Owen nods but doesn't speak.
His silence stirs a strange but not entirely unpleasant feeling in Liz. His silence makes her bold, and she decides to ask Owen for a favor.
"You can say no, if you want," Liz begins.
"That sounds scary," Owen says.
Liz laughs. "Don't worry. It isn't scary, at least I don't think it's scary."
"And of course, I already know I can say no."
"So, the thing is, I'm sort of tired of Betty driving me around everywhere, but I need to learn threepoint turns and parallel parking before I get my driver's license. I died before "
"Sure," Owen says before Liz is even finished. "No problem."
"I could ask Betty, but we sort of have a bad history in the car "
Owen interrupts Liz. "I said, no problem. It's my pleasure."
"Oh," Liz says, "thank you."
"I wouldn't mind hearing about that bad history, however," Owen says. "In fact, maybe I should hear about it beforewe start."
Why do two people ever fall in love? It's a mystery.
Liz and Owen meet every day after work for the next week. She masters threepoint turns with relative ease but finds parallel parking more challenging.
"You just have to visualize yourself in the space," Owen says patiently.
"But it seems impossible," says Liz. "How can something whose wheels move forward and backward, suddenly move side to side?"
"It's the angles," says Owen. "You need to turn your steering wheel as extremely as possible, and then slowly back in."
Another week passes and Liz is still no closer to mastering the elusive parallel parking. She has almost given up hope that she ever will and is beginning to feel like a dunce.
"Look, Liz," says Owen, "I'm starting to think it's psychological. There's no reason you shouldn't be able to do this. There's something that's stopping you from wanting to parallel park. Maybe we should call it a night?"
That night, Liz contemplates the reason for her ineptitude and decides to call Thandi.
"Well, speak of the dead," Thandi says.
"I've been working a lot," Liz replies, "and Owen Welles has been teaching me how to drive."
"I bet he has."
"What's that supposed to mean?" Liz asks.
"When we were at the dog run, Sadie told Paco that you've been seeing a lot of Mr. Welles."
Liz looks at Sadie, who is lying on her back so that Liz can rub her belly. "Traitor," she whispers.
"He's in love with someone else," Liz answers Thandi, "and besides, we're just friends."
"Uh-huh," Thandi says.
Liz tells Thandi about her problem with parallel parking, and asks her, an experienced driver of almost eleven months, if she has any suggestions.
"I think you don't want to learn to parallel park, Liz."
"Of course I want to learn!" she insists. "It's just hard! It's not like the rest of driving! It's not logical!
It involves visualization and leaps of faith and sleight of hand! You've got to be a freaking magician!"
Thandi laughs. "Maybe you don't want your lessons with Owen to end, if you catch my drift? I mean, if you had only wanted to learn parking and turning, you could have asked me."
"You? You haven't even been driving a year!"
"Or Betty?" Thandi suggests.
"Come on! You know our history!"
"I think you're falling in love with him," Thandi teases. "I think maybe you're already in lo-ove!"
She laughs.
And then Liz hangs up. Thandi could be such an incredible know-it-all. Sometimes Liz cannot even believe that Thandi is her best friend.
The next evening, Liz accomplishes parallel parking three times in a row without error.
"I told you you could do it if you put your mind to it," says Owen. He looks out the window. "I suppose we're done here," he adds.
Liz nods.
"Incidentally, what do you think was blocking you?" Owen asks.
"It's a mystery," Liz answers. She hands him his keys and gets out of the car.
Liz in Love
How do you know you're in love with someone?" Liz asks Curtis Jest during both their lunch breaks.
Curtis raises an eyebrow. "Are you saying you're in love with someone?"
"It's a friend," Liz says stiffly.
Curtis smiles. "Are you saying you're in love with a friend? Are you trying to tell me something, Lizzie?"
Liz's cheeks burn. "My interests are purely anthropological," she replies.
"Anthropological, eh?" His eyes dance in what Liz considers an inappropriate manner.
"If you aren't going to be serious, I'm leaving!" She is indignant.
"My, aren't we touchy! What's a little mirth between friends, Lizzie?" As he is getting nowhere with Liz's mood, Curtis relents. "Oh all right, darling, let's talk about love."
"So?"
"In my humble opinion, love is when a person believes that he, she, or it can't live without some other he, she, or it. You are a clever girl, and I imagine this is nothing you haven't heard before."
"But, Curtis," she protests, "we're dead! We have to live without people all the time, and we don't stop loving them, and they don't stop loving us."
"I said believes. No one actually needs another person or another person's love to survive. Love, Lizzie, is when we have irrationally convinced ourselves that we do."
"But, Curtis, doesn't it have anything to do with being happy and making each other laugh and having fun times?"
"Oh, Lizzie." Curtis laughs. "If only it were so!"
"It's very rude to laugh at a perfectly natural question," Liz says.
Curtis stops laughing. "I am sorry," he says, truly seeming sorry. "It's just that only someone who has never been in love would ask such a perfectly absurd question. I long ago decided to stay out of love's way, and I have since been a far happier man."
On the bus back to work, Liz thinks about what Curtis said. In a roundabout way, he answered her real question, Am I in love with Owen? The answer is no. Of course she isn't in love with him.
In retrospect she almost feels silly. For one, Owen is in love with his wife. And two, laughing, having fun, and being happy has nothing to do with being in love. Liz feels relieved. She can continue seeing Owen as much as she likes, safe in the belief that she doesn't love him and he doesn't love her. All this love business is trouble, anyhow.
Liz decides she is probably too young for romance. She will focus on work and her friends, and that will be the end of that.
Yes, in a way Liz is relieved. But in another way she isn't. In truth, she enjoyed entertaining the notion that Owen might love her, even a little bit.
The night after Liz mastered parallel parking, Owen finds himself with nothing to do. He spent nearly ten years alone and only three weeks with Liz. And yet he cannot remember what he used to do with his nights for the ten years before the three weeks. Owen stalks about his apartment.
He does the type of domestic things one does only when one is trying to fill up time: he cleans the space between the oven and refrigerator with a long wooden spoon that isn't long enough to accomplish its goal; he sweeps under his bed; he tries to read The Brothers Karamazov, the new translation that he's been trying to read since before he died without ever making it past page sixty-two; he tries to balance an egg on one end by placing a small mound of salt on his kitchen counter (it doesn't work); he carves a boat out of soap; and he throws out all the socks that have lost their partners. All that takes an hour, and then Owen collapses dejectedly on the couch.