Heart the Lover (31)

‘Are you in or out?’ Carson asked.

You didn’t answer.

‘Then let her go,’ she said, and put down the phone.

I went to my mother’s in Phoenix. I was there five months. Strange to say, under the circumstances, but it was a beautiful time with her. My last long uninterrupted time with her before she died. She did not once question my decisions. I needed help and she gave it to me without hesitation. She found the agency and sat with me on their loveseat as we looked through three-ring binders of people without names or addresses, just professions, personal statements, and photographs. I chose the couple looking at each other, not at the camera. She did the classes with me. I didn’t want the drugs. When I went into labor, the only place I could look was in her eyes. ‘You are going to be okay,’ she said to me, over and over. When the baby finally came, it was my mother who said, ‘Oh sweetie, it’s a girl.’ We had an hour with her, then a proper goodbye. She was never mine. I always knew that. I could not keep her.

In my head I call her Daisy.

Sometimes she comes to me, more a feeling than a vision, a warmth, not a regret. I worry about many things, but I never worry about Daisy. Somehow I know she is well.

We sit on the porch with our beers.

‘You have a real life here, don’t you?’

‘I do. I imagine you have a real life, too.’

‘I don’t.’ You look down and rub your jeans. It makes me remember this cassette tape I had of Faulkner reading As I Lay Dying. We listened to it in your car a lot. Anse keeps on rubbing his knees. That was our favorite line. The Deep South cadence created a strong drumbeat. Anse keeps on rubbing his knees. We repeated it randomly for months. For a moment I think you’re going to say it, and maybe you are, but Silas comes up the driveway.

He’s been on a run. He often runs after work. Somehow I’d forgotten this.

He’s flushed and a little sweaty. He comes up the steps two at a time and normally we’d do some hugging and kissing and he’d try to mush me against his damp T-shirt and I’d pretend to be grossed out, but now we are self-conscious in front of you. I go for a kiss and he a hug, and my jaw hits his ear.

The two of you shake hands. You sit back down and Silas leans against the railing and asks about your drive up from Logan, and who you’re going to see up the coast.

I say I have to start dinner, and flee.

I was in grad school in Pennsylvania three years later when the phone rang late one night. ‘Ivan died,’ you said.

He had died that morning. It was impossible to hang up. I listened. Ivan had gotten an infection that tore through his intestines in a few weeks. You and Sam had been there in the hospital with him the whole time. At the end you took turns reading him Joyce. Shakespeare. Dylan Thomas.

We talked for three hours. At some point you started reading me some of those passages that you’d read to Ivan. Then you read something that made you think of me, you said. It was from Journey to the End of the Night by Céline. The narrator was remembering a goodbye he’d had with a girl named Molly at a train station. He hadn’t said goodbye properly, he hadn’t appreciated what they’d had together. It was beautiful. Full of regret. There was a line about how he’d kissed her but not as he should have. I’ve tried to find that passage in that book so many times but I never have.



You read me those lines, but you didn’t say more about them, and I didn’t ask you to. We did not speak of what blew us apart. I did not tell you about our child or that I could not write a story in grad school without a baby in it.

You called a few more times that winter. You asked if we could see each other in the spring and I said no. Oh, how I wanted to see you, that lonely winter in Pennsylvania. Those calls reawakened all the love and all the wounds. I couldn’t trust you again with my heart. I was glad when you didn’t call back.

The next year I got a poem in the mail. A poem by D. H. Lawrence copied out in blue ballpoint on yellow legal paper.

‘The elephant, the huge old beast,’ it began, ‘is slow to mate.’ They wait ‘for the sympathy in their vast shy hearts slowly, slowly to rouse.’

I wasn’t an elephant. My heart had never been slow. I tore it up.

You and Silas stay on the porch. I’m glad to have the kitchen to myself, glad for a break from your unsound observations. The Breach was fussy, grandmotherly, frozen in 1957. Our house full of children and animals is nothing like that. Silas is laughing. He’ll be indifferent to your scrutiny of him. He might notice it, but he won’t take interest in the verdict. Once, as we were leaving the house after dinner with a couple we didn’t know well, we heard one of them say through an open window, ‘Well, what’d you think of that?’ I slowed to hear the response, and Silas tugged me down the driveway. He did not want to know.

Your conversation sounds animated, from what reaches me through the screen door. I season the chicken legs and put them in under the broiler. I trim the asparagus, drop them into the steamer. I see you come in and go through the living room to the bathroom. On your way out you stop in the doorway and ask if I need help. I send you back to the porch with another beer. Setting the table, I can hear you two talking about The Invisible Man. You must have asked Silas what he was teaching in the fall. I call to Silas to round up the boys from next door and you both go across the yard. You come back all together ten minutes later, Harry and Jack explaining the rules of Crater to you.