Early Work

by Andrew Martin

  “So, that’s not going to happen,” she said. “What I’m going to do is, I’m going to come inside. And you’re going to have about thirty seconds to cancel your plans, if you actually have plans, which I don’t believe you do. That’s your option.”

  He stared at the ground, and when his eyes reached hers again, he looked like he was about to cry.

  “I was really trying to make a point,” he said.

  “I know,” she said. “I know you were.” She saw her moment—she stepped forward and wrapped him in a hug. He put his arms around her and let her rest her chin on his shoulder, but he didn’t squeeze back.

  “Can we go inside?” she said.

  “Yeah, I guess,” he said. “I’ll tell my friend to meet us here.”

  “Is that really what you want to do?”

  He took off his Twins cap and ran his hand through his flattened hair.

  “I told Patrick I’d watch the Iowa game with him,” he said. “Don’t make me be an asshole to him, okay? Please?”

  They watched the game, all three of them, and Leslie was almost relieved enough to enjoy it.

  Part V

  This was when the angst and dishonesty really kicked in. Now that it felt like there was a decision to make, any time I spent apart from Leslie took on a heightened urgency. I’d asked her why we couldn’t spend time together at her aunt’s house. The answer was that her aunt didn’t work and was in and out of the house at unpredictable intervals. I reminded Leslie that she was nearly thirty years old, and she explained that her aunt was sternly moralistic in matters pertaining to sex and, additionally, would report the presence of a new partner to her mother. Apparently Leslie’s mom was a big fan of Brian, and had gone from despondent to devastated as Leslie moved from unsure to firmly broken up with him. I’d spent enough time with Julia’s folks to know that one underestimates family dynamics at one’s peril.

  I wasn’t ready to become the kind of person who committed his infidelities in a motel, nor was I interested in further enlisting the help of friends who might resent my sleazy favor requests and/or bring their concerns to Julia. So I did something that you’re not supposed to do, one more addition to an expanding universe of said things: I invited Leslie over to the house while Julia was at work.

  We were spotted pulling up to the house by my neighbor Peggy, home on an apparent lunch break. Peggy’s dog, Charleston (a “she,” confusingly), played with Kiki a few days a week in her yard or ours, and most of the text messages I received between nine and five every day were from Peggy, asking if Kiki wanted to play with Charleston, wondering if I could bring the dogs in or put them out depending on the weather, asking for updates on Charleston’s baroque health problems, which were often brought on by her tendency to binge eat anything within her range of vision. Peggy had been, at some point, born again in Christ’s love, and though she didn’t explicitly evangelize, she “accidentally” referred to Julia and me as husband and wife, and inevitably invited us to join her for church if she spotted us between Friday afternoon and Sunday morning, an invitation we always politely declined.

  As Leslie and I got out of the car, Peggy came lurching toward us, tugged forward by Charleston, who was being urged on by Kiki’s frantic flinging of herself against the front window of the house.

  “It stopped raining, so I thought I’d bring Charlie over to play!” Peggy said. She gave Leslie a momentary glance and then turned back to me. “You’re not teaching today?”

  “The prison’s on lockdown,” I said, which was true.

  “Oh,” she said. She’d made it clear that she generally didn’t approve of my teaching at the prison. Those women needed Christ, not composition. “Well, I don’t want to interrupt if you have company.” She looked at Leslie again, longer this time.

  “No, it’s fine,” I said. “I’ll just put them in the backyard.”

  “Why don’t I put them in my yard?” she said. “That’ll be easier for you while you’re entertaining.”

  She clearly didn’t want to leave her dog with potential fornicators. Kiki was attempting to kill herself against the window in excitement, and I worried that Charleston was going to rip Peggy’s arm off.

  “That’s very sweet of you,” I said. “I’ll bring Kiki out for you. Leslie, this is Peggy. Leslie’s a writer, Peggy. We’re talking about collaborating on a screenplay.”

