In the fall of 2002, I was a graduate student laboring over translations of the Hebrew Bible. (Sometimes I paused to ask myself why I was bothering to translate into English a book that existed in a perfectly good English translation in the majority of American households. Mostly, I didn’t pause. Or ask.) I had, at that point, been living as a guy since my seventeenth birthday, a little over seven years before. So I was comfortable, or at least relatively established, in my identity as a man.

But I was technically female. By “technically,” I mean “by some alchemical mixture of biology, law, and social understanding.” In a more precise manner, I mean that though I looked like a guy and had changed my name (from Alice to Alex), I hadn’t had surgery and I took no hormones. I had XX chromosomes. I had a uterus. I had breasts. Under normal conditions, none of these things were ever evident.

Owing to a fluke, my driver’s license said I was male. The day I’d gone to obtain the license, the clerk at the DMV had simply gone on the basis of what she saw in front of her (I’d left both sex boxes on the form blank) and put M.

I was dating a woman. We’d been together for about two years (though we had known each other much longer), and we were engaged. We weren’t quite sure what this meant. Or we were, but only in one way: we knew we were committed to each other and wanted to spend the rest of our lives together. Hence, we would get married.

But how? The state we lived in didn’t offer any form of same sex marriage (union, conjoining, partnership, etc.), and to get married as an opposite-sex couple required birth certificates. Both of ours said female, so that wouldn’t work. That left two options.

1. Go to another state and get a same-sex marriage. This would be purely ceremonial and not recognized by any other nation, state, shoe store, etc.
2. Go to Vegas and get an opposite-sex marriage. I’d looked online: Vegas only required that both members of the couple produce driver’s licenses. Mine said M. Hers said F. It might work. But I suspected it might be illegal, or at least not fully legit. And I get nervous about things like that. (The very existence of my not-quite-correct license made me nervous.)

In the end, we opted for the ceremonial over the illegal and drove up to Vermont in December, eloping at a bed and breakfast with the dishwasher (the person, not the machine) as our witness. We signed the certificate for our same-sex Vermont civil union, went for a lovely snowshoe afterward, and drove home with a mix of feelings. On the one hand, I knew, internally, that I’d gotten married. Vowed to be with this person. On the other hand, externally, I didn’t know what that piece of paper meant at all.

***

Things change, sometimes, and sometimes not. I turned twenty-five. I still looked like I was fifteen. It got tougher to pass as a man. So I started taking shots of testosterone and soon enough looked, if not twenty-five, then at least not fifteen. We moved to another state. We told people we were married. We were. We weren’t. The state we’d moved to didn’t recognize Vermont civil unions as anything, but we did. And to whom does marriage matter anyway?

The state we moved to also had tougher laws for providing documentation in order to be issued an identity card, and I feared the days of my flukily obtained driver’s license M were numbered. So I asked my doctor to write a letter explaining that I had undergone medical gender reassignment because I took testosterone and that I should be considered male. I sent this letter to the Department of Human Services in the state where I was born, and a few weeks later, they sent back a new birth certificate: Alex Myers, male.

This felt odd. I was and I wasn’t. I was now, at this moment, male. Well, mostly, though I still hadn’t had surgery. But I hadn’t been born the way I was now. And so, though grateful for the ease that the document provided (it’s just smoother when the paper matches the appearance), staring at it—Record of Live Birth, Alex Myers, Male—it seemed to belong to someone else.

More to the point, the new birth certificate meant that my wife and I were no longer married. Our same-sex civil union was rendered void: we were no longer a same-sex couple, and Vermont did not validate opposite-sex civil unions. However, we happened to be living in one of only nine states that recognized common-law marriage. To have a common-law marriage, a couple had to meet the following criteria: live together (we did), have a joint bank account (we did), present to others as married (of course), and file taxes jointly (would happily give it a try). We went to a lawyer, just to be certain. “Sure,” we were told. “It’ll work fine, until you move to another state.” We were married again.

***

Years went by, and eventually, my passport expired. I’d gotten it before receiving my new birth certificate, so it still said F. I sent off an application together with my new birth certificate and asked them to adjust the sex on my passport accordingly. They replied, “We need a letter from a medical doctor.”

I replied, “My birth certificate says I’m male.”

They replied, “Your citizenship gender record says you are female. Only a letter from a doctor can change your citizenship gender.”

I had no idea that there was such a thing as a citizenship gender, but apparently we all have one, and it may or may not match the gender on one’s birth certificate. I sent off a new doctor’s letter. As I waited for the passport, I wondered if, like a birth certificate, a common-law marriage wasn’t good enough. (When I told this story to a friend, complaining of having to secure another letter, she told me I should be glad I’d changed my birth certificate when I had. Since that time, my birth state had altered its laws and it now required proof of surgery to change gender. How odd, how arbitrary. How could someone decide this is gender, this is sex, here’s the defining line?)

When the new passport did arrive, with its M, I realized that, until the blip of this passport on my life’s radar screen, I hadn’t given much thought to gender lately. Gender’s like that. I lived as a man, I remembered to give myself my shots of testosterone, it wasn’t an issue. And I hadn’t thought of marriage much lately either. Marriage is like that. I was married, I lived happily with my wife. Both entities simply were, no fancy verb needed.

But that simple existence occurred only in my own life. As I held the passport in my hand, I realized that both marriage and gender have a life beyond my own. Somewhere, my citizenship gender had been on file. Somewhere, a record of me existed that over-ruled my daily existence. Here, I was a man. There, I had been female.

I asked my wife if she would marry me again.

***

We decided to return to Vermont. Another elopement, I guess. Just the two of us, in the summer this time.

Everything’s different when you’re an opposite-sex couple. We went to the town clerk for our license (before, it was done in advance by mail). We each filled in identical forms at the counter. Midway down, our pens paused.

Question: Have you ever had a civil union before?

We both wrote yes. The clerk, a classic Vermonter with a home perm and tint, took our birth certificates and our licenses, examined them, handed them back. The she read over our forms. “Who was your civil union with?” she asked my wife.

“Him,” my wife responded, pointing at me.

She looked at me, and at my form. “A Vermont civil union?”

“Yes,” I said. “We used to be a same-sex couple. Now I’m male.”

“Oh.” She read through the rest of the form. “Can I see that birth certificate one more time?”

I passed it over, and she found the line she wanted. Male. Then she took a blank license form, cranked it into her typewriter, and began to clack at the keys.

For some reason, no witness is required for opposite-sex marriages, just an officiant. We held hands and vowed once more to become, to remain, to always be, married.

***

Maybe the day will come when my wife and I will need to get married again. Maybe there will be genderless birth certificates. Genderless marriages. Some category that doesn’t mention sex at all. Because, even with all my current identification, a perfectly matched set, I still feel that I am… and I am not…and I will be… and I have been… There’s just no noun and no verb tense. There is, however, one thing of which I am certain, regardless of what my sex might be today or have been yesterday or be regarded as tomorrow. We are, have been, will be, married, joined together in union—always.

***

Rumpus original art by Liam Golden.

Related Posts:

• “The Phlebotomist”
• Tender Speech
• ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: BOB DYLAN’S BLONDE ON BLONDE
• Women are Bitches
• Coverflip: If Books By Men Were By Women

His name is Craig, and he is the wire editor at the paper. The calls all involve someone named Honeybun. I presume Honeybun is his wife, although I can’t for the life of me understand (1) why he would voluntarily and unironically call his wife “Honeybun,” or (2) why he uses his desk phone in this fashion in a quiet office with a at least a dozen colleagues eavesdropping.

When Craig mentions his wife to coworkers, she’s Barb. On the phone, she’s Honeybun, always Honeybun, as if invoking the name earned him a monetary bonus each time he used it. “Oh hi, Honeybun. Did you have a fun time, Honeybun? Honeybun, I told you: I left them in the top cabinet.”

With our office phones, one long ring means an internal call; two short rings is someone on the outside. Craig’s phone rings from the outside approximately ten to twenty-five times per night. Or as I would categorize it: incessantly.

***

Craig is tall and 50-ish with hair the color of a gloomy day. For a typical shift, he wears a pink cotton short-sleeve shirt—a summer clearance find at J. C. Penney’s—nearly white khakis, and gleaming white sneakers someone might wear while riding a three-speed in a dentures commercial. His glasses, the lenses of which have a subtle tint to them, peaked in style eighteen years ago.

His voice is attentive and kind. Even during stressful deadline crunches, I never see Craig lose his cool or raise his voice. Upon arriving each day, he greets me with a delicate “Oh hi, Dave,” delighted and almost surprised that I have returned for another shift. He is gentle and jovial, often sharing interesting tidbits from the Associated Press newswire, quizmaster style: “Okay, which country is the world’s number-one exporter of drinking straws?”

He will inquire what I did on my weekend, or what I do in my free time. “You’re from Colorado, right? Did you ever get up to, is it, Winter Park? Barb’s parents used to stay at a lodge up there. I bet they get a lot of snow during the winter.” Here he pauses in thought, formulating in his head a year’s worth of snowfall in Winter Park. On paper, he is everything you could ask from a coworker who is twenty years older. He’s deft with pleasantries, making the forty hours you sit at your desk per week, at the very least, bearable.

Then the phone rings. “Craig Howell…Hi, Honeybun.” I listen and wonder: How could a guy who seems so constitutionally merry be the same guy who gets hung up on seven times a night?

***

This is my fifth job in five states in eight years. That’s how the newspaper business works. You start at a small paper, stay for a couple of years, then move to a bigger one.

Living without the foundation of the family and friends of my hometown promotes a sense of detachment. Because I’m young and ambitious and at work more often than not, my coworkers have become my family. Age, gender, family status, it doesn’t matter; the colleagues of the moment fill my life. Nearly all of my greatest friends begin as strangers whom fate has placed in the adjoining cubicle. I’ve cruised to Mexico with one colleague-turned-pal and been a groomsman for another.

When I am first seated next to Craig, I figure we might eventually get to the point of sharing a coffee break or grabbing lunch. Or who knows? I might eventually tag along with him and his wife for a day or two of skiing in Vermont. But over time, we stay mere colleagues, acquaintances.

