Early Work

by Andrew Martin

  We had been arguing, since a month into our dating life, about the fact that Julia had slept with only one other person besides me, and even that had been only a one-night stand with a hirsute Bulgarian floor-mate her freshman year. Think of all she’d be missing if we stayed together forever! The speculation hadn’t bothered me that much at first. We were mostly happy together, and it seemed premature to the point of irrelevance to be worrying about a sexual lifetime. But it kept coming up.

  One night, after a movie at which we’d consumed a large Poland Spring bottle’s worth of vodka, Julia was particularly persistent in speculating about the skill and stamina of our friend Connor, who was, it must be noted, very handsome and an apparently excellent rock climber. At some point, she edged from speculation to intention.

  “I bet he’ll be really creative,” she said. “And, like, strong, but gentle. Not demanding, you know, but, like, with a clear knowledge of his own body.”

  “I know my body,” I said. “Shin bone, hip bone. Hippocampamus.”

  “Different doesn’t mean better,” she said. “It’s fun to think about it. Isn’t that what you’re doing when you jerk off?”

  “I’m always thinking of you,” I said. “I’m thinking of your face.”

  “You’re not as funny as you think you are,” she said. She was sitting on the edge of the bed. I was lying on the floor.

  “If you need to get fucked by whoever, who am I to stop you?” I said. “Just like take a shower at his place before you come over, you know?”

  “I have my own place,” she said, calm. “And you’re in it, unfortunately.”

  I stood up suddenly and the blood rushed from my head. I steadied myself against her dresser, knocking over a pile of books. I was so drunk that I thought I was sober. I eyed the books that had formed a collapsed ziggurat. The Waves by Virginia Woolf was nearest to hand. It was Julia’s favorite book at the time. I’d borrowed her copy of it for months and made it through ten heavily underlined pages before giving up in baffled boredom. Now I picked it up.

  “You think Virginia Woolf worried about how many people she’d fucked?” I said.

  “Yes,” Julia said.

  I tore the book in half—it came apart at the spine much faster than I thought it would—and dropped the pieces on the floor.

  “Oh, shit,” Julia said quietly.

  I walked out of the bedroom and out the front door. I walked for a long time, all the way to the Forty-Second Street subway, with a dull thud in my ears—You’re fucked, you’re fucked, you’re fucked. Times Square was at its empty, bathetic worst, wasted electricity for the sad-about-sex.

  When I finally got to Brooklyn I’d sobered up enough to realize the scale of my failure. I had a long email from Julia waiting in my inbox. It was comprehensive, accurate, damning. It’s a bad sign when a person who has every reason to be furious with you opens a letter with two paragraphs about your good qualities (“You like good country music. You are caring and adept with animals. You are neither overly nor too little concerned with the getting and spending of money”). It is the mark of someone who has taken your full measure and found it wanting.

  In the third paragraph, Julia laid it out: despite my kind and noble qualities, my ego prevented me from making a sincere connection with her, and thus from understanding and fulfilling her needs. She recommended that I use the next period of my life, “of whatever duration,” to examine my heart and attempt to understand what I wanted from myself and from a partner, and that I “not merely grab on to the nearest person like a drowning shipwrecked sailor clings to passing driftwood.”

  She concluded with the exhortation that I “be better.” Not for her, mind you, and not for my next partner, but—get this—for myself. But wasn’t I already too self-involved? Wasn’t that the foremost of my myriad problems?

  We were broken up for a year and a half, during which time Julia joined and quit Teach for America, and finally got to find out that sex with young men was all pretty much the same. I got my first magazine job and tried desperately to date a fellow assistant who knew better, then dated one of her friends in defeat. Julia and I got back together after crashing into each other at a Titus Andronicus concert at Maxwell’s. It was, in retrospect, too easy.

