“Number three,” you say. “Number three is this: When my husband died, I didn’t tell anyone but I was relieved. He was an alcoholic, the secret kind, and he was depressed, the secret kind of that, too, and speaking honestly: I was tired of dealing with him. I was drained. We were seriously talking about splitting up, and I had privately met with a lawyer. We loved each other in the beginning and all through the middle. But at the end . . . I’d say we hadn’t loved each other, really loved each other, for—not for a long time. He might have driven that pickup off the side of the road on purpose. At least he wasn’t drunk. For once, the asshole wasn’t drunk at the wrong time.”
No no no! You do not say this, of course. You do not. You will never say this despite it being the one true thing, despite thinking of yourself in the emotionally safe and gimmicky distance of the second person. Never. What you really say is: “Number three is this: When my husband died, I lost my best friend. And the world lost a remarkable, gifted poet. I’m piecing together the book manuscript he was working on, which he called The Ghost Child, and I’ll look to you—this community he loved—to support my efforts to carry forth his words, his true legacy to the world. We’ve lost Michael, but we all know his art can—and will—live on. That’s what he would want.”
Oh, the relief! Happy ending! With a rainbow! And a unicorn posed pertly next to the pot of gold at the end of that rainbow! This is exactly the story that everyone wants, and considerate you, giving it to them. You’ve turned Michael into the person they want to remember, and so what if they didn’t know him? Poof, you created a new Michael. Poof, a new you, The Brave Widow. Tentative smiles ripple the group—eyes are wiped, sniffles dried—and tension dissipates like air leaking from a balloon. Michael’s death felt awkward and annoying, but now that Michael is gone, replaced by a man with a half-finished poetry book, like most of the people in the room. And you’re another plucky survivor of the Game of Life. This is what you have created, that Dr. Frankenstein thrill you recognize from when you were writing.
Louise does not say, “Which is the truth?” as she has after everyone else’s turn. Instead, Louise announces, quite loudly, “Fuck you, you’re a lying cheater.”
There’s a collective gasp, murmured protests, a tightening: of the circle, of crossed arms, of lips. The room turns rigid and too close. Even the excluded people stare. The director says, “Okay, Louise, okay,” as if speaking to a child. His eyes fix on her. “I think . . .,” but his voice trails off as if he isn’t sure what he thinks, what anyone could or should think.
You extend one flat, upraised palm—kind of a Jesus gesture of forgiveness, a Brave Widow moment—but what you say is, “I’ll take that fifty bucks, thank you,” and there’s another collective gasp. You wonder who is more hated right now, you or Louise, and you don’t care. You gave them the stories they wanted; does it matter why? She smirks, setting the money in your hand. The bill is slightly sticky. You don’t need fifty dollars; you’ve been told that the check for thirty thousand dollars of life insurance finally will be wire transferred to your bank on Monday.
“No one’s ever beat me,” she says.
“Meet the new boss,” you say. You like feeling cocky.
Louise yanks you into an uncomfortable, showy hug meant to suggest more rainbows and unicorns, and you’re brash: “Go, Louise. Your turn now.” A few vague murmurs are enough to encourage her, so she steps back, gathering in a deep breath: “Okay. First, I ate acorns when I was a kid. My mom and I gathered them from the neighbor’s yard, and then she roasted them in the oven and ran them through the blender into powder and baked bread. Actually delicious.”
“They’re poisonous,” whispers the man with the bad brother-in-law, Mr. Blowjob Dog. The know-it-all. Acorns are not poisonous for people, and you guess this story is true. You remember a chapter in one of Louise’s novels where a little boy eats acorns because he’s afraid to go to the grocery store with his mother. You immediately Googled “acorns poisonous” because you wanted to catch Louise being wrong.
Louise says, “Next, is that my cat was on David Letterman’s ‘Stupid Pet Tricks’ because I taught her how to crack open eggs.” Everyone should know that’s true because she links to the YouTube clip on her website.
