It was that Monday that Thomas realized he could no longer be Tommy. Letting the lukewarm coffee pool in his mouth, he tugged at the necktie that was slowly strangling him. The coffee traveled sluggishly down his throat. Suburbia. The word sounded much too romantic for what it meant.
Staring at his tattered loafers with their crooked soles, he watched the crusted polish flake off like dandruff. He had mentioned a month ago at dinner how he wanted a new pair, but his father, Thomas Murray, Sr., had deemed it too impractical, too extravagant. And so, Thomas sat now at the kitchen table for breakfast with those flaking shoes on his feet, a cup of coffee that grew colder by the second, and pangs of hunger that twisted into his stomach like a knife. The chandelier light above him flickered, slowly dimming, then suddenly brightening with a nervous twitch of energy. He looked to his right and sighed—the wallpaper was peeling at the point where the kitchen met the living room. Speckled robin’s egg, his wife had called the glorified shade of blue that covered the stark bareness underneath. Thomas would press the half-sticky paper to the wall every morning, smoothing out the wrinkles etched into it by time. And every morning it would droop back down, hanging lethargically from a wall that no longer cared to hold it up.
“How much longer on those eggs, Ivy?” he asked, his aching stomach seconding his plea with a decided groan. He stared at the back of his wife’s head as she sloshed around the contents of the pan. The burner refused to ignite—all clicking, but no flame. As she lowered her head to give the stove a proper examination, her bobbed blonde hair did not move at all, providing the perfect frame for her porcelain face. That is, if Ivy would turn her face to him. But true to her name, Ivy clung to the house, analyzing a home improvement magazine as if it were a war strategy, carrying a broom and dustpan like a sword and shield. And every free moment of hers was spent tending to Little Tommy, their baby who would coo in her arms but spit up in his. He looked nothing like Thomas. Having taken his first steps into his mother’s arms the week before, Little Tommy was now ambling about, waddling from one of his toys to the other, slapping his bare feet against the hardwood floor just to hear the sound of it. As he waited at the table, Thomas tried calling Little Tommy over to him. But the baby just sat down nervously, clutching his little blanket the way he did when strangers looked at him.
“You just need to wait a little longer, dear,” Ivy said, the stove barely sustaining a small flame. His stomach wailed in protest. A stove that would not burn. A wife who would not look at him. Now there’s a story, he thought ruefully, and grabbing a paper napkin from the stack on the table, he took out his pen from his pocket. A man whose heart smolders more strongly than a stove, he began, marveling at the words’ inky birth before him.
Thomas had always wanted to be a writer. He would spot something during his day, something unique, something that broke up that numbing rhythm that tried to lull him to sleep. The inspiration would rest upon him like a tongue of fire, like a neatly folded flower whose petals pressed against each other, waiting anxiously for daybreak to come and unfurl them. And he would lie awake all night, crafting the story in his head. Soon enough, a technicolor world would dance in his mind, stirring restlessly as it waited to be transcribed onto paper in the morning. And then he would write—not of fantastic kingdoms and mythical realms but of the most majestic version of everyday life, shrouded in a dazzling ideal—the way it should be.
But one image hung perpetually in his mind. Whether Thomas did not understand it himself or if it was simply too sacred for words, he did not know. All he knew was that he had never been able to put it into writing. But when he closed his eyes, he saw the silhouettes of a man and woman embracing each other, their bare feet ready to step in time to a song only the two of them would be able to recognize. But the song never played for them, and so they stood there, frozen in empty revelry.
“Waste of time,” Thomas Murray, Sr., had deemed his son’s work, “writing about things that aren’t even real.” A game of golf with a friend from college, and Mr. Murray had his son working at the bank, a path of life so commonly traveled that Thomas’s footprint would barely be seen for a moment before the thousands of men behind him wiped it away. His half-finished notebooks lay orphaned on his bookshelf, dust scattered across their tops like ashes. But the stories were still out there, waiting to be chiseled from the stones in which they hid. So, Thomas had collected a couple dozen half-started stories, writing out a phrase or two if only to remember how the pen felt in his hand.
