When I buried my deceased husband, I assumed he’d stay put for once. But six months later, he called to say he’d moved in with a lady friend and now that he had the space, he hoped I’d surrender the treadmill.
I confess that when I heard Lou’s voice, a dumb hope swelled inside me. Finally, an apology. Finally, remorse. I mean, why else would Lou call from the afterlife?
It was late in the evening. I’d just brushed my teeth. I took the phone to bed and turned off the lamp. I’d always liked talking in the pitch-black dark. How our voices seemed to leave our bodies. Leave this world.
But then Lou said what he said, and just like that, I felt the bloat of regret for a lifetime of poor choices.
Lou had been living in a shitty efficiency in midtown when he dropped dead. His heart just stopped, and I’d thought, yeah, that tracks.
The apartment: Think petrified dog turds scattered about nubby patches of grass like sad Easter eggs. His space had been hardly big enough for a bed, much less a treadmill.
“What could you possibly need a treadmill for?”
“What do you think?” Lou was always answering questions with questions, as in when I asked if he was having an affair, and he said, “What makes you think I’m having an affair?”
I tend to think of people who are no longer in my life as boxed up somewhere in my attic or a closet. As if I have put them away and then lost them. But I literally did put my dead husband into a box. The most expensive box I ever purchased. The only box I’d ever purchased to contain something I could no longer keep. Yet here he was again.
Lou went on to say that this lady friend, Fanny, owned the mausoleum at the end of his row. “The big one with the angel with the outspread wings. Face so weathered it looks more like a thumb? Anyway, Fanny has enough square footage for a couple of treadmills. Remember how we said you’d keep it only temporarily? Until, you know, you either forgave me or I gave up on you forgiving me and moved on?”
I’d wanted him to give me a rationale. It wouldn’t have taken much.
“We didn’t say that. You did.”
“You agreed.”
With Lou, exasperated submission and crushed defeat were two shades of a color called agreement.
“Well, in any case, I’d think you’d be happy to be rid of it. You never used it. And you were always complaining about how much space it took up.”
The treadmill was enormous. It arrived in a box about the size of the one I later buried Lou in. Big enough that we could both fit inside. I know because that’s what we did after we assembled the treadmill. I got in first. The box had that cardboard smell—woody and gluey and slightly sweet. Then I suggested Lou join me. He didn’t want to. But after some cajoling, he relented, and I turned onto my side so that Lou could lie flat on his back. The box’s walls came up so high that all I could see from down in there was our ceiling, which was dimpled and white, and the skylight, which radiated beams of light that made me think of cat whiskers. In that light, a cosmos of dust. I remember thinking about how that was me and Lou swirling around up there. My dead skin cells, Lou’s. I remember thinking how they shimmered like stars. I also remember how I said to Lou, “This box is big enough to have sex in,” and he said, “Why would anyone want to have sex in a box?”
I didn’t suspect anything back in those days.
“I feel like this goes without saying,” Lou said then, “but, well, you know as well as I do that this wasn’t going to work out. Being that we’re in different places now. I just wanted to put that out there. What with my moving in with Fanny and all. It’s no snub on you, you know. You’re the love of my life.”
He laughed at that, but even so, he sounded sincere. Nostalgic, even? Or was the darkness making me hallucinate?
It was true that I’d never taken to walking on the treadmill, but lately I’d been turning the treadmill on for background noise. Something about the whir of its engine and the endless looping of the track comforted me. I couldn’t say why exactly. Just as I couldn’t say why the winding down of a year depressed me even though it led to the beginning of a new year, which was my favorite time of any year. Or why the view from the treadmill box of that cosmos of dust had stayed with me all this time, becoming part of the permanent dust of my own mind.
What did this say about me? I wondered.
Nothing good, I decided. And so I said, “The treadmill is all yours, Lou.”
“Thanks a million, Babe. Will you deliver the treadmill to Fanny’s place, being as I don’t exactly have transportation?”
I told Lou I’d be happy to. And I was, because I liked the message this would send, as in if you want to keep running in place for all of eternity, Lou, have at it. I’m done with that shit. Not that I believed for a second that Lou would register that message. The man only ever understood blatant, unsubtle actions, like my kicking him out of the house. But that was okay. I didn’t need Lou’s appreciation or acknowledgement. There’s never been anything I’ve professed to love that I wasn’t, deep down, ambivalent about. I pictured a matchbox with its slide-out bin. Small enough to put in my pocket. Small enough to crush within my palm.
