by
C.J. Hauser
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I wasn’t a Scully looking for a Mulder, I was a person seeking some sort of mutual trust. I was a person who wanted to believe that two people with wildly different ways of being in the world, which is, let’s be honest, most any two people of any genders, could come to trust each other as a matter of pure instinct. That you didn’t need to believe all the same things, or have lived the same lives, in order for trust to be possible. That difference is just difference. It’s just human. It doesn’t need to activate into some perfect complementary cycle. It doesn’t need to be pathologized. You just have to believe the other person’s things are real and valid, too. You just need to know that if you called them, they would pick up the phone. That it would almost be beside the point to say, It’s me, because they would know
sweet
As you remember, you were badly dressed but skinny, with gravity-defying tits and an ass the boys sometimes slapped at school, even if you were wearing something patently unsexy like those striped train-conductor overalls you loved. You were frizzy-haired and plain-faced and privileged and sweet and moody. You were tediously Pollyannaish about anything to do with social justice and performatively contrarian about everything else. You kept a shrine to John Lennon in your bedroom at the center of which was this satisfyingly heavy biography you’d never read but in front of which you lit flying-fairy Chinatown incense. You liked to say you were “born at the wrong time.” You preferred animals and children to anyone else. You had no idea what to do with your body but you were always already a hedonistic little ball of senses and you understood pleasure. You loved music and food and the smell of the boy’s armpits and being touched. You had enormous eyes and enormous ears and you were just cripplingly earnest, but, having been raised by fast-talking New Yorkers and having consumed too much art, sometimes disarmingly adult banter came dropping from your mouth and the contrast must have been alarming. You were happiest alone in the woods or with a book. You cried over things like the fact that flowers didn’t bloom for that long. That they had to die. Seriously, literally, you cried about this. You had just turned seventeen and the facts of the world were pressing in on you for the first time with a sort of tedious, metaphysical, white-girl sadness that felt too much to bear. And he was the first one who said to you, Hey, people have like, written poems about that stuff, you know? And songs. Do you know Keats? David Byrne? He showed you how to find yourself in this way. Introduced you to the sacred texts of the terminally sensitive.
Since having people I loved in the house made it feel better, I decided I might try love again. I let myself fall for a funny, handsome man I’d had a crush on for many years, since the first moment I saw him, really, even though I knew he lived abroad. I went and found him in Paris and we climbed all the steps of Montmartre to hang out in Moroccan bars, and eavesdrop on the singing inside the Lapin Agile, and to sit outside the Metro station sipping beers, watching the tides of people coming and going. When he came to stay with me in my house it was midwinter, and it snowed so hard there was nothing for us to do, and I worried about how my house was not as good as Paris. But the snow bucketed down and we played guitar and had sex all day and it was perfect. And then my house was a house where I had feelings again, where I had sex again. And after he left, I cried, but a house where you have cried over multiple heartbreaks is infinitely better than a house where you’ve only cried over one, defining, bad thing.
<3
That my body is for me, is mine, that my body does not have to please others, has been a hard thing to understand. It is a thing I’ve been working on for a long time. My piercings and tattoos have helped. They are little flags I use to settle the land of my body. To claim it for myself. Mine, I say. I do with you what I please. Mine, and I don’t care what someone else thinks of this. Someone who sees me tomorrow. Some imaginary someone someday. This has nothing to do with them. I plant a flag. Another. This is mine.
same
After the insemination, she tells Brynn to lie still for about ten minutes. Then she asks Brynn if she wants to keep the vial.
“Yes?” Brynn says.
“I forgot to keep all my kids’ stuff,” the nurse says, “and now they ask where it is.” She leaves.
“No one asked me that the last times,” Brynn says, still lying on the table. “About the vial.”
“You could turn it into a Christmas ornament,” I say. “Hang it on the tree every year and reminisce.”
Brynn laughs. “Or I could keep it in a drawer somewhere and take it out when they want to do anything and say, ‘Why don’t you ask your father about that?’ ”
I am wheezing I am laughing so hard.
