I Am No One You Know Read Online Free PDF

cheerful good-natured boy. A natural athlete, a smart if inconsistent student. Rick had friends, he didn’t mope. His good luck, his acne was all on his back; his face was smooth. What an acrobat on a skate-board! Though sometimes when his mother happened to see Rick and he didn’t see her, she was troubled at his boyish face so melancholy in repose. His mouth worked, with unspoken words. She loved her son, and her son loved her, yet it was all she could do to keep from begging his forgiveness. I’m to blame. I must be. I couldn’t keep him, your father. Try not to hate me! Yet she knew that Rick was embarrassed by her sentimental outbursts. He liked his mom droll, wisecracking like a high-minded Joan Rivers. In sheepskin jacket, jeans, and hiking boots in winter. Chunky dark glasses obscuring half her face. The admiration of his teachers when she visited the high school. For she was something of a local celebrity, to her embarrassment. A poet published with a respected New York press, translator of slender volumes of German verse, Rilke, Novalis. She was a popular teacher of poetry and translation workshops at the State University of New York at Olean.
    Since the divorce she’d been involved with few men. Her romantic liaisons flattened quickly into friendships. It was as if her sexual life, her life as a woman, had ended.
    Rick’s thoughts on the subject of whether his mom should “see” men, or remarry, were ambiguous. Of the sexual behavior of a parent, no adolescent can bear to speculate. If the subject came up, Rick winced, laughed nervously, rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. And blushed. “Hey, Mom. It’s cool, O.K.?”
    Meaning what? She had no idea.
    She thought Some illusions are too much strain to uphold, in any case.
    Olean was a community of married couples, many with young children. The divorced departed, or died. She was no threat to anyone’s marriage. She was well-liked by both sexes equally.
    Stalled in writing, she studied Woodson Johnston’s snapshots. (He’d sent her several by this time.) In one, she saw a small vertical scarlike a fish hook just above his upper lip. In another, she saw a curious asymmetrical alignment of his eyes, and the left eye just perceptibly larger than the right. (A trick of the camera?) He spoke of himself as a lone soul. Even before prison he’d been, he said, condemned to solitary confinement.
    She didn’t query Johnston about his personal life, nor did she answer his polite but persistent queries about her personal life. If he’d read her poems (as he claimed to have done) he would know a good deal about her. More than she was comfortable with him knowing, in fact.
    Never did she reply to his letters immediately. Always she put them aside on a windowsill or on an edge of her desk.
    He’d been sentenced to life in prison. He’d sent her printed information about his case, his appeals, a photocopy of a letter from his attorney. She’d glanced quickly through these. She did not want to discover, and to be embarrassed by, Johnston’s inevitable claim of innocence. Mistaken identity. Police coercion. False testimony.
    Did Rick know about his mother’s prison admirer, as she thought of him? She’d mentioned Johnston to Rick only that first time, and then not by name or very specifically; since then, not a word. Nor had Rick the slightest interest in the treasures on her cluttered desk, whether hard-won drafts of poems, translation projects, or poems and letters from others. Now he was in high school, he rarely troubled to enter her study at the rear of the house, a winterized porch overlooking a shallow ravine. She’d glance around to see him leaning in the doorway—“Hey, Mom. I’m back.” Or, “Hey, Mom. I’m out of here.” She smiled and waved him away, pushing her glasses against the bridge of her nose.
    Oh, she adored her son! Now he’d become untouchable.
     
    T HERE WERE WEEKS, even months, when she forgot Woodson Johnston, Jr. Or would have