Desire Lines (7 page)

As Paul’s research took him deeper beneath the surface, Kathryn found herself gliding contentedly along the top. She’d been writing occasional articles for the
News-Sentinel,
a weekly newspaper run out of a tiny office in the basement of a warehouse, and when she quit the program they asked her to edit the arts page full-time. The job didn’t pay much, but it was enough to live comfortably on and start paying off her student loans. Her life quickly settled into a pleasant routine. She went to exhibits and openings, poetry readings, play performances. She bought fresh vegetables at the farmer’s market on Wednesdays and warm bread at the gourmet food and wine shop on Market Street in the afternoons. As she got to know the town beyond the university, she found that much of the population consisted of grad-school dropouts like herself who had come to Charlottesville for an education and never left. Looking around, she saw overqualified writers and artists and historians and architects and educated faculty spouses competing for the same menial jobs, and suddenly she realized what people were talking about when they said they stayed in this scenic college town for the lifestyle—they wanted to be around people like themselves, hardcover-book-reading, museum-going, white-wine-drinking underachievers. Playful yet pragmatic, liberal yet sensible, they reveled in the pleasant weather and the beauty of the place, they had exquisite dinner parties and took occasional trips to local mountain inns. They recycled (paper, plastic, and aluminum), they petitioned for carpaccio at the local supermarket, and they subscribed to
The Washington Post.

For the next two years life was good. Life was comfortable. And it began to terrify Kathryn. She saw herself at fifty, living in a house on Altamont Circle or perhaps out in Keswick, publishing seasonal poetry in the literary supplement of
The Daily Progress
and serving cocktails and grilled shrimp to the backstabbers in her husband’s department who were scheming to deny him the chairmanship. She felt a desperate urge to escape. It
was as if she had arrived in hell and found it to be a pleasant, comfortable, even interesting place. The only way you knew you were in hell was that it slowly began to dawn on you that you were never going anywhere, never doing anything. You were never getting out.

Paul, meanwhile, had become friendly with three hard-edged women from the English department, and several undernourished men. He played guitar in an all-male rock band that called itself Sons and Lovers, and soon developed a little following. People would call the apartment and, when Kathryn happened to answer, hang up. “It’s your groupies again,” she’d say. “Or one of the three harpies.”

“Don’t call them that.”

“They’re depressing. You only like them because they have crushes on you.”

“Sounds like you’re jealous.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Should I be?”

“Oh, please, Kat,” he said. “God. You know, ever since you quit the program, you’ve been nothing but nasty about it.”

“I have not,” she said, her voice rising to an unnatural pitch.

“If you have such disgust for what I do, then why did you marry me?”

“Because I liked your shoes. And because you promised you’d finish in three years.”

He lifted his chin, an old prep-school gesture, and said coldly, “Let me explain something to you. Writing a dissertation is not like writing a six-hundred-word story for the arts section of a lame-ass weekly newspaper, with its bullet points and catchy little hooks and Monday-afternoon deadlines. This is my fucking profession. This is my life. And if you don’t like it …”

“If I don’t like it, what?”

“You can go to hell,” he said.

“I’m already in hell! This is hell!” she shouted, laughing maniacally.

“Well, you know what Eliot said,” Paul said dryly. “Or maybe you don’t. ‘What is hell? Hell is oneself, hell is alone, the other figures in it merely projections.’”

The marriage lasted another six months. Paul confessed to having slept with one of the harpies (“She bolstered me,” he said. “She helped me find a piece of myself I’d lost”), and Kathryn confessed to being bored to tears with the minutiae of his academic research. Neither of them had much in the way of assets, so the break was fairly clean. The only sticking point was their dog, a pug named Frieda they’d bought in their first year of marriage from a Turkish rug dealer on the downtown mall.

“I should keep her,” Paul said. “After all, you’re the one leaving me.”

“Only because I’m leaving,” Kathryn said. “You wanted the divorce.”

