The Geometry of Love Page 15

  I sent him packing, my mother says as I stand, stunned, in the doorway of your room. The curtainless window is like a wide eye out on the world; the bed, all signs of you are stripped and gone, packed up or taken to the wash.

  I didn’t like the way he looked, she says, showing me her indifferent face. And then, Breakfast on. Two eggs today, scrambled.

  Although it is almost summer, the sun is barely up, and the sky is freshly pleated with the yellows and reds of the sunrise. I go downstairs and heat the griddle, start the sausages, make coffee. In a little while the men filter down into the kitchen, their showers still damp in their hair, their clothes smelling of laundry soap. They take plates from the stack, and I slide on the eggs, fill their cups from the coffeepot.

  Chicky is about your age, and he takes two plates into the dining room, one for Mr. Charles. I can hear him on the front stairs, his boots already heavy though the day has just begun.

  Hey, he says to Chicky, really a give-him-trouble complaint, The yolks is broke. Chicky is already forking in his eggs, a bite of sausage slathered with yolk. I can see this through the open door into the dining room where everyone is settling. Nobody minds your empty chair. Mr. Charles raises the general alarm: My yolks is broke. They’re broke.

  I am at the stove, lifting the last of the fried eggs onto somebody’s plate. Coffee? I ask. They’re broke, he says. Then wordless I swing into the dining room to scoop up the plate in front of Mr. Charles. I turn my back on him, and without pause go back into the kitchen. He can watch me as I tilt the contents into the scrap bucket on the counter, bang the lid. The plate rings on the table when I put it back in front of him, his mouth and eyes circles of surprise. I shed the apron as I climb the back stairs, and I can hear my mother, calm, say into the quiet room, Scrambled or fried, Mr. Charles? and then she coolly breaks two eggs onto the sizzling griddle.

  From the window of my room I can see your pickup idling down on the blacktop in the shade of some cottonwood trees. I want to run down the stairs. I want to hear the bang of the screen door like a gunshot as it swings shut behind me. I want to feel the air pumping into my lungs as I run. I want to watch you get out of your truck to take me into your arms, pleased, your face cramped into a smile. Before I can do anything your truck simply moves on.

  I have a recurring dream that I am driving fast and low to the ground, the forward motion a wide dreamy curve as if I were following the arc of the Earth, but the road, although it is sweeping and smooth, the road turns too tightly. I know if I turn the wheel any farther the motion will push the car too far, will roll it, and I imagine the feeling of rolling, the pulling of my seat belt, the angry metal folding in on itself, and instead I let it go, let the car roar off into the grassy shoulder, bumping down into a ditch, harmlessly.

  I am headed north; coming down out of the hills, through the random dustiness of Ardmore, it shows its ’50s face to the highway. The road soothes me, urges me on, and I have the feeling of the land shaking me out like a blanket. The land behind me is one long unbroken slope, stretching to the horizon, and I study the rearview mirror for a glimpse of your truck. When I pass a police car pulled to the side of the road, the flicker of my brake lights is a nervous giveaway.

  This whole trip is, of course, unnecessary. My bank card and gas card are the clues. I can put distance between us, make the moves as if to jam miles between us, several state lines and a name change or two. But you know where I will go, where I am drawn like a flower to the sun. And if you have somehow forgotten, the map will arrive in my mailbox, envelope by envelope, bill by bill, charting my progress in days and direction.

  And, too, in this, one place is as good as another. Certainly I can escape the experience of our crime report, of seeing us on the evening news, spoken about by blondes with perfect teeth. But anywhere there are husbands and wives, where there is feeling, I can read or hear the same inescapable things.

  It is the movement that matters, the speed and the look of things. As I watch the landscape rush past my windshield, the images accumulate in the fresh space in my mind, the woman’s face in the next car as she passes me; billboard advertisements for boots, motels, for Amarillo steaks; the sun’s shimmering slant on the highway ahead. Each image scoots over to make room for the newcomers, until some are crowded out, must get off the bench of Now and go along into the antechamber of Then. It is not distance I put between us, but detail. And in this way I can disconnect the alarms in my head, turn down the burner and let my heart cool to a simmer.

