er features are large and not a bit ashamed of their twenty years. She stares into him with the look of the wide-eyed, serious pigeon that he despises.

"I love to see you in the morning. You're all defenseless. I could reach inside of you." She pats his face.

Sam raises one of his hands to envelop the irresolute jaw, but stops before he touches her. His eyes grow cold. A shutter to some past life has been raised and what is left overwhelms all other sensation. "Get out," he says.

At first Jamie Harwell thinks this is a cruel joke, the sort of thing she will understand in a few years. Then he rolls onto his side. She knows.

The young woman—a child, really—rises from her professor's bed and gathers her clothes with a steadfast dedication he had not anticipated. She dresses slowly and quietly and without any modesty, daring him to take one last look. She stops at the mirror to fix her hair.

Blinking, he watches her reflection and sees her face break into tears. She opens the door to cool October air. A leaf swirls inside. He feels nothing but a pain in his throat. He wishes for water.

 

t was a hell of a way to live. Caught between stone and plaster were the whispered dreams of a young couple too intrepid to recognize what was foreign, the soft, impossible late-night games that spilled into morning like the hesitant blue light of a painter's dawn. The walls had absorbed the sound of her voice. It was the worst thing he had never imagined.

Fifteen feet from the door, Sam Quarter drew up the collar of his oilskin raincoat against the sea breeze. The shadows of the house washed over him in ominous silence, but his was a hugely unimportant intrusion. Time was arrested here. No matter how much he scrubbed and waited, he would step inside and smell her on the bed.

Sam's breath was drawn out of him, as it was every weekday at five. His throat ached. Of course he wished for a drink of water. Of course he was ashamed.

You've got to work through this, the psychiatrist said on Wednesdays, one step at a time.

Sam stood, shuddering and pigeon-toed, on his driveway. The wind whistled past him and threw itself by the fistful into a gathering storm. It ruffled his coat against the unpressed, faded chinos he wore and the scuffed black briefcase he carried to and from class.

Who can tell me the characteristics of a German short story? Anyone?

 

his is the fate of a great man:

He held his fingers under the bathtub faucet until the water ran hot enough to scald his skin. Then he pushed the cup under the stream.

Sam didn't look at her, but she was still there. Actions are irreversible. Her sliced right arm was dripping blood into the cream carpet. Her eyes stared.

"It's not my fault," he muttered to no one in particular, who didn't reply.

When he found her, Sam had stood erect and princely with the overflowing water swooshing around his shoes. My God, her hair is not even wet. He had slapped his jacket, looking for a notebook, a pencil to record the thought. Instead, he had written it carefully in his mind: Her hair is not even wet.

He said as much to the psychiatrist that first day when she asked what he was thinking. He couldn't tell her he regretted that he would never get to fuck her ears off again. That wasn't the sort of thing one spoke about with a lady, and it wasn't the sort of thing one thought about a wife.

"How is it possible?" he asked as the pictures rushed through his mind. "She must have been in there for an hour or more. Her hair wasn't wet." As he said it, Sam slipped further into that world where she was in the bath, bathing, as any respectable person would have been.

"Charlie," the psychiatrist said, and her lips pursed humbly around the word. She was afraid to let it go.

"Yes. That was her name."

"You won't say it. Why won't you say it?" The psychiatrist sat across from him wearing her sterling mantle of practiced eminence. Yet she asked such questions.

"I'll say her name." His eyes iced. But the doctor hadn't asked him to demonstrate.

Sam turned off the water with a distracted flutter of his wrist. He tensed his muscles, bracing for the first shot of vodka on a college binge. He shut his mind and drank it down. Sam bent slightly, unsprung, and refilled the cup. Again. And again. In an hour she was gone.

 

he digital clock on his desk blinked 2:34. Beyond his chilled window, the arms of their apple tree fought the wind that rushed headlong into night.

Sam adjusted the lamp on his desk and wrote in his sad, slanting hand,

My dearest Charlie—

My love, you cannot think how I miss you.

Skipping three lines,

I hate the look of the blank page, the crisp uneasiness, the dare—it's gone, isn't it? You haven't any more.

"God damn you," he said aloud, and pounded his wrist on the desk for emphasis. He finished weakly as thunder boomed over the bay, God damn it all.

Sam didn't turn around. He put his head on the desk and tried to sleep. She was always in bed, waiting. Where's my Mephistopheles? he mused. I have loved.

Two weeks before she died—committed suicide—he thought conscientiously, there had been love on the old, tired mattress that she joked would have to be replaced before they had children. He had laughed at her and kissed her on the nose. She took him by the neck and looked into his eyes. "How brave are you?"

He misunderstood it as a rhetorical question. How brave are you. "I'll always take care of you," he had whispered, and slid a hand between her warm thighs.

The question echoed through his life.

 

e look at literature as a mirror of reality. But the author often creates work that is a reflection of what is within him, instead of life as it really is. Examples."

"Or her."

"Excuse me?"

"Or her." The boy in the third row stood, his hand an anchor on the desk. He nodded to make Sam understand. There was smugness in his eyes.

"Of course. Examples." Sam spoke loudly, a little shrilly. "Examples."

