My Education (41 page)

It had to be one story or the other. All of us who had been there had chosen: disaffection for New York ratified by the awful events, or love for New York ratified—differently—by the awful events. I'd made the second choice, and so my life. Years of noncommittal cohabitation, of narcissistic foot-dragging, of self-righteous anti-marriage-and-child-rearing screeds, and—most stubbornly obstructive and thoroughly secret—of shameful bereavement for Martha, had come to an overnight end. Reader, I grew up. I married Matthew. To his speechless delight, as if doing a striptease, I saucily threw out my birth-control pills. It was a trading of the murky infinite for the well-lit and limited, and I would never regret it, but extravagance of action on the part of others—the assertion that plot twists remain possible—now excited in me mild scorn, the reverse side of envy. I would have felt this even if it weren't Martha, but given that it was, I felt it all the worse.

I felt it for Nicholas also, or something allied, as he wound up his story. Contempt/jealousy that he'd let her rewrite all their terms, and relieve him of shared custody, so that she could move from New York, taking Joachim with her. I didn't have any reason to doubt his motives, though it wasn't so difficult, standing there in his gracious, impeccable rooms, to imagine his sacrifice hadn't been total. But what did I know? There were his teenage son's photographs, beautifully framed. There was his teenage son's sheep-farming blog on the screen of the laptop. Still, something had altered in my estimation of him, or perhaps some unset intuition had finally hardened into permanence. Part-time, long-distance, aestheticized fatherhood suited him all too well.

“If he'd failed to adjust there was some thought he'd come back to me for high school. That's a point that we're still grappling with, I'm not thrilled with his schooling. But he has adjusted, remarkably well!—as you see. Should I write down the Web site for you? I'm aware I am biased but I think he does wonderfully with it. He's made it an art form.”

“Please do,” I said, and repented my judgments of him as, with a surfeit of pride more childlike than parental, he painstakingly copied the URL for me, down to the
http
.

•   •   •

Since Dutra's marriage announcement that spring I had noticed our home telephone sounded different, though it was the same dusty Panasonic cordless that Matthew and I had bought years ago when we'd moved in together. Now it rang with a strange obsolete gravity, like those fog bells on lighthouses no longer used. It seemed to know we would hear its portents with just half our attention, yet this made it that much more commanding. Perhaps it was just that I heard it so rarely. Since becoming a parent I'd begrudgingly gotten a cell phone, and like filings to the superior magnet almost everyone in my life now directed themselves to that number, especially as my life revolved mostly around other parents I'd met on the playground, or college-age night-babysitters, or the leaders of sing-along circles or wintertime play groups or tumbling-for-tots. Most of the people in my life now did not even know my home number, and perhaps this was why, when it rang, I flinched with foreboding as if at the sound of a siren.

It was Alicia, whom I hadn't seen in years, since long before she and Dutra broke up. “I know you're surprised,” she cut short my confused pleasantries. “I want to know if you've heard anything from Dan.”

There had only been the message he'd left from his car, and when I told her so she said, “I meant more recently.”

“Why? What's happened?”

“Nothing—I mean, I don't know that there's any emergency. Um, okay. If we do need to talk you'll know why,” and she gave me her number.

“Alicia, I need you to tell me a little bit more.”

“I can't. I mean, it wouldn't be appropriate,” she signed off, an evasion that would have addled the rest of my day if I hadn't heard from Dutra within the same hour, when the mailman rang my doorbell.

“Certified mail,” he said. “You have to sign.” The envelope had been sent from a town in California called La Honda, and it contained a short, jocular note and a cashier's check for ten thousand dollars.

“I've heard from him,” I told Alicia when I called her a few minutes later.

Alicia had received an identical check, and a similar note, though tailored to their history. “Ali,” it began, “do me a favor and deposit this check without getting all hung up about it. You know I've never cared about money except as a means to the most basic end. I have more than enough for that. What's left over is only a pain in my ass. You've put off grad school for years saying you can't pay for it. Now you have no excuse, get admitted and I'll pay the rest.”

