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FOUR

In order to reach this place I’d crossed several state lines, mounted several bridges, exited highways, and ridden others until they ended. I eventually headed down a coveted stretch of land, surrounded by water on three sides, known by painters for its light, somewhat unto itself most of the year but overrun in July and August, and finally reached my destination.

Everybody knows a spot like this, a fishing village turned tourist trap, with pornographic sunsets and the Sea Breeze Motel. Out of respect for the powerful emotional attachments people form to such places, I’d rather not say exactly where I went, in the event that the detailing of my location causes even more congestion on the streets of that nicely preserved, remote southern New England coastal town.

A Dutch windmill stood at the highest point on campus, a replica or maybe the real thing, brass plates screwed to its siding from an ongoing fundraiser to repair it. On the distant practice fields, yellowing in the heat, the college held a lacrosse camp for high school boys and girls. It sat along some quaint national seashore, amid a high number of colonial-era buildings, among shifting mountains of sand, speckled with dune grass. A frolicsome place, a remote place, a place I’d barely heard of before coming here to teach. We arrived by bus or ferry or train or car, or airplane service direct from Boston. Because of its location, the conference had an easy time attracting artists, oil painters, memoirists, old guys, skitterish teenagers in search of illicit pleasures, driftwood sculptors, printmakers, actors, and playwrights.

They offered a filmmaking workshop. They taught all kinds of crafts. In the afternoon there were shuttles to the beach and a Ping-Pong table in the main building and shows in the gallery and staged readings of plays in the auditorium every night. The writers took classes in red brick buildings with white shutters. Other buildings were crumbling or had been condemned and were barricaded behind tall metal fences with posted signs. The actors camped out in the auditorium. The studios were over the hill, on the far side of the windmill, in what had once been a shipyard. Fine Arts occupied a long, skinny two-story wooden structure that creaked like a sailboat, shingled and faded, and there were cinder-block dorms where they’d put me the first two years, and a wharfy, flaking cottage where they stuck the gang of interns.

This year they’d put me in the Barn; it really was a barn, chopped into apartments for staff during the year, and still partly unfinished. The door to the top-floor apartment wasn’t locked, it didn’t even close, it thunked against the doorframe, swollen from the seacoast weather. It was one big open room with the angled walls of an attic, rusted skylights and a windowed cupola in the peak, and a narrow swath running down the middle of the room where you could stand up straight. There was a kitchen, frying pans whose handles fell off when you touched them, a coffee table and dresser, a white plastic fan, a filthy plaid couch, and two twin beds crammed in along the eaves.

I’d arrived on Friday at five and hung up my shirts, my head at an angle, hitting it once hard enough on a beam that I expected my skull to crack open and my brain to fall out. I stood on the bed and with some effort cranked open the skylight, stuck my head through, and looked out across campus. I heard a seagull bark like a dog. Over the rooftops of the little town I saw blue water, the harbor jetty, and a dinky lighthouse I’d never noticed before. I felt like I’d shimmied up the mast of a ship.

No humidity, no horrifying summer heat, no buses banging down the avenue, no garbage trucks, no marital rancor, just a clean white mattress on a low metal frame, and nobody to wake me up in the middle of the night by punching me in the head, or barfing down my neck, or giving me a heart attack every two hours with his bloodcurdling screams. Nobody else yelling “Daddy!” through the shower door. When I tell her to stop she begins kissing the door, because that’s how much she loves me.

I loved them, too. What would I do without them? All last week, I’d had moments of fear and excitement, waking up with a stomachache, worrying how they’d live without me, while peeling Kaya’s carrots, packing Beanie’s diaper bag, but also feeling less owned by them and maybe cocky and probably gloating, unintentionally ignoring Robin, and she’d noticed it, shaking her head and muttering how I’d already checked out or was too lazy to marinate the fish, rolling her eyes when I forgot to put ice in her water, not wanting it when I came back with the ice tray. Kaya picked up on it too, woke up in the night and needed to pee, wondering if she could have some potatoes, telling me about Louis, the turtle at camp, as we walked back from the bathroom and I tucked her into bed. Maybe it was all in my mind.