As the months pass, I begin to notice patterns in the daily onslaught, as 70 percent of Craig’s conversations consist of him pleading his innocence. “No, Honeybun…No, I didn’t…No, that’s not—”

I develop a number of theories and observations:

1. The topic of conversation is almost irrelevant, because anything Craig says seems to be taken as the opposite of what he means. As defense, he has three responses:

a) “No.” This sturdy rebuttal sandwiched between barrages is intended to mean “I am listening to and engaged with this discussion, but I do not concur.”

b) “No-no.” These two nos are spoken rapidly, back-to-back, usually in high-pitched desperation, as he senses the misunderstanding beginning to unravel beyond immediate repair.

c) Pure repetition. If his intent is to drive home a point, he uses a word or string of words over and over, like a talking teddy bear whose chest has been stepped on one too many times. In one epic contest of will and determination, Craig utters the phrase “I didn’t touch it” an astonishing sixteen times. Say it in your head: I didn’t touch it, I didn’t touch it, I didn’t touch it…

2. Regardless of subject matter, any call may end without notice. There is rarely the standard “Okay, bye” or “Talk to you later” (although he occasionally employs the antiquated “ta-ta”). Rather, the talking stops, and Craig hangs up the phone. To the casual listener, it might seem that Honeybun had been on a cell phone and driven into a tunnel without warning. I guess when you talk to the same person twice an hour, there’s no sense in creating any notion of finality. But usually the end is more abrupt; Craig gets interrupted midsentence. He might pause, sigh, or clear his throat before gingerly replacing the receiver. Sometimes, a seemingly pleasant conversation undergoes a sudden about-face, with Craig pleading not to be misread, misunderstood, misinterpreted. Then comes the same hang-up as before.

Because calls can end abruptly and are made and answered in varying degrees of hostility, it is possible for some conversations to consist only of one sentence.

“Craig Howell. No, we didn’t talk about what you would have for dinn—”

“Craig Howell. No-no. No, we didn’t…We didn’t—No. We didn’t…We didn’t talk about it. I was thinking…I was thinking of yesterday.”

It would be unfair to say that Craig and Honeybun only argue. Because the combative calls are so common, the pleasant conversations begin to get my attention. Sometimes they’re short and playful.

“Craig Howell. Oh really? [Snickers.] Oh. Huh. [Simultaneously replacing receiver.]”

Other times, they become a marathon of quirkiness.

“Craig Howell. You did right, Honeybun…yeah, yeah…He’s incapable of…He’s, he’s…yeah…What do you mean over the barrel?…What do you mean over the barrel?…Yeah…So…It’s just him playing Santa Claus…Keep in mind…I’m aware of the issues…I’m aware of the issues…I’m aware of the issues…I think Chris…Yeah…Yeah…They take the kid apart and ask him…If the mother says it’s fine…No…I’m saying legally, they’re not going to hold him…No, I think you’re right…They just don’t think these things through…”

Just when I think I am heading toward some sort of solution to the Honeybun Mystery, something even more bizarre happens. Craig’s phone rings. He puts the receiver to his ear and pauses for about three seconds, and then, in a soft and gentle lovey-dovey singsong, says, “Is that you, Honeybun?”

“Is that you?” I can’t imagine what might prompt an “Is that you?” Is it faint moaning or sobbing? Has her voice dropped two octaves and become unrecognizable? Is she caught in a sneezing fit? Speaking in tongues? Perhaps it’s dead silence. Regardless, are there really enough people phoning Craig and disguising their identities to warrant an “Is that you, Honeybun?” Of course it’s Honeybun. Everyone in the goddamn building knows it’s Honeybun.

As always, I keep my gaze on my computer screen. To ask him anything at our desks would be to put him onstage in our quiet office. So I carry on like normal, like I don’t hear what I hear, as if his conversations are appropriate in a professional environment, as if all married couples communicate so brokenly.

***

What’s astonishing—nay, inspiring—is that Craig never seems adversely affected by even the harshest phone activity. I see him hanging up the phone, apparently browbeaten, one moment, and seconds later, he’ll ask someone a snappy, relevant, work-related question. A second after that, he’s on the phone again using the Honeybun Voice, a tone generally reserved for pets, infants, and angst-ridden teens.

In our office, where the loudest sounds are a faint, faraway TV and fingers tapping keyboards, Craig’s shenanigans dominate.

“No-no, tell me about it, Honeybun…Tell me about it, Honeybun…Tell me about it, Honeybun. [Hangs up. Dials back immediately.] Tell me about it…[Hangs up. Waits approximately thirty-five seconds. Dials back.] Hi, Honeybun…No-no. That’s not true…No-no…That’s not true, Honeybun…No-no…[Hangs up. Dials phone immediately, then speaks under breath for about forty-five seconds. Hangs up abruptly, clearing throat at same time.]”

The themes of Craig’s conversation rarely move beyond this. I have no choice but to make assumptions about the relationship, which seems to be built on a series of misunderstandings, all the fault of Craig, who apparently lives waist-deep in a pond of ineptitude, idiocy, and all-around bungling of everyday tasks.

“I’m always in her dreams screwing something up,” Craig says. “Just the biggest imbecile. The biggest screw-up that you could imagine.” While relaying this story, Craig never turns off his grin. “She’ll wake up the next day and say, ‘You made me so angry last night!’”

If I weren’t such a calm person, I would leap over the one-foot wall separating the tops of our desks, grab a handful of his collar, put my nose two inches from his, and scream, “Why does your wife hate you? And why are you still smiling?”

***

Here are a few things I know about Craig’s life beyond our workplace.

1. Craig married Honeybun in his early 30s. He’s in his early 50s now. Before newspapers, Craig worked as a lawyer. Not the flashy kind of trial lawyer you see on TV, but a financial lawyer, the kind that works in a bank amidst blue walls and gray carpet and a feeble setup of coffee and hard candy for customers waiting to inquire about free checking. The kind of lawyer I imagine occasionally being asked by wandering customers where the withdraw slips are kept.

2. Craig wore a mustache in the early days of his marriage. I know this because the day I shaved my beard, he was the only coworker to notice, bless him. He followed his observation with a story about his own facial hair and the day he shaved it on a whim. He recalls Honeybun’s response:

Honeybun: Did you get a haircut?

Craig: No, I shaved my mustache.

Honeybun: I never liked that thing anyway.

He recalls this story with a head-shaking, ain’t-she-a-character grin. With a nervous half-smile, I shake my head, too, then uncomfortably scratch the back of my neck.

3. Craig and Barb do not have children, together or otherwise.

4. In the place of children, Craig and Barb have a boat. The boat is Barb’s deal, but Craig is its primary caretaker, compelled every weekend during warm months to sail it, sleep on it, or bear the burden of supervising its repair and maintenance. The first thing I know about the boat: They paid too much for it. (“It was out of our price range,” Craig says, “but the agent said, ‘Just take a look,’ and of course Barb fell in love with it. It was the first one we looked at.” He sighs. “It was the same way with our house.”) The second thing I know about the boat: It is sucking the life out of Craig. Literally. At the cafeteria, he pulls out a sandwich sans lunchmeat—just cheese and lettuce—to save the dollar. He blames the boat. Despite his just-below-the-surface contempt for it, Craig never directly insults the boat. He’s more passive-aggressive when it comes to the sea, opting for heavy sighs during and after discussing anything boat-related. At times, his feelings emerge, and he verbalizes his displeasure for the boat, the sea, and the time it swallows from his life.

“It took us 21 hours to sail to Nantucket,” he tells me. “I could have driven halfway across the United States in 21 hours.” He sighs and speaks as if he was criticizing someone else’s trip. “It’s like if you had a car with a radio that didn’t work, so there was nothing to do but sit there, and its top speed was seven miles per hour, and you had to drive it up to the White Mountains.”

Though the words are spoken calmly and powerlessly, they are the closest he ever comes to confronting this thing that occupies his life. I feel like he wants me to examine the subtleties and nuance of his voice, to look closer and closer until I see a miniature Craig, waving his arms, reflecting a mirror into the sky, hoping someone, someday might save him.

***

It occurs to me that seeing Craig’s wife in the flesh might provide some answers to the Honeybun Question. I think of ways I could meet Craig and Honeybun outside of work. I keep my ears alert for dining plans, which might create the opportunity to “accidentally” bump into him at a restaurant. I consider boldly inviting myself to dinner or showing so much interest in sailing that he feels obligated to have me out on the boat. There I could give their relationship a fair hearing, free from the limitations of the one-sided phone call. Maybe Honeybun is right. Maybe Craig is the scorn-worthy buffoon that Honeybun makes him out to be.

A new person is hired who sits adjacent to Craig twice a week. During an after-hours conversation, she becomes curious about some of her new coworkers. I bring up Craig. And Honeybun. And the phone calls.

“You have to ask him,” I tell her. “You must demand to know all about these conversations.” Like a director, I spell out the scene: “You’re young, you’re innocent, you’re curious. You don’t know these calls happen twice an hour. It’s all new.” She refuses. But I plead with her, because I should have pleaded with Craig when I still could. I should have jumped in when I couldn’t have known any better, when I could have chalked up my faux pas to the ignorance of being the New Guy. I could have waited for him to set the phone down and chimed in, “A little fight with your old lady, eh? The old ball ‘n’ chain? Haha! Yessir!” and he might have detected an odd closeness with his new carefree colleague and felt obliged to let me in on his secrets.

I continue to look for opportunities. I pass him in the break room at dinnertime, a perfect moment for some blunt questioning beyond the earshot of anyone else. But everything I think of seems obtrusive. “So, Craig…What’s the deal with that crazy wife of yours?” If I were a better liar, perhaps I could act like we have something in common: “Man, I didn’t get all the laundry done this weekend, and boy, did my old lady let me have it!”

Instead, I smell the air in exaggerated fashion and try to guess what he brought for dinner. “Chili?”

“No, lamb stew.”

***

From a series of calls, I piece together bits of information here and there, and determine Honeybun will be manning a booth at one of the region’s largest boat shows, to be held at the convention center downtown. I consider showing up, hoping for a chance run-in. I might wear a polo I have that features the newspaper’s masthead prominently; it might spur some conversation with strangers, and one of those strangers could be her. But if I went to the boat show, what would I be looking for? From the picture in my head, it would be a scowling lady with stringy gray hair and a weathered face creased by years of sun and wind and unhappiness. She’d be belligerent and confrontational, launching irrational accusations at passersby.

I wonder how someone could be committed to a person like this, enduring a marriage for years, belittled and held back by contempt. I imagine it happens slowly, never from day one, never overnight. One end of the relationship slowly gains power and control as the other end gets smaller and quieter, settling into a helpless existence, having forgotten what life is like outside the darkened room.

