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Reaching Through Glass Mason was the kind of man who brought extra suitcases on airplanes, hoping they’d be lost. He filled them with newspapers and dried leaves and paper bags damp with hamburger grease. “Airlines pay four hundred dollars for lost luggage,” he told me. We only traveled together once. We flew eight hundred miles to see a photograph of a lake in a Chicago museum. Mason had seen it in a book three years before. He said it had made him want to start taking pictures, the way the image of the trees was inverted in the water. “Things are made so much more beautiful that way,” he’d told me, when he’d asked me to go. “Seen as a reflection, through something else.” At the airport, standing in the security line with our arms around each other’s waists, I asked him, “Do you always do this, bring these suitcases?” He looked embarrassed and said, “Well I don’t travel much…” I don’t think it was for the money, though. He didn’t make much, but he had a lot saved away. I think he did it because he craved those little tremors of hope, that feeling people get in their stomachs when they wait for something they want. He’d chosen the plainest, blackest suitcases he could find—an expandable duffel, and one of those small Samsonites with the pull-out handle and the wide front pocket. But at the baggage claim they both came back, falling into clumsy poses on the conveyor belt. While they made their tedious loops Mason pleaded, “Wait, Dette. Someone might pick one up by mistake. We postured by empty luggage carts, read maps and pretended to make phone calls. Mason looked at me with a shy smile and scratched his knuckles and said, “You never know, Dette, you just never know.” He had a lot of those smiles. He only used them with me. I could have made him leave, I could have taken his hand and said, “Come on Mason, it’s time to go.” But instead I kissed him on the mouth, and wove my hand into his, and I waited with him. I waited for those smiles. Still, though, he was not the kind of man to raise a child. I’d come to Mason looking for a job. I was at Rutgers studying Ethics and Graphic Arts, and his photographs had been published in The Rutger’s Anthologist. It was the week before graduation when I saw them, the time of night when the sky is a taut black, stretched as far as it can go. I used to read a lot during this time, when I couldn’t sleep. Artbooks and textbooks, science magazines with facts about useless things. But then I saw his photographs. They were all mirrors and colored light and images suspended in air. They were lined up in a series in tiny square-shaped frames, each one the size of an eighty-cent stamp. But in the last picture, when I squinted, I could see the reflection of the photographer’s hand at the bottom edge, sunken in at the knuckles. There was something arresting about it. Something fargone. In an art class you could spend an entire semester on hands alone. We were told, hands say more than voices, more than eyes. It was those sunken knuckles. As a child, my hands had looked that way. Passed from person to person, always reaching out. I wanted to hold that hand from the photo, press it tightly into mine. I wanted it to hold back. I woke up my roommate, who’d fallen asleep in a shivering cloud of marihuana smoke. I said, “Trudi, I'm going to find this man.” Trudi rolled over. “You’re crazy Bernadette. Go to sleep.” I said, “Maybe—but what else have I got?” She said, “Well where am I going? You’ve got me.” “You’ve got Mel.” She buried her face in her pillow. Her words surfaced in slurs, muted. “You’re just worried because you’ve got no plan. Neither do I. Go back to sleep.” In four years, Trudi had never felt sorry for me. I always liked that about her. His name was Mason Frey. I looked up his address in the Yellow Pages. It was printed in a thin font, half-hidden between Frey, L. and Frey, Richard. But, it was there. I thought, this is the sign of someone who knows he’ll never really be famous. But still, there was something about that photo. I’d read, When swans mate, they mate for life. A widowed swan will pine away for a lost partner. It will sit on the empty nest, stare into nothing. Ancient Britons believed a swan’s wings sang with a human voice when it flew. To this day, all swans in England are the property of the Crown. It is a punishable offense to harm a swan. I left right after the ceremony, although Trudi had said, “Stay for the party, Bernadette.” I drove to Queens with the windows halfway down, the wind pressing my white gown against my thighs. It was storming. The sky was waterlogged, and it was a purple dusking color. Mason lived above an Indian deli that served flour puffs and smelled like Masala tea. It was lunchtime, and the restaurant was crowded. I parked in a metered spot three blocks away. For forty-five cents, I had twenty minutes. After that, I would have to put more money in the slot or drive away. Mason lived on the sixth floor. The apartment building had no elevator. When he opened the door I was breathless, and my shoes pinched against my heel. I said, “Mr. Frey I’ve seen your photographs in The Anthologist.” He didn’t say anything. I asked him, would he give me a job? I said, “Please. I’ve got nowhere else to go.” He leaned against the doorframe. He scratched the nape of his neck and looked past me, although there was nothing there but a water stain on the hallway wall. Until then, I had never seen more than his hand. Now I saw he had a rounded, monkish face. Pale mouth, wide shoulders. Early forties, blonde hair grayed in strands. He had enormous eyes. I told him I'd run errands and arrange furniture and pose in forty-watt light. I stood there with my hair dripping and my feet cramping up, my duffel bag clung to my shoulder. It made