The Interloper (3 page)

We made our way toward the middle of the diminutive park, to a patch of grass on which we could play Frisbee. Patty wore black sweatpants and a black t-shirt. We had just started playing. She was not very good at throwing, and I was not very good at catching; in the other direction, we achieved marvelous things. We had begun playing Frisbee because we were looking for an outdoor activity that didn’t require much talking. We hated to sit around the house, and we’d grown tired of buying something every time we went out. We weren’t joggers, golfers, cyclists, rollerbladers, surfers, volleyballers, softballers, basketballers, footballers, or any other kind of ballers, and—despite its aesthetic appeal—I hated tennis. I hated tennis because you could never know ahead of time whether courts would be available. We had tried target shooting for a while, with a Glock we bought for protection. I am a crack shot. I thought shooting would be good for Patty, but aside from the momentary thrill, it had no effect on her. Eventually, the local gun club was shut down because some depressed person decided to shoot himself instead of the target.

Frisbee was freedom. And aesthetically, Frisbee was pleasing, especially when I was throwing and she was catching. The
other way around, aesthetics was lost in the dirt. There was something undeniably pleasurable about playing Frisbee with Patty, at a time when pleasure seemed in short supply. The combination of tranquility and exertion, the physicality of the exchange, the fact that we faced each other as we played.

I threw a long coasting shot that cleared her head and hovered there. She turned and plucked it from the air and faced me, all in one fluid motion. It’s difficult to forget, more difficult to remember. She threw back, less gracefully.

I had decided that I would tell her that evening, over dinner, how I had rented the PO box and written to Henry Joseph Raven. I knew it would take a long time for her to understand what I had done. I would have to confess how misguided I’d been in trying to pursue correspondence with Raven. Digging the Frisbee from a hedge, I considered the possibility of never telling her what I had done. No, I had to come clean. Otherwise I would be able to think of little else. I was not well-suited to deception. I decided again that I would tell her over dinner, and I threw the Frisbee.

She caught it magnificently and returned it to me with a fluid and direct shot. The Frisbee drifted on the air as if in slow-motion. I skipped to the side and lined myself up to catch it. I crouched, raised my hands. Then the Frisbee, cruising directly through the frame of my outstretched fingers, hit me squarely on the forehead, and I had the idea. A plan to eclipse all plans dropped egg-like into my brain, whole, and it began with this realization: my pseudonym had been of the wrong gender. Why would Raven have any interest whatsoever in corresponding with John Dark? He was a lonely man, locked up with a bunch of other
lonely men. He didn’t need letters from another lonely man, on the outside, to add to his pile of loneliness and maleness. He needed a lonely woman.

The plan unfolded with crystal clarity in my mind even as I bent down to retrieve the Frisbee and throw it back to my wife. I would rent a new PO box under a female pseudonym. Henry Joseph Raven would fall in love with his correspondent and then, when she had wholly gained his affection, when she had come to inhabit every fiber of his being, she would break his heart. Raven would suffer the wrenching removal of someone from his life.

I resolved then and there not to tell Patty about my plan until I had reaped its fruits. The idea of hiding something from her, as I mentioned above, made me uncomfortable, but what I was doing I was doing for her, and when the opportunity came to reveal what I had done, that is, when my plan was successful, I’d tell her. All my duplicity would turn out for the best, like planning a surprise party. This was the only way I could unpoison the soil, restore a sense of justice and balance to our world, bring the old Patty back. Then we could begin building our normal lives again.

I got a new PO box, at the Mailboxes Store in Second City, a neighboring town, so Raven wouldn’t suspect that John Dark and his new female correspondent were the same person. Composing the letter was simple enough. Naming her was the hard part. I went through hundreds of options before landing on lonely, lethal Lily Hazelton. Hazel-eyed Hazelton, Lily the lily, a trumpet on a slender stem. An invitation for Raven to tend or pluck. Then a haze, the magician’s puff of smoke, and she’s gone. Finally, a ton of bricks falls on his head. I’d woven the whole plan into the name—there was no way to lose sight of it.

I typed the letter on our old Olivetti and signed it in the most feminine way possible.

