Valley of Ashes

by Cornelia Read

  —Judith Butler, Undoing Gender

  44

  A week had passed since Cary’s service, and I was still aching.

  I needed to talk to a friend. Just spill my guts.

  It wasn’t as though I didn’t have friends. I had dozens of them, all across the country. And lots of them were people I could’ve just unloaded all of this shit on, without the need for any chipper I’m-holding-up-all-right-despite-everything small talk.

  But no one I’d tried calling was home: Ellis, my sister Pagan, my pal Sophia, my mother, Aunt Julie… just more voice mails to leave. And it was getting a little late to be calling people on the East Coast: close to eight o’clock here meant tennish in New York and Boston.

  Who in California—Muffy? Katy? They’d just be sitting down to dinner in San Francisco.

  I briefly flirted with the idea of calling my first stepdad on Oahu, something I did every other year or so, but that was guaranteed to be a trainwreck. He always told me the same stories about growing up on the South Side of Chicago in the Depression and working for Edward R. Murrow after the Marine Corps, and why the world would be a better place if we’d elected McGovern in ’72. That part was fine, and I even found some comfort in the sheer repetition of the anecdotes, but then he’d start bad-mouthing my mother and I didn’t want to listen to that. Plus it was exhausting to hear someone else’s monologue when you wanted to talk about sad shit that was happening in your own life, and he wasn’t the kind of guy who’d ever think to ask me what was going on with me.

  And by the time I’d run through all those options, I didn’t trust myself to hold up my end of a conversation without just starting to cry and not being able to explain to the poor person on the other end of the line why I was even crying.

  I looked out the window at darkened Boulder. The girls were fed, bathed, and bedded down, but Dean was still at the office.

  I turned on the TV: Roseanne was a rerun and I couldn’t stand Frasier or Home Improvement. The CBS Tuesday Night Movie was The Dead Pool, but I didn’t need any more inspiration to go all Dirty Harry on Bittler, or anyone else.

  I tried Fox and decided Iron Eagle III looked like irredeemable shit before I’d watched a full thirty seconds, despite Lou Gossett. I gave up and turned it off altogether.

  An hour to go before my weekly hit of homesick–New Yorker Sipowicz bonding on NYPD Blue. Maybe Dean would come home by then and we could both watch it.

  I considered writing a letter or two in the meantime, then remembered Ellis giving me shit about how it was time I tried using email.

  If the stuff actually worked, I might hear back from her the same night—better than leaving her yet another plaintively whiny voice mail.

  Fuck it, might as well try out this virtual-communication shit.

  I sat down at the big desk in Dean’s office, booting up our black Acer PC.

  Sure, I’d toddled online once or twice, but to me computers were still strictly for word processing—especially now that I had articles to write again, like an actual human.

  I read through the handbook and tried connecting, leaning in close to the Acer’s tower when it started beeping rapidly through a phone number.

  I got a dial tone and then two busy signals in a row.

  I coaxed it along in my very best HAL voice. “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that…”

  The thing finally broke through: static-fuzz squawks ending in a metallic space-age wail.

  Dean had shown me how to get onto CompuServe once or twice, scrawling his ID and password on a Post-it note for me. It had been stuck to the bottom of the screen for a long time.

  Then the glue gave out and I’d stuck it somewhere for safekeeping.

  In a book?

  I closed my eyes, trying to remember.

  The Joy of Cooking. Bingo.

  I went into the kitchen and grabbed it out of a cupboard.

  Yeah, there it was—little slip of yellow sticking up, marking the page for a beef stew I’d never actually made.

  I typed in “DeanBauer” and his password: “bigangst.”

  It still took me ten minutes of noodling around before I ended up at what looked like the screen for emails.

  There was a list of subject lines going down the page. Mostly things referencing filters and spares, or model numbers of the various water-quality-testing scientific instruments he was the salesman for.

  There were a few I figured had to come from this Saudi customer he’d been talking about recently, just because the syntax was so bizarrely amusing for business correspondence: “Wonderful you,” “Hello!” and “So soon already we two will join in New Orleans.”

