‘Morality Tale’ (Published 2008) (2024)

Foot Bridge

He told me to stop thinking about him, so I tried. Tried to clear all the thoughts of him out of my head, like clearing away the ornaments after Christmas is over, taking them down from the tree and collecting them off the ground where they've squatted in dusty nests with the pine needles and ribbon bits and unseen shavings of wrapping paper. You box them all up and put them in the basem*nt once the festivities are over, then forget about them till next year.

That's what I tried to do with my thoughts about him.

The he in the first sentence is my husband. The him is the other guy. I had better not name him; it might get the man into trouble, and besides, people are more powerful if you give them names and they vanish when you don't.

He was called Richard.

There were so many things I didn't know about him-about Richard. I didn't know what he liked to cook, I didn't know what books he had on his bookshelf, I didn't know how he voted. I knew he had a mom in Chicago and a dad who was dead, and a sister he liked a lot and a brother he didn't. I knew he thought the universe didn't make mistakes, which was a faith I found strange but intriguing, and I knew he believed in accepting what was and wasn't given to you, which was noble and right but at times beyond my spiritual reach. I didn't know what his mouth would feel like kissing mine, though Lord knows I imagined it. I once held his hand, that time on the park bench, and I thought of that old song about the guy with the whole world in his hands, because that's how it felt.

I guess that song is about God, though, isn't it?

I should certainly mention my husband in all of this. That was always the problem. I tried to box up my thoughts about Richard and they just wouldn't stay boxed, and I tried to get them to settle on to my husband instead and my mind, like a bird, would flutter off to a different branch altogether. It took a certain discipline, takes it still, to keep my mind focused.

He was in business. My husband. Of the two of us, he was the one with the job that tended to get referred to as "real"-as if mine were a chimera. He had a profession, though I remained womanishly vague on what it was precisely that he professed to do. He crunched numbers (like a trash compactor); he balanced books (like an acrobat). It was a position to do with finances and consulting, two words that made my mind dip into helpless narcolepsy. I could tell you that the work he did required the wearing of a suit, and that he went to an office five days out of seven, where he had a keyboard and a key card, an extension and an inbox, along with a gnawing job insecurity brought on by sinister managerial throat-clearings and co-workers he never went so far as to trust. Still, it was a job that gave him a place in the world, as jobs are meant to do, though mostly what mine gave me was standing-room only, behind the counter, next to the cash register and a handy panel of pens.

Stationery. That's where I was. It was funny, I always felt, to work in a business that was one of the nation's more common misspellings, and don't think I didn't occasionally get notes from friends or relatives asking how went life at the stationary store, like all the other stores were on the move and it was just mine that stayed still. (Cemetery is another one, I could have worked at a graveyard and been in a similar situation.) That was my station in life, my husband liked to josh with his two boys. Pan, as Alan and Ryan had nicknamed me long since, after some joke involving pandemonium, and her station at the stationery store. Strictly speaking I had come up with the pun first-I have always enjoyed words, they are like candy or toys to me-but my husband may have forgotten that, and with everything else going on in our household it wasn't worth spending extra bitterness on questions of attribution. As Richard would have said, we have to accept what the universe has given to us, by which I supposed he meant: When your husband irritates you, you have to learn to let it rest. It was a lesson I struggled with.

Even now I find it difficult to go into how I met Richard, because when I think of that late-summer, near-back-to-school day it makes me happy, and I was never encouraged to be happy. About Richard, that is. (My husband tried to press on me the importance of the distinction: he did sincerely want me to be happy, just about anything other than Richard.) After the park-bench incident with Richard and the state of emergency that followed it-our family's thankless Thanksgiving, soon succeeded by the annual joyless schedule-battles over the boys' Christmas-I did my best, as per my husband's pleading demand, to find alternative sources of contentment. It wasn't easy. My sapped spirit had become so accustomed to seeking solace in that special, Richard- reserved place. It had become a Zen room in my head, a meditation chamber, a soft spot. Stepsons bratty and unmanageable? Never mind: just think about Richard. Husband recalcitrant, barking orders and complaints? That's all right, there's always Richard to think about. Worried over the mistakenness of your own paths, wrong turns taken that have made you crave distraction? One day, certainly, you ought to come to terms with all that; but for now it is easier and more enjoyable to think about Richard.

