LATELY LISA’S MOTHER HAS BEEN TELLING HER THINGS she does not want to know. Lisa’s mother, who has told her little, now will not shut up. She follows Lisa out to the car, under starlight, to tell her that Lisa’s father has been impotent for years. She tells her, at the kitchen table, about the pornographic film he has rented on his doctor’s orders, about the penile pump.
This afternoon, she is telling Lisa about the drawings she has made. They are walking in Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden less than a mile from the house where Lisa grew up; it is October and the trees are a conflagration. Ocher. Russet. Orange.
The drawings her mother has made are crude, scrawled on typing paper in red and black magic marker. The first one is of Clara—the woman Lisa’s father had an affair with ten years back, an affair he revealed for the first time two weeks ago. Lisa’s mother slashed the drawing with lines and words. Slut. Cunt. Whore. Bitch. Then she hung it up in their bedroom.
“I told your father about it before I hung it up, so it wouldn’t be a surprise,” she says, as if consideration were the point here.
The second drawing, of Lisa’s father, is stick figure with a huge erection and slavering mouth. Her mother titled it The Unrepentant Rat (Lisa laughs at this); she put that one up in the bedroom, too. “I realized,” Lisa’s mother tells her as they walk a familiar path through the woods, “that Clara wasn’t the one who betrayed me. She didn’t know me. She was a slut and a whore for sleeping with a married man, but she didn’t know me.”
What makes her mother angry, she tells Lisa, is not the fact of the affair but that Lisa’s father will not apologize. He has told Lisa’s mother that he is sorry that the news has caused her pain, but he will not apologize for fucking another woman. He claims not to remember the details. When it happened or for how long. So Lisa’s mother, her brilliant mother, her 190-iq-mother-who-gave-up-a-career-in-medicine-to-marry-The-Unrepentant-Rat spends her afternoons scouring checkbook registers from 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999 in order to piece together the story Lisa’s father will not tell. Her mother has deduced from these that the affair took place while Lisa’s parents were in marriage counseling and her father was a consultant for a local electric company where Clara worked. He will neither confirm nor deny the allegations, her father, the lawyer, the dick.
Lisa wants to comfort her, her beautiful brilliant mother. But she does not know what to say. She wants to tell her not to take this personally. That extramarital affairs are like an extracurricular sport in this country. Everyone is doing it. She wants to tell her that sex on the side is fashionable these days—that it is to the twenty-first century what Buddhism was to the fifth. It’s a sign of the times, not a personal failure. These days, everyone is cheating on something or someone: income taxes, stock holders, husbands, lovers, wives. We are cheating ourselves. But what can she say on the subject of adultery that her mother has not already heard? The headlines are full of it. There is no comfort for the suspicion that it raises, Lisa knows this well herself: the suspicion that it is her fault that he wandered, that somehow she was not enough, that maybe nothing ever will be.
“The last erection your father had was with her,” Lisa’s mother tells her bitterly.
They are walking under pine boughs. A forest out of fairytales. The ground littered with brown needles. The sweet smell of pine and earth. Wood smoke rises from the chimney of the stone house that serves as a visitor center inside the wildflower garden. Lisa has walked these woods with her mother since adolescence. They are not out of them yet.
It is a month now since Lisa’s partner, Richard, left her for another woman, taking with him the boom box on which they’d played Gluck’s Orfeo and R.E.M., Smashing Pumpkins and Piaf; two boxes of books; his files; and their golden retriever, Jeff.
“This is why people get married,” Gretchen, Lisa’s best friend, says.
“Why? So they can cheat?”
“No, so they stay together when they cheat.”
“Would that be better?”
“It would be different. It would be another choice.”
Gretchen is getting her PhD in political science at the university where Lisa teaches composition and sometimes, like this term, creative writing. Gretchen studies Rational Choice Theory, why people do what they do and how to predict it. Gretchen calls it “Rat Choice” for short; the model, she says, is flawed, but it is popular. The New Republic ran a cover story on it just the other week. In Gretchen’s field they talk a lot about “rational states”—a concept that pleases Lisa secretly. Whenever her friend talks about theorizing rational states, Lisa pictures a continent of tiny owlish people, scholarly and dour, a whole country governed by reasonableness. Like Swedes.
The crunch of leaves, the smell of wood smoke. Richard once called autumn an operatic season, and Lisa understands now that he meant the almost painful fullness of it, the bombast and the overblown beauty of the trees, the smell of fruit and rot, the leaves, the watery weight of the chill air. Thinking of him, she feels a lurch of desire in her belly, acute as a menstrual cramp. She tries to think of other things, of getting home, of getting food, of the class she has to teach tomorrow night for which she has yet to prepare. The cold walk has made her hungry. Her mother has fallen silent now. Lisa takes her mother’s arm, hooks it in her own, and leans her head against the older woman’s shoulder. Her mother smells of Anaïs Anaïs, a faintly floral French perfume.