Staring at the back of Ivy’s head, wondering what expression she wore on the front, he remembered the days before their marriage, when his father had boasted Ivy’s “pedigree.” He and Ivy’s father played golf together every Saturday. On their first date, Thomas had taken Ivy to the movie theater. He had tried putting his arm around her. But something about her frame seemed incompatible with his, her elbow lodging itself sharply into his rib. Glancing over at her, he had found her eyes were blank, nothing but the screen’s changing images reflected in them. And when Thomas laughed at something in the movie, she always laughed a beat behind. And now, sitting at the table, he tugged at his too-tight wedding band, wondering if it had completely molded into his skin. Whose heart smolders more strongly than a stove, a stovetop kept from burning under a wife’s chill. He wrote the last part on the napkin frantically, tucking it under his forearm as Ivy came to the table. In her hand was a plate holding barely scrambled eggs. The undercooked egg whites looked like something out of Little Tommy’s nose.
“Does it feel stuffy to you in this house?” Thomas asked his wife, searching for the faintest glimmer within the woman’s eyes. Maybe she could sense how stale the air was, like there was something rotting within the walls. Maybe she got that restless feeling he got, the one that made him want to tear off his necktie and watch the wind carry it away from him, folding and refolding it until it was nothing but a bad dream. But her eyes just sat there, wedged deeply into her skull, dense as rocks.
“Well, I can turn the heat down in here, dear, but you know it is not good for the house to keep changing the temperatures up and down, and—”
Her words had no movement to them, falling flatly like stones.
“Tired, dear?” Ivy offered quickly, intently focused on sipping from her mug. Thomas watched her face contort as the coffee hit her tongue. Too bitter.
“Exhausted,” he answered, a certain hope beginning to smolder inside of him. Maybe she understood. Maybe she knew.
“You have not been getting enough sleep then, dear,” she said, shaking her head at her husband’s obvious oversight, masking her coffee’s sharp taste in sugar, then cream, then a bit more sugar. She stirred the slurry together vigorously, each clink of her spoon against the mug sending a pulsing pain through Thomas’s head.
“I am tired of sleep,” he mumbled, catching his head in his hands, shielding his eyes from the dizzying, flickering light. The spoon kept clinking, clinking, clinking, calling attention to a toast that would never to be made.
“Seven to nine hours,” Thomas heard Ivy say, “seven to nine hours of sleep, they always say, and you wake up a whole new person.” A final clink, and Thomas listened as she sipped, swallowed, and sighed, perfectly satisfied. But as she lowered the mug back to the table, her gaze dropped to what lay beneath Thomas’s arm. He looked down and caught the rogue phrase wife’s chill peeking out from behind the bulwark. Her eyes brimmed with a hurt she could not understand.
“I doubt some sleep can—” Thomas began, his words suddenly clipped as he felt his arm being moved. Clutched within Ivy’s tight grip was the napkin. She rubbed it against her mouth, the coffee dribbling from her lips, bleeding into every letter of every word one by one.
“Did you need this, dear?” she asked, still using it to dab the corner of her mouth. Thomas stared at the napkin, his vision blurring alongside the words that melted meaninglessly onto her hand.
“No, I won’t be needing that anymore.”
“I love you, Tommy,” she suddenly crooned. The sound breathed life into his aching bones. He looked to his wife, his expectant eyes anxious to meet hers.
“I love you, Ivy.”
But she was not there. Halfway across the room, she was holding her arms out to Little Tommy, the two of them speaking back and forth in garbled nonsense. Pushing his plate away from him, Thomas stood up to go to work. Folding the napkin neatly, he threw it away, watching as it slid down the sides of the trash can.
It was trash anyways, he thought to himself as he trudged into his office building, nearly crashing into the burly man in front of him as he joined the endless queue of workers waiting to get to their cubicles. The memory of the weekend still stayed with them, clinging to their vision like the sand that crusted in the corners of their weary eyes. Heads down, hands exiled into the deep recesses of their coat pockets, they looked as if they were in a bread line, one that gave out money in exchange for their souls each day. Then Thomas remembered that he was part of the line. And so, tucking his head into his chest, he followed as the line moved forward, marching in time with those before and after him, waiting to pass the desk of that old receptionist who smelled like dying roses.
