Let the record show I was excellent at the beginning of things.
That is not bragging. Bragging would require pride. I am stating a skill, the way a locksmith states he can open your car in ninety seconds, and you should hear the caution in it. Give me two weeks with a person and I could tell you how they took their coffee, which sock they put on first, the song they hummed when a room went quiet on them. Give me two months and I could have surprised you with your own birthday plans, executed to the letter, memorable down to the candle count.
Anne had answered my text on a Saturday. By the following Friday we had a first date, and by the end of it she had said two sentences that should have told me everything. “You planned this,” she said, not unkindly, about the table at the little Ethiopian place on High Street, the one with the six tables and the line out the door, the one I had called three times that week to charm into holding two seats. And later, walking back to her street, she said, “It’s impressive, Eli. I just can’t tell yet if you’re paying attention to me or just very good at paying attention.”
I laughed. I had learned that laugh in meeting rooms, the one that buys time while you frame a response. I told her there was no difference, and she let me walk her home, and at her door she did the thing that would become Item 5 before I owned a notebook to put it in.
She turned the deadbolt. Then the knob lock. Then the deadbolt again, quick, a small up-down of her wrist, a period at the end of locking a door.
“You checking it twice?” I said, casual, cataloging even then, cataloging without even meaning to, holding my breath without noticing.
“Three times.” She kept her hand on the knob a second longer than the locks required. “Go home, Eli. Text me something that doesn’t sound rehearsed.”
I drafted three texts at red lights on the drive home and deleted all three at my kitchen counter, and what I finally sent at 12:40 in the morning was, The place had six tables and you were the best one in it, which was rehearsed down to the comma. She answered with one word, Acceptable, and I sat there grinning at my phone like it had paid me a compliment, which, in the only economy I had, it had.
I had planned the date down to the dessert. She had spent it watching me plan. We both went home thinking we had won the evening, and only one of us was right, and it took a pink children’s book and a dead mother to teach me which one.
Early dates are montage by nature, so I will give you the parts that matter, and I will try to give them to you the way they happened, not the way I stored them.
The farmers market on Saturdays, where I discovered, watching her stall by stall, that she greeted every dog by name even when there was no tag to read it off of, and that she stopped at the flower stand and bought carnations, little ruffled red ones, and when I asked why not roses she said, “Roses are funeral flowers. Somebody should have told the whole rest of the country.” Item 4, though I did not have the number yet.
Her apartment, a third-floor walk-up with a window unit that rattled the panes and never cooled the kitchen, where she cooked the one meal she claimed she could cook, which was a lie, it was two meals and both were better than anything I had ordered at the Ethiopian place, and where, doing dishes afterward, I noticed she loaded the plates facing the same direction every time, edges east, handles of the forks all one way, like silverware reporting for inspection.
And once, a July evening in German Village, the Book Loft, thirty-two rooms of used books in an old brick house, where she moved through the stacks at half speed, pulling spines out an inch to read their names, putting most back with a pat. I bought her nothing. I remember that; it was one of the only times all summer I let an evening stay unplanned, and the best hour of the summer came of it, her coming around a corner with a seventy-year-old etiquette manual, reading me a rule about how a lady handles asparagus, both of us folded over laughing in aisle nine. She bought me a copy of it, a joke gift, two dollars, and I kept it on my shelf ever after, spine out, like a trophy from a sport I had not won.
“You always load them like that?”
“Like what?” And she looked, actually looked at her own hands doing it, and frowned, because she had not known. “Huh,” she said. “East. Weird.” She shrugged it off in half a second. I carried it with me for a week. That asymmetry, her shrug and my carry, is this entire chapter in one sentence.
Her nervousness. She got a call about a manuscript, a bad one, and while she listened she straightened the pens on her counter one by one, tap, tap, tap, then lined them up again at a right angle, and when the call ended she stood in the middle of the kitchen and hummed, low, tuneless, two bars of nothing, before she could speak. I asked about the pens. “I don’t know,” she said. “Nervous hands, I guess.” She moved on. I memorized it.
If you have been counting, you have four of the first five items already: the flowers, the plates, the hum, and the lock. The clothes came later that summer, a Saturday morning at her place, a t-shirt and shorts from the day before folded into a square on top of the hamper lid, not in it. I asked, truly curious, why fold laundry that was headed for the wash. She thought about it longer than the question deserved. “Waste not?” she tried, and knew it wasn’t it, and laughed, and said, “You know, I have no idea. Ask my shrink.” She was joking. I did not know, then, that she was also telling the truth, that there was a shrink, and a reason for the shrink, and that the reason would take the better part of two years to reach me.
I filed it under joke. That is where I filed everything that later turned out to be a door.
Those are the five, as I wrote them in the notebook. Everything you need to convict me is right there. A whole woman, a whole inner country, and I had mapped it in five entries like a surveyor staking a claim.
Marcus met her in June, at a cookout in his sister’s backyard in Grandview, the Fourth of July weekend, kielbasa and a kiddie pool, somebody’s uncle telling long stories with the confidence of a man who has never once been fact-checked. Marcus, to his credit, did not perform for her. He asked her what she edited, made her do the economist impression, laughed so hard he had to set his plate down. I watched them hit it off and felt a warm thing I mistook for pride. It was inventory. My best friend and my girlfriend, getting along, all of it on one shelf.