“We’ll be fine, Mom. You and I,” Lisa says. “We are.”
What Lisa is, in fact, is thirty-two and crying too often in the afternoons. When she is feeling Byronic and self-pitying, she tells herself that she is crying because she is childless, loveless, and middle-aged. When she is feeling more robust, she makes excuses: says she has lost the love of her life after a devastating six-year love affair; says graduate school is demoralizing; says it is performance anxiety. But she suspects it is both more and less than these, both more complicated and simpler. She wants to get beyond these woods and is afraid to.
The following evening Lisa stands before her class in a fluorescent third-floor room on the campus of a midwestern university, instructing thirty students in the basics of fiction. Tonight she is giving them an exercise. Lisa has asked her students to write down on index cards three things—a fear, a regret, a secret. Later, she will randomly redistribute these cards, each with one item, to the students as they write a character sketch of a person they consider virtuous or good. “They may or may not be good by conventional standards,” she says. “But it must be someone you consider to be virtuous or good.”
As they write their sketches, she sorts the index cards into piles—secrets, regrets, fears. After sorting them, she sits on her desk and reads through a few.
I am afraid of a world in which art does not matter.
I am afraid of suffocation. Of being suffocated.
Squirrels.
She laughs out loud, then apologizes to the few students who look up, their brows fretted with worry. The truth is, she is moved by these anonymous fears. Detached from specific people, they do not seem neurotic but become philosophical. Existential. Voices out of the void. Everyfear. They are such poignant and courageous proclamations. Despite a world in which art is disregarded, suffocation possible, in which there are squirrels, we go on.
She sorts through the fears, then the secrets. She does not have time for the regrets.
After they have written for five minutes, Lisa hands each of them a random secret to incorporate into the sketch. As she walks around the room handing out the cards, a few students begin to moan. “Can I have another one?” a guy in a baseball cap asks from across the room. “Okay,” Lisa says, “anyone willing to trade with Nick? Anyone want to swap their fears, their regrets?” Hands go up around the room. “Can we trade with each other?” two women beside Lisa ask. “Okay,” Lisa says. She allows the students one trade, either with each other or with her. “Oh, man,” Nick says as Lisa hands him a new card, “I don’t like this one either. This is worse.” “Trade you,” someone says from behind Lisa. “Would it were so easy in life,” Lisa says. A few of the older students laugh.
“Don’t just plop it in,” Lisa tells them. “Work toward incorporating the secret into your sketch.” This, she tells them, is how fact gets turned into fiction. This is how autobiography gets turned into myth—through the introduction and incorporation of random external elements (those casual pranks of the gods, she thinks). She tells them that it is an important discipline to accept random elements, not to try to control your material. When a thought comes up, it is important not to dismiss information about a character because you think, “That’s not how I want it to go.”
At the end of class, a student asks her what he should do with his cards; should he throw them out? “No,” Lisa says, “I’ll take them.” She does not understand why she should want to hold on to other people’s sorrows, but she cannot bring herself to toss them. She throws the lot of them into her briefcase. Shuts out the lights as she goes.
When Richard told her a month ago that he was sleeping with one of his students, Lisa had found the confession hard to believe. Like a bad plot twist in one of her student’s stories, his phrases had seemed hackneyed, overdone. He did not tell her he was leaving her; that part had been her idea. He said, simply, that he was having an affair. Then he wept. “Who is she?” Lisa asked, her voice cold, as it is in the face of conflict. Emotion becomes remote to her when she needs it most, like a polite guest slipping out when the family dinner conversation takes too personal a turn. He told her that the girl was a former student, emphasizing the first of these two words. Former student. He told her he did not mean for this to happen. They had gone for coffee a few times to discuss—Lisa interrupted him. “Don’t give me details,” she said. “I do not want to know.” One detail she will remember though, from what he’s told her, one detail she cannot forget: The student he is fucking smells like ripe avocados. “We’ve lost the sense of wonder,” he told Lisa, explaining why he’d strayed. “There are no surprises between us anymore.” She told him that he was wrong. That she was surprised as hell; she was surprised that after six years of quasi-marriage he was going to leave her for a smell. She was surprised at herself for picking up a plate from the dinner table and hurling it at his handsome chest. She was surprised to find that she is a very good shot.
At home, after her class, she makes herself a cup of tea and stretches out across the bed that once was theirs. On the bedside table, a cairn of mostly unread books. The topmost one is The Inferno, translation by Ciardi, Lisa’s version of pulp fiction. She likes the opening best: the forest Dante wanders through alone.
She can trace the origins of all her love affairs to books. With Richard it was Dante, Martin Amis, and Roland Barthes. Their first conversation had been about A Lover’s Discourse, which Richard recommended that she read. He told her about his late nights staying up till four to trace the figures through the pages back and forth, his hands on the sheets, making notes in the margins. It could have been a body they were discussing. She had promised him she’d get the book that day. They were working that summer as interns for an august and long-standing lefty mag that worked them hard and paid them little; that was how they met. Checking facts and running down photos. They took pride in living well and on the cheap, in scamming press passes to the MoMA, cutting work to attend free screenings. She remembers this one day in particular: as they rode the elevator down from the ninth-floor office, they talked about their lives before that summer. Richard told her about growing up in LA. She told him about her summer spent in Italy on a grant.
