The Geometry of Love Read online

  I remember your face, angry, grim, shading washed to an even dim by the unreflecting light from shuttered windows. Your hand hard and tight on my arm. Your hard mouth, shouting something. But what?

  You came to the house late in the day, in your hands a bunch of flowers, a paper sack (bonbons?), like a cartoon suitor. Your fist was just reaching up to knock when I opened the door on you, by accident. At last I was taking out the trash; the open windows were letting in the smell of spring. All of this is a peculiar convergence, as if the scene were cut in from an earlier reel, by mistake. You: silent, unseen, suddenly speak up. Me: making the best of things, trying to reignite the engine of my life, make it move without you. All the drama has been wrung out of us by expectation: by the nights I spent waiting up for trouble long past its curfew, by the hours when my phone shrills angrily, you on the other end willing me to pick up. The door abruptly opens on us, and you are so close I could touch you, if I would.

  My life is like a series of unrelated scenes, like the clips from a dozen films stripped together, a little romance, some tragedy, a snippet of mystery. They make a peculiar sort of narrative, because the characters, the places, even the tone scarcely overlap. The main character, even to me, is inconstant, now someone, now someone else, always on the edge of finding something, then something else.

  The characters are like a scattering of meteors in a shower, skirting the edges of objects, buzzing our hems. As in a night-sky shower, sometimes these meteors pass silent and undisturbed, as a stranger might pass you on the street. The others, the characters we see, catch hold, irresistant, swing into orbit or plunge like red-hot rain to the surface. They are the ones that are burned, that are a pocked and holey jumble, a souvenir of probabilities, luck’s spoiled leftovers, while the rest silently pass us by.

  On paper, in temperate black print we can catch the characters for a moment here or there, then or now, a momentary slice in a long line of moments, like the links in a chain hidden in the bottom of a bureau drawer. The events we get are a scattering of things: birthdays and by-chance meetings, job interviews and dying wishes, and these things crowd out the everyday, a peanutbutter sandwich or a sunny moment stepping out onto the porch after a long sleep. We draw the curtain on other events, and nonevents, other characters and lives in the complex weave of dangerous life. It is as if these things do not exist. How can we be sure they don’t?

  If we see you, the reader, today walking on a street in the city where we live, if we greet you as always, a word or two exchanged, eyes tilted toward the lowering sky in a think-it-will-rain kind of way, plans exchanged for lunch sometime. And then say, tomorrow, you get word that your father has died in some other, faraway city, a man we have never met, in a place we have never visited. He has died while doing a thing we will never do. On the third day, then, when we hail you on the street, cross over, shake your hand in expressed condolences, would that change in your life, in you, be evident in the somber face you show us. Would it change us? Would it, could it infect our life, like a germ hitchhiking on your handshake, or even traveling along a glance, exchanged like electricity, with a jolt of meaning.

  Do we, without cause, share and share alike, as the inhabitors of one another’s skins: all of us mourners at the same funeral or guests at one wedding? Who are the bride and groom?

  One might prefer to imagine this in the context of a narrative, of a story, of a life: We are all just customers, like diners in the world’s largest restaurant (Seating Capacity Four Billion, by Order of Fire Marshal). Imagine the menu. Imagine the waiters with their stacked trays, taking orders on their floppy pads, passing out plates as long as the kitchen is open, the cooks in the back sweating it out, steam rising off the world’s longest griddle, smoke from fryer vats as big as bathtubs, heat from ovens the size of two-car garages. Imagine the dessert cart.

  The servers: They get some things wrong, forget to bring water or serve you beef when you say chicken, Ethiopian when you say Lebanese. They forget to bring menus sometimes, get confused about their areas, and so some customers wait a lifetime in the lobby outside for their names to be called. I’m sorry sir, your table won’t be ready for eighty-seven years, but you can wait in the bar if you like. Some people miss their names, they fall asleep or are a little hard of hearing. Some customers, threading among the tables, follow the black-clothed back of the officious maitre d’, endlessly circling in search of their table, taken by interlopers or pulled together by another party. Then there are others, indistinguishable from the rest, who are seated in comfortable chairs, not by the kitchen or back near the rest rooms. They are served promptly and tip well. They go home content.

  We can watch them leave as we idle at our own table, hungrily drumming our fingers on the tablecloth, trying vainly to snag our waiter (That’s him, I know that’s him. No, ours had a mustache, remember?) with two raised and hopeful fingers, eyebrows, hearts.

