by Laura Smith
Taylor, meanwhile, was producing thousands of words a day, writing until the early morning hours. He had stopped sleeping entirely. His eyes were vacant. We went to a bar with friends and I noticed that when anyone spoke to him he mostly just nodded and smiled.
“You have to go to sleep,” I said to him quietly.
“I know,” he said.
The next morning he went to see a doctor, who prescribed sleeping pills. We walked together into town to fill the prescription. We were both happy and relaxed. His problem would soon be solved. He went to sleep that night, but I did not.
—
Five days before P.J. was supposed to arrive, he told me that he was interested in one of our friends, whom I’ll call Kristin. She seemed to be interested in return. Did I think that was okay? Previously we had agreed that friends were off limits. But we had five days left and I told him to go for it. The next day when he called and told me that he had slept with Kristin, I was relieved. My guilt had taken on a physical quality. Every day in the late afternoon, a burning sensation had crept up my esophagus and spread outward through my chest. “My chest is on fire,” I told Michael. “It’s heartburn,” he said, offering me an antacid.
My hotel room was a mess, the bed unmade, dirty clothes and drafts everywhere. In the midst of my own marital maelstrom, I couldn’t think clearly about Barbara’s, and to cope I wrote meandering drafts as quickly as possible and scattered them around the room in the hopes that clarity might suddenly appear.
This was not like me. Messy rooms normally drove me crazy. The sight of a countertop heaped with books, water bottles, old receipts, and computer cords made me feel as though my life had become unhinged. I admired people who seemed unfazed by their messy houses. They were more liberated, their internal worlds not so easily shaken by their physical surroundings. But now, with my life in chaos, there was too much else to worry about.
My relief at P.J.’s news disgusted me. As I got off the phone with him, I wondered what kind of person is relieved when her husband announces he is sleeping with someone else.
Occasionally, I would recall the feeling of loving just P.J. and feel a pang of longing. I missed the uncomplicated, urgent love that comes at the beginning of relationships, when all your attention lands like a laser beam on one person. Your work doesn’t matter, trivial disagreements with friends or family members are forgotten, all is blown away by the blunt force of that new, singular love. It reminded me of the beginning of Anna Karenina, when Levin falls in love with Kitty: “for him all the girls in the world were divided into two sorts: one sort was all the girls in the world except her . . . the other sort was her alone.”
“You don’t love me the way I love you,” Michael would say. “This is quit-your-job kind of love, sell-your-house kind of love, move-anywhere kind of love.” He was right. My love was divided.
—
I told Taylor that I needed to run alone that day and laced up my running shoes. I raced down the hill by the Bow River and made my way to a quiet road that overlooked a lake and a mountain. I picked up speed, feeling electrified and miserable. A pack of firs lined the road. As I came around the bend, an enormous elk stood in the path, its antlers raised skyward. It looked at me indifferently and turned back to grazing. I stopped, struck by its imposing muscular frame, and thought I could see its nostrils flare as it breathed. I tiptoed around it in thrall, giving it a wide berth, and made my way farther down the road, feeling my strength return as blood beat in my temples. My feet seemed to fly over the pavement, and the cool mountain air rushed over my skin. A woman alone. A lone traveler. A lone wolf. Maybe this was how I was supposed to be. I broke into a sprint, my blood pounding through my body, my chest heaving, and all thoughts were driven out.
After my run, I had lunch with one of the program’s faculty to discuss my draft. Charlotte is svelte and strikingly beautiful. She has alert green eyes and the serene expression of a meditation guru but is too sharp to speak in New Age tropes. We ate salads in front of the dining hall’s floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windows, and suddenly anxious for a disinterested party to confide in, I told her about my marital experiment. Her eyebrows raised and a subtle smile spread over her face.
