—
As for me, there was no question of telling my mother about Sadie. It wasn’t that I feared she’d disapprove, exactly, but that such transgressions of societal convention weren’t spoken of in my family. I had no interest in upsetting the smooth surface of the early part (I hoped) of my parents’ old age. Sadie, though, wanted to tell my mom. Her own mother’s lies had taught her to hate deception of any kind. I argued that some forms of deception were benign, and that in any case everyone was always deceiving everyone else, we didn’t go around baring our souls to everyone we met. She accused me of lacking courage. Chastened, I told her we could tell my mother eventually but I needed time, secretly suspecting the relationship would end before we revealed our secret.
The tension that had begun to cloud our correspondence in recent days, though, seemed to dissolve the moment I saw her. We embraced, kissed, held hands to the Jeep, and drove back from the airport to my mountain listening to a mix I’d made for her the night before. “It’s so great to see you,” she couldn’t stop saying, as if the words were what kept me from disappearing. “It’s so great to see you,” I said. It was. The day was bright and warm. As we passed through the vineyards of Suisun Valley, the pleasing rhythm of the passing rows of grapevines was interrupted by a flurry of digital chimes, and when we reached the base of the mountain I asked Sadie if she’d mind if we stopped so I could check my phone before it went out of service. “You mean before we enter the Void?”
The texts turned out to be from Laura. Today was the day of her sister’s wedding, and Laura was giving me a running commentary of the reception: her mother was getting drunk, her mother was drunk, her mother was whisper-yelling about her sister’s dress, her sister was talking shit about her mother, the reception was fast turning into a “disaster”—a disaster I knew Laura was sort of enjoying even as it appalled her. Keep the updates coming, I texted. Will respond more fully later. “Just a friend with a crazy mom,” I said, not wanting to invoke an ex-girlfriend at this moment, and Sadie and I, still dazed by each other, ascended above the clouds.
Reunion sex with someone you really like is the best sex not only because the pleasures of rediscovery are overlaid on the more immediate pleasures of touch, almost as though you’re reenacting your first time, but also because, as in a suspenseful book or movie, you experience equally and simultaneously anxiety and its assuagement.
Next day was the warmest since I’d arrived and so clear we could see not only the Golden Gate Bridge but downtown San Francisco. I let Sadie press the button that retracted the glass doors suspended half an inch above the pool, while I inflated the floating chaises longues. We spent the day getting in and out of the pool and sometimes lounging beside it. The pool was warm; the wind was cool; the sun was warm then hot. Sadie had a higher tolerance for the hot tub than I did (more than five minutes at a time made me light-headed). The chaises longues’ cupholders didn’t support our mimosas, so we drank them sitting on the edge of the pool, legs suspended in the water. We tossed quarters in the deep end and dove to retrieve them. Sadie swam like an Olympic champion, so I was embarrassed, but also not, when it was revealed I could barely swim the length of the pool. Sadie asked if I’d taken swim lessons when I was a kid, and I told her I had but they never took.
“Water isn’t my element,” I said.
“What is?”
“You,” I said ridiculously, kissing her.
“You’re ridiculous,” she said, pulling me toward her.
“Where did you learn to swim so well?” I said into her mouth.
“Ocean,” she said into mine.
Ocean.
Later, or earlier, we watched a pair of eagles circle the house and then swoop through the valley.
“Golden,” Sadie said.
We ate strawberries for lunch.
We ran laps around the house till we worked up a sweat, then dove into the pool and got out and did it again.
All day we did whatever felt good. I have a photo of Sadie on the edge of the pool, legs in the water and sunlight streaming through the pane of glass behind her onto her naked and gleaming body, a look of contentment on her face that consumes all other contentment in the world. For a long time we sat in folding chairs on the balcony, reading our respective books (hers: the latest Didion; mine: Berryman’s Collected), and I thought, If happiness exists then here it is: two naked people reading silently together on top of a mountain in the sun.
