by Liz Phair
We spend the rest of the afternoon strolling through the gardens. My tour guide promotes the local artisans who display their wares in the tea shop, and I spend as much money there as I can. I understand now that it’s not about funneling me through a tourist trap so much as supporting somebody’s gig here in Shanghai. The dried-up flower they drop into my teacup unfurls into a beautiful blossom. I want to learn everything. I feel so blessed just to be outdoors on a sunny day, here on the other side of the world, alive in the time of easy travel. The golden sun blazing in the sky far above us hits the red-tile rooftops, but down here in the galleria it’s cool and shady. In a way, I guess, living with complexity is as simple as finding the proper altitude. If you don’t change where you’re flying, you’ll never reach the smoother air.
Rory and I have gone for a swim. It’s late in the afternoon, but the air is still hot and languid. We can cool off and get out before sunset, when the sharks come in. I love that my boyfriend will do spontaneous things with me. He’s strong and brave and handsome. I love being out in the water with him, far from shore, just the two of us. He spins me in a slow circle, creating a shallow wake. I throw my arms around his neck, and we kiss.
“We should swim that way.” Rory points back toward the Manhattan Beach pier. The current has pulled us fifty yards farther up the coast. I didn’t even notice that we were drifting. I do the sidestroke, keeping my eyes on my man. As long as Rory’s there, I feel safe. He stops and circles back to me, sliding his hand down to my ass. I rest my chin on his shoulder, treading water, out of breath. The open ocean looks intimidating from out here, alien and unconquerably vast. It’s overwhelming. I turn my gaze back toward the shore.
We’re almost in line with our favorite beach house, the multi-million-dollar property Rory and I have picked out as our future residence once we’re married and strike it rich. It’s a fun game to play, imagining, What if? He’s so confident about us as a couple that it makes me optimistic. We’ve met each other’s families. We’ve gone on trips together. His sister even threw us a big party to introduce me to all their friends. Rory’s the first guy in a long time that I could really make a life with.
He snags a yard of seaweed that’s floating nearby and tosses it away. There was a red tide a couple of weeks ago, a poisonous algae bloom that kept us out of the water. We watched from my balcony as the rust-colored plumes choked and muddled the sandbar. Dead fish and birds washed up along the trash line. One night, we took flashlights down to the beach to view the bioluminescence. At first, we didn’t know what we were looking for. Then a wave crested, and a streak of ultraviolet light shot down the length of its barrel. It was so beautiful I wanted to swim in it. How could anything that dazzling be toxic?
A large swell takes us by surprise, and Rory and I break apart—tilting our faces up to the sky to breathe as the surge rolls through. With my ears submerged I hear the underwater kingdom clicking and scraping. I’m up to my neck in a world that I’m usually unaware of. It’s merely a distraction, an interruption in the lovely evening I’m having with my boyfriend. I don’t want to think about the unknown or the unknowable. We’re in love, and that’s all my soul has room for.
It’s not like there haven’t been warning signs. My subconscious has been trying to tell me something, knocking on the door of my awareness with symbols and metaphors that spring to mind spontaneously; but when you’re holding your hands over your eyes, it’s hard to read signs. At a weekend wedding in Napa, one of Rory’s friends accidentally spills red wine on me at the reception. One minute I’m a vision in a cream-colored Stella McCartney dress, and the next, I’m Carrie from Stephen King’s imagination, covered head to toe in blood. People gasp in horror and back away as I stand there dripping. We wash my dress out in the sink and laugh about it, dancing late into the night, but the stain lingers. Life doesn’t do the math for you; it simply supplies the data. All I’ve done on my computation sheet is doodle our initials inside little hearts with arrows.
Minor problems are easy to ignore. His mother doesn’t like me. Her sphinxlike eyes follow me around when I’m in her house, sizing up the competition. And my mother only sort of likes him. Nobody really gets us. It’s not a relationship that my friends embrace. They’re happy I’m happy, but our two worlds never quite fit. He’s smart, and funny as shit, but I’m the bookish one. He’s athletic and stylish. In that way he’s got me at a disadvantage, and he knows it.
One time we’re playing tennis and I tell him not to go easy on me in the next set. His forearm turns into a laser-guided weapon, and I can’t return a single hit. I burst into tears and am inconsolable. I’m devastated by how much of his skill he’s been suppressing. We’ve played casual matches for months, but the gap in our ability was never so evident. I can’t express it, but some part of me recognizes how it symbolizes the ways in which we hold each other back. Another part of me senses the danger in how seamlessly he can fake it. The truth is, although we spend half of every week together, I don’t really know this man.
On the surface, Rory and I get along well. We have a natural rapport that is playful and instinctual. He’s charming and adept in social situations, and I’m finally in step with my married friends. If he’s selfish or cold occasionally, I rationalize it as the prickly ego of an alpha male, and if I’m being strictly honest, I take a little bit of pride in it. But my judgment is clouded by the thrill of this role-playing. I’m keeping more and more of my thoughts to myself. I long to slip into that life that I see everyone else living, that looks so easy and appealing from the outside.
