Amy Inspired (27 page)

Late that night Valerie went into labor. By the time I got home from work the next afternoon, Jake had posted pictures of mother and baby on Facebook. They’d named her Rachel.

When the young family returned from the hospital, Everett and I drove to her house to visit and deliver food. Jake met us at the door, wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt on which a smiling taco said
Hola!
The house was small, crowded in a comfortable way. The living room smelled of baby powder and tomato soup. It had the closed-in feeling of a happy family absorbed in their private world. Valerie let us take turns holding Rachel. I was mesmerized by the tiny white line of her fingernails.

“She’s beautiful,” I said. In the moment it felt like a novel thing to say.

Selfishly, we stayed an hour, a good forty minutes after Valerie lost interest in our company.

When we got in the car I started crying.

“Why are you crying?” Everett said. “She’s fine—the baby’s fine. Everybody’s fine.”

“I think I want one,” I said.

“Oh, honey.”

This was my second breakdown of the week and I didn’t even care this time. I had lost all dignity. Everett drove directly to the Donut Shoppe where we ate bear claws and coffee for dinner. He tried to cheer me up with gossip about Eli.

“So that was some drama, the other night.”

I’d managed to stop crying. I wiped my nose on a napkin and asked what he was talking about.

“Eli and Jillian. They were arguing on the porch at your party. Well, he was on the porch, on
the phone
arguing with her. I don’t know what she had her panties in a twist about, but things look bad for our hero.”

“You could hear them fighting?”

“I heard his end, which was more than enough. Trust me, barbs were thrown, rejoinders met with sarcasm.”

“How can you tell?”

“I’m a writer. I know dialogue.”

“You write criticism.”

“Then I know character development. Whatever.” He lifted his coffee as if to make a toast. “It’s curtains for Jillian.”

It was too hot for March. We suffered a weekend of rain that only amplified the humidity. When the sun returned Monday, it seemed an earnest, unwanted newcomer at an already out of control party. It shone eerily over the wind that throttled the windowpanes and whipped the trees into a frenzy. Girls walked sideways. Dead leaves, blackened from months under snow, stirred and spun in mini-twisters. On the field, the men’s soccer team kicked the ball toward the goal only to wait in suspense as it lingered in the air eight, nine, ten seconds before falling back to the earth and directly at the opponent’s feet.

At the office, I closed the blinds and shut the door. I was too busy working to notice the increasing violence of the wind. When I checked my e-mail several hours later I found four campus security messages waiting in my inbox.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Sent: Monday 3.12.07 10:37 AM

Subject: Wind Advisory

Students and faculty:

A severe wind advisory is in effect for Copenhagen University from 3:30 PM to 8:14 PM. Winds have been clocked in at 40 MPH with corresponding gales at nearly 60 MPH.

There have been power outages on South Campus. If you are without power, you may stay in the Student Commons for the night. Bring a sleeping bag and pillow. The Student Commons and Laws Dining Hall will be open for meals. Campus security requires that all individuals not moving to the student commons REMAIN INDOORS until further notice.

~Campus Security

Similar messages had been sent at 11:21 a.m., 12:15 p.m., and 3:12 p.m. Each insisted that students and faculty remain indoors so, like the students, I went outside to see what was going on.

The sky had yellowed. Somewhere wood splintered, the spine of a sapling snapping in two. The clouds moved quickly, each a part of a larger tapestry pulled quickly on a reel. In the parking lot, a group of boys took turns sitting in wheeled office chairs, using dormitory bedsheets as parachutes to rocket themselves back and forth across the lot. I drove home at a crawl, mindful of falling debris and blacked-out intersections.

Eli forced the door open for me with both hands.

“You all right?” he asked.

I shook leaves from my coat. “The traffic lights are out.”

He took my bag and ran up the stairs ahead of me. “Everything’s out. We had to close The Brewery—Kevin says the whole downtown has shut down.” He returned from Zoë’s bedroom cradling the flame of a cinnamon candle. “Do you have any more of these? It’ll be pitch-black in half an hour.”

We found one flashlight, three jar candles, and twelve tea lights I’d kept stashed away in the closet with the Christmas decorations. We lit them all. The many flickering lights cast the living room in soft shadow.

I shone the flashlight into the almost empty kitchen cupboards, wishing I hadn’t skipped lunch to work. “I’m assuming all the restaurants are closed.”

“We have hot dogs,” Eli said optimistically.

We cut the hog dogs into half-inch slices and laid them on white bread, smothered in mustard and ketchup. We ate at the table facing the open screen door so we could enjoy the show. Heat lightning had begun. The cold hot dogs tasted good. They reminded me of home, of Friday nights with my brother playing Monopoly. We’d eat box macaroni and rubbery, cold hot dogs dipped in ketchup packets snatched from McDonald’s.We loved hot dog night and were oblivious to the guilt our mother felt serving us dinner on paper towels, how she’d stood in the grocery aisle an hour before doing math, thinking of the electric bill and the rent.

