The Atlas of Love

by Laurie Frankel

  “You guys have fun,” said Jill. “Remember I have library time in the morning, and Janey has yoga, so you’re on Atlas duty.”

  “I remember,” said Katie. “We won’t be that late.”

  After they left, Jill and I deconstructed their relationship. They’d been dating for five minutes. It was time.

  “He’s going to want to have sex with her,” said Jill.

  “At the very least, he’s going to want to take her out for a beer,” I said.

  “Maybe he won’t be as creeped out as we are when he orders beer and she orders ginger ale.” Katie has this way of making you feel like a degenerate for drinking anything that isn’t pale soda.

  “Maybe he won’t mind not having sex. Maybe he’ll like her that much.”

  “Maybe he will convert.”

  “Religious conversion for someone seems kind of wrong,” said Jill.

  “Maybe it can work,” I said. “If you’re convinced, if you believe.”

  “Maybe,” said Jill, “but not because you fall in love with a girl and she’s a Mormon and won’t have sex with you unless you’re a Mormon too.”

  “Love is transformative,” I said.

  “But he’s fundamentally different from her. Religion’s not just about what you believe. It’s cultural. It’s like saying race is just about skin color.”

  “They’ll share other values,” I said. “Education. Scholarship. Whatever.”

  “You just like him because he’s a Mets fan, and he made you feel vindicated about Parker Tamlin.”

  “Stupid Parker Tamlin,” I said. “Stupid Yankees.”

  “Plus he’s a historian,” said Jill.

  “True.” Jill and I share a distrust of history and people who study it. It wasn’t like dating a Republican, but it was still good to be alert.

  “It would be fun to have a wedding,” she mused. “Put Atlas in a tiny tuxedo. Have a big shower for her. Sit around bridal stores while she tried on hundreds of huge white dresses.”

  “I think you’re putting the cart before the carrot,” I said.

  We were still up when Katie got home. Ethan walked her to the door but did not come in. We couldn’t tell if he kissed her or not. Katie came in, took off her coat and shoes, kissed an Atlas sleeping in Jill’s arms, and asked how our evening was.

  “Who cares about our evening,” said Jill. “How was yours?”

  “Mmm, nice.”

  “And?”

  “And I don’t know. He’s nice. Did you guys think he was nice?”

  “We liked him a lot,” I offered.

  “He seems great,” said Jill.

  Silence. Nothing.

  “What did you do?”

  “We went out to dinner. To the Hopvine. And then for dessert at Victrola.”

  Huge pause. Nothing forthcoming. This was highly irregular.

  “And? Was it fun?”

  “He had a beer,” Katie said slowly, and Jill and I exchanged glances. “I didn’t,” she added as if she needed to. “But he didn’t seem to care. He’s doing interesting work. With Professor Carlson. He’s nice and funny and cute.”

  “But . . .” Jill prompted.

  “But not Mormon.”

  “Does it matter at this stage?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I tried to feel out what he might think of conversion.”

  Jill shot straight up on the couch. “Are you mad?”

  “I didn’t come right out and ask him. I just hinted around. He didn’t seem too open to the idea though. He said he believed in God but not religion. I don’t even know what that means.”

  “It’s a little early,” I said gently.

  “Yeah, we’ll see.”

  “Will you?” asked Jill.

  “We’re going to have lunch Wednesday. If you can stay an extra hour or so with Atlas,” she added in my direction.

  “Yeah, of course,” I said, bewildered. How can you tell someone who doesn’t already know it that a first date is too early to ask someone to convert for you? On the other hand, for someone who knows already that this would be a deal breaker, maybe it isn’t too early to ask; maybe it’s the only possibility.

  Seventeen

  It wasn’t experiments in dating that did it anyway. It wasn’t amoebas or lack of sleep or our hanging-by-a-hangnail schedule. It was narrative. Narrative rose up and kicked our asses.

