The Best American Mystery Stories 1998

Merrill Joan Gerber

This Is a Voice from Your Past

from Chattahoochee Review

Every woman gets a call like this sooner or later. The phone rings, a man says: “This is a voice from your past.” If you’re in the mood and the caller doesn’t find you in a room where other people are (particularly your husband), and if you have some time to spare, you might enjoy playing the game.

“Who is this?” I said, when my call came.

“Don’t you recognize my voice?”

“Not exactly.”

“Alvord’s class? Florida? Your senior year?”

I paused. There had been a number of young men in my life in college, in Florida, in my senior year — and most of them were in Alvord’s class.

This call — the first from Ricky — came just after I had given birth to my second daughter. I was living in California. I was in the kitchen cutting a hot dog into little greasy pieces for my two-year-old’s lunch and at the same time I felt my milk coming down, that sharp burning pain in both nipples, like an ooze of fire.

“Janet?” His voice was husky, or he was whispering. “This is a serious voice from your past. You know who I am. I think of you all the time. And I work at the phone company, I get free calls, so don’t worry about this long-distance shit, I can talk to you all night if I want to.”

“Tell me who you are,” I said, just stalling for time, but suddenly I knew and was truly astounded. I had thought of Ricky often in the kind of reveries in which we all engage when we count the lives that never were meant to be for us.

“You must know. I know you know.”

“Well, it must be you, Ricky, isn’t it? But I don’t have all night. I have two babies now, and I’m feeding them right this minute.”

“Is your old man there?”

“No.”

“Good, get the kids settled down and I’ll hold on. And don’t worry, I’m not going to complicate your life. I can’t even get to you. I’m in Pennsylvania — and out of money.”

“Hang on.” I did some things I had to do for the children and then talked to him with my big girl eating in her high chair a foot away from the frayed green couch where I reclined on a pillow, letting the baby suck from my breast. Ricky told me then that he couldn’t write a word anymore, it was killing him, he was drinking all the time, he had six kids, his wife was running around with someone else, and could I believe it, he, he, was working for the fucking phone company.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m really sorry, Ricky.”

It occurred to me that anything else I said would sound trite, like: “We all have to make compromises,” or “Maybe at some point we have to give up our dreams.” The fact was, I hadn’t given up mine but pursued it with a kind of dauntless energy. I didn’t count the dream that he might have been my true love because I knew even then, all those years ago, that it was impossible. When he read his brilliant stories in class, he was married and living with his wife in a trailer on the outskirts of the campus. He’d already written his prize-winning story that had brought our writing-class to its knees, the one chosen later for an O. Henry Award.

Alvord, our professor, a famous teacher and esteemed novelist, had informed us in class, in front of Ricky, that the boy had been touched by the wand of the muse. He spoke of Ricky as if a halo gleamed over his head. He made it clear that none of us would ever reach the heights (and should not hope to) for which this golden boy was destined. “A talent like his,” he told us once, “is like a comet. It appears only once every hundred years or so.”

I clung to my own modest talent and I was working on it; I couldn’t envy Ricky his, based as it was in Catholic guilt to which I had no access (his stories were all about sin and redemption). What I envied during that hungry, virginal senior year of college was his wife, the woman he held in his arms each night, the one whose face was caressed by the gaze of his deep-seeing, supernaturally wise, marble-blue eyes.

That day he called me as I sat nursing my baby girl, feeling the electric suck of her pulsing lips sizzle in a lightning rod strike from nipple to womb, I remembered an image of Ricky that rose up like an illumination. We were in the university library. Ricky had come in alone and had chosen to sit across from me at one of the long, mahogany tables where I was studying. He had his magic pencil in his long fingers and was bent over his lined notebook paper to create whatever piece of brilliant, remorse-filled prose he was writing. A long lock of his dirty-blond hair fell across his forehead, and his fingers scribbled, bent like crab pincers racing over the lined notebook page, wrote words that according to Alvord would turn out to be second only to James Joyce’s.