Without Heart
I rarely leave things unfinished. That goes for books, conversations, relationships, love—about anything you can name. There was an exception once, but I’ll get to that. First, let me explain my thoughts on endings because it might help make sense of my story.
I’ve come to believe there’s more than one kind of ending. Four to be precise. The most common, at least for me, is the ending that feels like an ending though it may not look that way to everyone else. For instance, I might watch only the first few minutes of a movie, then walk out for good. Or stop dating a man just when things appear to be stepping up. To some, these endings appear premature, a waste of something promising. But to me I’m done, based on an internal sense that there’s nothing more to explore.
Most people drag these endings out. This is the second kind, one that occurs internally like the previous one, but is allowed to play out until it looks finished to most people. These are the endings that gain you sympathy from family and friends. They’re socially acceptable. Even I sometimes take my endings to their “logical” stopping-point just to dodge the appearance of callousness and allow others the satisfaction of “soothing” me. In the case of love, that may mean dating a man longer than my feelings last. The trick is to wait for the inevitable lessening of his attention, the gradual decline in lovemaking, glances at other women. Then the final strike: calling him on the “evidence,” building a case for distrust, “driving him away” with suspicions. There are ways to push someone out so your own handiwork doesn’t show.
Of course, there’s a third kind of ending, the kind brought on unexpectedly by uncontrollable events. Death. Disaster. Murder. Madness. It hardly ever looks just or fitting, but upon reflection these endings usually bring a sense of tragic finality. “There must be a reason,” people often say afterwards. The implication being that some wiser hand has orchestrated events perfectly, paving the way for something better or even the possibility of enlightenment and growth. I haven’t endured many of these endings and don’t relish their bludgeoning element of surprise. But at least they’re over quickly so life can fill in with something better.
There’s a fourth ending, a more enigmatic one, because like the ending just mentioned, it comes unexpectedly. But unlike ending No. 3 this one never feels final. Nothing is learned—even upon reflection. No enlightenment. I know because I’ve had nine years to reflect upon one such ending, the only one I’ve ever endured. And it still doesn’t feel finished.
I say this all as a prelude to my story of Danny. It’s my contention that this fourth ending, the one I had with Danny, is an ending left undone. How else to explain why I knew him, why something so ripe with opportunities for insight and expansion, for love, crumbled into such senselessness? If you believe, as I do, that all things happen for a reason then this riddle has no answer.
****
She marvels now that Danny and she ever chanced upon one another, two people so different. Or that she allowed more than a brief conversation given their obvious disparities. Some decisions defy logic. Even “fate” doesn’t quite capture the odd sense of inevitability that still haunts her memories of their time together.
By now it’s obvious I’m telling this story in the third person for distance. Or else I don’t think I can tell it at all. At least with any honesty.
She was in New York that fall doing research for a book on Yiddish theater in America. She’d won a nine-month Cullman Center Fellowship offered by the New York Public Library. Adam, her boyfriend, was back in Philadelphia finishing his master’s degree in art museum administration. She planned to rejoin him the following May.
Danny ambled up the library’s grand front steps where she sat eating carrot sticks and hummus in the bright sun. It was unusually sultry for November. Danny was lugging a tub of tools, which he dropped behind her next to the plywood scaffolding erected around Patience, one of the two marble lion statues that flank the library’s entrance.
“Should I move?” she asked, reaching to gather her lunch.
“No, sorry.” He wiped his forehead and ran fingers through thick chestnut hair. “We haven’t started repairs yet.”
She should have said, “Terrible about the crazy nut with the sledgehammer—good luck with your restoration,” and left it at that.
Which is exactly what she did say. Except that she continued to return each day, parking herself beside Patience with his half shattered head and missing left paw, for glimpses of Danny stealing glimpses of her.
One day he plopped beside her. “Mind if I sit?” They stared together at the swarm of bodies moving below along Fifth Avenue.
She should have cut things short. But she never can, not where there’s male interest. You have to admire it, so easily exploited.
She asked about the repairs, leaning toward him, noticing his tanned forearms, veins over muscles, his unsmiling face.
“Gonna take a while longer,” he said. “Mr. Klimek’s the best…Natan Klimek the sculptor…my boss…he’s famous…I just help with delivering supplies and stuff.”
Danny leaned back, long legs stretched down the steps, crossed at the ankles. “You work at the library?”
“Only temporarily…I’m researching a book.”
Danny’s fingers, long and remarkably refined given his manual job, brushed dust off his jeans.
“Wow,” he said, gray eyes taking her in from some still place inside. He probably didn’t mean to stare. “I gotta get back to work, but I wanna hear more.”
He rose, stomped his work boots and held out a hand to help her up. She stood without accepting it. A bellowing fire truck plowed through traffic. She took it all in, the smell of gasoline fumes, the rumbling vibration of the city, the blue of Danny’s shirt, same as the sky. The way he squinted against the sun, one eyebrow higher than the other.