Charlotte and I discussed whether I should write about my open marriage. She reminded me that there were ways to allude to things without explicitly addressing them, ways to avoid having to fully open myself to the scrutinizing eye of a reader. “You can’t lie, but you don’t owe anyone everything,” she said. But I knew that I would write this story explicitly. I would omit certain details, but I didn’t want to hide behind allusions and coy insinuations. I wanted to walk loudly on the page and pay no heed to those with delicate sensibilities. I wanted to be this more fearless me forever. Writing about that self would preserve her in print. Is this not also what Barbara had done? I wondered if her obsessive recording of her own adventures was a way to ward off unwanted lives, lives she might also have been attracted to. She’d had a taste of her ideal self at sea and sought to enshrine that self on the page. Should her incoherent, ephemeral self ever disappoint over the course of her life, the self she had created in black type would be there—simpler, better.
I told Charlotte I would consider what she was saying, but that, more pressingly, I didn’t know how to end my draft. She gazed at me with that cool, serene smile. “That’s because the end hasn’t happened yet.”
FIFTEEN
The night before P.J. arrived, I couldn’t sleep. I realized it was possible that he might not show up. It would be highly out of character, yes, but suddenly everything seemed possible. P.J. and I hadn’t spoken much over the last couple of days; he had spent them with Kristin. I had been focused on Michael and on turning in my draft, and there had been a steady stream of social events as the residency wrapped up. Lying in the dark I imagined P.J.’s and Kristin’s bodies entangled, limb over limb in our bed. I felt nothing except for a vague hope that things wouldn’t be awkward between Kristin and me.
What was P.J. thinking? Was he dreading seeing me? Was he in love with Kristin? I had for so many years inhabited P.J.’s brain. I felt I understood every glance and gesture and its corresponding thought. At dinner parties, I knew the look that meant someone had just said something appalling, after which he would feel compelled to disagree with a polite, “Well, but . . .” I knew the flash of animation that came across his face when something excited him. We can never truly know what someone else is thinking, but I fancied we had, at moments at least, gotten pretty close.
But now, flailing around in my bed, thinking that if I just fluffed my pillow one more time or tightened the blinds, then I might get to sleep, P.J. was a total mystery to me. And while I was desperate to know what he was thinking, I also wondered if there wasn’t something stifling about so fully inhabiting someone else’s mental space.
I recalled a nature documentary in which a fungus invades an ant’s body. The fungus inside the ant causes it to climb to a particular height on a plant. Once there, the fungus emerges from the top of the ant’s head in a bulbous, alien protrusion and releases its spores, the ant’s corpse now having served its purpose. Had P.J. and I burrowed into each other’s minds, and in so doing, devoured one another? It suddenly seemed that all the things that were beautiful about being married—the finishing of each other’s sentences, the communicating without words, the feeling of being known—could be self-annihilating.
In those early-morning hours when everything dangerous seems certain to happen, I could imagine in precise detail what it would be like for P.J. not to come to Banff, and I knew that this possibility was really what was keeping me up. I could see myself standing on the curb in front of the reception building, straining to see inside each car that could possibly be his. The next day, he would—or wouldn’t—walk back into my life, and I couldn’t decide which possibility scared me more.
—
The next day I stood at the e
ntrance to the arts center in my black dress. All the residents would be giving a reading later that night, and P.J. would be arriving just in time for it. He texted to say he had gotten on the plane but that his phone was dying. He was renting a car in Calgary, which was about an hour and a half away. He hadn’t slept the night before and had waited until the last possible minute to pack.
I arrived fifteen minutes early. I brought a book, but I couldn’t read. I didn’t know what the rental car looked like, so I craned my neck and peered into every passing car. Fifteen minutes went by, then thirty. I paced anxiously. When he was forty-five minutes late, I began to really worry. I imagined him barreling down the highway, windows rolled down, the wind blowing through his hair. All our camping gear was in the back, and as the mountains rose up before him, he might think to himself, fuck it, and turn off the highway and drive out into the majestic scenery. A man alone with nothing but the sky, the pine trees, and the Rocky Mountains. Could I really blame him? P.J. had never been the type to ditch and run, but each passing minute intensified my paranoia. What if everything I understood about him had changed? I thought with irritation about how he hadn’t charged his phone, hadn’t packed until the last minute, and wondered if our experiment had turned him into some kind of irresponsible man-child. I wondered if, on some level, I didn’t want him to come because then I might see that the spark that animated our marriage was gone.
