Vladimir: A Novel by Julia May Jonas (2022)
Vladimir: A Novel by Julia May Jonas (2022)
Chapter II
People said this crop of youth was weak, but we knew differently. We knew they were so strong-so much stronger than us, and equipped with better weapons, more effective tactics. They brought us to our knees with their softness, their consistent demand for the consideration of their feelings-the way they could change all we thought would stay the same for the rest of our lives, be it stripping naked for male directors in undergraduate productions of The Bacchae, ignoring racist statements in supposedly great works of literature, or working for less when others were paid more. They had changed all that when we hadn’t been able to, and our only defense was to call them soft. They had God and their friends and the internet on their side. And perhaps they would make a better world for themselves. Their aim was not to break taboos, the way people born ten to twenty years before me, and, in a small way, my generation, had done. No, they worked in a subtler and stricter way. And perhaps it had to be so. And so Careful, I told myself. No anger, no personal attacks, just Grace, Grace, Grace (30-1).
Chapter V
She pursed her lips and closed her eyes. I felt deeply sorry for her. Before I met Vladimir, when I heard that he divulged Cynthia’s suicide attempt in his interview, I had felt a rush of distaste, like I feel when any great writers, or people, really, who have committed suicide are mentioned in the context of that act before their work. I had pitied her position at the college, coming into our small, gossipy department predefined as “damaged.”
After he told her this, the morning before they were due to come swim at our house, she had retreated into what she called “the howl,” which she described as feeling like one has been caught up in a wave-all sound a roar, all vision static, an ache in every part of her body, a wild pain everywhere. He actually had an injection for her, that’s how sick she was, she told me, laughing, “That’s how sick I am. He keeps a shot like Nurse Fucking Ratched,” she said. “Like Nurse Ratched, like Girl, Interrupted, like The Bell Fucking Jar, like every seventies and eighties mental-hospital TV movie of the week. Like Frances,” she said. “Like fucking Frances, have you seen Frances?” she asked me. I said I hadn’t and she said, “Oh, never mind, like every crazy person I’ve got a morbid fascination with crazy people.” She held up a hand to an imaginary objector. “I’m allowed to say ‘crazy’ when I’m talking about myself. Anyway, I slept for eighteen hours. So I’m sorry I didn’t show up.”
She took a breath after all of it was finished and laughed, not the laugh of a disturbed person, but the deeply ironic laugh of someone who has never lived without the company of pain. She had fallen inside of and then climbed out of her pain so frequently and for so long that she could not cherish it or give herself any sympathy. I couldn’t know the depth of what she had felt-she had gone so much further than I ever had-but I felt I knew about the kind of life that involved a begrudging and humorous acceptance of sadness as the invariable state of experience.
Could it be because we simply weren’t sentimental, or we were too intelligent or too sensitive or too watchful? Was that mere self-flattery? What made us sad, and guilty of our sadness, what pit us in this battle against ourselves? And why couldn’t we release the way some did, and say, yes, well, depression is a medical condition, I’m just wired a little poorly, I’ve got an illness I need to take care of, as all my students said. (Which is not to say that Cynthia Tong didn’t take antidepressants-I’m sure she did.) Perhaps it was this idea of self-expression and this thought that if we were fully to release this sadness, or if we were to alter it too much-if we were to give up all the obsessions and anxieties that caused us pain-then we would become a kind of person we disdained, someone content with an abstract idea of the littleness of their lives. For our lives were, as writers, essentially little by nature. Writers have to lead little lives, otherwise you can’t find time for writing. Was depression simply a hanging on to grandeur (63-4)?
I hadn’t expected to find her so interesting. I hadn’t expected that she would be truthful and real. I realized I hadn’t ever heard her speak, and I had imagined her voice to be high and bashful. Instead her voice was low and clean, and her words were precise and well-chosen. She wasn’t below Vladimir at all, she wasn’t even his equal. She was his superior, lowering herself to be with him. Her suicide attempt hadn’t been at all about him, there was no Medea to it, no grabbing for love, no attempt to get attention, as most female suicide attempts are interpreted, as I had maybe interpreted hers. No, she had an honorable depression, the likes of well-known writers, a true despair. “Honorable depression”-what does that even mean (66)?
He was incredibly talented, of course. She might not have his talent, his assurance, his hunger, or his drive. He might, from the external perspective, lead the relationship, with his accolades, with his career. You have to be willfully ignorant of certain truths to be successful, you just have to, and she seemed to me like the kind of woman who could not be ignorant of anything. The kind of mind that could paralyze itself (66).
Chapter VI
I decided to make her stovetop spaghetti carbonara pie, an old specialty of mine she loved-a sauce made of bacon, tomato, olive, and anchovy (I add olives and anchovies to all tomato sauce because tomato sauce is always better with olives and anchovies) simmered on the stove, to which one adds al dente spaghetti, then cracks eggs into little craters in the mixture, cooking them until they are just set, after which an obscene amount of parmesan is grated over the entire thing and the skillet (oven safe) is put under the broiler for three minutes to crisp the top. The dish is an ambush of calories; it would be good for all that alcohol sloshing around her insides (77-8).
Chapter VII
“It’s not her fault. Or it is, I don’t know. But it’s not like I can prevent her from getting hired. My ass would get sued every way but straight.” Every way but straight-one of John’s phrases. Sid laughed. She loved the old Texan/Midwestern expressions John and I traded. She used them to contrast with the rest of her overeducated liberalese. In high school she was fascinated when she learned that Bob Dylan lyrics were cited by judges to elaborate on obscure laws in court filings. The folksiness blended with the officiousness delighted her. More than doing good, and to my great pride, she was a do-gooder, far more than her father or I were or would ever be, she loved the language and jargon of the law. She loved the way phrases could become solid, and then could have their solidity stripped from them, all by interpretation, all by language, language, and more language. Fighting with words, she would call it when she participated in Lincoln-Douglas debates in high school. She was so awkward then, so homely and horse-ish, with bad makeup, poorly fitting clothes, and a sawing, toneless laugh. But when she stepped onto the debate stage her tongue was loose and her mind was quick and precise. She could find and dissect holes in the arguments of her competitors nearly instantaneously. It was when I saw her there at that podium that I knew, despite everything, despite all my weakness and guilt, that she had something in her she could use to take care of herself.
I, of course, was thrilled when she told me she was dating a woman. What a relief, I thought, to free oneself from the heterosexual prison. Straightness: the predictable container in which all possible outcomes seemed already etched into stone-happiness, unhappiness, complacency, strife-a life in which we were all operating inside of a story already told, even as we sought to live an authentic existence. Even as we tried to say to ourselves that it wasn’t who we mated with but the quality of the thoughts in our brain that made us radical, we knew that the patterns of our life were the patterns of our parents, were the patterns of all the dim, sorrel-chomping sheep living unexamined existences in all the homes all over this thoughtless, anti-intellectual country. We knew that the stuff of our lives was the stuff of normalcy, and how normalcy and its trappings and expectations were always there. There would always be couple friends who were a bit more square than you, who you would have to play some hetero game with. There would always be family who would ask the women to do the dishes while the men played chess. How fortunate for her, I thought, to be able to evade all that. She told us she was queer, attracted to men still, and that she would appreciate if we didn’t label her one way or another. She was Sid. Fine, fine, fine. As long as whatever she chose, she wouldn’t have to take on the identity of the anxious woman who got dinner on the table while the men sat on the porch. As long as she didn’t have to act the part of the schoolmarm to a good-natured rascal of a partner who did whatever he liked and was loved more because of it. And if she did choose to cook or clean or worry, at least she could maybe do all those things for a woman who understood, not a man who, by virtue of being born with a thing between his legs, had absorbed from an early age that it was all right to sit back and enjoy being served (86-7).
Chapter VIII
There was a burning in my body, an extra level of excitement keeping part of me fed and running that required no sustenance. It was longing for the love of Vladimir Vladinski, junior professor and experimental novelist. Longing was energizing my muscles and organs and brain. Longing was replacing my blood with fizzy, expansive liquid. I loved him.
I have always been amazed at the mind’s ability to do several things at once. I remember reading to Sidney when she was a little girl-for hours I would read to her-and often during those times I would be in a completely different thought space and would have no consciousness of any of the words that were coming out of my mouth. As Sid and I walked the trail she told me about trends on social media (I didn’t have accounts, mostly because they made me feel undignified, and I relied on Sid to keep me updated), television shows that she watched, articles that she read. She gave me a long report on The Deer Hunter and how it was much campier than she remembered. All the while I was thinking about Vladimir. I imagined us in a flat in a European city, it didn’t matter which one, so long as the language outside was not English, the murmur of an incomprehensible tongue surrounding us like a curtain of privacy. It would be my flat, with open shelves and a big slop sink and cut-up fruit lying on a wooden slab on the counter. There would be one small bedroom with windows on two sides, big old windows that either stuck or flew up wildly, and a mattress on a floor with crumpled and cool white linens. We wouldn’t live together, that wouldn’t be what anyone wanted, that wouldn’t be compatible with a life, but he would come to me, some evenings, a few afternoons a week. We would drink wine, or not, we wouldn’t need the wine, we would spend hours in a tangle on the mattress or walking around half-clad with books in our hands. (I had to pause the reverie to consider that lately I was having more and more hip problems, so I would need to probably raise the bed, and inserted an antique iron frame beneath the mattress.) I might feel desperate and half-crazed by where he went when he was away, but I would restrain myself, cherishing the time we did have. I would write stories in reserved and pulled-back tones, like Mavis Gallant, about the life of the expatriate. I might teach, yes, I might teach, maybe a few wealthy students, one-on-one, a class here or there at a university. Not a university life, not that anymore-maybe the equivalent of a community college, something very incognito and undemanding. There would be something sad about our love, mainly when I started to become too old, to become Léa in Colette’s Chéri, and his eyes would pool with tears on the day that I told him he could-he must-go. Of course, I didn’t really picture my own self in all of this. I pictured some amalgam of film stars, with doctored teeth and antiaging programs, and money spent with fun, mean trainers who put their bodies through all sorts of tortures. I didn’t picture my already withered top lip with the bulging scar at the tip from the ingrown hair I had attempted to dig out with a razor blade five years ago. I didn’t picture my upper arm aloft, flesh hanging like a ziplock bag half-filled with pudding. I certainly didn’t picture my own breasts, which had always been more conical than globular, and which now, on a bad day, looked nearly phallic (90-2).
