Frank, on the Extent of His Travels; and Renee, on How These Maxims Have Sustained the Night

PART I: Frank, on the Extent of His Travels

I wear a bowtie because there is an old woman in the muffin shop every morning who seems very intent on being there. An effort in her eyes, a squinting to exist; as if the linoleum moves beneath her, she bends her knees for balance. The bare walls box in a smell like custard and tires. Unbroken lines of dusk-colored smoke parade out of a back closet; someone is taking a cigarette break, but has not left the building. The man behind the counter—who looks as if his nametag pin were stuck into his chest—seems not to want my money at all. And I think all this requires a certain level of dress. I scrape a piece of loose skin out of the inside of my bottom lip—it is as if my mouth is dying—as I look out the window, down the road, where I will drive after receiving my muffin while the others stay behind, their forearms collecting layer after layer of flour, their hands too accustomed to drying batter to bother washing off.

I will drive up this flat road for twenty-six minutes more. I will be surprised if I pass more than ten other cars. I will park outside a pyramid-shaped structure made mainly of windows. I will look down the road for much of the day, unsure what is beyond this oasis.

I will be assigned a project involving a database of clinical trial results. Pfizer must organize its human research subjects’ responses to its highest-ever dose of Viagra. I will organize men’s responses to the prompt, “Please rate your satisfaction with this erection on a scale of 1 to 5.” I will for a moment feel calmed by the lack of fives. I always meant to be a five, a five all-around—go back to school, move away, take my wife all red cheeks and laughing bickers—but somewhere along the way, I forgot, and I settled. My wife Renee, now there’s a five, brick-colored hair and a near-PhD, knees always bent and ready to propel. She moves in ways I wish I moved. I cannot bring myself to be a roadblock. I have never even tried. I keep her out of my mouth. My tongue withers in waiting for the day she remembers me. I believe someday she will.

Rolling pools of sand will be arranged and rearranged throughout the day by the brooming of the wind. They will tumble enthusiastically out of the parking lot and farther down the road, where they will rise and break apart, becoming clouds, and then disappearing.

I will dip a sugar cookie from the break room into a coffee brought to me by the new secretary, Mandy, who is attempting to buy friends. She will have driven back to the muffin shop, twenty-six minutes back down the road, at a time when the lines will have expanded and become a mob, collectively impatient to find their way either up or down the road, perhaps past our pyramid, or perhaps past my own house, noting its tomato-paste red exterior, behind which there is almost nothing. Mandy will be reprimanded for having taken so long on her mid-morning break. At the end of my coffee there will be crumbs from the dipping. I will forget about the cookie and complain on my lunch break about the coffee settling out. I will only realize my mistake after I have pulled out of the parking lot.

I will pass the muffin shop as I drive back at 5:37, having stayed late to finish a spreadsheet. Nine is my beginning, five is my end, one just a backwards version of the other, and all the hours in between like myth, dissolving once abandoned.

I will follow backwards the route from which I came. The beachy honeymoon picture dangling in my keychain will hit my knee over and over but remind me of nothing. I will wonder why it is that I consider the old woman in the muffin shop as I dress myself each morning, yet have never said a single word to her. I will decide that she would likely have no use for me anyway. I will arrive in forty-seven minutes at a house that is made not of windows, but of wood that seems always to be soggy, even in a drought like this one. Renee will not be there. She will, perhaps, be farther down that road. She is gunning at something, the distance of which is impossible to know. I wonder if she has traveled the extra forty-eighth minute that I have never seen close-up, where some can go, and I cannot.

PART II: Renee, on How These Maxims Have Sustained the Night

Eventually everything comes out like a turkey left in the oven too long. First, there is the burning smell of something forgotten, the smoke of it diffusing throughout the air, getting into your lungs and eyes where it stings. Then there is the split-second spent wondering if it can be saved, if maybe you can take the ugly layers away, if maybe there is something underneath that hasn’t changed. But once you’ve forgotten it, once you remember it in a vibrating panic, knowing it’s too late to be done over, it’s already changed throughout. This is chemistry; this is memory. This is what wakes us in the middle of the night: The smells. The burning. The knowing. The never-coming-back. And then, it is something else entirely.

I grew up an only child and to be fair it’s given me a lot of things in life. But I suppose in hindsight I was lonely. During the summers, I rode my bike every morning and afternoon while my parents had brunch with my neighbors. I made up games about the boys I liked. Greg was one, Doug another. Josh. Trent. Mahesh. I made up a points system. Riding over a pothole without getting tripped up, that was one point. Keeping a tic-tac under my tongue without crying from the burn or chewing it up, that was one point for every minute I managed. At night, while my parents held dinner parties and cocktail hours, riding between the shine of two streetlights in under ten seconds was one. Riding all the way up the big hill on Crosby Road without stopping, that was ten. And when I had enough points, the boy I liked at the time would fall in love with me.

But I never knew how many points that would take. So I kept doing what I was doing, day in and day out, racking up hundreds of points over a few hours. Tens of thousands over the season. And somehow I knew that tens of thousands weren’t enough. It was my own system, and I didn’t even know how it worked.

