Tenemental

by Vikki Warner

  But what about babies? The thought cycle cuts back in, scraps the self-affirming visualization. Do I want to have babies? Now or never, dude.

  No, I tell myself, I’ve always said I probably wouldn’t, right? Why am I second-guessing this now?

  Well, obviously, it’s because I’ve recently been dumped. I’m wondering if I blew my chance, if I’ll die alone, you know, the most basic nagging questions.

  When my thoughts become unguarded, the coiled snake of my brain lunges out to order me back to self-interrogating.

  I have no answers with which to placate this inner dialogue, so I turn down its volume by drinking Vinho Verde with Dan and Steve, meditating, reading, and listening to music. In order to avoid penning email confessionals to Seth, Dan suggests that I rearrange my apartment and buy some furniture. I swap my office and bedroom; sleeping in a new room feels good. I cook myself nice food and spare no effort in doing so. I decide to resurrect my dusty stereo and buy some life-affirming music. My turntable needs a new needle, so one chilly, sunny afternoon, the old cartridge in my pocket, I take the five-minute walk to the nearest record store. The owner, Dave, is standing on the sidewalk in conversation with someone, a fact I overlook as I yell out, “Hey! There’s the guy I’m looking for!”

  If my mom were to concoct a pickup line, this is what she would come up with.

  But I wasn’t trying to throw come-ons at him. I really was just trying to get a new needle and shake off my solitude for five minutes. It was the end of winter, and most days I barely verbalized at all. I was forgetting how to speak to people without jumping all over them, pent up like a crated puppy. We talked for a few minutes. Dave guided my buying decisions; he tried to give me a discount; I refused it. I knew he and his ex had broken up around the same time that Seth and I had split, and he knew it too, so we were kind to each other, but kept it light.

  Shortly after that interaction, a common Providence thing started to happen. Dave and I ran into each other more in a few weeks than we had in five years. Being single again, we were both going out, pretending everything was cool, socializing, but it was more than that. In a small city like Providence—one with a teeming music and art scene—you can think of someone you’d like to see, go to a public place, and conjure him up. You can make her choose to do the very thing you’re doing that night; compel them to stop into that particular bar on that particular night. Part of it is a pleasantly proportional relationship between the number of appealing things to do on a given evening and the high number of like-minded people up for attending said events. The rest is just Providence, something subliminal, some kind of kismet that can’t be quantified other than in our dreams. Providence lifers attest to having dreams in which the city where we live becomes an amusement park, a futuristic utopia, or an enclave in the clouds. “It was Providence, but it wasn’t Providence,” we say. The dream cast includes our friends, our exes, our mentors, our enemies, and they wave and smile beatifically, all debts and slights forgiven.

  Out in the real city, the one with many faults and many magnificent people, Dave seems to be everywhere. I like the crinkly, smiley corners of his eyes; I like his voice. He’s funny, charismatic, excitable, and full of life. Thoughtful. Game for the joyful wasting of time. Someone who will always take the conversation to an unforeseen place.

  We’re pleasantly keyed in, a good conversational fit. It’s fun to realize I get along well with this person, especially after having seen him around town for years. Still, I barely know him, and although he is intriguing, I’m hanging back. No phone numbers are exchanged, no feverish texting or Snapchatting commences. It goes on like this for a while.

  On one of my run-ins with Dave, we get into a discussion of our local minor league baseball stadium, a slightly dumpy old concrete fortress where the crowd is scrappy and fun, and the experience campy. We make lax plans to “maybe” see a game “sometime soon,” but there is a stunning lack of urgency on both sides. A month later, we finally exchange phone numbers and make a plan to go.

  Even with the long wait, I’m not prepared for it. It happens to be Star Wars Night at the ballpark, which means a rare sold-out crowd and roving bands of overstimulated children dressed as Han Solo. Dave has a disposition to match: he heckles the players, he loudly claps, cheers, sings, and complains about the lethargy of the fans seated in our section; he has all of the kids in the vicinity laughing and anticipating his next joke. Bit of a handful, this dude, I think, while also smiling nakedly into his face. After the game, we go dancing, and then I drop him off at home, where we talk for another couple of hours. I go home thinking, well, that might have been a thing?

