Losing It (13 page)

Nine

A few days later I sat with Allison Block from work in a downtown seating area with pink concrete dividers separating us from the historic main street walkway. People waded through the heat, peering into store windows. A very old man and woman walked by, hand in hand.

“Cute couple,” she said, tilting her head to the side.

“Awww,” I said, trying to get into the spirit.

We were people watching. It's what Allison suggested we do when I'd asked her if she wanted to get a drink. We'd always been chatty, and I thought it would be good to have a friend in town. Someone to go out with. But within five minutes of sitting down with her, I could tell she was already zipped up in her life and didn't have time for or really need another girlfriend.

“Anyway,” she said. She stealthily whipped her hair around so it landed on a different shoulder and readjusted her sunglasses. “We settled on the farmhouse-style tables in the end. God. Stop me. This must be so boring for you.”

“No, no! I mean, it sounds like it's like trying to organize a United Nations conference,” I said. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat.

She was telling me about her wedding. She was getting married in the fall. The guy was named Caleb Clark and they met at Duke but they hadn't hit it off. It was only now, years later, when they were the only two people on some stupid ghost tour, that they'd reconnected. These were some of the things she told me. He was from a large, sprawling, storied Southern family, and his mother was addicted to sleeping pills, but it was more like a joke, just one more quirk in a cast of eccentrics because—and this is something I gathered, that she didn't tell me—they had money. Money like ancient ore in the Clark family line, money that nullified all problems and that had a home in a mansion surrounded by forty acres on an estate about thirty miles out of town. Allison had alluded to this in an under-the-breath way, but I could tell she savored it, the fact that this would be her life, that she held it in her mouth like a lemon drop. And maybe because of this, or maybe because this was just the way she
was
, her whole bearing was as peaceful as a just-made bed. And so it didn't seem right to nose in with my uncomfortable problems.

I watched an ant, trapped in the hairs on my arm. I wondered if, now that she'd fallen through all these lucky chutes, if it must have seemed preordained to her, like it would never have been any other way. I wondered if she'd ever felt like a pinball, rolling appallingly down the center of the board toward the gutter at the bottom, unable to divert into a different life.

“My aunt Viv,” I offered up, “who I'm staying with, is fifty-five and she's a virgin.”

“Oh, no!” said Allison, as if my hat had flown off.

That's how she would be about it. She'd be just like that, about everything, gutturally amused, like life was a tragic, funny pageant. She could afford to be that way, now that she had what she had.

I thought of Viv, on her knees, patting something down in the garden. All those years alone in that house.

“How did that happen?” she said.

“I don't know,” I said, looking over her shoulder, into the distance.

“Uh-oh,” she said, scrunching her face up in an amused way.

“What?”

She gestured toward something and I looked over. A man with a bunch of tattoos wearing a leather vest and a plaid skirt and holding a beat-up cardboard box was walking our way.

“Just don't make eye contact with him,” I said. “He's got a bunch of plastic anime figurines in that box and he'll try to sell them to us if you seem one iota interested. So just, seriously, don't look him in the eye, it's happened to me twice.”

“Okay,” she said. “That shouldn't be hard.”

The man passed us.

“He kind of reminds me of Elliot.”

I looked at her. “From work?” I said. “Really? Why?”

“The ponytail.”

“Yeah, he has a ponytail, but I would say that's the only thing they have in common.”

“It's just that Elliot's is so long,” she said.

“Yeah, it is pretty long.”

“He thinks he's a Highland warrior or something.”

“I know,” I said wistfully.

“I mean, don't get me wrong, he's
nice
,” she said, unscrewing the top of her sparkling water.

She was staring at me.

“What?” I said.

She smiled. “You like him.”

I was playing with the side of the napkin. “No I don't!” I said. “Besides, he's married.”

“Yeah,” she said distantly.

She put her bottle down. “His wife, Devon, she came into the office once.” She made a comically frightened expression.

“What?” I said.

“Well, first of all, she's like fifty feet tall.”

“I knew it,” I said. “I knew she was crazy.”

“She came in holding this huge vase. I think it was supposed to be a gift? For the office? Well, they kept walking around with it. She was like, ‘Put it there, no, put it there,' you know? Like kind of bossy?”

“Yeah.”

“You can tell who wears the pants. The way he looked at her—just, in love, you know?”

“Yeah,” I said uneasily.

We were quiet for a few moments. A large man on a small bike wobbled by.

“I'm going to set her up,” I said. “My aunt.”

Allison nodded, swallowing a gulp of water.

“You are?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you think that's a good idea?”

“Well, why not?”

“Maybe she likes things the way they are.”

“No,” I said, “I don't think so.”

I had to know it could happen for Aunt Viv. That the tide of bad luck, or whatever it was, could be reversed. I didn't want to do the background mental shifts to accommodate the kind of world where she'd be alone forever. If you looked at it from the outside, it made total sense—a man and a woman meeting in their late fifties and falling in love. And, on the board game of their lives, there had to be some pike or fork that diverted them into each other's path. And maybe that was supposed to be me. I had to know the pattern could be broken. The summer was more than halfway over. I felt the dark sides of my predicament pressing in on me.

