Double Rings

 

 

Greg and I don’t speak in public anymore. We used to, last year, when we were actually dating instead of just sleeping together. Sleeping together: isn’t that an ironic term? As if we ever sleep, those nights he calls me when he gets home from the bar and I make the pilgrimage up that dark sidewalk to his apartment. Even if I wanted to sleep in his bed, he won’t let me anymore. He always kicks me out around five. “Sleeping together” is just the term I use, because I am uncomfortable with the words he favors: having sex, screwing, fucking.

            I am in my tapestry-draped single in Melbourne Hall typing a sociology paper when I hear the double rings that mean it’s an off-campus call. I know it’s him from those rings. I don’t know why I still rush to pick up the phone. I guess it’s a holdover from when we were still going out. Those double rings are my weakness.

“Do you want to come over later?” he asks me, in that scratchy voice with a touch of Boston. There are other voices in the background. He’s probably at the bar, on his cell phone. I know him too well.

            “I’m kind of busy,” I say. Balancing the phone on my shoulder, I pull out my ponytail elastic and shake out my hair. “I have to write a story for my workshop. But I guess you can come hang out and watch TV, if you want.”

“Jo, if I wanted a girlfriend to hang out and watch TV with, we’d still be together.”

“Well, fine!” My voice twists with sarcasm. “I guess I’m too busy to give you what you really want.”

            “It’s not like I care.” His voice is hoarse and a little loose. I know he’s been drinking, probably a lot. It’s a Sunday night. “We’re just fucking. It’s just sex. I hope you know that, Joanna.”

            He says this a lot, but some tiny piece of me keeps picking up the phone because I’ve got a feeling he’s lying. Or maybe that’s just me hoping.

 

♠♠♠

This semester I’m in Carol Cheney’s prose workshop that meets twice a week. We sit around a table with coffee and discuss each other’s stories. We pretend to be writers. Sometimes I want to wear black and leave my hair stringy.

Today we are discussing my story. “I don’t think this scene works,” says Nicole, chewing thoughtfully on her tongue ring. In fiction, things aren’t good or bad. They “work.” Or they don’t work. “The part where she meets him on the street on the way home from the bar. That doesn’t seem very realistic. I mean, who talks to random people on the street?” Nicole is the kind of person who has lots of opinions, all of which she says out loud. “It seems forced, what she says here on page three. And what about the ending? I’m not sure it works, either. What does the narrator gain from all this?”

“I think you can make it work, though,” adds Justin. “If you added some more dialogue here. Although the dialogue you have is good.” He smiles at me across the table. I think maybe he likes me, a little. But he’s the relentlessly cheerful stocky football player type. I prefer my boyfriends more tortured. I nod and scribble notes on my draft.

Carol says, “Although I’m not sure what your narrator wants in this scene. Your characters have to want something. That’s what’s wrong with your ending, really.” Her long blonde hair swings as she turns her head. She is not what I expected a writer to look like. I expected her to wear dark glasses and be an alcoholic.

I nod again. Authors are not allowed to speak during workshops.

In my story, the two meet on a March night, when the first thunderstorm of the spring has soaked the black pavement of the street. The air smells like grass and fresh water. She sits on the top step, he passes her a can of beer he’s been keeping in the shadows. They fall silent. The can feels coolly damp and soothing in her clenched hand. She takes a long gulp of beer and hands it back to him.

He is staring absently at one of the streetlights. Then he blinks and looks over at her, as if he’s just remembered she is there. He picks up his right fist and examines it, conspicuously. All of the fingers are bruised, a dark shadowy purple-green, and one of the nails is broken.

‘What did you do?’ she exclaims, touching his wrist carefully.

‘Oh, I punched a stop sign last week. My ex-girlfriend pissed me off.’

‘Ouch,’ she says sympathetically. ‘You OK?’

