The Encyclopedia of Exes Read online

  “Really, for real please. How can we make you shut up?” she’d ask and go to sleep.

  One day I asked her about her past boyfriends. “They were mostly musicians,” she told me. “I’m really into that type. You know, extra-skinny with long hair. Kinda junkie looking but not actually.”

  “Uh huh,” I nodded, wondering if there was any culture in which I could pass for extra-skinny.

  “Guys who are passionate about making music just really get to me for some reason.”

  “I see.” We walked along. “So you never dated anyone from the comic book store?”

  “Those guys? No way!” she said, and then I guess she noticed my hurt look because she got quiet and we didn’t speak for the rest of the day.

  That’s how days went from then on, only worse. Awkward moments, me bugging her, her walking away.

  Then one morning I woke up and looked around and she wasn’t there. “Darby!” I yelled out. There was no answer. I listened but the world was still. Then I noticed at my feet a note written into the dirt, etched out in huge letters, on a patch hundreds of feet long. She must have spent the whole night writing it. It said:

  “I’m sorry to leave you like this but I think it’s for the best. I really wanted to like you, I really did, but in the end I just have to admit that you are just not my type and I can’t go against chemistry. But I think you’re a great guy. It’s so cool that you like Raspberry Mocha Alarm. It’s just chemistry.

  “Don’t look for me. I have built a boat and am going to another continent. Believe me, it’s better this way. Have a great life! Darby”

  I called out her name again just for the heck of it and hearing it realized I liked the sound, had gotten used to hearing myself say it to her these past few months. Darby, Darby, Darby Darby. It sounded so nice and reminded me of how pretty she was. I called it out again and again and pledged to keep calling for her as long as I could still remember the time we spent together.

  MURMUR

  Panio Gianopoulos

  (mûr’mər) n 1: a low, indistinct, continuous sound: spoke in a murmur; the murmur of the waves 2: an indistinct, whispered, or confidential complaint; a mutter 3: Medicine. an abnormal sound, usually emanating from the heart, that sometimes indicates a diseased condition

  When I met Maryanne, she was standing on the subway platform and talking to herself. She was tiny, less than a hundred pounds, with dark circles beneath her eyes and unwashed brown hair. We were nearly alone in the station. I leaned against a girder to listen, but her words were indistinct, a blur of gentle noise, and soon enough a train charged in from the darkness to silence her. The train thundered along the track, and as we approached the yellow edge in anticipation it kept hissing and racing until, at last, it disappeared with a shudder. We were left side by side, introduced by disappointment.

  “You were listening,” she said to me.

  I blinked too many times, flustered. I glanced down at her thin pretty blouse and back up into her tired smile, those two rows of small lopsided teeth.

  “Maryanne,” she said.

  When we boarded the next train there were empty seats, but we stood side by side holding onto the same fingerprinted pole. I spread my feet and felt the train twist beneath me like the spine of a cat. We were new at being New Yorkers so we talked about home, the places we had fled.

  “I didn’t know people actually lived in South Carolina,” I said. “I thought it was one of those states they made up so there would be fifty. Like Oklahoma.”

  “You’re just upset because we call you Yankees,” she said.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  I told her I was going downtown to buy an album by The Terrifics that was being released exclusively in vinyl format. I didn’t own a record player but I wanted the album.

  “I have a record player,” she said. “I’m not sure if it works.”

  “Does it have a needle?”

  “I think so. My mother gave it to me.”

  “Ask her if it has a needle.”

  “She’s dead.”

  I changed hands on the pole, startled, though I shouldn’t have been, as flirtation usually involves precocious familiarity, asking and telling things ordinarily unshared with a stranger. They aren’t grand secrets, they’re things any friend would know, but it’s through the swift progression of revelation that a new intimacy arises.

  “I’m picking up a friend at Penn Station,” she told me as we transferred to the E train. “He’s in the air force.”

  “A friend,” I said, carrying her black bag.

  “He called me up to say he was coming up from D.C. for the weekend. We went to college together. Medical school.”

