The Bachelor

by Andrew Palmer

  Another block passed before Jess said, “I wrote him back, expressing sympathy, you know, ‘I didn’t mean to call you a monster. You’re not a monster. You seem very sweet,’ or whatever. And he writes me back saying basically I’m the only one who’s ever understood him. Which, you know, makes me feel very good. So we develop this correspondence, and we keep it up my last two years of high school, and we really start to get to know each other, or at least that’s what it feels like. I mean, I’ll be honest: I felt closer to Brett than I’d ever felt to anyone in my life. And it was partly because we were so far apart and only communicating long-distance, I think.”

  We’d arrived at her parents’ house and were idling in the driveway. No lights were on inside, nor in any of the neighboring houses. Warm air brushed against our faces.

  “Did you see him again?” I asked.

  “Not while I was in high school. His band didn’t tour for a couple years, and he split his time between Nashville and Athens, Georgia. But then I went off to NYU, and we started talking about meeting up in New York, since he traveled there occasionally for one reason or another. So toward the end of my freshman year we made a plan to meet.”

  “You must have been so nervous.”

  “I was, but by this point I felt I knew him really well. I didn’t really see how things could go wrong.”

  “Oh no.”

  “No, actually, it was great. We hit it off. We went out for ramen and walked around Manhattan for hours, just talking, or just sitting and watching people. And the next day we went to the Cloisters together, and again walked around Manhattan for hours, and by the time he flew back to Nashville the next day we were more or less a couple.”

  “What?”

  “We dated my last few years of college. He moved to New York. We just broke up a month ago. And it’s strange, but it’s only in the past few weeks that I’ve started to realize what an asshole he was. Like, he really was the monster he said he was in that first email he ever wrote me! Of course, the moment I say that out loud I start to think, No, he wasn’t so bad.”

  I assured Jess that he was very, very bad. She smiled and leaned across the gearshift toward my shoulder to hug me. Then she abruptly broke off the embrace, thanked me, said good night, and left.

  As I drove home through the vacated streets, I turned Jess’s story over in my mind, trying to draw some lesson from it, if only one that clarified, even a little, the nature of our relationship. Was this the saddest story she knew about herself? That she’d worked a shitty job and read the Bible and discovered music and under the spell of her discovery convinced herself she was in love with a man who may—or may not—have taken advantage of her or worse? What did it mean? And why did she trust me with it? Should I have leaned in, after she finished talking, and pulled her close and kissed her (she was “up for anything”)? It had crossed my mind, of course, but I was so much older than her, and I liked her, it was nice to have a friend. Also, of course, Ashwini (she was still in India). Also, I was a little intimidated by Brett. A part of me had always wanted to be a rock star, to be onstage, to have fans. To go on tour and night after night abandon myself to the living moment, not caring about physical or emotional or any sort of consequences. What did Brett know about life, I wondered, that I hadn’t allowed myself to learn? And yet: Brett was a monster, maybe. I was pretty sure I wasn’t. That’s why Jess had trusted me with her story, I thought, because I wasn’t Brett. And it felt good to have Jess’s trust, it made me feel solid and real. If I could be the anti-Brett she needed, I would play that role.

