was equally convinced that you
had crossed the pine-speckled border into "I bet you he's in This is how your wife and I have come to know each
other—through these phone calls, and through those five or six dinners, you
seated between us, topping off my wine glass and telling your ridiculous
stories. You introduced me as your star student, and I felt that buzz that
comes from being the pupil singled out by the teacher—this despite the fact
that I was a teacher myself, a thirty-six year old English instructor, a
lover of E.M. Forster, Edith Warton, and Evelyn
Waugh. “I find economics depressing,” She made a dismissive gesture in your general
direction. I had seen the sentimental movies about the young
disciples, the idiot savants, the kindly mentors, and sitting around that
benevolent table, I tried so hard to say intelligent, charming things. I
settled into the lie as if it were a soapy tub. “He’s doing important work,”
I said, thinking of swarms of numbers. "Hey, Kephalis,"
she said back to my answering machine, when she returned my call. She is
always using my last name, as if she were my gym coach barking at me to do
more push-ups. " The loop of your voice still greeted me when I
ping-ponged her call back. " "Do you think he's with somebody?" she
said back, when she called at five the next day, her voice softer. "I
mean, seriously, I think there was somebody else. Well, she can have him, I
don't care. I have an interview next week by the way." "Great to hear about the interview," I
said in mid-June. "How did it go? Call me back when you get a chance.
Dinner would be great." "I think he's dead," she said, in early
July, when they found your truck in the mall parking lot. It couldn't have
been later than five in the morning and I could hear her voice from upstairs
in my bed, where I had been sleeping soundly. The sound of that voice was so
plaintive—so fragile—that it would have been a violation for me to pick up
the receiver and interrupt her. "Jesus, I still had the feeling he was
just going to appear at the door full of apologies." I swung my
heavy legs out of bed, pulled on my jeans, my boots, a wrinkled shirt, and
headed out to the woods, pushing my way through the pine branches. I had imagined you back to life so completely that
I had begun to think that you might call. And when the phone had rung I had
thought in my dreaminess, ah, this is it. And then I had wanted to run downstairs, pick up the
receiver and interrupt her conversation with my machine—and then open my
mouth and simply let the truth fly out. Something else would fill that space,
I decided, if I should just empty it, something full and satisfying like
those long, leisurely meals we used to eat together. But instead I was trudging my way to our silly
little house. The first thing I noticed upon arriving was that some thorn
bushes had been cleared from around back and dragged into a small brush pile.
When I cupped my hands around my face and bent to look into the window, I
could see the stocky candles, the neatly folded blankets, and something
else—a large spider plant, the tips of its leaves brown, hanging from a hook
fastened into the ceiling. I certainly would have remembered it, had it been
there before, but I did not. It hung around my height, in the center of the
room, so that I would have been forced to crouch to avoid smacking my
forehead against it. The
padlock was securely fastened, the windows unbroken. But my
first instinct was not to discover the origin of this new addition to that
little paradise. That came later, as I walked back to the car. No, I tested
the lock—I vainly twisted the numbers around and around and listened to the
clicks—because I wanted to save the plant. Its leaves were turning brown, and
although sunlight streamed through the skylight, I was sure the soil in the
pot was the approximate texture of a beach. And yet
breaking the window seemed like heresy. Despite my trips through the halls of
the faculty offices I was not a vandal and I was reminded by the mystery of
this hanging plant that I had only been just a visitor in this place. Back at
the car, I noticed other tire tracks, in a place where few if any people
would ever park. I wondered if hunters ever came here, or young couples with
their animals, and if they had claimed the place as their own. Did a
different padlock hang on the door? The idea
of two other people making love there seemed to me one of those casual
cruelties life offered up from time to time as an object lesson. It made me
want to become the vandal I had been so sure I couldn't be—to smash the
window with my shirt-wrapped hand, kick over the candles, pee across the
floor in a jagged line. The
skylight would be the best way to enter—or at least the most dramatic—but I
would be due at work soon, and I was hungry, and I didn't know if I had it in
me anyway—to enter that place like a cat burglar. So I put my car in reverse
and went to work, where I moved from office to office, until I came to yours.
I let myself in, looked through your files, your
desk, your neatly sharpened pencils. When you had first gone missing I had
spirited away the Jim Beam from the bottom of your desk, so that nobody would
find it, but as I sat in your chair I wished I had not been so fastidious, so
I could lean back and take a long swig from the bottle, close my eyes, and
feel as reckless as you. Did you ever want to feel like me? That
night, a message for me. * * * * * During an idle moment at the college I dropped
your name into the search engine on a library computer, and you came back to
me in fragments, an article here, an article there,
the titles as long and incomprehensible as centipedes. It seemed incredible
that you wrote such things about the Federal Reserve Bank while living the
life of a sad little rock and roll star. As I scanned the articles, a student
came up behind me, said hello quietly, his hand on the edge of the
table. I glanced up and around. I recognized him from the
open lecture you had given more than a year before—he wore the same "He doesn't teach here anymore," I said
over my shoulder, as the names of the articles scrolled by. He was looking at the computer screen, at your
life's work, with a dismissive curl to his lip, as if he had caught me
searching for pornography. "Good," he said said.
