I moved to Provincetown for the winter, into the house that had been my grandmother Nana’s. My father’s sister owned it and offered to let me write there. I was twenty-seven and had started a novel, which my mother knew was about her. She liked to refer to it cheerfully as Mommie Dearest or She Came from Evil. I drove up with my cat and laptop, ordered red pajamas from L.L. Bean. Wind pressed the windows of the house, noisy, announcing cold. The hulking clock ticked in the corner of the dining room, the table gleaming with someone else’s labors. I called my sister to remind her of the oversized pink roses on the black hall carpet, the pantry that smelled of raisins, the squeak of the swinging kitchen door. We had mythologies about these things, sister inventions and ancient meanings. The master bathroom was unchanged, a monument to my grandmother, who’d been dead more than a decade. Penelope and I used to beg for baths there because the tub, set beneath a window facing the bay, was elevated on a pink-carpeted platform and corralled by a white wooden railing. We had envied the pink vanity its frilled muslin skirt, its sparkling decanters for perfume. The bottles still held yellow liquid, once Chanel No. 5 and Arpège, carnival amounts that smelled like dust and nothing.
I chose my grandfather’s study for my apartment because of the massive desk, the bookcases built up to the ceiling, and filled with John O’Hara and Saul Bellow, the bed made from antique church pews with real mattress ticking, and because of a door that opened directly onto the deck. The soft sheets bought fifty years before at Bonwit’s were still in the linen closet, and I made the bed and covered it with white chenille. The room was a good deal larger than the studio I’d relinquished on Christopher Street.
I was tired of lovers and bosses, and when an L.A. boyfriend visited I treated him shabbily, walking ahead on the beach, cheering on in-jokes with my new friends from the Fine Arts Work Center. I wanted the last lovemaking, the boyfriend a generous expert, but no more conversations, no future plans. “Leave me alone,” I thought. “When he goes, I’ll write,” and I did.
But I didn’t know how to be alone. For my breaks, I walked along the planks of the deck but got chilly fast and went back in. I would drift up and down the staircase, waiting for the phone to ring or the postman to come. Without the anchor of sex I was uneasy and missed the spontaneous reveries I’d had while making love, my mind loosed and wandering, falling on lost specifics, the taste of grass, the mosaic floor of a Paris bookshop. Being transported.
The town was crouched small for winter, and the writers and artists showed up to the same potlucks, the same bar, the one pool table. Some had paired off, and I’d already had the angry poet. Three months of that, listless sexual despondency and a novel I couldn’t wrestle.
Then Christopher walked into a reading. He looked cold in his denim jacket, and I beckoned him over and patted the seat of the empty folding chair. For many weeks after I met Christopher I told friends the same astonishing fact. “He doesn’t lie.” I used this as one might say, “He has brown hair, medium build.” It was essential to who he was and the shocking draw to me, even before I knew it.
“I’m Susanna, what’s your name, are you a writer, what are you working on, where are you from?” But I didn’t hear the content of his answers, a fevered rushing in my ears.
How can you know when this will seize you, pull at you with unconscious imperative? This man is the person you need was hammering in me like a pulse, and we had not yet held a conversation. Christopher was not tall, not short, a little older than I was, wore glasses and a baseball cap from an Alaskan tackle store. He looked like he wanted to be unnoticed. His teeth were straight, eyes hazel with flecks of gold. While he spoke, I stared, thinking, You are not my type. This doesn’t make sense. He was talking, I could see that, and I heard the warmth of his voice, how kind and rich it was. He smiled, and the lines around his eyes broke my heart and remade it. “Come to dinner tomorrow,” I said.
The next night he arrived. I was in a dress, low cut to show the tops of my breasts, black tiny buttons glistening straight down the front. I’d made Marcella Hazan’s spicy sausage and black-eyed peas that my stepmother had taught me to make. Christopher and I poured into each other, coaxing stories, going through beer, nervous as hell. You could feel this was big.