There was something in his gaze. An understanding of things—a curiosity—that most people probably missed. A part of himself kept hidden. But she’d seen it.
No way. Not this time. Not to Adam.
Any other woman would have let Danny be. But she saw shyness behind the armor, a vulnerable center. She heard what she always hears—not a bid for conversation or the first wary steps toward something yet undefined—but an invitation to steal what she can never resist: an offered heart. She always does.
****
I have trouble with men. I can’t love them.
That is to say, until a man is hers, until she owns his love, she keeps reeling him in, aching for him to fill what never seems full. Then once he’s pulled close, poof, the aching evaporates. Delicious moments of yearning are swallowed whole by the intolerable intimacy of attainment.
In an instant, traits she coveted turn sour. Suddenly shyness isn’t sensitivity but weakness. Sacrificing everything for art isn’t audacious but foolhardy. Steady work isn’t stability but conformity. Contemptible. Whoever he is, whatever his situation, however she regarded him just seconds before, she wants him gone. Forever. His “flaws” justify her escape.
For every longing there’s an equal and opposite pull. That’s where she dwells—in the violent swing between exquisite merger and explosive recoil.
Her friends ask why she flees, why she hurts men. Her mother asks. She can’t explain, even to herself. There’s no broken past, no scars of abuse. Nothing uniquely awful enough to explain it. Yet somewhere deep, and deeper still, lies her inexplicable, pathological dread of being caught in love. A black place so frightful she still can’t get close enough to assess its true depth or size—or the possibility of obliteration. She prefers wielding pain, enduring loneliness, to that awful darkness where her heart should grow.
****
It was supposed to be different with Adam. Over a year she stuck it out, and he stood by through each juncture of her panic, patiently deciphering her urges for flight and explaining them away. She was certain they’d short-circuited her fears. One overcast day behind a dune on a windy New Jersey beach she almost believed that black place inside was gone for good. With Adam’s arms around her she suddenly sensed that love was something she could produce and give away.
Adam said he felt it too that day. Her love. She surrendered to his animal warmth, and he declared love had finally caught her. He saw it in her heart, he said. It burned holes in her eyes. He inhaled her in a kiss.
That night he took her to a B&B in Cape May. They talked until dawn and fell asleep as the sun rose. Later they strolled hand in hand through the streets. Adam told her over and over how he felt, eyes like quasars, shimmering like hers never have. Like a Cubist masterpiece showing every plane of his love, all at once, just for her.
Adam never saw the end coming. Neither did she. Until Danny Linehan asked her out for a drink after work one afternoon and she agreed. By the time Adam called later, the remembered shine of his love seared her mind like a death ray. She almost choked on its intolerable scalding stench. He called again and again, cajoling her to hang tough, as he always did.
“I’m not ready for what you want,” she said. Quietly and simply like an afterthought. Without drama. But he must have heard the finality of her decision, even if it sounded rash and illogical (ending No. 1) because he hung up softly and never called again.
****
She meant to end things with Danny, too, while the first kind of ending was still possible, and certainly by the second ending (which would have occurred “naturally” and “acceptably” with her return to Adam in the spring). But she didn’t opt for either. They left their ending to chance.
An ending gone awry, forever in search of elusive closure. How else to explain why everything—every decision, every choice since then, since Danny—feels increasingly wrong like being dragged away forever from ancestral ground, no salve for the despair that won’t end. Opposite the calm that gradually takes root after the decisive denouement of a real ending.
****
Danny and she began going out after work, sometimes to a bar, sometimes to walk the streets, side by side, talking about this and that. He was from Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Raised by his mom. His dad died young. He’d been working for Natan Klimek for 10 years.
She described her research and writing. Danny asked questions. He seemed interested. Always insisted on walking her to her East Village apartment. But he never accepted her offers to come up. He watched her like a cautious child from behind a window, the real Danny hovering on the other side. Hands in pockets, he’d slip away before she could open the front door.
She was baffled and charmed. Both. Baffled by his slowness to take the bait and charmed by what she interpreted as respectful reluctance to push for anything more than her company. He was, by far, the most difficult man she’d ever worked to unfurl. She was hooked.
There was a melancholy about Danny that became more apparent with time. She couldn’t pinpoint its source exactly. But when he smiled, which was rare, his face broke open like a piñata spilling luscious candy before it reassembled itself into stoniness. As though happiness wasn’t something to trust.
Danny never said much, but when he did, people listened. So did she. With time, she saw more edges and contours. He seemed less shy than he had at first. He simply didn’t speak when there was nothing to say. It was a beautiful thing. Economical. Like he knew who he was and what he carried inside, even his melancholy. He’d accounted for it all and owned every bit.
She didn’t love him. At least I don’t think so. Yet there was something, something she still can’t name. She felt safe with him and tranquil—closer to home than she’d ever been.
****
She saw Adam with his wife and young son not long ago, walking along a Philadelphia sidewalk. They didn’t see her. The boy, with Adam’s curls and careful eyes, was between them holding both their hands. His wife looked kind and sensible, even fun.
