Amy Inspired (5 page)

High school was similarly unsuccessful. First came Aaron Borke, chess club captain, talented swing dancer, homecoming date, and my first kiss. Then Charlie Smith, who led prayer around the flagpole every fall and spent the rest of the year in a state of borderline hedonism for which he would repent the following year back at the flagpole.

Twelfth grade was Seth Rieder, aspiring musician who was forever endearing for claiming that I had the knees of a supermodel, yet forever disappointing for liking breasts better. He stayed with Tiffanie Lewis who
had
breasts.

My college love affairs comprised a disappointing succession of altogether unattainable men: Leonard Brown, professor of literature, freshman year; Lawrence Green, roommate’s boyfriend, sophomore year; Barry Jones, philosophy major and gay, junior year. After graduation, there was Dylan Jones, lead singer of the church band and my cubicle neighbor with whom I flirted for eight months, dated for six. I spent my twenty-fourth year of life in love, my twenty-fifth recovering from the break-up.

And then Adam Palmer, a relationship doomed from the start, made impossible due to problems of faith—in other words I had one, he didn’t.

Of all the men I’d loved, I had relationships with four. That was an average of one relationship for every four years (if you only counted the court-able decades). Adam was the first I’d dated who neither believed in God nor made a front of being interested that I did. What had inspired me to think a relationship with a man who held every one of my beliefs in contempt could possibly be healthy?

Adam had been intriguing, his swagger a welcome change from the exhausting self-deprecation Dylan mistook for humility. And Adam made no attempt to hide his attraction or to keep his hands at bay. At first, it was exciting to be touched so boldly by a man who had none of the reservations that tortured the Christians I’d dated. I tripped along breathlessly, mistaking his flair for rhetoric for superior intellect and his sexual advances for romance. I ignored the growing conviction that I’d stepped out of line and suppressed the guilt in favor of the pleasure, a pleasure that grew more fleeting as Adam became more insistent.

At night, lying in bed alone, I relived the embarrassment of telling Adam I was a virgin, a fact I had revealed while standing in my panties and bra in the middle of his living room five seconds away from the worst mistake of my life. I told him I couldn’t; he put his pants back on. This had only been two weeks ago.

I hadn’t told Zoë. She only spoke cryptically of her own experience—or inexperience. While she and Michael did not sleep over at each other’s places by rule, I had no idea what they did when alone. Sex for Marriage was our mantra, but Zoë tended to have more lenient interpretations of just about any belief we shared. She was the daughter of a travel writer and a nurse who had met through the Peace Corps. The Walkers listened to NPR; they voted Democratic; they were open-minded. I was the product of a culture that considered the phrase “open-minded” anathema.

My childhood was carefully policed by the powerful mandates of the First Fundamentalist Church of God, which discouraged fraternizing with nonbelievers. I had to save a boy before I could date him and even then there was little fun to be had without sinning, so I placated my hormones with fantasies and fueled my hopes with novels. I ascribed to the True Love Waits campaign without any real dilemma, having confused scriptural mandates with my own outrageous expectations: I believed God was the Divine Author and my life the story of an ultimate romance.

I quit the First Fundamentalist Church of God soon after attending college, exhausted by its stringent legalism. Leaving behind the church that had raised me was hardly a novel thing to do (it was, in fact, the one stab at independence I had most in common with my smattering of freshmen friends) and it was hardly difficult. But forsaking Christ himself was impossible. The basic precepts of the faith defined my life as the skeleton gives the body definition: I could as soon function apart from Christianity as sever muscle from bone and retain shape.

Particulars of its moral code, however, had grown increasingly tiresome. While I couldn’t make love where I didn’t feel love, chastity for its own sake had become pure drudgery. It had been fairly noble to champion virginity when I was sixteen, but the closer I got to thirty the more I began to worry. The more I felt like a baby-maker with a ticking egg timer.

3

Once I got around to telling them, everyone was kind about the break-up with Adam. Zoë said he didn’t deserve me. Mom recited her usual litany of animal kingdom analogies: There were other fish in the sea; you had to kiss a lot of toads to find your prince; don’t throw your pearls to swine. Valerie Powell came bursting into my office the next afternoon breathless and sweating. “He
broke up
with you?”

“In the cafeteria,” Everett said from his desk without bothering to turn away from his computer.

Valerie was the only other woman from our graduate workshop who stayed in Copenhagen after finishing the program. While our friends moved on to finish Ph.D.s or write their novels in mountain cabins, Valerie promptly went about the business of getting pregnant. By escaping academia when she had the chance, she lived a sane and unhurried life. She was also a practiced gossip.

“Well what are we all doing here then?” She grabbed my coat off the filing cabinet. “You need to talk and I need carbohydrates.”

Ten minutes later, we sat crowded into a Donut Shoppe booth, Valerie listening attentively to my now-detailed list of Adam’s inadequacies, and Everett who had invited himself along, interrupting to volunteer examples I’d forgotten.

“He broke up with me in the
cafeteria
of the student commons,” I said for the third time. It had become the refrain of the story.

“It’s sick,” she muttered.

“And he had the nerve to be totally calm about it.”

“Jerk.”

“Not even an affectation of grief,” Everett added.

