My phone rang and I glanced at the number on the screen. Seven-twenty wasn’t an area code I knew, but I picked up.
“Hello?”
“Hi.” She said it with a mixture of tension and relief in her voice, which had a touch of the South in it. I paused, trying to guess who was on the other end of the line.
“How are you feeling?” she asked. I told her I was tired, which is true often enough to be my automatic response.
“How are you?” I asked. She sighed.
“Just… wanting to hear from you.” Here, I stopped trying to discern her identity. I did not know this woman.
I paused again, deciding how I should treat the situation.
“Is it not a good time?” she asked in a tone which suggested that she often called at times that were not good. Her speech was familiar, though her voice was unfamiliar.
“I’m pretty busy,” I answered. Again, not lying--by a fluke, I had slept until four in the afternoon with a full day of homework ahead of me.
She sighed again. “Well, why don’t you give me a call back when you’re a little less busy?”
“Okay. I will,” I lied. I could tell it was what she wanted to hear.
“Bye,” she said, her voice both hesitant and hesitating; she seemed reluctant to let the conversation end, while half-expecting and half-hoping it wouldn’t.
“Bye,” I said, and hung up, already rooting around my desk for a pen and paper.
Upon writing the conversation down, I realized that I had made a promise which I had no way of keeping. Worse, I had made a promise as a person I wasn’t. Somewhere out there was a man who, unbeknownst to him, was expected to call the woman I had spoken to.
I cycled through the repercussions in my mind. Best-case scenario, he calls, of his own accord, and my brief trespass into their relationship disappears. If less lucky, he doesn’t call; she calls him again without mentioning the broken promise. Worst-case scenario, she holds my words against him. She gets fed up with his neglect and decides she is done being his doormat. Their relationship ends.
I mourned for him, the man who I was for a scarcely a minute. It’s hard enough keeping women happy without someone else making promises in your stead.
Alternate worst-case. She calls him and chews him out. She quotes me at him, and they slowly piece together what must have happened. She looks upon me, the familiar voice that belonged to a stranger, as she would look upon a molester; she curses the intimacy with which she spoke to me, curses herself for being so familiar. They wonder, together, why I would pretend to be someone else.
And I, too, wondered. When she first spoke, I could not tell whether I knew her or not; to avoid embarrassment, I feigned recognition. But at that critical moment—“Just wanting to hear from you”—the moment when I knew she and I were strangers, why did I press on?
I turn to my written recollection of the conversation. That moment of recognition held so much for me, but it was not the realization that gripped me. I was gripped, rather, by the sound of resounding need in her voice.
Whoever I became for that minute, she needed him; to hear his voice, to listen to him speak. As she said to me, “Wanting to hear from you,” I became a part of her need. Though she was a stranger, I wanted to help satisfy her. I wondered, did any part of me need her?
I remember, now, the way I altered my voice. Afraid of being found out, I dampened my speech, talking as through a cloth. I aimed for vocal ambiguity, speaking in as generic an accent as I could manage. Still, it was important that I end the conversation in as few words as possible. Who wouldn’t have been fooled?
By the time she asked me to call her back, I had committed to my role. It was far too late to back out, to tell her I was just confused and easily led along. I said “Okay,” because anything else would require an explanation, and an explanation would require too many words.
Had she sounded more like a stranger, spoken less like a lover, I might have been willing to disappoint her. I wondered if my history of promiscuity weakened my ability to distinguished ordinary people from potential mates. I had pined for strangers before, but I’d never had the chance to move beyond mere pining. So often, women would walk by me and I would stifle the urge to say “You’re beautiful, in case you didn’t know.” My behavior on the phone seemed a bizarre reversal of all the scenarios I had hoped would unfold.
Ultimate worst-case scenario. I’m wrong about everything. The woman on the phone is someone I’m supposed to know, and I’ve made a promise I didn’t know I had to keep. I’d have ruled this one out, if not for an inscrutable amount of something recognizable in her voice; maybe this is what my aunt Carol sounded like when she was in her twenties—young, naïve, sorrowfully attached to a man who does not appreciate her. It was not that the woman on the phone sounded like someone I knew; rather, that she sounded like someone I should know.