“Finally,” Louise says, “the last thing is that ages ago, back when I was at this conference the first time in 1996, I didn’t have my diaphragm one night and I got pregnant by Vanessa’s dead husband Michael—though he wasn’t her husband then and she didn’t know and he didn’t know until later—and I told him I got an abortion but I didn’t really. I had a little girl, and after two weeks, I hated being a mom, I couldn’t deal with a baby, and so a really nice couple adopted her and a little while later, I got an ‘inheritance’ of twelve thousand dollars that paid for me to move to New York. That’s where my story, ‘Where We Are When We’re Lost,’ came from—not from the dream I had while dozing on the Metro in Paris on my way to Jim Morrison’s grave, like I say in the interviews.”
No no no! No, she doesn’t really say that. But she could. This is true. Michael told you. Michael was the man who was “Michael” in the story. This is true, and Michael told you nine years after you got married, eighteen years after you got together, which adds up to four years ago when you found out. Recent, still. You had read Louise’s famous story in the New Yorker. “Look,” you said, “the man is named ‘Michael,’” and, “Look,” he said, “there’s something I have to tell you.” The two of you were eating tuna salad when he said this, and you gagged. You saw her finger cutting the air, that check mark. You don’t eat tuna salad anymore. Louise knows you know this. You never thought the money was true and neither did Michael, but maybe it is, maybe that’s how disgusting Louise might be.
No no no!
She really does say this. She really does say this, and everyone laughs in a horrified way because she says it in a fast, pleading voice like a little kid repeating a fabulously dirty joke she doesn’t get. Everyone laughs because they have all read her famous story, they have read the interviews about the famous story: the story about the story. Now there is this story on top of those stories. This new story cannot also be true.
But when they look at you not laughing, they fall silent, confused and nervous, like sheep being herded toward a cliff by a malevolent border collie. There are too many stories, suddenly. Suddenly no one knows what story to believe. The director opens his mouth as if he wants to say something but once again doesn’t know what to say, or maybe he wants to puke. But you can’t worry about him.
You scrunch up the fifty dollar bill into a tiny wad and hold on tightly. There are several things you could do right now. Laugh. You could choose to laugh.
“Which is the truth?” Louise demands of the group.
You choose to throw that wadded up bill in Louise’s face and then spin and push your way through the party, hurrying into the dark night outside as people call your name. You hear pity, and you run from it. You hear the truth.
INTERIOR MONOLOGUE: fully inhabiting one mind and its thought processes; often erroneously viewed as interchangeable with “stream of consciousness”; use sparingly, if at all.
Don’t look at the clock, don’t, don’t. Christ. 4:12. Goddamn doctor, one more refill would’ve been okay. Over-the-counter crap. The Ghost Child. Melodramatic title. Like her titles are anything, “Where We Are When We’re Lost.” Pillow smell, like a wet Band-Aid. A fly—a moth at night. If Emily wrote the poem at night, would’ve been “a moth fluttered.” Fluttered—buzzed—buzzed—fluttered. Buzzed, yes. Oh, Emily. If he hadn’t found her. If we had our own baby. If. Told him not to look. Michael is dead, Michael is dead. The Ghost Child, and the real ghost child, Emily, named for her grandmother, not the poet. Not everyone thinks about poets. He found her. Michael found his baby, found Emily. “Where We Are When We’re Lost.” Where we fucking are is standing in front of a tiny fucking gravestone in Portland. That shortcut growing up, cutting through the cemetery to walk to Mer
cer pool summers in Iowa, baby graves along the fence. Don’t walk on those, tiptoe over. Tiny. Lonely. Sad. We shut up, squabbles silenced. Picking dandelions to arrange on the sad baby graves. What those parents thought, a dozen dried-up dandelions on their kid’s grave. Sure, they visit years later, forever, now, still. Their child. Emily. A name Michael would pick if he were asked, if he had known. “Emily.” Father to a dead child. No wonder he. Supposed to be a teenager, cheerleader, mean girl, nerd, slut, drama queen, jock, smarty-pants—his eyes, that gap-toothed smile. Who believes in heaven? If he listened to me . . . don’t look, I said, I said, don’t look don’t don’t, no . . . no. If he didn’t want to make it right. If he hadn’t told me. If Louise. If. Damn it, who thinks a kid is dead? (And who is relieved when she is, relieved?) Eight years old, and a tiny gravestone. Michael is dead. I didn’t wish for that. (That, or for her to be—) Just—maybe, just—(Yes, you did.) Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, us fucking sinners like me, now and at the hour of our death, amen. Shit. (Sinners and suicides go to hell and cannot be buried in consecrated ground.) The clock—don’t look. There’s a clock in every book someone said. Okay, here’s my clock. Here’s the ticking. “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME.” Eliot. [sic] In your own fucking head you think, “[sic]” because you know the line exactly. Goddamnit. Always the writing, always words. Just once to escape! (Fuck.) Agent all, keep notes, she’ll shop the memoir. The Ghost Wife. Didion was a best-seller, Joyce Carol Oates excerpted in the New Yorker—no. No. No. Shouldn’t. Never wish for it. (But you did.) Never wish for anything. (You did.) Except sleep. It’s okay to wish for sleep (I’m a fucking sinner. Fuck.) (Everything could have been different.) If.
