Parallel, as if on the same track, running at the same speed, but not touching and having no way to touch. Parallel like people who went to bed without remembering to say good night, or saying it without meaning it, or meaning it but not saying it. I appreciated how on those rare occasions when my wife would kiss me, she did so with flat lips, popping them the way she did when she smacked at her ice cream. In this way she turned my face into something more palatable.
Was it a good life? Was I more joyful, sensitive, and compassionate in my deeply entangled commitment to them? Was there anything better than seeing the world through the eyes of my nutty kids? Was my obligation to Robin the most sincere form of love? Or was I living despite their obstruction, intrusion, whatever? Had I instead been saved by the transcendent power of my ideas and work connected to the larger world, drawings I’d done for the magazine that illuminated trivial or important events of our time? Was I doing all I could to enrich and enhance and enliven my time on earth, or was I doing all I could to destroy, limit, or block any growth or connection? Or was I doing nothing, imitating real suffering while my time ran out, goofing around, rotting, sexless, ugly, and bitter?
Was this as close to love as I was ever going to get? The closer I got, the more I wanted to destroy the things I loved. Something rose up in me, threatening me. I had to deflect it somehow.
I’d never been able to beat back the loneliness of a solitary life, but as part of a couple I felt invisible and deformed, and even at those times when I meant what I said, my words of affection had to be forced through sarcasm and shame. When I misbehaved, acted out discreetly, impulsively, I felt unbreakable and invincible, although of course the guilt eventually tore me apart. And sometimes I examined those parts, and sometimes I pushed them away, but that was just pushing myself away, the pure, monstrous reality, the real me, and without those parts I was an empty shell. The longer it went on, the worse I felt, until I was out of control and panic seized me and I ran back home.
I’d spent the winter engaging in daydreams, fantasies, alternate realities, while flipping through emails in a secret folder, and looking at selfies of this same beautiful woman, barely clad in a towel at a fancy resort in Zurich, or on the swings with her kids at the park, or modeling the necklace I’d sent her at Christmas.
We met here a year ago. She took a class in the studio next to mine and pulled some late nights; we shared a bench in the courtyard, downwind of a cigarette. She was a nice woman with a few complaints, suggestible, not finished, wrapped up in her kids. She was unmoved by her own painting and thought her classmates were hilarious if a little hard to take: the lady who painted in her bra, the hipster who flirted with her in his little fedora. We bumped into each other in the laundry room, and went for a walk on the jetty at sunset, and talked about marriage, and stayed out late, and spilled our guts.
Wasn’t that the whole point of this place? To take a break and clear your head? And who really gave a fuck what two people did at an arts conference in some swinging summer paradise? Real life was so lonely anyway, and I figured I’d never see her again, so on the last night we went back to her dorm room and goofed around.
When the conference ended, we started zipping notes back and forth, just a few, then more and more. For a while I thought she’d leave him, and if she left him, maybe I’d leave Robin. But then she didn’t, and I didn’t, either. I saw her once in the fall, for an hour of furious hand holding and making out in a candlelit booth in New York City. And once in March, at her house in Connecticut. Then things got heavy and she stopped talking to me.
In June I sent her a birthday card and asked if she’d be coming back to the conference. It took her three weeks to say maybe. And now, after signing my contract and promising to play softball, as I headed to the tent for lunch, I thought about what might happen if she did. It didn’t help to think about it, but I’d spent a lot of time thinking about it anyway. I got excited. I still had passion. I came over a rise and the whole town lay beneath me, the buildings old and stinking of charm and practically spilling into the bay. I caught a whiff of sea life, a funky low-tide odor. For so long, I’d been deprived of even accidental physical contact. I needed love; short of love, I needed something. I saw myself as adventurous, amorous, and brave. I got stuck in some loop of possibilities and had to stifle a ridiculous little moan. I felt a dog-eared excitement, and rode that familiar surge of energy. By the time I reached the tent, people had worn a muddy track across the lawn between the check-in table and the buffet.
“Ha ya doin’? Everything good at home?”
“Yes!”
“You believe we’re back here again?”
I got something to eat and scanned the tent for the face I’d kissed and held, for those long legs of such smooth, glassy skin, striding briskly in the fresh breeze off the bay, for that stranger who’d hovered over me, gasping and weeping.
I didn’t see her, but students sometimes walked into town for meals. I went over by the brick wall and sat with some other faculty members, Vicky Capodanno, a painter, Tom McLaughlin, an old guy who’d written a memoir of his childhood, and this idiot biographer named Dennis Fleigel, who was waving his sandwich in the air. He had his foot propped on Vicky’s chair as she cut her salad.
“I read your book,” he said. I put my bag on the wall and downed my lemonade. I just wanted to eat. “Graphic novel, comic book, whatever you call it. What do you call it?”
“I’m not in that argument.”
“Do you check the number on Amazon?”
“It’s not in print.” I was eating some kind of chef’s salad, dry raw beets, chunks of cheddar, and these mysterious white cubes of something. This was a new, wholesome food service. “Hello, Vicky. Hi, Tom.”
“Richie,” Tom said. “How are you, bud?”
Vicky looked at me with deep intensity. “How are you?”
I couldn’t remember if I’d ever responded to her last email, from Vermont, where she’d gone to take a break from New York, trying to quit smoking, childless and out of romantic options, wondering how I was, asking for photos of me with my kids, or just my kids, or any cute kid stories—and I grinned at her like a lobotomized dope.
“I was just saying,” Dennis said, “that my book was selling, it sold pretty well, Amazon number below ten thousand for two straight years, word of mouth was good, but then that movie came out.”
“What movie?”
“Ring-a-Ding Ding. It’s about Sinatra, and when it came out, my Amazon number went from ten thousand to a hundred and fifty thousand, and it never went lower ever again.”
Charlene Wetzel joined us, smiling, and said, “I think I have a stalker.” More people sat down. “He wore sunglasses in class,” she said. “Last year, it took a few days. This year, first day: stalker.”
Heather Hinman, who taught poetry and had a coiled energy that included her hair, said that one of her students asked what font she typed in. Roberta Moser put her plate down and told us that she’d just finished an interview with the local NPR and that the questions were dumb.