Version

Kim Magowan

i.
    “What do you want?” she asked him once when they were lying in bed. “What do I get to keep?” Other couples, they break up, and it’s objects they dicker over: the music collection, the never-used china. But when one is sleeping with a writer, it’s the memories that get divvied: Who keeps the kisses at the airport? Who gets the seedy hotel with the fingernail clippings on the night table?
    Of course she does not explain herself.
    And they wrestle over his journal. When he is peeing, she lifts it out of his bag and tries to find the page he began to read to her before saying, “No, I can’t share this with you.” Something about them necking in the alcove at the airport. That was the word he used, necking, like a teenager, like a boy. She thinks of the supple muscles of his neck, his hot skin.
    Then he is out of the bathroom, his hand on the door frame. “Hey! What are you doing?”
    “Nothing. Go wash your hands. Go brush your teeth.”
    He uncurls her fingers from the journal, holds it over her head, out of reach; he pins her arm behind her back.
    “No, you don’t.” He laughs. “Stop kissing me, you don’t get it back.”
    “But I just want to find the part about me. Aren’t I allowed to find myself?”
    “This version doesn’t belong to you.”

They do not talk about what will happen after this year. Kate is a visiting writer, and the marks she makes at this school will leave no prints: footsteps in grass rather than snow. The tense he uses with her is present, and the direct objects he attaches to love are not herself: “I love your kneecaps; I love your carrot salad; I love the ink stains on your hands.”
    She first meets him at her job interview, not the formal part, when the search committee interrogates her, but later. He’s sitting in the back of the room when she reads her story, and she sees him again when they take her to the faculty lounge. He’s standing in a corner, looking at her, eating bright orange cheese cubes speared onto toothpicks. He has a whole handful of cheese cubes, and the first thing she notices about him is his open hand with toothpicks spiking out.
    She approaches him. (Well, she tells herself that she’s approaching the wine, and she does pour herself some in a plastic cup. White, so it won’t stain her teeth.)
    “It looks like you’re holding a hedgehog.” She believes at first that she’s merely thinking that line. But it turns out she has said it out loud, because he raises his eyebrows, laughs, and extends a toothpick-free right hand.
    “I didn’t eat lunch. I’m David,” he says.
    She takes his hand, and it gives her a shock. She drops it. “Whoa. That hasn’t happened since I was on a playground slide.”
    That shock becomes part of the story they tell to each other about their meeting: literally, there is something electric between them.
    He is part of the group that takes her out to dinner afterward, but he is sitting at the other end of the table. The only time he actually speaks to her is when she comes out of the ladies’ room, and he’s standing in the corridor. Then he says, “Are you one of those neurotic people who like to get to the airport really early?”
    She’s a little startled—she’s just come out the bathroom, he’s standing right there after not talking to her all night, and he doesn’t open with “Hi” or indeed any pleasantry at all—but she says, “Not especially neurotic, I don’t think.”
    “Well, I’ll pick you up at your hotel at nine tomorrow morning then. I’m your ride.” He smiles. “I just finagled it.”
    “Um. Thanks.”
    He looks her up and down, in a kind of obvious, exaggerated, slow-mo way. “Actually, let’s make it eight,” he says.
    And still she almost misses her plane home. As soon as she sits in his car, he grabs her hand, and the whole drive to the airport, except when he’s signaling, he holds it. He puts the car in short-term parking to walk her in. But he doesn’t touch her—it’s still just their hands—until they approach the security line, and then somehow without exchanging any dialogue, they end up kissing in an alcove, kissing and kissing until she says, “I’m going to miss my plane.”
    “I knew I should have given you a ride back to your hotel last night.” He shakes his head and laughs. “Damn. What is this?”
    “I have no freaking idea,” she says.
    “Do you make a habit of seducing prospective colleagues during fly-backs?”
    “Me seducing?” she objects. “Hardly.”
    “I don’t know if I want you to get the job or not. You could be very distracting.”
    “Well, maybe you’ll get lucky. Maybe they’ll give it to the drunk.”
    “Or the lesbian.” He kisses her again. “Run along. And stay in touch, you. Send me that story you were talking about last night. The one about the spareribs.”
