Knob and Shell

Dear Lamar,

I am sixty-two years old and I am writing you a letter because if I had to say this out loud I would rather be swallowed by the Puget Sound, which is close and available, so count yourself lucky.

Here is the confession. I am afraid my body has stopped doing it for you. There, it is on paper now, where I cannot take it back and you cannot interrupt me, which might be the whole point of writing.

Twenty-two months ago we met at that faculty fundraiser, the one where you fixed the microphone before anyone asked you to, and I watched your hands and thought, well, there is a man who knows what things are for. We have been together a year and a half now. In the beginning you looked at me like the shore looks at a tide. Lately you look at me like I am a piece of good furniture you are afraid to scratch.

I do not think you mean to. I think you are being careful, and careful is a lovely quality in a man who drives and a terrible quality in a man who touches me.

So here is my proposal, and you may laugh, but laugh kindly. One month. We talk only in writing. Letters, voicemails, notes tucked in coat pockets if you like. No dinners where we both perform being fine. No in person anything until the bonfire at the preserve, the one the bookstore people throw, which happens to fall at the end of the month, convenient as a punchline.

Everything we want, everything we are afraid of, everything we have been too polite to say, it all goes on paper. Signed, Margaret Hughes, music teacher, terrified, hoping.

I keep looking at this letter and thinking about mailing it. I will put a stamp on it before I can change my mind.

M.

* * *

The voicemail came on a Wednesday, four days after the stamp went on, and I played it in the kitchen with the coffee going cold beside me. I am writing it down here exactly as he said it, because that is the rule now, words on paper or not at all.

"Maggie. It's Lamar. I read the letter twice, then once more out loud in the truck, which is embarrassing, so don't tell the truck. I'm in. One month, paper and voicemail only, no seeing each other, and everything gets said. I agree to all of it.

"Now you have to listen to my part, so take your coffee and sit down.

"I have been holding back. Not because of your body, and I need you to actually hear that, because your body is the thing I think about in line at the hardware store like some kind of fool. I held back because of your bones. You had that fall last spring, and the doctors said take it easy, and I heard take it easy and I never stopped hearing it. I got careful with you and I couldn't figure out how to stop being careful, and careful turned into distance, and distance turned into you writing me a letter with a stamp on it at eleven at night, which I know because of the postmark.

"I'm sixty-four, Maggie. I don't have a whole other lifetime to learn how to say what I want. So give me a month and a pen and I'll do it. First letter is coming. It's going to be honest and that frightens me more than the ocean frightens you, which I understand is a great deal.

"Okay. I'm going to hang up before I say anything with actual feeling in it. Goodbye."

He said goodbye twice. I have the machine to thank for that.

* * *

Dear Lamar,

You asked for honest, so here is honest, and I want it noted that I wrote this at the shell bazaar at eleven at night, sitting on a crate behind the abalone bins, in a converted firehouse that smells like salt and old varnish, while a man three feet away argued with somebody about the price of cowries.

I have a fantasy and it is not a polite one.

I imagine us at the bazaar, in that side room where you work, the one with the bins and the broken shell hardware and the good light from the old fire truck doors. I imagine you coming in and finding me there, and there is no conversation. You put your hand on the back of my neck and you bend me over the edge of the abalone bin, the one with the big green shells in it, and you take me right there, standing, fast, no warning, while I hold onto the bin and try not to knock it over and fail.

In the fantasy I am not sixty-two and soft in the middle and worried about my knees on a hard floor. In the fantasy I am just yours and rough is the right word and you use me like the answer to a question you have been asking all day.

I have never said that sentence to another living person. Now it is in your mailbox. The mailman read it over my shoulder, probably. Let him.

Do not write back something gentle. I mean it. I will know.

M.

* * *

His letter came on a Saturday, in an envelope with no return address because of course he does not trust the post office with a return address. It said this.

Maggie,

You said no gentle. Okay.

March. The morning of the fourteenth, which was a Tuesday, which you remember because you had sectionals that day and you were standing in my kitchen in my shirt and nothing you would admit to underneath it, making coffee you had no intention of drinking because you do not actually drink coffee, you just like the smell, which is a thing I love about you and have never said.

You leaned over the counter to reach the sugar and your hip came out of the shirt and I wanted to grip it. Not hold. Grip. I wanted my hand on that hip hard enough to leave a mark you would find in the shower Thursday and think of me at work in front of your students with a bruise under your skirt and smile at some private thing.

I did not do it. I put my hand on your shoulder instead, light as a bus transfer, and you looked at me in a way I pretended not to see, and I poured your coffee you were not going to drink, and we had a nice morning. Nice. I have been choking on that word for months.

I am not telling you this to frighten you. I am telling you because you wrote me a fantasy about a shell bin and I figured the least I could do was match you. If that bruises something other than your hip, write and tell me and I will pull back and I will not pull back slowly, I will pull back all the way.

Otherwise, write back.

Lamar

P.S. The hip was the left one. In case the detail matters to you the way it matters to me.

* * *

Voicemail, Wednesday, 9:40 in the evening. I am transcribing it here by lamplight with the porch light off so nobody thinks I am home.

"Lamar. It's Maggie.

"You asked if it bruised something. No. It lit something. Sit with that a while, I certainly am.

"Now I am going to tell you about a doorknob, because apparently that is where my brain has gone.

"You remember the first antique store we ever went into together, the one off the highway with the cat that judged everyone. You picked up a porcelain knob off a shelf, one of those old doorknobs, white with a hairline crack and a brass base, and the crack runs through a little painted blue flower. It does not match anything. It does not even match itself, the crack goes one way and the flower goes another. You said, this thing is ruined and beautiful at the same time, and you bought it for a dollar fifty and gave it to me in the parking lot like it was a diamond.