by Laura Smith
At dinner that evening, Taylor and I met the other six residents. I immediately liked our cohort: a couple of academics, a crime reporter, a strange wiry young poet turned nonfiction writer, and a magazine writer with feline eyes and a deadpan expression, but I liked Michael best of all. He was handsome, broad shouldered, and charming. He dressed like an Italian from the 1950s, which gave him the well-kempt but carefree look of a gentleman perpetually on vacation. We talked about psychopaths, which we had both spent time researching for stories. I took note of him and tucked the thought away.
I soon settled in to a routine, writing in the mornings and jogging with Taylor on the Hoodoo Trail or into town in the afternoons. Taylor talked constantly. As we ran along the icy Bow River, we talked about my marriage and Taylor’s relationships. I heard in minute detail the life stories of every one of his girlfriends, all of whom seemed to be named Sarah or Kate. Sometimes we would work through our story ideas—though mostly it was Taylor’s story ideas, which meant we spent a lot of time talking about mania because that was what he was most interested in. I learned about the discovery of lithium, the salt that Taylor said had saved his life, and about Emil Kraepelin, the German psychologist who first defined manic depression. Sometimes talking so much about mania made me feel a little manic, but I couldn’t tell if it was runner’s high or the effect Taylor was having on me. He and I established an agreement that if his talking got to be too much, I would tell him to “turn off the Taylor tap,” which I did a few times.
After our run I usually called P.J., then I’d work again until dinner, after which my new friends and I drank heavily and occasionally went to an opera or an art show, or went back to one of our studios to dance and talk.
My life in New York soon began to fade. I tried to imagine our block in Brooklyn, the coffee shop on the corner, the Yemeni sandwich place, and the chatter of sidewalk conversation. It began to seem remote and alien. Friends called and I didn’t pick up. When one sent an e-mail saying, “Let’s find a time to catch up,” I felt irritated. Their calls and texts were an intrusion on our perfect self-contained world in Banff. I didn’t want to be reminded of a world outside of trail runs, my studio, or the nights spent drinking and talking in our studio decks in the woods, because each call and e-mail reminded me that this was not going to last, that soon I would have to return to my small apartment, to grocery lists, and to the sink that seemed always to be filled with dishes.
Though I avoided other phone calls, P.J. and I still talked on the phone every day, often twice a day. It didn’t feel like an encroachment because he understood when I had to jump off suddenly because someone had knocked on the studio door. He was enjoying his freedom as well. At night, I would call him while I was getting dressed.
“Where are you going tonight?” I’d ask.
“A bar,” he’d say. He hadn’t been with anyone yet, and the possibility charged our conversations with tantalizing danger. I wasn’t really his anymore. He wasn’t really mine. I felt an urge to cling to him, to retreat back into our marital den like a cautious mammal, but I stopped myself and felt a rush. It’s just bodies, I thought, feeling scorn for past selves that would have been horrified by this attitude. My life, which had always been bogged down by fears of disappointing other people, now suddenly seemed unencumbered.
Something subtle had changed in the way I interacted with the people around me. I felt more at ease in the presence of strangers, not like a beetle scurrying off to avoid their notice. Now if a man was looking at me, I could look back. Why had I given them the power of evaluation when I had just as much of a right to evaluate them?
Previously, I had found walking in public a solitary experience. I was almost startled one day in the grocery when a woman asked me if the polenta I was buying was any good. I looked around the aisle, assuming she must be speaking to someone else. She had pierced some tacit agreement that when you’re in public, you will mind your own business.
Now I wanted to interact with people—all people. It seemed not just that my marriage had opened up but that my world had. Single friends had remarked on the impenetrability of couples before. I told myself that while I had noticed pairs lurking near the hors d’oeuvres table disengaged from the party around them, P.J. and I weren’t like that. But of course we were. Couples exist in their own little self-sufficient world, and people sense this and retreat.
I asked Taylor what he thought about this. “Look,” he said, “when you’re hanging out with a couple, the conversation you’re going to have is different than if you talked to them one-on-one.” I conceded that this was true. I felt that people treated me differently when P.J. was around. And there were many times over the past few years when, faced with a Saturday night, I would think to myself, “What’s the point? I’d rather just talk to P.J.” There was something beautiful about that. But it was also stifling.
I considered the idea that nuclear families suffered from a similar isolation—in the creation of a unit, of one house separate from other houses, was the implicit exclusion of all others. This was what bothered me most about wandering around my neighborhood as a kid. Inside the houses, the kids and parents seemed lonely, cut off from the rest of the world. I didn’t want the intimacy of a small group to remove me from everyone else.
—
One night, a few of us went to a dance performance. Michael and I got separated (perhaps intentionally) from the rest of the group and sat near the back of the darkly lit performance hall. He was wearing a checkered blazer and I remember being aware of his body in the seat next to mine. His knee grazed mine. I could smell the faint scent of white wine and his cologne. I could sense him looking at me and heard him breathing in the dark.