From an outsider’s perspective, it seems so clear: Leave. Nothing is worth a life of regret and unhappiness. You have no kids. You deserve better. Leave.

I sit next to him for forty hours a week, spending more time in his company than in any other person’s. But I don’t know him. Hearing one side of his phone calls doesn’t give me the right to judge. He may be perfectly happy, enduring grim phone calls because the payoff is so great. Perhaps Honeybun is insanely attractive and twenty years younger, independently wealthy with a British accent. Perhaps she apologizes profusely when he gets home and makes up for the phone calls with exquisite home-cooked meals and vibrant, mind-twisting sex.

Or perhaps she suffers from something beyond the scope of the phone calls, something that wasn’t there when they were newlyweds. Brave, valiant, and compassionate, he’s refused to give up on her, committed to hearing only the voice he fell in love with. Maybe that’s the woman I should be looking for if I go to the boat show.

***

Today, I know that nothing is stopping me. I could call across the half-wall and demand the truth about Honeybun, the other side of his phone calls, and his life. I could know everything. As much as my curiosity haunts me, the truth might haunt me more. For Craig’s sake, I cling to the idea that key information has somehow eluded me, that their relationship would make sense if only I heard the other side.

When I’m honest, I sense that Craig is exactly who I think he is. Years of verbal and emotional abuse have made him hollow. Crushed beyond the point of accepting his predicament, he’s forgotten that he even has a predicament.

I’ve decided I don’t want to know. At least not for sure. If he were a friend of mine, I’d listen. I’d plead. I’d tell him to demand his freedom, his life. But he’s just a colleague, and I just happen to sit by him.

For two years now, I have avoided investigating the intrigue of Craig and Honeybun, which inclines me to doubt that I will ever solve the mystery. The window of overt curiosity has passed. I know that he knows that I can hear every word, and it’s as if we’ve made an unspoken agreement that his phone calls don’t exist.

***

Rumpus original art by Liam Golden.

Listen to David read his essay:

Related Posts:

• Multiplicity
• Placenta Previa
• FUNNY WOMEN #91: Shower Gifts for the Traditional Bride
• Songs of Our Lives: Frida Hyvönen’s “Pony”
• “The Phlebotomist”

Since you are a half-a-wide-western country away, I will tell you what the red is like—it is like splotches of afterbirth on white hospital sheets. The blossoms bloom relentlessly with the brazenness usually found in the faces of those gripped by insanity—momentarily unstable or terminally ill—frightening onlookers, emotionally invested or not. It is not ironic, but fitting that there are only six roses. Half-assed, like a marriage proposal that never happened, like a joke where only you laugh, like a therapy session where only you talk. The arrangement contains an unusually substantial amount of the requisite baby’s breath. This bouquet has the showy buds of motel paintings, and those promising sketches of gardening catalogs. Gratuitous almost. So standard they negate their own importance. They are such roses that it is hard to find any subtext. Granted, this seems a little much to expect—that even a bouquet have a subtext. So it seems, but yet it is not.

On my program, Young and Restless, endless flower arrangements regale nearly every scene with nods to romance quite suitably unabashed. The staged settings of fictional circumstance are appropriate locales for the flourishing frivolity of kermit-green gerber daisies and explosions of champagne-colored dahlias. Most every office, boudoir/hotel room, hospital room and condo feature fresh arrangements ranging in luxury according to the hierarchy of the characters in the scene. Bachelor pads, dive bars, and the city jail are the exceptions. Though the more gentlemanly the bachelor, the more likely he will have an arrangement somewhere in his set. Rarely will you see a full-on bouquet of red roses. On Young and the Restless red roses have subtext. There’s subversion. The roses, and their appeal to tradition, matter when juxtaposed against the couple’s non-traditional situation. He is not the father of her baby, but how he will drink deeply the nectar of denial. She isn’t herself, but her sister, and yet, she loves the children just the same. The couple isn’t married to each other, but to other people, but their love is true. You and I? We are married to each other, and yet there’s no truth to tell about our love. The appeal to tradition is endearing when a couple is four children deep into a young, restless and homicidal love. Your roses don’t appeal to tradition. They don’t appeal. They adhere.

The red is like the carpet of our church, excuse me—my church—where I walked on the arm of my father on my wedding day down to meet you at the altar. I try to imagine someone sending such a bouquet with the right intentions. I can’t. I can’t imagine any person being so imbued with the cultural construct that they deserve nothing more than the banality of another bouquet of the quintessential red. Perhaps some do find them beautiful. Perhaps older people do. Irrelevant people. People who are just performing the state of personhood. Do you remember how no one came to our wedding? Do you remember the dark wooden emptiness of the church pews on that Sunday afternoon? Do you know how that comforts me now?

I’d like to say something about the thorns—but we both know that I abhor cliché, and so we can leave out the obvious points of pain. The blossoms caught your son’s eyes and held his attention, which is saying something for an eight week old. My father moved the flowers from the kitchen to a small table in front of the picture window. Here we look out upon a large oak and several feeders. My mother bought a songbird reference guide for my father, but bird-watching has been good for us all. Your son’s baby swing faces the window with the two velvet green chairs on either side. The chairs were in our bedroom when we lived downtown. One of those antique chair cushions was desecrated when you sat on a bowl of spaghetti. You were drunk, and suicidal. You berated me until I made you a bowl of spaghetti. I begged you not to spill. You sat on the bowl. A few months after you sat on the bowl of spaghetti, while I was staying with our friends Mandy and Robbie to get away from you, Robbie came home drunk in the middle of the night demanding to be fed. Mandy fixed him a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup while she cried. Then he dumped out the soup at the kitchen table, cursing the stupidity of Mandy, the filthiness of their home, and the depth of his depression. I wonder how many boys, tongues thick and unmanageable from liquor, come home on any given night to demand food from their children’s young and anxious mothers. The stupid slutty whores that unfortunately have born their damned-able and forgettable progeny? Do you remember those chairs?

I can’t comment on the scent of the roses, because you couldn’t pay me to smell them. Their perfection is pedestrian and infuriating. I refuse to get close. When they came, I wasn’t surprised. I wasn’t proud. I wasn’t relieved. I tried to throw them away out in the garage, but my daughter, your step-daughter, your soon to be ex-step-daughter, caught and confronted me in just the way you would expect her to—she’s not your typical nine year old. How could she be after having to throw herself around and on top of me as protection from your harsh words? Hugging me, pushing my hair out my face, as I sat on the floor pressed against the washing machine, the legs of my pants covered in snot, while you yelled. Crazy. Psycho. Hate. Dead.  It isn’t so easy to avoid the thorns, I apologize. Do you remember how you told me you bought your ex-girlfriend flowers on Valentine’s Day while you were in bed with another girl?

The horrid flowers you sent suck up murky water rapaciously. I’m an ingrate. I don’t deny I’m selfish, angry, bitchy, depressed, annoying, and at times stupid. Red is violent, and this is fucking obvious. Someone refills the vase. It isn’t me. I make a daily effort not to lie, but I told my daughter I was putting the flowers in the garage to keep them cool. Cool really isn’t the word for a Midwestern February afternoon when the sky is clabbered over with clouds of coldness so fierce there is no way to describe it except cruel. I don’t want to kill them but I want them to die. My daughter believes we moved in with Grandma and Grandpa because of how much you work—how you’re never home. So that was partly true. Do you remember how the cat shot out of the bathroom, wet with imposed salvation, days after you and she were baptized?

Flowers aren’t cheap, but I’m sure they didn’t cost as much as an expensive dinner out in Santa Clarita or drinks at a club in Hollywood. It seems, from the bank statements, that you have been having quite a few of those. I knew the flowers were from you before I even knew they were roses. They are quality roses, and so I should appreciate that, but really, you just selected the type. The florist is the one who plucked each budding stem from the bucket and placed them with precision. The delivery guy is the one who made his way here. My father tipped the delivery guy a few bucks. It seems that my misguided love for you will never stop costing my parents money. Do you remember how your extended family looked at you, sitting around a too large table, squeezed against the walls in the upstairs room at the rehab center? Do you know that while you were in rehab I slept better than I’d ever slept before or after because I knew that you were safe? That I was safe? That my daughter was safe. That our cars were safe. That our money was safe. That our computer was safe. That my job was safe.

The only time I can stand the sight of the bouquet of bullshit is early in the morning, before I flip on the lights. In the dark their perfection is only imagined, not confirmed by sight. This eases the edges like a pain pill dulls the healing muscles around the site of my incision. Even my mother asks in exasperation, will they never die? We feel compelled to keep them for your soon to be ex-step-daughter’s sake. We want to hide our nausea because it could be catching like our anger. You said I could take a flower out and put it in my daughter’s room, but no one wants to touch them, or talk to too much about them. I can’t stand the thought of one of those pernicious stems lying in her daughter’s room, dying too slowly to be the harbinger that it should so poetically be. When the day comes that even the outermost edges of the petals finally give over to the faintest of juicy browns, hinting at the beginning of rancidness yet to come, I will throw out the whole bouquet—crystal vase, garish red bow, and bracken water. There won’t be any waiting. There will be no second chances. There will be no confusion. The flowers will be gone. Do you remember how I kicked at the plasterboard wall of our closet until it broke its connection to the ceiling? Do you remember every square inch, of every ceiling, of every room we have tried to share?

It’s a shame that the snow is melted. Not only am I emotionally unprepared for the mush and the saccharine sweetness of an Iowa spring, but I would have liked to have thrown the ruddy bouquet outside in the snow so I could see the roses flopped on the ground like bloody victims of pillage, muddied down where the smaller snowbirds and swallows pick at droppings from the feeders. Tossed out like garbage. Useless. Unable to be pawned for money. Disgusting. Frivolous. Your son wears diapers. Not roses. And again. Here I am with the thorns. A baby needing diapers. Home with the parents in Iowa. A baby in a swing. A cliché. A bird-watching, baby- nursing, heart-wrenching cliché.

The warmer it gets, the less I like seeing the birds eat. The more I sit bird-brooding instead of bird-watching.  What does it matter without the snow? There’s no desperation. It is gratuitous. I can’t stop thinking about gratuity. Disgusting. It’s like a boy crying after the loss of his rectitude. A boy slurring his words, staggering with drink, erupting with belches and promises of equal significance. A boy lying until the phone he’s using loses service because the weight of his falsehoods crash the whole network. It turns the stomach. Like a pregnant mother left alone on a mountain with no car. Like a baby pushed into the mind’s burgeoning genre collection of afterthought. Like a placenta fused unnaturally to a cervix. Like the wretched splitting of the mid-section. Like the sound of electric medical equipment sawing through flesh. Like the bloody floor after an emergency cesarean. Like a vase of red roses. Like red.