"The Texture of Water," someone called from the back.

Sam smiled enigmatically. "What do you know of that?"

"You wrote it, didn't you?"

"Yes." His was the voice of authority, of a thousand thoughtless errors and careless triumphs. And in two years, when their futures had grabbed hold with a bulldog's irascible sense of vengeance, would they still be so awed?

"Do you feel the same way now?" The owner of the voice rose. "Professor?"

Sam Quarter stopped breathing. His toes curled painfully in the ends of his shoes. She's not real, he told himself. You have to work through this.

"No," he gasped at the girl, whose name was not Charlie.

Sam moved to the blackboard that was not black at all, but white and plastic. He wrote on it with a filthy, clinging marker. "Fiction must." He stopped and put the back of his hand against his mouth. He yearned to stagger them with this, the work of a lifetime. "Move with a sense of purpose." He slathered the words on the board with an expansive hand. Perhaps one of these sophomores would remember this day, this writer who was not James Joyce or even James Jones, but a quiet man with a burning, intrigued dignity who could not help but see his wife in the faces of women twenty years younger than he.

After the class left Sam sat, still startled, at his desk. There is no succeeding to this, he wrote. There is no winning, because it isn't a game that winners play. It is a game for those who are too tired or too weak or too sad. We pretend to be proud and noble creatures, but we are cracked. No one asks us to dance. We wear a look upon our faces: shocked, disbelieving, antique. We have discovered a secret and cannot bear to tell the truth. Nothing. Nothing, nothing. We write to fill the emptiness, searching for the answer to a question that does not exist.

With a red pen he crossed through the 'we's. I. I. I. He wrote it again and again. The plural cannot validate the self.

 

he damnable part was that he had never written like this before. The critics and public loved it. His friends looked past his eyes and smiled sadly.

He knew, too, there wasn't a way for him to write it out; there weren't enough words in the world. He scribbled in his journal, the one the despised psychiatrist had vaguely prescribed: If I let this misery go, will I still be able to write?

He didn't really care. The pen was his definition; its products were secondary.

Sam took down a picture from the shelf above his desk. Their skin glistened damply at Spirit Lake. She had spent her summers there as a child, had sailed on the same waters and tramped the same roads. But she was not the same person. She wore a smile and a yellow shirt that clashed gruesomely with her hair, and there was an irrefutable truth in that-not beauty, but steadiness. He had known her pieces, her moments. He wondered if what he taught was true, if there was any merit to a reality beyond the one a person worked for, suffered through, delighted in. Sam took the picture out of the rough wooden frame and wrote on the back so lightly as to leave but the faintest of impressions, "Love is a chemical." Unlike any other.

He went to the parties in the evenings and got drunk once or twice. It was a challenge not to be an angry drunk. He descended on Joey's house, who rightfully wanted to know why Sam bothered. He spoke slowly so as to be understood and convinced. "I watch," he said after a moment, "I watch because it makes me forget how lonely I am." Sam looked up at his beefy faced friend who had been there when he was bullied and again when he was bribed by would-be patrons who kept artists like Shih Tzus.

"Does it work?" Joey asked in a flat voice.

Sam started to reply, but settled for shaking his head. His lips were tight and pale. Finally, bubbling up from an obviated spring: "Truth is an excuse we tell children when they ask difficult questions." He considered himself exceedingly profound.

He thought Joey was going to hit him. He thought it so hard that he giggled.

Instead, the man spoke coldly: "I don't need a fancy car to know you're messed up." Joey was unnerved by his frustration. "You go through life thinking that because this one thing happened you have the right to screw over everything around you. Here's some news—it didn't even happen to you, Sam. It didn't happen to you." He took a breath and doubted Sam's consciousness.

Joey went on, quietly, because it needed to be said and he didn't want to be blamed later. "The buzz is if you don't stop screwing your coeds and then screwing their grades, you're not going to have a job, much less a reputation. And that's what you're made of, isn't it?"

Sam didn't turn his head; he stared at a fly on the wall. "It's filthy in here, Joey. Get out."

Sam went home and drank from the faucet until he was sick. He slept on the floor, clinging to a towel and to his sweat. The next morning he found a note beside Joey's name in his notebook: "Friendship is a ruse between people who want to forget their previous failures, a lightbulb that shatters, leaving you in the dark with the smell of ozone and wondering if you will cut yourself on the broken glass." He laughed bitterly in his shame and saw himself tearing out the page. But he never did. He was proud of how acerbic he could be, even when drunk. He considered it the mark of a Good Writer.

 

s he brushed his teeth Sam stared at the face in the mirror. He looked at the bags under his eyes that said, like a hundred people, sleep, you really should get some sleep. But it was irrelevant, for these were blue and sorrowed times. Right here, he thought. She was right here.

He remembered them gathered in heavy coats like forlorn black swans. They nodded in troves, this one fondling his cigarettes, this one wondering how long she should stay, all of them compelled to light touches of sympathy by the knowledge this would not happen in their houses, in their precious Pyrex rooms. And where there should have been silence was instead the cautiously optimistic and funereal strains of Haydn, chosen by a mutual friend.

