God and Jetfire (2 page)

*   *   *

The top of Jevn's head almost touched the ceiling of the car. Bending down to see out his side window, he filled its frame like someone who'd been stuffed into a television set. The highway ran along the Mill Creek Valley, which emptied into the Ohio River as it curved around the southern edge of the city. Just on the other side was Kentucky, and, beyond that, the South I was always trying to get away from.

I'd always feared somehow getting stuck there, becoming one of those girls I used to see in the Kmart parking lot. Girls with stringy long hair who couldn't carry their own toddlers for their girth and didn't teach them not to cuss. They emerged wearing flip-flops from long maroon cars with hot vinyl seats, shorts inching asymmetrically up the insides of their thighs while they shopped for microwaves, boxes of Coke, and dirty birthday cards. They were the girls who had the sons who sat on the front porches of half-fallen homes on rural roads that didn't have curbs, who called at me as I jogged past: “Yewanna run?…
We
kin make ye' run.”

Pure products of the mountains, I grew up among them, I carpooled with them to school in smoke-filled hatchbacks, but I begged for braces to fix the gap between my front teeth so no one in my future would know where I'd come from and send me back. I was an accident, so I knew I didn't belong in the world at all, but I especially didn't belong in Tennessee.

But soon after I got to Cincinnati, I realized it was just an extension of Kentucky, whose southeastern hills wove right back into the mountains of Tennessee. It was like I just couldn't escape the South, hard as I tried.

*   *   *

We got off the highway and onto the gridded streets of the university neighborhood. As we neared my apartment, I tried to make sense of it. Eight weeks pregnant. Due in July. I tried to work out what it should mean to me by imagining what it might mean to other people. My mother was Catholic, so I knew she'd be disappointed, and could guess at least one option she wouldn't approve of. And my dad wasn't anything, but I was pretty sure I knew what he'd say.

Biiiiiiig bucks!

He'd lean back and smile with both thumbs up when he said it, as if to say: it must be so much fun to spend money you didn't work your fingers to the bone to earn! Besides all the lost dreams, the dropping out of school, the flying Confederate flags—having a baby was expensive. And he'd always tried to curb my expensive tastes. He used to tell me that if he let me spend money the way I wanted to, our whole family would end up on the street eating dog food. My siblings were content to be potato-sack bears and old-laundry-basket worms-in-apples, but I wanted a store-bought, trademarked, two-piece vinyl Halloween costume with a plastic mask. I wanted a real Barbie and real Breyer horses. My desire for things knew no bounds. And so my father worked carefully every day to thread a fear of poverty into my most basic wiring.

What I begged for most was a grand piano. One with keys you could plunge your fingers in like the muddy bottom of a pond; one with worlds to plumb before you sank to somewhere solid. Our piano was an Everett upright that was fine for Christmas carols, but for real music it was just like diving into the shallow end.

Biiiiiiig bucks
meant no, and that that was the end of the conversation. Dad made me get a job at Pizza Plus so I could earn my own grand piano and, he hoped, see what a future in music would really look like—no doubt similar to single motherhood. Poverty always appeared the same way in my imagination: sitting on the curb eating a big bag of dog food, kibble by kibble.

*   *   *

Jevn dropped me off at my apartment. I don't remember if we said a single word, or if we were both just speechless. It was almost the end of the school term, so we had plenty of things to get back to.

 

TWO

The first time I ever saw him I was shocked by his beauty. Very tall and tan, white-blond hair and shadowy blue eyes. I lost my breath—that first time, and every time I'd see him. I was content to admire him from a distance, but sometimes when he'd come around the corner I'd actually jump in surprise, which only drew his attention. He began to leave things on my desk in studio. Long strips of industrial felt, aluminum tubes with torn ends, crumpled sheets of lead, tiny dunes of broken glass. I don't know how I knew it was him. He had a name for me, before he knew my name, and he'd say it softly, like an owl, after we'd pass each other in the hallway.

Wooomb.

This began after the pumpkin-carving competition in my first architecture studio in college. Jack-o'-lanterns in the manner of famous architects. I picked Louis Kahn, whom I'd never heard of, and read his famous conversation with a brick. The architect asks what the brick wants to be, and the brick responds, “An arch!” It's one of the most well-known fairy tales in architecture school literature, the point of which is that we should let materials be what they want to be. Bricks do well stacked heavily on top of one another in compression; they do not make good curtain walls, as another famous architect later demonstrated on our very own campus.

I couldn't understand why an architect would want to do otherwise, but I resolved to stay true to my material. I opened the pumpkin up like a belly from the side, revealing within it a tall, narrow gourd, which I cut open and splayed to reveal a small, pale white pumpkin. Each fleshy layer revealed the pumpkin-y nature of my pumpkin; each was backlit with candles, and water pooled in the bottom like a bodily fluid.

The judges favored the jack-o'-lanterns that had square windows and an architectural sense of structure. More like buildings and less like the midpoint of an open heart surgery. Technically, I was still a piano major.

Jevn was one of the judges. After that, I'd see him. I'd jump. He'd say,
Wooomb
.

*   *   *

Then he was there again, recruited to teach my architecture history review sessions, which met only before tests to revisit material our professor had covered in class. But what Jevn liked to talk about instead was architects' deaths. Borromini fell on his sword, but not as you'd expect. On the long axis of the oval of his chest. Kind of significant, when you think about San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane. Right? He would glance around the room. We'd all be mad because it was never the material we were going to be tested on.

Late one night before a review session, he came into my studio and asked if I was indeed in his class (he supposedly couldn't remember). He wanted my assistance with a task having to do with slides and projectors. I followed him to his office, the only office belonging to an undergraduate, and after a long pause, he told me I seemed like someone who had a brother. I said I did. Two years older. Mikey. Jevn was reclining in his swivel chair and I was standing in front of his desk. And he just went silent and watched me.

