I don’t want to place blame here. It’s not your fault this happened. It’s not my fault. It’s both our faults. But I know us. I know me, I know you, and I know that even though we’ll say we’ll work on our relationship, nothing will change. I think it’s better to say good-bye now before things get too ugly.
I’ll never forget you, Bob. You’ll always be a part of me. You were the first person I ever loved, the only person I’ve ever loved. I’ll remember you always.
I’ll love you always.
Good-bye.
Beneath that was her signature. She’d signed her full name, both first and last, and it was that bit of formality that hurt more than anything else. It’s a cliché to say that I felt an emptiness inside me, but I did. There was an ache that was almost physical, an undefined hurt that had no set center but seemed to alternate between my head and heart.
“Jane Reynolds.”
I glanced again at the paper in my hand. Now that I looked at it, now that I reread it, it wasn’t just the signature that struck me as being too formal. The entire letter seemed stiff and stilted. The words and sentiments hit home, but they still seemed familiar and far too pat. I’d read them before in a hundred novels, heard them said in a hundred movies.
If she loved me so much, why were there no tears? I wondered. Why weren’t any of the letters smeared; why wasn’t the ink running?
I looked around the kitchen, back into the living room. Someone had to have helped her move the furniture, the couch, the table. Who? Some guy? Someone she’d met? Someone she was fucking?
I sat down hard on one of the chairs. No. I knew that wasn’t the case. She was not seeing someone else. She would not have been able to hide something like that from me. She would not even have tried. That she would’ve told me about. That she would’ve talked to me about.
Her dad had probably helped her move.
I walked out of the kitchen, through the living room to the bedroom. In here the loss was less, but more personal, and all the more painful for that. No furniture had been removed. The bed was still in place, as was the dresser, but the bedspread and the lace doily covering the top of the dresser were gone. In the closet there were only my clothes. The framed photographs on the nightstands had been taken.
I sat down on the bed. My insides felt like the apartment — physically, structurally unchanged, but gutted, hollowed out, soulless, the heart removed. I sat there as the room darkened, late afternoon turning to dusk, dusk to evening.
I made my own dinner, Kraft macaroni and cheese, and afterward watched the news, Entertainment Tonight, and all the other shows I usually watched. I was paying attention to the TV, yet not paying attention; waiting for a phone call from Jane, yet not waiting. It was as though I was possessed of multiple personalities — all with conflicting thoughts and desires — and was aware of all of them at once, but the overall effect was one of numbed lethargy, and I sat on the couch and did not move until the late news came on at eleven.
It was strange walking into the dark, empty bedroom, strange not hearing Jane in the bathroom, brushing her teeth or taking a shower, and with the television turned off I realized how quiet the apartment was. From down the street somewhere, muffled and indistinct, I could hear the sounds of a frat party. Outside, life continued on as usual.
I took off my clothes, but instead of dropping them on the floor and then crawling into bed like I usually did, I decided to put them in the hamper, as Jane had always nagged me to do. I carried my pants and shirt into the bathroom, opened the plastic top of the dirty clothes basket, and was about to drop them in when I looked down.
There at the bottom of the hamper, rolled up next to one of my socks, was a pair of Jane’s panties.
The white cotton ones.
I dropped my clothes on the floor. I swallowed hard. Suddenly, staring down at Jane’s rolled-up underwear, I felt like crying. I took a deep breath. I remembered the first time I’d ever seen her. She’d been wearing white panties and a pair of jeans with a rip in the crotch to school. I had been sitting across from her in the library and I had been able to see that white peeking through the hole in the blue, and nothing had ever turned me on so much in my life.
My eyes were wet as I bent over, reached into the hamper for the panties. I picked them up gingerly, handling them as though they were breakable, and carefully unrolled them. They felt damp to my touch, and when I lifted them to my face, the cotton smelled faintly of her.
“Jane,” I whispered, and it felt good to say her name.
I whispered it again. “Jane,” I said. “Jane…”
Ten
Jane had been gone for three weeks.
I settled into my chair and looked at the calendar I’d tacked up on the wall to my left. There were fifteen red X’s drawn through the month’s workdays.
As I did each morning, I crossed out another date, today’s date. My eye was drawn back to that first X — September 3. I had not heard from Jane since she’d left. She had not called to see how I was; she had not sent me a letter to tell me that she was all right. I’d expected to hear from her, if not for sentimental reasons, then for practical reasons. I figured there were logistical things she’d need to discuss — belongings she’d forgotten and wanted me to send, mail she wanted forwarded — but she had cut off all contact cold.
I worried about her, and more than once, I thought about going to the Little Kiddie Day Care Center, or even calling her parents, just to make sure she was okay, but I never did. I guess I was afraid to.
Although I could tell from the drastic decrease in mail that she had put in a change-of-address request at the post office, she still occasionally received bills or letters or junk mail, and I saved it all for her.
Just in case.
After work, I stopped by Von’s for milk and bread, but I felt so depressed that I ended up buying half a gallon of chocolate ice cream and a bag of Doritos as well. All of the checkout stands were crowded, so I picked the one with the shortest line. The cashier was young and pretty, a slim brunette, and she was bantering happily and easily with the man ahead of me as she ran his items over the scanner. I watched the two of them with envy. I wished I had the ability to start up a conversation with a perfect stranger, to discuss the weather or current events or whatever it was that people talked about, but even in my imagination I was unable to do it. I just could not seem to think of what to say.
Jane had been the one to start the first conversation between us. If the responsibility had been left up to me, we probably never would have gotten together.
When I reached the cashier, she smiled at me. “Hello,” she said. “How are you today?”
“Fine,” I told her.
I watched in silence as she rang up my items on the cash register. “Six forty-three,” she said.
Silently, I handed her the money.
I’d never thought about it before, but as I put the ice cream in the freezer, the Doritos and bread in the cupboard, I realized that there’d always been something within me that distanced people. Even my relationships with my grandparents were overly formal; we never hugged or kissed, though they were naturally affectionate. Ditto with my parents. Throughout my life, our “friends of the family,” my parents’ friends, had always been nice to me, cordial to me, but I never got the impression that any of them liked me.
They didn’t dislike me.
They just didn’t notice me.
I was a nobody, a nothing.
Had it always been this way? I wondered. It was possible. I had always had friends in elementary school, junior high school, high school, but never very many of them, and as I thought back now, I realized that nearly all of them had been, like myself, totally nondescript.