“How did you know?” I heard myself asking.
“Know what?”
“That you weren’t happy. With Carlene.”
“What do you mean, how did I know? If you’re not happy, you’re not happy.”
“But you stayed with her for a while after that, right? After knowing?”
“I guess so. Sometimes it takes a while to fully admit to yourself that you know something. Or it takes something else coming along. Something better.” He squeezed my thigh.
“And what if I hadn’t come along? How would you have known then?”
He frowned. “What are you getting at?”
“I’m not getting at anything. I’m just curious.”
“Don’t be curious,” he said, leaning over and kissing my neck. “Just be happy. I’m happy.” His hand was still on my thigh; now he slid it up further. I thought of the moment in the karaoke room when my pants had ripped, when my thigh had been exposed to the swirling greenish disco lights. It was this part of my thigh he was touching now. I was suddenly saturated with a self-disgust so thick that I actually gagged. “I don’t feel so good,” I said. “I think I might just go to bed.”
“What about the pizza?”
I looked longingly at the box, steaming fragrantly on the coffee table in front of us, not yet opened. Its tomatoey, herbed aroma filled up the room. I wanted it, but not as badly as I wanted to be alone. “I think it might make me barf,” I said. “I’m just gonna go lie down.”
“What’s going on with you?”
“Nothing. I just don’t feel well. Stress, maybe. The change of season.”
He smiled. “You’re not pregnant, are you?”
“Of course not! Dennis, I just got my period, don’t you remember? I went home from work. You gave me a back rub that night.”
“Calm down,” he said. “Of course I remember. I’m joking.”
“Don’t joke about that, please.”
He held up both palms. “Sorry. I guess you should go to bed.”
“I’m going.”
From the darkness of our bedroom I could still smell the pizza, could hear the TV crowd’s muffled laughter, could sometimes even hear Dennis laughing along with them, as if everything were just fine. It was odd, experiencing this all from the outside: hearing the sounds of our life, smelling its smells, without participating. Was this what my life would be like, without me?
The next day I went back to the elementary school again. I sat on the same bench, sipped an iced coffee from the same Starbucks, waited again for Carlene to emerge.
She did, at the same time as she had the day before: today in nicely tailored dark jeans and a kind of maternity peasant blouse, her red hair down around her shoulders. I strained to glimpse the presence or absence of a wedding ring, but I was too far away.
As I had the day before, I watched her walk over to the group of teachers, chatting while keeping an eye on the children’s antics. I wasn’t sure what I was waiting for, what I had hoped to see, beyond confirming the truth of what I’d observed yesterday. I was just about to get up and leave when she turned in my direction—then paused, squinted, and stiffened in recognition.
I raised a hand weakly in greeting. She murmured something to the teacher next to her, let herself out the gate in the chain-link fence, and strode over to the bench where I was sitting. She looked down at me, hands on hips, as if I were one of her errant students. But she didn’t exactly look hostile: more like wearily patient, as if she’d been expecting this moment for a long time.
“I was just in the neighborhood,” I said. “I didn’t know you worked here.”
She sat down next to me, arranging herself on the bench, resting a hand lightly on her belly. “Somehow,” she said, looking straight ahead, “I find that hard to believe.”
“You look…great.”
“Thanks,” she said, turning to face me, with a smile so large it must have been involuntary and genuine. “I’ve always wanted kids. And so when, you know—I thought, fuck it. I’ll do it on my own. And I have to say, it’s already the best choice I’ve ever made, and I haven’t even met the baby yet.”
Usually, when pregnant women say that they’re excited to “meet” their babies, I want to vom. As if the baby is already this fully formed person with opinions and a personality, who they’ll finally get to sit down and have coffee with. When my sister’s was born, we all made this big fuss about the arrival of a new person, and then the new person turned out to be not a person at all but a wrinkled, larval sac of bodily fluids. There was nothing to “meet.” Yet when I heard Carlene use the phrase, I felt oddly touched. I could tell she really meant it, not as a smug pregnant-woman platitude but as an actual description of her feelings.
“Everybody’s rallying around me,” she continued. “I have more support than I would have if I’d stayed married to Dennis. Dennis was never home for more than five minutes. You know?”
I did know. That morning, when I’d awoken at six-thirty, he was already gone. He liked to get to the office before anyone else. He was one of those people who barely rest, who view the need for sleep as a faintly pitiable quirk.
“That’s great,” I said weakly. “I’m happy for you.” I was surprised and oddly disappointed, hearing the words come out of my mouth, to realize that they were true, or at least could be true. I could suddenly see Carlene in a detached, disinterested way; we had nothing to do with each other. I might have stolen her husband once, but what difference did that make, now? She was happy. I hadn’t stolen her future babies, and she hadn’t stolen mine. Even if such a thing were possible, she had no reason to curse me.
