Strange things have been going down in my people relationships. The day after the flood I got a card from Keith. I haven’t heard from him in almost a year. We were very close, but he never loved me. He was my element. But things change. They changed big time when I told him about the pregnancy. He said we’d “take care of it” together and then I heard nothing from him for months. I finally made the arrangements myself (Terri came with) and called him and told him. Suddenly he offered all kinds of help. I told him he was a bit late. That was the last time I’d talked to him.
Anyway, in his card Keith said he missed me, wanted to see me blah, blah, blah. I sat on it for a week or so, then called him. I went over to his apartment wanting to talk about this thing in me. I have been harboring ugly feelings for him for so long and I wanted them out. So, I let them out. I really let it rip. He told me to leave but then called me back and said I had a right to feel those things. He cried (!!!) and told me he had loved me, but was afraid. I saw that he was more right than he knew—he was afraid way, way down. And I saw that I’m not afraid. At least not in that deep down way. I said it was too late, that it couldn’t be like that.
Haven’t got much time, so I’ll just cram the rest in: (1) finally went to Zion—holy shit! (2) finished my course in meditation—the change is massive and I hope to continue meditating for the rest of my life (3) haven’t done any hard drugs or blacked out in three weeks. More to come on this, I hope.
Sending you a copy of the paper with my photo on the FRONT PAGE. Ok, must work now. Everyone is ok.
I love you,
Martha Claire
The Scene at the Arb
Dusk fell on Rust and Ivy’s backyard, a quarter acre of wild sagebrush backed up to Peavine Peak. A slab of patio ringed by pea gravel and dandelions, ice plant from the previous owner, a wall of tumbleweeds blown against the fence, bamboo leaning over from the neighbor’s yard. Out in the sagebrush, Joy and Eva scaled a play structure gifted by one set of grandparents and assembled by the other. Ty and I sat in lawn chairs on the slab, and Rust squatted on a cooler. Ivy reclined on a lounger with the new one. We couldn’t see the sunset, but the hour was as golden as the dead bighorn at the airport had promised, the sky over the Sierras certainly aflame.
“How’s Theo?” Ivy asked.
“Theo’s fine,” I said, all but wincing.
Ivy said, “Are you two still having a hard time?”
“We’re not ‘having a hard time.’ We just don’t know if we want to be married anymore.”
“Because you slept with that student?” Ty, as if inquiring which font I used on my vita.
“Spooned with a graduate student,” I replied. “And she wasn’t my student. She’s a theory person. Anyway, no, Theo doesn’t care about that. That’s just the administration that cares.”
Ivy asked, her gentleness soft as a bosom and unbearable, “Then why aren’t you sure if you want to be married anymore?”
“Because,” I said, my biologist’s most recent invitation to erotic rendezvous hot in my phone, “because of other things.”
“What other things?” Ty wanted to know.
“Things like our espresso maker.” I recalled for the assembled friends a time early in Theo’s and my courtship—our marriage counselor encouraged such reveries—when Theo had risen an hour earlier than me, read the paper, then dressed and walked out into the snow. Each morning he came back, red-cheeked and smiling, and set a latte on my desk just as I sat down to write.
“An assistant could do that,” was his opinion now. Now, we had an espresso maker. Now, we had a baby. And wasn’t that wonderful? For hadn’t I dreamt while Theo was gone, while sleeping alone in my bed reclaimed, of our baby? And hadn’t Theo wished, while trudging through the snow, for an espresso maker?
My problem was I’d never learned to use the espresso maker, preferred the farm stand slash coffee shop around the corner. I’d get a latte, change the baby’s diaper in the potty, torture myself by watching my favorite baristo flirt with some nymph in a romper.
The farm stand slash coffee shop had three teeny tiny tables scrunched in close. Once, Anne Carson met a former student at a table beside mine. These sorts of visitations do occur in Ann Arbor. Anne Carson sits diagonally from me, talking to her former student beside me, doling out affirmation and advice. I am eavesdropping slyly when Anne Carson looks right at me. She says, I think the universe is tired of waiting for you to get the message.
