I Regret Everything (20 page)

Khakis and an oxford cloth shirt were the perfect uniform if one had nearly killed a homeless man in suburban Connecticut and wanted to remain anonymous. Other than the carving knife at my hip, obscured by the untucked shirt, I looked like any other local out for an evening stroll. Spaulding had changed into a pale blue dress that hung loosely on her as we tramped toward the train. Cars drove past and no one gave us a second look. The evening was cool and starlit. A breeze carried a salt tang. The forested acres leaned oppressively close. Somewhere the intruder lurked.

“I had a dream where I killed a Minotaur,” I said. “That's what was going through my mind when I thought he was dead on the floor. My Minotaur.”

“Really? In my head I called him Grendel.”

“You've read
Beowulf
?”

“We did a section in English called Literary Monsters.
Beowulf
,
Frankenstein
, the Hulk from Marvel Comics.”

The mix of bliss and terror was wholly new. How could I not be smitten with someone who after nearly being murdered references
Beowulf
? Putting my arm around Spaulding, I held her to me. It took nearly an hour to navigate to the distant train station. On the empty platform Spaulding and I stood at a distance from each other, so in the event someone else was to arrive they would not think we were together.

There was a pay phone adjacent to the locked station and miraculously, it worked. I called the local police and reported the incident. I let them know Spaulding had gone into the city and would be available to file a report on Monday. When they asked my name I told them I was Ezra Pound.

A gleaming sedan rolled into the parking lot and a well-dressed couple around my age emerged from the backseat. They ascended the steps to the platform as if it was a victory stand where laurel wreaths would garland their broad shoulders. The pool of station light in which they posed lent their tall blondness an Aryan quality. His hair was a little long but perfectly groomed and hers was held back with a white band wide as a baby's wrist. He whispered in her ear and she laughed delightedly, the wittiest thing she'd ever heard. They could have been siblings but the way she adjusted the collar on his jacket then smoothed it with her palm told a more intimate story.

How I would have liked to trade places with this pair of golden retrievers. To have wrapped myself in the comfort they exuded, to have drawn their aggressive health around me like a protective cloak, to have tasted their candied concupiscence and been satisfied and needed nothing more, to have merged with them, been absorbed by them, to have become them was all and everything in the precious minute that had brought us together on the train platform.

Spaulding stood twenty yards away with her back to me. The effortless togetherness of these show dogs was something we could never experience and the sadness of that realization caused an ache that was wholly unanticipated. I wanted to run to her, hold her, kiss her again and again. Be bold. Be bold! It was a taunt to a man on a diving board who could not swim.

When the train arrived I discreetly slid the kitchen knife into a garbage can. The railroad car was only a third full. Spaulding took a seat several rows in front of me. Someone had left a copy of yesterday's
Wall Street Journal
and I pretended to read until we arrived at Grand Central Station. I walked to the subway with Spaulding in my wake and only when we got off the train in Brooklyn did she slip her arm in mine.

I closed the door behind us. Before turning the light on I listened for anything out of the ordinary. Faint city sounds, a car horn, a brief burst of Spanish on the street, the rattle of an ordinary evening. A wounded man stumbled thirty miles north of here or perhaps he lay dead in someone's woodpile and yet my overstimulated amygdala suggested I expected him to visit. I asked Spaulding if she wanted anything to eat or drink.

“I want to take a shower.”

I gave her a towel and told her she could sleep in my bed and I would sleep on the couch in the living room. In the kitchen, I filled a highball glass with ice and poured myself three fingers of single malt. Then I remembered I couldn't drink and despondently emptied the contents into the sink. I filled the glass with club soda and took a few sips. For a brief moment I was able to focus my tumbling thoughts on the imaginary burn of whiskey in my throat. To act like Spaulding wasn't standing in a nearby shower, rivulets of water running down her naked body as she soaped herself, inadvertently driving me into the same state of sexual wantonness that got me thrown out of graduate school, I turned on the radio and found a classical station. As the calming strains of Mozart washed over me, I sat at the table with my not-whiskey and proceeded to get a staggering hard-on. In spite of Dr. Tapper's dire prognosis my circulation remained excellent.

