by E. J. Levy
When Richard told her a month ago that he was sleeping with one of his students, Lisa had found the confession hard to believe. Like a bad plot twist in one of her student’s stories, his phrases had seemed hackneyed, overdone. He did not tell her he was leaving her; that part had been her idea. He said, simply, that he was having an affair. Then he wept. “Who is she?” Lisa asked, her voice cold, as it is in the face of conflict. Emotion becomes remote to her when she needs it most, like a polite guest slipping out when the family dinner conversation takes too personal a turn. He told her that the girl was a former student, emphasizing the first of these two words. Former student. He told her he did not mean for this to happen. They had gone for coffee a few times to discuss—Lisa interrupted him. “Don’t give me details,” she said. “I do not want to know.” One detail she will remember though, from what he’s told her, one detail she cannot forget: The student he is fucking smells like ripe avocados. “We’ve lost the sense of wonder,” he told Lisa, explaining why he’d strayed. “There are no surprises between us anymore.” She told him that he was wrong. That she was surprised as hell; she was surprised that after six years of quasi-marriage he was going to leave her for a smell. She was surprised at herself for picking up a plate from the dinner table and hurling it at his handsome chest. She was surprised to find that she is a very good shot.
At home, after her class, she makes herself a cup of tea and stretches out across the bed that once was theirs. On the bedside table, a cairn of mostly unread books. The topmost one is The Inferno, translation by Ciardi, Lisa’s version of pulp fiction. She likes the opening best: the forest Dante wanders through alone.
She can trace the origins of all her love affairs to books. With Richard it was Dante, Martin Amis, and Roland Barthes. Their first conversation had been about A Lover’s Discourse, which Richard recommended that she read. He told her about his late nights staying up till four to trace the figures through the pages back and forth, his hands on the sheets, making notes in the margins. It could have been a body they were discussing. She had promised him she’d get the book that day. They were working that summer as interns for an august and long-standing lefty mag that worked them hard and paid them little; that was how they met. Checking facts and running down photos. They took pride in living well and on the cheap, in scamming press passes to the MoMA, cutting work to attend free screenings. She remembers this one day in particular: as they rode the elevator down from the ninth-floor office, they talked about their lives before that summer. Richard told her about growing up in LA. She told him about her summer spent in Italy on a grant.
“What were you doing in Italy?” he asked.
“The usual,” she said. “I went to fall in love with the world. To recover from my education. I wandered around Florence thinking I was Michelangelo, thinking I was Dante.”
He’d smiled. “Who was your Virgil?”
“I’m still looking,” Lisa said. But it wasn’t true. In that moment she thought that she had found him. Two months later he moved in.
Now, lying here alone, awake, at night, she goes over the narrative of their life together looking for clues, what she might have noticed and failed to, the tropes, foreshadowing, repeated imagery, all the things she tries to get her students to consider but cannot. She thinks about character, point of view, motivation, tense, how one action led causally to the next.
In class last week she told her students about fiction diction, which she told them differs from actual conversation in that there is always another meaning in the text. In fiction, unlike life, she said, you do not mean what you say. “A character does not come right out and say ‘I do not love you anymore. I am leaving you for an undergraduate who smells like avocados.’” Her students looked at her, concerned. “The story would be over,” Lisa said. “Instead, a character might say, ‘Let’s get a beer.’” They were reading “Hills Like White Elephants” that week, and in context, Lisa tells herself, the comment had made sense. Now she’s not so sure.
Her life is a jumble of uncertain anecdotes, images, and scraps she cannot make into a whole; what she gets instead is a headache. Everything she struggles to get her students to do, she now tries. She looks for the moments of decision, the fatal flaw; she has explained to them the concept of hubris, with which they were not acquainted. She has introduced them to irony, which amazingly some hadn’t heard of. Welcome back to the Midwest, she thinks. This, she told friends at college in the East, was why she was a sickly child, growing up in Minnesota, sorrowful and grim: She suffered from an irony deficiency.