I remember two other things about that conversation. His using the words
reindeer
and
clouds
, and although I'd learned those words many, many years ago, my not knowing what he was talking about. I also remember that I asked him what his favorite book was. It was a dense philosophical text I later read, but at the time I only understood the part about felt. It pointed out that felt, unlike woven textiles, gets its strength not through organized structures but through disorder; tangling. The sociopolitical implications were lost on me, but I took it as a small sign of our connection. My family were sheep farmers, and I'd made felt, rubbing handfuls of raw wool between my palms in soapy water until big clouds of it, piled on the floor and across the kitchen table, became thick fabric. I didn't understand Jevn, but I knew firsthand about that special resilience born of complex and messy knots. And that seemed like some kind of auspicious starting point.

*   *   *

I didn't understand much about architecture either that first year. I thought architects were kind of like civil servants, like postmen or plumbers. An architect's job, it seemed to me, was to put buildings where buildings were needed: hospitals for refugees in war-torn countries, homes for families after tornadoes and hurricanes. Architects used mundane materials to create humble things, which were not even about themselves but the empty space inside them. And people who really needed buildings often couldn't afford them, so ideally architecture should be free.

Architecture was definitely not something to be passionate about. But students would stay up all night working with the kind of dedication I thought existed only in music school. I couldn't tell what they were working so hard on. After the pumpkins, we were supposed to design a building for a site that overlooked downtown. I'd been there lots of times to watch storms come in from the west over the river valley, and I didn't think that place would be at all improved by architecture. I proposed instead that they demolish the bathrooms already on site and do a little landscaping. I put in time like a good civil servant and then slipped away to play piano. I thought it couldn't be the least of the tools in an architect's toolbelt: to know when architecture was not called for. There were so many vacant buildings just down the hill.

At the end of that first term, my class presented our designs on the grand staircase of the school for everyone to see. I wasn't nervous about speaking in front of my classmates or my professors; I only hoped Jevn wouldn't pass by. But he did, just as I was explaining my empty set of drawings, my inadvertent argument against architecture. The next day, by my drafting board I found a tiny pile of one-sixteenth-inch basswood sticks cut into equal one-inch lengths.

It was soon after that that I saw him standing on the sidewalk near my apartment one afternoon, his arms full of books.

“I thought you'd like these,” he said as he handed them to me, and I realized he'd been waiting for me to get home. How did he know where I lived? And how did he know what I'd like?

*   *   *

That spring was magical. I didn't know from experience how special it was to fall in love, but I felt it, a fullness in my chest as I walked past the park feeling stupidly aligned with the chirping birds and the early morning frogs and the fog. Feeling like college was just a fascinating backdrop for something even bigger.

At school Jevn was serious and reserved; no one would believe the way he danced on his bed and mouthed the words to “Rocky Mountain High.” Mouthed, not sang. He carefully selected the things in the world he would love, and I considered my position extremely privileged, dancing on the bed with him, knocking him down but still failing to stop the mouthing. He said it was the way I smiled all the time that made him want to know me.

But I kept him at a distance to protect myself. First it was because I wanted independence. Then it was because I was in love and scared he'd figure out I wasn't as smart or talented as he was. I practiced losing him so I'd be ready for it; I went to Europe for the summer without him even though he wanted us to go together. I cheated on him, and though he didn't believe I'd done it because I liked him so much it terrified me, he still forgave me. I chipped away at us with small complaints—I said we were getting boring, always taking the same walk through the same woods to the same restaurant. He said, “I think repetition has everything to do with a heartbeat.”

His name was pronounced “Yehn,” and it meant
steady
. He was born in the United States, but he was Norwegian by blood, and his rituals seemed Scandinavian. Getting up religiously before sunrise to take a long, pensive bath, folded into the tub but gazing out the windows like he was floating in a forest lake in Finland. Reading for hours, sun still dawning—not books for school, but his own readings on philosophy and art. He worked so hard he would fall asleep sitting up any time his attention wasn't needed; screen saver, he called it. His dad was an alcoholic, and he'd taken refuge in an architecture internship in high school, devoting himself to beautiful lines and to men who stood steady themselves. When he decided he liked something, he didn't waver.

I trusted him so early on and so absolutely that I often forgot myself. When he'd drop me off, I'd be surprised to be alone, as if I'd been gone for a long time and hadn't anticipated my own return. I was happy when, the first time I visited his apartment, he had three vases on his mantel, and I thought:
Those are
ugly
!
I realized it was one of the few times I'd heard my own voice in his presence. But it took only a few more months of architecture school for me to learn they were very famous vases, by Alvar Aalto, and I grew to appreciate them so much that when I went to Europe without him, I made a pilgrimage to the factory in Finland where they were made, and because I couldn't afford one, I scooped up by-products of their fabrication off the factory floor to take home as a memento.

It scared me, how naturally I disappeared. How easily, how fully, architecture school, and Jevn, supplanted my natural instincts. He couldn't understand why being myself meant I couldn't be with him, and I couldn't explain it. I didn't understand it, either. It was simpler for us to break up.

*   *   *

By the time we found out I was pregnant, we had been dating for two years. I was twenty-two. Twice eleven, Jevn's favorite number. He said we were like the number eleven. Eleven is special because of all kinds of ancient ideas about numbers I still don't understand, but also because of its shape. Two solid rectangles with an invisible rectangle in between. That invisible rectangle exists only when the two solid ones stand close by. Jevn called it “the third,” and he said that was what was special about us, the thing that wasn't him and wasn't me, but emerged only out of our proximity. Even if I wasn't as talented as he was, I thought, I at least helped make that third thing he liked so much.