It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…   

Charles Dickens

I have borrowed money.  I have borrowed faith.

Jorie Graham

THE SIMPLE TRUTH: John Sender believed in love. 

Thirty-three.  Still single.  Driven, overly driven.  So much head work, and such solitude, but now into his self-doubt, love.  Real love.  A love he could hardly believe after such draught, but yes, he believed.  He’d even gone home to Montana and borrowed his long dead grandfather’s black Florsheim wingtips from his recently dead grandmother’s bedroom closet, and from her bureau the diamond ring she’d kept through two foreign wars—his mom wanted him to have it—the ring he’d be giving to his bride.  There was only one problem he hadn’t worked out; Samantha did not yet know she loved him.  

He pressed his hands down on the desk, flattening them, staring.  Big boned, rough.  Late night; everyone gone.  Alone again.  The day had been without tone or hue, loans drawn up, rates secured, moneys meted out.  Strange, he thought, the bones of a hand, beautiful in their way.  His were like his father’s, not afraid of work. Strong like his father’s too, but too meek with women. 

Not desultory, just reserved.  And raised that way for good reason, he had thought.  It came easy, the meekness.  Perfect for handling horses, the breaking and calming, finding the heart of the animal and soothing it, not fearing, giving the animal its legs, letting it run.  But not so with women; excruciating, in fact, how uneasy he became.  He had thought he might just stick to horses; they calmed him every bit as much as he calmed them, the kind-spirited ones, the wild ones too, like bolts of lightning he could get a heel into and fight.  He missed it, breaking for Dad and the neighbors.  That, and all the rodeoing he’d done. 

Spooked since he could remember, he felt like a fool on every date he’d been on, which was few.  Tall man: 6’5”, wired tight.  Bridge of the nose bony as a crowbar, broken on a fence in Flagstaff.  Rodeo docs always salty, that one had laid him flat on the ground, shoved two metal rods up his nose and got on top of him, then jerked the rods hard.  The sound was awful, the pain like a landslide in his brain. Straightened things out but left a crude notch.  Too tall for saddlebroncs doc said, but he’d made do. 

Hardnosed, his dad said when he saw the nose. 

Keeps the women away, John answered, and they chuckled. 

But John was better looking than he gave himself credit for.  Shoulder-length black hair, black enough it had a blue sheen, drawn back, crowlike.  Brown eyes.  Bold features.  Big.  Just generally quiet with women.  He put his hands through his hair.  Easier just to see couples enter his office, and sit with them, and work with them.  The men were anomalies.  Their wives called them husband, or hubby, or honey, or silent, said nothing.  Men didn’t know what they had, John thought.  When it came to women, they should realize what you borrow is a woman.  You borrow her from her family, her mother and father, but mostly from God.  They came to him to borrow money; but first off, money came too easy, especially with interest rates being what they were; and second, marriage came too easy, especially in America.  But not good marriage, John thought, that was work.  He knew it would be work, as it should be, and it burned him up when men acted dead around their wives.  He couldn’t stomach it to see them walk on a woman or discard her or plain ignore her.  He wished he could say it direct, to borrow something was to claim it as one’s own before it was quite earned, so it required respect. 
Kind of like hope.  Had to have it, or all was lost.  He himself was trying to claim his love for Samantha even before she granted it.  And he’d do what he had to, he’d fight for her love because whether she gave him a second glance or not, he believed. 

His daily business was loans, but in this, his so-called life’s work, he sometimes felt he had no life, just like the men he saw, really.  He couldn’t escape the fact they were, for all intents and purposes, brothers.  Sometimes he talked big, but he hadn’t accomplished himself the very standard he held them too.  He needed to think more openly.  Still uncomfortable in the city, even after a handful of years.  Slick hair and tailored suit and contemporary tie, Guess frames, Cole Haan shoes.  Too late again, after dark already, he needed to finish this transaction and get home.  Odd, he thought.  Vicarious living or some kind of narrow foresight.  No cowboy hat, no boots, but when he looked in the eyes of the men, he still saw some light.  Against a litany of broken unions and lack of love and under the great pressure life exerted, he believed they truly wanted love, even if in marriage they suffered for it, or suffered their wives.

He looked at his hands again.  Too soft too, too much city. 

A rodeo scholarship and a BA in English from the University of Montana, then three years on the circuit and an MBA along with a smattering of additional graduate work in philosophy from Seattle U..  He was selected straight out by Washington Mutual for their residential loans division.  Everything real in seven year increments, almost of Biblical resonance.  Seven years rodeoing, seven years with Washington Mutual, and now Samantha. 
Until he met her everything seemed caught in a space and time foreign to him, and uglified.  Hollow, missing the land and sky.  The ranch.  Mom and Dad by themselves and him a corporate hired hand, like a pawn trapped in some large thoughtless efficiency, all take, no give.  The nature of his job was strange.  To borrow implied responsibility, even culpability, destiny made of desire and whim and need; but made also of emptiness, palpable and burdensome.

And of the men who borrowed?  

Their lives, like his, swirled in an ether most often he couldn’t discern, edging toward death but wanting life, poised on the tipping point between darkness and light.  Tangibly, he sensed they ranged the border between indifference, chaos and shame, and a new country of grace.  And it worried him, how many people he’d misplaced or forgotten before he met her.  Like most, he centered his thoughts on the present, and like most he too quickly forgot the past, the mundane days and multiphasic tasks, the endless clients and the seemingly unassailable reasons for individual and collective failure, and in among the mess, the individual man.  He forgot, even if subsurface he knew from his training in philosophy, the individual was of penultimate value. 

THE FORGOTTEN, from seven years back, four men, among many. 

Zacharias Harrelson.  Sean Baden.  Phil Silven.  Andrew Elk Shoulder. 

He’d met them early the first year and worked each file to completion.  Then he’d forgotten them.  And these men, too, had forgotten him.  And none felt compelled to remember, though even slight remembering might have meant help, and remembering all might have meant salvation.  Dumb like animals, like angels majestic, men were born into foolishness yet into love awakened.  Unknowingly they willed themselves to succeed or die. 

JOHN PLACED THE LOAN in the processor’s in-box.

Past midnight locking the office door his hands felt very cold.  He hoped beyond fear she’d come around but he had to laugh at himself, everything so unlikely still.  He’d only spoken to her once, but as he merged onto I-5 for the forty minute commute from downtown to North Seattle he slipped the George Winston Plains CD from its alphabetical place in the CD wallet, put the stereo setting on country western, and listened to cut ten, Winston’s tender cover of the Garth Brooks song “The Dance.”  Beat up Ford F-100 he’d bought old and had for years and still loved; good sound he installed last year.  He pushed the ring over his right pinkie finger, a simple solitaire, firm hand at twelve o’clock, and watched the glow through the windshield, subdued usually but in the direct light of an oncoming vehicle the stone a tiny torch of white, gold, and vermillion.  He envisioned placing the ring on her slight hand, smiling into her eyes, receiving from her the smile she’d give.  He dreamed of trips back home to Montana, driving Going-to-the-Sun Road in Glacier, hiking the lakes region from Hidden Lake at Logan Pass, to Avalanche Lake and Two Medicine, teaching her to fly fish, making small bright fires under wide skies on nights that went from light to dark blue then black as black silk, silver points like fine sand from east to west, the Milky Way an arm of clustered stars overhead.  The Summer Triangle.  Signus the Swan.  Vega, Altair, Albirio.  In the western night they’d shine, he and her, shine like satellites.  

