Leaving Before the Rains Come (20 page)

“I’m perfectly fine,” he said.

“Then why don’t you laugh at my jokes?” I asked, half joking even as I said it.

“Because your jokes aren’t funny. They’re unkind.”

I fell in love—or imagined myself to have fallen in love—with a backcountry explorer who lived two and a half thousand miles away. I felt unrestrainedly, disturbingly hungry for the sort of scant attention he could offer. I waited until we were driving, the car holding us in unambiguous confining coupledom, before I told Charlie, “I think our marriage is in trouble.” And then I said that I was at least tempted by the idea of falling in love with someone else. Charlie stared through the windshield, tight-lipped, silent. Miles clocked by. I said, “Please say something.”

He said, “You’re married. You’re my wife.”

I said, “I know.” I looked out the window and watched the way the farmland slumped and rose in ripped contours along here. Every spring when the farmers plowed these fields, topsoil picked up in the wind and blew west, sometimes in such a thick cloud that the road was closed for hours or days at a time. “This can’t go on,” I said.

“No,” Charlie agreed.

After that, he started to read my e-mails, check the phone records for unfamiliar numbers, and he started to see affairs where there were none. He would confront me. There would be more fights and tears. I said, “Don’t check up on me. Check in with me.” I thumped my chest and burst into tears. “I’m right here, for God’s sake.” But I wasn’t. Neither of us was there. We were between mother ships, struggling to stay buoyed. The signal flag Kilo is a rectangle of yellow next to a rectangle of blue. It means, “I wish to communicate with you.”

We separated—a trial separation we said, as if to lessen the blow. We told the kids that nothing would change which, looking back, was not only a lie, but also a terrible threat. The whole point of the separation was that everything needed to change. We couldn’t carry on in the stagnant-feeling deadlock of our relationship without putting ourselves into a kind of living death. I rented a one-room cabin in a friend’s back garden, Charlie kept the house, and he continued to keep track of the finances and pay the bills. I felt as if I had left home as a sort of silly, unsustainable experiment, more like a teenager practicing living alone than a woman in charge of her destiny.

After six months we crashed back toward one another, unable to tolerate the unaccustomed anxiety of ourselves alone and the children’s bewildered sorrow. And perhaps we remained desperate to heal not only the old wounds we carried from our own families and histories but also the fresher wounds we had made in one another. We decided to stay married. And once again I convinced myself that a deep, nurturing connection coupled with the vigorous defense of each other’s freedom was a false expectation, something that happened so rarely between two people that it was a completely unrealistic goal. It was better, I decided, to have the sort of marriage the bedrock of which was a complicit agreement to say nothing of real substance to one another.

We shared a bed, a bathroom, a closet, our meals, and the gift of our children. We phoned one another through the day and had the sort of mundane exchanges overheard in public places everywhere. Sometimes, we reached reflexively for one another in the middle of the night. But in every real way, we steered assiduously away from one another.

Charlie continued to sell real estate, manage our finances, and plan adventures abroad. To keep himself in adrenaline, he took up polo again, playing in the summers at the little club in Jackson with patrons, mostly from Texas. He bought four ponies and an old four-horse trailer and his Wednesdays and Saturdays were taken up with chukkas. It was a far cry from Prince Charles and Nacho Figueras, but it was a big step up from the dust-gusted pitches of Lusaka, and even though Charlie’s was a mismatched string—ranging from Big Boy, a towering thoroughbred of over sixteen hands, to a tough little Argentinean criollo—the whole idea of polo with its flashy, champagne-and-cigar and private-plane implications didn’t seem to fit with Charlie’s continuing concerns about our never-enough bank accounts.

