He stayed in Cambridge, in Boston, last summer, to work on starting his project, and he got a research job in his engineering lab, and he didn't even ever really explain why he didn't want to come be in Bloomington for the summer, even though I'd just got my B. A. here. But he sent me a big arrangement of roses and said for me to come live with him and be his love in Boston that summer, that he missed me so much he couldn't endure it, and I went through a lot deciding, but I did, I used my graduation present money to fly to MIT and got a job as a hostess in Harvard Square at a German restaurant, the Wurst House, and we had an apartment in the Back Bay with a fireplace that was really expensive. But then after some time passed, Bruce acted like he really didn't want me to be there. If he'd said something about it that would be one thing, but he just started being really cold. He'd be away at the lab all the time, and he never came in to see the Wurst House, and when we were alone at home he didn't touch me for a week once, and he'd snap sometimes, or just be cold. It was like he was repulsed by me after a while. I'd started taking birth control pills by then. Then in July once he didn't come home or call for a day and a night, and when he did he got mad that I was mad that he didn't. He said why couldn't he at least have some vestige of his own life every once in a while. I said he could, but I said it just didn't feel to me like he felt the same anymore. He said how dare you tell me what I feel. I flew back home a few days later. We decided that's what I better do, because if I stayed he'd feel like he had to be artificially nice all the time, and that wouldn't be any fun for either of us. We both cried a little bit at Logan airport when he took me on the bus. In Bloomington my family threw confetti on me when I got home, they were glad to have me back, and I felt good to be home, too. Then a day later Bruce sent arranged roses again and called and said he'd made a ghastly error, and he flew back home, too, and said he was very sorry that he had got obsessional about all sorts of exterior things, and he tried to make me understand that he felt like he was standing on the cusp between two eras, and that however he'd acted I should regard as evidence of his own personal shortcomings as a person, not as anything about his commitment to me as a lover. And I guess I had so much invested in the relationship by then that I said OK that's OK, and he stayed in Bloomington over a week, and we did everything together, and at night he made me feel wonderful, it could really be wonderful being close with him, and he said he was making me feel wonderful because he wanted to, not because he thought he had to. Then he went back to Boston and said wait for me till Thanksgiving, don't sit under apple trees, and I'll come back to you, so I did, I even turned down friendly lunch invitations and football tickets from guys in my classes. And then Thanksgiving and Chrstmas felt to me like the exact same thing as that bad part of the summer in the Back Bay. My feelings just started to change. It wasn't all him. It took time, but after time passed I felt something was missing, and I'm selfish, I can only feel like I'm giving more than I'm getting for so long, then things change.'
"Bruce perhaps here is the opportunity to confront the issue of your having on four separate occasions late last fall slept with a Simmons College sophomore from Great Neck, New York. Perhaps you'd care to discuss a certain Halloween party."
'Last summer was no fun, and when I'd tell him that at Christmas, he'd get mad, and tell me not to bring it up unless I was trying to really tell him something. I'd already started to be friends with the guy from Stats, but I wouldn't have even been interested in hanging around with him if things had been OK with Bruce and me.'
'I sleep and eat and sit around a great deal, and the red in my eye slowly fades. I wash insects' remains from my mother's windshield. For a time I devote most of my energy to immersing myself in the lives and concerns of two adults for whom I have a real and growing affection. My uncle is an insurance adjuster, though he's due for early retirement at the end of the year because of the state of his wind: the family worries about the possibility of his car breaking down on one of the uncountable Aroostook County roads he crisscrosses every day, adjusting claims. The winters here are killers. I have the feeling that when my uncle retires he will do nothing but watch television and tease my aunt and relate stories about the claims he adjusts. His stories are not to be believed. They all start with, "I had a loss once. ." He talks to me, in the living room, over the few beers he's allowed each day. He tells me that he's always been a homebody and a family man, that he loved spending time with his family — the children now grown and gone south, to Portland and Augusta and Bath — that there have been plenty of fools in his agency who spent all their time on their careers or their hunting or their golf or their peckers, and then what did they have, when winter came and the world got snowed in, after all? My aunt teaches third grade at the elementary school across town, and has the summer off, but she's taking two courses, a French and a Sociology, at the University of Maine's Prosopopeia branch downtown. For a few days after I'm rested I ride over with her to the little college and sit in the campus library while she's in class. The library is tiny, cute, like the children's section of a public facility, with carpet and furniture and walls colored in the muted earth-tones of autumn rot. There is hardly anyone in the summer library except two very heavy women who inventory the books at the tops of their lungs. It is at once too noisy and too quiet to do any real work, and I have no ideas that do not seem to me shallow and overwrought. I really feel, sitting, trying to extrapolate on the equations that have informed the last two years of my life, as though I'd been shot in the head. I end up writing disordered pieces, or more often letters, without direction or destination. What is to prove? It seems as though I've disproved everything. I soon stop going to the UMP library. Days go by, and my aunt and uncle are impeccably kind, but Maine becomes another here instead of a there.'
"Explain."
'Things become bad. I now have a haircut the shadow of which scares me. It occurs to me that neither my aunt nor my uncle has once asked what happened to the pretty little thing that came visiting with us last time we were up, and I wonder what my mother has said to my aunt. I begin to be anxious about something I can neither locate nor define. I have trouble sleeping: I wake very early every morning and wait, cold, for the sun to rise behind the gauzy white curtains of my cousins' old room. When I sleep I have unpleasant, repetitive dreams, dreams involving leopards, skinned knees, a bent old cafeteria fork with crazy tines. I have one slow dream in which she is bagging leaves in my family's yard in Indiana and I am pleading with her magically to present with amnesia, to be for me again, and she tells me to ask my mother, and I go into the house, and when I come out again, with permission, she is gone, the yard knee-deep in leaves. In this dream I am afraid of the sky: she has pointed at it with her rake handle and it is full of clouds which, seen from the ground, form themselves into variegated symbols of the calculus and begin to undergo manipulations I neither cause nor understand. In all my dreams the world is windy, disordered, gray.'
"Now you stop kissing pictures and tearing up proofs and begin to intuit that things are, and have been, much more general and in certain respects sinister all along."
'I begin to realize that she might never have existed. That I might feel this way now for a different — maybe even no — reason. The loss of a specific referent for my emotions is wildly disorienting. Two and a half weeks have passed since I came here. The receptacle is lying on the bureau in my room, still bent from the tollbooth. My affections have become a sort of faint crust on the photo, and the smell when I open the receptacle in the morning is chemically bitter. I stay inside all day, avoid windows, and cannot summon hunger. My testicles are drawn up constantly. They begin to hurt. Whole periods of time now begin to feel to me like the intimate, agonizing interval between something's falling off and its hitting the ground. My aunt says I look pale. I put some cotton in my ear, tell her I have an earache, and spend a lot of time wrapped in a scratchy blanket, watching Canadian television with my uncle.'