Do You Mind? by Nathan Leslie

This is the oddest thing, Greg thinks. Lydia is standing on a hardened snow bank, snapping pictures of geese and ducks and the seagulls hovering over the free flowing nub of the lake. Greg is watching the man-made intake burble fifty feet off. Greg can feel the breadcrumbs in his pocket. He tossed bits of stale French bread bits to the birds, but he had to hurl hardened clumps of it at them and shout when they rushed in a starving frenzy of flapping wings and squawks. We can always walk to the store, Greg thinks. Aside from handouts, what do birds even eat during a blizzard? Especially with the lake frozen. Lydia takes his picture one more time, then circles to the other side and takes another one. Greg winces.

“How many shots is that?” he asks her, stretching the lining of his coat pocket and shaking the crumbs onto the snow. He’s surprised the ducks don’t rush him. Out of range perhaps.

“I have four more on the roll,” she says. “That’s one, two, three, four more pictures I can get of your sweet mug.” She pats the tip of his ski cap, then tugs it down over his ears. “I can’t get enough of your winter scruff. Look at you.” She shakes her head, admiring. He shakes his head for a different reason.

Greg pinches a smile and says he’d like to finish the walk. He’d like to return to his biography of Schopenhauer. He thinks of these bouts of daily exercise as concessions to his health, not aspects of his life he’d like to actually cultivate. It’s not that he minds walking. Greg enjoys the outdoors; he knows it enriches him in some way. But since the blizzard confined them inside for three days in a row, Greg almost wishes he were alone. This is a waste of time, he thinks. Greg doesn’t feel cabin fever. He just would rather be in his own mind instead of share it with Lydia. Greg almost wants to risk the treacherous roads just to enjoy forty-five minutes of seclusion in the company of strangers.

“Sure thing,” Lydia says. “Ahh. So beautiful out here. It’s as perfect as a postcard.”

“It’s nice.”

“It’s really beautiful,” she says.

“It’s something,” he says flatly.

“Everything okay? I mean, you seem to be a bit—”

“Sure. It’s nice. Everything’s fine. I don’t know. I’m tense. I just have a bit of a headache or something.” The truth is Lydia is making it worse. Not that he would say this to her. As soon as he has these thoughts he immediately feels guilty. Lydia is just being a “good girlfriend.” She lavishes him with love and attention. Him, a forty-three year old bachelor, who still lives in a modest two-bedroom apartment. Part of it is the snow, he thinks. He’s simply not used to having anyone around for this length of time. He’d rather be on his own, he thinks. In general, he’s better off with only small stretches of social time. Greg fears a serious case of misanthropy looming on the horizon.

“Let me just get one more shot of that goose.” Lydia whirls back to the left, where a lone Canadian goose sits in the midst of an expanse of snow-encrusted ice. “It still looks stuck there,” Lydia says. “It must have fallen asleep. Maybe its legs froze in place. Strange.”

Greg already claimed the goose was just a loner, and said that it just didn’t want to be with the flock circling the free water.

“He’s basking,” Greg says. “It’s sunny. He’s fine.”

Lydia drops the camera over her eyes and snaps his picture, then stares at the goose and adjusts her earmuffs. The goose cocks its head and stares back as if it is about to take a picture of her, Greg thinks.

Lydia zips a pouch in her coat open and withdraws her sunglasses from them, and sighs. Greg knows Lydia has always been somewhat of a narcissist, but the truth is simply more glaring when he can see her in action for long stretches of time. Thank God I don’t live with this woman, he thinks. One of us wouldn’t survive the ordeal.

“If you really think the goose is in danger,” Greg says. “You could crawl out and free it.”

Dramatically Lydia points out over the lake.

“The goose must be fifty yards out in the lake,” she says. “But do you see any footprints? It’s not solid, Greg. Don’t be so testy.”

“I’m just making an argument,” he says, and then he immediately hates himself for saying it. He’s always backing down, letting the women in his life wear the pants. He supposes this can’t be helped. He is the way he is.

They are back in Greg’s apartment drinking decaffeinated green tea: honey in his, none in hers. Her t-shirt and sweater are sticky with sweat. Greg doesn’t want to take a shower. If she goes this will at least give him ten minutes to himself.

On the plus side, Greg thinks Lydia is at least helpful. She’s not a leech, he thinks. She is a “good girlfriend,” as good as any other. Lydia helps around the apartment. She does dishes. She helps him cook. She takes the garbage to the dumpster. This is a firm foundation for something, he thinks. This is a starting place.

“If you want to take a shower, go on by yourself,” he says. “I feel okay.”

Lydia downs the remainder of the tea and nods. And she’s not a nag, Greg things. That’s another thing.

Lydia clicks the bathroom door closed and he can hear her jeans drop to the tiled bathroom floor, then the burst of water.

Lydia has also been useful at shedding light on the Kent-James fiasco. Greg still doesn’t completely understand how he allowed himself to get so involved. Kent is Greg’s oldest friend, an editor at a trade magazine, someone who would spend just about every weekend with him. Over the past ten years, Kent developed a friendship with another of Greg’s friends, James, an engineer. The three men were close, as close as three male friends can be, Greg thought. Kent is a chunky bearded man with pasty skin that chapped and cracked easily. Eczema. He would be lucky to last ten more years, Greg thought. James is younger, suburban, comfortably proportioned, physically a sort of blunted version of Mel Gibson.

Three months back Kent and James stopped speaking to each other. As Greg found out later, the majority of their conflict had to do with a perceived minor slight that may or may not have happened in the first place (and according to James, it didn’t). Lydia has told both men to grow up, but to Greg, they seemed entrenched. Greg feels stuck in the middle. Lydia tells Greg regularly that he shouldn’t let either friend even mention the other until the situation is resolved in some way. Lydia says the conflict is too stressful on him.

“And what if it isn’t resolved?” Greg asked once.

“Then policy becomes permanent.”

Greg pushes the kitchen chair under the table, and slowly dumps the rest of the tea into the sink, watching the grainy dregs coat the silver sink bottom. Greg feels old, and lonely, and he’s ready for Lydia now. This is the give and take he has with himself on the issue of relationships. It’s not easy being a loner, Greg thinks. No wonder people get married. Who would choose serial monogamy?

“Now what?” Lydia asks. She leans back in the rocking chair in Greg’s cramped living room. The rocking chair is inches from the wall, wedged between the loveseat and a bookshelf bursting with volumes of philosophy, history, and religion. There is not enough room to comfortably rock. Lydia rubs her arms with mango-scented lotion.

“I don’t know,” Greg says. Lydia is topless, wearing a new pair of long johns and wool socks. She came prepared. Greg looks nervously around the living room, checking both windows. He doesn’t want to give the neighbors a show. Lydia has a tendency towards exhibitionism, he thinks. Why does she always have to grasp for attention, to showboat?

“Hey, do you mind?” Greg says.

“What?”

“A t-shirt or something.”

As soon as the ‘s’ of ‘something’ hisses from his tongue, Greg can tell he made a mistake. He knows he’s probably over-reacting; he just can’t help it. Close confines. Unfulfilled desires. Boredom.

“You mean you don’t like what you see? Is that it? Is my body that repulsive to you?”

Greg tries to explain, to apologize, but the back of the rocking chair clats against the wall, and Lydia zips into the bedroom, snags a plain gray t-shirt, one of his favorites—austere, rough-around-the-edges, grainy, real. She stands in front of him, arms rigid by her side. Fine.

“Anything else? Greg?”

The way she speaks his name says it all. It’s not that they don’t get along often; their relationship is simply an effort. Why can’t he just relax within the comfort of a warm and loving relationship? Is he trying to prove something to himself? Why does he subvert his own happiness? Greg pulls his legs onto the loveseat and he sits cross-legged. He doesn’t think the posture will help. He needs something else altogether.

“You know, I…” Lydia sits on the rug at his feet, grasping his shins.

“I’m sorry, Lydia,” he says. Ultimately Greg knows he needs her. Aside from serving a useful purpose, she is a balancing stick. But now she is already within her own mindset.

“I know you think I’m frivolous.

“What does that mean exactly?”

“You think I’m just a woman who likes to take a bunch of meaningless pictures. You think I’m young, and that I’m superficial, though I’m worth keeping around for other reasons.”

Greg scratches his unshaven face, hoping that will remind her of the snow, the lake, the birds. Something pastoral and optimistic. Then he protests, defends her innate importance in his life. They have had this conversation several times before. Greg knows that for Lydia the day-to-day is the central crux of their relationship. Photography is a way to capture this, to take measure of their lives. But for Greg, her need to archive their experience is a side issue, a distraction from what really counts.

“Yes, I’m not crazy about photography,” he says. “Why not just experience the moment? Why do we have to constantly catalogue it? But this is just a philosophical difference.” His own voice sounds forced to him for some reason. “Maybe it’s really a personal difference,” she says, leaning her head against him. He is touched by the mournful quality of her voice. Even though she put the t-shirt on for him, she’s still not wearing a bra. He has to smile at the accommodation.

“Who knows?” he says. “It’s okay, you don’t have to have shelves of philosophy. You’re not superficial.”

“Well, that’s good to hear,” she says sarcastically.

Lydia presses her hands against his thighs, and for a moment the posture reminds him of a Biblical scene, a painted rendition of something he has viewed before in a museum. The Met? The Louvre? For two years he has loved this woman, and though Lydia is mostly on track, he’s still not sure she understands his needs. Greg is actually not sure why he’s with her at all, why he loves Lydia instead of someone else. He’s not sure he really does love her, or ever did. In a sense, Greg thinks Lydia seems fairly generic, interchangeable. Perhaps this is why he has stayed with her for so long. She is comfortable. She is her role.

Greg pats Lydia’s head, and smoothes the damp hair against her face and behind her ears. Then he allows his hands to drift lower.

When Greg was nine he realized. He could see his parents were different, that where his eyes were deeply set into his skull, where his chin was a small hump their eyes spread wide along their faces, exhibiting more or less roundish chins that sloped and curled away from them. His mother’s hair was a light reddish tan, the color of their hardwood floor. His father’s hair was thick and curly and blonde. Greg’s hair was black and oily—just different. During the winter his skin was the color theirs became only in the summer. Something wasn’t right.

Greg’s friends at school told him he was a “bastard,” but when he asked what that meant they shook their heads. “Ask them. It’s their fault,” his friend Kenny said. “Ask them.”

When they told him, he didn’t cry. He didn’t stop going to school. But inside he smoldered constantly. He wasn’t ashamed; he knew that much. But he did feel unusual, as if he had been tricked somehow and disoriented on top of that. He knew he’d keep calling them “Mom” and “Dad,” but that he couldn’t mean it any more. They suddenly felt like an uncle and aunt to him: Carl and Ellen.

Months later he was still smoldering, and he could tell Ellen seemed to notice. After school he would sit and drink a soda at the table, and eat slices of apples and corn chips. He would just sit and chew, but she looked at him awry; she knew something was wrong.

“Honey, are you okay?” she’d ask. “Is there anything…on your mind?”

To Greg she seemed almost scared of him, tentative. And this made him not want to say anything at all. It wasn’t his fault. Kenny was right. He was just part of the mix. Ellen got him involved in this; she was the one who had to deal with it.

“You know,” Ellen said, sitting next to him. He could hear the wood in the chair adjust to the weight of her body. The table and the chairs were both old, antiques that creaked with each use. She smelled of baked fruit of some sort—cherries or apples, he wasn’t sure—and of cinnamon and brown sugar. She continued: “If you want help trying to find out who your real parents were, I can help you some. I know where you can call.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t want to.”

His mother sat at the table with him and Greg slid each crisp apple slice in his mouth one by one. Greg didn’t want to feel as if he had to hurry just because. Then he ate his chips. Ellen stood up and left the room and came back just as quickly. She handed Greg a yellow folder.

“This is yours,” she said. “If you ever change your mind there is a phone number inside and we can call.” Then she told him that nobody knew who his real mother was, including the agency. “We’re doing the best we can,” she said. Then she turned her back to him, turned toward the counter, and he could hear the click of the knife on the cutting board. But she was too far up; he couldn’t see what she was cutting.

Greg remembers these small moments. It wasn’t as if he had a torturous childhood, or even a painful one. He didn’t. But Greg thinks of his life as undergoing a definite shift. Before the moment of realization he just was: afterwards he was aware. Growing up he often felt numb, as if his life with Carl and Ellen was just transitional, as if he was always waiting. Later he learned this feeling-in-between had a name: purgatory. How could he actually believe in anything if what he knew was fleeting? In retrospect Greg is sure this is why he was never interested in God. Ever.

His friends say that he seems to be always searching, wandering. He never did try to find his mother, but maybe he has found his own means of doing so. He always thought trying to track down a woman who gave him up would be unnecessarily painful, not to mention useless, a lost cause. But then maybe his life would be easier if he just got it over with. If he knew something.

As it was, Carl and Ellen moved off to Salisbury, Maryland the year before. They bought a stately Victorian overlooking the brown Pocomoke. He still considers them parents to some degree, but sometimes Greg can’t help thinking of Carl and Ellen as simply his older friends who at one point cared for him.

The snow melts. Lydia and Greg return to work. Usually they would talk every night on the phone, but for two days Greg doesn’t hear from her, and he doesn’t feel inclined to call. Greg knows they are both avoiding the underlying issues. On the third night he drives to the mall. He never does this.

In the mall Greg doesn’t enter a single store. He just wants to be surrounded by strangers in an unfamiliar environment. He walks by shoe stores, gourmet chocolate shops, fashion boutiques, computer stores. In the mall Greg notices the young women, high school girls, young professionals, sisters or friends in and out of stores, sitting in the food court, talking on their cell phones. They wear tight jeans or slacks, or revealing skirts, and without exception skintight shirts that follow every curve. If they are alone, the men look away nervously, or ogle, or glance quickly from each to each. If they are with one of these women, they parade them (girlfriends or sisters or friends) triumphantly past the shoppers sitting on aluminum benches or standing next to trash receptacles.

He also notices some older women, and when he sees them he wonders if each might be his mother. Very few women fit the description, and of course he can’t know for sure if he looks more like his father or mother. It’s a crapshoot, but he can’t help thinking. Still, even if he does see a woman he thinks might be his mother he would never approach her. Not in a million years.

Greg sits by a fountain in the center of the mall. Artificial plants surround the fountain in huge metallic planters. Pennies and nickels catch the underwater lamps. Couples sit around the fountain eating pizza or stir-fry or tacos, and laugh and smile at each other. A boy with red overalls washes his hands in the fountain water. Two girls play patty-cake leaning against a planter. Greg looks at the fountain itself and listens to the flow of water. The lamps catch the foam as it cascades downward into the pool only to rise again.

Greg wonders if Lydia feels neglected. Perhaps the fact that he rarely wants sex more than once a week throws her off. The more he thinks about it the more disgusting it seems to him. Sex seems so unnecessary. The whole ordeal is nothing more than the relieving of an urge, like defecation. You can barely walk down the street without seeing a woman dressed like a whore, he thinks. This is what it has come to. He’s had it.

On the way out of the mall Greg stops at the magazine stand. All of the magazines are the same—some beautiful buxom nineteen-year-old starlet showing off her cleavage, her lips parted in sexual anticipation. They all look the same, he thinks. It’s all one woman. Greg wishes he had a can of spray paint in hand. Instead, he opens a copy of each magazine and lets the subscription inserts flutter to the sidewalk, and he walks away.

That night Lydia calls, but Greg doesn’t answer. He sits in the rocking chair without rocking and stares at the wall. Later Greg will listen to her thin voiced and pleading message. “Call me,” she says. “It’s vital.” Vital? Greg can’t remember the last time she used this word. Perhaps she never made this exact utterance before, its only instance in her life. He doesn’t return the call.

Later James and Kent will call, Greg thinks. They usually do on Wednesday nights. Greg won’t return those calls either. He wonders if he should even bother with them, if the effort is worth the consequence. He wishes he had the gumption to tell them both to go to hell, that the last thing he needs in his life is division.

At the moment Greg is consumed with the wall and the silence that surrounds it. He can bear an occasional muffled thump from beneath, but otherwise he feels as if he’s in a vacuum.

The wall is marked and scratched from years of use. How long has it been since the complex painted these walls? Fingerprint smudges mark the wall along with the legs of a mosquito he smashed a year ago, several identifiable pale blue smears. My life is null and void, Greg thinks. What am I doing? I am forty-three, and what have I done?

He recounts the many books he has read, works of literature, religion, philosophy. Stories. His life is nothing but a compilation of “meaningful” tales. As a child he holed himself away. He wasn’t angry; he fled. Ellen would call to him, “Greg, do you want to play a game? Would you like to go for a hike? Do you want to go to the park?” No. No. No. He would rather lie in bed with his latest find from the library. At school he would draw on the bathroom stalls, melt crayons on the radiators, scribble on the brick façade during recess. He was caught just once that he can remember, and then he was only forced to wash the bathroom stall and promise to never do it again. “I promise,” he said. He was a sneak, a fraud.

School wasn’t difficult, that was for sure. Greg discovered all he had to do was show up and do what he was told. If he did that he would pass with flying colors, and people would trust him. If he made the gesture of being good, in their eyes, he was good. Then he could follow your own agenda without scrutiny. When Greg was in high school it was shoplifting: clothes, records, books, film, birthday presents. He was never caught. About once a month he even stole five and ten dollar bills from his parents’ money drawer. If they knew they never said a word.

In college he would skip most of his classes. When Carl and Ellen started seeing the failing grades they confronted him. Greg admitted he had lost his concentration, had become lazy and distracted. But he never told them about avoidance. When he failed out of school a semester later, luckily his wealthy great aunt died, leaving him two hundred thousand. Then Greg knew he could have his life as he wanted. Spend frugally, live simply—no restaurants, no fancy clothes or luxuries, no car—and he could live for years and years. Twenty-four years later he’s down to five grand, no job, a waning love life, a marked wall, and a rocking chair pinned in a tiny, silent apartment.

On Saturday Lydia picks Greg up to bring him to her townhouse for dinner. He sits in the passenger seat next to her. But instead of receiving her usual warm glowing eyes and embrace, she pats his shoulder and snaps the radio on. As she drives down the wet country roads, Greg doesn’t say anything. Neither does Lydia. The Beach Boys are on the radio. “God Only Knows.”

“Did you ever worry about your parents when you were a kid?” Lydia finally asks. Her mouth looks sour; disgust emanates from her. Greg is still unshaven, nearly a full beard.

“Not much,” Greg says. And he didn’t.

“I worried about mine all the time,” she says, cracking her window. “God. I always thought something might happen to them at any point.”

“How did the pictures turn out?”

At this Lydia hits the brakes and pulls onto the gravel shoulder. The pebbles snap under her tires. She tells him he’s not avoiding this, that she’s exhausted from doing battle with him, that she needs to feel appreciated, and loved. Greg remarks that he’s the same. He’s been the same person the past two years, and Lydia sighs, not a tear in sight.

Greg can easily imagine his life without Lydia. It doesn’t seem to matter to him if she stays or goes—in fact, part of him would rather be alone. Not that he’s a control freak, but at least he would know who to blame if he was alone. Yes, if Lydia was out of the picture there would be a temporary void. But it would easily be filled, just like before.

Before Lydia he was a day from proposing to his girlfriend of three years, but an hour before the big dinner, Greg called Stephanie and said it’s over, it’s over, it’s over. He still has the ring tucked in a shoebox just in case somebody else comes along. When Stephanie asked for an explanation, he said he didn’t want to explain. She just wasn’t what he expected, he said. That’s all.

As Lydia talks, Greg thinks. Yes, he did worry about Carl and Ellen. He’s sure now he never asked them the questions they thought he would ask: why was I adopted? Why didn’t you have your own? What did people think? Do you feel I’m really yours? He was curious; he just thought some things should be private. He could come to his own conclusions. They had their reasons, their feelings, their thoughts. I have mine, he thought. But Greg did worry. He knew they suffered. He knew it wasn’t easy to feel unworthy, punished. “You sound just like a real mother,” Greg would hear people say. If anything, Carl and Ellen were better than most “real” parents.

“If you ever want to know,” Carl told him once. “Just call the agency and see. It’s worth a shot.”

“Are you listening to what I’m saying?” Lydia asks.

“Yes. Right,” he says. “My parents.” Greg watches the wipers, the wet grass. He yawns.

“That’s it,” she says. “I’m sick of this. That’s it. Get out of my car. Get the hell out.”

“What? What did I say?”

“I’m tired of the disregard, you know. I’m normal. I really want to be, you know, desired like a normal person. I can’t take this brooding shit anymore.” Greg unclasps the seat belt, unlocks the door, lifts himself from the car. The door blings, blings, blings.

“Take a walk,” Lydia says. “Go home. Be by yourself. That’s what you want.”

Greg does as he’s told: he begins walking. He doesn’t turn around when Lydia’s car peals out, snapping gravel against his calves. He walks along the white line. He feels oddly liberated. He knows where it will lead, and he knows what he will do when he returns. He will pick up the phone and begin calling. He will start all over again.

© Nathan Leslie

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