Man of the Year

by Caroline Louise Walker

  Stuart was an absolute nerd about my roots, fetishizing Missouri like it’s the other side of the planet, but he was from Oregon, not Osaka, and the Ozarks aren’t all that different from Myrtle Creek. Thanksgiving in Joplin with my family was cultural tourism for him—and consequently, often revelatory for me too. My parents adored Stuart. If he tended bar with a heavy hand, he could get them talking something fierce, telling stories about me, stories I’d never even heard—not that I needed to hear them all, like the one about how I was likely conceived in a Best Western in Branson while my parents were in town for a family reunion at Silver Dollar City. I could have lived without that visual.

  Stuart found it romantic, though, and wanted to go there, to Silver Dollar City—“to see where the magic happened,” he joked, and I gagged—and I refused, but we did take a tour of Marvel Cave. It was as corny and beautiful as I remembered. More beautiful than corny through Stuart’s eyes. He delighted in place names: how Marble Cave was rechristened after miners failed to strike marble; how the tiny town of Blue Eye, Missouri, mirrors Blue Eye, Arkansas, across the state line. A pair of Blue Eyes hiding in the heartland. He viewed my history like it was a classic film about an average upbringing, rather than just an average upbringing, which is what it was. I liked how that felt, seeing my life his way. It was exciting. At first.

  Way back when, a year or so before our marriage fell apart—before I suicide-bombed what was left of it, that is—I found a therapist on campus and spilled my guts, desperate for a practical solution to an emotional quagmire. How could I possibly find fault in a husband who worshipped me, who wrote notebooks full of poetry about me? Why was I so unhappy? When the therapist asked what I valued most in my life with Stuart, I pretended to be joking when I answered, Our cat, Finch. The therapist didn’t laugh, though. He was so earnest when he said, “The beautiful things that grow from decay can make it awfully hard to leave the garden.”

  After I stopped judging his platitude, I was gobsmacked to find it rang true. And so I understood that I hadn’t been seeking marital advice so much as permission to leave. My therapist offered the practical solution I thought I wanted: sit down with Stuart—the only other person in my marriage, the only person in the whole world entitled to an opinion on the fate of my marriage—with a willingness to ask and answer the uncomfortable questions I’d been avoiding. Have the difficult conversations, this man advised. He made it sound so simple. Instead, I blew the whole thing up. My terrorism was absolute—designating a victim, a villain, an event—while sparing Stuart from having to ask the only question that mattered, from having to hear me answer, No, I don’t love you anymore.

  To punish myself, I denied myself that which I valued most: Finch, my career, the respect of my peers. I let Stuart keep the cat, the friends, the apartment, restaurants and cafés. These sacrifices felt so generous—signing over the rights, erasing myself for his convenience—that I hardly considered how it must’ve felt to coexist with all that evidence of what we shared: the furniture, the plants, the holes in a wall where I hammered nails before thinking to check for studs. The calico cat named after a bird. Meanwhile, I kept nothing but a ratty undershirt and a journal full of handwritten poems that could almost get me high. Rolling the stem of sea holly between two fingers, I read on—

  North of Blue Eye, due south of Marvel Cave,

  You came to be, a being forced to leave

  Your single-cell utopia to save

  Yourself, you see, for you’d begun to cleave.

  Bereft, so severed by your Great Divide,

  You built a world beneath your mother’s skin.

  Like this, you split apart and multiplied,

  Then nine months on, were pushed away again.

  Mother to Dickinson to sisterfriend:

  Each life you fused to refused to make fast.

  Yet every failed attachment’s bitter end

  Prepared the open wound to better graft

  My pneuma, form and vital heat to yours:

  A heart made whole by Love’s return to Source.

  —and am reminded of why his poems could make me queasy, too.

  I was Stuart’s muse. He loved to remind me of this fact, frequently, ostensibly to flatter me, but I’m not sure he knew much about muses, those goddess-nymphs, violently talented daughters of a Titaness who never forgets. Maybe if Stuart had consulted me before picking me apart on a cellular level—dramatizing my embryonic angst in iambic pentameter, as if he knew, as if he’d been there, as if—I’d have appreciated his intentions a little more. But no, he’d never risk not seeing me as a love-starved parasite, incomplete from conception to grad school, only made whole, at last, through him. And he wondered why I held myself back. He accused me of trying to be mysterious, but I was never posturing. I was just protecting what he refused to see: that I was secretly whole the whole time.