A prickly sensation of shame crept all over my skin. I imagined walking up to the podium to take my turn. I would be reading the scene where Barbara vanished, and P.J.’s empty chair in the second row would suddenly seem enormous, somehow larger than the other seats in the auditorium, its emptiness a potent rebuke. The draft I had turned in was dishonest. “Let us see the cracks in your marriage,” one of the program’s editors urged me. One night, as I slept beside Michael, I dreamed the editor was in the room, standing over our bed, and said, “Ah, now I see the cracks in your marriage.”
Another car drove into the entrance and I looked frantically inside. It was a middle-aged man with a goatee. A pickup truck followed, and I peered into that too, though it was hard to imagine P.J. renting a pickup truck. The sound check was at five. I would wait until 4:52, I decided, then I would run to the auditorium and quickly down a glass of white wine. Further up the drive, closer to the reception area, which was partially concealed by a row of pine trees, I saw another woman from my program, Alex, also waiting for her husband. His car pulled up and he jumped out. They locked in a long embrace and kissed. I felt a flush of envy.
Alex and her husband came over and I pretended to be surprised to see them. I introduced myself to her husband, Jeremy.
“Are you waiting for P.J.?” Alex asked.
“Yeah,” I tried to say nonchalantly. “He’s a little late, but should be here any minute.”
“Oh, what does he look like?” Jeremy asked.
How nice to have a helpful husband, I thought. How nice to rush into someone’s arms and then have him be cheerful and helpful to your friends. I showed Jeremy a picture. “If you need to go to the sound check, I can keep an eye out for him,” he said.
“I’ll wait a few more minutes, but thanks.”
“There was a lot of traffic between here and Calgary,” he said. “There was an accident or something.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s probably it,” I said, and then paused. “What did the car look like? The one in the accident, I mean.”
“Not sure,” Jeremy said.
It would serve me right, I thought. How greedy I had been, wanting not just his love but more. I looked at my watch. It was 4:52. I had to go. I walked into the reception area and told the man at the desk that P.J. should be coming soon and asked if he could tell him to go to the auditorium.
As I left the reception area I saw a white sedan parked nearby. P.J. got out of the driver’s seat.
“Hi, stranger,” he said.
SIXTEEN
There is another, much sadder reading of Barbara’s disappearance. She was not some masterful magician orchestrating her own vanishing act. Magicians don’t vanish, they make their assistants vanish. A beautiful woman steps into a box and the magician makes her disappear. She is the stage prop. He decides when she will be seen and when she won’t. He can bring her into being. He can also make her nothing. The audience claps.
I had told myself that Barbara’s disappearance had given her power—the power to hold people in thrall, to leave them wondering. It was a way to remain on people’s minds. Nick would have wondered for the rest of his life. But from another perspective, the vanishing woman is a trope and not a very empowering one at all. I could think of dozens of stories about enigmatic disappearing women. In this fantasy, I saw a troubling unwillingness to take women as they actually are.
Once, sitting in the Columbia archives, I had come across a letter in which Barbara had expressed disapproval of mixed-race marriages. I wanted her to be more progressive than that. The vanished woman is perfect because she is whoever we want her to be. She doesn’t grow old, or fat, or ugly; she doesn’t say things we don’t like. She is frozen, no longer her own, but ours.
Would I have written about Barbara if she hadn’t disappeared? Probably not. It was the metamorphosis from woman to enigma that captivated me most. I was using her story for my own purposes. I was not so much telling her story as appropriating it.
I told myself that my intentions were better than that, that I was trying to reverse the process, to unvanish her. I believed she was the magician and I wanted proof that it was true. But even in that more flattering scenario, I had still cast myself in the role of explorer, invader, planting my flag in her unknown lands.
So which was it? Was she the stage prop or the magician? When we date someone we say we are “seeing” them. I’m seeing someone from work. To be loved is to be seen, noticed, selected from the masses of humanity as someone remarkable and worthy of special attention. Barbara’s husband fell out of love with her and wanted to be with someone else. To be fallen out of love with is to be rendered invisible. I’m seeing someone else now. I’m not seeing you anymore.
