The Geometry of Love Read online

  When you pull out of the lot, I drop my car in behind yours, fixed on the outline of your head, one arm draped over the passenger seat, the personification of ease. You reach up to the rearview mirror, the adjustment a flash in your hand.

  At the apartment you run up ahead, out and on the stairs before I can turn my car off. You wave, flash a smile of encouragement. I pause, waiting for my heartbeat to slow to a simmer. I poke through the glove compartment as if looking for something, gather up my purse, examine a grocery store receipt saved loose on the seat, evidence of life: Yogurt .59; Bread, sandwich 1.29; Apples, Granny Smith .89 lb. at .33 lb.

  You are stopped in the black doorway of your apartment, and from inside I get a shady glimpse of furniture: couch? I count my change, adjust the strap of my sandals. You wave, your smile a mask. You let the door swing behind you.

  It’s OK, I tell myself. In a moment you are shunting back the drapes, I can see your face through the window, wreathed by the curtains. In your hand there is a rectangle of newspapers. You are tidying up. It’s OK. I can hear you call to me from the open doorway, a slice of your face in the light, a line of neck, your curved fingers on the door frame. There is the curve of your profile, the frame of the front window, the square city buildings lining the street, the deepening sky. I cannot make myself open the car door, cannot swing my feet to the ground. I cannot make myself stand up and move toward you and your new life.

  Darcy, you say, and the smile turns to dismay. Don’t do this. I cannot hear you, cannot see your face. I have started up my car again. I am backing out of the parking space, looking over my shoulder. I cannot look at you, although I imagine you are taking the stairs two at a time, your feet barely touching. I have to get out of here fast. I shift into forward and speed out of the lot into traffic, cutting off a man in a new truck and scattering the oncoming traffic. He leans on the horn and swears at my retreating taillights. Hey.

  Seven

  When the gun went off it broke to pieces the sound of your voice. In the space around the gunshot, your words were thin, two-dimensional like a cardboard cutout, against the body-falling thunder of the shot. The bullet made a sudden hole in the dining room wall, stuck near the ceiling, like some decorating element gone wide. We were both stunned a moment into silence. Outside everything went on without pause, the sun did not wink, nobody minded the noise or the mess or the sprinkle of plaster on my dining room floor. Inside, though, it was different. It was as if our masks had slipped, a sudden acknowledgment of murderous intent. You were halfway to a crouch beside the table.

  Jesus, Darcy, do you want to kill me? you said, taking the gun from my hand. As you moved, I could smell the bitter smell of gunpowder and fire, a hint of hot smoke on the air. In truth I hadn’t meant for the gun to fire, was only moving it off the kitchen table to make way for the meal when somehow my hand slipped across the trigger, and I felt the give.

  I’m your husband, you said, and I couldn’t say anything to that, couldn’t cross that patch of bare space you gave me like a square of sunlight through an open door. What was there to say besides: For now?

  We lived in a cul-de-sac of small houses, their weedy yards poking up through the gravel drives. The neighboring houses were angled around the circle, as if laid out with a crowbar, each one wedged in against the next, but their yards were spread out behind them like the feathers in a fan.

  It was warm, even in winter, and the bougainvillea grew in an arch over the porch, scattering pink petals on the steps as if at somebody’s wedding. Behind the houses was a field, some developer’s unfinished dream, and in the spring we could watch storm clouds roiling in the wide sky to the west before they moved in to meet us. The rain was usually brief, a peppering of big drops, and we sometimes sat through it on lawn chairs on the patio, half-sheltered by the narrow rim of roof that hangs over the steps and let the stray drops fall on our legs.

  I remember sitting outside with you, drinking iced tea and smelling the rain as it moves in. I have a day off, and we have ordered a pizza. I do not remember your face, but only your laugh, and the sizzle of tomato sauce in my mouth, the rain layering over the hot day. Sam sits at our side waiting for a crust to fall. I remember your laugh.

