She started out asking some innocuous question about where I was from, which led to something and then to something else, and at a certain point in the conversation she commented on the solidity of the floor and the discomfort of sleeping on the hard wood surface, and not too long after that she invited me to sleep in her bed. Not with her, but in her bed. At first I told her it didn’t matter, that I’d be fine on the floor, but I realized I was saying it just to be polite, and why should I be that? Her bed, she said, was large enough, and her offer seemed sincere, an offer of kindness. So I told her, Why not? I didn’t say the words “Why not.” I just said, “Yes, I would love to sleep on a bed.”
She was wearing the same large T-shirt on the bed; the bathing suit, it turned out, was ordinary regular-sized underwear. And there we lay, on our backs, in parallel lines. I was facing the ceiling, making a point of keeping my body straight, imagining an invisible border between us. I let my eyes close, and we weren’t talking, not at first, and then she said something about her lack of success in the restaurant business. She was a waitress in a local restaurant and apparently she wasn’t getting the shifts she wanted. We talked about her boyfriend, or ex-boyfriend, and I said something about looking for my lost wife. She seemed to understand. We seemed — mutually, I think — to be getting along, and I didn’t sleep and she didn’t sleep, and as we spoke, and as I listened to the sound of the whispering human voice, I was lulled into — not a trance — but I moved closer, so that my shoulder was touching, or almost touching, her shoulder, so that only an infinitesimal gap existed between my arm and hers. Although I couldn’t see her arm, I imagined it, brown and smooth and still.
At some point, under the spell of the words that were passing between us, without my actually doing anything, Laura’s arm transformed itself — or I transformed it — into a different arm. I imagined Anne’s arm next to me. And because a person’s arm is connected to the rest of the body, gradually, in my mind, Laura herself was replaced by Anne. Not an image of Anne or a representation of Anne. The person beside me was Anne, and I was lying there, happily absorbing the old familiarity and warmth.
Because my eyes were closed it was easy enough to alter the body beside me, but because the voice wasn’t Anne’s voice, and because it wasn’t possible to shut my ears, I had a little trouble keeping the audio part of the fantasy intact. But as she spoke about her plans to move to a bigger city, and as the sound of her voice traveled from her mouth through the air to my ears and then into my brain, over time, I was able to transform that voice and mold it into what I wanted. The knowledge that the voice I was hearing was a voice I was making, I let that recede, happy to usher out of consciousness any evidence of my own volition.
I was able to overlook the knowledge that she wasn’t Anne, so that to me, she was Anne. In the back of my mind was the fear that she would say something or do something to wake me up, but because this new reality was preferable to the earlier one, I was able to maintain it. I settled into the more comfortable mode of lying with Anne, and the reality of Anne, such as it was, became more solid and stable, and when it got to the point where I was sure of its solidity, that’s when she decided to go to the bathroom.
When she sat up and crawled over me, wearing her oversized T-shirt, it was Anne in an oversized T-shirt, crawling over me as she’d crawled over me a million times. That’s the thing about a fantasy: once it gets started it takes on a life of its own, and I kept it alive by picturing Anne in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet and washing her hands and then climbing back into bed, which she did.
And when she did I had a million questions to ask her. Mainly I wanted to know if she loved me, and if she did, how could she leave me standing in front of a convenience store.
When she lay down on the partially made bed and resumed her position beside me, I asked her, “Where did you go?”
“The bathroom,” she said.
“No, I know, but before. Where did you go?”
“Before what?” she said.
I was talking about the gas station in New Jersey, but she didn’t seem to remember that, or didn’t want to. So I asked her why she’d left.
“I had to pee.”
“Not that,” I said.
“Then what?” she said.
And we went around like this, in a circuit of mutual misunderstanding. And the words were only a symptom.
I was lying there in the darkness behind my eyelids, imagining Anne, and of course, if I had opened my eyes I would have seen that Anne wasn’t there. But I had no desire to see that. I was thinking of Anne, wondering where she’d gone. I was hurt. I thought she was going to be there. She said she was going to be there, that she was going to wait for me and she didn’t wait for me and now I didn’t know what she was doing. Or feeling. I thought we had an understanding. I certainly had an understanding, but she obviously had a different understanding because she hadn’t even contacted me. What was I supposed to do? Was I even part of it, this thing that happened so suddenly? Or did she plan it all along? Some thing she couldn’t tell me. I didn’t know. How would I know? What the fuck was she doing to me? That’s what I wanted to know. And there’s no reason to get mad at someone you love, except the way I saw it, she wasn’t being fair with me.
“I don’t even know if you’re alive,” I said.
And at that moment the person next to me sat up and tapped my chest. “I’m here,” she said. “Open your eyes.”
“Open my eyes? Okay.” And I opened my eyes.
Although the light was not that great, I sat up to tell her that what she was doing was wrong, wrong to me and wrong in general, and as I was about to tell her this I looked into her oval face, at her eyes, and the whites of her eyes, and of course I saw that the person I was talking to wasn’t Anne.
I remembered the Irish bar, and the baby carrots, and then the fantasy vanished. I don’t know what I actually said, if I even said anything, but after a while I was aware that the feeling I’d had a moment before had passed. Something had come along and taken its place. The fear was still there but the anger was gone, and I didn’t know where it went, but fine, I thought. I could hold on to the anger or not, fan the flames or not. And I chose not.
I turned to Laura, and I don’t know what I thought, but in the middle of thinking it she told me that my body was a vehicle. She said I could use it, or I didn’t have to.
Then she lay back down on top of the covers.
Here she was, with a man, with the body of a man, and she was hoping he would be a normal man, and now she was presented with someone who was talking to her in a way that made no sense. Half naked and next to her, and what is supposed to happen now? That’s what she was probably thinking.
I was propped on my elbow looking at her, trying to think of my body as a vehicle, and maybe I was aware of some galvanic skin communication in the muscles of our arms, or my arm, because it seems to me that under normal circumstances we would begin kissing. I remember thinking that I ought to be kissing this person, and I would have been kissing her except for one small thing. She wasn’t who I wanted her to be.
So we didn’t kiss.
And the lack of kissing, which I expected to wedge us apart, instead seemed to open up a kind of pathway between us. Instead of relating via the kiss, we had to relate in a different way, in a companionship way, and so we began to talk. Everyone has a story, and we had stories, and we brought our stories to this place, this bed, and we told each other as much as we wanted to be heard, or as much as we could bear.