“They are when they don’t have a choice.”
“There’s always a choice. You could chase a whale obsessively until it killed you and everyone else. Or you could chase it for a month or so and then give up. Or you could stay home with a book and care about something besides whales.”
“You could but Ahab couldn’t. You couldn’t if you’d spent most of your life at sea, afloat, homeless, in danger, unloved. If you had no skills on land. If a whale had eaten your leg.”
“Then I wouldn’t be a real person. I’d be an allegorical figure.”
“There’s less difference than you think,” she said.
“I’m just saying real people choose love or at least laziness, not hate, not anger, not fanatical whale chasing. The difference between real people and allegorical figures is we have choices.”
“Not really,” she said. “If you were in a book and your best friend got pregnant, you’d have to raise the baby. You couldn’t leave even though you hadn’t been stupid enough to get pregnant. You’d put your life on hold. You’d sit around all afternoon reading the baby’s errant father’s favorite book aloud even though you should be at the library doing your own work. You wouldn’t have any choice. The frameworks of narrative leave no option for deserting your best friend and her out-of-wedlock baby.”
“Sure they do. I could have left her and her baby, made my way in the world, and looked back with regret once right before my marriage, once when my first son died tragically of the plague, and once on my deathbed, having lived an otherwise rich and successful life.”
“Only if you were a man.”
“Only if I were fiction,” I said gently. “I had a choice, Jill. We all did. We had choices all along the way. We still do. I have stayed not because I had to, not because of the bounds of literature, not even because of the bounds of friendship. This, given the circumstances and my infinite options, is what I choose.”
“Or at least that’s the story you tell,” said Jill.
Eighteen
Meanwhile, Katie was suffering her own narrative constraints. Feminist narrative theory notes that for most of literary history there’s been an imbalance between men’s and women’s stories. Male characters go out into a world of infinite possibilities. Female characters either get married or die. This makes enlightened female readers such as ourselves pissed off. But however much we deconstruct the narrative, however vigilantly we plow and apply the theory and read with our skeptical, over-educated eyes, still some lessons are hard to fully internalize, and the dream of happily-ever-after love, in real life and in literature, dies hardest of all. Which seems about right I guess. Because really, what’s better than true love? We mock the concept. We bemoan what often must be done on the way to a love whose truth and timelessness turn out to be merely veneer. It’s cheesy to talk about. But when it’s good, there’s nothing better.
Something you had been looking for that long, you’d think you would recognize it when you saw it; you’d think it would be obvious. Katie’s problem wasn’t that she was in love with a non-Mormon, and it wasn’t that she was dating someone she wasn’t in love with. It was that she couldn’t tell yet and had to keep trying to find out. Their second date, lunch in the food court at Uwajimaya, our Asian mega-grocery store, had gone very well. Ethan had been happy to share everything which is something Katie insists upon—she hates eating her own meal. They had tuna sashimi, miso soup, pad thai, and tofu summer rolls. They had seaweed salad, avocado curry, and a Vietnamese sandwich. For dessert, they had cream puffs and strawberry mochi that tasted like bubblegum. Katie also likes to have lots of options. They walked around and looked at the rows and rows of fish tanks, at the novelty snacks in pastel packaging with Japanese descriptions they could only guess about, at more receptacles for saki delivery than you ever imagined could exist. They held hands. She came home laden with leftovers and beaming. Only Katie could make a date of going to the grocery store.
“We’re going miniature golfing on Friday night,” she reported. “After he gets his cast off.”
“You’ll freeze,” I said.
“Are you twelve?” Jill said.
“Are you going to the beach?” I said. “There’s no miniature golf around here.”
“There’s one in Ballard.”
“Is it indoors?” I asked.
“How did you talk him into that?” Jill asked, incredulous, nasty even.
Katie didn’t even notice. “It was his idea,” she said and danced out of the room.
Miniature golf also went very well—they dressed warmly—and, better still, loosened her tongue on all matters Ethan. I’m not sure what made her decide that she could talk about it without making it too real, without jinxing it, without confronting all the questions without answers, but something did. Miniature golf loosened her tongue in the other way too. They made out on a bench near the hole with the whale. They made out near the hole with the clown and the one with the castle. They went out for ice cream after miniature golf and made out in the car in the parking lot. Then they went to Joe Bar to get hot cocoa and warm up from the ice cream, and they made out there as well.
“He’s very sweet,” Katie reported, “and very . . . soft. And he smells nice.”
“What are you doing?” said Jill.
“He’s really smart. Some of the research he’s doing overlaps with yours,” she said to me.
“He’s not going to convert for you,” said Jill.
“You’ll both really like him. He’s funny and so sweet too. He sucks at miniature golf and wasn’t even embarrassed about it. And we can talk about anything. I’ve never dated someone before who I could tell about my work and he understood let alone cared.”
“And you’re certainly not going to convert for him,” said Jill.
“We like the same music. We like the same books. We like the same movies. We even like the same ice cream except I had to get sorbet because of the lactose, but back when I used to eat ice cream, I liked the same kind as he does.”
“Well that’s certainly more important than God,” said Jill.
“You can’t ruin this for me, Jill,” Katie finally snapped and stormed out of the room.
“You know she has to work through this on her own,” I said to Jill. “Why are you torturing her?”
“I’m not torturing her. She’s torturing her,” said Jill.
I took Atlas and Uncle Claude for a walk so I could call Nico to get a male opinion. And because I was missing him. Nico has this theory about dating that in order for it to work you have to be two things: soul compatible and actually compatible. You have to be attracted to each other and have chemistry and desire and desperation to be together and rip each other’s clothes off and all that, but you also have to wake up on a Sunday morning and, having dispensed with the sex, want to spend the rest of the day doing the same things. A little bit of compromise will always be necessary, but it should be pretty minimal.
“Like us,” Nico explained, as if this were the first time I’d heard this theory rather than the eightieth. “We were totally soul compatible and could spend hours at a time just gazing into each other’s eyes, but after that, we wanted to spend a free day doing the same things—going to the park or having coffee or kayaking or hiking or going to shows or whatever. It wasn’t like I wanted to go out rocking every night and take drugs, but you wanted to stay home and read and be in bed by nine-thirty. Or I wanted to hunt endangered wolves while you went to Greenpeace meetings.”