by Rebecca Lee
David Booth was already there, standing in a corner of the kitchen, with a bottle of beer in his hand. He was the perfect man—calm, intelligent, nice—though it didn’t ever seem to dawn on him—ever—no matter how many situations he and I found ourselves in that duplicated a date—at our mutual friends’ home for dinner, for instance, or at a carnival with a group of friends, all couples except for us, or walking across campus at dusk, the perfume of huge and strange southern flowers all around us—that the two of us could try to date. Would it kill us?
It was September 11, 1998, which was the day the Starr Report had emerged in the newspapers. All of us had spent the day poring over it. I was working on a TV pilot and was supposed to be writing revisions, but instead I’d spent the day with the New York Times laid out on my desk as I read it—rapt, nearly unconscious. It was seventy-four pages long, and the writer had been good enough to write it as a narrative, complete with suspense, structure, style, and substance. It was like reading Edith Wharton, minus all the fussy details. Lesley and I had been calling each other all day, on and off, to discuss it. “I don’t know,” I said now to her, “I just really emerged with the feeling that Clinton hadn’t really wanted to betray Hillary at all. In my reading, I thought he was trying to resist temptation the whole time.”
“Oh please,” Lesley said. “It’s as if we read entirely different documents. He originates most of the action.”
“But only after he resists quite a few times. And he mentions Hillary many times. She is on his mind!”
David Booth lifted his beer in a little toast at this, which I thought was charming.
“Oh spare me my husband ever uttering my name while he’s having an affair,” Lesley said. She had already spooned out the soup into the bowls and now was carrying them, two by two, into the dining room.
“Noted,” Andy said.
“I’d want to be on his mind,” I said. “That smells amazing.” Just the fact that it was real food seemed miraculous to me, after a day of drinking only coffee and eating M&M’s. Somehow Lesley had found the rabbit hole into real life, while I had continued on this other precarious path—single and free and mostly what I wanted, but still, there wasn’t any real food, it seemed, no soups or stews or casseroles, except for the two or three nights a month when I came to dinner here.
“How’s that TV pilot coming?” David Booth asked me, as we all sat down to eat. One of us was missing—Berber—but she was always late. She always came flying in, with a great excuse. I was quite anxious to see her since apparently she had just made a decision, reported to Lesley earlier in the week, to abandon her life amongst us and go “join with” a man—a married man—she had met at a yoga retreat in the mountains. Lesley had also warned me she was wearing a turban these days, and I wanted to see that, too.
“It’s coming terribly, honestly,” I said to David Booth. “My writing partner and I can’t agree on anything, and there are fifty other people with all sorts of opinions, and nobody agrees. It’s all a big mess.”
“It’s about Wonder Woman still?” he asked.
David Booth had written and published a book last year called The Continuing City, a book of essays that was so beautiful and thrilling it made me nervous to read it. Every essay—whether it was about reading Voltaire in boarding school, or his mother’s career as a film actress in the sixties, or his grandmother’s recipe for lamb—always wound its way into some really beautiful reckoning with fate, and life, and God. So I didn’t like it that he described my project as a TV pilot about Wonder Woman, even thought that’s exactly what it was.
“It is,” I said.
“What are her powers anyway?” Andy asked. “I should know that.”
“She can force men to tell the truth,” I said. “She has a lasso that can do that.”
“She has an invisible airplane,” Lesley said.
“One thing about her,” I said, “that often gets lost in all the scripts is that she can love unconditionally. She can love people who don’t love her back.”
“That’s a superpower?” Andy said.
“No mortal can do it,” I said.
Which is when Berber appeared, bringing in the deep green verdant smell of their front lawn, as well as the ocean. The turban made her look a number of conflicting things—pure and spiritual for sure, but also completely cracked in the head, like she’d had an actual surgical procedure, or maybe an imaginary one. But then it also somehow emphasized her big, square, beautiful teeth.
“Berber, we’ve started,” Lesley said. “I’m sorry. We didn’t know if you’d make it.”
“Oh that’s fine,” Berber said, and quickly slid into her chair.
“We’ve been talking about the Starr Report. Did you read it?” asked Lesley.
“I would have slept with him, of course I would have.”
“Is this how women think?” Andy said.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“Well, I thought you’d all be censorious of him, but really what you’re doing is thinking about whether you would sleep with him or not.”
“You can have both those thoughts at the same time,” I said. “You can feel very critical of a man even as you’re sleeping with him,” I said. David Booth laughed a little at this, a gesture that was enough to keep me interested in him for another few years.
“That explains a lot,” Andy said.
“What about this guy?” I said to Berber. “What’s going on?”
“Lesley told you then. He’s wonderful.”
“Is there going to be a ceremony or something?”
“We haven’t worked out the details, but yes.”
“So he’s getting a divorce?”
“No, his wife is very sick. She’s in a home.”
“She’s dying,” David Booth said.
“She is.”
“Have you met her or something?” I said.
