Clay

            When the door closed, I blinked, but I didn’t get up.  She hadn’t slammed the door, and the absence of that sound was louder than all the words we should have spoken.  I blinked – maybe a little longer than a blink – and sipped from my beer.  The ceiling fan still turned; the TV still showed something I hadn’t been watching in the first place; the upstairs toilet was still running.  In other words, the house didn’t fall apart, though I still held my breath just in case.  It wasn’t her fault, but why should that stop me from blaming her for it?

            She left on a Tuesday.  In my head, she always left on a Saturday, in the afternoon.  In my head, I was working on the car, grease on my hands and tools spread across the driveway.  The sun divided the world into blinding spots of light and impenetrable shadows.  She wore a red dress and oversized sunglasses that I’d never seen before.  Her hair was perfect, and the click-clack of her heels on the driveway could have been a metronome.  The way the breeze blew her dress and her hair to the right, gently but noticeably, accentuated her shape.  I liked that shape.

            In my head, she said, “I’m leaving.”

            Wiping my hands with a handkerchief I had never owned, I looked at her, squinting in the light.  “I guess I can’t blame you,” I said.

            “No, you can’t,” she said. 

            A cab pulled up to the end of the driveway, but a really old one, like an old Packard or something.  I’d never seen a cab on our street before. 

            “Goodbye,” she said.  She turned sharply and click-clacked down the driveway, placed her little yellow suitcase (which I’d also never seen before) into the trunk, and sat down in the back seat of the cab.  The windows must have been frosted or something, because once she was in I could only see her silhouette.  The cab pulled away and I watched until it was out of sight.  I then grabbed a duffel bag from the garage, threw it in the car, set fire to the house, and drove off in the opposite direction of the cab.  A single tear threatened to roll down my cheek, but was reabsorbed into my left eye at the last second.  Roll credits.

            In reality, it was Tuesday, around 7:00, and I had indigestion from the cheesesteak I had inhaled during our silent dinner together.  My feet hung over the arm of the couch I was lying on, the TV was on for no reason, and I read an article about the fall blockbusters in Entertainment Weekly.  A bottle of Amstel Light stood just within arm’s reach on the coffee table, sans coaster. 

            “I’m leaving,” she said.  She wore jeans and a sweatshirt, which I’m fairly certain was actually mine. 

            “Ok,” I replied.  “I’ll be here.  Have fun.”

            “No, Clayton.  I’m leaving.” 

            I craned my head around on the couch to look at her motioning to the piles of bags in the hallway.  When did she pack all that?

            “I’ll probably have my brother come by for the rest of my things, probably later in the week.  I’ll tell him to come while you’re at work and give him my key.  He knows what to pick up.”  She fixed her pony tail, and her shadow hands on the hallway wall were gigantic. 

            “Um,” I eloquently began, “can I ask why?”

            “Really?  You want to ask why?”

            “If I didn’t want to ask ‘why?’ why would I just ask if I could ask ‘why?’” 

            She inhaled slowly, exhaled loudly, and clenched and unclenched her fists.  “How long have we been together, Clayton?”

            “About two years?”  I tried to keep my inflection flat, but nothing could stop that from coming out as a question.

            “Three years next month.”  She looked down and stuffed her hands into the sweatshirt pocket.

            “Well, yeah, two-three years.  You know, in that range.”

            “Jesus, Clayton.  I can’t even begin, I can’t even begin, to understand your issues.  And I’m not going to try anymore.  I love you, Clayton.”

            “I love y-”

            “Don’t.  Just don’t.  I love you, but I can’t do this.  You don’t want a girlfriend, much less a wife.  You want a therapist you can occasionally sleep with.  That’s really all our relationship is, and has been.  I’ve just been too stupid to recognize it until now.”  Her mouth contorted for a second into that “I’m going to cry” look, but quickly snapped back.  “And you know, Clayton, if you ever get another girlfriend, you might want to at least put down your beer and get up off the couch when she leaves you.  Goodbye.”

            So, when the door closed, I blinked but I didn’t get up.  I couldn’t see from my angle if she was getting into a cab or not – probably not though.  She probably had someone pick her up, which means she had probably been planning this for some time, which means I was probably the last to know.  But, I guess that’s how it usually goes.  I turned off the TV and finished my beer.

 

            The next morning, I didn’t set fire to the house.  While I still liked the idea from a dramatic standpoint, it wasn’t very financially sound.  In fact, living here alone wasn’t very financially sound, either.

