Topics of Conversation

by Miranda Popkey

  What I care about—what I try to care about—now. A sense of humor. Kindness, whatever that is. Knowing who the good teachers are, knowing how to get my kid into their classes. I did have a kid, eventually. A baby who is now a kid. Not with my ex. Not with anyone. I mean, not with anyone who’s still around.

  So Laura got divorced and moved in with my parents and after a while I went down to visit. We went for a hike in Griffith Park. The winter and the first half of that spring it had rained, really rained, for the first time in years. Thunderstorms taking drivers on the 405 by surprise. Record snowpack in the Sierras. This was June and people were skiing. In Griffith Park the bloom had peaked in March but wildflowers were still sprouting, an embarrassment of petals, yellow and burnt sienna and ripe purple, pale green stalks. The top layer of earth was a soft powder, a light brown so anonymous and uniform as to appear, in memory, colorless, and Laura talked and I listened. I walked ahead of Laura because I am by nature a competitive person and also because Laura was talking and so slightly out of breath. She talked about Dylan. I’d only met him once, at the wedding, their courtship had been so rushed and then also their marriage.

  Dylan had been raised by his aunt and uncle. His mother had died in childbirth or just after—an infection contracted at the hospital, not as rare as you’d think—and his father, devastated, had driven from Belzoni, Mississippi, to Salina, Kansas, the baby in a drawer liberated from the bedroom dresser, and knocked on his dead wife’s sister’s door. At least, Laura said, this was how she imagined it. The father driving the eleven hours straight, though of course he must have stopped for gas, to feed the baby. The drawer part was true, Dylan had told her that, said the aunt and uncle still had it, though this didn’t make sense to Laura, wouldn’t Dylan’s father have needed the drawer, back home. But Dylan had shrugged, said probably he’d been too ashamed to ask for it back. Didn’t spend the night, had a cup of coffee then he was back on the road. Dylan swore his father hadn’t called ahead, hadn’t asked his sister-in-law and her husband whether they wanted to take the baby, take him. Laura had asked and Dylan had shaken his head, back and forth, his head drooping so that Laura could see the bald spot, a perfect circle, like a timid monk’s tonsure, blooming at the tip of his skull. I loved that bald spot, Laura said, that soft underbelly he carried at the top of his head.

  We were drinking whiskey, Laura said, and it was late. All I did in Mississippi, Laura said, was drink whiskey. Summer nights, we’d drive out into the country, start with beer, Budweiser, nothing fancy, then a beer and a shot, the beer going down easy, like water, the condensation on the bottle being the real point, how cool it was against my hands, my neck, you know out in the country even the bars didn’t have air-conditioning, just ceiling fans, if your skin was dry you could barely feel the breeze. The whole state was like a proof of concept for the idea of sweating. By the time he got to this part of the story we were drinking whiskey straight. We’d known each other a few weeks then and he wasn’t trying to seduce me, he didn’t need to, for one, we fucked the night we met—the word fucked here standing in for Laura’s anger, I stumbled as she said it, small rocks on the path coming loose under my feet as it came snapping out of her mouth—but also it wasn’t the story you’d tell if you were trying to get a woman to sleep with you. It was the story you’d tell after, when you’d decided you wanted to sleep with her again, and again after that, maybe wanted to keep sleeping with her for a while, but also you were a man and so you couldn’t come right out and say it because telling people what you want makes you weak. That, Laura interrupted herself, I actually believe. Telling people what you want, speaking desire, and I could hear the air quotes in her voice, the ones she used when she slipped into grad-school vernacular. It’s like telling people how to hurt you, handing them instructions. I think, Laura said, the fact that women are better at asking for what they want, that we have to be otherwise we’ll never get it, and even then, even asking, mostly we don’t, I think this is why we’re stronger than men, in general. But anyway, Laura said, what Dylan said was after his mother died there was a funeral, and at the funeral his aunt asked if they, if we, needed any help and my father said we would be fine. My father, Dylan said, was a man of few words. Probably he was still in shock and didn’t know it, that’s what my aunt said. So six months went by and every week or so my aunt would call my father to check in on us and every week my father would say we were doing just fine, thanks for asking. And then one week my aunt called and my father didn’t pick up, the phone just rang and rang and the next day he was at my aunt’s house, we both were, him in a suit looking sheepish and me in the drawer, overheated. They thought I had a temperature but I was just swaddled too tightly. My aunt thinks he had a breakdown. I think he came to his senses. I think, Laura said, that’s the night I fell in love with him. If he’d asked me to marry him that night I would have said yes. It wasn’t the story itself but how he told it. No anger in him, just sorrow. Sorrow not for himself but for his father, how scared he must have been. His father was dead by the time Dylan moved back to Mississippi. It wasn’t forgiveness in his voice. Laura shook her head. It was more, it was beyond, it was like—like forgiveness was something he could turn around and look at, like that’s how far in the past it was, like that’s how still it was for him, how sure. And I thought that was beautiful. It was a religious feeling I had, sitting across from him, like I was in the presence of something holy. And I don’t think I was wrong, but I do think I saw him for a moment and thought I’d seen him whole, only that’s not how it works, is it. The whole is the whole, the moment can’t stand in for it.

