Chapters (24)
He blew up then. This is so like you, he said. Also for the umpteenth time. He said, You are impossible.
This is so like you. Everything that bothered him, everything that went wrong between us, was always so like me.
It was so like me not to have made him happy. So like me to have driven him away. To have forced him to seek comfort in somebody else’s arms—that was so fucking like me.
He actually said.
Yelled, in fact.
Imagine the young couple exchanging bewildered looks. Why is she telling us all this?
Or why not imagine them kind. Forgetting their fight, putting aside their own troubles to listen. Quel est ton tourment?
A folie à deux was how my ex described what was happening between my friend and me.
He washed his hands of us.
Crazy lady. Talk about your biggest fear. Crazy old lady with her bags on a park bench. Blessing things, cursing things. That kind of woman’s story. A fate my own mother barely escaped. I should get up and go now. The ice cream is melting. The fish will spoil. But my head is light. I’m afraid if I stand up I’ll be dizzy. Panic strikes. What is happening here?
The man with his broom and dustpan, the feeder of squirrels and birds have both moved on. The French couple (oh good: they must have made up, he has his arm around her, her head is on his chest) are moving on.
What is happening? My heart throbs with fear. Soon it will end, this fairy tale. This saddest time that has also been one of the happiest times in my life will pass. And I’ll be alone.
Blessed are they that mourn.
What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about, said Benjamin.
I have tried. I have put down one word after the other. Knowing that every word could have been different. As my friend’s life, like any other life, could have been different.
I have tried.
Love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice—
What does it matter if I failed.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to Joy Harris and to Sarah McGrath.
I am also deeply grateful to the Ucross Foundation, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the James Merrill House Writer-in-Residence Program, and the MacDowell Colony for their generous support.
CREDITS
Quote: Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: HarperCollins, 2009).
Quote: Jules Renard, The Journal of Jules Renard, trans. and ed. Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget (Portland, Ore., and Brooklyn, N.Y.: Tin House Books, 2008).
Quote: Inger Christensen, The Condition of Secrecy, trans. Susanna Nied (New York: New Directions, 2018).