Chapter 17
17
After that, there is the time in his office that you close the door behind you. You just want to ask him about—what exactly? Everything. He opens the door back up. Stands against it. I can’t, he says. It is not who I want to be. He is shaking his head, looking at the floor. He doesn’t move aside. What else can you do? You just go, mouthing: It is. It is.
There is the time you see him in the rain, blocks from school, and he hugs you. A short one. You’re going to be okay, he says. You’re just getting started.
He pulls away and sort of lets his tongue hang out in exhaustion or maybe for air.
There is the other time. I wanted to ask you, you say when everyone has left the room. It’s the final day.
When you said, You’re so…Do you remember that?
I do, he says. His eyes won’t connect with yours.
What did you mean? you ask.
It’s just a turn of phrase, he says.
And that is that.
One time, not long after, you are in the Halls of Gems and Minerals at the Museum of Natural History and you’re sure you see his wife. But you can’t be sure. You’ve only ever glimpsed her in a photo. At the museum, you follow her around and around. You are intimidated by the way she walks, captivated by her long neck. Secure is the word that comes to mind. Like if she was on a deserted island, she’d be fine. You are maybe too obvious, and after a while, the maybe-wife says, Hello. You cannot say hello back. You run. On a deserted island, you would not be all right. You’ve got no idea how to make a fire from sticks.
For the rest of your life, you never finish another short story. You drop out of the program the following semester not because of him so much as because you’ve realized your heart isn’t in writing, even if it felt like it might have been.
You go to graduation anyway, for obvious reasons. You see him and he stands a person away from you in a crowd and wishes you well. He actually says, I wish you well. You feel like you might throw up.
Afterward, you meet your mother for lunch. She asks if you are using the blush she bought for you.
It’s not working, she says. You touch your face.
You do not work in writing or in publishing. For a while, you do billing for your ex-stepfather because it’s simple and you can stay in the city and do the reverse commute. Margaux has graduated, is working for an artist named Haldi. It’s abusive, the way you see it. He barely pays her, demands she go to Paris with him but makes her sleep on a cot, asks her for feedback and steals all her ideas. Margaux says it’s part of the process. And she’s always taking you to fabulous parties and you can distract yourself with champagne and bubble skirts.
You hear that his wife is an artist. You see a photo of her in an art magazine that you buy with the express purpose. Margaux’s got her finger on the pulse. It was her at the museum. Sometimes, you wonder what you would have said to her. Nothing is what. You don’t want to hurt him. Maybe because some part of you still believes that he’ll come back around. And also: she is not a woman who would stand for it. And if you want her to be an important figure in your life—and there’s a perverted way that you do—forget it. Forget it.
You join a book club just to make yourself read. You skate over all the words. Everything is icy. You have to read the same lines again and again and again. And what does it matter? There’s no one to talk to, really. Not really.
Years later, you take a poetry class at a community college. There are moments when you remember the ecstasy and agony of writing. But then you try to write and fall flat on your face. Overall, your judgment is underwater too. Anything that anyone writes seems great to you—maybe because you’re not writing yourself. Furthermore, you don’t trust your professor. He’s no expert. Or maybe you’re just used to something else.
Just before your twenty-seventh birthday, you meet Fred through friends. He is more handsome than he is smart—you can tell that immediately—tall, thick eyebrows, lean swimmer muscles, good in suits. He smells like white soap, has no pores, no cracks for unwellness to slip through. An expensive watch doesn’t clash with him. He is a success story without even. And though you sometimes think about juxtaposition and irony, it’s rare these days. Unless you’ve been drinking wine.
Fred is kind. He doesn’t read anything but the Journal . He likes films about history. He golfs. He comes from a good family, not super wealthy, the town over from yours. His father is a therapist. You wonder about being his patient. You wonder if you can get the answers anyhow.
Soon, you invent less. There is less cause. Comfort is intimacy. Intimacy is comfort. It doesn’t feel like giving up, and yet. It feels like an unscrewing of something.
And to say that your mother is over the moon. Fred likes her too. Sometimes, he says things like, I don’t know why you give her such a hard time. She won’t be around forever.
You have to forgive him. And her. What choice do you have?
You haven’t heard from your father in five years. Fred says, We have each other now. He isn’t wrong.
Fred loves you each day. That is the truth. Never once is it dependent on the moon. Or tides. Or anyone else. There is no one else. He is supportive. You have your moments, but mostly they’re because of you. Because of what you lost. In some ways, because of your mother. And father.
After a couple of years, he urges you to go back to school for special education because you talk about kids a lot and you’re so good with them. You love school. You love the kids. They are all good inside. You realize you didn’t really enjoy the drama so much as you fell into it. You blame the writing for a lot of that.