John readied himself for bed and sat at the kitchen table eating a bowl of Corn Flakes.  White T-shirt, plain white underwear.  Now that he was in Seattle he could dress with anyone, but he loved things spare.  In bed, his hands were still cold.  Chill air, down comforter his mother gave him a Christmas ago.  He held his hands over his chest and stared at the ceiling.  The reasons men borrowed were simple, and not so simple.  They borrowed what they felt they needed, and not just from him, from everyone, and not just money, they borrowed everything.  He thought about the needs: wedding bands, a good job, great sex.  They borrowed against their line of credit, cash, jewels, furniture, paintings, cars, TV’s, VCR’s.  They borrowed money even to buy their own beds.  In isolation it was nothing but combined it meant great debt, depending on who borrowed what, and for how much, and when. 
Loans for the common man were his specialty, the melting pot American male in all his jaded glory.  And it brought in good money.  Everyday he sat with them and processed their loans, and he felt he knew them, each one, his occupation and monthly income, his stocks and bonds and yearly giving, his ambition, and in the precious eye the fragile nature of his ways, his losses, his vulnerabilities, his deep fiscal vulnerabilities.  Every man borrowed and what he borrowed was uniquely his.

Intimately John knew them.  He knew them not at all. 

ZACH HARRELSON, angry, borrowed another man’s car until he was arrested on the edge of the Safeway parking lot in West Seattle. 

SEAN BADEN, young, borrowed his father’s New American Standard Version Bible.   

JOHN HAD TO admit he was low in Seattle, real low away from home, boxed in by granite and glass, and the rain, no range or visibility, no sky, and out among the millions, for so long he’d thought he’d find no one.  It wasn’t the flats near Sunday Creek where you could ride for miles and never see a soul and never feel alone.  Here, you sort of hit people constantly, bumped them on the sidewalk or in a grocery line, touching and being touched and never having a real conversation, and you couldn’t get away from the sheer mass even if you wanted to; it made you feel bad.  

Yet in the midst of all this, he’d found her.

He stared at the ceiling.  His hands wouldn’t warm up. 

He’d borrowed the ring.  He’d borrowed the shoes.  Now he’d put them to good use. 

TO WIN WOMEN men put on an attitude of cleanliness, clipped nails, and shaved faces, sideburns like little battle axes, a soul patch below the lower lip or a thin goatee, lines of facial hair crisp, hard, geometric, glistening.  They borrowed style, Jockey briefs or Polo boxers, colognes like engines of desire: Fahrenheit, Body Heat, Obsession.  Beneath the surface of the world and over the surface and above it God moved; each man granted the gift of opportunity but none possessing all, some by purpose or chance possessing more than others, every man filled or being filled of hope, or hopelessness, satiated, left wanting. 

ZACH HARRELSON borrowed his passed-out friend Lenny’s crystal meth, along with five dollars, and walked out the door crazed, alive.  Two blocks later five policemen put their fists to his face and struck him down like a rabid animal, then beat him on the paved sidewalk at the edge of the parking lot, the people gathered, gawking.  The officers rose, holstering their batons, put him in the squad car and drove off, adrenalin like black sand slowing in their pink, translucent veins. 

PHIL SILVEN borrowed Italian leather gloves and a white silk scarf from his wife’s lingerie drawer. 

ANDREW ELK SHOULDER, director of youth programs for the South Seattle YMCA and a Northern Cheyenne from Lame Deer, Montana, was well-liked at home and work and everywhere he went; he borrowed his grandfather’s elk-bone breastplate, framed it in a shadow box and placed it over the cherry wood mantle of his fireplace.  He aligned five white colonnade candles beneath it on the tile and during the evening they shone in the dark like a small upside down sky. 

IN AMERICA, if you were to be a man, and if you wanted a woman, you borrowed boldness.

Each man had it to varying degrees, the verve that drew women, the force and façade, the sex with which he governed his own interplay of looks and presence, and urgency, such urgency: inevitable, precise, disparate, united; Zach, Sean, Phil, Andrew; messy, clean, married.

AND JOHN SENDER, alone.  On free fall in the apartment, linear, solid, spare.  Unable to sleep he moved from the bed to the kitchen, drank a glass of milk, went to the leather reading chair and stared at the window.  Strange reflection: long white body adorned in white.  He leaned and lifted the Fall issue of Montana Quarterly left on the floor the night before.  He read an article on a wolverine researchers collared that crossed nine mountain ranges in forty-two days.  He fell asleep in the chair.  He woke, stumbled back to bed.  Night sifting the sediment of dreams.  Dark animal, solitary, full of speed.  Light.  Morning.  Glass of water.  Toast.  No TV, no radio.  No sound.  Driving I-5 to work he took from the heart pocket of his suit coat the pen Samantha had given him the first time they met.  He thought of her holding the pen, a blue ball point made of inexpensive metal alloy, pens the bank gave out.  She worked in human resources in the day, at night completing a master’s degree in American Studies.  He’d seen her in the lobby after work, seated, writing a memo, a note to a friend, or perhaps to her mother, left-handed—a note to him, he liked to imagine—her clear nail polish and French manicure, the pale half-spheres at the base of her fingernails like small suns touched to the ocean of her skin.  It was sudden: he desired her more than anything. 

Awful, the anxiety he’d had over his voice being too boyish, his face overly pale and hands too hard.  He sat down next to her.  “Can I borrow your pen?” he said. 

“Sure,” she said, handing it to him, “keep it.”  She slipped her fingers into her purse, a thin Yves St. Laurent, and drew forth an identical pen. 

“Handy,” he said.  His hands were not only cold but sweating.

She smiled.

He managed a few awkward questions.  She grew up in Bellingham.  She mentioned her family, her mom, studies, work.  She looked right at him, not away.  He lost himself. 

“Can I take you to dinner?” he said.   

“What?” she replied. 

“Sorry,” he said.  “Sorry.”

“Sorry,” he said again, and rose.  Started walking. 

“That’s my pen,” she said, and he paused and looked in his hand, and held the pen out to her, a gesture she found innocent, and lovely.  “You’re borrowing it,” she said, and she laughed, light-hearted.  He blushed. 

He’s country, she thought.  She didn’t dislike him. 

“Thank you,” he said, and his hands flushed again, so he waved at her and she smiled, and he blushed again, and walking out the door he was astonished at how much her smile delighted him.  Down the hall, when she couldn’t see, he slapped his hands together, covered his mouth and muffled a slight whoop.  She hadn’t even said yes.  Still, he felt as if the top of his head had been blown off.

THE RING was small by modern standards, a little less than a half karat, very big for his Grandma’s era, a cherished heirloom.  Through the elevator doors, passing her floor, the third, going to his, the fifth, he hoped.  He also felt mortified.  The first time on a saddle bronc was no different; exhilaration, and horror.  Glad he’d had the buck reign Dad bought for him second-hand, worn in and comfortable if blackened.  Single thick rope, awkward, tricky as a rattlesnake.  He’d lost it when the horse went rump high straight out of the chute, launching him head first into the dirt.  Still, the buck rein was the only help; tiny saddle and his own fatal balance no good to him at all.  Bruised shoulder; dirt in his nose and teeth for a week.  Not a natural by any means, but he could work.  It took seven rodeos to complete his first real ride and when it came, it unhooked him good; digging spurs, arm flying, horse a force of nature below, John a bright fire between heaven and earth.  The classic event of rodeo, skill and finesse over straight strength.  He’d held the whole 8 seconds, bounced and landed on his feet, full of spit and gratitude.  Cheer from the small-town crowd; town called Roundup, dustbowl, eastern Montana.  Fatherless Child was her name; 1100-pound fighter; never saw her again.  Still loved that horse. 