We shared our babysitter with the family of a girl named Molly. Robin had picked them up from Molly’s on her way home from work on Friday. I’d called them from the highway in the last hour of my drive. Her mom and stepdad were coming for dinner if they could get it together. I heard Beanie, grunting and sucking, and Kaya going, “Horsey horsey,” which meant Beanie was on Robin’s boob and Kaya was on Robin’s knee.

“Maybe they won’t come,” she’d said.

Her mom was in the late stages of dementia, and her stepfather was attempting to drink himself to death. Her sister lived three thousand miles away and never called. Her brother had faded into myth.

“It’ll be fine,” I said. “Make your frittata.”

“All right,” she said to Kaya. “Knock it off.”

“Kaya,” I said, knowing she could hear, “get off Mommy so Beanie can eat.”

“She used to make jokes: ‘When I’m drooling in the corner, smother me with a pillow.’”

“She’s not drooling.”

“Yet. But maybe this is when I’m supposed to kill her.”

“Don’t kill her tonight.”

“All right.”

“Or at least make it look like an accident.”

“Don’t tell me what to do. Kaya, stop it.”

“Sorry.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

I didn’t know who she was talking to.

If Robin needed help she’d call Elizabeth, who lived eighteen feet away. They liked to stand in the alley between our two houses and talk intensely as the girls rode up and down on their tricycles. Robin talked about Beanie’s sleep patterns and Kaya’s emotional IQ. Elizabeth talked about her fourteen-month-old’s language problems and her seven-year-old caving to the mind games of her five-year-old. They talked about clients Elizabeth saw for psychotherapy and a story editor who tortured Robin. They discussed clothing, did fashion shows for each other: can I get away with this, is this consistent with my persona? They talked about cutting off their hair, glass beads, making jewelry, maternity undergarments, the anti-inflammatory properties of turmeric, hot yoga, colon cleansing, the perils of a Montessori education, the naughty spanking trilogy, the sexy vampire movies, postpartum body issues, hip pain, back spasms, stretched stomachs, cosmetic surgery where they freeze your fat. If you got her talking long enough, Robin mentioned her weight, that she was bigger now, so she thought her head looked too small. They talked about sex and marriage, aging parents, the transformation of a loved one in decline, the terrible suffering of their mothers, helplessness and guilt.

I hung up and drove the last fifty miles to campus. After unpacking the car I went to dinner and ate barbecued chicken under the big white tent, at a table with Howard, a bald guy with a tanned, polished head, and Tina or Dina, who’d come here last year and made sculptures out of wire. After dinner we crowded onto the porch, where a poet read a poem. Carl gave his welcoming remarks, urging us not to climb through windows if we lost our dorm keys. Then we went off to see the theater company do a mash-up of Chekhov plays, set in the 1930s, with Uncle Vanya shooting himself in the second act, wandering in and out with a bandage on his head. In the big hall of the main building I heard Tabitha give the same talk she gave last year, about her spiritual journey beyond incest, into alcoholism, then past that, into group sex and casino gambling, ending in healing and forgiveness. In the gallery there were photos taken by an American soldier during some of the hundreds of trips he’d made while bringing fuel to stranded convoys all over Afghanistan, of the landscape, people, and culture, before he himself was finally blown up and killed. The photos survived. I ate some chocolate-dipped strawberries and talked to a woman with blue streaks in her hair.

Then I went back to the Barn, hung my pants on a nail in the wall by the refrigerator, and thought about Robin, what she was doing, what I’d be doing at that hour if I were home. It was just the usual struggle to stay in love, keep it hot, keep it real, the boredom and revulsion, the afterthought of copulation, the fight for her attention, treating me like a roommate, or maybe like a vision of some shuddering gelatinous organ she’d forgotten still worked inside her.

