by Debra Monroe
One night, I dreamed I wore a brown dress that was once shabby chic but now was just shabby—a wash dress, my taskmaster grandmother used to say—and I was in a lecture hall with marble floors, and Landon, in a suit behind a podium, said the Southern Agrarian manifesto was doomed but seductive, and I nodded in agreement, but in the dream I was in the back of the hall, hunched over an oven with a can of Easy-Off, greasy streaks on my forearms as I scrubbed, while well-dressed hordes whispered that Landon was brilliant. But he couldn’t hang window shades in an apartment. And why, you ask, didn’t I feel bad about his wine-drinking girlfriend? I did. I’d turned into a version of my mother’s nightmare, the Other Woman, or at least the other woman. I didn’t sleep. Landon’s longtime girlfriend probably didn’t either, I thought, unhappy, wandering the dark.
Then it was Veterans Day, no postal delivery. No artful, well-edited letter today, I thought. I was grading papers. No spontaneous phone call either. Landon had moved home; he couldn’t use that phone. He couldn’t use his office phone either. But there’d likely be two or three letters tomorrow, I thought. I was steeling myself to write a stern one, saying this extension of summer love had lasted too long into winter. The phone rang.
A woman on the other end introduced herself, saying she’d found my number on the cover page of a forty-page manuscript—the first forty pages of my second book that a writer in the audience at the conference had asked me for after hearing me read. My reading had lasted ten minutes, but the writer had wanted more. Then he’d given my pages to his editor. She’d buy the whole book, she told me on the phone. I wasn’t done yet, I said. I had maybe fifty pages left to write. She wanted the paperback rights to my first book too. She said, “If you don’t have an agent, get one, because we’re making a deal.”
So I was writing, blocking out worry, quibbles, dread, when Land-on’s letters stopped. Silence arrived as a pile of mail I sifted through, searching for what wasn’t there: a hand-addressed, creamy envelope with a postmark from the town of S—. My worrying ratcheted up. I got sick. I broke out in hives. For ten days I thought he’d died in a wreck and no one would tell me. Or he’d come to his senses and wouldn’t say so, which was less alarming, yet cruel. No, he’d had a grand mal seizure. When he phoned at last, he said, “I know you worried.” I said, “I was okay. But I thought you weren’t.”
He still wasn’t, he said. A seizure causes months of lethargy. He broke up with me. This was for the best because my breakups, evasive, apologetic, lack clarity. I hung up, thinking it was helpful I had that book deadline because deadlines preempt regret. And Christmas was coming, a holiday I found difficult—I’d need temporary seasonal help.
Not Felix, I decided, who still called because I’d come back from the conference too distracted for long conversation. Like a high school girl, I’d told him we needed to take a break. I thought it was a short leap from “take a break” to “break up,” and he’d know. But he wanted to bring me food his mother had sent on dry ice. He wanted to buy me a wristwatch. I wasn’t hungry, I said. Also, “I don’t need a wristwatch, but thank you.”
I met a professor, born in France, teaching literature-in-translation at a tiny private college in a neighboring town, Seguin. At a party, he asked the host, married to a colleague in my department, to introduce us. He borrowed the host’s car to visit me in my dark cabin— darker as the solstice approached—bearing wine. He told me I drank too fast. “Like a thirsty horse,” he said. Yet I was not unattractive, he said. Could I drive him to the airport for his departure for his Christmas holidays because he didn’t have a car, not because he couldn’t drive, but because he was bad with money? “Hopeless,” he said.
In mid-December, I met Jed Pharr in a village restaurant. He was tall. He had a huge beard and eyes that were blue or green, shining or sad. He owned the restaurant—the building, not the business. He owned a house next door. He built using nineteenth-century designs, insisting, for example, that the stately house next door, with star-shapes hanging like pendulums from its eaves, have an outdoor staircase, since settlers didn’t waste interior space on stairs. So the house sat empty because no one wanted outdoor stairs.
When Jed stepped out of his indigo-colored stepside truck onto my driveway, Sim charged off the porch, teeth bared, and leapt for Jed’s throat. Jed used one knee to block Sim. I apologized, put Sim on a chain. I said, “He doesn’t get it that he’s a dog and I’m not.”
