“Warped?”
“And they’re just writing it down and memorizing it like it’s what really happened . . .”
“You teach fiction, Janey.”
“So do you,” I insisted. “We don’t have any kind of accurate picture of the history that was made, say, yesterday, so I know for sure that whoever spins it however many years from now is making it up.”
“But you’ll be dead then.”
“So there won’t be anyone to correct them.”
“You don’t teach history when you teach Shakespeare?” he asked. “You don’t tell them about the printing press and the new settlements in the Americas and the plague and the influx of people in London?”
“I do, but only to show them what we don’t know. Besides, that’s not history; that’s background information.”
“You’re drawing awfully fine distinctions there.”
“Anyway, those are facts we know are true. We aren’t making those things up.”
“Can I just reiterate that you teach fiction?”
“Just because fiction is made up, doesn’t mean it isn’t true. What do we learn about life from Shakespeare’s history? Maybe Shakespeare was Catholic, maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he married willingly, maybe he didn’t. Maybe he loved his family, maybe he deserted them at the first opportunity. Maybe both. We know nothing from history. We learn what’s true from King Lear. Old age is frightening. It’s hard to recover from the feeling of betrayal even when you know you’re wrong. There are few things, even death, worse than madness, blindness, loss of power and respect and the love of your family. Storms in the world accompany storms of the soul. Both serve as powerful metaphors. Fiction is much more true than history. History is about other people. Fiction is about you.”
“You’re just using characters as models. So am I. It’s just what my characters did really happened. We learn from them the same way we learn from Lear. We try to honor what we admire and avoid what felled them. The particulars change but not the pattern, not the overriding—”
“Narrative?” I guessed.
“I admit nothing,” he said.
We sat and thought awhile, enjoyed the weather. Then we threw out the remains of lunch and set a place and time to run. As we were walking away from each other, I turned around. “Ethan, speaking of inevitable narratives, Katie met someone.”
“Oh, that’s great,” he said—because what else could he say?—but he may or may not have meant it. “Who is he?”
“His name is Peter. She met him at church.”
“What’s he like?”
“Haven’t met him yet. They have their first date tonight.” I’d had a text on my phone when I got out of class.
“Sounds pretty serious,” Ethan said. “See you tomorrow.” And I started home to find out just how serious it was.
Twenty-three
On Wednesday, I reported the whole thing to Ethan while we ran. For the first half mile or so, it felt like a betrayal, gossiping about Katie behind her back when Ethan wasn’t so much a mutual friend as her ex (by contrast, I’d also relayed the whole thing to Jason that morning over coffee without a second thought). In my defense, several things: (1) being witness to Katie’s love life was like being thirteen again, so why not act the part? (2) she was so high, I doubted she’d ever notice or care; (3) it is good to run and talk at the same time as it increases cardiovascular effort and ability; and (4) it was too much fun not to.
Peter had been on time, nearly to the second, and arrived in a tie with black and white patent leather shoes. Bearing flowers. He was cute, young, and obviously nervous, but he held his own against the three of us—Atlas screaming, Jill and I transfixed by those shoes. Katie had insisted on waiting upstairs so that she could make a grand entrance (sixty outfits later, she’d settled on a dress of Jill’s with a wide skirt that flowed cinematically as she swept down the stairs). She was furious with us by the time she hit the living room because we could not stop giggling. (“You guys are not easy on a first date,” Ethan broke in at this point. And I laughed, saying, “We were easy on you.”) She glared at us then turned to Peter, all smiles and glittering eyes, took the flowers, cooing practically, and handed them to me without a word, without even turning her eyes from him (as if I were the maid), and fairly floated out the door on his arm. They’d been out to dinner and to a movie, and we’d ordered Indian and rented one and were paused in the middle of it, just getting Atlas down, when Katie and Peter got home.
We barely inquired after their evening and ran upstairs. “Are they always so giggly?” we heard Peter ask but didn’t hear the answer. “They’re like my teenage sisters,” he said. The first thing she did—before she offered him something to drink, before she took off her shoes, before she dimmed the downstairs lights—was turn off the baby monitor we’d hidden in the corner. But lying on the floor in Atlas’s room, staring up at his mobiles and listening to his baby sleep, we could at least catch the tone. There was a lot of laughing. Then a lot of soft singing quiet talk. Then nothing.
When she finally made it upstairs, alone, at quarter past four in the morning, she found me and Jill sound asleep under six or seven baby blankets on the floor of Atlas’s room.
“Why are you guys sleeping on the floor?”
“Accident,” said Jill. “We were trying to spy on you. This room is closest. How was it?”
“So great,” said Katie, snuggling in with us, pulling over one of the blankets. “He is so great.” She was already falling asleep which suggested to me that she’d just woken up. “We talked for a really long time. Then he kissed me. Then we kissed for a really long time. And then we fell asleep. Then we woke up and he went home. We’re going out again tomorrow night.”
“You mean tonight?” said Jill.
“Yeah, tonight.” She smiled and turned over.
Jill and I went out into the hall. “Could just be NiCMO,” she said.
“Maybe.” I shrugged. “I’m going to bed.” I had to teach in a few hours.
“It’s true. It could just be NiCMO,” said Ethan when I finished my story. “We had NiCMO.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said, panting. It is hard to tell long stories while you run.
“You do?” Horrified.
“Of course.” NiCMO, for the uninitiated, is Non-Committal Make Out, Mormon-speak for hooking up. It differentiates itself from regular making out in that it holds no possibility of being The One. While this is in fact true for the vast majority of make-out sessions that occur on earth, most participants take that as a given or can at least usually make the distinction without naming it. Katie and Co. went ahead and specified. The Mormon church, which has strict rules against not only sex before marriage but also most kinds of touching (above or below the belt, above or below the clothes, even of oneself), doesn’t mind making out and even recognizes that sometimes you might want to do so just because it’s yummy, or at least many of its followers realize this. It’s a weird religion.
Wednesday night I had to grade the is-it-or-is-it-not-a-poem papers. This time, Peter arrived in jeans and a T-shirt, less nervous, easier with us. Atlas had a cold and was on and off weepy, even in Jill’s arms, but when Peter asked to hold him, he settled right down, nuzzled against him, and closed his eyes. Katie looked like she might cry. We chatted with Peter about school, about moving here, about home, his mission, his family, the youth picnic he and Katie were planning. He asked polite questions of us, gave polite answers back. Then they left, and Jill and I debriefed.