"Did they fire his ass?" I felt my jaw muscles tense to defend you. I was
ready to parrot back words you had said about your deep, deep talents and the
rigid norms of our society, but he quickly added, "I couldn't believe
they way he treated you that day. It was so condescending." "What day?" I asked. "Never mind," he said. "Can I have
the computer when you're done?" "You can have it now," I said, because
it was time for me to leave anyway. After my last walk through the woods, I had
pledged that I would not return, but you are a hard person to forget, and
hearing that boy talk about the past squeezed the days together, so that
finding you seemed a simple matter of taking a few steps backward. I did not
believe this, of course, but I felt it in the parts of my head and hard that
are beyond reason; I felt it even more strongly as I took my bolt cutters
from the trunk of my car and headed off down the overgrown path, and even
more strongly as I dropped them onto the ground, cupped my hands around my
face, bent down, and peered through the cabin window. The plant looked worse off, although I couldn't be
sure. I imagined it slowly dying as I watched it week after week after week
from my side of the glass, and as I watched it, as story came to mind. Not
even a story, just a small burp of a memory, something you probably forgot
the day after it had happened. Do you remember that rented room in What would have happened if I had said yes, stood
up, slapped my hands against the edge of the table, and said that I would
drive the first five hours? Would you have shrunken back, looked at me as if
I were crazy, or would you have smiled and handed me the keys? I was still thinking of that day—and of you in
some vague The book was an autobiography of Miles Davis. I
could see his familiar wizened pharaoh face splashed across the front. You had lent that book to me once, along with two
of his albums, so I am sure you can understand how I was feeling. It's him, I thought. I sat down on the ground and dug my fingers into
the tall grass. "Get up, you big baby," I expected to hear you say
from over my shoulder, from back somewhere in the trees. It was stupid—it was
worse than stupid—but I looked up then, off into the woods. Nothing but the
pines and the patch of earth where thorn bushes had been. That's when I noticed. The earth had been turned
up and laid down again, by a spade or shovel. It had been that way before,
but I hadn’t noticed because I had been so focused on the cabin. Rising to my
feet, I looked more closely at the spot. The rocks were muddy with reddish
dirt, as if they had been unearthed from deeper in the soil. A single larger
stone, the size of a football, had been placed dead center in the bare patch.
I walked over, bent down and smoothed by hands over it, then gripped it
tightly, preparing to underhand it into the bushes. And yet still, beyond all reason, I expected your
voice. You would have spoken from over my shoulder, made
a joke about my dirty fingers, the resolute set to my jaw, and that
ridiculous rock clenched in my hands. And I would have spun around and maybe
we both would have laughed then, because even after everything that had happened it would have seemed like a joke. Even all that,
it would have been easy to forgive. I tossed the rock and it rolled some distance
away, but not nearly as far as I thought it would carry. The force of the
throw brought me forward too, down to one knee, right palm against the
ground. And still more surprises, because there was a
voice, but not yours. A calm, low voice, a man, from behind me, saying,
"What are you doing here?" I turned
and looked up from my spot on the ground, feeling like I should spin and
bolt. "It's me," I said. I don't know why I would say that, except
that it was the only truth I knew at that moment. He was
young, in his mid-twenties probably, with black hair cut close to his head
and thin eyes—handsome eyes, I decided. We stood assessing each other, and
the strangest thought occurred to me, a rough sequence of rushed, violent
events—my helpless resistance, my yells and kicking, those handsome eyes
searching through my wallet, hands sliding over my body, pulling away my
clothes, and then the two of us, you and I, buried in the same ground. It was
like something conjured up from a gothic romance, and its beauty was as
blinding as the sun behind this unknown person who had, while I was lost in
reverie, stepped two steps closer. He was
lean and tall and dressed like a yuppie in a bright orange crew neck sweater
unzipped down the front to reveal a neat yellow pocket-T. God knows why, but
the fact that he was a beautiful boy with a serious frown, in expensive,
colorful clothes, made him seem more dangerous. The pieces
fit, as least to me, in that sparking, ridiculous moment when he said your
name. "You knew Michael," he said. "Yes,"
I said. He did not move; neither did I. I thought
of the heavy bolt cutters behind him, twenty steps from where I stood. He was
not holding anything, not even a stick. His hands were not even shaped into
fists. "I
expected you to look different," he said. "Younger." "Yes,"
I said again. He stood directly in front of me, his arms slack and legs
slightly bent in a mirror image of my pose. If he were to step just a little
to the right or to the left, then I would be able to move, take those twenty
steps, but he didn't move except to open and close his hand, and so I didn't
either. He laughed
at my silly answers. It was like you laughing. In my
mind's eye, his hands became less threatening, although they were still
moving over your body, tugging at your clothes, unclasping your belt. Maybe
that was more threatening. I imagined him biting at your mouth. We suspect
we are idiots, but never know what kind until late, late in the day. "He
never told me about you," I said. "I'm at a disadvantage." "You're
all he talked about," he said with a slight smile, "but he took ten
years off you and thirty pounds." I was
moving now, stepping past him, over to my unused tools. I scissored
them open and closed theatrically, as if I were snipping an invisible thread.