The dance performance was choreographed by a man whose young daughter had died in a house fire, and the dance was loosely based on that night. Watching the dancers writhe on stage, fling their bodies about, and call out, I was moved. My chest swelled as the protagonist clawed at the walls. The music and my own pulse pounded in my ears. I decided I had never seen a better performance of anything. I decided I would sleep with Michael.
At the end of the performance we joined the bustle of the crowd, our shoulders brushing. We ran into someone we knew, greeted her, and quickly moved on. Michael seemed to want to avoid other people as much as I did. Their presence was an intrusion on our intimacy.
“Michael,” I said coolly as the crowd thinned out.
“Yes?”
“P.J. and I have an arrangement.” He looked at me and I sensed that he knew exactly what I meant. That night, my life was my creation.
—
The next day I sat in the studio trying to write. I had called P.J. on the phone after leaving Michael’s room and told him what had happened. I was troubled that I couldn’t really read his reaction as we’d had only a few minutes to talk. Was his voice cold because he was within earshot of friends? Or was it something else? I hoped that P.J. would sleep with someone quickly. I sensed that if he didn’t I would begin to feel guilty.
I heard a knock on the studio door. It was Michael, bringing a Danish and coffee. He was both gentle and cautious, trying not to overwhelm me, but pleased by what had happened. At dinner with a group of friends, I felt his foot brush mine, and I brushed his back.
Later that night, we danced to Paul Simon’s Graceland on the porch of one of our studios. Michael was a good dancer, whisking whomever he was dancing with confidently around the porch, laughing. I liked the way he smoked a cigarette, how he brought his whole open hand to his mouth, tilted his head thoughtfully downward, and breathed in. My ex-boyfriend had been a smoker and I had hated it, but now, inexplicably, I liked watching Michael smoke.
“You’re a shitty dancer, but I don’t care,” Michael said, pulling me to him when no one was looking.
By the third day, he told me he was in love, and by the sixth I believed him. Late one afternoon, we walked to downtown
Banff. We sat on slate stairs that led to the bank of the Bow River. In the distance, we could see a field and a large stony mountain rising above the tree line. The sun was setting.
“This place is ugly as shit,” Michael said, and I laughed.
“I have to tell you something,” he said, suddenly looking solemn.
“Okay, tell me,” I said, feeling alarmed.
“I want you to know that we could have a life together, that to me, this isn’t just some fling. I don’t have a ring, but I’ll marry you.”
I reminded him that I was already married, and that we had known each other for only a couple of weeks.
“But when you know, you know,” he said. I wasn’t sure what to say, suddenly feeling a bit overwhelmed by his emotions. “Just say that you understand that I’m serious,” he said.
“I understand,” I said.
I remember thinking that his feelings were getting out of control and that it was a good thing my own sense of control was still so firmly in place. But a few nights later, we spoke about our families, and he told me about the first time he remembered seeing his sister. He was three years older than she was, and she was sleeping in her room. He opened the door and tiptoed over to her crib. Peeking over the edge, he was struck by a pang of awe. “There was this wonderful, magical creature right there in my house. We’ve been best friends ever since,” he said. I was moved in a way that felt tectonic. I turned and looked at him, considering him in a way I hadn’t before. I wanted to be near someone who thought and felt things like that.
In the afternoons we worked together in my studio. We would share drafts or discuss our work. He was writing about a poet who was imprisoned in Saudi Arabia. If a line wasn’t reading right, he would give it to me and I’d suggest a change. He would read a paragraph and I would tell him how it sounded.
“I want to do this forever,” Michael said, “us working side by side.” I bristled. I already had a person I shared my work with.
—
This was not how things were supposed to go. I had imagined friends with benefits, but without realizing it in a matter of days I had somehow slipped into a serious relationship. My calls to P.J. became less frequent, which I told myself was because of our conflicting schedules. He had become somewhat nocturnal, staying out at bars or concerts with friends and sleeping late. Though his work was lighter in the summer, there was still some, and he had to cram it into his busy socializing schedule. He hadn’t slept with anyone yet.
One night, all the journalists and a few of the opera singers went to a karaoke bar downtown that had a mechanical bull. We drank a lot, rode the bull, and some of the opera singers sang rock ballads. An alumnus from a previous year was there, a journalist from a subarctic town in Canada. He was handsome with delicate, fair features. He pulled me onto the dance floor.
“I’m camping by the lake,” he whispered in my ear. “Come swimming with me.”