On his return to Seattle he’d purchased a black velvet box for the ring and placed it in the inner chest pocket of his suit coat during the day, the weight of it a solid horizontal presence next to the vertical lightness of the pen.  He was convinced, before her he’d never truly been in love—it was her manner, melodic, mysterious, her danger, like wilderness, like God.  Her face too, fine arch of bone above the eyes, and how she looked out at him, shy but fierce like the best horses, or more like the lions he’d hunted in the high country, the hunger in her so immeasurably far beyond the refinement of a woman encased in metal and glass, caught in the architecture of the city. 

When he spoke to his clients he held the pen in his hands and remembered Montana. 

Metal chute, boots high-rails over the horse.  The crowd, the gate pullers, the pickup men.  Grit in the glove, horse’s back hard as stone; muscle it down ready.  Knees up, spurs down, chute gate flung wide and horse and man sprung out clean and tight and wild.  Tossed on a string, close to tetherless, horse like white lightning, free hand touching sky, punching, pulling, power in the hand of fear, and fear in the gut, and below fear tenderness, and deeper down, down deep love.  He liked the smoothness of the pen, the energy it gave during hours of signings, the way he saw man and woman, and read them better now that he’d met Samantha, their blank-looking faces and open eyes.  He wished for them the love he felt.  They sat slack and listened as he issued rhetoric of interest rates and points, fixed-terms and arms and debt consolidation, money given, equity earned.  Often they stared at him looking only half there, but he didn’t notice.  He liked them so much more now, even loved them, the details of what they borrowed, and why.  Their skin, their eyes, big lights, big big lights in the city. 

BUT THE FORGOTTEN ones remained.  Men of want and possibility.  They’d borrowed what they needed long ago and John had forgotten their names and wouldn’t recognize their faces.  They lived in the shadow of other men, too easily displaced.  Victims.  Tyrants.  Depraved.  Unworthy.  Or healthy.  Healed.  Humbled.  Whole.  He bumped against them and went his way and despite forgetting them he felt now that every man in the great dim fortified world hoped for an answer to loneliness that might heal him and set the world afire.    

ZACH HARRELSON in dirty t-shirt and jeans without knees, hollow look and hooded eyes.  Tiny loan on a single wide trailer.

PHIL SILVEN in Versace suit and Gucci watch, big house on Lake Washington.

SEAN BADEN in a rancher east of the city.

These, and ANDREW ELK SHOULDER, gracious, clean-faced, one of Chief Morning Star’s Beautiful People, an athlete, and with him a white woman made like a feather, shaft of bones and thin body illumined, face to the side, staring out the window. 

Four-plex in the suburbs. 

ADMITTEDLY JOHN LOVED more than most, he loved the subtlety, the distances people carried, their kindness and complexity, the eccentricity.  Because of her it seemed he could love everything, the arc of his mind enhanced like blown glass.  In the past, even at his best he’d seen people only as small parts of a basically sound machine, evolving but mechanistic, pretty much determined despite their best wishes.  It had made for cynicism, and looking back, he hated cynicism, hated himself for so easily embracing it, for now he saw so much better, now he found everyone beautiful, like works of art or something sacred he’d give his life for.  He remembered Van Gogh: the words standing as if written in light: the greatest work of art is to love someone.  He could give Samantha his whole life, he knew he could. 

Yet often, at work, in the bathroom looking at his face in the mirror, he reminded himself he hardly knew her and that it could fail, and miserably.  Strong and good, that’s what his parents called him.  Yet in his own mind more afraid than good.  And not too good sometimes either.  Hard to stop thoughts, especially the will to fail, or the mind to quickly condemn.  He needed courage for what he was about to do.  At his desk he stared at his screensaver, panorama of Glacier’s mountains shouldering the blue of Hidden Lake.  He wanted to make a life with her.  He felt sick.

HE PUT THINGS IN in motion: small bright email, phone call followed by a meeting in the third floor lounge, shared lunch at week’s end, and a week later the first date: Anthony’s Seaport over the water.

She asked of his background, his schooling, his mother and father, his interests, religion, sex, masturbation.  She scared him, very much.  But he felt vital in her presence, and bold.  Stunning, her chestnut hair and high-boned face.  He wasn’t all business, she was glad, and told him so, intrigued with his upbringing, his background in English and Philosophy.  For his part she reminded him of the great poets: terrifying, exact. 

On a Thursday afternoon, seated in the bay window at the end of the lounge, they watched the Olympics, the Sound.  Three months of good contact, less discomfort, nice start, an ease had come to them.
“What’s your favorite song?” he asked. 

“Heaven,” she said, “Brian Adams,” and hummed a few bars to jog his memory.  And he felt important, her verve right there in a room of fellow employees, her melody making people lift their heads, making them smile. 
She looked radiant, her smile, slight splash of brown on the right side of her face, birthmark like a butterfly. 
“Tell me your favorite song, John.” 

Pearl Jam crossed his mind, Alive, then Temple of the Dog, Hungry, then Sound Garden and Chris Cornell, Black Days.  Angst.  No Country.  City.  Not as good as Country, but hard-edged, and tough.  He didn’t know what to say.

“Journey,” he said, “Steve Perry, Open Arms.” 
      
She lifted an eyebrow.

“Give me a little,” she said, nudging his hand with hers. 

“Hurt your ears,” he said.

“Impossible,” she said and she closed her eyes and sang the Perry vocal perfectly, high and soft, Lying beside you… here in the dark... feeling your heartbeat and mine.

He broke in two.  She was capable of breaking him. 

He stared at her face, her eyes.  He said nothing. 

“You ready?” she said. 

“Yes?” he answered. 

“Frankl’s four things for a true life, what are they?”

 He thought about it.  “I don’t know,” he said. 

“Not good enough,” she said, and got up and pushed in her chair.  She winked and walked away and as he watched the oval of her head recede, he wondered what he’d done.  Her step was light as she opened the glass door, slight lift in her hips.  She moved down the corridor and didn’t look back. 

“What’s up?” he called. 

Over her shoulder she waved her hand and kept walking. 

He looked at his shoes, his grandfather’s shoes.  He’d never known how to read a woman.  He heard the bell of the elevator.  He didn’t know what to think, of her or anyone really, the games people played.  The industry, he called it.  His mind felt tight.  Calm down, he told himself, it’s okay.   But it wasn’t okay; his thoughts darkened and he had the sensation of standing on the edge of an abyss, a feeling he tried to shove down, cover over.  People are innocent, he thought, but dangerous.  He wanted to follow her; he stayed where he was.  He remembered the line-up he’d drawn in Reno.  It wasn’t the ones with menacing names like Hell’s Fire, or Kitchen-of-the-Damned, or Homicidal Tendencies that got you; it was the playful-named ones like Honey-Do, or Conjunction Junction.  Hell’s Fire and HT were nothing.  Honey-Do nearly broke his neck.

