Steve had moved safely through the routine of his work day and
entered the evening hours without incident. Returning home to his
apartment building, he walked along sidewalk savoring the brisk air of
late fall. The lobby of his building was comfortably warm with muted
lighting. The mirrors and marble were soothing. He nodded at the doorman
with the appropriate mixture of geniality and distance. Reaching into the
deep pocket of his coat, Steve withdrew his mail key and pulled out the
letters, magazine, and flyers from the box.
One letter protruded from the bound bundle. Barely half of the
handwritten address was visible, and there was no return address. Yet
even without focusing on the envelope, he knew the sender's identity. The
words were strung together like baroque boxcars with gaps within each word
that followed an arcane algorithm he had never decoded, like so may other
things about Alyson. How long had it been since he has seen her
handwriting? At least a decade, but the passage of time did not matter.
The day was no longer safe. He closed the mailbox slowly, acutely aware
of the sounds of the others moving across the carpet. He raised his head
with a cautious scanning movement and walked towards the elevator with the
mail under his arm.
Alyson was well-know in their small town long before she arrived
at his high school during the sophomore year. The daughter of a rich
horse breeder and a former debutante, she was devastatingly lovely.
There were, of course, other beautiful girls. But Alyson's character was
flavored with a mix of intelligence, histrionics, and sensuality, and the
effect was universally intoxicating. So, it was no surprise that she was
always surrounded by men staring at her as the ancients must have stared at
the first fire. Under her influence, boys--and men--made desperate
gestures and reckless decisions to be near her, or away from her, that
would haunt them for life
Steve told himself at first that Alyson did not have the predicted
effect on him. He had seen her in a dazzling white tennis dress at the
country club, pirouetting through a game of singles in a way that seemed
to show her undergarments more than necessary. Her statuesque mother sat in
a ornate wrought-iron chair on the sidelines, cradling in one hand a
frosty and powerful cocktail and in the other a long cigarette with a
languid trail of smoke. The spectators attempted to veil their voyeurism
with somber comments about the progress of the set, but their attention
was too intent for what was in truth no more than a competent game on the
courts of a sun-baked country club in a modest Southern hamlet.
He kept his distance from her at school, watching the other boys
clamoring for her attention. Yet at the fall dance, he somehow found
himself in front of her. With a toss of her hair, she indicated that he
should dance with her. He moved as commanded, not without resentment, and
for the first time he noticed a vulnerability in her. Her eyes were wide
and smiling, but in the corner was an allusion of something close to
terror.
When the song came to a stumbling close, he leaned towards her and
whispered, "That was nice, but you don't have to be beautiful for
everyone." He had meant it in anger, but she looked at him with relief
and squeezed his hand. She gushed into his ear, with a voice that was
huskier than he had expected, "Thank God someone knows what kind of hell
this is." Her breath made him shiver. She kissed him on the cheek. Her
lips were moist and glistening, and her hair cascaded around his head.
Then she was gone.
After that, they were friends. They confessed, schemed, and
gossiped. She had many anxious suitors, but for reasons that he never
understood, she would ask him out on dates. Then, by some unseen signal,
they were kissing. Their mutual virginity was something they cursed
together, and, in the back seat of his car over the Thanksgiving holiday,
they became lovers. It was a fleeting and terrifying coupling.
Afterwards, she hide on the floor of his Volkswagen with a blanket over
her head, sobbing that he had to get a douche to make sure she was not
pregnant. He found an all-night drugstore on the edge of town and bought
a dusty box from an old man with a stoop and extravagant gray nose hairs.
"It don't work after, now, y'hear," the old man said as Steve went out the
door.
The elevator opened and Steve went inside. He pushed the button
for his floor with precision. He approached the rear of the car and then
faced forward. A man and two chattering women also entered the car. The
doors closed smoothly, shutting out the noises of the lobby. Now the
voices of the women seemed even louder as they careened off the walls of
the car. Steve leaned back and looked up, his jaw clenching and relaxing
with the rhythm of his thoughts.