me stoop to one side. He stroked his chin. Nodded. He said, “Yes, I think that’ll work out all right.” I was surprised, when I turned to leave, to see panic course into his eyes. “Where are you going?” I said, “I’ve got to put more money into the meter.” That afternoon I moved into the extra room in his apartment. At first there were the awkward pauses, the shifting from foot to foot. I said, “Can I call you Mason?” He said yes, I could, and I said, “Mason, do you dance?” We listened to “It Happened in Monterey.” We drifted in spirals over the living room floor. He was a very good dancer. I thought, he must have done this before. He had an amaryllis plant and its leaves flickered when we passed, showing paler colors underneath. It reminded me of the way trees move before the storm, when the sky is all gray plumes and tumbles of light. Trudi called and said, “Are you sure you know what you’re doing, Bernadette?” Love is a neuronal process stimulated by chemicals. Strong feelings of love initiated by this process can supersede other drives, such as hunger or thirst. There are pronounced similarities between the feelings and behaviors romantic love produces and those associated with substance abuse. Norepinephrine can cause loss of appetite and insomnia. Serotonin, which is used to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder, can result in neurosis, an urgent need for affection. Mason said he always took his photographs through mirrors. He told me, “The image is flipped three times, see—twice through the lens and once through the mirror.” An experiment in what’s real. “So what is real?” I asked. He didn’t answer. I said to him, “Mason, you’ve been taking pictures all this time and you still don’t know what it means to be real?” I thought, had I gone too far? I kept on capping film canisters, but my heart was pumping gallons. Mason was squatting on the living room rug. Camera parts made a jagged circle around him. “Theories,” he said twirling a lens between his fingers. “The truth starts with theories.” I went over then, and knelt down next to him, and watched a pale image of myself contract into his pupil. I sipped his breath. It tasted like white smoke and tangerines. The moment felt urgent. “What if there is no real? What then?” I whispered it, like a child admitting a sin. He stroked his chin. He didn’t have a beard, but he liked to stroke his chin, I’d noticed. “Now that’s a thought.” He said it in an offhand way. But I could see that prisms, numerals, were shifting in his head. Later, I was in the workshop painting mirror frames. I heard the corduroy rustle of him behind me. I wiped my fingers with a wet cloth. He put his hand on my hand. “I smell like dishwater,” I said. My stomach was moving in shimmers. He was still for a long time. “It’s like a kaleidoscope, Dette.” He took his hand off mine. He picked up his own and traced the lines of his palm. As if the moment had come, briefly, for us to leave off regarding each other and examine ourselves. “From one side of a kaleidoscope, you see tumbling images—the interplay of light, reflection and color. But if you look through the bottom, you see what’s making all those shapes move, what they started from—all those beads and foil stars. What’s real is that stuff, the stuff at the bottom.” Mason knew things. He knew how to fix bicycles. He knew what a hectometer was, and how to make his hands move in shadow-shapes. He knew things. I posed as a black silhouette, my head resting against the wall. Mason took my photograph through a mirror with an olive-wood frame. “In these pictures, you’ll see things you wouldn’t have otherwise. You’ll see the most sacred and darkest parts. They’ll change you.” He spent two days and two nights in the darkroom, a red-lit shape hunched over a table. I made him cinnamon toast and fettuccini and white cake. When he finally came out he looked at me for a long time and said, “God, you are beautiful, Bernadette.” We looked at the pictures standing side by side, our arms around each other. The photographs were black and white and poster-sized. Mason spoke in ribbons, the words tumbling out: “I made them larger, Bernadette, because you are important. I knew it right away. See? The pictures are almost life-sized. Pictures this size can’t go unnoticed. They can never be pushed into drawers, like trivial things.” “Why did you make them black and white?” I asked. “You can only see the real colors that way.” I left a message for Trudi on her cell phone. I lay on my bed and sighed like a teenage girl after a date. I said, “It was a wonderful kiss, Trudi, the kind that takes your breath away. And he’s a genius. Absolutely a genius.” Under his shirt he had burn scars stretched over his shoulders and the undersides of his arms. He huddled, folded the shirt and stood up. He came over to me, watching his feet make their small, precious steps forward. I didn’t ask questions. From the beginning, I’d loved Mason in a questionless way. I think he was always grateful to me for that. Afterward we lay on our backs and stared at the ceiling, and his breath went in pulses. Our hands touched and he said, "Bernadette I can't do this again." I said, did his arms hurt, I had an aspirin in my purse, would an aspirin help, but he said, "No, Bernadette.” I thought, I’ve done something wrong. He said, “I’m sorry.” He touched my cheek with his hand. “It’s just that there’ve been so many people—gone away. You know? We’re a lot alike in that way, you and I.” I thought, he’s going to ask me to leave tomorrow. But then he looked at me. He had hologram eyes and he said, “Dette, thank God I have you.” After that he called me "Dette” all the time. I still slept in my own room adjoining his but lots of nights he would ask me to lie next to him until he fell asleep. When I did, he’d kiss my