“I want children,” I told him at dinner. “I’m twenty-seven, and I just thought you should know.”
He didn’t flinch, as if we had to discuss this. “I don’t think I want them,” he said. “Childhood is too difficult.”
“Ha!” I said. “Listen, I know that. I know what not to do.” Right away I told him of my vital struggle, my crucial failure of never quite getting shy of my mother. “You have to understand this about me,” I said. “I am someone with a crazy mother.” Then I laughed because words did nothing.
We watched Double Indemnity. How upright Fred MacMurray was, led astray in spite of himself, how superb and mean Barbara Stanwyck. We drank down a bottle of Glenfiddich and didn’t feel a thing.
And then, when I had kept Christopher there so late, brought him to the fireplace in my grandfather’s cheery study, when he was happy on the green rug against the chair, I made my pass. Christopher straightened up, put his palms on the floor and said no.
No? He brought my kiss to a definitive close, chapter over. I had no alternate route. I was giddy with him, unspooled that he was here when all day I’d been waiting and agitated, aware of this exotic, this nonfiction love.
All right then: I’d wait a few days, cook more, show up unexpectedly, wait maybe three days. But Christopher still wouldn’t go to bed with me. He made me tapes, Hank Williams on heartbreak, Lucinda Williams on despair. He did not believe in sudden happiness, and I teased him. “Live a little.” We drove to Wellfleet for a movie. He released information about himself with slow authority, not trusting me yet, pointing out that people didn’t just trust. This drove me mad, and I was determined to show him that the reason he didn’t want to go to bed with me was that he’d never had great sex. I would free him from his lifetime of wasted encounters and poor relationships. I would be the sex he had never dreamed of; I would be sex.
It took two weeks, a term I had never, ever waited. We walked on the dunes. He made us beef stew, with tarragon. In my kitchen we drank Lapsang tea, sharing our chapters over the blue-and-white oilcloth. Christopher was from Utah. “Jack Mormon,” he was quick to say. His parents called each Sunday night, and soon I was on the extension, being shy with his mother and teasing him later that all three of them said, “My gosh.” When I reeled off the stories of my mother, Christopher listened hard and then pushed aside the anecdotes and locations and asked me if she’d hurt me, helped me, guided me, scared me. He kept asking, steady company as I fumbled for the answers.
Finally, Christopher said yes. He was ready. We undressed with care and self-consciousness, and I lavished on him everything I’d been storing up. I wanted to take his breath away, force regret on him, even, that he’d made me wait. I kept a steady control over what we did, and he said, as I anticipated, “You are amazing.”
In the lazy conversation after lovemaking, I told on myself. Christopher was earnest, and I banished irony and told him about the bad girl I had been up until a month ago. She lied, cheated on her boyfriends, thought only of sex, power, triumph, double-timed, triple-timed. I wanted to make it sound funny, loaded with family tradition.
“Poor honey,” he said. His eyes were very close to mine, unwavering.
“Poor nothing,” I said. “It was fun.”
“You gave away so much. It sounds painful.”
“Sex is the way of the world. Don’t you always think first thing whenever you meet someone what they’d be like in bed?”
“I do not,” he said. He looked worried, and I kissed him.
“I could always take care of myself.”
“By cheating?”
“That helped.”
“If you cheat on me…,” he said. “If you hurt me—”
Lucinda Williams sang, “But I can’t get over the lines around your eyes.” I had never loved so richly.
I promised to be honest. What a gesture, with its high-stakes hope. Other people did it? Christopher said so. I didn’t actually understand, but he said cheating wrecked relationships, and I didn’t want to wreck us, the meat of us not yet known.
“He doesn’t want children,” I told my mother, our phone calls daily, my moods dictating how much to reveal to her. Pull her in, send her back. Why could I never decide? Happiness made me feel invulnerable to her, and unhappiness made me helpless to resist her.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “If he loves you, he’ll agree.”