  Jill’s big project, her soon-to-be-proposed dissertation, was women’s Holocaust narratives. At least it would have been if she were working on it. In fairness, I should emphasize that under normal circumstances, disserters taking months/semesters/years off from writing their dissertations—while claiming instead to be reading, researching, teaching, traveling, exploring other angles, waiting for interlibrary loans, waiting for student loans, waiting for handwriting analyses, psychic readings, a sign from the heavens, and/or the (literal) death of their authors so that they can finally nail down a definitive oeuvre—is not only not unusual, it’s pretty much expected. There are people in our department who started their master’s degrees the year I started middle school. There are people in our department who took a year off from writing their dissertation so they could have a baby, and now that baby is graduating from high school. There are not people in our department—not even one or two—who have finished their dissertation in the purported year it is budgeted for. Writing a dissertation is not a linear process. No one minds. The unfinishable state of dissertations keeps introductory college courses staffed with practically unpaid labor and keeps the job market nearly impossible but not quite so completely impossible that riots ensue. I would go so far as to suggest that they must put something in the water to keep disserters distracted and ever nearer but never quite done, some Sisyphean chemical, except that would make me sound paranoid and insane.

  Suffice it to say that Jill’s not doing any work in and of itself wasn’t cause for alarm, at least not to the department or the graduate program. But to we who lived with her, who watched her stop not only writing but also reading and researching to take up instead pursuits pretty much limited to activities that could be accomplished from the couch, including a remarkable amount of really bad TV, it was pretty alarming indeed. And there was lots and lots of crying. Maybe you are thinking that in a house full of women and babies there was bound to be lots of crying. But Jill is not a weepy person nor one easily put off from her goals, and we were worried.

  Because it was Wednesday, I’d rushed home from my class to take over Atlasing so Jill could go to hers, but she was sitting in full lotus position on the floor, eyes closed, breathing deeply, listening to a yoga for mothers and babies CD with Atlas wide-eyed in her lap.

  “Jill, you’ve got to go. Class starts in ten minutes. I hurried best I could but I ran into Dr. Brown after class and you know how that goes. He would not shut up. You’re not even dressed!” I rushed in, breathless, in a very despite-practically-running-all-the-way-home-I’m-six-unmakeupable-minutes-behind-so-you-have-to-go-go-go place. Jill did not even open her eyes. She inhaled deeply into her navel center then her heart center then her third eye. She was wearing sweatpants. She exhaled slowly.

  “I’m not going,” she said as calmly and quietly as if this were normal. Grad seminars meet only once a week. You are expected—highly expected—to be there.

  “You’re not going?” Not that cutting class is some kind of tragedy. But I’d just rushed all the way home, and plus I had planned my day around not having my day. “So you’re just going to sit there and do yoga?”

  “Mmmhmmm,” said Jill and breathed all the way in, all the way out.

  “You’ve already missed this class,” I added lamely. “You can’t miss again.”

  In. Out. “I’ve dropped the class.” Calmly. In. Out.

  “What?” I shrieked. Uncoolly.

  Jill’s head turned towards me. She opened one eye. “We are chilling out,” she said pointedly. Then added, “You are harshing on our mellow.”

  I said nothing
. I went into the kitchen and made myself lunch. I tried to decide whether the anger I was feeling was virtuous concern or selfish jealousy or the stunning realization that dropping a class probably didn’t portend the end of the world. Eight minutes later, I couldn’t stand it anymore. She was stretched out on her back in savasana, hands upturned towards the ceiling, ready to receive whatever the universe had to offer. I was beginning to regret getting Jill into yoga. Either it worked too well on her or she didn’t need it. She was already too calm.

  “You’re dropping this class or all of them?” I asked less shrilly.

  “Just this one for the moment.” So calmly.

  “Can I ask why?”

  “In a few minutes,” she murmured from her yogic sleep.

  I went back to the kitchen. Had I taken on this ridiculous schedule so that she could drop out of school? Had I consented to surrogate-parent her child so that Jill could sit around doing yoga while I rushed from place to place? Was Atlas not her son and thus her problem, and if so, why was I running madly home in the rain in my good shoes while she achieved enlightenment in the living room?