FIRST PERSON: I; primarily used in conjunction with a unique voice or the “unreliable narrator”; beginning writers should avoid this POV as its simplicity is deceptive.
That next morning I hunched in a corner of the dining hall, my hand curled around a cup of bad coffee, and people got the idea and left me alone. Louise didn’t show for breakfast, not when I was there anyway, which was fine by me. With nothing scheduled until the welcome reception before dinner—the students would be arriving throughout the day—I wandered outside to an Adirondack chair in a sunny field overlooking the pond. With a book in one hand, my computer in the other, I cultivated an aura of “writer at work,” ready to stave off anyone who approached. What a joke; I hated every word I wrote the past four years, even the published ones. Delete, delete. My computer was mostly a bookmark of cute cats. But for a good long while, I sat undisturbed, airport shuttle vans and cars coming and going amid a pleasant blur of distant commotion: crunching gravel, the bang of the main hall’s screen door, grunts of luggage shepherded about, jokes and greetings, hugs and handshakes, laughter. It was the sort of scene where it was easy to imagine Michael emerging. “Hey you,” he would say, not buying my “writer at work” pose, knowing I was anxious for the right company. “Hey you,” I’d say back, but then what? We were barely speaking in the end, fuck you about as likely as hey you.
The field—tinged golden already in August—was infused by sunlight. Grasses bent and whispered in an invisible breeze. I resolved not to drink tonight, or not to drink more than one drink. Dragonflies flitted and darted, their wings latching glints of light. I tried to think only of the things in front of me. Ripples on the pond. A group of attractive young men on the far side, bare-chested, smoking and lazing on a scrap of smooth shoreline. Something unmoving on the close bank that could be a turtle or a stump.
Sometime after lunch (I didn’t go; I barely ate anymore—only when people were watching), the director joined me, lugging over the chair that I had dragged ten yards away from mine. He wore shorts with too many pockets and a light blue windbreaker that had a damp-looking stain down the front. He sat down and slapped both his thighs. His legs seemed extraordinarily hairy. He pulled a slim paperback out of one of his many pockets and opened it widely, cracking the spine a bit.
He wasn’t actually reading—but then neither was I. We sat for a minute or two, staring blankly at our books, and finally he said, “I hope being here isn’t too hard for you.”
“It’s not.”
He said, “You shouldn’t mind Louise.”
“I don’t,” I said.
“You know,” he said, “I was in love with her.”
“We’re not playing the game anymore,” I said, trying to laugh and failing utterly. “But I suppose that sounds like the truth.” It wasn’t exactly a secret that Louise always had a string of men, so this wasn’t a surprise.
“I guess you remember that was about a year after my second wife died.”
Suicide, I remembered. So sad. There was a line in my book that I kept staring at for no reason: “Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now.” The Things They Carried. Tim O’Brien. The words felt like a different language, but one I understood slightly, like something once studied in high school. Michael meant to read this book because I told him he would like it. Now I was rereading it as if to compensate.
“Michael was a good man.”
“He was,” I said.
“Though it’s never that simple, is it?” he said. “‘A good man.’ Whatever that means.”
“What you call someone when he’s dead.”
He grunted, maybe in agreement, maybe not. “That’s what I’m hoping. But I don’t know.”
