Despite how close we were, Julia waited months to tell me she was seeing someone. When I pressed her for details, she told me that his name was Daniel, and that she only saw him late at night, when he would stop by her apartment unannounced, and they would share tea or wine and talk about books and movies and music and then have sex in her bed, after which he would leave, never spending the night.

 “How often do you see him?” I asked, holding back many other questions.

She told me that he showed up at her door once or twice a week. She said that their time together was ‘sacred’, a word that didn’t surprise me; Julia was a deeply spiritual person, unaffiliated, non-traditional, but spiritual. I was more cynical. I relied on Julia for her optimism, though that first conversation about Daniel had come a few months after Julia had confided to me that a gang of boys in her neighborhood was stealing her mail. She lived in a small upper apartment with two units below her, and the three separate mailboxes in the alley behind her house were visible from her kitchen window. I asked her if she had ever actually seen anyone reaching into her mailbox. “They only do it when I’m at work,” she said.

“But if you don’t actually see them. . .?”

“I know it’s them, Martha. I see them on their skateboards on Saturdays. They ride by and they watch my window.”

“But, Julia, why would they—”

“They’re tormenting me,” she said. Her face hardened into certainty.

“Have you reported it to the post office?” I asked.

“I filed a complaint. They’ve done nothing.”

Then I did not know what to say; I did not want to disagree with her or worse—to tell her that I thought she might be imagining things. A word came to me then, one that surprised me, given how much I had always relied on Julia’s contentment: paranoid. “Why would anyone steal your mail, Julia?” I asked.

“They think they can get away with it,” she said, from between her teeth. “because I live alone.”

I thought about this afterwards—Julia’s alone-ness, how much it mattered to her that she had her own, inviolable apartment. How carefully she arranged it, how scrupulously and independently she financed it. I knew that there had been other men in her life before, men who wanted to be with her, to live with her, to even marry her (two proposals), but she had never yielded. It was never the right man.

Suitors called her and wrote letters to her and penned lovely poems about her. Because she was lovely, with her ash-blond curls either pulled into a high pony tail, or caught in a low, unraveling braid. She wore hoop earrings and tiered skirts and used graceful hand gestures when she spoke. She had studied ballet and she walked the slow, deliberate walk of a dancer, her feet slightly splayed. She was herself a poet of quiet, intricate poems. She was my most precious friend. We’d stayed in Ann Arbor with our MFA’s and both found jobs related to writing. I worked at a bookstore; Julia edited a medical journal for the University.

“When can I meet this Daniel person?” I asked a few weeks after she had first mentioned him. The request came from a place of concern more than curiosity. She told me that she preferred that we not meet. “It’s too soon,” she said. “I need to wait until Daniel is more . . . comfortable.”

“Comfortable with what?”

“He’s very shy.”

I let it go. But I remembered that I had never met the last man that Julia had let into her life either—Eddie the poet, who had moved to Ann Arbor from Seattle. Eddie had not been a secret, but neither had he been interested in meeting Julia’s friends. She explained this by stressing that he was working on a book of poems about hunting and fly-fishing, working out of a studio apartment on the outskirts of town. She said he was brilliant and therefore too busy for anybody or anything non-essential.

Eddie had abruptly left town, returning to Washington state. Julia was devastated, but refused to hear the slightest note of criticism about him. “He needed to go back,” she said, wiping tears with her fingertips as she spoke. “He missed the ocean.”

“Did he ask you to come with him?”

“Yes.” She covered her face and let out a small sob, perhaps remembering this conversation.

“Did you consider it, Julia?”

“Oh God. It wouldn’t have worked. He has no money.”

“How will he get by?”

“He knows people. Friends. Fishing buddies. An old girlfriend.” She grimaced in pain to admit it. She added mournfully, “There was no future in it.”

Remembering this, I considered the mystery of Daniel, a lover who came to her only late in the night, eliminating the complication of meeting friends or relatives. Was there a future with Daniel? Or was it essential that there be no future, no hope of anything permanent, only a fleeting, sexual, carefully guarded present?

I learned from another of Julia’s friends that Eddie had stolen money from Julia before he left Ann Arbor. “Three hundred dollars, to be exact. She kept cash in her underwear drawer—isn’t that so much like her?”

“Are you sure she didn’t just give it to him, Carol? She knew he had no money.”

“I was with her when she discovered it gone. I don’t know if she would have told me otherwise. She knew it would make me hate him. Stealing from her like that. Brilliant poet, my ass.”