    “You were listening to that?” she asks, even though she knows—she could tell at the time—that he was.
    She gets the job, though by the time they offer it to her, it’s turned into another job entirely, whittled and shriveled. They lost the funding for the tenure-track line, so now it’s a one-year gig. In fact the job is no better than the one she already has, and it’s unclear to Kate herself how much of a factor the Hot Writer Guy (her designation for him) is in her acceptance of it.
    When she drives up to the house she has rented for the year (from a French professor, on sabbatical), David is waiting on the porch. He has a bulging bag of groceries with him. “Just some staples,” he tells her, when she asks what is in it. And she laughs in the kitchen when she unpacks it and finds—among the milk, coffee, eggs, apples, sliced salami, and bagels—a box of staples. He stands behind her with his arms around her. He kisses the back of her neck.
    “Let me at least shower,” she says. “I’ve been driving for two days.” But he shakes his head; he pushes her into the French professor’s bedroom.
    Later he asks her, “So how discreet are you? Because this sort of thing is frowned upon, you know.”
    “Very discreet,” she tells him.
    They are undercover, or so they think. He won’t hold hands with her anywhere near campus, or at any bar where they might run into students or colleagues.
    “Discretion, temptress,” he says. But it occurs to her that all this subterfuge might be an excuse.
    She tries to explain it, him, to her friend Ellen over the phone, to explain it to herself.
    “I’m regressing,” she tells Ellen. “He’s the type of guy I liked in high school. You remember? The two types: the tortured poet and the bad boy. He’s like a smoothie blend.”
    “And you were finally growing up,” Ellen sighs. Ellen had high hopes that Kate would fall for a doctor she introduced her to, a nice guy, divorced, responsible, cheerful, but that has all gone by the wayside in the wake of David. “Remind me what you see in him.”
    “Sex. Scrabble. The conversation. We can talk and talk.”
    “About what?”
    “Oh, stupid shit. You know, what word belongs in this sentence? What color, exactly, is that mustard? Why did Freud screw up with Dora? Things no one would care about besides us.”
    “You’re in love with him,” Ellen says. “I can tell by the way you say ‘us.’”
    They carry on. “Carry on” is his phrase, and she asks him in what sense does he intend it? Carry on meaning to continue, or to fool around, or to have wild tantrums?
    “The first two,” he says. He looks at her speculatively. “You don’t seem like the wild tantrum type.”
    She does her best to be cool, smooth, light. These are characteristics that Kate has always possessed, but because he approves of them, they become exaggerated. Sometimes Kate thinks those adjectives would better describe a product (a Scandinavian lamp, say, or a moisturizer) than a person.
    When she asks him, “What’s going on with us?” he evades her. He quotes Thom Gunn: “‘Their relationship consisted / of discussing whether it existed.’”
    “Don’t think so much,” he tells her. He bites her earlobe. “Thinking again?”
    But what is she supposed to think? For instance: She comes to his apartment a late May evening, knocks. He doesn’t answer, so she feels for the keys he hides under a dented yellow watering can. When she opens the door, she sees them right away, sprawled on his ugly plaid couch. They haven’t even made it into the bedroom. They are still wearing some clothes. She notes the girl has red hair, unshaved armpits, and is prettier and younger than she. His mouth is open, a round hole, and involuntarily Kate imitates it. “Oh,” she says, before closing the door.
    She does not answer the phone, though it rings and rings as she packs her books into orange and onion crates. She is glad she traveled so lightly. It would be easier to unplug the phone, perhaps: each time it rings she pauses in her packing.
    Two days later there is a knock on her door. She doesn’t answer. Her door opens anyway, and he stands there. They look at each other.
    “You know, in retrospect it was probably a bad idea to show each other where we keep spare keys,” she says. “Give them to me.”
    He tosses them underhand. Kate catches them. She is very pleased: she can’t think of a better occasion to make a graceful catch.
    “Going somewhere?” he asks. She registers his tone. Whatever he came to say has been diverted by the boxes.
    “Nowhere,” she says, and though they say more things, this is what she remembers, this is the clean cut she makes in the memory. He can have the rest.
    The university tells her she must leave a forwarding address. She doesn’t.

