by
Kurt McGinnis Brown
We maintained a cool and rational communication by email. Issues to be resolved appeared in bullets in a Word file sent back and forth—ending.doc—until only one remained. I didn’t blame her for insisting (bold font) that the final bullet be carried out at once.
It did upset me though that she chose that afternoon to throw a party. Cars were bumper to bumper along the curb, so I pulled the U-Haul into the church parking lot two blocks away and walked back past houses where I imagined couples to be happy. At number 511, I checked the mailbox and opened the door an inch before remembering to step back and ring the bell. The party was in the broken early stages. I heard people greeting one another with a forced sense of fun. After she let me in, I saw half a dozen people scattered around the living room. Several more faces appeared in the kitchen doorway to see if there were to be a spectacle. But we had no energy to renew the fight. “Here,” she commanded, and I felt pulled through the crowd and into the hallway. Reaching out to close the bedroom door, she flung open the guest room. “I put all your stuff in here. Don’t leave anything.”
A cursory inventory hinted that she’d been meticulous about including every single item I’d brought into the relationship, and I didn’t dispute her choices of what was mine out of the many things we’d bought together. I didn’t want any of it anyway. Balancing the CD player on one of the bulky speakers, I squatted to heft the speaker and backed out of the room. By that time everyone had crowded into the kitchen, talking low and giving me a clear shot to the front door. As in a cartoon they seemed to think I could remove all my belongings in one gigantic haul, things balanced on top of one another to the sky, for as soon as I was outside I heard them reassembling in the living room with exclamations and abrupt laughter. Once on the sidewalk I calculated I’d need seven or eight trips; that many swings back and forth through the house would be grim, the fury and righteousness exuding from the packed kitchen too much to bear. Having rung the doorbell again and nodded and smiled my way back to the chilly guest room, astonished looks all around, I slid open the window, twisted out the screen and let it drop to the bushes. Then I started tossing the contents of the room out to the grass: boxes of books, framed prints, a chair, two lamps, board games, a tray of kitchen utensils, hangers of clothes, and several boxes of miscellaneous items I could only assume were breaking as they hit the ground. The TV imploded and the stack of CDs traveled in a graceful arc through the air, separating slowly like an accordion. The clatter on the lawn lasted several seconds.
On the bed was the shoebox sealed for all the years of our relationship with yards of packing tape, now brittle. Natural suspicion, once the giddiness of living together had flattened to a pleasant hum, caused her to kick it out of the closet with her foot one night when normally we would have been exhausted from lovemaking. She asked that it be opened; I pretended I was too busy fixing the closet door, which sagged and scraped the floor. She maintained that secrets could only sink us; mellow with philosophy I replied that we were entitled to keep something of ourselves ourselves.
She wanted it opened.
Growing hot, I tossed the screwdriver onto the box and told her to go ahead, goddamnit, whereupon she maintained she no longer cared one bit about my past. My past. Constant churning desires and lives led before each successive you—I had learned that you keep this well hidden, desire and words as separate as wolves and sheep. I said none of this and instead snatched the screwdriver from on top of the shoebox and started cranking out the hinge plates on the doorframe. “Goddamned old house.” Kicked back into the closet as she left the room, the box lost its eloquence but radiated poison during our remaining life together.
My belongings, now mostly junk, littered the strip of grass between the guest room window and the neighbor’s house. The chair I’d tossed out had landed on its legs and sat regally among the debris until I aimed the shoebox for the seat. The chair reared over backwards like a drunkard and lay on its back, legs wantonly in the air.
The neighbor raised his kitchen window. “You moving?”
I waved.
There was nothing left in the room but the other belly-high speaker. Grappling it, I made my way through the party, which, since I hadn’t been sighted in a while, had again reconstituted itself in the living room. No one looked at me directly, yet a path opened. I waddled out to the sidewalk. The neighbor bounced down his porch steps and approached with a smile.
“I even thought for a minute you guys were having a party,” he said looking at the house behind me. “Can’t believe you’re moving.”
“Can I pull my truck into your driveway?”
Though confused by the extensive damage to the items in the side yard, he helped gather and haul every broken thing to the truck, after which I stepped over the low evergreen next to the house to close the window. His Great Dane charged and leaped on the fence, paws dancing back and forth over the slats and jowls trembling between barks. “It’s all right,” he said, “He won’t hurt you.” I assured him I’d never been afraid of the slobbering and barking I encountered just about every day I’d lived there, but he ignored me, saying soothingly to the dog, “If he does, I’ll whack him one.” Content, the dog dropped from the fence and paced quietly.
The metal frame of the screen wobbled crazily as I lifted it and shoved it back inside the house. Fingers on the glass I eased down the window as best I could then stepped back over the bush and shook hands with my former neighbor, who followed me around to the front lawn. He’d grown suspicious. Suddenly, from behind he was saying loudly and with evident relief, “Did you know he was leaving?”
