On the fifth of the month, Mr. Tannen stops by the flat to remind me of my commitments. When he sees me, he seems to take pity. He does not look like Redford except that he has, I am sorry to say, blue-gray eyes. He tells me that he will deduct fifty dollars from my rent if I am having problems, and I am so grateful for this kind gesture, I sleep with him. Afterward, when he tells me we can sleep together every month, I come after him with the knife I now keep under my bed.
I LIVE IN EXILE. The desk librarian finds me asleep in the book stacks, my head resting upon a shelf. Around me, there are pages and pages torn from Nietzsche’s books and scattered about. The librarian demands to know who I think I am, but I cannot tell him. He turns me in to the dean, who places me on probation and orders me to see the school counselor. The counselor is a humanist, and so I have found my little corner of hell. In his waiting room, there are endless copies of Cosmo, reading material that paves the New World. I weep inconsolably and tell him I cannot go back to the flat, that I have suffered through long, lonely nights there and fear for my sanity. He suggests only that I learn forgiveness and love.
I nod desperately.
Mr. Tannen, however, is out to deter me. This morning, I receive a certified letter in the mail demanding overdue rent and money for damage to the floors. With it, there is a crude, handwritten note, telling me I was the worst piece of ass he’s ever had. He tells me I have cost him money, he repeats that I have ruined his floors, and if I do not remit payment, he says, he will have his day in court.
PLEASE, IF YOU LOVE ME, YOU SHOULD KNOW WHAT TO DO
My wife wants a cow. If I don’t get her a cow, she says, she’s going to take little Alice and move to the country and I can fend for myself with microwave dinners and scraps. She’s quite serious about getting a cow. She tells me it must be a Holstein with dewy eyes and thick lashes and a long tail to swat flies. She’d like me to also purchase a bucket and a sitting stool because she says that of course she will milk the cow once she gets it.
The cow is to be named Claraluna. My wife believes this to be a pretty name.
I don’t know what to do with my wife when she gets hysterical. Everyone knows you need to have some kind of special permit to own a cow in the city, or you need to be someone famous. I tell her that the air is unsafe for cattle and that the skyline threatens to fall. I tell her this, but she says it doesn’t change anything. She says, Please, if you love me, you should know what to do.
When my wife says this, I don’t know what to do. When I want something that is outrageous and will never happen in a million years, such as a leaner stomach, a fuller head of hair, a magical pill to keep fear or sadness at bay, or just a wife who doesn’t make such extravagant demands, I get up and take out the trash.
My wife never takes out the trash; she simply sits on the edge of our bed, sniffling, holding little Alice in her arms.
We live on the fifteenth floor of a tall building. When I take out the trash, I walk down a lot of stairs, but it doesn’t make my stomach leaner, and if I perspire I lose more hair. Sometimes, when I take the trash out, I see rats behind the Dumpsters in the alley. They twitch their whiskers, then scurry and hide. Thinking of this, I say to my wife, Would you settle, honey, for a rat?
She weeps when I say this. When she weeps her shoulders jerk up and down and baby Alice bounces on her lap. The baby laughs when my wife weeps.
LATER, MY WIFE PACKS a suitcase while little Alice rolls over and over again on our bed. When my wife closes the lid of her suitcase, it makes a click-click noise, which is like the sound of a great heart closing. I’m leaving you, she says.
There’s nowhere to go, I say. There’s no one for us but each other.
The baby bangs her chubby fists on the bed. She kicks her legs in the air and laughs in three short bursts.
My wife grew up on a farm with cows and other livestock. She lived on this farm until we met and married and moved to the city. My wife’s father was never around for her, and last September when my wife was pregnant and big as a house, my wife’s mother died, and the bank sold the farm, along with the horses, the cows, the chickens, and all the eggs.
My wife was very tight-lipped about the whole thing. She didn’t even get along with her mother and thought the country was a real drag. After her mother died, my wife said, I don’t want to talk about it. Then she had the baby and said things like, The baby is crying and needs to be fed. She made meals in Crock-Pots and added lots of butter. She even tried to add butter to the baby’s bottle of milk.
