The Red Tree

CHAPTER FIVE

I thought perhaps I’d made the last entry to this journal, if you can even call this a proper journal. Dr. Harvey’s typewriter has sat here on the kitchen table, neglected, untouched (at least by my hands), for the past four days. So, I was hoping I’d kicked the habit. No such luck. Clack, clack, clack. And I’m not entirely sure what has brought me back to these clangorous keys, whether it is today’s events or merely force of habit. If I claim the former, I can feel as though I am compelled, and so what I am saying has some importance. If I plead the latter, well, then this is really no different than the nicotine, and perhaps nothing happened today that was any more remarkable than the nothing that happened yesterday, and the nothing from the day before that. But, because I need a fix — the motion of my fingers, the syllables spilling from my mind, the “sound” of my own goddamn droning voice talking to myself — I’m willing to inflate the significance of the afternoon to give me an excuse to write.

For the most part, Constance has kept to her attic, and, for the most part, I’ve passed the time downstairs reading and watching old movies. Mostly, I suspect we’ve both been trying not to think about whatever happened when we tried to reach the tree last Sunday. I have avoided the manuscript, and I have also avoided glancing out the kitchen window. I know she’s been painting, because she tells me so when I bother to ask. And the variegated stains on her hands and the smocks she wears change from day to day. The smells of linseed oil and turpentine leak down to me. Before today, we weren’t talking very much, mostly only when we happened to share a meal, which has been less frequent than before. She’s either got some food squirreled away up there, or Constance has simply been skipping meals. I would guess the latter. I can tell she hasn’t been sleeping well. Her eyes are bloodshot and the flesh beneath them looks bruised.

But she came down to breakfast this morning, seeming a bit more like her old self; that is, seeming a bit more like she did before our “lost picnic.” She made eggs and bacon, and while we were eating I suggested we take a drive. I was surprised when she agreed.

“Have you seen Beavertail?” she asked, and I told her that sounded like a pickup line from a dyke bar. At least I made her smile for a moment.

“It’s over on Conanicut Island,” she continued, the tines of her fork rearranging what was left of her scrambled eggs. “On the way to Newport. There’s a lighthouse, and the tourists usually aren’t too bad there. No real beaches. Just rocks.”

“Sounds good to me,” I told her. “I’m sick to death of this place.”

“You’re not writing,” she said. It wasn’t a question, but I answered like it was.

“No, I’m not.”

Constance frowned and stopped picking at her eggs.

“Have you talked to your agent?”

“No, I haven’t. Honestly, I think she’s about ready to give up on me. The woman has the patience of a saint, but even saints have their limits.”

“I really don’t know much about Catholicism,” she said, and when I laughed, she just sort of stared at me.

“Jesus, girl. I think maybe you need to get out of this dump even more than I do.” And then I told her to get dressed while I saw to the dirty dishes. So, she went back upstairs to change clothes while I washed the plates and coffee cups, the greasy skillet and utensils. Half an hour or so later, a little before noon, we were headed south on Barbs Hill Road. Constance talked quietly while I drove, and as we got farther from the Wight place, her mood seemed to lighten a little, her features becoming gradually, but noticeably, less weary. She told me stories about visiting the lighthouse on Conanicut Island, pausing now and then to give me directions, because I had no map and no idea which roads to take. Her stories were entirely unremarkable, and I was glad for that. No “ghost of the Forty Steps” here, just the sorts of anecdotes that tend to accumulate when someone has gone back to a particular place very many times over the course of a life. The sorts of stories that make a place familiar and comforting. I don’t have a lot of those sorts of places myself, for many different reasons.

As we headed out across the span of the Jamestown Verrazano Bridge, leaving the mainland behind and crossing the west passage of Narragansett Bay, she pointed to the ruins of an older, smaller bridge on our right. It ended abruptly a few hundred yards from the shore.