It wasn’t that I didn’t want Sid to know. Part of me longed to tell her war stories, tell her of Boris’s barn, the half-finished art more erotic than his dry, anticlimactic kisses, or Robert, always in his suit and tie when he met me at the motel room we rented each week, or the time I got a rash from the sawdust on Thomas’s hands. I wanted to tell her about my obsession with David and how our romance was so intoxicating that I was ready to leave my whole life, including her.
I also wanted to keep my own secrets. It was a pact I held with myself, a game. If I didn’t tell anybody about certain things in my life (notably the things that I would most like to divulge) then, like the men who hold themselves back from orgasm to preserve their life force, I would accumulate some inexplicable strength (96).
Chapter IX
What did I truly want from him? Did I want a day, a month, a year of domination? In which I could scream at him and mock him all I wanted with impunity? Did I want him to grovel at my feet? It wasn’t that, exactly. I wanted him to accept the role of the penitent. But you can’t ask someone who feels like a victim, as John most certainly did, to live apologetically. And there it was, that twisted logic. Even as we railed against victim mentality, against trauma as a weapon, we took the strength of our arguments from the internal sense of our own victimhood. John was acting just like the women who accused him. He had been wronged, goddamnit. While there was a part of him, I knew, that understood I was suffering too, he still cherished the sense that he was the most drastically injured party. He grasped his being wronged like a precious gem in a velvet pouch. Yes, he was like all the rest of them, desperately holding on to his own pain.
By the time I arrived on campus, I was shaking with anger. I was late, having stood stock-still in my bedroom staring out the window, a cavalcade of thoughts crashing down on me. I remember reading that Edna St. Vincent Millay gave instructions to her housekeeper not to interrupt her if they saw her standing still-that was the way she would compose poems, on two feet, staring into the middle distance, writing and rewriting lines in her head. I never had that organization of thought: my rapt pauses were all about conflicting feelings, images and memories running and bumping into each other-more like a chaotic battle scene than the unfurling of insight.
At any rate, I was hurrying to my Women in American Literature survey class when I saw Edwina, my treasured star pupil, walking with Cynthia Tong along the green. I waved, and they waved back with overdone fangirl adoration. But it was the gesture of two people who were clearly together in thought, while I stood on the outside. When I began teaching, when I was young and fresh and within a decade of my students, there were certain women with whom I related deeply, women who became my friends. Even briefly watching Edwina and Cynthia crossing the quad, I saw this was happening with them. So quickly, only three weeks into the semester. Jealousy burned at me, anger fired from my womb. Edwina hadn’t put her off, she hadn’t said she would make a date with her and hadn’t followed through. I had written an email to her with x’s and o’s and they were giggling with each other like new roommates (105-6).
Which student had complained about me? Oh, but it didn’t matter. I could picture the cafeteria, outfitted with gas fireplaces so it looked like an upscale ski lodge, and three Formica tables pushed together to create a long banquet, at which were seated ten or so students, mostly female. I could see the different body types and the different foods, most probably incongruous-the thin ones with cream-sauce pastas, the thicker ones with lean proteins and salads. What started out as a question, “Oh my God, guys, do you think it’s weird that his wife still teaches?” grew into more and more of a rallying cry, as together they decided that my presence was offensive, that it made them frightened, that it reminded them of bad people and bad events that had happened to them, or to their cousins.
Picturing them in the cafeteria, I started to view their utensils as little pitchforks that they moved up and down. I understood not only the bonding that comes out of complaining but also the incredible sense of identity that comes with discovering why you think something is wrong. I wanted them to feel that fire, that was what college was for. They were enacting a right of all young people, unearthing what they felt were the systemic wrongs of the world. It was their right to look at us murderously, longing to stand where we stood. It was their right to believe that they could do our jobs better than we could. We, who had experienced enough bitterness in life to expect flaws, faults, and complexities in every situation we encountered. They had grown up with a constant stream of global warming and gun violence burbling on low from their parents’ radios as they were driven to and from soccer or clarinet. Their lives, for the most part (at least the majority of students who attended this liberal and very expensive college), were cloaked in the postmillennial blanket of peace and prosperity, while terrible threats loomed in the shadowy corners of the larger world. They were overpraised and overpressured. There were teenage billionaires, twelve-year-old YouTube stars, and no jobs for them once they graduated. Once Trump became president, the illusion, the one imparted to them comfortably from the driver’s seat of a minivan, the idea that the world would slowly get better, that “the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice,” was upended.
Or something. I shook off my grandiose thoughts. I didn’t know them or understand their world at all. I prized myself on liking them. I defended them at dinner parties. The Kids Are Alright! I liked their action, their strict moral code, their stridency-
“Ma’am.” From my seat on the pavement I saw the wheels of a golf cart and looked up to see a square woman from campus security wearing wraparound sunglasses and a fisherman’s hat.
“You need to put out that cigarette right now, ma’am, this is a no-smoking campus.”
“I know. I’m a professor here.”
“I’m going to have to issue you a ticket, ma’am.”
“I’m a professor here, I teach here. I’m not a student.”
“You should know better, then, ma’am.”
“Stop calling me ma’am, please. This is the first time I’ve done this-I just had some bad news-”
“In the future you can walk beyond the perimeter of the campus, ma’am. It’s right out that way.”
“I know where the perimeter of the campus is, thank you.”
“Can I get your name, ma’am?”
“Why?”
“For the ticket I’m about to write you.”
“May I have your name?”
“My name’s Estelle. My mother died of lung cancer. I have one job on campus, and that’s to issue tickets to illegal smokers. Name.”
Estelle drove off into the sunset, her back emanating triumph. She did it! She nabbed another culprit! It was a good day, baby, I heard her saying to some wiry wife in an A-line skirt as they drank stupid home-brewed beer. I even nabbed a professor! Wasn’t she a piece of work. I showed her!
I held the ticket in my hand. Fifty dollars. A hundred for repeat offenders (117-9).
Chapter X
Seized with an urge to consume, I went to an upscale butcher shop that had recently opened in the area and bought expensive T-bone steaks from a very handsome, well-muscled butcher. I tried to imagine him tracing the tip of his knife over the curves of my body to cheer myself up, but the fantasy failed to displace my doldrums. I stopped at the organic market and purchased dark black kale and designer anchovies and a nineteen-dollar brick of parmesan and olives and seeded crackers and an uncut boule of whole wheat sourdough and goat cheese and salami and raspberries and a flourless chocolate ganache torte.
Usually I went to some undignified liquor warehouse for alcohol-the wines were good enough and the prices were better and the salesclerks left you alone. Today, however, I stopped at the boutique in town-used only by tourists-and let an Englishman talk me into three thirty-dollar bottles of red and a new, artisan vodka. I wanted to take substances into my body like an immoral and immoderate businessman traveling on a company credit card. I wanted everything that passed my lips to be decadent, full of sulfites or iron, with mouth-screwing flavor, to taste rich and deep.
I found Sid in the guest room, glassy-eyed and grumpy, playing a multiplayer video game on her laptop. I demanded she shower, put on a button-down, and meet me downstairs. Sensing my desperation, she complied. I stripped, ripped, and washed the kale and set it out to dry, rinsed and patted the steaks and shook them with salt and pepper. (I am of the opinion that good steak should have no seasoning other than salt and pepper.) I lightly boiled an egg and then broke it into the bottom of a wide, low salad dish with anchovies that had been mottled with garlic and olive oil. To that I added the kale and a massive amount of freshly grated parmesan, and then massaged it until it shone. I set out the cheese, salami, bread, crackers, and olives and decanted the wine. I pulled out my tray of cocktail fixings with the firm intent of getting completely and gloriously wasted.
The air was chilly, but daylight savings was still a few weeks away, so I pulled out extension cords, ran them into the backyard, and plugged in two heat lamps so that Sid and I could sit and watch darkness fall and the evening creatures peek out from the bushes. There were always a disturbing number of deer, covered in flies and ticks and savagely ripping the heads off all the flowers-those you saw every night. Often you would see a fox, sometimes reddish rabbits, and very occasionally a beaver or an opossum. One year there was an ancient-looking tortoise from God knows where who lived nearby the pool for a month as she laid her eggs.
Sid and I set up a folding table and I put the steaks on the grill. By the time they were ready I had drunk half my martini. I ate like a beast, ripping chunks of flesh with my teeth, stabbing enormous forkfuls of the salad into my mouth and letting the oil smear all over my face, shoveling crackers and cheese, alternating my red wine with my martini to wash everything down. Sid and I tore the sourdough with our hands, soaking the pieces in salted olive oil. I had a memory of my mother, back when I was twelve or so. She was a nurse’s aide, and after she and my father divorced she picked up shifts as a waitress at a local Irish pub, the kind that exists in most towns in America, with burgers and onion rings and soggy fish and chips and a perpetual stale-beer-mixed-with-cheap-floor-cleaner-topped-with-cigarette-smoke smell. Friday nights I (and I suppose my sisters if they were home, though I don’t remember them ever being there) was permitted to stay up and wait for her to come home. I would read and watch late-night TV and try on her makeup in the bathroom mirror until around 11 p.m., when her shift was done. She would come in bearing two grocery-sized bags full of pub fare, and a couple bottles of Coca-Cola, and she and I would feast on the soggy, greasy food and the sugary desserts until we could eat no more. I remember us silent, content, and chewing. It was the one time my mother and I shared a common appetite together, perhaps the time we were the closest (120-2).
