“Sorry, I didn’t mean to rant. There really was a lot I liked about living here. Good schools, surprising diversity, low crime rate. Not a lot of extreme poverty or ostentatious wealth. The Art Center’s nice, the sculpture garden. And people here take their time. I like that. That’s what happens when your ancestors are pioneers, I suppose.”
I doubted the causality but made an affirming noise. “Why did you decide to move to New York?”
“It’s where I’m from.”
“You wanted to be closer to family,” I suggested.
I thought I heard her stifle a laugh. “They’re all gone.”
“I’m sorry to hear—”
“No, it’s nothing,” she said with a finality that made it clear it was not nothing. Who was this woman, this friend of my mother’s? She was out of place in this city, clearly, too avid and voluble and opinionated. That’s why her friendship with my mild-mannered mother—mild-mannered in the Des Moines, Midwestern way—was unlikely, I saw now. The question was not why she’d moved back to New York, but why she’d moved to Des Moines in the first place. And why was everyone always moving? Why couldn’t we just stay put? What was wrong with us? Did I know this neighborhood was farmland till the sixties? Sadie was asking. I hadn’t known. That house right there—she pointed to the only all-brick house in the neighborhood—that was the original farmhouse. I’d made dim note of the house’s difference from its neighbors on hundreds, possibly thousands of occasions; to discover the difference’s source released a pleasure that shot through my body and back to my childhood. “Wow!” I said, then felt very silly. Sadie looked at me and smiled with her eyes, brown.
We came to an intersection with a paved foot- or bike path I couldn’t remember ever seeing. “This way?” Already Sadie was turning onto it, and I was, and then we were walking through thin deciduous forest that rose on our right to a row of houses and fell on our left to a frozen river, the Des Moines? I tried to call up a mental map, but its shapes kept shifting and dissolving in my mind. We’d only been walking for twenty minutes, couldn’t have been more than a mile from Sadie’s house, a little less than that from my childhood house, and yet this was foreign territory to me. I wondered if these woods connected up with the woods at the end of Cortez Drive. I regretted never going in those woods as a child. Then again, there was still time.
The sun had set and the world had dimmed to a thousand browns and grays. The woods on our left gave way to a view of the frozen expanse of water. Sadie stopped. This was a great place to see bald eagles, she said, and she fished a pair of binoculars from a pocket and pointed them at the tops of trees on the opposite bank. I scanned the dark branches for bird shapes, movement, suddenly needing to see an eagle. Sadie handed me the binoculars—“Wanna try?”—and I aimed them at everything, forgetting the cold, yearning (why?) for birds. The frozen river creaked and groaned. It was Sadie who finally ushered us onward. I was crushed. I needed eagles. I hadn’t known. As we walked between marshland and open field, fallen now into near-total darkness, Sadie told me she used to walk here with my mother. There was always so much to see back here—not only eagles but osprey, hawks, foxes, otters, all sorts of little mammals. “Once we saw a bobcat!” she practically shrieked, as if she’d just spotted it again. “Everyone we told refused to believe it, though,” she said, “so eventually we just stopped telling people.”
* * *
—
I hadn’t realized until that walk that I’d been missing my mother terribly. For the past decade or so I’d seen my parents an average of two or three times a year, but my last year in New York, and my months in Halifax, my mother had been a near-constant companion: the novel I’d been working on, I told whoever asked, was a disfigurement of her father’s memoirs. A few years ago he sent five long sections to my mother, whom he hadn’t spoken to or seen in many years, and she photocopied them for my siblings and me, “in case you want to understand what I’ve had to deal with my whole life.” Beneath or within its parody of self-aggrandizing political memoirs, which itself belied my grandfather’s actual self-aggrandizement, it’s a story of missed chances, disillusion, frustration, resentment, and latent violence. He spent most of his life in the air force, drifting from base to base. If he’d been born two years earlier he would have flown in World War II, maybe dropped bombs on Japanese islands, maybe gotten shot down. He would’ve been a member of “the Greatest Generation,” would’ve been called a hero, which would’ve masked the fact that he was a standard-issue American narcissist and boor. “We all have a secret, private life that we try to conceal from world view,” he writes redundantly. “Our culture dictates a system of moral values that is in conflict with our true nature. We are all hypocrites, steeped in dissimulation, fackery [sic] and pretense. Autobiographies are usually attempts to justify our peccadilloes and illuminate our magnanimous nobility.” It takes a man of my grandfather’s moral courage, implies my grandfather—who the only time I saw him, when I was six or seven, I watched throw a waffle at his fourth wife’s face—to puncture our culture’s false ideas of itself.