After dinner, Eli and I worked together at the dining room table, sharing the glow of the single flashlight. Eli was finishing a drawing he wanted to eventually commit to lithograph. I wrote in an old notebook, something I hadn’t done since before graduate school when I’d had time to leisurely draft the edges of a story on paper, take my time working toward a cohesive center.

“Do you always write in such pretty rows?” he asked.

“Do you always draw in such ugly lines?” I asked back. I watched his hand skittishly jump here and there on the page. “What’s it like in your head when you’re drawing? I’ve always wanted to know what it’s like to be able to draw.”

“I don’t know. I don’t really think about it. I just make something and keep making it until a pattern or a figure or something emerges. And it becomes pleasing to me.”

“You love it, don’t you?”

“I don’t work when it’s not enjoyable.”

This struck me as somehow profound. “Can you call it
work
then?”

A smile tugged at the corner of his lips.

I said, “I doubt there are very many things I hate more than writing.” “Then why do you do it?”

I chewed on the end of my pen. “For that one moment of inspiration,” I decided.

He stopped drawing, leaned his chair back on two legs in that way that so exasperates junior high teachers. “So it’s one moment for you—the light bulb going off over the head?”

I considered the image. “More like a million light bulbs going off at the same time. Like paparazzi. Then nothing—silence for weeks. It only ever comes in bursts for me. The rest is pure drudgery.”

“Sounds daunting.”

I gathered my courage and asked what I’d been meaning to ask for days. “You never said what you thought of my stories.”

He let the chair fall back on all fours. “I liked them.”

“We’re not allowed to say ‘like’ in our critiques.”

He continued drawing. “Can I say I really liked them?”

“Much worse.
Really
is an empty modifier.”

I imitated his expression, eyebrows raised in theatrical alarm.

He worked silently, feverishly, at the corner of his notebook for a full five minutes without speaking. When he’d finished he showed me the drawing: cartoon me being pulled into the sky by a dozen light bulbs like helium balloons. Cartoon me looking desperately down at the ground as if unsure the sky is where she wants to be.

“Your characters seemed real to me,” he said finally, setting the sketchbook back on the table. “Can I say
real
? Is real an emptying or whatever modifier?”

I laughed. “You can say real.”

I pulled my hair into a loose knot at the top of my head. Eli watched the careful operation, and I pretended not to notice. The wind smelled of rain that never came, but when the trees gave up their first spring growth and the baby green buds shot like pellets across the yard, the sound was like sleet on the rooftop.

A complete happiness came over me like the heat of a blush to the cheeks. I had a vision of the two of us together always, sharing the little apartment. I would write and Eli would cut and paste and paint, while the rain pattered and the night closed us in. This would be a quiet contentment so wonderful I wouldn’t need anything else. I didn’t even need him to touch me—not anymore than this brush of the hands. Our affection would be pure, platonic, simple. I just wanted to wake up and spend every day near him.

The light of the flashlight faded until our eyes were heavy with the darkness and strain. We took turns in the bathroom. Just like any night, he spread a sheet on the futon. He said good-night.

It was nearly one in the morning. In bed I lay wide-eyed, an energy in my chest and belly humming.

Eli came to my room.

“Was just wondering if you were asleep.”

I sat up. “I can’t.”

He came and sat on the bed, his face close to mine. Shadows pooled beneath his brow and his cheekbones until his face was almost like a stranger’s.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“I can’t sleep either.”

We were whispering. I moved over. He crawled into the bed beside me. He put his arm under my head and I pressed my face into his neck. I breathed in his smell.

He kissed me on the forehead; his lips lingered at my brow. Then he pressed his mouth on mine. He wrapped his arms around my waist as he said my name. The wall beams creaked, and I felt a fleeting sensation of falling, a dizziness, as if the room itself rocked in the wind.

14

I woke up to the sight of Eli’s abandoned pillow, to the sound of the shower running. It was nearly ten already and the sunshine hot in the room. Eli had left a note on the alarm clock. Classes had been canceled due to power outages.

I closed my eyes, wishing I could return to sleep, indulging for a few moments in memories of the night before. But the guilt had already planted itself, a sickening nausea that forced me out of bed. I imagined explaining myself to Zoë.To say something happened or nothing happened depended entirely on a person’s sense of sexual morality: We had only slept holding each other. We hadn’t been thinking; it had only been once; he was miserable with Jillian— anyone could see that. I didn’t know why Zoë was the one I felt I owed the apology.

I checked my reflection in the microwave. I ran my fingers through my hair and splashed water on my face from the kitchen sink.

“You’re up,” Eli said. He walked over to me, hesitated slightly, then kissed my cheek. It was a rough, dry kiss, heavy with selfconscious effort. He’d been in the bathroom forty-five minutes. A shower never took him more than five. “Kevin called. The downtown area has power. He and Diedre are getting together for brunch and wanted to know if we’d meet them.”