Why I Don't Write Read online

  A sign propped on crimson chrysanthemums had the cutout letters of a ransom note: I AM HERE BECAUSE I AM SCARED FOR MY COUNTRY. Beside it, another: SEX WORKERS AGAINST CAPITALISM. She looked with interest for the custodians of this second sign but saw no one who matched, only a man in a Lapland hat with the flaps over his ears, fiddling with a loose button on his shirt. Other signs within sight: FUCK GOOGLE. GREED IS AN ADDICTION. REVOLT. EAT THE RICH.

  She noted a theme: anger.

  Initially he’d been an interesting conversation for the girls. She had to tell someone about it. This blaze. Wow, they said at lunch, shiny eyed, Fun. Good for you. Then, as he became less forthright in his intentions, or more forthright in his lack of intentions, the girls, stalwart, married, squared away themselves in that department, lost their patience on Ivy’s behalf. He didn’t answer texts? Not acceptable. This guy should be howling at your door, they said. Even she wasn’t convinced by that. But something in her appreciated their protective rage.

  After lunch everyone would gather up their pocketbooks, put on their new coats, suddenly urgent, each with her own errands, each with her own worry. They shared some troubles; some they hid. Then they all would hurry off, busy. But, no, they now said, shaking their heads with tight certainty. You don’t want that. Outside under the red restaurant awning, kissing one another goodbye, they touched one another’s sleeves tenderly, looked in each other’s eyes. They looked down and complimented someone’s new boots, then dispersed in four different directions. You don’t want that.

  But she did. She did want it.

  When she lay alongside the man her body dissolved into his. And after she left the cool and hot hours in his arms, she would stay in a hypnotic state, zombielike. It was so—

  Her knee knocked something to the ground. A book. She picked it up. A woman in a plaid coat glanced over her shoulder, irritated, briskly thwonking books into plastic crates which surrounded her as if she were a child playing house. Labels were marked: POLITICS. PHILOSOPHY. NOVELS. WOMEN’S STUDIES. Would there ever be a box that said MEN’S STUDIES?

  Sorry, Ivy said and handed over the book. One was always so quick to apologize. Sorry! Don’t mind me. Always the first reaction. The people here, their signs wedged with water jugs against the wind, leaning on plastic tarps, weren’t apologizing. When you were a protester you could drop the apologetic pose, marching elbow to elbow. Twenty years ago she’d been like they were, knocking on frozen doors in the suburbs of Boston, interrupting people during warm yellow dinners with televisions colorfully swimming behind them, asking for money to protest the slaughter of Alaskan seals. She had righteous belief in the cause. Save the whales. Even then, though, she would begin with an apology: Sorry to bother you, but we are trying to stop the killing…

  The book she had handed over was a popular novel everyone had loved. Everyone, it seemed, but she. No, no, it gets better, people said. You should keep with it. She had abandoned it early on. Why did people want you to read a book you didn’t like? They were the same people who wanted you to try the dessert you didn’t want. Really, come on, try it, they said, holding out the fork. Was it the desire to share? Was it power? Did they want the consolation of agreement, so they might feel, like these protesters, part of a larger connection? They were the same people who told you what you didn’t want in a man. Or were they in fact the saintly ones, trying to protect you from what you seemed unable to register as dangerous? You don’t want that.

  But they didn’t know the cliff of him, arriving in her small doorway.

  Thanks, said the librarian flatly, taking the book with a mustard-colored fingerless glove.

  This a lending library? Ivy said. The question came like a gush, so grateful was she to address something outside her head. She hadn’t spoken to another person since noon when she’d left Nicky—it was a school half day—with the sitter for the afternoon.

  The woman, lustrous hair piled in a bun on her head, looked put out. Her look said, Obviously.

  So you take book donations? Long quiet hours had been part of her days for more than thirty years now, but she could never get used to the disorientation of reentering the world.

  Again an irritated nod from the librarian.

  So this is an honor system? Ivy asked.

  We have a sign-up sheet. The woman’s attitude said, Go away.