My phone rang, and I answered without checking the screen.
“Hello?”
“Hey. What’re you up to?” Marina asked. The energy in her voice clashed with the rumination she had interrupted.
“Not much. Woke up at four, just trying to crank out a rough draft by Thursday.”
“Think you’ll have time to come over later?”
“Maybe. We’ll see how everything goes.”
The pause meant I had disappointed her.
“Say, Marina. Weird question. Did you call me about 30 minutes ago?”
Another pause.
“No…. why?”
“I’ll explain it next time I see you.” I could hear her nod, even over the phone.
“Well, work hard. Let me know if you find some time.”
“Will do, Jellycake,” I said, and hung up.
* * *
I spotted Maggie as I walked around the side of her building, a Marlboro planted firmly between her lips. The burning point of light only made her face look paler, though the November overcast played its part. I wiggled my fingers and she waggled hers; our casual hello.
As she drew the last puffs from her cigarette, I fingered the new pack of Pall Malls in my coat pocket; the man who sold them to me pronounced it “Pal Mal,” as in “Bad Friend,” and I thought it apt. Were I a smoker, as Maggie is, I would have popped one in my mouth as I approached, or I might have had one lit before I rounded the corner. Being, as I was, in the budding stages of cigarette consumption, I still felt some amount of shame at having bought them. They burned a hole in my pocket, though unlit.
She tossed the butt to the curb and opened her door to me before I could summon the pack from my jacket.
“Do you want some tea or something?” she asked as I unraveled my scarf.
“Sure.”
As she boiled water, I drew the reason for my visit from my backpack. Pointing to the titles on the cover, I said “We’re supposed to read The Behavior Of The Hawkweeds and A Good Scent From A Strange Mountain for tomorrow.”
She nodded and poured hot water into a styrofoam cup. “I’ll copy these and give the book back in class.” I nodded, in turn.
“So, how’s your boy? I haven’t seen him around campus lately.” I asked. Maggie tugged lightly the string of the teabag, absorbed in its drink-making dance.
“He’s doing okay. He’s just reaching that point where all the freshman professors stop being gentle.”
“Oh, to be a freshman again.” I crossed my arms and tilted my head back in reminiscence.
She placed my cup of tea on the table. “Why do you think I keep the boy around? I’m like a vampire, feeding off his youthful vitality and innocence.”
“Oh, so is that why you bite him?”
Her pallid cheeks flushed, and she quickly turned to walk into the living room. The room was relatively bare, only because Maggie’s apart-mate with the decorative flare had decided to move out.
“I finally got rid of the bitch,” she said, turning a circle with her arms outstretched before flopping onto the couch.
The walls and floor, stripped of Disney paraphernalia and other kitsch, were empty save for a Jim Morrison poster on the rear wall. I suspected that the room remained uncluttered as a tribute to its newfound right to be so.
I sat next to her on the couch and put my tea on the coffee table.
“So, a strange thing happened to me yesterday. It seems like the sort of thing you like hearing about.”
“Lay it on me.” I paused, momentarily distracted by her clothing.
“Have I ever seen you wear jeans before?” I asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“They look good. Cheery, even, in the sort of way you’d never fake.”
She smiled. I don’t know if she knows it, but I try to never say the same thing twice to her. Maybe part of her knows it.
I showed her my rough transcript of the conversation and she laughed. “Did you call her back?”
I had. After digesting all the angles of the situation—a process that took exactly 43 minutes and 1/3 of a pencil—I decided to call the unknown number and explain my mistake.
“You are returning a call to a prepaid calling system and the party that called you cannot be reached at this number.”
I laid my head in Maggie’s lap. “Oh,” she said, her voice a mixture of surprise and enchantment.
“So there’s nothing I can do.”
