Bedbugs (19 page)

I waited in silence for more than an hour, listening to the steadily ticking clock measure out the time. Finally, feeling increasingly impatient and worried about my friends who would be departing today, I left. I considered leaving a note with my name, address, and phone number in the States, but then thought better of it. After making sure that her place was in order, I carefully locked the door behind me and descended the narrow stairs to the street below.

I wandered aimlessly around the sleepily stirring streets for more than two hours before I finally found a landmark I recognized. The air was filled with the pealing of church bells and the distant sound of passing traffic. I got back to the hotel sometime around ten o’clock.

I say I got back to the hotel, but already I was feeling as though a part of me wasn’t there. I felt as though I—or at least some small but vital part of me—was still back at her apartment, wrapped in a bed sheet and sitting on the couch in the dusty, pre-dawn silence, waiting for her to return.

I never even knew her name.

It was Sunday morning, and my friends wanted to get back to the Orono campus before evening so we wouldn’t be too burned out when classes resumed on Monday morning, but I told my friends that I didn’t want to leave yet. Since it was my car we had come in, they couldn’t very well argue the point. When they asked why I didn’t want to leave yet, I didn’t answer them.

How could I?

What would I say?

They tried to guess, and before long they started teasing me about having fallen in love. I denied it, of course, and as God is my witness, it was true, I
wasn’t
in love . . . at least, not the kind of love I had experienced up to that point in my life.

It was something else.

Something deeper.

Something more involving and more consuming and, I knew even then, more dangerous. After lunch, I told my friends that I was going out for a walk. They wanted to come along with me, but I refused, saying simply that I had to meet someone. When they asked when would I be back, I didn’t reply.

In the harsh glare of the midday sun, the streets didn’t look at all like they had the night before. I walked around in circles, looking for some familiar landmark, but the rain-swept streets we had walked last night now seemed like an illusion, the faintest memory of a dream that was rapidly dissolving into airy nothingness.

Somehow—miraculously—toward evening I found the cafe. Just as I remembered, there was no sign above the door, but I knew I’d found the right place. I entered the shallow darkness of the room, pausing a moment to let my eyes adjust before seating myself at one of the tables. A few patrons sat in silence at nearby tables. I couldn’t help but cringe when I sensed them watching me askance with slitted eyes.

The waitress came over and took my order for a cup of tea. I hadn’t eaten anything all day, but the hollow feeling of hunger in my stomach was somehow pleasurable. I sat in silence, staring across the room to the table where, just last night, she and I had sat and talked. But the table, even the cafe itself, seemed altered, somehow. It appeared to be much smaller and danker than I remembered. The only words that come close to expressing how I felt was that everything seemed somehow more
solid
, more
real
than it had the night before.

I shivered, and when the waitress arrived with my tea, I merely nodded my thanks before taking a sip. The warmth did nothing to dispel the aching feelings I had of loss and loneliness, of being caught up in something that I couldn’t understand, that I wasn’t capable of understanding. I drank my tea in silence. When I was finished, I considered paying my tab and leaving, but I had noticed one particular group of men seated at a table in the far corner. I was positive that they were the same patrons who had been there last night, so I got up and walked over to them.

All of them regarded me with thinly veiled mistrust when I smiled and said, “
Bon jour
.” It was obvious that they had already pegged me as an American, and it was just as obvious that they didn’t like me simply on principle.

But I had to try, so in English that was sprinkled with the smattering of French I remembered from high school, I asked if any of them knew the girl with silver rings. I didn’t know the French word for
rings
, but I kept making a motion, circling one of my fingers with another.

I was positive that they understood me, but none of them said anything except for what I knew was French for
Sorry, but I don’t speak English
.

“The girl,” I kept saying impatiently. “
La femme
with rings . . . with silver rings,” and I circled my finger again and again.

They all smiled tightly and shook their heads, grunting as they glanced at each other.

“I was here with he r. . . Last night . . . I know some of you saw me with her.”

I was starting to get mad and couldn’t help but let it show, but they continued simply to stare at me and mumble to each other while shaking their heads. Finally, one of them nodded and said
oui
. He made it clear that he recognized me and had seen me here the night before; but when I pressed him, asking if he knew where I could find
la femme
, he merely shook his head sadly and said something that ended with the word
solo
.

“What do you mean,
solo
?” I practically shouted. “I wasn’t here alone! Yes, I came here alone, but I left with her. I left with
la femme
with silver rings. Last night. Around midnight. I know you saw me! All of you saw me! So please—tell me. Who is she? Where can I find her?”

They exchanged meaningful glances again and shook their heads as though confused. Several of them shifted their glazes away from me, apparently not wanting to look at me except from the corners of their eyes.

“I wasn’t here alone! I went home with her!
 
With the girl—the
femme
with the silver rings!”

It was useless.

They either didn’t understand me or chose not to understand me. Finally, in frustration, I turned away. I paid my tab and walked out into the purple evening. I considered trying to retrace our steps from last night and find her apartment again, but I knew that I couldn’t. I had no idea even in which direction to start. I began to wonder if she hadn’t purposely doubled back a few times and taken me in a roundabout way to her place in order to confuse me.

What I couldn’t figure out was, why?

She had wanted me. Perhaps not as much as I had wanted her, but she had been willing, and she had made passionate yet tender love to me in the warm and inviting darkness of her bedroom. I could still feel the cool sting of her silver rings on my naked back as we made love.