Jed Pharr drove me to the tops of tall hills, pointing at small towns nestled in distant valleys. An appealing restaurant here, he said. Good music in warm weather in a natural amphitheater over there. Our last stop was an ornate bridge over a creek, leading to nowhere—to a tiny lot with a cliff behind it. Jed owned the lot. One day, tired of his clients, he’d brought his crew here. He opened a thermos and poured us cups of coffee mixed with reposado tequila. “Poetry,” he said, about the bridge. “Form. No practical function.”
That wasn’t his line. The editor of the small-town newspaper had written it.
It was a beautiful bridge.
For Christmas, Jed bought me a poinsettia and a bottle of tequila.
His eyes changed according to light, I realized. He was fifteen years older than me, not old enough to be my father; I was nobody’s midlife crisis. He’d gone to college at the state’s best school, but what he knew didn’t sound familiar. Or all business majors have just a cursory acquaintance with history, philosophy, literature. I meant to date him briefly.
As a young man, he’d run one of the first catfish farms. He showed me a photo of this self—no beard, wearing a double-knit suit and a cowboy hat, on the House floor in Washington D.C., lobbying for catfish. He’d married and raised a child. He’d divorced, not amicably. He’d imported tequila. He owned an antique machine that made adobe bricks from straw and sand, because new adobe (concrete covered with painted stucco) offended him. He built houses for people he liked. He’d just bought property in a far off mercury mining ghost town filled with decamped-from-the-American-Dream former strivers, a wild west where men outnumbered women. On the way to visit this property, we stayed at a restored grand hotel in Marathon, Texas, where we ate roast quail, drank champagne, and slept in a room draped with Victorian fabric, train whistles waking us at night.
Then we went to the mercury mining ghost town to see Jed’s abandoned dance hall made of real adobe. Its roof had blown off seventy years earlier. By day, the former dance hall felt like a container of light, its walls as bright as egg yolks, the turquoise sky, the homemade adobe bar with art deco aspirations, curvaceous, geometric, and then the surrounding cell-like rooms that, we surmised, had once been whores’ bedrooms. Jed and I slept on a pallet on the dance floor, staring at millions of stars, one or two always falling.
When we bought ice at a place people called the Straight Store because it was run by fundamentalist Christians, I stayed close to Jed, and Sim, who tolerated Jed now. Men who lived in cars or rusty trailers crowded too near. I registered a doubt: Jed liked it here.
But Jed’s assorted ventures sounded enterprising on a summer trip he proposed we take to Spooner, Wisconsin, where, flashing a credit card, he paid for every meal and talked to my dad, who owned the auto parts store and, once, a tire shop and little gas station. They talked about business, the suppliers, the employees, the customers, so necessary but annoying. Then they’d cheer each other up, pouring another drink, and quote Dale Carnegie: “Take a chance! Life is chance!” When my dad talked to me, he talked about weather in Texas, weather in Wisconsin. Then we left, Jed waving from his truck, and my father, stepmother, sister, brother, nieces and nephews, said goodbye, a chorus of sighs, murmurs: Jed Pharr was a brick, a saint, a piece that would fit the puzzle, me.
James Stillman weighed in too. In recurring, unsettling dreams, he was dying. No deathbed. No last breath. A pair of low-order angels wearing navy blue uniforms took him away in handcuffs. He’d whisper to act as if I didn’t know him. This was like a plan we’d had when I’d slept
at his house: if he got busted, I didn’t know about the drugs. In these dreams, arrested by Death, he told me to stay alive. But in a new dream, he stood at the end of a hall I recognized, a hall with a green phone, and said: “Better.” James, forever young in ragged Levi’s, said: “Man, I’d be watching you with those other guys and think, damn, she could do better. A little better this time.” I woke, annoyed or pleased.
I used to split myself in two. Or I believed I’d split myself in two: a bookish self; a homespun self. A third self had emerged: emergency. I’d been having sex on and off for twenty years, but I’d been so intent on being good in a one-time man’s career, being good in a system of courtship where men pursue and women accept or demur, that I’d curbed the desire for what I’d had for a few hours with just a few lovers and never with a husband.
