At the bottom of the box Bob discovered a dress of Connie’s. It was a summer dress with spaghetti straps, worn cotton the color of sun-bleached bone with flecks of color threaded throughout: red and blue and yellow and green. Bob remembered the dress but couldn’t picture Connie wearing it — he knew it as an artifact rather than living souvenir. But he felt a pull to engage with it, and he took it out of the box and brought it down from the attic. He hung the dress from a hanger and set this on a nail on an otherwise naked wall in the kitchen, sitting in the nook to consider both the dress and the feeling the dress brought to him. He went back in his mind, and believed he could remember her wearing it in the sunshine, in the backyard. Perhaps this hadn’t happened at all, but it felt a real enough, a likely memory, and he went into it, his thoughts both faraway and close by when he saw by the side of his eye that the dress was moving, undulating, on its hanger. It took Bob some few seconds to understand what was actually happening — he’d hung the dress above a heat register — but within that short span of time he experienced the hauntee’s bottomless terror. After, he felt the flooding gladness of relief, and he shook his head at himself, but he didn’t look away from the dancing, ballooning dress. It was Connie laughing at him the way she had laughed at him when they were in love, not unkindly, but with sympathy, with care for him and his deep and permanent Bobness. An odd-enough Sunday, he thought, running his fingers over the creases from the rolls on the sleeves of his robe. When the heater stopped pushing air the dress, as a film run in reverse, became still again.
AFTER CONNIE WENT AWAY WITH ETHAN AUGUSTINE THERE CAME into Bob’s life the understanding of a perilous vastness all around him. To be hurt so graphically by the only two people he loved was such a perfect cruelty, and he couldn’t comprehend it as a reality. He learned that if one’s heart is truly broken he will find himself living in the densest and truest confusion. There was the initial period of weeks during which he took a leave of absence from the library and only rarely ventured out of the house; he was not eating or sleeping according to any traditional clock or calendar, and his hygiene was in arrears. He began to daydream of a means of murdering himself, weighing out the pros and cons of each style and generally fascinating at the comforting thought of long and untroubled sleep. Connie sent him a letter that he threw away without reading; Ethan sent him a letter that he burned. Six months after Connie left, Bob received the divorce papers in the mail. He sat down and read them and signed them and sent them back and took a five-hour walk without a coat on and caught a cold that furnished him with a physical wretchedness to match his mood. His fever broke on the second restless night and in the morning he peeled himself off the mattress and moved to the bathroom. Looking at his pale person in the mirror, he decided he would not die, and that it was time he resumed his fastidious habits and behaviors. “Fine, fine — fine,” he said. Eleven months later he learned that Ethan had died. Bob was eating breakfast at a café up the road from his house, sitting on a barstool with a newspaper laid out on the counter and skimming through the Metro section when he happened on Ethan’s name. Before he read the piece he knew something bad had happened and he stood away from his stool, as if wanting to achieve a remove from whatever information was coming toward him. He read the article standing, with his hands on his hips, looking down at the paper:
HIT-AND-RUN DRIVER KILLS PEDESTRIAN: Ethan Augustine, 26, was struck by a motorist and killed in front of his house in Northwest Portland yesterday afternoon. Mr. Augustine had only recently moved into the neighborhood with his wife, Connie Augustine, 22 years of age. There were no witnesses to the accident. Any information should be relayed to Portland PD.
Bob sat and folded the paper and stood. He left the café without the paper and walked home and sat on the couch in the living room and stared at the dust motes floating around and around. Later that same day he was passing through the kitchen and saw by the window that there was a man on his hands and knees in the driveway. Thinking him injured or suffering an attack, Bob hurried out to the man’s side. “Are you all right?” he asked.
