by David Payne
But six months have turned to eight and nine now, and I’ve begun to ask when she expects to finish, and Stacy says she isn’t sure but feels she’s getting closer. When it gets to a year, I’m angry, I feel rug-pulled, as though we’re right back where we were in New York when we broke up the first time, and the issue is the same one.
–Three months, Stacy, three months is what you said.
–So what, David, how long did it take you to write your first book, ten years?
And it’s true. I feel cold-cocked when she says it. I head up onto the mountain and cut a tree down, stack a quarter cord of firewood. When I return, the storm’s blown over or receded. Stacy goes on writing in the loft, I go on writing in the guest room, and nothing changes except that when I come to bed at night, I often find her sleeping with her back turned, and my single-jigger drink’s become a double.
By the two-year mark, it’s gone to hell. We’re living in the same house and barely speaking, and somewhere near this time Stacy actually finishes the script I’ve begun to suspect exists only in her imagination. She sends it to an agent who says she likes it, only it’s too “artsy,” not commercial. The agent wants Stacy to write a second script—one featuring a male protagonist. When Stacy finishes, the agent says, she’ll try to sell the two together.
Fuck that, send it out again! I tell her, but Stacy’s in despair. To have come so close a second time—in writing, as before in acting—and to need to write this second script and know she isn’t going to get to write it because there’s no one to support her while she does it. She puts it in a drawer and I’m bemused and scared and angry—suddenly our situation in Vermont looks disconcertingly as if we’re under an enchantment and if you gazed toward the window you’d see briars growing up around the tower.
And then, as if on cue, when things can’t get much worse, they blow up altogether.
In Year Four of my book contract, when I finish my fourth novel and send in my final pages, the editor rejects it. Instead of the $50,000 installment I’m expecting on completion, my agent tells me I owe back to the publisher the $165,000 I’ve been paid already.
–How is that possible? They’ve seen three-quarters of the book and paid installments all along. They can’t reject it now.
–They can, he says. According to the satisfaction clause, at any point prior to final acceptance, they can reject the book for virtually any reason, and you owe back the full advance.
–But it’s gone. We’ve lived on it.
–I understand, believe me.
–Will they come after me?
–I don’t know. They could.
–Can we sell it elsewhere?
–We can try, but I think we’ll be lucky to get half. And whatever we do get goes to the publisher first and you’ll still owe the balance.
–Fuck me.
I ask him to inquire about rewriting, and he gets back to me and says the editor agrees but says, I have no idea how to tell him how to fix it.
So I spend the next eight weeks setting out in some radical new direction I don’t recall now and send the pages to my agent, who calls and says, I wish I could say I love it, David. I try again, another eight-week cycle, and after that another, and another, and another, six times total, and there you have Year Five under contract at income zero as Stacy and I live on credit card advances and our balance with Providian hits five figures and climbs northward. Year Six? Da capo and repeat the chorus. By this point I’ve burned up my thyroid gland and cracked four bottom molars from grinding them while sleeping—bruxism, the dentist calls it. Four root canals, four crowns. By now I can no longer bring myself to walk to the mailbox, afraid to find the letter informing me that the publisher is commencing legal action, coming for our house and property, our only assets.
Stacy’s on the move now, frantically driving up to Middlebury—a postgraduate degree might enable her to teach acting, and culinary school’s another possibility—and she brings home brochures and I say, Who’s supposed to pay for it? And when she looks for jobs, all she finds available is retail down in Manchester, working for eight, ten bucks an hour, and I say, Fuck it, why even bother? Against our debt, the wage seems insignificant, but Stacy’s therapist accuses me of sabotage and, looking back, I think he was right. Though I didn’t see it at the time, I suppose the power I had in the relationship, my sense of righteousness and victimization, was worth more to me than $10 an hour, though if Stacy had taken the job it might have eased the pressure on our marriage.
At the time, in conflict, without insight, I don’t even see how much our situation in Vermont resembles George A. and Margaret’s down in Winston. All I see is that nothing’s different, not the least bit, neither of us has grown up, we each thought the other had—meaning come around to our position. As in New York at twenty-five and thirty, so in Vermont at thirty-five and forty, only now we’re married.
So Stacy doesn’t get a job, my revisions are going nowhere, we go on living in the same house and practicing mutual avoidance. I’m so mad and scared now and can no longer sleep without medication, and my drinking’s getting worse, I’m often having double doubles and on bad days triple doubles and I’m no fun to live with, zero, and when I drink sometimes I lose my temper and shout the way I swore I never would, and the intervals decrease between eruptions—six weeks, four weeks, two weeks, weekly. And Stacy gives me that look that says or seems to me to say, Who are you? I thought you were someone different, and it seems so unjust and it still kills me.
At the root of my explosions, I think I’m arguing that I’m a good and decent person who’s meant well and has been generous to her, however badly things have foundered. I want Stacy to say, Thank you, David, for those two years in New York when you supported me while I pursued my dream of acting, and for these two years in Vermont—for the first one, you were kind and willing, and the second, though you grudged it, you still gave it. But Stacy gives me nothing, and the more I argue, the less inclined is she to give it.
