The Geometry of Love Read online

  I cannot go back without a thought to who might look for me there or what might happen. I cannot call. I imagine Jake opening up alone this morning, a little puzzled, waiting a while to prep for lunch, waiting almost too late, until perhaps the Heating and Air guys start arriving, and then he starts without me. He will shake his head as he cleans the hot griddle with the edge of the turner. Later, when the rush is over, he will ring my phone, and either someone will pick it up or he won’t. Perhaps after closing, Jake will coast past the house on his way home, his brake lights an ignition of surprise in the dark night. What will he find?

  I am on the run, again. I’m not sure how it will end, or where, but I’m headed back the way I came. It is as if somehow I hope to unspin experience, to reconnect with my life. I wish I could unlive these last years, slip the knot of the shuttered house where I have lived. I want to breath fresh air again, although it has been hard to quit you. The noise and movement, the clutter of experience and expectation smother passion. I spent some years doing the easy thing, spent it on us, one more day, maybe our life will turn out better, will return tomorrow or the day after, but I think it has gone too far for that now.

  As I come out of the McDonald’s, a crowd of blackbirds sweeps low across the sky. They are a sudden bouquet of black wings and motion, an urgent fluttering. They pepper the generous sky with a hint of dismay, freckle the pavement with their shadows like an unseasonable rain, and I have the urge to cover my head, to cower, to shake. I stop to look at the hundreds of them, flowing around the electrical lines, weaving their way among the branches of a tree, skimming the rooftops. They crash like a tide against a nonexistent shore, coming up short on the edges of things. Each bit of bird is a bundle of motion, impossible individual motion, but each one moves alongside the others, too, like a brushstroke in the, painted, sky. Its motion is its own and another’s, yes and no, question and answer.

  Before things started to happen, I used to sit at the kitchen table with my feet propped up and watch the birds raid the feeder outside the window. They are some homely variety, suburban and bland; they arrive cozily, like the neighbors coming over for drinks. I can frame the world in this narrow window, a space no bigger than I can see all at once: a patch of ground, some trees, a glimpse of field, beyond that a slice of horizon, a remnant of blue. The birds, they come in clutches of two or three, their tiny black eyes glistening side to side as they peck in the seeds, showering bits to the ground. A female cardinal pokes along in the grass. It has a nest nearby, and it hunts twigs and bits of leaves, any tidy snip of useful stuff. Its plumage is dusky, but its beak is sharp red, its eyes licorice. The females are camouflaged, I learned in a science book at school, as in my family. It’s only a question of what we are trying to hide.

  Even after these years, you and I are still alternately breaking apart and smoothing things over: Your voice is angry and hard, then later gentle, like your hands. With raised voices we spin apart, and close again, turning fast with the twisted gravity of bodies in eclipse.

  I remember your hand on my face in the beginning, a caress, desire, the feeling of your skin on mine. I remember satisfying you, your face at rest. That was so long ago, its memory echoed only in my beating heart, in the roar of the wind that rocks my car as I head north again.

  In the flow of traffic I can lose myself, can become another car on the road: What color was the car that just passed, what kind, what name, how many passengers? On the road I am a stranger, unnoticed, insignificant, a piece only of the whole picture and not something alone. In this way I hope to slip fate’s mind, skip the consequences, live.

  When I see you in the street or in a restaurant I want to pass by without the sudden, anxious focus that means recognition, and sometimes I can accomplish this. I see you in the little sandwich place on the corner, sitting opposite a blonde I do not know. You are laughing at some joke, openmouthed, ostentatious. If I were to look at you I would see the flash of your teeth in a smile. I do not look, and you bring your napkin to your mouth, as if to cover the sight. The woman, someone’s daughter I can’t help thinking, puts a slender, white hand on your arm. She is very small, compared with you, breakable, her hand like a child’s on your brown arm. She laughs, too. As I turn away from the counter with my sandwich in a paper bag, I walk past your table. I can focus on the glass door ahead, the way out, it is lit with the neon of bright summer. I can feel your eyes on me, but I skim your face as if you were a stranger and look away.