But as Thomas neared the desk, he felt a difference in the air. It was as though a storm had blown through the building moments before, purifying the hall with its bands of rain until all that was left was a breeze bashfully kissing Thomas’s face. The air—it was redolent of something sweet, something warm. He broadened his nostrils, inhaling deeply until he could feel the perfumed air tingle in his lungs. As he closed in on the source, he felt the warmness running through him, broadening his veins. Straining his neck, Thomas tried to see beyond the man in front of him, but his broad shoulders stood as unmoving sentinels between him and this mysterious force. Just three more steps. Then two more. Thomas clutched at his stuttering heart. One step, and he stood before the desk.
But he did not see a person behind the desk. Instead, he saw a pile of hair. Long and sprawling, it spilled over the desk’s edge like a gently flowing current. The tendrils frizzed in every direction, reaching out towards every corner of the lobby. First a nutty brown, then a ruddy auburn, its color had the potential to be anything it wanted to be. Peeking out from under it were pages of a notebook kept guarded by the shield of hair. This pile of hair had a name, Angelina, written in dancing script on the sheet of paper folded over the name plate of the previous receptionist. At the corner of the desk was a cup of hot tea, the steam spiraling out of it like incense, blessing the desk and everything around it.
Suddenly, the heap of hair stirred, churning like deep-scarlet magma as it gathered its sprawling tendrils into itself. Held up by a soft ivory neck, it rose up from the desk. Two hands anointed with blue ink parted the hair like curtains to reveal a face covered in a constellation of freckles. But the eyes would not look up. Fixed upon the notebook, they gazed tenderly upon the words written on the open page as one would a newborn child. Inebriated by the smell, Thomas felt drunk as his legs buckled beneath him. The next man in the queue stumbled into Thomas and curled his lip at him, sickened by the daydreamer who held up the forward progression. He redirected the line around Thomas, and the other men followed like a trail of dutiful ants. But all Thomas could do was stare—stare at the cascading hair, the soft face, and the page that so captivated those hidden eyes. And he stared at that makeshift nameplate that summed up the splendor into a single word.
“Something wrong with my name, sir?” asked a voice that jingled like a thousand coins. Brought to his senses, Thomas looked up to find the eyes fixed upon him. Gleaming softly yet steadily from that gently freckled face, they adorned her face like twin sapphires. Thomas licked his lips, priming them as best he could for the words he knew would fall clumsily from his mouth.
“No, no—it is an excellent name, truly.” He blinked, and the image of a girl, not just a collection of features, came into view. She could not have been more than twenty years old.
“And what is your name, sir?” asked the girl, Angelina, whose saucer-eyes grew wider as they pulled the world into them like magnets. And in those gentle spheres, Thomas could see his own face, dumb and dreamy, swirling within them.
“Surely you know your name, sir?” the girl asked, her eyes crinkling with laughter. Thomas opened his mouth, his lips shaping themselves around the word that was his father’s name that had come to be his own. But just before the sound could come through, his mouth changed its form. Something different was fighting its way through, breaking through the barrier like water busting through a dam.
“Tommy,” he said, “my name is Tommy.”
But it was Thomas who had to tuck himself inside his cubicle like a caged animal, and it was Thomas whose pen felt desperately heavy in his hand as he sat before his ledger. The minute hand of the clock across the room mocked him with its leisurely march, the hour hand playing some sort of cruel joke. Thomas looked absently at the numbers before him as they melted into an inscrutable puddle. Curiosity nagged at him, spidering across every corner of his brain. He bounced his leg up and down, the movement sending pulses to the network of workers around him. And as time stood stubbornly still, he wondered what words lay on the page before that mystical girl at the reception desk.
Five in the afternoon, and Thomas shot up from his chair like a spring. Pages stuck out in every direction as he crumpled them into his briefcase. He was determined to reach the reception desk before the girl left, leaving nothing but a trail of musk and intrigue in her wake. As the workers shuffled back into their line formation out the door, Thomas barreled in front of them, his shoe’s rubber soles flapping out from under him as he raced to the desk. Ten paces short of his target, Thomas could still smell the honeyed fragrance in full force. But as he saw the shock of auburn hair still hovering over its notebook, panic overrode his senses. His mouth went dry as a desert, the moisture flooding instead into his clammy hands as he wiped them feverishly on his slacks. Holding his aching chest again, he stood there before those eyes—those strong, cobalt eyes—with absolutely nothing to say.