***

Rumpus original art by Paige Russell. 

Related Posts:

• In the Ezo: Behind Closed Doors in Tbilisi
• Brother, This is Your Memory Cloak
• Multiplicity
• “Searching for A Memory That Wasn’t There”
• Columbine, Virginia Tech, Fort Hood, Tucson, Aurora, Newtown: An Etiology

Solid ground at last! Over the years, I have found several options that never fail to please when a biblically-inspired shower gift is needed for a traditional bride.

Practical Gifts:

Sometimes, I give seven negligees. No, that’s not a different color for each night of the week, but one for each of the co-wives likely to be present in a biblically-inspired marriage. Hopefully, this peacemaking gift will soften the hostility of incumbents toward the newbie.

A top-of-the-line chef’s knife might also be helpful, not only in the kitchen, but also in any situation that requires a wife to perform a strategic haircut (Delilah), heroic murder (Jael), or impromptu circumcision (Zipporah). It can also function as a useful means of self-defense against a traditional bride’s male relatives who might become angry if, at some point between the shower and the honeymoon, they learn that she is not, after all, a virgin. In such cases, a kitchen knife could even prevent a bride’s traditional death by immolation, asphyxiation, or stoning.

If, as in many biblical marriages, the bride and groom are first cousins (Isaac and Rebekah; Jacob and both Rachel and Leah), uncle and niece (Nahor and Milcah), or even half-siblings (Abraham and Sarah), I sometimes honor a bride’s tribal identity with a gift card for a tattoo parlor where she of a truly endogamous union can proclaim her happy affiliation with an artful design permanently inked into her ankle, belly, neck, or lower back.

Lastly, for a traditional bride addicted to celebrity memoirs, I like a biblical queenship theme: Bathsheba’s Tips on Seduction, Fratricide, and Blended Families; the Queen of Sheba’s Wisdom Riddles II; Queen Esther’s How to Throw a Stellar Monday-Night Execution Party.

A digression: For a traditional groom gift, I always recommend a hint from The Book of Tobit: fish-gut incense in the honeymoon suite to scare off the demons—and housekeeping service before noon.

Fertility Gifts:

In biblical marriages, the lack of progeny can be ruinous. If the bride’s fertility is at all in question, might the shower guests pool resources for the gift of a reproductive surrogate? This solution worked brilliantly for Sarah and Abraham.

If, however, the groom’s fertility were in question, I’d lobby the relatives for a male angel, a hassle-free means of insemination that worked well enough for the mothers of such luminaries as Jesus Christ, Samson, and, from the antediluvian era, the Nephilim.

Gifts to Avoid:

1. A pet. Traditional wives bear an enormous responsibility for the home, and most of them do not want an adorable puppy or conspicuous golden calf, to feed, exercise, polish, worship, or clean up after for the next fourteen years.

2. Gourmet treats. Initially, I was unaware of the numerous dietary restrictions followed to the letter by American biblical traditionalists. For example, sea creatures without fins and scales are “an abomination” in The Book of Leviticus. Therefore, I always ditch the Maine lobster and go with the explicitly permissible: locusts, crickets, grasshoppers.

3. Jewelry. An understanding of specific tradition is key here: Isaac’s bride, Rebekah, was divinely blessed with jewelry, while the bejeweled Whore of Babylon received a nasty slogan on her forehead. To bling or not to bling? I tend to play it safe.

4. Plagues. Save gag-gifts for the bachelorette party. The traditional bridal shower is not the place.

5. Miracles. The burning bush makes a good story, but who needs a patio plant that might spontaneously combust? Blessings could be a curse.

And finally, I avoid, more diligently than other potentially unwelcome gifts, any last-ditch attempts to dissuade the traditional bride from the traditional marriage she has chosen. More convincing than my own words, I think, is a beautifully bound edition of The Holy Bible–just in case she just hasn’t had a chance to actually read it.

***

Please submit your own funny writing to funnywomen AT therumpus dot net. See first: Funny Women Submission Guidelines.

To read other Funny Women pieces and interviews, see the archives.

Related Posts:

• FUNNY WOMEN #101: Threat Assessment and Risk Analysis for N. Drew
• Props from a Fellow Funny Woman
• “First of all, I can stop competing with Jonathan Franzen”
• FUNNY WOMEN #100: Writing the Next Great American Woman’s Novel
• Multiplicity

He started going out to bars at midnight once I began insisting on my sleep. Midnight became my cutoff. I could see my life devolving. He wanted me volatile. Called me an operative, an automaton, a shell or a construct: not much of anything at all.

He told me his bar stories, trying to catalyze a reaction.

Everyone I knew seemed to be reading Ekhart Tolle’s The Power of Now. Tolle’s rehash of mystical presence and mindfulness spoke to everyone but me. I’d had it with the present, so I wrote out jokes to myself about a parody– The Power of Then. I was so tired.

He called my evenness passive-aggression. And the truth was that I was ready to learn some reactivity. In my submissive blur any discernment seemed threatening.

On the subway platform, I paced. The habit of listening to music didn’t come naturally. He was a musician and preferred the music in his head to the music through the stereo, and our tastes were different anyway. At this point we’d been married 13 years. I had an iPod that I had gotten for free with a computer but I didn’t listen to it because it offended him. His loneliness was my job and it was full-time.

It was therapy that taught me to listen to music. I started with the things I had listened to in high school– a curious mixture of Pink Floyd, Sondheim show tunes, Bach and Brahms. During the marriage a few CDs had made it in–Brian Eno’s ambient series and contemporary chamber groups like the string quartet Ethel and the choir Ars Nova Copenhagen. I listened to those too and I downloaded a Fleet Foxes song that I’d heard at a yoga class. The lyric “how could the body die” gave me comfort. Somewhere along the line I’d heard Joanna Newsom and I swallowed her whole–the timber of her voice reminded me of the Beijing Opera I’d fallen in love with after the 1994 movie Farewell My Concubine. I had been so moved by the insistent squeal of the Chinese two-stringed erhu that I bought one for him when he wasn’t yet my husband. It was my gift to him on the occasion of our first Christmas.

It was through Joanna Newsom that music became a feature of the house. The first few plucks that open The Milk-Eyed Mender anchored me. I could feel my shoulders loosen. By this point I was too perpetually distressed to read books.

He said I didn’t understand what a man was. He slept in late every morning but I wanted to get up early. The bed was something to escape from. Trying to climb over him without waking him didn’t work if I waited too long.

When he woke and I said, “Hello,” he said he’d hit the end of his fuse. He began: “This morning was a reminder of all the thousands of mornings where we did it this way.” He said his love was unrequited. He said he’d been dragging and pulling and dragging me along in the marriage.

He wanted me to understand the biology of a man. He said I was going to have to try and find a way to reverse the fear I’d instilled in him. He said, “Be careful not to pressure, be careful, be careful, I don’t know how to be any more careful.” He said there shouldn’t be any rage on my end. He said that what I should have is compassion. He said he was dying. That our love was dying. His passion for me was dying.

During the year of all that saying, one of the compromises he made was to try and find some good in the music I liked. When I became frozen, an immovable and empty body curled in the upper left hand corner of the bed, he took to putting my Joanna Newsom CD on for me. He said he’d come to realize that her compositions were skilled.

But now that I listened to my iPod on the train I wanted to listen to even more music at home. One CD wasn’t enough for me. And his objections to me listening my iPod in his presence never gave way.

A woman I considered a friend but didn’t know well included me in the email dispersion of a file sharing “mixed tape” and that went right onto my iPod too. One song above all the others drew me, seeming to tell just the story I needed to hear.

That’s how Frida Hyvönen came into my life. And I knew from the start that she represented danger of the best, most delicious, life changing variety. For the first month I managed to keep “Pony” a secret.

But he’d figured out how to hook my iPod up to the stereo so I could listen without excluding him from the songs I was experiencing. I stayed on my toes when I heard it coming and quickly skipped it but eventually he heard:

The stable is where you learn to be in charge
and not take shit

dressed to the occasion
leather boots and swift black whip

He was hearing my fantasy of power and he was revolted. He said something about fucked up feminists but the song went on:

I don’t even have to use it
I just hold it like this

pony knows when she sees it
that does she not behave

she’ll get to taste it

He always seemed to be talking. He said that what I called pressure was my unknowing who he was. He said I was hostile to knowing how he felt. That I was asking him to negate himself and that if he did voice how he felt I called that pressure. He said I wouldn’t register his frustration as a natural reaction. He said I was hiding something from him and he wanted me to reach out toward him but I barely left his sight. I had no private world, up against walls, I had no space to reach through. He said I wasn’t honest.

On my way to therapy, walking the long Time Square corridor between the E and the 1, “Leather boots and swift black whip.” It was still unusual for me to be out walking on my own. It was only to go to therapy that I left his side, so with all the thrill of a teenager in the city, on an adventure, “I don’t even have to use it… pony knows when she sees it…she’ll get to taste it.” And putting my feet down on the title floor, standing up straight. Through osmosis I absorbed some strong.

I often didn’t bother with the second half of the song,

tickle the palm of my hand
with great eager lips

I give you sugar, pony
if you give me obedience

which started to loose me. Really I was just dying to be left alone, let free. Anything other than feeling some control was beside the point.

My mother was always bothered by the flicking of stations on the radio but at some point it dawned on me I can skip songs I don’t like, and I can listen again and again to particular sections of songs I love.

I loved the image of the whip.

The second time the song came on over the home stereo was during a rare moment of closeness and I confessed that I found the music empowering. I teased that he was the pony and he began prancing around the apartment and singing, to the tune of Hi-Ho-the-Dairy-Oh, “The pony gets the whip, the pony gets the whip,” his right arm reaching over his left shoulder pretending to whip himself and when he whipped he pranced even higher.

For months it went on like that. I was living in the version of love where I’m consumed by the needs of others, and I was feeling hurt and mocked, and we were both drowning in our separate anguish as he pranced, “The pony gets the whip, the pony gets the whip.”

He told me that his therapist said I just don’t like him. He told me that his therapist said I play games.

I couldn’t say, “stop.” Or, “I have nothing more to give.”

