The Stuff That Never Happened (15 page)

There was an awkward but lovely moment when he came back. We stood there in silence for maybe four or five seconds. I felt him looking straight at me, like he was memorizing me. I squirmed. I wished I’d combed my hair. Then he smiled. “Are you going to be okay here? I can’t believe all I’ve done is talk about myself. It was really just to get you acclimated, so you wouldn’t think we’re lunatics. I promise you I’m not like that, really. I do know that you’ve been through a terrible time with your brother and all, but I’m just so glad you’re here—you
and
Grant.” He smiled and leaned closer. “Will you promise me that you’ll be lazy and indolent for the rest of the day? Go exploring, and tell anyone who asks that you’re far too beautiful to work.”

IT WAS the middle of September. The early-fall weather was cool and clear, the sky behind the buildings glowing a deep blue. This couldn’t be the same country that contained California, with its parched, barren wideness, its freeways and long tracts of empty, wasted space, malls and parking lots, rows of apartment buildings surrounding pools. Everything here was compact, efficient, concrete. I loved how, walking along the sidewalks, you were aware from the rumble of the subways that you lived only in one layer of the city, while other people occupied the spaces around you that you couldn’t see. And I couldn’t get over the way people cultivated the minuscule inches of soil they had been given to plant. Marigolds and morning glories rose up from the tiniest patches. Some people actually grew grass—miniature lawns—in their window boxes.

Grant was hardly ever home that whole first semester. He took to being an assistant professor the way some people take vows in religious orders. It consumed him. The only time I could snap him out of it was when we were having sex, which we did all the time whenever he was home. I’d amble uptown to the university sometimes in my California sundresses, hoping to remind him of our shared roots. Remember Isla Vista? Remember the beach, and the way we’d once made love in my parents’ swimming pool? Remember the day you asked me to marry you? Remember
why
? But always I’d find him distracted, tucked away in the tiny little office he shared, his own half neat and orderly and with files stacked perfectly on the desk while the other section, belonging to a woman who wore only brown and looked frightened to death if you so much as said hello to her, was filled with squirrel knickknacks, postcards from the Grand Canyon, and mugs half full of old coffee, loaded with floating green stuff.

I teased him about her. “Don’t you ever just look over and think, ‘Well, what the hell? What would it hurt to go over and bend her backwards and have a passionate fuck right there on the desk?’”

He stared at me. “Please. Don’t talk like that. You scare me sometimes.”

“Do I?” We were standing in his office. His office mate—Bronwyn Lorimer—had just stepped out for something. I kept my eyes on his while I started slowly undoing the thirty pearl-size buttons down the front of my dress.

“Come on. Stop it.” He looked around. “Why are you acting like this? Are you trying to get me fired?”

I went over to him and kissed him, and after a moment, he saw the futility of trying to push me away and kissed me back. But then when he pulled away he said in a low voice, “We shouldn’t talk like that in here, that’s all. Who knows when people will just barge right in?”

“Oh, yeah. God forbid people should see us making out. I’m sure that’s never happened before on this campus.” I sat down in his swivel chair and surveyed his office, with its four-inch window and metal shelves. “I’d go crazy if I had to be in this office all the time.”

He cleared his throat. “Well, that’s because you’re an artist. You need light and landscapes. But I’m just grateful to have a desk and a quiet place to think.”

At first I was dedicated to contacting real estate agents, but then I gave up. All the empty, available places tended to be in dangerous neighborhoods, the kind with drug addicts lying in the streets. The late 1970s was not a good time for the city. President Ford had refused to bail New York out, and it looked as if everything would just go under. Jeremiah and Carly said it would be ridiculous for us to leave, when we all got on so well together.

And we did. Carly was wonderful to me. She had a throaty, exciting voice and a way of confiding in me that made me feel as though we would someday be old friends. One day she told me that she and Jeremiah were better when they lived communally. “It makes us behave,” she said. “I can’t seem to do marriage in private. Over the years, I’d say our best years have been when we had spectators.”