I have no idea how to be that type of woman. I’ve been reading online dating advice, trying to be the perfect girlfriend. I don’t ask him where he goes when we’re apart, or when I’m going to see him next. If he hurts my feelings, I don’t get angry; I just get busy with other priorities. It seems to be working, because he treats me like a princess. He spoils me. I think I’m being feminine and paying him respect, but what I’m actually doing is not listening. There’s a lack of intellectual discourse between us that is totally uncharacteristic of me.
Which is ironic, because I’m more than happy to communicate in other ways. We make love all the time. I complain to my therapist that we fuck three or four times a night on the weekends and I’m so tired, but really I’m bragging. Our sex life didn’t start out this fevered. In the beginning, it was awkward and stilted. But the whole getting-to-know-each-other part and subsequent deepening of appreciation all happened on the physical plane, while our emotional life is still stuck in adolescence.
I dip my head back in the ocean, slicking the hair off my face. The houses along the strand look like stock photographs, their windows glinting gold in the fiery light of the sunset. Our bodies float through warm and cold pockets. I feel Rory’s strong arms suddenly lift me high up out of the water as a rogue wave breaks over our heads. He’s laughing as he lowers me back down, his blue eyes shining. He’s so goddamn magnificent, all tan and broad shouldered. How did I get so lucky? I don’t even have to look out for myself. He does that for both of us.
The sun is sinking lower in the sky, but I don’t want to go in just yet. We’re the last ones left out in the water at this hour, apart from some surfers still bobbing on their boards farther up the beach. The lifeguard is locking up his tower, a pickup truck idling on the sand waiting to take him back to the substation. He knows we’re good swimmers. We come down here often. We’re planning to be back in the morning, actually.
Tomorrow, Rory has his girls, but I don’t have Nick—which is kind of nice, because when it’s all five of us, my son ends up helping out with the childcare more than he’d like to. Hadley and Avery won’t leave him alone. They go into his room and coax him out to play. I love Rory’s daughters like they are my own. He and I met on a blind date, set up by a mutual friend. I couldn’t believe I’d found an attractive single father of two beautiful babies. I thought God had granted my wish. I thoug
ht that, because I’d been working so hard to become a better person, I’d finally earned the right to have a family.
Looking back, I’ve been thinking about the paper snowflakes I cut out to decorate Rory’s tree that first Christmas. We hadn’t been going out for very long, but it was important to me that his bachelor pad look festive for the girls. This was Hadley and Avery’s first big holiday since their mom and dad split, and I wanted to make their time with their father feel as homey as possible. It’s funny how women start marking their territory. I wonder now if she saw the snowflakes, and if they fought about it.
Hadley, Rory’s eldest, was a tough nut to crack. She was only two and a half when I came into their lives, and she tested me mercilessly. It took a solid year of consistent love and loyalty before she trusted me. I wouldn’t let her push me around. She and I butted heads in the beginning, but we ended up bonding the most deeply. More so than Rory and I, even.
I was there at night when she was sick. I sang the girls to sleep and carefully untangled their hair after bath time. I kept them busy on airplanes with books and games. I made Hadley wear her sweater when it was cold outside. I wouldn’t let her torture her little sister, even when Avery started it. I believed in her, and I think she knew that.
I got a lot of things wrong with Rory, but I did a pretty good job with his kids. One time, the girls and I got stuck in the stairwell of their building when the power went out. We were on our way up to the pool when it suddenly went pitch-black, and I mean lightless. The girls were screaming and going crazy, of course, and I had both of them by the hand. They refused to move, either up or down. Somehow, I managed to convince them that we could make it all the way up to the exit. I picked up Avery and carried her in one arm while Hadley and I talked our way up the twenty-seven steps to the top. After that, we were inseparable.
I wonder what kind of young women they are now. I wonder if they remember me, or if their parents ever told them about our time together. Most likely, it’s all been erased and filled in again with her memories, because that era must have been painful for her. Sometimes it’s easier to plaster over old wounds and not stir up the past. I know Rory wouldn’t want his daughters to know the role he played in our breakup, and I don’t blame him. If I had to guess, I’d say Rory’s a sociopath.
“I’m going to take this wave,” he says, letting go of me and positioning himself in the water. He checks over his shoulder a couple of times, then executes three perfect freestyle strokes as the wave starts to front-load and bear down toward the shore like a freight train. Before I know it, he’s gone. I don’t see him again until his head pops up in the white water, seventy feet away. I can’t believe he’s just left me out here. I tread water for a minute, feeling the familiar sting of disappointment behind my eyes. I swallow a lump in my throat, vowing not to take it personally. No matter how many times this happens, I never get used to his sudden shifts in personality.
Almost to be a dick about it, I don’t swim in immediately. I lie back and look up at the sky, feeling my body gently rise and fall on the swells that carry me aloft like Rory had done just a few minutes before. My allegiance has switched to the sea. She, at least, is dependable, sort of. Rory’s not even watching me. He’s walked back up the beach to where our clothes are and is drying off with a towel. He says he loves me all the time. He’s asked me to marry him more than once. But something in the back of my mind keeps nagging me to be cautious. There’s something I already know but don’t want to see.
“But what is his character like? What are his values?” my best friend asks after she meets him.