What Lisa can’t get over, what keeps her up this night, is how sudden it was. Their ending. Like a bursting pipe. Like the clutch that gave on her car last week as she was idling at a light. Sudden as a stroke her car had died. One minute she was moving, then paused at a light; the next minute there was no gear to shift into, just a growling as she frantically tried to stick the shift into a slot. She flipped on her emergency blinkers, got out, rolled the tin can that had taken her across the country a dozen times to the curb. The mechanic said it wasn’t worth the money she’d spend to fix it. “Are you sure?” Lisa had asked. It seemed to her that people were altogether too quick to give up. Americans were always ready to move on, at the first sign of damage or dissatisfaction. “It’s been a good car,” she said. She knew the body was imperfect, dented, but the heart of it, its engine, had been good. “It’s been a good car,” she repeated. “Probably,” the mechanic said, as if he were not sure. “If it was a cream puff, lady, I’d say maybe, but this is no cream puff.” His hands were stuffed into his pockets. “If it were a cream puff,” Lisa said, “I wouldn’t have been driving it eighty down a freeway.”
Still awake at four a.m., Lisa gets herself out of bed and curls up on the couch to work. If she cannot sleep, she can at least grade student papers. She hauls her briefcase onto her lap and tips it up to empty out the stack of papers, but index cards spill out instead. She gathers up the clump of cards and shuffles through them, sorting, reshuffling other people’s sorrows. She tries to imagine some useful purpose for them. She envisions, for an instant, a board game like this: where you choose a regret or a fear, where you are dealt these cards and then deal with them. But what would be high, what low? How could you possibly win? For a moment, she considers mailing them to the nubile girlfriend of her ex, whom she has identified on campus, or thinks she has. She considers mailing them to enemies or friends. She considers sending them one by one, like postcards from a tropical vacation, to Richard.
Each morning her mother calls her with more news—the latest on her father’s infidelity. She calls Lisa and leaves messages on her answering machine, messages Lisa does not return. Her mother’s voice, when Lisa replays the messages, is an anxious blur. Lisa does not hear the words, just tone. Her mother’s bitter cheer. “Hi, sweetie,” she says. “This is your mother calling. Just wanted to find out how you’re doing.” She calls to remind Lisa that her sister’s birthday is tomorrow. She calls to ask if she is coming over for a visit. Her voice is edgy with enthusiasm. All week, after their walk, she calls. Unanswered, she persists.
Lisa first learned about her father’s affair two weeks ago, precisely two weeks after Richard told her of his own. The symmetry appalled her, the neat parallels of fiction cropping up in life. She was in the lobby of her therapist’s office, waiting for her session, when she decided to check her machine. Her therapist’s office has a courtesy phone on a table in the reception area, and Lisa is her father’s daughter. She cannot resist a free call. In all the years she was growing up, she remembers her father best through his calls. Brief and out of the blue. He traveled most of the time, conducting seminars in tax law in Omaha, Baton Rouge. He was not around much, but he called. Whenever it was “somebody else’s nickel.” Whenever there was a company phone. Whenever he didn’t have to pay. He would ask if there was any hot mail, any important calls, then he would ask for her mother.
Sometimes, when there are no messages
these days, Lisa feels bereft. Sometimes she calls back just to make sure. Too often these days, when she is alone, time stands still. There is no movement. She feels cut off from the vital flow. That day, though, there were many beeps. Thank God. The voices are like ropes cast out to her to haul her back to safety. They give her a reason to go on; they keep time moving forward with their requests, their invitations, their calls for help. An editor had called to tell her he had a book on his desk he’d like her to review; there was an invitation to a party; and there was her father.
Her father had called to tell her that they were back in town. They had been to a couples’ workshop in northern Minnesota for the past week. Now they were back.
“Your mother and I have returned from the Northwoods,” he boomed. “Actually, we haven’t been in the Northwoods, we’ve been on a voyage into ourselves. We’re back,” he said, “and we’d like to share with you some of our discoveries. We’d like to introduce you to the new parts of ourselves. Give us a call,” he said. “Stop by.”