And perhaps on Stacy’s side, she wants me to say, Thank you, Stacy, for loving me and listening generously and sympathetically, for making my house a warmer place, redolent of fresh-baked bread with a vase of flowers on the table. Looking back, I wonder if what Stacy wanted wasn’t what I felt bottom-fishing in the Albemarle with Pa Rose and what perhaps she’d felt only with Ginger, to be seen and understood and loved without condition by someone who won’t let you go down and will go down with you if he or she has to, for shouldn’t one person in this hard and often disappointing world stand up for you no matter what, shouldn’t your lover—now your husband—support you and assist you in your soul quest not for three months or two years but for however long, however far?
But I don’t give it to her, either.
Instead we fight. I fight with heat and Stacy fights with coldness. At the time, it seems that every fight is different and specific, but looking back I see it’s the same fight over and over, a perpetual-motion machine whirring underneath the surface, a machine whose principle of operation and perpetuity eludes my understanding, though it seems to have a sense of purpose. What does the machine do? It makes us blame and make each other—and ourselves—unhappy by demanding of the other what the other can’t and doesn’t want to give us, by demanding from the other what is against the other’s nature and feeling cheated when denied it.
Do we know how bad it is? I don’t think so. Don’t people tell you marriage is no picnic? Is our picnic-less-ness worse than others’? Are we outside the bell curve, out of hailing distance, or different only as fingerprints and snowflakes? Whom do you ask when you only have each other and the example of your parents’ marriages, which failed as egregiously as ours is failing?
And what if we or one of us had told the truth? What if I had? What if I’d said, I’ve done as much as I want to or intend to.
What if Stacy had said, I don’t want to join you in the traces, David
. Why should I give up my dream and have to grind it in the real world working to eat to live in order to keep working when you never have and have consistently refused to?
If one of us had spoken perhaps we might have split or renegotiated our contract or had one for the first time. But neither of us says it. Why not? I can’t speak for Stacy, but for me the reason is the old one. If I say it, she might leave me alone before the Urals, and this way, see, even if I’m angry and unhappy, at least I have the hologram of Stacy, the hologram of our couplehood and marriage, even if my real wife is upstairs sleeping with her back turned.
And then one day Stacy comes to me and says she’s had two dreams, two only, to be a working artist and to be a mother, and now the first is gone. She wants to have a baby.
–Jesus, Stacy, I say, this isn’t the right time. We’re in the middle of a crisis. I need to resolve this before we even think of having children.
–What time is ever “right”? I’m thirty-seven, David. You said you wanted to have a family.
She’s right, too, I did say that and she is thirty-seven and the years went helling by much faster than either of us expected. I’ve made her suffer and blamed her for things for which she wasn’t responsible and been a bastard, who once wished to make her happy and still wants to make her happy, which is why I consent now.
And not long after, my agent summons me to New York. I drive to Whitehall and take the Amtrak to the city. It’s a wet, raw winter day in SoHo, and I meet him in some eatery off Prince Street where he grins and gives me a big bear hug. As soon as we sit down and order, though, he puts aside his menu and his demeanor sobers.
–David, as your professional representative, I don’t think it’s in your interest to continue with this novel.
–But you said you thought the book might be my best one . . .
He looks at me the way a sports fan looks at a contender, someone he’s had money riding on, who’s in the midst of a great contest and is losing, and simply makes no further comment.
We get through lunch, making polite, perfunctory inquiries about personal matters, and it’s raining when I leave and I walk all the way north to Grand Central and my good English shoes—the ones I bought when I lived with Terrence at 99th and West End—are scuffed and soggy when I get there. A five-hour train ride back to Whitehall gives you time to think, and north of the city the rain turns to snow, and starts falling heavily. Dusk arrives, then dark, and as the ties tick under me, I gaze out at lighted windows in muddy little upstate towns and crossroads and at woods and wilderness where the snow is piling up beyond them. I try to think about my situation, my next move and so on, but the only thing I remember from that train ride now is, The woods are lovely, dark and deep . . . The woods are lovely, dark and deep . . . Just that line, over and over.
And when I get back to Wells there’s a foot of new snow and the driveway isn’t plowed. I gun the Saab up the steep part and put it in a snowbank, and then I walk two hundred yards across the meadow in my good shoes which are now ruined. Upstairs, when I sit down in the armchair to unlace them, Stacy, who’s in bed with her back turned, asleep, I think, sits up and turns the light on. Her face is pale and strained.
–David, I’ve got some news . . .
I know what it is before she says it.
–I’m pregnant.
I look into her eyes and then out the window for a moment, then I walk over to the bed, take her face between my hands, and say, That’s so great, Stacy. So great.
–Are you coming to bed?
–I’ll be up in a little while.
Downstairs, I pour a drink and atop my stack, as fate would have it, is Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer’s account of the Everest disaster in 1996, where eight people died descending from the summit, including two of the most experienced climbers, Rob Hall from New Zealand and Scott Fischer from America, both expedition leaders. What grips me as I read, as apparently it gripped many, is the story of Beck Weathers, the Texan neophyte, who lay facedown in the snow all night in a Himalayan gale, sank into hypothermic coma, was given up for dead and left behind by his companions, yet stood and walked back into camp with one arm frozen solid and made it off the mountain.
