Mrs. Roanoke

Miller started his day with Mrs. Roanoke.  That wasn't her name, and Miller had never been to Virginia, but he was sure that
if the city of Roanoke ever resembled a person, it would resemble the old lady who peddled her bike past his window
morning after morning between 7:30 and 8:00.  And old Mrs. Roanoke was.  He hadn't realized how old until the day a
gust of wind blew her canvas hat off her thinning gray hair in front of the house and she had braked her bike, dismounted
shakily, and gone casting after the hat through a couple of sadistic breezes.  As she stooped over and then stooped over
again, Miller saw she had to be closer to 80 than 70, her oval face set in the squint of a wrinkled squaw who had seen too
much to remember tribal details.  Her daily exercise up and down the hilly block had to sap her strength for hours
afterward because she was certainly no once-upon-a-time athlete with stored up resources against aging.  The shoulders
under her blue print shirt were almost curved to a hump and the legs inside the loose tan slacks defined the spindly.  If he
hadn't met Mrs. Roanoke through his window, he would have most likely encountered her in one of those dusty mantle
photographs where a great-grandmother sat surrounded by generations of family members and tried to look oblivious to
the drunk next to her shoulder and the brat on the floor in front of her.

Miller being Miller, the fact that the woman was so scrupulous about her exercise worked its way up through an initial
dismay to an incredulous anger.  How could her regimen end except with the stroke or heart attack she appeared so
dedicated to keeping at bay?  At least if she had been punched out at home, she could have fallen on a chair, a bed, or at
worst a carpet.  But in the street?  Suppose she had her attack as she was pedaling across in front of a bus?  She not
only would have been dead, she would have been mangled painfully beforehand.  Every time she went churning by, he was
tempted to run outside and remind her of all the fitness gurus who had collapsed in the middle of their exercises.

That he never actually did run out to her was Miller: Not only given to regular angers, but to abandoning his most urgent
ideas at a temptation level.  The angers he had learned to negotiate by avoiding contact with people; the habit of not
carrying through on his impulses he had long entrusted to the malices and tragedies recorded when others had done more
than think about acting on some inspiration. He wanted no further part of that destructive motion, and hardly felt poorer
for not volunteering for more of it.  For himself he had his computer and his telephone, mostly venturing through his front
door only when the city threatened him with citations for sidewalk snow that had turned to ice or for the latest assault on
his garbage can by the neighborhood cats.  About this too he had learned to take the long view since as long as he
appeared every so often at the front of the house to shovel or re-bag, the kids on the block had no reason to play Scary
Freddy games through his windows and their parents couldn't gripe he was a spooky neighbor.  In a way, the city's
periodic threats had come to make an essential contribution to what the TV chatterers called his life style.

Miller hadn't always been so reclusive.  Well up to his 40th birthday, he was Mister Congeniality, always the first to suggest
evenings out and equally first about fishing out a credit card for handling what charges the evenings had racked up.  There
had been women, there had been movies, there had been ball games, there had been trips to Europe, the Caribbean, and
Latin America, and there had been more women.  At many junctures on this odyssey he could have sincerely replied to the
curious that yes, he was a happy man.  No one lived in Eden, but how far from it could he have been if he occasionally got
a whiff of its aromas?  And if he was wrong about the source of that scent, the self-delusion alone seemed like enough to
get on with.

There had been no specific cause for the marked change in Miller's behavior --- no traumatic car crash, loss of a job, death
of a friend.  He had been pretty well along in his seclusion before becoming aware of it.  One month he had been knotting
his tie in the morning to go off to his office, the next he had been scraping directly from his kitchen table breakfast of
cereal and coffee to his studio desk.  If he could satisfy his employer as much from home as from the middle of the city,
why argue?  The closest thing to a distinct fork in the road was the day his broker had informed him they had
underestimated the potential windfall from a startup in Nebraska and had made twenty times more than what even their
optimism had foretold.  With that profit safely ensconced in his bank account, Miller saw no reason for continuing his office
employment even at electronic remove.  There had been a couple of obligatory farewell evenings with colleagues, but these
he mainly remembered for his impatience for the check to arrive so he could say goodnight and walk out into the future
with an empty promise to keep in touch.  He had been grateful his ex-colleagues had shown enough understanding of his
attitude to wait on him to carry through and not to precipitate starker tones with their own calls.

Thanks to behavior developed years before his strict domestic routine, filling the day didn't pose much of a challenge.  If
people could be described by a single adjective, Miller's would have been avid.  The piles of stock reading printouts that
accounted for most of his paper garbage every day said he was an avid investor.  The floor-to-ceiling shelves in his studio,
living room, and bedroom said he was an avid reader.  The hallway train of bookcases for his CDs and DVDs said he was
an avid listener of music and watcher of movies.  His refrigerator said he was an avid consumer of fruits, yogurts, and
chicken, his closet that he was an avid wearer of black jeans and solid Caribbean shirt colors (mango, lime, rose).  His
credit card and phone bills said he was an avid customer for anything that could be delivered to his door.  In this sense,
his avid pursuit of isolation was not at all odd: It was just a different avidity.

