John Haskell - American Purgatorio

I stayed rooted where I was, dressed and warm, and when he climbed out of the water with a huge smile on his face I made a point of looking away. Birds may have been singing peacefully in the trees but I wasn’t listening.

“It’s not that bad,” he said.

I made some disparaging face.

“It’s only cold in comparison to out here,” he said.

“Which is where I am,” I said. “Out here.” I told him I was perfectly fine.

“If that’s what you think you need,” he said, and he walked again to the edge of the bank and again he jumped into the water. I watched him breaststroking his way across the pond.

I’d been fairly successful at protecting myself, and the reason I decided at that moment to step out of the skin of that protection was … I don’t know what it was, but I took my clothes off. I stood naked on the grassy bank. Alex yelled to me to jump, and I was trying to get ready to do that. “Jump,” he said, but there was the thought of the freezing water and the warmth I’d be giving up. That was on one side. On the other was something in me, something I needed to cleanse myself of, and I thought … or rather, for a moment I didn’t think. I just jumped.

Actually I dove. He’d said it was deep enough so I dove in, head first. And it was freezing. He said it wasn’t that bad, but it was that bad. I also started hooting. We were both kicking furiously to adjust to the cold or to counteract the cold, but I think the fact that it was freezing, the fact that the cold itself cleared away all other thoughts and sensations, made us happy. I say we were happy because both of us were smiling.

I stayed in only a few seconds, and then we were both on the bank, running in place and flapping our arms to keep warm. We were two naked hyperventilating apes, laughing at the exhilaration of pure sensation. When our thoughts, slowly, started coming back we put on our pants. I was drying myself with my T-shirt when Alex, apropos of nothing apparent, turned to me. He was shivering and he looked at me, and he waited until I looked directly at him. We stopped running in place.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

I could see the goose bumps covering his body. I nodded.

We were face-to-face in a way we hadn’t been able to be in the car, and why at that moment I don’t know, but that’s when it hit me. Anne. The fear of losing her. I don’t know if Alex saw the fear, but I know that I was feeling it. That I would never see Anne again. That my life, and everything I’d based my life on, had gone. That I’d never get it back. And at this point, something in me started welling up — and it didn’t matter about Alex. I was staring into his face but I wasn’t seeing him or thinking about him.

The thing I’d been successfully holding in me, or keeping out of me, was gathering in my chest or belly. And when I let my attention go there, when I let myself experience what it was, it came up from down in my body, through my chest, and the sobs just came, in waves, the tears flowing from the corners of my eyes, mixing with the pond water dripping down my face. And once they started coming they kept coming, and I stood there, unworried about the strange face I was probably making, feeling the peristaltic convulsions come, not making them come, just feeling the empty space from where they seemed to originate.

And when they finally subsided, when whatever spasm it was died down, I stood, staring into the pond and shivering. We both were shivering. And then, without speaking, we got dressed. Slightly damp and still shivering, we got in the car, and with the heat turned up, we drove out of the hill country and on toward Lexington.

We arrived in the late afternoon. Alex navigated us to a bar, an Irish bar (or faux Irish bar) where at that moment a girls’ softball team was celebrating some local victory. I was still a little chilled, and because I didn’t know anyone, I sat at a table near the jukebox wall, removed from the locus of the festivities.

I noticed Alex circulate among the crowd, bowing imperceptibly when he met his friends, bowing, ordering beer, and talking to a girl in a ponytail. I noticed her several times that night but never spoke to her — she never came to my table — and after a while, after the beer and the infectious celebratory mood wore off, I drove Alex to the place where he lived, a cedar-shingled house on a quiet street with lawns and large trees. Inside, because there wasn’t a lot of furniture, we sat on the hardwood floor, drinking leftover red wine, and because there was no sofa I assumed I’d be sleeping on the floor. I had it all laid out in my mind. With a few rugs stacked on top of each other I’d have a mattress, soft enough for sleep. I went to the car, brought in my sleeping bag, and as I was spreading it out on a rug beneath a painted bookcase, the girl from the Irish tavern walked into the room. Alex hadn’t mentioned it, but it turned out that she was his roommate.

She joined us, sitting cross-legged on the wood floor, a bowl of miniature carrots between us, and she was wearing an oversized T-shirt and what seemed like the bottom of a bathing suit. Although a lot of her skin was visible, I had the impression that she wasn’t showing off, that this was how she walked around, and she was determined to do the same thing, even if a strange or unknown man was camped out in her living room.

Laura was her name, and when Alex retired to his room Laura and I started talking. She said she was a cartoonist, and so we talked, not about cartoons, but about the philosophical foundation of animation. About how you start with a point, and then you have another point, and between them you have a line, and by moving the line just slightly, just imperceptibly moving the line over and over and over, over time, you begin to effect a change. You start to tell a story.

She started out asking some innocuous question about where I was from, which led to something and then to something else, and at a certain point in the conversation she commented on the solidity of the floor and the discomfort of sleeping on the hard wood surface, and not too long after that she invited me to sleep in her bed. Not with her, but in her bed. At first I told her it didn’t matter, that I’d be fine on the floor, but I realized I was saying it just to be polite, and why should I be that? Her bed, she said, was large enough, and her offer seemed sincere, an offer of kindness. So I told her, Why not? I didn’t say the words “Why not.” I just said, “Yes, I would love to sleep on a bed.”

She was wearing the same large T-shirt on the bed; the bathing suit, it turned out, was ordinary regular-sized underwear. And there we lay, on our backs, in parallel lines. I was facing the ceiling, making a point of keeping my body straight, imagining an invisible border between us. I let my eyes close, and we weren’t talking, not at first, and then she said something about her lack of success in the restaurant business. She was a waitress in a local restaurant and apparently she wasn’t getting the shifts she wanted. We talked about her boyfriend, or ex-boyfriend, and I said something about looking for my lost wife. She seemed to understand. We seemed — mutually, I think — to be getting along, and I didn’t sleep and she didn’t sleep, and as we spoke, and as I listened to the sound of the whispering human voice, I was lulled into — not a trance — but I moved closer, so that my shoulder was touching, or almost touching, her shoulder, so that only an infinitesimal gap existed between my arm and hers. Although I couldn’t see her arm, I imagined it, brown and smooth and still.

At some point, under the spell of the words that were passing between us, without my actually doing anything, Laura’s arm transformed itself — or I transformed it — into a different arm. I imagined Anne’s arm next to me. And because a person’s arm is connected to the rest of the body, gradually, in my mind, Laura herself was replaced by Anne. Not an image of Anne or a representation of Anne. The person beside me was Anne, and I was lying there, happily absorbing the old familiarity and warmth.