The bond Steve had hoped to establish on that confusing night did
not develop. In fact, they never had sex again during high school. They
necked awkwardly a few times after that, but Alyson's ardor waned with
each encounter, and she soon took other lovers who were close friends of
his. She treated him as if he were a priapistic troll who had ravaged her
and thus doomed her to a wanton life. His name circulated in harsh
whispers among her friends, and he was shunned by the other girls. Alyson
would write long notes to him in class relating her sex life in painful
detail. Steve stared at the baroque handwriting with a sense of helpless
loathing. Yet, he read them, as if this were the punishment he merited
for some unwritten transgression.
After making two stops, the elevator opened at Steve's floor. He
walked out with deliberate steps. The hallway was quiet and the carpeting
muffled the sound of his shoes. He went into his apartment and turned on
the lights. Without removing his coat, he sat in a chair by the window
and held the letter in his hands. He ran his fingers across the
handwritten address, hoping for guidance.
High school ended. Much to the dismay of Steve and his
classmates, life moved on, and they passed unceremoniously into their
twenties and thirties. Alyson went to an Ivy League school and continued
to devastate the men around her. But neither Steve nor his classmates
became the celebrated artists or flamboyant suicides they claimed as their
destiny. Instead, they settled into the agony of anonymity and marked out
the passage of their lives with tiny desperate gestures. There were
marriages, children, and divorces. A few died without glory in the
occasional auto accident. One classmate Steve barely knew died of an
overdose, but his timing was poor and he was only pitied as a careless
user.
News of Alyson reached Steve from time to time as he went through
college and professional school. She graduated from college and moved to
New York to live in a condominium her parents had purchased for her. She
tried her hand at acting. Then, she became to personal assistant to a
well-known eccentric who published a literary review. This allowed her to
move in the elite circles of Manhattan, where she made her mark briefly as
a charming dinner diversion. There was even a cryptic paragraph in the
New Yorker's Talk of the Town referring to her lavish thirtieth birthday
party. Her reign of glory came to an end, however, when she imbibed too
much champagne at a formal affair and retched copiously into the lap of a
prominent German diplomat. From there she went to law school, where she
met and married a rich boy. She never practiced law, but settled down to
have a son, whom she named Beau, which Steve always considered a vulgar
antebellum synonym for Adonis.
Steve's life was marked by similar failures and indiscretions, but
they remained only office gossip. His marriage ended after five years,
and there were no children. He got a business degree from a respectable
Eastern school. The last time he and Alyson were together came when he
went to New York for a job interview. Alyson met him in the lobby of his
hotel, and they had a sumptuous meal on his expense account. They drank
desperately in an attempt to capture some approximation of intimacy. As
mysteriously as that Thanksgiving night, she went back to his room, and
they went to bed together after mechanically removing each other's
clothes. Steve was shocked by her boyish figure. In high school, he had
always thought of her hips as the epitome of fecundity. They stumbled
through sex and fell asleep with what seemed like a cavernous distance
between them. She was gone when he awoke. He later learned that the week
before their meeting she had discovered that her husband was having an
affair.
No illumination came from touching the envelope. He flirted
briefly with the delicious idea of throwing out the letter unread. Maybe
he would even burn it. But, he knew that they had entered into this
pathological pas de deux long ago and that it was now his turn to follow
her lead.
"Dearest Steve,
"Can you believe that I am on the alumni funding raising
committee? Well, they tell me that you have never given any money to
the school. I told them I thought you would certainly give something if I
wrote you. Please don't let me down. Even $20 would be enough. Alyson."
The chair tilted for a moment and Steve put an arm out to steady
himself. The thoughts formed in his head of a long venomous letter in
reply detailing her sadism over the years, but when he realized what that
implied about his own behavior, the idea collapsed into a vague wave of
disgust. He paused for a moment and looked out over the city.
"Here is a check for twenty dollars," he wrote to her. "Give my
regards to the appropriate parties. Steve." That was as much anger as he
would let her see. Character, he thought as he sealed the envelope, is a
burden he and Alyson would have to bear for life. Perhaps he would never
be prepared for the unmoored vertigo he would feel if he broke off their
dance. He placed his right foot forward and held his hands expectantly in
the air. A nervous smile of dreaded expectation broke across his face,
but at least he knew what would follow. A distant and halting waltz
echoed through his apartment.
(c) 1995 by John Cooke