  In the days after she saw him, everything she looked at would take on his perspective, or at least the perspective she imagined, as if his face were a mask on the inside of her skull. Was she compensating for his absence? It was involuntary. She did feel he had a sharper way of looking at things than she did, he was decidedly less of a fool. Taking on his perspective gave her a new and inspiring angle on things. Trees, for instance. Trees were something she’d always loved, but now trees were more fascinating than ever. Their enormous trunks with their crusty bark, the rings of wood, all from a tiny seed! And the branches spraying themselves out, governed by nothing but the need to grow, spreading in a perfect but unplanned design, producing one veined leaf after another, at perfectly placed yet random intervals, needing light, dropping off in the fall etc. etc. The miracle of trees! The miracle of them kept smacking her, even in this city covered with concrete and tar, trees were sprouting out of bucket-sized areas of actual earth. They had never spoken of trees, but somehow she felt the man had given her an increased amazement about trees.

  A gust blew from above and blue pamphlets swam past her feet like ocean skates. Everything was like something else. In front of her a small sign in orange neon: WE WANT OUR COUNTRY BACK BITCHES. She turned down the sloping hill to leave.

  * * *

  •

  Then on the far side of the park through curling spaces she saw a familiar line of neck and shoulder in a brown fatigue jacket. Her heart started up crazily, and instinct made her turn away. Jesus, she was even hallucinating him. Then like a bad spy, she pretended to search her pockets for something while glancing over her shoulder. He was on the other side of a row of trees, his back to her, talking to a woman with a hatchet chin and a ribbed vest, interviewing her. A man wearing a hooded sweatshirt and holding a camera on his shoulder filmed them. Ivy moved and nearly stepped on a person sleeping curled under a blanket of blurry blue and white snowflakes. The man had on a black wool hat and Ivy had never seen the shape of his head in a hat. It did not look familiar. No, she realized, it wasn’t him. This man was thinner and his shoulders more narrow and his head was big for his body and he had the beginnings of a beard. Fleming was clean-shaven. At least, he had been when she’d last seen him.

  Her hair blew into her mouth. Thin leaves swam like minnows in the air. The beard had a reddish tinge though. Maybe it was him. He. She backtracked to get a better angle. From there she saw she had definitely been wrong. This man was much smaller, and the hat was simply like one everyone else was wearing. The tilt of his neck toward the woman, listening, gathering information, though, that did look like Fleming. But Fleming was much taller and wider, she thought.

  She stayed at a distance, up the hill, spying. Even watching this man not he, she felt the little stabs of his being somewhere that didn’t include her. He was, in each and every moment, choosing not to be with her. This sort of line of thought threw her very quickly into a state of pain. Stop it, she told herself. Think of the good things. She wouldn’t be able to keep him if she did not keep thinking of the good things.

  The cameraman in the hoodie moved, blocking her view. He lowered his camera, and the man’s face was straight in her direction. No, not him at all. It was a man who resembled him, but the features were not in his proportion, as if a child had arranged them, the way Nicky did with Mr. Potato Head. The man’s brow seemed indented and his eyes shallow like wax melted. It was even creepy, his mouth starved and thin, not at all the mouth she knew, plump and lovely to kiss. Amazed at the eerie coincidence she kept glancing furtively at this half-matching
person. He appeared to be scouting around for the next thing to film, his ear tipped to the cameraman, conferring. Only a narrow tree trunk was blocking his line of vision to her but he wasn’t looking in her direction.

  For a split second she thought about walking by him, to see up close this doppelgänger. But something kept her away. She wasn’t prepared to present herself to anyone at the moment, not feeling particularly appealing: pale, wind whipped, drained.