We drove down to New York and went for dinner at my father and stepmother’s. In the elevator I remembered to say Nat had MS and couldn’t move. “Don’t offer to shake his hand.” My father discussed the history of Brigham Young. The next day we met Penelope by Bethesda Fountain and walked in Central Park. She held me by the arm, controlling my balance. It wasn’t something you’d have noticed if you weren’t her sister, and I was glad when we parted. We had a date to meet my mother and her husband for drinks at the Carlyle, where they always took a suite. On our way I felt the warnings, but they were muted, because steady, clear-headed Christopher was with me. He gave things a sequential order, slowed down confusion. My mother behaved, reined in. Wissam told stale jokes about which she teased him. A formal waiter wheeled in a white-covered cart with the drinks and hors d’oeuvres. Daphne stroked my face and said, “I’m glad you’re so happy. Just look at Sue. Isn’t she happy?”
Afterward Christopher said, “I’m exhausted. Is she always like that?”
They said “catch and release,” and Christopher leaned over and explained under the noise of conversation. They were talking about fishing. We sat around a plastic table on the concrete patio. Christopher was smiling and, with his sister, interrupting their father, who reported on the creek in central Utah where they’d grown up fishing. Christopher grew up getting into pickups and winding up canyons to park in tall dry grasses and wade into mud. I was ready should someone ask me more than the identifying enquiries. I had quieted in Salt Lake City with its lengthy store transactions, polite drivers of freshly washed SUVs, the comfort of money everywhere but without style. I couldn’t join in, so I thought about the pale salad, the heap of dressing, the bowl of thin pressed wood. This was a fly-fishing family, which I did not understand bestowed on them a certain pedigree of sportsmanship, a code of behavior as right and decent as any in the sporting world. This family was honest together, ethically minded and schooled in sharing, protecting, offering help. It wasn’t just the vocabulary of fishing I didn’t understand, the act that didn’t interest me, it was a way of being that made me hopeless. None of my talents mattered here. I itched to phone my mother—at the Carlyle, in Dubai, in Barbados?—and reveal this unknown America to her, which had always been here beyond the reach of our island and our airports, passport travel, good tables. I wanted someone to listen to me in my language.
Christopher and I had bedrooms on different floors. His parents made sure not to ask about the motels we’d stopped in on our road trip to Utah. We told them we were moving to Montana, and they didn’t ask if we would live together. This confused me. “But they know we sleep together,” I said. “They don’t want to know,” Christopher said. His mother’s sewing table was set up at the end of my bed, which was covered by a quilt she’d made. I cannot be here, I thought, when I have lived in the Piazza San Marco with Bellinis, on trains through France, beneath wall-sized mirrors on Barbados estates, in seats ten rows from the stage at the Met. It wasn’t money that had gotten me there (though it was) but the pursuit of center stage and the middle of things. In the Piazza San Marco, waiters watched, ready for your flicked hand. Men came and bent over the tiny table, their air kisses worth imitating later. On the train you’d meet a young man with his book. You’d give him an agitated shock to carry home.
Christopher’s parents handed us the key to their small apartment in Sun Valley, and we drove north.
“They must be hoping this works out,” he said. “They’ve never let me stay alone with a girlfriend.”
We drove to Idaho, Christopher treading the grooves of childhood, me familiar with Hemingway legends. “And this river, and this river,” Christopher said, pointing out ribbons of shiny water. The anglers were anonymous from the road.
“I’m rethinking,” Christopher said. We put on our waders. “Maybe moving in so soon won’t work.” He wanted to be thoughtful, he said, take it slowly. He tied on my fly. All I heard was, Not you, and in a burst I wanted to walk off and interest someone else. “I want to fish, build my life around that,” he’d told me a month earlier. “It makes me happy.” I’d gone to a bookstore on Broadway, to look up Missoula, Montana, in a travel book at his suggestion. Missoula, I read, was a nicely sized university town with five rivers nearby, a paradise for outdoor enthusiasts. Writers lived there. My mother saw it mentioned in an airplane magazine. “Missoula’s the new Taos,” she said, pointing out that I was copying her. Christopher would be spending the summer at a writers’ colony, but our plan was to live together after that, and I had volunteered to drive to Missoula first, set up a little. Now he didn’t want me.