“What were you doing in Italy?” he asked.
“The usual,” she said. “I went to fall in love with the world. To recover from my education. I wandered around Florence thinking I was Michelangelo, thinking I was Dante.”
He’d smiled. “Who was your Virgil?”
“I’m still looking,” Lisa said. But it wasn’t true. In that moment she thought that she had found him. Two months later he moved in.
Now, lying here alone, awake, at night, she goes over the narrative of their life together looking for clues, what she might have noticed and failed to, the tropes, foreshadowing, repeated imagery, all the things she tries to get her students to consider but cannot. She thinks about character, point of view, motivation, tense, how one action led causally to the next.
In class last week she told her students about fiction diction, which she told them differs from actual conversation in that there is always another meaning in the text. In fiction, unlike life, she said, you do not mean what you say. “A character does not come right out and say ‘I do not love you anymore. I am leaving you for an undergraduate who smells like avocados.’” Her students looked at her, concerned. “The story would be over,” Lisa said. “Instead, a character might say, ‘Let’s get a beer.’” They were reading “Hills Like White Elephants” that week, and in context, Lisa tells herself, the comment had made sense. Now she’s not so sure.
Her life is a jumble of uncertain anecdotes, images, and scraps she cannot make into a whole; what she gets instead is a headache. Everything she struggles to get her students to do, she now tries. She looks for the moments of decision, the fatal flaw; she has explained to them the concept of hubris, with which they were not acquainted. She has introduced them to irony, which amazingly some hadn’t heard of. Welcome back to the Midwest, she thinks. This, she told friends at college in the East, was why she was a sickly child, growing up in Minnesota, sorrowful and grim: She suffered from an irony deficiency.
What Lisa can’t get over, what keeps her up this night, is how sudden it was. Their ending. Like a bursting pipe. Like the clutch that gave on her car last week as she was idling at a light. Sudden as a stroke her car had died. One minute she was moving, then paused at a light; the next minute there was no gear to shift into, just a growling as she frantically tried to stick the shift into a slot. She flipped on her emergency blinkers, got out, rolled the tin can that had taken her across the country a dozen times to the curb. The mechanic said it wasn’t worth the money she’d spend to fix it. “Are you sure?” Lisa had asked. It seemed to her that people were altogether too quick to give up. Americans were always ready to move on, at the first sign of damage or dissatisfaction. “It’s been a good car,” she said. She knew the body was imperfect, dented, but the heart of it, its engine, had been good. “It’s been a good car,” she repeated. “Probably,” the mechanic said, as if he were not sure. “If it was a cream puff, lady, I’d say maybe, but this is no cream puff.” His hands were stuffed into his pockets. “If it were a cream puff,” Lisa said, “I wouldn’t have been driving it eighty down a freeway.”
Still awake at four a.m., Lisa gets herself out of bed and curls up on the couch to work. If she cannot sleep, she can at least grade student papers. She hauls her briefcase onto her lap and tips it up to empty out the stack of papers, but index cards spill out instead. She gathers up the clump of cards and shuffles through them, sorting, reshuffling other people’s sorrows. She tries to imagine some useful purpose for them. She envisions, for an instant, a board game like this: where you choose a regret or a fear, where you are dealt these cards and then deal with them. But what would be high, what low? How could you possibly win? For a moment, she considers mailing them to the nubile girlfriend of her ex, whom she has identified on campus, or thinks she has. She considers mailing them to enemies or friends. She considers sending them one by one, like postcards from a tropical vacation, to Richard.
Each morning her mother calls her with more news—the latest on her father’s infidelity. She calls Lisa and leaves messages on her answering machine, messages Lisa does not return. Her mother’s voice, when Lisa replays the messages, is an anxious blur. Lisa does not hear the words, just tone. Her mother’s bitter cheer. “Hi, sweetie,” she says. “This is your mother calling. Just wanted to find out how you’re doing.” She calls to remind Lisa that her sister’s birthday is tomorrow. She calls to ask if she is coming over for a visit. Her voice is edgy with enthusiasm. All week, after their walk, she calls. Unanswered, she persists.
Lisa first learned about her father’s affair two weeks ago, precisely two weeks after Richard told her of his own. The symmetry appalled her, the neat parallels of fiction cropping up in life. She was in the lobby of her therapist’s office, waiting for her session, when she decided to check her machine. Her therapist’s office has a courtesy phone on a table in the reception area, and Lisa is her father’s daughter. She cannot resist a free call. In all the years she was growing up, she remembers her father best through his calls. Brief and out of the blue. He traveled most of the time, conducting seminars in tax law in Omaha, Baton Rouge. He was not around much, but he called. Whenever it was “somebody else’s nickel.” Whenever there was a company phone. Whenever he didn’t have to pay. He would ask if there was any hot mail, any important calls, then he would ask for her mother.
