I caught up to her and we walked together. As we did, I linked my arm in hers and grabbed her cigarette and took a long drag, and in a German accent I wondered what she thought of Solito’s slide talk last night, mispronouncing words with a Hessian flair. “Vut vuz it?” I asked. Was it autobiography if parts of it were conflated? Were conflated parts definitively fiction? What if fiction was mostly made of facts? She didn’t care, and misquoted Faulkner, with Kissinger’s Bavarian lilt, but said she thought there was something “litigious” in his work, and that his answers had sounded strange.
I’d had feelings for her, while we’d been lying together on the beach on a bedsheet, of a sibling bond, answering questions about Robin and my kids, bumming her cigarettes and listening to stories of her ex-boyfriends. Two of them were dead. The first one either choked to death or had a heart attack in a restaurant. She’d kept him alive until the ambulance arrived. The other one got hit by a New York City bus. And although I was subordinate to her, there were similarities in our art, at least with her more cartoony work—a piece about life in a Mexican garbage dump, another about donkey basketball, and one of painted color fields with scribbled questions about porn and eye-popping insults directed at her audience, interspersed with detailed drawings of an assault she’d survived in a subway station.
I saw them crossing the field, heading to the auditorium, walking close. Ilana and Fred were of average height, with the same dark coloring. I jealously studied their movements. There’d always been a laughable attempt to hide it, moving through a crowd, mixing in. There was a clear, quiet, concentrated energy between them, as though together they’d escaped a burning building, and were charged somehow, connected on a profound level. We got to the door of Fine Arts.
“See you later, fr?ulein.”
She dropped the accent and asked again why I’d missed drinks and where I’d been. I said I’d been tired and had gone to bed. I thought that if she didn’t look directly at me, I could say it, especially since it was true. But I’d been living with my story for so long, and had muddied the elegiac and ecstatic elements with terror and shame, and hoped that talking about it would give me some relief.
“Do you know her from somewhere else?” She crinkled her face at me. “The one who broke her arm?” She raised a hand above her head to indicate a person of great height. “The glamazon?” She rolled her eyes at me. “That big Wookiee!”
They were curious, but also pissed. They didn’t want a happiness to go unsullied. They wanted the story, but if they had the story, they wanted the story behind the story, to punish the ones who had grabbed them and held their attention.
I was late for class but wanted to say one thing and be done with it. I thought she might understand. I didn’t need to go on the way Frederick had about tearful Christmas phone calls, but I wanted someone to know. The seriousness of my expression implied that we’d destroyed each other’s lives.
“Do you meet on the sly? Do you think of her when you’re with your wife? Are you good at lying? Do you feel like a sleaze?” I said yes. “Do you know the husband? Do your families go on vacations together? Does it get easier with practice?” I said no.
My classroom smelled lived in, pre-breathed, bodies but not enough air. I could see by the rate of progress that several of the students had pulled overtime since yesterday’s class. Someone had spent the night, and lay wrapped in a beach towel at the back of the room, fast asleep. By the powdery bottoms of her feet, I knew it was Mel. I went around quietly with the handout I’d made yesterday, the guide to scanning and software. George had done a drawing of the interior of the bar at the infantry club at Fort Benning, circa 1965. I envied the steady breathing and quiet noises of humans at work. The intensity was palpable, but they were taking too long to draw. From this point they’d be stuck here, breaking for meals, powering through the night, blearily uploading their work, fighting at the scanners, complaining about someone’s music, stapling or stitching the binding by hand.
Helen Li was slated to start med school in Boston in the fall, but she still had a few things to say about growing up in Taiwan, where the school day was twelve hours long, with homework until two A.M. If she swore, her mother smacked her with a shoe. The sadists who ran the school hit kids with books, made them line up and squat, then kicked them over like dominoes. At the far end of the room in her spot by the sinks, Rachel sat with her head bent, scribbling, wearing earbuds, lips moving, hearing voices, going hard, talking to herself.
I stood behind the printing press and listened. What I heard instead was Amy’s breaths coming faster, those sweet, soft sounds. Then her tired voice, fumbling, reconciled: “Even if I’m alone for the rest of my life, I’ll never be as sad and lonely as I am now, married to him.” I wrote this down on the back of the handout. I had to stop fetishizing my cartooning blockage and look past my crippling envy to see the complexity in her, the potential storylines, huge ones of corrupt elements of power, but also small ones of people living in these fugue states of depressive, combative paranoia. Some cruel, killing part of her had flicked away the truth of my financial woes. Something despicable had risen up in me as I’d witnessed her crumbling fa?ade, by the flagpole, then on the ball field, and in the clinic—an inadvertent meanness.
I wavered, in the middle of my classroom, drowning in this soup of confusion, accosted by fragments. I was seven inches taller than my wife and outweighed her by sixty pounds. My anger had frightened me, so I could imagine how it must’ve been for her. I felt an animal terror. I attacked out of fear of being less than, or when Robin treated me like the nanny or cook, or when Amy saw me as a gigolo, moments when I’d lost my individual identity. Emotional commitments and lifelong guarantees had turned me into an object of someone else’s neuroses. I used Amy to divert my aggression away from Robin. In contrast to Mike, I was a goddamned hero. I humiliated others, swiped at phantoms, and feared for my life. I had to get it all down.
I needed concentrated hours, days of quiet in a nurturing atmosphere, to experiment with tools and materials, shielded from parenting, domestic hostility, taxing freelance work and students, in a place where I could safely lose myself in the process and surprise my eyes with emerging themes, to build out with images that mapped our emotional landscape, to explode out from there with memory and imagination. I made a few thumbnails, then got up and paced around the room.
Rebecca had added a new character to her ambulance scene, a paramedic in charge. He looked like a hockey enforcer, with a lined scowl and a heavy brow, sitting in the ambulance across from the younger Rebecca, counting off as she performed CPR, telling her to stay calm.
“He’s dying,” the hockey enforcer explains. “You’re not dying. You’re okay.”