You meet Michael when you are fifteen. You meet at a religious youth conference, a protest, a coffee house. He is older and has a girlfriend who isn’t as friendly as he is. He is a teller of stories. He tells about his upbringing in D.C. in the dangerous early nineties, about the first girl he fell in love with, about moving to West Virginia with his father and buying a gun after a terrible thing happened to his younger sister. You exchange telephone numbers and he calls first.
He is a graphic design major at a school in the city where you live. Pittsburgh. You think that he is incredibly cool. He has an apartment, a great music collection, broad shoulders. He calls and says things like, Shall we meet at The Grind and reminisce about the glory days of the Klingon empire? At fifteen, you think that he is a strange agent. You don’t appreciate his quirky phrases. Years later, as a senior in college, as you are taking notes, considering writing something about him, you will think back and find his trekky tendencies endearing.
You meet him at The Grind the week before leaving for college. He has brought a pack of clove cigarettes to celebrate the occasion. He tells you that you are going to be one hell of a woman. He buys you a pot of your favorite kind of tea. You promise to keep in touch, knowing that you have the capacity of insincerity for the sake of convenience. You are leaving. New York awaits.
He sends you mix tapes which you listen to on your head phones late at night when you have papers to write. You do this for a number of reasons:
1) Your small roommate with the fantastic proboscis sleeps as quietly as a bandsaw.
2) You are homesick.
3) The tapes are really good.
4) Four.
You stop at four, delete the list from your otherwise blank computer screen and try to formulate a thesis for the paper due tomorrow at noon. You climb into bed and listen to the music, moving in and out of sleep until the sun comes up.
During your sophomore year, you stop returning his calls and forget to send him birthday mail. You have met someone. Pierce: You think that you love him and he has made you stupid. Rather, he facilitates your insincerity, cultivates your saccharine lies. He offers you a clumsy-looking diamond ring and you stupidly accept. Stupid.
 * |
Michael still has the girlfriend that he had when you first met, Agatha. Michael and Agatha and you and Pierce break up during the same holiday season. You call one another. He’s so depressed, he tells you, he’s eaten half a pumpkin pie today. It’s ten in the morning, you think to yourself. You, on the other hand, haven’t had a thing since Thanksgiving dinner when you choked down a few spoons of turnips to please your grandmother. It’s been three days for you, four for him, since the breakups. Your mother brings a tray of food to your room and a funny magazine. You love her but want neither of the offerings. You try to interest your chinchilla in the turkey soup. She burrows in her dust, shakes off your advances. The only thing that you want is the phone when he calls. Michael.
You go back to school. Call him from New York almost every night for the rest of the semester. He’s like a brother, you think, though you have never had one. But he begins to tell you things, that if you weren’t so far away... and then he sighs, coughs, or you change the subject. One night when you are feeling particularly low, he tells you that you are beautiful.
| * |
On a Tuesday, in your Victorian Literature class your heart begins to pound and you feel your throat close up. The teacher is lecturing on the implications of Jane’s escape to the heath. You slide your homework onto his desk and rush out. Back in your dorm room, you call your mother, cry, and then fall asleep. You wake up the next day, glad that whatever had come over you has passed. You don’t know that it has only begun. The panic attacks keep coming. You combat them with wine, a boy on campus who is interested in giving you attention, and phone calls to Michael. Still, they come and you constantly feel as though you are about to break, as though some demon has taken a pickaxe to your most vulnerable fault line. There is a map of the world in your room. Take it down. Now is not the time to think about plate tectonics.
| * |
You go home for the summer. Evaluations from your teachers arrive in the post. You did surprisingly well for being a wreck. Perhaps it’s not insincerity, you think to yourself, perhaps it’s fraud. Take a shot of vodka and go to bed. Quit your job. Cry in the hammock in your mother’s courtyard. Become a cliché: go to therapy dressed in expensive heels and a vintage dress to talk about how your parent’s divorce ruined your life. Cry, accept tissues from your shrink. Now that you are terrified, you have lost your capacity for insincerity. Cry harder when this becomes clear to you.
Sometime in the center of the summer, you receive a thick package of papers from England. Last fall you applied to spend your junior year there. The program of your choice has accepted you. Oxford. Your parents want you to go. Sit you down, say You must. You look at them, here in the same room together, and understand that this is no small potatoes. Cry. It’s pathetic how much saline you waste this summer. You wish they would just leave you alone. You would rather have nothing than all of this, you think. You would rather have small potatoes. An ex-boyfriend of yours once spent an hour talking about how you can make bootleg vodka out of potatoes. You wish that you had taken notes.
Go to the courtyard of your mother’s apartment building, her cordless phone in the pocket of your oversized shorts. Call Michael. Two days later he is there with you in the courtyard. He has brought a bottle of port and a pack of your favorite kind of smokes. You tell him how scared you are.