  5

  By the fifth episode of The Bachelor there had been enough one-on-one dates that most of the remaining bachelorettes were starting to feel emotions they couldn’t describe. They tried to describe them, but the words they knew weren’t equal to what they felt. They said “amazing” and “magical” and “perfect” and “I’m in heaven.” “I’m the luckiest girl in the world,” they said. “I haven’t felt like this about somebody for so long.” And always, inevitably, bachelorette by bachelorette: “I didn’t expect to feel this way.” They were confused, visibly so; more: metaphysically disturbed. They’d come on the show knowing just what to say (they’d been fans of The Bachelor for nearly a decade): that they were here to fall in love, they were ready for a husband, they wanted to take that leap of faith, they believed in fairy tales. No one believes in fairy tales. They were here to have fun, to taste fame, to have an experience. At best they half-believed the words they mouthed. They weren’t stupid. They knew the Bachelor almost never ends up, in real life, with the woman he chooses on the show. But now those distinctions—the show, real life—were starting to break down. You could see it in the women’s faces, and it was unsettling, thrilling. They’d been living with each other in the mansion for weeks now, contractually deprived of the usual diversions—computers, phones, TV, magazines—and their poignant fantasies of romance and leisure and wealth and luxury and escape, which they’d been so used to ignoring beneath the crush of their lived realities, were drawn out and made solid by everything around them. The show had become their only reality (as it had been for the Bachelor from the start): not in the way a novel becomes our reality while we’re reading it, but in the way a novel might become our reality if we were able to step through the pages and share the world its characters inhabit—not just what the author’s chosen to record in words, but everything, their whole lives, all the unconsidered and in-between stuff, everything too multiform or fleeting for words. Emotions were seriously running high.

  I’d just gone for a run and now I was in bed, propped up against what I think is called a husband pillow, long underwear and shorts scrunched down around my ankles, open laptop beside me on a folded blanket against which lay a bottle of fragrance-free hand lotion. I’d tried and failed to perform the second item on Laura’s list; I couldn’t stop thinking of Ashwini, and that made me too sad to continue.

  The date card was addressed to Chantal, an executive assistant from Seattle who was emerging, along with Emily, the Ashleys, and Michelle, as a serious contender: “How deep is your love?” read the handwritten note. All the girls wondered, What could that mean? Chantal went upstairs and put on tight jeans, a tight gray T-shirt, a black leather jacket, dark makeup, and silver hoop earrings, then came back down to wait for the Bachelor in the living room, a yellow-gold and glacial white and royal blue den full of enormous candles and vases. Densely floral-patterned fringed curtains hung from doorways and windows. Beneath them the bachelorettes waited on couches, sizing each other up in their morning clothes. The Bachelor arrived smiling in a leather jacket to match his lucky date’s. He sat with the bachelorettes for a while, making them laugh with everything he said. Just a good-looking dude hanging out with his girlfriends, waiting for the helicopter to arrive. When it arrived, the women shrieked and brought their hands to their mouths and clutched each other’s forearms and said, “Oh. My god,” and “Shut. Up.” They scampered in their yoga pants and ponytails to the Italianate front patio, with its palm trees and rose bushes and cascading fountain, and watched the helicopter’s descent with touching excitement, gaping to expose their perfect teeth. Michelle didn’t like thinking about Chantal and the Bachelor going off together in a helicopter, enjoying a magical romantic night that ends with some sort of make-out. Ashley wanted to tear Michelle’s head off. Other Ashley just looked sad and worried. Then the Bachelor and Chantal were in the sky, his hand on her knee, her hand on his hand, looking out over green hills dotted with mansions.

  I muted the fibromyalgia drug commercial and closed my eyes and waited. I’d already watched this episode once, so when the commercial ended I wasn’t surprised to see the helicopter land on Catalina Island, then the Bachelor and Chantal walking arm in arm down a pier surrounded by bobbing yachts, condos glowing pastel behind them, to an accompaniment of breezy acoustic guitar music they couldn’t hear, and then the Bachelor’s dis
embodied voice: “I have something in store for Chantal and I that will make us feel like we’re completely out of the real world.” They boarded a red motorboat. The music stopped. The Bachelor took Chantal by the arm and said, “Can I tell you now?” She nodded. “We are going to walk on the ocean floor.” Wide eyes. Ominous string music. “Shut. Up.” “Swear to god.” Wet suits. Men in flip-flops. Astronaut helmets with handles like tusks. Being in the ocean was one of Chantal’s biggest fears. “When I’m in deep water I feel absolute anxiety and terror,” she said, a feeling I could relate to—the blue-black light, the obliterating sense of infinite space, the water’s surprising viscosity and weight, the slow-motion movement through a prehuman world, the strange creatures we never see but are always there, lurking, indifferent to us. Chantal really, really didn’t want to get into that water. But if she just gave up and didn’t face her fear, that would show the Bachelor she wasn’t willing to take chances for him. She knew that if you put yourself out there, a whole new world could open up to you. “So I have to do it.”

