The Geometry of Love Read online

  That is, I think, what we were doing: keeping hold, the both of us directionless and drifting, never being sure which way was true. Otherwise, I do not know how to explain the things that have happened between us. I cannot explain the wanting. The desire, the pull you had for me was like the things that happen when pen meets paper.

  And later when my mother said she didn’t know me on the phone, I realized it didn’t matter, my mother would have her way whether I were there or not, so maybe it was just as well.

  Not too long after we moved into that house, we found a pack of children, tan-faced and small, outside the grocery store with a box of young puppies. The puppies were fussing like kittens and scarcely more than patches of black fur. They were too young, anyone could see, to be away from their mother, both children and puppies, and I held a broad-faced puppy, hardly able to hold up his head, cupped in my two hands. He smelled of sour milk and urine, but the look on his face was calm and sweet. He laid his cold nose down on the heel of my hand and yipped tinnily.

  Don’t you want one, lady? the boy says. Mama says we can’t bring them back home.

  He has a stand-up head of black hair. He allows that they have been waiting since early morning for someone to want them and have given away two. He tells me the puppies’ mother is dead, hit by a car the day before yesterday. He says carefully that they are six weeks old, but anybody can see that is a lie, if only from the way the boy looks away, at the sky or into the parking lot, scanning for the next customer.

  His brother, a smaller version of him, then intervenes stutteringly to tell me not to worry, they will let the ones that are left go in the lot behind the store where they can live in the drainage ditch that runs through the field.

  The fur on this puppy is feathery and light against my skin. He watches me closely, and I consider the consequences, imagine him at the house, consider the price of dog food. You are anxious for business to be done, fidgety. And I tell the boy we will think about it as I pass him back.

  Even early on I kept track of your temperature, always a sideways look to gauge your expression, to read the angle of your’ shoulders. Sitting across from you at my mother’s table I kept a watch on your plate, checking things off my menu. It is as if you were the sudden center of my orbit, as if I were drawn in by your unexpected gravity. The curve of your jaw against my face is the shape of desire.

  I walk beside you in the grocery store. You have one hand hooked onto the pocket of your jeans and the other pushing the cart. One wheel wiggles in protest of progress, and I am glad to be beside you. We are shopping for the week. Potatoes, hamburger, milk, flour, just the bare stuff. Tomatoes, onions, peppers we are growing in a weedy garden out back of the house. I do not bring up the dogs, already I know better.

  When we get out to the truck, I am swinging the bags into the bed when you go back for something. Just a minute, you say, one hand held up. Wait, and you turn your back. I sit in the cab, going over what we might have forgotten, soap? cereal? light bulbs? Looking out at the traffic on the street, at the sky stretched cloudless overhead like fancy spring clothes, soft blue and embroidered at the hem. When you come back, I can see you in the rearview mirror swing a bag of something dog food? in beside the groceries. You slide in behind the wheel. When you pull your hand from inside your jacket you bring out the puppy. Meet Sam Jr.

  I’ve known boys before, of course, red-haired Cameron, who suddenly leaned over in math class and put his lips on mine (Mr. Anderson jingled the change in his pockets, scowled, but the cadence of his drone did not waver) and Emmitt, before he got busy being a baseball star and met the diamond girls with their matching-panty outfits.

  Emmitt and I were at a football game late in the season, the lights burning yellow-bright, like a rack of small suns, in the November night. We were crowded together on the metal bleachers, getting cold, and surrounded by other kids and parents, everybody waiting for something to happen. In the row in front of us were a couple of ear-splitting girls, somebody’s younger sisters sent to sit someplace else. Their faces were smudgily painted with the team colors, and they roared with excitement, Go, Blue. The marching band was strewn in the bleachers alongside us, their starchy uniforms growing a little more unbuttoned as the scoreboard ticks off the minutes. The band director, Mr. Andrews, lets his long arms draw the beat in the air, and the drummers pound out a rhythm that enters us like a heartbeat, as if we needed a spare.