Gray light is streaming through the window as I turn the final page, and I feel settled in a way I haven’t felt in some time. In the kitchen I hear Stacy making coffee, and I stare toward the gap and the blue profile of the Adirondacks fifty miles away. As I was finishing my rejected novel I was spending eighteen-hour days pounding on the keyboard, laughing and sounding out my sentences for cadence the same way I once did with my first one. I thought the book was strong, and the strongest part was the big shipwreck scene in the finale, and Stacy thought so, too, and my agent, on his first read, concurred, even if the editor’s rejection shook him, as it did me.
So today instead of setting out in yet another new and radical direction, I sit down and reread what I sent in in the first place, and pretty soon I’m flipping pages, as engaged in the disaster I engineered as when I engineered it, and when I’m done I write two letters, the first one to my agent, firing him, the second to my publisher, requesting a new editor, prepared to hear the baying of the hounds as they start north up the Taconic. Instead, to my surprise, the publisher agrees, and the new editor weighs in and says, I like it—what’s the problem?
I like it what’s the problem . . . With a heigh-ho, the wind and the rain . . .
The problem is that a book we could have lived on for four years and which I wrote in four has taken seven and that last installment payment, when it comes, goes mostly to our creditors, Providian and its successor companies. But at least we get to keep the house, and if we’re in the hole, there’s light above us for the first time in a long time.
And when I send Margaret the manuscript—which has a scene where the bipolar younger brother takes his older brother duck hunting on Pea Island, and all the shotgun business is recounted—George A. nabs it and calls me at the crack one morning and says he’s been up all night reading, and he’s bubbly and excited and tells me how much he liked it, and his generosity surprises me and shames me first before it moves me, and family love may not be stronger than time or death, but this morning it comes roaring like the brook down Northeast Mountain and blows out the constraints between us and we talk for thirty minutes or an hour the way we once did in the lair when I helped him get in shape and George A. turned me on to Blind Boy Fuller.
When the midwife calls to tell us it’s a girl, Stacy cries for twenty minutes and I stand and pat her shoulder and don’t know why she’s crying but think, Maybe now, maybe, maybe we can pull it out and love each other and be a family and be happy.
And on a hot August day in 1998 when Stacy’s water breaks, we get in our old Saab and drive like hell an hour north to Randolph to the birthing center and might as well have walked there. Grace, our daughter, takes her own sweet time, and comes out with an orange Mohawk and a fairy thumbprint on one eyelid, and we wash her in the kitchen sink and play with her and read her Home Sweet Home and play her Bach and Mozart and the Beatles and do all the things that parents do to give their children better lives. And we go sleepless for that year and then the next one, and as Grace grows and pulls herself upright we run behind—mainly Stacy does—on suicide watch as she puts her fat-knuckled fingers in every electric outlet. Me, I’m smitten and exhausted by her, my stamina’s for shit and drinking doesn’t help it, whereas Stacy is a dedicated, tireless mother, though I’m learning, slowly, how to be a father.
And Stacy has a full-time job now—being a mother with an infant—but three months have become three years and the one thing I’ve ever asked of her has been indefinitely deferred now, and when I go up most nights I find Stacy sleeping with her back turned. And though professionally I’ve fought the battle of my life and won, our marriage is really going wrong.
At fifteen months when Grace starts walking I take her with me
out into the meadows and up onto the mountain, to the secret glade beneath the hemlocks, and we sit in dappled sun and shadow, and Grace picks up the orange newts that live there and studies them and puts them back respectfully, and as I watch her something in me tightens, I have that difficulty breathing, my heart is pierced with that new feeling I don’t know the name of, regret or grief or hope or fear or all of them, and when the wind blows through the treetops or the brook runs in the distance I think it’s trying to tell me something. What, though?
And sometimes at the corner of my vision I see a shadow flitting, and though I’m careful, very careful, not to look in its direction deep down I know what’s lurking there behind me, the specter who has come to tell me I no longer love her and that Stacy no longer loves me, that though when I ask she says she does, I don’t believe her when she says it.
With Grace’s birth, Stacy has begun to talk of moving back to North Carolina. It’s too isolated here, she says, Grace needs to grow up with aunts and uncles, cousins, grandparents. And Stacy never took to Vermont the same way I did, to mud season and the seven months of winter and black flies and deer season when our little hidden valley rings with shotgun blasts and there’s a dead buck on the hood of every other salt-eaten pickup or every third one. Once a week, it seems, she raises this issue, and Stacy can’t understand my viewpoint, why I’m unwilling to roll the dice and start fresh with her down South in a place that will be better not just for her and Grace, but for me, too, she says.
And then one day, barely a year after Grace’s birth, Stacy comes to me and says she’s pregnant for the second time, and this time I don’t consent, reluctantly or otherwise.
–Are you kidding? You can’t be serious—you can not be serious—tell me you aren’t serious. How did this happen?
–It was an accident.
– Fourteen accident-free years with the diaphragm, and now an accident? I don’t believe you.
