Working it
She’d put it to him quite directly, no escaping it. “Where do things stand?” She threw it back at him, taking affront. He always blundered in this manner, despite a reputation for the beauty of his lines, a romantic, formal, a throwback among so many others who wrote viscerally, not that he was incapable of it, but the lines came as they came, struck him as how lines should be. They offered not the slightest protection.
The lines weren’t the issue. The affront was personal, she felt, and longstanding. The mother of their two daughters, beauty the dominant line: where did that fit in his fucking universe? “I’m a poet,” he said, and regretted it immediately. “I wish I’d never met you!” she shouted. Their arguments often took this form. He felt himself shutting down. When they met, she admired him, loved his work, then saw where she stood in relation to it. She wasn’t a writer, didn’t understand how it worked.
She chalked it up to married life initially, but came to feel she’d made a mistake. He started agonizing about his work. The critics who mattered were losing interest. The book he was supposed to deliver wasn’t, while she was more in demand as a model than ever. Of course, she was noticed. She’d always been noticed, but put it to one side when she fell for him. And for what? Touchy, unreliable, wasting his time on creative writing students — was he sleeping with them? His current hangdog manner contrasted sharply with his past generosity of spirit. Their friends had started to notice.
Alienation of affection, estrangement: they make life difficult in close quarters. There’s also absence, the need to fill in. It made him see how his work imposed on her without his asking, although she had her own work, different from his but also time-consuming. In the beginning, his work was a leitmotif to hers and vice versa. When he had to work at it, a working poet with his reputation on the line, things fell out of balance.
“I think I’m going to write ad copy,” he said one morning. “Teach the classics. Write about them,” she answered. “You’re wasting your time teaching creative writing!” He stared at her. “I was at St. Patrick’s yesterday,” she continued. “I lit a few candles for your Muse. On the way back on the subway, it came to me that your overwork has driven Her away. You’re not sure what to write anymore, because what you like to write has fallen out of fashion, and what’s in fashion, you hate. So, drop it! I should have said this months ago, but I only just saw it. I thought you were fucking your creative writing students, but you’re not the type.”
“It must be over, whoever she was fucking,” but he kept this to himself. She was right about all of it and disposed to give him another shot, that Catholic ability to wipe the slate clean. “Pragmatic,” she told herself, faced with divorcing him for a semi-known or keeping it going, their life, the girls, summers upstate, their circle. He could likely be salvaged. Worth a try.
She liked the side altars to the female saints, with their profusion of candles, their possibility of redemption. She loved cathedrals especially for their ripeness in this respect. Beauty is slippery, like a talent for pitching or batting. You’re always admired, but the phone can stop ringing. It was fun, fucking her brains out for a change, but she liked a higher level of conversation. Funny. It’s the transgression that turns you on, desire pure and simple despite good reasons not to. Then it wears off. The big risk in modeling is to try to keep it going, and she never, ever let herself do so.
A fucking realist then? Someone in this family needs to be. “Write copy!” she spat it out, but that was later, walking from the cab to a photo shoot. Yet she felt elated, the first real hope she’d had in a year, maybe, discounting the times she thought about remarrying, starting again. Men seemed to have these thoughts all the time, dumping children with one woman onto another. She couldn’t picture it, not for lack of trying. The girls loved their father. The candles she’d lit flickered and came to life. Not the Muse, she thought, but her particular saint. “We’ve all been here before,” she thought.
