Lisa, 2009

“Listen,” he said, putting a finger to her lips.

“What?”

“Just listen.”  And there was a sound, through the window, a cooing sound that trailed through the night.

“Poor, sad owl...oh, I want to go to it,” she said, breath against his cheek.

“Mother-woman,” he said.  “Always a mother-woman.”

She was forty-five, and he had only just found her.  It was over, she had said.  The mothering part of her, ripped out and stitched back.  Yet here she was, near-weeping over the hoot of an owl.  He left his fingers against the ends of her hair, the tips dried and cracked from years of dyeing out the gray...her face like that, too, the cracking just starting around her lips and down from her nose to the edges of her mouth.

The owl-sound came again, and her mouth opened a little, her own owl-sound escaping from deep in her lungs, a whimper.

“You know, I’d give you anything in the world.”  Sometimes he gave her sentiments like this, handed them off without thinking.  She looked wise, on the outside, wearing jeans that weren’t fashionable and knowing several languages and the names of statesmen as well as actors.  She looked wise, and so he forgot the doe-eyed look that came now, the ignorance she had managed to live with for forty-five years.  Afraid, she said, of men.  Not of closeness or of sex, but of men.  And so she had never been close.  A virgin, she had said, before him.  So here she lay, trusting, so trusting, of the words he had thrown out to how many women before her?  He had lost count.  His bedpost was made from a tree he had found in that forest, notched even before he had cut it.  He considered her a conquest.  The tree, that is.  He kept a solid count of the trees he had cut; it seemed only proper.  But women?  Women came and went.  

“Do you love me, Paul?”

He thought for a moment, staring into those sad eyes.  “No.”

“No?  What if that’s the only thing I wanted?”

“Then I would have only lied once.”  

She paused, and he wondered if she would understand.  At times like this, though, she was wiser than he gave her credit for.  

“Do you lie to me often, then?”  

This he could grow to love.  She was without contempt, the sort of woman who knew the ways of men like him, men who count trees instead of women and accepted them.

“I’m trying to stop.”  

She settled against his chest and closed her eyes.  He glanced at his hand, resting on her shoulder, calloused and freckled and dry, covered in bark more than human skin.  She must know the sort of man he was from that hand, at least, the same way that he could read her eyes and the lines on her face into a story.

“If you’re waiting for me to tell you that I love you, I don’t,” she said.

“I believe you,” he said, his second lie of the night.

“I don’t love you,” she repeated.

“I know.  That’s okay.  I’m not in love with you, either,” he said, and this time she looked angry.

“Well, good.”

“Go to sleep,” he said, and tried to stroke her hair comfortingly.  Her eyes closed, but her body stayed tense and her breath did not change.  “Rest.”

Her eyes opened a bit.  “Who are you to tell me to rest?”

“I’m a man, that’s who.”

“Oh yeah?  That gives you a right to tell me what to do?”

“It was a joke, Lisa.  You know I’m not like that.”

“I don’t think I know what you’re like.”  Her voice was soft now.  She would not spend many more nights with him.  That was sad, for what it was, but not so sad.  “I’m sorry.  I’m being crazy...I get like this when I’m tired.”

“You’re fine.”  

“No, I’m not.  I shouldn’t be mean to you.  You’re so kind to me.”

“You’re not mean, Lisa.  You’re just tired.”

“What is ‘love,’ anyway?  It doesn’t mean anything, and it’s certainly not worth getting worked up over.  Why do we give so much weight to one silly word?”

“Lisa, let’s sleep.”

“Wait, Paul.  If it doesn’t mean anything, then why won’t you just say it?  Just tell me that you love me.”

“I didn’t say it didn’t mean anything.  You said that.”

“Because it doesn’t mean anything!  Everyone knows that.  It’s just good manners, Paul.  Just tell me you love me.  We’ve been together a few months, and that’s what men say to women after a few months, isn’t it?”

“Sometimes, yes.”

“Then why won’t you just tell me that you love me?”

“I love you, Lisa.”

There was a long pause.  Paul closed his eyes, though he knew better than to think that the conversation was over.

“Do you mean it, Paul?”

When he opened his eyes, they were met by a knot on the birch bedpost, staring back at him, an eye.  An eye that was not attached to a mouth that did not ask rhetorical questions or expect nonsense from him, an eye that let him be a man, a silent, brooding man in his own bed, bare feet warm under a quilt that smelled of mothballs and dust, a man under creaking house-timbres and surrounded by owls who were not anthropomorphized, just owls...

“We are not so different, Lisa.  I’ve had this house twenty years and never had a woman to share it with.”

She didn’t reply, but that was fair.  After all, he hadn’t answered her question.

“I like the quiet.”

“I suppose you do,” she said.  “I suppose you’ll never change, either.”

“I like the quiet, Lisa.”  

“You’re a sentimental man, you know that?  You pretend not to love, but you do love things.  You act gruff and you look gruff, but underneath you’re just a coward, afraid to get close to anything that moves.”

“I had a dog once, Lisa.  They move all the time, more than women, even.”

“I’m serious, Paul.  What man even lives in the same house forty years anymore?  You only love things that are rooted to the ground.”

He gave up on sleep, mostly, at that point.  She was aching for a fight, apparently, and he didn’t have the energy to get out of it.

“You’re probably right, Lisa.  I don’t know.”

“I’m looking to marry, Paul.”

He let the silence draw out, then said, “oh?” as if he had not known the sort of woman that she was.

“I shouldn’t waste my time on men who aren’t, you know, at my age.”

“Alright, Lisa.”

“Well?”

“What?”  he had thought that the conversation was ending, but now it seemed that it wasn’t.  

“What about you, Paul?”

“Lisa, you’re right about me.”

“I wish I wasn’t.”

She seemed to have an endless capacity for emotion and sentiment.  He was bone-weary, and she kept on about feelings.  He longed for a good sleep beside the open window, to wake in the morning and go out into the brook for a swim.  Instead, she would bring out the wine soon, he knew, and they would drink and talk about feelings some more, and he would wake up in the morning having heard her insults and held her as she cried into him, all because of simple differences in their characters.  He would be hungover, perhaps, and either way not rested.

Such a waste of a night, spending it with a woman.