Realizing this, I should have felt free, but instead I felt weighed down more heavily than ever. Because, if the psychic explanation for my malaise did not involve Carlene, whatever thing was attacking me had come from some other place: some place that was harder to define, harder to assign a location outside of myself.
“Thanks,” said Carlene. She frowned again. “So why are you here?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I honestly don’t.” I stood up. “I have to run,” I said. “They need me back at work. I’ve got a meeting in half an hour.”
“Okay, but—”
I didn’t hear Carlene finish her sentence, because I was already walking away.
I did not walk back to work, though. I hadn’t been lying about the meeting, but I just couldn’t go back there right now. I couldn’t be around all those people who thought I was this one thing when I felt like this other thing. Something was pounding through my head, an almost unbearable pressure, something independent of the song, though the song was still there too, now starting to skip like a broken record: ’Cause I’ve got one hand in my pocket, and the other one, the other one, the other one…
I went back to JoyfulSongTime, paid the teenage attendant, accepted the sparkly tambourine. But when I finally found myself alone in room 6, I didn’t pick up the remote and punch in a number. Instead I just pulled my knees in close to my chest, rested my forehead on them, and began to sob.
A karaoke room in the middle of the day is a great place to cry, because you can be completely alone. It’s the last place anyone would expect to find you. Even if I’d been home, I would have felt more exposed, among all the objects that used to be my own and which I now shared with Dennis, intermingled with the objects that had once been his and Carlene’s, and the objects we had purchased together. Here in room 6 there was nothing personal, only binders full of songs cataloging the variable and yet endlessly predictable permutations of human feeling. Here my privacy was the most common, clichéd thing in the world. Here I could safely turn myself inside out.
I cried for half an hour straight, and then my BlackBerry started to buzz. It was Dennis. I was late for the meeting, of course. I let it buzz until it died, and then it started buzzing again. Then a text came through: Chris are you OK?? I’m worried about you. Fuck the meeting. Just tell me where you are.
I hit the reply b
utton, then stared down helplessly at the device. Was it even possible to tell him where I was? Where was I?
When Dennis found me, I was lying supine on the long padded couch in room 6, my hands at my sides, like a corpse. I wasn’t crying anymore. I was staring up at the ceiling, at the swirling pattern of lights that spangled its surface; yet my focus lay elsewhere, on something beyond the visible.
What I was focused on was the silence. When I had finally stopped crying, my head was blindingly clear, like a landscape blanketed in snow. The song was gone. Everything was gone—except this silence, like a taut tightrope across which I now had to navigate without losing my footing. I couldn’t be distracted. I felt a clarity that was wordless, without reference. It had no message. It was the message: a tight humming blankness that belonged to me, that demanded my attention, that demanded everything.
I heard the door open. I heard Dennis come in. I heard him speak my name. I did not reply, or turn my head to acknowledge him.
I knew that I would have to speak soon, that I would have to tell him some things. What I didn’t yet know, what I hoped that the silence would reveal to me, was just how many things there were. And also: would he be able to hold these things, to cup them in his palms and accept them—or would he hand them back to me, impenetrable as mirrors, mine and mine alone?
He sat down next to me, his expensively suited butt squeaking on the cheap vinyl as he settled himself. He said nothing. He took both of my hands into both of his. I tried to pull them away, but he held them tighter. Then he looked up at the ceiling, where I was looking, and waited for me to speak: so patiently that it was like he wasn’t waiting at all, like he was simply watching the miasmic patterns of the disco lights as if they held great interest, sanguine about whatever mysteries or banalities they might reveal.
I opened my mouth and heard myself begin to speak. The sentence I spoke was not the one I had planned. What I said was “I’ve lost something.”
“What?” said Dennis, gently. “What do you mean, baby? What have you lost?”
I had no idea how to begin.
Horse
Every morning we meet in the kitchen and unsheathe our needles. Serena delicately peels down her underwear, exposing a modest triangle of buttock; I count to three, hold her hip to steady her trembling frame, then jab, thrusting the handle until the fluid disappears. She exhales, in one quick hiss, like a cat. Then I turn and bend over, underwear around my ankles. I don’t care what she sees: my cottage-cheese ass, the tuft of fur between my legs. I used to wax and prune, to spread “smoothing creams” on every inch of my body, even the parts no one ever saw in the daylight—but since I started taking the shots, my attitude has changed.
Needles don’t scare me like they do Serena. But when she plunges it in, I give a little yelp of solidarity. We are in this together—at least for now.
The two needles look identical, although their contents are different. We have different goals. Serena wants to become a mother. I want to become a horse.
Q: What does it mean to be a horse?
A: First, it means not being a person. No credit cards, no fad diets, no existential questions, no more boring meetings or family dinners. No political allegiances or disappointments, no responsibility to anyone but yourself. Mostly: no embarrassment, which (as a great writer once said) is the fundamental condition of being human.
Q: How do I become one?
A: It’s quite simple. State your desire in writing and we’ll take it from there.