  Well, she was relieved it wasn’t he. In the afternoons arriving at his black-and-white apartment she would feel gleaming, expectant, ready to present her body to him. She trudged now toward the top of the park where police barricades of blue sawhorses made a low fence marking the official edge of the encampment. She watched her legs walking, but saw instead the window in his white room where the daylight made a radiant rim around the rice-paper blinds. She saw herself encased in the glass shower with the beads of water clinging and him stepping in that first time, unembarrassed, saying, Excuse me, with a matter-of-fact air, as if the rollicking and tumultuous hours they’d just had in bed were an everyday occurrence, familiar and regular for him. This seemed to her a sign both good and bad, good in how he was an unhurried and warm lover, and bad in how little if any impact it seemed to have. Excuse me, he had said, reaching past her to a bar of soap. It was easy to be unembarrassed when one felt nothing at stake. She passed a dog-eyed man carrying a cardboard holder with four cups of coffee bearing the stamp of the Starbucks maiden. The man swerved gracefully to give Ivy room to pass. Thanks, she said. Sorry.

  Sorry.

  Somewhere the bright sun went behind a cloud and the buildings darkened, altering the mood. At a bench bolted to the ground, she stepped up between some cartons of food cans for a higher view. The cameraman in the hoodie and the man had not moved but had turned their backs, looking for new victims. A shiver ran through her; it was colder up here. Her coat was too thin. No, not him, but what if it had been?

  A dull rope of despair pulled at her lower ribs. Or maybe it was just fatigue. One hit these bland pockets of exhaustion a couple of times a day and just had to forge on through them. Usually they happened at the playground as she was watching—

  She looked at her watch. Shit. Twenty-five past five. She jumped off the bench and walked briskly toward the nearest exit and half ran up the street to her bike. She was going to be late. The blue Schwinn was splayed sideways off the post, someone had knocked it over. Half the time one returned to a locked bike dislodged by—what? A car? An angry person kicking it over for fun? The bike was rusted and trashed anyway so it hardly mattered, one gear wire sprouted in front like an antenna. She kept it locked out on the street, since there was no room in the tiny apartment. There was barely enough room for two people. She’d converted the shoebox-sized study into a shoebox-sized bedroom for Nicky. The apartment was meant, really, for one person.

  On her bike she glided down the one-way street, the tire spoke clicking against something broken or out of place. She purposefully did not look in the direction of the hoodied cameraman and his director. Her attention now was required to be on her son. She was the one person on earth looking out for him, and a loosening of that vigilance would result in who knows what manner of harm and recklessness. Every now and then she was struck by the precariousness of her duty, how much his life hinged on hers, how she was the sole person on the earth, really, tending to this helpless creature, and her brain would often reel thinking of all the children as helpless who did not have someone they could rely on. She had managed to avoid that hinged life for years, though she had serially hinged with a number of men. But then she would unhinge. Unhinging was not something you could ever do with a child.

  A herd of people poured into the crosswalk at the bottom of the street, seemingly ignoring the encampment in the park. The pedestrians walking quickly took it for granted that they would all avoid one another. Everyone was used to it. But Ivy found it amazing how each person managed to avoid knocking into another, a sort of cooperative behavior as mysterious, really, as those silvery fish in colossal schools which swept in one direction then another, hundreds of them, so fast, so expertly in time. People with their unspoken cooperation were as amazing as trees. She canoed along with one foot oaring the ground.

  Traffic was at a standstill; horns honked. A white van at her elbow inched forward, staying just far enough to the right by the curb so she could not pass.

  Impatience flushed her chest and into her forehead: once again she would be late. Once again it was her fault. The awareness of her being to blame caused more anxiousness than the lateness itself. Ahead in a wide crosswalk made vast by the crater’s blocked-off streets, a traffic cop in an orange-and-yellow vest addressed the gridlock, moving her arms like a proud conductor. Cars lurched forward at her wave, then stopped again in the jam.

  Ivy dismounted. Cars with blinking lights hugged the curb. The space between the cars was too narrow, so she humped her wheels onto the sidewalk, swerving urgently. People had decidedly less respect for a pushed bicycle than they did for another human and she wove past irritated glances and people stepping to the side with mild outrage. A bike was not supposed to be on the sidewalk. Drivers in cars seemed to feel the same way about the bikes on the road. Bikes were welcomed nowhere.

