The Ignored (12 page)

The first thing I probably should’ve thought was that somebody had taken
her, that she’d been kidnapped by the same person who had ransacked our
apartment.

But somehow I knew that wasn’t the case.

She’d left me.

I don’t know how I knew, but I knew. Maybe I had seen it coming but
hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it. I thought back, remembered her telling me that
communication was the most important thing in a relationship, that even if two
people loved each other, there was no relationship if they couldn’t communicate.
I recalled her trying to talk to me for the past few months, trying to get me to
talk to her and tell her what was bothering me, what was wrong.

I remembered the night at Elise.

We hadn’t really talked much since that evening. We’d fought about not
talking a few times, she accusing me of emotional secrecy, of not opening up and
sharing my feelings with her, my lying and claiming that there were no feelings
to share, that everything was fine. But even our fights had been tepid, lukewarm
affairs, not the passionate battles of the past.

I looked again at the folded square of white notebook paper with my name
on it.

Maybe she would have told me of her plans to leave at one time. But we
definitely had not been talking much lately, and in that context the note made
perfect sense.

I reached down, picked up the paper, unfolded it.

Dear Bob,

These are the hardest words I’ve ever had to write.

I didn’t want to do it this way, and I know it’s wrong, but I don’t
think I could face you right now. I don’t think I could go through with it.

I know what you’re thinking. I know what you’re feeling. I know you’re
angry right now, and you have every right to be. But it’s just not working out
between us. I’ve turned this over and over again in my mind, wondering if we
should try to work it out or if we should just spend some time apart, in a trial
separation, and I finally decided that the best thing to do would be to make a
clean break. It’ll be hard at first (at least it will be for me), but I think in
the long run it will be for the best.

I love you. You know that. But sometimes love isn’t enough. For a
relationship to work, there has to be trust and a willingness to share. We don’t
have that. Maybe we never had that. I don’t know. But I thought we did at one
time.

I don’t want to place blame here. It’s not your fault this happened.
It’s not my fault. It’s both our faults. But I know us. I know me, I know you,
and I know that even though we’ll say we’ll work on our relationship, nothing
will change. I think it’s better to say good-bye now before things get too ugly.

I’ll never forget you, Bob. You’ll always be a part of me. You were the
first person I ever loved, the only person I’ve ever loved. I’ll remember you
always.

I’ll love you always.

Good-bye.

Beneath that was her signature. She’d signed her full name, both first
and last, and it was that bit of formality that hurt more than anything else.
It’s a clich� to say that I felt an emptiness inside me, but I did. There was an
ache that was almost physical, an undefined hurt that had no set center but
seemed to alternate between my head and heart.

“Jane Reynolds.”

I glanced again at the paper in my hand. Now that I looked at it, now
that I reread it, it wasn’t just the signature that struck me as being too
formal. The entire letter seemed stiff and stilted. The words and sentiments hit
home, but they still seemed familiar and far too pat. I’d read them before in a
hundred novels, heard them said in a hundred movies.

If she loved me so much, why were there no tears? I wondered. Why
weren’t any of the letters smeared; why wasn’t the ink running?

I looked around the kitchen, back into the living room. Someone had to
have helped her move the furniture, the couch, the table. Who? Some guy? Someone
she’d met? Someone she was fucking?

I sat down hard on one of the chairs. No. I knew that wasn’t the case.
She was not seeing someone else. She would not have been able to hide something
like that from me. She would not even have tried.
That
she would’ve told
me about. That she would’ve talked to me about.

Her dad had probably helped her move.

I walked out of the kitchen, through the living room to the bedroom. In
here the loss was less, but more personal, and all the more painful for that. No
furniture had been removed. The bed was still in place, as was the dresser, but
the bedspread and the lace doily covering the top of the dresser were gone. In
the closet there were only my clothes. The framed photographs on the nightstands
had been taken.

I sat down on the bed. My insides felt like the apartment—physically,
structurally unchanged, but gutted, hollowed out, soulless, the heart removed. I
sat there as the room darkened, late afternoon turning to dusk, dusk to evening.

I made my own dinner, Kraft macaroni and cheese, and afterward watched
the news,
Entertainment Tonight
, and all the other shows I usually
watched. I was paying attention to the TV, yet not paying attention; waiting for
a phone call from Jane, yet not waiting. It was as though I was possessed of
multiple personalities—all with conflicting thoughts and desires—and was
aware of all of them at once, but the overall effect was one of numbed lethargy,
and I sat on the couch and did not move until the late news came on at eleven.

It was strange walking into the dark, empty bedroom, strange not hearing
Jane in the bathroom, brushing her teeth or taking a shower, and with the
television turned off I realized how quiet the apartment was. From down the
street somewhere, muffled and indistinct, I could hear the sounds of a frat
party. Outside, life continued on as usual.

I took off my clothes, but instead of dropping them on the floor and
then crawling into bed like I usually did, I decided to put them in the hamper,
as Jane had always nagged me to do. I carried my pants and shirt into the
bathroom, opened the plastic top of the dirty clothes basket, and was about to
drop them in when I looked down.

There at the bottom of the hamper, rolled up next to one of my socks,
was a pair of Jane’s panties.

The white cotton ones.

I dropped my clothes on the floor. I swallowed hard. Suddenly, staring
down at Jane’s rolled-up underwear, I felt like crying. I took a deep breath. I
remembered the first time I’d ever seen her. She’d been wearing white panties
and a pair of jeans with a rip in the crotch to school. I had been sitting
across from her in the library and I had been able to see that white peeking
through the hole in the blue, and nothing had ever turned me on so much in my
life.

My eyes were wet as I bent over, reached into the hamper for the
panties. I picked them up gingerly, handling them as though they were breakable,
and carefully unrolled them. They felt damp to my touch, and when I lifted them
to my face, the cotton smelled faintly of her.

