In Between Things

IN BETWEEN THINGS)'Marshall Boswell IN BETWEEN THINGS, Parker slept with Rachel. He kept telling himself he wouldn't do it, even insisted, sometimes out loud, that the mere thought of doing it was completely out of the question. Yet for one reason or another, reasons he did not always care to examine, he just kept doing it. Over and over again. Even after he'd said he wouldn't. And he said it all the time. He said it when she called, he said it while he was saying yes it would be all right if she came over, and he said it—sometimes out loud—as he waited for her to come over. At least part of him said it. One part of him said he shouldn't do it, and the other part went ahead and did it anyway. Even while he did it he said he shouldn't do it, so clearly there were two Parkers at work here: the one who said and the one who did; the word versus the deed. But in this battle between pen and sword, the sword was mightier by a pretty large margin. He referred to this state of affairs as the Rachel Situation. The reference was mostly private, since not many of his friends even knew there was a Rachel Situation, though most of them knew Rachel. They knew Rachel and they knew Parker used to date Rachel and they knew that Parker no longer dated Rachel; theyjust didn't know there was a Rachel Situation. For the Rachel Situation was further complicated by the fact that Rachel was one of the "things" he was "in between." He was in between Rachel and someone else who hadn't shown up yet, some spectacular woman who would represent, in full, the last person on earth he would ever desire. More than the girl of his dreams, she was the future incarnate. He knew that when she finally arrived in his life in all her perfection, he'd be a whole person at last, fully integrated, all problems solved. And in the meantime, he was sustaining intimate, sexually charged break-up proceedings with his past. When he wasn't busy with the Rachel Situation, Parker pursued his new life—not really the future incarnate so much as the interim existence he began when he inaugurated break-up proceedings proper. This new life, in which he sold telephone services to small businesses, took place in the real world. The real world was that vast, frightening expanse of metropolitan Atlanta that stretched with teeming busyness and activity beyond the walls of the graduate school where he and Rachel were once mutually enrolled. Back then, Parker and his graduate student colleagues liked to theorize about the real world. Many of The Missouri Review · 9 them wrote papers about the real world. Some of them taught entrylevel freshman courses that prepared young people to flourish in the real world. A few of his more flippant colleagues taught their students to interpret advertisements and television talk shows in the manner of literary works, all in order to demonstrate the relative importance of the real world over that of the purely textual and idealistic. Still and all, few of these people had ever actually gone to the real world. Some had visited, some had fled, but no one in Parker's immediate set had ever really lived in the real world itself. It was just this abstract place out there, this throbbing, clashing, quaking world of the ineluctably real. And now Parker lived there himself. Nowadays, as he fought his way through rush-hour traffic, or picked up his dry cleaning, or stood in line at the supermarket in his suit and tie with a little tote basket piled high with frozen pasta entrées, he would say to himself, I'm finally here, I'm finally a real person. Rachel, on the other hand, was still in graduate school. A petite, elfish sprite of a girl with enormous clear green eyes and a tangle of ginger-colored hair usually bundled into a roll at the back of her head, she eschewed Parker's real world...