“Well,” he says.
Shenanigan’s is less than three miles away but in a town this small that’s far. I keep moving to smaller and smaller towns and the distances grow accordingly. Five miles used to be nothing. Now three seems excessive, ridiculous. And if it’s cold or rainy out, forget it. My most recent ex-boyfriend grew up in Los Angeles and thought nothing of driving fifteen miles to eat sushi, which was one of the reasons it didn’t work out between us. Not the distance, exactly, but the way distances framed our worlds.
“You sleep all day?” I ask.
“I stayed up last night.”
“You were playing that video game again.”
He opens the ashtray and lights a cigarette.
I’ve watched him play his game before; it’s just a bunch of code, an indecipherable collection of numbers and signs that made me feel dumb so I made fun of it. And of course there’s a girl on there he likes, a girl who lives a thousand miles away so he can imagine her beautiful and accommodating, so he can imagine they might fall in love.
We sit at the bar, the side closest to the bathroom and jukebox. Ben hands Michelle his debit card and she brings us two Miller Lites. I know he won’t let me split the bill when it comes, but I don’t feel too bad about it because even if we take shots it won’t be more than thirty dollars.
“You want to play pool?” he asks.
“No way.”
He goes to the bathroom while I drink my beer and try not to make eye contact with anyone. The other grad students only come on Thursdays because it’s steak night: a slab of meat, a baked potato, and a salad for seven dollars.
When he returns, I tell him that I listened to Melinda have sex for an hour earlier, that I thought it would go on forever.
“Were you just standing outside her door?” he asks.
“Pretty much.”
“How would you feel if she did that to you?”
“You don’t like her, what do you care?”
“I just think it’s rude,” he says.
“People in New York share everything—they hang a curtain in the middle of a room and pretend they’re alone.”
Like Melinda, Ben is also a poet, but he doesn’t write about fruit or trees. He writes about McRibs and factories and Walmart. He writes about me. There’s a poem about the time I threw his I Ching at Crescent City, another about the afternoon we met at a Waffle House in Memphis and how he knew by the texture of my skin I’d slept with someone else. And then there’s the one where I’m in my panties reading Don DeLillo while he makes lasagna. He gives me ways of seeing myself differently, provides me with images I wouldn’t otherwise have. I wouldn’t remember reading Don DeLillo in my panties, wouldn’t remember any of the things he has deemed important. It’s like I get to have my own memories and his too.
I rest a hand on his knee, my fingers searching out the hole in his jeans so I can feel his skin. A guy in a wheelchair rolls through the door. He looks at me and I look away because one time he told me I was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen and I was embarrassed for both of us because I’m not that pretty, because he was only able to approach me in that way because I’d never be with him.
We order shots of whiskey and another round of beers, but when karaoke starts I ask him to take me home.
Ben pulls up to my house and we sit there for a minute with his car running. The basketball that’s been rolling around in his trunk is finally still. As we kiss, I wonder what it would be like to want to fuck someone so badly you’d do it even though it goes against everything you truly desire.
I climb the stairs and find Melinda at the dining room table with a glass of red wine and a full plate: half a chicken, vegetables, and spinach in a separate bowl. She never allows herself more than one glass of wine and only with a meal.
“You’re like a European,” I say. “What time is it?”
“I don’t know—nine? Ten? Where’d you go?” she asks, but I don’t want to tell her. She would never go to Shenanigan’s, would never be friends with Ben, and can’t understand why I would. Anytime I date anyone at all, for even a minute, she tells me I’m too good for him.
In the morning, I listen to Melinda bang around: opening cabinets and slamming them, pots clanking. I can’t believe how loud she is, how little regard she has for me. It is seven-thirty and already painfully bright outside. I need curtains but this seems completely beyond the realm of possibility—where would I get them and would they be long enough? I’d probably have to have them made. I watch the occasional big-winged bird fly by and think about what I have to do today. I don’t have class until six. I have a few stories to read but that shouldn’t take me longer than thirty or forty minutes. Despite my teaching schedule and three classes a semester, there is so much time.
I call my ex-husband. He picks up on the third ring. He always makes me wonder if he’s going to pick up but he always does.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“On my way to work,” he says, taking a sip of something. And then he says, “Guess who died?”
“What?”
“Guess who died?”
“Mrs. White.”
“Mrs. White already died.”
“Oh yeah.” She was old, ninety-seven or ninety-eight, our next-door neighbor. “Who then?”
“Jonah,” he says.
“Jonah?”
“Jonah,” he repeats. “One night he drank too much and didn’t wake up.” He sounds excited about it.
“Wait, what are you talking about?”
“He drank too much one night and didn’t wake up.”
Jonah was our closest friend, though I haven’t seen or spoken to him since I left Meridian. I’ve hardly even thought of him because I’ve done my best to put everyone and everything in that town behind me. It hasn’t been difficult. Once you leave a place like that, so long as it isn’t your hometown, you know you won’t ever have to see any of those people again.
“Jonah’s dead?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s really messed up that you would tell me like this. Why didn’t you call me? And why would you say it like that—guess who died?”
He explains that Jonah had been going downhill for the past year. He’d stopped coming over to the house; he hadn’t even seen him in months.
“When?”
“Three or four weeks ago.”