Writers & Lovers - Lily King Page 0,20

‘They stay open late. And we could get a bite to eat after.’

Bite to eat. It was something my mother would say. ‘Sure.’ I feel like laughing. I’m not exactly sure why, but I don’t want him to hear it.

‘You’re laughing.’

‘No, I’m not.’ I was. ‘I’m sorry. It’s my dog. He’s doing this thing with his ears.’

‘What’s his name?’

I don’t know the name of Adam’s dog, and he isn’t in the potting shed with me. Do I really not know the name of that dog? ‘Adam’s dog.’

‘Adam’s Dog is the name of your dog?’

‘It’s not really my dog. It’s Adam’s. My landlord. I take care of him sometimes. I don’t know his real name.’

Silence.

I should never answer the phone in the morning. ‘I mean, I’m sure I knew it. I’m sure he told me. But I’ve forgotten it. I have to walk him every morning right in the middle of my writing time and I resent him so much I don’t even want to know his name and I only do it for the fifty bucks off my rent.’

‘And he’s not why you were laughing, either.’

‘No, I really don’t know why I was laughing.’

Silence.

‘It’s just that I can’t quite match your voice to your body right now.’ I wince at the word ‘body.’ Why was I talking about his body? ‘And the expression ‘bite to eat’ reminds me of my mother.’ Do not tell him your mother is dead. He has called to ask you out on a date. Do not mention a dead mother.

‘Huh.’ It sounds like he was getting into a different position, reclining, smooshing a pillow under his head maybe. ‘Do you get along with her?’

‘Yes. Completely. Very simpatico.’ But I don’t want to pretend she is somewhere that she isn’t, like I did with the dog. ‘She died though, FYI.’ FYI?

‘Oh shit. I’m so sorry. When?’

‘Recently.’

He gets the whole thing out of me, all the bits I know about her trip to Chile. It still burns a bit, coming out. He listens. He breathes into the phone. I can tell he lost someone close somehow. You can feel that in people, an openness, or maybe it’s an opening that you’re talking into. With other people, people who haven’t been through something like that, you feel the solid wall. Your words go scattershot off of it.

I ask him, and he says his sister died, eight years ago.

‘I usually say it was a hiking accident,’ he says. ‘That she fell. But she was struck by lightning. People can get very caught up in that. The symbolism. Or the physical details. Either one. It bugs me.’

‘Where were you when you found out?’ I don’t know why, but I need to picture him at that moment. It’s such an awful moment. I heard over the phone at five in the morning in a tiny kitchen in Spain.

‘I was home, at my parents’ house. I was supposed to be on that trip but I’d gotten mono. That day was the first day I felt okay. I went to the mall to get a pair of sneakers, and when I came back my father told me to sit down. I said I didn’t want to sit down. I heard it all in his voice. I already knew. For so long I was so mad he made me sit down. Something like that rips you out of your life and you feel for a long time like you’re just hovering above it watching people scurry around and none of it makes sense and you’re just holding this box of sneakers—’ I hear a voice in the background, a woman. ‘Oh shit, Casey, I have to go. My class started twelve minutes ago.’

‘You’re in school?’

‘Teaching. Summer school. God, I’m sorry to hang up right now but that was the head of my department. Can I call you tonight?’

‘I’m working. I’ll see you at the museum on Friday.’ I don’t want to spend too much time on the phone, then have it be awkward in person like in that story ‘The Letter Writers’ about a man and a woman who fall in love through ten years of correspondence, and when they meet their bodies can’t catch up to their words.

We hang up. My room comes into focus again, my desk, my notebook. It’s still morning. The whole time we were on the phone I didn’t worry even once that it would ruin my writing time.

Muriel comes to the potting shed after her walk with David.