The Future's Open Wide

Chapter II

In the 15 years since I met Joe, I never once stopped thinking about him. Even now, all these years after I broke up with him via a one-night stand with his roommate, I wonder what he looks like, how he sounds, whether he’s happy, though I know that he is and that we wouldn’t have lasted because we were young and impetuous, and I did not believe, from the beginning, that we had a chance because we began as a one-night stand in a lie about who we were.

Once I had resigned myself to being the disappointing daughter that I was going to be to my parents, having sex became really easy. Maybe I was looking for comfort, and maybe I was never going to find it in a guy who was willing to wrap himself twice instead of having a conversation with me, but I was never alone, at least physically, unless I wanted to be. I was always in solitude, though, up until I met Joe. The intensity of the conversation and sitting with someone and feeling alive was a very powerful aphrodisiac, and all these years later, at the age of 34 and with two children and a husband, I feel his presence in my heart, even when I desperately want it gone.

Today is one of those days. I feel riveted and torn apart. Today I got the note he sent me five days ago via e-mail. He wanted to wish me and my family a very merry Christmas. He usually sends his notes on or around new year’s day, but this year he sent it three days before Christmas. He also wanted to send another picture of his son. I don’t see any resemblance of him in his son, although surely… surely, this is his son and must resemble him. His son bears a name that was on the list of names for my first child—no tremendous event, as this is a popular name enjoying a renaissance right now. I have no idea to whom he is married—the woman he was on-again, off-again with the last time I saw him, or some new woman with whom he was intimate on the sly. How can I know? He doesn’t tell me about her and I do not ask. His holiday greetings are short and to the point. “Hi, I haven’t heard from you in a while and thought I’d say hi. Have a great year! Joseph” No more “Love, Joey,” which hurts and puzzles me.

K. says it cannot possibly be true that I do not understand that he cannot possibly say that anymore. To which I respond, “Why can’t he?” If I felt like he would listen to my words, I would write to him and sign my note, “Love, Amy.” I shall always love him.He is on my heart. He is fused within me and is with me every day, though I try to stuff him out of my daily consciousness. He is a danger to my life and my children’s safety. So I do not send him notes, except when he sends me one. Even that is danger, because then I obsess over him, and how I might have hurt him, or how, worse, I may never have hurt him at all, never have been imprinted on his heart. But it has been years, and he sends me an annual note to invoke me to have a good year. Of course, he remembers me; I could not have imagined that we had a moment of shared experience in our youths that was powerful and big and not a little frightening. That was how I experienced the love I felt for him, and that was why I crushed it.

Once I confessed my sin of infidelity, even though fidelity had never been offered at the bargaining table, the three of us quibbled over the details, over the who did what and how it was and why it was and what would and would not come of it, and then, exhausted, the three of us went to breakfast. He wanted to know if I did anything more interesting, felt anything more enticing, than I did with him. Of course, the answer to that question was no because M. was not into me, he just wanted a taste, and frankly, I was not into M.; I just wanted to hurt Joe, to make him hate me. M. did not want me. I was not his type, never would be, didn’t care to be. He liked long, lithe women, ballerinas—not my body type, not my interest, and not in my nature to ever become one for someone who would tell me of his predilection for the dancer body when we later met, long after Joe had left for Vegas and during a weekend when I missed Joe fiercely. M. was never Joe. In economic terms, not a good substitute. I didn’t see M. after that weekend when he wanted me to dance for him but, instead, stripped for me in his ridiculous silk boxers and programmer’s geeky sex face. It just didn’t work for me.

These are the things I do not know, but wonder, about Joe:

Who is his mother?

Where did he grow up?

Where was his father?

Does he see his brother who lives in Phoenix and who lost a little boy many years ago?

Is he Irish, or Italian, or Catholic? Was he really an altar boy?

What did he look like as a boy?

Did Joe really kill someone, or was that more of the random minutiae that he made up and fed to me for fun?

Did he love me? Would he still if it were not a danger for him and the safety of his child?

Does he love her?

Does he miss me?