“That’s the old Jamestown Bridge,” she informed me. “They demolished it a few years back. Shaped charges, TNT, you know, the whole controlled-demolition thing. I don’t know why they left that part standing. Used to scare the hell out of me, crossing the old bridge, ’cause there were just the two undivided lanes, and the grade was so steep sometimes cars stalled, but there really wasn’t anywhere to pull over and get out of the way. And out there is Beavertail,” she said, pointing past the bridge to a low green bit of land a couple of miles to the south of us. The day was clear and hot, hardly a scrap of cloud to be seen anywhere, and the color of the bay wasn’t all that different from the color of the sky.

“It was even worse in the winter,” she added. “The bridge, I mean.” And then Constance didn’t say anything else until we were almost off the bridge, and I asked her about the exit.

I still haven’t quite gotten used to how close together everything seems in New England, compared to the careless sprawl of the South. We stopped at a grocery store in Jamestown, because Constance said she needed to pee and this was our last chance, and when I checked my watch, I saw that it had only been about forty-five minutes since we’d left the house. I’d just assumed the drive would take a lot longer, that it would be late in the day before we reached our destination. But no, here we were, almost there, and less than an hour had gone by. The air smelled like saltwater, and the woods and fields of Moosup Valley seemed much farther away than the thirty or so miles we’d driven. This landscape of picturesque cottages, salt marshes, and sailboats hardly seemed to belong in the same state as Squire Blanchard’s peculiar tract of land.

I followed Constance inside, because my own bladder’s seen better days, and I was getting hungry, and needed a fresh pack of cigarettes. Inside, it was cool, and there was a mix of what Shirley Jackson might have called “summer people” and year-round residents. In the checkout aisle, Constance (who was buying a Hostess lemon pie and a Dr Pepper) turned to me and said, speaking softly enough that no one else would hear, “You never talk about her.

”And, no lie, for a second or two I had no idea who she meant.

“Why is that, Sarah, that you never talk about Amanda?” she asked, smiling for the cashier, who asked if it would be cash or debit. Constance told her cash, and then fished a couple of crumpled bills from her jeans pocket.

“We’ve talked about Amanda,” I replied, thinking I was surely telling the truth, that she must have come up at some point since Constance had returned from LA and taken up residence in the attic.

“Nope,” she said. “Not even once. I’ve never even heard you say her name.”

The cashier took Constance’s money, but looked at the crumpled one-dollar bills like she didn’t see such unsightly things very often.

Constance turned her head and looked at me. “If you need to talk about her, Sarah, I don’t mind listening. I’m actually pretty good at listening.”

“I’ve never mentioned her to you?” I asked.

“Not even once?” and Constance shook her head.“Not even once,” she replied.

“Then how did you know to ask about her?” and I realized that the cashier was staring at me, as though she, too, was curious why I’d never spoken to Constance about my dead girlfriend.

“I’ve been reading your new story,” Constance said. “It’s dedicated to her, right?”

“I don’t have a new story,” I said, and the cashier was watching me now.

“You’re a writer?” she asked, smiling a blandly eager sort of smile. “Wow. That’s so interesting. You know, I’ve always wanted to be a writer.”

I glared at her a second or two, then turned back to Constance, who was screwing the cap off her bottle of Dr Pepper. “That’s utterly fucking fascinating,” I said, “because, you know, I’ve always wanted to be a checkout girl.”

Constance laughed, and the girl at the register muttered something angry and offended. I’m not sure what she muttered, because I was already on my way out the door, whatever I’d intended to buy forgotten, my hunger forgotten, the need for cigarettes forgotten, too. Behind me, I could still hear Constance laughing, and all I could figure was that she must have been sneaking downstairs while I was asleep and reading this journal, that she’d begun reading it before I had finally decided to start hiding the pages.

“Sarah, you are totally overreacting to this,” she said, emerging from the market. “I wasn’t trying to pry. I only asked you a question.”

“A pretty goddamn personal question.”

“I wasn’t trying to upset you.”

“Just get in the car,” I told her, turning the key and unlocking the driver’s-side door. “This isn’t a conversation I want to have in a parking lot.”

