Andrea Barrett - The Middle Kingdom

‘I never heard of him,’ I said. ‘Or his books, or the movement — I was just trying to find a job.’

‘Me too,’ Connie said. ‘I should have known from the ad …’

We laughed some more, and then she asked me if I wanted an ice cream. When I said yes, we drove to Friendly’s and ordered enormous sundaes, consoling ourselves for our lost hopes. Connie was Walter’s age, but we had so much in common that our age difference hardly mattered at first. ‘My kids are teenagers,’ she said. ‘They’re done with me. They think I’m a fossil. And my husband — he’s over in History. Full professor, tenured. Reformation.’

‘Oh?’ I said.

‘Zwingli,’ she said airily, waving her plump arm. ‘Melanchthon. All that stuff.’

She told me her hair had turned white when she was my age, and that she had a degree in home economics from a Baptist college in Texas. ‘I taught junior high for a while,’ she said. ‘But I had to quit.’ She leaned over her mocha praline sundae and peered through her heavy glasses. Her eyes were large and startling, almost violet. ‘I have this little weight problem, and all that cooking in class …’

‘I failed Home Ec,’ I told her. ‘In seventh grade. My teacher wore false eyelashes and spent all her time trying to show us how to use lip pencil and waggle our butts like the models do. Doreen Sandowsky and I brought a shoebox full of field mice into the kitchen and let them loose, and Mrs Kriner broke her ankle trying to jump up on the windowsill. She flunked us both. I weighed a hundred and eighty-five pounds my junior year of high school. Then I got thin, then I was fat again, then thin again. Now this.’

Connie laid her soft hand over mine. I guessed her weight at a hundred and forty. Small shoulders, large breasts, most of her weight in her hips. ‘Diets,’ she said. ‘I’ve tried them all.’

‘Who hasn’t?’

‘You’re married?’

I told her about Walter. ‘Zoology,’ I said. ‘Lake ecology, acid rain …’

‘Children?’

‘We can’t. Walter …’

‘School?’

‘I quit,’ I said. ‘More than a year ago. I’ve been trying to figure out what to do since then.’

She smiled at me fondly and pushed up her glasses. ‘So,’ she said. ‘We’re bright, not bad-looking, educated. We live nice lives. Why are we chasing after stupid jobs? Why aren’t we having fun?’

‘Because we’re not doing anything?’

‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘What we want is something to do .’

What we did, in the few months we had together before Connie got a job in a New Age bookstore, was to get together twice a week for lunch. We took turns cooking; we turned out exotic meals and then ate them secretly, in the middle of the day. While we cooked and ate we picked our lives apart, as if going over our old tracks would show us where to go next; and so when I was browsing through the Times one Sunday and came across a review of Randy’s first one-man show in New York, it seemed natural to save it and show it to Connie. She dipped her finger in the sauce that had enveloped our Thai chicken, and she said, ‘You were married to him?’

Together, while the coffee burbled and plunked in the pot, we studied the photo of Randy and of one of his pictures: an abstracted, wildly skewed view of the block of rowhouses where we’d lived. He’d turned the people who walked our street into cockroaches, earwigs, city bugs; the sky was a jagged field of blue and green. ‘What a nutball,’ Connie said. ‘You sure know how to pick them.’

‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘I really do.’ Randy had earrings in both ears and hair so long it fell over his shoulders; beneath a leather vest his chest was bare. His thumbs were hooked in his belt and his fingers pointed toward his groin. He looked dangerous, even deranged, wholly improbable as a candidate for fatherhood — but the article said he shared a loft with a set designer and their infant daughter, Persia.

‘Persia?’ Connie said. ‘What kind of a name is that?’

‘Maybe her mother picked it,’ I said. The woman had nerve, I thought. Enough to pick a name like that; enough to force Randy to keep their child. She had everything I lacked.

A Bowl of Neon Tetras

I ended up with a cheap aquarium full of fish. I bought them to comfort me after Connie found a job and we had to give up our lunches, but my first tank was a disaster. The plants died. Algae flourished. The fins of my angel-fish molded and tore within days. A sleek black-and-silver creature, which I’d been unable to resist at the pet store, turned out to be a fierce and undiscriminating predator. After I bought him I woke each morning to find one fish gone, two, three, until finally I had only him, cruising sullen and big-eyed in my tank. I gave him back to the pet store and tried again, and my second time I bought only neon tetras, which were harmless and easy to keep.

Walter was writing a textbook then, the Introduction to Ecosystems that would seal his fame, and while I drew the figures for his manuscript I watched my fish swim back and forth and waited for them to tell me what to do. When I saw Page at departmental parties, when I ran into Connie at the store, I came home and told my fish how outcast I felt. When my family visited and my brother’s twins snapped the stems from my wineglasses, I whispered my rage to the fish. I bought new copies of the books Chuck and Mark and I had once read together, and on the nights Walter worked late I sat by the tank and read out loud. But the books had gone dead and had nothing to say to me.

Uncle Owen died that February. He went out one morning to pick up a paper and a blood vessel burst in his head, felling him before he reached the street in front of his Cambridge house. By the time Dalton, his current companion, reached him, he was already gone.

‘He died an easy death,’ Dalton told me over the phone. ‘We have to be happy with that.’ But it was hard to be happy with anything. At the funeral, Dalton laid his head on my shoulder and cried, and I cried too. I sobbed, I gasped, I moaned. The two of us made a spectacle in that quiet church, where all the rest of my family sat dry-eyed and stony-faced. Walter made comforting noises and passed me his handkerchief, but I turned away from him.

Five years of Christmas dinners had not made Walter and Uncle Owen friends, and so each time I’d visited Uncle Owen and Dalton I’d left Walter in Sunderland. Which had never been a hardship; Uncle Owen and Dalton had treated me like a princess. We had strolled down Newbury Street together and window-shopped. We’d had tea at the Ritz-Carlton. I’d had my hair done in fancy salons while the two men looked on and gave advice. We’d gone to auctions and bid on Sarouks and Tabrizes and fine old Isphahans, and then returned to Uncle Owen’s tiny shop and consoled ourselves for the bargains we’d missed. Back at his house, he’d shown me some of the priceless objects he’d bought so cheaply during the siege of Beijing, and then we’d sat in his living room, drinking port and eating the savories Dalton had made. We had danced to Judy Garland records, and when it was late enough, when we’d had enough to drink, we had sometimes talked about Walter and about my inability to carve out a life of my own.

‘You’re so smart ,’ Uncle Owen used to say to me. ‘There’s a million things you could do …’

He and Dalton proposed handfuls of job ideas and I rejected them. ‘Too easy,’ I said of some; ‘too hard,’ of others. Too dull, too repetitive, too much travel, too much work — what I was, although I couldn’t tell Uncle Owen, was too scared. Walter’s wild success, now that our lives had fractured, seemed somehow to guarantee my failure, and I couldn’t imagine finding work that wouldn’t seem trivial next to his.