  Peggy brightened with obvious false cheer.

  “How exciting!” she said. “You must be friends with Peter’s wife, Julia, as well!”

  “I am, yes,” Leslie said, giving her a shit-eating grin in response. “She’s really wonderful.”

  “I just love her,” Peggy said.

  I walked to the front door and let Kiki out. She nearly knocked Peggy over with joy, then cowered away from Leslie when she tried to pet her. Peggy’s eyes gleamed in triumph.

  “She takes some time to warm up,” she said.

  “I know,” Leslie said stiffly. “I’ve been here before. A few times.”

  “Well, good luck with the writing!” Peggy said. “You can come get her whenever, Peter, or I’ll bring her back when I get home.”

  “Thanks, I can do it,” I said.

  “Whatever’s easiest for you,” Peggy said, already being dragged back toward her house by Charleston, with Kiki running circles around both of them in joy.

  “Sorry,” I said when we got inside. “She means well. Or, I mean, the opposite.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if she and my aunt go to Bible study together,” Leslie said. “That’s exactly what all of her friends are like.”

  I felt trapped in the small house, watched by passersby. We read on the couch together for a while like we did at Kenny’s, she with her head in my lap, but we did too much shifting around to make any progress. After half an hour, she got up and stood in front of the biggest bookcase, then moved methodically to the one next to it, then cycled through each row of each of the six cases in the room.

  “What are you looking for?” I said.

  “Nothing in particular,” she said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “What, do you think I’m secretly looking for something?”

  “You just seem very deliberate,” I said.

  She sighed heavily and pulled something out, randomly or not, I couldn’t tell, and started paging through it. I looked down at my book and tried to keep myself from glancing at her, even peripherally, and she seemed committed to doing the same with the book in her hands. I broke first, of course.

  “What is that?”

  “Lowell,” she said, curt but not quite snapping.

  He was Julia’s favorite poet, and I tried to remember whether or not I’d told Leslie this. If not, it seemed slightly uncanny, though I suppose the number of his volumes in the house upped the odds. Plus, he was a lot of people’s favorite poet.

  She put the book back on the shelf and sat down next to me on the couch.

  “I just wanted to check something,” she said.

  “Is there something I can do?” I said.

  “I didn’t feel like a creep before,” she said. “Which was probably my own failing, I realize. But it’s a real thing.”

  “Let’s just go out for lunch,” I said. “We’re still just people. Friends, you know? Like, in real life.”

  “I don’t want to go out for lunch,” she said. “I want us to do our thing and not feel guilty about it.”

  “You’re always going to feel guilty about something,” I said.

  “I don’t think that’s true. I hope it’s not. What I don’t like right now is how badly I want to get fucked-up just so I don’t feel like a shitty person.”

  That did seem like a problem.

  “Let’s … what do people do?” I said. “I bet we have some food. Are you hungry?”

  “Probably,” she said. “I didn’t eat anything today.”

  There was half a baguette on the kitchen counter, a bunch of cheese in various stages of decomposition i
n the fridge, some tomatoes and apples, a quarter tub of hummus. I made coffee and assembled a vaguely presentable smorgasbord (cohabitation comes with the occasional useful skill), and we ate sitting kitty-corner at the end of the moldier-than-usual dining room table. Through the window, the squirrels were asserting unspeakable privileges with Kiki away, foraging in the piles of decayed leaves and chasing each other around the huge tree in the corner of the yard. I watched Leslie transform as she chomped on loaded chunks of bread. Her eyes widened, gained hints of blue. She perched straighter in her chair and lightly pressed her fingers against my hand to emphasize a point she was making about how the biopic industrial complex was destroying America. Food! It turns out you need to eat food!

  We were still a little shaky. We watched a couple of episodes of a surrealist sketch show on the Internet—during the day! the pinnacle of decadence!—which, despite its screaming and grotesquerie, eventually led to us making out on the couch like a married couple just home from a counseling breakthrough. She squirmed away from me, smiling, her skirt riding up to reveal almost parodically ugly beige underwear that hung loose off of her hips. When I moved my face toward her, she slapped me hard.