Jealousy isn’t the right word. It was more a stunned bewilderment that Adam could be happy after her betrayal. And sad, too. The human spirit renews and heals. That should have brought comfort. But she felt only grief that their time together hadn’t cut a deeper mark on Adam’s heart. Her place only temporary.
What blockage has kept her cold all these years? I’d plunge it out with my bare hands if only I could reach it.
****
“Did you ever want to get married?” Danny asked once as they headed down to her neighborhood on a February evening.
How could she answer? Yes? No? None of your business?
“Not really.” She heard uneasiness in her voice, protecting brittle layers beneath the papery veneer she presented to the world. Run away!
Danny shuffled silently beside her. Did he hear the words urging her to run? Why didn’t they urge him, too?
****
“I like talking to you,” Danny confided a few weeks later. It was March, but still raw outside, and they sat bundled on her front steps watching people scurry through the cold, evening streets. It was the first time he’d stayed to sit.
“No one else understands me.”
She held her breath. An opening.
“My wife and me…we’re separated.” He stared ahead emotionless.
A surprising indignation nearly escaped as a gasp. A wife he’d kept secret.
“We don’t want the same things.”
Possessiveness, like bile, burned down her throat. She moved closer to Danny, arm against his. His body tightened, but he didn’t ease away.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, willing his wife from existence. Danny shivered. Or she did. One of them sighed.
It was wrong, I know. His disclosure—a revelation so long in coming—meant more than any ordinary revelation. Danny was inviting her through layers of flesh, around muscle and bone, to the very core of him. A place real and precious. She should have stopped him. Let him be.
He leaned toward her. A kiss, nearly perfect. The first one always is. She absorbed it, inhaling the smell of stone dust and sweat, the triumph of fulfillment. She didn’t deserve to keep his kiss. But she needed the rush of possession that made her matter and filled the hole where love should flow.
Except she felt more, I swear. Something akin to gratitude, like when a wild animal finally eats from your hand. That kiss was for her alone. Only her. Sealed with hard-won trust.
She wanted to be worthy. She really did. Yet even then, she knew she would never live up to it. That required more courage, more capacity for compassion, than she had. In the end, she’d listen to the old voice urging her to flee.
Danny’s lips brushed hers again, so sweetly she shuddered, before he took off down the steps and was gone.
****
They pulled up alongside a 19th-century brick warehouse in Sunset Park a few weeks later. Danny jumped from the truck, yanked up a rolling metal door scratched with blood-orange graffiti and drove in alongside Mr. Klimek’s three other trucks.
“Come see the studio,” he said, pulling her by the hand into a cavernous space piled high with slabs of raw marble in shades of cream, pink and silver-gray. Chisels and mallets lay scattered on dusty work tables. In the center a stallion, or maybe it was a dragon, stood 20 feet high. Next to it, a giant hand with leafy vines tangled through its fingers reached upward.
“Here’s the lion’s new head and paw,” Danny said from across the room. He ran his fingers along marbled curves. “Mr. Klimek’s installing everything next week.”
“How did you meet him?”
Danny stared off for a moment. “I used to watch him working through the windows.” His voice echoed around them. “He started inviting me in after school to help.”
She watched him remembering. “It was like a cathedral here,” he said. “So much better than our empty apartment—my mom was always working. Mr. Klimek hired me when I started messing with some bad dudes. Been here ever since.”
Later, they climbed the twilight streets to a park and sat on a bench overlooking New York Harbor with the Manhattan skyline just beyond.
“Sometimes I make little sculptures at night in the studio and come up here to think,” he said.
“Have your shown him your work?”
Danny squeezed her hand. “He doesn’t see me like that.”
“You should.”
For a second Danny’s face softened in the darkening light like he believed it, too.
“Ask to be his apprentice,” she urged.
But Danny’s eyes were already closed, and he shook his head, slow motion, pushing away her words before they took hold.
“You’ve got a career and went to college and all,” he said, his voice simultaneously angry and weary. “Doesn’t work like that for guys like me.”
“Hey, I had to work hard, too.”
He stared ahead, glaring at the distant skyscrapers, towers of dotted light. There wasn’t a name for that look. “You get to do what you want, write books and shit,” he mumbled. “Somebody probably paid your way, but I can’t mess with what I got. Nobody’s supporting me.”
“You’ve got to follow your heart,” she said.
“Shit, I’ve been trying my whole life.”
“What are you scared of?”
“Losing my job. Hurting her.”
“What about me?” She shouldn’t have said it.
Danny waved his hand, an orchestra conductor commanding musical silence. A dozen emotions crossed his face. “I’m trying to make this right.”
“By stringing me along?” It was wrong to say, to suggest she cared.
“If you’d ever followed your heart you’d know that’s not true,” he growled. “You’d know more shit than you do.”
