Distortions

Four Stories About Lovers

I

His wife is a very sick woman, because she thinks these things through very thoroughly. He wouldn’t be surprised to find out that she likes the big white house so much not because it’s big or white, but because the post office is across the street. She is very sick, and she mails letters to him from the post office. She gets up at night, and while other wives might read or do housework with their insomnia, she writes him a letter — usually a brief note, actually — and pulls the raincoat over her nightgown and crosses the street to the post office. Some nights when he too has insomnia, he raises himself to one elbow and parts the curtains to watch her. She is a pretty wife, and he’ll be glad when she’s come back to bed.

The matter of reading the letters, the matter of reading the letters. He is never sure what is best to do. He very rarely throws them out, though. He can’t tell what reaction she wants — it seems to be neither extreme nor anything that he’s tried yet in the in-between range. For example: one morning, reading a note detailing what hotel she went to at what hour with her lover (she doesn’t let his name slip), he screamed with frustration, banged his hands on the breakfast table. She sipped coffee, shrugged. Another time he handed the note back to her saying, “So what?” She smiled, shrugged. There was also the time he asked her if she wanted to see a psychiatrist, and she said they hadn’t helped anyone she knew, or the time he telephoned her mother and her mother said she didn’t want to get involved. Sometimes he dreams that the messages will stop coming, that the mail will bring only blessed bills. Sometimes when he looks out the window to see her crossing the road at night a thought goes through his head: it’s not for you. It’s for someone else. That’s no consolation, though, because if it’s to someone else, chances are it’s to her lover. He accepts her getting out of bed to do something related to him — mail him a letter — but what of her awakening to jot a fond message to someone else?

She said that she wanted a big house so the baby could run and play. They have one daughter, Elizabeth, who is five. He liked the house, but wasn’t it too close to the road? She watched the baby, unlike other mothers, so what did it matter? Besides, it was the size of the house that mattered. The house had so many possibilities. When they first moved in she spent so much time redoing the house that she couldn’t have had time for a lover. The messages were few and far between at that time. But in the fall Elizabeth went to kindergarten and most of the rooms were finished, and then he began to get the messages daily, and sometimes there were two a day. From the first he never thought they were a joke, and maybe that was where he bungled — if he had only scoffed at them she might have seen that he genuinely didn’t believe it. There had been an envelope addressed to him in his wife’s handwriting and she had brought it to him while he was having breakfast, and he had smiled, expecting some kind of joke, and of course he had been doubly let down. If only he hadn’t recognized the handwriting.

The notes are different now. The first notes, the fall notes, were brief, specific, and often personally insulting. The winter notes were longer, less specific, more … what might be called mystical. She felt that she was becoming a part of something large, large and important. In the spring there were rhymes, or little drawings, sometimes a combination: a sketch of a little animal-groundhog? — with a verse: “We went to the zoo/The sky was so blue/The sky was so blue/Then what did we do?/Then what did we do?” Now the notes are questioning — no easy clues as in the spring notes: “There is something vast and warm as summer, and at times I am as warm as summer, but other times I am cold and pull up the blanket in my sleep. How, exactly, does the mind let you know you are cold? What signal makes me move when I intend not to move?”

One night he says her name out loud, whispers “Janet” in his sleep. Either asleep or awake she puts her arm out to stroke his side. He knows why he woke up, though — not her touch, but what he was thinking. What signaled him? What will happen now?

As a joke, almost, he writes her a message when he gets to work and has his secretary mail it. All day he thinks, Do I need a psychiatrist? Answered by, Who have they helped? Should I speak to her mother again? Answered by, Didn’t she already tell you to leave her alone? He goes home, has dinner, plays with Elizabeth, does a little work, and goes to bed. For hours he turns in the bed, wondering what will happen. More than that, though, he is lonesome and wishes Janet would wake up. He thinks of pretending to be asleep and rolling over on her, or of calling her name — no whispering, right out loud. A cheap trick. He kicks the covers off and looks at whatever objects he can see in the room in spite of the dark and in spite of his limited perspective. And then she stirs too — for covers? No — she’s quietly getting out of bed.

“A message?” he whispers.

“Yes.”

This is the first time they have ever discussed the messages when she’s in the process of writing them.

“Coffee?” he asks.

“All right.”

She sits sleepily across from him at the kitchen table, and for a while as she drinks the coffee he thinks she’s forgotten about the notes she intended to write. Almost mechanically she scrawls a few words on a pad and puts a piece of paper in an envelope, then drops the envelope on the counter and walks beside him down the hall to bed. It’s a humid night and the sheets feel sticky. He has trouble going to sleep. Finally he stops trying and throws his legs over the side of the bed.

“Getting up?” she says.

“Yes.”

“It’s so humid it’s hard to sleep.”

He gets up and walks across the floor.