  She stepped onto a ladder, took a breath, began the slow climb down. She laughed and whimpered and brushed her hair behind her ears, giving a glimpse of her blood-red nails. One of the men in flip-flops put a helmet over her head. What if she went down there and didn’t come back up? Sheer cliffs shot up from the distant shore. She couldn’t tell if she was shaking from cold or fear. Then she was underwater, holding hands with the Bachelor, the air they breathed out bubbling to the surface. They brought the transparent face shields of their helmets together in a joke of a simulated kiss, and the show went to commercial (cholesterol drug) and I closed my eyes and waited and a doorbell rang. On the show? It rang again. I pulled up my long underwear and shorts and tossed the bottle of lotion into the bathroom and walk-ran down the hallway and stairs to the door. I opened it.

  “Oh!” my mother’s friend said as I said, “You’re early!” It was nice of her to have rung the doorbell.

  “Am I?”

  “Maybe I misread—it doesn’t matter. Welcome!” I think I wanted to acknowledge in my overenthusiasm the weird inversion of our roles.

  “Thank you! What a lovely home you have.”

  “Isn’t it?” I worried my face was flushed. “I’m going for minimal. Is it too much?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. She set down her suitcase. “I’m a big fan of the furniture-free look. It has a certain purity.”

  She looked younger than I’d imagined by ten or twenty years; certainly she was younger than my mother, who was sixty-three. She wore a slate-colored stylish-seeming knee-length wool coat, tall black leather boots, a bright red scarf. Her long, curly hair was black and graying slightly; it blinded me as we hugged.

  She stepped back and looked me in the eyes for a long moment. “God, it’s so great to finally see you. I’ve heard a lot about you, you know.”

  “Likewise.” In fact my mother had told me very little about Sadie before putting us in touch a couple months ago. They got coffee together sometimes, she’d said. They exchanged gardening tips. Apparently they hadn’t been close enough for me to know she existed when I was a kid. Now that I was face-to-face with her, she didn’t seem like the kind of person my mother would be friends with, but I wouldn’t have been able to say quite why. “Thanks for letting me stay in your house,” I said.

  “Oh”—she made a gesture that said, No need to thank me. “How has everything been going? Have you had any problems? Is there anything you need that I can get you?”

  I shook my head and said everything had been great.

  “You’ve found enough to do?”

  “I’m good at amusing myself.”

  “That’s important. A very important skill. The older you get the more important it becomes.” Her voice had a distinctive clarity and poise that struck my ears as almost British.

  I half-laughed. I think I was sweating sort of a lot.

  “Well!” she said. “That was the longest flight of my life.”

  “Oh man, I’m sorry I didn’t—”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “Can I take your suitcase upstairs?” I offered.

  “Gentleman,” Sadie said, and followed me to her room.

  “Sorry about the—I was going to change the sheets,” I said.

  “Please, please, don’t worry about it.” She slipped off her boots, removed her coat, and threw it on the floor and herself onto the unmade bed. Then she nestled her head into the pillows, sighed, seemed to remember I was standing there, sat up, and said, “I hate to be such a rude houseguest, but would you mind if I slept off the tail end of an Ambien?”

  “Not at all.”

  “When I wake up maybe we could go for a walk.”

  * * *

  —

  The wind was in our faces and the cold thrilled through us. Wind chimes were its audible expression. Dusk was approaching and the overcast sky and fallen snow were the same grayish mauve. Almost all the Christmas lights and lawn ornaments were gone. Smoke raced horizontally and somehow comically—as when steam shoots out from a cartoon character’s ears, I later realized—from small cylindrical metal chimneys. As we walked down the street we both used to live on, the space between Sadie and me seemed fogged by politeness or uncertainty or reserve, or maybe the cold. Then Sadie attacked the silence with questions. Was it good to be back? What was happening here? Had I liked growing up in Des Moines?