“What does she mean by that?” I asked Jeremiah, and he laughed his easy, intimate laugh and said it meant they didn’t fight as much because they didn’t want to argue in front of other people. “Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but Carly is kind of, uh, a passionate person. She can scream and carry on, and when she’s alone with me, I seem to bring out all her fury, for reasons I can’t seem to help. So—and you’ll love this—you know what we call you and Grant when you’re not around? The ‘marriage saviors.’ If we make it to our golden anniversary, I promise you there’ll be a special plaque with your names on it.”

I LOVED living with children, even though they were exhausting and opinionated and not toilet trained and showed no signs of ever becoming civilized humans. Still, they made me laugh a hundred times a day. They were both cherubic, with Carly’s red hair and Jeremiah’s huge blue eyes, and deliciously fat, golden bellies, and when they were sleeping or cuddling with you while you read to them, you could almost forget that they could turn into rampaging maniacs with no warning whatsoever, fighting over toys and screeching and spilling milk and flinging food and being unwilling to put on their coats or get into their pajamas or finish their dinner. Lindsay was serious-minded and managed her brother (seven minutes her junior) with a hands-on-hips imperiousness that made all the adults laugh. Brice was clownish and clumsy and would do anything for a laugh. Carly once observed that when he walked into a room, the wallpaper started automatically peeling off the walls. But they called me Anniebelle and crawled in my lap sometimes just for fun, and the day I read
Goodnight Moon
thirteen times in a row, Lindsay said she loved me best of anybody.

As much as I was fascinated by the children, though, I was outright mesmerized by Jeremiah and Carly. I had never known people to be so cheerfully honest about the deficiencies and difficulties of marriage. It was so
adult
, the way they were always throwing up their hands in exasperation with each other and having hissing fights in front of us, fights that seemed to me both comical and ironic. But not scary, not at all scary. Their disagreements were so unlike the arguments my parents would have indulged in, which always felt sort of dark and ominous. Carly could get furious with Jeremiah over his opinions about books and films and plays, just as often as she’d get mad about the fact that he had let Brice go without a diaper, or that he was hiding dishes in the oven and then forgetting and preheating them.

And whenever the four of us were together—at the dinner table, for instance—and they and Grant would get to talking, I felt as though I was a kid permitted to stay up late and sit at the adult table. I felt so young and incompetent around them, like I would never catch up, never understand how to live a cosmopolitan life. Jeremiah and Carly were older and they were physically beautiful, and they had furniture, wineglasses, dinner guests, daily planners, and a whole household that ran on something approaching chaos, but which still ran. It thrilled me to discover that running a family didn’t have to be an all-consuming enterprise, the way my mother and her friends did it, but could just happen in an offhanded, casual fashion. Jeremiah and Carly and their friends were sophisticated and cool, and to my shock, Grant seemed right at home with them, able to hold his own talking about authors and playwrights and artists. It made me see him in a whole new way, as somebody who knew things. He could be a New Yorker, while I was just a baby. A California child.

Sometimes, though, they’d all be talking, and I’d be left out, and when I would look up, Jeremiah’s eyes would be resting on mine. He’d have just the tiniest smile on his face, a lifted eyebrow, a smile that seemed to acknowledge that everything that was happening at the table was all just superficial bullshit, that he and I knew the real stuff.

I’d want to look away, but I couldn’t. I’d been marked by his understanding of me. There was a little scorched place inside me where he had seen.

We, his eyes said—we, he and I—were the ones who truly understood.

I KNEW Grant and I shouldn’t stay and yet we couldn’t bring ourselves to leave, so we all four fell into a pattern of life that somehow worked out. Grant and Carly were the industrious, busy ones, heading out the door early in the mornings with their importance wrapped around them like cloaks. Jeremiah called them the ants and said that he and I were the grasshoppers, and they had to take care of us. I had temp jobs sometimes, typing in banks and offices that required that I put on panty hose and skirts and close-toed shoes, which Jeremiah called my pitiful attempt to show myself to be a would-be ant. But many more days I was at home, and there were those days when Jeremiah and I just hung out. One of us would take the children to day care in the morning and then we were on our own. He showed me around the city, took me on my first subway ride standing in the front car, hurtling through the underground darkness. We went to parks and museums. We’d go to the market together, plan dinner, walk around the neighborhood, then settle down at home with our books and our imagined work. I sketched things, he typed at his desk. We met in the kitchen for heated-over morning coffee, padding around in our socks, watching the late-afternoon sun slant in through the windows while we drank wine and cooked dinner.

