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10 You Could Hear Me Whisper Then

10

you could hear me whisper then

Danielle

It’s almost completely dark out as I pull up to the complex. I glance at the clock: six-fifteen. I told Alicia I’d meet her at the salon at seven-thirty. She got me an appointment last minute with her hairdresser. She said I needed a “drastic physical change” so I’m going blond. Well, blond-ish. My hair has been dark brown, almost black, since I was born. I’ve entertained the idea of going lighter as I’ve gotten older, something softer, but Alex always said he liked my striking dark hair.

Divorce is always a good time to bleach your hair, I figure.

I’m cursing myself inside for fighting for so long with Alex on the porch. I’ll hardly have any time to settle in with this last load of things I’ve brought to the apartment. I park in the front fire lane, turn on my hazards, and jump out. As I’m unloading my suitcases and a couple of boxes to the front of the building, a woman walks out. She looks to be in her sixties, wearing pink scrubs.

“Hi, girlie. ”

I laugh out loud. “Hardly,” I say. I know I’m going to like this woman already.

“I’m Candy, let me help. I have a few minutes. The manager told me you were moving in today—2A, right? Danielle and Alex?”

“You can call me ‘Dani.’?”

“Dani and Candy, how cute,” she says, and I laugh.

I hope she’s not nosy. Candy seems like one of those hummingbird type of people, so she probably is. Always in motion, talking, chewing gum, fidgeting constantly, to the point where you think if she stops moving, she’ll die. She’s thin. I notice her pink scrubs have little tiny bananas on them and her badge says, CANDY LEE, RN above the emblem for Verdugo Hills Hospital.

I point to her badge. “Ah, my husband does one day a week there.” It immediately hits me that I called him “my husband” and she is never going to see us together. Do I explain this weird situation to her? Do I call him my ex, or soon-to-be ex?

“Oh yeah? What department?” she asks.

“He’s a physical therapist.”

She winks. “I’m in the ER. I probably never see him.”

Of course she is, the ER requires her kind of energy.

We put the last of the boxes at the bottom of the stairs going up to my new apartment. “Well, it was nice to meet you. I know you have to run…”

“Same to you. I’ll give you my number in case you guys need anything. They keep this place real nice, and it’s safe too. By the way, where is the fella?”

I guess I’m not getting out of this one so easily. “He’s…um.” I don’t have it in me right now. “He’ll be here later.” Dammit, why didn’t I tell her?

“Well, good luck with unpacking.” And she’s off, humming along .

Once in the apartment I flip on all the lights. LEDs everywhere. It’s stark. I hate the lighting, I hate the gray furniture, and I hate the gray wood floors. This place definitely needs some life—plants, art, music, macramé. No one will drop dead from a little splash of color and a few tchotchkes.

I take a deep breath and plop onto the sofa, which looks and feels like a solid granite slab. There isn’t much I can do at this moment. It’s too late to go out looking for furnishings, so I get up and begin unpacking. The record player fits perfectly on the built-in shelves in the corner. I manage to rig the speaker with my MacGyver skills, which I know Alex will criticize if he notices I didn’t use the proper hooks or a stud finder to hang the speaker. There are no babies here, we can operate like college kids, so unless it falls on his head, it should be fine.

I start putting the records on the bottom shelf, when one of the sleeves pops out. It’s a Mazzy Star record. Not exactly a classic passed down from generation to generation, but I guess it will be now. I laugh to myself at the memory of buying that record. Alicia had made fun of me, saying it wasn’t the type of band you got on vinyl. She had bought the CD, but look now, I doubt she’d be able to find her old CD collection, and here I have this little time machine to take me back to the late nineties. Music and smells are the senses that evoke memories for me more than anything else.

I started to continue my father’s tradition around the time I bought this album. The white sleeves on the inside of some of my father’s records would be covered with his notes. Some were just lists of things happening around that time, and some were in the form of short narratives. I had done the same for many years after he passed them down to me.

I put the Mazzy Star album on and set it to the song “Fade Into You.” As I read the note on the sleeve, I’m instantly back, twenty-two-plus years ago, to the first night Alex and I were together. I was so light then, in every way emotionally. Nothing was serious to me yet. Ben was still alive, my parents were together, and I was breaking in as a writer. I was living a dream.