‘For sure,’ he says, shrugging it off. He stares across the street, glances over at her, then spits on the sidewalk. ‘I really fucked up that stop sign, though,’ he said. ‘It hasn’t given me any shit since.’

She laughs and somehow they fall in love.

It has to be realistic. It’s how Greg and I met. He was a junior and I was a sophomore, and we met on the cracked sidewalk outside his house with the green shutters and the small litter-strewn square of lawn. I was alone, and he called me over from where he was leaning against the porch railing. “Hey,” he said. “You shouldn’t walk by yourself.” I remember thinking he was good-looking, with deep-set dark eyes and curly brown hair that stuck to his forehead. I remember thinking he was going to save me.

I can’t help reacting to Carol’s comment. “But what if I don’t know what they want?” I blurt out.

“You have to,” says Nicole. “You wrote it.” Carol is giving me one of her glares. I have broken the rules.

“OK,” I say. “But what if they don’t know?”

On the way out of class, I run into Greg. He’s striding through the hall in a backwards baseball cap and a wrinkled button-down shirt. Abruptly I stop, causing Justin to bump into my backpack. “Hey,” Greg says roughly, then buries his head and shoulders through the back door into the snow. Anger flares inside me. I hate how the sight of him still makes my heart flip-flop. I concentrate on the tiled floor.

“Wasn’t that your boyfriend?” Justin’s eyebrows have drawn together, and his voice is puzzled.

“No,” I tell him, a little too loudly.

“Oh,” he says, frowning. “Someone said he was.”

 

♠♠♠

 “I can’t sleep anymore,” Greg tells me halfway through the semester. “All I think about is graduation. I’m having these dreams. And then I wake up and have to call you.”

            “Dreams about what?” I think maybe he is going to say something like, ‘About you.’ I suck in my breath. I am sitting in the desk chair, absently playing Solitaire on my computer. A candle burns on my bookshelf, and the yells of drunk kids throwing snowballs drift through the window that’s open just a crack for fresh air.

            “About next year. About whether I’ll have a job. Or a girlfriend, or a life. Stuff like that. About who I’m going to be when I graduate.”

            I click the mouse hard. Piles of computerized cards go bouncing down from their neat stacks. He wants a girlfriend? He can’t handle a relationship here, but when he leaves it’s suddenly OK?

“Well,” I say, starting a new game, “you’ll be you. You just won’t be here.”

            “I feel like that’s a contradiction,” he says.

            I congratulate him for using a big word. He’s a fine arts major and I’m an English major, a point of much teasing between us. I have seen some of his art, black and white photographs that are all angles and bricks and corners. Looking at it makes me feel cold. He has never taken a picture of me.

            “Shut up,” he says to my laughter. “Hey, do you think Shawna McCartney is hot? I kinda want to hook up with her.” I close my eyes and clamp my head between my palms. I wonder if he says these things deliberately or if he’s just stupid.

            An IM pops up on my screen with a cheerful ring. It’s my best friend Steph. I click on the X to close Solitaire. I am sick of watching cards fall, even if it means I’ve won. You don’t get anything when you win computer solitaire. I am sick of not getting anything.

            “I have to go,” I tell Greg.

            “Can I come over later?”

            I tuck a piece of hair behind my ear and start typing to Stephanie. “No,” I say, in what I hope is a careless voice. “Good night.”

            I resolve to start unplugging the phone. This is not healthy.

            I resolve this every night.

 

♠♠♠

“The way he treats you is such bullshit,” announces Stephanie, picking up her turkey sandwich. A piece of lettuce drops to the countertop, which she flicks contemptuously to the deli floor before continuing, “I mean, come on. You go out for, what, two months? And then suddenly, it’s, ‘Oh, I can’t handle a relationship.’ Bullshit. That’s something guys say when they want the excuse to hook up with five girls at once. When they want to get sex from you at no price to them.”

            “But he’s not hooking up with anyone else,” I point out, staring into the depths of my salad bowl. I try to stack croutons one on top of the other, using my spoon. I do six before the tower falls, landing stickily in a pool of ranch.

