Which Was True

The man met me at the boxy strip mall record shop where I had worked for only a few weeks, those few late-May weeks after escaping higher education at long last. He was clutching Hunky Dory, by David Bowie, and when he came to the counter I said, "Make sure you get the RykoDisc edition because it's much better." Which was true.

I looked at him as he went back to exchange his CD and reflected that I liked the way his ass looked in his jeans, the architectural folds of thick denim stretched over an only slightly fallen behind. He wasn't that old. Well, he was thirty-five, maybe. Older than any man I'd ever dated. The man set the RykoDisc edition on the counter, a wide, close-mouthed smile paved across his mouth. Oh, god. His eyes were sad and that was the end of it.

I slid his credit card receipt over the counter towards him, and his hand fell on top of mine as if it were an inevitable thing, us touching. I looked up quickly, but I knew I wasn't really surprised or offended. After my shift, we went for coffee and later there was sex in his white Volvo station wagon, my knee hitting his gear shift enough so that the next morning, I noticed I had an imperfect circle of a bruise there.

Afterward, he laid in the backseat, facing up, his knees bunched towards his middle, and looked ill, constipated with tears. I found it embarrassing to be in the presence of this veritable display of personal entropy and asked him whether he minded if I drive myself home, and did he think he could make it to his own house from there. He belched a little sob and I took that to mean yes.

I drove his car into the circle drive of the apartment building across the street from my own, because I didn't know what type of psycho he was, to go picking up girls and then very nearly losing it in the backseat of his own car. I turned around with my hands still on the wheel and saw an old bag of Chips Ahoy cookies on the floor, bright blue against the blonde of the interior.

The car didn't have air conditioning. My thighs below the hem of my skirt were stuck to the seat, and I had an awkward childhood memory of being driven by my mother with a friend to the county pool in our old Volkswagen. We were only in our swim team suits, midsummer tan skin everywhere. When we got out, running barefoot over the broken asphalt of the lot, there were red marks everywhere on the backs of our arms and thighs and necks where the sticky seats had wanted to hold onto us. On second thought, I didn't know how I would've known about the red marks. Made them up after the fact, I guess.

The man got up and his foot crushed the blue cookie bag, making a horrible noise because there must have been the plastic infrastructure still inside, maybe some old forgotten cookies, too. A noise like furniture breaking or a branch falling on a roof. We laughed together then, because we knew we were ridiculous for doing what we'd done and putting on the way we had. I got out of the car and pushed the lever so the front seat pressed forward and he could get out.

When we both stood outside the car, he looked at me, square in the pupils. Red rose in his cheeks. He grinned and I confessed that I lived across the street. He said okay, and I nodded and turned and walked toward my building.

When I stopped at its front door to press the key into the lock, I turned and saw the Volvo burning rubber down the street. I got inside and took the stairs to my sixth floor studio and looked and looked at it and its unpacked boxes for a long time.

I filled a bowl with frozen peas and ate them on my cement slab balcony, listening to the sitcoms my downstairs neighbors were watching. I sat there in the smog of cigarette smoke rising from balconies below me, and breathed the remote heat of a May night.

After I finished the peas, I unbuttoned and re-buttoned the top of my skirt and thought about this guy who'd been quite excellent at fucking but also quite clearly a little mad. Maybe older guys, guys his age, are just like that, I thought. Maybe the gears in their heads slow down just enough so that they notice and panic, but not so much that they stop caring about their inevitable breakdown. Time passing, yeah.

And I thought to myself that moving to a new city with no prospects or friends was really painfully clearly the stupidest thing I'd ever done.

At eight o'clock I took a sleeping pill, falling onto the mattress on the floor on top of the comforter and waited for unconsciousness. Thoughts buoyed in my head full of liquid, old aquarium water, goldfish, one of those ornamental sandcastles. Air bubbles. Tiny nutshell-hard snails moseying up the inside curve of my forehead. Plastic seaweed that refused to waft in the current. It made me think of the article I'd read that morning about fish genetically engineered to glow in the dark. Five dollars a pop. Bred in Florida, where else? Tropical fish aficionados would be into it, or at least that's what the company owner predicted. I disagreed. Genuine aficionados are purists above all else. I'd learned this at the record shop. I'd always liked music but I didn't really care what it was, as long as I liked it. And all of those greasy, cool guys coming in and out looking for the right pressing of the right record, with the sleeve in perfect condition had hammered into me the fact that they were a different breed of animal altogether. And that if you were not an aficionado, you might as well not even try to play the game. I remembered I was lying on my bed and all I wanted to do was ride on a train backwards and forwards in time. But I fell asleep, fell into the hard heavy medicated sleep, and didn't wake up until ten the next morning.

