I Regret Everything (6 page)

In his iced tea voice he told me she had asked to be taken to the train station. The peaked cap was back on his head. “It's hard to say no to that girl.”

On the Major Deegan Expressway headed south toward Manhattan, as I scrolled through a series of work-related emails, my mind kept returning to Spaulding. The last person I had dated was a modern dancer named Cree whom I met at a retirement party for one of the partners where she was working as a server. We went out several times, which led to forgettable fellatio followed by desultory cunnilingus during which, to keep from getting bored, I used the tip of my tongue to spell out the third article of the New York State Tax Code. Our pillow talk consisted of Cree telling me she wanted to try online dating.

Spaulding, on the other hand . . . why was I even thinking about her? Perhaps it was because she embodied so much of what was missing in my life. Audacity, enthusiasm, a brio that would be addictive if . . . if . . . if . . . If what? If I were to let something develop? This train had to be stopped. I pulled out Trevelyan's will and began to dictate amendments into a pocket recorder but my attention glided as if on casters from my client's miscalculations to my own.

The house of regret has many rooms. Sometimes, there is an awareness that a wrong decision was made, but it's not that big a deal and life continues, as it would have had another option been pursued. Then there are massive regrets: the kind where one thinks, If I hadn't made that choice, life would be completely different (read, significantly better). Isabel represented the second kind, a maw, a Grand Canyon, a black hole of regret. The Australian wife of my graduate school advisor, she was an anthropologist and I made the mistake of falling in love with her. She was around my age, at least ten years her husband's junior. Tall and slim with long chestnut hair tied back with a strip of leather, she had lovely hands that she used to fabricate her own jewelry and the silver earrings she made were set off by her burnished skin. She rode horses, had an easy laugh, and could drink whiskey like one of the Pogues. Presumably, these were among the things that had attracted her spouse, an Irish poet whose fondness for cannabis was only exceeded by his lechery and who had enough charisma to be something of a rock star in the insular world of poetry. His name was Milo McLarty and rumors abounded about too-close relations with female students.

In graduate school I volunteered at an animal shelter and one Saturday afternoon Isabel stopped by to inquire about adopting a dog. There was a one year old she liked, a chow/German shepherd mix, and when I lent her a leash so she could take him for a walk, she asked me to join her. She had spent six months in India researching polygamy and was planning to do her thesis on the subject. This led to a discussion of our own love lives. She joked that her husband was in favor of polygamy but from the way she spoke I could see she wasn't really joking. It was near the end of my first year in the program and I'd been there long enough to know Milo's shenanigans were an open secret. Isabel and I became so engrossed with each other that no one kept track of the time and the shelter was closed when we got back. She didn't want to bring the dog home because Milo had not been informed one was on its way so I offered to bring him to my place for the night. This I did and in due course she and Milo adopted him. Or, more accurately, Isabel adopted him, Milo got angry, and when she told him she needed the company when he was out fucking his students, he smacked her in the face.

Isabel and the dog fled the house and found their way to my doorstep. I offered her my bed but she insisted on sleeping on the couch. This arrangement lasted for about ten minutes, or until Isabel crawled in next to me, followed by the dog. Of this I am not proud. But I will tell you, with no Clintonian parsing of words, we did not have sex that night.

The next morning, after listening to multiple messages from Milo begging her forgiveness, discoursing on his desire to change his evil ways, and imploring her to come back, she returned home, leaving the dog with me. It was a cold peace with the unhappy couple and a few days later when she called to ask if I would meet her for drinks, I accepted. Many ounces of Johnnie Walker into the evening an indiscretion occurred, which is to say in my humble graduate student digs we copulated like a pair of deranged macaques. When Isabel and I drunkenly decided to inform Milo of this via a late night phone call, my continued presence in the graduate program became untenable.

One night, about a week later, Isabel showed up at my apartment. She brought a small gift, a sculpture of Ganesh, the Indian god with an elephant head. Our sex was epic, she said. We laugh a lot, she said. It was a spring night. The windows were open and I could smell the dogwood trees. Here was a beautiful, accomplished woman who was willing to throw her lot in with me. There was a research opportunity in Africa, did I want to go out there with her? I could teach English, write, travel.

