Early Work

by Andrew Martin

  “That’s…”

  “Enough,” Julia said. “Finish your beer and let’s go.”

  We didn’t speak on the drive home, which felt twice as long as usual. I rummaged through my head for some aggrieved indignation but I couldn’t summon it. I didn’t feel as guilty as I should have—maybe the sudden narrowing of my options provided a kind of moral anesthetic. It didn’t matter how I felt, which, I guess, didn’t usually get in the way of feeling things. But there I was.

  Julia and I started the drive to Maine on a Friday morning, with Kiki assuming her usual role as the quietly forbearing queen of the backseat. We were picking up our friend Colin, flying in from Chicago, at the Portland airport. Colin had gone to college with us and had served, over the years, as a reliable plus-one, plus-two when he had some short-lived girlfriend in tow. He was generally satisfied by what the world presented to him, which made him an excellent vacationer. He was a universal adapter.

  Julia and I hadn’t ceased speaking to each other, but a ten-hour drive was a long time for anyone, especially two people with particular things to not talk about. We listened to NPR through Virginia, and then I switched to music while Julia put herself to sleep with the new Saul Bellow collected essays. I was limited in my music choice to the dozen or so heavily scratched CDs in my immediate reach, Pleased to Meet Me, Fear of a Black Planet, Sticky fucking Fingers. I had the audiobook of an acclaimed surfing memoir on my phone but didn’t want to hear it. I wanted, oddly enough, to just think, a concept foreign enough to me that it deserved the italics of a ready-made phrase from another language.

  I tried to get a sexual fantasy about Leslie going—Sunday-morning exchange of oral sex in an expensive hotel room?—but my brain resisted full engagement. I moved on to what I hoped might be a more productive line of thinking, mostly the word “Maine” repeated over and over again with panicked flashes of Leslie’s face in between. Kiki sighed and shifted in the backseat—I would need to stop and walk her around a parking lot at least three more times before we arrived. There was such a long way still to go.

  We stopped to buy heaping sandwiches and rugelach at the always-slammed old-fashioned deli near Hartford. Chopped liver was the one foolproof path to Julia’s heart that I knew, and I sensed a partial, temporary détente as we ate standing over the baking hood of the car. Kiki sat in the driver’s seat, monitoring every chunk dropped from bread to wax paper, until, yes, good dog, she was rewarded with scraps on the asphalt.

  In the car, the silence between us took on a hazier quality, one less pregnant with the next unasked question. We listened to a throwback hip-hop station that seemed to be permanently playing a loop of the opening Kool & the Gang horn sample from “Let Me Clear My Throat.”

  “Do you want me to read something to you?” Julia said after about ten minutes of this.

  “I think DJ Kool’s going to start shouting soon,” I said.

  “The caveat is that I’m only going to read you something that I’m already in the middle of, because that’s what I want to read.”

  “What are you in the middle of?”

  “Bunch of things. But the one I want to read is The Magic Mountain.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Or I could read silently to myself, like a normal person, and you can keep waiting for the fucking drop.”

  So she read me the boring adventures of what’s-his-name, a tale I’d failed to read in a college class and again in an ill-advised all-male book club in New York. The fact that I didn’t particularly care about or for the words being spoken gave me an opportunity to savor the instrument of Julia’s voice, its depth and weight, which, of course, I didn’t do nearly enough. I tuned out the content completely and focused on the rise and fall of the words, the way her voice ran down at the end of a long sentence, then rose again with urgency at the start of a new one. I pictured her trudging up flights of stairs, pausing on the landings, continuing higher.

  “I need to stop,” she said raspily, after an hour. She gulped water from a cloudy pink Nalgene.

  “That was better than I thought it’d be,” I said. “Less German.”

  “Probably helps to have it read by an Italian Jew,” she said.

  Within seconds, she was asleep again—after years of medical school, I was used to this—and the spell broke. The hip-hop station had turned to static so I listened to the hits of the eighties, nineties, and today. “Today,” even when expanded to include almost two decades, was not a good day. Unless that Santana song came out after the year 2000?

  A few miles from the airport in Portland, I accidentally woke Julia by slamming on my brakes ahead of a traffic slowdown I hadn’t noticed.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “You’d be even more sorry if you were picking my teeth out of the dashboard,” she said. “Come on, man.”

