II
II
At home in her small white living room, she turned off all the lights but one and sat down on the couch. She put the shirt on and pulled the collar up to her chin. There was some kind of aftershave or deodorant, and a musk equal to hard work, and with these all his countless other smells mingled to warm the skin under her nose and the skin of her neck and her cheeks, the way a mint or a medicine would. Her arms swam in the sleeves excitedly and she wrapped them around her body and touched her own ribs as though the arms were someone else’s arms – not his, exactly, not the man’s arms.
Wouldn’t she like to sit next to him again? Sitting for a nice long time next to quiet men didn’t come easy. Most men would either look her all over, like the men in gas station parking lots did, or ignore her and stay far away, like the men most everywhere else did. Melissa went and got into her bed and closed her eyes. She lifted the comforter up to her face and held it tightly in her fists. Almost, the idea of the man came next to her. It was difficult to imagine him, and she badly wanted to imagine him, with her eyes closed, with a pillow beside her that could feel like a body. She put the collar of the shirt in her mouth and took it out again; her mouth was dry, and the shirt didn’t get damp. Since she did not know the sound of his voice, and had never seen him talk or laugh, her imagination did not work a miracle. She got up and took off everything but the shirt; it hung down close to her knees. In the kitchen, she walked in small circles from the sink to the light of the refrigerator, drinking water out of a mason jar. And eventually she sat on the floor.
Her head was wild with a savage loneliness and the floor was cold and smooth. She lay her cheek down on one of the tiles and balled herself up and held the jar like a toy. It was then that she saw the jar glowing. It glowed dimly, like a flashlight behind a thick hank of wool. The smell and color of the shirt grew suffuse in the empty jar and when she held the lip of the jar to her nose the idea of the man was there. It was complete and full, just as though he sat with her on the tile floor, with his back turned away, doing something else. She could smell him and she could even hear his voice, though she had never heard it before. It sounded like he was talking to a friend, someone nearby that she couldn’t see.
She put the jar down and rummaged through drawers and cabinets and found a lid for it. It was a canning lid, of course, with a flat disk and a screw top, one that she had never used; she found it next to a cherry pitter, under a sieve. After she tightened it on the jar the glow went on unchecked. She opened the jar again and once more she felt the man in the room with her. A sense of relaxation and contentment overwhelmed her. It was a thrill of holiday excitement, like she might have expected to feel in a church parking lot after a nighttime concert of vespers and hand bells, like the ones she heard as a child, her consciousness hovering on the edges of a vast and serious country. With the lid tightened again, she took the jar to bed and placed it on her nightstand, and she slept soundly, and dreamt of nothing all night long. She did not dream of voltage, or electrical tape, or insulated wires, or men. She did not dream of herself.
