Lydia Netzer - How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky

To make matters worse, her mother read aloud every night from poems and novels that glorified love. Love of the ages, a penetrating, everlasting love of eternal proportions. Love you find once and cling to forever, even if the person you love is decapitated in the process. Love fraught with difficulty. Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester love. Heathcliff and Catherine love. Love on the moors, love with a capital L. Cleopatra love, and Romeo and Juliet love. Love in uncomfortable costumes, with death at the end of it. It was like her mother’s Bible. It seemed to be her mother’s creed.

Irene didn’t drink or have any sex in college, and when she graduated she was still twenty and went on to Bowling Green for a master’s degree in math. In Bowling Green she loved a music graduate student who composed for a tuba ensemble. Or, more specifically, a euphonium ensemble. He lived in an apartment in a tower, and she took an elevator up. She sat in his bedroom on a chair and worked on her work, and he sat at his desk and worked on his, and they listened to Sting. From time to time he would come over to her and put his head in her lap or on her shoulder. He kneeled in front of her chair and she put her arms around him and patted his back. Periodically, he pressed his lips into her neck. He was cute, and had long hair. In her mind, Irene had been calling him Percy Bysshe Shelley, before they met. It was shocking to her that he wanted to date her. Once, she’d had a nonlucid dream where a kiss on the neck became pretty sexual, awakening feelings in her that led her to want to replay the dream again and again. But in real life it didn’t happen that way. It just led to a wet spot on her neck.

When he first kissed her on the mouth, it was her first kiss. She was sitting on a radiator in his apartment with her back against the window and he came at her, with the obvious intent to kiss. He said, “Irene, I know you have been kissed before.” She hadn’t said no. She noticed he licked his mouth right before he came close. Eventually, they had a careful, feeble attempt at sex. Looking back later, she thought it might have been his fault, because he was terrible at it. He didn’t even take his pants off or her clothes off, just pushed and pushed at her, and then eventually said, with a gasp, “I did it.”

At the time, she just felt tired, like she wanted to go to her own bed. Nothing came of it thereafter. There was no further attempt. She started getting bored and dumped him. He was a good guy and very smart about music, but after he had been pressing himself on her leg through his pants, she never felt good about him anymore.

After that, she was getting her Ph.D. in Columbus, and she dated lots of men but didn’t have sex with them. She learned instead how to do very good blow jobs, to the point that she felt quite masterful about it. She stopped dating academics and fell in with a man in a nightclub who didn’t tell her his last name until she finally ripped his driver’s license out of his hand and found out it was Wiener. He was handsome and funny, and he was also dealing drugs, which Irene didn’t realize until later. They would walk up and down Park Street while he said scornful things about the liberal arts majors she pointed out. But sometimes, he would be in her apartment and he wouldn’t talk and he’d appear to be watching television but would lose the ability to respond to questions. So Irene rolled him off the couch and into bed and then the words would come out, encouraging words. She realized later that he must have been tripping during these catatonic times. She thought back to cuddling next to him on the couch, while he stared blankly before him, and felt that it hadn’t been so bad. In times of lucidity, he argued about his need to give Irene an orgasm with his tongue. But he failed to convince her it would work.

The relationship ended one night at a club. They ran into another guy she had dated a few times, a smart guy, a physics fellow. She was surprised to find that when she turned to introduce her boyfriend to this smart guy, she had forgotten the boyfriend’s name. “This is uhhh,” she said. The smart guy laughed. The boyfriend didn’t. The next week he moved out to her neighborhood and bought a kitten, and said, Look what I did for you. But she couldn’t face him ever again after that night. She wanted to go to his new apartment and see his kitten, but she broke up with him instead. It just hadn’t felt good to stand there and forget his name. There had been no way to cover that up.

So in her mind the main history looked like this:

1. Mother’s face as a chin.

2. The boy on the playground touching her legs.

3. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s wet lips on her neck.

4. Drug dealer staring at the television.

The only thing next was Belion. And then George.

“Here we are!” said George.

Irene turned the corner into a rutted dirt road flanked by encroaching trees, each with leaves turning a different shade of brown. They had been on the main drag of Sylvania, a western suburb. Monroe Street was Vegas-wide and lined with neon, oversize restaurants, and gift shops. Then they had turned onto a blacktop highway, rolling over hills and through some woods. Now the road had narrowed and decayed.

“Just keep one wheel up on the middle thing, and one wheel over on the side. If you let yourself down into the ruts, you won’t get through.”

“You live here?” asked Irene.

“Well, my mother has a city apartment. My dad lives here. We used to live here. This is where I grew up. Yes, I live here. Sometimes.”

Irene took her eyes off the ruts to give him a powerful stare. “If you’re sure.” He smiled back and she laughed.

The house was ramshackle-quaint. A tumbledown well in the center of the yard gave it a haunted feel. There was a two-story garage with wide, carriage-house doors, and cragged oak trees spread their gnarled limbs over everything.

“Wow,” said Irene. “Picturesque.”

“Yeah,” said George. “My mother used to have her psychic shop set up out here. It used to be even worse than this—prayer flags and a llama. Over there in the side yard they had a crystal maze, where they’d buried crystals in the ground in a labyrinth shape—you were supposed to be able to get to the center by feeling your way along the crystal energy.”

George pointed to a little meadow adjacent to the house, where rosebushes were sending out their fall offerings around the edge.

“Or you could just walk there, to the center,” said Irene. “Not much of a maze.”

“Yeah, you should try it,” said George. Irene started laughing with sound coming out. Actual sound.

“Are you OK?” George asked. He smiled at her.

“I think you fucked me silly,” she said. “This is me silly.”

“OK, silly, you can just park here next to the garage.”

When they got out, she picked her way across the lawn and sat down in the porch swing. She let out a long sigh and looked around.

“So this is why your hands feel like longshoreman hands,” she said.

“Gardening,” said George. “I do it a lot. And how do you know what a longshoreman’s hands feel like?”

“Conjecture,” said Irene. She pulled her feet up on the swing and hugged her knees, making the swing move but not rock.

“You do not look right at home,” said George, pointing to a hand-lettered sign on the wall that said MAKE YOURSELF RIGHT AT HOME.

“How do I do that?” Irene asked.

“Probably with some of Dad’s weed,” George told her.

“Is your dad here now?”

“No one’s seen Dad since the banquet,” George responded. “But if he does show up, we’re not supposed to…” George appeared to be trying to remember what he was not supposed to do.