This, Lisa imagines, is the sort of thing that happens to affluent, educated people in their seventies—these enthusiasms. In another era they might have become pious. But her parents gave up religion long ago, read the existentialists, studied physics and the brain. Long ago, they secularized their longing. What religious fervor must have been to another century, faith in self-help books and PBS are to her parents and their kind. They read Joseph Campbell and listen ardently to Bill Moyers’s specials; they take an interest in theories about the goddess within; they believe the opinions in the New York Times. It is not so much faith they seek as a decline in incredulity. They have believed in nothing but their own efforts for so long that their spiritual faculties have atrophied. They cast themselves about with ill-gotten fervor, like adolescents in a first brush with love. Nevertheless, Lisa had been disappointed to discover this sappiness in her father, the high-powered lawyer. In her mother of the 190 IQ.
On the way home from therapy, Lisa dropped by her parents’ house. Her father was seated in the living room, reading the local paper when she walked in; he said from the couch that he was delighted she’d stopped by. They’d had an exciting adventure, he said, gained many insights into their relationship and into themselves that they’d like to share with their children. Lisa felt vaguely nauseated as she took a seat.
“I’m happy for you,” she said. “But I don’t want to know how you feel about your marriage. I’m your daughter,” she said, thinking she should not have to explain this.
“Well, then you don’t have to listen.” He shifted his bulk on the cushion. Squinted at her. “I was disturbed,” he said, in his skeptical, lawyerly tone, “to learn from your mother this weekend that you once suggested that she have an affair.”
There was a glint in his eyes, as if this were a game, the way he used to look when he’d test Lisa and her sister with torte-law dilemmas over dinner. “I don’t recall having said that,” Lisa said, “but if I did, I suppose I meant it. She needed more than kids for company, Dad.”
Her father’s eyes softened, grew unfocused.
“So let me ask you a question,” Lisa said. “Did you ever have an affair?” It was an idle question, but the subject—given Richard’s recent revelations—was on her mind. Lisa’s sister had once speculated that their father had had an ongoing affair with a lawyer he worked with in Louisiana. Lisa hadn’t thought it possible then.
Her father smiled at her. “Yes,” he said. “I did. Ten years ago. I told your mother about it this weekend.” He looked delighted, as if he had won a debate. It was not the confession but his evident delight in the confession that appalled her. He seemed pleased to have cheated, and pleased to tell her so.
The garage door opened, went up, went down.
Her father said, hushed and quickly, “Your mother’s coming.” The door to the kitchen opened behind them, and they heard Lisa’s mother come in.
“Hi, sweetie,” she called from the kitchen. “How are you?”
“We were just talking about Dad’s affair,” Lisa said, looking past her father, defying him to shut her up.
“Oh,” her mother said, coming into the living room. Her tall and lovely mother bent in half and sank onto a cushion on the couch; she looked tired, worn out. “I was pretty upset when I first learned about it. But then I realized,” she turned to Lisa’s father, “we’ve done worse to each other.” Her father raised his chin, frowned as if interested in this equanimity, in the novelty of this response. Lisa wanted to punch him.
“But,” she said, turning back to Lisa, “the workshop was very exciting.” She told Lisa about the rules of the couples’ workshop. Everything, she said, was defined in terms of E/A: Encounter and Acceptance. Experience and Analysis. Enlightenment and Acknowledgment.
“I don’t believe this,” Lisa said.
“What don’t you believe?” her father said.
Lisa ignored him. Faced her mother as if they were alone.
“Dad has just told you he had an affair,” Lisa said. “What are you going to do?”
“We’re trying to work it out,” her mother said.
“Jesus Christ,” Lisa said, inexplicably angry. “I have spent my entire adult life getting the divorce you didn’t. I have spent my whole adult life leaving your marriage behind. I want another kind of love than this.”
