Leaving Before the Rains Come

by Alexandra Fuller

  Off the main rotunda, I found a series of darkened rooms featuring video installations of eleven different artists. A sign explained, “Found in Translation.” There were places to sit, but there was nowhere to rest until I found a bench in front of what looked like home-movie footage of a homely elderly woman with a pudding-bowl haircut. She was reciting Bertolt Brecht. “And I always thought: the very simplest words must be enough. When I say what things are like / Everyone’s heart must be torn to shreds. That you’ll go down if you don’t stand up for yourself— / Surely you see that.” I sat and waited for the piece of footage to replay, and then I waited to hear it again, and again, and again.

  After that I flew home to Charlie and asked for a divorce.

  “We can’t,” he said. “We can’t afford to.”

  “We can’t afford not to,” I said.

  Charlie shook his head. “You don’t understand. The timing could not be worse.”

  I stared at him for a long time, wondering if there was something worse that he wasn’t telling me. Worse than the fact that the house could not sell for what we needed to meet the debt we had on it, worse than the fact that I was having an affair, worse than the unbearable loneliness of being in this marriage. I said, “Don’t you think you’d be better without me?”

  Charlie said, “We can’t get a divorce now.”

  I said, “I mean, don’t you feel as if we’ve done the best we can?”

  Charlie said, “This can’t end now. We’ll go completely broke. We have to stick it out.”

  But to me, it was like the end of the dry season in southern Africa, when the sun has swallowed all the obvious water—the lakes and rivers and streams—and somewhere else, as if rumored, there exists the promise of rain. Every year, animals stir toward that promise however dangerous and unlikely-seeming, however instinctive and potentially unfounded. The Germans have a word for this, Zugunruhe, meaning “migration restlessness” or “the stirring before moving.” From the wrong perspective, it would be easy to mistake Zugunruhe for something destructive, mad even. Who in their right mind travels hundreds of miles in the dry season, when rain is nothing more than an idea? Why not hunker down and wait to see if things improve? Who goes anywhere on empty?

  May in the Rockies is a time of collision, winter crashing against summer. The Snake River becomes a pale, boiling green torrent with glacial melt. Elk herds begin dispersing out of their man-made winter feed-grounds where they have been fed alfalfa for the season, and revert wild in the cottonwood forests. Ski bums pack up their gear and make for the beach. Snowbirds flee southern heat and begin arriving at their second homes. The off-season is about to turn on.

  One Wednesday in the middle of this colliding time of year, in the middle of my usual biweekly exercise class, I suddenly found myself unable to keep track of where I ended and the gym’s mirrors began. Just as suddenly I felt as if I could no longer move my appendages, as if I could make only grand flopping gestures like one of those red plastic Fortune Teller Miracle Fish. Curls Up Entirely—Passionate. Turns Over—False. Motionless—Dead One.

  The class finished, and I faltered out into the parking lot. For a while I sat in my car waiting for myself to return from wherever I had gone. Then I phoned Charlie. “I’m so sorry. I think I am having some sort of breakdown,” I said. I closed my eyes and thought of the children getting out of school about now. I thought about bus stops and dinner and laundry. “I probably shouldn’t drive,” I said.

  It was as if Charlie had been waiting a decade for that phone call. He arrived in minutes, hurried me into his car, and drove me to his doctor’s office. “You’ll be okay,” he kept saying.

  “Thanks,” I said. Now that someone else was taking my collapse, or whatever it was, so seriously, I didn’t think I was necessarily suffering an emergency, although I knew I was in the throes of at least a smallish crisis. “I’m probably just overtired,” I said. But then I noticed the meadows by the side of the road weren’t keeping up with the speed at which we were driving. Or perhaps it was my brain, going too fast.