  I carry some part of you with me, although coming down out of the hills I stopped beside the road and got out of the car. It was cooling off quick as the sun dropped into the hills’ pocket. I pulled the rings from my jeans, and they were as warm as if I had been wearing them, two small circles of hard feelings. When I pitched them out into the air, I lost sight of them immediately in the dimming light. I imagined they flew apart, like repellent magnets, landing ping-ping against granite deep below and lost forever to each other and to me.

  You are somewhere behind me, I think, and I imagine you struggling up from the kitchen floor where I left you. The night is gathering outside, it tints the house with chill blue shade. You slip in the mess of broken dishes and old food on the floor, the splattering of soda we have smeared, but you catch yourself on the rim of the sink. Your shirt (the blue button-down?) is clammy and damp where you have lain on the floor for hours. It is probably ruined by that inexplicable tear, but never mind, the stain will never come out anyway. You gingerly creep to the hall, testing the space in front of you with your outstretched hands. You move to the phone table and sit slowly, delicately in the chair beside it. You keep the cold wet shirt apart from your warm belly, press one warm hand against the skin on your ribs on that side. Your dripping makes a pattern of dots on the wood floor, like a sloppy painter, and you sit in that hard chair by the phone, reach for it, to call someone. But who?

  On that last day I stole a photograph of my father. I took it out of her night table drawer where I knew she kept it shoved between the pages of a book. It was their wedding day, and I tore the photograph in half, a ragged rupture, and slipped his half into the pocket of my backpack, her half back into the book. He is young and trim and newly married, and when I look closely at his face I can see the eyes he has given me, the jaw line, the chin. This photograph I have tacked up on the wall of my bedroom where I can look at it lying in bed. It is this face that comes to me when I dream.

  Outside, she said, outside. I had flipped a clean sheet onto the bed and knocked over a bedside lamp in Mr. Stuart’s room. Out on the quarter-section, Mr. Elkhart was planting, row by row, back and forth, and we could hear the roar of the motor as it ripped red-brown dust into the afternoon air. On the way out the door I stopped to say something to her. I watched for a moment from the doorway, watched her right the lamp, one hand rubbing the scuff on his shade, the drawer has come ajar in the commotion. Then the world goes quiet, without air, and her idle hand slips onto the drawer handle, pulls it. She pauses to look inside, then gingerly explores its contents with one hand. What she takes from there I cannot see. But she sits on the bed, as if suddenly weak, brings something glinting to her face, a ring? The world is quiet but for the sound of the tractor in the field. The breeze comes in from the window cool and blue. She draws the thing to her heart a moment and something makes her remember herself, to look around, to catch me at the door, and I run out onto the porch, into the yard. The old wood screen door slams shut behind me with a crack. Her angry face shows behind the screen in a patchwork of shade and light, and then she turns away. In a little while I can hear her moving through the house again, top to bottom, shutting doors, each one a gunshot until she comes to the kitchen. I can see her through the screen, her fingers moving as if to knot her handkerchief, her face now red and damp. She moves as if to come out the door, and. I look away, quick, in time only to catch a blur of her face as she swings the door shut hard, and behind that, I hear her throw the bolt, sna
p.

  The sunset comes in my side window with force, The sun has melted to an orange ball. The light strikes hard on my face, and I move the visor to block the blow. Traffic has loosened up now, most of it trucks, skimming hard to my left. I am behaving myself, trying not to speed, although I haven’t seen a trooper in a while, and I nudge the needle up toward eighty.

  Out my open window I can feel the heat of the sunset on my arm. It ignites the sky with the color of fire, and the wind coming in the window carried with it a hint of summer and the last leavings of the rain as it slides into evening.

  I rubbed the web of my thumb, felt the memory of the wet warmth on my hand, suddenly slippery, the memory of it already permanent, like a crease in a fold of paper, my hand wipes itself dry again against the car seat, my thigh, rubs at my heart.

  Once the sun sets, I stop for a hamburger. I have outrun the clouds, and I imagine you, too, are left behind. I can ease myself out of the car. My legs are unexpectedly stiff, with the turn of the car key I find an ache in my arm. Standing up, though, I breathe deeply of the rain-filtered air and smell the sudden freshness of damp concrete and settled dust.