G
iven what we had just been through I thought it would be okay if I borrowed his toothbrush, and while I brushed my teeth I wondered if it was possible that one of the worst nights ever could also lead to an entirely new way of being. My suicide flirtation again shown up for the bullshit it was, I was overcome with gratitude for having been spared, twice now if you're counting. My will to live was unabashed.

The streetlight smoldered beyond diaphanous curtains and cast a soft light on the framed photographs of the World Trade Center hanging on the wall. Any safe place can be violated.

I lay in bed wearing one of Mr. Best's tee shirts. The apartment was locked and he was in the next room but it's hard to feel safe after you've nearly been murdered. Despite my attempt to banish them, the events in Connecticut played in a relentless loop: the headlong run from the train station, prostrate in the bushes, face in the dirt, the fruitless late-night search with Edward P and his doubts about my sanity, and then the attack in the house, that horrible creature with his hands on me, and Mr. Best nearly killing him. This malevolent movie unspooled until my muscles stiffened and I was grinding my molars. I had an urge to reach for a Xanax but there weren't any. And wasn't I trying to be less of a chemistry set? Taking a deep breath, I attempted to unwind. The familiar calming rhythm, the rhyme that would save me, or at least fend off the crazy, was circling and preparing to land.

The next / room holds / the key / to my / demise.

Demise? What? Where did that come from? The Iambic Pentameter Strategy did not always work perfectly.

I tried again.

In a / new room / a girl / waits to / be born.

I wanted to burst through the wall and land on Mr. Best's lap, have him run his hands through my hair. I wanted to feel him get hard against my thigh, his tongue dancing with mine. But still I waited. On the street two guys were singing “Happy Birthday” to someone named Saffron, their voices marinated in liquor.

After I'd been lying in his bed for ten minutes with the lights out the fear was like a wild animal thrashing in a rickety cage. Trying to get at me, teeth gnashing, claws outstretched, wild-eyed. The terrifying images kept cycling through my brain and I became more and more unnerved. Why wasn't Mr. Best in here with me? He had kissed me earlier in the evening so I knew he was attracted to me. And since I had been through something utterly horrible, didn't I deserve some comfort? And didn't he deserve it, too? He had done the hard part, literally saving my life. Why couldn't he just lie here next to me and make everything stop vibrating? I wanted to bury my face in his neck, to hold him even if we didn't have sex, but I wasn't going to leave the bedroom because I didn't want to make this about my needs. He had no family, no one he could depend on while he was trying to get well. The least I could do was not be the cause of more problems. But it was impossible to be alone. Perhaps it would be all right if I told him I was famished. We had skipped dinner. It made sense that I'd need food and if I said that he wouldn't think I was an emotional basket case.

—I don't feel like being by myself.

Mr. Best was hunched at the small kitchen table, a laptop open in front of him. He looked totally exhausted, as if the events of the evening had physically diminished him. But when he saw me he straightened his spine.

—I don't blame you.

—Are you hungry?

At a local market, the kind with ten varieties of lettuce, we bought some chicken—yes, chicken, because I didn't want to throw myself at him in his kitchen and he was still shell-shocked and all I had done was cause drama (and he had more than enough of that) so, yes, chicken—and new potatoes and some green beans that I could sauté with garlic. Mr. Best bought a large bottle of fresh-squeezed berry juice because he was on a new health regimen. We were quiet on the way back to the apartment, both of us wiped out from the evening, and the only words we exchanged were the kind you can't remember because there's a sense that you're becoming more comfortable, more at ease, drawing closer and closer so the words become detached from their meaning as they float in the air all around you and quietly connect into a net that keeps the animating energy from lifting you both off the sidewalk.