In his annual note to me that I read today, he tells me he has included another picture of his son, at a place I may remember. A place I may remember? I think of that pond in California I had to pass to get to his place the last time I saw him. Perhaps some place in Portland, the city he needed to leave? His apartment above Vaseline Alley? The park blocks? We only have so many places, most of them in Portland, because after he left, I only saw him three more times—once in Vegas, when I was driving through from Colorado to San Diego; once in L.A., where he and Christine lived in a small apartment down the street from The Viper Room, where River Phoenix had just died a few months prior; and once at his apartment in Marina del Rey when we were to meet for coffee—the apartment where he told me he wanted to give me a child because he thought I would be a good mother.

As I wait for the large image to download, its progressive scan coming in line by line, I wonder what this place is—there is no son, yet, only these pillars—and then I know. I know this archway, and I am seized. I cannot breathe for one tiny moment. This is the place where, on the first night I left the library with Joe to go for a motorcycle ride after we sat and talked at the Heathmann Pub for two hours, we rode at midnight. We went in the darkness and the cool spring night air through mazes of foot paths in wooded areas and arrived at this place in the dark, lit by the moon or the bright, clear night sky; I cannot remember. I only remember the detail of that wide-open sky and rose bushes. I thought, this place is beautiful; this must be what he does—to know this place, how to get here, how to say the right things and make a deeply sorrowful girl feel… strangely and suspiciously happy.

I watched him walk away from me, silhouetted against the darkness, me loitering near his motorcycle. I did not want to be left in that park in the middle of the night, and I did not know the person, only his name. He walked and then turned and held his hand out to me. I went to him. I took his hand, and we walked on the walkway of little smooth stones over water colored blue or white by submerged uplighting, and he held my hand, cold from the night and shaking because I couldn’t make it, nor any part of my trembling body, stop. He covered my hand and held it in his bomber jacket pocket as we walked along the pebbled corridor under those modern arches, and as we stood there for a second or an hour, I leaned into him and he wrapped himself around me and kissed me—my first kiss, the kiss I had anticipated and wondered about receiving throughout my adolescence, though by that time, I was no longer a virgin in the literal sense of the word—and, as the Modern English song performed by Nouvelle Vague says, I melted with him.

Gotta Get Out Of This Funk

Chapter I

Gotta get out of this funk. Yeah, it could be the weather and it could be that I have so much to do that I choose to do nothing, but the truth is, it’s just me. It wouldn’t necessarily be so threatening to have my head space looming in, but I know what my head can do and it’s not just a “crazy” thing. It has been nearly one straight month of rain, rain, rain—I can live with that. I’m a Washington girl and have lived with that all of my life, minus the time I’ve lived in California and Colorado. No, it is the “what-if” thoughts that rankle. What if I had stayed single? What if I had gone to university right out of high school and lived in a dorm and had life-long college friends? What if I had married someone more wealthy and my job was only to go to the gym and work out and have facials every day? What if I had some business prowess and built a successful corporation and made a gajillion dollars every year? What if I could compartmentalize my life to get a little more excitement out of it? What if I took the Dark Side out every once in a while to feed it?

Here’s the thing: I am afraid of the Dark Side. It’s not some schizo thing, it’s just that I quite like my dark side and I chose a life that is decidedly “lite.” It’s not filling, but it’s better for me. Every time I hear from Joey, it breaks my heart and makes me think of all these questions that lay dormant. What if I had moved to Las Vegas with him? These questions that are so much better left unasked, let alone unanswered. I never was the girl who asked him any questions, so I feel strange about wanting to ask them now. Too late, Chica. I chose my path, and it did not include him. So scared then, and now I’m not so much stuck, as I quite like my life, and not so much bored, as I hardly have time to do this sort of navel-gazing, but lacklustre. There. There it is. My life is so lacklustre that I must use the international English spelling of certain words just to mess with Microsoft Word’s desire to want to change it. No, I shout, no! You cannot change it. I change it back to the British “re” each time.

Where am I going with this?