  I scarcely dare to look at the papers in the rack outside until I realize they are from the morning, assembled probably before midnight. This somehow is safe, some image of the world before today. I drop two quarters into the slot and slip loose a paper from the stack. Take Only One, a sign inside says. And something in me slides a second one into the path of the cover, jamming it open, the next one is free.

  Inside, I feel a little funny standing alone at the Please Wait to Be Seated sign, ashamed almost, with my newspaper under my arm, and when the hostess says One? I nod, nose in the air, pretending I am important.

  Around me there are more travelers, a quiet bunch sown not too densely among the tables; it is after 8 P.M. The hostess gives me a booth by the window, and I look around at my neighbors, examine their faces for familiarity, look at my reflection in the window. At the tables around me, the conversation is sparse, muffled by the memory of the wind in my ears. On one side is an older couple I can match with the blue Buick in the lot, there is a businessman or two. Some tables away a baby cries, and the father slips her a package of crackers that she grips with her small hands like something precious.

  Fingering the plastic menu, I cannot decide what to have. Breakfast all day, the menu announces and although it is nighttime, I am tempted by the thought of a plate of eggs. When the waitress arrives (a slender blonde whose pink plastic name tag says Patti), I order a hamburger, as if even my desires were traveling incognito. While I wait, I look at the paper, search the pages for something I do not find and cannot name. I still feel the car’s movement in my limbs, think of the things waiting out there for me, the suitcase and the gun, too. I stretch my feet out onto the seat opposite, try to relax. I study the pages more closely, eyes down. I pointedly turn my back on my reflection, as if it were a stranger impolite enough to stare. I know no one is paying attention, across the room the couple is taken up with feeding the baby bits of their dinners, the businessmen are studying papers slipped like leaves out of their cases, or they are hiding their hard faces behind newspapers. I feel as if something were edging in closer to me, like a stalking animal, it comes up just beyond the edge of my sight, like a spook, grinning and mugging, but it winks out the moment I turn my head.

  When the waitress returns with the plate, I get a flash of a tattoo on the flesh of her thumb. The picture is smudgy red, a rose? a thorn? a heart and dagger?

  Anything else? she says, bringing catsup for the fries. She fetches the pad from the pocket of her apron, impatient.

  No, nothing else. She rips loose the check and slides it under the rim of my plate.

  This is the pattern of my life, unspun from connections, my father is dead. My mother’s voice long ago faded from the other end of the phone line. My friends I cannot name. Now you, too, I have torn from the photograph of my life.

  There is no one at the cashier’s stand when I go to pay, everyone is buzzingly busy, looking away or doing something else. I wait at the counter but then another group of people comes in from outside, spills around the little lobby, a couple of women and three men, all of them talking at once. I cannot stand the friendly motion of their bodies, the rattle of their voices. I leave my money on the counter and slip out around them. As I pass the phone by the entrance I consider calling Jake. I pause for a moment, lift the receiver even. The dial tone is familiar and friendly in my ear, as if it were an unbroken memory. I tip the receiver against my shoulder so I can fish through my pockets for some change. Then I imagine Jake’s voice on the other end, an uncertain H-Hello? I imagine he asks me where I am. I imagine he tells me the police have questioned him, that they are looking for me. I imagine he asks me what has happened. I imagine hearing the sound of a door opening on the other end, and he breaks the connection suddenly, in midsentence. I hang up the phone.

  Through the windshield, I get a shiver of the world in the path of my headlights, in the spare streetlights that keep watch on a town, in the ongoing rhythm of the cars opposite, coming instead of going, in the lighted signs beside the road. I am enclosed, safe, in the womb of my car, the dash throwing an amber light up into my face but from the other drivers I am obscured by the mask of my cool headlights. All I can remember of our wedding is your face, believable and cool, I had the sudden sense I was talking to you at long last, unmasked.

  Your face from that day comes to me in dreams: To Have and to Hold, you say and your mouth makes the words important. From This Day Forward. Your face, your warm hands, lead me through the script. And later your face is illuminated by the night table lamp, amber and warm, your face colored by the afternoon sun, ignited by anger, anger and dread.