  “You’re a doctor? You look sixteen.”

  “I’m an intern at Sloan-Kettering.”

  “I’m healthy,” I said.

  “Terribly,” she said and reached up to tug the collar of my jacket. We were melting, with a kind of instantaneousness that had little to do with each other and more to do with ourselves, a mutual affinity for being saved. I tried to convince her to leave her friend at the station but she wouldn’t agree to it, though it seemed she wanted to. I accompanied her past my stop to Penn Station and walked her to the turnstile where she wrote her telephone number on my hand in red ink. Then she slipped her jacket over her head and I couldn’t see her face.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Come here.”

  I leaned in close, nervous, worried that the sweat on my hands would smudge the numbers. She turned her head and pressed her lips to my ear, as if she were going to whisper a secret. We were breathing in that dark, humid space, surrounded by the fever of strangers, and then she slipped the jacket off of both of us and walked away to meet her unwanted friend.

  At the restaurant they took your shoes. As Maryanne pried her sneakers off she held my forearm for balance, each bony finger serious as a handcuff. In the dining room the wooden floors had been scooped out to let you dangle your feet, in case kneeling was too difficult.

  “Order for both of us?” she said, and folded her menu. “But I’m not too hungry.”

  “It’s Japanese food,” I said. “It’s little.”

  She was wearing pale frosted lipstick; it looked as if she had kissed a mirror and the reflection had peeled away onto her lips. Her legs were short, and her bare feet pedaled in the dark hollow beneath the table.

  “So how was your friend?” I asked.

  “I should have gone with you,” she said. “He left on Saturday. Do you drink?” she asked and split her chopsticks unevenly.

  “Sure,” I said. “Should we order sake?”

  She shook her head. “I’m on antidepressants. You’re the healthy one.”

  And she did look a little unhealthy, I noticed later, as she ignored the broiled eel and yellowfin tuna to squeeze the plump green heart of an edamame into her mouth. Her bare arms had the muscle tone of a marathon runner, that cruel survivalist decay, and her neck had toppled from elegance into precarious skinniness. The natural slimness of her girlish body had been exaggerated, her eyes looked larger, the sockets almost aggravated by hunger. She was tiny, spare, so fine and slight it seemed that I could have folded her up and slipped her between the pages of a book. There was obvious beauty there, in the prominence of her cheekbones, the softness of her eyes, the dizzying click of her clavicle, but it was shadowed by a furious self-cannibalism.

  After dinner we walked along upper Fifth Avenue. I had only fallen out of love recently, and for the first time, and was still suffering from the punishing conscience of youth that believes, exclusively, in the phenomenon of everlasting love. Because of this it felt like a kind of betrayal when Maryanne wound her fingers through mine and I experienced, rather than a simple and permissible erotic charge, tenderness. We sat on the steps of the Met while the rain went misting past the streetlights. It was sometime after midnight and Fifth Avenue had emptied. I kissed her earlobes. The mist set
tled onto our skin.

  “I was raped,” she said into my neck. “Last year. You ought to know.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “It’s a bad story,” she said, and told me.

  I rubbed my fingers along her neck. I could feel the shiver of her shoulders against my fingertips. The rain had almost stopped now, and the glitter of the streetlights made the puddles look like powdered glass.

  We walked to my apartment in silence. She came inside without asking. I wandered around the living room lighting candles with wicks that were too long, so that the flames trembled and sent hasty shadows onto the bookshelves. When I kissed her neck, I located that tiny vein flickering beneath the skin, hurrying life, and I pressed my mouth to it.

  We pulled our soaked shirts over our heads. There were bruises on her ribs. I stuck a finger through the belt loop of her jeans and pulled her to me. She was braless, small-breasted, but she didn’t cross her arms. I carried her into the bedroom, enjoying the lightness of her. I threw her on the bed and she bounced once, laughing. Then she screamed.

  “What is it?” I said. “What happened?”

  She pointed at the window where a knife lay beneath the curtains.