“Mail the letter while you’re up,” she says.

“No,” he says. “I refuse.”

The room is silent, and then she laughs. He goes back to the bed. She’s half on his side of the bed and makes no attempt to move. He lies down anyway. She begins to whisper — about something vast that surrounds them. Doesn’t he feel its presence? What can they do? He rests an arm across her stomach. He can’t answer the question when she whispers to him any better than he can when she writes it. He takes his arm away and pounds the bed.

“Yes,” she says. “There.”

It is a humid night, so it will be difficult to sleep. In the morning she will get his note, and that will be inadequate too, because it doesn’t contain any answers.

II

The lover thinks that he is compared unfavorably to other lovers. In fact he is no longer her lover, but he remembers when he was, and that depresses him because he never intended to become her lover and he never intended to stop being her lover. She left because he got nasty. One time they argued — well, a lot of times they argued — but one particular time they argued walking into the house and he bent to make a snowball, then another, and another. He threw them all at her, and instead of running into the house she ran around the house and, of course, finally fell. He didn’t realize that she had really been frightened until he put out his hand to help her up and she tried to scramble backward with that strange expression on her face. Then, of course, the martyrdom: he could save his energy by just kicking snow over her instead of pulling her up. Go on, go on … He wasn’t opposed to kicking a little snow? She was afraid of him sometimes, but she still fought with him.

Pulling up in front of the house where she lives now, he tries to remember pleasant things. How they had watched the snow falling in the morning. The morning of the day he threw snowballs at her. The morning of the day she turned her ankle. He didn’t turn the ignition off. One of the girls she lived with looked at his car from where she stood on the front lawn. She must have been surprised when he took off again. She must have wanted to get a good look at him because no doubt she had heard stories about the girl’s lover.

“Heard any stories about me?” he asks pleasantly when he returns to the house.

The girl has. She looks at him without speaking. She must be a little afraid of him, though, because she gives a half nod. The girl has brown braids and wears a backless summer dress. He toys with the idea of asking if she wants a lover.

“It’s your lover,” he calls through the screen door.

She comes to the door smiling. One of the things she likes about him is his sense of humor. What does she think is funny about his having been her lover?

She shows him around. She says she is happy in the house. She points out a table she likes. This house is furnished. They had very little furniture in the other house, although that too was “furnished.” He tries to remember the inside of the other house and ends up remembering being her lover. He says nothing about the table she shows him. She asks if he has eaten dinner. Does he want to go out, then, or just listen to some music? Go out. Where will they go? It was always her fault — she was always so quick to be cynical. He thinks about telling her they can go out and throw snowballs so he can watch her face change — so he can notice something familiar about her face. This doesn’t even look like her face. He remembers that she shares the house with three other girls. What do they look like? Maybe one of them was his lover.

When he drove away from this house the first time he came, he went to a liquor store and bought some bourbon and drank it. She must have guessed that. She once thought he had been drinking when she smelled Lysol in the house. Lysol! If she’s as uncomfortable as he thinks she is, maybe she’ll drink some. She drank, too, but she always had something to say about his drinking.

The girl with the brown braids calls to them: “Have a good time.”

She doesn’t approve. He goes across the lawn to where the girl is digging in the garden. He picks up a handful of moist dirt, shapes it into a ball and throws it at the front of her dress.

“Whose lover am I?” he hollers.

The girl scrambles, regains her balance and tears off, calling, “You’re her Goddamn lover!”

Exactly right. He raises his eyebrows questioningly to his lover.

“You won’t scare me this time,” she says.

She turns and walks to the car, pulls open the door, and sits down. She leaves the door open for him to close. He does: click. The proper little date.

“Did you do that to scare me?” she asks. “You won’t scare me any more.”

“You feel you understand me well enough now to be my lover?” he asks.

“What is there to understand?” she asks.

She’s trying very hard to act self-assured. The speeding and changing-lanes trick always gets her. She wants to give in. Why else would she have agreed to see him? He looks at her questioningly again. That unnerves her a little; she repeats her question.

III

She suspects her husband, so instead of accomplishing anything, in spite of all the books and articles telling her how she can accomplish everything, she takes a bus downtown and sits in the park across from his office. She once went to a Christmas party at his office. They rode to the top floor. Does he work on the top floor, or is that only where they have parties? It seems as good a place as any to look, because she could not really see him in the building anyway. Sun glints off the glass, so she doesn’t look for too long. She looks up high, then at the door. She does this for about two hours. She doesn’t see her husband. She intends not to do anything so foolish again, but the next day she finds that she has no more work to do, so she drives her car to the bus stop and parks it and gets on a bus. She doesn’t like the downtown traffic. He says she is spoiled, living in the suburbs. He drives downtown every day at rush hour. The park is crowded today, so she goes looking for his car. Foolish, really, because it’s probably in a garage. But she walks up and down several blocks and doesn’t stop doing it until she thinks she might get lost. She doesn’t know her way around the business district well. When she returns to the park it is nearly noon, and she finds a seat next to a man eating his lunch from a bag. He smiles at her. She returns his smile. She wonders if he works with her husband. Was he at the Christmas party? Probably not. She watches the door and once she thinks she sees him, walking next to a short man in a pale-blue suit, but it isn’t him after all when she rises off the bench and can see more clearly. What time does he go to lunch? That night as they eat dinner she asks what time he eats lunch. He says that he never eats lunch at the same time. Today he ate around two.