  What is wrong with us, I wondered then. Acting and reacting, push comes to shove, and that to blows. Your hands on me in a caress, your hands angry.

  It was late when I pulled into Oklahoma City, coming up on the 1-40 junction. I ran into the rain again; it was a sprinkling that smeared the windshield. Up ahead was a motel, and the thought of sleep seemed perfectly safe. It was late. The chunky woman behind the counter was watching television when I pushed through the glass doors, and I had the feeling it was hooked to security cameras, peering into successive rooms, around the ice machine, into stairwells, but then the laugh track sounded, and I knew.

  Single? she said, and I wanted to say: Separated, potentially a widow, but I was quiet, a little smile on my face at the joke. I paid her in cash and accepted the jigsaw piece of plastic that was a room key. 201, she said.

  My face in the mirror was lined and tired, my hair sticky. The place seemed safe and cool, the furniture impersonal and easily wiped off, the whole thing smelling of other lives, but sanitized. I threw the bolt. I hiked the covers and looked under the bed, examined the contents of the bureau drawers (two postcards showing my room, redecorated, a Gideon Bible, the Yellow pages) looked into the shower stall, ran the faucets, listened to the dial tone, feeling ridiculous.

  I let the shower steam up in the air-conditioned cool a while, and when it had frosted the mirror I peeled out of my clothes. It was a glass stall, and I closed myself into that tiny shatterable room, let the door seal suck itself shut. I stood in the warm stream, letting its heat wash me blind and deaf, numb with the force of it. I stood for a long time in the water, not even washing, just letting go of the day. Then I lathered up good and let the soap rinse off, seeing my skin under it as if for the first time. It was hard to turn off the shower and get out, but I felt clean again, rubbing my skin with the rough little motel towels. I felt almost happy. I was sitting naked on the toilet lid, toweling my hair and looking at my bruised legs when the click of the door latch startled me. I looked around the little room for a weapon: a bottle of shampoo, a comb, a small pyramid of white towels, and, oh yes, the paper you use to polish your shoes.

  Out in the room I could hear someone moving, quietly, a slight metallic rattl
e (keys?) the rasp of breath, stealthy regular footsteps on the plush.

  Who’s there? My voice sounded shaky and small. It was very quiet in the room outside. In the ceiling above me the heat lamp clicked off into quiet. Who is it? although I might have been calling simply, Is it you? I combed the hair out of my face with my fingers and crouched, tense, at the door. I felt very small. I cracked the door, peered through at a slit of room, at a slice of carpet and cabinet, the yellow unwavering light, no clue.

  I can hear the fuzzy electronic spark, the blue electricity of On, as the television ignites with noise, joyful voices, the canned laughter of some sitcom, a moment too loud. Then just as suddenly comes the crackle of Off, the sound goes dead. Someone is playing with my TV. What to do? Run? Scream? Hide? Sit on the bed and watch prime time?

  Naked, I am as thin and pale as one of those blind cave fish, and unprotected, too. I let my heart beat a moment, once, twice, trying to decide. When I come out of the bathroom, the room is empty, unsinister, exactly as I left it. The door is locked tight and bolted on the inside. The bed is still made, the TV screen is cold to touch, my keys are in a bunch on the counter, my clothes in a pile on the floor. Everything is right, and you are nowhere again. Somewhere down the hallway outside, I can hear booted feet descend the stairs, shaking the room in a spare perception of danger.

  Twelve

  Let’s go back to the time line, I think, the events laid out in full view, experience examined under the magnifier and explained in succinct phrases in a particular order, which may or may not be how we understand it: Father Dies. Skipped School. Mother Miscarries. Ate Pie for Breakfast. Asked for Divorce.

  As we have found, experience isn’t stacked one on top of another or even side-by-side, elbow-to-elbow: boy, girl, boy, girl, like the seating chart for a dinner party, everybody seated twenty-two inches apart and using all the proper cutlery. It’s more like a card catalogue, each event noted and cross-indexed. Under L for Love: See also contentment; obsession; rage; fear.