The Stuff That Never Happened

by Maddie Dawson

  “I think maybe it means I don’t want to be married anymore,” I said slowly.

  There was a silence, and then she sighed and said kindly, “Wow. Well, Annabelle, this is something we’re definitely going to have to examine. I’m afraid our time is up for today, but we’ll take this up next week.”

  JUST IN case you’re growing concerned that you have stumbled into a story about a bored, displaced, middle-aged woman whose husband has gone all distant on her and whose only hope is to persevere, trying to grope her way through life while she seeks meaning through causes and self-examination and blah blah blah, let me ease your mind. This is not the way this is going. Believe me, I wouldn’t put you through that, not when there are so many other things you could be doing.

  The truth is much more complicated. The truth is that I’m actually in love with another man.

  His name is Jeremiah, and I haven’t bothered to tell Ava Reiss about him, because, frankly, Jeremiah and I haven’t talked to each other in some twenty-six years, and I know what she would say about that. She would ask how I could even think of this as real. She would think I have carried on without any real, you know, payoff. I’m aware from other remarks she’s made that love for her is something that is supposed to pay dividends that you can draw on, more like social security than a dazzling, mysterious force that shakes you out of your complacence and makes you ask questions and laugh at the mystery even as you’re cursing it and wishing for it to solve itself and knowing that it can’t be solved.

  I would have to tell her that this is that kind of love. This, I would say cheerfully, is love that, by her definition, does absolutely nobody any good, and never has and probably never will. Yes, yes, I’d say with a big smile, it’s utterly useless. Ava Reiss would never get the soul-enhancing part of it, or understand that Jeremiah is here with me, that he’s taken up residence in my head, staked out some territory for his very own, and that he is as present to me as Grant is these days.

  Maybe this is common. Perhaps the whole human race goes around with an ache like this. Maybe we’re all dreaming of a person from the tantalizing past who sits there, uninvited, watching from the edge of our consciousness, somebody you find packing up and moving out of your head just as you’re waking up in the morning, and whose essence clings to you all day as though you have spent the night with him, wandering off together somewhere among the stars, making out on strangers’ couches and in train stations and football stadiums, laughing over things that make no sense at all.

  Oh, crap—so now you see why I don’t speak of him. I do it so badly. It comes out all wrong, goopy and sentimental. Only my best friend, Magda, even knows the whole extent of things, and she only dimly understands the trade-offs I have made; she knows the pact I made with Grant, she knows that the heart of love is good no matter where it lives inside you, and I suspect she also knows that months go by in which I am sustained by the firm, warm hand of Jeremiah reaching out to me while I sleep, even while I am snuggled close to Grant, who is snoring softly beside me, most likely dreaming of people marching in lines, carrying picket signs that say, ON STRIKE.

  [two]

  1977

  I met Grant McKay in California when I was twenty, before I knew that falling in love was actually a liability of mine and not a talent. Back then, I was always smitten with one person or another. I could be sitting in my Renaissance English class and fall in love with the professor for the way he explained a John Donne poem, and then be hung up on him for the rest of the semester even if he never did another inspirational thing. I was always just about wiped out by love for the guys I sang with in my own little rock band, the Oil Spills, although my chief boyfriend was the bass player, Jay. And I had recovered from another, even more official boyfriend left over from high school back home in Northridge, but he’d joined the army and disappeared to Germany, so all I had of him was his picture on my bulletin board. I walked around on the alert for love. I was an appreciator of people’s best moments.

  Grant showed up at a party my friends were giving, looking ridiculously out of place. He resembled a six-foot-tall orphan, an abandoned overgrown baby-man, with his blond hair and his pasty pale skin—and I first spotted him standing by himself in a corner of the kitchen, leaning against a counter with his arms folded across his chest. He was watching everything going on through big black Buddy Holly–type glasses with lenses like Coke bottles and trying to be invisible. His hair was cut exactly wrong, and he was dressed like he’d just come from a job interview, in pressed khaki pants and a navy blue V-neck sweater. I heard somebody whispering, “Who’s the narc?” and somebody else said, “He’s all right. He came with Simon.”

  I was a junior at the University of California at Santa Barbara at the time, and the party—billed as the Total Armageddon Party—was taking place in the off-campus apartment, in Isla Vista, of some of my more raucous friends, Janelle and Rennie. It was actually a party to celebrate that they’d been kicked out of their apartment for being, as the landlord had written in a letter on a piece of lined notebook paper that hung on the fridge, “too loud, too rood, steeling other peoples parking spases and causing lewdness and noise that if everyone did them would result in a total Armie Geddon.” At a specified time we were all going to set off cherry bombs in the living room, Armageddon-style. Janelle had gone around earlier handing them out.

  I was supposedly there with Jay, but he was seeing another girl, too, so I used parties as a time to make sure I could surround myself with enough other guys to make him jealous. The world was crazy that way in 1977—nobody ever said anything they really meant; it was all for fun anyway—and Jay was up on the roof smoking weed with three other guys and that other girl he was seeing. Her name was Flaxen or Foxie or something like that, and she was always flicking her red ringletty hair, and when she laughed she made a sound like a nervous horse, and I was not going to go up there to watch him make a fool of himself over her.