“Good for you,” her father said. He beamed at her. “I love the daughter within me.”
“What is he talking about?” Lisa had no idea. Her mother explained that this was Weir-speak—which Lisa will thereafter refer to as Weird-speak—more from the couples lab. It is called “percept language” and reflects the belief that no one ever really knows anyone else, only one’s perception of them. Hence, her mother told her, it is impossible to say, “I love you.” You can only say, “I love the image of you I carry within me. I love the daughter within me.”
“That is ridiculous,” Lisa said. “That is absurd.” People, it seems to her, are always doing this to reasonable ideas, distorting them until they become parodies of themselves. They have done this to God, to karma, now to Wittgenstein. It is one thing to acknowledge that perception is a factor in relationships; it is another to deny the possibility of self-transcendence. “Love is about self-transcendence,” Lisa said. “To say ‘I love you’ is to make a gesture beyond narcissism; the whole point is to move beyond oneself, to say it is you I love.” But she gave up. She knew her parents did not know this other kind of love. Nor did she.
“E, A,” her mother said.
“I love the daughter within me,” her father said.
Lisa said, “I am going home. I am leaving now. I’ll call you later, Mom.”
When she tells Gretchen about this later, she will make it comic-operatic, their three voices an absurd chorus. But the truth is, she finds nothing funny in it now. She is ashamed that they are none of them better at love than this.
Lisa should be studying or preparing for her class, but she sits among the library carrels studying the girls instead. She wonders who it is that Richard beds now. She watches as they pass her—on the sidewalk, on the street, the ones in cars, in hallways, carrels, in the stacks; everywhere she wonders, Is it her?
Her mother calls to tell her there have been muggings in the park; the woods are no longer safe to walk. A man was held up at gunpoint. A housewife has been raped. Her mother thought she’d want to know. “It’s not safe,” her mother says, speaking to the machine. “Stay out of the woods.” Her mother calls her as she’s heading out the door to pick up her car that has been fixed. Lisa does not pick up the phone but she listens to the words broadcast out into the room. The voice asks Lisa to stop by. And since Lisa has lost the trick of time since Richard left, since time holds still now and she cannot see the point in doing anything or going anywhere, except to class, she goes to see her mom.
It is a week now since their last walk, and the leaves in the garden are mostly fallen. The woods look skeletal as she drives past.
But she is happy to be going home. She will drink coffee, she will eat cottage cheese and toast. There is this compensation in her father’s recent revelations: They know the worst of one another now and can go on.
Truth is, she doesn’t judge her father for it. For wanting more. She understands it. Though she’s sorry for her mom.
But Lisa’s wrong. The coffee is not brewed when she arrives. Her mother doesn’t offer lunch; she offers news instead. She reels off a litany of betrayals, as Lisa stands there peeling off her coat: It was not just one affair, it seems, but a career of infidelities—blow jobs, hand jobs, phone sex, graduate students. Her mother tells her everything as her husband has told her. They sit at the kitchen table, whispering.
When her father walks into the kitchen for his lunch, Lisa’s mother hushes her. “Hey, Lee,” her father says. “I didn’t realize you were here, hon. How are you?” He opens up the fridge to forage. “Fine,” she says. “We’re just talking about what a dick you are.” “Ah,” he says, apparently unruffled. He pulls out a plate from the bowels of the fridge and faces his women. “Anyone going to eat this?” he says, holding up a plate to them.
At home, Lisa calls Gretchen and tells her all about it. Gretchen says it must feel terrible to know those things about her dad.
But in truth, Lisa thinks, it does not. She is relieved to know her father wanted more. More than the lawn, the car, the house, the wife, the kids. She is relieved that he wanted more than this and got it.
“It’s funny,” Lisa says. “In a weird way I’m relieved, y’know?” Lisa says. “And it makes a kind of sense.”
“What does?”
“Richard. The Avocado.” This is how she refers to Richard’s new girlfriend these days, and sometimes, when especially aggrieved, she calls her just the Smell.