  The rain starts on my windshield, and the speed gathers up the first sprinklings, makes it into rain. I am steering my way through the Arbuckles, where the road is sheared into the hills, as if those road crews had all the time in the world and nothing but dynamite. The asphalt quickly grows shiny with rain, sloughing under my tires, and the big trucks kick up a hard mist as they pass on the down slopes. I steer my car toward the place where the sky comes down to meet the road, both of them bluish and angry, as if kin, and I could drive up into the sky.

  I hadn’t counted on the road being so lonesome, harnessed into my own seat and watching the taillights ahead as they pop on, red and redder, red and redder, proof of a presence in the next car. I give the radio a pop with the heel of my hand, and it chimes on obediently. The car is in good shape, but the radio buttons don’t work, some loose wire or broken connection, and it fades in and out of noise with the rattle of the road. A talk show is on; I can get every few words, an intermittent signal, then static, like some fill-in-the-blank exam: I wanted to talk about … You know they raise … I mean what’s the …?

  After awhile the rain comes down heavier, falls like a curtain in front of my windshield, and I have to turn out. When I cut the engine the world is quiet but for the drops’ metallic chatter, like typewriter keys spelling out words. I am enclosed, somehow safe, and I swing my feet up into the passenger seat to rest, looking out over the landscape to the east, the rain on rolling, rocky hills. Out the window the rain looks mournful and cool, the big drops roll down the slant of my windshield like the trickle of tears. Although the car is parked my muscles retain the memory of movement, of speed, I can feel it carrying me toward something I don’t know.

  Although I know what I have. I can inventory it: I have my keys, some of them to places I will not go again; they are keys without locks, they will not again in their lives feel the comfort, the drowsy fit of the thing for which they were made. I have a little money; I have a suitcase with some clothes. I put my hand under the seat and feel the usual empty cups and other trash. I press the button (like a navel) on the glove compartment and with the downswing of the drawer I find the thing, waiting, snug in its nest of old receipts and saved napkins. It is like a hot heart, waiting and patient. It is the gun.

  Around me the world is all wet motion, lubricated by the rain, the trucks still roaring on the highway behind me, the trees shivering under the drops, the bluestem blown and battered, all of it ignited by the steely light. And my heart answers, angry, on the edge of weeping, but instead I start up the engine again.

  I’ll forgive everything, you said, flinging the words into the room as if at random, as if they would all find me while they bounced around the room, in whatever order they chose. I can forgive anything. I moved to put the skillet between us, letting the steam play with your aspect, letting you waver and smear with the rising steam, as if in a dream.

  There was nothing to forgive, I tell you. It never happened. Too late. I know where you were that night, you say and start on all your other complaints. I keep the skillet between us, dishing everything into bowls for the table, but you just sit on the stool in the corner, like some classroom bad boy, your eyes malevolent, your hands tucked under opposite arms, crossed on your chest. You look ready to double over, as if some old wound were bleeding quick from your side. I know, you say, again and again, like a song, and the words come to me set to the music of the plates, the sound of the bowls being set on the table, of silverware sorted through for forks and knives.

  I am tired. You want to eat?

  It is strange to me how some smells, some sounds, some ways the light falls across some objects are reminders of something else. The smell of pork chops reminds me of my mother and her warm house on a Sunday afternoon. The oven radiates its
heat on my legs as I stand at the stove, stirring the gravy, smelling the last brownings of yeast rolls. The steam from the gravy caresses my face like a father’s tender hand. Sometimes lying in bed late in the morning, I think of Emmitt, of his warm eyes, the inadvertent touch of his hand on my arm, his sharp laugh. It is the angle of the light through the window, I think, the way the sun thrusts itself through the break in the curtains and falls across the coverlet and onto the floor. Sometimes after a long night of waiting for you, once the day begins to seep into the sky, I will turn out the lights and lie down for a nap. Just before I go to bed I will push aside the curtain on the day with one weary hand, like a summons for memory.