My note read, “Dear Ginny, I know that you care about manners so don't be ungracious and try to return it. I want you to have it. Put it in a college fund for Lion if that makes you feel better. In recent news, I've found a very peaceful place to live and there's even a cement Buddha by the front door that I haven't kicked over.”

Alicia suggested we talk to each other in person. Since her marriage she'd been living in Bucks County but she offered to drive in to meet me, and she named a place at the bottom of First Avenue a few blocks from the little apartment she'd once shared with Dutra, the same apartment he had renovated “to the inch” in Italian Modern, and briefly lived in with Nikki, and finally sold.

When I came up the block from the subway Alicia was already there, looking the same as she always had, bone-thin and pale, her lank, almost colorless hair pushed behind her small ears, her wise-child's face gravely composed. She was leaning against an antique Chevy pickup parked in front of the café, and talking with a stout, powerfully built woman who faced her almost toe-to-toe, leaning toward her intently, with one meaty hand braced against the truck's body. The woman appeared much older than Alicia but this might have been an illusion caused by her physique. She had short, coarse brown hair and wore a pencil stub behind one ear, wire-rim glasses on her face, a white T-shirt, and Levi's held up by suspenders. Something in her bearing, an extremely compressed capability, suggested to me that she might be a butcher, or a construction foreperson, as well as a lesbian.

They stopped speaking as I approached and the woman sized me up until she was satisfied I'd noticed her doing it, and then she took her leave of Alicia.

“Bye, babe,” Alicia said and kissed her on the mouth. I watched the woman go with what must have been visible puzzlement. “Let's go inside,” Alicia said, and broke the silence once we were seated by adding, “You maybe don't know the whole story about me and Dan.”

“Maybe not,” I allowed.

“I know he let you think I was his girlfriend. It was the easiest way to explain me. But I wasn't—we weren't. We weren't like that.”

“Like what?”

“Sexual. Romantic. I mean, we loved each other, and it was even exclusive, but we didn't have sex.”

I must have looked, not as I meant to—receptive, nonjudgmental, for the moment all ears and no mouth—but completely dumbstruck, because her composure gave way and abruptly she said, “I was abused when I was little. By this guy that my mother was seeing. Intercourse, sodomy, the whole works. Starting when I was ten.”

“I'm sorry, Alicia,” I managed.

“Don't worry about what to say. I'm just trying to make it make sense. Anyway, that put me off track of, I guess you'd say, intimacy, for a pretty long time. When I met Dan, it's hard to explain, but he got it. It's like he saw me. And I saw him, too. The way we're wired up as people, it's hard to explain, but it matches. He's the first person I ever told about my mom's boyfriend. And he told me things too, that he's never told anyone else. So we were together—but in a way that was chaste. Having sex would have been grotesque somehow. A few times I tried to make him have sex with me. I really wanted—I was desperate to have love and sex in my life, just like anyone else. But he knew, when I acted that way, I was hurting myself—‘Come on, put your cock in me, fuck me'—I'd be goading him like that, like I was possessed. He'd just sort of hold me at arm's length until I woke up.”

“You lived together,” I said, after we'd sat in stunned silence a moment. “In a five-hundred-square-foot apartment.”

“We did. And we slept in the same bed, and peed with the door open, and had big screaming fights with each other. But like siblings. No sex.”

“Why?”

“At the time I would have said, to take care of each other. Having stepped back a little I guess I would say, codependence. It got us off the hook with other people, with trying to make something normal work out.”

“But didn't you want something normal to work out?”