He had also collected new relationships, and of the best kind --- people who, like his broker, claimed from him only what he
had been ready to cede anyway.  It had taken weeks to find them.  First he'd had to maneuver through chat rooms that
were screens for on-line sex numbers, phishers disguised as former classmates, and other Internet con artists.  Truth be
told, it had been an aggravating search, and just to have someone to communicate with he had been tempted for a few
days to reply to the president of the Nigerian State Bank who had millions of dollars in an inheritance for him if he would
only send along his bank account number.  But being a mere temptation, this potential relationship with Lagos was quickly
forgotten, and he returned to hunting for serious correspondents.  Ultimately, he found several.

One was Marco in Lucerne, who really wanted to play chess.  For all Miller knew, the man might have been Pierre in Geneva
or Hans in Zurich lifting his personal anecdotes about Lucerne from some obscure novel only the Swiss knew about.  That
didn't matter to Miller.  The person he knew as Marco in Lucerne was as eager --- and as inept --- about chess as he was.  
The two of them had plenty of laughs every game about how it was already a miracle that they knew how to move their
knight pieces.

Another correspondent was Lena in Copenhagen.  She had come on so flirtatiously that Miller had thought she was
another phone sex worker, but then he realized she wasn't being flirtatious at all, simply typing more frankly than he was
used to.  When she had asked if he had a lover, she had wanted to know only if he had a lover, not if he had a citizenship
she could borrow.  After a few weeks she had admitted she wouldn't have liked it if she had been part of confidences he
hadn't felt free to share with a lover.  As Lena had put it: "You would be dishonest with two of us.  You would be making
us halves of some whole that exists only in your mind."  Miller reassured her immediately.  "The only reason I'm even in
contact with you," he told her, "is so nothing genuine exists only in my mind. You are my sanity."

And so were others.  Frank in Monterey knew everything there was to know about movies made in the 1940s and 1950s,
and constantly tested Miller with the names of actors (those who had played the four killers in High Noon, who had played
the jurors in 12 Angry Men, etc.); it was thanks to Frank that Miller kept Netflix hopping after one forgotten title after
another.  Julia in Milwaukee knew every group Miles Davis had ever played with, Billy in Memphis every backup shortstop to
play with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Raymond in Boston every politician who had been denied a likely vice-presidential
nomination.  Miranda in Miami Beach went on incessantly about Spanish language dialects, Sebastian in London about royal
families.  Everyone was an expert on something, but not so overbearingly that he or she couldn't be dismissed with the
click of a single key.

Inevitably, there were pests.  One was old man Christian next door who used any pretext at all to ring the bell.  If it wasn't
to borrow something, it was to come right out with a blatant invitation over to his house for a coffee, iced tea, or some
other concoction Miller had plenty of in his own kitchen.  Miller was polite the first few times, claiming work deadlines or the
need to remain home for a phone call.  But then he made the mistake of saying he had a contagious disease; instead of
responding to the outrageous lie for what it was or just simply backing down from the front door in fear, Christian had
taken it as an excuse for a dirge about how his two daughters had left him alone by marrying husbands on the other side
of the world.  It had gotten so bad, Christian had confessed, he had begun drifting down to the local Catholic church for
the weekly bingo games to have company.  The exasperated Miller had finally cut off the whining by advising Christian to
look for a card with a B6 on it at the next bingo evening and had slammed the door.

John Fazio, the UPS deliveryman, had also become irritating.  First there had been the jokes about how he could have
made a living just delivering to Miller.  Then there had been the calculatingly idle remarks about the contents of the
packages and the sulking when he hadn't had his curiosity satisfied.  The third and latest stage had been the absence of
any greeting, the shoving of the clipboard into Miller's chest for signing, and the leaving of the package on the ground in
front of the door.  Miller considered calling UPS to lodge a complaint, but he had the feeling he had already become John
Fazio's favorite topic of conversation back at the warehouse loading platform and that any new deliveryman would feel
compelled to be twice as snippy in an act of solidarity.  He let it go.

There were others, as well.  The cable man came practically every month to fix a tiled television picture caused by squirrels
chewing the wires in the control box and acted as though Miller should have exercised more control over the neighborhood
wildlife.  Despite all the blockage lists he had signed up for, he was bothered regularly by telemarketers pitching life
insurance, politicians, or phantom charities.  And no, he didn't want to take just two minutes out of his busy schedule to
answer some public opinion poll about global warming.  Nor had he ever been sure where Jehovah fit into the mythological
pantheon, so drop him from the potential Witnesses two eerily smiling women kept coming back to find on his street every
other Sunday.

