This vital exchange, as powerful as it is silent, alters everything and nothing at all. As fall turns to winter, and winter warms to spring, we continue our connection on an intellectual plane. When he goes off to Yale for that PhD, he writes to me. I write back to him. Our ties deepen as I enter college. Finally, I’m of age, and he and Sandra split up because she’s never around. Nick’s and my relationship is consummated in a blaze of passion. We marry the June after I graduate as an English major from Yale. We live a life full of books and learning, our conversations what we nurture, no noisy children interrupting the literature that brought us together and sustains us still. He dies first. It’s quick. He barely manages to tell me he loves me one last time before his heart stops. I linger for exactly three more years, limping along, half of me gone, and yet I must step into his shoes to usher the last class of freshmen he taught through their senior thesis. Upon their graduation, my job done, I graduate to the other side, where I meet him again in the company of angels in heaven—
Wait, am I actually getting religious here?
That man truly has transformed me.
Back in the real reality, I stare at Nick’s closed door for a little longer, to see if he comes out, to see if we can jump-start my spaghetti fantasy into action. When nothing happens and I hear no sounds inside his apartment, I’m crushed, sure as if we had a date and he stood me up.
I force myself to descend the stairs—because how embarrassing would it be to get caught standing on his doorstep with my sack of dirty clothes hours from now?
Down on the basement level, I walk past the boiler room and proceed to the laundry. I flip the switch with my elbow as I enter, and I’m surprised that one of the washers is on a spin cycle. It’s the third one from the left, the one I’ve been using ever since the bleach tragedy. I’m forced to take the machine all the way on the right, as I don’t want to be too close to anybody, and I’ll never use that other one on the far end ever again.
I portion out the contents of my laundry bag, and as I fill the machine with a single serving of my dark load, I recognize, not for the first time, the ease that comes with having an all-black wardrobe. No reason to worry about color leaching.
Provided no one gets creative with the Clorox.
As I go over to the vending dispenser and purchase a small box of Tide, regular scent, I think of Greta and feel bad for whatever target she’s moved on to. But I have to acknowledge my relief. I was unaware of how much I tracked her every movement, in the dorm, in the cafeteria, around campus. Paranoia, however, has a half-life. When it isn’t validated, eventually its potency decreases.
I train the machine’s knobs on normal wash cold, cold rinse, and single spin, and then I go over and sit on one of the metal folding chairs at the table that holds the overflow of detergents and fabric softeners. It’s not lost on me that, despite Greta forgetting about me, I remain unable to leave my clothes down here unattended. But the protective impulse is easy to give in to, and I was just reading alone upstairs, anyway.
I reopen Nick’s book on my lap. I’m loath to put it on the table for fear of damaging the spine or staining the cover with some sweet-scented liquid detergent I’m unaware was spilled. Even with all his notes in the margins, he’s still managed not to crack the spine. I see this as a sign of his sensitive nature and his respect for the things he pays for. It’s a nice change from the girls here for whom everything is disposable.
I’m reading, and enjoying the pleasant waft of Tide rising from my machine, when someone enters the room.
“Oh, my God, we’re doing the same thing tonight.”
I look up in surprise and fumble to keep the book in my lap. Nick’s smiling and his hair is damp from a shower. He’s wearing those slouchy, faded jeans that ride low on his hips along with an Ambrose sweatshirt that sits on his strong shoulders like they’re a display form.
“We are,” I say in a coquettish voice. Or at least my version of one, which is probably not all that coquettish. “Party animals.”
“It’s true.”
He checks his machine, the one that’s running. The one that I’ve been regularly using. It’s like he knew my Maytag habits and wanted our clothes to be in the same washer. I am suffused with happiness.
Nick, on the other hand, seems frustrated, although in a good-natured way. “I was hoping this load would be done by now.”
“Going somewhere?” I ask casually. I make sure to duck my eyes back to his book so that I appear only moderately interested. In reality, I’m waiting for his response like it’s the result of a pathology report.
I remind myself it’s inappropriate to be jealous of the woman he walked down the aisle with.
“My father’s passing through town.”
I look back up. “Your father?”
As a tight expression crosses Nick’s face, he links his arms over his chest and tilts a hip against our machine. While he seems to be composing a careful reply, a rush of thoughts goes through my head. I wonder whether his load is a light or dark one. I wonder if he uses scented or unscented detergent. I wonder if his boxers are in there. Whether he wears boxers. What he has underneath those jeans right now.
That last one floods my face with heat and I cover it up by pretending to sneeze.
“God bless you,” he says as I fake-itch my perfectly content nose. “And, ah, yes, my father’s driving through and we’re meeting for dinner.”
“Are you going to Luigi’s?”
As if that hole-in-the-wall where my mother and I ate is a three-star Michelin restaurant, and because I’ve gotten the jump on him, I can thus recommend the reheated chicken Parmesan over the microwaved spaghetti Bolognese.
“That’s the one. You’ve been there?”
“My mother and I have.” I don’t mention it was after she came on the emergency basis, and I hope that he assigns her and my patronage of the establishment to sometime around the first day of school.
“It’s a terrible dive, isn’t it,” he says with a laugh. “We just don’t have anywhere to eat out here in the sticks.”
“Horrible.”
I mimic his tone of benign exasperation, as if I, like him, have a palate well familiar with the likes of first-rate sushi, imported caviar, and French dishes prepared by Le Cordon Bleu chefs. But it’s okay. Soon we will be back in the cosmopolitan environment our tongues prefer.
“It’s nice that your father’s come to see you.”
“He loves Sandra. And the feeling is mutual. She’s very excited.”
“She’s going out with you, too?”
“She’s in for the weekend, yup.” He nods to my lap. “Are you liking Auel any better?”
I am instantly nauseous as I revise his shower scene to include a woman with a brilliant mind and long dark hair and a smoking habit that’s a necessary flaw. Because without that personal failing, she’d be too divine to exist outside the pages of the Bible.
“It’s…” I flounder, and hope that he ascribes the awkward silence to a gathering of my thoughts about the book. As opposed to a grappling with his sex life with his wife and the tension with his father. “I think the author has a great knowledge of the prehistoric period and likes to share what she’s researched with her readers.”