            “What’s up, Clay?” 

            I had my cell laying on my chest with the speakerphone on, to free up my hands for all the nothing they were busy with.  “Nothing much.  You still looking for a place to live?”

            “Uh, yeah, I guess.  Why?”  He sounded like he was driving.

            “Sarah just left.  I’ve got an extra room.  Four hundred a month, plus utilities.” 

            “Wait, Sarah just left?  Are you ok?”  Josh lit a cigarette, and the wind through his car window echoed through the speakerphone.

            “Yeah, I’m cool.  Do you want the room?”  Sunlight was trying to force its way through the gaps in the mini-blinds, creating bright red splotches in my closed-eye vision.

            “Tell you what, how ‘bout if I stop by in an hour or so.  We’ll get some beers and talk about it.”

            “Yeah.  Cool.”  I hung up and turned the TV volume back up. 

 

            I dreamed I was Anne Frank, and the Nazis were here.  I woke up to Josh pounding on the door that I forgot I had locked. 

            “Are you really ok, Clay?  I mean, seriously, if you want to talk about it, I’m here.  It was two years.”  Josh reached over the bar and grabbed an ash tray, exhaling in a cloud that seemed to funnel its way into the green glass cone surrounding the bulb above us.  The sunlight from this morning had been replaced by gray clouds that now spat on the windows.

            “Almost three, actually.”  I threw back about a quarter of my beer in one mouthful and pulled a cigarette from the pack he left on the bar. 

            “Really?  Three?”

            “Apparently.”  The match flared more than I had expected and blackened the entire end of the cigarette.  “Honestly though, I don’t really want to talk about it.  It happened.  It’s over.  Can’t change anything about it now.  I’d rather just not think about it.”

            Josh nodded and looked to the TV in the corner showing a baseball game no one cared about.  “Well, I can move in next week.”

            “Good deal.”  I finished my beer and tipped the empty towards the bartender.

            “Good deal,” he echoed.

            We sat in silence for another half hour before he dropped me off back at home.

 

            “SCI Graterford, how can I direct your call?”

            “Um, I’m not sure.  I want to set up a visit.”  I had the phone to my ear this time, sitting upright on the couch, stacking the empty cans on the coffee table. 

            “RHU or general population?”

            “I, uh, don’t know.  What’s RHU?”

            Sigh.  “Restricted Housing Unit.  RHU’s are only allowed one visitor per month.”  This woman sounded like she had smoked five cigars in the past hour.  “Are you friend or family?”

            “Um, I’m…”

            “Ok, just give me the inmate’s name and I’ll tell you when you can come visit him.”

            “Sure.  It’s… uh…”

            “Hello?  Sir?”

            I hit “end call” and stared at the cell phone screen for five minutes before lying back down on the couch and going to sleep. 

           

            In my head, I drive through the prison gates on a cloudy, cold day.  I get searched on my way in, but I’m not carrying any weapons or other suspect materials.  The prison is dark, and everything appears to be wet inside: the stones, the bars, everything.  A guard with a mustache guides me down a hallway to a room full of those windows with phones on either side. 

            “C7,” he tells me, and points down the line. 

            I walk along, trying not to look at the prisoners on the other side, and trying not to look at the poorly aging wives and girlfriends, the biker buddies with bad ponytails and faded tattoos, the crying mothers.  I tell myself that my footsteps don’t sound nearly as loud to anyone else as they do to me.  Guards line the back wall, holding night sticks at the ready.  I sit down at C7.

            He looks older than I had expected, and fatter.  Even with his head shaved, I can tell that he’s balding.  There’s a tattoo on the side of his neck disappearing into his shirt, but I can’t tell what it is.  His dull gray eyes search my face, and I can almost feel them, probing.  He spits tobacco into a plastic cup.  “I know you?”

            He has my nose.

            “My name is Clayton O’Connell.”  I look at a spot on the wall behind his right shoulder while speaking.  My own words echo through the phone.

            “And?”  He spits again, and picks at something in his teeth.

            “You raped my mother.  You impregnated her.  She gave birth to me.”  I say these things the way a child recites a history lesson.

            In my head, everything gets put on pause at that point.  He never responds, I never say anything more, nobody moves.  We’re frozen in that moment in time, in that limbo.

 

            In reality, I wake up to a TV that’s too loud, a beer that’s warm and half-empty, and a house that still hasn’t fallen apart.  But I’m convinced that it could at any moment; it’s that kind of world.