“You want me to kill him for you?” Valerie asked. “Because I could do it.” She gave a wave of her arm over her very pregnant belly, inviting us to examine her late-term physical prowess. She once confessed to me that she’d spent all of junior high peeing in short, quick bursts, having heard at summer camp that doing so toughened your uterine walls for the birth process.

I was grateful that Valerie was back in my life. She and I had been close in graduate school, our friendship the direct result of similar schedules and shared workloads. Once we’d graduated, we’d lost the common complaints that bound us together: There were no more thesis abstracts to belabor or deadlines to dread. We spent a year disbanded, living less than five miles apart but rarely seeing each other outside of a random run-in at the farmer’s market or the library video aisle.

Valerie was the one who rallied us back together for a book club. We invited neighbors and acquaintances, informing them we would be reading serious novels by serious novelists:
Gravity’s Rainbow
and
War and Peace
and
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
. When no one else joined the club, we lost no time defecting from the booklist we’d prescribed in favor of more indulgent forays into Jane Austen and the Brontës. We had every intention of rereading the novels, but the majority of our meetings consisted of watching the film adaptations of books we’d already read.

Valerie finished a second raspberry-cream donut. At this point in her pregnancy she couldn’t wear her collection of handmade silver rings on her swollen fingers and her usually curly hair had gone straight. “Hormones,” she’d reply when people asked about the new do. I found the transformation exotic. She had the darker complexion of her Puerto Rican father and the voluptuous figure of her American mother. She was zaftig, thick-lipped and thick-thighed; on her, pregnancy seemed a natural shape.

“Well, I had my qualms about you dating a writer,” she said, doctoring her coffee with a third creamer. “I don’t know what I’d do if Jake was. We’d kill each other out of sheer competition. And at least you have time to focus on your writing now.” She perked up, remembering: “Did you get any news from
Exatrope
?”

“Rejected.”

“What? But your style is perfect for them.”The sincerity of her surprise at this news endeared me to her forever. “Amy, this is
not
your week.”

Everett said, “I’m beginning to think it’s not her decade.”

Everett had agreed to be my date for the poetry reading that night so I would be with company if Adam showed. The reading was held in the upstairs galleries of the Fuhler Art Building. As a member of the committee that had instituted the reading, I was obliged to attend. Three student performances were to be given simultaneously in three different galleries, the idea being that the audience changed rooms instead of the poets taking turns. I supposed it was meant to be interactive; mostly it reminded me of channel surfing.

“I can’t stand it,” Everett said.

We were sitting on folding chairs in gallery two. Fifteen rows up, a tall man with panty hose over his face was reading a sonnet. Behind him, a video montage of war headlines flashed on a projector screen. When it became apparent that the ten-minute recitation was only prelude to a second collection of poems, Everett began to fidget. He preferred rhythm, lyricism. These kinds of readings provoked him to panic, a minor detail I wished I’d remembered before demanding he come with me.

“Can we leave?”

“We can’t leave while he’s performing,” I whispered.

Over our own poet, we heard three others; the walls separating the galleries did not reach all the way to the ceiling.

“I want to leave,” he whispered back. His voice was petulant, like a child’s.

“We’ll wait until he’s done.”

He groaned under his breath, bent over, and started breathing into the program he’d folded into a tube. I noticed he was missing a button on his right cuff. He was typically dressed: old jeans and a white-collared shirt under a tweed jacket. At thirty-two he was completely bald up top. His glasses were horn-rimmed, his one stylish ornamentation. His intelligence eclipsed his social skills. Our friendship still surprised me.

When the panty hose performance was over, the emcee returned to the microphone. “All right, ladies and gentlemen, for your listening pleasure, please give a warm welcome to Jason Burkie.”

“It’s one of your students,” Everett said unnecessarily.

Jason held the microphone, still in its stand, right against his lips. “I’m Jason Burkie,” he said. “Can you all hear me?”

He held his poems up to his eyes, then paused. He spotted me over the rim of his paper. “This goes out to Ms. Gallagher, bestlooking English teacher in Copenhagen.”

There was a ripple of laughter. People turned in their seats searching the room. A few applauded, and one wolf-whistled. I nodded, waved tentatively, and slid down in my chair.

Jason was grinning. “All right!” He punched the air. “Power to the English teachers.”

“He’s a total moron,” Everett said. “Do you encourage this kind of Neanderthal stupidity in your classroom?”

Jason read his work with unbridled pride. It was evident that he considered his performance superior to those that had preceded his.

Everett nudged me halfway through the fifth poem. “Do you know that guy?” He nodded his head toward the right side of the room.

I turned slowly to follow Everett’s gaze. A tall man stood against the far wall, his arms folded across his chest. Our eyes met. Immediately he looked away.

“I’ve never seen him before.”

“Well, he’s been staring at you.”

“I’m sure he wasn’t doing it on purpose.”

“Um, yes, well, the performance is up there, and his eyes were
here
.”

“Everett, honestly, can you just pay attention for five seconds.”

I glanced back, but the stranger had disappeared.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said to Everett as soon as Jason finished.

“Thank you.”

We slinked off into the adjoining gallery to listen to a freckled freshman recite her haikus about dirty laundry and a cat named Fiasco. When the punishment was over, we stationed ourselves at the food table to eat Mini Gherkins and Ritz crackers. To my combined relief and disappointment, Adam never showed. It was unfortunate that he couldn’t be there to see how well I was doing without him.