When I fell into the river my unwieldy pole flailed upward, and water rushed into my top-open waders, pinning me to the shallow river bottom. I was furious. A month ago I was ready to stop lying for good, to give everything of myself to this solid, loving, decent man, and now he was pulling away. How did I get here, dragged out to a meaningless place, and now you’re rethinking? I was game! Christopher picked his way through the water to me as I lunged for the bank and pulled myself onto the grass, freezing and embarrassed.
Rosebud, Stillwater, Sweet Grass, Silver Bow. I drove through the Montana counties, my last day in the car, and said the names aloud, a pretty incantation. I’d been driving for days, alone except for the cat, and here I was, the Montana important to Christopher. We’d have separate apartments, okay? Please? The gleam deep in him was enough for me, a harbinger of something important, but I didn’t know what. I loved the feeling of being told the truth, its simple direction. I was trying to make the best of it, staring out beyond the rim of the windshield at the blown fields and consuming sky. I had never felt more of an imposter, the New Yorker in new jeans, Jewish. I took the first Missoula exit off the freeway, one hand up to block the sun from my eyes. This was what the rest of the country looked like, the country Christopher grew up with—no, not the gaping fresh emptiness, not the butter-and-straw-colored expanses, but this at the bottom of the exit ramp: boxy restaurants strung together by parking lots, looming semis spattered with dirt, squat supermarkets, traffic lights swaying on black cables over the streets. The brief length of downtown ended abruptly at the former train depot, the town bordered by the track. No enclosure of subway tunnel, no elevated relief of the metro platforms on which I’d spent such vivid bits of my life. Paris at nineteen, I still had my carte orange. I had never looked at the naked rails. This will be the new way, I thought, rough and open, and I will be that way too.
The motel was named the Sweet Rest, the same fairy music as those counties, the name that looked placid on the page of the travel book in my hand in New York 2,422 miles behind. I pulled the car off a grim thoroughfare to park on a narrow strip of paving before the motel office. I’m game, I’m game. I had studied Christopher on our road trip. When we stopped at cafés, he’d go through the screen door, looking at some middle nothing, grab a stool at the counter and say, “I’d take a piece of that pie” and “What d’I owe you?” It was the right way, the indifference, the sliding beneath notice. That was the way people did it out here. With Christopher everything was the machine of the oiled world, just going along.
I left the cat with a crack in the window and walked into the office. I said, “Hey,” while looking off to the side at a rack of chamber-of-commerce pamphlets (imposter, imposter). The man (let him go, do not ask about his leg, don’t need to know about his family, his blues of the day) had me register and gave me a key attached to a plastic card. The room cost $147 for the week. Tomorrow I’d look for a place, but today I’d find a cash machine, name the neighborhoods, get something to eat. “It’s my sister’s cat,” I said. “She’ll be here tomorrow to pick it up.”
I’d already lied, couldn’t go more than a day. Tomorrow I’d start again.
The town was filled with bars. You could tell each decade from the signs, deco red neon, old-west-style horses and cowboys. What there was to do was beer and rivers. What there was to do was drive. The downtown parking spaces were huge, and when the light changed at the empty corner the people (who were waiting) walked across in no hurry. There wasn’t a smell, a sound, a habit to remind me of myself. My headache lasted all day from the strong daylight undiffused by buildings or crowds. My face hurt from squinting. No one said “Susanna.” At the Sweet Rest I looked up the synagogue in the phone book, but there wasn’t one, and I wouldn’t have known what to do had I gone.
I couldn’t call Christopher easily. In the day he was writing in a cabin, lunch baskets left for him outside his door. During the dinner hour I got the colonists’ busy signals. At a pay phone inside a bar entrance I called a friend in New York and cried when he answered.
