I

I'd not looked directly at her eyes, noticed her eyes, in a long time. They were a dark brown, and I hadn't remembered that they could look cold, that eyes could transmit so much of a person's feelings. Brown eyes are supposed to be warm.
Then she slapped me, and said something softly, that I didn't catch.
Then she turned and walked away from me, her ten-hole black boots marking time on the hardwood floor, and then she slammed the door.
Wham.
This is the way a friendship ends -- with a whimper and a bang.
I sat there for a long time, subjectively speaking, and I'm sure I had that stunned, vacant look that I'm supposed to have, but it actually reflected my stunned, vacant attempts at thought.
I walked into my room. The floor was covered with books, "AGARD High-lift system aerodynamics", "Prescription for Nutritional Healing", "Microsoft Excel 5.0 for Windows." There was a picture of Kary on the wall, from when we went to California, and I realized I hadn't really looked at that either, or at least not lately -- her light brown hair all roiled like a mop, like it was when I first met her, her long nose and predatory grin, all teeth and eyes.
I walked back out, pretty quickly, and wandered down past the bathroom to the door of her room. A fiction; her room was where the computer and the bicycles lived. But I didn't go in.
Back down the hallway, opened the drawers and looked at the pillowcases, refolded one so that the angles were all even, and back to the kitchen. I washed the glasses first, all hers unmatched and mine all identical, then the silverware, using the vegetable brush between the tines of the forks, and then the plates all flowery patterns and cold grease, ending with the heavy, detritus-encrusted pots. I didn't feel like washing dishes right then, but they needed to be cleaned up. They needed to be spotless.
Maybe she was out there, looking at the house, and she could see me through the little window, washing dishes. Maybe she's watching me and wondering why I'm doing it, wondering what I'm thinking. Maybe she'll...
Maybe this is pathetic.
Her Saab was still in the driveway. I went outside, through the living room, tracing her steps, and locked the door behind me. She had her door key. When she's pissed, she goes and walks, but when she's furious. When she's furious.
I drove the three-minute drive to the Nampa airport, and walked into the tired little grey building. Chet was lying on one of the sofas, looking his bright-eyed, bushy-tailed self even when supine, micro-length brown hair crisp like a Marine, his narrow blue tie sharp and the crease lines of his beige pants as professional as they could be. He was reading some rag, but dropped it and sat up as I walked in.
"So. Kary. What's up with that, man?" He pointed at the door. "She came in looking like she was off to shoot a man in Abilene."
"We, uh, had an argument."
"Oh really?" Immediate calculating looks from Chet, the Walking Slime Ball. Of course, I guess I'm in the running for that office. "What happened? Tell all."
"She file a flight plan?"
"Buddy, there aren't too many things that scare Chet Jackson, but when she walked in here and said, "What's free?" I threw her the keys to the Sierra and said I had to go to the bathroom. When I came back, she was off and gone." He paused. "So really, Mark, what's up?" He looked right at me, eye to eye. A parody of caring, and it worked, I guess.
"Oh, I don't know -- I said I'd, um, like to start seeing other people. She, um, got mad and left."
"Mark... why?" He was still looking straight at me. Maybe he had the evil eye.
"I don't know. Because she's... she drives me crazy. She's sloppy, she messes up my books, she leaves her shoes on the floor."
"Mark, nothing personal, but you alphebetize your cereal boxes. Where the hell do YOU leave shoes?"
"Look, Chet, will you call me when she comes back?" When, not if, I told myself.
"Mark, listen to yourself. Her shoes?"
I turned and walked out, listening to the growl of Lycomings, awash in the acrid delicacy of burned kerosine. Somewhere behind one of the T-hangars, a turbine fired up, creeping its eerie way through the scale to near-inaudibility.
I kicked my Acura. Just the tire. I drove home. Sometimes, you can get what you ask for and still not be happy.
"Alicia. It's Mark."
"Hey. How'd it go?"
"Not too well. She slapped me and walked out. I haven't seen her since."
"Oh. I'm sorry. You want to come over and," pause "talk about it?"
"No."
"Mark, you had to tell her. You can't keep on living a lie. You're only hurting yourself."
"Well, no, actually I'm hurting her, too. Rather a lot."
"But she's got to realize that..."
I cut her off. "Look, I, um, need to go on a walk or something. I've got to go."
"You're free to come over, you know."
"Yeah, I know. I'll call you soon."
"Yeah," she said. "Yeah. Soon."
Click.

I sat there and looked at the table. Kary always saves Publisher's Clearinghouse envelopes and pins them up all over the place. She says that even if it's just a computer printout, it's still a thrill to see that some stranger prints her name, her full name, on pieces of paper, immediately adjacent to the words, "One Million Dollars!!!!!!!!!!!!" I usually throw them away because they make me crazy. I hate seeing that little nasty grainy rotogravure-like picture of Ed McMahon on the envelope and my idea of hell would be to wake up and find him on my front porch, with TV cameras.
I got a piece of lined paper from my paper drawer and started writing in longhand. I wrote a long letter to her, trying to say what I'd wanted to say, what I'd meant. It was one of those letters. Then, I realized exactly how bad it was, how badness oozed from its every bad pore, and I crossed it out and crumpled it up and dropped it on the wood floor. I wrote a second one, telling her all the things I should have, and some I probably wouldn't have, and it sucked, too, so I crumpled it up, three pages worth, and I wrote a third letter to Kary. I wrote it about her eyes, and I wrote it about how I hadn't actually looked at them for almost a year, until today, and I lifted a line from a Nine Inch Nails song, "I still recall the taste of your tears," and about halfway down the page, I stopped. I couldn't go on because I didn't want to write what I thought I would write. So I stopped, in the middle of writing the word, "brilliant." It came out "bril" which sounded very Australian.
I walked out the front door, tripped on the walk, where the cement shifted last winter, and I walked three blocks to the park. The grass was browning, with the fall, and the water rippled. I threw the biggest stones I could find into the pond, over and over, watching the rings float out from the impact, and drown in tiny wind-blown wavelets, which overwhelmed my larger waves by persistence and quantity. I threw rocks until I was down to scrabbling for pebbles, and my arm ached all the way up to my shoulder, and I walked back home.
Kary was sitting on the floor, and my first letter was by her right knee, and my second letter was by her left knee, in three pages, carefully smoothed out, and my third letter was in her hands, and she didn't say a thing, she just looked straight at me.