When Lydia stepped into her Capitol Hill apartment after work, the curtains were closed and the only light came from the pair of glowing monitors stacked next to each other on the small desk in the corner of the living room. The coffee table had been pushed aside and David was arching his back on the carpet, wearing pajama bottoms and no shirt. A spiral-bound book of yoga poses was open on the floor. He smiled in her direction.
“Hey,” he said. When he dipped back to the carpet a piece of lint stuck to his lips and he sputtered it out.
Lydia was glad to see him, and even gladder to see him occupied.
After a few years of crappy jobs at convenience stores and phone banks, David had taken a job last winter as an IT grunt at a curriculum development company and now spent his days in a windowless office surrounded by programmers and gamers—indoorsy types, he called them. At first he’d worried that fifty hours a week at a screen-lit desk would turn him into a bleeding-eyed drone, but before long the idea of getting paid to solve problems clicked perfectly with his tinkering side, and as an act of rebellion against his coworkers’ diet of Funyuns and Mountain Dew, he made it a point each day to exercise—hence this evening’s yoga.
“Just a minute more.”
“Take your time,” she said, then set her bag of groceries on the kitchen floor and slipped into their bedroom, a bright cube of windows so overrun by a pair of blue spruce that it felt like a tree house. Their apartment was on the second floor of a converted Foursquare home, and details like this one—not to mention their $300 rent—kept them from leaving the neighborhood and disappearing into some condo complex with shuttles to the slopes and mixers by the pool.
Lydia stood in front of her dresser and opened her sock drawer. When she slipped the postcard into the back, behind her summer socks and the itchy teddy she never wore, her fingers grazed the birthday photo.
Five years back, David had surprised Lydia by hovering next to her at a Broadway bar and reaching over her shoulder for a napkin, a toothpick, and an olive before finally getting the nerve to ask her to shoot a game of pool. His interest in her didn’t make sense: David was quite possibly the most beautiful boy in the bar—wiry body, rosy cheeks, lippy smirk—and though Lydia was wearing cutoffs and sandals and a black Bikini Kill T-shirt that left her feeling slightly more comfortable in her skin than usual, she was also cocked sideways by bad gin and tonics, smoking her thirtieth cigarette of the day, leaning on Plath’s shoulder, and feeling as if she’d just fallen off a hay truck. At first she acted shy and overly suspicious, as if his hitting on her had been a cruel bar bet, but as she weaved behind him she noticed that his gait was slightly awkward, and that one of his sneakers was dragging a frayed gray lace. Her suspicions faded even further when he leaned into the pool table’s green felt and she saw, in a moment that warmed her thighs, that his right hand was a mangled twist of missing fingers. His thumb was there and most of a pointer, but otherwise the hand held a trio of squat little nubs.
A few hours later, during drunken sunrise omelets, she would find out that David had been a deep-fried mathlete in high school—his words—when one shitfaced night at a party he accidentally dropped a shot glass into the garbage disposal. He was fishing it out, hand groping the bladed depths, and flipped the light switch above the sink to see better what he was doing. Only it wasn’t a light switch.
—My mom told me it made me less of an asshole, he said.
—Then you musta flipped the right switch, Lydia said.
Back in their first months of dating, she’d begun to notice that nearly every woman under forty eyeballed David like he was breakfast in bed. To all these gawkers Lydia felt like his presumed sister, his drinking buddy, the girl who could beat him in a belching contest—until, by chance, their sight fell upon his half-a-hand. She could see it sparkling in their eyes: Is he holding something? An uncooked chicken breast? A knot of bread dough? In their worst moments together, Lydia couldn’t help but wonder if it—his hand—had been their main matchmaker.
But that was early on, and if it was really only David’s hand that had kept them together, then by now their relationship would have been long over. As Plath once slurred, “Three missing fingers does not five years make.” Lydia agreed: she and David were onto something. She just didn’t know what it was, or whether she could handle it.
Negotiating boyfriends had never come naturally to Lydia. As a teenager, when she lived in her father’s mountain cabin in Rio Vista, whenever boys asked her to dances or out for a drive she usually quivered and claimed that her father was oppressive to the point of violence. This was a half-truth at best—oppressive, yes; violent, no—but the boys always backed away slowly and settled on those hometown girls who got all their jokes and knew their parents from church. That was okay with Lydia. With the exception of the single hallucinogenic night when she lost her virginity to a metalhead atop a picnic table, this reputation of being untouchable protected her through the end of high school. Once she fled Rio Vista and moved to San Francisco—vowing to get as far away from her father as possible—she ramped in the other direction, sleeping recklessly with strangers at first, then slowly easing into a scant selection of boyfriends, none of whom lasted more than a month. Lydia honestly enjoyed this short period of penis-hopping, but with each boy the problem was always the same. After singling her out in the grocery line, the Victorian lit class, the taco shop, they inevitably realized that the armor in which she hid was impermeable, no matter how daring their moves. In different ways, they all wanted to share the space that belonged to her the most, but that was impossible. She was the only one allowed in there.
But from the start David had been different. The first time she’d spent the night at his apartment, she’d awakened alone in his bed and could smell something cooking (burning?) in the other room. She assumed that he was making eggs or french toast, but when she slipped into the T-shirt balled on his floor and came out to the kitchen she found him not cooking at all, but rather using an old iron to wax the pair of skis that were stretched across his countertop. A few minutes later, when she went back into the bedroom to get dressed, she nearly tripped over a dismantled VCR—the huge kind with clunky buttons and fake wood paneling—that had been wired to a surplus military bullhorn, a gift-shop strobe light, and the tube screen of an old black-and-white television. Nearby sat a pile of VHS videotapes (Rocky Mountain Wildlife; Coping Skills for Emergency Responders). She suspected it all had to do with a rave or some smart-drink electronica video project, but when she asked David what it was, he said he didn’t know.
—Just fiddling, he said.