by Jamie Quatro
She has a friend whose husband suffers with premature ejaculation; another whose husband is addicted to porn. Thomas has abandonment issues, she tells herself. It’s a small cross to bear.
It won’t take long. She’ll look at the books stacked on her nightstand, the bottle of water, the ceramic lamp with its taupe linen shade. When he’s finished, he’ll hold her and stroke her hair and say, over and over, I’m sorry. That was the last time. I swear to God, Maggie, it will never happen that way again.
Take us to the Hyatt. In the backseat his fingers barely touching the edge of my thigh, taut in its pencil skirt. I began to shift my hips side to side—a fraction of an inch each way, the movement nearly imperceptible—side to side, over and over and the skirt began to ride up but he didn’t move his hand so by the time we arrived at the hotel his fingertips were pressed against my skin. I stopped moving, he kept his hand where it was—this mutual refusal to pull away signifying our tacit agreement, We will do the most we can do without the appearance of intent, we will do the most we can without speaking, without looking, even my breath I kept as shallow as possible, as if word or look or breath would rupture some temporal membrane but as long as his hand stayed where it was, as long as my leg didn’t move, we could stay here, poised between our platonic past and carnal future. Balanced on this precipice we could blow open eternity. The car idled. The driver cleared his throat. And then the indecision—the intentional nonaction—was over, James was pulling me out of the car, aggressively, by the elbow. I stood and tugged my skirt down, he gripped my wrist and said Leave it, in his eyes the amusement and admiration, but something else, too, what I’d seen in a priest’s eyes once (attending mass with a Catholic friend; Just do what I do, she said), when he placed a wafer on my tongue and said, Body of Christ broken for you: sanctity, humility, willingness to be a vessel, used of God for a higher purpose. Also superiority and control. For this I was ordained, there is no one else who can administer this sacrament, in this moment I am the only one who can give you what you need, his fingers lacing into mine as he pulled me through the revolving doors behind him, so close that for a moment my hips were pressed into his backside and then we were in the lobby with its mirrors and modern fixtures, reception desks made of blocks of wood inlaid with marble, giant paintings like fractured stained glass. I gripped his hand, one solid thing in a universe quivering liquid. In the elevator I pressed floor 16, then moved to the back and let the mirrored wall hold me up. James stood beside me. The doors closed, our reflections slid into place: thin auburn-haired woman tall in heels; dark-headed, dark-suited man beside her. I watched the woman in the reflection lean against the man. Watched the man open his jacket and pull the woman against his white shirt.
Here is house. Here is red front door opening onto front staircase with a curved banister the husband wraps with colored lights each year at Christmas. A photo gallery that needs updating, school pictures of each child in uniform, polo shirts, khaki pants, and plaid skirts, in third grade the son wearing cowboy boots with his shorts, his hair slicked back with gel; daughter with a curly bob and bangs, hair lengthening and bangs growing out as the photos move up the stairwell. Here is dining room, farmhouse table pocked and gouged, the long mirror in which wife and husband and daughter and son have seen their reflections each day for nineteen years. Here is round kitchen table with four chipped-paint chairs, cat asleep on the window ledge, gerbil on a metal wheel, running for his life. Here is master bedroom with four-poster bed, king-sized mattress purchased after son was born. Dresser with its tiny top drawer in which wife has kept notes from children and husband and, tucked in an envelope, nude pictures of herself nine months pregnant. Here is bathroom, husband’s idle razor, lidless bottle of cologne, engagement picture on a beach in San Diego, wife in a bandeau bikini, tanned skin and fifteen pounds lighter. Too thin, back then. Daughter’s bedroom, twin beds ordered from Pottery Barn, carpet stained with paint, bulletin board with ticket stubs from movies and concerts, boarding passes from trips to England and India; handwritten Bible verses from when she used to go to Sunday school (Let your beauty be that of your inner self) and lists she made during her list-making phase—Things I Will Do This Summer: 1) dance in the rain 2) eat watermelon 3) watch the stars come out—each item with a small pencil drawing beside it. The monogrammed pillowcase she didn’t take to college. Here is son’s bedroom, stacks of books he never read, clear shoe boxes full of Legos and dominoes and marbles. Squirt guns, airsoft gun, Nerf gun, vestiges of a little boy’s life.