head and draw circles on the small of my back. He was the kind of man who drew circles with two fingers instead of one. Still, though, he was never the kind of man to raise a child. Mason had a gallery show coming up in December, a few weeks before my birthday. Finally, his photographs had been noticed. A small museum in Manhattan had called to invite him. It was going to be a big event, a masquerade gala. That was Mason’s idea. They loved it. “A costume party and an exhibit,” they said. “Marvelous, original. Art on the walls, art on people.” Mason was skittish. Nervous. He stayed in his workshop all the time. At dinner, he kicked at the table legs. In the middle of the night he’d wake me up, prodding my shoulder gently with his forefinger. “Talk to me, Dette. I can’t sleep.” On these nights we talked about everything we could think of, like we were afraid of what we’d see when we fell asleep again. We’d talk about movies, and mirrors, and how weather is made. We’d plan dinners, and make grocery lists. Sometimes Mason would ask me to tell him the story of how I fell in love with him. We’d tell each other our secrets. Sometimes his were worse than mine. When they were, I’d run my fingers along the insides of his elbows and he’d moan. “It doesn’t matter, Mason. We all have some kind of ancient fears. It doesn’t matter to me.” He’d look relieved. He said, “You’re better than me in a lot of ways, Dette.” Mason left the apartment once a week, on Tuesdays. That was when he taught photography classes at the state penitentiary. One Tuesday he came home later than usual. I sat by the window with the phone in my hand, deciding whether to call someone, wondering who to call. Then I saw his hunched-over shape outside, moving in small steps over the sidewalk. I ran downstairs to meet him, barefoot. I yelled out as I came through the lobby, “Where did you go, Mason? I was so worried. Why didn’t you call?” “I go to mass, sometimes,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “After the class. I’m sorry I made you wait.” He was not a bad man, Mason. Really he wasn’t. As an artist, he was fading out. In late November his exhibit was cancelled. They told him, “People have stopped being interested in mirrors. They are frightened by their reflections, by what is real but not real.” After that, he’d stand in the mirror room, staring at his own face for hours. Days would go by that he didn’t take a single picture. “I’m just uninspired, Dette.” He was stooped at the shoulders. We had late, wordless nights. We watched reruns and daytime soap operas we’d recorded. For weeks Mason ordered Indian food at every meal, sometimes five or six times a day. He ate dosas and tandoori chicken on tray tables, left greasy napkins on the couch. Then suddenly, for no reason at all, he stopped eating all together. I begged him, “Eat, please eat,” but he only got weaker and moved in leaden steps. On the fifth morning I made French toast on challah bread and waited at the table. The toast got cold. I found Mason in his bedroom, slumped against the headboard of his bed. Fingers wide and splayed, eyes limp, arctic-colored. I felt my tongue go dry and cracked, all my insides like a package of broken crackers. I called the paramedics with the jumbling, wild voice you hear on 911 playbacks, with the pitch soaring up and down. Mason woke up at the sirens crying out. His eyelids quivered and opened. He lifted his head and said “My God Dette, they’ve really come for me.” He had clammy hands. Little beads of sweat on his fingers, like tears almost. I said, “Mason I swear to God if you don’t eat I’ll leave you.” I took his face between my hands. My palms were against his cheeks. He closed his eyes and held the hem of my shirt. Mason refused to open mail that came in colored envelopes. He only set his alarm for odd-numbered hours. He kept white net curtains over his windows all the time and slept with a nightlight. He told me, “There are people out there who do crazy things.” He needed me there, to lay with him until he fell asleep. He was eating again, but there were always those sleepless nights. “Bernadette?” “Yes.” We lay on our backs. I heard the rustle of his head turning toward me. “I can’t sleep. I’ve been thinking.” “What about?” “They’re not bad people, you know.” “Who?” “The guys in the penitentiary. I’d be friends with them.” “Me too probably. If I knew them like you do.” “You know, there’s this program. The guys train puppies to become service dogs. There’s a waiting list to do it.” “That’s nice that they do that.” “But—there are other things too, about being there.” “What?” “They wear uniforms that snap down the front. Uniforms in blue, and mustard yellow.” “Blue’s not bad. “And the temperature’s kept low. It’s always cold. And there are sounds. Rolling doors. Metal sounds. The sounds of tiny spaces lined up in a series. Loud, and quiet. But always it’s either lots of one or lots of the other.” “I know, baby, you hate small spaces.” “There are some very old people. They don’t say a lot. They have watery eyes. But I’m afraid of them the most.” “Why?” “They don’t have much time left. Either way.” “That is sad.” “You know what’s sadder?” “What?” “Most people don’t make it that long. Santa Claus died last January. The man who’d played Santa Claus at the Christmas party. He always had this red patchy skin that looked like a sunburn, and I kept wondering how someone could get sunburnt in prison, you know? But they were rashes, from lupus.” I closed my eyes, and the man with the sunburned skin, he was on the backs of my eyelids. I opened them again. “Bernadette?” “Yes.” “I’m afraid to go to sleep.” “Me too.” “It’s weird, you know—sometimes, I feel safer there. Does that make me crazy?” “No, baby. Not crazy.” “But I hate it there too sometimes.” “So why do you go?” “I don’t