  The next few times we talk on the phone, in the late evening as he prepares himself a negroni and goes out to his fire escape to watch the moon, it comes up that we’ve lived most of our adult lives within a mile of one another. We’ve been in the same room countless times, at parties, at shows, at bars, going back to the nineties when he arrived in Providence as a college freshman. I’d seen his bands perform. We track ourselves to this show, that festival, and find that the underpinnings of our lives line up along the same curve.

  When you start talking along those lines, things can proceed in one direction only. Having presented ourselves to one another as simultaneously familiar and new, we drift into a carefree summer of beach trips and hikes. It smacks of a revisitation of youth, a nostalgic trip with our former selves, and we claim it without shame.

  That year, for the first time in my life that I can recall, it rains heavily, all day, on the Fourth of July. The neighborhood fireworks displays are silenced, shown up by thunder and massive, ripping lightning. Plans are cancelled; grills lay dormant. Dave and I happily spend the day in bed, freed from obligation. As we settle into probably our third nap, we hear another slash of lightning and a very loud and unclassifiable sound. I run to the window and see that a huge bough has torn from the tree just outside and is sprawled on the street. “Holy shit,” I say, yawning, as I return to bed.

  Dave lives in a mill building in an old industrial neighborhood once dominated by working factories. It’s a cozy, open space with giant windows off of which he and his roommates have built their own rooms with sleeping lofts. Everyone takes care of the space; they keep it clean, cook together, and do small repairs. It’s a communal living situation that actually works. Dave has filled his corner of “the mill” with records—shelf after shelf of meticulously maintained, carefully arranged records. This is his personal collection—the gems—and it is never to mix with the stuff for sale at the shop. While the records are kept in museum-ready condition, the rest of his room is not subject to such order. Stereo equipment is piled to the ceiling—most of it awaiting one crucial piece before it can be used. His bed is a twin mattress on the floor upstairs; there are a couple of metal poles strung up, between which his clothes are slung. There are a few other bits of furniture, all utilitarian objects in found condition. Books about music, baseball, and philosophy.

  His priorities are clear, and I like where they are.

  The store, of course, is another record repository. There are the front room records—the stuff for sale—and a slew in storage in the back. There is a hierarchy to the storage and filing system, but it’s not terribly transparent unless you’ve happened to trip and fall into Dave’s brain. I loved going into the store before I knew Dave, and part of what I loved, without knowing it, was his essence incarnate—his down-to-nerd-out, lovable goofball personality—posted up in every corner of the place. The people who worked there were charming and lively and without pretentiousness. The store was home to a range of music I found inspiring and overwhelming, and I’d often go in determined, flip through the stacks, and come out a half hour later, flustered, with a random calypso record—or some other thing I wasn’t sure I wanted—in my hand.

  Dave starts bringing records to my house instead of to the mill. We listen to old stuff, new stuff, and we decide which to keep and which should go back into rotation at
the store. When I wax poetic about a record that had once been special to me, it is in my hands the next day, wrapped in brown paper, Dave’s handwritten note stuck to it. I lower the needle onto the record, and we lie down on the rug, side by side, in front of the speakers, to get a good listen.

  We are building something sturdy. Upon this frame, variables are aligning.

  Thrillingly Optimistic

  After a year of chance cohabitation, Dave moves into PennHenge. He’s been living at the mill for the better part of ten years, so this must be bittersweet for him, but I can’t find an ounce of conflict in his disposition. We clean out his space at the mill, and he rents a storage unit for the vastness of his record overflow. It quickly becomes piled to the rafters. Then Dave begins the process of further classifying the treasured records that made it into the house. The records for everyday listening—the ones that we want to hear again and again—end up in the living room alongside the stereo and a set of boss speakers that are overkill for a third-floor apartment. The records not likely to find themselves on heavy rotation—no less coveted, just less frequently spun—end up outside the door on the third-floor landing. There are more in the basement. A dehumidifier hums next to the boxes; climate control is crucial.