I called my wife crazy when she did this. I told her they lock women up and take away their babies if butter goes into the milk, or if the milk turns sour. My wife said she was sorry. She said she was sorry over and over again. I told her even so, she should try to be more careful. I told her butter and babies don’t grow on trees.
IT’S POSSIBLE THAT a cow is just a cow. It’s possible my wife wants an exotic pet, like she wanted the baby. Maybe my wife is one of those demanding wives you hear so much about, the kind who up and leave for no apparent reason and without sufficient warning and you can only sit on the bed for years afterward wondering what in the world went wrong. It’s possible my wife is just flat-out crazy. She has been known to put butter in the baby’s milk.
But now my wife is stroking the blond curls of little Alice’s head. She is balled up on the bed and cradles the baby against her breast. Her closed suitcase with the locks that go click-click lies next to her.
I’ll say this much: When my wife talks about the cow, there is no way to reach her. She is here on our bed with baby Alice and not here. She has traveled backward in time to a place where the light shines softly and there is a sweet buttery smell that lingers in the air and all her love is ahead of her. When she goes to this place, she has a double vision, a way of looking both forward and back. My wife says cow to Alice as though the word were the start of a story she is whispering but can’t fully remember. In the story, it doesn’t even matter if my wife really loved her mother, or if things were better here in the city or there on the farm. Grief has its own peculiar language, and its manifestations are endless.
Sometimes I imagine that behind this story of the cow there is another story, that my wife, like so many others, is lost, locked in a great dungeon where rats crawl around in Dumpsters and the air smells sour and she is alone. For some reason, the only thing she can think to tell me is, Please, if you love me, you’d know what to do.
I want to touch her when she is like this and tell her that it’s true that in our grief we only have each other. But then my wife looks up, as though I could never possibly understand, and, as if that look has its own peculiar language, I suddenly don’t. I don’t understand anything about my wife at all. I think, Maybe my wife just wants to leave. Click-click, end of story. When that happens, I don’t know what to do except leave her curled up on the bed with the baby. When that happens, I don’t know what to do except go to the kitchen and take out the trash.
THE THIN BORDER BETWEEN HERE AND DISASTER
Dobbin had bought the mask on eBay because the price was good and he was a history buff and liked that sort of thing: vintage, canister, the kind used in the First World War, the kind of mask that protected men from chemical attacks and toxic compounds such as chlorine gas and white crosses. At the time, the entire country was recovering from disaster, and he’d felt the sway of sorrow, the sharp pull of grief. But then, gradually, slowly, in the months that followed, he felt a counterpull toward meaning, one that brought with it an almost unexpected hopefulness. He reasoned he should be hopeful. He and Julia were newly married, he’d landed a job teaching in the South, and he was determined that, for all the world’s chaos, he could at least make his own life good, his love more lasting.
Now, ten years later, in the midst of their separation, Julia stands in their bedroom and holds up this very mask. Dobbin sees a faint flicker of recognition—the shape of Julia’s mouth changes—before she places the mask on his side of thing
s: snorkel gear from a vacation in the Caribbean, a leather bomber jacket, and binoculars she has fished out from the closet. She is rummaging through old things these days, deciding what is hers and what is rightfully his, splitting up what is both of theirs, in the interest of fairness. Julia is the kind of woman who is most always fair, if not a bit severe in her pronouncements; Dobbin sometimes feels she levels them like her own brand of atomic weaponry. Sorting through their things (their things; Dobbin still thinks this way), she seems so oddly purposeful that it frightens him. He feels a small, persistent sorrow in the knowledge that she blames him for everything—being in this state, her long years of unhappiness, his mistake with Annie. If he blames her for anything, it is that she somehow seems too finely honed to this ritual of breaking away. If he blames her for anything, it is that she has not managed to learn the art of forgiveness.