Chapter XI
I remember, back when I lived in New York City, eavesdropping on a woman asking her boyfriend if he wanted to get a drink. Clearly, she wanted one. He replied in a reserved and pious tone that he wouldn’t be drinking tonight. His refusal embarrassed her, and her voice rose to a high pitch: “We Never Want the Same Things at the Same Time!”
For so long, this was how it felt with John. If he came to me lightheartedly, I would want seriousness. If he came to me gravely, I would feel irritated. If he came to me lovingly, I would react icily. If I came to him in supplication, he would mock me. If I came to him in strength, he would ignore me. We were so pitted against each other. Perhaps because we were so desperate to hang on to our own identities, our own separate I’s. We insisted on living our own lives in our own minds and could never truly merge. Perhaps we were undisciplined, or perhaps it was because we didn’t go to church, didn’t live by a moral code, didn’t believe anyone was watching. We had come into adolescence in the 1970s, of age in the 1980s-we were brought up swaddled by the most selfish and individualistic decades in the history of the United States.
Then I remembered his fat thumbs texting students. Meeting them in hotels. Acting agog at the sight of their bodies, their breasts like small, round flotation devices. Even if I didn’t care, even if I liked the space, had I been doing what Sidney had said? Had I been talking myself into a compromised existence for the sake of being tough? Why did I feel as though I was still trying to figure out how I could be a better partner for John?
“Do you think you brainwashed me?” I hoped I looked a little bit alluring from the bathtub.
“What are you talking about?”
“All the women. Was it brainwashing? The fact that I allowed it?”
“You suggested it in the first place.”
“A very long time ago.”
“We didn’t want a conventional marriage. That’s what we said. That’s what you said.”
Yes, that was what I had said. And yes, that was what I had wanted. Strangely, I hadn’t thought about the idea of a conventional or an unconventional marriage in months-since the petition. I suppose because I had been foisted into the clichéd role of the wronged wife. We had wanted to live unconventionally, in a new way, invented unto ourselves, and now I was playing the most timeworn part.
Our conviction wasn’t truly behind it, because then we would have shared our life choices with Sid. If we believed in an unconventional marriage, I wouldn’t have been the one to make all the dinners and arrange all the play dates and schedule all the lessons. We lit a couple of fires in unexpected places, but we weren’t willing to burn it all down.
“Hey.” He was feeling moved, I could tell, he swelled slightly with import. “I heard what the department asked. I’m sorry that this all has affected you. I find it truly boneheaded.”
“Where do you go at night?”
He finished flossing, rinsed his mouth, and spit a stream of blood-tinged saliva into the sink.
“Nowhere.” Then he pulled his elbows behind him to stretch his chest, farted, and left the room. As a matter of habit he flicked off the light on his way out, stranding me in the dark (130-2).
Chapter XII
My date with Vladimir was two days from now. Did he know? Could I tell him? It struck me that Cynthia had taken Edwina’s affection from me, she would have taken my class had I not resisted, she had Vladimir, whom I wanted, and now she had taken John. For what, for spite? She had youth and a body I always dreamed of, a body that would stay muscled and smooth well past her middle age. She had even, unlined skin and straight white teeth. She had attended the most prestigious writing program in the country, and her work would be better reviewed than mine ever was. She was the survivor of great trauma, she had something to say. I was jealous of every bone in her body, every moment of her history. She was acting wildly, I was jealous of that-jealous of her extremity, the fact that she was drawn to John, for who was the baddest boy on campus right now, who was the ultimate taboo? She had just arrived and was already so reckless-what would happen when the true, three-year-in boredom of small-town life worked on her? I wanted to push her into the mud and kick up great puddles of splattering filth, defiling her face, her clothing, her stylish shoes. I also wanted to worship at her feet, have her tell me all her secrets and methods for living so completely and exactly as she wanted (146).
Chapter XIV
After we had texted babysitter information to Cynthia, were seated by an eager Italian man, and had ordered our food and received and poured our bottle of wine (I filled Vlad’s glass twice as full as mine, and being male, he did not notice), we turned to discussing his book. I had reread it over the past few weeks and made careful notes about theme, symbolism, his deft use of irony, his startling word choice, his use of plot as metaphor, his vivid set pieces. When I was a young and insecure teacher I decided that the greatest service I could do for my students was give them my focused attention. Kill them with care, was my motto. If you’re unsure of your brilliance, give your time. A student who feels seen by you is yours forever. And even though it cost me hours of sleep, and probably came at the expense of my fiction career, the habit of close reading has become the way I teach and the reason that, until all this hoopla with John, I was one of the most popular professors on campus.
Our table sat against the glassed-in wall of the porch looking over the brook. Vlad couldn’t stop exclaiming about how charming it all was. The decor was a little outré-red-checked tablecloths, Chianti bottles coated in wax holding candles, large old fake cheeses hung with straw in the rafters-but the fireplace and the contrast with the rural upstate New York exterior that surrounded us made the decorations feel special rather than silly.
I pulled my notes from my bag. I couldn’t meet Vlad’s eyes as I was speaking-he was too interested and eager. I alternated looking at my notes and at the brook outside, watching a long-beaked bird pick at the carcass of a frog, digging and pulling at its gelatinous corpse.
“What I find so remarkable about your book, Vlad, is that you’ve created a work of extreme restraint that never reminds the reader of its leanness. You move so deftly from scene to scene it feels continuous, and only after I finished did I realize how impressively you pushed time forward. Your use of tense is fascinating, as well as the switch-offs between first and third person. I took these shifts as our narrator’s shifts in self-knowledge, and the impossibility of knowing the self. We reflect, we identify, we seek distance, we seek intimacy, all tactics fall short when it comes to actual perception-the views of ourselves are always conditioned. The writing is like a trapdoor: it gives the reader a sense of knowledge behind and around what the prose is presenting-a fascinating sleight of hand. The recurring appearance of paintings and photographs forced me to consider the representation of experience as it was being represented, which was dizzying and exhilarating. I thought often of John Berger and not only Ways of Seeing but also his photography book-do you know that one? I’ll lend it to you. The character of the boy is pitiable, lovable, hilarious, tragic, and the relationship with the father has a warm and lived-in feeling. Do you know those rides that spin so fast that you’re pinned against the wall? Yes, like in the Godard film Breathless, or sorry, what is it? That’s right, the Truffaut film 400 Blows. I know they are so different but I can’t help but mix them up in my mind because I watched them all during one specific time in my life. So anyway, like in those rides, I feel like what is in the center, what everyone is afraid of falling into, what everyone is spinning to avoid, is the body. The material sense of aliveness, animal-ness, humanness. And yet the body is there-it’s the pit, it’s the center, it lives, molten at the core. I admire that the body is there but that you skirt direct mention of it-ever since Roth and Updike it seems as though men can’t write a book in which the physical is present but not didactic…”
And so I continued. At one point Vlad interrupted to ask if I minded if he recorded what I was saying. I said of course not and that I was also happy to provide him with what I had written. Our food came-we both ordered salads and soups. As I spoke, I occasionally topped up his wineglass and watched his eyes become glassier with the effect of the alcohol. I went through my pages-three legal-sized sheets-and when I finished I leaned back in my chair, pleased with myself. I was comprehensive, and complimentary without fawning. I told him I thought he might pay more attention to compression as he neared the final third, my only substantial criticism.
“I want to kiss you,” Vladimir said. And though I knew it was just an expression my heart rate seemed to double, and I felt queasy. He told me that it had been a very long time since he had gotten feedback like that-in fact he had thought the days of hearing his work reflected or analyzed in that way were over. He would be reviewed in the future, he would hear from advisers about what he could change to help sell a manuscript or from publishers about parts that weren’t clear or from a copy editor about usage and grammar, but he hadn’t expected to hear someone fully reflect his work back to him-what he was trying for-with such specificity or rigor.
“Cynthia’s a good reader,” he said. “But her advice is always so holistic. She’ll say, ‘cut this part’ or ‘that guy seems fake.’” He waved his hands at me, as if to say I was “too much.”
“I knew I was excited about our date for a reason.”
“Well, I didn’t want to read your book. And then I was very jealous of you when I first started it. But then I realized it was very good, and when something’s very good, it doesn’t make me jealous, it makes me happy that it exists.”
“No more-I’ll float away on my own inflated ego.”
I put my elbow on the table and leaned my head against my fist, in a gesture of total attentiveness. “How’s the next book coming?”
Badly, he said, he didn’t have enough time to work on it, so he could never find the kind of rhythm he needed for an honest start. It was hard in the condo-he missed his writing space in his apartment. It had been a closet, he had stared at a blank wall-there had been nothing picturesque about it-he had sat in a folding chair that murdered his back. Still, it was where the first book came from. Also, as a first-year tenure-track junior professor, he needed to publish in some journals, so he had to keep working on an essay he was writing comparing Zamyatin’s We, Huxley’s Brave New World, and recent trends in apocalyptic television. The essay was taking him forever, because as he was writing it he kept forgetting why the topic had ever been interesting in the first place. Finally, with his next book he felt he needed to “swing for the fences” and write something really big-historical, maybe, or with multiple perspectives, or concerning a social issue. He felt scattered, he kept changing topics, he couldn’t settle on something true (163-6).
Chapter XVII
He relaxed back on the couch and held up the book. “I forgot how good a writer Lawrence can be,” he added.
“The beginning is very good,” I said, my eyes locked on his face, trying not to notice that the towel had slipped quite low, so the V of his lower abdominals was visible. “But once the caretaker and Lady Chatterley actually get together it’s nearly unreadable.”
“The first paragraph-”
I made a sound of assent and interrupted, “‘Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.’”
