Lydia Netzer - How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky

“Stop saying that. You’re being wrongheaded,” said George.

“You’re wrongheaded!” she yelled. “I’m the one that got made for you, like some custom pair of pants or a sauce recipe. I’m the one that got born for you. You can’t possibly understand what that feels like.”

“I’m sorry!” said George. “But it doesn’t matter.”

“You can say that because it’s not the same for you. I didn’t get to choose what I wanted to do. I always had to do what would make me better for you, because my mother was so committed to this—these lies—she wouldn’t stop. I never got to choose! Anything!”

He sat there behind a pile of student papers. He was wearing his reading glasses and looked utterly adorable. But for all Irene knew, she had had the idea planted in her head when she was a toddler that tall guys with brown hair and pink cheeks and reading glasses were proper mating potential. She had it planted in her head, and then she had her head discarded by the people that planted it, before they even harvested the idea. Here it was, come to fruition, and she had nothing to do with it. She only wanted to retreat. Retreat, retreat, retreat, before there was more embarrassment and more grief.

That morning she’d hired a real estate agent to list her mother’s house, and she’d hired a Dumpster company to come and park a big one in the driveway. She would empty out the house. Maybe Kate and Belion would help her. Then she would move to Bowling Green and commute. She would see George at work sometimes, maybe, but the Toledo Institute of Astronomy was a big place. She wouldn’t run into him that often, and when she did she would be professional. She would see him married to someone else, someone he could pick in the usual way, where you look around and notice someone you like, and you don’t get all hectic, throwing the word “love” around right away like a crazy person. She would work tirelessly at the Euphrates Project. She would finish setting up the experiment. If once in a while on her way home over the Anthony Wayne Bridge she stopped her car and got out, wavered a little on the edge of the river, no one would blame her for touching the railing. And when the project was up and running and the beams were firing, the detectors detecting, she would let herself fall forward, smack into the water, crush into a broken thing. Maybe they would name a particle after her. The George’s Constructed Wife particle. How glorious.

What she knew, what she knew with utter clarity, was that if she could not have George, she could not continue. She could not go through life whizzing through a pipe unhindered, endlessly whizzing and whizzing, a proton in a circuit, a hamster in a wheel, with no one to intersect, nothing to stop her. She would stop, meeting water, meeting concrete, meeting whatever would break her apart into whatever particles were no longer recognizable as her.

“You won’t do this,” said George. “You won’t leave me. You think you will, but you won’t.”

Irene bridled at this. She almost told him to go to hell. But then she felt sorry for George, too. It wasn’t just her who’d been duped. Poor man, he’d bought the long, sick story even before she had.

“You don’t know me, George. You think you do, but you don’t.”

“I do know you,” he said. “I recognize every part of you. I knew you when I first saw you, before we figured out about all these stupid intersections they planned. I knew you when I first saw you in the banquet hall. Just because our mothers did some stupid crap back in the eighties. Come on. Two people meet and fall in love. Then they’re happy forever. That’s the story. That’s the whole story.”

“That story is not real!” she screamed at him.

“What in the time we’ve known each other has not been real? What about me is not real? What about you?

“Forget all the schemes and the intersections, all these little coincidences they planned. They also made us, on some deep and basic place, to work together. You’re the lover, I’m the fighter, you’re the believer, I’m the pragmatist, you’re the heart, I’m the head. They built that. We can’t ignore it—it’s who we are.

“Then let’s not ignore it. Maybe that is love.”

“Of course you still believe that stupid crap! It’s you that believed it this whole time! You’re the believer, George, right? And I’m the scientist. We fit together like a puzzle! Except now, surprise! The thing you believe in so much means that our big fancy ‘true love’ romance story is bullshit, just a bunch of planted ideas, manipulation, hypnosis, whatever!”

“Irene, what if it’s even lower than that, even deeper, beneath all that stuff? We’re not the believer and the scientist. We’re not the folk music and the travel and the birthday. We’re two people who are loyal, and ambitious, and honest, and we both are scientists—hello? We both are believers—don’t deny it. The girl who believed she could create a black hole in a lab? The guy who documents the location of distant stars—with actual math, thank you very much. We aren’t puzzle pieces. We are actually the same.”

She listened to him, her breath coming hard. He must feel such a fool, having sat with her mother, her drunk and devious mother, listening to a ridiculous prophecy of a girl with brown hair, astronomer, dreams, and nonsense, who was really hardly worth the use of a pregnancy test. How long had the mothers’ plot survived, even six years? And then it fizzled. They were too crazy. They were too drunk. Or somebody changed her mind, and somebody else was too drunk to argue.

“Why are you trying to ruin everything? Why can’t you just be happy?” He sounded so sad. She felt so sorry. She wanted to fix it. But how could she?

“I don’t even know what happiness is,” said Irene.

“I do,” said George.

She should have let her mother burn their house down with both of them in it. She should have taken a deep, cleansing breath of the smoke and rolled over in her bed to pass out and expire right there. Then George would be with Kate Oakenshield right now. Or George would be with Sam Beth. And Sam Beth would take care of him properly. She, Daughter of Babylon, would know what to do with George. She was an astronomer, a brunette, and a dreamer in the most literal sense of the word.

“You don’t belong with me,” said Irene.

“You’re not in your right mind,” said George. He carefully made a mark on one of the papers in front of him and set it off to the left.

“Maybe you belong with Sam Beth,” said Irene.

“Who?” said George. “Patrice?”

Irene began to move distractedly between the pieces of his universe model. She touched a galaxy with her left hand, a galaxy with her right hand. She stepped carefully around a single star, though she had no idea what it was doing out all on its own. She had seen George’s calculations, his attempts at solving for a plane of symmetry in the universe, his attempts to fold it back on itself across a single plane and find that each half had a match on the other side. She felt the magnetism in his body, felt it pulling on her, making her try to find his words sensible, convincing. She felt she could almost let go, just nod, smile. She had to fight.

“Now you’re being crazy,” said George.

“No, you’re being blind. Maybe Patrice really loves you,” said Irene. “Just by chance. Real love. Not by design.”

“You love me,” said George.

“No, I don’t.” Irene corrected him sharply. “George. It’s not how we thought. I am conditioned to feel something for you, but it’s not love. It’s training. Maybe Sam Beth loves you for real. Reach out to her. Why not? She’s smart, and she believes in you.”