Your office is glorious.”
Cynthia Tong was waiting for me by my door when I came back from teaching—a distracted class in which I felt like I was both overly acquiescent to my students’ poorly read opinions and overly combative. They could critique only based on representation, they missed the formal elements of a story. Of course Rebecca is, in many ways, a story that is erected in misogyny, demonizing women, demonizing the other, but I was not interested in that for them. I wanted them to see how suspense was created, how symbols were utilized, how repetition made the ghost of Rebecca rise from the page. Again and again I told them, you need to see these things, these forms. Oh, they drove me crazy, being so completely obsessed with whether or not people were represented well, wanting every piece of literature to be some utopian screed of fairness.
I had to slide past her awkwardly, so it could seem like I was welcoming her, rather than her welcoming me. I made a gesture toward my couch, but she stood and looked around appreciatively, wanting to impress upon me how much nicer my situation was than hers.
“Are you in the windowless room? I was put there when I first came. Sit down,” I said, but she didn’t sit, she looked out the window, not in direct defiance—more as though she didn’t hear me. The light made a line across her face. She was truly outstandingly lovely, with thick, curling black hair, firm cheeks, a dress shaped like a box that was modest, chic, and sexy all at the same time. She had dancer’s or runner’s legs, muscles at the top of the calves, indentations above a strong-looking knee, a clear line running up the thigh separating the front muscles from the back. I always noticed that line because I remember a boy I knew in high school telling me how alluring he found it. I didn’t have it, and as he was telling me, I found myself understanding a new sort of truth: that there were all kinds and types of bodies, different aspects of physical form, that could spark arousal. That women’s bodies were to be noticed and scrutinized and found attractive in all sorts of ways that I had not heretofore conceived. Chins, hands, throats, bellies, asses, legs, feet, all were to be considered and fetishized or dismissed.
“I don’t have an office,” she said, after staring for a long while at the view of the campus’s rolling hills, then eventually sitting opposite me on the couch facing my desk. “They don’t give them to adjuncts anymore.”
I told her I would look into it, that if nothing else, she should be set up in a shared office. I wanted to make sure she knew from the beginning of our conversation that I was on her side. I complimented her dress and asked her where she got it, I told her I could never pull it off. I told her how much we missed her on Saturday, that I had been so looking forward to getting to know her, that I had read an excerpt of her memoir in Prairie Schooner (I had not, yet), and that it was inimitably impressive.
“I wanted to come and talk to you about Saturday,” she said, and as she said it a wave of tension seemed to leave her body and I could see in her face the look of a swimmer before they enter cold water for the first time, the mental recklessness needed to trick oneself to jump in before you could stop and think about it too hard.
“I know all about migraines,” I said. “I had them until I was around forty-five. The whole world would be insufferable.” This was not true—I had bad headaches, but I never had migraines, never had the refracting of light that people describe, the spots, the auras—but I wanted to insist on our similarities.
“I didn’t have a migraine,” she said. “The truth is that Vlad and I had an awful fight and I couldn’t get down from the ceiling after. He had to drug me and put me to bed.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know all about fights, too.”
“I sometimes have migraines,” she said. “I think. Anyway, I wanted to tell you that.”
“What was the fight about, if you don’t mind me asking—you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.” There was a fantasy that flashed into my mind quickly—as quickly and intrusively as those horrid images that used to haunt me as a young woman, of shit being thrown in my face or a rapist stuffing my used maxi pad into my mouth to gag me—of her telling me that the fight was about me, about Vladimir’s lust for me. No, fool. I pushed the thought from my mind as immediately as I would push back those other images.
“I don’t mind telling you,” she said. “That’s why I came here. To tell you. Do you know I’ve read both your novels? I loved them. I wasn’t going to tell you I read them. But I want to know you, and I want you to know me. Do you think that’s strange? But we’re working together and now my daughter has swum in your pool and I didn’t come and it was so rude and I want you to know why. Listen. I’m going to be frank.” She paused and leaned in conspiratorially. “I’m kind of a fuckup.”
“Me too.” I said to her. I had not expected, when I saw Cynthia sitting quietly in the faculty meetings, that she would be like this. I had been prejudiced—not against her being Chinese American, although who knows what assumptions were lingering unconsciously in my mind. I had been prejudiced because she was a wife. A hanger-on. I was a wife too, but my husband and I were hired for tenure-track positions at the same time. We made equal salaries until he became chair. I sold my first book for an advance that allowed us to make a down payment on our home. This woman, teaching one class, had moved with her husband, parasitic and helpless.