Why’d she leave?  He must have offended her.

Even the mean animals he loved, but he wasn’t dumb; you could get kicked in the head by something you loved, and often it took a lot to avoid it.  Even with years of rides he always gave respect to the animal.  Watching the greats, stacking skill against weakness.  On the circuit you had to be careful, but with abandon.  Super-vigilant, half-crazed.  Everything so large-scale at the big rodeos—Oklahoma City, Cheyenne, Denver, Provo, Sacramento.  No more 1100-pounders, it was 13 or more, 1500 sometimes, horse blowing snot in the chute, white-eyed, and fast, and powerful, and leap like a gymnast.  Roads, long black lines grey at the edges, hard driving, hard riding.  He’d broken 30 bones, mostly fingers and other hand bones, plus ribs; he’d cracked a collarbone too, fractured his right scapula, and in a tiny rodeo in Miles City broken his jawbone.  Wired up.  Ate through a straw for months.  

Broken bones he could handle.

She was gone and he felt like collapsing. 

He looked at the shoes.  Wake up, he thought.  The first day he’d tried them on there was a drop of dried blood on the shell of the left one.  It was a decade ago, he was 23, just weeks after his grandfather’s funeral.  Back then it took no energy, his mind didn’t dwell; he’d licked his thumb and removed the stain.  He’d worn the shoes for an hour or two then put them back in Grandma and Grandpa’s closet.  But now he thought darkly of his grandpa without wanting to.  Tough old man who rarely talked.  Real down, John thought, ending it on a Sunday, body laid out behind the barn, head slung back and to the side.  He remembered the slender barrel of the .270 flat on the grass.  Real quick, John thought, too quick.  Then Grandma years later, but not violent, dignified, even with Grandpa still a big hole in everything. 

He couldn’t fake it, her playing him like this troubled him.  He felt severe. 

He looked at his hands.

He’d stop at Clyde's Give and Take, huge used bookstore south of downtown before he went home.  Get buoyant.  He knew about Frankl, existentialist, psychiatrist, philosopher, man who lost his whole family save one daughter in the Nazi inferno.  He’d find what was needed.

WHAT THEY BORROWED, be it financial or emotional, was due much to a man’s bent, but more to his education level and earning power, and most to the character of each man’s specific line of descent.  As a person of both Czech and French blood and the son of unusually decent, not domineering men, John called his father, who gave him good advice. 

“Be patient.  Don’t rush.” 

Down to Clyde's.  Out of his way to clear his mind, further south on I-5, city of crystal and steel dwarfed in the subtle glow of water and out far the darkness of mountains, the dull white of distant peaks.  Behind everything, the sky on fire.  His chest grew tight.  He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.  He took in the mountains as he drove and he gathered himself.

An hour in the bookstore.  Then back to Virgin downtown to get the Adam's CD, then back in the truck and driving north among the packs of lit cars, he slid the disc into the player, Adams Unplugged, acoustic long-play set from MTV.  He placed the words of the song over the memory of her humming: You’re all that I want.  You’re all that I need...  I’ve been searching for so long… for something to arrive… for love to come along.  Now I know it’s coming true… through the good times and the bad… I’ll be standing here with you.  Clean guitars, Adams’ rough voice, ragged like the mountains over Browning outside Glacier: Finding it hard to believe… I’m in heaven. 

She was telling him something.  He glanced at the cover of the Frankl book beside him on the bench seat.  Man’s Ultimate Search for Meaning.  Spur from shoulder to skirt, drop-swing motion, shoulder to ribwork.  Effortless.  So repetitive it soothed him.  Alone in the high country he’d stop and lay his head on his horse’s neck, Black Night, or Charlie, the two his dad still kept for him back home, Night a black Arabian-cross, high in the legs and narrow face, and Charlie an old palomino quarter-horse.  The motion, the sweet grass smell of the coat, breathing in, exhaling—it brought him back from any distance. 

He entered the apartment and set the CD case on the bookstand left of the door.  He went to the reading chair and read Frankl cover to cover, got up night deep in darkness, brushed his teeth, went to bed and slept deeply before returning to work.   

EVERYONE BORROWED.  They borrowed things both common and strange, tangible things or intangible, singular, many-layered, concrete, cold like cash, or things more ultimate, like charisma and concern, or below these, and more violent—more core—contempt. 

Men not only borrowed money for a home, they borrowed the skills of other men.  They borrowed, or bought with borrowed money as they were able, talent at carpentry and handiwork, their neighbor’s hammer, his band-saw, his understanding of power panels and pilot lights, his wrench, his tool belt, his box of screws, nuts, nails.  They borrowed ideas for checking and savings, budgeting and financial planning, retirement, real estate, stocks, money markets—they borrowed pressure, advantage, vagueness, anxiety. 

BACK IN Lame Deer for a week, Andrew Elk Shoulder borrowed three eagle feathers from his father to put in the shadow box alongside his grandfather’s elk-bone breastplate. 

PHIL SILVEN, determined to remove his wife’s germs, borrowed a new pair of his mother’s rubber gloves to take home and wear while disinfecting the toilet seat. 

ZACH HARRELSON borrowed five bucks from the pants pocket of his unconscious friend Len before he borrowed a stranger’s car.  He wanted a box of Hostess raspberry-filled powder donuts from Safeway; he didn’t want to walk two blocks, what could be wrong with that.  Ten days earlier, his wife had knifed him in the stomach while he slept.  He woke to what he recognized as her ugly fat head, skin folds and sweatlines on her neck while the blood pooled on the flat below the arched bones of his ribcage.  She stood over him and said calmly, Take that.  He pushed the heel of his hand into the wound and called 911.  She took the car and kids and went to Oregon to her mother’s house.  That was then.  Now he wanted donuts.  He was lying on the couch with his shirt off, itching the wine-colored threads on the gash above his enflamed bellybutton, the birth knot blue-black and hard as a marble.  He still loved her.

SEAN BADEN borrowed time at the bus stop to read his father’s Bible.  Passages about Christ humbling himself, about the Son of God not considering equality with God a thing to be grasped, but humbling himself, taking the form of a man.  Sean’s wife, the floor manager for Nordstrom’s in women’s shoes, still liked him.
 
Not for long, Sean thought.  

He felt edgy in the head; he hated himself; he wanted sex; and not from her.
           
HOUSED IN THE FACE of the men who came to John for money, there was more than their women bargained for.

The truth of each man was that he borrowed sexual greed in its varied expressions.  Men were opaque and secretive and they borrowed what their fathers had borrowed before them, the emotionless vessel in which to carry their own habits, the way they made their wives hate them, the hatred men could engender.         
           
And yet, for all their ugliness they borrowed love. 

Not merely disillusionment or desperation, they borrowed listening, and quietness, loveliness.  They borrowed the urge that sent them in the evening walking with their wives, a deck of cards, a conversation, songs the marriage shared, and whispers.  They borrowed goodbyes, greetings at the door.  They borrowed music, and dancing.  They borrowed the stars their eyes beheld, the hopes that bore them up. 

They were terrible, and beautiful. 

They tried everything. 

