You should never be in a hurry if you can help it. It’s bad for everything. Bad for the stomach, the spleen, the skin. Especially bad for the joints. The knees and ankles. Rushing isn’t healthy at all.
Eventually the old man drove me to his house outside Taupo and he told me that I could go waterskiing and hang gliding and kayaking because there was a lake nearby and people in that lake did things like that, but I didn’t tell the old man that I didn’t want to ski or glide or yak because that was not the kind of person that I was and I was not on an adventure and I was not a tourist and I was just a person. I smiled and said,
Oh, that sounds nice,
and he said,
It is, it’s nice, it’s a nice place. I’ve lived here for about thirty years and it’s very nice.
I woke at four the next morning in the old man’s guest bedroom, which was actually not a guest bedroom but the abandoned room of his daughter: pink quilts, pink walls, gymnast trophies, and a dusty dollhouse. I had slept in my clothes so I just got up and put my shoes on and left and walked far.
11
How funny (or not funny) that the old man (all alone in his four-bedroom farmhouse on the edge of a dried-up orchard with a garage full of small engine parts for the plane he’d never built) had a life that had gotten up and run away from him (his daughters in other countries and last names, his wife forgetting everything, his grandson in some other dimension, his apple trees diseased and fruitless, and his incomplete engines rust-thick) while I, instead, had been the thing running from my whole life.
The sky was brightening slowly as I walked into Taupo, past a parking lot full of boats, down a highway just east of the lake, and though I can sometimes think back and romanticize this moment, the sheer morning glow, the cloudless sunrise, I know that all I was really thinking about in that objectively beautiful moment was whether I’d even had a choice when it came to leaving my husband, and whether we are, like Ruby had once said we were, just making decisions based on inner systems we have little to no control in creating—and I thought of that professor who became my husband and I thought of the sensation that came after he put a hand on my shoulder, a sensation that had turned me more human, put me in contact with what I think I was supposed to be feeling, and how it allowed me to be destroyed by the leaving of Ruby because being occasionally destroyed is, I think, a necessary part of the human experience. Before he put his hand on my shoulder I suspected that somewhere in me or near me was the appropriate human reaction for that moment and after he put his hand on my shoulder the appropriate human reaction made itself evident, and when he touched my shoulder, he also seemed to have come into contact with the emotional reality that he needed to experience. We both cried and the fluorescent light tinted our skin blue and I could see right through his skin to a vein in his face, a tiny blue vein on his forehead made bluer in the blue light and we held hands—it somehow made sense to hold hands with this stranger in ways it had never made sense to hold the hand of any other stranger—and Mother came back in and sat beside me and put a hand on my shoulder and nothing happened, nothing changed, nothing felt better, because she didn’t have the same effect on me that this professor had on me and I didn’t know why that was then, but I am coming nearer to understanding it now. Some people make us feel more human and some people make us feel less human and this is a fact as much as gravity is a fact and maybe there are ways to prove it, but the proof of it matters less than the existence of it—how a stranger can show up and look at you and make you make more sense to yourself and the world, even if that sense is extremely fragile and only comes around occasionally and is prone to wander or fade—what matters is that sometimes sense is made between two people and I don’t know if it’s random or there is any kind of order to it, what combinations of people work the best and why and how do we find these people and how do we keep these people around, and I don’t know if it’s chaos or not chaos but it feels like chaos to me so I suppose it is.
My mother looked at me, her only surviving and previously not-prone-to-weeping daughter now all wet-faced with this man in a poorly cut suit, and she put her hand out to him and said,
Ruby’s mother; I’m Ruby’s mother
, and he shook it, then Mother got up as if that was the last thing she had to do and she left and didn’t tell me where she was going and I didn’t care where she was going because I was in a more human state—I was making sense to myself—I was making sense to this man and we were making sense to each other. We went to a diner and tried to eat but couldn’t, so we mostly sat in silence and a woman came around refilling our coffee to a constant brim and we just held each other’s hands and we seemed to know something that we had not previously known.