Here is stove, microwave, coffeepot. The gravity of the kitchen sink. Here is window over sink, looking onto back porch and back door, through which wife has watched them leave, and come home, and leave again.
(How was Chicago? Thomas asks.
She’s standing at the sink, holding a butter dish under hot running water.
Fine, she says. Busy.
Did you see that poet?
What poet?
The one at Princeton. The one you write to.
She turns off the water, places the butter dish facedown on the wooden drying rack.
Briefly, she says.)
I want you to list five positive and five negative memories from your childhood.
That isn’t why I’m here.
Why are you here?
Because I fucked someone who isn’t my husband. Because I’m in love with my husband. Because I’m in love with a man I can never speak to again. Because I want to stay married. Because I’m filled with longing for a life I can’t have. Because I don’t want to confess to Thomas. Because I must confess to Thomas.
I’ve been doing this for a long time, you need to trust me. Let’s start with the memories.
But I want to talk about New York. How it was supposed to be the last time we ever saw one another. How the grief following that decision became fuel for what happened in Chicago.
Telling me about that day—and you’ve told me about it already—won’t help the healing process.
We’ll see about that.
I suppose we will.
September 11, 2016
New York City, overcast morning turning sunny and warm by afternoon, first edge of fall, angled sun and shadow on sidewalks and stoops. Everywhere, fire trucks, Never Forget signs, thank-yous, handshakes, hugs. We’d moved Tommy into his dorm at NYU two weeks before. Thomas had gone home to get back to work, I’d stayed on with a friend in Brooklyn.
I rode the F train from Carroll Gardens to West 4th. I’d planned to walk up 5th and meet James in Union Square. The summer heat was still trapped underground, stale air compressing my body, my feet so hot in my heels I took them off and walked barefoot through Washington Square Park, a carnival: a bearded man, shirtless and in socks, grabbing up pigeons and holding them to his mouth, one by one, though what he did with or to them was unclear, his long hair fell around his face and obscured the view. A man in a tuxedo playing Clair de Lune on a concert grand beside the fountain—he played badly, all rubato, no sense of the precision of the 9/8 time signature. A ballerina dressed as a dominatrix doing ronds de jambe for a cheering crowd, her long ponytail wrapped in a black cord. It kept smacking her face like a whip, leaving a red stripe across both cheeks. Pain obviously the salient part of her performance.
I walked under the arch—Empire State Building in front, Freedom Tower behind—glorious to be here, on this day, some new beat in my vascular system, an anticipatory cadence that matched the wider pulse of traffic and construction noise. Life, life. Manhattan was saying it. In the interstices between tragedies, the spaces between the arrowing buildings, the rush of air in alleyways and tunnels, breezes across rooftops, life. So much sweat and energy absorbed by the inanimate, I thought, if you removed every human from this island the stones would cry out. Faulkner said the East and Middlewest—New York, Chicago—are young because they’re alive, the South old because it’s dead. Killed by the Civil War. Maybe that was what I felt. I’d come up from Nashville to find myself among the living.<
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He hadn’t been to the city on a 9/11 in the fifteen years since. Too painful, he said, too many souls lost. A colleague’s mother, who worked in food services; a former classmate who worked in day care; the neurosurgeon who lived three doors down, whose newly graduated son worked at One World Trade Center. His second day on the job. He’d gotten a haircut, and that was the thing the surgeon noticed, James said, when he was called to identify the remains: the son’s fresh haircut, precise edge along the neckline into which the surgeon pressed his face and wept.