Sometimes, when there are no messages these days, Lisa feels bereft. Sometimes she calls back just to make sure. Too often these days, when she is alone, time stands still. There is no movement. She feels cut off from the vital flow. That day, though, there were many beeps. Thank God. The voices are like ropes cast out to her to haul her back to safety. They give her a reason to go on; they keep time moving forward with their requests, their invitations, their calls for help. An editor had called to tell her he had a book on his desk he’d like her to review; there was an invitation to a party; and there was her father.
Her father had called to tell her that they were back in town. They had been to a couples’ workshop in northern Minnesota for the past week. Now they were back.
“Your mother and I have returned from the Northwoods,” he boomed. “Actually, we haven’t been in the Northwoods, we’ve been on a voyage into ourselves. We’re back,” he said, “and we’d like to share with you some of our discoveries. We’d like to introduce you to the new parts of ourselves. Give us a call,” he said. “Stop by.”
This, Lisa imagines, is the sort of thing that happens to affluent, educated people in their seventies—these enthusiasms. In another era they might have become pious. But her parents gave up religion long ago, read the existentialists, studied physics and the brain. Long ago, they secularized their longing. What religious fervor must have been to another century, faith in self-help books and PBS are to her parents and their kind. They read Joseph Campbell and listen ardently to Bill Moyers’s specials; they take an interest in theories about the goddess within; they believe the opinions in the New York Times. It is not so much faith they seek as a decline in incredulity. They have believed in nothing but their own efforts for so long that their spiritual faculties have atrophied. They cast themselves about with ill-gotten fervor, like adolescents in a first brush with love. Nevertheless, Lisa had been disappointed to discover this sappiness in her father, the high-powered lawyer. In her mother of the 190 IQ.
On the way home from therapy, Lisa dropped by her parents’ house. Her father was seated in the living room, reading the local paper when she walked in; he said from the couch that he was delighted she’d stopped by. They’d had an exciting adventure, he said, gained many insights into their relationship and into themselves that they’d like to share with their children. Lisa felt vaguely nauseated as she took a seat.
“I’m happy for you,” she said. “But I don’t want to know how you feel about your marriage. I’m your daughter,” she said, thinking she should not have to explain this.
“Well, then you don’t have to listen.” He shifted his bulk on the cushion. Squinted at her. “I was disturbed,” he said, in his skeptical, lawyerly tone, “to learn from your mother this weekend that you once suggested that she have an affair.”
There was a glint in his eyes, as if this were a game, the way he used to look when he’d test Lisa and her sister with torte-law dilemmas over dinner. “I don’t recall having said that,” Lisa said, “but if I did, I suppose I meant it. She needed more than kids for company, Dad.”
Her father’s eyes softened, grew unfocused.
“So let me ask you a question,” Lisa said. “Did you ever have an affair?” It was an idle question, but the subject—given Richard’s recent revelations—was on her mind. Lisa’s sister had once speculated that their father had had an ongoing affair with a lawyer he worked with in Louisiana. Lisa hadn’t thought it possible then.
Her father smiled at her. “Yes,” he said. “I did. Ten years ago. I told your mother about it this weekend.” He looked delighted, as if he had won a debate. It was not the confession but his evident delight in the confession that appalled her. He seemed pleased to have cheated, and pleased to tell her so.
The garage door opened, went up, went down.
Her father said, hushed and quickly, “Your mother’s coming.” The door to the kitchen opened behind them, and they heard Lisa’s mother come in.
“Hi, sweetie,” she called from the kitchen. “How are you?”
“We were just talking about Dad’s affair,” Lisa said, looking past her father, defying him to shut her up.
“Oh,” her mother said, coming into the living room. Her tall and lovely mother bent in half and sank onto a cushion on the couch; she looked tired, worn out. “I was pretty upset when I first learned about it. But then I realized,” she turned to Lisa’s father, “we’ve done worse to each other.” Her father raised his chin, frowned as if interested in this equanimity, in the novelty of this response. Lisa wanted to punch him.
“But,” she said, turning back to Lisa, “the workshop was very exciting.” She told Lisa about the rules of the couples’ workshop. Everything, she said, was defined in terms of E/A: Encounter and Acceptance. Experience and Analysis. Enlightenment and Acknowledgment.
“I don’t believe this,” Lisa said.
“What don’t you believe?” her father said.
Lisa ignored him. Faced her mother as if they were alone.
“Dad has just told you he had an affair,” Lisa said. “What are you going to do?”
“We’re trying to work it out,” her mother said.
“Jesus Christ,” Lisa said, inexplicably angry. “I have spent my entire adult life getting the divorce you didn’t. I have spent my whole adult life leaving your marriage behind. I want another kind of love than this.”