We’d planned to descend into Napa the next day, maybe visit a few wineries, but we awoke to find ourselves not above the clouds but in one. “I think it’s raining,” Sadie said. “I think we’re inside the rain.” Purple-gray fog pressed against all windows, bathing the house in an alien light that didn’t change as the day progressed. It was crepuscular, the light, but also bright, as if combining the softness of twilight with the clarity of midday sun. It was lovely. Without clocks, it would’ve been impossible to guess with any accuracy the time of day.
“Fuck time.”
Beads of water ran down the windows. Swirling eddies appeared here and there before losing themselves in the cloud’s near solidity. There was no question of going to Napa now, not because we didn’t want to drive through the cloud but because we wanted to stay inside it, to see what effect it would have on us.
We spent the morning replacing lightbulbs. Dave had ordered 950 “cool blue” bulbs to replace the ones that had come with the house, less because he disliked their quality of light than because he could afford it, I sensed. Sadie and I quickly developed a routine. We took turns on the ladder, unscrewing and replacing, while the other tossed up new bulbs, caught old ones, and made sure the ladder didn’t fall. We worked in near silence, honing our techniques. We aimed for, and achieved (we decided), “maximum efficiency.” The work required just enough attention to keep us from thinking of other things. Our minds relaxed almost into mindlessness. I want to say we entered a trancelike state, but I was too aware of being with Sadie for that to really be true. What is true is that beyond her and the lightbulbs I was aware of little else, and I felt a new quality settling around us, and sensed she felt it, too.
I didn’t expect to feel this way.
That’s a good thing, right?
Every time we fall in love, we imagine that all the other times weren’t real, our new love’s authenticity exposing the hollowness of our previous love. Such an intuition is as necessary as it is illusory. Sadie and I knew not to trust it but did. The visit had initiated something, we both felt that, and our drive back down the mountain the next day was permeated with that certainty-in-uncertainty that accounts for the terror and joy of such beginnings. As we neared the bottom my phone went crazy and I pulled into a driveway to check its messages: ten or twelve more texts from Laura completing the tragicomedy of her sister’s wedding and one from the day after that read, Sorry for bombarding you. Everyone fine. My sister is a wife! Then there was one from a few hours later—Are you there?—and another that seemed to answer it: I’m here, and it took me a few moments to register that the last one wasn’t from Laura but Maria, sent that morning, a little after six, her first response to the email I’d sent what must have been only a little more than a month earlier, and it’s strange to remember thinking as I stared into my phone of Michael Jordan’s 1995 fax announcing his return to the Bulls from minor-league baseball—strange to remember he’d ever left, strange to remember remembering faxes—which said simply, “I’m back.”
Where’s here?
11
“The house is old, rambling, so overgrown with flowers that it seems rather to have grown with them than to have been built before or after the lovely half-wild garden in which it stands,” wrote Beryl to Berryman on June 18, 1938. She was staying at a friend’s house outside London as an interlude between university, which she’d completed, and her summer job as tutor and au pair in Italy. Berryman, also through with Ca
mbridge, had returned to New York to live with his mother. The past year had been a difficult one for the couple, newly engaged. The moment they got back to Cambridge from Germany, Berryman had thrown himself into his Shakespeare studies in preparation for the Oldham exam. “I’ve been puzzling pretty steadily now for a week on ‘Most busie lest, when I doe it,’ he wrote his mother, “and a certain baffling gem in Romeo and Juliet which turns on a single word in the phrase ‘that runaway’s eyes may wink.’ ” Also, he added, he’d grown a beard. “Delicious not shaving, my sole object; the necessary result I don’t mind, scarcely know I have it, and it’s generally admired; will have a picture taken and send you one; may keep it permanently or may take it off next week.”
