Ten Takes

TEN TAKES

Susan Ferguson

Dianne doesn’t recognize the man who has commandeered her chair at the table in the coffeehouse where she has just read her vignette. She looks the stranger over as she makes her way towards him. More strangers join him. She says hi to a few friends, an old classmate: “Good to see you. Yes, it’s good to be back home— Two weeks on the road in New England. It’s beautiful but lonely.” She keeps walking, keying in on new faces, bright colors — her mind’s still in travel mode. The man at her table looks like Mr. Clean.

She approaches him. She doesn’t want him to leave, but she wants him to know she was here first. “That’s my stuff,” she says to him, pointing to a book and her backpack. “I can move it if it’s in your way.”

He looks up at her with a wide sparkling smile but doesn’t get up, just slides his chair a little to one side. He has dark green eyes, a shaved head, a tiny gold ankh in his earlobe, and broad shoulders. He smells good — not too sweet, maybe musk. His tan is deep; his body, lean. His coffee, in a paper cup, is golden with cream.

He looks decidedly more pleasant than any of the other men Dianne has met lately, so she pulls up an empty chair and sits down beside him. She is aware that others are watching her as she speaks: “Hi. I’m Dianne. I don’t believe I know your name.”

“But I do, so I’m one up on you.” Everyone in earshot laughs when he says it. He goes on: “My name’s Rob, I write stories, I like white chocolate mochas, I recently completed my master’s, I’m a mailman, I collect first editions, I like theater, and— and— oh, and I just bought a car. Not a new one. A good one.”

He sums himself up in fifty words or less. Dianne finds that appealing. And he sounds rather charming: A sense of humor. A college degree. A job. A hobby. Good taste. He seems happy.

She does the math. It adds up. “Good for you. Nice to meet you.” His hand is warm when she shakes it. “Are you reading tonight?”

“You are,” he says. “Your story was good.”

Okay, so he’s evasive. They listen. They talk. That’s what coffeehouses are for.

After his friends have gone, he asks, “Are you seeing anyone?”

It’s her turn. “I’m seeing you.”

“Touché.” He smiles.

She’s never seen eyes quite so pretty.

In Dianne’s dreams Rob comes to her wearing a cherry red sock cap and bright yellow gloves, his arms pressed against his body. He’s streamlined. He’s muscular. He has lively green eyes. He is a rocket rushing wildly through space, slowing as he nears her.

She lies waiting. He glides to a halt atop her. Flight takes something out of him. He rests. Their bodies fit nicely.

She lets him kiss her on the mouth. He grows hard against her. They make love like machines—there’s no sound, there’s no feeling, just motion, their finale the result of repetition, friction and time.

She looks at him, his eyes dark and deep like a fairy-tale forest. He is smiling. In his red sock cap and gloves, he smiles. She believes she makes him happy. She wants her dreams to come true.

They see each other often—at the coffeehouse, at readings, at random. They exchange numbers. But he doesn’t call, can’t and won’t call, doesn’t answer his phone, doesn’t call her back when she leaves messages. He’s just not a caller. He’s pleasant and thoughtful when they see one another, and he gives her a long-stemmed red rose for her birthday, but he doesn’t call, doesn’t ask her out. Old enough to know better, Dianne tells herself she doesn’t know what this means.

She dries the rose and puts the fragile petals in a special white satin box in her dresser drawer. Surely he realizes he stirs feelings in her—excitement, longing, promise. He has to know. Anyone can see. Maybe he already has a friend? A lover? Maybe he’s queer? Maybe married? Maybe maybe. Who knows? Dianne feels the flutters. Surely he knows.

She writes volumes of email to a woman friend, telling her the kinds of things thirteen-year-old girls talk about for hours to their thirteen-year-old girlfriends on the telephone. “We both love our coffee with cream and sugar. It must mean something,” she writes. “He likes Egyptian art. So do I. Maybe we’re meant to be.” Dizzy with passion, or maybe lust—she’s afraid to define it—Dianne begs of her woman friend, “Tell me. What do I do about this guy? This is making me nuts.”