She watched him fade into dark. There was more to say. She wanted to follow, scream after him. But the words crumbled around her. What did he know anyway? Uneducated. Nobody. Thinking he was in her league. And yet she’d lost him before he could be the one to lose her. She headed into the empty night for a cab, lugging his awful words like ingots of black lead.
****
This should have been the third kind of ending—one that halts abruptly, but is right upon reflection, offering ample insights and growth. Sure, she might have wondered about Danny sometimes, about his choices and how he saw through her that night in the park. Punishing her for my heartlessness.
But she’d have stories to tell, and perhaps a new understanding of life. Danny might have become a stone carver, or reconciled with his wife.
She might have found her heart and learned to follow it.
Or they might have talked again and become friends. Who says things always end?
They could have tossed any of these pebbles into the pond and watched the ripples spread. But they did something else. They threw in a boulder.
There is a fourth kind of ending.
****
She knew it was Danny as the buzzer rang. Relief and revulsion. Where had he been all these weeks? Did he think she’d wait for him? Run.
He stalked in, first time in her apartment, plopping on the sofa.
“I asked Mr. Klimek to teach me,” he mumbled at the floor. “You were right.”
Danny looked good. His presence felt right. She couldn’t deny it: she was happy to see him.
“Wonderful,” she said, sitting beside him. They watched together, barely breathing, as she traced a finger down the length of his arm, both unwilling to accept their previous ending.
He kissed her and buried his face in her neck. “I’m sorry what I said last time.”
She pulled him tight. “Shhh…”
“I’m getting a divorce … wasn’t fair to you or her.”
She felt his fierceness, life beating around them. In him. He wanted her, raw and crazy like she’d never wanted anyone. She let him in. Because she could. Because she wanted him, too. Right then. She really did.
Afterwards, they lay in bed, drowsy and close. She watched Danny in the glow of a streetlight. Voices wafted up from the sidewalk. For just a second he was beautiful, a child curled around her. She felt safe, loved.
“Now what happens?” she whispered.
“Whatever we want.”
She pulled him in, pulling away.
“You’re mine now?”
He should’ve seen her game. But he squeezed her close, rocking gently. “Yeah,” he whispered. “Yeah.”
It’s always the same, only variations of person, place and details of plot. This is where her mind spins in the opposite direction, mad dog running. She had him. She’d plucked another heart, bloody beating reminder of what she doesn’t have. Now reverse and slam.
She snuggled in. “You and me…,” The words flowed deliciously as they always do in the final assault. “We’d never fit together.” Relief from his awful nearness, his breathing, unbearable pulse of life and love inside him.
“Surely you know that.”
Danny’s eyes receded like a turtle pulling into its shell, all emotion falling inward.
He rose in the dark, naked, hovering like she wasn’t human. Hands surrounded her throat, wrapping tight, then loose, then tighter. She tried to scream, but a flash of searing light knocked her silent. Fist to eye.
But, no, that’s not what happened.
Danny heaved her over, face down and climbed on top, suffocating her, smashing her. She squeezed her eyes tight, tears stinging, and waited to feel. Impaled. Humiliated. The full force of his rage rammed inside her.
But that didn’t happen either.
Danny lay motionless, holding her. Tenderly. Then a dreadful moan leaked from somewhere unimaginable inside him, the monstrous gasp of something dying. It was the saddest sound she’d ever heard.
He muttered words she couldn’t hear, pinched with hate. Then he dressed and was gone. Forever.
And that’s the truth.
****
She’s had no new men since Danny. No apologies seem adequate, though she’s practiced many. Nothing ever fully explains why I—why she—hurts men. Why she hurt Danny. Why she can’t love.
I’d never admit it to anyone, but sometimes she aches for one of her imagined endings. A horrific ending No. 3. Beaten or raped. Which itself reveals a tragic inability to love even herself.
She never allows either scenario to play out to the end. She can’t. How could they be preferable to getting off easy?
And yet, without heart, both endings make soothing sense, buffers against the endlessly aching limbo. If Danny had pounded his pain into her physically, she might have crept away punished, but somehow guiltless, too. Victim of a savagery far more gruesome than her own. At least that’s how it would look to the world.
Instead, he left her drowning in the emptiness of what she lacks.
****
She cries sometimes, sobbing uncontrollably, even after all these years. Lately, she hears a faint beating afterwards from the depths of some concealed cavern. Anguished, but fully alive and capable. Alien, but beautifully nourishing. Pumping mercy through tender, new veins. Louder each time.
She remembers now it was there when Danny left in loathing. First beats, vital enough to recognize and not forget.
Did you hear it, too, Danny?
Recently, a stunning thought stops her still—what if things aren’t really left undone?
Did you know, Danny? Your wise hands sculpting a finished ending after all? One without visible conclusion, at least to my eyes. But the best possible ending for me.
A path to heart.
