Certainly, I was not happy in the summer of 2001, which was when I met Matt. Those two facts are not unrelated.
I was still living in New York, though not with Jenny. Jenny wasn’t speaking to me then. I’d told her I wanted to stay in the apartment, that I’d change my ways and spend more time there, and that she shouldn’t advertise for a new roommate. I’d meant it. But I hadn’t delivered, and Jenny had weathered another lonely few months before packing up my belongings in garbage bags and setting them in the hallway. Things were said.
After graduation, I had turned my attention to the only job I was now qualified to do, aside from waitressing or folding sweaters at the Gap: writing. I set up shop in a café near my new apartment, a kind of drop-in centre with lattes, where the regulars were all current students or recent graduates of the creative writing program. They were all demented in their own ways, all of them working on projects of great ambition and no commercial potential. They were tiresome and needy; they were deliberately, studiously, and even aggressively odd. It was becoming apparent to me, after a year in their company, that I had very little in common with them.
An added peculiarity was that the café owner, Melinda, had advertised on several popular tourist blogs, claiming that the café was a site of great literary significance and that visitors could watch important novels being written in real time. In return for serving as the attractions in this “unique New York experience,” we writers could sit all day and never be asked to relinquish our seats.
This made us museum exhibits for tourists who wanted a cultural sweetener with their caffeine. They would whisper to each other, trying to figure out if any of us were famous. It was pathetic how much we all enjoyed their attention, even though we pretended to be above it. Since graduating, I’d had the sense that I was beginning to fade at the edges, and that I might disappear in this vast place full of hungry, ridiculously talented people. At the café I felt visible, at least.
I used to envy the vacationers for their unabashed enthusiasm and their manifest preference for personal comfort over fashion. I envied my fellow writers, too, for whatever buoyant combination of hope and arrogance kept them afloat in a hostile sea of poverty and obscurity. They were, all of them, sincere in their missions. I, by contrast, was a fraud.
It was unbearably hot that summer. The heat sucked the life out of me and made me fantasize about summers at Berry Point, the water lapping against the old dock, and the wind in the pines, and the loons calling to each other in the morning mist. Loons, for God’s sake! I was half-mad with homesickness, but I hadn’t allowed myself to understand that yet.
My mother was calling regularly, trying to persuade me to escape the heat and come up to Berry Point for a week or so, to work on my book there. Then, I attributed my inertia to the oppressive heat. Now, I see that I was paralyzed with ambivalence, unable to take the next, necessary, step on my own.
Then Matt walked in. Literally. Melinda, the café owner, had taken a few days off, creating a vacuum in the café universe. Matt, utterly without writing credentials or ambitions, took a seat, made himself as comfortable as a long, lanky man in a café chair could be, and stayed. By the time Melinda returned, Matt had been there for the better part of a week. He was also in a litigious frame of mind, because he was studying for his New York bar exams. Melinda had a polite word with Matt about the culture and customs of the café, and Matt had a polite word with Melinda about the laws of the state of New York, and Melinda retreated behind the counter and got him a latte on the house. And that was the end of it.
The next week, standing at the coffee bar at lunchtime, he stuck out his hand. “Matt Nathanson,” he said.
“Avery Graham,” I said.
“Avery,” he said, “I could use some assistance. I’m bored out of my mind right now. If a person can die of boredom, I might be at risk.”
I laughed. “That’s terrible,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to stand idly by if I could help.”
“Have lunch with me,” he said. I hesitated. “Please,” he said. “You could save a life.”
“All right,” I said. “At least then I’ll have done something productive today.”
We carried our sandwiches over to Matt’s table. He moved his stack of books onto the floor. “Real estate today,” he said. “Bar admissions. Horrible.”
“You’re a lawyer?” I said.
“Not until I pass the bar exams,” he said.
“When’s that?”
“In three months,” said Matt. “Assuming that I pass them on the first try. But you’re supposed to be distracting me. How did you end up as part of Melinda’s psychic family?”
I choked on my coffee. Matt patted me on the back while I coughed. When I caught my breath, I said, “Clever. Pretend to be in distress and then try to kill me. I never saw you coming.”
He grinned. “It’s the mild-mannered Canadian thing,” he said. “They never see us coming. You should know. How long have you been here?”
I sighed. I’d been passing as a New Yorker for a few years now. This was more proof, it seemed, that I wasn’t even a good fake.
“Three years,” I said. “I came down for grad school. I’m a writer.”
“That is very cool,” said Matt. “Law school is full of people who wanted to be writers but didn’t have the balls. What are you writing?”
“A novel,” I said. I was going through a superstitious phase, and had convinced myself that the more I talked about the book, the less likely I was to finish it. In truth, I was expanding and revising the novella that I had submitted in my final semester of the MFA program, about a young woman’s sexual awakening following the death of a parent; it was intensely and, I was beginning to realize, painfully autobiographical.
I was rethinking the project, changing the point of view, adding characters and subplots, and becoming increasingly magical in my thinking, which I suspected was common among writers upon finding themselves mired in a doomed book. Also, I liked the idea of retaining some mystery with Matt, so that he might imagine me as the sort of writer who would win awards and be sought out by obscure publications for her views on the future of the novel, and not as what I actually was: an unemployed and chronically miserable MFA graduate.
“What’s it about?” said Matt.
“Do you read fiction?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Absolutely.”
“What was the last thing you read?” I asked.