She was watching from the front porch, arms crossed. She could see that the truck was packed. It was our last chance to say something that might stick.
“Hope you’re happy with her.”
“Who?”
“I thought so,” the neighbor said.
“Whoever it is.”
“I didn’t cheat on you.” The finicky literal fact that I’d not slept with anyone else while we were together seemed a worthwhile case to argue out there on the lawn with at least one person in the neighborhood listening. I looked at the faces of the houses across the street to see who else was craving drama that day.
She was wide-eyed with rage. “How can you lie?” A man I seemed to recognize sidestepped onto the porch and put his arm around her. Her voice, which had been tight and rising, modulated into a tone of defeat. “I suppose you blame it on your DNA.”
“Can I?”
At the Salvation Army south of the train station I pulled up to the covered area for drop-offs. Hopping out I saw a computer printout slipped inside a plastic cover tacked to a wall. NO LATE DELIVERIES. I yanked on the giant flimsy wood door, but it was locked. Someone moving inside the main building came out.
“Not supposed to leave anything when we’re not around. Changed the rules a year ago.”
“You’re around.” I circled to the back of the truck, tossed the iron lock to the side and shot-putted the door overhead.
“Closed,” he said, following. “You know, no one’s ever came here in a U-Haul.” He laid a hand on the iron ridges of the truck bed and leaned in. “You’re kidding, JP speakers?”
“I want to leave everything except this.” I plucked out the shoebox and transferred it to the passenger seat.
“Someone die?” he asked, following again. “I seen it before. A guy brought in a lifetime load after his brother was killed in a car accident. Most of what we get is junk, people thinking they’re being saints, but when someone dies we get really top-notch shit.”
“No one died.”
“I mean that’s good. I wasn’t hoping.” He pulled his nose and looked at the cement between his feet. “Those speakers work? I can’t give you a receipt this time of night.”
“Your car around here?”
He thought a while. Then nodded. To make it formal, I asked two hundred for anything he decided not to itemize and put inside the store. He drew out his wallet, thumbed through the bills, looked through the big window toward the cash register, and declared, “Be right back.”
After the nasty breakup, I’d found an opening in an XXX-rated movie house downtown with apartments above, rent month to month. Immediately I discovered that it’s popular to protest the place. Several church groups make the outing, showing up with traveling coffee mugs and sacks of sandwiches from the deli down near the piers. Coming home that evening, I waited them out from the corner restaurant. At dusk, the church group left but was replaced by a solitary lay preacher who held a bible like a broken bird in one upturned palm while punching his other hand in emphatic rhythm toward the building. He requested that it vanish. Despite signs of dementia jitterbugging around his eyes, he appeared enthusiastic about changing the world, presumably for the better. Since the wooden door leading up to the apartments and the glass doors to the theater lobby are mere paces from one another, both tucked under the low marquee announcing the week’s kinky feature and lit underneath by a thousand tiny lightbulbs, you must completely disregard your reputation in order to get into the apartments, and as I approached the doors, shoebox in hand, the man bore into me with a glare that looked to be modeled on news clips of Charles Manson attending his pointless parole hearings. “Brother, you don’t want to go in there, that building’s going to disappear.”
“But it’s where I live now.”
The electric sign of the strip club across from my window pulsed, faded, pulsed. Live Women Live Women Live Women. I tossed the shoebox onto my bed, sliced it open and hauled out the twenty years of love letters I’d written to every woman I’d ever thought I was in love with. Though written ritually since the age when love and words seemed knitted together, “I love you” as meaningful at first as an atomic bomb, I’d never sent a single one. And so they’d been preserved among my things as if they’d been sent to me in the first place. The easiest thing would have been to burn them one by one, weeping like some hero faking it in a movie, and I wished I could still live that way, the pretend outweighing the real. But every belief, every gesture, every passion must be original—or else you might as well take a seat in the bleachers as a spectator, applauding mildly or booing, until your life is over.
I chose a bar that was familiar. The place is never too loud; the pool games are serious, with those waiting their turn leaning on pool cues like they were Ethiopian prayer sticks, and the drinkers only pretend as though they are still young. “Vodka gives you such a clean drunk,” a drunk said as he took a spot on the short side of the bar. No one looked eager to add a voice to what continued as a monologue. “Hey?” the speaker inquired, “Isn’t it right what I say? Clean and kinda jingly compared to a whiskey or wine drunk.”