About two weeks ago, when I was looking for information about North Carolina because I felt a certain desperation about wanting to know something about the place where Joey lives now, I went on Craigslist to see what kind of job prospects lie in the major cities there. There is nothing, or at least nothing on Craigslist. What do people do there? Wait for hurricanes? Practice honing the better Carolina dialect—not that hick sound from South Carolina? I popped back over to Seattle and started cruising jobs here, as I do regularly. I have always done this—whether I loved my job or hated it. I just like to know what else is out there. (I see a theme emerging here.) I wanted to see if there was any freelance work or glamourous (British spelling, notice that?) international telecommuting to supplement my income, which I could do by giving up the remaining hours of my day which I frivol away with sleep. There was nothing that was just waiting for me to take it. So I looked at the crap that people want to sell and the housing swaps to see if anyone from Tuscany or Seville wanted to give up tenancy of their own elegant domicile to live here. No one did. Then I cruised over to the Personals to see if anyone of the nanny’s age wanted to meet her. At the moment, it is easier for me to concentrate on her not having a social life than me. Very strange creatures looking for Strictly Platonic.

If I was going to look at freaky ads, I decided I might as well look at Casual Encounters. When I first moved to Seattle, I got The Stranger for this reason and this reason alone—to read and make fun of the freaky ad people, the people and their weird-ass kinks and their bizarre lifestyles requesting the assistance of some other interested party. I always wondered who that second or third party might be because I could not imagine meeting someone from an ad. How desperate do you have to be to meet people? Can’t you find them at work or at school like anybody else? So I deemed them all social retards and would pick up the weekly Stranger for my fix of l’etrange.

Anyway, back to the Casual Encounters. Casual Encounters on Craigslist begins with a disclaimer page that screens out Victorians and modern-day Christians (er, maybe not—aren’t they the wacky individuals with strange sexual predilections?) by announcing that some of the content a person over the age of 18 might see might be sexually explicit. From this screen, the user is but one click away from viewing said explicit content. One simple button that tells the Craigslist community that yes, I am over 18 and no, I’m not bothered by sexually explicit content releases and discharges Craigslist from any liability for molesting my moral fiber. This I also find hysterical.

I have to hand it to the folks who actually post what they want and what they’re looking to get in the course of the next 3 hours because the Internet has certainly taken strides that The Stranger never could. One woman is looking for a man to come over and have sex while her husband is away at Costco with his mom—eww! There are several ads from the same big, fat man looking for someone to have a no-strings-attached quickie with—really? No Strings Attached? Not even a thread? It doesn’t look like this guy is going to have much success and he thinks NSA is going to get what he wants for him? You’ve got to be kidding. The only way I could imagine a woman wanting anything with this guy would be if he promised her she could move into his trailer with him and he’d support her welfare ass for the rest of her life, or until he couldn’t stand it anymore and killed himself. But that’s just me. See what I’m talking about? My head space—so judgmental and evil. Why can’t we all just get along?

I cleaned out my linen closets this morning. Afterwards, I compiled a queen-size bed’s worth of baby stuff to go to either Baby Boutique or the Goodwill or the consignment shop. Then I went downstairs to our newly acquired family room/fitness room and moved the sofa and media center so that we could fit the two new machines in there—at least I hope we’ll be able to get that elliptical trainer and treadmill in there. At least one will fit, and I don’t want to get rid of the StairMaster or the Nordic Track. Another of my problems—never wanting to give up anything to get something else. Then I folded towels that don’t go in any of the bathrooms due to their color or texture, which, because of this, are relegated for use at the beach or to clean up spills or when the basement floods, like after a month of rain.

Feeling pretty good about my morning’s work, I went back up to my computer and decided to get some work done for work. Instead, I started wondering why Joey never called back and I knew that, whatever our history and whatever he’s doing now, we were never really an “us” and we will probably never be friends, which means I will probably never get to know what he’s thinking when he sends me random messages.