That December I worked on the problem of redirecting my thoughts. I felt like a road worker setting up one of those discouraging orange detour signs right at the route you were hoping to take. It was the packed run-up to the holiday of Saint Nick, that stretch when every kind of paper product was in high demand, and at the store I waited busily on the hordes of harassed gift-givers while trying, surreptitiously, to be happy about something excluding Richard. On a rainy day, I tried to be happy that the yuletide skies gave us that calm, cleansing baptism, though as a matter of practicality it meant people were bringing in wet umbrellas all day and leaning them against the gift-wrap table where they dripped onto the rolls of printed reindeer and candy canes. I tried to be happy that the clothing-and-trinkets shop next door was playing its Christmas music so loud that every time our door opened in blew a Winter Wonderland or jaunty, red-nosed Rudolph. My boss, Mr. Finkelstein, was a Hanukkah man himself, and drew the line at piped-in jingling and Fa-La-La-La-Las. He stuck to Vivaldi to encourage the shoppers.

I tried especially hard to be happy, as my husband urged me to be, that he and I were going to the fancy Christmas dinner at the hotel up the hill, as we did every other year when the boys were not with us. (Our holidays had a binary, on/off quality in those years, with then without, with then without.) The hotel would serve crab cakes and lamb roast and some ice-cream confection for dessert, and we would save the co*cktail stirrers for Alan and Ryan who could stab each other with them later. My husband and I would both eat and drink more than we usually did, then wonder why we came home feeling bleary and bloated. Merry Christmas, he would say with brandy on his breath, before falling into a heavy, early sleep, from which he would wake uncomfortably, around midnight, looking for Tums.

I tried these mental diversions all through that dim December, with mixed success. My thoughts seemed, devilishly, to have a mind of their own. And my husband instinctively knew it. Spouses may not yet be able to monitor all the other person's thoughtwaves, but my husband did the job as well as he could within the limits of what was technologically possible. If I didn't laugh promptly enough at his jokes, he guessed (often correctly) that I had been listening to some inner monologue of Richard's instead. If he caught me looking distractedly into what is literarily termed the middle distance, he assumed (mostly correctly) that my eyes were picturing Richard. If he caught me doodling on a sheet of paper, he might read the meaningless words there-FALAFEL; UNIVERSE; CHICAGO-and deduce (not incorrectly) they had something to do with that wretch of a Richard. In any of these instances, my husband would stamp or shout or hurl things around; or, worse, go very quietly gloomy, so that my heart sponged up guilt and became heavy and sodden. There was a point when it got so bad, my husband could practically read the ticker tape in my head that ran Richard Richard Richard, which meant I had to be careful when it came to eye contact when I was with him at home. That's one of the problems with marriage: people learn to see through you. My husband stopped being fooled by my bright, perky deflections. His gaze bored straight through all of that, searching for Richard, and more often than not finding him, to his-my husband's-despair.

I met him at the store. That was another part of the problem: we had a work connection, so my husband couldn't make stationery jokes any more without his teeth clenching and a sound like a choked bark in the back of his throat. It was the middle of August, just after that dull, desert stretch in the midsummer calendar when there are no significant holidays. (Who sends cards for the fourth of July? After the golf clubs and napping jokes of Father's Day there's nothing going on, date-wise, for months; the sensible people have fled town and are reading their once-a-year novels by the beach.) When mid-August rolls around we stationery employees perk up, as parents and children begin to contemplate the end of the summer and the dawning need for supplies for the new school year. Richard was the envelope guy. The new envelope guy, I should say, replacing hundred-year-old Milton, a specimen whose face had been lined by his long, dedicated years of correspondence-enhancing salesmanship. There was nothing you could tell Milton about envelopes that he didn't already know. The man breathed envelopes. For all I knew, he ate them.

Richard was not like that. He knew envelopes, yes, dimensions, colors and weights, and he could talk for a surprising number of minutes on the padded-versus- not padded question. If you showed him a piece of paper of any irregular size, he would find you an envelope that neatly contained it, and he went to some lengths to prove the superiority of envelopes over boxes for most mailings. He could, if you asked, give you the derivation of the name "Manila".

But none of that really interested him. I understood that immediately, that there was more to Richard than mere envelopes. Richard was a man who loved people and who loved stories, he was at heart a philosopher, in the narrative school. His real passion was for the cosmos and its workings: the stars and the planets, and why we are here. He was the kind of guy who read plenty of science fiction, which put him in touch with a great number of other universes, the parallel and the not-so-parallel both.

