Free American Purgatorio by John Haskell Page A

toward Lexington.

6.
    We arrived in the late afternoon. Alex navigated us to a bar, an Irish bar (or faux Irish bar) where at that moment a girls’ softball team was celebrating some local victory. I was still a little chilled, and because I didn’t know anyone, I sat at a table near the jukebox wall, removed from the locus of the festivities.
    I noticed Alex circulate among the crowd, bowing imperceptibly when he met his friends, bowing, ordering beer, and talking to a girl in a ponytail. I noticed her several times that night but never spoke to her—she never came to my table—and after a while, after the beer and the infectious celebratory mood wore off, I drove Alex to the place where he lived, a cedar-shingled house on a quiet street with lawns and large trees. Inside, because there wasn’t a lot of furniture, we sat on the hardwood floor, drinking leftover red wine, and because there was no sofa I assumed I’d be sleeping on the floor. I had it all laid out in my mind. With a few rugs stacked on top of each other I’d have a mattress, soft enough for sleep. I went to the car, brought in my sleeping bag, and as I was spreading it out on a rug beneath a painted bookcase, the girl from the Irish tavern walked into the room. Alex hadn’t mentioned it, but it turned out that she was his roommate.
    She joined us, sitting cross-legged on the wood floor, a bowl of miniature carrots between us, and she was wearing an oversized T-shirt and what seemed like the bottom of a bathing suit. Although a lot of her skin was visible, I had the impression that she wasn’t showing off, that this was how she walked around, and she was determined to do the same thing, even if a strange or unknown man was camped out in her living room.
    Laura was her name, and when Alex retired to his room Laura and I started talking. She said she was a cartoonist, and so we talked, not about cartoons, but about the philosophical foundation of animation. About how you start with a point, and then you have another point, and between them you have a line, and by moving the line just slightly, just imperceptibly moving the line over and over and over, over time, you begin to effect a change. You start to tell a story.
    She started out asking some innocuous question about where I was from, which led to something and then to something else, and at a certain point in the conversation she commented on the solidity of the floor and the discomfort of sleeping on the hard wood surface, and not too long after that she invited me to sleep in her bed. Not with her, but in her bed. At first I told her it didn’t matter, that I’d be fine on the floor, but I realized I was saying it just to be polite, and why should I be that? Her bed, she said, was large enough, and her offer seemed sincere, an offer of kindness. So I told her, Why not? I didn’t say the words “Why not.” I just said, “Yes, I would love to sleep on a bed.”
    She was wearing the same large T-shirt on the bed; the bathing suit, it turned out, was ordinary regular-sized underwear. And there we lay, on our backs, in parallel lines. I was facing the ceiling, making a point of keeping my body straight, imagining an invisible border between us. I let my eyes close, and we weren’t talking, not at first, and then she said something about her lack of success in the restaurant business. She was a waitress in a local restaurant and apparently she wasn’t getting the shifts she wanted. We talked about her boyfriend, or ex-boyfriend, and I said something about looking for my lost wife. She seemed to understand. We seemed—mutually, I think—to be getting along, and I didn’t sleep and she didn’t sleep, and as we spoke, and as I listened to the sound of the whispering human voice, I was lulled into—not a trance—but I moved closer, so that my shoulder was touching, or almost touching, her shoulder, so that only an