Helen Zuman - Mating in Captivity - A Memoir

Her gaze swept the forest of upturned faces, raising a guilty flush on each it touched. Though my guilt had already consumed my fling with Dylan, I, too, blazed with the common shame.

“You guys disgust me. If this is how you wanna be, you can all leave. I’ll take Swan and the kids and get an apartment. I’ll do this revolution by myself. I’m through with your bullshit. I’m through with it.”

That night, each sack in the Potato Shed held one Zendik. By the time we’d wiped the last patch of soot from the walls, most couples had dissolved.

Alone again, we could love Arol best. She would be our only flame.

I STOOD BESIDE KRO IN THE palm of our Farm, night hiding us from other humans. It was 5:00 a.m., a month past the fire and three years after I’d had sex for the first time, with him as my guide, beneath a quilt in this same field. I’d pulled him from the trailer, hours into a marathon date, to offer him a song. This was risky. Singing exposed me. So far, as a Zendik, I’d sung only on solo hikes down sleeping roads.

Kro reached under my blouse to caress my waist. Dew crept through the hems of my long black pants. We faced north, toward the pond and woods, where the wild creatures met their own needs, mated as they pleased. Across the creek, to the east, the bucks paced their pen, snorting and grunting, awaiting the day when the does would go into heat and Arol would choose who would sire that year’s batch of kids.

Kro’s hand dropped back to his thigh. I closed my eyes, raised my chin, and poured out a folk ballad I’d carried with me since college—one of just a few songs strong enough to survive my story that only Zendik music was pure. Imitating Joan Baez, I stretched the final syllable of each line of the refrain into its own prolonged lament:

In the song, a man cuckolds a friend and dies by the rope. Yet all I heard as I sang was the lyrics’ grace and flow. My own betrayal—my journey west—had morphed into a quest for certainty: that I would die a Zendik and be with Kro. Maybe someday we’d have babies together. If I could trust him with my singing, I thought, I could trust him with anything.

But I still craved dates with other men.

In particular, I craved a date with Mason.

I’d spoken with him by phone around the time of the fire, when he’d yet to leave Ohio. Nothing was keeping him from moving in with us, he’d said—except student debt.

I’d advised default. A collection agency would buy his loans from the government and try to track him down. If they found him, they’d call and run their playbook: threat, compromise, guilt trip. Once they saw he had no income, they’d give up.

Weeding strawberries with him one late-April morning, on a slope overlooking the creek, I learned that he had indeed defaulted, that he’d lasted a scant six months at the job he’d quit to come to Zendik, that no strand of romance tied him back home.

His thread to the Deathculture was frayed enough that he might stay.

Where Kro was ox-strong—hard to budge, mighty once in motion—Mason was antelope-fleet: all vigor and sinew, poised to spring up and gallop. He leaped to the running-around jobs, the fetching-and-carrying jobs, the sweating-and-gasping jobs that Kro would only do if Arol said he had to. Feeling my own lethargy, when it rose, as a sinister undertow, I stretched toward those who seemed to surf above its current, doubt a mere cirrus wisp in their distance. Naked in a date space with Mason, I imagined, I might drink in some of his vim—then return, thirst quenched, to Kro.

Hadn’t Wulf and Arol “balled around”? Hadn’t polyamory paired with honesty begotten the union at the heart of our revolution?

Maybe so. But that didn’t pacify Kro. When I told him I hoped to go on a date with Mason, he slipped into livid silence. I bolted. As if I could avoid him in a world as small as ours.

He charged me one gray May morning, on a garden crew, as I forced a cartload of wet compost over sodden ground. Our eyes hadn’t met in days. He stopped my cart. Our eyes collided.

“I don’t see how we can be together. We can’t even talk to each other. I’m done. Unless you have a solution.”

Feeling my load sink in the mud, dreading the shove it would take to get it going again, I shook my head. Tears blurred my vision. Drizzle seeped from the haze veiling the garden. Neither source of moisture could dissolve the block between us. I had no solution.

That evening after milking, trudging down the hill from the goat barn, I crushed thoughts of Kro. His steady warmth. His creosote kiss. His gleeful grin.

I missed him.

I also missed Arol, on her knees, weeding the flower bed fronting the Farmhouse.

“How are you doing, Helen?” she called.

I started. Any other day, I would have seen her first.

I stepped over to the rail between path and bed and clutched the rough wood. She smiled up at me, eyes bright. The whale on her cheek crested and fell. Around her, snapdragons blazed in shades of red and purple. Come midsummer, there’d be cosmos, rudbeckia, sunflowers, echinacea. This bed, like the others Arol tended, was a four-dimensional painting whose colors and composition shifted with her whims and the seasons.

“Not so good,” I said. “I’m pretty bummed about it being over between me and Kro.”

“Why does it have to be over?” She set her trowel down and straightened her back. “Is that what you want?”

“No!” My voice broke. Fresh tears wet my cheeks. “I feel like I really love him. I mean, yeah, I have other attractions—but he’s the one I wanna be with.”

She tucked a hank of hair behind her ear and nodded sympathetically. “The problem I see in your relationship with Kro is that you don’t get help from anyone close in who’s made a relationship work. You talk to these other guys who are just as lost as you are. The blind leading the blind, you know? They don’t know how to do it either!”

Leaning forward again, she gouged out a snarl of bindweed and periwinkle. “ I’d be willing to help you guys with your relationship,” she said, tossing the weeds on her waste pile, “if you wanna try again.”

My tears slowed. I noticed the persimmon trees across the path, glowing with new growth. Breathing deeply for the first time in days, I drank in the moist fertility of the world budding around me. Snapdragons fluttered like tiny flags in the heart’s army.

“I do! I want to!”

“Is Kro around? Why don’t you go get him and we’ll see if he’s into it?”

I dashed up to Kro’s space, on the second floor of the Farmhouse. He was stretched on his bed, eyes closed, arms folded over his chest, ears cased in headphones. How does he get away with lying around, listening to music, when it’s not even dark out? Oh, yes—that threatening gaze.

Alerted by the creak of floorboards under my feet, he opened his eyes and removed an earpiece, raising an eyebrow in inquiry.

“Arol wants to talk to you,” I said, knowing that invoking her name was the quickest way to set my beloved ox in motion.

Outside, I resumed my post at the rail. Kro stood a few yards away. Stealing glances at him as he listened to Arol repeat her take on our failure, I thought I saw his shoulders drop, his spine straighten.

Arol jabbed the ground at the edge of a clump of spiky grass, tugging it with her free hand. I saw a band of matted root, still clutching subsoil. The clump wasn’t ready to come out yet. She let it drop. She looked from Kro to me and back to Kro. “You guys could be the model Zendik couple,” she said, her eyes steady on his. “You just have to communicate. You have to commit to asking me for help when you hit a rough spot. You wanna try it?”