He told me he was supposed to be spending his sabbatical writing a book about something having to do with the history of an uprising in upstate New York, but he said he wanted to switch fields, to write a book about the philosophy of creativity instead. He was sick of the work that had once come so effortlessly to him. He wanted to find the seams of people’s stories, of the spirituality and mysticism they carried with them, and then he laughed his always self-deprecating laugh. He was tentative and almost formal around me, put-upon and beleaguered, but in a funny way, and always ready to laugh. He knew such a wide variety of things: he could play the guitar, speak three languages, cook gourmet meals, and talk to just about anybody on any topic at all. At the market, I’d go off to pick out fruit and come back to find him squatting down talking to some street person about redevelopment or the constellations or the best way to light a cigarette if you didn’t have any matches.

I confessed to him that I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing. I should do art, I supposed. Or maybe I should go back to school, get my degree. Should I be painting? Working more? Getting a full-time corporate job? Who knew? One day he said, “Why the fuck does everybody have to
do
something? Why can’t we just enjoy ourselves? I think that’s what you should do. Resist, resist. Do as little as possible for as long as you can.” He moved his arms in the air, like waves, when he said, “Resist, resist.” His voice was like silk and velvet.

Grant, when pressed for an opinion, held the same one he’d always held, that I was vastly talented and should be doing art for my own self-fulfillment, for art’s sake alone. And Carly thought I should be looking for studio space and galleries to show my work, and possibly lining up mentors, if not benefactors and backers. This was what she referred to as “support.”

“I would like to support your art,” she said to me one day, “but I notice you’re not doing any. And I want to know why. Are you depressed, do you think?”

I stuttered through some explanation about not really having the time and space. The truth, which I was much too shy to ever admit, was that I was way too disorganized and confused. Art was the last thing I could think about in this new life. The most I could do was sketch pictures of the peonies in their glass bowl in the living room or portraits of the twins on the move, and I never intended to show anyone those.

“Perfect!” she crowed. “No time or space? That we can fix! Can’t we, Jeremiah?” She and some friends had taken over some old factory space in SoHo, a giant, unused loft where once there had been machines and heavy shoe-making equipment. Other artists, too, were trying to set up studios there, and she told me that if I was truly serious about doing my art, I could maybe join in a co-op, start claiming my own space. I didn’t think I qualified as a “serious artist,” the way Carly and her friends might define it.

“I like her, but she scares me,” I said to Jeremiah one afternoon when we were trying to wrangle the children into playing with Play-Doh, and he laughed and said, “Yeah, she’s fucking scary. Always has been. Really one of your more
intense
individuals.”

I swallowed. “But very, very committed. A good person,” I said.

“Oh, yeah. Goes without saying. A terrific person. Grant, too.”

“Absolutely.”

“You two are without a doubt the best marriage saviors going.”

And for a moment our eyes met over the top of the children’s heads. He brushed his hair out of his eyes, and I looked away.

ONE DAY I came home from a temp job working in a bank and there he was, pounding away on his typewriter at the kitchen table while the kids banged on pots and pans with wooden spoons. He held up one finger in the air, like somebody saying, “Wait!” and told me he’d had a flash of an idea for his book. This wasn’t a treatise on creativity and labor unions after all; it was a novel! He could barely stop typing. He looked almost feverish. He’d been writing all day and the ideas were just pouring out of him, he said. He was trembling with energy.

Lindsay’s diaper smelled to high heaven, so I whisked away the twins and changed both of them, and then I sat on the rag rug in their room with them and blew bubbles from a plastic wand while they tried to smash them. When Jeremiah came to join us, he was smiling.