I was walking north on Columbus Avenue looking at a woman walking south whose face struck me as somewhat peculiar—wild hair, platinum dye, stern joyless expression—and registering that the peculiar face was itself regarding my own with the same measure of scrutiny if not befuddlement. One encounters this kind of situation in New York City with sufficient regularity to ignore its over-or-under-tones and continue walking on without seeking clarification, which is exactly what I did. About three steps past the woman I heard, “Hey!” which stimulated my ignore button further. Then “Hey!” again, this time more insistently and followed by my name.

            Reluctantly I turned, and as I’d feared, it was the peculiar-looking woman.

            She said, “You just walk right past like you don’t even know me?”

            And then I recognized … the sound and the tone more than the face, but of course, the face fell into resolve around the sound immediately thereafter.

            “Bonnie!” I said, “Bonnie Bray.”

            I hadn’t seen Bonnie for at least a half-dozen years. I’d heard her daughter married a cop, her husband disappeared, and that she’d moved back to New York.

            She said, “What the fuck!”

            “Sorry,” I said. “I just completely blanked.”

            “What the actual fuck,” she said.

            I said, “Truly, I did not recognize you. You look,” and here I searched for a word that might get us past the friction, but she beat me to it.

            “Fuck you.”

            I said, “Come on, let me buy you an iced coffee. You look – it’s hot as hell out here.”

            I pointed to the café just two doors up.

            She said, “You know what you can do with your coffee.”

            She spun on her heels and clomped off.

            I said, “À bientôt, Bonnie!”

            Without looking back she gave me the finger.

•••

Back home I told my wife about bumping into Bonnie.

            She said, “Bray?”

            I said, “Herself.”

            “Didn’t you say she’d moved?”

            “Last I heard.”

            “Didn’t you say her husband disappeared?”

            “That was the scuttlebutt.”

            “Didn’t you say you didn’t blame him?”

            “That’s not nice to say.”

            “I didn’t say it, you did.”

            “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”

            “Whatever.”

            She returned to her cutting board. I went inside and turned on the news. From the kitchen, I heard her.

            “I don’t br-aaa-aaa-yyyy.”

            That was our joke, borrowed from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. George—Richard Burton—tells the guests, “Martha brays.” Martha—Elizabeth Taylor—says, “I don’t bray,” of course braying. George attempts to defray the argument so he can get on with his story. “All right,” he concedes, “you don’t bray.”

            “All right,” I shouted to my wife, “you don’t bray.”

            Over dinner, we watched more news. War appeared to be a certainty. In modern American history, this was hardly news. If peace broke out, that would be news.

            At a commercial, my wife said, “What do you think she’s doing here?”

            I said who.

            “Your ex-“

            I said, “Please.”

            She said, “Well, she is.”

            I said, “She is the ex- of a monster who no longer exists, in large part thanks to you.”

            “Wow—so you think you were a monster when you were with her?”

            “I was a drunk when I was with her.”

            “So she could have reasons to be hostile?”

            “Dozens.”

            “Did you ever apologize to her?”

            “Apologize?” I said. “What for?”

            My wife said, “For anything. For any of those dozens of things.”

            I said, “Do you know what she did to me?”

           “But I thought she apologized.”

           “Hardly.”

           She waited till the next commercial to say, “Well, that doesn’t mean you can’t.”

           “Look,” I said, “I should have done worse. I wish I’d done worse.”

            She said, “That’s not nice.”

            I said, “Well…”

            She said, “No, really.”

            “Forget it,” I said. “I’m not apologizing.”

•••

A few days later the phone rang. I was in my office, my wife picked up. I heard some pleasant chit-chat, then my wife poked her head in.

            She covered the receiver.

            “It’s her,” she whispered, pointing at the phone.

            “Her who?”

            “Bonnie.”

            “Bray? You’re shitting me.”

            Before I could slip out the fire escape, she shoved the phone into my hands. “Hello?”

            “It took you long enough to decide,” that voice of Bonnie’s said.

            “Bonnie,” I said. “What’s up?”

            She apologized for giving me the finger.

            “I’m sure I deserved it.”

            “And just walking away like that. It was rude.”

            I said, “Tout le monde a ses raisons.”

            She hesitated. “Right,” she said. “Anyway.”

            “So you’re living here, are you? You’re back in New York?”

            She explained that she hadn’t called to catch up. She was calling to inform me of something I needed to hear: she was writing a memoir.

            “Hey,” I said, “brilliant. I wish you the best.”

            She said, “That’s not why I’m calling.”

            “Oh,” I said, “Now I’m confused. So you’re not calling about the memoir?”

            “No,” she said, “I am calling about the memoir but I couldn’t care less about your best wishes.”

            I said, “In that case, wishes retracted.”