Ten was when the sun came over the hill behind my building and cut through my window. Searing pain opening my eyes then. I made coffee, forewent breakfast, and just drank coffee until my stomach pulsed with all of the acid. I drank coffee until I got diarrhea and sat on the toilet and purged in my own way. Using a tissue to wipe myself, I remembered that I needed to go to the store. The toilet paper had run out last week.

It was my day off. I unpacked boxes for as long as I could, until it popped into my head that it might be a bad idea to go and get quite that established what with all of the running away I'd dreamt about. Running to, maybe. But there was no one to run to. I scolded myself for having the type of boring, typical thoughts that any lonely person might have.

I picked up a hunk of souvenir amethyst from the Natural History Museum in DC and set it down on the window-sill, near the edge. For the rest of the day I stared at the amethyst and tried to move it with my mind off the sill. It didn't budge, for predictable reasons of logic and physics. The mind force I tried to send towards the little, lavender, pock-marked lump very simply wasn't going to make it move. The underside of the rock wasn't purple, but a dirty and gritty vanilla, where the gem had been cut from the larger sediment where it lived. Sediment wasn't the right word, I thought, but I also didn't care.

As soon as it was dark out, I left my vigil and gave myself permission to lay down on the bed, though I didn't sleep.

In the morning, I was gray-faced from the insomnia and wished for a moment that I were a man, because rubbing my thumb against the morning stubble on a jaw-line was precisely the sensory experience I wanted for breakfast. Instead, I threw away the old coffee grinds in the Mr. Coffee and replaced them with new ones. I filled the carafe with water, poured it into the machine's backside, and turned it on. I took a shower, got dressed, put on lipstick, filled my to-go cup, and left for the record store.

When I got home in the evening, my little coffeemaker was a burn victim. I'd forgotten to turn it off. The cheap black plastic had melted all over the counter. There was no way I'd get my deposit back now. But I was lucky it hadn't started a fire, and I cleaned up the best I could, leaving only the worst of pits for later appraisal.

At seven, the intercom from the lobby buzzed my apartment. When I answered it, a man's voice said plaintively, "It's got to be you." And it was.

It was the man with the newly purchased RykoDisc Bowie CD. He explained he'd methodically called each apartment from 101 on up, and fretted over each unanswered number that he would never be able to find me. So it was with much relief that he spoke into the receiver. "It was a game of probability," he told me. And I realized he hadn't fretted about the unanswered numbers any more than one would over a lost round of tictac-toe. That was the beginning of my comprehension about the type of man he was, and the type of feelings he would have for me.

Instead of letting him come up and see the melted coffeemaker and mess of boxes, I went down to meet him. On the steps, it struck me that I hadn't even glanced in the mirror before I left the apartment, a realization that was the beginning of my comprehension of the type of feelings I would have for this man.

We went to a fast food joint down the street and got hamburgers and sodas. The restaurant was the typical kind, with its fluorescent lights and palette of primary colors. The vinyl upholstery on the booths was stained and cracked. The tables were grimy. The tiled floor was hopeless. But if you squinted your eyes, you could pretend it was the type of establishment the commercial architects had intended it to be: slick, modern, and futuristic in every way. This is what I did instead of listening while the man talked, mouth open, full of greasy reconstituted beef. The yellow mustard smeared on his forefinger was what pushed it all too far, though, and I excused myself in a surprisingly sweet fashion to the restroom in order to vomit.

Afterwards I returned and drank my diet soda and left my hamburger alone in its paper wrapping. Finally, we walked back in the direction of my apartment, cars with penetratingly bright lights zooming by. Headlights white, brake lights red. Motors gunning after red lights turned green. We ran recklessly across the six lanes to my building. We both wore dark clothing.

"I like your blonde hair," the man said while we both caught our breath on the other side of the road. We stood under a streetlight. I reached up to pat it after he said that. "I have a wife," he said then. I'd figured that. Single men just don't have white Volvo station wagons. The man seemed a lot more confident than he had in the record store, certainly more so than he had while crying in the backseat of his car. The crying had been unsettling, but this confident honesty was even more so.

He also had children, it came out later, two sons he'd left at Tae Kwon Do while he paid his visit. It was the excuse he gave for leaving at eightthirty after I'd given him a blowjob in his car. During the act, I'd noticed that the Chips Ahoy bag had disappeared.

The man left and I watched his brake lights dissolve into the darkness. It felt somehow right, even tidy, that he leave me just like that.

During our next engagement, the man told me his wife had left him and the boys because she was dying of cancer. Like an animal wanders into the woods to die alone. He said also, very matter-of-factly, that they were in true love. This should have bothered me, but I was used to his frank manner by this time.

