by Debra Monroe
Kip’s roommate went to a bar, and Chet went too. “You don’t mind,” Chet said, already out the door. Kip walked me home, carrying a bottle of gin, another bottle of tonic. We sat on the dark and private side of the porch, the screened-in porch. On the public side of the porch, the door to the living room was wide open so Kip and I could go in and wrangle ice cube trays if need be, and I remembered those nights in Utah when my mother and her boyfriend stayed up drinking and clinking, and Kip said I needed to get a divorce.
I told him he was nervy and impertinent.
He said, “True. But someone had to say so. It might as well be me.”
Chet’s manners that night had seemed lacking to me too. Chet had only coercive power, I thought, while I had reward power, so all Chet could do was balk, resist, disturb the peace. He’d lately started talking about staying in Greensboro after I moved, living in a garage that belonged to the guy who painted houses, and doing upcoming easement work. I wondered what else Kip had noticed. But I never did get to ask Kip, younger than me, raised by a mother younger than mine, what he knew and I didn’t, because a bleeding, half-naked man dashed out of the night onto the other side of the porch and was banging on the front door frame. Kip and I froze, silent, in our cube of darkness.
The man glanced around, not seeing us, and walked inside.
I got up and went inside too, blinking in the light. The man had a cut on his chest, and he was wearing cut-offs too short for a man his age. My fear of crime was a figment from another life already. Or I was drunk. I stood in my living room, the half-packed boxes, bare walls. “What are you doing,” I asked, “besides bleeding?” All of this would make sense the next morning when the local paper would report that the grocer’s a few blocks away had been robbed by a man in a blue shirt, that a customer called the police, an altercation ensued, and the suspect got away, throwing his telltale blue shirt into shrubs. But I didn’t know that when he said, “Lady, please. Call me a taxi.” I pointed at the door and said, “Get out. If you do so politely, I might.” I didn’t have to, because he bolted.
Kip was standing next to me. “Did you not see that he had a gun in his back pocket?”
I was still holding my gin and tonic. I looked at Kip. “I didn’t,” I said.
“You’ll be fine divorced,” Kip said. “Really. What’s the delay?”
Depredating Deer
I decided to be undomesticated. Wild. Not coupled up. Not celibate. I never will marry nor be no man’s wife. How do I account for the dozen years I tried to live this way?
Categorically.
But, first, the lay of the land. I arrived in the sky-blue truck, its brakes stopping on a dime now, towing a trailer of my furniture from Garnett’s store, more scratched and threadbare after another move. “Take everything. Whatever you don’t bring you’ll have to buy again,” my mother had said when I was still packing in North Carolina, and she’d called from Arizona, where she lived then, our telephone-only era during which, if her husband wasn’t home, she sounded like herself, thrifty, thoughtful. If he was, she hung up.
I got to my new habitat, a swath of abruptly rugged hills separating coastal farmland from high plains. The university sat atop steep crags, the San Marcos River winding below. The campus was in shambles. Its former glory—buildings like limestone castles; acres of hibiscus; stained glass murals; paths leading to secret courtyards; a round building accessible by way of a footbridge that spanned a pond with red lilies—was masked by scaffolding and cement trucks. At a party, a professor who’d drunk too much told me that, after a scrappy tom fell through a Styrofoam ceiling onto a secretary, the university had hired a specialist to relocate feral cats but not yet the bats in stairwells.
Not-drunk professors rushed to assure me that the university, recently and generously endowed, was on the upswing. Because it had previously been a normal school, it had a long history of female administrators—a boon, I’d realized as I listened to one offer me a salary thousands less than I’d been going broke on in North Carolina. I’d been raised to believe that asking for money was impolite. Perhaps the woman offering the salary had been too. She smiled, helpful. “I see by your facial expression that I’m not even close.” I’d nodded, embarrassed. She offered thousands more. But I was in debt.