  “It gets stuck,” I said. “The window gets stuck.”

  She whispered something I couldn’t hear.

  I picked up the knife and she scurried to the end of the bed. She watched me with the sheets wrapped around her body and across the white shadow of her mouth. I wrenched open the window and flung the knife onto the rooftop of the movie theater next door.

  I lay down beside her and she wriggled into my arms. Her thin hair tickled my shoulders as she tucked her head into my neck. I could feel the warmth of her cheek against my bare chest, and her breath moving across my ribs. We slept for a while.

  “You have an arrhythmic heartbeat,” she mumbled when we rolled onto our sides.

  I raised my head off of the pillow. “Is it serious?”

  “It’s probably nothing,” she said, closing her eyes again. “But you should have it checked out.”

  After that night we always met in her apartment, not mine.

  Maryanne lived in an elegant high-rise tucked along the East River where the doormen all knew her and treated her like a child even when she came home dressed in blue surgical scrubs. They soon recognized me. I typically visited after her midnight shift had ended, and the late-night doorman would shake my hand with an affection that I found disconcerting to encounter in the city, which seemed an escape from the considerations of geniality.

  She didn’t cook, and her freezer was filled with unpleasant soups her grandmother had made, so I would bring dinner; failing that, we would sit on the couch and eat cheese and pretzels while she flicked through the channels without noticing, or skimmed magazines, her foot rocking tirelessly on the table. Nothing seemed to hold her attention, and while there were always new books appearing on the shelves, I don’t remember her ever finishing one. Her single consistent distraction was a crippled kitten she had adopted; its spinal injury left it with a hopeless nervous system. It moved like a rabbit crossed with a sidewinder snake. Whenever it tried to pounce on my bare foot it jumped the wrong way, or collapsed onto its back, before hissing and hurling itself into a wall.

  So she cradled weakness, that was obvious to both of us, and in whatever manifestation it arrived, including me: young and bruised, quietly hiding, fit only to remove her from the outrageous loneliness of the city. There was, beyond the shared reluctance to pry, or the survivor’s appreciation for the barest kindness, a mutual attraction that bordered upon absorption. I spent almost every night in her four-poster bed, wandering along the narrow bones of her body, the adolescent chest, the wiry legs, the unsoftened hips; we fondled and caressed each other restlessly. Yet when it came to penetration itself—impossible. Though Maryanne insisted she wanted to, no matter how hard I tried there was simply no entering her.

  “You’re sure you want to do this,” I said, during another unsuccessful attempt.

  “Yes.”

  “Because I’m trying and it doesn’t—”

  “I’m sure.”

  After a discouraging few minutes, she shrugged and rolled me off of her, then climbed on top. I could feel the slight weight of her pressed against my stomach, like a bag that’s been leaking from a tiny hole for days until it’s almost empty. Some awkward moments passed as she positioned and readjusted her bony knees on the bed. I reached up for her and there was sweat on the inside of her elbows, though they were cold. She sighed and sat back on my thighs. “It . . . I don’t know why it isn’t working,” she said. “I want to.”

  “You do?” I said.

  “Maybe we just have incompatible genitalia,” she said, and playfully swatted my hip, to distract me from a widening uneasiness.

  For a while the nights continued with their domestic comforts, the midnight cereal and careless television, and I quit my attempts. Instead I enjoyed the ardor of her guilty attention, the earnest, apologetic affection. I vaguely suspected—with the vagueness that overwhelmed me that first city winter—that her physical refusal mirrored an emotional reluctance, but her initial candor made this seem a little unbelievable. The ordinary contradictions of a personality somehow seemed unlike Maryanne. She was too extreme, I thought, too strident—as she accompanied her senile neighbor to the movie theater bathroom, or cried when passing a gibbering homeless man—too obviously disturbed to bother misunderstanding herself.

  I was the one who worried about the issues, about sexual satisfaction and occupation. The desire for possession surged with the arrival of spring; after a heartbroken fall and a catatonic winter, I was hungry for renewal. Renewal requires a sacrifice.