“I did. With him. I was blind, I refused to see clearly. You have to understand, all the time we were together, I never saw it this clearly, the way I do now. I would think, in a little more time we would heal each other. I'd stop being so frigid toward men, toward men's bodies, I guess I should say toward
his
body. And he'd put down his torch and start feeling romantic, toward me. But I was just nursing delusions. Dan saw us clearly. He always saw what we were clearly. He saw Nell, my partner, and her seeing me, before I even knew she existed. Nell lived in New Hope, a couple of miles from my mother. When my mother got sick, and we started to go there a lot, whenever we went into New Hope for stuff Nell would somehow appear. At the health food place, at the drugstore. She has a landscaping company”—
of course
, I thought—“and that truck's like her office, and whenever we pulled into town, Dan would notice her truck. Then he'd go pin her down, chat her up—you know how he is, like Attack of the Overly Friendly. As if he might actually be mocking you. And she
hated
him, later she told me he made her blood boil. But little could she have suspected. One day he says to me, ‘That Nell's after your narrow ass, Ali.' And I said, ‘Please do not be disgusting.' But over time he becomes serious: “You should let that dyke Nell make love to you. Just to see how it feels.” I was livid. I threw things at him. I said, ‘You're just trying to ditch me because I'm a burden.'”

“Do you think that was true?”

After a moment she said, “I had become a burden. But I also think he saw my chance to be happy, and was pointing me there, because it turned out he was right.” She smiled down at her untouched cup of tea and croissant, made speechless a moment herself by the tale of reversals with which she'd stunned me.

“He told me you wanted to marry him, after you found out your mother was dying,” I said, not to protest her story, but to ratify it, to give up what I knew for revision.

“It's true. I really thought, in my craziness, that getting married would fix me.”

“And he said that he refused to marry you, until you faced up to your feelings about losing your mother, or something like that.”

“He's such an honest person, even his lies come out basically true. He did refuse to marry me, because us getting married would have been a farce. And there were feelings I had to face up to, but they weren't just to do with my mother.” She glanced at her watch. “Sorry,” she said. “I don't mean to be rude. The truck's parked at a meter and I don't have much time, and we haven't even talked about the checks.”

“I don't know what to say about them. I'll listen.”

“Dan's impulsive. I guess you know that. He's also incredibly loyal, to ideas and people. He believes in love, he really does. Crazy lightning-bolt love, he would say that's the only real kind. In his life it's come twice and both times were disasters. Did he ever tell you about the girlfriend he dealt heroin with? Tanya. His first love. A very big deal. But he had this idea he couldn't let go of, that she'd betrayed him by calling the ambulance when he OD'd. She'd disobeyed orders. There was no way around it, he had to break with her. It's like a code that just makes sense to him, and it ruins his life. Then there's the second time, you know all about that. That time's even worse. Even more against code, so he gives that up too, but he never stops trying to replace it. Of course he would say you can't
try
, it's all fate, but he can't help himself. That's what happened with Nikki. Fuck, I still haven't dealt with the checks. It's this simple, he's asking for help. He knows neither of us would accept so much money, but he's forced it on us. It's sort of a power play, trying to have influence in our lives. I don't mean that the checks aren't a generous impulse. They are, but they're also so lonely. So needy. He sees our lives all taken care of, even I'm taken care of, and he's still alone.”

As if to provide illustration, Nell now appeared on the sidewalk outside, checked the meter, then leaned on the Chevy and folded her arms.

“I don't know if you'll cash your check, or return it, or put it in a drawer,” Alicia went on, “and I don't know what I'll do with mine either. But whatever you do with the check, you have to do something for
him
. I don't know what. If it was as simple as get him a shrink, I'd have already done that. There's one last thing I wanted to say. I don't know if you knew that my mom was a suicide. That was awful but it wasn't surprising. Years before she did it, pretty much since I was ten or twelve years old, I was already thinking about it myself. I really believe it's genetic, the impulse. And not long after Dan and I met, I told him that to me, suicide felt alive. Like a friend, or an angel. Always there for me, if I ever really needed bailing out. Crazy as it sounds, I found that comforting. I still do. Anyway, I asked Dan if he'd give me his blessing—if he could tell me, truthfully, that if I did it, he'd bless me. He wouldn't resent me, or judge me, or be ruined by what I had done. You can probably guess what he said.”