“You suggested it.”

“Oh, come on, Paul. You were the one having the affair.”

“Let’s not go into all this again,” he said. “I think we should think about what’s best for Frieda. I can provide her with stability. You don’t even know where you’re going.”

“Yes I do—I’m going to Maine.”

He snorted. “You think your life here is hellish, wait till you spend some time in Bangor. You’ll be out of there by the end of the summer.”

Kathryn relinquished the dog. They didn’t fight over wedding presents; Paul kept the ones from his side of the family, his friends, and she kept the ones from hers. The day before she was to fly out of Charlottesville for good, she packed her meager belongings into boxes and drove into the countryside to the UPS command center to drop them off. As she stood in the front office, watching her brown boxes ascend the ramp on little rollers and disappear over the top, Kathryn felt a great weight lift from her. She didn’t care if she ever saw the packages again—in fact, part of her wished that she’d given a false address. It would be fitting, she thought, for the boxes to be stuck in limbo, riding around in those big brown trucks until somebody figured out that there was no destination. She was, for the first time in a long time, free of baggage. She felt as light as air.

Chapter 5

T
he next day, after sleeping late again, Kathryn decides on an impulse to drive out and see her father. He lives in Hampden, ten miles from Bangor, in a modern home with a swimming pool on twelve acres of land. A partner in one of Bangor’s largest accounting firms, he drives a forest-green Miata and a Jeep Wagoneer and keeps bottled water and fresh-squeezed juices in the refrigerator. When Kathryn was in high school, every time she went to visit him there’d be music on the sound system wafting out to the driveway and back behind the house to the pool—the kind of music that she and her friends listened to, REO Speedwagon and Jefferson Starship and the Bangles. Hearing it as she walked up to the door always made her wince.

Kathryn used to wish she had one of those fathers who was around at night and on weekends, who’d help her with her homework or toss a ball with her in the park. Even before he moved out, her father wasn’t like that. He never quite seemed to be part of their family. He was vacant with them; he kissed her mother on the top of the head when he came
home from work, holding her, literally, at arm’s length. Kathryn and Josh pulled back and watched. When he left the house in the morning, they watched him dither about when he’d be home; they saw the look on their mother’s face when he called to say that, yet again, he’d be working late.

Margaret Fournier had been Kathryn’s father’s secretary. She was also, on Saturdays, a gymnastics instructor at the Y. Most of the girls in Kathryn’s middle school had, at one time or another, taken gymnastics with Miss Fournier in the cold, cavernous gymnasium at the West Side YWCA. They were in awe of her—in her brightly colored leotards, her hair pulled back in a bun, Miss Fournier looked like a star. The first time Kathryn saw her in street clothes, ill-fitting jeans and a baggy acrylic sweater, drawing on a cigarette as she waited for the bus, she was shocked at how she looked: scrawny, mean-faced, cheap. Kathryn remembered this image when her father came to tell them he was leaving.

It took her mother years to get over the hurt. “Did you know about it?” she’d ask Kathryn or Josh, trapping them in the hall as they left for school. “Could you tell?”

They’d shrug and squirm away, embarrassed at the naked pain in her eyes. When their father called the house wanting to speak to Josh or Kathryn and their mother answered the phone, her voice, calling their names, would take on a tense, high-pitched quality. They’d pick up the receiver without looking at her and answer their father’s questions like prisoners under duress. Their mother became intensely busy; she volunteered at the hospital and was elected president of the PTA. Before the divorce was finalized, she binged on shopping; Kathryn would come home to find boxes of shoes piled up in the hall, transparent makeup bags filled with tubes and vials on the table. She redecorated the living room and had the yard landscaped, charging it all to her husband’s credit cards.

One night at dinner she told Kathryn and Josh that she had decided to become an interior decorator. “So I’ll be taking night classes,” she said. “And I’ll need you two to do your part around here.”