            “Or your worst wishes.”

            “Oh no,” I said, “not a bit of those. Only best, currently retracted, of course, as per your request.”

            My wife poked her head back in. She squinted. I shrugged and shook my head.

            “I need to tell you,” Bonnie said, “you will be mentioned.”

            I said, “Honored.”

            “I couldn’t give a shit about that either.”

            “And might I add tickled pink, or is it pinkly tickled?”

            “I’m calling to see if there’s a name you’d like to be called.”

            “Hmm,” I said, “let me think.” I recalled Pauline Réage’s The Story of O, how it both intrigued and frightened Bonnie. “Sir Stephen has a sort of scintillating sibilance.”

            “I’m serious.”

            “So was Sir Stephen.”

            “Fuck Sir Stephen.”

            “Caligula?”

            “Will you stop?”

            “Will you? Because, honestly, and returning to an earlier theme in this lovely resumption of our communication, I couldn’t care less.”

            “You don’t care what I call you?”

            “My name will suffice.”

            “No, I can’t call you your name.”

            “Because you’ll be writing fiction?”

            “Because the lawyers can’t trust that a washed-up never-been alcoholic asshole won’t sue.”

            I said, “Sensitivity like yours is so rare, and certainly to be desired in the successful memoirist.”

            “What do you know about success?”

            “It comes easy to those born on third base.”

            When we got off nanoseconds later, it was with my full blessing and her full understanding that she could call me any goddamn thing she ever wanted.

•••

The memoir came out a year later. It was called An Element of Blank.

            My wife said, “What kind of title is that?”

            “I like it,” I said. “It’s from Emily Dickinson.”

            My wife said, “So what?”

            “Yeah,” I said. “Not that she’s ever read Emily Dickinson.”  

            My wife said, “Are you going to buy it?”

            I said, “Not even at gunpoint.”

            “You’re not interested.”

            “Pas de tout.”

            “You don’t want to know what she called you.”

            I said, “I’ll wait for the movie.”

            My wife said, “I’m going to buy it.”

            I said, “Be my guest.”

            And a few days later it was in the apartment, on the coffee table, with a couple of post-its in the places where my wife thought I was mentioned.

            “It’s not very good,” my wife said.

            I said, “You read it?”

            “Not the whole thing,” my wife said. “I don’t know who could. I mean the writing…”

            I said I know.

            “So wooden,” she said.

            I agreed.

            She said, “It’s not even my first language and I feel like I have more facility.”

            I said, “Infinitely.”

            She said, “Then how…”

            I said, “Welcome to the USA. Welcome to the bubble. Welcome to the land where 90% of the culture is produced by the 10% who own it, and 99% of what’s produced holds up a mirror to the 10% so that they can admire themselves for their pluck, their virtue, and their beauty.”

            My wife said, “Whatever. But I will say, you don’t come off so bad.”

            I said, “Really?”

            She said, “I mean, if you were the monster you say you were, she’s pretty kind.”

            I said, “Wow.”

            “Even forgiving.”

            I said, “Wait, we’re talking about this book?”

            My wife made a face.

            I said, “So what does she call me?”

            My wife said, “Are you ready?”

            “Come on,” I said, “the suspense is killing me.”

            “OK,” she said, “then I’m just gonna say it.”

            “Say it.”

            She took a dramatically calculated pause, then blurted, “Dick.”

            And we both erupted.

            I said, “But that’s what you call me.”

            We continued laughing. It was difficult to pay attention to the news, which was: we were indeed back at war.  It was shock and awe this time. Total, speedy, and nearly bloodless victory promised.

•••

By my count, upper case Dick appeared in the memoir forty-one times, lower case dick a bunch more (at least she was somewhat honest). Dick was harmless but mean-spirited, penniless and resentful of the rich, and drunk until he got sober. The other dick belonged primarily to older men who’d tried, most often unsuccessfully, to seduce Bonnie from her early teens unto eternity. Others belonged to celebrities or the princes or dukes of European aristocracy. These dicks were worse, even the one or two she married. Some were guilty of sexual assault. Many treated her the way she treated me: as though she were a peasant in all the understandings of that term. The Dick, however, had at least one redeeming quality: he’d led her to make the discovery that saved her life. I have to say, reading that bit choked me up.

            My wife said, “So why don’t you just call and tell her? Or tell her in person if she’ll see you.”

            That night I had a dream. I was with Bonnie at the ocean, which she lived nearby. The day was bright, the waves big and rough and relentless. Still, she went in, she took a pounding, and she washed up in the whitewater at my feet on the beach. Looking up, smiling, she said, “Come on in.”

            After coffee that morning I called.

           A pre-recorded message picked up. “The number you have just dialed,” it announced, “is no longer in service.”

– Tim Tomlinson