I am not saying I wish that it were otherwise. Sometimes a choice becomes right in its making. How long we gaze behind us, at least, is something we decide. And whatever the myths tell us, it’s ourselves we destroy with our looking: Orpheus has that part wrong.
But I am also saying this: were I granted another moment of that phantom present—a single now that was only now, and not the future plunging to the past—it is that room I would go back to, and it is you I would hope to find there.
* * *
—
For several years, and several reasons, the best day of Cel’s life will be the day Mattie M was murdered. She will find this awkward, always. It will bother her that she was onstage, deliriously happy and more than a little drunk, while Mattie was dying on a scratchy patch of grass somewhere, observed by every single person who’d go on to talk about it on television. One of them will even write a book about it—an entire fucking book! It seems callous, somehow unseemly, that Cel hadn’t known. She’ll feel she should have felt it, somewhere out there in the universe; in darker moments she’ll fear she would have, if she hadn’t been standing before an audience.
But what would she have done if she had known, in the moments right before she went onstage? The audience wouldn’t have believed her if she’d told them; they would have laughed and thought it was a joke. And even if they knew it was not a joke, they might have laughed at it anyway.
Because that moment on the stage will always be distorted in this way—bracketed by a corrupting dramatic irony—it’s the trip to California Cel will come to cherish most. Driving underneath that powder-blue sky, dodging shuddering rigs, reading billboards out of something that—she realized halfway across the country—was less like boredom than like curiosity. She knows that somewhere on that drive, Matthew’s fate was sealed—the shooter was packing his van, double-checking the appearance schedule, beginning a drive of his own. But Cel will never know exactly when—the moments are equal in their almost-guilt: the tenuous absolution of riflemen in a firing squad—and this allows her to recall them all with almost-tenderness.
The pocked landscape dimming into sky; the grass crumbling to caliche when she reached New Mexico. The grotesquely enormous crosses dotting the roadsides, like relics from the Appian Way. The eerily lunar geometry of Carlsbad Caverns: its filigreed grottoes, its preposterously priapic columns; her own footsteps sounding icy and very far away—farther and farther, somehow, with every step she took.
For some of the same reasons, she’ll come to cherish her memories of New York: in later years, there will be other reasons, too. The thing about memories is you forget them all: almost all of a city, almost all of a woods and little stream. One day Cel will forget trying to eat the scrawny almost-carrots underneath the Queen Anne’s lace, though she’ll remember nibbling tiny red bead-like berries from a bush, and how she knew right away that she should not have. She’ll remember the wild blackberries, as fat and shiny as the flies that hid on them; the flies themselves she will forget. She’ll forget the tang of lemongrass on her tongue. She’ll forget the rickety roller-coaster feel of the pedestrian walkway on the Brooklyn Bridge. But she’ll remember walking over it one random day in May, feeling truly end-credit levels of happiness, though this wasn’t actually the end of anything. She will remember the way the shadows of traffic moved like schools of fish in the East River. She’ll remember roving summer sunlight on the water. And she’ll remember a little nothing moment from the day before she left New York. She’s running some nameless errand on the Bowery, wearing that ridiculous yellow raincoat—which for reasons no one ever understands, she’ll keep for years—and she catches a glimpse of a girl in a storefront window.
And in spite of the raincoat, and for a single moment, she does not recognize this person.
And in something that’s both less and more than a moment, she wonders: Who is that girl?
And she thinks: Oh, she could be anyone!
* * *
—
Brookie’s been in bed for hours, and it still isn’t quite as dark as it should be. I pull down the blinds and hit the lights and let the television make the room feel darker.
Matthew is still today’s top story. Even in death he’s a ratings wizard—though otherwise he’s become a different person overnight. Today, according to the television and depending on the channel, he’s a nationally beloved rapscallion, a puckishly provocative entertainer, a sincere progressive idealist, a once-thoughtful journalist and once-serious politician. And maybe he would have been again! Maybe Matthew Miller could have been a senator! Stranger things have happened, after all: we know because we saw them on his show.
They are trotting out lost tidbits from his political career—the unimpeachable platform, the pro bono civil liberties defenses, the trip to register voters in Mississippi. These were the same resume gems I’d once used to harass Brookie, and now they were boring all of America! Including me, a little, in much the same way Matthew used to. I had no idea this stuff was even public knowledge; I have the sense quite a bit of it is news to the anchors. Who has time for investigative journalism in a twenty-four-hour news cycle? Answer: whoever pre-writes the obituaries.
They handle his scandal tastefully—really, they hardly handle it at all. A lesson in decorum, I guess, for any budding Matties who may be watching. There is no mention of me, thank God, or any surfacing of those ill-gotten photos. Those were the only images of us there were or ever will be: we never took any ourselves. They would have been a liability for Matthew, I suppose. And I was always the kind of person who let other people take the pictures.
They have a million photos of Matthew and Alice, though, and maybe this is why they hardly mention their divorce. There are pictures of the two of them at his law school graduation, on their wedding day—Alice wasn’t photogenic even then, though I guess I never did see her in person. There are pictures of the two of them at some gala I never heard about—during my time, I suppose, since it could be no other decade than the seventies. In this photograph is an answer to a question I must have cared about desperately once; now it doesn’t even seem like a question at all.
