The Bradbury Report (2 page)

Anna talked avidly, in large swaths, without inhibition. I don't remember what she talked about. I believe much of the time I was attentive; I carried with me through the after-years a fairly elaborated sense of her. I knew she was keen on literature and film. I knew she was an only child, that her parents divorced when she was very young, that her mother had raised her in straitened circumstances, that in high school she'd had no boyfriends, in college one terrible, sociopathic suitor, that her father was absent and unkind. She was full of self-deprecating humor, full of political fervor (she belonged to several anti-government action groups), which, in her case, was authentic and not a means to sexual encounter. She was a good storyteller, and, as much as I enjoyed anyone's company at that place, in those days, I enjoyed hers.

With the beginning of term, I saw Anna less often. Because she was a year ahead of me, we had no classes in common. I did not yet have other friends, as she did, competing for my time. We met several times a week for lunch or dinner. On these occasions, we were alone. She saw to this, fending off her friends, sparing me, I assumed, their society. In all this time, which amounted to most of the first term, I did not touch her. We did not kiss or hold hands. She did not come up to my apartment. I did not see her room in the graduate residence. Whatever those observing us may have thought, between ourselves we did not characterize or speak of our affections. We were chummy. We were not romantic. I didn't think much about our friendship, apart from being thankful I had someone to talk to from time to time. I had no idea what she was thinking.

I did not tell Anna about the girl, still at William and Mary, who thought she and I were to be married soon after her graduation in the spring. We'd made no formal plan, but that was the understanding. We'd grown up together in New Hampshire. I'd known her since grade school. She'd been my only girlfriend in high school, and, after a year apart, she followed me to Williamsburg. Our families were close. We shared a history, seamless and literally lifelong. We were tied in all manner of ways. She'd had other, more advantageous options, but chose William and Mary to be with me. In her sophomore year there, with what was unconscionable slovenliness, I got her pregnant. I arranged and paid for the abortion. For much of high school, and through several years of college, I imagined I loved this girl, in the inchoate, mindless way I imagined love. I did not mention her to Anna. This was, in part, because I saw no reason to; in part, because I felt diminished by my attachment—it had, by that time, begun to feel slavish and unimaginative—to the girl in Virginia, whose name will here be Ann. That this omission was calculated and self-serving needs no remarking. But I think it is true that, had I thought it was in any way caddish of me not to tell Anna about Ann, I would have told her. That there was a girl in Virginia, to whom I was preemptively attached, to whom I bore some overriding responsibility, had nothing to do with the nature and degree of my feelings for Anna, which would have been what they were, girl or no girl. I liked Anna. I felt some unwarranted pity for her, which, I fear, might have given me a puerile pleasure I was not, at the time, above. I did not love Anna, felt toward her no physical attraction, and did not want her for anything other than friendship.

In early November, I met, purely by chance, one of Anna's three roommates, an undergraduate, who for three years had been Anna's closest friend at the university. Before she married me, her name was Sara Bird. I was on campus, in the automat, eating lunch. Anna and her roommate were already there, though the place was crowded and I didn't see them until I was nearly finished. They came over to my table. Anna introduced her.

Sara Bird. Twenty-one years old. From Indianola, outside Des
Moines. Her father, briefly my father-in-law, was a minister in the moribund Episcopal Church. In the public gaze, he was an exemplary man—learned, wise, well-spoken, elegant in bearing, reverent, refined. In private, to his wife and three children, he was despotic. I was given a glimpse of the domestic version. It was enough to eradicate in me whatever remnants of Christian faith there might have been; merely being in his presence, I was determined, as was then the expression, to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There is no question he was the principal cause of most, if not all, of Sara's emotional debilities. Her mother, an aristocratic Norwegian, born into the Lutheran Church, who, after nearly thirty years in America, spoke only a rudimentary English, was of no use in preventing or even tempering her husband's attacks, which found, as their favorite target, the eldest child, the beautiful, languid, exceedingly vulnerable Sara. For seven years I hated him. I watched him closely whenever he was around her. I was poised to intervene, eager to expose him for what he was. (I was delusional. I was in my twenties. I would have been no match for the man.) When Sara died I stopped just short of blaming him expressly. I did prevent him from presiding at the funeral. Afterwards, I had nothing more to do with him.