            “You don’t think he is. But do you know? And these phone calls,” Steph says, drowning a bite of sandwich with a gulp of Mountain Dew, “this is a classic case of a dependent personality. He has a problem with intimacy, yet he needs your attention so he keeps calling.” Steph is a psych major. “This is obviously a consequence of his parents not paying enough attention to him in early childhood. He’s a middle child, isn’t he?”

            “Steph, you only know that because I told you.” A bell rings as a crowd of laughing sorority girls enters. The chilly breeze sweeps our napkins to the floor.

            She looks straight at me. “Jo, it’s not you he wants.”

            But he used to. He used to say I was the only one he could talk to, used to hold my hand on the sidewalk where people could see. This was before he was a senior, before he came up with words like “distancing” and “just fucking” and “not getting too attached” to explain why he suddenly stopped caring. This is what Steph doesn’t know about, because it belonged to Greg and me. Just us.

            “Want the other half of my sandwich?” Steph offers. “You’re not eating enough.”

 

♠♠♠

Greg and I stop for pizza on the way home from the bar on Friday night. We stand in line on the grungy linoleum floor, between too-tough frat boys shoving each other into empty tables and scantily clad girls gossiping with their coat buttons undone. We are together yet self-consciously separate. Greg’s paying.

The guy behind the counter smirks and grunts in a thick voice, “Hey Johnson, that your girlfriend?”

            I know what he sees: Greg, shifting his eyes and swallowing. Standing deliberately apart from me, looking at me when he thinks I’m not looking. Me, a girl in a fleece jacket, pretty, with blonde hair. The kind of girl you’d take home. She’s quietly watching Greg, she’s not attempting to disguise it. They’re standing close, but not touching. Never touching. That’s what I imagine he sees.

            “No,” says Greg roughly. He takes the pizza and plunks some money down on the counter.

            I smile, uncertainly. I glance at Greg. Our eyes meet and this scares both of us into looking at the linoleum floor. “No way,” I say.

            The pizza guy laughs. “Sorry. I thought… ”

            “Yeah,” I want to say, “so did I.”

 

♠♠♠

Double rings on a Saturday night. 

“Hey,” he says. I hear his voice through the static. He’s on his cell phone, and it’s cutting in and out. “I was in my friend’s room after the bar, but now I’m coming over.”

I prop myself up on my pillow and squint at the clock. It’s after four. “No, you’re not,” I say, my voice cracking. “I’m sleeping.”

“Yeah I am,” he says. “I’m already halfway across the parking lot.”

“Greg, no. I’m serious.”

“I’ll see you in five,” he says before hanging up.

I squeeze my eyes shut. Maybe he won’t really show up. Maybe he’s lying. I force myself to breathe evenly. Maybe if I go back to sleep, I won’t be able to hear him knocking. I should take Stephanie’s advice and date Justin. Justin would never pull this shit. Justin wouldn’t use me.

When Greg gets to my dorm and climbs the back stairs to the second floor, he knocks only once, a timid tap, before he starts yelling. “Joanna!”

I am sitting on my bed in my pajamas, my knees tucked up under my chin. My heart beats loudly as I stare hard at the floor. For some reason, I am frozen, like a hunted deer. I feel as if he can see me through the door.

“Jo! Let me in. I know you’re there, let me in!”

“Greg, no.” My voice shakes. “Go home.”

“What the fuck, Jo! What do you think I walked all the way over here for, in the fucking snow?”

I jump out of bed and tiptoe close to the door. “You want sex!” I hiss. “And I don’t want to. I just—I don’t want to. I’m sick of it. So go away.” Sick of it, sick of him finishing and turning his back on me. Sick of the lame excuses for why I can’t sleep in his bed anymore.

He slams the door with his fist. He hits it so hard that it vibrates on its hinges. “Is that what you think I want? Is that what you think I want from you?”

