“Really?” Images of Nora come back to me, the glass of wine always in her hand. And the night they came home, her weird looseness, her breath reeking. “I guess I never understood that.”
“I didn’t feel you had to know.”
I nod, appreciating he thought to protect me like that.
“There were other things. Her insecurity. My immaturity.” He smiles.
“You’re getting pretty old to be pleading immaturity,” I tell him. He smiles again. “True story.”
“So what about this one?” I nod my head in the direction of his bedroom. “Are you feeling more mature?”
He raises his eyebrows, looks toward the TV a moment. “Let’s just say I don’t expect her to be perfect this time.”
“So you are more mature.”
“Maybe I am.”
Later I find my senior high school yearbook and sit on my childhood bed. In my picture I gaze out at the camera, not smiling. My makeup is too heavy, my nails bitten down and ragged. It’s easy to see how unhappy I was, why I made all those bad choices I did with the boys in Manhattan and with Heath and the Jennifers. I flip through the rest of the book, looking for myself there. My classmates fill the pages, playing soccer and volleyball, performing in plays. They look happy, involved. But I’m nowhere to be found. I close the book and put it away, sadness filling my chest. I want to believe I’m different now. I’ve overcome the pain that made me act so impulsively and harmfully. But I don’t really know if that’s the case.
After I spend time with Bevin, I start my retreat in Vermont. The summer here is hot. The landscape is lush and green. Birds lazily circle overhead. Crisp river water rushes by beneath a bridge. Days, I work on my novel. When I grow restless, I walk in the warm sun down to the main house, hoping to find others procrastinating too. Or I head up to the gym in the college nearby and run on the treadmill. There aren’t any boys for me here, but it’s one of those rare times I’m OK with this. I like the friends I’ve made, especially three painters—all guys—with whom I go to the local bar some nights. We shoot pool or sit with beers and cigarettes and discuss music and art. I’m attracted to one, Frank, who has sharp blue eyes and skin around them that crinkles when he smiles, but he’s married, so I don’t go there.
The first week, Frank and Jerry, another painter, and I go to the bar, which is two miles away in the next town. Locals play pool and classic rock sails down from overhead speakers. When I order wine, the bartender, a scruffy man with a big belly, laughs at me and then calls into the back for someone to find the box of Franzia. Frank laughs at me too.
“You don’t come from a place like this, do you?”
“And you do?” I smile.
“I know my way around a dive bar.”
“Maybe that isn’t something to be so proud of.” I light a cigarette. I can feel those blue eyes on me, the way he’s watching my mouth. Jerry gets up to watch the pool game, maybe feeling something happening he doesn’t want to be a part of.
“You think you’re so smart, writer girl,” Frank says.
“I do.”
He pulls a cigarette from my pack, and we both watch as it comes out.
“You have paint on your hand,” I tell him.
“That’s because I paint.” He smiles, watching me watch his hand. He lights the cigarette.
“It’s sexy,” I say.
He leans toward me. “You,” he says in a low voice, “are a very dangerous girl.”
During the week, after a few hours of writing, I go to find him painting outside on the bank of the river. We sit together in the sun and talk seriously about our work. Two days before I’m to leave, during one of these times by the river, he tells me he’s crazy about me. At first, I try just to be flattered. I like him, too—a lot. But he’s married. This guy is married. Somewhere his wife is going about her day, assuming Frank is in Vermont, innocently painting away. Perhaps she rushes home every afternoon, checking to see whether he’s called. Perhaps she would never consider that he’s hitting on me, that rather than thinking of her when he’s alone in his bed he’s thinking about what it would feel like to touch me. But as the minutes pass, as we sit together and talk about this thing that could never be, as he explains how different I am from his wife, how much he learns from our discussions, how he loves the way I see things, a familiar feeling rears its head inside: There’s another woman, and he chooses me.
Later, we go swimming in a nearby river with some other friends. The water is icy cold, but I barely feel it. I’m too aware now of Frank, of whether he’s looking at me, thinking of me. I’m too aware of me.
In the evening, we sit in the dark on a stoop and kiss. He pulls himself back, then comes toward me again, grappling with himself. He’s drunk. I know he had to drink to be able to be with me like this. Sober, he’s thinking of his marriage. He tells me he thinks he got married too young, and now he doesn’t know what he wants. I want him to decide he wants me.
The final night we all have a party, and Frank and I dance together in the corner of the room. We’re both tipsy, and I can feel how dangerous our dancing is, how our hips press against each other’s, our breath near each other’s ears. A little later a girl asks me,
“What’s going on with you and Frank?” I can see the excitement in her eyes. Artist colonies are notorious for breaking up marriages and housing affairs. They’re also breeding grounds for gossip, usually about those affairs, probably because making art is such a painfully introspective and lonely business, and gossip gets you out of yourself. Hence the girl’s excitement. But I say, “Nothing,” and make a face to suggest she’s being silly. If Frank knew people were talking he’d surely pull away.
I wind up in his bed, but he won’t touch me. He tells me he’ll miss me. I want badly for him to put his hands on me, to feel evidence of his wanting me. It’s such an old habit. How easily I’m pulled right back to that place, where I am only body and desperation, where everything depends on this one man’s decision. Will he love me? Will he not love me? I try to talk myself down, to realize that this is also enough, just knowing he wants it as much as I do.
When I leave, I tell myself it’s over, but he calls me the next night.
“I can’t stop thinking of you,” he says.
“I wish I were still there.”
“I do too. But I’m also glad you’re not. I’m afraid of what would happen.”
“You wouldn’t be able to resist me.” I laugh, joking, but I want him to agree.
“Maybe.”
“You should come here,” I tell him. “Just do it.”
I hear him breathing. “I can’t. Not now.”
I bite my lip, wishing I had magic words to get him to join me.
“But I want to,” he adds.
I buy a CD he tells me to buy. Palace Music. It’s romantic, heartbreaking, angst-ridden. I make a CD for him with Richard Buckner’s “Once” where he sings about wishing to be saved and Aimee Mann’s “Save Me.” It’s true. I want to be saved from myself, from my hurting. I want a boy like Frank to lift me up like a dead thing and breathe me into life. I lie on my bed in my little studio and feel how badly I want Frank with me. How I want his interest in me to mean something, to mean I’m worth something as big as ending his marriage. It’s so selfish, I know. Some time later, when I’m married myself, I’ll know just how selfish. After years of tangling your lives, of making compromises and concessions, of building a shared life, it’s appalling to imagine someone else, some outside person, dismissing all of this for her own gain. But I don’t think of any of that now. I feel the wanting in my bone marrow. It’s like a nasty virus that won’t die.
The next time we talk, I try another tactic.
“You got married so young,” I tell him. “It’s reasonable to grow in different directions.”
“I know,” he says. “But she loves me. I still love her. It’s not so simple.”
“But you’re unhappy.”
“How do I know I won’t be unhappy if I leave her?”
“You can’t know unless you take the risk. If you stay, though, you’re just unhappy.”
He sighs.