  Upon our return from Maine, Julia started a two-week “independent study” block. She was supposed to be scouring hospital records for a research project on antibiotic-resistant infections, but mostly she went on long runs with Kiki at the hottest points of the day, otherwise closing herself in the shared office (which neither of us ever used, usually) and blasting Illmatic on repeat. She emerged only after dark to watch movies projected on our living room wall. I was too guilty to do anything but observe this from the dining room table, where I stared at Word documents and tried to find the language to mercifully sever us from each other.

  Leslie and Kenny were waiting for me out at his house. I hadn’t told them exactly when I would do the breaking up, but Leslie had practically moved in with Kenny, so it wasn’t much of a hassle for her to be on call there. Leslie was frank about the fact that she and Ken had shared a bed on a few nights when they’d both gotten too drunk to see straight, but they both swore that nothing more significant had happened. I didn’t quite believe them, but who was I to envy them their supposedly straightforward affection, stuck as I was in my pantomime of commitment?

  “Come watch?” Julia called to me on the fourth night of this.

  “What’s on?” I said. I stood in the doorway of the dining room, not meeting her eyes. She was wearing a football-themed fake-vintage Rolling Stones T-shirt.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Is there anything you want to see?”

  “Um,” I said. I tried to think of something normal. All we ever watched were foreign films about the inevitable dissolution of relationships. “We still haven’t watched that movie about the Indonesian genocide.”

  She searched my face to see if I was joking. I wasn’t sure myself.

  “Didn’t you want to see that Renoir movie about India?” she said. “That probably wouldn’t be horrible.”

  I had wanted to watch that, at some point. I’d wanted to do a lot of things.

  “Sure,” I said. “Do you want a beer?”

  “Naw,” she said, tapping at her keyboard blankly, finding us the fun. From the kitchen I heard music, presumably the opening of the movie, a rhythmic sitar-like humming. A plummy British accent was saying something pedantic about India. The tone of the fucking thing …

  I came back empty-handed and landed heavily in the armchair across from Julia.

  “Hey, look,” I said.

  She kept her eyes on the wall, on the movie. The voice-over prattled on until she suddenly lunged and struck the space bar on her computer, stopping the sound. She finally turned to me, her face glowing deep blue from the light of the power button on the projector.

  “I’m keeping Kiki,” she said.

  I had considered this. When we first adopted her, Julia and I had made a verbal canine prenup in the event of just such a thing occurring. Because I had been the one most stricken with the need for a dog, it had been decided that I would become her guardian in the event of a breakup or a period of long separation due to career, family illness, etc. We’d joked about the arrangement with friends—it seemed, to us, if not to them, a sign of our progressiveness, or something, to be able to talk openly about what would in reality be an extremely unhappy situation. I had resolved to myself that I would be gracious in this matter. I told myself that I’d done the hard math and concluded that Leslie and the open future were more important than a dog who was so braided into my daily life that I sometimes went a week without really thinking about her. But now that Julia had said it out loud, I felt nauseous with despair. Is there anything more pathetic than imagining your dog waiting by the door for you to come home, wagging her tail brightly at the sound of a similar car coming down the street, only to hang her head in shame when you don’t arrive? Or, the obv
ious facing image in the pendant, the dog growing accustomed to your absence, then, eventually, shifting her loyalty? There was some small comfort to be found in Kiki’s steadfast resistance to strange men. Perhaps she would drive more than one suitor away with her attitude. Which was a terrible thing to want, too.

  “You should have her,” I said. “I know.”

  I started crying and put my head in my hands. When I looked up, Julia was still perched on the edge of the couch, holding the resolute expression that I knew did not come naturally to her. Kiki was under the bed, probably. She could sense bad vibes coming from a long way off.

  “I’m really sorry,” I said to Julia, wiping my tears with the palms of my hands. There really weren’t that many tears.

  “You need to go,” she said. “I know you’re going to regret this, and it’s going to be a real fucking shame. I don’t even hate you yet, so I mostly just feel sad for you. What you’re doing is awful, and I’m not going to forget it.”