But everything was not enough, and before love died they looked fiercely at the future and borrowed the illusion, and oh how her body had leaned into him, and oh how she had loved his willing heart, and each man remembered in his bitterness how once his kiss was her singular dream, and how now when he looked at her he could see he repulsed her, and in the end, no matter their makeup, when love waned they went from her like dogs with tails between their legs, and they worked more and borrowed more, borrowed more money, borrowed their fathers’ shovels and backhoes, they dug trenches in new back yards, placed sprinkler systems and fences, some fences higher than others, some trenches deeper.  Each of them masturbated, often uncontrollably, and when they did they used the images of other women, their porned-out bodies and red willing faces, and each wife, openly or secretly, despised her man for selling her out. 

And porn was its own beginning. 
          
John started when he was 11 years old.  You’re old enough, his cousin Harry said, go ahead.  Harry was 15.  John had sat on the bed with Harry and looked at porn for two hours, giggling, hearing Harry say, Shut up and look.  It felt like five minutes.  If you want to wack-off, take one home, said Harry.  Take this one, I’m tired of it.  The Playboy had a happy blond on the cover.  John hid the slick for three years until his mother discovered it mixed in with the Richie Rich comic books she was trying to throw out.  She cried.  He cried.  She told his father.  His father mumbled something unintelligible and she drove John six hours to a psychiatrist in Spokane for an awkward hour of sandtray therapy in which he was asked to construct a world of small plastic figurines, trees, animals, and people.  His world had one high hill with everyone on top like devotees circling a red rocket.  The family never mentioned it again. 
         
PHIL SILVEN’S father, an office manager, fled town with another woman when Phil was 12, leaving the family bankrupt and publicly disgraced (he took ten-thousand dollars from the County Parks and Rec fund).  Privately, he had been penetrating Phil for three years, telling the boy he’d kill him if he told.  Before he left, Phil took his father’s prized stiletto, a possession his father kept in Phil’s mother’s lingerie drawer—a blade given by Phil’s father’s father, the Polish-Italian long-haul truck driver ten years dead who had bragged about beating up women.  Back then Phil had worn two pairs of tube socks, and folded them down to form a thick band over his ankle.  He’d slide the black handle of the blade into the slot between his ankle and his achilles where it stayed firm and hidden and he could feel its rigid line and think of grabbing it if he needed to.  He’d wore the socks when he slept too, the knife where he liked it.  He’d almost felt safe.  The weekend his father left, his mother bought him a pair of designer jeans by Armani, Adolfo, and despite his pure hatred for his father, Phil borrowed his father’s bravado. 
           
ANDREW ELK SHOULDER saw three of his friends die his senior year at St. Labre, the Catholic school thirty miles east of Lame Deer on the edge of the Cheyenne reservation in southeast Montana.  He’d known each of them since kindergarten.  Andrew had no mother he knew, and from that he borrowed a sense of dread.  Joe Big Head hung himself in his own bedroom, Elmore Running Dog was knifed to death behind Jimtown Bar, and Elias Pretty Horse was shot in the back of the head at a party in Crow Agency.  Not long before, Andrew’s father himself had killed his own brother with his bare hands, ruled self-defense by the tribal judge, Russell Bird, because Andrew’s father was bigger than any two Indians on the rez.  In a different light, when Andrew left town he borrowed the swagger of his father, the way he could look the white man in the eye and smile, and it led Andrew from an AA at Dull Knife Memorial College to a BA in Political Science from the University of Washington.  When Andrew was fourteen his uncle Cletus had gotten a woman drunk and tried to force her to give Andrew oral sex.  Andrew ran from the house crying.     
           
WHEN HE WAS HOME Zack Harrelson’s father slept with a shotgun in his bed.  When he wasn’t home he slept with the next door neighbor and lied about it and everyone agreed to let him lie even though the neighbor was Helen, Zach’s mother’s best friend.   The night before Zach was knifed in the stomach he brought home three roses from 7-11 for his wife.  Zach was hoping to make up for when she caught him high on speed and sexually abusing their six-year-old daughter Jayla.  He’d placed his bare penis on Jayla’s stomach while she slept.  When his wife walked into the room she slapped him in the back of the head so hard he hit the floor and Jayla woke up crying.  Get out, his wife said.  No, he said, and rose up and punched her in the chest, then watched as she clutched at her neck like she couldn’t breathe. 

Roses calm a woman, he thought, help her think straight.
          
The flowers stooped in a drinking glass on the kitchen counter.  Tired of everything, Zach’s wife drank a beer and picked out a straight-edged steak knife from the drawer next to the fridge.  She heard her husband’s breathing, heavy down the hall.  It was late afternoon, he was nude, sleeping on top of the bed.  She set the beer down on the kitchen table, walked the necessary distance, raised the blade high in her right hand and drove it into the center of his stomach.  She took Jayla and left, telling herself she’d never be back.  As it went, Zach went to the emergency room, then returned to sit in his house.  A couple of days passed before he took the bandage off so he could itch the gash more directly.  He felt sane when he took his friend’s stash, the five bucks, the neighbor’s car.  Then he got himself beaten to submission on the edge of the Safeway parking lot.  Sitting in King County Jail in bright orange coveralls he thought of killing himself. 
         
SEAN BADEN, THE CHRISTIAN worker, was a poor student.  When he was young he borrowed his sister’s class notes and proceeded to fail his freshman year in high school twice.  He might have had a learning disability but his father said God is in control, refusing his daughter’s wish to get Sean professional help.  The school, being fundamentalist, Christian, and private, assumed the same, and Sean, having suffered the loss of his mother at age eight, did not go against his father’s wishes, wanting no one ever to suffer again.  At 16 he flunked out of school, never having passed ninth grade.  At 18 he discovered massage parlors and hand jobs.  At 20 he was a delivery man for a food services company that shipped candy and cookies throughout the Northwest.  On his third overnight trip, on a stop just outside Missoula, Montana, he lost his virginity by having sex with a small-town prostitute.  Her skin was cold and she didn’t speak.  She kept her face to the wall.  He hated himself.  At 23 he got his GED, moved to Portland and began work in construction.  He met Sarah at a nice church, non-denominational with good worship, and fell in love.  By now he’d received more than one-hundred hand jobs, he’d had sex with twenty-four prostitutes.  He vowed to stop.  He was successful until the night after he and Sarah were engaged when he left his apartment walked ten blocks to Sal’s Therapeutic Massage and was masturbated by a short sixteen-year-old Asian girl named Louise. 
          
MEN BORROWED compulsion, fear, disaster, desire.

THE NEXT DAY Sean told Sarah everything and she left him.

Three days later she called and said she’d still marry him but he had to go to counseling.  He agreed and for three months they went twice weekly to see their pastor.  On their wedding day Sean sang a song and Sarah cried.  On their wedding night Sean cried.  He felt like a virgin again.  It took him three years to get a two-year Bible degree from Western Christian, a small private college in Vancouver, Washington.  Sarah read his textbooks aloud and every night he taped her voice, stream of mercy, listening and relistening until he knew the material.  He was accepted for a position with Campus Crusade and successfully raised the required ninety percent of his support goal (a salary of $19,000 per year comprised of family, friends, and strangers giving monthly or one-time gifts).  He reported to headquarters in San Bernardino, California with Sarah for eight weeks of training after which he was assigned to the University of Washington to lead worship (he had a powerful high tenor voice) and be in charge of evangelism for the Crusade ministry there.  Clean, nearly debtless, two used cars bought with cash—a loan with no points was easy and when they walked to the foyer from John Sender’s office their smiles were wide and white.  Their eyes shone like stars.