We sat together, half-clothed in the empty movie theater. It was the middle of the day, the first screening of some romantic comedy. The actress moved across the screen to her lover, and then the scene cut to the next morning when the two lovers spooned in bed under a thin blue sheet. Sunlight filtered through their window.

The man kissed me with dry lips then, the first kiss between us, and said, "I won't ever love you, but if you move into the house, the boys can have some stability and we both will have some grown-up company." I told him I would think about it. The boys were at school. I wondered why the man wasn't at work. I realized I had no clue what he did for a living.

In July, two months after the advent of our affair, the man and his boys and I went to Spain on a little get-to-know-you vacation. In the vacation's honor, I quit my job at the record store. On the long flight over, I read fashion magazines and thought about finding a sub-leaser for my apartment. In the small hotel, I was in my own room on the third floor, the boys and their father directly below me on the second.

Spain did not look so different from America, at least not as different as I had expected it to. Sure, everything was older, and built with stone, and the men, it should be noted, were generally more attractive than the mole-like office-workers of the States. The women were generally more generous and more sensuous in their informality than the worry-lined women I had lived among all of my life.

It should also be noted, however, that American cultural influence had made itself known. The very same fast-food restaurant where I had sat with the man, blocks from my apartment, had a sister franchise here in Spain, with the same vinyl upholstery and dirty tile floors. To me, it was remarkable, and not discomforting in its familiarity.

During our days in Spain, the man and his boys went off on day trips while I stayed, content in the hotel café. Sitting by an open window, I could hear the splash of the nearby fountains, the bustle of the streets, and the men calling out to the women. It was all very much what one would expect in Spain.

On one of the last days of the vacation, a woman sat down at my table, uninvited. "Whew," she exclaimed. "Whew." She was clearly American with her Cleveland Browns T-shirt and unattractive white shorts. "You're American, right?" she asked me. I nodded. "I can't speak a word of Spanish and I'm just gagging for some company. You're the one with the handsome husband and the two adorable little boys," she said. "I'm staying in this hotel too. I noticed you in the lobby when you were checking in."

"No," I said. Then, realizing it wasn't a very clear response, I clarified, "He's not my husband, and those are his sons." I could tell the woman was miffed, even behind her big plastic sunglasses, more by my terseness than the idea of a fractured family.

My coffee came, and she ordered a Coca-Cola and a roll, in slow English, trying to make sure the waiter understood. I tapped my spoon against my saucer, not really caring to make further conversation.

"Well then," the woman said finally after a long silence, "what exactly are you to him?"

"Not much," I replied.

"Ah," she said, and then went on to talk about herself and what occupation she held and her arthritic husband, "finally retired after all these years."

The soda and roll came. "And I told him I had to leave the United States or I would just die!" The woman tore off a piece of the roll with her meaty thumb and forefinger and pushed it into her mouth. " Now I'm here and we should've just gone to Boca, because I never was much of a cultured person and all of these antiques just give me the hives." I nodded noncommittally. "Not literally, you understand, just in a manner of speaking," she said. I nodded again. She pushed her chair from the table, making a grinding noise as its legs scraped the stone floor.

"Has anyone ever told you that you talk too darn much?" the woman said with a straight face, and then dissolved into laughter at the feat of sarcasm she had accomplished. It was an old, clichéd joke. I put coins down for the coffee and left the table without saying anything at all. The woman looked a little hurt, mouth agape and both her hands flat on the table, inert for a moment with shock.

Later, the man put the boys to bed early and the two of us went to a fancy restaurant for dinner. I wore a fitted white dress, a pink sweater tied around my shoulders, and dainty kitten heels that stuck in the seams of the cobblestone. He wore a linen dress shirt with the top few buttons open. Together we were a perfectly matched pair of charming, sophisticated Americans. Someone played a sad guitar in the far corner of the dining room.

Before the wine even came, the man cleared his throat and made his announcement. "She's died," he said, with more inflection than anything else I'd ever heard him say. The words were as broken and indigo and slow to come out as stillborns. I wondered to myself what type of cancer his wife had.

"What's more," he continued, "is that when she left us, she came here, to Spain." I answered with a petite grunt at the back of my throat. "Tomorrow, the four of us will travel to identify her body. You can take care of the boys while I mind all of the paperwork."

After the announcement, I ate fish while the man ate meat and rice. We both drank white wine, and afterwards he came to my room, but only to tuck me in. "It will be a good sort of life," he said, as he drew the covers above my chest.

