by Jenny Offill
The kiss was the trickiest sound to capture, the engineers said. Some of the ones they tried were too loud, others too quiet. In the end, the kiss that landed on the record was one that Timothy Ferriss planted on his fiancée Ann Druyan’s cheek. The intern takes his yellow marker and highlights this for me.
The blip in that cosmic love story then. Ann Druyan was engaged to marry Timothy Ferriss while they were working on the Voyager project with Carl Sagan and his wife, Linda. Then Carl and Ann decided to get married. The news took a while to reach Linda and Timothy. Or so my intern says. But when Ann Druyan tells the story, that part is missing, like a record that skips.
She talks instead about how she went into a laboratory just two days after that phone call. She was hooked up to a computer and began to meditate. All the data from her brain and heart was turned into sound for the Golden Record.
To the best of my abilities I tried to think about the history of ideas and human social organization. I thought about the predicament that our civilization finds itself in and about the violence and poverty that make this planet a hell for so many of its inhabitants. Toward the end I permitted myself a personal statement of what it was like to fall in love.
According to People magazine, Carl and Linda Sagan’s divorce was “acrimonious.”
21
The Yoga People always travel in pairs, their mats under their arms, their hair severely shorn in that new mother way. But what if someone sucker punched them and took their mats away? How long until they’d knuckle under?
Would you like to run the fun fair? Would you like to join the compost committee? Would you like to organize the coat drive? Would you like to teach a puppetry elective?
A student asked Donald Barthelme how he might become a better writer. Barthelme advised him to read through the whole history of philosophy from the pre-Socratics up through the modern-day thinkers. The student wondered how he could possibly do this. “You’re probably wasting time on things like eating and sleeping,” Barthelme said. “Cease that, and read all of philosophy and all of literature.” Also art, he amended. Also politics.
There are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, 52 weeks in a year, and X years in a life. Solve for X.
What T. S. Eliot said: When all is said and done the writer may realize that he has wasted his youth and wrecked his health for nothing.
She will not go to college if that means she must go away from me. When she has a baby, she will come and stay with me for a month and I will help her care for the baby and then she will go away for one day, then she will come back again and stay for a month or a year. She does not ever want to live away from me, she explains. “Promise?” I say. She curls up in my arms, all elbows and knees. “Promise.”
My Very Educated Mother Just Serves Us Noodles. This is the mnemonic they give her to remember the order of the planets.
Once when she was just learning to talk, I ran my hand across her face, naming every part of it. Later, when I put her in the crib, she called me back. First, she asked for water, then for milk, then for kisses. “It hurts. Don’t go,” she said. “What does? What hurts, sweetie?” She paused. “My eyelashes.”
Some women make it look so easy, the way they cast ambition off like an expensive coat that no longer fits.
Stop writing I love you, said the note my daughter wrote over the one I left in her lunchbox. For a long time, she had asked for a note like that every day, but now a week after turning six, she puts a stop to it. I feel odd, strangely light-headed when I read the note. It is a feeling from a long time ago, the feeling of someone breaking up with me suddenly. My husband kisses me. “Don’t worry, love. Really, it’s nothing.”
There is a husband who requires mileage receipts, another who wants sex at three a.m. One who forbids short haircuts, another who refuses to feed the pets. I would never put up with that, all the other wives think. Never.
But my agent has a theory. She says every marriage is jerry-rigged. Even the ones that look reasonable from the outside are held together inside with chewing gum and wire and string.
So now this woman at the playground is telling me about how her husband rifles through her purse for receipts. If he finds one for the wrong kind of ATM, he posts it on the refrigerator, highlighted in red. She shrugs. “He can’t help it.”
What exactly am I waiting for her to say? That she married a fool? That her house is built on ashes? And here I am, the lucky one for once. Such blinding good fortune to have married him.
The wives have requirements too, of course. What they require is this: unswerving obedience. Loyalty unto death.
My husband sits in our kitchen and hand-sews a book. I hope that when it goes through the post office no machine will touch it.
22
How Are You?
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The wife is praying a little. To Rilke, she thinks.
It is important if someone asks you to remember one of your happiest times to consider not only the question but also the questioner. If the question is asked by someone you love, it is fair to assume that this person hopes to feature in this recollection he has called forth. But you could, if you were wrong and if you had a crooked heart, forget this most obvious and endearing thing and instead speak of a time you were all alone, in the country, with no one wanting a thing from you, not even love. You could say that was your happiest time. And if you did this then telling about this happiest of times would cause the person you most want to be happy to be unhappy.
