Our Lady of the Prairie

by Thisbe Nissen

  My husband picked up the phone and I said, “Michael, I have to say something and it’s not something you’re going to like to hear so I’m just going to say it because you have to know. Nothing is worth anything unless I say this. I’ve just come from Lucius Bocelli’s house—the historian here I’ve mentioned to you—I’ve just come from his house where I spent the night with him. Sexually. I spent the night with him, in his bed, sexually. I slept with him. I left there and I came home—to this house, the sublet.” I felt myself faltering. “I came here and I called you. I haven’t taken off my shoes. I have not thought this through except to know I had to tell you.”

  There was silence on Michael’s end of the line. Then he said, “Phillipa?”

  “Of course it’s me!”

  He hung up.

  Ginny has told me that in the throes of an episode—in the midst of her descent into that place in her mind I will never truly know—she visits a moment of such uncontestable clarity, such blatant truth, that she’s compelled to abandon any previous notions of reality she may have held. All standing convictions as to the nature of existence are razed to the ground. The effect of my affair with Lucius on my marriage to Michael is possibly the closest I have come to understanding what she means. I had just toppled the logic of a partnership we’d lived more or less peaceably (Ginny notwithstanding) for nearly three decades. I was the firebomber. My husband was Dresden: unsuspecting, unprepared, and incinerated. And, yes, I speak from the relative safety of the plane, flying above the open target range below, but it’s a nightmare from every angle, no matter where you’re dreaming it from. And if you want a world to wake into, or land on, you’ll have to build it yourself, because there’s nothing left. Love changes everything.

  I redialed our number. Michael waited nine rings. When he picked up, he said nothing.

  “Michael?”

  “What.”

  “Please say something.”

  “What? I can’t . . .” He took a breath. “I’m not sure what . . . what is . . . Is this happening?”

  My relief was immeasurable. The helpless free fall of those nine long rings felt like something vital had been severed, but Michael’s voice opened the line like a channel of possibility, and for an instant I felt the telephone connection literally, felt the fiber-optic canal hollow out from my ear to his. “It happened,” I told him. The bed on which I sat—the bed of a professor of cultural criticism, on leave in Berlin doing esoteric research on a subject I could never remember—the bed was soft and deflatable as a soufflé. As I waited for Michael to speak, I thought that this would not be a particularly good bed on which to conduct an affair, and I knew that no matter what Michael said or didn’t say, this affair would be conducted.

  THE AFFAIR: three weeks of Ohio May and then who knows? I felt like the college seniors all around me, throwing up their hands and partying until the end: I’ll deal with the aftermath in the aftermath! The timing was, as such timing inevitably is, inauspicious, to say the least. Three weeks in the dawning Midwestern spring, and then I had to leave. It’s not clear to me how much the people around us knew, but I may be deluding myself to think anyone was unaware. We took measures of propriety, didn’t leave our cars parked all night on the street in front of each other’s houses, didn’t leave the house at which we slept and walk together to campus under the fluttery canopies of new-green leaves. We did not hold hands in public. But we were everywhere together: shared every meal, arrived and left together from every campus event we were professionally compelled to attend. It was as though we’d decided that since I was married, and nothing could be going on between us, then, for all outward purposes, nothing was. We’d clicked, we’d bonded, become fast and inseparable friends—we simply adored one another. I could even have imagined myself saying to Anthea Lingafelter, “Oh, I have such a crush on Lucius Bocelli,” and she’d say, “No kidding!” or “Join the club” or “You’re hardly the first, sweetheart,” and he and I would go on, cutting things a little close for some people’s comfort, pushing the line of our “friendship” further than credibility allowed while adamantly insisting our openness insured us against wrongdoing. Well, we seemed to say, I’m sure I’d assume we were sleeping together, too—we look really suspicious, don’t we? Perhaps we only looked pathetic, but Lucius was so revered there: beloved, long-tenured, and single. They likely thought he deserved a little something. I was the outsider, the visitor who’d be on her way soon enough.