She nodded in agreement. She did not ask why I had made the promise, which made me wonder if it was as strange as I thought it was. To be fair, I reminded myself, Maggie is the person I talk to when I want to feel more normal.
“I know that I have no connection to this woman, and no knowledge of who she was calling--the guy I pretended to be—but I keep imagining things about them.” I feel her stomach against my left ear and I breathe in her smell, the smell of Chinatown, of opium—sweet, soft, dry, and mildly intoxicating.
“She’s slightly heavier that she wants to be, so she sacrifices her pride. Or maybe she’s ugly. Or maybe she just thinks she is. You get the idea. But she lets him get away with more than she should, because she feels lucky to have anyone.”
Maggie picked up the thread, “and he’s, inevitably, a piece of shit. You know, not very interesting, but cagey enough to look thoughtful. A murky ocean that’s only three feet deep.”
“Exactly. The way she spoke to me… it’s obvious that he doesn’t call her enough. She sounded so wistful, like just calling him took all the confidence she could muster.”
Maggie runs an idle hand through my hair, and I reach up and muss hers. Monday turns to Tuesday in a second’s time.
“You can’t love everyone, you know?”
I sit up. “Come again?”
“Just because somebody needs to be loved doesn’t mean you’re the man for the job. I know you like to be a sort of romantic messiah, but it can’t be done. Someone will always get hurt.”
“But I could help. I could listen to her and give her some advice, just be there for her. All she needs is someone to tell her she’s pretty, or that she’s worthwhile.”
“But what if you’re wrong about everything? What if, after all this speculation about her and her man, you were wrong? Nothing you thought about her was true. Do you think you could handle that? If she wasn’t who you thought she was?”
I couldn’t say.
“I know you aren’t done thinking about this, so just keep this thought in mind : you need her as much as she needs you—maybe more.”
I pulled my coat on, feeling my bad friends thump against my chest.
“Do you feel like another smoke?” I asked her.
She craned her neck to the side and her eyes consulted the ceiling. “Yeah, actually.”
We stepped outside and she readied two Marlboros.
“Sadly,” I said, “sadly, sadly, I’ve got my own.” I drew the pack from my pocket. She held out a lighter for me.
“Don’t become a smoker. Please?”
“I know, I know. The problem is that I think they help me write.”
She nodded; it was probably something she had told herself, once.
Maybe they helped me write or maybe they didn’t. I’d gotten in the habit a month earlier, when I had to churn out a rough draft of a story in eight hours; I continued smoking through the revision process. I felt, and still feel, that it lends a certain authenticity to my persona as a writer. Becoming the brooding, sullen-eyed-type who smokes in a black coat out on the Brookings Quad seemed to be the quickest way to become a real writer.
“Still, I don’t want to see you become a smoker. I’ve decided that when I go to grad school, I’m going to treat myself to quitting.” We chased the flames down to the filters. “Or maybe not.”
We laughed.
I pulled the pack out of my jacket and handed it to her. “You keep them, so I can’t smoke them alone, and I don’t have to bums yours off you.”
“You don’t have to, you know?”
“I know. I want to. It’s a habit I’ve hated from the beginning.”
She pocketed it.
We hugged; the soft, contortionist’s flesh at her midriff rubbed against the inside of my forearm. I kissed her lips.
“Love ya, Magpie.”
“I love you too, man.”
* * *
I sat with Marina. I was hunched over a blank sheet of paper, trying to block out my suitemate’s music—George Winston’s tribute to Vince Guaraldi.
“Why don’t you tell him to turn it down?” she asked.
“What kind of suitemate asks you to turn down your solo piano album? It would be tyrannical!”
It was not, so much, the volume of the music that disturbed me. If I hadn’t known the music well, I could have ignored it.
The page stared as blankly at me as it had ten minutes before. I stood up and turned a fan on to buffer the noise. When even that failed to help me work, the two of us climbed into bed.
“Are you doing anything on Friday?” I asked, kissing her forehead.
