Even if they had been single, childless—free—there would have been no future in it. So she pointed out to us when it was over, and we nodded, gravely.
But of course they weren’t free. Both of them were married; both had still-young children (he had three under thirteen). He even declared himself to be happily married—he went so far as to insist that he was deeply in love with his wife. The painter snorted when she told us this—she couldn’t help it—and one of us (the playwright, who could always be counted on for sarcasm) obligingly responded, Sure, it stands to reason then that he would trade a million e-mails and elaborately arrange four secret meetings with another woman (we did not yet know about the kisses). But this was the wrong thing to say, for the unhappy painter now took pains to point out that what her beloved actually said was that he was deeply in love with his wife too—that the emphasis on “too” was notable—and that he had said this very sadly. We did not say anything at all then. We were quick studies, all of us.
But what difference did it make, we thought, if he had said it sadly? What difference did it make, in fact, if he was “deeply in love” with both his wife and our friend—who might not have been particularly “happy” in her marriage (or in general—but who among us was?), but still had not considered that she might divorce her husband and run off with the ob-gyn? (Although after it was over, the playwright was unable to resist remarking: Still, if she had, just think! This town would have gotten a reputation as a place where gynecologists run off with their patients.)
The truth was, we felt sorry for the painter. During the ten months that she had been in love, or had imagined that she was—had told herself she was—even those of us who envied her also felt sorry for her. Only the novelist, who had no memory of her brief, early, childless marriage (so she swore) and could not be counted on to keep a dinner date with us—she was the one of us who was now a step-grandmother as well as the mother of five-year-old Uncle Henry, who had cried over his half sister’s wedding—would invoke the phrase “in love” when she spoke of her feelings for her present husband. The rest of us had not been in love for a long time—not even the one of us who was in her third marriage, who read women’s magazines and was learning how to be a chef, with her new husband’s blessing; not even the three of us who dated, had romances, dragged ourselves through periodic breakups. Some of us debated whether there was any difference between being and only imagining oneself in love. How could there be, one of us asked, when being in love was an act of imagination? (It could have been almost any one of us who asked.)
Either way—being or imagining—it sounded exhausting. And we were already so exhausted.
Still—it was a complicated sort of feeling sorry for the painter that we all felt while she was in the midst of it.
*
And then it was over, and our pity for her was uncomplicated. We petted her and brought her little presents—chocolates, books we thought she might like (we were wrong), bottles of wine. The cellist and the high-school English teacher both made mix CDs for her; the art history professor and the aspiring chef brought baked goods (a sponge cake and a pie) they had made themselves. We put our arms around her when she cried. We helped to keep her son distracted, hoping to keep him from noticing his mother’s grief.
And when, soon after this, the one who’d moved away so long ago called one of us (then called most of the rest of us, one after another—for it seemed that there was no one she could talk to in the place where she had lived now for so many years) to say that she had just found out her husband had been having an affair, we were full of pity for her too. And she too wept, and while we couldn’t put our arms around her from two thousand miles away, we made comforting sounds, we told her we had never liked him (though in truth we hadn’t really known him; we hardly remembered him), we told her we loved her.
But what should she do? she asked us, each in turn. Should she forgive him—stay? Or throw him out? Or leave him in the house and take the children? Should she force him to go to counseling? He didn’t want to go to counseling. He didn’t want to choose between her and the other woman but he knows he has to, she told all of us, one at a time. And then there was the matter of the children. My children mean more to me than anything, she told us he had said. But obviously that could not be true. Not more than anything, we said—to her, and to each other. We didn’t say it in the presence of the painter.
Take them and go, one of us—the only one of us who had taken her own child and gone when she’d ended her first marriage, who was now in her third—advised. The museum curator, married once so many years ago that she could not remember it, agreed. Three of us, including the painter, urged forgiveness. The rest of us, to various degrees, equivocated. One of us reported to the rest of us that she had asked, Do you still love him? And that our old friend had been infuriated by the question, had said, How am I supposed to know? I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean.
*
She had been a translator and editor and something of a writer herself, but unlike the rest of us, she had given up all work but motherhood—and taking care of him, she added bitterly—when she’d had the first of her children. Her husband’s work paid very well (we could not remember what that work was, only that it had brought him out west, had taken her away from us—but it was too late to ask about it now; it would make it seem as if we hadn’t been paying attention). She had not worried about money since the start of her marriage. But now she was very worried, she reported. Was that why she wasn’t leaving? one of us who thought she should leave asked the rest of us. No, one of us said—it was the art history professor or the cellist. Nobody would stay just for the money.
And then we debated that—just as we’d debated in love versus one imagining oneself in love. All of us enjoyed this sort of conversation—or perhaps “enjoyed” was not the right word. “Indulged in” was better. All of us indulged in this sort of conversation. We could discuss such things, wondering aloud about them, arguing about them, trading our positions on them endlessly. It was only doing something that was difficult.
