Emma Rathbone - Losing It

She caught me staring. “A bad sunburn,” she said, “from when I was a teenager. I fell asleep in the sun. It never came out.”

“I didn’t know that could happen,” I said.

“Me neither,” she said.

“It doesn’t still hurt, does it?”

“No, no.” She pushed down in the book with her pencil, scraped it back and forth a few times as if to sharpen it.

“I’m mapping out my project,” she said, “with the plates.”

“Oh, okay.”

“I want to tell the whole story,” she said. “Merlin, the Knights of the Round Table. I’m even going to have a title plate.”

“That sounds great.”

Maybe it was the intimacy of being up together, or maybe I just didn’t feel like being alone after what had happened, but I kept standing there at the sink.

She glanced up and asked me how my evening was with a kindly indifference that made me want to put my head against her shoulder and weep.

“It was—” I was trembling, about to break, but I pulled it together. I exhaled. “It was fine.” I laughed a little. “Bad date.”

“Oh?” I couldn’t tell if Viv was touched or unnerved by this admission, veering, as it was, into more personal territory.

The lacy curtain above the sink fluttered in a warm breeze. How good it felt to be somewhere softly lit, and warm, and private. I felt relieved by all the land, the sheer mileage between me and Bill Meeks.

“Yeah,” I said. “The guy was… not a nice guy.”

“I see,” she said, nodding. I could tell she wanted to offer more.

I didn’t know anything about Viv’s romantic history. I thought I heard that she was involved with someone named Richard a very long time ago, but I couldn’t remember the details. I knew she’d never been married. I studied her. She was in her late fifties — but her forehead was smooth as a stone. She looked pretty with her long red hair behind her shoulders and her regal posture, her face calm as a pond. I could see some raggedy old soldier laying his head in her lap.

She dropped her hands to her knees. “Yes,” she said. “That can happen.” She looked at me, her eyes friendly. “I’m sure you told him off.”

“May I?” I said, pointing to a bottle of wine on the counter.

“Of course.”

What did she think of me? What would she think if I told her I was a virgin? I wanted to tell her right then, because I was sick of lying about it, sick of pretending to be something I wasn’t and contorting myself to cover it up. I opened my mouth, but then I couldn’t — I couldn’t stand watching her try, in her polite, reserved way, to assemble some kind of sympathy.

I got a wineglass out of a cabinet and walked to the table and took the bottle and poured some and said, “Told him off? Not really. I wish I had. Have you known guys like that? Or men? Who just sort of want to put you down?”

She gave a sort of shrug. “I think so.”

“He was strange,” I said. “It was like trying to talk to a pinball machine.”

This made her laugh. “Well, at least it wasn’t boring,” she said.

“But he was boring, too.”

She looked at me with curiosity.

“I know, it doesn’t make any sense.”

“It doesn’t sound like a very good combination,” she said, smiling.

“I still had to be the one to make the conversation go.”

“I know what that’s like.”

“It’s horrible, isn’t it?” I said. “Having to do all the work?”

She nodded.

“You have to hope something will catch.”

“Yes!” she said. “I knew a man like that once. It was at a training session I had to do, at the Piedmont Center. We were partners and had to put together a presentation and spent the whole day together.” Viv was talking with a fluidity I wasn’t used to, and I realized that she was a little drunk. “He didn’t utter a peep the whole time, and so I found myself talking nonsensically about anything and everything. Making preserves.” She tossed up her hands. “Airport mosaics.”

“It’s exhausting!”

She nodded, smiling.

“Have you ever been on a date like that?”

“Sort of,” she said. “But I haven’t”—she shook her head—“I’ve never really been with a man.” She stole a look at me.

“What?”

“A virgin.” She put her hands up, trying to make a joke out of it. “What do they call it? — a maiden aunt.”

She studied me and then quickly turned back to her leather book.

Later, when I looked back on that moment, trying to unpack it and go over it and study the exact grain, I remembered the feeling of being under a lot of pressure, because what Viv wanted was to gauge my reaction. I didn’t offer her anything. I just stood there, dumbstruck. She was writing in her book, her brow furrowed, in what seemed like feigned concentration. I almost came out with it. I almost said, “Me too!” But what a weird clay that would have made in the air between us. Where would we have gone with it? Instead I watched in silence as she took another sip of wine and then erased something and tore the page and smoothed it out. There would be times thinking back when I wondered if I’d misinterpreted it. Why would she admit that in such a casual way? Maybe she didn’t care. Maybe she’d reached a sage understanding about it. But then I would remember how she glanced over — her searching expression after she told me, and I could tell. It factored in. It factored into everything.

—

How could this be? I thought, sitting at the wicker desk in my bedroom twenty minutes later, unable to sleep, unable to read, clicking a pen. We’d both been embarrassed. I’d finally said, trying to be funny, “Well, you’re not missing out on anything.” She’d nodded quickly, everything about her demeanor saying she wanted to get back to work and be left alone.

I listened to the night sounds outside my window, crickets, a birdcall. The house became alive with the rush of water — Aunt Viv in the bathroom, getting ready for bed.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. It could happen. It did happen. The train could pass, and disappear into the distance. Everything you’d gathered for the right moment could wither in your arms and spiral away in the wind. It was like looking at someone who’d been in a plane crash, or struck by lightning. Someone who had fallen through a random crack of fate, and why, and how easy actually was it for this to happen and could it happen to anyone and how was it possible?

I tried to think of everything I knew about Aunt Viv and about the times we’d spent together when I was a kid. There were the card games. I remembered the soft, cool pads of her fingers pressing onto my arm in the hallway. I pictured her caught in the doorway with a bunch of bags, and a few sleeves of flowers, her face flushed, looking where to put them down; she’s searching for her keys, upending a small glass frog on our kitchen counter; a spike of laughter from her — her and my mom, in a room somewhere in the house. There was so much time I didn’t know her, so much time between then and now when we’d lost touch, and that whole time she’d been not having sex. All those minutes, hours, days, what had she been doing? What had I been doing? I heard the snap of her long denim skirt in the wind. We’re at a park, she’s scanning the horizon. There were car wrecks, tornadoes, foreclosures, but what about the disasters that could be visited on a person slowly, incrementally, over the course of decades?

It didn’t make any sense. Aunt Viv was nice, pretty normal, relatively attractive. She smelled good and was organized. So she was shy and a little reserved. Plenty of people like that have sex. Maybe she was a lesbian and was all repressed and could just never admit it to herself.