what he means, and because I’ve learned to be patient with children, to tease out the logic that’s always somewhere there, and irrefutable once explained, I’ve come to understand that grown-ups, mad or sane, ought really to be accorded the same respect. In this sense, nobody is actually crazy, just not understood. When Brianna’s mom says that I get kids, part of me puffs up like a peacock, but another part thinks she is calling me crazy. Or that, at the very least, she’s separating me from the tribe of the fully adult. And then this, in turn, will explain—if not to me then to someone who is, seerlike, in charge of explanations—why I don’t have children of my own.
If you’d asked me, upon my graduation from high school, where I’d be at forty—and surely someone must have asked? There must be a feature tucked away in the long-lost yearbook laying out our plans for later life—I would have painted a blissful picture of the smocked artist at work in her airy studio, the children—several of them, aged perhaps five, seven and nine—frolicking in the sun-dappled garden, doubtless with a dog or two, large ones. I wouldn’t have been able to describe for you the source of income for this vision, nor any father to account for the children: men seemed, at that juncture, incidental to the stuff of life. Nor did the children require a nanny of any kind: they played miraculously well, without bickering, without ever the desire to interrupt the artist, until she was ready; and then, the obligatory and delightful picnic beneath the trees. No money, no man, no help—but in the picture there were those necessary things: the light, the work, the garden and, crucially, the children. If you’d asked me then to winnow the fantasy, to excise all that was expendable, I would’ve taken out the picnic, and the dogs, and the garden, and, under duress, the studio. A kitchen table could suffice, for the art, if need be, or an attic, or a garage. But the art and the children—they were not negotiable.
I’m not exactly not an artist, and I don’t exactly not have children. I’ve just contrived to arrange things very poorly, or very well, depending how you look at it. I leave the kids when school gets out; I make my art—I don’t have to use the kitchen table, because I have a whole second bedroom, with two windows no less, for that purpose—evenings and weekends. It’s not much; but it’s better than nothing. And in the Sirena year, when I had my airy studio to share, when I couldn’t wait to get there, my veins fizzing at the prospect, it was perfect.
I always thought I’d get farther. I’d like to blame the world for what I’ve failed to do, but the failure—the failure that sometimes washes over me as anger, makes me so angry I could spit—is all mine, in the end. What made my obstacles insurmountable, what consigned me to mediocrity, is me, just me. I thought for so long, forever, that I was strong enough—or I misunderstood what strength was. I thought I could get to greatness, to my greatness, by plugging on, cleaning up each mess as it came, the way you’re taught to eat your greens before you have dessert. But it turns out that’s a rule for girls and sissies, because the mountain of greens is of Everest proportions, and the bowl of ice cream at the far end of the table is melting a little more with each passing second. There will be ants on it soon. And then they’ll come and clear it away altogether. The hubris of it, thinking I could be a decent human being and a valuable member of family and society, and still create! Absurd. How strong did I think I was?
No, obviously what strength was all along was the ability to say “Fuck off” to the lot of it, to turn your back on all the suffering and contemplate, unmolested, your own desires above all. Men have generations of practice at this. Men have figured out how to spawn children and leave them to others to raise, how to placate their mothers with a mere phone call from afar, how to insist, as calmly as if insisting that the sun is in the sky, as if any other possibility were madness, that their work, of all things, is what must—and must first—be done. Such a strength has, in