At the edge of the trees, I am surprised by how far away the house seems. I had remembered the yard as smaller. I trek through the long grass. I find Julie making a salad in the kitchen. “I was thinking about how we found this place. Already I can’t remember,” I tell her. I kick off my shoes. I rest a hip on the counter beside her.
“Oh, I have the clipping.” She sifts through a pile of papers: signed contracts, first utility bills, a bevy of gaudy coupons. “I know it’s here somewhere. I kept all of this stuff together. The language was odd, something like the right house has found you, and it talked about all the storage, needing updates, nature nearer by than you could dream.” She pages through again with no luck.
“Not to worry. I was just surprised I’d already forgotten.”
Julie gives me a look full of sly skepticism. “James, you wouldn’t remember because I was the one doing all of the hunting.” She rests her long arms on my shoulders. I feel her wrists cross behind my neck. “But that’s the way I wanted it.” She kisses me.
I want to argue. I want to say that I remember finding different listings in the real estate sections. My only memories, though, are of her rejecting my suggestions. She covers up her slights with sweetness. I give up. I kiss her back.
5
JAMES AND I met on a blind date when he answered my personal ad—a situation that horrified my friends. I’m not talking about a hygienic online dating website. This was a time when your best bet was to put an ad on Craigslist. My ad was simple, asking if anyone wanted to hang out—an act that, to an outsider, seemed desperate and unsafe and strange.
The flood of responses was to be expected, as any woman willing to post a picture is sure to receive a good many suitors no matter her looks or the content of the ad, and I got satisfaction from the attention, even if most of the responses were from tired creeps and the socially catastrophic.
I met several men for a drink in the following weeks, sometimes three in a night, but there was no pressure to succeed, even when a particular man’s powers of persuasion were high. I did a good job of weeding out the weirdos at the email stage, but I kept talking to all of them until they stopped talking to me, except James, who kept calling.
Connie—an old friend, recently minted as coworker—and I catch up on each other’s lives over a lunch break down the street from my new office. “But don’t you feel like that’s settling?” she asks. “Letting the man have all the control over whether or not the relationship continues? Weren’t there men you liked more than James?”
“No,” I say, full of honesty and endangered pride, “because it worked out perfectly: he’s the one I wanted and I was the one he wanted.”
“That doesn’t sound like the Julie I knew before. You were so precise and rational about everything. I remember a spreadsheet evaluating the boys in the psychology department based on different metrics.” She reaches across the tiny table to clear the hair that’s fallen over one side of my face and to cup my cheeks. “Hello, Julie? Are you in there?”
I bat her away and she snorts. “I felt like that was the way to be sane in a situation like that. Where did those charts get me? Anthony? He was not a prize. People get so carried away. Not to mention, it’s only after that dating bender ended that I recognized the pattern, that I understood why it worked. I mean, I was attracted to James from the start. His body was so solid. He was so dusky eyed and unkempt. He had a certain confidence to him, but it wasn’t arrogant. There was a silliness about it. So much mischief in him. I think I was looking for someone very different from me and it wasn’t worth thinking about rationally, because I’d cut myself off at the knees every time evaluating the ways the men fell short. Maybe it was me who stayed tuned in to him and so he’s the one who ended up sticking around.”
“Okay, enough about how much you love your husband.”
Connie tries to change the subject, but I pull it back. I want to push her to consider a different way of being. “But I do think there could be multiple soul mates for a person, you know? People are beautiful and complex enough that I believe I could find multiple people in the world to love.”
Connie drops her mob of curls into her hand, exasperated. Her whole face opens up. “Really. How can you be married and believe that?”
I swat her hand. “Isn’t it more romantic that I could be with anyone I want, but it’s James I pick? Isn’t that beautiful?”
“That’s not a soul mate, though,” she replies.
“Sure it is; I can’t imagine life without James, but I can imagine life with someone else.”
Connie hurries away with the conversation to talk about her half-hearted despair at what she’ll wear to an upcoming event—anything to get away from willingly recognizing the limit of her point of view.
I play along. “I swear, that has got to be the one-hundredth stroller that’s passed this window in the last hour.”
“Welcome to Normal Town.” Connie clinks our glasses. “This is really where you want to be?”
“It is!” I don’t want to tell her about James’s gambling problem. Not yet, at least. I want to believe that we can get past it and start fresh and that it’s possible for it not to matter, and so I say some things by way of explanation that aren’t untrue. “I was so into trying new restaurants and scouring event listings for the hottest tickets in the city, but at some point I said to myself, ‘If I order one more cocktail named after an old Western, I’ll shoot my own horse.’”
Connie laughs and so I name a few. “Lonesome Dove, Purple Sage, Death Comes to the Archbishop. When I saw one called Wounded Knee, I knew we had to get out or else.”
Connie’s eyes are wide with horror, but she keeps the joke up. “But you! You wanted a little piece of that homesteading life for yourself, so you set out for small-town America.”
“There is a lot more land out here.” I shrug.
“But the company is a bit more … limited,” she says, hinting.
I deliver her the compliment she’s asked for. “But who needs variety if a high-quality selection is available? I was ready for a change of company. It’s good to get out of your comfort zone. And those people knew all of my secrets. Too many ways information could leak out. I was ready to go into hiding.”
“I’m happy to be your only security risk.” We laugh and another baby rolls by. She points and says, “One hundred and one.”
6
I GRAB A beer with my coworker Sam on my way home from work. He’s not a friend I would pick on my own. In the economy of work compatriots, though, he will do.
We drive separately to the bar closest to the industrial park that our office hides inside.