The Atlas of Love

by Laurie Frankel

  “Why?” Jill interrupted.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Food and games have nothing to do with each other.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Katie. “These are five-year-olds. What do you think happens if you feed them ice cream and then do a sack race? What if he fed them macaroni salad and then I had them playing Marco Polo in the pool?”

  “The horror,” agreed Jill.

  “So when are you going out?” I asked.

  “Oh, he hasn’t asked me out yet. But he will. I can tell. We’re meeting tomorrow morning to discuss the picnic.” And she danced upstairs to try on everything she owned followed by everything I owned and everything Jill owned.

  On Tuesday, we tried to define the term “poem.” It was hard. My students knew it needn’t rhyme. They knew it didn’t need to sound pretty. But they didn’t know what it did need to do. At first they asserted that they knew one when they saw it, but I gave them some Robert Hass, and then they had no idea. It looks like prose. It sounds like prose. I assured them it was considered poetry and sent them home to write a response paper supporting that position or explaining why it was crap, whichever they liked.

  Ethan and I carried lunch out of the sandwich place and sat under a tree on the quad and ate it. I told him about class, gave him a copy of Hass’s “A Story About the Body.”

  “It’s prose. It’s totally prose,” he said, laughing. “That’s the wrong answer, isn’t it?”

  “Officially? There is no wrong answer.”

  “Actually?”

  “Actually, it’s a poem. Stark, visual, lyrical, opaque. Robert Hass is a poet. What did you do?”

  “We started religion in Renaissance Europe. At this stage, it’s mostly lecture, but it’s really exciting. Telling them what happened and why and what it led to, this long chain of interconnected events . . . What?” I was smirking.

  “It’s make-believe,” I said. “Storytelling. Fun with narrative.”

  “Oh, you’re one of those.” He rolled his eyes. “Why don’t English majors believe in history?”

  “Because it’s all so much more complicated and suspect and full of half-truths and warped and incomplete than you’re telling them . . .”

  “Warped?”

  “And they’re just writing it down and memorizing it like it’s what really happened . . .”

  “You teach fiction, Janey.”

  “So do you,” I insisted. “We don’t have any kind of accurate picture of the history that was made, say, yesterday, so I know for sure that whoever spins it however many years from now is making it up.”

  “But you’ll be dead then.”

  “So there won’t be anyone to correct them.”

  “You don’t teach history when you teach Shakespeare?” he asked. “You don’t tell them about the printing press and the new settlements in the Americas and the plague and the influx of people in London?”

  “I do, but only to show them what we don’t know. Besides, that’s not history; that’s background information.”

  “You’re drawing awfully fine distinctions there.”

  “Anyway, those are facts we know are true. We aren’t making those things up.”

  “Can I just reiterate that you teach fiction?”

  “Just because fiction is made up, doesn’t mean it isn’t true. What do we learn about life from Shakespeare’s history? Maybe Shakespeare was Catholic, maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he married willingly, maybe he didn’t. Maybe he loved his family, maybe he deserted them at the first opportunity. Maybe both. We know nothing from history. We learn what’s true from King Lear. Old age is frightening. It’s hard to recover from the feeling of betrayal even when you know you’re wrong. There are few things, even death, worse than madness, blindness, loss of power and respect and the love of your family. Storms in the world accompany storms of the soul. Both serve as powerful metaphors. Fiction is much more true than history. History is about other people. Fiction is about you.”

  “You’re just using characters as models. So am I. It’s just what my characters did really happened. We learn from them the same way we learn from Lear. We try to honor what we admire and avoid what felled them. The particulars change but not the pattern, not the overriding—”

  “Narrative?” I guessed.

  “I admit nothing,” he said.

  We sat and thought awhile, enjoyed the weather. Then we threw out the remains of lunch and set a place and time to run. As we were walking away from each other, I turned around. “Ethan, speaking of inevitable narratives, Katie met someone.”

