American Purgatorio by John Haskell

wasn’t being fair with me.
    â€œI don’t even know if you’re alive,” I said.
    And at that moment the person next to me sat up and tapped my chest. “I’m here,” she said. “Open your eyes.”
    â€œOpen my eyes? Okay.” And I opened my eyes.
    Although the light was not that great, I sat up to tell her that what she was doing was wrong, wrong to me and wrong in general, and as I was about to tell her this I looked into her oval face, at her eyes, and the whites of her eyes, and of course I saw that the person I was talking to wasn’t Anne.
    I remembered the Irish bar, and the baby carrots, and then the fantasy vanished. I don’t know what I actually said, if I even said anything, but after a while I was aware that the feeling I’d had a moment before had passed. Something had come along and taken its place. The fear was still there but the anger was gone, and I didn’t know where it went, but fine, I thought. I could hold on to the anger or not, fan the flames or not. And I chose not.
    I turned to Laura, and I don’t know what I thought, but in the middle of thinking it she told me that my body was a vehicle. She said I could use it, or I didn’t have to.
    Then she lay back down on top of the covers.
    Here she was, with a man, with the body of a man, and she was hoping he would be a normal man, and now she was presented with someone who was talking to her in a way that made no sense. Half naked and next to her, and what is supposed to happen now? That’s what she was probably thinking.
    I was propped on my elbow looking at her, trying to think of my body as a vehicle, and maybe I was aware of some galvanic skin communication in the muscles of our arms, or my arm, because it seems to me that under normal circumstances we would begin kissing. I remember thinking that I ought to be kissing this person, and I would have been kissing her except for one small thing. She wasn’t who I wanted her to be.
    So we didn’t kiss.
    And the lack of kissing, which I expected to wedge us apart, instead seemed to open up a kind of pathway between us. Instead of relating via the kiss, we had to relate in a different way, in a companionship way, and so we began to talk. Everyone has a story, and we had stories, and we brought our stories to this place, this bed, and we told each other as much as we wanted to be heard, or as much as we could bear.
    We lay there, without speaking. And because, for a moment, I’d been with Anne, I was fairly happy. Although she wasn’t Anne anymore, she had been, and that was enough. I think we were both fairly happy, and happily we went to sleep.
    She did anyway.
    I just lay in the bed, waiting for the light to come in the window, and when it did I slipped out from under the covers, packed my bags, and when Alex got up I ate cereal with him before he went to work. I liked Alex, and I hoped that when I thanked him for his navigation skills, he understood I meant more than navigation.
    When Laura got up we were going to make coffee, but there wasn’t any milk so we went to a coffee shop down the street. We sat in a booth and seemed to be getting along, connecting easily with each other, talking about whatever came up, just talking and talking, and we hardly noticed when we left the coffee shop. We were walking along the damp sidewalk, still talking and walking, and right about as we passed my car, which was parked on the street near her house, that’s when I stopped. I couldn’t go back with her to the house, I thought, because I had somewhere else to go. I realized that time was passing, and I couldn’t spend whatever time there was sitting around a Lexington living room.
    I had to get on the road, I told her.
    She asked me why.
    I tried to explain to her about Anne and what I was doing. I told her it felt as if a door was slowly closing in front of me, and that behind the door there was something I was still