Beyond the anger I felt toward my grandfather on my mother’s behalf, I felt almost no connection to him the first time I read his memoirs. He may as well have been someone else’s grandfather. Then the anger faded and I began to read them as if he were a character invented and controlled by a novelist, a narrator whose unreliability was exposed through the steady accrual of dubious information; shoddy writing; and crude, self-serving forgeries. I marked up the text with little notes, then started making edits to heighten by any available means the irony generated by the distance between my grandfather and my imagined novelist. I conflated women and invented new ones to make his love life more complexly patterned, and elaborated anecdotes into fuller and stranger stories. The working title of my novel was My Grandfather’s Memoirs, but I saved it on my computer as “Grandpa.”
I explained my project in an email to Maria around the time of Sadie’s visit, using the present tense instead of the past—she’d asked if I could say anything about the novel I was working on—so that my lie seemed less a lie than an inconsequential matter of grammar. The content of our emails, though still largely literary, was moving toward the more expressly personal. I’d written her about my recent one-on-one, lightly caricaturing Jess, it seems to me now, as a self-involved youth who lacked (unlike Maria) the aesthetic sensitivity necessary to appreciate foreign documentaries. Recounting the events of that evening, I discovered—the movie, the nachos, the German beer house, the walk through downtown Des Moines, Jess’s story—gave them a solidity and texture they’d lacked both as they unfolded and immediately afterward, as if the whole night hadn’t actually happened until I wrote about it to Maria. Similarly, telling her about my novel made me feel as though I hadn’t abandoned it, as though I still believed I could count on myself to tell the truth through fiction.
Maria, too, had begun to open up, relating funny anecdotes, anxieties, the texture of her days. Tensions between housemates (Maria not excluded) smoldered, then flamed up or petered out, a constant source of drama, intrigue, annoyance, anger, and amusement. Lately, Maria wrote, her upstairs neighbors, an on-again, off-again couple, Sam and Jo, had begun waking up at five a.m. to argue about what to make for dinner. “I feel like we’ve had a lot of basmati recently.” “Fine, we’ll use whatever rice you want to use.” “Baby, I didn’t mean it like that.” “Mean it like what? We’ll use a different rice. What do I care what rice we use?” “No no no you should care.” Etc. They went on and on, these fights, somehow encapsulating everything Maria disliked—a larger category than she had been willing to admit, at first—about her “intentional community.”
Nevertheless: the time, the time. Maria bathed in it, luxuriated in it. She walked, she lay on the floor, she read. Could days and weeks be filled in this way? They could. I was beginning to learn that filling days and weeks required far less than we t
ypically imagined. Still, a part of me wanted to ask her the bad question: What are you doing with yourself?
Well, for one thing she’d started to do some translations from the Finnish. She’d been teaching herself the language off and on, she told me, for the past year and a half. She liked to imagine, as she studied and translated, Finland’s snow-caked pine and spruce forests, its frost-coated ferns, its frozen earth, its bears and wolves and foxes and elk, the low afternoon sun laying streaks of gold on fields of blue and purple ice. What was her connection to Finland? None. She’d never been there and had no plans to go. Sometimes she wondered if her fantasy of the place was the source of whatever vitality her amateur translations might possess. (She was proud, she wrote, to be an amateur—from the French and Latin for lover. Amateurs did what they did out of love. They didn’t instrumentalize. They lacked ulterior motives.) There was a Finnish word for homesickness felt for a place one has never been: kaukokaipuu. That’s what she felt for Finland: kaukokaipuu. “Will you send me a draft of your novel when you’re done?” she wrote, and I promised her I would.
