Ordinary World (21 page)

            “Kid, your worst day doesn’t match the inherent misery of some of our faculty and administrators,” he said, followed by a quick eye roll. I couldn’t help but laugh.

            “Shit, man. You have got to get out of this role as chairperson.”

            He laughed with me. We clinked our glasses and toasted our fucked-up colleagues.

            That left traveling. And Sam’s novel.

            I remembered telling Melody that Sam had wanted to start traveling. I also remembered Melody telling me to fulfill some of Sam’s goals if I couldn’t think of any of my own. I knew of at least two now. I hadn’t looked at the novel since I’d first stumbled across it. And yet, I also hadn’t stopped thinking about it. In addition to the draft, I had found a folder of notes regarding characters and possible storylines and plot twists. No ideas for an ending, however. Apparently he had no idea where this was going to take him, but he seemed willing to be led. The folder also contained a Google Map of Lima, a personal essay written by a Harvard grad school buddy on the currency system in Peru, and a couple of travel brochures to Machu Picchu.

            Why Peru? I wondered. He had never expressed a specific interest there before. Then again, apparently Sam had kept several secrets from me.

***

            David and I were at his place, making spaghetti and meatballs. I still wasn’t ready for him to come to my house.

            “Ever been to Peru?” I asked.

            “No, why?”

            “Just wondering. I found a brochure in Sam’s desk. I think he was contemplating a trip.”

            “Do you wanna go?” he asked before slurping a strand of spaghetti. He then broke off another strand and handed it to me for tasting.

            “Are you inviting me?” I asked. I ate the spaghetti strand and advised him to let it cook for another minute.

            “I’m just asking, is all,” he said.

            “I don’t know. Maybe. If I did, would you wanna go with me?”

            “Possibly,” he answered, and proceeded to set the table.

            He didn’t sound gung ho about the idea. I stirred the sauce pensively and thought about brushing up on my Spanish.

***

            Two days later, I printed out the draft of Sam’s novel and read it carefully, making edits and underlines and notes in the margins. I wrote down a lot of questions, which I usually did when either Sam (or my students) gave me something to read. I’d ask questions and then give it back to him and we’d sit and talk about it and he was always so grateful for the insight and would tell me that my students were lucky to have me. David had said that too, as Devin, when I had given him writing instruction.

            Maggie was right—this novel was something Sam and I were working on together. Every question that I jotted in the margin was a question to
him
. Sometimes I even found myself talking to him out loud. “How do you want me to do this? Should Alexander methodically research his father’s past and Peru first before going there? Or should he go to Peru on a whim and let it all unravel before him? What’s the deal with this guy? What is his
story
?”

            I stuck the Summer Goals list on the fridge with a magnet and made an additional copy to tape to my bathroom mirror—never had I done that before.

            Another new beginning, I thought. One step closer to the ordinary world.

Chapter Twenty-seven

August

           
I
N ADDITION TO THE BOOK CLUB AND SPENDING time with David, I spent the summer engrossed in Sam’s novel, which I decided to call
My Father’s Letter
. Part of this task involved re-reading almost everything Sam had ever written in order to study his style. Doing so elicited an array of reactions: falling in love with him all over again; grieving his loss all over again and getting depressed for days; re-igniting my interest in stylistics from my grad school days; and even learning things about Sam that I had never known. For instance, I peeked into his childhood with his brother Kevin, who would scrape up enough money to take Sam to see the Red Sox at Fenway and buy him baseball cards for his birthday—how much he looked up to Kevin, especially after their father left. In some ways, I felt as if I was intruding, but this was all I had left of him. Reading Sam’s writing was the only alternative I had to his actual presence. Sometimes I read his memoirs in our bed, imagining him reading them to me. I longed for the sound and smell of him.

Furthermore, by going through Sam’s papers, memoirs, and scholarly essays (he was starting to incorporate a lot of travel metaphors in his academic writing, I’d discovered), I found out that he had contacted his editor at University Press and queried about getting the novel published through them, since they’d already published his two books of nonfiction. Thus, when I contacted Sam’s editor myself and showed her the draft of the manuscript, she was quite enthusiastic about the project, but uncertain about University Press being the right publisher for it. Great marketing potential of a love story though, she said—not the novel’s, but mine: my husband, tragically killed, and me, granting his final wish, or some crap like that.

            I actually found novel writing to be quite fun. Fiction offered a chance for things to work out that were normally beyond one’s control. I was writing conversations between Alexander and Cassandra that were reminiscent of the ones Sam and I used to have, and it was like talking to him all over again. There would be no tragic ending in this story. No drunk driver, no need to pick up the pieces and blindly feel one’s way back to normality. There would be no former escort to confuse things. Instead, the possibilities abounded. Cassandra could be daring in the ways I was timid and confident in the ways I was insecure. Alexander didn’t collect bobble-head dolls and never left his dirty laundry on the floor. What would life have been like for him had he not met her? Or for
her
, for that matter?