But here in my office, she impressed me. Not because she had liked my novels, but because there was an intense desperation to her, as though after all that she had gone through, the last stop on the train for her was truth, and the pursuit of truth.
She told me what I expected, that when Vladimir had suggested she text to coordinate lunch, she had bristled and told him she wouldn’t let the first text she wrote to me concern food. She told him to check with me about towels, because they only had slightly stained white bath towels, and she would have to go to the store and get new ones. She told me that she had gone to a spa to get her legs and underarms waxed to prepare and had bought new bathing suits for herself and Phee. She told me she was so nervous that morning that she was snappy and irritable. When Vlad, after one snap too many, snapped back, she broke down in tears and told him that all she wanted was to show us, me a writer, and my husband—an academic mind she admired—that they were a normal family. (She took a detour to say that she had fucked a couple teachers during her undergraduate and graduate experience, and while in general, looking at the drawn and papery skin that pulled toward their penises, or their crinkled eyes in morning light, she found them sad, she felt herself to be free and aware enough of the dynamic between them and was disappointed in women these days whose first thought after a consensual love affair was of their trauma—me, she said, I know trauma.)
“Vlad is so sick of my moods, he’s so fed up with my ‘mental health’,” she continued. “I don’t blame him,” she said. “I’m sick of it too. I’m fucking sick of it.” Her voice rose with a soft press of emotion that she swallowed. “So then he told me that you already knew we weren’t a normal family—that everyone knew—and then he told me—I didn’t know this—I didn’t know this until Saturday—I sat in faculty meetings and fucking potlucks and I didn’t know this—he told me that he told the hiring committee about my suicide attempt.” She stopped herself. “Were you there?”
“I was not,” I said, “but—” I lowered my head, hesitating.
“You heard.”
“I heard.”
She turned and looked out at the view again. “He said that’s probably why he got the job, because when they asked him why he wanted to move all the way up here, something set him off and he started crying, and it all came out in a burst, and he told them how I had tried to kill myself when our child wasn’t yet one year old, and how his responsibility was now to keep me alive, and they could hire me, that I was brilliant, that we were still living in the same apartment where he had found me foaming at the mouth, having shit myself in the bedroom, with a note to keep my daughter away.”
At this I might have made a slight noise, because she glanced over to me as though daring me to say something. I held her gaze and nodded slightly, and she turned back to the window.
“I was surprised when they hired me for the memoir-writing class. It’s not like a college to just—offer a job. Maybe I should have guessed. He said that when he left he felt ashamed of himself—so unprofessional—but after so many rejections, the offer came within the week.” She paused and shook her head. “I mean, students are on that committee, right?”
“They sit in on the interviews, yes.”
She pursed her lips and closed her eyes. I felt deeply sorry for her. Before I met Vladimir, when I heard that he divulged Cynthia’s suicide attempt in his interview, I had felt a rush of distaste, like I feel when any great writers, or people, really, who have committed suicide are mentioned in the context of that act before their work. I had pitied her position at the college, coming into our small, gossipy department predefined as “damaged.”
After he told her this, the morning before they were due to come swim at our house, she had retreated into what she called “the howl,” which she described as feeling like one has been caught up in a wave—all sound a roar, all vision static, an ache in every part of her body, a wild pain everywhere. He actually had an injection for her, that’s how sick she was, she told me, laughing, “That’s how sick I am. He keeps a shot like Nurse Fucking Ratched,” she said. “Like Nurse Ratched, like Girl, Interrupted, like The Bell Fucking Jar, like every seventies and eighties mental-hospital TV movie of the week. Like Frances,” she said. “Like fucking Frances, have you seen Frances?” she asked me. I said I hadn’t and she said, “Oh, never mind, like every crazy person I’ve got a morbid fascination with crazy people.” She held up a hand to an imaginary objector. “I’m allowed to say ‘crazy’ when I’m talking about myself. Anyway, I slept for eighteen hours. So I’m sorry I didn’t show up.”