  Or perhaps life is more orderly and contained, all of us simply killing a little time on a cosmic Saturday night, like teenagers at a skating rink, four billion abreast, hunting partners, taking a moment to skate, or stand and rest at the refreshment table, everybody’s shoe size printed on the heels of their skates like an IQ.

  The skaters come in all sizes, tall and short, wide and narrow. The crowd is a riot of colors and shapes and noise, everybody talking at once and trying to be heard over the music. A girl sniffles noisily beside her mother because the others won’t play. A boy leans on the handrail, waiting for something to happen and for his face to need shaving. A man and a woman whiz past, holding hands. The metaphor depends, I suppose, on how much meaning you squeeze from the idea of love. Is the secret of life that coupling and uncoupling, the dance that is a connection to other people, opposites or alike? Freestyle, all skate, the announcer calls over the scratchy PA. Mostly we skate in a vast circle, sometimes passing someone ahead, sometimes falling behind, circus music playing on the speakers. Some of the better skaters mark their own rhythm in the center of the rink, skating backward or in pirouettes. They make it look easy, skate with their hands behind their backs and trace smooth figure eights with their sharp blades. They coast the curved lines that, perhaps by chance, signify infinity, sideways.

  But, of course, all my characters are not yours; they are not following your lines. Your rotations are all your own, though I treat you like the axis of the pinwheel that turns in the breeze. All your characters are following lines and curlicues and roller-coaster nightmares of their own, some the same, some not, like schoolmates, everybody following the same scheme of scenes, one grade then another and another until graduation or accident or illegitimate birth, and we scatter into life like so many animals disappearing into the brush.

  Some of my characters: You, your eyes burn a vivid blue in my head, almost as if you were alive again to me and mattered. Your face, it comes to me with many grades of shading: in the blue-black of the curtained bedroom; the squinting white-dark bright of the garden; the crosshatched hue of the living room where the television roars, the cool kitchen where the blinds are open a crack and the sun brings in the flavor of spring and you, and you. I wake up in a sweat and kick the covers off.

  Certainly some characters are necessary to a story like this one: Father, Mother, Confidants. This mother speaks for herself. She is somehow the easiest to cast. Put her hair up off her neck in that frigid bun, and give her good posture, a strong back, because it is a load she carries. Her hard face, the sound of her voice are the ice freezing in April, unexpected and fresh, catching the season by such surprise it coats the slender stalks with chill, each leaf outlined, encased, redone as if with winter’s watercolor set, brought to you special from Belgium last Christmas by your Uncle Nick.

  The father is a phantom, passing from one room to another seemingly without effect. His hands do not grasp even the smallest knickknack for dusting. He cannot rearrange the least difficulty or dry the smallest tear. This is an illusion, his watery reflection is at the center of those con
centric rings that flutter and wave to the opposite shore. But his work is all Look-Ma-No-Hands, as if done by mirrors.

  And secondarily, notice another man, one without the necessary blood ties but still sympathetic. He stands to one side, aproned for restaurant work and waiting to go on as Jake. Jake stands behind the counter at the club, waiting for someone responsible to arrive so he can quit the place, back to the office for a nap or around the corner for a drink. He is a small man, balding and old-looking for his age, and his voice is soured and blurred by years of smoking. His smile is warm enough; his face, his hands, are capable. If we were auditioning father figures it would perhaps be Jake we would choose, signaling him to come on at the appropriate moment and, meanwhile, giving him time to study the script.

  The husband arrives in an old pickup and sometimes is accompanied by a dog, left in the bed of the truck while he crosses the parking lot to the bar. His figure is briefly illuminated by the neon sign advertising Bud. He is wry, and his main feature is his face, browned from many days working outside, his blue eyes, a peculiar turn of his head when he is lost in thought, brings a bare space to his demeanor, chin slightly up, open-throated, vulnerable, his Adam’s apple pokes out of a slender neck like words he cannot say but stacked up in there hoping to slip out in a reckless moment.

  Children, certainly, make the best secret keepers because although they often can’t tell what is appropriate to disclose, they do not hold it against you. What you say is only what you say, and the picture they have in their heads is hard to change from that first impression, good, or based on the prune face of disapproval you were making at the moment they first glimpsed you. Still, things happen, people die or make happy lives. A friend may fall away in a moment of recklessness, don’t look back, like dust kicking up in the air of the playground, of heedless good-byes once things are gone and changed.