“Greg, be quiet. You’ll wake people up.”

“I just want to see you. Please. OK, I said please, are you happy now? Now can you open the door?”

I’m struggling. My hand drifts up to the doorknob. He pounds on the door again. I can feel it shaking. I remember what Steph said: It’s not you he wants. She’s right, I know she’s right. My hand squeezes the doorknob, then releases it. I stare at my hand, its fingers spread out and hovering in the air, pale in the glow of the streetlight that filters through the crack in the shade. “No,” I say. “I mean it. I’m going to bed.”

His voice is softer now. “Joanna, I just want to see you.”

And it hurts, it really hurts. I remember how he used to bring me coffee while I pored over Dickens in the library. I remember how he smiled when I twirled his curly hair around my finger. I bite my lip hard and lean back against my bed. Joanna, I just want to see you. I’m not one of those heart-of-gold girls who want to save everyone. I don’t want to save everyone. Just him.

 

♠♠♠

Nicole talks too much during workshop. Tonight Carol instructs her that she is only allowed to speak every half hour, on the half hour. I contemplate making Greg call exactly once a week. Maybe on Saturdays.

My story this week is about a girl who disappears. The police and her boyfriend and her parents are all trying to find her, but no one knows where she is. Probably they find her dead somewhere, but I haven’t written the end yet.

Nicole’s mouth twitches, and she squirms in her chair. I just know she wants to leap up, waving the sleeves of those flowing peasant shirts she wears, and yell, “Overkill! This scene is way too heavy handed! It has the mark of the author all over it!” Or something like that.

“Jo, I don’t know how you can write this kind of shit.” Justin shakes his head. “You look so normal.”

I scribble black X’s in my notebook margins. I press the pen down hard. My pen snags as it rips through the paper.

“Where is the girl in this story?” Carol asks, jabbing the manuscript with her pencil eraser. “The problem with this draft is I don’t feel it enough. Emotion in action. That’s what a story is.”

            And I wonder, if a story is emotion in action, then what about people like me who are only going crazy on the inside?

 

♠♠♠

We are fighting, in Greg’s house with the green shutters. We are opposite each other, in the hallway with its dirt-smudged walls and empty cardboard beer cases stacked by the door. Strings of blonde hair are falling into my eyes. His shirt is untucked, with the stain of a spilled drink down the front.

            “I can leave the bar with whoever I want! It’s none of your fucking business! And Justin is just a friend! God, I tell you that every day!” I scream. “He obviously didn’t come home with me, because he’s not here now, is he?” I’m just glad Justin’s house is two streets before Greg’s. I wouldn’t want him to see this.

“How do you think that made me feel, to see you leave with him?” He steps closer. My heart beats faster. My brain is trying to work. Greg must have driven home. How else would he have gotten here before me? He was waiting on the steps for me, waited to pull me inside for what I thought was just the usual post-bar sex. The sidewalk outside the open screen door is muddy. The snow has melted now, and I am wearing just a thin fleece jacket.

            “I wasn’t aware that you felt anything.” I step backward, toward the door. I grope behind me, fingers closing on an empty beer bottle. I don’t know why, but it makes me feel better to have something in my hand.

            “I don’t!” he yells, slamming his fist into the wall. He’s drunker than usual, I can tell by his bleary red eyes.

            “Stop it, you’re scaring me.” But really, I’m almost enjoying it, in a dark B-movie kind of way. I am a character in my own soap opera.

            “I’m scaring you? This is my fault? You cheated on me!”

            “You can’t cheat on someone you’re not going out with! You’re fucking crazy! Get away from me!” I scream, hurling the beer bottle at his head. It explodes in a shower of brilliant amber glass against the wall, two feet to the right of him. I can hear the pieces tinkling their way to the corners of the room. It sounds like something pretty; it sounds like wind chimes. It would have looked brilliant in a TV movie, would have made my mom jump and scatter the popcorn.