Her woman friend is married with kids, secure for now in her love life. She has forgotten the torment of dating, or maybe she never knew it. She advises Dianne to go for it.

“That’s too vague. Go for what?” Dianne asks. How? When? Where? “How will I know when I get it?”

Her friend tells her she’s hopeless. “Just go for it. If he likes you, he’ll say so. If he doesn’t, or he has someone already, you’ll figure it out, unless he’s a nice guy and wants to let you down easy, in which case it’ll take longer but eventually you’ll find out.”

Dianne goes for it. She finds reasons to talk to him—none that she’s proud of. Questions, contrived, stalling instead of going home, talking, hoping that small talk will lead to coffee will lead to more talking will lead to dinner will lead to romance will lead to great sex will lead to true love.

It doesn’t. Talking leads to I have to get up at four-thirty to deliver mail to Good night. So she expedites and leaps over the small talk straight to the coffee, but it doesn’t take: Not this late. I have to get up early. My job. See you around. Another time she skips the small talk and coffee and gets right to more talking, and he tells her he’s not what he seems, that what she sees is a mask, he doesn’t want her to see who he is. Besides, I have to work in the morning.

She begins to believe she is out of her league—competing with the postal service for the affections of a man. Who is crazy enough to do that? Still, she dreams about him at night. Dreams are her saving grace, her undoing. Their love flourishes in the rapid-eye movement moments before dawn.

For months, she moons over him. Puppy love. Infatuation. Do grown women have crushes? Yes. Her journals overflow with angst about love, rejection and fear. She talks over her feelings with everyone she can think of until she convinces herself that maybe Rob likes her, after all.

The few times he does reveal anything of himself, he shares mostly tragedy—how he overcame great odds to finish his thesis; how his legs have some condition that makes walking and therefore delivering mail painful; how he lost his mother in some mysterious, tragic accident that left him scarred and for a time suicidal. He tells her he likes her—“You’re a nice woman, Dianne. I could talk to you for hours”—but he never asks her any questions. She just blurts out the things she thinks he should know. Their conversations go sideways—never quite meeting in the middle. She determines that he wants things from her—mostly sympathy, patience and attention—but pushes them away when she offers. He’s not reciprocal, but that doesn’t stop her from wanting him. She’s confident there’s a balance. She’s confident he’ll change.

After many conversations, he says yes when she invites him to a movie. Outside the theater afterwards, he fidgets and says he can’t stay to talk. Disappointment crushes her as he bolts for his car. Later, she invites him on a weekend getaway to Vegas, and he says yes; she’s elated. But three days before leaving, he tells her he’s sorry but he can’t go. To make up for it, he invites her to a party at a friend’s house, where they both have a great time, but when it’s time for her to leave, he doesn’t even say bye.

She counts the bits that make up their friendship. Things are moving so slowly. He is so oblique. She is confused by it all—the wanting, the possibility, the hedging, the denial. She wants answers, she wants truth, she wants to understand what he’s feeling, but most of all, she wants him to tell her he loves her. If he would do that—which she is certain he’s feeling but just doesn’t know how to say—if he would do that, then everything would be okay.

Dianne drives to the university where Rob’s thesis is on file. She wants to see what he suffered for, what he believes is worth suffering, she wants to understand how he thinks. She locates the black bound volume in the library stacks, finds a quiet room and reads it. It takes hours.

His thesis is about rocks. He never mentioned that. She assumed it was about literature or business or the theater. He never talks about rocks. In his thesis, though, he describes things about rocks she never imagined, never heard of or will have the desire to know. She takes notes. She doesn’t know what she’ll do with them, but out of respect for his interests she takes notes. She knows this is nutty, but reading his ideas about something she knows nothing about makes her feel closer to him, makes her feel like maybe she knows what makes him tick. Even if it’s rocks.