  By this time we’d hiked to the top of something—a ridge or hill, not a proper mountain—and so we paused and stood together for a moment, silent, looking out. Also, Laura said, I didn’t realize how many times he’d told the story. I should have known, how polished it was. The practiced hesitations. I thought he was opening a door. And that on the other side of the door was—intimacy, I guess. Only it was just a room. A crowded one. Laura made a sound like she’d started to laugh but forgotten how partway through. I looked at her. Since we’d reached the top of the hill or ridge I had only been half-listening, had been thinking, instead, about what it would feel like to push Laura over the edge. I mean literally. Not that I was angry at her. Just, I’d been having these kinds of thoughts. On the freeway, looking at the bumper of the car in front of me, at the low fence separating asphalt from dirt and then rocks and then ocean. Thinking the word temptation. On balconies and sidewalks, my mind flipping back and forth between jump and push.

  It might be worth mentioning that at that moment I hated Laura, was glad her marriage had fallen apart, that her ceaseless trust in the world had at last been proven foolish. Finding friends in every city she moved to, marrying a man on the strength of what, who knows, everywhere manufacturing happiness, happiness, happiness. But her luck had run out. Her story was still the better story, but finally, thank god, she was miserable in it.

  Also that I’d started involuntarily imagining what it would be like to fuck every man I came into contact with. What it would be like if the power went out and everyone else in the room were raptured and we just had to do it right there on the conference room table for the sake of, you know, humanity, his hand in my hair, pulling, and me opening my mouth to protest, the words dying in my throat. Involuntarily, right. I was working in HR at this point, is that irony. I should know, that PhD I didn’t finish was in English lit. Probably this was connected to the fact that I’d started watching porn. Every morning, right after taking my basal body temperature, like putting a thermometer in my vagina gave me the idea. Like I couldn’t think about making a baby without thinking about making a baby. In retrospect I think I was mad at my husband. Is that too obvious? Remarkable how hard it is for women to admit they’re angry. Not annoyed or upset or irked or miffed or any sentiment that might be captured in a text message that ends in a series of exasperated question marks. Angry.

  The
fantasies I kept having, I hated not the form of them but the content. Not that they were pornographic but that they were clichéd, that even the sex I let myself imagine was boring. Another cliché: my husband was having an affair. No, not another cliché, a lie. Actually I cheated, and not on a conference room table post-rapture, in a hotel room, there’s the cliché, up in the city, San Francisco. Then I came home and told my husband. This was later.

  Up on the ridge or hill I turned to Laura and said, “Why did you tell me that story?”

  “I think,” she said, “I thought I was telling you a story about how we fell in love.”

  We started back down the path. “What do you think the story is about now?” I was again in front of her and so had to turn around to ask this question.

