by Mad Dash
“That is so unfair! Tell him—he only gets one more. I could do that, too, if I wanted, but it wouldn’t be fair. Like emotionally remote. And no sense of humor about himself.”
“Emotionally remote—that’s code for I won’t join in when she tries to pick a fight.”
“I’m not finished. Pride, too much pride—he gets it from his father. And it’s his fault I’m a photographer, he forced me into it.”
“Now, let’s—”
“What?” Andrew grabs for the lever on his chair. He gets the ottoman part down, but not the seatback—he’s stuck, he can’t stand up.
I laugh.
He rocks back and shoots himself out of the recliner, stumbling from the momentum into the foot end of Bill’s chair. My God, he’s furious. He stalks to Bill’s desk and stands behind it, as far from us, from me, as he can get in this small room. His face is streaky red. We look at him, Fogelman craning around backward, and wait for him to speak, but he can’t, he’s too angry.
It was nice of him to demonstrate my “no sense of humor about himself” claim so promptly. Bad form to thank him for it right now, I suppose. Anyway, I feel terrible; I’m not taking any pleasure from this at all. But it’s funny. Why couldn’t he laugh when he got stuck in his chair?
“What I meant was,” I say calmly, “I was young and I had a lot of ideas about what I wanted to be. It’s ancient history, yes, and it’s a cliché, and I don’t even blame Andrew for it—but it’s true that after we got married I had no more professional choices.”
“Professional choices.”
Such sarcasm, such disbelief he says that with, I pitch the last dregs of my interest in saving his feelings. “Yes, Andrew, professional choices. I had a lot of promise.”
“You walked other people’s dogs.”
“I had odd jobs while I was trying to find myself, but I had talent and it could’ve gone anywhere. But now we’ll never know.”
“We know it didn’t go into Crowd Control.”
“Goon Squad—that’s a band I was in,” I explain to Bill. “We had a very progressive musical sound, over Andrew’s head.”
“They had noise. Talentless decibels.”
“That’s right, only you had talent. Your career was important, mine was frivolous.”
“I was getting a law degree; you were screeching into a microphone in your boyfriend’s basement. You tell me which was frivolous.”
I stand up, too.
“You talk of talent, promise, potential,” Andrew keeps on. “The truth is, you had no direction at all. You should thank me, not hold it against me that you found your life’s work trying to make some money for us when we were young and struggling. It’s what anyone would’ve done—it’s not heroic that you went to work while I went to graduate school.”
It’s not the words I hate so much as that infuriatingly reasonable tone, as if he’s talking to a mental patient on a ledge. “You know,” I say ominously, “I don’t think you should talk to me about jobs.”
“What does that mean?”
Fogelman’s gone silent. He sits moonfaced, following us with his eyes through the tops of his bifocals. If this was his plan all along, to set us at each other’s throat, it worked.
“It means you’re stuck in a rut.”
“Oh, this again.” Andrew smiles thinly at Fogelman while he tosses a roll of Tums in the air and catches it. “My wife thinks I’m a failure, in case you hadn’t picked up on that yet.”
“I have never said that to you, never. I would never.”
“You don’t have to say it, you make it clear at every faculty event we’ve ever attended.”
“I do not. And I don’t think you’re a failure, I just think you should admit it—you’re jealous of Peter Flynn. What you’re agonizing over is not a moral quandary, Andrew, it’s not about Thomas Jefferson, it’s about them hiring a younger man to teach the same subject you do. You were insulted and hurt, and you can’t get over it. You’d rather stay stuck in your rut and not advance even though you deserve that job than give in and write one damn chapter in Peter’s book. And you call me unreasonable.”
“This isn’t the first time she’s left me, you know.” Andrew circles the desk as he pops antacids in his mouth and crunches down violently. “It’s just the first time she hasn’t been able to run off to her mother.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Once before our wedding—”
“Cold feet!”
“And once before Chloe was born.”
“Hormones!”