In the morning, things did not go as planned. When I came downstairs to the man's room, his older son answered the door. He had been crying. The man was sick, very sick, with a fever and volumes of cold sweat running down between his shoulder blades.

I called the hotel doctor, who said he would be fine after a few days of bed rest. The man told me that I would have to take the boys to identify the body, and I very definitely hated him for expecting me to do it.

In the same way that leaves falling off the trees in autumn reveal things formerly hidden, the man's firm order had cleared my mind and I realized the terrible sort of situation I was in. It was one thing to be a girlfriend. It was quite another to have to look at your boyfriend's wife's dead body, a wife whom he had loved more than anything else. The lexicon of boyfriend and girlfriend prickled in my head. Too emotional. "Lover" was also not the correct word.

I sighed. Without me, the boys would go unsupervised, and the wife's body would rot. It wouldn't be nice to leave things in that state. And so I stayed, and took the train with the boys to the town where their mother had expired.

On the train, I discovered that I quite liked the man's sons. They were fairly adorable and polite, too. Uncomplicated, quiet. We got along very well. The younger one slept in my lap. It was late afternoon by the time we arrived at our destination. The old stone funeral home sat well marked on the top of a grassy hill.

The building reminded me of the funeral home in an old movie with Jack Lemmon and a somewhat portly British blonde actress. The man and the woman, strangers, travel to a resort in Spain or Italy or Portugal to identify the bodies of their father and mother, respectively. It is an odd thing that the film is a hi-jinx sort of romantic comedy, seeing as how there is all that death right from the beginning.

In the movie, there is some debate over where the bodies should be buried, and whether they should be buried together, since the man's father and woman's mother were having a covert affair. I recalled that at some point, the bodies disappeared from that old stone funeral home, and I worried whether the body we had come to see would be in the building we walked towards now after all.

Leaving the boys outside, I made sure everything was in order. There was no one to be found. It was cool in the building, far cooler than outside where the sun beat down with a sort of disturbing menace. On a metal table in the center of the room was a female body covered in a sheet. I guessed that it was the man's wife. I pulled back a corner of the sheet to reveal the face of an unimaginably beautiful redhead. I pulled the sheet farther down and saw a crosshatch of scars across her chest and thought that they were probably on account of the cancer. I drew the sheet to her neck, and the body appeared more peaceful that way.

I went outside and told the boys they could come to see their mother now, if they wanted. The younger one had been playing with an earthworm. He put it gently down on the soil, and rose to take my hand. The older one trailed behind us.

Inside, the younger boy held onto my knee while the older one approached the table. He kissed his mother's cold forehead and turned around abruptly. "I want to go now," he told me. On the way out, we met with the attendant, who mercifully spoke English. He told me that he could send the appropriate papers to the man's house, and the older boy recited the address.

We got on a train back to the hotel, and arrived late. Thinking it might be better not to disturb the man, I had the boys sleep in my bed. They did so quietly. I sat on the chair by the window and stared out to empty streets and the black sky shot through with city lights until everything went golden at dawn.

It used to be that when I didn't sleep, I felt an evil type of disobedience, ignoring the sunrises and sunstes. That old tradition that women and men everywhere sleep when it's dark out, and wake when it's light. Now, after so many years of sleepless nights, it was just a fact that regular sleep was not something I was blessed with. I wondered how many of my character traits were a result of my insomnia, and how many were naturally occurring.

By seven o'clock the boys were up, rising early the way young children often do. Before breakfast, we went downstairs to knock lightly on the door of the man's room. He answered, sleepy, in a big white bathrobe. Not only did he not look sick, he looked remarkably healthy. I began to think he had been faking the illness. I imagined him naked and crouched in the bathroom, pouring ice water down his back and packing his face with scalding hot washcloths. The thought gave me a horrible stomachache. The boys bounded past me to hug their father, who picked them both up at the same time, one on each hip. It was clear that this was a well-worn gesture.

I turned on my heels and ascended the stairs to my room. While packing my things, I registered a lack of surprise when the man did not come after me. The silence, undisturbed by knocking or phones ringing, implied the type of relationship this man and I had made together.

As the silence continued, my stomachache lessened, and by the time I was in the lobby with my bags, I was feeling encouragingly robust. The American woman from the café passed by me with a very rotund husband in tow. "Hello," she said brightly, seeming to have forgotten the way I'd left her open-mouthed at the café table two days before.

In that moment I became elated with an odd sense of freedom from my own personal history. I would take on as my own the sort of pleasant amnesia that the American woman displayed. The glass entrance of the hotel was glowing with the low morning sun. Seconds later, bag in hand, I was in the street, walking in a very precise direction toward nowhere I had ever been.

- Amanda Goldblatt