“I’m not telling,” he said. “I bought it at an airport. You would judge me.”
“I wouldn’t,” I said.
“You would,” he said.
“Okay. I probably would,” I said.
“How about this?” said Matt. “Let’s go to a bookstore. You can recommend something for me.”
“Now?” I said.
“Why not?” said Matt.
“I . . . can’t,” I said. “Not today. I’ve got to get some writing done.”
“Tomorrow?” he asked.
“Um . . .”
“Sorry,” he said. “I don’t get out much these days.”
“That,” I said, “is a tragedy. You’re in New York!”
“All I’ve seen of New York is the inside of my law firm, the library, and a bunch of restaurants.”
“You do need saving,” I said. “Bookstore tomorrow it is.”
He beamed. “It’s already the best part of my week,” he said. He shook his head. “Conveyancing. Apparently, people do this for a living.”
“Once you pass the exam, you never have to think about it again, right?”
“If I do, I’ll have made some very poor decisions,” he said.
“The only way out is through,” I tell him. “My dad used to say that, and he was a lawyer.” I stood up. “Back to work.”
I walked back to my own table and stared at my screen. I found myself thinking about my favourite bookstores, wondering where to take Matt. There was the bookstore near campus with the carved ceiling, which had a great panini place around the corner where we could eat afterwards; or the one with the rare first editions, near the park with the huge chestnut trees where we could take a walk; or the one that played old Edith Piaf recordings and had a tiny bakery next door.
What could be more innocent than a trip to a bookstore? I closed the screen and rubbed my eyes. I rummaged in my bag and extracted a pad of lined paper. I had been experimenting with journaling, automatic writing, and various other forms of procrastination, which were supposed to dislodge my creativity from wherever it was blocked. The results were predictably dreadful, except with respect to my cursive, which was much improved.
My cellphone rang.
“Hello, darling,” said Hugh. “How’s it going today?”
“Great,” I told him. “This section is coming along nicely.”
“You see?” he said. “I told you that all you needed to do was to glue yourself to the seat and it would come. I’m so proud of you.” I had, in a moment of intimacy that I now regretted, confided in Hugh that I was working on Cultivating Discipline, and I was finding the ground surprising hard and stony. Hugh had taken to calling me every day around this time, to boost my spirits and my resolve. I hated it.
“Thanks,” I said. His pride made me squeamish. My career was important to him, more important, I was beginning to understand, than it was to me. And in lying to him about my progress and pretending to appreciate his calls, I understood, too, that I was protecting him from small-scale disappointments; it was all I had to offer.
“See you at dinner, then,” he said. “I’m cooking that lentil and chickpea casserole you love. A reward for all your hard work.”
“Wonderful,” I said.
“I love you,” said Hugh.
“Me too,” I said. I disconnected the phone and put my head down on the table. Hugh exhausted me.
We had been married for less than a year.
Start as you intend to finish: another one of my dad’s pearls of wisdom. Had I? It had been Hugh’s idea to get married to make up for all the secrecy early on in our relationship. I would have been happy to live together in a more public way, but he was overcompensating. He wanted to celebrate us, he said. It felt like less of a celebration to me than a performance, and no one had given me the script. Hugh spoke obliquely about every marriage having an adjustment period, and I hoped fervently that he was correct. I was inclined to defer to his views on diagnosis. He had been my teacher, after all, and I tended to accept most of his opinions, supported as they generally were by well-researched footnotes. And, in any event, I didn’t have an alternative theory.
I sat back up. Matt was looking over at me with concern. He mouthed the words Are you okay? and I nodded and waved him back to work. He was hard at it, two books open at once, and a stack of cue cards that he was scribbling on when he wasn’t attacking his keyboard, and I could feel his energy sparking across the room; it was bracing. I thought, He has the most perfect wrists of any man I have ever seen.
I could remember, and it troubled me to do so, that there had been a time when Hugh’s wrists made me weak with desire. I had sat, once, across a desk from him, watching him read an essay, and been transfixed by the sight of his wrist, the crisp cotton of his cuff, and the black strap of his watch. I remembered kissing him, the first time we had sex, right at the pulse point, where the buckle had left an imprint on his skin, and I remembered the shiver that went through him, and through me.
What I realized that day in the café, writing the book I would never publish and thinking about the man I would leave, and the man I would leave with, was that we don’t understand memory at all. We believe that shared memories bind us together, when, in fact, they have the destructive power of the worm in the apple. When I thought of the early days of my affair with Hugh, for example, I could recall the dawning awareness of my ability to unsettle him, the crystallizing knowledge that we would end up in bed together, sooner rather than later, and that it would be very, very good when we did. I could appreciate that I had once felt that way, could reconstruct it intellectually, but I couldn’t feel it again.
That’s our first mistake, of course: the idea that any of our decisions are truly rational. Shear the emotions away and any choice looks peculiar at best. And then there’s our second mistake: believing that memories are shared at all. We know that eyewitness testimony is unreliable, that everyone sees the world through a filter as unique as a snowflake, that the colour receptors in our eyes process blue in such a way that we see separate skies when we stand next to each other and look heavenward. But still, we can’t quite believe it.
The sad fact is that the past, perhaps especially our own past, is mysterious. Lodged in the present, you move further away each day from the reasons why you took this path or that one. And you’re left with only the story you’ve told yourself, the one with perfect lighting and a flattering angle. The one that even you know doesn’t really look like you.