First a guy sticks something in you. Then a thing grows inside your body. Eventually it tears its way out, leaving a trail of destruction. Then it’s outside your body, but still sucking on you. It makes you weird, these different people in you and on you. Robin had had two C-sections and felt that they’d put her back together wrong the second time. A cold electric twinge shot down her back, down her leg, while walking, sitting, standing, or lying down. It defied any cure, painkillers, epidurals. For a while she wore a small black box on her belt that electro-stimmed her buttocks.

In a previous life, she bit my neck and licked my ear when we did it. After Kaya, I worried about courting her in my pajamas, with our little angel breathing down the hall, and lost focus and cringed as Robin’s patience ran out if I finished too fast or not fast enough and overstayed my welcome. Bad sex was better than nothing, but Beanie effectively ended the badness. Fuckless weeks, excused by parenting, turned weirdly okay. Like our anniversary, we weren’t sure anymore when it was supposed to happen. And, with the exception of my tongue on her clitoris every who knows when, she didn’t need to be touched. She had vibrators for that. I think she mostly thought of what I did as a way to save batteries.

Our sex life hadn’t been mauled by depression, routine, or conflict as much as it had been mauled by distraction, diffusion, a surfeit of beauty. Was that it? Our children’s vitality and strangeness, their softness, shocked me every day. Their lightness and willingness and spirit and stupidity surprised me, their readiness to bravely step into a world they couldn’t understand, packed with swimming pools, speeding cars, blazing sun, fanged dogs, stinging bees, heat, silent anger, slammed doors, inexplicable demands, funny hats slammed on their heads, and constantly from every direction these giants with twelve-pound heads, ten times their weight, five times their height, grabbing, pushing, shoving past, talking loud, telling them how to think, what to want, how to treat their own impulses, which ones to kill, which to love. No to crawling inside a dishwasher or smacking your food when you chewed. Yes to climbing trees and sucking your toes. I was sad for the bleakness of a little kid’s bumbling existence, envious of the simplicity of their cause. They faced the world because they had no choice. Someone was crying. Someone had pooped his pants. They were explorers in a new land. Robin and I stood by them, in parallel formation, to witness and guide them.

Parallel, as if on the same track, running at the same speed, but not touching and having no way to touch. Parallel like people who went to bed without remembering to say good night, or saying it without meaning it, or meaning it but not saying it. I appreciated how on those rare occasions when my wife would kiss me, she did so with flat lips, popping them the way she did when she smacked at her ice cream. In this way she turned my face into something more palatable.

Was it a good life? Was I more joyful, sensitive, and compassionate in my deeply entangled commitment to them? Was there anything better than seeing the world through the eyes of my nutty kids? Was my obligation to Robin the most sincere form of love? Or was I living despite their obstruction, intrusion, whatever? Had I instead been saved by the transcendent power of my ideas and work connected to the larger world, drawings I’d done for the magazine that illuminated trivial or important events of our time? Was I doing all I could to enrich and enhance and enliven my time on earth, or was I doing all I could to destroy, limit, or block any growth or connection? Or was I doing nothing, imitating real suffering while my time ran out, goofing around, rotting, sexless, ugly, and bitter?

Was this as close to love as I was ever going to get? The closer I got, the more I wanted to destroy the things I loved. Something rose up in me, threatening me. I had to deflect it somehow.

I’d never been able to beat back the loneliness of a solitary life, but as part of a couple I felt invisible and deformed, and even at those times when I meant what I said, my words of affection had to be forced through sarcasm and shame. When I misbehaved, acted out discreetly, impulsively, I felt unbreakable and invincible, although of course the guilt eventually tore me apart. And sometimes I examined those parts, and sometimes I pushed them away, but that was just pushing myself away, the pure, monstrous reality, the real me, and without those parts I was an empty shell. The longer it went on, the worse I felt, until I was out of control and panic seized me and I ran back home.