  It is the recollection of the gun in my hand, the firecracker of the shot, the gunpowder smell of the smoke that seems the measure of you. That smell, that touch has loitered all along on the edge of my senses. I wonder that I didn’t name it before, in the flavor of your torn shirt on that first day, in the static smell of the cab of your truck, in the hot touch of your hand on my skin, angry or otherwise.

  Then there is that other you, the one from the old days.

  Some days when I am putting the food on the table I can remember you on that first night, carrying in the corn and potatoes, managing the swinging door to the dining room, getting your thumbprint in the mashed potatoes. I think of your face sucking that scorched thumb, sheepish, imagine the taste of the potatoes, salt, butter, starch. How can that ever have been? I think, sitting down to dinner. This you is a stranger. This you does not make a move, only wags your hand at me, as if you were hammering some bit of punctuation onto the end of your sentence, like pin the tail on the donkey, nailing the idea down so it does not float away. I sit down and calmly fill my plate, let the spoonful of green beans drain on the side of the bowl, break open a roll to butter and steam, take a pork chop from the platter with my fork.

  How can you eat? you say angrily. I go ahead without you, cutting the chop, then laying the knife down and forking the food one dainty bite at a time into my appetite. I am determined to go ahead without you as if the meal were a metaphor for us.

  Later, I will hear you in the next room, ordering a pizza. Yes, you say into the phone, small sausage and pepperoni, put some hamburger on there too. You are a carnivore.

  You have a place to stay? Jake said that first day, an afterthought. Yes, yes, I told him, lying, embarrassed at what I took to be fatherliness, but the thing turned on me. Then take a bath there, he said. Later he let me use the shower out back, a holdover, I suppose, from when the owner lived behind the store. It was a couple of weeks before I could save enough from my check, and the money you brought in to pay a month’s rent. I spent an afternoon leaning on the counter and scanning the rent ads in the classifieds of someone’s discarded newspaper.

  Our landlady is a long time answering the bell. At first we think she isn’t home, and then she stands on the threshold looking at us through the storm door, one angled, arthritic hand on the latch while she decides. I feel her cold fingers as she cracks the door and pokes the key through to me. She sends us down the block to look, and we walk to the house, holding hands shyly, the key cool in my nervous hand. The house is a little shabby, like us, a little down on its luck, but you twitch aside the stained curtain at the sink window, and I can see beyond you a weedy back yard, a fence, beyond that countryside, the wide sky. The landlady leans on her cane and sucks her mouth in annoyance when I tell her we don’t have the money for a deposit. But something gives way in her, some soft place shows in her face when I tell her we have just wed, and she lets us have it anyway. Just in case, she takes down my mother’s address in her uncertain hand, carefully shaping each shaky letter like stick figures, ready to run.

  I suppose I am lucky that my memories of my father are not clouded by those that came after. They are not ballasted, sunk beneath the weight of many years of him, of many seasons, folded inaccessibly into the trunk of my childhood. In this way he is as fresh as when I was four, as full and alive as a child’s mind can guess, remembering the slant of one hand in a gesture of anger, a smoke and sour smell, the sharp edge of his voice, the scrape of his cheek on mine in a goodnight kiss, the way he rubbed his hand on the back of his neck, and other things.

  I am always waiting for things to come clear; I want to take my fist and rub an open space in the frost on the window, a circle large enough to encompass my whole view and make things clear. As in my childhood: no more my balance upset by the raised-voice pullings of teachers: Mrs. Scott, my ancient, black-haired, second-grade teacher, who was looking always for a way to unspin the story I kept tightly wrapped to me. She bends her powdery face to me: Can you spell elephant? No.

  I remember the sound of the rain on the windows, the roof, a gentle rhythm, warm almost and clean smelling. I remember the look of the sky outside the windows, liquid and strongly washed with color. I remember standing at the board, looking out at the faces of my classmates and feeling afraid. Some of them are watching, some looking away, nobody worried or laughing. Emmitt is signaling, his mouth forming letters, but I do not watch his mouth. I only take the dry bit of chalk into my hand, shake it like a die and come up with E. I stroke it carefully onto the board and pitch the chalk back into the metal track. Good start, Mrs. Scott says. Alice? Can you add some more? When I get back to my seat, Emmitt nudges me with his elbow. E-L-E.

