What I Loved

pinching fear. I clutched at the rightness of it, my punishment come due. I stalked from one room to another, letting the cold anxiety squeeze my lungs. I turned on the television to hear voices. I turned it off to get rid of them. An hour passed and then another. By four o'clock I was exhausted from flying around the apartment like a terrified bird. I continued to walk from room to room, but I paced myself, going more slowly. In the bathroom, I opened the medicine cabinet and studied an old toothbrush of Erica's and a lipstick. I removed the lipstick from the shelf and opened it. I screwed it up from the bottom and examined the brownish-red shade. After lowering it and replacing its top, I walked to my desk, opened my drawer, and put the lipstick inside. I chose two other objects to keep there—a small pair of black socks and two barrettes that were lying on her night table. The absurdity of the hoarding was obvious to me, but I didn't care. The act of closing the drawer on these things that belonged to Erica soothed me. By the time Bill arrived, I was calm. He stayed longer than he usually did, however, and I'm sure he did it because he sensed that under my apparent equilibrium lay panic.
    Erica called that night. Her voice sounded high and a little squeaky. "When I put the key in the door, I felt glad," she said, "but when I walked inside, sat down, and looked around, I thought I'd gone completely mad. I've been watching TV, Leo. I never watch TV."
    "I miss you," I said.
    "Yes."
    That was her response. She didn't say that she missed me, too. "I'm going to write to you. I don't like the phone."
    The first letter came at the end of the week. It was a long letter dense with domestic particulars—the spider plant she had bought for the apartment, the drizzly weather that day, her trip to Cody's bookstore, her course plans. She explained her preference for letters. "I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or on the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be waiting time—a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law—that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully. In letters I can only tell you about my wildness. It isn't the wildness itself, and I am wild and savage over Matt. Letters can't scream. Telephones can. When I got back from Cody's today, I put my books on the table and went to the bathroom, stuffed a washcloth in my mouth, and walked into the bedroom so that I could lie on the bed and scream without making too much noise. But I'm beginning to see him again, not dead but alive. For a whole year, I've only seen him dead on that gurney. Far away with only letters between us, we may begin to find our way back to each other. Love, Erica."
    I wrote back the same evening, and Erica and I embarked on the epistolary chapter of our marriage. I stuck to the bargain and didn't call her, but I wrote long and hard. I kept her informed about my work and the apartment. I told her my colleague Ron Bellinger was trying a new drug for his narcolepsy that made him a little owl-eyed but less apt to drop off in committee meetings, and that Jack Newman was still going at it with Sara. I told her that Olga, the cleaning lady I had hired, had scrubbed the stove with such ferocity that the printed words FRONT and BACK to indicate the burners had vanished into her little ball of steel wool, and I told her that I had been distraught when I understood that she was gone, really gone. She answered me, and so it went. What neither one of us could know was what the other omitted. Every correspondence is skewered by invisible perforations, the small holes of the unwritten but not the unthought, and as time went on, I hoped fervently that it wasn't a man who was missing from those pages I received every week.
    Over and over again during the months that followed, I found myself on the stairs walking up to Bill and Violet's loft for dinner. Violet would call me in the early evening and ask if she should set an extra place, and I would say yes. It was hard to say with any conviction that I preferred to eat scrambled eggs or corn flakes downstairs. I let Bill and Violet take care of me, and while they took care of me, I found myself looking at them all over again. Like a man who had crawled out of a