            He seizes me around the wrist. The energy between us is almost visible in the air. My heart is pumping wildly. Afraid? No, that’s not right, that doesn’t make sense. I love him, why would I be afraid? He moves quickly, angrily. The muscles in his arm, exposed by his rolled-up sleeve, are taut as he whips me in a circle and flings me down.

            I am off balance, I am slipping, Sharp pain in my upper arm, a flash of pain before my arm goes numb. I am prone. I am on the mattress, panting. Everything slows. I see the world from a new perspective; I see things sideways: the scuffed door frame and the buttons on the VCR. I see his feet, near my head. I grab my arm and curl up on myself, rocking back and forth and cradling my arm to my chest. I must have hit the corner of his dresser as I fell.

            He stands by the edge of the bed, towering over me, hands opening and closing. He’s waiting for what I’m going to say. He’s afraid. “Jo, I didn’t mean-- …” he says, stuttering. “”Joanna. You know it was an accident, you know I…”

            My arm is throbbing. But I’m waiting for him, too. Waiting for words to come out of his mouth that will make it OK. Waiting for, “I’m sorry.”

            But he doesn’t say it. He’s never been able to say it.

            I pull myself up, dropping my sandals twice before my fumbling fingers can slip them onto my feet. I don’t feel like an actress anymore. This is me. This is happening: live, in color, and starkly, frighteningly real. And if this was a TV movie, I’d be the abused wife who’s too needy to leave him, who sniffs away her tears and claims she still loves him. The woman the viewers shake their heads at, because they’ve seen this movie before and they know how it ends. My voice is cold and flat. “Don’t call me.”

 

♠♠♠

It starts off red, angry red, but turns purple. I prod it with my fingertips just to feel the pain. I watch the colors change, like orange leaves in the fall, and think they are splendid. My bruise fades to blackish-green. I wear long sleeves to hide it, this bruise. I write a story for my English workshop about a girl who comes home for Thanksgiving Break to find that her mother has moved all her stuff out of her room. “But why?” she cries. “Don’t you love me anymore?”

            “We never loved you,” her mother says.

            Carol calls it farfetched but nevertheless gives me a 3.5 for execution.

            “Good job,” she says as everyone passes me their marked-up copies. I finger my bruise underneath the sleeve of my sweater.

            Just then I notice the bottom of the manuscript on the top of the pile. Justin has scrawled, “Are you OK?” across the margin. My breath catches in my throat. I can feel the hotness of tears welling relentlessly up in my strained eyes. I look up at him, and I know my eyes are wet.

            “Excuse me,” I whisper, and rush out of the room.

            When I return from the bathroom, even Nicole is looking at me sympathetically, peering out through her dark purple eyeliner. “Sorry,” I say, my eyes lowered. “I have a cold.”

 

♠♠♠

It’s the night before graduation.

            Soft breezes flicker and fall, as I walk slowly up the street. It’s past two, and the streetlights turn the sidewalk pink. The house with the green shutters looms ahead, squatting on the corner. This is where we met, over a year ago. And somehow I know he’ll be there tonight. I know he will. I turn the corner and there is a figure sitting on the porch steps, shoulders hunched up. I’m not surprised to see him, and I don’t think he’s surprised to see me.

            “You always walk alone,” he says. I see his hand lift from the shadows of the porch to bring a beer can to his lips. “You know you shouldn’t do that.”

            “I know.” I watch him as he stands, arms folded across his plaid shirt. His eyes look tired. He shifts his weight, shuffles his feet, and looks at me.

            “There are some things I wanted to say to you,” he says finally.

            “I’m listening.”

“Look… I gave you as much as I could possibly give you,” he insists. “You knew that. You knew I couldn’t handle a relationship. I know you wanted more, but I told you I couldn’t give you more. I told you that. I thought you were OK with it.”