  I was so bored, and the body copy promised to be equally entertaining, something like the liner notes for a bootleg Bob Dylan cassette I’d once almost bought on a Hong Kong sidewalk on which the initial track’s title was “Bowling in the Wind.”

  So, I pointed the cursor at “Wonderful You” and double-clicked.

  The opening line read, “Oh my sugar dearest…”

  The closing, “From your best fluffy kitten, Setsuko.”

  Bracketed between was the bitch’s gushing thank-you note to my husband for their first-ever fuck. “Now you have taught me how to love, and this first of times with you has been like no other time, no other man. All of my dreams of what it could be, only so much sweeter, so much better.”

  It was dated March 9, the morning after my birthday. Which meant they’d been fucking for the very first time the night before, which pretty much explained why Dean hadn’t bothered calling home to wish me any happy returns of the day.

  That wasn’t the end of it. I kept reading—not everything, just skipping randomly forward.

  That hideous email, then the ones before it, then the ones after.

  What had really been going on in my marriage since we’d moved here, with me so naively oblivious.

  The last message was Dean’s thank-you note to Setsuko. For taking him out to dinner with her father.

  In Tokyo.

  The three of them had dined on toro and Kobe beef at what was apparently a very elegant restaurant.

  “Ski-trip vacation” my ass. The skanky bitch had flown to Japan so she could ball my husband’s sorry brains out on her home turf.

  Most transitions in anyone’s life happen gradually. You can look back and see all the tiny little increments leading up to whatever it is that’s going to shift into something different.

  And then there are things that happen at one specific instant, huge and irrevocably sudden as your car doing a 360 into the parkway median after you hit a patch of black ice, when a split second before all you worried about was remembering to buy eggs and milk at the little market on your way home.

  I stared at the computer screen, at that email, and watched everything I thought was my life writhing like that old Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the entire span undulating to bits for the delectation of newsreel cameras.

  Steel and concrete aren’t supposed to do that. Rows of streetlights are not supposed to whip and saw like buoys marking the progress of gale-force surf.

  This wasn’t a knife through my heart, this was full-body evisceration by the fucking Benihana dinner show—flying cleavers and all.

  I ran from the room exactly the way that psychic guy had run from me, straight for the downstairs bathroom, and puked up what felt like everything in my being: the crusts of the quesadillas I’d made for the girls’ dinner, hope and faith and trust, all of it, right down to the last acid mouthful of yolk-yellow bile.

  I stayed there in the dark for another five minutes, wrapped around the toilet’s chilly curves, my head heavy on my forearm. Water frothed into the cistern until the float rose to the top, then it was all quiet but for my breath and the metallic tinkling of icy snowfall outside, making everything white and soft and uniform.

  I didn’t want to get up. I just wanted to stay there forever, static—a body at rest, no expectations, no bullshit, no death, no pain.


  I wanted my mom. I wanted my life back, the way it had been fifteen minutes earlier. I wanted to hit a giant fast-forward button and get through all the crap sure to come because it was all going to suck so hugely I didn’t want to begin even imagining it.

  I got to my feet, wobbly, and walked back to the laundry room desk to call Dean’s direct line at the office.

  When he picked up, I said, “You need to come home right now.”

  “I can’t, Bunny. I still have a ton of work to do.”

  Those words hung between us for a long moment.

  “I just read Setsuko’s emails, Dean. And yours back to her.”

  Silence, then. I could hear the clock on his desk ticking. “Bunny—”

  “Get your ass home,” I said. “Right goddamn now.”

  Getting home would take him at least twenty minutes, so while I waited I read the rest of the electronic love notes. First all of Setsuko’s to him, then his to her.

  He’d written her the night after I’d taken him to the dentist for a root canal four weeks ago. I’d had to help him upstairs to bed because he was so unsteady on his feet from the anesthesia.