While I seasoned the chicken I kept sneaking glances at Mr. Best at the kitchen table futzing on his laptop but he didn't seem to notice. A desire to get to know him better, this savior, this poet and shield, fought with a fleeting sense of decorum that told me to leave him alone. But decorum never stands a chance with me. When I wondered if he would mind if I asked him a personal question, he told me to go ahead.

—You don't have to tell me if you don't want but this thing you have? How serious is it?

—It's serious.

—You have great hair. Really super thick.

—Thanks.

—Doesn't chemo make it fall out?

—Not always. When's the chicken going to be ready? It smells great.

He closed his laptop and checked the stove. It was easy to see I had gone as far as Mr. Best was going to allow me to go right now. Neither of us said anything for a while. He just stood by the stove and stared at the kitchen timer. When he had his back to me I took a close look to see if I could notice anything different since he had started treatment. It was hard to tell. He didn't look gaunt but you don't lose weight instantly. And his coloring looked all right, not haggard or yellow, just maybe a little tired, understandable since it had been a super-stressful evening. When I realized what I was doing my chest got tight because that was the moment the whole situation sunk in. I was examining him. It was clinical, but it also felt sexual, and the whole sensation left me lightheaded. My nerves tingled, not because I didn't think I belonged in this apartment but because I thought I did. At least I was pretty sure I thought I did. It was difficult to know. Was life without meds going to make me overthink everything?

He was looking at the chicken through the oven window. I rose, refilled my glass, and sat down again. I took a glug of the wine, so refined. Some of it dribbled down my chin and I wiped it with the heel of my hand. The kitchen timer shattered the silence. Mr. Best was taking the food out of the oven and placing it on the counter when I came up behind him and put my arms around his waist. He turned around expressionless and I began to stammer another apology when he smiled and that smile let me in and held me and crooned comfort and belief in me. It was confidence and resignation, connection and isolation, defeat and victory, possibility and nothingness, all of the complexity that only poets can put into words. He touched my chin and kissed me lightly. He opened his lips and I slid my tongue into his mouth. When his hands cupped my ass my doubts evaporated and I grabbed the hem of my dress and lifted it over my head. I stood in front of him in my bra and panties and I could feel he was already hard so I pulled his zipper down. He unfastened my bra and covered my breasts with soft kisses while I caressed his cock. I lifted my thigh and he split my fig and we had sex standing up in the kitchen. He supported my legs with supple hands and I came and then I came again and he came. He kissed my lips and my eyelids and my neck and my nipples. I remember thinking, Jesus, that took long enough, but it was worth the wait.

—Spaulding, he said, I don't think you should call me Mr. Best anymore.

I started laughing because, really, what can you do when someone you've just had sex with for the first time tells you that?

He started laughing, too, and for a few seconds I forgot he was supposed to be sick, and that I was almost murdered, and there might be blood on the carpet in Stonehaven, and the Tesla had a dent in it. With his body next to mine, his chest rising and falling in easy rhythm, his tired eyes clear, it was impossible to remember any of that.

—Jeremy sounds weird, I said. But if you insist.

He kissed me.

—I'm afraid I do.

There was chocolate chip ice cream in the freezer and we put scoops on slices of the homemade pecan pie I had brought that afternoon. He turned a radio on. Classical music played as we sat naked at the kitchen table. Jeremy told me about the year he spent as a student living in Rome, his first attempts at writing poems, and the unexpected detail that he'd never had a serious girlfriend. When there was a pause in the conversation, I said,

—Was this a time-killer?

—What do you mean?

—You said, and I'm quoting, Sex is nothing but a time-killer, something you do when the conversation is exhausted.

—When did I say that?

—That night in the cab.

—When you're trying to be clever and failing, sometimes bullshit comes out. That's not how I feel. Look, when I jumped out of the cab and ran into the crowd in my lawyer costume and some guy cold-cocked me, I lay there in the street and for a moment I thought, why get up? If I stay on the ground all my problems will end under the feet of that mob. But I wanted to know that you were safe. Don't read too much into what I just said. What I'm telling you is someone had to act like an adult. And I failed.