She took a breath after all of it was finished and laughed, not the laugh of a disturbed person, but the deeply ironic laugh of someone who has never lived without the company of pain. She had fallen inside of and then climbed out of her pain so frequently and for so long that she could not cherish it or give herself any sympathy. I couldn’t know the depth of what she had felt—she had gone so much further than I ever had—but I felt I knew about the kind of life that involved a begrudging and humorous acceptance of sadness as the invariable state of experience.
Could it be because we simply weren’t sentimental, or we were too intelligent or too sensitive or too watchful? Was that mere self-flattery? What made us sad, and guilty of our sadness, what pit us in this battle against ourselves? And why couldn’t we release the way some did, and say, yes, well, depression is a medical condition, I’m just wired a little poorly, I’ve got an illness I need to take care of, as all my students said. (Which is not to say that Cynthia Tong didn’t take antidepressants—I’m sure she did.) Perhaps it was this idea of self-expression and this thought that if we were fully to release this sadness, or if we were to alter it too much—if we were to give up all the obsessions and anxieties that caused us pain—then we would become a kind of person we disdained, someone content with an abstract idea of the littleness of their lives. For our lives were, as writers, essentially little by nature. Writers have to lead little lives, otherwise you can’t find time for writing. Was depression simply a hanging on to grandeur?
“I like you,” I said. And it was true. She even looked less unapproachably beautiful after she was finished. I wanted to sit with her and talk about all sorts of things. I was thrilled that she loved my books (or said she did). I wanted to ask her what other writers she liked, what other experiences she’d had.
“I like you,” she replied. When I told her she didn’t know me she said, “I’ve read your books. I like you. I can tell you have sharp elbows and rough edges. You’re prickly, like me. I like prickly people—I trust them. I hate nice people. I like Vlad because he’s Russian, at heart, he’s Russian. He’s brutal and he can’t hide anything. I’m a mess,” she said, and rose. “Don’t let anyone make you feel bad about your husband,” she said to me. “I wish Vlad would fuck other people but he doesn’t want to. He barely wants to fuck me.”
I told her to give it time, that maybe he would.
“Fuck other people or me?” she asked.
I told her maybe both.
“Here’s hoping,” she said. “What time is it? I have to pick up Phee from the day care at three.”
It was five till. “Quick, go,” I said. “They charge by the quarter hour after pickup time.”
“Shit,” she said.
And she was gone, leaving only the light indent of her tiny ass on the cushion of my office couch.
There is a straight two-mile path that cuts through a grove of tall fir trees in the state park at the edge of our town. After I had finished up my administrative duties for the day and forced myself to sit at my desk until my posted office hours ended, I drove over to walk it. If my body is doing something that my brain doesn’t have to process, then I am free to think and to work through things. Often, when I am working on a book or an article, I come to this path.
As I would do when I was working on a book or an article, I tried to force myself not to think about Cynthia Tong and Vladimir Vladinski until I had walked the first two miles—one way to the end of the path. Once I turned around, I would allow my thoughts free rein. The first stretch though, I would attempt to discipline my mind. Every time they popped into my consciousness, Vlad, talented, flirtatious, eager, Cynthia, dark, honest, with what seemed like two lifetimes of trouble behind her eyes, I would catch myself and refocus on what was happening in that moment—the sights, the sounds, the smells, my body—an exercise I learned in a mindfulness course the college had offered to the faculty a few years ago.
I hadn’t expected to find her so interesting. I hadn’t expected that she would be truthful and real. I realized I hadn’t ever heard her speak, and I had imagined her voice to be high and bashful. Instead her voice was low and clean, and her words were precise and well-chosen. She wasn’t below Vladimir at all, she wasn’t even his equal. She was his superior, lowering herself to be with him. Her suicide attempt hadn’t been at all about him, there was no Medea to it, no grabbing for love, no attempt to get attention, as most female suicide attempts are interpreted, as I had maybe interpreted hers. No, she had an honorable depression, the likes of well-known writers, a true despair. “Honorable depression”—what does that even mean? Look at the trees, I told myself. Focus on the spaces between the branches, the light fading and filtering through—
He was incredibly talented, of course. She might not have his talent, his assurance, his hunger, or his drive. He might, from the external perspective, lead the relationship, with his accolades, with his career. You have to be willfully ignorant of certain truths to be successful, you just have to, and she seemed to me like the kind of woman who could not be ignorant of anything. The kind of mind that could paralyze itself. Listen, I reminded myself, what’s the farthest sound you can hear? The cars along the freeway, the shouts from a soccer game in a distant field—
The sun was coming down and there was a chill in the air. Every so often the trees would rustle from a reckless chipmunk careening up its trunk. There was the outline of the moon, there was the North Star, there was the cashier from the nice grocery store walking her dog. We nodded at each other, acquaintances for more than ten years, two people who had exchanged pleasantries about our kids, her parents back in Bangalore, my daughter the lawyer, but who had never known the other’s name.