I’ve come to believe there’s more than one kind of ending. Four to be precise. The most common, at least for me, is the ending that feels like an ending though it may not look that way to everyone else. For instance, I might watch only the first few minutes of a movie, then walk out for good. Or stop dating a man just when things appear to be stepping up. To some, these endings appear premature, a waste of something promising. But to me I’m done, based on an internal sense that there’s nothing more to explore.
Most people drag these endings out. This is the second kind, one that occurs internally like the previous one, but is allowed to play out until it looks finished to most people. These are the endings that gain you sympathy from family and friends. They’re socially acceptable. Even I sometimes take my endings to their “logical” stopping-point just to dodge the appearance of callousness and allow others the satisfaction of “soothing” me. In the case of love, that may mean dating a man longer than my feelings last. The trick is to wait for the inevitable lessening of his attention, the gradual decline in lovemaking, glances at other women. Then the final strike: calling him on the “evidence,” building a case for distrust, “driving him away” with suspicions. There are ways to push someone out so your own handiwork doesn’t show.
Of course, there’s a third kind of ending, the kind brought on unexpectedly by uncontrollable events. Death. Disaster. Murder. Madness. It hardly ever looks just or fitting, but upon reflection these endings usually bring a sense of tragic finality. “There must be a reason,” people often say afterwards. The implication being that some wiser hand has orchestrated events perfectly, paving the way for something better or even the possibility of enlightenment and growth. I haven’t endured many of these endings and don’t relish their bludgeoning element of surprise. But at least they’re over quickly so life can fill in with something better.
There’s a fourth ending, a more enigmatic one, because like the ending just mentioned, it comes unexpectedly. But unlike ending No. 3 this one never feels final. Nothing is learned—even upon reflection. No enlightenment. I know because I’ve had nine years to reflect upon one such ending, the only one I’ve ever endured. And it still doesn’t feel finished.
I say this all as a prelude to my story of Danny. It’s my contention that this fourth ending, the one I had with Danny, is an ending left undone. How else to explain why I knew him, why something so ripe with opportunities for insight and expansion, for love, crumbled into such senselessness? If you believe, as I do, that all things happen for a reason then this riddle has no answer.
****
She marvels now that Danny and she ever chanced upon one another, two people so different. Or that she allowed more than a brief conversation given their obvious disparities. Some decisions defy logic. Even “fate” doesn’t quite capture the odd sense of inevitability that still haunts her memories of their time together.
By now it’s obvious I’m telling this story in the third person for distance. Or else I don’t think I can tell it at all. At least with any honesty.
She was in New York that fall doing research for a book on Yiddish theater in America. She’d won a nine-month Cullman Center Fellowship offered by the New York Public Library. Adam, her boyfriend, was back in Philadelphia finishing his master’s degree in art museum administration. She planned to rejoin him the following May.
Danny ambled up the library’s grand front steps where she sat eating carrot sticks and hummus in the bright sun. It was unusually sultry for November. Danny was lugging a tub of tools, which he dropped behind her next to the plywood scaffolding erected around Patience, one of the two marble lion statues that flank the library’s entrance.
“Should I move?” she asked, reaching to gather her lunch.
“No, sorry.” He wiped his forehead and ran fingers through thick chestnut hair. “We haven’t started repairs yet.”
She should have said, “Terrible about the crazy nut with the sledgehammer—good luck with your restoration,” and left it at that.
Which is exactly what she did say. Except that she continued to return each day, parking herself beside Patience with his half shattered head and missing left paw, for glimpses of Danny stealing glimpses of her.
One day he plopped beside her. “Mind if I sit?” They stared together at the swarm of bodies moving below along Fifth Avenue.
She should have cut things short. But she never can, not where there’s male interest. You have to admire it, so easily exploited.
She asked about the repairs, leaning toward him, noticing his tanned forearms, veins over muscles, his unsmiling face.
“Gonna take a while longer,” he said. “Mr. Klimek’s the best…Natan Klimek the sculptor…my boss…he’s famous…I just help with delivering supplies and stuff.”
Danny leaned back, long legs stretched down the steps, crossed at the ankles. “You work at the library?”
“Only temporarily…I’m researching a book.”
Danny’s fingers, long and remarkably refined given his manual job, brushed dust off his jeans.
“Wow,” he said, gray eyes taking her in from some still place inside. He probably didn’t mean to stare. “I gotta get back to work, but I wanna hear more.”
He rose, stomped his work boots and held out a hand to help her up. She stood without accepting it. A bellowing fire truck plowed through traffic. She took it all in, the smell of gasoline fumes, the rumbling vibration of the city, the blue of Danny’s shirt, same as the sky. The way he squinted against the sun, one eyebrow higher than the other.
There was something in his gaze. An understanding of things—a curiosity—that most people probably missed. A part of himself kept hidden. But she’d seen it.
No way. Not this time. Not to Adam.
Any other woman would have let Danny be. But she saw shyness behind the armor, a vulnerable center. She heard what she always hears—not a bid for conversation or the first wary steps toward something yet undefined—but an invitation to steal what she can never resist: an offered heart. She always does.