“How long do I have to pretend this will work?” I said. The receiver smelled of gasoline and cigarette ash. “Could I come back and stay on Elizabeth Street with you until the summer’s over? Maybe I could get Christopher to move to New York then.” When I said “Elizabeth Street” I thought I would throw up from longing. “You know what I’m looking at? A big store window that’s layered with different-colored paints, and it’s a huge cartoon of a grizzly bear in a crimson football helmet.”
My friend was laughing, and I was crying.
“You have to give it more than a day,” he said. “You’re okay. You’ll adjust.” I imagined him with more friends at a restaurant that night, the quick story he got to make of me, and I was furious. I was furious at him, at Montana, at Christopher, at the lie in the name Sweet Rest, assigned to a paper-and-cardboard misery of a motel, bed weak in the center and sunken, bathroom walls stained, towels unable to absorb enough lousy water to matter. These towels couldn’t do their single lousy job.
That night I wrote to Christopher, a long letter on the legal pad, words coming and coming, meant to stand in for me. I described, I listed, hopeful the hard word on the yellow page would place me here, make me part of it. I stamped the envelope and turned off my light. Women whined at each other in the back alley, and people flicked lighters, and they smoked beneath the slot of my bathroom window, my room infused with that and the garbled fume of gas and drying beer on warm gravel. In the middle of the night someone pounded on my door. “Gimme my food stamps, you bitch!”
I rented an apartment, the converted attic floor of an old house near the university, guys downstairs slamming doors, drawers, books, bottles. They started engines, they invited girls in, their voices rising with beer as they watched David Letterman. They were nice. Everyone was nice. A couple of them wanted to take me to a hot spring. We drove a long ways, hiked in and took off our clothes under moonlight, going silent when a moose picked its way around the steaming water.
I expected the boys were hard under the water, which cheered me up. I told Christopher we went. A carpenter wanted to take me to dinner. I went, letting him think it was a date, told Christopher about it. “You’re not jealous?” I asked. He said, “I trust you.” A woman at a bookstore took me for a walk up the mountain with the college letter, a massive M in whitewashed cement. She told me to say, “I walked up the M.” But eastern still, with seaboard lungs, I got only halfway and waited for her on a crude bench as she reached the summit, then turned and came back down the trail to get me. She invited me to a lesbian dance. Beyond the carpenter and my neighbors, everyone seemed to be a lesbian. I was desperate to be included.
“Cherry girl,” someone called me, a hungry look on her lips. “Meet another cherry girl.” She pushed a woman into me at the edge of the dance floor, who took my hand. She seemed young, which made me feel more used to things, my two weeks here. She whispered in her warped Australian accent that she was ready for a first time. Oh, okay. Be my guest at my unready apartment with its bed pushed beneath the eaves. Let orgasm make it home.
She came back with me, and I was making brittle jokes to seem clever. I didn’t need to try so hard. She liked being the novice, mentioning her wonder at buffalo burgers and huckleberry milk-shakes. She petted the cat. Had I slept with women before, she asked, because she hadn’t. She looked inside an open packing box and took out a mixing bowl. “From Conran’s,” I said, which allowed me an image of Broadway and Eighty-fourth Street.
As she was leaving a few hours later she grabbed me and begged that I call her. “You will, won’t you?” and I had sympathy for the man put in this position, the way he wanted to peel off the grip, dry off, never return. “If you don’t, I’ll call you. I’ll call you later. I’ll stop by,” she said, her last accented word taking a good long while, and then she left.
I sat down on the bed and started to write, summoning erotica. “Dear Christopher.” The naked breast, the heat and wet between the thighs, an hour of going down on her. It sounded fake. I made her hair longer, made her smarter, and in the morning I phoned him to tell him, catching him at breakfast. I hoped he’d lose a whole day of work, distracted, heated, missing me and my brazen spirit.
“I went to bed with her,” I said, my speech still a bit slow from the overused mouth, and he said, “Oh,” but not in a turned-on way. I couldn’t read him.
“How could you meet someone so fast?”
