The Meaning of Isolated Objects Read online

  Spring.

  Wendell had met Tristan when she was a freshman at UV, in the computer lab, almost eight years earlier. Now she was in his kitchen, double-checking teaspoons and tablespoons of basil and garlic, wrestling slippery noodles into a dish.

  “I thought you made lasagna for your dad last night.”

  “He had to leave early. No big deal. You’re hungry, right?” She barely waited for his nod before continuing. “So, guess what, I turned down the site supervisor job for that new excavation.”

  Tristan opened a bottle of wine and poured two glasses. Rubbed her shoulders while she layered cheese and sauce with the noodles.

  “Maybe taking time off is good,” he said, and then, when she stepped over to the stove to stir the sauce, he moved with her and kept rubbing her shoulders. In only a few minutes the lasagna was in the oven. Tristan didn’t even like lasagna all that much, but he would eat it and enjoy it and in some way, make everything right.

  She took her clothes off and pulled him to the bedroom, another way of making something right, so easy to do with Tristan. He didn’t resist. He was tall and dark and Welsh, and when things got to this point, when she needed to feel better about something, he was her source for solace.

  More tender than usual, she dusted his body with her hair and fingers, gentle, like using brushes and trowels during a dig.

  Making love was, in a way, like archeology. Seeking old things and rocks, the dust of the ages. Feelings experienced as children, love and security. Loss and grief. Making love was the unearthing of lost things.

  Sometimes when they made love, he whispered, murmurings she couldn’t quite understand. Little prayers, or blessings. She only knew she felt safe. His mystery combined with familiarity in a way she hadn’t found anywhere else.

  Back in the kitchen they ate lasagna naked by candlelight and finished it off with toffee Tristan pulled from the cupboard. He handed her the box first and leaned back in the chair like he was waiting for something.

  The John Hedjuk passage she had printed out and taped on the refrigerator was still there, long enough ago it had become torn and stained. She walked over and read it out loud.

  “The landscape of Texas is sparse; objects take on a clarity and remoteness. There is a magic moment in the fall after weeks of intense dry heat when Blue Northern comes down across the northeast plains. Temperatures drop 50 degrees within minutes and the air becomes cool and crystal clear, the shadows deepen. It is also a time when you can run after armadillos. Now armadillos appear to be hard, but in fact they are soft and shed tears when you catch them by the tail, so you let them go.

  There are a lot of things you let go of in Texas. You let go of old visions and old romances, you let go of city-states and northern broodings. But in letting go, other things and other moods are captured, such as the meaning of isolated objects, of void spaces.”

  Tristan poured more wine and she took her glass back. “What is he talking about exactly, the meaning of isolated objects?”

  “Connections. The mysterious things that pull us together.” He added as an afterthought, “and keep us apart.”

  He was gliding slowly toward something she had made him promise never to do again. He had asked her two times to marry him, once when they were undergrads and again after graduation. She shouldn’t have come to his house so soon after leaving her father passed out in his chair. She shouldn’t have slept with Tristan.

  “Don’t.” She looked at his face. He had a defiant expression, a stubborn look he didn’t often get with her.

  “I swear, Tris, if you start up again I’ll go to Texas.”

  “That would be running away, wouldn’t it? Something you say you never do.”

  She tried making a joke. “I’m not running, Tris, I’m transcending.”

  He didn’t smile. “You have to choose. You can’t keep doing this with me if it doesn’t mean anything.”

  Her clothes were still on the kitchen floor, where she’d shed them earlier. She put them back on.

  “Don’t go.” He held out his hands, palms up, a gesture of truce, an apology.

  She shook her head. “I need to get home.”

  “That’s a choice. If you leave, that’s the decision.”

  In her apartment she felt like she had gone under water. Everything seemed filmy and muted. No stark reality being spoken out loud, just quiet. She broke the peace by turning on her computer. The beep of Tristan’s IM.