  I once met old Mrs. Elkhart on the street in San Antonio. We were coming out of a movie downtown. She told me her husband was still farming our quarter-section, had bought it even, when my mother moved to town. She’s fine, she said, but since the trouble she was living on the south side, What is the name of those apartments? Mrs. Elkhart patted me on the arm, as if she understood, and said my mother was still as sharp as a tack. I imagined her scuffling around the apartment in blue fuzzy slippers, arranging the drapes to seal out the sunlight and never bothering to get the mail. Or perhaps that is me. My mother, she doesn’t get dressed except when company is coming, and she doesn’t cook anymore but only uses the dishwasher to file important papers and keep her checkbook. Up on top, in the glassware rack she arranges the farm sale documents and her will. She organizes the current bills in the individual cubbyholes of the cutlery basket.

  The mother I carry around in my head complains about not enough bananas in the Jell-O on the salad bar at Western Sizzlin’, or the quality of men these days. I mail her presents at Christmas time, sometimes a fruitcake baked in a tin, a book of poems, once a bathrobe of white terry cloth with a blue butterfly appliquéd over the heart. I package them in brown paper, although the post office doesn’t like it when I use twine, in the old way, and the clerk will sometimes ask me to take it home again and tape it up with string tape. I mail them to General Delivery, Lance County, OK. I never hear back, of course, but that is what I expect. The only way I could be certain would be if I found them on my doorstep, marked Return to Sender, her handwriting reduced to cramped and spidery stitches made by the needle of feeling. It never happens that way; it is as if they have fallen into the hole that is my past, unreachable and deep.

  Sometimes I call the old number, and a woman picks it up, Hello, Hello? though I do not say anything because she isn’t my mother. Her number has gone to someone else. Often, though, no one is home, and I stay on the line, listening in my memory to the phone ringing, ringing on the table in the hall of my mother’s house, no one to get it but me, my mother out on the back porch looking off into the distance. A breeze ranges through the house, touching everything, riffling the papers on the table and causing the lamp cord to sway against the base, like a bell. No one is around, and I let it ring.

  The views outside my window remind me of you, of our first summer here, reclusive, damp, sexual. Your face across the breakfast table, a secret challenge. The sun on the leaves a hot green and the undergrowth cool and lush. That kitchen was warm and dampish, and smelled sweet with mildew and the crumbly bread I made. You are everywhere. Through every window in my house I see you in the trumpet vine that overtakes the bushes. I glimpse your face, like a miracle, an icon, in the stain of oil on my driveway, in the steam on the bathroom mirror, in the irregular peel of the orange I eat at lunch. It seems we are a secret kept from both of us, but I am fitting together the puzzle pieces—all strange angles and irregular shapes—to see what picture we form.

  I was slow to learn to cook. It came hard, and my mother was an impatient teacher, some of this and that, a little more of another thing and mix it up with whatever’s handy. For a time I kept a cookbook under the mattress in my room, like contraband, its coverless pages stained with age and spilled food. I bought it for a quarter at the secondhand store in town, run by the Episcopal church and open only on Thursday afternoons. I was skipping school and needed somewhere to go for a few hours. I know they must have known, although I stood up straight and hung my purse over my arm like a lady.

  I read the ingredients again and again against the night, reciting them like prayers. My favorites were for things I couldn’t imagine: Hearts of Palm, Oyster Newburg, Shrimp Florentine. The flavor of them coming through the words. Heat oven to 400° F. Cut dough lengthwise into thirds; slice crosswise into 1/4” slices. Place 1” apart on ungreased cold cookie sheet. I watched the white shape of my curtains billow and blow in the night breeze and wondered what it was about.

  Lately, I have lain awake, planning my escape. I wonder if you are waiting for it too. I imagine you sitting outside on the street, like a private detective, at all hours alert for me, ticking the ashes from your cigarette onto the cement, growing angrier every moment. With the right timing I could move. Perhaps you are down the street having a sandwich, or using the bathroom at a neighbor’s house. I think I could go over the fence and off into the weeds behind the house, across the field and another a couple of miles to the Loop where perhaps someone would pick me up, someone without questions. In this way I thought I could get a ways away before you caught on. In truth, I think I knew you were not what kept me indoors, rooted me to this house, this life. I had a recurring dream that I am outside in the fresh day, can feel the sun on my face, the wind, the weeds scratch my bare legs as I walk through the fields at my mother’s house, admiring the sky.