I said, “What, Anne Carson?”
Anne Carson was not talking to me. But also, she was.
I found the baristo on one of the apps. A long-limbed crust punk with sulky eyebrows and deep lines around his eyes from laughing so much, I imagined. I also imagined he had a nice long dick, and whacked off to this potentiality while awaiting his response.
Another Innocent, my baristo. The public Ivies are full of Innocents. None of them got their hands dirty. The last time I’d seen the baristo—in his bed, a mattress on the floor of course—he was moody, wondering why anyone would bring a child into this world. I knew why but didn’t tell him. Because otherwise we’d have no excuse to get together and fuck.
I’d had my Innocents and Theo had Viv. Theo’s best friends were, in this order: our daughter, then Viv, then me. Viv was a dancer. She lived somewhere in Europe on some residency or whatever. She and Theo met in Cuba, watching Alicia Alonso at the National Ballet. He had a whole romantic story about it: they had never touched, didn’t need to, which was so much worse than some cliché mattress on a floor or one night of spooning reported to the Office of Institutional Equity or various other consensual walkabouts with various other adults. Viv traveled the world alone, sent all kinds of wacky currency to my daughter. Viv remembered everyone’s birthdays, sent cards, gifts, long letters to which Theo wrote back immediately. It was all very Age of Innocence. I mostly boinked millennial preparers of beverages and schlepped to book festivals to hook up with whatever adequate rando lurked at the end of my signing line. This was what our open marriage looked like.
I asked Rust if he still had that weed left over from Burning Man, and could we bring it to the reading?
“She needs to be high before she goes onstage,” Ty said. “She’s a low-key drug addict.”
“I’ve got to stop spectating,” I said. “I’m hovering somewhere up there.” We all looked up to the purpling sky, to the cottonwoods where Larry still dangled. Fun fact about cottonwoods is they have a life span of about a hundred years and most of the cottonwoods throughout the American West, the ones lining almost every river and stream from the bosque to the palouse are about a hundred years old. There aren’t any new cottonwoods because for about a hundred years now there hasn’t been enough water for babies.
“I see you!” said Rust. “You’re in a hot air balloon.”
“Dad,” Ivy called up to the cottonwoods, “say hi to Claire for us!”
Larry said nothing, either did not hear us or did not care to respond.
I was in full-on mope mode. “And now apparently I’m supposed to talk to five hundred high schoolers tomorrow! I have no idea what I’m gonna say!”
“You’re an artist!” Rust said. “Just have them lie on the floor and listen to Pet Sounds!”
I’m not an artist, but Rust is. For his senior thesis he got a grant to travel to Minneapolis, where, over a period of three weeks and with the aid of an ornithology post-doc he was cockteasing, he clandestinely released dozens of color-bred canaries throughout the employee mall of the 3M corporation, which you may know as manufacturer of the Post-it, which has trademarked the color canary yellow.
“How come you didn’t prepare?” Ty asked.
“They just told me about it,” I said, meaning I’d just read the email where they told me about it. “Two hours I have with these kids at some ungodly hour tomorrow morning. Then someone’s taking me to the airport.”
I couldn’t cancel. I’d spent the honorarium. “They’re children,” I said. “Underserved.”
Rust nodded. “That’s it. Do your poor girl from the rurals bootstraps routine. For the encore do ‘Art Saves.’ ”
“I’d love to, believe me,” I said. “But I promised my therapist I’d stop doing things that make me feel like a fraud.”
“You’re not a fraud,” said Ivy supportively. “Just a slacker.”
“A slacker,” Ty put his hand on my shoulder as if he’d read it somewhere in a manual, “and a bit of a coward.”
“Actually,” I said, “I’ve been described as ‘searingly brave.’ ”
“By who?”