ALL BUT JOHN had wives.  All had been married long enough the undersurface showed.  Some nearly every day wore a tough face, a grimace at how it had happened to them as it had to every man—sex was no longer easy, their wives seemed to deeply dislike them, the grace of a smile was false or forgotten.  Men borrowed the will to forget their wives.
 
They wandered and fantasized, they glazed their eyes with found porn. 

They spoke to other women, they slept with them. 
          
SEATTLE, THE SUN hidden.  Autumn, light rain, low ceiling of grey sky and John was struck by the need to heighten things.  Though brief, he’d slept hard.  He was in his office at 7: 40 a.m. when he raised the receiver. 
           
“Can we meet?”
           
“Sure.”
   
Tenth floor, better views, more out of the way.  When he greeted her he listed Frankl’s four elements: meaningful love, meaningful friendships, meaningful work, these three, and a fourth, the will to transcend unavoidable suffering.  She smiled at his nervousness.  She sat on her chair, one leg crossed over the other, tapestry skirt, light lavender blouse, her upper body forward some, her hands in her lap.  She dressed in feminine ways.  He liked that.  Her eyes always seemed to celebrate something. 
          
He looked out the window and breathed and tried to calm himself.  He thought of pearl button shirts freshly folded, three of them in a plastic container among the battle wares he’d carried on the road, big canvas bag, halter, halter strap, flank strap, buck rein, dulled spurs with rolling rowels, padded leather riding vest, bronc saddle in the floor space of the passenger side (light weight, no horn), immaculate Stetson (black, felt) atop his head and beside him on the bench a simple straw cowboy hat, black-banded, twelve bucks at K-Mart, no helmet, never liked helmets. 
           
She reached and touched his shoulder, black Italian-cut suit, fine red pin-stripes.

“No more tests,” he begged her, and gave a weak smile.
 
“I always test,” she said, drawing her hand back.  “Make sure I’m not getting a dud.”

“A dud?” he said, and laughed, but he thought the laugh sounded more like a whimper.
    
“We’ll see,” she said, and winked.  The words were harsher than she’d wanted.
 
She looked at his face.  She’d never dated, never even kissed. 

She put up a good front. 

She was well put together.
 
She was afraid. 

“What’s wrong?” he said.

“Nothing,” she replied. 
 
She doesn’t like my face, he thought. 

He tried to look at her without looking away.  “Are you okay?” he said.

“Fine,” she said.

But she wasn’t fine.  She always kept men at arm’s length.  Chased them off, really.  Had to, she thought, the way men were: her dad, others.  Her mind thickened and she knew her face was too hard.  She didn’t like the discomfort she felt.  There wouldn’t be many more chances. 

She touched his arm. 

The bones of her hand looked tiny to him, light as a swift or mountain swallow.

He took her hand in his.  His hand started sweating.  He tried to let go but she held on and looked at the street below.  She thought of her father.  She was nine years old.  Her father was jailed for two years for what he’d done, and no contact since.  Long ago.  Just like yesterday.  Perhaps she didn’t like any man, or couldn’t.
She thought she liked John.  John followed her eyes to the flat feel of buildings, hard corners, square structures, the blackened long surface of windows etched of precise linearity, a multiplicity of rectangles in long vertical lines from ground to sky, jet black, two-dimensional, impenetrable. 

Her eyes were far away. 

She turned to him.  “Are you scared?” she asked. 

He thought about it, then said, “Yes.” 

The way she stared at him made him shudder.
 
He loved her.  He couldn’t not love her.  Her eyes were teary.  He put his hand on her arm.  “I hope we keep going,” he said.    
          
“Me too,” she said.  Nervously he raised her hand to his lips, and kissed.

HE DIDN’T SAY how much porn he’d seen.  She didn’t ask. 

In November he met her mother at their home on Mercer and by January he set a surprise trip and drove Samantha to Spokane where they boarded the Amtrak Empire Builder and went by train north into Montana.  At night he’d been dreaming of rodeo, big horses, sorrels and greys, blacks, massive crossbred pintos, paints, Arabians, big roughstock from Texas, and him hat in hand and arm high, countering the arch-kicks, cutting the leans.  They’d reach the family ranch near Choteau after sun down.  Spare house, two outbuildings, and southerly, the long flat that bordered the Rocky Mountain front. 

He’d called and asked his father if he could borrow Grandpa’s two-person open carriage and at that request his father had brushed it up and set it with runners for winter.  John’s mother was more direct; she painted it white and adorned the sleigh with ribbons and bows and small delicate bells, silvery, starlike.  
           
When John and Samantha arrived at the station it was late and cold.  His mother and father greeted them with hugs, and kisses on the cheek.  In the dark of morning his father drew the carriage to the front door of the ranch house leading a large grey work horse named Felicity, Dad’s horse, a family favorite, utterly gentle.  John slept in his old twin bed, the night black and formless around his face.  Samantha was in the back guest room, a room set west toward broad fields of snow and the expanse of range John’s father owned, and farther on, the sheer uplift of the backbone of the world.  John hadn’t heard his dad go out, it was the familiar sounds that woke him: the tamp of hooves in fresh snow, the easy breath of the horse.  He heard the glide of the runners on new wax, a slight shimmer of bells.  He and Samantha had coffee and cinnamon rolls with Mom and Dad in the kitchen.  She was happy, and unaware.  John helped bundle her himself and she said, “Thank you,” and, “What a gentleman.”  
           
To her delight he lifted her in his arms and carried her out the front door to the sleigh.  When she saw how elegant it was, how elegant he was, she started to cry.  Her tears quieted him, and he drove her two miles in the half-dark to Deer Creek, cold air crisp and high in their lungs, snow covering the land to the east on a blue-white arc to the end of seeing.  From a rise of land they watched the sun emerge and fire the world and John told her he loved her and wanted to marry her. 
          
WHAT MEN BORROWED varied based on income, based on patience and delayed gratification, based on how liberal or conservative their habits might be.  In addition to the money to pay for homes, appliances, landscaping, toys like boats, motorcycles, cars, ATR’s, they borrowed things they wished they hadn’t.  From the dull look in their fathers’ eyes they borrowed the violence that resided there.  

WHEN PHIL SILVEN returned home at 3 a.m. on a hot night in July, his wife sat up in bed.  Her name was Mary Irene, a weird name for any era, thought Phil.  She was full-blooded Hungarian, Irene her great grandmother’s name.  They had been married five years and had a six-month old daughter, Brianna.  Mary Irene watched Phil remove the gloves near the armoire, fold them, kiss them, and place them neatly in his own underwear drawer.  She watched him do the same with the white neck scarf.  Physically, he was a small man, she a bigger woman; those items were hers once.  In a quiet voice she said aloud what she’d been thinking for more than a year.  You’re gay.  She didn’t have time for this.  Boeing made her work 60 hours a week.  She needed sleep.  He turned, walked to the bed and slapped her face so hard he left the imprint of his hand like a birthmark on her jaw.
           
