Chapter 14
14
After that, meet him again in his office. This time it’s about language.
Authorial distance.
Release of information.
Realize what an interesting thing it is: how so often it feels like it isn’t about you. Some days, he says your name loudly, claps when you walk in the door though you’ve done nothing to deserve it. Some days, it’s like you’re a candle in the corner. You’ve done nothing different. It’s him.
Don’t ask him about his wife or the confession he wrote about his child or the letter M , though you would die to know.
One time, you find him staring out the window. When you look, all you see is the usual stuff. Water towers. Gray buildings. Clouds like wisps. You don’t want to startle him. Whisper his first and last name. Apologize immediately. When he comes to, he shakes his head as if to rid it of something, as if he’s choking or he’s got bad news wrapped around his throat. You apologize. You have nothing to be sorry about, he says. Stuff on my plate. Green beans, borscht, et cetera.
It makes you touch your heart. He puts down his work and claps his hands. Well, he says. But he doesn’t finish. He asks if you want to do a writing exercise together. You do.
When he writes, notice how his face changes. It goes soft, as if it’s been covered with petals. You can tell he is in it. Sometimes, his mouth changes and you’re not sure if he is smiling or grimacing. He chews his pen.
Shit, he says out of nowhere. He looks around the room as if it might explain.
I’ve got to pick up my son, he says. To be continued.
The words repeat in your ear for a week. To be continued. To be continued. To be continued.
His son.
You gather your things together and you imagine gathering things together. You know?
In your room, you read his short story about the affair again. That part when nothing and everything happens. Two people are standing on a dune, their faces flattered by ocean light. They’ve been brought together by circumstance but also sadness. He is a widower. She is a math teacher who cannot bring herself to eat. That isn’t you, of course. Remind yourself that he wrote it before before before. And yet.
Your father sends you a letter. It arrives tea-stained on the envelope and inside. He asks about school, about your mother. All he says about himself is that he’s doing fine. The weather in Colorado is always good. Last time, he was in Wyoming. The time before that, Texas. The time before that, you didn’t know for two years. He remembers none of your birthdays, or graduations. Sometimes, he includes a check for a hundred dollars. Your mother would kill you if you cashed it. You don’t. Write him back. Tell him that you’re in school again and you love what you’re learning. You have a professor who’s changing everything for you.
It is the first time in years you don’t wallow in the mess of your family for days.
In the meantime, learn more about eyeliner from a lady at Bloomingdale’s named Linda, who also waitresses at a place that serves horsemeat where she dates the owner, who is married. Go bra shopping with Margaux and settle on black lace with a tiny satin bow. Margaux knows that you know that she knows, but you both just do a lot of smirking. Margaux has a line of boys and men interested in her because she’s got gray eyes that she opens and closes as if they’ve got better things to do. She dances to music in her head and everyone stares, wondering which song. She is going to run the world.
It feels important to say: it is not that you haven’t been approached by men. You have. It is just that you have always imagined being with someone older, wiser, long dinners, skillful sex. Gravitas. You’ve imagined a short story, no surprise. Maybe this one. And perhaps that’s your main problem: the imagining. It gets in the way. It has always made real life pale, pallid, pathetic, in comparison.
Until now.
One day, in his office, sit in a leather chair across from him, doing a prompt. Be suddenly aware of your elbows, fingers, knees. You can hear the ebb of his breath. Every once in a while, he looks at the ceiling. The answers are there. That day, his is about fishermen in Nova Scotia. Yours is about a restaurant downtown. It’s not very good. When you talk through it, he says that what’s critical is that everything must further plot or character or both. He tells the story of an entire family in five hundred words. His capacity for language. And yet, he’s never not generous. That is very astute, he says of your line about antique linen napkins. It makes you imagine his hands holding the sides of your face.
You want to ask him what this is. Instead, you imagine what the M on the wooden block stands for. Michael, Mickey, Micah, Matthew, Malcolm, mine. Yours.
You remember how once, after a breakup, you asked your mother why it was over. We’d stopped making memories, she’d said. After that, every time things were going south, you’d just ask: Memories or not? That’s how you’d know what to expect, when the money would stop coming in and you would have to clean the house yourselves.
And then you moved out.
What you’re trying to say is that with him, everything—even as it happens—you know you’ll never forget. What you’re most attracted to is everything. You don’t know what you wish for except more of this. Even on the days he doesn’t look your way until you go to him. You know that when he does, there will be the feeling.
Memories, never not.
Soon, you see him constantly. He is in a button-down or a brown cashmere sweater with patches. He is drinking coffee with milk or he is eating challah toast. His beard is unruly or neatly kept. He stands up when you walk in or he has his head in his hands and exhales sharply before he half smiles at you. He has a stack of mail or a stack of papers. He notices your necklace or he apologizes for not being himself. A lot a lot a lot lately, he says.
You can tell. Also, you want to ask him what that means exactly.
Sorry, you say instead. Do not pry.
One day, bump into him on the bus near school. He’s in a long coat with a high collar, dark with dark checks. He says he doesn’t usually come this way. He needed to get some air. It’s complicated. Is this an opening? Listen with your whole face. Don’t ask about her. Take some lint off his shoulder instead. It’s not her hair. There, you say as you drop it on the bus floor. It flies away.
As you walk into the building, suggest that you help him in his office. You’ll organize his books. It might be helpful to…Before you can finish, he says he’d like that. Some days, it’s not that you want him as much as you’d like to tuck him in for a nap.
In the books, look for notes. There are none from his wife. None from any lover. One from Frank. Wilkinson? you think. His editor at The New Yorker ? It says, I think you’ll love this one. I did. But that’s it.
Buy him a book of poetry that he doesn’t have. Watch him open it with gentle hands. Wow, he says. I haven’t gotten a gift in a long time. Let it be a sign. Wish you’d written something inside. How dumb.
Dust. Open the windows. Bring him one of those candles your mother loves and light it with a lighter that you bought specifically for this. You’re really something, he says when he comes in. Thank you.
You can choose to take that as a compliment. You wanted him to say that. You can choose to think he read your mind too.
You’ve watched the way he puts on a coat and stuffs gloves into his pocket. Some days, he offers you half his blueberry muffin. Once, he’d just gone for a run and changed, and you watched him roll his sweaty clothes into a ball. Sometimes, you can tell he’s a father just by the way he takes care.
Sometimes, you can’t imagine him with a baby exactly but instead, driving, his son in the passenger seat. Maybe they’re going to pick up juice, or go to a carnival, or to visit the mansion where a poet once lived. They’re just being quiet, listening to music, trees flying by, heat on, all the support everyone needs. Wouldn’t that be nice. To be his. Or his.
What do you know?
Recall a book review in which they say he has an uncanny insight into the psyche of women. He feels how women feel and how they are. He depicts them fully realized, complex and beautiful. In his books, there are old women, a shopkeeper, a neighbor, a hairdresser, a pregnant woman, daughters, and also someone who may be his wife. Every one is cared for like a plant. That was the thing you noticed most. It makes you wonder about his mother. What kind of woman.
Sometimes, you want to sit for him and let him write your story as if it were a portrait. As if depicting you would fully realize you. As his muse, you’d finally know.
When he asks how the porch story is going, lie. Make him think that’s the only one. Is it true that he feels flattered by it? Or did you make that up too?
One day, he asks you if you’d like to go for a walk in the Park.
Meet him under the bridge next to Bethesda Fountain. Meet him in the scarf that your mother says brings out the color in your face. Meet him in eyeliner and pretend you’ve just been at a matinee with friends. Meet him when the sky is violet pink. Be flattered when he says you look nice. Notice he has an armful of short stories, drafts, yours in there somewhere, and a navy cap, pulled down hard to his brows. Wonder if you’re meant to relieve him of the stories. Say phew under your breath when he stuffs them into his bag, puts his hand on the small of your back, and you walk. Be a delicate fruit or blossom. Be ladylike in your neck.
