she looked like a natural pulling in the lazy sheet…I could only stare. Gobsmacked.
When we were docking, she jumped off the boat first. I thought she was running away. I shouted after her, When can I see you again?
Are you kidding? she shouted, reaching back for the dock line. You’ll never get rid of me now!
* * *
—
During those first years in Milbury, those baby-versus-dissertation years, the only thing that could truly exhaust me—the only thing that was as crazy and disorganized as I was—was the internet. I relinquished golden hours of scholarship to reading online consumer reviews for products I had or was considering, until I would feel an irresistible urge to add my opinion, and to watch the likes add up, until I could no longer ignore the fact that more people would benefit from my opinion on an acrylic throw blanket than would ever benefit from my thoughts about confessional poetics.
I think that was the beginning of the end for me.
Who knew that, years later, I’d come home to her lying on the floor, crying. What’s wrong? What’s wrong?
I don’t know.
Sybil standing in the doorway. Is the baby OK?
Yes, yes. He’s asleep in his crib.
Sybil kneeling down, patting her shoulder. It’s OK, Mommy. Do you want an ice pack, Mommy?
We got her into bed. I fed Sybil dinner, read to her, tucked her in. Then this voice in my head says, Hey, maybe you’re the problem, that ever occur to you, Einstein?
* * *
—
Could I decide that rejecting my literary studies was a matter of principle? After all, some of the poems I pored over were solipsistic, artistically undisciplined, occasionally whiny. Was my primary subject, Anne Sexton, even a good poet? This was debatable. Her subject was herself—her own desire and her own madness.
And poetry, what did it do for anyone? Could a poem dig a hole or heal a wound or bake bread? The creation of art is predicated on an unconscionable looking-away, even if for the small duration taken to create it. As Theodor Adorno put it, To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.
I would stop loving poetry. This unseen self-deprivation would be my protest.
That’s about when I started going to the marina. Once or twice a week. In the middle of the workday. I was just there to hang out w/ a 60-year-old man w/ a hard gut, but somehow it had the whiff of the illicit. I’d come up w/ one excuse or another. My team leader pretended not to be irritated, because irritation was not part of the corporate culture at Omni. But soon we were having some pretty tense meetings. Arguing over small, irrelevant things. Maybe I wanted her to fire me so I could finally have my excuse to go sailing.
I used to look at Juliet at night while she slept. How many times I almost woke her up to tell her everything. I didn’t have the balls. I guess, in the end, I was afraid to talk to Juliet.
How could a grown man be afraid to talk to his wife in the privacy of his own bedroom, you ask?
It’s like a sailor who doesn’t tell his shipmate that water is pouring into the hold.
* * *
—
Then I realized nobody gave a shit what I did, one way or the other.
Should I have tried harder? Been more honest? A better communicator? Sure. But listen, part of the problem with Juliet is, she’s really exacting. As hard on others as she is on herself. And very hard to argue with. All that unused academic training. I couldn’t talk to her when she got all wound up. When she got wound up, she was like John Calvin at a poetry slam. My wretched insensitivity inflamed her! My actions were indefensible! She couldn’t bear my indifference! I wanted to be, like, Juliet, do you even remember what we were talking about? Because I don’t. And if you think those words have a place in some stupid argument about how we take care of our comfortable home or our healthy, appropriate children, you