  Good? Happening? Liked? It hurt to speak—to contort my tongue and lips. But there was something at once warm and disarming in Sadie’s manner that made me want to answer honestly, and I found myself talking (which question was I answering?) about my unending dream of a childhood, a succession of parks and backyards and playgrounds and friends’ bedrooms and basements and TV and video games—scenes floating through my mind like clips from a movie, as if my childhood were something that had happened to someone other than me. It was one long summer vacation, I said. I rode my bike everywhere, or walked. I did as I pleased. I knew nothing bad would ever happen to me, and I was right, it didn’t.

  “Nothing?” Sadie said.

  “No. I mean my cat died. Everyone’s cat dies. We got another cat.”

  “Mittens? I love Mittens.”

  “Mittens was two cats after Fritz. First there was Tom, but he died of cancer. So—two cats died. I had a happy childhood. Protected. Sheltered, I guess you could say. And insofar as it’s impossible for me to separate growing up from growing up in Des Moines—”

  “Growing up is such a weird phrase, isn’t it? I still feel like I’m growing up.”

  “I know. I mean, I don’t know but I know. Anyway, yeah, I liked growing up. By which I mean—this is what I was trying to say—growing up in Des Moines. But what’s funny is that for the longest time I went around telling people I hated Des Moines. I guess I’d come to think of it as a sort of no place, the same mess of strip malls and fast food restaurants and big box stores you see everywhere else.”

  “I mean,” Sadie said as we turned right onto Lower Beaver; I wasn’t sure which of us had chosen that direction.

  “And yeah,” I said, “it sort of is that, but it’s also more than that. Or maybe its blankness is part of what I like about it: you can make it whatever you want to. I don’t know—you didn’t like living here?”

  A steady stream of cars went past: men and women I imagined as versions of my parents, returning from their jobs in agribusiness or state government or insurance. Well, Sadie began, this neighborhood—it wasn’t a community. Not really. No one walked in Des Moines—she waved an arm at the empty sidewalks—and there were no squares, no stoops, not even porches, and even though everyone had these big front yards, people only ever hung out in their big backyards, on patios, everyone had to have a big backyard patio, the houses were turned inward, toward themselves, away from the street, away from the world. No one gardened.
Or they did but they grew only the showiest flowers, all non-native of course. Except for the stray tomato plant, no one grew vegetables. When she told people she’d started growing vegetables they looked at her like she was from another country, like she couldn’t afford to buy food from Hy-Vee. Instead of these big vacant lots—she pointed one out—there should be community gardens. Community. That’s what was missing from Des Moines, she said. Probably that was why no one here had anything resembling a political conscience, except of course when the caucuses came to town—but even then, even then what people cared about wasn’t policy, wasn’t issues, the real, pressing issues of our society, not really, it was glamour and fame and the spotlight, it was attention, election years were the only times the rest of the world paid any attention to Iowa, then and whenever a new farm bill was on the table and suddenly all of Washington cared passionately about corn. Corn and soybeans. Vast deserts of corn and soybeans. And pigs and cows hopped up on growth hormones. Did I realize, Sadie asked, that Iowa was directly responsible for what was happening in Egypt and Tunisia? I told her I hadn’t really been paying attention to the news. “Well what’s happening is that people in the Middle East are starving, and they’re starving because they can’t afford food, and they can’t afford food because our government’s giving money to farmers right here in Iowa to grow corn not to eat but to feed pigs or cows, or else to turn into gasoline. And no one here”—she nodded at the houses—“cares, or even knows what’s going on. I mean, they just reelected Branstad.”

  Terry Branstad was the avuncular mustachioed monster who’d governed Iowa for almost my entire childhood. But he’d retired. Now he was back? What else had I missed? “I should really start reading the Register,” I said pathetically.