by
Miranda July
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Harris walked into the kitchen as we were finishing up. He paused, watching us smooth on the monkfruit-sugar frosting. I held my breath.
Almond cookies with jam in the middle, grain-free banana muffins, carrot custard—even when they turned out all wrong Harris always gobbled them up, which was the highest praise. Praise I maybe couldn’t live without. I was suddenly united with a long lineage of women who fixed everything through food; terror can really strip you of your modernity.
If he eats a cupcake we’re going to be okay.
He paused.
“There’s cream in the middle,” Sam said with great urgency. We were both praying.
But Harris was only looking for something and it wasn’t in the kitchen after all.
“Okay, here’s my take,” she said. “Just ride it out. A lot of women destroy their lives in their forties and then one day they wake up with no periods and no partner and only themselves to blame.”
That had the ring of truth to it.
“So, you think I should just smooth things over?”
“I know that’s not the hip thing to say, but yes.”
“I don’t know if I”—I gasped—“can physically do that. Swallow my desires like that.”
Cassie sighed.
“Remember the Simone de Beauvoir quote,” she said, “ ‘You can’t have everything you want but you can want everything you want.’ ”
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While I squeezed our child and brushed hidden clusters out of their hair, Harris informed me (my forehead) that he would be throwing a brunch next Sunday.
“To celebrate Caro’s new single ahead of the release.”
“Of course.”
I couldn’t believe it. This was where his focus was?
“Do you want me here for it?” I asked, trying to imagine Caro and me in the same room. This brunch didn’t really fit into the theory of their secret affair, unless it was a “hidden in plain sight” kind of thing. Still, wouldn’t he have a better time without me there? “I could help set up and then leave for a few hours. What kind of food were you thinking?”
Harris looked up at the kitchen ceiling and shut his eyes as if I’d just said something beyond the pale.
“I’d like to be with a person who actually wants to be here,” he whispered. Not to me but to himself or the gods.
“Have you been anywhere fun lately?” a long-haired man asked me after describing Cancún.
“No,” I said, “but I’m just realizing this dynamic I have with my husband where I express my problem so dramatically that I become the problem, which makes me desperate to win back his favor. It’s a cycle that keeps us from ever moving forward with our issues. I think my mom did this, too.”
“Sounds like you could use a vacation!” said the long-haired man, smiling and moving away from me.
“This all started with a vacation!” I called out, but he was already in the garden.
lol
“And . . . favored nations, right?” he said, looking down at his shoes.
“Favored nations?”
“The same rules apply to me.”
Oh. The foldout couch in his office; he probably hadn’t done anything on it but he wanted permission to now. I waited to feel a rush of overwhelming jealousy and rage. Indeed, I was shaking. But—and it took me a moment to realize this—only with surprise. One could even call it hope. He, Harris, the telephotographer, had seen me, or more of me anyway, enough, and I wasn’t being cast out. I could remain with him and our child in this house, as I really was.
“Of course,” I said, the same way I said I do at our wedding—no way of knowing for sure, but here’s hoping.
“We went back to her place.”
“Okay.” I stood up. “Okay then.” I sat down. I put my hands to my cheeks and then clasped them in my lap. “All right. All right then.”
He watched me, braced for whatever was coming. I crossed my arms and looked away. So, this was the cost of that free feeling each morning. Brutal. But there was enough hypocrisy built into life, one shouldn’t choose it.
“I think this is good,” I rasped.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
We looked at each other in shock, like two people hovering in the air with nothing holding them up. No scaffolding, no strings, no wings—but not falling.
I waited for her to say more, but she was done talking, so I took over. Yammering away, I went back and forth in my mind about whether there was a charge between us—I wasn’t overcome by lust, but then, she didn’t seem to be, either. She was sober so I decided not to vape. If I wasn’t aroused by the time things got physical I could astral-project myself into a more taboo situation, clamp the invisible screen over my face. Of course some people didn’t have sex on first dates, she might be like that. Or maybe I was mistaken, maybe this wasn’t a date, given that it had been three hours now and neither of us had laid a hand on the other. By one a.m. and with great disappointment I started to give little hints that we should wrap it up. I yawned and she said, God, I’m not usually this nervous; come over here.
cute
He was supposed to be working at a Sacramento Hertz, lost in memory and yearning. Or pacing around their shitty little house with Claire telling him to take out the trash and him saying What? And her saying Take out the fucking trash. Blazing around the stage, doing the thing he was put on this earth to do while encircled and adored; it didn’t get better than this. This was the one shared dream that wasn’t only a dream.
I prayed for their dance to go wrong somehow. Not an injury, God no, but some kind of creative faux pas that would break his spell over everyone and return him to me. Maybe Davey and Dev wouldn’t know how to end it, they would wear out their welcome—or plagiarism. Did they have that in dance? It only took one bad review to ruin a career, especially if plagiarism was invoked.
I was aware that I was being profoundly ungenerous—miserly, small-minded—but that only made me more wretched.
“Oh, I go out,” I said too quickly, as a joke. “I’m constantly out.” No, of course I didn’t hang out in bars. I had been in my converted garage for the past fifteen years, working at the table with one short leg. And when I had gone out, it had been to attend my own events or the events and openings and premieres of my friends and peers. The bar was having trivia night and people were excited about that. They had time for that. I hadn’t planned on becoming this rarefied; I had just spent every waking moment trying to get across what life seemed like to me, only allowing undeniable things—the child, a bad case of the flu, hunger and thirst—to take me away from this trying. And apparently time had, meanwhile, been passing—great swaths of it, whole decades. Indoor smoking had been banned and this young man was leading me to a table outside. The air was perfectly warm. We drank tequila and I wondered if the upside-down triangle of his upper body—his bony but broad shoulders narrowing down to his small waist—was perhaps a classic proportion with a kind of ancient resonance. Something to do with Michelangelo’s drawings or Da Vinci or whoever it was. The Da Vinci code. Like if you measured the angles of his upper body would you discover those same measurements in the Bible or inscribed on a Greek vase and would they also correspond, if scaled up, to a larger, cosmological measurement, perhaps between stars? Celestial music—what was that? If I’d been at home, working, I’d pause to look it up. But, stunningly, I wasn’t at home working and I wouldn’t look it up and I didn’t really want to look anything up, ever again. We were sipping our drinks and talking; I was trying to explain what my work meant to me. How life, usually so frustratingly scattered and elusive, came under my spell; I could name each thing, no matter how obscure, and it would open to me as if it loved me. Working was a romance with life and like all romances always seemed on the verge of ending, was always out of my control. I said this last part half standing, with my arms grasping the air as if to catch a bird. I really got why people drank to unwind after work, this was great. I tried again to guess his secret passion.
<3
[...] as readers, we have the chance to see a few of these people, under unimaginable pressure, with chaos and violence everywhere around them, responding with transcendent and unforgettable moral beauty. These are not people born with special moral qualities, people who find it easy to be brave and honorable. We know them: we know quite well that they are just as irritable and selfish and lazy as we are. As Anna's husband tells her: 'no one found himself with courage ready-made, you had to acquire courage little by little, it was a long story and it went on almost all your life.' Ginzburg shows us the possibility of this courage, she bears witness to the possibility, and reading her work we know and believe also.