  It is hot for September even for Texas, pushing past 100 and as dry as July. I was a child in northwest Oklahoma, where the state squints up against the Panhandle. My father planted poplars along the dirt road leading up to the house, and they stood like so many lonesome pickets, their backs turned against the wind. The land he farmed was overlaid with irregularities, with small dips and quick hills, as if someone had traced onto it the last ripplings of the mountains, though they were miles and borders away. His fields were shot through with a creek, a meandering trail left by the passage of water from away west and headed someplace east and south. Painted on the background of this picture was the wide streaked sky, and rain and snow roared down out of the west, put of the mountains beyond the flat horizon like echoes of other places and other lives.

  As for the details, they were filled in with houses, every mile or so, with plowed fields and livestock, with scrub trees, squatting in a smudgy, border on the land. Here and there the trees rose, twisted and strange, into the sky like scratches left on the negatives by a careless photographer.

  The creek was irregularly rimmed with cottonwoods, their broad leaves a brush to paint a clamor on the wind. In spring the cottonwoods rained seeds on our old house, and I could sit in the attic window that was mine, three floors up, and watch the fluff floating past stick in the grass around the door and pile up like a shadow of the snow in winter, in drifts here and there against the house. The nearest neighbor I could see from my window was Mr. Elkhart, who farmed the quarter-section butting our one-sixty to the west. For the most part we were alone, but the town was crowding in close to the east, and I could see the stacks from the fertilizer plant chugging with smoke a couple of miles down the narrow stripe of blacktop. The house was a quarter-mile from the road, and the road set back from the blacktop, which was set back from the interstate like so many layers of life. We were protected in a pocket of trees from the hard wind that whipped around and through the branches and made a solemn sort of music, enlivened sometimes by the clatter of a loose part of something banging hard against a stationary part of something else like the clapper of a bell.

  Looking out the attic windows of my mother’s home I can see the blacktop down toward town and watch the people go about their business in big old American cars, Buicks and Fords mostly, the shine taken off them, faded to powdery pastel, the trucks embittered by rust, bumpers askance, windshields spidered with the impact of the years.

  Everybody is identifiable even from that distance: Mr. Roy driving the co-op truck, Mrs. Whitten going into town, the Rainbo truck coming in from Enid. Mr. Elkhart rattles his old tractor between the one-sixty and the eighty down the way, beyond Mr. Arnell’s wheat. In the late spring, June mostly, the winter wheat roars into town by the truckload when the custom cutters make their sweep through the country and pass on.

  All this is identifiable, known and justified, both margins even and straight, easily tabbed out like type on a page.

  Certainly there were strays now and then, Hawley was a place you traveled through to someplace else, a stutter, but these cars you could identify by their fresh speed, out of sync with this place, the rolling look they took at the stop sign where the blacktop meets the highway, the incautious anxiousness, the outsiders as visible as the Bingo buses that dieseled past on the way to Okemah and the Muskogee Creek games.

  It is hard to match Hawley’s unselfconscious noise—of tractors and machinery, the church-picnic small talk of friends on the street, the shouted commentary under the lights at a F
riday night football game, the clatter of dishes at the drugstore lunch counter, all of it purposeful and slow—against the busyness of San Antonio. Looking out the storefront window of Jake’s, even in the lull after lunch, the streets are thick with passing vehicles, stacked up at the, light, urgently idling, anxious to get somewhere, the wiggles of heat and exhaust patterning the scene.

  At the club on a slow night I can stand alone at the window, a rag in my hand from cleaning the chrome on the jukebox. I can look out into the night at the traffic on Bandera, the headlights strung along the road like so many suns, each driver in his own windowed world, sealed against the night heat, the traffic noise, keeping mostly to himself the music of his own radio among the twenty-five stopped together at the light, each playing a different song. The driver of the second car, impatient, rolls down his window, and I can hear the thunder of his radio, downbeats only, a brief rumble through my open door. He flicks out his cigarette and cranks the window closed again. When the light changes, this man and the others around him bolt into sudden motion, their taillights, the flash of chrome, the reckless noise of their engines battering the night, as they speed away, some of them kicking up sparks where the asphalt dips in the intersection. When the light goes to red again, they are replaced by another line of urgent strangers. Where do they all go?