“Nope. Why?”
“Are you up for another monthiversary dinner out?”
She said “yes” and I kissed her lips.
I lifted my head away from hers and looked into her blank, expectant eyes. This feeling of constant expectation had been present from the start of our relationship, but I hadn’t begun to balk at it until recently. I rolled to the other side of the bed.
She propped herself up on one shoulder. “What?”
Even this inquiry made me grit my teeth and face the wall.
“The way you looked at me, just then, makes me feel like I’m supposed to do something. Like I’m performing for you.”
“What look? I wasn’t trying to say anything by looking at you.”
“It’s not a matter of what you meant to convey. It’s the same vibe I get from you all the time.”
She nodded, blinking her eyes with the slow tilt of her head.
“I don’t want you to expect me to do things for you. I want to do things that make you happy, not things that will keep you from being unhappy. You with me?”
She nodded in much the same way as before.
“When you need, truly need something—like for me to tell you ‘I love you’—I want to give it to you. But when that need becomes an expectation, then the meaning is lost. It’s the difference between picking up garbage out of conscientiousness or doing it because it’s your job.”
“You don’t want our relationship to become a set of obligations”
I turned me head sideways and glanced briefly toward the ceiling.
“In some, but not all cases. There is a necessary element of obligation in any relationship.”
She sighed. I pulled her close again, burying my face in her shoulder and biting the exposed skin of her collarbone. She lay silent. With my finger, I traced a figure eight on her brown skin.
“It’s not just about hearing you say ‘I love you.’ I want to know what you’re thinking. I feel like there’s a lot that you don’t tell me about, and so I try to figure it out by looking at you.”
“How can you wonder what I’m thinking? Isn’t it obvious? We’re here, in my bed on a Tuesday night. As long as I’m with you, you should know that I’m yours. What more do you need me to tell you?”
“I want to know the thoughts that make you do the things you do. I need more than just the gestures. I need to understand where the gestures come from.”
“See, we’re right back where we started. You’re tired of the gestures because you’ve come to expect them from me. It’s got to be like each nice thing I do is the first of its kind. Treat my actions and words as if they were coming from a stranger.”
She pushed me away. “I can’t do that. I could never think of you as a stranger.”
I reached for her hand.
“Maybe not to such an extreme, then, but you’ve got to try to expect less of what I do for you. I can only be novel for so long before I burn out.”
“I’ll try,” she said, and I kissed her nose.
“At any rate, I think it’s a good sign that we can have arguments like this.”
“What makes you say that?” she asked.
“Nothing in particular. I’d just hate for ours to be the kind of relationship where one of us suffers in silence.”
* * *
I imagined my stranger, pictured things about her that I could never know for sure.
I see her as 5’6”, just inches above average, with her brown hair cut conservatively at a medium length, falling just between the shoulders and the ears. She wears a blue tank top and jeans; something about this outfit suggests the South to me.
Her name is Janice.
She leans against a tree in my grandmother’s front yard. I don’t know why I put her there--it’s just where she ended up. She buries her hands in her pockets, up to the knuckles. On her face is the sort of bashful joy of a person who isn’t used to being admired.
She stands, as in a living photograph, biting back a smile. Her upper teeth hold her bottom lip in place. She wants to laugh, but nothing is funny. She is happy.
She does not know she is beautiful. She has learned the meaning of beauty from reading magazines, when she should look to Botticelli’s Venus for her inspiration. She is Rubenesque, though she has never heard the word.
And though she does not know she is beautiful, she knows that the person looking at her considers her to be. She can see it in his eyes.
Then, her man. He’s 5’8”, just inches below average, with a short crew-cut that stands, constantly, at attention. He wears a cornflower blue, short-sleeved shirt, tucked into a pair of gray slacks. On the shirt is sewn the logo for Crestwater Insurance. He stands perfectly still, because I do not will him to move; somehow, the motion I lend Janice is unbecoming of this man.
His name is Peter.
