As he got into the truck to leave his marital home for the last time, Randall Hansen tossed the HANSEN brass nameplate into the storm drain, hearing it bounce across concrete before falling into the murky water below. That metallic skittering radiated through his future and his past as a symbol of finality and the loss of hope, summarizing all of his fears of loneliness and worthlessness as well as the thought that, now broken, his life would never be whole again. He pulled the door of the truck shut and drove away quickly.
Seven years later, as he stared into the dappled kaleidoscope of the waves caught in sunlight, he reflected that what truly broke his heart was language itself. Suddenly words like "love" and "trust" were only symbols, batted about by people in daily life like the girls on the beach patted back and forth volleyballs, televangelists spoke about the love of a seemingly absent deity, or the carnies on the shore called out "cold beer here." He no longer trusted any word to have meaning.
It all started on a more promising note. Randall remembered looking up as a shadow fell over his arm at a faculty party. "I read your paper," said the tall thin girl with golden hair. "Comparing Austen and Celine? Ballsy move."
Randall found himself at the English department evening forums for the past month, hoping to meet more women. Eventually he cornered Wendy Putnam by accident, bumping into her shoulder, and was proud of himself for how quickly he recovered with an apology, introduction, and offering to get her more of the screw-top wine they served at faculty-sponsored events. She surprised him by knowing who he was, something odd because she ran in social circles both above his, and less interesting and edgy than his.
"Wait, you actually read the paper? I'm impressed," he said. "I didn't know anyone did that. I thought the thematic parallels were enough to write on."
"You convinced Professor Gonzalez," she said. "And me, come to think of it. They're both apocalyptic, and they hide their pain with humor."
They made small talk then, chatting about the class and "college life," which is basically gossip dressed up as some kind of psychological assay of their fellow students. It went well, and he left with her phone number.
Letting time tumble forward, an older Randall found himself in a different predicament. Gwen -- she preferred this more elegant version of her given name -- washed a coffee mug at the sink in their condominium near downtown. They had been married for seven years, and had two years ago talked about the possibility of having offspring. His business restoring classic turn-of-the-century homes had taken off, while her internship had ended with her achieving a placement in the cancer center downtown. Everything was moving upward, just like in those magazines he read in high school which told him about the movers and shakers making waves in the new economy. He had just opened a bottle of Warsteiner and was sticking the old key-style bottle opener back in the drawer.
"You know, not every man does it that way," she said quietly.
"Like... what?" asked Randall.
"You open the drawer, take out the bottle opener, then close the drawer. Then you use the bottle opener, then open the drawer again to put it back. You could just leave the drawer open."
For a highly verbal person, he did something unusual in that moment: he said nothing, but instead took his beer to the old wooden door across two filing cabinets that he used as his desk. He recognized that life was like a castle that he saw once in a dream, where touching any candle brought him back to the foyer, no matter how far away in space and time he had been from that moment. Her criticism, mild and insignificant even among their periodic verbal tiffs, took him to the same place he always found himself lately when he considered Gwen, a dark and limited space.
Between that conversation all of those years ago and the discussion of the bottle opener today, Gwen and Randall had experienced many good years. First he invited her out for a drink, then she came back to his antique dorm room for heavy petting, which on the third date devolved into raw lust unleashed while Enya played softly in the background. This was serial monogamy, where you tried to be faithful to your partner and not too slutty, but you moved from one to another. After that night, Gwen asked if he wanted them to be exclusive, and in the afterglow of a shockwave of orgasms, Randall said yes.
At this point they became boyfriend and girlfriend, which meant that when Randall was not in class or at a specific event, he was expected back at her dorm room, which was in the newer and fancier dormitory designed to be for less party-minded, more serious students. This was their junior year at the University of Texas, which is just about the point where the work switches from the same stuff they had in high school to simplified but memorization-intensive college material, and both of them were quite busy. At the semester close, he asked her for her number at home.
Randall worked the whole summer for Davis Construction first as a gopher and later as a carpenter. He had a knack for the kind of high-precision woodwork that a century prior had been the norm for upper middle class houses. He called Gwen every other night and on the off nights checked in via Facebook back when people still used that and MySpace. He was several beers into one night when he saw a picture pop up tagged with Gwen's name, a blurry party where people seemed to be wearing little clothing. In the morning it was gone. Just a glitch, but he remembered the name Steve Callahan. The next night, he called her up, and her mother said that she was in bed early. He never mentioned this to her.
Nonetheless when they met again at school all was forgotten, since young people never know how to spot patterns beneath the skin. They fell into a comfortable relationship where he stopped by on the weekends and on his way home from his on-campus job, but otherwise, they had a lot of time to themselves since they were both working on theses and setting up careers after graduation. During spring break, they rented a cabin on the beach at Corpus Christii using his dad's credit card and spent every day sleeping late, making love, and then going out to have drinks with friends in the nearby tourist zone where dollar beers were a nightly event.
On the last Saturday before the term resumed, Gwen strode boldly out of the shower and lay nude on their bed. She was half Polish and half English, so she had long gold ringlets from her distant Turkish and Jewish ancestors from the Polish side, but a strong chin from her English forebears. "So we're going to graduate soon," she began.