“Why do you ask?” he says.

“That’s why you’re not very hungry,” she says.

He has eaten almost everything on his plate.

She skips a day and feels good all day, thinking that she will never do it again. But the next day something tells her that she will see him, so she drives downtown without realizing that she hasn’t stopped at the bus stop, as she usually does. She’s downtown in the traffic before she realizes what she’s done. She’s nervous and twice she gets in the wrong lane and has to wait while everyone makes a left turn, but she finally makes it safely to a parking garage. She’s just nervous, so she goes into a drugstore and drinks a cup of coffee. Then she goes, as usual, to the bench. She thinks that she may not see him after all, because she spent a lot of time tied up in traffic, and then more time at the drugstore. She only waits for an hour, then gives up because he must have already been to lunch. So many people pour out of his building that she might not see him anyway. She goes back to the parking garage and finds that she’s lost the ticket. The attendant calls the manager, who comes out to talk to her. He asks her to describe her car and she’s very upset and can’t think well — she almost describes her husband’s car before she realizes her mistake. “Well, decide what you’d like best, lady,” the manager says, laughing. He thinks it’s funny. He asks how long she’s been and she says two hours. He tells the attendant to charge her for three and walks back into his glass cubicle. She thinks about trying to hit him, but she wouldn’t want to be hit back. If he has a sense of humor like that he might hit a woman. She doesn’t want to make any excuses to her husband. She even tips the attendant.

She sits on the bench the next day from about ten o’clock — only an hour after her husband has left the house — until four o’clock. She stops at a store on the way to the bus stop and buys a pretty blouse. She has to stand on the bus all the way to her car. She’s tired when she gets home. Her husband is already there. He asks where she’s been.

“Shopping.”

“That’s why you look so tired,” he says.

Her husband never has much energy himself, but she has nothing to accuse him with. She will. The next day she plans to stand outside the building, to be there when work lets out, right on the side of the street with the building so she won’t miss him.

The next day she arrives early — three-thirty. He doesn’t get out until six. She looks through some stores and looks idly for his car, without much hope of seeing it. She goes to the drugstore again and has a cup of coffee and sits in the park when she gets tired of walking. At five o’clock she gets up and crosses the street and leans against the building. To pass the time she examines the chapped spots on the backs of her hands and twirls her wedding band. She reaches in her purse for her comb to comb her hair and feels for the parking ticket. It isn’t there. She searches thoroughly, even bending down to take things out of her purse. She can’t find it. Thinking that she might have dropped it she retraces her path, but it’s not on the ground. She hurries to the garage. There is a crowd of men — mostly men — waiting for their cars to be brought down. She tells the girl in the cashier’s booth that she’s lost her parking ticket. She talks a little too loudly — the girl leans back on her stool to get away from her voice, and several of the men stare at her. The girl calls the manager.

“Didn’t this happen to you yesterday?”

“I’m very sorry, but I have to have my car back.”

“What does your car look like today?”

She describes her car. It is a blue car. Blue. Yes, the roof is blue, too. A four-door blue car, and she can’t remember the make. A Chevrolet. Blue. About three hours ago.

“Four hours ago,” the manager says.

Tears spring into her eyes.

“Three,” she says.

He shrugs. What is he going to do? He calls an attendant over and tells him to get a blue Chevy. She stands in front of the men, looking up the ramp.

“Move back,” the manager hollers.

She backs into a group of men who quickly spread out to make room for her. She waits while six cars are brought. Seven. Eight. Then hers. She gets in without tipping the attendant and heads home, driving much too fast. She’s home before she realizes that yet another day is ruined, and that she’ll have to go the next day.

“Where were you?” her husband says.

She’s been crying. She never did find time to comb her hair. She’s empty-handed, so she hasn’t been shopping. What’s the point of it? She’ll never catch him.

“Where have you been?” she says.