  “I don’t know, do you like this original Japanese copy of Rumours? I feel like the first American pressing is better. Boomier, earthier, definitely louder, you know?”

  I can’t always hear the difference, but I like being asked.

  My books, his records: PennHenge now needs constant vigilance to keep it from creeping into hoarder territory. I’m not precious about my books—they’re folded, creased, softened by my heavy-handed study. And I often give the extras away. I believe that’s how they’re best appreciated. But records—bought and sold on their condition—are sensitive, worth more money, susceptible to horrors brought on by heat, cold, dust, mold, overzealous handling, and haphazard storage. I cringe every time Dave takes one of my old records out of its sleeve because as a teenager I was a danger to keeping things nice, a maven of both overzealous handling and haphazard storage. “This one would be worth a hundred bucks if it wasn’t so beat,” he might tell me, quickly adding, “but it looks like you enjoyed it, so that’s great.”

  I struggle with putting a new man in an old house, sometimes, especially when all the flotsam of my past seems to drift around us as we perch up here on the third floor. The physical space hasn’t changed much since James lived here with me. I dream, once, that Dave is speaking to me the way James sometimes did, toward the end: “Why don’t you clean the fuckin’ litter box? It stinks!” I yell back at him: “I cleaned it last night!” When I wake up, after a moment of ill reminiscing, I feel an acute sense of peace, a pleasant heaviness that illustrates how much my inner landscape has changed.

  As “the landlady’s new boyfriend,” Dave could be a real nuisance to my tenants, but he is golden, the perfect buffer. He manages to be vocal without throwing his weight around. He is a master of wielding humor to solve problems. He’s a grounding force.

  Testing the waters of working together, Dave and I take on a few projects. We clean out a particularly junk-filled room in the apartment, paint it, seal the floor and buy some midcentury furniture from Craigslist. We get rid of stuff, then organize what’s left. We have yardwork days; we cut down invasive trees and vines and trim back the plants that have gone out of shape. We both find this work highly meditative. There are smaller things, too—the un-clogging of drains, the fixing of toilets, the turning of compost. We alternate between wordless concentration and the briskly paced cracking of jokes, interspersed with frequent kissing. It’s not the quickest way to get a job done, but you can’t squabble about petty shit when you’re kissing.

  I never feel embarrassed around this person; so often in the world I feel like I’ve said the wrong thing, or said too much, but never to Dave. He takes me at my most irritable, dorky, tentative, or premenstrual, and he encourages those expressions. Having that kind of freedom and emotional rigor in a relationship allows for far-and-wide explorations of one’s inner workings. My old tendency toward romantic speculation, of striving to figure a person out and then trying to force our goals to coincide, has abated. There is no wondering when things will change, when the circumstances will be right.

  Is this where I tell you that we got married?

  I certainly can’t leave that fact for the very end, as if it’s the payoff to this lonesome story of a lady and her house, struggling together, biding our time, waiting for a sweet and caring man to come along and make this drafty old shithole a home.

  That isn’t how it went, but man, I am glad he came along.

  Despite the risk of suddenly sending this story marching up to the summit of Mount Platitude, I have to tell you that we got married; it was beautiful, and we are colossal together.

  He hasn’t made over the house in grand style or fixed all of its problems. He’s not a jacked furniture maker, or a tough-guy builder, or a sleek rich dude (as if), or any romantic male/domestic fantasy archetype, besides being a willing taker-out of garbage. So we are safe from perfection. The house is still a mess, but we’re happy.

  After two years together, a couple of months before my fortieth birthday, we start kicking it around. There’s no ring, there’s no dramatic proposal; in our excitement, we just make the decision together. We start making plans for Maine in mid-September, which is two-and-a-half months away.

