The Third Line

The Third Line

Twelve days out of the house in Milton. I keep the count on the inside cover of a composition book, the marbled kind, a dollar at the drugstore on Main Street. One line a day, written before I make the coffee, so that it gets written.

The first two nights are at my mother's house in Albany. She is 74 and she keeps the thermostat at 78, and she makes up the bed in my old room with the wedding-ring quilt. She asks me nothing. At nine at night she puts out crackers and a block of cheddar on the same green plate she used when I was in high school, and she lets me sit beside her through her program without talking.

On the third morning I leave a note on the counter and drive south. She would have kept me as long as I wanted. That is the reason I go.

The sublet is two rooms over a dry cleaner in Poughkeepsie. Until about noon the floor holds the smell of hot press cloth, and after that it lets go of it. I have a folding table, a mattress on a frame, four plates, and a ring of eight keys the last tenant left in the kitchen drawer. None of them opens anything in these rooms.

I unpack in an order. Clothes, then the drafting tubes, then the kit. The amber bottles go along the windowsill by height with the labels turned to face the room. Everything in this apartment sits where I put it, which is the only part of the last 12 days I have decided myself.

I want to be exact about what I carried out of that house, because he will tell it another way. My clothes, my tubes, the oil kit in its canvas roll. And the black leather notebook, which I took because the terms were written into it in his own hand, and I was not going to leave that behind in a house he had started letting people into.

I did not take the tapes.

I counted them back into the cookie tin at the kitchen table, four of them, the masking-tape numbers turned up so he would see them. I set the tin on the oak table with the lid beside it. The player I left on the counter by the toaster with the cord wrapped twice and tucked under itself. Then I made a sandwich, cut it on the diagonal, left half of it on a plate for him, and went out and pulled the mailbox open at the end of the walk so he would find the mail.

Which means somebody was in that house between four in the morning and four in the afternoon. I have gone at it every night since and I have not found a way to put it to him that he would hear.

* * *

Tuesday I drive to the Hannaford on Route 9 and buy for one person. Eggs, a bag of clementines, milk in the quart because the half gallon turns before I finish it. I reach for the oat bread out of habit, put it back, and then take it again, because it costs $1.90 and I am not going to make a ceremony out of a loaf of bread.

The cashier is a heavy woman with reading glasses on a chain. She bags the clementines separately without being asked. She hands me the receipt and says see you Thursday, and I have never once been in that store on a Thursday.

In the composition book I keep three columns: what I did, what I saw, what I was told. For 20 years I wrote those same three columns about James and sent them where they went, and now I write them about myself and send them nowhere.

The handwriting has not changed. I have tried to make it come out different and it comes out the same.

Afternoons I draw, which is the half of my life nobody ever had to invent for me. There is a house on Academy Street with a north slope and an owner who has stopped returning calls, and I keep laying out her bed anyway. Hellebores along the wall, fothergilla behind them, a run of sedge to hold the edge of the walk. I tape the corners down, sharpen the pencil twice, work about three hours, and by the end of it my hands are steady.

* * *

Thursday night I make a batch of the oil, because it is Thursday night.

The formula came down from my grandmother and I have never written it out for anybody. Four parts of the base, warmed to the temperature of the inside of a wrist. Then the herbs, then the mint, in that order and no other, until what comes off the bowl is the one thing it has always been, musty herbs and cold mint.

I hold the dropper vertical. Held at an angle the count runs small and the whole batch goes flat.

The case holds 12 bottles. It came to me sealed, and I opened it on this counter and counted 11.

I fill them, cap them, and write the date on each label in pencil. Then I pour every one of them down the drain, one at a time, and run the hot water for two full minutes after. The apartment keeps the smell until Saturday.

I keep one bottle back. It is in the drawer with the keys that do not open anything.

The oil is not the part of it I miss. What comes up is a night in the Brooklyn apartment six or seven years ago, when a headache put me down on the bathroom floor with my cheek against the tile. James ran a dish towel under the tap, wrung it out over the sink until it stopped dripping, folded it in thirds, and laid it across my eyes.

Then he went and sat in the hallway in the dark, because the strip of light under the study door would have come through the towel, and he did not type a word that night. In the morning the towel was on the radiator, dry, still folded in thirds.

* * *

I watch the interview on the television that came with the sublet. Ten o'clock, the studio in midtown, the charcoal suit I had taken in at the shoulders two years ago.

He touches his left cuff nine times in 22 minutes. He does that when he has settled in advance on how a thing is going to be told and he is holding himself to it. Anybody watching sees a man who has slept. He has not slept, and I can tell that off a television screen the same as I could tell it across a room.

Twice this week I drive 9W past Milton and park at the pull-off above the switchback. From up there the house is a white shape with one lit window on the second floor, and when the wind moves I can see the red maple. I stay 20 minutes and then I go. The porch light comes on at 6:40 every evening, and I never set that timer.

The night of the interview I call the study line at 1:40 in the morning. It rings four times. He picks up and does not speak, and I listen to him not speak for 11 seconds, and behind him I can hear the Underwood, the carriage going back and the bell at the end of it.

Then the line drops.

He was awake, and he had the machine going, and he heard me breathing and put it down.

He will say the phone in that study did not ring until two o'clock that night, and that when it rang it was his agent. I know what I dialed and I know what I heard.

* * *

The number I have called for 11 years now gives a recording. A case reference, six digits, no name, no way to leave anything. I have written the reference into the composition book and I have called it six times.

The transfer date moved. Since the year we married it has cleared on the eighth of the month, and this month it clears on the 22nd, and nobody tells me it is moving. I find it on a statement at this folding table with a pencil in my hand.

Wednesday, eleven in the morning, I drive out to the gray brick house in Westchester. The door is locked in the middle of a working day. The fake plant is gone out of the hall, the runner has been taken up, and the boards where it lay are lighter down the middle.

I leave a message on the private line. It does not come back. In 11 years there was never a day when a message on that line sat longer than an hour.

My last report comes back to me marked already received. The receipt number on it runs two lines below the one I was issued, and the routing slip at the bottom carries a set of initials that are not mine. Two letters. Nobody has ever given me a name to put with them.

So somebody else is on Subject B, and the schedule has been rewritten, and the way I am being told about it is by paperwork.

* * *

Friday I come up the stairs with the groceries and there is an envelope inside the door, face up, squared to the baseboard.

No stamp. No postmark. No address. The flap is sealed with the wide clear tape they sell at the hardware store two blocks down, and on the front, in black ink pressed hard enough to emboss the back of the paper, are two handwritten letters.

They are the same two letters that were on the routing slip.

I set the bag on the counter first. I put the milk in the refrigerator and the eggs in the door, and I fold the paper bag flat and slide it under the sink. Then I sit down at the folding table and open the envelope with a paring knife along the top edge, because I am not going to tear it.

One sheet inside. A printed schedule. Three lines, no letterhead, no header, nothing in the margins and nothing on the back.

The first two lines are mine. A date in April and a date in August, an address in each, and a word in the last column that means the work is finished and the file is shut.

The third line is not mine, and it carries a milepost on Route 9W, tomorrow's date, and nothing else.