  “I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t have to,” I said.

  “That’s got resonance, Pete,” Julia said. “You should be a writer. You should fucking write something down on a piece of paper.”

  And, what? I would have liked to say something worthy of the life we’d shared, but that’s not what happened. I got up and walked quickly to the bedroom, threw some dirty clothes in a bag. I grabbed a couple of books I wasn’t reading from the bedside table. What better time to finally crack A Dance to the Music of Time? I tried to coax Kiki out from under the bed but she wouldn’t budge. She was scared; she didn’t recognize me like this. Or maybe she just thought I wanted to give her a bath.

  When I got out to Kenny’s house, he and Leslie were already standing on the front lawn. They took turns hugging me in silence. I’d texted to alert them of my imminent arrival, but there was still something unsettling to me in their solemn reception, somewhere between the taking in of a fugitive and acknowledging a mourner at a wake. Then Scruggs raced out the front door and I started crying again.

  “Aw, buddy,” Kenny said. “Let’s get some whiskey in you. We’re not gonna talk about the bad times no more.”

  “I’ll go in and turn off the George Jones,” Leslie said.

  “Seriously?” I said.

  “Naw, we were listening to the Everly Brothers,” Kenny said. “Bet you can guess the tune.”

  I took a seat on the flowered, yellowing couch next to Leslie. Ken poured me a coffee mug of bourbon.

  “Well, what’ve you guys been doing?” I said. I took a sip of the whiskey. I didn’t want to, but I started feeling like less of an asshole almost immediately.

  “The same thing we do every day, Pinky,” Leslie said. She shaded southern in imitation of Kenny. “Readin’, ponderin’. The intellectual country life.”

  “Who you calling a in-tuh-lectual?” Kenny said. “I’m just glad you’re here now, Pete, so I’ve got somebody to make love to me.”

  “Seriously, though,” Leslie said, nuzzling my shoulder with her chin. “I got a lot done. But I bet you can make me more productive.”

  “That’s romantic,” I said.

  “Oh, right,” she said. “Let’s talk about romance.”

  After a couple of rounds, Leslie and I wandered off to the dusty downstairs bedroom that she’d taken over as her own. It was like the room of a neglected child in a particularly downcast British film: Kenny’s broken instruments and power tools and a couple of Scruggs’s ripped-up toys looked to have been left wherever they’d fallen on the scuffed wood floor. Leslie had countered by strewing her clothes and books around in a similarly unpremeditated fashion, and the room now had a wistful trace of her distinctive smell, an admixture of cooked vegetables, laundry detergent, and body-crevice musk.

  “So are you, like, out out of your aunt’s place?” I said.

  “I’ve still got some stuff there,” she said. “I told her I’m working on an art project that meets at night a lot, so I’m staying with a girlfriend? In the old sense of the word. I was very vague, but she seems pretty good with me being gone. She texts like every three days. Sorry, I know you must feel bad.”

  “I think I’m not feeling it for real yet,” I said. “I mostly feel bad about losing the dog.”

  “Eh, bitch never liked me anyway,” Leslie said. “Sorry, that’s awful. Even if that’s her scientific name, she’s a wonderful creature. Maybe you can do joint doggie custody?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said.

  We sat in silence for a minute. That would have been the time to leave. I’m sorry, I can’t do this. And go where? Into the woods. Yes. Live in a tree. Die on the ground.

  “Well, do you wanna fool around a little?” she said. “Would that make you feel better?”

  I hung my head. Forest death faded as an option. But I didn’t want to seem easy.

  “Probably not,” I said.

  “Ohhh-kay,” Leslie said.

  “You didn’t really want to have sex with Kenny, right?” I said.

  “What do you want the answer to be?” She put her hand on my knee.

  “For you to only want me forever?” I said.

  “Now, that wouldn’t be very much fun, would it? Just wanting one thing? Maybe I’m filled right up to the brim with him right now.”