“N+1.”
“What is that?”
“My therapist also said so.”
“The one who says you’re a fraud?”
“The other one.”
“That you’re searingly brave?”
“Not ‘searingly’ but—”
“What for?”
“Having a baby before tenure.”
They all looked at me. After a time, Rust said, “That’s typical Oregon Trail Generation.”
Ty nodded. “Concentrating on the homestead.”
“What’s the Oregon Trail Generation?” I asked.
“It’s a think piece we all read,” said Ivy, not bothering to hide her accusation. “I posted it on my Tumblr.” I did not even know she had a Tumblr. I thought we were too old for Tumblr.
“The Oregon Trail Generation is us!” said Ty. “The generation that came of age along with the internet. Born in the eighties. Last of the analog natives. We had landlines and grew up to be digitally fluent. We played the Oregon Trail on Mac IIs in grade school and had cybersex on home PCs in middle school. Dial-up in high school, ethernet in college.”
“Generational identity theory,” Rust said. “Classic scam. Generations were invented by advertising executives. But this one is kinda neat! The idea is that technology changed so rapidly that it . . . isolated us from the generations we might have otherwise related to, Gen X on one side, Millennials on the other.”
“We are not old Millennials!” said Ty. “We’re a microgeneration.”
I considered this for some time. It felt right.
Then Ty said, “Hey, can I ask you a writing question?”
Reluctantly, I said he could.
“What did that one review mean by ‘sophomore slump’?”
Ivy shushed him.
“It’s fine,” I said. “In the Times, you mean? Basically, the critical consensus on my second book is that people really liked my first book.”
“And ‘overwrought.’ What does that mean? Too long?”
“Bossy word choice,” Rust said. “I warned you about that. You should try to stay as far away from your work as you can. Unless you really want to go up your own asshole, as Vonnegut said.”
I told Rust that Vonnegut also said, All this really happened, more or less, but he went on.
“And now this? You’re writing about this, this”—he flung his arms up to encompass everything around him, his homestead, his women—“this inanity!”
To Ty I said, “It means overwriting.”
“Overwriting,” Ty exclaimed, “that’s exactly the right word for it. I can see what makes you such a good teacher.”
Ivy could not resist. “That, plus the cuddleslutting.”
* * *
—
What I did not tell my friends was I’d broken a rule, an unsaid one. Do I have to say it now?
“To be fair, it feels like I loved this person first,” I’d told Theo. “Years ago.” By first I meant something like in a past life. “Loved them, then you. Now them again.”
Theo said, “ ‘Fair’?”
I said my plan was to wait for it to come back around to him. Love, I guess I meant. My adoration. I said I was trying to stay put. I said this while packing my bag.
He said, “Are you ever going to put these clothes away or are you just going to high-grade them until I do laundry again?”
I said, “I can’t find a trace of me in this house!”
He said, “This is not about the house.”
“The house is haunted,” I said. “Mildly. Admit that.”
“I’m not denying it.”
“You’re not affirming it.”
“I’m commiserating with you.”
“Well, I’m not miserating,” I said, “so maybe you’re just a complainer.”
“Oh, you’re miserating.”
“I’m honestly not, I just know this house has some bad juju, a little malevolence. The whole region does! It’s making us fight.”
“The house or the upper Midwest?”
“I have to get out of here.”
“I’m sympathizing,” Theo said. “I’m trying to. But if anyone’s haunted, it’s you.”
I said maybe if I could get outside more . . .
If I had to say, absolutely had to right at this moment, I would have to admit that I am in love with various Innocents, my biologist and some others too, but not Theo, not my husband, not right now. I don’t want to get into the weeds here. The point is as soon as the ground thawed, I started sleeping in a tent in our backyard. It was cold, and sometimes widow-makers swooped down from the black walnut, but it was quiet and I felt free out there, so free that one day I said, “I’m thinking of moving out, Theo.”