  Stuart didn’t know why I went up to the Cloisters to circle the quince trees and sit on cold stone, that I’d pass those hours talking to Shae, telling her everything I couldn’t or wouldn’t talk about at home. Expanding. Sometimes I’d commune with her at Riverside Park, or the Botanical Gardens, or when I was feeling particularly compressed and in dire need of space, down in Battery Park. Or, later, the High Line. Stuart didn’t know the things I told Shae in my head. He never saw how complete I was, or how straight my thoughts were. After he found out about Robert, he kept saying, You aren’t thinking straight, and, This isn’t the Elizabeth I know, and I’d reply, That’s just the trouble, isn’t it?

  Our train doors open at Jamaica, and the girl in front of me waves good-bye with one hand while her mother drags her away by the other. My feet lead me to my connecting train, and I settle in, and the world is blacked out as we shoot through the tunnel to emerge in Penn Station, like it’s the most ordinary place in the world for me to be. So I walk, letting these boots propel me into a flow of bodies passing through corridors, up stairs, down streets. I am but a single part of a greater system, people pumping like molecules of blood through arteries and capillaries and one-way streets, the city’s life force keeping tempo with our collective pulse: beats broken by oncoming traffic, a magnificent system radiating health. People at a crosswalk gather around teenage boys doing backflips on the corner as Salt-N-Pepa’s “Push It” blasts from a boombox. I speed-walk to the beat, bob and weave, choose my route by choosing streets I can cross without having to pause. By the time I reach the High Line, I’ve reclaimed the clip of my former self, a rhythm useless in Sag Harbor but essential here. The city sets our pace, and we abide.

  I take the stairs at Thirtieth Street, climbing to the park hovering over Tenth Avenue. It’s grown so much since I left, yet the view remains the same. I’d come down here to sit beside Russian sage, trying to smudge the oppressive stink of home life: coffee and cigarette breath, ammonia-soaked litter, afternoon sex, bacon, peppermint and vetiver oils, that goddamned laundromat downstairs. Exhaust from the washing machines pumped a cloying mix of mildew and chemical perfume into the alley and our window at all hours. Stuart tried cover the smell by burning incense from the head shop down the block, and while it worked at first, my brain eventually merged the olfactory files. To this day, Nag Champa makes me gag.

  I take a seat on an empty bench, wood slats crusted with pigeon crap and greasy bits of shawarma. A sumac casts lace shadows on raised beds. I gaze into shadow-leaves like they are tea leaves and picture my old apartment: the jute baskets holding plastic pots of philodendron, spider plants, and devil’s ivy hanging above the kitchen sink; our living room full of beautiful books, peace lilies, succulents; light streaming through a far window, illuminating dust crystals of cat litter suspended in the air like so much glitter—and for half a breath, I’m twenty-five all over again, wondering what the future holds, wondering if I’ll be somebody someday, wanting to be more than someone’s something, but wanting to be a part of a pair anyway. Getting my wish. I’m twenty-six and full of love, stroking our kitten’s Jackson Pollock fa
ce, marveling at her religious devotion to play and limitless capacity for forgiveness, delighting in her tiny meow that was more of a chirp, telling Stuart she sounded like the house finch that nested just outside my bedroom window in Missouri one summer and Stuart saying, Finch it is. In my mind, Stuart holds a match to a stick of incense mounted on a wooden sleigh on the kitchen counter. Sick to my stomach, I hold a hand to my mouth.

  On the reclining lounge chair next to mine, a musk-soured man stretches out and pulls a half-empty sleeve of Saltines from a bulging pocket on his stained cargo pants. A mangy pigeon lands on his belt buckle, and I suddenly feel like crying. “Shae,” I whisper, summoning two ghosts: Shae’s and the long-gone side of myself who could sit for hours in parks around the city, almost (but not quite) believing in telepathy and afterlives.