Did he forget where I came from, what I knew how to do? There was no such thing as waiting. I never needed to wait. I didn’t know how not to meet someone, because every “Excuse me?” meant a willingness, every released button the aching awareness of my effect on people, that urgent agenda to show off in bed what just wasn’t possible to show in the produce section or the bookstore. When we talked these colony weeks, pay phone to pay phone, I was play-suspicious, sorting through his news for the special name, the private encounter.
“Come on!” I’d say. “That poet? You mean you didn’t kiss? Didn’t you want to? She didn’t try to kiss you?”
“Susanna, not everyone does that.”
“Everyone flirts.”
“No, they don’t,” he said. “You have to leave the door open, let them know they’re welcome to come in. And my door is not open. I am yours.”
I was taken aback by the candor, just like that, what he gave me. But my door had to stay open. If my door were closed I would have missed the invitation to the lesbian dance, missed the lechery of the downstairs boys, the hot-springs hard-ons and first dates, what added up to such precious inventory. Christopher didn’t understand how the world worked, what mattered, the imprisoning gaze, the signals of availability, the purr under a coarse joke, knowing how to make a come-on out of the basic tools, how to turn a simple thing velvet and complex. My mother and I used to contemplate the men who knew nothing. “Thank God for us,” she would say.
The cherry girl wanted to give me a leash, a right to her every hour, and I didn’t want it, anxious to shake her off. She called, she came to my front door and pressed her face into the glass for a better look. “I’m working,” I said, and didn’t invite her in. Maybe I was meant to be the man, the sort who met need with idle cruelty. I wanted the quick flirt, the hot memory—the dark SoHo street, pulling what’s-his-name back to the apartment, my body laid out across the bed, throat up, come on me. I wanted the material to spiff up and tell more than I wanted the mess and follow-up, the directions to the bathroom, just there on the left.
At the bookstore, my one place so far safe with routine, I hung around talking to the women who worked there. One told me she had a gun and always kept it loaded. “Why else have a gun?” she said. We were sitting on a bench outside the shop, watching a yellow color light up the M mountain. She took the gun backpacking, she said, gone for days, carrying what she needed on her shoulders. I looked up at the mountain, thinking, But who’d want to go into the woods anyway? The other woman at the store told me about her dog, the smart blue heeler. He was out in the truck; she took him everywhere. “An Australian breed, Susanna.” They had the right to tease me, wanting more details of the cherry girl. I hadn’t told the lesbians yet about Christopher, unready to give up my credibility and diminishing mystery. I needed these women and the consolation of my sexiness.
The day Christopher arrived was the day composed of waiting, hours of composing my face for the emotional reunion. I moved soap from sill to bathtub ledge and back, stood in front of the open refrigerator, cataloging what each item would mean to him, this brand of milk, what it meant about who I was in Missoula, Montana. I perched on the edge of the couch, facing the window, eyes locked on the speck of bridge that would become the first glimpse of his car. My eyes were burning and tired. I was tired of being here, wanted him here with whatever we were about to make of a relationship. I cared very much that I had hurt him, and that was something genuine and new. We’d have a place to be a couple, to have bank accounts and library cards, to make peace about the cherry girl. After we made love. I had tugged at the corners of the duvet and tilted the shade on the lamp, vacuumed near the bed so bare feet would feel only floor and rug. I took out the plastic garbage bag. My cat was dead, gone under the low-lying bed one day the week before, unwilling to be pulled out. I had to move the bed, and he was weak and asleep. I took him to the Yellow Pages vet, where he died in the night when he was supposed to be getting fluids. I had no one to hug me when I said he was dead. Three days as a waitress at the sweet-and-sour restaurant that called itself “Oriental,” I was dressed in black sneakers and the T-shirt with the logo. I walked out of the vet’s office, bleak and sobbing, shocked that the constant cat was gone completely.
This was where I lived, defined so far by alien curiosity, loneliness, now grief. Flirting hadn’t changed it.