  “No,” she said, still smiling. She stayed in the same position, making no further move.

  “Hmm,” I said. I moved my hand tentatively toward her crotch, and she drew back her arm sharply, so I retreated. She nodded curtly at the erection visible beneath my black jeans. I cautiously unbuckled my belt, unbuttoned my pants, and looked to her for approval. Another curt nod. I pulled my jeans off. Nod. Boxers. Nod. I reached my hand toward her again—a minute headshake. I put my hand on my cock. Nod. Raised an eyebrow. Nod. Indicated with my eyes that I was positioned fairly prominently in front of an open window. Nod.

  If it was to be done, I guessed it was best to be done quickly. She remained still, watching me with attention as I moved my hand over my cock. I raised my eyebrows again, to indicate that things were getting serious. She looked down at my busy hand, then back up into my eyes. I wasn’t going to stop unless she told me to. She didn’t. So she got, I guess, what she wanted.

  “Did that feel good?” she said.

  “So it seems,” I said. I tried to appear casual in my assessment of where the traces of my enthusiasm might have landed. Mostly my shirt, it seemed. Cool.

  “Was it as good as fucking me?”

  “Is that a trick question?”

  “It’s more like a koan,” she said.

  I pondered this.

  “Don’t you want anything?” I said.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “It’s your house.”

  We were going to have to find another place, was the elaborately delivered message, apparently. Or, I could cease to live in this house.

  On the drive back to her aunt’s, Leslie abruptly turned off the bluegrass on the college radio station.

  “I meant to tell you,” she said. “Well, I deliberately chose not to tell you, I guess. But now I’m telling you. There’s a semester-long teaching job open in Montana. They had somebody flake out for the fall, and they can’t pay shit, so they’re kind of scrambling for somebody to teach a couple of classes. Apparently I’m a quote strong candidate for the job if I want it, probably because they literally don’t have anyone else. So I’m going to jump through the interview and syllabus hoops and whatever and see what happens. I just thought you might want to know.”

  “I mean, that’s awesome, right?” I said.

  “It’s something,” she said. “It’s not nothing.”

  “Is there some universe in which you don’t want to do it?”

  “Well, it wasn’t really the plan,” she said.

  “It’s no central Virginia,” I said.

  “That would really solve your problem, wouldn’t it?” she said. “A little tidy, but life goes on.”

  I pointedly ignored what she was getting at. “I’ve never been to Montana,” I said. “I’m only vaguely aware of where it is. I guess it’s basically Wyoming?”

  “Maybe you’ll tell Julia about all this someday. After she cheats on you. You’ve got an ace just waiting in the hole.”

  “If you get the gig, we’ll see what happens.”

  “My point is, it’s really not going to be your problem.”

  I was nearly shaking before the possibilities this opened, the gaping maw of the future suddenly present before me. I spent so much time on the daily logistics of just staying alive that I often went weeks without remembering that I had no idea what I was doing with my life. I knew, because I’d been told, that passivity was not a quality to aspire to. But I thought it was possible that there was some secret nobility, a logic, in letting the tides of life just knock one around, in keeping the psychic ledger balanced.

  When I dropped Leslie off, neither of us made a move to kiss the other goodbye.

  Julia had the next day off so we went hiking in Shenandoah with Kiki, a steep uphill trudge to a big-deal view that we’d seen a half dozen times. I imagined Montana, thought about how the mountains and views there were probably better in every sense, but then tried to figure out whether or not that actually mattered to me. So it was prettier, grander. It would still be standing on a mountain, looking at other mountains, right? You’d still have to come down. We ate peanut butter and banana sandwiches and almonds on our hike and tried to get Kiki to drink out of the portable fold-up dog bowl we’d wasted fifteen dollars on. You can lead a dog to water.

