"The whole world," I said. "The whole world has changed."
"Is this what you saw us doing when we were young?" she asked. "We were idealistic. We wanted more than this, Clark. Remember? Remember what you wanted?"
I stared into her fluttering eyes. "Yes," I whispered. "I remember."
She stared back at me, confused, and then it seemed to register, what I was talking about. She laughed, tossed her head back, and snorted. "I don't mean that, silly." She waved her hand dismissively and knocked my drink into my lap.
I jumped up and slapped at my crotch, where the Kahlua had doused whatever had begun to smolder down there.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm a dope." Then she took her drink, looked at it, and dumped it in her own lap, the vodka and cranberry juice making a small and inviting pool in her skirt. We both watched as the booze seeped into the small triangle between her thighs – until all that was left were six of the most fortunate ice cubes I've ever seen.
"There," she said. "Even."
Ten minutes later we were in her hotel room. I would like to say that the next eight minutes constituted one of those life-altering, transcendent moments that can occasionally occur when two people do what we attempted to do, but far too much liquor had crossed the breach for anything more than a boozy tumble. (Ow. Ooh, not there. Mmmph. Are you okay? Sorry.) We certainly did nothing to make good on the promise and longing of all those years.
And yet, when it was over, we held tight and I spent the next hour staring at the tiny blond hairs on her temple, listening to her breathe on my neck, and we lay all night like that in each other's arms, slowly sobering up, but not saying a word, not wanting to waste a second with talk or sleep, our fingertips lightly tracing each other's bodies until dawn began to nudge at the curtains and we could stand it no longer and, aching, we pressed together again, and then all morning, clenching and arching and falling away. And I doubt that such things can be controlled, but the last memory I hope to indulge on this earth is the weight of Dana's hand on my neck and the gust of her voice on my ear as she whispered, "Clark. Oh my God, yes."
When I finally gave in, it was to the deepest sleep I can ever remember. When I awoke, about three that afternoon, Dana was sitting in a chair across from my bed, talking on the phone. "No," she was saying. "It was fine." She listened for a few minutes. "I'm flying out tonight." She listened again. "Clark?" She looked up at me. "Yeah, I saw him a little bit… Well, we didn't make any plans, but if I see him, I'll tell him hi."
"Okay," she said. "Love you too," and hung up the phone.
"Hi," she said to me.
"Hi."
She smiled sadly, and I had the inexplicable feeling there was someone else in the room with us – some version of our pasts or vision of our futures, some overwhelming sadness. "You have the worst timing of any person I've ever met," she said finally.
We showered separately, dressed, and drove into town. She wore a print dress that reminded me of the things she wore as a kid. She kept pushing her hair over her ears. We ended up at the Davenport Hotel, which was just then beginning another renovation, and I stood quietly in kinship with it, my insides long ago gutted and abandoned, dead for fifteen years and now, against all reason and odds, crying out for rebirth.
We drove out to the Valley, to her parents' old house, in the apple orchards near the Idaho state line. They'd moved to Arizona a few years earlier, and Dana didn't want to disturb the new owners. She sat low in the passenger seat of my rental car and traced the white porch railing on the car window. "We're kids for such a short amount of time." She turned and looked at me. "But forever."
Dana had never been to my house when we were in high school, and I said nothing as we drove past it. My mother was in the yard, her back to us, bent over a flower bed along the sidewalk in front of their house – her shoulders a little narrower, her hair a bouquet of gray. I passed behind her, a ghost in a rental car.
"Where is it?" Dana asked a few blocks later. "I thought we were going by your house."
"It was back there," I said.
At the airport, I ordered a drink, but Dana didn't want one. We sat at the end of the terminal, watching mothers preboard with their babies.
"Have you thought about how you're going to tell Michael?" I asked.
"Tell Michael?" She cocked her head.
I stared at her for a moment and then said, "Oh." Understanding fell in my lap like a White Russian. "You're not going to tell Michael."
They announced her section of the plane and Dana stood. "Oh, Clark," she said. "I'm sorry. It would kill him." She kissed me. "This was nice. Maybe even something I needed. But I have to get back to my life now."
This was nice. I lurched and burned and swayed and watched her walk all the way down the tarmac, until at the very end, just before she stepped on the plane, I swear I saw her glance back.
3
I got drunk that night, and again the next night and pretty much every night for the next six weeks. I have always tried to drink moderately, but as you may have noticed by this point in my confession, I have a somewhat compulsive personality. So for me drinking moderately is akin to fucking moderately, or jumping moderately from a cliff. Either you do or you don't. And after watching Dana get on that plane, I did. I got drunk on the plane back to Seattle, got drunk at the airport bar after I landed, and then – when Dana wouldn't answer my e-mails – set about humiliating myself in a different bar each night for a month and change. I have fond memories, and fonder blackouts, from this time (one Saturday afternoon I staggered from a Pioneer Square bar and led a tour of the Seattle Underground to the water, where, thankfully, I was stopped before I could perform any baptisms). I will not indulge these lost evenings, these nights in which I was potted, canned, screwed, smashed, soaked, bottled, and blitzed; instead I'll skip to the last night of this long hot binge, when I was summarily thrown out of the Triangle Pub for standing on a stool and asking for help measuring the bar's hypotenuse.
After I was led outside I promptly fell over on the sidewalk, looked up into the drizzle, and saw a girl's thin face staring down at me. She was young and lithe in her Deadhead sundress, her braided red hair and worn backpack. I immediately recognized her as one of the girls I'd slept with during my bohemian days.
"Tamira," I said.
"No," she said. "Kayla."
"Oh. Kayla. You look like a Tamira."
"Yeah. I just came out to tell you, it doesn't have a hypotenuse."
"What?"
"The bar. It's an isosceles triangle. Doesn't have any right angles. So you can't measure the hypotenuse." She peered into my eyes. "What's wrong with you?"
I asked her to marry me. We went instead to a late-night breakfast joint where I told her the whole sordid story while she ate ginger french toast and tofu sausage with one of her turquoise-ringed hands and smoked Lucky Strikes with the other.
"So you're saying you spent the last three years trying to be like the guy that this Dana woman married?" she asked.
I thought about it. "Yes," I said. "I guess I did."
Kayla took a drag of a Lucky Strike. "Well, there's your mistake. The last thing some married chick wants is a guy like her husband. You should go back to yourself."
In a flash of understanding I saw that Kayla was right. Go back to myself. The problem was this: which self?
Two days later I was back in Spokane, at a cemetery downriver from the city. I crouched down in front of a small stone, set flush into the ground. I ran my finger over the letters, BENJAMIN T. MASON, and those cruel dates, NOVEMBER 12, 1966-NOVEMBER 19, 1985. I know there are people who go to such places to talk to the person who has died, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. (I also refuse to say that a person has "passed," as if he has simply processed a rich meal.)