“Was she angry?”

“No. Just upset. She kept saying how all he’d had to do was ask her.”

“Not even a little bit angry?”

“You know how she is, Carol. Never angry. Anger is for mere mortals.”

Had I ever seen Julia really angry? 

Since we’d met, she had always radiated a sense of satisfaction about her life. She loved her apartment, with its out-of-date floral wallpaper, its battered woodwork, its poorly lit bathroom. She made curtains from India bedspreads. She made bookcases from bricks and boards. She hung sun-catchers in the windows. She was tidy and careful with her clothes, most of which were from another era, like her ancient toaster and her Mr. Coffee.

Something in the apartment was always broken—the back burner on her stove, a kitchen faucet that leaked, a widening crack in one of the stairs leading up to the second-story landing. Her landlord was generally MIA, but Julia accepted Clyde’s negligence because he had allowed her to keep her cat—an elderly Russian Blue—and to attach suction cup birdfeeders to all of her windows.

Julia didn’t like it when I criticized Clyde for frequently raising her rent. I once asked her if she would ever want to live with me—if we might consider finding a place in Ann Arbor together. 

“That is so sweet of you, Martha, but I love it here,” she said. “It’s perfect for Mabel and me.”

And now there was Daniel, coming to her in the night, expecting to be taken in and serviced. That never would have worked with me as her roommate.

I needed to know Daniel’s last name, so that I could track him. I started the process by asking Julia where he worked, pretending that I cared. “He’s adjunct at the University.”

“Is he? What’s his area?” I expected her to say Creative Writing, but she told me instead that he taught night courses for the Social Sciences.

“Is that why he comes over so late?”

“It’s just easier for him.”

My mind spun a moment. “Why is it easier, Julia?”

She sighed, disappointed in me. “He’s just very busy during the day. He’s finishing a novel.”

Of course he is.

Julia’s penchant for writers was known to me, especially the “undiscovered” ones, hopefuls from the MFA Program, students were trying to break into the literary world with works of originality and passion. As we had all felt ourselves to be while in the Program, a sensibility that faded a few years after we graduated from the Program. As students, we had all been “on the verge” of a literary breakthrough, of being discovered and rewarded. It was part of being in the safe bubble of the program.

I’d had a brief, brutal affair with one of my professors in my first year. When it ended, I decided to stay away from the men who were in the program with me, students and faculty. I believed that they could not be trusted. Whereas Julia was often dazzled by men with writerly ambitions, men who wanted to be writers—writers of all styles and subjects and levels of success, as long as they were serious. And dedicated. And not sticking around after graduation.

The subject of the stolen mail came up with new urgency—Julia believed the boys had stolen an actual check from her mailbox—a refund from a medical overpayment that had supposedly been sent, but had never arrived. She was beside herself about it, because money was tight. In her mind this made it a more calculated cruelty. “It was mailed to me two weeks ago, Martha. I just know they took it.”

“Did they use the right address for the refund?” I asked. We had both had multiple addresses in Ann Arbor.

“They did.”

“Can you just have them resend it?”

“I don’t want them to resend it! I don’t want those boys to get away with this. I want something done!”

“But there’s no way that you could prove—

“What if they steal the next check, Martha? I have to stop them somehow.”

She was clenching and unclenching her fists as she said this, as though the matter might come to blows.

I found a photo of Daniel in the Faculty Directory, on the adjunct instructor page. Daniel LeClaire, teaching two sections of Intro to Sociology at the ISR Building. The small headshot revealed someone bearded and serious, with hair to his shoulders and wire-rimmed glasses. Which fit with the type of man Julia was drawn to—someone with a 70’s look, masculine, dominating, but with a certain gloominess—a side effect of the writing life.

I found his evening lecture classes in a campus schedule and made a plan to be in the ISR hallway in the moments before his Monday night class started.

I stood in the hallway outside the lecture hall, pretending to be scrolling through my phone, but secretly checking out everyone who walked by. At 6:55 pm, a man came toward me and I recognized him from the directory photo, although he looked significantly older and more weathered. He was wide shouldered, toting a battered briefcase and wearing a hand-knit stocking cap over his long hair. Julia was a knitter, and I suspected the hat was a gift from her. Perhaps I stared at it too long, because Daniel slowed his gait as he approached and met my eyes.