know… it feels good, coming out, I guess. I feel better about myself.” He wore black with brown pants. He did crosswords in permanent pen. By the time he finished the hardest puzzles, the paper would be all scratched through. We’d laugh and I’d say, “It doesn’t matter, Mason. You’ll never be a bad man.” Three days before my birthday, Trudi called. I hadn’t seen her since graduation, although we’d written emails, sent photographs and magazine clippings and index cards with jokes we’d heard on the radio. She was teaching children’s ballet in Staten Island. She had broken up with Mel, she said, and moved in with Erik. A pastry chef from Dallas. He owned a townhouse and a bistro in Manhattan. She told me, “I got the photo of Mason.” “What did you think?” “It was you who took the photo, right?” I’d taken him by surprise, snapped it under white light with a disposable camera. During our tour of the gallery space, when he was flushed and proud. “How did you know?” She said, “There was something there, in the way he looked at you.” “You think so? Really?” “But I still don’t think it was good, your going there.” “He’s got his faults, Trudi. We all do. But he’s wonderful. I still get butterflies.” “But you’re different, Bernadette. You seem…trapped in there. You never go out. I’m worried about you.” I said, “No, no Trudi, I’m fine, really. It’s Mason you should be worried about. I’m afraid for him” “What happened?” I said, “Ever since his exhibit was cancelled…. Well, he stirs his soup slower now, you know? He eats in smaller and smaller bites. All the time he should be crying but he isn’t. He looks like he doesn’t know how.” She told me I should get him out of the house, take his mind off things. She said, “Erik won a dessert competition in Atlantic City last month. Bring him to the restaurant on Saturday, he’ll cook for your birthday.” I said, “I don’t know, Trudi. I’ll ask him.” I was afraid to tell her, we were not like other couples. “Please, Bernadette, come. I want to see you.” When I hung up Mason was against the doorframe, leaning the way he was when I first met him, his face a mosaic of unsaid things. “Do you know what you did, Bernadette?” He came up to me, clutched my shoulders. “All this time, I’ve been so careful.” I said, “Mason, what are you doing?” “My photo, why did you show it around like that? Things only worked, you know, because no one saw my face. Now you’ve put it out there.” “You were listening to my conversation.” I twisted my neck and winced. “You’re hurting me.” He let go of my shoulders. He sat down on the bed, his head in his hands. He pressed his thumbs and forefingers together in a diamond shape and leaned his forehead down against them. “It’s always been” he said, “that they see my pictures, and there are mirrors, sometimes other people. But I’m just out of view, don’t you see? They crane their necks to see me but they never can. But now I’ve got a face and I’m ruined, everything’s been lost. They’ll know it all, Dette. Now they’ll know who I am.” I said I was sorry, that I didn’t know and I was sorry. “That’s bullshit. You did know, you knew.” “You’re overreacting, it’s only Trudi.” I tried to touch him but he pulled away. “Before you came, I was faceless. I had this name, and that’s all, and I had no one and I was fine like that.” “You don’t mean that.” “I don’t know.” My voice rose. “Well what about the penitentiary? They see you. Why do you go there all the time then?” “They’re trapped there, Bernadette, come on!” He slammed his fist against the dresser. “It’s a world set aside. It’s a blinded place.” “So what?” “So what else have they got? What if I’m the only thing they can see that no one else can? What if it’s the only thing they’ve got?” Mason stood up and started pacing, rolling his hands around each other in circles. He was murmuring, “I was always just out of view. They craned their necks to see me but they never could.” I put my hand on the long part of his arm. He spun toward me, his back skewed sideways. He grabbed both my wrists. He coiled his fingers around them. I thought he was going to hit me. I winced and tried to shield my face with my shoulder. But he only held my wrists. Then he let go. He never squeezed. He just held. A vague grip. It could have been a threat, or a plea, or both. He held them. He let go. I started to cry, and he took my face gently between his hands and said “Oh God. I’m so sorry, Dette.” I sobbed, “You can’t be afraid all the time that they’ll see you. You can’t always be afraid.” Mason said, “Don’t leave me Dette. Please don’t leave.” He’d never said, “I love you.” But it was okay. This meant much more. He had his own way of saying things. This time we undressed each other, both our hands trembling. He put his palm against my back and lowered me against the pillows. It was different than the first time. Solemn, apologetic somehow. I was confused and said, “Why does it feel like this?” He said, “Like what?” and I said, “Like an ending to something.” He laughed and said “That’s crazy,” and he had on his shy smile, crooked on the left side. But I couldn’t shake the feeling. Afterward, we lay on our sides facing each other, the sheets in swimming colors. He said, “You know Dette, I think you’ve made me into myself.” The line of his mouth went straight, the left side came down a little. “Don’t disappear.” “I won’t.” Whooping cranes mate for life. In early spring adults display elaborate courtship rituals. The whooping crane has a five-foot-long trachea coiled behind its breastbone. When they mate they bob and weave and call out in a desperate, hollow sound. When the female lays her eggs, both adults incubate them. The whooping crane is one of the world’s most endangered bird species. There are fewer than one thousand whooping cranes left today in North America. I was