He said that his therapist told him he was enabling me by sitting and waiting and letting me hold my anger against him. At midnight he left to go drinking and at 4 a.m. came home, desperate for affection. I was holding his hand when he said, “What if you were my prostitute and I could just pay you.”

Then I found myself walking once again through the long corridor at Times Square, listening to “Pony,” my journal tucked under my right arm. That time I took it into both hands to do the klutzy dance of writing while walking and wrote, “Is divorce the light at the end of the tunnel of marriage?”

***

Now he’s been gone for 9 months and I hardly notice “Pony” when it comes up in rotation. Instead, I’m listening to Frida’s album as a whole. I’m hearing, “The love of my life/ when I was a kid.” And I’m hearing, “you do the dirty/ and I do the dancing.” I’m hearing her playfulness with language and willingness to tell real stories.

I hear, “the relief in the grief.”

And:

You count on the birds
you count on the birds

you count on them
to represent your longing

And I am grateful for my own longing. And grateful to be in the city. And grateful for the music I take along with me on my way.

Related Posts:

• Is Marriage Obsolete?
• ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: BOB DYLAN’S BLONDE ON BLONDE
• Multiplicity
• ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: TO THE EXTREME BY VANILLA ICE
• Albums of Our Lives: Songs: Ohia’s Magnolia Electric Co.

“But as Linda ripened and cured, marriage did something: It made her dowdy. Hetero. Almost loyal. She did, actually, now adore the way men, particularly Ed, could unfold before her without meeting her eye, as he faced away, blinking ahead at the road, or the television, or at the bottles of Jameson on the bar. She knew that as long as he didn’t have to look at her, he’d give her his past, and let her roam his face for truth.”

Related Posts:

• Multiplicity
• Tender Speech
• ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: BOB DYLAN’S BLONDE ON BLONDE
• We Are Only So Much Monkey: Lessons Learned From Failure
• Between Us (and Honeybun)

-In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust

I still think that my husband knew at the airport. Maybe he was thinking about Paris five years earlier, remembering how I’d call late at night from my dorm room at the Sorbonne around the time he would be leaving work in the States. Back then, I couldn’t wait to talk to him. But even that summer had its sour moments—wet leaves would get swept into loose piles in the boulevards and when the lovers drew close on the Left Bank it would leave me cold and hopeful for something of my own that was then only loosely defined. My loneliness was a persistent thing even then. I was incurable in my desperate need to understand my own heart. There was a consistent need to examine, examine, and examine. I would sometimes watch planes from the top of the Pompidou Center and try to make out what distance was doing to us both.

But even at the moment he proposed a year later, it felt more like a relief or a confirmation of something I could analyze and formally present to others around me rather than to simply celebrate the idea of fully being with someone I was really devoted to. That is, my brain was involved in the answer, the yes, I will marry you rather than my heart, which should have been bouncing around like a superball in a glass arena. The trouble? I was twenty-three-years old and thought it was okay not to feel myself consumed with passion, or dizzy with happiness like a new fiancé should be. Of course, all this is easy enough to evaluate and dissect after so much time has passed. At the time, I was already thinking about the wedding day logistics. I was thinking about my last name changing. I was thinking of wedding dates, locations, and the word wife and how it would soon apply to me. I wasn’t really focusing on the most important thing, the deceptively simple question of whether or not this person was really the one for me.

Fast forward a few years and the fights (predictably common, domestic) have snowballed and I find myself a woman unswitched, out of love, and what’s worse, out of reasons. How did it all begin? Can I pinpoint the beginning of the end?

I can. It was at the Denver International Airport, around July 31^st, 2010. I was at baggage claim, just returned from a month-long writer’s conference in Mexico.

When you see someone you are supposed to love and realize you no longer love this person it is like walking into your closet and finding it empty. You wonder if you are crazy. You try flipping the switch on and off, but nothing. Are you even in the right house? You start to ask yourself things like this.

Well, I finally accepted that I was in the right place. I could recall the architecture, the scaffolding that had done a rough job at holding us up for so many years was still visible, but I could hear the wind in the bones of it, there was something hollow to it. I barely knew how to get from room to room, but there I was. In this empty house I’d never imagined, vacant closets, and no laughter.

Getting off the plane I think I’ll be honest with him.

I take an escalator to baggage claim recalling my first grade teacher telling the class honesty is the best policy, but isn’t this different? Surely that rule doesn’t apply to everything, not when honesty is just plain, shitty honesty. We are all just going to hurt each other thinking that way, I tell myself.

Thought One: This isn’t happening, is it?

Thought Two:   How hard would it be to just pretend?

Thought Three:  Pretending is what got me here in the first place….

In this scene I am in the airport holding a red suitcase, and my red backpack is strapped to me. Everything feels heavier now and I try to remember what I bought that weighs so much. My thoughts are more disconnected than usual. I know he will be there any minute, and I want to say something that isn’t a lie. I imagine myself an actress running into his arms, bursting like I ought to be after not having seen him for a month, but the freakish truth was that I didn’t feel like doing any of it. I was already rehearsing the I-Can’t-Do-This-Anymore- speech without knowing I was rehearsing it.

Still, I wondered if acting in love would make me be in love.

I was desperate to go back and correct the architecture, to re-do the scaffolding, and get the place furnished, like it was supposed to be. Right then, I really wanted to remember how to get around that house, how to get the light back on, but that’s only because I was scared to death. I knew I needed to turn the key in, but could I do that?

I spot him near the escalators searching the crowd. I remembered how I’d wanted to run hard at him, to pronounce the word Love, to be dramatic, but my feet aren’t moving. Instead of warm, I feel cold. So cold I realize I’m shivering.

Our eyes lock, and I don’t move. I realize I would be a terrible actress. Then I remember something and realize that maybe I wouldn’t fail at acting after all. I swallow hard and prepare for speech. I realize I’ve been holding onto my suitcase and standing with my backpack on the whole time, just waiting to be found, totally petrified by the prospect of what the next hour may bring. I shift my weight from one foot to the other. He walks faster.

I say something like it’s just so good to see you because I think that’s not totally a lie, but the neon word LIES goes off in my brain. I close my eyes to block out the image, but it’s still there—big and blinding LIES.

What are you doing?

I hug him, hoping he didn’t see the word, too. We back away from each other and our eyes meet. At this point I say nothing, which I know is wrong and unthinkable, but I keep imagining myself a shore, and he is a shore and an ocean is crashing against both of us. Nothing is sticking; everything is in flux. Language is somewhere in that water I want to stop and the only way to find words is for the water to leave me with the right shells and the shells are language. I think, Let there be an I missed you on the sand, a love, or at least an it’s been way too long. Let me find something here. But everything is blank. The beach and my mouth are failures. My husband is a beige coast. The water in my brain rushes in and out. I see myself see myself.  I wait and try, but the water leaves me with nothing.

When he asks if he can carry something, I reply no, it’s fine. I tell him I am used to the weight by now. I tell him it makes me strong.

See how fine everything is?

By this point it’s really late at night and we’ve left the airport and are now driving around, lost in Denver. Words like separation and divorce start making appearances in our conversation. I tell him I didn’t want to have to say I don’t love him anymore, because that’s cruel. It’s too cruel. And yeah, I stopped caring and no I didn’t miss him while I was gone, and maybe I should have emailed more, but I cannot be the one to say I don’t love you anymore.

But that’s it, isn’t it?

Yes, I whisper.

Everything gets very quiet and I start to notice how many streetlights are out.

The outcome starts to feel inevitable after being so honest. I wonder if he’d been anticipating this ending all along. Did he look at me and see logistics, endless rows and columns? Did he see lines brackets, and numbers where my body was? Where the fireworks were supposed to be? Had he known I was some insolvable problem all along, doomed to be laid away?

In the quiet, I let him make some wrong turns. It’s late, past midnight now, and we are still in that unfamiliar city. As he drives the wrong way, I stare at my reflection in the window and the decision covers me like a mask. I start pinning labels on my forehead. I’d thought I was lonely before, but now I’m really lonely. Sometimes I can hear him crying. I tell him where to turn to get us home, and he seems grateful. I look down at my hands and think they look like they are holding onto each other. I want to open my hands, but I can’t. They keep holding on.

Why won’t my hands open?

When we get to the apartment, he drives around looking for a parking space. The space we eventually find is far away. The car stops, and I sit there clutching a tissue, the sounds of my husband’s sobs still ringing in my ear. I wonder how anyone could want me this much. I wonder how it’s possible I don’t want someone who wants me this much. I watch him turn the car off and touch his eyes and he asks me if I am getting out. My hands finally come apart and on cue, I answer him.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

Related Posts:

• Multiplicity
• “The Phlebotomist”
• ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: BOB DYLAN’S BLONDE ON BLONDE
• We Are Only So Much Monkey: Lessons Learned From Failure
• Between Us (and Honeybun)

Jessica Treadway, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, has written an accomplished short story collection titled Please Come Back To Me. Each of the eight stories exposes a darker side of American family life, with hidden fault lines of contradiction lurking in the human soul. Her characters become entangled in painful questions of identity and culpability; they seek change, yearn for redemption or escape. A mother fantasizes about smothering her colicky infant, whose incessant screaming brings her dangerously close to the brink; a young woman struggles with her sister’s allegations of sexual abuse and is knocked off-kilter when her own past turns out to be far different than she ever imagined.

In almost all of these stories, characters are presented with a chance to redeem themselves; some of them seize it, some do not. If there is a mantra that applies to Treadway’s work, it is “Be grateful for what you have; remain humble.” This is an important message, yet if I try to isolate what it is that gnaws at me, to identify my doubts about these stories, it is the feeling that I am being presented, however subtly, with a better way to live. Underlying Treadway’s keen insights into the ambiguities of the human heart are morals to some of the stories, artfully puzzled together for a reader to look back and recognize the signs that were there all along.

In “Dear Nicole,” twelve-year-old Gerald’s father, owner of a car dealership, sells a schoolmate’s father a new car; he boasts to his wife about convincing the unsuspecting Mr. Sprinkle that his “flocus valve” has blown. Gerald knows there is no such thing as a “flocus valve”—from outside the dining room, he hears his father “helping himself to the last piece of pie, eating it straight out of the pie dish in blueberry forkfuls” and chuckling at the man’s gullibility. Years later, when Gerald realizes he has married the wrong woman—the type who, in telling the story of what brought them together, describes her childhood friend Allie as “one of those kids you just want to slap all the time, because they always look so scared”—we get the sense that Gerald has inherited something malignant from his father, something he will never be able to extract from his troubled soul.