  I’d always known my mind could hop logic and bypass tedious necessities. I was good at instinctively knowing when to dive for cover, and when to leap to my feet. I wasn’t afraid of doing things other people would have thought crazy, illogical, or risky. Of course, I realized that I simply had a higher than usual tolerance for eccentricity, but I also hoped I would know when I had crossed into madness. When I crossed into madness, I trusted it wouldn’t be my usual brand of inspiration. “A queer, divine dissatisfaction,” as Martha Graham would have had it. “A blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than others.” When I finally and profoundly slipped my mental moorings, I believed it would manifest as an accursed wreck with me crumpled and undone at its center.

  Charlie helped me into the examination room and stayed with me while I told his doctor what was happening: I hadn’t slept for some time, I was in some kind of mild existential extremis, I’d had an affair, I’d been drinking too much, I felt as if I was leaving my body, I thought my brain might be going a little quickly. The doctor didn’t look at me much. He stared at his computer screen and scrolled through a list of questions. Did I have a family history of mental illness and alcoholism? Did I sometimes feel hopeless and despairing? Had I ever had thoughts of suicide?

  “Who doesn’t? Who hasn’t?” I said.

  The doctor offered me a couple of choices. “You’re either a sociopath, or you have bipolar disorder.”

  “Really?” I said. “Those are my only choices?”

  The doctor was grave. “Look,” he said. “Normal people don’t lie, or think about suicide, or have affairs.”

  I wanted to say, “I think normal people who are unhappily married might do all three in a single day.” Instead I said, “Okay then, I’ll go with the bipolar.”

  Charlie drove me home. I had a hot bath and swallowed some pills as directed. Then I got into bed and suddenly a profound exhaustion overcame me, as if my arteries had been filled with lead. I tried to read the small print on the pharmacy printout. “Listen to this. Fainting, dizziness, fatal inability to swallow,” I said. “Good God, what’s in these things?”

  “They have to say that,” Charlie reassured me. “It always sounds bad when you read the side effects.”

  “Am I drooling yet?”

  Charlie phoned my closest friends and assured them I was in good hands, I would be fine now, I was on the drugs I needed. But I didn’t feel fine. My tongue was the size and consistency of a mattress. Words floated to the top of my brain and reassembled into gibberish before a sentence could form. I couldn’t make my eyes focus on words anymore. Then I passed out and slept for eighteen hours without moving. When I woke up the next morning, I found a line from a U2 song had floated into my head and eddied out there. The words looped over and over. I felt a little hungover—as if I’d taken a sleeping pill with wine on top of jet lag—but also as if everything in me was back in place, like iron filings realigned on a magnet. “Maybe all I needed was a decent night’s sleep,” I said.

  On such little evidence, I wasn’t convinced I was completely sane. But I was absolutely certain I didn’t have the luxury to lie around in a tranquilized state. From what Charlie had kept telling me in the past months and weeks, we weren’t going to get any less in debt, the house wasn’t going to get any less repossessed, something had to be done. I got out of bed and pulled on my clothes. “Time to shake a leg,” I said. But Charlie didn’t smile at my father’s old instruction. I said, “We’re going to be okay. It’s going to be okay, right?”

  But I had no idea what okay might look like, because for reasons that had long ago trickled out of my grasp, I had never fully, or even partially understood whole parts of our life. Beyond the certainty that we were in dire straits, financially, I wasn’t sure exactly what that meant. I didn’t know how or when our taxes were due, or even h
ow we could still owe taxes in our current financial state. I didn’t know what a second mortgage was, or why we had one. I couldn’t imagine the figures Charlie told me. How did people go about getting so powerfully in debt to begin with?

  It wasn’t at all obvious. True, we had a house, a cabin, some investments, but it turned out we didn’t own any of the roofs over our heads, the bank did. We had three horses on some pasture in Idaho, those were ours, but Charlie said we’d have to sell them too, not because they were worth anything, but because we could no longer afford to feed them, we couldn’t pay the vet for their annual checkups. We didn’t have fancy cars or expensive art. I owned no good jewelry, nor did I desire it. Neither of us had much in the way of an extravagant wardrobe. We didn’t eat out often, or go on luxurious vacations although in retrospect we had clearly traveled more than we could afford. Sometimes Charlie frowned at my grocery bills—did I need to buy organic food? he wanted to know—and I disliked his habit of buying three cheap things instead of one decent thing. But I didn’t see how we could have spent ourselves into such a dead end.