An exhausted dog with its tongue hanging out walked by.

Allison tilted her head into the sun and closed her eyes. “Mmmm,” she said, “it's such a nice day,” as if the whole world nourished
her.

Ten

I stared at the long nose and noble face of the watercolor teacher. She had completely white hair, swept back, and was wearing a loose-fitting flannel shirt. She looked like the kind of plain-Jane woman who still managed to elicit gritty loyalty in the men she was with. Not exactly pretty, but elegant in the way she did things. She probably had a quiet, studious way that a man would eventually fall in love with without really knowing why. She looked like she had had a lot of unself-conscious sex, like her life was racked by sex and she never even talked about it because it was such a given. I could see her being bent over things, bending, bending, bending, over a wooden horse, a sofa, laughing, her life replete, sun-soaked. She probably knew how to change a tire, and had a laugh like ribbons crumpling to the ground. I could just see her life. I could just see it.

Everyone was looking at me.

“My name is Julia,” I said. “And I'm here because I wanted to try something new. I did some watercoloring once, when I was a kid, but I've forgotten how to do it since then.”

“I'm Sandy,” said the woman next to me. “I've had some experience, but I wanted to learn more about the technique.”

“I'm Aames,” said the guy next to her. “I'm here for a friend.” Everyone laughed. He had long gray hair fanned out over a tattered jean jacket, and he looked around at everyone with a rigid, defiant expression as if challenging us to not think he was charming.

It was the day of my first watercolor class and it had rained. When I got to the college campus, all the redbrick pathways were misting and people were just starting to emerge from under awnings, shaking out their umbrellas. I parked and walked in what I thought was the right direction.

The campus, sleepy during the summer, was composed of colonial-style buildings and pleasantly unkempt trees. The building I walked toward, however, seemed to be some kind of cubist, concrete, 1970s add-on. I passed two metal benches outside the entrance and a sculpture of suspended silver zigzags.

I took the elevator up to a big airy room on the third floor. It was nice enough with the windows open, looking out onto all the wet, jungly greenery outside. The smell of rain came in. Someone had shoved a bunch of chairs and some burlap couches to one end, and people were standing around, waiting for the teacher, some leaning against the windowsills.

Upon entering, I immediately scanned the room for possibilities. There was a mom-type with a sullen sixteen-year-old daughter. There were a few women in business clothes chatting and eating pasta out of Tupperware and wearing plastic badges as if they'd just come from their jobs as health administrators; a cheerful lady, wearing linen overalls, who I just knew was going to be pleasant to talk to; then there was the guy named Aames, with his hair fanned over his back.

The teacher strode in wearing riding boots. Behind her was Gerald.

Gerald Campbell. There was just something so open about him. That was the first thing I noticed. He had the tentative, fragile smile of a kid who got routinely bullied and was constantly trying to make amends.

He seemed more or less my age, maybe a little older. He had a fleshy, square-shaped face. He was wearing the ill-fitting jeans of a homeschooler, or someone who had been too protected to develop a sense of cultural agility, and a thick, striped sweater. He had darting eyes and that delicate smile, and then there was a detail that would, in any other circumstance, have caused me to completely discount him—a neon-green lucky rabbit's foot hanging from his belt loop.

None of this would usually have added up to anything resembling the type of guy I would have wanted to be in any type of heavy-breathing situation with, but ever since the conversation with my mom I'd felt a dark, locked-down sense of purpose. I watched him lean his watercolor pad against the wall, look hopefully around, and apologize to no one in particular when his keys fell to the floor. It was the time for action, and here was a nice, eager, sweet-looking guy. Not exactly the man of my dreams, but someone who would work for a once-off, an anonymous encounter.

I was further emboldened when he introduced himself. “I'm Gerald,” he said. “I just moved to town, and I thought I'd just get out there and try something new.” His voice was really low and a little gravelly, which dispelled his slightly uncooked exterior a little.

I attempted to set my easel—an unwieldy wooden thing I'd had
to lug from a corner of the room—next to his, in a way that I hoped didn't seem too obvious, although I had a feeling that the sixteen-year-old girl, who was shooting looks my way, knew exactly what I was doing the whole time.

We all hauled out paints and palettes and brushes from a supply closet and set everything up. Our teacher began the class with a demonstration in which she created flower petals with simple dabs of the brush.

“I like your rabbit's foot,” I said to him, once we got started. In the tumult of getting ready, the class had proven to be a jovial one, with everyone sort of cheerily apologizing for getting in each other's way, and talking and complimenting one another on their progress. There was enough chatter going on, with the teacher walking slowly around the circle to offer tips, that starting a conversation with the person next to me did not seem to ripple anything in a strange way.

“Ah, thank you, thank you,” he said, looking down at it. “My brother gave it to me. He said it was good luck, and so I started wearing it, and now I'm afraid to take it off.”

“I understand,” I said, which was true. This was just the kind of superstitious nonsense I could relate to.

Next he offered something: “Have you seen her work?” he said, indicating our teacher. I could tell he didn't think we were flirting yet.

