“There’s nothing to say; I don’t think about my past,” he said.
I rolled my eyes. “We all come from somewhere,” I said. “Even if it’s ugly, we all got born and grew up somewhere. It’s the one thing we all have in common.”
“What we have in common is not going to save us,” he said, into the increasing dark. The Noble Nomad again. I couldn’t decide if he was a selfish pig or some kind of St. Francis type, giving up the world for some higher calling. Whatever it was, his talent for companionship made me sorry he was so committed to solitude.
“What about the carving?” I asked. “Have you ever been at a birth?”
He dropped my foot. “What are you going to do, write my biography?” he said, throwing a pillow at me. But I wasn’t too dense to get that was the kind of joking that says, Go no further.
Before I went to bed, I put the carving in a place of honor on the mantel. He didn’t seem to be paying attention as he lay his blanket by the fire, but after I brushed my teeth I came back and noticed he’d turned it differently and laid a scrap of my maroon velvet under it. He was sitting on his little pallet, in seeming meditation; I thought the way he was scooched over to one side was perhaps an invitation to join him. He hadn’t directly mentioned any vows of celibacy to me, except what he’d said in the van. I thought about it for about one second and realized what a dive into foolishness it would be. I could see the emptiness and regret already unfurling before me. I tiptoed past him and climbed the ladder to my loft.
“Good night, Zack,” I called when I got myself settled into bed upstairs a few minutes later, feeling like John-Boy as soon as I said it. But Zack didn’t answer. He was either asleep or pouting. Or perhaps—I didn’t want to rule this
he carved the radishes into fat little birds and animals, and when I discovered them in my salad he giggled like a little brother.
After dinner we sat around by the woodstove and talked and gave each other foot massages. His feet were clean from a bath and he smelled like the inside of a pumpkin.
“Boy,” I said at one point as we switched feet, “what I wouldn’t have given to have an evening like this with Alex. We never seemed to be in sync.”
Zack popped my toes, as if to say, Tell me about him.
I started looking for words. I had often wondered if it was our very lack of harmony that by some kind of relationship science had held us in a force field that we couldn’t break. I felt Zack’s thumbs press into my feet and found myself telling him things I had never said before, about how I’d been sure when I met Alex that my heart had actually physiologically gotten larger, I’d felt it pressing against the inside of my ribcage, but never any peace, never any rest.
“I used to have this dream I never told him,” I said, “because he’d assume the guy was him, and in the dream this guy keeps trying to grow hothouse flowers but they never bloom, just grow big, healthy leaves. I guess it was about him.” As I spoke it all began to seem unimportant. It was difficult to imagine, actually, the tumult of emotions that used to accompany thoughts of Alex. I wanted to confess this old pain into this kind stranger’s ear and be done with it. I wanted Zach to be able to carve away whatever didn't matter and find the real story. I couldn’t tell if he had some special ability to get me talking or if it was just time.
It dawned on me then that he hadn’t told me a single thing about his own experiences. “You,” I said. “Your turn now.”
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