I kept reaching for his heart and finding nothing there to hold on to.
Gradually I lost my confidence. That was about when he proposed to me and I said yes. Some mistakes are both simple and huge. The worst mistakes Ive made have been the ones directed by sweet-natured hopefulness.
After we were married I realized that I had no particular idea who he was. I once called him the Lon Chaney of Ann Arbor, and instead of being hurt, he was pleased. At least Im a star, he said. Days would go by without an endearment. He was too young to be a sleepwalker, so Id try to wake him up. Wed have a nice dinner and wed rent a movie and then wed go to bed. Wed kick back the sheets and frolic like a good modern couple, and he would gradually fade on me, hed look like he was thinking about the stock market. His distance took the wind out of me. And then I got this idea that the trouble I was having wasnt just with Bradley but was a generic trouble. It was with men. He wouldnt share his heart with me. He was preoccupied with the unspoken and would be all his life.
Believe me, most women know what Im talking about.
AND THEN SOMEONE walks into your life and takes control of the situation.
This was a few weeks before he took me to the dog pound, this episode Im about to describe. About at the end of the summer, the last week of August. He was correct about the two jobs I had and that he and I were married by then.
Oh, I should tell you one other story about that period. My grandfather was dying. He was getting Alzheimers and living in an assisted-care facility. Id go over there to visit him. And one summer afternoon I drove over to see him and went up to his apartment and knocked and went in, because the door wasnt locked. I heard the water turned on in the shower.
Grandpa? I asked. He wasnt in the living room.
Im in here, he said, calling from the bathroom.
Okay, I said.
So I waited for him. But he stayed in there. Stayed and stayed. So eventually I stood up, because I was worried and anxious about him, and I went into the bathroom where he had said he was. I looked in through the translucent glass of the shower stall and saw my grandfather in there, and I could also see that he had all his clothes on. Naturally, I was alarmed. I reached over and pulled aside the glass divider.
There inside the shower was my grandfather wearing his three-piece suit. He was standing under the spray of water, his wet hair hanging like seaweed down the sides of his head. Even his shoes were on. Grandpa, I said, what are you doing in there?
He looked at me. The stars, he said. The stars are so beautiful.
The stars at night? I asked.
What other stars are there?
I took his hand and led him out of the shower and took his clothes off and toweled him dry and into his pajamas. Then I went downstairs and told the attendants that they would have to take better care of my grandfather, that they would have to watch him more closely.
BUT BACK TO BRADLEY. In those days he had an idea that he was a painter. Of course he was a painter. Thats not what I mean. He labored as a house painter but his real love consisted of a variety of sly and very odd expressionism on canvas. He became proficient at it. He understood the ironies of his existence, painting houses during the day and making eerie images at night. When youre as young as we were you have a strong sense of the pranks of fate. He had to prove that he could be a real painter and not a pretender, just the way that a lot of men feel they have to prove theyre real men. Ive never known what that was about. I dont think that most women have to prove that theyre real women. You live long enough, you graduate to being real.
Bradley comes on as a know-nothing but he really admired artists like Diebenkorn and Jennifer Bartlett and Hockney and all the other painters who knew how to use a light luminescent blue. He loved representational art that was full of problems you couldnt solve just by looking. He loved stylization and stasis and pale pastel color, color that appeared to be temporary or about to fade, colors that might be in danger of becoming obsolete any minute now, blues that were endangered and inadequate. Did he mention that? Probably not. Because he had sold so few of his own works, he grew killingly modest. The more representational his art was, the more abstract he became. You couldnt find him anywhere. He turned himself into the greatest abstraction.
As for his paintings, they filled up all the space we had. It was really tricky for me to adjust my attitude toward his accomplishments because I really wasnt sure whether his works self-consciousness was intelligent or just gawky and shy. He had given up hyperrealism and had gone in for social commentary in faded hues. I remember that he splashed Tip of the Andes coffee on one of his canvases as a judgment against the proliferation of big coffeehouses like Starbucks, but how would you ever know that unless he told you, since the painting was of a window? All his canvases required an explanation or a commentary. They accumulated in the house. They even occupied the bathroom. And his art took up most of his free time. So when he was painting I found other diversions.
