Chapter 4
After that, I started seeing Sarah at the library fairly often.
I’d stop and chat with her at the information desk when she was on duty or say hello when we ran into each other in the stacks.
Sometimes she’d swing by my carrel and look at my pile, or bring me a reference book she thought I might find useful.
Occasionally, we’d share a cookie or a brownie on her break.
I started seeing her around town, too, not in any organized way, but always by chance.
It was one of those things that happens, where you go for years not noticing a person, and then, once you’re clued in to their existence, they become ubiquitous.
I’d hear her voice in the stationery store—that funny, almost-chortle she used in superficial conversations—or recognize her hair on the far side of the co-op vitamin aisle.
I’d spot her hesitant gait and slightly hunched posture inside the bakery with the amazing spelt bread.
Apparently, we’d been crossing each other’s paths all this time without ever seeing each other, locked inside our parallel dimensions. Now, at last, our eyes had been opened.
Our big topic became the juggler at the farmer’s market. We liked to keep each other up-to-date on our most recent sightings.
“I saw him without his makeup on,” she said one day near the avocados at the grocery store. “At the DMV. I’m pretty sure it was him, anyway.”
“I saw him with his clown wife,” I said. “They were riding around on bikes together. They seemed very blissful.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen his wife, too,” she said. “She didn’t smell that good when I saw her.”
“No,” I said, “not the cleanest clowns, those two.”
We were always brief, always cheerful, always polite.
I was always charmed by her quick laugh and subtle wickedness.
She had a way of taking an idea and sending it back at a slanted angle, a little smarter, a little more colorful than before.
I’d mention a kid with a bad Joker tattoo, and from her it became a Christopher Walken facial tattoo, a Johnny Depp pelvic tattoo, a Henry Kissinger ass tattoo, ad infinitum.
At some point, I came to understand, she liked hearing funny complaints of any kind, anything involving a minor humiliation or gaffe, so I started preparing anecdotes of little disgraces I’d endured.
I’d tell her about my argument with the cat lady in the neighborhood, or how I’d been caught by a neighbor throwing a broken table into his dumpster.
She rewarded all my self-deprecation with avid delight.
“What did your neighbor say when he caught you?” she said, eyes gleaming.
“He said he had to pay for the dumpster by weight,” I said. “He said I should’ve asked him first.”
“And what did you do?” she said.
“I offered to take it back out if he wanted,” I said.
“And what’d he say?”
“He said I didn’t have to. This time.”
“?‘This time,’?” she said. “So you owe him now.”
There was nothing going on. We were just two neighbors having a friendly back-and-forth.
We liked each other, it was obvious, but she clearly liked a lot of people that way.
She was the sort of person who touched people’s forearms when she talked, and laughed at mediocre jokes, and relished almost every story she heard, even when it wasn’t that great.
I went away examining every conversation we had for special signals she might be sending, but I never found them.
Not that I’d expect any. She was Phil’s wife.
In that way, quietly, she entered my pantheon of unrequited crushes.
There had been so many over the years. They came in the form of neighbors, cashiers, co-workers, actresses.
Historical figures, students, friends’ sisters.
They were often people I barely knew, and yet who got recruited as the unwitting stars of my ongoing fantasy life.
In my mind, they wandered into kitchens and living rooms wearing only towels; climbed stairs without underwear; entered bathrooms mid-shower.
They played out roles rife with inexplicable submissions and offered their bodies willingly for incredible liberties. Now Sarah was one of them.
It was intriguing because she wasn’t my usual fantasy object.
Usually, I gravitated to women with compact bodies, small breasts, trim hips.
I favored snub noses, chestnut hair. Who knows why?
Sarah, by contrast, was long and languid.
She had a substantial chin and a light dusting of hair on her cheeks.
Her pores were noticeable. But it didn’t seem to matter to my libido.
I started imagining her in the library reading room after hours, wearing loose sundresses, or doing Pilates in a private room at the gym, covered in a glaze of sweat.
From there, the fantasies progressed as always.
Were my daydreams obscene? Abnormal? I didn’t think so.
If anything, they were probably more tame than most. I’d never find out.
All I knew was, if everyone else wasn’t walking around with these movies in their heads, these visions at once utterly depraved and utterly inconsequential, if they weren’t imagining their fellow humans in every possible state of excitement and undress, I truly had no idea what was going on in the world at all.
In June, Phil and Sarah invited me to their annual solstice party.
I was happy to have made the leap to mutual friend and party guest, and flattered by the invitation in general, even if I assumed it would probably be a party much like every other in Ashland—a mix of campus people, yoga people, transplants, and assorted architects and vintners, standing around talking about their vacations and where to buy the best fish.
I’d been avoiding these gatherings as well as I could since getting back to town, protecting my personal privacy from the few friends and acquaintances I had left, but I RSVPed yes anyway, knowing I couldn’t really say no.
I figured I could always sneak out if I wasn’t enjoying myself.
Their house was only about two miles from my mom’s.
And yet, as the days to the party narrowed, I found myself actually looking forward to it.
If nothing else, the function would divulge some good sociological information.
So these are the people a biology professor and a librarian consider friends.
So this is what a biology professor and a librarian serve as snacks.
One never knew when these little granules of data could be repurposed in the writing life.
And maybe, too, I thought, this party would offer other pleasant surprises.
I wasn’t thinking about Sarah, per se, but rather an entirely new person who might appear in my line of vision.
Maybe Sarah would introduce me to her own replacement, the woman who’d finally unlock the deepest wellsprings of my passion, or at least offer a fun night or two.
Maybe some graduate student would tell me she admired my work and take me home for a wild tryst. I’d been alone too much lately.
And this was the ultimate reason for any social congregation in the end, wasn’t it? The long-shot possibility of sex.
When I showed up at the door with my bottle of wine, Sarah and Phil seemed genuinely touched I’d come.
They hugged me warmly and introduced me around enthusiastically, telling everyone I was their new writer friend.
I did my best to meet the party halfway.
I talked for a long time to a blond jewelry-maker about her love of the Girl Scouts, then to a man who said he produced independent documentaries, though his last efforts seemed like they were a few decades in the past. I sat for a long while with a group of San Francisco expats trading horror stories about the Tenderloin, bragging to each other about the profits they’d reaped when they’d finally cashed out of the Bay Area.
All were fine, pleasant conversations, with thoughtful, interesting people, none of whom I’d be talking to again, I could already tell.
I’d been hoping to get in a little banter with Sarah during the night, but it turned out she was too busy for that.
She was always in motion, filling wineglasses, guiding people to the hors d’oeuvres table, ripping apart heads of butter lettuce into a huge wooden bowl.
I spotted her numerous times policing the front door and forcing people to take off their shoes.
I could have cornered her and demanded a few minutes of time, but I didn’t want to come across as a needy guest. Better to tip a glass in her direction as she lit the candles on the buffet table and receive a passing, apologetic smile in return.
It was a couple of hours into the party when I decided I needed a break from the small talk.
It seemed too early to leave just yet—the paella hadn’t been served—but I felt like some quiet would do me good.
I broke away from the main group in the living room and went around looking for a space to hide.
There was a line for the bathroom, and upstairs seemed off-limits, so I ended up drifting into what Sarah and Phil called their library, a bumped-out side room partly masked by a sliding, inset door.
It was a nice room, with double bay windows, bushy houseplants, and a comfortable couch with a long-necked reading lamp. Best of all, it was empty.