****
I have trouble with men. I can’t love them.
That is to say, until a man is hers, until she owns his love, she keeps reeling him in, aching for him to fill what never seems full. Then once he’s pulled close, poof, the aching evaporates. Delicious moments of yearning are swallowed whole by the intolerable intimacy of attainment.
In an instant, traits she coveted turn sour. Suddenly shyness isn’t sensitivity but weakness. Sacrificing everything for art isn’t audacious but foolhardy. Steady work isn’t stability but conformity. Contemptible. Whoever he is, whatever his situation, however she regarded him just seconds before, she wants him gone. Forever. His “flaws” justify her escape.
For every longing there’s an equal and opposite pull. That’s where she dwells—in the violent swing between exquisite merger and explosive recoil.
Her friends ask why she flees, why she hurts men. Her mother asks. She can’t explain, even to herself. There’s no broken past, no scars of abuse. Nothing uniquely awful enough to explain it. Yet somewhere deep, and deeper still, lies her inexplicable, pathological dread of being caught in love. A black place so frightful she still can’t get close enough to assess its true depth or size—or the possibility of obliteration. She prefers wielding pain, enduring loneliness, to that awful darkness where her heart should grow.
****
It was supposed to be different with Adam. Over a year she stuck it out, and he stood by through each juncture of her panic, patiently deciphering her urges for flight and explaining them away. She was certain they’d short-circuited her fears. One overcast day behind a dune on a windy New Jersey beach she almost believed that black place inside was gone for good. With Adam’s arms around her she suddenly sensed that love was something she could produce and give away.
Adam said he felt it too that day. Her love. She surrendered to his animal warmth, and he declared love had finally caught her. He saw it in her heart, he said. It burned holes in her eyes. He inhaled her in a kiss.
That night he took her to a B&B in Cape May. They talked until dawn and fell asleep as the sun rose. Later they strolled hand in hand through the streets. Adam told her over and over how he felt, eyes like quasars, shimmering like hers never have. Like a Cubist masterpiece showing every plane of his love, all at once, just for her.
Adam never saw the end coming. Neither did she. Until Danny Linehan asked her out for a drink after work one afternoon and she agreed. By the time Adam called later, the remembered shine of his love seared her mind like a death ray. She almost choked on its intolerable scalding stench. He called again and again, cajoling her to hang tough, as he always did.
“I’m not ready for what you want,” she said. Quietly and simply like an afterthought. Without drama. But he must have heard the finality of her decision, even if it sounded rash and illogical (ending No. 1) because he hung up softly and never called again.
****
She meant to end things with Danny, too, while the first kind of ending was still possible, and certainly by the second ending (which would have occurred “naturally” and “acceptably” with her return to Adam in the spring). But she didn’t opt for either. They left their ending to chance.
An ending gone awry, forever in search of elusive closure. How else to explain why everything—every decision, every choice since then, since Danny—feels increasingly wrong like being dragged away forever from ancestral ground, no salve for the despair that won’t end. Opposite the calm that gradually takes root after the decisive denouement of a real ending.
****
Danny and she began going out after work, sometimes to a bar, sometimes to walk the streets, side by side, talking about this and that. He was from Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Raised by his mom. His dad died young. He’d been working for Natan Klimek for 10 years.
She described her research and writing. Danny asked questions. He seemed interested. Always insisted on walking her to her East Village apartment. But he never accepted her offers to come up. He watched her like a cautious child from behind a window, the real Danny hovering on the other side. Hands in pockets, he’d slip away before she could open the front door.
She was baffled and charmed. Both. Baffled by his slowness to take the bait and charmed by what she interpreted as respectful reluctance to push for anything more than her company. He was, by far, the most difficult man she’d ever worked to unfurl. She was hooked.
There was a melancholy about Danny that became more apparent with time. She couldn’t pinpoint its source exactly. But when he smiled, which was rare, his face broke open like a piñata spilling luscious candy before it reassembled itself into stoniness. As though happiness wasn’t something to trust.
Danny never said much, but when he did, people listened. So did she. With time, she saw more edges and contours. He seemed less shy than he had at first. He simply didn’t speak when there was nothing to say. It was a beautiful thing. Economical. Like he knew who he was and what he carried inside, even his melancholy. He’d accounted for it all and owned every bit.
She didn’t love him. At least I don’t think so. Yet there was something, something she still can’t name. She felt safe with him and tranquil—closer to home than she’d ever been.
****
She saw Adam with his wife and young son not long ago, walking along a Philadelphia sidewalk. They didn’t see her. The boy, with Adam’s curls and careful eyes, was between them holding both their hands. His wife looked kind and sensible, even fun.
Jealousy isn’t the right word. It was more a stunned bewilderment that Adam could be happy after her betrayal. And sad, too. The human spirit renews and heals. That should have brought comfort. But she felt only grief that their time together hadn’t cut a deeper mark on Adam’s heart. Her place only temporary.
