A love story

8

An author lived for a time in a modern house behind mine, on the other side of a eucalyptus grove. She had recently divorced. She is a great writer, though she has written only one book. The book takes a frank approach to sex and bodies. I try to copy her writing. Her book is about prostitutes, so I assume she was once a sex worker. Or maybe she just wants her readers to believe that, for street cred at book parties, in university settings.

I could kind of see into the rear windows of her house at night with a pair of binoculars. These voyeur sessions never lasted long, because all she ever did was sit there. Maybe once or twice I caught her walking to her kitchen. It was boring. She was alone all the time, and while she was no doubt thinking amazing, fantastic thoughts about the nature of art, my binoculars could not see those thoughts.

The town we live near is so small, it was inevitable that we would meet. We did, many times. We once even shared the dance floor at the local bar, a Mexican restaurant, really. We momentarily danced together like robots from outer space. But then each time we met again it was, to her, as fresh as the first time. "Nice to meet you," she'd say. Once, I had to deliver a piece of misdirected mail and she invited me in for a glass of wine. In an instant, I developed a fantasy of the famous writer and me as best friends. I dropped that fantasy quickly, because it was clear that her alien-robot routine back in the bar had not been an act.

When I mentioned that I had three children, her jaw came unhinged. "Oh, my God." Her hand rose to her face as if I'd said I had three months to live. Maybe that was what children meant to her.

I went to hear her read at the local library once when I was very pregnant. During the Q. & A., she spoke of child rearing with great disgust. Likening motherhood to a dairy operation. She said that children murder art, and though it was easy for me to dismiss her comments as ignorance—she'd never had a child, she'd never made a life or a death—I could not prevent the other people in the audience from looking at me with pity. "How did you like that?" a number of my neighbors asked me afterward.

"I enjoyed it very much, thanks."

When I was at her house she dismissed me after one glass of wine. "I have to eat my sandwich," she said, as if that sandwich were something so solidly constructed it would be impossible to divide, impossible to share. I left.

The next time I saw the famous writer, she was in the grocery store. Once again, she didn't recognize me or acknowledge the four or five times we'd already met, the wine we had drunk together, so I was able to freely stalk her through the aisles of the store, to spy the items of nourishment a famous writer feeds herself: butterfly dust, caviar, evening dew.

I stood behind her in line at the fishmonger's counter, my own cart bulging with Cheerios, two gallons of milk, laundry soap, instant mac and cheese, chicken breasts, cold cuts, bread, mayonnaise, apples, bananas, green beans, all the flabby embarrassments of motherhood that no longer embarrass me. I heard her order a quarter pound of salmon. The loneliest fish order ever. I stepped away without ordering, scared her emaciated loneliness might be contagious. She kept her chin lifted. Some people enjoy humiliation. Maybe I used to be one of those people, but I don't feel humiliation anymore. The body sloughs off cells every day, aging. After all that, what is left to feel humiliated? Very little indeed.

•

The commuter bus that runs between here and the city is one small part of America where silence still lives. It's a cylinder of peace moving through the world swiftly enough to blur it.

Once, on a return bus, there was a woman seated in front of me. People do not speak on the bus. At least, no one who rides with regularity. We understand that this hour of being rocked and shushed is the closest we'll get to being babies again. But this woman was not a regular. She'd gone down to the city for the day. She was ten to fifteen years older than me, mid-fifties, though I never saw her face. I could feel she was buzzing. She'd taken a risk travelling to the city by herself, such a risk that accomplishing it had emboldened her to try other new things, like the voice-recognition software on her smartphone, that newfangled device purchased for her by an older child who'd grown tired of having a mother who lived in a technological backwater.

There was nothing wrong with her hands, but she wanted to demonstrate that even though she was middle-aged and less loved now than she'd been in the past, she could be current with the modern world. She could enjoy the toys of the young. So, on the quiet bus, she began to speak into her phone as if recording books for the blind, loudly and slowly. Everyone could hear her. There on the silent bus, the woman shouted multiple drafts of an e-mail to a friend, laying plain her regret, fumes of resignation in the tight, enclosed area.

-Hi. Just on my way home. I spent the day with Philip and his glamorous wife. He had a concert at the conservatory. I hadn't been back in years. It was great to see him. His wife is gorgeous. They live in Paris. Ouch. I just

The woman paused and considered. She tried again. Her voice even louder, as if it were another chorus, a building symphony of mortification.

-Hi. I'm on the bus back from San Francisco. What a day. I saw Philip. He had a concert at the conservatory. His wife is gorgeous, glamorous, everything I'm not. They live in Paris and their kids

She paused again. Take three. Loud and utterly desperate. Words falling apart.

-Saw Philip and his gorgeous wife. Conservatory. Paris. Kids. I just

I turned to the window, which, although sealed, at least reminded me what fresh air meant, what it was to breathe without the toilet leaking air freshener, without having to hear that woman's echoing regret.

•

People should be more careful with their language. People shouldn't infect innocent bystanders with their drama.

There's a man I hardly know, an academic. He began sleeping with a graduate student when his wife was pregnant, but everything was cool, because, you know, everyone involved read criticism and all three of them really wanted to test the boundaries of just how much that shit can hurt.

I imagine that shit can hurt a whole lot.

Every time I hear about another professor with a student, I think, Wow, that professor I know is way more messed up than I ever thought. Stealing confidence from eighteen-, nineteen-, twenty-year-olds.

Nasty.

This professor, he cleared the fucking of the graduate student with his pregnant wife, and for reasons I don't understand the wife allowed him to dabble in younger, unwed women while she gestated their child, while her blood and bones were sucked from her body into their fetus.

Though the wife is an interesting part of this triangle, it's neither her nor the husband I'm thinking of here in bed while Sam bleeds out his last drop of life on our living-room floor. I'm thinking of the poor, stupid graduate student.

She and the academic attended a lecture together one night. After the lecture, there was a party where she was in the insecure position of being a student among people who were done being students. And though everyone was staring at her—they knew the wife—no one wanted to talk to her or welcome the grad student into the land of scholars.

This was not acceptable. She liked attention. She liked performance. She cleared her throat—and the noise from the room—as if readying for a toast. She stood on a low coffee table. Everyone stopped drinking. In a loud, clear voice, one that must still reverberate in her ears, the academic's ears, everyone's ears (it even managed to reach mine), she said, "You're just angry because of what I do with my queer vagina."

On my living-room wall I keep a photo of my Victorian great-grandmother engaged in a game of cards with three of her sisters. These women maintained a highly flirtatious relationship with language. "Queer" once meant strange. "Queer" once meant homosexual. "Queer" now means opposition to binary thinking. I experience a melancholy pause when meaning is lost, when words drift like runaways far from home. How did "queer" ever come to mean a philandering penis and vagina in a roomful of bookish, egotistical people? How did common old adultery ever become queer?

I feel the grad student's late-blooming humiliation. How she came to realize, or will one day soon, that her words were foolish. I remind myself there in bed, Don't talk. Don't say words to people, because words conjure images. Her words created a likely unwanted idea of an organ that, like all our organs, is both extraordinary and totally plain. Some flaps of loose skin, some hair, some blood, but, outside the daily fact of its total magnificence, it is really not queer at all.