The slight scraping sound the envelope made as it slid into the mailbox, the almost inaudible paper-on-paper kiss as it joined the other letters inside—I remember exactly dropping that first letter into the slot, remember thinking that I was, for the first time in a long time, for the first time ever, I should say, embarking on something truly important, not just a job, or a task, or a lark, but a mission. Few are lucky enough to find themselves a mission in our precious little time between womb and tomb. Now I have nothing but time and no courage to end time. They won’t let me have my papers, but I can remember everything.

Patty and I were set up by a college friend of mine, Lennon Kwan. The pellucid waters of Lake Tahoe, the pellucid intentions of Lennon Kwan. Though Lennon and I took classes on opposite sides of campus—I majored in English, he in molecular biology—we spent a great deal of extracurricular time together. After college, he moved to San Francisco and I stayed in Los Angeles. We kept in touch as best we could.

I had a job but otherwise my life was a disaster. My friends in Los Angeles had long given up on me. I lived in a squalid 1950s apartment down by the beach. I drank myself to sleep most nights. The bright sunny weather was an affront. The outside world refused to reflect my inner world. I came to realize that
not everyone had this problem. I considered daily the ways in which I might stitch myself back onto society. Everyone around me built lives with blithe unconcern for the fact that these same lives would crumble to bits one day. Some nights I slept outdoors, on the roof of my building. I highly recommend sleeping outdoors as a means of building one’s character. It reminds one how the simple act of sitting inside an apartment watching daytime television actually reflects man’s victory over the forces of nature.

Around this time, Lennon called me and asked if I was interested in joining him and a few friends on a Lake Tahoe ski trip. He had called me in the past, asking me to go on trips like this, and I had always refused. The Owen he was asking was not the Owen I had become. This time I decided to accept the invitation.

Upon my arrival in Tahoe I realized that the trip was not only about old friends getting back together. Everyone was a couple. Even Lennon had brought a date. The only exception, besides myself, was a large-eyed young woman with pale skin, the kind of skin that, with dark hair, looks translucent. She seemed unenthusiastic about me. I expected her to progress from lack of enthusiasm to disgust when she realized that I was the man with whom she was being set up in a sort of mutual-friend ambush. But shaking my hand, she smiled and said that she’d heard so much about me. How had she heard so much about me? I had heard nothing about her. I repressed the urge to mumble “likewise” and smiled back. Her name was Patricia Stocking. Patty. P. S. Like the Palm Springs bumper sticker:
P.S. I Love You
, and the license plate I saw once on Palm Canyon Drive:
PSIH8U
. We would love or hate each other.

New love should blossom under blue skies among explosive S-turns of fresh white powder, and maybe it does. But that week the weather seemed more conducive to no love. The first days alternated between gray gloom and blizzard, and the second half of the week brought a patchy cloudiness that melted snow only to reconstitute it as ice a half hour later.

She and I teamed up from the start. It was as straightforward as yelling “single!” in the line for the chairlift. She was a poor skier, unsteady on her legs, and could manage, at best, a wide sweeping snowplow down the bunny slope, knees bent enough so one couldn’t say she wasn’t bending her knees. I was an above average skier, and having had advance warning of her inexperience, I rented a snowboard to place myself further back on the learning curve. She wore a puffy lavender ski suit and white-framed mirror sunglasses. I wore jeans—my idea of fashion on the slopes—and by noon the seat of my pants was a frozen plate.

On the chairlift, she was a scientist. She pointed out dying trees and speculated about what had happened to them. She remarked on detail after detail of our surroundings, then hypothesized about why things were the way they were. While we glided smoothly above the trees—with a punctuating
pah-rump
each time we passed a tower—she talked about what she wanted to research when she got home. She had a pencil and notepad in her ski suit. She couldn’t resist writing things down to look up later. That curiosity, her need to categorize and figure things out, belonged only to the old Patty. It would not last. When she pulled her hand out of her glove, it looked wrinkled and red, the skin of a newborn.

On the day of the blizzard, she wanted to keep skiing, even after I thought inclement weather might force us to cut the day short. The air was snow. Her technique never improved, her speed never increased, but she was having the time of her life, and while howling winds caused the chairlift to shut down periodically, she displayed no fear whatsoever. It was an amazing combination, this fearlessness coupled with a total inability to improve her skills. It would not last.