FIVE

I’d spent the winter engaging in daydreams, fantasies, alternate realities, while flipping through emails in a secret folder, and looking at selfies of this same beautiful woman, barely clad in a towel at a fancy resort in Zurich, or on the swings with her kids at the park, or modeling the necklace I’d sent her at Christmas.

We met here a year ago. She took a class in the studio next to mine and pulled some late nights; we shared a bench in the courtyard, downwind of a cigarette. She was a nice woman with a few complaints, suggestible, not finished, wrapped up in her kids. She was unmoved by her own painting and thought her classmates were hilarious if a little hard to take: the lady who painted in her bra, the hipster who flirted with her in his little fedora. We bumped into each other in the laundry room, and went for a walk on the jetty at sunset, and talked about marriage, and stayed out late, and spilled our guts.

Wasn’t that the whole point of this place? To take a break and clear your head? And who really gave a fuck what two people did at an arts conference in some swinging summer paradise? Real life was so lonely anyway, and I figured I’d never see her again, so on the last night we went back to her dorm room and goofed around.

When the conference ended, we started zipping notes back and forth, just a few, then more and more. For a while I thought she’d leave him, and if she left him, maybe I’d leave Robin. But then she didn’t, and I didn’t, either. I saw her once in the fall, for an hour of furious hand holding and making out in a candlelit booth in New York City. And once in March, at her house in Connecticut. Then things got heavy and she stopped talking to me.

In June I sent her a birthday card and asked if she’d be coming back to the conference. It took her three weeks to say maybe. And now, after signing my contract and promising to play softball, as I headed to the tent for lunch, I thought about what might happen if she did. It didn’t help to think about it, but I’d spent a lot of time thinking about it anyway. I got excited. I still had passion. I came over a rise and the whole town lay beneath me, the buildings old and stinking of charm and practically spilling into the bay. I caught a whiff of sea life, a funky low-tide odor. For so long, I’d been deprived of even accidental physical contact. I needed love; short of love, I needed something. I saw myself as adventurous, amorous, and brave. I got stuck in some loop of possibilities and had to stifle a ridiculous little moan. I felt a dog-eared excitement, and rode that familiar surge of energy. By the time I reached the tent, people had worn a muddy track across the lawn between the check-in table and the buffet.

“Ha ya doin’? Everything good at home?”

“Yes!”

“You believe we’re back here again?”

I got something to eat and scanned the tent for the face I’d kissed and held, for those long legs of such smooth, glassy skin, striding briskly in the fresh breeze off the bay, for that stranger who’d hovered over me, gasping and weeping.

I didn’t see her, but students sometimes walked into town for meals. I went over by the brick wall and sat with some other faculty members, Vicky Capodanno, a painter, Tom McLaughlin, an old guy who’d written a memoir of his childhood, and this idiot biographer named Dennis Fleigel, who was waving his sandwich in the air. He had his foot propped on Vicky’s chair as she cut her salad.

“I read your book,” he said. I put my bag on the wall and downed my lemonade. I just wanted to eat. “Graphic novel, comic book, whatever you call it. What do you call it?”

“I’m not in that argument.”

“Do you check the number on Amazon?”

“It’s not in print.” I was eating some kind of chef’s salad, dry raw beets, chunks of cheddar, and these mysterious white cubes of something. This was a new, wholesome food service. “Hello, Vicky. Hi, Tom.”

“Richie,” Tom said. “How are you, bud?”

Vicky looked at me with deep intensity. “How are you?”

I couldn’t remember if I’d ever responded to her last email, from Vermont, where she’d gone to take a break from New York, trying to quit smoking, childless and out of romantic options, wondering how I was, asking for photos of me with my kids, or just my kids, or any cute kid stories—and I grinned at her like a lobotomized dope.