“Ganesh is the remover of obstacles,” she said.

To an analytical person, the condition of romantic love is not something one arrives at simply. It's easy to define it as nothing more than a series of chemical reactions taking place in the brain. And there was my unfortunate family history. But Isabel temporarily overwhelmed rational thought and I loved her in the messiest way. Here is the tragedy: The idea of making the kind of grand declaration that running off together would represent felt operatic to me. When the opportunity arrived, I couldn't do it.

Regret expands. It matures. It accrues strength and mass. It is a living organism.

Isabel got divorced and I enrolled in law school at Colum­bia. From time to time I would get postcards from polygamous hotbeds like Gabon and Burkina Faso and would write back with the considerably less compelling news of what I was doing. But our correspondence eventually petered out. As for the dog, I managed to place him with the family of a computer science professor.

T
he teacher's name was Mr. Davenport and he spoke in a near whisper.

—Poetry, he gravely intoned, is the voice of the divine speaking through us.

Somewhere in middle age, he had retained enough youth in his features that it was easy to see the boy who had been picked on in the schoolyard. His hair was as disheveled as short hair could be. Myopic eyes peered through heavy glasses. His robin's-egg shirt was wrinkled and his jeans sagged in the ass, not in the hip-hop style but like a guy whose pants don't fit. The shoes he wore appeared to have been swiped from a nun. I liked him instantly.

—The best poems, he told us, are about feeling, emotion, what's in your heart. It doesn't mean check your intellect at the door, you need to know the difference between a trochee, a dactyl, and a spondee, but it does mean you need to be in touch with the rubbish in your attic. And don't be scared to write about it.

The rubbish in my attic terrified me, the pitchforks, prescriptions, rags, resentments, and breath mints, but maybe my attic was a gold mine.

The classroom was on the fourth floor of an old brick building on the Barnard campus at 118th Street and Broadway. It was the third week of what had been a blistering June. The windows were open but no breeze circulated the tropical air. Sweat pooled at the base of my back. A suitcase rested next to me. Edward P had somehow performed a miracle and convinced Hurricane Katrina to let me spend the summer living with them. My mother was at the gym when I left so I taped a note to the refrigerator.

Dear Harlee, I'm off to spend a few weeks at your first husband's house in Connecticut. Please don't take this as a reflection on you or how I view our relationship. It's more about the cats. Why don't we try and have a regular dinner or something? Hugs, Spaulding

Was it insensitive to leave a note as opposed to waiting for Harlee to return from her workout and then having a long discussion about the need to balance my needs with her needs? Au contraire. It was totally sensitive because now she didn't have to pretend she wanted me to stay.

Mr. Davenport asked us to go around the room and tell everyone our names, what we hoped to accomplish in the workshop, and then say something true about ourselves that no one would suspect.

There were eight girls and two guys. Dylan was doughy with a mop of dark hair, a slightly bulbous nose, and lips that were always pursed when he wasn't asking questions in an effeminate voice. He would hold his hands in front of him and wave his fingers as if he were conducting an invisible orchestra. Despite his large frame, his Polo shirt hung over his pressed white pants like a dress.

—The thing about me no one would suspect, Dylan said, is that I was raised as a Jehovah's Witness.

A few of the girls stared at each other like they didn't see that coming. If you look at someone and imagine they're the opposite of what you think you have at least a fifty percent chance of being right.

Lucas went next. He was short with unkempt curly blond hair and a superior vibe. Red skinny jeans and a faded Sonic Youth tee shirt. In a voice that sounded like he'd been gargling with rocks for thirty years he informed us that despite a perfect score on the SATs he was going to school to become a luthier, a word he dropped as if we should have known it. (Thank you, dictionary app! Luthiers make stringed instruments.)

I only mention the guys because the girls were all more or less alike, brooding, neurotic lovers of mid-20th-century female poets, stayers-at-home, readers-of-books. My tribe.