After that, everything changed. When their father left, their mother had continued to run the house pretty much as she always had. She fixed the kids a hot breakfast before school, picked them up on time when they had to get to piano lessons or track practice, and put dinner on the table at six. But now that she was a student, too, the old family structure crumbled. They ate cold cereal standing at the sink, and Kathryn and Josh arranged rides to after-school activities and learned to do their own laundry. Kathryn started cooking dinner, strange and creative combinations of whatever she could find in the fridge. On the evenings when her mother was home, the three of them did homework together at the kitchen table.

Now that she was out and about, their mother became known as one of the cool moms, the type who wore brightly colored turtlenecks tucked into Guess jeans and flirted with the coaches at their kids’ baseball games. She always looked stylish and put-together—a lot more put-together than her kids did. She often complained, half jokingly, that she was the kind of mom who should’ve been rewarded with cheerful, straightforward children who organized bake sales and homecoming rallies, instead of the bookish, reticent ones she got. “I don’t understand you,” she’d say when she found Kathryn lurking in her bedroom on sunny afternoons. “Have you looked outside? It’s a beautiful day!”

“I’m reading, Mom.”

“Don’t you want some exercise?”

“Maybe later.”

“Are your bicycle tires pumped up?”

Kathryn would sigh exaggeratedly, a finger marking the place in her book. “Don’t know.”

“I’ll check,” her mother would say brightly. “It’s a nice day for a bike ride. Maybe I’ll go, too.”

Josh became very protective of their mother. He even refused to visit his father and Margaret, but Kathryn dutifully went when they called. When she visited them in their stark new house with its vaulted ceilings
and hot tub on the deck, she felt like a nun in a bordello. She disapproved of everything.

“For chrissakes, Katy, lighten up a little,” her father would laugh at her cloudy expression. “Did you bring a swimsuit? No? Maybe you can fit into one of Maggie’s.”

Margaret was wary around her, careful to be polite. She made perfectly balanced dinners out of gourmet cookbooks, substituting juices, she explained, for the salt and fat. Kathryn became a spy, searching for clues about what it was that made her father happy, what he had found with Margaret that he couldn’t get at home. Margaret, she discovered, was trying very hard. The shelves of her nightstand were full of titles like
Wine Made Easy,
A
Beginners Guide to Classical Music,
and
Understanding Opera;
home-decorating magazines with pages pinched down were arranged by month in the kitchen. Jars of vitamins lined the kitchen counter. Under the sink in the master bathroom Kathryn found a variety of douches—Lemon Fresh, Summer Sunshine, Floral Breeze. In Margaret’s dresser were lacy negligees, silk teddies, sheer French-cut underwear and a see-through black merry widow. Kathryn fingered the pieces slowly and then shut the drawer, imagining Margaret on top of her father in that outfit, moving her lithe gymnast’s body, completing the fantasy he’d constructed for himself out here in the countryside, far from the ruins of his life with them.

Margaret had stopped teaching gymnastics, but she still knew the names of Kathryn’s friends. “How’s Jennifer?” she’d ask, taking a long drag on a cigarette as they sat sunning by the pool. “Still practicing on the parallel bars?”

“She’s okay,” Kathryn said. “How come you smoke so much, if you’re so into vitamins and stuff?”

Margaret would look at her over the rim of her mirrored sunglasses. “It’s an addiction, Katy. I’m trying to stop.”

“Don’t call me Katy, if you don’t mind.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Doesn’t your father call you that?”

“Yeah, but no one else.”

“Well, okay,
Kathryn,”
Margaret said, stubbing the butt into an ashtray. “Anyway, smoking keeps me thin. Your father likes me that way.” She smiled conspiratorially.

Kathryn frowned. “Huh. He’s really going to like you in twenty years, with a tube sticking out of your throat so you can talk.”

“God,” Margaret said, settling back into her chair, “you’re a load of fun to have around.”