  On the way back we stopped at the brewery-restaurant on the edge of the Blue Ridge. Kiki strained at her leash, trying to ambush a shivering Pekinese two tables over. This I would miss, this approximation of well-curated middle-class happiness. The late-afternoon sun paired with a citrus-infused IPA. Stupid stuff.

  “You excited for Maine?” I said. We were supposed to go to Julia’s parents’ place in a week to celebrate her finishing another year of med school and me giving all of my summer prison students As.

  “Actually, we need to talk about what’s going on with you,” Julia said.

  I gave an exaggerated rictus smile.

  “You are … depressed? Bored?”

  “Are there other feelings?” I said.

  “Right, the usual,” she said. “So … what? Do you want to have sex with someone else? A different kind of sex? More? Less?”

  She was trying to keep it light, but I could tell she was on the verge of tears. Had I been that out of it? I really couldn’t remember whether she’d brought up anything like this lately. I’d thought she was going to ask if I was an alcoholic, though I suppose that would’ve been awkward over beers.

  “I mean … I know I’ve been weird,” I said. “I feel kind of burned-out.”

  “Burned-out from what?” Julia said.

  “Just … being myself, I guess. I’m not saying I’m bored with anything other than myself.”

  “So you’re depressed.”

  “Well, but I do feel better sometimes.”

  “When?”

  Don’t say drugs, don’t say Leslie.

  “When I can imagine things changing,” I said, which was in the ballpark of the truth.

  There was a long silence, though of course the people at the other tables kept screaming away.

  “Between us?” Julia said, like she was clearing her throat.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I took a long swallow of beer and felt it curdle in my mouth.

  “Does this have anything to do with Leslie?” she said.

  Somehow, I was shocked to hear her named. I looked just above Julia’s eyes, right into the center of her forehead.

  “Naw,” I said. “She might be moving soon, actually.”

  Julia perked up, curled her lip at me.

  “And how do you feel about that.”

  “Kind of bummed,” I said. “I hope we stay in touch. If she goes.”

  “Have you had sex with her?” Julia said, wonderingly. “I guess it makes sense.”

  “Don’t say that,” I said. />
  “Is that true?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “There’s some, you know, tension between us, though. For sure. We’re both attracted to each other. In some ways. But that’s not a crime, right?”

  “Having sex with her isn’t a crime, Peter. We’re not talking about crime.”

  “Look,” I said, shading male, reasonable. “I’m not going to pretend there’s not something between us. I don’t think it’s anything you need to worry about. It’s just an … understanding.”

  Julia shook her head slowly, looked me in the eye, looked away, looked back.

  “We have an understanding,” she said.

  “Well, it’s nice to have another one,” I said.

  “I’m not, you know, taking this lightly,” Julia said. “If something happened, I think we can talk about it. But if you won’t talk about it, I don’t know. It’s hard to know what to do with that.”

  “Would you countenance the possibility that there’s nothing to talk about?”

  “There’s always something to talk about. That’s basically your catchphrase. You’ve berated me for not having something to talk about.”

  “I meant, obviously, on this particular subject. I should have owned up to the, I don’t know, intensity of our friendship. You’re right. But that’s all it is. You shouldn’t push and push to see if I’m going to give.”

  “See, you keep taking it one step further, Pete. That’s why I keep pressing.”

  “I’ll do a better job of being present. My class is finished, and I’m going to have some time to work on my own stuff. I’m really looking forward to that.”

  “Right. It’s not like ninety percent of your time isn’t already available to you for whatever the fuck it is you get up to.”

  “We can’t all be learning how to cure cancer and writing the great fucking unreadable poem of the century.”

  “I’m glad the blame lies squarely with my ambitions.”

  “Yeah, Jules, this is a real Rosie the Riveter moment.”

  “Fuck you! I don’t think I’ve ever actually said that to you before. But seriously. Fuck. You. I’m not crazy.”