As you walk, he asks you question after question. Talk of books and your mother and her boyfriends and your roommate who is from Russia and puts fresh cherries in her tea and leaves the cups to mold. Look at him when he talks about the fellow writers he happens to like and those he doesn’t, how he always writes in blue ink, is superstitious, how he’s worked for his family’s business for longer than is good for his writing and other things. But it all works out. It was the only way we could make it work, he says.
You and your wife? you say. But he doesn’t respond. He’s still talking. Maybe you’re not meant to say wife .
Act amazed at everything. You’re not acting, but there is a special thing you can do with your eyes. Do it.
Stay with him until dark. Wonder where else he has to be. Or not. Wonder about that too.
End up at the Boathouse. Red and tinsel and eggnog and Burl Ives. Stand outside. The windows are golden and warm as toast. Let them cast light on your face. Let him face you. You are both leaning. There is so much leaning, in the beginning. There’s even a porch.
Do not think of his wife. Do not think of the graduate school bills in your room, unopened, or what your mother would say (What an odd choice, Alice), or how you’re craving egg salad. Instead, think about how, in the beginning, you get to be seen. You get to show how brave, how complex, how uniquely yourself you are constantly. You want him to say, Oh my gosh, you’re so. Show your empathy. Show the way you hold your heart when you laugh.
There is something, you say. That you’ve been thinking about lately.
Oh yeah? he says.
Nod.
Do you remember, you say, that part in West when Middy ends up in the Tetons?
He nods slowly, wistfully. His face opens to you like a fan.
He writes a letter home to his daughter, you say. He explains everything. Remember that?
God, he says, as though it was his own life, lifetimes ago. What made you think that? It was such a weird book. I haven’t thought about it in some time.
His face scrunches up like a paper plate. You want to pat it flat with your hands. You want to touch him. Don’t.
Instead, tell him how it cleared up so much for you. Mean it. It did.
He raises his eyebrows. You want to touch them too. So much of what he does, who he is, feels like an invitation. Say yes.
My father’s out west, too, you say. Then, for a moment, you imagine telling him everything. And also: not having to but feeling connected nonetheless. You’ve never felt anything like this before. Try not to reveal that on your face.
And the poetry? he says, covering his eyes. You read the poetry too?
Get closer then. Get brave. Wrap your hands around his. Be gentle and firm. Coax him. Uncover his eyes.
I did, you say. I read everything I could. Your work has meant so much to me.
Stand there a while. You and him. Him and you. It feels like you’ve unlocked some metal latch, some mental latch. His jaw loosens. His head cocks. Someone watching, you think, might think you are posing for a photograph. You and him. Him and you. You are the only two.
Put his hands against his own chest then. Beats like coconuts in a pot of boiling water. Yours too.
That line about language, you say. How it enters us like stars as we sleep. Open mouths.
Yes? he says.
It changed my whole life, you say. Made me feel like someone knew what I needed.
No, he says. Stop that.
He doesn’t mean it. And he knows you won’t.
We are illuminated, you say. By words, polished by memory, over and over and over. Language enters us like cold water, like a stream.
You know it by heart.
His heart darts then, from one eye to the other, his mouth, his forehead. It is not unlike a small animal, you think, seeking shelter. You’re sure: you’ve answered a question he didn’t know he’d asked. What you want him to see and what he sees align. There’s power in it, and powerlessness too.
Walk to the East Side entrance, touching sometimes, sometimes not. Feel like you’d follow him anywhere, for any amount of time. And from then on, you will only ever write in blue pen.
Do you have to go? he asks. You’re standing under a lamppost. Take it as a compliment. String and restring the words. Consider subtext. In real life, there is just conversation. Tell him yes. But wait. There is a pause. Wait and weight. He is looking at your profile. Let him. Stop feeling the cold wind. Atmosphere, unlike weather, is a literary device. It holds when you want it to. The trees make a sound as if they’re about to say something. It begins to snow.
You’re so, he says. But he doesn’t finish. Close your eyes. See the moment replicating itself in words.
For the first time in such a long time, a moment isn’t its measly self. It isn’t dulled with routine, or boredom or immaturity. It isn’t too much or too little. It is just. You’re so.