I don’t understand what she’s talking about. “Look at him, Anne! He’s perfect. Can’t you just be happy for me?” I’m frustrated that it’s not totally obvious to her how amazing he is. Why do I need to explain what I see in him? It’s a fragment of a conversation from an uneventful day. And yet I’ve gone over it a hundred times in my mind, trying to glean what I missed about Rory in the first place.
I’m careful. I wait a long time before I introduce Rory to my son. I know Nick will like him, and I don’t want to risk either of our hearts until I’m sure it’s serious. After six months, I arrange for them to build a rocket ship together for Nick’s fifth-grade science project.
The other students gather around as Rory and Nick huddle together on the schoolyard blacktop. Rory holds the directions in one hand, helping Nick stabilize the launchpad with the other. They light the fuse and jump back, but nothing happens. Then, in a burst of flame and smoke, the rocket shoots skyward, ascending several hundred feet into the air, disappearing from view. The other kids cheer and congratulate Nick, running out onto the soccer field to scavenge the fallen capsule. It’s an unequivocal success.
I walk with more confidence in the school pickup line after that, especially when Rory is with me. Nick seems proud, too, in his own quiet way, like we have a unicorn on a leash or something. I’m grateful to be able to shed the label of “single mother” for a while and imagine that the other women envy me rather than pity me, the way I fear that they usually do. It’s impossible to express the sense of relief I feel having the protection of a man in my life again.
That tension between independence and security is churning inside of me as I float here, alone in the water. I feel colder without Rory, but also more real. I’m aware that I’ve been acting like those superficial girls I was jealous of in high school. I’m surprised at myself. I didn’t realize I’d been harboring such a deep-seated need. It’s clear to me now that Rory represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a do-over.
I’m on the verge of an epiphany, when I suddenly get that tingling feeling, that dreadful sensation that I’m being watched, and it’s not by my boyfriend. My awareness flips upside down, and I can see myself as I appear from underwater: pale limbs dangling down from above. My subconscious is trying to tell me something, knocking on the door of my awareness with symbols and metaphors from the murky deep. I turn around and see that the sun is gone. There’s nothing left but an orange smear on the horizon. I need to swim in.
I catch the first wave, but it’s a dud. I keep paddling. The second one moves me forward a few feet. For some reason, I’m panicking. I have a vision of a solitary great white shark gliding in the gloom, its black eye darting, curious snaggleteeth aching to investigate. I put my head down and start pulling hard in a flat-out crawl, breathing only when necessary. I keep my kick powerful and neat, no splashing. I’m good at this. But I forget that I’m inside the surf break, and before I know it, I get caught up in a massive dumper that pounds me down to the ocean floor. I let the wave take me and spin me around in a washer cycle. I know that when it’s done I’ll be scooting into shore.
Things change after that. It’s as if the unseen threat has followed me out of the water and is chasing me around everywhere I go. I start to second-guess Rory’s judgment. He notices the briskness in my tone of voice. Several times, when we’re driving home from dinner, we find we have nothing to say to each other. I stare out the window of the car, watching the streetlights flash by, wondering where the happiness went. I tell myself that we’re in a difficult phase, that we’re both stressed out from work. He complains that I’m dismissive of his opinions, impatient with him. I can’t deny that I am distant, critical of his choices, no longer in awe of my fine, strapping boyfriend. Suffice to say, we’re fighting more. Rory gets short with me, and I deserve it. I’ve become increasingly insecure. But he’s still pushing for total commitment, as though catching me like a wave could magically transport him over the trouble and let him outrun the consequences of his mistakes. In romantic moments, he lobbies to get me pregnant. I still believe that he loves me, that we love each other. I’ve never had any reason to doubt it.
He breaks up with me, finally. We go on this terrible vacation, and I’m a sullen, uncooperative bitch. Maybe I want to push things to a head, because nothing is making sense anymore.
Something is pulling the puppet strings of our interactions and making him act crazy.
He writes beautiful love letters, pledging his life to mine, then gets blackout drunk and is barely able to lift his head the next morning. For two weeks he doesn’t speak to me. Then he comes over and cries like a baby on my couch, holding my face in his hands as he weeps, saying that we can never be together. It’s so weird. I’m like, But I’m right here. He says he wants to make love one more time, so we do, on the floor in front of my fireplace, but I don’t feel anything. Somehow, I feel irrelevant to the drama in my own relationship.
I need to get out of town. Rory is exhausting me. I drive to Arizona and meet my friend Kim, who is attending a Greenbuild conference in Phoenix. We ride around the city in rickshaws and stop at three or four bars. We go to a NASCAR rally and have a blast. It feels so good to be myself again, free from anything having to do with Rory. I’m not sure I fully realize yet that this is the end.
On the drive home, over the phone, he finally tells me what’s been happening. He’s never completely stopped seeing the girl he was dating right before me, a trainer who works at his gym. She got pregnant, and two months ago she gave birth to his son. I’m thinking, Two months before this conversation? You mean the son that you kept pestering me to have this summer, you jackass? The imaginary son you named and joked about and tried to impregnate me with, but I wanted to wait? Jeeeeezus fucking Christ.