On top of all the good things happening, I was also dating Alex. We had met at a mutual friend’s house party, exchanged phone numbers, talked on the phone, and gone on a couple of group dates, both of which concluded over a pile of cocaine on a picture frame and drinking until we passed out. Those two nights, Alex and I ended up chatting on the friend’s porch into the early hours of the morning. We didn’t even kiss, but looking back, I credit those two nights to the solid foundation we formed as friends. We hadn’t gone on a proper date at that point, but somehow the cocaine-fueled evenings had led to some intense conversation. We knew a lot about each other from those talks. We knew for sure that we liked each other and agreed on practically everything in the world news.

In messy blue ink, the Mazzy Star album sleeve reads:

Alex was here last night. Alex was everywhere.

I remember writing it. It was after our first real date. We had gone to dinner and my roommate was out of town, so Alex had come back to my apartment. We didn’t sleep…and there was no cocaine. I guess when I wrote the phrase on the sleeve, I wasn’t thinking about handing the record down to my children. It wouldn’t matter if they saw it anyway, even at their age now; they’ve been exposed enough to the inner workings of my mind from watching the shows I’ve written. They wouldn’t be surprised I wrote something like this on a record sleeve twenty-something years ago.

That night, so many years ago at my apartment, I saw Alex’s vulnerability for the first time…he was a little insecure, unsure of himself. Prior to that night, he’d been nothing but confident. He had that kind of confidence that’s never mistaken for arrogance. It was the thing that attracted me to him from the start. He was funny and kind with me, and with our mutual friends. He moved in a way that made him seem coordinated and smooth, but not slimy. He had spatial awareness and self-awareness, and he was intelligent but not immodest. Physically, he was by far the most universally attractive person I had ever dated. He still is, after all these years, a man who turns heads but doesn’t really know it.

But that first night we were alone at my apartment was different. He was softer, more timid. I had put the Mazzy Star album on, poured two glasses of wine, and sat next to him on the couch.

“So your roommate is in Europe?” he asked. Something unspoken was lingering between us. We were either going to have sex or we were going to be friends. I don’t think he knew with any kind of certainty which it would be, but I definitely had a clue.

“Yeah, she’s in Spain for a month visiting an aunt.” He watched me closely, which made me uncomfortable. I was fidgeting. He put his hand over mine and smiled.

“I can’t believe we haven’t kissed yet,” he said, before laughing. Instantly the mood lightened. He had pointed out the elephant in the room and things felt easier. He was staring at my mouth.

“I guess that is weird,” I said. “Not attracted to me, or what?” I teased, knowing that wasn’t the case.

“You’re beautiful and I’m very attracted to you. The most attracted to someone I’ve ever been, I think. I just don’t want to blow it.” He was sincere, but cautious .

“Do you date a lot?”

“Not really. I had a girlfriend for four years.”

I don’t know why that surprised me. “You did?” I said, and then laughed.

He smiled. “Why do you think that’s so funny?”

“Just because we’re so young,” I said.

“I’m twenty-five. A little older than you. I guess that’s still young-ish.” He shrugged. “Maybe I’m kind of a relationship person?”

“Why’d you break up?”

“I’m afraid if I tell you, you’ll think I’m shallow”

I remember in that moment thinking, Oh no, this guy’s gonna tell me his girlfriend gained ten pounds and I’m gonna have to punch him in the face and tell him to get out. “Try me,” I said. It was important for me to know if he was, in fact, shallow.

“She called me ‘bro.’ I have no idea why. I mean…I spent four years with her calling me that, and for a long time it didn’t bother me. She did it from the very beginning. Anyway, we weren’t really a great match. It wasn’t totally about that. We were nothing alike. Toward the end she became obsessed with Beanie Babies. You know those little stuffed animals?”

“Yeah. I have a few my mom gave me. Is there something wrong with them?”

“When I say obsessed, I mean she had hundreds . She spent all her money on them and then she started dragging me to Beanie Baby conventions.” He laughed and looked away. “I just couldn’t get into it. She’s a nice person. She’s already moved on to a fellow Beanie Baby collector.” His delicacy about the subject was charming, as if he felt guilty for not liking her.