  Drinking a milkshake at the drugstore down on Main Street with my friend, Alice: We are eight years old. It was my favorite place downtown, its windows crusty with age and dust, the floors worn to gray. A huge metal fan roared in one corner by the ceiling, and the occasional passing of a car on the street punctuated its hum. We were in our go-to-town dresses, and the black patent leather shoes pinched my hot feet.

  Our mothers had gone to do their shopping, and we could sometimes catch a look at them as they rounded the end of an aisle: two youngish women in print dresses, pushing carts. Mrs. Bryant went to have her hair done every Friday, and she patted it protectively when they passed within range of the fan. They didn’t look up from their talk as they passed, although Mrs. Bryant snuck a sideways glance, checking on us, as she listened to my mother’s words, quick and low, as if she were telling secrets. Alice waved her small hand, a flutter like wings, but her mother only looked past us with her wan smile.

  I was sipping a milkshake up through the narrow waist of a straw. Alice drank from the rim of her tall glass, drawing a milk mustache, strawberry pink, on her upper lip. She kept wiping it onto her sleeve.

  My momma says your mama’s shopping for a new daddy, she said, and as she turned her face to me her long hair dragged in the ring of wet her glass made on the counter. Beyond her I could see Mr. Henry bent over his little sink where he washed the glasses and the ice cream dishes. The angle of his head offered a look at the impossibly precise crease in his white paper hat.

  I looked back toward the aisles but our mothers had disappeared in the maze, somewhere between the tissue boxes and the columned cage of play balls at the center of the store. I did not know what they talked about, but I liked to think of them as unhooked from everyday, testing the pinkest shades of lipstick on the backs of their hands and spraying each other with perfumes of the world.

  I’ve already got a daddy, I told Alice.

  Nu-huh, she said. He’s dead. I pushed off from the counter, then, letting the stool spin me around slowly, as if cranking the room into orbit around me. I am the sun. Behind the counter was a mirror so everything would flash past twice, once in silvery echo. Except my face, sudden and sun-browned, I could catch my face only once, my mouth a blur as if to speak. But I felt only the restlessness. I stopped spinning long enough to suck down to the bottom of the shake, and Alice didn’t say anything more. After that we played on the stools together, slapping the rails of each with our open hands, making them spin all at once; they made metal-on-metal music and motion, like a dozen anxious birds ready to fly. We heard the gunshot of something breaking then, like a jar of something falling from a top shelf somewhere, and then my mother’s nervous laughter came to us from somewhere among the aisles. That’s when Mr. Henry stopped his clearing up and went to fetch the broom and dustbin. As he passed out from behind the counter, he pinched his narrow face at us and told us to sit still like good girls.

  I remember coming down the back stairs in my pajamas, hearing the scuffing of my slippers on the wood floor. I have a sore throat, and I want to ask for something to drink. As I approach the top of the stairs I can hear the murmur of voices, hers and another (who?), in the kitchen. Their voices are low, a rhythm line to the clatter of coffee cups on saucers. And I wait, listening to the song of a spoon on a rim, the returning chink of the lid to the sugar bowl, chair legs scraping on linoleum. I wait awhile at the top of the stairs until she somehow hears my sniffles, shows her lighted face at the base of the stairs, her mouth an anxious O. What is it? she asks, and then there is urgent stair climbing and her arms carrying me back to bed and sleep.

  It was a long way to twenty-two and Texas in September, but I felt like I was just the same, more years stuffed into me like so much more dirty laundry stuffed into the top of the sack, more ingredients in some confused sauce. Some years were already spent in the succession of hot days and nights of South Texas, in the business of bare living, and I was happy to leave it behind.