  We inched through rush-hour traffic to the airport in that old ugly silence. Colin was waiting, with one tiny shoulder bag, at the arrivals curb.

  “What’s haps, cabrones?” he said, falling into the backseat. He tried to pet Kiki but she burrowed herself tightly against the door, poking her tongue out briefly in cottonmouthed disinterest.

  “Oh, just lots and lots and lots of driving,” Julia said. “Did I mention the driving?”

  “What’s the emotional temp?” he said. “Hopes and dreams?”

  “Swimming,” I said. “Lobsters. Swimming with lobsters?”

  “Now, are we going to cook lobsters?” Colin said. “The whole gourmet-murder thing? I do know how, but I know, Jules, that you’re not so into killing stuff.”

  “I eat lobster,” Julia said. “But my parents want us to buy live ones from the neighbors, and I think I really don’t want to do that?”

  “I’m all right skipping it,” I said.

  “Well, no one thought you were going to be much help,” Julia said. “I think it’s kind of on Colin.”

  Silence.

  “We’ve got to get you guys out of this car,” Colin said.

  “I’ve forgotten what it’s like to not be in it,” Julia said. “I think I might just stay.”

  “Don’t worry, Pete and me’ll make it better,” Colin said. “You’re the vacation princess, we’re the helpers.”

  “I need to get a lot of writing done this week,” she said. “I’m sure you helpers can find something to help with. Kiki will appreciate it.”

  “It’s a shame Betsy couldn’t come,” I said to Colin. Clearly it was time to stop engaging Julia. “I wanted to meet her.”

  “We’re pretty much broken up,” Colin said. “At first it was fun to be dating this, like, Randian figure. I kind of thought she was joking a lot of the time, but it turns out she wasn’t. She actually just really hates poor people. The sex is great, obviously.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever knowingly had sex with a Republican,” Julia said. “It was kind of funny in college when girls were saying they’d have sex with Bush people if they promised to vote Kerry. I might’ve done it, but I wasn’t really into having sex with random people back then.”

  “Yeah, once I realized how serious Betsy was about her horrible politics, I thought that maybe I’d be doing a good deed by dating her and slowly changing her mind. But I think she’s rubbing off on me. It’s like the emperor and Anakin. And you know how that ends.”

  “Peter’s into assertive, morally bankrupt women these days,” Julia said.

  “Who isn’t?” Colin said. “I’m just getting to that point where it’s like, if there’s literally no chance I’m going to settle down with this person, how long should I string it out?”

  “Col, you’ve been saying that since you were eighteen,” Julia said.

  “Truer now than ever.”

  It was almost dark by the time we got to the house. Kiki bounded out of the car, thrilled to be free, and skidded all the way onto the dock, very nearly into the inlet. She’d still never gone swimming, always wimping out when her feet couldn’t touch the bottom of a body of water.
I’d vowed to finally get her all the way in on this trip, as if that were something worth prioritizing at this particular juncture.

  Julia unlocked the door of the little house, which was perched right against the water, and I walked down to the dock to collect Kiki. An email from Leslie had come in while I was driving, but I’d restrained myself from checking it during the trip. Now I stole a glance.

  She missed me. She was reading Don DeLillo, which wasn’t helping anything. She wished she were swimming in the ocean with me, but since she wasn’t, she wondered if I could give her Kenny’s number so she could swim and work at his place, and also finally meet the man whose house and garden she’d enjoyed so much. She also hoped I would tie her down and fuck her for three days straight when I had a minute.

  I felt a tinge about giving her Ken’s number. It had to do with my sentimentalizing the five days we’d spent together out at his place, so much so that the house, in my memory, had become mine, not Kenny’s, and the idea of her spending time with him there was therefore a violation. I knew this was all bullshit the moment it crossed my mind, but I still felt it. I didn’t respond to Leslie’s email. I called Kiki and she ducked around my heels as I brought bags and supplies in from the car. The house itself was tiny—just a kitchen, a living room, and an upstairs overtaken entirely by one large bedroom. There was a little cottage next door where Colin would be staying, a shack about the size of a boutique hotel room. It was good, I thought, that he wouldn’t be a party to whatever went on between us that week.

