You are angry with me, climbing the improvised fire escape stairs up to Hemingway’s office above the garage behind his lovely green-shuttered yellow house in Key West. But you would never say it. Your voice drops into your soft Pennsylvania-slash-lived-in-Northern-California accent that goes into the bones of me, like wind through trees. You are behind me up the stairs. We’d just been told the stairs are for tourists, only. In Hemingway’s day, there had been a bridge from his bedroom in the house to this private floor above the garage, overlooking the pool. A bridge from bed to words that only he could cross, no matter who else was on the property.
A year before, I’d stood in the frost-fogged window of the guest bedroom at your parents’ house, one floor beneath the chilled attic where you slept. Jesus, god help me: a man with a copy of Captain’s Verses by Neruda on your bedside table. It was New Year’s. I’d left family, driving my southern ass through sleet and snow to get to you. I’d slid off my wedding ring because it seemed too awkward for you, the questions and stares at the table of your Catholic household. It cut, don’t you know, when you said evenly, just a truth, “It doesn’t matter to me.” Because you were hot to take me around your city: show me the coffee shop, the Priory, ride the funicular up the cliff above the confluence of rivers. Would stand there above the black waters with our breath fogging silver. But not take my hand. Not touch. Me at the window later, past midnight, freezing in a champagne silk nightie, believing you were still awake. But you’d scrape my windshield in the morning— good love—and send me safe, back home.
The streets of Key West writhe with drinkers. Carousel of drag queens gleam up a stage blocking off one side street. Straight white women careen past on rented scooters. Everywhere, cheap liquor in half-gallon plastic cups. You are stuck with me. That’s what your silence says. This love-hate anger. I owe you— you who burned favors, spent money, left your vacation from Europe to fly down and see me—I owe you some kind of good time. We duck into one bar, good as another. Gel lights, high-top tables, floor as sticky as it should be, a band. Single women, pretty waitresses who size you up, your broad height, lean boxer’s build. You want me to be . . . what? Finally here. What? Gone. You want me to be gone. I’m tempted to walk out, let you cruise. But the pull doesn’t leave us. On stage, the singer stops between songs. Looks directly at us in the mass of crowd. Tells you to kiss me. Gets the crowd involved. Flat, loud and clear, you answer, “She’s not my girlfriend.” Not one in the crowd believes you.
Two years before, I’d driven across country, flown the remaining half, and arrived at a workshop with you. You’d caught me, halfway through the first day, noticing the flash of your belly bared when you stripped off your sweater. Sweet and sultry the way you laughed caught you. Wasn’t looking. Really. Only, at the end of life I might still remember the exact pattern of hair from your navel disappearing below your belt. Would remember, always, what it came to be, looking for each other ordering coffee in the morning. What it was for you to ask me to play pool, that last night. No one. No one. No one had ever asked me to play pool. You didn’t care if I was good. You cared that it was me. In a bar late that night, we’d been out long enough that the length of our thighs pressed against each other while we talked to strangers. A bride’s sister from a drunken bachelorette party cried out, “Y’all two are lovers!” And you’d walked me home. You shifted my bag to your shoulder. You took my hand. It was the moon. It was you. It was that you held my hand a full mile, that long walk home.
You are angry because you knew before you flew down that my marriage was dissolving. Not for easy reasons. My husband with mental issues. I never told you that the seven consecutive medications they tried him on made him violent. But I was trying to help him through. I don’t tell you that, walking through Hemingway’s bedroom, I wanted you to throw me on the carved Spanish bed that signs ordered tourists like us not to touch. I want to tell you that I could feel you, everywhere you are. I don’t tell you that I know what it feels like to be in bed with you even though you’ve never crossed that line. But you are angry because I had allowed you to believe my marriage was more over—him more gone than he actually was—when you arrived. I don’t tell you it’s your own fault because you’d left it so long that I’d stopped telling you things that might not matter to you. What walls up between us is that it could have been a different trip. You are not an animal. You tell me, halfway down to Key West, it would have been better if we hadn’t gone by my house. If I had just picked you up in Miami, if we had just driven down. You don’t say: you might have been able to sleep with me if you hadn’t had to shake his hand.
You don’t know. There will never be a chance to tell you. When we leave Key West, I will sit in the parking garage for an hour after your flight leaves, sobbing. Knowing I could have gotten on a plane and followed you. A different life, a different path. I don’t even know yet all the shit ahead of me. I just know I feel like me when I am with you. But I fueled your anger with silence all through Miami, all through Key West. Because I would not tell you. Not for some time.
That night I went to see you on the frozen cliff above the funicular, I stood an hour in the chill in a silk nightie I had bought for how it would feel in your hands, arguing with myself whether you would welcome me if I’d climbed the stairs and gone to you. Willed you to feel me as I felt you: Come down to me now.
But you never had.
And life keeps going. And I couldn’t wait forever. And before you had called to say you wanted to come see me in Miami, I had decided to give my husband one last try.
You’re angry because I can’t tell you, walking around Key West, that I found out I was pregnant two days before you arrived. Could not have left, just like that. Could not have shagged, even if you’d not been flaming anger with me. Would not have done that to you. No matter how much it was what I wanted.
What you are saying to me, as we cross from Hemingway’s house to the stairs up to his writing atelier, quoting the tourist brochure: the bridge from his bedroom to his private office was blown away in a hurricane and never rebuilt.
I am there, still, climbing the stairs. Never left the moment when you could have noticed my body climbing ahead of you, at eye level. When we could have been different versions of this life. I want those eyes. The arms that wrapped around me. The mouth I’d kissed. I want the you who loved to be with me for hours on the phone, who’d will everyone else to go quiet so you could hear me speak. I want that. The world gone quiet. Stage cleared, seas parted. Try again.
Elissa Field’s fiction and essays have been published in Hypertext, Reckon Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Conjunctions, Adelaide, Scary Mommy, Writer Unboxed, and elsewhere. Her work has been a finalist or shortlisted for awards including the SmokeLong Summer Fiction Contest and the James Jones First Novel Fellowship. She lives in a ridiculously cool historic house under an ancient mango tree with her sons, and teaches history and journalism at a school for the arts. She is at work on a novel and collection of stories.
Hypertext Magazine and Studio (HMS) publishes original, brave, and striking narratives of historically marginalized, emerging, and established writers online and in print. HMS empowers Chicago-area adults by teaching writing workshops that spark curiosity, empower creative expression, and promote self-advocacy. By welcoming a diversity of voices and communities, HMS celebrates the transformative power of story and inclusion.
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