Others are coming back, as I watch the television montage. Did he ever love me? Did he ever love Alice? But did he ever really love me?
To a child, any answer longer than a word feels like a deceit. Sometimes I still think that it is. But for now, for just tonight, let us call it a duality.
On TV, Matthew and Alice are standing united at one of many dreadful conferences; they are dancing at a wedding I can only assume is not their own. They are the smiling high school valedictorian and salutatorian—not in the respective order you’d expect—being heartily congratulated by their local newspaper. In this photo, they are nearly cute together, in a certain cerebral, sub-erotic way: I almost catch myself wondering what could have ever gone so wrong between them.
And this is the other part of why I did not go to the funeral. It wasn’t only that Brookie came home today: he will, after all, be here tomorrow. Yet in the story that I tell myself in later years, today could be a beginning or an end. In real life, it is both: this is the nature of reality. But in memories, like all works of fiction, we need to make some choices.
I turn down the volume on the television. It is saying nothing I haven’t heard before, or ever need to hear again. They’re showing shots from Matthew’s mayoral campaign, then State Assembly campaign, then inscrutable political activities from even earlier than that. They zoom in on an image of him as a young man—far younger than I ever knew him. He is speaking at a podium somewhere—perhaps at a gymnasium, perhaps to a union—and his mild features are sharp and fervent. And though I have no idea what he’s saying, I have the sudden certainty that he means it.
I close my eyes and hold this image in my mind. Slowly, I begin inching toward the television. I fumble with the buttons until I find the one that makes it stop. In t
he darker darkness behind my eyelids, I see this Matthew more clearly: the furrowed vertices of his eyebrows; the lashing, semi-submerged intensity of his gaze. For a moment, I let this image eclipse the others—the other memories, other possibilities, kaleidoscopically arraying themselves around and among and above the moment I hold in my mind. I know they’ll be back, as ghosts always are: haunting being a treatable but not yet curable condition. But for now, there is only this. The only me is in this moment, the only Matthew is in that one—that moment when he believes something he is also saying out loud. When he believes that he will do this for the rest of his life. When it is still possible he is right.
It is then that I decide: this is the one I will remember.
To the women of my family, especially Carolyn, Beverly, Marjory, and Kate—
In gratitude for your resilience, and in celebration of your second acts
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to my singular agent, Henry Dunow, and my dauntless editor, Andrea Walker. Thanks to everyone at Penguin Random House, especially Emma Caruso and the much-missed David Ebershoff.
I am grateful for the following works: Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked a Gay Revolution, David Carter; Geography of the Heart, Fenton Johnston; Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited, Andrew Holleran; “Poor Teeth,” Sarah Smarsh; Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City, Jonathan Soffer; And the Band Played On, Randy Shilts.
Thanks to everyone at Texas State University. I am especially grateful to my astonishing MFA students, and to Tom Grimes, who first lured me to Texas to teach them.
Thanks to my families: the boundlessly good Perrys and Martins, the cantankerously resilient Fletchers and Selbys and Joneses and Birdgenaws—and most of all Carolyn du Bois, who gave me everything except a totally solid understanding of how to spell my last name.
Thanks to Dalia Azim, Adam Krause, Keija Kaarina Parssinen, Kate Sachs, and Mary Helen Specht, for the feedback. Thanks to T. Geronimo Johnson, Karan Mahajan, and Tony Tulathimutte, for the advice. Thanks to Roman Butvin, for the Russian. Thanks to the staff and clients of Front Steps, for the perspective. Thanks to Angie Besharra, John Greenman, Becka Oliver, Stacey Swann, and Mike Yang, for the blood sport. Thanks to Stephanie Noll and Stacey (again), for their kindness in New Mexico.
Thanks to Jen Ballesteros, Prerna Bhardwaj, Will Boast, Dave Byron, Katie Chase, Callie Collins, Lydia Conklin, Morgan Gliedman, Louisa Hall, Akemi Johnson, Matt Lavin, Chris Leslie-Hynan, James Han Mattson, Kate Medow, Jill Meyers, Ilana Panich-Linsman, Maya Perez, Adeena Reitberger, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Justin Race, Cassie Ramos, Nina Schloesser, Maggie Shipstead, Tyler Stoddard Smith, Becca Sripada, Patrice Taddonio, and Laura Vert: for pretty much everything else.
The parts about Northampton are for Aislinn. The parts about the woods are for my father.
The rest is for Justin Perry: I will never know what I did in my last life to deserve you in this one. Whatever it was, I say to the universe: you’re welcome!
BY JENNIFER DUBOIS
The Spectators
Cartwheel
A Partial History of Lost Causes
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JENNIFER DUBOIS is the author of A Partial History of Lost Causes, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Prize for Debut Fiction. The National Book Foundation named her one of its 5 Under 35 authors. Her second novel, Cartwheel, was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award. An alumna of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Stanford University’s Stegner Fellowship, duBois is the recipient of a Whiting Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing grant. She teaches in the MFA program at Texas State University.
jennifer-dubois.com
Twitter: @jennifer_dubois
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The Spectators Page 34