“Novels don’t do that anymore,” he said. “Big pronouncements about the way of life.”
“He undercuts it though, doesn’t he,” I said. “He says something like, ‘Or so Lady Chatterley thought.’”
“Good memory,” he said.
“I don’t know why I remember it,” I said. “It struck me at the time, maybe" (192-3).
“So I woke up this morning and thought, Cynthia got to run away.”
I was surprised by his harshness. To call a suicide attempt “running away,” that wasn’t right. “You can’t really call it that,” I said. “She was in crisis.”
“But the motivating factor of all of it was escaping. She wanted to escape. And she did. I had to stick around, and she read the complete works of Kawabata on a deck chair in some sanatorium that looked like Mann’s Magic Mountain. Did she ask me before she decided to run? No. Did she prepare me? She did not. So.” He shrugged, caustic and nonchalant.
“So you want to take revenge.”
“Revenge? I don’t know. Quid pro quo is more like it. Nothing extreme-just a few days to escape. Maybe I’ll write, maybe I’ll just clear enough space out that I could write. Or maybe I’ll find something to write about.” And he looked at me as if I might be his subject.
“Here?” I asked.
“Why not?”
“But,” I protested, not understanding quite why I was protesting, for the sake of logic, maybe, or out of female solidarity, perhaps, or because as he had told his story I had felt a growing impatience and disdain for him that I could not yet comprehend or admit, “excuse me, but you, well, when she tried to- when she left, if that’s the right word, you knew where she was. Maybe not emotionally, but physically. She doesn’t know where you are.”
“No, she does, well, basically she does.”
“How?” I was confused. I had checked his phone when I returned from the gas station and it was still on the fritz. We had no landline at the cabin-he couldn’t have called her.
“You told her.”
My throat tightened and my heart pounded so thunderously it reverberated in my armpits. I felt the need to keep the appearance of eye contact with him and felt myself putting on a face of false surprise, squinting at his forehead, as though I were trying very hard to understand what he was saying.
“You wrote her that text message from my phone. About needing time.”
“What?” My brow was still furrowed and my head was now shaking back and forth very quickly.
“I have my laptop in my bag. I can see my text messages on my computer.”
I pushed words out of my mouth. “Well-drunk-you must have…”
“No, you wrote it. I didn’t write that. I know that I didn’t. It’s okay,” he said, smiling warmly at me. “It’s interesting” (199-200).
Chapter XVIII
“I thought it was something you wanted,” he said, contrite, and I understood that as a handsome man of his ilk, he knew his body as something he could give that might make someone else happy. A gift. And when I chained him, hadn’t I wrapped him up and then opened him like a present?
“Have you,” I searched for the right word, “transgressed, before?”
“No. Once, very early on. An old girlfriend from out of town.”
“So why would you do it now?”
His voice lowered. “I have my reasons.” I could feel him looking at me with half-lidded eyes.
“Oh, stop,” I said. “Don’t be stagey. Name one.”
“I’m not-” he started, but then paused, arranging his phrasing. “I guess because I’m not doing it, am I. You are. I’m only acting out a part in some situation that I was placed in. You brought me here, you cast me in this role-I’m just playing it out for you.”
“You don’t have to. You can go, I’ll drive you home.” His words hurt me, like he was a marionette and I was an evil puppeteer. I felt the need to apologize. “I’m sorry about last night-everything got out of control.”
“No, I like it, I’m glad you cast me. It’s interesting.”
Ah, I thought, so he had rationalized the situation so that he was in control of it-in control of the experience, of the part he was playing. Well, naturally he had that ability, it was the ability of the successful: to reseat themselves, no matter where they were, in a place of power. “Please don’t patronize me,” I said.
“No, no,” he said. “I’m not. I like how we talk. I’ve thought about you. There have been a few moments in the past when the thought of kissing you has jumped into my mind.”
“In a repulsive way?” I remembered a fellow cohort in my graduate program all those years ago-male and tall and reasonably attractive-who told me he pursued ugly women because he was fascinated by the grateful way they made love (207-8).
Chapter XIX
“I’m not lying,” John said, emerging from the bathroom, wiping his wet hands on his pants. “I’m writing an epic poem and Cynthia’s working on her memoir. We have a writing club. We do drugs, then we write. It’s fun.”
I think I looked to Vladimir to try and offer some words of peacekeeping or explanation, but before anyone could say anything, he lunged at John, tackling him to the ground, my husband falling like a scarecrow stuffed with wet sand. It was unfortunate, really, how mismatched they were. John barely struggled; he simply attempted to pull himself into the fetal position, trying to cover his face with his hands. My eyes rested on a scratched message on the medieval chair: “Death to Yuppies,” written in script decorated with thorns. I found myself thinking about a time when yuppies were a thing we despised. What was a yuppie other than a young professional? What made them so objectionable? They were selfish, they had money, they were blind to societal ills. They liked nouveau cuisine and fitness. Was that it?
“You fuck,” Vlad kept repeating, until he had John flattened out on the ground with two shins on his upper thighs and his hands pressed on John’s biceps. I couldn’t help but feel slightly stirred at the sight of Vlad on top of my husband, his knees spread wide, the fabric of his pants stretched against his rear.
“Do you have any idea what you’re doing?” Vlad said, seething and trembling. “You give her drugs? Do you have any idea how fucked-up she could get? She’s a mother. I have a kid. You might as well give her gasoline to light herself on fire.”
He pounded on John’s chest with his hands, more a shove than a blow, then rolled off and lay on the ground, staring at the ceiling.
“I don’t give her drugs, son,” John said in a weary voice. “She gives them to me.” And he glanced at me to let me know this was true.
Vladimir sat up from the floor and twisted in my direction. “You have to take me home,” he told me. “Right now.”
Once again I felt annoyed at his paternalism. The whiff of the New England preacher that I had sensed early on in our acquaintance returned. His wife was a writer, entitled to her own process and troubles. If she wanted to do drugs (I assumed an amphetamine, possibly Adderall, though I wasn’t sure), didn’t that simply place her in the ranks of so many other writers, with complicated relationships to substances and work? Even if she was at risk, she was her own person, not his child. Didn’t Sontag write all her books on speed, and Kerouac, and so many others? Coleridge? Sartre? Graham Greene? Just like a man to believe a woman had to keep her behavior in line while also churning out a work of genius.
“I’ve been drinking,” I told him. “I can’t drive you. We’ll have to wait for the morning.”
“She’s probably on a bender right now,” he said, rising to stand. “My child is not safe.”
“She’s not on a bender,” John said. “I keep the drugs locked in my safe. She does a very little. She doesn’t trust herself with more. “She’s trying,” John added, and I saw that he cared for her, and was touched.
“She’s an addict,” Vlad said. He was now pacing back and forth. “You don’t know. You said she gives you the drugs.”
“She gets them from a student.”
“So how do you know she doesn’t have more?”
John rolled onto all fours, then used the arm of the couch to help himself upright, one heavy, trembling leg after another. “Because we talk. Because I know that all she wants is to get this book done so you can move out of that fucking condo and it can stop being about you all the time.”
Vladimir stopped pacing, inhaled, and shook his head. John must have channeled something about Cynthia that he recognized, because the tension wilted from his body.
“When in my life has it ever been about me,” he said softly. He looked away from us and mouthed something, some retort to Cynthia, I imagined. Then, head down, he held out his hand. “Gimme a cigarette.”
“They’re there,” I told him, and pointed to the windowsill. He walked to them, looking hunched and beaten, put one between his lips and another behind his ear, and stood still, staring at the window for a long time. Eventually I realized he was looking at John and me, reflected in the glass. He lifted the lighter to the cigarette in his mouth.
“You can’t smoke in here,” I said quickly, and without acknowledging me he put the lighter in his pocket.
He moved toward the sliding door that led to the porch. Facing away from us, he said, “What is wrong with you guys,” and shook his head. He struggled to pull the door open, then yanked it clear off the track so that it hung from the frame on a diagonal. John and I exchanged a look, and I put my hand up to stop him from saying anything, like Vlad was an angry teenager whose behavior we were trying to ignore.
We watched his back on the deck, his arm lifting and lowering the cigarette. When he finished he put it out in the coffee can full of water we’d been using as an ashtray (plip, in the silence) and walked to the lake. We heard the scraping of the gravel beach against the bottom of the kayak, then the splash and give of the water as he launched the boat.
“Wear a life jacket,” John shouted toward his direction.
“You should go out and stop him. He shouldn’t kayak at night.” I went to the door and peered out, but I couldn’t see past six feet in the dark.
“He’s fine. What could happen?” John waved my concern away, then raised his eyebrows for a joke. “Ominous, no?” (216-9)
Chapter XXV
A young woman in pastel camouflage scrubs leads me to John’s room. “He’s a nice man,” she says, and when I feebly joke that she probably says that about all the patients she smiles and tells me that she does, but with him she means it. At his door I close my eyes and take a few deep breaths to settle myself before knocking. Electra spends the entirety of Sophocles’s play in a doorway, I say to my students, when we read his Theban trilogy in my Adaptations course. She is unable to return home and unable to venture into the world. Pay attention to doorways, to paths, to in-between spaces, I tell them, these are the places of transformation. The young woman in scrubs, who I don’t realize is still standing behind me, misconstrues my hesitation and reaches around my waist, raps at the door, then turns the handle and pushes it ajar. “You’re fine to go in,” she says, encouraging me. “He’s waiting” (227-8).
Please don’t think I stay with him because of some Florence Nightingale syndrome, because he needs me and that gives me purpose and dominion or some tired story like that. The home health aide comes the very next day and cares for him until he is self-sufficient. I don’t sacrifice my independence or interests; the following night, in fact, I attend a taped screening of a new, much-lauded opera at a movie theater in Albany. No, things work out because of the way they work out, because I open one door and then another, because I find that ease can be one of the greater forms of freedom (232-3).
