The Ignored

happened to her, it had left her even more radiantly beautiful than ever.

I realized that I had not really thought of her as beautiful before, when we’d been living together. I’d been attracted to her, of course, but I had not seen in her this exquisite objective loveliness. She was beautiful now, though.

She was also Ignored.

That had not really sunk in yet. I knew it, recognized it, but somehow it didn’t quite register.

It also didn’t matter at this moment.

I looked closely at her face, at her mouth, at her lips. I looked into her eyes. I didn’t know what to say, didn’t know how to bring up what I was thinking, what I was feeling. What were we now? Just friends? Old close friends who had met again after a long absence? Or was she feeling the same thing I was feeling? Did she want to jump back into a relationship, take up where we’d left off? There was so much to go over, so much to talk about. Yet as close as we were at that moment, as close as I felt to her, there was still a barrier between us. We’d been apart for a long time, almost as long as we’d been together, and we couldn’t read each other the way we once could.

Then I looked into her eyes, and I knew how to cut through it all. I said what I wanted to say, what I felt: “I love you.”

And she answered the way I wanted her to, the way I hoped she would: “I love you, too.”

And all that uncertainty was gone. We knew where we stood now. We knew what the other one was feeling, what the other one was thinking.

The words flowed freely from us then, bubbling out and over each other, colliding, overlapping, weaving an interconnected tapestry of two unconnected stories. She said she’d regretted walking out but had been too stubborn to come back and apologize. I told her I’d been willing to crawl but had been too afraid to approach her. I told her I quit Automated Interface, and I told her about meeting Philipe and the Terrorists for the Common Man, but I left out my murder of Stewart and the acts the terrorists had later performed. She told me she’d discovered on her own that she was Ignored, and while working as a waitress had met another woman who was Ignored, an older woman, and had come with her here to Thompson.

Both of us expressed our amazement that we had found each other again. And here of all places.

“We were meant to be together,” Jane said, and there was only a hint of playfulness in her voice.

“Maybe we were,” I said.

We got our groceries and went to her house, a one-story tract home near Main Street. I was surprised to see a lot of her old furniture, the furniture she’d taken from our apartment, arranged in the spacious living room. She’d obviously felt no need to prove anything to anybody. There’d been no attempt to make the room look unique or outrageous; there were only the furnishings she liked arranged in the way she liked them. I felt comfortable here, instantly at ease, and though I now recognized intellectually the anonymous homogeneity of Jane’s taste, it still pleased me. It felt right.

How could I not have noticed that she was Ignored?

Why hadn’t I figured it out before this?

Stupidity, I guess.

She made dinner — baked chicken and Rice-A-Roni — and it was just like the old days. I lay on our couch and watched TV while she worked in the kitchen, and we ate in the living room while Jeopardy! was on, and it was like we were married and had never been apart. The rhythms were there, our habits and speech patterns and little personal traits all unchanged, and we kept the conversation current, superficial, and I could not remember when I’d ever been this happy.

After dinner, I helped with the dishes. I grew quiet as Jane scrubbed the last of the silverware, and she must have noticed because she looked up. “What is it?”

“What?”

“Why are you so quiet?”

I looked at her, nervously licked my dry lips. “Are we going to — ”

“ — make love?” she finished for me.

“ — have sex?” I said.

We both laughed.

She looked up at me, and her lips looked red and full and infinitely sensuous. “Yes,” she told me. She put her soapy hands on my cheeks and stood on her tiptoes and kissed me.

We needed no foreplay that night. By the time our clothes were off, I was hard and she was wet, and I got on top of her and she spread her legs and guided me in.

I fell asleep afterward, a blissful sleep, free of dreams, and sometime in the middle of the night she woke me up and we did it again.

I called in sick the next morning, talking to Marge Lang, the personnel assistant, and I could almost hear her smile over the phone as she spoke. “We figured you’d be calling in today.”

Big Brother was watching me.

I kept my voice nonchalant. “Really?”

“It’s okay. You haven’t seen each other for a long time.”

Such intimate knowledge of my movements and motives and private life should have offended me, but somehow it did not, and I found myself smiling into the phone. “Thank you, Marge,” I said. “See you tomorrow.”

“Bye.”

I glanced through the sheer curtains of the living room and saw outside the bright blue Arizona sky, and I knew that nothing could ruin this day.

I crawled back into bed, where Jane was waiting.

Four

I moved into her house the next weekend.

I took only the clothes and personal belongings I’d brought with me to Thompson. Everything else stayed with the condo for the next inhabitant.

Unpacking my box on the floor of the living room, I came across the pair of Jane’s panties I’d taken with me when I’d left the apartment. I presented them to her, and she turned them over in her hands. “I can’t believe you kept these,” she said. She grinned. “What did you do? Sniff them?”

“No,” I admitted. “I just… carried them with me. I just kept them.”

“To remind you of me?”

I nodded. “To remind me of you.”

“Wait here a minute.” She went into the bedroom, was gone a few moments, and returned with an old T- shirt of mine, a promotional Jose Cuervo T-shirt I’d gotten free at UC Brea and that I used to wear while washing my car. “I stole it,” she said. “I wanted something to remember you by.”

“I didn’t even notice it was gone.”

“You wouldn’t.” She sat down next to me, put her head on my shoulder. “I never stopped thinking about you.”

Then why did you leave me? I wanted to ask.

But I said nothing, only bent down, lifted her chin, kissed her.

I was happy, truly, and honestly happy. What Jane and I had together was average, I suppose — how could it be otherwise? — the same feeling millions of people across America, across the world, had every day — but to me, it felt wonderful and unique, and I was filled with a deep contentment.

We got along better now than we had before. The wall that had existed between us prior to our separation was gone. We communicated intimately and openly — without the miscommunications, misinterpretations, and misunderstandings that had once marred our relationship.

Our sex life was more active than it had ever been. Morning, night, and on weekends, noon, we made love. Some of the old fears and anxieties, however, had not gone away, and even as I enjoyed the pleasures of our newly