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Groundhog Day - Part Two

By Arthur Phillips

It has been 25 months since Whit's young wife, Claire, died. And it is only now that he feels the stirrings of attraction again, with a woman he noticed preparing a window display across the street from a sandwich shop where he ate lunch. But before Whit can conquer his fears, he needs to find that restaurant again.

It is brigadoonishly difficult to find that sandwich shop again. (The first time was by chance: he was playing a lonely snow-fall game designed to achieve maximum disorientation: one may only walk on streets or sidewalks where the snow is pristine. When, with a single step from a quiet side street onto a busy boulevard, the game ended, Whit was hungry and the sandwich shop ingratiatingly materialized.) Late this afternoon, though, it plays the coquette. It slips away, masquerades as a cobbler, a tea bar, a computer repair. He excitedly understands why he is lost: he was not aware of his surroundings, was not registering new memories at all until he saw the window-dresser amidst her headless wards, and some mechanism he had assumed was permanently destroyed gently whirred and clicked.

In his circular odyssey this afternoon, holding possible names for the window-girl up to his recollection of her face, he approaches a building blanketed in scaffolding, and he instinctively slows to look out for errant bricks or speeding nails shot from the wind-swollen tarps and monstrous-worm garbage chutes. "Fire, baby, fire, baby," yells a hard-hatted man on the ground, calling up through cig-cradling teeth. Whit stops and enjoys the sight: an orange translucent lighter tumbles slowly from a downturned palm, accelerates into waiting hands below, flickers its function, and then the film is reversed without a glitch, the orange and bubbled tool sails back up, decelerates upward into the original palm above.

Finally, Whit is able to find the restaurant only by deducing its position in relation to her store across the street. The eatery has whimsically shrunk and wandered a block closer to the Square in the last week. He holds out for the occupied window perches which flank the door, declines open tables deeper inside the noisy hall. "Suit yourself, Chief," sighs a staff goatee, over-taxed by just such customer whimsy.

Having given her a temporary name that seems to fit his glimpse of her, Whit engages in provocative ritual: he orders the same sandwich, looks down at its arrival, allows it to come apart in his hands, wrestles with its devolving form. He slowly looks up. No luck, even after several efforts. He contemplates the well-dressed and jolly decapitated children. Outside her window the snow rests on a fluted glass awning in smooth parallel tubes of peerless white, tilted cylindrical clouds lined up for inspection.

He lingers over his meal, orders an inedible dessert and indelible coffee. He wonders if he could smolder for her, if she could gently kindle a fire of romance. Someone drops a loaded tray, but the noise does not bring her to her window. No, romance cannot be. Not for lack of physical desire: that has not seemed impossible for many months now; it returned not long after Claire's death with firm morning tenderness, offensively indifferent to recent events, and has religiously never bothered to mourn since. (Except once, when desire held itself priggishly aloof while well-meaning colleagues laughed too loudly and cheered unconvincingly and ordered pricey rounds and rounds and rounds and the round, hard breasts of a racoon-faced stripper chafed Whit's eyelids and nose.) Rather, it is romance that seems impossible, he reminds himself as he fingers the toothy, chipped edge of his stained coffee cup, because romance demands from its congregation an effortless, thoughtless faith in unknowable outcomes and mysterious possibilities. This faith is -- like a boy's soprano -- an unrecoverable knack, Whit has learned these past 25 months. At whatever age it goes, it goes for good. He knows this as a regrettable fact that all men must someday accept. No, it is gone and a future with any woman is unmysteriously knowable: a spell of avid affection, followed soon by awkward conversations about commitment, pursued immediately by debates about money, then routines more or less comfortable and comforting, the puzzling shock of random childlessness, and all at once fat, guffawing cancer arrives on a sparkling summer day, peels off his shoes to pick between his toes, smacks his gourmand lips at the promise of a fine meal: he takes first one bite then another of her lovely chest, proceeds to savor with slow epicurean skill the rest of her, lingering over his whimpering banquet as long as he can, irritated but not hastened by the hapless cuckold's futile tears.

---

Contrary to countless pamphlets scattered like rose petals in front of him by everyone he knew (as if her death had created a community of social workers), he did not travel along 12 discrete stations of grieving. His mind did not heal in progression, like lucky, logical flesh, flushing, sealing, numbing, scabbing, scarring. Rage and denial came and went on unpredictable schedules, and a kind of exhausted acceptance sometimes chilled him in early mornings: life was once better, in the past, and would never be so good again. The end. This was a sort of stabilizing force, not comfort exactly, but sufficiently calming. Unfortunately it, too, visited then abandoned him at random.

Basketball, for example. The first time he went back to pick-up night, a year and some ago, only a few of the guys knew where he had been for the previous several months. Those who understood were clumsily gentle with him, which he found embarrassing -- gentle passes, gentle compliments on his game, gentle blocking, even bizarrely gentle trash talk ("Okay, here I come, big Whit, you're not as fast as you think you are"). The well-meaning stupidity spread rapidly and efficiently: he never saw anyone say "Lay off, his wife just died," but one after another player did suddenly grow tentative and soothing with him. This irritated him; he needed to play. He called them pussies, laughed at the feeble defense, scored and fouled freely and with a real lust for violent impact. They just took it, marveled at his moves, absorbed his insults and his hits with a shrug and a laugh, yeah, yeah, Whit, you the man.

Walking home after that game, energized and scorning their unnecessary pity, he declared himself fine. He examined his recovery under the passing streetlights, turning it this way and that, admiring the sheen of his manly resilience. An instant later, a motion-activated streetlight perversely shut off as he walked under it and that same smooth and admirable agate seemed flinty, cold, shamefully callous. But either way, he was getting better, he told himself. He was sleeping better at last, without any help and with only occasional fear. Shameful or not, there could be no question: he would live, would even be okay.

Thirteen months seemed an appropriate sentence of pain and mourning. And yet the very next night he was standing in front of the convenience store near his apartment, and an instant later he was inside it, rocking from heel to toe in front of the feminine hygiene products, holding a pack of supers in one hand and maxis in the other, straining to remember the specifications of her occasional urgent requests for a nocturnal errand, shouted out from the bathroom as he went out for nicotine gum. That night he bought the maxis from a pierced and snickering kid who, new to this job and the world, could not imagine what circumstances would make a dude buy such products. He walked home over the uneven ice and snow, clutching the brown paper bag in his numb fingers, tears freezing on his sticky lashes and stinging his contorted cheeks, and he was soon stuffing his uncomforting parcel into the wedge of open space in a street-corner trash-can overflowing with donut boxes and dog shit in plastic sacks.