  “Oh, that’s great,” he said—because what else could he say?—but he may or may not have meant it. “Who is he?”

  “His name is Peter. She met him at church.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Haven’t met him yet. They have their first date tonight.” I’d had a text on my phone when I got out of class.

  “Sounds pretty serious,” Ethan said. “See you tomorrow.” And I started home to find out just how serious it was.

  Twenty-three

  On Wednesday, I reported the whole thing to Ethan while we ran. For the first half mile or so, it felt like a betrayal, gossiping about Katie behind her back when Ethan wasn’t so much a mutual friend as her ex (by contrast, I’d also relayed the whole thing to Jason that morning over coffee without a second thought). In my defense, several things: (1) being witness to Katie’s love life was like being thirteen again, so why not act the part? (2) she was so high, I doubted she’d ever notice or care; (3) it is good to run and talk at the same time as it increases cardiovascular effort and ability; and (4) it was too much fun not to.

  Peter had been on time, nearly to the second, and arrived in a tie with black and white patent leather shoes. Bearing flowers. He was cute, young, and obviously nervous, but he held his own against the three of us—Atlas screaming, Jill and I transfixed by those shoes. Katie had insisted on waiting upstairs so that she could make a grand entrance (sixty outfits later, she’d settled on a dress of Jill’s with a wide skirt that flowed cinematically as she swept down the stairs). She was furious with us by the time she hit the living room because we could not stop giggling. (“You guys are not easy on a first date,” Ethan broke in at this point. And I laughed, saying, “We were easy on you.”) She glared at us then turned to Peter, all smiles and glittering eyes, took the flowers, cooing practically, and handed them to me without a word, without even turning her eyes from him (as if I were the maid), and fairly floated out the door on his arm. They’d been out to dinner and to a movie, and we’d ordered Indian and rented one and were paused in the middle of it, just getting Atlas down, when Katie and Peter got home.

  We barely inquired after their evening and ran upstairs. “Are they always so giggly?” we heard Peter ask but didn’t hear the answer. “They’re like my teenage sisters,” he said. The first thing she did—before she offered him something to drink, before she took off her shoes, before she dimmed the downstairs lights—was turn off the baby monitor we’d hidden in the corner. But lying on the floor in Atlas’s room, staring up at his mobiles and listening to his baby sleep, we could at least catch the tone. There was a lot of laughing. Then a lot of soft singing quiet talk. Then nothing.

  When she finally made it upstairs, alone, at quarter past four in the morning, she found me and Jill sound asleep under six or seven baby blankets on the floor of Atlas’s room.

  “Why are you guys sleeping on the floor?”

  “Accident,” said Jill. “We were trying to spy on you. This room is closest. How was it?”

  “So great,” said Katie, snuggling in with us, pulling over one of the blankets. “He is so great.” She was already falling asleep which suggested to me that she’d just woken up. “We talked for a really long time. Then he kissed me. Then we kissed for a really long time. And then we fell asleep. Then we woke up and he went home. We’re going out again tomorrow night.”

  “You mean tonight?�
� said Jill.

  “Yeah, tonight.” She smiled and turned over.

  Jill and I went out into the hall. “Could just be NiCMO,” she said.

  “Maybe.” I shrugged. “I’m going to bed.” I had to teach in a few hours.

  “It’s true. It could just be NiCMO,” said Ethan when I finished my story. “We had NiCMO.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said, panting. It is hard to tell long stories while you run.

  “You do?” Horrified.

  “Of course.” NiCMO, for the uninitiated, is Non-Committal Make Out, Mormon-speak for hooking up. It differentiates itself from regular making out in that it holds no possibility of being The One. While this is in fact true for the vast majority of make-out sessions that occur on earth, most participants take that as a given or can at least usually make the distinction without naming it. Katie and Co. went ahead and specified. The Mormon church, which has strict rules against not only sex before marriage but also most kinds of touching (above or below the belt, above or below the clothes, even of oneself), doesn’t mind making out and even recognizes that sometimes you might want to do so just because it’s yummy, or at least many of its followers realize this. It’s a weird religion.