  “How did this happen?” I asked.

  Charlie was defensive. “I’ve tried to explain. You won’t listen.”

  My brain spun. “It’s not that I won’t listen. It’s that I can’t understand what you’re saying.”

  Charlie had taken control of the money side of my business from the very start. When checks arrived from my agents, they went straight to him. I didn’t have a credit card in my own name; there was nothing under my own Social Security number. When I thought about it, in all ways except for putting my name to the words I wrote, I didn’t even own Alexandra Fuller. She had become a Ross—she had taken Charlie’s name, his nationality, his advice. It was as if we had taken laws from a century before and folded them into our modern lives. “A man and wife are one person in law; the wife loses all her rights as a single woman and her existence is entirely absorbed into that of her husband.” “A wife’s chattels real become her husband’s by some act to appropriate them.” “Money earned by a woman belongs absolutely to her husband.”9

  It wasn’t as if Charlie was a misogynist, or old-fashioned, or malicious. He was none of those things. For the most part, he was gentle and current and kind. I had been so subsumed by Charlie and by his identity, not on purpose or through any deliberate intent, but because we had fallen into those roles through necessity and expediency and now we were so far into them that getting out felt like it would take an act of God. “Until you make the unconscious conscious,” Carl Jung said, “it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

  FALLING

  A month later, in less time than it takes to read these words, everything changed forever. That’s what they say, of course. In the blink of the eye, in a single heartbeat, in one distracted moment, all the life we’ve got mapped out—however messy and uncertain—becomes certainly uncertain. And that’s not divorce, which is like a pot sitting forever on the stove suddenly coming to the boil. Nor is it children leaving home, the way they grow up and then for the last time go down the end of the driveway and disappear into their own lives. It’s not even the phone call from Vanessa saying Dad will be dead in a week. Those events still allow for denial and pretense, as if time is an open door between two rooms and we can still choose between now and the period in which we want to stay. But the blink, the heartbeat, the moment—that is the thing from which there is no coming back, that is the thing beyond which there is no reminiscing.

  For months after the accident, this was the image that came to me when I closed my eyes for any length of time: the last of Charlie’s polo ponies, Big Boy, was upside down and he appeared winded or wounded or both. His legs batted the air; his great black hooves sliced first the sky, then the sagebrush. His neck lunged sideways and I could see his eyes rolling white. I could see the saddle with Charlie’s step-grandfather’s name across the back of its seat appearing and disappearing like code for something imperative: CORSE, CORSE, CORSE.

  Underneath the horse, still improbably in the saddle, I could see Charlie. Mostly, I could see his agonized face, his straining neck. The rest of his body—legs, torso, chest—was covered and in the process of being crushed. Mint-colored dust, powdered sage, and earth surrounded the scene. Two minutes before, when decisions still felt reversible and the world was still right side up, I’d dismounted to open and close a makeshift concertina gate. Then, before I was able to put the loop over the top of the gate’s pole, I’d heard a soft commotion behind me, turned around, and seen the impossible horror of the flipped-over horse.

  An animal sense of impending slaughter prevailed; there was nothing to be done or said; nothing to be undone or unsaid, either. Charlie was going to die, of that I was certain. I dropped the gate I was in the process of closing, I dropped Sunday’s reins too and she wandered off, unconcerned, to graze. Dilly hurried anxiously between the huge, thrashing horse and me, as if trying to convey the horrifying urgency of the situation to someone who could fix it.

