Bonnie Nadzam - Lions

“You mean a psychologist.”

“It comes with the tuition.”

She watched him. He must have been imagining what he’d say to such a person. That he’d discovered or been given a new job in life, one he neither wanted nor didn’t want, but which he was compelled to perform.

“And if you don’t do it,” this doctor would ask, “what happens?”

“I was born to do it.”

“And you recently lost your father?”

“Yes, sir.”

The doctor would nod at that. Jot something down. Interesting, he might think.

To ignore this task his father gave him on his deathbed, Gordon would explain to the counselor, would be to live a lie. To do it, however, would be to turn his back on everyone and everything he once thought was his life.

“A very pleasant life,” Gordon would explain. “That was supposed to include Leigh. And clean and simple rooms in a clean and simple house in a clean and simple town.”

“That doesn’t sound so indulgent.”

“I didn’t say I’d be turning my back on indulgence. I’d be turning my back on a certain kind of life. A very good kind of life.”

“Does she know about this — job — of yours?”

“She knew my father.”

“But you haven’t spoken of it?”

“Not explicitly.”

“Why not?”

“She might think I was crazy.”

“She thought your father was?”

“A lot of people did.”

“Do you think,” the doctor would ask slowly, “that I think you’re crazy?”

“Yes.”

“Does thinking so change your feelings about this — task, as you call it?”

“No.”

Then Gordon would describe the hut where the wounded man lived, the alternative to the pleasant, airy, sunny home he might have shared with Leigh.

“It’s a way to feel close to your father?”

“I guess.”

And this doctor would nod, and refer to his notes, and respond in kind with a prescription.

In Gordon’s dorm room, Leigh sat forward in the extra chair and closed her eyes, then suddenly stood up. Somewhere in the distance the sound of a crackling motorcycle rose in the late summer sky.

“Stay here with me,” he said.

“I need some air.”

“I know we’ve been having a hard time,” he said. “Leigh, look at me.”

“You won’t tell me what’s going on.”

“It’s all falling apart,” he said.

“That’s it? That’s all you have to say?”

He shook his head. “What do you want me to say?”

“I mean what is this?” She gestured at his chair, the afghan. The room he’d created.

“I thought we could get a fresh start again out here,” he said.

She looked around his room in disbelief. “You did?”

“I’m talking about you and me. I thought it could be like it was at home again. That we could start over from how it was, before.”

“No, Gordon. That would be like starting over from a negative number. Do you understand? I don’t want things to be like they were at home.”

“You don’t.”

“For God’s sakes no. Why did I come here?” She flung her hand at the shade he’d pulled down over one window and knocked it sideways. As it swung slowly still, it dawned on her. “You only came to try to lure me back.”

He shook his head. “No, Leigh.”

“That’s exactly what this is. You were never going to stay.”

“Listen.”

“You were going to lure me back.” She said it this time quietly, as if to herself.

Gordon fixed his eyes on the line where the wall met the carpet.

“I am not going back in any way, shape, or form.”

“I just need a little time there. Six months. A year.”

“I don’t want to be there and I don’t want things to be like they were there and I don’t want to be any place like it. Not for a day and definitely not for a year.”

“OK, Leigh.”

“I’m not going to be like your mother.”

“OK.”

“Good.” Her breath was shallow and her heart raced high in her chest. “I’m going now.”

“OK.”

She went from his dorm into town to meet her roommate and a few other new friends at a café where you could sometimes convince them to sell you a glass of beer. There was a quartet of young men from the college playing from the Great American Songbook, and she and her friends took up the ragged love seat and armchairs in a circle around a gas fireplace. The evening was just cool enough for it. Someone, somehow, procured a bottle of wine, and they filled their empty coffee cups and chatted and listened to the music. But even in his absence Gordon managed to ruin the night. When the wine was gone and the young men were packing up their instruments, she crossed campus. It was well after midnight, and quiet, just the sound now and then of a lone car on the main strip and the sprinklers ticking over the blue lawns and early autumn flowers. She followed the sidewalk toward Gordon’s dorm.

The door to his building was locked, and her own ID card didn’t work. She pressed her forehead a moment against the metal door, then straightened and walked over the damp grass to his window. It was on the first floor, but a good ten feet from the ground. She scanned the immaculate grass for something to throw at it. A piece of gravel. Nothing. She sat with her back against the brick building, facing the lawn, her head and arms in a pile on her knees. When the first birds called out from the line of tall, narrow poplars and the illuminated sky in the east began blanking out the stars, she raised her hands and spread her fingers and carefully, as the woman at the Lucy Graves had done, closed the dark empty space above her head like the petals of a flower.

Around dawn someone opened the door to Gordon’s building from the inside, and she went in. She could see his door open from the end of the hall as she approached. He’s in the bathroom, he thought. I’ll take him to breakfast. We’ll go somewhere pleasant. She told herself how it would be with each step of her feet until she stood before the empty room. He was gone, and he’d taken everything with him.

Gordon drove east as the moon set, hands trembling on the wheel as he shuddered in the cold truck. He’d rolled down the windows to let the cold in and keep himself awake. He drove as night dissolved around him. The sun came up and he entered Lions and knew all of it — what it smelled like, and what time the birds woke — as well as he knew his own body. It was early autumn, the grass and weeds an endless span of cool blonde parchment.

Before the summer, the world and all its forms seemed made for pleasure and consolation. His shadow printed on the street outside the diner. Rain against the window. A train of two hundred heavy, black, silent cars pushing west in slow motion. That world was lost to him now — and yet he’d never felt so awake.

So life was sweet only where it was also bitter. He would take it all, without condition, without reservation, and without wishing it were otherwise. Not because he was virtuous or good, but because he was tired, his hands were empty, and he had no energy in him to be otherwise. The world vibrated around him. There wasn’t much in it he felt was worth chasing.

The shop would be there, just ahead off the highway, beside his house, and in its way that was everything. His father had shown Gordon that in the undivided heart there lives a secret love bringing a man to silence beyond all thought, teaching him to repudiate and disavow all that is false in the world. Gordon would go back to the work.

There were no lights on in town. The diner wasn’t open yet. Boyd’s was dark. He pulled over in front of the empty hardware store and looked over the dusty junk in the store window. Chintzy vases and teacups and saucers with roses and lilies and forget-me-nots painted in ribbons around gilded rims. Board games — Connect Four, Donald the Donkey, and Lose All You Have, the colored boxes faded, the shrinkwrapped plastic brown with dust.