“This isn’t a story about the vanishing of a woman,” Michael said to me one day. “This is a story about the vanishing of love.”
I had the feeling we weren’t talking about Barbara anymore.
—
P.J. and Michael met at the reception after the reading. At the cocktail event, surrounded by faculty, friends, and the audience, they shook hands. I believe they spoke about baseball, which baffled me as I have never known P.J. to speak about baseball. Both were uncomfortable but tried to seem friendly and at ease, to unweird our impossibly weird situation. I moved uneasily between them, unsure who needed my reassurances more. I found P.J.’s upbeat demeanor unconvincing, his excessive ease masking his discomfort in an awkward and humiliating situation. Michael was less gregarious than usual, but he didn’t seem unhappy. He had told me the night before that he valued our time together, and that it had been an important lesson in learning how to love without possession. I had felt relieved. Now at the event I told myself the meeting was going well. Michael said he needed a smoke and P.J. joined him. At a distance, through the plate-glass window, I watched them talk outside. Someone might see them, I thought, and think they are great friends. I felt like a nervous pet owner. Look how well they are playing!
P.J. was exhausted from not sleeping and from the jet lag, and I was exhausted from stress, so eventually, we excused ourselves and went back to my hotel room. We turned on the last two episodes of a show we had obsessively watched together in New York. In the penultimate episode, one of the main characters is diagnosed with terminal cancer. I didn’t feel particularly attached to that character—in fact, I didn’t really like her—but I cried my heart out, with a chest-heaving kind of sob that I hadn’t experienced since childhood. I cried so long and hard that when I got up the next morning and looked in t
he mirror, I thought my face had exploded. My eyes were swollen and red. I ran my face under the icy faucet water and checked again. I looked the same. I considered that maybe I had done myself permanent damage. P.J. did not seem particularly alarmed by the state of my face. He rolled over and went back to sleep. I took note and raced downstairs to grab a coffee and prepare for one final meeting, hoping I wouldn’t run into anyone I knew. I immediately bumped into Michael in the hallway. He looked stricken when he saw me.
“Oh, my god, what happened?” he asked.
“I think I broke my face,” I said.
I knew then that I was in big trouble. When P.J. had appeared, he had given voice to my worst fear. We were strangers. Michael, with his endless reassurances of devotion and deep concern, was suddenly the one who understood me.
“Is there any way I can talk to you alone later?” he asked.
Yes, I said. Of course. I could meet with whomever I wanted. I was a free person. I suggested the wine bar nearby. But even as I reassured myself of my freedom, it didn’t quite feel true anymore—that phase was over.
I arrived at the wine bar early.
“We will need a bottle,” I told the waiter.
I had told P.J. I would just be an hour, concerned that more than that might alarm him. Having totally abdicated the conventional rules of marriage, I created new rules. I could meet with Michael but only for an hour. I assured myself that this made total sense because talking to Michael would give me “closure.” I’m going to end things on a good note, I told myself as I sat at the bar. I’m making the transition to friendship. I could feel myself lying.
Seeking closure was an excuse to act on the desires of what I began to call “the irrational love brain.” The irrational love brain wants what it wants, which is to be near the person it loves. It pays no heed to its own well-being, work, sleep, or the well-being of others. I thought back on the millions of excuses I had heard friends make over the years to be near the people they loved impossibly. One friend applied for a job at her ex’s company, arguing that she wanted to prove to herself that she no longer cared and could work near him. “That’s insane,” I told her. It is so easy to recognize the garbled thinking and willful self-deception of the irrational love brain when you are not lost in its fog. “If you really didn’t care, you would work at literally any other company,” I told her. No, she said, it had to be that one. Another friend kept having one last dinner, then another one, and no, really, this time was the last dinner, hoping the person he loved but could not be with would say the magic words that would release him from the animal devotion that was gnawing at him—or was it giving him life? He wasn’t sure. Then he could move on, he said. I suspected that really the last dinner was a last-ditch effort to change her mind.