By this time we’d hiked to the top of something—a ridge or hill, not a proper mountain—and so we paused and stood together for a moment, silent, looking out. Also, Laura said, I didn’t realize how many times he’d told the story. I should have known, how polished it was. The practiced hesitations. I thought he was opening a door. And that on the other side of the door was—intimacy, I guess. Only it was just a room. A crowded one. Laura made a sound like she’d started to laugh but forgotten how partway through. I looked at her. Since we’d reached the top of the hill or ridge I had only been half-listening, had been thinking, instead, about what it would feel like to push Laura over the edge. I mean literally. Not that I was angry at her. Just, I’d been having these kinds of thoughts. On the freeway, looking at the bumper of the car in front of me, at the low fence separating asphalt from dirt and then rocks and then ocean. Thinking the word temptation. On balconies and sidewalks, my mind flipping back and forth between jump and push.
It might be worth mentioning that at that moment I hated Laura, was glad her marriage had fallen apart, that her ceaseless trust in the world had at last been proven foolish. Finding friends in every city she moved to, marrying a man on the strength of what, who knows, everywhere manufacturing happiness, happiness, happiness. But her luck had run out. Her story was still the better story, but finally, thank god, she was miserable in it.
Also that I’d started involuntarily imagining what it would be like to fuck every man I came into contact with. What it would be like if the power went out and everyone else in the room were raptured and we just had to do it right there on the conference room table for the sake of, you know, humanity, his hand in my hair, pulling, and me opening my mouth to protest, the words dying in my throat. Involuntarily, right. I was working in HR at this point, is that irony. I should know, that PhD I didn’t finish was in English lit. Probably this was connected to the fact that I’d started watching porn. Every morning, right after taking my basal body temperature, like putting a thermometer in my vagina gave me the idea. Like I couldn’t think about making a baby without thinking about making a baby. In retrospect I think I was mad at my husband. Is that too obvious? Remarkable how hard it is for women to admit they’re angry. Not annoyed or upset or irked or miffed or any sentiment that might be captured in a text message that ends in a series of exasperated question marks. Angry.
The fantasies I kept having, I hated not the form of them but the content. Not that they were pornographic but that they were clichéd, that even the sex I let myself imagine was boring. Another cliché: my husband was having an affair. No, not another cliché, a lie. Actually I cheated, and not on a conference room table post-rapture, in a hotel room, there’s the cliché, up in the city, San Francisco. Then I came home and told my husband. This was later.
Up on the ridge or hill I turned to Laura and said, “Why did you tell me that story?”
“I think,” she said, “I thought I was telling you a story about how we fell in love.”
We started back down the path. “What do you think the story is about now?” I was again in front of her and so had to turn around to ask this question.
“Sometimes I think it’s a story about being tricked. Not that he did it on purpose, but it wasn’t accidental, him confiding in me, just then.” Of course every confidence is a kind of manipulation. Or calculation. I trust you with this. Or maybe it’s I want you to think that I trust you with this.
“And other times?”
“A low bar. I’m not—I mean, your mother dies and your father abandons you, I’m not saying that’s not rough. But the man tells me one sad, you know he shares one feeling—not even, he sort of implies emotional depth, and I’m ready to marry him. We ask too little. Or I do, anyway.”
* * *
—
We got to my car and I drove Laura back to my parents’ house. She asked me if I wanted to come in and I said I didn’t, But tell them I said hello. Then I drove back up north, to Marin County, which was where we lived. You know Marin County, clogs and herbs in window boxes and cleaning with white-wine vinegar. Inconveniencing ourselves, yes, but only if we were guaranteed an aesthetic payoff. Good intentions, sure, but when have they ever been enough. And my herbs were dying. Some wanted water and some wanted sun and some wanted shade and a good talking-to and I couldn’t bring myself to care which ones were which. Anyway even the aesthetics we could barely afford, how we thought we were going to manage with a child I have no idea. When we split I moved in with my parents, my husband had to get a roommate.
Two things Laura said: the part about speaking desire and also the part about the low bar. I started thinking about how I’d told John, that was the future then ex now, I wanted a baby, and he’d said Okay, like that, no conversation just Okay, like it was my decision, how endlessly supportive he was every month when I got my period, never angry, never sad, like it was something that was happening not to us but to me. And then I thought about how what I wanted was not a baby, not a baby with John, what I wanted was to go into the glass-fronted cabinet we’d bought at an antiques fair and restored, John was handy, he had that going for him, all those summers working construction, and remove the tea service his parents had gotten for him, for us, a wedding present, Limoges china, floral pattern, delicate handles, those rims so thin you wanted to bite right through them, and smash it, smash every single piece. Twelve cups and twelve matching saucers and the teapot, bulbous, mocking me. A bizarre gift, his parents weren’t particularly rich or particularly British, something they said they thought I’d like. Maybe because I was, am, a snob.
So I opened the cabinet and I took the teapot out but then instead of smashing it I set it down on the ground and I removed its dainty lid and I unzipped my jeans and I pulled down my underwear and I pissed in it. Wiped the spray away with the bottom of my T-shirt, put the lid back on. Lifted the teapot, put it back in the cabinet, closed the cabinet’s glass-fronted door. In my hand the china felt, just slightly, warmer.
The piss stayed in the teapot for a year, my last year with John. Then I had my affair and I got my divorce and I gave John the teapot and now I live somewhere else with my kid. He’s a boy. I haven’t seen Laura in years.
San Francisco, 2012
“Twice a month.” A smirk. “Maybe three times. Three days, two nights. Usually Tuesday to Thursday, though sometimes I’ll pull a Monday–Wednesday, a Wednesday–Friday.” I was on the bed, he was on a gray armchair. “Wednesday–Friday, that’s the shit. Thursday’s the weekend but with plausible deniability. It’s weekend pussy but no missed soccer games, no wife on my case about date night, no you don’t spend time with me, no you don’t love me anymore. None of that crap.” He’d loosened his tie and unlaced his shoes and he was drinking scotch from the minibar.