Follow Me (54 page)

She would convince him that he had no choice but to accept her version of the truth as the one that would determine his course
of action in the days and months ahead. But at the same time, the resolute conviction that she was wrong would plant itself
just beyond articulable thought, where belief is experienced as a murky but potentially influential feeling. He didn’t believe
her, and with a similar vague awareness, she recognized this. Yet he couldn’t deny that there were many reasons to believe
her. She gave him more reasons than he could ever counter, and by the end of her visit he was forced to acknowledge with words
that sounded artificial to both of them, when spoken aloud, that she must be right.

She was his mother, and she’d come to tell him what to do. Here was a hefty sum of money, more than two thousand dollars.
Take it, Abe, and run. Run away. Leave Sally to explain to Penelope why she’d been abandoned by the man she loved. Or not
to explain to her,
for such things,
she would think helplessly,
are inexplicable
. That’s what she would offer instead of telling her the truth about Abe. Faced with the reality that her daughter would be
raising a child who never should have been conceived, Sally would decide that the best comfort she could offer Penelope was
to keep her ignorant.

Buster Boy,

Where are you?

You said you’d be here by four o’clock last Saturday. That was a week ago.

You said you loved me.

You said you would never leave me.

You stopped answering your phone.

You no longer live at the address I have for you.

You quit your job.

You broke your promise.

Why have you gone away? Answer me. But you can’t answer me because you’re not reading this letter. You’re not reading this
letter because I don’t know where to send it. I don’t know where to send it because you went away without telling me where
you were going. I’d hate you if I didn’t love you so much. Nothing can make me stop loving you, even the fact that you’ve
destroyed me. Abe, why have you done this?

There was a song my mother used to sing: it’s simple to wish, and simple to dream.

I was singing that song in the shower on Saturday afternoon when I was getting ready to see you. You know a lot about me,
but you haven’t heard me sing, since I sing only in the shower. It made me laugh to think that someday you’d hear the terrible
noise I produce called singing. My mother is the singer in my family. She could have made a career of it. She might have tried
if I hadn’t come along. She had to find a job to support me. It’s hard for single mothers. Did you ever consider that?

But I was telling you what I did on Saturday. I took a shower, dried my hair, put on the jeans you like, the skinny Levi’s
with the button-up fly. I watched the TV in the common room. There was an interview with an Englishwoman who was fired from
a cannon. She wanted to break the human cannonball record and fly clear over a river, but she missed her mark and fell into
the safety net. She said she thought they’d ironed out the troubles with the cannon, and she was going to try again. I was
planning to tell you about her when you arrived. By then it was four o’clock, and I waited for your knock on the door. I kept
waiting. At six o’clock I called your house, but there was no answer. At eight o’clock I called Stacey and got your friend
Sam’s number. But no one answered at Sam’s all evening. I skipped dinner. I couldn’t sleep. I kept picturing your car wrapped
around a tree on some back road. My Buster Boy. What has happened to you? I finally got Sam on the phone the next morning,
but he didn’t know where you were. I called your work number, and they said you’d quit. I called Stacey and asked her to go
to the address I had for you. She called me late in the afternoon. She’d talked to the landlord and learned that you’d packed
your bags, paid up your rent for the month, and moved away.

That’s impossible. You wouldn’t have moved away without telling me.

Where are you?

Don’t you love me anymore?

This is how I’ve been spending my days: I wake up in the dark, about five a.m. I look at the phone to see if it’s ringing,
and even though it’s not ringing I pick up the receiver and wait for your voice to speak to me. But you don’t speak. I hang
up the phone and go down the hall to the bathroom, where I throw up. I throw up once every morning. Our child is a small hard
bulge low in my belly. I sing to it in the shower, I sing, It’s simple to guess that you and I will never stop being in love.

Where are you?

Why won’t you answer me?

After I take a shower I get back into bed and read. I’m reading Dreiser’s
American Tragedy.
I read chapter 41 this morning and thought of you. Here’s a quote: “All that he would see or feel was that this meant the
loss of everything to him.” Here’s another quote: “The loss of all his splendid dreams.” Did this bulge in my belly threaten
all your splendid dreams, Abe? Is that why you’ve gone away? We didn’t need to have this child. These are modern times, and
we have won the invaluable freedom to choose how to live our lives. I thought we’d made the choice together, Abe. You and
me. We were committed to each other by the power of love. We were going to spend the rest of our lives together. Forever.
You said that word to me. You whispered it to me, remember, when you were inside me.

I thought you meant that FOREVER went with the word LOVE. But now I wonder if I’d been deceived and you were only pretending
to love me so you could fuck me on a regular basis. If that’s true, Buster Boy, you deserve an Oscar, for you really had me
fooled. When I had my legs wrapped around you and we were both sloppy with sweat, you had me fooled. When you traced the center
of me with kisses, you had me fooled. When we were pressed hip to hip, you had me fooled. When I spent the rest of the day
smelling your aftershave on me and daydreaming about us together, I never guessed that I’d fallen for the oldest trick in
the book.

I am baffled and disgusted and desperate. But I can’t be angry with you, not until you admit that you were using me. I need
you to put it into words. Say it, say that I am nothing to you. Nothing. I want you to whisper it in my ear. Repeat after
me: You are nothing. I don’t care about you. I don’t love you and I never loved you. I want to hear you say it. You’d better
say it over the phone and not in person, or otherwise I might tear your eyes out. Just kidding. But it would be a relief to
be furious. I can’t be furious at an absence. I am nothing, and you are nothing. We are the space left behind by broken promises.