The day has dwindled to five o’clock by the time she emerges from the library. The fragrances of pine and the pleasant dampness of spring snap her back to reality. She looks around, embarrassed about what she has done.

This isn’t her. This is stalker behavior. This is crazy. She drives home in a funk.

In late summer she composes a letter she believes she should give him so he will know how she feels. On a deeper level, she hopes it will open a door for him to tell her he cares but she doesn’t want to admit that; that’s selfish and greedy. It is one of those letters that should never see the light of day, and she knows that, but she writes it just the same. Then she begs him to meet her, and they do—after her yoga class, when she is high on deep cleansing breaths and ethereal illusions of intergalactic, intrapsychic, introspective yoga bliss. After yoga class is a dangerous time for affairs of the heart, she concedes, but it’s better than no time at all.

At the coffeehouse, she and Rob share a table the size of a cracker. She gives him the letter and watches as he reads her confession of love in her cramped, tortured writing. He pores over each line, never looking up. She is confident he is as enthralled as she is over paragraphs that reveal where she is in her head and her heart:

“Some time after I first learned your name, in that space between a glorious New England summer and a long brutal winter, I decided it was time to dismantle my façade, that emotional/architectural masterpiece of long standing complete with thick stone walls, a thorny bramble hedge, and flaming oil moat stocked with sharks. (Façades, it seems, are never done halfway….) But tearing down this erstwhile castle was a bigger challenge than I anticipated, exposing emotions I thought I would never know again. I’m still a long way from being done. Nonetheless, I’ve knocked down enough to see daylight and to see what a truly likeable person you are, and I’ve been struggling with new/old feelings ever since. Fear has been a most frustrating constant. Isn’t that always the way it is? In any case I care for you. I value our friendship. Maybe one day that will mean something.”

Has there ever been a bigger, grander love letter in the whole world? She thinks not. If someone she liked gave that to her, she would melt into a puddle of love.

He finishes and folds the letter closed. He looks tired when he glances up, and his reading face doesn’t change when he says, “You’re entitled to your feelings.” After that he’s mumbling and stumbling around for words, and there are people shouting coffee orders, and the cappuccino machine is howling, and six people are talking and laughing all at once at the next table, and she can’t hear or understand him, but good God, she wants him to love her so badly that she feels dizzy.

His voice is so soft she can barely hear him as he tells her a story about a woman he’s pursuing (or maybe pursued earlier; she’s not sure) and how he isn’t sure how to go about it but he doesn’t want to risk hurting her, and Dianne’s so nervous and caught up in the moment she assumes she’s the one he’s pursuing, though she doesn’t understand how that can hurt her. He says something filled with s and m sounds that she can’t hear exactly over the shriek of the cappuccino machine. Her brain wants to believe that he has said, “I share your sentiments.” Then he compliments her for having the courage to express her feelings, and her yoga mind kicks in and she starts talking crazy—about their connectedness and the positive karmic energy vibes she’s been having.

He still has his reading face. He’s still mumbling. She’s not sure where this is going, but they talk about writing and life and the cosmic glory of it all. He tells her she’s a good person. She goes home ecstatic.

And then, nothing. He drops off the grid.

She learns later from a friend of his that what she thought was “I share your sentiments” was really “I’m seeing someone.”

The humiliation is complete. He has broken her heart.

On a hot day in August she crams her life in a truck. Not unlike a turtle, she hauls everything she owns a thousand miles to New England. She will start over, clear her head, forget about What’s-his-name and how things went awry. Maybe forget isn’t right. Maybe the trip is a diversion. In any case, she moves. She doesn’t say goodbye.

A friend emails her to tell her Rob came back around to the coffeehouse after he learned she was gone but said things just weren’t the same, so he’s gone again. No one knows where.

She emails back to the friend that she can’t be responsible for What’s-his-name’s happiness. “Don’t send me anything about him. I don’t want to know.”