“Well, don’t you think you were kind of harsh back there?” she asked, nodding towards the store. “I mean, sure, I get that stupid shit, too. Everyone seems to think it must be completely marvelous to be a painter — or a writer — because they’ve never had to try to make a living doing it. But, still—”

“I asked you to please get in the car,” I said, interrupting her, and Constance sighed and rolled her eyes and smirked back at me across the roof.

“No, Sarah, in point of fact, you ordered me to. But I will, just as soon as you unlock my door,” and now her voice had affected an almost singsong rhythm, and that forced and utterly self-satisfied excuse for a smile remained painted on her pretty face.

When we were in the car again, she switched on the radio and tuned it to some noisy college-rock station broadcasting from Providence, then stared out the windshield while I drove. There were plenty of road signs, so at least I didn’t need to ask her for directions. I followed the narrow, curving rind of asphalt laid between Mackerel and Sheffield coves. There was a cobble-strewn beach on my left, Mackerel Cove Beach, speckled with fat sunbathers and fatter children. Through my open window, I could smell the heady sewage stink of low tide, the stench of stranded seaweed baking beneath the July sun, and I was dimly amazed that people were actually swimming in that. Farther out, I could see bobbing plastic buoys marking the positions of sunken lobster pots, and a couple of large rocks jutted up from the steely blue water. And then the coves were behind us, and on either side of the road there was farmland again, fields of hay and tall, rustling corn marked off by low stone walls. We passed a few horses, and the houses of people who could afford to live by the sea.

“I wasn’t trying to piss you off,” Constance whispered, and I only just caught her words above the radio.

“Sure could have fooled me,” I said.

“Sometimes things just come out the wrong way, that’s all. Yeah, I suppose maybe it wasn’t the most appropriate place to ask that question. But why in the world would I have wanted to start a fight with you in public?”

There were about a dozen things I wanted to say to her then, all of them vicious, all of them the scathing sorts of things you can’t take back once they’ve been spoken. But, instead, I only said, “Amanda killed herself, back in February. That’s why I never talk about her. I came up here to try and forget about Amanda.”

Neither of us said anything else then for a while, and there was only the radio, the tires humming against the road, the wind whipping in through my open window. Before much longer, we came to a sign that informed me we’d reached Beavertail State Park, and Constance lit a cigarette and turned the radio off.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know. I honestly had no idea.”

I shrugged, catching a glimpse of the sea through a break in the trees. “How could you have known, Constance? You’re the first person in all Rhode Island that I’ve told. Just don’t fucking apologize, okay?”

The road led all the way down to the point and to the tall whitewashed lighthouse. Land’s end, literally, there where the Atlantic had spent however many million years chewing away at the southern tip of the island, and the woods and underbrush and grassy open spaces suddenly gave way to a steep line of cliffs leading down to the sea. It was a breathtaking sight, even through the obscuring haze of my confusion and anger, and I felt like I’d driven out of the world and into a picture postcard.

“That’s the new lighthouse,” Constance said, though it didn’t look very new to me. “It was built sometime in the mid-Nineteenth Century, after the old lighthouse burned down. There’s been a lighthouse at Beavertail since 1753.”

“Burned down?” I asked her, glancing from the sea cliffs back to the stone tower, which, to my eyes, seemed fairly impervious to fire.

“Well, the first one was wood,” she said. “Actually, I think there might have been two wooden lighthouses, before they finally built this one. Anyway, Sarah, you can’t stop here,” and she pointed ahead of us, where the road curved north again. “There’s a parking lot right up there.”

And so nothing else was said about Amanda or the scene at the market or the nonexistent “new story” she claimed I’d let her read. I parked in a paved lot a couple hundred yards northeast of the lighthouse, and for the next couple of hours or so, I followed Constance across the rocks. Turns out, she’s a veritable font of information about the place, and I listened while she rambled on about naval history, shipwrecks, the local geology, how you could find trilobites farther up the coast if you know where to look, and the whale carcass that had washed ashore here when she was a teenager.

