At a Loss For Words Read online

  At A Loss For Words

  A Post-Romantic Novel

  Diane Schoemperlen

  For my girlies

  and for Dale

  There is some truth to this, like all lies.

  —Lynn Crosbie, Liar

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  I am a writer who cannot

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Diane Schoemperlen

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  I am a writer who cannot write. There are many reasons for this.

  For starters, I didn’t sleep well last night. In fact, I haven’t slept well for many nights in a row. For weeks maybe, months even. I used to keep track of my sleepless nights, but now I’ve lost count. It was too depressing to continue logging one wretched night after another.

  Perhaps I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in years. Perhaps I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in my entire adult life. Perhaps not even before that. When I was six, seven, eight years old, my mother used to give me Valium to make me sleep. Sometimes a whole tablet, sometimes just a half. I remember her at the kitchen counter at midnight, wearing the frilly yellow pajamas she called “baby dolls,” trying to cut up the little blue pill (I remember them as blue, but maybe they were white, or maybe pink like the antidepressants I’m now taking) with my father’s penknife, the one with a picture of a moose on the handle, the one he used to clean his fingernails after working in the garden or on the car. It was a tricky and frustrating procedure, this halving of the pill. I remember the sound the knife blade made when it finally cut through and hit the counter hard. Sometimes one or both halves flew out from under the blade, and then I had to crawl around on the kitchen floor until I found it: under the table, under the radiator, under the edge of the counter, or just lost in the swirly multicolored pattern of the worn linoleum. “Mother’s little helper,” indeed.

  Ever since then, I have longed for sleeping pills. None of the over-the-counter remedies have ever worked for me. They only make me even more wide-awake and restless than I already am. In fact, any medication that says May cause drowsiness on the label is guaranteed to make me increasingly jittery and anxious.

  Two months ago, after much begging and whining, I was finally able to convince my doctor to write me a prescription. I loved those little white pills. They worked. But she would only give me a three-week supply, no refills. She is a very good doctor: cautious, conscientious, and thorough. I told her that a previous doctor once said he wouldn’t give me sleeping pills because I have an “addictive personality.” She said she had to agree with him. She grinned wryly. So did I.

  And so I soldier on, sleepless, brought almost to tears by those idyllic television commercials in which attractive men and women drift off to sleep in luxurious bedrooms with immaculate bedding, fresh flowers on the bedside table, not a stray sock or undergarment anywhere in sight, while butterflies and stars float above their sweetly somnolent heads, in which, no doubt, visions of sugarplums dance. In the morning they are bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, eager to get up and get on with their exceedingly productive and purposeful lives. Clearly they aren’t thinking, as I do each morning, How on earth am I ever going to get through this day?

  Every night here: first I cannot fall asleep, then I cannot stay asleep, then I wake up too early and cannot get back to sleep. I used to be able to nap in the afternoon to compensate for nights like this, but now I can’t even do that anymore.

  I recently heard a sleep specialist interviewed on the radio, and she said there are at least seventy-five different kinds of sleep disorders. Some nights I think I have all of them.

  A few weeks ago I read a newspaper article that said recent studies have proven that a person suffering from sleep deprivation can still perform routine mechanical tasks properly and efficiently, but that their ability to think and work creatively is severely impaired.

  Well then…no wonder!

  I’m supposed to be thinking about the book I’m supposed to be writing…but I am thinking about you instead.

  It is July as I write this. It’s hot, hazy, and humid, as summer increasingly tends to be in this part of the world. I’m worried about global warming.

  I’ve always been very sensitive to the heat.

  My fingers keep sliding off the keyboard in this heat. When I try writing by hand in my notebook instead, my pencil gets all slippery and my hand sticks to the paper. I cannot think in this heat. My head hurts in this heat. My glasses keep sliding down my nose in this heat. I get a prickly rash all over my body in this heat.

  All I can think about in this heat is this heat.

  And outside in the yard, the flowers are all drooping, exhausted and limp. I really should go out there right now and give them a good long drink before they give up the struggle altogether and fall flat on their pretty little petaled faces.

  Oh, how I wish it would rain.

  Four days in a row I’ve been unable to complete the crossword puzzle in the morning paper. I take this as a bad sign. Those unfilled little squares haunt me all day long. Sometimes I don’t get the puzzle finished until bedtime, sometimes then only after a telephone consultation with my friend Kate, who does the same puzzle every day at her house on the outskirts of the city. But she is currently out of town, and I am on my own puzzle-wise.

