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Groundhog Day - Part Four

By Arthur Phillips

"Paperwork. Phone calls with the apologetic or obtuse. She is no longer taxable. She will no longer be contributing to her 401k. Please stop charging $1.50 for the extra calling card. Please stop sending dental reminders. No, she will not be renewing her membership, but thank you for your call. Because she's dead. That's all right."

Drowsy in his ergonomic workspace, he reflects that Sandy and Marnie and their small spectral sorority have appeared less frequently in recent days. Most recently, Sandy, still 21, wore a long coat, scarf, sunglasses, and a winter beret of some sort. A crowded block ahead of him, she turned a corner just as he stepped off the escalator from the subway. A sliver of her right profile flashed in and out of view. He could, he thinks, batting his mouse around its slick pad, try to track her down through the alumni office. If she's not married with children. If she still lives here. If she doesn't recall him with shudders or embarrassment.

He was "fiery" then, in college. He used to ache to see Sandy. No hour was immune to the sudden, feverish need to be with her, preferably in bed. And unpredictable, clammy jealousy: of her friends, teaching assistants, ex-boyfriends, strangers, even her female roommates. He would interrogate her -- not kindly -- for long nights when they could have been happy instead. Once he had grown so angry (over something she had admitted or something she had denied?) that he wanted to hit her, felt he could hit her, thought he would hit her. Instead he put his foot through the wicker back of a white rocking chair and threw a framed picture of them (four vertical snapshots from a train station photo booth: blink, kiss, forced laugh, kiss) against a wall, managing to scare himself out her door. The next morning, sleepless to the point of nausea, slow-basted with self-loathing, he presented himself unwashed and groggy to a rhythmically rocking, unlit-pipe-gnawing campus counselor, and he talked aimlessly about his dad, among other things. "I see," he was told. He never wanted to see her again, for fear he would find this rotten version of himself waiting in her room. Sandy, however, thought it all very dark and alluring and francofilmic. She pleaded with him to forgive her (so apparently she had admitted to some actual violation). He couldn't forgive her for still liking him after his display and they broke up again and again and again, until their smoking dialogues grew too boring to repeat.

A future with Sandy Carlin seems unlikely.

He was never jealous of Claire, shouted when she shouted, they each gave as good as they got, but he never felt violent; it never even occurred to him as a possibility. Such extremes were unimaginable; they suffered no aches or scalding, although once, in a fight, she admitted...Oh, God, is there no statute of limitations for these offenses? Evidently not, so Whit just tries to rush through the recollection as quickly as possible, the branches of it whipping his face and stinging his eyes, and he sprints to reach the far side, bruised but with limited exposure to the poisonous leaves of regret and self-reproach: he and Claire fought (topic since forgotten). A week later, a tenuous Mid-East peace was restored, although occasional deniable rockets were still being launched while both of them posed as victim or wise peacemaker. One such bomb: she admitted that she found attractive a particular co-worker of hers, a younger man. Whit felt smugly wise, knew she was only trying to hurt him. "Yeah, well, nobody wants to die," he said calmly, almost supportively, meaning that she only wanted this younger guy because she was afraid of getting old. The very next day in the shower she found a peculiar lump that merited a second look.

And Marnie? No alumni office can help him; it would be like hunting one individual butterfly last seen some years ago in the middle of a forest since razed for low-income housing. And if he found her? To pick up where they left off? She was too groovy for him; that was the tacitly agreed upon essence of their time together. "My high-tech lover," she used to call him, ambiguously, with a sweet, cruel giggle of pity at someone who would consent to corporate life or computer life or whatever compromise it was that he bent over and took. She made fun of his friends to their faces, and they admired him for it, since he must have been groovier than them if she was with him. Her existence of auditions, demo tapes, friends of friends who promised a shot at this or that, frequent and hurried changes of apartments, the looming threat of eviction, staying with some people I know for a while: all of this was alluring to him twelve years ago, perhaps not very different from the allure Sandy had found in his barely contained violence. But even when he and Marnie were at their weirdly happiest, he knew he could not keep up with her, tantamount as that admission was to executing a potential personality, a Whit who never was and never would be. Most of all, he can still taste that unbanishable flavor of their time together: that he was doing something wrong, something essential and intangible that he simply could not do correctly in her eyes.