  I mean it Wendell. If you’re not saying yes, I’m letting go. I’m tired of hanging on.

  She didn’t respond and in a few minutes he sent an email.

  Maybe you should go, Wendell. Maybe that’s what’s best.”

  Her father had once again extracted himself from her life with a simple phone call. And now Tristan had done it with an email.

  She remembered the earlier part of the evening, Tristan inside her, his weight pressing her to the bed. She’d felt herself turn to air and melt up through him, off to some other place, seeking some other thing. Like smoke.

  Gone.

  In Mobile, Alabama she drank tequila with a cowboy, or maybe he was a mechanic. He sat on the barstool next to her and rested his boot on the bottom rung of her stool. He nodded at the bartender, without ever taking his eyes off her. Two more shot glasses appeared.

  His hands were clean but the short squared-off nails were rimmed in something dark. He touched her on the arm and then stopped. “I’m sorry about the hands.”

  They drank shots and danced. His dancing was one simple step, but he had rhythm and he angled his hips at hers and pulled her close. “Baby.”

  The languid drawl of his voice blended perfectly with salt and lime and tequila, and later, a bare mattress on the floor in his dark apartment. “You’re so sweet,” he said and lay back on the bed. “What are you doing in Mobile, anyway?”

  It was hard to say. Finding bits of moments that added up to something whole, but she couldn’t tell him this, that his accent, the bare apartment devoid of comfort, drew her to him, what she would take when she left.

  “Just passing through,” she said. He didn’t seem to care that she would be gone the next day. He touched her breast and grinned, his teeth shining for a moment as he moved his head through a shimmer of light that passed through the window.

  She let it all soak in. The rub of the rough mattress on her knees, the musty smell of a room that never had a window opened. It was only a place he came for sleep. And this. There was nothing alive in this room but him.

  She slept maybe an hour.

  How he looked in the pinched gray light of dawn. The way he found her with his hands before his eyes opened. She kissed him back to sleep so she could slip away. His face bristled with beard, a dark shadow along his jawbone.

  On the road she felt gravel-eyed and empty. Exactly what she wanted. No weight of attachment. Nothing bearing down.

  Next stop New Orleans, a renovated red-light district named Storyville. After a few hours sleep in the hotel, she woke up restless and wandered along the street, stopping for bourbon and ginger ale until she found someone interesting to follow. A dark-haired man caught on and played along. Furtive glances down different bars, tracking his linen jacket through the crowd on the street. She paused once inside a doorway to see what he would do when he realized she was no longer behind him. He simply waited, as if he knew she would come out and take up pursuit again.

  In the last bar he turned and bought her a drink, left it sitting on the bar. She sipped the drink and watched him move effortlessly between tables until he reached the back wall, where he leaned, arms crossed, and waited. She followed his path and let him move her to the corner. They ended the game there, against the back wall in a dim corner of a club, kissing, not one word spoken between them. Smoky blues in the background, the soft shine of his white jacket like the moon in that dark space they made. The taste of bourbon and ginger mixed in with his kiss.

  The next day she drove again. The Sabine River m
arked the Texas border, cypresses and Spanish moss, old farm to market roads she stumbled onto to get off the interstate. For several hours she tried to lose herself, rights and lefts at random, but the Sabine ran north to south and there was no way to forget that. Finally she gave in to it and crossed over.

  Tristan called this running and maybe he was right. Beaumont, on to Houston, where she intended to find a real cowboy, or at least a Texan, but halfway in she changed her mind.

  Twenty minutes fumbling with a ripped-up road map in the gasoline stench of an Exxon parking lot. Back to the highway.

  Hands on the steering wheel, white knuckled in five lanes of traffic, praying to the open sky she wouldn’t miss the exit to Austin. Just west of Houston evening fell like a cloud. The huge refineries dazzled as the sun set, castles in the night, billowing puffs of white smoke into the air.