He stands behind his desk with an expression of insincere hospitality; this should not be held against him—he is an insurance salesman. Over his shoulder is his community college diploma, made inconspicuous by the surrounding swarm of Crestwater plaques and certificates. He poses as though for an “of the month” photograph. His expression is one of vaguely smug delight. He is glad to see his talents recognized, but still resentful of the times they were overlooked.
His phone rings, and I allow him to move. He answers.
“This is Peter, how may I help you?” A grin spreads across his face. He moves to close his office door.
“Hey, how are you”
“I’m alright. What are you up to tonight?”
“Good, good. Do you want to do something? Maybe get some dinner and then back to my place?”
“Perfect. Pick you up around 6:30?”
“See you then. Love you. Bye.”
After he has hung up, there comes a knock on his door. He opens it, and Janice enters. She hugs him. He sits down in his leather swivel without closing the door. Janice remains standing.
“Hey.”
“Hi, Janice. What’re you doing here?”
“Well, I had the day off, so I figured I’d drop in, see how you’re doing.”
He gestures at his mostly bare. She nods.
“So, do you want to go get dinner or something tonight?”
He draws in his breath and winces. “I can’t. I’ve got to work late tonight, and pretty much all week. You know, we’ve got a lot of new clients that we need to have sorted out by New Years.”
“Oh,” she said, looking at her feet. She notices her navel peeking out from under her shirt, so she crosses her arms to cover her midriff. “Well, will you have any time next week? I feel like I haven’t seen you in forever.” She thinks of the unreturned phone calls, but decides not to mention them.
He does not tilt his head to consult the ceiling. He does not have to think. “Sure” he lies. “Sometime next weekend.”
Janice leaves, dejected but hopeful. Another week of waiting, she thinks, won’t be so bad.
Once in the car, she pulls her seatbelt across her chest, but the belt snags. She tugs in vain until her face turns red and she begins to cry. Letting the belt roll back into its holster, she pulls it again and succeeds. She tells herself that seatbelts snag all the time, but she cannot help thinking of the obese airline passengers who require double-length seatbelts. She grips the steering wheel and grinds her teeth, trying to resist the already steady flow of tears. When she gets home, she decides, she will put on a less revealing top.
I watch this woman driving through a city I have created for her. Every light turns green as she approaches and there is no traffic to speak of. As she drives, the daydreams of leaning against a tree somewhere out in the country. A man she does not know is taking her picture, and she can feel his eyes on her, his lens taking her in. She feels that, somehow, his eyes and his lens are one and the same; that this stranger sees her as she truly is, as objectively as a camera might.
She stands, self-conscious and proud, with her hands buried in her pockets, up to the knuckles. She sees her own beauty reflected in his eyes, and she knows it must be real.
I give her this daydream and she smiles. Her hand loosens its grip on the steering wheel and her tears dry away. She lets go of the wheel entirely, tilts her head back and consults the ceiling. I paint the road beneath her tires and clear the path ahead of her. She is in my care, and I will keep her safe.
This is the only way I can meet my stranger. The number she called me from is useless, and I do not know who she is or where she lives. She may never know that she was speaking to a stranger and, if she did know, she would have to dial the right wrong number if she wanted to call me back.
But here, in her car, as she dreams of me and I write of her, we can be together.
And here, I can love her; both because she needs me to and because she doesn’t expect me to.
And here, she will know my love, and know that she deserves it.
Appendix : A Non-Diegetic Epilogue “Hey, Maggie? What’re you up to?”
“Not much. I’m pretty cracked out. I stayed up all night writing a paper for women’s studies. It’s good, though.”
“You doing anything right now?”
“No. Just cleaning up the apartment.”
“For the purposes of my rewrite, I have to smell you. It was the detail about Chinatown and Opium. She asked me what Chinatown and Opium smell like, and I tried to remember, but all I can smell in my room are my dirty socks.”
“So you wanna come over and smell me?”
“Sure do. I’ll be over in a few minutes.”
