Ben Greenman - What He's Poised to Do - Stories

That morning when I woke and stood by the window, I returned and sat at the breakfast table in my apartment and considered what had transpired the night before. Samantha had taken me, or at the very least she had taken me to a place where I had taken her. And now, hours later, I was in a small space with a woman I had possessed, and I still smelled her on my hands and face, and I still remembered the way she had opened her mouth to meet my open mouth, and yet I did not feel an ounce of kindness toward her. I had a schoolmate who used to say that he had “throbbed off into” a woman, a phrase I found reprehensible at the time, but which I found useful the morning after I had throbbed off into Samantha. I retreated from the window and found one of Edith’s letters. I sat on the bed and reread it. Her hand was steady and her mind more so. I treasured her opinion on everything from Hirohito to Mickey Mouse. When Charles Lindbergh had received the Medal of Honor for his first transatlantic flight, she had confessed to me that she found the man “frightfully repulsive, not just for his ideas but for his single-mindedness of purpose — I would have preferred that he fly off in all directions at once.” Her daughter, for all her beauty, for all her youth, accounted Lindbergh a hero. That saddened me. Despite that, I was pledged, and her scent was on my hands and face, and one day soon I would marry her.

How can a day like that be forestalled? I considered jumping out of the window, though I was only on the third floor and would most likely embarrass rather than extinguish myself. I considered paying one of my schoolmates to seduce Samantha, after which time I could denounce her as unfaithful and promiscuous, though that seemed rather too Byzantine a scheme, not to mention that I did not wish to crush her spirit, only to free my own. I had no real sense of my options and no real belief in my freedom. This may not make for much of a story, and yet it is every story, told all the time, in every language, with every available flourish. Man is asphyxiated by choice, not in the abstract but in the concrete. It hardens around him.

I went back to sleep, where I had a dream. I was riding on a bicycle. A beautiful young woman with long blonde hair was sitting on my lap. I was facing forward. She was facing me. She had on a white skirt, and I reached up underneath it and felt the presence of nothing additional. “Lift it,” she said, and I did, and she joined us together with a gasp. This was my betrothed, I was sure, and the prospect of being joined to her in this way each and every night for the rest of my life suddenly seemed less odious. There was transport involved. I kept riding, fast at first and then slower and slower until my feet were going around in a nearly frozen circle. The bike remained upright. She put her arms around my neck and spoke my name. Then she spoke her own. It was Edith. This time, I did not wake with a start. I slid down into the bed of sleep and, having arrived there, tried to climb back up the incline to my dream. I saw my salvation, finally. My dream would protect me. My dream would keep time from moving forward ruthlessly, from suffocating my sense of my self, from forcing me to come into the world as someone else. I regained sleep, and then the corner of my dream. We biked on, over a long cobblestone path, the unevenness of which was wonderful for both of us. She asked me to tell her what was up ahead. “Black branches,” I said, and she laughed. There were no black branches and she knew it. What there was, which she didn’t know, was a place where the road ended, or at least dropped off into a shallow stream. I rode on into the water. We slowed down again and nearly stopped. The bike was upright in the shallows. The water began to rise. Edith’s arms tightened around me. Heat came out of her mouth and her chest and from between her legs. The water was cold. I knew it, but even when it had reached the bottom of my feet I experienced it only as an idea. The dream gave no indication of ending; inside it I thanked Edith, and she threw back her head and delivered a laugh I can describe only as godly. I matched her laugh, there in the dream. Did I laugh outside it? Did I disturb the sleeping Samantha? I did not know and I was not about to surface and find out.

Dear X,

I am not writing to you. I am writing to your letter. It is sitting on the table in front of me, white paper, black type that looks like it came from an old typewriter, your signature streaking across the bottom of the page. Why am I writing to your letter and not to you? For focus and also for protection: protection for us both. Dear letter, I attack. Dear letter, I relent. My wife is out of the house. I have time for this now. I should get on with it.

Writing a letter to another letter may sound questionable, but it is a deep conviction of mine. It is related to a trick I learned when I was a waiter. I would tell customers, “Do not direct your anger toward me. Speak to me, but let your anger flow toward the menu.” It started as a joke — I had a series of belligerent patrons who drove me to the edge of retaliation — but it grew into a kind of belief system. The restaurant’s soul did reside in the menu. It was a record of what was and what could not be. I was only a messenger. Do not kill the messenger. Do not even address him. Direct your attention toward the text. Make peace, or war, with what is written.

I relayed this philosophy to hundreds of customers during my last years at the restaurant. Some found it charming, because they understood my aim. Some found it presumptuous, because they subscribed to another philosophy — that servants should not think above their station. One of the members of this latter camp complained to my boss, and I was fired. My dismissal launched me into my new life, into real estate, into wealth. I became a husband to a woman who was an equal match for me in ambition and intelligence. She did not want to have children, and I agreed, imagining that we might be happy together. I could not have imagined any of this while I was working in the restaurant. In retrospect, I am thankful I was fired, for all these reasons. At the time, I was stung. I wanted a fair hearing but I received none. Only a single sous chef shed a tear for me. Her name was Clementine. Much later, after I came to America, I learned that song: Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling Clementine. A little while after that, I met you. I told you that if we ever had a child together, we’d name her that. I assumed it would be a daughter, a little girl who looked like you. I was talking in the heat of new love. We were sitting by the water. There was a gap of bench between us. You never liked to sit too close to me. Once I asked why and you said, “The space between us represents your wife.” You spoke slowly and deliberately, as if lecturing a child on safety measures — which, in a sense, you were.

My wife would have known exactly what to call this space between people that represents another person. Her vocabulary is and has always been the most impressive thing about her. “It’s true that I love words,” she said. “But all this time I’ve believed that my interest in finding the exact right word for a situation was just an adventitious bonus.” In a less serious woman, this would have been a joke, but she intended, as she would say, not a soupçon of levity.

Dear X,

Direct your attention toward the primary document. In my case, the primary document is the letter you have written me. It was written ten days ago, mailed nine days ago, received six days ago, left to cool off on my counter for one day, and then read with hands that somehow manufactured a steadiness that I did not, deep down, possess. Its message was clear: you did not want to see me again, would not be my lover, could not be my friend. “I am gone,” you wrote, “like the dodo.” I called you when I received this letter because I wanted to tell you that I loved you. I did not tell you anything of the sort. Instead, I agreed with you that you needed to be gone. “Like the dodo,” I said.