The words flowed freely from us then, bubbling out and over each other, colliding, overlapping, weaving an interconnected tapestry of two unconnected stories. She said she’d regretted walking out but had been too stubborn to come back and apologize. I told her I’d been willing to crawl but had been too afraid to approach her. I told her I quit Automated Interface, and I told her about meeting Philipe and the Terrorists for the Common Man, but I left out my murder of Stewart and the acts the terrorists had later performed. She told me she’d discovered on her own that she was Ignored, and while working as a waitress had met another woman who was Ignored, an older woman, and had come with her here to Thompson.
Both of us expressed our amazement that we had found each other again. And here of all places.
“We were meant to be together,” Jane said, and there was only a hint of playfulness in her voice.
“Maybe we were,” I said.
We got our groceries and went to her house, a one-story tract home near Main Street. I was surprised to see a lot of her old furniture, the furniture she’d taken from our apartment, arranged in the spacious living room. She’d obviously felt no need to prove anything to anybody. There’d been no attempt to make the room look unique or outrageous; there were only the furnishings she liked arranged in the way she liked them. I felt comfortable here, instantly at ease, and though I now recognized intellectually the anonymous homogeneity of Jane’s taste, it still pleased me. It felt right.
How could I not have noticed that she was Ignored?
Why hadn’t I figured it out before this?
Stupidity, I guess.
She made dinner — baked chicken and Rice-A-Roni — and it was just like the old days. I lay on our couch and watched TV while she worked in the kitchen, and we ate in the living room while Jeopardy! was on, and it was like we were married and had never been apart. The rhythms were there, our habits and speech patterns and little personal traits all unchanged, and we kept the conversation current, superficial, and I could not remember when I’d ever been this happy.
After dinner, I helped with the dishes. I grew quiet as Jane scrubbed the last of the silverware, and she must have noticed because she looked up. “What is it?”
“What?”
“Why are you so quiet?”
I looked at her, nervously licked my dry lips. “Are we going to — ”
“ — make love?” she finished for me.
“ — have sex?” I said.
We both laughed.
She looked up at me, and her lips looked red and full and infinitely sensuous. “Yes,” she told me. She put her soapy hands on my cheeks and stood on her tiptoes and kissed me.
We needed no foreplay that night. By the time our clothes were off, I was hard and she was wet, and I got on top of her and she spread her legs and guided me in.
I fell asleep afterward, a blissful sleep, free of dreams, and sometime in the middle of the night she woke me up and we did it again.
I called in sick the next morning, talking to Marge Lang, the personnel assistant, and I could almost hear her smile over the phone as she spoke. “We figured you’d be calling in today.”
Big Brother was watching me.
I kept my voice nonchalant. “Really?”
“It’s okay. You haven’t seen each other for a long time.”
Such intimate knowledge of my movements and motives and private life should have offended me, but somehow it did not, and I found myself smiling into the phone. “Thank you, Marge,” I said. “See you tomorrow.”
“Bye.”
I glanced through the sheer curtains of the living room and saw outside the bright blue Arizona sky, and I knew that nothing could ruin this day.
I crawled back into bed, where Jane was waiting.
Four
I moved into her house the next weekend.
I took only the clothes and personal belongings I’d brought with me to Thompson. Everything else stayed with the condo for the next inhabitant.
Unpacking my box on the floor of the living room, I came across the pair of Jane’s panties I’d taken with me when I’d left the apartment. I presented them to her, and she turned them over in her hands. “I can’t believe you kept these,” she said. She grinned. “What did you do? Sniff them?”
“No,” I admitted. “I just… carried them with me. I just kept them.”
“To remind you of me?”
I nodded. “To remind me of you.”
“Wait here a minute.” She went into the bedroom, was gone a few moments, and returned with an old T-shirt of mine, a promotional Jose Cuervo T-shirt I’d gotten free at UC Brea and that I used to wear while washing my car. “I stole it,” she said. “I wanted something to remember you by.”
“I didn’t even notice it was gone.”
“You wouldn’t.” She sat down next to me, put her head on my shoulder. “I never stopped thinking about you.”
Then why did you leave me? I wanted to ask.
But I said nothing, only bent down, lifted her chin, kissed her.
I was happy, truly, and honestly happy. What Jane and I had together was average, I suppose — how could it be otherwise? — the same feeling millions of people across America, across the world, had every day — but to me, it felt wonderful and unique, and I was filled with a deep contentment.
We got along better now than we had before. The wall that had existed between us prior to our separation was gone. We communicated intimately and openly — without the miscommunications, misinterpretations, and misunderstandings that had once marred our relationship.
Our sex life was more active than it had ever been. Morning, night, and on weekends, noon, we made love. Some of the old fears and anxieties, however, had not gone away, and even as I enjoyed the pleasures of our newly energized love life, I found myself wondering if Jane was really as blindly and uncritically satisfied as I myself was. One Sunday morning, as I lay on the couch reading the newspaper, Jane pulled open my robe and gave my penis a squeeze and a quick kiss. I put down the paper, looked at her, decided to voice what I was thinking. “Is it big enough for you?” I said.
She looked up at me. “That again?”
“That again.”
She shook her head, smiled, but there was no sign of the old impatience or annoyance on her features. “It’s perfect,” she said. “It’s like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. You know, one bowl of porridge was too hot, one was too cold, and one was just right? Well, some are too big, some are too small — and yours is just right.”
I put down the paper, pulled her up and on top of me.
We did it there on the couch.
I wondered sometimes about the other aspects of Jane’s life, her friends, her family, everything else she had left behind when she’d come to Thompson. I asked her once, out of curiosity, “How’s your mom?”
She shrugged.
“How’s your dad?”
“I don’t know.”
I was surprised. “You don’t keep in contact with them?”
She shook her head and looked away, far away, into the distance. She blinked her eyes rapidly, held them open wide, and I could tell she was about to cry. “They ignore me. They can’t see me anymore. I’m invisible to them.”
“But you were always so close.”
“Were. I don’t think they even remember who I am.”
And she did cry. I put my arms around her, held her close, held her tight. “Of course they do,” I said. But I was not so sure. I wanted to know what had happened, how they had drifted apart, what it had been like, but I sensed that this was not the time to ask, and I kept quiet and held her and let her sob.