Once or twice after that, she has dreams about him—he wears a coat and is standing far away in a field, with his back to her; she can barely make him out through the blowing snow. She assumes this is her mind’s way of putting buffers between them. The hurt heals, little by little.

Maine winters are too dark too long. She moves back to the Midwest in the spring. She sees Rob on the street. She remembers. Be still, my heart.

He flags her down, asks her how she is, and invites her to join him for dinner. They sit in the neighborhood burger joint, waiting for their order. He plays table hockey with a plastic coffee stirrer and a jelly packet. He says he’s missed her, says he’s glad that she’s home.

Like a stick scraped against a picket fence, his words rattle old feelings. She eyes him suspiciously. She has been down this road.

The jelly packet slides between the salt and pepper shakers. He sets it back in the holder. He’s through playing. “So, how was it where you were?” he asks.

“Strange,” she says. “How was it where you were?”

He looks confused before he answers, like he thinks she must be thinking of someone else. “I was here.”

“I know you were here. How was it?”

“Okay, I guess.” He smiles with his eyes. “It wasn’t the same with you gone.”

Still the charmer. Of course it was the same, she wants to shout. Words line up on her tongue and pack like cotton against her teeth. It was every bit the same as it was when I was here because you can’t figure out if you care or you don’t. You’re a selfish prick bastard. She takes a breath. How many other women have you led on since I left? How many women do you keep on that lovesick little string you call you? Have you changed your ways, or are you still like you were? Are you seeing someone? Did she give you a day off? What is it you want with me? That’s what she wants to say to him, but she can’t. She must be calm. He invited her, after all. Maybe things have changed. She has to be cool, just in case. The words get crowded in her mouth, and she washes them down with a long deep cold drink of Coca-Cola. All she really wants to hear, she realizes as she swallows, is for him to tell her he loves her. Bastard or not, that’s what she wants. But she understands it won’t happen. She has to take what she can get. “That’s so sweet.”

“I’m still a mailman. Out of Twenty-Third Street Station.”

“That’s good. Work is good.” She looks at his fingers, his neck, the open collar of his shirt. No rings, no chains. He’s wearing the same little ankh he wore the first time they met.

The waitress brings plates of greasy fries and burgers trussed with toothpicks. “Will there be anything else?”

He says no.

Dianne wants to say yes. She wants to say, Yes, I want you to read his mind and tell me why we’re here. I want you to tell me if, when he comes here without me, does he come here alone? She’s vacillating; a war between emotion and reason is boiling up inside her. But she looks at the waitress, tells her, “No. I think we’re okay.” She can’t say that they’re good.

The waitress lays the check down and leaves. Rob watches her go and then looks back at Dianne. “So, what’d you do? While you were gone, what’d you do?” he asks.

She lived alone, licked her wounds. “I tried to find a job.”

“So why’d you come back?”

“Didn’t find one. I was running out of money. I was to the point where I could sell my stuff and maybe get enough to live one more month there or spend what I had to bring my stuff back here. I liked my bookcases, and besides, Maine was no place to be homeless. It’s a hard, strange place to live.”

“Did you miss me?” he asks.

She thinks about the way he looked in that coat. “What was there to miss?”

“Ouch.” He lifts an eyebrow, takes a bite, chews slowly, his eyes scanning the dining room. “The war in Iraq started while you were gone.”

Grotesque green images of shock and awe flash in her head. “No shit,” she says, regretting that she says it. Confrontation makes her uneasy.

“I used to be in the Army. Special Forces,” he tells her. “Parachutes.”

This is a new side of him. She doesn’t think she likes it. “Really? How long ago was that?”

“Right after high school, like twenty years ago. We were trained to be the first ones in in an invasion.”