So I lived deep in cedars and live oaks in a cabin more cavelike than anywhere I’d lived. It had mud-colored walls and a grubby carpet I covered with area rugs, including the faux-Oriental with traces of tar, wedding present from wedding #1. I’d been warned to wear boots outside—rattlesnakes. Come winter, I’d use the woodstove. For now, a tiny air conditioner kept me cool during the day. At night, I’d wake, hearing footfalls on sere grass outside a window near my bed and think: Who’s out there? Who turned on the floodlight? The moon shone down silvery. Deer cocked their heads at me, collegial.
My other companion was Sim. A man in the parking lot of the village grocery store had held up a sign, FREE DOG. “This’ll be an asset whether you hunt or run cattle,” the man said. “What about as a pet?” I asked. The man pushed his hat back. “Can’t say.”
Sim rode in the back of the blue truck until Chet arrived from North Carolina in the Subaru—to visit family, to see if I’d get back together. I was still paying the car note. The Subaru was registered to me. It got better mileage. But I resented giving up the truck because, as I’d come home from the high-elevation university town to the higher-elevation village, driving across the skyline in a sky-colored truck had made me happy. The University of Disrepair had a casual feel, so I’d be wearing a homemade black dress, or the lime-green miniskirt with a men’s black T-shirt, black tights, black lace-up work boots. As I drove the hills in the squat Subaru, I didn’t get the same euphoric surge. Sim liked the denlike space, though. In the passenger seat, taller than me, he’d sigh, let go of his hypervigilant scanning of the periphery for potential threats, and put his paw on my thigh.
Sim sat alert, erect, next to my chair as one day I phoned my dad to ask to borrow $400 because I needed new tires, and I’d cut up all the credit cards. I told my dad I was getting divorced, explaining that Chet was chronically insolvent, not just out of pocket due to my career, and that I was living lean until I paid off bills—a rationale for divorce and borrowed money my dad found irrefutable. “I won’t charge you interest,” he said. But he worried. “What about your children?” The ones I hadn’t had. I didn’t have spare money or brain-room to consider children. I needed $400. I thought about saying that I didn’t need to marry to breed, but I couldn’t be so blunt with my dad. I said, “I guess I could someday maybe adopt.” This filled the blank in his vision for me.
“Yes,” he said, relieved.
Dating and mating, then.
Category 1. No damage, short delays.
Category 2. Longer delays. Obvious escape routes cut off.
Category 3. Small structures destroyed. Evacuation required.
Category 4. Hurricane party. Mesmerized, I drank too much. Battered structures likely.
The problem with this metaphor is that I wasn’t stationary, waiting for landfall. I moved across landscapes too, for example the village near my house where a man followed me to the hardware store, then a gift shop that sold office supplies, then the post office, where he memorized my return address to show up at my door and recite a poem he’d written, its rhyme scheme dependent on words with -tion endings: all my perspiration, due to love’s vibration . Stalker Behavior and Rural Courtship Norms, I thought. Wondering how to respond, I finally told him that, during the twentieth century, poetry had abandoned end rhymes as harsh, artificial. “You’ll see internal rhymes,” I said, “or slant rhymes.” He looked confused. “Heart and dark,” I said, “not dark and bark.”
On campus? Single professors?
My former graduate school classmate from Utah who now hated her lonely job in South Carolina asked me this by phone. An art history professor, grizzled, a bit rotund, had introduced himself, bowing. He’d met me at convocation
: new hires lined in a row onstage. No doubt, he was lonely. This was 1992. The Internet wasn’t invented. Or it was, but for use by government scientists to send research results to labs. One day I thought I saw a motorcycle guy—black leather vest, keys clipped to a big chain. But he carried a briefcase. I asked a female colleague who he was. She said, “Angry young man figure.”
She introduced us at a dinner at her house. I’ll call him Felix. Felix arrived with a cooler full of Budweiser and set it in the dining room. She asked him to put it on the porch. Conversation stalled. Felix said, “The university is exclusionary.” I was cutting my chicken. “This university,” I said, “or all universities?” He frowned. “Both.” Our hostess said, “Nonsense. Everyone’s kind to you here.” Everyone had been kind to me, I thought.