***

            David’s and my reconciliation didn’t last very long. And I still wouldn’t call what we were doing “dating.” “Seeing each other” was a more accurate description. Every time he got too close, I would start to pull away. And when I wanted to get close, he felt as if he was being used. No matter what, we couldn’t get into a groove. When we’d first met in New York, we’d negotiated and notarized our relationship right off the bat. We knew our roles, put it in writing, and then carried those roles out. Never mind that we were constantly trampling over those boundaries that we’d negotiated. Never mind that we were just playing those roles like actors playing parts, that we were faking it with each other and the rest of the world. We hid behind the false security of that contract, of those pre-scripted roles. We knew who we were supposed to be and where we stood.

            But when we met the second time in Rome, we had long since shed those skins. I had become Mrs. Sam Vanzant, or Dr. Andrea Vanzant, tenured professor and Director of Freshman Writing at NU, and he had become David Santino, gallery owner and art dealer. For what purpose did we have to be together this time? There was nothing left to teach, nothing to trade, and nothing to negotiate. This time, we had to be ourselves, and the only thing we really shared was a past-life incarnation. That, and an immense attraction to one another. If Sam and I had been a pair of gloves, then David and I were a pair of polar magnets—we both attracted and repelled one another.

            David and I met at the Starbucks on

Church Street

in

Harvard Square

on a regular basis. Many times we’d bring our laptops and work on our respective writing projects (Sam’s novel for me, the art history textbook chapter for him) and hardly talk to each other. I don’t know if this signaled something positive—that we knew each other so well that we didn’t need to entertain each other in one another’s company, or something negative—that we were still avoiding the hard questions. I couldn’t help but think of the dinner scene in
When Harry Met Sally
, after Harry and Sally have slept with each other for the first time, and are preoccupied with their salads, crunching loudly to drown out the awkward silence.

            I looked up from my laptop, taking a break from vicious click-clacking, and noticed David had stopped as well, staring at his screen in concentration.

            “How’s it comin’?” I asked him.

            He paused to finish the thought or sentence or paragraph he was reading.

            “Okay, I guess,” he finally responded, looking up and smiling at me when our eyes met. I couldn’t help but smile in return.

            “Whatcha workin’ on?”

            “It’s a sidebar piece for the
Globe
to accompany the latest American Impressionist exhibit review at the BMFA. The exhibit isn’t focusing on Monet, but rather on those who were inspired by him. My piece is about why you kinda need to see Monet before you can see the other artists.”

            I nodded my head. Before I had a chance to say anything, David asked, “Will you read it? Right now?”

            My eyes widened as I straightened my posture in my seat. “Sure.”

            We shuffled papers and coffee cups and crumb-riddled plates around our tiny table in the process of carefully swapping laptops. “You can read mine too, if you want,” I added.

            His laptop in front of me, I took off my reading glasses, wiped them on the bottom edge of my tank top, put them back on again, and began to read:

Why We Need to See Monet

What can possibly be said about Monet that hasn’t been said already? Haystacks are lovely at sunset? Lily pads look divine on cadmium water? It’s all been said before. Now, here’s the kicker: Claude Oscar Monet was deemed the father of an entire movement of art, and he may never have had an original subject grace a canvas. He had nothing new to say or show. And yet, he wasn’t about painting new subjects. I almost wonder if Monet cared at all about what he said, what he thought, how he painted, or what he saw in his work. So, why this guy? Why Monet, the Father of French Impressionism? It wasn’t just because his painting,
Impression, Sunrise
, provided the inspiration for which the movement was named. Rather, Monet was about
seeing
. He saw movement and color and emotion, and invited viewers to see the world in an entirely new light. His world became their world. Better still, Monet constantly posed the what-if question. What if stones don’t stand still, and boats aren’t solid? What if life careens in brushstrokes of thought, dancing in chaos, and we don’t even know that we’re missing it (life, I mean) until someone comes along and shakes us out of our reverie? It takes courage to see what Monet saw, and the way he saw it; to allow ourselves to accept and allow the chaos of the world. If we stand at the right distance of a Monet painting, then we see the subject. We see a world of order and form. We see the light. If we move in too close, however, then the image dissolves, leaving us with smudges of color, as though we can see the artist’s process—his thoughts and movements—right before our eyes. And then, the image disappears altogether. We’ve traded the aesthetic illusion of picnicking on the Seine for the discomforting truth of the pigments beneath the picture. We’re confronted with the thought that nothing is stable, whole, or true. And yet,
that
is the beauty. That is the most breathtaking allure of the Impressionists—they dared to harness the chaos of the world around them, and now invite us to witness the beauty of such chaos. And will you? Will you allow yourself to see how powerful and unerringly beautiful chaos really is? Will you allow Monet to show it to you from his own eyes? Because somewhere, between the image and the brushstrokes, exists a harmony that none of us can afford to miss.
            From the corner of my eye I could see him watching me nervously, not unlike the way he used to when I’d read the drafts of the writing assignments he’d done for me during our seven-week arrangement in New York, exactly eight years ago. At that moment the urge to cry had inexplicably come over me. He had matured so much as a writer. As a person. It suddenly occurred to me that I hadn’t read anything of his since the
Boston Leisure Weekly
Jesse Bartlett review that Sam had showed me years ago, before we’d had gotten married. Even in all the time that David and I were seeing each other since Italy, I’d not read any of his columns or reviews. Why?