What blockage has kept her cold all these years? I’d plunge it out with my bare hands if only I could reach it.
****
“Did you ever want to get married?” Danny asked once as they headed down to her neighborhood on a February evening.
How could she answer? Yes? No? None of your business?
“Not really.” She heard uneasiness in her voice, protecting brittle layers beneath the papery veneer she presented to the world. Run away!
Danny shuffled silently beside her. Did he hear the words urging her to run? Why didn’t they urge him, too?
****
“I like talking to you,” Danny confided a few weeks later. It was March, but still raw outside, and they sat bundled on her front steps watching people scurry through the cold, evening streets. It was the first time he’d stayed to sit.
“No one else understands me.”
She held her breath. An opening.
“My wife and me…we’re separated.” He stared ahead emotionless.
A surprising indignation nearly escaped as a gasp. A wife he’d kept secret.
“We don’t want the same things.”
Possessiveness, like bile, burned down her throat. She moved closer to Danny, arm against his. His body tightened, but he didn’t ease away.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, willing his wife from existence. Danny shivered. Or she did. One of them sighed.
It was wrong, I know. His disclosure—a revelation so long in coming—meant more than any ordinary revelation. Danny was inviting her through layers of flesh, around muscle and bone, to the very core of him. A place real and precious. She should have stopped him. Let him be.
He leaned toward her. A kiss, nearly perfect. The first one always is. She absorbed it, inhaling the smell of stone dust and sweat, the triumph of fulfillment. She didn’t deserve to keep his kiss. But she needed the rush of possession that made her matter and filled the hole where love should flow.
Except she felt more, I swear. Something akin to gratitude, like when a wild animal finally eats from your hand. That kiss was for her alone. Only her. Sealed with hard-won trust.
She wanted to be worthy. She really did. Yet even then, she knew she would never live up to it. That required more courage, more capacity for compassion, than she had. In the end, she’d listen to the old voice urging her to flee.
Danny’s lips brushed hers again, so sweetly she shuddered, before he took off down the steps and was gone.
****
They pulled up alongside a 19th-century brick warehouse in Sunset Park a few weeks later. Danny jumped from the truck, yanked up a rolling metal door scratched with blood-orange graffiti and drove in alongside Mr. Klimek’s three other trucks.
“Come see the studio,” he said, pulling her by the hand into a cavernous space piled high with slabs of raw marble in shades of cream, pink and silver-gray. Chisels and mallets lay scattered on dusty work tables. In the center a stallion, or maybe it was a dragon, stood 20 feet high. Next to it, a giant hand with leafy vines tangled through its fingers reached upward.
“Here’s the lion’s new head and paw,” Danny said from across the room. He ran his fingers along marbled curves. “Mr. Klimek’s installing everything next week.”
“How did you meet him?”
Danny stared off for a moment. “I used to watch him working through the windows.” His voice echoed around them. “He started inviting me in after school to help.”
She watched him remembering. “It was like a cathedral here,” he said. “So much better than our empty apartment—my mom was always working. Mr. Klimek hired me when I started messing with some bad dudes. Been here ever since.”
Later, they climbed the twilight streets to a park and sat on a bench overlooking New York Harbor with the Manhattan skyline just beyond.
“Sometimes I make little sculptures at night in the studio and come up here to think,” he said.
“Have your shown him your work?”
Danny squeezed her hand. “He doesn’t see me like that.”
“You should.”
For a second Danny’s face softened in the darkening light like he believed it, too.
“Ask to be his apprentice,” she urged.
But Danny’s eyes were already closed, and he shook his head, slow motion, pushing away her words before they took hold.
“You’ve got a career and went to college and all,” he said, his voice simultaneously angry and weary. “Doesn’t work like that for guys like me.”
“Hey, I had to work hard, too.”
He stared ahead, glaring at the distant skyscrapers, towers of dotted light. There wasn’t a name for that look. “You get to do what you want, write books and shit,” he mumbled. “Somebody probably paid your way, but I can’t mess with what I got. Nobody’s supporting me.”
“You’ve got to follow your heart,” she said.
“Shit, I’ve been trying my whole life.”
“What are you scared of?”
“Losing my job. Hurting her.”
“What about me?” She shouldn’t have said it.
Danny waved his hand, an orchestra conductor commanding musical silence. A dozen emotions crossed his face. “I’m trying to make this right.”
“By stringing me along?” It was wrong to say, to suggest she cared.
“If you’d ever followed your heart you’d know that’s not true,” he growled. “You’d know more shit than you do.”
She watched him fade into dark. There was more to say. She wanted to follow, scream after him. But the words crumbled around her. What did he know anyway? Uneducated. Nobody. Thinking he was in her league. And yet she’d lost him before he could be the one to lose her. She headed into the empty night for a cab, lugging his awful words like ingots of black lead.
****
This should have been the third kind of ending—one that halts abruptly, but is right upon reflection, offering ample insights and growth. Sure, she might have wondered about Danny sometimes, about his choices and how he saw through her that night in the park. Punishing her for my heartlessness.