  The car was hot again already and smelled of old french fries and heated vinyl and the dust that gathered where the dash came to meet the window. I cranked down the windows on both sides to let in the new air and busied myself arranging the straw in my drink while I waited for a boy and his mother to cross behind my bumper toward the door of the restaurant.

  His mother was young, nondescript, and she hurried him up. See, I told myself, I am nice. I smiled at them in an imitation of pleasantness and waited until they were on the curb. In reverse, the old green Ford rattled its sorrow, and I eased it into forward, let it roll slowly toward the exit.

  I tried for a long time to act right, to pay attention, to drink coffee instead of tea, to always use the turn signal, to make sure dinner was ready on time, to look away when another man looked at me on the street or at the club.

  Just be careful, I told myself. It took awhile for my eye to heal that time, and I thought Where would I go? So I lay awake beside you, listening to your breathing and in the morning when you went to work I could kiss you good-bye and wave from the front porch, endurable only because I was thinking this could be the last time, anything could happen. You could die. The world could end. Sometimes at night, too, I’m ashamed to say, that when I came home to a dark house, when I sat up waiting for you in the narrow, deep dark of early morning, I thought you could be run away or dead, and I was glad in some secret sliver of me. Then the tires of your truck churned up the gravel on our drive. And then I remember your face at our wedding, grave and lovely: Your mouth, in a hiccup of pleasure, says: I will.

  We were just first gone from my mother’s house, staying someplace north of here. I think it was Seagrave, in a park down by the creek that wanders through town, the noise of the interstate, two miles west, hangs over the town like a morning mist. We were sleeping in the back of the truck, the blankets paisleyed around us. In a little while, I knew, you would get up and set the tailgate swinging down, and we would stretch ourselves out into the day, but for now we lay quietly in the back, smelling woodsmoke from other people’s fires and looking up at the immovable sky, already blue with morning and getting hot.

  You shifted, and I knew you were awake from the squeaking of the shocks. We kept low in the back. Though we were parked a little ways from the others, I liked to think they couldn’t hear us in the night, the shocks complaining with every movement like the rush of feeling up my spine.

  It was fine not to stir too quickly while the morning was fresh, watching the day solidify around us, the colors coming up strong with the sun. I could smell bacon cooking somewhere over a camp stove, and I missed the feeling of a mug warming my cold hand in the back of the kitchen. In truth, I didn’t miss
much of anything except those mornings alone in the kitchen, thinking what to cook for the day, planning the pies and looking out the back over the misted fields where the rabbits sometimes sniff about, looking for some tasty nibble, too. Sometimes I could take my father’s shotgun from the cabinet near the back door and come back with dinner plans, though I wasn’t a good shot, and the dew would soak through my slippers once I stepped off the porch.

  On that idle morning waiting for the day, I thought about my mother, imagined her standing at the stove in her apron, tending the bacon with the wood-handled fork, waiting for the men to come downstairs so she could fix their eggs. There would be biscuits in the oven, and she would be idly eating a diagonal of toast smeared with honey. I wondered what would happen to her; whether she would wait for me to come home or simply move on with her life. It’s as if I knew you couldn’t last, as if I could look ahead to this day when I’d be headed north again, though not entirely unchanged.

  Marry me, you said, as matter of fact as what’s for breakfast. You fiddled with a strand of my hair, spooling it around your finger then letting it fall away. Marry me. I hadn’t figured it would come to this, had tried to think only as far as getting gone and getting somewhere else. When I didn’t answer you tugged on the piece of hair. Wake up and marry me, your insistent voice said. I smiled, said only, What’s for breakfast.

  I want you to marry me, you said. I confess it was a pleasure to hear, it made me love you, I think, for the wanting. Or you’ll get no breakfast, you said, although we did have breakfast first in a little place where the eggs were not too dear. Afterward, we poked around the courthouse square in some little town, looking for the J.P. We bounced the old streets in your truck, and you held onto my leg like a handle with your free hand. I was scooted over onto the gearshift, as if you would lose me if you didn’t keep hold.