They had gathered around him in apologizing huddles, reliving roles they imagined themselves to have played in the unfortunate disrepair of a mind. Saying, what must have happened, saying, where does it go from here, meaning, what did you do, wondering, does it float in the air?

Yes, he answered. Yes.

Sam was put away, alone, into his house of rooms because he couldn't stand the idea of loss anymore. And so he told the lies, long blue lines he could remember in what little sleep he found: I don't need you, I don't want you. They rolled in and out like the nameless iterations of the tide.

God, God, is this me? (Brush, Rinse, Repeat.)

Secretly, he believed it would never change. In thirty years he would still see black and staring eyes superimposed over his own. And yet he had accepted the amicable line that for him life would be Better Than The Brochure.

Whistling through his mind, through the sacred corridors she would not leave: we are alone. We are always alone. Surging down his throat the water went, choking, gurgling, sputtering—still he drank.

Brush. Rinse. Repeat.

 

n a Saturday Sam walked seven miles up and down the trails that skirted the shore, pushing, pushing, convincing himself he was healthy and well. He came back glowing and stared at his tree and his yard and his Marcos coupe and the stack of firewood and the grey gravel road that arched behind him. He planted his shoes and willed something to change. It did not.

Sam went inside, to the inside that was also inside of him, and stared at paper for a while. Failing to produce anything of consequence, he read through old stories.

Then he sat in the great leather chair that was cracked from the sunlight and whose arms were beginning to show wear, and he stared. On the wall, smothering the fireplace and an attempt at order, were his books. In penciled remarks and eraser dust and red outline were the thoughts of his life. Every page had been marked, woven into a web he was beginning to understand with the careful diligence ascribed to neophytes.

She had been jealous of this passion and stood over him with her great, dewy eyes and manicured hands. "I don't understand you," she had said. "You're ruining them. Do you have to do that?"

Sam gawked at her. He almost asked, Do you have to breathe? The pen was how he thought. It was a logic that could not be explained.

"Well," she sighed, resolute, "not these." She placed thick, gilded leather editions in the cracks his lack of design had not filled. "All the way from France," she said proudly.

He watched her as she grunted and pushed. "You don't speak French."

She stood back from the shelf, admiring the colors. She pulled her hair across the nape of her neck and lowered a hip. "I don't speak French. You don't speak French, either." She glared over her shoulder. He was betraying her with the notes he could not share, the secret world of the armchair and desk. Was this her way of asking to be let in?

"I can always learn," he had confided. "We'll learn together." He knew they wouldn't.

She never did.

Sam took down the scowling books from France that had not moved since the day she died. They were pretty in an agéd sort of way, just as Sam had been pretty to her. "Your eyes are so old," she once had said.

They're older now, he told Flaubert. Sam turned the pages, feeling weakness in the crackling fibers. He turned faster and faster. But there were no notes, no final words or last request. Each flawless scroll was a disappointment. In the end, he clutched them to his chest as children clutch rag dolls.

After a time, Sam stood up and balled his fists in his pockets. He felt betrayed. Leaning on the doorframe, he gazed out into the night and the water and the patriarchal echo of a tree that had once grown against the backdrop of an uncompromising spring. His tears dried on his face in the channels time had carved.

 

Miss Harwell:

A wise man would not write this letter. I write it because I have found in my life, which is of no consequence, that there are some things a person should say to another, for both of them to benefit by, and yet these same things may be thought too difficult to give voice. I realize now that I have taken advantage of you. I do not apologize for this, because I believe a man should act in accordance with his beliefs at the moment, and that later, when those beliefs are called into question, he will rise and fall with them, and not with his furtive protests . . .

I have learned certain things in my life that I am only now beginning to understand. Among them is that humanity is a precious thing, love a rare and fragile thing, compassion something few will know. I cannot ask for your forgiveness because I know I do not deserve it and do not wish, among other things, to be a hypocrite. I only ask that you learn from what I have done here, and that when you give your love to a man, do not give it without heart. Do not speak without listening first . . .

It went on from there.

 

he calendar on his wall says March. Sam is in the backyard, kneeling at the base of his tree. Odd and domestic, he slaps pitch on the still oozing remnants of a shattered limb. He looks up through the branches now and again, marveling at what it must be like to see the world through a cage of one's own design, fettered by a thousand tousled and whiskered limbs that have no will. He marvels at a good many things.

He doesn't hear her as she drives up in the battered Chevrolet. He doesn't see her adjust herself in the seat and fling a manicured hand over the steering wheel in a form of pathetic salute. He doesn't feel her standing behind him, and can't envision that her blonde hair is thin and not so crisp as he remembers. She is porcelain. Her flaws have become measures of her perfection. "It's not okay," she says. Her voice is cracking out of insecurity, just as it did when he knew her as a child.

"I know," he answers, and still does not turn. He reaches for a tool, wrenches his hand, curses.

But in a moment something jumps inside of him and he looks at her yellow top and incipient gaze and loves her. He is silent, just loving her. He sees the shadows spilling over her face as she clenches and unclenches her jaw.

"I know," he says, for she is only chimera. He turns back to his gardening.

 

[END]

© Elizabeth Routen 2002