But she’d have stories to tell, and perhaps a new understanding of life. Danny might have become a stone carver, or reconciled with his wife.
She might have found her heart and learned to follow it.
Or they might have talked again and become friends. Who says things always end?
They could have tossed any of these pebbles into the pond and watched the ripples spread. But they did something else. They threw in a boulder.
There is a fourth kind of ending.
****
She knew it was Danny as the buzzer rang. Relief and revulsion. Where had he been all these weeks? Did he think she’d wait for him? Run.
He stalked in, first time in her apartment, plopping on the sofa.
“I asked Mr. Klimek to teach me,” he mumbled at the floor. “You were right.”
Danny looked good. His presence felt right. She couldn’t deny it: she was happy to see him.
“Wonderful,” she said, sitting beside him. They watched together, barely breathing, as she traced a finger down the length of his arm, both unwilling to accept their previous ending.
He kissed her and buried his face in her neck. “I’m sorry what I said last time.”
She pulled him tight. “Shhh…”
“I’m getting a divorce … wasn’t fair to you or her.”
She felt his fierceness, life beating around them. In him. He wanted her, raw and crazy like she’d never wanted anyone. She let him in. Because she could. Because she wanted him, too. Right then. She really did.
Afterwards, they lay in bed, drowsy and close. She watched Danny in the glow of a streetlight. Voices wafted up from the sidewalk. For just a second he was beautiful, a child curled around her. She felt safe, loved.
“Now what happens?” she whispered.
“Whatever we want.”
She pulled him in, pulling away.
“You’re mine now?”
He should’ve seen her game. But he squeezed her close, rocking gently. “Yeah,” he whispered. “Yeah.”
It’s always the same, only variations of person, place and details of plot. This is where her mind spins in the opposite direction, mad dog running. She had him. She’d plucked another heart, bloody beating reminder of what she doesn’t have. Now reverse and slam.
She snuggled in. “You and me…,” The words flowed deliciously as they always do in the final assault. “We’d never fit together.” Relief from his awful nearness, his breathing, unbearable pulse of life and love inside him.
“Surely you know that.”
Danny’s eyes receded like a turtle pulling into its shell, all emotion falling inward.
He rose in the dark, naked, hovering like she wasn’t human. Hands surrounded her throat, wrapping tight, then loose, then tighter. She tried to scream, but a flash of searing light knocked her silent. Fist to eye.
But, no, that’s not what happened.
Danny heaved her over, face down and climbed on top, suffocating her, smashing her. She squeezed her eyes tight, tears stinging, and waited to feel. Impaled. Humiliated. The full force of his rage rammed inside her.
But that didn’t happen either.
Danny lay motionless, holding her. Tenderly. Then a dreadful moan leaked from somewhere unimaginable inside him, the monstrous gasp of something dying. It was the saddest sound she’d ever heard.
He muttered words she couldn’t hear, pinched with hate. Then he dressed and was gone. Forever.
And that’s the truth.
****
She’s had no new men since Danny. No apologies seem adequate, though she’s practiced many. Nothing ever fully explains why I—why she—hurts men. Why she hurt Danny. Why she can’t love.
I’d never admit it to anyone, but sometimes she aches for one of her imagined endings. A horrific ending No. 3. Beaten or raped. Which itself reveals a tragic inability to love even herself.
She never allows either scenario to play out to the end. She can’t. How could they be preferable to getting off easy?
And yet, without heart, both endings make soothing sense, buffers against the endlessly aching limbo. If Danny had pounded his pain into her physically, she might have crept away punished, but somehow guiltless, too. Victim of a savagery far more gruesome than her own. At least that’s how it would look to the world.
Instead, he left her drowning in the emptiness of what she lacks.
****
She cries sometimes, sobbing uncontrollably, even after all these years. Lately, she hears a faint beating afterwards from the depths of some concealed cavern. Anguished, but fully alive and capable. Alien, but beautifully nourishing. Pumping mercy through tender, new veins. Louder each time.
She remembers now it was there when Danny left in loathing. First beats, vital enough to recognize and not forget.
Did you hear it, too, Danny?
Recently, a stunning thought stops her still—what if things aren’t really left undone?
Did you know, Danny? Your wise hands sculpting a finished ending after all? One without visible conclusion, at least to my eyes. But the best possible ending for me.
A path to heart.
Bio
Sidney Stevens is an author of fiction and nonfiction with an MA in journalism from the University of Michigan. Most recently, her short story “All In a Day’s Work” was accepted for publication in The Centifictionist, and her short story “Necessary Lies” placed as a finalist in the Writer’s Atelier 2018 fiction contest. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Newsweek, New Works Review, Sure Woman, and a new anthology called Nature’s Healing Spirit from Sowing Creek Press. In addition, She has had hundreds of nonfiction articles published in magazines, newspapers and online, and has also co-authored four books on natural health.
