Chance Encounter
It had been almost ten years since they’d talked or seen one another, and at this point, having achieved a hard- won tranquility about his fate, he just wanted to know why she had done it. Two-and-a-half years had passed since the board reinstated him, so there’d been time for time to do some healing, although he would not say he was not still a little angry, or even seething, about the disgrace of it, about the seven-and-a-half years of lost productivity and wages, the humiliating interim work, or say he has even approached forgiveness. But acceptance, yes. So when he ran into her at the convention in Seattle they both, right there in the atrium of the WSCC, froze in their tracks and each seemed to be waiting for the other to make a move. He went first, said hello. She replied in kind, checked her watch, stepped forward and asked how was. He had so deeply integrated the idea of her toxicity, her infectious bad karma, into his psyche, even as he cautiously answered, she would inch closer and he would inch away, maintaining a physical buffer of several feet, even as he felt that old magnetic attraction, saw her naked in his bed as if it were last week; the years had barely touched her. He was polite, but not cordial. When he had an opening, though, he bluntly asked the question that he’d needed to ask ever since she reported him and fled with his dog: Why did you do it? On some level, in hindsight, he really did expect an honest answer, a revelation even, the missing variable, the X of how she saw it, which kept him from solving the most vexing equation of his life.
That dark nature she exuded—spontaneous, quixotic, diabolical at times—came with its complementary light as well, and after his marriage to Wendy she had been strong medicine, so intense in her affections, her consolations. But what kind of person registers accusations of abuse against you to your licensure board, and doesn’t relent until she’s seen your ability to work in your field revoked? And then takes your cocker spaniel, on a whim, as she’s leaving the house you shared? When they had met she was experiencing her own low point. Her father eaten with cancer (her mother had perished on flight 103 over Lockerbie), her sister recently diagnosed with a debilitating nerve disorder that would take her life within a year, she with Crohn’s, the IRS after her for several years of back taxes, the group practice she’d been in just dissolved; it should have been clear, to anyone who believed in or knew to look for such things, that a certain kind of roiling energy underwrote her life, and even if one doesn’t think in those terms, there is always a person’s response to adversity to consider, those revelations of character that come in difficult times. And what did he see: he saw what he wanted to see, he saw her with sympathy because she was beautiful, because she was a generous and insatiable lover, ignored the way she’d lash out at her partners with vitriol, the way she’d rationalize her own scheming and even her kindness as an angle to recovery, to compensation, as some kind of deserved expiation for her unique level and quality of suffering.
Despite the warning signs he stayed, for the sex, for the curve of her hip and those magnificent breasts, for her neediness (she couldn’t cook to feed herself) and for the feeling of being on the inside of a corner of the world she occupied, an anointed ally, for the exclusive position he occupied as her lover. Because inertia is a law. But as it is, as it always is, the ways in which we watch our friends behave toward others eventually is meted out to us, and his day on the wheel arrived when, maybe it was after a series of perceived slights, after he failed to bury her cat quickly enough, or maybe he missed a certain something she wanted on a trip to the store or failed to reset the seat in her car correctly after he borrowed it—really, he had no idea, but she turned on him, turned against him and turned decisively, and what had looked like simple inconstancy from this new angle looked pathological, like a personality disorder or worse, and once she started having fights in the office with misaligned co-workers (it’s always them, always them) she couldn’t let up on him, and before he knew it he found himself not just out of a girlfriend but in front of the state licensing board, facing his peers as they thumbed through a fat file, which due in part to the nature of the times they treated as open and shut. But here she was, ten years on, looking as good as ever, with little hint of interest in what he might possibly have been through to be back here, and all she had to say in answer to the question was: blow me. Which an hour later he found himself in her hotel room doing, his face enthusiastically buried between her legs, because really, who can help themselves?
John Estes directs the Creative Writing Program at Malone University in Canton, Ohio and is a visiting faculty member of Ashland University’s Low-Residency MFA. He is author of three volumes of poetry— Kingdom Come (C&R Press, 2011), Stop Motion Still Life (Wordfarm, forthcoming) and Sure Extinction, which won the 2015 Antivenom Prize from Elixir Press—and two chapbooks: Breakfast with Blake at the Laocoön (Finishing Line Press, 2007) and Swerve, which won a National Chapbook Fellowship from the Poetry Society of America. Recent work has appeared in Tin House, Gettysburg Review, Southern Review, Crazyhorse, AGNI, and other places.