“Everyone thinks she’s this Mother Earth figure: Dash is so generous, oh, Dash has such a big heart, she rescues people, she’d do anything for anybody—yes, when everything’s going perfectly. When life is exactly the way she wants it, she couldn’t be more obliging.” He stops talking to Fogelman and rounds on me. “This may come as a shock, but you’re not the first woman to lose her mother.”
“Don’t you talk about my mother.”
“Or hit middle age, or have a child go off to college.”
“You leave my mother out of this.”
“Why?”
“Because I said so!”
“Here we go.” He puts his hands in his hair. “The sprinkler system is on.”
There’s a fake fireplace in the corner of Fogelman’s office. It has real gravel on the brick hearth, supposed to look like ashes. The knots and burls and burned ends of the logs look about as real as papier-mâché. A fat tear plops on the veneer mantel I’m holding onto with both hands. I want my woodstove. I want my mother’s chair and the dog in my lap, silence all around, nobody talking.
Fogelman finally says something. “I’d like to change the focus, try something different. You’ve given some of your conflicts an airing, some ways in which there’s not as much harmony as you want, and I think we’ve laid some groundwork for goals and directions we’ll want to take and explore in the weeks ahead, months ahead. Let’s keep going and talk about some positive changes you could begin to strive for in your relationship.”
“Changes.” I leap on the word. “I do want changes, that’s what this whole thing is for—I never wanted us to separate for nothing. Andrew’s the rock, and that’s good, but rocks are sedentary. I’m trying to do things. I’m thinking about a whole new career. I’m reading about world religions, I’m making new friends, people as unlike me as I can imagine. I’m taking yoga.”
Andrew’s got his arms folded, unimpressed.
“What are you doing?” I challenge. “What do you want? You are so damned passive. Don’t you want anything?”
“Yes. I want peace and quiet.”
“Well, you’ve got ’em now, haven’t you?” I say nastily.
“And I’m enjoying them more than I ever imagined possible.”
“Good.” Oh, that hurts. I thought he was lonely. He’s still angry, but I can see he’s telling the truth. I hate this game.
“What are you enjoying about it?” Fogelman asks.
“The calm. The lack of surprises. People have been very kind to me.”
“Who? Who’s being kind to you?”
He raises his eyebrows at me. He removes his glasses and takes out the special cloth he uses to polish them. “Mrs. Melman comes over to walk Hobbes every day. Women at work bring me food. Tim and I go out together in the evenings.”
“Who brings you food?”
“Miriam.”
Oh, Miriam. The department secretary.
“Elizabeth O’Neal.”
“Elizabeth O’Neal! She can cook? What does she make you, blackbird pies?”
He ignores me, speaks to Fogelman. “What I like about it is the sanity. It’s tranquil, there are no upsets, no drama. Before she left, I felt like I was shrinking. Dash got bigger, I got smaller.” A sour laugh. “The incredible shrinking man.”
The words are bad enough, they’re like knives in the chest, but I can’t believe he’s saying them to Fogelman, a stranger, a man
he’s going to write a check to when this hour is up, if it ever is. I turn away, my hand on my throat. I keep swallowing; I won’t give him the satisfaction of more tears. If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen—Fogelman hasn’t used that one yet. I’m burned, seared, I’ve stayed in here way too long.
Andrew’s not finished. “Since I’ve been on my own, it’s as though I can breathe again, stretch out and be myself. I’m sorry Dash lost her mother, and I’m sorry that to her it’s as if she’s losing a daughter, but I can’t do anything about it. I can’t replace them. I wish I could, but I can’t. And I’m exhausted trying. I need a rest. You ask what I want? I would love to be bored.”
I rally for a second. “Bored? Is that what you said? That’s a—that’s a terrible goal. Obviously—I don’t know who you are anymore. You want everything I don’t—I assume vice versa. Do we even like each other?”
Andrew shakes his head, which I hope means “I don’t know,” not “no.”
I’m learning how thin-skinned I am. I’m parchment, sheer as gauze. This has never happened to me before in a fight with Andrew. I was tough, flamboyant, I used to throw things. But he never said he was happier without me. I snatch up my coat, noticing too late that the sleeve has a split at the seam—my arm goes in the wrong track. My exit’s ruined.