In that dark autumn and even darker winter we kept meeting for coffee, meeting in parks and plazas and diners and having long hugs and before this I had not been the type of person to want to hug a person, but now I didn’t even think of who I had previously been and what I had previously done because now the only thing that made sense was our shaking chests pressed together because when we were together we were alive and human in a way we had not found in other parts of life, and we would spend hours sitting on benches in cold parks until it got dark and we would go and eat something together and we did this many days in a row, then after a few months we went to his apartment while it was snowing and we fucked like our lives depended on it, like every life on the planet depended on it, like the concept of death depended on it, like the state of being a human, and being alive, in general, depended on our fucking. And this went on for a while and I became a haver-of-authentic-emotions, an openhearted, well-adjusted, and thriving person, a dependable employee, a woman who could go out to a deli and order a sandwich and eat it and read the newspaper like a grown woman without thinking of the sentence
I am being a grown woman, eating off a plate, and reading the news
, because I was not an observer of myself, but a be-er of myself, a person who just
was
instead of a person who was almost.
For a year or so I thought that was how it would always be, that I had achieved some plane of existence that was better than the one I’d been on previously and there was no going back, but I was wrong and there was going back and I went back, I went back and forth, and forth and back again—
I would sometimes think of my husband smiling and the thought of him smiling would make me smile but hours later I would think of my husband again and I wouldn’t smile—I’d think,
Husband, what do you think you’re smiling for, there’s nothing to smile about
, and I would think that wasn’t the kind of thought that I wanted to have, but I
had
had it, and then I couldn’t think of my husband smiling anymore because every time I thought of him he was frowning a pissed-off frown and later I would think,
Husband, please smile again
, and sometimes, after a while, the thought of my husband would smile again and I would think,
Oh, good, we’re fine, we are human, we love each other like adults should, we are grown people.
And this went on for some time and sometimes it was easier to keep the thought of my husband smiling and sometimes it was harder to keep the thought of my husband smiling. As the years went on I sometimes could have sworn that the existence of my husband and the whole complicated mess of him in my life was everything that was wrong with being alive and if I only extracted myself from him everything might go back to making sense the way it had when we had been new to each other. If he was no longer a part of my life then the fact that he was no longer a part of my life would be
new
and maybe the newness was what had made me make sense to myself—not him, another human, just fallible and breakable and not capable of creating redemption—because that’s the thing: people can’t really redeem people and I don’t know what redeems people, what keeps people good, what keeps people in the sense-making part of being a human instead of the senseless, the unwell, the wildebeests that everyone has—because we all have them and there is a part of every human brain that just can’t bear and be, can’t sit up straight, can’t look you in the eye, can’t sit through time ticking, can’t eat a sandwich off a plate, can’t read the newspaper, can’t put on clothes and go somewhere, can’t be married, can’t keep looking at the same person every day and being looked at by the same person every day without wanting to make him swallow a tiny bomb and set that bomb off and make him disappear, go back in time and never get near this man who is looking at you and living with you and being so happy to just love and be loved and we all sometimes want to walk away like it never happened.
Isn’t everyone on the planet or at least everyone on the planet called me stuck between the two impulses of wanting to walk away like it never happened and wanting to be a good person in love, loving, being loved, making sense, just fine? I want to be that person, part of a respectable people, but I also want nothing to do with being people, because to be people is to be breakable, to know that your breaking is coming, any day now and maybe not even any day but this day, this moment, right now a plane could fall out of the sky and crush you or the building you’re in could just crumble and kill you or kill the someone you love—and to love someone is to know that one day you’ll have to watch them break unless you do first and to love someone means you will certainly lose that love to something slow like boredom or festering hate or something fast like a car wreck or a freak accident or flesh-eating bacteria—and who knows where it came from, that flesh-eating bacteria, he was such a nice-looking fellow, it is such a shame—and your wildebeest, everyone’s wildebeest, just wants to get it over with, can’t bear the tension of walking around the world as if we’re always going to be walking around the world, because we’re not, because here comes a cancer, an illness, a voice in your head that wants to jump out a window, a person with a gun, a freak accident, a wild wad of flesh-eating bacteria that will start with your face.