I’m not going, you say. I am not ready and they can’t make me.
| * |
You know that they can.
He gets up and tells you to come with him. You follow him out of the courtyard and down the lamp lit street to his car. You stand there with sidewalk beneath your bare feet wondering what this is all about. He opens the trunk and pulls out a baseball bat, tells you to close your eyes. You comply. When you sense that he has lifted the bat you flinch and open your eyes. See, he says, you sensed danger and you naturally protected yourself. You punch him in the shoulder. Michael drops the bat and grabs you. You hug him back.
You knew I wasn’t going to hurt you and I think you know that England won’t kill you either. When he leaves that night, he kisses you on the top of the head and says, Sleep the sleep of the just. You love him for that.
| * |
You go to England. But that’s not really what this story is about. The following information, however, is appropriate: You take long walks nearly every day and the panic subsides a little.
You come back from England. It has been a year. You spoke with Michael only a few times. The connections were always less than perfect and it was hard to find times when you were both awake and available. During the year he has gotten a job and moved out of state. He comes to visit when you return. Sure I’ll visit, he says, it has been a long time since we have reminisced about the glory days. Your mother loves him. Is pleased that he is coming to stay for the weekend.
You go out to your favorite diner for eggplant sandwiches and straw french fries. Afterwards, you go to an exhibit at your favorite museum. It is about mirrors and light. While he is mesmerized by a wall-sized projection of kaleidoscope activity, you walk into a room full of mirrors and black lights. You are alone so you walk to one of the corners where two mirrors intersect. You bring your face close to that corner and look at yourself, a million of you coming together at once, and sense what it must be like for someone else to kiss you.
| * |
He has met someone, tells you about her. You have met a number of people. You enumerate. There was the one from the Canary Islands who wanted to take pictures of you while you were in his bed. Though he was charming, you didn’t let him. He knew too much about the Internet and you didn’t really trust him because he never paid for your drinks. There was an older man, late twenties, who you met in church. He did pay for your drinks but by your second gin and tonic was discussing the possibility of living together. You had wished that you had a gong like in old television shows. Then there was the lifeguard who liked to chew on your fingertips and almost stole your heart.
The girl that he is dating is a good one. You go to visit him and you meet her. You approve. She is sweet and wears motherish sweaters. You like the way she smiles when she looks at him. The boy that you are dating is probably a bad one. But you’re not sure yet.
| * |
You have a dream. In it you are pregnant. Your present boyfriend, the implicit father, is absent or useless. The dream is unclear. The point is, you know that he is gone. Michael appears in the dream. He is not convoluted or warped as dream people usually are. How can you possibly do this? you ask him. He holds you and says something that you will never forget:
You may not have a man in your life but you have good men in your life.
You wake up. The dream was not just a dream. You are two weeks late. You haven’t mentioned this to the present boyfriend yet. He has been acting odd and you are on your guard. His roommate spills the beans. Present boyfriend lost his day job and has been selling black market Xanax to local college kids. Don’t tell him about the baby. Just collect your toothbrush and run. No, fuck the toothbrush, just get out of there. He comes home just in time to watch you stub your toe on the cinder blocks that he uses to prop up his television and bang your elbow on the cheap plywood front door. You hope that this is the only damage that you will acquire in the process of leaving him. Your tires spinning and then catching in his gravel driveway and his incomprehensible yelling are your exit music.
As you are driving away remember something that you left in his closet. Most Recent Ex-Boyfriend had taken you on one really nice date. Dinner and dancing. The liars can usually dance. Beware. You had bought a dress for the occasion. Dark blue with a red dragon climbing up one side. You loved that dress. Forget it.
Back at mom’s house, call Michael. He is there the next day, without a bottle of port. You talk about your options, go over and over and over them. He is the only one who knows. You can’t imagine telling anyone else, no matter what you decide. By the end of the conversation you are both exhausted, drag yourselves inside from the court yard. He says goodnight, kisses your head and goes into the guestroom. You go to your room. It is the summer before your senior year of college. This is not as things should be. You pity yourself something awful and you cry, cry, and cry. Your face is in the pillow. (You don’t want to worry mom, not yet.) But Michael must have heard you because he is crawling into bed with you. He puts a kiss on your belly which is already becoming firm. He smooths your hair and spoons you. Sleep the sleep of the just, he whispers.
Think to yourself: I don’t have a man in my life, but I have good men in my life. I have Michael. Wonder if the creature growing in your belly will be a boy. Start to love it, whatever it is. This is sincerity. This is real. Listen to Michael’s breathing. Caress his sleeping arm which is wrapped around your torso. Sleep.
© 2005 Diane Goettel