Polo seemed a grand, extravagant, incongruent gesture that was not of a piece with how Charlie did anything else. He had budgets and constraints and columns of numbers and a preoccupation about those columns of numbers that became the weather system of our home, building and swirling regardless of how much we worked or played or loved. Sometimes Charlie talked about retiring early—he would travel the world, fishing and skiing and running rivers, he said—but I didn’t see where I could ever fit in with that plan. For one thing, I always wanted to write, and I couldn’t imagine a time when I would want to stop. For another thing, I couldn’t see the point of living a piecemeal, disparate, unfulfilling life now with the expectation of something glorious to come. It was the biblical promise of a future reward for current slog writ in material, pointless, selfish miniature.

The grand, extravagant, incongruent gesture was much more my territory: it was of a piece with the way my parents had raised us and done everything else. On the rare occasions we had money, my father slammed his fist on the bar. “Round’s on me!” And when money ran out, conspicuous, exaggerated destitution was part of our family vaudeville act. For example, during the long unhelpful stretch when the ancient Peugeot 403 took to stalling and we couldn’t afford the spare part to fix this problem, Vanessa and I had to jump out at traffic lights in Umtali and push the car through the intersections when the lights changed to green. “Come on girls, don’t just stand there!” Dad yelled while Mum wept with laughter in the passenger seat. “Put some vim into it.”

For a while, in that same Peugeot, it was possible to watch the road whip by as we drove, dust billowing up into the backseat in a reddish film until Mum put bits of cardboard down where the floorboards had rusted through. She painted sunsets, giraffes, and flowers on the cardboard, and signed her name in the corners with a flourish. “Like the Sistine Chapel, only not the ceiling,” she said. “Although I wouldn’t stand on it if I were you, or you’ll plop right out.” Which served to prove to me from an early age that imminent danger and innovative beauty were often closely linked.

When Mum and Dad finally did get their hands on a stack of money from the sale of the English farm on which I had been born—“Bloody stockbroker paid a fortune for a barn and a soggy field,” Dad said in incredulous delight—we lived like tycoons for a time. “Well, there’s no guarantee we’ll be around to enjoy it later,” Dad said. “And anyway, who wants to retire and die of bloody boredom?” Money was put aside for Vanessa and me to be educated overseas—Vanessa to finishing school and art college, me to university. Dad bought an old diesel Mercedes-Benz, spray-painted a remaindered peach. “The nipple-pink baby,” he called it. Then he invested in some horses off Zimbabwe’s racetracks—“Pukka things, these,” Dad promised. “Four legs, the lot”—so we could play polo and Mum could show jump. “Marvelous way to shake up the liver,” Dad said. And finally he took Mum on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday to New York, the West Indies, and England.

After a while, Vanessa and I left home, the money dried up, and my parents were back to starvation rations. “We seem to have taken another inadvertent vow of poverty,” Dad said. But they kept the horses, and the Benz, and they held on to the memories of the large times. To this day, Dad recalls the name of the taxi driver who took them under his wing and showed them around Montserrat. “Winthrop,” he says. And then he sings in his botched West Indian accent, “Goat water, goat water, good for ya’ daughter.” And Mum still recounts how people in New York mistook Dad for Crocodile Dundee. “That wonderful film had just come out, and of course Americans are very impressed with anyone who can wrestle alligators or play with snakes.” But she never fails to act as if it is my personal fault that the difference between an Australian drawl and my father’s impeccable English enunciation was lost on an entire nation. “Dad’s sunburn must have confused them,” she says regretfully. “I suppose they expect all their Englishmen to be pink.”

Charlie and I had another baby. And for over a year, while I breast-fed her, a familiar tranquility washed over me. I was more or less permanently contented and mildly exhausted, my blood awash with the mellowing agents of oxytocin and prolactin. For those long blissed-out months, I spent my days moving through the rhythm of the baby’s needs: her baths, her feedings, walks by the river. I cooked, I cleaned, I wrote, and at night I fell asleep with Cecily pressed against my skin, her breath innocent with the charmed, milky scents of babyhood.

“If they could bottle these hormones and make them into pills, my marriage would last forever,” I told a friend.