  “Sometimes I think it’s a story about being tricked. Not that he did it on purpose, but it wasn’t accidental, him confiding in me, just then.” Of course every confidence is a kind of manipulation. Or calculation. I trust you with this. Or maybe it’s I want you to think that I trust you with this.

  “And other times?”

  “A low bar. I’m not—I mean, your mother dies and your father abandons you, I’m not saying that’s not rough. But the man tells me one sad, you know he shares one feeling—not even, he sort of implies emotional depth, and I’m ready to marry him. We ask too little. Or I do, anyway.”

  We got to my car and I drove Laura back to my parents’ house. She asked me if I wanted to come in and I said I didn’t, But tell them I said hello. Then I drove back up north, to Marin County, which was where we lived. You know Marin County, clogs and herbs in window boxes and cleaning with white-wine vinegar. Inconveniencing ourselves, yes, but only if we were guaranteed an aesthetic payoff. Good intentions, sure, but when have they ever been enough. And my herbs were dying. Some wanted water and some wanted sun and some wanted shade and a good talking-to and I couldn’t bring myself to care which ones were which. Anyway even the aesthetics we could barely afford, how we thought we were going to manage with a child I have no idea. When we split I moved in with my parents, my husband had to get a roommate.

  Two things Laura said: the part about speaking desire and also the part about the low bar. I started thinking about how I’d told John, that was the future then ex now, I wanted a baby, and he’d said Okay, like that, no conversation just Okay, like it was my decision, how endlessly supportive he was every month when I got my period, never angry, never sad, like it was something that was happening not to us but to me. And then I thought about how what I wanted was not a baby, not a baby with John, what I wanted was to go into the glass-fronted cabinet we’d bought at an antiques fair and restored, John was handy, he had that going for him, all those summers working construction, and remove the tea service his parents had gotten for him, for us, a wedding present, Limoges china, floral pattern, delicate handles, those rims so thin you wanted to bite right through them, and smash it, smash every single piece. Twelve cups and twelve matching saucers and the teapot, bulbous, mocking me. A bizarre gift, his parents weren’t particularly rich or particularly British, something they said they thought I’d like. Maybe because I was, am, a snob.

  So I opened the cabinet and I took the teapot out but then instead of smashing it I set it down on the ground and I removed its dainty lid and I unzipped my jeans and I pulled down my underwear and I pissed in it. Wiped the spray away with the bottom of my T-shirt, put the lid back on. Lifted the teapot, put it back in the cabinet, closed the cabinet’s glass-fronted door. In my hand the china felt, just slightly, warmer.

  The piss stayed in the teapot for a year, my last year with John. Then I had my affair and I got my divorce and I gave John the teapot and now I live somewhere else with my kid. He’s a boy. I haven’t seen Laura in years.

  San Francisco, 2012

  Twice a month.” A smirk. “Maybe three times. Three days, two nights. Usually Tuesday to Thursday, though sometimes I’ll pull a Monday–Wednesday, a Wednesday–Friday.” I was on the bed, he was on a gray armchair. “Wednesday–Friday, that’s the shit. Thursday’s the weekend but with plausible deniability. It’s weekend pussy but no missed soccer games, no wife on my case about date night, no you don’t spend time with me, no you don’t love me anymore. None of that crap.” He’d loosened his tie and unlaced his shoes and he was drinking scotch from the minibar.

  “Can you hear yourself?” The armchair was all curves, not a right angle on her. Upholstered in velvet, which had to mean velvet had swung all the way back around, gone from classy to chintzy to classy again. Earlier I’d asked him a question.

  “Hear myself what?”

  “Weekend pussy. Wife on my case.” The heels of his shoes grinding into the carpet. The carpet plush and white. Would show a stain and hold it, that carpet would. The question had been, How often do you travel for business?

  “So, what the fuck? What’s wrong with the way I talk?”

  “What’s wrong with the way I talk?” I rolled my eyes. “What deleted scene in which Scorsese are you from.”

  “This is why the CEO won’t let broads on our floor.” He set the scotch down, stood. “Guys need to be able to let off some steam, use language.”

  “Use language,” I said, two fingers doing air quotes. “Broads.”