  I remembered how heavy his arm had been, across my shoulders, as I pulled him up each step. I’d tucked him in, brought him a cup of tea from downstairs, smoothed his hair back from his forehead gently until I thought he’d fallen safely asleep.

  “I spent the whole afternoon in bed,” he’d written to her that night, “gliding along on opiate wings, thinking of nothing but how beautiful and sweet and perfect you are. How much I wanted to be with you, then and there. Kissing every inch of your silken belly.”

  Silken. Belly.

  Those words Dean’s fist, splitting my flesh starburst-ragged, smashing through the vulnerable skin-muscle-organs exposed just beneath the apex of my sternum’s gothic arch and straight on back to my spine.

  The slight force of a sob was enough to topple me forward, cheek against my knees, arms reaching tight around my legs.

  I could never match Setsuko’s perfection. She was exotic, a long-limbed Weston nude draped graceful across the snowy pasture of some expensive hotel’s bed linen.

  Excruciating detail: soft hank of my husband’s wheat-blond hair falling forward, soft against her skin as the tip of his tongue limned her golden curves, her concavities.

  I stood up and walked slowly through the dining room.

  I had always been less lightning rod for entropy than child of diaspora—translucent and porous, eminently discardable.

  I curled up in the dark on our sofa, watching yellow headlights slow-dance across the ceiling.

  A car pulled up out front, some time afterward. Its engine coughed out and a tinny door-slam echoed through the night. The rhythm of my husband’s footsteps coming up our snowy front walk was reluctant, defeated.

  Pure delusion on my part, having held so much as the slenderest belief that this marriage could sustain my fragile purchase on thin air.

  In truth I’d crashed out of the sky a good twenty years before Dean and I first met.

  I could still hear my escaping father’s wing-strokes, his steady cadence unperturbed as I shot headlong toward the wine-dark Icarian Sea, trailing feathers and wax.

  “Bunny?” Dean stepped softly into the darkened living room.

  He’s been crying.

  “Here,” I said from the sofa, still on my side, curled fetal. “Come sit?”

  He lowered himself to the floor, resting a hand on the cushion’s edge beside my head. “I’m so sorry.”

  Kissing every inch of your silken belly.

  The perfumed concubine—burnished, cosseted, flawless.

  I couldn’t stand my own exhausted belly in the mirror: the baby-slack skin, stretched and stretched by the girls until it had been crosshatched permanently pink.

  I closed my eyes. “How long?”

  “The whole—” His voice caught.

  I held my breath.

  He covered his face with his hands. “Before we even left New York. Just… talking on the phone. We knew.”

  And of course only that first “we” meant Dean and me.

  I remembered Cary calling me from the office on Valentine’s Day, saying Dean was crushed because I’d winced when he kissed me that morning. The girls had been up all night in shifts. I’d shrugged him off, bitching, so tired my skin hurt.

  And Cary had been so gentle with me on the phone, so patient: “You really need to call him, okay? I’m serious.”

  He’d known. He’d tried to protect me that morning and it made me miss him more than ever.

  And that’s what lay behind his declaration to me in the car, the day Dean had been such a pig at lunch. Cary hadn’t been railing against that specific incident, Dean’s little tantrum… he’d taken up arms on my behalf because he knew the whole of it, the ocean of betrayal I hadn’t yet known I was drowning in.

  He’d made Dean read my article that afternoon, confronted him about who-knows-what else, stood up for me—even though I’d begged him not to.

  And it had worked. What seemed like our new beginning, Dean’s and mine, had started that night.

  Tears started leaking down my face again. “Dean?”

  “What, Bunny?” His voice so soft, his fingertips brushing so lightly against my hair.

  “Is this why you want the job in Boston?”

  He dropped his head. “Yeah.”

  I unfurled my legs and reached for him, pulling him onto the sofa beside me.

  We curled up in each other’s arms.

  I felt his mouth against my ear. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I’m so glad you didn’t leave us,” I whispered back.

  I had no idea what else to say. It was all I could think of, at that moment.