In the year 134 B.C., Hipparchus observed a new star. Until that moment he had believed steadfastly in the permanence of them. He then set out to catalog all the principal stars so as to know if any others appeared or disappeared.
They were in the coffee shop that day he asked her. When were you the happiest? Something she should have seen then, something about the look on his face, the way the air changed in that moment.
So how come it took her a month to think of her own question? The one he answered rhetorically.
Is that what you think this is about?
And then there is the night that he misses putting their daughter to bed. He calls to say he is leaving work right when she thinks he will be home, something he has never done before.
And so slowly, stupidly, she asks the question again.
Why would you even say that?
He falls asleep. All night, she lies there beside him, listening to him breathe. Her whole body is prickling. She feels hot then cold then hot again. I noticed particularly, she thinks. The minute it is light out she wakes him.
That’
s not what I asked you.
His eyes, god, his eyes, in the moment before he nodded his head.
Thales supposed the Earth to be flat and to float upon water.
Anaxagoras thought the moon was an inhabited Earth.
Her sister drives in from Pennsylvania at five a.m. to pick up the daughter. “Don’t worry,” she says. “I’ll take her on an adventure. She won’t know anything. Not yet at least.”
What Ovid said: If you are ever caught, no matter how well you’ve concealed it / Though it is as clear as the day, swear up and down it is a lie / Don’t be too abject, and don’t be too unduly attentive / That would establish your guilt far above anything else / Wear yourself out if you must and prove in her bed, that you could / Not / Possibly be that good, coming from some other girl.
Taller?
Thinner?
Quieter?
Easier, he says.
In 2159 B.C., the royal astronomers Hi and Ho were executed because they failed to predict an eclipse.
23
Researchers looked at magnetic resonance images of the brains of people who described themselves as newly in love. They were shown a photograph of their beloveds while their brains were scanned for activity. The scan showed the same reward systems being activated as in the brains of addicts given a drug.
Ca-ching! Ca-ching! Ca-ching!
For most married people, the standard pattern is a decrease of passionate love, but an increase in deep attachment. It is thought that this attachment response evolved in order to keep partners together long enough to have and raise children. Most mammals don’t raise their offspring together, but humans do.
There is nowhere to cry in this city. But the wife has an idea one day. There is a cemetery half a mile from their apartment. Perhaps one could wander through it sobbing without unnerving anyone. Perhaps one could flap one’s hands even.
In many tribal cultures children are considered self-sufficient at or near the age of six. For all practical purposes, this means if they were lost overnight in the wild they might not perish. Of course, in modern industrial societies, children tend to be protected much longer. But there’s evidence that the age six still resonates with men. Researchers say that many men have affairs around the time their oldest child turns six. Chances are their genes will still march on even without direct oversight.
Eat the black berries! Not the red! Daddy has to go away for a little while. And don’t talk to the bears!
“How is that even possible?” the philosopher says. “He’s one of the kindest people I’ve ever met.”
She knows. She knows. So it begs the question, doesn’t it? Did she unkind and ungood and untrue him?
24
The wife goes to yoga now. Just to shut everyone up. She goes to it in a neighborhood where she does not live and has never lived. She takes the class meant for old and sick people but can still hardly do any of it. Sometimes she just stands and looks out the window where the people whose lives are intact enough not to have to take yoga live. Sometimes the wife cries as she is twisting her body into positions. There is a lot of crying in the class for the old and sick people so no one says anything.
But even the wife notices that her teacher is arrayed in light. The teacher takes pity on her and gives her private lessons. The wife tells her about the husband. About how he may or may not love someone else. About how she may or may not leave him. She tells her that they viciously whisper-fight at night when her daughter is in bed.
She does not say, Last night, I pulled his hair. Last night I tried to pull his hair out of his head.
It is so easy now for the wife to be patient and kind to the daughter. She will never love anyone or anything more. Never. It is official.
She remembers the first night she knew she loved him, the way the fear came rushing in. She laid her head on his chest and listened to his heart. One day this too will stop, she thought. The no, no, no of it.
Why would you ruin my best thing?