  That night, Colin and Julia cooked pasta and made sauce while I made a playlist of “good cooking songs” and drank wine.

  “How’s your poetry going?” Colin said to Julia.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Julia said. “I think it’s on an upswing. Unfortunately I’m one of those people who writes better when they’re unhappy. Which is a shame. I’d much rather do the ‘love like a bourgeois and reveal your savage guts on the page’ thing.”

  “I don’t think that’s how that goes,” I said.

  “Is med school bad right now?” Colin said.

  “I’m just dealing with a lot of other stuff,” Julia said. “We are.”

  She was standing at the stove with her back to me. I wanted to see her face. It was out of character for her to tell anyone, even Colin, about the mechanics of our relationship, and even more so to do it in a dramatic fashion. So I waited, and Colin did, too.

  Finally, he said, “What do you mean?”

  “Well,” she said. “Oh, fuck it. Peter is … just tell him, would you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re going to say,” I said.

  “Yes you do.”

  “Maybe we don’t need to talk about this now,” Colin said.

  “Julia’s upset with me because I have this intimate [Julia: “HA!”] relationship with a friend of mine,” I said. “Of ours. And she—you—feel anxious about it, which I totally understand. But we haven’t talked about it that much.”

  “Colin, you know I’m not crazy,” Julia said. “He’s sleeping with this girl, or has slept with her. I’m not happy about that, obviously, but I just wish we could have a normal conversation about it.”

  “This is the opposite of that,” I said.

  “What, are you so worried about Colin hearing this?”

  “Seriously, it’s none of my business,” Colin said. “I’d leave, but I really want to eat dinner. Can we just make dinner, and eat it?”

  “I do understand your point,” I said to Julia. “And I’m sorry for hurting your feelings.”

  “Hurting my feelings by doing what?”

  “By being insensitive.”

  “Wrong,” she said.

  “You know what I mean,” I said.

  “Peter, I don’t. Care. About. The sex. That much. I just want you to tell me that it happened.”

  “It didn’t,” I said.

  “Well, then I’m sleeping in Colin’s cabin tonight. With Colin. We’re sharing the cabin. You can have this whole stupid house to yourself.”

  “Um,” Colin said.

  “Sleep wherever you want,” I said. “Let’s make dinner, okay?”

  “Supersonic” by Oasis came up on my playlist and the ridiculousness of the song’s intrusion punctured the moment. We were standing around a tiny kitchen, the three of us, having a dispute out of a Rohmer movie an hour into a week’s vacation on the ocean. They finished cooking dinner, and Colin started talking about the movies he’d seen that summer, and we all feverishly talked about movies for the next hour. After we ate, we put on a recent movie about hipster vampires that Colin had brought with him. I had no particular desire to see it, but it was the closest activity to hand, and one that would involve little opportunity for further conversation. The movie ended desultorily, like it had begun, and the three of us sat there in silence, staring at the credits.

  “That was okay,” Colin said.

  “The music was good,” I said.

  Silence.

  “It was awful,” Julia said cheerfully. “Am I missing something?”

  “I was being diplomatic,” Colin said. “Have you seen most movies? They’re really bad.”

  “Duh, that’s why I’m into, like, poetry?” Julia said.

  She took her wineglass into the kitchen, then picked up her suitcase from where she’d left it by the front door.

  “I’m going to sleep in the cabin,” Julia said. “You guys stay up as late as you want.” She walked out into the night.

  “Boy, it’s good I flew here from Chicago,” Colin said.

  “One of us would probably be dead by now if you hadn’t,” I said.

  “You, I hope,” he said. “What do you want me to do? I’m stuck here, you know? Like, physically.”

  “I want you to be here, bud. And Julia does, too. We’ll start having fun, I promise.”

  I felt two quick buzzes in my pocket, a text message. I felt my cock getting hard just thinking about a note from Leslie.

  “I don’t care about having fun,” he said. “I mean, I did, but. What’s going on, man?”

  I paused. I knew that I should lie, but I thought that might be the final step to my damnation, if that was a real thing. Colin deserved something like the actual truth.

  “I’m seeing this girl,” I said.