  I am sitting on the stool at my mother’s bureau. She is standing behind me, running a hairbrush through my long hair. In the mirror I can see her body, her white arms, the contented look of her face. Her bedroom is littered with the business of everyday: a towel on the bed, an open paperback on the night stand, the bedside lamp’s rakish shade, a dress that needs hemming thrown across the chair. The bed is rumpled, unrepaired from the night; the white curtains stir. Beyond this room another layer barely glimpsed: the blue, blue sky of summer, the buzzing of crickets in the yard outside, the faraway growl of the tractor, the sky-bound buzz of highway traffic beyond the horizon. Sometimes a bird will cross the triangle of sky in my view, a black-brown life fluttering in the endless stillness.

  We are almost finished, and she has worked loose all the little tangles that pulled. Now the brush runs freely through my hair, and I imagine we are lingering, enjoying the pleasure of touching and being touched.

  She is humming a little light song I do not know, and I listen to the notes coming from her as if coming from far away, across the empty air and into my ears, as if into some tunnel where I am deep inside. She is strumming the brush, again and again, through my hair, laying it out brown and smooth across her pale hand. I am looking in the mirror, at me, at her cool face, around her room in reverse, as if examining another life, arranged at a funhouse angle to the real version, all of it backwards except me, my face is as I always know it. I am picking out the objects on her bureau, idly turning over an old-fashioned nail file, fingering the loose stopper of a glass perfume bottle, worrying the flounce of the eyelet runner. It is an elaborate bit embroidered with bluebirds, a hand-me-down, I suppose, from Grandma June. My hand falls on the shallow first drawer, half-open, and I can see the folded lingerie, smell the scented handkerchiefs, spy something glittering down under the satin folds, a siren, and I reach into the dark of the drawer to pull it out. It is a gold chain with a man’s ring on it, a plain gold band, a simple circle of light. I turn the ring over in my hand, feeling the length of the chain. What’s this? I ask her. She does not speak, but in the mirror I can see her face turn. She takes the ring from my hand and goes on humming. She dangles the ring a moment before my face on its slender chain, turns it, lets the light gild its facets, and then she lets it wind back into the folds of a handkerchief. She slides the drawer shut with one hand and goes on brushing my hair.

  Something has changed. Outside the tractor roars overdrive, sputters, dies. Humming, she hits a hard note, hard and flat, and it stops her. She backs up a few bars, gets a running start, but the notes lead to it again. The brush bites my scalp. Again, and
I lift a hand instinctively. She raises the hairbrush and flings it away. It hits the floor, and its pieces skitter onto the rug. She turns her face from the mirror, but I cannot look away from her, can see only the painful line of her jaw, the curve of her slender neck, one hand raised to her face as if to keep something away, as if to weep.

  The griddle is hot and smells of old grease and burned metal but I like the warmth on my face. It is a slow day, and I am tired, wearing an old dress that I bought at the thrift store because it reminded me of home.

  Jake hears me rooting around in the freezer for another pack of burgers, kneeling in among the big jars of mustard and ketchup. I can smell the crate of onions on the floor to the right, and I admire the color of their papery brown skins through the slats. Jake calls me back into the office.

  What’s the matter with you? He says. You’ve been so down in the mouth. This sounds somehow like my mother, and I know that if I try to answer I will start to weep, like a five-year-old, at the unfairness of things. I want to tell him about you, about the nights I do not see you, about the nights I do. I want to tell him things have somehow gotten aslant, to describe to him the awful angled look on your face. But my throat closes over the tears. I cannot say what is wrong, I just look at my hands clasped in my lap or out the narrow window behind his head. This gives me a snatch of blue sky, a look at the wider world. I try to think about something else while waiting for Jake to release me.