ANDREW ELK SHOULDER entered AA at thirty-five.  It took him three years to celebrate his first full year of sobriety.  In the winter of that year he caught his wife Sadie sleeping with his best friend from high school, Jack Plenty Buffalo, who was visiting from Lame Deer.  Andrew threw Jack naked out the back door, beat him unconscious, and broke out three of his teeth.  Andrew and Sadie revived Jack and that night Andrew relapsed, sucking beer and hard liquor with Sadie and Jack until past two, sometimes laughing so hard he cried.  In the morning Jack left and that night Andrew attended the AA meeting on 40th Avenue in West Seattle in the basement of the Unitarian Universalist Church.  His wife, for the first time, accompanied him.
           
MEN WORKED ON borrowed time. 

Little in the way of wisdom. 

AT THE ARRAIGNMENT, ZACH Harrelson was led into the courtroom and seated in the aisle directly right of where he entered, manacled at the wrists, chained at the ankles.  He was the last of fourteen criminals that day.  His wife was there, seated in the first row behind the defendants’ table, not looking at Zach.  Her brother was with her, a fledgling body builder in a tank top and slicked hair, barbed wire tattooed on a black line around both biceps.  Zach saw her lips, pursed like wrinkled metal, her eyes like plugs in the flesh of her face.  He wanted to abuse her.  He sat for two hours.  He stood when he was told.  A guard walked him to the table and when he passed in front of his wife she rose, spit on the back of his head and said, Ass Bag.  Her brother pulled her back.  The judge told her to sit down. 
           
Zach served six months and when he emerged from the cement and metal structure on 500 5th Avenue his wife got out of her car and greeted him at the front door and took him into her arms saying, My baby, Baby, good baby.  It’s okay now, Baby.  Good baby boy.  He held her face in his hands and kissed her long and hard and with his tongue.  
           
JOHN HOPED the best for people. 

He and Samantha spoke tentatively, of life and the future, and likely because they weren’t having any, they avoided talk of sex.   

John was masturbating, using fantasy, trying to think only of Samantha.  When he felt unable to resist he used porn, in which case he could not think of Samantha, or he could only think of her head on someone else’s body.        
           
WITHOUT FORETHOUGHT men borrowed things that might put them in good stead with women.  They borrowed their father’s gait, his manner of walking, the tones he used when he wanted his wife, the readiness.  They borrowed his cool facial expression, the way he sat with one leg crossed over the other forming a triangle between his legs, or kicked back, hands interlocked behind the head, legs crossed at the ankles.  They also borrowed his rigid brow, and manic intention, the speed at which he could do harm. 
         
PHIL SILVEN, after slapping Mary Irene, borrowed a place to sleep for the night. 

ANDREW ELK SHOULDER, a month into his second sobriety, found his wife naked and passed out on the couch with a recent AA group member named Richard.  This time Andrew was more prepared.  He left a note in the bathroom saying, I love you, Sadie.  I want to be married to you.  Are you willing to give up drinking?  He left the house and ate dinner with his sponsor, a man of 30 years sobriety.  When they were through talking they prayed together and when Andrew came home at 11 p.m. Sadie and everything she owned was gone.  Her own message, written in clean blue cursive on a yellow pastel sticky note and placed on his pillow, said, I’m sorry.

WHEN MEN GOT HOME from work, all of them borrowed, when supplies were low, against their wife’s patience, her favorite foods, the last of the brownies, the final cookie, the last drink of milk, the remnant of cereal in the cereal box, and each of them, when they were lazy or couldn’t find their own, borrowed their wife’s toothbrush, and when she was in the bathroom being vocal, contemptuous, they took her pillow to spite her, they took her side of the bed.   Marriage was made of perception and defense, apathy, and absence.
      
PHIL SILVEN UNDID the knot and took the white silk scarf delicately from around his own neck, handed it to a man with a perfect chest, watched the man shove the scarf quickly, two-handedly into Phil’s open mouth and proceeded to be swept into the man’s embrace.  Fear in Phil’s eyes, his heart felt immortal.  Hours later, at home again, he lied straight-faced to his wife.  There was no need to borrow anything anymore.  It was Saturday night.  He had never liked her sex.  No, he remembered distinctly, he had liked it a great deal for the first year or two, even loved it.  Tonight she demanded it.  No, he thought, he had never liked her sex.  She approached and tried to unbutton his jeans.  No, he said, but she kept on.  He wasn’t going to slap her anymore.  He put his hands on her and pushed her away.  She didn’t cry.
 
“It’s someone else,” she said. 

“Whatever,” Phil said. 

In the morning over breakfast she berated him.  She’d gotten Boeing to agree to a two-month extension on her maternity leave but it had ended a month ago and now she was more tired than ever.  Their daughter Brianna sat in the high chair.  At the end of the argument Mary Irene said, Admit it, Phil.  Then she lifted the plastic table top from Brianna’s high chair and threw it at Phil in a swift two-handed motion, bouncing it off the side of his head, making his hair look silly.  He watched her pull Brianna from the chair and clutch her to her chest.  His wife’s face was blotchy.  He rose and approached and tore the child from her arms.  He left the house and took Brianna to Mass at Our Lady Fatima.  When he returned home his wife was seated with her hands face down on the kitchen table.  I want a divorce, she said.  Fine, he said.  He got the house.  She got the child. 
          
SEAN BADEN BORROWED money from his father three times in four years to help with hospital costs for the three daughters born to him and Sarah: Rachel, Hagar, Tamar.  The Campus Crusade ministry at the University of Washington was filled with Holy Spirit fire.  Sean’s voice, high and with a hard edge, 80’s-style like Lou Gramm of Foreigner, drew in close to one-thousand students every Friday night.  After one such Friday night he borrowed twenty dollars from his director thinking he’d use it to take a couple of new converts for a burger and a coke.  Except for porn and masturbation, he’d been clean for some time.  When the students said they couldn’t go, Sean drove to the city center, parked his car and went walking.  He turned toward the white light of an open doorway, entered an adult bookstore and watched a peep show for five dollars.  Outside, a block further on he spoke to a prostitute, walked into an alley and paid her fifteen dollars to follow him to his car and give him a blow job. 
  
TO INCREASE HIS own livelihood and better his own future each man borrowed.
 
At night in the subtle yellow glow from the dashlights, driving home, John remembered the men from a given day, coming to him to borrow money, so much money, their faces and quirky mannerisms, their eccentric ways and enigmatic wives.  He was getting better at defining them, not so rose-colored.  Men too neat, too tidy, or the overly dirty ones, unkempt, careless, and all shades and variations in between.  In rare times when he saw them outside work, he was kind and they were cordial.  He noticed their eyes, subsumed in small houses of flesh and bone, men who needed so much, some with hard mouths and slate faces eyeing their wives with menace or loathing, haughtiness, horror, and hate—and on the other side of the divide the ones he hoped to emulate.  Considerate, he thought, quick to listen.  Their children sleep soundly and wake fearless in the world.  Again, he checked himself.  He didn’t know anything really about anyone.  Even knowing himself seemed absurd, especially when it came to love, too much speculation, not enough experience. 

He thought of Samantha.  They’d be married soon. 