  Emmitt sits beside me, and I am content. He does not speak but I can hear his breath, see the sheen of the lights on his dark hair, smell faintly the cigarette he smoked in the truck. I move my arm closer to the leather sleeve of his jacket and this disturbs his careful attention to the game. Our players are the ones in blue, rumbling back and forth on the field, churning up mud in the emerald grass. As the night deepens the lights burn a little brighter, haloed by bugs. We can hear the thumping of the players’ pads in the scrimmage. Emmitt watches, his hands in his pockets, without a thought to holding mine. He paid for my drink at the concession stand, and he stood awhile with the pep club girl behind the counter, her nervous face breaking over her smile. I stood to the side awhile and watched the long line of his leg jiggle with what? Desire, I think, he fidgets as if to excite some movement, some progress, to hurry the clock. In a little while I take my Coke back up to the foot of the bleachers and wait for him there, as if not waiting at all but involved in watching the game instead. Go, Blue.

  Emmitt had an old orange truck, slowly losing its battle with rust. He was sweet to me after the game, and we went parking down at the edge of town to talk about what we’d do when we got loose of this place. He was going to college I think, and I guess he got there, though after I quit school I never saw him again. You came along about the time I began to wonder what would happen to my life, watching the days peel away without moment, as if I were stuck someplace in the past, and the world had gone on without me.

  We lie in bed, and I can watch the flash of the lightning bugs streaking in the darkness beyond our bedroom window. They are cheerful, a blinking white like Christmas lights, although it isn’t the season. I like this scattering light, scratching streaks of day into the liquid night. We lie in bed careless of one another, touching skins, legs entangled, your hand on my belly, mine on your arm. Your breathing is heavy with sleep and calm, a template for mine, and I will myself to sleep, sleep. The lightning bugs do our dance for us, scarcely touching one another’s orbits but offering a rhythmic answer to something unasked.

  You have a tattoo, half really, a smear of blue on your bicep, a connect-the-dots eagle where the tattooist sent you home for the day, half-done, your arm swollen red and twice its size, but you went out for more beer instead and forgot to go back.

  Still, it is beautiful to me, lying beside you I trace the lines with my eyes, completing it. I once took a pen to it, filling in the wings with rough red, straddling a bench in a smoky bar, and you with a beer in the other hand. Hold still, I said, and licked my finger to rub loose a mistake.

  Even after everything, the essence of you lingers. It’s not just the things you have left behind, a stack of paperbacks on your side of the bed, a carton of orange juice molding in the refrigerator, your sunglasses in the glove compartment of my car, an occasional sock that surfaces in my laundry when I think I have cleared all this stuff out.

  When I am alone late at night, I can sniff you in the next room, as if you were shuffling newspapers or watching television. I can sit in the dim kitchen, the day quiet around me, sipping tea, my feet on your chair opposite. Outside the window I can watch the wind blow the trees in the yard, drawing uneasiness in the sky. I will hear your incautious footsteps in the next room. I know I am alone, and I go on drinking my tea and looking out the window, waiting for the feel of your hand on the back of my neck, but that does not come and in a little while I will forget. Things will get easier, I tell myself.

  Sometimes, though, you are not as cautious: A book I left in the bedroom appears in the living ro
om. The salt shaker is tucked into the medicine cabinet. Sam’s ball winds up in the butter dish. It is as if inescapable you had been here, rifling my stuff. I don’t know how this happens. I have changed the locks, and you have no key. I shiver when I take the dog toy from the refrigerator, squeaking it once or twice as if to squeeze from it the chill of that other life. It seems all these events are stacked up on one another, and you, you are slipping the frame. Your curious hands are diddling another reel of the film.

