“Anyway, while Seth was gone, I was thinking about how he had begun waiting for me to tell him I loved him, and that I didn’t know enough, anymore, to say that to him with any confidence. I never had a time like Joline, in your story, Gen, the way the father of her child saw her, when I felt like the way he looked at me was some kind of transformative moment. I loved learning his body, what a man’s body could do, and how it would respond. But during those days he was driving to Florida, after I left work, I spent hours walking around the city. I remember seeking out the abandoned buildings, the ones with shattered windows, and floors covered with paper and trash. I was seeing empty buildings, broken buildings, no lives being lived in them, no businesses working out of them anymore.
“And I was thinking they had pasts that weren’t difficult to imagine, people at desks or working on assembly lines, and I was thinking that wasn’t true about the apartment I had with Seth, where so many lives had been lived that you couldn’t imagine only one, and then I was thinking about the house I grew up in, where by this time my father and mother had separated, and how someone standing outside it would see a pretty home with a blossoming cherry tree, because it would have been blossoming by that time, and I wondered whether they could see, too, the tension of the lives being lived there, lives that were still going on. Whether they could see the house, and the beautiful tree, and see the beauty, but also feel the tension. Once a building was abandoned, like those I looked into on those long walks, I knew the imagined lives in them were over. And those two nights, coming home late to that empty apartment, I could tell that my life with Seth was over, too. Not because he was gone. Not because of what he was doing. It’s just that those tiny rooms already looked like a place someone had once lived in, long ago.”
She could hear Genevieve breathing in the foreground, the sounds of the insects behind her. She thought of the motel, and how far away it seemed, how Lucy and Jack were there, maybe Lucy lying on the couch next to Jack, who had fallen asleep while quietly turning the pages of a magazine in order not to wake her. But she was having trouble picturing them.
“He came back the evening of the third day. He’d called to tell me when he was arriving, and I’d made a good dinner for him. I wasn’t going to break up with him right away. Particularly because when he came through the door, he was so happy. He almost bounded in. I asked him how Florida was, and he said everything went fine, and that it was fun to drive into summer, and to see palm trees, which he’d never done before.
“But he didn’t say much of anything else. He kept telling me how delicious the meal was, which was just chicken and potatoes and green beans, and yet he was savoring each bite, looking into my eyes and smiling as he chewed. But I was already watching his jaw move, seeing the way he looked at his meal, then back up at me, and the way he pushed his food around on his plate—it was like a videotape that I was playing back, years from now, rewinding and playing back, in order to remember him, because I was already amazed at how faded this time of my life had become.
“We still drank together after that dinner. We still pulled each other to the bedroom afterward. He didn’t talk while we made love, and, instead of rolling off of me afterward, he fell asleep on top of me while I stroked the hair around his neck. So when the man broke through the apartment door, he was still there, his chest on mine, his knee thrown over my thighs.”