Sara became my wife. I lived with her seven years. I knew her better than I had known anyone before, or since. I loved her as I have loved no one else. She was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen. From the first, I was aware how idiosyncratic this judgment was. She was thin and pale. In repose, her face was sad. There was a darkness about her. Her eyes were sunken and shadowed. She was quiet, formal, flinchy, because she was delicate, easily hurt. I talk about her this way to Anna—who is, she says now, beyond being hurt by it—and she remarks I might be describing some vaporous nineteenth-century heroine. For me, all these melancholy accoutrements constituted her beauty, which was ethereal, asexual, for all her sadnesses, serene. She was irresistible.

At that first meeting, other than to say hello, she did not speak. She was glad to let Anna do the talking. Once I knew who she was, as is the way, I began to see her frequently on campus. She was not
easy to talk to, or to get at. If she was not with Anna, which made awkward any overture, she was almost always in the midst of a herd of students, her fellow undergraduates, male and female, as unlike her as they could be: noisy, raw, lighthearted savages, careering about as if they believed they would never die. She told me, later, she despised them. But among them, she said, in the thick of their rout, their collective spasm, she felt anesthetized, blanketed, needing never to speak or think.

When I went back to New Hampshire for Thanksgiving, I still had not had the chance to speak with Sara alone. The Monday before Thanksgiving, my mother died. She'd been sick a long time. A common case of extended morbidity. The end, however, was precipitous. I was her only child, very nearly her only kin, and it properly fell to me to make the arrangements for her funeral. Though we had not been as close as she'd wanted, I'd loved my mother. I did not get the chance to see her before she died. I was now alone—my father was long dead—without family. Ann had come up from Virginia for the holiday. She was a support to me at the funeral, and I was grateful for her presence there. It was the last time I would see her. Ann, Anna, Sara. Three women. A mysterious conflation: the only three women in my life, all at once. By the time I got back to Ames, obeying an animal instinct to avoid any additional pain, I had, if not forgotten Sara Bird, pretty much scrapped whatever designs I'd had.

If my work at the university had been interesting, or challenging, I might have thrown myself into it. Now I was back, the friendship with Anna, who offered me only an appropriate and genuine sympathy, began to cloy. She seemed—nothing in her behavior had changed—oppressively needful and clinging. I avoided her, fabricating lame, perfectly transparent excuses. After two or three of these, Anna felt the insult and stayed away. At the same time, without providing an explanation, I broke off communication with Ann. I wanted, I told myself, nothing to do with anyone.

In the bleak midwinter—I believe there is an old song that begins thus—walking back to my apartment late after a profitless night at the library, I stopped at the New Times Café, on the near edge of
town, to get out of the cold and the snow. It was not a café, but a bar, little more than a cement bunker, with a grill, and a pool hall in the rear. It was a shithole—grim, roughneck, inhospitable. It was the first time I'd been in the place. That night, Sara was already there. She was sitting in the darkest corner of the lightless room, at a high-top table for two, with Anna.

I stood inside the doorway, brushed the snow off my coat, stamped my boots. They were talking. I could have gone back out before they saw me. By any measure of sensitivity, I should have left. Instead, without consciously deciding to do so, I walked across the room to their table. So far as I knew myself, I was no longer interested in Sara Bird. I had, certainly, no wish to cause Anna any further unease. Yet over I went, as if I was precisely the person they were both hoping, on that arctic night, to see. It was to be, in all our lives, a pivotal moment. I cannot regret it.

The place was crowded, raucous, in direct relation, it must have been, to the severity of the weather. Anna saw me approaching. She stood up. In my hearing, she said to Sara, “I'm going to the bathroom.”

I smiled at them both. Before Anna had a chance to flee, I said, “Hello.”

Sara looked at me reproachfully. Anna had confided in her. She put her hand on Anna's wrist. (My wife had the most lovely hands. I miss them still.) “Stay,” she said. Then, to me: “What are you doing?”

Anna stood there, embarrassed and bewildered. I saw no anger in her.

I should have stopped talking, turned around, walked away.