IV

He calls this woman, who is not his mother, “Mother.” It is her mother. She has come to stay with them not because of poor health or lack of money, but because she is lonely. She makes no trouble, except for the one annoying thing she does, and doesn’t interfere with their life because she is always in her room. His wife thinks it’s abnormal that she shuts her door after breakfast and does not reappear until dinner. Their son loves his grandmother and spends a lot of time in her room, talking to her, drawing pictures for her, and eating her candy when he gets home from school until dinner. There is no good reason for disliking her, except that he does not believe she has come to live with them because she is lonely. If that were true, why would she stay in her room? But he can’t talk to his wife about it. It makes her think he wants her mother out of the house, and that upsets her. He suspects that it upsets her because her mother is necessary-she takes care of their son after school so his wife does not have to be home at three o’clock. In fact, he has called later in the afternoon several times and Mother has told him she isn’t there. He called yesterday at four o’clock and she wasn’t there, and that was the second time this week. He suspects that she is seeing her lover again. At any rate, he has started seeing his lover again. One of the things that nags at him is that his wife has seen his lover and knows she is rather plain and not very young, but he has never seen his wife’s lover. Perhaps the lover used to come to the house when he was gone, but no longer comes because her mother is there. Perhaps things have not worked out so well for his wife after all.

He has decided to go home early, to be there when his wife walks in, just to make her uneasy. He takes the afternoon off and buys things at a sporting-goods store he’ll need for his vacation. Then he stops in a gift shop and buys his wife a pretty little enamel box — a gift, to make her uneasy if she’s seen her lover today. The saleslady is all smiles, asks if she should wrap it. He tells her it will have just as much impact in the bag. She frowns a little, in sympathy for the woman whose pretty present will just be handed to her in a bag. She wraps the little box carefully in pink tissue paper. As an afterthought, he stops at the florist’s and picks out a bouquet of assorted flowers for his wife’s mother. Just in case it’s a conspiracy. He goes into a phone booth at the corner and calls his lover to say that he’ll take her to dinner Friday. Not until then? Impossible. She’s a little angry, but she won’t leave him. She has been his lover for years and years. He goes back to the florist’s and sends her a bouquet of assorted flowers. The florist looks at him strangely. The man could at least make a joke of it — instead, he takes it personally that he has come back, that he didn’t complete his business the first time. He decides to find another florist in the future.

As he thought, she isn’t home. He knocks on her mother’s door. She is surprised to see him and asks if he’s sick. No — just home early. He’s put the flowers in a vase for her, and she seems very pleased. She tells him where to put them. She doesn’t know where his wife is and acts surprised that she’s not in the house. His son? He must be with her. He goes downstairs and waits. He looks at the day’s mail and reads the paper. The house is quiet and very empty; the cars that pass are monotonous. He can understand why his wife wouldn’t want to spend much time in the house. It’s depressing in late afternoon. He doesn’t blame her for not being there, but he blames her for her lover. The bag with the enamel box is at his side.

She comes in at five o’clock. His son is with her. She’s surprised to see him. His son is happy to see him. His son has a balloon.

“Where did that come from?” he asks his son.

“A man in the park gave it to me.”

“You’re not sick?” his wife asks.

“Just home early,” he says. He gives her the bag. “For you.”

She loves the little box. He can’t tell if she’s excited because he might know, or just surprised to see him, happy with the present. She goes into the kitchen.

“Did you ever see the man in the park before?” he asks his son.

“No.”

“How come you got a free balloon?”

“The man had it.” His son shrugs.

Late that night the phone rings. As usual, her mother has it on the first ring. She pounces on the phone — no chance for them to get to it first. And, as usual, whoever it is hangs up. That makes her mother nervous. She always opens her door and calls down the stairs that someone called and hung up. He feels like telling her that it was either her daughter’s lover or his own. Neither of them says anything, and the door closes. He has already asked his lover if she calls and hangs up and she has denied it. He suspects her anyway — everyone lies to him. He tells his wife he has run out of cigarettes. Does she need anything from the drugstore? He puts his clothes back on and drives to the drugstore, where there is a phone booth. His lover is angry: she tells him he thinks she is a fool. She has better things to do than call his house. She tells him he is bothering her. So it was his wife’s lover. He buys a carton of cigarettes and drives home. His wife is in her mother’s room; the door is open, but they aren’t talking. Or at least they’re not talking now that he’s coming up the stairs. He’s tired. His mother-in-law must be tired of the calls. His wife must be tired of the depressing house.

“I was telling her what pretty flowers you brought me,” his mother-in-law says.

“Who do you think was on the phone?” he asks.

“Who?” his wife says.

“That’s right,” he says. “Who?”

“I don’t know,” his mother-in-law says.

“Yes, you do,” he says.

She looks startled. His wife looks at him blankly.

“You know,” he says.

“Be quiet,” his wife says. “You’ll awaken Stevie.”

“He already knows, too.”

Whether his mother-in-law really knows or not, her expression, looking back and forth between them, makes him think she won’t be staying there much longer. There is, of course, the slim chance that his lover was lying.