Chapter II
People said this crop of youth was weak, but we knew differently. We knew they were so strong-so much stronger than us, and equipped with better weapons, more effective tactics. They brought us to our knees with their softness, their consistent demand for the consideration of their feelings-the way they could change all we thought would stay the same for the rest of our lives, be it stripping naked for male directors in undergraduate productions of The Bacchae, ignoring racist statements in supposedly great works of literature, or working for less when others were paid more. They had changed all that when we hadn’t been able to, and our only defense was to call them soft. They had God and their friends and the internet on their side. And perhaps they would make a better world for themselves. Their aim was not to break taboos, the way people born ten to twenty years before me, and, in a small way, my generation, had done. No, they worked in a subtler and stricter way. And perhaps it had to be so. And so Careful, I told myself. No anger, no personal attacks, just Grace, Grace, Grace (30-1).
Chapter V
She pursed her lips and closed her eyes. I felt deeply sorry for her. Before I met Vladimir, when I heard that he divulged Cynthia’s suicide attempt in his interview, I had felt a rush of distaste, like I feel when any great writers, or people, really, who have committed suicide are mentioned in the context of that act before their work. I had pitied her position at the college, coming into our small, gossipy department predefined as “damaged.”
After he told her this, the morning before they were due to come swim at our house, she had retreated into what she called “the howl,” which she described as feeling like one has been caught up in a wave-all sound a roar, all vision static, an ache in every part of her body, a wild pain everywhere. He actually had an injection for her, that’s how sick she was, she told me, laughing, “That’s how sick I am. He keeps a shot like Nurse Fucking Ratched,” she said. “Like Nurse Ratched, like Girl, Interrupted, like The Bell Fucking Jar, like every seventies and eighties mental-hospital TV movie of the week. Like Frances,” she said. “Like fucking Frances, have you seen Frances?” she asked me. I said I hadn’t and she said, “Oh, never mind, like every crazy person I’ve got a morbid fascination with crazy people.” She held up a hand to an imaginary objector. “I’m allowed to say ‘crazy’ when I’m talking about myself. Anyway, I slept for eighteen hours. So I’m sorry I didn’t show up.”
She took a breath after all of it was finished and laughed, not the laugh of a disturbed person, but the deeply ironic laugh of someone who has never lived without the company of pain. She had fallen inside of and then climbed out of her pain so frequently and for so long that she could not cherish it or give herself any sympathy. I couldn’t know the depth of what she had felt-she had gone so much further than I ever had-but I felt I knew about the kind of life that involved a begrudging and humorous acceptance of sadness as the invariable state of experience.
Could it be because we simply weren’t sentimental, or we were too intelligent or too sensitive or too watchful? Was that mere self-flattery? What made us sad, and guilty of our sadness, what pit us in this battle against ourselves? And why couldn’t we release the way some did, and say, yes, well, depression is a medical condition, I’m just wired a little poorly, I’ve got an illness I need to take care of, as all my students said. (Which is not to say that Cynthia Tong didn’t take antidepressants-I’m sure she did.) Perhaps it was this idea of self-expression and this thought that if we were fully to release this sadness, or if we were to alter it too much-if we were to give up all the obsessions and anxieties that caused us pain-then we would become a kind of person we disdained, someone content with an abstract idea of the littleness of their lives. For our lives were, as writers, essentially little by nature. Writers have to lead little lives, otherwise you can’t find time for writing. Was depression simply a hanging on to grandeur (63-4)?
I hadn’t expected to find her so interesting. I hadn’t expected that she would be truthful and real. I realized I hadn’t ever heard her speak, and I had imagined her voice to be high and bashful. Instead her voice was low and clean, and her words were precise and well-chosen. She wasn’t below Vladimir at all, she wasn’t even his equal. She was his superior, lowering herself to be with him. Her suicide attempt hadn’t been at all about him, there was no Medea to it, no grabbing for love, no attempt to get attention, as most female suicide attempts are interpreted, as I had maybe interpreted hers. No, she had an honorable depression, the likes of well-known writers, a true despair. “Honorable depression”-what does that even mean (66)?
He was incredibly talented, of course. She might not have his talent, his assurance, his hunger, or his drive. He might, from the external perspective, lead the relationship, with his accolades, with his career. You have to be willfully ignorant of certain truths to be successful, you just have to, and she seemed to me like the kind of woman who could not be ignorant of anything. The kind of mind that could paralyze itself (66).
Chapter VI
I decided to make her stovetop spaghetti carbonara pie, an old specialty of mine she loved-a sauce made of bacon, tomato, olive, and anchovy (I add olives and anchovies to all tomato sauce because tomato sauce is always better with olives and anchovies) simmered on the stove, to which one adds al dente spaghetti, then cracks eggs into little craters in the mixture, cooking them until they are just set, after which an obscene amount of parmesan is grated over the entire thing and the skillet (oven safe) is put under the broiler for three minutes to crisp the top. The dish is an ambush of calories; it would be good for all that alcohol sloshing around her insides (77-8).
Chapter VII
“It’s not her fault. Or it is, I don’t know. But it’s not like I can prevent her from getting hired. My ass would get sued every way but straight.” Every way but straight-one of John’s phrases. Sid laughed. She loved the old Texan/Midwestern expressions John and I traded. She used them to contrast with the rest of her overeducated liberalese. In high school she was fascinated when she learned that Bob Dylan lyrics were cited by judges to elaborate on obscure laws in court filings. The folksiness blended with the officiousness delighted her. More than doing good, and to my great pride, she was a do-gooder, far more than her father or I were or would ever be, she loved the language and jargon of the law. She loved the way phrases could become solid, and then could have their solidity stripped from them, all by interpretation, all by language, language, and more language. Fighting with words, she would call it when she participated in Lincoln-Douglas debates in high school. She was so awkward then, so homely and horse-ish, with bad makeup, poorly fitting clothes, and a sawing, toneless laugh. But when she stepped onto the debate stage her tongue was loose and her mind was quick and precise. She could find and dissect holes in the arguments of her competitors nearly instantaneously. It was when I saw her there at that podium that I knew, despite everything, despite all my weakness and guilt, that she had something in her she could use to take care of herself.
I, of course, was thrilled when she told me she was dating a woman. What a relief, I thought, to free oneself from the heterosexual prison. Straightness: the predictable container in which all possible outcomes seemed already etched into stone-happiness, unhappiness, complacency, strife-a life in which we were all operating inside of a story already told, even as we sought to live an authentic existence. Even as we tried to say to ourselves that it wasn’t who we mated with but the quality of the thoughts in our brain that made us radical, we knew that the patterns of our life were the patterns of our parents, were the patterns of all the dim, sorrel-chomping sheep living unexamined existences in all the homes all over this thoughtless, anti-intellectual country. We knew that the stuff of our lives was the stuff of normalcy, and how normalcy and its trappings and expectations were always there. There would always be couple friends who were a bit more square than you, who you would have to play some hetero game with. There would always be family who would ask the women to do the dishes while the men played chess. How fortunate for her, I thought, to be able to evade all that. She told us she was queer, attracted to men still, and that she would appreciate if we didn’t label her one way or another. She was Sid. Fine, fine, fine. As long as whatever she chose, she wouldn’t have to take on the identity of the anxious woman who got dinner on the table while the men sat on the porch. As long as she didn’t have to act the part of the schoolmarm to a good-natured rascal of a partner who did whatever he liked and was loved more because of it. And if she did choose to cook or clean or worry, at least she could maybe do all those things for a woman who understood, not a man who, by virtue of being born with a thing between his legs, had absorbed from an early age that it was all right to sit back and enjoy being served (86-7).
Chapter VIII
There was a burning in my body, an extra level of excitement keeping part of me fed and running that required no sustenance. It was longing for the love of Vladimir Vladinski, junior professor and experimental novelist. Longing was energizing my muscles and organs and brain. Longing was replacing my blood with fizzy, expansive liquid. I loved him.
I have always been amazed at the mind’s ability to do several things at once. I remember reading to Sidney when she was a little girl-for hours I would read to her-and often during those times I would be in a completely different thought space and would have no consciousness of any of the words that were coming out of my mouth. As Sid and I walked the trail she told me about trends on social media (I didn’t have accounts, mostly because they made me feel undignified, and I relied on Sid to keep me updated), television shows that she watched, articles that she read. She gave me a long report on The Deer Hunter and how it was much campier than she remembered. All the while I was thinking about Vladimir. I imagined us in a flat in a European city, it didn’t matter which one, so long as the language outside was not English, the murmur of an incomprehensible tongue surrounding us like a curtain of privacy. It would be my flat, with open shelves and a big slop sink and cut-up fruit lying on a wooden slab on the counter. There would be one small bedroom with windows on two sides, big old windows that either stuck or flew up wildly, and a mattress on a floor with crumpled and cool white linens. We wouldn’t live together, that wouldn’t be what anyone wanted, that wouldn’t be compatible with a life, but he would come to me, some evenings, a few afternoons a week. We would drink wine, or not, we wouldn’t need the wine, we would spend hours in a tangle on the mattress or walking around half-clad with books in our hands. (I had to pause the reverie to consider that lately I was having more and more hip problems, so I would need to probably raise the bed, and inserted an antique iron frame beneath the mattress.) I might feel desperate and half-crazed by where he went when he was away, but I would restrain myself, cherishing the time we did have. I would write stories in reserved and pulled-back tones, like Mavis Gallant, about the life of the expatriate. I might teach, yes, I might teach, maybe a few wealthy students, one-on-one, a class here or there at a university. Not a university life, not that anymore-maybe the equivalent of a community college, something very incognito and undemanding. There would be something sad about our love, mainly when I started to become too old, to become Léa in Colette’s Chéri, and his eyes would pool with tears on the day that I told him he could-he must-go. Of course, I didn’t really picture my own self in all of this. I pictured some amalgam of film stars, with doctored teeth and antiaging programs, and money spent with fun, mean trainers who put their bodies through all sorts of tortures. I didn’t picture my already withered top lip with the bulging scar at the tip from the ingrown hair I had attempted to dig out with a razor blade five years ago. I didn’t picture my upper arm aloft, flesh hanging like a ziplock bag half-filled with pudding. I certainly didn’t picture my own breasts, which had always been more conical than globular, and which now, on a bad day, looked nearly phallic (90-2).
