The phone rings. It’s a live number. I inhale and hold my breath. It’s been many years, so I can’t say for sure I’d recognize the voice. I listen as carefully as I can.
“Hello?” the voice comes a second time. Racking my auditory memory, I can’t figure it out. Is it the same voice? I can’t be sure. I hang up. Exhale.
I hang up because that’s the kind of person I am. I’ve always been that way. Tentative? Is that a good word to describe me? I should just admit I’m a coward when it comes to this kind of thing.
What happens is my heart begins beating so hard that I can feel it in my throat, my head, my wrists. I try to make some sort of sense when I speak, if I can speak at all, but the words all come out wrong. Jumbled.Maybe in some order that makes no sense.Not even to me.
I take several deep breaths, calm myself after the first go, and hit redial.
“Hello? Who is this?”
My heart shifts back up to somewhere between second and third, my foot on the accelerator. I try my hardest to ease off the gas pedal.
“It’s, uh, me.”
“Who? Me who?”
“Chris.”
“Chris? Chris who?”
“Chris, you know, from Honolulu. From Galaxy of Sound. Is this Pam?”
Silence. I picture her sitting in a comfortable chair. Very plush. Enveloping her. The way I always picture her sitting when I think about going out for dinner or drinks drinking after work at the record store. Porta Bella. My favorite Madison Italian restaurant. Probably because of her. I always think about us being there. Can see her there now.
I look at the clock. With the three-hour time difference. No. At this time of year, it would be four hours. She’d be sitting under a lamp. One with a curved neck. The shade suspended above her head, lighting her from the top down. The light shimmering like a halo.
“Wow,” she says. “Chris. It’s been a long time.”
“I, uh, yes. A long time.The last time I saw you was when I came back to Wisconsin in 1982.”
“You have a good memory,” she says, her voice relaxed now.
I’m amazingly relaxed myself. Like I’m talking with an old friend.
“I couldn’t remember when it was,” she says.
This disappoints me. It’s depressing to think she’s not remembered me as long and as hard as I’ve remembered her.
“How are you?” she asks.
“Ah, oh, good. I’m good. I’m retired now.”
“Retired.” She chuckles. I can see that smile of hers. It could stun like a taser. “Time actually does fly.”
“Are you retired, too?”
“No,” she says, “I’m still working.”
“Oh, that’s good. What do you do?”
I already know what she does. I follow her pretty closely on the web. She’s in the aerospace industry.”
“I work for the Air Force. Satellites. Lasers. Things like that.”
“Wow, Pam, that sounds pretty exciting.”
She laughs. “Ah, the reality is nowhere near as exciting as you might think. It was when I first got into it, but it’s become pretty routine.”
“But it’s cutting edge, isn’t it? That’s got to be kind of exciting.”
“No, no way,” she says. “True, it’s R&D, but that can get to be a grind.”
“So do you have enough years to retire?”
“Yes, I do. But I can’t.”
I’m guessing she’s got all the money she’ll ever need. Should I ask her why she can’t give it up?
Pam answers the question. “My kids have some pretty big bills because of dealing with my grandkids, so I try to help them.”
My heart upshifts again. I have to ask. “And your husband, is he retired?”
“That guy? Huh. He’s long gone.”
I’m riding high right now. It’s top gear, but this is not nerves. This is pure joy.
“Chris,” she says, “you remember how, when we were at the record store, Simon and Garfunkel were singing about how being 70 years old would feel strange?”
“Yes, sure, the ‘Old Friends’ song.”
“Well,” she says, “Back then, in my 20s, I thought it could be strange to be 70. I thought, man, 70 is so old. But now that I’m 70, I think of people in their 20s being so young.”
We both laugh.
“Yeah,” I say, “I think about that song a lot. You know, Pam, I can picture the two of us sitting on a park bench.”
“You have a very vivid imagination, Chris. You realize you might not even recognize me now. Maybe I wouldn’t recognize you either.”
This, to my mind, would never be the case. In my imagination, although we might be nearly 50 years older now, we still look the same. We’re sitting on this park bench looking exactly the same as we did back then.
But I say, “Right. That’s true. We might pass each other by and never know.”
I hear her clear her throat. I’m not sure what that might mean.
“So, Chris, I always was curious. Why did you stop writing to me? We were great correspondents. If we’d had cell phones back then, I think we would have been constant texters.”
I don’t know how to answer this question without sounding like an idiot. We’d written to each other, sometimes twice a week, for nearly two years after I moved back to Hawai‘i. I finally had to see her. I was madly in love. But when I finally went to Madison, I found out she had a boyfriend, and I simply stopped writing. It took the heart out of me.
“Well,” I say, “I wish I knew the answer to that. I started my teaching career and I lost track of everything.”
Pam says, “I was so sorry not to hear from you again.”
This just about kills me. Of course, she would have a boyfriend. Pam, because of the kind of person she was, would always have a boyfriend. And living in Honolulu, I couldn’t be her boyfriend. She’d have a boyfriend who was present. Right there by her side. And I hadn’t been. What a fool I’d been. Boyfriend or no boyfriend, I should have just kept writing. Eventually, who knows?
“Me too,” I say. “You wouldn’t believe how much I missed our letters. You must have known, Pam, that I was totally in love with you, right?”
There’s silence on her end. I see her sitting there under the lamp glowing above her head, trying to find the words to tell me how much she loved me, too.
I wait. And wait.
“Pam? Hello? Are you there?”
I open my eyes and stare at the computer screen. It’s amazing how the “white pages” searches will give you both someone’s cell and landline numbers going back to forever.
There they are. The two most recent numbers for her. But I’m not the kind of guy who does things like calling up a woman I fell in love with 50 years ago. I’ve always been too shy, too much of a coward to do things like that. But how great it would be to reconnect. Wouldn’t it?
Are you there? Right. I shake my head. I glance at my phone sitting silently beside the monitor, and wish I had it in me to at least try calling. After all, I could just hang up if she answered. That would be me.
Lanning Lee 