The air was filled with the cries of gulls and with cormorants and smaller seabirds that I didn’t recognize. The waves seemed tremendous, rushing in and slamming against the tilted, metamorphosed strata, breaking apart and rushing out again. There was a brisk, cool wind coming off the sea, but I was glad I’d thought to wear sunscreen, because I burn at the drop of a fucking hat. We were not entirely alone, but close enough for comfort. There were a few fishermen here and there, casting their lines into the waves, and they paid us no mind. Finally, winded and sweating, I found a place to sit, a high flat boulder safely out of reach of the salty spray and not too covered with the white splashes of gull shit that dappled almost everything above the high-tide line. Constance sat down next to me. She gave me a cigarette and we sat together smoking (though, later, I learned it’s now illegal to smoke at Rhode Island beaches, beginning this year) and watching the waves.

“I never knew anyone who committed suicide,” she said. “I can’t imagine what it must be like. I really can’t.”

I stared down at my tennis shoes dangling over the edge of the boulder, guessing it was at least twenty feet down to the water.

“And I couldn’t tell you,” I replied. “All these goddamn months later, I still can’t put it into words.”

“Was she sick?”

I laughed and asked her to define “sick.” Instead, she stubbed her cigarette out on the rock and took her ginger Altoids tin from a pocket, depositing the butt inside.

“She wasn’t sick,” I said. “I think she just didn’t want to be here anymore. Half the time, I think I know exactly how she felt. I just don’t have the requisite nerve to act on my convictions.”

“You don’t mean that,” she said, looking at her Altoids tin and not at me.

“Don’t tell me what I do and do not mean, Constance.”

“You’re still mourning, that’s all.”“Yeah, sure,” I said. “That’s all,” and I took a long, last drag, then flicked the half-smoked cigarette at the waves.

“You really shouldn’t do that,” she said, scowling, slipping the tin back into her pocket. “Cigarette butts are poisonous to birds and fish. And the cellulose acetate they’re made from isn’t biodegradable. I read somewhere, people throw out four and a half trillion cigarette butts a year. Four and a half trillion.”

“We should head back soon,” I said.

Constance looked over her shoulder, back towards the trail leading through a thicket of beach roses, bayberry, Queen Anne’s lace, and poison ivy and back up to the parking lot. “What’s the hurry?” she asked. “What’s there to get back to?”

“I’m just tired,” I told her. “Tired and on edge.”

“So, sit here and listen to the sea. It’s good for you, Sarah. Even better than Valium,” and she laughed as a giggling gray gull sailed by low overhead. I’m not exactly sure what happened next. I remember the shadow cast by the low-flying gull, and her laughing, and then she was kissing me. And Jesus, it was a fucking good kiss. I don’t know how long it lasted, only that it wasn’t long enough. Still, I’m the one who pulled away, the one who ended it. Then we sat there on the rocks, just staring at each other, and I didn’t even realize that I was crying until she started wiping at my face.

“It’s okay,” she said, and her red-brown eyes sparkled in the sunlight like polished agate, and she said it again, “It’s okay.” I think I hate her for that.

I don’t want to write any more about this shit, not now, not tomorrow, not ever. I want to burn what I have written and then never write any more. It doesn’t matter how much there is left to be said, all the things that happened next. If you keep going, there’s always something that happens next. Always something more, if you lack the courage to type THE END at the bottom of the page. I want to take up Dr. Harvey’s goddamn 1941 Royal typewriter and fling it out the back door into the darkness. Let the grasshoppers and skunks and deer have it. Let it rust away to nothing. But I’m a coward, and I’m no more capable of getting rid of this typewriter than I am of taking my own life.

Constance has borrowed my car to drive into Foster for groceries and some things she needed, art supplies, and so I have a little time alone to try to set this down before she returns. I don’t believe that I could ever manage to write it with her here in the house with me. Hell, I’m not sure that I can write it with her out of the house.

