Bright Before Us (29 page)

I guess,
I said.
Sometimes it's hard.

Can we change the subject?
you said.

Calm down. Jesus.
There was a pause. I knew it scared you—how quickly, how easily I had slipped into anger. It was one of those moments you feel slithering from your grasp—the tone shifts, and you know you won't be able to wrest it back. No, I remember thinking. Stop. Don't.

Why are you talking to me like that?
you asked.

I'm not talking to you like anything,
I lied.

You know, sometimes I feel like you don't even like me,
you said.

I looked into your narrowed eyes.
I do like you,
I said.
You know that already.

You started to speak.
You're really
—you paused, shaking your head—
you're kind, and then you're fucking cruel, Francis.
You plucked blades of grass.
I wanted to visit my parents' grave on my wedding day and you couldn't just let me do that.

You're mocking this,
you said.

Let's just start over,
I said.
Can't we just start over?

You're mocking me,
you said.

I heard it in my head, loud as a bullhorn.
I didn't—I'm sorry.

You breathed heavily.
How stupid do you have to be, to get a girl pregnant?

My insides turned to ice. I clenched my fist, wishing for something to punch.
I suppose earlier you took some precaution you didn't mention?
The tone of my voice was toxic.

Your lip trembled.
I'm sorry.

You should be,
I snapped.

Yes,
you said.

I knocked on the damp earth, not yet marked with a headstone.
Hello? Anybody home?

The déjà vu of that moment—every fight I had ever had that went nowhere—created an immediate response that rose inside me. You had been carrying anger around, not bothering to tell me about it. It was like a lie. And I knew about lies. I had been a liar, a deceiver, a willing
participant in my own moral debasement, for as long as I could speak. And like any liar, the thing I hated most was being called on my falsehoods. I felt, in the haze of the evening, that you were telling me in so many words that I didn't really love you. The pure and uncomplicated feeling I had for you was the only truth I had known for years, and it counted for nothing.

Don't,
you said. Now you were crying. I could hear it in your voice.

Can anybody hear me?
My mouth hovered above the dirt.
Just wanted to say thanks.

Francis, stop.
Your hand lurched forward, as though you could block the words before they hit the air.

Thanks for dying,
I said,
so I could finally fuck your daughter.

Without looking at you, I stood up, brushed the grass from my knees, and trudged toward the car. When I realized it was
your
car—we had taken
your
car that morning, that morning when we had gone to get married—I set the keys on the hood. I stood there a moment, and then did the only thing that would show you how indignant I was. I started walking.

 

I want to tell you what it was like after that.

I waited for you to come to me. It was what I was used to. That night, I got to my apartment after walking for three hours and then flagging down a cab in Daly City; my roommate had to pay the fare. The next day I started to sort things for the move into your house. I went to class, to my student-teaching engagements. If you needed some time, fine. We were
married
, I thought. That was week one. The second week, I started calling. I put a letter
in your mailbox—did you get that? Your car was always gone. The third week I stopped leaving my apartment. By week four, I had undergone the lovelorn makeover: drastic weight loss, facial bags from a sleep deficit that was alternately narcotic and pulverizing.

I went back to Greta somewhere around the fifth week, half alive, to prepare stoically for domestic life, suburbia, fatherhood. I felt certain that she knew where I had been, what I had been doing—that she had intuited at least the flavor of my absence, if not its particulars. And yet she said nothing. So neither did I. I didn't tell her about the funeral or the wedding, or what you and I had done in the dank dressing room—though not for the reason you think. It wasn't that I was afraid of her reaction. It was that I feared if I told her, she would swallow her own anguish to comfort me in my time of loss. I may not have loved Greta with much integrity, much honor. But I did love her too much for that.

That week, she and I went out to dinner. I took her to an Italian restaurant and she held my hand in the parking lot after, and we were almost to the car and I was thinking, I'm forgiven. I had been waiting for a punishment, a day of reckoning, and I felt the last of that anxiety lift. She was pregnant. She was scared. I'm forgiven, I thought again. And with that thought the atmosphere shifted—she tightened, winced in such a way that I actually wondered if she had
heard me thinking
, if my posture had changed in some way she was able to read for what it was—and as we reached the car she turned, looked me square in the face, and said,
Don't do me any favors. I don't need you to. If you want to go, go.

I held her gaze, let go of her hand. I thought of ways to turn it back on her, or play dumb—
Is that what you want, Greta? Why are you saying this now, Greta?
But her expression stopped me.

If you want to leave, do it,
she said.

My mind cleared. Her face seemed to absorb the ambient light around us, her hair picking up in the wind. She looked radiant and livid. Every particle of me felt sharp and true—like I was a blade, like I was an instrument of death.

I don't want to leave,
I said, meaning it.

 

About a month after Greta lost the baby, the annulment papers arrived. The documents were accompanied by stationery from the lawyer I had met at your house. I signed and returned them, wondering if I should have withheld consent. Maybe it would have forced you to talk to me in person, though even if you had I suppose it wouldn't have mattered. You didn't think of this, of me, as a mere mistake. The document cited California Family Law statute §2210(c) as justification for nullity:
Party,
it read,
was of unsound mind.

Eight hours after leaving Chappell, I took a rural turnoff boasting the holy trinity: Gas, Food, Lodging.
How much?
I asked the kid behind the counter. I felt haggard, and in the motel lobby's gilt-framed mirror, I looked it, too.

Forty,
he said.