My legs became strong. I became a teenager who won MVP at soccer games, the fastest sprinter in the league, my endurance unmatched. The scoreboard flickered to reflect my dedication. My points became everyone’s points. Everyone looked at me, their nostrils flaring above real and involuntary smiles. My mother’s voice crackled her congratulations through bad reception. My father seldom picked up, as cell phones were not allowed on the golf course. I would walk home, but I’d linger on the way. I’d make friends with deli clerks and librarians and classmates who lived en route to my house, so I could get home as late as possible. The things I cared about seemed to take place under a seal of increasing darkness, my bedtime moving back and back, the house floating farther and farther away. The rest of my life would go something like this.

The boys began shaving and the tips of their shoulders grew wider apart. I married one of those boys five weeks after my twenty-third birthday, fourteen months after my college graduation. It did not occur to me then that his hair would begin to pull far back away from his forehead. It did not occur to me then that his promise to go back to school was mere speculation, like all promises. It did not occur to me then that my increasing accomplishments in the fields of biomedical research and sexual vigor would build themselves into the walls of our house, something passed and unseen on the way to the kitchen, like a crookedly-hung landscape or an unfilled vase on a coffee table. It did not occur to me then that I would end up more like a mother than a wife, to a man who needed to be told he’d done right if he was to continue doing anything at all.

I would be demoted at the lab as the result of a sulfuric acid spill, and my ensuing efforts to blame it on an intern. Millions of points would hover over me like fog over water, there to grab, some out of reach, and some making it into my fist but never into my body. Nothing ever running through me like wires. No absorption, no propulsion. Nickels bouncing off my hips but never leaving marks. I change constantly and completely, save for this these two things, my two inertias: my one goal and my one husband.

I was twenty-five the first time I slept with someone else. The second time was the next month. The third was the next week, with two men in the same night (although not in the same room). I could hear the ringing of my score reaching up and up, the scoreboard short-circuiting from breaking too many digits. I don’t know how many points I scored, or what I was scoring them for. In the spirit of my childhood bike games I am inclined to think that somewhere deep down, I was playing for Frank. Once I finally found the number that would release me from the game, Frank would revert back to the man who admired me, all love and freckles, smiling without meaning to when I did right. I would like to be that kind of woman, who wanted all that.

But I don’t know if it’s Frank at all. I do know how my eyelids fluttered like they might turn to wings when Trent went down on me in his apartment building’s elevator. I do know that I get kissed for finishing Neil off, and every kiss stays with me. I do know that the hunger for me, visible in every body in every bar I walk into, is like a Tic-Tac burning under my tongue, knowing that the faster I ride beneath the street lights, the closer I am to some reward, unnamed but surely worth it; some sunrise, come much later than expected.

I never take my men back to my house. Frank is always there. He is always there, and he is always waiting. I cannot stand to wait. There is a light somewhere that will come to me if only I go toward it; the day I can stop will rise up and meet me halfway. I cannot see it yet, but it is coming from somewhere, and I am running, pedaling toward it, always floating a few feet off the ground but knowing I am treading through something, moving somewhere. No one knows how many turns of a wheel it will take to reach an infinitely distant point, a baseball card clicking in countless reminders of rotation. I fuck and fuck and fuck and fuck, backwards, forwards, upside down; in hotels, in stairwells, in passenger seats and on countertops. I am constantly guessing.

Frank spends the night reading. I know this from the overturned books I find on our coffee table in the early morning, when I come in the front door and prepare for work before he has quite gotten out of bed. He reads paperback mystery novels whose titles stand just a millimeter off the cover. Frank does not bother guessing anymore. He goes to sleep. Sunrise and sunset, they are the same to him, just backwards, ricocheting off his forehead with a thudding force that he hardly even notices anymore. He assembles databases for Viagra and does not even see how strange a thing that is. I do feel sorry for him.

While I wait for morning, though, I do what I will with the night, and I commit myself to remembering all of it, everything reminding me of some other place or person from whom I’ve gathered up points. My memory is built into my skeleton. The images inside my eyelids connect my joints. Pieces of my past make legends. You couldn't pay me to be anyone else. I am still moved by my every hushed extramarital exhale. How lucky, how rare I am, to be moved by anything at all, and in particular by something so silent.

How long should it take for Septembers to stop feeling like beginnings; Junes like ends; Julys and Augusts like something infallible that will disappear into myth once abandoned? When will years begin to matter more than seasons? When will I stop accidentally dating documents the year of my college graduation? Erasers grow dull. I move forward only because I cannot move back.

To be clear, I have no delusions of invincibility. I have faith that the end will come, that the scoreboard that sits at the base of my skull will one day fold in on itself and make my brain something else entirely. I believe I will know that day when I see it, the sky turning deep blue after a long night of black, though it is a maxim of my life that everything tends to come later than expected, even when I am expecting things to come late. I wait for the first purple arm of morning to reach out, its length impressing even me and lifting me like love—like it’s my birthday, and my parents, for once, remember to call.