  The little no-name motel she crashed in was shabby but cheap. Mobile, New Orleans, Beaumont, Houston, all of that washed clean in the shower. She slid into a fresh skirt and blouse, dashed out for dinner from the vending machine. Soda and a candy bar eaten while she paced the small distance from door to back wall in the motel room. The sound of rough pavement grinding endlessly beneath thin tires took hours to fade.

  This was nothing like the road trips she’d taken as a child with her father. Their back road meanderings, the best memories she had.

  In the morning she breathed the stale air in the car and pumped the gas pedal. 290 to Austin. Working oil wells that dipped and bobbed like birds pecking at the ground. When she hit the hill country she pulled over and got out. Sky that spanned a lifetime, more than one, green brushed blue someplace so close to the horizon it had to be an optical illusion.

  Springtime, paler green than what she was used to, everything bleached a few shades lighter. But then the bluebells, decadent rolling fields of lapis, washed in sunlight, quivering with life.

  A girl could get lost in a place like this.

  A girl could lose things she no longer wanted to carry.

  What she found first was a plain white rental house thirty minutes outside Austin, two bedrooms and a bath, avocado green kitchen. There was nothing else out here, just her sitting on the back steps watching for armadillos but seeing deer instead.

  Thinking about a job, something gritty and real, where the pay was cash and no one knew anything but what she told them.

  If she used cash her father couldn’t find her as easily, so she put all her money in a jar in the fridge and pretended she was an outlaw of sorts. To make the money last longer, she ate beans and rice with salsa and sour cream. Drank Shiner Bocks instead of imports.

  At Wheatsville Co-op, in the produce section, a man followed her to the bulk bins and offered a pen to record the stock number off the organic brown rice label.

  “Your red hair is something,” he said.

  He wore expensive clothes one size too big, a haircut grown two weeks too long. Heavy and older and incredibly sexy, a man you could sink into, a man who could hold weight, good Scotch, a wild woman. She reached over and touched his arm.

  “Watch out, girl.” He trailed her to the parking lot. “What’s your name?”

  “Wendell.”

  “Give me your phone number.”

  She got in her car. “I don’t have a phone.” Which was not a lie. She had a phone line, but not a phone. When she drove away he watched. His lips stretched into a slow, lazy smile.

  Outside the library, shiny black grackles strutted circles on the sidewalk, blue and green in the sun, brazen but beautiful. Their call was intriguing, a series of rattles, squeaks, and whistles. She wondered what the different sounds meant. What each part said to the other birds.

  Later, in the quiet of evening, the man’s words lingered, sweet and intense, like a promise. The memory of his voice interrupted the buzz of insects outside, one song interfering with the other.

  The computer screen glimmered lavender blue in the dim living room. Dial-up was slow, but she had no other options; in the middle of nowhere Texas, high speed hadn’t happened yet. While the emails filtered in, so slowly she couldn’t stand to watch, she went out back with a Shiner Bock and studied the sunset. Three deer skittered across the back edge of the yard. Still no armadillo, but she remained hopeful. A raccoon had climbed a tree outside her bedroom window the night before and stared intently when she moved the curtain back. A masked bandit with glittering beady eyes.

  Who are you, he could have been asking. Who did she want to be?

  Her little house was quiet. No creaks, no shifting of timbers, simply shelter from what stretched beyond its walls. The driveway was long and curved slightly, a question mark.

  No mail in the rusty old box on a post by the road. No television. Just music and her computer. All she needed.

  Inside, the emails waited. She sorted by sender and scrolled down, scanned for the T’s.

  Tristan didn’t even know she was gone. The way she’d left the apartment, taken so few things, even if he went by and used his key it would look like she’d just gone out for a while. He would assume she’d found some new guy to hang out with. She’d done it plenty of times before.

  In his email Tristan did not address what had happened but wrote about the book he was reading (something to do with magic and time travel and mysticism), the movie he’d just seen (Memento on DVD) and what he had eaten for dinner (Thai food at their favorite restaurant, and he didn’t say it but she bet he took that new girl Kate in the Classics department), which made her jealous.

