“Right.”
“Get it, Scotch tape?”
“Oh.”
The rain pattered.
She pulled it out of the white paper bag with a flourish. I widened my eyes, trying to seem impressed.
The tape was yellowed, an amber sort of color. It looked like the tape we’d used in grade school, before they invented good tape.
“It looks old,” I said.
“No, no, this is the best. They invented it, these people! Probably up there, in that castle. A bunch of monks, took them centuries.” She was desperately trying to get some tape from the roll but it wasn’t attached to any standard tape dispensing device. I wanted to help but knew she’d ask me if she felt she needed it. That was the rule.
In a few seconds she was done assembling, wrapping the tape around the adapter and the walkman. But the tape wasn’t sticking. It fell off immediately. It was like paper. It was not tape. It had no adhesive qualities whatsoever.
I laughed and then stopped. She was angry. She peeled off another strip and tested its stickiness against her fingers.
“It’s not even sticky,” she said. “I can’t believe it.”
She started the car and pulled out.
“This is Scotch tape, right?” she said. “God damn it.”
Up through the highlands at dusk. Throughout the electric-green hills were great white stones flung like teeth.
“I see this and I think glory,” I said to Erin, loving the sound of the word glory, and hoping it would impress her in some way. I was driving now, and soon realized that driving on the wrong side wasn’t very difficult.
“I’d love to live here,” I said, trying to sound dreamy.
“You can’t live here,” she said. “There’s nothing here. No work.”
“I could telecommute.”
Silence from Erin.
“If you were here,” I started, then dropped the thought.
She gave me a fake smile. I soaked up every ounce of it.
When I met Erin I was working at a statistics-processing firm, a small shop founded by a one-time major league pitcher named Dean Denny. He was a side-armer, goofy and mustachioed. After retiring at thirty-two, he’d run for office, lost, spent ten years as a lobbyist for everyone from Exxon to Greenpeace, then started the American Institute for Statistical Studies. The firm was located in a converted Victorian in Alexandria, catering to the nonprofits in D.C., some federal agencies, and those who wanted influence at either or both. The other two staff members were Michael and Derek, Michael being Dean’s son and Derek being Michael’s old friend and the former personal assistant to Alan Simpson, senator of Wyoming.
Two months after meeting Erin I secured a job for her at the AISS. I was afraid she’d hate Michael and Derek, that they would drive her away. For their own amusement, they had recently removed one letter from the firm’s name and had made business cards with A.S.S. on them. They were chucklers, they were assholes. They called me The Turtle.
Then Turtle-man.
Then Yertle.
Then Yentl. Then Lentil.
Finally they went back to Turtle.
They were funny and loyal. They laughed about Dockers but then wore pants shockingly close to Dockers. Sometimes they’d wear baseball caps to work, the bill carefully bent in an upside-down grin, the edges frayed. Their footwear was always perfect — old Nike hiker’s low-tops in earth tones, or white bucks flawlessly faded and scuffed. They dressed the way certain Cape Coddish catalogs tried to dress their models, but these two were better at it, effortless about it, tucking one side of their shirts in just so, their clothes worn in but never threadbare—
It sounds as though I was paying attention to their wardrobe but I don’t remember it that way. You know these men. They’re fine people, they know right from wrong. I had a strong feeling that, in a pinch, they would do more for me than I would for them. It was more in their blood; they were not people who would think twice.
The American Institute for Statistical Studies was the only one of its kind on the East Coast and therefore we were the best at what we did. We were the people who took the statistics— how many people injured on the job each year, how many boys fondled by priests every decade, how many cats declawed in urban areas every week, anything — and, among other services, extrapolated those numbers into the frequency per day, per hour, minute, whatever seemed most grievous. We knew all the pertinent figures—525,600 minutes in a year, 31,536,000 seconds — and so could always figure out how to make whatever issue or trend seem as menacing as possible. Three million squirrels poisoned by processed food a year is one thing, but if the public knows that one such squirrel dies every twelve seconds, well then, the reasoning goes, you have a populace motivated to act.
Given our physical proximity, the four of us knew an inordinate amount about each other. We could hear, if we chose to listen, every word spoken by any of the others, on the phone or otherwise. We quickly became protective of one another but especially of Erin, who we pretended needed our shielding. She had been raised as an only child outside of Asheville — she had the faintest accent — and now she felt, she often said, as if she’d inherited three brothers. When she first said that, after we’d been working together for a few months, we three coveted it, being thought of as her brothers — it prompted Derek, at least, to start lifting weights. But it made anyone’s romantic pursuit of Erin seem against nature or God. We’d all had, before that point, intentions of varying severity. My feelings for Erin were confused. I loved her.
She noticed things about me. When I sat across from her, at any meal, she would find a time, after looking at me for a few seconds, to make a declaration. “You have minnow-shaped eyes,” she said. “You smell clean. Like a little boy,” she said. It didn’t matter what she said, I was always grateful. “You have something below you,” she said to me, eating a hoagie one day, prying open my every pore and reading my every memory. “Like a bunch of teeth waiting to come through.”
I wanted to love her heroically, selflessly — to honor her and defend her, and punish people who looked at her stump in a way that displeased her. But soon I realized that she had more than enough suitors, and at least a few of them would be better for her. They all seemed to be quiet, uncomplicated men, who were usually older and who invariably looked older than they were, and wore wool. But occasionally we glimpsed an “old friend” or an acquaintance from this gym or that band — she went to a lot of shows — and these men caused us concern. These men were thinner, unshaven, wore boots.
She spread her attention between the three of us with maddening equability. We usually all ate together, but occasionally, in a casual but calculated rotation, we ate with her alone. For a time, Michael and Derek stepped into an area where they were permitted to make ribald jokes about her missing arm. I never followed, nor did Dean. Derek she allowed to call her Lefty, but at some point Michael lost his license to kid her about the arm, I don’t know how. I rejoiced.
Michael, Derek, and I, each unsure of the others’ intentions and of our own, agreed, drunkenly one night, never to touch her, not even in a state like the one in which we currently found ourselves. Everyone had their intimacies, though. Derek took her on motorcycle rides, Michael taught her how to roast a pig. I was the one — either because she loved me more or because I was the least virile — she told about her men.
She claimed never to want to talk much about them, but she did, with little provocation. Hearing their names, or the nicknames she gave them — Fingers, Señor con Queso, Mr. Robinson — made me uneasy; it was clear that many of them were still lurking nearby, and that she was not adept at or willing to cut them loose. She lamented the fact that she seemed to attract men who wanted to extract something from her. She used this word, extract, often, when talking about these unnamed men. I considered her flawless, though I wished she were more careful, or better able to keep herself out of the path of these bad men. The bad men, I told her, were not always obvious at first, though I wasn’t sure that was true.