It wasn’t that I didn’t want Sid to know. Part of me longed to tell her war stories, tell her of Boris’s barn, the half-finished art more erotic than his dry, anticlimactic kisses, or Robert, always in his suit and tie when he met me at the motel room we rented each week, or the time I got a rash from the sawdust on Thomas’s hands. I wanted to tell her about my obsession with David and how our romance was so intoxicating that I was ready to leave my whole life, including her.
I also wanted to keep my own secrets. It was a pact I held with myself, a game. If I didn’t tell anybody about certain things in my life (notably the things that I would most like to divulge) then, like the men who hold themselves back from orgasm to preserve their life force, I would accumulate some inexplicable strength (96).
Chapter IX
What did I truly want from him? Did I want a day, a month, a year of domination? In which I could scream at him and mock him all I wanted with impunity? Did I want him to grovel at my feet? It wasn’t that, exactly. I wanted him to accept the role of the penitent. But you can’t ask someone who feels like a victim, as John most certainly did, to live apologetically. And there it was, that twisted logic. Even as we railed against victim mentality, against trauma as a weapon, we took the strength of our arguments from the internal sense of our own victimhood. John was acting just like the women who accused him. He had been wronged, goddamnit. While there was a part of him, I knew, that understood I was suffering too, he still cherished the sense that he was the most drastically injured party. He grasped his being wronged like a precious gem in a velvet pouch. Yes, he was like all the rest of them, desperately holding on to his own pain.
By the time I arrived on campus, I was shaking with anger. I was late, having stood stock-still in my bedroom staring out the window, a cavalcade of thoughts crashing down on me. I remember reading that Edna St. Vincent Millay gave instructions to her housekeeper not to interrupt her if they saw her standing still-that was the way she would compose poems, on two feet, staring into the middle distance, writing and rewriting lines in her head. I never had that organization of thought: my rapt pauses were all about conflicting feelings, images and memories running and bumping into each other-more like a chaotic battle scene than the unfurling of insight.
At any rate, I was hurrying to my Women in American Literature survey class when I saw Edwina, my treasured star pupil, walking with Cynthia Tong along the green. I waved, and they waved back with overdone fangirl adoration. But it was the gesture of two people who were clearly together in thought, while I stood on the outside. When I began teaching, when I was young and fresh and within a decade of my students, there were certain women with whom I related deeply, women who became my friends. Even briefly watching Edwina and Cynthia crossing the quad, I saw this was happening with them. So quickly, only three weeks into the semester. Jealousy burned at me, anger fired from my womb. Edwina hadn’t put her off, she hadn’t said she would make a date with her and hadn’t followed through. I had written an email to her with x’s and o’s and they were giggling with each other like new roommates (105-6).
Which student had complained about me? Oh, but it didn’t matter. I could picture the cafeteria, outfitted with gas fireplaces so it looked like an upscale ski lodge, and three Formica tables pushed together to create a long banquet, at which were seated ten or so students, mostly female. I could see the different body types and the different foods, most probably incongruous-the thin ones with cream-sauce pastas, the thicker ones with lean proteins and salads. What started out as a question, “Oh my God, guys, do you think it’s weird that his wife still teaches?” grew into more and more of a rallying cry, as together they decided that my presence was offensive, that it made them frightened, that it reminded them of bad people and bad events that had happened to them, or to their cousins.
Picturing them in the cafeteria, I started to view their utensils as little pitchforks that they moved up and down. I understood not only the bonding that comes out of complaining but also the incredible sense of identity that comes with discovering why you think something is wrong. I wanted them to feel that fire, that was what college was for. They were enacting a right of all young people, unearthing what they felt were the systemic wrongs of the world. It was their right to look at us murderously, longing to stand where we stood. It was their right to believe that they could do our jobs better than we could. We, who had experienced enough bitterness in life to expect flaws, faults, and complexities in every situation we encountered. They had grown up with a constant stream of global warming and gun violence burbling on low from their parents’ radios as they were driven to and from soccer or clarinet. Their lives, for the most part (at least the majority of students who attended this liberal and very expensive college), were cloaked in the postmillennial blanket of peace and prosperity, while terrible threats loomed in the shadowy corners of the larger world. They were overpraised and overpressured. There were teenage billionaires, twelve-year-old YouTube stars, and no jobs for them once they graduated. Once Trump became president, the illusion, the one imparted to them comfortably from the driver’s seat of a minivan, the idea that the world would slowly get better, that “the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice,” was upended.
Or something. I shook off my grandiose thoughts. I didn’t know them or understand their world at all. I prized myself on liking them. I defended them at dinner parties. The Kids Are Alright! I liked their action, their strict moral code, their stridency-
“Ma’am.” From my seat on the pavement I saw the wheels of a golf cart and looked up to see a square woman from campus security wearing wraparound sunglasses and a fisherman’s hat.
“You need to put out that cigarette right now, ma’am, this is a no-smoking campus.”
“I know. I’m a professor here.”
“I’m going to have to issue you a ticket, ma’am.”
“I’m a professor here, I teach here. I’m not a student.”
“You should know better, then, ma’am.”
“Stop calling me ma’am, please. This is the first time I’ve done this-I just had some bad news-”
“In the future you can walk beyond the perimeter of the campus, ma’am. It’s right out that way.”
“I know where the perimeter of the campus is, thank you.”
“Can I get your name, ma’am?”
“Why?”
“For the ticket I’m about to write you.”
“May I have your name?”
“My name’s Estelle. My mother died of lung cancer. I have one job on campus, and that’s to issue tickets to illegal smokers. Name.”
Estelle drove off into the sunset, her back emanating triumph. She did it! She nabbed another culprit! It was a good day, baby, I heard her saying to some wiry wife in an A-line skirt as they drank stupid home-brewed beer. I even nabbed a professor! Wasn’t she a piece of work. I showed her!
I held the ticket in my hand. Fifty dollars. A hundred for repeat offenders (117-9).
Chapter X
Seized with an urge to consume, I went to an upscale butcher shop that had recently opened in the area and bought expensive T-bone steaks from a very handsome, well-muscled butcher. I tried to imagine him tracing the tip of his knife over the curves of my body to cheer myself up, but the fantasy failed to displace my doldrums. I stopped at the organic market and purchased dark black kale and designer anchovies and a nineteen-dollar brick of parmesan and olives and seeded crackers and an uncut boule of whole wheat sourdough and goat cheese and salami and raspberries and a flourless chocolate ganache torte.
Usually I went to some undignified liquor warehouse for alcohol-the wines were good enough and the prices were better and the salesclerks left you alone. Today, however, I stopped at the boutique in town-used only by tourists-and let an Englishman talk me into three thirty-dollar bottles of red and a new, artisan vodka. I wanted to take substances into my body like an immoral and immoderate businessman traveling on a company credit card. I wanted everything that passed my lips to be decadent, full of sulfites or iron, with mouth-screwing flavor, to taste rich and deep.
I found Sid in the guest room, glassy-eyed and grumpy, playing a multiplayer video game on her laptop. I demanded she shower, put on a button-down, and meet me downstairs. Sensing my desperation, she complied. I stripped, ripped, and washed the kale and set it out to dry, rinsed and patted the steaks and shook them with salt and pepper. (I am of the opinion that good steak should have no seasoning other than salt and pepper.) I lightly boiled an egg and then broke it into the bottom of a wide, low salad dish with anchovies that had been mottled with garlic and olive oil. To that I added the kale and a massive amount of freshly grated parmesan, and then massaged it until it shone. I set out the cheese, salami, bread, crackers, and olives and decanted the wine. I pulled out my tray of cocktail fixings with the firm intent of getting completely and gloriously wasted.
The air was chilly, but daylight savings was still a few weeks away, so I pulled out extension cords, ran them into the backyard, and plugged in two heat lamps so that Sid and I could sit and watch darkness fall and the evening creatures peek out from the bushes. There were always a disturbing number of deer, covered in flies and ticks and savagely ripping the heads off all the flowers-those you saw every night. Often you would see a fox, sometimes reddish rabbits, and very occasionally a beaver or an opossum. One year there was an ancient-looking tortoise from God knows where who lived nearby the pool for a month as she laid her eggs.
Sid and I set up a folding table and I put the steaks on the grill. By the time they were ready I had drunk half my martini. I ate like a beast, ripping chunks of flesh with my teeth, stabbing enormous forkfuls of the salad into my mouth and letting the oil smear all over my face, shoveling crackers and cheese, alternating my red wine with my martini to wash everything down. Sid and I tore the sourdough with our hands, soaking the pieces in salted olive oil. I had a memory of my mother, back when I was twelve or so. She was a nurse’s aide, and after she and my father divorced she picked up shifts as a waitress at a local Irish pub, the kind that exists in most towns in America, with burgers and onion rings and soggy fish and chips and a perpetual stale-beer-mixed-with-cheap-floor-cleaner-topped-with-cigarette-smoke smell. Friday nights I (and I suppose my sisters if they were home, though I don’t remember them ever being there) was permitted to stay up and wait for her to come home. I would read and watch late-night TV and try on her makeup in the bathroom mirror until around 11 p.m., when her shift was done. She would come in bearing two grocery-sized bags full of pub fare, and a couple bottles of Coca-Cola, and she and I would feast on the soggy, greasy food and the sugary desserts until we could eat no more. I remember us silent, content, and chewing. It was the one time my mother and I shared a common appetite together, perhaps the time we were the closest (120-2).