He sat for the Oldham Shakespeare exam and proceeded to worry about its results. Beryl alternately eased and tormented his mind, impeding his progress toward the literary immortality he planned to attain through poems inspired by her. His diary from the fall of 1938 maps out his central preoccupations. October 1: “Very happy doing nothing at all with B.” October 7: “Uncertainty kills me as finality kills most men.” October 10: “Brooke approved my beard.” October 11: “More anxious about the Oldham than I tell even myself….Seeing Beryl every day is heavenly, but I’m not able to work very consistently.” October 17: “Up in Beryl’s room all day. Rather than begin revision of Cleopatra in the evening, I read two meaningless plays.” October 25, his birthday: “Mainly music and very gloomy thinking about all kinds of things—Hamlet, survival…Ezra Pound, the critical labor, possibilities of greatness. Again and again, the meaning of life and its negation. I must go deeper before I leave.” November 2: “Beard trimmed extensively.” November 5: “Beryl in during the evening. I’ve seen her every day since term began; it may be bad for us under the circumstances Cambridge imposes.” November 10: “I wonder if I shall live long enough to write the great poetry I know I can.” November 23: “I have the Oldham.”
The Oldham didn’t solve any of his problems. The irrelevance of his chosen field, for one: “I wish I could believe people read poetry, but they don’t and it doesn’t much matter.” “Stupid insipid” people “who asked for opinions,” for another: “I must stop telling people who are of no sensibility what I think, and my useless rages must stop.” Another: making art was incompatible with living life. Yet another: his fiancée was pregnant. Beryl wanted the child; Berryman didn’t: he had no money or job prospects. He endured weeks of worry before Beryl reported that the positive had been false. “Not our fault,” he wrote his mother, “a mechanical slip, but sufficiently harrowing.”
After that, he and Beryl agreed it would be best if they saw a little less of each other for a while, which gave him more time to sit alone in his apartment, blurring the worlds of art and all that isn’t. He bought a gramophone he couldn’t afford and listened obsessively to the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, with its driving strings and leaping flute and harpsichord that plucks your nerve endings. “Blake born 180 years ago today—where now?” he wrote in his diary. He slept in his clothes and let his beard grow long and scraggly. In a fit of self-analysis he summed up his character: “a disagreeable compound of arrogance, selfishness and impatience scarcely relieved by some dashes of courtesy and honesty and a certain amount of industry.” “The central difficulty,” he explained to his mother, “is that of being certain one will be able to write well. More than ever before, the world is full of men who have given their lives to literature and have achieved nothing: humiliation to eternity. I have only contempt for such men, they clutter the horizon.”
As his time in England drew to a close, he wrote Beryl a letter about their engagement, which he was trying to honor in spite of creeping doubts. Her brave, beautiful, heartbreaking response is dated April 26, 1938:
I too have been thinking about our marriage. I too love you devotedly and believe you love me. And I too think we have been happier than most men seem to have any right to expect. But, as you say, there’s more in it….If you are best pleased that we see each other for the next six weeks and then no more, I shall have strength to be so too. I cannot see to write this….
As for the artist in you, you are as you are, and I shall love you as long as I am not hurt beyond your healing. “This one difficult life is all we have, and being so is precious, and is so quickly gone away.” I have no desire, no hope or expectation of living happily; life and happiness contradict each other as I understand them. But I have a most passionate desire to live fully. To do the work I must do, I must live, and sweet or bitter, the taste must be strong.
She asked Berryman to tell her how she hindered him. Did it bother him that she was financially independent? That she was English? That she loved him so intensely? “Finally,” she concluded, “do you wish to marry at all? and is marriage of vast importance anyhow?”
Berryman’s answer to this interesting question is buried in a letter he wrote around this time to his mother (“Dearest little angel mum”): “Life for the artist is a single moral act of vision….He works only for himself, perhaps for a few friends, for the recognition and establishment of a relationship with God. What the world gets is its own affair, not his. There is something peculiarly terrifying in his solitude.”
* * *
—
Sadie didn’t react well to my proposal that Maria stay in her house for a while, I told Laura on the phone a few days after the conversation in question.
“How did you expect her to react? I mean, unless I’m misunderstanding, you were basically asking one girlfriend if another could stay in her house.”
