She sat in the living room, jotted efficiently on her clipboard, and asked me how I was feeling about the apartment across the street. “Had I decided?” I went into a rhapsody about the complications of my decision, about the necessity of contacting my nonexistent writing partner. I had been talking for a minute or so when I noticed a rictus forming on Elizabeth ’s face. She was looking past me at waist level with her mouth dropped open and her writing hand frozen. I turned my head and looked at the TV, and my mouth went open, and if I had been writing, my hand would have frozen, too. There I was on TV, being shuffled along in mock arrest on the Crime Show. There was a long moment before I came out with “My God, that fellow looks like me.” What filled the long moment was my shock, not at the bad luck of the show’s air date and time slot, but at how I looked on TV. The blue parka made me look fat, which I’m not. It made me look like a criminal, and I’m not. The show then jumped to the long shot of me talking to the two policemen. Now we could see my apartment in the background, so there was no use denying the obvious. “Oh right, it is me,” I ventured. “I made a bundle off this,” and I nodded up and down as if to verify my own lie. Then I turned to Elizabeth and said, “All I’m saying there is ‘I’m talking, I’m talking, I’m trying to look like I’m talking.’ ” She looked over at me, then back to the TV, and I knew that she had identified me as someone dangerous.
This moment was like a pivot. Everything in my little universe swung on its axis and reordered itself. Here’s why: Elizabeth, whom I had previously seen only on her turf, or through a window, or in my head, was, now that she had crossed the threshold of my apartment, an actual being who would demand closet space. I didn’t even have enough closet space for the clothes she was currently wearing. I knew that I could not share a bathroom with eighteen gallons of hair stiffener, and I began to see how clearly she misfit my life. At the same time, when she saw me on TV, her face hid a well-tempered revulsion. In these few elongated seconds, our magnetic poles flopped as she became ordinary and I became notorious.
Elizabeth must have now viewed my apartment as a halfway house, since she asked me if addicts lived in the building. I said no and did a pretty good job of explaining the TV show, though when I began to explain about the murder downstairs she got the hiccups and asked for water. I felt a small surge of pride because the water from the kitchen tap was not murky or even slightly brown. Her cell phone rang and she spoke into it, saying “yeah” three times and hanging up. Her tone was as if the person on the other end of the line had heard stress in her voice and was trying to suss out her predicament with questions like, “Are you all right?”
“Are you in danger?” and “Do you want me to come get you?” She was out the door, and I looked at her from my spot by the window and felt a twinge of the old longing, no doubt brought on by placing myself in the old circumstances.
After seeing the two women side by side, Elizabeth actually before me and Clarissa in my mind, a thought came into my head that jarred me: Would it be possible to scoop up my love for Elizabeth and steam-shovel it over onto Clarissa? This thought disturbed me because it suggested that the personalities of the two women had nothing whatever to do with the knot of love inside me. It implied that, if I chose, I could transfer my adoration onto anyone or thing that tweaked my fancy. But my next thought set me straight. I knew that once love is in place, it does not unstick without enormous upheaval, without horrible images of betrayal flashing uncontrollably through the mind, without visions of a bleak and inconsolable self, a self that is a captive of grief, which lingers viscously in the heart.
But Clarissa was making the decision easy for me. She reflected light; Elizabeth sucked it up. Clarissa was a sunburst; Elizabeth was a moon pie. So now my preoccupation with Elizabeth became a post-occupation as I turned my Cyclops eye onto Clarissa. Yes, I would always love Elizabeth in some way, and one day we would be able to see each other again. But it was too soon right now. Better to let her handle her own pain, with her own friends, in her own way. But Elizabeth was at fault here. She had destroyed whatever was between us by making a profound gaffe: She met me.
Long after the sun had set, my thoughts continued to accumulate, spread, and divide. What were my chances with Clarissa? None. Clearly, none. In nine months of twice-weekly visits, she had not placed on my tongue one sacrament of romantic interest. And not only that, she spoke to me in the tone one uses with a mental patient: “And how are we today?” meaning, “How are you and all those nuts living inside you?” At least Clarissa knows I’m benign. But that is not an adjective one wants to throw around about one’s spouse: “This is my husband. He’s benign.”
In spite of the gleaming bursts of well-being that were generated by the idea of loving Clarissa instead of Elizabeth, in the deeper hours of the night I began to look at myself, to consider myself and my condition, to measure the life I’d led so far. I did not know what made me this way. I did not know of any other way I could be. I did not know what was inside me or how I could redeem what was hidden there. There must be a key or person or thing, or song or poem or belief, or old saw that could access it, but they all seemed so far away, and after I drifted further and further into self-absorption, I closed the evening with this desolate thought: There are few takers for the quiet heart.
In the middle of the night I woke spooked and perspiring. I clutched the blanket, drawing it up to my mouth as protection against the murderous creature that no doubt was lurking in the room. I lay still in case it did not yet know I was there. I held my breath for silence, then slowly let it out without moving my chest. Eventually this technique caught up with me and I had to occasionally gasp for air. But no one killed me that night, no knife penetrated the blanket, no hand grabbed at my throat. Looking back, I can identify the cause of my panic. It was that my earlier Socratic dialogue with myself about the nature of love had no Socrates to keep me logical. There was just me, seesawing between the poles. There was no one to correct me and consequently no thought necessarily implied the next, in fact, a thought would often contradict its predecessor. I had tried to force clarity on my confused logic, and this disturbed my demanding sense of order.
Two days later I saw a man in a suit and tie standing on the sidewalk in front of the apartment next door. He was rail thin and for a moment I could have been in Sleepy Hollow except this man had a head and no horse. He swayed from left to right, scanning up and down the block for street numbers. He was all angles as he craned sideways and looked up, twisting at the waist to check an address he held in his hand. This one-man menagerie crabbed along the sidewalk, with his neck moving owl-like as he looked far and close.
When he saw the address above the stairs of my building, it seemed he’d found what he was looking for. He collected himself and came up the steps and knocked at my door.
“Daniel Cambridge?” he called out.
I counted to three then opened the door.
“Yes?” I said.
“Gunther Frisk from Tepperton’s Pies,” he said.
We sat chair and sofa; this time with the TV off as I didn’t want an errant Crime Show to leak into my living room. He asked whether I would be available on March 4 to read my essay at Freedom College in the event I won. “I would check my schedule,” I said, “but I can always move things around.”