lying in bed, eyes open. The morning hung in rouge. Birds dipped behind the window slats: vanished, reappeared, vanished, reappeared. A choppy, blinking flight. The sound of Mason came gradually, widening into rings. “You’ve got to get up, Dette. It’s all ready now.” I put on my bathrobe and he led me downstairs, and I said, “What, what’s all ready now?” He had pushed a dome cake into position on the kitchen table. It squatted in the center of the wood on a pedestaled dish, stuck with candle nubs. On the bulging cake belly, red-gelled letters announced my birthday. Mason was grinning, leaned forward a little, his hands holding the edge of the table. “See what I did Dette? There’s pudding inside. Did you know, they’ve got those cake sets where you can actually bake the cake hollow. So when it’s done, you can fill it with something.” I said, “I don’t think anyone’s ever made me a cake before.” His head bent a little to the side. It was an almost imperceptible change, but it felt strange, his looking at me like that. The way you look at someone when you feel sorry for the life they’ve had. I said quickly, we should light the candles, but he said, no, wait. He had something else, in the workshop. “Mirrors?” “No, over there.” On the saw board a blue tarp jutted in angles. I pulled it off. Underneath was a long cylinder that widened at one end. It had gold edges, and little round knobs. I touched the knobs first, then the edges. “I’m not really sure what it is, Mason.” It felt bad, not knowing when he’d worked so hard. “Don’t you see?” He gripped the workshop table, leaned forward a little, so proud: “It’s a big kaleidoscope, Dette! Look—hold it here, use this hand, hold it to the light. Do you see? There’re little pictures of me, going around in circles, on the inside.” “It’s just that I haven’t seen her in so long.” I pulled on my nylon jacket, my arms stretching through the puffed sleeves. “It’s okay, Dette, you go,” he said, playing with the curtain cord. “I’m just—not good—out there.” “I know. I’ll be back, I promise.” Outside, my breath made white shapes in gray air, and I pushed through them into the subway. I rode to Columbus Circle. When I got out, it was already dark. I’d never gone alone at night into Manhattan before. Snow slanted. People shuffled, jogged, passed in stretched-out gaits. I pushed forward in a half-trot with my hands wadded into my pockets. I looked in a series: behind, in front, at my watch. Brief clips of vision: streetlights growing larger, streetlights growing smaller, second hand going round. A half-block from the restaurant, the hood of my coat caught on something. I was pitched backward, my arms thrashing, working up and down like wings. I jerked my head to the side, and saw Trudi. Her face was a wash of rouge and black ink. Her hair dropped down in clusters, flaked with snow. She said, “Bernadette, no! You can’t go in there.” “Trudi? What’s going on?” She clung to me, gripping the shoulders of my jacket with her gloves. “God Bernadette, I’m so glad to see you.” “What happened?” She said, “It’s over.” “What’s over?” “Me and Erik.” I let out a long breath. I said, “Who left who?” “I don’t know—he left—I left. Shit, I don’t know!” She spoke in a tangle of phrases. “We both left I guess, we walked out of our apartment at the same time. He went up Seventy-third, I went down Seventy-third.” “I’m so sorry Trudi… when did this happen?” “A few hours ago. Don’t be sorry. I’m not.” She let her arms fall limp to her sides. “How come you didn’t call me? I would’ve come sooner.” “I left without taking my key, or my phone—I’m such a dumbass—now I can’t get back in. We had this big fight, Bernadette. Big. I mean, throwing shit, breaking shit, scratched faces.” “How did this happen?” “Well, it started because I found out he cheated—” She saw my mouth and my eyes round into wide Os, and she said, “No, no, not like that. The thing in Atlantic City. He cheated.” I said, “Oh. So…what did he do?” “Some guy called today, he said Erik would have to give back the check, and the medal. It turns out he’d brought in three chocolate centerpieces and entered them all in different names.” “Is that such a big deal?” “Bernadette! I can’t date someone like that. Who’s to say if he cheated on that stupid competition, he wouldn’t cheat on me?” I started feeling the cold. It moved like fingers over my skin. I said, “It’s too cold out here. Let’s go inside somewhere.” We went into a supermarket. There were only a few people in the store. They made deliberate zigzags through aisles, crossing from one side to the other. Trudi and I went to the back corner where the bread shelves were, where it was quiet. I thought, people don’t really go out for bread on Saturday nights. We leaned against the shelves, and I held her hand, even though we both still had our gloves on. “Okay, Trudi. Tell me more.” Trudi put her head against the shelf and closed her eyes. “So I told Erik I couldn’t love him anymore. He said, ‘Why not?’ and I said, ‘Because I don’t know you.’ And then he told me he’d done it for me, that he wanted me to be proud of him. “What did you say?” “I said, ‘I was proud before, but not anymore. What the hell do I care if your desserts win first place?’ So that’s it, I guess. That’s how the fight went.” I was breathing in flickers, thinking of Mason, how he told me things at night. How, despite them, I still curled up next to him, still craved the space he made for me under his arm. “Trudi, you know—is it so bad, what he did? It’s just that, I think it would take worse things than that for me to leave Mason.” Trudi nodded and said, “That’s what Erik said. He said we all do terrible things, who’s to say what’s worse? He said, ‘You talk gossip about people. You take the Lord’s name in vain. You spend too much time on your makeup and that’s vanity and that’s one of the seven sins, isn’t it?’ That’s when I slapped him.” Trudi’s mouth was bright. It moved in pink flashes. Her words had the sound of stones falling a far way into water. A cracking and sinking. “I’ve know, I’ve done some bad things, Bernadette. Smoking and swearing and crap. But I’m working on it. Okay, I’m trying. The best I can. But there’s a difference between a bad habit and a conscious decision, you know?” “We all make bad decisions though, at some point.” “Yeah, I know. It’s just that, I always kind of felt like I was… better. Than him. A better person, I mean. How can you stay with someone if you feel like that?” “Yeah, you’re right. I’m sure you did the right thing.” “I mean, I’m a good person, right?” “Of course you are.” “But do you think I was I wrong to get so upset?” “I don’t know… I guess not, I mean if you’re not upset about it now, afterwards. Upset that you won’t be going back.” “Yeah, I don’t think I am. He was a jackass. Really. ” She pushed out a long breath, pushed a strand of her red hair behind her ear. “Anyway, this is dumb. Let’s not talk about it anymore. How are things with Mason?” “Well… we’re good, Trudi. Should I tell you we’re not?” “God no, don’t do that. We don’t need things to be bad for the both of us.” I paused. “But, you know, there are still things—” “Like what?” “Things.” “What?” I wanted to say, there are these things that keep us up at night. But I couldn’t. “Bernadette, seriously, you worry me sometimes,” Trudi said. “That’s so stupid. I’m fine. We’re fine.” “You’re different than you were in school. What’s wrong with you? You seem detached from everything. And you don’t tell me everything like you used to. Remember how we used to stay up all night talking?” “Well what do you want me to do?” “Just come out with me more, okay? Coffee, dinner, clubs. Anything.” I felt sorry for her, being all alone. I thought of how we’d each be that night, in the last moments before sleep: Trudi wading alone through silk bed sheets, me gathered into the space of Mason’s bent arm. “Sure, Trudi. Anything.” When I got home, Mason was gone. He wasn’t in the bedroom, or the workshop, or any of the rooms. When the phone rang, I scrambled to answer it, knocking over the amaryllis plant. The pot-shaped mold of dirt split open and crumbled onto the rug. It was Trudi. “I just wanted to say thanks,” she said. “For listening, you know. I’m sorry I brought up the Mason thing, I didn’t mean to upset you.” “Trudi, Mason’s gone.” “What?” “I came back and he wasn’t here.” She laughed. “Bernadette, I am so sure he’s fine.” “He’s left me, I know he has.” “Of course he hasn’t. Is his stuff gone?” I ran to check. “No, no, it’s all here. Thank God, it’s all here. I’m so dumb.” “See? It’s fine.” “But what if something’s happened to him?” “People go out, Bernadette. They go out. To the store. For walks. Things like that.” “No, I’m telling you Trudi, Mason’s different. He doesn’t go out.” “What about that class you said he teaches?” “At the penitentiary? No, that’s only on Tuesdays.” “Well maybe he went today.” “No, no, he wouldn’t do that. Only Tuesdays. Something’s happened, Trudi, I know it.” “You always do this.” “What?” “This. I’m sure everything’s okay.” “I’ll call you back.” “What are you going to do?” “I don’t know. Call the police, go find him, I don’t know.” Junior year, a girl from my dorm went out to buy a soda one night and didn’t come back. In the morning everyone was afraid for her because she was a shy girl who always stayed in her room on the weekends. She never went to parties. When we called the police they told us, “She isn’t a missing person until she’s been missing for seventy-two hours.” We said, “No, something’s definitely wrong. We’re telling you—she doesn’t do drugs, or drink, we swear. She volunteers on Saturdays with the Catholic Students Association.” But it turned out, they were right. Matt Cohen found her with his roommate, sleeping in the guy’s bed. So everyone said, for sure she must have been raped. But she woke up with flushed eyes and flushed cheeks and said no, no, it wasn’t like that. It turns out they’d been dating for two weeks. No one had known. Trudi had said, “Who would’ve ever thought?” So I knew I had to tell the police something terrible had happened to Mason, so that they’d come look for him. I cried and told them, “I heard him yelling outside, and now I can’t find him.” I told them there might have been gunshots. We found Mason two blocks away. He was curled under a street lamp, cradling a shivering terrier. He was thumbing its apricot fur, rocking it in the underside of his elbow. The lamp cast an awning of white light over them. I ran over to him. The blonde scrolls of his hair were frozen at the tips. “Hey Bernadette.” He held the dog up to me. “See? I saved him.” I said, “I thought you were gone for sure.” “I found him. He was almost frozen dead. He needed me.” “I need you, Mason,” I sobbed, kissing him all over his face. “God, don’t ever do that again.” The officer came over, made muffled sounds against his radio. “Are you okay?” Mason started shivering, rubbing his shoulders with his forearms crossed over his chest. His eyes were blotched and seeping. The officer said, “Are you allergic to dog hair? You should go to the hospital.” Mason said no, he was fine, it was only the cold. He bundled the dog into the space under his chin. “We found him Trudi. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have worried.” “It’s okay Bernadette.” “What are you doing tonight?” “Going to bed.” “Now? It’s only nine o’clock.” “I know. I’m tired, I guess.” I curled up next to Mason. He was asleep, his chest rising slowly up and down. His body was warm. “Are you going to be okay alone?” “Of course. I’ll be fine. Really.” Mason named the dog Christopher Ryan. Two days later I found his picture photocopied on yellow paper, stapled to the lamppost where we’d found them. I called the owner while Mason taught his classes. When he came home I said, “You can’t say anything. It wasn’t right to keep him.” Every once and a while after that, I’d hear the undertones of his voice, like a mantra saying, “I could’ve kept him. He was better off with me.” Love is correlated with the emotions of jealousy, anger, and hatred, among others. It can override other drives, such as hunger and thirst. Scientists, for example, note cases of baboons that have fallen in love and died of broken hearts. “It’s not just a myth,” said one senior scientist. Evidence indicates that as attachment grows, passion recedes. In this scenario, self-defeating crimes of passion become the unfortunate by-products of the biological system. February, and the sky is a white color like the underbelly of a shell. People have been eating more Indian food lately, it seems. Smells are stronger. Masala curdles my stomach, and I take walks for fresh air. The sidewalk stretches in squares like a board game. Mason comes with me. He holds my hand as we move from one square to the next. This morning I looked at Mason’s photos in The Anthologist, the June issue of last year. I scanned them with a piece of glass to make the images larger. The photos had a glossed-over look, full of reflections—from the glass, from the magazine pages, from the tiny mirrors in the pictures. Clear droplets on the bottom of his hand. Could have been faucet water. Rain. Light. Could have been. Mason said he tried to wake me up last night. He said my face looked crusted with bad dreams, haunted. “It’s like you were enveloped in glass, Dette. I couldn’t reach you.” He’s walking around now with bloodshot eyes. He can never get back to sleep without me. He’ll only eat the cottage cheese with the blue label. Small curd. Four percent. He still talks about Christopher Ryan. He talks to himself a lot. Or to people who aren’t there. Either, both. The room is cream and metal-colored. On the wall there are certificates in black frames. Probably it is bond paper. There are small ribbons dabbed onto the bottom corners, and circular seals, raised up. They are wonderful achievements. Things to celebrate. Many lives saved. I tell him: I came to see you today because I think I am dying. There are things passing out of me—energy, urine, blood. I can feel myself depleting. I feel like a ghost. He says, You’re pregnant. I feel like a ghost. Our brains deal with relationships in serially monogamous terms. Data gathered from around the world shows that divorce is most prevalent when a couple has a single dependent child. Trudi is standing to the side, her legs pressed together, her feet cocked ninety degrees apart. She is speaking in two-syllabled foreign words, her voice in soft cadences. Ferme. Demi-plié. Even though they are only four or five or six years old the girls are responding. They are doing some kind of a lowering, toes and knees angled out, arms curled overhead. I stand behind the door and watch, read the flyers taped to the far wall. Russian Ballet. Tuesdays 4:00. Spanish Gypsy Dance. Ballroom, mornings, 10 a.m. Birds dipped. It Happened In Monterey. I notice there are no mothers watching. How terrible. These little girls. They’ve all been left. And now their tiny dresses are fading colors, corals passing away into washed-out tints. The girls themselves are only pale dashes of color. Some are receding, glass dolls, vanishing against white cement. Trudi sees me and comes over. She says, What’s wrong Bernadette? What’s wrong? I say, There are no mothers here. I know. They don’t come the day before the show. She bends her head to the side and her brows bunch together so that they almost meet. They make the shape of birds dipping, how the girls, probably, would draw them. There are little creases in Trudi’s forehead. She bites the plump part of her lip. Are you okay? Why don’t they come the day before? The girls have reappeared, they are watching us now. The kids don’t want them here. They want them to wait till the show to see how much better they’ve gotten. How they’ve learned so many new things. What’s wrong? Bernadette? But already I am trickling backward in quick delicate steps, toe to heel, toe to heel, getting further away, and smaller. And I’m in the parking lot, the car is stopped but my hands are on the steering wheel. I’m watching people pass through glass doors, counting the number who go in and the number who come out. There seem to be more of the first group than the second. At the reception desk a woman uncaps her pen. She says, Where’s your support person, and I look around and say, Oh. I guess I don’t have one. And I’m so afraid they’ll tell me I’ll have to go home and get one and come back. But they don’t, they give me one of theirs, a brown-skinned nurse who they have on hand for girls like me. The sad unsupported girls just out of college—the ones who’ve got no one. My support nurse has thick knees and eyelids the color of cherrywood. She lets me tell her over and over again, I’ve got friends, and a man, really I do. They’re just not here right now. I’ve got this great friend named Trudi, and a man who loves me. She lets me tell her, I’m really not a bad person. You know, mothers who know things ahead of time, they’ll do this. I knew this girl at school—her baby would’ve had cystic fibrosis. She was trying to save it from its life. They put a needle in my arm. I am lying on my back, staring at the ceiling. Between my thighs there is the sound of a long inward breath, a continuous struggling for air. Like the tube at the dentist that collects saliva. My hand clings to my support person. She lets my hand clutch her hand—although I think I am crushing it, I’m having visions of broken