Chapter XI
I remember, back when I lived in New York City, eavesdropping on a woman asking her boyfriend if he wanted to get a drink. Clearly, she wanted one. He replied in a reserved and pious tone that he wouldn’t be drinking tonight. His refusal embarrassed her, and her voice rose to a high pitch: “We Never Want the Same Things at the Same Time!”
For so long, this was how it felt with John. If he came to me lightheartedly, I would want seriousness. If he came to me gravely, I would feel irritated. If he came to me lovingly, I would react icily. If I came to him in supplication, he would mock me. If I came to him in strength, he would ignore me. We were so pitted against each other. Perhaps because we were so desperate to hang on to our own identities, our own separate I’s. We insisted on living our own lives in our own minds and could never truly merge. Perhaps we were undisciplined, or perhaps it was because we didn’t go to church, didn’t live by a moral code, didn’t believe anyone was watching. We had come into adolescence in the 1970s, of age in the 1980s-we were brought up swaddled by the most selfish and individualistic decades in the history of the United States.
Then I remembered his fat thumbs texting students. Meeting them in hotels. Acting agog at the sight of their bodies, their breasts like small, round flotation devices. Even if I didn’t care, even if I liked the space, had I been doing what Sidney had said? Had I been talking myself into a compromised existence for the sake of being tough? Why did I feel as though I was still trying to figure out how I could be a better partner for John?
“Do you think you brainwashed me?” I hoped I looked a little bit alluring from the bathtub.
“What are you talking about?”
“All the women. Was it brainwashing? The fact that I allowed it?”
“You suggested it in the first place.”
“A very long time ago.”
“We didn’t want a conventional marriage. That’s what we said. That’s what you said.”
Yes, that was what I had said. And yes, that was what I had wanted. Strangely, I hadn’t thought about the idea of a conventional or an unconventional marriage in months-since the petition. I suppose because I had been foisted into the clichéd role of the wronged wife. We had wanted to live unconventionally, in a new way, invented unto ourselves, and now I was playing the most timeworn part.
Our conviction wasn’t truly behind it, because then we would have shared our life choices with Sid. If we believed in an unconventional marriage, I wouldn’t have been the one to make all the dinners and arrange all the play dates and schedule all the lessons. We lit a couple of fires in unexpected places, but we weren’t willing to burn it all down.
“Hey.” He was feeling moved, I could tell, he swelled slightly with import. “I heard what the department asked. I’m sorry that this all has affected you. I find it truly boneheaded.”
“Where do you go at night?”
He finished flossing, rinsed his mouth, and spit a stream of blood-tinged saliva into the sink.
“Nowhere.” Then he pulled his elbows behind him to stretch his chest, farted, and left the room. As a matter of habit he flicked off the light on his way out, stranding me in the dark (130-2).
Chapter XII
My date with Vladimir was two days from now. Did he know? Could I tell him? It struck me that Cynthia had taken Edwina’s affection from me, she would have taken my class had I not resisted, she had Vladimir, whom I wanted, and now she had taken John. For what, for spite? She had youth and a body I always dreamed of, a body that would stay muscled and smooth well past her middle age. She had even, unlined skin and straight white teeth. She had attended the most prestigious writing program in the country, and her work would be better reviewed than mine ever was. She was the survivor of great trauma, she had something to say. I was jealous of every bone in her body, every moment of her history. She was acting wildly, I was jealous of that-jealous of her extremity, the fact that she was drawn to John, for who was the baddest boy on campus right now, who was the ultimate taboo? She had just arrived and was already so reckless-what would happen when the true, three-year-in boredom of small-town life worked on her? I wanted to push her into the mud and kick up great puddles of splattering filth, defiling her face, her clothing, her stylish shoes. I also wanted to worship at her feet, have her tell me all her secrets and methods for living so completely and exactly as she wanted (146).
Chapter XIV
After we had texted babysitter information to Cynthia, were seated by an eager Italian man, and had ordered our food and received and poured our bottle of wine (I filled Vlad’s glass twice as full as mine, and being male, he did not notice), we turned to discussing his book. I had reread it over the past few weeks and made careful notes about theme, symbolism, his deft use of irony, his startling word choice, his use of plot as metaphor, his vivid set pieces. When I was a young and insecure teacher I decided that the greatest service I could do for my students was give them my focused attention. Kill them with care, was my motto. If you’re unsure of your brilliance, give your time. A student who feels seen by you is yours forever. And even though it cost me hours of sleep, and probably came at the expense of my fiction career, the habit of close reading has become the way I teach and the reason that, until all this hoopla with John, I was one of the most popular professors on campus.
Our table sat against the glassed-in wall of the porch looking over the brook. Vlad couldn’t stop exclaiming about how charming it all was. The decor was a little outré-red-checked tablecloths, Chianti bottles coated in wax holding candles, large old fake cheeses hung with straw in the rafters-but the fireplace and the contrast with the rural upstate New York exterior that surrounded us made the decorations feel special rather than silly.
I pulled my notes from my bag. I couldn’t meet Vlad’s eyes as I was speaking-he was too interested and eager. I alternated looking at my notes and at the brook outside, watching a long-beaked bird pick at the carcass of a frog, digging and pulling at its gelatinous corpse.
“What I find so remarkable about your book, Vlad, is that you’ve created a work of extreme restraint that never reminds the reader of its leanness. You move so deftly from scene to scene it feels continuous, and only after I finished did I realize how impressively you pushed time forward. Your use of tense is fascinating, as well as the switch-offs between first and third person. I took these shifts as our narrator’s shifts in self-knowledge, and the impossibility of knowing the self. We reflect, we identify, we seek distance, we seek intimacy, all tactics fall short when it comes to actual perception-the views of ourselves are always conditioned. The writing is like a trapdoor: it gives the reader a sense of knowledge behind and around what the prose is presenting-a fascinating sleight of hand. The recurring appearance of paintings and photographs forced me to consider the representation of experience as it was being represented, which was dizzying and exhilarating. I thought often of John Berger and not only Ways of Seeing but also his photography book-do you know that one? I’ll lend it to you. The character of the boy is pitiable, lovable, hilarious, tragic, and the relationship with the father has a warm and lived-in feeling. Do you know those rides that spin so fast that you’re pinned against the wall? Yes, like in the Godard film Breathless, or sorry, what is it? That’s right, the Truffaut film 400 Blows. I know they are so different but I can’t help but mix them up in my mind because I watched them all during one specific time in my life. So anyway, like in those rides, I feel like what is in the center, what everyone is afraid of falling into, what everyone is spinning to avoid, is the body. The material sense of aliveness, animal-ness, humanness. And yet the body is there-it’s the pit, it’s the center, it lives, molten at the core. I admire that the body is there but that you skirt direct mention of it-ever since Roth and Updike it seems as though men can’t write a book in which the physical is present but not didactic…”
And so I continued. At one point Vlad interrupted to ask if I minded if he recorded what I was saying. I said of course not and that I was also happy to provide him with what I had written. Our food came-we both ordered salads and soups. As I spoke, I occasionally topped up his wineglass and watched his eyes become glassier with the effect of the alcohol. I went through my pages-three legal-sized sheets-and when I finished I leaned back in my chair, pleased with myself. I was comprehensive, and complimentary without fawning. I told him I thought he might pay more attention to compression as he neared the final third, my only substantial criticism.
“I want to kiss you,” Vladimir said. And though I knew it was just an expression my heart rate seemed to double, and I felt queasy. He told me that it had been a very long time since he had gotten feedback like that-in fact he had thought the days of hearing his work reflected or analyzed in that way were over. He would be reviewed in the future, he would hear from advisers about what he could change to help sell a manuscript or from publishers about parts that weren’t clear or from a copy editor about usage and grammar, but he hadn’t expected to hear someone fully reflect his work back to him-what he was trying for-with such specificity or rigor.
“Cynthia’s a good reader,” he said. “But her advice is always so holistic. She’ll say, ‘cut this part’ or ‘that guy seems fake.’” He waved his hands at me, as if to say I was “too much.”
“I knew I was excited about our date for a reason.”
“Well, I didn’t want to read your book. And then I was very jealous of you when I first started it. But then I realized it was very good, and when something’s very good, it doesn’t make me jealous, it makes me happy that it exists.”
“No more-I’ll float away on my own inflated ego.”
I put my elbow on the table and leaned my head against my fist, in a gesture of total attentiveness. “How’s the next book coming?”
Badly, he said, he didn’t have enough time to work on it, so he could never find the kind of rhythm he needed for an honest start. It was hard in the condo-he missed his writing space in his apartment. It had been a closet, he had stared at a blank wall-there had been nothing picturesque about it-he had sat in a folding chair that murdered his back. Still, it was where the first book came from. Also, as a first-year tenure-track junior professor, he needed to publish in some journals, so he had to keep working on an essay he was writing comparing Zamyatin’s We, Huxley’s Brave New World, and recent trends in apocalyptic television. The essay was taking him forever, because as he was writing it he kept forgetting why the topic had ever been interesting in the first place. Finally, with his next book he felt he needed to “swing for the fences” and write something really big-historical, maybe, or with multiple perspectives, or concerning a social issue. He felt scattered, he kept changing topics, he couldn’t settle on something true (163-6).
Chapter XVII
He relaxed back on the couch and held up the book. “I forgot how good a writer Lawrence can be,” he added.
“The beginning is very good,” I said, my eyes locked on his face, trying not to notice that the towel had slipped quite low, so the V of his lower abdominals was visible. “But once the caretaker and Lady Chatterley actually get together it’s nearly unreadable.”
“The first paragraph-”
I made a sound of assent and interrupted, “‘Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.’”