  I wonder that you haven’t found my overnight case. Even though this is my house now, I keep a suitcase packed with a change of clothes and underwear, tiny travel bottles of shampoo and lotion, as if I were going on a weekend trip somewhere, say, to Dallas. At least it makes me feel as if I had someplace to go. I keep it in the back of my car so that I see it whenever I get groceries or pop the trunk. I think someday I will need it. I will make a right turn instead of a left; I will coast onto the highway, without a backward glance. I expect you would object, would unclip its metal locks and scatter the contents around the house, hang the pajamas on the back of the door, rain the underwear over the living room, hide the toiletries behind the milk or in the pantry. You would use the shampoo to write messages on the bathroom mirror, revealed only in the negative, with the spray of steam from the shower. Your shade is mostly benign, just a little mischievous.

  At first it seemed you stayed away a long time, although I know it couldn’t have been more than a week, or maybe two. I know I was relieved for the feeling I could come and go as I pleased, and I spent a lot of time at Jake’s, wondering if I’d find you home when I got there, not knowing how I felt about that possibility.

  When you do come, though, and I peer at you through the peephole, and you seem pleasant enough, your old self, perhaps; at least you knock politely.

  I know you’re in there, you call through the door. First you try reason. Please, Darcy, we have to settle this. A little humor. I need some socks, OK?

  I huddle behind the door, quiet, waiting for you to go away. I can’t let you in, of course, because of the last time. It seemed as though we were leading up to something all along, although I thought it would be something else.

  In truth I cannot tell when things turned for us.

  We were sitting on the patio of a restaurant, drinking margaritas and waiting on our food. It was hot and the light was good and strong, the fringed umbrella swaying slightly in the breeze.

  You used your hand to tap on my forearm, Hey, what are you doing? You were increasingly anxious, somehow, stopping the waitress for a refill with a wave of your glass. Just stop it, you said, under your breath. Can’t I take you anywhere? You’re embarrassing. It is a puzzle, and I look to see whether I’m wearing clothes, as in some recurring nightmare. The margaritas are strong, and I feel slightly woozy behind my eyes, as if things were not entirely real.

  You’re giving that guy the eye. Don’t deny it.

  What guy?

  You know what guy, I’ve watched you, your low voice is a growl. I look around at the other tables, and you put your hand up to stop me, your fingers in my hair, a caress pantomimed but pulled tight, your fingers cradling my breakable skull.

  Don’t. That hurts. At that moment the waitress comes with the drinks, more drinks. It’s happy hour, and you ease up, release me. You sit back in your chair and say something funny to her. I cannot look at her laughter, at you, only at the table, my glass, my hands in my lap.

  I do not know how things came to this, it seems my world has shrunk with each day, until it is this one narrow room, the couch where I sleep at night, the kitchen, too. My tie to the outside is like an arrangement of strings, it grows more taut until it snaps, ping, ping, one string at a time, and I am left holding one limp end, useless.

  I have gradually stopped going out. First it was downtown or out to dinner, I could not go to a movie or shopping. My circle got a little narrower, its spiral cranking in smaller and tighter, until nothing but the things between work and home were in bounds. It was as if a wall rose up between me and the world. I could see things happening as if they were a long way off. Then the club dropped off my map, one day it was just impossible, though I would have been glad to see Jake’s fatherly face. Things dropped off fast at that point. The block and Sam’s walk, the yard, the porch. Even the hall scares me now, and I hate to go into the bathroom, the house seems strange, so out of control. I scarcely visit the bedroom anymore since Sam was lost, and I do not dare turn out the lights. In the next room the range hood’s amber light is my companion, yellow and warm, through the dark night.

  Our house, my house really, is shuttered and cool. I keep the curtains drawn and the doors locked. The summer scarcely makes its imprint. I have asked the mailman (bored eyes, rimmed with red, fingers fingering the envelopes that go to houses beyond mine) to take my mail instead to a rented post office box I never attend. Soon the electricity will go off, and the phone, though when their billing departments call I tell them my husband is in the hospital and expected to die. I tell them my mother has cancer and won’t last. I tell them anything, my children have been in a bus accident, and the cat has the flu. I say I lost my legs in a midair collision over Toledo. Truly I think they may call to hear the tales I tell, a shocked voice on the other end says Yes, ma’am, I’m so sorry. And by then I am sorry too, though the truth is to me scarcely less paralyzing. I cannot leave the house, can scarcely even go to the closet for a change of clothes. The food is running low. The garage stinks sweetly with garbage I haven’t emptied in weeks, though I am careful to keep the house picked up, to sweep the floors first thing each morning. I don’t know whom this is for. Sam disappeared weeks ago: I found a hole knocked in the fence, the boards missing, a breach in my defense.