And yet—after some months had passed—our old friend and her husband did do something. He moved into the guest room and they went to counseling together. She would come home from each session and call one of us—or several of us, one after another—and report on everything that had transpired. When her husband confessed that he was still seeing the other woman—that he’d never stopped seeing her—we were on the phone with her for hours.
And he blames me, she told us, one by one. He says he never felt nurtured. That’s what he told our therapist! He had the nerve to say I’d never nurtured him. But here’s the thing—that’s not my style. You know me. Now we were confused, each of us, one by one. Did we know her? After all this time?
Still, we said. That’s no excuse for what he did.
That’s not the point, she said.
It wasn’t? we asked. What was the point then?
The point, she said furiously—and for a moment each of us, all of us, imagined what it might have felt like to have been her husband—the point is that he never told me that he needed nurturing. Is it fair to hold it against me that I didn’t give him something that he never even let me know he needed?
No, it wasn’t fair, we said, staunch friends even at this distance, even after so much time. We were confused, our pity suddenly turned complicated, and all of us—even those of us who weren’t married—wondered all at once about what might seem obvious to us but wasn’t to the ones we loved, and who loved us.
But still we said it. Not fair! we all cried. Not fair at all!
*
Finally, our old friend and her husband were divorced. And some time after that, she married again, as did her ex-. The counseling hadn’t worked, she said, but she told us about how they had “come to terms,” and how the children, afterward, had seemed no worse for wear, how both she and her first husband were much better off than they had been before. The phone calls came l
ess and less frequently and then eventually stopped. By the time all of us received our invitations to her eldest daughter’s wedding, a whole decade had gone by.
By this time four more of us will have divorced, including the painter—but not including the comp studies professor who’d long ago stopped sleeping with her husband. The Bobbsey Twins divorce. The former administrator, now a chef and the co-owner of a gastropub with a fellow student from the cooking school, divorces her third husband. Never again, she says, but we do not believe her.
One of us is widowed now. Not the one who had daydreamed about it, the cellist—she is still married to the same husband. Four more of us have lost our parents. Four of us are now orphans.
Many of our children finish growing up, leave home, begin their own lives. Five of us are grandparents. The one of us who’d moved away, whose eldest daughter is now married (three of us flew out west for the wedding), adopts a baby with her second husband, although she is fifty-six. A private adoption. She calls just one of us—one of the three who’d come to her daughter’s wedding—to report this news and asks if she would spread the word as she sees fit. A few weeks later, all of us receive engraved announcements.
The playwright doesn’t say a word, which surprises all of us.
The poet, who has just suffered through a terrible divorce from the woman she was married to for only a year, and who has now joined the ranks of the sober among us—now there are six—suggests, over dinner, that we may have reached the age of post-postgrief.
All of us laugh. Hear, hear, says the painter. Here’s to being beyond being beyond grief, one of us—it’s hard to tell which one, as we are all still laughing—says.
None of us believe it. Even so, all of us raise a glass—some wine, some water. The age of grief is never-ending, we all know that. All of us are grieving, always, for one thing or another, or one person or another, or ourselves.
Trailer
Robert Clark
The last time we spoke was July 17, 2010. My phone bill says I called him at 1:23 in the afternoon at a number near Asheville, North Carolina, and the call lasted for one minute; I must have left a message or else we spoke for just a moment. He called me back at 2:30—this was 2:30 my time, so it was 5:30 for him; and I picture the heat of the day having just crested, the shadows pooling on the east side of his crappy trailer—and we spoke for ninety minutes. That was not long for us; sometimes we’d go on for two and a half hours. Still, in hindsight, ninety minutes seems a long time: I think now, hadn’t he gotten hungry; didn’t he need to piss or take an insulin shot? But he would rather talk; talk at all costs regardless of the wants of body or soul. Like me, he cared only for words.
I called him back the next afternoon at 2:28, again for just a minute; again I left a message; we never spoke again. Doubtless the message concerned nothing much of consequence, maybe something I said I’d follow up on or maybe I merely wanted to talk. Maybe I wanted more of what I’d had the day before: gossip, commiseration, flattery. But he hadn’t picked up: he was outside walking among the other crappy trailers, chatting with the cat lady who lived in the double-wide opposite him, or perhaps he’d gotten a ride into Asheville for an appointment with the psychiatrist who orchestrated his battery of medications: Depakote, Lamictal, Neurontin, Risperdal, and Seroquel, separately or in concert depending on the pitch of his mood, thrumming or stagnant or shattered but, in any case, haunted. Or he might merely be lying on his couch, not answering, too sapped and bled out to lift the receiver. Knowing that likelihood, I tried not to take it personally; at times he was hardly a person to himself at all.