  Lately I cannot help but notice how many of the crossword clues and their eventual answers seem to be uncannily applicable to my current situation:

  10 Across: Love intensely (5): ADORE

  18 Down: Ponder morbidly (5): BROOD

  15 Across: Self-centered (8): EGOISTIC

  7 Down: Insincere (9): DECEITFUL

  9 Across: Discarded (4-3): CAST-OFF

  23 Across: Hard to pin down (7): ELUSIVE

  19 Down: Easily manipulated (8): GULLIBLE

  3 Across: Reject disdainfully (5): SPURN

  21 Down: Betray trust (3): RAT

  13 Down: Cowardly (9): SPINELESS

  6 Across: Poisonous (5): TOXIC

  1 Across: Like a bad dream (11): NIGHTMARISH

  12 Down: Freed from captivity (9): LIBERATED

  At my age I should have known better than to get involved with you. At my age I did know better than to get involved with you.

  But I did it anyway.

  I am thinking about how you said I could always trust you.

  I was skeptical.

  You said I had to trust you.

  I wanted to believe you.

  You begged me to trust you.

  You were so earnest, so persuasive, so charming. So boyish and sincere.

  I said I knew that if I could learn to trust you, it would make me a better person in so many ways.

  You wrapped your arms around me.

  I allowed myself to be convinced.

  You begged me to trust you. And I did.

  For a week now, my refrigerator has been making a strange sound, somewhere between growling and gurgling, followed by a gulping noise, and then several minutes of silence before it starts up again. The refrigerator equivalent of sleep apnea, I suppose.

  I know I should do something about this before it breaks down altogether. But I’ve been procrastinating. I really should call the repairman. He is very reliable and exceedingly prompt: he might well want to come over right away. He is also fastidious, allergic to dust, and (as I once discovered when he came to fix the dryer in the basement) afraid of spiderwebs. Which means that if I call him today, first I’ll have to try and move the fridge so I can vacuum under and behind it before he arrives. And then I should also clean out its contents so he won’t be offended by that bag of liquid lettuce, that bowl of fermenting
strawberries, that blue-furred lump in plastic wrap that used to be a piece of pork and ham pâté (country style).

  He is a brusquely pleasant middle-aged man named Ted, with tattoos, a long gray ponytail, and a silver ring in one ear. It seems safe to assume that he never imagined he would end up as a major appliance repairman. Much as I like Ted, maybe I should find a new repairman, one who is not so hard to please. I could just pick another one out of the Yellow Pages. There are at least two dozen listed, many of them with large ads featuring reassuring phrases like:

  Prompt Friendly Service

  Trouble Free Fast

  Honesty Is Our Policy

  Quality Repairs at Affordable Prices

  38 Years of Experience

  Family Owned and Operated Since 1969

  But how can I possibly choose? This is repairman roulette. How can I know in advance what I’m getting? How can I know which ads are actually true? Isn’t this how I ended up with Ted in the first place?

  At first it seemed ideal: you there in your city and me here in mine. I liked the idea of a long-distance relationship, having had so little success with those conducted up close. And it wasn’t a long distance anyway. It was a short distance, with only a few hundred kilometers between us.

  We agreed that we would see each other whenever we could. Of course, we were both very busy, but we would work it out. In the meantime, there were e-mails, many e-mails, daily at first, sometimes three or four a day.

  Once you wrote to me seven times in one day!

  And, of course, there were phone calls too, weekly at first, usually on Friday afternoon before we headed off to our respective weekends.

  Once we talked for four hours straight!

  You said, That was the longest phone call of my entire life!

  I said, Me too!

  At first it seemed ideal.

  For months now I’ve been obsessively reading books about how to overcome writer’s block. There are more of these than the non-writerly person might imagine. They have lengthy and auspicious titles and subtitles like:

  Room to Write: Daily Invitations to a Writer’s Life

  A Writer’s Book of Days: A Spirited Companion and Lively Muse for the Writing Life

  Unstuck: A Supportive and Practical Guide to Working Through Writer’s Block

  The Writer’s Mentor: A Guide to Putting Passion on Paper

  The Pocket Muse: Endless Inspiration: New Ideas for Writing

  The Writer’s Block: 786 Ideas to Jump-Start Your Imagination

  The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain

  But so far I’ve found that these books share an unfortunate kinship with those over-the-counter sleep remedies: they are so full of promise and they may work for other people, but, so far, they do not work for me.

  And yet I haven’t given up on them. I’m still trying to follow their advice: Don’t panic. If you feel extremely anxious about writing, do some deep breathing before sitting down at your desk.

  Okay.

  Yes, I am breathing deeply.

  Yes.

  I am.

  Breathing.

  Deeply.

  Yes, I am breathing deeply.

  After a few minutes, I find that all this deep breathing doesn’t make me feel any more relaxed or inspired: it just makes me dizzy.

  I said, I have not had much tenderness in my life.

  You said, I can fix that.

  I said, I’ve had too much heartbreak in my life. Over the years, I suppose I’ve become good at many things. But love is not one of them. I guess, on some level, I’m afraid of men. But I am not afraid of you.

  I said, You make me feel utterly, totally, and completely safe.

  I said, You are so kind. Which is the most important and attractive thing I can think of in a man. It has been my experience in life that many men are not kind.