The smell inside my car had thickened: my filthy body, clothing steeped in lake water. It was imperative that I clean myself properly, with hot running water. It was imperative that I be presentable.

Forty,
the kid said again.
Only smoking rooms left.

I counted out the five-dollar bills.

The room was half the size of any motel room I had ever seen, the walls yellowed by cigarette smoke like stained teeth. I threw my bundle of putrid clothes into the bathtub, went outside, and drove to a drive-through window. I took my six sad tacos back to the room, eating in front of the
wall-mounted television. I watched three episodes of a program about a detective team who seemed never to get it right the first time. When I could no longer stand the noise, I put the TV on mute and rinsed my clothes until the water ran clear. I parboiled myself beneath the scalding shower stream and shampooed my hair three times. I fell onto the bed gasping, rolled my neck until it released several violent cracks, and in a haze not unlike a head rush, slept.

I dreamed Greta and I were in Chappell, repairing the back of that burned house. But every time I gave her a nail, she requested another. I was handing them to her in quick succession—I couldn't offer them fast enough. I heard no hammering; they just disappeared, sucked into that black maw.

I woke up sweaty, the night sky showing through the rough tweed curtains. The slick polyester coverlet slipped across my body with each ragged breath. The alarm clock read 4:45 AM. It was time. Despite the season the air outside was cool, and as I pulled back onto I-80 a chill overtook me. I reached under the seat for the black hooded sweatshirt I had worn since high school, but it was missing. There came a sudden vision: the sweatshirt, balled on the motel armchair where I had tossed it the evening before. It was gone. I couldn't make myself turn around to get it. There was no hope if momentum was lost. There was nowhere to go but forward.

 

At Iowa's eastern border, I sped across a wide silver bridge that spanned the Mississippi. Past Illinois, where, in a disorienting loop, I circled what signs indicated to be Chicago; it looked dismal. Then Indiana, which was
over quickly. Ohio took longer, Pennsylvania longer still. Predawn in those mountains, there was nothing to see by. No towns, no lights along the highway. I could finally open my eyes completely after squinting my face sore in the daylight. As dawn broke, what I saw of New Jersey was green and tall, its high, verdant cliffs rising beside the highway. The signs became more insistent in the gray of the small hours, and then it was midmorning and I was leaning forward, gripping the wheel, navigating sudden freeways and trying to figure out which level of the George Washington Bridge to use. I was scared. I thought, Sing a song.

I crested a hill peppered with stacked residential streets, entered the tunnel-like lower level of the bridge, and left the continent behind. I strained my neck, looking for a city to appear. It did. It looked too dense, as though it were a solid mass with vertical points; I didn't know how the life down inside could exist or breathe. I started to sing my students' favorite song, “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt,” tentatively, uncertainly.
His name is my name too. Whenever I go out, the people always shout.
The water below looked shimmering and unclean. New York was a thin outcropping of urban landscape surrounded by water—an idea I was used to. I was breathless, the song repeating.

I began to whistle, turning the air-conditioning on and then off—I was either too hot or too cold. I felt as though all my life I had been too something. Nearly out of gas, I took an expressway stemming from the bridge's exit ramp and watched the landscape morph into brown cubes. Exiting, I read the street signs aloud, checking them against the directions I had written down.
Broadway,
I
said.
One Hundred and Seventy-Eighth Street.
On the sidewalk, trash bags rose in mounded pyramids. I paused at a stoplight, scanning. Mothers walked with their children, rolltop metal covers enclosed storefronts like sardine tin lids.
One Hundred and Eighty-One.
I parked on a residential street, parallel to Broadway and laden with thin trees, in front of a synagogue. I stepped out of the car and walked to a building less than a block away.

Approaching that building, scrap of paper in hand, with an icy stab I remembered something. My breath snagged in my throat. The motel where I stopped had required an address at check-in. I had given them the one in Vallejo—my and Greta's address—without hesitation. As people pushed past me into the tan-brick building, I ran a finger over the names on the buzzer panel, imagining my lost sweatshirt being shoved into a mailer by that teenaged concierge. I pressed a button, picturing that envelope being stamped by a postal meter, being shipped back to California, bouncing in the cargo hold of an airplane. A voice came through the intercom—
Hello? Hello?
—and my solar plexus compressed as though I had been punched.
Hello,
I choked, but the intercom must not have worked because the voice continued.
Hello?
it said, and then, resigned,
Hello.
There was a pause. Then, a zapping reverberation opened the building's inner door. Reeling, I entered the lobby: a step toward my thwarted destiny, my unlived life. My fingers depressed the elevator button. Through the porthole on the elevator door I watched each floor slowly pass, thinking about how I had destroyed my life in the name not of this girl's existence but the fucking
memory
of her existence, not because I loved her—though
I did—but because I had lost her. The indefensible things I had done in the name of my former certainty, the people I had hurt—that kind of humiliation defied description. I thought too of the humiliation I had left in my wake, picturing Greta as she examined that envelope's return address, some nowhere place in some nowhere midwestern state. And then opening it, recognizing its contents, her eyes adjusting to the glare of my final disgrace.

The hallway smelled of garlic, of toxic solvents and mop water. I lifted my hand to knock but the door opened, a person standing there backlit by a sunny window. Only the simplest thoughts surfaced: you were thinner than I remembered, and taller, and your hair had changed.

Nora,
I said. A useless thing to say, a placeholder. A simple way to begin again.