“Who is ‘D’?” he wanted to know. “And are you ‘M’?”
He was reading off the scorecard, where my sisters and I put our initials. My older sisters and I were competitive miniature golfers and played with our father on a course near his ranch house every summer. I told him I was “M,” the one with two holes-in-one. I didn’t say that “D” was for “Daddy” and not “Del,” who had always refused to play.
Del had turned on the TV and made hot chocolate spiked with Kahlúa. She sat a few feet away from me, shushing me every so often so she could hear, dropping handfuls of candy corn onto the bed for me. I told William I was an art major, and then I told him about my Women and Grief course.
“We listen to tapes of keening women from Ireland and Greece,” I said. “I can barely stand it.”
“I can understand why,” he said.
I tried to explain how it was so awful I wanted to laugh, and how hard it was not to. At that point, Del gave me a look. “My sister says I’m crazy,” I said.
“You’re interesting,” he said.
He said he, too, was an artist, and he taught at the university. A photographer. “Like you,” he said. He’d heard of my work—abandoned places, landscapes—from another professor. I asked him who, surprised, and he brushed this off. “Just another professor in the department.” I didn’t want to seem as if I was encouraging him to gossip, so I let it go.
“I’m just an adjunct,” he said. “I’m hoping to find something more permanent.”
I asked him what his work was like, and he said he’d been inspired by Ted Spagna’s sleep studies. “Something like that,” he said.
All very vague, but at the time his hedging and easy side-stepping hadn’t been obvious to me. I would push him away, ruin it, if I was too inquisitive, but it was difficult to negotiate closeness over the telephone. I was struck, then, that this was something out of the ordinary—a man calling me up in the middle of the night to talk.
“Why abandoned places?” he asked.
I could make out his breathing on the other end, waiting.
“You’ll have to see for yourself,” I said.
Below my window, beneath the elm, Mary Rae waited, though for what I hadn’t yet decided. I wondered how well William had known her, and then decided it was wrong, at this point, to bring her up.
“The places must seem like the women on the tapes,” he said.
“Yes, keening,” I said. We were both quiet for a moment, deciding what to say next.
Del turned off the television and stood in the center of the room. She, too, had put on her coat, and I made a mental note to ask Geoff about the heat.
“Let’s call it a night,” she said.
“It is three a.m.,” William said. He’d heard Del, and it rankled that somehow she had become part of our conversation. “I have class tomorrow. Do you?”
“No,” I said, though I did. I wasn’t ready to run into him in person on campus, to have him take my arm again and lead me into the Green Dragon for coffee. Talking to him had filled me with some sense of promise that I might become someone other than myself, and I wanted time to fashion this person. When I hung up the phone Del came out of the bathroom in a T-shirt, and slipped quickly under the sheets of the bed. We had a few blankets, including the afghan my grandmother had crocheted for me, and she pulled them all up. Beneath the covers I could feel her shivering. She smelled of cigarettes, and a cologne that must have been worn by the Firebird guy.
“That was him, wasn’t it?” she said. “The weirdo from the party?”
“He’s an artist,” I said, sounding like Charles Wu. “Besides, a Firebird? Really?”
I could tell Del was falling asleep. “He had on a leather jacket,” she said. “A 1950s hoodlum jacket.”
“What was his name?” I said.
“Don’t know,” Del mumbled.
“Randy,” I told her. “Geoff said his name was Randy.”
“Are you sure he didn’t say he was randy?” Del said.
“No, he said he was a good sort,” I said.
“It’s snowing,” she said, and fell quickly asleep.
10
William called every day that week. We learned how to interpret each other’s silences, which direction to take our resumed words—back to our childhoods, or simply to daily occurrences to fill the spaces in our conversations.
“I slipped off the steps of my porch today,” I said. Then I worried he would think me ungraceful or foolish.
“She fell arse over tit!” Del cried out so William could hear. She was imitating Geoff, something she’d begun doing unconsciously, without any malice.