“Of course you are,” I said—a reflex, the expected reassurance, the E-Z suck up to the man who hired me to teach at the conference. “Here, I’ll say it when you’re alive: you’re a damn good man.” Once I heard myself, I was ashamed; my voice sounded artificial, like too sweet flavor syrup.
His eyes were fixed steadily on the open page of his book. Poetry. I saw short lines and white space. I wondered if the words on a page of poetry felt lonelier than the words in a novel. Or maybe they felt more precious. I could think about that all day, hours of only that in my mind so as not to think about anything else.
Finally, he said, “You met here, didn’t you?”
I nodded again. I felt sweaty and nervous and I suddenly had to pee. There was pressure to decipher a hidden meaning in his words, a message he intended that I couldn’t hear. I crossed my legs, uncrossed them. Nothing was comfortable.
“And we all played Louise’s game,” he said. “That night in 1996. Remember? Michael spooked everyone by describing his uncle’s exorcism. Remember that? We all knew he was bullshitting, but what a great story. The eyes rolling like pitted olives in a drunk’s martini. Remember?”
“Did we?” I said. “Did he say that? Sounds like him.”
“And you told us—.” He paused, flipped his book for a quick glance at the back cover, then continued: “You told us your mother committed suicide when you were six. You woke up and she was in your bed.”
“You’ve got quite the memory.”
“A lie, you said.”
“Of course it was, all of it.” I pressed one finger to the bridge of my nose, wondering if I should have put on sunscreen—not that I had any.
“But I think you were telling the truth,” the director said. “I’m pretty sure you were.”
I laughed. I swear there was an echo. “Then you were the only one,” I said.
“And Michael,” he said.
“Michael,” I repeated.
“He also thought it was true. That’s what I remember.”
I studied his face, pretending I wasn’t. A gleam cut through his eyes that might have been only a tricky bit of light. “Why would you say that?” I tried laughing again. “Why would you say that now?”
“The hardest thing when they’re gone,” he started. A long pause. I wondered if he would finish. Just when I was about to ask him, he continued: “The hardest thing when they’re gone is that they never actually leave. I loved her,” he said. “I really loved her,” and he stood up, shoved his book in his pocket and wandered away.
As I
listened to his footsteps crush the grass, I realized that I didn’t know if the her was Louise or the wife who had committed suicide or both or even someone else.
My mood was disjointed after that, his words running through my head like a toy train circling a single track. Yet I continued to sit, as if waiting for something more, until the light started to settle, and it was time to head back and get ready for the cocktail party.
When I returned to my room to change into whichever baggy black dress I had dropped into my suitcase at five in the morning (only yesterday!), there was a folded note thumbtacked to my door that I yanked free. I didn’t have to read it to know who it was from, so I crumpled it—like the fifty dollar bill—and, setting down my computer and book, I turned the knob, but there was a slight cough, and then there was Louise, rounding a corner in the hallway. “Going to aim that at me?” she asked, keeping her voice light.
“I like your skirt,” I said quickly. I didn’t—a zebra print; too short, too tight, and too expensive, for here, for her—but it was the sort of thing one might wear wanting attention, so I played along. Plus, she had scared the shit out of me, showing up abruptly. I wondered if she’d staked herself out, waiting.
“This old thing?” she said. Ironically, sardonically, sarcastically. I was never one for adverbs tagging dialogue—red penning them in my students’ work—but her voice had an edge that wasn’t easy to define. When unable to define things, I threw words at the problem. Mockingly, acerbically, derisively. Scornfully, disdainfully, contemptuously. That’s about it without clicking on the thesaurus function.
“Yes,” I said. “That old thing.”
She seemed startled, then rallied and said, “Did you read it?” She pointed at the note. Her fingernails were painted blood red, a different color than they’d been yesterday, and looked professionally done. Had she spent the day getting a manicure?
I smoothed the note and read out loud: “I loved him too—many of us did, you know. Yours is the greatest loss, but we’ve all lost something special. xo Lou-Lou,” which is what we had called her in 1996, or maybe it was what she had called herself. I couldn’t remember, only that seeing it there on paper made my stomach lurch, and I balled up the note again.
This Angel on My Chest Page 13