The key to this bug I have is to be open with A. about it. If I keep this from A., then I am on a slippery slope and it seems like only a matter of time before I’m in alleys shooting up heroin—just that close, so you can see my moral dilemma. Spare A., but lose myself in a lie of a life because of a secret so big that I am irritable and waiting for my next fix. It’s the first step to recovery, they say—admitting that you have a problem. So I tell A. I tell him in the kitchen two nights before I have my first conversation with Joey in four years. I tell him that I received an e-mail and that I’ve been obsessing over it. He goes about his business as usual. At least he isn’t reading the goddamned Wall Street Journal—that’s the worst, when I can’t get his attention and don’t know if he’s listening to what I’m saying because he doesn’t put the paper down. But he is doing the dishes and listening to whatever talk radio station he listens to when I’m not home because the sound of it is just noise to my ears and the hosts and callers are equally fetid. I don’t care what the subject is or what the call is about. If a radio host has a contrary and arbitrary and dictatorial sound to them, I know I’m not going to like it. I tell A. my dilemma even though this dreck is droning behind us. I tell him about the provocative e-mail. He thinks how nice it is that an old friend is staying in touch. To draw on the wisdom of Scooby-Doo, Awrrruh?

Okay, I will have to make this sound more like something pressing. So I tell him that I love Joey and have always loved Joey. He thinks how nice that I had a youthful romance that still carries with it good feelings. Mother of god, this guy should have been named Pollyanna. Let’s take it a step further. I tell him that I am consumed with this thought that he sent me that picture and I don’t know why—either to say, remember this and wasn’t that a nice time, or to say, fuck you, don’t you wish that was our kid under those arches, or for some other probably more innocuous reason that I have yet to think of, but the point is, I can’t stop thinking about what Joey’s doing and where he is and wondering what my life would have been like if I had gone ahead and followed him, but that I believe I made the right decision not to follow him.

Ah, finally. He looks like he is contemplating something I have said. He’s tracking this now. He can see that he has married a crazy girl and that she might be obsessive-compulsive, at least with anything other than managing piles of clutter. He can see that I am torn and have a dilemma. He can see that I am a girl who loves big and is vast of heart who thinks about things and is open about them and doesn’t keep secrets. He can see that the depth of affection and trust I have for him is enormous and that even if he doesn’t love me passionately, I embody passion and for this, he will always hold that long-lasting ember of love for me and admiration for my reckless ways and will bide his time while I cool my jets and he can outlast any crazy dilemmas I may have. I get that he is thinking all of this, but I guess incorrectly. When he finally speaks, he says, if you leave, leave the girls here.

Again with the Huh?

A., I say, don’t you get it? I am telling you this because I am not going to leave you… not for anyone else, that is. I might leave you for some other reason, but not for another man because my personal philosophy on trading men is different man, new shit. I prefer to deal with the shit I know than to figure out new shit. And I woudn’t leave you for a man I already knew because I don’t know him anymore and already made a decision a long time ago not to follow him, so please, please banish that thought from your head that I would leave you for some abiding love that is in no way grounded in any kind of reality. Okay, he says, and we hug. I feel like I have just kissed a boo-boo on one of my children, except that this is my life partner, well-chosen and very maddening.

Five phone calls: the first one, I called him on Friday after he sent his cell phone number. I thought he was still in California. He called me right back after we were disconnected. He was in a mall in North Carolina chasing his son around. He asked if I was still in Washington, and I said I would be until I was dead. What a response! Yeah, that’s sexy. I always say things with a smile on my face so they don’t sound so tragic, hopefully more comic, but geez. Still. I told him A. loves our house and wants to install a lift when we’re too old to drag ourselves up the 30 stairs to the front door. Okay, he now knows I’m still married to the same good guy he didn’t want me to marry 10 years ago. Then he had to go because they were going to find Mommy. He said “Mommy” with the same intonation that he uses on words that have unspoken meaning—like “lunch,” which I believe he uses as a euphemism for sex. Call me slow. He asked if my number was my cell phone number and told me he’d call me back.

He did call me back on Wednesday. I was just leaving tennis and had to finish setting up my plans with my tennis partner. He said, “You play tennis?” Yes, a little. Don’t you remember, you big thug? The last time I saw you, I suggested we go hit the ball around a little, but you wanted to stay in. What else is new?, he wants to know. Well, it’s January and I decided to get a jump on training for the triathlons I did last year. You did a triathlon?, he asks me. Yes, actually three of them. I don’t place nor am I competitive, but I’m doing them and they’re a lot of fun. Yeah, that’s great, he says. He sounds genuinely… what? Impressed? Surprised? Who’s to say?