“I was just saying,” Dennis said, “that my book was selling, it sold pretty well, Amazon number below ten thousand for two straight years, word of mouth was good, but then that movie came out.”

“What movie?”

“Ring-a-Ding Ding. It’s about Sinatra, and when it came out, my Amazon number went from ten thousand to a hundred and fifty thousand, and it never went lower ever again.”

Charlene Wetzel joined us, smiling, and said, “I think I have a stalker.” More people sat down. “He wore sunglasses in class,” she said. “Last year, it took a few days. This year, first day: stalker.”

Heather Hinman, who taught poetry and had a coiled energy that included her hair, said that one of her students asked what font she typed in. Roberta Moser put her plate down and told us that she’d just finished an interview with the local NPR and that the questions were dumb.

I began to feel hopeless and desperate in a familiar way.

Dennis explained that NPR was fine for pushing an art film or a book, but that the machinery that promotes a studio movie is so much bigger. “Ring-a-Ding Ding the movie killed Ring-a-Ding Ding the book, and it never recovered.”

“What are we talking about?” Roberta asked.

“My book Ring-a-Ding Ding,” Dennis said, “and how it got killed by Ring-a-Ding Ding the movie, which I also wrote.”

Roberta smiled at Dennis. “I still don’t understand.”

Tom McLaughlin brought over a bottle of wine. Frederick Stugatz sat down with Ilana Zimmer, who put some wine to her lips and said, “I just got back from six weeks as artist in residence at the University of Bologna.”

Heather took a drink and said, “After this I go to Ole Miss.”

Frederick said, “After this I go to Berkeley.” He turned and stared at Ilana, who ignored him.

Dennis said, “Ring-a-Ding Ding the book is about a sensitive brute who happens to be the twentieth century’s greatest entertainer. The movie Ring-a-Ding Ding is a piece of shit. But that’s not my point. My point is that the kid who’s supposed to be eighteen was played by a twenty-six-year-old, and the eighteen-year-olds who saw it thought the guy looked like a senior citizen.”

Dennis had red hair and a pink forehead and surprisingly bright blue eyes. If you tried to make eye contact, he couldn’t see you. I liked to think of this as the result of some head trauma. It was a kind of blindness that made him unlikable but high-functioning. He’d written four biographies and two screenplays and went on morning talk shows when his books came out. I could imagine back in caveman days someone like him being cut from the tribe, dragged away, and thrown off a cliff.

Heather buttered a roll. She used to be a drunk but now wrote poems about bartending, drinking binges, blackouts, and AA. Roberta was a filmmaker. She’d been making a documentary for the past nine years about corrupt black mayors of major American cities, filming them in jail, running for office again, taking walks with their aged mothers. Frederick taught the musical book, whatever that was, and had been the genius behind last year’s musical about Karl Rove. Ilana Zimmer had headlined an indie rock band, with one hit in the eighties, then had a ho-hum solo career, and now dabbled in kids’ music. She ran a songwriting workshop every year in Frederick’s class. Vicky had paintings in museums around the world that were violent, cartoonish, biting, dark, and funny, that dealt with war, religiosity, porn, rape, but also the cost of art education, women’s bodies, and people who lived in garbage dumps. And Tom McLaughlin had been a high school English teacher for forty years, then retired and wrote a rambling memoir of his childhood growing up over a pool hall in Alffia, Texas, population 71, with wrenching scenes about killing cattle and the death of the town; it became an instant classic, then a hit movie. He sat there like the most relaxed guy in the world, his face heavily lined, familiar in a way from posters of him around the conference—they were hard to miss, his head gleaming and speckled with age spots.