“Tommy?” came the voice, soft as velvet, and those big, rounded eyes were trained on him again. Her delicate face was so pure—a clean canvas outlined with paint-dot freckles waiting to be connected into a masterpiece. At the sound of his old name, a craving seized him. But that old boyish shyness took hold of him as well, making his face burn as he struggled to think of something to ask her, something to keep her with him. Then he saw the cup sitting on her desk, almost empty except for the tea bag left inside, imparting all it could to those last dregs of water.
“You don’t drink coffee?” he stammered, his eyes immediately darting down, as if the answer to how idiotic his question sounded were written across her desk. But when he looked up, she was not laughing at him.
“No,” she answered, her eyes flitting from his face to her cup, then back to him, “I find it too bitter without adding all the cream and sugar.”
“And what’s wrong with adding all the cream and sugar?” Thomas watched her wide eyes narrow as she seriously considered the answer.
“Well,” she began, her voice drenched in honey, “it just doesn’t make sense to me, choosing to drink something you don’t even like unless you change it. I want to like it for what it really is. I guess that is a bit silly, isn’t it?”
But Thomas just stared back at her. Looking nervous, she giggled a bit, and he smiled as the sound of her light, airy laugh took years of weight off his shoulders. He breathed in deeply and asked what he had really wanted to know.
“What is that book?”
“Poetry—my poetry,” the woman said, the fresh stanzas still swimming inside those glittering eyes.
“I—I write, too,” he replied, “or at least I used to,” he said, wondering how foolish he must have looked as he deliberated over which position his elbow should take on her desk.
“Well, I have bookshelves of my work lining my apartment, but I am missing an audience, so—”
“Take me there,” he blurted, the regret smarting viciously across his face as he considered the implication of the words he could not hold back.
“Sure,” she said calmly, “you can just follow my car on the way home.” And Thomas’s mouth hung open in baffled guilt over the girl so pure that she thought nothing at all of a strange man following her home to her apartment.
“Here, give me your shoes,” she said as they entered through her door, the tongues of his loafers sticking out rudely in protest. As she took them from him, his hands freed of the burden, he realized just how heavy they had felt. With nothing but a thin sock on each foot, Thomas stepped into the apartment. The coldness of the tile floor invigorated him, rising from his feet through his trunk, flooding every chamber of his body until even his fingertips buzzed. Books and magazines were left open, sprawling shamelessly throughout the living room. Newspaper clippings fell from the table like petals. Everything hummed with life, fixed in place if only by a smell like dripping honeysuckle threaded through each object. And as she placed a tea kettle on her stove, he looked out through the apartment’s big clear window. Beyond the lethargic suburbs, away in the distance, Thomas could see the city scrambling with undying action.
“This one has some of my best work, I think,” she said as she returned from a shelf holding a notebook with furled pages, “but I’m no poet.” But the hope that she could be considered one was written across her twitching lips as she carefully nestled the open book in his hands.
“I get an idea, and I’m so excited,” she continued, sitting into her hip, stretching one of her ringlet curls as far as it could go, “but it’s sticking with it once it’s lost its freshness that’s hard. Keeping that magic, you know?” Thomas nodded meekly, wondering how long he had ever let himself sit in that frustration before letting his notebook close, its own spine folding in on itself. But there he was, holding a notebook whose pages were ruffled and scarred by her feverish work. And so, he sighed. And so, he read.
Just one line. In just one line of hers, the desire emanated from the page. The petals of his mind unfurled themselves, and his thirsting skin basked in the warmth of what he read. Just one line, and a filmstrip of pictures flashed in his head, the same way they did for him as a boy. He saw passion spreading itself like a deep, rosy flush across an old, gray wall. He saw apartment buildings wedged into a city teeming with people who never grew tired, their eyelids propped open all night not by regret but by reckless hope for the next day. And he saw a man and a woman embracing each other, swaying gently back and forth, back and forth, because the music had finally played for them. And at last Thomas could hear the sweet, rich sounds, too. Because it was his own heart burning through his chest, beating more vehemently than ever before, that was keeping time.