James rode the train in from Princeton that Sunday to have lunch with his daughter at The New School, and to see me again, in the flesh. I imagined our parallel lives, when he described lunch with Caroline, her flyaway hair and the low-cut dress he kept wanting to adjust; my own daughter at Boston College, also a junior, with hair to her waist; and our sons, both starting their freshman years, with man-buns and habits of smoking weed in order to fall asleep at night. He’d made the requisite arrangements—though his wife wondered why, of all dates, he chose this one to go into the city—because I’d decided we should end our communication and he wanted to talk me out of it.
Did you tell Beth you’d see me? I asked. We were walking through Union Square.
I told her, he said. At the last minute.
And?
Tell Maggie I look forward to meeting her. That’s what she said.
His phone chiming while I stopped to buy die-cut paper foldouts of the Taj Mahal for Kate, Eiffel Tower for Tommy; chiming as we walked up Broadway, making our way toward Penn Station so he could catch the train back. It was close to four. We looked at churches—Serbian Orthodox, Marble Collegiate—trying to find one with a door still unlocked, someplace cool and private. I bumped into an acquaintance crossing 28th. Maggie? she said. She was in the city en route from Amsterdam, had just been to India, where my daughter was about to go, and she told me how a shopkeeper in Delhi, wrapping a Ganesh statue in newspaper, complimented her choice: You will not be disappointed, he is bestselling god!
What are the odds, James said later, when we were sitting across from one another in a coffee shop. If you consider the number of people on this island.
The chimes were texts from his wife. Why can’t you get on an earlier train. We have the dinner tonight, I need you to pick up some wine. Caroline said you left her at two, what could you possibly have to talk about with Maggie for this long? Texts finally superseded by a phone call. I need a minute, he said, putting the phone to his ear, and in the quick way he said it—I need a minute—and more important what the phrase meant (Don’t let Beth hear you while I’ve got her on the line), I wondered if I was one of many, just another woman with whom he’d taken up a clandestine conversation, one more frisson fueled by lust and loneliness and the need to tap into some kind of creative energy, some in-love-ness, however fictitious, to keep him working; and if his wife, knowing this pattern of his, was rightfully, mercifully insinuating herself between us. I heard the edge of frustration in his tone when he spoke to her, it was a response-in-kind, he was only matching his pitch to her frustration and (deeper) fear, as couples do; but I heard in his voice (Well, did they want us there right at seven? Can I at least go home and change first?) an impatience that, I imagined, would uncurl itself into full-blown anger once he got home.
Sitting across from him, listening to his end of the conversation—beneath the table I was shredding my napkin, twirling the bits into pebbles—I imagined him explaining me to his wife in the same tone. The buzz from the flirtation fuels my art, she lives nine hundred miles away, what are you worried about?
She’s fuel, nothing more, I imagined him telling his wife.
Though in the coffee shop that day I knew none of it was true—knew, in his physical presence again, that whatever was between us was dangerous, and real, and needed to end.
We can’t just throw our friendship over a cliff, he said. You’ve become too important to me.
I can’t keep it up, I said. (Stuffing napkin-pebbles into my jeans pocket.)
What are you afraid of, if we just keep up a professional dialogue?
That I’ll keep being in love with you, I said. Hefted the word onto the table and let it sit there between us. Always my weakness, to lay out the unfiltered truth no matter the consequence. He looked away when I said the word love. Angry, maybe, that I’d said it first, or said it at all. (Two forces rule the universe, Simone Weil says. Light and gravity. And what is the reason that as soon as one human being shows he needs another, no matter whether his need be slight or great, the latter draws back? Answer: gravity.)
We finished our coffee and kept walking. At an intersection the light was changing; I started to run but he grabbed my elbow. Careful, he said, letting go and for three seconds pressing his palm between my shoulder blades, and in the afternoon glow of the fifteenth anniversary of 9/11 in New York City, a day on which nothing in the United States of America was tangibly amiss, I knew that our conversation, emails, shared music, photos, phone calls, texts, all of it would gather to a microscopic point, quivering with quantum energy, and if we decided to allow it—if we were brave or foolhardy or desperate or in love enough—would explode outward in a single, effortless, life-changing orgasm. I mean it was there for the taking if we wanted to take it. Even our bodies lined up, me lifted two inches in my heels so that when we turned to look at one another, standing at the intersection, we were eye to eye. Navel to navel, hip bone to hip bone.
