Jonathan Starke
Never Was
I always remember you like this. Sitting on my washing machine with a T-shirt pulled over your knees, staring out the window the morning after our first night together. One of the most beautiful images I’ll ever remember. All those brown curls. That golden light on you.
I’d stood looking from the bedroom doorway, my hand on the frame. The same hand I’d busted years ago throwing a right cross in the ring. How I’d pull up the outside knuckle to show you the crack. The way you didn’t flinch or move when it popped.
But I could tell something was wrong. Even then. Even so early into what we were making in Colorado. The way the sun came angling through the trees, creating breaks in the way it lit all those drifting parts of you. Your face half in shadow. Looking out as if waiting for someone else. Like Troy, New York, was just beyond the front yard. Like you could go back home in that moment. Like all you were made of was only some kind of vapor I could trace until you disappeared entirely.
On our first time out, I’d taken you to a family-owned cantina. The small owner with the slick combover and big black moustache greeted us with handshakes and cold golden beer. I pointed to the stiff row of pool cues stuck to the wall and asked if you wanted to play. You answered by setting your cigarettes on a corner table and carrying your beer to the wall, grabbing a cue in your free hand and holding it up like a lance. Inspecting the slight bend and make of it. The kind of body it had to strike.
We shot pool late into the night. Watched by a crowd of blue-collar workers who sat with their backs to the bar just to see. Men who’d come in after twelve-hour shifts at the factory where cracked hands shaped engines and bent steel to fit aircraft that took off fast and rushed through blue skies, their white trails left behind like tracks you can’t follow.
The jukebox flipped song to song, the lyrics in Spanish. All trumpets and banjos and harps and violins. The blow of the horn and soft pull of the strings. And the world outside went from blue to black. And we danced in the corner where our empty beer glasses dripped sweat onto the dark table. I had you in close against me, my face in your curls, our mouths to each other’s necks, sucking the blood of the moment.
A few weeks later, you were saying things like might leave, might go. Leaving. Going. Gone. Words I’d felt and heard too many times already. That I never wanted to hear again.
But still. There was a hope you might stay. That you wouldn’t leave me too. That I was enough and your mind wouldn’t always be two thousand miles away. In some other state. With some other man. One you’d left and returned to, left and returned to. Like a toxic boomerang. And I feared over long nights on the phone that he was working his way back into your life. Into that dream of building a cabin west of Cody, Wyoming. The roughed brown dirt and peaking stems of tomatoes and peppers and carrots. The rows of oats and barley and those persistent sunflowers with expressionless yellow faces.
With a hopeful heart I came to you one fall night. The moon shining in three-quarters. You were housesitting in the woods. We sat in the churning hot tub on the back deck and looked at the stars over the treetops. Talked about hitching and traveling. And I told you how I’d gone and gone and gone and was hoping to find something lasting now. Because the movement breeds the kind of ache that catches in the throat. And we confessed our desires to have children against our better judgment for our nomadic lives and shortcomings. Maybe if we both rooted somewhere, we told ourselves. Maybe so.
For a while we didn’t talk. The backs of our necks against the hard-grained wood, our eyes looking up, watching the blinks come and go in that dark sky.
At one point I took your hand just to see how long you’d hold. My eyes closed. Our fingers linked underwater. The threaded bracelets on your small wrist. Soon you were up and out of the water. Your feet making soft movements over the deck behind me. I looked ahead into the dark trees. Smelled the fresh pines. And then you were calling me to come in and listen to some music.
Inside you told me about how you were a real tomboy as a kid. We were in the basement going through all these old records. You told me about wrestling your brothers and climbing trees. Walking the ground barefoot. I put down the record I was holding and gave you a light shove.
You charged at me. Really tried to take me down. I laughed. Partly because I didn’t expect it, partly because I loved your intensity. All that fire. I stopped the first takedown and spun behind you. Pulled you to the ground and wrapped you up. You squirmed and laughed. Then went back to the serious business of trying to get out of the hold. Soon I relented and got up. Took off across the room. You came after me by running over the bed and dove for my legs. I picked you up at the waist and tossed you back on the bed. Jumped on top of you and let my body go limp. You laughed still. And I could feel your muscles working under me. Your body contorting to find the gaps of escape.
I put my face in your neck. Those curls around me like a cloak. I kept still as you moved, and I breathed you in. That smell. That feel. The kinds of things I couldn’t lose if I tried.
Later we sat tired and sweaty in the upstairs living room. You had one leg over the armrest. Your banjo on your lap, playing old bluegrass songs and singing low. Songs you knew. Songs you were learning. Songs you’d made up.
I watched and listened and waited.
There was a big picture window in front of us. All the lights were out except for the soft hue of a corner lamp. The moonlight cutting in. I wondered if it could always be like this. If you’d trade the known quantity of him for the possibility of me. For the different kind of world I could offer, where leaving was forever erased from the shared dictionary of a new life together. A rooted life with the promises of no more sorrow and no more wandering. Of symmetrical gardens and micro-houses and cloth diapers and all the pent-up love I’d always wanted to give but never had the chance.
Out of nowhere, you said, “I bought a ticket back to Troy.”
And kept plucking the strings.
“Colorado’s not really working out for me.”
Strum.
“I need to get back home.”
Strum.
“I don’t really belong here.”
Strum.
“I didn’t know how to tell you. I’m sorry. I really care.”
I was looking out the window. You kept lightly playing. Picking at the strings with your head to the side, that curly hair falling.
“I do.”
But the whole time you never looked at me. You looked past me. Through the moonlit window and out into the cold night. Like I wasn’t even there. Like I never really was.
I saw a picture of you today. After so many years of wandering foreign countries. Just the pack and me and the road and all the loneliness a man can carry. A hundred thousand miles and heartache always trailing like a shadow. And that version of you I cannot let go. That girl on the washing machine always looking out the window. Held in my mind for so long.
Then, suddenly, you were there again. A new image. Still two thousand miles away. Tucked on that cold coast. Frozen in time on a stage in Troy. Standing in your brown leather boots in front of a microphone, picking that old banjo with a crescent smile. A wedding ring. A powder-blue summer dress. A pregnant belly the size of a soft autumn pumpkin.
Jonathan Starke is a former bodybuilder and boxer. He’s ventured to sixty countries, harvested seaweed in Ireland, given free hugs in Spain, and flipped pancakes in Denmark. He loves riding trains and wondering about the lives unfolding outside the window. His debut novel, You’ve Got Something Coming, received the Black Heron Press Award for Social Fiction. He’s the founding editor of Palooka, and his writing has appeared in The Sun, Missouri Review, Threepenny Review, Gettysburg Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Brevity, and others. You might find him making homemade soap in the evenings or studying French. You might not.