Vacation by Deb Olin Unferth Page B

creation? And if Myers was expected to believe there was anything innocent in it—well, did she think he was a complete and utter fool?
    At night Myers lay next to her. He dreamed that she was dreaming of the man. He dreamed that he, Myers, was absent and that man was here—and that man was lying here dreaming of his wife.
    If anyone thought Myers was going to give away his position now, they had another thing coming.
    Best-case scenario: The guy had committed a crime she had witnessed. Another guy had committed a crime and this man was the victim. She needed to tell him something. Someone paid her to follow him, it was a job she made money at and invested in secret. There were other reasons—political, philosophical, messianic. She expected terrible or wonderful events to stem from him. She had gone mad.
    Next, this: he knew the man . Or thought he did. The man was familiarish. He got a quick look in a men’s room. Then a long stare from the side. Where had Myers seen that face?
    A procession of images passed behind his eyes.
    The name didn’t come at first, just the outline of his head against a collegiate backdrop. Then the shoulders, the form of him, a figure propped up at the bus stop years ago, of him bent over his tray in the dorm café. Myers lay the one over the other, stood them beside the man now receding down the street while Myers found himself stunned into a standstill.
    Illumination. Gold came up in the pan.
    The name was Gray.
    They argued. It was her birthday and he stupidly said he loved her, handed the words over along with a gift, stupid because he didn’t feel like he did that day but he said it, he loved her, and she said, I don’t even know what that is. He said, That’s a nice comment to make to your husband, and she said, fine, she was just saying what was on her mind. If he wanted, she could keep what was on her mind where it was.
    Odd thing to have on her mind, he said, considering she had heard him say it for almost two years running, not to mention on their very wedding night.
    They were in the bedroom when this happened. Not in the bed but by the closet door. She was half-dressed and dressing further, getting ready to meet her friend Anita for a birthday dinner. He was half-undressed because he was staying home, had stayed home from work (had been missing too much) because he had come down with the flu (who wouldn’t, zigzagging around in the rain like an umbrella?) and was on his way to bed. He knew she’d ditch her friend and follow that man by herself.
    She doesn’t know what that is, he mumbled. There are many things that he is that he doesn’t know what are.
    You damn well used to know the word before, he said.
    What word?
    Love. As in, I love you.
    I didn’t say I didn’t know the word, she said. I said I didn’t know what you meant when you said it.
    Next, this: she didn’t know his name. Myers tried to be cute, said Gray’s name aloud, called him a client, inserted him into news stories, but she looked as bored as ever, as sunk into her own cesspit, and it was obvious—she’d never heard of him. Which why should that surprise him? Why else follow someone through sleet and sun, around the ironwork of this city, other than because you don’t know who he is?
    For Christ’s sake. Jesus.
    So she lied and sneaked with a regularity matched only by the rising sun and anybody within a few feet of her (Myers) was just going to have to live with it, buddy, and he certainly was.
    What do you mean what did he mean? He didn’t know what he meant. I love you. He said it like he always does.
    Married people say that all the time, he said.
    It’s a vulgar phrase, she said. It means nothing. Why not simply say what you mean?
    He wasn’t the only vulgar one. Might he remind her that she herself had said it many, many times herself?
    The man Gray, whom his wife followed, sat alone in restaurants near other men who looked more or less like him, youngish, early thirties, also alone. No