OR, BEFORE GOING OUT, he receives a letter. We see him returning from work, retrieving an envelope from the small, rust-colored box just outside his front door. The envelope is plain and white but asserts its presence for not being a bill—no tiny cellophane window to peek through—and for the name on the front: the man’s own. There is a return address from a Spanish-sounding name of a town in California. It is the only mail this day—the envelope thick and soft, many pages—and he takes it in the house with him, opening it alongside a bottle of beer at his small kitchen table.
The sheets of paper within have been folded into thirds. Dear James , the first page begins. A thick black ink, a decent pen. Looking back to the return address, the man wonders who knows him in California, anywhere near California. The letter instructs James to copy—either by typewriter or by hand—the letter and its accompanying pages, a text written by the letter’s previous recipients, and then to add his own paragraph at the end. He’s to do this three times and send each letter to a different person within three days. The letter’s author—in a boxy, forward-leaning handwriting, neither masculine nor feminine, neither script nor print—goes on to detail the fates of previous recipients who did not follow the instructions. A woman in Ohio was strangled by her husband of fifteen years, he having accused her of cheating. A boy, a teenager, took his dog for a walk in the forest preserve a mile from his house; the collie returned two days later without him. Car wrecks on long stretches of night highway without another vehicle for miles; allergic reactions; sudden, previously unknown medical maladies; amnesia. The man has never been a member of a team, has always been wary of groupthink and anything that involves a number of people doing the same thing at the same time: school choir, church, disco. More something his superstitious wife would be into. He flips to the next page. Above a solid block of text, in the same pen as the first page, hangs the title: An Old Story. In some versions, he keeps reading.
In the movie version, the wife is a crone, a controlling, uncaring woman whom we want to not only see left but also shamed, made to realize the ways she’s failed. If only she had been kinder, the man’s car wouldn’t have broken down. The wife’s hair is stringy and limp, her eyes the insensate gray of the drugged. She barely lifts her gaze from the boxy television as the man leaves the house, goes back to watching a made-for-TV movie, a woman with long, glossy hair found dead, bent and angular, in an alley. It makes it easier, in this same version, for the man sitting in the theater—after having sat for too long, after having given the woman too much time to walk away from the small, old theater—to finally rise, rush up the dark aisle through the lobby’s soft, buttery light, and out into the now-damp chill of evening. Easier for him to look one way down the lamplit street—always the wrong way first—then the other. To run now, to turn the corner, to see her from afar and call her name.
In most versions, there is no man. No unreliable car or woman with hair like silk, hair like curled ribbon, hair like old string. There is no short house to leave from, no dimpled couch sunken into a shrug or pieces of chicken in a cardboard bucket next to a six-pack of Schlitz in the fridge. In no version is the night warm, romantic, or mysterious. No version in which the season means anything at all. After a few years screening adult films and B movies, the single-screen theater in the small town closes and does not reopen for many years, if it ever reopens. Instead of a house, there is a blank, dry field near the interstate. There is the distant whoosh of passing traffic that sounds like fabric being ripped. Bottles and old pieces of pipe in the dead grass, crumpled paper garbage that has been tossed from above, and at the front of the lot, an orange plastic fence that arcs downward in a lazy collapse. In one version, there is a FOR SALE sign pushed into the earth and people who might do something with the space. In another version, there is no field.
HERE COMES YOUR MAN
THE MAN DRIVES A TRUCK and has a glorious beard. It’s leather brown and looks impenetrable, like the after of a Just for Men commercial. He says, You probably wouldn’t be interested in someone like me. We’re in a bar on the edge of a college town, and my friends and I look like the grad students we are. They don’t understand why I like to come here, where there will be people we don’t know.
What department are you in?
History, I say.
I would have guessed science.
Because of the glasses?
They’re dark-rimmed and thick—massive. Someone once told me I looked like Woody Allen in them. Not the exact compliment a woman wants to hear, but I don’t mind. It’s kind of true.
What kind of truck do you drive? My dad used to work for Peterbilt.
Oh yeah? It’s a—
How much room is there in the cab?
IT’S COZY IN THAT little bed area behind the seats. The cushion takes up the whole space except for small cubbies in the walls. One has a tiny TV/DVD player in it; another is tall and holds a rack lined with Carhartts. The trucker places our shoes in an empty recess, tucking in the laces. He’s taped up a bunch of old-fashioned postcards on the walls. Lots of pronouncements from states that don’t get enough attention. Iowa: You Make Me Smile. Missouri: Let us show you the Show Me State! I like when young people collect old things. A way to say: everything used to be just a little better before. It makes the trucker seem interested in his world but not overly clever, like he’s not going to be making any jokes I don’t get.
I came straight up from Missouri, he says. Didn’t even stop at home. I just needed to be around people. He looks at me and smiles, scratching carefully beneath the rim of his dark knit cap. I’ve suddenly grown shy, always more interested in good lines than in actually delivering on them. It’s crowded with the two of us back there, and when he finally puts his arm around me and we take off our clothes, it is as though our lovemaking is all a complicated way of saving space. You know, we’d have more room if I could just put this here and you put that there … It feels like Tetris, like packing boxes in a different kind of truck, and I think maybe I should have gone into the sciences. All that spatial reasoning, something about conservation of energy.
Afterward, we lie perfectly creased into each other’s bodies.
I say, You must be really good at folding maps.
He says, You’re beautiful.
I bite my lip.
I could get used to this, he says, and I wonder what I’ve gotten myself into.
HE JUMPS OUT of the truck then helps me down, and I have a vision of women wearing laced-up boots and full, complicated skirts, of a man pulling them from horse-drawn carriages. What kind of hat would I wear?