“I don’t think it was shallow of you. Did you break her heart though?”

“Not at all. It was unemotional, like she expected it or wanted it. I went to her house and told her I thought we should take a break. She told me she had been wanting to call it off for a long time. That was that. I called her on her birthday four months ago and she said she was getting married.”

“To the Beanie Baby guy?”

“Of course.”

“It was meant to be this way,” I told him.

He leaned in and kissed me then. It was not a long, passionate, crazy kiss. It was like a testing-the-waters kind of kiss, but I could tell just from those three seconds connected to him that he was going to be good in bed. When he pulled away he was searching my eyes…hesitant. “What about you? Do you date a lot?” he asked.

“I’ve never really had much of a substantial relationship, other than this guy Jacob, who I dated my first year in college. But no, I don’t date a lot. I’ve made it very clear to my friends to stop trying to set me up. I went on like eight stupid setup dates last year.”

“I wonder why they didn’t set us up?” he said.

Alicia had told me that Brandon, a guy she was dating, had a friend, Alex, but that he was into blondes. In the beginning I thought a lot about the “blondes” thing. At the time it was strange for Brandon to try to thwart Alex and me getting together, but years later, Brandon revealed to us that he was gay, and had always had a thing for Alex, so it all eventually made sense. I loved the way Alex handled the situation when Brandon came out and told him. Alex was flattered, gracious, and forgiving of the whole thing. He didn’t make Brandon feel bad, even though I know when we were first dating he was pretty pissed at him.

“Brandon told Alicia that you were into blondes. ”

“He did what?” Alex seemed genuinely confused, and a little pissed.

“Yeah, that you wouldn’t be into me.”

“I never said I was into blondes or that I wouldn’t be into you. The opposite actually. Yeah, my last girlfriend was blond, but we know how that ended.” It was quiet for several moments. “Honestly, when I first saw you, your dark hair…I mean, you’re so striking, Dani, I could barely take my eyes off you. You have this thing, it’s like a transcendent beauty.”

It felt like all of the air in the room had suddenly dropped to the floor. Time had stopped. We were in our own atmosphere. He leaned in to kiss me again, but then hesitated. “Brandon knew I thought that. I don’t know why he told Alicia—”

I put my hand to his lips to quiet him. “Never mind.”

Every detail of that night is still a sharp memory. Later, when things really got going in the bedroom, he asked me if I liked what he was doing. I could barely speak when I told him yes. He wanted to please me then. He cared.

Nothing lasts forever, I guess.

My phone is buzzing in my pocket. It’s Alicia.

“Hello?”

“I’m on my way to the salon. Are you there yet?”

“No, I’ll leave in a minute.” I had lost time. Floating around in a dream of what used to be.

“Is that Mazzy Star I hear playing in the background?”

I laugh. “Yes.”

“Why?” she said.

“I love this album,” I whine .

“You’re such a dork. Meet me there in ten.”

“Bye.”

As I’m walking out, I glance at my laptop screen on the desk. There is a Facebook notification. I look closer. It’s just a reminder of an old high school friend’s birthday. After wishing her a happy birthday, I decide to type Jacob Powell into the search bar for some reason I can’t explain. His profile immediately pops up. Even though I know I’m running late, I can’t help myself. He looks exactly the same. Jacob was my longest relationship before Alex and it was only a year, my freshman year in college. He had actually, legitimately broken my young, tender heart. Jacob was just one of those people who couldn’t be pinned down, but he was so much fun and unbelievably sexy. When we were together, he made me feel amazing, but he was too wild. I wanted him in my life forever, but relationship commitment was just not in his DNA. And we were so young.

His profile says he’s single, of course. Then something catches my eye: We have two mutual “friends,” Alicia and Mark. Alicia had definitely met Jacob a few times while he and I were dating many years ago, but Mark never did. Why are they Facebook friends?

I change my status from married to single and then immediately go back and try to return my status to married, but it won’t let me. The computer is frozen, displaying an endless spinning pinwheel. “Ugh.” I don’t know why I did it to begin with. Frustrated, I shut it down and grab my purse to leave for the salon. I make a mental note to ask Alicia why she and Mark are friends with Jacob on Facebook. Then I wonder if this moment officially marks the beginning of my divorcée status.

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