It was almost two a.m. before I was finished at the typewriter last night — this morning — and so much has happened since then that I suspect I’m never going to get back around to writing about that part of yesterday after the kiss on the rocks. Maybe it all follows from that kiss, or maybe these events were set in motion the day we got lost trying to find the tree, or the day she arrived here. Maybe it all began with Amanda’s death. It’s a losing proposition, a futile game of infinite regression, trying to guess at the particulars of cause and effect that led to my waking up this morning in the attic on Constance Hopkins’ futon.

And, of course, there’s the problem of the “new story” I am supposed to have written, the one that she brought up yesterday in the market in Jamestown. It’s lying here on the table, right next to the box with Dr. Harvey’s unfinished manuscript. Seventeen typed, double-spaced pages, apparently composed on this machine, using the same onionskin paper I’ve been using for these journal entries. It is titled simply “Pony.” I’ve read all the way through the thing five or six times now, and if it wasn’t written by me, then someone’s done a damn fine job of forgery. There are numerous corrections on the pages in what I cannot possibly deny is my own hand. That is, I cannot deny these things, unless I am willing to suggest the perpetration by Constance of an elaborate hoax or practical joke, and unless I am also to assume that she possesses the skills required to actually pull the hoax off successfully. That she could perfectly ape my voice and forge my handwriting,and that she could have managed it on this noisy fucking type writer without my knowledge, when I hardly ever leave the house. And then,with these assumptions in mind, I must try to conceive some motive for the hoax, what she might possibly have to gain by gaslighting me. Of course, here I may be falling prey to the assumption that she needed anything like a rational motive. And, somehow, I’ve already gotten ahead of myself. I’ll clip the seventeen pages of the story to the end of this entry, though it’s another thing I know I’d be better off simply destroying.

Last night, after I made the entry, and immediately after I’d put those pages with all the others, in that hiding place I will not name here, I went to check the front door before brushing my teeth and getting ready for bed. I found it open, the porch light burning and swathed in a swooping, fluttering halo of moths and nocturnal beetles. And Constance was standing just a few yards from the steps, dressed only in a T-shirt and her panties, staring up at the night sky.

“What are you doing out there?” I asked, and she didn’t answer right away. In fact, a couple of minutes probably went by, and so I asked, “Constance, are you okay? Is something wrong?”

She turned around then, and she was smiling. “I’m fine,” she said. “I just wanted to look at the stars, that’s all. Sometimes, I need to look at the stars. To get my bearings, to remember where I am.”

I squinted at the lightbulb again, at all those bugs, a few of which had managed to get inside, what with me standing there holding the front door open.

“Well,” I told her, swatting at a beetle, “I’m going to bed now. I’m exhausted. I think I got much too much sun today.”

She nodded, turning away from me again, looking back to the sky. “But it was good for you,” she said. “It was good for both of us, to be away from here. To be there, at the sea. To talk.”

There was an instant pang, then. Disappointment, mostly, that there had only been the one kiss, and perhaps embarrassment that there had been any kiss at all. But she was right, it had been good, as had the conversation that followed. And we both knew, and had openly acknowledged, that we never would have been able to talk as freely as we did, to find that level of intimacy, if there had not first been the kiss. It had broken down something inside us both. Or so it seemed. Unless, of course, it was only another part of the hoax. Right now, I don’t know what’s true and what’s a lie. This morning, I awoke in the cool of Constance’s attic, in her arms, thinking that, just maybe, I’d stumbled ass-backwards into a goddamn glimmer of hope, that maybe I was finding my bearings. I’m getting ahead of myself again.

“I saw a shooting star,” she said. “Just before you opened the door,” and she pointed at the sky.

“Only one?” I asked.

“Only one,” she answered. “I’ve never been very good at spotting them, even during meteor showers.”

“Maybe you just try too hard,” I said, and she shrugged and lowered her arm to her side again. “Did you make a wish?” I asked.

“I saw a comet once,” she said, as if she had either not heard my question or had chosen to ignore it. “Back in 1997. I was nineteen, I think. Eighteen or nineteen. But that’s not at all like seeing a falling star.”