Orange, a hint of spice envelops him when Julia walks to the bed, clothing in hand. Dobbin sits, watching her, and runs his hand over her sweaters, which she has laid out and folded, all to be boxed up. He wants to plead, loudly, bang his fists, but there is something in Julia’s demeanor that preemptively forbids this, and so he picks up the mask and inspects the thin fractures in the yellowed glass, the molded rubber face covering, the breathing apparatus that Julia always thought looked like a miniature elephant’s trunk. “Ugly,” she said when she first saw it, but wasn’t everything ugly that was connected to combat? They were in graduate school then, living in a cramped apartment with small windows that barely filtered light. Studying for his dissertation, punch-drunk from a continual lack of sleep and a profound nervousness, Dobbin believed—actually believed—it was a good idea to own a mask, that everyone in the country should own one, just as a matter of day-to-day survival. He saw himself in a jaded yet oddly optimistic way, as a revolutionary on the brink of a new world. “Do you remember?” he asks now. “What things were like when I bought this? Do you remember when you came home that night, and I had this mask on?”
Julia wears a neutral, perhaps cautious, expression. She folds a summer dress and places it in a box. “You were tired and delirious,” she says. “Craziness abounded in all directions, as I recall—dissertation and anthrax scares in the news, suspicious powder in envelopes.”
“Everything was so chaotic,” he says. “So frightening.”
“It was.”
“Julia,” he says. “If we could talk.”
She’s near him, so close he could reach from where he sits on the bed and touch her hand.
She tilts her head out of habit but no longer pays him any real attention. Instead she folds shirts and pants that are of course hers. She packs a CD by a folk singer they discovered when in the Southwest. The CD is in question—it might be his—but Dobbin says nothing. As she moves briskly between the closet and the bed, Julia has the distinct air of a bird of prey. She’s a tall brunette, slim, though imposing, with her hair pulled back in a twist that makes her face appear sharper. She’s forty, never bothers with makeup, and still always manages to look dignified. Still, despite this, she’s not the type who will forget any wrong done to her or turn away from any grievances, and this trait has always made her a solitary woman—no one can live up to her standards, not even him. Thirty years from now, when she is old, she will probably live alone, behind closed doors, like Dickinson. Or she will own fifty cats and set about the arduous task of feeding them each day. This is what Dobbin thinks, begrudgingly, as he traces the slender line of her neck, the birthmark at the base of her chin that looks like a miniature country. He wants her to stay here in their house with its many bookshelves and oriental rugs and antique furniture, and not move into the subterranean apartment of another man’s house. He tells himself he will win back Julia’s love. Things work themselves out, he knows. Even sorrow ends.
Because, after all, they are civil. It seems to him, that even if Julia ignores him, such as she’s doing this very moment, they don’t hate each other. They have had years together that were, all in all, solid, their home established, defended, held dear. And Julia isn’t so unkind as to hate, or to be malicious. She’s perhaps too serious, too honest—she frightens most people, really—but mostly she is a smart, astute woman with a sometimes plaintive sense of humor. And under her harsh honesty there is a sensitivity that Dobbin easily loves. When they lived together they rarely fought. They shared chores, held dinner parties, decided—mutually, agreeably—not to have children. There is nothing terrible he can think to say of her, no catastrophic flaw in her demeanor to pinpoint as the origin of fracture. And he has made only one mistake.
She emerges from the closet with sandals, boots, a pair of high heels. “Leave it to separation to make you clean out the closets,” she says.
“You don’t have to do this,” he says. “You don’t have to go.”
“Leaving is the one thing I do have to do,” she says.
“You’d rather live in Poe’s basement?”
She places the sandals and boots and heels in a cardboard box. “William. Not Poe.”
“We used to call him Poe back when we made fun of him. All that angst and fussiness in one man, it’s criminal, Julia.”
“William is fine,” she says. “He’s hardly the problem.” Her jaw twitches, and her anger passes over him with a nauseating effect. Even though it’s a warm, pleasant day, he can practically feel the chill in the air between them. She packs more persistently, with less attention to folding and arrangement. “Anyway, he had the room, and it was affordable. It’s not like I’m making a ton of money, I’d like to remind you.”
