If You Love It, Let It Kill You, page 1
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For Lucy C., Emily S., and MacDowell
And for Ann Beattie, belatedly
What void? she asks. What are you talking about? The void of the Universe, he says …
—Margaret Atwood, “The Female Body”
… And they said, is death that which gives meaning to life? And I said no, life is that which gives meaning to life. Then they said, but isn’t death, considered as a fundamental datum, the means by which the taken-for-granted mundanity of the everyday may be transcended in the direction of—
I said, yes, maybe.
They said, we don’t like it.
I said, that’s sound.
They said, it’s a bloody shame!
I said, it is.
—Donald Barthelme, “The School”
What follows is pure fantasy.
One
NICE TO MEET YOU, PLEASE TAKE CARE OF ME
Today I am restless, I text my friend Jane from the bathroom.
It’s a Sunday, early fall, the day of my nephew’s sixth birthday party. Yesterday was his actual birthday. I made three varieties of mac ’n’ cheese from scratch. He informed me—a few hours before dinner and later made good on the threat—that he would be eating none of them. I let his littlest brother pick the pasta shape instead: wagon wheel.
That was last night. Now I’m in the bathroom, my bathroom, mine and the bald man’s with whom I share my bed. It’s on the second floor of our house. I’m watching my father, eighty this year, park his orange MINI in front of the neighbor’s house across the street. My sister and her family live one house down from there. Her backyard is where the party is happening.
One week ago, Jane called to tell me my ex had written me into his debut novel.
“He means to keep it a secret,” she said.
“From the world?” I asked.
“Only from you,” she said.
“Is it bad?”
“I don’t like it,” she said.
“You don’t like the book?”
“I don’t like your portrayal.”
“How am I?”
“Smug,” she said. “Insecure.”
“If I were an angry and unsatisfied man,” I said, “that’s exactly how I’d describe a woman with ambition, too.”
Jane said, “You’ve got the hang of this already. You’ll be fine.”
I explained the situation to my boyfriend, the bald man. I told him that my ex had written me into his novel, one allegedly about our toddler of a marriage and his affair with my dear friend.
“Why a secret?” I asked. “Why from me?”
My boyfriend shrugged. “Maybe because you’ve written a memoir about the very same toddler.”
I shook my head. “But that’s not a secret.”
He said, “Going into this relationship, I thought I was the only one with shared custody.” He is referring to his daughter, the eleven-year-old, who lives half her life with her mother and half her life with us.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Writers,” he said, with not a little bit of disgust, before leaving the room.
There’s a bounce house at my sister’s and lots of booze. I haven’t seen the booze yet—I’m still in a bathroom on the other side of the street—but I saw the bounce house earlier when my boyfriend helped my sister move a tiny desk from her garage attic to the six-year-old’s bedroom. The desk is what? A gift maybe?
There wasn’t supposed to be a bounce house, but my sister caved. Everyone knew she would cave, including the six-year-old, so there were never any tantrums. Earlier this week, my sister sent an announcement regarding the bounce house. When I showed my boyfriend, he said he’d never before seen an amended birthday invite for a little kid. I suggested anticipated attendance must be down, which was a joke, because my sister’s boys have birthday parties that rival your best New Year’s Eve.
I’m sitting atop a small white storage container, inside which are spare razors, spare toilet paper rolls, spare soap bars, spare bandages, spare liter bottles of shampoo, spare bags of cotton balls, and I’m waiting for Jane to respond. I’m lamenting life, I text. Jane’s a Shakespearean and lives one-point-two miles away in a house that gets great light.
Last week, after getting off the phone with her, I googled my ex-husband for the first time in seven years. I was hoping for more news of his clandestine novel. In doing so, I accidentally discovered a story he’d written in which I’d been knifed to death by a homeless man. For several years, I’ve been walking around with no idea! I liked my ending, which was dramatic but without fuss. The homeless man gets in several quick jabs, all of them meaningful. There’s no chance of recovery.
I told my boyfriend that he and I had been turned into characters in a story by my ex. “We’re married,” I said.
“Only in our hearts,” he said.
“Your name is Bruce.”
He nodded. “I like that. Do I still have a daughter?”
“You do.”
“Good,” he said. “And I’m still bald?”
“It’s unstated.”
“I like being bald.”
I did not tell him I’d been murdered, and he did not think to ask.
My boyfriend-husband—I’ll borrow the name Bruce—has been part of my family for only five years. He is still learning our rope tricks. When my mother calls, for instance, I ask her immediately, “Have you fallen off a horse? Are you feeling sick? Have you gotten a diagnosis? Are you trapped in the attic again? Do you have intentions of climbing a tree while tied to a chain saw?” In this family, if you don’t ask the right questions, you don’t get all the information.