But my husband before he was Husband, being around him did, for a while, make me forget about my wildebeest. We walked around the city holding hands and we did a good deal of reflexive smiling and we often kissed and it felt like drugs that are too strong to legally exist outside of a body and there was that night the professor who became my husband smiled at me in the dark and I could see the pale white glow of his teeth and I thought there would never be anything better than seeing the pale white glow of his teeth through the dark on this night after we decided to get married and for at least a few minutes it made perfect sense and I believed that he had redeemed me and in a way he had and he did—but I don’t know why the wildebeests kept coming back, throwing all their angry weight around and making all those sweet, human, cracked-open, genuine, well-adjusted feelings go away, but they did go away—why did they go away?—I would like them not to go away and I would like to go back to being or feeling redeemed by him, by the white glow of his teeth in the dark, by our skin against each other—
What are you thinking?
he asked me that night with his teeth, and I thought about what I was thinking about and I worried that I was slipping away from making sense, but I gripped hard on that sense and said,
Oh, nothing, just how I love you
, and I twisted my toes under the sheets and told myself to be a woman who lives normally, being loved and loving—and I could be her—couldn’t I? Couldn’t I?
12
After Taupo and some cars, I got to Wellington and I got all the way to the ferry station and I stared at it. I remembered what someone said once about traveling, that sometimes the body moves somewhere too quickly for the soul and the soul is taking its sweet-ass time to catch up because the soul is not on speaking terms with the body but regardless, the body is a lonely animal without the soul, so I thought, maybe it is time for me to sit very still and wait for the soul and I understood how melodramatic that was but I decided not to care because, after all, someone else had said it first and even though I couldn’t remember exactly who it seemed that they were very old or European or both—someone somehow trustworthy.
I walked to a hostel and tried to pay for a room with a card and the girl behind the counter seemed embarrassed when it wouldn’t go through a third time—
Oh, it’s probably my fault
—so I paid for a night with one of the traveler’s checks I’d brought to give me a false sense of having my shit together. I only had a few hundred dollars in checks because a false sense of having my shit together only cost a few hundred dollars. I left my backpack in my room and walked into the city, beside a museum, past a bank, past a library with wide windows. Businesspeople strolled around, looking for business.
I stepped into a nearly empty pub where the bartender was wiping the counter, leaning into his flexed arms, a swirl of black hair on his head like a cartoon of a mechanic in some imagined past. He seemed to immensely enjoy being himself, fashionably morbid, nostalgic for an era in which he was still dead. At the end of the bar was a woman who was maybe my age or younger. From the waist up she was waifish and pale, but her legs were gigantic, muscular logs—proportionally absurd, and I imagined taking her to a park where she could lie on the ground and I could nap on her legs, thick as mattresses as they were. It is a strange thing to want, the sexless bodily comfort of a stranger, but her legs seemed to be as long as a door and one was bent to her chest and the other dangled below like all this leg was just too much for her and there was something comforting about that surplus and I was low on comfort, on anything comfortable. A man with a bloated neck stared down the girl the way a dog stares down a steak.
Up close the bartender’s face was boyish and pained, so much so I felt like his mother when I looked at him, and it was unbearable to see him so unhappy after all that I had gone through to bring him into the world. This was not a convenient feeling to have when all I wanted was to order a sandwich and beer. I took a stool facing away from the girl and pushed my bizarre feelings away for long enough to order and I got out a book to avoid looking at the bartender and as I read I half dreamed that the bartender asked me to read aloud to him, and so in my half dream, I did. At first he laughed at the right parts, he saw the quiet tragedy of
Mrs. Bridge
and I began to think that he had just the right measure of unhappiness and dissatisfaction with life to be someone I could get along with. In my half dream the bartender smiled and we made occasional, comfortable eye contact as I read, but then my fantasy turned sour, and he stopped laughing at any of the funny parts, stopped reacting entirely. He looked around for someone to pour a beer for and seemed dismayed when there was no one. He exhaled visibly. He cracked his knuckles.