A university that lists its second and third most famous graduates as George Strait and Heloise with her Household Hints isn’t elitist. And even our most famous graduate, Lyndon B. Johnson, first taught in a Spanish-speaking country school. But I knew what Felix meant. I said, “People whose parents and siblings went to college before them seem more comfortable—in class, handling the red tape. For them, college seems like a career path, not a long-shot detour.” I spoke for myself, but Felix blushed, angry. As the cooler of Budweiser emptied, he lounged near me with his proud, fierce face and mood swings.
I dated Felix for almost a year, Category 2, obvious escape routes blocked.
I’d stop seeing him, but then I’d see him at work.
Or he’d show up in my driveway, and I’d rush outside to pull Sim off Felix’s car, and conversation resumed. Sim, who weighed ninety pounds, let women onto the property, but he lunged at men, including my landlord, or lienholder now, because he’d sold me the house, using my previous months’ rent paid as down payment. Meanwhile, I bought a book about raising dogs, yet so far hadn’t been able to follow the first rule: to move Sim outside, establishing myself as alpha. Sim came inside, cool in the summer, snug and fortresslike in the winter with a roaring fire and wood on the porch stacked across windows, blocking light.
But I sent Sim back out one night when he came in with a bloody squirrel, dropped it, and snarled as if to attack me when I started to clean up. I kicked him off my bed for good one morning when I noticed him on his back next to me across the chenille bedspread, snoring, jowls quivering, his big head on the embroidered pillowslip.
You might love animals in a spiritual way—They do not sweat and whine about their condition, / They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins—or in a fantasy way—birds tying ribbons, or helping you do chores, or leading you down the right path. But you have to draw the line somewhere, I thought one summer afternoon when I came home and saw wasps as big as hummingbirds flying in and out of an attic vent. I bought spray (”kills from long distances!”) put on pants, boots, a long-sleeved shirt, gloves. The day was hot. One hundred and three, the thermometer said. I put a lace curtain over my head and sprayed and ran.
I was outside one day when a man in a pickup stopped, rolled down his window, and said that cutting weeds keeps snakes away. So I scythed, then bought a lawn mower. I planted flowers too. I’d read in the local paper that deer ate flowers, but you fight back by surrounding your flowers with mothballs, or human hair from a barber shop, or bars of soap.
Or you sprinkle your flowers with synthetic wolf urine from the hardware store. Or mist them with a spray called Not Tonight Deer. But Sim, an asset whether I hunted or ran cattle, patrolled my flowerbeds. So I kept planting, having discovered this urge to dig, sow, water, fertilize, wait for bloom. Nightfall, I’d walk to the river and swim by moonlight, my arms and legs pale in dark water. Sim stood guard on the bank, protecting me, I felt, but the book said no, claiming me. He nipped my heels, rushing me home.
In August, I had to go to a two-week conference. I boarded Sim with a man who used to raise minks in huge pens. “Honey, a dog like this is happier outside,” the man said. “Might even calm him down,” he added, because Sim, at the end of his leash, had lunged.
I drove to the university town to spend the night with Felix—his apartment was closer to the airport. Felix was teaching summer school, and he complained that Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog” didn’t depict the underclass. But Chekhov was the underclass, I said. Once he’d made money, he spent it on people who didn’t have any. I loved the story, its ending, its last word, beginning, demonstrating that endings-as-resolutions are artificial, unlike life with its culminations that undo again, new problems arising.
Conversation with Felix was like sex with Felix, combative. But, having been Chet’s wife, I hadn’t had sex in years. I didn’t see sex as a means to an end. I saw it as an end. I should have been forthcoming about that. Or I shouldn’t have slept with someone from work. But there are lots of people most of us should never have slept with. After sex that night, I lay in Felix’s bed, nervous about the trip, the important conference. Go and be your best self, my mother had whispered the night before I started kindergarten, I recalled. Felix felt restless, or neglected. He pushed me out of bed and onto the floor with his feet. I stood up and turned on the light. “What?” Hangdog, he smiled.