She has to ask: “So in the old wars, the colors were different, weren’t they? Did you notice how in this war the color scheme of battle shifted from the usual oranges, reds, yellows and grays to a more soothing, relaxing, restful sort of green? I was watching the bombing— Who wasn’t watching the bombing? With all the night-vision goggles and night lenses on the news cameras, the Baghdad invasion looked more like a giant tree-growing party instead of what was really going on—soldiers dumping mega-doses of smoke, bombs and death on civilians. Don’t tell me I’m the only one who noticed that.” Her anger is up in her throat as she speaks. “Is that what you used to do? Mega-death?”

He shrugs. “There wasn’t a war when I was in the Army. We just trained. It’s why my knees are fucked up.”

He wants her to feel sorry for him. Anger and sympathy lodge in her throat and she coughs to clear them away.

He picks up her water glass and hands it to her. “Take a sip.”

She drinks.

“It’s good that you’re back,” he tells her again when she has set the glass down. “I missed you a lot.”

He invites her to the writing class he’s been attending, swears that she’ll love it. She goes, and she doesn’t.

Afterwards they buy ice cream and he takes her on a driving tour of an old neighborhood with smooth red brick buildings and trees that meet over the streets. It is nighttime. Mid-summer. Children are outside playing in the dark—counting, shouting, singing, laughing, making all kinds of noises. Hip hop rattles from boom boxes in a knot of teens in a park; angry voices billow from open windows. A cool breeze drifts into the car, carrying with it exotic aromas and languages Dianne doesn’t know.

“This isn’t where you live, is it?” she asks. She knows better, but she’s puzzled.

“This is where I deliver mail.” He lapses into a travelogue as he steers his car through the streets. “I’ve just been reassigned. This neighborhood is mostly poor- to modest-income multicultural—Latinos, Somalis, Asians, Bosnians, blacks and whites. English is a second language for most of these people, even the Americans,” he laughs. “Lots of government mail.”

He jabs his finger at houses. “I deliver mail here, here and here,” he points out, cruising round and round, like he’s trying to reconstruct his grid. “There’s a mean dog at that house, and a crazy woman there. Here, past all these three-story apartment buildings, I’ve delivered here. They look empty, but they’re not. People live in them. Without glass in the windows. I’ve delivered mail through here.”

He slows the car at an intersection but doesn’t stop as he peers into the shadows beyond the streetlight. “There’s this one place, if I can find it, at the bottom of a hill, that looks like an empty warehouse.” He revs the engine and jumps a hill in his hurry. There’s a ball bat in the street. He swerves around it. “It has signs up, unfit for use or whatever they say, but people work there. There are people working inside and I hand someone the mail.” He laughs again.

Dianne is patient. If this is what he wants to give her, then she has to be patient. It’s the only time they have.

“What do they do there?” she asks.

“Anybody’s guess,” he says, rolling down a hill to a long low wooden warehouse. He pulls up to the curb and they creep forward. “This is it,” he whispers, as though being here is sacred. “See, there are signs. Someone’s painted NO ENTRY in red and blue. But people work there every day.”

“Doing what?” Dianne asks again.

They’re inching past it, not-so-stopped now in the street.

“I don’t know. Something. They’re doing something. Not right now. In the daytime. Nobody speaks English.”

He punches the gas and the tires spin against the pavement. They rush toward an old bridge and slither under it and do a sharp turn to the left. They’re on a wider street now, heading back toward the houses.

“Every yard on the route stinks of dog shit,” he says. “Every yard. We’re supposed to walk back down the sidewalk to the street and then back up the next sidewalk, but I don’t. Nobody does. We all cut across the grass. Except here. Here in this neighborhood particularly there is about one ton of dog shit per yard in the grass, mostly between the houses, mostly where we walk. So I take the long route. It takes more time, but I don’t have to stop and puke every other house. That takes time, too.”

Dianne doesn’t want to be impolite and hurt his feelings, but she finds his fascination with the neighborhood underwhelming. She yawns and stretches. It’s all phony. “I don’t mean to interrupt—”

“Sure, yeah. I can take you home.”

They drive a few blocks in silence.

“You must like what you do.”