  “The fuck’s wrong with the word broads?” He paused. “Wait, time out.” He crossed his arms. “Do you actually hate this?”

  “You’re asking? This isn’t part of the—”

  “I said time out.”

  “No.”

  “No you don’t actually hate this?”

  “No I don’t actually hate this.”

  “So why are you—”

  “You’re being a dick. I’m responding to you being a dick. That doesn’t mean I don’t like it.” My dress was in the bathroom and I was wearing the hotel’s bathrobe and under the hotel’s bathrobe I wasn’t wearing anything.

  “That doesn’t mean you don’t like it.”

  “No, it doesn’t—but okay, now you’ve fucked it up.” A pause. “Throw me a bourbon, will you?”

  He walked to the minibar.

  “That was what, investment banker?”

  “Hedge fund.” His back was to me now. “That is how they talk, you know.” Either his voice was muffled because he was facing away or, annoying possibility, I’d actually wounded him. I resisted the urge to roll my eyes.

  “I don’t—I wasn’t—” I shook my head. “Forget it. I trust you, forget it. What’s next.”

  “You choose.” He tossed me a mini-bottle of Bulleit and I caught it, unscrewed it.

  “I hate making choices.” My voice just a little higher. The a in hate held half a second too long.

  “What if”—he looked at me—“I gave you direction.” Coming out of his sulk then, good boy.

  “I take direction”—my eyes on his, my body shifting against the bathrobe against the duvet cover against the duvet against the sheets—“very well.”

  “Noted.” Stepping closer to me. “Filed.”

  “So. Give me direction.”

  “Let’s say”—a step closer, his hands on the duvet, his torso over the bed now—“as far from stockbroker as you can get.” His face level with my face, his hands moving up the duvet. “Let’s say none of that generic bro bullshit. But let’s say you still hate him. Have good reason to hate him.”

  “You think I want to fuck someone I hate.”

  “Let’s say I do.” His face very close to mine and then turning. He stood up, retrieved his glass of scotch, raised it. “Let’s work from that assumption.”

  “Okay,” I said, “give me a minute.” A pause, a slug from the mini-bottle. “Okay,” I said, “let’s say he’s a vegetarian. Let’s say he’s a feminist. A Marxist, even, but like, totally willing to consider the ways in which class just might be affected by gender and race. Calls his mother twice a week and says he was raised by a strong woman, says it one-hundred-percent unironically. On the first date, tells you his favorite
novel is The Golden Notebook.”

  “Is what?”

  “Is The Bell Jar?”

  “Not even a male feminist is that dumb.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You know it’s actually—but okay, fine. Not The Bell Jar. And not The Awakening, either, and probably not House of Mirth because he skimmed a thing about how Edith Wharton maybe hated women and that gave him, like, a bullshit ex post facto excuse for not having read her. Okay, so that leaves us with—oh, wait, oh I’ve got it”—almost spilling bourbon in my excitement, catching myself in time—“so he makes a point of telling you his favorite poet is Adrienne Rich but he’s really only read, like, a handful of her essays in some anthology or whatever because of course he thinks poetry is like, so bourgeois, but Rich is such a great feminist he figures—”

  “Wait, so is Adrienne—”

  “No, wait, no”—my hands flying up—“it’s actually perfect that you don’t—but shut up now, you’ll ruin it.”

  This was before Tinder. I had booked a room at a midlevel chain near Fisherman’s Wharf, an Inn of some kind, a Holiday or perhaps a Comfort, or maybe it wasn’t an Inn, maybe it was a Hilton. Honestly I don’t know, I made and canceled the reservations so many times, and always at a different chain. Then I told John that I was visiting a friend from college. That I had a job interview, two days, the company was putting me up. Girls I went to high school with were in town; a riot grrrl group was on a reunion tour; there was a speaker series whose speaker I was just dying to see. All of these things I told him only then my quote-unquote plans kept quote-unquote falling through when I lost my nerve, so many plans and so many times that I can’t remember, now, which one quote-unquote didn’t.