Until you get pregnant with your first child, you work at a school in Yonkers. Your coworkers are great. So is the administration. Sometimes, the kids ask you to tell them stories and you do. Everyone says what a knack you have for it. You should write a children’s book but you don’t. You could though.
Two years later, you have twin boys—Ethan and Noah—and they are insane until they are five, and then they are good, kind kids. Noah doesn’t have a creative bone in his body, but you can imagine Ethan as an architect. He started moving around the furniture when he was six. Let’s have it like this, he said. It is a thing you say to each other for years about furniture, food, an outfit, vacation plans, and hopes. Let’s have it like this. Let’s have it like this. You love to take them to the Park not because it reminds you of Abe exactly but because you are comforted by the memory of being at the start of something, once. An uncracked spine.
When the boys are eight, you have a daughter, unplanned. As it turns out, she is a child with autism, and you give up your job to take care of her full time. She is brilliant. She is simply brilliant. She wants you to write a children’s book too.
And him? You google him maybe once a year. On Sundays, you read the Book Review . Fred has switched newspapers. He’s gotten much more liberal over the years. Probably because of your daughter. Never once does he ask about Abe—not only because he doesn’t know about him, he doesn’t, but because that is not the kind of relationship you have. You do puzzles together. He washes; you dry.
From what you’ve gathered, Abe has stopped teaching, which is a shame. He’s written for all the important places, and more novels, and a second trilogy became a television series that has gotten much recognition and praise. He won that writing award that makes all the difference, and frankly, you’re not surprised. Objectively speaking.
Of course, you wonder how he feels about it all. Writing never seemed to torment him as it did so many writers. Life did. But maybe that sorted too. No way to know.
One day, Margaux—never had kids, husband’s an architect, both big deals now—emails you a piece from the Style section. It is about them. They are white-haired, aged. But they look as if they have a special, superhuman kind of strength and grace. Something about their necks and mouths. The way they stand with their arms down, leaning on nothing, unawkward with their hands. They are in their kitchen, which is painted dark green, and there are copper pots hanging from the ceiling that they must use. They have brown rugs, a wooden bowl full of pomegranates. She is in a mint-colored necklace, a gap between her teeth, a dimple. He is wearing his wool hat and looks distinguished. Is that the word? Your judgment doesn’t hold up in this way anymore.
You wonder if anyone ever saw you together. If any of your moments outlasted themselves.
Sometimes, when you can’t sleep, you imagine writing him a letter. You want to tell him he couldn’t have managed a child with special needs. It takes so much out of you. Not that it’s not worth it. But you want him to know all that you have done. What you have been through. You feel it’s important that he knows.
Instead, you flip over and put your hand on Fred’s cheek. This is a good man, you say in your own head. And he is. This is enough. You think about all those times that life didn’t measure up until it did, with him. And you try to do the math of making this moment measure up. But to what now? The equation gets twisted around. You have a full and meaningful life. What does that equal exactly?
After that, there are two possibilities for how it goes.
One, you never reach out. Some nights, you dream that you end up together, but you’re both young, the same age, and the world isn’t the real world. It’s good to you in ways that life never ever is. There is an unnatural sense of ease.
The other option is that you reach out.
You don’t.
If you ever take out a journal to start writing, you end up writing about him. Maybe his is the only story you ever knew. Maybe his tire tracks run so deep that any time you try to run in any other direction, you can’t find a trail. You’re not even sure you loved him. You don’t know the word for it. It has something to do with fiction. Or loving a ghost. And you don’t blame him for anything. You’re just very, very tired.
The only time you ever communicated again was during your final semester. He was on sabbatical. You’d switched your concentration; your paths never crossed. But you left him a copy of the story of you and him in his mailbox in a yellow envelope, typed, no name. You had finished it while you were still in his class, but you couldn’t share it. Not then. In the end, you were proud of it. It had arc.
The school forwarded the same envelope with all the pages to your home address that summer. It arrived when you were dripping from the pool, no shoes on. You stood next to the mailbox. A whole-body beating heart. When you opened it, you shouldn’t have been surprised. You scoured, checked twice: there was not a word on a single page except the final one. No coffee stains or stray feathers either. Nothing. Just a tiny slit in the paragraph about the woman in a blurry photograph. The one in which she is wearing white and there is a gap between her teeth and a large potted plant behind her. It means nothing. It probably caught on something. Like, what did he care? Let it rip. On the last page, in red ink: We try to avoid drama for drama’s sake. The content of a romance novel is actually romantic even if the writing is mediocre.
And so you wonder, which came first? Character or the invention of character? What would watching the snowfall look like without the words? Without the writing and all the sunlight it casts? Which is to say: impossible to know what you truly loved in him, if anything. If it was him or him or him or him or him or him or him or him or.