I laughed. “Oh, I can’t,” I said. “I’m married and I’m sleeping with Michael.” It was only when I said those words that the strangeness of my situation struck me. Swimming with strangers at night was the kind of thing I had envisioned when P.J. and I had talked about nonmonogamy. It was supposed to be harmless and light. Our lovers would return to their subarctic towns, and we would never hear from them again. But I hadn’t even considered going with the subarctic journalist, not because of P.J., but because of Michael. I had noticed him sulking near the bar, and now he was nowhere in sight. Not only did I not want to go swimming at the campsite, I felt I couldn’t. I was a monogamous adulteress. All of my inclinations were driving toward more intimacy, not less.
“That’s insane!” the journalist said with a laugh. He shook his head and slipped out of the bar.
Michael came back, looking stormy and smelling of cigarettes. I told him what had happened and his face became grave. “Are you going with him?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “I’m going with you.”
—
Michael and I began to refer to our relationship as our Banff marriage. He was now living almost exclusively in my hotel room and often worked in my studio. We learned each other’s sleeping habits. Sleep has always been fragile for me, but now in Banff, it was especially brittle. If he sensed me tossing and turning, he’d jump out of bed to grab a melatonin or my eye mask. If he snored, I rolled him over on his side. We developed our own language, our own nicknames. I noticed something in his ear and stuck my finger in and pulled it out, a gesture that, while kind of gross, struck him as romantic. It suggested comfort, a lowering of barriers between bodies. He liked watching me get ready because it was something that no one else saw, a vulnerable moment before my presentation to the outside world was complete.
“You’re mine,” he would say.
His possessiveness both aroused and repelled me. I thought, no, I am no one’s.
I saw my relationship with Michael as a beautiful little terrarium: a self-sufficient ecosystem that had no bearing on the outside world. There were none of the questions about the future that often weigh down the beginnings of relationships. I wasn’t constantly reading his behaviors for red flags. I didn’t wonder if he would have ear hair when he got older. I didn’t read his flair for the dramatic as a sign that we were emotionally incompatible. When I brought him on a run and he cursed, panted, and sweated the whole way, complaining that he just wanted a cigarette and a beer, I found it charming. I stopped running and started walking with him instead and didn’t worry about whether this meant we were ill matched. I wasn’t playing soothsayer, trying to divine the desires of my future self and how it would match up with his future self. We slipped away from our studios to hike the hoodoos. One night we told friends we were working late and went to a Cajun restaurant in town. I imagined strangers seeing us and thinking we were married and felt a pulse of pleasure. Then I imagined their horrified faces when we said no, we were having an affair, and felt an equally appealing pulse of pleasure.
We walked through the residential areas of Banff holding hands, pointing out which little cottages we liked best. “Are we house hunting?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. It was only in the terrarium that I could indulge a house fantasy. In the terrarium, my house was beautiful. It was a white clapboard cottage with periwinkle hydrangea and a pair of rain boots by the front door. I could search for a house with Michael and imagine living there, precisely because I knew it would never happen. But then another voice in my head chimed in, what if it could?
—
I had begun to dread my phone calls with P.J. The church outside our apartment was under construction, and he said the early-morning drilling was driving him insane. His moods were impossible to predict. Sometimes he was loving and reassuring. Other times I heard a robotic stoicism in his voice. His questions were explicit and made me uncomfortable. Even though total transparency had been our agreement, I found it tempting to avoid mentioning things I thought might hurt him. At the same time, I wanted to know all the nuances of his experiences with other people. A few girls had given him their numbers. Each time, I wanted to know, What was she like? Had she approached him or had he approached her? What was it like—really? I craved a complete record of their interactions, and P.J.’s answers to my questions were never satisfying. Some crucial element always seemed murky. Were we subtly but deliberately obscuring our experiences from each other? And if so, was that wrong?
At other times P.J. sounded enlivened by our conversations. There was warmth between us and we seemed to be bringing others into our intimacy. “There is no doubt,” he said at one point, “that there is more love in our lives now.” He had grown closer to a group of our friends and was enjoying the expansive sense of belonging this gave him.
I never knew which mood I would find him in, and often I would find him in both moods on the same day, even in the same moment. Our conversations were riddled with contradictions. “I have to let go of
you to have you,” P.J. said. We settled into a routine of one bad and one good conversation every day. Occasionally, during the bad conversations, we would discuss the possibility of calling off the experiment. But I had the sense that a chain of events beyond our control was in motion. Like skydivers in free fall, we could not get back on the plane. Besides, how could we stop when P.J. hadn’t slept with anyone yet? Of course I could have stopped and given him a pass to sleep with someone, but I didn’t want to stop. I was jittery on the phone, anxious that he would say something that would make it necessary for me to end things with Michael. The summer would be over soon enough and I was greedy for the time we had left.
Michael would occasionally stun me by crying. I would be talking and look over only to find silent tears running down his face. I had always found displays of emotion disconcerting and slightly awkward, but watching him cry I was touched by his contradictions, the way he was both gentle and strong. I didn’t want to admit how quickly my feelings for him had changed, how precipitously I had fallen in love. Now when Michael told me he loved me, I said it back.