Losing It (15 page)

“Sandscape,” I said.

“What was that?”

“It's called a sandscape. I finally figured out what they're called.”

“Right,” he said. “And you can move it—I mean, if you turn it over, it just creates a different picture.”

“Well, that's your prerogative,” I said.

“Hey,” he said. He motioned with his salad. “After you get your sandwich, do you want to walk to the park together?”

His bearing, the way he asked me, was somehow acknowledging everything that had gone on between us—my crush on him and how I hadn't caught on that he was married, and I got the sense that he felt sorry for me and was just trying to make me feel better. To be friends. All of this made me angry and I wanted to leave.

“I can't,” I said, turning back to him. “I have to meet someone.”

“Oh, okay,” he said, disappointed. He hesitated. “I wanted— I've been meaning to tell you . . .” I tilted my head. But then something shifted inside him and he retreated. “Never mind.”

The door to the gallery creaked open and a couple of people walked in. We both watched them for a second.

“Well,” I said, “I'll see you later.”

“Okay, sure,” he said. And I left him standing there.

It turned out that my date with Gerald was on the hottest day of the year, during an already record-breaking summer. I stared out the window of my bedroom, combing my hair, and thought about how much I didn't want to go outside and get into my baking car. Everything about this idea now seemed deflated and futile.

We'd decided to meet at a coffee shop and then go from there to his house. I swayed down Main Street at approximately two o'clock in the breezeless afternoon. The storefronts were unpleasantly bright and everything felt smeared. I saw someone listlessly walking their dog, but otherwise it was deserted. My shirt stuck to my back. I felt a little sick. The heat made the empty street feel like another planet, hostile to life.

When I got to the coffee shop and opened the door and recovered from the blast of air-conditioning, I saw him sitting at a table, staring out the window with that same smile.

On my way out there, I'd tried to remember how it was in the class—how we were actually flirting, how I actually started liking him without having to contort myself too much. I remembered his
low voice and unaffected manner. I was hoping we would build on our time in there. That our flirtation would layer and gain momentum and we would tap into whatever we had that afternoon. That we would actually get along and the promise of that unexpected spark would be fulfilled. I was hoping.

But the minute I walked inside and the door slammed behind me and he kind of tentatively stood up from his table, my heart fell a little. There was something pleading in his eyes. I sensed that same fragility in him from before. I immediately wanted to leave.

“Hi!” I said. “I'm just going to . . .” and I motioned toward the coffee counter.

“Sure, sure,” he said.

I ordered an expensive iced drink even though now I was freezing, the sweat on my back having turned cold from the AC.

I sat down across from him. The shop was made out of fresh beams of pale wood and glass. There were serene squares of light on the floor. Aside from the employees, we were the only people there. Gerald nodded a little and smiled and leaned back. He had opaque wraparound sunglasses pushed back on his head, and they revealed two inlets of shiny forehead where his otherwise thick hair was retreating. We were both quiet for a few seconds. There was a clatter outside as an old-fashioned car with a bunch of cans attached to it drove by.

“It's hot,” I said.

Gerald looked bewildered for a moment and then exploded into agreement. “Yeah! I know. It really is.”

“Are you from there?” I pointed to a key chain on the table. It was a little rubber oval that read “Sonoma.”

“Yeah, yeah, I am,” he said. “I just moved here about a month ago. But yeah, I grew up there.”

“What's it like?”

“Ah,” he laughed. “It's nice. It's a good place to grow up. Do you play?”

“Play?”

He gestured at the table, which had an inlaid checkers board on the surface.

“No. Yeah,” I said. “I mean, I know how to move the pieces around.”

“Great!” He produced, from below the table, a velvet pouch and started withdrawing chips. I was grateful for the time this bought, how it allowed us to concentrate on something else.

“Looks like we're missing one,” he said.

“We could improvise, use a coin or saltshaker or something.”

He erupted into laughter again and looked at me with bald admiration. “You're terrific,” he said.

We ended up using a packet of sugar and started playing while also trying to make conversation. The motor finally caught and we got to talking. This is what I learned: Gerald told me, in a stilted way, wherein I had to fill in some of the gaps, that he was raised in a very strict Mormon household out in Sonoma, California, where all his friends and everyone in his community was Mormon. It was very sheltered and close-knit and many things were not allowed and at a point in the recent past, fueled by doubts about his religion, he decided he wanted to see the rest of the world. This caused a major rupture in his family, who said they wouldn't talk to him if he
left the church. He did anyway, and from what I gathered had been a bit rudderless ever since, taking an IT job here and there, and acting on half-thought-out plans.

I was pretty gripped by this story, which he told with some reluctance and shyness, turning a penny over and over in his hands. I thought it showed a depth and restlessness in him—to break away from your family like that, to have the courage to act on the itch of doubt that must have plagued him for so long. But sadness, too, to have left everything he knew and held close.

“Wow,” I said, after he finished talking, my mind racing, trying to think of something to say. “I cannot relate. To. Any. Of. That.”

“You were raised without religion?”

“My family was Catholic,” I said. “I was baptized and confirmed. But then my parents just gradually stopped practicing, and I never really missed it that much. My mom still goes to church sometimes. I miss the music, actually. I do miss that.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, nodding, looking down. I felt like I should have been able to parlay his story into something else, some larger conversation about religion, something to push us over the brink of actually connecting to each other on which we were now teetering.