I skipped classes on Wednesday and took the bus into New York. I walked from the Port Authority up to Columbus Circle and
then across 59th and up Fifth Avenue. I stopped to browse at a book vendor, and I picked up a copy of a book. It was the Dreiser
novel,
An American Tragedy.
Have you ever read it? It seems strange to have to ask, but I’m only just starting to realize how much I don’t know about
you. I was reading the description on the back of the book, when all of a sudden I heard your voice. You said, “And then we’ll
take the night train to Vienna.” But it wasn’t you, of course. It was another guy, he was about your age, a few inches shorter,
and he was walking with his arm around a girl. They were planning a trip, I guess. They were talking about traveling around
Europe together, and it made me so jealous and sad to think that we would never take a trip like that, and now it’s too late,
you’ve moved on to a better life and left me behind. I was thinking about this as I started to walk away. I kicked at the
rotting leaves and thought about how alone I was. I was still holding the book, Dreiser’s novel, and the vendor shouted at
me, he called, “Hey, lady, are you going to pay for that or what?” And guess what I did in response. That’s right, I started
to cry. I stood there bawling on the sidewalk while appropriately clutching
An American Tragedy.
I am an American tragedy. I was duped into playing the role of the naïve girl. How did that happen? I would never have thought
I could be so easily trapped. I’d always been so tough and independent, you said so yourself, you said I was the toughest
girl you’d ever known. But you wore me down, Abe. My love for you has made me pathetic. I was a pathetic mess, standing there
bawling on Fifth Avenue. An American tragedy. It’s an old story, a familiar story. Can tragedy be pathetic? That vendor, he
must have felt sorry for me. He gave me the book for free. It was just a used paperback with a creased cover, priced at fifty
cents. But the man wanted me to have it for free. So I said thank you, and I took the book and managed to stop crying. As
I walked uptown carrying that thick book, I considered how stupid I’d been. I’d always thought I could recognize a trap when
I saw it. But I was starting to realize that the world was like the unread book in my hand. Until I took the time to read
it, I wouldn’t be able to tell up from down. There was so much to learn. I needed to learn more about other lives in order
to understand my own.

I felt a little better after spending a few hours in New York. I called my mother from a pay phone in the Port Authority and
told her I was coming home. I got there at midnight. She was waiting for me at the station. On the car ride back to the house,
I told her about us. I was surprised at how easily our story could be summed up, how small and predictable it seemed to my
own ears. But mostly I was grateful because my mother didn’t react to the news of my pregnancy with disappointment. She became
suddenly practical and reminded me that abortion is safe and legal. She doesn’t want me to repeat her mistake and become saddled
with a child before I’m ready. But it’s too late, I’m already committed, and I’m not going to let your cruelty change my mind.
Once my mother understood that she couldn’t talk me out of it, she was so quick to come up with a plan that it almost seemed
like she’d rehearsed it. She reminded me that I must see a doctor for regular checkups. And she told me to get back to school
so I could finish the semester. I’d take the spring off, she said, and then she would look after the baby when I returned
to complete my degree in the fall. She said she wants me to prepare for whatever career I choose. This isn’t the end of my
life, she insisted. It is a beginning, she said, and she promised me that as long as I kept looking to the future, I’d get
over you.

She’s wrong about that. I won’t get over you, Abe. I will think about you every day for the rest of my life. I will imagine
you in different places around the world, caught up in different jobs, in bed with different women, enjoying new adventures
to replace the old ones. I will come up with a thousand explanations for why you left me. Thirty years from now, I will smell
your aftershave in a crowd, and it will be as if no time at all has passed since we last made love. I will love other men,
but they will never replace you. I won’t forgive you, but neither will I stop loving you. And even if I’ve discovered that
I don’t really know you as well as I thought I did, I know you well enough to continue believing that you would have chosen
to stay with me forever if the situation had allowed you to choose. Something beyond your control drove you away. I want to
blame you, but I can’t. All of which is to say that despite the fact that you broke my heart, Buster Boy, you’ll always be
welcome if you ever want to come back. I am writing to tell you that.

The problem is, you’ll never read this letter because without an address for you, I can’t send it. I can’t even say good-bye.

Penelope

He didn’t intend to throw himself off the pedestrian bridge and drown in the river. He didn’t leave his room early that morning
to fulfill a specific plan. As he wove through the streets in the direction of the gorge, splashing through rivulets streaming
toward sewer drains, stepping over branches that had been downed by the wind, he was thinking to himself that the whole situation
was too absurd to take seriously, and he was everybody’s favorite clown. Ha-ha, look at him go, staggering on tiptoes to the
right, oops, then to the left. What a funny man.

Could he help it if the ground went one way and he went another? Having stayed up the night before washing down warm Smirnoff
with warm Smirnoff, he wasn’t completely balanced. He wanted to laugh at himself and was about to let out a big guffaw, but
a car’s horn preempted him, warning him to get out of the middle of the street. Geesh, he could have been killed!

There — he thought of it first as an accident narrowly averted, then as a prospect to consider, then as a direction to follow.
Somewhere ahead of him was an end to the torture. Beyond that point, he would no longer have to think about what he’d done
and what he’d have to live without.

He followed the street under the highway, across the intersection, and toward the river. By the time he reached the ruins
of Boxman’s Mill by the falls, the sky was a pale blue and most of the streetlights had blinked off. He stood for a few minutes
by the stone steps leading to the old mill wheel. He pictured the wheel in motion, turned by the force of water surging through
the race.

Standing by the ruined mill, he began to feel for a second time that morning that he was being watched. It seemed that he
was being observed and judged by his willingness to follow through with his purpose, now that he had a purpose, which was…
he had to think for a moment, yes, he was on his way to the pedestrian bridge that spanned the gorge. The bridge provided
a convenient destination — the point from which he would not return. There, he could see the first lamppost behind the corner
of the old button factory, and, as he approached, the second lamppost, and then the whole bridge and the smokestacks of the
brewery on the opposite bank.