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That Time When All the Sad People Came and Stayed at My House - Part Four

By Adam Rapp

The band never panned out, and with his ambition drained and his wife long gone, James Ingalls moved into his boyhood home in Pollard, Illinois. Even his dad had managed some success, retiring to Florida with a new wife. Just to remind him of his failings, he rents an apartment in the house out to his ex-wife's brother, Bradley, a slacker who nevertheless has no trouble with the ladies.

Despite the fact that my ex still pays his rent, Bradley and I seldom speak, and when we do our conversation is executed with the fewest possible syllables.

"Hey," I'll say, after he opens his door. "Bradley."

"Hey," he'll reply in his sleepy baritone.

"How's it going?" I'll ask, hanging on to a thin vestige of the former familial tissue that existed when his sister was still officially in my life.

"What, she didn't send the rent?" he'll say after a genuinely blank moment.

"No, she sent it," I'll reply. "I just wanted to see how you were doing."

"I'm cool," he'll say.

Then we'll stand there and stare at each other, the smell of reefer creeping into the hallway, almost man-like in its sharpness, his sister's TV murmuring in the background.

"If you ever need anything...," I'll offer with open-ended sincerity. And then he'll nod and I'll nod and we'll just stand there.

"You have snot in your eye," he'll say -- or something to that effect -- lethargic as a well-fed lion.

"Thanks," I'll say, wiping my eye.

And then he'll shut the door -- not quite in my face -- and I'll turn and head back up to the attic.

I've seen exactly 32 women knock on Bradley's door -- yes I count them (I actually keep a tally on a piece of paper that is thumb-tacked over my desk) -- most of whom I estimate to be between the ages of 20 and 30. They are all beautiful, and slightly agitated. The majority of them leave dramatic notes taped to his door.

"Bradley, Why won't you call me back, you fucking boner!"

Or simply: "Bradley, Please call."

I have no idea where he meets these women or how he goes about accumulating them. I thought for a while that it might be some sort of personal dating enterprise developed on the Internet, but Bradley doesn't own a computer. I almost believe that he is the kind of member of the male species who simply has to put out an odor and that the ladies come swarming, ovulating rapturously, drunk with pheromonal confusion.

Although I know that I am pathetically still in love with a woman who no longer wants me (other than the wretchedness of what I vicariously came to know through my mother's cancer there is perhaps no other greater misery), I could certainly use the services of one of Bradley's visitors. I would like to believe that I have evolved into my own plant-like state, solitary, self-sustaining, only animated by moisture and the sun, but I can't deny that I long for the simple creature comfort of companionship -- particularly feminine companionship. And it's not sex that I'm talking about, although that certainly accounts for something; it's the warmth of another; the reliability and purity of a woman's shape moving through a shared room; the cast and cant of her shadow on a wall; the warm apples-and-smoke scent hanging faintly in the air; the perfect spider web smallness of bras and panties clinging to a hamper's wicker skin.

In the simplest of terms, according to her, Sheila Anne left me because she felt I lost my ambition, because I settled, because I grew to be satisfied with our life in Pollard and the cresting of The Third Policeman and the cluttered familiarity of the basement studio (now I have moved all of the equipment into a cheap fiberglass-and-sheet metal tool shed that I purchased from Sears), and in my opinion because I let love become my priority, which, in retrospect, I discovered results in too much doting, a compulsive need to touch and cling, and the dissolution of any mystery that might exist between even the most intimate companions. It is mystery after all, that keeps a marriage interesting. Things secreted in drawers. Unknown telephone numbers on the long distance bill. Unusual URL address on the Internet Explorer. I think I took marriage to be a kind of pre-midlife apotheosis, but instead of it inspiring me to continue growing as James Ingalls the Man and James Ingalls the Rock Musician (and increase my mystery quotient), it pushed me into a strange mode of self-satisfied semi-retirement. I loved getting domestic and cuddly. I could have floated in that warm, three-foot pond for the rest of my life. I might has well have followed my father and his wife Sissy to Jupiter, Florida and set up house among the golfers and the elderly.