“They do,” she said. “Valium, Prozac, Xanax.”

I laughed. “If I ever have to be tranquilized to stay in my marriage, it’s really over.”

At fourteen months, the baby grew out of breast-feeding and I took an assignment following pilgrim Mexican cowboys in Guanajuato, then I signed a contract to write a book about the effects of a natural-gas boom on a small cowboy town in southwestern Wyoming. There was talk, and increasing evidence, of air and water going bad where hydrofracturing was occurring. The safety practices of the drilling and oil companies were blatantly shoddy and the willful carelessness of Wyoming’s legislators seemed directly linked to their obeisance to the industry.

Now I worked hard not out of fear but out of outrage. I wrote letters to editors of local newspapers and op-eds for national publications, I went to Cheyenne to testify in front of the Wyoming House Judiciary Committee, I attended meetings about declining air quality and unsatisfactory working conditions. I lodged complaints. I knew my noise was unlikely to change anything, but I didn’t feel it was responsible of me to shut up now, of all times.

Then I helped organize a tiny protest right on the oil patch of the Upper Green River Valley: a few cowboys, ranchers, hunters, and residents from the area, a local rancher’s son driving a tractor, a few friends who didn’t particularly care about the issue but wanted to show their support of my cause, the way we all gave money to one another’s favorite local charity at Christmas. Charlie joined me and brought the horses and the children. Mum and Dad were visiting and came along too.

“Peace protest,” Dad said doubtfully. “You know I’m deadly allergic to hippies.” But there were no hippies, only a rather inadvertent Burmese Buddhist monk in orange robes whose presence was more than offset by the very intentional cop who had come to monitor the event. Mum’s eyes lit up when she saw a man in uniform. “Oh,” she said. “What fun. A bulletproof vest
and
a holster. Very satisfactory.” I steered her toward a difficult horse.

Dad clamped his pipe in his mouth, held his hands behind his back, and performed what amounted to a field inspection of the cop’s weaponry, stalking circles around the rig, puffing fragrant clouds of tobacco in his wake. Then, when he had satisfied himself that he had never seen so much firepower in the possession of one man in his life, he removed his pipe and addressed the cop in tones of regretful apology. “Look, I’m terribly sorry,” he said. “We’ve been trying to shut her up for forty years ourselves. Maybe a dart gun would do the job?”

Photographs of Charlie and me from around this time show us seeming-happy: I was fulfilled by my work, and Charlie was doing well in his; we were both rewarded by parenthood. Yet no matter how committed I was to our unit—this beautiful family I had been complicit in creating—I remained unsettled. I felt as if we were living half a lie, or perhaps the greater part of a lie. “There is a sense of discrepancy between what we do and what we are, between appearance and reality, that is the motive force that impels us to seek unity,” Justus George Lawler wrote in an essay entitled “The Two Great Sadnesses.”

But instead of either of us slowing down to address my misgivings, we plowed on, out of habit, out of expediency, out of fear, and out of denial. Once, elbow deep in bubbles at the children’s bath time, I suddenly found myself praying in a kind of panic that nothing would ever change. “It never has to get better than this,” I remember thinking. “We can do this forever. Just like this.” But the mere fact of my thinking it was a kind of acknowledgment that this couldn’t last, neither the equitable moment of our marriage nor the shaky American dream in which it had been conceived.

Because seen in a certain light—the flat, hot light of a summer afternoon, for example—that promising dream has a depressing, thrill-ride quality about it, hurdy-gurdy with brightness, loud and distracting. And however much fun people seem to be having, however endless the music and gaiety seem, soon the ride will be over and then there are the carnies all jittery with meth, and there is the dust and the heat and the desolation. The truth is the American dream had never been an innocent, harmless way to make a living. “It’s incredible,” Dad kept saying when he came to visit. “Who’s paying for all this lot?” Then I saw him make mental calculations. “Well, bloody nearly free petrol helps, doesn’t it?”