Men in Brown

THIS IS HOW BAD IT’S GOTTEN: I dream about the U.P.S. man. I order household items I neither need nor want: extendible fan blade dusters (I do not have a fan); silver serving spoons (I do not have dinner parties); tulip bulbs (weeds strangle my flower beds); and this morning, complicated underwear with clips and flying buttresses and lace and thongs and garters. (I already own thirty-two Miracle bras, and on me they look like penance). And, yes, I regret it already. When the discreet brown-papered package arrives will he snicker at me, his brown eyes, eyes the flavor of bitter brickle chocolate, lick over me, knowing, secretive, brown, his black shock of hair sending shock waves down my spine? Oh, heart be still. Men in uniform. What was I thinking?

It began innocently enough. I joined a book club; I just wanted to belong, to belong to a club. Club, it sounds so chummy, so hail-fellow-well-met. Except that I hate crowds, so I joined a book club. I could be a member but stay home. I am something of an agoraphobe, but I am a claustrophobe, too. I rattle around in my house like a stray thought. I spend unhealthy lengths of time staring out my windows. An agoraphobic-claustro-phe, you can imagine why this might be a problem. But once a month, the books arrived, and once a month I could leaf through the catalogues, the cookbooks and self-help books and fill in the tidy little order form with my fastidious fine-tipped pen. The books were a comfort. And once a month the brown truck, the neat little brown truck bumped up my dirt road like a parcel with wheels. The little brown truck with its matching driver, nicely groomed and bearing gifts.

I looked forward to the monthly delivery, anticipated it, counted on it like the full moon, as predictable and regular as the electric bill. Then I got zapped.

I was staring out the window, as was my wont, expecting my latest club order, A Brief History of Dish Washing Gloves, when the familiar truck thumped up my drive. But wait. What was this? This was not my militarily neat driver. Who was this man in brown with the Love-Me-Tender lock which he whipped back as he flung open the rear door? His lean brown legs scissored up my walk, cutting my breath short. The knock.

I opened the door. Gack, I said like a cartoon cat with its tail in a wood chipper. My mouth clogged with wet sawdust.

I slipped into his eyes like a strawberry dipped in fondue chocolate. Delicious mud-pie eyes. Drowning in cocoa syrup. Do I have to sign? I asked, but my oral-motor muscles were shot. Goo, I drooled. Grobble? I wiped my chin.

He chuckled. He knew. I am sure that he knew. They always know. He bounced the book in his palms. Your package.

Ung, I thanked him.

He tucked his pad under his arm. His hands were brown, too, and strong. I imagined him on his Saturdays off, doing brown things, his hands in loam or in his yard creosoting timbers, his shirt off, his chest turning chestnut under the spanning chestnut tree. I swooned. I braced myself against the doorjamb.

I belong, too, he said. He nodded at the package.

Heavenly days. He read. All that well-packaged pulchritude, and he could read, too.

Pynchon’s latest was more accessible than the previous one. What’s the title? He jutted his star-studded chin at my package.

Huh?

The title?

I sank to my enfeebled chin in the mushy brown slurp of his eyes.

What are you planning on reading there?

I stared at the package in my hand with lickerish aphasia. Lust lapse. I snapped my synapses back together. Immanuel Kant, I said. The complete works.

We both stared at the tiny package. The Categorical Diminutive.

The miracle of digitization, I said. E-books.

He chuckled again, made a cute little salute with that Saturday tanned hand and said, Be seeing you, and sauntered off in his bister serge, my heart a lurch behind him.

That was how it began. I tried to reason with myself. He was just a dun-colored suit on a new route. But I began ordering more books, more dusters, more pie servers, more satin tap pants. What was I doing? I imagined myself tap-dancing my heart out on little Jack Horner’s plummy pie while reciting sonnets, the couplets rhyming like door chimes, like thee and me. I inked in order forms, one a day, then two, before I knew it, seven or eight a day, and, driving to the post office I startled, did triple and quadruple takes, thinking that I spotted his sporty van jaunting along the road, here, no there, turning the corner in the corner of my eye.

It had been a while since I’d been interested in anyone. When I first stopped teaching and moved to my home here in the Vermont hills, I thought, that’s it. I had a free lance job editing text books. No more dates.