  Jake’s place is a little shabby, under the counter it is a mess of things used and chucked away, greasy things and extra cups. There is a wide countertop of wood that I scrape at night before I go home, though the-smell-of onions will never let go of it. The best part is that the place is warm and dry, and people come and go. It was a good place to work and I missed it, but it was hard to go back.

  I wonder that I had the nerve, one day, even to walk out onto the front porch. I was watching a girl on a bike through the slats of my blinds. I was moved into the front hall, somehow, by the sound of a newspaper hitting the screen as the girl swooped through our yard. I took my keys off the hook by the door and opened the door, swung it wide. It was bright day outside, and the warm sun framed the doorway with light. I put on my sunglasses and stepped out onto the porch, without meaning to, really, without a thought of going down the two steps to the walk, but getting there anyway. The girl was out in the street, drawing lazy curves with her bicycle wheels. The newspaper bag was light at her side, almost empty. It was just a moment before I was down at the drive, before my hands felt the hot metal on the hood of the car, the rim around the door, and I was in. The car took awhile to start but once it did it was nice to feel movement again. When the girl heard the car start up she looked at me, and I
saw there was really no one else, just her and me. A little ways down the block a woman was sweeping her porch with a ragtail broom, her rhythmic brushing kicked up a cloud of dust and dry leaves. I drove down the street to look at her, following the girl on her bicycle, too, focusing on the arc of the newspapers as they left her hand. In this way I got to the end of the block before the girl dropped back, coasting a U-turn, and I was on my own, no going back.

  Jake said only, It’s about time. I stood in the open doorway. I could feel the light behind me, pushing me inside, and I was drawn toward Jake’s disapproving face. He tied the apron on me as he had at the first, one hand pulling my ponytail out of the string at the back of my neck. Replacement quit yesterday, he said and went back to the office, head down, relieved, as if he noticed nothing at all. I consulted the tickets clipped to the countertop and counted the burgers on the grill. My hand found the turner and the sizzling meat sang a little song to me as I idly scraped the grill with the edge of hard metal. When I lifted the fry basket out of the oil and shook it, the steam reddened my face in a rush, like a blush.

  The part I like best about Jake’s is the stools out in front of the counter, the metal rims are shiny with the rubbings of so many butts, and the vinyl seats molded by countless customers eating countless hamburgers. They are, of course, like a million other stools in a thousand other, nicer, places, but I like to go around in front of the counter sometimes and half-sit on the end stool. When no one is looking I sometimes pick my feet up and spin, a little hesitant at first, idly, as if I were not paying attention, and then building to abandon, apron fluttering, feet in the air, hands outstretched, as if they would fly free, like birds, banging up against the ceiling.

  I remember standing in the tiled hall of my elementary school, waiting to hand my thirty-five cents to the woman at the desk, like a pulpit where we turned the corner into the cafeteria. I remember standing and waiting, my backside cool against the tiled wall, behind me was only the new boy, scarcely as tall as me but with black hair like the fur on my Labrador, Sam, thick and slick, and his dark eyes were deep. He wore his newness like something showered on him, as if in a sudden rainstorm, though you could see something else in his manner, too, something strong underneath. Up ahead Mrs. Reynolds was pulling out the children without lunch money and noting down their names in her book. They stood to the side, embarrassed, watching the others go ahead and pretending not to, looking away. There were just a few, not so many that I didn’t know their names. Tamara stood there with her fingers fiddling her stringy light hair, with Bill and his brother against the opposite wall, their hands in their pockets. There were a couple of others who had been paying kids last year. I was anxious, knowing my pocket held only a square of wrinkled wrapper from a mint candy and an old dried bean. I had dawdled in the classroom, until the teacher, Mrs. Allison, had looked over her reading glasses and told me to go. Behind us the hall was dim and empty, I studied it for places to hide. Then I felt the shapes of coins, still warm from the boy’s pocket, in my palm. Wait for me inside, he said. When I came to the woman I gave her the coins and then I heard the boy say to her Emmitt, Emmitt Webb, and he joined the others on the side, his name on her list.