  She was getting sick of beans and rice.

  The note showed up in her mailbox the next day, sealed inside a dove gray business envelope. To the woman with green eyes was scrawled across the front.

  She dangled it by each corner in turn, felt its weight, tested to see if anything slid around inside. Unlike her usual practice of ripping into mail the instant she got her hands on it, she let this mysterious missive sit on the kitchen table for the length of time it took to wash up the few dishes she’d used for dinner.

  The anonymous letter was handwritten, blue fountain pen on gray paper. Multiple pages, folded in thirds. She grabbed a beer out of the fridge and went out to the back steps.

  It told the story of a man suffering vertigo, the loss of balance in his life. Kismet, he said, had delivered her to him. He wrote of organic brown rice and girls who would not reveal telephone numbers, an entire paragraph centered on the color of her hair. How she had stirred his quiescent desire.

  Of course it was from the man in the co-op. He had managed to track her down. Already.

  She thought of her father, who hadn’t tracked her at all. Even given what he did for a living. He thought she didn’t know. Okay, so maybe she didn’t know all of it. Certain details she might never know. But CIA, covert ops, she knew that much. Over the years, she’d dreamed of Afghani mountains, barren, the color of flesh, narrow gaps riven by stony roads. Her father driving away in a jeep while she called to him in the fierce wind.

  Tristan had uncovered a few things online, freshman year, UV, when they’d just started being best friends. Tristan had come to Virginia straight from Wales.

  A guy in their class called him a hacker, said the government tried to hire him but Tristan wasn’t interested. Instead, he read the classics in Greek and Latin while she studied archaeology. They spent hours sprawled across beds in their respective dorm rooms, drinking red wine out of chipped coffee mugs, discussing alchemy, quantum theory, standing stones, Carl Gustav Jung, and past lives.

  They studied magic and transformation, dreamed of faraway places and analyzed her father’s work, about which they’d speculated wildly. It had always been her secret game, guessing where her father was, what he was doing. Inventing the life he’d refused to share. Tristan and Wendell closed their eyes and envisioned places and missions, told every detail, one to the other. By the end of that first year Tristan was better at it than she was, went on and on while she listened, greedy for facts, even if they
were made up. He became necessary. The man from her girlhood dream.

  Which was why she had to leave.

  Sixth Street in Austin had more live music than she had ever seen in her life. She listened from dark doorways, headbanger, no thanks, cowboy vocals, not tonight. The twang of good guitar was what she was looking for. One shot of tequila at the bar and a Shiner Bock to settle in with until someone asked her to dance.

  The man from the food co-op was there. She saw him first, from behind, and recognized his baggy, elegant clothing. He turned and walked over. Didn’t hesitate to take hold of her arm, looked her in the eye when they moved together to the music. Neither smiled. After a set of songs they were both sweaty and hot. Out on the sidewalk he used the edge of his shirt to wipe her face.

  “I got the letter.”

  He shook his head. “What?”

  “The letter in my mailbox. I got it.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He wasn’t drunk and so far had asked for nothing, but his eyes revealed more, a wanting and not having. He wrote a number down on a receipt from his pocket and gave it to her. Then walked half a block down the street before he turned and said good night.

  The drive home was her goodbye, with the windows down and 10,000 Maniacs blasting. That beady-eyed raccoon was on the front porch when she pulled up.

  She didn’t check email, skipped the shower. Sprawled on the bed with sweat dried to her skin, the taste of tequila and beer just beginning to go sour, and wondering who had written that amazing letter, fell asleep.

  Her hair was damp with new sweat when she woke. The bed not the right way in the room. Tristan’s body missing when her hand crept through the maze of sheets to find him.

  In this dream she had gone back for him. His apartment was empty, nothing but a flattened cardboard box on the bedroom floor. She went to the post office, no forwarding address. He had simply vanished.