You always like to say that if you were young and starting out again you’d do this or you’d do that, but I don’t think anybody seriously means it and it’s not going to happen anyway. I took myself out of the world early on, and looking back now I don’t think I ever got close to anybody, and of course you get judged for that. Apparently there isn’t any “we”—like I had something lacking. But what everybody needs to understand, you get to a point where you can’t do anything about who you are anymore. And the same applies to other people, so that’s who you’re dealing with. And then the best you can hope for is not to do anybody damage, and good luck with that. I don’t know, maybe I’m just talking to myself here: Who made me the big authority on what everybody needs to understand? It could be that I never got the memo, and that it’s all about love, so-called, but am I the only one? You’d hate to think so.
Monsalvat
Back during the summer, a mockingbird had perched in the ginkgo tree in front of their building and kept at it all night. Paige would lie there while Richard slept, trying to count how many different songs it knew, but by the third or fourth she’d forget the first: it had been her summer of having just a hit or two of dope before bed, sticking her head out the bathroom window before she lit the pipe. Richard said the songs weren’t music, strictly speaking, but sounds meant to warn predators away from the young, and he did know music if nothing else; in that, her father was wrong about him.
Now, in October, the mockingbird was a long-gone daddy and ginkgo nuts lay all over the sidewalk, looking like evil white grapes, smelling like vomit. She and Richard were both back teaching, and she’d added a little bump of speed in the morning to her drug regimen: just a bump—one—in each nostril while running water in the bathroom sink. On Tuesday and Thursday mornings, higher than a motherfucker, she’d come out of the building with that god-awful salty taste still in her throat and step around the ginkgo nuts so the Ten O’Clock Scholars wouldn’t think they were smelling vomit on her shoes. The other mornings, after she and Richard moved the cars, she could actually work again on her book, without which she would always be an adjunct and whose title she had now changed to Merrill, Mirabell and the Mystical Moment, though sooner or later she’d have to admit to herself that the alliteration was tacky. She hid her really very modest stash in her plastic makeup bag, along with the silver salt spoon, once her grandmother’s, its tiny bowl fluted like a scallop shell, the lighter and the wooden hippie pipe that was the least depressing one she could find in the head shop on Eighth Street. She kept the makeup bag in her underwear drawer on top of her diaphragm.
Paige just happened to know that she and Richard last had sex on May 24, the day after her fortieth birthday. He’d taken her to Café Loup, and he drank so much that when they got into bed and she reached into his boxers he asked for a rain check. He honored it the next morning, or, rather, she did. Then she found out about Mary Beth. He swore never again, and the never again turned out to extend to Paige as well. Nowadays Richard would wake up first, stretch and stretch, then hop out of bed: get down there, soldier, and give me twenty. He kept himself in such nice shape that she hated to watch. But. Then he’d go out to the kitchen to make their coffee while she woke up by reading a poem or two in her father’s first book, which she didn’t want to admit was his best; she’d begun keeping it on the night table. And sometimes she put her hand in her pants and did the supposedly necessary.
On a Thursday in the middle of October, he brought in coffee and said, “I need to tell you something.”
“What can this be?” she said.
“Nothing you don’t know,” he said. “It’s just—this is all really confusing to me. And I thought I might just go take some time to think.”
“If what?”
“I don’t follow you.”
“You said you thought you might,” she said. “You might if what?”
“Okay,” he said. “This is an excellent example of why.”
She closed her eyes, shook her head. “I’ve been awake for like two minutes,” she said.
“Sorry,” he said. “I guess I shouldn’t have jumped you first thing.” Jumped you? He must already have been wishing he’d rephrased that.
“Actually, I don’t think I really want to talk,” she said. “Why don’t you just go.”
—
But you know? It turned out to be a good morning. Because she was totally jazzed to teach. For her Ten O’Clock Scholars she detangled “Aire and Angels,” “The Sunne Rising,” “The Good-Morrow” and “The Extasie.” (She’d xeroxed from an edition in the original spelling, so as not to soften the alienness.) Then she cabbed it down to the World Café to meet Sally. You could count on Sally to be late, so she nursed a cup of coffee while prepping for her two o’clock class, Dante for Dummies. (Only Richard knew these nicknames. It was unfair that he should still know them.)
Sally came puffing in, wriggled out of the silk-thin leather jacket she’d gotten when the movies bought her book, handed a manila envelope across the table and said, “Here’s your care package.” Paige stuck it in her backpack and took out her wallet; Sally held up a hand. Silver rings on each finger, thumb included. “My treat,” she said. “Tomorrow’s the first day of principal shooting. I am so in the money.”
Paige had meant to tough it out, but when Sally asked how Richard was she sort of had to tell. Sally shook her head at the right places, then said she’d never told anyone this but as a matter of fact her Richard—how weird was it that they’d both married guys named Richard?—had also left for a while, taking a cab over the bridge every night to sleep at the Fort Lee Best Western. A week of that, she said, had brought him to the bargaining table.
“Right,” Paige said. “I guess I’m not sure what to wish for.”
“What about a couple of sturdy twenty-four-year-olds?”
“What about them?”
“They’re a good thing, twenty-four-year-olds, I can tell you that,” Sally said. “I mean, I know you run more to fifty-five-year-olds.”
Richard was in fact fifty-three.
“I doubt I’ll be running to anybody,” Paige said.
“Yeah, well, give it time,” Sally said. “You too might come to the bargaining table.”
When Paige got home, his suitcases were gone. He’d left the bookshelves gap-toothed, and his depredations showed among the CDs. She decided to break her rule this one time and opened Sally’s envelope. Wowzer: now there was a generous friend. She did a couple of bumps just sitting there on the sofa big as life. Then she put on Timeless: Hank Williams Tribute, her new good thing, which Richard had not taken—he considered it, quote, fourth-rate—and got busy shoving books together and fine-tuning the alphabetizing. After that she moved the bed back from the windows, as she’d been wanting to, and did what that necessitated in terms of the dressers and the floor lamp going where. In the bathroom, she scrubbed his soap scum off the walls of the shower stall. With this very, very good product called Zep.
She began marking up the Ten O’Clock Scholars’ first set of papers, comparing Sonnet 34 (greatly underrated) with the “Full Fathom Five” song. It touched her to see them pretending they had a preference. She got through five of them—four and a half—then took a break with Merrill’s essay in The Poets’ Dante, which might be crucial to this one chapter of her book. But she hit the wall, as always, when she got to the part about how Dante’s universe was a “cosmological solution of Einstein’s equations in general relativity theory”: