Sense and Sensibility, Too
Con Chapman
When they broke up, Marcie moved out of the north-facing apartment on Beacon Street and rented a place on the back side of the Hill, again too dark to cure her of the winter blues that ailed her, he thought. He took care of telling the landlord, the old Flemish guy who’d made them swear they were married – which they weren’t – when they signed the lease. He broke the news over the phone but he could see the guy shaking his head from side to side, telling himself he’d known all along there was something fishy about those two, despite the dime store rings they’d purchased for the interview.
He found new tenants to take over the lease, a couple from Connecticut moving up to Boston. The man wore a tan-and-orange plaid sport coat and a blue club tie with pheasants on it when he came to check the place out. His wife arrived a little late, and much littler than him; she was a highlighted blonde who wore lipstick on a Saturday and kept going on and on about how much she loved the wide-plank pine floor and the Franklin stove and the little courtyard out the back. He didn’t mention that a guy had tried to break in that way one night, shining a light in the bedroom that woke him up. He choked when he tried to scream, and scared the guy off by running to the door and slamming his body against it. Marcie didn’t wake up until it was over.
The couple was happy to take the place at the current rate, so he moved to a one bedroom on Newbury Street that he could rent by the month. The landlord had a bunch of strange rule, no overnight guests, no more than three people in an apartment at a time, but he didn’t care. He wanted to move on; he could plan his next move when he got settled.
He walked out on the street the day he turned thirty, and thought things weren’t so bad. He wasn’t desperate, he would just take his time. He went to Marcie’s new place on the back side of the Hill a few times, supposedly just to check things out at first, as if he were her father and she’d gone away to college. He ended up spending the night more than once, so he had something going on the side; now he figured he needed a main squeeze, a term he could only use facetiously if he’d said it aloud.
Fall turned to winter and the eye action in the Back Bay slowed down. The girls were all bundled up with scarves around their necks, and walked down the street against the wind coming off the Pike with their heads down. The outdoor cafes closed, and the crowds thinned out in the bars.
Because he lived so close to Marcie he tended not to spend the night when they got together; what was the point he thought, and she didn’t seem to care. It prevented sex from turning into something more, but then she started seeing a man – older than him – who owned a bike shop on Commonwealth Avenue over by B.U.
He’d been caught leaning the wrong way, so to speak. He called her one Friday afternoon, supposedly just to see how she was doing, and worked his way around to asking her to dinner on Charles Street, which would have meant he’d spend the night at her place.
“Uh, I can’t,” she said, with a hesitation that surprised him. Then he made the mistake of probing.
“Why, got a date?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do,” she had said, proud as a poker player turning over a winning hand.
“Oh – okay,” he’d said as if it wasn’t a big deal, but it was. It meant he, the one who’d first said he wanted to break up, no longer held the advantage in the toting-up they would carry around in their heads for the rest of their lives when they took stock of their romantic selves from time to time; he may have scored first, but she had won.
And so the same street scenes that hadn’t seemed so bad in the fall were a little grimmer now. He didn’t have Marcie to hold onto, like the dasher at the ice rink where she tried to teach him how to skate; he counted the glance of every woman who turned away from him as he looked, trying to get something going. There were no opportunities at work; it was very much a back-office, low-enthusiasm environment. People didn’t pal around after hours or go out for drinks on Fridays; most were older and went straight home, and didn’t live in the city.
He had always read the personals in the weekly paper for laughs, but now he found himself paying more attention. There were some high-toned ones, and he knew at least one couple – the owners of the art gallery down the street – who’d met that way. They always seemed happy; maybe he shouldn’t look down his nose at the possibility, he thought.
He answered a few ads placed by women but found the process irritating, like applying for a job, and there was the dishonesty of it all. He arranged to have coffee with a “well-proportioned woman” who turned out to be a college girl, and looked nothing like he’d imagined; apparently one was expected to know the code in which these things were written.
The office of the paper was down at the end of Newbury Street, and he passed it every night after coming up from his subway stop. He could place an ad, get a P.O. box there, drop in after work and it wouldn’t look suspicious; he didn’t know anyone in his building, and if someone asked why he got a box he could just say he didn’t want people stealing packages or something like that.