We’d come up to it. Right up to the edge. I’d laid myself bare in front of him, made myself—what—too forward, distasteful? Though might it have been a way of trying to save myself, telling him I was in love? (And was I? Am I? Or is James—as you, Counselor, would say—the next in line, my line, a litany of men I draw toward myself not out of loneliness or unhappiness, but out of one desire, to be fucked by someone besides my husband? And because I only know arousal within love—because I’ve never separated emotion from body—is my pattern to create a pretend love first, over and over, in order to feel desire, and desirable?)
At the coffee shop we exchanged books. I gave him my marked-up copy of St. John of the Cross. In the absence of conversation, I said, this might be a way to feel as if we’re still talking.
He gave me a Sharon Olds collection. This will break your heart, he said.
At 31st we cut over to 7th. We could try St. John the Baptist, he said.
In front of the church he looked at one last text.
I’m sorry but I have to run, he said.
And he did—he ran. Walking back downtown I fingered the napkin-pebbles in my pocket, then dropped them on the pavement. One by one, block by block. Leaving a trail in case he decided to turn around.
Maggie: Thank you for coming in to see me.
James: It was lovely—and lovely is the right word—to be with you in person again. Two years was too long. I only wish I didn’t have to run off like that.
M: Probably for the best.
J: [ … typing]
M: Though I’m feeling a bit melted now.
J: Are you in a cab?
J: Me too. Melted.
M: Yes. On Manhattan Bridge.
J: I’m going to write you tomorrow. A long letter.
M: [ … typing]
J: I have more to say.
M: No. Let’s let today be it.
J: Ok.
M: You read the book I gave you and I’ll read the book you gave me.
J: Ok.
M: Thank you.
J: [ … typing]
M: (heart)
J: (broken heart)
How clean, how simple the early days in the big house in Franklin. A house they will grow into. Green summer spilling into empty rooms, sunlight reflecting off wood floors, dust motes glittering like static. The back lawn sloping down to the wooden swing set and honeysuckle border; dogwoods and crape myrtles and pines along the driveway, their two cars parked beneath the trees. They intend to add on a garage but never get a
round to it. Over the years the hoods grow speckled with sap.
When the weather cools she opens the French doors and plays the grand piano—a Steinway, another inheritance purchase—imagining the notes carrying into neighbors’ yards. The children are four and two. They press the keys of the upper register with their fingertips and Maggie lifts them into her lap, holds pointer fingers to press single notes. “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” They run around naked after baths, hold hands and bounce on the bed. In the kitchen they pull out plastic containers with rainbow-colored lids.
Lellow, Kate says, handing a lid to Tommy.
Lellow, Tommy says.
Good job, little man! Kate says, kissing the top of his head.
Maggie doesn’t correct Kate’s backward-speak: godmother fairy, pale nolish, footbare, or the way she calls honeydew greenalope. While they nap Maggie wanders rooms, at peace with the tactility of child-rearing, the raw physicality of it. It’s as if she’s come to her senses outside of academia. She reads stories and novels, theology and poetry. And she writes poetry, or tries.
Potty training, sippy cups, half-day preschool, singsong videos. Now the children are five and three. They sit in tiny rocking chairs engraved with their names and watch a video her mother sent, an animated version of the Exodus story. The children love the songs, though she fast-forwards the scene in which the Angel of Death curls out of a cloud, a green vapor probing doorways, repelled by blood on lintels. They watch a series of videos called “Veggie Tales,” put out by a nearby production company. A cucumber and tomato and other vegetables sing and act out stories from the Bible. “Dave and the Giant Pickle”; “Josh and the Very Big Wall”; “Where’s God When I’m Afraid?” A tiny asparagus sings a song about God, and how he’s bigger than the boogie man.