Love,
Astrid
Joe let this soak; then, to heat it up, he wrote back a few days later. As he wrote the letter, he felt an inexplicable, mad, tingling ache.
Dear Astrid,
Your letter seems to take the position that it is in reply to a letter from me. I have not written you. But it is nice to have yours anyway. As for here, it is not so bad. I am leading a baffling life but I am suited to that. I have barely had a chance to look into the sort of shooting we may expect this fall; and in fact all the little pleasures have gone by the way, not because I am so busy but because I am apathetic from being unable to completely understand what I am doing all this for. I wonder if you remember the great number of mountain hippies we used to have around here. Well, they are all running tax shelters for environmentalist organizations and I plan to meet with a few to see if we can save a buck or two as well as take the fun out of breaking this thing up for my greedy connections. Why haven’t they moved away? I have found on my return that going out to seek your fortune no longer has the prestige it once had. Now on return they give you that fishy look and ask, “Back for the summer?” This proves to me that it is the rats who do stick with a sinking ship. No reference to you of course darling. I have had numerous opportunities to confirm that in fact I trust nobody. Which has its distorting effect. But we all live beneath some sort of lens and no true shapes can be discerned. I think it is quite enough to be able to tell someone what is on your mind, even if the delivery is nervous and sidelong. Therefore, this letter, my ideal recipient. — Still not getting any. How about yourself?
Joe signed it “With suspicious affection,” licked the envelope, and threw it on the kitchen counter for the next trip to town. But before he could get it into the mail, he received yet another letter from Astrid, a short one. It said, “I hate you. You stole my car. Now I hate all men.” He fired back one more.
Dear Astrid,
God made women because sheep can’t cook.
Joe
He sent this latest with a gleeful and almost breathless air, reflected in the enormous cost of sending it by overnight mail. He must have known that it would have a big effect. He must have planned this bit of explosive infantilism without a hint of innocence. Because in four days flat Astrid, wearing enormous dark glasses, dragging more luggage than she looked like she had the strength to carry, walked in the front door and said, “Take it back, motherfucker.”
He was so happy! He loved her with his whole heart. And then tears came into his eyes.
“Met anyone nice out here?” Astrid asked.
“One. But I already knew her, really.”
“Get anywhere?”
“I would.”
“Only what?”
“I keep laughing at the wrong time.”
“I see.”
He couldn’t fathom her. It was like Jackie O at the funeral of Onassis. One suspected the sunglasses concealed twinkling eyes. When Astrid wished to tell him something important, she would grab his forearm the way children do to each other in the scary parts of movies. She did that now. “Do try to remember the week we had,” she said. “All those funny things that weren’t funny.”
“Like what wasn’t funny?”
“Farting in time to music.”
“What else?”
“Calling me drunk at three a.m. and shouting, ‘Don’t pay the ransom, I’ve escaped!’ Joe, you were a hoot!”
A certain formality was agreed upon without discussion: Astrid would have her own room. As it happened, the two bedrooms were on opposite sides of the kitchen and so the sense of division was fairly complete. It was Joe’s plan to make this arrangement clear to Ellen as soon as he could. He didn’t think that that was absolutely required; and in fact he meant to be sure his explanation did not imply a deeper responsibility to Ellen than necessary. He just wanted it clear. Astrid settled right into the arrangement without particularly indicating whether she was there for a day or a year. Joe didn’t plan to ask. He didn’t mention his daughter because he wanted to make certain a reasonable plan for visiting was in place before he got down to the specifics of an arrangement.
He was immediately fascinated by Astrid’s city ways, which he hadn’t even noticed before. She folded her things in her dresser and hung her blouses carefully in the closet. She got a glass from the kitchen to put in the bathroom cabinet and set a bottle of French perfume on the dresser where the brassieres were folded one cup inside the other. She tied the curtains in their middles to let in light, stretched the bedspread taut and placed a travel-battered paperback next to the bed. Joe noticed all this as breezily as he could, but since he had no real routines in this house, no routines anywhere really, it was hard to make a single natural movement at the same time he was observing Astrid. He simply felt her presence swelling and seeping throughout the house and found himself less and less able to even act as if he was ignoring it.
As they passed in the short corridor, he reached his hand out to her arm. She stopped at exactly that distance and said, “Yes?”
“Hi,” he said, smiling, and feeling shockingly stupid.
She said, “Hi.”
They passed going in opposite directions. Joe thought that to keep this business from degenerating at a very rapid rate, he was going to have to have something to do other than absorb the impact of Astrid.
He turned back from the living room and stretching his arms across the doorway, spoke down the corridor toward Astrid’s room. “I’m going to run in and get a few supplies before things close.”
“Bye,” she called, “use your seat belt.”
He sped to Ellen’s bearing some peculiar force because she simply let him rush into her house and make love to her, bracing her pelvis while she scrutinized this demented, ejaculating person. Joe felt withered by her quizzical stare. He dressed so quickly afterward he had to pry himself back into his shorts. “I have to talk to you,” he said, underlining this vagary with a powerful, fixed look. “You know what it’s about. I feel I’m being strung along.”
Ellen said, “You’ve got a lot of nerve after what we’ve just done.”
“I mean, is this it? We’re just going to sneak around like this?”
“It depends,” Ellen said.
“Depends? On what?”
“On how I feel. God, Joe, you never changed! Can’t you take one day at a time?”
“No,” Joe said so loud it was almost a shout. “I want to see my daughter!”
He went to the IGA store and threw things arbitrarily into the shopping cart. He got stuck in the only check-out line that was open. A small, heavy woman in front of him, with a dirty-faced infant riding the cart, unloaded small items piled as high as her head. He stared at the front page of the Star, at the headline RABBIT FACE BABY HAS TEN INCH EARS, and read as much as he could of the text before he had to check out with his items: the dieting mother had binged on carrots during her final trimester.
As he unloaded his groceries in the kitchen, Astrid glided past him and said, “I smell what you’ve been doing.”
He slowly turned in her direction, the burn of deep conviction; he was a bit too slow: she was already back in her room.
“When are you turning in that rental car?” he asked loudly.
“As soon as I can get to the airport,” she said. “You can follow me.”
“Why would I follow you?”
“So you can fucking well give me back my car.”
Joe had once gone out with a girl who was just breaking up with her live-in boyfriend. He had quite fallen for this girl and had already begun worrying about the depth of his involvement. The boyfriend had recently moved out but he stopped back from time to time to bicker with the girl about the ownership of the stereo and the health of the bamboo plant he claimed to have nurtured to its current size, and to laugh sarcastically at the clean house she was currently keeping. As Joe watched the progress of these small nagging encounters, he began to suspect he was witnessing a preview of his own life. Detachment set in. Now, years later, he placed similar hopes on the pink car. Some nagging, the exchange of a few receipts, some appropriate body language, whirling departures or loud footsteps on the wooden floors of the ranch, and the slave chains could be gently lifted.