And right there next to him was this woman who could not be more than twenty years old, whose hands were covered in the ink through which the words had been born. This woman who he had not even known for a day, but whose words had been written upon him his entire life. Dropping the notebook, Thomas reached for the woman next to him. Her waist was the bookmark telling him where his hand should go. With his other hand, he held her face, the skin as creamy as an unmarked sheet of paper. And he uttered that sacred name, summoning all the reverence and zeal he could out of the dregs of his soul.
“Angelina.”
As soon as he said it, he knew he had made a mistake. Poisoned by his lips, the name lost its sweet melody, and the sound hung dissonantly between them. The sugared fragrance in the room soured, stinging his nose.
“Tommy?” she said, the word barely sputtering from her mouth as she looked confusedly at the hand on her waist. Then her face was looking up at his, those twin sapphire eyes stabbing into him. He looked in one eye, watching as it blazed and smoldered. It flashed with the desire to let that feverish passion finally unmask itself before her. But it was the other eye that turned the flush in Thomas’s face into a blistering shame. The eye that squinted against the light reflected from his wedding band. The gem-stone eye that was dull, losing its luster as it realized the immaculate dreams she would be trading for this stranger. It squinted as it peered into Thomas, searching for which parts of him were real and which were just added to mask the bitter truth. Then the tea kettle hissed on the stove, screaming a bloody cry that made Thomas wince. He could not do it. He would not.
“It’s Thomas, just Thomas,” he said, dropping his hands from the woman, stepping over the fallen notebook, and picking up the threadbare loafers by the door. He did not bother to put them back on as he left, walking outside toward his car in his socks.
So Thomas drove home, watching as the skyline dropped off from city buildings that cut through the clouds down to the squat houses of suburbia. The air was sucked from his lungs; every breath felt mechanical. And he would have felt entirely numb, numb right to the bone, had it not been for the cool, smooth feeling off the gas pedal on his shoeless foot. It felt so charged beneath him—vivifying—and as he pressed harder into the pedal, he laughed just a little as his car shot forward. The rapidly passing shapes in the neighborhood blurred into new, pulsing colors as he surged through the side streets at speeds he had never dared before. But then his laugh petered off into a dry, hoarse cough as his car rolled lethargically into his own driveway. He rubbed his foot on the pedal, slowly caressing it as he mourned the last bit of passion he would ever feel.
Throwing his shoes aside on the porch, he let them flop lifelessly if they wanted to as he walked inside. He made his way towards the kitchen. A woman with perfect hair stood in profile, an infant slung tightly around her, his feet kicking in the air, eager to feel the ground beneath them again.
“Thomas?” Ivy asked, turning to face him. In her hands were a pair of fresh leather shoes. Their slick, glossy tops served as a mirror, showing Thomas the tentative light that began to pulse in his eyes.
“What are these for?”
“Well, you kept saying you were tired, and well—you mentioned new shoes, so I thought I’d—” the words were clumsy and devoid of rhythm, and yet they were charming, “I went to get these for you today…in the city.”
He put the shoes on, lacing them up in the middle of the kitchen with no intention of going anywhere that night. Rising to his feet, he let himself be bold enough to take Ivy’s hand in his. And he squeezed it, trying to simulate a heartbeat between the two. It was cold and rigid, but as his warm hand held on to hers, a certain energy coursed between the two. Passion, it was not. But it was raw, unmasked. It was imperfect enough to feel real.
He contemplated the old wallpaper behind Ivy. Maybe those random speckled dots had some pattern. Perhaps it was a robin’s egg. Maybe the baby babbling softly into Ivy’s neck would grow up to look a bit like him—maybe they would have the same ears or nose. He could settle for a nose. And perhaps Ivy could make Thomas sound sweet coming from her mouth. He could at least wait and see.
He would take out the trash—try to get rid of the stale smell inside. Maybe he would try to write again, now that the buried words of his heart had been dug up and all. He did not know. But now, standing next to his wife by the stove, he placed her hand on the stove knob, placing his hand over top. And with her hand in his, he turned on the burner, trying to see if he could keep it lit.
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