Bob said, “I’ve made love to one woman in my life.”
Linus shut his eyes, and he became so still, as though he’d suddenly succumbed to slumber. After a while he stirred, opened his eyes to slits, and asked, softly, “What’s the German word for pity, scorn, and awe happening all at the same time?”
BOB WAS SITTING IN THE KITCHEN NOOK WATCHING A NEIGHBOR ACROSS the cul-de-sac raking up the leaves in his yard. The neighbor was unshaven, his face red, a little swollen; he might have been sick from drink, but he looked happy, and Bob considered the man’s experience: the scents of earth and moldering leaves, his pulse throbbing as he transferred the leaves into the garbage can. Bob thought, It’s Sunday. This led to his wanting to perform a domestic maintenance of his own, which led to his spending the afternoon in his attic. The idea had been that he would tidy up up there, but when he arrived and was confronted with a lifetime’s worth of documentation and mementos, then he lost his purpose and began simply investigating himself.
There was a wall of cardboard boxes running the length of the attic space, neatly stacked to the ceiling, as if bearing the weight of the roof. Bob had suffered a lifelong phobia of audit, which accounted for his dedication to record keeping, receipts dating back fifty years in some cases. These papers, viewed altogether, functioned somewhat like a diary — stories existed in the cumulative information. Bob’s relationship with tobacco, for example: he purchased a pack of cigarettes every day for seven years up to the age of twenty-four, when he met Connie, who began at once to wage her prohibitive campaign, and so his purchases became inconsistent: a week off, then back on, a month off, back, and finally, after much needful turmoil, quitting the slender devils outright. This nicotine desire dimmed and eventually disappeared, but then, after Connie ran away with Bob’s best friend, Ethan Augustine, Bob bought a carton of cigarettes, inhaling fully three packs in thirty-six hours, sitting in shell-shocked petulance lighting one cigarette off another, and was so sickened afterward that his flesh gave a greeny hue and his spit came blackish and he tossed the remaining packs into the trash and then none, not again, never another cigarette since.
Bob found a receipt for a matinee screening of The Bridge on the River Kwai on the day his mother died. The stub prompted the memory of his having the whistling theme song in his head as he came into her room at the hospital and found her bed empty and stripped to the mattress. He had summoned a nurse, who summoned two other nurses, who swarmed the room and hovered around Bob to worry over him. The theme song persisted in his mind, which paired with the calamity of the moment led to silent, shuddering laughter, this delivered into his fist, and which was mistaken by the nurses as grief. Bob coughed, hid his face. He was not laughing at his mother’s death, but death in general, or life in general, or both in equal measure. Actually, her passing made him feel afraid, afraid of what his life would be like on his own in that house — the same house he was living in now. This was before he’d met Connie or Ethan but after he’d found his initial position at the library.
A wish came to Bob, then, which was to view the receipts from the date of his wedding, July 12, 1959. He imagined the day would be bursting with ephemera but there was only one receipt he could find. It was pencil written, a shivery, all-caps printing, and it read: SUND x 3—VAN VAN CHOC. Below was the figure $2.75. Further down, in an upright cursive: Congradulations + good luck!!! (Your going to neeed it!!!) Bob puzzled over the stub, trying and failing to understand what purchase it was describing, even. Soon, and a picture took shape in his mind: he and Connie and Ethan were sitting at an otherwise empty soda fountain, each of them drinking a milkshake. Ten minutes before this, across the street and within the cool marble chambers of City Hall, Connie and Bob had been married, with Ethan standing by as best man. After the ceremony’s conclusion, the trio stood together on the sidewalk, shielding their eyes from the summer sun. Bob was thoroughly and completely satisfied. He was looking at his brand-new wife. “You’re Connie Comet,” he told her. She said, “It’s true, that’s who I am.” When Ethan asked, “Now what?” Connie’s arm came up level, and she pointed her bouquet at the soda fountain across the wide boulevard. They all three hooked arms and stepped off the curb; the street was clear but a car sped up to meet them, honking its horn as it approached. They achieved a group trot to push past the vehicle’s path, but then Connie broke free from the chain and spun about, lobbing the bouquet into the open window of the car as it blew past. The driver was a white-knuckling raver, a gargoyle of the highway; he received the bouquet on his lap as if it were a ticking bomb, and it was a joyful thing to watch the sedan sliding all across the road, eventually bending into a long, screeching right-hander, up a one-way street and out of sight.
The soda jerk was an old man, paper hat perched on his speckled head, nodding as the trio set themselves down on the red leather stools. He understood what they “meant”; it was not uncommon for newlyweds to visit him postceremony, he said. Connie asked if he could tell who the groom was and the man sized up Bob and Ethan and said that obviously it was Ethan. The little group laughed at this, and Bob laughed the hardest, hoping it was not too obvious that he’d been stung by the soda jerk’s mistake. The soda jerk was embarrassed; he patted Bob’s arm and told him, “He just has a sheen about him, but of course you’re the one, sure you are. You’ve got those haunted, I’ll-never-be-alone-again, let’s-share-everything-forever eyes.” He asked the group what they wanted and they ordered — vanilla, vanilla, chocolate.
Forty-six years prior this scrap of paper was passed to a barely recognizable version of Bob, and now he was an old man in an attic, and his heart was muted as he returned the receipt to its file. He thought he should discontinue his excavation, but then the next box he came across was adorned with Connie’s handwriting, and he felt he couldn’t look away. SALLY ANNE it read, which was what Connie had called the Salvation Army. He opened the box and found a neatly folded stack of his own old clothing. At the top of the stack was a housecoat, a loud number in gold and red rayon, SILKLIKE RAYON as it was named on the tag; stitched to the side of these words was a small, green palm bent by a hurricane wind. He put the housecoat on, discovering that the sleeves had been folded up, two folds per sleeve, which meant that Connie had been the last to wear the garment. Connie had often worn his clothes around the house, and was always adjusting his sleeves in this way, so that it happened he would put on this shirt or that sweater, and there would be this evidence of her. Or there was her habit of using a single blond hair as a bookmark; he had seen her pluck a hair from her own head and set it in the pages of a book that she might or might not return to. And so it was that Bob would happen upon it later. When she and he were together these little touches were such sweet remembrances of her presence; but when it happened after she’d run off with Ethan Augustine, then it prompted a shock of bitterness in Bob, as if he’d been unkindly tricked. Now, after decades with no sign of her anywhere in the house, and Ethan long dead, the folded sleeves were simply bizarre. He stood looking at his own bony, homely wrists, recalling how he used to tease Connie about the sleeve-folding practice, saying she had the arms of a T. rex and that it was a wonder she could blow her own nose. Bob unrolled the robe’s sleeves and resumed his survey of the box. It held several pairs of pants and button-up shirts and was a fair representation of Bob’s wardrobe circa 1959–60. This box was confusing for Bob, because none of the clothes were damaged or threadbare, and it wasn’t as though Connie and Bob had the money to be cavalier about their purchases — clothes were rarely bought, and only thrown out when approaching disintegration. But Connie did have strong opinions about certain articles of Bob’s clothing; when she didn’t appreciate or enjoy a shirt of his, she might tell him, “I don’t like that shirt.” If he wore it again, she would say, “Let’s talk about the removal of this shirt from our lives.” Recalling this, Bob formulated the theory that the box held her discards, the ones she most wished to get rid of. Why the box hadn’t made it to the Salvation Army was a mystery he couldn’t answer — likely it was that their marriage had collapsed before the chore could be completed.