He’d been training his mind to quit doubting, quit tempting darkness.  I’m unworthy, he thought.  But if he tried he found he could reach past his self-loathing, find a way to hold her and himself in a good light, perhaps the whole world in a good light.  Since they’d returned from Montana he’d been practicing most nights on the drive home. 
When he thought right his hands didn’t sweat and everything opened up.  Just as before, in the stillness of a great run before ten or ten-thousand he was at home; just his own physicality set down straight, having to forget everything, especially himself if he wanted to do any good.  Saddle broncs had taken years to master, but gave him a power and grace he never thought possible.  Remember, he told himself.  Remember.

Marriage ahead, the truck wheels humming, and in his mind’s eye he pictured himself in the last evening of summer, in a modest home he and Samantha had purchased together.  They’d be lying down in a large bed, him watching her sleep, her artistic body, the fine lines; a true woman, and he a true man, and there in the waking dream he saw himself clearly.  He was alone in the garden of her loveliness and he beckoned her and she turned and her face did not grow weary and in her eyes was a promise and he saw that her look was a look of kindness and the soft touch of her hand was meant for him, and he felt his burdens fall away, and the weight of his failings became as nothing.  Thank you, he whispered—and in the warmth of their bed in the half-world between sleep and consciousness he reached to caress the elusive nature of her ways and into her presence he was welcomed, and from her lips came soft words in the darkness…

I have loved you with an everlasting love, I have drawn you with lovingkindess.   

MEN BORROWED DIGNITY, or they borrowed shame. 
       
Sean Baden locked himself in his bathroom for three days after he’d had sex twice in one night with two different prostitutes for 40 dollars apiece, loose bodies, slack faces.  His wife knew nothing and spent most of that time crying outside the bathroom door, trying to call him out.  She didn’t tell the Crusade director or the director’s wife.  She didn’t tell anyone.  Their two oldest were with her parents for the week.  She had Tamar with her.  Sean lay on the bathroom floor on his side, his cheekbone to the cold tile, wishing he could become that hard, like stone, unknowing, unknowable, unable to hurt or do hurt, unable to harm. 

He left the bathroom for one hour and bought a ten-foot coil of rope from True Value Hardware in the U-District.  As he reentered the house he hid the purchase under his polo dress-shirt and returned to the bathroom.  He felt capable of nothing.  The rope was ½-inch nylon boating rope, smooth, flexible.  He didn’t acknowledge Sarah anymore, or her small pleas.  She’d made a bed for herself and Tamar just outside the door, he heard their breathing, rhythmic breaths, subtle as soft harmonies.  They needed each other.  He’d have the water running hard a good long while before he did it.  Past midnight he heard a loud knock on the door.  Please, his wife said, talk to Tommy.  Tommy Vigil was a youth pastor in Dallas, Texas.  Sean and Tommy had taken the first two summers of Crusade courses together.  Miles away, Sean thought.  He cracked the door; he didn’t look at Sarah.  She placed the phone in on the bathroom floor.  He pulled the door shut.  On the other side she was seated cross-legged, listening.  The child slept in her arms.  She prayed. 
           
The first sentence Tommy spoke was, “You’re having sex with prostitutes again aren’t you?”
 
“Yes,” Sean said, and his face broke.

He opened the door and sat down next to Sarah and the child.  His tongue felt thick.  He handed her the phone.  Sean has something to tell you, Tommy said.  She put the receiver face up on the carpet between them.  Crying, he told everything. 
          
This time they went further, taking six years to gain back what they’d lost.  Him working odd jobs, carpentry, road work, sand and gravel.  Inpatient.  Out-patient.  Six years of counseling, mentoring, sponsors, recovery, self-reflection, vulnerability, responsibility; seeking to be pure, becoming pure.  In year seven there was a public laying on of hands when he was reinstated as worship leader at the University of Washington.  Same crusade director, new flights of students, Sean was deathly afraid, but no longer full of shame.  At night in his study working out the chord progression to a classic praise song called “I Will Sing of Your Love Forever,” he paused, thinking.  From the kitchen he overheard his wife on the phone talking to a friend.  He’s beautiful, his wife said.  He’s beautiful now.  And Sean felt beautiful, and he believed he might be beautiful forever.  
         
PHIL SILVEN, twenty years divorced from Irene, sat with her at a table in the back of a room in a hall lit by chandeliers.  On the dance floor, their daughter danced with her partner Lee Anne, army pilot who flew Blackhawks.  The wedding was beautiful. 

Mary Irene held Phil’s hand.  I was too hard on you, she said. 
           
He looked at her.  And I you, he said. 
           
You’re happy with Paulo.  I can see that. 
           
Thank you. 
           
Our daughter, she said, looking out. 

Yes, he said.  Our daughter. 

Thank you, she said.
           
He leaned toward Mary Irene, took her head in his hands and kissed her forehead.  
           
DAILY, JOHN WATCHED men walk through the door and borrow against the future. 

Borrowing will from unseen places, from family and friends, from loved ones or strangers, they borrowed and were broken.  They were broken; they were healed. 

Lately, John had come out from behind the desk and begun to sit beside them.
 
Men try hard and many fail, he thought, but some succeed.
          
ANDREW ELK SHOULDER, four years sober, four years single, agreed to meet his former wife, Sadie, when she called from a phone booth on the corner of Freeman and 77th.  She sounded dry.  Why not? he thought.  They hadn’t spoken since she left.  He didn’t know where she’d gone.  He wasn’t bitter. 
|
They sat in a booth at Denny’s and she told him she’d moved back near her father in Michigan, said she’d been sober three years.  Her work as a dental hygienist had been consistent and good.  She hadn’t contacted him because she didn’t trust herself. 

“And if I said I’m with someone else?” he said. 

“I’d be happy for you,” she said.  “And sad.”
 
He looked at the sincerity in her face and thinking of his mother, he wondered.

“I’m not with anyone, Sadie,” he said.  “I want to be with you.” 
             
AT 12 NOON on a bright day in Seattle, a Saturday, John drove his truck to the modern cathedral in Edmonds.  He was listening to Winston’s rendition of “The Dance” thinking how perfect it was.  He glanced in the rearview mirror at his dad in the off-white Chevy Impala, his mom next to his dad on the bench seat, Dad’s arm around Mom. 

We borrow things that are beyond us, he thought. 

Samantha had arrived early.  Alone in the bathroom off the foyer, she stood in front of a full length mirror staring at herself in her wedding gown, hopeful, humbled.  She thought of his kindness, their dreams, the life they’d create together.  She looked intently at herself.  Tendrils at the temples and behind the ear, the deep brown sheen of her hair, the veil that made her face shimmer.  She thought of love—the sleigh.  Montana.
 
John entered the wide wood doors of the church on the corner of Olympic and Pearl.  He wore his grandfather’s wingtips polished to a high shine.  Next to his heart in the silk-lined pocket of the tuxedo, he kept the ring in its velvet box.  He’d be giving it to Samantha’s nephew, receiving it back in front of five-hundred witnesses and placing it on her finger.

She cracked the bathroom door and stayed hidden.  She’d heard him come in.  He hadn’t seen her.  She watched him move across the foyer into the sanctuary.  At the head of the aisle he turned and looked back.  She saw his face directly.  He still hadn’t seen her.  She loved his face, strong man looking out at the world.  The skin was brazen, broken nose, pale eyes searching. 

He wanted to be something to someone, to mean something more than his own life. 

He turned and walked resolutely down the aisle. 

He’d say it to her out loud in front of everyone. 

Say it with all his tenderness, all his love. 

I do, I will.