  Off the curb, back onto the road, she swung up onto the seat, pedaled across at the stoplight and glided along a traffic-less area cleared for construction. No people walked here. Orange cones dotted in front of a skyscraper whose lower floors were walls of glass and upper floors a skeleton in steel. She pedaled furiously along the vacant square, gaining momentum, and was startled by a construction worker in suspenders who stepped out from behind a shed and jumped back just in time to avoid being hit by her.

  Hey, he screamed in a deep street voice. She sped by, no time for him. You idiot, he called. You’re going to hurt someone!

  He was right. She was being reckless. But she wasn’t going to say sorry this time, she thought, she was in a hurry for a reason, she had her little boy—even if this time saying sorry would have actually been appropriate. She pumped the pedals, ignoring his cry, trying to ignore her responsibility. It felt familiar, the determination to ignore. And nearly choking at her throat came an eruption of rage toward Dexter Fleming—for not being there, for having captured her interest, and then for keeping her so damn preoccupied. A wave of exhausted shame crashed over her. The screaming man was right, she was an absolute idiot.

  Her eyes shut against the shame of it as she whizzed beside an untouched concrete sidewalk and slanted around the corner. In front of her, a patch of road the size of a coffin had been dug up and refilled with sharp cubes of granite. It was a surprise and too close. She would skid if she turned on it and before she’d even had the thought she squeezed the hand brake, the one that worked, and her front tire stopped on a dime. The bike froze upright, and Ivy pitched flying forward over the handlebars, her arms behind winglike, aware in the microsecond of the flight that this was going to be either really bad, or okay. She was going to be either slightly hurt, or have a major disaster, possibly be maimed for life. She even flashed on an ICU with monitors beeping and her body lying with a mask on its face. She flashed too on Nicky swinging on his monkey bars, his gaze past his tiny arms, checking to see she was watching. She even saw her ex-husband, Henry, forehead wrinkled with concern, a rare expression he reserved for important moments.

  Her chin landed first, with the sound of two rocks hitting each other. A white, then black, strobe swept through her head. She crumpled into a lump on the cold tar. A fizzing numbness spiked through her body at the same time a burning sensation raked the left side of her face. She pushed up on one arm, relieved she could move and sit and turn her head. The wind was knocked out of her, but her neck didn’t seem to be broken, though there was a worrying ache across her jaw. Was her throat closing up? She turned her torso in slow motion to see the angry construction wo
rker striding toward her. She touched her chin, felt wetness, and saw the red black drips down the front of her green canvas coat.

  You okay? the man bellowed.

  She lifted her unpropped arm and waved it stiffly, like a wisp of grass, unable to speak. Nothing was inside her. She was suspended, stopped. She saw other figures approaching. She felt an odd relief. For a few moments at least she would not be required to do anything…she had only to tend to this, this accident. She was involuntarily occupied. A woman in a colorful coat appeared at her side. She was older, dark skinned, with hair cropped in a corn yellow cap. Can you hear me? the woman said with a reassuring lack of condescension. Good. You’re okay. Now don’t you worry, we’ll get you help.

  Another figure, a portly man in a blue jogging suit, stood above her. Don’t move, he said, breathing deeply. They’re calling 911. He gestured mysteriously back in the direction of the park. She had to be only here.

  Nicky, though. She had to get word to Nicky. As soon as she could speak she would get someone to call the sitter. No, she’d get them to call Irene, and Irene would step into action and know just what to do and would fetch Nicky and bring him back to her happy house with the twins and the dogs and the husband, doing it all effortlessly because Irene was capable and knew how to care and look after these things.

  Her perspective for a moment zoomed up above and looked down at the scene from a height: she saw the colorful coat, a jogger in his blue outfit, the suspendered construction worker in his cap, and herself like a splotch on the ground at the center. She was rarely in the center. Surrounded by these strangers she felt a peculiar sense of bliss. The sky seemed to widen.