  I had to leave a few days shy of the end of finals week to make it back for Ginny’s wedding. Sometimes I wish the schedule hadn’t been so unforgivingly tight and Michael and I had some time to contend with each other before the wedding. We tried to talk, but the phone felt impossible. Michael’s birthday fell during that period. What does one say to one’s cuckolded husband on his fifty-ninth birthday? Happy Midlife Crisis? Professors’ worlds narrow at the end of the semester just like our students’; we, too, live on coffee and microwave pita pockets in our sprint to the finish line. With more time, Michael and I might have handled things better, but—and I say this at the risk of sounding like I believe in a power higher than Murphy—sometimes I think it’s a blessing we had such little control over the unfolding events.

  I left Ohio the afternoon of the third Thursday in May 2004. As I kissed Lucius goodbye in his mudroom against the upright washer/dryer, the dramatics swirling in me belonged far more appropriately to the hormone-riddled twenty-two-year-olds prancing around campus like spring-born gnomes. Like them, I had little sense of what awaited me beyond the college gates. I put my car on I-80 West and drove, unfortunately, straight into the sun. I left my prescription sunglasses, I realized too late, on Lucius’s laundry room shelf, where he’d discover them, and then what? Call or email to say he had them? Find my address and mail them to me at home? Tuck them away until I returned? I had no idea; that’s how new it was, how unarticulated our terms.

  That evening, just past Gary, Indiana—facial muscles pinched, eyes strained from five hours of squinting—Chicago-area road construction narrowed the interstate to one lane and I spent three hours in traffic moving slower than an imperial cavalcade. In front of me, a glittery grape-colored Ford Aspire had a Bush-Cheney ’04 sticker and another that said If You’re Living Like There’s No God You’d Better Be Right. The license plate—primary colors, stick-figure drawings, a child’s green handprints, KIDS FIRST—was from Indiana. The plate holder read: Practice Safe Sex. Get Married and Be Faithful. For three seething hours, crawling forward in spurts that never got me out of second gear, it was all I could do not to stick my head out the window and yell, What about love? I was faithful for twenty-six years, then I fell in love—so what then? What would your goddamn god have me do then? I knew the answer, I suppose. I didn’t ask the question. Instead I put La Cage aux Folles on the stereo and sang along very, very loudly.

  In the traffic ahead of the Aspire—we aspire to build a decent car, really we do—was the longest semi I’ve ever seen, hauling what I finally figured out was a church steeple in an enormous plastic bag, factory-pristine as a special-order game piece, ready to be ripped open, hoisted up, and deposited by crane atop a prefab church in some planned shopping mall community off the interstate, the steeple Lego-clicking into place. SUVs hulked over me like steroid-muscled henchmen, and I thought of the running joke circulating among the eco-crunchier of my students: they added the word “anal” to the macho-militaristic names of those gas-gorging, flab-assed RVs and SUVs to make Anal Trailblazers and Anal Pathfinders, Anal Excursions, Anal Rodeos, Anal Coachmen, Anal Odysseys. I once saw an Anal Prowler. But that day on I-80, when I spotted a brontosaurus-sized Anal Invader towing an army-green Anal Armada, I was near tears, about ready to abandon my car in the parking-lot-of-a-highway and march west on the median into the setting fireball sun. Orah and Obadiah Yoder were killed by an SUV—the driver never saw the Yoders’ buggy as it crested the hill in front of their farm. They—Silas and Eula’s parents—died in a catastroph
e of horseflesh and blood and metal and fucking collard greens, and I blame every goddamn SUV owner for killing two of the best people I’ve known in this world. After the Yoders died I wanted never to drive again, to divorce myself from a society that allowed creation of the SUV. I wanted my own buggy. I wanted to move to Prairie, Iowa, and stake my own life against the world that had flown at Orah and Obadiah with the weight of all that American-made steel, obliterating those good, good people. The Amish, they forgive—they invite the murderer to the funeral, for chrissake!—and it’s not that they’re any less clobbered by loss than I am. They’re sick with grief, but not with anger, not with the hateful bitterness I parade around. They have their heaven, and everything’s better there, so they’re not angry when a loved one crosses over. But me, I’m a selfish, angry, godless Modern, and I want the Yoders here, with me and Ginny and Silas and Eula and the grandchildren they’ll never know. The Amish get past the Yoders’ deaths in a way I never will—and I’m not sure I want to. I hate this America where there’s no hope for a horse-drawn buggy to share the road. I’m so full of hate for it I don’t know what to do with myself. Yet, law-abiding citizen that I am, I didn’t abandon my vehicle on I-80 that day and wreak mayhem—this wasn’t Woodstock, it was a fucking death march: the great death march that is life in America—I sat in my car, waiting out the traffic like everyone else. Good Phillipa, good American.