  “You’re not.”

  “I said maybe. The point is, you don’t get to find out. You get to ask, and then I don’t tell you.”

  “That’s a little one-sided.”

  “Exactly. There is only my side. And lucky for you, you get to be on it.”

  “I’m pretty sure you have at least two sides. In my experience.”

  “Hey, there will be plenty of time for all that. We’re having a philosophical discussion now. How many sides are there?”

  “One?”

  “Good. Good learning.”

  That night I lay awake until dawn, watching the morning light bring texture and shade to the contours of Leslie’s snoring nose.

  We started life as a family of three. During the day, Leslie and I found corners in which to do or not do our work while Kenny went into town to work day shifts at the soup place or rehearse with his band. Then we all joined up for dinner, cooked, more often than not, by Kenny. Leslie was somehow even less inclined toward the kitchen arts than I was, bored to death by the idea of a recipe and cheerfully incompetent at improvisation. Together, we managed pasta with red sauce and, another time, a gloppy stir-fry almost inedibly heavy on peanut butter.

  “I mean, it’s food,” Kenny said, setting on the latter dish.

  Leslie worked hard in the stifling house, commandeering the rickety wooden table by the big window in the front room. She’d angled an old metal floor fan to blow directly into her face, sending her hair into a constant storm around her head and, not coincidentally, rendering her deaf to the world. She could put in four, maybe five hours before breaking for a swim, which I was always more than ready to join her in.

  I decided my best shot at productivity was to isolate myself upstairs, in the room whose closet had previously housed the three-legged kitten. (Kenny had given him to the cute girl who worked at the bookstore when he tired of its pissing on the bed.) This was the hottest room in the house, but I was going for some kind of masochistic hypnotism, imagining that my intense physical discomfort might somehow lead to an aesthetic breakthrough. There was no Wi-Fi up there, nothing on the walls, no books. The morning started bearable, a decent breeze wafting through the one small window. I opened a story I’d been working on for years, a thing about a secretly gay Republican congressman, and, reading through it, became increasingly distressed by the reverberating yammer that sounded nothing like the voice in my head. What was the point of writing if all you ended up with was this, the textual equivalent of a speakerphone voicemail overheard on a bus?

  I put the story aside and added it to the growing list of things I was inadequate at or incapable of doing. I couldn’t tie a knot more complicated than a shoelace. I couldn’t r
oll a good joint, drive stick, or shuffle cards. I couldn’t string or tune, let alone play, any instrument. I couldn’t juggle anything, dice a vegetable, shotgun a beer, or ride a bicycle in even moderate traffic. I couldn’t do a somersault, sing or whistle a tune, follow a map, or dance any recognized dances. I could not take a photograph of distinction, couldn’t draw or paint an identifiable subject. Almost anything considered a sport was basically a wash. I was uncomfortable handling guns and fireworks—anything on fire or remotely combustible, really. I had no idea how the stock market worked. I was afraid to try the really interesting drugs. There was a long history of mental illness in my family.

  At this point I realized that I was on the verge of passing out from the heat, so I went downstairs to gulp water from a jar in the kitchen and stare at Leslie, with her discipline and flying hair. I did my best not to bother her, but I’m sure my hunched, imploring presence, even if unacknowledged, was not helpful. I returned to my hundred-degree prison to squint through sweat into my dirty screen until Leslie called me down for a trip to the pond, where we floated around making desultory conversation about books and the people who wrote them. The sphere of reference shrank slowly, from Dickens and Tolstoy to Díaz and Cusk, to people we knew and then, inevitably, with relief, ourselves.

  “I think I could, like, do this,” Leslie said, floating on her back while I treaded water. “It’s not, you know, there yet, but I’m peeking around a corner. There’s a ton of stuff the next room over. Worlds, maybe.”

  “Sure, that’s how it feels when it’s going well,” I said.

  “But even when it’s not, there’s this buzzing lately. There’s some usable static coming through.”