This all happened more than twenty years ago. I’m married, now, and have a nice home, a job I can tolerate, a wife I love, and three terrific children. Still, though, once or twice a year, I drive up to Quebec. Alone. I walk the streets after dark, and I’m particularly happy if it starts to rain like it did that night so long ago. But I can no longer even find the old cafe without a sign. I watch the rivers of light reflecting off the rain-slick streets, and my mind fills with the memory of how her hands had felt as they held mine. And I often think about that barn swallow I had caught and held when I was a boy.

I can almost accept the idea that the men in the cafe may have been right—that I never left with her that night. It happened so long ago, I have myself more than half-convinced that it might never have happened, that I never met her, that I never went with her to her room, that it had all been a dream, and that she was nothing more than a figment of my imagination . . . or maybe something else. . . .

But there are some things I do know.

I know that she still holds something of mine in her hands. I can feel the cold sting of her silver rings as she cradles my heart like a small, trembling bird in her cupped hands. And I know that, even now, with the slightest bit of pressure, she could still my heart’s warm, steady beating. I also know that, someday, she will quiet my heart, and maybe then I will see her again.

—for C. R.

-1-

D
iary entry one
: approximately 10:00 A.M. on Valentine’s Day—How ironic.

If you’ve ever spent any time in academic circles, you’ve no doubt heard the expression “Publish or perish.” Simply put, it means that if you want to keep your teaching position, at least at any decent college or university, you’ve got to publish occasionally in academic journals. I suppose this is to prove that you’ve been doing important research, but it also contributes to the prestige of your school.

My experience, at least in the English Department here at the University of Southern Maine, is that the more obscure and unread the periodical, the more prestige is involved. I mean, if you don’t write novels or stories that pretend to “art”—well, then, you can kiss your chances for tenure good-bye.

Bob Howard, a good friend of mine here, did just that. He wrote and sold dozens of stories and two novels; but because his work was viewed by the tenure committee as “commercial” fiction, he didn’t keep his job. After he was denied tenure a few years back, he and I used to joke over drinks about how he had published and perished!

I have reason to be cynical. The doctor who talked with me last night might have some fancier, more clinical terms for it, but I’m tempted to translate his conclusions about me to something a little simpler: let’s try—
crazy as a shit-house rat!

That’s crazy, all right.

But keep reading.

I’m putting all of this down as fast as I can because I know I don’t have much time. I’m fighting the English teacher in me who wants to go back and revise, hone this sticker until it’s perfect, but if I’m right . . . Oh, Jesus! If I’m right! . . .

Okay, I’ll try to start at the start. Oops. Got a little redundant there. Sorry. Anyway, as I’ve always told my students, every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Life, I’ve found, unfortunately doesn’t always play out that way. Oh, sure—the beginning’s at birth and the end’s at death—it’s filling up the middle part that can be such a bitch!

I don’t know if this whole damned thing started when I first saw Rose McAllister . . . ah, Rosie! She was sitting in the front row on the first day of my 8:00 A.M.
Introduction to English Literature
class last fall. It might have been then that everything started, but I’ve got to be honest here. I mean, at this point, it may not matter at all . . . or it may be all that matters. I think I’ll be dead . . . and
really
in Hell within . . . possibly less than four hours.

One thing I do know is, when I first saw Rosie, I didn’t think, right off the bat—
Goddamn! I want to have an affair with her!

That sounds so delicate—”have an affair.” I wanted to, sure; but that was after a while, once I got to know her. Once we started, though, we slept together whenever we could . . . which wasn’t often, you see, because of Sally, my wife. Ah, my dear, departed wife!

I guess if I were really looking for the beginning to this whole damned mess, I’d have to say it was when we started our study of Marlowe’s
Doctor Faustus
. You know—your classic “deal with the Devil” story. I didn’t mention too much of this to the police shrink because—well, if you tell someone like that that you struck a deal with the Devil, that you sold him your soul—yes, I signed the agreement with my own blood—you’ve got to expect him to send you up to the rubber room on P-6. If I’m wrong about all of this, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life writing letters home with a Crayola.

Wait a minute—I’m getting ahead of myself, but as I said, I don’t have much time left . . . at least I don’t think so.

Okay, so sometime around the middle of the semester, Rosie and I began to “sleep together.” Another delicate expression because we did very little
sleeping
. We got whatever we could, whenever we could—in my office, usually, or—once or twice—in a motel room, once in my car in the faculty parking lot outside Bailey Hall. Whenever and wherever!

The first mistake we made was being seen at
The Roma
, a fancy restaurant in Portland. Hank and Mary Crenshaw saw us.
The Roma!
As an English teacher, I can appreciate the irony of that, too. Sally and I celebrated our wedding anniversary there every year. Being seen there on a Friday night, with a college sophomore (“young enough to be your daughter,” Sally took no end of pleasure repeating), by your wife’s close (not
best
, but
close
) friend is downright stupid. I still cringe whenever I imagine the glee there must have been in Mary’s voice when she told Sally.

Hell, I’ll admit it. Why not? I never liked Mary, and I know she never liked me. Hank—he was all right, but I always made a point of telling Sally that Mary was
her
friend, not
mine
.

So, Sally found out.

Okay, so plenty of married men (and women) get caught cheating. Sometimes the couple can cope and work it out. Sometimes, they can’t. We couldn’t. I should say, Sally couldn’t. She set her lawyer—good ole’ Walter Altschuler—on me faster than a greyhound on a rabbit. That guy would’ve had my gonads if they hadn’t been attached. You must have heard the joke about the lawyer and the shark . . . well, never mind for now.