"So you're the new envelope guy," I said when I met him on a Monday morning that fateful, fitful August. The skies were unpredictable, you could not know when or whether the cold morning fog would lift, and my moods, I'll admit, had become similar: there were days when I kept waiting for the sun and good humor to break through but they just never did. My remark to the new man was something of a redundancy-Richard had appeared alongside of our most recent shipment of envelopes, to make my and Mr. Finkelstein's acquaintance-but I was trying to be friendly.

"That's right," Richard said, and there was elastic in his voice. Springiness. Life. "Richard Applebee. Pleased to meet you. You may think of me as an envelope-pusher; but I like to think of myself as someone who pushes the envelope." He chuckled like a hen.

The line did not have the fresh flavor of something the man had just thought up on the spot; it had more of the zip-locked staleness of something he had put together earlier and was now carrying around for new clients or friends. That was all right with me, though. We can't always be original, every time. It would be far too tiring.

"Which envelope do you push?" I asked Richard. I liked him right away. His voice was warm and his eyes were alight. He gave the impression of fullness: he was quietly hefty, with a rounded rusty beard and pink-leaning skin. An Irish Santa Claus, maybe. Somebody whose suit buttons didn't really want to stay closed. Isn't attraction mysterious? My husband was on the slim side, something I had considered a virtue, proof that he didn't get carried away with his appetites-though the earlier part of our history might have suggested otherwise. And facial hair! I had never in my life thought the stuff was appealing, the way it made men's skin so furry and primitive. Nuzzling against the undergrowth: wouldn't it be like kissing a marmoset? Yet here I was, watching the orange steel wool scrubbing this man's clean, shiny face, and thinking it might be nice to put my cheek against that texture. And all this before I knew the first thing about him.

"Well," Richard answered me, glancing at his notes, "I see you have a standing order for the McKinleys' in nine by twelve and ten by thirteen, and I don't see any reason to suggest-"

"No, no." I think it was then that I touched a couple of fingers to his sweatered arm. This boldness was unusual for me. Maybe I was testing, instinctively, to see whether he was real, or a mirage. Maybe I was wondering if I had somehow dreamt him. "I meant-which envelope do you push, generally?" And I gestured, with a flourish, at the wider world, a world beyond stationery.

"Oh!" The carrot-headed man put his notes down on the counter between us, and I could see from his face he liked the question. I was taking his joke seriously. I was trying to open him up. "I mean, I enjoy looking at things from an angle. Thinking outside the box. I consider myself a person who marches"-now his voice sounded shy, endearingly so, in spite of his size and his beard-"to the beat of a different drummer." That was his small speech. He put his hands together and rested them on the counter. The melamine might as well have been an altar, the way I felt at that moment, and the receipt for the envelopes, a ring. I was ready to follow this man, this big man, to someplace else. Someplace far away, someplace different. I, too, was eager to get out of the damned box; my own had become so airless and miserable lately.

That was the size and shape of our first encounter. We talked a little more that day, but honestly, not much. He was conscious of keeping to his schedule, meeting all the people who for years would only have known Milton, and I, meanwhile, had the typical stream of humanity coming in needing its staple guns and tape dispensers, its Post-Its and paperclips. While Richard was still in the store, for instance, a troubled man came in searching for an envelope to fit his child's passport. The passport had to be sent upstate to the child's mother so that mother and child could go on a trip to Mexico, which the father didn't approve of. (Divorce and its dramas: they're everywhere you look. Is there anyone untouched?) People used to offer these stories about themselves even when you didn't much want to hear them, and I was good enough at my job that I listened while customers gave the back story of their particular requests. I was frustrated that it cut off the conversation with my new friend, the plain-suited St. Nick, but on the other hand it meant he got to see me in action. Perhaps I was showing off for Richard as I helped find a container for the customer's travel anxiety; it was an envelope question, after all. We settled on a number four, padded, and I sensed Richard's approval. (My husband, on the other hand, had not seen me perform in this way in a long while. He had not taken in that there were items at the stationery store I was quite skilled at selling.) By the time the guy, now calmer, was gone, I could see in Richard's four-leaf-clovered eyes a glitter of respect and curiosity. "I hope we have chances to talk further," he said rather formally, before he left too, but I was fairly sure the formality was a thin cover for shyness.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Morality Tale by Sylvia Brownrigg Copyright 2008 by Sylvia Brownrigg. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.