Peter Orner: Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge

Toward dawn he fell asleep. She watched the sun gray, then pink, the frost-crusted window. She saw how dingy and small the room was going to look to him when he awoke. A man with a house and daughters. This wasn’t something she ever thought about. Men didn’t look at her room. They looked at her. Her with her stockings on and her with her stockings off. One of his hands lay across her stomach like a plump fish. Moist. The fish rode the rise and fall of her stomach. She wanted it off. She wanted it gone. She had once loved a man in Cape Girardeau, but not enough had come of it. And yet it isn’t this man or that man or any man at all. Isn’t it the sun leaking through the window again? Isn’t it the sun trying to melt this frost? Isn’t it this narrow bed and breath dissolving into memory?

If I tell you something will you listen? Will you not leave and will you listen?

I’ve listened before.

But will you listen now?

I said yes.

It’s another story, Barry.

All right.

Another story story.

I said fine.

It was when I was living in Spokane. I hadn’t been there long. Two weeks maybe. I met this guy in a coffee shop.

Right.

Right. Same as always. I liked the book he was reading. We talked about who knows what, and I liked him. I let him take me home and I fucked him. It was gentle, slow. I was new to the city and it was dreary, but I liked the hills and the way the trees grew up out of the sidewalks sideways. Another week with him and I broke my lease and moved into his apartment on the first floor of a little frame house in what people called the even shittier part of Rupert Heights. Because I liked him and it meant saving on rent. My job was decent. I taught art to the second grade at a Montessori school. Liberal, but they only went so far. The pay sucked. His name was Edward. He worked in a B. Dalton in a mall and lived off money his grandfather left him. Maybe he was twenty-four. He said he wanted to go back to school and finish at some point. He had a clarinet in his closet he never played. We lived on a little hump in the street and there was good light in the morning and I set up a darkroom in the bathroom. He didn’t mind that I blacked out the little window. For five, six months, I was happy. He was quiet. He could just sit, you know? What I’ve never been able to train myself to do. Just sit for hours, not bored, not anything. Thinking, I guess. And I thought, I’m smart. I finally made a decent decision in my life and my work is coming along and this Edward with his calmness. Don’t laugh at me. He listened to me. I’d tell him everything. About my mother driving all over the lawn and then into the front door, the whole time screaming that we were all foreigners to her, that she didn’t know a single soul in our house, that it wasn’t even her house. All the shit you’ve had to hear. And he’d endure it. He never asked questions. His upper lip sometimes quivered, that’s all. And you can’t know how after talking to myself for so long what it was like to just have this person watch me and listen. I shot him. The pictures are probably still in a box somewhere. And I listened to his stories about his grandfather who worked in a mill, who moved out there from St. Louis to help build the Coulee Dam. He didn’t have many friends except for a couple of guys he sometimes played chess with at the coffee shop up the block. Another two or three from the bookstore. He said when he was through reading all the books he wanted to finish, he’d drive to Seattle and make more friends. At night we rented old Bruce Dern movies. I remember one where someone was trying to blow up the Super Bowl. Edward had very timid eyes. He looked away from you when you looked directly at him; he looked away when you kissed him. Fucking him was good and gentle, and when we were through he’d stand by the window wrapped in the top sheet and tell me about his grandfather’s prize tomatoes. How his grandpa once took his fattest, spoogiest tomato to the same guy who bronzed baby shoes and said, Immortalize this, why don’t you? He never mentioned his parents except once to say they lived in Houston. Another time, though, he told me about a mother who left her kid in the bookstore. The kid was three or four and she wasn’t abandoning him or anything — she must have just forgotten she was with him and wandered out of the store without him. The kind of thing every mother probably does once in her life and then has nightmares about for years, but Edward said that what made him remember was that the kid didn’t seem to notice. He looked around. Seeing his mother wasn’t there anymore, he went on flapping through a picture book until the mother came back ten minutes later, hysterically shrieking apologies to the kid, to Edward, to everyone standing around. The kid hardly looked up. That night I gripped Edward hard. I tried to love him. From the gut, I tried, and it didn’t matter, none of it mattered.

Because one day your Edward, your beautiful Edward of the silence, was gone. And all your dreams were shattered.

I asked if you were going to listen.

It’s just that we’ve been here before. Different guy, different city — What about that guy from Wisconsin? The circus clown?

Trapeze artist. From Baraboo. Right, so Edward left. You’re right on top of this, Barry. I wasn’t there a year. It was December. But because it was his place and he had to come back eventually, I stayed. I promised myself that when he comes back, I’ll move out. That I would tell him, Look, we had something for a while, and hey it didn’t work out. No hard feelings. You move on. Here’s your key and the past-due rent. So long, I told myself I’d tell him. So long. It’s amazing how quickly you get used to being left. It’s like meeting yourself again. It’s not all that lonely. One week went by. No cryptic letter saying it was a great ride but I’m confused. I’m gay. I’m Buddhist and I need to go on a pilgrimage like Siddhartha. I’m scared of love because this one time I got hurt so bad… Nothing. Zero. I went over to the bookstore and the manager said Edward hadn’t shown up and hadn’t called in. And he was sorry, because he liked him and the customers liked him. Edward was the anchor of the sales team, the guy said. A real future in book selling. I asked at the coffee shop and the people said they hadn’t seen him around. Edward’s friend with the scarf, the chess mullah, he called himself, said maybe I needed some patience, that maybe I just needed to wait Edward out for a while. When I said I was thinking of going to the police and filing a report or something, this asshole just looks at me and says who am I to say who’s missing and who’s not. Missing from where? Another week went by. I went to the police and they opened a file and said they’d call me if anything turned up. I checked the hospitals — nothing. Meanwhile, I started going out more. To clubs with some other teachers from work. I even dated a social studies teacher a few times, nice guy with a mile-long forehead. The first of the month came around and I didn’t pay any rent because I didn’t know who to pay it to. I’d given my checks to Edward for my half. I figured I’d wait until someone called or came around asking. Of course I went through his stuff. Nothing in his papers but some receipts and Visa bills. No family pictures except a bunch of his grandfather leaning against a Buick. So he had no cards from his mother and nobody ever called him? I thought maybe he threw the cards out or his parents didn’t know where he was living. Unlike me, he didn’t feel the need to blab his history to people who wouldn’t want to listen anyway.

What’d this guy look like?

He was bulky, not fat exactly. And he wore it kind of happy, you know? And tall. I think he had more trouble with being tall. He was one of those tall guys who doesn’t know what to do with his height. The kind of guy that lanks around and apologizes for having to stoop through doorways, except that Edward never apologized, he only sort of waved.