It was Mrs. Roanoke who weighed on Miller the most, though.  She almost never missed her morning grind, the major
exception being when a blizzard had left the streets impossible for walking, let alone bicycling.  As the old woman had kept
at it day after day, Miller had also observed how totally absorbed she was in her pedaling.  Not only Christian but several
people on their way to work had waved to her as she had passed, but they might as well have waved to the clouds for all
the acknowledgement they received from her.  Not counting the day she had been forced to go after her hat, in fact, she
saw nothing around her except the next few yards in front of her wheels.

The woman's blinders gave Miller the shivers.  Was she mocking him in some allusive way, taunting him that he wasn't the
last word in concentrating on self-generated projects?  There wasn't much reassurance in the thought that she couldn't
have been doing that because she had never glanced at his window long enough to know he existed behind his curtain.  
However she knew he was there, he was certain, she knew, and the bottom line was mockery.  As foolish as he felt raising
the subject with her, he shared his misgivings with Lena.  "Tell me I'm being stupid," he implored her.

Lena waited a whole day before getting back to him.  "The woman sounds like she's in her own world," her message said.

"I know that much.  That's why I mentioned it."

"So what is the problem?  You want to compete with her at some game?  Why would you want to do that?"

"It's no game!"

"Good."

As e-mail brush-offs went, it was the sharpest one Miller had received since Julia in Milwaukee had teased him for mixing up
the Adderley brothers.   He regretted having given so much of himself to Lena, and made a mental note not to repeat the
mistake.

His anxiety about Mrs. Roanoke continued to build.  Just attending the morning ritual produced a hot fluttering in his
chest.  Day after day she chugged past -- slowly enough that no one protested her using the sidewalk instead of the
street, ruthlessly enough that she might have had a demonic gleam in her eye for being more predictable than some of
Marco's chess moves.  She seemed to be counting on him to watch her go by so he would be forced to remind himself he
would be doing the same thing the following morning.  None of the rest of Miller's activities were so preordained.  If he
wasn't in the mood to talk about old movies, he simply left messages from Frank unopened in his Inbox.  As obsessive as
he was on the topic, Sebastian knew not to make the Windsors and Tudors daily fare.  But not Mrs. Roanoke: She came
wheeling down the street morning after morning, totally indifferent to the capacity of others' tolerance.

Miller was tempted to respond to her arrogance.  Maybe startle her by running out the door one morning, planting himself
in the middle of the sidewalk, and bursting out with a cheerful Hello.  Before she got over her shock, he might even relate
an anecdote or two about his former life style, swamp her with meaninglessness.  Did he care about her reaction?  No, he
didn't.  The only important thing was to interrupt her relentless flow.

Because he was only tempted to stage his little street scene, Miller let the idea ride for more mornings of watching from
behind his curtain.  His growing anger with Mrs. Roanoke he dealt with by ignoring everyone in his mailbox and turning on
cooking shows, talk programs, and sitcoms that reconfirmed for him how little of the world was worth saving.  When that
didn't do, he reached for one film noir DVD after another, nodding through the cynical deliveries of the Garfields and the
Mitchums until he felt naked in his lounger without a cigarette and a wide-brimmed fedora.

Then one morning Mrs. Roanoke didn't come.  At his post behind his curtain he checked his watch three times, and three
times his watch said he hadn't been late for her usual appearance.  To be on the safe side, he submitted to the gougers at
AT&T for a time check; for once, wasting money felt like a secondary consideration.  He was furious.  Had she succumbed
at home the way he had often imagined?  Or, short of that, maybe collapsed and been admitted to a hospital for too much
exertion?  He didn't feel like guessing, so he called every hospital and then every funeral home in the district, claiming the
old woman as a grandmother he had lost touch with.  All the polite, suspicious, and brusque replies came down to the fact
that no one answering Mrs. Roanoke's description had been admitted on their feet, on their backs, or any other way.  She
had simply changed her schedule!

"There is another possibility," Lena pointed out.  "Maybe the riding was too much for her and she just decided to stop."

"Why?"

"I don't know why.  You would have to ask her."

Miller laughed at the notion.  Instead, he started paying greater attention to the death listings in the local paper.  Old
women appeared to drop dead every day, but none of them was Mrs. Roanoke.  They were the wrong age, the wrong
ethnic group, or in the wrong family situation.  How did he know?  He just did.  When Mrs. Roanoke died, he didn't have
the slightest doubt he would recognize her between the lines of the agate type.

The days turned into weeks without any trace of her in the obituaries.  Putting the paper aside one morning, Miller realized
he had become as used to not detecting her presence in the death listings as he had grown accustomed to not seeing her
pedal past his window.  He risked saying as much to Lena.

"You don't sound angry about it anymore," she replied.

"It'll be there one of these days," he reminded her.

"Then what?  You'll be angry again?"

"I'll probably be tempted to be," he typed out to Denmark.

Donald Dewey