We had crossed (we both felt it, I was sure) some critical threshold—of what? Intimacy. What is intimacy? A feeling, a register, a hum, little touches on the shoulder as you do the dishes. Maria referred to our correspondence more than once as a “collaboration.” We were, from a certain perspective, ridiculous people, alone in our houses in the heart of the part of the country no one cared about. We needed each other; I understand that now. When I imagined Maria I saw her sitting, legs crossed, on her bedroom floor, leaning in toward a book or screen, her shifting eyes skeptical, demanding, intent, concentrating so hard she almost vibrated. When I imagined her imagining me, I saw myself working on the novel I’d abandoned, which made me feel as though her correspondent wasn’t me but a version of myself from the recent past, a version who not only still wrote novels but who also was still in love with Ashwini, and this lent an undercurrent of illicitness to our innocent-seeming emails. But the flashes of guilt I felt from time to time only fed a larger excitement. I was a little suspicious of this feeling, but more than that I was interested to see what would happen.
* * *
—
The evening of our walk through the wilds of Des Moines, Sadie attended the Art Center fundraiser that was the reason she’d flown in. Next day she went on a series of “friend dates,” and I felt much more strongly than usual like an intruder in someone else’s house. I sat for a long time on the living-room floor, reading and rereading a single paragraph from Berryman’s posthumous novel Recovery, force-feeding meaning to the starving sentences, trying to leave myself behind, if just for a moment. But the walls pressed in on me, the carpet itched, shadowy forms peered in from the windows, and finally I closed the book and went to watch late-afternoon ESPN. There was a new episode of The Bachelor that evening, and I was hoping Sadie wouldn’t return till it was over.
Eight o’clock came and she was still out, and, relieved, I changed the channel to ABC. The show had barely started when I heard the moan of the garage door. I waited a few seconds, debating what to do, then clicked to the beginning of the Bulls-Magic game I’d been planning to watch during commercial breaks. But this was the week of the dreaded two-on-one date, and the scene was about to shift to Las Vegas (a city full of wedding chapels, noted Alli, an Ohio apparel merchant), and the bachelorettes were staying in the most beautiful hotel ever; how could I abandon them now? The host was right: it was time to go big or go home. I pressed the pre ch button. “We are in Las Vegas,” announced the Bachelor. “They’re happy. I’m happy. Fresh beginnings. Viva Las Vegas.”
“This show still exists?” Sadie asked, walking into the room.
“It does!” I said superfluously, and she sat down in her sleeveless, dark purple dress on the opposite end of the couch from me, her dark-lipsticked mouth a little parted, her eyes fastened—the cliché felt true—to the TV screen. The Bachelor was delivering a date card to the bachelorettes in their high-ceilinged enormous-windowed suite in a Vegas skyscraper. Marissa: “The second the date card hits the table, it’s very real.” I watched through Sadie’s eyes as the date card hit the table. She couldn’t have known to be surprised that the date went to Shawntel, a mortician from Chico, California. Shawntel had no idea what the Bachelor had planned. The Bachelor couldn’t wait to tell her. They were going on a SHOPPING SPREE. Delirium. Tears. And not at like the Chico mall or whatever: at one of the nicest malls in the world. The other girls were literally dying of envy. It was every woman’s dream to go from store to store and pick out every single thing she wanted. But Shawntel was the only one who got to live that dream.
The date was amazing. Shawntel cleaned house. And she and the Bachelor felt so natural together. “This is a real feeling, this is real love,” she said. When she got back she passed around a $5,000 handbag for the rest of the girls to look at and touch. Shawntel was so living every girl’s dream. Michelle pretended to hang herself with her scarf. “It’s like the perfect Pretty Woman moment that every girl dreams about,” said Ashley.
“Why do they keep saying that!” Sadie said as the show went to commercial. “It is not this girl’s dream to go shopping in Las Vegas. Actually that sounds like a nightmare.” I nodded. “This show is awful, awful, awful,” she said. “It’s pernicious. It’s really evil. How can you watch this?”