  He was still here, with me and the girls. He wanted to leave Colorado, which meant leaving Setsuko. He’d already put the end of things with her in motion.

  Even though he’d had dinner with her father. The three of them, laughing and drinking, treating themselves to whatever they wanted. And my husband had had the gall to call me from the fucking restaurant so he could crow about how great the Kobe beef was. The same day Cary was killed.

  The images I couldn’t help but conjure forth ripped me open, laid me bare and ugly and cold. Do you agree to meet the father of the woman you’re about to abandon? Do you write a fucking thank-you note, telling her what a marvelous fucking time you had?

  He hasn’t left you. Not yet.

  Was his recent kindness nothing more than the death throes of my husband’s sense of duty? Not to a lover, but to the ruined, shabby vessel who’d borne his children? I was not the beloved, just the obligation to which he considered himself beholden.

  I pulled myself up off the sofa and ran for the bathroom, sickened by the image of myself as I imagined he saw me.

  There was still so much bile in my soul, so much acid. Maybe that’s all I had ever been made of. Maybe that’s why no one had ever wanted to stay. Dad through Dean—every stepfather, then every lover I’d had myself between the bookending pair of them: father-and-husband.

  What did you expect? You’ve never been worth sticking around for, Madeline, and you never will be.

  Dean fell asleep easily in our bed.

  I lay awake, trying to cleanse my mind of his dalliances with Setsuko. Tried instead to think of us, to cast back through our years together for some evidence this outcome wasn’t inevitable, or at least hadn’t always been.

  When I think back to that night, now—many years later—I wonder if a woman who thought anything of herself would have shared his bed that night.

  Even though I know the answer: No fucking way.

  But at the time I was as terrified that he’d slip away from me as I was repulsed by the depth of his unkindness.

  I wanted my best friend back. But he was lost somewhere in the body of this person who’d just about finished me off, on top of everything else.

  I stared up at the c
eiling, watching tree-branch shadows shift, then grow still.

  I tried to remember what it felt like, before this. At the beginning.

  And all I could recall was that it had just felt like sanity, at the start—compared with the way my parents lived.

  Now, as a parent myself, I could see that they’d been absolute children. Married when they were ten years younger than I was that night: people who’d never been prepared for the world they’d actually have to inhabit, even before the ground dropped out from under their feet in the late sixties.

  When I met Dean he just seemed solid, dependable, kind. No game-playing, no jerking my heart around.

  He met my father and sister on our third date: a Dare family gathering Dad had driven east to attend.

  We ended up sitting on the bed in the back of my father’s van—me and Pagan, Dad and Dean—smoking some wicked sinsemilla of Dad’s and getting so fucking stoned we were all pretty much paralyzed.

  Then Dad whipped out another joint and said, “Okay, that was Brand X, and now you have to smoke some of this Brand Y, because it’s the antidote,” and meanwhile his seven surviving siblings were doing their various Brahmin-Lockjaw-Social-Register insanity dances around the place.

  But Dean just rolled with it, that whole long weekend. He observed, he took us in with gentle but wry humor, he shared some fine insights about the whole spectacle with me—but most of all, he had my back.

  I had a fine, tall, upstanding young man as my ally. For the first time ever, I’d achieved gravity within my own paternal family. A foothold. Meaning.

  I had shown up with someone who commanded their respect. Which meant they had to rethink me. They couldn’t exclude me from the clan’s constellation, couldn’t write me off as poor relation, abandoned child, unwanted daughter, un-dowried exemplar of the chattel gender.

  It had always seemed to me that my family was like some too-closely-bred line of show dogs, neurasthenic and plagued with iron-poor blood, a tribe composed entirely of Northern-Puritan Tennessee Williams characters with double the crazy and none of the sultry charm.

  Then along came this young strapping guy with the vitality of a line on the upswing. And I hoped he was someone who wouldn’t leave me broke with kids and no protection by the side of the road somewhere—because I knew full well that in that situation I wouldn’t have a shred of my mom’s surprisingly feral toughness; that in her shoes I’d flame out entirely.