  The trouble was, there wasn’t much to do in the apartment without Jay there to observe me. I was wearing a tight short skirt, my long blond hair was perfectly parted in the middle and completely straight, thanks to Magda’s steam iron, and I had on just the right amount of eyeliner and eye shadow. Feminism was important, but if you were in a rock band as I was, you still paid attention to how you put on your makeup.

  The apartment was crowded and smoky. We’d all—except Grant, of course—been to parties here tons of times. In the back bedroom there were the usual shenanigans: someone Rennie knew had brought a brass hash pipe and some Turkish hash, and you could hear screams of laughter. In another room, with the door closed, people were most likely having sex, or getting ready to. People were always having sex at these parties; you’d have to be nuts to put your coat down on a bed. It would get fornicated upon. A wrestling match blared from the television set in the living room, and there was the usual crowd of spectators—guys mostly, and the girls who were trying to impress them—shouting at the TV.

  Grant was standing next to the fridge, squinting at the Armageddon letter, and I wanted him to move.

  I said, “Excuse me, do you mind if I see if there are any beers left?”

  He turned and looked at me with that blinking, gray-eyed stare of his. It was even more pronounced back then. His hair, which was fuller in those days, and therefore more in his way, fell across his eyes, and he brushed it away. He stepped away from the refrigerator. I saw him looking at my very, very short white leather skirt.

  I said, “Do you want a beer?” and he said heavily, as though he were in great pain, “Not really, but I might as well.”

  I handed him a Bud. “That’s funny, isn’t it?” I said. “That letter from the landlord.”

  “Do you think so?” he said.

  “Well, yeah. I mean, the landlords are just idiots.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Except for a few spelling and grammatical errors, I think they’re making a good point. They’re probably sick of the place getting trashed
all the time. Can’t blame them for that, I guess.”

  “Yeah, well, I gather from Rennie that they’re not the nicest people …”

  “Most likely I wouldn’t be nice either if people treated my property like a trash can.” He said this perfectly pleasantly. Then he said, “Besides which, they’re probably immigrants trying to make good, and English is a second language for them, and they’re confused by—”

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “You made your point.”

  He smiled, and I took a sip of my beer and felt my face grow a little warm, knowing I’d been caught trying to be tougher than I really was. I was trying to be hard and cool in those days, but I was finding out what a softie I really was. My mother had called me the week before to say that she and my father were separating, and since then I always felt like I was about to burst into tears. I’d sensed all along that they weren’t ecstatically happy, but whose parents were? In the suburban Southern California neighborhood where we lived, everything looked normal, but nearly every house had some hideous secret: divorce, affairs, fights, abortions, bankruptcy, wife-swapping, drug overdoses. My family had just kept plugging along, and I guess I thought my parents knew something other people didn’t know about how to hold it together.

  My mother worked as a receptionist in a dentist’s office and cooked dinner (a protein, a starch, and a vegetable, with fruit for dessert) every night. She took care of my father and my brother and me, always smiling except for those rare times when she went into what my father called her “black moods.” Then there was no pleasing her. She’d clean the house and slam doors, screaming at us like a maniac—but then it would pass and she would go back to normal, sweet as pie.

  When she called to tell me about the separation, her voice was oddly cold and flat. She was normally warm and brimming with an embarrassing surplus of emotion—she was the kind of person who was always getting into long, intimate conversations with strangers in the line at the grocery store, much to my mortification—but now it was as though she were reading from a script written and handed out by the Association for Conversations with Adolescents About Divorce, and she was checking off their recommended tips as she went along. She said the separation was a decision that had been made, she wasn’t asking for my advice or input, it wasn’t my or my brother’s fault, she and my father both loved us and wanted us to be happy, but the fact was that she and he had differences and they were embarking on a trial separation that might or might not lead to divorce. She didn’t expect me to be happy about it, but she expected my understanding.

  “SO WHEN is this Armageddon going to begin, do you think?” Grant said, clearing his throat, the first of many such nervous tic throat-clearings I would be hearing for the rest of my life.

  “Don’t ask me. This feels like an ordinary party to me,” I said. I looked at him more closely. “Haven’t you ever been here before?”

  He said no. That’s when he told me his name and that he had borrowed a friend’s car, and when he went to return it, the friend had dragged him along to the party, promising him that they wouldn’t stay long. The friend was with the people watching wrestling.

  “So you’re a student?” I said.

  He smiled a tight little smile and cleared his throat. He’d been a math major as an undergraduate, but now he was getting his PhD in history, with a concentration on labor relations, and he was finishing up work on his thesis, about the children of migrant workers who came to California during the Depression. He shouldn’t even be here. He still had some work to do on the introduction.

  “Wow, that sounds like a sad subject,” I said. “Kids and migrant workers …”

  “Yeah, I’m not in it for the cheerfulness,” he said. “But when you get into it, into the people’s stories, you find out all kinds of stuff.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, you don’t want to know.”

  “I do. I really do.”