“I’m not coming back,” I tell Fogelman as I struggle with the coat, struggle not to cry, not to look at Andrew. “I, too, am much, much better on my own, so there’s no reason to keep pretending this is all going away soon, it’s just a temporary glitch that’s my fault, I’m the crazy one, mad Dash on another one of her drama-queen tears. I love it in Virginia. I love it, I could stay there seven days a week and be happy. This is unnatural, not that. And I’m so glad we’ve finally admitted these things to each other. Thank you, Bill—I didn’t think it would work, but it did. So, this is great.”
Nobody stops me when I head for the door. They look surprised, but neither one moves. “Andrew, I hope you have a nice, long, boring rest.”
In the mirrored elevator doors, I look nothing like the me who rode down three weeks ago, smug and tickled, leaning against my husband’s shoulder exchanging wisecracks. My eyes look like marbles; my mouth is a tight whitish line, tensed so it won’t tremble. When the doors open, I squint in the too-bright lobby, wander out to the street. Start for my car, stop.
I have to see Andrew alone, not with Fogelman. I brace my back against a parking meter to wait.
May I be peaceful and at ease, may I be happy—the Buddhist metta prayer. “Try it,” Mo said. “It works.”
It’s not cold, but I’m shaking. My blood feels sluggish, like water at the freezing point. Things have gone too far. If I could take back my life since last Christmas, would I? May I be peaceful and at ease, may I be happy.
Andrew pushes the glass door open with his shoulder, hands shoved deep in his pockets. Yes, I would take it back—I think—if I could have him right now, with his thin nose and his serious forehead, the wide strides he takes with his long legs. But he would still be himself and I would still be me, and after a time, wouldn’t I just want him to go away again?
It’s been a game until now. I was dancing on a thin edge, but part of me liked it because I knew I had a safety net. I could call the game off any time and skip back to safety—Andrew’s infinitely tolerant arms would be wide open. Now he’s taken himself away. “I feel more like myself,” he said. So I was diluting him, my needs were camouflaging him; without me he’s the pure, unretouched image. Well, if it’s true, it’s true. Neither of us was telling stories in Fogelman’s office.
He stops short when he sees me. Pedestrians pass between us while we look at each other and don’t talk. I push off from the parking meter and go closer; now people have to walk around us. “Did you mean what you said?”
“Yes.” He paused before he said it, though. He leans forward, stork-like, trying to read my face. “Did you?”
I nod.
“Are you all right?”
“Peachy.”
A little more staring, that’s it. I have to squeeze my hands into fists and unsqueeze them, otherwise I don’t feel real. I’m so stupid—I didn’t know how precarious marriage was, mine, anybody’s. I took it for granted, but it’s a fragile envelope, delicate as human skin. People keep flowing past us. I keep my eyes focused on Andrew, the rock; I look at him so hard my eyes water.
He turns away first. We parked our cars in opposite directions, and we move toward them like shipwreck victims swimming for different shores.
andrew
thirteen
“Next item.” Richard Weldon bounced from the window back to the conference table and checked his notes. “As you know, we still have no budget for next year, so we remain in the dark as to the summer schedule.”
Groans; tsks.
“But not for long.” Richard held up his hands with tired patience. “Next week, the dean assures me. Probably at our next meeting, I can let you know exactly how many courses we’re going to have to cover.”
“Assholes,” Dominic Brodsky muttered, shoving his chair back and dropping his feet, thud, thud, on top of the table.
“It’s like this every year,” Peter Flynn said in his patronizing tenor, rearranging the tails of his tie over the front of his shirt just so. “They like to see us with our mouths wide open, cheeping like baby birds.”
Every year. As if he’d know, Andrew thought; he’d been here all of three.