“No,” I said. “You mean, is she like locally famous or something?”

“I looked her up. She won the North Carolina stamp design competition.”

“No kidding.” I watched the teacher; she was leaning over the girl, pointing at something on her canvas. “I didn't know any old person off the street could design a stamp.”

“Well, what with budget cuts and everything,” he said. His eyes cut to me.

I laughed. “What would you design? If you had to make a stamp.”

“Hmmm.” He seemed to take the question very seriously. “Maybe a bird, the state bird. What about you?”

“For North Carolina? Maybe like an old . . . barn.”

He smiled. “I like it.”

“You're really off-roading there,” I said about ten minutes later, pointing at his pad, on which he'd painted a lizard walking up the side of the page, with squiggles around it to indicate its zany passage.

He burst out laughing. And then I saw him look at me in a new way, size me up as a possibility, and then immediately extinguish any thought that I might be coming on to him.

I liked the warmth in his eyes. He had such a completely different feeling about him than Bill Meeks did. Bill was filled with compacted, frantic resentment, and this person was all trust and light and belief and the sense that anything was worth a try.

“I want to design logos,” he said.

“Really?”

He nodded.

“That's nice,” I said. “That's nice and specific. Do you have anything in mind? Any logos you've got in the pipeline?”

“Well.” He got kind of serious. “I've been thinking about it. I have one idea—it would be for contact lenses?”

I nodded.

“Just for any brand. You always see people putting them in, in the commercials. And clear green fields and things like that. But I was thinking, there could be a little blue guy.”

“A little blue guy?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “As the logo.” He nodded to himself. “And he would be on the box and everything.”

“Sure, yeah,” I said. “What would he be doing?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, on the box.”

“I don't know,” said Gerald. “Maybe, sitting on a porch swing? Or, standing next to a windmill.”

I waited for him to go on.

“Cool,” I said. “Maybe he could be leaning against the letters, causing them to jumble together.”

Gerald considered it. It dawned on him. “Yeah,” he said. “I like that.”

“Or lying on top of them. Like he's just
been
lying on top of them.”

He nodded. “That's good, too. Anyway,” he said. “It's just one idea I have. I have to think about it more.”

“I think it's really good,” I said. “You've got to start somewhere.”

“Yeah.” He laughed a little. “I guess so.”

There was something else about the way he looked at me—a slight, decorous pulling back, as if he didn't want me to think he expected anything out of our flirting. I could feel it. If it was going to be him, I was going to have to be the one to make a move.

I thought about it for the last half hour of the class. I was getting
nervous. I kept looking at the clock above the chalkboard. Soon people would start gathering their things. I didn't want to wait another week for something to happen—here was a man, we were flirting, and this was exactly what I had come here this summer to do. Of all the possible ways it could happen, of all the different men and varieties of the experience, a nice guy in a thick sweater from an art class was not the worst of all possible outcomes.

I was getting so focused on the end of the class that I was clamming up, going rigid while trying to bend myself into affecting the right kind of measured nonchalance.

Luckily, he gave me an in, and I went ahead and took the plunge.

“Crap,” he said, looking down at his rabbit's foot, which was splattered with a little paint.

“It'll come out,” I said.

“This was my favorite one.” He looked up at me while unclipping it from his belt and wrapping it in some newspaper. “I have a collection.”

“Of rabbit's feet?”

“Yup.”

“I'd like to see it sometime.”

For a moment he seemed terrified. And then it dawned on him, what was happening. “You should.”

Strangely, I felt proud of him.

“When?” I said.

And then it happened so quickly, the way we made plans and exchanged numbers, as if we were both trying to trap something.

We looked at each other, both a little embarrassed, smiling.

I had it all planned out.

Viv and I sat across from each other, a few days after the watercolor class, at a restaurant that had fashioned itself like a French bistro. Smudged mirrors with lightbulbs around them hung on the walls, shedding a golden, cheerful glow. It was rainy outside and the windows were fogged up and it was humid. Viv's hair was frizzier than usual, but she looked nice. She was wearing a silk blouse with a faint zebra print, and a necklace made of green stones and dangling, antique-looking earrings. They were swinging back and forth. She put up her hands to still them. “I think it should be incorporated more into our general vocabulary,” she said, “‘My personal Hillary Step,' that kind of thing.”

She was telling me about a book on Mount Everest she was reading, and the people who have climbed it. We were on our first glass of wine, and color was leaping into her face.

“Yeah, that would be useful,” I said. “You could say, ‘Getting past that performance exam was a real Hillary Step.'”

“Exactly,” she said.

“It sounds good,” I said.

“I got it from Melayna,” she said.

“Who?” I said, kidding.

“Melayna,” she said.

“Yeah, no, I know.”

“She's turned out to be interesting,” said Viv, with authority. She sat back and looked around in a pleased, dignified manner. “I like it here,” she said. “How did you find it? I never hear of these things.”

“There was an article about it in the paper,” I said. “The weekly one.”

A woman with a wet umbrella and hair plastered to her head walked by, brushing our table with her wet raincoat.