“Good for you,” her father said. He beamed at her. “I love the daughter within me.”
“What is he talking about?” Lisa had no idea. Her mother explained that this was Weir-speak—which Lisa will thereafter refer to as Weird-speak—more from the couples lab. It is called “percept language” and reflects the belief that no one ever really knows anyone else, only one’s perception of them. Hence, her mother told her, it is impossible to say, “I love you.” You can only say, “I love the image of you I carry within me. I love the daughter within me.”
“That is ridiculous,” Lisa said. “That is absurd.” People, it seems to her, are always doing this to reasonable ideas, distorting them until they become parodies of themselves. They have done this to God, to karma, now to Wittgenstein. It is one thing to acknowledge that perception is a factor in relationships; it is another to deny the possibility of self-transcendence. “Love is about self-transcendence,” Lisa said. “To say ‘I love you’ is to make a gesture beyond narcissism; the whole point is to move beyond oneself, to say it is you I love.” But she gave up. She knew her parents did not know this other kind of love. Nor did she.
“E, A,” her mother said.
“I love the daughter within me,” her father said.
Lisa said, “I am going home. I am leaving now. I’ll call you later, Mom.”
When she tells Gretchen about this later, she will make it comic-operatic, their three voices an absurd chorus. But the truth is, she finds nothing funny in it now. She is ashamed that they are none of them better at love than this.
Lisa should be studying or preparing for her class, but she sits among the library carrels studying the girls instead. She wonders who it is that Richard beds now. She watches as they pass her—on the sidewalk, on the street, the ones in cars, in hallways, carrels, in the stacks; everywhere she wonders, Is it her?
Her mother calls to tell her there have been muggings in the park; the woods are no longer safe to walk. A man was held up at gunpoint. A housewife has been raped. Her mother thought she’d want to know. “It’s not safe,” her mother says, speaking to the machine. “Stay out of the woods.” Her mother calls her as she’s heading out the door to pick up her car that has been fixed. Lisa does not pick up the phone but she listens to the words broadcast out into the room. The voice asks Lisa to stop by. And since Lisa has lost the trick of time since Richard left, since time holds still now and she cannot see the point in doing anything or going anywhere, except to class, she goes to see her mom.
It is a week now since their last walk, and the leaves in the garden are mostly fallen. The woods look skeletal as she drives past. But she is happy to be going home. She will drink coffee, she will eat cottage cheese and toast. There is this compensation in her father’s recent revelations: They know the worst of one another now and can go on.
Truth is, she doesn’t judge her father for it. For wanting more. She understands it. Though she’s sorry for her mom.
But Lisa’s wrong. The coffee is not brewed when she arrives. Her mother doesn’t offer lunch; she offers news instead. She reels off a litany of betrayals, as Lisa stands there peeling off her coat: It was not just one affair, it seems, but a career of infidelities—blow jobs, hand jobs, phone sex, graduate students. Her mother tells her everything as her husband has told her. They sit at the kitchen table, whispering.
When her father walks into the kitchen for his lunch, Lisa’s mother hushes her. “Hey, Lee,” her father says. “I didn’t realize you were here, hon. How are you?” He opens up the fridge to forage. “Fine,” she says. “We’re just talking about what a dick you are.” “Ah,” he says, apparently unruffled. He pulls out a plate from the bowels of the fridge and faces his women. “Anyone going to eat this?” he says, holding up a plate to them.
At home, Lisa calls Gretchen and tells her all about it. Gretchen says it must feel terrible to know those things about her dad.
But in truth, Lisa thinks, it does not. She is relieved to know her father wanted more. More than the lawn, the car, the house, the wife, the kids. She is relieved that he wanted more than this and got it.
“It’s funny,” Lisa says. “In a weird way I’m relieved, y’know?” Lisa says. “And it makes a kind of sense.”
“What does?”
“Richard. The Avocado.” This is how she refers to Richard’s new girlfriend these days, and sometimes, when especially aggrieved, she calls her just the Smell.
“How do you mean?” Gretchen asks.
Lisa can hear Gretchen chewing, tart little toothy sounds. “What are you eating?” Lisa asks.
“Sorry,” Gretchen says through a mumble of food. “Rice cake. I didn’t think it’d be so loud.” There is a hollow swallowing sound. “So what makes sense?” Gretchen asks.
“My father was a philanderer,” Lisa says. “I appreciate their charms.”