  “Have you even looked into why you can’t?” I asked Maryanne one night.

  It was April and warm, and coming through the screen windows was the wet, sooty smell of the city returning to us. She was playing with the cat; even with its funny spine it had grown long and skinny.

  “Have you discussed it with anyone at the hospital?” I asked.

  “It’s not something I’d feel comfortable bringing up.”

  “If you’re worried about anonymity, invent a friend with the disorder.”

  “It isn’t a disorder,” she said and righted the cat who then, ungratefully, clawed her.

  “We don’t know that,” I said. “How do we not know that? Trial and error?”

  She put the cat down. We’d been together long enough so we didn’t have to be nice to each other anymore and could opt for honesty instead. This was what I told myself to justify cruelty.

  “If you were your patient, what would you recommend?” I said.

  “You want to try again?” she said, sucking on the skin between her thumb and forefinger where the cat had sunk its claws. “You’re annoyed.”

  “We’re talking about you,” I said.

  She sat down beside me on the couch, the confused animal rolling on its back and clawing the air, its mouth open.

  “No, we’re not,” she said.

  There was a brief sensation of enormity as I slid my arm around Maryanne’s tiny shoulders and pulled her close to me, the hard knot of her runner’s knee pressing against my thigh. Then the telephone rang. Maryanne glanced at it.

  I stood up quickly, irritated by her skittishness—her rocking foot was unsteadying the coffee table, and she was whispering to herself again—and found my clothes. While I was dressing I could hear her on the telephone with her grandmother, who was shouting because someone had broken into her house and stolen sixty pounds of sirloin she kept in a basement freezer.

  “They came in,” I heard her grandmother say. “I was asleep.”

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” Maryanne cooed, while with her free hand she calmly pulled the cat’s claw out of her foot. “We’ll call the police. It’s okay.”

  “Somebody took my meat!” her grandmother moaned.

  I laughed, and Maryanne glared up at me. She was crying
, I saw, two wet little jewel streaks across her cheeks. I blinked furiously and walked over to the stereo. The record player did have a needle and one night after I had hooked it up we had listened to The Terrifics, though halfway through the first song Maryanne had wandered off to the bedroom to rearrange her sundresses, and I’d soon turned the player off. I tucked the album under my arm and stood by the front door. I was dressed in a tie that night, my posture was stiff, and the formality wasn’t—as I’d thought at the time—so much a seriousness of intent as a complicated and anxious relationship to cowardice.

  Her grandmother was loud and inconsolable, and Maryanne shot me apologetic looks. As I waited, the cat stalked me, weaving clumsily across the floor. It leapt for my toe and I snatched it off the ground. I held it in the air with one hand. Its head rolled back and from side to side, the sharp white teeth exposed, and with my thumb I stroked the soft fur of its belly. The cat’s head continued to thrash as if it was in agony, while it made a low, purring sound.

  I left without saying good-bye.

  She called me from the hospital, between shifts. I didn’t return her calls. What had begun as momentary sullenness soon transformed, with little effort, into a parting. We had always been imprecise about our relationship, and I relied on this indistinctness to protect me from any accusations of unkindness. But there were none; after two weeks of silence had passed she left a final message: she was sorry I was gone, she was lonely again, and I should remember to have my heart checked out. She suspected it was nothing, but it was best to get a second opinion, and be certain.

  I spent my weekend nights in bars, catching up on my drinking. I was startled by how big other women were. Their skin seemed thicker, their fingers as large as Maryanne’s wrist. They didn’t stand on their toes to talk to me. A woman took me home on her birthday and we had sex in the living room while her roommate pretended to be asleep. I woke up before dawn with the blanket across my neck. The room smelled of oranges. Her curly hair, longer and darker than Maryanne’s, had fanned out across my chest and there was a shadow of paleness behind it. I missed the shape of Maryanne’s nervous mouth and the lock of her fingers. I dressed silently and kissed the birthday girl’s forehead and within an hour was standing outside of Maryanne’s apartment.