As he passed, I saw that his eyes were quite piercing—bright green, inquisitive; he was staring at me. Just for a moment. Before he passed me, he said “Good evening” with an ironic, half-grin, amused by his own formality. Flirtatious. Not shy. Then he hurried into his lecture hall. I stayed outside the hall a few more moments, listening to Daniel’s introductory remarks to the class. “Let’s get to it,” he drawled, faintly sarcastic, as though he didn’t want to be there any more than his students did. His teacherly drawl sickened me—the falseness of it.

He’s a fraud, I thought. My suspicion stemmed from years of mistrust of men who wrote fiction, poetry, love letters, lame excuses, unequivocal goodbyes. Men who were clever, evasive, untrustworthy. Writers. My mind clouded with bitterness.

I resolved to help Julia get rid of Daniel.

#

I saw her the next Sunday at an old-world restaurant called Amadeus on East Washington.  Amadeus had become the place where we would meet for brunch to celebrate our friendship and update each other on how our lives going. In the early days, it was the program we talked about—our classes, our workshops, our efforts to get published. We weighed in on who from the program was ascending, who had dropped out, who was getting published, who had won this or that award. It was never us, but we remained curious and hopeful.

We always dressed up for those brunches, wearing long skirts, drapey scarves, earrings and wide-brimmed hats, like empresses from another era. The cuisine was Polish. We ordered  pierogies, creamed herring, crepes, deviled eggs, cinnamon rolls, mimosas—foods we only ate in that elegant setting. We always shared everything and always split the tab down the middle.

On this particular Sunday, I was feeling the weight of having stalked Daniel and the related, more urgent weight of my decision to rescue her. After our mimosas came, I asked Judith how things were going with the new relationship, keeping my voice neutral.

“He finished his novel,” she reported proudly.

“Oh, good for him. Did you celebrate?”

She nodded. “He brought a bottle of champagne. And an actual hard copy of the manuscript. So that we could both toast it before he sends it off.”

“Sends it off where?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Have you read it?”

“Parts of it. It’s very good. He’s going to try to find a New York agent.”

“Will he stay in Ann Arbor?”

“For a while. He’s not happy teaching the big lecture courses though. He wants a day job. Something he can walk to from his neighborhood. Would your bookstore be hiring? I could really see him working at a bookstore.”

Not my bookstore. I asked, “Where does he live?”

“I’m not sure,” she answered. “Somewhere in Kerrytown.”

A pause. “You honestly don’t know where he lives, Julia?”

She shrugged, like this wasn’t a big deal.

“Does he live by himself?” I pressed.

Julia put down her champagne and put her hands in her lap. “Please don’t start interrogating me, Martha.”

“I’m not! I just. . . I can’t believe you don’t know where he lives!”

“He shares the house with a few other people in and it’s not very private. He likes being in my apartment because it’s so quiet.”

“If that’s true, then why doesn’t he ever sleep over?”

Julia looked at me, her expression pleading. “I don’t care that he doesn’t sleep over. I like that it’s just Mabel and me in the mornings. I prefer it.”

“I get why you would prefer it, Julia, I really do. But in my experience, when someone is never free to spend the night, it’s because they’re in a relationship.”

I waited for her to say that Daniel wasn’t in a relationship. She remained silent. After a moment, she pushed her plate of crepes away. “I have to get back,” she said.

We usually spent a couple of hours at our brunches; we had only been seated forty-five minutes ago. We’d had no dessert and I’d hoped to have another mimosa with her.

But she waved our waitress over and asked for our check. “Two checks,” she instructed.

“Julia, please don’t be mad at me,” I entreated softly. 

“I’m not.” Though she did not look directly at me. She began to dig around in her bag, a faded tote made from quilting squares, searching for her credit card. The air between us grew tense. She was angry, but I was suddenly angry too, that she would refuse my concern. Still, I found my voice and said calmly, “I’ll get this today, Julia. You can get it next time.”

Her expression softened into bewilderment. “I don’t know where my card it! I had it  yesterday.”

“Where did you last use it?”

“I had it at the post office. I distinctly remember tossing the card back into my purse.”

A dark thought took hold of me. Daniel.

Aloud I said, “It’s probably in your apartment. I can come back with you if you want and help you look for it.”

The waitress had come back with our bills. I picked both up, waiting for Julia’s reaction to my suggestion. She was hesitating, perhaps because of my aggressive questions. “I won’t interrogate you,” I promised.