  The seconds swelled and grew and burst; fat drops of very distinct time. Big Boy made an effort to right himself, pitching over sideways time and time again. I glimpsed Charlie’s crumpled body, free of the horse, but then Big Boy, unable to rectify himself, rolled back onto him again. It seemed like several more minutes before Big Boy at last found purchase, his hooves connecting with the ground. Slowly he heaved himself up. Then he stood next to Charlie’s body, head hanging, flanks pumping, legs quivering. A thick thread of blood dribbled from his nose and there was a gash on his knee. The ground around him was flattened; sagebrush folded down on itself, grass mashed into the earth.

  I thought, “It’s not supposed to happen this way.” This was supposed to be our calm, reasonable, reasoned way out of the marriage. We were supposed to be out for a quiet Saturday afternoon ride to discuss how we could end our stalemate. It was five days after our nineteenth wedding anniversary; Charlie had spent it alone in Wyoming, and I had spent it surrounded by two hundred Lakota Sioux on a magazine assignment near the Black Hills. Charlie was planning to leave the next day to accompany our son on a school-sponsored trip to Washington, D.C. I was planning to leave in a week back to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

  I suppose we thought we didn’t have much time. And we were wary of being in the house together, of arguing in front of the kids. But I don’t know why we had decided to go riding. For one thing, there’s something unthinking and unseemly about getting on a horse to talk about divorce. In some cultures it’s expressly taboo to ride in an altered state of mind, without clear and benevolent intention. “Even into battle,” a Lakota elder told me afterward, and then amended that to, “Especially into battle.” For another thing, I’d just ridden more than a hundred miles from Fort Robison, Nebraska, to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. A few hundred Lakota take part in the ride annually to commemorate the murder, in 1877, of their leader, Crazy Horse. “Today is a good day to die,” he is supposed to have said on the morning of his death. “For all the things of my life are present.”

  I had found the Lakota were fearless horsemen—skilled and tough and careless. Most had forsworn saddles, and a few had little more than a strap of leather or halter rope between them and their mount’s mouth. Some of the horses were barely green-broke. Even before the ride started, one horse bolted around the perimeter of the field where we had gathered at dawn, bucking wildly and dumping its rider hard on the June-verdant grass. No one helped the fallen rider to his feet. “Hey, you been hanging around the fort too long?” someone yelled. “Have you been shot at, or what?” someone else asked. “Camera wasn’t rollin’. Go again.” There was a lot of laughter.

  But Charlie had pointed out that we would always have a reason to postpone this conversation. Also, we would soon have to get rid of our horses, sell their pasture, give up that life. We should ride while we still could, he argued. Besides, he reminded me, we needed to figure
out the financial mess we were in sooner rather than later. Then the fighting started. Me saying again that I didn’t understand our investments; that I had trusted him not to get us here in the first place. Him saying that he had been trying to tell me all along things hadn’t worked out so well for us; that I had been an active participant in our economic demise.

  “Easy there,” I told Big Boy, taking his reins and moving him away from Charlie. Then I crouched down next to Charlie. He was still alive, but he was lying utterly motionless, and was strangely bloodless, by which I mean not only was he not bleeding—and it seemed as if he should have been—but all blood appeared to have left his body: his face was gray, his lips were slack and colorless, his eyes were open but unfocused. I thought it couldn’t be long before a breath left his lips and no new breath came in.

  “Hang on,” I told him. “Please hang on.”

  I didn’t tell him, “It’s going to be all right,” because I knew that would be a lie, and I knew if Charlie could hear me, he wouldn’t want me to say something pointless and untrue. “I love you,” I said. “I’ll be right back.” And then I spun down the trail we had just ridden up, back toward some mountain bikers we had seen earlier, and I was shouting as loudly as I could. But even as I came tearing down the road toward help, that single word pouring out of my mouth, I couldn’t make the world do what I wanted it to do. The two men and the woman in their mud-spattered Lycra remained fixed in place against the tailgate of their car, a still life of bemusement. And Charlie remained on the trail in the hills, dead or dying alone.