“You don’t know where I’ve been.”
Starfucker starfucker starfucker star.
He began unbuttoning my shirt.
Of course it was different from Monkey King. First, I knew what was going on. Mutual consent. And I liked it, a little. Although I wasn’t lying when I said it hurt, much more than I’d expected.
At one point Carey asked: “Are you sure you’re a virgin?”
I stared at the green light of the stereo. The music had gone off. “Of course I’m sure.”
“It doesn’t seem like it.”
It’s Carey, I told myself. A boy you know.
I shut my eyes and pretended I was my sister.
When it began to get light I put my clothes back on and I: walked back down the hill to my dorm. I was exhausted and I queasy, but I had done it, taken the first step to breaking the spell.
My mother looked Carey in the eye and loved him. We drove down from Providence one Saturday night to have dinner with her. It was just the three of us, since Marty was away for the weekend. Ma and I were in the kitchen clearing up while Carey, seated at my father’s place in the dining room, was smugly polishing off the Burgundy we’d brought. He knew he’d been a hit.
“It’s a good thing he’s scientist,” said Ma. Then she turned on the tap full force so I couldn’t say anything. It reminded me of when I was small and she’d be lecturing me about something in the car. Just as I was about to answer she’d say, “Not now, Sal-lee, I have to concentrate on this turn.”
But this time I continued covering bowls of leftovers with plastic wrap until she turned off the water, and then I asked, “What does that mean, it’s a good thing he’s a scientist?”
“You are a dreamy artist,” Ma said, pointing at me with a wet finger. She was wearing a navy-and-brown-checked dress for the occasion, and her cheeks were slightly flushed from the wine. I hadn’t seen her look so good since Daddy’s death. “Scientist is down-to-earth. This is a good match.”
It was true that on the outside Carey was perfect—intelligent, well-bred, and much more handsome than I deserved. He’d sung in the church choir when he was little, attended two boarding schools (he’d gotten kicked out of the first one for growing pot in his closet, but I didn’t tell Ma that). His parents were social register.
“Carey’s so dignified,” Ma told me. “I think your daddy would have liked him.”
True to character, Carey got into every grad program he’d applied to but decided on Columbia because it was in New York City. We’d been going out a little over a year, and I knew this was the best shot I’d ever have. It was I who proposed to him, over a late breakfast between classes at a greasy spoon on Thayer Street, although he’d first put the idea into my head by implying that I’d like sex better if we were married. When he asked me about my own plans for school I said I didn’t mind dropping out of RISD, I was sure I could get into Parsons.
“Well,” he said. He shook his head and smiled. “I guess I could picture us.” He put his fingertips on either side of my chin and brought my face close to his. “For the rest of my life, every morning waking up to this. Yes, I can see it.”
That was about as romantic as Carey got. I remember that the waitress was clearing the table next to ours, making a huge clatter, and I felt like telling her to get lost, but that would have made things worse.
I never got around to applying to Parsons, I guess I was sick of school. I got hired as a pasteup artist at the first place I interviewed, a small advertising agency whose specialty was toy accounts. My first big break came when they gave me a brochure for a new game, something to do with the alphabet and the names of different dinosaurs. I stayed late every night for a week, rifling through everyone’s type books, deconstructing letters into reptilian shapes. The result was a collage that got me promoted out of the pool to assistant designer.
Carey and I lived cozily in one of those rambling university housing apartments between Broadway and Riverside. After dinner, if he didn’t have a night lab, he’d take me into his lap and surprise me with presents from gift shops in the neighborhood, odd and mysterious things, like a bowl made of lava, or brass earrings crafted by an Italian monk.
The sex got better, but what I loved most about Carey, what I missed about him after the divorce, was simply his physical presence. Nights, I’d wait for him. Even if I fell asleep, some part of me would still be waiting, anticipating the dip of the mattress, the heat of his body. I knew this always, even through my dreams.
The second phase of our marriage, what I later thought of as the yuppie phase, was marked by Carey receiving his doctorate and a tenure-track teaching position at Columbia. By that time my agency had expanded and merged with a Madison Avenue one, and I’d been promoted from designer to director. It’s only now that I understand I was throwing myself into my job the way I’d thrown myself into painting at boarding school. I did it in order to numb the monster inside me, the one who wanted to murder Monkey King but instead ended up trying to murder herself.
We moved ten blocks downtown and over to Riverside into a fifteenth-floor co-op. One Saturday I started looking through my old boxes and found brushes and paints, which prompted me to set up a skeleton studio in the spare room that was supposed to be the nursery for our future progeny.
It’s funny how all the big decisions I’d ever made were about escape. Maybe that’s why I was able to make them so quickly—they were all basically the same decision. While Carey was away at a conference I went down to Charlottesville to visit Marty. God knows how she’d ended up there, something to do with an old boyfriend, like all her expeditions. I hung around in the old blues club where she was tending bar, Miss Exotic, the sleek mink in a pen full of mice. “What about your acting?” I asked.
“They let me sing here, sometimes. It’s worth it. It’s experience.” She was smoking a lot, to roughen her voice. Give it character, she said. I remember this: she had an Ace bandage wrapped around her left wrist.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Coffee burn.”
She was lying, but I didn’t call her on it.
I returned to the city, dropped my bags in the living room, and stood there in the dark looking out at our spectacular view: the midnight blue Hudson with the George Washington Bridge stretching jeweled and serene to the north into New Jersey. But when I turned on the light I was surrounded by the oppressive furniture of my life: the dining room table with its six walnut chairs whose flowered upholstery took Carey’s great-aunt twelve years to embroider, an elaborate teak sideboard with baroque scrollwork, ancient pale Oriental rugs, and four extremely ugly table lamps in the shape of bucking horses which Carey adored. The shelves were crammed with textbooks, lab notebooks, and boxes upon boxes of slides my husband had shot of the new kind of bacteria that had been the subject of his thesis. There was not a whisper of me in this room. I might as well have not been living there at all.
I played back the answering machine tape. There was a message from Carey, which I buzzed past. I changed into my painting clothes and went into my studio and started scraping away at an old canvas so I could start again. I was twenty-six years old and I wanted to start again.
Youdon’t know how to give in. You don’t know how to love like a wife has to love.
Maybe Ma had been right.
I came home from work the next day and saw my husband’s suit bag draped over the sofa and his shoes side by side on the carpet, heard the shower running. I sat down in the living room and waited till he was on the way to the bedroom, towel wrapped around his waist.