  I open my eyes. People pass in and out of the scene sprawled before me, eating sandwiches and tossed salads, talking on cell phones or talking to themselves. I close my eyes again, and when I open them seconds later, the scene has changed, if merely by degrees. New players are eating, talking and walking with the flow, drifting along with the current of this place. A woman in platform sneakers trips in front of me but does not fall. She turns to stare at the pavement, blaming it for her misstep, but she keeps her pace, and the scene changes once again. I break a blade of zebra grass from the potted prairie at my back, imagine Shae by my side, whisper, “I miss you like crazy today.” It isn’t silly at all, I told Bess just this morning, and so I turn my whisper inward and silently tell my best friend everything, pulling every tiny tooth that’s been gnawing at my conscience all summer. The whole truth and nothing else.

  • • •

  Life jumped the tracks again this summer.

  You would have liked the boys, Shae. They were sweet, both of them. Smart, too. They reminded me of us, a little bit, in so far as what a match they were and how tragic it is. I suppose, to understand what happened to them, it might help if I begin with how we got here.

  It all started when Nick came to live with us—except, well, wait. That’s not true, is it? It would have started when Jonah came to live with us—only that’s wrong, too, since technically, the whole mess started before Nick knew we existed—and, to some degree, before Jonah and I met. Forgive me. It’s hard to know where to begin when it’s hard to know how it began.

  Jonah is twenty now. He was just a kid when I broke up his family and moved into his house. I don’t blame him for hating me. He had every right, and he was too young to understand how messy his parents’ marriage had been, and anyway, I wouldn’t have wanted that for him. Vanessa was an incredible mother. Jonah lived with her through high school and barely stayed with us. He threw the daddy out with the bilge water, if you will. I think that for Jonah, his father’s choice to leave felt like a punishment, like Robert was saying, You’re not good enough to earn my place in your life. You don’t deserve this happy family, and I was the witch who gave his father the power to disappear.

  The thing is, Jonah and I didn’t have a bad relationship because we didn’t have a relationship at all. There was nothing. Then, this past year, something changed. He started opening up a bit, and everything got much better early this summer, when he moved in with us. Proust bridged the gap, if you’ll believe it. I helped Jonah enroll in summer school at Stony Brook, gave him tips on which professors to avoid, that sort of thing. When he realized he’d signed up for a course in which his only text would be the madeleine passage—a whole six weeks of madeleines—he nearly strangled me for suggesting it, but he ended up loving the class and wanting to talk about it, obviously, which (big surprise) led to us facing our own recollections of how things unfolded for our family, which led to us telling our sides of the story, which led to—well, I guess it led to us seeing each other. We got to fix some of what could be fixed, just by broadening our peripheral hindsight. It was extraordinary. We became friends.

  Robert didn’t notice. I didn’t point it out to him either. My connection with Jonah had been so vulnerable, our conversations so personal, that I couldn’t bring myself to betray the boy’s trust. Mostly, though, it was nice to have something that was just ours, mine and Jonah’s. Robert’s not exactly a Proust kind of guy. I wasn’t keeping a secret, I just didn’t want to brag about making a connection where Robert couldn’t. I didn’t want to rub it in. Besides, I figured Robert would notice, eventually. He would have, too, if Nick hadn’t come along.

  I’d give anything to rewind and do it differently. No, this part is my fault. I was the one who pushed for him to stay in our guesthouse all summer. He’d lost both of his parents—mother to Lou Gehrig’s, father to suicide—and my heart broke for him. Plus, I liked him. Most important, though, he was Jonah’s best and only friend. They were brothers-by-choice, and while I’m sure they’d have connected if Nick’s parents had been alive and well, I truly believe Nick’s particular history had a particularly profound effect on Jonah. After so many years of identifying as the victim of a broken home, Jonah started questioning his very understanding of victimhood and family. He stopped feeling sorry for himself. Nick healed Jonah in many ways, and in doing so, he cleared the way for Jonah to see me as an actual human being, flawed and complicated. Can you imagine the mercy it took for Jonah to offer me a second chance? The grace? He gave it to me—not forgiveness, exactly, but a fresh start: a tabula rasa—so I accepted it and never looked back. Starting over with him was my joy. I owed this joy to Nick.