Alone on the couch that afternoon and dazed with hunger, Lisa considers what Gretchen has told her of Rat Choice. According to the theory, developed in the 1950s from neoclassical economics, people are predictable. The theory assumes that humans are rational beings, and that given a set of exogenously given preferences (assumed to be universal, unchanging, and self-serving), a person’s behavior can be predicted. Everyone, according to the rats, has a set of definable interests that can be ranked hierarchically, and everyone can be depended on to act so as to maximize these. Sometimes the theory worked. According to the article in the New Republic, rational choice could tell you why drivers join AAA—because the organization offers member perks. But it is at a loss to explain idealism—why, for instance, comfortable, middle-class, white kids from New England joined the Freedom Riders in the 1960s. The theory cannot account for this. The rats know nothing about it. Self-sacrifice. Hope. Altruism. Crazy love. This is precisely what the theory cannot account for. The model would call them irrelevant, inexplicable as hope, love, fidelity. In the theory, interests are simply given and are assumed to remain constant over time. Nothing, it seems to Lisa, could be farther from the truth.
Lisa has forgotten to eat, for a day at least, she thinks, or maybe two. Her fridge is empty save for mayonnaise, old eggs, expired milk, and capers. At times like this, the body is a total pain. Like a pet, it demands its feedings. So she’s forced out into the world to get some groceries. It tires her to have to eat; the need seems unending. Each day, her body makes the same demands anew.
She grabs her coat, walks out the door. The sky is a quilted gray. It looks like snow. As she walks the two blocks to the grocery store, Lisa thinks about her visit with her mom. She cannot help but note how radiant her mother has become—toned, vibrant, luminous in her misery, alive with pain and desire. At seventy-two, Lisa’s mother is having more sex than she is.
Lisa first learned about the body from her mother, as she learned from her the plays of Beckett and Brecht, learned etymology and ants. The body, when they considered it, was discussed as if it were a car one must keep well tuned. Her mother spoke of exercise, of calories, and fat; she spoke of folic acid, zinc; the latest from JAMA. When, as a child, Lisa had asked questions about sex, her mother answered her with a cold and clinical accuracy. She never spoke of passion, and Lisa had not imagined her parents in the clench of a strong desire. Even when Lisa grew up and came to love, kissed the girls and blew the boys, desire remained for her abstract, remote as a rumor.
Across the street from her childhood house, her best friend’s parents fought. The father slapped the mother’s ass as he passed her where she tended the barbecue grill. He kept a mildewed archive of Playboy in a room off the laundry room—a room empty but for the stacks of slick magazines, which Lisa and her best friend perused till desire became, in Lisa’s mind, linked with the smell of mold, the cold damp of a small white room, a cement floor, exposed pipes. Something chilled and damp.
At the grocery store she hauls things off the shelf, indiscriminate. Apple juice, potato chips, Milano mint cookies, ground chuck, and wheat bread. She throws them all into her cart. Tangelos, marshmallow fluff. Stuff she has never considered eating, never even considered food, she takes.
The check-out line at the grocery store is long, and her thoughts are unruly. She keeps wondering how it started between Richard and the Smell. Where did literary criticism turn to love? She wonders if they might have taken up doing something as simple as shopping. She was, he’d said, a former student; outside the classroom, where was it that they met? Beside her are racks of Seventeen, the busty images of Cosmo. She wants the details now. Specifics, she thinks, will give her satisfaction, peace. Contain it for the moment, at least. Without them, it bleeds into everything. In every café grocery store classroom bus stop she imagines them meeting here. In every street. Was it here, was it here? A madwoman’s mantra.
She pulls out the index cards to distract herself from thinking. And then they spill. Pouring into the Cosmo rack and across the gum-rubbed carpeting. “Fuck,” she says, and squats to pick them up. The guy behind her squats to help, and she tells him it’s okay, she’s got it thanks, but still he tries. When she straightens up, recovered now, he holds out several cards to her, face up, their writing plain as day. I am afraid … I regret … My secret is … He glances at the cards he holds, returns them to her with an air of stifled interest. The smile he gives her looks like a smirk.
He is a short Semitic guy, with a buzz cut and wire-rims, a gray tweed coat, chapped lips that are trademark grad student, a dry flakiness around his eyes, excessively long lashes. She guesses from his pallor that he’s in the sciences, or a student of some Slavic language or other—Russian lit, maybe the classics. He has the desiccated smug affect of the grandiosely studious.
He chats her up in line. Asks if she’s at the university. About her field, the focus of her research. She wants to tell him her field is love, her focus infidelity. Instead she tells him she’s not very focused these days. He offers her his hand to shake and gives his name as Matt. She doesn’t offer hers.
In the parking lot, he rattles up behind her with his cart, and asks, not facing her but more as if he’s asking the whole lot, if she’d like to get a cup of coffee? Despite herself, she’s touched.
“Thanks,” she says, “but I have errands.”
“Forget it,” he says, bitterly, as if she’d led him on. As if he’d known for years that she would fail him. His eyes are on the tar of the parking lot as he walks away. His shoulders bunched up like shrubbery around his throat. A tweedy hump of resentment, moving off.
Richard used to say she was reliable. That with her, he always knew what to expect. At first this was a compliment; later it was not. She thinks about Rat Choice, which makes her think now not of Swedes but of a maze. The rational choice model posits interests as given and unchanging. The things the theory can’t account for are the things that count: altruism, love, grief, irrational hope.