“You already moved out.”
“I mean out of the yard. My own place.”
He said, “Where?”
“The Arb, probably,” meaning the Arboretum. “I need to get a feel for the scene over there first.”
Theo said, “You say you don’t love me anymore but I don’t believe you.”
I said, “At yoga they say the only constant is change.”
“Who says that? The yogi?”
“The chalkboard in the bathroom,” I admitted. “But it speaks to me.”
Theo was quiet awhile. Thinking of the mistakes he’d made, I assumed. Eventually he said, “What others?”
A question they all liked.
* * *
—
I cased the Arb at dusk in disguise as somebody’s mother. L.L. Bean boots, Patagonia jacket, lined REI leggings, the baby in the UPPA. O, the trespassing a suburban white woman can get away with pushing a six-hundred-dollar stroller!
Theo didn’t feel entirely comfortable with this.
“Relax,” I said. “The Arb is public property.”
“It’s not. It’s university property.”
“A public university! Or has everyone forgotten that? And I’m an employee! They’d let me sleep in my office, wouldn’t they? How many male professors going through divorces have slept in those offices over the years? They’d at least look the other way! The Arb is just an extension of my office.”
“So sleep in your office then if we’re going through a divorce.”
“It’s too depressing in there.”
It wasn’t even my office. It was Joyce Carol Oates’s office. She was on perpetual leave so I was permitted to use it. But I didn’t dare move her things, didn’t make room on the wall of memorabilia opposite the desk: decades of JCO swag including first editions of her countless books, framed posters from gigs at the 92nd Street Y, and a portrait signed flirtily to her by Muhammad Ali. At office hours, students took in the JCO wall reverently. My favorite, the theoretician, said, “I guess you really like Joyce Carol Oates.”
I told Theo, “I’ll be fine at the Arb. I come from a long line of squatters.” He seemed sad at me. I touched his arm. “You knew I was moving out, Theo. I technically already have.”
“It’s not that,” he said. “I’m actually relieved you’re mov
ing out. Moved out. And I think it’s cool you’re following your . . . heart, or . . . whatever . . . is happening . . . out there”—he wagged his hand northward—“at the Arb. It’s just . . . I’d gotten excited about you taking the baby out more.”
“Oh, Theo.”
“I thought you were starting to like spending time with her.”
I agreed not to implicate the baby. I didn’t need her anymore anyway. I procured various tools from Theo with little more resistance than a weary request for me to please put them back on their proper pegs in the shed when I was done (which just now I realized I forgot to do). I wrapped the tools in baby blankets and ferried them in the UPPA to the cemetery adjacent the Arb. I opened up a seam in a secluded segment of the fence, bent the new sharp prongs back and passed through.
A tent would be a tell. Tents practically screamed hobo! Whereas my hammock said student, said white, said money, soon said nothing at all, for as I got bolder and the trees leafed out, I cinched my straps higher and higher, so that by June I could smoke weed and read way up in canopy seclusion. When it got dark, if I had enough juice, I called Theo.
“Are you still glad I moved out?” I asked him.
“Yeah. But I’m sad, too.”
We could have sex with other people or fall in love with other people, but not both. Not both in the same person. That was the rule I broke. His word, “rule.” I felt it was more of a guideline. “An aspirational value,” I said. We were describing human beings after all, flawed and confused, ever lost and imperfect. “In the best of times,” I may have said.
Couldn’t we be decent and loyal and at the same time completely free? Maybe things like “loyal” and “free” look different to different people, and did that make someone with a different “loyalty” or “freedom” wrong or bad? I sent him some links. Isn’t the best kind of life one where all kinds of things happen? Theo did not see it this way. I could not apologize and come home because I was not sorry. I did not feel love was ever a bad thing. Days Theo was at the hospital and the baby was at Miss Moonbeam’s I let myself into the house to shower and smell her things.
I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness Page 8