Five years pass. She publishes her second collection of stories and goes on a book tour. Ann Arbor is her sixth stop, and by then she has a rhythm and a story she likes to read. It seems to go over well: it has lines that elicit reliable laughs, it’s not too long, and the themes are easy to process in a sitting. The title is homey and sedative. But when she gets to the lectern, she sees him sitting in the second row, staring at her, and she changes her mind about what to read.
    This is not the city where she knew him. It is a shock to see him, and she has to drink most of her glass of water to recover. After she drinks the water, she coughs. Then, without her usual jokey preamble, she says the title of what she plans to read: “This one is called ‘Nowhere.’” In the front row she sees Ellen, her best friend, look up, surprised. She reads. It’s a mean story; it has pointy teeth, and it’s all there: the airport, the fingernail clippings, the journal, the yellow can. When she finishes reading, there is a pause before the audience claps, and their clapping is tempered. The professional in her takes note of this: “Black Tea” goes over better.
    She takes her time signing books, chatting with each of the buyers, and he waits until the line is gone before he approaches. When he hands her one of her books, she signs it. Just her name. He looks at that part first.
    “So,” he says. He flips to the inside back jacket. “Vermont, huh? I wouldn’t have guessed.”
    “And you live here?”
    “Nowhere,” he says, and smiles. “But now I have all sorts of information about you. You’re forty-one—”
    “You knew that.”
    “You live in Stowe, Vermont. Oh, and here’s your publisher’s address. Good to know. Nice picture of you, by the way; you haven’t changed.”
    “Ha,” she says.
    He flips now to the dedication. “Who is Molly?”     “Me,” Molly says. She has been sitting in Ellen’s lap, in the front row. Now she disentangles herself and marches forward, sticking her stomach out.
    He stares, then bends to his knees to look her in the face. “Hi, Molly. I’m David. Pleased to meet you.”
    “David?” Ellen repeats.
    Kate gives hard looks all around, to Ellen, to Molly, to him. She deals them out like cards. Ellen stares back, eyebrows raised, but David and Molly ignore her.
    “So, Molly,” David says. “Who’s your mommy?”
    Molly points.
    David turns to look at Kate, then back at the girl. “How old are you, pretty girl?”
    “Four and a half,” Molly says at the same time that Kate says, “Three and a half.” They say “half” simultaneously: it sounds like they are harmonizing. David looks at Kate, then her daughter, forward and back. There is a pause. The moment thins and contracts.
    That is the lesson of fucking a writer. Everybody looks guilty.

    ii.
    Clean cut.
    Or: there are different ways to proceed from here.
    David walks out of the bookstore. He doesn’t say anything, but the look he gives Kate is certainly legible: to hell with you. He goes back to his apartment (on Plymouth Road, some twenty-two blocks away; it takes him less than twenty minutes to walk there). He shakes his head most of the way. He is actually talking to himself; he is that discombobulated. Someone watching him on the street might conclude he’s crazy, and indeed there is someone watching him, a nineteen-year-old girl with long dirty-blonde hair and a crocheted hat. She’s a philosophy major at the University of Michigan. She thinks to herself that he’s cute but seems pretty weird.
    He gets home, and the first thing he does is hide Kate’s book, stuffing it behind other ones on the shelf so he doesn’t have to contend with that spine staring at him. He pours himself a glass of Maker’s. He wonders why the fuck he went to that reading. Idle curiosity, there’s a predictable narrative.
    He takes out the book from where he shoved it, behind the Es: George Eliot, Ralph Ellison, Louise Erdrich. Kate was not the first to point out the disjunction between David’s organized bookshelf and his messy personal life.
    He reads the story, “Nowhere.” It’s rambling and ends, he thinks “objectively,” too abruptly, but there’s a line in it that makes him smile: he remembers quoting that Thom Gunn poem to her. He remembers her reply: “He insisted, she resisted; / so they persisted, misfitted.” (She has left this comeback out of the story, though, and he isn’t sure why. If it had been his line, he would have kept it.) The way she would roll her eyes. Mocking, narrow, near-sighted eyes. They were the first thing he noticed about her.
    David starts leafing through the book. He reads “Black Tea,” but it’s not his favorite. He likes one called “Convolutions” quite a bit; it’s about a young pregnant woman who has an old, decrepit, needy cat. He wonders if she wrote it when she herself was pregnant.
    He spends the rest of the evening reading the book.
    When he’s done he restarts his computer (it’s close to midnight now) and Googles her for twenty minutes. She isn’t on Facebook, either openly or surreptitiously, or on MySpace, and her old e-mail account doesn’t work (he already knows this last bit from a prior bounce back), but eventually he finds her, “visiting” at the University of Vermont.
    He writes:

well, that was very strange, and i’m having trouble figuring out exactly what to say to you. so two things for now: 1) “convolutions” is really strong, maybe my favorite story of yours, though i always liked that bizarre one about the acrobats. i love esp. the bit about the cat’s greasy fur—you can almost feel it under your fingertips. 2) how long are you in town? because i’d like to take molly out for ice cream, if you’ll let me. (and if you won’t i’m prepared to make a fuss.) needless to say, you’re invited too. xo, d.