  “Hey there,” she said with a smile, sitting down and helping herself to half my sandwich without asking. I was too annoyed to eat and fed the other half to Uncle Claude.

  “Where’s Atlas?”

  “Napping.”

  I could never—never—get Atlas to nap in the afternoons anyplace but my arms. When I put him down, he wailed and wailed. Jill set him in his crib, closed the door, and walked away.

  “I can never get him to nap,” I said, miffed.

  “He was very zen from yoga,” said Jill. I considered how killing her would be rude, bad for my karma, and impossible to schedule around.

  “So you’re just dropping classes?”

  “No, I’m not just dropping classes. I have dropped this class.” Calmly, gently.

  “Why?” Annoyed, angry, irrational.

  “Because I can’t do it.” Logical, simple, infuriating.

  “How can you not do it?” I demanded. “This is your class. It’s taught by your advisor. She’s teaching it for you. It’s the subject of your dissertation.”

  “All true, but it turns out I can’t do it. I can’t, I don’t want to, I won’t. That’s it.” Satisfied, smug, offering so little information. I believe the word is “maddening.”

  “Jill, how is it that you can’t do it, but Katie and I can? We’re taking on just as much as you are. We have just as many classes and students and pages to read and essays to grade. We aren’t watching stupid TV all day every day. We haven’t completely stopped doing any work at all. We are doing just as much child care as you are, and he isn’t even our kid. How is that reasonable?”

  “Because he isn’t your kid,” Jill hissed, suddenly icy. “And because you aren’t studying Holocaust narrative.”

  “What the hell has that got to do with anything? I love him like he’s mine. I take care of him like he’s mine. I take time off from my own work like he’s mine. And besides, Holocaust narrative is easier than Shakespeare. You’ve got fifty years of scholarship to go through. I’ve got four hundred and counting.”

  She slammed her water glass on the table, grabbed huge fistfuls of hair at her temples, and pulled hard. “There are no dead children in Shakespeare,” she whispered through clenched teeth, too insane, apparently, to talk out loud, and while it is not strictly true that there are no dead children in Shakespeare, I kept my mouth shut as I suspected this was not her point. “I can’t read about the dead babies.” She started crying. “I can’t do the kids starving to death, freezing to death, silent under floorboards waiting to die. I can’t read about the children separated from their parents and marched off to gas chambers. I can’t read about it, and I can’t think about it, and I can’t write about it. Even the survivors, even the happy endings, they’re the kids who were all alone, who hid in latrines and haystacks and the homes of people who never loved them and were only trying to make money, and it’s killing me. It’s hurting my heart. I can’t do it anymore. I don’t even want to try to get over it. I don’t ever want to read this stuff ever again.”

  I tried to think of something useful to say, but it’s hard to argue to a going-insane new mother that she should read about mass graves full of dead children.

  “Okay,” I tried. “So you’ll study something else.”

  “I can’t start over. It’s too late.”

  “It’s not too late. You could start a whole new dissertation proposal, a new specialty, a new program altogether. You could switch to math if you wanted and still finish years before half the people here.”

  “People will ask why I switched topics. I can’t say, ‘Oh, dead babies,’ because I mean probably if I didn’t want to read about death, I shouldn’t have picked Holocaust narratives.”

  “Things are different now,” I said. “Pick something else. There are lots of uplifting literary periods.”

  “There are no uplifting literary periods,” said Jill. And then, “I can’t let words on a page ruin my life. So I have to stop reading them. Maybe all of them.”

  Part of dedicating your life to studying literature is realizing that storytelling is more than just make-believe and that make-believe is far more important than we all pretend—make believe—it is. One way or another, books tell the stories of their readers. But telling our lives is not the same as shaping them, whittling them away. Suddenly Jill had lost control. Her books had taken over and were in charge.