Or it’s biological, animal fact. I was thirty-five. I didn’t want to hope for sex to get good, better, best. I wanted it best now. It was. So I was three selves now. Jed suited two. My work self had survived alone so far, I thought. But lying in bed with Jed after luxuriant, frantic, slaking sex, during the pillow talk, I’d think how different this talk was from talk I’d had with Landon, though not for long—my conversations with Landon in tangled bedsheets lasting just ten days and ten nights, but countless hours by letter and phone. I’d talk about work at work, I decided, and not with Jed, who looked anxious if I did.
Fragmented thinking, I thought. Old vistas. New frontiers.
My wandering grandmother would run away from home, and people brought her back. Playing separate roles for separate spheres—roles that well-adjusted people keep inside “healthy boundaries,” to use the lingo—isn’t schizophrenia. But schizophrenia is statistically high among first-and second-generation immigrants, I’d recently read, among first-wave feminists too. It’s a disease, of course, a breakdown of neurological function. But researchers speculate that, for those pre-disposed, the radical stress of dividing the self between one world and its rules and another world and its rules serves as trigger.
One night, pillow-talking, Jed told me about long ago losing his passport while buying wholesale tequila and spending four days in a Mexican jail. I asked how his wife had worried. He said, “She was still trying hard to understand me then. It was ten more years before she gave up.” I asked if he’d tried to understand her back. He sighed. “At the time, no. It had to be hard, my plans changing hers. She’d weigh in, but I didn’t listen.”
Another night we lay curled in opposite directions, Jed’s face upside down, so when he blinked, his gray-green eyes blinked from the bottom up. He looked like the movie character E.T., I told him. Jed’s dad once saw a UFO while planting onions, Jed said, and Jed believed aliens had been here, still were. But he didn’t believe in the moon landing.
“What?” I said. He was the first moon landing denier I’d heard of. It turns out that, according to a Gallup poll, 6 percent of Americans are moon landing deniers; 20 percent, if it’s a Fox News poll. Jed turned defensive. “Why did we never go back there then?” I was pacing while wrapped in a bedsheet, upset, though I wasn’t sure why yet. “Because Congress objected to the cost. Because the point of a race is the finish line. This is bad logic. Little green men mastered interplanetary space travel, but humans who can’t get to a nearby celestial body convinced journalists to televise a hoax? Not to mention a problem with all conspiracy theories—hundreds of people won’t keep a secret.”
He got up and left, angry. He came back a day later. Did we break up because we disagreed about space travel? No. He never brought it up again. No, because we didn’t always talk about concepts and hypotheticals. We talked about cooking, sleep, weather—weather so central to what linguists call phatic talk, talk that’s all mood-calibration, not information. We talked about Sim, who attacked the workers I’d hired, because I’d used money from my book deal to gut the cabin, tearing out murky paneling and old carpet.
When we pulled out the carpet, so many years of dirt had sifted through, despite my three-times-a-week vacuuming, that when I first saw the slab I thought it was a dirt floor. It was a dirty floor. I sent workers away and swept. I got on my knees with a Shop-Vac. I was putting tile in every room, and painting cabinets, walls, outside walls, replacing the leaky roof. The cabin wouldn’t get bigger, but it was going to be airy and light.
While I was turning my cabin into a tidy cottage, I got a phone call asking me to apply to be the director of a creative writing PhD program in a Great Plains state university, a good program with good students. I’d visited it, teaching a class, doing a Q&A. The current director had retired unexpectedly, the man on the phone said. The month was May, nowhere close to the time when departments interview, but the department had to fill the post quickly and well. I was their first choice. They knew my work. I’d do the interview by conference call. I said, “No thank you. I’ve moved so much.”
The man on the phone said. “We’ll pay you more and reduce your teaching load. We’ll pay your moving expenses too. Sleep on it. I’ll call back. You’re deciding too quickly.”