I hunkered over the bar for as long as it took to lap up a bourbon, then I slid off the stool, got among the tables and started handing the letters out to people. Well, women. “What might have been,” I said angling the stack in my hand like offering cigarettes. A stunning woman with glistening cornrows and a broad smile laughed and drew one at random, then grew visibly embarrassed as she read. A man snaked his arm around her shoulders and frowned with distaste as he touched the letter with his free hand and reluctantly read sentences.
A woman with frizzy blonde hair and roots like loam tried to prevent me from moving by stepping in and blocking me with her back. “Don’t let him do this,” she said to everyone else. She turned a shoulder my way. “You’re disgusting.”
“True, true.” I was working the ends of the letters again to get them spread out evenly. Though the purpose was to get rid of the letters, I had preferences as to who got them. I know how strange that seems. I’d spotted a woman whose lovely face and hair like a black silk scarf floated above a jet black dress, and I started toward her once the woman who had been blocking me climbed a chair to address the crowd.
And it was a crowd now. “Don’t you see what he’s doing?” she panted. “He’s implicating everyone of us in his nasty fantasies.”
“What’s he doing?” asked a young woman hustling over with a pool cue, her friend right behind urging her to take one. She did so and immediately screamed with joyful hysteria, “It’s a LOVE letter!”
“Oh— My— God,” said her friend, snatching another out of my hand. “That’s— Too— FUNNY!”
I smiled with her, thrusting my offerings toward other hands that now grabbed. Half the letters were gone.
The woman who made the announcement about my nasty fantasies continued to try to prevent me from coming into contact with anyone else. “He’s degrading you,” she declared stepping off the chair and shadowing me while batting at my forearms. Her tone was low and serious. “I know. I know men.” I’d made it to the woman in the black dress, and my adversary asked loudly, as if to indict me in front of witnesses: “Why only the most attractive women? Trying to get laid?”
“Yeah, dude, why her?” put in a man who clearly was trying to get laid. “Every woman here is beautiful. Or like can’t you see that?”
I felt activity at my shoulder, tried to brush it off, and then was off the ground and thudding against the wall. My palm smacked a tabletop as I rebounded. We both wobbled. Glass shattered near my feet. The guy who’d tossed me didn’t seem to care about the implications of my choosing this woman over that, he simply was indignant that his girlfriend, who held a letter and glowed with embarrassment and interest, had been one of them. He straight-armed me against the wall, his face blurring near as he angled to get off a punch. My legs were locked up with a chair. Frowning with concentration he jabbed directly into my solar plexus.
I’d never known exactly where that was before. As I gasped with new knowledge another punch came. Since I was doubled-over already, his fist drove against my hip bone. I had nowhere to go but forward and so I walked into him. He went over backwards, grabbing and stretching my sweatshirt like taffy.
We lay that way.
“No one’s hurt, no one’s hurt,” came a repeated declaration from overhead. Probably the owner. What he based this on was unclear, but his goal was to get us out of there before anyone else caught the frenzy and his place became a playpen for anarchists.
Hands lifted me. Trying to get my feet underneath I kicked my assailant’s head but not deliberately. I caught a glimpse of the door and wanted to get there, but the two heavy-bellied men trying to throw me outside only succeeded in turning me the wrong way. From the floor, my assailant was clawing at legs that danced around his head. When the bouncers ducked in the crowd to yank him up, I broke for the door and lurched to a bench in the park across the street. My adversary came breasting out of the bar like he was finishing a race. Clutching her letter, his girlfriend fought to join him, screaming sideways at the bouncers. Now yelling at each other, the two of them shot around the corner without spotting the guy on the park bench.
Me, a few thousand words in a packed universe. Once, the world had a single story. Then two. As I limped home, I counted the letters I had left and figured I’d stripped myself of three-quarters of my love life. At my apartment window, as the traffic lights rolled through their usual sequence, though seemingly with greater emphasis, I folded the last few letters into airplanes and sailed them out over First Avenue. Big currents of air from the street boosted each plane upwards at first but eventually in the thick wet air they spiraled more or less straight down. The preacher appeared on the sidewalk. His immediate concern was with the blurs of white nosediving all around, which at some point, for him, were transfigured into paper planes scattered on the sidewalk and street with crumpled noses. I could feel his intense need to look up. Yet to do so was to see that everything but what he wished for was likelier to be true. Of course he wanted to believe these planes were a miraculous communication from someone equally lonely and fanatical overhead; at least for a moment, he must have allowed himself to imagine her long hair dangling loose, her perfect breasts nearly exposed, signaling in this strange beautiful way her own naked intense hunger to be loved. I hoped he’d move on without investigating, but we’re always quickest to destroy our own dreams, and at last he proved himself a realist.
“Love letters,” I called down when he looked up. “You’re welcome to them.”
“Pervert,” he spat out. Head high, he put himself in motion and disappeared into the double darkness beyond the traffic lights. It’s my last love letter. Without hope we live in desire.