I batted away a huge brown moth, then asked her what the difference was, between seeing a falling star and seeing a comet. She looked at me again, and I had the impression that it was only with considerable reluctance that she took her eyes off the eastern sky.

“Comets have often been considered harbingers of doom,” she said. “But you’d know that, I suspect.” And while I continued my struggle to keep Mothra and all her flitting companions out of the house, Constance slowly walked back to the porch. Her bare feet were damp from the heavy dew, and a few blades of grass stuck to her skin.

“1997,” I said. “So, that would have been Comet Hale-Bopp. Yeah, I saw that one myself. Lots of people did. Probably anyone in the Northern Hemisphere who bothered to look.”

“See?” Constance laughed, picking some of the grass out from between her toes. “Nothing special.”

“No, I didn’t mean it like that,” I sighed, and Mothra flapped triumphantly past me and vanished into the house. “Constance, I’m letting bugs in. Really big bugs.”

“I’m not afraid of bugs,” she said. “Well, except for centipedes. I was stung by a centipede once. Hurt like fuck. Do spiders count as bugs?”

“Bugs are insects. Spiders are arachnids. Anyway, centipedes aren’t spiders.”

And it went on like that for a time, five or ten more minutes — the comfortable, meandering talk of comets and bugs. She mentioned the Heaven’s Gate Cult suicides, their connection to the comet she’d seen, and I told her that I’d also seen Comet West, way back in 1976, two years before she was born. Then Constance finally came inside, and I shut off the porch light and locked the door behind her. She asked if I wanted a cup of chamomile tea. I didn’t, but I lied and said that I did. She filled the kettle and put it on the stove, then took a couple of tea bags from a green box of Sleepy Time. And fuck it, at this rate, she’s going to be back from Foster long before I get to the point, supposing there is a point to any of this, that any fraction of it’s more or less important than any other.

She made us tea. And then she asked me if I’d like to fuck her. And there it is, no more beating about the bush (ha-ha fucking ha, ba-da-pa-pa), and she really wasn’t much more subtle than that. She sat down at the table with the two steaming mugs of tea, and asked, “Sarah, how long’s it been since you’ve had sex?”

“Jesus,” I said, and I must have forced a nervous laugh or twiddled my thumbs or done something equally inane. “You do have a delicate way with words.”

“Do you want to sleep with me tonight?” she asked, sipping at her tea, and watching me intently over the rim of the mug. “No strings attached,” she added. “Right now, I think we’re both pretty lonely people. I think it might do us both good. Like the sea.”

“Sort of like that kiss at the beach,” I said, staring at my own cup of tea.

“Sort of,” she replied. “I don’t know about you, but I’ve been working too much. It’s never good for me, when I get that far into my work. Anyway, I won’t be insulted if you say no. I’m a lot better at taking rejection than I am at finding four-leaf clovers.”

And I noticed then that the big moth from the front porch was circling about the light hanging above the table, and I let my eyes stray to the kitchen window, and sat there staring into the night decently hiding the red tree from my sight.

“You feel it, too?” she asked, and before I could reply, she said, “I try not to think about it, but I never stop feeling it, squatting out there, watching me.”

“It’s only a tree,” I said, unconvincingly, and Mothra beat her fragile wings against the thin shell of glass standing between her and the deadly heat of the 60-watt incandescent bulb.

“No strings attached,” Constance said again.

“Oh, there are always strings,” I replied. “Whether we put them there or not.”