Jessica Treadway

In another story, the young mother Norine exhibits risky behavior—pulling over to the wrong side of the road close to a blind curve to save time on her paper-delivery job—equal in weight to the kind that got her husband Jimmy into trouble. This “double standard” is described all too tellingly by her bar acquaintance from the Bowl-a-Drome. Here, too, there is a parallelism between generations: Their hired lawyer is ready to do anything he can get away with, however unethical, if he can score a few points with his crush, Norine’s mother; while Norine’s own admirer, a high-school friend and cop, lies to get Jimmy off the hook. “Every marriage has secrets, her mother had told her once. You don’t have to tell everything.” Again, the implication seems to be that Norine has inherited something deceitful—and even as she realizes that Jimmy is the only one to have seen those two parts of her, the only one who can “keep her honest,” she resents him for preventing her from living the life she feels she deserves.

When she sees that her mother has far more to offer Jimmy emotionally than herself, Norine’s rage dredges a childhood memory to the surface: On the pretext that their house’s heat wasn’t working, the mother took young Norine into the family car and left the motor running in the garage; folded in half on the kitchen table was a suicide note with the father’s name written on it. But while the mother eventually goes back to school to become a minister, and a sermon she writes—“Shirley Wants Her Nickel Back”—seems to foretell Norine’s predicament, all the preaching in the world cannot undo the damage she has done:

What happened when the train of our destiny suddenly became derailed? Well—God would help us see that the journey we’d bought the ticket for had, in fact, a different destination than the one we ourselves intended.

Nonetheless, somehow the story places the fault with Norine, and it is this contrived sense of guilt I am trying to get at, the suggestion that it is a character’s lack of integrity that accounts for her bad karma. Similarly strained is the implication that bad parenting is at the root of much of the world’s evil. Some of Treadway’s stories feel too well composed, their parts too elegantly interlocking, as though to say that if one looks closely enough, an answer to life’s dilemmas is bound to emerge. But the thing is this: It often doesn’t. The battles of the human conscience don’t lend themselves to causal explication. And so I find myself wishing that Treadway would fling herself wholeheartedly at the horrifyingly meaningless side of suffering—to penetrate the inscrutable voids in each of us that her award’s eponym, Flannery O’Connor, so fearlessly navigated.

Treadway is at her best when she depicts characters colliding with one another in the blind clutch of life, without anyone being particularly more at fault than another—when tragedy results from circumstances of misunderstanding and human weakness. In “The Nurse and the Black Lagoon,” while there is yet another parallel between mother and son and an implied cause for the son’s dark imaginings—internalized rage at his father’s lack of empathy—Treadway succeeds brilliantly in describing the state of “going blank,” striking close to the core of why we don’t see ourselves doing the things we do:

Something crackled in Irene’s brain—the physical equivalent of all the lights in the house dimming and surging again at the same time. Then the power stayed on and she forgot the flicker.

The mother catches herself in the act of forgetting something crucial she should have seen about her troubled son—in the very instant she realized that it made no sense to her. We do not see the things we don’t wish to see, things we can’t bear to see—it is this not wanting to know that wreaks the most havoc. Good intentions are crossed by bad behavior; conflicting needs create deadlocks, leaving mothers and daughters, fathers and sons incapable of true communication or communion. The stories in Please Come Back To Me resonate with repressed injury and affliction, bringing to mind that insidiously familiar “family smell of high spirits and misery, celebration and bitterness, comfort and dread.”

Related Posts:

• Multiplicity
• Between Us (and Honeybun)
• Death of a Gay Porn Star
• Placenta Previa
• What Music?

A long meditation on poetry, love, time, pain, and finishing the novel:

April 2010. I’m in Wassenaar, Holland, at one end of the long desk I share with my wife, Elisa. She scored a writer-in-residence fellowship here at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) and managed to coattail me in, so we’ve been spending time at this desk since early February, working every day to push forward on our new novels. We face two five-foot tall windows we’ve had to decorate with yellow Post-its to keep the busy Dutch birds from trying to fly in on us. When we look away from our computer screens, we can see spring slowly arriving: On the ground, brown flowers into green and, above that, the sun heats the steel gray sky until it turns a deep, bright blue.

There are occasional days of rain and cold, but there’s no doubt about spring. I feel far less certain about my new novel. There are other large projects that feel uncertain, too. Elisa and I have been together for five years and we have a fourteen-month-old son, and though we want nothing more than to be good partners and good parents, we sometimes fail. Failing, of course, is to be expected. We simply need, as Beckett says, to fail better. But even that can feel elusive.

The other night we fought and I walked alone to this office in the dark. My plan was to sleep on the office couch and hope the morning would bring some clarity.

A copy of Nick Flynn’s The Ticking Is the Bomb is in my backpack. Reading Nick Flynn has helped me through moments like this before. Crossing paths with him hasn’t hurt, either. I suppose this essay is my way of trying to thank him. I like to believe he’ll understand.

**

November 2002. Before Elisa, I almost married a poet who is a close friend of Nick Flynn’s. The poet and I re-met at our twentieth high school reunion, outside of Philadelphia. I was thirty-eight, single, and for the last year and a half I’d been living in Albany, New York, where my social life felt barren and hopeless. I didn’t show up at the reunion with a specific plan, but any chance to meet people outside of New York’s lonely capital felt promising. Plus, I got a nice jolt from the idea of meeting someone I’d known as a teenager. Many of my friends had married in their early twenties and over the years I’d watched them develop a kind of intimacy with their partners I feared I’d never have—or wouldn’t discover until my mid-fifties, if I started right away. Maybe if I fell in love with an old classmate, we’d find a shortcut to that intimacy I’d admired from afar.

As I stepped away from the registration desk, one of my best friends (married with three kids) rushed over to tell me about a woman I needed to talk with immediately. “She writes poetry now,” he said. “I told her you actually read that stuff.” The name he mentioned called forth the image of an attractive, quiet girl with a wall of curly brown hair who sat near me in Mrs. Bintner’s English class one year. I never bothered trying to talk with her back then. I was not in her league. In high school, I was too low in the social standings to be in any league at all.

Over by the bar, I discovered that her wall of hair had been trimmed back. She was wearing black boots, tights, and a short skirt. I couldn’t help feeling she was still out of my league, but I sipped my whiskey and reminded myself that it was 2002 and I’d recently signed a two-book deal for a novel and a collection of stories and I had a tenure-track job and stayed in decent shape and wasn’t yet completely bald and had never been married. It wasn’t necessarily hopeless.

We talked about poetry and had a nice conversation about Mark Doty and Provincetown. I learned she and her bee-stung lips lived in New York City these days and I told her I tried to flee Albany for Manhattan as often as I could. We exchanged e-mail addresses before walking off separately to continue our reunioning.

It may or may not have been because of that shared English class twenty years earlier, but we did move toward intimacy with exciting speed. There was a flurry of e-mail followed by a long, winding stroll through the Upper West Side. We wanted to plan another date right away, but winter break was coming and I was heading west to hole up in my uncle and aunt’s cabin north of San Francisco to write. I casually invited the poet to join me for a week or two. Within twenty-four hours she’d shocked us both by purchasing non-refundable tickets. In the same e-mail that contained news of the tickets, she included Jane Kenyon’s poem, “The Suitor,” which she’d spied on the subway. I kept re-reading the final lines:

Suddenly I understand that I am happy.
For months the feeling
has been coming close, stopping
for short visits, like a timid suitor.

**

April 2010. At this long desk by these big windows I’m writing a novel that, as far as I can tell, has something to do with fatherhood and something to do with torture. Two of the books I’m reading, hoping they’ll help with the work, are Philip Gourevitch’s Standard Operating Procedure and Nick Flynn’s The Ticking Is the Bomb. Both books are absorbing and disturbing, for different, albeit related, reasons. It’s not until I’m far along in Nick’s book—a harrowing, gorgeous nonfiction exploration of fatherhood and torture—that I discover he’s already read the Gourevitch. This discovery is comforting (I’m on the right track), but also unsettling (I’m trailing after Nick again).

Nick became a father in 2008. I became a father in 2009. Elisa gave birth to our son, Miller, in the bathtub of our Brooklyn apartment. For a long time, there were four of us in the candlelit bathroom: Elisa, myself, a midwife, and a doula. The labor lasted about thirteen hours and even though I was right there I’ll never understand how Elisa did it. But suddenly there were five of us, Miller turning from blue to pink in Elisa’s arms. The midwife and doula helped clean us off and ushered us to bed. They fed us and beamed with us and told us we’d be fine and then they were gone, leaving our new family, the three of us, alone together.

Elisa drifted off into a deep sleep. Miller slept as well, his mouth against her breast, still in rhythm with her, the two of them absolutely stunning and miraculous. Curled up next to them, exhausted, I was also ready for sleep, but I felt a sparkling in my lungs I’d never felt before, like a box of matches slowly lighting up inside me with each breath. When I tried to close my eyes, more matches flared and it was almost blinding. Is this what people mean when they talk about a “third eye” opening? Is this what Nick means when he invokes bewilderment as the way to enter each day? If so, maybe becoming a father means becoming bewildered for the rest of your life.

I don’t know what Nick’s first few months of fatherhood were like, but mine were tough. I remained joyfully bewildered. I also came to feel terribly lost. When Nick speaks of what it means to be lost (as he does powerfully in Some Ether, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, and The Ticking Is the Bomb) he occasionally cites a line from D. W. Winnicott: “It is joy to be hidden, but disaster not to be found.” He shares some lines from Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost, as well: “Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the familiar appearing….”

As those early days blurred into early weeks, I watched my newborn son losing weight; he’d just arrived and already he was disappearing. It felt like a complete disaster. Elisa and I had devoted a lot of time to preparing for the homebirth. As the pregnancy went on, it became increasingly important to both of us to give our child a peaceful, natural entrance into the world. Some combination of superstition, cluelessness, and exhaustion, however, led us to devote surprisingly little time to preparing for the days after the birth. Then we woke up to find Elisa’s breasts engorged and our son unable to nurse effectively. One pediatrician called him, alternately, a “lousy sucker” and a “poor sucker.” Another assured us it was normal for a newborn’s weight to decrease a little, for a little while. Fine, but what constitutes “a little” and “a little while”? More important, how could it be that we did not know how to feed our son? We were failing him from the very beginning.