“But Christ, it’s almost the end of March.” Tim Meese scrubbed the ends of his mustache with both hands. “Why the hell can’t they get their act together?” He sounded more worked up than he usually bothered to get at faculty meetings; in fact, the summer schedule was the only order of business so far that had roused a word out of him. But the meeting had been going on for over forty minutes, and after five o’clock Tim’s focus had a way of about-facing, like an honor-guard soldier, from college business to a warm glass of stout.
From his perch on the tepid heat register, Andrew stared out at the network of illegal footpaths crisscrossing the winter-dead grass squares of Main Quad two floors below. The days were getting longer, but today it was almost dark out at—he pulled up his sleeve to see his watch—five-thirty. Late March: the time of year when students committed suicide most often, not at Christmas or during finals or senior comps. “
Poor bastards; he could hardly see them down there in the gloom, bending into the raw wind or letting it hustle them from behind, using their books and book bags to shield their heads from an icy, spiking drizzle. The students, the sky, the wet stone faces of Mason Library and Burnham Hall, the whole blighted world today was the shade of gray of a rain-slicked cemetery. It was the first day of spring.
Richard bounced to the other side of the chilly seminar room and began to talk about a temporary vacancy in the fall term, when Dominic Brodsky was scheduled to go to some vowel-less Balkan country for a conference. Andrew couldn’t concentrate on the topic, could hardly follow it. His mind stalled out these days, rushed forward to catch up and stalled again, like an old lawn mower. He ought to wake himself up by drinking more of the stale coffee Miriam had set out, but it gave him heartburn.
He caught Miriam’s eye; she sent him a sympathetic look that brought him out of his stupor enough to sit up straight. He’d had his cheek and temple pressed so long to the windowpane, he had to rub them to get the circulation back. God. He’d be like old Dr. Cleveland soon, it was inevitable. There he was in his usual spot in back, snoring softly, fountain pen slack in his knotty fingers and leaking blue ink onto his notebook. He’d been emeritus for fifteen years, but he still came to school every day, to do God-knew-what in the closet of an office some sympathetic past chair had given him. He never missed a history department meeting, either, although he rarely said anything and he wasn’t allowed to vote.
He came, of course, so he could feel as if he still belonged. And to get out of the house, empty since his wife died half a d
ozen years ago.
“We’re almost done,” Richard assured them for the fifth or sixth time. “Let’s see…Elizabeth, did you have something on the women’s studies department?”
Funereal in black boots, black stockings, black skirt, black sweater, Elizabeth O’Neal began to straighten from her languid slouch, a snake uncoiling—at the same moment Bonnie Tzach jumped up and started to put on her coat. “Sorry,” she said in a stage whisper, “gotta sneak out.”
“Wait, you’ll want to hear this.”
“Oh God, Elizabeth, I can’t, I told Richard I might have to leave early if, you know, we ran over—”
“But this is about the interdisciplinary studies program.”
“Right, well, I’m interested in that, but—”
“Yes, you said you were interested. Last term you told me you were. Otherwise I wouldn’t have mentioned it to Professor Carillo. Now she’s thinking you’ll do something for them next year on women’s roles in the Reformation. Along the lines of the lecture I did,” Elizabeth couldn’t resist adding, “in the colloquium series on contemporary women in the Middle East.”
“Um, haa.” Bonnie tugged her long, lank hair out of her coat collar. It used to be blonde and stylish. For that matter, her face used to be sunny and serene, not sallow and vague. “Well, you know,” she said with a wan try at a laugh, “that was before I had twins.”
Wincing, Andrew put his head back against the windowpane. Before he closed his eyes, he saw Peter Flynn’s superior sneer, and in the brief pause before Elizabeth spoke again he could hear a subtle, communal downshift of expectation. Bonnie, for the love of God, he thought, why hand them the stick to beat you with?
If Richard would pay more than lip service to mentoring the junior faculty, this wouldn’t be happening. Bonnie was a good, solid teacher—didn’t that count for anything anymore? But she had three-month-old sons and a husband who couldn’t help because he’d just opened a restaurant. She was falling behind, and when the time came, Richard or whoever replaced him would probably vote no on her tenure.