Q: Is it expensive?
A: No.
Q: Why not?
A: Because there is not yet sufficient demand for the procedure. All the more reason for you to try before it becomes pricey and exclusive. Right now it costs less than a Pilates vacation in Tulum. Would you rather transform your core, or your entire being?
Every time she saw the blue minus sign, she said, Serena heard a big game-show buzzer going off inside her head. She was running out of time: only one more round of IVF before her money dried up. In the meantime, her ovaries swelled painfully, she felt like a hormone-soaked sponge. I didn’t say so—I held her hand, I told her she was beautiful and perfect, I spoke soothing words about the future—but she looked like a hormone-soaked sponge: bloated, leaking feeble aimless tears.
Serena’s name fit her perfectly: she was sleek, composed, never a hair or a word out of place. Even in rare moments of rage, or grief, or drunkenness, she seemed exquisitely self-controlled; her emotions seeped out of her like an invisible vapor, leaving her porcelain-doll face, her slim body, unchanged. Now, though, she’d begun to grow blurry. This was what she wanted, to blur and smudge her own outlines: but she wanted pregnancy, not anxiety or disappointment, to be the cause.
Meanwhile, I felt my formerly messy self congeal, cohere, grow tight and purposeful; I became leaner, more alert. Sometimes, walking down the street, I gave my long hair a toss, I almost let out a whinny of delight.
Q: How does the process work?
A: The process now known as Equinification was discovered by Dr. Janus Beláček, a Hungarian doctor employed by the government of Croatia. While using horse DNA to test a method of improving hair luster, Beláček discovered that his subjects—but only the females—had begun to grow hooves. This accidental discovery enabled Beláček to extend his formula, transforming human DNA into horse DNA. The process requires only a simple series of shots.
Q: Where do these horse-women live?
A: Atalanta Ranch, which occupies an entire island off the coast of Florida and has been built expressly for this purpose.
Q: What do the horses on the ranch look like?
A: They look like horses, which is to say that they look exactly like themselves: tall graceful animals designed for running and for grazing, muscles rippling beneath a shiny coat of fur, hair flying in the wind. They don’t look like the sad, compromised horses you might see plodding around muddy rings carrying children, or dragging tourist-laden carriages through a city park. They look like they are doing nothing other than actively being themselves—as if this, the act of being themselves, joyfully absorbs all of their attention. They lap from clear pools beneath waterfalls, they canter across open fields, they nibble grass at the base of exquisite, tree-lined foothills.
Q: Are the horses happy?
A: There is no way of knowing for sure.
Q: But what’s your gut feeling, though?
A: How could something that beautiful not be happy?
“Why do you want to be a mom so bad, anyway?” I asked Serena. We sat across from each other at the kitchen table, fingers curled around steaming mugs of tea, the offending pee-stick faceup between us. “It’s weird that I’ve never asked you.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I just always have.”
“Are you sure you really want it? That it’s not, you know, just socialization?”
She set her mug down and closed her eyes, as if gathering her thoughts, and then opened them. “Sometimes I want to hold a baby so badly,” she said, curving her arms around the invisible burden, “and it’s not an idea, it’s a physical need. It’s stronger than the need for sex. The warmth, the weight—I don’t know. It’s incredibly specific. It’s a more specific desire than I’ve ever felt for any man.” She looked at me. “You’ve never felt that, not even a little bit?”
I shook my head. “And I’ve always thought, when people say they want to start a family, why would anyone want to create more family? Isn’t family the thing we’re all trying to get away from?” She laughed, while I blushed and backpedaled: “I mean, yours won’t be like that. Yours will be great.”
She shrugged. “My kid won’t always like me. Maybe I won’t even like him or her all the time. But I don’t care. It’s like—” She hesitated for a moment. “You’re going to think this is cheesy, but I heard this song lyric once that described children as ‘life’s longing for itself.’ That’s the best way I can describe it.”
I blinked, startled by the phr
ase. “I know exactly what that means,” I said. “Life’s longing for itself. But for me, it has nothing to do with children.”
Serena had a husband once: Bill. Nothing was wrong with him, really; he just didn’t stick. Some people slide right off each other, despite their best attempts to stay attached.
I’ve never had a husband, or a wife. I’ve had lovers, some briefly, some for ages. One of us always left. At first I thought I was failing at something and then I realized I was aiming for the incorrect goal. In trying to knit my life together with someone else’s, I was going in the wrong direction entirely: what I wanted was to be free, utterly free.
At first love appeared to offer freedom; it gave me a kind of soaring feeling, the world seemed to belong especially to me. But every long-term arrangement made a mockery of this initial flight: each shared domestic situation became a sadistically nurtured garden of resentments, each nonmonogamous configuration required a volume of careful politics—of unceasing demands disguised as negotiations—that I imagine it might take to run a progressive, moderately sized nation. Sweden, for example.
The Wrong Heaven Page 4