What else is new?, he asks again. He does seem interested. It does not seem as though he’s just asking this to kill time while organizing his fil-o-fax. Oh, well, the girls keep me pretty busy. They’re energetic. I opened a preschool a couple of years ago, so they’re in preschool a few hours a week. Really? How much do you charge, he asks. I tell him. Wow, he says. What? That seems expensive? No, well, it depends on where you are. In L.A., two half-days a week was $500 a month, and here, it’s $160 a month for three days a week, he tells me.

What else is new?, he asks. I’m running out of stuff. I am a mom and own a business and am working out and playing tennis and have gone back to school and there is really, really nothing left, except that I am supremely vexed about his interest in me. I really want to know what is new with him. I don’t know anything about this guy, like how his life is, or why he keeps this tiny, little, ungraspable thread going with me all these years. I tell him my stuff, like how I’ve gone back to school for child development, and how I started my business doing tutoring in the afternoons. Amy and the high school boys, he says, bemused.

What? Geez.

Well, I’m no Mary Kay LeTourneau, I say, although I may consider using her marketing plan: do this trig problem, flash a little bra strap...

It is easy and awkward talking to this guy whom I only knew as Joey and now announces himself as Joseph. Who is Joseph? Surely I’m speaking to the elder Mr. Miller because the guy I knew was named Joey. When did “Joseph” happen?

He wants to make more money. He sold a crackerbox house in L.A. for nearly a million dollars and found a lovely big house on a 400-mile-circumference lake in a little town called Cornelius just about an hour north of Charlotte. His real passion would be to have a wine bar, which, I say, I can see, but then I’m embarrassed and tell him well, in some past life I could see that, because I haven’t known him at all for 15 years, and probably never knew him to begin with. So I just say, I think you’d be a genius at that and leave it at that. He says he wants to make more money because he’d like to spend more time with his son and go to preschool with him and hang out, but they are a single-family income household. Why?, I say, nearly sneering. I don’t know where it comes from, my judgment about this. I don’t own a self-editor, and things slip out. Part of me thinks maybe he is single again, but he was just last week going to find Mommy at the mall with his son, so I know that is not it. Then I think he is not working because she used to be some high-powered salesperson who traveled to New York and that is why he’s home hanging out and making phone calls, or why he didn’t give me a work number. But these are not the case.

I ask myself that same question every day, he responds. And I don’t touch this subject of her not working, not for a second.

Then another telephone line rings and he tells me to hold on, then comes back and says he has to take this call and will call me back. The next morning, he calls me. Miss Baker, he says, using the voice I am very familiar with but find it curious that he is so familiar with me. Mr. Miller, I say back. But the thing is, I am subbing in my preschool class for a sick teacher. I cannot talk and I tell him I will call him back in an hour-and-a-half. I do, and he acts peculiar. Is this a bad time?, I ask. Yes, he says, again with the loaded inflection. And I quickly remove myself from the call and then nothing. Ten days of nothing. It is heartbreaking that I give a rat’s ass about having some contact with this guy, now man, Joseph, née Joey.

So for ten days I have been gazing at my navel, working, re-vamping my web site, fielding calls for early enrollment for preschool, taking in new tutoring students, assessing current students, saying good-bye to students ready to move on. I have re-hired a former employee, gone to the mountains to ski but didn’t because of avalanche danger, and been a bit apoplectic about my car, a goddamned German job that never fails to cost a minimum of $1200 just to fix some minor hose. In other words, my life “lite” keeps plugging along.

It will be interesting to see how this year plays out. I do want to be content. Mostly I am. I am every year, except I wasn’t during the 3rd and 7th years of marriage, but that’s another song for another day. My life is good. I have absolutely no call to complain, except for the things I leave undone, and thank goodness for the confession of sins that I get to do once a quarter or so when I go to church because that is my favorite line in the absolution of sins:

Most merciful God,
we confess that we have sinned against you
in thought, word, and deed,
by what we have done,
and by what we have left undone.
We have not loved you with our whole heart;
we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.
We are truly sorry and we humbly repent.
For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ,
have mercy on us and forgive us;
that we may delight in your will,
and walk in your ways,
to the glory of your Name. Amen.

Free at last, I think, and exhale.