  Later, Jill napped, and I sat with Atlas snug in my lap, reading him Moby-Dick. I don’t especially like Moby-Dick. It is hopelessly long, and whaling is boring, and the allegory is painfully obvious though perhaps it wasn’t before it became total canon fodder and probably not for a nine-week-old anyway. But Moby-Dick is beautiful—good for reading aloud—and it was one of Daniel’s favorites. It seemed like what he’d have read to his son, and I am a firm believer in knowing people by knowing what they read, holding their favorite words in your mouth, running curious fingers along the spines of their books. Atlas watched me intently, eyes clear and bright and wide open, head pressed against my chest, warm and heavy in my arms. The consuming, epic, iconic hatred and passion of Ahab’s quest for that whale seemed nonetheless dwarfed by the love I felt for this small, small person. I failed suddenly to believe in emotions as destructive as hate and obsession when such vast, all-consuming love could emanate from a tiny brand-new being and fill the room, the house, my heart. Atlas watched and listened, breathing in and out quietly, moving in and out as I breathed too, as Ahab paced the decks and watched the waters. Jill came downstairs rubbing her eyes and lay down on the sofa to listen quietly in the half-light. “You’re skipping parts,” she said after a while when I was sure she’d fallen back to sleep.

  “Moby-Dick is long,” I said. “And whaling is boring.”

  “But you’re missing the point then,” said Jill. “It’s supposed to be long and boring and over-detailed so you feel what it feels like to be at sea for months on end, so you feel what it feels like to be totally lost with no power or control.”

  “It’s just a bedtime story. It’s not like he understands it anyway.”

  “Yeah, but why read it at all then?”

  I didn’t want to tell her I’d chosen it because of Daniel, but I suspected she knew. “It’s pretty,” I answered and added, “but I’ve stopped believing it.”

  “Which part?”

  “All that hatred and vengeance and myopic anger. It doesn’t seem believable to me. Real people aren’t like that.”

  “They are when they don’t have a choice.”

  “There’s always a choice. You could chase a whale obsessively until it killed you and everyone else. Or you could chase it for a month or so and then give up. Or you could stay home with a book and care about something besides whales.”

  “You could but Ahab couldn’t. You couldn’t if you’d spent most of your life at sea, afloat, homeless, in danger, unlo
ved. If you had no skills on land. If a whale had eaten your leg.”

  “Then I wouldn’t be a real person. I’d be an allegorical figure.”

  “There’s less difference than you think,” she said.

  “I’m just saying real people choose love or at least laziness, not hate, not anger, not fanatical whale chasing. The difference between real people and allegorical figures is we have choices.”

  “Not really,” she said. “If you were in a book and your best friend got pregnant, you’d have to raise the baby. You couldn’t leave even though you hadn’t been stupid enough to get pregnant. You’d put your life on hold. You’d sit around all afternoon reading the baby’s errant father’s favorite book aloud even though you should be at the library doing your own work. You wouldn’t have any choice. The frameworks of narrative leave no option for deserting your best friend and her out-of-wedlock baby.”

  “Sure they do. I could have left her and her baby, made my way in the world, and looked back with regret once right before my marriage, once when my first son died tragically of the plague, and once on my deathbed, having lived an otherwise rich and successful life.”

  “Only if you were a man.”

  “Only if I were fiction,” I said gently. “I had a choice, Jill. We all did. We had choices all along the way. We still do. I have stayed not because I had to, not because of the bounds of literature, not even because of the bounds of friendship. This, given the circumstances and my infinite options, is what I choose.”

  “Or at least that’s the story you tell,” said Jill.

  Eighteen

  Meanwhile, Katie was suffering her own narrative constraints. Feminist narrative theory notes that for most of literary history there’s been an imbalance between men’s and women’s stories. Male characters go out into a world of infinite possibilities. Female characters either get married or die. This makes enlightened female readers such as ourselves pissed off. But however much we deconstruct the narrative, however vigilantly we plow and apply the theory and read with our skeptical, over-educated eyes, still some lessons are hard to fully internalize, and the dream of happily-ever-after love, in real life and in literature, dies hardest of all. Which seems about right I guess. Because really, what’s better than true love? We mock the concept. We bemoan what often must be done on the way to a love whose truth and timelessness turn out to be merely veneer. It’s cheesy to talk about. But when it’s good, there’s nothing better.