“Wait,” she yells at Matt’s resentful back. “Wait up.” She takes long running steps to catch him. “Sure,” she says. “Coffee sounds just great.” She feels so sorry for them both. And for a moment, seeing his expression, she is almost hopeful. A whole new theory starting here, she thinks:
Irrational Choice.
Matt is not an attractive man, not by a long shot, but she feels a certain kinship that might approximate attraction in a pinch. His hurt is so obvious. She feels a keen longing to alleviate it, the way she imagines nuns must feel, a selfless desire to relieve another’s suffering. She decides that if he asks to sleep with her, she will say yes, though she feels no desire for him. When he opens the car door for her, he asks, “What is your name, anyway?” She lies to him and tells him: “Beatrice.”
Sunday would have been their anniversary, and Richard calls her, drunk. His voice is sad and felty through the phone. He asks if she remembered; she tells him, yes, she did. He says he doesn’t ever expect to feel that way again, the way he felt about Lisa. “I can’t imagine feeling that way about anyone ever again,” he says. “I can’t imagine feeling that in love.” Talking to him, she feels time lurch, resume its unsteady trot. He sounds so familiar. “Not even with me?” she asks. “Not even with you,” he says. He tells her he has concrete around his heart. It hurt so much to leave. “But you left me,” she says. “It still was hard.” The girl and he have broken up. And Lisa, trying to disguise her glee, asks, “How old was that chick anyway?” “Twenty-nine,” he says, “but she seemed much younger. Or maybe I’m just feeling old,” he says. “You’ll never be a child prodigy,” she says, quoting back to him what he had said to her when she turned thirty. He laughs. And suddenly they are relaxed, familiar again. They tell each other jokes. He says the local bus company has a new slogan, has she heard? In an affected German accent, he says, “Vee have vays of making you valk.” She laughs. “That’s good,” she says. She tells him her latest idea for a New Yorker cartoon: a man showing trophy fish points to one and says, “I caught that one in the stream of consciousness.” He laughs. Then Lisa tells him the one about the parrot that started to curse a blue streak. His owner threw him in the freezer as punishment. First he heard a frantic fluttering, then silence. The owner opened the freezer door, peeked inside. The parrot was sitting inside, contrite, legs crossed, wings folded. “Are you ready to come out?” the owner asked. The bird nodded. “No more cursing?” The bird nodded. “Okay,” the owner said and replaced the bird on its perch. “Just one thing,” the parrot asked. “Tell me: what did the chicken do?” They strangle on their laughter. For the first time in weeks, she sleeps.
On Monday morning Lisa’s mother calls, and Lisa unthinkingly picks up the phone. She asks Lisa how she is, then she tells her that she has begun reading Virginia Woolf’s diaries. Lisa’s fave. She likes them enormously, her mother says, “all that she suffered, blow on blow.” It seems a bizarre reason to like Woolf. For a moment Lisa is offended, the way she always is when she hears art explained away as the by-product of suffering, not work. Years ago Lisa gave her mother To the Lighthouse to read, and now she asks her mother if she liked it, if she ever read it. Her mother says she liked it, but that now she appreciates it more, knowing it was based on autobiography, knowing that she suffered so.
Lisa can hear her father shouting cheerfully in the background. “Tell her I say hello,” he says.
“Did you hear that?” her mother asks. “Your father says hi.”
“The bastard,” Lisa says.
Her mother laughs.
“Is Dad being nice to you?” Lisa asks.
“Oh,” she says, airily, “we’re working things out.”
Her hopeful mother.
She has read too many Russian novels to believe in happy endings, but still she does. She thinks they will get back together. She thinks they will meet on a bus, or in a bed. She is a stupid with hope. Umberto Eco is reading at a local church, and so she goes, thinking maybe she will run into Richard there. The room, when she arrives, is full of men who are not him. She scans the pews. Eco looks like an egg with a beard. Eco says he usually appears with his translator, Will Weaver, and that it is strange to appear alone. Eco reads two pages from The Island of the Day Before in Italian, “to prove I can read Italian,” he says. Afterward he reads in English about jealousy and about hell. Hell, one tormented character says, is not what we have been told. It is not unremitting despair but unending, useless hope.
After the reading, Lisa drives uptown to KinhDo to get some take-out Vietnamese. She gives her order to the guy at the cash register, pays, then stands there waiting for her food, scanning the room, when she sees them. She doesn’t know if it is the Smell or someone new, the speed with which we move on dizzies her. All her imaginings, she sees now, have been wrong. She has never seen this girl before. She has never seen Richard so happy. The two of them are tender, unreserved—bodied—as they never were. Their lips are wet and smiling; they snap the heads off shrimp. Their fingers glisten with oil.
It is nothing rational that prompts Lisa to start toward them, but more like reflex, like the day she’d pitched the plate at Richard’s chest; choosing what her mother hadn’t chosen all those years—to make a scene, make a fuss, make a mess of things but try, to love this man who once loved her. When Richard raises his eyes to her, they seem filled with happiness, and for a moment she thinks he’s glad to see her, as if they’d intended to rendezvous, that maybe this is not a date.