One thing Cynthia’s visit had certainly confirmed for me was that Vladimir was as sexually attractive as I had perceived, not only for me, an older woman who, I would be the first to admit, might have low standards, but for all women. One of the reasons she was with him was that she found him sexy. He wasn’t a mentor, he was a prize. This was a disappointment. I had hoped that my attraction to him was something private, born out of a subsurface communication, an invisible thumping current specific to him and me.
A bird cawing so loudly it sounded like a cat in a fight. A woodpecker. My daughter at ten years old, saying, “I don’t like nature because everyone is always screaming at you to look at things. ‘Look at this deer! Look at that bird!’ ” My daughter. My good and serious daughter. Twenty-nine and interested in the material of the world. She had no use for abstractions, for fiction, for subtleties and nuances. “Subtlety achieves nothing,” she would say. “There’s no room for subtlety right now. There has to be right and wrong, and one has to decide and do it fast and not worry about anyone’s feelings.”
I cycled through memories of my daughter, some real, some photographic, until I reached the end of the two-mile marker and turned around.
It was then I saw a figure walking toward me—a man, with broad shoulders and a confident gait. I had been walking east, so when I turned around to face him he was backlit by the last intense glare of the setting sun. Was it Vladimir? It couldn’t be. And yet the way he walked was recognizable—swinging arms and a rapidity that seemed to suit someone who had recently come from an urban area. As he came closer and closer I thought for sure it was him, and I felt like I was submerged in snowmelt water: my skin was prickling, my old, bad tits hard as rocks at the nipples.
It wasn’t him. It was just some man in his mid-fifties taking a stroll. His shoulders were broad but his face was squashed, it looked as though he was taking the walk in order to lower his blood pressure. Still, all afire, I thought of this man pressing me against one of the fir trees, rubbing a flat palm over my aching breasts. I greeted him, and he responded in an overly loud voice about the last of the nice weather. I thought ruefully about John and about how only recently now, in his early sixties, did he seem too old for his twenty-year-old students, whereas I, in my late fifties, felt too old for a man in his forties. Older women with lust are always the butt of the joke in comedy, horny saggy birds with dripping skin. But then again, what was I saying, I didn’t want to consummate anything with Vladimir. I liked his wife, I liked his daughter, I liked his writing, I liked his personality. What did I even think I wanted to do about it? In truth, when I got to the real imagining of the act, I found myself repulsed by the idea of actual physical contact. I only wanted to think about him, framed by my darkened window.
I quickened to a run, even though my shoes weren’t supportive and my hip would ache and lurch for days after. I ran the last stretch of the road to my car, stripping off my coat and letting the cold air rush against my skin. When I sat in the driver’s seat, I felt it again, that pressing and orgasmic need to write something down. I pulled out my laptop. Unlike other times in my life, when I needed morning or quiet or the right kind of pen—when I was forcing myself—this writing did not need to be coaxed, it erupted.
I stayed at the parking lot until it turned dark. The jocular man who I had passed rapped on the passenger-side window of my car—Is Everything All Right?—and I nodded and gave him a thumbs-up. He kept speaking at me, but I ignored him, my radio playing Tallis, bending my face closer to the laptop screen. Then he came around to the driver’s side and knocked on the window, louder and more urgently, until I turned off the music, opened the window slightly, and asked him, What? Looking hurt, he pointed toward the entrance of the trail. There, a black bear stood on its hind legs, leaning up against a spruce tree, its front paw stretched to hold on to a branch, rubbing its back up and down against the trunk. I smiled and unrolled my window fully to apologize and thank him for showing me. He nodded, walked away, said Stuck-Up Bitch over his shoulder, and gave me the finger.