“This place we’re in is the worst place in the city to deliver mail,” Rob tells her as he drives his car down a dark street in a part of town Dianne’s never seen.

They’re returning from a poetry reading at a church in midtown. It’s a few nights after Halloween. They’ve been getting along of late. Dianne’s not sure why but their friendship is the best that it’s been. The terms are tenuous: She gives and asks for nothing, he gives nothing in return. Everything’s by chance. They don’t talk about how they feel. They just talk about what is. There’s no yesterday or tomorrow. Today is as good as it gets.

In this neighborhood, gutted shriveled jack o’lanterns lay dead in the streets and snarling dogs strain in the dark against fences, posts and chains. Every fifty feet there’s a new bad smell—oil, smoke, mold, rot, shit, garbage, death. In the smoky yellow light of an open doorway of a ramshackle house, Dianne sees a silhouetted man with wild hair grasp his penis and piss from his porch. She looks away.

“Nothing about this place is good,” she says when they reach a corner. “You’re not working here now, are you?”

“No.”

“So you brought me here because?”

Rob is driving back over streets they’ve already been on. “I didn’t want to come here by myself.”

“You’re kidding,” she laughs. “You wanted me to protect you?”

“I wanted you to see it.”

“Something of this reminds you of me?”

“Of me,” he says. “Everything about this place reminds me of me.” They stop at a stop sign. He pauses and swallows and then turns the corner. “When I was a kid growing up in Tulsa, I was a punk. Hustled kids for their cash, stole cars and sold car parts to make money.”

She waits for the punch line or the confession he’s found Jesus. It doesn’t come. “And you’re telling me this because?”

“This neighborhood is like Tulsa, like the place where I grew up.”

“Wow, I’m sorry. This would suck.”

“Shit happens.”

“And so why are we here tonight?” She looks at his face in the near dark. He is looking straight ahead, driving slow. His lips are taut. He has put on his mask.

“I guess because I’m afraid.”

His answer surprises her. He’s never said how he feels—about anything. He’s just gone with the flow.

“My life was fairy princess stuff compared to yours,” she says, trying to bring levity to the moment. “My childhood, anyway. I got tripped up after I grew up.”

A car comes toward them slowly. The street is packed on both sides with parked pickups and junked cars. There’s barely anywhere to go. Rob steers toward the side and slows and waits. The street is so narrow.

He looks at her. His eyes are red, wet and pained. “Like I said….”

The other car edges past them, the driver staring hard at them while they both try to look straight ahead.

She pats his thigh, realizing this is the first time she’s touched him since the day they met two years back. “It’s okay. I’m here to protect you.” Again, she tries to make it light.

He chuckles. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

He doesn’t start driving. They just sit in the dark behind the carcass of a truck. He breathes louder than he’s ever breathed. “My old man was a drunk. He used to beat my mom.”

“That would be scary.”

“He killed her with his fists when I was fourteen.”

She can’t touch that. Nothing she can say or do will take that hurt away, but she blurts out, “I’m sorry.”

He presses on the gas, eases back onto the street. “I should probably get you home.”

At the end of the block, he turns onto the thoroughfare that will take them out of the bad neighborhood and away. They drive in silence to a part of the city where there are streetlights, smaller dogs and better smells, down wide streets where people’s doors are closed against the night.

“You’re not your father,” she says when they get to her house.

He turns on the dome light, glances at her and her front door, tells her good night.

“Do you want to come in?” she asks.

He shakes his head but doesn’t look at her. “I just wanted you to know.”

“And now I do. Would you like to come in for a while?”

He shakes his head again.

“Let me guess. You’ve got mail.”

“There’s always that.”

She reaches for the car door handle. “You’re an odd man. You know that?”

He looks at her. “More than you’ll ever know. See you. Good night.”

She gets out, dashes up the stairs and steps onto the front porch.

He doesn’t even wait till she’s inside. His tires spin on the damp pavement, his taillights fade in the dark.

All she can do is stand and watch him go.