  “Right,” Colin said.

  He paused, looked into his wineglass, saw that it was empty, and put it down on the floor.

  “Don’t fuck with Julia’s head,” he said. “That’s the hardest thing to forgive. Break up with her if you have to. Go back to Virginia, clean out your shit. Do what you have to do.”

  “I’m going to talk to her,” I said. “It all doesn’t have to be so goddamn dramatic.”

  He stared at me, daring me to confess more. I looked out the window at a reflection of myself.

  “Where are you sleeping?” he said finally. “I need to go to bed.”

  “You take the bed upstairs. I’ll go see Julia, and if she doesn’t want me there, I’ll sleep on the couch.”

  “You can share the bed with me if you want to,” Colin said. “Don’t be a martyr.”

  He picked up his bag and bounded upstairs, taking the steps two at a time. Colin, more than anyone I knew, seemed able to change his mood instantaneously, moving from anger or sadness to complete equilibrium with no stops in between. (Julia, for better or worse, ranked second in this odd ledger.) I finally checked my phone and read Leslie’s text message: “you see my email? send me kenny’s # or email? miss yr face + books.” Well, there was that at least. I wanted to tell her I missed her, but I sent her Kenny’s number and nothing else. She didn’t respond. I read a graphic novel for a while, the memoir of a middle-aged Russian woman’s dating life in New York, and empathized deeply with the protagonist. I wished that I could write a quotidian memoir about my life as a woman in New York, with occasional detours to Europe and L.A. They couldn’t write them fast enough for me. All the women I knew wanted to write novels wit
h plots.

  I stepped out onto the front porch and heard a faint warning bark from the guest cabin. Dogs can hear a door open from one hundred miles away. I was anticipating the worst, but when I got to the cabin, Julia was asleep or pretending to sleep. She curled toward me under the covers, instinctually or otherwise, and I warmed myself by the heat she gave off, that inefficient generator. I slept soundly, to my surprise. I dreamed about arguing.

  I woke up to bright sunshine and an empty bed. It was ten a.m. I walked outside, surveyed the ridiculous beauty of the water and the coastline and the tiny island a few hundred yards away. I was mad that I couldn’t enjoy it, that I’d made it impossible for myself to have a nice vacation. A vacation from what being the inevitable echo. It was Julia’s vacation. A nice time, then. A nice fucking time, in general. I wanted my unhappiness to be a result of defying convention—like a Hardy novel where I’d exceeded my society’s allowance for freethinking and was now being punished. But I wasn’t actually that stupid. It had occurred to me lately that it was much more possible than I’d previously considered to be both “self-aware” and fundamentally wrong about the nature of the self.

  I found my phone in the main house, on the couch where I’d left it. There was a Post-it note stuck to it, in Colin’s handwriting. “Went for a run with J and Kiki. Coffee in the kitsch. B uv good cheer, ocean boi. C.”

  I turned on my phone, which was nearly dead. Nothing from Leslie. There was one form email from an obscure literary journal rejecting a half-finished story I’d sent them, and a political newsletter I received daily and never read. I sat on the front porch drinking coffee and puffing on my vaporizer until I was both seriously stoned and jittery with caffeine. I walked down to the dock and put my feet in the cold water, stretched the rest of my body out so I was taking on maximum sun. Maybe I could be happy without Leslie, if she went away. I’d been happy, or happy enough, before I met her. I still loved Julia. That wasn’t really in question. I had plenty of love. It was, I was realizing, a callous kind of love. That seemed to be all I had to give. Anyone I was with would realize that eventually, I thought, with my feet in the water, so really the goal was to create the illusion of depth for as long as possible. Not for the sex, no. For the company. Other people were interesting, and the more privileged time you had with them the less bored you would be. They would teach you how to live, or at least entertain you while you failed to learn. And it wasn’t entirely selfish, because, to other people, you were someone else, too, someone interesting, even if you knew that you weren’t. I knew a lot of people who thought that everything they said and did was of value, worthy of broadcast on the local or national level. I was coming to understand that it was this belief itself that sustained those people’s desire for communication, rather than the actual content of what was being said. Content, now more than ever, was irrelevant. Then Kiki was licking my face, and I felt a shadow blocking the sun over me.