“Novels don’t do that anymore,” he said. “Big pronouncements about the way of life.”
“He undercuts it though, doesn’t he,” I said. “He says something like, ‘Or so Lady Chatterley thought.’”
“Good memory,” he said.
“I don’t know why I remember it,” I said. “It struck me at the time, maybe" (192-3).
“So I woke up this morning and thought, Cynthia got to run away.”
I was surprised by his harshness. To call a suicide attempt “running away,” that wasn’t right. “You can’t really call it that,” I said. “She was in crisis.”
“But the motivating factor of all of it was escaping. She wanted to escape. And she did. I had to stick around, and she read the complete works of Kawabata on a deck chair in some sanatorium that looked like Mann’s Magic Mountain. Did she ask me before she decided to run? No. Did she prepare me? She did not. So.” He shrugged, caustic and nonchalant.
“So you want to take revenge.”
“Revenge? I don’t know. Quid pro quo is more like it. Nothing extreme-just a few days to escape. Maybe I’ll write, maybe I’ll just clear enough space out that I could write. Or maybe I’ll find something to write about.” And he looked at me as if I might be his subject.
“Here?” I asked.
“Why not?”
“But,” I protested, not understanding quite why I was protesting, for the sake of logic, maybe, or out of female solidarity, perhaps, or because as he had told his story I had felt a growing impatience and disdain for him that I could not yet comprehend or admit, “excuse me, but you, well, when she tried to- when she left, if that’s the right word, you knew where she was. Maybe not emotionally, but physically. She doesn’t know where you are.”
“No, she does, well, basically she does.”
“How?” I was confused. I had checked his phone when I returned from the gas station and it was still on the fritz. We had no landline at the cabin-he couldn’t have called her.
“You told her.”
My throat tightened and my heart pounded so thunderously it reverberated in my armpits. I felt the need to keep the appearance of eye contact with him and felt myself putting on a face of false surprise, squinting at his forehead, as though I were trying very hard to understand what he was saying.
“You wrote her that text message from my phone. About needing time.”
“What?” My brow was still furrowed and my head was now shaking back and forth very quickly.
“I have my laptop in my bag. I can see my text messages on my computer.”
I pushed words out of my mouth. “Well-drunk-you must have…”
“No, you wrote it. I didn’t write that. I know that I didn’t. It’s okay,” he said, smiling warmly at me. “It’s interesting” (199-200).
Chapter XVIII
“I thought it was something you wanted,” he said, contrite, and I understood that as a handsome man of his ilk, he knew his body as something he could give that might make someone else happy. A gift. And when I chained him, hadn’t I wrapped him up and then opened him like a present?
“Have you,” I searched for the right word, “transgressed, before?”
“No. Once, very early on. An old girlfriend from out of town.”
“So why would you do it now?”
His voice lowered. “I have my reasons.” I could feel him looking at me with half-lidded eyes.
“Oh, stop,” I said. “Don’t be stagey. Name one.”
“I’m not-” he started, but then paused, arranging his phrasing. “I guess because I’m not doing it, am I. You are. I’m only acting out a part in some situation that I was placed in. You brought me here, you cast me in this role-I’m just playing it out for you.”
“You don’t have to. You can go, I’ll drive you home.” His words hurt me, like he was a marionette and I was an evil puppeteer. I felt the need to apologize. “I’m sorry about last night-everything got out of control.”
“No, I like it, I’m glad you cast me. It’s interesting.”
Ah, I thought, so he had rationalized the situation so that he was in control of it-in control of the experience, of the part he was playing. Well, naturally he had that ability, it was the ability of the successful: to reseat themselves, no matter where they were, in a place of power. “Please don’t patronize me,” I said.
“No, no,” he said. “I’m not. I like how we talk. I’ve thought about you. There have been a few moments in the past when the thought of kissing you has jumped into my mind.”
“In a repulsive way?” I remembered a fellow cohort in my graduate program all those years ago-male and tall and reasonably attractive-who told me he pursued ugly women because he was fascinated by the grateful way they made love (207-8).
Chapter XIX
“I’m not lying,” John said, emerging from the bathroom, wiping his wet hands on his pants. “I’m writing an epic poem and Cynthia’s working on her memoir. We have a writing club. We do drugs, then we write. It’s fun.”
I think I looked to Vladimir to try and offer some words of peacekeeping or explanation, but before anyone could say anything, he lunged at John, tackling him to the ground, my husband falling like a scarecrow stuffed with wet sand. It was unfortunate, really, how mismatched they were. John barely struggled; he simply attempted to pull himself into the fetal position, trying to cover his face with his hands. My eyes rested on a scratched message on the medieval chair: “Death to Yuppies,” written in script decorated with thorns. I found myself thinking about a time when yuppies were a thing we despised. What was a yuppie other than a young professional? What made them so objectionable? They were selfish, they had money, they were blind to societal ills. They liked nouveau cuisine and fitness. Was that it?
“You fuck,” Vlad kept repeating, until he had John flattened out on the ground with two shins on his upper thighs and his hands pressed on John’s biceps. I couldn’t help but feel slightly stirred at the sight of Vlad on top of my husband, his knees spread wide, the fabric of his pants stretched against his rear.
“Do you have any idea what you’re doing?” Vlad said, seething and trembling. “You give her drugs? Do you have any idea how fucked-up she could get? She’s a mother. I have a kid. You might as well give her gasoline to light herself on fire.”
He pounded on John’s chest with his hands, more a shove than a blow, then rolled off and lay on the ground, staring at the ceiling.
“I don’t give her drugs, son,” John said in a weary voice. “She gives them to me.” And he glanced at me to let me know this was true.
Vladimir sat up from the floor and twisted in my direction. “You have to take me home,” he told me. “Right now.”
Once again I felt annoyed at his paternalism. The whiff of the New England preacher that I had sensed early on in our acquaintance returned. His wife was a writer, entitled to her own process and troubles. If she wanted to do drugs (I assumed an amphetamine, possibly Adderall, though I wasn’t sure), didn’t that simply place her in the ranks of so many other writers, with complicated relationships to substances and work? Even if she was at risk, she was her own person, not his child. Didn’t Sontag write all her books on speed, and Kerouac, and so many others? Coleridge? Sartre? Graham Greene? Just like a man to believe a woman had to keep her behavior in line while also churning out a work of genius.
“I’ve been drinking,” I told him. “I can’t drive you. We’ll have to wait for the morning.”
“She’s probably on a bender right now,” he said, rising to stand. “My child is not safe.”
“She’s not on a bender,” John said. “I keep the drugs locked in my safe. She does a very little. She doesn’t trust herself with more. “She’s trying,” John added, and I saw that he cared for her, and was touched.
“She’s an addict,” Vlad said. He was now pacing back and forth. “You don’t know. You said she gives you the drugs.”
“She gets them from a student.”
“So how do you know she doesn’t have more?”
John rolled onto all fours, then used the arm of the couch to help himself upright, one heavy, trembling leg after another. “Because we talk. Because I know that all she wants is to get this book done so you can move out of that fucking condo and it can stop being about you all the time.”
Vladimir stopped pacing, inhaled, and shook his head. John must have channeled something about Cynthia that he recognized, because the tension wilted from his body.
“When in my life has it ever been about me,” he said softly. He looked away from us and mouthed something, some retort to Cynthia, I imagined. Then, head down, he held out his hand. “Gimme a cigarette.”
“They’re there,” I told him, and pointed to the windowsill. He walked to them, looking hunched and beaten, put one between his lips and another behind his ear, and stood still, staring at the window for a long time. Eventually I realized he was looking at John and me, reflected in the glass. He lifted the lighter to the cigarette in his mouth.
“You can’t smoke in here,” I said quickly, and without acknowledging me he put the lighter in his pocket.
He moved toward the sliding door that led to the porch. Facing away from us, he said, “What is wrong with you guys,” and shook his head. He struggled to pull the door open, then yanked it clear off the track so that it hung from the frame on a diagonal. John and I exchanged a look, and I put my hand up to stop him from saying anything, like Vlad was an angry teenager whose behavior we were trying to ignore.
We watched his back on the deck, his arm lifting and lowering the cigarette. When he finished he put it out in the coffee can full of water we’d been using as an ashtray (plip, in the silence) and walked to the lake. We heard the scraping of the gravel beach against the bottom of the kayak, then the splash and give of the water as he launched the boat.
“Wear a life jacket,” John shouted toward his direction.
“You should go out and stop him. He shouldn’t kayak at night.” I went to the door and peered out, but I couldn’t see past six feet in the dark.
“He’s fine. What could happen?” John waved my concern away, then raised his eyebrows for a joke. “Ominous, no?” (216-9)
Chapter XXV
A young woman in pastel camouflage scrubs leads me to John’s room. “He’s a nice man,” she says, and when I feebly joke that she probably says that about all the patients she smiles and tells me that she does, but with him she means it. At his door I close my eyes and take a few deep breaths to settle myself before knocking. Electra spends the entirety of Sophocles’s play in a doorway, I say to my students, when we read his Theban trilogy in my Adaptations course. She is unable to return home and unable to venture into the world. Pay attention to doorways, to paths, to in-between spaces, I tell them, these are the places of transformation. The young woman in scrubs, who I don’t realize is still standing behind me, misconstrues my hesitation and reaches around my waist, raps at the door, then turns the handle and pushes it ajar. “You’re fine to go in,” she says, encouraging me. “He’s waiting” (227-8).
Please don’t think I stay with him because of some Florence Nightingale syndrome, because he needs me and that gives me purpose and dominion or some tired story like that. The home health aide comes the very next day and cares for him until he is self-sufficient. I don’t sacrifice my independence or interests; the following night, in fact, I attend a taped screening of a new, much-lauded opera at a movie theater in Albany. No, things work out because of the way they work out, because I open one door and then another, because I find that ease can be one of the greater forms of freedom (232-3).