She would never explain it, would only shake her head when he failed. An attitude about life. A mode of emotional expression. An intricate, righteous interlacing of libertinism and strict standards. He strove to keep up, stiff and sore from the exertion.

He recalls now that he was relieved -- greatly relieved -- when she went to Paris to work on a film in some unlikely capacity (thanks to the favors of the old girlfriend of an old boyfriend), and that was the end, never-declared, never-ratified. Her multiply zippered leather jacket. Her long dark lashes fringing curiously pale eyes, virtually iris-less in profile. Her pricey binges on this or that, except when she was trying to save money to attend some ashram where high spirituality and low sensuality met and mingled in the brain of a lascivious guru.

And now, what might she make of someone as burlap brown as this middle-aged widower/Java programmer? He would have even less energy for her today. If she is not an entirely different person, it will be hopeless. If she is an entirely different person, why bother? But still she appears in dreams, in crowds, in clouds. Where she belongs.

Compared to Sandy and Marnie, meeting Claire was like being heli-lifted to safety, lowered into a very well protected harbor with a spacious shopping arcade boasting a good Thai restaurant and a movie theater. He can recall very little spoken passion with her. Oh, but malicious recollections are so easily triggered: he was lying in a bathtub with her, their hiking honeymoon near Banff. He informed her that he loved her so much he would die for her. "Thank you." She sponged his back. "But that shouldn't be necessary if we play our cards right. Of course, I will certainly keep you informed should I need your life for anything."

But he did mean it. She refused to take his passion too seriously, her skepticism a healthy byproduct of their calm love. But whether she believed him or not, he would always be that kind of shield for her. He would die for her.

Which claim did not much impress the fat, oily lover who came and carried her off.

She was very sleepy, still somewhat drugged, but still smiling for him as he stroked her forehead. "I was just thinking," he said. "Since it's essentially construction work, why don't we save a few bucks and have the same Dominican guys do it who are working on the roof of our building?"

"Whitty, they'll put the damn thing on my back."

"True. If they don't just keep putting it off indefinitely: 'Señora Claire, Señora Claire, we make build the breast tomorrow, sí? No today good, no today good.' Or, you know, I was thinking: everyone else has the reconstruction just like the original, but that doesn't mean you have to. Could try something new."

"Let me guess: bigger?"

"No, just different. Like an udder. Or something with more colors. Or a pyramid instead of the traditional dome."

Late one evening Whit sits in the study and types an e-mail to the sports columnist Mike Sziemaszko (whoisthatmaszkoman@talkbacksports.net), questioning the completeness of Mike's recent "Best Athletes of the '90's" article. He berates the weekly opiner for omitting a particular Los Angeles Clipper. Whit's first two paragraphs, outlining the underrated guard's accomplishments, are easy, but then he doubts his letter will be printed because there will surely be a lot of correspondents with similar gripes. He sits for a while, staring through the window, past the snow-blanketed plastic patio furniture that lean against each other in wind-blown repose on the condo's balcony. The snow is clean but the white furniture is dirty. Beyond the furniture, the black rails. Beyond the rails, the fifteen-story drop to the river. Bare treetops and stars. "Admittedly he made his share of errors, unforced errors," Whit types, still looking out the sliding patio doors. He sits another moment or two, thinking nothing at all, before typing a very long, unfeasibly serpentine sentence, apologizing to Claire for everything he can recall ever doing that bothered, angered, inconvenienced, or hurt her, whether she knew of it or not, types without hesitation or pause or punctuation for fifteen minutes, sometimes leaving his crimes half-typed because new ones are occurring to him faster than he can put them into words, swears at himself, sometimes saying aloud a word or two of what he types, sorry, so so sorry. He sits back, only half-satisfied because he has not figured out -- despite the long catalogue of sins petty and grand--precisely what it is that he wants to apologize for. He deletes the e-mail, and falls asleep that night with far less difficulty than usual.