And now, I think maybe I’ve had a change of heart. I think I do mean to leave this house. I can go to Providence, and it may be that, from a distance, I can begin to sort this out. Or forget it, if that’s possible. Either way, I don’t want to be here anymore.
I’ve just read back over my account of the dream of Amanda and Constance, Monday morning’s dream. And I see that Sarah is up to her old tricks again. Which is to say, I can’t begin to fathom why I bothered to add so much embellishment to what little I could truly remember. Half of it — at least half — is simply made up. I understand why I once fabricated dreams for an insistent therapist, but why bother here? I can’t even say that I was lying to myself. I knew full well what I was doing when I did it. My best excuse would be to claim that it was some sort of defense mechanism kicking in, that I was falling back on the old habit of storytelling as a means of keeping myself calm or giving voice to fear, something of the sort. And having lied, it doesn’t mean that I was necessarily dishonest, any more than “Pony” is dishonest. I am usually at my most brutally forthright when making shit up. That’s the paradox of me. Regardless, seeing it now, all the parts of the dream I didn’t genuinely dream, I find it annoying. Hell, I find this entry complaining about it annoying.
It’s very quiet outside. A skunk passed by the window a little earlier. I didn’t see it, of course, but smelled it. And there was some sort of owl hooting out there for a bit, but, otherwise, the house and the woods around it are quiet and still. I might almost believe that I have been taken away from the world and placed somewhere else. I’ve left all the lights downstairs burning, and the porch lights are on, too, so here I am, a little puddle of brilliance in the inky void. I brought my laptop into the bedroom a while ago, and tried playing a couple of CDs to dilute the silence — Bob Dylan’s Street Legal,and then Fables of the Reconstruction by R.E.M. But the music only seemed to make me more jumpy. It masks the noiselessness of the night, but in so doing, it also masks the noises that I cannot stop listening for. I found myself straining to hear through the music, even if I can’t say what I was listening for. Constance’s coyotes, maybe. Or Constance herself. Or maybe the red tree, after it pulls itself free of the ground and begins an ent-like march towards the house. So, I turned the music off halfway through “Maps and Legends,” and now the stillness is broken only by the clack-clack-clack of the typewriter’s keys, the clack of the keys striking the paper.
This doesn’t seem like the time for confession. Sitting here, swaddled in the dark, and the silence pressing in on my bright electric bubble. Though, on the other hand, the tree and this house don’t seem shy about revealing their atrocities by the stark light of midday, so why should I balk at divulging my confidences by night?
When I discovered Amanda was fucking the owner of the Buckhead sushi restaurant, I confronted her. It was a very cold day, and it was raining, on and off. A misty, ugly sort of rain for a misty, ugly sort of day. It was late afternoon, and there was fog over everything, heavy fog like you don’t often see in Atlanta. She was sitting on the chaise, reading, and I’d been pretending to edit something, the page proofs for a short story. There were pages in my lap and on the coffee table, marked in red. STET written in the margins again and again and again, which is usually the way I react to the ministrations of copy editors, whether they happen to be right or wrong. I write STET, and, half the time, I know I’m just being an asshole, but I do it anyway. They are my mistakes. Let me make them.
I can’t remember what Amanda was reading. A novel. She’d taken the day off. And I said that I knew what she’d done. She laid down her book and stared at it for a time, and then she stared at me.
“So,” she said, finally, “what happens now?”
“I don’t know what happens now,” I replied, and my voice seemed flat, betraying almost nothing of the rage that had been seething inside me for days.
“Who told you?” she asked.
“What difference does it make, who told me?”
She sighed and glanced out the windows at the fog.
“It’s true?” I asked.
“Yeah, it’s true. But you know it’s true, without asking. You always know what’s true, don’t you, Sarah?”
She was baiting me, like I needed provocation, and I let the jab go. Or I tried to let it go. Every word that passed between us eliminated the possibility and served to set the future in stone.
At some point, she asked if I wanted her to leave, and I told her no. But I knew that what she was really asking for was permission to leave, that it’s what she wanted, and I had no intention of making it easy. If she wanted to move in with the purveyor of eel and tuna, she could damn well screw up her nerve and do it on her own, without my complicity. And that’s when she got angry, when I withheld a simple release from her predicament. She said things I have tried hard to forget, threw accusations the way some women might have thrown dishes or knickknacks or stones. And, mostly, I sat there with my pages and my red pen, listening, wishing I knew some magical incantation that might yet undo the whole mess. Wishing impossible, silly things, the way a child wishes, the way people pray to their gods. That I could have been the woman that Amanda needed, assuming that such a woman was ever born. That there were still words to set things right, words to facilitate salvage, and that I could find them. That she would just stop,and tell me she was sorry, and that it was over. That it wouldn’t happen again. And that, hearing this, I would believe it, and go back to my copyediting, and she would go back to reading her book.
“Most of the time,” she said (and I remember this; I will always remember this part), “I do not even know who you are, Sarah. You write, but you hate writing. And then you blame everything and everyone around you because writing is all you have. And now, these seizures of yours. How much more am I supposed to be able to deal with?”
“You’re sitting there telling me that you fucked this woman because I hate writing, and because I’m having seizures?” I asked. For a second, I think I might have been more flabbergasted than angry.
“Yes,” she shot back, suddenly standing up and letting the book fall to the floor at her feet. “Yes, Sarah, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Because, goddamn it, you never let a day go by that you don’t remind me and the whole damn world how utterly miserable you are, and how you expect us all to be miserable right along with you.”
A lot of other things were said, but that’s the upshot and the part I remember clearly. And later she told me that she was going out. I asked if she was meeting the owner of the sushi restaurant, and Amanda said who she might be meeting was her own business and none of mine. And that’s the last time I saw her alive. Most of this, I told the police. Most of it.
I told them about the affair, and that we’d argued. I suppose I should be grateful that she killed herself in another woman’s apartment. At least it spared me the embarrassment and inconvenience of being suspected of foul play. At least, the sort of foul play you can be arrested and brought to trial for. And I didn’t have to worry about cleaning up the mess.