  A week or two after the decision is thrillingly official, with our parents informed and plans just underway, we spend the Fourth of July in rural Vermont with Dave’s old buddy/bandmate and her family, and a crop of friends. The night before, we arrive and set up our tent in a clearing overlooking rolling hills, a few friends’ tents surrounding our own. The sweet little crowd assembled there are among the first people we inform of the upcoming wedding; a cheer goes up into the dusk. On the Fourth, we ready for a party, and an impromptu stage is set for the bands playing that day. People arrive and lay out their blankets, the music begins, and I let a child paint my face like a butterfly, the antennae curling up my forehead. It’s easy to fantasize from this perfect, revelatory place that the ugliness in the world has disappeared, that it isn’t crazy to be optimistic, to be taking romantic leaps in this time of national and global turmoil. Then some bad campfire music breaks our reverie, and Dave and I retreat to our tent, where we laugh and goof around like two nearly forty-year-old kids.

  A month later, in August, I do actually turn forty. Going against all that a younger me had ever heard or believed about that threshold, when the day comes I am excited to cross it. Lying in the sand on a deserted beach at the tip of a little island, shutting my eyes against the gleam of high Rhode Island summer, I feel young, strong, ferocious with life force. In late bloomerism there is much to embrace.

  Having observed unhappy “older” women all my life, I’d assumed I too would be miserable by now. Reaching adulthood wasn’t what I thought it would be, didn’t have to be the way I saw it internalized by some women I’d known—as a constantly building litany of trying tasks and overstated dramas to be endured from under the thinnest veil of acquiescence. A well of unreleased rage and knowing confinement seethes just under that veil. Our culture makes it this way, of course; we don’t choose it. Endless stipulations are imposed on us before we’re born. But in gaining a single degree of separation from cultural expectations, a space flares open. A little at a time, we push back and find there is room to divine our own spirit.

  The plumber is named Matteo. He comes on a Sunday morning in September; it happens to be the Sunday before the wedding, and three days before Dave and I are to leave for Maine, where the wedding will be held. The house, sensing my imminent departure, sensing my dangerous level of happiness and that my energies are focused elsewhere, has asserted its power over me one last time in my waning single life, as usual in the form of water where it shouldn’t be.

  By the time he enters the house, Matteo and I hav
e already had a driveway-based conversation about how sad he is to see the state of his old neighborhood. He says he was born on my street—a few houses down—and has lived in Canada, and in Italy, and now he’s back in Rhode Island. “It’s a long story,” he says.

  He speaks softly. His downturned face displays a look of pity for me.

  “It’s really not bad, I mean, it’s not exactly paradise, but I like it! I’ve been here a long time,” I say, with overenthusiasm, really just to clamp this conversation shut. His sympathy, besides being totally unwarranted, is delaying an investigation of the pipes. I try to steer the conversation back to mechanical matters, as he is a plumber and not a leisurely gentleman caller just visiting for the hell of it. He joins the long line of sad-faced repairmen who seem to wish they could protect my small, white woman’s body from the horrors of this bad place and these bad people who are all around me, these obviously terrible, shadowy characters—who in truth haven’t so much as uttered an unpleasant word in my direction in twelve years and counting.

  Dave comes home while Matteo is working on fixing the problem, and true to form, immediately engages him in a conversation about politics, religion, Trump, all the hits. At first, it is amusing to listen to Dave make a case for his humanist beliefs with an argumentative plumber, but the tenor of the interaction goes sour when Matteo—casually fingering a wrench—spouts off a couple of racist proclamations. We do our best to argue that his attitude is all wrong. Eventually we have to awkwardly shut down the conversation just so that the job at hand can go on and this man can leave our home.

  After fixing the main problem at long last, Matteo tells me there is bad news: when a tenant shut off the flow of water to his apartment to avoid flooding, he must have loosened some sediment in the pipes, for there is now a blockage in the plumbing somewhere between the first and second floors. The second and third floors now have no water. He provides Dave and me with a few tips as to how we might find the clog, although he admits these usually don’t work. If we can’t locate and clear it, he says, we’ll need to cut into the first-floor ceiling and replace all of the pipes in that part of the house so that water will flow freely again. He’ll get the plumbing company in touch with us tomorrow morning to get the first appointment set up. Oh, and heads up, it’s going to be expensive.