Together, though, we were above all else mutual narcissists. When we looked in the mirror we saw, of course, ourselves, but also each other: divorced middle-aged men; once “promising” authors who’d run out of gas; men in trouble with women; depressives and maniacs in and out of various therapies and drug regimens; men bewitched by certain nostalgias embodied in music, landscape, and especially books; but most of all men who wrote or wanted to get themselves writing again and couldn’t.
I would like to claim this amounted to a great friendship, that we supported and protected and encouraged one another even if we could never quite save each other. Certainly I couldn’t save him. I didn’t even know he was dead until eighteen months after the fact. But that is in the nature of writers. The book you are writing—or failing to write—is indistinguishable from yourself; is always the main and pretty much only thing. It precludes the extreme sorts of compassion friendship can require: inconvenience, even sacrifice, or loyalty. As Fitzgerald said of his friend Hemingway, “Ernest would always give a helping hand to a man on a ledge a little higher up.” Hemingway, to be sure, was a championship bully and interpersonal larcenist. But I myself promised Jeff (that was his name) for four years straight that I would come visit him. Yet I never did, even as he was fired from the menial jobs that were his lot, was checked in and out of psychiatric wards, dashed his heart against one woman or another, lost his credit, his car, and his home, all the while laying down miles of ink, albeit in notebooks rather than actual manuscripts; sketches, outlines, and proposals rather than stories; words rather than writing. I did finally go to Asheville and to the trailer just outside of town two years after he’d died, but only when I thought I might get a piece of writing for myself out of it.
I intend for that to sound frank and unsparing—I mean for it to mean that for you, the reader—but the truth, the emotional, felt truth, is elsewhere, somewhere altogether less dramatic and perhaps less meaningful, at least in the way I intend. Which is not to say I’m being untruthful or insincere, or even that I’m valuing style over substance, in creating an impression. I am merely trying to make things interesting.
So let me stipulate that I feel bad that Jeff is dead and that I wish I had done any number of things differently while he was alive; that if I am not quite ashamed of myself, I have many regrets; that if I am not exactly guilty of anything I am not innocent either. And if I cannot say what or why that condition is, I would like to try to describe how it was and how it is or, rather, remains.
But Jeff described that approach just as well, unbeknownst to me and on that same day we’d talked for the last time. He wrote in his journal, “Do not need to understand it to write about it—how is the interesting question, not why. As long as you can say how it was, what it was like.” I know this because I persuaded Jeff’s mother to let me see all the papers and notebooks he left behind, and that was in his entry for July 17. From my own archive of e-mails I also know we talked that day about agents and editors: later that evening I contacted my agent with the address of the editor of Jeff’s first and only book; the editor had moved to a new publishing house and Jeff must have thought he might be a good prospect for the novel I was then trying to place. I in turn prompted Jeff to buy some books (Julia Blackburn’s The Three of Us, Simon Gray’s The Smoking Diaries), not that it required much effort to persuade him to do so. Over one manic weekend during an efflorescence of his bipolar disease, he’d ordered $1,500 worth of books and CDs from Amazon. Amazon took them back (I think he’d volunteered to send an explanatory note from his psychiatrist), but even in his most levelheaded moments he could not forgo buying books or making lists of ones he wanted or loading up his online shopping basket with another dozen titles. Jeff believed in “models,” in the template, or at least inspiration he hoped to find in someone else’s book for his own books. And if it wasn’t in one book, maybe it would be in the next one, or perhaps the one after that; would be the lucky bet in his Amazon queue, the daily double, and he could see his way beyond the notebook and into the tale, the work, the thing itself. My approach was different: I wanted my books to be self-generating—I feared contamination or didn’t want to be in anyone’s debt—and in any case I was never as broke as Jeff nearly always was. I could support my own habit and at times I enabled his. In his journal entry for July 17, he’d noted the titles of the books I’d recommended and I know from his
own e-mail archive (to which his mother also gave me access) that he ordered one of them that same evening.
It pleases me that he thought enough of me and our conversations to not only jot down the books I liked, but (I also see in his journals) to take down some of the advice I offered. For example, after that list of books he wrote “being preoccupied with the scaffolding rather than the substance” and I know I said this because it is something I still say to writing students today; that often the conceits or opening lines and paragraphs or epigraphs that seem so essential at the start are things the writer needs to clear her throat, to launch herself into the work, and, having served their purpose, can then be jettisoned. And now I read the journal page again and I also realize that it was not Jeff but I who must have said “how is the interesting question”; that the remark is written directly above the list of books, among the things I said that day.
So I said it and Jeff rendered it again in his scrolled and pitching, precise and headlong cursive italic. He’d have been in the trailer, on his couch or at his desk, the cats (one tabby, one piebald) dozing, the tolling of the crickets outside taut and sheer. He would have had music on (maybe the Byrds singing Dylan’s “My Back Pages”) and that would have mellowed the heat, defused the piercing light through the window even as evening fell, and he would have been consoled by it; and maybe by putting down the words that had passed between us, the veil of Seroquel and all the rest lifted for a moment.
Affinity Page 15