“I can’t see you anymore,” she told him the next day. It was easier to say than she’d anticipated that it would be. The words came out of her mouth in a smooth, fluid rush.
On the bridge across the canal, she was walking him home, he on the railing but holding on to her hand. When she was small she’d walked that way with her mother, her mother’s arm lending her balance, and the rail or bench elevating her so they were equally tall. But the rail made him much taller than Jemma, and he was too sure of his balance to need a loan from her.
“Don’t say that,” he said. The sun was just behind him, so his head seemed replaced by a ball of flame. She closed her eyes against him and saw not just the blinking orange globe but his face, too, in disappointed afterimage.
“I can’t see you anymore,” she said again, not opening her eyes but stepping back and pulling her hand free.
“Why not?”
“Because,” she said.
“What did I do?”
“Nothing,” she said. “It’s just a bad idea. No, just that… it’s just impossible, is all.”
“Why?”
“Because it is.”
“But it isn’t,” he said. She didn’t reply, and they stood facing each other in silence. She opened her eyes one at a time, just peeping at first, thinking he might be gone, but he still stood there looking down at her with his arms folded across his chest. People passed them, single or in pairs or accompanied by dogs, and some stared curiously.
“Look,” he said finally, “it’s always impossible, isn’t it? This is impossible, but happens anyway. Watch.” He swung his arms behind him, then brought them forward over his head, and the rest of his body followed, first his belly, then his thighs, and then his feet flying up not a foot from her nose, making a breeze that she felt against her ears. He flipped full around once and landed solidly on the rail. It was perfectly done. He would not have fallen if Jemma hadn’t grabbed at him and knocked him off balance. She shrieked and put out both her hands to pull him in, but she only succeeded in pushing him into the pond. He looked distinctly surprised and even betrayed as he fell, but made no sound as he went into the water.
Now I’ve done it, she thought calmly, but not resisting an urge to pull miserably at her face. A vision flashed in her head of his very white bones surfacing in the acid water and bobbing about a little before dissolving into pink, marrowy foam.
“I made it!” he called up to her. “I had it landed before you pushed me!” She ran off down the bridge, meaning to run entirely out of his life. He could suffer a collision with her and not die for it. He would suffer this little damage and then go on living. Goodbye, goodbye! she called out in her head as she ran, imagining the other woman he would find. She would be prettier than Jemma but stupider, and she would be the type of woman compelled to uncover the past lovers of her lovers. When she heard the story of Jemma’s behavior she would be utterly unable to fathom it.
“I’m only calling,” she told him four days later, “to tell you I can never see you again. And to tell you to stop calling me every day.”
“Okay,” he said.
“It makes me embarrassed for you,” she said. “All the messages.”
“Yes. Will you see me tonight?”
“Of course,” she said, meaning to say, of course she would like to, but she certainly could not. But he had hung up and was already on his way to the bridge. When he stood under her window and called for her she went down to him, a voice in her head as she went down the stairs — her mother’s or her brother’s or her father’s or her lover’s — remarking how her resolve was as sturdy as a peeled banana.
But I like him, she said to herself, to them, slowing on the curving steps.
It doesn’t matter.
And he likes me, I think.
It doesn’t matter.
And I need him.
Who’s to say what’s necessary? What’s your need compared to his life?
You’re just being superstitious.
Is it superstition to insist that the sun rises in the East?
Shut up! she said, not out loud — she wasn’t that crazy. Though she could call them out of the dark to stand silently around her bed, and though they were the constant companions of her dreams, and though she still consulted her mother on which days were skirt days and which days were pants days, and exalted with her brother in a great high or a stupendous drunk, and though she continued to have imaginary, masturbatory sex with her departed lover, she knew they weren’t real when they stood before her on the last four steps, raising their hands in the gesture she had practiced: stop, no more, go back upstairs. Four is enough, her father said. She passed right through them.
She thought that she might catch the roach and set it free outside, but it hid from her whenever she sought it. A few times, studying on her couch, she felt watched, and looked up to see it on the counter, waving its antennae as if in admonition or warning. When she chased it, it evaded her easily. Her best opportunity to banish it was whenever Rob Dickens came for her. The roach was always waiting near the door, but if she caught it she’d have to spirit it past him, or else hold it in her purse until there was a time in their evening when she could set free. The dinnertime disaster had already played a few times in her head: her purse carelessly closed; a tickle on her leg, belly, breast and neck; the roach emerging from around her ear to perch on her head and regard the endangered rival; the screams of the waitress.
He was a candle lover. They gave his bedroom the air of a chamber of sacrifice; they were all around his bed, in free-standing iron sconces, on the nightstands and dresser, in an enormous chandelier brought back from a year in Belgium. When they were all lit, the room was almost as bright as a hospital hallway. It was the bedroom of a priest, or a ritual murderer, and laying eyes upon it she’d had a surge of hope, that he might be crazy, too. Always she required him to extinguish some, so the light became gentler. When she looked at him his dripping face wavered with the light, and it became the face of her first. He spoke her name to her, but she never answered with his, for fear of a mix-up.
Sound asleep in her new lover’s bed, she dreamed of her old lover. She stood on a corner well away from her parents’ house, waiting for him to pick her up. It was one of their routines — she’d sneak out her window and fleetly step down the birch tree that grew next to the house and she’d wait for him at the top of the hill. He drove up like he always did, but his dream car was the ruined image of his waking car, and he was a ruined image of himself.
Get in, he told her, and she did, folding herself tight to squeeze under the sagging roof.
You’re late, she said.
Let’s not put this on me, he said. Let’s put this where it belongs. Do you have any idea what you’re doing?
Don’t you yell at me, she said, like she had when he was alive.
Do you have any idea? Any idea at all? Is there even a brain in your head?
Don’t yell at her, said a voice from the back. She looked there and saw her brother, folded up even more extremely than she was. His blue eyes seemed to glow in the dark car. He was whole, not cut or burned or twisted.
Who the fuck asked you?
Slow down, said Jemma, because while her attention had shifted to the back of the car the landscape had changed, and now they were hurling down foggy roads lined with trees covered with dying, hand-shaped leaves.