  The yard is weedy and brown, although last week I watched my neighbor run his lawn mower over the front. I attended his passing through the slitted holes in the blinds, without disturbing the impression that no one lives here anymore. He is a delicate man, an early retiree from an airline, and I watched his scalp redden and burn around what’s left of his hair as he passed back and forth in front of my cool window. I resisted the urge to call out to him. Wear a hat.

  Our kitchen floor is a yellow vinyl, the tile edges outlined by the dirt of years, dirt I tried to scrub away on my knees, the stiff brush playing a rhythm line to the lemony cleaner. After you left, I spent my nights scrubbing things shiny, moving from room to room in the small hours: sweeping and mopping, vacuuming the draperies and the chairs. I saw a woman on television vacuuming the dust out of her cushions by putting them into a plastic bag and letting the hose suck all the air out of it. The shriveled bag was oddly satisfying (somehow like testicles), and I let the vacuum run a long time on each one, inhaling the essence of our life and collecting it for garbage. I crawled along the baseboards with a nail, scratching out the accumulated gunk, climbed onto a chair to unscrew the light fixtures and shake loose the withered corpses of long-dead flies. It is as if you had never lived here, nor me, for that matter. When I was done the house smelled of floor cleaner and tub-and-tile soap, not cooked meals nor dust nor Sam, nor our accumulated life. And I sat in the cool living room with the shades drawn and Sam at my feet and waited for night to fall so we could move to the bedroom and lie awake in the bed, waiting for the day to arrive. First I check all the doors and windows, I pick up the phone and listen to the dial tone, constant and comforting. I unplug the toaster. I squeeze the faucets tighter so they do not drip and turn up the air conditioner so I can hear its hum, constant and gentle, all night.

  It is just as if I were leaving on a trip, although the only place I go is to bed, into dreams sometimes, if I can sleep. I lie there a while listening to the house, listening for the sound of a truck on the road, of things falling, of a fluctuation in the air from the vent that will mean someone is moving around in here, punctuating the hum of night. In a bit I will get up and do the whole routine again, sliding my hand in behind the blinds to feel the hard lock
of the windows (imagining your face on the other side of the window, watching for a mistake), twisting the doorknob to test its give, laying a hand on the cool spirals of the burner coils. Sometimes I stand quietly in the living room and listen for the sound of your wheels on the drive, or your footsteps in the flower bed. I expect you but not really with stealth. I expect the noise you make, will be sudden, like the crash of a brick through the window or a horn, loud and long, before the wheels of your truck climb the curb, rip ridges into the lawn. The truck will crash into the house like a road crew’s friend, shattering windows, flinging pieces of walls and ceiling, shattering the cocoon I have built for myself and letting in the wind. In a little while I get tired again, the anxiousness subsides, and I can lay down beside Sam and rest awhile against his furred flank, both of us waiting for the day, this day, to arrive.

  Three

  Waiting for the light to change, I get a flash of a memory: of yellow kitchen tile, a spilling foam of soda, the curve of your neck feathered with brown hair. The place is a mess with shattered crockery and spilled and spoiled things, and some things that shouldn’t be there at all. Then the light changes, and I cannot look back, can only look up the long ribbon of road ahead, hot, where the surface wavers, uncertain, and the traffic takes me, with the beat of the sun on the drum of the next minute or two.

  I fit the car onto the highway and on the opposite side a patrolman passes. I can glimpse the officer’s pink face through the windshield like a bored moon. I put both hands on the wheel, and he passes me without a glance. I am trying to drive as if nothing had happened. Had something happened?