The door opened and closed. I looked behind me. A woman holding a giant vintage clock walked in.

When conversation is easy, it's easy. When it's hard, it's hard. But what about when it's just in-between? Flaring from the bellows of shared experience, but just as quickly stalling out?

I continued trying to find a comfortable position in my small chair, shoving it forward and back, crossing and recrossing my legs.

We finally came to a natural stopping point. As we got up from that table, he kept his eyes on me, smiling that trembling smile, as if looking for guidance.

We walked outside and started wading through the heat.

“Which way?” I asked.

He shoved his hand into his pocket and withdrew his keys.

“My car's just around the corner,” he said.

“Your car?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought you lived down the street.”

“I do,” he said. “It's just bit of a walk in this weather.”

I hesitated but decided, at the time, that it made sense.

We reached his car and got inside and it was spotless. “Is this a rental?” I asked. He shook his head. “Nope.”

We pulled into the street and he started driving down Main and we were both strangely silent, as if we knew what was going to happen and were forgoing any formalities. It occurred to me then that neither of us had said anything again about the lucky rabbit's foot collection, that I just got into a car with a complete stranger, and that no one knew where I was. I hadn't even left a note for Aunt Viv.

I kept expecting him to pull over, or turn off somewhere. The sun illuminated some dusty handprints on his dashboard I hadn't seen before. I was feeling more and more uneasy. “Where do you live?” I finally asked.

“It's coming right up. Just a few more miles.”

Obviously, in his sheltered upbringing, Gerald had not
developed a sensitivity to the flares that might go up in a woman's mind, should she witness certain behaviors in a man driving her out of town—like flexing his jaw and gripping the steering wheel and staring straight ahead without saying anything.

It also occurred to me how the other side of fragility can be tremendous violence in a person, and I pictured him bashing my head in with a snow globe in a fit of rage.

Calm down, I told myself. It's not
likely
that Gerald is a psychopath.

We finally turned into a complex, one of the new housing developments that were popping up on the outskirts of the city. It was a series of rows of town houses, with about a square foot of yard in front of each of them. At the entrance we passed a freshly painted sign that read “Madison's Ridge” in elegant, slanted writing. There were still little orange construction flags here and there, and mounds of red dirt that hadn't healed into landscaping grass. It felt eerily empty. A plastic sheet blew by.

Gerald must have read my mind. “It's a new neighborhood,” he said. “I'm one of the first to move in.”

“Does it have a lot of amenities?” I said.

“Ha! Yeah.”

We parked in front of one of the houses and got out. He opened and shut his mailbox without really looking in, and we walked up the walkway. Inside, the apartment had a serene feel, with light falling on the carpet from large windows. It was pretty empty. There wasn't anything on the walls. It didn't look like anyone had moved in, but rather just stashed some furniture in the room. There was a
flat-screen television and a black leather couch and a flimsy-looking side table. A disproportionate amount of cords ran across the floor.

About five minutes later we were drinking lemonade on his back deck. He'd poured us both a glass from the only thing in his fridge—a carton of juice.

We could see the other back decks of the other town houses, all in a row. The whole development was situated on a swell of land, not quite a hill. No one else was outside. It was thunderingly quiet. I felt like we were in the middle of nowhere, the last two people on earth, that we hadn't gotten the memo about something.

Gerald was standing next to a newly bought grill as if he meant for me to notice it. I put my lemonade down on a glass table and looked at him. It was now or never. We both felt it.

“So where's the collection?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah, that,” he said in an oily way. He put his drink down, and then came over to me, and in an embarrassing, theatrical way, pushed me against the sliding glass door and started kissing me. I finally had, in that moment, insight into his whole orientation toward this thing—the collection
was
just an excuse for me to come over. This whole day
was
based on the supposition that we were going to hook up, have sex, whatever. And by the bumbling draft of passion with which he kissed me, I could tell that he thought this whole time we'd both been simmering with desire. Why else would I have been so bold in the watercolor class? Why else would I have gotten into his car? And he was now, finally, breaking the seal, expecting it to all flow out.

We knocked over a terra-cotta pot that spilled out a mound of black dirt.

I was doing the bare minimum to keep apace, which was actually quite a lot, considering all the effort he was putting into it.

It was all wrong, but I was still in a state of shock, just trying to deal with the situation at hand. The sun kept flooding into my eyes. I felt like I was trying to get my bearings underwater.

He pulled away and looked at me with such raw passion that I was mortified. He took my hand, coyly swiveled around, placed my arm on his shoulder, and said, “Follow me.” As he led me into the house, I tripped on the doorway and knew something with complete certainty, something that had been hovering around my mind that I hadn't let myself fully consider—that Gerald, too, was a virgin.

Get out of here, Julia. Just leave, I said to myself, as we walked up the dark, carpeted stairs. But I was somehow unable to change the flow of the current. And another, distant, calculating part of me thought, You're so close. You're so close now. This could be it. This was going to be it.

His room was just as bare as it was downstairs. A window looked out onto the bright roof. There was a large poster of Dalai Lama quotes in different fonts.

His bed was covered with a baby blue comforter. There was the smell of air freshener. It was too cold. Gerald sat on the edge of the bed and started daintily untying his shoelaces, leaving me stranded there.