After the conference, Sim was happier outside. But my flowerbeds had been ravaged. It was late to reseed. I’d fallen in love fast. This is like taking drugs—short-term pleasure, long-term ruin. My usual way is to meet a man, pledge myself to him while feeling suspicious yet hopeful he might be The One with whom I’d belong in the paired-off world; or I’d feel pressure to take myself off the market, to ward off scary or implausible suitors. I’d been in love with James Stillman those fleet weeks when the wanting was mutual, neither of us weighing the other down, and during wee hours with Max, who, as a favor to me, gave monogamy a whirl. I hadn’t wanted someone badly since.
Now this time the longing and remembering—he said, and I said back, and he touched me like that, and our eyes met but no one saw—went undeterred too long, due to the vacationlike setting of clapboard cottages, Adirondack chairs, the vernal wood we wandered while pointing at writers one or both of us had read but never hoped to meet, and our most serious decision of the day the restaurant at which we’d dine that night. The conference was renowned for its aphrodisiac mood. A classmate from Utah had seen my name on a poster and called to warn me. “The careerist and sexual currents run deep there.”
Did he know this firsthand? No. He’d heard. Correctly, maybe. Cardboard bins in the laundry rooms held free condoms, the conference director announced during his first-night keynote address. This was when heterosexual people first started using condoms again. Promoting safe sex was the right thing to do, the conference director said. As was protesting apartheid. He mentioned this too. But I’d be laundering a pair of jeans or a summer dress because the weather was hot, cold, hot again, and someone would wander in, grab fistfuls of condoms, and I’d see him two hours later on a panel discussion.
Landon and I located each other early in the same way that, on my first day of school, a boy in a knitted red sweater and I located each other and walked hand in hand through manic recess. One night I drank too many of the complimentary cocktails, and Landon and I woke together in the morning. The sex was incredible, he said. Fully alert, I gave it another try. It was. The conversation was too, like a good class discussion, but not dog-eat-dog, as school so often seems, because this was talking, not debating, not one-upmanship, and it was mixed, too, with Landon’s asides about how he liked what I said about John Berryman, or that I lived in the hills with snakes and deer, or the way my hair tangled in the humid summer air, or the dress I’d sewn, or how I kissed. Had one person ever liked all these different qualities of mine at the same time before? No. Just my homework. Just my housework. Or just how I was in bed, flesh-and-blood and wanton.
But all things must end. Autumn leaves must fall. That’s what I thought, flying home, deplaning, driving from the airport, surveying my pillaged flowerbeds. What happens in Yalta stays in Yalta. In “The L
ady with the Dog,” Gurov went home to Moscow and should have forgotten Anna and resumed his life. But if he had, we wouldn’t have a story.
All I hoped as I unlocked my door, thinking it would take me time to forget Landon, was that he’d need time to forget me too. Landon was tenured in another state, living with a woman in a refurbished Victorian with a fountain that babbled as he sat alone on the porch, contemplating Lucretius or James Agee, while she watched TV and drank. But my key was still in the lock when I heard my phone ring. He had a plan. He’d leave his girlfriend, and we’d see each other every Christmas, spring break, and all summer, when we’d write in the day and make love at night. I was skeptical, though one colleague in North Carolina had a wife who lived in Ohio. A professor in Utah was married to an opera singer in Germany. This career mixes badly with marriage, you see. Dreams get sacrificed.
Before we gave up on each other, Landon told his department chair that he’d met The One. Landon’s department chair told Landon to stop running up the department phone bill, calling me. Landon left his girlfriend; he moved into a cheap apartment. Yet there were no blinds on its windows, and he was used to better quarters, so he crept home. He got a therapist who looked like Bonnie Raitt, with her red hair and cowboy boots, but she lost Landon’s respect by saying, “Many people see the proverbial cliff and think about jumping, but you literally jumped.” He explained that literally requires a real cliff.