“I don’t know. She’s in an open marriage. I thought she’d be more…open.” Instead, I told Laura, she was upset. She accused me of taking advantage of her. She had no idea who this Maria character was; why should she trust her with her house? It wasn’t until I relayed a version of the story Maria had told to me—edited to blur the edges of our relationship and make her as sympathetic as possible—that Sadie grudgingly allowed her to stay in her house through the end of March: twelve days. After that, she said, she was putting it on the market; she didn’t expect her presence would be needed in Des Moines much after spring. I thanked her. I apologized. I told her a partial truth: that I’d been moved by Maria’s story and wanted to do what I could to help.
Maria’s story (from her narration of it on the phone when I called her from a Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot in Oakland after dropping off Sadie at the airport):
Sam and Jo, Maria’s newly married housemates, abandoned their South American honeymoon after falling sick in the Peruvian rain forest. The day after they returned to Detroit, she developed symptoms identical to theirs but stronger: fever, loss of appetite, localized paralysis, and a nausea that resolved into stomach pain just sharp enough to make the slightest exertion unthinkable. Her father drove up from Indiana and took her to a hospital near his house, where she drifted in and out of pain and sleep for three and a half weeks. It turned out some gnarly equatorial caterpillar had laid its eggs inside her, and her doctors, who’d never seen such a case, tried two treatments before the third one took. Back in her father’s country house—which had undergone so many renovations in the past decade that it barely resembled the house she’d grown up in—she rested, ate, watched TV, and started piecing her life back together. When, sifting through the correspondence she’d missed, she read the email in which I declared my love and invited her to live with me in Des Moines, she didn’t know how to begin to respond. “I really appreciated what you said,” she said; she “felt it deserved a thoughtful response.” But the prospect of explaining her long delay had filled her with an anxiety that bordered on dread. She still felt so weak from her illness, she said, and the medications were making her light-headed. And so, she told me, her voice faint and tinny, she’d decided to wait to respond to me until she felt more herself.
Meanwhile, she was determined to use her illness as a means of escape from
the house in Detroit. She drove back up, packed her stuff, and returned to Indiana. It felt so freeing to abandon that life, which had never stopped seeming, she told me, like an interlude, though between what and what she couldn’t say. As her health slowly improved, however, and she became more aware of her surroundings, she began to be troubled by a growing sense that her father’s mind was going. He seemed alternately withdrawn from the world and totally bewildered by it. One moment he’d look lost in dark daydreams or memories, and the next he’d be laughing at the strangest things—the sudden appearance of a stinkbug on a window, a commercial for agricultural fertilizer, a ringing phone, the lighting of a stove. Several times she saw him standing in front of a door, looking down at its handle for what seemed like minutes, as if unable to remember its function or afraid it might burn his hand. Also, his speech was faltering. He often trailed off in the middle of sentences, sometimes frustrated that he couldn’t find a word, other times appearing to lose interest in the thought. And he’d started saying aloud, in a barely audible voice, what he was doing as he did it: locking the door, peeling a banana, opening my inbox, watching TV—as though if he stopped narrating his life it would cease to be real.
The day before she texted me and I called her, Maria said, she’d yelled at him for interrupting her reading with this constant self-narration. He yelled at her for yelling at him, and in the midst of the ensuing fight he said that a family friend had recently died, a man who had been like an uncle to him during his years in Argentina, thus severing the last of his remaining ties to that country, and, he said, to his youth. “I knew about this guy,” Maria told me, “and had even met him once, when I was very young, on a family trip to Buenos Aires. All I remember of him is that he was obese, and that he spoke Spanish with a German accent so thick I could barely understand him. Anyway, I was almost certain he’d died when I was a teenager. I called my sister, and she confirmed my memory. The next day I accused my father of lying, and he just completely exploded. I felt so bad. I decided I had to leave that night, so I did, I wrote my father a note, and since I didn’t know where to go I went to you. I drove all night. But you’re not here, you’re there.”
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