  Wednesday night I had to grade the is-it-or-is-it-not-a-poem papers. This time, Peter arrived in jeans and a T-shirt, less nervous, easier with us. Atlas had a cold and was on and off weepy, even in Jill’s arms, but when Peter asked to hold him, he settled right down, nuzzled against him, and closed his eyes. Katie looked like she might cry. We chatted with Peter about school, about moving here, about home, his mission, his family, the youth picnic he and Katie were planning. He asked polite questions of us, gave polite answers back. Then they left, and Jill and I debriefed.

  “He seems nice.”

  “He does.”

  “He’s very cute.”

  “He is.”

  “He seems to like Katie.”

  “Which is a good thing because she really likes him.”

  “Think she’s made her mind up?”

  “Since before she met him,” I said.

  We were sitting on the floor in the living room, all three of us. Atlas had learned to sit up while I was at school in the morning and spent much of the evening, despite his cold, demonstrating for our squeals and applause. I was grading papers on my lap, clapping for Atlas, throwing the ball to Uncle Claude, and talking to Jill all at the same time.

  “Think how good you’ll be at multitasking when you have a baby,” she said, and it stopped me because I had a moment, two, three, when I was confused by the word “when,” when my brain flashed an unarticulated, confused “But I already have a baby” across the sky. I shrugged it off.

  “You’re getting worse at it,” I said, not to be mean, just because she’d presented an opening.

  “I was never very good at doing too many things,” she said. “I like to put lots of energy into one thing—teach one class or take one class or write one paper or read one book.”

  “Graduate school isn’t like that.”

  “Right, so I’m . . . cutting back. What’s more important than being a good mother?”

  I did not feel like just-a-friend with an undefined place in this family. I felt like a fifties father, like my parenting role was superfluous and unappreciated. Really, my job was to bring home the bacon. And shop for it and plan meals around it and cook it and clean up afterwards. Which hardly seemed fair.

  “You’ve got lots of help parenting,” I pointed out.

  “I don’t mean changing diapers and babysitting and putting him to bed or feeding him or whatever. I mean emotional energy, giving him my undivided attention, freeing myself up to notice his little progresses and setbacks, never saying, ‘I have something more important to do.’ ”

  “Isn’t that a little . . . narrow? Wouldn’t it kill you if someone’s only thing in the world were you?”

  “No, I think that would be lovely,” said Jill. And then, “Why do you think he got all quiet when Peter held him?”

  “Peter seems to have some experience with babies. Katie looked like she was going to cry. Didn’t she say he has little sisters?”

  “Yeah, but I mean we’re good with babies, especially this one, and he was fussy all afternoon.”

  “He has a cold.”

  “Not when Peter held him.”

  “Change of scenery?”

  “Change of sex.”

  Change of tone. I heard her voice catch and braced myself for what was coming.

  “I think it’s because he’s a guy,” she said.

  “Atlas?”

  “Peter. I think Atlas needs a man. Maybe a bunch of women isn’t good for him. It must feel different being held by a man. Maybe there’s some connection there we just can’t provide.”

  “He has a cold, Jill. He has Jason. And that’s not the issue here, and you know it.”

  Atlas, upright but precarious, looked nervously between us and smiled. He didn’t seem to be suffering. He also didn’t seem like he needed Jill’s attention so much she couldn’t pick up a book. He looked like he needed something nailed down to lean against. Otherwise, he seemed fine. I went to bed at midnight, and Katie wasn’t home yet, so things must have been going well.

  Thursday was the lull in it. In class, we did half a poetry unit, introduced the next paper. I went straight home afterwards to take care of Atlas while Jill and Diane had some much-needed alone time—sometimes a girl just needs her mother. It had suddenly occurred to Katie that she should play hard to get at least a little bit, so she decided, after the youth picnic, not to see Peter for the rest of the day. They spent three hours on the phone.