  So yes, I embraced the idea of Nick spending the summer with us. The truth is, our house was fun with those boys around. They wanted to read just so they could ask me questions. They thought I knew things. I know that sounds cocky, but you can handle it, right? I enjoyed being appreciated—admired, even. By straying from my tired syllabi, I realized how passionate I still can be. We tried to start a book club, the kids and I. It was sweet, you know?

  Then it all came crashing down.

  Goddamn it. There’s another one. They’re everywhere now, phrases I never noticed before that have become dangerous: crashing down, pushed over the edge, at the brink, tipping point, nosedive, rotten, smashed to smithereens. Broken. Busted. Falling for it.

  The Terrible Thing happened early in the morning. Robert had been driving me nuts. Nothing serious. He’d just been a little neurotic after getting through an event he’d been stressing about. It was a banquet, a community fundraiser thing, but he was the honoree, and I think he didn’t know what to do with himself when it was over. Anyway, we argued, and he slept in his office the night before, then he left for the gym very early in the morning. He didn’t even come upstairs to change clothes, but he did shout up to me before leaving the house, told me he wanted to take me out to dinner, that I should choose a place. I suppose he wanted to make nice.

  I was still in bed, drifting in and out of sleep, but he couldn’t have been gone for more than a few minutes when I heard stomping on the other side of my bedroom door. I scrambled to the hallway, where the door to our widow’s walk was wide open. A girl was standing right in front of me.

  I recognized her right away. The only time I’d seen her in the flesh had been the night before, although I hadn’t been sure, at the time, that it was her. But in daylight, it was obvious. Long red hair. Full cheeks. Full everything. Freckles. She’d been on TV tons last year. The paper, too. Right away, I recognized those eyes that said, This can’t be happening, even though I didn’t yet know what this was, this time.

  Her name is Kayla. Kayla Scott. She’s seventeen and has a pet iguana and likes house music and wants to be an architect, only she didn’t apply to colleges because she was too busy being depressed and disgraced her senior year. Of course, I didn’t learn those things from the news. To hear reporters tell it, she was an oversexed, overdeveloped teenager who must have been asking for it because she had good posture. I only learned those other things from Jonah after Kayla left our house on the day Nick died.

  She used to babysit for a prominent family in town
before the kids’ dad started putting his hands on her. She told her parents, and they went to the police, and a big, messy scandal erupted. Then one day it all stopped. The girl held a press conference and told the cameras she’d made the whole thing up. It was obvious she was lying, that she’d traded dignity for closure. Her eyes had been full of tears that day, but also full of fury—just like they were when we stood face-to-face on the upstairs landing in my house. My brain had been sleep-fogged, but I recognized the tears and fury, so I asked what happened. She said, Nothing happened. I swear, so I tried calming her, even though I didn’t understand, but she kept repeating, Nothing happened. We just fell asleep.

  That’s when we heard a terrible sound coming from the open door leading up to the roof. A crack and thud echoing down the spiral staircase, followed by Jonah’s footsteps. And to think: I was worried about Jonah breaking his neck tumbling down the stairs like that. How quickly the kaleidoscope twists. Jonah’s features seemed to be melting into something unrecognizable when he ran into the hall and said, It was an accident.

  I forced myself back into my body and asked, What was an accident?

  He quietly unraveled; the noise and violence were trapped inside of him. Banging fists against his head and making faint animal sounds to accompany tears that wouldn’t come, he whimpered, It was an accident.

  That’s when I kicked into management mode.

  I told Kayla and Jonah to go to my room, sit on the bed and do nothing until I got back, then I ran up to the roof and moved through the crow’s nest out to our widow’s walk, where I noticed the broken banister at the opposite end of the deck. I can’t remember how I got there, if I walked or ran, but the next thing I knew, I was peering over the edge of our house, staring at the shape of Nick’s broken body splayed in the bushes—the terrible angle of his neck, his head twisted all wrong, eye open: cubism in the flesh—and at the derailment of so many lives at once. He was—it was beyond my wildest nightmares. If there was a chance of saving him, I’d have called 911 immediately, but it was worse than bad. It was irreparable.