"Look there; look there."
King Lear
Turbulent water pouring out gushed through the gutter; the gutter shook from the roof, trembling against the side of the house.
Runnels of roiling water rushed over stone and dirt, foamed round the roots of trees, and flooded the curbsides.
I watched the street from a window inside the house. I wondered if he would make it. On a night like this, he'd be stranded. In Brattleboro or someplace worse -- and pass the night in motel desolation.
"I am so sorry," he said when he left. "I wish I did not have to do this," he said.
"Then why are you doing it?" I demanded.
He simply looked at me, exhaled, and shook his head, but said nothing. He rose and left.
There was nothing I could do. Two days before the night I am describing, he called me from New York. I had not heard from him in nearly two years. He wanted to see me. He did not ask. He told me he was coming, driving up "the day after tomorrow."
I was shocked, torn, at odds with myself.
He did not drive. He took a plane and then a taxi from the airport. His rap on my door shook me out of reverie. I heard. I went to the door. I opened it. I looked at him. I did not know what to do. He grinned. He took my hand. He did not let it go. Puzzled, I led him, my hand still in his grasp, into a parlor, on the left. The kitchen was at the back of the house. The steps, opposite the room we went into, led to the second floor.
I tried to remove my hand, but he did not let it go. I could think of nothing to say. My mouth dropped open. Finally, I said, "It's a surprise to see you."
"What kind of surprise?" he said.
"What do you want?" I said.
"Don't know," he said. "It's hard to say."
"You don't know or it's hard to say?
"It's hard to say because I don't know," he said. He let go my hand. He raised his freed hand to his brow and held it there as if he were checking for fever.
"I have made a life without you," I said.
"I knew you would, and that made it easier for me to leave," he said.
"And does it make it harder for you to return?"
"It makes me happy for you."
"You didn't always like it."
"What does that mean?"
"You never allowed me to make a life of my own. You wanted me a captive and dependent and entirely subservient to you."
"It's my fault you didn't know what to do!"
"Why are you here?" I asked again, greatly puzzled.
He looked at me pained until he said, "to free myself from guilt."
"What?" I said, a corkscrew of anger beginning to twist inside me.
"I have said too much," he said, and, seeing my puzzlement, he added, "and perhaps too little. But it is as much as I can say."
I regarded him, waiting, nevertheless, for him to say something further.
Instead, he rose and said only, "I am sorry for disturbing you. I must go."
I was immobilized and before I could object he had let himself out. I ran to the door after him and flung it open. I saw him walking quickly away, the rain had abated but not stopped altogether. I dashed after him and was quickly drenched myself.
I caught up to him.
"What are you doing?" I said.
"Let me be," he cried.
"You called me."
"The call is finished."
Suddenly, I did not like him. There was something in his eyes that was mean and forbidding. I realized from when first I knew him that there was something in his bearing that prevented me -- prevented me -- not from this or that in particular, but across the board prevented me -- in a kind of existential way. That defined me. I wished with my whole heart to vibrate in sympathy with him and feel our spirits join in complementary understanding. But time and again, he turned me away, complaining as he did so that I had brought it on myself.
And now I did not want him. I did not care about him. But I did not want him to go away this way. I wanted to know exactly why he had come and what the hell he was talking about. I needed to get ahold of him not because I liked him but because I did not.
"You would be better off leaving me alone, letting me go without forcing me to..."
I looked at him intently and listened anticipating now the secret of his visit, but he broke off before I could learn anything. I was determined to know, as much to bend him, for once, to my will as to know what it was that both brought him back and was at the same time, driving him away.
"Look," I said, "after running out on me and failing to answer the few e-mails I sent you afterwards, and I stopped when I saw that it would do nothing but make me seem pathetic -- as if I were harassing or stalking you -- here you are nearly two years later, reappearing quite mysteriously and vanishing without enlightening me about why you decided to see me, quite mysteriously. I want to know what is going on."
But he shook me off. "No you don't," he said.
And I realized I didn't. There was something corrupt in my old lover that had not been there when I knew him, something about him that give off the presence in him of defeat. Better just to be rid of him and take no interest.
"Why did you leave?" I asked.
"Leave?"
"Two years ago."
"I did not want to hurt you."
"What!"
"I said I didn't want to hurt you."
"You don't think it hurt me when you left?"
"It was a matter of degree."
"I am completely puzzled."
"I fell in love with someone," he said slowly and quietly, "with someone else."
I stopped and looked at him, enraged, humiliated, and wondering if any of this mattered at all, especially after two years. What had been had been and I had gotten through it. Was it coming back now to drown me in the second wave after I had managed to ride out the first?
He was a mystery, and that was that.
"I don't care if you go," I said.
He looked at me like a withered man. But I could not revert, re-infect myself with sympathy. Desire is a disease to which you never develop an immunity.
"Go way now," I said. I sent him away. He went. I looked after and bid good riddance. On the corner, he got a cab.
It was raining harder now. I walked up the steps to the porch and closed the screen door behind me.
And what of him?
He sits dejected in the cab and looks through the web on a telephone for a hotel and directs the driver to The Schrafft, downtown rather than in the vicinity of the airport.
"It did not work. I could not do it," he thinks, no matter what specifically "it" stands for.
He stretches out on the bed. He looks at the ceiling.
But this is not his story and he will disappear now without our knowing any more of him than I have told. Let him stand for so many who have woven in and then out of our lives leaving hardly a trace except those ruptures cut into memory and the soundness of the heart. Had they stayed, oh, the difference they had made.
I was tired. The fire in the hearth now had burned down to embers, blacker than red. I crouched in front of it tearing up sheets of newspaper and tented around the bunched paper clumps graduating circle of sticks from small to larger until I saw a fire clawing itself out of the paper and scratching itself out of the wood. I set on the burning structure three slender logs and brought a new fire to life.
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