  He studied my face for a moment, as if he were trying to figure out if I was just making fun of him. He didn’t seem to be the most confident guy in the world. “Well, the children had their culture, their games and their songs, and so even while they were being moved from place to place, it was the children who were responsible, really, for assimilating the new culture in with the old-timers’ versions. That’s all.”

  “Oh. So it’s stories,” I said. “You’re really telling stories.”

  “No. It’s analysis. Charts and graphs and all that. But then there’s this undertone. That’s what historians are looking for. Come on, you don’t want to hear about this.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “Why do you keep telling me what I do and don’t want to hear about?”

  “Because nobody wants to hear about it. Even my mother doesn’t want to hear about it.”

  “Look, we’re making polite party conversation,” I told him. “One of the rules is that when a person asks you a question, you’re not supposed to insult them by saying they don’t care about what they’re asking about. You’re supposed to answer, and if you see their eyes glaze over, then you know to stop talking.”

  He looked at me, and then he smiled a little. “Well. It’s good to have the rules explained once and for all. And what are you studying?”

  I said I was majoring in art education because I liked to paint, and he raised his eyebrows.

  “Well, why don’t you major in painting, then, instead of education?”

  “Because I can’t make a living as an artist, so what I’m probably going to end up doing is teaching elementary school,” I said.

  “But is that what you really want to do?”

  “Oh, I have no idea,” I said. “My father told me education would give me something to fall back on. And anyway, who in this world gets to do exactly what they want to do?”

  “See, I just don’t get people who think like you. Why give up before you even try? And I don’t think elementary school kids need more teachers who don’t really want to be there. Why don’t you just have the courage to strike out on your own and be a real artist, and not settle for teaching before you even try?”

  “Excuse me, but do you know anything whatsoever about how to make polite party conversation?”

  “I think I’d rather have a real conversation.”

  “But I’ve only known you for five minutes, and already you’re sitting in judgment about what I want to do with my life.”

  He looked pained.

  I took another sip of beer and smiled at him. “Now the way this is supposed to go is, you would say, ‘Oh, you’re studying art education. That’s fascinating. And what paintings do you like?’ and then I’d say, ‘Oh, actually, I’m studying the abstract expressionists right now,’ and you, being you, might say, ‘Oh, I find that to be a load of crap most of the time—all those jumbled-up colors—why, a five-year-old could do better than that,’ and then I might explain what I have learned about abstract expressionism and why it’s valid, and then you’d say something else about how labor history is the greatest thing ever, who knew, and then we’d finish our beers and go our separate ways and that would be that.”

  “What would be polite about my calling abstract expressionism a load of crap?”

  “Well, that falls under a technicality, actually. While it’s not exactly polite to say something is a load of crap, it’s acceptable in this case because, number one, it’s representative of your honest feelings, and, number two, it’s not directly related to a personal choice that I’ve made and that you’re insulting. After all, I just said I was studying it; I didn’t say I was the premier abstract expressionist in the United States or something.”

  He was staring at me, but I could see a little grin starting to curl its way around his mouth. “Oh, I see. And how does making false assumptions about somebody’s taste in art figure in? Is that considered polite?”

  “Well, it depends.”

  “Ah. This is where the rules get weird. I guess this is why I don’t come to parties so much. But the truth
, in case you’re interested, is that I happen to like art a lot, and I do know something about abstract expressionism, and I think it’s fascinating and has a lot to tell us about our inner lives.”

  I stared at him. “You read that in a book.”

  “No. I happen to believe it.” He straightened his glasses. “And I also happen to believe that some people are put on this earth to do art—to record their inner experience, as it were—and that other people should dabble around trying to explain the universe through number theory, and that other people should chart data about migrant workers in Central California, and that all of those things are fine.”

  “That’s very democratic of you.”

  He flushed. “And, while we’re at it, I don’t think people should rent apartments and then trash them with cherry bombs.”

  Well, I didn’t either, not really, but amazingly enough, I hadn’t given it much thought until right then.

  Janelle came over to get a beer out of the fridge, and she said, “Ooh, Annabelle, who’s your friend?” She was laughing and rolling her eyes because he was clearly not our sort. I saw Grant notice that, and he looked down at his shoes, and I couldn’t help it, I might have actually started to fall a little in love with him right then.

  “Has Jay met this guy?” she said, laughing at the ridiculousness of that, and then she left, screaming to the crowd at large that it was almost the end-of-the-world moment.

  Grant looked at me. “Well, I think that’s my cue to leave. It’s been nice talking to you.”

  “Wait,” I said, but just then Jay came down from the roof to get me, bursting through the back door with his dilated eyes and the smell of smoke clinging to him like a tail. And then—well, this was bad—I moved closer to Grant and grabbed his arm so that Jay would notice and maybe would be even the slightest bit jealous. But it didn’t matter anyway, because Jay and his friends were all wasted and laughing at nothing, swooping into the kitchen, yelling about something between their bouts of hysterics, and it turned out they’d seen the cops turning onto the street with their red lights on, and we’d all better get out because we were probably all going to get arrested for possession.