That was before the root canal. While I gagged on drains and drills and torture devices, my dentist told me about his divorce. He asked me out to dinner. He had trays full of sharp instruments at his disposal. I had a mouth full of hardware. How could I say no?

As I recall, the date ended miserably on the edge of a snowy field in his parked truck. When he tried to kiss me, all I could think about was dental hygiene. Had I flossed that morning? He told me that one of his fillings picked up a local radio station. He had a metal plate in his head, a consequence of brain surgery. He kept humming. The Copacabana, I think. I kept praying for the tooth fairy to swoop down, whisk me home, and tuck me under my own pillow. There was no second date.

About a month later driving back from a power-struggle lunch with my publisher, I stopped at The Pioneer House for a double. A man at the end of the bar sent up another. A double double. He sidled onto the neighboring stool. A Vet, it turned out, Viet Nam. Also with a plate in his head. Strafed by a detonated mine, he claimed. Two men with steel plates in their heads. What a coinky-dink, I thought, as I drove myself home on a four-laned highway that had been two-laned four hours ago. Double vision.

But the third one. It gave me pause. High school history teacher whose chapter on The Age of the Iron Horse I was editing, he proposed marriage promptly, over his third martini. Had a huge settlement from a car accident, ready to settle down. Head injury, yep, steel plate in his head.

Once, you think—how sad. Twice, you think—odd. Thrice, you think—hey, wait a minute. Is there a lot of this going on out there? Occurrence, repetition, pattern.

He said that he was thinking of retitling the chapter, The Iron Age. I said, Bad move, and made mine. I was out the door and on the road faster than you can say, Desperado.

And I was desperate, desperate to be gone, to be golden, to be history. Steel Plate Man? The superhero of litigious geek myth? I’d never be that desperate.

Then there was Walter. We met at a Parents Without Partners mixer. We were both just trying to pass. Childless, we found out after we skipped out on the line dancing, both of us. One two skip to my Lou. We drank Manhattans in Rutland at the Holiday Inn, Cosmopolitans in Cowtown. Children, Walter said, are the black hole of conversation.

Children, I said, are the black hole of life.

We started seeing each other, and it worked out pretty well because we didn’t like each other very much. No fretting by the phone, waiting for the other to call. No bitten fingernails. Vinous recriminations, whine and roses. We caught the occasional movie, tangled each other’s sheets, went Dutch on Scotch. It went along fine until he dumped me.

I can’t see you any more.

Can you see me any less?

I’m serious.

About whom?

I’ve met someone.

Where?

She’s a model. A model and a psychiatrist.

This was unlikely. Where did you say you met?

I didn’t.

You didn’t meet.

I didn’t say.

This went on for a while. Walter was serious; he was also seriously insane. He had met this therapo-babe in a chat room. A lingerie model, she claimed. A shrink, she said. Shrink-wrapped maybe—Walter sent me a Neiman Marcus catalogue with a wispy waspy blonde model on the cover in a corduroy Christmas jumper with a snowman embroidered on the bib. No self-respecting woman wears a corduroy Frostie, even for a photo-shoot, even if she teaches second grade. I tried to imagine her Santa-panties, her figgy pudding.

That’s her, Walter said when he called next.

How do you know?

She told me.

Walter. I tried. It wasn’t jealousy. As I said, it had only worked out because we didn’t like each other much. I explained that she could be anybody, a man. A telepathological liar. That it was unlikely that she was Victoria’s unkept secret and an expert on and off the couch. That was male fantasy, email fantasy. Chat room chatter. Electronic locker room banter.

But Walter was serious. He was trying to figure out if he could support her and her three kids.

Walter, if she ‘s a model and. . . .

But he would hear none of it. He was looking at houses with four bedrooms, bungalows, shotguns. He was looking at flights to New Orleans.

Next call: She’s back-pedaling.

Sur-prahze. Sur-prahze, Gomer.

She’s not sure that she wants to meet.

Uh-huh.

Next call: Everything she told me wasn’t true.

Well, gadzooks.

But some of it was true. I know that there’s something there. We’ve been talking on the phone every day.

Never at night?

She has kids.

"YOU’VE never talked to her at night."

I’m going down there. If she’s even one-third as good as I think, I’ve got to know.

