Nick Arvin - The Reconstructionist

Ellis laughed. But she didn’t. She made a small adjustment to the position of the pitcher of iced tea. With a feeling of abandoning the shore he said, ‘It wasn’t a coincidence, exactly, when I ran into you at the art museum.’ He told her about seeing her at the airport, about driving by her house, about going week after week to the museum.

‘Why didn’t you say something in the airport?’

‘My mom wondered the same thing,’ he said. He was trying to joke, but she only picked up a bit of amber-coloured cellophane on the tip of her finger. ‘I was surprised.’ He looked at the oozing blob of tiny weapons. ‘I suppose I was scared.’

She set the cellophane onto a star. Was she waiting for him to go on? He couldn’t go on. He ached and jittered with embarrassment, and then, looking at the aliens’ broken glass teeth, he thought of Boggs. Abruptly he stood and said goodbye, and he fled. He saw that she was surprised; he went too quickly to see if it became disappointment.

For six weeks a pain seethed in his chest, as if his blood were attempting to flow in the wrong direction. Until, on an afternoon when Boggs had again left town, the phone rang, and Heather said she needed help moving a set of shelving she had bought.

In great caution they didn’t meet very often. Sometimes he did not see her for three weeks, four weeks, and he grew anxious. Then despairing. The architecture of his life began to look like lunacy.

Affair: the word astonished him every time it appeared in his mind. All he had done was rediscover and fall for a small, dark-haired, scarred, slow-smiling woman. That she happened to be married wasn’t a part of the equation. That she happened to be married seemed simply strange. That she happened to be married to his boss seemed strange to the point of unreality.

Sometimes Heather said that things needed to change. On a couple of occasions, she grew angry. ‘We all need to grow the fuck up!’ she cried. ‘I’ll just tell him it’s time for a divorce. It’s not a big deal. A divorce.’ She sounded very grim. It made him fearful. He wished he weren’t, but he feared to sabotage Boggs, feared Boggs’s reaction, feared the loss of his job, feared the end of his present life. He wished it could be done in some way that would not hurt Boggs. But she spoke of soon , and when soon might be remained undefined. He had decided that if she asked him to give up his job and his friendship with Boggs, he would. But finally she didn’t ask, and he wondered, what did she fear?

The covert nature of the relationship amplified, he saw, its excitement. The sense that they were getting away with something, that they should be ashamed, that no one else knew the potent emotions flowing between them, that they created and inhabited a hidden world. When their relationship became public, it would become something different. So, after he’d been working for Boggs for six years and having sex with Heather for two, he still could not say when the situation would change. Shouldn’t he want an ordinary life with her? He did. He did. And he had an obscure trust that it would come. And nothing changed.

And what was wrong with her relationship with Boggs? She said only that her husband had closed away the essential parts of himself. Ellis could see that being married to the man would be a different thing than being friends with him. There had been entire days on the road when Boggs didn’t speak a single unnecessary word. And when they examined the result of some inexplicable driver action – a driver who attempted to pass in a blind curve, or run a red, or pushed a grocery cart full of concrete mix down the street with the front bumper of an IROC-Z – Boggs often displayed a daunting misanthropy. ‘The only thing that makes humans different from animals,’ he said, ‘is that humans can be creatively stupid.’

One night, on a nearly empty highway, returning to civilisation from an accident location a couple hundred miles into the plains, Boggs had hung behind a semi-trailer for several miles and then, without a word, began edging nearer and nearer, until the front bumper of their rental was just two or three feet behind the trailer’s blunt steel framework. At 75 mph, Ellis gazed in horror at the trailer’s glowing tail lights, close and large. When he glanced at Boggs, Boggs reached down and adjusted the volume of the radio. Ellis said, as gently as he could, ‘What are you doing?’

Boggs backed away. He didn’t say anything.

Ellis intended to bring it up sometime when Boggs seemed more calm. But it didn’t happen again, and nothing, really, had happened – there had been no collision, no physical evidence. It seemed almost as if he might have imagined the incident. And it was a tricky topic to raise with a man who was, after all, his boss.

He met Heather in cars and motels and in the duplex where he lived, but most often in her father’s RV, in strip mall parking lots and highway rest stops. The RV’s little windows were always shut, the lemon-yellow curtains drawn, so nothing outside could be seen, and nothing outside could see in. Still, traffic always ran nearby making its ceaseless noise, rising to a roar when the semis passed, and Ellis could imagine the vehicles and their motion quite clearly. On the RV’s dining table lay Heather’s experiments for her classes, or some of her own work – an Elvis bust made from peppermint drops, small gold Christmas tree bulbs glued together into a crashing wave. She intermittently worked for weeks or months on these things, then they sat around for a while, until she threw them away. If Ellis suggested they could be displayed or sold, she scoffed.

Nearer in memory, however, were the movements of Heather’s ribs as she breathed, the touch of her fingers on his skin, the minty odour of her shampoo and her own human scent. She called his penis Detroit; her crotch was Los Angeles. And she called it the recreational vehicle in a tone that made it a double entendre. In memory, the RV meetings washed together warmly and settled into a few singular, wondrous impressions. She moved on top of him, and when he had come, she stilled him and held him inside her until he became hard again and she renewed her movements. He’d felt as if they might go on this way, the two of them, simply, lazily, forever.

‘Tell me something you don’t like,’ she’d said once, lolling beside him.

‘Moment.’

‘What?’

‘Just the word, moment.’

‘Why?’

‘It might mean a fraction of a second, or it might mean minutes, or days, or weeks. In a history book it might mean years. It’s totally imprecise. What’s worst are things like “a moment or two”, “a few moments”. I don’t know how anyone ever understands anyone else when we use words like that.’

‘You should let your inner dork out more often,’ she said. ‘It’s cute.’ She rolled over and grabbed his penis with both hands. ‘Just don’t get cocky about it.’

‘OK. OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s talk economics – I have a theory that Detroit is about to experience an urban renewal.’

She asked, climbing onto him, ‘What if joking is a substitute for real communication?’

‘Detroit doesn’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said, ‘and Detroit doesn’t care.’

Then, Heather’s father died. For years he had been in declining health, a decline that failed to halt his habit of burning and inhaling three or four packs of cigarettes a day. Ellis learned of the death in a brief phone call from Heather, and he ached that he couldn’t go to the funeral, couldn’t see her, couldn’t comfort her. She had not seemed especially close with her father, but he had been her only parent from the time she was four. When he did speak with her after the funeral, on the phone, she said that she was all right, more or less, that her father’s long illness had helped her to prepare for the end. But she was angry with Boggs; without consulting her, he had sold the RV.