“Yes or no?” she asked, and there was only a hint of impatience in her voice. Of course I said yes. She nodded and took my hand, and led me out of the kitchen, our twin mugs of chamomile tea abandoned on the table. I followed her down the narrow hall and up the narrower stairs to her garret. There, surrounded by her canvases, all of them hidden beneath drop cloths, she undressed me, and then I sat naked on the mattress and watched while she undressed herself. She’s thinner than I’d thought, almost bony, and there’s a tattoo perfectly centered in the small of her back. Two symbols placed side by side, somewhat reminiscent of a child’s stick figures, only there were no circles to indicate the heads, and the vertical lines that would form the torsos and necks extended downwards between the “legs,” like a tail. They also looked a bit like a pair of stylized arrows pointing upwards, the tips of each crossed by a horizontal stroke. The tattoo had been inked in shades of gray, and was no more than five or six inches across. It, or perhaps they, looked like this (drawing these in with a pen):

“What is that?” I asked, as she tugged her T-shirt off over her head, revealing breasts just beginning to lose the enviable firmness of their youth. Her nipples were darker than I expected, my expectations based on her generally pale complexion. They were, I saw, almost the same terra cotta as her irises, and for a moment I actually considered the possibility that she rouged them to match her eyes. “The symbol tattooed over your ass, what does it mean?”

She dropped the T-shirt to the floor at her feet and stood staring down at me, her forehead creased very slightly, as though the answer to my question escaped her.

“The tattoo,” I prompted. “I don’t know that symbol.”

“Oh,” she said. “That. I had that done at a parlor in Silver Lake. I was pretty drunk at the time. It wasn’t even my idea.”

I lay down, admiring her breasts, her flat belly, her hips, and trying not to be ashamed of my own body, which bears all the scars and blemishes and imperfections earned by the chronic inactivity that generally accompanies the life of a professional writer.

“It’s a kanji,a Chinese character.”

“I know what a kanji is,” I said, probably sounding more defensive than I’d meant to. “What does it mean?”

“What difference does it make what it means?” she asked, slipping out of her panties, letting them fall to the floor on top of her T-shirt. Her pubic hair was the same jet-black as the hair on her head. “Maybe I was so drunk I don’t even remember what it means.”

“You really don’t remember?”

“Are you trying to spoil the mood?” she countered. “Do you want to discuss my tattoos or do you want to fuck me?”

“I wasn’t aware the one necessarily precluded the possibility of the other,” and then she frowned and told me to shut the hell up, and shut up I did. She climbed on top, and pretty much stayed there the whole time, which was just fine by me. She’s the first person I’d been with since Amanda. I didn’t tell her that, but I’m going to assume she knows it. I didn’t sit down here to write some silly erotic confessional, and it’s all a blur anyway — her fingers and her tongue, her attentive lips and those odd clay-colored eyes of hers. I’m not sure how many times I came, and I have no idea how many times she came. Afterwards, she switched off the lamp by the futon, and we lay together in the darkness, hardly talking, listening to the night outside the farmhouse.

“Forest,” she said to me. “It’s the kanji for ‘forest.’ At least, that’s what the tattoo guy told me.”

“And why did you have the kanji for forest tattooed on your back?” I asked. “Unless it’s a secret, I mean.”

“I swear to fuck,” she sighed, “I honestly can’t remember that. I wasn’t kidding about being drunk. We’d been doing shots of Jägermeister with Bud all night.”

“We?”

“Nobody important,” she said, and I didn’t press the matter. She laid her head on my left shoulder, and told me that she could hear my heart beating.

“That’s usually a good sign,” I said. She laughed very softly, and sometime after that, I drifted off to sleep. If there were dreams, I can’t remember them.

I woke to the angry caw of a crow, which seemed loud even over the chug of the AC unit.

I made coffee while Constance made breakfast, and while we were eating, she mentioned the short story again. I’d forgotten all about it, and would have been very happy to let things stay that way.

“I’m not sure about the title, but it’s actually pretty good,” she said, and, deciding maybe it was easiest not to argue, I asked if the manuscript was still upstairs.

“Yeah,” she replied. “But I’ll bring it back down right after I finish my coffee,” which she did.

Seventeen onionskin pages, held together with a plastic paper clip, and most of them bearing corrections and proofreader’s marks in red pencil. My handwriting. And so now I’ve come full circle, and if there’s anything I’m forgetting, anything that matters, it’s going to have to wait until later, because I think I hear the car.