So he sat himself down one Friday night, one on which he noted that he had no plans for the weekend, and began to compose his personal ad. He took pad and pen in hand, and began to create his ideal woman by carving away those things about Marcie that had driven him away. How…impractical she was; how she wanted to move into the city right away, before they could afford to. Their apartment in Brookline was fine – why couldn’t they save up for awhile after he got out of school, then move to Boston when they’d built up a little cushion?
Her mood swings could be hard to deal with; she’d go into a funk in November and wouldn’t come out of it completely until spring, he thought. That’s why he didn’t want to take their first city apartment, the one she and the little woman from Connecticut fell in love with; the windows faced north, and he’d seen how down she got in the winter. He knew better than she how a room with a southern exposure could change her mood; he recalled having brunch one time on the second floor of the Hampshire House, which looked out over the Public Garden. She’d smiled the hour away, and not in that typical wry fashion of hers, as if she were at peace with the world for once.
The transcendental meditation had become an issue between them. Whenever they fought – which was often enough – she’d tell him that he should meditate, and he’d say it didn’t seem to work since she’d started the argument, as he would retrace the steps that had led them to the particular precipice they’d ended up on. The more precisely he described their path, the more furious she would become. It was all a bunch of hocus-pocus to him; the candle, the orange and the handkerchief you gave your guru, the personal, secret word he gave you in exchange. It seemed like a New Age Masonic lodge, with different regalia.
He thought better of specifying physical qualities, figuring you had to swing at what was pitched to you. He loved the few little freckles on the top of Marcie’s cheeks, her dark hair and the robin’s egg blue eyes, but he turned his head to look at other types, too.
And then there were the things that he liked, or at least he thought he ought to like about her; her love of the harpsichord, and oddball British writers she’d try to get him to read. Those qualities were nice, but more like aspirations than essential. He could do with a woman who was a little less ethereal, he thought; a woman who wore a mood ring on her heart, so you knew whether you were going to touch off a minor civil war with an idle remark, didn’t seem like such a bad thing to him at this stage of his life.
The thing he loved about her the most was the thing he knew he couldn’t replace; the way she held onto the inner life of her childhood and could summon it up at will, revealed sometimes by the secret language she shared with her sister and their friend Caroline. The coded insults – “dubo” and “stunod” – that they’d use around him when they ganged up to tease him. She would glide back into her little girl voice sometimes when they were in bed, thereby admitting him provisionally to her secret sorority, as if they were brother and sister instead of adults who’d given their innocence – or what was left of it – to each other. It would have seemed arch in another woman, but he took it from her as the best evidence of their intimacy.
He started to write, and ended up with this:
SM looking for SW with sense and sensibility, too. Artsy but not fartsy. In this world and of it. If swept off feet can nail the dismount. Me, 5’11”, Back Bay, social drinker, no drugs, stay fit but no jock. Professionally employed, too proud of his wit perhaps. Non-smokers only.
He took a moment to admire his work. He thought he’d baited his hook with the right stuff; the echo of Goldsmith’s Edmund Burke with the self-deprecating crack about his wit, the lead that would appeal to Austen fans.
He sent it off with a check for a two-week run, and went about his life, picking up the paper when it came out on Thursday, looking for his ad and cringing when he read it. A bit too precious, he thought, but what the hell. What’s done is done, he’d see what happened.
There followed a week of work like most others, numbing his mind to anything outside the office until Thursday night when, as he stood in line to pay for a frozen dinner, he saw the weekly paper and realised that there were probably some letters in his box by now. He paid and, at a pace that belied his assurance to himself that he was just curious, walked back towards the newspaper office.
The office was closed but the boxes were located in the outer lobby. He opened his and found inside a handful of letters, some in pink envelopes, and a flyer for an escort service, which he threw away.
When he got back to his apartment, he tried to remain calm, taking off his coat, turning on the oven and putting in his dinner, then laying the letters out on the counter with curiosity. He spotted one with handwriting that was vaguely familiar, but no return address; it wasn’t in one of the pink envelopes. He decided to read it first and slipped his finger under the fold to tear it open.
The letter inside read “Sense and sensibility? You had that woman once, you dumbo. Come to her again.”
“I am a Boston-area writer, author of two novels. My work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Christian Science Monitor, The Boston Globe, and various literary magazines. My biography of Johnny Hodges, Duke Ellington’s long-time alto sax, will be published by Oxford University Press in August of this year.”