“Yes. She wants Bryan and me to be together.”
Later that night, David and I left the party together. He walked me to my car. The eastern seaboard at night in September is so beautiful, so warm and cold, and the streetlights threw such bright light on the street that it was almost like a movie set. “What do you think?” I said, “About this Bryan person?”
“Yeah, it’s interesting, isn’t it? I don’t know. I’ve been reading about a Utopian community from the late 1800s, in Massachusetts, called Fruitlands. I had the same feeling while listening to Berber’s set up. This should work, but I know it won’t. How can it?”
BY THE TIME WE met Bryan, it was a few months later, in December, at Lesley and Andy’s annual Christmas party. I was there with David Booth. He had even picked me up in his little car. Looking back, this was the night I silently broke up with him, even though we weren’t dating. The house looked magnificent; Lesley and the girls had draped piney garlands everywhere, and even just the smell of pine and cinnamon was suggestive of the deepest, richest kind of family life. How could David not want this for the two of us—a big fire, our homeschooled children circulating with little silver trays of food, and then the inevitable long gossipy discussions after everyone left and we languidly picked up the living room and then settled down on the couch together.
It was easy to spot Berber and Bryan, since they both were wearing their turbans, which as far as I was concerned joined them more absolutely than marriage.
Bryan reached out immediately to shake my hand. He recognized me without an introduction. He had one of those broad, merry, twinkly faces, with a gap in his teeth. He just looked happy. He looked so happy you wanted to make him more happy. “It’s so nice to meet you,” he said warmly. “I’ve heard so much about you. Berber just loves you so much,” he said.
“Oh thank you!” I said. “I love her. And this is David Booth.”
And here Bryan bowed slightly. “David Booth,” he said in a low, dramatic voice. “Your book was the work of a genius.”
“Thank you,” David said. “Thank you for reading it.
”
“The essay on Tommy alone was worth the price of admission.”
“Oh, thank you.” (One had to say thank you continually to Bryan; every conversation was engineered that way.) “Yeah, Tommy,” David went on, “I saw that when I was eight, perhaps the most impressionable age possible. And then my older brothers played the Who till late in the night, every night, in the basement, so those lyrics are just permanent background in my brain.”
Bryan pantomimed an air guitar and sang in an actually really pretty falsetto, “Deaf, dumb, and blind kid, sure plays mean pinball.”
Berber smiled and nodded a little. She seemed so charmed by him, and I was, too, still, at this point. His cup was full to the brim, and just a little over.
“And how’s Wonder Woman?” Berber asked me, a little conspiratorially.
“She’s good,” I said.
“It’s a movie script?” Bryan asked.
“TV,” I said.
“TV,” Bryan said. “I barely know what’s on TV these days. I like what you said, David, in one of your essays about TV, that it replaces experience to such an extent that the person is no longer privy to the great truths that lie at the heart of action.”
Oh, this. “Well, what about Tommy? Tommy doesn’t do that somehow? Cause it was on a bigger screen?”
“Oh,” David said, “and I was just posturing. Some of those essays are just bullshit. You know, you get writing, and you just try out ideas.”
“At our yoga retreat—where we met—there are no screens of any sort allowed and what we’ve found is that people have access to the deeper stories of their lives when you’re not distracting them with the shallow, irrelevant stories from a television. Berber and I, for instance, both have shadowy ideas of knowing each other in the past.”
“Really?” I looked at Berber. She sort of shrugged. She was a little embarrassed, I could tell.
“Yes,” he said. “We think we were married in the past. During a plague. One of us perished. I mean, who knows, right? It can’t be known, but we both felt a strong connection to the past when we met.”
“And your wife, who was she in this scenario?” And then I instantly regretted it, because a look of such absolute sadness passed over his face.
“I guess nothing is simple,” he said.
DAVID AND I REALLY did break up, even though he was unaware of it. But without me calling all the time, we never saw each other, except here and there, once or twice a year, by accident. And in the meantime I got married to an old friend named Mark. He ran the Raptor Center in our town, in the black swamps to the west of us, alongside the Cape Fear River. If you looked carefully, he was a wonderful man. He played the harmonica, he had a beard, he was ten years older than me, he was a settled man, and smart and humble, you could trust him never to have an affair or even leave the house too much. I got pregnant right away, which we’d planned. He was not here tonight. He told me to go ahead, that he’d already had dinner at Lesley and Andy’s, as if dinner with friends were one of those things you did once, to experience it, and never again.
It was 2005, and Lesley and Andy’s home had undergone some major changes. About five years earlier Lesley had discovered a series of pointless affairs Andy had participated in thoughout their marriage, nothing too serious but of course completely devastating to Lesley. Her solution was not to leave him, but to add all sorts of extra rooms and dividers into their home, as if to demarcate places for herself and places for him, and then some mutual territories as well. She’d also installed a huge flat-screen TV high on their kitchen wall. Tonight it showed Hurricane Katrina bearing down on New Orleans. The sound was off but the mesmerizing scenes of water pouring down city streets were both beautiful and terrible to look at.