things—while I say, why isn’t the medicine working yet, Christ is it supposed to hurt this bad? Even though I know Christ is far away and silent, in removed spaces. And now there is a lot less pain and there are gossamer images, and overstuffed people. Flickering. Voices floating, words in adagio. I’m saying, He was never the kind of man to have a child. And I’m mumbling things about Mason, telling them all his secrets, like how Mason isn’t his real name, and how he had a wife once, and two babies. All the things coming into my head, I’m just saying them, like how when his wife died he was so sad. So sad, so sad Mason. He cried all the time when his wife died, he didn’t know how to raise babies without her. I’m telling them how he tried to suffocate his babies on the garage floor, and his can of propane gas caught on fire, and he rolled around and around, so sad, on the cement. How he got the fire out, saw himself blistered, and panicked, so sad in the little mirror propped up on the side. And then, I say, he realizes what a terrible thing he’s been about to do, but his wife’s sister has already smelled the gas and the fire and she comes in and sees him and sees what he’s tried to do and starts screaming and screaming. But there is a part of her feeling sorry for him too, standing there so helpless, so sad, he is holding out his raw arms. And so she doesn’t call anyone, she doesn’t call and say ‘Take him away he’s a terrible man,’ because he isn’t a terrible man he’s just a lost man, and instead she takes the babies away with her where Mason can’t find them, and he comes to New York and changes his name and starts taking pictures and that’s when I came to find him. So he’s really not a bad man, really he’s just a lost man, and he’s all I’ve got, and he needs me and I just couldn’t live without him, I couldn’t but he’s not the kind of man to raise a child. So what am I supposed to do, what would you do, what would anyone do really, maybe same as me. And when I go home he’ll be waiting for me in our apartment, which is really too small for three people anyway, and he’ll give me his shy airport-smile and we’ll go on, the two of us, the way it should be. We’ll watch soap operas and reruns and order samosas and everything will go on as it should, the same way it always has and there won’t be any need for a baby because really it should just be us, going on like we always have, because he was never the kind of man I’d let raise my child, even if it’s his child too. A taxi brings me home. It is swathed in a lime-green. Mason is in the workshop. My lips stretch to meet his, and I say, I’m going to take a shower now. I think, Bernadette you’ve got to be careful—you’ve got secrets now too. I go into the bathroom, I turn on the water and stand under it in my clothes. I lean my head back and the water runs into my mouth in cold, passionless streams. I still feel empty. I sit on the bathroom floor and hold the cordless phone, my back against the toilet bowl. My fingertips quiver over the buttons. Finally, I dial Trudi. The numbers make a loud pattern of sounds. Loud and sad. Bernadette are you okay? You looked…strange today. Ethereal. I am crying. All the water I’ve just drunk in the shower has come out again, I think. Trudi, I don’t know how he kept his secrets for so long. I can’t do it, I can’t. It feels like hands coiled around my neck. I tell her everything. In between each sentence I say, don’t hate me, don’t hate me Trudi. She says, Bernadette you didn’t. Don’t hate me Trudi. He could never be a father. He doesn’t know how to raise a child. Shit…neither do you. Don’t hate me, Trudi. A father Namaqua sand grouse of Africa’s Kalahari Desert flies as far as fifty miles a day in order to soak himself in water and return to his nest, where his chicks can drink from his feathers… I throw up in the toilet bowl. The smells surge into me; I lean my head against the window. Outside, birds line up on black wires. There is the rustle of corduroy. Mason is standing in the doorway in a frozen lunge position. He has one foot forward and one foot back. He is gripping both sides of the doorframe. His lashes are going fast and heavy as if stuck with cigarette smoke. He is holding the cordless phone in his hand, the one from the mirror room. He says, How could you, Bernadette? It was our baby, how could you? I throw up again into the toilet. When I stand up I am dizzy. Mason, please listen, I did it for us, I did it so we can be together. He drops the phone, lowers himself to his knees and grips his head with his hands. He looks up and says, I saved them, you know, from myself. Bernadette—I stopped myself before I did it. I want him to hit me, to twist my elbow until I scream. Then I would know I did the right thing. But he doesn’t. Instead he sits on the tile floor next to me. He leans against the side of the toilet bowl and takes a long breath. Our heads are touching. He draws his legs to his chest. He takes one of his hands with the ten sunken knuckles and runs it through my wet hair. There are beads of water now, on his fingertips. I moan, a low sound. Don’t go Mason. Just don’t go. I’m not a monster, Bernadette. I’m not a monster. He stands up, walks around the bathroom slowly. He fingers the brass knobs on the cabinets, the shower, finally the door. There is the transferal of water beads from his hand to the knob. What you did was much worse. I would have been better than that. Don’t go, Mason. Oh God. Pulling my knees up against my chin, rocking back and forth. I’m so sorry Bernadette. The taste of old food between my teeth. There’s more than phantoms out there, I say. Real people. They’ll see you. I know. Cramps between my legs. Don’t go, I need you. Mason. Oh God don’t go please don’t go. Mason?
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