Walter flew down, followed his heart to New Orleans and came home with a steel plate in it. He’d holed up for three days in a cheap hotel near her husband’s office. She was not a lingerie model, looked nothing like the corduroy cutie on the catalogue. She had modeled hats once in junior high for a local department store’s Spring Fling. She was not a psych-therapist although she had taken a counseling course in Junior College before she got married, and she was likely certifiable. Now she was married and wanted out, and was husband-hunting for number one’s replacement, casting her inter-net on the wide electronic sea. But she and Walter? Two blips who passed in the night. She was not one-third as good, one quarter, one-twentieth, one-one-thousandth, one goo-golplexth as good as he thought.

Walter was disappointed, but he recovered quickly. He asked me out the following Saturday. But I declined. I didn’t dislike him enough any longer.What could I tell him? That I didn’t know that he had that much hope, that much capacity for delusion in him? I could love a man like that, so I never returned his call. He married the Holiday Inn hostess two months later.

But the psycho-model haunted me. In the hypnagogic dusk, the oneiric purple evenings of late fall, she glimmered over the silage, like summer’s last firefly, a fleeting thought. I could understand an e-flirtation, an e-seduction, an e-mendacity. But to move from e to actuality, that was beyond my comprehension. How could she show up at some quickie motel, wearing her face, her flesh, all the while knowing that Walter, her e-paramour, trembled behind door number two (the brass number slightly askew) expecting an entirely other e-babe to enter his embrace, expecting to grab the brass ring and exchange it for a diamond one. Surely she knew, one knock and she’d blown her glossy cover. Did she think that he’d overlook the catalogue ink and love her on the instant for herself? Was that optimism or crass brass?

Bang the conundrum loudly. Herald in the new me. That was that. I was done with dating. Really done this time. Overdone, tough with gristle, charred to the bone. Hard as hardtack. Down to brass tacks: no more dates.

But that was before, before Mr. U.P.S. rolled into my driveway, my life, my heart. And it was just time now, a week or two, before those orders started rolling in, rolling rolling rolling, keep those brown trucks rolling, rolling down my dateless driveway. And they did. They do.

So how to explain why I hide in my own closet or crouch behind my couch whenever I hear a car bump up the driveway or catch a glimpse of the brown truck nosing to a stop in front of my garage, leaving my Mister U.P.S. to leave a parcel tucked into a forlorn door, unsigned for, unwelcomed, unloved. How to explain that, after the plume of dust settles in the driveway, that then, that only then, I scurry out of the closet or scuttle from behind the couch to retrieve my parcel with its plastic daisy sink stopper within only to press the corrugated cardboard against my chest, trying to recover the warmth of his palms, his brown hands against brown paper. I live in sepia tint like a curling photograph.

When I should be editing, I find myself staring out windows again, willing the little brown truck up my driveway so that I can dash into my closet before he reaches my door. Oh mysterious workings of the human heart.

I named him UPS, Mr. Ups. Up. Heart rate up. Pulse up. Attitude up and up and soaring. Up, the launching pad to my heart. Up my hopes and raised my eyes. My brown clad lad, my star ascendant. My pretty package, Mr. Ups.

When you live alone, you can keep your own schedule. This morning I’ve been editing the Iron Horse chapter, steel plate number three, since five a.m.. At ten I decide to color my gray and wash my sins away. Halfway through my shower, the tap head starts spitting pellets. Power must have gone out. I lurch out of the stall. My feet freeze to the floor. I can’t find my towel and have a head full of dye. I grab the nearest thing I can find to plunk onto my head while I scramble, naked, chattering in quest of towel. I twist my mop into a padded mailer and dash for the linen closet. Sweet Jesus, it is cold. I emanate steam. Dry ice. Then I hear it—a distant rumble in crescendo, crescendo. Quick. What? Hide.

I up-end a wingchair in the living room, and, trying to compress my body into the size of an ice cube, I weld myself to the chairback. At least I forget that I am cold, but my heart stabs me like a jousting icicle. Calm down, I reason with myself.

But I can hear in the purr in the drive, the brown cozy cat of the purr that it is my package man, the van, the vanguard of my fantasies. Hush, I say to my roving mercenary marauder of a heart.

I hear the knock. My heart rocks.