I had squeezed in some softball as my one evening sport. Im a bit of a jock. As a girl I swam constantly and played basketball when I could. I used to love to watch gymnastics. I would rather watch the women gymnasts than the men. I would rather watch women playing basketball than guys. When sports are played by women it speaks directly to my condition. I like to watch their fierceness and the animal pride of female physical movement.
Our softball team was doing pretty well that particular summer. We were blowing everybody else into the ash can. That week the one Im telling you about we had this night game with the Bruckner Buick Devils. They were another womens team and supposedly our rivals. What I liked was simply getting out on the field under the lights during those summer evenings, playing the game, watching the evening come down to earth, the moths flittering in front of the floodlights. I was psyched for it. I had let Bradley know how much the game meant to me.
So on this occasion it was the bottom of the eighth inning. We were ahead, five to four. Bradley sat in the stands watching. He cast his husbandly gaze on me and maybe paid more attention to me as a softball player than as his wife and lover. He had a curious budget of attention, Bradley did, maybe it was the painter in him, maybe he thought of softball diamonds as geometrical abstractions. I was up to bat. Their pitcher was throwing some skillful stuff and they were concentrating hard in the infield and I could hear Bradley from the stands clapping and encouraging me. That was sweet. Give him credit. I had my patient husband the Toad in my corner. So I thought Id show them, and on her next pitch I connected with what I thought was a line drive.
Their shortstop was a sort of lanky woman. She had that specific appearance of physical confidence as if she never thought twice about making a move before making it. All her moves were ones she did purposefully. First thought, best thought. She did them quickly. Body and mind together. It was certainly beautiful to watch. As an athlete she had no hesitation of the kind that sometimes hobbled me. After my hit, I was two steps off for first base when she ran backward and leaped to her left for the ball. She extended herself and went airborne and caught the ball smack in her glove. Thmp. My line drive.
I was out. I was absolutely out and out. What she had done was there and then the most amazing physical move I had seen for I dont know how long, in its concentration and certainty and grace. Most people would have been crushed that they were put out in a game that close. Not me. Not that time. I am telling you it was heart-stopping. To watch that goddess in her ponytail doing that one leap caused me to halt in my tracks. I was almost irrelevant to what she did. I did the hit. She did the move on it. She had conviction. God, I loved that. So I stood there like a waxwork. I stayed right on that spot halfway between home and first base. They could have put me into Madame Tussauds, I was so unmoving. She got up from the ground and dusted herself off. She rubbed her forehead with her forearm. She held the glove up and then threw the ball to the pitcher. She smiled at her teammates and girl-whooped the way you do when youre the champ of one particular action that you can do in front of other people. Then she smiled at me.
If a guy did that smile to another guy it might be a challenge to him and an insult. But not hers. Not her spun-steel-and-stardust smile. She was displaying what she could do for me. A very pleasing and smiling woman. And I thought: this certainly aint your regular sort of day. Or your regular sort of game either. Because that night with the moths clustering in front of the lights, when she smiled at me I felt that smile go down through me and out the other side. Some sort of competitive drive in me gave way to something else. As if I was transparent. A burning. Permeable to her smile.
We ended up losing that game. Six to five. Even while it was happening the game was already a quickly fading memory. Losing. Winning. Who cared? Because by that time I was watching her stealthily. I was trying to recover that moment by sheer willpower.
AFTERWARD THEIR TEAM and our team went out for beers at the Kings Armor Bar. As it turned out her name was Jenny. Id seen her before. She worked as a meter maid. Almost like a song: Lovely Jenny, meter maid. Pitchers of beer circulated all around the table. I was the pretty woman in a baseball uniform sitting with her husband and surrounded by other girl-jocks. We were smok-ing and laughing and consuming the beer. I was being cool. My husband Bradley was scrunched up against my left side where I could lean into him and he was talking to the other husbands and boyfriends and girlfriends who happened to be stringing along. Jenny the meter maid had taken a seat on my right. I had not the slightest clue what I was going to do next. Except for my involuntary stomach flips it might have been any night at all. I was ignoring the stomach flips.