I wanted him to see the lengths to which I was prepared to go. "I guess
I don't need these anymore," I said. "Since you must know the
combination?" Once we
were inside, he picked up the book—the book you had loaned him—and, holding
it open with his thumb, glanced at some hidden sentence, smiled sadly, then
closed it. "Where is he?" I asked, as I stood in the doorway. "I
don't know," he said, and he let out a deep breath and slumped his shoulders. For the first time I noticed how
thin he was, and I was ashamed of myself for imagining that this person could
hurt me, even if he had tried. Had I wanted to die? I spit the thought away. "Maybe
he's in I wanted to be the one who knew. He still held the combination lock in his palm. He
passed it back and forth between his hands. I sat down on a milk crate, the
bolt cutters across my knees. "You are not at all what I expected,"
he said, screwing the insult just a little deeper. But it made me feel
good—to be that surprising and elusive. "Yes, yes," I said. "He was a
liar." "Definitely," he said. We were both
smiling. "God," he said. "What a liar. The biggest." He
tilted his head back, as if he were speaking to someone up above our heads. "You were one of his graduate students?"
I asked. "No," he said. "I don't think he
ever fucked his students." "I think he did, actually," I said. "Yeah, well," he said.
"Whatever." "So who are you?" "A nobody," he
said. "A loser." He tossed the lock up in the air with his right
hand and caught it with his left. He was smiling. So was I. And I thought of
him tossing the lock again, to me this time, underhanded, as if we were
friends tossing a softball back and forth. He would fall back onto the
blankets, scratch his nose, and tell me more about you, and then I would do
the same. I would tell him about your slow-boil temper, your disgust with a
world that didn't move at your breakneck speed, the way you spattered your
French fries with catsup and then ate them with a fork. And we would measure
these two things—which in fact were the same thing—against each other, like
kids talking earnestly about the same movie. Then I would set the lock on the ground—the bolt
cutters too—and slide off the crate into a kneeling position, and then down
onto my stomach, slowly, as if I were trying hard not to startle him. Maybe
it would be a way of touch you again—to know you through him—or maybe it would
be a small revenge against you, but I would rest my hand on his arm and
smooth the blond hairs up to his tense bicep. This is something you used to
do to me—I am sure you remember—and I would watch him for some sign that he
recognized the gesture. "I was always jealous of you," he would
say. "And now here you are." Our lips would not meet. We would not even fully
undress, and at some point, as our bodies pushed up against each other, I
would look down and see our ridiculous stocking feet—mine white, his black—and
realize that this was another mistake. When we were done, I would roll to one side so as
not to bother him with my body. "Don't
touch me," he said, because I had moved toward him, propelled by the
beautiful clockwork mechanism of my shiny fantasy. What had you said that one time? That I was
turning into a sentimental old fag. He scrambled away quickly enough that his shoulder
bumped the hanging plant and sent it rocking back and forth. I steadied it
with both my hands. "You're scared of me," I told him. And for a second I imagined myself through his
eyes as someone a little more dangerous, a little stronger. And then I knew
what I was looking for—not the complete idea of you, but the complete idea of
myself. At that moment, as your old lover walked past me to the door, this
seemed the most difficult knot to untangle. And yet I knew at the same time
that it was my sentimentality driving me toward this conclusion. You would
not have allowed yourself something as middle class as self-knowledge. "No," he said. "You're just old.
And too fat. You're old and fat." He underhanded me the lock, and my imagination
intersected with reality for a split second, then arced away again.
"It's yours now," he said. "Burn it the ground for all I
care." I am an articulate person—you have said so
yourself, that I have my moments—but I am struck dumb by feeling, and so my
mouth fumbled for words. "Wait," was all I managed to say, before
he strode off. I could hear his footsteps move down the length of the cabin
and then off down the path, crunching branches and leaves. I settled back
onto the blankets and let the sunlight drain down through the skylight onto
my face. Long after he had gone, I walked around behind the
cabin and began to dig with my hands, pulling back the earth. I was not used
to this kind of work, but there was something meditative about it. I had
never worked in a garden, but I imagined it might be like this. Just a little more than a foot down: long hair the
color of gold. And then
something tattered and thin, like a torn jacket or rag. I pushed and scraped
at it and found something smooth and sharp and white—a tooth. I ran the side
of my hand along the ground and revealed more fangs, an open mouth filled
with dirt, a dried black nose. The tattered thing, the piece of rag, it was
the dog's ear. I uncovered its face, then its neck, and the orange reflective
collar and dog tags that probably held a name and address. There were people
at that address who had not seen this animal in four months. They slipped
into my life for a moment, as pale shadows of my imagination, the way the
nameless young man had the hour before as we faced each other in the
cabin—the way you had too, I suppose. "Poor thing," I said,
marveling at the intricacy of your character. I left the
dog as you left it, returned home, padded my muddy feet across my carpet,
registered the blinking light, lifted the receiver, dialed her number—your
number—and heard the ridiculous closed loop of your voice again, repeating
its happy hello. "Please
pick up,” I said. "I know you're there.” |
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