Martin Sloane Read Free

are co-conspirators in what has become of me. A lifetime of versions. But the little girl? She’s gone. I don’t have her. It’s only when you’re old enough to understand that the past is gone forever that you begin to store your own life, and like most children, at least as I recall, I thought I would be eight forever. Or eight and taller, eight with hips, eight with boyfriends. Never anything but eight.
    I probably didn’t start keeping track of my own life until I left my childhood home. Then I’d lie awake in my dorm bed testing to see if I could remember how all the doors in the house I no longer lived in opened. Which ones swung easily on their hinges, which had a sticking point you had to tug it through. Which doorknobs were loose, which stiff. The folding closet door in my bedroom that slid open on a track and then came off the track and swung free. I thought to myself, once I’d forgotten the doors of my childhood home, my childhood would truly be over.
    Martin Sloane was fifty-four when I started writing to him, fifty-six when we became lovers, now that’s the thing that seems shocking, the raw fact of that. Before then, I had a clear vision, so I thought, of the kind of person I would eventually love. It would be someone a little like me. Like me, but with improvements. Someone more open, someone a little smarter, a little stronger emotionally. But someone who’d fit in back at home, should I have ever wanted to return. After meeting Martin, I went down my list. He
seemed
more open, but I couldn’t really tell. He
was
smarter, but emotionally stronger? Did I really want that tested? Did I want to
lose
that test?
    The problem of what other people would think was more serious (I dreaded the gossip) but in the end it was more easy to deal with. By the time I couldn’t live without Martin, it didn’t matter what anyone thought.
    The first time we met in person his face surprised me. Although he was thirty-five years my senior, his face was smooth, his short mussed hair jet black with only flecks of silver. (I was to have more grey in my hair by the time I turned thirty.) His nose was too big for his face, and his eyes were as dark as his hair. His face made me think of the busts of dead men, the illusion of living eyes made by holes in the stone. So that from one angle, they would seem pitiless, and from another, they’d spring to life.
    He’d just walked off the bus in Annandale, where Bard College was. I was waiting with a car I’d gotten from Rent-a-Duck, a rusted-out VW bug with a pipe for a gearshift and a steel plate over a hole in the floor. He was lugging his artworks in a plain old garbage bag, and I rushed over to him and forced him to put the bag down and let me stack the artworks, so they could be carried, tower-like.
    Just dump them in the back, he said.
    Let me be in charge of them. You’re a guest now.
    If anything breaks, I’ll fix it. We’d gotten to the bug. This is a great little car, he said.
    They were out of Jaguars. I put down the boxes gingerly to unlock the trunk. The lid had to be propped up with a stick. Then he began plunking them in, like they were groceries. He put the last one in and took the stick out, and the lid slammed shut. I’d watched him with paralyzed wonder.
    You can’t treat them like they’re permanent. He went around to the passenger side. They’ll get ideas. He tried to put the seatbelt on, but the business end of it had been melted into a glob in some previous disaster. This is going to be an adventure, he said happily.
    I started down the country road that wound between towns, one side a river, the other a forest.
    Can I work the shift? he asked.
    What do you mean?
    You say
shift,
I change gears.
    Do you know how to drive?
    No. But when I was just a kid, my dad had a Saloon car and once we drove it from Dublin to Galway and part of the way I sat on his lap and shifted the car. So I have that part down good.
    Did you travel a lot with your