            The fabric of my windbreaker swishes as I shift my arms. “Why?” I ask. The word hangs in the air between us. “Why couldn’t you handle it? Is there some big dramatic secret? No, there’s not. The truth is you didn’t want to be emotionally involved because it was too much work. Because you were lazy. The truth is you hit me, and you didn’t even have the balls to say you were sorry.”

            “Look, of course I care about you. Is that what you want to hear?”

            “No.” I close my eyes. “It doesn’t matter now.”

            “Yes it does,” he says. “I don’t want you to think I’m an asshole for the rest of your life. I just…” He sees me looking at him. “I never know how to say the right things.”

            “No, you don’t.”

            “What do you want to hear?”

            And suddenly I don’t know. He’s asking me, and I don’t know. I am just like my characters, on a dark street with no idea what to feel. There’s a crack in the concrete step, by my shoe. I stand like a little kid with my shoulders stiff and my arms wrapped around my chest. “You never told me I was beautiful.” My voice comes out wistful and thin. We’re on the porch, beneath a row of trees. Their limbs are long and ghostly, with soft green buds just beginning to blossom into leaves.

            “I thought you knew that.”

            I swallow and tilt my head up. We look at each other for a while. A shadow from the trees covers his eyes and one cheek. He leans in and kisses me.

 

♠♠♠

Every story has to end. That’s what Carol says. Things have to come full circle.

What circles have I made? I wonder as I watch Greg sleep, his face turned slightly away from me. How do I know what happens next?

And it is then, on the couch on Greg’s back porch with my head resting on his flung-out arm, that I get the idea for the new story I am going to write. An idea. Or rather, a beginning. A scene. A girl, lying half underneath a guy. They are naked, glowing, waiting for their breath to slow. She feels the breeze brush her damp skin. The shadows of the great thick trees in the yard darken the porch. The stars are brilliant; they dangle in the sky above her. She smiles and takes them in, takes it all in. Her skin is touching his, their legs are tangled together. But they are not one. They never have been. She knows that now, and so she isn’t thinking about him. She’s thinking about herself.

            She’s marveling about being naked under the sky for the first time in her life, and how right it feels, and how free.

            I put my clothes on quietly. Standing on the porch steps, I glance back at him one last time. He looks quiet, innocent, incapable of hurting anyone. Like a little boy, with spiky brown hair and a slack face. He looks whole. And I realize I’m not angry. Couldn’t we all have done the things he did to me? Couldn’t anyone? Couldn’t I?

            I walk home alone, and a tear slides down my face.

            This is not a walk of shame. I am not ashamed of anything I’ve done.

 

♠♠♠

It’s my senior year, and I’m in a more advanced English workshop. Nicole, who has gone abroad to Italy, has been replaced by a skinny track boy. Justin still smiles at me and writes little notes on my drafts. Sometimes I smile back. I might date him this year. Maybe. The phone stays silent, the porch is empty. In her comments on my latest story, Carol tells me I am finally learning to write endings.

Sometimes I stare for a long time at the girl in the mirror, letting my mind fall blank. I want to see something significant, to come to some final understanding, but there is nothing. Just eyes and lips and hair. Sometimes I stop at what used to be Greg’s house. I stand on the cracked sidewalk and feel its blank square window-eyes on me. That house knows secrets about me. It knows how weak I really am. Sometimes I wake up sweating in the dark, thinking I have heard the double rings. But these are just pieces, flashes, moments. They don’t make sense unless someone puts them together. And maybe I have been the creator of my own story all along.

            Do I miss him?  I don’t remember. I don’t know. What I do know is that I suddenly know what to write.

And so I write us. I write the two of us, the things that happened when the doors were closed and the lights were off. I write what no one understood. I write 3 A.M. phone calls and hurt voices. I write the first time we were together, and how he held my hand all night. I write what I wasn’t strong enough to stop. I write the bruise on my arm. I write an apology, I write a eulogy. I write a history.

            I write a story that is not good, not noble or beautiful.

It’s not a pretty story, but it’s ours.