The thing to do here was relax and not worry about where I ranked among them. I pushed my plate away and started drawing on the tablecloth. I drew the bay, a single steady line, wispy clouds in the distance, and walking along the shore I drew Batman, the Caped Crusader, looking a little haggard and overweight. Last year’s tablecloths had been made of a thick, toothy paper, with a spongy plastic coating underneath, but this was thin one-ply, and the ink bled like I was drawing on toilet paper. It was a waste of time, but I didn’t care. Batman was the first superhero I’d ever drawn. I hadn’t drawn him in thirty years. Why now? Drawing him middle-aged with a big keister seemed to answer something. He stood in the surf at low tide with a touristy camera around his neck and his tights stained dark from wading.

One line led to another, the feeling of deadness went away, and this arrangement of markings became a scene with a little girl about Kaya’s age holding Batman’s hand. Was it a memory? Was it cathartic? Did it work? I didn’t care. I kept going, surprising my eyes with what my hand could do. In Batman’s other arm I drew a little boy in a swim diaper—my knees bouncing under the table—until, shading in the bay around their ankles, I pressed too hard and tore the tablecloth.

Then I thought of home and felt my throat close up. I wondered how I’d protect my kids from hundreds of miles away. I worried that Kaya would ride her tricycle into the renovation pit from the construction next door. I worried that Beanie would suck the propeller out of my old tin clown whistle. Joey, the high school kid down the block, sometimes cut through the alley in his Subaru with his foot on the gas, even though a dozen kids under the age of ten jumped rope and played games there. A spasm of electric jolts shocked my heart, from the heady mixing of blood and guilt that brought on flashes of horror and feelings of dread and excitement, the fear that I would do something sexy and rotten and get away with it.

Stewart Rinaldi pulled up a chair and said, “What did I miss?”

“We’re talking about my book,” Dennis began, “Ring-a-Ding Ding.”

No one could stop him from explaining that the movie killed the book. When he finished, no one spoke. Beside me, Charlene folded things into a sandwich.

“Pass the salt.”

We had nothing else to say, or didn’t want to try for fear of starting Dennis up again. We didn’t discuss the news of the day or the presidential campaign or politics in general, power, money, greed, or war. As members of the cultural elite, we didn’t believe in any of that. We’d been teaching together for years. We sat in circles, bragging about things that mattered only to us. We were artists. We believed in ourselves.

And yet, things were happening out there. Obama had drawn a red line but Assad refused to back down, while hundreds of thousands fled, in what was looking like a massive refugee crisis. “Call Me Maybe” held steady at No. 1. Ernest Borgnine died. Kim Jong-un had been named Supreme Being of North Korea. The Republican primary had been brutal, awash in dark money, the first since the Supreme Court decided that mountains of secret cash in exchange for favors was totally fine. Romney emerged as the nominee, a hollow, arrogant flip-flopper. He’d spent the summer refusing to release his most recent tax returns, while his legal representatives explained away the Swiss bank account stuffed with tens or hundreds of his own millions. He was in London this week, having FedExed his wife’s half-million-dollar dressage horse over to compete in the Olympics.

We didn’t care about that stuff. We cared about art. We cared about lunch. Finally Dennis stood, picked up his bag, and walked out of the tent, past the drinks cooler, toward the library.

“Ring-a-ding ding,” Roberta said. “Does that ring any bells?”

“Forget it,” Tom said.

People liked Dennis as a teacher. Around the faculty, though, he lost control. He engendered pity, which must’ve bothered him. The interns were clearing off the buffet table behind us, watery bowls of lentil salad no one wanted. Roberta said Dennis’s wife had moved out, and Charlene shook her head and said it was a long time coming. Frederick turned to stare at Ilana, who pretended not to notice. Vicky asked why we had to sit here, year after year, talking about Dennis Fleigel, and wondered if anyone wanted to go for a swim in the ocean, and gave me a deep, meaningful look, but I didn’t want to linger, to catch up, didn’t want to be her beach pal. I couldn’t listen to the grievances of childless grown-ups anymore, their boredom with their free time, wondering what they’d missed. Whatever had caught up with them was making them depressed.