Love’s Lost Ledger
By Maia Rosenbaum
He became a door to door salesman at a dying age in a newly born industry. He liked the contradiction and romanticized that people still actually opened their doors to strangers. He had a face carved deep by endless smiles. His eyes crinkled and puffed, and the lines extending from the bottom of his nose along the sides of his mouth were all that remained of his once full cheeks. His face had been animated for so long that when it had to rest, it rested forcefully, but he always found all expressions to just be exaggerations of an inner feeling, so the deep furrow in his brow had been etched in a dark period of his life, but a period not as difficult as if you were to have looked at it from the inside.
He liked his job, which surprised him and then all the other people in his life. He would knock and smile and strike up quaint conversation until the next thing he knew they were writing him a check for thousands of dollars and he was feeling better about himself. The area in which he operated was small enough that after a few months his face was known by all, and after a few years he had knocked on everyone’s door at least once and yet no one was upset to see him again. Many even invited him in to chat about how he managed to keep business going, and ended up sending him off with leftovers packed away neatly under another heavy check. He liked people and liked even more to think of himself as someone people liked. So he lived alone. It wasn’t for a lack of trying, he tried plenty but was never able to find anyone young enough to match his curiosity yet with enough life experience he didn’t feel he always had to explain everything over again. Besides, he was content in his own company and the topical companionship he found behind every door. That is not to say he never made any real friendships. He did in fact foster many through crossing the thresholds of their houses and not stopping until he was invited to the Sunday potlucks. Perhaps it was because he was aging and alone, or perhaps because he was friendly, and gave people hope that you could age joyfully, letting only your skin give way to the decay of time.
One of his favorite customers turned companions was a young woman, a single mother with two boys and a quaint life disguised inside a shabby house. The first time he knocked on the door it was thrown open, in contrast to all the later times our man knocked and the door was gently and carefully pulled back. Like removing a sticker from the bottom of a glass. The woman was expecting her mother to pick up her kids in time for the woman to attend her one social event of the week: going to the local pub with the other single moms to talk about their kids while trying to remember to enjoy their time without them. She was in a rush, as she was running her usual late and almost would’ve left her kids with him had she not dropped her keys. After scraping them off the floor, she looked up at the person she had opened her home to. She was shocked as strangers, especially aging men, did not knock on her door with any frequency at all. But he smiled, and as we know he had a rare smile that anyone could see was genuine. Always. Perhaps because it slightly pulled up more on the left side of his mouth.
The woman’s mother arrived at that exact moment, ushering her apologizes into the house in front of her, not aware of the moment she almost could have interrupted. And so he left, but not before saying he would make sure to come back at a more opportune time as there was an offer he could not help but bring to the (our) woman.
He did return a couple days later, and the woman, having spied him through the window on her approach to the door, opened the door carefully and with a smile. He gave his usual spiel, practiced enough to flow naturally. Sprezzatura, a lover our man had known intimately for years. The woman was sold of course. But he, upon looking around her house decided he could not sell to her, no, it wouldn’t be fair, and our man was nothing if not fair (at least when he perceived himself to be so). The woman would not be bankrupted by handing our man this check, but her house had the sort of disarray of one who has to move quickly through all moments of their life, as they have never had the privilege of being able to take things for what they are. He could see this woman cared about appearances, and that broke his heart. He decidedly could not sell to her, no, he promised himself. So instead he decided he would give back to this woman all the things people had forced her to give up. He started to come around once a week, then twice, then three or four until her two boys called him by his first name and ran excitedly to greet him. He always stopped by under the pretense of being in the area and wanting to see how things were going, but once his visits became nearly daily, that lie didn’t even convince the boys. And so he stopped pretending he was there out of anything other than pity he had convinced himself was empathy sprinkled with good will. He and the woman would talk, she would talk a lot more than he, but he always preferred to listen anyways and she found these interactions were some of the few times in her life when she wasn’t interrupted. He and the woman would talk for long hours, sipping lemonade turning to wine and then whiskey. For as much as they talked they never really remembered what was said or what was heard. But this then allowed them to repeat the whole routine again the next day, and so they never really remembered to mind.
After many months of these near daily rendezvous, he asked her to marry him. It seemed like the right thing to do, and even though they had never exchanged any affection beyond a greeting kiss on the cheek, their mutual need for companionship outweighed the extending lack of physical intimacy. They married and somehow it didn’t occur to either of them that their life should change so she kept living in the cramped house with her two boys, while he would continue his now strictly daily visits to the house. The kids were not made aware of the marriage, as it had slipped their minds to tell them, and so he never became a step-father in the sense he was never called out from a crowd with the title, but when the boys graduated from high school and one of them eventually college, he was there smiling in all the pictures, easily filling the expected role of their aging grandfather.
Because yes, as we had all forgotten, he was already aging when he met the woman and then after twenty years together his body did finally betray its last stand against Age. He was withered already at this point but people forgot to notice because he eyes had stayed clear and his crooked smile still pulled at even the faintest of whims. So when Time came for him, everyone was shocked that the one person who had always lived forever in the memory, unremarkably died of a heart attack. He appeared on that town’s doorsteps quickly, made a name and then a face for himself, 30 years passed, and then he left it again suddenly and without warning. At least not by his own accord, although many people did feel he chose to abandon them. The woman was distraught of course, but not as sad as she had expected herself to be. She had always seen this coming, as she was one of the few who noticed new lines gather around the corner of his eyes and so when he died, and she wasn’t as upset as 20 years together would have asked her to be, she found she had been madly in love with him the whole time. And that did make her very sad. But then at least she felt vindicated in having spent so many nights talking to an old man who never touched her. And so, she realized, like he had all those years ago, when he had first knocked on her door, or perhaps he always knew and it took us until then to realize, a romantic was never loved for being realistic. And neither was he.
Maia Rosenbaum is a freelance graphic designer, production assistant, and writer living and working in New York City. She has published poetry in the Eunoia Review and created editorial design for the Boston College Gusto culinary magazine.