In stressful moments, I tend to withdraw. Elisa tends to crank up the volume. She wants to jump and shout and I want to sit and think. As Miller lost weight, I silently struggled to figure out what to do, while Elisa detailed everything that was going wrong. Where was our midwife now? Why did every lactation consultant tell us something completely different? Where were our extended families? Why, in the middle of this enormous city, were we so isolated? We’d worked so hard for something natural, but this was not natural—to be so alone, just the two of us and a crying, starving baby. It was barbaric. It was idiotic. It was dangerous. These were not the conditions for a new life. We needed help. We were doomed. We’d always been doomed.

**

December 2002. Those first days with the poet in my uncle and aunt’s cabin felt magical, at once familiar and thrillingly new. At the same time, it didn’t take me long to feel surprised by how much the poet wanted to talk, how much, it seemed to me, she needed to talk.

From that quiet cabin you can drive out Coleman Valley Road, up into the hills, where the winter landscape is almost lunar, wind blasting over boulders and brown grass and hardscrabble farms. The road is narrow, as if the crew that made it wanted to finish the job quickly so they could move on to greener, kinder terrain. But if you follow the path of those tough-luck laborers long enough, you’ll eventually crest the final hill and start winding your way down to Highway 1, right along the Pacific, just a few miles from Goat Rock Park, where the Russian River flows out into the ocean.

Edward Schwarzschild

I’d told the poet that my plan was to hole up in the cabin and write, and I meant what I said. Based on a 90-page fragment, I’d signed a contract to turn in a complete novel by a date that already felt far too close; so, for better or worse, I was more motivated than usual. Of course, there was time to take daily walks, drive down to Goat Rock, linger over meals, lounge around in bed watching the sunset give way to a star-filled sky. But I also wanted to work, quietly, for a bunch of hours everyday.

By the second day, the poet had started making phone calls while I worked. She reached out to friends for what she called “minis.” She explained them to me as, essentially, a chance for one person to talk, to say whatever she’s feeling, for five minutes, uninterrupted, with the knowledge that she is being heard. You ease into it gently and exit the same way. There’s no summing up or request for comment. It’s not a discussion.

I come from a pretty stiff-lipped family. A shorthand history: My parents didn’t go to college; right after high school they took jobs they’ve kept their whole lives so my brothers and I could go to college, and they expected the three of us to move the whole family forward, steadily, single-mindedly, without complaint or complex feelings. With my limited frame of reference, the poet’s minis sounded to me like controlled rants, and it was odd to be present across the room while they were taking place. I tried to focus on what was going to happen next in my imaginary world, but I kept wondering about those intense phone calls. Who was she talking to? I wasn’t ready to date someone who was already in a relationship. I understood the minis were simply a form of therapy, or connected somehow to therapy—the poet’s shorthand history: she came from a family of therapists, her parents, her older sister, a brother-in-law, all in the profession—but I couldn’t imagine talking that way to someone I wasn’t in a relationship with. Back then, I couldn’t really imagine talking that way at all.

I wasn’t listening carefully—listening carefully wasn’t my strong suit—but I think several of the mini calls went out to a guy named Nick.

**

February, 2010. We’ve been in Wassenaar less than three weeks and we’re struggling to settle in. I wander into the new library in the heart of the village and, searching through the small collection of DVDs, I find a copy of Darwin’s Nightmare, a documentary I’ve wanted to see for a while. Nick Flynn has some connection to it—“field poet,” the credits say—and I already have Nick Flynn on the brain, so I pick it up and bike back to our temporary home. I can’t read the description on the case—I have no Dutch—but I think I remember hearing what the film is about: Lake Victoria is being fished empty to feed people outside of Africa while people along its shores and throughout Africa starve. Planes fly into Africa full of weapons and fly back to Europe full of fish.

Wassenaar in Winter

For the last two years, Elisa and I haven’t lived anywhere for more than a few months at a time. It’s a consequence of good fortune—a semester in Spain on a Fulbright, extended trips with family and friends over summer and winter breaks, her apartment in Brooklyn and my house in Albany—and we’re always seeking opportunities to get on the road. We don’t always do well with transition, however. Our joke: Sometimes we’re a road family, sometimes we’re a road-kill family.

Miller has a stubborn cold he caught on the plane and he’s teething, and Elisa wonders about the wisdom of our having traveled to this flat, gray, cold, wet country. On this particular night, after we put Miller to bed and before we can begin to watch the film, our heat cuts off. Then Miller starts crying and fights going back to sleep. We’re all exhausted. And then Elisa starts crying, too. Somehow, it helps her. It doesn’t help me, though, and such moments push me toward my own dark thoughts. I have a headache and I wonder how I got into a situation where everyone is crying except me and we’re in the goddamn Netherlands where I know no doctors and no heating specialists and I want nothing more than to soothe everyone back to sleep.

I decide it’s probably not the best time for Darwin’s Nightmare.

Eventually, Miller quiets down and when he wakes, early in the morning, I boil water for his oatmeal. I also boil a few pots full of water to pour in the bathtub so Elisa can at least give herself a sponge bath before she has to head off to Amsterdam for a busy day. She is touched and grateful.

**

2003. Albany is two and half hours north of New York City, if you travel by Amtrak and Amtrak runs on time, and seven hours east of San Francisco, if you travel by plane and get lucky with your connections. I wish I lived in New York City. Before moving to Albany, I lived in San Francisco, my favorite city in the world so far. I’d prefer Albany, California (just outside Berkeley) to Albany, New York, but writers and academics often have to take the jobs they get. The poet can occasionally see the considerable charm of Albany, NY, but like me she prefers New York City. Unlike me, she lives in New York City and has lived there for fifteen years. Before long, our sweet-spontaneous-cross-country-rendezvous relationship runs into the reality of Albany. I’m not likely to get a tenure-track job in New York City (or, alas, San Francisco), and I’d be unlikely to get tenure at Albany if I were commuting from NYC, so for the next few years at least, I’ll be living most of my life in Albany.

The poet wants to find a way to accept that. Friends would help. One day a friend of hers who is, also, to some degree, an ex—the details are unclear to me: she says they quickly realized it wouldn’t work between them, but doesn’t say how quickly, or what occasioned the realization, and I don’t push it—comes to visit. His name is Nick Flynn and he’s traveling with his current girlfriend, a playwright he met in Italy. I give them a tour of my neighborhood with its blocks of 1880s brownstones and the Fredrick Law Olmsted-inspired Washington Park. I tell them if they have a few beers and squint they’ll almost be able to imagine themselves in Brooklyn. After a while, we wander away from the brownstones to Empire Plaza, the fascist-inflected, concrete Brasilia imposed upon the city center by Nelson Rockefeller. We walk over to the performance space called “The Egg,” an ovoid building made of poured concrete that seems to float just above the Plaza like a flying saucer forever struggling to lift off. I’m happy to watch the poet enjoying this Albany afternoon. As we stroll around the city, she stays close to Nick while I talk with the playwright.

**

2000. Before the poet, I planned a wedding. The invitations proclaimed it would take place on September 9, 2000, in Truro, Massachusetts. (I had a month to swim in a pond in Truro, writes Nick, describing a rare halcyon moment in his life.) I had a few busy days driving around Truro, meeting with a rabbi, setting a menu, picking the spot high on a hill with a view of the ocean where we would speak our vows.

I’d met my fiancée on a blind date while I was in the writing program at Boston University. She was a cardiologist working at the VA hospital, living with her parents, putting her life back together after a divorce. A few minutes before I rushed out to meet her for our second date, I received a phone call from Eavan Boland at Stanford University telling me I’d been awarded a Stegner Fellowship. I applied for Stegners the way I went on blind dates: It was something I felt I should do, but I always assumed it wouldn’t work out. Now I would be moving to my dream city (San Francisco) to study at my dream university (Stanford) with my dream teacher (Tobias Wolff).

And the second date was fantastic. By our calculations, it went on for a while, since we spent every night together for the next month. (I do, apparently, have a tendency to move from intense solitude to instant relationship.) Our third date lasted even longer, and in middle of it she asked when we should start talking about marriage. Before long we were living together in the Bay Area. She took a job at a different VA hospital and I commuted back and forth to Stanford. Soon after we arrived, a doctor visiting from Hilo, Hawaii approached the cardiologist about joining his practice. Would I consider moving to Hawaii, she wanted to know? It was an absurd question and I laughed at the prospect of yet another dream coming true.

We decided to spend the summer in Hilo so she could make sure she’d like working there. We sent out our wedding invitations and joked with friends that our weeks on the Big Island would be our practice honeymoon.

Then the run of good fortune ended. We learned that her mother, a breast cancer survivor, now had pancreatic cancer, and there would be no surviving that. Though I like to think of myself as relatively sensitive and compassionate, I was my parents’ son; and up until then I’d been lucky enough never to have someone close to me die. I’m not proud of how I handled this tragic news. I stayed willfully ignorant, trying to convince both of us that her mother might survive for years. I cut short conversations about what was happening, suggesting that her mother would want us to go on with our lives, not wallow in self-pity. I worked hard to write my pages every day.

Still, we flew to Hilo. Our second day there, she came home to the outrageous house we’d rented and told me she needed to cancel the wedding and she wanted me to leave. I apologized for all that I’d done wrong. I pleaded for us to get counseling, begged her to use the word postpone instead of cancel, promised to learn to be a better, more caring partner. But she was adamant and certain, as doctors can be. So much for our practice honeymoon.

The last time I saw the cardiologist—at least I had my heart broken by a professional became a favorite joke—was when we drove around the Big Island to pick up the box of cancellation notes we’d had printed, then spent an hour or two addressing envelopes. Then I was at the airport, going up the escalator, looking down to watch her turn her back and walk outside to the car. Not long after that, she invited a guy I knew to fly over for a visit. It turned out that sometimes, when I wasn’t home, they talked on the phone for hours. Less than a year later, while the cardiologist’s mother was still alive, they married.

**

Throughout The Ticking Is the Bomb, Nick refers to the two women he is in love with, and the book, in part, chronicles how he chose one and not the other. To re-word Winnicott: It is joy to be chosen, but disaster to be un-chosen.

**

April 2010. I don’t know why our fourteen-month-old loves clocks, but it’s been going on for a while. He points his finger when he sees one on the wall, finds them immediately on the pages of his favorite books, tugs at the leather band on my wrist. “Tick-tock,” he says. “Tick-tock.”