Berber and Bryan were standing under the television, newly married and with their turbans off, thankfully. Bryan had cornered David and was asking him about his newest book. “Are we meant to believe that there is or isn’t a God by the end?”
This made David laugh. “I really don’t know,” he said, as he hugged me hello.
Lesley and David had lined up two lasagnas end to end—she had made one vegetarian and he had made one meat, and they lay there under the candlelight, awaiting us. I was so hungry. I’d been so sad for the last two weeks that I hadn’t been able to eat. I was in the middle of a protracted miscarriage—the baby still alive, but with a heartbeat measuring once a minute, like one of those sea creatures that live at the floor of the ocean.
“I saw it,” David said to me. “I saw the show.”
“Oh yeah?” I said. “What’d you think?”
“I thought it was great,” he said. “I really did. All that derring-do. And the culture is ready for a big dose of feminism.”
“You think?”
“Yes. If I were a woman, I’d want to be an Amazon.”
“Thanks,” I said. And then he touched my arm, just like that, which so surprised me that I nearly fell into his arm. It must be exactly what men don’t want—you reach to touch a woman lightly and then she falls into you, her whole weight, which in this case included another man’s dying baby. “Sorry!” I said. Sorry to David Booth for falling into him, and sorry to baby, for everything. For no life.
But anyway, life isn’t that good always. I wished I could let the baby know that. There’s a lot that’s lousy. It’s true there are large turning structures—Ferris wheels—that will carry people high into the air above the ocean, that is true, and then around the next corner there are funhouses, those are great, and then there are just ordinary playgrounds on every corner, and there are things not even for children that are for children, like church spires that look like weather vanes, and there is one downtown that actually spins, a little spinning cross, an image that would live in the child’s mind maybe forever, gathering ideas to it, spinning madly but also stable there, and in tonight’s wind it wouldn’t even be a cross, it would be distorted into maybe a little question mark, and standing for all the children in town as a kind of fervent lasting joyful little thing they always know. So there is a lot, admittedly.
But then you grow up and you get a wonderful man and he cheats on you, or you get somebody like Bryan, who at your wedding says this as his vow—“I will be your teacher and you will be my team.” Or you get David Booth, in which case you marry somebody else.
We sat down to the his and hers lasagnas, right as the last levees were breached and the ninth ward completely overwhelmed. See, I said to the baby, look at the seawater rising, look at the cats and dogs on the roof, it’s okay to just pass along, (I will miss you!), just keep going.
Acknowledgments
This book was written with thanks to (but not about) my family: Don and Marilyn Lee, Emma Beke and Stephen Beke, Wendy Arnold, Steve Arnold, Joshua Arnold, Jessica Arnold, Eric Lee, Janya Wongsopa, John Beke, Allison Beke, Paul Beke, Alexander Bilson, and Kate Bilson.
Many thanks to writers and friends in Wilmington: Dana Sachs, Todd Berliner, Karen Bender, Robert Siegel, Nina de Gramont, David Gessner, Philip Gerard, Phil Furia, Jill Gerard, Mark Cox, Malena Morling, Sarah Messer, Michael White (Picture me floating down through the fires of this day and the next), John Sullivan, Mariana Johnson, Hannah Abrams, Kimi Faxon Hemingway, Emily Smith, Ben George, Tim Bass, Lavonne Adams, Clyde Edgerton, Kristina Edgerton, Virginia Holman, Megan Hubbard, Beau Bishop, Lisa Bertini, Peter Trachtenberg, and Wendy Brenner, who routinely says lines so funny that I try to immediately put them into stories, plagiarism that she cheerfully tolerates.
Many thanks also to C. Michael Curtis, Sumanth Prabhaker, Adrienne Brodeur, Nicole Winstanley, and Leslie Bienen.
And also, to Doug Stewart, who is the best, fastest, nicest, and smartest agent in the world.
And to everyone at Algonquin, huge thanks: Elisabeth Scharlatt, Ina Stern, Brunson Hoole, Anne Winslow, Kelly Bowen, Debra Linn, Emma Boyer, Chuck Adams, Lauren Moseley, Katie Ford, Craig Popelars. And thank you to Kathy Pories, whose thinking is poised perfectly, at every m
oment, between serious and funny.
Published by
ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of
WORKMAN PUBLISHING
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014
© 2013 by Rebecca Lee.
All rights reserved.
“At North Farm” from A Wave by John Ashbery. Copyright © 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author.
Some of these stories appeared first elsewhere: “Bobcat” was published as a chapbook with Madras Press, 2010; “The Banks of the Vistula” was first published in the Atlantic Monthly, 1997; “Slatland” was first published in the Atlantic Monthly, 1992; “Min” was first published in the Atlantic Monthly, 1995; “Fialta” was first published in Zoetrope, 2000.
This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
eISBN 978-1-61620-265-1