Another Insane Devotion by Peter Trachtenberg Page B

first time, seventeen years before, had been mostly out of guilt because she’d so plainly wanted to be proposed to and everything else I’d given her had been so shoddy and so quickly reneged on. That morning I laid out the jewel box beside my overnight bag along with some clothes and toiletries, then left the apartment to discharge my nervous energy working out. It was late summer; the pavements shimmered. When I came back from exercising, I was sweaty and sore, but I no longer felt like vomiting. I had an hour and a half before my train. That seemed like enough time. I showered and packed; I made myself a cup of coffee. I filled the cats’ bowls with two days’ worth of food and water and turned on a fan for them. Then I got ready to leave. All I had to do was put the box in my pocket. I’d decided that would be the safest place to keep it and had solved the bulge problem by putting on a pair of cargo shorts with pockets so deep I could have carried a .44 in one without anybody knowing. The pockets, moreover, snapped shut. But the ring wasn’t where I’d left it on the bed. I thought I might have moved it to
the nightstand, but it wasn’t there either. It wasn’t in the drawer of the nightstand. Could I already have slipped it in a pocket and forgotten? I patted them down like a TSA agent and turned them inside out for good measure. They were empty. I hadn’t taken the ring into the bathroom when I showered—at least I didn’t see it on the counter or the sink or on top of the toilet tank, which would have been a really stupid place to put a diamond ring, considering how easily one of the cats might jump up and knock it into the bowl. I hadn’t taken it down to the kitchen when I’d made coffee; I looked there too. I looked inside the refrigerator.
    I was sweating now, worse than I had while skating along the Hudson; my armpits were sour and dank. Every breath held the threat of a sob. I revisited places I’d searched only minutes before; it was like some awful dream of loss. At one point, finding another drawer or cupboard empty, I bellowed and flung my coffee cup at the wall. An explosion of black liquid and white shards. The cats, who’d been following me closely, ran.
    In another minute, I’d either have to cancel my reservation or go to F. ringless. Looking back, I see that neither would have been a big deal. There were plenty of other trains, and she had no idea of what I was planning to offer her. At the time, though, it seemed that my whole fate was at stake, that if I didn’t give F. the ring now, I never would, and sooner or later we would pass out of each other’s lives forever. I fell to my knees at the foot of the bed and dropped my face into my hands. “Tell me what to do,” I said. Maybe it was just, “What do I do?” I don’t know what I said. I don’t know what I was speaking to. Nothing spoke back to me.

    I got up. The bed stretched below me like a landing strip, with the overnight bag at its center. Just beyond the bag, in its shadow, so to speak, was the small blue velvet box with my mother’s ring inside it. Trust me, I checked.

    I file e-mails compulsively, and the moment an airline sends me confirmation of a flight, I usually place it in a folder marked “Subscriptions.” But I can’t find a confirmation for the flight I booked on the night of September 30 and so don’t know for sure what time I finally made my reservation. At around 7:15, it appears, I changed my password, since the airline sent me a message to that effect. I must have forgotten my old one. Why anybody should need a password to book a trip on a fucking airplane is beyond me. I can all too clearly picture myself typing different combinations of letters and numbers in the designated space and having each one rejected, my anger mounting like the anger of a sucker in Vegas feeding quarters into an unresponsive slot