  IT WAS TWO in the morning by the time I got home. Michael didn’t rouse when I entered the bedroom; if he was awake, he didn’t let on, just lay on his side of the bed as he had for all of our marriage. For longer than Ginny’d been a person on the earth, Michael had slept on his side of that bed, I on mine. To return home (albeit from an extended trip, in the course of which I’d broken my marriage vows) and not fall, exhausted, onto my side of the bed was something I had never done. I’d been going on adrenaline for three weeks by then. Adrenaline and—forgive me—sex. More sex than I’d been involved in for a long time. It is only luck that I did not kill anyone on I-80 that night. I should have been stopped at the toll plaza; in no way could I have appeared fit behind the wheel.

  I got as far as the edge of the bed and couldn’t go any farther. It felt wrong. I was degenerate with exhaustion. The dilemma of what to do if I didn’t climb into the bed bloomed into such a paralytic cloud that I have no memory of sinking to the floor, but that’s where I was when I next came to. The ensuing sequence I can only see as if it’s part of a pretentious student-staged drama: each time the lights come up, the stage is set with a new tableau, a different arrangement of characters in space to mark the passage of time.

  Lights rise on two figures. Him: asleep in bed. Her: sitting upright on the floor, asleep, head against the mattress. Lights down.

  Lights up. Two figures. Him: slumped on the edge of the bed staring blankly out, his hand, flat and noncommittal, on the top of her head. Her: asleep, head on the metal bed frame, neck crooked at a distressing angle.

  Two figures. Him: on the floor, legs crossed awkwardly, stiffly yogic. Her: head on his shoulder. He tilts toward it slightly, perhaps with affection.

  Two figures. Him: lying ramrod-straight down the center of the bed, hands locked behind his neck. Her: fetal, on the floor, knees pressed to eye sockets.

  Two figures. Him: on his belly, head sticking off the foot of the bed, face pressed to her hair as if a scent there might return them to another time. Her: seated, legs splayed like discarded crutches, arms fallen between them, empty palms open as if to catch a child’s rolling ball.

  Two figures.

  MICHAEL WAS IN the shower when I woke the next morning on the floor, an unseasonal ache in my bones. I clutched the bedspread around me without knowing if I’d taken it or Michael had sacrificed it to me in the night. My sneakers lay on the carpet, laces tied. I pushed back into them, tightened my hair elastic, stood, and kept on.

  There was so much to be done that day, but Ginny and Silas had left me and Michael free of demands until late afternoon when we were to transport Bernadette from the nursing home to the rehearsal dinner downtown, at the Sundry Heifer Café. Until then, we had the day to ourselves. Maybe they were being thoughtful, or maybe it would have only stressed Ginny more to have me involved. Perhaps she had an inkling of what sort of shape I might be in—maybe I was deluding myself in thinking I was deluding anyone as to the unhingedness of my life. Maybe they knew Michael and I would need time together after so long apart, though they could not have known why we needed that time or how we would use it. To tell Ginny what was going on between us would have been not only inappropriate, but impossible. We barely knew what was happening ourselves. What Michael and I did know was that we wouldn’t have time to deal with anything for real until after the wedding. When we’d gotten Ginny and Silas on the honeymoon-bound plane to Paris, we could fall apart, not before, but we were unlikely to survive ten minutes of wedding propriety without some sort of processing beforehand. Love for Ginny aside, one of us would have cracked and blown. We just needed to get through the wedding, and in all honesty, I think the spanking was neither wholly ill conceived nor ill considered. It was born in Michael of valiant intention.