Jane texts, Restless how? Lamenting what? Say more. I send her a picture of the spider plant in the corner of my bathroom and several dozen of its babies, whose roots are soaking in jam jars I’ve crammed along the windowsill. Jane, who, like me, is childless by choice, writes, Freudian.
I’d be sitting on and texting from the lip of my clawfoot bathtub if I could, but it’s fiberglass, and I’d dislodge the water supply lines were I ever to put any sort of weight on it. When Bruce and I bought three years ago, we assumed the bathtub was original to the house (1927), which means I assumed the tub was cast-iron and coated in porcelain. You spend forty-five minutes in what will likely be the most outrageous purchase of your life; you have no idea what you’re getting. I’ve spent more time looking at jeans online today than I spent in this house before deciding to buy it.
“Today I am lamenting life,” I said to Bruce first thing this morning, when we woke up yet again before sunrise.
He said, “Is this an all-day activity?”
I said, “Intermittent, I think.”
Then we had a quick fight about his early departure from the mac ’n’ cheese dinner. Dishes had been cleared. Monologues had begun. He slapped his knees, popped up from the table, and said he was tired and therefore going home.
Bruce’s daughter also popped up, declaring her own fatigue. She didn’t clear her napkin or her water glass, and I didn’t notice until after she and her father had already left. I didn’t want to stay at my sister’s house and hear any more monologues, but even less did I want to leave as some sort of family unit in which groupthink and joint decisions might appear the dominant mood.
My ex wants to keep secrets, and I want to confess:
I have never been pregnant.
I do not like children.
I am surrounded by family.
I often lie awake in bed at night and think, When they are dead, I will …
I have an oral fixation.
I dislike most people.
I am tired of men.
I am fascinated by the simplicity of erect penises.
I am haunted by my childhood.
I am living too much in the iterative tense, I text Jane.
The iterative what? she asks, playing dumb for my benefit.
The tense of routine, I write.
She responds with a picture of her entryway. The sun across the floor is disgusting.
Outside, my father is still in his MINI, the driver’s-side door wide open. I consider taking a picture then decide against it. He’s on a call. This—parked car, door open, speakerphone on—is his preferred mode of doing business. I send a text to my mother, saying that her first ex-husband is already here and that she should stop by my house for a quick glass of wine before heading to the party.
My sister and I (and our mother and our father)—we all live in Kentucky now. It’s a long story, but I moved here first—years ago and with my ex. We never intended to stay. But now he is gone, and my family is here. “FOMO,” my mother said when she h
Bruce has spent the better part of the morning grumbling about my nephew’s shindig. He’d rather stay home and reread Beloved, which he’ll be teaching next week. Like me, Bruce is a professor of English (Americanist). Jane is also a professor of English, as is her husband, Teddy (another Shakespearean).
I zoom in on Jane’s entryway. I text, That’s a gorgeous rug. Is it new?
My immediate neighbor, a professor of mathematics, is walking down his driveway whistling. I’m watching him and am thrilled to witness the precise moment when his whistling stops, and he becomes aware of the giant man in a cowboy hat sitting in an orange MINI parked in the wrong direction on the opposite side of the street having a loud conversation. My neighbor is north of seventy himself. I see my father see my neighbor. If there is a standoff, my father will win. His entitlement isn’t just willful, it’s pathological. “Entitlement” is the wrong word anyway. Better to say that he is notably undeterred by the environment around him.
I’ve always been an inquisitive, even nosy, person. Eavesdropping on the conversations of strangers is among my favorite hobbies. But it wasn’t until Bruce and I moved into this house—and I began paying very special attention to the math professor, his wife, and their four adult children, all of whom still live at home—that I purchased a pair of binoculars for outright spying. Actually, I purchased two pairs. Bruce sometimes joins me. The fact that he will occasionally turn off all the downstairs lights and call quietly up to me in my attic office and tell me to come down fast because the neighbors are acting curiously; the fact that he will crouch next to me as we skulk from window to window trying to get a better view of them … Well, that he tolerates, even encourages, this proclivity speaks volumes about our relationship and the reasons it persists.
Plus, there is the house. We are each separately in love with its brick walls and wraparound porch. We have more columns than anyone else on the street, including my sister. Last week, Bruce’s students told him that he talks about me a lot. A student we share, Camille, told the class that I did the same. This delighted his students. He told them we talk about each other so much because we still like one another, which can’t be said of all couples. I asked him if his assertion amused or terrified them. (There’s a steep learning curve for students in Kentucky between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. Some seem as though they’ve known since childhood that life is an unkind joke to be fretted over dusk until dawn, while others appear to believe their parents have never regretted a single decision.) By way of an answer, he said, “It’s the Faulkner class.”