Her neighbor’s husband fell in love with a girl who served coffee to him every morning. She was twenty-three and wanted to be a dancer or a poet or a physical therapist. When he left his family, his wife said, “Does it matter to you how foolish you look? That all our friends find you ridiculous?” He stood in the doorway, his coat in his hand. “No,” he said. The wife watched her neighbor get fat over the next year. The Germans have a word for that. Kummerspeck. Literally, grief bacon.
Love is the word men use to paper over this.
Studies show that 110% of men who leave their wives for other women report that their wives are crazy.
Darwin theorized that there was something left over after sexual attractiveness had served its purpose and compelled us to mate. This he called “beauty” and thought it might be what drives the human animal to make art.
Every single song has a message for the wife these days. Some are particularly moving and must be played on repeat over and over as she walks to the subway. For example: Watergate does not bother me. Does your conscience bother you? Tell me true.
No one gets the crack-up he expects. The wife was planning for the one with the headscarf and the dark jokes and the people speaking kindly of her at her funeral.
Oh wait, might still get that one.
We both felt really bad about it, the husband tells the wife. “Oh, the hand-wringing!” her best friend says. “Do they think they’re in a movie?”
Sometimes the husband and wife run into each other in the park across the street. He is there to smoke, she to stare at the trees. He buttons the three buttons of her coat. He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, she thinks. Both have trouble working up the nerve to go into the Little Theater of Hurt Feelings. They joke that they should just run off to Mexico together. Forget this whole stupid thing.
But in they go. It is the designated place for questions.
“Are you still e-mailing or calling her?”
“No,” he says.
“Are you still sending her music?”
“No,” he says slowly. “I’m not sending her music.”
“What? What are you sending her?”
“Just one video,” he says.
“Of what?”
“Of guinea pigs eating a watermelon.”
What Kant said: What causes laughter is the sudden transformation of a tense expectation into nothing.
What the Girl said: Hey, I really like you.
25
The wife thinks the old word is better. She says he is besotted. The shrink says he is infatuated. She doesn’t want to tell what the husband says.
Anyway, he takes it back a few days in.
I am not very observant, the wife thinks. Once her husband bought a dining room table and it wasn’t until dinnertime that she noticed it. By then he was angry.
These are the sorts of things they talk about in the Little Theater of Hurt Feelings.
But she does get irritated when her college sends around the memo at the end of the semester about how to recognize a suicidal student. She wants to send it back marked up in black letters. How about you look in their eyes?
People say, You must have known. How could you not know? To which she says, Nothing has ever surprised me more in my life.
You must have known, people say.
The wife did have theories about why he was acting gloomy. He was drinking too much, for example. But no, that turned out to be completely backwards; all the whiskey drinking was the result, not the cause, of the problem. Correlation IS NOT causation. She remembered that the almost astronaut always got very agitated about this mistake that nonscientists made.
Other theories she’d had about the husband’s gloominess:
He no longer has a piano.
He no longer has a garden.
He no longer is young.
She found a community garden and a good therapist for him, then went back to talking about her own feelings and fears while he patiently listened.
Was she a good wi
fe?
Well, no.
Evolution designed us to cry out if we are being abandoned. To make as much noise as possible so the tribe will come back for us.
The ex-boyfriend starts sending her music. Rare cuts, B-sides, little perfect things. He wants to make amends, she remembers.
She did speed with him once. But it is not the best drug for her. Her brain tends to speed along anyway, speed, swerve, crash, and so on and so on. That is the default state of things.
Some nights in bed the wife can feel herself floating up towards the ceiling. Help me, she thinks, help me, but he sleeps and sleeps.
“What is he acting like?” her best friend says. Like an Evil Love Zombie is the answer.
That first time they fucked after she found out. Jesus. Jesus. He looking down at her body which was not the girl’s body, she looking up at his face which was not his face. “I’m sorry I let you get so lonely,” she told him later. “Stop apologizing,” he said.
What John Berryman said: Let all flowers wither like a party.
The wife reads about something called “the wayward fog” on the Internet. The one who has the affair becomes enveloped in it. His old life and wife become unbearably irritating. His possible new life seems a shimmering dream. All of this has to do with chemicals in the brain, allegedly. An amphetamine-like mix, far more compelling than the soothing attachment one. Or so the evolutionary biologists say.