  We spent the day before our daughter’s wedding in negotiations tense enough to make the Geneva Convention seem like blowsy New Age conflict mediation. Michael claimed the seminal desire for the spanking had come to him during the night and grew that day as we railed in angry whispers and dramatic pantomime across the bedroom.

  I’d led the U of O English and Theater Departments’ trip to London over March break, so hadn’t seen Michael since the end of January, when we loaded the Volvo in a snowstorm, Michael teasing that I already had enough in there to last the winter. Once it was packed, he tried to persuade me not to leave until the weather cleared, but classes began the next day and I hated to show up late. “You’re no use to them dead on the highway,” Michael said. I countered that death would be a good excuse to avoid add/drop week, and left in midstorm, snow-blind, I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It on the Road playing loud enough to be heard in the other vehicles on the highway. With cars and semis piling up in the median like the aftermath of a demolition derby, it took me four hours to drive sixty miles before I pulled off, got a room at Motel 6, and watched HBO for the rest of the day while snow collected like windblown trash against the balcony door. I called Michael that night, lied, and told him I was in Ohio. I didn’t want him proven right about driving in the storm. Still, I can’t help but wonder if something began that day, with that small and seemingly negligible lie.

  The day before the wedding, I don’t know how long we negotiated until I got Michael to come out with the notion of the spanking. Hours, certainly. He’d agreed on the necessity of brokering a temporary truce—some way to slip a bookmark into our story so we could leave it upstairs on the bedside table (or secreted like a Hustler between the mattresses) and return to it when the weekend was over. But Michael could not get past How could you? and the clock was ticking. We needed to progress to It’s done, so what now? And, I suppose, because he was the wronged, and I the wronger, it came down to me finally, on my knees at the side of the unmade bed where my husband sat, my hands grasping his like a Dickensian beggar: What do you need, Michael? What can I do to enable you to bear this?

  He shuddered and sank into himself, reminding me of Ginny as a child, clamped and encased in her own impossible fury, no answer an answer, the only remedy a time-travel pipe dream: Go back and undo what’s been done. Make it like it was before. Then she’d throw a tantrum—a phrase that’s always struck me, for its exact opposite is true. One does not take the initiative and throw a tantrum; the tantrum does the throwing. Ginny was victim, not victimizer, and I, her young mother, was frightened for and by her as she screamed on the floor of Toys “R” Us, or in the public pool dressing room, or at Samantha Slingerland’s fifth birthday at the roller rink by the old highway, the O’Hare arrivals ramp, the Ground Round . . . Once a tantrum’s begun, the only way out
is to soothe. No matter how angry I was, how frustrated, how much I might have wanted to slap her, I had to be a drug. That’s how I came to think of it: I had to become morphine and flood calm through her veins. In the midst of the shrieking and flailing, the gasps of a child spiraling in on herself, I had to become the eye of the storm and steer her down. This took a long time to learn.

  But now, with Michael looking like he might get thrown by a tantrum of his own, I knew how to help him. I knelt at his feet, frightened of my husband as I had only ever been frightened of our daughter. He was scaring himself, and that scared me. He seemed afraid of his own thoughts, and I could only imagine that those thoughts were violent, that he wanted to do me harm and was deeply shaken by his own desires. On the bed above me he began to quake as if with fever. I tried to imagine what his mind had stuck on, what idea could cause him this degree of distress. He wants to kill me, I thought. Above me he cringed, as if in response. He wants to rape me. My husband—I was trying out possibilities, trying them on for fit—father of my girl, this man I’ve slept beside for twenty-six years, has ideas of carving and mutilating me. Fantasies where he clubs my head in, smashes my body between his car and a brick wall, again and again and again . . . He wants to fuck me with pinking shears, crush my head in a vise, snap my neck the way cats kill bunnies in spring . . . I was frightening myself. This wasn’t my life, but it was the life of the woman who’d just spent three weeks in a near-perpetual state of orgasm. A practically menopausal woman wearing everyday panty liners to contend with a wetness she’d always thought was a lie breathed by phone sex operators revving up their johns. Now, this was my life.

  “Michael, tell me what you want. You haven’t done it. Thinking’s not a crime—”