  I said, You are also sensitive, honorable, interesting, intelligent, enthusiastic, compassionate, charismatic, gentle, funny, honest, open, warm, and giving. Not to mention…extremely attractive in all ways!

  I said, You are one in a million!

  You said, I’m flattered by the way you see me.

  The writer’s block books are cheerfully chock-full of ideas designed to help frustrated people break through the wall of wordlessness upon which they have been banging their hapless heads. Some of these are writing exercises: suggestions for topics, scenes, characters, dialogues, and descriptions. They are both abstract and concrete, large and small, serious and silly. They are like mysterious encrypted poems.

  Write about hair.

  Write about a river.

  Write about a train.

  Write about a sudden storm.

  Write about the horizon.

  Write about socks.

  Write about a bed.

  Write about a character who is losing control.

  Write about a character who is suffering from writer’s block.

  Now why didn’t I think of that?

  Write about the first (or last) person who broke your heart. If you had the opportunity to take revenge, would you?

  What if the first and last person who broke your heart were one and the same person? What if the first time was almost thirty years ago, and then he blew back into your life without warning, and you thought, Now, finally now…now it is my turn to have a happy ending?

  What if he said he had been working his way back to you for thirty years?

  What if you thought this was the most romantic and seductive story in the world?

  What if you thought being with him again would erase every rotten thing that had happened to you in the meantime: every heartbreak, every rejection, every betrayal, every disappointment, every minute of loneliness and despair you had suffered in the last thirty years?

  What if you thought being with him again would make everything else make sense, because this was what you had been waiting for, this was what your whole life had been leading up to?

  What if you thought this was your destiny finally arrived, your fate finally incarnate, this man finally returned to you after your thirty long years of wandering alone in the wilderness?

  What if you thought now you were going to live happily ever after after all?

  I am thinking about the time you brought me a bouquet of lilies and a basket of blueberries from the market downtown.

  I didn’t have the heart to tell you that I don’t like blueberries. In an e-mail afterwards, I told you they were delicious. But in truth, I left them in the fridge until they rotted, and then I threw them in the compost.

  I did love the lilies though. (I’m not in agreement with my neighbor who once told me she doesn’t like lilies because they remind her of funerals.) I put them in a clear glass vase and set them in the center of the kitchen table.

  You were in my city for a business meeting later that afternoon, and you’d come to town early so we could have lunch together first. You’d be returning to your city directly after the meeting.

  This was the first time you’d been to my house. I gave you the tour (small house, short tour). You dutifully admired every little thing, especially the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in the living room, the kitchen floor which I’d retiled myself the month before, the bedroom which I’d repainted and redecorated the previous winter, and, of course, my study where I wrote every day and about which you exclaimed, I’m so honored to be actually standing here in the room where all your wonderful words are generated!

  You marveled several times at how clean and tidy everything was. I assured you that I’d done a major cleaning in anticipation of your visit, but you said you didn’t believe me. You said you were sure it was always this perfect. You were sadly mistaken but, harboring some long-standing issues with respect to my sketchy halfhearted housekeeping skills, I was secretly pleased.

  The evening before, I’d prepared a large bowl of Greek barley salad and a chicken oven-baked in a special barbecue sauce according t
o one of my mother’s favorite recipes. Once cooked, the chicken was best refrigerated overnight and then served cold. You said you remembered my mother making this once when you were at our house for supper thirty years ago. I doubted this, but I didn’t say so. Again, I was secretly pleased to think that you would pretend to remember, even if you didn’t.

  It was such a lovely day that we decided to eat outside in the backyard.

  We carried the salad, the chicken, and two large tumblers of cranberry juice out to the picnic table beside the maple trees. You suggested we have the blueberries for dessert, but instead I produced a bowl of cold shiny cherries already washed and ready to eat.

  I was nervous having you there and didn’t eat much, but you didn’t seem to notice. You had two hefty helpings of chicken and salad. I took a picture of you there at the picnic table smiling and squinting into the sun.

  Then we moved from the table to the lawn chairs in the shade of the black walnut tree. We ate the whole bowl of cherries, spitting the pits into the grass, and talking for two hours about anything that came to mind.

  I was no longer nervous. The more we talked, the more it felt as if no time had passed since we’d been together thirty years ago. It was like picking up the conversation where we’d left off. Those two hours together again in my backyard seemed to last for all of five minutes, and then suddenly it was time for you to go off to your meeting.

  After you left, I did the dishes and attempted to have a nap. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t stop thinking about you.

  That night before I went to bed, I moved the lilies from the kitchen to my bedside table. Peach-colored and so fragrant, they perfumed the entire room. They lasted for more than a week. During that time, it seemed that I was able to sleep much better than usual. I told you I thought they must have magical soporific powers, that they were soothing me as I wandered through that frequently thorny place between waking and sleeping that we had talked about. (Yes, it seemed that you, too, were a career insomniac. Oh, we had so much in common!)