Sea Wife - Amity Gaige Page 0,57

bathroom.

My ugly angels were more comfortable in Milbury.

More space for their molting wings.

Sometimes, I missed Juliet, even when she was right there.

Don’t know when this missing feeling started. When she was pregnant with Sybil, she was gorgeous, just colossal. I was so proud to lead her around by the fingertips as she swayed around town. I cried when Sybil was born! I plastered my office at Bingham & Madewell with photos of this little bald, cross-eyed person. I literally became a better man.

But still, I missed Juliet.

We met senior year at Kenyon. A friend of mine was in a play. I went to see it. The gods smiled, I sat next to Juliet, who was eating a package of Red Vines & laughing w/ the boy on her other side. We’d never spoken, but after a semester of sitting across the room from her in our Ethics class, watching her take endless notes, I’d imagined talking to her many times. When I was actually faced w/ her, the real, live Juliet Byrne, all I could think of to say was that I hoped it didn’t sound too weird, but did she know that she made a little circle w/ her mouth when she was concentrating really hard?

She stared back at me. The lights went down.

Then things got even more awkward. Turned out, my friend’s play involved him pantomiming having sex w/ a horse. Naked. I mean, there he was, standing onstage, in front of me, his cock in the stage lights. He wasn’t a close friend, really. The point was, he had this whole other life I didn’t know about. A life in which he stood onstage showing the world his cock. And nobody else seemed to mind. The others in the audience watched him. They were moved. To them, his cock was just part of the play. His cock wasn’t important except that it was part of the play.

I’m not sure what it says about me, but the whole thing made an impression. I mean, I was about to graduate. But where had I been? Hanging around the Econ Department, clinging to the lifelines, agreeing w/ everybody. While other people were gathering in theaters & basements & cafés throwing off their fetters. Juliet made an impression on me, in her stupid coat & her bangs so blunt they looked like she’d gone at them with a handsaw. She laughed when she thought something was funny, even if no one else did. She was something else. Literally. I mean something else, not a “girl” or a “girlfriend.” It’s like she was impatient w/ all gamesmanship & was just like, listen—yes or no.

* * *

—

Ironically, I could understand Sexton’s poetry even better when I was kept from writing about it. She was, after all, a suburban housewife, with two little children and a husband who frequently traveled for business. She plonked away on her poems while her children listened to records.

But how could I explain this to my adviser back in Boston? Especially after my second extension passed, with no results. That I loved poetry. I loved its density. Its suggestiveness. The shadows it cast. I loved the trance it put me in. I could feel my brain stretch when I read poetry, my preconceptions literally cracking up like ice in spring. When I read poetry, I had no body. And for somebody like me, this was a particularly welcome relief.

My adviser, however, would have been horrified that this was all I could come up with. Love? Trance? She was clearly awaiting the death of poetry with great excitement, so that she could autopsy it and publish the results.

Nobody had told me, back when I was a star undergraduate in the Kenyon English Department, that loving poetry functioned in inverse to the ability to finish a dissertation about it.

Juliet let me take her out sailing once back then. On a small keelboat I rented for the day on Lake Erie. It was very choppy, just like I remembered. She kept shouting questions over the wind. Are we going to tip over? Are we going to drown??? Juliet has a strong body, so even though she never sailed,