I started delivering the mail to save my marriage. My wife and I had only been married for a few months, she had just become pregnant. Every night I laid my head on her tummy to listen to the small animal that was growing inside her. Usually I heard nothing, but sometimes it was as if it was talking to me in a language that could only be heard through the abdominal wall. The baby told me to be careful.
My father-in-law had bought us a little house down a narrow alley abutting a shopping street. At night the shouting of drunk men echoed between the walls, and we listened to their drunken clamour as if to a recording of a concert – with revulsion and nostalgia.
On the first day I went out to deliver the mail, a Tuesday, I rode along with a man with long grey hair. That morning I’d been issued with a jacket in the colours of the delivery company, along with special saddle bags for my bicycle. It was autumn, and the old trees in the neighbourhood were cautiously dropping their leaves. The man handed me a stack of letters and said, ‘You do that street.’ He gestured towards a neighbourhood I’d never been to before. ‘Oh, and this one,’ and he threw a package at me, which fell on the pavement with a crashing noise. I nodded, got on my bicycle, and lurched for a moment because of the heavy saddle bags. I rode slowly, searching out the right house numbers, and meanwhile peering in everyone’s windows, hoping I would see something I’d be able to tell Emily about later.
The package had to be delivered to a villa with light-blue window frames. I tried to push it through the mailbox, even though I could immediately tell that it was never going to fit. I rang the doorbell a few times, then I decided to lay the package under a rosemary bush and wrote a note. I walked over to the big window and looked in. There was a large bookshelf, a Chesterfield sofa, and a potted plant so big its leaves touched the ceiling.
Every morning around 10.30, I rode my bicycle to the dark depot to pick up my stack of mail. My backside ached more with every passing day. Emily was glad to be rid of me, ‘finally you’re doing something with your day,’ she said, and I nodded. She was right – I was lazy, my mother used to tell me that too. You’re perfectly capable of paying your own way, Emily told me, even though we got more than enough money from her father. I’m getting money – you’re not getting anything. In the evenings I attended vocational high school, where I tried to become the kind of man who could take care of his family.
During the first few days I didn’t have any packages for the big house, but that Saturday there was a fat brown envelope in one of my saddle bags with a red ribbon around it. I was happy when it didn’t fit through the mailbox and I could ring the doorbell. An older woman answered. She wore a tailored wool skirt and jacket.
‘Have you finally come to apologise for the broken teacup you delivered?’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘There was a package under my rosemary bush with a broken teacup inside it.’
‘Oh,’ I said. I ran my hand through my hair and looked over my shoulder at my bicycle, which was leaned precariously against a fence.
‘That’s going to fall over,’ the woman said. I nodded slowly.
‘Why don’t you come in for a minute?’ the woman asked, and sometimes I still wonder why I went inside with her.
I looked down at the brown envelope, at the firm kraft paper and the red ribbon. The package was heavy in my hands and the pressure calmed me. I breathed in deeply and felt my breath quiver.
The woman moved aside, and I walked ahead of her into the house. During our arguments Emily has often asked me if I knew by then what lay ahead, and I always say I didn’t.
I sat down on the sofa, wearing the coat from the delivery company, as she disappeared into the kitchen. I put the package down on the coffee table.
‘So, what’s it like delivering the mail?’ the woman asked. She emerged from the kitchen holding two glasses of wine. I tried to arrange my thoughts into straight lines. As if this was all totally normal.
‘It’s OK,’ I said, ‘except I’ve been getting quite severe pain from the saddle.’ I put a hand on my right hip.
‘Oh, you poor thing,’ the woman said. ‘My husband delivered the mail for a few months, too,’ and she pointed at a picture of a young man in uniform, ‘after he got back from the army.’ I knew her husband was dead from the way she pointed at the picture, as if it was the repository of his essence.
The woman got up, went upstairs, and came back with a little tube without a label.
‘Come over here,’ she said, and she looked at me like a mother in a dream, beckoning me tenderly.
I got up. I wanted to head for the door, but instead I walked over to her. She was nothing like my mother, she was the complete opposite. I yearned for the woman like I yearned to wake up on a carefree spring morning in my childhood bedroom.
I hesitated for a moment, my movements faltered, but then I pulled down my pants. My briefs stretched between my thighs, and I laid down in her lap. I kept my windbreaker on. I was ashamed of the hungry feelings the woman must have seen in my eyes.
The ointment felt cool on the skin of my buttocks, her hands were soft. I felt a tingling in my lower belly, my penis got hard, and I squeezed my eyes shut to send away my tears.
‘You’ve got red welts,’ she said, and she squeezed some more cream out of the tube.
When she was done, I hurriedly got dressed. The woman smiled at me as she rubbed what was left of the cream into her hands.
‘Do you want to sit in my lap for a minute?’ she asked, and I shook my head. I felt like a child – I was a child.
Outside it was drizzling. My bike had fallen over, the mail was scattered across the sidewalk. I gathered up the soggy papers, delivered everything, rode back to the depot, and resigned.
‘Delivering the mail isn’t for everyone,’ said the man with the long hair.
I rode home, where I told Emily the woman and I had had sex.