It was upsetting to hear such a vicious appraisal of something I had grown to love. “I guess I just really want to know who wins,” I said, but that sounded unconvincing even to me (though it wasn’t false), and immediately I added, “It is awful. Of course it’s awful. It commodifies love and demeans women—”
“It demeans everyone.”
“It demeans everyone, you’re right. I mean—of course. And it’s cynical and trashy—”
“And heteronormative.”
“And heteronormative and exploitative and of course, of course. But”—I wasn’t sure what my counterpoint would be—“the thing about it is these are real people, they’re not actors, and I really think they start to develop—some of them—actual emotions toward the Bachelor, and vice versa. And yeah, those emotions get confused with the emotions that come from being on TV and living in this world full of pools and helicopters, but I actually think that some of the women might be falling in love. I really do. In some actually meaningful sense of the word love. And whatever you think of these people, how they talk and act and their jobs and clothes and priorities or whatever—I don’t know! It’s hard not to feel some empathy for them. Because all they want is to be happy, right? And everyone deserves to be happy, don’t they? The pressures they’re feeling to find a romantic partner—aren’t those only magnified versions of the pressures we all feel?”
“You’re telling me it’s not all scripted.”
“Only in the sense that all these people are repeating things they’ve heard on previous seasons of the show. I mean, I assume—this is the first season I’ve watched. Also things they’ve heard on TV and in movies or whatever. But I’m ninety percent sure the producers aren’t feeding them lines. Maybe once in a while, but usually not, I think.”
“I just find it hard to believe that anyone believes they’ll find love on a reality TV show.”
“They don’t at first! That’s part of what’s so compelling! They’re all as skeptical as we are until they start feeling these real feelings!” I was all worked up. This was the first time I’d been asked to articulate my interest in The Bachelor, and I hadn’t realized I felt quite so strongly about it. Maybe I didn’t until this moment. I could tell from Sadie’s face that I hadn’t convinced her of anything, but when the show returned from commercial she didn’t leave the room, and after a few minutes she half-reclined on the couch and covered her bare legs with a blanket.
On the second part of Shawntel’s one-on-one, she and the Bachelor sat down to dinner on the roof of the mall they’d just finishe
d eviscerating. Shawntel wore a gray sleeveless dress from her shopping spree. She looked incredible. She felt like a princess. The Chardonnay became champagne. It was a perfect night.
“She’s going to win,” Sadie said. “She’s hot, and she’s not stupid, and they have a physical connection.” A wave of relief passed through me: Sadie was in.
“Maybe.” I hadn’t been thinking of Shawntel as one of the favorites, but I had to admit she had a pretty solid date. “Let’s see what happens the rest of this episode.”
If the one-on-one enacted every girl’s dream, the group date enacted every guy’s: to drive a NASCAR race car on an actual NASCAR track. “Oh no,” I involuntarily said as soon as the date’s premise was announced.
“What?” said Sadie, and I told her Emily’s story—Ricky, the engagement, the plane crash, little Ricki. “Oh my god,” said Sadie, “how can they do this to her? It’s so cruel.”
Apparently Emily hadn’t told the Bachelor yet that Ricky had been a race car driver—I’d thought she had, but maybe she only told the TV audience—so when the Bachelor saw her on the verge of tears he didn’t understand what was wrong. He asked the other women if they’d mind if he took Emily aside for a moment. On the one hand, yes, they definitely did mind, but on the other hand this was yet more evidence of his sensitivity and kindness and compassion and real husband potential. They watched as he and Emily sat down on the infield lawn, the grass glowing weirdly bright in the spotlights. It was windy and Emily kept brushing strands of her bright blond hair behind her ear. (“She’s actually very pretty,” Sadie said.) When she told him Ricky had been a race car driver, the Bachelor didn’t know what to say. He looked away. Emily picked at the grass. Finally he said, “I feel like a jerk.” She didn’t want him to feel like a jerk. “Em, I care for you,” he said, jaw clenched. (“He’s so earnest!” Sadie said.) “A lot. And I want you to know that.” (Sadie: “He’s insane. I think he’s insane.”)
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