On the drive back downtown, Marcus behind the wheel of his truck, windows down, firework smoke still hanging over the freeway, he said, “She’s real.”
“I know.”
“You don’t, though.” He said it to the windshield, offhand, casual as a traffic report. “You’ve got your cataloging face on. I’ve seen it since college. You’re taking her apart like a carburetor to see how she runs.”
“I like her, Marcus.”
“I didn’t say you didn’t. I said you’re curating, not connecting. There’s a difference. A museum’s full of great stuff nobody gets to touch.”
I let that sit, because I had no answer that would survive him. Marcus had grown up in Huntington in a house where his father worked with men at the bottom of their lives, men one bad week from the ditch, and it gave him a detector for performance that has embarrassed me more than any mirror. His daddy, Marcus said once, could tell inside of a minute whether a man was sorry or just tired of consequences. Marcus had the same gift, at half power, pointed at me.
The notebook, I bought at a Walgreens on the way home from Anne’s place, second week of July, after the lock thing. There is no significance to the Walgreens, I bought a pack of razors at the same time. I picked the blue spiral pad because the wire was sturdy. Blue had nothing to do with anyone’s eyes. You know what it had to do with; you met that boy in the first chapter, at the window, with his soft-cover books.
I wrote the first five entries that same evening, at my kitchen counter, in the order I had collected them, neat, numbered, dates noted, and I felt something settle in me that I can only describe as order. A woman I loved had four locked doors into her, and I had five keys, and if that metaphor sounds like theft, good. It was.
Marcus saw the notebook in August.
We were at my apartment, a Sunday, watching the Reds lose with the resignation of long practice, and I had left the pad on the coffee table next to the remote. He picked it up to move it. He did not move it.
He read the whole page. Five lines. Then he read it again, and I watched something cross his face I had only seen there twice before, both times involving women he knew were about to hurt him.
“Bro.” He set the pad down like it weighed more than it did. “These aren’t love notes.”
“They’re observations. She does interesting things.”
“These are field observations. You wrote a field guide to a woman.” He tapped the cover with two fingers. “Plates facing east. Lock three times. Hums when nervous. My daddy’s intake folder on a new client doesn’t go this deep this fast, and his clients are legally required to disclose.”
“It’s how I pay attention.”
“It is not.” He said it quiet, which was worse than loud. Marcus loud was comedy. Marcus quiet was his father’s son. “Paying attention is her telling you why the plates face east, and you putting down your fork. This,” he held the pad up, “this is you loving the specimen jar. You’re going to curate her right out of the room.”
I told him he was reading a lot into a list of quirks. I told him everybody in a new relationship collects these things, it was normal, it was even sweet, women kept scrapbooks for God’s sake. I had a whole defense prepared, polished, ready, because some part of me had known this conversation was coming since the Walgreens.
He listened to all of it, nodded once, and finished his beer. “Okay,” he said, in the tone of a man filing an objection for the record. Then, getting up, he said the sentence I wrote down nowhere, which is how you know it mattered: “Accurate isn’t the same as intimate, Eli. Ask me how I know.”
He never did tell me how he knew. He didn’t have to. His mother left his daddy when Marcus was nine, and by every account Marcus Sr. could tell you exactly what she’d eaten the morning she went, and not one word about why.
Did I think about it? I did, for an afternoon, with full sincerity and no intention, the same nod I gave my doctor’s advice about salt. Because the notebook worked. The notebook made me feel like the man in the story instead of the man watching it. Every item I wrote was proof that I was the kind of person who noticed, and noticing was loving, and loving was enough, and the chain held as long as I never pulled on any single link.
Anne saw the notebook exactly once that summer. It was on the counter, open, while I poured coffee. She leaned over and read down the page, quick, the way she read everything, and said, “Huh. That’s me, reduced.” Then she took her mug and kissed my cheek and let it go, and I read her letting it go as harmlessness.
It was not harmless. It was the whole thing. The jar. The rope. The field guide to a woman who was, even then, standing in the next room being three-dimensional without my permission.
Marcus was right about everything except the part that mattered. He thought I was writing the notebook at her. I wasn’t. I was writing it at the dark, the same dark I used to watch from a window in the East End, and if you want to know what a boy at that window was hoping to learn by writing down the truck, I will tell you in a later chapter, when I have earned it.
August ended. The list held five entries and the relationship held everything else, and I mistook the second thing for proof of the first. There is a kind of arithmetic the guilty do, where holding a thing and understanding a thing get entered in the same column. By fall I would have twenty. By the holidays, thirty-nine, and a girlfriend learning to go quiet in ways I would fail to read, so busy writing that I never once asked her what page I was on.
Item 5 is the lock. Three turns.
She told me what the three turns meant two years later, after the worst of it, on a night I will get to when I have earned it. In July of 2024 it was just a wrist-flick I cataloged and congratulated myself for catching.
Catch. There it is, the verb I’ve been avoiding this whole chapter. Even then. Even five items in.
The museum was open. The exhibits had no idea.