Ross Sutherland is a poet and playwright and an all-around gorgeous madman. He has this podcast called Imaginary Advice and the “Sutherland Dunthorne Luck Index” is my favorite episode. There’s a running gag among his friend group that whenever something good happens to his friend fellow writer Joe Dunthorne, something bad happens to Ross. And so they devise a test to determine whether this is true. They go to a casino together. And sure enough, Joe wins some money and Ross loses all of his money. Theory proved! But then they talk about what happened in the casino. Ross asks Joe why he cashed out when he did, and Joe says it was because he’d won some money. He cashed out not because he was financially prudent but because he’d achieved a sort of narrative completeness: man goes to casino, plays cards, wins money, the end. Ross, on the other hand, had been up and down throughout the night, too, but he didn’t stop playing. Not because he loved gambling but because, he sort of realizes as he’s talking about this, the story of the night couldn’t quite seem over to him until he’d lost all his money.
It had nothing to do with luck. It had to do with what kind of story expectations they were carrying around inside them. For Joe, the story he was in didn’t feel over until something good had happened. For Ross, only losing everything could feel like the end.
I told Lindsay because she was beautiful and kind and patient and loved good things like birds and I wondered what she would say back to me. What would every good person I knew say to me when I told them that the wedding to which they’d RSVP’d was off and that the life I’d been building for three years was going to be unstitched and repurposed?
Lindsay said it was brave not to do a thing just because everyone expected you to do it.
Jeff was sitting outside, in front of the cabin with Warren, as Lindsay and I talked, tilting the sighting scope so it pointed toward the moon. The screen door was open and I knew he’d heard me, but he never said anything about my confession.
What he did do was let me drive the boat.
The next day it was just him and me and Lindsay on the water. We were cruising fast and loud. “You drive,” Jeff shouted over the motor. Lindsay grinned and nodded. I had never driven a boat before. “What do I do?” I shouted. Jeff shrugged. I took the wheel. We cruised past small islands, families of pink roseate spoonbills, garbage tankers swarmed by seagulls, blowing fields of grass and wolfberries, and I realized it was not that remarkable for a person to understand what another person needed.
Your daughter, solemn and big-eyed and possessed of a slyly wicked sense of humor, is twelve; just around the age you were when you started going off the rails. Does her twelve-ness fill you with anxiety? If so, you’re not quite admitting it to yourself. She grows more beautiful every day, even as you grow homelier, no matter how many chaturangas you perform. A friend discovered, at the health food store on your island, something called emu oil. As far as you can tell from the gnomic description on the tiny bottle, it appears to be secreted from the glands of emus. Which glands? Unknown. Whatever, it makes you and all the other ladies in your neighborhood look great. Glowy. Everyone goes for it in a big way for a month or so, but after a while it just seems too gross. Meanwhile your daughter appears to be coolly lit from within by some tiny inner moon. Does her comparative glowiness make you feel that your own mortality, your own youth, is drawing inexorably to a close? Again, not in any way you care to admit.
I confess his sinning was what interested me. He was so ridiculously, overtly on the make, it sort of took me aback and even impressed me. Here I was, being so good, trying to keep my shit together, trying to be better than the craptastic girl I’d been, and he was just running around being bad. I didn’t know anyone bad (or thought I didn’t—more on that later). I wanted to keep watching him in action. Maybe I would like to, um, receive some action.
He gave me a disbelieving look. “You’ve never kissed anyone besides your husband in—how long? How many years have you been married?”
“Fifteen years. But we were together for a year before that and I never cheated on him.” Fact. “So sixteen years since I’ve kissed someone else.”
“Just…Wow.” We gazed at each other over the crevasse that lay between our world views: his flagrancy, my virtuousness. My virtuousness, which on some level I knew was a veneer or an overlay.
“Well, what’s the worst thing you have done?” he asked, settling left ankle onto right knee, leaning forward, really interested.
“This,” I said. But I smiled at him. Love me, said my smile.