“I'm not doing anything,” I said, gracelessly. “I was going home. I was cold. I came in. I saw you both. I said hello.”

“I'm leaving now,” Anna said. She took her hand away from Sara's.

“No, don't,” Sara said.

“It's you he wants to see, Pie.” Anna's pet name for Sara. I never learned its provenance.

“I don't want to see him,” Sara said.

“I'm sorry,” I said. It was not clear to whom I said this.

Sara stood up. I watched, dumbly, as they gathered their things, put on their coats and hats, and stalked off.

I took a breath. I had no idea what I was doing. I looked around the place. It was not friendly. In a wash of cheap remorse, I considered staying there and getting drunk (I was then, I am now, in practice abstemious). I considered losing whatever money I had with me to the pool sharks, should there be any, in the back room. I considered dropping out of school and going home to New Hampshire to await, in self-imposed quarantine, Ann's graduation from William and Mary and, following ineluctably, a colorless marriage. I did none of these things.

By the time I caught up to the girls, who were walking uphill back to campus, I was near frenzy. When they heard me slogging after them, my boots sloshy in the snow, they turned to wait. This was a gesture of real kindness. It was still snowing hard. And though the wind had slaked somewhat, it was brutishly cold. Anna stood just behind and to the side of Sara. I stood before them. For whatever reason—guilt, cut-rate sentimentality, the cold—my eyes were full of tears.

“Forgive me,” I said. “I mean neither of you harm. I like you both. It's been a bad time. My mother's death. Other things. I am not myself.” I shook my head, wanting to withdraw what I'd just said. “This is no excuse. I'm sorry. There is no excuse. Forgive me. I won't bother you again.”

They did not speak.

“That's all I want to say.” I started down the hill. As I did, I slipped in the snow and landed, with a great pathetic whump, flat on my ass. Had I planned it, it could not have been more effective. I heard Sara laugh. It was a musical laugh, a trill really, sweet and full of mercy. It was that laugh, and her hand on Anna's wrist, that determined me. Then Anna called out: “Are you all right? Are you hurt?”

By the end of January, Sara had moved out of the graduate residence—where, owing to a dispensation procured by Anna, she'd been allowed as an undergraduate to live—and into my apartment above the Hmong gift shop. We'd been dating, if that term is apposite
for our furtive meetings, only a month and a half when she decided to take this step. I loved Sara. I wanted, always, to be with her. Somehow we'd kept our assignations hidden from Anna, who had, or claims she had, no inkling about what was happening. All the sneaking around was infantile and vulgar and demeaning to us all, but I was besotted and wholly irresponsible. When, preparatory to vacating the room they shared, Sara finally revealed to Anna what had been going on, Anna was stunned, mortified. Not by what we'd done so much as how we'd done it. And she was deeply saddened. Far more by the loss of Sara than of me. But she was sad about me, too. She had, as she has said, some hopes.

Sara didn't see much of Anna after that. For what remained of their friendship, they established workable but uneasy terms. I didn't see Anna at all. Except once. Sometime in March, a matter of days before Anna left the university, after Sara and I had been living together nearly two months, I felt it was past time to resolve the situation with Ann. It was, of course, more than past time; it was inexcusably late. I should have gone to Virginia to tell her face-to-face about Sara. Instead, I phoned her. Ann was wounded, rageful. She refused to accept my explanation, my apology, whatever mongrel, disreputable thing I was tendering. She berated me, cursed me. Our conversation—I said very little; beyond the mere, for her appalling, facts, I had little to say—lasted more than two hours. By the end of it, I could barely stand or breathe. I felt as if I'd been eviscerated. I also felt—this was scandalous—sorry for myself.

I went looking for solace, for Sara. I had not wanted her to be in the apartment when I called Ann. It was Saturday night, ten o'clock. Spring was near. The streets in town were full of life. When I got to the campus, desperate to find Sara, the students were in the throes of a spontaneous, drunken, somewhat premature, end-of-winter celebration. It seemed everyone was bent on going wild. I could not find Sara. I became more and more distraught. I went to the graduate dorm, to the room she'd shared with Anna, thinking—I was hardly thinking—I might find Sara there. I had not gone to that room before.