The Other Side (16 page)

The body lays itself down but does not know with precision in which direction or at what point, if any, in the future it will rise and go. Or if it will be physically possible, the future having maybe splintered the body into a thousand wet-shining shards.

Underneath: bedrock unbuckles with the thrust of vast tectonic plates, skidding at this very moment over an ocean of white-hot magma in the body's every orifice.

But the mind goes thrashing. The mind goes thrashing away from the body, which does not move a muscle, does not move an inch from the spot in which it is unraveling, will be unraveling, has been unraveling since.

[nine]

THREE YEARS AFTER
the kidnapping I can't find anyone to sleep with me. My married colleague won't sleep with me. My single colleagues won't sleep with me. My professors at graduate school are too gay or too old to sleep with me. Tonight, I have just come home from a night of dancing with my girlfriends—the first without my wedding ring. I am drinking vodka from a plastic cup and blowing my cigarette smoke out the window, browsing around the Internet—
not exactly a dating site
, My Good Friend tells me in the e-mail—when I see the photo of a man who might sleep with me. I e-mail him first, a hokey pickup line. He writes back almost instantly. We e-mail many times a day, every day, for weeks. We tell flirty jokes, trading the grand narratives of our lives, the minutiae of our hobbies, and then he asks me for an actual in-person date.

I tell my officemates I'm supposed to meet him at his apartment and they think I am insane.
You're not even divorced yet
, they scold. One insists that I call her five minutes before I arrive, and she will call after I've been there ten minutes to make sure he hasn't hacked me into pieces.

He greets me with a giant smile—he's blushing a little—and a kiss on the cheek. Inside, he offers me something to drink. We spend most of the evening on his couch, smoking cigarettes, sipping from tall glasses of flat water. We take turns talking: his voice, like water, puts me at ease. He tells me what he knows about loss.

I spill all my beans.

Instead of the predictable response—the shock, the hand over the mouth or to the chest,
I'm so sorry
—The Man Who Might Sleep with Me says something like
Shut
UP
! That did
NOT
happen to you!!!

I laugh. It is a good first date.

He reaches over to hold my hand halfway through the high-budget kung fu movie. My palm sweats and I hope he doesn't notice. Maybe he thinks his palm is sweating.

Before the credits roll, we're making out on the couch like a couple of teenagers. I try to unbutton his pants. He takes my hands in his and brings them to his lips. I try again, pulling him close, closer. Closer.

But this man doesn't unbutton his pants, or pull my shirt over my head. He kisses me on the forehead and offers to make me a cup of tea.

It's not what I'm expecting, not even what I want, but I agree.

At first I say I don't want a boyfriend. I'm not interested in a relationship.
All I want is someone to fuck me senseless, to pound me until I'm raw and shaking. I want to be held down, pushed aside, flipped over, and smacked. I want to be choked, chained, tied to the floor. I want to bruise, to bleed, to cry out
please stop please don't stop
. I want him to leave after it's done. And then I'll stand up, take a shower, turn on the television.

But what I get is two hands on my shoulders when I'm screaming in my sleep. I get a hand on my back, in my hair. I get kisses on my cheek. I get glazed salmon and a glass of chardonnay. I get mixed
CD
s, and antique books, a shiny new cigarette case. I get picked up after work. I get dinner and a movie. I get a drawer, one side of the closet, a trash can in the bathroom. I get the best spot on the couch, a whole wall for my bookshelves, one half of the rent and the bills.

I am packing my books into boxes, preparing to move in with this boyfriend, when Dad and his new wife come to town and take me out to lunch. We scootch into a booth in a corner near the window. We are on the second floor of a café in the artsy downtown district: Dad and His New Wife
across from me, their backs to the restaurant, my back, like always, to the wall, where no one can approach me from behind. At first, things are tense. I haven't spent much time with His New Wife yet, and it's clear she's still sizing me up. She wants to like me, wants to be liked in return. She has brought me a gift: a pair of silver earrings. I haven't brought anything for her. I carry only my wallet, my cell phone, the shiny new cigarette case.

Dad asks how school is going, whether I have decided to go on for the PhD. I talk about a class I've been teaching at a local shelter, a poetry workshop for women recovering from substance abuse: their stories, their lives—always in limbo, always tentative. I'm writing a paper, I say, presenting at a conference this fall, two more in the spring. I ask His New Wife to tell me how they met. A blind date he didn't know he was on, she jokes. A mutual friend set it up. He has already told me this story: how after the divorce he would leave each day before dawn to work at the power plant, sleeping each night in a spare bedroom above his friend's garage. The mutual friend invited them both over for dinner, where Dad was polite to this woman, but tired. He left early to go to bed. His New Wife laughs at this now, as she stirs sweetener into her tea. On their first actual date, they went to dinner. Before the waiter brought their drinks Dad learned they share the same birthday. By the time the bread came, he learned she loves to laugh. Sometime between the salad and the soup, he came alive again, he says.
She was across from him, looking so beautiful, sipping her wine. She was talking about her children, saying,
I have an infinite capacity to love. And that was it
, my father says,
I knew she was the one
. I smile. I'm happy for him, really. I'm about to say so when the waiter comes to take our order.

From the windows in the apartment I share with My Boyfriend I can see a brick wall, so close I could almost reach out and touch it. Between our windows and the brick wall, there is a shaft of light, a small alleyway that leads out to the street. There is only one window in our apartment that looks out toward that light, in a little alcove where we've put an armchair, a lamp, and an ashtray. On the days when I do not take classes or teach, this is where I work, my annotated copy of a postmodern Irish novel, or a stack of student papers, or poems from workshop spread out on my lap. My Boyfriend walks to work in the morning, and at noon he comes home for lunch, though we only lie down in bed together and nap. At night, I write poems while he paints, or replants his aquarium, or designs at his desk. If he reads one of my poems, he says things like,
The image at the end reminds me of what Blavatsky says about the finite's relationship to the infinite
. And then he goes to pull a book off the shelf and shows me an illustration and then we are having a conversation about that.

At night, I stay up long after he has fallen asleep beside me in the bed, his arm draped over my waist, listening to the voices coming through our window from the alleyway, the men and women, all drunk, stumbling out of the bar downstairs. Now a woman yells,
You're an asshole, a fucking asshole!
Her voice growing hoarse with the force of every syllable. I remember that hoarseness, how it scratches from my throat into my chest, into my fingers and toes. I remember how The Man I Used to Live With stands above me, his red face contorted, the veins full to bursting in his forehead. He's squeezing my face in his hand. Now the woman cries softly in the alleyway. The man calls her baby.
Baby
, he says.
C'mon, baby
. From this bed, where I am almost sleeping, it makes a kind of sense: this is why I could not love him the way he wanted to be loved.

My sisters and I spend the holiday together, like usual: all of us on Christmas Eve at Mom's house, all of us on Christmas Day at Dad's. Mom's house—the house she shared with my father, the house she got in the divorce—feels dark and empty this year, even with all of us here: all of the doorways closed or covered with blankets, the heat vents in my old bedroom closed, the floral-print couch pulled into the dining room off the kitchen. My sisters and I exchange questioning looks.
It doesn't usually look this way
, I whisper to
My Boyfriend as we sit down.
I'm happy
, Mom tells us over dinner—a pot each of chowder and chili—
happier than I've ever been
. She's sewing more than ever. She's taken a part-time job. She's dating someone from church. My Boyfriend asks to see something she's working on and she shoots him down with a look.
Don't expect me to get attached to you
, she tells him, as my sisters and I file off to bed.
I've learned nothing is permanent
.