Jed agreed. He beamed, finding this area in my life—besides tequila, day-trip destinations, and whether I wanted a tin or shingle roof—where he was expert. Eating carry-out food in my cabin that wasn’t a cottage yet, he said, “You don’t ever turn down job interviews that fall in your lap. If you get an offer, you tell your employer.” This seemed like trying to make someone jealous, like asking for proof that I mattered. “No,” Jed said. “It’s establishing your genuine market value. Your employer will likely match the offer.” If not? I asked. Jed said, “You stay as you are.” But I’d have to take the job, I said. If I told someone I was thinking of leaving and someone said go ahead and leave, I couldn’t stay, not with dignity. Jed shook his head no. “You’re confusing work with love.”
I cleared painters out of the house and did the conference call interview. The next day, I had an offer. I told the man on the phone I needed a week to decide. I made an appointment with the woman who’d first arranged my salary in Texas. I couldn’t play it Jed’s way, as sorely tempted, because she read my facial expressions well. I stared at the floor and said I hadn’t been looking for a job, that I was remodeling my house and planning to stay, but this job offer came out of the blue. She finished the conversation for me. She said, “Naturally, we’d like to match the offer. How many days do we have to try?”
I was away at a conference in Pennsylvania, sleeping in a lumpy bed next to a phone, when I decided I had to take the new job. I pictured myself in a new state—with a bigger house, better groceries, a newer car. The phone rang. “We can match the offer,” the woman administrator in Texas said. “We can’t make you director of a PhD program, because we don’t have one, but we’ll match every other aspect.” The mirage-vision of my new future stayed in place. I shook my head, willing it to go away. I conjured the limestone campus in Texas with it fiery flowers, my cottage soon to be airy and light. I shivered. Pennsylvania in June is chilly. I want to go home, I decided. I said, “Thank you.”
Sim got bit by a rattlesnake, and the vet said to hold a compress on Sim’s chest, and he might live. I’d once tried to clean a tiny leg wound, and Sim bit me, but now he laid his head in my lap like a hurt cowboy staring at the kind schoolmarm, and the wound drained. Afterward, he neglected deer patrol, so sometimes I chased away deer from my flowers.
Jed Pharr told me one morning after we’d drunk too much that he felt like he needed a PhD. “Why?” I was serving eggs, biscuits. He wasn’t sure, he said, ornery. Yet he’d hated college, I thought. He’d complained about studying for a real estate exam. It seemed clear that, to paraphrase Shakespeare, my PhD was an impediment to the marriage of our whatevers. Minds. Bodies. Our love wasn’t love if it altered while encountering alteration. My dad once said: “I don’t see how anyone could have stayed married to you—starting with a waitress, ending with you now.” Hence, I’d led a fitful life.
But movies started getting filmed in Texa
s, and, with Jed’s knowledge of place, his carpentry, he was making a career swerve whether I objected or not, he said. Like I was the ex-wife, I realized, who’d disapproved of the tequila business, or the adobe business. The new job impressed people, life on the set: handing Tommy Lee Jones a cup of water with spray-on mist to make the cup look as if it had beads of condensation; searching junkyards for a radio to put inside a truck Kris Kristofferson would pretend to drive.
Jed would be gone for months, and I’d visit him for a weekend now and then. This left me more time to work. Reunited, we’d make love, then sleep in each other’s arms. On one visit, Jed told me he’d paid for the grand hotel bill, the trip to Wisconsin, the bottles of wine and tequila, while not earning a red cent. I’d cooked for him or bought him clothes when his wore out. Not equal. “Why did you spend money you didn’t have?” He said, “You’d never been anywhere for fun. How else would I date you?”
Complicit, I’d fallen in love with it all. His moody eyes, his lean body, the lovemaking, the whirlwind fun fun fun tour. I offered him money, but he was almost from another generation; he said no, emphatically. At least for now. He had that new job.
A movie was being filmed in a border town where Jed’s family lived, including a brother who’d made a fortune building colonias—slumlike housing developments. I later realized that selling houses on land that won’t have electricity or water for years, if ever, requires cozy relationships with corrupt judges. At the time I knew only that Jed’s brother, Vick, paid the house note or rent for every relative except Jed and Jed’s sister. But Vick had given Jed start-up money for all of Jed’s businesses, Vick told me, shaking his head: “I never thought there’d be so many.” Jed and I once stopped by Vick’s house as Vick paid workmen to chase an owl. An owl near the house portended death, Vick explained.