“Jane,” I whispered, and it felt good to say her name.

I whispered it again. “Jane,” I said. “Jane…”

Jane had been gone for three weeks.

I settled into my chair and looked at the calendar I’d tacked up on the
wall to my left. There were fifteen red X’s drawn through the month’s workdays.

As I did each morning, I crossed out another date, today’s date. My eye
was drawn back to that first X—September 3. I had not heard from Jane since
she’d left. She had not called to see how I was; she had not sent me a letter to
tell me that she was all right. I’d expected to hear from her, if not for
sentimental reasons, then for practical reasons. I figured there were logistical
things she’d need to discuss—belongings she’d forgotten and wanted me to
send, mail she wanted forwarded—but she had cut off all contact cold.

I worried about her, and more than once, I thought about going to the
Little Kiddie Day Care Center, or even calling her parents, just to make sure
she was okay, but I never did. I guess I was afraid to.

Although I could tell from the drastic decrease in mail that she had put
in a change-of-address request at the post office, she still occasionally
received bills or letters or junk mail, and I saved it all for her.

Just in case.

After work, I stopped by Von’s for milk and bread, but I felt so
depressed that I ended up buying half a gallon of chocolate ice cream and a bag
of Doritos as well. All of the checkout stands were crowded, so I picked the one
with the shortest line. The cashier was young and pretty, a slim brunette, and
she was bantering happily and easily with the man ahead of me as she ran his
items over the scanner. I watched the two of them with envy. I wished I had the
ability to start up a conversation with a perfect stranger, to discuss the
weather or current events or whatever it was that people talked about, but even
in my imagination I was unable to do it. I just could not seem to think of what
to say.

Jane had been the one to start the first conversation between us. If the
responsibility had been left up to me, we probably never would have gotten
together.

When I reached the cashier, she smiled at me. “Hello,” she said. “How
are you today?”

“Fine,” I told her.

I watched in silence as she rang up my items on the cash register. “Six
forty-three,” she said.

Silently, I handed her the money.

I’d never thought about it before, but as I put the ice cream in the
freezer, the Doritos and bread in the cupboard, I realized that there’d always
been something within me that distanced people. Even my relationships with my
grandparents were overly formal; we never hugged or kissed, though they were
naturally affectionate. Ditto with my parents. Throughout my life, our “friends
of the family,” my parents’ friends, had always been nice to me, cordial to me,
but I never got the impression that any of them liked me.

They didn’t dislike me.

They just didn’t notice me.

I was a nobody, a nothing.

Had it always been this way? I wondered. It was possible. I had always
had friends in elementary school, junior high school, high school, but never
very many of them, and as I thought back now, I realized that nearly all of them
had been, like myself, totally nondescript.

On an impulse, I went into the bedroom, opened the closet door, and
found the pile of sealed boxes under my hanging clothes—the record of my
past. Dragging the boxes to the center of the room, I ripped off the masking
tape and opened their tops one by one, digging through the contents of each
until I found my high school yearbooks.

I took the books out, began looking through them. I hadn’t seen the
yearbooks since high school, and it was strange to see again those places, those
faces, those fashions and hairstyles from half a decade back. It made me feel
old and a little sad.

But it also made me feel more than a little uneasy.

As I’d suspected, there were no photographs of me or my friends in any
of the sports, clubs, or dance pictures. There were not even any of us in the
random shots of the campus that were sprinkled throughout the books. We were
nowhere to be seen. It was as though my friends and I had not even existed, as
though we had not eaten lunch at the school or walked across campus from class
to class.

I looked up the names of John Parker and Brent Burke, my two best
friends, in the section of the senior yearbook dedicated to individual
photographs of each class member. They were there, but they looked different
than I recalled, the cast of their features slightly off. I stared at the pages,
flipping back and forth from Brent to John and back again. I had remembered them
as looking more interesting than they apparently had, more intelligent, more
alive, but it seemed my memory had altered the facts. For there they were,
staring blandly into the camera five years ago and out of the pages at me now,
their faces devoid of even the slightest hint of character.

I turned to the blank green pages at the front of the book to see what
they’d written to me on this, the eve of our graduation.

“I’m glad I got to know you. Have a great summer. John.”

“Have a cool summer and good luck. Brent.”

These were my best friends? I closed the yearbook, licked my dry lips.
Their comments were just as impersonal as those of everyone else.

I sat there for a moment in the middle of the floor, staring at the
opposite wall. Was this what it was like for people with Alzheimer’s? Or people
going crazy? I took a deep breath, trying to gather my courage to open the
yearbook again. Had it been them or myself? I wondered. Or both? Was I now as
big a blank to them as they were to me, merely a name from the past and a hazily
remembered face? I opened the yearbook again, turned to my own photo, stared, at
my picture. I found my visage not bland, not blank, not nondescript, but
interesting and intelligent.

Maybe I had grown more average over the years, I thought absurdly. Maybe
it was a disease and I’d caught it from John and Brent.

No. I wished it were something as simple as that. But there was
something far more comprehensive, far more frightening here.

I skimmed the rest of the yearbook, scanning the pages, and a familiar
envelope fell from between the last page and the back cover. Inside the envelope
were my grades. I opened the envelope, scanned the thin translucent sheets of
paper. My senior year: all C’s. Junior year: the same.

I hadn’t been average in English, I knew. I’d always been an
above-average writer.

But my grades did not reflect that.

I had gotten C’s across the board.

A wave of cold passed over me, and I dropped the yearbook and hurried
out of the bedroom. I went into the kitchen, took a beer out of the
refrigerator, popped open the top and chugged it down. The apartment seemed
silent again. I stood in the kitchen, leaning against the sink, staring at the
door of the refrigerator.