He’s a chubby, breast-fed boy (eventually we found a fantastic lactation consultant) who also loves birds and trucks and dogs and apples and peek-a-boo. Breakfast time remains guy time, and when I try to wipe his mouth with a dishtowel, he takes it from me and covers his face, giggling beneath the towel as I call for him. Has anyone seen Miller? It’s still dark out, sunrise an hour or two away. He’ll hide again and again, laughing louder each time he reveals himself. I’ll stay at the table, finding him, for as long as he wants. No disasters permitted here.

His name comes from my mother’s mother, Mildred, another tough, tight-lipped ancestor, but Elisa and I also like the association with those writer Millers, Arthur and Henry. We decide not to worry about the beer and the Miller-time jokes bound to come his way.

When we looked up the standard origin of the name, we found that it’s Old English and that it refers to a mill worker, a grinder of grain. I like that, too, since it fits with how I aspire to exist in the world: work hard, persevere, be useful, stay steady and true.

I’ve read some Beckett, but not yet Endgame, from which Nick takes his epigraph for The Ticking Is the Bomb: “Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there’s a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap.”

**

2004. I’m entering year three on the job at SUNY Albany, and who knows if it will last? I need to publish a book and then another book to get tenure and I’m still revising my first novel. I’ve lived forty years without tenure, so clearly I can survive not having it. The same could be said of having children, something I’ve been thinking about more than usual since my recent break-up with the poet, who seemed like my last best chance.

Nick Flynn

A few months after the break-up, Nick visits our campus to give a reading. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City has just been published. Due to some bizarre scheduling, Chuck Palahniuk is visiting campus the same day. I’m teaching a large upper-level undergraduate course on contemporary literature and a large introduction to creative writing workshop. In both classes I assign Nick’s poetry collection, Some Ether, as well as excerpts from Another Bullshit Night. I’ve been on college campuses most of my adult life, attended hundreds of readings, and I’ve never seen students more excited about a writer than these students are about Palahniuk. They own his books and can’t wait to see him in person. Maybe I should engage this interest of theirs, embrace this odd pedagogical opportunity, but with the shocking Abu Ghraib images still in the headlines and with torture the hot new narrative device on 24, Lost, Battlestar Galactica, and other shows, I have no desire to examine Palahniuk’s obsessive exploration of violence. I assign nothing of his to my students and do my best to compel them to attend Nick’s event. He’s given a small room with lousy ventilation and an afternoon time slot. Palahniuk gets the evening slot and one of the largest rooms on campus.

I am Nick’s host for the day. I’m nervous, in part because I don’t like playing host—delivering the introduction, directing the post-reading Q&A, making sure everything runs on time. At such moments, I’d almost always rather be alone in a cabin somewhere. But I’m also nervous because I don’t know if Nick has done any recent minis with the poet. Ours wasn’t the most amiable break-up. Yet more shorthand: I traveled to China for a few weeks and we were going to use my time away to think. So I thought. And decided we should split up. She thought and decided we should live our lives together and when I returned from my trip I didn’t see any point in meeting up to talk more about our different conclusions. For better or worse, I wanted to talk less, not more. I wanted to believe that I’d learned a lot from my heartbreak with the cardiologist. I wanted to believe that I’d moved from one extreme to another—from a woman who kept everything hidden to a woman who didn’t want anything ever to be hidden. I told myself I needed to find a woman somewhere in the middle.

So there’s one poet in the room (Nick), another poet not in the room (our shared ex), and Palahniuk getting ready in a room nearby. After Nick’s electric, inspiring reading, it’s my duty to drag him to Palahniuk’s pre-event dinner. We arrive late, perch at the edge of the table, and talk quietly about how creepy the guy seems. Meanwhile, Palahniuk entertains the small group of administrators and professors, boasting about how many people faint at his readings; sometimes they faint during the reading itself, other times they lose consciousness when he tosses ghoulish plastic severed limbs into the crowd during his Q&A. He hopes to watch a few more go down tonight. Nick and I scarf our food and bolt.

Back on campus, 45 minutes before the reading, Palahniuk’s room is at capacity and a line of revved-up students snakes around the building. Most of these students have never attended a reading before and most of them will be turned away. The ones who know me ask if I can get them a seat. I’d gladly give them my seat if could, but I don’t tell them that. I try not to be cynical. I shake my head, apologize.

It’s my job to go in and at least make an appearance. Nick comes along because he’s supposed to meet someone inside. It’s a madhouse, packed, and I imagine anyone remotely claustrophobic might faint before Palahniuk even takes the stage. I show Nick to one of the reserved seats and then excuse myself because I see a friend of mine, the poor guy I somehow convinced to introduce Palahniuk, sweating near the front of the room. I want to wish him luck. When I return to Nick, I find a young woman sitting as close to him as she can get.

Soon after the reading begins, Nick whispers that he’s taking off. I follow him and the young woman, escorting them back outside, trying to be a good host. Normally I would offer to take them out for a nightcap or coffee and dessert, something to close out the visit, but they seem to have other plans. I linger in front of the building for a while, watching them walk away. Nick and I had spent a bunch of nice hours together, more or less just the two of us, but neither of us had mentioned the poet. By the time I peer back inside, Palahniuk is slinging those fake bloody limbs into the cheering crowd. I call it a night and head for home.

**

Albany's Center Square in Snow

May 2010. I don’t know Nick Flynn well—I barely know him at all. I haven’t seen him since that visit to Albany, though I hope to arrange another visit around the new book. This fall I’ll be back at SUNY Albany, where I’ve been tenured for a few years now. I’m happy to say that the poet and I have been in touch. She’s met Elisa and Miller a few times. In fact, despite all her talk about the perils of leaving Manhattan, she now lives upstate, in a town just south of Albany. The second time she met Elisa, I wasn’t there. They ran into each other at a reading in Brooklyn and the poet reacted strangely. Elisa didn’t understand what was going on. Later, the poet explained she’d mistaken Elisa for Nick’s Italian playwright. They both have dark hair.

I don’t know Nick well, but somehow our lives have crossed and I don’t think it’s only in my head. I could keep detailing more tangential connections—his friends that are my friends; our shared interest in Evan Connell and others; the way we both wrote the books our fathers could not write—but I don’t know what these tenuous connections prove.

I should be working on my damn novel, at this very moment! I’m well aware—maybe even too aware—that our time at this long desk is limited and that it might be years before we’re gifted again (if ever) with such an extraordinary opportunity to write, in such a peaceful place, free from the responsibilities of teaching. Of course, that’s how I felt during that Stegner year, too, when I had no time to comfort the cardiologist. My mind still moves in the same way, I suppose, though I hope I’m more conscious of that movement than I once was.

I hardly know Nick at all, and yet I’m spending day after day here trying to figure out why knowing him this way means so much to me at this moment. When I search for the words to describe the experience of reading The Ticking Is the Bomb, and re-reading his earlier books, I recall a few lines from Walt Whitman, the very first poet I cared about. He once described “the process of reading” as “not a half-sleep, but, in the highest sense,

“an exercise, a gymnast’s struggle… the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay—the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or frame-work. Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does.”

Maybe it’s that simple: After reading and re-reading Nick, after struggling to make sense of how his work touches me, I feel more like a “complete thing.”

Like Nick, I can’t help wondering if I could be a better son, if I have it in me to be a good father. Nick’s life is not my life, despite the crisscrossing connections, but his questions help me recognize my own questions, which strikes me as a good way to describe one of the things we seek from books, from reading, and from the people we love. Who can truly take good enough care of his parents? Who is truly prepared to be a parent? How do we stay connected in love here in this deeply flawed world? These are also Elisa’s questions, and it remains an incredible thrill to seek answers together. It’s no surprise that she’s now hooked on Nick’s books, too.

During our fight, Elisa was upset because she wanted us to talk more; she wanted to feel closer to me. I genuinely strive to talk more and I want nothing more than to be close to her—and though I try my best I was still, apparently, failing, which made me feel hopeless. It was a lousy night and I wouldn’t want to go through it again. But as I made the long, cold walk to that office with its long desk, I figured I should at least learn from what was happening. Elisa was hoping to break through some of my protective layers, to get past some of the ways I’ve sequestered myself for years.

By the time I reached the office, I was ready to try apologizing, ready to say again that I want, always, to be a better partner. Still, I gave myself more time to think and calm down. I sat on the threadbare couch and re-read the end of The Ticking Is the Bomb. I read some lines near the end so often that I wound up writing myself into them:

“That Elisa and I keep figuring it out—to be together, to be with our son, that it’s all a daily practice—this is the only miracle. It’s so simple—sometimes we just need to be held….”

An hour later, I called home. We both apologized. I headed back outside. The temperature had dropped a few degrees, but as I walked toward our house, I was warm.

The next day, in the office, while our distinguished colleagues up and down the hall prepared for lunch, the two of us drew the curtains across the enormous windows. We locked the door, stripped off our clothes, and quietly made love on the threadbare red couch that, fortunately, I hadn’t had to sleep on the night before.

**

June 2010. After finishing The Ticking Is the Bomb again, I make a note to myself to read Beckett’s Endgame soon. In the meantime, as I struggle to finish this essay, or appreciation, or whatever the hell it is, I look up the Beckett quote I kept centered on my bulletin board a few years ago as I was finishing my first book, a novel about fathers and sons.

“Hand in hand with equal plod they go. In the free hands—no. Free empty hands. Backs turned both bowed with equal plod they go. The child hand raised to reach the holding hand. Hold the old holding hand. Hold and be held. Plod on and never recede. Slowly with never a pause plod on and never recede. Backs turned. Both bowed. Joined by held holding hands. Plod on as one. One shade. Another shade.”

One shade, another shade—both, I like to think, seeking light.

I’m eager to get back to work on my new novel, but that can wait until tomorrow. Right now there are a few things I want to talk over with my beautiful wife. And I think Miller has found another picture of a clock in one of his books. I can hear him in the next room, reminding us in his new language that all this time we have together is precious and holy.

“Tick-tock,” he says. “Tick-tock.”

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

Related Posts:

• Multiplicity
• The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Race Matters
• David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Identity v. Identification
• Between Us (and Honeybun)
• OG DAD #17: These Things Happen

— A new study shows that facial hair “increas(es) physical attractiveness and perception of social status.” (via Andrew Sullivan)

I mean, they used a regression. What more evidence do you need?

Also, be sure to check out this diagram, which explains everything.

Related Posts:

• Science: Still Confusing, Still Important
• Multiplicity
• Academia’s Biggest Fraud Comes Clean
• Between Us (and Honeybun)
• Placenta Previa