When she wasn’t smiling or laughing, there was something severe about her face; mostly she looked sad. Like she’d been up all night arguing. Whatever attracted me to her appeared before I got to know her at all. And I met every new detail with rapacious enthusiasm. She could have told me she had six toes on each foot and I would have found in that fact two more reasons to love her. She was a rule follower but not a crowd follower. Her curiosity about the natural world often caused her attention to stray from what someone was saying—a condition I later dubbed
naturalist-autism
.

Her little house—which would become our little house—was as sweet and put-together as my apartment was not, but when I made her dinner at my place, she politely pretended that I did not live in a dump.

“I’ve seen worse,” she said. “It’s a bachelor pad.”

“Sorry it’s such a mess,” I said. “I usually sleep on the roof anyway.”

She laughed at this.

“When the weather’s good,” I clarified.

She laughed some more.

I had never thought of myself as funny. Yet there I was, making a beautiful woman laugh as I cooked her dinner. It was one of Patty’s little talents, in those halcyon days, her ability to make me feel charming while I was only being myself.

“After you’ve fed me,” she said, “we’ll go sleep at my house.”

I never slept at the apartment again.

The courtship phase has to occur correctly if the relationship is going to have any chance of lasting. An uninterrupted honeymoon, for example. Once we’re into those plateau years, we have to keep drawing on the memories of those early days—they are our mutual creation myth. I wanted nothing more than the great plateau of marriage, the silent calm of mature love.

A month later, I had it. We eloped, then had a reception at her parents’ house. The Stockings lived in a California neocolonial, meaning it looked like one of those East Coast houses on the outside, it carried that kind of visual authority, but if subjected to actual East Coast weather it would probably blow down. I found the house intimidating, both for its affluent surroundings and its blue-chip attitude—the way its columns and shutters repelled anything half-baked. I could feel which parts of myself forged on with confidence toward that house, and which parts wanted to turn around and run to the curb.

The tented yard was full of people I didn’t know. My aunt and uncle were there, too, of course, but they were the only ones on the “groom’s side.” The Stockings introduced me around. These new people would surround me for the rest of my life. When I kissed Patty in front of them, I looked into her eyes and I thought, finally, I can rest. I am going to assemble a life for myself, and she is going to lead the way. It is amazing, though,
how you can be watching something for a long time, and it looks one way, then the light shifts a little, or the wind blows, and that branch is an insect. That rock is a fish. That owl’s eye is a butterfly wing.

We had to rush home from Cabo San Lucas. Funeral, arrests, trial dates. For weeks, she cried herself to sleep. Then, without consulting me, she switched to the night shift. Her company was generating nasal-spray drugs around the clock and they needed quality-assurance people there all the time. She told me she would rather sleep during the day. I was patient—I had no other choice. There was no consoling her. At the beginning, at least, I tried to find happiness where I could.

Where we used to laugh over bygone injuries, we now cried over bygone pleasures. Our house, situated in the middle of the block, was the most peaceful place I had ever known. I spent hours on our wooden deck in back, reading the newspaper and watching the hummingbirds bob from flower to colorful flower. Gone. In the winter the air was brisk and refreshing, and we treated the occasional rainstorm as a rare event worth celebrating, by mixing cocktails and lighting a firelog. The crackle of wood, the tinny patter of rain on the metal plate of the air-conditioner … the night-blooming jasmine of February, the wild winds of April, the muggy fogs of June, the dry hot Septembers, the smell of brush fire smoke on the hot Santa Ana winds of October … all gone. Our Little Hamlet by the Sea belonged to one season alone, not the season of L.A. cliché, the season of no-season, but the season of memory, all of the seasons superimposed upon each other, like a broth into which new elements were constantly added, so that something from long ago could
bob up next to a brand new ingredient. Someday, all the elements would become lost in a single flavor. There were days on which our street would be filled with the harsh music of crows calling to each other from the treetops. I could never determine whether they were fighting or mating, but I could watch those sleek black birds call back and forth and chase each other for hours. Only later did I make the connection—those enormous black crows. Ravens. Every moment contains within it the seeds of its own destruction.