But when Richard says her name, it’s not in welcome but in warning: “Lisa.” He slides from the booth and stands like a bodyguard between her and the dark-haired girl, but nonetheless it reaches her, the faint scent of avocado. Her skin aches with what might be anger or grief.
“I didn’t expect to run into you here,” he says, hands on hips; it’s a new gesture, unflattering; she wonders if he’s picked it up from her.
“That makes two of us,” Lisa says. “Or rather, three.” Lisa stretches out a hand to the girl, stepping around Richard as she does. The girl is not what she’d imagined: black hair to her shoulders, freckles, black-rimmed glasses; thoughtful, bookish. Such confrontation is more suitable for daytime TV dramas than for life; the books Lisa loves avoid it, but she’s tired of avoiding things. Of rational choices.
When Richard moves to intercept her, he is fast but clumsy and a little off balance: his left arm swings back toward the booth and collides with a water glass, a soup bowl, and liquid is everywhere—hot broth, iced water.
“Fuck,” says the girl, jumping up and colliding with Richard.
“Are you okay?” he asks, his arm protectively encircling her. A waiter races over with a rag.
“No worry,” the waiter says. “Clean up fast.”
“You okay?” he asks the girl again—and suddenly there’s nothing more to say. He’s said it all. By reaching for someone other than her.
“God, I’m so sorry,” the girl says, reaching for Lisa with napkins in her hand. When Lisa doesn’t take them, the girl takes his hand instead and says, gently, smiling, “I’m Becky,” clearly clueless that there was ever anyone but her.
Lisa walks out without waiting for her order.
Outside on the street, the sky is inky black beyond the orange sodium glare of the street lamps and Lisa is disoriented. Every direction she looks in seems like the wrong one, every street a dead end. Cars race past in front of her on Hennepin Avenue and her heart throbs in her chest. There is a buzz in her throat, a pressure behind her eyes that makes her think she might cry. She walks to the parking lot at the side of the building and goes to her car, which—like herself—looks worse for wear, but still it runs. She gets in and shoves the key in the ignition. She hesitates before starting it up. She hasn’t the slightest idea where to go from here.
She leans her head on the steering wheel and tries to cry. She sits there, willing the tears to come, dry-eyed and ridiculous, forehead to the wheel. To help herself along, she tries to remember “telling details,” as she coaches her students to do. She recalls how she and Richard had nearly driven off a cliff on their way to see Mount Rushmore in a January snowstorm last year during their Kitsch Tour of the Midwest. She remembers how Richard phoned her, after her kitty disappeared, and meowed to the tune of the “Internationale” to cheer her up, insisting it was a collect call from France. She recalls how they used to eat fat California burgers and drink cold beers in a dark neighborhood bar around the corner from their place and did not need to talk; the sex they had on his office desk and once in the elevator on the way up to their department; how she once saw him pick up a rubber duck in a bath shop (where she’d come to buy a gift) and turn it over and over in his hands, scowling at it from every angle, as if even this merited serious consideration; she remembers things they have eaten, bottles of wine they tried, positions in sex, the taste of the biscotti they made together and his wine-poached pears—simple physical things.
But it’s no use. She cannot cry. Her body and mind are not on speaking terms. So she starts the car, shoves it in gear, and drives. She’ll go to Gretchen’s or to her mom’s. Or she could pull over at a pay phone and call up Matt, the guy from the grocery who gave her his number after coffee and asked her to call. Her heart is pounding; her throat is tight. Panic, she recalls, was named for the god of wilderness. She heads for home.
She takes the parkway fast, rounds a lake and then another and then she is in the woods. Passing Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden and Bird Sanctuary, it occurs to Lisa to stop, but she has spent too much time already in this dark wood; she is ready to be done with it. She’ll find no Virgil there to guide her; she’s going to have to make her way alone for now and maybe for years to come, alone, and the thought of this—of herself alone, without Richard, in the vast stretch of time that is her future—makes her, finally, cry. She sobs big, ridiculous, hiccupping tears. Her vision blurs, and she reaches for her bag, fumbles inside for a Kleenex, and finds the cards instead. She pulls them out and drops them in her lap, and slows.
The curves of the parkway are gentle, and when she rolls down her window, the cold autumn air feels good against her wet face as she drops her speed from 45 to 35 to 25 to 20 to 15 to 10 miles per hour. Then 5. At this speed, when she holds the stack of cards out the window, those accumulated sorrows in her hands now, they do not slice away from her and scatter like buckshot, but rise gently from her palm, lifting away, fluttering briefly, before they begin their inevitable descent. In the rearview mirror, they look like enormous moths, or like a flock of birdless wings, like some strange new creature making its way, awkwardly, hesitantly, for the very first time, into the terrible beautiful bodied world.