  Peter turned out not to be much into baseball one way or the other, but he was a guy and mildly enjoyed games of all kinds. Having gotten out of the way the possibility of his being a Yankee fan, Katie invited him over for dinner Friday night under the no-pressure conditions of a family picnic on the floor in the living room while watching a baseball game so as not to have no conversation but not to have too much either. I don’t know if she was worried we’d say embarrassing and incriminating things or thought we’d be boring or feared we’d grill the love right out of him with too many questions he didn’t want to provide—or she didn’t want to know—answers to.

  “Casual and laid back. No more than two courses,” she warned me, “including dessert. And make it baseball food—hot dogs or popcorn or something. Maybe we should just order a pizza.” As if cooking a real meal would invite real conversation and spoil the whole thing.

  “Sooner or later he’s going to find out that you’re smart, you read a lot, you vote for liberals, you’re a feminist, you can’t cook, and your roommates are fairly overprotective and obnoxious,” I pointed out.

  “Fine, later,” she said.

  Friday then finally. “One down, four to go,” I assured my students, already exhausted with only one week of summer session and one paper under their belts. Two days off. Two whole days without seeing each other, without seeing me, without having to think about poetry. I was jealous of their (probably fictitious) carefree weekends at mindless jobs followed by lovely summer parties since what loomed for me was a weekend of grading and a picnic on the floor I was getting increasingly nervous about. Anxiety, more than the flu, more than mono, more than a rash, is very contagious. At home, I found Atlas laughing hysterically in a bouncy seat at the edge of the kitchen floor which Katie was cleaning with a toothbrush.

  “What happened to casual and laid back?” I asked her.

  “Because I am casually, laid backly, effortlessly neat and clean,” she explained, pushing hair out of her eyes with rubber-gloved hands.

  “Where did those gloves come from?”

  “I am a perfect housekeeper, so I obviously have tons of these stored under the sink.”

  “Where did they really come from?”

  “I went to the grocery store and spent forty dollars on cleaning products.”

  “Very laid back
,” I said.

  “Shut up,” she said.

  Jill and I spent almost as much time as Katie did getting dressed. Jill put Atlas in his tuxedo onesie as a joke only we got. I decided I couldn’t just serve hot dogs and popcorn. It’s not like I’m neurotic or never use a microwave or think I’m above ordering a pizza. I love pizza. But when you invite someone to your house for dinner for the first time, it is polite to actually cook. I fought with Katie for an hour before I convinced her that, though this was her date, it was my kitchen and therefore my decision. We compromised on real food that could nonetheless be eaten in front of the TV. Salmon burgers and salad and raspberry cheesecake bars. And indeed, except Atlas, we all looked appropriately casual in (carefully chosen) jeans and T-shirts and bare feet. Peter showed up similarly clad and, pointedly (which sort of defeats the gesture), ten minutes late. We sat on the floor and ate on our laps, cuddled with Atlas and Uncle Claude, chatted idly about the commercials, the color commentary, the occasional good play. The Mariners and Orioles played a completely ordinary baseball game, just one of 162, too early in the summer for standings to matter yet between two teams who weren’t going anywhere anyway with a boring final score of 5–2. After the game, Jill and I walked the dog for a while. When we came in, Peter and Katie were in such deep conversation they didn’t even look up. We went upstairs without even saying good night.

  Six hours later, at five o’clock in the morning, Katie crawled in bed with me. “He said he had a dream,” she whispered, less, I think, because it was five A.M. and more for something like reverence, “where he was in a bike race for tandems, and everyone else had two riders, but he was alone, and even though he was fast and strong and good, he couldn’t catch up, but then he pulled over to have a snack, and I was there, and I said I’d ride with him, and then we caught up to everyone else and overtook them and won and rode all over the world together.” She was crying.

  “What do you think it means?” I said dryly.