When it was my turn to speak, here is what came out of my mouth:

—The thing about me that you might not suspect is that I spent a month in a locked ward at Payne-Whitney. Show of hands, anyone else?

They stared in mute wonder. Dylan leaned forward, interested.

—The problem with writing workshops, Mr. Davenport said, is that they can feel like group therapy sessions and since I'm a writing teacher and not a therapist, that's not something we want to encourage.

Then he moved on to the next student, probably a good idea.

I'm not sure what I was trying to accomplish by advertising that information. I thought about saying it then watched myself say it like I was both in the audience and onstage. I wondered if that sense of two selves was good or bad and what did it say about my mental health? But lots of successful poets were mad, bad, and dangerous to know (Lady Caroline Lamb re: Lord Byron), so maybe I was just trying to make everyone think I was more legit.

Alone at a café on Amsterdam Avenue, I sipped an iced coffee and texted Mr. Best.

Asked my workshop leader if he'd like you to talk to the class and he said yes. Can you?

 

* * *

 

According to Wikipedia so you know it's totally true, Death Valley is the lowest place in America, Mt. McKinley the highest, and suburban Connecticut the dullest. All right, I made up that last part. Nothing had changed around here since the locals were burning witches. As white as it was when the Continental Congress convened in the late 18th century. Yes, material advances had been made, but it was still the place where the ruling class burped and scratched safe as a bottle of gin in a locked cupboard. This was where my father's second wife and their two sons spread out in a mock-Tudor house on a shady street in Stonehaven, a town founded back when the citizenry didn't have to hide the way they felt about Jews.

In the late afternoon the temperature was still prickly. The cab I took from the train station to my father's house was a converted squad car. The driver was a beefy guy from Poland. A rivulet of sweat sliced the side of his stubbled head. He said the local police liquidated half of their vehicles so they could get cooler ones. Then he told me Stonehaven was the safest place in the world.

Every time I visited I was amazed all over again by the almost throbbing lushness of the landscape. The city makes some people feel claustrophobic but that is nothing compared to the anxious sensation all of these trees evoked. Forbiddingly tall, their long, ropy arms were thick with leaves that squelched the light. Packed cheek by jowl, it was easy to imagine them whispering to each other, spreading rumors. There was a reason so many fairy tales took place in forests. Castles showed up a lot in those stories and Edward P's house might not have had crenellated battlements and a moat but it was a honker of a home.

In order to get my father to allow me to live there I had to promise to religiously take my meds. I intended to keep the promise but it was imperative that I begin to cut down. I hadn't written any poetry since the winter and it was necessary to throw off these chemical blankets that dulled every sensation. Dr. Margaret and I discussed this at our previous session and she agreed to let me try. Today was my third day on a lower dose. Maybe that was why the trees seemed like they could animate and pursue me down the road.

And maybe that's why I began to obsess over the reason Mr. Best hadn't texted me back. Had I been too forward sending the text in the first place? Should I not have emailed him the pen and ink drawing I did in the car? Maybe he wrote his poems on an old manual typewriter and was at war with the 21st century. And dancing on his client's lawn might not have been the greatest idea either. What one person considers adorable another might see as bipolar. All of this was agitating me when the cab turned onto the street where my father's family lived.

On the side of the road was a shady-looking guy in his twenties dressed in worn clothes shuffling down the sidewalk in the opposite direction with his hands stuffed in the pockets of dirty jeans. He had a beard and scraggly blondish hair. Despite the heat of the late afternoon he wore a flannel shirt. It was hard to tell if he was homeless or a hippie. As we drove past, he looked right at me and I noticed that he was cute in the way of certain serial killers, the kind who when they get caught their neighbors say, he seemed so normal! This one had regular Nordic-type features like so many of the androids around here. Instead of looking away I kept staring and noticed his eyes had pinwheels spinning in them. Not pinwheels literally, but they were frantic, the type of eyes that let you know someone is nuts. That's how you tell. It's always the eyes. A guy can look like Brad Pitt but if he's got those eyes there's duct tape, rope, and a shovel nearby. He kept walking and after we had passed him I turned around and there was the house of my father's second, more perfect family.