“Okay,” she said. “I have to find it before I go back to work tomorrow.”

“We’ll find it,” I assured her. I paid our bill and we left the café together.

As soon as we were inside of her upper, I was aware of an alien smell. Or I should say, not so much alien, as completely absent in my own life. It was clear to me that Daniel had come to the apartment the night before. Though he had not slept there, he had left his scents—cigarettes, whiskey, sweat. Masculine, needy, insistent.

I knew better than to mention this. Instead, I began searching through the cushions of Julia’s ancient brocade sofa. I looked underneath the sofa. I moved the books around that were on her coffee table to look under and between them—poetry collections, historical novels, birders magazines, crosswords. Mabel had come out of the bedroom; she watched me curiously as I dug and rifled, but kept her distance. “Did you see him take it?” I whispered, crouching down to her level. The cat came closer, allowing me to pet her, which was rare. “We hate him, don’t we?” I whispered.

Julia was in the kitchen; I heard her dumping her tote onto the table to search through the contents one last time.

I joined her, helping her flip through the pages of a notebook, the pages of a pocket calendar, the pages of a paperback. A few coupons and receipts fell out, but no plastic card. It’s not here, I thought. Because he stole it.

Though I genuinely hoped we would find the card. It was awful to think of another robbery in the sanctum of her apartment. At the table, her hand suddenly froze over the tote; something out the window had caught her eyes. “There they are,” she said. “Those little bastards.”

I came around the table and stood at the window. In the alley, three boys were navigating the ramps and curbs in the narrow alley, making a kind of obstacle course of the intersecting driveways. They were younger than what I had pictured; they looked barely out of elementary school, wearing team logos on their hoodies. They were taking turns, totally engrossed in their game. There was nothing suspicious about them. None of the three so much as glanced at Julia’s mailbox. “You’re sure those are the ones?” I asked.

“Oh, it’s them,” She turned back to her bag, began reloading the scattered contents. “I filed another complaint at the post office. Basically, they told me to get a locking mailbox.”

“Not a bad idea.”

“Locking mailboxes are expensive. And I’d have to get a big one because I get so many manuscripts in the mail for my job.”

“Maybe your boss would help to pay for it. Since you need it for work-related stuff.”

She scoffed. “Marvin has never reimbursed me for anything. Sometimes he even deducts mailing costs from my paycheck and then I get less than I was expecting. And last week he said he can no longer pay for my health insurance.”

Julia had never before complained to me about her job. “Maybe you should look for a new job.”

She shrugged. “Editors are a dime a dozen in this town.” She sat down at the table and pushed her bag aside.

Fretful again, she murmured, “It has to be here. It just has to be here.”

We searched for the card a little longer and then Julia announced, “Let’s call it a day, Martha. Maybe if I stop looking, it will just show up.”

I suppressed my doubts. As I was leaving, I noticed that on a small occasional table near the entryway sat a thick manuscript. I approached it to better read its title: The Year of my Absence by Daniel LeClaire.

“He left his novel here?” I asked.

Julia had come up behind me. “It’s his back-up copy,” she said. “He thought that it would bring him good luck to keep it here. He really needs to sell this book.”

“Does he? Because he needs money?”

“Well, it’s not only about money—

“Were you asleep last night when he left the apartment, Julia?”

“Yes. But I don’t mind that he—

“And where was your purse? Was it right out in the open? Like on the table?”

Julia covered her face with her hands. “I cannot believe you would suggest what you are suggesting.”

“He’s married, isn’t he?”

From behind her hands, a low groan. “Martha, please. I need you to leave now.”

“He’s married, he’s broke and he could easily have taken the card from your purse. Are you missing any cash?”

“Stop!” She erupted. “Just stop this! You’re wrong to accuse him!”

“Julia, you need to better protect yourself!”

She was shaking her head. “I really need you to leave,” she repeated, mournfully this time, near tears.

So I left, taking the stairs gingerly, navigating the broken step, the widening crack, cursing Julia’s landlord for never having fixed it. One day, someone would fall. Hopefully not Julia, now that her boss had canceled her health insurance. Now that Daniel had taken her credit card.

At the bottom of the stairs, I watched the boys skating in the alley in high spirits, whizzing, shouting, laughing, barely avoiding collisions. Little bastards, I thought. Stop stealing from my friend.

Though I knew they were harmless, innocent boys, oblivious to all that they had been accused of.

By Margaret Willey

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