Dobbin says nothing. He knows it’s unfair to hold three degrees, to be well-read and to have two chapbooks in press, only to have that translate to a job teaching composition and rhetoric on a limited-term basis, expendable at a moment’s notice. He knows Julia could have done better in terms of a career, had they not had to negotiate the two-body problem so common in academia. And he knows that in this small, conservative town of only a few thousand people, there is so little for her here, only one or two in the department who dabble in poetry, Poe being one of them. To reach people who share even a remote sense of her interests, she must commute more than an hour and a half to the nearest city. Over the past year, she’s become uncommunicative with many, and Dobbin most of all. She’s buried her head in books, hidden herself away. Though he can’t blame Poe for any of this, he also can’t help but feel that Poe has probably been saving up for this moment for years.
Dobbin places the gas mask on the bed and picks up a sweater that has fallen to the floor. He says: “I’m sorry.”
She pauses, shakes her head, adjusts. She wears an overly formal expression that she reserves for moments of hurt. He watches as she sorts through a stack of photographs, some old letters—the exquisite line of her hands, the ring she still wears—shaking.
Dobbin gets up, reaches out to comfort her, but she jerks away. It is an act so jarring, so unfamiliar that it makes him cry. “Julia,” he says.
“Don’t,” she warns. “Just don’t.” She carries a box out of their bedroom. Downstairs, in the kitchen, she pauses and looks around as if she has forgotten something. Dobbin wonders if, after she leaves, she misses these still-familiar rooms. But perhaps she doesn’t allow herself to dwell on their home, or their years together, or him. Perhaps she’s already relegated them to the annals of history, closed chapters, done deals. Perhaps she’ll simply return to Poe’s and decide that this entire separation can be the source of inspiration, a reason to write more: sestinas, ghazals, sonnets. Regardless, he knows that soon he will be alone. He will chastise himself for not reaching to touch her again, now, if only he knew what to say.
After Julia leaves, Dobbin mulls over history papers on WWI and anti-German propaganda. One of his criminally smart students writes that the war started over a domestic disturbance. He writes down, in response, yes.
OF COURSE by Friday everyone on campus has heard that Julia’s moved out. It is a small college i
n a small town of southerners who still view outsiders with suspicion, a polite distance, and interest. Both Dobbin and Julia are known, even by strangers. This fact alone has singularly unnerved Julia, who can’t even go so far as the grocery store without bumping into a colleague, or a parent of a student, or, worse, the students themselves. It is uncomfortable for her when a student takes that moment to ask about his grade on the final paper. “It hardly matters,” Julia once said. She already knew by the end of classes who would pass and who would fail and so instead spent finals week at the kitchen table, not grading but folding research papers into origami shapes of birds and frogs and other woodland animals. If later at the grocery store the well-meaning student would mention that he never received a graded final, Julia, slightly mortified, might nod vaguely and say, “Right, the turtle. Good job.”
Now, of course, there is a new wave of speculation, about Dobbin, about Annie. Almost everyone in Dobbin’s department seems bent on disclosure, though so few publicly acknowledge him or what has happened in any real way. The departmental secretaries exchange knowing looks, their suspicions about Dobbin’s affair finally confirmed. To compensate, Dobbin has avoided prolonged conversations with both the secretaries and his colleagues. He has walked around this week in a strange, comforting haze of denial. He generally operates at a hurried pace, often exchanging quick pleasantries before slipping into class or retreating to his office. Today, though, Clint Barron, the department chair, takes Dobbin aside to ask if his “situation” is going to be a problem. He hints that, if so, Julia is on a limited-term contract and he might be able to speak to the English chair. “Pull some strings,” Clint tells him, nodding affably, though Dobbin knows Clint is concerned and doesn’t want any prolonged scenes. Dobbin stops him before he can go any further. “It’s not a problem,” he assures Clint. “We’ll work it out.”
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