I text Jane, I’m desperately looking for small secrets to distract me from this brewing unhappiness. Yesterday it was a pair of Spanish leather boots that, when they arrive, I will tell Bruce I’ve owned since boarding school. Today it’s indoor plants, which, when he notices them a week from now, I will say have been inside since June.
She texts back immediately, Boarding school strains credulity.
I write, grad school then.
She writes, You had money in grad school?
I write, credit cards and debt. I send her a link to the Spanish boots.
Bruce and I have been married in our hearts since last year, about an hour and a half before his first colonoscopy. Because we aren’t legally married, the kindly young man at check-in was resistant to my status as emergency contact. (The state of Kentucky takes its marriage laws and hospital forms quite seriously.) Things got heated, and Bruce—tall, broad shouldered, originally from Decatur, Illinois, and not a little un-scary when he’s nervous or angry—declared loudly: “Sir, we are married in our hearts.”
After a beat, the young man (he was wearing mascara) blushed and pushed the clipboard in my direction. “Just write wife,” he whispered.
While Bruce stared coldly at the wall in front of him, I wrote Wife next to my name and tried for an air of contrition. It’s my fault we’re not married.
Several years ago—after my divorce, after my husband, then still a colleague, cheated on me with the woman, my dear friend, who’d originally introduced us—a graduate student of mine suggested that if things ever got serious again with another person, I ought to keep it weird. My student hadn’t kept it weird: she was married with a daughter. But she seemed to have a firm and honest grasp on her situation as wife and mother, as well as on the incongruities of the world. (She once handed in a story to workshop in which a mermaid was roasted over an open fire and served to guests as a delicacy.) I was very much in the market for advice from interesting, clear-eyed, and absurd-minded women; I adopted hers with fervor.
About the time my ex was killing me in his fiction, I was explaining to Bruce that while I wanted to buy a house with him and was even willing to help raise his daughter, I did not want to be married to him, or anyone else, ever again. I wanted to keep it weird.
By keeping it weird, I assumed—naively—that I could skirt the official role of stepmother, a title I’ve despised ever since my father married a deeply sadistic architect when I was ten years old. My hope was that, despite living with Bruce’s daughter half of every week, despite making extravagant dinners for her and cutting out giant hand-stenciled letters on her birthday and at the end of every school year, I’d somehow continue to exist merely as the eccentric childless girlfriend who happened to own fifty percent of a house with her father.
All semester I have been pestering my students about the perils of abstraction, but now I text Jane, It’s not a desire for infidelity or even something romantic outside the relationship, but it’s parallel. When I’m not writing, I feel udderless. Instead, my brain is lustful for Otherness without feeling actual lust and honestly despising, even fearing, the actuality of Otherness.
I reread my text. Then I add, *r*udderless.
She writes, my Freudian hackles are up, up, up!
I write, Basically I am aware of my domestication and would like one week as a wolf caterwauling at the moon, after which I’d likely be happy as a quokka for several more years.
Before she can ask, I send her a screenshot of a smiling, pint-size marsupial with the hashtag “quokkaselfie.” She sends me a picture of her guest bedroom/office. The sunlight is obscene. I search my archive, then send a photo of our new dining room table. She writes, talk about strong rug game. Is THAT new? Then she says, Teddy likes it too, and I wonder if she is signaling that we are not alone.
I know about signaling via text. Jane and I are not lovers. We just have a sympathetic view of life’s illogicalities.
Jane knows that my lamentations have at least something to do with my ex and his book, but neither of us is tedious enough to say so. I send her a picture of my attic office, which I’ve recently rearranged. In a single photograph, there is a stuffed barracuda, a zebra rug, several skulls, a seventeenth-century rug, an art deco mirror, the skeleton of a piranha, and a ship captain’s chair—all of it inheritance from my mother, who, about five years ago, decided to stop buying gifts and start giving away her possessions.
Jane writes, you’re a bohemian!
I write, In my heart I am a mid-century minimalist.
She writes, Can anyone with a child in her life be a minimalist?
I write, Can anyone with any kind of person?
Early on, things with Bruce’s daughter were fine. If I was, say, standing behind her when the UPS man knocked and she opened the door, she’d shove a thumb over her shoulder in my direction and say, “That’s not my mother.”
I’d say, without hesitation, “And that’s not my daughter.”
When her father wasn’t in the room, she’d sometimes sidle up next to me and whisper, apropos of nothing, “I’ll never kiss you. Never ever.”
“That’s good,” I’d whisper back, “because I don’t want to be kissed by you ever ever.”
But now, three years later, she seeks me out while I am in the kitchen cooking dinner. She kisses my arm. She hugs my waist. She smiles whenever I make eye contact. She plays my favorite Guy Clark songs and sings along with me, especially during “L.A. Freeway.” She beams when I go loud about the landlord: “… sonaBITCH has AL-WAYS BORED ME!”