The man groaned as he stood, using the front bumper of Bob’s Chevy to lift himself up. “Altogether I’d say that yes, I am all right, thank you. Are you Bob Comet?” He identified himself as a police detective, produced a notepad and pen, and asked that Bob should name his whereabouts at the time of Ethan Augustine’s death. Bob answered that he’d been at work, and the detective took down the address and phone number of the library. He asked if he could borrow Bob’s phone and Bob walked him to the kitchen and stood by, listening to the detective’s conversation. After, the detective hung up the phone and told Bob, “All clear, buddy. I’ll let myself out.” Bob realized that when he’d first seen the detective in the driveway, the man had been checking the Chevy’s front bumper for incriminating matter.
Bob waited through the remainder of that day and evening for the multitude of independent emotions inspired by the news of Ethan’s death to form a whole, but it wasn’t until the next morning that they coalesced and he understood he was experiencing a righteousness. He didn’t believe in God or fate or karma or luck, even, but he couldn’t help feeling Ethan’s death was in reply to his, Ethan’s, betrayal; and he couldn’t pretend that he wished Ethan was still alive. Bob understood the grace of forgiveness, and he aspired to grace, but what could he do? An ugliness had been perpetrated against him and ended the way of living he thought was best; the perpetrators were punished, and he knew a foundational vindication. He became thrilled, then, energized, basking in Ethan’s misfortune from the deepest places of himself. Nights, and he cleaned his home, cleaned every room and object in the house to a degree surpassing necessity and logic, as if attempting to return the property and its accoutrements to a state of newness: scrubbing the interior of his toilet’s cistern, polishing the pipework beneath the kitchen sink with Brasso. At a certain point he explained to himself that he was preparing for Connie’s return. Well, so what if he was? He allowed himself to daydream about it, playing the scene out in his mind. His favorite was that it would be raining, it would be night, a knock on the door, and there she would stand, drenched. “Oh, Bob.” Bob would open the door for her and move to the kitchen, making a pot of coffee, but silently. The fewer words he could speak, the better, he decided. He mustn’t forgive her too quickly; he should try to make it look as though he might not be able to accept her back in his life at all. These tales and behaviors were good for passing time, but waiting with such eagerness became its own sort of torture, and Connie’s homecoming was taking longer than he’d thought it would. He told himself that the story only became more burnished with the passage of days; the longer Connie waited to return, the finer would their reunion be. But what wound up happening was that nothing happened. The rains arrived, but no knock on the door. Spring came, and the perennials Connie had planted stood upright in their beds, but the phone did not ring. Bob passed a long and very rotten summer sitting on the couch, but never a letter in the mailbox. He never heard from Connie again. His reaction to the knowledge that it all was actually and finally over was obscured by an alien otherness, and he hobbled along through the following months in the manner of the walking wounded. Eventually, though, he found himself returned to the path he’d been on before he’d met Connie and Ethan. He had strayed so far from that way of life; they had led him away from its isolation and study and inward thought. Now he rediscovered and resumed his progress over that familiar ground. Bob was quiet within the structure of himself, walled in by books and the stories of the lives of others. It sounded sad whenever he considered it, but actually he was happy, happier than most, so far as he could tell. Because boredom was the illness of the age, and Bob was never bored. There was work to do but he enjoyed the work. It was meaningful work and he was good at it. When the work was over there was the maintenance of his home and person and of course his reading, which was a living thing, always moving, eluding, growing, and he knew it could not end, that it was never meant to end. Ultimately it was Bob’s lack of vanity and his natural enjoyment of modest accomplishment that gave him the satisfaction to see him through the decades of his lifetime. He had been in love with Connie, who had loved him, but it had been a fluke; he had loved Ethan Augustine and understood what it was to have a true comrade, but that had also been a fluke. The betrayal by and loss of these two people was hard to square, but the grief was temporary. There was something residual left over, which was an absence, the recollection of injury, but this became blurry and far-off, hiding in a corner of his mint-colored house. Sometimes he could forget what had happened for an hour, and sometimes a month. But whenever the memory was returned to him, he never reacted with bitterness, but took it up as a temporary discomfort. Days flattened fact, was the merciful truth of the matter. A bell was struck and it sang by the blow performed against it but the noise of the violence moved away and away and the bell soon was cold and mute, intact.